The only issue with "nerfing" a class is player complaints. That's a valid issue, but from a design perspective there is no problem with reducing the power of an overpowered class.
Constantly upscaling power causes mudflation, which reduces the impact of player driven self advancement due to an overall "world advancement".
The start to half life 2 is actually very novice gamer friendly.
You start out just wandering around. The only thing that's missing to make it very friendly is an in game explanation that W-A-S-D are your movement keys, but presumedly the manual does that (I didn't read the manual). In fact your early game game experience is entirely running around in a 3d space, which is pretty easy even if you have no shooter experience.
(great storyline happens)
You eventually get to a couple jumping puzzles. Here we're got one new gameplay concept - jumping, and it's introduced in a tense setting but where you have all the time you need.
By the time you get into combat you've been playing for half an hour, and I believe it tells you how to "fire" (swing your crobar).
It's a little while before you get a gun.
In short half life 2 is very gamer friendly, starting off with extremely simple gameplay and introducing one new gameplay element at a time. You just don't notice it because the game rocks so much, you don't really think about how the game isn't a frag fest from frame 1.
This really shouldn't be getting press on slashdot, it's clearly a marketing campaign.
If you want a model with a certain look, go to a modeling agency.
If you want press, pretend it's some kind of contest, and wait for fan and news sites to give you lots of free publicity.
$10 says the "winner" of this contest will turn out to not be a gamer, and will never have even played everquest 2 prior to hearing about this contest.
I have no problem with Sony doing this, they're really smart, but following up on this as press is really dumb. Bad slashdot. No penguin cookie for you.
Alas I may burn an off topic karma point but all I can say is good post!
However i disagree the government should get out of the Marriage business and leave things up to churches, because not all (straight or gay) people are religious and want to be married by a church.
Take a look at Canada for a good model, we're steadly moving towards gay marriage sanctioned by the state.
I find it interesting that a story with gay/lesbian content gets press at Slashdot only when Microsoft is involved.
Come on, 10% of the Linux kernel was written by gays! (made up stat but probably true:)
stop bitching about qa issues
on
Troika Games Closes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah Troika had some QA issues, but they made brilliant games. A bug free piece of crap game is not really very interesting. A buggy brilliant game is still a brilliant game.
It's easier to improve quality than it is to improve brilliance.
Even with quality issues, TOEE and Vampire have sold pretty well. The bigger question should be, how can a company make critically acclaimed games that sell well and still go under? What's wrong with the market? Do we want to see game production limited to a few major studios like EA and Ubi or do we want to see innovative titles?
I hope everyone participating in this thread is voting with their pocketbook and buying great games made by small studios.
I hope that those small studios can come up with business models that let them succeed. Maybe Valve's STEAM model is the future? I'd like to see more suggestions for how small studios can survive and less bitching about QA issues.
Many games out there like Unreal, Warcraft 3, have great tools for creating fun games. The scripting languages that come with these games are legitimate programming languages that let you focus on gameplay and not on implementing basic engine components.
Creating a games engine is not creating a game. Using a toolset lets you create a game, while skipping creating the engine.
I've been testing for a year and I'm glad it's ending too.
But probably not for the reasons you think, I'm glad because I'm really bored! I'm down to maybe 10 hours of play a week because there just isn't really that much to do.
Most beta testers are assuming there will be a character wipe, which is a great thing! I can shelve my level 60 and start fresh, and play the game when it's most fun, the leveling curve from 0 to 60.
But sadly I'm not confident that, after I get my level 60 on release, there will be much to do. Wow currently is seriously lacking in the endgame department, and I do not have the blind faith many seem to have in Blizzard.
So tell me what to feed my cats! I'm feeding them Hills perscription diet z/d (which is insanely expensive) because my vet thinks they may be allergic to chicken.
Without a doubt wow is the more polished game, however it is not really ready. More explicitly, class balance, PVP, class talents, racial abilities, and more are incomplete.
While many people will say "MMOs are never complete" those of us playing WOW every day know that the game feels like it needs 1-2 more months and then it truly would be done.
Releasing Nov 22nd is a business decision, and it's probably the right one, but WOW isn't truly done.
