Plants vs Zombies Facebook

I'm a huge fan of Plants vs Zombies, an adorably cute linear tower defense game that was released in 2009 and rapidly became one of the games of the year. I first bought and played it on my iPhone in almost one solid sitting, then realized extra levels and features were available in the PC version so bought that and played it too, then replayed it on my iPad, and then got the HD version for the iPad too. I've got almost every achievement on almost every platform and I don't even know how many times I've played through the main levels.

I like that it's cute and friendly feeling. I like that I can pick it up at any time when I have time to kill and play a few levels or some of the extra challenges. I like trying different plant combinations to see what's most effective for different levels, or trying to pick up achievements I haven't got so far.  So, when I saw the Plants vs Zombies facebook game released last month I immediately tried it out.

The overview

The biggest change is that the levels are no longer left-to-right linear like the original. The zombies now follow paths which may turn in multiple directions, even criss-crossing, like a more traditional tower defense game. This adds another dimension to laying out your plants, which now have 2-dimensional areas of effect, instead of just shooting straight ahead. There are some new plants also, an Aspearagus which shoots asparagus spears; and a Beet, which clubs zombies down. Judging from the title screen art there is probably also a Bamboo Shoot in my future, which looks unfortunately like a bad Asian caricature.  The names of the plants have always been clever puns and Aspearagus and Beet follow this tradition, but some of the other plants just seem to give up on wit completely.  "Magnet plant" isn't funny (why not "Mag-nut"?) and neither is "flaming pea".  There are new types of zombies also: a barrel zombie, who's essentially the same as the newspaper original, and a rocket jet pack zombie who charges fast until a snow pea disables his rockets. Conga-line zombies are similar to the original disco zombie but linear, and a zombie with lots of hats is essentially a graphically more interesting way of showing a heavily armored zombie (each hat gets knocked off separately).

Stockpile restrictions

The individual levels now lead you along a road trip path through different areas where you defend your camper van instead of a stationary house. You manage and build up a village which is your home base. Houses in your village earn you coins and buffs; coins purchase plants which you grow in village planter boxes. When you play a zombie level on the road trip, you only have available to you plants that you've previously grown at home and stockpiled. So, you have to keep collecting coin from your village and planting new plants for your stockpile. Adding a restriction on top of that, you can only choose a limited number of plant types from your stockpile, and can only use up to 5 of each even if you have more than that in your stockpile.  Adding a further restriction, you can only stockpile up to 15 plants at a time (and only 2 buffs).  All these artificial limits are way too restrictive and very annoying.  If I spend the time to stockpile 50 plants, let me stockpile 50 plants. And if I have 10 snow peas in my stockpile, let me use them in a level if I want to. Sure, it would make some levels much easier, but it's still balanced out by the fact I then need to take the extra time to regrow those 10 snow peas instead of 5. And it would remove the problem of people getting stuck on levels and just giving up.

The requirement to stockpile plants also changes the gameplay significantly.  Unlike the original where all you need is sun, now you also need to conserve your plant stockpile, so the incentive shifts to winning each level with the MINIMUM number of plants (and thus the least downtime in re-growing them) instead of trying to find the most efficient solution (which I enjoy). Now I find myself thinking "should I plant that extra beet, or just let the lawnmower catch the last wave of zombies?" And the answer is usually to not plant, and let the lawnmower do the work instead of your plants, which seems to me to clash with the essence of the game. The name of the game is not Lawnmowers vs Zombies, but the game mechanics have created a situation where you're heavily motivated to try to NOT plant plants and rely on lawnmowers instead.  To have a Plants vs Zombies game which discourages you from planting plants seems absurd to me.

Three currencies

In addition to coin there are "zombucks" which are earned from adventure levels and dropped by zombies and used to buy village houses and decorations; and gems which are the real money currency used to buy other currencies and shortcut gameplay (e.g. you can buy a plant with gems if you don't have one stockpiled). The three currencies are a little confusing and they're not clearly explained early on, though you eventually figure it out.  Two currencies seem like they would be plenty from a user perspective (gems and coin). I understand it would be much easier for the developers to manage the economy by dividing purchases into coin and zombucks but it feels a bit like a lazy move at the sacrifice of player clarity. My main complaint about the currencies though is that it's WAY too easy to spend gems without meaning to: if you run out of plants during a level and try to plant another, it'll just deduct gems without a confirmation prompt. And early on since you have no idea what gems even are, you can easily use up your initial starting stash of gems without even noticing. (Oddly, it gives me prices for gems in UK pounds, despite the fact I live in the US.)

The village, and visiting friends

As you travel in your mobile home and complete map areas, you slowly unlock new areas of your home village. The village seems to exist only to harvest coin/buffs and grow new plants. Buildings in the village occasionally get attacked by zombies, so you need to plant some defenses and plan your layout carefully.  There's a limited ability to decorate your village, but any decoration that you add is actually an annoyance that gets in the way when zombies attack, so the incentive is actually to NOT decorate.

Like most facebook games, you're able to visit your friends' villages. However, unlike most facebook games, when you get there you're expected to attack your friends' buildings with your own army of zombies.  If you succeed (which is unlikely since the zombies offered to you are very limited and can barely be controlled), then you destroy a friend's building and they have to repair it. What exactly is the point of this, I have no idea. It doesn't seem to benefit your friend at all, in fact it harms their village, so I have avoided doing it entirely. It's a disincentive to visit.  It would be far more encouraging if you could do something positive in their village, like leave a free plant, or speed up their planter growth.  What if visiting friends' villages allowed you to give them a gem?  

Slow progression

The requirement to stockpile plants you grow in your village is a deliberate slow-down mechanism, presumably to make the game last longer before you finish the content, but it's irritating.  You can't just keep playing through the spare time you have free, you have to play a few levels then wait hours for your houses to generate coin and your plants to grow. It ensures you do NOT get immersed in the game and are constantly counting coin and plants, which isn't a particularly fun pastime. Worse, the further along in the game you get, the more this becomes a problem.  Every new plant takes longer and longer to grow, and of course the higher levels require the new plants, so the time you have to wait between levels just gets longer and longer meaning you can play less and less.  It's essentially punishing you for progressing.  

