Tamrielo

I’ve been dabbling in PvP games recently– Battlefront a few weekends back, FFXIV’s Lords of Verminion, a bit of Starcraft. I even jumped back into Tribes to check it out, since I remember loving that game.

Of these, one has decent matchmaking, and one is too young to have enough data for good matchmaking. It’s an interesting problem with PvP design in general– for the vast majority of people, it’s only really fun if the sides are even, and otherwise it’s miserable. Furthermore, the speed at which players quit if they’re losing is a lot faster than if they’re bored of winning, so you quickly get into impenetrable situations where any sense of stratified play is eliminated. There’s no space for new players to learn how to play the game, and advanced players benefit from stomping new players.

At the same time, a lot of PvP games (especially MMOs) try to blur the line between levels of player skill, making each match a crapshoot as to whether it will be a close, fun match or a total blowout. It tends to make PvP feel more random and less “balanced”, which doesn’t satisfy PvP players, and it frustrates players who dabble in the gametype because it feels punitive and random compared to the rest of the game.

As a recent example for me, I’ve noticed that the Lords of Verminion metagame has, broadly, three tiers of players. There are the low tier players, who are trying new strategies and testing out minions against players (because the AI, even at its hardest, isn’t that challenging outside of some of the pre-scripted challenges), who tend to lose most of their games against other players (owing at least partly to a lack of rare minions). There are the mid-tier players, who are what I was running into a few days ago, who supplant skill with rare and overly powerful minions. Then there are the high-tier players, who are using no more than three or four different minions (a couple of which are rare), all generally with the same special ability, but are adept at using it and reacting to the other player’s moves. They tend to beat the mid-tier players who just use rare minions, because they’re better at the game and know which rare minions are the best and which more common minions can beat them. Unfortunately, I’m paired with all of the different tiers of players essentially at random, and the lower-tier players tend to stop playing after two or three matches. They tend to be the best and most even games for me, because I also lack rare minions, though I can occasionally beat a mid-tier player, though high tier players are both better than I am and have better minions. As a result, after a scant handful of games the only players remaining on the field for me are the ones I’m at a stark minion disadvantage against.

In a similar vein, Starcraft divides its players up by “leagues”, from bronze all the way up to platinum, diamond, and master. Every game you play adjusts your overall ranking, so that you’re more or less always being paired with players of your skill level. Starcraft’s downside is that even the very lowest tiers of play require knowledge of the game that’s hard to get without exposing yourself to other players. Other players, especially in PvP games, tend to be abrasive and combative– League of Legends is a prime example of a game that’s been fighting this for years with mixed results. Even in the usually surprisingly positive FFXIV community, I had a person (who was the top-ranked player in my server’s tournament last I checked) tell me to “just quit, you’re not good” in our match. It’s a bad environment to learn in, and worse if you have both opponents AND teammates to interfere (again: see League).

Solutions to this are interesting. In the MMO space, the number of players who actually actively participate in PvP is vanishingly small in most games– depending on the game it sits anywhere from as low as 2% to as high as 35%, but it’s always a minority of players. It’s a relatively inexpensive source of content, which is why you see it as much as you do, but supporting teaching systems (which would be significantly more expensive) are vanishingly rare.

Here’s the thing that frustrates me. PvP is fun. Probably a majority of my readership just read that and winced, or outright said to the screen “no, it’s not!”, but I assure you it is. Mariokart is a fun game. Smash Bros is a fun game. Lots of board and card games are fun, and they’re PvP. Bar Trivia is PvP. It’s possible to have fun in PvP in a video game, and I’d be honestly surprised to run into someone who’s played games for a long time who hasn’t had fun with PvP somewhere in there. It’s just that when you’re playing Mariokart with friends on the couch, you’re (probably) not dicks to each other, and you can make adjustments for slight skill differences to make it fun for everyone. No one wins if someone just slams everyone else and smack talks about it, and if someone does that, they’re probably not getting invited to the next game night.

Despite this, PvP in online games continues to be inaccessible for all but the most devoted. It’s something I think about a lot, because I think there’s a niche for a game that teaches PvP skills in a friendly, accessible way without being frustrating or leaving a huge skill gap between players who have just played the campaign and some “vs AI” matches and players who have played against other players. There’s got to be a way to pull it off.

In the meantime, though, I’d also like to see games lean on more serious PvE on a wider variety of levels for its challenge. Diablo 3 does this rather well, and while that game isn’t my cup of tea I think it’s a good example of a game with basically no PvP that’s still compelling over long periods. I’ve talked before about wanting an MMO with a legitimately scary world, too.

