08.29.08
Posted in Electronic Gaming at 6:47 pm by Rob
So now that the Heavy Pack has been released to the rabid Team Fortress 2 masses for consumption, our collective Thought Train has once again pulled into everyone’s favorite stop, Speculation Station. What’s the next Pack going to be? Will it be for your class? Are they finally going to nerf the Demoman? Let’s take a look at the numbers and see if we can’t make a decent book on whom the next update will be for.
As an early note to anyone curious, these stats were pulled right off of the TF2 stats website at 6 PM PST on 8/29/08, making them current for the week of 8/22/08 through 8/29/08. Right.
First, let’s take a look at the global percentage of time played for the remaining six classes without Packs. Remember, the first few classes to get Packs were seemingly chosen by their popularity (or rather, lack thereof) in-game.
PERCENT OF GLOBAL TIME PLAYED
All percents are approximate, just so’s you know.
Engineer (14%)
Sniper (10.5%)
Demoman (10%)
Soldier (10%)
Spy (7%)
Scout (5%)
So, Spy and Scout are clearly in the basement here. What about for points?
POINTS
Sniper (110)
Spy (100)
Demoman (90)
Soldier (90)
Scout (70)
Engineer (60)
Scout is still scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but Spy looks significantly brighter. Remember, now, that a Spy gets 2 points for most of their kills: one for the kill itself, and a second point for the backstab. Let’s check the kill stats.
KILLS
Demoman (67)
Soldier (64)
Sniper (62)
Scout (45)
Spy (45)
Engineer (42)
Spy and Scout tie here, meaning that the Spy is only getting 10 non-kill points on average, compared to the Scout’s 25. Now, this isn’t quite as damning as it might first seem, as recall that Scouts are likely getting most non-kill points from captures, which are worth 2 points apiece. Taking a look at the average # of captures per hour, however, paints a different story. The Scout is currently managing 5.5 captures an hour, a full 3 captures more than his closest competition. Coupled with his average of 16 kill assists an hour, this is a reasonable mix of point-earning methods.
The Spy, on the other hand, appears to average a dismal 3 kill assists an hour, meaning that his other 7 non-kill points are likely from destruction, at a rate of one building every eight minutes or so. Note that this number may be slightly higher, depending on how many non-backstab kills Spies are averaging globally. Since we don’t have access to those sorts of numbers, we can only dream.
All that said, as a first pass, I’m willing to put the odds of the recipient of the next Pack into the following three general groups.
———-
Spy - 1 to 1
Scout - 6 to 5
The Scout and Spy are clearly suffering on the stats page, and I would wager that this is primarily due to their high learning curves and the novel skillsets required to play them well (pure twitch in the Scout’s case, and strategic/stealth skills for the Spy). Going purely by the numbers, I think the Spy update is slightly more likely than the Scout’s, and the odds I’ve assigned reflect as much. Also in the Spy’s favor is the fact that he could have his own Meet The Team video released alongside his namesake Pack; Meet The Scout, of course, is already old news.
Engineer - 3 to 2
Demoman - 2 to 1
The Engineer and Demoman are the only classes that Valve has publicly acknowledged still have balance issues: the Engineer for his bipolar sentry guns, either stalemating a crappy team or barely fazing a skilled one, and the Demoman for his entirely-too-offensive defensive sticky grenades. Rolling a fix for these issues out with a Pack would be an elegant solution, so the question is simply whether Valve intends to do this sooner rather than later. I’m willing to bet that, at least for this next Pack, the answer will be ‘later’. Note, as well, the relative popularity of the Engineer class. Discounting the elevated totals for classes who have just received an update, the Engineer is consistently the most played class. Though the first Packs were certainly targeted at the unpopular classes, if the Engineer is being perceived as boring or problematic, it would likely behoove Valve to get out a fix to those players, which is why I’ve booked the Engineer Pack at being slightly more likely than the dark horse Demo Pack.
Soldier - 4 to 1
Sniper - 5 to 1
As shown by the numbers and my own personal experience with these classes, they’re not having any problems functioning as part of a team at this time. In fact, Sniper might even be a bit *too* popular, especially in the wake of the Heavy Pack. I don’t think we’ll see Packs for these guys until sometime next year.
