A few years back I wrote a little guide on the best way to approach Steam Sales and how to navigate the bewildering array of sale types to get the best deal. It was a popular post, and still occasionally gets pingbacks whenever a new Steam Sale kicks off. It is also, alas, woefully out of date. The Steam of four years ago was a very different place to the Steam of today (there were far fewer anime dating sims, for one thing) and much of the advice contained within my guide is no longer relevant. With that in mind, and considering I missed last Monday’s review, I thought I’d spend half an hour or so writing a new one.

Fortunately this time around it’s much simpler, because Steam is much simpler. Valve doesn’t do timed/flash/daily sales with extra discounts any more, presumably because the number of games has swelled to the point where focusing the profit on a lucky few titles was actually losing them money elsewhere. I’m sure the fact that obsessives like me had figured out their rules and had been gaming the system for a while also factored into that decision. Regardless of the reason, though, today’s Steam sales apply just one level of discount to each participating game, and that’s the discount that applies throughout the lifetime of the sale. If you’re basing it purely on price, this makes the buy/not-buy decision very easy: you can check the sale on the first day and either the discount is worth it or it isn’t, with no other factors muddying the waters.

However. I’ve been a more-or-less willing participant in Steam sales for nearly a decade now, and in recent years especially I’ve come to realise that there’s a commodity far more precious than money involved here: my free time. I’m sure most Steam users have dozens of games that they’ve bought on sale but have barely (or never) played. I have over two hundred. This has always been a problem, but never so much as it is now: the PC games market of 2016 is arguably oversaturated with releases from both AAA and indie developers and everything in between, and even when you take the anime dating sims out of the equation the tiny percentage of these titles that are genuinely worth my time still collectively add up to far more than my actual quantity of free time. The current motivation you have to play something is also an important factor here; too many times in the past I’ve not been in the mood for something right now but picked it up anyway with the intention of playing it a week or a month down the line, only for it to languish in my list of unplayed games years later. There’s just too many good games and it isn’t possible to play them all, to the point where I’d argue that the first rule of Steam sales isn’t anything to do with money, but is actually this:

 1)  Don’t buy anything you’re not going to play within the next couple of days at most, and certainly NEVER buy a game “for later”.

Steam sales are cyclical. The summer and winter sales happen like clockwork every year and show no signs of ever going away. Steam also still does weekend sales for high-profile titles and midweek sales for midrange titles, and the discounts on these are just as good as you’ll find in one of their big sale events. This ensures that the thing you’re interested in will be on sale again in the future, and it’ll likely be cheaper too. If you’re not going to play that game right now you can probably afford to wait the 3 to 6 months it’ll take for it to come up again. I can guarantee you’ll save far more money following this rule than you will gaming the Steam sales any other way.

A legitimate objection to this approach is that I just made the argument that your free time is precious, but what I just suggested basically relies on you checking the Steam store every day. Or it would if we lived in the bad old days; fortunately the Steam of today is pretty smart about trying to separate you from your money any way it can, which brings me to the second rule of Steam sales.

2) Use Steam’s wishlist to keep track of games you’re interested in.

Steam’s wishlist is ostensibly a way for friends to see which games you want and potentially gift them to you if they’re feeling particularly generous. It works fine for this, but the real value of the wishlist is that whenever anything on it goes on sale Steam will let you know by sending you an email. This ensures that you don’t have to faff about checking the store daily – be warned, though, that you won’t get these emails when a big sale event kicks off, presumably because you’d end up being spammed with dozens of them depending on how much stuff is on the wishlist.

The wishlist is also useful for preventing any interesting games you find from being lost in the raging torrent of anime dating sims. Steam might be the only online storefront in the world that is actually worse than Amazon for general browsing purposes, so this is an important function.

3) Beware of seemingly-big discounts on expensive games.

I have some sad news: after nearly two decades of inflation-proof RRPs the sticker price on AAA PC releases is finally going up. It’s rare you’ll find one selling on release for less than £40 these days. Still, there are savings to be had despite this; if you do find yourself buying an AAA PC title on release my advice is to actually not do that directly through Steam. It used to be a really good idea to check Amazon for box copies that usually came with a tenner or so knocked off the RRP; since they were usually integrated with Steam anyway you lost nothing by doing this. Unfortunately — barring Collector’s Editions and the like — physical copies of PC games are a dying breed, making Amazon less reliable for savings these days (it’s still worth checking though). Recently the best approach I’ve found for buying Steam games on release has been to do it through Green Man Gaming, who let you buy one game for 20% off each month via a rotating discount code, and if that game is integrated with Steam they’ll usually offer a Steam code — do pay attention to that last point, though, as you might end up with a code for Origin or Uplay instead, and while competition has forced them into being far better systems than they were in the past I appreciate they’re still carrying around a bit of a stigma. As for GMG themselves I’ve bought 20-odd games from them over the last four years with no problems whatsoever, so they’re pretty reliable as far as I’m concerned.

But this is a post about Steam sales, and the point I wanted to make here is that while the RRP on release has gone up, it doesn’t stay up for very long. Unless you’re talking about Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto there’s a very high chance that the RRP will have been slashed down to £30 or less within six months of release. That 25% saving on a £40 game might look attractive now, but bear in mind that you’re still paying £30 and it’ll likely be cheaper very soon. The RRP is actually more likely to go down than the discount level these days, in fact, which brings me to rule 4.

