Inaccessible Content

For many players, raids are inaccessible content.  They were for me all through classic WoW and, while I wasn't particularly happy about the fact that I still hadn't gotten past the first few trash mobs in Molten Core when Burning Crusade came out, I still loved the game as a whole.

Now that MMOs have become rather mainstream, inaccessible content is verboten.   In my last post, I toyed with the idea of a new type of content which would probably be inaccessible to some -- especially if such content were randomly generated each time, thus eliminating the possibility of looking up the answer.  And I'm certain that the forum-rage would be significant if some foolish developer went forward with the idea.

But, in my opinion, it is not in any player's best interest to rebel against such things.  Would anyone really wish to live in a world where any activity that was inaccessible to the mainstream was banned?  I think existence in such a world would be terribly depressing.  What's the point in attempting new things if success is guaranteed from the outset?  And doesn't such a philosophy completely ignore the fact that our abilities and desires change over time?

Raids were inaccessible content to me at one point.  They are no longer.  I don't particularly enjoy them, but that's a different topic entirely.  I'm glad I was able to experience the journey that took me from wishing I could raid to finally being part of a raiding guild.  And if I had never experienced raiding?  Well then it would still be something that I could work towards.  I don't think a sense of entitlement towards all things is healthy.  I think immediate gratification of all our desires is destructive, and I wish developers would start showing us some tough love.

Sadly, I have the feeling that we're already screwed.  Perhaps five or six years ago a company could have developed a successful MMO where there were dozens of types of activities which were mostly inaccessible to players.   If our expectations had been managed early on and if we had been taught to appreciate games in which we couldn't really hope to ever master all things, I suspect fewer people would be burning out on the MMO genre today.

Pirates

There's an old type of logic problem which I know by the name of Saints and Pirates.  The central premise is that Pirates always lie and Saints always tell the truth.  Given this, and given a number of statements made by people who are assumed to be either Pirates or Saints, one sets out to determine which ones if any are Pirates.

There are often additional criteria given to assist the solver, and there may be additional information that is to be determined, such as the name of the Pirate, but the overall idea remains the same.

Here is a simple example of such a problem.

There are 4 numbered suspects whose names are Bri, Dee, Cay and Ann, though it is not known which suspect is which.  It is also known that three of the suspects are Saints and that one is a Pirate.  Given the following statements made by suspects 1 and 4, determine the name and suspect number of the Pirate.

Suspect 4: I am not Cay and Bri is not a Saint.
Suspect 1: Either Dee is not a Saint or Cay is not a Pirate.
Suspect 4: Either Suspect 2 is not Bri or I am not a Saint.

Now, feel more than free to solve this and post the answer or, if I've screwed up and allowed for multiple possible answers or no possible answer, feel free to point that out as well.

But the real question is, if you encountered such a problem in an mmo, would you:

1. Look up the answer because you view such problems as annoying obstacles.
2. Look up the answer because you wouldn't want to risk possible negative consequences.
3. Look up the answer only if you couldn't solve it after some time.
4. Avoid looking up the answer even if you were never able to solve it.

I think I'd fall into category 3, though its a moot point since I suspect we are well past the time when developers would bother putting such things into an mmo as they fail to cater to the average player.

Note:  I've made up hundreds of such problems over the years -- so if there were any interest at all, I might post a few more.  Heck, I might post more even if there is no interest.

Diablo 2 Memories

All the recent talk on the various blogs about Diablo 3 has me fondly remembering all the good times I had in Diablo 2.   For a time, I was a frequent poster on alt.games.diablo and some of the friends I made there and in-game became friends in real life.   In anticipation of good times to come, and possibly of chances to re-connect with people I haven't spoken to in almost a decade, I thought I'd repost one of my old posts from 2003.

So here is a brief chronicle of  my adventures with the passivezon build which, at the time, was a fairly new concept.  Variations of this have since been taken all the way through hell, but I still think I was the only one who added the restriction to avoid attacking anything directly.

Oh, and there never was a part 2.  The original thread does contain some followup, but nothing worthy of note.  Ultimately I seem to recall that EvenSong was unable to progress beyond Act 2 Normal.

