lol Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Chasing a PVE MOBA

July 16, 2015 by Belghast

A Meaningless Term

Yesterday I witnessed a conversation unfold that I have had a dozen times myself with various folks. A friend of mine made the idle comment that they would really like to see a “PVE MOBA”, to which someone else predictably replied that you cannot have a “MOBA” without PVP. The problem is that there is absolutely no clear definition of what exactly a “MOBA” is. Additionally each player seems to refer to a slightly different set of mechanics when someone says “MOBA-like”. So for some people it is all about the match based pvp action, and others it is all about the interesting class design. If you simply dissect the term “MOBA” you get Multiplayer Online Battle Arena… which in itself is another absolutely meaningless term. Multiplayer Online is clear enough but the Battle Arena part is complete nonsense. What are you battling and what sort of arena are you battling in?

For me personally the key elements of what make a MOBA intriguing have nothing to do with player versus player combat. I like the different characters and their unique sets of abilities, and the way they interact with other characters and their abilities. In fact I would be happy spending my time in lane killing creeps because I honestly enjoy doing that way more than engaging with other players. When I play League of Legends I will almost always play against bots, and have long thought that it would make an interesting game to make it purely co-operative against interesting challenges. The problem is if you say this.. you get the reaction above that it cannot be done… because MOBAs are PVP games dammit! But what I am presenting is that folks are assigning a specific mindset to a term that is absolutely meaningless on its own merit. Multiplayer Online Battle Arena can describe so many games and is likely why the term gets blurred so much to describe games that are absolutely nothing like the original Defense of the Ancients roots.

Keep the Interesting Bits

For me the interesting bits about what we generally refer to as a MOBA are the Character design that I have talked about before, and ultimately the payment model. I like this concept of purchasing individual champions, and having a rotation of free champions to play to consistently keep testing the waters and trying to branch out. The key part as well for me is the way that MOBA titles grow over time. If you look at the evolution of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm, in both cases they are constantly releasing new content to satiate the appetites of players. I think this has been key to the success, that every few weeks there is something new being introduced to the game to shake up players expectations. League for example has over 120 different unique champions that they are doing a decent job of keeping balanced against each other, and Heroes is adding at least one champion a month it seems to catch up. So I feel like the big success of this genre has been constant incremental evolution of the product.

This variety helps deal with the “special snowflake” syndrome that happens in MMO design. Often times there is a demographic of players that wants to play a specific class in a manner that was not intended to be played. Granted this happens to some extent in build system MMOs like league, but it is always clear that this is not necessarily a “supported” play style. The champion system instead lets companies roll out lots of hyper focused characters that play to very specific niches. So in this case what would be a “special snowflake” like the “melee hunter” would simply just be another champion they could build to fill that desire. So instead the focus becomes on mastery of a specific set of abilities unique to that champion, rather than a much larger set of abilities as seen in most “talent tree” systems. I feel like this is crucial in allowing someone to adapt to a brand new champion quickly, but at the same time feeling confident enough to branch out into things they have yet to try before. There are game play modes like ARAM (All Random All Mid) that encourage this branching out because it forces players to play with a random champion.

Chasing a PVE MOBA

So the quandary I am in is that I love the League of Legends lore and champion design, but don’t love the game itself. I have long thought that it would be awesome to have a PVE centric version of League of Legends where you play the same champions with the same abilities in a Diablo like setting. Instead of fighting in Summoner’s Rift against five other players in a battle to destroy the opposing teams nexus, it would be a co-operative experience as five players venture into a procedurally generated dungeon with a treasure at the end. The idea is that each map would be harder than the previous until you reach a boss battle for the final treasure in the dungeon. You could even keep the build mechanic in the form of at the beginning of each map level you could have the same merchant that exists just outside of your teams Nexus in the Rift. After venturing a certain way into each map level he could travel to the next level, making it so that players could only buy new items at the beginning of each map.

For the hyper competitive players, you could still keep all manner of stats from number of monsters killed, their average difficulty rating, how fast it takes your team to clear a map, and of course how many times you have died during a specific encounter. Personally I would go with a counter strike approach where each player gets a single life per map, making it progressively harder the more players that you have lost. I would introduce the ability to purchase resurrection potions, but again that is an opportunity cost… since you have limited item inventory slots and limited gold to keep purchasing items with. Similarly I would introduce a “lives” mechanic in the number of times your team can retry during a specific dungeon crawl sequence. This would encourage the team to stick together and work on group tactics rather than going off on their own and risking getting overwhelmed. The thing is… I would absolutely pay to play a game like that, and would probably rope my friends into playing it to. The key impediment however is that folks seem to keep thinking that “MOBA” style mechanics cannot also apply to PVE game design. Someone make this game happen… I am looking at you Riot.

