A couple of nice people I encountered

So I played hooky today, after a very long (very fun, but very long) weekend. And, yes, I spent most of the (waking) day playing CoX, because I was just in that kind of “burn some time doing something fun” kind of mood.

And so I need to compliment two players I ran into PUGging during the day.

1. Dr. Bearnard, a large, bear-shaped, lvl 25 Defender on Virtue, who shepherded / supported a band of Lvl 3-4 characters through the Sewers from Atlas, down to the bottom, and up again to Kings Row, offering heals, but, as important, congratulating each character by name when they leveled. And, when we were most of the way back up, teleported the whole crew to the exit. The character was very supportive, polite, and made the Sewers death-march almost pleasant (not to mention profitable), without at all trying to be the boss. Molly Morningway thanks you, Doc.

2. Cut-Up, a lvl 42-or-so Dual-Blades Tank on Freedom, who invited me on to help finish a mish when folks were dropping from the original team because of problems … and, when it turned out to be just him and me, went out of his way to find something we could do (with me down at 39), eventually leading us to do a few of the Midnighter missions. Very hospitable. Miss Crackle gives you a smile and a wink, Cut-Up.

On the flip side, Molly found herself this evening with the rump-end of a group where most folks had to run. She’s managed not to get a bank mish yet, so she didn’t have a travel power and was at 11. And she was given the star.

*sigh*

So, still in Kings Row, she recruited for the mish, got a group of eight, carefully explained how she wanted the mish to go (“Let’s street sweep on our way to the bank, since not everyone has a travel power yet. Yes, we have plenty of time to do that.”) … and ended up running after everyone who was charging at full tilt toward the next goal.

Still managed to survive, get a temp travel power, two side missoins, and enough XP to level to 12. Fortunately, Margie came home about then, and I could duck out.

There’s a reason I never ask for the star …

Paying for Fun

Grepppo posted a link in a comment which pointed (eventually) to this article on China’s “gold farming” industry.

Li Hua makes a living playing computer games. Working from a cramped office in the heart of Changsha, China, he slays dragons and loots virtual gold in 10-hour shifts. Next to him, rows of other young workers do the same. “It is just like working in a factory, the only difference is that this is the virtual world,” says Li. “The working conditions are hard. We don’t get weekends off and I only have one day free a month. But compared to other jobs it is good. I have no other skills and I enjoy playing sometimes.”

Li is just one of more than 100 workers employed by Wow7gold, an internet-based company that makes more than £1m a year selling in-game advantages to World of Warcraft (WoW) players. Customers may ask for their avatar’s skill level to be increased (“power levelling”), or for a virtual magic sword or precious ore to be obtained. As one player put it: “Where there’s a demand, China will supply it.”

For thousands of Chinese workers such as Li, “gold farming” is a way of life. Workers can expect to earn between £80-£120 a month which, given the long hours and night shifts, can amount to as little as 30p an hour. After completing his shift, Li is given a basic meal of rice, meat and vegetables and falls into a bunk bed in a room that eight other gold farmers share. His wages may be low, but food and accommodation are included.

There are an estimated 400,000 folks in Asia working in the “playbour” industry.

Thousands of miles away, western consumers are driving these industries, pumping hard-earned cash into products and services that exist only in fantasy lands. I ask Jamie el-Banna, a 24-year-old gamer from the UK, what makes him spend his money on these sites. “The reason people buy gold is the same reason they pay people to wash their car – they would rather spend money than do it themselves” he says.

“You could spend time farming gold, say, 20 real-life hours. Or you could go to work for two hours and earn the money to buy the gold. If I’m playing I want to play, not do boring tasks. Go back some years, and a job involving a computer was a skilled job. Nowadays, keyboards and mice are the new ploughs and shears.”

But does he ever consider the conditions of the workers supplying these services? “I don’t think about the workers. I think about the product. I’m sure the wage that gold farmers are paid is low. Manual labourers in third-world countries probably earn a similar amount, but I doubt you would ask someone this kind of question if you saw them drinking a cup of coffee.”

