Category: Editorial (Page 27 of 34)

      WoW PvP: crowd control gone wild

      December 22, 2010 /

      WoW Arena.

      I’ve been spending a good bit of my game time playing World of Warcraft and I’ve been enjoying the expansion so far. Yes, it is more of the same, but my favorite class (hunter) has been reworked and feels like he did in early BC when I learned to love him. It’s been good to see Blizzard speed up some of the more tedious aspects of the game, and it’s nice having populated worlds again.

      My main focus in the game now is PvP. I did the raiding thing for a while, but I just don’t have those big chunks of time to put toward a single dungeon any more. I want to jump in some BGs, go work on my Archaeology, go bleed some gold from the auction house, and work on my professions in a play session. PvP is a lot more conducive to that. PvP in WoW has always disappointed me a bit. There are just too many different skills to worry about from the different classes, and without thorough study, it can be tough to know what happened to you in a fight. I often find myself looking at the combat log (a feature League of Legends desperately needs) and then googling the various effects to see what the hell they are.

      The biggest problem, though, is CC. Crowd Control in WoW is one of the worst active game systems on the market today. It is entirely plausible that you will be unable to control your character for stretches as long as 30 seconds, during which you will most definitely die. Blizzard woefully tries to address this with diminishing returns, but those returns are player specific, so you can get chain-disabled by a group of 2-3 players without them incurring much penalty.

      There are a lot of good ideas out there for fixing this, but I thought I’d share my own variation, from a post on the Battleground forums:

      The CC in WoW always brings me back to a simple game design principle: is the anti-fun generated by the mechanic greater than the fun generated by the mechanic. The answer is overwhelmingly yes.

      Someone in the thread mentioned that the goal of WoW PvP is to deny your opponent the ability to fight instead of outfighting them. It’s unfortunately true, and again, really not fun for either side. Do I get a sense of accomplishment when I kill a target that doesn’t move and I just shred away for 15 seconds? No. And the guy getting killed is obviously having very little fun. Loss of character control will always be a crap mechanic for the receiving player. The fact that it can last as long as 20-30 seconds (with disables from a couple toons) is just absurd.

      To all the people saying the equivalent to “get cleansed bro,” players don’t always have a cleanse nearby, and suggesting they should get one doesn’t at all address the problem. Nerf the CCs, and nerf cleanse with them so it doesn’t get to the point that you can’t lock that warrior down.

      A [global diminishing returns system] would be awesome, but I’d also love to see some system where CC breaks when you take some percentage of your health in damage – let’s say 10 percent for the sake of argument. You get stunned, as soon as your health is reduced by 10 percent of it’s max, the CC breaks and you become immune for X amount of time. I say reduced because heals could prolong it – this would hopefully remind people to kill the damn healer. Fights would have so much more back and forth and be infinitely more interesting. It would also rightly encourage people to use CCs against their off-target for spell interrupts. Put that kind of system with a GDR and PvP is instantly more interesting. You’d probably have to move the damage/healing slider a bit, but any change would require some across the board tweaking.

      Even though WoW is the rampaging juggernaut of the video game world, it could learn a lot from burgeoning fields, like the MOBA world. I’ll let you know how it feels when I have a couple hundred games under my belt, but for now I feel like I’m either getting disabled to death or doing the disabling. It’s not very often that I’m hitting someone who’s hitting me back.

      Editorial, world of warcraft

      Cassiopeia Impressions: active casting = active vulnerability

      December 14, 2010 /

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      Cassiopeia released today, adding another caster to the mix. I had the chance to play a couple games with her this afternoon and, I gotta say, I don’t really like her. Though she has a fairly active playstyle, the poison and Twin Fang combo plays away from a mages typical strength: super burst damage.

      As Phreak mentions in the champion spotlight, Cassiopeia relies on a full combination of spells to get a kill. She has to land her poisons, maximize damage output from Twin Fang, and land her ult. Miss one of those things and her damage plummets. It sounds fun, like a sort of high risk, high reward game. The problem is, her skills all utilize different casting mechanics, so it’s pretty tough to chain them. Her Q skill casts on mouse position, her W is a ground target, her E is a single target nuke, and her ultimate is a cone. Add to all of that the fact that you need to move to get into position because her range is fairly small (with the exception of Miasma), while watching your enemies to determine when they’ll be facing you so you can get a stun instead of just a slow. When you pull it off it feels great, but with Flash and all the champions with ranged slows, dashes, knockups, and knockbacks, it’s actually extremely hard to pull off perfectly.

      As I mentioned above, there’s also a very simple positioning issue. When I want to get a kill with Annie, I’ll Disintegrate -> Tibbers -> Incinerate -> Ignite -> Disintegrate, which is almost always a kill (if I’m willing to blow that full rotation). The thing is, I can cast those spells very rapidly and then get out. If I just want to harass, I can stun with a spell and cast either Disintegrate or Incinerate for a nice, solid chunk of health. With Cassiopeia, the full kill combo takes a lot of mouse movement, and the equivalent harass combo, probably something like Noxious Blast or Miasma to a couple Twin Fangs. The fact that you have to cast four or five times means you’re in range for return fire for the majority of those casts. She has no disable, so you better hope you can give better than you’ll get, or harassing won’t work very well for you.

