Askgar

Well, I missed 2 days but that was mainly because I got a new laptop on wednesday and spent time setting it up.  On both days I played the usual facebook games (see days 1 and 2) and I also logged into DDO on Day 4.

DDO

I only really logged into DDO to see how it looked but ended up deciding to go an do a mission.  I took advantage of the new casual difficulty mode and completed a level 7 (my level) mission on my own.  It was quite fun, other than missing one box and having to go back and find it at the end, and it was just the right difficulty for me, I never died but came close a couple of times, there were traps and lots of bosses and some areas with a large number of enemies but only once did I feel overwhelmed, and that was when I ran into a room without paying attention.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll remember to post at the end of day 5, you can look forward to a writeup of DDO night and ermmm, thats probably it.

Had a less than pleasent day today, and a bad internet connection at the pub I’m staying in doesn’t help, so a very short one today.

Guild Wars

Tuesday comes and it is time for Guild Wars with the Tuesday Noob Club, unfortunately because of my terrible internet connection when I was able to be in Guild Wars my pings often were above 10k ms and as such, unplayable.  It also didn’t help that my voice connection was so flakey that people could barely hear me, and vice-versa.

The only thing I did in game today was to purchase a Celestial Tiger for someone in the guild who had asked me to get them one, I got it cheaper than expected so all was good… except the bad connection that is.

Facebook

I described the games I play on facebook yesterday and there is little point in me saying the same things again.  I did notice that one of the members of my “raid group” in Ghost Trappers had left, so I now need to recruit a new member, but other than that nothing changed.

Hopefully I will have a more interesting post tomorrow but I wouldn’t recommend anyone getting their hopes up.

Today I’ve played a total of 6 “games”, I’ll go through them in the order I played each one.

Mirror’s Edge

The first game I played today, I started playing this last week after having purchased it VERY cheap on steam a while ago and finally getting it downloaded.

Mirror’s Edge is a very interesting game, mainly based on free running but with occasional chases from armed “blues” and occasionally a helicopter.  The free running itself is fun, but having to do this while being chased is often frustrating, one slip and you’re dead.  During today’s session I had a particularly nasty section where I was being constantly ambushed by “blues”, it took me 10+ attempts to complete this and I very nearly gave up.  I eventually completed it then got stuck on a section where I lost a large amount of progress after falling off a crane.  I gave up at this point and moved onto my next game for today due mainly to frustration…

Evil Genius

Similarly to Mirror’s Edge I purchased this a while ago from steam during one of their infamous sales.

I played a little of this game and found it a little fun, but rather confusing.  I get the feeling that I need to sink a bit more time into the game and get the hang of it a bit more, it seemed very slow and didn’t keep my attention for very long.

Super Laser Racer

I discovered this on steam and decided to give the demo a quick try.  It is a simplistic racing game, a bit like a 2D version of Wipeout, with the graphics style of Geometry Wars.  It kept me amused for about 5 minutes but seemed very shallow and as such I decided to remove the demo and will not be purchasing the game.

Mouse Hunt and Ghost Trappers

The final three games I played today are all Facebook games, with these 2 falling into the category of “passive” games.  I will cover these in more detail in the future, however the basic premise is you set up the game and then every X minutes (often between 10 and 15) you can do an action (in this case hunt a mouse/ghost).

I often play these in the background while doing other things, although never while working I must add, and they only require attention every 10-20 minutes, with no real consequence if I forget for an hour or 2 (or 12).

There was no notable progress made in either of the games today, with me being a couple of weeks away from the next upgrade in Ghost Trappers and trying to build up stockpiles of gold in Mouse Hunt so I can go hunting for one of the most powerful mice in the game (the Acolyte).

Castle Age

The final game for today is Castle Age, this is of the “Mafia Wars” style, you spend a certain amount of energy to undertake a “quest”, which gives you XP and money.  Each level you gain points to spend on skills, and the money can be spent on new weapons, armour, “soldiers” and land.  Castle Age includes some more advanced features, more commonly seen in MMOs, such as raiding and epic monsters, requiring teamwork to kill.

