KillTenRats - Ethic

I took on my raid – er, ultramarathon – and completed it in a little over 23 hours. The weather was perfect, the scenery was stunning and the experience was unforgettable but it was tough and apparently about 1 in 4 runners wiped. Many thanks to those who offered well wishes and thoughts after my [...]

Achievement unlocked is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Is it just me, or do the unique class mechanics stand out more in Warhammer Online than in most other games? The more I reflect on it, the more I see it in other games, but it just seems more prominent in WAR. By “unique class mechanic,” I mean the special feature that guides many [...]

Unique Mechanic is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Make things visible on the execution side of an action so that people know what is possible and how actions should be done; make things visible on the evaluation side so that people can tell the effects of their actions. — The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman Decoration and interaction appear in non-user-friendly [...]

Display the Options is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I played a bunch of Guild Wars this weekend as I am slowly working on my titles.  17 more Nightfall explorable areas to completely vanquish of mobs, and I will hit “I’m Very Important” from the maxed titles achievement track.  This might come as a surprise to many of you who might think that I [...]

HoM-rizon is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Commenters elsewhere respond to Ravious’s post on the GW2 Necromancer. Within 24 hours of first Necromancer information, the comments note that Necromancers are overpowered and that Warriors will devastate Necromancers. It is not just that people are commenting on balance for a game they have never played, for which they have no stats, where the [...]

Class Wars is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Following up from the official announcement of the Guild Wars 2 necromancer, Eric Flannum, the lead developer for Guild Wars 2 was able to answer a few questions about this dark profession. The role of the necromancer in Guild Wars was not easily defined, as it straddled the line between hexer, minion master, and even [...]

Guild Wars 2 Necromancer Interview is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

If the store is buying and selling used games in quantity on the day they are released? Well, technically “fencing” is not the same as “stealing” but… : Zubon On Another Hand is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

On Another Hand is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the grind. (Our sponsors would like to apologise in advance for the slightly more personal and self-indulgent nature of this post. Thank you for your custom.) To achieve competence in sport necessitates training. Training involves doing the same thing over and over and over and over [...]

On the treadmill is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

… we salute you! For those about to rock… is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

For those about to rock… is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Yesterday, ArenaNet officially announced the necromancer profession. Of course, the fourth profession for Guild Wars 2 has been known since the gamescom demos started going public. I am happy because in Guild Wars, my main is a necromancer. I can’t say the profession is my favorite because ritualist makes the decision too close to call, [...]

I, Necromancer – Guild Wars 2 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

How much less would your house be worth if you could never re-sell it? How about if there was no used car market, and instead you put the car in the landfill when you got a new one? Okay, that same effect applies to the price of new and used games. : Zubon Buying Used [...]

Buying Used is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Improvements can take place through natural evolution as long as each previous design is studied and the craftsperson is willing to be flexible. The bad features have to be identified. The [designers] change the bad features and keep the good ones unchanged. If a change makes matters worse, well, it just gets changed again on [...]

A Local Peak is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

After several tries, with my prior best being level 41, I have finally reached level 80 in World of Warcraft. It only took using the refer a friend program for triple XP up to level 60 and a total of 9 days, 16 hours, 6 minutes and 26 seconds to get from 0 to 80 [...]

Party Time – Level 80 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

There are two game mechanics that really came to light at gamescom that seem to be hitting a nerve with the Guild Wars 2 communities.  I already gave my thoughts on the cooldowns for elite skills, and now I want to talk about Guild Wars 2 energy. Before I do, one of ArenaNet’s programmers discovered [...]

Thoughts on Guild Wars 2 Energy is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Has any “rebuttal” opening with that phrase ever been accurate? There are many variations on that phrase, usually amounting to “I don’t think you are taking X into account,” but the ones starting with “obviously” rarely seem to take the explanation much further than that unless it is to stack ad hominems. : Zubon “Obviously [...]

“Obviously you have never…” is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Ravious (and the Fifth Telling) have me missing our camp from way back in the original A Tale in the Desert. It’s funny that guilds felt so much more meaningful in the game where you could have more than one, although maybe raiders appreciate their guild ties more. An essential difference, as Ravious says, is [...]

More Guild Projects is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Months ago, I went through a brief exercise helping you think about how much money Blizzard had in the queue to buy sparkleponies. That was a $3.5 million queue. I just heard that All Points Bulletin consumed $100,000,000. So go back to that $3.5 million exercise and repeat it once a week for half a [...]

