Those Warship scenarios are actually good for something

When there is no ranked season, I play random battles to collect the coal. If I have a camo and +XP signal (I have 100+, despite never buying them, they just come), getting 7-8K XP isn’t hard, meaning I can get all 3 crates in 6-7 games. I need the coal to buy +speed, +flood, +AA and -explosion signals. I have 80K, but I want more, just to be sure.

There are also two daily quests, needing 6 battles, 4 wins with increasing XP. They provide modest rewards, including coal and I already decided that they aren’t worth the extra work. I mean if I already have the 3 crates and have 2 wins missing, there is no point trying to get 2 more wins, because MM can say “nope” for 10 games, both in form of defeats and in 1299 XP wins.

I started doing scenarios (PvE battles) for the Royal Navy event, which consist quests for both rewards and progression to the next stage. Some of these quests send you to a scenario. Scenarios count into the daily quest too and I’ve never seen a defeat. Getting 1300 base XP is hard on some, but easy on the recent submarine scenario. So if I have just a few wins missing from the daily, I go to the scenario and do it. Easy win and reward for trivial work. It’s a dumb grind, but sometimes it is worth the effort.

The second ranked sprint didn’t even end, but it ended on the first day for me. So I don’t know when the next “real” ranked will start. But I stockpile the coal, because I’ll need it to properly deck out my Shima and Grozovoi.

If all else fails, do as Gevlon told you in 2014

Nosy gamer reported that finally CCP did the sensible thing and stopped the grief-wardecs after they’ve found that only 4% of these wars have a defender side kill and most “defenders” just quit their corp or the game.

Their reasoning – as their representative told to Kotaku:

CCP has now stated that in EVE’s winter release, corporations that have not built a structure in space will no longer be a valid target for war declarations. This means that players who have formed social groups and have no interest in war nor capability to defend themselves will have a way to opt out of being targeted and hunted into extinction.

The funny thing is that this was my exact reasoning for the exact same solution 4 years ago.

Of course CCP weren’t drooling retards to be unable to see the obvious, especially that I spelled it out for them. They merely didn’t care, because the company wasn’t on the brink of death, so the devs cared more about the fun their “player” friends had than the amount of players and income the game lose over their griefing.

Finally, when the question re-emerged as “what can we do to save our jobs”, they “figured it out”. This is a shining proof of corruption and the lack of proper management from the top. The questions of today should have been asked 10 years ago by some top dog. But since they did not check on their minions, they were free to put their own little interest above the company’s.

What changed? Pearl Abyss took over and they are sure good in analyzing player retention. They probably sent some data analysts over who instantly pointed out how harmful highsec wars are (against non-structure owners) and demanded a solution.

So now, with new bosses, there is hope for EVE. Just as I predicted in 2016 by the way. Does that mean I’m considering returning? No. While the wardec fix is great and shows that PA is caring for the well-being of the game, it’s not enough. I have a special canary in the mine: the employment of CFC Falcon. As long as that stinking beacon of corruption is polluting EVE, I won’t touch it. Things can’t get really better as long as the management can’t even catch such blatant exploiter of the game.

And as usual, Goons aren’t shy to point this out. They proudly present their close connection to him and make sure to personally inform me about it, as a warning what if I’d dare to challenge them again, I still wouldn’t just face lots of players, but devs.

“Humble” request for unban

You might remember when I proved that there is no such thing as Star Savers in World of Warships, got banned from the game subreddit for it, then upvoted for posting totally fake “proof” that they exist.

Their only excuse was that I don’t have “experience”, because you know you have to be a fly to write a scientific paper about their behavior. Just gathering objective data doesn’t help.

Now that I’ve ranked out on the first day, in 24 games, I went back to them with this “humble” request:

They did not respond, so I assume they do not wish me in their noble community.

You might say that posting with a more humble tone would have helped. But why would I do that? It’s me who is offering free content. My blog is a work of love, with no monetization (whatever ads you see is placed by the free blog engine, I don’t see a dime). They are not a prestigious publisher, but a shitty subreddit where most posts are low effort memes.

I don’t need them, they need me. They are likely unable to see that. That’s fine.

