Diablo III released yesterday and it’s all over the community. Whether it’s players who have already shot through the game or those who can’t even start it, there’s still plenty to talk about. I was able to attend a release event Monday night for the game and it turned out to be a blast. I came back home and got my install on, and I’ve been playing through the beginning of the game, which is pretty much the same as what was offered in the beta, though there are a few different features.

Since the game has released and many players will be trying out different things, I wanted to get a post up about my initial run through the game. My aim is to offer tips and hints that may help new players as well as those who are looking to get into the game. So, with that said, let’s get right to it.

For my first run through Diablo III I chose the Demon Hunter. I chose it mostly because it’s a neat-looking class, but also because Demon Hunter happens to be one of my favorite bands. I played this class through the beta and of all the classes available it seems the most versatile.  Not to mention it’s a really fun class to play, especially when in a party.

Demon Hunters are small in number. They live to hunt demons for countless days on in the hopes of saving lives. They believe that even if they can save one life the world will be better for it. Demon Hunters are plagued by nightmares of claws tearing flesh and men and women being drowned in their own blood. They are at war with themselves, using both Hatred and Discipline to govern their daily lives. Hatred burns within them to fuel their maddening attacks, tipping each arrow with a bit of spite, and their Discipline serves them well to take caution at those around them so that they may live to see, and kill, another day.

Through the beginning levels you’re just going to be shooting stuff. Just keep your distance from enemies and continue to lob arrows into them relentlessly. The Demon Hunter has a great beginning skill called Hungering Arrow which attacks enemies and bounces off of them. This makes crowd control a bit easier when dealing with mobs. As long as you stay at a safe distance from enemies you shouldn’t have a problem.

As you level, though, notice that your attacks won’t do as much damage and enemies will require more shots to defeat. This is important because it makes you stay on the move. Holding down Shift will allow you to shoot from a standing position, and it’s a good tactic to use so you’re not click-running all over the place to get to enemies. What you’ll want to do, however, is know your limit. When an enemy begins to close the gap between the both of you, either retreat to a safe distance away or circle around the enemy and continue to fire. Using the circling method helps keep the distance tight between you while preventing you from wandering too far away from your starting point.

You’ll soon gain a different type of primary attack called Entangling Shot which works a bit differently than Hungering Arrow. If I remember right, this skill wasn’t available in the beta. Instead of hitting multiple enemies this arrow has the ability to snare, or slow down, up to two enemies at once. I’ve found that this skill is helpful when fighting larger enemies though it really hinders you when going against multiple enemies at once. The added snare feature can sometimes work when needing to slow enemies down, but I found it much more useful to just bounce attacks between them and kill them quicker than it is to snare them at all with a shot.

Another thing is that the Demon Hunter gets an ability called Caltrops which is a snare all on its own. You basically set a trap down on the ground which will activate when enemies walk over it. This will slow all enemies for a rate of 60% within 12 yards of the trap. With this ability at your disposal you don’t really need to make use of Entangling Shot. You can just run up, pop Caltrops, then run back and bounce your Hungering Arrows off the slowed enemies. It’s a much better recipe for destruction.

The next skill in your arsenal is Rapid Fire. This skill is amazing and comes very much in handy. Using this skill will allow you to rapidly fire arrows for 228% the normal rate. This skill makes mowing down weaker enemies a cinch, and it really helps to get you out of tight situations. When you’re being overwhelmed by enemies or trapped in a corner just spam this skill and make a break to safety. You can then pelt arrows back at enemies while your Hatred meter refills and unleash again when the time is right.

These are some of the skills you’ll receive in the early levels of the game that will help you through the first part of Act I. This is where I’ve come to take a break in my game so these tips are what I’ve got to offer at this point. I hope you find them helpful, and are enjoying the Demon Hunter class as much as I am. Do you have any tips of your own? If so, post them below! I’ll be back soon with another post full of Demon Hunter tips.

We’ve got Call of Duty, Quake, Battlefield, and tons of other FPS games that have hit the market over the past decade. Starting with Doom and running all the way through Modern Warfare 3, each of these games performs different in their own way, all while running off of the same basic principle: run and shoot. Some of these games remain fun and intuitive to play, however, over the years they’ve become muddled and streamlined to the point where it’s possible that they’re losing their touch within the gaming community.

I’ve been an FPS fan for years. I love Doom, Quake, and Bulletstorm. The thing about each one of these games is that they approach the whole FPS genre differently, allowing them to be separated from one another. They don’t fit the general shooter norm. Sure, Doom was a game about senselessly running around killing things, but it was part of what’s been called the “beginning of the genre.” Quake was a game in which the multiplayer mode opened up a brand new way for players that are shooter fans to come together competitively. When it comes to Bulletstorm, in what other game can you unload a clip of lead into an enemy’s hind quarters and score extra points for it? Don’t worry, I’ll wait… Exactly. You don’t find FPS titles like these much anymore, and when you do they usually get a bad rap.

When Goldeneye came out for the N64, gamers went wild! To this day if you’re a gamer and have a score to settle, the gentlemanly way to deal with it is to have a match on Goldeneye to assess the victor. And if you haven’t played Goldeneye on the N64, you should probably stop reading this and go play it. I’ll be here when you get back.

Goldeneye was another game where the shooting was senseless, but it was built upon fun levels, interesting game modes, and fun little options that made the game ridiculously entertaining for hours. I mean, come on, rolling through an entire level with Paint Ball Mode on, while everyone has huge heads? That’s a total recipe for WIN!

With the more recent FPS games that have released, namely the Call of Duty series, we don’t see much of these interesting features anymore, and it’s being noticed. Steve Ellis, the co-founder of Free Radical Software, provided his own assessment of the modern FPS genre, and it’s not a pretty one. The Timesplitters developer claims that “pretty much every FPS loses money.” Ellis has recently set up a mobile game studio by the name of Crash Lab with former Rare colleagues, but don’t expect to see any FPS titles coming from the developer anytime soon.

So why has Ellis turned cheek on the FPS industry? What is so bad that would force the writer of the multiplayer component in Goldeneye to leave FPS games behind? Luckily for us, he elaborates on that a bit in an interview with Edge. Starting off, Ellis states:

“I spent the whole of 2008 going round talking to publishers trying to sign up Timesplitters 4. There just isn’t the interest there in doing anything that tries to step away from the rules of the genre – no one wants to do something that’s quirky and different, because it’s too much of a risk. And a large part of that is the cost of doing it.”

What do we take from this little snippet? Simply the fact that FPS developers nowadays are fearful of straying away from the Call of Duty template. Devs want to make sure their game sells, so they look at it in a process that cuts out somewhat like this:

• Create a setting, sometime during some war
• Introduce characters that seem interesting, but not enough for players to get attached to
• Develop a single-player campaign that caters to loner gamers, but don’t make it necessary to enjoy the game. Strip details and have it follow the point, shoot, move on method.
• MULTIPLAYER, MULTIPLAYER, MULTIPLAYER
• Add guns, lots of guns
• Throw in some killstreak rewards for the elite players
• Develop maps that look like the old ones from the previous titles, only with different names and a random car moved to the other side of the map
• Plan more maps for DLC, to keep gamers throwing money at the game
• Start working on four sequels

Okay, so I may be pressing just a little too rough on the FPS genre, and I’ll admit, I really enjoyed Call of Duty: Black Ops. I’m even excited for Black Ops 2, but you can’t deny that some of what I mentioned up there is truth. Following this template means that your FPS game will sell, no matter how bad it is. As long as you make it look cool, gamers will gobble it up.