Developer Appreciation Week 2015 – Part 2

April 1, 2015 by Belghast

Yesterday I kicked off my own versions of the Developer Appreciation Week with five companies and game teams that I greatly appreciate it. It seems like we are starting to get some traction because yesterday MMOGames.com independent of my own intervention ran a piece of what we are doing. I still hope to see more people join in the fun and talk about the development staff that they really appreciate it. I play a lot of games… so I have a lot of love to go around.

Blizzard – World of Warcraft Team

Last night was quite possibly my single best night in World of Warcraft raiding. After some sluggish weeks we strolled into Blackrock Foundry and cleared seven normal bosses, then popped out and took down two heroic bosses… one of which was our first kill. To make the night even more special we managed to one shot all of them. After riding that high last night, it is impossible to do a developer appreciation week post without talking about Blizzard. World of Warcraft has been the juggernaut in the room for so long that I can barely remember a time when they were not the clear market dominator. While I have some disappointments about Warlords of Draenor, I feel like they are legitimately trying to turn the franchise around after what felt like years of neglect. It feels very much like they have doubled down on this game, and at the end of the day I am still enjoying playing it with my friends. For a ten year old game to still maintain relevancy is a pretty mighty feat, so my hat is off to the Blizzard staff who have supported it throughout the years and made it this experience that we judge all other MMOs against. It has been the gold standard for good reason. Even if World of Warcraft is not your game, you have to marvel at the level of polish that they deliver when they roll out a new expansion.

Bioware – Star Wars the Old Republic Team

Star Wars the Old Republic and I have somewhat of a checkered past to be honest. I went into this game feeling like it was going to be the WoW Killer for myself and my friends, but ultimately we lasted the same three months that we normally do in this sort of game. When they chose to go free to play, I was frustrated by how insanely restrictive the system ended up being. All of this said… if you can some how push past all of the limited time loot boxes and free to play cludge… there is a great game there at its core. With the launch of SWTOR I tried something that I don’t normally do… I leveled as part of a dedicated duo with my friend Euron. I played a Jedi Guardian and he a Jedi Consular, and we participated in each others stories. The way those two tales interweave was something to behold, and while it felt a bit confining to always have to make sure you and your friend were on at exactly the same times… it was a leveling experience unlike no other. The thing that stands out about SWTOR is the story, and what ultimately killed the game for me was when I ran out of it. Now I know I have several expansions that I can go back and experience and I keep thinking that one day I will do precisely that. In the meantime I have fond memories of the time we were all obsessed with this game, and give massive props to the folks who built such engaging content… that we pulled some fourteen hours a day to get through it all.

Zenimax – The Elder Scrolls Online Team

Since Daggerfall I have been in love with the Elder Scrolls franchise. Each time a new one comes out I end up devoting hundreds of hours to playing it, but all the while I keep thinking… this experience would be more enjoyable with my friends. So when I found out that Elder Scrolls was in fact being made into an MMO I was completely over the moon about it. I was lucky enough to be in the first round of alpha testing, so ultimately I participated in this game for over a year before launching it. Unfortunately this was a bit of a double edged sword because I got to see some features that worked better in early versions of the game, as compared to later more minimalistic ones. When you test a game that long it skews your vision of what the game actually is. Elder Scrolls Online has some of the best story content I have experienced in any game, and there are a number of quest lines that stick out in my memory. The whole concept of being able to continue into another faction after you have finished yours was inspired. The problem is by the time I hit the Aldmeri content I had lost a lot of my steam, and our guild was suffering the traditional drop off in players. Now that the game has shifted to buy to play however I am able to experience this game again and realize just how great it actually is. A lot of the problems I had with it early on have been smoothed out, and the post 50 progression no longer feels quite so grindy. I really appreciate the staff that has been plugging away quietly on making this game a better place to be, and I look forward to playing it more in the coming months.

