Photo-Receptor Focus on: The Clicking Game
By Maer
Another fun and successful event has come and gone in the Star Wars universe. It drew many players back into the game, at least for the event itself. I spent hours doing the various quests and finding little boxes to open, as I collected enough tokens to purchase those items I had to have. Yet, as much as I loved the event, there are some lessons that Bioware could learn and apply to the next event. First and foremost is the Clicking Game.
More after the jump…
The most important thing I hope Bioware takes from this outing has to do with clicking items to get your quests done. Now that we have giant servers with lots of other people, this was quite simply a nightmare at times. One of my guildies dubbed it the “Clicking Game” and he pegged that one right. I mean, really, Bioware?
Sometimes, it took people as long as an hour to complete one quest on Day 1. OK, so you can sarcastically say, “Then don’t do events on Day 1”. Yeah, um thanks for that, but no. I don’t think that’s the answer. Of course, we want to participate on Day 1. Some of us are starved for new content and events feed that hunger.
However, having to deal with the rude players, ninjas and pranksters can be teeth-grindingly irritating. Too many people trying to click on one item at a time and that will only work for one player/group at a time is a disaster. The laser puzzle and the little droid you followed were the worst ones to deal with. Although the race was no picnic, either.
People would deliberately click on the panel for the laser and the group doing the quest would be completely messed up. Or some rude joker would run into the room and completely ignore the fact that the room was full, others were waiting patiently for their turn and he would immediately jump in. Needless to say, this was frustrating to those who’d been there for upwards of twenty to thirty minutes. And it would mess up the sequence someone had just set up. That happened to me and a friend and we were not happy campers having to start all over.
Another very unfun thing happened with the droid. People would wait until the little droid died and you were busy killing the mobs. They would then repair your droid while you were busy and off they would go to collect the mask. Ninja strikes were common.
Now, most of these problems would not be issues at all if we lived in a perfect, polite society. Unfortunately, it’s rather naive of Bioware to assume that everyone is going to be polite. Believe me, if there’s a way for someone to be a jerk, there’s going to be someone just dying to fill that role. Usually lots of someone’s.
So, Bioware needs to face the fact that Clicking Game does not work and stop using it. The Clicking Game irritates the players who do patiently wait their turn. There’s always going to be someone who delights in messing with the status quo. Bioware has other options available, including instancing, and I hope in future they don’t force their nice players to have to put up with the rude ones.
I’ll talk about the other lessons I’d like to see Bioware take form this next week.
For now, that’s my two credits. What’s yours?
Ready…set…discuss…
The rarity of vandrayk pieces in boxes was also a major problem, I spent two hours farming boxes for a miserable 6 pieces and it was not fun in the least. Compounded by the first few days by people flooding the servers hunting items with that 10 minute respawn, 4 hours was spent the first day on box hunt.
I guess I’m fortunate in that I was able to get most of these done with a minimum of trouble. My strategy was to go to the location, type “/s Anyone for a group?”, to which nobody would respond. Then I simply blind-invited anyone standing around not actively doing the quest. I waited a minute for people to join or not and then spam-clicked whatever item started the quest. This might be not nice, but it was effective, and I DID give the other players a chance to join me. 🙂
Anyhow, I agree that these sorts of quests would be well-served by instancing in the future. I can only guess that this wasn’t done due to budgetary concerns, since even adding a room to the zone would involve more teams (modelling and level design for instance).
I personally wasn’t particularly happy with the rewards. The master-crafted barrels were nice, but the rest of it wasn’t my cup of tea. Others will hopefully get more mileage out of the sandmuppet suit (wait until you see one of these guys speak in a flashpoint dialogue and you’ll see what I mean) and the pet.
Other than that, it seems that MMOs are counter-intuitively ill-suited to scavenger hunts. I don’t see a way it can be designed that it won’t have all the solutions on a website the day it goes live. I would have thought it would be the perfect venue, but the community has proven that to be false.
Anyhow, I thought it was a good effort, probably more fun for people other than myself, but certainly not that bad.