4) Discount bands aren’t quite as generous as they used to be.

A natural consequence of Steam abolishing daily and flash sales is that game prices don’t have to be cut quite so much to participate. You’ll still see 75% off a lot of things, especially older games or package deals, but 80/90% off is mostly reserved for games that a developer or publisher is trying to squeeze a few last pennies out of. 66% is now a “decent” level of discount, and even 50% is reasonable, especially if the RRP is set at a sane level rather than an artificially inflated one (see rule 3 above). Basically, don’t be too picky about holding out for a deeper discount later as you’ll probably be waiting a while. This forms a positive version of rule 1: if you do want to play the game right now and you’re reasonably happy with its price tag, then don’t faff about and just buy the game now. It’ll be worth the few extra pounds you’d otherwise be saving by waiting, and that goes for things with inflated price tags too. At the end of the day a game is worth exactly the amount you are willing to pay for it, and even £40 is a fine price for a game if you know what you’re getting into and are sure you’ll get a decent amount of enjoyment out of it. In my case I wouldn’t consider paying that much for anything I wasn’t going to get at least 15-20 hours out of, but as long as that’s the case I’ll hand over the money without suffering from even the slightest hint of buyer’s remorse.

I guess the gist of this post is: don’t worry about gaming the sales. If your objective is to simply buy games that you will enjoy playing then it just isn’t necessary any more. Everyone mentally separates things into “Buy on release” and “Buy on sale”, but for anything in the latter category it’s your gut feeling that’ll help you out more than anything else. Anyway, your free time is far too precious to waste playing games that were cheap when you could have been playing games that were fun. Ideally you’ll be playing something that’s both — even if it’s an anime dating sim — but aside from using the Wishlist there’s very little effort involved in achieving that overlap – because it’s largely out of your hands now. That’s modern Steam sales for you.

The post Steam Sales, Again appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Yes, I own one. No, it’s not very good.

A few months back I moved into a new flat and, somewhat buoyed by the novelty of having free space of my own to play with for the first time, immediately bought an XBox One¹ and a gigantic television to play it on. This console generation being slightly awful, however (and no I don’t think I bought into the wrong ecosystem; as far as I’m concerned the pickings are even slimmer on the PS4) I soon ran out of interesting-looking games to play and started to cast around for other ways I could use these expensive technological wonders. Fortunately it was around about this time that Valve announced a release date for their much-vaunted Steam Link and Steam Controller. Perfect, I thought, I’ll pick those up and instead of being restricted to the six games I’ve bought for the Xbox I can play any one of the six hundred games in my Steam account on my nice shiny new television.

I must admit I bought into the hype a little bit here. Every single preview of the Steam Link streaming technology I read had been overwhelmingly positive; I’m usually quite suspicious since I’ve seen countless high-tech boondoggles that test perfectly in a controlled environment implode when introduced to the messy and imprecise real world, but for some reason I thought Valve could really nail this thing. Certainly I had more faith in the Steam Link than I did the Steam Controller, which is a horrible plasticky piece of kit that remains in its box, unused, over four months later². And to be fair to it, taken in isolation as a thing that sits behind your television and streams in-game video from your PC, I wouldn’t call the Steam Link all that bad. The problem is the that the tech stack sitting behind the Steam Link is incredibly immature and really not up to providing the painless, seamless experience that I’ve come to expect from living room videogaming.

Let’s go over it in detail. That tech stack consists of:

• The Steam Link itself. This is a small box about the size of a wallet with two USB ports, an HDMI port and an ethernet port. The HDMI goes to the television and the ethernet goes to your home network; in theory the Link has wi-fi capability but in practice this is so overwhelmingly shit that you’ll never use it. Only a hardwired ethernet connection can provide the network bandwidth for this thing to work even passably well. The USB ports are for wired controllers or – in my case – a wireless dongle for Xbox 360 controllers, which worked flawlessly when plugged in. It also has integrated wireless for the Steam Controller but honestly who is going to use that thing.
• My computer, consisting of a hodge-podge of parts that are variously between one and four years old. (The case is a whopping 12 years old, but that doesn’t count.) The components are all midrange quality targeting the sweet spot of price-to-performance. In other words it’s about the average gaming PC you’d expect any reasonably dedicated gamer who didn’t fall into the “enthusiast” (i.e. insane) bracket to own. It’s handled every single game I’ve played in the last year on High or Very High graphics settings without complaint.
• Steam Big Picture mode, which the  PC will automatically switch to once it detects that it’s streaming video. It’s not a very good interface, but you can at least navigate to and launch the games in it. Sometimes. If it feels like letting you.
• Steam streaming. You don’t need a Steam Link to stream Steam games to your television; you can do it with a regular media PC too, which is what the Steam Link is a cheap stand-in for. Steam video streaming is a separate technology from the Link, which is unfortunate because it’s the real weak link in the chain.

The problem here is that encoding video in 1080p on the fly is quite a demanding thing for a computer to do. If it’s doing something else demanding at the time – such as, say, rendering a complex 3D environment with high graphical fidelity — then you’re almost certainly going to encounter performance bottlenecks. To my thinking Steam’s video streaming capabilities need to encode the video with as little overhead as possible if it’s ever going to be more than an occasional curio as you cannot expect the end user to be running a £1,500 behemoth of a machine that can cope with doing both at the same time. Unfortunately based on the testing I did it really isn’t there yet. I tried the Steam Link with a fairly wide range of games, and the results were very disappointing.