Trion Worlds – Trove Team

Trove is this quirky world building game that blends MMO combat, MOBA style character design, and Minecraft style exploration and construction. I was lucky enough to be including in the first round of alpha invites for trove, and it has been insane to watch this game evolve. What I love the most is the way the developers have been meshed with the community since day one. Instead of a traditional forum, they decided to open up the process with a reddit, in fact I think this is the first game I can ever recall doing that. In those first days the community was so amazing, because it was so tight knit. You would log in and get welcomed by people that might recognize your name from the Reddit, and there was rarely a time when a developer was not in game talking to players. As the game has progressed the community has gotten larger, and the rigors of development have degraded this closeness a small bit, but it is still very much a game that draws its inspiration from the players. While I don’t play it as much as I should, I have loved watching it evolve around me. It feels like the sort of game you get when you throw a bunch of seven year olds in a room and tell them to solve a problem. It is pure unbridled joy and imagination… and has been good for my jaded soul to see that a game like that can exist.

Riot Games – League of Legends Team

League of Legends is 100% not my type of game. In fact I might never have played it were it not at the suggestion of my friends. Actually I rarely ever play this game other than when a bunch of friends want to do so. That said the experience of playing with a team of friends is contagious. There are a lot of aspects about this game that are problematic for me, a huge one being the still very toxic community. That said I give the biggest credit I can possibly give to the character designers. What League has in spades is the personality that seems to be lacking from so many other MMOs. The characters in League of Legends have a life of their own, and they make you fall in love with them. I have joked for some time, that this isn’t actually a game, but a modern sticker album… because I seem to largely collect characters and skins rather than actually play with them. Each character is really a triumph of taking what are mostly remixed elements and making them feel fresh and new. I tend to stick to the characters I know and love however like Darius, Graves, WuKong and Garen. My favorite gameplay mode however will probably always be ARAM simply because no one expect you to know what you are doing, which is about perfect for me.

Crystal Madness

June 6, 2014 by Belghast

Permanent Exhaustion

Back in March my wife and I each purchased a fitbit, and since then it has rewired quite a few things in our daily routine. Over the first few month we mostly focused on changing the way we walked, and picking up steps in places we could during our normal routine. So instead of taking the elevator in the parking garage, I started walking the stairs… and have now changed that up to walking the ramps down for maximum steps. In many ways the fitbit changes exercise into a game, and with it comes a whole slew of “achievements” being tracked by the fitbit dashboard. While what it does is rather stupid… it is just an always on pedometer, the fact that it is there and constantly reminding me that I need to be walking is where the real benefit comes in.

Over the last month we have been walking on a nightly basis, and within the last week and a half this has morphed not only into walking to augment our total steps… but to trying every night to “ding”. My wife is not a gamer really, but she has picked up my MMO analogy when it comes to the fitbit. For us dinging is getting to our target steps of 10,000 per night, and this is fitting since the little band goes nuts when you reach your target goal. While trying to hit 10,000 is cool… my new goal is trying to hit 70,000 weekly steps and getting the achievement associated with it. Why do I care? Well it has been looming there for months… and it was a thing I never thought I would actually be able to hit.

More than anything this whole experience has been a lesson in proving me wrong. I’m fat, and I will likely always be fat. At 6’4” I carry my 350 lbs more better than some… but I am still very much a fat man, and I am mostly okay with that. More than anything I want to be a more “fit” fat and have more stamina and endurance… and I have already come so damned far already. Granted right now I am somewhat living in a state of permanent exhaustion as I try and do this exercise thing each night and also do my evening gaming. Right now we are walking a little over 2 miles per night, and doing what we call our “triple loop” where we weave a course through our neighborhood and the next one over. The course is designed so it never takes us past our house, that way we are not tempted to call it and stop. Right now I need to have walked between 6500 and 7000 steps to be able to hit 10-11k during my evening walk. With it being a rainy and otherwise sedentary weekend… we might have to start walking a “quint loop”, but by god I will hit my 70,000 steps this week.

Crystal Madness

I had all intents of streaming last night, but for whatever reason it never quite happened. I spent a good deal of the evening running down the last few things I needed to do to complete Deredune, and what I was doing… while enjoyable for me seemed like it would be extremely boring to watch. As the evening wore on, more people joined me in the channel… and I simply never alt tabbed to fire up OBS. Wildstar is latching onto me with a vengence, and in ways I am surprised. You can go through my pre-launch posts… and I struggled hard to figure out a way to get into this game. I wanted so bad to like it, because at face value it seemed like a game I would love… or at the very least the me from five years ago would have loved. Overall it intrigued me enough to play it at launch, especially since I would be bringing with me a chunk of the Alliance of Awesome community.

