GamesMadeMe: Game Markets

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today.  Playing the Palia closed beta a little bit one thing that shocked me was the lack of an in-game market to trade with other players.  I consider the in game economy one of the three pillars of an MMORPG.  I love my game markets.

 Let's start with the best game market I've had the pleasure to enjoy: Guild Wars 2.  Early on in development they hired an economist that had direct input in designing the game's economy and boy did they hit some home runs.  First: the auction house is global to all players regardless of what server they play on.  Second: there is an exchange available to swap gold for premium currency for the cash shop. Third: a public API is available so third party websites can crawl the auction house data.

 I made a lot of gold and bought a lot of premium currency in Guild Wars 2 simply through playing the global auction house.  There were many tools such as GW2TP that break down whats trending up and whats trending down that also feature tools to find easy profit flips.  More than anything in Guild Wars 2 I was a market flipper and I would not be surprised if 50% or more of my /played time was at the auction house.

 In my current game of choice, New World, I spend a large amount of time in the trading post as well.  The tools and interface are not the best, but there is a lot of "inefficient" areas in the market of New World.  Those inefficient areas let me slide in to make a gold or hundred.  These areas are always shifting as different things happen in the game and it's as much a part of the "player vs player" in the game as the actual "go kill players" aspect.  The market in New World is cut throat and the bigger you climb the harder you can get crushed by the true market makers.

 Another market I look back on fondly is how trading worked in Ultima Online.  There were two main facets: player to player trading and house merchants.  

 Players could own houses in the open world in Ultima Online and place merchants that they stocked with wares to sell.  As a player you needed to know who sold what where and how to get there in order to buy.  Many times in towns you would see folks offering to portal folks to their house and entire shopping malls of houses sprung up to offer a centralized area to buy.

 The market in the game towns also served as a place for folks to advertise their wares and find buyers.  Some "player towns" (close groupings of houses) also became extremely popular not just to go and find wares but to also stand around shouting what you were selling.

 One of my favorite activities in Ultima Online was to jump on my tamer and tame wild horses.  The horses would follow you into town and then you could transfer the tamed horses to another player.  As you could name the horses custom names it was always funny to see A, B, C, D, etc flowing in behind me as I rolled into the town center.  You could also tame dragons and other big bad creatures which were even more fun to figure out how to sell!

 Another more recent game with a neat market mechanic is Albion Online.  In the game all items are crafted by players; even the rewards given out as dungeon loot.  The game cycles items through the "black market".  As the game needs items of a certain type to put into chests it places buy orders on the "black market".  Players can then craft (or buy) items to sell to the black market and the game in turns puts those player crafted items directly out into the loot pool for other players.  It is an absolutely fascinating concept and something players make their entire career around in Albion.

 Game markets.  They are games in and of themselves and they made me the gamer I am today and that reminds me need to go check those buy/sell orders in New World.

 Oh and Palia... seriously... no market? WTF

Heavy bois represent!

 Just Atlas Fishmo and I holding it down in Outpost Rush last night.  We both ended up back capping and at one point it was 2 vs what felt like the entire enemy team.  Atlas plays a heavy PvP tank build and I play a heavy "wheelchair mage" build.

GamesMadeMe: Game Manuals

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today. With the release hype of Baldur's Gate 3 upon us (no, I am not playing it) it had me thinking about my journey into Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. Specifically the big, fat ringbound instruction manual.

A legendary artifact of gaming past!

 That is a good looking instruction manual!  When you picked up the box at the game store (a local mall GameStop for me at the time) there was some weight to it and you knew you were getting into something good.  Seeing the manual slide out of the game box was an awesome feeling and you knew what you were going to be doing for the next few hours while you waited for the multi-CD install process to finish.

 Even before Baldur's Gate 2 I have fond memories of sitting in the back of the family minivan reading through the manual of whatever latest video game I just bought.  I still remember buying Final Fantasy 8 and flipping through the manual.  I was so excited for that game and decades later that memory is stuck in my head.  Some of my favorites like FF8 and BG2 are still with me to this day.

 That experience is all but gone today and I can't remember the last video game I bought that came with any sort of game-related material.  I can still get a hit of the nostalgia with most board games and their manuals but it's more of a chore there as you really can't play the board game until you digest the rules book so it's always getting in the way of the fun.