More Perspective and Visualization is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Reading Melmoth’s thought of the day of avatars that lose color as they lose health (instead of having health bars), I wondered what alternative option would be available for colorblind players. Systems that work poorly for the colorblind are shockingly common in video games, despite the perception of a male-majority playerbase and the prevalence of [...]

Ghostly Avatars is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Now if, back in 1978, you’d told me that there were going to be three main character classes in future MMOs, I would probably have assumed some kind of rock/paper/scissors relationship among them for reasons of balance. Archers beat infantry, cavalry beat archers, infantry beat cavalry — that sort of thing. I don’t believe for [...]

Quote of the Day is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I’ve been learning a lot about Guild Wars 2 skills from all the footage of the Guild Wars 2 demos coming in from gamescom.  The skills are fairly similar to the ones in Guild Wars with a few twists and differences. We’ve known for awhile that the first 5 skills are based on the weapons [...]

Guild Wars 2 Skills and Recharge is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Been meaning to write something lengthier about this for a while, especially in relation to a lot of the recent news about Bioware’s The Old Republic. But I haven’t got around to it yet and now Sony’s Clone Wars Adventures Free2Play not-browser based “MMO” is in a free-to-all open beta, ahead of of it’s mid-September [...]

Begun, the Clone Wars beta has is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Randomessa has a good account of Warhammer Online’s pre-release comments on public quests, which were entirely borne out. The public quests are more or less as advertised. You might dispute design decisions like the quick resets and having influence bars to fill (is that grind or rewarding repeatability?), but most PQ issues came from how [...]

PQ 2.0 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I feel bad for ArenaNet that the leaked video was the first footage we saw of gamescom, but things have turned around quickly: The necromancer is the next profession for Guild Wars 2, and from this video, my favorite Guild Wars 1 profession is looking pretty cool.  ArenaNet says we will get a more official [...]

Guild Morning, Gamescom is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Hopefully the personal story acts as a guide through the zones because that will be necessary. Players need more purpose than pure exploration… — Ravious He is probably right, but I wonder. The first generation of graphic MUDs had far less guidance. I started with Asheron’s Call, which had almost none. There was no quest [...]

Pure Exploration is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

A lot of people that watched the leaked videocam of a Guild Wars 2 demo (beware: poor quality and obviously a dev in godmode), saw at the very end of the video… dun dun dunhhh… a kill ten rats quest… specifically an asura needs harpy glands to make some perfume.  Go kill enough harpies to [...]

Kill Ten Rats Events is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

A commenter at the PC blog every PC gamer should follow Rock, Paper, Shotgun with the moniker ExRTW gave a long, insightful comment on the news story about all the layoffs for All Points Bulletin (“APB”) developer Real Time Worlds.  In my opinion, the saddest part is, rather than being a revelation, it really just seems to confirm [...]

APB: Deep Knowledge is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Yesterday I accepted the suggestion that design should lead users to the right action. If what feels intuitive is wrong, change whatever part of the game is encouraging failure. I was talking about interface design, but this is how we get theme parks, isn’t it? The trail of bread crumbs leads you from ride to [...]

Design of Theme Park MMOs is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Allow me to preface this by saying this isn’t a hateful post. It’s merely an observation. I’ve got absolutely nothing against DDO. I think it’s a fine game. Not the best game there is, but does it have to be? It provides fun and that should be the basic mandate of any game. I like [...]

DDO, or how to take the RP out of ‘RPG’ is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Thanks to a guildmate I came upon this interesting blog run by David Edery, who has his fingers interwebbed throughout the gaming world.  The post of interest was an argument for “aggressive” monetization of games.  He wrote that Western game developers were wary of Asian games, especially F2P games, where a player could buy everything [...]

$omething for Everyone is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The recent addition of Steam achievements to Borderlands encouraged me to fire it up and see how many popped up at once (~20). I thought I might blow up a few people while I was there, and I was reminded of how poor the interface is. Maybe it works better on a console. The very [...]

Unintuitive Controls is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

One great way to encourage your community to add to your game is to make it easy for players to get those additions. It is not enough to have tools for modders; you want it to be easy for players to use those mods, which will encourage their use, which will encourage their development, virtuous [...]

Developer’s Gift to Modders is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The Torchlight 2 announcement came just after I started poking at Torchlight again. I had long ago started a game on the highest difficulty but wandered off after getting tired of how that slowed down the game — it is just a matter of giving all the enemies bigger numbers, which means that my pets [...]

Torchlight Difficulty Levels is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Guild Wars 2 has no quests.  At least it doesn’t have quests in the conventional sense where each player is nearly insulated in purpose outside of specific group content.  I know there have been countless occasions where an unknown player and I happened to be killing the same mobs in the same area, yet we [...]

