How to Write a Beta Test Post

My post this week will be a continuation of my coverage of the Diablo III beta. The image is a picture of the Wizard class in Diablo III casting a magic missile. I thought it might be a good idea to give an example of a constructive feedback post. If you don’t follow the basic guidelines that most video game beta forums tell you to follow, none of the developers will ever read your posts. Therefore you’ll be wasting your time. Here are a couple of important guidelines you must follow to give feedback on a game:

1. Keep it constructive. You can complain all you want about various aspects of the game, but remember that game developers care very much about their games. Mix your complaints in with suggestions on how to fix said problems for the developers. The game developers won’t read your post if the moderators delete it because you said the company sucks and the developers are idiots.

2. Write clearly and well. I can’t tell you how many forum posts I’ve seen that don’t have paragraphs, or violate basically all the basic tenets of writing. If your forum post says, “Hay guyz, I reallly dont like teh wizzurd cuz of his spells and stuff. i tahnk you for reading tihs” do you think game developers will take you seriously?

3. Check to see if others have written about your topic before you make your own thread. If there are fifteen threads about how a door won’t open in a certain level, do you think the sixteenth will make a difference?

Finally, here is an example thread that I created on the Diablo III beta forums. A moderator eventually entered the thread and thanked me for my feedback.

Wizard Class Feedback – Diablo III Beta Post

I have to say, the Wizard's abilities are kind of boring. After re-rolling the Witch Doctor, I found I was having WAY more fun with the WD's abilities than the Wizard ones - and the Wizard's abilities are his bread and butter.

Here are my impressions of the Wizards abilities:

Magic Missiles: Yawn. In almost every RPG since D&D. Scales based on weapon damage, nothing particularly interesting here.

Wave of Force: Again, yawn. Area of Effect slow and deals damage, may trigger traps and make walls fall over. Also some knockback.

Arcane Blast: AoE ranged blast. Not a bad spell; good utility, but it suffers from the same problem as other Wizard spells: They're generally boring and don’t do anything new or innovative.

Buff that gives +15% weapon damage: Interesting. I'm guessing this +15% improves all your other spells, because they're based off of weapon damage. Right? (Yet I never noticed any damage difference before activating and after).

There are plenty of other Wizard spells, but none of them really stand out. This isn't just a complaint post however, I have some suggestions for more entertaining spells:

Flame/Ice/Lightning stream: A progressive damage and debuff that sets the target on fire/freezes it. The longer the stream is hitting something, the greater the fire/ice/lightning debuff it gets, the longer the debuff lasts, and the more damage the stream does.

Transmorph: A unique buff for monsters. A streaming buff that gives a monster (not a boss, to prevent griefing) +10% stats for every, say, 3 seconds it's cast on the target. Additionally, it increases the % chance you get a magic item from the monster by 1%, capping at 100%. Keep in mind that this 100% isn't a guaranteed magic item drop - it's a 100% increase in *that monster's* chance to drop an item, which is probably like 3 or 5%. Meaning it doubles the chance it'll drop a magic item when killed if fully cast.

Raging Madness: A channeled spell cast on a monster that doubles its stats and then forces it to attack the nearest target - friendly or enemy. Talents can make this spell pass like chain lightning through multiple monsters.

Just because a Wizard's spells are meant for Damage Per Second doesn't mean they have to be boring. There are creative ways to apply DPS in any RPG, and this one is no different. I'm of the opinion right now after spending hours with my Wizard that he's boring and desperately in need of more creative game design.

League of Legends and Free to Play Marketing

League of Legends is a free online game created by Riot Games, and is the wave of the future. The free-to-play economic model of video games, in which games are released to the public at no cost, seems unsustainable. How do you make money as a corporation, spending millions on a game, if you release it for free?

The answer is in-game microtransactions. These games, while free, let you buy items in-game at little cost. Generally these items are under five dollars. There was however a danger to this system. Early free-to-play games became known as “Pay-to-win” games because they let players buy items that gave them unfair advantages in-game. For example you could buy a temporary 50% damage bonus in a multiplayer shooting game. It would cost about five dollars, and you had to buy it each match. Considering that serious gamers play hundreds of matches, this adds up rapidly. These games devolved into who had the bigger wallet, rather than the most skill. Gamers then abandoned them.

