Metacritic needs to filter by review date

Video games have changed in a lot of ways over the last ten years or so - in fact, the ability to change is a large change in itself.  With the advent of the internet, games now change from week to week and from year to year for as long as the developers see fit to fix, improve, expand, and balance.

The filter should be optional, but in my opinion, the default setting should use the filter, and it would include only reviews from the last 12 months (for games which are being actively updated) or reviews since the last update (in cases where games have finalized over a year ago), with a floor of at least 5 reviews in cases where too many reviews would be left out (more than 5 would be better, but there do not seem to be enough sites on Metacritic to support a larger number at the moment).  Take or leave the particulars of that, but you get the idea.

For example, consider League of Legends.  Currently, Metacritic rates it at a 78.  Not horrible, but frankly, this groundbreaking and addictive game has come a long way since those reviews were written, and the early reviewers couldn't be blamed, exactly, what with them being human and lacking omniscience and whatnot.  As a case study, only as of October 2013 did Gamespot get around to re-reviewing League of Legends, bumping its score from a 6-with-potential (or as far as Metascore is concerned, a 6) to a solid 9.  Currently, Metascore only uses the score of 6 in its scoring.  Players who can only play the March, 2014 version of League of Legends are being presented a weighted average of scores of games spanning from post-beta and continuing on throughout years of meticulous balance, graphical overhauls, expansions, tweaks, and so on.

Another example to consider is Windforge.  Plagued by a prolonged crowd-sourced development and a buggy release, this game only has two reviews so far, but if it accumulates many more, it is unlikely to ever recover, regardless of any patches it comes out with in the future.  Speaking as someone who really wants to like this inspired-but-reportedly-unplayable game, the solution to me is obvious - don't score the game based on potential, but do have its Metascore to be based on the game people are actually getting.

In the case of Windforge, one could argue that rushing an unfinished game to publication comes with its risks, but it's harder to say this about League of Legends, which was designed with constant iteration as a core feature, a hook which keeps players coming back with an eye out for new champion skins.  And in Windforge's case, I agree that legacy reviews are valuable for showing a developer's track record (should I bother pre-ordering from them ever?), but in the end, future shoppers looking to pick up a hypothetical, massively debugged and rebalanced Windforge would be consuming information well past its shelf life.

If there is any sense in the world, then in ten years' time it will have become startling to think that we once lived in a world where reviews of sandcastles were routinely chiseled in stone.

Miley Sivir - Riot Plz Don't

You know, I've been absolutely expecting misogynistic trash from Riot's splash team on this one, but this exceeds even my expectations. Congratulations, Riot. You practically made the joke for me:

Riot pls: Don't break Sivir's spine

(The following is about League of Legends. Some of the context is here.)

The visual upgrade for Sivir is up on the PBE. I don't know whether they'll be updating her splash art or not, but I've been very nervous that they might give her the Escher Girls treatment ever since the first announcements several months ago that they were working on her.

Here's her current splash, which looks pretty good to me.

Like most of the male champions, she's shown in the process of doing something in the way that a normal human would. There's nothing wrong with her spine, and her torso appears to have sufficient room for organs. These are things we can't really take for granted:

Miss Fortune. Sure, she's a nympho pirate hunter, but she looks a bit unwell here.

Soraka. She used to be the only adult human female who looked over 35 years old, but then they broke her back and made her into a teenager instead.

Morgana on death's door.

Anyway, I fixed those some time ago in Paint. Sort of. They're obvious Paint jobs, but at least they're not dying anymore:

And one more. I didn't fix this one, but I showed you what Elise would look like standing up.  I can't believe that people fap to this:

Anyway, giggity giggity, spine porn.  It's really freaking weird.  We know you're doing it on purpose.  Please stop it.

- MTaur

Riot Pls - League of Legends needs a Wind Fish

I briefly alluded to The Wind Fish in my previous post.  This guy right here:

The Wind Fish! (in name only, for it is neither - so the saying goes!) (Source photo came from here)

A Google image search for Wind Fish can brighten any day in about ten minutes.

He's essentially a Buddhist humpback whale in outer space. (Comically undersized wings thrown in for good measure.)

What does this have to do with LoL?

The story is right here.  In February 2012, IronStylus had a big post about Leona, his dream job at Riot, and his dream marriage.  He went so far as to say that he was so happy that it sometimes made him afraid that it was all a dream he might wake up from at any moment.  When another commenter speculated about the metaphysical implications for the rest of us, I immediately posted the above picture in the comments (the image has since been deleted from the servers as a part of periodic cleanup), since basically the whole conversation up until then was one big spoiler for the ending of Link's Awakening.

Anyway, IronStylus's reaction speaks for itself:

I... do not have a clue in my brain as to what this may be...However I am sobbing uncontrollably with what I can only describe as "the purest of joys".

