PUBG: If a broken ladder falls in the woods…

Posted on August 21, 2017 by SynCaine

Gevlon’s last project in PUBG has come to an end, with a result very similar to his LoL project. He played a huge amount of hours, come up with a pretty terrible plan/strategy, and failed utterly. The main different between his inability to escape the starter ranks in LoL and his almost mathematically impossible feat of never winning a PUBG game out of the hundreds he played however is that at least in PUBG, he was high on a leaderboard.

Now, if you want to debate whether the point of PUBG is to win matchs vs being high on a leaderboard, have fun dying on that hill with Gevlon, you’ll be in quality company.

But, days of real life spent ‘playing’ a game of ‘hide and collect the medicine’ inside a shooter aside, Gevlon inadvertently does bring up one interesting item; how important are such leaderboards when they are clearly so highly flawed, and how much priority should a developer devote to fixing them into something reasonable?

Even to someone who has never played PUBG, it should be pretty clear that when someone who almost never kills anyone AND has never won a single game can get close to the top 100 in a region, something is broken. But just how broken is it? Gevlon is a unique snowflake in gaming, with his combination of being immune to boring bot-like actions, having 7+ hours a day to play a single game daily, and with an end-goal of blog traffic (regardless of why that traffic shows up) rather than playing for fun or achieving actual success. A very well designed system like the one in LoL he can’t exploit (so it must be dev corruption, obviously…), but does it matter if he can in PUBG? (guess no dev corruption here yet…) It’s not a must-team game like LoL, so Gevlon being in a game with 99 other people of much higher skill isn’t a big impact; he is basically a delayed disconnected player in every one of his games. That’s very, very minimal impact to everyone but Gevlon, and Gevlon doesn’t care that he isn’t actually playing the game.

PUBG is in Early Access and still rapidly developing, so the next question is what priority should fixing the ranking system really take? Would a normal player want more weapons and better balance, or a leaderboard system he likely doesn’t look at or care about fixed? Can PUBG leave EA with this flawed system and still be fine? Right now PUBG is one of the most popular games out, period, so clearly a bad leaderboard isn’t influencing many from staying away, nor is it discouraging people and having them stop playing.

The big difference between PUBG matches and say LoL matches is that in PUBG, winning is rare (or impossible in some cases…), so when people do win, that alone is a highlight and makes playing ‘worth it’, and it’s also why the ladder is an afterthought. A better ladder would be nice, but it wouldn’t honestly add all that much to the game. In LoL, you win about 50% of the time, so the victory screen itself isn’t that special. In LoL, it’s winning more often than not and climbing the ladder that most players focus on, which is why a working ranking system is so important.

PS: I do find it incredibly comical that Gevlon, in his own post, includes a screen shot of a player he thinks plays like him. The player is ranked #2, but has only 80 games played, 14 of which he has won, along with a K/D ratio of 1.5. The guy with hundreds of games and zero wins is basically the same as the guy with a respectable K/D ratio and a 17% win rate (which is very high for PUBG) in the mind of Gevlon. You just can’t make this stuff up.

Posted in beta, Blogroll, Random, Rant | 28 Comments

This is a Castle Story post, 5 years after the last

Posted on August 18, 2017 by SynCaine

Way back in 2013 I posted that I bought Castle Story off a Steam sale, and wasn’t very impressed. Bonus content in the comments section of that post, good to see some things never change. Double bonus about that post also talking about the now-dead EQNL and how it will fail. Checking the scoreboard, I believe I’m now up a billion and one in terms of accurate predictions. Why ALL developers don’t follow my advice at this point really is a mystery…

Anyway, Castle Story is officially released. I’ll have to load it up and see if its better now than it was 5 years ago. You’d assume it is, but you know what they say about assumptions (they say mine are 99% accurate).

This is also a reminder that sometimes Early Access works great, sometimes it fails horribly, and a lot of times it leads to having a game that is finally released 5 years later. The new-ish era of gaming everyone!

Posted in EQNext, Random, Rant, Steam Stuff | 1 Comment

Since he asked…

Posted on August 15, 2017 by SynCaine

show me a bad player and I show you a bad person. – Gevlon

Does playing 1000+ games and not making it out of the tutorial ranking qualify as a bad player? Does playing 1000+ games of PUBG without a single win qualify as a bad player?

Posted in Random | 13 Comments

PUBG mini review

Posted on August 14, 2017 by SynCaine

Forgot to mention I went on vacation. Sorry about that, but hey, I’m back now. And that was “SynCaine life updates”. Moving on.

I picked up PlayerUnknown’s BattleGround (PUBG) a few days prior to vacation, and have somewhere around 150-200 games under my belt now, including about a dozen or so wins. Not a great ratio, but not terrible either, especially considering FPS games are easily my weakest genre in terms of competitive gaming.