I have readers here who value my work. Maybe I could have more if my work was reposted in reddit. But those people had the exact same chance to find me as my current readers. I owe them nothing either. Even more: I owe you, the current reader nothing. If I’d wake up tomorrow and delete all the content I’ve created, you couldn’t ask for your money back, as you gave me none.

This should be an important lesson for all wannabe bloggers, if they don’t want to quit fast, like most in Blaugust. You writing is a gift to people you don’t know. You owe them nothing. They don’t have to like your writing or you. You are the one doing the favor, act like it.

However, some will. And they will come back.

It’s called ranked sprint for a reason

So the second ranked sprint started Nov 1 morning in World of Warships. As Nov 1 is “Day of the dead” holiday here, I could start playing from the beginning.

Around 5 PM:

The statistics page doesn’t even have a Sprint 2 page, so there is no leaderboard yet, but my stats are already up.

Indeed, the opponents on the first day were harder than on day 5 with the Bogue in sprint 1, so my winrate fell back to 67% from 73. Still super Unicum. My plane kills are down to 13.7 from 16.6, but most of the time I kept the skies.

I can only add one thing to my Bogue guide. There are some super curious players who just fly over their own ships with fighters and bombers, waiting for me to open. This case I hit any bad target I can (destroyers, cruisers) on the sides, because a little damage is better than none, while he is waiting for me to commit over some valuable target that will never come. Finally he loses his patience and takes an unfavorable fighter duel.

Here are the results from all battles:

The summary of the second league: Win, W, Star save, W, W, W,
The summary of the first league: Lose, L, W, L, W, W, W, L, L, W, W, S, S, W, W, W, W, W.

This isn’t how you design a game, part 54321

Everyone makes mistakes, including game developers. But this post isn’t about a random unbalanced class or (even a game breaking) bug. They’ll fix it.

I’m talking about games that are built on a completely hopeless idea, like Zeal.

Zeal is a 3rd person Action RPG where you don’t need to level up and gear up your characters, you just pick a class, make a build and jump right into the action!
— Up to 16 playable classes
— Arena mode of 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 with ladder system
— Battlegrounds, big scale fights that ranges between 5v5 to 20v20 depending on map with interactive objectives such as Capture The Flag or Defend The Base.
— Dungeons: An action-packed PvE mode with different difficulty levels.
— Conquest Mode: A massive map with 35 teams of 2 players fighting for dominance until a last team is standing.
— Story Campaign which can be completed alone or with up to 2 friends.

None of these is bad, per se. But they are industry standards. Every MMO has classes, arenas, battlegrounds, dungeons and scenarios. No gears and levels are standard in MOBAs and FPS-es, and while they are a weird choice for an MMO, level and gear scaling WoW is practically the same thing with some cosmetic gear and levels.

Ergo, we have a game that offers absolutely nothing new. On the bad side it offers all the new-game problems from bad graphics to unbalanced classes. But even all of it are ironed out, the perfect version of this game would still be worse than WoW.

Please note that I didn’t mean “in my opinion”. In my opinion the Black Desert gear upgrade mechanic is horrible. But it’s fundamentally different from WoW’s and I understand that some people like it better. But with Zeal nothing different. It’s like a rusty sword and a shining one. They are both swords, but one of them is shiny.

Let’s say I’m not surprised that the Kickstarter is failing and has 57 average players. Were these people not thinking? Is there no formal training for game developers?

If we excuse them as dumb enthusiasts in a garage, what’s the excuse for ArenaNet who thought that and WvW becomes a Major Thing, including an esports franchise. What? How could anyone with a brain think that Server vs Server can become anything but server hopping. Players always switch to the winning or more rewarding faction instead of fighting it out. Always! Not me saying it, but every single experiment. Remember Tol Barad win-trading? Those were the days, but they only lasted for a week and Blizzard never expected TB more than a side-activity.

And people are still crying over developers losing their jobs? These people don’t know the very basics of their profession. Crying over their misfortune is like crying over the engineer who – after years of dreaming and hard work – fails to create the Perpetuum mobile.

Busted! Also on game endings

I thought it all out well and was pretty smug about myself catching Azuriel whining about a game he kept playing until completion.

Then Smokeman reminded me that I did the same with Subnautica. After 200 hours. The truth is that I loved exploring the world. I even made a huge map.

