World of WWII

Tags

Wargaming.net, World of Battleships, World of Tanks, World of Warplanes

I continue to get in matches with World of Tanks.    Not too many – 3 or 4 a night.     I’m having far too much fun with Minecraft.      I’ve yet to see the new map put in with 8.9, and I haven’t yet started on the new German TD’s.     Trying to finish off the Jagdtiger and get the Tier X unlocked.

And my other Tier X ?    The Maus is still sitting in the garage, crewless.     I’ve waited for around six weeks for a retraining special, and I don’t think it’s going to happen, so it’s time to just bite the bullet and spend the gold.  The Veterans Day weekend special is pretty good, but doesn’t include retraining discount.

World of Warplanes is getting closer to launch.    It turns out, that you get a minor benefit if you’d been playing those beta games – your XP will be converted at launch into crew XP, and distributed among your starter airplanes.     And of course, there’s a good “Veterans Day” quintuple if you want to gain some more.

Not only that – there’s a “First to the Top” contest to go along with release day – November 13th.     Well I suppose I’ll play along with that.     I’ll have to try and pick the most obscure piece of the tech tree.    Maybe I can manage a few bits of free premium time.     Several people are going to get a 10-year premium account, which is mind boggling.

World of Battleships/Warships is entering alpha, and has requested that anyone with 150 posts or more apply to be an alpha tester.    Feh.     Those who want to post over and over about a game before it’s launched are the most qualified to move it forward ?    I don’t think so, but who cares what I think.

Still, this is the title I’m most interested in, and it does seem to fit more with the “Not a twitch game” style that I prefer, so I continue to follow the development and hope for the best.

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Master of Orion 4 thoughts

Tags

Master of Orion, Wargaming.net

Overlord asked what we’d like in a Wargaming version of Master of Orion.      Well, this would be my first pass at designing it.

Possibility the First : 4x turn-based strategy game.    Start out by copying Moo2 (and forgetting Moo3).

One think I loved about MOO1 was the ability to use thousands of little bitty ships to take on Leviathan class dreadnaughts.    This has tended to disappear in the latter 4x style games, so I’m hoping they’ll remember to balance the tiny with the big.

Another item is the abstraction of factories.    MOO1 abstracted all production in this all consuming number.    Moo2, I built individual items which each had a certain amount of production points or whatever.    Why should I build an isotope factory, interestellar harvester, and all of that just to get additional industry points ?     This would be better abstracted.    Same with food, and laboratories.    Don’t make me build tons of individual doo-dads on each planet, I find that boring.

What’s fun, is the idea of taking that radioactive rock and turning it into a terran paradise.    Go deep with the ideas of terraforming, and unlock this stuff before the final stages of the game.    Let me play the galactic virus, expanding the universe and creating it in my image.

Much of the other stuff is pretty obvious.     Useful difficulty levels, from Newbie to Impossible, build up over time until you war with other empires, and a fun variety of ways to win as in the other games of the genre.

DLC could include ship packs – where the game ships with, say 8, and you can use many different ones for cosmetics if you’re willing to buy.     And different lifeforms; most space games seem to assume oxygen/nitrogen atmospheres on a certain narrowly defined temperature.     What about methane breathers – or creatures floating around in gas giants ?

Possibility #2 – A MooMmo

My experiences playing Evony-type games give me pause on a grand strategy game with other players against you.     The organized groups destroy you, people who gather outside of the game in guilds and then all flood a certain area and cooperate you to death.     And how did I play these games ?   Try to get in with a bunch of players who abandoned the game early, then you could take them over.   Yeah, that tends not to be fun.

You could do some kind of loose confederation, ala realms play.    Pirates of the Burning Sea had you as French, English, or Spanish.     If you expanded into your realm as Race1, or Race2, or Race3, with some kind of war against other races, but with soft war possible within your race.     Such as becoming the leader of Race1.    These things tend to suffer from unequal distribution of players though.     And which of the classic Moo races would you leave out ?

Now what could really work would be the ideas of the multiverse.     What if you played a MMOSPG MOO ?     All worlds created on 8/10/13 would be seed XYZ.    Whoever ended their game (in a reasonable time) with the highest score, best replay, most technology, etc, would be memorialized in a high score leaderboard.   Or would get some kind of meta-points, which would increase their abilities in-game by a tiny bit.

