Over the course of the last week, OTL player JazzyJet found this, Voyager: Ascension by RFLXT, owned by World Enterprises LLC - no link because I can't find any presence of this company on the Internet. It was notable to him because the trailer was, to use JazzyJet's words, "just footage from Overload".

Upon pointing this out, RFLXT replied saying that they have "licensed the game from Revival".

"...for web3 use."

I'm sorry, what?

Turns out, RFLXT is working on some tech called the Digital Double avatar. The long and short of it seems to be that they aim to offer this Digital Double avatar to people, which is essentially an AI that mimics the person. I surmise that their short term goal is to get a somewhat deep game catalog going, and then eventually integrate this avatar into these games somehow. Buzzwords thrown around by RFLXT on their website include "web3", "AI", "blockchain", "metaverse", and "NFT". To quote fellow OTL pilot Doctor Tasty, "we have a royal flush, folks."

Getting back to the game at hand, Voyager: Ascension is essentially a free-to-start, 1 to 1 copy of Overload. There are some differences, including some mysterious currency called V Points for killing bots and collecting some items, a slightly different story, changed voice lines that some believe are done by AI rather than voice actors, a reference to an unimplemented season pass, and the ability to unlock all levels for $9.99 (may also be unimplemented as of this writing). There are also a number of bugs that have been found in Voyager: Ascension that don't exist in the base game. But the levels are the same, and the menus and game look and feel like Overload. In short, it is a very low-effort copy.

Now, I'm not here to shit on this game, and if this ends up being some players' first experience with 6DoF, it's not a bad start into the genre. I'm not going to suggest that you should run out and get this game either, though. What I do want to do, however, is look at this from a neutral perspective and evaulate the chances that something like this has to succeed.

First of all, this is a Six Degrees of Freedom First-Person Shooter. By itself, this is one of my favorite genres. However, when considering whether this is going to be a commercially viable game, you have to look at the genre as a whole, which I did recently in my Six'd Off announcement video. If you're going to do a new 6DoF FPS, it needs to offer something unique in terms of gameplay. Slapping on these royal flush buzzwords - or honestly adding any social features from the past 30 years - is not going to help the game do any better than Overload. The gameplay itself needs to be new, exciting, and offer something different. This game does none of that so far.

Second of all, the fact that this is practically a 1 to 1 copy of Overload means you're not going to get too many players wanting to pay twice for the same game, especially to two different companies. Maybe they have plans to radically change the game, and are just putting out a tech demo of sorts, but there is no indication anywhere that this is what they are doing.

Third, you're associating your game with these royal flush buzzwords that most sensible people on the Internet associate with words like "scam", "grift", and other terms that generally keep smarter people away from ventures such as this. Sure, some people will be excited over this, but these are likely to be the same people who have been rug pulled at least once in their life.

Releasing a game in an unpopular genre, when the game is just a copy of a game already released in said genre, attaching web3 features to it, and then expecting cash to pour in to your business is like multiplying 0.01% by 0.01% by 0.01% and expecting to get 100%. Voyager: Ascension's existence makes absolutely no business sense to me, and I have to imagine that this game is not going to last very long once they figure this out. The company behind it surely won't last long if they don't.

Which leads me to the title of this post. WTF did Revival Productions just do? At best, they've opened the door for web3 to invade the 6DoF space for a quick cash grab. At worst, they've knowingly involved their product and brand with technologies that many consider to be the morally worst technologies on the planet. And this is to speak nothing about what it's done for the modding community. With olmod under an MIT license, all RFLXT would have to do to use olmod code in Voyager: Ascension is to include that license with their product. I know I don't want to be writing software for free for a web3 company, and I imagine most of the other developers on the modding team would agree. This puts us in an extremely tough situation, and I honestly don't know what to do about this. Do we try to license the source code ourselves somehow? Do we change the license on olmod? Do we just close up shop and call it a day and let Revival and RFLXT do whatever they want?

I certainly didn't have "Overload but with web3 features" on my 2024 bingo card.

I think Revival Productions owes the Overload community an explanation here, and what we should expect from both them and RFLXT moving forward.

Update (4/30/2024):

Matt Toschlog posted the following to the Overload Discord. It confirms that they weren't trying to do anything malicious by licensing the code to RFLXT (also, it appears Refactor Games is doing most of the development on Voyager: Ascension) and were simply looking to gain back some of their losses while working on Overload. Unfortunately, I think no amount of statement from Revival is going to unmuddy the waters that is the modding situation. Hopefully it becomes a non-issue, but it is always something we're going to have to kep an eye on in the future. Here is the full statement:

Overload fans,

We've been following the conversation on this server about the release of Voyager Ascension and realized (a little late) that we should make a statement.

Voyager Ascension is, obviously, based on Overload. We licensed the game to RFLXT about a year ago after they approached us about making a Web3 version of the game. (And, as has been surmised, the person who instigated the deal was Alan Pavlish, who was an exec at Interplay when they published Descent.)

We're not experts in Web3 and crypto and don't have much interest in moving into that world. But we did think it was an interesting idea and we were happy to sign the deal. Overload was a labor of love for us, and while it was one of most fun and satisfying projects we've worked on, it was not a financial success. Even with the licensing fees for Voyager Ascension we've lost a significant amount of money on this project. (Which is fine. Embarking on a new project is always a risk.)

When we licensed Overload to RFLXT we insisted that any Web3 version be released under a different name to avoid confusion with the original game. One of the great things to come out of the Overload project is the enthusiastic community that's developed around it, and we didn't want the licensed game to affect that. Voyager Ascension will exist in its world, and Overload can continue with its own dedicated base.

If any of you decide to check out Voyager Ascension we'd be happy to hear what you think. We hope it's successful. And maybe it will even bring some new players to Overload.

Thanks again for your support.

Matt Toschlog & Mike Kulas
Revival Productions

Labels: Gaming, Overload, Revival Productions, RFLXT, Voyager: Ascension, Web3

Monday, February 12, 2024

A Tale of Two Communities
Posted: 3:01:00 AM 0 comments

"If you're a high visibility player, it's on you to move the community in a positive direction." -Jonas Neubauer, 1981-2021, seven-time CTWC champion

This quote by Jonas Neubauer has been engraved on the Classic Tetris World Championship's first and second place trophies since 2021, the year he unexpectedly passed away at the age of 39. I met Jonas and his wife Heather, a Dr. Mario world champion at TwitchCon in 2019. We both happened to cross paths at GDQx 2019. I was doing couch commentary for SpootyBiscuit's Cadence of Hyrule run while Jonas was doing couch commentary for Blink's Tetris 99 run. I got a big hug, a photo I'll cherish forever, and I introduced Jonas and Heather to one of the exhibits on the show floor, which was basically a mind-meld Tetris game. I remember the two of them enjoying themselves and having fun, and their laughter was contageous. Jonas was one of the few people I've met who, online, was pretty much the exact same person he was in real life, one of the most genuine individuals I've ever met. He was graceful in his CTWC defeats, and always worked to build up the community he championed.

Since his last win, there have been 4 other tournament winners. Joseph Saelee won twice. Then, Michael Artiaga (dogplayingtetris), won in back to back years. Eric Tolt (EricICX) defeated Justin Yu (Fractal161), the latter of whom won it a year later. Harry Hong also famously won the tournament back in 2014, interrupting Jonas's seven year streak.

All of these players have made a positive impact on the classic Tetris community in some way. Some have even made contributions to the community, hosting their own events, doing content creation, and genuinely being a good ambassador to the game. I had no idea that one side tournament at SGDQ 2018 would get me involved in a community amazing enough that I now find myself contributing my time to almost every classic Tetris organization. Oh, I suck at the game! But I don't let that stop me from being involved in organizing events, commentating for matches, and playing in the lower tournament levels myself, even if I have taken a bit of a step back from competitive lately to keep my competition anxiety in check.

Sure, Tetris has its bad spots. Players cheat. People get upset at others. People do tasteless things that get them banned. It happens, because people suck. But far and away, the classic Tetris community is wholesome, and I am better for being a part of it.

If only every community was like Tetris.

In the fall of 2021, a player showed up on the Overload Teams League team SpaceCowboys by the name of Zor. He was a pretty decent player. Not quite top 10 in a league of some 60 pilots, but someone seen as dangerous to play against. There was a lot of secrecy around this player. Teammates would often go on mute when talking about Zor's past experience with 6DoF games, or just outright not stream. Someone caught a stream and quickly identified the voice as the Descent pilot - and former OTL pilot - Jediluke. With a DCL record of 5982 wins and 348 losses (1413-117 vs Rethink, 809-33 vs Drakona, and 476-24 vs b2af), Jediluke wasn't just a known quantity, he was the most active competitive player while the DCL was around, between 2013 and 2020. And, as the record indicates, he was pretty good, too: he was ranked first at the end of more DCL seasons (7) than anyone else (Mark392 5, Souljah 3, bahamut 1). What's more, he is unquestionably the most successful D1 pilot on my Twitch series The Observatory, a quarterly tournament open to all Descent 1 pilots where games are broadcast and commentated on, something the community never really had prior to this series, which was founded in 2016. To date, he's won 31 out of 34 seasons, losing only to Mark392 (season 5), Zero (season 12), and Morfod (season 26). We'll talk about Morfod's winning season a bit later. Unfortunately, Jediluke's also got a temper. He gets mad when he loses, and winning your first game over what seems like an impossible opponent usually results in him making you feel like shit, rather than celebrating your momentus victory.