• Spelunky and Crypt of the Necrodancer are not particularly high-tech in terms of their visuals; nevertheless they still experienced intermittent video lag. However the thing that made them really unplayable was the input lag, which was a very noticeable fraction of a second while the control signals bounced back between the Link and my computer. It made it impossible to time moves in either game. And don’t talk to me about Pinball Arcade.
• I couldn’t even get past the intro sequence in Just Cause 3 because there was so much judder. I’m not going to blame Steam streaming or the Link for this one because Just Cause 3 was a pretty bad port and had performance problems just running stock on my PC until I got some new Nvidia drivers and looked up some workarounds for other issues online. However it does demonstrate that if it’s a technically demanding game that’s pushing your computer then you have no chance of streaming it to the television.
• The Witness almost ran well, but unfortunately about five minutes after I booted it up I started getting rendering pauses for about one second out of every ten, which was annoying enough to put me off continuing with it on the Link.
• Assassin’s Creed Unity just ran awfully with a whole host of rendering and framerate issues. Ditto Syndicate.
• There was one single current-gen game I tried that actually didn’t run too badly: Fallout 4 streamed well enough to be 100% playable, although its sweeping open world vistas were rendered a little muddy by the video encoding. I eventually switched to the PC because I prefer mouse aiming in FPSes, but there were no technical issues stopping me from continuing on the Link.

Still, it wasn’t all bad news.

• It’s pretty telling that the best performance I got out of it was when playing older — or at least last generation — titles. I went through all of Assassin’s Creed Rogue on the Link and it ran entirely acceptably in 1080p resolution, allowing me to see how the Link should be performing. There are the shortcomings you’d expect from watching a video of a game being displayed rather than the game itself; even at 1080p there were visible artifacts in the video, and it had a lot of difficulty doing dark areas as video never copes well with black colours. There was also input lag here, however it was barely noticeable and — thanks to the sort of game Assassin’s Creed is — didn’t impact my enjoyment of the gameplay at all.
• I saw the same problems in Dragon’s Dogma, but here I eventually stopped playing after ten hours partly because Dragon’s Dogma is a very dark game and I was sick of not being able to see anything because the video encoding couldn’t deal with it. It was entirely playable otherwise though.
• Finally, from the fifteen minutes I played of The Talos Principle it seems like a game ideally suited to the Link: a slow paced puzzler where quick reactions and rapid camera movement are not necessary and it has the time to render properly.

So my view on Steam’s streaming capabilities is pretty clear: it works for older games that don’t require split-second reaction times, but if you want to play anything pretty on your 40 inch television you’re going to need one hell of a beefy PC powering it. If you don’t you can pretty much forget streaming the latest and greatest console hits, and given that this is the reason I bought the Link I can’t help but be rather disappointed in the way it has turned out. Even if I had such a machine there would still be the inevitable issues that all Steam streaming does – all it can do, reasonably — is mirror what’s being displayed on your desktop monitor. If anything else decides it wants to seize control of the display (such as that really annoying Do You Want To Switch To A Basic Colourscheme popup) then there’s nothing Steam can do to stop it and it’ll necessitate a trip to the PC to sort it out. Big Picture mode does not react gracefully if a game fires a third-party wrapper such as uPlay, and it really doesn’t react gracefully if the user is ever asked for text input; I spent the first couple of minutes with Fallout 4 running back and forth between the living room and my room so that I could set up my player profile with a keyboard as the controller text input mechanism simply didn’t work.

Basically what I’m saying here is that the Steam Link is not a cheap or convenient alternative to a console for living room gaming, which is something of a problem for the Link because this is what it’s marketed as being. Console games are known for looking great on a television and for being plug and play with a minimum of faff³, but Steam streaming provides neither. You can get stuff to work acceptably well with it, particularly if it’s an older game and you’re willing to spend some time cajoling it into working before settling in for a gaming session, but the Steam Link, Steam streaming and Steam Big Picture mode don’t eliminate any of the typical problems you’d encounter when playing a PC game. They just mean that you have to walk into another room to fix them now. If this is Valve’s assault on the living room then I don’t think Microsoft or Sony have anything to worry about just yet as it comes across as a half-baked technology at best. Perhaps in five years it’ll amount to something useful, but I’m not holding my breath.

The post Thoughts: The Steam Link appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Back in October I wrote a little piece about my first impressions of the Dota 2 beta. This was based on around a dozen hours of play – the equivalent of dipping my toe into an ocean that went all the way down to the abyssal deeps – and at the time none of the teaching functionality such as “tutorials” and “actually telling people how they’re supposed to play the game” had been introduced, and so the only way to learn how to play it was through repeated failure and/or the painstaking help of others. Most people, when they are put in a situation where e.g. a burly man repeatedly punches them in the face, are going to naturally have a reaction along the lines of “I don’t like being punched in the face” and remove themselves from that situation, which is why those first impressions were broadly negative. However, if you’re crazy enough to stick around, eventually you are going to become really good at not being punched in the face.