I helped out on someones raid today, and did a few quests to level up, however nothing notable really happened.  I will post a more detailed analysis of Castle Age at some point as well as the “passive” games detailed about.

Tomorrow I will continue my week of blogging, detailing what I do, and possibly posting a small analysis of anything I come across.

I’ve noticed, especially with the relatively recent addition of Facebook applications to the internet, more and more games are using the term beta either as a way of demoing their product, or as an excuse for any problems that may occur during the game, or with the servers.  From what I’ve seen there are two main abuses of the term beta I’ve spotted in recent online games, the “open beta” that occurs around one month before launch of an MMO and the releasing of a game onto the internet and sticking beta on it as an excuse for problems that occur.

The first of these, the so called “open beta”, doesn’t seem to be a beta test at all, more like a preview event for he game, often allowing people to give the game a try for a couple of weeks, decide if they like it and then purchase it the next week when it is released.  I personally have nothing wrong with this as a concept, however I would prefer the term “open beta” not be used, calling it something like a preview event, or even a pre-release demo period, would seem more appropriate to me and better sum up what it is about.  Usually by the point a game is in “open beta” the game has already gone gold is getting ready to be shipped, it is unlikely many suggestions, other than major bug fixes, will be acted upon during the open beta period, and just as unlikely people playing in the “open beta” will actually file bug reports.

The other misuse of the term beta I’ve noticed a lot on Facebook games, the usage of the term beta as a pre excuse for any problems that occur (so that any problems can be blamed on its beta status), initially I naively believed these applications to genuinely be starting off as a beta and then transitioning into a fully “gold” application, however many of these are STILL in beta over one year on (Pet Society being the first one that springs to mind I’ve experienced), to me this signals a problem, not in the game as it has the occasional glitch (a problem with being a flash application I believe), but in the terminology.  This is now a released game in my eyes, along with many other Facebook applications using a similar method of launching, and as such should no longer have the beta label.

What I feel is even worse is that despite the application apparently being in beta, i.e. an unfinished state, most of these applications are perfectly willing to sell you virtual items for real money that could just disappear at any moment, should there be some sort of glitch causing items to go missing (it does happen in these applications), and often because the developer has another 10 games of very similar function it can be difficult, if not impossible, to track down the developer and complain.  The forums then become the focus of attention for these problems but as is often said:

The forum is for discussion of the application/game/… not account specific issues, please contact the developer/admin/… directly

In my eyes there are two choices here, either remove the beta tag, which is often not be a problem as they should be out of beta by now already, or they should not put the ability to spend real money on virtual goods until it has been released, instead of trying to monetise it before it has been fully tested.

This does however bring the problem of how do you test the “real money” functionality, I feel that the recent beta test of DDO:Eberron Unlimited did this well, to test the addition of the item shop they created a separate beta server and client, gave people a certain ammount of points to spend in the store, and then gave an incentive to anyone purchasing more points, by promising to add double the amount of points purchased during the beta to their release version account.  This allowed for the developers to test the item shop, and anyone willing to try out putting their own money into the game had an incentive to do so.

However, I expect absolutely none of this to change in the future, we will still have open betas just before release of a game to let people preview the game, and I’m sure we will also continue to get “permanent” beta games, especially with F2P games starting to become a lot more mainstream, and relying on item shops to make money, often during beta to ensure development can continue.

Finally I feel I should point out an interesting alpha test that is going on at the moment which relates to this topic somewhat, Love recently opened up signups for its alpha test but is going to be charging €3 a month to participate.  Despite my stance on games charging players for virtual items during beta, I have nothing against this, Love is being developed by one person and to keep servers up and allow people to test he will need money.  The developer is completely honest about the state of the game, in his own words,

As you may have noticed, im trying to under-sell and over-deliver here.

But due to anticipation for the game, and need to have it tested by a large number of people, has opened it up for anyone who wishes to test it out to pay a small fee and have a go. (For more information on the Love alpha check out the information page here).

As a final note I should mention that this post was in part thought up thanks to my wife, she has mentioned it to me with a number of applications on facebook which are perfectly happy to take your money, despite being in “beta” and admitting that problems may occur.