Too Little, Too Late

Everyone that's listened to OnHVW at any time at all over the last 2 years knows I loved Hellgate: London; I suppose I still do.  After all, despite what a lot of folks have to say about the game, it did do a few things right.

• Some NPCs had character.  In fact some of the NPCs in Hellgate had more character to them than some of your favorite RPG's heavy lore characters
• It was real-ish.  We really haven't the faintest idea what the human race would actually do if demons suddenly started erupting out of portals in the middle of every major city world-wide.  I'll bet if at least one semi-competent military strategist survived the initial onslaught, he/she wouldn't turn around and build a camp in the middle of the damn woods so the demons could find them.  Humanity would go underground.
• The icon mini-game is the single best design improvement for ARPGs in the last 5 years, period, end.  For those uninitiated, in MP, three icons would be lined up in the lower part of the screen with numbers embedded in them.  These icons could be associated with a creature type that needed to be killed, a damage type that you needed to kill mobs with.  Fill in all 3 icons, and loot erupts out of the ground, and three new icons replace it.  This is the single best way to get people to experiment outside their comfort zones to discover new things about the game. Oh, and it is totally optional, if you're averse to having loot explode out of the ground.
• HG:L is as close to a Rifts game as we may ever get, without the game turning into a clone of FO3.  I'd accept the assertion that Borderlands did a Rifts style game; however, Borderlands doesn't take place on Earth, which is part of the point in Rifts.
  

I'd be lying if I didn't say HG:L didn't have its problems.  Obviously it did.  So, when news surfaced of Hanbitsoft resurrecting HG from the ashes (http://tinyurl.com/ydw5qmb), I got a momentary tingle thinking about getting back on the horse and stomping a mudhole in demon ass so deep that when I finished I could pop out of the hole and order Chinese food.  Then, after the initial elation that a game I endorsed wasn't going to die forever, I came to realization I was past HG:L

Borderlands and FO3 took the place of HG:L in every possible way.  I got my post-apocalyptic RPG at 2 different speeds (FO3 is significantly more deliberate than Borderlands).  I got a realistic-ish Earth after all hell breaks loose.  I got loot by the carload.  I destroyed giant tentacle monsters.  I saved the day.  I got to be a bigot against "zombies".  I got to set zombies loose on the bigots.  I got hundreds of hours of game play out of these 2 games, and I haven't even touched Mothership Zeta yet.  The question I am left asking myself is: After all this time, after getting my Rifts-esque RPG on for well over 300 hours between FO3 and Borderlands, is there any room left for Hellgate?  Or is hellgate going to feel like Fallout-lite or Borderlands minus graphics?

I think the answer to the first one is a qualified yes, but for only one reason.  The summoner class was going to get an ability similar to the WoW Warlock's Metamorphosis ability.  Simply put, magey guy turns into melee bad ass.  I wanted to play one before Flagship closed it's doors, and if I am going to take up the game again, this will be the way.  Beyond that, the only thing bringing Hellgate back does for me is give me a small chance at some type of redemption for recommending it in the first place, but Borderlands already did that for me, too.

Deconstructing Populist Nonsense

I'm currently in the Star Trek Online Open Beta Test; Santa Claus was nice enough to see fit to throw a Collectors Edition pre-order my way Christmas this year.  Overall the game is fun enough.  I still feel the ground combat is shallow, but it is far less tedious now that I have completed the Starbase 24 Fleet Action and upgraded my entire away team's kit simultaneously.  While the game is "fun enough" by my own words, I a still considering telling Santa to cancel the pre-order and get his money back.  "Why," you ask?

The community; more appropriately, populists in the community trying to infect STO with the same silliness that infected, and subsequently annihilated any ambition to play World of Warcraft.  One particularly annoying populist troll on the forums goes by the name of Slarus.  Slarus believes argument to be chain posting the exact same logic devoid, false assumption laden paragraphs over and over again.  So, I figured the best way to lead off the third attempt at Post-it Notes from the Void would be to deconstruct the nonsense.

Premises:
First, STO is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).  As such, the environment is competitive amongst members of the player base.  The goal is, of course, to obtain the maximum "reward", which could be alot of things: gear, levels, raid progression, credits, in the least amount of time possible.  There is another obvious type of competition among players, PvP, but the populist falsely believes this to be the only source of competition between players.  What's disregarded is the importance of more skill and dedication leading to greater rewards; conversely, incompetence and casualness leading to inferior rewards.  Naturally, writing the latter out of the thought process is an entirely self-serving means of "leveling the playing field" by demotivating the players above the populist on the skill and dedication curve, and giving entitlements to everyone below an arbitrary and too high threshold.