For comparison, here's Jonas's last game at a live CTWC where he was shockingly eliminated in the first round.

Anyway, back to the point, Jediluke decided to compete in the OTL as Zor to "get away" from his Jediluke personality. Thinking it would put less pressure on himself, he adopted the alias and kept his true identity a close secret for a couple weeks. The voice changer was pretty silly, but once the word got out that Zor was Jediluke, he posted something quick in the OTL Discord explaining the name, and barring some critique from some old rivals, that was the end of it. The general vibe was like "yeah, it's weird, but he's got less of an attitude now, so whatever."

Also towards the end of 2021, season 26 of The Observatory occurred. An unknown entrant with the name "Genevieve" (PwnJett in game) showed up for the Finals Tournament as an unqualified player who had to fight from the wildcard anarchy to even get into the knockout bracket. He did so in shocking fashion, taking out Jediluke in the semifinals and Sirius in the finals to win the tournament. And, as the tournament concluded, Morfod revealed that he was in fact Genevieve. It was amusing at the time, and everyone got a good laugh. He had only played under that handle for a couple weeks, enough so that some regulars were aware of the handle. For me, I was kind of kind of amused, but also kind of annoyed that someone would go to such lengths as hide their identity just to gain an advantage. I let it slide, hoping it wouldn't happen again.

Um, remember earlier, when I said that people suck?

Season 35 of The Observatory kicked off this month, and with it Jediluke proclaimed his retirement, supposedly tired of not having a challenge after Mark392 showed up for about a week to play games and then left to become a parent. While Jedi's lack of participation didn't bother me - a more competitive top of the table would benefit the show - a newcomer, Tonka, showed up who had been around since August. Code, a long time Observatory player, did some training with him, and Tonka's skill began to noticeably rise. By the time season 35 began, it was clear that he would be a strong contender, and did in fact win all of his games in the first episode, including against season 34's runner up, terminal.

But something didn't sit right with some pilots, and eventually it was made known to me that he was suspected of cheating. Although there wasn't anything conclusive, and it was later decided that no cheating was involved, it got enough people suspicious that for the second episode, his IP was taken from a game log and compared with some website logs. I noticed that there was a lot of activity with that IP on the Overload game browser that didn't match the player's activity in Overload, which was very low and many months prior. I then decided to compare the IP to logs on the game servers themselves, and that's when the smoking gun was found. That IP was the same IP used by Zor in Overload.

While I had 100% confidence at that point that Tonka was 31-time champion Jediluke, a lot of things didn't add up. This player Tonka showed up in the community about 6 months ago. They were trained on basics like trichording. They had matches with Jediluke. They gave a phone number with a Houston, TX area code. They would chat back and forth with Jediluke, aggressively looking for games. Even now, this whole scheme doesn't make sense to me.

But it was real. Jediluke eventually confessed to the whole thing. And he was totally nonchalant about it. In fact, my current co-commentator, Chillybus, thought it was crazy that he would go through the whole thing. He said on Discord:

"for six months? what do you have to gain against pilots who would take hundreds and hundreds of games to even be competitive with you, let alone take a game? multiboxing discord accounts? faking tracker games? IMO you did competition a disservice and your friends dirty from the sound of it, just chasing shadows of the afternoon someone aliased you to a win. not how a longtime decorated top competitor should compose themselves. it isn't time to go around again, I think it is time to log off. you have shamed yourself here. That's all I'll say in this time and place."

The reply from Jediluke was equally nonchalant: "1 v 1 Chilly?" and "those who don't compete ...commentate".

Is this moving the community in a positive direction? Does he care at all about the community? Is this how a top player is going to treat the community that he represents?

This is literally night and day. In one community, I have players that are leaders, care about the community, and do everything they can to move the community forward. In another, I have players that are selfish, care about themselves, and do everything they can to try to get ahead.

You tell me which community I'm going to put more effort into.

Labels: Descent, Descent Champions Ladder, Gaming, Overload, Overload Teams League, Tetris, The Observatory

Sunday, November 27, 2022

A Two Tiered, Untiered OTL
Posted: 1:32:00 AM 0 comments

For those that don't follow the Overload Teams League, here are some examples of somewhat common scores: a close 96-93 game, a double-your-score 125-62 blowout, a comfortable 84-52 win, and a please PuDLeZ don't ever put 10 people into Indika again 283-252 throwdown.

And then there's this.

That's two-time OTL champion Invidia taking out winless Rogue Pilots by the score of 110 to 5. Ouch.

Here are the all time records that this game produced:

Highest Team KDA: 26.4
Fewest Team Deaths: 5
Highest Team Damage per Death: 2600.8
Highest Individual KDA: 84.0
Fewest Individual Deaths in 2v2: 1
Highest Individual Damage per Death: 8196.6

You may not understand these numbers, but rest assured, they are impossible numbers to get, especially given RP decided they're not playing anymore with their current roster until they can get some more pilots on their team.

Immediately, questions across the league were asked about why such a game should be counted. The answers are many, as are the arguments against. I sat on this for a couple days, thinking of a way to resolve this.

The obvious first solution is to divide the league into 2 tiers. Only count games when upper tier teams play upper tier teams and when lower tier teams play lower tier teams. On the surface, this sounds like a great idea until you realize there are only 11 teams, plus Rogue Pilots, which means that if we did this, we would essentially be dividing the league into two tiny tiers. Then you'd have to worry about league promotion/demotion tournaments and all kinds of other unpleasantries that an 11 team league simply does not have the patience for. This also has the drawback of disallowing play between lower tier teams and upper tier teams, at least from the formalized perspective. Sure, we could count "practice" games, but I am not made of enough time to track those practice games in this small of a league. I feel like the point at which I do something like this would be at 16 teams.

The second solution is to mark a team on a case-by-case basis as a practice squad. This would mean that the OTL is exclusive, and requires teams to prove themselves before they can start playing games that mean something. It would require manual intervention to get teams into the main league before they started playing games that count. That is not what the OTL is about. I am fine with teams that don't have skilled players trying to learn by playing against teams with skilled players. However, something has to be done about the current situation.

Putting everything together, I thought about what could work and what couldn't work. I don't want to exclude anyone, but I don't want to have the "NBA champions vs. bad high school basketball team" count for records. So, I came up with a system that allows those games to happen, but for the stats not to fully count.

The answer is an two tiered, untiered league.

It is untiered because a championship team can play a winless team, and have the game be meaningful on a league-wide level (provided the winless team decides to remain active). The standings page simply doesn't change. All teams are listed and rated accordingly.

What is two-tiered, however, shows up in individual stats. Going forward, individual stats are only displayed for games played vs. the upper league. That means when Rogue Pilots plays Invidia, Invidia is not playing for personal stats, only a team win. Rogue Pilots, however, do get to play for individual stats. That way, everyone's stats - from the top team to the bottom team - show their performance against only the upper league teams, and they can be reasonably compared. You can still see a pilot's stats against the entire league by going to their pilot page and selecting the appropriate option. However, everywhere else only shows stats vs. upper league teams.

This, of course, leads to the question of who is in the upper league and who is in the lower league. I thought about this, and again did not want to be exclusionary by saying only RP should be in the lower league. So, I have retroactively applied the following formula to determine who is upper and lower league:

The first eight teams in the league are automatically assigned upper league.
All new teams thereafter are assigned lower league.
At the conclusion of the season ending tournaments, the league is re-divided, with the six teams that make the knockout stage plus two other teams assigned to the upper league.
In seasons that have it, the two finalists of the season-ending Best of the Rest II tournament are the other two teams that make the upper league. In seasons that don't have it, the top two teams by the previous season's rating that did not make the knockout bracket make the upper league.

There are obvious caveats with this. First, one of the newest teams in the league, The Boys, are made of pilots that came from other upper league teams. They're pretty good, too, The Boys hold 3rd in the current season standings. Should they be lower league? The answer is yes. This is still a new team with a new dynamic that other teams need to become familiar with, so for a single season TB is considered lower league. Once they finish the Championships in the top 8 - and I have no doubt they will as half of their team was a large part of OMG's recent run of top 4 OTL finishes - they can be assigned to the upper league.

Second, if a team leaves the league mid-season, what should happen? One, that team loses the right to be upper tier, even if they return later that season. Two, there needs to be a way to fill the spot, and that will fall to 3rd place from the most recent Best of the Rest II tournament.