It’s an interesting concept — disturbing in many ways, as any sort of cheap foreign labor is. EULA conditions aside, is it “ethical” play?

Part of the blame has to come from the games themselves, I should think. If you have a game that relies too much on drudgery and grinding to get to the points where the player can have “fun,” then, yes, that’s going to encourage this sort of cheating. I hear a lot more about this sort of thing in WoW than in CoX or LotRO, and I don’t think it’s just because of the relative player base. 

But it does exist, even in those latter games — though I suspect it’s more in the form of PLing than buying gold (or Influence). If I could magically change some of my low-level characters in to their 20s or 30s, that would be kind of cool. But somehow paying someone to do it for me seems wrong — a harkening back to the Indulgence trade, perhaps (which originally arose when remission of sins awarded by the Church for particular holy acts — a pilgrimage, going on a crusade — evolved into paying to equip someone to do it, thence to simply … paying). 

For myself, it’s just not something I’d actually do. But is it really something I can condemn someone else for doing? Yeah, I can point to the ill effects it causes — inflation in the auction houses (if a sufficient number of people did it), and a bunch of PLed n00bs running around who don’t know how to use their powers on a PUG. But, really, those are relatively trivial. It seems that the “offense” is primarily against the social contract of the game and the ethical concerns over the working conditions of the “playbourers.”

I just wish they’d stop spamming my in-box.

Blowing up bad guys

So I’m horribly, horribly behind in all my I14 pre-release info review. 

Instead, Margie and I have been grinding along on various PI arcs, in particular the first Tina McIntyre Praetorian gig. Unlike previous duos, we decided we really wanted to see if we could take on the AVs as AVs, rather than as Elite Bosses.

We tried duoing some AVs with Psi-clone and Amorpha, but just couldn’t get the DPS up high enough (which, with Amorpha, was saying something). But with Kitsune and Ex-Terra, in particular with Kitsune’s /Rad bits, we thought we might stand a chance.

Two things we learned.

1. Running into a room to confront an AV without prepping yourself first is an excellent way to experience Paragon City’s fine health care system.

2. We can, indeed, duo AVs. Not without difficulty and occasional death, but between irradiating the snot out of them, distracting them with phantoms, and and with Ex-Terra’s spine slowing and damage, plus some careful Endurance management, we managed to take down the four AVs (AntiMatter (twice), Neuron, Bobcat, Shadowhunter) in that arc. Yay.

Big XP, too, natch.

I’m taking souvenir pix of the baddies.

By Sunday night we were well into level 45. Good fun.

Hover and Flight Speeds

Some love going out in I14 to folks who choose the Hovering Lifestyle …

Folks may or may not be happy to know that I [Castle] checked in some changes for I14 yesterday that increases the minimum speed of Hover and the Suppressed Speed of Flight. Previously, both values are ~5.5 [mph] on live. After the change, the values will be ~14 [mph], with Hover enhanceable up to around 22[mph] (about the speed of unslotted Sprint.)

And, more directly (including bumping Swift with Flight):

Currently:
Code:Hover 14.18
w 3 slots 21.78
w swift 16.13
w both*3 25.16

That’s not great, and it’s still an expensive build, but it makes it more feasible to have toons that “never” touch ground (I have a couple) by design.

Sources: 1 2 

NCsoft and Europe

I follow along the European Dev Digest as well as the US one, so the current kerfuffle at NC Brighton caught my eye.

NCsoft Europe cuts 70 jobs at Brighton office – Massively
Official details on the NCsoft Europe layoffs – Massively 

With the official word from NCsoft being:

In order to solidify and streamline company operations across all NCsoft West territories, we are implementing some structural changes this week which will impact 70 to 90 employees. We are working with these employees to determine the best fit for approximately 80 alternate positions within the company.

The European office is transitioning to have a stronger focus in marketing and sales, with many of the existing disciplines being consolidated in our studios on the US West Coast and our headquarters in Seattle. Additionally, we are transitioning to an embedded quality assurance (QA) model in which the QA staff works in our studios directly with the development teams, providing support throughout the entire development process.