Back to what Ellis was talking about, he continues his interview:

“Nobody really buys any FPSes unless they’re called Call of Duty. I guess Battlefield did okay, but aside from that pretty much every FPS loses money. I mean, [look at] Crysis 2: great game, but there’s no way it came anywhere close to recouping its dev costs. We’ve been through more than a couple of console generations and seen things grow and grow to a stage where it’s not really the business we got into. It’s not really what we signed up for in the start.”

Through Ellis’ words, he explains that the FPS genre just isn’t what it used to be. There’s no real fun in it anymore. Players get extremely competitive, in a negative way, which influences the way the game appears to other gamers. It’s even getting to the point where developers are shying away from the genre all together, simply because they don’t make the Call of Duty games. The genre has just reached a stalemate, and I can’t say I believe it will pull out anytime soon. Maybe we need another Goldeneye? The reboot for that didn’t go over well, on either platform it came to.

I think that players have become desensitized to their FPS games. Players are somehow okay with the same, repetitive gameplay over and over again. Something about giving it a new name and paying the full price for it over and over again makes it seem new. While I find some enjoyment in the Call of Duty games, I still find myself looking back to the older games in the genre, hoping for some kind of savior to break the mold.

What do you think? Could the FPS genre use a breath of fresh air? If so, what could help take it to the next level?

It’s been nearly a year since EA launched their Origin service. To say that the company’s digital distribution platform has been a huge success would be a gross overstatement. In fact, I don’t know anyone that actually enjoys using it. Sure, some friends will say that they don’t mind it, but in stark contrast to Steam, no one tells me about how much they love Origin.

EA has at least noticed that their customers aren’t particularly thrilled with the service. They recently made a post where they admitted that Origin isn’t perfect, and they asked for feedback. That’s right, if you head over to the official EA blog, you can tell them what you like and dislike about the service.

So what do I dislike? To be frank, I dislike the post that they made. While I appreciate their desire to listen to feedback, they went about it all wrong. Namely, they made an example out of an experience a particular journalist had with the service. This line is what really gets me. “The exchange also made it obvious to us that some of Origin’s most fundamental features—like the ability to play your games from any PC—weren’t as clear as we’d hoped.” Not as clear as you hoped? After reading the article they referenced, it wasn’t a matter of making things more clear, it was an issue where their service just plain wasn’t working right.

I feel that I really need to address the journalist that was referenced, Jon Peddie. The piece he wrote late last month was disgusting. He starts out talking about how he was frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t play Battlefield 3 on his laptop because the registration code had already been used. He was signed into Origin like he should be, but the service was denying him access to the game. At this point, I’m totally with him. I’d be pretty upset if I couldn’t play my game too. However, from there his piece turns sour.

Mr. Peddie goes on to explain that he “fired off a WTF email to a few people and made sure it would get to folks at EA.” Despite having contacts at EA, I’d still probably try the support line, but who am I to judge? Anyway, he then starts singing the praises of the company, as they were kind enough to send someone out to a coffee shop a few days later (he said that he was impressed with the response time) to explain what went wrong, and fix his mistake.

“It seems I was too fast. I out ran their server and it lost the credentials transfer,” he said. You don’t “out run” a server. The server knows that you installed the game on one computer, so what was it still trying to do? Does it really take more than a few seconds to update your Origin account with your registration key? If so, that’s a problem for EA, not someone who’s trying to play a game.

The person Mr. Peddie spoke with did apologize and take responsibility, though from the quote above, it sounds like Mr. Peddie was still made to believe he did something wrong. The EA rep then astounded him by rebuilding his account in Starbucks, then had his boss come in and make another apology. Naturally, by the end of it, he was delighted with how this company treats its customers.

Of course, this isn’t how real customers are treated, is it? Most customers are going to hop on the Origin Support chat, where they might get someone helpful, or they might get hung up on without any resolution. Either way, the problems don’t always get fixed in a snap. And even if they do, no one’s going to meet you at Starbucks to hold your hand and kiss your ass.

So why am I so upset with EA’s little post? Because after reading the account of Jon Peddie, I understand exactly what it is they were trying to do all along. They were lucky enough to find a journalist who had a problem that they could personally come out and assist with. What’s more, they found a journalist who could be so easily manipulated into writing a piece praising them for customer service that they don’t actually provide to their regular customers. Once the article was written, they showcase it as an occasion where EA was able to ride in on their white horse and save the day of an average gamer. Nevermind that he was given special treatment, or that he wasn’t considered average at all.

Shame on you, EA. Had you simply admitted your shortcomings (which you did start to do) and ask for feedback, I would be writing about how I’m happy to see you taking a step in the right direction. However, you didn’t just leave it at that. You had to send not one, but two of your employees out to hold the hand of a journalist, just so that he’d sing your praises.

How do I know you did this with devious intent? Well, if you were just helping him for the sake of helping him, you wouldn’t have felt the need to tell everyone about it by linking to his column, now would you? No, you needed us to see that someone else thinks your support is awesome, so that maybe, just maybe we’d believe it.

“It doesn’t have the programs I like to run.” This is one of the most commonly-uttered phrases when asking someone why they don’t use Linux. In some ways, I’m in the same boat. I need to be able to use Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere on my primary desktop. However, those are the only three pieces of software I need for everyday work and internet browsing. So why do I still use Windows? Well if you couldn’t tell, I’m a bit of a gamer. And until I can play the majority of my games on it, I’ll be staying away from Linux.

The winds of change are in the air, and playing games on a Linux machine might not be so crazy of a thought. Yes, I’m aware that you can use emulation to run Windows games, but that’s not nearly the same as having a native solution. Valve has confirmed that they are indeed working on a Linux port of the Source engine, and a compatible version of Steam. Both should be available sometime later  this year.

The first game to be made available to Linux users will be Left 4 Dead 2. However, it sounds as though they are planning to port the rest of the Source-based games to the open source OS. While this is great, one still has to wonder how many non-Valve titles will be ported. One company is not enough to turn Linux into a viable solution for PC gamers. To get a better idea of what we can expect, we can look to the other platform that Valve has tackled.

It was just over two years ago that Valve announced that they would be bringing Steam and the Source engine to Mac systems. Looking at the store, we can see 245 titles that are playable on OSX. Granted, that pales in comparison to the nearly 1,600 Windows games. However, it shows that Valve has the ability to light a fire under some developers to open their games up to new platforms. Sure, some of these games already had Mac versions, but I think having a platform like Steam really helped push the idea of gaming on a Mac.

Will Steam revolutionize Linux gaming? It’s really hard to say. I think it will be a slow process, with many developers shying away from the platform for years to come. However, I think that simply providing a place to sell Linux games will be enough. Once Valve can show that there is money to be made in the Linux market, the games will come.

As wonderful as it was to see Double Fine Adventure succeed, one success does not a movement make. For Kickstarter to mean anything in the grand scheme of things, it has to keep the ball rolling. Further, it can’t simply rely on projects headed by universally beloved developers like Schafer or sequels to cult classics like inXile’s Wasteland 2 or Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun Returns. While these franchises are not what publishers would consider mainstream and faced difficulty in finding funding, how much of a movement is it really if all the games being funded are relying on name recognition? As indie game designer Ian Bogost recently tweeted, if that’s the case, they may as well “change Kickstarter’s name to Sequelstarter.”

As it happens, that’s not the case. There are indeed completely original games from lesser known developers that are succeeding on Kickstarter, though you may have missed them in the buzz about the aforementioned Kickstarter campaigns. No, they’re not cracking seven figures, but they’re exceeding their goals and that means they’re getting developed. They’re the foot soldiers of this would be movement, the ones whose success determines whether crowd funded games are going to last two months or two decades and they shouldn’t go unheralded. So today, we’re going take a closer look at three of them – Takedown, FTL: Faster Than Light and The Banner Saga.

