An update… :D
By Brandon Reinhart | June 30, 2008
Haven’t updated in a while.
- Quit WoW a while ago, haven’t logged in for some time. Reasons have been covered by Damion. In brief: we are on a back water server with very few quality raiders. It’s been too hard to find good people to fill out our ranks and we had trouble advancing past Illidari Council. I finally decided to spend my nights doing other things. Blizzard needs to merge their smaller servers.
- Been playing EVE. Working on getting kills for my full membership to IRON (in IRON, ranking is based off of tracked kills), as well as supporting my corp in extensive ops of all sorts.
- Here’s my killboard profile: http://www.iron-alliance.com/kb/statistics.php?pilot=25719
- Painting my Black Templars. It’s an off and off kind of thing.
- Lots of Europa Universalis 3.
- Lots of Metal Gear Solid 4.
- Still training in Jiu-Jitsu. My body is covered in bruises from head to toe.
- Work
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
Collected OB Posts of Eliezer Yudkowsky
By Brandon Reinhart | June 10, 2008
Andrew Hay has created an index of all of the posts of Bayesian thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky. This is an impressive amount of content and every post is extremely thought provoking. Highly recommended reading, covering a broad range of topics, but always centered on teaching the Martial Art of Rationality.
Topics: Philosophy | 1 Comment »
‘Respecing’ receives critical acclaim from the AoC player community.
By Brandon Reinhart | May 30, 2008
I posted my “respecing” blog update to the AoC forums in its entirety and received quite a lot of positive feedback from players. At the moment the thread is up to 5 pages with 95 responses and 2,697 views. 90% of the responses are echoing the argument for cheap or free respecing. Some players have asked for “quest” based respecing like City of Heroes. There are some arguments against free respecs, but most seem to stem from not reading the original post.
Still, spec costs in game seem unchanged and no developer has responded to the post (as far as I can tell, no dev has ever responded to any post on their forums).
Topics: Age of Conan, Game Design | 2 Comments »
Respecing
By Brandon Reinhart | May 25, 2008
Here’s an abbreviated look at my logic on respecing:
David Hunt (Designer, Flying Lab Software) gave a nice little talk at the ION Conference this year on retention. Retention is, of course, the concept of keeping people playing your game month to month. It’s critical for any game that derives income from monthly subscriptions, or in their absence maintaining a certain critical mass of community.
One thing David mentioned in his talk is the import of not punishing the player for character development decisions and, furthermore, avoiding permanent or semi-permanent decisions that trap the player into making mistakes. Essentially, players who feel like they’ve made mistakes with developmental decisions become frustrated. Now that alone isn’t going to drive players from the game, but frustration can accumulate from a broad number of sources and eventually tip the player to leave.
So reducing frustration is one key element to having good retention.
The respec costs in AoC are counter to this goal.
Why do designers add respec costs? There are a couple of reasons.
1) Designers want developmental decisions to feel “meaningful.” If the player cannot easily change a decision, then it must be meaningful!
Why this is flawed: Specs are no less meaningful because they are easily changed. Players will still develop personal attachments to specific playstyles, or argue why their specific choice is superior. In fact, with the ability to change spec more rapidly, players will be able to try and discover a wider variety of interesting specs than otherwise.
2) Designers want players to be able to identify with a specific playstyle decision. It certainly helps the community communicate. I can say “I am a 2H Barbarian” and other players know what this means (that I am PvP spec’d.) Furthermore, because each spec reflects a broad playstyle (like PvP vs PvE) hard specs provide a language for players to talk about playstyles within the community.
Why this is flawed: These are characteristics of quality SPEC design, not making the specs nearly permanent decisions. If your specs are good and certain choices are enhanced by other choices, players will tend to build specs by which they can identify themselves.
3) Designers want systems to act as economic drains.
Why this is flawed: Respecing is a very poor economic drain. The higher the cost, the less people that will use the system. In general, the best drains are so small they are barely noticable by players OR they are so well integrated into the game’s systems they are a part of the game. EVE is an example: ship loss is a major drain, but it’s a part of play. As is resource refinement inefficiency and contract fees. Respecing isn’t something players do often and do less the more you charge. Charging less would increase its efficiency as a drain. Furhtermore, any drain can be eliminated by removing it and compensating by increasing other drains or lowering faucets.
4) Designers do it because WoW did it.
Why this is flawed: WoW is making a mistake. Copying its mistakes is an error. WoW’s economy has inflated to the point where respec costs are somewhat minimal at level 70 compared to the amount of gold earned doing dailies. AoC’s economy is vestigial, so costs have a greater impact.
Further harms:
- High costs to respec punishes experimentation. Experimentation should NOT be the province of a few rich players. Rather, the designers are missing an opportunity to make spec experimentation a natural part of play. With spec costs increasing exponentially, I am not likely to waste any money on experimentation unless I’m a particularly hardcore theory-crafter. Why eliminate an activity that players might have fun doing?
- High costs to respec puts a high educational burden on the player. Mistakes made during specing are costly, so all players must spend a lot of time on the forums or fan sites researching “proper” decisions. Obviously this is going to lead to the propogation of cookie-cutter builds, but furthermore it favors players who are “hardcore” enough to do that research. Players who are new or aren’t savvy enough may suffer, but not know why they aren’t playing well.
- High costs to respec hurt meta-gaming. Meta gaming is the concept of making a decision to counter a broad community-scale phenomenon. If I find that a large number of opponents are using knockbacks, I might spec into anti-knockback tech to have an advantage. Obviously a part of meta-gaming is designers providing meta-game options in the spec tree, but without experimentation players will not be as likely to discover unlikely counters to common patterns.
