Hardcore Mode

Some games like Diablo 2 and Torchlight offer players the opportunity to play in hardcore mode. This option offers up greater rewards for taking the risk of permanent character death if that character is defeated.

Now Permadeath is one of those hot topics in MMORPGs. It tends to produce two, completely opposed camps. One group wants it, and wants everyone to be subject to it, reasoning that it makes the game more realistic (among other things.) The other camp is completely opposed to the idea. They think that it opens the way for griefers and laggy connections to ruin a players day.

Both camps have some good points, and their arguments have merit. But the evidence does weigh more heavily for the No-Permadeath camp’s stance. Unfortunately, players can lose their characters through no fault of their own, or through griefing and exploits. This alone makes a Permadeath game unappealing for many.

But what if Permadeath was purely voluntary in the same way it is in Diablo and Torchlight?

A player could select that little box a creation, or perhaps do a quest later in the game, to enable the Permadeath feature.

As a result, there would be faster XP gain, more skillpoints, or perhaps some other rewards and social benefits. Maybe uber epic mounts would be half price. Add in the ability to transfer that epic mount or other heirloom equipment to a newly created character upon death, and the idea of voluntary Permadeath might become more attractive to players.

Here’s the question. Would you be interested in playing a character in hardcore mode if you were given the choice, and there were appropriate rewards for doing so?

If you’re playing Torchlight will you be choosing the hardcore mode for any of your characters?

Let me know in the comments.

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Battlenet WoW Account Merges – Bad For Everyone?

MMOCrunch has a post about the time having come to merge my World of Warcraft account into Blizzard’s new Battlenet service. There’s still a bit of time though, since WoW won’t become unplayable without a Battlenet account until the 11th of November.

And since I unsubscribed from World of Warcraft some months ago, I have even more time. At least until I decide to resubscribe for Cataclysm, or buy Starcraft 2, or have some other reason.

But being the curious sort that I am, I decided to check out Blizzard’s FAQ on Battlenet. And quite honestly some of it disturbs me a little.

For one thing, it seems that Blizzard is recommending that players merge all their World of Warcraft  (as well as other game) accounts into one Battlenet account. They do say that players will still be able to play multiple WoW accounts simultaneously, but it’s what they don’t say that has me concerned.

There’s no mention of the permanence of the Battlenet account to game linkages. If I created a new BNet for a loved one or a friend account can I transfer one of my games to that?

If I create an account for Starcraft 2, and five years down the track having forgotten the account details, can I create a new account for that game? (I know this doesn’t happen for MMORPG games, but SC2 is a single player game and has a different audience for the most part.)

What happens if I get an account ban on one of my games. Does that ban extend to all the games on that Battlenet account, or even just all the same type of games? Does a ban on one WoW account shut down all my WoW games?

Another question: What are the criteria for a Battlenet account ban that closes everything down?

We’ve all heard the stories from players complaining that Blizzard has unfairly banned them, and how difficult (or impossible) it was to reinstate the account. While these stories often have to be taken with a teaspoon of salt, I’m certain that there have been a lot of wrongly terminated accounts that have not been reinstated.

Not only that, now all my games will be on a single logon which is also something I’m not comfortable with. While once, if you had multiple WoW accounts, it was hard for a hacker to break into more than one account, if a player gets hacked all their WoW, Starcraft, and Diablo 3 data is ripe for the picking.

This is one of the reasons I’ve always resisted those OpenID or Passport schemes. It reduces the fail point of your security to just one spot. I’d prefer to have multiple signons and keep track of them in a non-digital-non-online way.

While it will be a when-I-get-around-to-it event, I’ll definitely be transfering my WoW account at some point. But I won’t be putting all my games on the same Battlenet account. I’ll be creating a new account for each. It’s just a more secure option.

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Torchlight In A Nutshell

After the download from Steam completed last night, I fired up Torchlight and started playing.

I selected the Destroyer character on Normal difficulty and headed down into the mines. The Destroyer is the archetypal melee class. He relies on strength, and beats on things with big bladed objects. I played for about ninety minutes and got him to level 6 before I quit for the night.

Tonight I selected the Vanquisher. This is a ranged bow or gun class. She’s a bit squishier. Where the Destroyer rushes in, the Vanquisher needs to plan the encounter a little better in order to keep at range. I played her to level 7 on Hard difficulty, also for about 90 minutes.

Consequently, I haven’t got very far into the storyline yet. I’ve managed to retrieve the first lot of ember, as well as meeting up with the antagonist of the story for both characters.

At the moment, I’m reasonably impressed.