Third, if a team chooses to sit out of the Season Championships, what should happen? There are teams that aren't quite so competitive that they need to rank themselves in a season ending tournament. However, they may clearly be an upper tier team that just chooses not to play. So, if a team that sits out a tournament was upper tier in a previous season, I think the fairest solution is to play a separate series against the lowest upper tier team after the end of season tournaments are over, and the winner gets that spot.

There are probably other things that I'm not thinking of. It's probably not a perfect system, but to make sure that we're not excluding other teams and at the same time making sure we don't get ridiculous records (Yinut's 0 death game is also out of the record books after this update) that can't be beat under normal circumstances, this will do in a pinch.

There are two other minor changes that result from this update:

New teams are automatically set as not qualified to affect ratings (ie: ratings for games played against that team do not count) until they have played everyone 3 times. This is to ensure that teams that show up for half a season and then disband don't hit the ratings at all. Side note: I really need to come up with a term other than "not qualified".
Because it's a little more important now, the group stage will be returning to the Best of the Rest II tournament. The specific format of that will depend on how many teams play in it. A 3rd place match will only be played if it is necessary, ie: multiple upper tier teams disband at the end of the Championships.

There is also the ethical angle of the team that carried out that 110 to 5 victory. As of the beginning of the year, there is nothing to be gained for your team by getting 22 times the score of your opponent. It's no different than winning 110 to 109. Did the league's focus on stats make Invidia feel like creating a blowout like this was justified? I would like to think better of our pilots, but I can't discount that possibility either. I've also played in a game against RP where I got an outsized KDA, and all it made me want to do was never play them again, because it simply wasn't a challenge. If stats are a motivator for this kind of thing, I hope that by eliminating the source of motivation, games like these won't happen again, unless the lower team really wants the upper team to go hard.

This is a large update to the league structure. It seems like a lot is changing. But honestly it's a small update overall. I feel I owe it to the league to make sure that incidents such as the 110 to 5 game are just looked at as a footnote, rather than a lightning rod for drastic change. Ultimately, this isn't a drastic change, and it doesn't change the way the league operates on a day to day basis. Only individual stats are affected. The biggest controversy will probably be which team is in what tier, and if that's all that comes of this, this update will be a success.

Labels: Gaming, Overload Teams League

Thursday, March 25, 2021

Overload has truth; next it needs balance
Posted: 6:31:00 PM 0 comments

Overload multiplayer was put together in around a month, went through another month of testing, and ended up being rather underwhelming to play. Ranked multiplayer queues died out after the first couple weeks, those that remained were either gaming the system or late to the party. Mercifully, ranked multiplayer did not survive very long.

However, multiplayer soon began to thrive in the form of the Overload Teams League. I founded the OTL in 2019 for pilots who wanted to play team games. It caught on pretty quick with 6 teams by its second month. At first, we dealt with the frustrating limitations of poor server choices, shoddy networking, and always demanding to Bammer "RESTART YOUR SERVERS!!!". But shortly after Revival Productions folded in February of 2019, a glimmer of hope appeared in the form of olproxy, a piece of software that allowed Overload LAN servers to act as Internet servers. For the first time, Internet games were playable without official servers.

Over time, this expanded to olproxy being incorporated into olmod, a collection of mods for Overload with the aim to improve multiplayer game play. A large number of improvements have been included in olmod since then, including larger game sizes, reporting to a tracker, sniper packets, lag compensation, and more. What hasn't been addressed is weapon balance.

Multiplayer weapon balance has not been great since Overload launched. Ammo weapons have been shown to dominate, and the energy weapons are a mixed bag with cyclone being dominant and reflex being weak. Hunters used to be super strong until an early nerf was added to olmod. Creepers and time bombs used to be excessively out of sync between client and server. Despite this, people still played, but bigger issues existed because people couldn't understand what they were seeing. Ship positions were not consistent. People were saying that 50ms in Overload felt worse than 100ms in Descent 3. (While seemingly unbelievable, this was learned to be a true statement since Overload intentally adds a minimum of 83ms of lag to game play; 33ms for processing controls smoothly and 50ms to be able to interpolate ships smoothly.) Slowly over time, the net code was deciphered and unravelled, and we learned some shocking things about how the net code was implemented. In addition to the intentionally added lag, your entire controls are sent to the server every frame for processing server-side. Every button press, mouse movement, or swing of the joystick would be part of that send. But because client and server frames don't match up one to one, this would cause errors in position and rotation, and weapon firing that was often out of phase, meaning what you saw on your screen wasn't what was happening on the server.

First, we fixed the weapons. Sniper packets made it so that every time you fire something client-side, that is what was seen server-side. This also eliminated some super bad parts of the game, such as disagreements as to how many missiles you have, what weapon you're using, what side of the ship you're firing a missile out of, and more.

Second, we fixed most of the intentional lag and made it so that it would try to compensate for lag, predicting where ships will be in the future, making them easy to hit. Then we revisited weapons, also compensating them for lag so that they'd be easier to dodge.

I say "we" because this is a team of developers doing this. Arne de Brujin created olproxy and olmod and showed us what is possible. I've contributed a bunch of code, and Tobias, Whollycow, and derhass have been instrumental in keeping things on track. We even have occasional contributors like terminal, luponix, and D.Cent provide extra quality of life for both players and developers.

And now we're ready to tackle balance.

Players are now seeing the game closer to the truth than ever before, and as a result they have honed in their skills better than ever, showing us that, yeah, there are serious balance problems with the game. It's not like we didn't already know this. However, now that we are seeing closer to the truth, we can begin to understand exactly what these balance problems are, and hopefully start finding common ground in regards to what needs to be balanced.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, olmod, Overload

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

OTL's player disconnection issue
Posted: 5:40:00 PM 0 comments

The Overload Teams League has started off fairly well. We've played 26 games in the first month, completed a small one-day tournament, and have had five teams play each other at least once. But there's one issue that's come up that's been really tough to call. There was a player disconnection issue that recently came up where a player BSOD'd and there was some confusion on what to do. I wanted to put something in writing before this happens again.

First, some background.

In Descent 3, Heat aside, all servers were private. Players could come and go as they pleased, and you could always rejoin a game after crashing out. Game parameters were also much more open. Kill goals and time goals were text entries, not selections from a menu.

Revival confusingly bucked this trend in Overload, removing server browsers and opting for monolithic servers that can run multiple games at once. However, the only way to access these games is if you have the password AND you join before the game starts. There's no way to see what games are running, and even if you had the password you can't join a game in progress.

The Descent 3 Teams League pretty much ignored any issues with disconnections. DCs could simply be met with a substitution (subs were common in D3TL matches!), or by playing shorthanded until the disconnected player returned. Only a full server crash would suspend a match (in the D3TL Tournament, this only happend once ever, but was in the semifinals!), but players would pretty much just restart from the prior score and amount of time left with little fuss.

Disconnections in the OTL cause bigger problems.

Players can't reconnect to a game in progress, leaving their team short-handed.
If you wish to suspend the match, you have limited options to select time parameters in game.
Because of the above, disconnections can be seen as gaming the system, depending on many factors.

In short, in Overload, we as a league have to deal with a situation that's less than ideal. We are aware of the fact that games online are not nearly as flexible as they were with Descent 3, and we have to adjust as a result.

In the OMG/PTMC Terminal match, PuDLeZ BSOD'd and disconnected with approximately 2:30 remaining in the match while his team led by 5. Teams immediately stopped playing and agreed on starting a new game from the current score and time remaining (they had suggested 5 minutes, until I stepped in and asked for 3 to more match the time remaining). The stats from both games were combined for the final match score.

From my standpoint, that was awesome. Both teams came together to finish out the match despite the circumstances. And, this is the kind of model I want to encourage... work out a solution that both teams can agree on. However, teams will have different ideas on how to do this, so I think it's good to have a set of guidelines available along with what to do should teams NOT agree on a way to go forward. Here's what I came up with:

Should a player disconnect or a game end prematurely due to a crash or network outage, every effort should be made to get the current stats from the game up to that point in the match. Teams should then agree on what to do next, within the following guidelines: - Teams can agree to restart a Challenge if 10 minutes or more remained on the clock at the time of the issue, or if multiple issues happen within a single match. - Teams can agree to end a game with the score as is if less than 3 minutes remained on the clock at the time of the issue. - Teams can agree to play a 2nd game, combining the scores of both games for the final score of a single match. The second game's time limit should be as close to one of the time options available in game as possible to the amount of time remaining when the issue occurred. For instance, if there was 6:23 on the clock, teams could agree to play the 2nd game with either a 5 minute or 7 minute time limit. In all cases where a match is suspended and resumed, the same pilots must fly for both teams, as substitutions are not normally supported in Overload games. If teams cannot agree on what to do, an administrator can be asked to decide how to proceed, and they will make the decision. The administrator may also opt to adjudicate the match accordingly in extreme cases. If one player is repeatedly having these kind of issues, they may be suspended from the league until their issues are resolved. If it is deemed that the player is acting maliciously, they may be banned from the league.