======================================================
Hello All.
Some of you might recall that I asked earlier for thoughts on an amazon
build using only skills in the passive tree.  Well today I started
EvenSong and, just to make things interesting, I decided to try playing
without attacking.

Let me repeat that:  No attacks allowed whatsoever,  no bow, no throw, no
melee, no spells -- at least not by EvenSong herself.  Truly a Passive
Amazon. 

Anyway, here is a rough outline of her adventures through Blood Raven.
And yes, she did take down Blood Raven, untwinked, simply using a
strategic running-around-wearing-the-right-equipment technique.  ;-)

First, before ever leaving the rogue camp she sold her starting equipment
and set her left and right "attacks" to throw.  That way she was in no
danger of accidentally attacking a monster (since she wasn't wielding a
throwing weapon).  Her next concern was then gold -- being unable to
damage anything she was, at the moment, in no position to start thinking
about gaining experience.

Several chests later, and several hops through the cold plains portal,
she was finally able to buy a Sturdy Quilted Armor of Thorns (an entire
1pt. of damage done to attacking monsters).  Excited, she ran right back
out into the Blood Moor and promptly stood smack dab in the middle of a
pack of Fallen.

Sadly, to no avail.  It seemed that her fine Suit of Armor was providing
sufficient defense to prevent frequent hits upon her person by said
Fallen.  They'd hit EvenSong occasionally, but then would fully
regenerate before hitting her again.  Then a voice from above (whom some
know as my wife) said:  "Run!!!!".  Ok, the voice wasn't quite
that emphatic. ;-)   The point being that running makes you more open to
attack -- something I didn't know until now.

Anyway, prompted along by the Powers That Be, EvenSong started running
madly back and forth through the pack.  Success at last!!!  Moments later
she had her first few experience points and the game had finally and
truly begun.

Some short time later, EvenSong reached Level 2.  She placed her skill
point in Inner Sight as a pre-requisite for her eventual Valkyrie, but
had no need of skills as of yet.   Also, by then she had pretty much
liberated (that's what she calls it) every Fallen she could find, was out
of gold, potions, chests, and was completely unable to kill anything
other than Fallen effectively.

A quick "nap" in the Rogue's Camp (i.e. A New Game conveniently provided
by those same Powers That Be) allowed all the Fallen to regenerate and
the Chests to refill -- though she did notice that they were repositioned
somewhat, and she certainly didn't remember those two Experience Shrines
placed conveniently near the Cold Plains Portal.  She wasn't one to look
a gift horse in the mouth however, and after purchasing a Sash of Thorns
(another 1pt of damage, but a 100% increase from EvenSong's point of
view), she very quickly arrived at Level 3.

Charsi at that point was beginning to get the idea, and pulled a Shield
of Thorns out of the back room and sold it to EvenSong at a very
reasonable price.  Finally, at level 3, and doing 3 points of damage to
attackers, EvenSong was able to start taking on Zombies, Fallen Shamans
(yes, they really do have a melee attack if you stay close), and Dark
Hunters,  --- but not Gargantuan Beasts, at least not in packs, and
certainly not that Nasty Extra Strong Unique Gargantuan Beast and his
Minions who were hanging out right on top of the Cold Plains Portal.
 
Fleeing wildly from that, ummm, situation, EvenSong decided another nap
was in order (but it would be the very last one before Blood Raven, lest
you start thinking she's a bit on the lazy side).

A new Morning Dawned and with it, EvenSongs first big test.  A pack of
Champion Dark Hunters had moved in (right where those Vicious Gargantuan
Beasts had been the previous night) and proved to be her greatest
challenge yet.  With Flavie's help and strategic use of fences along the
boundary between the Blood Moor and the Cold Plains, she was able to
isolate them one at a time and eventually prevailed.  Lo and behold, what
should one of them drop but a Small Brown Leather Cap which would
completely change EvenSong's way of thinking.

A Cap of Charged Bolt.