The game is stylistically different to both Diablo and Mythos. The graphics bear a strong resemblance to the graphical style of World of Warcraft and have that cartoony look.

The gameplay is Diablo. If you’ve played Diablo 1 or 2, Titan Quest, or Mythos, then you’ve played Torchlight. If you liked any or all of those games, then you’ll like Torchlight.

However, the game also takes you on a linear path through the mines, at least in these early levels. While Diablo 2 felt a lot more free form than it actually was, I don’t get that sense of freedom with Torchlight. Others have described it as being on rails. I agree. Having said that, Titan Quest was also a very linear game, and I didn’t enjoy it as much as Diablo 2, but so far I feel that Torchlight is superior to Titan Quest.

As others have also said. Normal mode is extremely easy. My Destroyer barely took damage through the dungeon. Even in hard mode, my Vanquisher didn’t really have to worry much, but still had to chug a few health and mana potions from time to time. I’d hate to see how easy mode would be here. It’d probably play the game for me!

I haven’t done any fishing yet.

I like that I can put my overflow inventory in my pets inventory (although whoever heard of a cat carrying saddlebags, every cat I’ve ever known would have rebelled at the indignity) and then send him off to sell it in town. Great idea and keeps the gameplay going without all the annoying trips back to town I had to face in the other games.

That however means I have a smaller personal inventory.

And from what I can recall, a first in these games (at least Diablo-wise,) there is no more extremely frustrating rearranging of my inventory every time I pick up a large weapon. Each item fits in one, and only one, inventory slot. FINALLY!

I like that there is a shared storage area. Tonight on my Vanquisher I picked up a unique, very nice shield that is useless on a ranged character. So I dumped it in the shared bank, and when my I log my Destroyer, he’ll be able to collect it and use it.

I don’t like that there are only three classes, the Destroyer, Vanquisher, and Alchemist (melee, range, magic). I think a game like this needs more than three classes.

Having said that, I don’t know what Runic are planning for the future of Torchlight, except for turning it into a MMORPG. They’ll definitely need a few more classes then.

When it comes down to it, my overall first impressions of Torchlight are pretty good. Runic have created a good fun game here that builds on the games that have gone before, and they’ve done it fairly quickly by all accounts. The game also appears to be quite stable. I didn’t encounter any obvious bugs.

I’m very impressed that the ex-Flagship Studios team managed to get this one up and running so quickly. In fact, this is something of a victory for open source. I had a peek in the application directory and it looks like Runic used an open source graphics engine called Ogre to build the game. Very nice, and it just goes to show that things get done when the wheel doesn’t have to be reinvented every time.

Torchlight == Good Game.

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Windows 7

Wolfshead has a handy little trick for fixing some network problems that he’s been having with Windows 7. It seems that if your LAN properties are set to use TCP/IP version 6, you might lose your Internet connection every 30 to 60 minutes or so.

Of course, that reminds me why I usually wait for a while before I upgrade to a new version of any operating system. No software is bug free, and it actually never becomes bug free. All any developer, be they an Operating System vendor, an accounting package supplier, or a MMORPG developer, can hope for is to minimize the most egregious creepy crawlies that inhabit their code.

This week there was a couple of blog posts by Eric of Elder Game, and Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green regarding a bug found in the Champions Online swear filter (why they don’t make this a swear jar, and charge players a few cents for each cuss, I don’t know. They could raise a bucketload of charity cash!) These posts were on opposite sides of the ‘it’s easy for a dev to do x’ debate. This case being, it’s easy to implement a swear filter, so why did this one go wrong?

Simple. No code is bug free. And changes to a game as complex as a MMORPG is going to have run-on effects elsewhere in the code.

Still I suspect that the game industry hasn’t caught up with the software development community at large in regards to the software quality practices that (I admit slowly) are being adopted by main stream development houses. This, I believe is likely the reason we see so many critical bugs in our games.

But… back to Windows 7. I have 2 Windows PCs to upgrade, my XP gaming rig, and my Vista laptop.

I’ll give it a few more months and upgrade the laptop first.

But Microsoft has done XP users a disservice by not providing an upgrade path. Instead I have to copy all my data and apps off the harddisk, do a clean install, and then reinstall everything.

Screw that!

I have way too much to reinstall, and since much of it is digital download (the downside of that distro method) I’ll have to spend hours redownloading games and patching.

Sadly I think I’ll wait until I get a new gaming rig. Until then… Viva la XP!

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Torchlight

is downloading as I type this.

I was going to hop into EQ2 this evening, but spent a bit of time attaching a NAS to my home network. (More hardware to come too. I finally bought myself a UPS to smooth out (hopefully) my power supply woes.)

