LoL-cloning should be amusing

Posted on August 18, 2011 by SynCaine

Attempting to clone LoL has been the FOTM in the gaming industry ever since Riot started seeing it’s amazing success. Luckily for most dev studios LoL is not an MMO, but the fact that it is a PvP game will expose lesser games faster than creating yet another fantasy PvE MMO. While an average game could get away with just copying basic PvE concepts and have the players catch on slowly (or not care), PvP is a different animal.

You can’t slip ‘just ok’ design by PvP players. You can no longer ignore the top 5% who clear your PvE content in a day using some class/talent combo you did not plan for, because now that top 5% is exposing your flaws to everyone, and everyone can follow along and exploit an imbalanced champion or build. Whether the results are the same or not is secondary, as the perception of a problem is enough to leave a bad impression or cause a forum shitstorm.

Another factor to watch will be the business model. League of Legends, currently by far the most popular MOBA title, does not sell power. Titles such as World of Tanks do, and its popularity shows that there are plenty of gamers who don’t mind their wallet factoring into who wins a game. As the flood of me-too MOBA clones comes, it will be interesting to watch how many games cave into the lure of the gold ammo/character cash grab.

One factor that may influence the business model is the rise of competitive gaming. Valve is running a million dollar DOTA2 tourney right now, and Riot has trumped that with a 5 million prize pool for season two of LoL. Games that sell power are excluded from competitive play for obvious reasons, but will we ever see a game REMOVE power items from its shop and adjust design to try and solidify themselves as a truly competitive game? If prize pools and viewer numbers continue to increase, we just might.

Posted in DoTA, League of Legends, PvP, RMT | 5 Comments

Fantasy Football time again

Posted on August 16, 2011 by SynCaine

The Hardcore Sunday Casual Funday fantasy football league is back! If you are interested let me know here and I’ll send you an invite. Please only join up if you can stay active the entire season.

Posted in Site update | 17 Comments

Third faction finally added to Warhammer Online!

Posted on August 16, 2011 by SynCaine

The F2P knockoff game that is.

If you are still playing WAR, how much does this kick in the nuts hurt?

“Oh hi, we screwed WAR by making it two faction like WoW, but we made the knockoff a threeway. AHAHHAHAHHAHAHA suck it WAR/DoAC fans!” – Mythic

On the ‘plus’ side, it’s nice that the WAR team has moved on from failing to clone WoW to failing to clone LoL.

Poor Games Workshop and their IP, they really do deserve better.

Posted in beta, League of Legends, PvP, Rant, Warhammer Online | 16 Comments

Final Fantasy Tactics on the iPhone

Posted on August 15, 2011 by SynCaine

Square Enix has been releasing older Final Fantasy games for the iPhone for a while now. FF1 and FF2 were released for $8.99. FF3, which got a pretty heavy overhaul when it was released for the PSP (I believe), was released for $16.99. For those counting at home, that’s about $16 more than most iPhone games, give or take a penny. I passed on FF3, but I’m just waiting for it to go on sale or have a price drop.

Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT) was released recently for $16.99 (also an updated PSP version).

I picked it up.

FFT might be my all-time favorite Playstation game, and it’s certainly one of the greatest TBS games of all time. That it’s now available for the iPhone and looks/sounds/plays as amazing as it does, is, well, pure awesome. The only technical issue I’ve seen on my iPhone4 is odd slowdown when you go to select/confirm an attack (literally the menu option showing up seems to slow the game down, but all the attack animations, the camera spinning, effects going off; all of that runs just fine. Really odd, and hopefully something that gets fixed in an update).The game being available on the iPhone is especially great since it’s the PSP version, which has had its translation cleaned up (not perfected though, but eh) and some new movies added.

At $16.99 it’s tough to recommend the game blindly, but if you enjoy TBS games, or wish to relive the greatness of FFT, I’d say it’s well worth the price.

Note: I’m not sure how the game runs on older iPhones, but I’d guess some slowdown would be expected.

Posted in Console Gaming, iPhone | 16 Comments

Is Darkfall vaporware, again?

Posted on August 13, 2011 by SynCaine

With most MMOs you have to deal with a lot of hype pre-release. Ideas looking amazing on paper, fans letting their imagination run wild on what could be, all of that.

Is Darkfall the only MMO to ever repeat this cycle? I mean look, stuff like this sounds amazing right? Momentum mattering in combat (Mount and Blade?), how itemization will work this time around, the character power/options stuff, all the graphical updates, better new player experience, etc. It all sounds great. On paper.

