A Meaningless Term

Yesterday I witnessed a conversation unfold that I have had a dozen times myself with various folks.  A friend of mine made the idle comment that they would really like to see a “PVE MOBA”, to which someone else predictably replied that you cannot have a “MOBA” without PVP.  The problem is that there is absolutely no clear definition of what exactly a “MOBA” is.  Additionally each player seems to refer to a slightly different set of mechanics when someone says “MOBA-like”.  So for some people it is all about the match based pvp action, and others it is all about the interesting class design.  If you simply dissect the term “MOBA” you get Multiplayer Online Battle Arena…  which in itself is another absolutely meaningless term.  Multiplayer Online is clear enough but the Battle Arena part is complete nonsense.  What are you battling and what sort of arena are you battling in?

For me personally the key elements of what make a MOBA intriguing have nothing to do with player versus player combat.  I like the different characters and their unique sets of abilities, and the way they interact with other characters and their abilities.  In fact I would be happy spending my time in lane killing creeps because I honestly enjoy doing that way more than engaging with other players.  When I play League of Legends I will almost always play against bots, and have long thought that it would make an interesting game to make it purely co-operative against interesting challenges.  The problem is if you say this.. you get the reaction above that it cannot be done… because MOBAs are PVP games dammit!  But what I am presenting is that folks are assigning a specific mindset to a term that is absolutely meaningless on its own merit.  Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can describe so many games and is likely why the term gets blurred so much to describe games that are absolutely nothing like the original Defense of the Ancients roots.

Keep the Interesting Bits

For me the interesting bits about what we generally refer to as a MOBA are the Character design that I have talked about before, and ultimately the payment model.  I like this concept of purchasing individual champions, and having a rotation of free champions to play to consistently keep testing the waters and trying to branch out.  The key part as well for me is the way that MOBA titles grow over time.  If you look at the evolution of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, in both cases they are constantly releasing new content to satiate the appetites of players.  I think this has been key to the success, that every few weeks there is something new being introduced to the game to shake up players expectations.  League for example has over 120 different unique champions that they are doing a decent job of keeping balanced against each other, and Heroes is adding at least one champion a month it seems to catch up.  So I feel like the big success of this genre has been constant incremental evolution of the product.

This variety helps deal with the “special snowflake” syndrome that happens in MMO design.  Often times there is a demographic of players that wants to play a specific class in a manner that was not intended to be played.  Granted this happens to some extent in build system MMOs like league, but it is always clear that this is not necessarily a “supported” play style.  The champion system instead lets companies roll out lots of hyper focused characters that play to very specific niches.  So in this case what would be a “special snowflake” like the “melee hunter” would simply just be another champion they could build to fill that desire.  So instead the focus becomes on mastery of a specific set of abilities unique to that champion, rather than a much larger set of abilities as seen in most “talent tree” systems.  I feel like this is crucial in allowing someone to adapt to a brand new champion quickly, but at the same time feeling confident enough to branch out into things they have yet to try before.  There are game play modes like ARAM (All Random All Mid) that encourage this branching out because it forces players to play with a random champion.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

So the quandary I am in is that I love the League of Legends lore and champion design, but don’t love the game itself.  I have long thought that it would be awesome to have a PVE centric version of League of Legends where you play the same champions with the same abilities in a Diablo like setting.  Instead of fighting in Summoner’s Rift against five other players in a battle to destroy the opposing teams nexus, it would be a co-operative experience as five players venture into a procedurally generated dungeon with a treasure at the end.  The idea is that each map would be harder than the previous until you reach a boss battle for the final treasure in the dungeon.  You could even keep the build mechanic in the form of at the beginning of each map level you could have the same merchant that exists just outside of your teams Nexus in the Rift.  After venturing a certain way into each map level he could travel to the next level, making it so that players could only buy new items at the beginning of each map.

For the hyper competitive players, you could still keep all manner of stats from number of monsters killed, their average difficulty rating, how fast it takes your team to clear a map, and of course how many times you have died during a specific encounter.  Personally I would go with a counter strike approach where each player gets a single life per map, making it progressively harder the more players that you have lost.  I would introduce the ability to purchase resurrection potions, but again that is an opportunity cost… since you have limited item inventory slots and limited gold to keep purchasing items with.  Similarly I would introduce a “lives” mechanic in the number of times your team can retry during a specific dungeon crawl sequence.  This would encourage the team to stick together and work on group tactics rather than going off on their own and risking getting overwhelmed.  The thing is… I would absolutely pay to play a game like that, and would probably rope my friends into playing it to.  The key impediment however is that folks seem to keep thinking that “MOBA” style mechanics cannot also apply to PVE game design.  Someone make this game happen…  I am looking at you Riot.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Chasing a PVE MOBA

Commoditization of Music

A few days ago I wrote a piece talking at least in part about how the prevalence of steam sales has lowered my valuation of games in general.  Yesterday while running errands at lunch I happened to catch a piece on NPR talking about how Audio Streaming is both the salvation and the curse of the record industry.  I did not catch the name of the show but they brought on several points of view, talking about how it is both creating new artists, and giving folks a steady trickle of income…  but making it extremely hard for said new artists to actually work on music as their fulltime job.  While I sympathize with this point of view, I have to say that I am absolutely one of the people who is no longer buying music.  There is the rare occasion when I buy an album that does not yet exist on a streaming service, for example I have purchased the two  Final Fantasy XIV soundtracks, and have the third on preorder.  However once I get them, I rip them and upload them to my Google Music account so I can listen to all of the music I care about through that one interface.