I have a constant urge to experience new things. It’s what I imagine wanderlust is like for other people, except for me it’s not necessarily places, it can be all kinds of things. For most of this year, it’s been food. One of the closest food stores to me is a Japanese grocery, and over the course of the year I’ve been shifting my diet as a result of what I can find there. The change has been interesting for me.

Whereas I used to eat a lot of bread and meat, I’m now eating more rice and fish– mainly because that’s what’s inexpensive and readily available. I already ate with very few condiments, so it’s been pretty easy to transition and be extremely selective about what I season my food with. It’s simplified my meals considerably, and as a side effect I’m eating a lot more healthfully than I have before. In order to get the exciting flavors I like in my food, I’ve had to start trying different things– rice seasonings, various types of chilis, and new types of sauces. One of the best I’ve found is dried garlic in chili oil, which I use on a variety of things but mostly eggs– it makes for amazing scrambled eggs.

Today I picked up a package of umeboshi– pickled plums. I’d had a bite of one some time ago, and it was intensely sour cut with honey sweetness; one of the only foods I’ve had where honey doesn’t make for a cloyingly sweet flavor. It was a balance between extremes, and I wanted to try to find my own. I’d been told that the kind I was looking for were “sweet umeboshi”, but I have no idea how to differentiate those. After looking over the shelf in the grocery store, I confidently selected a package at random to bring home. I got an approving nod from a fellow shopper, which made me a bit concerned.

These were, as it turns out, not the sweet kind. It’s pretty much an intense hit of saltiness and sourness, with a sweet, fruity aftertaste. The flavor was, at first, almost overwhelming, and pretty unlike almost anything else I’ve tried before. It took me a solid ten minutes to work up the nerve to eat more than a bite or two, and finally just finish the whole thing. I did manage to finish it, and a little while later I suddenly understood why they’re so popular.

After the intense shock of salty and sour, what’s left is the faint taste of plum– slightly sweet, slightly tangy, very mild. It’s a very pleasant aftertaste, like plum wine without as much sweetness or alcohol. It’s a sensation that manages to be both similar to and unlike eating an actual plum, and I’m ultimately really glad I experienced it. I’ll be prepared for it next time I eat one of these, knowing that the real experience is in the complex aftertaste, not the initial salty/sour shock.

I’m so used to food that centers its experience on the consumption step– where the highlight of the experience is when the bite is actually on your tongue. The only place where that really diverges for me are mixed drinks, where the appealing part isn’t necessarily the flavor of the drink, but the aftertaste, or the aroma, or the texture. Umeboshi fits into this interesting space where I appreciate the flavor AFTER I’ve eaten it, but not during. It’s possible that will change, but it’s a flavor I couldn’t have imagined myself enjoying even just a year ago.

It reminds me of why I like to experience new things, try new sensations, and understand new concepts. Understanding that this salty, sour pickled plum is widely enjoyed made me want to try it, and approaching it with an open mind gave me the chance to have an entire new world of food open up to me– there are a bunch of things that I’m interested in trying now. I think it’s easy to have an experience that doesn’t fit in neatly with what I’m used to, and simply dismiss it as “weird” without a second thought. It’s an automatic response that I consciously try to fight.

Part of this is that I believe that people are fundamentally pretty much the same everywhere. Things are often just arranged differently. There isn’t some magic cultural trait that prevents me from understanding and enjoying the flavors of other places, and there’s a lot out there that can surprise me, still.

I think it ties in nicely to games– when I was younger and hadn’t experienced a ton of games, relatively mainstream, relatively popular games could still surprise me and make a big impact. As I’ve gotten older and have expanded my gaming palate, it takes ever more high-quality, original games to get my attention. However, if I start delving into genres I’ve never touched, or thought I didn’t like, I can often find new experiences that are familiar enough to be compelling but different enough to be new and exciting. The best part is, for a lot of those genres have their own outstanding, top-notch games to try.

The first taste might not seem interesting or palatable, but there’s a reason so many people like a given thing. I find it fun to try to find out why, find that spark that gets people excited.

So, I’m done with Lords of Verminion, after less than a week. It’s an interesting game with some crippling pitfalls. I’ll probably still play around with the AI and replay some of the more interesting puzzle challenge battles, but it suffers from a severe problem when playing against other players.

The rarest minions are, by far, the best, with very few exceptions. If it’s a rare drop from a dungeon or from treasure maps, it’s an absolute killer. Essentially, if it sold for several million gil prior to the patch, it’s now a top-tier minion (again, with very few exceptions). Possibly you’re reading this and saying “well, yeah, of course the rarest ones are the best, that’s how it works in other games, like Magic”.