And with meta points, you could steal an idea from World of Tanks – Crew Skills.     With an obviously much faster progression, let your warships have crew skills acquired through meta points.    Or bonuses to your race’s abilities, et cetera.

Either method, I think the trick is having the Intellectual Property gets you interest.    Without a good design you get Moo3.  So design it well and implement carefully.     Any kind of an MMO might allow you to tweak your ideas as you go along, while a single player game is a smaller one-off project.     And who’s to say it has to be one or the other ?

Resurrect the MOO franchise for the younger gamers in a single player form, and wait until later for the MooMMOSPG.    Oh I love that – a “Mooooo MMMMMM oooooo SSSSSSSS PiG”

World of Orion ?? Kickstarter kicking it ?

Tags

Kickstarter, Master of Orion, Wargaming.net

Guess who the new owner of the Master of Orion franchise is ?

Wargaming apparently won the bidding, with Stardock a close second.     Oh, I would love for Stardock software to have this instead, but it seems Wargaming outbid them.    Overlord has some comments scattered through his blog on this as well.

Now, the question is, what kind of a game are they going to build.    Can they make the franchise look good after the steaming pile of poo that Alan Emrich turned MOO3 into ?

On another note, I received a recent email from Stainless games about the Carmaggeddon Reincarnation project.    You know – it was originally funded June 2012, with a 2013 target date.     Seems there is no expected date, specifically, but it will come out Really Awesome once it’s all finished.   I mean, they said so.

I haven’t looked at Kickstarter since putting up the money for this game – and for good reason : I’m not big on throwing money down ratholes.    I’m not saying that’s what is happening with Stainless – they did manage to get me Carmageddon for the Android, free.     But the PC version is stuck in “We’re working on it” mode and the target date has slipped dramatically.      And this is with (I believe) a pretty good team working on the game.

It’s not wasted money either way – I’m either going to have helped bring the game about with my money, or will have learned a useful lesson about the concept of “micro-venture-capitalism”.

Matchmaking by Win Rate ?

Tags

Wargaming.net, World of Tanks, XVM

Hat tip to Z, as is often the case.

Any patent attorneys out there ?     A patent applied for by Wargaming shows them patenting the idea of a matchmaker system – “Dynamic battle session matchmaking in a multiplayer game” with skill based components.    If a player has a 60% win rate, they could expect to be put into a harder match; and conversely, if they had a 40% win rate, they could be put into an easier match.

I am not going to overanalyze this patent – they pay people to do that.    My initial reactions include being annoyed as usual at software patents on obvious processes.     Really?    The matchmaker does a lot of obvious things.

I also note the dates involved – applied for on 5/16/12, well after WoT had already launched, and granted recently 4/23/13.     Via XVM’s website, this mod was first created 2/10/12.

What does any of this have to do with XVM ?    Well, it’s a natural extension of looking at the data provided by XVM, to start thinking about skill based matchmaking.  It gives you a suggested chance to win, along with the win rate for each player.    People have clamored for/against it ever since the mod came out.

My thinking is the narrative probably went something like this – XVM comes out, created by dedicated fans.    Questions are raised about skill based matchmaking.    The big guy, Victor Kislyi head of Wargaming, makes the decision to investigate the idea which probably resulted in the patent application and eventual approval.

Another idea occurs to me – does the fact this patent exists, simply codify the existing matchmaker as a patent, with some extra ideas thrown in which may/may not be present ?    Yep, sure could be.    Just look at the win/loss text of the patent :

According to another aspect, the matchmaking server may store a win/loss percentage for each user (or vehicle) at a given battle level. As the player’s win/loss ratio decreases, the player becomes more likely to be placed in battles having battle levels at the lower end of the allowable range, whereas as the player’s win/loss ration increases, the player becomes more likely to be placed in battles having battle levels at the upper end of the allowable range.

The very next paragraph describes the “not too many games being at the bottom” component of the matchmaker.

According to yet another aspect, with reference back to FIG. 8, a variable may be defined (here, referred to as range variable N) that defines a number of battle sessions that a vehicle must participate in before the vehicle may be assigned to the highest possible battle level within its allowable range of battle levels. Range variable N is used to define a sub-range within the otherwise permissible range of battle levels for a given vehicle. In one variant, a vehicle may be placed in any battle level except the highest allowable battle level, based on any placement algorithm described herein or otherwise, until the player plays at least N battle sessions with a particular vehicle.

