My other C5

Posted on June 25, 2012 by SynCaine

The Civilization V expansion, Gods and Kings, is a very nice EXPANSION to the game. How rare these days… A nice overview of the two main additions, religion and espionage, can be found at Mashable.

I’m only one game and 300ish turns in, but I like what I’ve seen so far. The new take on religion seems far more ‘natural’ than what was done in Civ IV, as well as being more gamey. Getting to design your religion’s bonuses not only makes the whole thing have more impact, but nicely skirts the issue of making one religion ‘better’ than another in terms of bonuses. Now if you make Islam awesome and Judaism suck, you are the terrorist and not the devs.

While religion is an important factor, espionage seems to be pretty minor. It’s allowed me to steal a few technologies, and see some cities, but it’s not been nearly as important as religion. Perhaps further into a game or with more experience this will change. That said, it’s a welcome layer to an already deep game, so its addition is positive overall IMO.

I’ve also noticed a fair amount of UI improvements, all of which (so far) are very nice. Performance-wise the game is better, although I’ve never been one who had major issues with the original game.

More civilizations is also always nice, and I feel like the new additions expand the strategic options well, rather than just adding civs for the sake of adding them with generic or non-unique units/buildings.

If you are a huge fan of Civilization, I’d recommend picking the expansion up. It more than adds enough to the game to rekindle interest and get you hooked. If you can wait, and don’t have Civ V with its DLC, indeed wait for the inevitable Steam bundle to save some cash.

Posted in Civilization Series | 13 Comments

EVE: C5 ISK

Posted on June 22, 2012 by SynCaine

As previously mentioned, one of the major factors in moving INQ-E into a C5 and joining HAHA was ISK, and more specifically just how much more ISK you can make running C5 sleeper sites than you can in a C3. In this post I want to talk a bit more about that, and also compare it to Incursions.

Running sleeper sites in the C5 is all about capital escalations. In fact, other than clearing the initial wave, we leave one ship up and never ‘finish’ a site. The 6-8 BS sleeper waves are worth far more in terms of ISK/hr, especially if we have more than a couple dreadnaughts in the fleet. The last time we were doing sites we had 5 dreads, and their DPS was so high that it was almost pointless for our Tengu pilots to shoot at anything but the initial wave of smaller ships. Why shoot a missile volley for 1k when a dread can blap something for 15k, and their combined firepower kills the sleeper BS before more than a few missile volleys hit?

I don’t have an exact ISK/hr number, but even running just a few sites is worth more than a billion ISK, and tens of billions have been collected in one night more than a few times. And when I say in a night, I don’t mean anything close to an old-school night of raiding, where 4-5 hours is expected. Rather, fleets generally wrap up in about two hours, sometimes less depending on the number of sites. Furthermore, pilots are free to jump in and out as needed, and their payout is adjusted based on a rather simple shares formula (Google spreadsheets ftw).

C5 sites generate far, far more ISK than Incursion sites, yet you don’t hear much about how they are unbalanced, or are wrecking the EVE economy. Part of the reason is because living in a C5 is far different than just showing up to an Incursion site, and this greatly limits the number of possible participants and the general exposure.

The other major factor is that while we make running C5 home sites as safe as high-sec Incursions, that security takes some effort and knowledge. We post scouts on critical’ed WHs, scan often, and have FCs who know how to respond should anything threatening come along. And even with all that, the slim possibility of disaster exists, and with capital ships on the field, the cost of such a disaster could be rather high. Add in all the other challenges of living and defending a WH, and one could very easily argue that the amount of ISK made in a C5 is more than justified.

The best part of all of this is that with the ISK flowing as it does, HAHA can focus much of its efforts on USING that ISK to enjoy ourselves. That process is a bit circular. We make ISK to have resources, such as POS towers, T3s, and capitals. We use those resources to, in part, boost our killboard by blowing up expensive stuff, be it ships or structures. A boosted killboard allows us to charge higher rates for merc work. High rates mean more ISK to do more ‘stuff’. The circle of EVE life is quite wonderful like that, and the actual making of ISK is just a small part.

Posted in EVE Online, Inquisition Clan, MMO design | 13 Comments

Speaking of regression

Posted on June 21, 2012 by SynCaine

This is a rather ridiculous story. Paying full price for a single player game is no longer enough to fully play said game until the company lets you. Yikes.

