Imagine that 5-years old boy runs in the house with eyes sparkling "Mommy, I've beaten Dad in football!". Would you think that he actually won? Or rather that daddy let him win to make his son happy and to motivate him to play more? Obviously the latter. It's a lie. It's a cheat. But it works, so parents do it. It's considered OK to lie to a little kid since he is unable to comprehend the World yet and has looong way to go. The truth would be "son, you suck in football so I beat you easily but if you keep practicing and losing for years, you'll be so good that you won't only beat me but can participate in some serious football team". It's just too much for a 5-years old.
This image was mentioned by my girlfriend explaining the success of the game World of Tanks and co. In these games the bad players are treated as toddlers. They are granted wins without telling them so. World of Warcraft is losing customers because of communicating the nerfs. The visible "luck of draw" and "power of aspects" buffs, the "accessible dungeons" mantra on the devblog all have the same message: "yes, you'll clear the place and get rewards but only because we nerfed to your pathetic level". The social doesn't want pixel items. He wants the feeling of being loved and respected. WoW doesn't respect bad players, just throw them welfare epics with the same attitude you drop a coin to a beggars hat. Sure, it saves him from having to go on with his day without booze, but I doubt if he truly enjoys the act of getting charity.
World of Tanks and low-end League of Legends provide boosts to the bad player without him having any clue about his uselessness. "We won yay" says lvl 14 guy with 1 kill, 2 assists, 10 deaths when the team of him and 4 lvl 18 wins. Same for the moron who died in the first minute driving to Malinovka field. For LoL the boost is in the hidden ELO that creates a group with both good and bad players without telling the latter that he is way below the others in ELO. WoT probably uses that too, and messing with penetration and hit and probably detection and God knows what else.
You know what makes this scheme perfect? Besides the few people who truly play for win, it serves the good players too. I'm talking about the l33t social, the guy who actually has skills, but not aspiring for victory, challenge and improvement but - like all socials - peer respect. He's the one who tops the damage chart on the Arathi bridge. In this scheme he is either "pwns", or really loses because of bad luck or terrible teammates. You know, these people use to lie that "we won because of me, we lost because of the sucky team". In this scheme that statement is true.
Look at this and compare it with the one from a week ago:
Except I know it's not luck. Probably my post did not go unnoticed (WoT forum is my #1 referral for the last month in the blog), so they changed the algorithm. I guess the original algorithm was looking at XP/battle and not win rate, as most players consider that the most important stat. My Marder II wasn't strongly nerfed by the algorithm since even the world best Marder gets less XP/battle than an average T5 tank he is pitted against. Now they probably watch win rate too, making sure it stays in the 40-60% range. So I did not beat the system with the exceptional gun of Marder II but by its low XP/hour. Now they proved that they can "adjust" the game so not even a Marder II can't chain-win.
The future of gaming is not hardcore, average customers will suck and leave.
The future of gaming is not accessible because it's called "lame" by even those who couldn't complete that difficulty without boost.
The future of gaming is not having various difficulty levels, allowing everyone to play on his level since no one wants to face that he is on the lower levels.
The future of gaming is lying to the customer, telling him he was beating equal peers while actually he was winning in a totally controlled environment carefully tailored to his skills.
I deleted the game I once loved with disgust from my computer. But I doubt if there are many people out there like me. If none of us play games without proofs to be fair, they still have legions of bad players and several "l33t" socials to pay in their shop. What's left for us to play? Story-games like WoW-MoP and SWTOR doesn't count, they are not games to play but interactive movies to consume. We have sports, Chess and EVE. We'll be fine.
I'm really-really worried about Diablo III. What if Blizzard delayed it to reprogram for this scheme? What if the monsters against bad players will be stealth-nerfed, and the difficulty for good players stealth-buffed to make the hype of "OMG it's hard" while letting drooling facerollers still complete it if they buy some gear on RMAH? I mean if the game needs some farming from the HC, it would be unbeatable by the average even if he buys full BiS. Does D3 has an exportable combat log?
Even worse: what if the item-droprates are adjusted to give an OK item every day and a great one every week, regardless of how many hours you play a week and what kind of monsters you kill? I mean such system would make the casual motivated and prevent the HC from getting BiS and leaving. Is there and exportable drop-log we can upload to a 3rd party site to verify that it's random and check if a named really gives better loot than a random monster?