After I finished copying a bunch of folder across, I looked at the Everquest 2 icon, then at the Steam icon, and bought Torchlight.

I’ll let you know what I think after I’ve given it a shot.

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I Lurve Digital Distribution

I was reading a piece on the upcoming post apocalyptic Borderlands on Rock Paper Shotgun and I thought to myself, “I wonder if that will be available on Steam?”

So I loaded up the Steam client, and lo and behold, there it is. Coming on the 27th of this month.

Then I noticed, directly below, coming on the 28th of October: Torchlight.

A little more searching and there is on the 4th of November, Dragon Age: Origins (plus the digital deluxe edition.)

Just wait while I do a little happy dance…

…done, back.

Aside from the convenience of downloading games directly to my PC, which is a winner in itself, it’s also marvelous to be able to get them for US prices.

Here in Australia a new game from a game store will normally cost close to A$100. (Up to $20 more for a console game.)

Back when the Aussie dollar was down around 75 US cents, that made sense. The difference in currencies made importing an expensive proposition. But with the Aussie inching closer to the US dollar, it makes more digital purchases more and more attractive. (Won’t work with console games though since they use the evil region locking madness.)

It’s also a great time for Aussie subscribers of US based online games. We’ll finally be paying the same (or close to) as our US brethren. Kinda almost makes up for all those scheduled downtimes falling in Oceanic primetime hours.

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Yes Virginia, There Is A Fallen Earth Trial

Sigh.

Don’t ya hate it when you make a prediction, and less than a week later you get proven wrong?

Obviously the Fallen Earth folks listened to the plaintive cries of would-be Fallen Earth players, desperate for a free trial before they shelled out their hard earned bucks for a chance to wander the wastelands of the Grand Canyon province.

However, this is a limited trial offer that will give prospective players a fifteen day period to try out Fallen Earth during the Days of the Dead Halloween event. This Days of the Dead trial will only be available for Halloween, and the game will revert to a no trial status at least until the next major holiday event.

Still, it’s a great opportunity for those who are leaning towards subscribing to Fallen Earth to give the game a try. There’s also the benefit of being able to retain any of the special items won from participating in the Days of the Dead events.

So, if you’ve been hanging back from Fallen Earth, there’s now no excuse to drop in and have a look see.

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Is There A Fallen Earth Trial?

This is a question I’ve seen asked around quite a bit lately. I’ve seen it both on the official Fallen Earth forums, and in the search engine phrases that people have used to find their way to this blog.

The quick answer to the question is: No. There is currently no free trial period for Fallen Earth.

The slightly longer answer is that this is to be expected. I’m not even sure that I need one finger to count the number of games that have given a free trial period at the launch of their brand new game. While that’s certainly the case with the AAA MMORPGs that have been released, there maybe a few free to play or indie games that have offered a trial.

As for when a trial period will be available for Fallen Earth?

No idea. Since Fallen Earth is still in its first month of release, and is doing well with the sales showing that people are willing to buy it without a trial, it could be a while before a free trial period is offered. It certainly won’t be this month, and my guess is that a trial will only be offered once sales slow down and Fallen Earth, LLC want to kick start sales again. Give it at least six months.

However, if the game continues it’s success at sales, you could be waiting a lot longer for a free trial.

It’s up to you.

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Torn

Sigh.

Dragon Age is being released in less than a month. I’ve been looking forward to this game, moreso after seeing some of the good stuff popping up on Dragonchasers. The game has a 100 hours of gameplay (you can probably double that based on my normal rate of progress in games!) and there is so much else to play and to do. Hmmm.

Still, at least Dragon Age is actually going to be released here in the land of Oz. I haven’t heard any reports that it hasn’t passed muster at the OFLC board.

Which is definitely better than Left 4 Dead 2. Valve cut content out and resubmitted after the game was originally refused classification. The news today is that L4D2 has now been accepted. Good news in a way I guess.

What irks me is that one semi-elected official can dictate what the entire country can play. The attorney general for South Australia belongs to a state government elected by approximately 1.5 million people. The other five attorneys general belong to state governments elected by the rest of Australia’s 22 million populace.

So one essentially unelected individual can hold up something important like an R rating for games. Something that even a lot of people in his own state want.

There’s a state election approaching too. Unfortunately, there’s no credible opposition in SA, so it’s likely Atkinson will be returned, and will continue blocking progress.

Tell me. How that is democracy?

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Three Simple Ways To Fight Gold Spam

Possibly the biggest problem that Aion players are experiencing since the launch of the game, is that dreaded scourge of gold spam.

