Category Archives: Commentary
Established Fact
In one of Syncaine’s latest posts, a commenter made the claim:
WoW is bleeding accounts because people are finally realizing that being handed everything with minimal effort and no risk is, in actuality, not that much fucking fun over the long run.
After I presented the counter-argument that it was established fact that increased difficulty was principally the cause of WoW subscriber drop-off, Rammstein “countered” with this:
Anything that Chilton says to the New York Times is “established fact”? LOL. You never considered any of the following?
1. He could be lying.
2. He could be wrong, which looks more likely when you consider he is part of the design team responsible for the drop.
3. He could be both lying and wrong, the most probable scenario.
4. He could be right. In this horribly unlikely case, what he said is STILL NOT ESTABLISHED FACT, as that would require something establishing it as a fact besides someone just saying it to someone else.
Syncaine agreed with Rammstein and made another post highlighting it. So… let us give these arguments the gravity their authors did not.
1. He could be lying.
Sure, Tom Chilton could be lying to the New York Times. But… to what end? His specific line is:
“What we’re trying to do now is figure out what our current audience wants,” Tom Chilton, World of Warcraft’s game director, told me by phone last week. “It became clear that it wasn’t realistic to try to get the audience back to being more hard core, as it had been in the past.”
Is that supposed to be less embarrassing? An admission from the game’s director that they don’t know what their present audience wants, in an article about the release of Star Wars: The Old Republic? What could they be hiding that is worse? Assuming Syncaine and company are correct vis-a-vis lack of difficulty being the cause, it would be far, far easier to admit that WoW had deviated too far from what “made WoW great” and that Cataclysm was the first step in the right direction.
Except… Cataclysm clearly wasn’t a step in the right direction because it was released with a higher difficulty and 2 million people left anyway. So how convoluted does your difficulty argument have to be to still remain valid? That people hated the ease of Wrath, burned themselves out, got served a difficult expansion, and then quit 2-3 months later after getting exactly what they wanted/needed? The nerfs did not occur until after the loss in subscriptions, after the 50+ minute LFD queues. Or is the argument that the hardcore center hollowed out in Wrath? In which case… who were the 2 million who unsubbed in Cataclysm?
Even if we assume that Chilton was lying to the NYT for whatever reason, for that argument to hold you must further assume that it was not just Chilton, but the entire damn company. Here was Mike Morhaime in the November Earning call:
That said, we know there are improvements that we can make in gaming content. The level-up content in Cataclysm is some of our best works. But it was consumed quickly compared to our past expansions set, Wrath of the Lich King. Once players reached max level, the end-game content in Cataclysm is more difficult. Balancing this content for our diverse player base can be very challenging.
Our development team is constantly analyzing the game, and we’re continuing to explore ways that we can adjust the game to better satisfy both hard-core and casual players. To that end, our next free major content update for World of Warcraft is already in testing and will be available for players in the coming weeks.
I could post more. In fact, I did post more… back in March of 2011 as I put the backpedaling on a timeline starting from January 7th’s “We don’t think it was a mistake to start with the difficulty we did” to February 3rd’s “On the other hand, maybe things have come too far in the other direction.” The whole gang is there: Zarhym, Daxxarri, Bashiok, Ghostcrawler. Were they just repeating Chilton’s lie for the past 12 months?
Not only were they lying with words, they also had to be lying with deeds. Consider the LFD Luck of the Draw buff that rolled out not even two weeks after Ghostcrawler told everyone to L2P. Consider the absolute bevvy of heroic nerfs, the T11 nerfs, the ZA/ZG nerfs, the 4.2 nerfs before the end of the patch (!), and finally the implementation of LFR. And let us not forget part of the Mists of Pandaria announcement:
In Cataclysm, Heroic dungeons were intentionally designed as gear and difficulty checks on the progression to raiding. In Mists of Pandaria, the Raid Finder will be the appropriate transition from running dungeons to Normal raids. Heroic dungeons will largely be tuned to be about as difficult as they were in Wrath of the Lich King, allowing players to fairly quickly down bosses in PUGs and hit their Valor Point caps. Valor Points will follow a new philosophy with 4.3, as a parallel way to gear up alongside the Raid Finder, but not as a fill-in for boss drops.