Second, kamikaze play styles cannot be allowed to yield progression in any manner.  The kamikaze play style by its very nature precludes the possibility of requiring all players to learn and understand how their ships, weapons, shields, consoles, and bridge officers work in practice.  The concept has been thrown around to give buffs to players for not dieing in combat actions; unfortunately, this does not work for 2 reasons.  First, it turns group combat actions into tests of wills to see which player will get most bored first, and initiate combat, which removes the team aspect of the game in favor of retaining personal gains.  Second,  a reward system does not sufficiently penalize the kamikaze play style; nor does a reward system provide sufficient motivation for players to get better.  Now that premises are complete, let's deconstruct!

• Assertion: "A Death Penalty will make players actually think about what they are doing and use tactics"
•  its a time sink a waste of time, it teaches nothing, it provides ZERO insight into winning it mearly makes you wait to overcome the penalty and continue, a death penalty only makes a mission longer. 

It is not the game's responsibility to hand every answer to every challenge on a silver platter.  The first 'x' levels (MMO standard is 10) should teach the player the basics.  In STO terms, that means power management, shield balancing, weapons configurations and firing patterns (e.g. don't fire your photon torpedoes until shields are down), bridge officer abilities (Emergency Power to Shields), etc.  After that, the player should have the ability to craft their own ship, tactics, and skills to their own personal play style to be successful.  The responsibility of the game at that point is to provide opportunities for the player to put themselves to the test.  The so-called "refutation" of the notion that a death penalty will make players think ignores the concept that the time sink is a part of the death penalty.  Players will certainly not want to have a multiple minute or hour long extension put on the piece of content they are attempting to progress at any moment, so it seems that this is the perfect means to motivate players to learn how to play, and deter kamikaze play styles.

• Assertion: "A Death Penalty makes the game more challenging"
• If you wish to increase/improve the challenge level of the game, the appropriate way is by improving the content...Likewise, handicaps from DPs are not challenging, just a waste of time to fix them

If you have had your head out of the clouds over the past 5 years, you know that this assertion is absurd on its face.  Content cannot just be made harder, for that very notion violates the populist, bleeding heart's belief that we all need to be the same.  Besides, "challenge", "better", "improve" the content are all subjective terms.  What's better to the populist is rarely better to the elitist, and so on.  Once again, the notion that the time sink is a part of the death penalty is ignored.

• there is an obsession with punishing and hurting players.

Naturally, it is in the populist thinking to ignore concepts like "good", "bad", "exceptional", "terrible", etc. because the goal is to make everyone the same; it should come as no surprise then that the word "bad" is missing from this sentence.  Yeah, I am hellbent on making the STO experience such that bad players have no possibility of ruining the experiences of good players in fleet actions.  The question is what's wrong with that.  To the populist, everything; in reality, nothing.

• No nothing I do affects you except if we are teamed, and the simply answer is boot me if I don't play the way you like and put me on ignore and it will NEVER bother you again.

If we've learned anything from recent World of Warcraft, it is that putting the onus on the player base to self-limit an oversupply of players for content doesn't work.  The idea of just throwing everyone a person doesn't like on a (falsely) assumed infinite ignore list is quaint, but useless.  Part of the point of the online game is to develop community.  Ignore lists full of people exploiting a lack of death penalty to obtain progression they did not earn will ultimately work contrary to the concept of community building.  I do have to concede, however, that in a lone case of one player playing exclusively solo, the ability for that player to adversely affect my play experience is reduced, but it is still well within the realm of possibility.

• Yes I repeated myself cause you aren't reading. and Kamakaze players ARE A MINORITY

For now.  If it comes to pass that the kamikaze play style is more efficient than doing combat right, and in the absence of a death penalty to deter such degenerate play, then players will adopt the kamikaze play style more and more as time goes on.  Using a death penalty to make traditional combat the most efficient way to progress ones character is the proper way to address both death penalty and degenerate play.

• Your fixated in penalties and not just playing the game, I am motivated to do my best all the time because I want to do my best.

 Maybe your best isn't good enough.  Maybe you have flawed reasoning about disruptors, phasers, torpedoes, or bridge officer abilities.  Maybe you used kamikaze tactics through level 10 because there was very little death penalty, and are now a half-wit bounding across the galaxy.  Penalties at least force the player on an individual basis to make the choice.  Rewards still allow progression for bad players, which is bad.

Well, that's all for now.  I'm seriously considering telling Santa to cancel the pre-order and get his money back, because the game Slarus wants will unquestioningly suck balls.