Here are the plants I have so far, and the time it takes to grow them:

In the current levels I'm on, I will likely plant sunflowers (of course), snow peas, beets, wall-nuts, and a few magnets, and flaming peas.  Assuming I had space to grow replacements all at the same time, I'm slowed down by the slowest-growing plant, the flaming pea.  With a 6 hour replacement time for the flaming pea and a maximum of 15 possible to stockpile, I can play maybe five to six levels at the most before I have to sit for a MINIMUM of 6 hours. And in fact it's actually longer, because I don't have planter space to replant everything at once.  Given that I work during most days and only play before and after work, this means I can now play 6-8 levels absolute maximum per day.  It actually turns out to be less, since I'm not logging in at work (or waking up at night) to micromanage my plants so a lot of my free play time is spent growing also.

On top of the ever-slower plant growth, each subsequent map seems to have more and more levels to get through before you can progress further.  The ramp-up in numbers is very rapid. While the first map has only 5 levels to get through, it's up to 21 by the fourth map, and stays up in the 20s consistently as far as I can see to the end of the game.  

Looking at my friends' progress, a full 45% of my friends have stalled in level four "Park n Perish" where it makes the huge jump from 10 levels/map to 21. This seems to be where most people are quitting. Another 45% didn't make it even to map four, and the remainder are stuck in map five, aptly named Killjoy Park. Since each map has a "goal" at the end unlocking another region of your village there's a fairly big incentive to reach the end, so the fact the maps have so many levels in them is discouraging. Even though the gameplay would essentially be the same, it would be a lot more fun if each map contained only 5-10 levels and had some other reward at the end - such as replenishing your plant stockpile, for example!

On top of all these other artificial slow-downs, you cannot progress beyond the end of each map without getting friends to help you (and it requires more friends per map). To bypass this requirement you actually have to spend real $ on gems. So, each time I reach the end of a map I have to spam my friends with requests to help me on my road trip, and then wait until they answer and fill up the required slots before I can move to the next map.  Since most of my friends work full time also, this can take up to a day during which I basically can't do anything except redecorate my village.  I could in theory replay old levels, but that would just mean I have to regrow more plants, which discourages me. I can't even replay old levels while waiting in order to complete quests, since apparently that's not allowed - for example I currently have a quest to use the gardening glove in combat three times. The gardening glove is a buff I've found almost entirely useless and I don't think it would have been possible to finish most of the levels in the U of Z zone I just finished if I took that buff instead of a more useful one. But, I can't go back to an easier level to complete the quest since the glove doesn't even show up as an available option on those levels now. So there really is absolutely nothing I can do while sitting around waiting for friends to help me (friends who are increasingly quitting the game, so slower and slower to respond).  Sure, I understand this is a mechanism to get me to invite my other friends to play. But it actually prevents me from playing, and that's not good.  And since it requires more friends each time, it prevents me from playing for longer and longer. I don't like this gate at all, and would much prefer another way to encourage inviting friends, but at least if this is used it should remain a low number of friends (and preferably be bypassable with zombucks, not gems).

Monetization

There are lots of opportunity to spend gems to speed things up faster, but it feels as if this was an alternate option just added to everything. It doesn't feel as if the game has a very clearly thought out understanding of why people will spend money.  The pricing is odd.  Some prices:

• to get a new buff (lawnmower, zombie zapper, etc) without waiting: about $1
• to instantly buy a single plant: about $0.50 - $1
• village decorations that increase speed of coin gain: about $0.50-$3
• to bypass the need for friends to progress to the next map: about $0.50-$1
• to bypass a quest (although it's unclear what, if any, benefit there is from doing this): about $0.50

These prices seem to have little correlation to their actual value to the player. For example, I spend so much time waiting for my plants to regrow that I almost never run out of buffs, so I'd never spend money to get one faster. I also haven't run out of coin since I got past the first few levels of the game, so I see absolutely no value in buying coin boost buffs. On the other hand buying plants is clearly a huge time saver, but considering that you may use 10-15 plants in a single level, even $0.50 per plant is way too pricy. To replenish my stockpile of 15 flaming peas (6hrs each to grow) would be a total of 750 gems which will cost over UK£12, or almost US$20 which is completely ridiculous to spend for plants which will last you only 3-4 levels.

I'm not a big spender on microtransactions, but if I'm enjoying a game and there's a clear value to me, I'll usually drop a few dollars to support the developers. In this game though there's really nothing I will buy. It's either valueless to me (buffs), or so overpriced (plants) that I don't feel it's worth it. The game needs more clear value items to spend gems on.

What if, instead of requiring you to beg friends to help you on your road trips, you could just give a gem a day to a certain number of friends? (Dragonvale does this very well.)  Then the more friends you have, the more gems you get, and there's a strong incentive to invite your friends and keep them playing, without annoying long waits.  This also keeps players interested in spending gems, while currently they run out and have little incentive to look at them again.  Now add some clear value items: how about a Plant Nursery building for your village which takes zombucks to build at level 1, but gems to upgrade to higher levels. The Nursery would refill your plant stockpile completely when you click it, but has a long reuse timer. Upgraded versions shorten the reuse time.  Paying with gems could also reset the reuse time. This would be a strong encouragement to gain gems, both through recruiting friends and purchasing.  Or how about a Jewelry Store which allows you to give daily gems to a higher number of friends? Perhaps giving you a gem bonus also? PvZ monetization feels as if it's really missing the boat in providing tempting ways to leave money behind.

In conclusion...