Unfortunately, one of the things that Lords of Verminion does that’s interesting is also the problem with this. There’s nothing stopping you from running an entire field full of a single, rare minion. I’ll use Nutkin as an example, because it’s basically caused the end of every match I’ve lost. It’s a Critter-type minion, with outrageous stats, for 30 points (the highest possible point cost, out of 240). In theory, it’s balanced by the fact that you have relatively few of them. However, a single Nutkin can win against 4-6 other minions, regardless of type. I’ve watched two Nutkin (60 points) rip apart 6 Bombs (also 60 points) despite the Bombs having a type advantage and using Bomb abilities, without the Nutkin using anything. One Nutkin was low, the other was full.

Seeing this in a couple of games, I figured perhaps throwing other big minions against the Nutkin would work. Clockwork Twintania is another monster-type, which is presumably strong against Nutkin, and is 25 points. Three Nutkin beat four Twintania, handily, despite Twintania’s defense boost. Nutkin are also fast, either 3 or 4 stars, so they can move all over the map relatively easily.

In a game ostensibly about exploiting type weaknesses, this is a problem. It means that the rare minions determine the match, and because there’s no limiter on how many of these powerful rare minions are on the field, if they can win out even against type there’s no real way to fight them. In theory, swarms should be able to win out against smaller groups of powerful minions, but a powerful enough minion with just enough in a group will kill swarms faster than they can do damage.

The idea, I suppose, is to drive players to seek out the rare minions in order to compete, but mostly it seems to have a cooling effect on the playing field. Three times this weekend I showed up to play and saw a group of about 10-15 people all at the consoles. Within a handful of matches, it had boiled down to myself and one other person, throwing out rare minions and generally using the same strategy every time. Varying my own strategy accomplished basically nothing. Watching groups of players evaporate against what appears to be an unbeatable strategy (or one that’s being enabled just through access to already rare and hotly desired minions) is disheartening– it’s telling to me that on our entire server, fewer than twenty people are signed up for the tournament, and at least four of them are using Nutkin spam.

Other games have pursued a similar tack– several prepainted miniatures games put random figures in the box, and many card games have explicitly “rare” cards, which are often (albiet not always) straight up better than the more common ones. The “right” answer, in all of these cases, is to not bother with the usual delivery system and simply buy the models/cards you want straight up, then use those to win against people who didn’t do that.

I don’t much care for relying on random luck to acquire something crucial that you need to keep playing the game. It makes me feel very strongly that the game doesn’t respect either my time or my money, whichever is being used to generate more rolls on the random table. I understand that a lot of people keep rolling because that rare thing is an exciting surprise– for me it’s simply the thing I already knew I needed, so every roll that doesn’t come up with the thing I need was a waste of time/money.

I’ve noticed that the design of important things in games has shifted to agree with me, as well. Token and currency systems are the norm, removing the random bad luck of drop rates from the equation. Sometimes there are still random luck rolls, but they’re often for secondary sources, and much easier. FFXIV has currency for its “main” upgrades, but also supplies random secondary loot drops. It’s a good system, because you’re not relying on a lucky drop.

A lot of this is that my appreciation for random loot was burned away from me in my time helping run LNR. Random loot meant everyone was always unhappy– people who didn’t complete their set from the previous dungeon were annoyed when we moved on, people who badly needed a particular upgrade were frustrated when it never dropped, entire class teams would grumble when yet another week went by without any loot for them, and everyone sighed when the same item dropped yet again, when no one needed it.

What bothers me especially about Lords of Verminion is that it could have been a good excuse to break out those common minions that no one really used. It’s a simple game, but in theory a deceptively deep one, it just falls apart when it can be easily reduced to “spam this one powerful minion”. Players will always try to find the easiest possible way to win, and LoV does very little to force the issue.

As a result, pubstomping with a single, out-of-band minion is the norm, and it’s easy to watch it drive players away from the game. It’s a pity, because it’s a really neat game with a lot of cool ideas, it just falls apart when it comes to rare minions. The matches I play that aren’t ruined by rare drop minions are FANTASTIC, and almost fun enough for me to deal with the matches where I lose simply because I didn’t feel like shelling out 7mil for a minipet. However, those players leave after losing repeatedly to rare minions, and there’s no incentive for the rare-minion player to give up their advantage.

Instead, the winning move is not to play, and the forlorn tournament board registers 17 players on the entire server who have opted in. We stand around, hoping that this next match won’t be dictated by rares. It’s sapped the fun out of the game more or less instantly.