I guess the strange thing for me… is that I want to pay something for music but that I ultimately just want to pay a single monthly fee for “all you can eat” access.  While I absolutely love music on one level, on another level it has become commoditized for me.  There was something about going to the record shop, buying a CD, opening the package…  getting that new CD smell…  and then consuming it.  With the digital age that experience is all gone… and it makes me hard to care about it on any level deeper than what I happen to be hearing.  Also I feel like along the way my listening patterns changed. Music to me is a background soundtrack to my work day and my commute, and my attention is always somewhere else and not fully on the music.  Before the advent of streaming music, I had already pretty much stopped purchasing music… except for on very odd occasions.  As soon as I could pay one price to get full access to an existing library however… I was on board with that and after trying all of the current services I finally landed on Google Music being the best option for me.  There was a point where I realized that I no longer care about “owning” music and simply want to “lease” access to it, and I figure my monthly fee from streaming is giving the music industry more money than the “zero” they were getting from me before.

Tidy Whitey Man

Yesterday I had all of these plans to help shuttle a group of sub 170 players through a bunch of expert dungeons for tomestones of law and great freedom.  The problem is the game conspired against me, and at 9pm my time the servers went down for emergency maintenance.  Generally speaking when the servers go down with such short notice there is some sort of exploit at play, namely one that has “game breaking” ramifications.  So instead of doing the thing that I had intended to do… I was left with a plethora of other options.  The problem being… the only thing I really wanted to be doing was playing more Heavensward.  So I popped out of game and out of teamspeak and booted up the wildly popular survival game Ark for the first time.  I have a couple of groups of friends playing on various servers, but I wanted to at least get a feel for the game before I dove into having other people around me.  The game has a nifty local only mode that I decided to spin up a map in.

First off…  I had no clue what I was doing.  I could see a beacon off in the distance so I thought well…  maybe the game is intending me to run in that direction.   Along the way I figured out a few things… that I could punch trees to get materials, and I could pick up rocks with my bare hands.  The problem being that punching trees is apparently bad for my health.  Like when you are doing it.. the game messages quite clearing that you are hurting yourself.  After a bit of running around and collecting beach debris I figured out how to craft something.  I managed to punch a tree long enough for it to provide some wood, which allowed me to fashion a crude pick… and I was off to the races.  From there I leveled up and learned how to make an axe and a fire pit, and seemingly life was going pretty well.  That is until I continued down the path of madness that was finding the beacon.  At which point I stumbled across a level 26 spitter, that killed me rather quickly… and the controller that I was not using vibrated madly as I died.  So next time I maybe have a better idea on how to go about this process, and I am also going to try playing it with my xbox 360 controller since the game apparently supports it.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Tidy Whitey Man

Missing Tank

Last night was our raid night for the group that meets on Mondays in Final Fantasy XIV.  Initially there was talk of working on Bismarck Ex but since we only have one geared tank in that team, that was out of the question.  Ashgar decided to level his monk first, and is now working on bringing the Paladin online once more.  The amount of time he has had to work over the last few weeks has slowed down his leveling process, and you can tell he is more than a bit frustrated by it.  In any case that left us with one max level geared tank  and one partially leveled tank to play with.  Since the elemental snakes will one shot the tank if he has the wrong buff color…  that took Bismarck Ex completely off the table.  So as a result we opted to venture forth into the Final Coil of Bahamut, an area that we unlocked last week but had yet to attempt.

One of the constant themes of the Heavensward expansion is the fact that the Allagan’s are jerks and seem to like playing god.  The story behind the Final Coil of Bahamut seems to reflect this.  Not going to go into any massive spoilers, but I highly suggest you run through this content at some point so you can see the story bits yourself.  The other big surprise is the fact that we did in fact have to deal with a lot of mechanics.  We went into this place as a “undersized party” which is the lamest way of saying “let me go into it without level syncing me down”.  This is a great option for farming older content by yourself, for example I have been slowly working on getting the rest of my Brayflox Infantry set for example doing this.  For the older raids this means you can go in and have a bit more padding to deal with the damage these deal.  We pulled turn 10 completely blind, and managed to make some significant progress before ultimately wiping… and having to learn the mechanics of the fight.

Final Coil of Bahamut

Throughout the course of the night we managed to take down turn 10, and after a bit of futzing turn 11 as well.  We entered turn 12…  mainly because there is a huge amount of story content at the beginning of it.  We made a couple of attempts and agreed that we would simply return next week after doing a bit of studying.  I realize we are not doing this content “for real” by any stretch of the imagination… but it still feels very epic.  Everything about these zones and fights are just amazing to behold.  There is an awesome jumping sequence where you go flying through the air… and I am sure it is enough to make anyone with either motion sickness or a fear of heights squeamish.  I sometimes suffer from vertigo in games, but this actually didn’t seem to bother me too much, at least not in the same way that Razor’s Edge did.

Ultimately what I want to try and focus on instead however is gearing the folks that are sub 170.  I want to do Alexander with my normal raid group, and I want to also tackle the two extreme fights.  Unfortunately I am one of the few people on our team that I think is geared to that point.  So that means I need to start grabbing folks and dragging them into dungeon runs for tomestones of law over the coming weeks.  Basically I need to start seeing if people are already at 170 before running a dungeon… and then trying to grab folks that aren’t instead.  Over the last few days I was in my own mad push for that gear level and kind of ignored everything but doing that.  Now I feel like I need to take a much more structured approach in an attempt to get folks the gear they need to do the bigger and more exciting things.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Final Coil of Bahamut