Tag: lfd

Dauntless Founders Alpha Preview

Posted on by Gazimoff

Disclaimer: I bought into the Founders Alpha. As such, the usual caveats apply: wanting to avoid buyer’s remorse, wanting something to be good because you’ve sunk money into it, and so on. If you’re not comfortable with risking your investment in an Early Access beta that you might not enjoy, then don’t.

With that out of the way, why am I excited about Dauntless? If I’m honest, it’s because of something I love about MMOs: fighting big-ass monsters with a group of heroes and stealing their loot. Take that idea, put the boss on a floating island, and that’s how I look at the core concept. Simple, right?

Sure, some gamers may invoke the Monster Hunter lineage, but that’s alien to me as I never got into the series. From what I understand, however, it’s a similar deal: kill big monsters, harvest them to make better weapons and armour, use that to take on bigger monsters. Rinse and repeat.

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LFD: No Simple Answers

Posted on by Gazimoff

Looking around the blogsphere today reminds me of battle re-enactment. I can see the same people pulling on the same uniform and dusting off the same weapons to have the same good-natured scrap over something. The sheep-skin drums are beating, the blue and red overcoats are being pulled on. The beer tent is filling up as the two sides filter in and catch up on old times. The battleground? Looking for Dungeon.

The argument is that Star Wars: The Old Republic needs a Looking for Flashpoint tool in order to help groups form for both levelling instances and endgame content. There are currently a large number of players unable to experience this content, either because their guild doesn’t have enough players at the same level or because they’re too busy enjoying the stupidly good questing content.

The choice seems to be between a Warcraft-style Looking for Dungeon tool, or not having one at all and just making do with shouting in the chat channels like some market trader. Neither is a great solution – one end leaves you frustrated with anonymous people you’ll never encounter again, while the other leaves you frustrated at the lack of response from other players as you sit doing nothing for hours on end. Either way you’re left frustrated.

The exception is if you have a guild that’s both large enough to support flashpoints (and populated with people who want to do that content) and which has people in broadly the same level bracket. If either is not the case then even with the best of intentions the guild is less of a guild and more of a social chat channel. But I digress.

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In Defence of the Trifecta

Posted on by Gazimoff

In almost every MMO that I’ve played there have been three classic roles to choose from. A tank is the one who soaks the damage for a party, a healer keeps the party standing and the DPS are there to deal damage.

I like dealing damage. I don’t know if I have a thing for big yellow numbers flashing up on my screen or if it’s just some latent button-mashing left over from my childhood. It even moves into first-person shooters – in Team Fortress I’m playing either the Soldier that only has eyes for the rocket launcher or the Sniper that will camp somewhere for hours to get that perfect headshot. It’s why I’ve also set up DamageBin, a forum dedicated to those who love dealing damage in MMOs

It’s not that I haven’t tried tanking or healing. I’ve tried both. I’ve even tried melee DPS. I just don’t get on with them. I don’t find it particularly hard or difficult, I just don’t enjoy the role. Call me strange but they just don’t click for me.

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Karma As A Mechanic

Posted on by Gazimoff

Eurogamer recently did an interview of Will Wright, which I’d have missed completely if it wasn’t for a gem pointed out by Rock Paper Shotgun. It turns out that he’s working on a game with a strong karmic theme, using smartphones, tablets and Facebook as the platform.

The concept of the game is based on a short story called Maneki Neko by Bruce Stirling. Here’s what Wright had to share about Stirling’s concept:

He describes a karmic computer that’s keeping a balance of payments between different people, and causing them to interact with each other in interesting ways, to improve their lives even though they’re strangers. They earn karmic points that are redeemed by having somebody else help them.

This is all very interesting, but why is Wright’s latest facebook game so important?

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Bribes, Karma and Recommendations

Posted on by Gazimoff

Patch 4.1 is approaching, although when it’ll actually arrive is currently anyone’s guess. Content and changes are being crammed in on a regular basis, making predicting the arrival date sheer guesswork at the moment.

Call to Arms is one of the latest features to be squeezed into the patch. Essentially the change amounts to a bribe to persuade tanks (and occasionally healers) to queue by themselves for heroic groups by offering them an additional reward when they complete the dungeon.

The rewards on offer to those that respond to the Call are a mix of the following:

  • More gold
  • A chance of a rare gem, flasks or potions (basically more gold)
  • A good chance of a dungeon drop only non-combat pet
  • A rare chance of a dungeon drop only mount

Although the Call to Arms can in theory be triggered for any role, it’ll always go for the one that’s needed most. In the majority of cases this will be the tank, although occasionally it’ll be healers that are most in need. It is highly unlikely that this will trigger for DPS roles.

