Guildomatic

Went to a party and met up with Matt E, Yang and Walter last night. I've been meaning to write something about one of Yang and Walter's projects for a while now: Guildomatic. If you're a WoW enthusiast looking for a better home online for your guild than a random php forum, this is probably what you're looking for. Yang and Walter are both very sharp and their stuff is always top-notch.

Game Design: Lost in the Shuffle

WotC's Magic site posted a selection today from Richard Garfield's old Duelist column, Lost in the Shuffle, predominantly about general game design. Always thought-provoking stuff, it was one of my favourite parts of that magazine.

As a sidenote, one of the things Richard and Skaff Elias were up to recently was Spectromancer, an online card game mentioned on Penny Arcade the other week. I've been meaning to check it out for a while but haven't got round to it.

Quake Wars 1.4 patch due out before Christmas

From the horse's mouth.

Adds a sorely needed Training Mode, adds QWTV (a la HLTV) and a ton of little goodies. Can't wait!

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars Beginner Tips

I've been playing a whole lot of lunchtime Quake Wars at the office as well as a little practice time against the computer at home. The more I play, the more I like the game. It's definitely got a learning curve though and a lot of things aren't obvious unless you read the manual in detail. Here's some of the things I've picked up so far, in no particular order:

• Pressing “1” (by default) on any vehicle (including Icarus and Husky) launches a decoy flare
  
• Alt-fire (right mouse button) with an Engineer’s mine makes it a laser tripwire mine instead of a proximity mine
  
• You have to activate mines via looking at them and hitting f before they actually work
  
• Grenades detonate enemy mines but shooting them with infantry weapons doesn’t seem to
  
• If you’re playing a class with deployables (e.g. Engineer, Field Ops, Infiltrator, Covert Ops, etc.) you should have one placed all the time - they’re very powerful. Don’t forget that the medic class has a supply deployable!
  
• If you’re the sniper class, your first priority is making sure that your radar is up all the time. Don’t forget the GDF side has the 3rd Eye radar, which is particularly useful indoors.
  
• Multiple weapons are sometimes bound to the same slot (e.g. the deployable tool and the repair tool for the Engineer are both bound to slot 5). Pressing the same weapon key toggles between them.
  
• Use your context menu (“v” default) A LOT to spot enemy vehicles and deployables. Also use it to request a gunner in appropriate vehicles, health from medics, etc.
  
• When playing Strogg, learn how to use Spawn Hosts and Stroyup/Stroydown! Note that you can claim spawn hosts from the limbo menu as well as in play.
  
• If you’re playing a Soldier/Aggressor in the outdoor sections, you probably want to pick a Rocketlauncher/Obliterator or MG/Hyperblaster instead of an Assault Rifle/Hyperblaster.
  
• The Soldier’s HE charge (Aggressor’s Plasma charge) can be used to do a lot of damage to deployables. Place it, arm it and it will detonate after 40 seconds.
  
• The GDF smoke grenade that the Covert Ops has is useful to cover up planted HE charges and infantry advances.
  
• Covert Ops and Infiltrators can pretend to be members of the other team via looking at a body and using their Hacking Tool.
  
• Alt-fire on Strogg grenades makes the grenade sticky.
  
• Alt-fire on GDF grenades rolls the grenade.
  
• F/mousewheel on scoped weapons zooms the weapon.
  
• If you change class, any deployable you have built will self-destruct.
  
• Deployables have a 170 degree field of view, so the direction you pick for turrets and artillery guns is important. Note that they will turn out of their field of view if attacked.
  
• The Strogg Cyclops has a “stomp” attack to squish infantry close to it. Hit Jump (space) to activate.
  
• The Strogg Cyclops and Devastator can enter “siege mode” to fire faster (although they can’t move then). Hit crouch (C by default) to activate and jump (Space) to deactivate siege mode.
  
• Lots of vehicles have more than one seat. Press Use (F) to toggle between seats. It’s often pretty effective to have more than one person in a vehicle, so listen for people asking for gunners or ask for a gunner via the context menu if you’re driving a vehicle with extra seats.
  
• The sniper weapons are good against aircraft.
  