      That said, I found she’s much more fun in lane than as a solo. With a lane partner, there’s someone to produce a little threat with you, and someone to soak some of the heat if you’re about to take return fire. It also brings more damage, giving you plenty of opportunity to bring a target down.

      As much as I wanted a poisoner, Cassiopeia doesn’t quite cut it. She has to expose herself too much to deal respectable damage, so she typically ends up casting a Twin Fang or two, which isn’t quite enough to prep someone for a kill. Her current skillset is tough to balance, though. Buff her damage output too much and she does big damage in burst, but continues to deal sustained damage like a late-game carry at every stage of the game. Honestly, I think she might be better if they just made her into a carry. Make her abilities deal physical damage so that she has some early game burst and can rely on her auto attacks later in the game. She has a ranged slow, a movespeed buff, and targeted nuke for early game harassment (that would scale well early because it worked off armor pen instead of magic pen).

      Champions, Editorial, league of legends, Patches

      My first Kinect experience was underwhelming

      December 12, 2010 /

      Kinect Adventures.As part of this weekend’s festivities, Spike set up a gaming lounge in one of the suites at the Four Seasons with a couple different systems sporting current titles for our enjoyment. It’s a little odd to try to sit down and play some games with people you’ve literally just met, especially on a console. Console gaming, at least locally, is sort of an intimate affair. You’re right next to one another, can immediately see whether your teammate/opponent is doing well.

      Kinect augments this experience tenfold, because suddenly you’re doing these really foolish things in order to control the game. I started on a game called “Kinect Adventures,” which had me jumping up and down and leaning left and right to control a small raft. The camera had a hard time nailing me down at times, and even when it did find me it was a little sluggish. The worst part, though, was that it took pictures of me in these ridiculous poses and then showed them to the room when I finished a run. I’m not a particularly bashful person, but literally no one was willing to give the game a shot after seeing that.

      It seems like Kinect could be very cool for a young family or maybe in the right dorm room, but it’s definitely not something you should do with people you don’t know.

      Editorial, Xbox 360

      I’ve been reported enough times for a Riot investigation

      December 8, 2010 /

      Riot investigation

      I got an interesting email today, the contents of which you can find above. That’s right, I’m under investigation for potential violations of the Summoner’s Code. To say the least, I’m shocked.

      I won’t deny that I rage from time to time. I absolutely do, though recently I can only think of two games in which I may have been reportable, and in both cases I was retaliating. That doesn’t make it okay, but it’s not like I’m running around verbally abusing people without provocation. Frankly, it can be tough to keep it cool when a player who is 0-11 by 15 minutes is berating his teammates for their failures to “support him.” Again, I’m not saying I’m in the right. It is just a game, and raging doesn’t do me any good (or anyone else), but sometimes my frustration comes out my fingers.

      The second issue is that I haven’t really been playing that much recently. Either I’ve been reported in every one of my recent games, or action is being taken long after the complaints were originally made. I suppose it could also be that Riot has a “report threshold,” past which you get investigated, regardless of the amount time that has passed since your last report.

      I’ll certainly keep you guys up to date. I think I keep a pretty level head for the most part, so I doubt too much will happen. It will be interesting to see how the League of Legends penal system works from the inside.

      Editorial, league of legends, News

      Player with 500 alleged leaves finally gets a ban

      December 6, 2010 /

      Banhammer.This is dumbfounding, but there’s also a lot of missing evidence so please, take it with a grain of salt. There’s a post on the forums right now asking that Riot “Free RickoniX,” a player who, according to the post, was recently banned for his leaves. How many leaves? Again, according to the post, more than 500.

      From what little evidence can be gathered, it seems the account has been banned. There aren’t any games past November 23rd, and his ranked info has been deleted (I’m assuming. It also seems as though people know who he is, so this is either some highly forum troll work, or there’s some decent amount of truth to it.

      Let’s leave the 500 number out of it for now, though. What’s an acceptable number of leaves? I’ve personally seen people over 100. So why aren’t they immediately banned. Even if 100 games is less than 5 percent of your games, as it would be in my case, why aren’t you immediately served at least a month long ban. I’d say it’s more likely than not you’ve ruined or negatively impacted a good 75 percent of those, in most cases more, which is just way too many. It would be easy to have some sort of ‘leave decay’ so that, should you stop raging or learn to manage your team or even just get a better internet connection, you could get back to playing the game without immediate threat of a ban.

      To think that someone might be out there with several hundred leaves yet still playing the game is baffling.

      Editorial, league of legends

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