This is what has happened with Dota. Nearly everything I wrote back in October is still true; they’ve since put in some tutorials that teach basic game concepts, but if you ask me they’re woefully inadequate at preparing people for online matches with other people. The game is still as unforgiving as it ever was. If you tough that learning period out, though, if you have friends willing to coach you through it or just have an inhuman mental resistance to the psychological trauma of crushing defeat, then the game gradually morphs from a brutal, near-sadistic ordeal into something that’s almost beautiful in its complexity and balance. You need to understand what’s going on before you can really appreciate Dota for what it is. It’s not a game for everyone and it still has a ridiculously high barrier to entry, but now that it has passed across the nominal line separating “three-year beta” from “released product” I thought it’d be a good idea to revisit it in the light of my increased experience and perhaps provide a little bit of balance to that first impressions post. That post explains why you shouldn’t play Dota. This post, hopefully, will explain why you should. Or at least why I do.

For this review I have drafted in my old review-crafting partner, Jim. Jim has accompanied me on most of my journey from Dota novice to experienced Dota novice, and even wrote his own first impressions post at around the same time as I did. Say hello, Jim.

Jim: emerges from hidden compartment, waves at crowd Hello!

Hentzau: So Jim, get us started by summarising Dota in 100 words or less.

Jim: Dota is the most serious game alive. You may think that you can bumble about as red dinosaur wizard but, my friend, where are your wards? Why are you stealing my last hits? WHY DID YOU NOT CALL MISSING??? Dota, basically, is about anger management.

Hentzau:  Yes, as somebody with an overabundance of anger I can attest to this. I used to get really, really annoyed at people in competitive multiplayer games. Left 4 Dead sessions with me were nothing but a constant stream of swear words punctuated by the odd tense silence. Dota, though; Dota has forced me to take a calmer, more controlled approach to things. In my case it was that or drop dead from apopleptic fury, such is the power of this game to tickle that primal, atavistic part of your brain that civilized society was meant to have firmly put under lock and key. But in Dota it’s more than that. Dota is a team game, far more than any other game I’ve ever played, and getting angry isn’t just unpleasant, it’s outright counterproductive. Games of Dota are mental duels between you and your opponents as much as — possibly more so — than anything else, and as soon as one team psychologically collapses into infighting and mutual recrimination then the other has as good as won.

Jim: I feel like we’re not really selling this yet. This is more an argument for why our computer access should be permanently removed.

Hentzau: I think this entire blog is pretty good evidence for that, to be honest.

Jim: Hoooooo. So I’m going to be positive instead. I think it’s a really neat trick for the game to be honed enough that these random battles we fight with horrible people, they seem like mighty, intense duels that you care about. Why is that?

Hentzau: I think it’s because despite the hundred heroes available for play, and despite the two hundred plus items you can buy for them, the basic aspects of Dota — the things without which you will not win, no matter how hard you counterpick — are the elemental things that you find in every other competitive game on the market, except turned up to eleven. Things like positioning. Coordination. Reconnaissance. Map awareness. Resource management.

Jim: Shouting.

Hentzau: And yes, a fair amount of shouting. I should probably stress here that I almost never play Dota without an organised team of five communicating over a Teamspeak channel. I feel this is the way to get the most out of the game

Jim: I have been known to dip my toe into dual-queueing but yeah, the idea of only playing with the great unwashed fills me with fear. Anyway, these aspects.

Hentzau: It’s all basic stuff, but the primary one, the one that I think gives Dota its whole contest-of-titans feel, is  the teamwork. In other games I’ve played it’s possible for one person to win a game singlehandedly, simply because their individual skill with the game is so high. That just doesn’t happen in Dota. Sure, that pro player might come out of the jungle at the 30 minute mark farmed to the hilt with a three-level advantage and proceed to lay waste to the enemy team, but he would never have managed to get that far without the rest of the team making the space necessary for it to happen. You might rely on a good player to carry you at the start of the game, or in the middle of the game, or at the end of the game, but you can’t rely on them to carry you for all of it. Everyone has to make a contribution in order for the team to win, and that creates an us-versus-them bond that is thicker than any bodily fluid you care to name.

Jim: It’s very good at involving you in the metagame, too. I’ve never played a game that goes this out of its way to tell me who the best team in the world is, or encourages you to go watch them, or gives you little collectible stickers of their slightly miserable badly-haircutted faces. Okay maybe that last one is less of an incentive. But there is this burgeoning, miasmic cloud of “culture” directly attached to Dota 2 that is designed to keep you involved and learning.

Hentzau: Yeah, I might have dropped the game by now if it wasn’t ever-evolving, and if the professional matches that are woven into Dota’s intrinsic fabric weren’t around it’d be impossible to keep up with the shifting metagame. Heroes who were once dismissed as awful or fiddly suddenly click into place when used in a particular way, and items that I couldn’t see the point of before are unexpectedly picked up by a pro team and end up producing a devastating effect in a tournament game. This all filters down through Dota “culture” from the pro players, down through the spectated games, streaming channels and online forums, to regular chumps like myself. I hear about these metagame changes and it inspires me to try a new hero, or play in a different way with an old one. And because there’s so many heroes in the game there’s every chance this will continue for a good few years to come.

Jim: And, of course, your opponents are going through that same process themselves, so the sides you are arrayed against are constantly shifting and changing like the fashions in a shop window during a time travel sequence. That’s not to say the idea of a metagame was invented here, of course, I know if I searched hard enough I could have got exactly as much “culture” from, for example, Civilization. But it’s that direct fusing into the UI that makes it interesting. Another example of that is with the guides, of course.