I don't want it to feel like I'm ignoring the momentum argument, so I'll address it here. Momentum is a very real thing, and it sucks to have it taken away by an extraordinary circumstance. However, examples of leagues or competitions that put extra time on the clock because of such an issue is exceedingly rare. In fact, more often than not, you end up LOSING time. Here are some examples of what other leagues do, where, surprisingly, many take place in the sport's biggest games of the year.

Generally, MLB games will either be restarted at a later date if 4 1/2 innings haven't been played, end early if one team or the other is in the lead, or be resumed at a later date if tied.
The NHL is somewhat inconsistent. In one case, they cancelled the game after it was 1-0, then restarted the full game but kept the 1-0 score from the prior game. In another, they cancelled the game after it was 3-3, but made the stats from the first game official, however that works, and restarted the full game from 0-0 2 nights later.
The NBA will just end a game should something extraordinary happen.
The NFL doesn't really end games, even though the commissioner has the power to do so in extreme circumstances. The only example I could find that even comes close is one where the final play of the game ran out the clock well after a field goal was scored, denying the other team from fielding a kickoff and possibly scoring a miracle touchdown. The NFL made a rule change the following season in response to this to prevent successful field goals from taking more than 5 seconds off of the clock.
The Overwatch World Cup simply restarts the current game within the match.
League of Legends has something called "Chrono Breaking" that allows them to return to any point in time in the match, should something go wrong such as a game-breaking bug. When "Chrono Breaking" is broken, league officials will either declare a winner if one team is deemed too far ahead for a possible comeback, or restart the match.

I'm sure there are plenty more examples to put forth, but overwhelmingly the concept of momentum is not given much thought in any of these cases. Either they drop the rest of the game, pick up where they left off later, or they start over. Nowhere is something arbitrary like 5 extra minutes given just to facilitate a possible comeback or to restore momentum. And I think this makes sense, especially in an environment like the OTL where we have individual stats and want them to mean something instead of having them skewed by stats where matches were far too short or too long.

In an extraordinary circumstance, you need to make a judgement call that someone somewhere is not going to like. As long as we deal with these circumstances with consistency and with good intentions, that should be all anyone can ask of the league. I also strongly like giving teams options, and them letting them agree on which option to take, only calling in help when they can't agree.

Hopefully this will address the situation, but leave it open to discussion for now over on the OTL Discord. Apologies for not thinking of this sooner... I had a lot of situations planned out, and this was definitely not one of them!

Labels: Gaming, Overload, Overload Teams League

Friday, June 08, 2018

The Overload Teams League
Posted: 6:37:00 PM 0 comments

I wanted to put together a bunch of my thoughts regarding the possibility of creating the Overload Teams League.

Those who played Descent 3 might remember that I took over something called the Descent 3 Teams League from bash and Sirian, and ran it for a number of years. I kept it going until well into the second half of the aughts, with help from Matrix and IceHammer to keep things running smoothly. Eventually the game dried out, and with it the league was retired.

With Overload, the potential for Six Degrees of Freedom competitive team action returns. I've recruited Chilly Bus and MobMessenjah to bounce some ideas off of, and wanted to list out what we've come up with so far.

The Spirit of the OTL

The OTL "spirit" borrows a lot from from the D3TL. Essentially, teams get together to play competitive games against each other, and the system is there to facilitate the games with as little interference from administration as possible. However, we are planning on having a few notable differences for the OTL.

First, seasons are being planned. While there will be lifetime standings, we want to rotate out the standings every 6 months to keep the leaderboards fresh.

Second, we're going to want to keep big rosters down. The D3TL team NT was a unique idea, but we really don't need to have teams with 50+ players on it. This means that large clans would have to enter multiple teams on the D3TL, which means more people will be able to play, and even allow for intra-clan matches. Right now, we're looking at rosters being between 5 and 8 players, although we're leaning towards the higher end of that list.

Third, we're looking to keep the game time down. D3TL games averaged an hour in length. Overload right now only allows a MAXIMUM of 20 minutes, and that's the standard we're looking at adopting. If Revival raises that maximum, I don't think we're going to want to follow suit.

Fourth, we think map, opponent, and mode diversification is unnecessary in 2018. To keep teams from playing the same map over and over, we're likely going to borrow the "home map" concept from The Observatory. To keep teams from not wanting to play other opponents, we want to implement a ranking system that's more than just wins and losses. And, there's only 2 real modes in Overload right now, and both are team anarchy... one with friendly fire off, and one with friendly fire on.

Finally, we want to do frequent events. Three kinds of events we're thinking of:

Regular events, perhaps monthly, that are at different days and times, where people can get together and play a small Swiss tournament for a few hours. Similar to The Observatory's tournaments.
Mid-season events, a top 6-team invitational knockout tournament, perhaps with something on the line like a guaranteed spot in the knockout tournament of the end-of-season tournament.
End-of-season events where we pull out all the stops... qualifiers for people to get into groups, a group stage round robin, and concluding with a knockout tournament. You win this, you're the season champion!

Choosing Maps, Servers, and Colors

I mentioned using The Observatory as a way to determine what map to play, but I wanted to go into more detail on map selection, and other selections that may give advantages to one team and not the other.

First, here's what we're thinking for maps. Teams will have a pool of "home" maps, and when they are the "home" team, their opponent will choose one of those maps. Who gets to be home? That'll alternate every game between the two teams, with the first game being random. What if both teams want to play a map that's not their home map? Teams will be able to agree to play any map available, overriding the home team concept for one game.

Servers will work the same way. One team will be assigned to start the game, which allows them to pick the server of their choice, and the next game between the teams your opponent gets the choice. Every 2 games this resets. However, you can agree to play on a particular server (provided you have access to it) to override this behavior for one game.

Finally, colors will just be assigned in a similar way to servers. Unlike the servers, though, your team color shouldn't be something to agree upon. Sometimes you'll be orange, sometimes you'll be blue.

Game Rules

Overload has a lot of ways to play team games, but we obviously want to standardize them for fair competition. This is what we're thinking:

Time limit: 20 Minutes
Show Enemy Names: Team Only
Respawn Time: 2 to 4 Seconds
Respawn Shield: 2 Seconds
Powerup Overall Frequency: High
Powerup Initial Secondaries: Low
Powerup Super Frequency: Low

All powerups are allowed, largely because we can't disable anything non-weapon.

As for Friendly Fire, we're actually thinking of making that a separate "mode". If you recall, the D3TL had separate rankings for each mode, but there was an overall ranking as well. We'd probably do something similar for this.

The Ranking System

Let me come out and say NO ONE is going to like the ranking system. Regardless of what system we use, nothing's perfect. I am hoping that by using a combination of a ranking system and regular events, any decent ranking system will be accepted as long as it's not the final authority on "who is the best". With that said, I'm going say that naughty word: Elo.

Long story short, I want to have score ratio be a factor in Elo score changes, and have the rankings be somewhat volatile given that these are not lifetime ratings.

First, we have an idea to have the score ratio factor in the Elo "result" calculation. Normally, a win would give you a 1.0 result and a loss would give you a 0.0 result. In our version of the Elo formula, you'd only get 1.0 if you doubled your opponent's score, and 0.0 if your opponent doubled your score, with a logarithmic curve filling in the points in between. I came up with the "double" by examining the history of Team Anarchy scores in the D3TL Tournament. It maxed out at a ratio of 3.27 to 1. If you're beating your opponents 45 to 15, the team with 15 is going to need to improve dramatically to ever have a chance of winning. 45 to 30 feels more like that the team with 30 could eventually win. There's no real solid statistics on what exactly to use, but this feels like a good starting point.

Because we want a decent level volatility, K will need to be high. On top of this, because we're going to be using score ratio as the result, this requires us to have a higher K to keep things a bit volatile. I'm looking at experimenting with a K=50 for the first season.

Finally, we want to use a provisional rating so teams can't play 1 game and be ranked among the top teams. Teams that have 10 games in a season will have their full Elo as their rating. Outside of that, every game a team plays will give them access to 10% of their Elo. So, a team with an Elo of 1500 but has only played 2 games will have 20% of their Elo applied to their rating, so their rating will be 300.

We'll also have individual player stats, like total points, points per game, deaths per game, and efficiency.

Things We Want Revival To Do To Help

Revival has done a great job at making a game people want to play, but there's more that can be done to make this game really shine, as well as help out the OTL with doing what we want to do. To this end, we currently have a small list of ideas we'd like to pass on to them.

Overload NEEDS an observer mode. In 2018, it almost feels like an oversight to not have some kind of observer mode. Even Descent 3 had observing!
To keep games fair, all players need to be able to confirm the selected settings for a private match. Without this, the person starting the match could sneak in some setting that the other team won't be aware of.
Game stats from private games should be output to a text file. No funny key combination required, no UI element, just a way to always output private match results. It should include each players' score line (kills, deaths, assists, suicides), and each players' kills and deaths against each other. Again, something to take away from Descent 3.
Allow the player hosting to pick which region to start their game in. Right now it just defaults as the closest to them, but what if a bunch of US players want to play Germany players on a UK server?
Right now you can select which weapons to allow or disallow. Extend this to other powerups: Ammo, Energy, Armor, Invulnerability, Cloak, Overdrive... everything.
Make an option to disallow players from delaying their spawn in a private game. This would prevent cases where a team is in the lead, but the other team is making a comeback, except the team in the lead just stops spawning.