Now that I have spent a good deal of time playing it… I am completely enthralled. The thing is I am not sure exactly why. Guild Wars 2 is one of those games that I have tried to dissect just why I don’t enjoy it, and no matter what I try and do there… the game felt largely pointless. Wildstar feels like it took so many of the good elements of GW2 but presented them in a way that I actually care about them. Problem is I am not sure if I can explain why. For starters there is something psychologically enjoyable about challenges. You can be wandering around and loot an item… and then all the sudden you on the clock and every fiber of your being is poured into completely whatever this task happens to be. Sure you can ignore them, and start them manually from the challenges section of your quest log… however there is something special about just stumbling onto one naturally.

The game has a depth that I have not seen since Everquest 2, and that really shocked me. There are layers within layers within layers of nuance going on here. Right now it seems to have every feature that I ever wanted in a game. While it doesn’t have a “chronomage” style self mentoring system, you can apparently drop your level down to your party members at any time. In fact so many of the things in the game seem to be there to help you group with your friends. The only real thing that the game fails at is in still continuing to divide players into red and blue teams. That said I can for the most part deal with this, since they have account based friends and I can at the very least talk to my friends on the other side of the faction wall. I have reached a point where I am pretty sure already that this is my new “WoW”, and had I not already purchased Warlords of Draenor… I would seriously consider skipping this expansion.

The picture above is pretty cool because it is from my skyplot. One of the nifty things is that while you are out in the world, you are constantly collecting things for your house. A special kind of item that you can find is a “PreFab Kit” and these allow you to build new sections of your skyplot. While wandering around I managed to find a green quality one that essentially added a crazy jumping puzzle to my house. So the fact that it is a jumping puzzle in itself is cool… but it basically added a daily quest to my house. If you can make it to the top of the puzzle in 1 minute 10 seconds you can get a prize, which is similar to the prizes you normally get from challenges. I’ve managed to pick up a handful of housing items from doing this, including a really cool spiral tree. If you are on Evindra/Dominion let me know and I will neighbor you so you can have access to do the puzzle.

League Beginner Night

I feel like maybe this week the title of our weekly League of Legends night might be a bit of a misnomer. We had several folks, but not quite enough to do two matches at the same time. So as a result we alternated swapping folks in and doing 5 man vs Bots games to let folks get adjusted to new champions. Oakstout joins us this week and it turns out that while he signed up for a beginner night… he owns a whole slew of champions and has like 130 wins under his belt or something like that. So I would hardly call him a beginner, in fact I am far more beginnerly than he was. That said it was still an awesomely fun time and we hung out and joked while playing the game. I played a total of three games, the first of which I tried out the champion Gangplank that was free this week. I have to say I dig him quite a bit, and if he goes on sale again soonish I might pick him up.

The second round I played Aatrox, which I still absolutely love for his pure survival. During this battle Oak was playing one of my all time favorite champions WuKong… but the combination meant we got to bully our lane severely. Our double jumps meant we could engage quickly and shred the enemy bots quickly before returning to farming or taking down turrets. I have decided though that I really need to pick up the Justicar Skin since I don’t really care much for Aatrox’s default appearance. Finally I closed out the night by playing a game as Woad King Darius… which we have all agreed is the “most belghast skin ever”. It was a great time, and if you are looking to ease your way into League of Legends, then I highly suggest you participate next week. At some point I figure we will even start to play real people.

#Wildstar #LeagueOfLegends #LoL

Faffless Wednesday

August 7, 2015May 29, 2014 by Belghast

Banging Doors

Well it happened again last night, I was woken up by one of our cats banging on the closet door. The problem is after I finally got her crackhead self settled down and up into bed with us… I once again was completely wide awake. Problem is this time it was at 12:45 when it started, so there I lay in bed at 1 am completely unable to get back to sleep. So I sat there for a bit, finally deciding to get up and go upstairs and play something for awhile to hopefully tire myself back out again. The game of choice was Defiance, but I will go into that more later. I managed to get to a state where I thought I might sleep around 2 am, but the rest of the night was extremely fitful.

According to fitbit I was awake 9 times during the night. I have no clue what is going on with me that my body keeps thinking I am fully awake at any point I wake up. I have always struggled with sleep, and as a result cannot nap for fear of not being able to sleep that night. This whole waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep thing that has plagued me the last two nights is brand new however. Right now this morning I feel mostly normal, albeit a little sluggish… I just fear for what this will mean as the day wears on. Yesterday was rough since I had been up since 3:45, especially about 2 pm or so it became torture to try and do anything productive. I might have to start resorting to taking a sleep aid, but I hate how groggy they make me feel in the morning.