Hentzau: Yes, this is the part of Dota’s learning functionality that actually works quite well: when you play an unfamiliar hero you can now load up a player-written guide that will give you recommended skill builds and item loadouts and tooltips telling you how to use everything. Because there’s often several different ways to play a single hero picking the right guide can often be tricky, but once it’s loaded up it’ll keep you from making any stupid mistakes — and because they’re player-created and they’re constantly being updated, the newest ones will reflect the current state of the metagame. It’s this weird informational osmosis; Dota is awful at directly telling you what you should be doing, but once you’re hooked in makes it very easy to keep up with current trends.

Jim: We’re still reluctant to talk about the actual game, aren’t we? All that side stuff is nice but it’s just the information bap for the game burger. What is your best moment in dota in the last month? And why was it awesome?

Hentzau: Jesus, Jim, I can’t remember that far back. I’ll have to go and look at Dotabuff.

Jim: Which, incidentally, is another example of that excellent metagame, you tricky swine.

Hentzau: For sheer hilarity you can’t beat the first time I played Brewmaster in a single draft game (where you’re only given a random selection of three heroes to choose from) and was forced to go mid lane. Going mid lane is a big role in Dota; you get more experience and money than everyone else if you go mid, but your teammates will then rely on you to use that advantage to run to their lane and kill the comparatively-underlevelled enemy heroes there. Your opponents will also send somebody mid, of course, so another part of it is squashing their experience and gold farm as much as possible so that they can’t dash off to gank before you do. It’s a huge responsibility, and giving me the burly Brewmaster to do it with was extra-bad because I am actually the most cowardly Dota player in existence. Any hero that actually requires me to run up and hit people usually ends horribly, so I was quite surprised to find that I not only didn’t screw things up at mid, I actually killed the enemy Invoker after my repeated running away every time he moved forward lured him into a false sense of security. My turning around mid-flee and clobbering him in the face with my beer barrel must have been the Dota equivalent of being savaged by a chicken. One kill isn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but I managed to at least turn that temporary advantage into a couple of successful ganks at top lane and give my teammates a bigger advantage.  Again, it’s all about the teamwork; I did well at mid but I couldn’t have won the entire game on my own no matter how hard I tried, so I had to find some way of parlaying that into something that the team could benefit from. It’s rare that it comes across in such black-and-white terms, but it pretty much sums up Dota for me.

Jim: I think the ones I best remember are the breathless back-and-forth struggles. A game is generally over, or all-but-over, by 30-40 minutes but one we played last week took a sodding hour and a half. Past a certain amount of time, all caution and strategy gives way to panic and hysteria. Oaths were screeched, ridiculously flamboyant collections of items were acquired and we decided that we needed to pull out the nuclear option. The Divine Rapier. The most powerful weapon in the game, but also the only one that just drops on the ground when you die. So there we were, pushing deep into the base, just about to win when – shock – the rapier carrier gets nobbled. And now the enemy are doing the exact same thing, pushing right up to our ancient with their stolen rapier. We’d resigned to a loss, until a couple of lucky hits knocks *that* guy over and who should stumble upon this fallen monstrous god item but the weakest, crappiest support character in the game.

Hentzau: Cue screams of “Pick it up! Pick it up!” because there’s an enemy player still lurking in the base and you desperately don’t want him to grab it, only to realise that once the support player had it he couldn’t trade it back to a player who could actually do something with it.

Jim: So the game morphed into this VIP extraction mission where we had to keep this fragile guy out of harm’s way while still pushing back the tide into their base. The support, feeling much like this sloth, is just running around making excited noises about being so powerful. Curses were uttered, everyone on teamspeak was yelling contradictory instructions and, well, we kept him alive long enough to complete the win. Mission accomplished. Now while that is an extreme case, that for me illustrated the amount of emergent options that appear during a game. With hundreds of heroes, items and spells, two matches are never going to be the same, and that’s why I love it.

Hentzau: The thing is, though, if you had lost that game rather than won it, would it occupy such a fond space in your memory? Or would it just be the time that NAME REDACTED threw the game by trying to take on the entire enemy team single-handedly and giving them his rapier?

Jim: It does straddle a fine line, certainly. And as much as I want to say I’m not solely motivated by victory, I think that’s the biggest flaw of dota still as an experience. Losing can be disheartening and, because of that intensity we praised earlier, because you’ve invested about an hour of your life, it can hurt more than in most games.

Hentzau: I’ll be honest, for someone as competitive as I am I’m surprised that I enjoy the close losses almost as much as the wins. Losing’s never great, but as long as I feel that everyone played as well as they could and that we put up a good fight I can let it go. It’s the one-sided stomps I hate, where the hero selection has gone wrong or a certain lane is lost repeatedly or everyone just seems to be having an off day and is making really basic mistakes as a consequence. The ones where it is incontrovertibly your fault that you’re losing. It’s hard to keep your cool when that’s happening, but I’ve seen enough games that I thought were dead and buried be turned around into near-miraculous wins simply because we refused to give up and always kept trying that — like I said at the start — it’s done wonders for my general outlook on life. Because what Dota is about, at the end of the day, is resilience. Having the mental fortitude to put up with the game long enough to learn how to play it well, and then keeping both your and your team’s spirits up in the face of great adversity long enough to see what can be an hour-plus contest of skill and wits end with the fiery collapse of an Ancient. Preferably theirs.