This finalizes the NCsoft West reorganization plan which began last September, and the resulting structure will better support the company’s direction. 

The current senior customer rep for Europe, Ghost Raptor, is leaving (not formally booted, but unwilling to relocate to the US). Avatea is the new CSR, and will be moving to NCNC. That’s all led to speculation that the US and European boards might merge.

It can’t be seen as particularly good news by any means, though how bad it actually is remains hotly debated (lots of cries of “DOOOOM!” and “I hate you!” in various spots).
 

Meanwhile, at the upper end of the level range …

After about a week and a half of not feeling the CoX urge, Margie and I spent several hours this weekend doing two of our higher-level characters, Kitsune-chan and Ex-Terra, dinging them up to 43 and securely into the lower end of Peregrine Island.

Kitsune’s an Illusion Controller, but unlike my first 50, Psi-clone, she’s Ill/Rad, rather than Ill/Emp. The difference in play style is interesting. With PC my job was (aside from providing controllerish stuff with Phred the Phantasm and Scary Sam and the Boys) to keep Amorpha on her feet. Lots of buffs and heals, and let her do the heavy lifting.

Kitsune, on the other hand, only rarely fires off heals, since she has just the one. Instead, her job is to debuff the biggest boss on the board and then control the mobs while Ex-Terra spine-AoEs the snot out of them. It’s an effective combo — more of a team effort than PC/Amorpha, as both of us are AoEing the heck out of the baddies. Indeed, by the time I get around to actually doing any attacks, the baddy minons are usually down to a sliver. Aside from simple goofs, we seem pretty unstoppable at Unyielding (which provides more mobs, if not quite as high level as Invincible); I’m tempted as we get into the final story arcs to bump to Invincible and see how effective we are duoing vs AVs.

As Margie notes, there’s a reason that /Rad controllers are so in demand in PUGs.

Fun times.

You think the drama llamas in your SG cause problems?

Imagine if the defection of a member of your SG could not only dissolve your entire super-group, but leave all of Paragon open to effective attack by Lord Recluse and the Rikti combined. That’s sort of analogous to what’s going on over at Eve Online.

Something Awful’s Eve Online wing, GoonSwarm, has claimed what will likely go down in internet history as its greatest victory. It was an event described in a Metafilter headline thus: “It’s as if Apple dissolved Microsoft“.

That’s an incredibly accurate diagnosis of the events of last week. Thanks to a brutal betrayal of trust by an Eve player, the Something Awful superpower has used the game’s strange organisational mechanisms to take their arch-rival’s name away from them. Band Of Brothers (BoB), once the most feared of alliances, is now gone for good. The Goon victory wasn’t a great battle, nor a tremendous war brought to an end. Instead it was an inspired defector that led to the dissolution of one of Eve‘s most significant brands. It was a classic instance of underhand warfare tactics from the real world: sabotage by a traitor, trashing vital infrastructure, and leaving the gates of the fortress unlocked.

So what does it all mean? And how did it all come to pass? What it means is that upwards of several million man hours of work have been instantly obliterated, and a relatively peaceful region of Eve Online has been plunged into fresh war. The equivalent real-world costs are almost incalculable, given the sheer number of factors involved, and the thousands of people who have contributed to BoB. But it’s safe to say that we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in virtual investment put at risk.

Sounds both amazingly fascinating and a huge reason why I will never play that game …

Stinking Badges!

While most Red Name posts tend to be brief, I found this extended item from Positron fascinating as an insight as to how design work operates on this game (or, sometimes, doesn’t operate), especially over time.

Here’s some detail into the badge systems that several of you have deduced through reasoning and sometimes nefarious means.

When badges were introduced back in issue 2, we had the ability to give them a Name and a Description, and all the badges got these (of course). When City of Villains was in development, it was determined for those characters to use the same badge system as the original one for clarity sake (no sense in having two datasets floating around). We added a couple more fields to the database: V_Name and V_Description. These are used when your character has the “villain” bit turned on.

