MMO Gaming

At some point we seem to have entered into some episode right out of the twilight zone. I mean, when a post I make actually manages to then come true I think we can all agree something is decidedly wrong with the universe.

Now, of course, this has been a long time coming, and my own post has nothing to do with what they are going to be doing, per se, but it is rather odd. Perhaps even more odd because I actually ended up writing that post in late March and just set it to post for the April 2. In the spirit of finding out interesting news the day after I post about a similar topic I’d like to encourage whoever has news of the Shadowrun MMO (I repeat Shadowrun MMO, for the love of god let’s get this thing out) please come out and tell us about it. No, seriously. Why the hell isn’t this out yet. Am I going to have to write an entire post dedicated to how perfect the system and settings translate to the MMO space? Am I going to have to write down every design idea I’ve ever had for the game before I get some news?

Microsoft, get on that. Surely you can afford to waste a few million reviving one of the best intellectual property’s ever developed by the human mind. Oh yeah, and when you announce it (tomorrow perhaps?) don’t tell me it’s going to be a pile of shit FPS again. I’d personally come and strangle you all. Dead. Serious.

One day each year every jackass has the wonderful privilege of being given a free ride. Their asshattery is overlooked, perhaps even found amusing. This day is April 1st, perhaps better known as April Fool’s Day.

Coming off like that it probably sounds as if I am cynical about the whole thing. “He’s been fooled one to many times” you are no doubt thinking. You would be wrong. That assumption would be incorrect because on this day I choose to go about my normal schedule, read all the things I normally would, and then dismiss them, the realistic with the ridiculous, because the whole day is a sham.

“On the second,” I swear to myself each year, “I shall wade through the bullshit to pick out the nuggets of truth like so much unchewed corn.” I consider that my April Fool’s prank to myself. I never laugh at it.

It seems to be customary, apparently, to recap the events of the day tomorrow, pointing out to everyone, in case it was not abundantly clear already, just exactly what was a load of horseshit and what was not.

To spit on the spirit of the day I will now say something wholly truthful. In the month of April I will post at least one post every day. Of course, if for some reason this is not the case, will I just say that this was in fact my April Fool’s joke? Or perhaps it is, in fact, my April Fool’s joke and this lead up has all been about setting the proper tone? Unfortunately for both you and I, we shall only discover the answer to that mystery at the end of the month.

Back in August I wrote a fairly short little post about the business sense of straying too far from what is “normal” when designing an MMOG. Just a few days ago I got an e-mail about that post from someone who disagreed. His stance was a game could be both innovative and intuitive to play. His example was Katamari Damacy.

I freely and openly admit to not having played the game so I’m going to go ahead and take his word for it that it has a quick and easy tutorial that gets you off and rolling around having fun in very little time. That got me thinking. Assuming that what he says is true, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t, how can this game, a game which has a pretty different twist on what you are doing and how to play it accomplish what many other games can’t?

Since this is an MMOG blog let’s take a look at the MMOGs I’m talking about to start. First up I’ll tear down a game I personally enjoy and am playing, Tabula Rasa. It wanted to do things in a new way, change up some fundamental aspects of how we play in our MMOGs…at least as much as was reasonable for them. They knew this would be new to a great many MMOG players, so they do have a tutorial.

The tutorial in Tabula Rasa is a lot of fun to play through, but does it really teach you all you need to know about how to be running and gunning in no time? I can’t say for certain. I’m used to playing shooters as well as MMOs so the combination of the two wasn’t such a big shock to my senses. For a great many people the tutorial probably got them in and started in no time. But what about those people who were like me when I wrote the post back in August. Those who had a game to go back to so they weren’t willing to stick out and wait for their fun when they could get it immediately? If a handful of posts from the beta boards are truthful, they probably left and never came back.

Now, that isn’t to say this is such a horrible thing. Chances are those people were never going to stick with the game long term, or possibly even buy it on release. It just wasn’t there cup of tea, and that’s perfectly fine. Still, that is a hurdle the MMOG designer needs to overcome. That’s an obstacle in the road. These games require investments of time and money larger than most others. People only really play one or two MMOGs at a time, and even then one is usually played more than the other, even if which game that is may switch from week to week or month to month.

Example two, City of Heroes tutorial. CoX is not a huge change from the standard MMOG. It has, as every game has, it’s own set of quirks and differences but on the whole coming from EQ or WoW, you know what you are going into with CoX. That said, they still have a tutorial. This tutorial teaches you the basics of their systems that don’t appear in other games, specifically inspirations and enhancements and how they work, as well as giving out a general introduction on normal playing and beating up the bad guys. It also happens to be a free level of experience for those that do it.