League Interface

The primary interface for the OTL will most likely be a Discord bot. I have a lot of experience with Discord bots as I've made 3 now, and having a bot to help out with managing things like rosters, game reports, and more will really make it easy to keep the league running without anyone getting involved unless there's a dispute that needs to be resolved.

We'd still have a website, but its primary focus would be to show standings, results, and more. All other communication would take place on Discord.

What's Next?

Discussion, of course! I am posting this on a Friday to give everyone some time to read it over and form their own opinions as to what might be fun in an Overload Team League. On Monday, I'm going to do an Overload stream at http://twitch.tv/roncli and hold an AMA regarding the league. I'm looking for your questions and suggestions, so be sure to add your questions on the Reddit OTL AMA comments thread so that I don't miss them.

Summary

Overload is pretty well-suited for a teams league like this, and I think that having an organized teams league will get people playing multiplayer, and especially team games. Additional support from Revival will allow the league to do more, drawing even more interest from players who would not otherwise play multiplayer.

Labels: Gaming, Overload, Overload Teams League

Tuesday, January 02, 2018

The Descent DXX-Retro 1.4 Roadmap
Posted: 5:46:00 PM 0 comments

For some time now, I've been a Collaborator on the DXX-Retro project. Originally I just started helping out on various odds and ends, but lately my focus has been on the observer mode of the game.

Over the past two years, I've essentially been waiting on the project owner, Drakona, to work up the networking code to send client ship status to the observers. It's one thing to see the ships flying around in observer mode, but another entirely to know everything about those ships. That is, shields, weapon loadout, what weapons you're about to fire, etc. Unfortunately, her last commit to the project was February. Of 2016.

I get that priorities in life change, especially when you become a two-time parent. :) The Descent community, however, hungers for more, and as a result I've decided to finish off observer mode in Drakona's absence. There's actually quite a lot to make that happen, so I've created the v1.4 Roadmap. In this post, I discuss the rationale behind the roadmap, and what to expect from Retro in the future.

DXX-Retro has largely served its purpose to the competitive community, but two outstanding features remain to be added. Both of these were promised by Drakona to the late JinX. One of these features, observer mode, was even kind of named after him, "JinX Mode". The other feature was specific for Descent 2, and that is Capture the Flag Classic, which brings D3-style CTF play to D2.

In February of 2016, Drakona and I released an early version of DXX-Retro v1.4X5, which gave us a taste of observer mode. This only gave us the visuals. While we could see ships flying around, we didn't know anything about those ships other than what their opponents knew. This was always wanted, but we never really came up with a plan to do it. And, in the past 2 years, nothing has been worked on to support this. Unfortunately, Drakona just hasn't had time to work on it, and my work has therefore stalled.

While it hasn't been a great situation, the community has gotten a lot of mileage out of observer mode. So much so that a Twitch show was made out of it which continues to enjoy success among the community. However, there's a lot that we miss on the broadcasts because we don't have those shield numbers, the weapon loadouts, and whatnot. And after two years, the time has come to just get it done.

So, I'm getting it done. The roadmap includes 5 future releases along the 1.4 line. The first will be v1.4X6, which I'm hoping to finish this week. This will include the shield numbers appended to the pilot names under the ship. I want to also include a way to indicate damage, and will be working on ideas for that.

The second release will be v1.4X7, which will get the rest of the ship status in the game and make any necessary upgrades to the observer mode UI that we want to change from previous versions. I'm *considering* adding my custom-made Observatory UI to Retro, but am not sure that's needed.

The third release will also be v1.4X7, but this time for Descent 2! Once I know what I'm doing in D1, I can apply that to D2, and we can have an observer mode for both games.

The fourth release will be v1.4X8, also only for Descent 2. This will include Capture the Flag Classic, where instead of the "egghunt" style game where flags are worth 5 and kills are worth 1, we'll instead make the flags spawn in the base, only have teams be able to score if their flag is in their base, and have team points be based on flag captures only.

And finally v1.4 will be the final release for the 1.4 line, which will include any bug fixes, documentation updates, and any other housecleaning duties we need to do for a proper release.

After that, the future for Retro is murky at best. There are no less than 50 open issues on GitHub for Retro right now which vary from essential to nice-to-have to outright silly. Also to keep in mind, the DXX-Rebirth is nearing a v0.60 release that is essentially a codebase refactoring in addition to a ton of other updates. I would love to see a Retro v2.0 not only based on Rebirth v0.60 but something that can also follow that version as well, instead of being a complete fork that forgets where it came from. This in and of itself would be a monumental task.

Until then, however, we'll keep Retro focused on what we need to release v1.4, and if I can keep it going without the need for added help, perhaps that will be much sooner on the horizon than expected. Here's to some better Descent in the near future!

Labels: Coding, Descent, Gaming, Retro

Sunday, November 06, 2016

BlizzCon franchise roundup
Posted: 11:16:00 PM 0 comments

BlizzCon was as amazing this year as it has ever been. From the Sombra announcement to Weird Al closing out the show, there was more than enough to do this year. What I wanted to do with this post is roundup the six game franchises and give some commentary on their current state, going from best to worst.

Overwatch

Everyone was expecting the release of the new champion Sombra, and sometimes when you're expecting something you really don't get too hype for it. Sombra's reveal was definitely NOT one of those times, because the hype was real. They started the opening ceremony with a retrospective video of Overwatch's release. I thought it was pretty fake, with a ridiculously setup war room, some equally ridiculous lines, and in general a lot of small things that tipped off "this was not real". Sure enough, the video started glitching out, and eventually blacked out entirely before playing the reveal video. Everyone loved it, and it was as amazing as I had hoped it to be.

Overwatch has taken off in popularity since its release, and the main reason is that it makes a genre that was previously associated with hardcore gamers accessible to casual gamers, while at the same time making sure not to lose the hardcore crowd. The Overwatch World Cup was played at BlizzCon, complete with their own mini-stadium built inside of one of the halls. Overwatch is turning into a juggernaut that is continuing to gain momentum with things like arcade mode, new maps, and new game modes. They are constantly tweaking their matchmaking algorithms, improving their server technology to make the game smoother, and listening to fan feedback.

World of Warcraft

While Overwatch has all the hype, World of Warcraft is an established brand that has endured for over 10 years. However, their last expansion, Warlords of Draenor, hmm... sucked. No really, it was awful. They lost a ton of players, released very little content, and seemed to have no plan for the future.

Legion, on the other hand, has been an amazing expansion, with the new artifact weapons, a world quest system to replace the daily quests, other systems inspired by Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm, and a ton of content. So, it was pretty telling when on the first day, Ion Hazzikostas took the main stage and spent an hour talking about what was coming to future patches, and did so by himself. He went over the next two patches, 7.1.5 and 7.2, the raid content we'd see in it, and even gave a teaser for a 7.3 patch. This expansion is simply blowing the last one out of the water - not that it would be too hard to do so - and it's clear there isn't going to be any kind of content drought for the foreseeable future. Right now, WoW is pressing all the right buttons, and backing up their words with new content. If you've been wondering whether to get back into WoW after the failure of Warlords of Draenor, the answer is clearly yes.

Heroes of the Storm

Heroes is an oddity in the Blizzard world. It draws upon all of their franchises to take on giants such as League of Legends and DotA2. And to be fair, it does a good job. Again, it's another case of bringing a genre of gaming that is more associated with the hardcore gamers to casual gamers. They announced adding Varian Wrynn and Ragnaros to the game at BlizzCon, and continue to add more variety to the way you can play the game.

What I find odd, though, is that unlike a first person shooter, having all these different ways to play Heroes of the Storm just doesn't appeal to me as much as it could. It lacks player progression, and compared to Overwatch is significantly more difficult to pick up the cosmetics. Not to mention that with as many heroes as there are in the game, the learning curve is really huge when it comes to trying to figure out what each hero does, and how to successfully play against them. Having multi-class heroes like Varian is only going to make the curve grow. On the flip side, there is a plethora of things to do in Heroes of the Storm, so if you enjoy the game you're going to continually have more to do.

Hearthstone

Hearthstone is a fun, lighthearted game that tries not to take itself too seriously. However, I personally find that the game tends to move too fast, with multiple expansions per year and a constantly changing meta game. The speed of the meta changing is not a new complaint, but with the new expansion announced at this BlizzCon, that speed doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon.

To me, Hearthstone is an incredible time sink if you choose to play it. Not only do you have to stay current on the meta, but you spend time analyzing your cards and assemble decks with hopes that you will put together something that will be useful. Not to mention the investment - either time or money - required to get the cards you need to be competitive. Hearthstone can be amazing fun, but to remain competitive you really have to be ready to make the commitment.

