Grinding On.

Looks like I wasn't done with talking about Borderlands 2, after all.  How curious.  I will move away from this subject, I promise.  Seriously, I don't want to flog a dead horse, it only gets messy.

I'll just reiterate, though, Gearbox did a good job on building what they'd created with Borderlands.  They've created this fun and addictive game.  The only reason there was so much for me to complain about is because I've spent so much time going through the game.  Having clocked up so many hours^* playing the game the flaws are magnified.  The fact I'm willing to spend so long playing the game says as much on its own.

You see all that content?  Some of it coming out over a year after the game was released is still pretty fucking impressive.  And their still rolling out fixes and support^** in that same time.  While they might look like they're not sure how to handle some of the gameplay stuff, they do have a handle on the technical stuff.

So Gearbox did a good job.  We clear on that?

It still could have been so much better.  My main gripe with it is the nature of the loot drops.  I'm not going to go into it, but this gives a good overview: Evolution of Loot.  I'll give you some time to look through that.  It's a big fucking post.

One thing I'd like to point out is '1 in 30'.  It's the standard drop rate for a lot of the bosses in the game of their best equipment.  This doesn't sound bad, but when you think about it, it veers quite hard into the stingy territory, especially when you consider some of the bosses can be very challenging.  Yes, it's better than the one in ten thousand chance normal enemies have to drop top-tier gear^†, but it still leaves you at Stingy Station with a bit of straw clamped in your teeth.

You shouldn't need to fight the one boss anywhere near that number of times to get their best gear.  Getting to and fighting one boss ten times is a tedious exercise of Sisyphus-like proportions, thirty times can be brain-mushing.  And because it is probability and as close to random as technology allows you're likely to find yourself fighting that boss a lot more times to get the piece of gear you want.  There have been some horrifying statistics posted about how much chance you have of getting certain pieces of gear and they go into the hundreds before it starts to look decent.  That's not fun.  A game should be fun.  No it shouldn't just hand you the good stuff the first time you hold out your hand, but it shouldn't point and laugh at you when you're trying to get it while tripping over your grey beard^‡.  Rewarding you for your persistence in a half-way decent manner without taking a grinder to your patience.

I've thought about how they could do this with my non-codery brain.  My suggestion can't be implemented in Borderlands 2, unfortunately, though I do hope Gearbox tweak the drops before they finally have to walk away.  Perhaps for Borderlands 3?  Maybe?  Perhaps?  Dudes?  Please?

Anyway what I thought would be a variation on the RNG reliance.  The RNG sounds good in principal for the loot drops, but, as many people have seen it actually turns out to be very unfair.  I think the game should note when you've fought any boss.  Each time you fight a boss, a little note to say no loot was dropped and to start with there's that one in thirty chance at the good gear.  If by, say, the fifth boss fight without a drop the game starts to incrementally put its thumb on the probabilities scale.  Each time a boss is fought that doesn't drop its best loot the game weights the probability more and more until it hits a high probability, like one in five.  Once a boss drops its highest level loot the count resets.  Not perfect, by any means, but it would redress the imbalance gamers feel.  Or just really make it more likely to find good stuff across the board, that could work too.

That's the important thing that's forgotten in the reliance on the RNG, it's how the people playing the game feel.  Whether or not its completely random doesn't always register in our emotion-fuelled ape-brains.  We get pissed and start to see negative patterns where there aren't any.  We feel like the game is mocking our efforts^§.  That's not a feeling to be engendered by a game, characters in a game, perhaps, but we shouldn't feel like the company behind the game are sniggering every time we kill Hyperius and get a pile of white gear^§§.  It's childish to think they might be, but in the halucinatory haze you find yourself in while farming^§§§ it's easy to start thinking it.

This unwillingness of the game to part with its most prized items leads to behaviours that are considered cheating: duping and gibbing.  Gearbox have gone to great pains to wipe out gibbing in particular, but neither would be the problem they are if drop rates were more generous, less Ebenezer Scrooge and more Père Noël.  Never going to get rid of people cheating, but minimising it by making game mechanics feel more fair to the players.

No, we don't need these weapons or equipment – well maybe some of it to make progress in the hardest level of the game, but we want it.  Gearbox created the demand for it for those of us with the particular brain damage that makes us crave it, but they haven't quite furnished the supply.  Would it be so difficult for the unsung heroes of the games industry, the quiet programmers and coders, to bump the drops more in the player's favour?  That's the main aim, to create a game with even more lasting appeal, without doing it in a cheap way.

There are other criticisms, like the poor Krieg and Maya players who got shafted in the Overpower levels, but I think I've gone on long enough about the subject, don't you?  Next time something different, I think.

^* I'm now too terrified to calculate it.  My self-esteem can't handle that kind of knock.

^** The most recent one redresses, a little, one of the stingiest drops in the game.  That's pretty cool, I have to say.

^† Which is just jim-dandy, sir.  You don't want some schlubby gimp basic enemy dropping the best stuff, that would just be weird and make it pointless to fight the bosses once you've finished the game.  Yes, I do see the merit in replayable bosses, that's pretty cool.  I just don't agree with the low possibility of good gear.

^‡ Yes, even the ladies, because nature is cruel and hates everyone.

^§ Especially those fucking loading screens where it shows a parade of some of the rarest items in the game.  Three Pearlescent weapons in a row?  You fucking cunt!

^§§ If you don't get the reference, don't worry.  Or maybe you should, you made it this far not knowing what the fuck I'm talking about.  What's wrong with you?

^§§§ A term I discovered last year for fighting the one enemy over and over again to get a piece of equipment.  It's about as boring as my explanation sounds.


Will

Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.

Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.

I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry.  Let's throw that one out there.  I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot.  As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.

What I do have is a long history with computer games.  I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted^*.  I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer.  Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play ^**.

Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time.  Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other.  It was a golden, very pale time.

The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC.  All dependent on money and my interest.  Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life.  At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend.  Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!

My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games.  After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.

It happens.  Although I've felt it more with modern games.  Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in.  These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off."  These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game.  And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).

I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three.  It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure.  This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years.  And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game.  Pretty cool.

And I want in on that, man.

Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game.  A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game.  One can always hope, though.

^* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers.  Screw that shit.  The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.

^** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was.  Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded.  And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too.  I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised".  Gaaaah!



Will