How good is it though, really? It will certainly get you started and will teach you pretty much all you need to know about the how the game works but it lacks something rather small, something that is easily overlooked and by all rights is not a problem inherent to the actual tutorial at all. You can, and many do, skip it after they have played the game for a while. They skip it because in all honesty it isn’t that much fun to play through and it is probably just as quick to get that level after the tutorial than during it.

This isn’t a huge gripe of course, that’s the basic premise behind the tutorial, teach you to play and then set you off into the wide open world. But looking at Tabula Rasa, I can’t help but think, for all the things that tutorial might not do right, it actually is quite a bit of fun to play and replay, which is good, because you may need to a few times.

The point of all this is that the game that innovated suffers from people who need the tutorial not wanting to bother with it, and the game that is fairly similar to the “standard” MMO gets people out and playing immediately, but they could just skip it entirely and still be okay. Essentially what I’m saying trying to show here is the game that actually needs a tutorial is losing their players before the game that doesn’t.

Assume for the moment that the statement above is true, even if you disagree with it. What does that mean when it comes to design and creation of MMOGs? How does that compare to the gold standard of the MMOG, World of Warcraft? I’ll be looking into that in the next article.

mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, innovation, game design, tabula rasa, city of heroes

I found this sitting here in my drafts, mostly finished. I don’t know when I started writing it, a while ago it would seem, judging by the timeline I set up in the post. I also don’t know why I didn’t finish off the last bit of it much sooner and post it. These are questions I will probably never be able to answer. That having been said, I figured now is as good a time as any to finish it off so here we go. A post from the deepest pits of GamingMMO.com’s long-forgotten drafts page.

Enjoy!

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The year is quickly coming to an end. Normally I wouldn’t write anything in particular, since I already had my personal first year wrap up months ago, but everyone else is doing it, and hey, I’m a follower. Also, I haven’t posted much at all this month and I feel if I don’t post today then I will not start posting again regularly tomorrow, which would cause all sorts of problems.

Though certainly not the best year for MMOs there were definitely more interesting happenings than in many years prior. To highlight some of these goings on I decided to create a best (and worst) of list for whatever categories happened to pop into my head. If you’ve got your own “Best…” or “Worst…” post it in the comments; I’d love to hear.

Best Game Update/Patch

EVE Online: Trinity - Though it could be argued that this is more an expansion than a patch I’ll consider it, for the sake of having two separate categories (and winners) a patch, rather than an expansion. I’d say an expansion would be something you buy extra.

Now then, what makes “Trinity” so great? In case you didn’t hear, this is the patch where they completely overhauled the graphics, showing off some incredibly shiny new ships. There was other stuff too, of course, but that takes a back seat to the graphics, it’s the real reason people were so eager for it.

Pics via CrazyKinux

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I, like a great many people using Wordpress, use Akismet for my spam protection. I’ve been noticing a problem recently though. It’s letting through things, more than once, which I have already filtered out as spam. This is annoying.

Not so say it isn’t a great filter, it still is, as it blocks hundreds of comments each day (and has never blocked a legitimate comment to my knowledge) but the ones that get through just seem like such a pain.

Where do MMOs come in to this picture? Primarily in thinking about how to detract from in-game spam (of gold, or power leveling services, etc.). I’m not sure how to go about it. My problem is, you see, not that I don’t have an idea on systems that could be put in place (beyond what any of the current games are doing) but that I can’t think of a system that is inherently beyond being overcome in a relatively short time.

I started using Akismet when this blog first went up. That’s just over a year now. In that time some comments are already starting to slip through the cracks. Spammers are not stupid people (or the people creating the bots doing the spamming, depending on what it happens to be.)

I’ve noticed this trend for a long time in my time administrating/moderating communities as well. As soon as you implement something meant to stop spammers it works for a short time and then they circumvent that and you are back to square one.

So, how can we combat this in an MMOG? Giving it some thought the best I could come up with was spam filters (similar to an Akismet or any other type of spam filter) is applied inside your chat system. Any messages that are considered “spam” by the computer system are filtered out so they are never seen by the general audience of your game but it will still show for the spammers. This would be similar to an “auto ignore” feature built into the chat system.

Text that the filter is unsure of would be sent through once and could then be “reported” by players as spam. After it reaches a certain threshold of reports it flags all additional messages in that same auto ignore bank.

Similarly players could report any message that slipped through the cracks as just a normal message and it could be then removed as spam and flagged as ignore. (I’ll ignore for the moment the obvious useful administrative options that this would give any CSR as far as reports go.)