And on the one hand, Aventurine did deliver something pretty amazing with Darkfall. It still has the best MMO combat ever (fact not opinion), and name me a better PvP MMO that stayed true to it’s design for 2+ years not named EVE?

On the other hand, updates to DF of late have been… um… sparse to be kind. And DF1 had a lot of ideas on paper pre-release that never really made it either. So it’s not like we can say that AV always delivers.

Aventurine, breaking new ground, even in areas you never suspected (or wanted).

Posted in Combat Systems, crafting, Darkfall Online, MMO design, Patch Notes, PvP | 17 Comments

-placeholder- Creative title for this blog’s four year anniversary

Posted on August 12, 2011 by SynCaine

I’m like the WoW Magazine of yearly blog reviews; each one is out just a little later than the previous one.

Four years.

Now officially longer than any job I’ve had, longer than any relationship I’ve had other than to Ms. SynCaine, and certainly longer than any MMO I’ve played.

Let’s knock out the numbers first.

Blog Stats as of 8/12/2011

Total views: 1,035,401

Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 1,166

Comments: 16,129

Blog Stats 2010

Total views: 692,972

Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 843

Comments: 11,790

Blog Stats 2009

Total views: 335,842

Busiest day: 11,852 — Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 523

Comments: 5,393

Blog Stats 2008

Total views: 104,123

Busiest day: 11,852 – Thursday, September 6, 2007

Posts: 253

Comments: 1,658

So I never did a “hey look, a million views” post. Consider this it. Hey look, a million+ views.

Still no one has dethroned that Sept 6th day, although I believe one day earlier this year came close. Maybe next year.

Not much to report on the posts-per-year front either. Very similar to 2010. I consider that a good thing, and I’m always amazed that after four+ years, I still find something to write about almost every day.

Bit of a dip in comments this year than last. Not sure how to explain that one, although a lack of blog wars is surely to blame. I think it says something about the state of the genre when I agree with too many blogs too often to even warrant a cross-post. Everyone get off my “WoW sucks” bandwagon, please?

Top Posts for all days ending 2011-08-12

Rift Review (EG Style) 53,619

The love and hate game, WoW style. 17,966

The real Rift review 12,737

EQ2, trial of the neverending download. 11,812

iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday. 10,749

Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk battleship. 9,641

Aion end-game, way ahead of WoW and WAR. 8,809

Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finishes it. 7,572

DarkFall Review: One Year Later 6,581

Warhammer’s major problem, the players. 6,191

Top Posts for all days ending 2010-08-02

The love and hate game, WoW style. – 17,626

iPhone MMO, Field Runners, and a slow Friday – 10,564

EQ2, trial of the neverending download. – 9,796

Aion end-game, way ahead of WoW and WAR. – 7,701

Blizzard’s new focus for WoW, just as soon as Mythic finished it- 7,488

Level 4 missions in EVE, and my silly Rohk – 7,130

Warhammer’s major problem, the players. – 5,694

Dragon Age review – 5,378

DarkFall: 3 month review – 4,624

Screen shot comparison. – 4,260

Not hard to see the big change here. Due to some luck with Google, and showing that EG-style reporting ‘works’, we have a new highest viewed post, and by a large margin. Why is it that all the big number stuff around blogs (top post, top pageview day, etc) is always a random stupid joke? Why can’t it be that one post you really poured some effort into? It’s almost like it would be better to invent the pet rock than to cure cancer. Wait… Nevermind.

The bar to make the top ten has increased by about 2500 views, knocking some longstanding posts off, so it’s nice to see the Darkfall review post hang on. It says something about EVE’s consistency that people are still looking up how to run level 4 missions in a Rohk (how many people are looking up how to down Onyxia these days?), and I’m always amused that people are STILL Googling about that EQ2 download and how brisk it is.

Referrers for 365 days ending 2011-08-12

virginworlds.com – 4,351

Google Reader – 3,810

killtenrats.com – 2,637

greedygoblin.blogspot.com – 1,865

Google – 1,806

biobreak.wordpress.com – 1,601

tagn.wordpress.com – 1,138

massively.joystiq.com – 839

tobolds.blogspot.com – 803

solomid.net – 628

New to this year’s review is a 365 day overview of referrers, rather than an all-time list. What’s interesting is that VirginWorlds is still #1, despite the site not linking this blog for some time now thanks to me registering the syncaine.com domain. I’m not sure if Brent is WoW-ing VW and has moved on or what, but I’ve noticed fewer and fewer blogs get linked over there. Fix it up Brent, VW was/is a great site!