Takedown

After the success of the Double Fine Adventure campaign, the game development community looked a little like the kids at a junior high semi-formal, awkwardly looking around to see who else would be brave enough to step onto the dance floor before they tried themselves. Some other campaigns started during that time span, but none had goals anywhere near the bold $400,000 mark that Double Fine had set. Finally, in early March, veteran game designer Christian Allen – the lead designer of Ghost Recon 2 and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter – and Serellan LLC stepped forward with what was then called Crowdsourced Hardcore Tactical Shooter, which had a goal of $200,000.

As with Double Fine Adventure, Takedown is an attempt to revive a genre publishers thought was dead and gone but was near and dear to the hearts of both the developer and niche fans. Allen himself had wanted to make a game like CHTS for “over a decade” but hadn’t found the means to fund it. “I’ve pitched this type of game on and off again for years,” says Allen. “And then when I founded Serellan LLC late last year, first to do some consulting work, I started getting emails from people asking if I was going to make a tactical shooter, even though all I had done was posted up a splash image of the company logo.”

Then along came Kickstarter, and suddenly Takedown seemed closer to reality than ever before. However, Allen knew a game like Takedown couldn’t be funded from Kickstarter funds alone. So instead, he used Kickstarter to not only get the initial funds for the game, but as a way to prove that it would have an audience to secure funding from venture capitalists. “I was talking to a group of VC investors who were questioning how they could be sure there was actually a market for this kind of game,” Allen says. “I had been looking at Kickstarter for a few months, and decided to give it a go.”

However, as the first big campaign after the success of Double Fine Adventure, Allen and Serellan were working without many examples to follow and were taking quite the risk. According to Allen, “It was very possible if the campaign had failed miserably that Takedown would have not seen the light of day.” The eyes of the development community were on Serellan, waiting to see if they would succeed or fail. Did Allen feel at all like the canary in the coal mine, like people were watching Serellan’s campaign to see if someone besides Tim Schafer could pull off such a big coup? “I do think that was the case,” Allen confirms. “A lot of people had negative things to say or predicted our demise […].”

As it happened, those predictions came close to becoming a reality. With only 17 days to go, they were over $150,000 short of their $200,000 goal. The canary had stopped singing, and across the blogosphere they were murmurs of Kickstarter being a dud. “Not everyone is Double Fine,” declared a blog on Gamasutra. Still, Allen and Serellan weren’t about to quietly let go of their ambitions. They were able to separate the constructive criticism from the useless negativity and formulate a plan.

“We realized that our initial presentation just wasn’t up to par, and because we were getting the same questions over and over, we knew that we weren’t getting across the information that people needed to make the decision to support us […],” Allen explains. “With less than two weeks to go, we decided to reboot. We partnered with a production company, Anderson Live Media, who developed the concept of the interrogation and secured a film location in just a few days. We shot the video in a day – a very cold and miserable day for me.  Then we hooked up with Spliced Media to do the editing the next day. We finished the video after the guys worked all night on it, and we posted it up early Monday morning with six days to go.  It was a monumental effort for everyone involved, but I truly believe it made the difference.”

A screenshot from Takedown's second Kickstarter promo

The game was also given a proper name and logo, something that Double Fine had been able to do without, and suddenly new life flowed into the Kickstarter campaign. When it finished on April 1^st, it had raised $221,833 – ten percent above its proposed goal. Takedown was in business, and the Kickstarter floodgates had officially opened. For Allen, success was sweet.

“The excitement generated by Takedown has spread to the team, and especially the support we’ve gotten from other developers, both in the industry and indies, offering their time and support to make this project a reality,” Allen says. “It really is motivating to see something that you have wanted to do for years start off with such a bang.”

FTL: Faster Than Light

When Takedown succeeded, it helped prove that a new era had started on Kickstarter. Games with high funding goals could get funded during the pre-production phase, allowing games that publishers were wary of to still get the green light. However, in the days before Takedown and Double Fine Adventure, games being funded on Kickstarter had a different modus operandi. Video games with successful campaigns were typically ones that were nearly finished, and only needed a small boost to get pushed to completion and distributed. FTL: Faster Than Light started its Kickstarter campaign under this older model. It was the brainchild of two former 2K Games employees, Matthew Davis and Justin Ma, who had quit their jobs at 2K Games last year to work on FTL. After earning an honorable mention at the 2012 Independent Gaming Festival at GDC and getting a preview in PC Gamer, the pair decided to start a Kickstarter campaign.

“We had been getting a lot of positive press out of our participation in the IGF,” they said in a joint email correspondence. “It appeared that the project had the potential to be a success, so we wanted to get the funds we needed to be able to finish the game.”

Initially, their goal was set at $10,000. In the pre-Double Fine Adventure days, this was considered a reasonable sum, and so their expectations were well tempered. “We really had no idea how difficult it would be to reach that goal,” say Ma and Davis. “Having good previews in IGF and PC Gamer did give us some confidence that it would be feasible, but we were never fully confident. The number was chosen with the mindset of ‘how much do we need to finish the game?’ rather than stress too much about how much we could potentially raise.” It turns out they needn’t have worried. “The campaign exploded nearly as soon as we put it up. Within 12 hours we had passed our $10,000 goal and we were blown away. Within a day it was already considerably larger than we were expecting. Even just days away from the end, 2000% seemed unrealistic.” Yet that’s exactly where they finished. The final total was $200,542, over twenty times their initial goal.

A screenshot from the current version of FTL: Faster Than Light

Like Takedown, the story of FTL provided a sign that the Kickstarter movement was real. While Takedown was proving that the new Kickstarter model could work, FTL proved that even games that started campaigns under the old model were being swept up in the moment. Was the momentum from the craze that Double Fine started part of the reason that FTL was so successful? “Definitely,” agree Davis and Ma. “The Double Fine Adventure campaign brought a lot of publicity to Kickstarter and helped legitimize the concept of crowd funding for a lot of people.” They admit that their success at IGF and the PC Gamer mention certainly helped as well and their effect can’t be ignored. That said, if Takedown proved that the Kickstarter movement had direction, FTL proved that it had legs.

Such unexpected success does not come without side effects, of course. With an enormously successful Kickstarter campaign comes the burden of fan expectations. “There wasn’t too much pressure before the Kickstarter campaign. We were making a game that we thought would be cool, but did not stress too much about the financial viability of it as a product,” say Ma and Davis. “Now that the Kickstarter campaign is over, there is definitely a new and different type of pressure. There are a lot of people that are excited about the game and have trusted us with their funds, which is amazing, but it brings a lot of pressure with it to make FTL the best it can be. We’re working very hard to live up to those expectations.” As part of that, they’re being careful not to stretch their newfound funding too far and staying focused on their mission, a sentiment Christian Allen had also shared when discussing Takedown. “Our goal is still to make the game we’ve wanted from the beginning,” they confirm. What’s exciting to us is what comes after the initial game is complete.  FTL’s success means that we will be able to continue working on FTL and future games, which is of course the ultimate ambition of any independent developer.”

The Banner Saga

As the campaigns for FTL and Takedown were getting started, the developers at Stoic watched with interest. Stoic is a development power trio composed of Arnie Jorgensen, a veteran artist with tours of duty at DC and Image Comics before working at Retro Studios and Ion Storm, John Watson, who started as a programmer at NASA before jumping into the games industry at Sony, and Alex Thomas, the trio’s only lifetime game developer who began his career at Wolfpack Studios before they changed their name to Kingisle in 2005. The three met at BioWare, where they worked on The Old Republic together. Jorgenson and Thomas also worked on several side projects with BioWare’s blessing, including an iOS children’s book called DinoBoy. After The Old Republic shipped, they recruited Watson and they soon left BioWare began work on The Banner Saga. The timing couldn’t have been better. By coincidence, The Old Republic launched last December, and Double Fine’s Kickstarter campaign started shortly afterwards in early February.