Meta-gaming is the soul of a very healthy PvP environment, with players becoming savvy enough to speak in terms of common builds, their counters, good team-ups, bad match-ups, etc.
—
Additionally: the cost to “earn” the spec has already been paid in the time it took to advance. Charging for respecing is a lot like charging me to rebuild my Magic the Gathering deck. I’ve already bought the cards, why charge me to try out different combinations? Obviously you wouldn’t do this in a card game, yet the card game’s competitiveness, retention, and attachment rates do not suffer anything for giving me the ability to change my deck at any time (except in the middle of a tournament…a rule that could apply to AoC as well).
Let’s see what the AoC community has to say:
http://forums.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?t=32135
Topics: Game Design | 4 Comments »
Dear Age of Conan Devs
By Brandon Reinhart | May 25, 2008
Your game is very cool. I’m having fun chopping heads off noobs as a Barbarian. You’ve packed quite a few interesting ideas into this game. Thanks! I’d like to make a little request though: REMOVE THE FREAKING RESPEC COSTS. Holy crap. Many of the feats are plain broken and for many classes different specs represent PvE/PvP splits (like Barbarians: 2H vs DW). All of my money earned so far has gone into spec experimentation, but now I’m stuck. There’s no reason to have respec costs. I’d love to be able to go back to town and switch between 2H or DW depending on what I feel like playing, but furthermore I really hate picking feats that don’t work and getting stuck with them.
Broken feats are understandable. With 12 classes and 2 feat trees each, there’s bound to be some overlooked bits. But I also know you aren’t going to fix them any time soon. You have more important things to deal with, having just launched the game. Fair enough. In the mean time, could you please consider giving us an easier way out of permanent decisions (particularly when we lack good information early on to base our decisions on).
There’s no justification for punishing the player for making mistakes and there’s no justification for putting a cost on respecing. You actually want to encourage players to have easy access to changes. You want to encourage meta-gaming and you want to encourage experimentation. Please, please, remove the cost to respec.
And if you don’t do that, at least have it tell me how much my next respec will cost instead of just “You can’t afford to respec your feats.” 
Topics: Age of Conan | 1 Comment »
My Ion 08 Talk - Live blogged.
By Brandon Reinhart | May 15, 2008
Darius Kazemi managed to live blog a transcript of my ION conference talk. Here’s the link:
http://tinysubversions.blogspot.com/2008/05/ion08-conference-brandon-reinhart-on.html
I am planning on writing the talk up in an accessible essay format, once I get back from Seattle. In the mean, check out the transcript.
Huge thanks to Darius for writing this up, that truly goes above and beyond.
Topics: Developers | 2 Comments »
Age of Conan Early Access Sells Out
By Brandon Reinhart | May 15, 2008
Argh. I went over to eb games with the intent of pre-ordering Age of Conan to get access to the early access rush that will happen in two days. A posting there indicates that Funcom has closed pre-order sales with digital download because they have “sold out” of early access slots. While this sucks for me, it shows some intelligence on the part of Funcom. Although this will no doubt slow pre-orders, it does mean they are aware that the initial rush of players has to be carefully managed. This tells me that they have a pretty good idea of what their hardware and support crew can handle and that they are going to ease in to a full on launch. With hope this will help compensate for launch-day technical woes and give them three days to work out issues before the full on launch rush.
Rumor holds that Age of Conan is overall better looking and more playable than Warhammer Online, but that AoC has some technical limitations that may hurt it at launch. We’ll see. This is going to be an interesting launch. Their public beta has greatly improved public perception of the game and raised general awareness of the title’s impending release.
Topics: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »
Insurgency withdraws, Triumverate disbands.
By Brandon Reinhart | May 15, 2008
My alliance has managed to win an intense and very brutal pvp war against Insurgency and Triumverate for control of the Deklein region. Triumverate has completely collapsed as a factor in 0.0 and Insurgency is at this very moment making a panicked withdraw to guard protected Empire space. Deklein is wide open and the land rush is on. Gotta love massive scale pvp and crushing weaker factions.
Topics: EVE | No Comments »
Now I am in Seattle!
By Brandon Reinhart | May 12, 2008
I’m in Seattle for the week to attend the Ion Conference as the Design Advisor. I’m also giving a talk (which I still need to make tweaks to). I’ll post more on it later.
For now, I need to explore the immediate area!
Topics: Game Design | No Comments »
April Loot Roll
By Brandon Reinhart | May 11, 2008
April was a strong month for Dark Favor. We started to get one shots on Gurtogg Bloodboil, we defeated the Reliquary of Souls on our first night of attempts, and the same for Mother Shahraz. We still aren’t able to kill Archimonde, but we are making solid progress into the Black Temple.
On the flip side, the start of May has been a little rough. One of our best priest-healers suddenly transferred to another server, leaving a wake of vindictive drama behind. Several other paladin-healers may be transferring with her. A nother paladin-healer has declared his intent to quit WoW once his subscription expires later this month. So losing up to four healers in a week isn’t a good thing, but opening the doors to recruitment should solve that problem. Healers seem to get burned out pretty quickly. (We also had a Hunter quit, but that’s less of an issue. Finding new DPS is always easier than finding new healers.)
So May could be somewhat rocky, as we find new footing and train up new recruits. On the flip side, we might see a victory over the Illidari Council. Only time will tell.
Here’s the loot roll. I didn’t buy anything with DKP during April. The two weapons were free items, both going to be disenchanted. I took them to play with them in PvP.
I’m currently sitting on 212.00 points, #4 in the guild overall. The only item I need off of bosses we can kill is Teron’s cloak. Most of my needed drops moving forward come off of the big man himself.
Topics: World of Warcraft | 1 Comment »
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