———-
So there we have it. The odds may be a little off, but for the most part, I think my analysis is accurate. If you have any interesting counter-points, dear readers, please share. If I can find time in the coming days, I’d also like to do an analysis of what exactly we should be hoping for in a Spy or Scout Pack. Regardless, however, I’m fairly confident that Valve won’t disappoint us.
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06.26.08
Posted in Industry, Electronic Gaming, MMO at 9:22 pm by Rob
Raph Koster had an interesting post up today with a few random statistics and numbers he’s found browsing things over the last while. After taking issue with one of the numbers he posted from Time Magazine (damn you, Time), I decided that it might be neat to toss up a few random numbers of my own that I found interesting. Math is occasionally fun.
Average Pieces of Eight earned per hour of Puzzle Pirates voyaging: ~1,000*
Exchange rate in Pieces of Eight for Doubloons on our newest Ocean, Malachite, as of 8:12 PM, June 26th: 832
Average hourly ‘wage’ of a Puzzle Pirates player: USD$0.30
Minimum hourly wage, San Francisco, CA: USD$9.36
Amount of time required to earn the equivalent of one hour of San Francisco minimum wage playing Puzzle Pirates: 31.2 hours
California Lottery Mega Millions jackpot for 6/27/2008: $34,000,000
Number of new Mounted Tigershark items winning the Mega Millions jackpot could get you: 2,045,728**
Percentage of all players’ total playtime spent as Pyro class in Team Fortress 2 since Pyro Pack update on 6/19/2008: 26.4%
Percentage of all players’ total playtime spent as extraordinarily flammable Spy class in Team Fortress 2 since Pyro Pack update on 6/19/2008: 5.2%***
Total number of downloadable Rock Band songs available as of June 24th: 152
Total cost to download all available Rock Band songs as of June 24th onto your Xbox 360: $268.50****
More sources and explanation after the break.
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03.22.08
Posted in MMO at 4:02 pm by Rob
So Nexon USA has released an open beta of the latest product it plans to inflict upon our shores: Mabinogi. As it was advertised as being more ‘world-y’ than most traditional MMOGs, I decided to take it for a spin this morning in the hopes that I could grow as a person, and maybe, just maybe, learn a little something about life, love and the pursuit of the American Dream.
Instead, this happened.
Touché, Nexon. Touché.
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02.18.08
Posted in Industry at 2:37 am by Rob
This year, I am once again attending the GDC as a Conference Associate, so today was spent doing various preparatory tasks at the Moscone Center. Well, to be fair, the bulk of the day was taken up by one particularly draining task: tote bag stuffing. Frankly, I’m sure the conference totes are one of those things most people take for granted; that said, the group of CAs working on them only just barely finished assembling them before Midnight, and I am just now home and contemplating sleep.
So, please, I beg you: if you’re attending the GDC this week, for the love of God, at least sort through and *look* at the contents of your tote before dumping it out in a corner somewhere and grabbing your conference schedule. A lot of love and tears went into making the damn things, and there’s actually a few neat/useful things in there this year.
No socks this time, though. Damnit.
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10.16.07
Posted in Electronic Gaming at 6:40 am by Rob
So, lately, in between rounds of Team Fortress 2, I’ve been piecing my way through The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. It’s a decent game overall, but on no less than two occasions now, I’ve come across areas of the game that lead me to believe that Hyrule is in serious need of some experienced entrepreneurs. Below are my thoughts on this grave crisis.
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09.17.07
Posted in MMO at 7:09 am by Rob
Since the rather inflammatory ‘talk’ regarding RMT and microtransactions at the AGDC last week, a lot of opinions and opinion-like substances on the topic have been tossed ’round the blogosphere. Now, given that my employer has been a major(?) Western player in ‘microtransactions’ for the last two and half years or so, I figure it’s high time I weighed in on this lukewarm-button topic.