“Truth be told, Kickstarter was part of the plan back at the formation of the company,” says Thomas. “At that time the highest games could make was roughly $30k. Our friends from White Whale – currently working on God of Blades – had a successful run and encouraged us to go for some extra funding since we’re paying for production out of pocket using our own personal savings. Then Double Fine and inXile blew the doors off the Kickstarter thing, which was pretty surreal to watch, knowing that we were working towards the exact same goal. Suddenly we weren’t sure how to approach it. Ultimately it became obvious that the right thing to do was to ask for the real amount that we could use toward making the game the biggest we could while still manageable for three people.”

How did they come to this conclusion? They did their homework. With a handful of campaigns either completed or in full swing, the Stoic trio had enough material to formulate a solid plan. The first part of this plan was to avoid going in cold. “We did a lot of research when we were planning out our campaign but the best advice we got was to talk about the game early and often, pre-launch,” says Thomas. “By the time our page was ready to go we had a lot of people already interested in the game, which got us to our goal quick, in turn generating a lot more media attention and so on and so forth.” They also took special care when it came to the different rewards Kickstarter backers would receive at different levels. “One of the things we’re most happy with is the extra time we took to show all of our prizes at the start of the project,” Thomas elaborates. “As far as I know we were the first to really go all out with [it] and I think people have really connected with that.” Finally, they made sure people would get a preview of the game itself. “Another top priority was to make sure we had an actual game to show and make sure it was an accurate representation of the final product. Without a big name backing us we knew we’d be relying on the quality of the game itself to get people interested and the sincerity of how into it we truly are.”

After doing their due diligence, Stoic’s initial goal for The Banner Saga was set at $100,000. Were they still nervous about a goal like that even after planning so carefully? “Yeah,” confirms Thomas. “So to elaborate on that more, we were pretty nervous about reaching $100k. Unlike [Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2] we didn’t have any high-profile names supporting us, just our reputation as leads from BioWare and a game concept. We even considered playing it safe with a lower target with a whole whiteboard full of pros and cons. One of the pros to sticking with $100k was ‘It’s what vikings would do.’” Like the FTL team, their worries were for naught. The Banner Saga currently sits at roughly $570,000 with time still on the clock as of the writing of this article. “To be at over 500% funding now without even asking for future milestones is pretty mind-blowing and encouraging,” summarizes Thomas.

A screenshot from The Banner Saga's announcement video

And what of the factors that come with success? Does Stoic feel like such success in their Kickstarter campaign relieved some pressure, or did it add pressure of a different sort like it did with the FTL team? “That’s an interesting question, we’ve recently been talking about this because you’re absolutely right on both accounts,” Thomas answers when asked about the topic. “When there was no expectation we were planning to market the game as more of a grass-roots effort, like the trend with games to come out in alpha and grow a fanbase over time. With all the attention we’ve gotten recently that’s probably not the right approach anymore. We’ll be keeping fans up to date on our progress but I think there’s a certain expectation now that didn’t exist before. Plus, as we add top shelf talent to the project there’s the pressure of making sure everything meets that high standard.” Still, Thomas has a hard time being picky. “I can’t complain though, it’s the kind of pressure we’re happy to deal with and clearly it’s given us a lot of breathing room to give us a chance to make the game we really want to make, not a compromised version. I think we’re in a better position now than we ever could have hoped for.”

Like both Christian Allen and the FTL team before them, Stoic is also being careful not to overextend itself. “One of our primary objectives throughout this whole thing has been to run the campaign with quality and integrity. Sounds like corporate speak but it’s true,” Thomas says. “We’ve gone out of our way to avoid exaggerations and false promises. Basically, we never set out to make the game bigger than something we could handle with a small team, which has become an interesting problem because our backers are really interested in what we’re going to be doing with all the overflow donations. We’ve decided to keep the scope the same but up the quality everywhere that we can – animations, sound, music, additional programming support, QA, playtesting, writing.” Being level headed and realistic clearly doesn’t exclude being excited, though. Thomas adds, “When we started working on the game we knew it was something we were way into but we couldn’t be sure other gamers agreed. More than the funding. what Kickstarter has done is told us beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are a lot of people interested in the game. Nothing could be more inspiring.”

The success of The Banner Saga seems like the culmination of the lessons learned during the dawn of the Kickstarter movement, when Takedown and FTL were among the first to follow in the wake of Double Fine Adventure. The lessons on presentation that Serellan learned and implemented during Takedown’s campaign, to the effects of both FTL’s positive press and the surprise pressure and momentum that it gained all seem to ring true. Was the success of The Banner Saga at least partly due  to this? If so, does that mean that it represents the future of this Kickstarter movement, beyond long awaited sequels and campaigns led by big name developers?

What’s Next?

Each of the developers featured over the course of this article were asked what the future of Kickstarter funded games as they related to their own projects. To Serellan’s Christian Allen, what did the future hold? Could traditionally AAA games be somewhere down the line? “I think in the short term, you will continue to see smaller projects or games that have a strong dedicated audience that have not been well served by the traditional publishing model be the ones that are successful,” Allen predicts. “Something along the lines of a GTA or a Fallout still require huge budgets and highly experienced devs to pull off, but I am excited to see the future and how it shapes out.  We are proud to be at the beginning of something that can only grow from here.”

The FTL team were asked how much Kickstarter could help smaller indie developers. They responded, “Kickstarter has massive potential to help out smaller development teams. Independent developers often create really unique and interesting games that have very small markets.  Kickstarter can help connect developers to those fans.”

Asked more generally about the future of Kickstarter, Alex Thomas of Stoic answered in depth. “We’ve been talking about this a lot lately,” Thomas reveals. “The way I see it, Kickstarter is an incredible good-will generator and if you really hit the right note with an audience that feels abandoned by the current games market they won’t hesitate to support you. Interestingly, models that are popular with publishers right now like mobile games, micro-transactions, Facebook titles, MMOs and generally online or social aspects in a game are the kiss of death on Kickstarter. Since Double Fine’s success we’ve also seen a flood of old-school known developers looking for support.” All sound observations, but what does it mean for Kickstarter? Thomas goes on. “It seems to me that Kickstarter’s lasting success is going to depend on holding tight to that good will and making sure that the backers don’t feel betrayed or become cynical or burnt out over time, which is going to be tricky without any real barrier to entry. The second backers become cynical about the process the whole thing falls apart. That’s not to say I’m all doom and gloom about it; on the contrary I’m mostly concerned because it has been so amazing to see all these amazing games coming back from the past that I really, truly hope the whole thing becomes a new staple of the industry that gives some of that buying power back to smaller but passionate groups of gamers.”

Certainly something that’s so positive couldn’t be a prophecy of doom, but Thomas’ point shouldn’t be ignored. The consensus seems to be that Kickstarter has the potential to be a golden goose of sorts, a tool that could allow fans and developers alike to reap rewards they never could have had before. That said, we live in a world where James Bond is getting a twenty-third movie and the spinoff of the thirteenth game in a popular Japanese RPG series is getting new DLC almost monthly. Takedown, FTL and The Banner Saga prove that Kickstarter could be a fantastic resource in the future, as long as we don’t exhaust it in the present.

Click here to read Part 1

Why does League of Legends make people so mad?

This was the question we were starting answer in the first part of this article. In it, we compared League of Legends to a game with similar team sizes, long play sessions and a critical emphasis on teamwork – Left 4 Dead 2. As a result, we’ve already found that League of Legends has several prominent aspects to its design that encourage competition and therefore more intense emotions. In this second part of the article, we’ll take a look at these two games from the opposite angle – what does Left 4 Dead 2 do to encourage more cooperation and therefore less intense emotions?