What’s even worst however is that not only has Blizzard already collected everyone’s $60, but going forward everyone bitching and complaining won’t matter one bit. Know why? Because the idiotic 5-10% of gamers who are going to spend $250 per item on the RMAH to be a ‘hero’ are going to justify what Blizzard did here. People are going to point and laugh at Bobby (myself included) as he continues to tarnish a reputation a decade in the making, and his accountants are going to keep telling him he is doing a wonderful job because Sir Derpster just bought ANOTHER item off the AH and Bobby skimmed 15% off the top.

Posted in Diablo 3, Mass Media, Rant, RMT | 27 Comments

BG1: Gaming’s regression on display

Posted on June 21, 2012 by SynCaine

As mentioned, I recently finished Baldur’s Gate 1, and here is a post about that game as it relates to current-day gaming and more specifically MMOs.

For starters, it’s amazing how well BG1 has held up. Obviously graphically it’s not going to blow your socks off, but even so there are some areas/scenes that pull you in far better than most visuals today. On the audio side, and particularly because it’s a BioWare title, some of the voice acting is so good and memorable even today that you just can’t help but stop and listen. And most importantly, the gameplay today is still better than just about anything out.

Amazing game aside, BG1 is also a pretty solid sandbox title. It has a main quest, one that trumps what Skyrim recently did by a mile, but that quest is just one (important) activity in a large, rich ‘world’. Better still, the challenge is what it is, and the game leaves it up to you to decide how difficult you want to make things for yourself. If you want to faceroll, go cookie-cutter party, find all the uber gear, and smash away. If you want to challenge yourself, or just do something different, roll a ‘flavor’ character, pick a party based on RP rather than stats, and let the content drive you. What’s very important to note here is that the latter feels natural, rather than specifically going out of your way to gimp yourself (like raiding without armor or something equally stupid).

Yet while both Skyrim and BG1 are open worlds with various quests, BG1 does things better. Rather than always scale things based on your level, it artificially splits the world into two pieces; pre and post city. In the first section of the game, you can’t enter the city of Baldurs Gate, shutting all of that ‘later game’ content until you progress to a certain point. This allows that later content to be scaled to a certain difficulty, without feeling overly out of place.

The split does not mean all content is always at the ‘correct’ difficulty level. There are plenty of areas in both pre and post city that might be far too difficult for your party at a certain time. Again, rather than always scaling and always allowing you to win, BG allows you to try, but does not always roll over. What this ultimately does is it gives you a great sense of power growth. Your little band of nobodies truly does get stronger, becoming the heroes through experience rather than scaling. In stark contrast, you can do anything at any time in Skyrim, so a level one nobody can still become the mage guild grandmaster, or a lvl 50 in god armor will still be asked and ‘challenged’ by cleaning out a random cave.

At a higher level, my enjoyment of BG1 today reaffirms to me that a well-crafted game is made BETTER by challenge. The entire medium has not ‘evolved’ by allowing everyone to do everything at all times, ala Skyrim. Don’t get me wrong, I love Skyrim, but how much BETTER would that game be if it was structured more like BG in terms of encounter tuning? How much longer would MMO X retain you if, at times, you ran into something that knocked you on your ass and told you to come back later?

Posted in Random | 5 Comments

Dues Ex: HR 75% off, worth it?

Posted on June 21, 2012 by SynCaine

Not that I’ll have time to play it now, but is DE:HR worth picking up for $7.50 today to play at a later date? Note that I enjoyed Fallout 3 (have Vegas but have yet to play it), so I’m leaning towards yes, but figured I’d ask while also drawing attention to the sale.

Posted in Random | 14 Comments

Bucket of rage

Posted on June 20, 2012 by SynCaine

Random ranting incoming:

One ‘awesome’ feature does not an MMO make.

“TESO is a copy/paste puddle of fail, but feature X looks interesting”. A cute gimmick feature can make an iPhone game worth the buck and download. It won’t get people to subscribe to your MMO for years.

You know what feature separated Asheron’s Call from Ultima Online? Everything. Why was DAOC different from the previous big three MMOs? Because it was, from its roots to its end-game. Way too many MMOs today look identical in all aspects but one or two, and yet devs are surprised people are ‘burning out’ at an accelerated rate. Combine this with the MMO model being one of KEEPING people interested, rather than just GETTING them interested like a single-player game, and the failtrain is pulling into the station earlier and earlier these days. When people can write off your game after your first interview (SW:TOR , TESO), you might want to reconsider some things.