I'm currently level 18 and miles ahead of everybody else on my friends list (5197 zombie kills, while my next closest friend is 2 maps behind at 2867 kills). I watched all my friends jump in (everybody loves Plants vs Zombies) but they're dropping like flies, and to be honest the only reason I'm still playing is that I've been using it as a distraction while exercising.  The sad fact is, it's just NOT FUN.  The reason people play the original Plants vs Zombies is not that it's challenging, and it's not that it's ever-new content, it's that there's a joy in the gameplay that's just irresistable. PvZ facebook doesn't have this.  All the fun parts have been removed or severely handicapped (being able to try out different combinations of plants; raining down superior firepower in overwhelming numbers; being able to play without interruption).  Although there's lots of new content still ahead of me, I know it's going to be exactly like the old content only more annoying and requiring slower growing plants to get to, so where's the incentive to continue? More content is only a good thing if it's FUN content that you look forward to.  Painfully tedious content in large quantities is no reward at all, it's a disincentive.  Looking to my future I see only longer and longer wait times, and levels with the same old layouts but more and more blocked squares.  There's really little to no choice of plants in each level, there's generally one best combination that you pretty much can't vary.  And the choice of plants is very limited compared to the original.

The original PvZ didn't have any artificial blocks to try and extend gameplay, but people still played it again and again for the fun of it. Having good replayable content definitely beats artificially forcing people to play your limited and un-fun content slower. Because most won't; they'll just stop playing.

If I were working on this game, off the top of my head I'd start with the following changes:

• break up the levels so that no map has more than 10 levels. As end-map rewards where there isn't a village area to unlock, add a treasure chest that refills your plant stockpile. Maybe some gems now and then.
• remove the restrictions on only 5 plants of a type per level. If players grew them, let them plant them.
• introduce more new plants earlier. New plants are fun, new plants add new gameplay, and trying to find the best combos is part of the fun. There should be many different combinations of plant possible to succeed.
• remove the restriction that you can only stockpile 15 of each plant at a time. This should be unlimited. (It's particularly annoying when you open a treasure chest or a friend sends you a plant, but your stockpile is full so you lose out.)
• no plant should take more than 1 hour to grow.  Or unlock some kind of bonus so that the higher level you get, the faster you can grow plants.  It should never be a punishment to continue playing; you should be feeling better and more powerful as you level up, not the reverse.
• give a positive reward for visiting friends, instead of allowing them to attack with zombies - such as any friend who visits can make your plants grow faster, or give you free plants. 
• give a clear warning prompt when about to spend gems so players don't do it accidentally
• realize that levels that are challenging are not fun on their own. Levels are fun when they make players feel clever finding a good solution. So just making an annoyingly difficult level with only one solution is not a good level. On this basis, quite a few levels definitely need redoing.
• Make the gardening glove more useful. 
• Make the mega-perk more useful (and a much quicker re-use timer - it's far too long now).
• Allow a choice of two or even all perks in a level, not just one.
• Give players a way to replant their plants on mobile devices. Since it's a Facebook flash game, it doesn't work on iOS. If I could quickly check my plants and replant them while waiting for a meeting or sitting at lunch, that would be a huge help.
• Remove the "attack your friends" visiting option and instead allow players to give daily gems/plants.
• Monetization changes as suggested above, and sell plant packs or stockpile packs instead of individual plant purchases which are overpriced.

Banana Bread

Banana Bread 

4 oz. butter

8 oz. sugar

2 eggs (or: substitute 1/4 to 1/3 cup organic apple sauce for each egg)

8 oz. flour

1 tbs baking powder

1 tsp salt

1 tbs lime juice

2 peeled, mashed ripe bananas

1 cup walnuts (or other nuts)

Mix room temperature butter with sugar until smooth.  Mix in eggs (or apple sauce).  Sift dry ingredients and mix in.  Stir in lime juice, banana pulp and nuts, mixing as little as needed to blend smoothly.  Transfer to a prepared (greased or lined with parchment paper) loaf or square cake pan and bake at 350 F (180 C) for about an hour, until a toothpick stuck into the middle comes out clean. (Note: takes longer to cook with apple sauce than with eggs.)  Can also be made as cupcakes; bake slightly less long.

I've actually started to prefer the no-egg version made with apple sauce; it's even more deliciously moist and tender, and seems to form a bit more of a crispy crust at the top. 

Defiance!

I meant to write more about Defiance long ago, but actually working on Defiance kept me so busy that I just didn't have time!  So what's this game I've been working on?

Defiance launched on schedule on 2nd April.  That date was non-movable due to the tie-in with the TV show launch, so yes, there were definitely some late nights coming up to launch. At least 6 months of them. Yep, it would have been nice to push the date back, but we hit the deadline and the game is live.  It was an amazing experience to watch how much and how well the game improved and grew to completion over that time! As the first game on which I've worked as a producer (they hired me as an associate, but soon promoted me to producer of the design team) it was one heck of a learning experience, without doubt.  One I value highly.

I'm going to assume anyone reading this blog is somewhat familiar with the Defiance story, but in a nutshell: set a few decades in the future. Group of alien races in ark ships flee a dying star system and arrive at earth intending to colonize it, only to discover -- oops -- it's already occupied.  Years of negotiations ensue, earth not being at all happy to welcome intergalactic immigrants onto an already-crowded planet.  Some settlement starts but also some fighting, and at some point a disaster occurs: the ark ships parked in orbit (still containing most of the aliens and their colonization equipment) explode.  Accident or sabotage? Human or alien doing? Nobody knows, but the damage from the destruction of the fleet, the ensuing war, and the not-as-occasional-as-one-would-hope alien terraforming equipment falling to earth and running amok result in a very changed planet.  After years of war, remnants of both human and alien armies band together and defy orders that would result in massive civilian deaths, and the "defiance" movement begins to spread peace (albeit a highly-armed and rather jumpy type of peace).  

Set in the area once known as San Francisco, the game allows players to take the character of "ark hunters", highly skilled types who make their living from recovering ark tech and similar valuables.  Meanwhile in what was formerly called Saint Louis, the TV show follow the town of Defiance and its new mayor as they try to rebuild their city and protect themselves from outside dangers, of which there are no shortage.

The main characters from the show actually started off in the game, offering a series of missions that allowed game players to interact with the characters Nolan and Irisa.  At the end of the mission line, the two depart, taking with them a crystalline bit of ark technology that later plays an important role in the pilot episode of the show.  