The goal is that this will reduce the queue times for DPS, providing them with a better LFD experience.

It will not work.

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Looking For Dramatic Change

Posted on by Gazimoff

If you ever wanted a minute by minute reading of why tanks and healers feel special, you need look no further than the infamous Looking for Dungeon tool. It’s a bit radical to see tanks get insta-pop dungeons and healers have maybe five minutes while DPS are left to sit around for maybe an hour or more.

Ever wanted to feel third-class? Just roll a pure-class DPS and watch as the queue mocks you, again and again.

But why is this? Surely if we got more people to play tanks or healers then we’d all win from shorter queues? I’m not sure. We’ve had two major tanking changes, firstly to make non-Warrior tanks much more viable and secondly to introduce a whole new class to persuade people to tank. I’ll admit that the LFD tool was introduced after these changes, but still – that means that either nothing has got better or (shudder) things were actually worse than I remember.

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Coping with Cataclysm Heroics

Posted on by Gazimoff

LFG screnshot header

Let me say one thing up-front: the experience of running heroics in Beta is both different and identical to that in live. It’s different because healing was less of an issue – premade level 85 healer classes were given gear that’s suitable for their role, including Spirit on almost everything. It’s the same because even when the Tier 11-clad epic premades became available, people were still wiping on bosses because they were unable to adapt.

What does adapting mean though, exactly? There’s a term that my wife affectionately calls “management bollocks”, but it’s basically making sure that you set your expectations reasonably.  We’ve had our perceptions shaped by the state of the game over the past year or so. The changes the expansion has brought have been a shock to a great many people.

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Angry Mage is Angry

Posted on by Gazimoff

I managed to get pissed off at so many things yesterday. It seems laughable looking back on it, how can a videogame get me so worked up? It’s stupid, right? I mean, I’m a grown adult, so why let a game affect my mood so much? Why let it get to me?

Right.

I’ve been getting seriously annoyed with the loading screen bug. The one which seems to have only started in 3.3.3, where you’ve chosen your character and you’re waiting for the game to load. The progress bar fills up and seems about to run then just sits there. I can hear the dulcet tones of Dalaran zone music in the background, so I figure it’s just taking a while before flipping to in-game. Maybe some data got dropped between here and Paris, and it’s just taking  while to resync. It’s like some kind of digital tease, tormenting me while it sits there and does nothing.

No point waiting though. The game has hung, so it’s back to alt+F4 then going through the whole thing again. Email address, password, authenticator code. And I’ve usually got one of those bits wrong, so I usually end up typing it again, hammering each key deliberately as if my keyboard is being held personally responsible for my failure to type.

Trouble is, it won’t stop happening. It’s like an itch that you can’t scratch, growing more and more irritating. It feels like I have to log in two or three times just to get the game to load. When I’m switching servers or hopping between my two accounts, it’s a real bugbear.

That’s just one issue though, and a technical one to boot. Getting worked up about it is a bit like having a rage against a server. Sure, you might want to pull on your steel toecapped boots and punt it round the datacentre a bit, but that isn’t going to suddenly make it work. You might feel better, but it doesn’t fix the problem.

The thing that made me throw in the towel today was just sitting around in Dalaran. I figured that after a successful raid on Wednesday that I’d try my luck in VoA. There’s badges, there’s Tier 10, so it’s worth a go. We’ve just won Wintergrasp so I pipe up in Trade and LFG that I’m looking for a VoA group. As soon as I do it, there’s something like 4 or 5 other mages all saying “Take me, take me instead!” It’s reminds me of a birds’ nest, with a clutch of mage chicklets all chirping away hoping to be the one to get the invite worm.

I don’t know where they all came from. It feels as if everyone just said “You know what, I’m going to play my mage today.” So I go sod it, I have alts, I’ll play them instead. Sod the competition, I’ll see if I can do something in the guild another time.

I fire up my priest. I figure that he’s got the tier 10 robe, so there’s a good chance I can find a ToC or ICC PuG for him to join. Earn some rep, get a few badges, maybe snaffle a few drops at the same time. I find an ICC10 group looking for a healer and tank, so I join up. I should have realised something was up when there were only 7 spots filled, but I shrugged it off. I alt-tabbed, fired up Google Reader and scanned through some blogposts while I waited for the raid to fill.

