September 2015 – Page 16

Breakup on Reentry

September 10, 2015 by Belghast

Returning Players

If you have followed me for any length of time you realize I play an awful lot of games. One of those traits also involves going back and re-exploring games that I have long consigned to the dust bin. One of the challenges with this lifestyle however is trying to figure out what the hell you were doing some six months ago when you last touched a game. This morning I want to talk about a problem that most games have. As content is released there is often times no real thought about the folks that will come back to the game several patches behind. While there is generally one game that I stay up to date with, and that game currently is Final Fantasy XIV… the others sit in various states of completion with no real easy route back to where I last left off. What ends up happening generally is that I start a brand new character, because it is simply easier to start fresh than try and sort out the options open to a formerly “level capped” character. As a programmer it seems like it would be easy to create some sort of new features tool that lead you to what has been recently added to the game. Various games have attempted this, and honestly Final Fantasy XIV has one of the better versions of this technology… but it could still use a lot of work.

World of Warcraft has these quest boards in main cities that are supposed to lead you to the starting quests of new areas. The problem being that you level so damned fast in that game that you always are well ahead of the quest completion curve. The worst offender however has to be The Secret World. In that game every single quest is essentially repeatable, so even if you are up to date… it can be a challenge to sort out what quests are new in a given region. The last quest content I completed was the “Last Train to Cairo” from Issue 6, and even then I think I missed most of Issue 5 because I didn’t quite know where to start to find it. Now we are sitting at Issue 12 and I know I have a ton of awesome content waiting on me. As each has been released I have popped in to spend some of the lifetime membership currency that I gain each month. The problem being… without significant research on my part I have no real idea where to start to even begin trying to sort these out. I spend most of my free time consuming MMO content… and if this bothers me… it has to be an impassible wall to more casually interested players.

Content Advisement

With the launch of Cataclysm, the World of Warcraft attempted to solve this problem by creating a series of billboards spread throughout the major cities that are designed to give you the start of a quest chain leading into new zones. The problem there is that you level too damned fast, and I constantly had a back log of these quests telling me to go to various zones that were less than optimal for my questing experience. While I applaud their efforts… I think all of these MMOs need to do a much better job at giving players advisement as to what they should be doing. What I envision is an optional box that says what zone you should be in based on your level and or gear, and provide a series of quest suggestions that you never completed. If there is a holiday going on, it should prioritize this and if you are at the level cap it should guide you to the next patch worth of content that you had not experienced. This would go a long way in making returning players feel welcome and relevant in the game experience. Considering I have done this dozens of times… I can tell you that returning to an MMO that you tucked neatly away into your past… is a completely overwhelming experience.

Firstly you have to sort out your bags, because I have not left a single MMO in a state where I did not have hundreds of items in my inventory with no memory of what was actually useful and what was simply dross that I picked up while killing things. Next you have to sort out your quest log, which also is never really left in a neat state. If you are the level cap you generally have a mixture of quests that you never completed and quests from whatever happens to be the current “daily” hub. Upon returning generally speaking neither of these is much use, but at the same time I find it just as hard to sort through my quest log as it was to sort through my bags. What I really want is some intelligence guiding my decisions. Present me with options of things that players in my level range are normally doing. Help me get back into your game, and set down roots again. It honestly shocks me that no game company seems to have thought this one through. There are a fixed number of new players out there, so many times established games are just trading their populations over time. Anything a game can do to make it more “sticky” for returning players has to ultimately help the bottom line.

Breakup on Reentry

Like I said Final Fantasy XIV does a decent job at this, but their own advisement window is greatly limited based on several factors. The biggest is that most of the items in the list are limited to the zone you are currently in. In the case of a returning player, they may or may not know what zone they should even be in. For years I have been trying to play Star Wars the Old Republic again. The problem being that I always end up playing on an alt character because it is simply too confusing to try and sort out what I should be doing on any of my three previously max level characters. My original instinct has always been to go to the space station hub for my faction. Problem there is that there were no sign of new quests. I have repeated this process dozens of times, until last night it finally dawned on me that I should maybe return to my starship. Sure enough waiting there for me was a quest chain starter leading me to Makeb. The problem being… that since it took me two years to finally find this quest it was anything but obvious, which tells me there is a problem with the way the systems are working.