Screenshot of Irisa, Nolan, and my character retrieving the ark tech in the game:

...And two weeks later, in the TV show pilot episode, Nolan and Irisa using the same tech to help the town of Defiance.

Here's the Defiance launch trailer and one with a little more back story:

And also, the live-action trailer and digital comic Ark Hunter chronicles that led up to the game's release:

Defiance is a strange beast, one from which nobody quite seems to know what to expect. It launched on three platforms: PC, Xbox, and PS3, which I believe is the first time any MMO has ever done that (and, having seen what was involved in getting that to happen, I fully understand why).  It is an MMO, but not what you'd call an MMORPG. And in the gaming world of today where pretty much everyone hears "RPG" at the end of "MMO", that's definitely unexpected.  It's a shooter, but third person, and massively multiplayer. It ties in with a TV show but is not dependent on it nor dictated to by it.  As executive producer Nathan Richardsson described it, Defiance is an "MOTSCTPOWS": Massively-Online-TV-Show-Connected-Third-Person-Open-World-Shooter.  I think Defiance's refusal to fit neatly into any existing game category is illustrated very well by the extremely polarized reviews on sites like Metacritic:

User reviews have totally polarized into "love it" or "hate it" with almost nobody in between, while critic reviews do the exact reverse. My interpretation of this madness (also based on reading comments) is that players who had a particular expectation ("it'll be an MMO like WoW!" "it'll be just like Call of Duty!") are strongly disappointed when it is not, but those who didn't have a strong expectation just play it with no expectations and have a ton of fun.  Meanwhile the critics really have no idea what pigeonhole to fit it into, so they judge it on every possible category that a MMO or shooter might be judged on, which of course ends up right on the fence, since Defiance does some MMO things well and doesn't do others; and some shooter things well and doesn't do others.

I quite liked the review from TotalBiscuit which I think does a fair job summing up the things Defiance does well and still needs to improve on, and why a shooter MMO has to do some things in slightly different ways.  Defiance is definitely an odd beast, but I'm very proud of all the design team did in the year up to launch.  There are some amazing talents on the team and it's been impressive watching them at work.  If you picked up, or will pick up, Defiance then I hope you enjoy it!  It's not my normal type of game but I find myself enjoying playing, and it's great to have an MMO game where you can hop in and have fun for an hour without feeling you need to set aside your whole evening. Having played through the entire game post-launch I definitely had a lot of fun, while also seeing places there's room for future improvement.  But of course, that's always the case with MMOs, the development is never really over.  Looking forward to seeing what future DLCs and expansions will bring, and hopefully many other players are also!  Since apparently over a million players have registered for Defiance so far, seems there are a lot of other people looking forward to it also. 

Above: Nolan talking to my character, while Irisa waits.  

Below: a little accident I had in San Quentin. Did I do that?  Er, well, yes I did. Fun times...

Blast from the past: an interview with me from 2006!

While googling for something else entirely, I discovered this TenTonHammer interview with me from back in February 2006.  "Adeste" is the name of the main EverQuest II character I played at the time, primarily a carpenter.  I didn't even remember that this interview existed.

To put this into perspective, in February 2006 I was still working as an IT manager in Australia. EQ2 was about a year and a half old, had launched its first expansion about 6 months prior to the interview, and was looking forward to the second expansion Kingdom of Sky.  I had no idea at this time that I would be hired by SOE to fix the very tradeskill system I was complaining about in this interview; that didn't happen till April 2007. (Coincidentally my interviewer, Tony Jones, also later ended up working for SOE!) Carpentry (and tradeskills in general) back then were in a very sad and neglected state, and I was just a passionate forum poster trying to highlight ways they could be improved.  The dev team didn't have anybody who really understood what the players in this niche wanted, and they were actually starting to debate whether to change tradeskills to require adventuring, like many MMOs do these days, instead of continuing to support the ability for tradeskillers to be independent of adventuring.  And of all the tradeskill classes, carpentry was the least understood because it had absolutely nothing to do with adventuring at all. Housing was basic but also sadly neglected.  But I believed in its potential!

It's fascinating to read now what I wrote back then and see how much of it I actually did fix once I was hired.  Most of the statements I made back then are beliefs I still hold true, and which I spent almost 5 years on the EQ2 team working to support and improve.  The tradeskill system in EQ2 is now unique among MMOs in providing a broad, robust, and adventuring-level-independent playstyle.  The housing system in EQ2 is the best housing system in any MMO (though Rift's new dimension system and EQ1's new housing have done a good job too, albeit both by mirroring EQ2's extremely closely and both of which I was asked for advice on).  Prestige houses, which I'd been championing since 2007, finally came into existence and are extremely popular. Furniture items went from a neglected "here are 30 types of barrels and 20 tables" which none of the designers understood what to do with, to highly desirable rewards that are now both given out by quests and sold for real $ on the marketplace, as well as being a mainstay of carpenters.  I'm very proud of the part I played in transforming tradeskills and housing, and really believe it had a fundamental impact on the continued longevity of the game. And huge gratitude is due as always to Scott Hartsman, who took a chance and hired me to replace Beghn, changing the EQ2 tradeskilling/housing game forever, for better or for worse (the former I hope)!

Anyway, I was tickled pink to find this interview just now, so I'm reposting it below to preserve it for posterity.

[Also: editing the original post to add, as a friend pointed out on Facebook, it's pretty hard core to give an interview about a job that you won't be hired to do for another ~year and a half. I should be a time traveler!]

Crafting with the Carpenters

An Interview with One of EverQuest 2's Premier Carpenters

by: Tony "RadarX" Jones


Ask anyone who knows me if I craft. Go ahead. You'll probably get "Radar? Ha!" or "Radar? Who is that? Oh, that Templar who keeps getting us killed?" I claim to know just enough about crafting to be destructive and hazardous. Crafting in my mind, is taking a rare harvest to the crafter, and waiting very impatiently for my Adept III spell.