Now back then, I was the one in charge of all the badges, so I went and looked at all of them and wrote villainous names and descriptions for the badges that villains would be able to earn. In the process I had come across several badges that were “impossible” for the other side to get, “Positron’s Ally”, “Villainous”, etc.

I discussed with Jack and Poz what to do, and we had a plan back then. We knew it would someday be possible for a villain to turn into a hero or vice versa, so it was decided that the “impossible to get” badges should have titles and descriptions entered that reflected your “going rogue” status.

Thus (for example) “Positron’s Ally” has a V_Name of “Positron’s Betrayer”. “Villainous” is the V_Name, and so the Name (as seen by hero) is “Reformed”. The descriptions were entered to reflect a character that started on one side and switched to the other. There are literally dozens of badges with this sort of nomenclature in them.

These went through testing and betas and launched with Issue 6: Along Came a Spider. It wasn’t until the badge system got the pounding of the entire playerbase that a lot of cracks in the system became exposed. Most of these got shored up between issue 6 and issue 7, a couple persisted through to later issues, and one was thought to be fixed, but wasn’t really. That was the infamous Reformed badge. A badge which was able to be earned through a Villain character hitting a Hero character with Confuse while in Siren’s Call, enabling the Hero to now attack, and defeat, Longbow, and thus earn credit for the badge.

Fast forward to Issue 10: Invasion. We now introduced a mission that heroes could take that involves them going up against rogue Longbow agents. Suddenly there was a “legitimate” way to earn the badge. I use quotes around that because earning the badge involves farming the mission over and over to get the requisite 1000 defeats needed for it.

Fast Forward to Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. I am no longer “the man” when it comes to badges. Phil “Synapse” Zeleski has the dubious task of managing these and a lot of the other reward systems in CoH/V. I know how much work this is and how hard it is, and when Phil started delving into the datafiles he had a lot of questions. The Reformed badge was one of them, and I (wrongly) told him that it shouldn’t be available to Heroes at all. Dutifully Phil then put a “requires = villain” on the badge, thus killing any chance Heroes had of getting the badge, however the progress bar’s requirement was left to “any”, so Heroes would see their progress bar, just not be able to actually achieve the badge.

Again Phil asked me how to handle this: remove the meter, or let Heroes get the badge. I made the wrong decision (again!), and had Phil simply remove the progress meter. Yes, I had heard the concerns of a few vocal badge aficionados, and I fell on the wrong side of the argument (it’s amazing, but sometimes being insulted makes you feel MORE right than you probably should).

After sitting down with Phil and going over the history of EVERYTHING badge related with this issue, Phil and I decided to go back and reinstate the Reformed badge for Heroes. This will be in Issue 14: Architect, but your credit should still be being counted from now until that releases. Of course, you have no progress bar, and something might have happened elsewhere that I don’t know about, so if you really want to make progress towards the badge, I would wait until Issue 14 is released to do it.

I’ve been on some software projects like this. “Hey, Dave, why did you design this thing this way — should we change it to this other way?” “Uh … sure.” [Later.] “Oh, crap, I remember why we didn’t design it that way in the first place …”

Four Years! DING!

Yes, unbelievably, I’ve been playing CoX for that long And though my game time has certainly dropped down a lot after the first couple, I’m still out there fighting (or occasionally committing) crime, and loving it.

I’d like to thank Doyce for dragging me into it in the first place, and Margie for making it something more than just individual fun. And, of course, the folks at NCSoft for making a kickass game (warts and all).

Double XP Weekend

Came and went. Did some play during the weekend, but not obsessively.

Ran Rita and Runt through the entire Indigo arc. Ugh. Dual scrapper teams are not what you want with Knives of Artemis (though we both have some range attacks for those heavily-caltropped encounters), and we had a heck of a time doing a quick and effective take-down of the Sappers. Too many faceplants, but we still got up to 42.

