“LVL70 UberSaw MED LFG Goldrush PST. NO MED achievement farmers pls”
It’s great that Valve puts so much into the TF2 community. Let me get that out of the way straight up. The stuff they’re doing with the new medic weapons, and new maps are great. I finally played the new update today, and… WOW. Gold Rush is a stroke of genius. Gotta be about the best TF2 map I’ve played. I mean, there’s something in there for everyone. Whatever class you want to play, there’s room for it in there.
It’s particularly well suited to pyro antics. I had my first game on it, and I totally rocked out. Top scored and all. Its the way the pyro is meant to be played - lots of back alleys to allow attacks from unexpected angles and quick sweep-and-retreat style play.
And the feel and intensity of the game is just great. Valve has really hit on a winning formula with this game mode. The balance in the games I played tonight constantly shifted back and forth as the cart moved through different sections of the map. There is so much variety in there that it forces you to constantly adapt the tactics to the ever changing game state.
Highlight of the evening’s play was where I was defending as a heavy. During warm up, me and a medic hid round a corner out of sight of the attackers. The medic charged up a critzcrieg and opened it up on me just as the count down timer finished and the gates opened. The attackers rushed out straight into a hail of crit chain gun bullets. Carnage everywhere. It was magnificent.
10 out of 10.
But about these new unlockable medic achievements…
Achievements are the by-product of socially retarded and undersexed game developers
I just really can’t get excited about locking the new medic gear behind the achievement gimmick that is so in vogue at the moment. I mean it’s great if you’re into that sort of thing. Kind of an e-bragging right for the people who actually care (I don’t). If you want to spent 3 hours laying down 1000 sticky bombs so you can get the “draw a picture of Doug Lombardi with scorch marks” achievement so you can boast to all the other cool kids at school, then all power to you - just don’t do that useless crap on any server that I’m on.
Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation currently has more internet authority (and traffic) than Jesus. He had some insightful words to say on the subject in last weeks Super Smash Bros. Brawl review, so I’ll e-quote it here:
It’s a long watch (but well worth it), so I’ll paraphrase liberally (i.e. make crap up):
Game developers don’t have sex, or hang out with cool people, or go out to parties, or even talk to human beings. So they pump out self-indulgent, pointless, and time consuming achievements cause they think everyone else likes to spend hours of their life endlessly playing through every edge case orifice of their game, because they are just that s**t hot.
I blame Blizzard, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony for this crap
Blizzard and their golden goose of orcs and elves has lobotomized the prefrontal cortex of the game industry. Compared to the golden age of yesteryear (which never actually existed, but everyone thinks occurred about the time they were in college playing the game-du-jour for 10 hours a day), today’s game development efforts have turned into a stimulus/response reflex race to the bottom to transform every game into World of Warcraft.
Game developers look at Blizzard, see their pile of cash, and try to figure out how to replicate it. The answer that the triumvirate of evil (NinteMicroSony) came up with was to include an online system of shoe horning achievements into single player games that would otherwise have nothing what so ever to do with achievements. You got some androgynous anime-inspired waif to swing a super size sword and kill a boss? HAVE AN ACHIEVEMENT! You spent one man month hitting golf balls into hoops? ACHIEVEMENT! You crashed into every traffic light while it was orange while driving the wrong way around the track in your favorite arcade racer? YOU BETCHA! ACHIEVEMENTS GALORE! All of which is annoying and stupid, but ultimately harmless.
It’s like they tried to headhunt the high-priced consultants that came up with PHAT EPIC L00T from the early days of MMORPGs, but instead they actually got the guys that came up with the idea of those kitset model magazines where they dripfeed you one piece of the Bismarck or some crap every week to try and keep your interest in their product. Except that you get so bored of waiting for the grind for each new piece that you lost interest in whatever the original product itself was. In the end you give up by the time you’ve barely even assembled the port lifeboats and the officers’ private latrine.
(Yes, I may have been one of those people that bought something just for the kitset model - but it was of the New Zealand Antarctic base, and it was Weet-Bix cereal, and I was 8 years old)
Now that’s fine. Let them think that and code in these achievements (it’s a waste of resources that could go into game polishing, but thats their business I guess if they want to make an inferior product). The problem is when they force you onto the achievement grind treadmill just to get core game play elements.
Lazy developers. You’re not fooling anyone
It makes it too easy for developers to get lazy and skimp on game content. Say that you market your game as having 40 hours of playable content? What is cheaper: developing a game that really has 40 hours of content, or just developing 2 hours worth, and including 20 “achievements” that you have to grind through unlock in order to reach all of that 2 hours of content?