Starcraft

Starcraft II is definitely waning in terms of new things happening. Sure, the modding scene is pretty active, but there were no announcements related to Starcraft II, if you don't count the DeepMind announcement. They have completed the story with the 3 chapters of the game but do occasionally add new mission packs to the game which are fairly popular. However, this won't sustain the game forever, and unless they're thinking about moving along to the next chapter in the Starcraft series, there isn't going to be much to talk about when it comes to Starcraft any time soon. At least their e-sports scene is thriving.

Diablo

Where there is little to talk about for Starcraft, there is much to talk about with Diablo, and it's not very good. Diablo III has become a stale game, with the meta being exactly the same for the past 4 seasons. While they are adding some nice feel good elements such as the annual Diablo I event or the Necromancer, it really isn't clear what they have planned to allow the game to remain relevant. Challenge Rifts were a good thought, but even that will become stale after some time.

Diablo III almost seems like the red-headed stepchild of Blizzard. They have no e-sports scene, the content that gets added to the game tends to pale in comparison to other games, the meta has become stale, and they're even losing some of their top players to boredom. Are they doing enough to keep fans of the game playing it?

On the flip side, this sure feels awfully familiar. It's a long content drought, like those we'd get at the end of an expansion for World of Warcraft. Blizzard isn't dumb, they know when a game they've made is losing its appeal, and they tend to do something about it. They already did it with Reaper of Souls. Perhaps the next expansion or game is just around the corner?

Labels: BlizzCon, Diablo III, Gaming, Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Six Degrees of Confusion
Posted: 12:10:00 AM 0 comments

Note: I come down pretty harshly on a few titles here that probably don't deserve it. Every title listed here is a good title in their own right, and deserves to at least be played through. The point is, nothing, yet, compares to Descent.

As you may know, I'm a pretty big Descent fan. I would even go as far as to say I'm a pretty big fan of the whole Six Degrees of Freedom genre. Really, if you want me to buy your game, make it a first person, Six Degrees of Freedom shooter. I'll buy it.

With that said, I have been a bit confused by the rash of 6DoF titles that have come out claiming they want to be as close to Descent as possible, and yet are doing things that... well, aren't very Descenty.

The Pretenders

There's Descent: Underground. This title seems to be doomed with poor net code that micro-repositions your ship just enough to throw your aim off, and a confusing scoring system that they are stubbornly sticking to. They have the name, but in my opinion they seem to be making their own 6DoF game.

There's Geocore, which I can best describe as a project lacking direction. Its single player mode has changed up literally half a dozen times since I've seen I started paying attention to it, and lacks the polish of other titles. It has a slogan of "competition grade", which is shown in its well-done net code, but honestly the original Descent has much better-looking weapons, and the game taxes my GPU like no other.

There's Sol Contingency, the game that originally was going to be Descent but got yanked from under them. While it has a very polished look, there are definitely some contrast issues that make it difficult to see what kind of action is happening in the game. I am also not a fan of the slow startup on its vulcan-like weapon.

There's Overload, the game made by the original Descent developers, who want to give us a modern version of Descent. Except, they have no initial plans for multiplayer, which is very much a core part of the Descent experience to me.

There's Retrovirus, a Descent-like game with a beautiful single player story, but horribly bad multiplayer play. The MOBA game mode was poorly done, and the spaces feel so large that it feels like it's impossible to properly aim. Not to mention the tech trees that let the king of the hill continue to be the king by granting well-performing players extra powers. Descent was a game that already had a wide skill gap, why make it wider?

While each of these titles are very good in their own right, as a fan of the Descent series, all of these titles miss the mark in one way or another. I am beginning to wonder if the experience of Descent can actually be recreated at all. Did Parallax happen upon some kind of magic formula for success that made the original game still the best game of the genre, even 21 years later? Is this 6DoF revival period just a bunch of pretenders trying to recreate the perfect Descent experience?

Or maybe am I overshooting my expectations?

The New Originals

Take Sublevel Zero. I had no expectations that this would be Descent, or anything like it. However, it is probably my favorite of the modern 6DoF games because of its rogue-like replayability, its crafting system that allows you to play the game the way you want to, and some AI that, while it could be smarter, does just enough to be dangerous if you're not paying attention. It has no multiplayer, but it never claimed to be Descent, so I don't expect it.

Take NeonXSZ. One of the few 6DoF games without inertial dampening (in English: your ship continues to move in the direction you moved it even after you stop moving in that direction), this game takes elements from puzzle games, action RPGs, and of course the 6DoF genre and brings it into an engaging environment where, again, you can play the game the way you want to. I didn't expect this to be Descent-like, and therefore was pleased with the polish of the game, as well as the action that came out of it.

And how about little-talked about Kromaia, the 6DoF bullet hell? This is about as far from the original Descent gameplay as you can get, because you want to kill as LITTLE as possible, or else the difficulty ramps up FAST. It's a different way to play a 6DoF, but it was still a fun game.

It seems the games that I have the LEAST expectation of being Descent are the ones I have the MOST fun playing.

Maybe I should cut my expectations short with these new games and take them for what they are, rather than having them try to be the old experience in new clothes, but I tell you what, that can be really hard to do.

Labels: Descent, Descent: Underground, Gaming, Geocore, Kromaia, NeonXSZ, Overload, Retrovirus, Sol Contingency, Sublevel Zero

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

Report Card: 2015
Posted: 12:38:00 AM 0 comments

I often do a "Year in Review", but this year I thought I'd change it up a bit. Last year, in addition to reviewing what happened the previous year, I added some goals for 2015. This year, instead of just reviewing what happened last year and adding the goals, I figured I would also add in a kind of "report card", where I grade myself on how I did towards those goals from the previous year.

I'll be honest. These goals stayed with me all year long. When I thought about what I want to do, I compared that to my goals. Having goals I actually thought about has made me learn a bit more about myself than I knew before.

So, without further ado, here's the 2015 report card!

Music

2015 Goal: Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper"

There's no beating around the bush here, neither of these goals happened. In fact, I was musically silent for the first half of the year. I did, however, come out with three different pieces of music, but none of them were original works.

In 2015, I started a podcast with Dr. Zing and Morfod called the Self-Destruct Sequence Podcast, which is a podcast all about Descent. Dr. Zing kind of dropped off the face of the Internet a few months ago, but Morfod and I picked it back up late last year, and have been having fun with the episodes this year. I mention this in the music section because when we were putting the first episode together, we wanted to have some Descenty music, and I delivered in a big way.

Our title music, Self Destruct Sequence, is a remake of the level 1 music, while our outro, Mars Processing Sequence, is a remake of the level 8 music. Both had electronic elements, and two guitar tracks each that I performed myself. This is the first time I've actually been happy with guitar tracks that I've created, especially the lead guitar parts. Hopefully I can take my experience from this and translate that into better guitar tracks in my music in the future.

The third piece was something I couldn't get out of my head, a piano cover of the song "The Wight to Remain" by Danny Baranowsky, which is best known as the music to Zone 4 Level 3 in the game Crypt of the NecroDancer. This has always been a beautiful track to me, and could be the launching point of a piano-only soundtrack to the game, if I get so inspired to complete some day. I even put the song's score up on flat.io if you so desire to try to play it yourself.

So while I kept the dust off of my music, I didn't do what I set out to do. At all. I tried to work on "Paper" once, but couldn't get any inspiration for the one part I still don't have a working idea for. Maybe that will change in 2016, but unfortunately, this gets poor marks this year.

2015 Grade: D

2016 Goal: Complete and release full versions of "All In My Head" and "Paper". For real this time.

Coding

2015 Goal: Finish the updated roncli.com site

Well, you're looking at it, baby. I'm still quite proud of this accomplishment, and it really took a load off my shoulders last year when I completed it. It's even gotten a few updates since that fixed some bugs and added (and, sadly, removed) some features.

So with the main 2015 goal accomplished, what else have I done in 2015? A quick glance at my GitHub profile shows I've contributed to Descent's DXX-Retro source port (this was the mouse fix), and started a series of Descent 3 tools written in node.js, including the rebirth of Descent DSN. However, in recent months, coding's not exactly been a priority to me.

The main project I have going right now is getting Six Gaming's official website off the ground. It is going to be started pretty much directly from roncli.com with a Six Gaming theme. At first it's just going to be a static page with links pointing to most of our presence on social media. Later, it will include episode-specific links for the Six Gaming Podcast, and the final version will be a full fledged social site where people can come to find other people with whom to play games they enjoy.

So 2015 was good, and 2016 has a clear goal. Looks good to me!

2015 Grade: A

2016 Goal: Finish the Six Gaming site

Gaming

2015 Goal: Grow Six Gaming into a bigger and more general gaming community

So at the beginning of 2015, I had this great idea to make Six Gaming a big community, not just for World of Warcraft, but for all the games we play. Over the years, we found that many of the gamers in Six Minutes To Release enjoyed other games as well, so it made sense to want to cater to that while keeping the close-knit community we've created from the core members of the guild over the previous 7 years.