Yes, I know one doesn't normally talk about (even less Capitalize) a Cap
of Charged Bolt, but it had a 10% chance to cast level 3 charged bolt
when struck -- more than enough to wipe out entire crowds if she was
lucky enough to get the thing to fire off twice in rapid succession.
In any case, after picking up and selling all the great stuff dropped by
the Champion Dark Hunters, EvenSong had about 6000 gold saved, and was
able to purchase another Charged Bolt Item at Charsi's.  A Belt, which
unfortunately meant she had to make a decision between direct thorn
damage and an increased chance of casting Charged Bolt.  After some
experimentation, wearing the Charged Bolt Cap and Belt, and the Thorns
Armor and Shield, seemed to be the most effective combination.

At this point, EvenSong had reached Level 5 and finally decided to go
clear out this so-called "Den of Evil" she had been hearing about.  Turns
out she needn't have waited so long.  The Den was quite easy at that
point.  Strategy mostly consisted of luring lots of Fallen near the
larger monsters, rushing into them, and letting the resulting Charged
Bolts take everything out.  She tried to leave the Shamans alive as long
as possible because being hit by the extra revived Fallen running around
actually helped a great deal with the larger Gargantuan Beasts and such.
Unfortunately she ended up fighting CorpseFire all by himself.  Took two
trips back to the Camp for Potions, but he eventually fell and dropped
nothing of note.

Feeling heady after her first major victory, EvenSong headed to the Rogue
Camp and prepared to tackle Blood Raven.  Preparation pretty much
consisted of purchasing extra potions and adding 15 points to her
Vitality, bringing her life total up to 103.

Blood Raven was tough.  EvenSong had some quick early luck when Blood
Raven decided to stand right in the middle of her undead army.  Simply
standing there alongside Blood Raven and quaffing potions was enough to
generate sufficient Charge Bolts to bring her life bar down to about
half.  Unfortunately, that killed off the army and for some reason Blood
Raven was smart enough not to raise more dead -- at least not for about
the next 3 minutes.

EvenSong spent those minutes trying desparately to stay close enough to
allow the, now rarely seen, Charged Bolts to actually hit.  But
controlling the direction of the Charged Bolts was difficult and Blood
Raven proceeded to heal back up to about 2/3. 
 
Eventually though, EvenSong was able to gather Blood Raven's remaining
(and slowly growing in number) troops in a fairly tight bunch and won the
day in a Charged Bolt Spectacular worthy of Song (well, worthy of
EvenSong at least).  ;-)

No drops to speak of there at the end.  And EvenSong was pretty tired at
that point so wandered off to take a nap.

And that's all for now.  Mostly I just wanted to see if I could get
through to Blood Raven.  Now that EvenSong has a merc, things should go
much more smoothly.  I still do plan on avoiding any sort of attack and
playing untwinked as well, so if I have anything interesting to say (and
if there's any interest here) I may post a part 2.

Prophecy

from the North Island Scrolls, Vol 39 , author unknown, translated by Aaron Greyson

Prophecy is therefore a different sense entirely, not a vision, not sound or smell, but something closer to simple knowing.  Any analogy is of course imperfect, but consider an archery tournament.  Spectators will often react almost immediately when an arrow is released as if the knowledge of the result were some sort of foretelling.  But while the arrow is in flight, no-one has seen the result.  There are no visions of precisely where the arrow will land.  And a gust of wind could certainly offset the course of the arrow, as could minute imperfections in the weight and balance of the arrow itself.  Nonetheless, an experienced archery enthusiast will instinctively absorb dozens of tiny clues the moment the arrow is released and know with some reliability whether the arrow will hit its mark.

Coupled to this sense of knowing is a sense of rightness.  By rightness, one does not mean correctness, factual or ethical.  Rightness is simply that feeling a prophet will get when faced with a choice.  One choice will often seem to be the right one even if, which is most often the case, the prophet has no understanding of the consequences of said choice.  It is important to note here that rightness is very much dependent on the desires, both conscious and sub-conscious and both short and long term, of the prophet herself.  Consider for instance a game of wind-and-water*.  A prophet might play against one untrained** and lose even though she expected to win and despite the fact that she chose her move at every stage according to her sense of rightness.  While this phenomenon is not fully understood, most explanations boil down to a combination of the ideas that, for whatever reason, she didn't really want to win or that, in the long term, losing was the better outcome for her.

