The Game Venting Thread

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I would still need to sieve through the pages to make sure I sucked up ever piece of under priced cloth.

Someone whispered abuse at me, and a friend rebuked me.
I don't regret doing this, and I still stand by it. Though I acknowledge it is bad behavior. Though I am unsure if it's sinful.

The innocent victims will be players who need to buy a high quantity of Silk Cloth or Embersilk Cloth. The price is at a 35% of its real value.
But they can wait 48hrs.

Worst case scenario is that it makes loads of people do the same. But I am only doing this once.
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I should mention that it's people who sell for too cheaply in loads of 1s that are the true issue. It's the fact it's so much hassle to buy them out, but you have to otherwise it sets the market standard. So much fiddly clicking. If there was an option to buy multiple lots at once without having to do a lot of work to effectively narrow down tones of results.

These ass hats have turned playing the auction house into working the auction house.

I enjoy sweeping up a few 1s since it keeps the AH healthy and tidy. Not 10 pages of 1s.

[korvys]

I can't blame you for being annoyed, or giving up. Playing the auction house is a PvP game. The other players have apparently found a tactic they thing will 'win'. Winning in this case being driving a competitor away. You have adopted another tactic in an effort to make it harder for them. I commend you. It is not, as you say, sinful.

Boring EVE economics talk - Click to Expand

Reminds me of EVE:

Some background:
I play/played (depends on my mood) EVE. In EVE you can put up orders to buy and to sell (buy order are basically you saying you'll sell X money, in exchange for Y good, rather than Wow, where only the opposite is available). Station trading is the practive of sitting in a station, and putting up an order to buy, say, 1000 ammo (for simplicity) for say, 1000 isk (the currency).

Someone comes in from shooting aliens, has some spare ammo, sees your order, and fulfills it. You then take that ammo, and put up an order selling it for say, 2000 isk. Someone who doesn't have ammo pays you for it, and you make 1000 isk profit.

The second person, who wanted the ammo, could have put up their own order saying they wanted some ammo, and would pay 1500 for it, for example, but then they'd have to wait, or the first person could have put his own ammo up, but then he wouldn't have been paid immdiately. You make your profit by being willing to wait, and to hold the goods until you get a good price, making money off the impatient people.

The interesting bit:
The most common tactic in station trading is called penny-jumping. You list your order. Someone else lists theirs for 0.01 isk less. In WoW it would be a copper. You relist yours for 0.01 less. Basically, the price doesn't move, and whoever updated their order last when a buyer comes along wins, and sells their goods.

Most people think this is the best way to make money. If you undercut by more, the price goes down, and when you do sell, you get less. But it means you turn your time/attention into money. If you have more time to pat attention, and can check your orders twice as often as your competitor, you'll get twice the sales.

Another tactic is deep undercutting. Cutting by 5% - 10% of the price each time. The idea is to drive your competitors away. If you're buying ammo for 1000 and selling it for 2000, you're making 1000 each cycle, but the cycles are split between you and your competitor (given the same amount of time to spend).
On the other hand, if you're buying for 1400, and selling for 1600, the profit is getting so low, it's almost not worth it (there are taxes on orders). But if you're getting all of the business because no one else wants to compete, then you don't need to update your orders as often. Spending all day, updating your orders every 5 minutes, to get half of a large business, or spending 5 minutes, once a day, to get the whole of a smaller business could be much more appealing. More time to work on other markets, more time to play the rest of the game, or whatever else you want to do.

You will be unsurprised to hear that people don't like this tactic. Complaining that it drives the price down, and ruins it for everyone.

(a note: The stack problem you have doesn't exist in EVE. You can set a buy order for x amount, at a price, and if there are sell orders at below that price, they'll all get scooped up until your order is filled.)

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

GW2 uses EVE's system. It can be nice.

Say if you have 10000 of X to sell. You see there is 500 X for sale at the low price. You can freely list yours at the same level without undercutting since a good % of your stock will be bought.