I think both Everquest 2 and WOW have a great chance at success. The reason is that while EQ2 is far far far less polished than WOW, EQ2 gameplay appeals more to hard core gamers, the kind who obsessed over Everquest 1 and played the game for 3+ years.
Currently there is a lot of debate over WOW's ability to retain players for more than one year. The game is very easy, and the basic concern is that because it's so easy the player base won't be able to handle difficult challenges, Blizzard's content production team won't be able to keep up, and people will become bored and move on to other games.
People talk extensively about how much they hate the grind of EQ2, but it may be the case that grind is the secret ingredient to EQ2's long term success. After all, Sony doesn't need to be popular, they just need to get $15/month from as many people as possible.
Actionscript 2.0 is very different from actionscript 1.0. They are an entirely different beast. Actionscript 1.0 code will not run unmodified in an actionscript 2.0 environment.
While it's far from perfect, and it's not Java, it doesn't feel like javascript with extra flash API calls.
It feels a lot more like java. I'm only to some extent a newbie Actionscript 2.0 programmer, but I'm considering it seriously for web app development and, gmail asside, I wouldn't make the same statement about javascript.
If only Flash wasn't so proprietary (only likes talking to.NET backends etc though there is an opensource php remoting (client/server) tool it's a bit of a hack and is not mature).
Flash has grown up. What it represents (to me) is a potentially really solid thin client for building remote applications.
Why not use Java? Well compare the amount and quality of flash games to java games, that's my metric for my belief that at least for gaming, that flash is probably a better dev environment.
But the huge problem right now is the lack of quality documentation/tutorials/books on actionscript 2.0 (released last november). It's not completely backwards compatible. Most of the books are oriented towards dumbasses, and they are just actionscript 1.0 books with the code tweaked so it works on 2.0 (i.e. not OOPy).
If anyone has a good recommendation in terms of actionscript 2.0 books, I'd appreciate it. I have this one, which is a good book, but is very oriented towards AS1.0 programmers moving to AS2.0. It's hard to find a book that is geek friendly, example oriented, and designed from scratch for actionscript 2.0.
The concept that you start off fighting rats and snakes for a long time until you become "powerful" and can have fun fighting tough opponents is fundamentally flawed.
What defines a powerful opponent? Is it their hit points, their armor class, their level? For most characters in most MMOs a powerful opponent is one more than a couple levels higher than them, since those opponents will be able to kill them very quickly.
Perhaps it's just that "rats" are themselves boring, and don't seem powerful because they are rats. What this suggests is that it's important to pit players against interesting opponents at lower levels. There's nothing that prevents a low level monster from having all the characteristics of a higher level one, just at a lesser power to match that of the weaker character. There's nothing that forces the low level MMO game to be less fun than the high level.
I'm not suggesting there are no problems with leveling based system, but that section of the article does not identify a fundamental flaw with leveling systems.
Players had a diminishing return on their experience, the more you played the slower your xp would accumulate. It was pretty soft, there was no hard limit, and the decrease in xp plateaued.
They dropped it because of too many player complaints. They still have a small "rested" bonus but it really has no effect it's so minor.
I think this idea would work, but it would work best on a specific "soft core" themed server. The soft core server would give players an xp bonus that diminishes over time, eventually becoming a penalty, and limiting play.
From a marketing perspective it's not clear to me that an MMO could capture enough attention with this model though.
Slashdot Mirror
The only issue with "nerfing" a class is player complaints. That's a valid issue, but from a design perspective there is no problem with reducing the power of an overpowered class.
Constantly upscaling power causes mudflation, which reduces the impact of player driven self advancement due to an overall "world advancement".
The entire article reeked of the assumption that geeks are men.
At least bother to state "male geeks" if that's what you're going to talk about.
Thanks for a great formula to make a highly niche mmo that will not enjoy a large market success.
This is stupid I can't believe that slashdot posted it, this attention grab is more insulting and hurtful to women than booth babes are.
Just don't post dumb stories like this.
The start to half life 2 is actually very novice gamer friendly.