Do you see yourself playing this game for years to come, Jim? I know you’ve got something like a million hours invested in Team Fortress 2, but how much longevity do you think Dota will have? And why?

Jim: Valve have certainly got the long-term in mind, here, what with the continuous development, the store, the workshop, all that. It’s clearly settling down for a long stay, and so the game itself is going to lumber on, in some form or another, until everyone loses interest in MOBAs, and I have no way of knowing what’s going to supplant them as the game of the moment for the nerd on the go. How long will I keep playing? God knows, but if TF2 is a good model, I suspect it will be for as long as they are releasing new content and I can gather five hardy souls together.

Hentzau: It’s interesting, really, that Dota has existed for about ten years now, garnering ever-increasing amounts of interest as time has gone on, but I always perceived it as that weird mod for Warcraft III that everyone kept going on about for some reason. With Dota 2 Valve are making a serious push at taking it mainstream, one that they’re putting their full weight behind, and while stuff like the esports infrastructure and the in-game store may seem ridiculous to anyone who hasn’t played it it’s an essential part of what Dota is, right now, and an essential part of growing the genre out of its niche.

Jim: Look, the minute I pay a single penny for this game I’ve played for nine months, that’s when I quit.

Hentzau: Whereas I just bought a cat courier because I had 360 hours in Dota and I felt Valve should get a little bit more of my money in exchange for the service they provide me. It’s already lasted longer than L4D did, and might actually match Counterstrike in terms of the total amount of my free time it sucks up – and I played Counterstrike when I didn’t have a full-time job to hold down, too. I feel it really does have the legs to go another decade as long as development remains active, and that as large as the playerbase is right now it could really explode if Valve play their cards right. As old as it is, Dota is something that still has a lot of untapped potential, and exploring that is going to take PC gaming to new and interesting places. I actually can’t wait to see what Valve do with it over the next year or two.

The post Thoughts: Dota 2. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I’m a little bit wary of adding to the hundreds of posts, articles, forum threads and news sites dedicated to the fine art of Dota; it’s hardly a subject that needs more words written about it when there are so many that already exist that could probably do the job just as well. I’ve played Dota for a grand total of eleven hours (this is nothing) and so this ain’t going to be a detailed analysis of Dota’s gameplay by any means, and if you want one of those you should visit one of the other gaming sites. Before I got into the Dota 2 beta, though, I noticed two interesting things about it:

1)      Everyone who has played Dota rapidly undergoes this weird sort of mental break and starts communicating in a bizarre moon language that renders them unintelligible to anyone who isn’t a fellow Dota player.

2)      Everyone who hasn’t played Dota consequently has no idea what the fuck Dota is, except possibly that it does something to people that ensures it retains one of the most toxically unpleasant player communities on the entire internet.

So I thought it might be interesting to tackle the subject from the perspective of a Dota dilettante, before I undergo full metamorphosis and become just another part of the Wall. To start I should stress that Dota 2, the Valve-produced remake of the original Dota mod for Warcraft III, is supposed to be built from the ground up to be as friendly to new players as possible. I was – still am – a new player. I didn’t know a thing about Dota before I started save that it involved towers in some capacity. Much of the learning functionality in Dota 2 isn’t present yet thanks to its beta state, but looking at it I don’t see how you could possibly make any kind of tutorial system for Dota that would ensure a new player could play the game without being crushed repeatedly and mercilessly. It is that bad. The entire thing basically acts as an elaborate hazing ritual for new players where they have to undergo a prolonged period of abject humiliation before they’ll finally be accepted as one of the group.

(One minor positive point is that playing Dota has really brought home to me for the first time just what it is like for a non-gamer to be sat down in front of a common-or-garden FPS or RTS. They flail around pathetically, not understanding the UI or the controls or basic game concepts like “Push button to shoot gun” while anyone who is familiar with games looks on with an aghast expression on their face and wonders how somebody so stupid manages to dress themselves in the morning. If you ever see anyone mocking somebody for not knowing how to play video games I recommend you teach them a little bit of humility by sitting them down in front of Dota for a couple of sessions so that they can finally comprehend just how hard video games are if you have literally no experience with them whatsoever.)

Dota is an evolutionary offshoot of the RTS genre that got trapped on an isolated plateau in the Amazonian basin for ten years and has been evolving into its own distinct thing all throughout the last decade. Despite its shared heritage with RTSes Dota is just so alien that there’s very few touchstones present in mainstream gaming culture that a new player can use to orient themselves. The only thing I’ve experienced which is even remotely comparable is Starcraft league play¹, which requires you to learn all about the metagame relationships between different unit types before you can even think about progressing up the league tiers, but even that only has about 40-50 units grouped into three distinct factions. In terms of the knowledge base you need to play the game effectively Starcraft II is a child’s paddling pool compared to Dota. Dota is a versus matchup between two teams of five heroes each. There are eighty different hero types in Dota 2 at the moment — more are being added all the time – and an opposing team can be made up of any possible combination of those eighty heroes. Each hero has four different abilities and can carry up to six shop-bought items out of a selection of two hundred, many of which confer new abilities on the hero or even change their existing ones.