Ok, but what does this have to do with LoL?

Alright, so my hope is that the Wind Fish is still vivid in the mind of IronStylus, and that he's been, at the very least, marinating this inspiration for some kind of support champion.  Not necessarily a whale in outer space, but certainly a breathtaking, otherworldly manifestation of cosmic benevolence.

Problem 1:  Riot does not want to promote passive and defensive playing.  Soraka is the closest thing to The Wind Fish that LoL has right now, and she's already in a slightly marginalized spot and facing a bit of scrutiny from Riot, even after she was reworked some time ago to be a stronger CC source and a weaker healing bot.  Finding a way to communicate the "cosmic benevolence" theme within the constraints of Riot's philosophy of active, aggressive, and well-paced gameplay could be a major challenge.

Problem 2: The other issue is that any potential Wind Fish champion would be somewhat thematically redundant with Soraka - she sort of fits the Wind Fish concept, but her Wind Fish factor is about a 6 or 7, while I would love to see it turned up to 11.  Seeing as both Vayne and Lucian both fit the Batman archetype (i.e., the vengeful hunter of dark things in the night), my feeling is that a Wind Fish champion could be sufficiently differentiated from Soraka in theme, role, lore, and the rest.

If Riot were to roll out a Wind Fish champion as the centerpiece of a Support QoL rework, there would not be enough Fry memes to contain my glee.  I know that the process is lengthy and prone to delays and returns to the drawing board, but I can hope The Wind Fish is working his magic behind the scenes even now.

Fingers crossed,

MTaur

SKT wins LoL World Finals

Well, I was wrong.

Here's what actually happened. SKT won, 3-0.

It's hard for me to say what exactly Royal Club did wrong, but they clearly lost the laning phase every game. Apparently I underestimated holes in their laning game. I don't know what exactly those holes are, but they lost almost every dragon - but this may just be another symptom and not a cause in itself.

A few things I noticed:

1)  Royal Club was still clearly one of the best teamfighting teams in the league, even in the 3-0 showing. They even pulled off one of their unlikely aces that had the potential to turn the game around, but SKT kept their cool and didn't let it happen twice in a row.  Royal Club were just leaking gold too much to cash in on their fighting skills.  On the other hand, SKT was clearly was prepared for this, often managing to disengage from dives where other teams would've gotten sucked into an ace before they figured out what was happening to them.  They only got aced that one time.

2)  In between my blog prediction and when the match occurred, I heard several shoutcasters and pro players mention that SKT was playing a bit off at semifinals.  That was the only SKT match I watched very closely at all as of then, so I was thrown off.

It was somewhat odd to see SKT win by taking control of everything but teamfights.  It's an example of the asymmetric outcomes and strategies that can occur in higher-level play.  Winning a game while avoiding teamfights is a bit of a thousand cuts approach, but even then, SKT did win one of the three games in 20 minutes.

All aboard the Korean hype train. I hope Riot starts featuring them as well as China on lolesports.com in Season 4.

(I'm also hoping for jungler and support QoL improvements, as well as a support loosely inspired by The Wind Fish from Link's Awakening... I can dream about that last one, I suppose.)

Bougeois Francais! (from the SKT vs NJS semifinal match)

First, pictures:

(We made it to the fan poster page. Also, Nientonsoh signed my B.F. Sword.)

The short version of what the sign means: "It[, the B.F. in B.F. Sword,] stands for Bourgeois Francais. While the working class often has to make do with a longsword or a pickaxe, this basic weapon is quite popular among the French middle class."

The long version, since I'm fairly sure that almost no one at the game got the joke except for this one cool kid who probably wasn't old enough to drink (I'm 31): "Bourgeois" means "middle-class", and the concept is sort of a big deal in the Communist thinking of Karl Marx; in his view, they're afforded a higher income at the expense of the "proletariat," or working class. "Francais" means French. Since the B.F. Sword weighs in at 1550 gold, it is decidedly a mid-grade item, and one of the most expensive basic items in the game. Thus it makes perfect sense that it would be a very popular weapon among the Bourgeois, who (unlike the elite) can't afford its upgraded forms, Infinity Edge or The Bloodthirster.

Anyway, enough of that.

Christine and I went to the (League of Legends Season 3) semifinal match between Najin Sword and SK Telecom 1. It was a good match that went to 5 games out of 5. Ultimately, the team who deserved to win did so - in my opinion as a lowly Silver V player (I'm CountBuffon on the NA server).

I'm not super familiar with either team, so it could have just been an off day. But man, did Najin Sword lose by throwing. Often when watching high-level playing, I don't even see any particular mistakes from the losing team; the team who loses looks great to me, and the winning team just won by being even more super-humanly good in ways that I only begin to understand by watching the slow-motion replays. This is how the quarterfinal match between Royal Club and OMG looked to me.