* The translation wind-and-water is misleading as the original runic text is but a single word which has been seen to refer to both wind and water depending on context.  A certain level of instability or unpredictability is also implied as the term would never be applied to a steady breeze or current and certainly not to a still pond.  "chaotic flow" might be more appropriate, but as the term in this particular context refers to a deterministic game that bears some resemblance to our whites-and-blues, it seemed that wind-and-water would be most appropriate.

** This word, apparently used here to mean non-prophet, does not appear to be a literal opposite of the word used for prophet.  Broken down, it more closely resembles without-study.

Advancement and Challenge

The nouns in the title are two things that tend to contribute to a games enjoyment. 

• Progress Quest takes advancement to the extreme and removes all challenge. Surprisingly it still retains some entertainment value, at least until the player feels they have seen all it has to offer.
• An arcade style game such as Doublewires has no advancement to speak of, unless one counts advancement of the timer, and relies almost entirely on challenge to appeal to the player.  Such a game can remain fun as long as the player keeps getting better but will quickly become tiresome once the player either is unable to improve their skill or masters the game entirely.  In this particular example, mastering the game simply means that one is skillful enough to play indefinitely without dying.

Now one could argue that challenge in this context is merely a mechanism used to provide another form of advancement, namely the advancement of the players actual skill level (as opposed to some notion of virtual skill level).   But its more than that because challenge can remain fun even after one has mastered the game in question.  Whether a game falls into the latter category is purely subjective, but for many people Sudoku seems to be an example of this.  With challenge, at some point one moves from advancement of skill to maintenance of skill, and the latter can be fun even with no hope of further advancement.

Nonetheless, I personally tend to have little patience for a game unless it has a good measure of both challenge and advancement.  Disgaea was one such game and it took both of these elements to rather extreme levels.  Advancement was available for both characters and items, the level cap was 9999, and mobs continued to grow in power with the player.  At every point during this progression, players could effectively choose the difficulty by repeating earlier missions or by forging ahead to new missions when they felt they were ready.  On top of all this, the game was kept interesting through the use of randomized dungeons.  Unfortunately the level of variety provided by the randomization in Disgaea was not sufficient to keep things interesting for 10,000 levels.   Nor do I think it could have been, but that's something I plan to discuss at length in another post.

So what about mmos?  Well, WoW certainly has plenty of advancement.  But from my point of view, Blizzard has been systematically removing the challenge from the game.  Its no Progress Quest, at least not yet, but it does seem to be heading in that direction.  Now, lest I sound like some elitist, saying that something isn't providing me with enough challenge is not the same as saying it is too easy.  There are definitely things I'm not able to do in wow.  But for something to be a challenge, it has to be neither trivial nor impossible.  Its not challenging for me to travel to Australia for lunch today, its completely out of the question.  Regarding WoW, and Rift as well, what many companies seem to be doing is separating advancement from challenge so that for 99% of your advancement, there is no challenge, and for the remaining 1% of advancement, the challenge is no longer a challenge, but effectively impossible for a large percentage of the player base.

LOTRO has challenge in the way of skirmishes.  In concept, these are rather perfect from my point of view.

• Joining one is painless.  No travel time or waiting in queues is required.
• One may choose the type, mob level, tier (difficulty level), and number of players.
• The only drops are various types of marks (currency) which can be used at NPC vendors.
• One gains personal advancement in skirmishes which applies to the game outside of skirmishes.
• One gains skirmish-related advancement in the way of experience for one's skirmish warrior.
• Skirmishes have a random component in the way of enemy lieutenants and encounters.
• Advancing one's character in the main game unlocks additional skirmishes.
• Completing achievements within skirmishes unlocks additional achievements.
• All skirmishes are soloable, but there are incentives to group.

 Advancement and Challenge for everyone -- most definitely possible.

Rift: Fun and Disillusionment

There has been a lot of discussion about fun lately and I wonder if part of it might be due to the type 1 activity that was Rift.  And if you don't want to go to the link, type 1 is simply any activity that we think we enjoy, but don't actually enjoy.

Rift should have been the perfect mmo for me.  Everything they promised and subsequently delivered was pretty much what I had thought I wanted.  I participated in most of the beta events, participated in the headstart launch and played daily for almost 3 months afterward, the whole time thinking that I was there to stay.