EVE Business report: Thursday morning 10.3B (3 PLEX behind for second account, 0.1B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel and your UI suggestions are welcomed.
PS: read the analysis of Susan on ship prices! Really good.
This image was mentioned by my girlfriend explaining the success of the game World of Tanks and co. In these games the bad players are treated as toddlers. They are granted wins without telling them so. World of Warcraft is losing customers because of communicating the nerfs. The visible "luck of draw" and "power of aspects" buffs, the "accessible dungeons" mantra on the devblog all have the same message: "yes, you'll clear the place and get rewards but only because we nerfed to your pathetic level". The social doesn't want pixel items. He wants the feeling of being loved and respected. WoW doesn't respect bad players, just throw them welfare epics with the same attitude you drop a coin to a beggars hat. Sure, it saves him from having to go on with his day without booze, but I doubt if he truly enjoys the act of getting charity.
World of Tanks and low-end League of Legends provide boosts to the bad player without him having any clue about his uselessness. "We won yay" says lvl 14 guy with 1 kill, 2 assists, 10 deaths when the team of him and 4 lvl 18 wins. Same for the moron who died in the first minute driving to Malinovka field. For LoL the boost is in the hidden ELO that creates a group with both good and bad players without telling the latter that he is way below the others in ELO. WoT probably uses that too, and messing with penetration and hit and probably detection and God knows what else.
You know what makes this scheme perfect? Besides the few people who truly play for win, it serves the good players too. I'm talking about the l33t social, the guy who actually has skills, but not aspiring for victory, challenge and improvement but - like all socials - peer respect. He's the one who tops the damage chart on the Arathi bridge. In this scheme he is either "pwns", or really loses because of bad luck or terrible teammates. You know, these people use to lie that "we won because of me, we lost because of the sucky team". In this scheme that statement is true.
Look at this and compare it with the one from a week ago:
Except I know it's not luck. Probably my post did not go unnoticed (WoT forum is my #1 referral for the last month in the blog), so they changed the algorithm. I guess the original algorithm was looking at XP/battle and not win rate, as most players consider that the most important stat. My Marder II wasn't strongly nerfed by the algorithm since even the world best Marder gets less XP/battle than an average T5 tank he is pitted against. Now they probably watch win rate too, making sure it stays in the 40-60% range. So I did not beat the system with the exceptional gun of Marder II but by its low XP/hour. Now they proved that they can "adjust" the game so not even a Marder II can't chain-win.
The future of gaming is not hardcore, average customers will suck and leave.
The future of gaming is not accessible because it's called "lame" by even those who couldn't complete that difficulty without boost.
The future of gaming is not having various difficulty levels, allowing everyone to play on his level since no one wants to face that he is on the lower levels.
The future of gaming is lying to the customer, telling him he was beating equal peers while actually he was winning in a totally controlled environment carefully tailored to his skills.
I deleted the game I once loved with disgust from my computer. But I doubt if there are many people out there like me. If none of us play games without proofs to be fair, they still have legions of bad players and several "l33t" socials to pay in their shop. What's left for us to play? Story-games like WoW-MoP and SWTOR doesn't count, they are not games to play but interactive movies to consume. We have sports, Chess and EVE. We'll be fine.
I'm really-really worried about Diablo III. What if Blizzard delayed it to reprogram for this scheme? What if the monsters against bad players will be stealth-nerfed, and the difficulty for good players stealth-buffed to make the hype of "OMG it's hard" while letting drooling facerollers still complete it if they buy some gear on RMAH? I mean if the game needs some farming from the HC, it would be unbeatable by the average even if he buys full BiS. Does D3 has an exportable combat log?
Even worse: what if the item-droprates are adjusted to give an OK item every day and a great one every week, regardless of how many hours you play a week and what kind of monsters you kill? I mean such system would make the casual motivated and prevent the HC from getting BiS and leaving. Is there and exportable drop-log we can upload to a 3rd party site to verify that it's random and check if a named really gives better loot than a random monster?
EVE Business report: Thursday morning 10.3B (3 PLEX behind for second account, 0.1B spent on Titan project)
Remember that you can participate in our EVE conversations on the "goblinworks" channel and your UI suggestions are welcomed.
PS: read the analysis of Susan on ship prices! Really good.
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