Two major events accelerated this goal to fruition. First, Showsan got the jump on me. When he returned from his service in the military, he came in and lit a fire under everyone. He basically rebooted the Six Gaming Podcast, gave it a new format and new life. Since then, we've added a ton of cohosts that bring their own unique perspective on the games that we are playing. The Podcast has stayed fresh and has been enjoyable because of it, and we recently completed our 100th episode, which we call... Episode 48. Don't ask.

Second, Warlords of Draenor happened. What a bad expansion! I would rehash what I've already written, but suffice to say that not much has changed, and on top of it we're looking at another 6-8 months until Legion, which will make a 12-14 month content drought, similar to the one at the end of Mists of Pandaria, and exactly what the devs previously said they didn't want to do. Add in their stance on flying, and I honestly couldn't tell you if I trust Blizzard to get WoW right anymore. Legion is their last chance to get it right for me, and until then I am probably going to be doing some different things.

Like Descent. Descent: Underground made it known that Descent still exists for a lot of people, and despite the issues they are having (a topic for a future blog post), I am genuinely excited for a release of a new Descent game, even if it's not by the same people who gave us the first three. Naturally, a new Descent game has raised interest in the original games, and Descent 1, 2, and 3 have all seen an uptick in activity.

Case in point is the Descent Champions Ladder. It went from 1,408 games played in the fall 2013 season, down to 938 games in spring 2014, and down further to only 504 games in fall 2014. At the end of that season, Descent: Underground was announced, and the spring 2015 season saw a massive ressurgance with 2,218 games played. The late 2015 season, which was only 3 months, had 1,416 games played, and not even 3 weeks into early 2016 we have 510 games played.

Playing Descent again has been awesome, and has inspired me to learn a new control scheme. I used to be all keyboard, and now I do mouse and keyboard. I play at the high bronze/low silver level on the DCL currently, but I feel I have a lot to learn about the game both mechanically and philosophically.

I've also been involved with the Crypt of the NecroDancer community, racing most recently in CoNDUIT 7, and will be playing again on CoNDUIT 8 on the 29th. I'm not that great, which is why I'm in the "junior" league, but it's still a whole lot of fun getting some competition in. I still need to complete story mode and an all characters run to unlock Coda (I have no false impressions that I will BEAT Coda, mind you), so there's still plenty of room for improvement. I'm mainly known for having the Bard Deathless world record at 112 wins, and have performed fairly well at deathless mode with a few other characters as well.

I've also done a ton of streaming on Twitch. While I've stopped playing League of Legends, I still stream things such as my DCL games, Crypt of the NecroDancer runs, and even some Sublevel Zero speedruns. Basically, if I play it, it ends up on Twitch at some point.

Gaming has become a central part of what I do. I play a wide variety of games, involve myself in the Six Gaming, Descent, and Crypt of the NecroDancer communities, do two weekly podcasts involving games, and stream many times a week. I don't see this slowing down in the near future, so the only thing to do in 2016 is embrace it.

I have plans to start a regular Descent-themed competition show on Twitch, and am most interested in growing my stream large enough to get partnered. I don't think partnering will happen this year, but I at least want to get started. I've played with some ideas for growing my YouTube channel as well, but nothing's really stuck, but I'll keep trying.

2015 Grade: A+

2016 Goal: Substantially increase my streaming presence on Twitch

Life

2015 Goal: Get back to the Bay Area at least once

I think I nailed this one, at least in text. However, my experience thus far has been... less than ideal.

So instead of taking a trip to the Bay Area, I actually MOVED out here. In October, I packed my things, drove West a few days, and settled into the Belmont area. Central to everything, I've done... nearly nothing since I've gotten here. Sure, I've ventured to Pier 39 in the city, finally ate some Iguanas down in San Jose, and have occasionally taken in some of the area's scenic routes, I've yet to really do something... defining when it comes to the Bay Area. Seriously, I've seen more of the Bay Area the last time Kathy and I came out here in February 2013.

This is compounded by the fact that many of the people I knew and hung out with here are gone. One of the reasons I gave for moving out here was to be close to people I knew and give myself opportunities to "get out" every so often. I have done that a grand total of zero times since I got here.

There have been several reasons why I haven't really capitalized on my new living situation. The first is that I work remotely, yet am wanting to work locally. My job in Houston allowed me to work remotely when I told them I was moving and giving what I thought was going to be my two weeks. While the remote working part of the job has been going okay, I know through my experience with Sift that this isn't something I want to do forever. I have been really slow on advancing this agenda, however.

Second is that I've found myself in somewhat of a funk recently. I can't really put my finger on why, just that I find that I don't have the energy to do a whole lot since just before Christmas. My focus has been poor in coding-related projects, and I don't really feel that I've "settled in" very well. I don't at all regret making this move, in fact I think it's the best thing I've done for myself in a long time. However, I need to really break out of whatever it is that's causing me to, for lack of a better description, lose time doing nothing.

So, yeah, I made it out here, but... what next? Well, the first thing is going to be transitioning to a local job. Even before then, though, I need to find a way to get more active again. I have a plan, it's just acting on it - or more accurately getting over what's preventing me from acting on it - is proving challenging.

I hate these lethargic, stagnant days. I've had them before and have gotten past them, and have no doubt I will again. But the time until that happens can be downright depressing some days.

Oh, and there's this house thing. Yeah, we want a house. Soon.

2015 Grade: C

2016 Goal: Get more active, find local employment, and begin planning moving into a house

Overall

I've had an up and down year for sure. I recognize that my strongest point currently is with gaming, and recently that has been the outlet I go to in order to unwind and have a good time. I also find enjoyment in coding, but need to find a way to motivate myself to finish projects like I did with roncli.com. While my music still remains on the back burner, I am doing my best to keep sharp and avoid going flat... okay, I'll stop with the music puns! I recognize that I need to make some changes in order to improve my quality of life in my new surroundings, and am hoping that I can get those taken care of quickly.

2015 Overall Grade: B

Labels: Coding, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Descent, Descent Champions Ladder, Descent: Underground, Gaming, Life, Music, roncli.com, Self-Destruct Sequence Podcast, Six Gaming, Six Gaming Podcast, Twitch, Year in Review

Monday, September 21, 2015

Crypt of the NecroDancer Bard Deathless record
Posted: 2:13:00 PM 0 comments

If you haven't been following my Twitch stream, one of the games I've picked up recently is Crypt of the NecroDancer. It's a rougelike game where normally you have to move your character to the beat of the music, all the while avoiding deadly traps and attacks and killing all the baddies.

I say "normally" because there's one character that's different.

Bard is special in that you control the speed the game moves at. I call it NetHack Mode, because you get time to think about your next move without having to worry about your enemies moving. While it would seem like it's the easiest mode possible, I find that it's the classic case of trying to not beat yourself. You could easily spend 30 minutes or longer per game not only trying to get the best gear in the game and make sure that you never take even a single hit, but man that's boring and this makes it real easy to just go light speed and open the door and *BAM* you're black skeleton'd.

I've streamed some Bard Deathless, which requires you to win as many games as possible in a row without dying, but only to limited success. Prior to last week, my previous best was 27 consecutive wins. While this sounds like a lot, the record as of last week was 60 wins.

Today, the record stands at 112.

I spent four days of playing about 16 minutes per win to set the new Bard Deathless record. It was tiring, as I'd spend 9 hours per day playing, with one day going all the way to 5 in the morning to hit the 100th win. My final death ended as it always does on Bard, a preventable tragedy. I had a fireball and didn't use it against a red dragon, and ended up not having enough room to kill it without it killing me. In short, I beat myself. But not before I crushed the record.

I put up a playlist on YouTube of all 112 wins, but this isn't something you're going to want to go through from beginning to end... that's 30 hours of video. Not a whole lot of highlights to be had (I did highlight one moment of stupidity early in the run), but if you're interested in seeing how a deep Bard Deathless run works, pick one of the videos and watch one or two of the games. I'm usually pretty good at verbally documenting what I'm doing and bringing up any unusual events as they happen.

Up next: actually beating Aria.

Labels: Crypt of the NecroDancer, Gaming, World Record

Monday, July 13, 2015

Descent's Potential Ascent
Posted: 3:20:00 AM 0 comments

On a recent episode of the Six Gaming Podcast, we had a lengthy discussion about our futures in gaming. I mentioned on this episode that I felt I was at the point where one game that I was spending a large chunk of time was ending, and that another game would take its place, but I didn't yet know what game that was. With World of Warcraft sucking as of late, I've been trying to find out what the next game was that was going to grab my attention.

My wife has dove into Final Fantasy XIV Online. I personally have little interest in the Final Fantasy series, and watching her play hasn't done much to pique my interest.

League of Legends isn't it. For the first half of the year I did a segment called Ron's Bronze Plays that tracked my League of Legends play in the bronze tier. While I enjoy playing the game, I find I don't enjoy playing with random people. Despite Riot Games' testimony to the contrary, toxicity in the game is a very real thing. I don't like dealing with people that aren't cooperating in a game that requires cooperation. Sadly, my skill level doesn't allow me to rise above these players enough for me to enjoy the game. I still follow LCS and all, but I'm hardly playing the game any more.