The problem came when the exploration was complete and the game had no other content what wasn’t trivial. Playing the game to completion takes a few hours and includes no challenge. Not WASD, not thinking, not even grinding. The game is trivial and boring if you already explored it.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I played 200+ hours with a normal priced game. This was a good buy then, period.

This revealed that games should be either MMOs or end properly. Lingering on doesn’t help. If I got a “you explored everything” screen in Subnautica and was booted to the main menu, I’d be satisfied. But the game kept on existing and shoveled into my face that all the exploration was a big waste, because you don’t need those locations, you don’t need materials, you don’t need anything but 3 hours and some basic mats to win.

Alternatively the game could run forever as an MMO, with gradual challenges and progression.

Dead Cells left a bad taste for Azuriel and Subnautica for me. Not because they were bad, but because they didn’t close properly. We played a lot, being free advertisers for the game. But we left as bitter customers, spreading bad word of mouth.

Developers should think about not only the players who play, but design the whole product lifecycle to the point of quitting. Because if the game isn’t an MMO, we must quit it some time. We shouldn’t quit the way Azuriel and I did.

.

PS: World of Warship random matchmaking can’t stop to amuse me:

But you kept playing and that matters

Azuriel is upset about a game called Dead Cells. I don’t know the game, but he describes his problem pretty well: the game has half an hour content from start to finish, but it took him 26 hours to kill the last boss, because it has a harsh death penalty: you lose your progress and have to start the game again.

So he went in again and again until he got lucky with drops (if the boss have no timer or you die before the timer is up, damage reduction and heals beat any combo) and killed it.

Then proceeded to whine how empty and bad it feels, therefore designers are wrong. “But I know for a fact that I would have enjoyed Dead Cells more had I beaten the last boss two runs earlier than I did two runs later. ”

Dear Azuriel and dear lurking devs: nobody cares if you (the players of your game) enjoy the game. What matter is that you kept playing. Had you killed the last boss 2 runs earlier, you’d abandoned the game an hour earlier. Difficulty isn’t about “having fun”. Naked costumes, mailboxes, dance emotes and the ability to write “Anal [Eviscerate]” on global chat is created for “having fun”. Difficulty is needed to keep playing and give a sense of accomplishment and exclusivity.

Do you think Marathon runners are having fun at the 30 km mark? But they still show up at the race, without anyone paying them, as a hobby. They keep running because it’s hard. Because it’s an accomplishment.

You can tell whatever you want Azuriel, actions speak louder: you kept playing until you killed the boss!

Job is not a resource and services aren’t products

Telwyn wrote: “Speaking of Rift, the slightly shocking announcement that Trion has been bought by Gamigo and that subsequently a majority of the staff were laid off was a very sad piece of news to be reading. … People losing their jobs is never good news. I hope that Gamigo treat the games with some care and we don’t see another Wildstar-style shutdown on the cards.”

This is a dumb thing to say. It’s a bizarrely socialist way to look at jobs as something you have and can lose, like a home or a car. Jobs are positions to work. The ability to work isn’t a rare resource, you can work any time, just get up from your computer and clean your room.

When you consider your job as a limited resource, you implicitly say that your salary is unearned. That you are lucky to have this job, because you are paid more than you deserve. If you are not an impostor who got there by luck or scam, you get your salary for valuable work and you are able to provide this work somewhere else as soon as you are laid off.

The laid off Trion devs will get a new job fast if they are good at producing games. If they are not, they shouldn’t get a job in the game industry, because who needs crappy games?!

Wildstar didn’t shut down by a disaster, but because it wasn’t profitable to upkeep. It didn’t earn enough money to pay for the servers and for the staff that operates it. It’s not like your old car being destroyed by a fallen tree. Services aren’t products that exist on their own after creation. They must be continuously provided by someone and this costs money. If it’s a work of love, its price is the opportunity cost of creating something else. If Rift cannot upkeep its servers, it should be shot down as it’s eating resources that could be used for productive companies.

If you think that Rift is a good service and that’s why it shouldn’t be lost, maybe consider using it as a paying customer.

Feeling the obvious

Gnomecore and Syp wrote very similar posts: Battle for Azeroth is bad because lack of feeling of progression.