Does this patents existence mean, skill based matchmaking is present in the game ?     I believe the Dev’s have said, no, it’s not.    Feel free to find posts that contradict me, I’d be interested, but I’m not going to search out anything supporting my statement – I think it’s well known.

For the Record declines to believe this is implemented.    I’m inclined to believe them.   What would be the reason to lie to the playerbase ?     That doesn’t mean there’s no cause for concern – the real question, is *will* a skill based matchmaker be implemented at some point ?

I hope not.   I like the way it’s done fine – assuming equal skill and trying to match tanks by capabilities.    You can (and should) question whether they achieve that, but the concept seems solid to me.   Skill based can be seen as coddling bad players, and penalizing good players.     Not that it should have much effect on me with my current 49.97% win rate.

Wargaming should clarify the whole thing, given their pretty darn good record of communicating with the players.

A Tale of Russian Corporations

Tags

War Thunder, Wargaming.net

Gaijin Entertainment, the Russian developers of War Thunder, have resorted to the lowest of internet lows – they’ve decided that gaijin.com should belong to them, and have made the appropriate legal threats to back up this claim.

It came to our attention that you registered and maintain a website http://www.gaijin.com (“Infringing Website”) that infringes Gaijin Mark. By maintaining and offering to public your content via the website, i.e., Infringing Website, having the same domain as Gaijin Mark, you create consumer confusion and mistake as to the source, sponsorship and/or affiliation of the
Infringing Website and Gaijin, thereby infringing Gaijin Mark. Consequently, the main purpose of this letter is to demand that you immediately cease and desist from maintaining and offering your content via the Infringing Website or any other site having the domain substantially similar to Gaijin Mark. Gaijin also demands that you immediately transfer the Infringing Domain to Gaijin.

 

A quick perusal of the site shows there’s nothing confusing about gaijin.com which would make you think, you know, a Russian game developer must be running the site.

A couple of years back I wrote a review of a movie that had been the biggest box office smash that year and had won zillions of awards.

I hated it. I hated every moment of it with a passion and fury that outmatched the heat of a thousand fiery suns.

The rest is similar.    The site is simply some guy’s personal blog at this point, with articles (as I scroll down) about Roger Ebert, Tomato sauce, New Years resolutions, and my favorite albums.

This is apparently of no interest to Gaijin Entertainment.    After deciding they wanted the domain, they simply stoop to legal thuggery to attempt to get it, by sending frightening legal letters that would simply stop a non-lawyer in their tracks.

But apparently the guy running the blog has his own lawyer.   Not just anyone – Mike Godwin.    Have you ever heard of Godwin’s law on internet argumentation ?   Yeah, that Godwin.

Please be advised that my client, Brandon Harris, disputes your trademark-infringement claim in every particular.

That is the most polite way to state how vigorously we dispute your attempt to assert flat ownership of the word “gaijin,” a word so well-established in English that it is an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Currently, I’m advising my client to publicize your demand letter, so that the entire game-consuming public will be made aware of your client’s overreaching trademark assertions.

Now set your wayback machine to perhaps 1994.   Well before the time of personal blogs, back when I was still figuring out how this whole Internet Tube works, I ran across a similar little guy story – the bank Chevy Chase demanding a computer consultant release his website chevychase.com to them.     They sent nearly the verbatim letter to this guy, who flailed around for awhile until he managed to get legal help.      I always remember the final outcome for this one – he kept his domain.

They apparently kept after him for awhile, he negotiated, and simply requested that if they wanted the domain so bad, just pay him some fee.    And they disappeared and never came back to haunt him again.

I’ve been sued before, not having the resources to have a lawyer on speedial.   It sucks.    You are the equivalent of the 98 lb weakling getting picked on by the 300 lb hulk.     Getting one of these letters it’s tempting to just give in.    The fact that they have limited bases in law doesn’t seem to matter much – just try and strongarm the guy, and see what happens.    Copy, paste, send – what could go wrong ?

Bad publicity perhaps.     Remember the Streisand effect.