Najin Sword, on the other hand, just derped around and got caught a lot. They had a lot of good moves and were often great in teamfights, but they just got caught a lot. They also threw the last match pretty decisively, as pointed out by the shoutcasters: NJS's Shen ulted Ahri for no good reason, broadcasting to the entire SKT team that Ahri was going to engage, giving Orianna plenty of help in setting up a three-player ultimate.

My low-level thinking about the final is that Royal Club is going to win the whole thing. I thought OMG looked great in the group stage, and I was amazed at how Royal Club shut them down so hard, just inching forward by very small amounts before winning one or two teamfights and opening the floodgates and smashing the Nexus. On the other hand, with SKT having so much trouble with Najin Sword, it just seems impossible that they would be able to beat Royal Club. SKT looked good in the group stage, though, so it might be a good game. I'm predicting a win for Royal Club, and I wouldn't be surprised by a blowout.

Balance Isn't Boring

I suppose I should apologize for being a year late to this particular party, but Erich Schaefer's odd remarks about balance rub me the wrong way. Today the "balance is boring" speech continues to serve as the ideal landmark identifying the flaws of Torchlight which Runic "didn't even bother" to address in Torchlight 2.  As you can see from the title, someone needs to play Danica McKellar to Schaefer's Gucci-obsessed Paris Hilton.

It only takes a few afternoons with Torchlight 2 to see that it's a fine loot-centric action RPG with a lot going for it, in general and compared to Torclight 1: great aesthetics with smooth-running graphics that look great on low settings on mildly outdated machines, responsive controls, vastly improved style and variation in level design, more and better bosses, online and LAN multiplayer capability not present in Torchlight 1, and the return of the trademark pets who run your shopping errands for you. But what may turn out to be its saving grace is its extensive modder friendliness.

Indeed, Torchlight 2 comes with the Guts mod editor (so called because it lets you modify the "guts" of the game to your liking). Mods are kept in a folder kept separate from the canonical patch version of the game, and any number of them may be chosen for inclusion whenever the game is launched.

The reason I call this a potential "saving grace" of Torchlight 2 is because of, well, balance issues. Oddly enough, the balance between the player and the enemies is good, but the overall play experience is currently a bit of a spam fest fueled by a never-ending supply of overpowered health and mana potions.

It is a compliment to the game that I think it's even worth modding in the first place, though!

The potions problem

I was only in Act 2 before I broke down and started working on a potions nerf mod, and I'm finding it to be a vast improvement so far. It is difficult to exaggerate how overpowered potions are in Torchlight 2 and the damage it does to the game experience. They are both potent and spammable, restoring health or mana at a fast rate and having little downtime before becoming available again. Mana costs are way too high, but it literally doesn't matter. And health potions? The player has to walk into the proverbial Mordor if he or she is expected to die while under the effects of a health potion - and the game tempts the player to do just that, since potions bolster the player's cockiness up until the critical point at which enemies are overleveled enough to burst the player from 100 to 0 in half of a second, catastrophically breaking the sustain barrier. Barring this circumstance, the net effect of health potions is that the player is unkillable as long as she doesn't play too far ahead and is quick on the potion keys. Runic may as well cut the middleman and simply put up a big golden bar representing the player's wealth which fills up as she gains loot and empties as she casts spells and/or takes damage. Hopefully the reader is as bored by the prospect as I am!

I would go so far as to say that the unbalanced state of potions makes the game more boring. In other words, sometimes unbalance is boring. Anyone who's ever played a first-person shooter with cheat codes for more than ten minutes is likely to agree. Schaefer "doesn't even try" to balance Torchlight 2? Maybe he should try. It's somewhat astounding that potion balance has been totally overlooked when most modern games (see World of Warcraft's cooldown timers, or League of Legend's gradual potion effects) keep them in check. Even Baldur's Gate had this under control!

Let's talk about cooldown timers

Not satisfied with a simple potions nerf, next I set out to break up the monotony of skill use by balancing around cooldown timers. As my examples of the problems I am faced with, I am using my Torchlight 2 remakes of two League of Legends champions - Anivia, recreated as an ice Embermage, and Leona, recreated as a sword-and-shield Engineer.

My Torchlight 2 Anivia has a right-click attack that shoots several bolts of ice in a cone, sometimes (but not always) stunning or immoblizing enemies it hits. She also has a hotkey skill which drops a comparable AoE of ice on the cursor, doing about the same amount of damage and applying roughly the same crowd control effects with similar likelihood. This hotkey skill has a measly four-second cooldown. In other words, I have a second copy of my right click on a short cooldown that adds almost nothing to the game.