Faffless Wednesday

Last night for whatever reason we simply did not have a good turnout for our normal “faff about” in Elder Scrolls Online event. It could be that people were just busy, or it could be that the Wildstar servers were up for some reason yesterday and folks are anxious for the head start coming Friday. In any case there were just three of us that showed up with the purpose of doing the event, so we decided that it was really too few to do a dungeon, and too few to really do anything meaningful in Cyrodil. As a result we just kinda piddled around doing our own thing and chatting back and forth. PK and Delevax joined the rest of us on mumble and we hung out while playing. I have not really as much time to play Elder Scrolls Online that I would have liked.

Lately my weekends have been scattered with little landmines of not being able to play anything, and then last weekend the amazing single player games Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order got my devoted attention. At this point I think I am about two hours away from finishing Wolf, and transistor was a punch in the gut… but a very good one. I had been looking forward to Wednesday because I knew I would devote myself to playing nothing but Elder Scrolls Online, even if the “event” didn’t happen. I have to say I love the veteran content, and more importantly I love that mobs are once again difficult. There were always a couple of types of encounters that were painful for me… I am looking at you Harvesters… but for the most part I had reached a place where I could steam roll in entire packs of mobs. There were several late game public dungeons that I solo’d my way through, so my skill level with the game had reached a point where it was simply greater than the challenge.

Veteran content reset that equilibrium. I literally can get my ass kicked by a mudcrab if I happen upon a pack of three, and even in the case of two at a time I have to use Green Blood to heal myself while dealing with the second one. I like that the game instantly became a challenge again the moment I completed the storyline. The result is that while I do the Aldmeri Dominion content, the game feels fresh to me since I am having to relearn how to manage tough encounters. Last night I finished up Kenarthi’s Roost and moved on into Auridon. Since this is the content I have done the least, I am really enjoying winding my way through elfland. I’ve decided that I really like the Bosmer… I was talking last night with Euron that they remind me quite a bit of the Witch Elves from Warhammer Fantasy. As much as I want to dislike her, I have to admit that Queen Ayrenn is pretty awesome as well.

Figuring out Defiance

I wrote yesterday mornings blog post at about 4 am, and then proceeded to faff about in Defiance for the next hour until 5:30 when the alarm normally goes off. During that time I think I finally figured out how to enjoy the game. There was always something I liked about it, but the experience just felt lacking in some way. Like I didn’t quite grasp how the questing system worked or how the world exploration worked. The first change I made is that I started playing the game with the Xbox 360 controller. While it controls competently with the keyboard and mouse, everything feels like it just works better with the controller. I guess this is the side effect when you develop a game for consoles, but I am slowly getting used to playing an FPS with a controller. I find the lack of focused aiming to be far less of a detriment that I thought it would be.

Secondly I had a major epiphany while playing as I stumbled across and Arkfall. I started treating this game like it was Rift, in that so many times in Rift I just spend my time ping ponging from tear to tear closing the Rifts. Doing this so far has been worth a ton of experience and my Ego rank is slowly climbing. Additionally you seem to get some really good rewards for doing it, and I am starting to bump into other players as well which makes the experience overall more enjoyable. I always felt like the thing that was lacking was that I didn’t really have anyone to play the game with. I am hoping as this game transitions from “buy the box” to “free to play” that folks will start filtering back in. It might just be the recent time spent playing and FPS, but I am enjoying the game quite a bit. Therein lies the problem however… I simply have too damned many games to play.

League Beginner Night

Tonight I’m Playing League of Legends. Once upon a time in House Stalwart we did these league beginner nights, when we coaxed new players to League of Legends onto mumble and did some vs bots or custom 5v5 gameplay. The purpose was to ease folks into the game and let them soak up some of the knowledge of a few of our more veteran players. When the Alliance of Awesome folks started talking about League, I figured it was a good time to try and resurrect this concept. So tonight I will be playing some league and hanging out on mumble with folks while doing it. I am just hoping to get in some practice playing Braum, but if not I will probably default back to Wukong, Garen or Darius. I would actually love to play some Varus since I have yet to do so since picking up the PAX skin. If you are interest in joining up check out the Anook event, the goal is to start around 9 PM CST to make it doable for the West Coasters. There are technically only a couple of people signed up, but I know we will have a lot more just from word of mouth.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Defiance #LeagueofLegends #LoL