Posts filed under 'Gaming'
Many people have decided that WoW economy is worth investigating. So far so good, in itself this statement is fine, people will keep busy with whatever they like. However please don’t confuse WoW economy with real life economy. That just doesn’t make sense.
WoW economy doesn’t have taxes, expenditures for workers, lobbies, rents for office spaces, supply lines to consider and plan for, lawyers or courts etc. In WoW a person can make money simply by going out and killing things or picking flowers or mining rocks that pop out of the ground. Closest real life equivalents would be the livestock farmers, agricultural farmers and “gold-rush” miners. Each of those has expenditures from day zero, in that he needs food to live (basest of expenditure) to many others.
A WoW player needs nothing to survive and he has to spend nothing (outside of a periodic repair bill to his equipment) to play the game. This basic difference is so important that it already breaks the comparison.
However, there is a lesson to be learned. No WoW player has had his equipment removed because he failed to pay his loan. No WoW player was ever in debt. No WoW player bought anything without paying full value right then and there. If only the real economy would be like that…
May 27th, 2010
I have no words. ME2 voice acting stars are just phenomenal as you can very well see in this video.
Fans of SciFi should recognize everyone here and I’m (finally) really excited about playing this game. Just like Mass Effect was a great adventure and a brilliant experience, I’m now expecting great things from Mass Effect 2.
I’ve said before that voice acting makes a game, and with the stars on display here, the script can really come alive. And the folks over at BioWare have PROVED that they can produce an amazing storyline.
P.S. Soooo looking forward to hearing “Worf” again…
December 11th, 2009
Seems like someone else thought as I did about MMO betas and it was Massively.com
They have asked MMO developers the same questions about betas and there are some interesting points to read in this Q&A. I will not express an opinion as I have already done so, for one, and the views of each developer is plainly laid out. Just go read it and see for yourself.
December 1st, 2009
What is the best MMO? Most would say WoW and I can understand that. But here is a thought; there is currently not one MMO that is as good as it can be. Some are better than others, but all of them have something missing.
Having been playing MMOs since the very beginning (barring Ultima Online), I have played a great many of them. I’m always amazed at how people say that this feature was “stolen” from that game as if this is a bad thing. If that was the case then UO did most of it first and if “stealing” features was forbidden then the MMO market not have seen some of its current gems.
While I’m very happy these gems exist and have played / play most of them, I want that one bar of platinum. So here is a list of features that I would like to see in one game.
Classless progression. The old archetypes of tank, melee DPS, range DPS, healer, controller are done to their end. I have a friend that plays a tank archetype but has twisted the skills and items he wears so much that he is not the best melee DPS. I also feel that defining a class for a gamer leads to more standard deployments of skills (the templates that many sites have) than if you leave them alone to choose what they think is cool. Games that did not have classes were riddled with people that had completely different skill sets and they were enjoying themselves more because it was their character.
Strong player driven economy. While most would think that WoW is a good example, I would be willing to bet that most of them don’t know about EVE’s market. Plan for big economy please, with a crafting system that can make many things but output only a limited amount of items, just like EVE. I think all future developers should take a deep look at EVE crafting/market system and learn from it. Don’t give me a crafting profession that makes the top tier item in 40 seconds, give me a way to make (random numbers to follow) 1000 items, all of some value or need, top tier items to be made in hours, not seconds, and a way to make 10 of them at the same time.
Purpose. DAoC still stands in my mind as the single best game in terms of purpose. Spent a year leveling up my character and then three years playing the same character in which he never changed his items, instead he was getting new skills from PvPing. Saying that in today’s world seems insane to most. No new item in three years? Yes, back then the world was much simpler (or confined); if you wanted items and raiding you went to EverQuest, if you wanted persistent war you went to DAoC. It worked, and to a degree still does as there are servers open for those games. Modern equivalents are Warhammer (for DAoC) and WoW (for EverQuest). But here is the difference; Warhammer even has raiding in it, while WoW does not have any significant war elements. Battlegrounds and arenas are PvP raiding providing nothing for character progression other than more items. The world itself needs to feel alive and changing. You cannot understand the feeling of spending two or three hours in one map fighting over the castles in the area. It was not two months ago that I enjoyed such a feeling in Warhammer when we were trying to defend a castle for three hours. I cannot make it justice in words alone.