Over the course of a few months, I've read post after post about Carpenter issues. Statements like, "Where are the Tier 6 recipes?", and "Why don't we get cooler furniture?", etc... I'll admit I was quick to judge them as complaints, but even recently I've still been in the dark about what was going on. Adeste was gracious and kind enough to enlighten me on what it's like to be a Carpenter, and what a few of their issues are.

Adeste, thanks again for answering a few questions about this. First, tell us a little bit about your MMO experience. What have you played?

I was first introduced to graphical MMO's when I started playing the original EverQuest back in 2001, around the time of the Kunark expansion. Prior to that I'd dabbled a bit in multiplayer text games via local BBS systems, but the graphics of EverQuest brought a whole new dimension to MMO's for me and I played it until EverQuest 2 was released.  I took a brief look at Star Wars Galaxies and some others, but I work full time and don't have time to play more than one MMO at once, so I've remained pretty loyal to the EverQuest genre.  I have City of Villains sitting on my desk waiting to be installed though - at the moment I'm enjoying EverQuest 2 too much to try it out, but if my interest wanes, that will be the next in line.

EQ2's crafting system takes a special type of patience according to most people. What is your motivation to craft?

I get a lot of enjoyment out of other people's enjoyment, if that makes sense. It's something I have noticed since the original EverQuest - although so many people like to say it's "just a computer game", it isn't. The people on the other end of the pixels are real people, and you can really touch their lives with your actions. A week from now, you won't remember who you grouped with; a month from now, you won't remember the item you just looted from that named monster; and a year from now, whatever money you've saved up so far will seem completely trivial, if you remember at all. But years after the fact, you'll still remember a kind turn done for you by a complete stranger and the pleasure that you got from someone doing something nice for you. More than two years after the fact (and over a year since I've even logged into the first EverQuest) I've had a player that I thought was a total stranger, find out the name of one of my EQ1 characters and suddenly start gushing in vivid detail about how I met her young EQ1 druid in PoK one day and gave her some help and some equipment. I have no memory at all of the event, but I was floored what a huge impact it apparently had on the player. This is the real reward from the game that we'll take away years from now, not the number of heritage quests or the amount of platinum we have, but the real people's lives we've touched, and the real people we've made smile.

So what's this got to do with my motivation to craft? I craft because it's a way of helping other people and improving their game experience. As a carpenter, I give away a lot of furniture for prizes in roleplay events, and I donate furniture to houses set up as roleplay taverns, to encourage the community on my server. I give away beds to newbies arriving in my home village, to welcome them to the village and sometimes to the game. Playing my jeweller, I always keep a few items I've made in my bags when I go out hunting, and if I get in a pickup group, my groupmates get any upgrades they need. Crafting just to make a profit is as mindlessly dull to me as farming a named monster over and over. Boring! But crafting with the goal of helping someone or doing something creative with the result is much more interesting, as you keep your mind on the final outcome and know that it will be making someone else's day, not just your own.

What drew you to this class? Why Carpentry over some of the more popular classes like Sage?

What drew me to carpentry is the tangible outcome of my work. In all the other tradeskill classes, you don't end up with something you can place and see and touch and admire. Nothing else results in a physical object added to the world. Classes that make consumables - like spells, poisons, and food - seem very ephemeral to me. Even classes that make equipment for others, such as weapons and armour, aren't as satisfying. An adventurer will wear the item for 10 levels, then sell it to a vendor, and it'll be gone as if it never existed. But furniture is forever, and can be enjoyed by everyone who sees it, not just the wearer. 

EverQuest 2 does seem to have some interesting furniture. Do you think tradeskilling is done more for the money or the creative aspect?

I think it depends entirely on the player. Tradeskilling CAN certainly be done to make money, as can adventuring. Tradeskilling can also be done for fun, as can adventuring. There does seem to be a perception out there among adventurers that you make tons of money by tradeskilling, and maybe even that you NEED to tradeskill to make money. That's rubbish. Nobody who actually tradeskills to any extent would agree with that. You can make money by tradeskilling; you can make money by adventuring. You can make money by doing neither, and playing the market. If you want to make money, you will, and you don't need to tradeskill to do it. Personally, I earn very little money from tradeskilling and support my habit of giving furniture away with my non- tradeskill income. I tradeskill for the creative and social aspect. But that's a decision that's different for every player.

Carpenters have the unusual distinction of being the only crafting class that doesn't affect adventuring. What niche do you feel your tradeskill fits?

What I like most about carpentry is that it is the one and only class that can actually affect the physical environment of Norrath. And that's pretty cool. Carpenters, in our small way, actually add content to the game. Perhaps it's the aspiring game designer in me, but I find it very enjoyable to start with an empty "zone" - ie, a bare room - and create content. Through furniture items I can entirely change the look of the room, I can create a cheerful or a dark or a scary atmosphere, I can even add "mobs" to my "zone" with the use of house pets and arena champions. And whatever I create, others can enter and appreciate, and be influenced by it. I think that's an amazing ability for any class to have, tradeskill or adventurer. And there's nothing like decorating someone's room while they're out, then watching them enter for the first time and just stand there stunned, saying "holy $#!%!" That's something no other class can do, ever.

So no, carpentry doesn't affect adventuring directly, but it has the potential to affect everybody, adventurer or not. I feel carpentry has the potential to enhance the immersion of the game, and to enhance the roleplay aspect of the game also. And that even goes as far as to help keep people in the game, when they might otherwise have left. There are some people whose rooms I've decorated who barely play any more, but they still log in every now and then and go pay their rent, just to spend some time in their rooms! It's remarkable what the perception of having a "home" means to people, and how it enhances their enjoyment of the game and keeps them coming back. It may seem odd to those who aren't carpenters, but there is something very compelling about having a little corner of Norrath that is yours alone, and customized to your tastes. It's the difference between EQ2 being "a game", and being "a home". Even the least roleplay-interested players can be utterly blown away by a nice home decoration and completely converted to being house-proud. It's very hard to quantify the value carpentry adds to the game environment, but I think it is very important, and very underestimated.

What is the biggest outstanding issue you feel the Carpenters have right now?

