erdknuffel
der geballte Hirnfasching
- Mein Platz in der neuen Welt
http://erdknuffel.de/2010/09/mein-platz-in-der-neuen-welt/ - Wettbewerb: Entdecke den Skaven in Dir!
http://erdknuffel.de/2010/08/wettbewerb-entdecke-den-skaven-in-dir/ - Die ewige Zitadelle
http://erdknuffel.de/2010/08/die-ewige-zitadelle/
Die ewige Zitadelle
29. Aug
Diese Woche wurde nun endlich die ewige Zitadelle als 6vs6 Wochenend-Szenario ins Spiel implementiert und es sorgte natürlich für gespaltene Meinungen. Grund genug für mich, meine Erlebnisse aus dieser Stätte des Chaos einmal näher zu beleuchten.
Die ewige Zitadelle ist ein klassisches Team-Death-Match-Szenario, welches grundsätzlich gespiegelt konstruiert ist. Kampfplatz ist hauptsächlich eine zentrale Plattform, zu der jeweils eine Treppe führt. In der Mitte befindet sich die “Pit of Death”, die nur mangelhaft von Planken geschützt ist und so schnell zur Todesfalle werden kann. Während des Szenarios dreht der Wind des Wandels immer wieder und sorgt dabei für eine Veränderung des Portals, aus der man nach dem Wiederbeleben erscheint (es existiert je ein Portal am Fuße der Treppen und eines auf der Hauptplattform). Außerdem wird regelmäßig ein Spieler als Ziel markiert, der bei seinem Ableben mehr Punkte generiert.
Spielerisch wird meist auf der Hauptplattform gekämpft, wobei man oft mit der Wand kuschelt, um nicht von einem Spieler hinab gekickt zu werden. Zwar ist diese Plattform recht groß, trotzdem haben besonders Schwarze Gardisten einen unfairen Vorteil, können diese doch fast über 2/3 der Plattform kicken. Dies brachte dem Szenario auch bei uns den Spitznamen “Baseball” ein, weshalb wir jeden erfolgreichen Kick mit einem freudigen “Homerun!” im TS kommentierten.
Gegenüber von der Hauptplattform treibt übrigens ein Skaven sein Unwesen, der nach einem Rechtsklick den Titel “Ich sehe eine Ratte!” gewährt.
Letztlich handelt es sich bei der ewigen Zitadelle um ein sehr spaßiges und kurzweiliges Szenario. Eine Partie dauert im Regelfall nicht länger als 5 Minuten und somit erhält die Token-Factory hiermit echte Konkurrenz. Leider krankt es wieder einmal an einer kleinen aber feinen Sache: dem Matchmaking!
In 6vs6 Szenarien ist es für die Spielfreude umso wichtiger, dass beide Gruppen ungefähr gleich stark sind. Dies war im Laufe meiner Testpartien jedoch leider nur selten der Fall, weshalb es nur all zu oft zum reinen Fressen der Gegner kam. Trotzdem fällt mein Fazit zu diesem Wochenend-Event positiv aus und ich freue mich über den Titel “Der Zitadellen-Zerberus” für den erfolgreichen Abschluss aller Aufgaben.
Abschließend noch ein kleiner Screenshot von meiner Freitag-Abend-Gruppe:
Kleiner Surftipp:
Montbron regt sich über die komischen Namen in WAR auf. *unschuldig guck*
Yitu Gerd beschäftigt sich mit Geschäftsmodellen im Spielesektor
Außerdem hat Bootae das neue Video von Kill Frency vorgestellt:
Wie war eigentlich die GamesCom?
