Video Game Tuesday: Launch Day Madness

Hey all for this week’s Video Game Tuesday I’m going to cover a topic most of you will probably be familiar with after last week. It’s all about Launch Day Madness!

What’s Launch Day Madness?: Well it’s just a made up term I use when talking about a launch of a particular game and the breaking of various things that occur on that day.

Like what?: Well, for one and probably the one most people are familiar with after last week’s launch of Pokemon GO, the servers are down, or busy. The reason behind this is fairly obvious, too many people at one time. Even if some people get in just fine it’s more due to their own luck, or foresightedness at logging in early, rather than you just being unlucky. If a game can’t handle the massive amount of people logging in when brand new content launches than the IT team behind the game has severely miscalculated the anticipated user base, or it’s increased influx. That was the case with Pokemon GO for most people that I know, and myself personally. I still haven’t caught a single ‘Mon myself yet. The server went down before I could catch my first one.

What else?: Well it could also be the website used to register users can be down, another thing people are probably familiar with after last week’s launch of GO. Sane reasoning, although not to the same extent, probably only up to 80% of the user base if it’s a new game. It can also be that certain parts of the game don’t work, like Instances in World of Warcraft’s The Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King expansion launches.

Even if it’s not people having issue logging in, the servers might be unable to handle a certain amount of players in one area and that area’s server might go down. Like the Eastern Kingdoms going down during the Wrath launch.  Or it may cause server restarts causing people to quit the game and stop playing for up to a few hours.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday! Do you have a favorite Launch Day Madness story? Share it below!

 

TNT: What’s up with PK in Chinese Web Novels

Hi all I’m back with answers to a frequent question I get asked by friends for this week’s Translation Necessary Thursday! It’s all about What’s up with PK in Chinese Web Novels!

PK?: Player-Killing, it’s a term used most frequently by gamers in the MMO genre of games, although it can happen in any online game. Really it’s mostly all about PvP, or Player vs Player content.

Okay what’s so odd?: Well compared to Japanese series like Sword Art Online, where the plot doesn’t particularly focus on PvP, although players do die to each other, it’s more about killing the computer generated enemies rather than another player.  This is generally called PvE, or Player vs Environment. It’s typically two completely different styles of gameplay, and most players choose one or the other to focus on, though some people like to participate in both equally.

So what’s different in Chinese Web Novels?: Well they have a huge focus on PvP, or PKing each other. Mostly it’s because in most Chinese MMOs you can drop equipment, and very few things are exceptions to that, anything from incredibly rare items to mundane items can be dropped when you kill another player. And the competition over those items can be intense, as demonstrated by the conflicts Li Xiao Yao encounters in the series Zhan Long. This holds true in Korean novel series as well, although it’s too a much lesser extent. Ark’s first volume is a good example of a Korean novel.

Is it really that different?: Yes it really is, an item like Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Wind Seeker from World of Warcraft wouldn’t necessarily be soul bound in a Chinese Web. So a PvP player might kill the wielder of such a blade and be able to acquire it much easier than actually doing the quest line.

That’s it for this week’s Translation Necessary Thursday!

Video Game Tuesdays: Easter Eggs

This week for Video Game Tuesday I’m talking about a thing I love about video games. It’s all about those Easter Eggs!

Wait you don’t literally mean an actual Easter Egg right?: Of course not, it’s just a term for stuff that is either hidden in plain sight or truly hidden and are things the game makers place in the game for the players to find. Some times it’s an item, a lot of times it’s a name.

So what’s special about them?: Well for one they require people to be well informed, which is great for those of us who love pop culture. I laugh every time I see a funny reference to an obscure series I’ve read or watched. That isn’t to say they are all obscure, some are super obvious. Things like the Mario and Luigi npc’s in Un’goro Crater in World of Warcraft prior to the Cataclysm expansion. But if you don’t pay attention, you’ll often miss these references. Other things like MMO quest names are also obvious references.  The big reason I enjoy them is it let’s me use the vast amount of stories I’ve partaken in to enjoy a small joke with a game developer.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday! What are some of your favorite Easter Eggs you’ve found, feel free to post them in the comments!

Video Game Tuesday: Black Spindle and it’s Implications

This week on Video Game Tuesday I’m going to cover the recent Black Spindle “event” and talk about it’s implications for games in the future. It’s all about Black Spindle and it’s Implications!

Backstory: Two weeks ago someone was running a daily mission in Destiny, where one mission is chosen and it is harder than usual. In a case of sheer luck this person and his friend stumbled onto a secret branch off the typical mission and found a secret sub mission where an extremely powerful weapon was rewarded for completing it. The sub mission is ridiculously diffucult, I’ve tried it about 5 times both times the mission in quest came up as the daily, and failed every time. However this has lead the entire community into a frenzy looking for all the various secret endings to missions, especially in the daily missions.

This isn’t the only frenzy going on in the Destiny community. A certain weapon called Sleeper Stimulant has been undiscovered and people are frantically trying to figure out how to obtain it. It’s gotten so frantic that a entire subreddit has been made and is being almost constantly updated dedicated just to looking for this one single item.

What does this mean for the future of gaming?: Well if other developers copy this idea into future games it’ll become some of the best emergent gameplay in ages. It may even spawn an entire sub-genre of games where people try to solve all the various mysteries in order to get better and incredibly rare equipment. And other developers will copy this idea, they’d be incredibly stupid not to. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this sort of thing in a future World of Warcraft expansion.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday, go out there and search for some secrets in your favorite game!

Video Game Tuesday: Having fun with exploits

For this week’s Video Game Tuesday I’m going to be talking about having fun. It’s all about exploiting the bugs for amusement/gain.

For the past week I’ve been reviewing Destiny: The Taken King, and while I’ve got the review submitted and it should be up by the time this post runs I’ve also been exploiting Bungie’s mistake for my own gain. Normally I would never ever condone this, but given my history with Destiny’s RNG system and the fact that DeeJ, the Community Manager for Bungie said to “enjoy it while you can” so I did.

What is this exploit?: Xur came for his weekly trip with a new consumable item called Three of Coins. It allows an Ultra, read named, enemy to possibly drop an exotic engram. If it doesn’t drop the next time you use one of the items again and kill an ultra it has a better chance. This repeats until one drops. The old Scourge of Winter mission allows you to respawn right before the boss of the level allowing you to bring him down far enough to kill with a single rocket and you’d run up to him and shoot at point blank range in order to die and restart at the checkpoint. If he dropped an engram it would stay on the ground.

Why did you take advantage of it?: Because I know they are going to nerf this item to the ground, and I might as well get as much use out of it while I can. I spent every single strange coin I had on buying the items and farmed that mission for a few hours. About 130 items later I came out with a Hawkmoon, Zahalo and Hereafter as well as 20 other Engrams I haven’t decoded yet. I’m saving them for the off chance I actually care enough about the game to bother with getting to the next Light Level tier and have them boosted to the maximum values upon decode.

Why is this fun?: Because it’s taking a system and breaking it by using the rules against the developers intended choice. Also because I like to stick it to Bungie for all the crap they put me and other’s through since launch day of Destiny last year.

Am I spiteful because I did this?: I don’t think so, at least not overly spiteful. I missed the Loot Cave last year, which was arguably the best unintended player interaction that happened after the launch of the game. So I wasn’t going to miss this chance.

Why should I, the reader, care?: Because it’s great fun to take unintended bugs and troll others with it. If you heard about the corrupted blood event in WoW that’s a great example of potential fun to be had with unintentional bugs.

That’s it for this week’s Video Game Tuesday!