• If you get the Vehicle Drops XP upgrade, you can call for a Husky/Icarus to be airdropped to you via the context menu (V).


• You can bring up a command map with "n" by default

TF2: Playing the Spy and Pyro

The two most confusing classes for a newbie (like me) in TF2 are the Spy and Pyro.

So here's a couple of nifty videos on playing the Spy and Pyro by EvilDaedalus, who is clearly some kind of TF2 ninja compared with me.

The main thing I picked up from these that I didn't know previously was for the Pyro: using mostly hit-n-run flanking tactics and copious use of the shotgun. I'd thought of it as a hide-round-a-corner-and-go-boo class, which may have been why so far I've sucked whenever I slipped into something more rubbery and haven't played Pyro much at all. As for Spy, well, there always seems to be a sneaky guy on the team already and I like to fill in the roles that the team isn't covering at the moment.

Mmmmph mmmmmmph!

Quake (Office) Wars: Initial Impressions

I noticed a pile of new graphics card boxes sitting in a cube at work adorned with a sticker saying they included a free copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. I asked the IT guys if that meant they had a few copies hanging around that noone wanted and sure enough, they did.

Turns out to be a pretty good game. It's a lot like Battlefield and certainly draws a lot of "inspiration" from the Battlefield line. I've only been playing it at lunchtimes at work since my free time is nil at the moment, but it's well suited for that.

Here's the "lunchtime game" assessment.

Pros:
1) You only need 1 install disk for a LAN game (although we have several).
2) The bot support is decent and certainly playable.
3) The games are capped at 20 minutes for a map, so you can get in a game without manager-types getting all upset (however, campaign mode is more like an hour).
4) Due to (2), you can play a game with only a few people - with, say, Team Fortress 2, you'd need a bunch of people for a reasonable game.

Cons:
1) Learning curve is a little rough. There's no in-game tutorial at all, so it just drops you in and slaps you on the back. I could give you a (lengthy) list of all the stuff you need to know, or you could just go watch GreasedScotsman's excellent tutorial video series. However, the videos are pretty long, so if you'd rather read something on the subject this is the pretty much definitive source.
2) You will need bots to play unless you are playing on a pub Internet server or have a lot of friends (at least 5-8+ per side).

As for the actual game itself, well, it's good. I like it more than BF2142, which is the most recent Battlefield game I've played. The games progress in a series of objectives rather than just capture points, with different classes having useful inputs at each stage, which helps to concentrate both sides on single areas at a time. Deployable buildings add tactical depth and varies the gameplay from round to round. Dropping an artillery gun and then sighting it in with the Field Ops laser sight was particularly satisfying.

I suspect that playing it online won't be as fun for me just because I don't have time to get actually good at it and historically the Battlefield games have been rough going for me. I tend to die from sniper shots across the landscape and not even really know what killed me, which isn't terribly exciting. But playing with people in the same skill ballpark was enjoyable.

As for criticisms, I think my main issue would be that the sides could be more asymmetric. While there are definitely differences between the Strogg and GDF, predominantly the classes have the same abilities with different flavours. It seems technically well executed.

One final note: if you have multiple monitors and a NVidia card, your framerate may well be terrible. If you have this issue, you'll want to tweak the driver.

Delicious Portal (no spoilers)

I finally decided that the Portal spoilers weren't going to evade me forever, so I broke down on Friday night and bought the Orange Box.

I finished the main plotline of Portal last night. I think Yahtzee had it about right in describing it as "the most fun you'll have with your PC till they invent a force-feedback codpiece". A moist, delicious slice of awesome.




P.S. Best. Ending. Ever.

Latest Gossip

Just a little gossip from the last week or so.

Helped out over the weekend with a TV shoot for the Tinsman's nifty AngelQuest game, along with the Rosewaters. Sounds like they'll get a segment and interview on a certain well-known TV talk show in a few months. No, I wasn't on camera, although my oldest son was.

Played some Winston Draft with Izzy on Monday night. I drafted like a total muppet - one of the worst draft decks I've ever made. I'm really out of practice. In my defense, I hadn't played with Lorwyn yet and I was holding a grumpy baby for some of the draft. But really I just sucked. Still fun though - I really love Magic even after all these years. If you're a Magic player and haven't tried Winston draft, you really should - it's the best 2-man Limited format.