Three faction PvP is the new MMO cure-all.

Can we stop this already? Yes, after DAOC everyone was asking for three faction PvP instead of the two-sided stuff that WoW and its clones were doing. And yes, it’s sad that it’s 2012 and we are just now getting titles coming out that may have it. And yes, in general 3-sided PvP is better than two, but already the concept has been screwed and cheapened.

You know why factions worked in DAOC? Because you had ugly dwarves vs hippy elves vs asshat humans, and most people could identify with one side and hate what the other two represented. DAOC had three factions, who happen to fight over stuff. Hate keeps people logging in and bashing doors or space structures. Fact not opinion™.

It’s not “three faction” PvP if you take your only ‘faction’, split it evenly into three groups, and have them fight off in a corner and then come back to hug it out. If there is no buy-in or hatred, it won’t work long-term, and long-term is kinda the goal here.

Stop talking about your game years before its release.

If your release date can still be counted in years, stfu. If I can’t play your beta in a few weeks, I don’t care, and consider your title 100% vaporware. Feel free to prove me wrong, but do so quietly. Dominus, Copernicus, Embers of Cearus, DF2.0, the list goes on. Any intern with Google can create an awesome-looking list of MMO features. Before they deliver anything everyone is always convinced they not only know what previous titles did wrong, but how to fix it. And of course, come beta (if beta ever comes), we find out that 99% of what you said all these years can be summed up as “bears bears bears” and you just released a horrible version of WoW.

Bonus points to those who, after their MMO is shut down, continue to talk about how amazing their MMO was. If your game was worth a crap, it would not have been canned, but obviously whatever it was you were showing to those with money did not look nearly ‘awesome’ enough for anyone to throw you a few bucks.

Double bonus because no one can ever claim your ‘awesome’ feature was in fact trash, since you never made it far enough for anyone to see. Your e-rep is safe, yo!

Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is about as trendy right now as updating your Twitter or Facebook was yesterday. And while the general concept is cool (vote with your wallet), can we at least get projects that have SOMETHING completed before you ask for money? Like I’m pretty sure if I copy/pasted by “PvE MMO design” post into Kickstarter today, I’d have a million bucks tomorrow. And I could probably hit two million by copy/pasting some obscure MMOs art and making a ‘dev video’ talking about how my combat system is the most “fluid, lifelike, immersive” system ever, and how my housing/ship/war/econ/political system has the depth of a full-on sim title, all within a “massive, unique” world. STFU or start your beta.

In totally unrelated news, I finally finished my Baldur’s Gate 1 game, and having started BG2, I still can’t believe the same company behind those games made SW:TOR. It’s like Grey Goose releasing a new flavor called sewage water. Just disgusting.

Also BG1 is a better sandbox than most ‘sandbox’ titles today, but that’s another post.

Posted in Asheron's Call, beta, Combat Systems, Dark Age of Camelot, Darkfall Online, EVE Online, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings Online, MMO design, Random, Rant, SW:TOR, The Elder Scrolls Online, Ultima Online, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft | 25 Comments

EVE: Cleaning out our C3

Posted on June 18, 2012 by SynCaine

Not wanting to keep paying for fuel, I took down the last pieces of our C3 last weekend in an epic 5 hours marathon (and learned that the sun does come up before 5am EST here…).

Some notes:

I decided to make the move at around midnight due to our C3 having a high-sec hole. As I logged on, someone was running sites, but they fled as soon as they saw me on d-scan. They left about 300m in sleeper loot behind that I cleaned up in my cov-ops. Good start.

Somehow we had three shuttles in our Corp hanger (not ship hanger). I could not delete or move these as they were assembled. This prevented the Corp hanger from being packed up (could not unanchor due to it not being empty…). The next day someone had already blown the hanger up, but left the three shuttles floating. The next day someone took/blew up the shuttles. One man’s trash…

Our actual ship hanger still had about 20 odd ships inside it, mostly from members who went afk and a few from people too lazy to get them out. As I could not fly them out due to skills, I did the only thing I could: I ejected all the ships and blew them up one by one, using an Arby with five drones (the pilot in the hole has no real combat skills). Even unpiloted, it still took a while to chop up some of the T2 cruisers and the Brutix.

As each ship was blown up, the Corp collected insurance. I found this amusing.

