I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

[SuperBiasedMan]

and as you and SMB say,

 

[Vasari]

A Bungie dev gave a talk at GDC where he explained the "loot cave" situation. The part that stuck out to me was that he explained how the loot cave wasn't actually a good way of getting rewards, it was just an easier way than playing the game properly.

 

So in the end it came down to the math: players were spending a disproportionate amount of time getting subpar loot from weak enemies, when they could be getting far better rewards for doing pretty much any other activity in the game. Of course, the appeal of a loot cave in any game is the small amount of effort it requires to gain rewards. But developers don't spend thousands of hours building a huge, open world game like Destiny so players can put down roots in one little corner of it.

 

The lesson is that Destiny players care far more about effort than about actual reward or enjoyment, and it's making raids incredibly frustrating because everybody wants to use whatever exploits they can instead of just playing normally. Tonight I was doing a raid encounter that involves the team crossing a bridge. Three players have to stand in certain positions to hold open the bridge, and then one player can cross at a time if they're holding a sword. So everyone stands in position, we kill the enemy who drops the sword, one player goes across, and we repeat that until three players have crossed. Then they can hold the bridge open from the other side, and the remaining three can cross. It's not too hard to pull off.

 

But people are constantly finding ways to "cheese" this encounter. Technically what ends the encounter is killing the boss who spawns once all players have crossed, so through some clever manipulation of the scripting we used a different method. We opened the bridge, I took the sword and crossed, then they instructed me to hide in a corner where none of the enemies could reach me, and then everyone else killed themselves. Since the only living player was on the other side of the bridge, that made the boss spawn. Then someone self-revived, brought everyone else back, and they killed the boss while I crouched behind a vase. And it was fucking boring. These raids are the best part of Destiny and nobody wants to actually play them properly. If we'd just done it like normal it'd have taken the same amount of time and we would've had way more fun doing it.

 

It also might make these people not terrible at the game, because the final boss of the raid took 4 tries since if anything went wrong nobody knew how to handle it. One of the things the last boss does it summon a giant orb in the sky whenever a player dies. If the orb doesn't get destroyed then it wipes the group and we have to start the fight again. We died twice to it because people don't know how to react when someone dies and start asking if we should just let the group wipe, instead of just shooting the massive orb that takes up 80% of the screen. It's not hard to recover from something like a player dying or missing a round of damage to the boss, but if things don't go perfectly then people get confused and assume we've lost the fight. It really bums me out because the raids are so much fun if people are playing it fairly and communicating, but it's just not fun when people aren't even trying to enjoy it.

[Merus]

This is a well-known and long-lived problem in MMOs, it's not just Destiny.

[Gormongous]

This is a well-known and long-lived problem in MMOs, it's not just Destiny.

 

Yeah, it's been present in every one that I've played. It's interesting, though, because there was a lot of press, especially on this game's release, about Bungie solving or evolving the MMO, and yet within such an altered design are still some of the huge flaws that have dogged MMOs for decades.

[SecretAsianMan]

That kind of thing is usually my breaking point when it comes to playing a game.  When the game stops being about the fun of playing and instead starts becoming about the reward you get is when I quit.  The biggest example for me was Dungeon Defenders.  I have a ton of hours in that game (over 1000 according to Steam) but when I think about it now I hate it.  It's a loot based tower defense game which is fairly fun if you actually play it.  The problem was that at high level play, because of the tower defense nature the optimal way to play was to set up your towers to do ALL the work while you stood around and let the game play itself.  Getting high level gear wasn't about how good you were, it was about how much time you had to waste standing around for hours while you got up to the high numbered waves.  I hit my limit with the game when I spent one entire Saturday on the same map standing in the same spot.  When we reached the end, I stopped and said to myself "What the hell have I been doing?", realized I wasn't having any fun at all, and I've never played the game since.

[eot]

Was Warren Spector in Sim City 2000, or does this person just look like him?

[Vasari]

This is a well-known and long-lived problem in MMOs, it's not just Destiny.

 

Yeah, it definitely comes up in other games, I guess the problem here is that Destiny is an action game and it leaves alot more room for weird pathing or AI exploits. I wish they were more aggressive with patching that stuff out.

[osmosisch]

Was Warren Spector in Sim City 2000, or does this person just look like him?

Mr. Spector has a much longer face.

[Ninety-Three]

This is a well-known and long-lived problem in MMOs, it's not just Destiny.

 

The Kingdom of Loathing developers like to talk about this problem and it's not even inherent to MMOs. Zack Johnson calls it "dickstabbing", named for his complaint about "people who would rather stab themselves in the dick for eleven points, than bang the prom queen for ten points". The core problem is that as soon as a game has some kind of reward structure, there will be people who completely disregard whatever makes the game fun so that they can optimize rewards. The only thing a developer can really do about this is work to ensure the fun path is the one with the best rewards.