Which leads us to:
2. He could be wrong.
I am actually much more sympathetic to this argument, simply because we do know not just by experience, but by admission that designers (or at least the people that manage them) frequently have no goddamn idea what they are doing. Even in Blizzard’s specific case, Chilton is admitting they are still trying to figure out the current audience wants, which becomes more and more bizarre the longer you think about it.
That said, while I am sympathetic to this argument, it is also extremely weak. Blizzard is privy to 100% of the statistics that we have to crudely extrapolate from either Armory information, or from websites that have not been updated since October. And even the statistics we have access to can be incredibly misleading. I have always said that arguments based on total subs is asinine, because who knows what the churn rate is, what the concurrent users numbers are doing, and so on. Only Blizzard does, and we only know what they have said:
Are you basing this conclusion [heroics too hard] off of forum posts or in game data? I hope it’s the latter so you get a truly accurate picture.
That’s an analysis pulled from hard data. We always try to base improvements an accurate overall picture. (source)
The Luck of the Draw buff, however, is being made in response to the feedback we’re seeing on the forums, as well as the statistics we’ve been reviewing which reflect all types of dungeon party trends. We feel it’s a good way of closing the disparity between the success of pick up groups and the success of preformed groups, without trivializing the content for some players to appease others. (source)
By looking at actual stats, actual progression, time spent playing, where, and to what extent, we can see that most people are looking for more accessible raid content, so yes, we absolutely are able to tell without a doubt that the plan we’re enacting is actually what players playing the game want and need, and are not just listening to people on the forums. (source)
So the “He could be wrong” counter-argument essentially comes down to “Blizzard is wrong about why they experienced a loss in subscribers because I said so without any objective evidence other than total sub numbers.”
Could Blizzard actually be wrong? Sure. Maybe they actually lost 2 million subs because of the alignment of Praxis-12 Prime with the center of the Andromeda galaxy. But given the incredibly consistent (since February 2011), highly publicized direction shift when it comes to difficulty, it is beyond all reasonable doubt that Blizzard as a whole believes the Cataclysm drop in subscribers was due to Cataclysm being too hard. With the release of LFR and all information revealed about Mists of Pandaria thus far, it is similarly clear that Blizzard is literally betting the $1 billion farm on an easier, more accessible WoW experience.
Consider this fact established.
Truer Words
In the middle of an epicly-long Kotaku article expressing the virtue of Dark Souls’ difficulty, the following lines jumped out and strangled me (emphasis added):
Because you repeat each section of the game so many times, and commit it so firmly to memory, you build up certain tricks and patterns. You achieve mastery, which is satisfying, and yet you always feel like something could go wrong, which is exciting.
When it comes to discussing difficulty in MMOs, I firmly fall on the “make it easy” side of the fence. I enjoy difficulty, I enjoy taxing my abilities to their maximum, but I also believe difficulty has its place; specifically, not in waiting for someone else to finally stop failing so I (we) can succeed. Games like Dark Souls work precisely because they are single-player.
That being said… the bold sentence in the quote above is perhaps the most succinct, inspired description of the mechanics of fun I have ever read.
Game of Dethrones
Rohan’s recent post The Guild as a Nexus of Contracts is an excellent read on the subject of Blizzard’s automatic “GM Dethrone” ability that was added in patch 4.3, and the concept of guild ownership overall. And it reminded me of the hidden depths of my rage towards this policy.
I joined the guild Invictus back when Azuriel was a level 30 draenei paladin tanking Scarlet Monastery for the first time, around a month before the release of Patch 2.2. The original GMs were a husband-wife couple who, a few months after I joined, inexplicably left total ownership of Invictus to the suave, smarmy smartass that was is myself. There was a period of time in that initial confusion when I contemplated, quite literally, /gkicking everyone and running away with the entire contents of the guild bank.