The major mistake I think I was making was being too happy to settle for a pile with a playable card in my colours instead of being more choosy and skipping to try to find more removal. Izzy ended up with virtually all the removal and I only had one bomb (which I never drew) so it was a really savage beating. When you haven't played with a set at all, it's hard to gauge the average power level so you can figure out when piles are skippable.

On the GW front, I don't want to give away anything too exciting, but it did sound like the upcoming skill balance will really shake things up a bit. That, and some interesting pricing updates. We'll see how the community reacts. All of this is really making me miss Guild Wars PvP and Magic, I have to say.

The general community reaction to introducing shrines to the arenas seems to be negative, although I enjoyed it on the few occasions I've had a chance to try it in Random Arenas. The 20-point win total does seem too high for Random Arenas though - lowering it to 10 or having an auto-win condition for really lopsided matchups (as in Alliance Battles) would be sensible. I'm guessing Izzy will just take the shrines back out though.

Maybe now the baby is sleeping a bit better I'll try to get in a little bit of pick-up GW PvP. I do want to try to finish Bioshock and move on to the Orange Box soon though. I've desperately been avoiding Portal spoilers but something tells me I won't keep it up forever.

Guild Wars: Shrines in Arenas

So apparently ArenaNet added Hero Battles maps to the Arenas rotation. It only says Team Arenas in the update, but apparently they added them to Random Arenas too. Not sure whether that's intentional or just a bug.

I'm curious as to how this plays out. Of course, I expect a lot of bitching right now no matter whether it's good or bad. Maybe I'll manage to get a few free minutes and check into the arenas this weekend. Oh, just in case you didn't notice the front page news, it's a bonus points weekend in the arenas too.

Update: according to Izzy, adding the HB maps to Random Arenas was intentional. It was the change log that had the mistake.

Game Design: Making Games More Fun

Alright, it's plug time. Go read this post on how to make games more fun in the design stage. Sadly, right now the Gleemax site is pretty horrific, as you might expect from Wizards' rather lacking IT expertise. Hopefully they'll make it better in due course.

Full disclosure: Brian Tinsman is a good friend of mine. He's worked on a ton of games in the hobby space at this point - oh, and his book on game design is pretty good too.

Still Not Dead

Contrary to some media reports, I am not actually dead. Just resting.

Or anyway, I wish I was.

Since my last check in with the online world, some personal drama happened that I won't bore you with and one other minor thing - I had a daughter. Turns out that babies don't have a pause button, especially when they have colic. This means that I'm watching a lot of TV and not playing much game-wise, which is all rather sad since I'd much rather play games than watch TV.

In a few stolen moments of gametime, I've squeezed in a bit of GW PvE in the new Eye of the North expansion, which is nice although rather grindy. I guess enough PvE people liked all the previous title stuff that they figured they may as well answer the call for more grind, but this time reward it with in-game significance instead of just visual differences. I haven't got to play any PvP at all since the baby was born, which is a great shame.

In other news, I've also been playing the ubiquitous Bioshock, about which plenty has been written. My verdict is that there's a reason "shock" is in the name, but nonetheless a wonderfully atmospheric game you have to buy simply to know what everyone is talking about if nothing else. I should caution you that it's a bit demanding on the machine, though.

One last thing for now - there's a new king of online game reviews. Highly recommended, if NSFW.

Skill vs. Treadmills

Insightful post over at Raph Koster's blog on why successful games invariably have treadmill mechanics.

As a sidenote, one thing that I've noticed is that skilled players of a given game (online or offline), when given the chance to influence game mechanic development, typically demand games that further reward skill. This isn't always beneficial in terms of making the game fun to play.

The e-King Is Dead

Apparently, while I was on holiday Rex decided to ragequit e-life (again) in a fit of e-drama without so much as a goodbye. No cookie for you, Mr. Sausaletus. Consider your wrist e-smacked.

Guild Wars: Frontline tips

Here's a useful post over at the Mostly Harmless forums on playing frontline roles (warrior or dervish). I'm pretty terrible at playing in the front line, although admittedly I haven't gone back and tried for a while.