What got me on this topic was yesterday some friends and I were listing off “must have” features for an MMO. Which got me thinking… that this is the one feature that no MMO really does a decent job of. Please someone out there… put some thought into the experience of returning players. The answer is not to ignore all of the content that came before. The answer is to help players go back and experience the things that they missed. As a result some sort of intelligent system is well worth the time it takes to build. All we are really talking is a handful of database queries based on a few parameters, and then returning the relevant items to a window. This would go so far into making returning players feel like they matter and are welcome in the game. I cannot count the number of games that I have reinstalled… only to leave after a single night of trying to sort out what it was that I was doing when I last played. In each case I “wanted” to play the game, but the game required more out of me than I was willing to give it. When this situation happens all I really needed was a breadcrumb to lead me to what I should be focusing on. On the positive side I did finally start the post release content in Star Wars the Old Republic, which is a thing I have been passively trying to do since the free to play conversion. I would really like to see where that story goes before the launch of Fallen Empire.

Hide and Seek

September 9, 2015 by Grace

After the mad rush of Blaugust, I’ve been taking a lot of time to decompress and refresh my mental batteries. One of the great things I’ve experienced by engaging with Twitter is that I know I’m not alone in my introverted ways. Sometimes it is reassuring to know your stresses and anxieties are shared and feel like you’re part of something, and that there are people who will totally understand when you need to hide away for a little while.

My default hiding game lately has been Diablo 3, but all the time I’ve been spending there has presented a problem: my enthusiasm has attracted friends to join me. When I’m feeling well, this is great! I’ve had a ton of fun wandering around smiting demons with 1 – 3 friends at a time. The down side is when I need to be alone, those folks are still in my BNet friends list, asking me to join them. I’ve found that having one or two friends or family members is usually fine, especially when they’re folks who understand when I need to hide. More than that and I start to get anxious whenever I’m not up for company. This has stressed me out in the past, so much so that I occasionally purge everyone from my friends list and start from scratch once in a while. I love that Steam has an invisible mode, and I dearly wish that Blizzard would do the same.

In WildStar I have a few account friends, but for some reason it doesn’t stress me out quite as much. I think it helps that there’s no rewards for being constantly grouped up like there are in D3. The other big thing of course is that WildStar is just one game, and I barely play any alts. If people know and friend my main character, they can pretty much find me 95% of the time I’m in-game anyway. BNet friends can see you in any of Blizzard’s games, though, which means I can’t even sneak in a quick game of Hearthstone without everyone on my friends list knowing about it. Anyway, being pushed back into WildStar right now feels fine by me. I can’t wait for the doldrums to pass and the new Drop to land in a few weeks. I might as well spend the time remembering how things are and saving up a nest egg to spend on fancy new toys. Plus I still have too many alts that need to be leveled off the arkship so they don’t get deleted!

Totenkopf

September 9, 2015 by Thalen

I hope everyone had a good weekend. I had grand plans of a four day weekend to get some things done and relax; instead I spent most of that time sick. Frustrating, but what can you do? It meant I got some reading done, and once I felt semi-decent I was able to do some gaming.

Firstly, I joined the Shadowrun game that Tamrielo has been running for a while now. It had been mentioned to me that the party was perhaps lacking in information gathering capability, so I put together a character loosely based on the Occult Investigator example in the book. I focused primarily on spellcasting and conjuring with a specialization in detection spells. I feel like I can still be useful in combat though, tossing fireballs and summoning spirits. My first run with the team went pretty well; we'll see if the rest of the long night goes as smoothly.

Second, I played through Wolfenstein: The New Order. Twice. Okay, not two full playthroughs. I picked up where I had left off when I started playing a couple months ago and got distracted; I had made it up to the train depot and was getting murdered by SuperSoldaten. Pro tip: once you can ignore the two SuperSoldaten that jump out of crates near the end of the level and just run to the train and GTFO.

In any case, I finished up that first playthrough and decided that I wanted to see the other timeline and pick up the collectibles I missed the first time through. It is amazing how much of a difference having most of the perks makes in that game. The first time through there were a few places that gave me a lot of trouble, particularly near the end. Second time through, I pretty much breezed on by. Having all the secondary fire options and laser upgrades was hugely helpful too. Once I realized using the scope made the laser fire a massive shot that could take down nearly anything my life got a lot easier.

These jerks were much less of an issue the second time around.

I was a little disappointed that the two timelines were mostly identical. I had hoped that the game might branch at some point or have some alternate levels for certain chapters, but apart from some shortcuts that are only available in one timeline or the other it's pretty much the same. Even the ending is entirely identical either way. The difference is pretty much entirely in the cutscenes in the middle of the game and which of two resistance members is present. On the whole, I think I preferred the Wyatt timeline; Fergus' snark started to wear on me after a while and I preferred J to Tekla. I definitely thought his final stand against the Nazis was cooler.