This is why new players are so totally, completely screwed when they’re starting out in Dota. Just learning what all that shit does is going to take, at minimum, about 50-100 hours by my estimate. Learning how and when to use it well is going to take far longer, and until you do your team is going to wish you were dead because bad players in Dota don’t just drag their own team down, they actively help the enemy team through a mechanic called “feeding”. The ultimate goal of the game is to batter down the enemy defences and destroy their ancient (hence Defence Of The Ancients, or Dota), but the static tower defences you start every game with are very powerful compared to a level one hero. The only way heroes are going to get strong enough to start taking down towers and gradually work their way towards your ancient is by killing stuff (or by standing nearby while stuff is killed) which gets them money and experience. There’s constant streams of weak AI units (“creeps”) being generated by each side’s base structures which are what heroes eat to make them stronger in the early game, but creeps only get you a small amount of experience and – even worse – you only get an equally small cash bounty for killing them if you personally are the one who delivers the killing blow.

So the early game consists of hitting these creeps, gathering experience and trying to get last hits in so that you can get money as well. You hang around near the back, you try not to run in and expose yourself too much, you level up a couple of times and you start to feel pretty good about yourself. “This isn’t too bad,” you think, and you start to wonder why other people find Dota so intimidating. While you’re basking in this false sense of achievement there’ll be a bunch of unintelligible coded messages being spammed in teamchat — “ss bot”, “ss mid” and so on. You have no idea what these mean but they’re fairly regular and nothing bad happened yet, so they can’t be that important, right? You’ve made it this far without slipping up. You can do this. You can do this.

And then the five-man gank squad charges out of the fog of war. Your blood turns to ice. They’re coming for you. How did they know? How did they know? You try to run, to get back to the safety of your base, but one of them throws out a giant meathook that pulls you back to the centre of their formation. Then another imprisons you in a fucking minature wood. Then they all start beating the shit out of you. Then you die. And when you die, a little message pops up saying who killed you and how much gold they looted from your horribly-mutilated still-twitching corpse. One of the few things I know about Dota is that somebody once went to the trouble of analysing one of the professional Dota tournaments that are so popular these days, and one of the things they found was that if one team got just a 10% advantage in the amount of gold they had after twelve minutes that team went on to win the game in 93% of cases. That statistic is based on the performance of professional teams but it broadly translates across into everyday matches pretty well, so never mind the experience bonus they just got for killing you, and never mind that you yourself can’t gather experience and become stronger when you’re dead and waiting to respawn; by letting them kill you early and take your gold you’ve basically just handed them the game on a silver platter. They now have an advantage that springs directly from your own personal ineptitude and inexperience, and because this is going to be just the first of many, many ignominious deaths where you say “What the fuck is he doing? I didn’t know he could do that!” you had better get used to being on the losing team for a long, long time.

This is the mechanic known as feeding. New players who die a lot feed the enemy heroes and make them stronger, and if there’s a team with a feeder player playing against a team without a feeder player than the team that doesn’t have the millstone of you hanging around their necks is going to win regularly and consistently. Your teammates will know it too, and they will hate you for it. This is why Dota is so unfriendly to new people; not only is there a huge knowledge base that new players have to absorb before they can play effectively, but you’ll be worse than useless to your teammates until you do. It doesn’t even matter that you might start to improve slowly after three or four matches of learning the basic game mechanics, because to hear them talk about it (or more accurately to hear them hurl abuse at you whenever you make a mistake) every other Dota player is the best Dota player in the world and was born knowing everything there was to know about Dota because they assimilated that fucking information while they were still in the womb.  They don’t tolerate failure. Sure, they might also die a lot, but that’s because you were feeding the enemy team the whole time, not because they were shit at all.  At times it does seem like the Dota community is 100% composed of assholes, and that’s because playing this game turns you into an asshole. I’ve even felt the first twinges of rage myself when an enemy hero on low health slipped away because my lane partner was too busy shopping to help me kill him. The community reflects the game, and the game is absurdly unfriendly in almost every single mechanical aspect that matters.

It does get to the point of parody at times, like you can’t quite believe what you’re seeing happen in front of you is real. Even adhering to normal gaming conventions can lead you to do the Dota equivalent of farting loudly at the dinner table. For example, last night I was running back through the thick woods separating the creep lanes when I spotted a teammate fighting one of the groups of neutral creeps that can be found loitering within it. I play a lot of multiplayer games, and in every single one of these games when a teammate is fighting something – doesn’t matter what it is – you help them out. Even if they can handle the situation on their own two people will deal with the problem faster than one, so it’s almost always a good idea to lend a hand for a couple of seconds. So I went over there and starting hitting the creeps, almost without thinking, only to have him start shouting at me over team voice chat about stealing “his” creeps. I was later informed by a friend that it’s apparently appalling Dota etiquette to attack a creep that somebody else is already fighting despite it making perfect logical sense to me (after all, somebody on our team is going to get that money). Even helping somebody in this game can get nasty words thrown in your face if you do it at the wrong time. It’s baffling to me, it really is.