Of course this isn’t flawless by any means. The system could be abused by players, and will be, no doubt. But, I think adding in an auto filter for chat is the next logical step to take. Pure reporting works fine for a while, but as games get bigger, and the business of breaking the rules of those games get bigger, we need to find different ways to attack it.

Just some random things I was thinking about, back to your business now.

Apparently, having already seen my glowing review of AFK Magazine and enjoying that so much I was recently sent an e-mail by Dave Taylor from Gamerzines.com Specifically he directed me to Issue #2 of their MMOZine.

I was not informed of Issue #1, which is just as well, because I seem to like second issues much more than first.

Now, as happy as I am to randomly pimp a site here for the free post it allows me, there actually was something in the e-mail I was sent that I did want to pass along, I’ll just quote to save time.

This issue we have a free LOTRO item giveaway thanks to CodeMasters, so the item is Europe servers only. All readers need to do is request a code via the form in the magazine and we’ll send them it via email. Then they retrieve it via their COG account for use in game. The item is called the Glass of Aglaral and it restores +1 Hope for a 1 hour period on each use. Handy when you’ve been defeated.

I don’t happen to be playing LotRO, nor am I European, however, if Sitemeter is to be believed a large portion of my readership is from various places in Europe (and a shockingly large number from Brazil, but that’s another story) so I thought it was worth passing on.

As for the magazine itself? Well, I haven’t gotten very far into it but a few things I did like. First being, you download the PDF to view it. We all know how I feel about in-browser viewing of magazines I think.

Another nice thing, their reviews. I didn’t see a single number anywhere. Just a few days ago I was discussing with my brother how I would much prefer to get rid of scores given to games and just make people actually read text so they could decide whether the game was for them and not be forced to look at some arbitrary number someone set up.

All things considered I’m liking it so far and I’ll be watching it from here on out. If you are interested you can check it out here.

mmozine, gamerzines, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, mmo reviews

I’ve been enjoying several other bloggers taking the time to do this, so I thought I’d throw some rather odd search terms used to bring people to the site. I can’t be sure exactly what a great number of these people are looking for, but I’ll give it a shot anyway.

First, let’s start with some visit depth statistics based on search words.

• 37 people arrived here when searching for “rabbits” I assume they ended up here but I can’t be certain because I am actually listed several times under that search.
• 4 people arrived here when searching for “rf online wine” I’m not sure what they wanted. Did they misspell the word “whine”? Who’s to say, but my only thoughts on RF Online are posted here. A quick hint, don’t bother with the game.
• MORE THAN ONE person ended up here after searching for “http://www.gamingmmo.com”. Folks, I don’t mean to be rude, but at some point it is easier to just type it into your address bar rather than do a search for it.

Okay, enough with the numbers, let’s just move on to some normal, everyday, ridiculous search strings.

• wow stats kills the most players - One could assume you wanted to know about the player who has the most PvP kills in World of Warcraft, but with that kind of shoddy searching you’ll never find an answer. Try to write something comprehensible. Unless of course you were suggesting that WoW stats actually kill people, in which case I would disagree, but WoW itself does kill people…seriously, search it.
• turtle sex - Oh the many “Turtles do it…” jokes I could make here. I’ll refrain though, this is a kid friendly blog, assuming, you know, you’re kids are adults.
• i hate mmo’s - And you have to search this to find other people like you? I’m confused? I hate relish, but I don’t go searching for it on Google.
• wow cancer aldor - Scryer loving bastard.
• shirts outfitters adventure darkest - Random. Search. String. Anyone?
• mmocruch - Though some annoying bitches would yell at me over a typo, it looks like I get the last laugh because people searching make typos too.
• tabula rasa pets wont attack - Hint: They are non-combat pets.
• im running tabula rasa on vista - I’m running it on XP, do you want a freaking cookie or something?
• why won’t you talk to me? - I’m going to go ahead and guess it is because you are a little creepy.

I’ll stop there for now. I’ve purposely omitted a great number of some of the more disturbing search terms, for fear that my site gets higher in those rankings than it already is.

funny searches, stupid searches, mmo, mmog, mmo gaming, mmorpg

This was my last weekend of the month for gaming. Starting Saturday I will have hit December already. Having left off last week at level 19 I expected to get a lot done especially with the long weekend because of Thanksgiving. That was not the case.

That said I did manage to crawl my way up to level 21 in the Palisades and have worked a good bit of experience into 22 also. Unfortunately this seems to be the part of the game where the curve is not quite adjusted correctly. My brother, who is also playing is up around level 30 and has said that the curve starts to get better again right around that time, where experience coming in is actually useful compared to the experience needed. I’d like to see this tuned a bit. It is incredibly disheartening to complete a mission, especially one that may be particularly frustrating or difficult, only to find that the 18,000 experience you just got didn’t even noticeably move the bar.