You start out just wandering around. The only thing that's missing to make it very friendly is an in game explanation that W-A-S-D are your movement keys, but presumedly the manual does that (I didn't read the manual). In fact your early game game experience is entirely running around in a 3d space, which is pretty easy even if you have no shooter experience.
(great storyline happens)
You eventually get to a couple jumping puzzles. Here we're got one new gameplay concept - jumping, and it's introduced in a tense setting but where you have all the time you need.
By the time you get into combat you've been playing for half an hour, and I believe it tells you how to "fire" (swing your crobar).
It's a little while before you get a gun.
In short half life 2 is very gamer friendly, starting off with extremely simple gameplay and introducing one new gameplay element at a time. You just don't notice it because the game rocks so much, you don't really think about how the game isn't a frag fest from frame 1.
This really shouldn't be getting press on slashdot, it's clearly a marketing campaign.
If you want a model with a certain look, go to a modeling agency.
If you want press, pretend it's some kind of contest, and wait for fan and news sites to give you lots of free publicity.
$10 says the "winner" of this contest will turn out to not be a gamer, and will never have even played everquest 2 prior to hearing about this contest.
I have no problem with Sony doing this, they're really smart, but following up on this as press is really dumb. Bad slashdot. No penguin cookie for you.
Alas I may burn an off topic karma point but all I can say is good post!
However i disagree the government should get out of the Marriage business and leave things up to churches, because not all (straight or gay) people are religious and want to be married by a church.
Take a look at Canada for a good model, we're steadly moving towards gay marriage sanctioned by the state.
I find it interesting that a story with gay/lesbian content gets press at Slashdot only when Microsoft is involved.
Come on, 10% of the Linux kernel was written by gays! (made up stat but probably true
Yeah Troika had some QA issues, but they made brilliant games. A bug free piece of crap game is not really very interesting. A buggy brilliant game is still a brilliant game.
It's easier to improve quality than it is to improve brilliance.
Even with quality issues, TOEE and Vampire have sold pretty well. The bigger question should be, how can a company make critically acclaimed games that sell well and still go under? What's wrong with the market? Do we want to see game production limited to a few major studios like EA and Ubi or do we want to see innovative titles?
I hope everyone participating in this thread is voting with their pocketbook and buying great games made by small studios.
I hope that those small studios can come up with business models that let them succeed. Maybe Valve's STEAM model is the future? I'd like to see more suggestions for how small studios can survive and less bitching about QA issues.
And even I think it's dumb this game isn't being made in America.
While the details aren't clear, this is obviously associated with the US Military, and it seems like the money should be going to a US company.
The caveat to that of course is a US company would have to make a competitive offer! I guess that didn't happen, but it seems too bad.
Actually I'm a canadian (Ubisoft main development in Montreal) and I'd prefer to not have this game developed in my country =P
Her son wasn't a teen he was an adult (21)
"noting that game manufacturers hire employees with psychology degrees in order to make their games more addictive"
An undergraduate psychology degree doesn't really qualify you to make games 'addictive'.
There's a big difference between someone with a psychology degree and a psychologist.
Many games out there like Unreal, Warcraft 3, have great tools for creating fun games. The scripting languages that come with these games are legitimate programming languages that let you focus on gameplay and not on implementing basic engine components.
Creating a games engine is not creating a game. Using a toolset lets you create a game, while skipping creating the engine.
Why not ask both the people who listen to your stream what format they'd like the music in?
Why didn't you guys hire me when I sent you my resume
P.S. I'm flying out to one of your competitors next week for an interview
I've been testing for a year and I'm glad it's ending too.
But probably not for the reasons you think, I'm glad because I'm really bored! I'm down to maybe 10 hours of play a week because there just isn't really that much to do.
Most beta testers are assuming there will be a character wipe, which is a great thing! I can shelve my level 60 and start fresh, and play the game when it's most fun, the leveling curve from 0 to 60.
But sadly I'm not confident that, after I get my level 60 on release, there will be much to do. Wow currently is seriously lacking in the endgame department, and I do not have the blind faith many seem to have in Blizzard.
So tell me what to feed my cats! I'm feeding them Hills perscription diet z/d (which is insanely expensive) because my vet thinks they may be allergic to chicken.