KTR was the #1 blog for sending people here. I love that site, and where else can you get a comprehensive list of engineers with turrets from various MMOs? Exactly.

Funny that GreedyGoblin is on the list, but I guess it was only a matter of time before he started linking to the #1 WoW blog, right?

Rounding out the top 10 is solomid, which is a League of Legends guide site. Guess people liked that Warwick guide I had up there (now outdated thanks to WW getting nerfed, thanks Riot).

Search Terms for all days ending 2011-08-12

rift review –  47,448

hardcore casual – 10,242

syncaine – 5,560

darkfall review – 5,503

rift reviews – 5,279

field runners – 3,149

elo hell – 2,791

dragon age review – 2,764

kingdom conquest – 1,865

darkfall reviews – 1,604

perpetuum review – 1,386

Search Terms for all days ending 2010-08-02

hardcore casual – 6,772

syncaine – 3,466

darkfall review – 3,275

field runners – 3,149

dragon age review – 2,439

darkfall reviews – 1,097

aion endgame – 1,038

wotlk – 1,000

darkfall account – 913

wheel of time mmo – 773

People go to Google to search for reviews. Especially Rift.

I have to say it was pretty disappointing year overall for me with MMOs. Rift fell off the “Not in Azeroth” wagon in record time, Aventurine has basically stopped updating DF1 to play “is it vaporware?” with Darkfall 2.0, and the only things on the horizon that I’m even remotely interested in is GW2 (and that’s very 50/50) and Prime, which is also a 50/50 based on some of the info we know (3-way PvP, good. ‘Discovery’ crafting, bad).

With that said, if DF2.0 actually gets released in 2012, I’m guessing I’ll be back to playing one single game for a while. Or if Prime shapes up and gets Inquisition playing as a clan, that would be cool. Maybe GW2 will actually be a decent PvP MMO. Could happen. Problem is, none of those things are even close to a “sure thing”, and the next few months look like they will be filled with more LoL and whatever single player game crosses my desktop. Not terrible by any means, but I am an MMO gamer at heart, and not having a solid title to play for so long is disappointing.

Four years though; still kinda unreal.

Posted in Site update | 4 Comments

Trion’s RoN will be MMORTS 2.0!

Posted on August 11, 2011 by SynCaine

Are you as excited for RoN not being pay-to-win as you are about Rift (1.2 and beyond) not being in Azeroth anymore?

I know I am!

Posted in Random, Rant, Rift, RMT | 5 Comments

The new MMO business model?

Posted on August 11, 2011 by SynCaine

Not to bank on financial writers for solid reporting related to MMOs or anything, but this little blurb I found interesting for one reason: how important are initial sales for an MMO?

Of course they are important, after all if no one buys your game at launch, who cares how great your retention is, right? But five years after release, would you rather be WAR or EVE? EVE sold something like 50k copies at release, WAR sold close to (or over?) a million. We all know how each game is doing right now, and how things are likely to continue. Factor in development costs and all that, and the picture is pretty clear.

Going back to SW, the fact that the game is ‘trending’ high for pre-orders means next to nothing for me as a fan (I’m sure the suits are happy). A monkey could hype and sell SW right now. It’s SW, it’s BioWare, it cost a billion dollars to develop, and EA is throwing another billion to market it. It also helps that the vast majority of people who pre-ordered the game have not played it, and even those who have are playing in the “best case scenario” land of beta. But even if SW sells, say, 1-2 million copies at release, if its retention rate mirrors that of WAR (and I think it will), won’t the game still end up costing EA in the end?

WoW makes Blizzard truckloads of cash not because it sold a ton of copies at release, but because it has had millions paying $15 a month for years, easily recouping all those development costs and sitting pretty in almost (they do still have an intern updating the game occasionally I believe) pure profit land. That’s always been the model for an MMO: high initial cost, ability to make some of it back one day one, then hopefully make it all back and profit after X amount of time has passed. If the vast majority of your players are gone before you hit X, the plan kinda falls apart.

Or is the new MMO model to super-hype a release, get a million or so suckers, err sorry, fans, to buy it at release (for $150 preferably), and consider it a job well done a day/week/month after release? Because from an MMO fans perspective, that’s not what I’m here for, and I have sRPG’s that do a much better job of deliver that kind of content.

Posted in Mass Media, MMO design, SW:TOR, World of Warcraft | 11 Comments

While I climb to 1500 ELO…

Posted on August 10, 2011 by SynCaine

A while ago Riot announced that when Season One officially ends, anyone with an ELO above 1495 would receive a special Jarvan skin as a reward. Prior to that announcement I was happily making my way up in ELO, getting as high as 1494. Yes, one ELO point short of said reward. And of course, since I became aware of the reward, I’ve seen my ELO hover around 1480 and even drop to 1448 (as of today). FML and all that.

When I start to care more about each win/loss, I also start to analyze the games a bit more and try to figure out what went wrong. Some games are pretty obvious: Someone on my team going 0-8 and feeding their carry is not hard to understand. Not a whole lot you can do about those games, and over time you will be on the receiving end of a feeder just as often as you will be the victim of one.

The games I think about most are games were either I just played poorly, or games that were close enough that I could have done something to change the result.

Poorly played games are interesting because, technically, I know my skill level and know I’m not as bad as that one bad game showed, so why did it happen? Often, the champ I picked was just a terrible pick based on who the enemy champs where. If I was one of the first picks, not much you can do, but if I was near the bottom in picks, that’s a correctable mistake, but in order to correct it, I have to play enough champs well to feel comfortable switching.

Currently Teemo is by far my best champ, but he gets countered hard by certain combos (CC+burst slaughters him), and he relies on his team to properly setup group fights. I play him like a carry, but not a hard carry like an Ashe or Jax, where if I’m doing well, it’s GG regardless. I’m good with Amumu, but he is banned in every game. Warwick got nerfed, as did Shen, and neither champ is a real strong pick now. My Nunu games are too up/down to really feel comfortable; if I get a good start I roll with him, if things don’t go great in the first 15min, I can’t seem to recover. Basically, if Teemo is not a great pick for a certain game, my level of play drops off, and my odds of winning also drop.

The other situation, close games, is also interesting. In those games, whether I’m doing really well or not, I still believe I could have done more and gotten us the win. The “what” scenarios are too many to fully break down, but analyzing things like my item build, early game lane performance, when to go off and gank vs when to farm/deny, etc; looking at all of these things after a game is what really helps me improve.

What’s nice about LoL ranked play is it’s a pretty clear indicator of how you are doing. If you keep playing games but your ELO stays the same, it means you are not improving. If it drops it’s because you have regressed, or perhaps the champs you play are not as powerful as they once were (whether it’s because they got nerfed or others got buffed). Either way, the game is letting you know it’s time to change if you want to keep climbing.

Now to figure out a sure-fire way to hit 1495+ in time for that skin…

Posted in League of Legends | 17 Comments

Dawntide: A little more time

Posted on August 9, 2011 by SynCaine

I played a little more Dawntide (I can’t explain why, other than that I’m a sucker for sandboxes I guess), and while I still would not recommend it to most people, I have seen a few noteworthy things.

The combat is still terrible, but at least now I have figured out that it’s terrible because it’s an unresponsive button-mash system rather than an unresponsive, super slow, wtf-do-something system. That overhaul better be good…

Graphically the game is also meh. It’s like playing Darkfall on low settings, and Darkfall is not exactly setting the world on fire in terms of visuals (although personally I think DF looks pretty damn good for what it does and who made it). That said, there are some nice graphical touches. For instance, when you are out harvesting lumber, you actually turn a tree into a stump, and when that tree disappears (no falling animation, which is pretty weak) the lighting around the area is altered based on the loss of the tree. It’s actually fun to clear out a small forest and turn the area into a large patch of stumps.

Speaking of harvesting, along with the tree chopping, mining is also better than other games. You first must find an area with a resource using a search skill, and once you find a resource, you can mine right there for however long that resource holds (it gives you a quantity when you first find it). The closer you search to the source, the larger the pool. One of the first bits of advice I got was to head to a cave to mine some copper, and this whole system felt better than chasing from shiny node to shiny node over and over.

Crafting itself is solid. Nothing that really jumps out at me, but solid.

Character progression also has a small tweak. It’s a skill-based system, so the more you use a skill, the higher it goes, up to 100, and there is a total skill cap of 700. The tweak is that as you use a skill, you also gain XP in that skill, which slowly over time (16hrs I believe) converts into skill points. This is significant because it puts somewhat of a soft-cap on how hard you can grind out a skill in a day, while on the other hand it allows for smoother, more gradual gains for more casual players. I like it.

Ultimately I still think Dawntide has a ways to go, but it does have some interesting things going for it, and might be something to keep an eye on. I don’t think it will be where it needs to be come its planned October release, but you never know when that ‘miracle’ patch might hit.

 

Posted in beta, Combat Systems, crafting, MMO design, Random | 1 Comment