However if you sell low amounts, you might want to undercut since your 10 copper will be lost in the sea of 500 copper.
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Fuck Silk Cloth market. Too much work. Silverleaf and Light Leather however is lucrative since those are materials you have to harvest. Cloth drops from all humanoids regardless of activity as long as your activity is murder.
--
Someone bought all of it, and all the offenders too.

Now the Silk Cloth market is restored.

My prayer was answered! Good has come from it!!

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

One year on and Age of Wonders 3's campaign is still too hard.
THIS IS ON EASY MODE

Makes no sense why the AI has a better army than you.

[Kapol]

I like Professor Layton, even if I've only played the first. I really like Phoenix Wright. So far, the cross-over is pretty good. But there are two problems I've seen.

First: Let me save wherever I want, or at least more often. This might just be in the prologue. But having to wait until the end of the section to save my progress is rough. If that doesn't change, I feel like this is going to be another Majora's Mask scenario... Nevermind. My lack of looking at menus has punished me again. There's a save option in the menu.

Second: Don't penalize me for messing up on cases. I like Phoenix Wright. But let's face it, it's similar to the old-school point and click puzzle games in a lot of ways. Rub item A on statement B to get outcome C. You only get 5 tries. That is annoying, but I can understand it. The game should have a failure state. But the fact I'm actively losing 50 points every time I mess something up? That's frustrating to me.

Imagine if you're playing a point and click adventure game. Every time you try to use the wrong item on an obviously important thing, the game deducts from your score. It's a punishment... but many of the puzzles are obtuse enough that you're rarely going to get it the first time. I'm fine with a failure state because it prevents people from just standing in one place and trying every single option. But penalizing from my final score because I presented something that still makes sense, but isn't what the designers were looking for... that's annoying.


I guess my big annoyance is that I'm a completionist. I hate that I am one. It's ruined a lot of experiences for me (pretty much every game with collectibles that are require searching areas with no help finding them). So the fact I'm compelled to more or less cheat and take away from the fun because of what I feel is a poor gameplay decision is frustrating.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I wish new MMOs would push their USP more strongly.
I'm tired of "NEW MMO IN BETA COMMING SOON" that looks like Genericville.
Can't they push what's different about their MMO more strongly?

Story has little weight.
MASSIVE WORLD too.

[Kapol]

I don't understand why mobile developers (game developers and portable console makers) don't understand that motion controls are generally bad. I dislike them in general. But when a game requires anything precision, or anything that you have to do within a time limit, AND has motion controls? Every tiny movement is going to throw what I'm doing off to some degree. And considering your system and/or game is something I want to play on the go, I'm normally going to be moving at least a little bit as I play.

Hell, even in the best of cases like on a home console, they're never great. I don't have the room to do a 360 to look around the area most of the time. And when I do, it still seems easier to just use a control stick.

[ANeMzero]

Playing through GTA5 on PC, having already played a large chunk of it on a borrowed PS3 copy. I remember now why I never completed the game.

There are practically no rewards for any of the missions or activities in the second act. Everything in the game is stupidly expensive and they throw not one but two heists at you with a $0 payout, along with all kinds of races and other sidequests that *could* pay out, but don't. There are fun moments, sure, but there is no sense of progression or fulfilment. I'm just doing busy work for no reason.

Hell, even the options to make money once you get money are terrible. Investing in the stock market is risky and unreliable. Investing in property is a waste of time: The fastest automatic payment property requires 146 hours of normal playtime to pay itself off. The longest is over 5 times as long, clocking in at 730 hours. The manual income properties aren't any better, one requires you complete 25 repetitive missions to pay itself off, the other involves finding 11 of 30 rare objects on the ocean floor, and the third involves towing 300 cars; all before you make a single cent of profit.

The best way to make money is heists, it would seem, but I've got no control over when those occur in the story. Beyond that I can use Assassination missions to manipulate stocks, but they are limited in number and payout in a multiple of what you put in, so doing them when you're broke yields no rewards.

TL;DR: A game about stealing money and cars somehow manages to feel like a thankless low wage job for an exploitive employer.

[Kapol]

It wouldn't be a Mario Party game if you couldn't get last after winning all but 2 of the 15+ mini-games and getting 4 of the (arguably) best item in the game.

