New Year: New Posts

I plan on restarting this blog on January 1. I got side tracked by my connection issues (which are still happening, blarg). See you then!

Corruption, In Eve Online, That's Unlikely!

Two posts in a row, also unlikely!

Eve Online just can't seem to catch a break. It seems every few months another big scandal breaks. It is interesting because the actions of one or a few people can literally affect the entire game population. This is due to the entire universe running on one "server" (actually a giant cluster) or shard in a UO term. So if for example, and this is a complete impossibility, lets say someone was to amass minerals trillions and trillions of isk (the Eve currency) for free. This would be bad.

Oh wait, it did happen. Not only did it happen but it has been going on for 4 years. Not only was it going on for 4 years but it was reported multiple times but apparently those reports were closed without being investigated. Opps!

Some are claiming this is the largest exploitative operation in the history of any MMO. It is probably the most successful, but definitely not the largest seeing how UO developers removed 15 trillion duped gold a couple years ago. UO gold is worth more than Eve isk. Today I see Eve isk selling for 550 million per $35. That would only buy you about 35 million UO gold. And UO gold was worth at least double when the trillions was removed.

Let me give people who don't play Eve Online a better idea of the impact. Lets say every automobile manufacturer had to raise their prices by several thousand dollars per car because the price of raw materials to make steel skyrocketed. Now apply that to every other item that needs the same materials. The people who mine these minerals suddenly found out that instead of a lot left, there was nothing. The rug was pulled out from under them. That is the breadth of this exploit. A huge majority of the minerals on the market were from this exploit because it is so difficult to make them through normal game play. I would not be surprised if the Eve developers had to make changes to make these minerals easier to make because the entire game economy currently depends on it.

Isn't it rather ironic? Here we are in the midst of wall street scandals and a recession. Suddenly the same type of thing breaks out in a MMO. The market of space ship parts is going to get a lot more expensive, in the short term at least.

For this reason, it can be a good idea to split a MMO into several isolated servers. If something like this happens on one then it will only affect a small portion of your player base. UO used to be immune to this type of thing until they implemented character transfers. And what a headache those have been, being a major source of duping since their introduction. World of Warcraft also has character transfers but Blizzard restricts the amount of gold that can be moved. It is almost not even worth the cost. UO lets you transfer over 875 items each time which can translate into 875 million gold checks. Blizzard restricted you to 10,000 gold and I think they just raised the limit to 20,000. Plus you can only transfer a character once per month while UO let you do it without restriction until rather recently.

Putting aside everything said so far, there is even more to talk about. As I mentioned the person who initially discovered this bug actually reported it. That report was closed with a thanks, but nothing was ever done. For whatever reason, this player went on for the next 4 years to benefit from this. Other people have come forward claiming they also reported it over the years but nothing was ever done. In the past, Eve has suffered from some rather corrupt employees. It is possible that they were also trying to benefit from this new found exploit. It took the report getting to the right person this time for something to be done.

The results of this exploit are still coming out. The Eve team has yet to really explain the scope and impact. Going by the number of outraged players on their own official game forum, it is not something they will be able to keep under wraps as I bet they wish to.

Fleshing Out a Concept

I am going to make a post today, damn it.

Even though I no longer play Warhammer Online, I still check out the IGN Warhammer discussion forum. Specifically, I like to see if Mark Jacobs has anything interesting to say. He is after all the one who is in charge of Ultima Online and is not the typical MMO guy in that he posts a lot. But that seems to have died down a bit now that Warhammer isn't the hit people were hoping for. He has stopped posting on the F13 forum from what I can see and has slowed down greatly on IGN. Before I stray too far, I think part of the reason he wants his own Warhammer Forum is so he can have much greater control.

Anyway, on IGN I saw this topic linked to on the Warhammer Alliance forum. From what I gather, most people on IGN think down about Warhammer Alliance, so this is a bit of a surprise and peaks my interest. Inside is a suggestion about how Mythic could fix the Open Realm vs Realm situation. While brief, it outlines perfectly one method that could be used. More importantly it makes perfect sense. So much so that there has been 472 replies and over 15,000 views in just 10 days. The response is overwhelmingly positive.

The design talks about how Mythic is on the wrong track. At every step, the rewards go to the individual person instead of progressing to encompass more people. The first level is killing another player. You get rewarded specifically for that instead of the current design which allows you to gain points through other means. If you can only gain credit for killing players to progress, then there is no way around it. This makes a lot of sense.

Then it moves on to Keeps. Once again Mythic only rewards ~5 players with elite loot no matter how many people took part. The author suggests changing it around completely. Make it so a guild can only level up by owning a Keep. At the moment a guild can level up through many other means and it is automatic. If you can only level by Keep ownership then players are going to want to defend those. Guilds will feel pride and be respected for their high level and accomplishments.

The next stage up is controlling entire areas. There is really no reward for this at the moment. Instead, owning certain areas could reward the controllers. You could have access to special dungeons or quests. The faction that controls them reaps the rewards. It would encourage players to struggle for the zones rather than plow through them for hopes of attacking the other capital city. A much more natural and balanced process.

Finally there is the capital city, which once again focuses on individual rewards as Keeps do. As he put it, "Sieging a Capitol. Just like Zone Control, this should not reward the individual, it should reward your Realm. Having best loot from City Sieges == epic fail."

Sometimes you can't just pick out one thing and try to fix it when the entire concept is flawed. It is quite apparent that major changes need to be made to the oRvR system in Warhammer to make it more engaging and rewarding for players. Mythic has intertwined too many non-PVP aspects into the equation and players are not embarcing it. World of Warcraft started making the same mistake when they added a bunch of boss objectives for Battlegrounds. Players began focusing on the PvM instead of the PvP.