I paid for this stuff. Why won’t you let me just have it?
Do you think that I find it fun to waste my time jumping through hoops for you? As I’ve already established, I don’t have time for that crap. I bought your game and I demand to be entertained. I play it because I find something intrinsically fun about it. I have all week at work to grind through repetitive mind numbing tasks (actually no, my job isn’t that bad, but you get the gist of it).
If you put the goodies up on a high shelf where I can’t reach, the game ceases to be fun within the time parameters I’ve got to play it. If madlep doesn’t have fun, madlep doesn’t buy your game. You don’t make money, and you go out of business, and you end up destitute living on a street corner holding a cardboard sign reading “will code achievements for food”
But there are particularly bad problems when we’re talking about unlockables and mutliplayer games:
Jim Raynor didn’t need unlockable grenades to beat back the zerg
It’s merely annoying to lock up single player content, but it’s down right broken to grant better stuff (or even different stuff) to some players in multi player games that just happen to have done more of your moronic little time wasters. Blizzard (despite their later sins), was the original master of finely balanced multi-player gaming with Star-craft. The whole game was open to begin with, and it was incredibly well balanced. Imagine if you had to grind through weeks of play just to be on a level playing field? Would Star-craft be the national phenomenon it is in South Korea today if new players had to go through that crap just to be able to get their butt kicked fair and square by that hyper active 8 year old genius?
Valve sponsored Roombaism
You know how I mentioned that I top scored as pyro at the beginning of the post? IT WAS BECAUSE THE ENTIRE SERVER WAS FULL OF MEDICS TRYING TO UBER DEMOMEN JUMPING OFF CLIFFS, MEDICS TRYING TO UBER SCOUTS, OR MEDICS TRYING TO UBER FIST HEAVIES (or the scouts or heavies or whatever from their clan helping them out)
Ridiculous stuff. What the hell did valve think would happen when they put such moronic criteria for the achievements in there?
(Co-incidentally, I was too damn lazy to take my own in game screen shot, so I googled for one, then I went to look at who to credit it with, and it turns out it’s by Shakey Lo, from my old Tribes 2 clan - |8| Hi Shakey! Shakey rocks as a Tribes 2 Heavy Offence player. Those were the days… )
Gold rush rocks, but I’m going to be sorely tempted not to even bother playing for the next few weeks till this crap dies down a bit.
Achievement farming
It actually took me sometime to find a public server with a real gold rush game - or a real game with any map for that reason. Partly because there is still a lot of popularity, and the servers genuinely are busy. But mostly because I had to go through about 5 different servers before I found one where players weren’t there with their clanmates/friends/whatever solely for the purpose of grinding achievements to get the unlocks so they could go and play normally afterwards.
What the hell is the point Valve?
If these achievements are supposed to be bringing so much fun to the game, why are people doing this?
It’s all very MMORPGish. Why do you spent two nights slaying fearsome murlocs? It’s so you can get the quest reward of a bigger sword. And you need a bigger sword to do what? That’s right! So you can go and slay mighty murlocs, so you can get an even bigger sword, so you can go and slay Elite murlocs and over and over.
My brain hasn’t implemented tail-recursion optimization so I get a call stack overflow a few weeks into a grind like this (that means “I get bored and quit” in english. Sorry for the computer science geekery, but it’s late and I should be asleep).
Well, the guys from Control Point had some fun, but they’re a fun bunch of people, and they’d even be able to amuse themselves at an antique bed-pan dealers convention:
The potential black market for fully unlocked characters
This hasn’t happened yet to my knowledge, but the entrepreneurs that brought the world gold-farming and power-levelling must be rubbing their hands together that Valve has opened up a new market for them. Why spend weeks levelling up a TF2 account to get all the unlocks when you can buy a ready made account from some shady guy dealing out of a Beijing area code?
Again: What the hell is the point Valve?
The biggest problem
madlep sucks at this kind of stuff. I’m just not patient enough, and at this rate I will never get to know the joy of ubersawing to build up my critzcrieg. Have pity on a poor crap player like me Valve!
Conclusion
So I don’t know what to make of all this. I’m obviously not a big fan of the whole unlockable concept. Hopefully the next few weeks are such a mess that Valve seriously rethinks the whole unlockables roadmap. Ideally they’ll just release new items for the other classes ready to play by all as soon as they come out - and do the same for the medic items.
Bring on the new weapons and abilities. Even keep the achievements if you really have want (I won’t be getting them).
But leave the unlockables out please!
madlep on May 1st 2008 in funny, medic, rants, team fortress 2, valve
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