Gosh, I can't imagine what 'J' could be short for.

Progression Speed

September 9, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’m surprised more cooperative games don’t have variations in their progression systems. A given group of people is going to have a pretty different amount of time to spend in a given game than another group, and especially for self-contained games, it seems like there should be a progression speed slider. I’m mostly looking at tabletop RPGs and multi-session board games here; I’ve been playing the Shadowrun: Crossfire board game with some friends lately, and while I think it’s a great game, it has insanely slow progression.

Here’s how the game works: You have a character who starts with a basic deck. As a session (a “run”) progresses, your deck is going to increase as you play, and at the end of the session you flush the entire thing, and get a certain amount of XP (Karma) based on how successful the run is. You can then use this Karma to purchase upgrades, which change how you start the game and give you particular special abilities. It’s a neat system, and the ability to add on various means to make the runs harder on yourself for greater rewards is neat.

However, progression is SLOW. With a fresh group starting from scratch, you will have to win two games or lose five to get to your first upgrade; you’ll be playing the same mission each time until then. You’re not going to have the edge you need to go for any of the bonuses, and the game is pretty difficult; you stand a fair chance of losing each run. That first jump isn’t so bad, the first tier karma benefits are 5 karma apiece and you have one free slot to upgrade into. Here’s where it gets silly. To unlock another “slot”, you need to pay 10 karma, twice what you needed to get the first one. You THEN need to buy the upgrade, and upgrades cost anywhere from 5 to 50 karma, in increments of 5-10. You’re looking at a LONG time between your first and second upgrade, and a really long time before you’re looking at a fully kitted out character who can even attempt some of the harder missions.

The missions have expected karma levels, and some of the higher-tier ones suggest you have 75-100 karma at minimum to attempt them. That is a TON of playing this game just to get to that point– even the higher-tier missions only grant 4-6 karma each, and optional difficulty boosts add 1-2 karma apiece, and will rapidly overwhelm you.

We opted to simply double the experience gain, so that we could purchase fun upgrades after the first session and so that we can actually get to later missions. For our group, we might play this game once or twice a month, which, at 3-6 karma a session, is more than a year to reach the later missions, optimistically. It’s a fun game, but I’m pretty sure that it doesn’t need to have progression quite that slow. We’re speeding things up and should be able to do other interesting variants more quickly (and have more interesting options).

It’s a pretty minor tweak that works well in Shadowrun: Crossfire, and it makes the overall experience for the group a lot better– we can keep it fresh and different without spending a ton of time doing the same missions. It puts me in mind of the way I handle XP when I run tabletop games. I have a standing rule that experience is held constant across the party, so that everyone is always at the same experience level. It makes things better for people who can’t make every single session and it makes it a LOT easier for me to build and tune encounters; I know what kinds of things the party can handle.

I also give out XP to match the pace of the campaign. I used to make campaigns that were open-ended, but I’d fizzle out at some point and the story would falter. Now I plan a single significant arc and sometimes a few side arcs; the story has a specific end point that marks the conclusion of the story. If that means that I grant players a level every session for a few sessions, just so they can face whatever enemy I’ve got waiting in the wings, that’s fine– if we finish one game we can start another, and I usually start planning the next campaign about 1/3 to 1/2 of the way into my current one, so there’s always something ready to go.

I think that there’s a lot of value in tuning your game experience to the group you’re playing with, and it’s surprising to me that more games don’t have those options built-in. Certainly it’s not hard to just write house rules to suit you, but it’s interesting to me how many of the reviews of Shadowrun: Crossfire slam the game for its slow progression, and how many veteran D&D players mope about starting new level 1 characters, because it “takes so long to get to the good stuff”. Neither of those need be true.

Having talked to various people about house rules and other things, I’ve noticed that there’s often a moment of shock when I suggest changing the rules as they’re written to something that works better for us. Some people are staunchly opposed to it, other people look at me and have, in some cases, outright asked “wait, you can DO that?” as if there needed to be some permission to make the game more enjoyable.

The answer, really, is yes, yes you can. There are a number of games that I don’t like, but after a few rules tweaks are a lot of fun for me. If it’s a game I’m just playing with my friends who have the same viewpoint, why not change things so we can enjoy it more? It seems like a no-brainer.