The Faction system in UO had it right when the entire faction was rewarded with war horses and town guards. Unfortunately this became rather insignificant over time, especially after the Age of Shadows expansion. While the recent changes have helped give Factions new life, there needs to be greater incentives for players to want to capture and defend cities.

There is going to be a post tomorrow too.

Return of the Postings

Internet is still up and down. I called 2 days ago and they said it was an outage in the area and they are working on fixing it. We'll see.

Today I watched a 55 minute speed run for Super Metriod. I never had a chance to play that game. Watching someone else makes me feel like I missed out. Playing games when they first come out is when you can have the maximum fun. Unfortunately picking up a 14 year old game like this one, while it might be interesting, won't have the same excitement as say Fallout 3. It is just so dated.

Anyway, one thing I was impressed with this run was all the hidden items. In the Metriod series there is a number of power ups that you have to collect to progress in the game. But there are even more, such as extra missiles, that are not required. Almost always the ones you don't need are hidden and you have to find them. Some are easy to stumble upon while others can be absurdly difficult. To the point where you would have to read a guide to find.

Ultima Online certainly has its share of secret areas. Early on there was hidden valley that could be accessed by a false mountain door (which is actually broken and you see the entrance clearly now). There was the underground mage laboratories and tower in the Hedge Maze (which was completely removed due to Kingdom Reborn client limitations). Hmm, maybe I should mention something still in the game. The door into the inner Khaldun chamber works on most shards. On the one I play Atlantic, it was stuck open for the longest time so you could just walk inside.

Actually it seems a lot of UO's secret stuff has just become broken or obsolete. The Terathan Keep levers don't work anymore. The Despise lever area doesn't appear to do anything. The door into the Doom mage shop was sealed accidentally at one point. A gate was added so you could just walk into the star room instead of clicking the brazier.

When you have a good train of thought it is terrible for something to interrupt it, such as my persistent connection issues. I had lots of good ideas for this post but they seemed to have whittled away. Something much better tomorrow I hope.

=[

It was a good run

Farewell dear friends......................

No, actually I have been having absolutely horrid packet loss for the past few days. I thought this had been resolved a week ago. Things were going fine but it seems to have returned for the time being. I am going to have to call up my internet service provider on Monday.

Unfortunately trying to get long posts up on Blogger is impossible when under this condition. I will try and resume again tomorrow.

Two Different Methods of Item Balance

This post did not make it up on time! I'm sorry but after all the Thanksgiving excitement I just did not feel like sitting down and writing something. I felt more like sleeping.

Since the dawn of time players and developers have fought an epic battle over item balance. Developers would create items. Players would gather those items, combine them, abuse them. Developers would have to come down with the mighty nerf bat and swing it in many directions, breaking up these unbalancing combinations. The players would then come back and rebuild what had been ruined.

Actually for Ultima Online, this has only been an issue since the Age of Shadows expansion. Before that there were very few properties and items were designed to be expendable. That all changed though with dozens of new properties and equipment lasting forever. There is next to no information available as to the design and thought process when it came to making these new systems. So we can only go by experiance.

When Age of Shadows launched there were no cumulative caps on item properties. None. So you could stack as many as you could find. If I had to guess, I would say that the developers planned on balancing properties at the creation stage. They would only carefully evaluate what items could be introduced into the world. But even before new stuff was being added, the system fell apart.

One completely unbalancing property was Lower Mana Cost. At launch, it was possible for players to accrue up to 68% Lower Mana Cost. So an eight circle spell Earthquake which normally cost 50 mana, now cost 16. You could easily cast Earthquake, an extremely devastating damage spell, a dozen or more times in a row compared to just 2 before the expansion. If this was left alone, today it is most likely possible to reach 100% Lower Mana Cost. Meaning it would take no mana to cast any spell or use special moves!

Within about 6-8 months, more and more players were loading up on the new properties. It became abundantly clear that the system was out of control. Mages were now casting spells in the blink of an eye with 4 Faster Casting (which every 1 added reduced spell timers by 0.25 seconds). But there were so many bugs introduced with the Age of Shadows expansion, that is all they could handle. Unless something allowed a player to one hit kill another, it just was not on the table. It wasn't until over a year later that the developers sat down and tried to rein it all in.

Finally the hammer fell. Lower Mana Cost capped at 40%. Faster Casting capped at 2. Many other properties were capped as well. The fundamentals behind balancing the system flipped from a per item approach to a global approach. Now developers can add any item into the game they wish without having to compare it to everything else out there. This took an enormous pressure off the team in general and freed them up their creative ability. If they wanted to add a special helm with 20% Lower Mana Cost, it was possible. Some advantageous players would not be able to take the new helm and combine it with their other equipment to reach a new level of lowering mana consumption. They will always be limited to the 40% cumulative cap.

But this opened up an entirely new problem which have never been addressed. Well one developer tried, but the concept (decreasing returns) was just unpopular and hard to understand. With a set of hard caps, players now build suits in which they can maximize as many properties as possible. So instead of having insanely high Lower Mana Cost, they have the highest amounts of Lower Mana Cost, Lower Reagent Cost, Faster Casting, Mana Regeneration, Defense Chance Increase, resistances, and anything else they desire. I actually have a potential solution to this problem and was going to reveal it as part of a series of topics on the Stratics U Hall, but never got around to it. I will post it here some time soon.