While Blizzard did some ridiculously bad choices like scaling mobs to contribute to this feeling, the thing is that progression was missing from the game since WotLK. In BC you could grow your power compared to the world and the “noobs” during the expansion and got reseted only on new expansion day. In WotLK it was every patch with catchup mechanisms, so you couldn’t really outgrow the others or the new content.

I started to lose interest in the game and finally quit it. Or – as I use to say – I didn’t quit but play optimally: the easiest way to get gearscore X is to wait until it becomes catch-up.

Now the truth caught on these bloggers and others, my comment is merely “what took you so long”? Maybe Blizzard did better job concealing the lack of progress and you didn’t care about the reality till the feeling was there? Or nostalgia ran out?

This is why it’s important to rationally evaluate systems and leave when you see it’s broken and not when the collapse reaches you. Of course I’m not innocent of lingering, I kept playing EVE half year after Falcon made it clear that I shouldn’t. But me being guilty in the same thing doesn’t make it less wrong. WoW lacked “real” progression (compared to the existing content and the average player) long ago.

Sales, price segmentation and outrage

We could read on MMO Fallout that those who bought Shadow of the Tomb Raider for full price are outraged over the fact that the game now costs just half as much, only a month later. Please note that it’s not an MMO where being there at launch is special and provide advantages over latecomers. Those who buy it now enjoy the very same product for half price.

While the PR is maybe bad and such visible customer outrage could be avoided, the goal of sales were always price segmentation. This simply means “sell the same stuff high to the rich/enthusiast and low for the poor/barely-interested”. This sounds like a rip-off. You get a worse price for the same product just because the seller assumes that you can afford it.

You probably consider this practice evil and want to ban it. The EU banned several instances of such practices. Drug re-import is a hot topic in the USA. Nobody likes price segmentation.

I do, because it increases the GDP, therefore the well-being of everyone. To understand why, you must understand that all products have fixed and variable costs. In short, the fixed cost is the cost of creating the first product, the variable is the cost of creating copies. For something like a natural resource or a service, most of the costs are variable. For example a waitress has hiring costs and training costs, but this is in the magnitude of one month salary. So if you have a waitress for a year, her costs are 90% variable. But the more advanced the product is, the costs of development are getting higher. For digital entertainment and software, most of the costs are fixed.

If the product sells in N copies, then the price must be V+F/N to break even. If you can’t sell for this, you go bankrupt. Price segmentation is realizing that this is only true on average. The individual customer can pay less or more. Imagine that you can only sell a game for full price because such segmentation methods are banned. Let’s say the development cost was $10M and operating the servers and paying for the digital download provider is $5/copy.

If you can sell 100K copies, than you must price them $105. Except this sentence makes no sense. The amount you can sell of a flexible product like a video game greatly depends on the price. Let’s say there are only 50K people who are ready to pay this price. Bang, you are bankrupt.

However if price segmentation is not banned, you might not go bankrupt. You sell 50K copies for $105, so you recouped $5M production costs. Then you drop the price to $55 and you can sell another 80K copies. That’s another $4M. Finally you drop it to $25 and sell 100K more copies. Now you have $2M more, so you paid for your fixed costs and made $1M profit. If you would have opened with $25 price and sell all 230K copies for that, you’d only make $4.6M, you can start writing the “with heavy heart we must announce that…” letter to your customers, including the ones who would gladly pay $105.

Imagine price segmentation as pushing a cart together. The strong pushes more than the weak, but they both push and the cart is moving faster (or at all) this way compared to the strong pushing the cart alone. By buying for full price, you support the developer more than the guy who buys on sale, but he still supports it.

This isn’t leeching. The poor still contributes to the common good by carrying a portion of the fixed costs. That portion does not need to be paid by the rich. If we’d ban this practice, the prices would go up. For example the mentioned game must be sold for $205 if no one can buy it for less than $105. Except 50K copies wouldn’t sell for $205, so the price needs to be further elevated.

I agree that this case wasn’t the nicest implementation. The company should provide at least a marginal benefit for those who support them more and make his practices somewhat transparent. For example they could add extra costumes or whatnot to the original version of the game to reward those who don’t wait for the sale. But the main goal is solid and good.