MMO Herds and Guild Wars 2 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Ardua gushes about The Secret World, but I think a great asset to the game in the North American market is having a guy named Ragnar Tørnquist at the helm. Put that on the box cover. Not that most Americans know game developers or their reputations, just that the very name strikes a chord of [...]

Ragnar Tørnquist is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Hype has become the subject of the day, and I will contribute two repeats to the discussion. First, You Are Judged Against Your Hype. Doing something modest very well gives you Portal or perhaps Torchlight. Take your pick on “shooting for the stars and not even delivering all the features on the box.” Second, the [...]

Hype is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I am glad that you are still enjoying Wizard101 or Warhammer Online or Fallen Earth or whatnot. I like seeing your enthusiasm for a game that most of us are not playing. Keep blogging about your adventures. One of the reasons we have this huge blogroll is because there are so many people sharing their [...]

I Am So Happy For You is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Someone in the current corporate entity has spent the last year holding a fire sale on the goodwill that Blizzard spent a decade building. You can almost see some parts of the company working to maintain the customer’s faith, hope, and trust while other parts are strip-mining that resource. Anyone else have more metaphors I [...]

Odd Complementary Goods is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

First, if you haven’t seen this new gem from ArenaNet then feast on it in as high a def as you can muster.  It’s an updated video version of their earlier manifesto newly born for the upcoming games conventions.  The video starts out with a few of ArenaNet’s top devs giving some quick phrases on [...]

Guild Wars 2 Manifesto 2.0 is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The news that a pilot in EVE was attacked by other players who not only destroyed his ship, but also the PLEX (Pilots license extensions; in-game timecodes that can be traded between players) worth an estimated 22 billion ISK that he was carrying proves once again that, for me at any rate, it is far [...]

A Kestrel for a knave is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

My City of Heroes “main” was a Blaster, but Defender was the only archetype for which I had multiple level-capped characters, three in this case. Were I to go back, I would be all about Controllers, of which I left at least three in the mid-levels. For me, this was all about diversity of play. [...]

Variable Support is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Lots of Guild Wars 2 news has been dropping as the energy for the game ramps up to the first public hands-on demo of Guild Wars 2 at gamescom next week.  Thanks as always to the community at Guild Wars 2 Guru for keeping super up to date on any Guild Wars 2 rustling in [...]

Guild Wars 2 News (8/9) is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I am interested in seeing more factors tied to the account rather than the character and in the form of unlocks rather than items. Most MMO elements are tied to the character. Your level, skills, reputation, achievements: all of these are character-specific. You may be able to trade money and equipment between characters. Some games [...]

Account-Level Rewards is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

There is a difference between being wanted and having someone want something from you. : Zubon x LFy is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

x LFy is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

The critical threshold, for me at least, was getting around 30,000 electrum. Once my Elements deck was about half upgraded, it started doing reasonably well against False Gods, which lets you start winning upgraded cards regularly, which lets you finish upgrading your deck and work on other options. This is a good thread to show [...]

Elements Breakthrough is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

Hello, gamers, listen to your MMO, now back to Guild Wars 2, now back to your MMO, now back to Guild Wars 2.  Sadly, your MMO isn’t Guild Wars 2, but if it stopped using stock Pokemon sounds and switched to something that would blow Hollywood away, it could sound like Guild Wars 2. Listen around, [...]

That New MMO Smell is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

One of my main concerns while watching many of the videos the Guild Wars 2 folks have been sharing are the little one-liners the characters shout when they attack. You know, things like “Take that!”. I knew right away I would get sick of hearing that sort of thing all the time. Thankfully, they agree [...]

Snappy One-Liners is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I don’t like games where randomness dominates. Some can be fun, if we take them completely unseriously, but the less your actions ultimately matter, the less interesting the whole thing is. As the non-controlled element becomes larger, the virtue of winning goes to zero and the frustration of losing goes to infinity (or also zero, [...]

Learned Helplessness is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

I now have in my possession a pocket-sized computer which, when I speak a question to it (“Who is the author of Kraken?” “Who was the fourteenth president of the Unites States?” “What is the name of John Scalzi’s cat?”) provides me an answer in just a few seconds. If I take a picture of [...]

Quote of the Day is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

How is it that Runic Games is publishing Torchlight 2 early next year while other games languish in development Hell for years before coming out late, buggy, and poorly balanced? My compliments to whoever is in charge of production and logistics. I understand that Torchlight is not the most ambitious project ever. It is narrowly [...]

Turnaround Time is a post from: Kill Ten Rats