Missing furniture. Months and months ago - nearly a year now - NPC vendors sold furniture. There are still furniture stores in North Qeynos and East Freeport, though they no longer sell much. Many of their items looked identical to carpenter-made items but were much cheaper than we could make those items, so of course carpenters protested and asked that the identical items be removed. What actually happened though was that EVERY item they sold was removed, whether or not carpenters could make it. Some of those items were then given to carpenters, but although it was Frizznik's intention to give us all the recipes, many of the very nicest items were never added to our books. These items are now unavailable in game, neither from NPCs nor from carpenters. They include items like bookcases with books on them, wardrobes, stoves, urns, beds, and counters. As a carpenter, the three most-requested items that people ask from me are: ornate counters, bookcases with books, and chess boards. And there is nothing at all I can give them for any of these. Carpenters have been begging for these recipes for longer than I care to remember, with no response. It's very disheartening.

A more recent peeve, and a big one, is the fact that it's nearly half a year since tier 6 was added and carpenters still don't have advanced crafting books. If it were any other crafting or adventuring class overlooked in this way, all hell would have broken loose long ago. Carpenters are a pretty mature and realistic bunch, and realized that there were a lot of other more pressing issues after the DoF release that needed fixing before advanced furniture recipes. However, half a year is definitely too long to keep any class waiting for a fix, and the discontent levels in the carpentry forum are rapidly rising. 

I have a compiled list of outstanding bugs and wish lists related to the class here.

How pleased are the Carpenters, in your opinion, with the craftable items in the game now before Kingdom of Sky?

I'd say it's a very mixed situation. As mentioned above, the three items we're asked for most, we can't make, so that's pretty discouraging. We do have many very nice items though, the rough linen rug and the halasian bearskin rug being two of my favorites. We have odd gaps in some areas though that really need filling -- for example, there are no non-rare large dining tables that have a nice polished surface, and no wardrobes at all. Tier 6 furniture was a mix of very nice items and really awful items, but didn't give us any new tables or chairs at all, and most of it is too large to put in a 1-room home. There is an excellent post in the carpentry forum ( here) providing screenshots and suggested recipes for many items that we would love to see in game. I'm really hoping that someone is listening and that many of these will show up in tier 7, and be added retrospectively to some of the lower tier books too. But at present, we're in an odd situation where about 70% of our items we will almost never make, and only 30% are actually desirable to most players. So ... not very happy, is the answer. We're getting by, but there's a LOT of room for improvement.

What type of items are you hoping to see the Kingdom of Sky bring?

Ornate counters. Bookcases with nice colourful books and objects built in. Wardrobes. Nice non-rare tables with a professional, polished wood look texture, not the horrible crude rough greys of lower tiers. Those sconces from Stormhold that look like a flaming sword. More carpets, preferably with more intricate texture than the tier 6 ones (more like the tier 5 rough linen). Wall hangings. Chess boards. Smaller items than the gigantic tier 6 ones -- items that will reasonably fit in a 1-room home. Room divider screens, like the ones in Maj'dul. Nicer beds, like the ones in Poets Palace and Deathfist Citadel. Display cases and counters. Pool tables, like the ones in Nektropos Castle. And, tier 6 rare recipes. Basically, everything in this thread: here.

Beghn has been on the job with revamping Tradeskills for only a few months. Has he made progress? Do you think SOE is heading in the right direction?

It's hard for me to say that, because I don't have visibility of everything that he has been working on. I know he's been very busy fixing a number of the bugs that were introduced with tier 6 tradeskills, and I know that people in the affected tradeskills have been happy with his solutions, so that's good work. From a carpenter point of view, I have to say there hasn't been much sign of progress in our craft, but Beghn is only one man covering a huge area -- what I would really like to see is a whole team of tradeskill devs, not just one. It would be completely unrealistic to have just one dev handle all the adventuring development -- I feel it's equally unrealistic to have just one dev handling all the tradeskill development. SOE will be heading in the right direction when they hire more tradeskill devs to help Beghn, make some clear vision statements clarifying where they want to see crafting going over the next few years, and interact more with the crafting community for feedback into that process.

I couldn't speak to the popularity of Adventuring versus Tradeskilling, but I can see your point. If you could be guaranteed a fix on one Carpenter bug what would you choose and why?

Does missing furniture count as a bug? If so, I want my missing furniture! It's really challenging to decorate a room without access to some of the nicest items in game, and it's really painful to see the few remaining leftovers from the NPCs being sold on the broker for 10p and more because of their rarity.

If you mean an actual technical bug, I'd want to see the furniture placement issues fixed. Many of our bookcases are bugged so you can't actually place any books in them. The briarwood bookcase is the worst offender here, but most of the bookcases have the same issue at least to some extent. Given that we still haven't been given the recipe for bookcases with books in them, it's rather adding insult to injury that they haven't even fixed the empty bookcases we do make so you can place quested books in them!

If you could change something about the Tradeskill system as a whole, what would you change?

I would change the way that experience is earned across the crafting levels. It doesn't make sense for crafters to level up so fast through teir 1 that they can't even make half the items in their recipe books, yet have to make piles of finished product to get through the upper levels. There is a chronic shortage of crafted stuff in tier 1-3, and a vast glut on the market in upper tiers, because crafters have to make more and more of the products as they rise in level. Yet, when you look at the actual player market, there should logically be the same number of tier 2 players that need a sword as there are tier 5 players -- if anything, there are more in tier 2. It benefits no-one that the crafters are forced to make hundreds of unwanted tier 5 swords just to gain experience, when all the demand is in a lower tier. I'd like to see crafters level up slower in the lower tiers, and faster in the upper tiers, than currently happens. I'd also like to see higher level crafters still get some kind of benefit from making the lower tier items - perhaps not full experience, but why not the same type of experience as an adventurer would get by mentoring? Both of these changes would result in more items available in lower tiers, and less of a market overload in the upper tiers.

The server merges cometh! How do you think the they will affect tradeskilling and the market?