28. Aug
Manche Dinge muss man setzen lassen und ein Besuch auf der größten Spielemesse der Welt - ja ich weiß, die Tokyo Game Show hat mehr Fläche und beansprucht den Titel daher für sich - gehört definitiv dazu. Mit guter Musik kann man sich bekanntlich besser erinnern und diese Zeilen schreibe ich, während ich das neue Album von Plan B nun zum 100ten mal höre. Darum hier ein kleiner Musik-Tipp:
Ja, wie war denn nun die GamesCom für mich? Voll, anstrengend und flüssig trifft es wohl am besten. Mein Interview mit Carrie und Andy hat ordentlich Last auf meinem Webserver verursacht, so dass ich es hier wohl nicht ein weiteres mal erwähnen muss. In jedem Fall hat das Treffen der zwei Mythic-Vertreter, meiner Gilden-Kollegen und nicht zuletzt einiger toller WAR-Spieler, meiner Motivation einen kleinen Schub gegeben. Abseits vom erlebten gab es natürlich auch Spiele zu sehen und da erhielt ich doch einige interessante Erkenntnisse. Fangen wir mal mit dem Platzhirsch an:
Guild Wars
ArenaNet hat keinen zweifel daran gelassen, dass sie diesmal nicht der Underdog sind und selbstbewusst auftreten können. Der Messestand lud zum spielen und live zuschauen ein und ich muss sagen, es war toll das Spiel endlich mal vor sich zu sehen. Persönlich empfehle ich euch, euch die Guild Wars Präsentation von der Messe an zu schauen - solltet ihr das nicht ohnehin schon getan haben.
Wenig überraschend wurde der Nekromant als weitere Klasse veröffentlicht, außerdem konnte man die nette Charaktererstellung näher betrachten. Das Spiel selbst sah sehr geradlinig aus und bot eigentlich keine Ecken und Kanten an denen ich mich hier aufziehen könnte. Meine Vorfreude auf Guild Wars 2 selbst ist ungebrochen. Die Umsetzung der in der Welt auftauchenden Quests scheint sehr gut gelungen, aber ob dies überall funktioniert und nicht nur in den für die Spieldemo heraus geputzten Gebieten wird letztlich nur das vollständige Spiel zeigen. Außerdem warte ich immer noch sehnsüchtig auf eine nähere Erläuterung zum zukünftigen PvP-System!
Star Wars: The Old Republic
BioWare hat sich wieder einmal Mühe gegeben möglichst viel auf die auf den Charakter zugeschnittene Story hin zu weisen und wieder einmal musste ich herzhaft gähnen… Ach ja, da wären ja noch die Raumkämpfe, aber irgendwie machen die das alles auch nicht besser:
Vielleicht mag mir mal einer erklären warum er von diesem Spiel so gehypt ist, ich verstehe es nämlich einfach nicht. Auch dieses Video von Gamestar macht es mir nicht einfacher:
Black Prophecy
Neben JumpGate Evolution wird dieses Spiel ja als kommender Action-Weltraum-MMo-Hit gehandelt. Versteckt in der hintersten Ecke des Gamigo-Standes konnte man das Spiel an 8 Rechnern antesten und spätestens der Umstand, dass es keine Warteschlangen gab, hätte den Gamigo-Jungs zu denken geben müssen. Die Grafik wirkte durchschnittlich, die Steuerung war zu direkt und irgendwie spielte sich der Titel konfus. Meine Vorfreude auf Black Prophecy ist jedenfalls absolut im Keller, auch wenn der Trailer natürlich nett aussieht.
TERA Online
Wenn immer eine Firma mehr mit Merchandise und den Brüsten von Gina Lisa wirbt, werde ich skeptisch und so nahm das Spiel selbst am Frogster Stand auch eher eine untergeordnete Rolle ein. Die Bühne hätte für meinen Geschmack nur halb so groß sein müssen, dafür hätte der ein oder andere PC zum anspielen den Wert des Spiels deutlich mehr hervor gehoben. Vom Spiel selbst habe ich kaum etwas neues gesehen, bleibt nur der alternative Steuerungsansatz, der mein Interesse aufrecht erhält (sämtliches Zielen erfolgt, ähnlich wie in Neocron per direktem anvisieren und erinnert dadurch mehr an einen Shooter). Aber natürlich ist der GamesCom Trailer wieder einmal nett an zu sehen:
Rift: Planes of Telara
Gemessen an den Hinweisen über ICQ, die ich in den letzten Tagen erhalten habe, wird dieses Spiel der absolute Megahit. Zu meiner Schande muss ich jedoch gestehen, dass ich dieses Spiel bisher überhaupt nicht auf meinem Radar hatte. Bleibt mir nur der Verweis auf die nachfolgenden beiden Videos und die Bitte, dass mir doch mal bitte jemand erklären soll, warum mich Rift interessieren sollte.
Kleiner Surftipp:
Gamescom endet mit Besucherrekord via Spiegel Online
Das Messefazit von GamersGlobal
Interview von der GamesCom Teil III
26. Aug
Alles hat mal ein Ende und so gilt dies auch für die Post-Trilogie meines Interviews mit Carrie Gouskos und Andy Belford auf der GamesCom. Diesmal geht es unter anderem um Zahlungsoptionen, den Ladebildschirm-Tipp-Wettbewerb und die armen Schwarzorks, die wieder die größten sein wollen.
Stellt sicher das ihr auch den ersten und den zweiten Teil der Mitschrift lest, bevor ihr euch ans Ende wagt!
Erdknuffel: As you’ve maybe already recognized, the Germans do not use credit cards as widely as American folks do, the majority of German players paid their subscriptions by a direct-debit system. Now with Mythic, that’s only possible through third party providers by buying a gametime card over the EA store. Are there any plans to expand the provided payment methods in the future?
Carrie: Yes, we have several different phases of additional payment options that we’re working through right now. One that’s probably coming very soon and another one that’s probably coming by around the end of the year. So we’re working towards that.
Andy: What we’re working on as far as the service, what we want to provide to our customers: It’s not tied in any way with Star Wars. We are Warhammer, they are Star Wars. We are one happy BioWare family, but while we are all the same studio and we definitely share experience and knowledge. I mean between the two studios we have over 30 years of experience in making video games, but we don’t want the WAR community to feel like it’s all about Star Wars. We’re working on a completely separate schedule.
Erdknuffel: Goldspam is a serious problem. What procedures does Mythic take to keep the advice chat clean from ads like that?
Carrie: A lot of it goes of behind the scenes that we don’t talk about, because we don’t want Goldspammers to know what we’re doing. We’re constantly doing things at the backend to kind of thwart them, but there’s a feature we’re putting into the game. It’s done right now, but it didn’t make it into 1.3.6 so it will probably get put into a maintenance patch, we hope and basically it is a new right click option in chat. So if you see a Goldspammer you can report them as a Goldspammer. What that does is, it flags their name as reported as a Goldspammer and then when a certain number have been triggered it floats them to a CSR automatically instead of having to go into the help menu and the other thing that it does is that it ignores them for you. So the problem we have with Goldspammers actually is that for most players it’s easier to ignore them than it is to report them. The players just ignore them. We used to have people sitting in the advice channel but now we have every CSR focusing on the tickets and so if nobody reports them they’re going to deal with all the other tickets instead and because it’s so difficult for people to report them, they just ignore them. It’s no point. So now what we are doing is a different thing. It’s just as easy as ignore them; it will ignore them and will automatically report them on your behalf. So that’s what’s coming up.
Erdknuffel: What do you think about the German / French blogger community? Are there any plans on having a Blogger Invasion with some of them as well?
Andy: If we had more forewarning that we would be coming to GamesCom I actually would have tried to set some big event up for the bloggers. Unfortunately we had literally 3 weeks forewarning that we’re coming to GamesCom. So 3 weeks time to arrange all of our international press interviews, to arrange what we could with the blogging community and to arrange the fan meet up and to get my passport and things like that. So needless to say it just unfortunately wasn’t in the cards this time. But that being said, we’re hoping to do a Blogger Invasion or something with the Europeans at some point but that’s not solid in concrete.
Erdknuffel: What happened to the loading tooltips?
Carrie: The loading tooltips that have been submitted before the switch over were not saved for posterity unfortunately. So we’re going to hold another one for the European players. You have to remember your loading tooltip and submit it again to us.
Erdknuffel: Guilds are an important part of the game. After implementing the exotic mounts, the 60 % guild mounts are not as important as they were in the past anymore. Are you planning on bringing more incentives for guilds into the game?
Carrie: Yes but I don’t think that it is in the near term. We should probably do another pass on them, but it is probably not going to be a part of the RvR pack. What we do have are the guild banners, that problem should be resolved in the future.
Erdknuffel: Will we see more available mounts?
Carrie: Yes!
Andy: Mounts are cool, we like mounts!
Erdknuffel: Maybe something like Juggernauts?
Carrie: Well, I don’t know.
Erdknuffel: But nothing that looks like a Barbie Horse?
Carrie: I don’t think so, no. We got some cool mounts that we’re working on and nothing that looks like a Barbie horse!
Erdknuffel: In the game, there are several addons which grant the user an advantage over players, who don’t use them. Do you think that this is a problem and if so, what do you do to work against it?
Carrie: One of the early philosophies we had with the UI was that we wanted to make sure that it’s customizable enough that everyone who wouldn’t download third party mods wouldn’t be so far behind. There are so many things you can do in the game and people always are coming up with creative and clever mods. There are definitely a few mods that we have that I think people consider kind of necessary like State of the Realm is one and in some cases we go and say that’s maybe a case where our game is maybe too confusing or too complicated. I like those mods, because there is a person, who came up with something that is really helpful, but that not gives the player an advantage. Now if you take the other side of that: There are some mods like the autofocus mod, which we broke because that was an unfair advantage to people who use it over people who not. We generally try to look at them in maybe 3 different ways. One: That’s a cool mod but it shouldn’t be necessary and we should probably fix our game to not make them necessary like the autoroll mod early on because we put the functionality into the game so you can set your settings like need, great or pass and it does that automatically for you. That’s an example for a great mod where we thought: “We should have had this, let’s put it into the game.” And then: “That’s a great mod but we don’t have time to put it into the game and there’s a modder doing it. Yay for the modders.” and “That’s a bad mod let’s break it.”
Andy: Another example for a mod that we’re going to take a very close look at is NerfedButtons.
Erdknuffel: Do you have any plans on making the Black Orc da biggest Orc again?
Andy: Well if it’s up to me: yeah, because that’s something I’m constantly bugging these guys about. So Carrie, the community really wants for the Black Orc to be the biggest Orc, because it matches the lore.
Carrie: I think we can look into that.
Ich hoffe euch hat das Interview gefallen. Von der GamesCom habe ich übrigens noch ein paar Item-Codes, die ich hier im Blog in nächster Zeit verlosen werde!
Interview von der GamesCom Teil II
25. Aug
Nachdem ich gestern bereits den ersten Teil meines Interviews mit Carrie Gouskos und Andy Belford veröffentlicht habe, folgt heute nun die Fortsetzung. Diesmal antworten die beiden vor allem auf Fragen bezüglich der Community.
Erdknuffel: The transition from GOA to Mythic brought a whole new community with many new players and language regions with it. What impact does this have on your daily work and how do you deal with the new challenges?
Andy: So actually the community and the development part go hand in hand in a lot of ways. On a daily basis it actually adds a lot to what we do because every bit of communication that we put out there, we have to localize it. Obviously there are times, where we have emergency or immediate messaging, where we need to get out there very quickly and where we are not able to translate it immediately. When it comes to regular messaging, important messaging and things like dev diaries and starting with this version 1.4, in development posts, we’re localizing all of that. We’re working on ways to make the game experience not feel like an utter separation and disconnection for the European players. We want the European community to feel like this is their community and Warhammer is their community and their game.
Carrie: I was going to comment as we have in house French and German CSRs, but we don’t want to take away from their time, that they could be answering tickets. So we work elsewhere to get that. It definitely adds a layer of additional kind of preparation, because way before we could throw something up and say: OK, here it is! Now we have to be more careful about what we’re going to do with enough time in advance to do this and that. So getting all those communications translated it is, you know…
Erdknuffel: If you read the news as a native speaker in nearly every news you find some typos or small mistakes. Are you planning on improving this?
Carrie: There are a couple of things we’re doing. One is we’re working with a localization partner. Some of the French stuff we want to fix some bugs, that cropped up and there is a little bit of a problem with the transition. We are working with the group to fix a lot of that stuff. You’ll see improvement to localization over time. If there is specific stuff in the news some of it is, because the first batch of communication was happening so fast, there’s so much coming and we hadn’t set everything up yet. But they were firing off. They were turning those things around in a few hours. That’s probably the account for that, because we were just doing everything really quickly. I think as we settle into communications and we have more planning, because the transition happened in a really kind of accelerated pace, we are going to see an improvement.