[N1njaSquirrel]

What does Yoshi's feet look like? Are they singular digits, like a human foot, or just one cloven hoof? The more I think about it, the more it confuses me.

[Ninety-Three]

Don't you know? He's not wearing shoes, those orange things are his feet.

[N1njaSquirrel]

What. You're joking right?

[Ninety-Three]

Yeah. There's are canonical depictions of both Yoshi-the-Yoshi, and other members of the Yoshi species, as three-toed.

[syntheticgerbil]

What is that first image from? The manual from Yoshi's Island?

[Ninety-Three]

I think it's Mario RPG: Legend of the seven stars.

[N1njaSquirrel]

Wow. Today I learnt! Thanks a lot Ninety-Three!

[N1njaSquirrel]

So not only is Just Cause 3 going to be a thing (when did that happen?) but you can also vote on the contents of the special edition: http://vote.justcause.com/

 

I think this is quite cool. If the dictator statue puzzle doesn't win, i'm going to be upset, because that's the best.

[clyde]

Gamejolt got overwhelmed by Five Nights At Freddy's clones.

 

http://fireside.gamejolt.com/post/five-nights-at-freddy-s-garg8prr

[JonCole]

I really want to talk about #altgames, which was came up in the general conversation with this article by Zoe Quinn. The problem is, I don't really know how to start a conversation about it, where I should do it (it's kind of a social issue, beyond the gaming aspect of it), or even if I have any insight on the matter. Things of importance -

 

• The #altgames hashtag was originally (as far as I can tell) adopted by Soha Kareem (@sokareemie) and TJ Thomas (@TRONMAXIMUM) in the creation of a bot that would retweet #altgames tweets. The idea was to basically signal boost non-mainstream work created mostly by POC developers because the lack of exposure for POC in gaming is notable.
• Zoe wrote what I believe to be a decent article promoting "punk games" that she labels as altgames, sort of but not really separate from the hashtag because she used the hashtag in a tweet to share her article.
• It feels weird for Zoe to write this article more or less defining altgames while two POC creators more or less created it. That said, this is super murky. Zoe claims/implies that she wrote the article with the consent of people who "were already doing work in the [altgames] sphere", but TJ is subtweeting her with his ideas about what altgames means and Soha is essentially rejecting Zoe's characterization of the term as labeling when it was something far simpler with a broader focus. That said, they don't really claim ownership of the term but this strikes me as a situation where Zoe would have done well to actually include them in the article at the very least (aside from her quoting TJ's twitter in a little blurb).
• I have no idea how to square all of this. I don't think it's horrible to identify and appreciate the punk/jazz/hip-hop of gaming, but I also think it's counterproductive for a relatively privileged person to be writing the narrative on how that process is done. Basically, I don't think that hip-hop would have particularly benefitted from Queen or Elton John putting in their two cents and saying "really, Grandmaster Flash is a little too mainstream, I think that Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation are really paving the way to real hip-hop".

(note: I changed the comparison from punk to hip-hop because I have at least a cursory understanding of the origin of hip-hop, my understanding is that they follow a similar arc though aren't equivalent. If I'm not detecting something more nuanced about the use of the term "punk", let me know)

[clyde]

I think it's worth exploding the hashtag to let people who aren't incredibly knowledgable about computer games know that there are games that aren't on Steam. It has to be done by someone who has a mega-phone.

 

[clyde]

This is pretty much exactly how I feel about the "altgames" thing.

http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/03/altgames-is-no-fault-divorce-that-indie.html?m=1

[eot]

Last night I played some CS 1.6 for the first time in a few months. For some reason though, some of the text was showing up in Chinese. On servers that run amx there's a language option, but that wasn't it. After a lot of digging around I found a line in my config, 'setinfo "lang" "cn"' and sure enough, changing that fixed the problem. Now, the strange part is not only had I (obviously) not put that line there myself, but since CS servers can sometimes change local cvars I always keep my cfg as read only. Not only that, but I keep a backup of it, so I took a look at my backup from 2008 and what do you know, that same line was in there. I can only assume it's been there the whole time, but that doesn't explain why it had no effect until yesterday (I'd never seen Chinese text in-game before). Very strange.

[tegan]

I think this is Frog Fractions 2.

 

(NSFW)

[Bjorn]

It's glorious.

[Merus]

I love how, for a few brief moments, people have an incentive to support the weirdest shit because of the possibility it might be Frog Fractions 2.