Guild Wars: Hard Mode

Does exactly what it says on the tin. No, really.

Guild Wars: Hard Mode

PvE Hard Mode is about to be released. Check out the official page for the details.

Edit: one non-obvious point they didn't mention - to get access to Hard Mode for a PvE campaign, you have to log in with a character who's beaten the campaign. After that, all your characters can play in Hard Mode for that campaign.

Guild Wars: Automated Tournament Thoughts

In large part, the AT stuff posted looks very good. I'm principally concerned with GvG here because I think the HvH format right now needs some love to make it more about fighting and less about capping. I'm not sure how much it can be rescued, to be honest. Fundamentally you have 3 not-very-bright heroes on each team and only one human, so overruling bad AI decisions via a clunky interface is always going to be a large part of that game. I'm not convinced that's ever going to be really fun.

I was hoping to play some more HvH while I was on vacation just to see if I would come around to the format but my wife's laptop was just too slow for PvP - so I finally got around to finishing Nightfall's PvE campaign instead.

Anyway, some thoughts in random order:

The posted schedule looks like ArenaNet was trying too hard to appear even-handed. The round-the-clock distribution of playing times is fine in theory but in practice the bulk of their players are in a few time zones - EST, GMT+1 and GMT+2 mostly, I'm guessing, from the number of European and American guilds. I expect the schedule to be revised before the system goes live.

Shiny "Barbie Wars" rewards for doing well are a nice touch. People always seem to respond well to e-peen stroking opportunities.

Sadly, 4 hours straight is a pretty big time commitment for anyone with a life. Personally, I'd rather have a round or two less (say, 16 or 8 guild pods) or skipping the final single-elimination rounds and just doing straight Swiss to guarantee a shorter play time. Previously, I'd thought about tournament options where you just played a match every week or somesuch but after the Celestial tourney I'm convinced this is a bad idea. Getting 8 people to show up at the same time who don't know each other closely is problematic and a big time sink. Anyway, I guess we'll see how long each tourney really goes.

Higher K-values: well, about time. Hopefully this will mean ratings will start reflecting real guild strength more closely. Once again, we shall see how this plays out.

One missing point that's not mentioned is map choice. Hopefully maps will be random to cut down on the 8v8 builds on Jade phenomenon, etc.

As for this:

We are always trying to move Guild Wars to the fore of competitive e-sports

Sadly, I think this is doomed to failure. GW is just never going to be a good spectator's game because the amount of knowledge required to enjoy watching is just too high. Without a lot of spectators, you have no real sport. Magic has a similar problem - unless you know the cardsets the players are using really well, you can't follow what's happening. That said, my current #1 feature I'd really like is to be able to download observer mode replays. I have a suspicion that that is technically very difficult to implement and so will never happen.

Overall, I'm excited. Hopefully I'll actually be on the OoX core GvG roster and get to play...

Guild Wars: Automated Tournament Details!

The official post just went up. System starts up in April.

I have some thoughts on this but not enough time to write them down now. Watch this space. For now, let's just say I'm excited.

Guild Wars: Celestial Tournament over

The Celestial Tournament is over, with Team Everfrost [eF] taking the crown over Esoteric Warriors [EW]. In what I can only assume is some kind of cry for help, Rex has taken it upon himself to blog about pretty much each and every game played in the quarterfinals and onwards.

In other not-quite-news-yet, according to the official site, apparently we'll hear more about the breathlessly-awaited Automated Tournament system "very soon".

Guild Wars: Fixing Hexes

Phelann has an interesting post on fixing hexes over at the Guild Hall. Specifically, tweaking single hex removal skills to remove 1 hex per 2 hexes on the target, rounding up - so Holy Veil removes 2 on a target with 3, but only 1 on a target with 2. Makes covering hexes still have a point, but overwhelming hex stacks not so useful.

Could be one approach for fixing the all-or-nothing nature of hexes that seems to be a bit of a problem right now. Some hexes are fine - notably water snares and some of the mesmer domination line - but most are only worth it if the whole build is devoted to them. I'm not sure that this really solves the issue but it does at least provide a solution to the rock-paper-scissors metagame that narrow mass removals like Divert Hexes are currently providing.