Andy: And not only that. We are actually investigating options to improve our capability of gathering feedback from our European communities. We have things that we’re looking into right now that are going to make it easier for us and make us more efficient at gathering that feedback. Not only gathering the feedback, but communicating that as a development team. The volunteer moderators, you guys actually are doing an excellent job of being out there and interacting with the community, we have a language barrier with. Right now it’s an area that we recognize, it’s something that we do improve upon and that’s something we’re looking into. I can’t discuss something that we’re doing right yet. It’s something that is in legal right now so I can’t discuss that.
Erdknuffel: Previously, the French and the German language regions had their own community management representatives. How do you try to compensate the loss of these persons?
Carrie: That thing that he’s talking about? That’s what it is! We’ve been looking to hire someone that speaks French and German to be kind of Andy’s sidekick or his equivalent if you will but otherwise we’re working on the thing that he’s talking about.
Andy: Do you anyone that wants to come to the United States to be a community manager and speaks French and German?
Erdknuffel: French and German, both?
Carrie: Yes, we demand both. We have high standards.
Erdknuffel: If a player does not speak English, what would you recommend for him if he wants to bring his own thoughts and ideas into the development of WAR?
Carrie: Well if he’s German, he should just talk to you!
Andy: Honestly right now yeah. The volunteer moderators for each language are doing a great job of helping to pass along feedback, I believe. I’ve got PMs from you about feedback from the German community. Kaelgar was on holiday for a while, but he’s passing along feedback to me as well.
Erdknuffel: Do you read the discussions in the German and the French subsections of the official forums?
Andy: I read what I can. You probably saw, when the GOA forums were still up I tried going in there and I tried to read it and at least get an understanding and use Google Translate for it. It’s not ideal, it’s not perfect but I do go in there and I try to read it, but obviously like we’ve said, it’s not an ideal situation and we are working to improve it.
Erdknuffel: So I think, there are some plans to improve these subsections into fully fledged forums, right?
Andy: Not necessarily fully fledged but to give a more complete forum experience.
Erdknuffel: Speaking of the official forums, are there any plans to improve the BioWare Social Network? For example by putting in a way to mark unread posts?
Andy: So actually, we share the same frustrations as the community shares with the new forum software. Lithium was not ideal, it wasn’t the perfect solution but what they did, they offered a very complete service that had a lot of things that you expect when it comes to a complete forum software suite. We actually have been in constant communication with the Adminton forum team regarding the forums and they already are planning on moving to a new forum software suite. That’s in the works; they recognized that as an area for improvement. I can’t give you a lot more information on that right now, I can just say that there is new forum software that’s coming. We don’t have a prospective time; it’s all about priorities for them.
Carrie: And we’ve been constantly feeding them like: Here’s feature we need and they’re aware of that and they’re moving forward to things like that.
Erdknuffel: Customized avatars for example?
Andy: As a person, who is a forum troll, I kind of like the customized avatars, but on the other hand as a community manager I see the value in offering things that are very specific to the setting of the game and the lore of the game because we want for the forums to be another form of emergent. For a lot of people the forums are just another extension of the game and a complaint that a lot of the people, when they came over had about the official forums was, that they said: “These forums don’t feel like Warhammer.” The old Lithium forums felt like Warhammer and so we recognized that if you have a lot of customizable avatars or personalized avatars, you actually start to loose that Warhammer feel and you just become another gaming site, which talks about all games. That’s not the purpose of the Warhammer forums. The purpose of the Warhammer forums is to talk about Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer Online. That’s what we are here to talk about.
[O-Ton: Andy spricht hier von anpassbaren Avataren, nicht von Charakterverknüpfungen!]
Interview von der GamesCom Teil I
24. Aug
Endlich ist es geschafft, die Audio-Transkription meines Interviews mit Carrie Gouskos und Andy Belford ist fertig. Darauf erstmal ein Waaagh!
Insgesamt umfasst die Mitschrift fast 19.000 Zeichen -- eine Länge die selbst mir Kopfzerbrechen bereitet hat. Aus diesem Grund habe ich mir erlaubt, dass Interview in drei Teile zu splitten. Den ersten Teil findet ihr nun hier, die restlichen beiden werde ich jeweils morgen und übermorgen online stellen.
Mein besonderer Dank geht an Gikta, der sich die Mühe gemacht hat, meinen Kauderwelsch in eine lesbare Form zu bringen und natürlich auch an Carrie und Andy, die sich sehr viel Zeit für die Beantwortung der Fragen genommen haben. Viel Spaß beim lesen!
Erdknuffel: You are now here in Cologne at one of the biggest game fairs of the world. Can you say what it feels to be presenting WAR here?
Carrie: It’s awesome. It’s intimidating, because it’s so much going on. So many people. But we have been really welcomed by many sites and communities and had a lot of really good feedback and people have been really nice. It’s always important to come out and show that you’re really actively working on the game. I noticed a lot of the Americans and European press. We’re only sending out a couple of people so we’ve been running around, trying to find people and it’s a madhouse! Like it’s so busy especially these days where it’s open to everyone. Wednesday was kind of quiet but these days it is a madhouse and so it’s cool I like it.
Andy: I’m right there with Carrie. I love doing Conventions, especially love being out on the show floor. Like when we have a booth, working on a booth and talking to players. But this is actually really great because we don’t often get the opportunity to talk to the European community sites and that was actually one of the purposes of this. We are not just here just to talk about Skaven. One of the purposes of this trip actually is to talk to the European community. To sit down with the Bloggers- like you- next month, when we go to Games Day UK, we’ll be sitting down talking to some of the bloggers. We are lining up bloggers right now to talk to at Games Day UK. So I mean the purpose of this is not just going pimp our product out, it’s a reach out to the European community as well.
Erdknuffel: What are your expectations for this big event, except that you can eat sausages and drink beer?
Carrie: Our expectation is to be able to kind of put a face to the name of a lot of the European press. This is everything from EA Europe, which we haven’t spent a lot of time working with up until now. We have worked with them before as well, but now that we have the European Community from GOA both Camelot and Warhammer, we need to go out and make sure that we know who everyone is, so that we can reach the community more easily and it also helps us to understand the community a little bit better, the culture and things like that and then additionally on top of it to talk about some of the new stuff we’re working on. We’re not kind of giving the whole picture here at GamesCom and we’re not giving the whole story at Games Day Baltimore either, because we’ve got lots and lots to share. It’s going to come over the next months and weeks.
Erdknuffel: Now that we have had our first glances of the RvR pack one of the biggest questions is how you plan on implementing the Skaven. Maybe in a version of the Monster-play we have seen in Lord of the Rings Online?
Andy: We’re planning on doing something, which we think is completely different. We’re not ready yet to talk about exactly how we’re going to do it, but what we can say is this: This is an RvR pack. Everything that we’re doing in it has a focus on Realm vs. Realm combat so what you can be sure of is, that how we implement the Skaven will have a direct impact on Realm vs. Realm combat. We’re not interested in adding PvE content to it, really. It’s all RvR.
Erdknuffel: I heard some rumors about Warpstones, which will drop in the RvR so you can get skills and help to improve your Skaven.
Carrie laughs
Andy: Where you heard this? That’s nothing we’ve said.
Carrie: Well, that’s nothing we have said, but obviously Warpstone is a big part of Skaven. So we will be true to the IP and incorporating Warpstone in many different capacities.
Erdknuffel: You also talked about a new zone to be accessible. What is the goal players will have in this zone and will it influence the other RvR zones?
Carrie: RvR is the goal. The details of the mechanics will probably be revealed more, as we start to get into testing with the players and start getting feedback from core testers, but it is an RvR zone. I would even be so bold as to call it an RvR dungeon and it will be tied into the campaign. We’re still tweaking all of the nuances of that. It could have an impact on the campaign or it could be more a part of the campaign.
Andy: The idea is that we don’t want to create a new zone that’s going to have everyone flock to the new zone and then just leave the tier 4 campaign dead. That’s not the goal of it.
Carrie: We want to marry it a little bit more.
Erdknuffel: So you don’t want to create a tier 5?
Andy: That’s not what we’re intending to do right now.
Carrie: The cities are still in a lot ways the endgame, but with all the changes that we are making to the oRvR and with the new area to play, I think we’re creating a new fresh endgame for all of the campaign experience.
Andy: The idea is for the zone to organically fit into the existing campaign.
Erdknuffel: So not like the Land of the Dead?
Andy: No.
Carrie: No.
Andy: We’ve stated in the last Q&A: We’re not interested in doing something like Trials of Atlantis, where everybody goes and flocks to a new area in that sense.
Den zweiten Teil findet ihr hier.