[Kapol]

Enemies that explode when you kill them and force you to hammer A as fast as possible to take as little damage as possible are stupid. Status conditions you can't do anything about in the middle of the dungeon are also stupid. Earthbound, stop being stupid.

[Deedles]

Not sure if a pen and paper rant should go in here, but it's the best I can find;

I really don't like it when people get too obsessed with loot in pen and paper games. I think it cheapens the entire experience.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

Don't like players who refer to achieving things in games as "work". Game's a game. It's for fun/unwinding. If you start looking it as work, then perhaps you should reconsider your activity you do during your time-off.

Killing 150 spiders can be a zen/relaxing repetitive activity. Doing it for the purpose of 'work' is counter productive to that.

Find the process fulfilling. The destination isn't what's important, it's the journey.

You shouldn't work for loot, you should play for loot.

[AdmiralMemo]

Well, it kind of falls into how well the game is designed and what you're playing the game for. If the game is poorly-designed, and the thing you're doing is nothing more than a Skinner Box, then yeah, it should be classified as "work" in my opinion.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I dislike it when discussing a game in its general chat when someone chimes with "you have to work for your loot".

Um, are they missing the point of leisure time..?

Besides, I would hardly say playing a hotkey MMO is hard work. Just lots of repeating.

[AdmiralMemo]

Fair. If you're not enjoying the game, and are "working" for stuff... stop playing it?

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

I think if you're a child, whose game acquisition is based off gifts, you can be excused for playing a game that feels like work.

If you're an adult who has a bit more financial freedom, and have others things that you need to be doing, there is no excuse. If your game feels like work, it's probably better for you to spend your leisure time doing housework or something. Something where your time which feels like work is actually productive. Especially since now-a-days there's lots of F2P games to mess around with. Also as an adult you have a back-catalogue of stuff that could be revisited.

I'm obsessed with quality-leisure time. I also seem to full victim to time paranoia.
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Extra: Construction games like Minecraft or Rollercoaster Tycoon might have elements of work, but it's working towards a creative goal. It's also exercising a discipline. Mining in Minecraft can be relaxing zen-like activity as well. The work angle in how I use RCT3 does mean I do not play it often because it's not fun manually building a support pylon for every section of track from assets.

[Robo4900]

I've never understood enjoying games that feel like work. To me it just feels empty, which is why I've never been able to get into MMOs, or most RPGs.

[Deedles]

I find a calm in the grind, but that's if it's done on my terms. As soon as someone else starts dictating when I need to be around and how much I need to be around I go off it very quickly.

[Merrymaker_Mortalis]

Dragon Age Inquisition.

Playable Characters have finally learnt how to jump.
However, they are still really shite at swimming.
Their scrambling skills are pretty dire too.

I wish I was a comic artist because this game has some really funny design choices.

[AdmiralMemo]

For over a week, I've been fighting with Star Trek Online. I finally got it working... Guess how?

I put it in Compatibility Mode for Windows Vista. You, Perfect World Entertainment.

Can we say that Vista's good for something now?

[empath]

...well, I wouldn't go that far.

But congrats on making it work!

[Tinasaur]

Playing Civ V as Spain, going for cultural victory.
Finds Eldorado. Buy settler and run up to it.
Eldorade tile has been taken over by city-state. City-state is protected by Bismark.
Flip table. Eff culture. Burn down the continent.

[Antitonic]

You could build a citadel next to it using a Great General's ability. It should push the territory back one tile, letting you settle.

[Tinasaur]

Oh, I see... well, too late now x)

[Timelady]

For over a week, I've been fighting with Star Trek Online. I finally got it working... Guess how?

I put it in Compatibility Mode for Windows Vista. You, Perfect World Entertainment.

Can we say that Vista's good for something now?

I can do you one better on that: turns out that the control glitch that made me put down the PC version of Deadly Premonition can be fixed...by turning compatibility to Windows 98.

I suppose at least we're finally figuring out what to do with compatibility mode, since it never did an effing thing for compatibility...