Greedy Goblin

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Message from 2010

I'm spending lot of time reading old posts and either tagging them as "random", indicating that they didn't stand the test of time, or tag them as "ideas" and list them on the Table of Contents page. Looking back to that time, there is no wonder why my blog gained audience fast: the posts weren't too complicated, they were close to life, often spawned from reflecting to actual happenings last day. Like this. The ideas weren't theoretically created but field tested, like this.

Along with the unlikely success of my BDO posts, I see more and more now that my upcoming project must be close to the grassroots, the simple players playing a game directly. Not developers, game-philosophers, metagamers, game-fairness-prophets or whatnot. Play the game with them and show the pitfalls of social thinking when they fall into them.

Won't be easy after years of metagaming, philosophy-writing and game-rigging-hunting. But that simple writing worked and this does not.

9 comments:

Alessandro said...

My favorite kind of posts of your blog are the ones about economics and politics, and how they relate to games.

Like the one where you talked about artificial prices imposed on BDO. Or the ones where you coined "wellfare gear" in WoW.

And the mentality of playing smart (playing to "win").

Anonymous said...

The difference is you enjoyed gaming far more back then.

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous the difference is that gaming wasn't dead back then.

Hanura H'arasch said...

Sounds a lot like you plan to play WoW again. Not that I would disprove. Definitely one of the easier ways to play the game with socials.

I wonder if there are any other type of games where this could work. At least in games like lol this seems impossible.

Gevlon said...

@Hanura: the main WoW problem remains: you can reach any WoW goal by logging out, waiting 3 months, grab welfare gear and oneshot it. No point doing anything else.

Hanura H'arasch said...

@Gevlon: I don't disagree. But what other options are there? There is a very short list of viable MMORPGs that are out there, and other genres seem to be unfit for this purpose.

Unless you can make this plan work in a LoL/Overwatch/Rocket League type multiplayer game, I don't see many alternatives.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon Does WoW have any sort of pvp gameplay?

Smokeman said...

Gevlon said...

"@Hanura: the main WoW problem remains: you can reach any WoW goal by logging out, waiting 3 months, grab welfare gear and oneshot it. No point doing anything else."

To be fair, you can take that approach to any game. Leave it on the shelf, wait for the "2" version with better graphics to come out, buy it. Or... repeat the first step. Games are entertainment for the now, or playing now while it's a little harder for the challenge. I killed both Emerald and Ruby weapons in FF7. Did I "win"? I guess, as I destroyed all content in the game. But it was more of a letdown than a win as there were no more weapons to kill.

Is there still challenge in WoW? Sure! Be in a casual guild that wipes on normal EN every week. It's ridiculously difficult for you, struggling to absolutely maximize your output to counter for all the bad NPCs on your team. See what I did there? I couched the challenge as if the other members of your guild are NPCS, and as such, only improve slowly when they get "better gear."

In the end, you get paid the same whether you complete the raid or not as you volunteered your time.

Andru said...

"the main WoW problem remains: you can reach any WoW goal by logging out"

Any goal? What about clearing current content when it is current? No one cares now if you go to Uluduar and oneshot it in level 100 gear(or whatever, haven't really been following).

Really, not even socials want to 'be cool' by oneshotting last year's content. It's non-significant and does not grant them cool points with anyone.

You are dismissing a huge part of your readers if you think all your readers are asocial. Most of them are socials using asocialness to get ahead. That's possibly the best thing that can happen to you from a philosophical perspective.