 I have tried to bring some of this joy to my oldest son as well.  He found my Shadows of Amn instruction manual some time after he was reading by himself and he consumed the whole thing over the course of a couple days.  He didn't really want to play the game; was just fascinated there was a "book" with so much about a game in it.  We also bought him the collector's edition of the Zelda Breath of the Wild strategy guide and I've never seen a kid more fond of a book in my entire life.  He gets limited electronic time so he filled other time with reading and earmarking every last part of that book and coming up with elaborate plans for his one hour of electronic time the next day.  Man that makes a gaming dad smile ear to ear.

 Dang... need a tissue.  /sniff  Where does the time go anyways.  Game manuals made me the gamer I am today.

HowTo: Add a checkbox to Google sheets

 Dumb little thing I learned today while creating a checklist in Google Sheets; you can add a checkbox.  It is on the Insert menu.  Select the cell to add the box in, click Insert, and then select checkbox.  The data is stored as a boolean (true/false).

GamesMadeMe: Blogging About Games

 GamesMadeMe is a series of posts that cover gaming-related topics that have shaped who I am as a gamer today.  I've covered IDOCs in Ultima Online, THAC0 from D&D, and InQuest Gamer Magazine.  It feels like something obvious is missing though.  In the spirit of "Introduce Yourself Week" for Blaugust 2023 it only makes sense to close the gap on the obvious: blogging about games!

 In my "So it begins... again!" post yesterday I went back to where blogging started for me 18+ years ago, but I didn't actually talk about what inspired me to start.  First you have to understand where my gamer tag, heartlessgamer, originates from.  I am sure I've posted other recallings of this so bear with me if details have varied.

 My gamer tag comes from the game Kingdom Hearts and the "heartless" enemy featured in the game (little shadow dudes).  Playing Kingdom Hearts happened to coincide with some other key events that resulted in me needing to pick a new online handle.  Prior to these events I was using handles related to character names I had come up with for Star Wars role playing (Hehl Omni and Torno Shren).

 I was a frequent poster on the Vault network forums (think they are owned by IGN now) back in the day and for some reason the forums were changing and we all had to pick new names to go by.  I ended up going with "heartless_" because I was really digging Kingdom Hearts at that moment and time.  The underscore was required and then it was natural to just bridge that to "heartless_gamer".  Eventually that just became heartlessgamer after I nabbed the domain name.

 It is also those very forums that drove me to blogging.  I forget exactly what was transpiring at the time with the forums but there were forums shutting down and posts were going to be taken down forever.  It occurred to me: I don't have any control over this enormous amount of content I am creating on these forums... I should probably start a blog!  That'll show em!

 Eighteen years later and here we still are (I say we as though anyone actually comments on posts anymore).  There were several lean years in my blogging history as I became a father and realized there is more to life than punching the post button (and I needed spare time to play games of course; not worry about blog posts).

 The draught of blog posts ended in Sept 2022 when I said Let's do this - post a day! when I returned to daily blogging.  To be truthful while I had a gap in blogging I didn't slow down on finding platforms like Reddit to continue giving away my thoughts and ideas for free.  If you cant tell; I have deep desire to TALK ABOUT GAMES!

 Talking about games is directly tied to my enjoyment of games. My current jam is New World and I have tons of posts about the game here, on Reddit, in the old New World forums, in Discord, and other places.  Regardless of the scatter shot of places I put stuff I always come back to this blog.  Blogging is like breathing at this point and is as much a part of my gaming experience as anything else.

 In summary: I was writing a lot of posts about games on forums, the forums were going to go away, so I decided why not take control of my own thoughts and put them all on a blog. I have to talk about games. Blogging about games made me the gamer I am today!

 

New World: My hopes for territory control revamp!

 Having gone through the war cycle in New World recently (we won a war, got a territory, and then promptly lost that territory in a follow up war) it had me thinking a lot about the territory control and war system which is slated for a full revamp in Season 3 later this year.  Here are some hopes I have for the new system.

 The most important aspect for the new system is to get rid of the current PvP mission model to push a territory to war.  The mission objectives are static and so freaking boring.  There is also no real way to defend against a coordinated push. Also after the first wave of kills players are not worth any rewards for killing until their rewards timer resets so it gets tiring real fast as you can't ever stop players and you get no reward for stopping them.

 The dev team has hinted that the new system will be a timed event and focus on concentrating players into the open world zone that is being contested.  Control points/towers were mentioned. I am hopeful this means lots of open world PvP and long enough windows that players can get into the action without having to set a clock but not too long that players feel like they have to treat the game as a second life.

 One of the other things with the current territory influence mechanic is who gets the declare the war at the end of it.  While most often its just one company pushing a territory these days there are times when its more than one and the one that gets to declare and do the war is a toss up.  That is a lot of boring PvP mission grinding for nothing so I am never surprised when players don't want to do it. The root issue isn't that declaring the war is a toss up; the problem is there is only one war as the result of the action.  