Listening to the better angels of my nature, as The Abe would say, I relinquished my power to the rightful heir to the throne, Soleste, whom shepherded us through most of the remaining bits of Burning Crusade content. In the months leading up to Wrath though, when the leveling guild-turned-10m progression guild was grinding down due to cliquish drama and apathy, I found myself once again bearing the weight of the crown.
And I am here to say: Invictus is mine.
Or at least was, until Blizzard felt good money should be thrown after bad in terms of Guild Leveling, which has probably killed more guilds than it saved in the aggregate.
I get it. Guild perks and reputation and auto-sustaining levels of guild-funded repairs gives the average member more of a stake in the guild as a whole. But it’s also bullshit. The guild will “belong to everyone” when people can vote for GM, vote for guild bank permissions, vote for bans from g-chat, veto /gkicks, decide on how loot distribution will work, spend three hours on Vent trying to prevent a drama-fueled implosions, purchase guild bank tabs, decide on guild names, tabards, and transfers.
Blizzard is not rolling out the goddamn Magna Carta here – you still can and will be /gkicked by a GM for no reason, with no appeal, at his or her complete mercy. Ownership is, to me, the ability to destroy something. And while guilds can no longer be disbanded, the membership can still be destroyed via kicking, prohibiting g-chat, removing privileges, and so on.
So what the hell is this half-measure? For every guild that is “saved” by First-Come, First-Serve succession, how many random alts of alts suddenly come into possession of a guild bank full of goods? How much residual goodwill is lost from the knowledge that everything you have worked so hard towards for years is not there waiting for you, should you return? Invictus was the sum of its members, yes. But it was also my blood, my tears, my gold, my time that formed the mortar of that structure. If I am to lose it, I want to be the one to watch it burn.
It makes no logical sense, of course. Bear the burden of leadership long enough though, bear the responsibility, and tell me it doesn’t make emotional sense.
Boxed In
I have been having more fun with boxes than strictly necessary in DE: HR.
Two birds, one industrial crate.
Things Not to Say to A Guy Randomly Carrying Around a Vending Machine #467
With that kind of setup, I was surprised by the lack of an achievement.
What has been less fun are the frequent Crash-To-Desktop (C2D). By “frequent,” I mean between every 5 to 50 minutes with a trend towards the former. It boggles my mind that legitimate pieces of software are able to be released in this sort of broken state. Googling results in the same, unhelpful article posted a hundred different places. The Steam forums basically tells you to turn off DirectX11 (it’s off), and then tells you that it’s not really a Steam issue anyway. The Edios website tells you to, no joke, create a non-administrative user account in Windows, then play the game from there (tried it, didn’t work). Oh, and by the way, technically it’s not an Edios problem, but a Square-Enix problem. And there is no useful support forum for Square-Enix.
Finally, there was always the “turn everything down” proposed solution. I have yet to try this “solution,” mainly because A) I didn’t purchase a goddamn $1200 computer to play games on settings my laptop could have done, and B) the C2Ds, while supremely annoying, do not make the game unplayable.
I would like to believe that, ultimately, reviews should reflect the game as it should be, or is for the majority of players, reflected through the prism of of the reviewer’s worldview. For example, it would be asinine to complain about DE: HR’s graphics looking terrible in 640×480 resolution with the lowest settings. Similarlly, should a game be “punished” if it launched with bugs that later players never experience?
On the other hand, this situation frustrates me so much precisely because I love everything else going on. If it was a terrible game, like say Frozen Synapse, I would have dropped it like a rock (something I typically do not do). I want to be able to say that I’m never buying another game from Edios/Square-Enix based on their shitty QA process, but just like with Bethesda, I can’t say that either. If they released another Deus Ex, I’d be on that like white on rice microfiber weave carbon nanotubes on a super-conducting ceramic polymer.