Early Travel method. Champions Online is not to be praised for a great many deal of things. However it has nailed one thing; early travel powers. Running around a vast area does not add to any game. Give players the means to go where they need to or want to. Let them appreciate the content, not the pretty rocks the path is made of.
Keep it simple, stupid! Photorealism means nothing unless it is perfect or damn near perfect. It is something that robotic engineers (of all people) have stumbled on when trying to make their life like robots. People accept something easier if it has characteristics of human nature but obviously is not human, than a near copy which might even make them afraid of it. It is an instinctual response to dismiss something that tries to be something it is not. The closer something is not the thing it tries to be, the more apprehensive we become of it. It needs to be VERY similar or clearly dissimilar. Look at all the realistic graphics (Vanguard, EQ2, etc.) and you can easily see the differences, no matter how impressive it may be. Impressive wears out. Now look at WoW and Aion, both are completely stylized to their respective fields (Western and Eastern feel) and both are beautiful, and more importantly smoother than Vanguard ever was…
More to follow.
November 25th, 2009
There is an amount of admiration for hackers, those system wizards that know far more than many PhD holders. It is powerful to be able to gain entry to secret information and as we all know, power corrupts. This is why there is a distinction between hackers; the White and the Black.
White hackers are the Robin Hoods, believe in information freedom, uncover secrets that are dangerous or harmful to the public, or plain unfair. Proprietary software to them is evil and open source the holy grail. They do not damage systems and can even help protect a system by informing the admins of holes. As an example, most police officers working on IT crimes have elements of White Hackers.
Black hackers on the other hand are the ones that crash systems, invade databases to destroy them or copy data to pass along to others for financial gain. There is no nobility in their actions, simply the need to spread chaos. The ideology is one of supremacy; if you were hacked, you simply were not strong enough, tough break.
Although most, if not all, hacking is a crime, the distinction is real.
When people admire hackers (and by people I mean members of the general public) it is the White hackers they admire. Which is how games such as Uplink and Hacker Evolution (henceforth HE) exist.
I prefer Uplink as I find HE too confining. Uplink has a better system of hiding your tracks compared to HE . In HE a trace is magically always on and depends on varying amounts on what you do. A wrong server ping will give you 1% more trace, while a password break will increase the trace by 15%. The way to reduce the trace is to run a log parser that automatically goes through the system and depending on what you did cuts down (anything from 0% to 12%), or to pay $500 for a 10% reduction. There are a lot of action in HE that raise your trace by more than 10% and the log parser never balances out. So one always needs to steal money to pay for trace reductions. Also, if you leave the game on forever, no one is ever going to catch you; you only get caught if your trace reaches 100%.
While that approach is understandable as a means of control over the actions of the gamer in balancing action with reaction and exploration in an effort to enforce tactical thinking instead of endless time attrition of the target system, hackers don’t do that.
Uplink has a better way. You are an agent for a hacking firm and you pick hacking jobs from the bulletin. Complete them and you get money, which you NEVER have to spend to cover your tracks. Money in Uplink is only for upgrades, either of the software you use or the machine upgrades of your gateway (which, in Uplink, is the computer you control remotely, so you give it a better CPU and you run decryptions faster). Tracing is either active or passive. Active tracing is initiated when you do something suspicious or something that is set as a flag. For instance, logging in with an admin account will always start an active trace, no matter what you do. If the trace reaches your gateway, it’s game over. Passive trace is in essence a person that goes through the logs of every server you went through till he reaches your gateway. This is much slower but always happens, even if you did not activate an active trace. So the way for you to cover your tracks is to bounce the connection through as many servers as possible to prolong the time the active trace will take and, more importantly, to go back to one server along the bounce route (usually the first one) and delete the logs that will incriminate you. This way the passive trace will end at this server as the enemy operator cannot find your gateway.