A higher population on merged servers will mean both more crafters and more customers. It will probably put more life back into the crafting communities on those servers, and give the economy a general boost overall. The economy of a well-populated server such as Antonia Bayle can probably be used as a rough model for what other server economies will develop into, if they reach the same population level.

Is there anything you'd like to add or say to SOE?

Carpenters are some of your most mature, understanding, and loyal customers, and we also help keep people interested in the game and enhance the experience for many players. Please help us to do this, give us the missing recipes, and add those recipes we are asking for!

Thanks so much again for your time and happy crafting. I hope the Carpenters can get some love.

Tradeskilling the Luck o' the Irish

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Not a holiday I've ever paid much attention to, but apparently it's kind of a big deal around here.  Although this is not exactly how I'd ever pictured St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland, I guess it could work!

Completely unrelated to the above photo (it was too good not to share), walking through the park near my apartment today I found 5 four-leafed clovers today and one five-leafed, in an under-20 minute walk. Luck o' the Irish for me this St. Patrick's Day, apparently!

Can you spot the four-leaved clover in this photo I took today?

(Hint: it's in tbe south-west quadrant.)

I seem to have a knack for spotting four-leafed clovers and have found several there before, and I never know what to do with them. So, I've been playing around with jeweler's resin. I tried small paperweights first, then had the idea to try necklaces.

Paperweights/keychain:

Necklace (first attempt):

I took some photos of making necklackes as I went. Tradeskilling ftw!

First: bought some jewelry findings.  I tried out a couple of different shapes, including sterling silver hoop (above) and rectangle (below).  Plus, some silver flat head pins.

Next, resin. I tried ICE jeweler's resin brand, from Amazon.  Mix equal parts from the 2 bottles:

Then pour into the jewelry findings. I tried a few shapes. I used masking tape on the back, and poured in just enough resin to cover the bottom.  Mixing causes a lot of bubbles which slowly come out as it hardens, but I found using a pin to help smooth them out also was useful.

It takes about 24 hours to harden fully. Next day, I removed the tape. It left a rough surface, but I flipped over each one, then added more resin on the back to make the back smooth.

Once that is hard, add the clover (or whatever else will go in the pendant) and cover with more resin to make a convex surface.

If using a clover or other plant, you need to press and dry it first. I'd previously pressed my clovers for at least a few weeks under some heavy books; if you don't, they may decay inside the resin which obviously doesn't look good. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials with detailed walk throughs.

Finally, once the resin was hard, I added a chain and some extra beads to finish it off as a necklace.

Since this one was a gift for someone who loves ladybugs, I also added a small ladybug charm I got from Etsy.

And a gift box - plain cardboard from Michael's:

Plus some paint and wire, which I already had lying around:

A little box of good luck and good wishes, ready to deliver!

Still not quite sure what to do with all the clovers I found today, but they're in a book now being pressed and dried.  These do make nice little gifts for friends who're needing a little luck. And, of course, great accessories to go with your St. Patrick's Day tutu!

Update: adding some photos of more clover pendants I've made since the original post!

Video game fan videos

Over the years playing various games I've created a few random videos, all just for fun, when inspiration struck.  I'm certainly not a master of video creation, lacking both talent and time, but occasionally I get an idea that amuses me.  And if you don't spend your life doing things that amuse you, then what's the point of your life, right?

I was looking at the stats on my YouTube channel today and I noticed I have some pretty impressive view numbers for some of them (considering they're just random things I did for fun).  And I realized I haven't ever linked any of them on my blog, or at least not that I recall.

So here's a blog post about some of the videos I've made.  For the very first one, flash back to October 2006.  I was living in Australia, playing a lot of EverQuest II, and trying to convince them to hire me too.  Back then I was part of a wonderful family type roleplay guild called Saga, which had carried over from the original EverQuest. We hosted a tavern night on a semi-regular basis which included a quiz game for prizes and well as chat and entertainment. One night, a trio of male halflings stopped in and offered their dancing skills to entertain us: they jumped up on the bar and did a fantastic synchronized dance in perfect time, using various emotes to coordinate their movements.  It was hysterically funny and they showed up for a number of subsequent tavern nights to repeat the performance.  I assume the trio were probably the same player running three accounts and with macros set up to coordinate the movements perfectly, and the enjoyment from those performances inspired me to create this video using my halfling and an alt of my then-boyfriend's; with the computers side by side and some macros set up, I could also coordinate the dancing to create the same effect.

And thus was created: The Secret Life of Halflings.  I sent it to the EQ2 dev team to give them a good laugh, as they were hard at work crunching away on the upcoming Echoes of Faydwer expansion.  Over 4000 views as I write this.  Maybe not even all halflings.

A month or two later I created a video tribute to the EQ2 Echoes of Faydwer expansion, set to Van Halen's "Jump", which featured the fae jumping and flying around (and at the end, a halfling also trying to jump and plummeting off Kelethin to her death).  It reached over 7100 views before YouTube said I had to remove it due to unlicensed use of the Van Halen song, so alas, it is no longer viewable.

In April of the following year, 2007, I was actually hired by SOE to work on EverQuest II as the tradeskill developer. I had very little time for making fan videos during those years, though I greatly enjoyed a lot of the ones that other fans created.  (One of my favorites is still the "Pirates of the Saskatchewan" video created by user Monkeydarren.  The Arrogant Worms, who sing the song, are actually a Canadian band from my own home town of Kingston, and in case you're not familiar with the geography of Canada, Saskatchewan is an entirely land-locked province.  Ok, I might be a little biased by the awesomeness of the song, but it's catchy!)

In 2011 as I started playing a lot of Minecraft on a multiplayer server and having tons of fun creating (and destroying) things, I started playing around with some videos again.  A friend and I built an amazing snow castle for Christmas 2011, complete with an aerial powered mine cart track that played "we wish you a merry Christmas" on musical note blocks as you circled the castle. We invited everyone on the server to join us one weekend before Christmas, build stacks of snow golems, and let them loose at night to battle skeletons and zombies in a huge snowball fight. It was epic and wonderful and I filmed parts of it, and although sadly the details of the snowball fight didn't film very well (since it had to be at night to get the monster spawns) I incorporated parts of that into an overall video that I set to the same music the mine cart plays, to show off the details of the castle.  I finished this video very late at night on Christmas eve, hunched over my laptop desperately trying to get it finished in time to give it to my co-builder as a Christmas present (via an in-game treasure hunt leading to the URL written on an in-game sign).  The ending of the video is footage from the snowball fight, and for days afterwards as the snow golems escaped across the landscape, you'd hear random "KABOOM!"s as they encountered annoyed creepers.