When In Doubt, Update Drivers
As I mentioned in the last post, I was extremely nervous about my computer “investment” considering the choppy performance in Deus Ex: Human Revolution thus far. When I re-downloaded Fraps, I finally saw the full scope of the depravity: ~15 fps standing still in the outdoor environments, single digits walking around. Keep in mind, that was with the lowest texture settings, AA set to one notch above “none,” and a 1440×900 resolution. As is often the case in these things, Google was fairly useless other than letting me know that people with lesser machines were miraculously getting better performance.
Then, in my darkest… half-hour, I fell back on my most basic of training: when in doubt, update drivers.
The Nvidia driver update did not actually solve anything. But in the process of updating it, I noticed a Virtu Control Panel button in the System Tray. Screwing around with the settings there did nothing. That was when I chose the “check for updates button,” navigating to their website for the latest driver. Which said:
New games added
- Battlefield 3
- Shogun2
- Crysis 2
- DiRT3
- Deus EX Human Revolution
From what I gather, the Virtu program basically creates a virtual GPU that combines the power of your processors + your normal graphics card. Or, in my case, prevent my computer from using the goddamn graphics card. No, seriously. Once the driver was updated, I loaded up Deus Ex and had a maximum settings, 105 fps orgasm. We’re talking Perpetual Motion Machine lubricant smooth. This feels like an entirely different game than I was playing for the last 15 hours. I almost feel like starting the game over entirely.
So, when in doubt, update drivers. Including the drivers for shit you didn’t even know was installed on the machine.
Deus Ex: Cardboard Box Revolution
Been playing DE: HR for about 11 hours now, and I have come to some early conclusions.
- Many of the design incentives are all screwed up.
It is one thing for your reward scheme to be rote enough that a player can earn XP for knocking out a guard, and then earn even more XP for killing the unconscious guard. Or that there are obviously invisible XP triggers in the duct-work, that encourage players to actually wander around up there long after there was a need to. Those are fine, whatever.
Where I begin to draw the line is the differences between hacking a computer and using the known passcode for the same computer. It is not just the XP that you get for doing the former: the hacking bit is actually fun and rewards its own loot. Not getting the hacking loot might be considered an acceptable “cost” for someone who never bothers to upgrade those skills, sure. But the game design in regards to hackers doesn’t make sense on two levels. 1) Using the passcode prevents you from playing the fun minigame, and 2) it makes no goddamn sense that you couldn’t unlock those secret files with full administrative access to the computer. If I can find secret files while hacking, why can’t I find secret files when I enter the password?
Of course, many people have commented on the above inconsistencies months ago. While I haven’t gone around killing the guards I knock unconscious or running around in the duct-work unnecessarily for the XP, I find the hacking bit to be especially jarring. That could be a sign of my atrophied “simulation is important” organ lurching back to life, but I prefer to think of it as the principal of the thing. If I’m a hacker-type and get your password, I should automatically get all the goodies on your computer. It’s only fair.
- I’m getting nervous about my computer investment.
Perhaps its unrealistic expectations, but I honestly thought I’d boot up the game and play on the highest settings at 60+ FPS. That… is not the case. I turned some settings down, usually the ones with the acronyms that they don’t bother explaining, and am at a point where everything still looks good and plays smoothly. Considering Kotaku pointed out a deal today on a laptop with a i5-2430M, GeForce GT 555M for $695.20… I’m concerned I may not have got $500 more oomph for my money. Ultimately, it will come down to how BF3 plays, since that was my primary impetus for the purchase.
- Did this game begin as a cardboard box simulator?
Seriously, you cannot walk 15 feet in-game without half a dozen cardboard boxes being highlighted in helpful yellow. At first I was confused about all this seemingly pointless interactivity. But that was before I got to the basement of the police station…
Nothing out of the ordinary here, Mr. Camera.
Directly behind me was a keycard reader I was hacking; behind the boxes is an oscillating video camera with its helpful green beams. In a break from FPS tradition (Bioshock, et tal), hacking in DE:HR forces you to stand up and do so in real time. After some close calls with attempting to disable the camera with my stun gun and hack my way through the door while getting all the goodies, I came upon the more… practical solution.