Nowadays it appears that chevychase.com is also a blog page.   Funny how that works.    But no bank owns it.    I certainly hope the same happens for Gaijin. com.    And my respect for Gaijin Entertainment has sunk massively.     You guys have hit an issue that I am intimately familiar with; and you couldn’t be more wrong if you had tried.    And you think I’m going to give you money ?    Not likely.

Coincidentally, today is also the day I get a badly worded translation of a Russian story about how much Wargaming is making.

Revenues – 218 million euros.

Profits – 6.1 million euros.

I couldn’t be happier for Wargaming, providing such an entertaining game and doing the entire software development process right in the process.     If your revenue is so high like that, with profit much lower, it makes me think they could be positioning themselves to be an even bigger gaming company – and given how they treat their star property, that is fantastic news.    That sure dovetails with the upcoming World of Warplanes and the in development World of Battleships.

It could also mean that Wargaming is less business focused and more on providing the right experience for gamers.   This can happen with companies that have success, sometimes.      If so I hope they continue to prosper, and it’s still good news.

PS – I know Wargaming is from Belarus, but it just sounds better calling them Russian and it’s not far off; the country was part of the Soviet Union back in the day.

World of Tanks

Tags

Wargaming.net, World of Tanks

World of Tanks is an absolutely addictive MMOG, and it’s completely FREE.    Well, another freemium game that is.    But you get to jump in immediately and drive around a WWII era tank.   How can that not be cool as all get out ?

Thanksgiving special banner. Their original art is nicely done

You start off with three tanks and a few empty slots in your garage.   Each tank has some upgrades which improve the performance of the vehicle; you have to earn enough XP to be permitted to buy them.

I had to research each one of these items by earning XP.

Then you jump in and start shooting.   The controls are very intuitive to begin with.   Drive forward, back, shoot.    Moving while shooting and good sniping require a bit of practice but you’ll have plenty of time for that if you stick with this game.

Good scouting got all these tanks destroyed, and I got one in the process

I have been playing for about six months and am closing in on my 5,000th match.    You play so many matches because the developers have mastered the concept of working your way up a tree, starting with light tanks, on up to medium tanks, to the heaviest tanks with the biggest guns.   No, you do NOT start in a Tiger tank, you start in the tiny scout tanks.

The progression is intelligent.   You play matches in the little tanks and start to learn by experience what to do, and what not to do.   The game rewards camping in certain instances, and also the mad rush for the enemy.    You are part of a team of fifteen, so teamwork is essential; whatever you do, do it all together.

This is the German Tech Tree. I'm progressing through it pretty well.

So it works out roughly, the better you get, the better of a tank you get to drive.   It is totally possible to play this game without paying a single cent and get all the way to the monster big tanks.   If the game is around long enough for you to grind your way through that.

Now, the grinds available to you are multiple :

• You can grind your way up a particular branch of the tree to reach the Tier 10 tank.
• You can grind your favorite tank to improve your crew.   They start out at 50%.    You can get them to 100% in general training, then continue to grind them through three additional levels of special skills (Camouflage, Repair, Firefighting)
• You can grind to achieve elite status – IE, every item possible to research has been researched for a particular tank.

I am getting the most enjoyment out of attempting to elite all the tanks in the game; I am sure I’ll never pull it off but it’s fun to work towards.

How do the developers at Wargaming make their money ?    You buy gold and spend it in game.   The most popular thing to buy seems to be premium accounts which increase your silver (the non-premium currency, aka credits) and XP income by 50%.   At first I refused to pay this because I was simply enjoying the game and didn’t get why I should try to rush it.    Clearly, I will never reach the end of their trees and without premium will miss out on a lot of content.     You can also purchase special tanks with gold, train your crew to 100%, buy additional garage slots, and a few other things.    For a game this ASTOUNDINGLY GOOD, I didn’t hesitate.   I’ve dropped $50 on it two different times and I still have a bunch of gold in-game to spend.

No real PC game would be complete without some ability to customize.   Each tank has skins in the game which can completely change the look.   I’ve gone and customized the look for every tank.   No more boring Olive Drab for me.   I have a mix of realistic camo looks, and Warhammer-inspired paintjobs.

If you’ve never tried this game – you must download it.    Yes, you must.    And if you see me in game give out a shout to MrrX.