Rewards for Teamwork

One of the things that Left 4 Dead 2 does constantly is reward the player for teamwork. Before I explain how it does that, let me first elaborate on what exactly I mean when I say “rewards.” Rewards in games are not as straightforward as points, unlockable content or health items. A reward is anything that is intentionally gratifying to the player. Sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto are an excellent example. You don’t get anything helpful by causing random chaos, but the cartoony carnage that ensues is gratifying enough to be its own reward.

In League of Legends, most in-game rewards are centered around destroying the enemy. For example, every time you kill an enemy, you get the statistical rewards we mentioned earlier like gold and experience, but you also get something less tangible.

“You have slain an enemy!”

Hearing the announcer say that is such a gratifying sound that it’s almost enough of a reward on its own, but to make it even more satisfying, a huge announcement appears in the middle of the screen telling everyone present that you just smoked somebody. Nice! If you string several kills together, you’ll hear the announcer cry, “Double kill!” or “Triple kill!” She even says it with more enthusiasm as the number goes up, peaking at the elusive, “Penta kill!” The other time similar rewards are received are when you destroy enemy buildings, which helps your team claim victory. As you might expect, announcements that carry a twinge of disappointment occur when a teammate is killed, allied structure is destroyed, or you yourself meet your doom. Other less obvious rewards come from things like comedic death animations, the light clinking sound that occurs whenever you receive gold from killing creeps, or even just the sound of a successfully aimed skill-shot – bless your Javelin Toss, Nidalee.

Left 4 Dead 2 has these kinds of rewards as well. When you kill a special infected – which in Versus mode is an enemy player – a game-wide announcement appears on the side of the screen letting everyone know, accompanied by a satisfying sound effect. Another reward for kills is the display of ragdoll physics that follows. Watching a dead hunter twirl past your head like a Frisbee simply doesn’t get old. The game’s characters sometimes even compliment you on your shooting. So if Left 4 Dead 2 rewards the same kinds of actions as League of Legends, what’s the difference? The difference is that it expands these rewards to include actions that demonstrate teamwork. For example, every time someone protects a teammate by shooting a nearby infected that’s attacking them, a game-wide announcement is made for that as well saying, “Player 1 protected Player 2,” again accompanied by a satisfying sound effect. When someone kills a special infected that has a teammate captured a game-wide announcement is made saying “Player 1 saved Player 2.” Now here’s where things get subtle. For the player that has been saved, that message saying “Player 1 saved you,” is bright blue and appears on the middle of the screen next to a large icon of a shield if the player who saved you isn’t visible or if you’re recovering from an attack. If they are visible and you’ve recovered from the attack, that message and icon move to hover over the player that saved you. The same thing occurs for the player who did the saving, with the roles reversed so the message says “You saved Player 2,” and the message hovers over the player you saved. Notice that the action that provided the most direct help to a teammate was emphasized the most.

Similar emphasis is placed on players reviving or healing their teammates. When you’re reviving or healing a teammate, a meter appears on the middle of your screen labeled “Reviving Teammate” or “Healing Teammate”. When you’re healing someone, it tells you your target by saying “Target: Player 1.” However, for the player being healed or revived, that bit of text changes from “Target” to “Your Savior.” When the meter is filled and the healing or reviving action is complete, the “saved” announcement and sound effect occur. However, in addition the characters thank each other as an added reward. Given the focus of the Left 4 Dead franchise on its characters, the significance of this should not be overlooked. Characters also thank each other when given minor healing items like pills or adrenaline shots. As you might expect, this action is also accompanied by a global announcement and positive sound effect. In summation, players are constantly rewarded for actions that help their teammates just as much as they are for killing enemies, sometimes even more so.

Using these almost Pavlovian techniques, Left 4 Dead 2 is constantly urging its players to cooperate rather than compete. As a result, teams are less likely to turn on each other during a match, as everyone feels a shared responsibility for what occurs. When someone goes down, it’s not always their own fault, as the game has constantly reminded players that they should protect their teammates. When someone isn’t revived in time and bleeds out, everyone feels responsible for similar reasons. The player that died feels bad for dying, but everyone else also feels bad for not reviving them. In this way, the game creates a cooperative environment where both defeat and victory are shared more equally, rather than a competitive environment where blame and credit tend to go to individuals.

Team Bonding

Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu was known for – among other things – having an unusual focus around food and drink in his movies. Important conversations between characters often occur over meals or when sharing a quiet drink together. The theory behind this is that mealtime signifies a moment of recovery. It is a small window of calm where people can relax and let their vulnerabilities show without repercussions as they recuperate from the daily grind of their lives. According to Ozu, there is a sense of safety in eating. You don’t have to worry about showing weakness, and the people you eat with become the people you trust. Such a theory could, perhaps, explain why most dates include a meal. In Left 4 Dead 2, teammates do not share a meal together, but there are many moments that echo what the meal signifies in an Ozu film. As a result, it provides the players with many opportunities to bond as a team.

Although both League of Legends and Left 4 Dead 2 have very long play sessions, Left 4 Dead 2 is broken up into segments. These segments start and end in areas called Safe Rooms. As the name implies, the enemy team cannot spawn in them and heavy doors prevent AI controlled infected from breaking in. The Safe Room at the beginning of a level is truly a place of recovery. You take a moment to heal your wounds, restock your supplies and just prepare yourself mentally for the round ahead. It should be noted that in Versus mode – as opposed to the single player or cooperative modes – players always start at full health, so there’s no need to heal. Even so, just having that moment where you truly don’t have a worry in world is a very relaxing feeling. I found it wasn’t uncommon for even teams of total strangers to just take their time and chat with their team a little before putting their game faces on and getting the competition underway.

In addition, Left 4 Dead 2 has a lot of moments over the course of a level that evoke a similar feeling. Often, there will be rooms where it’s difficult or impossible for the infected team to attack, such as a trailer on the second level of The Parish. In these lesser imitations of a Safe Room, players can again take a moment to relax and lick their wounds while figuring out how they’re going to proceed. As with the Safe Rooms, casual conversation often finds its way into these moments and these are the times when teammates tend to get to know each other a little better.

League of Legends doesn’t really have an equivalent to Ozu’s meals or Left 4 Dead 2’s Safe Rooms. In the chat before the game, a team will be focused on their composition as I explained previously and once the game has actually started there’s always something to worry about. It takes about two minutes for creeps to spawn when playing a traditional League of Legends game on Summoner’s Rift, but even then players don’t have much time to lollygag. Setting up protection for your jungler or going after a level one gank will require immediate attention. Sometimes, teams will be content to leave each other alone, which provides about a minute of relaxation. Once that’s over, though, forget about it. Time wasted is time better spent on farming creeps or reacting to an enemy push. The only real break players have is when they teleport back to heal or purchase an item, or are killed. Obviously, the latter is not a good thing, and the former is something done alone and kept to a minimum whenever possible. The only time a team can really relax as a together is when they’re absolutely obliterating their opponents, and that’s really not the same.

Even in that one minute of peace I mentioned earlier, though, League of Legends has another handicap when compared to Left 4 Dead 2 – it lacks in-game voice chat. It’s a lot harder to have any sort of casual conversation when you have to willingly remove your ability to play the game effectively to reply to someone. Because of this, a lot of in-game communication is done through pinging, which is when a player temporarily marks a point on the their team’s mini-map. This sometimes restricts players to saying little more than “GL HF” when a game starts and “GG” when it ends. Without moments of safety and recovery, team bonding is difficult enough in League of Legends, but without a voice chat, the likelihood of a team of strangers gaining a sense of comradery becomes even slimmer.  In fact, players almost never even refer to each other by their screen names while playing. Instead, they refer to each other by the names of the characters they’re playing. One could make a strong argument that it’s just part of the game’s jargon at this point, but the sense of detachment that it symbolizes shouldn’t be ignored.