I’m not reading about the queues any more, and from what I’ve seen the game has had an excellently bug free launch. But, the gold sellers are spamming out the wazoo, and it appears there are no mechanisms in place to combat it.

Frankly it surprises me that any new AAA game is released these days without at least some form of method for at least reporting these gold selling fiends. To think that the Aion team didn’t think it necessary (and is only now reacting to the problem) considering the absolute nuisance that gold spam has caused gamers in many games over the years, beggers belief.

It’s my belief that game developers could be doing more to combat gold sellers before their games are released than they currently are. It appears that the developer response is to react to the problem, rather than sit down and think of the issues before they arise.

There are a number of things that the developers could do to drastically reduce the amount of gold selling and spam in their games. Here are three.

1. Reduce The Need For Gold

In some games huge amounts of gold are needed to access or use in-game features. World of Warcraft is particularly bad for this. Phenomenal amounts of gold are required to purchase spells and abilities, mounts and riding skills, and features like talent respecs.

It’s hard, if not impossible, to remove these sorts of mechanisms in existing games. But there is no reason why an in-development game cannot look at alternate methods of payment for some game features. Here’s a few ideas:

• Instead of buying a mount with gold, a quest chain can be completed. The rareity or level of the mount would be matched against a proportionately difficult quest. Makes getting that uber-epic flying mount a lot more ego-tastic.
• All spells could be dropped as loot, player researched, or given upon leveling. There’s nothing new about this.
• Players would quest or perform a set of tasks for bind on pickup tokens. These tokens when given to a certain NPC would provide a respec.

Even though this is probably one of the hardest methods to implement for fighting gold spam and selling  in a game, it remains one of my favorites because it not only reduces or removes the market, it makes the game more fun by taking the grind out of accumulating gold in the first place. I would much rather get my abilities or spells by going through a series of quests than buy travelling to some merchant and buying the same thing everyone else does, even though it’s easier.

Having said all that, there’s at least one caveat. Some games are based, or have major aspects of the gameplay based, around a monetary economy. Eve Online for example wouldn’t be the same without ISK. In this case the gold selling is an unfortunate side effect and can’t be avoided, although it may be able to be minimized.

2. Remove Mechanisms That Facilitate The Gold Trade

This is probably the easiest way to make an impact on the MMORPG gold trade. Don’t let players CoD or send in-game currency through the mail system. Have all trade conducted face to face or through the Auction House. It has two benefits, it makes it harder for gold sellers to operate, and it improves the socialisation in the game by having players connect with each other to trade.

The downside of course is the increased difficulty in transfering money between alts characters, and friends and guildmates. This wouldn’t be hard to overcome. Games like Everquest and Everquest 2 do this by having shared bank features. And a game could also allow cash transfers between members of the same guild.

The choice that would beed to be made is whether or not the convenience of remote transfers of money, outweighs the inconvenience of the gold trade.

Again, for some games like Eve Online, the inconvenience of gold spam wouldn’t tip the scales against the inconvenience of removing in-game easy transfers. After all, how would the pirates obtain their ransoms?

3. Provide Players With Moderation Tools

While allowing players to directly moderate gold spam in chat does have some pitfalls, it is potentially the most powerful method of reducing gold spam, and it is (depending on the complexity of the software architecture of the chat system) the easiest to implement.

It’s simple.

Add the facility to chat to allow players to report gold spam in chat. Some games already have this feature. When an account has been reported a number of times (a moderate threshold is necessary to prevent accidental or malicious reports) it is automatically banned from any of the public chat channels and from sending whispers for, let’s say, 24 hours. Guild and party chat is still available to the player.

Since it’s associated with an account, the spammer is prevented from  simply logging in another character and repeating the nuisance.

That should be enough, but longer and more permanent chat bannings could be implemented upon repeated offences, including even account bans.

As I mentioned above, this could (and would) be subject to abuse by players. The moderation system will need to be monitored by community managers and any abuse dealt with promptly. The affected player should be given the chance to appeal in-game too.

Fighting Gold Spam Is Not A Hopeless Battle

Despite the lack of success that MMORPG developers have had with fighting gold selling in their games, it’s not a hopeless battle they are waging. They do, however, need to start looking at their game systems during development, and after, with a critical eye as to how those systems will be abused by the less ethical. (Hey, it’s already being done to curb cheaters.)

When considering a CoD mail system, perhaps a thought could be given to how it will be abused by gold sellers, rather on how much more convenient it will be for players.

All features need to be examined against the rule of unintended consequences.

That, ultimately, will be the way to defeat the gold spammers.

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