This is closer to what I think is like real world hacking. That is not to say that Uplink does not have its faults. One big one is really ridiculous. Most players have found out that there is one server that never changes the password for the admin account and more importantly, never traces you. Hence, it is the perfect server to start the bounce, and most do. All hacks in the game start with this server as the first in the long chain of server bouncing. All hacks end with the players logging to that server with no bounce and deleting the logs that point to them.
So here is the question; why would the game police not hack this server since 99% of all game hacks went through that server? Ah well…
If you like Uplink, check out this guide but careful of the spoilers.
November 24th, 2009
It’s not the grind; people are forming many groups all the time and even specifically for killing.
It’s not the graphics; while very nice, they don’t make a game good or bad.
It’s not the money; the sub is at a reasonable level and in-game gold is not that hard to come by.
It’s not the bots; a little patience and planning and you can even have fun with them.
It’s not the limited flight time; there are many ways to work around that and gliding is much more fun and useful anyway.
It’s the crafting.
I cannot stay in a game that treats crafting as the best way to eat away at your money, that handles crafting of powerful items on a twice random roll (crit the first item and then crit the second to get it – leads to me making 48 gold rings to get the two rings I wanted).
I would understand it if it was HARD to find the mats. I would understand it if the items produced were so powerful that they could be sold for any profit (instead items dropped are very close to those made and as loot they are cheap to buy or find). I would even understand it if there was some justification for it (Vanguard system or the likes).
So yeah, I stopped Aion because I didn’t like the crafting, but that’s just me. Since it was there I wanted it to be good, and to me it is not. It even managed to piss me off.
November 19th, 2009
Those people are a special bread of people. Being a beta tester requires a way of thinking that is often not the norm. It also takes a person that is keen on detail and has clarity of thought so that he can put to paper his actions that lead to an erroneous action or response from the platform.
Now take that to the game beta tester. There are some that want to go in closed beta in order to play the game for free. They will not take notes on their actions as to identify bugs, they will not try many combinations of the same action but only the one they conceive as being the most efficient way to complete their goal (which is to level up, not to test the game), they will not report things they consider a simple annoyance but will just power through and ignore it.
Those people hurt the games we love but the industry seems to not do anything about it. I consider myself an above average beta tester and have been included in many a beta. Were such thing as a Beta CV I would have a very nice one, but such a thing does not exist. Companies that post applications for closed betas mostly do not ask anything about previous beta experience, and no company has ever provided me with any feedback or certificate or reference for beta work I have done.
Maybe it is time for a change? Or does the current system actually work with the in house QA team being sufficiently effective that the need for qualified beta testers is diminished and thus closed beta invitations are serving another function?
Perhaps there is a third option, that unpaid beta testers are actually so conscientious that there is no need to actually have an interview like platform.
November 19th, 2009
First of all, I love Netlimiter. It is just what I need in the two-user-one-connection house environment I live in and until they integrate a bandwidth limiting capability in home routers, I will keep on using it.
However it has one VERY weird side-effect. While it is running it blocks GPGnet from connecting. For those that don’t know, GPGnet is the multiplayer platform for Supreme commander, much like Battlenet is for Starcraft/WarIII.
As soon as I terminated it though, GPGnet would connect happily every time. Just a hint for all those who get the “1: Core 1 Cannot Connect to GPGnet” message and might be running Netlimiter…
P.S. some people have said that you need to uninstall Netlimiter for GPGnet to work, that is NOT true, I repeat, NOT true! Just right click on its icon and click on Exit.
May 30th, 2007
SO long has passed… what was I doing you might ask. Several things actually.