I have noticed a somewhat interesting trend via my blogroll this week. People are warming up to TR it seems. Those who wrote it off in beta are coming back and finding that it doesn’t suck like they remember. I would agree. A fair amount changed between release and end of beta, and those who got in at one point in beta but didn’t stick around may be shocked to come back to a much more complete game.

The Tabula Rasa beta seemed to actually be a beta test, compared to what many others do in their beta test, just using it as a chance to try the game before you buy it. Unfortunately it may not have been the best move they made as people didn’t immediately warm to it.

I’m not saying that the game is without it’s faults, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten close to that, but I agree with the redefined views of the game people are having. It is fun to play. Whether that fun lasts for only a couple of weeks or whether it translates to a long-term MMO experience remains to be seen, but the very fact it is there means the game has taken a large step in the right direction for the genre.

But, getting back to where I happen to be at, I did manage, before the problems, to get back to Wilderness and complete the Targets of Opportunity mission there. I still had to collect some Assault and Defense tokens from the Landing Zone and Imperial Valley. Having completed that I was rewarded with a Clone Credit and the Wilderness Master title. I didn’t really need either, but it was nice to get the mission out of my log. I’m going to try to get a little bit more done tonight, but, as you may or may not know, tonight is a big TV night, with Chuck, Heroes, How I Met Your Mother and Journeyman all being on.

We’ll see how that goes.

ncsoft, tabula rasa, plaync, destination games, landing zone outpost, imperial valley, clone credit, concordia wilderness, palisades, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming, Chuck, How I Met Your Mother, Heroes, Journeyman

As happened last week I’ll be taking a break from the story to give a little bit of info on what I did, since I didn’t get to play on my main character today.

There has been news of the next patch and what will be included in it on the main site. To understand this post it would be best to go check it out first.

A lot more issues are being dealt with this patch, which is of course good, but the big news is that this seems to be a bit more of some actual semi-useful content as well. The promised Military Surplus shops/auctions are going in. I’m not sure how useful this will be, but I think it is necessary to some extent to add a little bit of an in-game economy. Right now I’m sitting on (with just my main character) about 250,000 credits and I’ve been spending them fairly liberally. Having something to spend money on will be a good thing.

I won’t comment on the specifics of it as it isn’t yet fully implemented, I’ll wait until the official patch for that, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

One thing that is still there that is bothering me, as it is put under “Known Issues” is that the “Rage” ability does not show duration information. For some characters this isn’t that big of a deal, but for me, being a Commando, it can be a bit annoying. I use Rage a lot and not knowing when it ends, how long I have on it is a bit of a problem, I’m hoping this gets moved off the known issues list sometime soon. It is a small but crucial detail that needs to be taken care of.

At any rate I’m going to cut it a bit short today as I’m not feeling well, I’ll be back tomorrow to continue on with the story some more.

ncsoft, plaync, destination games, tabula rasa, patches, public test realm

Last week I was not quite level 20 and getting near the end of my time in Concordia Divide. This week I’m up to level 21 and just getting started in Concordia Palisades. Yeah, not very many levels gained I know, but once again I’m finding the curve to be a little off.

I’ve completed at least ten missions and my experience bar barely moves. In fact, I’m actually seeming to get less experience per mission in Palisades then I was in Divide…or at very best the exact same experience.

Soon enough I’ll be off Foreas entirely though and on to the next planet.

A side note on the slow leveling, though I spent the vast majority of my time playing my main character and working him up I did not spend all weekend (where most of my playing time is) using him, I did take about 30 minutes to level up a new character to five and choose the specialist class. I also spent a bit of time on my level fifteen Ranger doing some crafting.

The crafting in Tabula Rasa is actually one of the better crafting systems in a game I’ve seen, not because it is incredibly in depth or really the peak of what crafting can be, but because it fits in with what TR is. Tabula Rasa is about getting out into the battles and having fun and the crafting complements this. It doesn’t take very long to get anything done in crafting. The longest I’ve spent, from what I remember was just under two minutes. Unfortunately to make a lot of the best stuff you need a crafting alt, and there is no sense in creating that alt until you already have a character at 50 (who wants to put skill points into crafting and then still try and level a person) so I can’t say much about how the other, “better” crafting stuff works.