Once everything had been destroyed, I got back in my utility Cov-Ops to loot/salvage. While most wrecks were not that interesting, a few of the T2 ships had some nice faction and deadspace mods. I did not have it in me to see what mods did not survive the carnage.

As I was making a final trip out, the HS WH went End-of-life. For a brief second I considered not jumping and possibly losing the hole entirely (this pilot is the last member inside). I ended up saying screw it and jumped anyway. Made it back inside just fine, thankfully.

I’ve been using Redfrog like a fiend, and at some point I’ll finally swing by Jita to sell everything. I’ve lost count how many billions have now been hauled there, from all corners of New Eden (thanks to hauling junk out from different holes on different days), but the ‘joy’ of reprocessing hundreds of random items and then listing a few hundred more will be great…

The really funny/sad thing is that a few C5 sleeper sites generate more ISK than the entire C3 earned us during our stay. That we have an upcoming secret Op that will likely be worth far, far more than THAT also puts thing in perspective, and makes leaving behind a few hundred million in PI goods an easy choice over however many hauling trips it would have taken to get it all out.

If you would like to buy a C3 with a low-sec static and great PI (POCOs included), let me know. IMO it’s the perfect ‘starter’ hole for a Corp new to wormhole space. Traffic is low as you only have the low-sec to worry about, the PI is great and easy for everyone to get started with, and C3 Sleeper sites sit at just the right level of difficulty and reward.

Posted in EVE Online, Inquisition Clan | 1 Comment

The early bashing of TESO, and what it might mean

Posted on June 18, 2012 by SynCaine

I find the defensive nature of the Elder Scroll MMO devs interesting. The game is not close to release, no one has seen it in action, let alone played it, yet already ‘fans’ are objecting and raising complaints, and the devs are trying to settle the crowds. Not that I believe the criticism is not warranted, mind you, but when has an MMO been under this much fire this early?

To me this suggests two things. One is that more and more gamers are tired of WoW clones. ‘Vets’ of the genre have felt this way for some time now (2008 yo), yet sales of clones have been decent in recent years, indicating that how ‘vets’ felt was not representative of the majority. SW:TOR changes this in a major way. Yes, the game sold a good number of boxes for an average game, but SW:TOR was anything but average in terms of project cost and hype. That SW:TOR only peaked at 1.7m is telling, and its rapid decline, supplemented by EA’s dismissal of the game being ‘important’ to the company, only hammer this home.

The second consideration is that the average MMO gamer seems to be moving back to the roots of the genre, albeit slowly. GW2 is no UO in terms of sandbox design, but many of its features are directly intended to move it away from WoW, rather than evolve it, and fans have responded to this approach. When TESO proudly announces that it’s WoW but ‘better’, it’s notable that many today see this as a major problem rather than something to cheer.

It will be interesting to see if an MMO comes along that strikes the right design balance of MMO longevity with casual ‘accessibility’. I believe WoW had that during its initial run, if somewhat imperfectly, but no game has come close since. Most have been far too ‘accessibly’, with gamers facerolling for a month or so and leaving bored. Others have achieved the longevity aspects, but at the price of excluding all but the most dedicated. As the genre escaped the flawed shadow of current-day WoW, I’m fairly confided such a title will come along.

When is the billion dollar question.

And sadly, it certainly sounds like TESO is not that title.

Posted in beta, MMO design, Random, SW:TOR, The Elder Scrolls Online, World of Warcraft | 22 Comments

Damn competitive market!

Posted on June 15, 2012 by SynCaine

To the MMO minor leagues!

“The MMO market is very dynamic and we need to be dynamic as well,” he says. “Unless people are happy with what they have, they are constantly demanding updates, new modes and situations. So we are looking at free-to-play but I can’t tell you in much detail. We have to be flexible and adapt to what is going on.” (emphasis mine)

Or you could make a decent MMO to compete in the MMO market space.

That said, SW:TOR will be the first F2P game featuring the ‘4th pillar’, so they have that going for them I guess. And its going to be tough for future companies to compete in the F2P space now, what with the entry price being $300m. EAWare; raising the bar!

Posted in Rant, RMT, SW:TOR | 16 Comments

Sounds logical

Posted on June 14, 2012 by SynCaine

I really wish Gevlon would start trying out some of his brilliant solutions.

Enjoy.

Posted in Blogroll, EVE Online, PvP | 13 Comments