Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Ghostcrawler on over-optimization by WoW players

Fascinating series of posts from Warcraft game designer Ghostcrawler, lamenting the way Warcraft players feel they must optimize themselves for theoretical best DPS over doing things that are more fun or are useful in some way other than pure raid performance.

Posts like this make me very sad. You're portraying yourself to be at the mercy of uninformed yet tyrannical raid leaders who are quick to judge your performance based on perceived "tells." I know you need some basis to evaluate potential recruits or even pug members. But I do wish there was some way to turn around this virtual phobia of inefficiency -- this terror of being WRONG -- that we have managed to instill in our player base. I honestly think it's one of the greatest challenges facing the game. 

Minecraft temporarily free

Amazing sandbox building game Minecraft is temporarily free. The developer is having scaling problems, something to do with selling 100x more copies than he ever dreamt. So until he fixes his backend he's making the game free. Try it out! And if you like it, pay the 10 eurobucks to buy it once he's gotten his problems sorted.

My most recent Minecraft project was making paintings. Paintings require cloth. There are no sheep in multiplayer yet, so the only way to make cloth is with string. String drops from spiders. So naturally, the way to make a painting in Minecraft is to find some cactus, then take it deep underground to a spider generator and get that cactus growing. Build a cage of cactus bars separating yourself from the spiders, then wait patiently for the spiders to beat themselves to death against the cactus, then collect all the string. What could be more natural?

It takes about 4 minutes to collect 9 string to make 1 cloth. 4 terrifying minutes of spider screeching. The worst is when two spiders spawn at once and one jumps on top of the other and comes lunging at you. I lost my gold hat and boots to that trick. Now the bars go all the way to the ceiling. I also improved it later by adding a little water stream that flows through the bars; now the string just floats to me.

Pony brushing

Pony Brushing game Secret of the Magic Crystal was only $5 so I bought it and played it for an hour or so, long enough to train up my unicorn, win some races, and breed him? her? with a hellsteed demon horse. It's a terrible game. Too bad, I was looking for something amusing and different from the usual "headshot this and zerg rush that". I was totally prepared to take it seriously, respect that it's for younger people and girls and not snicker. But it's bad in almost every way. BTW, the only hints I could find online for the game were this forum thread. Either no one is playing or the audience doesn't want to share tips. If you're curious, you can watch video

The gameplay is terribly simplistic. There's really only one mini-game, a very slow paced Dance Dance Revolution. Most of the activities involve no game at all. You click, wait for the UI to respond, and go on. I understand making simple games for younger players, but even the 5 year olds I know would find this pretty lame, too repetitive and too slow. The graphics aren't particularly good, either. And there's no sound at all other than a looping music track.

The most egregious example of bad gameplay is the Gate, where you get to send your horse out in to the world. And race! And help your neighbor plough! But instead of enjoying the outside world, maybe some new scenery, all that happens is a text box pops up with random messages. "Ashleigh pulls ahead! Ashleigh goes slow. Ashleigh is in the 1 Place! Ashleigh takes the inside! Ashleigh flies by on the outside!". Then you click "OK" and wait for a tiny clock to count down before you can play again. The only excuse I can see for this complete failure of game design is the game developers just running out of budget.

The thing that does work is the grooming. It's not even a minigame really, you just take one of three tools (brush, sponge, or hoof trimmer) and wave it over the horse. But the animation is nice and the horse has a charming way of looking you right in the eyes. He'll even daintily raise his hooves up for grooming. It's very limited, but it does make a connection. I'm guessing grooming was the demo that got the developer team the funding.

Playing Secret of the Magic Crystals has reminded me of Rare's underrated Viva Piñata garden games. Those are really fantastic, rich and deep and with a lot of variety. They're too complicated for their own good, but a heck of a lot of fun. Maybe I should go back to them.

Losing

I hate losing games. I don't mind losing to the computer so much, but I hate losing to other people. I'm a sore loser. It kept me from playing Warcraft arena, and it's giving me a complex about Starcraft. I'm not much of an RTS player but I've decided to try to learn Starcraft II competently. It's the closest thing computer gaming has to a grand game like Go or Chess and I figured now was the time to learn it.

I made a mistake with my Starcraft account and won too many of my placement matches. Basically I learned one strategy, Protoss 4 warpgate rush, and then played it for 5 matches and won 3. That got me rated in the Gold Division with people who actually know how to play the game. The problem is all my knowledge ended at the rush, either I won at 8 minutes or I lost. I have no idea what to do next. I've since lost 8 matches and haven't won one, and I keep hoping the system will eventually re-rate me to a lower skill level.

There's an old saying about learning to play Go, that you have to play 100 games before you can really begin learning to play the game at all. I think that applies to Starcraft, too. Just rough when you lose them all; at least Go has useful handicapping. The good thing about Starcraft is there's a nice polite culture, even if it's expressed in acronyms like "GLHF" and "GG". At least folks aren't jerks about winning.