 My hope with the new system is a tiered set of war brackets where every company should be able to declare war and get matched up (or not) with a defending company.  While one company owns the territory it should be a faction-wide event when it comes to the war.  If I'm a small company that contributed I should be able to get a war and fill out a roster against the opposing faction.

 My vision would be a set of tiers of company wars.  The top tier is for the faction control of the territory and governed by the winning company.  The lower tiered wars would be for a slice of the territory pie; basically wars would be for a stake of the prize.  I would even be open to the idea of a company in an enemy faction winning a stake in another factions territory; though at a reduced percent if their faction isn't the owning faction.

 Anyway they do it they need to make war more accessible to more players.  The only way to avoid the "war logger" (players that only log in for wars and often have several accounts to get around account restrictions) is to ensure the wars all happen at the same time so players have to pick where they are fighting for that war.  

 I'd love to see a war calendar where a new territory is going into war every three days and the opposite day is for territory control fights and invasions.  Then if you win a stake in a territory you can rest longer than a couple days before you are cycling back up for defense.  The current pace a territory can be pushed is exhausting.

 In summary: make pushing territory into conflict an event and ensure more players can get into wars while spreading out the rewards for territory control to more companies.  Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

So it begins... again!

 It's the second week of Blaugust 2023 so we are moving onto "Introduce Yourself Week".  To kick things off let's take a look back at my first post on this blog: So it begins...

The date: Sunday, May 29, 2005 (18 years ago!)
The topic: MMORPGs

 The opening paragraph sticks with me to this day and I consider it some of the best text I've ever assembled.

 This blog has officially started. It has been a process of thought pulling at my mind for a while. I play these games we call MMORPGs, but I don't even know if "play" is the correct word to describe it anymore. I live and breath these games. They are more than an escape from my mediocre life. Fun is no longer the driving factor. Social interaction with like minded nerds and geeks; people whom live through their in game characters as though it was version 2.0 of themselves.

 The words are as true today as they were back then.  The major change for me, to be honest, is that I've grown up in the 18 years since I started this blog.  I was single with way more time than I knew what to do with back then.  Now I have a family (my oldest is starting high school this week!!!!).  Then or now though I love my MMORPGs!

 I've also chilled out a bit from those early days.  As noted in my first blog post there was a lot of energy devoted to "the game of choice! Room for debate among the flooded market of MMORPGs and the denizens that inhabit them. From baseless flame fests on the far reaches of the most bizarre gaming message boards; to developer's beloved Customer Feedback Forms." While I still feel passionately for or against certain games the idea of a "flame fest" is no longer appealing.  I am much more likely these days to just "let it go" or be positive in support of games others enjoy that I do not (gasp!).

 Ironically I am just not as heartless as I once was.  Double irony that my name was never really meant to be about being heartless; I was really just into Kingdom Hearts at the time I had to change from my old nickname.  In Kingdom Hearts the bad guys are referred to as "heartless" and they looked cool so I went with it.

 And so it begins... again... and now you know a little more about who I was and who I am now :)

Featuring Cheshiregaming

 On this fine Blaugust day we jumped down to another newbie to Blaugust 2023 and checked in on Cheshiregaming.

 The post I jumped into was Bloodstone Fen Meta which made me a bit nostalgic for Guild Wars 2.  Not for Bloodstone Fen but just for the "nice little touches" that Guild Wars 2 has to offer.  Most notably from a blogging perspective the ability to share information like a map waypoint that a player can use in game is cool.  So many neat little quality of life things that Guild Wars 2 features; wish some other games would follow suit!

 If you are looking for some Guild Wars 2 blogging then keep on digging into Cheshiregaming.

Sexy OPR win!

 

Oh snap; here we go! Palia beta!

 Here we go!

It's TiPalia time!

 On the fourth day of Blaugust 2023... something something something... Tipa shares some thoughts on Palia's closed beta.  It's TiPalia time!

 Tipa starts out comparing Palia to Free Realms:

"Free Realms, in particular, I miss. Like Gatheryn (which won’t really mean anything because I doubt few ever actually played it), Free Realms was a collection of minigames that were based off popular arcade games and casual PC/Mobile games." - Tipa

 Well I happen to be one of the folks that did play Free Realms (see my tagged posts) but I have no idea what Gatheryn is/was.  I started skeptical with Free Realms but then enjoyed a few hours before throwing my hands up at the number of times the game asked for a credit card (oh SOE how I miss ragging on you -- little did we know you were just ahead of your time).