I hope this looks like a problem to you too. Imagine if the hotkey skill did several times as much damage, always applied crowd control effects, and had a cooldown timer of something like 10-20 seconds. The result would be that I would have to make a meaningful decision about when to use the hotkey skill. If it also cost a sizeable chunk of non-refillable mana, then things really could get complicated - why, Anivia would become a character having skills different from each other who depends on the precious resources of health and mana! In other words, Torchlight 2 would be a fully-fledged action RPG as advertised, rather than Farmville with mild fantasy violence.


(Forum-goers have also reported that Prismatic Bolts, Anivia's left-click skill, is so overpowered that I could just level that up and let its over-the-top DPS and crowd control more than make up for it being a single-target spell. Much like the Ricochet skill from Torchlight 1, it's a skill that's just too good at everything, so the player can just spam it all day every day - from now until someone releases a better-balanced game, presumably.)
My Torchlight 2 Leona has Shield Bash on right click, naturally. The trouble is that it's too good at everything: zero cooldown, hits in an AoE, applies stuns about half the time, and does more damage than her sword attacks. It's an AoE attack and a DPS attack a crowd control attack all at the same time. I can just spam it all day every day and forget that I even have a left mouse button or... anything else other than my potion keys, really. Shield Bash needs a cooldown timer, and preferably, Leona would have a more appealing left-click option to compensate; the "Sword and Board" passive goes totally unused because it is utterly outscaled by Shield Bash. Boring? Very. Balanced? Not at all.

League of Legends

In League of Legends, Leona would be looking at a cooldown timer of 4-11 seconds, depending on skill level and item bonuses. Anivia has two burst damage skills and a damage-over-time skill which are clearly differentiated from each other. Either of them can use potions to gradually restore health and mana, or buy slower permanent items to do this even more gradually. All game long, each player makes hundreds of decisions which have a real impact on the outcome of the game. Thanks to the balanced state of the game, countless different team compositions can and do win games at every level of PvP play, and they all play differently in meaningful ways. Balance is an important factor in making variety possible in PvP. While a PvE game can afford a little cheese and excess here and there, a PvP MOBA game with an international championship league simply can't afford to have genuinely overpowered skills or champions.

League of Legends has 100+ champs who are balanced and fun to play, but each champion is restricted to a single axis of viable play. Many of these champions have fun-but-not-viable variations that simply can't be used in competitive play. AP Master Yi is no more; AP Lucian was nerfed to the ground before released instea of made into a balanced alternative; Taric's mana-scaling basic attack damage was nerfed into afterthought teritory; Alistar was nerfed into the ground after he won a couple tournament games in mid lane a while ago and has hardly seen tournament play since; supports released after Season 2 are never viable in mid. It is still up to debate whether LoL is overzealous in role restriction, or if it really is impossible to balance along extra dimensions (but they're not there yet).

In any case, PvE games have more freedom to liberate the player from a single pre-defined path. In PvE, all that matters is whether progress is possible and fun. Fluctuations in the power curve don't make a dramatic win vs lose difference before anything else can even be considered. A wobbly game has more chances to balance out in end.

Is balance boring?

It is true that Schaefer's examples were more along the lines of saying that cheese and excess can add excitement to the game as long as it's all balanced in the end:


I could expound on the complexity forever, but it’s pretty dry to discuss and probably not that much different from any other RPG, so let me digress to where I think our methods are different, and where it gets fun, for me, at least. I don’t even try to balance the game! … There are too many systems and too much randomness for my puny brain to deal with. But the more important reason is that I think balance is boring. I specifically want you to find a weapon that’s just too good. I want you to discover a skill combo that makes killing certain monsters seem too easy.

A few levels deeper into the game, you might be struggling to find a replacement weapon, your skill combo won’t work as well against the new monster varieties and your pet will start to seem weaker. The multiple, overlapping systems and heavy randomness work to my benefit in this respect … So all my spreadsheets and assumptions become less important as we finish development, and I concentrate on playing over and over again, getting tons of feedback, and ironing out the really crazy peaks and valleys. Fun always trumps balance.


The trouble is that his remarks, on the whole, feel like a false dichotomy. He says "balance" when he means "completely homogeneous blob-like state of never-ending same-ness". I personally prefer to think of Shaefer's ideal game state as a form of dynamic balance, a balance which the player labors to tip in her favor in order to achieve progress and complete objectives, as opposed to static balance in which everything is indistinguishable from everything else and it's all just a matter of clicking enough times.

Incidentally, Schaefer's idea of "balance" describes Torchlight 2's world of never-ending potion spam and cooldown-free, mana-unrestricted AoE/DPS/CC all-in-one right-click skills.

On his own terms, maybe Schaefer is right. Maybe balance is boring. Maybe Runic needs to let fun trump balance.

I'll be working on my mods. See you around.