League of Legends was the first game to get the free-to-play model right. Their game now has over 32 million players, most of whom have spent over ten dollars on the game. Some of whom have spent over a hundred dollars. What League of Legends did that other publishers did not is ensure that anything you can buy with real money is cosmetic, and doesn’t give an unfair advantage in-game. For example you can buy unique clothes for your hero that make you appear differently from everyone else in the game, but don’t actually change your power level at all.

This novel approach to free-to-play gaming clearly paid off for Riot Games. Based in Los Angeles, Riot games is headed by two gamers named Steve Feak and Steve Mescon. Notably, they hired a number of ex-Blizzard employees and raised over $8 million dollars to develop the game. Riot Games recently sold their Los Angeles studio to the Chinese company Tencent for $400 million dollars. Larger companies have taken notice of the free-to-play model’s wild success. Sony and other companies are releasing their next big games using the free-to-play model created by companies like Riot Games. We’ll know within a year or two if these companies can pull off the free-to-play model as well.

An in-game image of League of Legends

1,000 Player First Person Shooter Battle Breaks Technological Boundaries

A significant technical breakthrough was recently achieved in the world of online gaming. A Swedish technology company called MuchDifferent recently created a game prototype. This game prototype allowed one thousand living, breathing, players to fight online in the same digital space.

This is a huge development because, as most First Person Shooter players know, the biggest servers on the current digital battlefield can hold about 64 players. This game was capable of holding well over ten times that many. Games like this could transform shooters from being “battle simulations” to “war simulations”. Imagine digitally fighting over a state or country instead of fighting over a town and you’ll have an idea of why this is such big news.

The game itself was pretty basic, featuring only one gun and a simplistic battle against game developers. Their main plan seemed to be the commands to “move forward” and “shoot randomly”. Nonetheless the fact that a thousand living, breathing players could occupy the same digital space is a big achievement.

Even large scale Massively Multiplayer Online games like World of Warcraft can’t feature more than 150 or 200 players in the same space. Yet this Swedish company that, frankly, no one’s heard of, has surpassed them. World of Warcraft and other MMOs are notorious for their “instancing” – creating several copies of the same digital world, each of which can accommodate a small number of players. This was essential because the technology simply didn’t exist to host the tens of thousands or more players that play the game in the same area.

I am extremely happy to report that this is changing though. I look forward to the day when millions of gamers who play the same games can all look at the same army and digital landscape.

A video of the 1,000 player FPS battle can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNN_J0g5fmQ&feature=player_embedded

Diablo III Beta Impressions

Diablo III is a computer game currently in beta testing. Beta testing consists of a small group of gamers who are selected to play a game before it’s released, and then give feedback on it. For my first blog post, I will give my impressions of the Diablo III beta.

Diablo III is one of the most anticipated upcoming games of 2012. But does it live up to the hype surrounding it? To be blunt, no. The graphics are acceptable but not breathtaking, and the gameplay is mediocre. In Diablo III you play as a hero and kill monsters in a mindless and repetitive fashion. There is very little innovation and even less entertainment value in the game in its current state.

In Diablo III, there are a number of classes from which you can choose to create your hero. Among these classes are the Barbarian, Demon Hunter, Monk, Witch Doctor and Wizard. Each class has different abilities it gains by leveling up. You level up by killing monsters repeatedly, which is pretty much what you do throughout the game. There are occasional bosses and events to spice the game up, but it’s pretty standard grindy-RPG fare at the moment.

The problem Diablo III is facing is one that similar Role Playing Games are also facing: How do you create a game focused on killing monsters repeatedly that doesn’t get boring? One answer is Player versus Player combat. Blizzard, the makers of Diablo III, announced three days ago that they were removing Player versus Player combat from Diablo III though. What a letdown!

I have already brought up a number of issues in the Diablo III beta feedback forums, including the blandness of the specific hero’s abilities and the repetitive “grinding” nature of the game. I can only use my Monk to punch/kick a demon in the face so many times before I get bored. To be fair, the game is still being developed and much can change. But as it stands I don’t see what will keep gamers like you and I playing this title for more than ten or fifteen hours.