I alpha (pre-beta) tested both eq2 and wow
Without a doubt wow is the more polished game, however it is not really ready. More explicitly, class balance, PVP, class talents, racial abilities, and more are incomplete.
While many people will say "MMOs are never complete" those of us playing WOW every day know that the game feels like it needs 1-2 more months and then it truly would be done.
Releasing Nov 22nd is a business decision, and it's probably the right one, but WOW isn't truly done.
I think both Everquest 2 and WOW have a great chance at success. The reason is that while EQ2 is far far far less polished than WOW, EQ2 gameplay appeals more to hard core gamers, the kind who obsessed over Everquest 1 and played the game for 3+ years.
Currently there is a lot of debate over WOW's ability to retain players for more than one year. The game is very easy, and the basic concern is that because it's so easy the player base won't be able to handle difficult challenges, Blizzard's content production team won't be able to keep up, and people will become bored and move on to other games.
People talk extensively about how much they hate the grind of EQ2, but it may be the case that grind is the secret ingredient to EQ2's long term success. After all, Sony doesn't need to be popular, they just need to get $15/month from as many people as possible.
Great so once there is a properly managed e-rate program the FCC can start doling out money again.
Actionscript 2.0 is very different from actionscript 1.0. They are an entirely different beast. Actionscript 1.0 code will not run unmodified in an actionscript 2.0 environment.
I think you're underestimating actionscript 2.0.
.NET backends etc though there is an opensource php remoting (client/server) tool it's a bit of a hack and is not mature).
While it's far from perfect, and it's not Java, it doesn't feel like javascript with extra flash API calls.
It feels a lot more like java. I'm only to some extent a newbie Actionscript 2.0 programmer, but I'm considering it seriously for web app development and, gmail asside, I wouldn't make the same statement about javascript.
If only Flash wasn't so proprietary (only likes talking to
Actionscript 2.0 the language behind the latest Flash, is a real programming language. It feels very java-ish. So, why again do we need Lazlo?
Flash has grown up. What it represents (to me) is a potentially really solid thin client for building remote applications.
Why not use Java? Well compare the amount and quality of flash games to java games, that's my metric for my belief that at least for gaming, that flash is probably a better dev environment.
But the huge problem right now is the lack of quality documentation/tutorials/books on actionscript 2.0 (released last november). It's not completely backwards compatible. Most of the books are oriented towards dumbasses, and they are just actionscript 1.0 books with the code tweaked so it works on 2.0 (i.e. not OOPy).
If anyone has a good recommendation in terms of actionscript 2.0 books, I'd appreciate it. I have this one, which is a good book, but is very oriented towards AS1.0 programmers moving to AS2.0. It's hard to find a book that is geek friendly, example oriented, and designed from scratch for actionscript 2.0.
The concept that you start off fighting rats and snakes for a long time until you become "powerful" and can have fun fighting tough opponents is fundamentally flawed.
What defines a powerful opponent? Is it their hit points, their armor class, their level? For most characters in most MMOs a powerful opponent is one more than a couple levels higher than them, since those opponents will be able to kill them very quickly.
Perhaps it's just that "rats" are themselves boring, and don't seem powerful because they are rats. What this suggests is that it's important to pit players against interesting opponents at lower levels. There's nothing that prevents a low level monster from having all the characteristics of a higher level one, just at a lesser power to match that of the weaker character. There's nothing that forces the low level MMO game to be less fun than the high level.
I'm not suggesting there are no problems with leveling based system, but that section of the article does not identify a fundamental flaw with leveling systems.
They tried this with World of Warcraft.
Players had a diminishing return on their experience, the more you played the slower your xp would accumulate. It was pretty soft, there was no hard limit, and the decrease in xp plateaued.
They dropped it because of too many player complaints. They still have a small "rested" bonus but it really has no effect it's so minor.
I think this idea would work, but it would work best on a specific "soft core" themed server. The soft core server would give players an xp bonus that diminishes over time, eventually becoming a penalty, and limiting play.
From a marketing perspective it's not clear to me that an MMO could capture enough attention with this model though.