SynCaine does a good job of explaining some of my disillusionment with the game, and I agree with his statement that: The game pitched as “not Azeroth” very quickly started to mirror exactly that.  However, looking back, I think my disappointment started on day one and it took me 3 months to realize I had been lying to myself about liking the game.

I know I'm not the only one.  I had several discussions with other players during the beta and soon after launch that went something along the lines of:

Me: So how are you liking Rift so far?
Rifter: I'm not sure yet.  It seems awesome enough but ...
Me: I know what you mean.  Its incredibly polished, has some unique features, but...
Rifter: Yeah, there's nothing not to like but there's something indefinable missing from it.
Me: Yeah...

So three months in I was going along happily ignoring all the signs of impending emptiness, and then rather overnight I simply stopped playing.  There was no hatred, no rage-quitting, nothing like that at all.  Just sudden overwhelming apathy.

And now I want to know why.  I know I'm most definitely not burnt out on themepark mmos -- I've returned to LOTRO now and am really loving it.  That doubt I had during my entire Rift experience just isn't there.  LOTRO is fun and Rift wasn't -- even though I thought it was.  So now I'm left wondering what happened.  And I'm finding myself questioning the nature of fun itself.

Being disillusioned sucks.

Lying to Ourselves

I have an annoying (to me) tendency to be overly meta at times.  As an example, I'll be having fun playing a game only to be distracted by wondering why I am having so much fun.  Then I'll start wondering if I should write down my thoughts about why I'm having fun only to be distracted by curiosity as to why I enjoy writing down such things.

I've made a habit of privately writing down thoughts such as these for years, occasionally not-so-privately in the form of a response to some post, and now publicly in the form of my own blog.

And, surprise, surprise, all this activity has gotten me thinking about all this activity.

And all this thinking has led me to want to clarify what exactly I'm doing here.  Put simply, I'm merely trying to better understand myself.  I'd love to make some sort of grand claim that all of us are merely trying to better understand ourselves, but grand claims are usually wrong (see what I did there?) and tend to provide a nice opening for people to tell us that we're wrong.

Such a topic could obviously fill volumes if treated comprehensively, and I have no desire to write volumes.  Heck, if I go on for too long even I will stop reading what I'm writing.  So I'll generally try to limit meta-posts to a handful of observations.

Without further ado, one may classify activities into four types.

• Type 3 (or 11) -- Things one enjoys or would enjoy and correctly knows or believes this.
• Type 2 (or 10) -- Things one enjoys or would enjoy but doesn't know or aren't willing to admit this.
• Type 1 (or 01) -- Things one doesn't enjoy but believes they would.
• Type 0 (or 00) -- Things one doesn't enjoy and correctly knows or believes this.

Not only is such a classification personal, it also varies in time.  So if one had access to the relevant statistics, one could classify activities further by adding qualifiers such as "for most people" and "for most of the time" or even "for most of the time during the last year" or whatever time interval seems relevant to the discussion at hand.

As an example, it could be the case that playing a story-heavy mmo with a primary focus on immersion used to be a Type 1 activity for most people and has now migrated over to the Type 0 category.  Of course, the answer would depend on the specific mmo in question, but as the statistics are unobtainable, further refinement of the activity in this example serves no point.

I bring up this classification because in my experience a significant percentage of blogging boils down to a discussion as to which of these categories a given activity falls under.  Any time someone says: "I think most people enjoy ..."  or "People often claim to enjoy ... but the numbers paint a different picture." they are essentially making a claim as to what type the given activity is for the majority of people.

And I'm certainly no different.  My blogging adventure will most likely trend in much the same way.  I do feel that types 1 and 2 are the interesting ones.  As a person who is always on the lookout for activities to enjoy, it would serve me well to identify any type 1 or 2 activities and promptly move them to types 0 and 3 respectively.  The fact that the classification varies in time, even for an individual, greatly complicates the situation and necessitates constant self-re-evaluation, but it seems rather clear that I have a penchant for just that.

Obsessive self-analysis is obviously a type 3 activity for me.