In Wilderness there weren’t very many bugs. In Divide, there were a few but none of them particularly bad. In Palisades there are bugs all over the place it seems and it is very frustrating. I knew this, of course, but I was kind of hoping that it would be changed and things would be different. Names of locations don’t show up after death, mission rewards or items don’t show up correctly on the mission box. These things are just unacceptable and sloppy. They don’t hurt anything really but it just makes the game feel like it wasn’t given enough QA time to take care of these small things which make the game look bad even though all the big things work (for the most part anyway.)

Hopefully these bugs will be taken care of soon, and maybe the next planet isn’t quite so bad, but I have a feeling it is only going to get worse and worse from here on with more noticeable and annoying bugs popping up. That’s unfortunate because they don’t need to be there.

That covers the majority of my thoughts from this week, and we’ll see how the next week goes. Soon enough I’ll be out of days in November and back to normal.

ncsoft, plaync, destination games, tabula rasa, mmo, mmog, mmorpg, mmo gaming

So, just now I decided that I’m going to reserve Mondays for posting about where I am in my time spent playing Tabula Rasa. Well, more specifically, doing it in an out of character way. Let’s get some of the basics out of the way first though. I’m playing on the Pegasus server, currently the only east coast server available and my (last) name is Calceres. If you are playing feel free to send me a shout in game (let me know who you are though, because otherwise it is just creepy.)

Since I pre-ordered the game I got to start playing almost a week ago now, though not nearly as much as I would have liked and I only barely made it to level 6 in those first three days. Currently I’m sitting at level fifteen, about halfway through on my way to sixteen. I’m playing a Commando at the moment (the third tier class after Soldier) with a cloned Ranger at fifteen as well.

So far the experience has been a lot of fun. Lag was minimal through most of the weekend, though around prime time Sunday night I did run into some issues, but they were only for a relatively short time and it was never as bad as some of what I’d experienced in the beta. Overall, the big issues with the game seem to have been cleared up. That doesn’t mean there isn’t along way to go still to get content to where it should be but from a technical standpoint the game is running fairly well.

I’ve been very critical in most of my postings about Tabula Rasa. Such that I think an important message that I have tried to convey before has not been seen clearly. The game is fun. I challenge anyone to proc Rage 5, whip out a shotgun, and assault or defend a control point and tell me it was boring. I think that NCSoft has a game that will, in fact, succeed on some level. I don’t think we will see an “Auto Assault” happen to this game as so many have been saying because the game is significantly better than that. In fact, Tabula Rasa is probably one of their best MMOGs to date.

Of course, as I’ve said before, there are flaws and some of them don’t even relate to the content. I’ve encountered a handful of bugs up to this point. None of them are game breaking, but some are annoying. Broken missions is probably my biggest annoyance. Most missions work fine but that doesn’t help lower the annoyance of finding the ones that don’t work yet. Worse is that some of these missions did work in the beta and are only running into problems now. That’s just frustrating. We’ll see how I’m feeling this same time next week. The first month is critical and I may have some different things to say if there are not some quick hotfixes put in soon.

Tabula Rasa, mmog, mmo gaming, mmo, ncsoft, destination games, richard garriott

In case you were not previously aware November is quite a packed month. There is NaBloPoMo and NaNoWriMo as well. For those of you who don’t know what they are that’s Nation Blog Posting Month, in which you post once per day on your blog for the entire month of November and Nation Novel Writing Month, in which you attempt to write a complete novel in one month. If you are participating you may need the help of friends.

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The question from here obviously arises of what type of crunchy is it. If you are unaware of the various levels of crunchiness one need only look to the candy world for a veritable trove of examples. I’ll use only two here to explain my point. We have, on the one far end of the spectrum the crunchiness of the Tootsie Pop, and on the other the crunchiness of the Nestle Crunch bar. But where exactly does the MMO Crunch fall between these two extremes? We can only hope as far as possible from that damnable thieving owl. If, then, an MMO Crunch does land closer to the milk chocolaty goodness of the Nestle Crunch then we can imagine how useful such a site will be. Carefully covered in layers of smooth, creamy information with a slight but satisfying crunch of insight into each lovingly crafted post. It will be delectable.

Just wanted to plug a new site about MMOs, not a lot posted there yet, but a couple of interesting articles.

mmocrunch.com, mmog, mmorpg, mmo, online games, mmo gaming

Hellgate: London is coming out. The big question on everyone’s mind isn’t what you’d expect. No one seems to be worried about whether the game is any good or not, no, rather we worry about whether we can technically define it as an MMOG.

One would think this would be a relatively easy question to answer most of the time, but not when you are doing what they are. You see, they are letting people pay them a monthly fee for some features. And, as we all know, this is only reasonable for MMOGs. So, what’s the deal then?

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