For starters, we need to settle on some proper Goddamn terminology for the purposes of discussion. A ‘microtransaction’ does not necessarily occur when a player purchases an item in your virtual world, though the term’s certainly bandied about with that usage. As we all know, and as Raph Koster told us here…
The microtransaction, the common business definition is a system where… there are two flavors. One is: you actually pay a macrotransaction that converts into some point system and you eat away at the points. It’s like buying a block of cell phone minutes or a block of time, or something like that. And then the other method is: you buy something that’s really small and cheap, and then periodically the service aggregator, instead of billing you constantly, which gets expensive because they pay per transaction — they pay this fixed fee. Instead of doing it then, they let them pile up for a month and then they bill you all at once. And that is how pay-per-view works. That’s the definition of microtransaction. Notice the whole question of whether you handed your pay-per-view movie to him did not come into the equation! That’s a separate issue altogether, it has nothing to do with the billing model. Microtransaction’s just a billing model.
So stop using ‘microtransaction’ as an umbrella term, you heathens! You’re going to make Erik Bethke cry! Ahem. Now that we’ve straightened that out, let’s look at another term that gets tossed around in these sorts of discussions: ‘RMT’ (real money trade/trading). Now, strictly speaking, ‘RMT’ could probably describe the kinds of transactions that are occuring between players and developers that people are trying to describe when referring to ‘microtransactions’, but there’s a problem. The term ‘RMT’ has a lot of negative baggage associated with it, as described by the following snippet I found after Googling, well… RMT…
In Final Fantasy XI Online… reaching the maximum level (75) can take a [long time]. But leveling is only part of the game. Along the way, players have a chance to deck out their characters; they upgrade armor, weapons, and spells in order to maximize their abilities. Typically, the higher the level and the better the gear, the more expensive it is in the terms of the game’s economy. Taking the time to earn the necessary money often means a break from leveling… and in order to skip this process, some gamers out there are turning to companies like IGE or auctions on eBay to solve their gaming woes. For real money, they can purchase virtual game money — often known as “gold” (or in the case of FFXI, gil, the long-used term for money in the Final Fantasy franchise), which is then used in-game to gear up their characters. This system of buying virtual goods and/or money with real money is known as Real Money Trade, or RMT — and it is a bannable offense on most MMORPGs.
The emphasis is mine, and I feel sums up why we can’t just use RMT to describe ‘developer-direct item purchases’: RMT is most often used to refer to cash trades occuring between players, or between players and third parties. These are a whole other ball of wax and have a really bad rap amongst the developer community, which may be something I discuss in a future post. For now, though, it looks like we’re gonna have to come up with something else.
To digress a bit (with an ulterior motive), I attended a one-day conference back in June called the Virtual Goods Summit, and it covered the sorts of practices and issues we’re attempting to describe here. I’d actually never heard the term ‘virtual goods’ used with any regularity before that summit, and while ‘virtual good sales’ isn’t a bad term, I’d personally like to see something with a catchier acronym. How about ‘digital item purchases’ or ‘DIPS’? Since this is a monologue, and there’s no one here to disagree with me, I’m going to go ahead and make this my de facto jargon in future for referring to the practice of a MMOG or virtual space taking in at least part of its revenue from the rental or sale of items accessible only within the boundaries of its game world. Phew. Glad that’s settled. What an abrupt and ultimately unsatisfying conclusion! Serves you right for thinking I was going somewhere deep with this after two years of not writing a damn thing.
In future installments of this series, I’d like to actually, uh, discuss aspects of DIPS that aren’t purely semantic, such as whether they could be utilized in an existing subscription-based world, and whether the hand-waving freakoutery (HWFO, another fun acronym) regarding the acceleration of DIPS as a business model in the West is altogether deserved.
As a homework question, how do you, dear reader, feel about the term ‘digital item purchases’? Do you have a better alternative? Also, can you think of any ways you’d like to expand on the definitions I’ve given of microtransactions, RMT or DIPS?
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Posted in Site News at 6:02 am by Rob
…I just upgraded Wordpress. And installed Spam Karma. Oh, and switched over to a less broken theme.
But you’re not reading anyway, are you? ARE YOU?! Ha, expect more content shortly.
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02.21.07
Posted in MMO at 5:22 am by Rob
In a recent post on Scott Jennings’ blog, Lum and his many avid readers have done a bang-up job of hitting upon most of the factors necessary to including successful and fun PvP into your (probably hypothetical) MMOG. In a thinly-veiled attempt at increasing this blog’s roll of content, however, I’d like to take a minute or two to illustrate what I believe are the two most important such points of this complex issue using everyone’s favorite descriptive tool… the metaphor.