Occasionally I dive into some indie games, and Crypt of the NecroDancer is one I've fallen for pretty hard. I use my XBox One controller for the game, and I am really enjoying challenging myself to do better. But this isn't a game I can play for hours on end every day, there's just not enough to it.

Much of my gaming time has involved me competing on the Descent Champions Ladder. Of course, Descent is old as hell, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. I've played this game on and off since it came out, but the coming resurgence of Descent via Descent: Underground has me captivated again. I'm still far off of my level of skill I had when I played back in the day, but I'm relearning the moves and the levels, trying to get back into the rhythm I had when I played the first time around. But Descent: Underground doesn't come out until next year, and the active Descent community is so small right now, it's hard to find games. Fortunately, there's things like the 20th Anniversary LAN coming up, but these events are few and far in between these days. I'm really hoping that Descent: Underground is "it", but we'll have to see.

Until then, I'm thinking of ways I can further the Descent community. I've restarted my old Descent dedicated server network project, in node.js of course, and am far enough along that I should have something usable for the LAN. With talk about there being a competitive scene in the new game, I've considered doing a podcast-like show centered around competitive Descent. I've even inquired with the Descendent Studios team to see if they have use for a JavaScript guy like me on their team. (Sadly, they don't yet!) I feel like I want to get involved, but the size of the community makes me wonder if this is worth my time. I do have other projects floating around, you know!

So for now, I continue playing more Descent and working on my Descent DSN project. Nothing else has really stood out and screamed "PLAY ME!".

Labels: Descent, Gaming

Thursday, July 02, 2015

Warlords of Draenor is a failure
Posted: 3:00:00 PM 0 comments

As a background, I have been playing World of Warcraft since about 3 months before The Burning Crusade was released. I have been a part of 4 guilds, including running Six Minutes To Release for over 7 years. The Six Gaming Podcasts exists solely because of World of Warcraft. I have seen the best that World of Warcraft has to offer. Today, I am seeing the worst.

If you haven't heard, it was recently announced that Warlords of Draenor has likely shipped its final content patch - and in the opinion of many players, its ONLY content patch. 6.1 was the social media patch which did not progress the Draenor story at all. Even if you count 6.1 as a major patch, that is still only 2 patches.

Here is a quick reference to the content released in previous expansions:

	Vanilla	Burning Crusade	Wrath of the Lich King	Cataclysm	Mists of Pandaria	Warlords of Draenor
Major Patches Post-Launch (Not necessarily content patches)	11 Maraudon, Dire Maul, PvP Honor System, Alterac Valley & Warsong Gulch, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Gurub, Silithus, Ahn'Qiraj, Tier 0.5, Naxxramas, Cross-Realm Battlegrounds	4 Black Temple, Voice Chat, Zul'Aman, Sunwell	3 Ulduar, Crusaders' Coliseum, Icecrown Citadel	3 Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub 5-mans, Firelands, Dragon Soul	4 Brawler's Guild, Throne of Thunder, Deepwind Gorge, Siege of Orgrimmar	2 Twitter, Hellfire Citadel
Content at Launch	Raids: 2 Dungeons: 16	Raids: 6 Dungeons: 15	Raids: 4 Dungeons: 11	Raids: 4 Dungeons: 9	Raids: 3 Dungeons: 9	Raids: 1 Dungeons: 8
Content patched in	Raids: 5 Dungeons: 4	Raids: 2 Dungeons: 1	Raids: 5 Dungeons: 5	Raids: 2 Dungeons: 3	Raids: 2 Dungeons: 0	Raids: 2 Dungeons: 0

Warlords of Draenor the first expansion with less than 3 raid tiers, has had as many or less raids total than the other 4 expansions LAUNCHED with, has the least number of 5-man dungeons of any expansion, gave up queued scenarios, isolated players within their garrison, eliminated flying, and simply rehashed old ideas with its only major content patch.

Sure, Warlords of Draenor had some good content. The questing between level 90 to 100 was extremely well-done. Everything flowed correctly, there were more than one quest line you could take on at a time, and the build up to the dungeons made for a really good story. Sure, they funneled you into your garrison along the way, but the garrison didn't make you feel trapped. You WANTED to go out and explore, and explore we did.

Then 100 hit. Garrosh was killed at the end of Nagrand, and our only major questlines remaining were our weekly garrison quests and the legendary ring quest. Sure, we had dailies for Apexis, but other than raiding, dungeons, and PvP, what did Blizzard provide us?

Their first major patch of Warlords was 6.1. It was so lacking of content they even had a lame name for it, "The Adventure Continues". From their patch notes, here are the highlights:

Updated Blood Elf model
Heirloom Collectinos Tab
Cosmetic Transformations an Toy Effects improvements
Twitter Integration
Garrison, Follower, and Outpost updates

Blizzard considers this a major content patch because they incremented the first number after "6." to 6.1. But make no mistake, there is not enough content here to call this a major content patch. For all intents and purposes, 6.1 was business as usual for us players.

The second major patch was just released, 6.2, "The Fury of Hellfire". This was better, as it introduced Hellfire Citadel, mythic dungeons, and of course Tanaan Jungle. Something new to do, right?

Turns out it was just something new to look at. Here's a list of the content that was added:

Hellfire Citadel
Tanaan Jungle
Garrison Campaign
Legendary Questline
Mythic dungeons
Shipyard

Hellfire Citadel is a new raid tier, which is great news for raiding guilds, as we have fresh content to tackle. This is probably the best part of this content patch.

The legendary questline continues, but so far it's just a bunch of raiding. We'll know in a few weeks if this is worth. It probably is, but it's also quite a grind.

Tanaan Jungle visually is gorgeous. I cannot stop talking about how cool Tanaan looks, from the lush jungle to the desolation of the Throne of Kil'jaden, they got the zone's atmosphere down perfectly. The problem, however, is what you actually do.

First, there's the garrison campaign. Fine, a new series of quests, tie up some old loose ends, and we'll probably get a cliffhanger that says "Go raid Hellfire Citadel!" at the end. Still, a fresh questline with new story added can't be bad. Problem is that it's designed along the lines of the garrison campaign from 6.0. Namely, I may not get the same quest that my wife may get, which means we can't tackle the same content together. I find this bad design for an MMORPG. It would fit a single player game, but WoW is not a single player game.

Next up are the reputation grind dailies. I am so sick of daily missions in WoW, and have felt this way pretty much since they were introduced. It feels like end game filler content. There's no challenge to the daily quests, which makes playing them feel like you're just going through the motions for pretty much no tangible reward.

Also, the apexis grind. They added new bonus objectives that reset every day, so if you want to grind out the apexis, you can. You can even earn apexis just by killing, but you don't get a whole lot that way. The bonus objectives still can run out daily if you do them all, and the only real use for them is for oil for your shipyard because eventually you run out of the need for apexis once you get all your 695 gear. It's a boring grind, because your options are extremely limited. There are no scenarios, no real world events outside of world bosses, and the type of content you do is just a rehash of everything you've done so far. Where's the innovation? I feel Blizzard really sold themselves on how good their content was, when in reality it gets boring after just a week of play.

Mythic dungeons were added, which add higher difficulty to content we stopped caring about months ago. No real new dungeons were added. One of the great things about Wrath was the amount of dungeon content they added post-release. They seem to have abandoned something that worked well before.

And finally the shipyard. Oh, the shipyard. They hyped this up to be something really cool when the reality is it's just another garrison mission table with ships instead of followers. Personally I feel they need to abandon this whole garrison and mission idea. Bring back scenarios in their place, they were more fun!

In summary, Warlords of Draenor had some of the best leveling content, and some of the worst, most monotonous end game content they've ever put out. I've been extremely disappointed with how Blizzard has treated an expansion that we paid $10 extra for by really shortening the end game. They put out this great, epic time traveling/alternate dimension story, but they have supported it so poorly that I haven't had any interest in the story behind these raids. Why did we raid the ogres in Highmaul? Did we have any other reason to raid Blackrock Foundry than to get revenge on Blackhand? And Hellfire Citadel doesn't really end the whole story of Gul'dan and this alternate Draenor. How far down the rabbit hole are we going to go with this whole alternate dimension thing? We have so many unsolved stories on Azeroth, I feel Blizzard would be better served creating new story rather than re-hashing old story and making us defeat enemies we've already defeated in our own timeline.

This is most likely the end of Warlords of Draenor, so we can only hope the next expansion is better, but I am concerned that Blizzard is not going to learn from their mistakes, because the mistakes they supposedly learned from last expansion led to them making even worse mistakes this time around.

Give us content. Give us more to do at end game. Give us a game with a story we can get behind. Don't rehash old content in new zones. And for god sakes, don't you dare give us another selfie stick patch.

Labels: Gaming, Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft