Forbin

Played a couple matches yesterday. I'm not sure how I feel about how they've given the aliens a commander instead of just letting the gorges build structures. That simple asymmetry made the game more interesting to me. Also, games seem to almost always go to the marines right now, as they're far easier to learn. As a skulk, I find it harder to walk on walls and ceilings with complex geometry. Oldschool pure brushed based BSP maps were easier to navigate.

Considering that Pixar is making a day of the dead movie, it's possible we may be seeing some Grim Fandango stuff out of this Disney buyout. Probably nothing more than a subtle cameo.

Natural Selection was a hell of a mod. I'm glad to see these guys have finally shipped.

I wish i read this thread a bit earlier. I think people are too dismissive of the F2P audience. Both of the Free players and the paying players. It seems like everyone assumes that they're weak minded fools being taken for everything they're worth, and that they've got terrible taste in games because they don't like the hardcore stuff they enjoy. I think the later argument was more applicable a few years ago, but it's a bit dismissive. Spend the time to understand your audience, and you can serve them ethically and with respect. If you have GDC Vault access I suggest you watch Laralyn McWilliams talk from GDC Online 2011. She talks about her history of building games for other people, and I think it's fairly appropriate. You don't need to be a "crack dealer". That being said, just saying you respect your players doesn't mean you actually respect your players. I think that a lot of people have overblown the "manipulation" angle in free to play. Often it's nothing more than an attempt to have players return in their first few days. It's tough to cut it in the free marketplace, your users have no sunk cost to guilt them into sticking with your game, you'll lose more than half in a short period of time. There are a few outliers, where games capitalize on pain points in order to grab a couple bucks, or capitalize on guilt when a friend sends you a premium gift. But a lot of those things haven't spread, because they're short term. If you're not tying your monetization to things that players perceive as real value, then you're basically taking a short sighted slash and burn model and you have to have extremely high numbers or you won't succeed. One thing that I do think is done extremely poorly is the viral aspect. As someone who's passionate about UX, it's painful to see people doing bad things. I don't worry so much about the players (though it does make their experience frustrating), but it's damaging to the entire industry. And really, people like Zynga are trying to trick you into accidentally advertising for them. It feels like malware, and what's really disappointing is that people are ignoring the benefits of doing virality well. We had an amazing experience using game center leaderboard challenges in our office with Super Hexagon. It wasn't built into the game, and I feel like Terry wouldn't have given it much thought, but it absolutely was an improved experience. But word of mouth is important and converting your friends is a high value target, so we'll probably see people make a few more mistakes with that before some solid role models emerge. I also think that the "think of the children" angle is also thrown around without much thought. There's almost no store place out there that allows uncontrolled transactions. iTunes requires a password, can be child locked, and is extremely responsive to charge backs from parents of kids who managed to get through both hurdles (likely with the parents help, the same way they buy mature console titles). If you want to make money off of kids, and you chose a F2P model, you're probably making a mistake. Kids have more time than money, and studies show that if you want to convince most parents to pay, then you have to make your game a compelling experience that they see their kids dedicating a lot of their time to. Short sighted cash grabs just don't work, and the idea that people are making mountains of money off it seems a bit naive.

Also for some reason the term RNG really bugs me. It gives such weight and seems to imply complexity. I feel like it's used a lot by people that project fate or conspiracy to random systems. Like it's an entity for the players to worship or hate.

Yeah I've worked for a few years for an insurance brokerage company. One classic example, is that they were handling an incredibly large company that did flights all over the world, including supply runs into Afghanistan and other active combat areas. Their bill was astronomical, and couldn't be held by a single carrier, so many different companies carried the risk, and the split was much more complicated than even amounts amongst all parties. This was compounded by the fact that the airline was paying it's bill in 24 installments a year, and worst of all split everything down to a policy for each individual aircraft they had running.Splitting the money up even with 8 decimal points of precision on the penny ended up with unallocated cash that would block millions from being invoiced each month. You can't just keep adding extra precision because things are subject to binary precision loss, and unless the lines for AR and AP were added in the proper order the financial software would often complain as the numbers didn't total 0. There are ways to avoid having to deal with that much, but at some point you have to pick a precision and when a client deals with millions of dollars constantly, it's not long before you either end up with a big pile of unallocated cash, or you end up with a single party benefiting the most. So the system was built with random rounding algorithms that tracked unbalanced allocation over time and corrected it so that no single party got an unfair amount of money.

Most players hate proper random in games. There's a bias in their perception of how the games rules behave, and they'll attribute absolute nonsense to game mechanics when things are unpredictable. We've had an issue where players believe that the AI has a higher chance to critically hit them. And even though this is measurably false, it became the accepted theory. According to them, an unrelated patch broke the game, and the AI was better and unfair. Then one day we had to restart the server to load a new datasource for archival reasons, and the short maintenance window was enough for them to think we applied a patch, and then everything was "fixed". It's truly bizarre. The unknown is not something that people get comfortable with. This is kind of how randomness is handled in some accounting programs. When you're left with a fraction of a cent, if you just randomly distribute the extra income to one account, then you may be favoring a single party more than others. This becomes a big deal when you have payments split between monthly payments, and broken up amongst individual items. It's far from sexy, but the unallocated income it could generate is enormous. See Superman or Office Space.

I'm super upset that I slept through this panel. But it was billed as something ridiculous like "Space Press Conference" so I didn't feel too bad until I found out what it really was. I should have known you can't go wrong with Space.

you need a gold block for a ring

Got my invite tonight. Will be lording soon.

You might want to check out HCSMP if that interests you. I linked it earlier in this thread, but it's a reddit based server with month long bans on death.

Is there an equivalent to Day[9] in the DOTA community? I want to watch some replays to get a better understanding, but most of the commentary seems a bit advanced right now.

I think LA Noire is a good example of a game that playing a certain way improves the experience a lot. I don't fault the player when a game is played "wrong", but sometimes I don't fault the game that much either. Some people are self destructive and some games are just designed poorly. But most of the time I think you can make more fun out of a game that you're struggling with if you take a step back and examine what's not working for you. It's like a lucid dream, the better you are at recognizing your behavior, the more you can alter it. I find that MMOs are perfect illustrations. I've seen a lot of people burn themselves out from grinding away at MMOs on things that they either over value, or don't understand. Then later they sound like alcoholics saying that the game was such a waste of their time, and they spent so much effort getting something that became meaningless for them. The other phenomena I've seen is that people seem to only really get burned like that once, and the second time they get sucked into an MMO, they can recognize the good time sinks from the bad. Also, you get better at recognizing when you're not enjoying the experience for it's intrinsic value, and either shift your context or take a break.

Yeah, it looks nice but there's something I just don't really like about the feel. I'm having the same trouble with Rayman:Origins right now as well, I just don't like the way he animates relative to the speed he's moving. The music is a bit odd, they randomize from a small track list each time you load a level. Often there will be one track that totally fits the level, but it'll be replaced by something completely inappropriate your next attempt. IMO they should have just picked a track for each level and stuck with it, even if it was repetitive, it would at least fit better. They try to move you around the environment, but given your constant direction the variation almost highlights your inability to control your movement. It's kind of a shitty thing to pick on, because I like the idea of hand crafted levels and what they're trying to do, but it just doesn't feel as satisfying as other endless runners.

I have mispoken, I have only downloaded the spectator client. The lording will commence when I get an invite.

I just got DOTA2 who's up for some lording? Also, I'm a terrible newb. I have played about 3 games of LoL, and know a couple basics. For example, I believe I will be a "feeder". Invariably picking a "carry" class and running off to get myself killed.

I searched, and apparently there's no thread for Moon Base Alpha, or the moon in general. So I will post this here: ycn7S30UoMg

I thought it was a ghetto.

Responsive web design seems to be the new AJAX or Web 2.0. People obsessing over good practices that have been available for years. I'm glad that they're doing it, the site will look better, but I feel like it may be getting featured a bit more than it needs to be because of the sponsorship by IE. Clearly Microsoft wants to highlight that they can pull off media-queries and looks nice like the better browsers.As for the slant, it seems to me like the reason that they're "pitching" EA and probably other companies like that, is that they want to obtain exclusives for their online site, as you would traditionally get in a print magazine. Something that "looking good" may help, but at the end of the day it seems like PR is never interested. If they do succeed I'm not sure if that will be "good for the web" or just good for their site, as they'll get a ton of traffic when the exclusive hits.

I respect most of the people involved. But unless they start putting out a lot of video and audio content, I doubt I'll read almost anything they write. Blogs just don't have that much time in my schedule anymore. Besties is an alright twist on the weekly podcast, but not as good as the original Joystiq podcast IMO. I still don't get why they don't just alias polygon.com to theverge.com/gaming. They've spent so long building this site, that it's hard to tell what a "launch" will look like. In fact, I have no idea what they're planning to launch. They must be going after the mainstream audience, because the internet hardcore will have been aware of their site and current blog for so long they will hardly care. I have a feeling we're on the verge of an extraordinary Ad buy. Maybe leaflets will rain down from the sky, or be sent into space.

I think it's more about the matchmaking than it is about a paywall. Accounts are 15 bucks because it's super cheap, but expensive enough that people won't just buy a new one to smurf or cheat. That, and I think it's similar to what people have payed for CS in the past, either when buying a super old HL copy or CS retail. And much less than the people who bought HL2 just for CS:Source.

Mann vs LAN or LAN vs Machine?

The matchmaking in this game seems to be ridiculously good. I never considered myself good at CS, usually getting a negative k:d, but always playing with good people. But when I'm playing through the quick match feature, I'm getting put into games where I feel like a god. There always seems to be a person or two in the server I consider better than myself, either their on my team and I'm fighting them for kills, or they're on the opposite team and I'm trying to get revenge for their constant headshots. But what makes it amazing, is that when I go check my stats, my kill to death ratio is like 1.001. They're pairing me up against basically equals, and the pacing is such that I feel like I'm a bad ass. I think in a large part, it's due to the way I play CS. I was more of a DoD player, and enjoyed taking high risk rushes to flank the enemy team that would lead to capitalizing on their surprise. I'm constantly fighting myself to play CS properly, and be more patient. So my aim, map understanding and reaction times are all much higher than my survival instincts. Meaning that if I am forcing myself to stay concentrated, I'm paired up against people who are probably less skilled and I can win skill challenges that I'd normally feel terrified of. Such as long range AK fights, where I used to feel unbelievably out matched since everyone else was so amazing at it. Basically, since I'm always storming around like an idiot trying to get the first skill by surprise; when I do take the time to play properly I feel like I'm surrounded by people I can confidently beat. I have never felt this comfortable playing CS.

I see there are villagers walking around idle town again. I'll have to load up on emeralds.

I just tried playing a few rounds with a friend and some randoms. It's unbelievably frustrating when there is dead weight on your team. This engineer kept building sentries in the worst places possible. You feel committed since the queue time takes a while, but it's just not worth the hours of pain. Also, screw any uber'd bot that can carry the bomb. Most frustrating unit ever.