Anyone with kids knows that it can be a struggle to get them to eat vegetables, especially ones that aren’t potatoes. Anyone with half a brain, however, can tell you that vegetables are an important part of a growing human’s diet; without them, after the final throes of puberty we’d all end up with the physique of… of… well, a computer programmer, but that’s neither here nor there. So what are we do to balance our future world leaders’ diets if they won’t even try just one bite of something that’s actually good for them?
We bake it into a muffin.
Specifically, a chocolate muffin. One trick that my mother swears by (but promises she never was heartless enough to pull on me when I was young) is getting additional vitamins and nutrients into a kid’s diet by baking them chocolate muffins with grated zucchini in them. The kid gets the delicious chocolate taste, the parents get the vegetables down their gullet, everybody wins.
And this is something most games have been missing from their PvP, and something that Scott adeptly caught on to when he suggested that ‘whatever you can do to “NPC-alize” enemy players, do so’. Puzzle Pirates (and I apologize for my bias) does this beautifully. The way battles at sea in our game are structured makes it nigh impossible for a new player to actually realize that they are participating in a PvP battle until it’s almost over. This is very good. If a player isn’t rudely jolted out of the style of gameplay they are already very comfortable with whenever they encounter another player to fight, they are definitely less likely to be pissed off that their opponent is now Joe from San Jose rather than angry_badger_76 or the dread NPC ship, the ‘Hot Cod’. We’ve effectively baked some PvP zucchini into their PvE muffin.
Note that PvPers can still communicate with each other in Y!PP, and I feel this sort of social interaction is not something that you necessarily have to curb; as more qualified gentlemen than myself have already posted to death, the emotion that can come from such communication can make PvP mean more the participating players and hey, if anyone ever gets out of line with the smack talk, there’s always the /ignore command.
So, we can see that baking the zucchini into the muffin is important to get everyone participating and content. But what about, as Psychochild went over repeatedly on his blog, incentive? No matter how well you bake the zucchini into the muffin, the kids still aren’t going to eat it if it tastes like boiled shit.
And this is where, I’m sorry to say, Puzzle Pirates fails its PvP audience. Victorious ships in PvP pillage a portion of the opposing ship’s booty, which can amount to anywhere from a significant sum if the loser was on a lengthy pillage prior to the engagement to, much more frequently, sweet scupper all. This is where the kids realize that we’ve tricked them with our enticing muffins. They expectthe run-of-the-mill, gold fountain Piece of Eight reward they always get from NPC ships, but generally end up disappointed and feeling like the encounter was a waste of time. Not only that, but the times when the victors do reap the spoils, the losers get horribly shafted, generally losing one or more hours of in-game work. Needless to say, this is bad, and has led a lot of our playerbase to equate PvP with griefing, completely invalidating all the good and hard work we did getting the damn zucchini into the muffin in the first place.
I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb here by saying that making the muffins taste good is probably the toughest part of making a viable PvP system for your game. A few solutions have been tossed around for Y!PP, but most of the obvious ideas for balancing PvP and PvE payouts are highly exploitable. Start using magic money fountain rewards for PvP, for example? They’ll get a friend with a ship and trade kills. Ain’t gonna work.
I fear I don’t have an answer to this global dilemma, but some other games out there have made admirable attempts at both baking the muffins AND making them taste good (EVE Online is probably the best at this so far, even if their finished product is a bit difficult to eat), and I have hope that some of the more enlightened folks out there will be able to incentivize PvP to the point where even unintentional carebears like myself and Y!PP’s player base will be more than happy to slit some PvP throats now and again (I have my eyes on you, Warhammer Online).
That said, I’ve already done my part to fight the good fight: I’ve given you the recipe.
Go forth, my friends, and bake the muffins.
And for the love of God, make sure they don’t taste like ass.
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02.04.07
Posted in MMO at 6:28 pm by Rob
So, after about a year and a half, someone left a comment on our ‘About Us’ post, which means that at least one person other than Mori or myself has read this site. Also keeping in mind that pkurflax.org has cost me about $200 in hosting fees since it was opened, and that I haven’t actually posted on it since then, I figure it’s high time we made an effort to get some content up here. Yeehaw!
Since she actually asked for input from community management types on a recent blog post, I don’t mind mentioning a few things here about the official public Wiki we maintain for Puzzle Pirates, the YPPedia.
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