32GB At A Time
The new computer has arrived.
Remember that photo from the 5 Stages of PC Shopping? Yeah, that basically showed up.
Asian (unfortunately) not included.
Although I have technically had this rig – and it physically qualifies as a “rig” – for a day and a half, I have not actually played any games on it. As it turns out, somewhere inbetween the last time I bought a new computer and this one, I have accumulated a lot of shit that does not like being moved around. iTunes, for instance, was an adventure; you can’t just copy the iTunes folder over and be done with it. It’s fickle. So fickle, in fact, that I ended up having to change the way iTunes was stored on my laptop (moving everything to D:/), then renaming my hard drive on the new machine from E:/ to D:/ (for some reason the Blu-Ray drive was D:/), copying it all onto a 32GB thumb drive I bought today for this express purpose, and then finally shifting it to the new machine.
The whole operation felt like a Kidney transplant, complete with a fear of rejection by the host. And now that I looked it up on Wikipedia, it took around the same amount of time. My Steam transplant, by comparison, was more akin to a vasectomy: just a little snip-snip, followed by recovery.
Hopefully I will be back up and running at full steam (oh ho ho) by the weekend at the latest. Although I had half a mind to chase the Skyrim bandwagon before it completely faded from view, Deus Ex: HR was technically here first in the “I wish my computer could play this” category. And screw being topical anyway (when you are already so far behind the curve)!
In An Age 
Raph Koster Says Immersion is Dead
Jan 16
Posted by Azuriel
More or less (emphasis not added):
Things that we once considered essential to games drift in and out of fashion. And I think immersion is one of those.
Immersion does not make a lot of sense in a mobile, interruptible world. It comes from spending hours at something. An the fact is that as games go mainstream, they are played in small bites far more often than they are played in long solo sessions. The market adapts — this reaches more people, so the budgets divert, the publishers’ attention diverts, the developers’ creative attention diverts.
As I watch my son and daughter play games or participate in role play sessions, I find myself reluctantly admitting to myself that it is a personality type that ends up immersed in this way, and were it not in games it would be in something else. Immersion isn’t a mass market activity in that sense, because most people are comfortable being who they are and where they are. It’s us crazy dreamers who are unmoored, and who always seek out secondary worlds.
It’s just that games aren’t just for crazy dreamers anymore.
The part that struck me in particular was later on when he said:
But stuff changes. Immersion is not a core game virtue. It was a style, one that has had an amazing run, and may continue to pop up from time to time the way that we still hear swing music in the occasional pop hit. It’ll be available for us, the dreamers, as a niche product, perhaps higher priced, or in specialty shops. We’ll understand how those crotchety old war gamers felt, finally.
There are immediate, topical parallels to be drawn, of course. Difficult MMOs, for instance. And then, if immersion can go out of style, what does that say about sandboxes in general?
…actually, considering the widespread success of Skyrim, Minecraft, and the stubborn persistence of EVE, I am not entirely sure what he is talking about. Did he honestly believe the opposite, that immersion was something more than a niche genre? That there is a true Form of gaming that always included it? I enjoyed my years of table-top D&D, especially the world-building aspects of a six-year stint of being a Dungeon Master, but I was perfectly fine coming back home and doing some Battlefield 2, building M:tG decks, or playing some Super Smash Bros.
I am not too concerned about it though, because the name Raph Koster means nothing to me, regardless of how often he is quoted as being an “authority” on game design. Similar to Will Wright, the moment you stop making successful videogames or your ideas stop creating them, is the moment you cease to be an authority on the subject. Simcity 2000 ranks up as one of the best games I ever played (and it’s highly, highly underrated Streets of Simcity “expansion”) but come on, Willy. Get back on the horse, we need you.
And it might be juvenile schadenfreude, but I couldn’t help but giggle when Raph Koster talked about how his own children apparently disproved his life’s work. This Demotivational poster came to mind:
Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Demotivational, Immersion, Raph Koster, Simcity, Will Wright