Conclusion

So, at the end of the day, why does League of Legends make people so mad? Clearly, it’s not a simple answer. A myriad of factors can be listed, but the gist of it is that League of Legends encourages more competition than cooperation. It’s not just the fact that the game takes a long time to play and has small teams that need excellent teamwork to succeed. Left 4 Dead 2 is evidence of that, as it has those traits as well, but creates less aggression and intensity by encouraging cooperation over competition.

I hope that this pair of articles has explained that adequately, because it’s important to understand both as an outsider looking in at the League of Legends community and as a player within the community itself. When a player gets mad during a bad round of League of Legends, nothing’s wrong with them. They’re not an angry person. League of Legends is just built to bring out that kind of emotion. It’s neither a bad thing nor a good thing. It’s simply intense by design.

That little screenshot up there are some of the stats of my computer. At this time, with it’s GTX 560 Ti graphics card, I can play most, if not all games on the maximum or near-maximum settings. And, mind you, this computer is a good 3 years old, with only a few tweaks here and there to it. So, despite the fact that we live in a world with i5’s, and i7’s, featuring upwards of 8 cores in a chip, why is it that the minimum requirements for a game like Diablo III only require an old Pentium 4 2.8 GHz chip, and 1 gig of RAM? Mass Effect 3, which came out earlier this year, hardly requires any more power out of your system compared to Mass Effect 2, even though ME2 came out over 2 years ago. And, if you look at “Moore’s Law”, (which isn’t really a “law” and more of a rule of thumb, but that’s a different story), it says that the number of transistors that can be placed cheaply on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. In computer terms, that means that the average, inexpensive computer built will be roughly twice as powerful every 2 years, and so far, the average computer itself does seem to be following this path. So, why is it that ME3’s requirements are roughly on par with a game that came out 2 years earlier? Why does Diablo III only require a Pentium 4, a chip that came out well over 6 years ago? Is this reflective of a larger trend?

Using the website Game Debate, I decided to find out. For the purposed of the research, I took five different mainstream games from each year between 2005 and 2011 and tried to come up with a rough baseline requirement for the year as a whole. I also tried to include sequels, in order to get a rough estimate of how much the requirements have gone up for a similar game. However, for the most part, I avoided expansion packs, as they are usually tied in to a game that can be much older, and thus bring down the hardware requirements.

In 2005 and 2006, which were the first years that we saw the current generation of consoles, the requirements as a whole were on the low side. Minimum requirements were listing Pentium 3 processors, 256 MB’s of RAM, and GeForce 2 MK 400’s. The recommended specs had Pentium 4’s running at nearly twice the speed as the Pentium 3’s, 512 MB’s of RAM, and GeForce 6600’s and higher.

Starting in 2007, however, we see a huge jump in requirements. Pentium 4’s running at 2.4 GHz and higher started to become listed as the minimum requirements to run a game, while Core 2 Duos were starting to show up in the recommended specs list. A year earlier, if you had 512 MB’s of RAM, you’d be set to play a game on some of its best settings. Once 2007 hit, though, you wouldn’t even be likely to make the minimum requirements, as they jumped up to 1 GB, and the recommended amount went up to 2 GB’s. Graphics cards in this time also saw a jump, as the GeForce 6800 GT you were using in 2006 to run your game with the best graphics was all of a suddenly finding it difficult to run a game on the lower quality settings. Instead, you were looking at having to buy a new higher level 7000 or 8000 GeForce card to run those games at the best settings.

So what prompted this sudden increase? Well, remember that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 both came out in 2005 and 2006, respectively. The previous generation, the PS2 and the Xbox, had come out in 2000 and 2001, and it’s my theory that developers were developing games in ’05 and ’06 under the assumption that at some point they may want to port those games to the console. However, once the PS3 and Xbox 360 were released, and the developers started to develop new games after receiving development kits, they had room to jump up the specs for their computers. Add in a resource hog OS like Windows Vista, and the development of the Dual Core CPU, and it’s no wonder that we saw a spike in requirements.

After 2007, another trend emerged. The requirements for games started to level out a bit. There hasn’t been a big jump in requirements for games since that time, but rather, it’s become more gradual. In 2008, more Core 2 Duos were making up the recommended CPU line, but the RAM and GPU lines stayed about the same. In 2009 there was not much change, despite the fact that it had been 2 years since the last big jump.

When 2010 hit, you could see that the requirements were trending upwards, but not that much. The only main difference this time was that you started to see low end Core 2 Duos make up the minimum requirements line, and you started seeing Core 2 Quads in the recommended line. RAM stayed around the same at 1 GB for minimum and 2 GB for recommended, and amazingly, they still had GeForce 6800’s as the minimum requirement, despite the fact that you could see those cards in stat lines over 5 years earlier.

In 2011, only at this point do you see any sort of growth in the requirements in general. The minimum levels of RAM started to average out at 2 GBs, with the recommended levels going at around 4 GBs. The CPU levels are still remaining about the same, and even though you don’t see the GeForce 6800s listed anymore, you can still find GeForce 8800s being listed under the recommended cards, despite the fact that those same cards in 2008.

With all the games being developed to include PC’s and consoles as their platforms, it’s not surprising to me to see that the overall requirements of games have not gone up very high for over 5 years. In fact, it seems to me that the reason why requirements have gone up at all has to do with developers being able to fully exploit what the consoles are capable of. So, with that in mind, I am going to make a prediction. Whenever the next big consoles come out, where the developers will have new platforms to work with, look to see a huge jump in the requirements for games. You’ll start to see Core 2 Quads under the minimum requirements, when just a year earlier that same chip was well over the recommended level. The i5 chips will start to become commonplace in the recommended CPU slot. We’ve seen this jump before, as developers stopped developing on the limited hardware of the PS2 and Xbox, and started developing for the relatively unlimited PS3 and Xbox 360. Now, at this point in time, those consoles with their 6 and 7 year old hardware are what’s limiting developers from going hog-wild with what they can do in a game. Once that limit has been eliminated (comparatively speaking), don’t be surprised to see the developers take advantage of it.

Start saving your money, because that high end computer you’ve had for a few years isn’t going to do you much good once those new consoles are out. I know I’m saving mine.

I tear off my headphones and curse in frustration. Another League of Legends round has started poorly, and I’m not happy about it. In own my mind, it’s my teammate’s fault, and I let him know it in the Skype chat we’re in. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but that’s not really the important part. As I impatiently wait to respawn I take a deep, calming breath, and I realize what that is.

I have no idea why I’m so pissed off.

It’s not that I don’t know the sequence of events that led to me being so frustrated. They occurred only a few seconds ago. The thing is, I’ve played tons of games with this same friend. Some of them he’s good at, some of them he’s terrible at, but in none of these other games have I ever been so mad when he screws up. Hell, I was never this mad at him when we played Street Fighter IV together and he would kick my ass a dozen times in a row.

So why does League of Legends make me so frustrated?

I don’t know the answer, but I do know that I’m not the only one. League of Legends’ community, along with the communities of similar games like Heroes of Newerth and the original Defense of the Ancients mod for Warcraft III, are rather infamous for, as Tycho of Penny Arcade put it, “being noxious hellholes.” However, that’s really not quite accurate. The truth is that most the people playing League of Legends are the same people playing Team Fortress 2, Starcraft II or any number of PC games. In other words, they’re just gamers. It’s not that they’re mean spirited people; it’s that these games in particular have a way of bringing out the aggression of their players. So I guess the real question is this:

Why does League of Legends cause so much frustration and aggression when compared to other games?