However, we did get enough Prestige for Margie to do something-or-other with the base, so that was all good. And, in keeping with the travel convenience notes in the previous post, we used pretty much everything (except base teleporters) to hop around Paragon at Indigo and Crimson’s requests.

Saturday night, we rolled up a new pair. I wanted to try an AR Blaster again, inspired by the Malta TacOps folks. Except … you just can’t do it, because the military outfits simply are not the same (and, in fact, tend to cut off all the belts), plus there’s not a similar helmet. Disappointing. So I resurrected Honey Gun again, and we played that for a few levels (Margie rolled up a Controller … Controller/Blaster is either going to be very interesting or horribly frustrating).

Today we took a walk on the Red side, getting our Mastermind duo, Gifted Kid and Special Educator, up to 30, woo-hoo. Highest villain I have, and doing the MMs is about as from doing Scrappers as you can get. A fun pair for mindless fun, and the only team we played that actually felt like they were getting double-XP.

I’ve decided to set up a Google Docs spreadsheet with our solos and duos, so we can easily both look at them when we’re not altogether certain what we want to play. I’ll let you know how that works out.

Bells and whistles

Cool, keen stuff out there

  1. Valkyrie costume pack: This came bundled with the Mac client (about which, woo-hoo!), but will be available to everyone else for a paltry sum, along with the …
  2. Mission teleporter: Also available with the Mac client, available for others soon for a small amount. One things that CoX has steadily done over the years is reduce the grind of travel from point to point. Travel powers, obviously. But, then, PocketD (as an intersection with three, later four zones). And teleporters from bases. And a vet reward teleport to bases. And a vet reward jump jet. And then early travel powers from the Kings Row and Steel Canyon Safeguard mishes. And then extra train stops in Skyway and Founder. And Ourobous portals. And team teleport, both as a power but also as a Safeguard Power and a Vet Award. And, now, the ability to simply teleport to your mission (once ever 2 hours). Nice, if too slow. Of course, that’s changed early gameplay a lot. Back in the Good Old Days, I can remember a lot of mad dashes across the Hollows, as well as Steel. Time-consuming and dangerous, but also a chance for some good hunting skills, and an opportunity to know the zone from the ground (not to mention the between-zone gates). My problem these days is that there are so many ways to get places fast, it’s way too easy to not choose the most optimal. 
  3. Vet Reward 57: 50% discount on all tailor sessions (though, to be honest, unless you’re a clothes horse you almost certainly have a ton of unused tailor tokens from past issues).
  4. Vet Reward 60: After 5 years of play, you get all the “big” travel powers — Flight, Superleap, Teleport, Superspeed — available at Level 6, without a prerequisite. That is, take Fly without having to take Hover, or Superspeed without Hasten. Again (see #2), travel is a huge QoL item.

None of these are game balance changers, IMO — they’re just nice-tos to add to the enjoyment of the game. And, of course, an encouragement to stick around.

(For the record, I should be hitting 48 months very shortly.)

Worlds.com patents sex, sues Playboy … film at 11

So Worlds.com has filed suit against NCSoft — with other MMO publishers in their next-step sights — based on a very goofy patent. To wit:

The present invention provides a highly scalable architecture for a three-dimensional graphical, multi-user, interactive virtual world system. In a preferred embodiment a plurality of users interact in the three-dimensional, computer-generated graphical space where each user executes a client process to view a virtual world from the perspective of that user. The virtual world shows avatars representing the other users who are neighbors of the user viewing the virtual word. In order that the view can be updated to reflect the motion of the remote user’s avatars, motion, information is transmitted to a central server process which provides positions updates to client processes for neighbors of the user at that client process. The client process also uses an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the movement of the user’s avatar.

 

Why, yes, that does sound like City of Heroes. And, um, about every other MMO out there. While there seems to be plenty of “prior art” in question, and NCSoft says it will defend itself “vigorously,” some are worried that might not be enough — especially with a suit filed in Texas by an American company against some Damned Furriners.

Rrg.

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