No1: I was (and still am) in several betas. I’m actually racking up a pretty good beta resume. Ionas might be getting a little jealous but after a certain kind of favor I’m not at liberty to disclose he forgives me for my admittedly amazing streak of luck in getting in betas we both apply to.
I was in the Lord Of The Rings Online (LOTRO) beta which now I am able to talk about and will later. This one is about to end though. I’m also in two other beta, two Asian themed MMOs of different demeanors, first is more action based and more inline with the Asian sensibility of design (think RFO) and the other is more western in its concept. Both of those are closed betas and have a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) currently active.
No2: I got to be in the open beta of Vanguard and actually even preordered the game. I tried to love it, but I just could not. I appreciate the potential, I can even recognize a lot of its redeeming qualities, but the client… that damn client… and those bugs… Well I gave it up come March, I bought it, I did my part to support it, but I will not anymore.
Many people think that we should support it on principal, just because the software industry is what it is (projects never get finished and all that) and thus we should help them continue to develop while we pay them. Sorry, I’m not that sympathetic, they had 4 years to develop it, many months of beta, lots of the things wrong with game are easy fixes, some are not, but most importantly, the client is just abhorrent in its use of resources. Classic examples:
a) every time a playes comes in view the game hiccups, if you meet a small village or a crowded area with 10-20 people questing there, you cannot play for about a minute till the client does something, and
b) game is supposed to be “seamless” but everyone knows that it is not. You can also see the limit of one map if you have a torch lit (the active map is being lit by the torch, the ones that are not loaded will not be lit) and when you move between those chunks (as they are called) there is a 1-2 minute load and heavy Hard Disk Drive activity, client is frozen and the player cannot do anything, but the server thinks you are running forward and can thus aggro several groups of enemies that are there…
Of course there are more, like frequent crashes, slow frame rates in groups, broken crafting system (that magically became working as intended – I had seen a system message that said that the devs are working on the problem of too many complications during crafting, but after 15 days they announced that the system is just fine…) and ultimately (because it is not that important) not so great graphics for the horse power they require. Any idiot can make a game load 10.000 x 10.000 pixel texture of a sword to make it look good, load it with hardware effects and then add also a hardware bump map on it, that takes no skill. Skill is what Blizzard does, or what Turbine does with LOTRO, both of those games have an amazing balance of pleasant graphics and working frame rates. Fun fact; Vanguard would play with good frame rates if I turned all graphics options on, but it was murder whenever any other player came into view and don’t even talk about the cities. That’s why I was always on lowest setting and even then some cities (Khal was a test of patience) were a pain…
No3: University stuff of course, last semester and all, that takes up considerable time but is otherwise uneventful. Student council is still trying to decide how much credit a student should get for late submissions and all that important stuff. I’m saying that because they are not contending the time frame, but the grade reduction. Better spend energy on completing those papers people… then you wont need mitigating circumstances…
Final year project is moving along very well, almost ended now and I still have two months to spare.
March 12th, 2007
Well, here is one more MMO being announced. I know I do not sound all that enthusiastic, even though I really did like the Firefly universe. As one fan said in the documentary Done The Impossible:
“…I love that there are no aliens in it, I’m SICK of aliens…”
It is a future setting, one side is the Alliance, think of it as the established government of all populated planets, another side is the pure evil humans that we see in the film as the result of the Alliance’s experiments on pacifying a colony gone wrong, and then there are the people in between, covering everything from the simple accounting clerk to the pirate captain running a smuggling route.
I did like the series, I enjoyed the movie, but I cannot get excited about yet one more MMO. Gaming companies have turned their attention to MMOs and so many have produced one, but most of them are just unplayable crap. I’ve only enjoyed a handful of MMOs I’ve played, and even from those, only one stood out as a truly complete experience with only superficial bugs or omissions that didn’t destroy the game as some point.
So I say, good news, here’s to hoping the best, but also, here’s to not getting excited. I’ll just wait and see…
December 10th, 2006
Previous Posts