A month later, a server upgrade mysteriously changed the world biomes around, causing snow to fall in areas that previously weren't snow biomes, including the snow castle (which wasn't actually originally in a snow biome), my original tower, and several other people's home bases too.  A second video set to Frank Sinatra's "Let It Snow" was inspired:

For several years while working on EQ2 I'd been wanting to make more EQ2 videos, but time and inspiration didn't hit until after I'd left the EQ2 team. In August 2012 the "SOEmote" feature was added to EQ2, which allows players to use their webcam to capture their facial expressions and mirror it with their character's face.  Having worked on the team I knew this was coming many months in advance, and had been impatiently awaiting its arrival to create a masterpiece of pop culture, "EverQuest II Numa Numa".  In case you're not familiar with the meme, the "Numa numa guy" posted a short video of himself lipsyncing to the strange Romanian song "Dragostea Din Tei" by O-Zone.  It went viral and many parodies and some new versions were made, including a WoW video which misinterpreted the Romanian words into similar sounding English phrases.  I chose to use the English translation of the song, and picked a male halfling to sing it, and the result has had almost 4000 hits since August:

The video I most wanted to make, however, I'd been contemplating for at least three years but had never found the time or enough motivation to coordinate it, since I knew it would take a lot of help from other people to create.  Basically, I wanted to recreate in EQ2 the beautiful 2008 video "Where the Hell is Matt", created by Matt Harding as he traveled through the world and recorded himself dancing with people of all nationalities and backgrounds.  Matt's video not only went viral but also made the news in Time magazine and many other press outlets.  If you haven't seen the original, click through now and watch it; it's beautiful.

Anyway, I had been contemplating how to recreate this video in EverQuest II for years, but hadn't figured out the best way to do it. It was the revamp of the old Qeynos city zones that finally spurred me into action in September, long after I left the EQ2 team: with the city revamp, the old racial villages were being removed from game and would no longer be accessible except in quests. Hastily, a few days before their final removal, I logged into game and put out a call for players of the appropriate races to come dance with me in each zone to record them for posterity.  A wonderful, helpful bunch of tradeskillers, decorators, test server players, and random others spent a couple of hours following me around the world and dancing on queue in all sorts of zones, which I compiled and then assembled into the following tribute to "Where the Hell is Matt".  The main character in this one is Domino, the character I created to represent myself when I was a game developer, and she's wearing many of the tradeskilled items that I'd created over the years for various tradeskill quests.

The video includes scenes from many zones now retired from the game, as well as featuring a couple of cameo appearances from some of the well-known players of EQ2 including Jethal Silverwing, author and singer of many wonderful filk songs themed to EverQuest and EverQuest II.  My main regret with this video is the haste I had to film the disappearing zones meant I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to round up other EQ2 devs and players that I'd have liked to include.  But it still makes me smile to watch it. Favorite scene: the section of the Matt video where he mimics the indian dancers in saris is mirrored by me mimicking the goblin in the Isle of Refuge treehouse.  The video is now up to 1300+ views, clearly not as catchy as dancing Numa Numa halflings, but still pretty respectable!

Alas, my video editing skillz are pretty basic and I've been using freeware programs so haven't had the ability to do anything sophisticated. Still, they amuse me and that's the important thing, and hopefully the view counts mean they amused a few other people too!

I can't create videos yet for the game I'm currently working on - it's not yet released and still very much under NDA - but who knows.  Come April, maybe inspiration will strike again. We'll see!

Board games: Smash Up

Smash Up is a relatively new card game I got to play last weekend.  Requires 2-4 players (preferably 3-4), takes about an hour, depending how long people spend thinking about moves.

There are 8 factions of cards to choose from (indicated by the little drawing on the bottom right corner): robots, ninjas, pirates, wizards, dinosaurs, aliens, tricksters, and zombies.  To start the game, each player picks two factions, and shuffles them together to create his or her custom deck: for example, I played zombie robots.  Each faction has certain strengths and a certain theme to the game play which mean they're best played in slightly different ways.  Faction cards may be either Minions, or Actions.

In addition to the faction decks, there are bases.  The goal of the game is to gain victory points, which you obtain primarily by capturing bases (there are a couple cards that can directly award a point here and there too, but they seem rare).  Four bases are randomly chosen and laid out to start the game.  Each base has a strength number that indicates how much power is required to capture it (top left) as well as three point values indicating how many victory points are awarded when it's captured.  The first number is what the person who contributed the most points to the capture gets, the second and third numbers go to the second and third contributors.  As shown in the examples below, the first place is USUALLY the most points, but not necessarily always.  Each base also has text describing its specific special properties.

Play progresses as each player in turn can play minions or actions against a base.  You get to play one minion and one action each turn, unless the cards or the base tell you to do otherwise (which they often do).  Each minion has a certain amount of power points associated with it.  Once the sum of the minions' power equals is enough to capture the base, the cards are totaled up to determine which player won the base (whoever has most power there) and who got which victory points, then the base is removed from play and a new one replaces it.

First player to reach 15 victory points wins the game.  Simple!  But the fact your deck is different every time depending which factions you pick makes each game very variable.  We found some faction combinations felt better than others (Ninjas and Tricksters seemed a little too similar in function to combine well for example) but both games we played were extremely close in score which indicates it's surprisingly well balanced considering all the multiple variations possible.  I really liked the fun factions, the simple rules, and the many variations that combining the two factions can create in each game.

More good news: there's already an expansion planned adding 4 new factions, and the original box has plenty of extra space leaving lots of room for those expansions!