The game is a battle royale style game; 100 people drop from a plane onto an island, looking for weapons, armor, and meds/boosters, and the last man (or squad) standing wins. To encourage the action, the playing area gets smaller as time ticks down, and if you are caught outside the area, you take damage and can eventually die.

Being a PvP game, the initial learning curve is a bit steep. You need to get a handle for the shooting mechanics (they are pretty solid, if not top-tier for a FPS), the different weapons, and of course the island and it’s layout. The island is rather large, with a dozen or so hotspots for gear, along with countless smaller houses that also contain loot. As you play, you start to learn where in a particular building loot can spawn, how to quickly spot drivable vehicles from pre-set ones, and how to loot quickly/efficiently. Time is always ticking, so the slower you go, the faster everyone else is in terms of gaining loot or positioning themselves.

Once you have the basics down, you can start focusing on how best to play around the shrinking circle, or where the best ‘ending area’ is in each zone. You also start to get better at identifying weapons by sound, as well as being able to pinpoint a shooters location. These all take time, and as you learn, most of it comes from dying and trying again.

The ‘fast track’ to learning is to play your early matches very aggressively. Drop into hotspots and fight it out. You are going to die, but 5 minutes of learning gunplay and fast looting is better than 25 minutes of hiding in a house only to be shot once you are in the top 20+ and clueless. The goal is of course to win, so you want to improve until you can actually win, which means learning the hard way.

This is especially important if you are going to play duo or 4 man (squad), which IMO are the far better modes compared to FFA. Squad in particular plays very well, both because you can somewhat customize what role people play (one sniper + covering fire, or maybe more snipers if the loot gods are good), and because the firefights are more intense vs just always going 1v1 against someone. I also think the intensity of the final moments, especially when its just your squad vs another, are awesome to experience with 3 friends in voice chat. For me the FFA mode really is just training for multiplayer.

PUBG is also the first game of this type I’ve played, having skipped both DayZ and H1Z1, so there is a certain newness to it that not everyone might have. Having said that, I think anyone who enjoys online shooters can enjoy PUBG, just be sure to find some friends to play it with.

Posted in Inquisition Clan, Random, Review | 1 Comment

EVE: Off to war we go

Posted on August 3, 2017 by SynCaine

When Dear Leader speaks, especially for a war deployment, our numbers in local were great than local in Jita. Seems our ‘dead’ or ‘defeated’ alliance still has a little bit of life left in it…

So we are off to war, and personally I’m thrilled. While gathering up ISK and ships in Delve has been nice, especially for my industry-focused pilot, at the end of the day if you don’t use that ISK, what’s the point? Sure, we would fly out from Delve and skirmish with others, and that was fun, but a full-commit deployment is different, and IMO the real ‘heart’ of EVE. These are the events books are written about, and the “I was there” moments people really remember.

We are going north, though our final destination is still unknown to line members. We are also not moving out Super Capital fleet, just our dreads/carriers and doctrine sub-caps. I’m moving my Chimera carrier, along with a fleet hanger of sub-caps. The move op so far has been, as expected, a long grind of jumping, waiting, TiDi, and more waiting. And even with all our caution, some people are still dying. Such is life when 2000+ people travel and countless others want to pick off the stragglers.

The event is also a reminder that only in EVE do such things happen. A lot of MMOs talk about ‘meaningful travel’, or the idea of a convoy being something that actually happens with players transporting goods. In EVE it actually does, and sure, it’s not glamorous or super-engaging gameplay (if all goes well anyway), but it sets the table for everything else. If going to war was as simple and easy as queuing up for a battleground, the actions and results wouldn’t be nearly as meaningful or memorable. In short, by putting in all of this work to make it happen, the end-result is the culmination of all that work. When you don’t have to put in much work, the end-product probably isn’t anything special.

Good times ahead!

PS: Picked up PUBG since a bunch of Inq guys have been playing it. Fun game for sure, especially playing as a duo or in a squad (4 player team). So far one win, one second place finish, and a whole lot of learning by jumping to the most populated area and brawling to learn the mechanics quickly.

Posted in EVE Online, Goons, MMO design | 6 Comments

Mobile games and ‘real’ games

Posted on August 1, 2017 by SynCaine

Az over on his blog contemplates his time spend playing Clash Royale vs his time spend playing FFXIV. My gaming time split is somewhat similar overall I think, were I’d say 50% of it is mobile games now (Clash of Clans and Clash Royale being 95% of that).

But unlike Az I don’t view CoC and CR as ‘time wasters’ like most mobile games, where the fun lasts maybe a few hours via cheap tricks and shiny nothing and then you move on. After EVE, Clash of Clans is my second-longest played game, with my first post about the game (at least using the CoC tag) going up in June of 2014 (damn…).

I’ve gone so far as to ask if CoC is an MMO, and almost 2 years after that post, I’m leaning even more towards that answer being “yes”, certainly by the now very lax definition most people have of an MMO. Hell, in a lot of ways, CoC is far more of a traditional MMO than most MMOs today, being how heavily it relies on ‘grouping’, the long progression and difficulty curve, and how often its updated.

Mobile gaming originally was viewed as ‘cheap’ gaming, something quick to fill the time by playing very simple games. I don’t think that still applies to the whole platform. Today, mobile has ‘real’ games like CoC/CR, along with the filler, just like a console has ‘real’ games along with a bunch of filler. Mobile games are designed around the limitations and advantages of the platform, sure, but good developers can and do still make top-notch games working around or taking advantage of the platform.

Plus as hardware continues to improve, along with the speed of the networks, I expect the mobile space to further expand and more ‘real’ games to push the boundaries. It’s only a matter of time before a game the size and cost of a GTA V is released on mobile, and very likely with it will come the next “$10 for a horse!?” controversy related to payment model. And I can’t wait!

Posted in Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, iPhone, MMO design | 4 Comments

Station trading by another name

Posted on July 31, 2017 by SynCaine

This is more of a placeholder for later, but thanks to him sharing, we can see Gevlon is playing over 7 hours of PlayerUnknown’s Battleground every day, for a week straight so far. This is consistent with how he played LoL, and while there is no official record, it’s not hard to guess that is also how much he played EVE.

The other similarity is HOW he is playing. He’s a very below average playing seemingly in all games he tries, while at the same time not needing to do what 99% of us do to enjoy yourself; play the actual game in any manner remotely considered fun by a normal human.

In EVE Gevlon hauled and station traded for 4 years straight with ultimately minimal results. In LoL he played the same champion, in basically the same way, for 1000+ games, this time with basically zero improvement. And now in PUBG he is playing a FPS without shooting, and simply sitting in a corner hiding for 99% of his playtime until he is found and dies.

Yes, he paid money and is now spending a large percentage of his day sitting in a virtual corner by himself, all so he can make a blog post that he thinks makes him look good/smart. Spoiler: It’s not a good look buddy.

Does make for fantastic content though, so there is at least some value in that.

 

Posted in Random, Rant | 14 Comments

This hole isn’t going to dig itself!

Posted on July 28, 2017 by SynCaine

“bot detection should have done nothing with the client. Bots should be detected by behavior: repetitively grinding whole day.” “showing that he grinded mobs for 70 hours a week, which point everyone will agree that he was botting or had very bad life choices.” – Gevlon

Those 70hr a week grinders are indeed making lots of very bad life choices of late. Of course we know Gevlon isn’t a bot, because bots actually get results, while Gevlon plays 1000+ games and still can’t get out of the tutorial, but that’s a minor detail here.

Also in case you needed another example of why, according to Gevlon (“I have to ask, have you ever had any personal interaction with anyone who has ever worked in the games industry, beyond being insulted on Reddit by CCP Falcon? – Maxim. “No” – Gevlon), exactly zero devs have contacted him for advice/feedback:

“GM workload should be minimal with an internal instruction: “unban everyone who request it and had 1-2 accounts violating.”- Gevlon

For someone who spends so much effort and energy ranting about corruption, bot farms, ghost training, and whatever else scares him at night, you’d think he would at least know the FIRST thing about how any of it works. But it wouldn’t be Gevlon’s comedy blog if he had a simple understanding of a subject before writing 1000s of words on it, now would it?

Posted in Blogroll, EVE Online | 4 Comments

This War of Mine DLC review

Posted on July 27, 2017 by SynCaine

I reviewed This War of Mine in January 2016, and the review still reflects my views on the game, including highly recommending it to just about anyone.

Since that review the game has received two major updates; the first being “The Little Ones” DLC, focused around adding children to the game, and the free Anniversary update, which adds new locations and a few other tweaks. I want to talk about those, specifically the DLC.

As mention in the review, TWoM is amazing in terms of atmosphere, even if that atmosphere is focused around civilians surviving by any means in a war-torn city, so not exactly happy fun land. Adding playable children to that mix is tricky, because while it’s one thing to watch an innocent adult die, its another to see a child die or suffer. At the same time, enabling children to be safe or invulnerable, which is what many videogames do, wouldn’t fit into what TWoM is going for. I feel “The Little Ones” DLC hits a good balance.

For starters, children can’t go out to scavenge, so they aren’t put into immediate danger of being shot or stabbed while out at a site. They can, however, be injured during a raid on your house, and they react especially terrified if they are left home alone during a raid. The first time this happened to me I legitimately felt terrible (as do your adult characters) and as if I had failed the child (having kids of your own I think amps this up). What really makes things difficult is if you don’t send someone out to scavenge, you aren’t going to survive long-term, so sometimes you really can’t stay behind and protect the child every night.

Children also react more severely to someone getting injured while out at night, especially if they are attached to that person (either a father/mother, or someone they have become close friends with at the house). This makes an already bad event (getting injured), that much worse, because now not only does that person have to recover, but you also need to calm the child down and try to make them happy again.

Children are also harder to keep happy than adults, which is pretty realistic. They react more poorly to being hungry or tired, and while they can be taught to help out around the house, having them do too many chores also has a mood penalty. On the other hand, a happy child makes everyone else in the house happy, which can go a long way to counter the impact of not having cigarettes for a smoker or coffee for a coffee drinker.

In addition to all that, the children are very lively in the house. They run around, they try to start up conversations with people, and you can build them a good variety of toys to play with. Talking to them at least once a day is also important, and is often humorous or touching.

The anniversary update adding more ‘stuff’ to the game, combined with the DLC, means playing TWoM again felt very fresh. Fresh enough in fact that I got three full playthroughs out of it before stepping away again, though I want to play it at least one more time. Again, highly recommended as a masterfully done experience that really pushes the “are games art” question forward.

Posted in Random, Review | Comments Off on This War of Mine DLC review

Poor, dumb, and maybe corrupt

Posted on July 25, 2017 by SynCaine

Some high quality posting from Gevlon going on right now related to his favorite tinfoil hat: everything is corrupt!

It starting with his theory that the only reason anyone works in the gaming industry is because they are corrupt and getting paid on the side via RMT. Both are poorly worded posts, because Gevlon keeps using game dev and programmer interchangeably, when programmers are only a small sub-set of game devs, and programmers usually aren’t involved in shaping the actual direction of a game. But lets give him a break on that and focus only on programmers, since his entire post falls completely apart if we talk about artists, audio people, or any of the other dozens of possible roles on a larger game.

So why would a programmer work in gaming for less money and worse conditions (lets just assume that is also always true, and studios like Riot or Blizzard don’t offer very competitive pay) compared to another industry like say writing bank software? I think anyone with job options already knows the answer here, but lets just get them on the table anyway. For starters, for most people work is a combination of interest in the subject, personal capability, and the lifestyle afforded by the career. Each person will have a different weight on each factor (teacher vs cube monkey vs janitor) , but only truly special people like Gevlon place 100% value on pay vs enjoyment. Or does he? Allow me to share with you two recent quotes from Gevlon related to making money:

At this point I’m unsure if I’ll be capable of making more in-game money in an hour than I could make by one hour of real life working and buying APEX. During EVE, BDO and my short time in Albion, this was achieved after learning the game.”

“Sure, in some economy focused games like EVE a good businessman can make more in-game money than by spending the same time in an average wage (Western) job and buying PLEX. But someone who has the brains to do it is probably not working in an average wage job and even my peak EVE income (about 150B/month = $27K/year) is low compared to a high-paying job

So, according to Gevlon himself he could make more money grinding the MMOs above then he could working his job that pays less than 27k. So is Gevlon a hypocrite in that he doesn’t do what he rants about all the time (money>all), an idiot for not selling his in-game wealth via RMT and instead showing up for his normal job for less pay, or just lying in the above about his in-game income and/or real income?

Or is the truth that, like everyone else, Gevlon doesn’t do what would pay him more because he doesn’t have the stomach to RMT, or doesn’t want to accept the uncertainty and risk that comes with that line of ‘work’ vs just showing up for his normal, acceptable, lower-paying but safer job? Or wait, is Gevlon also corrupt in his real job, and is accepting bribes and stealing lab equipment on the side? Yes, it must be that!

I’ll just also mention here that all of his ranting and raving about corruption only works for multiplayer games where RMT is not just possible, but popular-enough to generate significant income to lead to corruption, which itself is a small subset of all game dev work, but as always, fully breaking down a Gevlon argument isn’t needed, as just pulling on a single thread is enough to collapse the whole thing.

At the end of the day Gevlon writes what he writes because he needs someone other than himself to blame for his failures, in part because he thinks his readers place value in his success/failure (which itself is rather funny if you think about it). He didn’t fail in EVE because he wasn’t smart enough to make enough ISK to be more than a semi-popular meme, he failed because CCP is corrupt! He didn’t fail to reach his goal of the top 10% in LoL despite playing at a rate of the top .01% because he is a slow learner, he failed because Riot is corrupt! He wasn’t ‘successful’ in WoW because when he played, the game was already dumbed down enough for his ability and handing out welfare epics, he was ‘successful’ because Blizzard is too big to be corrupt! Albion Online devs didn’t ignore him because is has a mile-long track record of insanity and horrible, horrible ideas, they ignored him because they are corrupt! Guess what is he is going to say about his next game when he also ends up failing if he doesn’t find something WoW-easy?

Posted in EVE Online, Goons, League of Legends, MMO design, Random, Rant, RMT, World of Warcraft | 13 Comments