From there things went from bad to worse. An hour later we finally enter the instance after suffering numerous joins, dropouts and so on. We have a resto druid attempting to MT heal with 1FPS. A resto shaman who is watching TV half the time. Another tank who has to leave because “something else came up”. One wipe at Marrowgar later and the raidleader’s having to replace people.

We finally get a group back together with a replacement for the tank and resto druid. We’re all set and ready to have another attempt at the boss. Only the resto shaman is AFK. She’s watching TV, asking us to wait while her programme finishes. At that point, the tank that just arrived sees the group for the joke it is and leaves.

I follow shortly after.

I know this is an MMO – that it’s supposed to be Massively Multiplayer. I get that this is the point. But sometimes the biggest selling point of the game is also it’s most crippling weakness. The sheer amount of asshattery that goes on in the game is a nightmare, and it feels like it’s something that’s only become worse since the cross-server LFD tool. It means that the decent people – the guilds I’m in and the people I play with – are all the more valuable.

It also means that sometimes I just want to treat it like an RPG. Like Dragon Age without all the cut-scenes and dialog trees. I just want to choose an anonymous alt, sit somewhere and go questing. Everyone else can shove off for a few hours. Just play it like a single-player game with a chatbox and mash buttons for a while.

There are always going to be asshats. You’ll find them in every game, from Counter Strike to Checkers. No amount of programming wizardry or karma system has been able to remove asshats from a game, or to generally discourage asshattery so much that it’s no longer worthwhile. All you can hope to do is minimise the effect that they have on your game, or ensure that the density of asshats is so dilute that their overall impact is negligible.

Meanwhile I’ll sigh, shrug my shoulders and carry on playing. After all, it’s only a game.

Isn’t it?

Escaping the Vortex of Suck

Posted on by Gazimoff

Lets be honest, the Dungeon Finder tool can be an invitation to torture. What started out as a way to find groups and gain some excellent rewards quickly deteriorated into an all out slugfest. Nowadays you’re as likely to find a group where the players are openly hostile to each other, or where some use it as a tool to deliberately cause grief to others. The worst thing is there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.

It probably started easily enough. The tank complains to the healer that he’s having trouble keeping up. The healer has a go at the DPS for being mindless zombies that should goddamn move out of the void zones. The DPS moan at the tank for failing to keep aggro on fifteen mobs while they’re going full-tilt on three different targets. The complaints, taunts and snide remarks go round in a circle, with everyone blaming everyone else. It’s a circle of despair – a loop of misery that feels endless.

It doesn’t end there. The proliferation of addons to measure, calculate and assess an individual’s performance means that players can be subjected to intense scrutiny – more than they’d have with their own raid group. People are now using Recount and GearScore to check a character out, even though the dungeon might have incredibly low requirements. Fail to come up to scratch and you’ll soon know about it, either by being booted from the group as soon as it’s possible or being subjected to humiliation for the entire run.

Why should people care though? I mean, it’s not as if you’ll regularly come into contact with the people you find in your random group. Most of the time they won’t even be on your server, so what have you got to worry about? Besides, if people behaved like an asshole to you then you have every right to be an asshole to anyone else that doesn’t measure up.

It leads to a Vortex of Suck. The conditions in the random groups continue to get worse. You try to suck it down, grow a thick skin and ignore anything said in party chat. After all, if it’s only used for hurling insults why should I even have it in my chat window? You end up at the Eye of Bitterness – the quiet at the centre of the Vortex. It’s where no-one says a word because everyone has just one mission on their mind – get in, get the badges and get out with as little pain as possible.

Of course, you may decide you’ve had enough of pugging. Your experience has left you hating the Dungeon Finder tool with a passion, and you find yourself wandering the Plains of Pug Exile. A good guild or group of friends may help fill the gap, but you won’t always be able to rely on them being around or wanting to run instances. If you’re determined to cut loose from the Dungeon Finder, you may find yourself with a fair bit of free time.

Does this represent a failure of the Dungeon Finder? Does it demonstrate that social design collapses when confronted with Gabriel’s Theorem? Or is there something wider here, that without some kind of release or control valve you end up with a chaotic system that starts to collapse in on itself?

I’m not sure if the Dungeon Finder can be classed as broken, or if it can truly be fixed. There seems to be a general feel that something needs to be changed. But what that something is or how it should change remains difficult to answer. It seems that for a while at least we’ll have to weather the storm.