To find out why, I’m going to compare some elements of League of Legends’ design next to another online PC game. This game has a lot of similarities to League of Legends, but from my own experience and its community’s reputation, it definitely causes less aggression. Not that it doesn’t have its share of the insults, griefing and general nastiness that is created by Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but clearly not as much. Like League of Legends, it has small teams, it takes a very long period of time to play a round to completion, and teamwork is absolutely critical. One weak link in the chain can destroy an otherwise solid team. This game is Left 4 Dead 2.

While comparing these two games, I found that the key differences between them broke down into two categories: things that encourage competition and things that encourage cooperation. For this first part of the article, let’s start with the obvious and tackle the design elements that encourage competition.

Before I go further, however, I’d just like to note that I love League of Legends and I play it all the time. What drives this article is curiosity and scholarly interest. The features that I mention in the following section are not necessarily good or bad. They just happen to make things, well, more competitive.

Statistics

In Left 4 Dead 2, statistics rarely show up and lack any real significance. At the end of a round during Versus mode, several windows will appear while everyone loads the next level, ranking the players’ performance in several categories. The categories are usually things like “Most Damage Dealt as an Infected,” “Most Common Infected Killed,” or “Most Damage Done to the Witch.” However, what statistics actually appear is randomized, and they only flash for a few seconds as a way to occupy players’ time during loading screens. For the most part, that’s their only purpose. There are two statistics that matter, however. The first is a team’s actual points, which you gain by progressing further through the level. If you get all four people into a level’s safe room, you get the maximum amount of points. If you get curb stomped at the beginning of a level, you get the minimum. This statistic is the only one that matters, except in one instance. When a team ties in this category during a round – which almost always occurs when both teams get all four team members to the safe room – then the total damage dealt as infected is compared. The team that dealt the most damage gains 25 additional points. This is a relatively small amount, however, and it’s rare to see a game decided by a margin of 25 or less.

League of Legends, on the other hand, is positively overflowing with statistics. Your kills, deaths, assists and a method for ranking players called Elo – named after a method for ranking chess players – are the big ones but there’s a bevy of others. How many creeps you’ve killed, how much gold you’ve earned, how many structures you’ve destroyed, and that’s just during the game. After the round, you can see things like how much physical or magic damage everyone gave or took, what their highest critical was, or how much healing they did. They even allow you to compare them between players with graphs and charts. Then there’s the character statistics, which are as varied and complex as any RPG. Things like attack speed, magic penetration and health regeneration are laid bare for all to see. These are augmented by items you buy during the course of the game, which are similarly diverse. These items compose what are called a characters’ build, and there are entire websites dedicated to determining which builds are the best for every character in the game.

So, obviously League of Legends has way more statistics than Left 4 Dead 2 and they’re far more important, but how does this heighten competition? And, similarly, how does this competition make players so much more susceptible to frustration and anger? This is a pretty easy one, actually. Statistics have been proven to cause competition wherever they show up up. Be it in professional sports or in a Wall Street office, everyone wants to be the guy with the bigger number. In League of Legends, this philosophy is most prevalent in the idea of “the carry.”

As most commonly used, the term carry refers to a specific kind of character – a low health, high damage character meant to snowball and be extremely powerful at higher levels. The term comes from the idea that they essentially carry their team to victory over the corpses of their enemies at the end of the game. Typically, this character gets the most kills during a match, and because everyone wants the bigger number, everyone wants to be the carry. This sometimes results in bickering over them on the character select screen or what’s called auto-locking – when a player selects a character and locks in without regard to what characters the other players are choosing. Within the game itself, the idea of wanting the bigger number also leads to accusations of kill stealing. Whether this is for reasons of ego or for want of another statistic – gold – varies, but can lead to a lot of conflict within a team of strangers. In Left 4 Dead 2, such conflicts are a rarity. No one really cares who killed that hunter that was leaping towards Ellis, they just care that it died and it died fast. The statistics that exist to fight for are so small and insignificant that no one wastes their time on them.

The fight for a higher number is not the only thing that comes out of all these statistics, however. In fact, it might not even be the most important thing. Lots of games have that battle of egos, most prominently shooters like Call of Duty. However, those statistics are fairly limited. League of Legends’ extensive statistics give players another tool entirely – they make it incredibly easy to find someone to blame when you lose.

Now, the most straight forward example of a statistic that lets players do this is kills, deaths, and assists.

“Why did we lose? Oh, it must be that 2/7/10 Amumu. I’m going to call him a feeder.”

Any experienced player knows that those stats only tell part of the story, though. Support and tank characters especially can be doing an excellent job and not come up with many kills, as often they’re just trying to serve them to the carry on a silver platter. The sheer amount of statistics in League of Legends give people looking to blame someone an easy way around this, however. Creep kills, for instance are sometimes looked to for blame. The less creeps you kill, the less money you get, the less items you buy, and the less powerful you are. Speaking of items, they’re also a common tool for the blame game. Not getting items with the right statistics or even getting them in the wrong order can make a character less effective, and everyone’s got an opinion on what’s “right.”

In summary, when a game goes south in League of Legends, all these statistics make it easy for a team to tear itself apart by blaming each other. This is partly because, a lot of the time, these statistics mean that there’s at least some truth to most accusations. Even if they deny it at the time, a lot of players will realize that in the back of their minds, and no one wants to be the reason their team loses. That fear and guilt doesn’t help matters, and makes people quick to blame others and angrier when they are doing poorly. Sometimes, the opposing team can even egg things on by using these statistics to taunt their hapless opponents.

Left 4 Dead 2 doesn’t really have this issue. Though there’s certainly the occasional blame game, there aren’t many statistics to support it. The only time that can occur is when a team is playing as the infected and a player has a very low amount of damage. However, given that some infected aren’t meant to do lots of damage and what infected you get is random, as long as they have even a moderate amount of damage, it’s difficult to use that statistic to blame a player for a loss. Even then, that statistic resets every round.

The Game Beyond the Game

The other big set of elements that encourage more competition in League of Legends than Left 4 Dead 2 are those that exist outside of the actual game itself. In Left 4 Dead 2, when you stop playing the game, you stop competing. How well you perform is based solely on your actions within each specific competition. In League of Legends, a round may end or may not have started yet, but the competition never stops. Some of the elements that cause this are called “the metagame.” What the metagame is specifically depends on who you’re asking, and not everything I mention here will fit into the common definitions of the metagame, hence the different title for this section. That said, the general concept of the metagame fits: actions that affect the game, but aren’t actually performed during gameplay itself.

The biggest thing this idea refers to is what takes place on the character selection screen. In what is accepted as the most complete mode in which to play League of Legends, character selection is done through a system called a draft. Each team picks three characters from the roster to ban from competition, and then takes turns selecting the remaining characters. This is a crucial phase to the game. Failing to ban an overpowered character or one who is simply a great counter to your team can be pretty bad, and there’s a generally accepted list of who to ban at any given time – depending on who’s been buffed or nerfed recently. A team captain who squanders the banning phase will likely face some ire.

After the banning phase, draft mode is similar to other modes when it comes to selecting characters. The difference is that characters cannot be selected twice, and people take turns picking them. This adds some strategy, but the gist is the same in other modes: you need to pick a team with a balanced composition. If you have a balanced combination of characters, you’ve basically given yourself a shot at victory. If you don’t, it’s entirely possible that you have lost the game before it even began. That’s how important it can be. Similarly, there are some characters that are not considered viable at all, and a player who selects them will likely be informed about this politely or otherwise.

Other features that bring the competition outside of the game itself are the runes and masteries systems, which are for boosting those character stats I mentioned earlier. As you can imagine, that makes them somewhat important. Selecting the right runes and masteries for your character can give you an edge, and selecting the wrong ones can give you a handicap. They’re not as important as the items you buy in the game itself or as team composition, but they’re that extra competitive element that keeps you occupied between games.