 Tipa continues to discuss how Palia is less "do anything you want" like Free Realms and more guided as someone would expect from a traditional theme park MMORPG.  Players get quests and go about the non-combat equivalent of "kill ten rats" (Palia has no combat outside of hunting creatures like deer).

 From the quests players move onto gathering materials to then build various things on their plot.  Building things requires materials, blueprints, and time.  Lots of time from Tipa's account.  As Palia described the game after her initial few hours:

But right now, just a couple hours in, it reminds me most of EverQuest 2’s crafting. You go outside and mine, gather, fish and hunt, then do some crafting.

  I have some more general thoughts on Palia which I am debating whether to share.  Why am I debating?  Because I got my closed beta invite this morning so figure I would be best served to actually try it before saying anything further (even though my comments are out there in various places).

 

Perilous MMO Tropes

 Roger Edwards (aka Mr Peril) of Contains Moderate Peril has been posting about MMO tropes.  For the third day of Blaugust I sat down and read a few of these trope posts and I have some thoughts.

The posts:

• Death
• Running All the Way
• "Kill Ten Rats" and Fetch Quests

 First; these are all great bathroom reads. Second; Roger is an amazing blogger.  Platitudes out of the way let's get to the tropes.

“The MMO genre is rife with its own set of tropes; recurring themes and motifs that have become established and ubiquitous. All of which are ideal material for a hastily produced, lazily conceived, recurring blog post”.

Death

  If there is an MMO trope that encapsulates the history of MMOs it is certainly death mechanics.  In Roger's post he covers the history of death in MMORPGs: from the "corpse runs" of early games like Everquest to the modern "Death is now treated as a minor penalty that temporarily inconveniences you." as Roger puts it.

 In my older age (40+) I tend to lean towards the modern inconvenience approach and I think it is appropriate for today's market.  Every year it seems like a new MMO project gets started talking about the "good ole' days" of corpse runs and death penalties.  None of those MMOs end up going anywhere.

 Death, as outlined by Roger, is a "means by which to teach the player that they’re doing something wrong and that they need to rethink their strategy."  Slapping a penalty on top of that creates friction and friction is what frustrates players.  Frustrated players don't stick around to play a game because there is a dozen other games on the market that will better respect their time. 

 Losing is enough of a penalty for most players.  Games would be wise to let us take our lump and get on playing again.

Running All the Way

 Running is an MMO trope and like Death it has a history with MMOs.  Large worlds and long travel times were a feature in the early days.  Now long travel times are just an inconvenience.  Roger makes a solid point when looking at single player games.

 "Single player games seem to handle travel differently and certainly have some advantages. I envy the fact that a game like Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption 2 provide the players with access to public transport."

 The answer for MMOs doesn't always have to be to add mounts and "public transport" is a great concept.  Some games do it; there were flight paths in World of Warcraft that are the equivalent of Roger's Red Dead Redemption 2 reference "riding the train between towns in RDR2 as it is very restful and highlights for a few minutes the detail of the open world."

  Public transport or player-controlled mounts (which are really just faster travel) the key is the same as death: don't add friction. Friction will piss gamers off and they will walk (ha!) from the game.  There are too many great games on the market to be bored to death traveling in a game. 

"Kill Ten Rats" and Fetch Quests

 I almost spit out my coffee when I read this:

"The MMORPG genre is a curious subset of video games. Not only is it predicated on violence against the individual, institutions and “others”, as so many video games are but also species-specific genocide and general mass extinction of fauna and flora."

 There is no truer statement to encapsulate what modern MMORPGs expect of their players.  Most games are designed around the concept of wiping out entire generations of enemies and then doing it all over again.  And again. And again. And again.  And again. And... you get the idea: grind!

 Some may not know this but Ultima Online launched originally with a model where "mobs" were limited and once killed they didn't just respawn.  If a deer was killed and harvest that was it.  In addition there was a predator/prey system; kill a rabbit and a wolf goes hungry.  Kill the wolf and rabbits could take over the world.

 As you may expect it didn't last long.  Player's killed everything in sight and the system fell apart to be replaced by the never-ending respawn system that is the norm.

 In regards to "kill ten rats" I do have a personal preference.  I would like to see game focus more on smaller but more difficult encounters.  Leave the "kill waves of enemies in a single blow" to the Path of Exile's of the world.  Move away from grinding endless respawns of the same creature.  Instead make me work to defeat one enemy and figure out a way to still reward me for trying even if I die.