So what’s the point to me explaining all of this? Well, the point is that all these features push the player to constantly strive to be competitive. Doing better at the game is always in the back of the player’s mind. Compete. Improve. Win. This is what the game beyond the game tells the player League of Legends is about. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not a good thing, but when a game encourages the player to compete at all times, it’s going to heighten the aggression of its players and cause greater frustration when they fail.

So we’ve established that League of Legends encourages more competition that Left 4 Dead 2, and that’s certainly a big part of it. However, in the second part of this article, we’ll look at things from the opposite perspective: how does Left 4 Dead 2 encourage cooperation rather than competition? Don’t change that dial.

Click here to read Part 2

Marketing and public relations is an area that takes a lot of skill. After all, your job consists primarily of interacting with with customers and news outlets. These are the two groups of people that you want to make a good impression on, as they will no doubt have an influence on the sales of whatever wares you’re peddling. Of these groups, I will always believe that the customers should be treated best of all, because they’re the ones spending their hard-earned money on your product.

If you’re looking for an example of how not to treat a paying customer, you might have a look at this correspondence published over at Penny Arcade. Here’s an excerpt from the email exchange between a customer who pre-ordered the PS3 Avenger, and someone from Ocean Marketing, who represents N-Control:

You just got told bitch … welcome to the real internet check kotaku in 2 weeks when they are reviewing free PS3 Avengers we send them as well as G4 and all the other majors hell yeah , don’t forget to check Amazon, gamestop.com, play n trade , Myers , Frys and a ton of other local stores coming your way you think you speak for billions son your just a kid you speak for yourself no one cares what you think that’s why were growing and moving 20-50 thousand controllers a month. We do value our customers but sometimes we get children like you we just have to put you in the corner with your im stupid hat on. See you at CES , E3 , Pax East ….? Oh wait you have to ask mom and pa dukes your not an industry professional and you have no money on snap you just got told.

I don’t care who you are, what you do, or who you know. This is not how you talk to someone, especially when that person has given you money for goods (that you’ve not yet delivered). Now, it could be that this was simply a fabrication to smear Ocean Marketing, but Mike Krahulik (better known as Gabe from Penny Arcade) sent a follow-up email to the same person, and after a few emails, received this charming tidbit, which confirms that this guy is just as cheerful as the previous messages made him out to be:

Your sites amateur at best my son could put together a better site than yours and you run PAX ?? Wow , Ill put my marketing team on a smear campaign of you and your site and your emails , I have about 125 dedicated people to run PR , Blogs , Articles , Videos you have no clue who I am . Thanks again

Reading through these only makes me wonder how this person got into the line of work that they did. This is not how you treat customers, and making threats toward someone who is a rather large figure in the gaming community (also known as your target audience) is just a bad idea.

After emailing my contact at N-Control, I got a phone call from Paul, who turned out to be the person sending these emails. We spoke for around fifteen minutes or so, and he assured me that despite the negative press, he’s been contacted by several companies, who have asked him to represent them. Paul also expressed confidence that this would simply blow over in a week or two.

He also told me that he’s received a lot of emails from customers, who were similarly upset about not receiving their product before Christmas. Apparently the only thing special about Dave was that he caught him at a bad time, and got under his skin. Of course, that still doesn’t excuse the way he treated a paying customer. Even if customer service isn’t your primary job (which is apparently the case, according to Paul), you still should treat the people trying to give you money with respect.

When I brought up the posts on Reddit that discussed the emails, and the backlash that was visible there, he more or less shrugged it off. He seemed annoyed by the amount of friend requests he’d received on Facebook, since someone managed to find him. He credited that to the fact that his information was posted at the bottom of the Penny Arcade piece, and said that he’d be talking to his lawyers about that later today. What’s more, he said that his job isn’t really to deal with individual customers like Dave, but rather to strike deals with companies like GameStop and BestBuy. Those companies are buying his wares, so he “doesn’t care about anyone else.” Why? Because as long as his products are on store shelves, people will buy them.

In the end, he conceded that it would be a good idea to send Dave an apology, and even hook him up with a couple of free Avengers as a gesture of good faith. After all, the guy just wanted his Avenger, and got some nasty emails for his trouble. While that’s good news for Dave, something tells me that he still won’t be getting a booth at PAX, or winning back the hearts of everyone who read the original emails.

Update: We have gotten a copy of the apology email sent to Dave, from Paul at Ocean Marketing. As you can see, it has a very different tone from the originals, and better grammar and spelling (for the most part):

Hey Dave,

I just wanted to apologize for the way our emails progressed from beginning to end , You caught me on an extremely bad day and I had been dealing with 100’s and hundreds of emails trying to explain the situation to everyone on where the product was and you just pushed me a little too much and I should have just apologized and tried to explain things better. Also I had a really bad day losing a friend to an overdose and the stress of my newborn baby and the Holiday ,missing my family and just stressing on getting product out to everyone and why it was held up in customs wore me out.

I am deeply sorry for any disrespect , aggravation or lack of information on the delivery date. We knew when product was leaving china and we were trying to adhere to a strict deadline but due to port issues and air freight issues. The units are domestic now and awaiting pick up at customs . So we missed the 17th deadline and I apologize for that but it was out of my control and besides me no one else was helping me handle the situation so imagine the weight on my shoulders.

I’m not asking for any sympathy just for some understanding and forgiveness , I’m human just like everyone else and made a mistake. I underestimated you and its cost me a lot of trouble thousands of spam emails , a lot of personal bashing , and internet spam and trouble and just overall stress with my wife and newborn. I ask that you please accept my apology as a peace offering I will refund your money and give you your 2 units/Avengers free of charge please help me to get some of this negativity removed or at least my personal name although its already all over the internet and the calls and emails will not stop but any help will be appreciated especially with penny arcade as Mike and edit his own website I owe him an apology too which I will write next.

Update 2: Gabe over at Penny Arcade has posted what is likely to be the last of the emails between Paul from Ocean Marketing and himself. There is an apology in there, but as Gabe points out, “there is a big difference between being sorry and being sorry you got caught.”

Update 3: Check out the official word from N-Control here (Spoiler! $10 off on pre-orders)

Over a million players log on to play Modern Warfare 3 every day. I play it, I’ve reviewed the game, and I love getting on the game and playing Team Deathmatch with my friends. But if you go through any of the game’s many forums lying around the internet, such as this one, you’ll see a rising issue among the multiplayer community out there: spawn killing/spawn camping.

For those of you who don’t know, spawn killing occurs when the enemy team finds your team’s spawn point on a map and camp, killing players with ease as they spawn. This has been an issue with other Call of Duty titles, but with the introduction of Modern Warfare 3 these types of issues have been showing up more and more often. Even the most experienced player can fall victim to spawn killing, and it’s easily one of the most frequent reasons for rage quitting that anything else.

One of the main issues and reasons for why spawn killing occurs in the game in the first place is how spawning itself works. In previous games, they allowed the player to spawn in different places all over the map. In Modern Warfare 3 this is taken away. Players will only spawn in certain areas, leaving the door wide open for enemy players to move in and camp the spawn area. Well-timed grenade tosses, full clips, and timed shots can result in multiple kill streaks, and numerous kills at a time. You can see this in action below, as the player in the video picks up a 76 killstreak in just one minute using this tactic.

This is a huge problem, and it’s even causing some players to stop playing the game all together. I’ve fallen victim to this myself, and it’s made me want to stop numerous times. In fact, I’ve not picked up the game in weeks. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but I really feel like Activision needs to fix this problem before it runs out of control. There’s talk on the forums that some servers have moderators that kick players if they’re caught using this tactic, but I’ve not run into it personally. That being said, have any of you ran into this problem? Are you a player who uses this tactic? Is spawn killing ruining the game? Tell us what you think.