This is what you’re letting yourself in for if you’re thinking of getting into Dota and you don’t have a decently large pool of like-minded friends you can team with who won’t get too pissed off when you inevitably fuck something up. It may be compelling and strategic and tactical but it is also impenetrable and unfriendly, and not even in the way that Dwarf Fortress in impenetrable and unfriendly. At least when you screw up in Dwarf Fortress nobody else is around to see your mistakes. When you screw up in Dwarf Fortress there’s nobody shouting “l2p nub!!!!11” into team chat every single time a dwarf dies.  And when you screw up in Dwarf Fortress you can at least spend ten minutes in a wiki learning what you did wrong and how to avoid it next time. There is nothing that will teach you how to play Dota except the bitter, bitter experience of repeated failure and death drawing the crude admonishments of your teammates. It is an awful black hole of hate and despair and humiliation, and you should avoid it at all costs lest it suck you in too.

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1. Not that other RTSes don’t also have detailed metagame elements, but in my experience they have a more leisurely pace than Starcraft II and allow a larger margin for error.

The post Don’ta Play Dota: Dota 2 Beta Impressions. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Note: I’m aware Black Mesa is a mod made by amateurs and so reviewing it to the same standard as a professionally made game may be a little unfair, but honestly I think that Black Mesa is a good enough product that if you stood it next to 90% of the games that have been released this year it would make *them* look like shit, not the other way around.

If twenty years playing video games has taught me anything it’s that it’s important to manage your expectations. Pre-release hype and marketing has always been around and will always be around, and it’s not particularly a bad thing having as many people as possible know that your game exists and is coming out soon. It’s a sales tactic that clashes badly with my policy of desperately avoiding any and all information about games I’ve already decided I’m going to buy (XCOM is especially bad for this having recently dumped an actual pre-release demo onto the internet three weeks ahead of release), but in general I can’t fault developers and publishers for doing it. It’s a good idea if you do it right. The problems only start if you continually fail to hit your release date, at which point your marketing can backfire badly by whipping people up into such a frenzied state of anticipation that not only is every subsequent failure to release the game seen as the worst kind of incompetence, but the final product can never live up to what people have built it up to be in their heads. They will inevitably be disappointed one way or the other, and that kind of thing can end up being utterly toxic for a game’s prospects; Daikatana and Duke Nukem Forever would not be remembered as two of the biggest jokes in gaming history if they hadn’t had some rather unfortunate publicity associated with them. It’s okay to release a bad game (well, it’s not okay, but it’s a forgivable sin). It’s less okay to proclaim it the Second Coming and then release a bad game.

This is why Black Mesa had a bigger problem than most games when it finally released a couple of weeks ago. It’s a remake of one of the best games ever (Half-Life) in a brand new engine (Source) that has been in development in one form or another ever since the release of Half-Life 2 back in 2004. Eight years ago. That’s eight years of expectations to fulfil and eight years of failing to produce a finished product this game has to make up for, which is a tricky thing to manage any way you look at it. It’s to Black Mesa’s immense credit that it (mostly) pulls it off.

Are you familiar with Half Life at all? I certainly am, which is why I was caught a little bit off-guard at how much the team behind Black Mesa have deviated from the holy scripture. The basic structure and key encounters in Half Life have all made it through into Black Mesa completely intact, but many of the levels differ greatly in their method. As an example, the very first level didn’t touch the tram ride at all, knowing better than to mess with possibly the most iconic moment of Half-Life, but after you push the sample into the glowy beam and everything goes dimensional rip-shaped you’re forced to make your way back up to the lab reception area with nothing more than a few flares for setting zombies on fire and a friendly (and I suspect invulnerable) guard tagging along. In the original you had the crowbar thrown at you within seconds of escaping from ground zero, whereas here you don’t get it until a good 10-15 minutes into the game.

Now, on the plus side this is very atmospheric and probably a net improvement on how Half-Life did it (which was a straight run to the surface while bopping zombies on the head) and if you were going into Black Mesa completely blind I suspect there wouldn’t be a problem with itl. Unfortunately the game going off-piste this early – and flouting several basic FPS rules while doing so – meant that I was convinced I’d done something wrong. It didn’t happen this way in Half Life and I couldn’t believe I was expected to take on numerous zombies without a permanent weapon, which is why I wasted quite a lot of time scouring the level for the crowbar I was convinced I’d missed somewhere.

This little vignette illustrates the hazards of changing Half-Life’s script. I imagine most players are going to be veterans of the original like myself, and while I found little changes in the detail refreshing I bristled at any sign that Black Mesa might be tampering with the basic elements of the game. Since the developers of Black Mesa have had to generate new material for one reason or another (new voices for female scientists, vastly expanded quantity of voice acting in general, new music because the rights for Half-Life’s still reside with Vivendi) you’d expect the game to be full of missteps like this, but I was mildly surprised to discover that the new stuff is generally of professional quality to the point where I honestly cannot tell what’s been taken from the original and what’s been inserted for the remake. The voice acting is just as good; Black Mesa has the odd duff line here and there but so did Half-Life. The music fails to match the original’s but that’s only because Half-Life’s music was incredible; the new tracks in Black Mesa at least live up to Half-Life’s tone and atmosphere and are kind enough on the ears that I don’t resent the enforced change that much. And as far as the level design goes that’s the one area where they’ve been able to do 1:1 recreations of what Half-Life had to offer. Most of the time this is what they go for, and it is just as amazing as it was fourteen years ago. The tentacle beasts, On A Rail, the Garg and assassin encounters – all of these things make it through into Black Mesa intact, and with the excellent new coat of paint provided by the updated Source engine (which is looking good for something that’s as old as Black Mesa itself) they pretty much haven’t aged. Black Mesa is proof that Half-Life would still be cutting edge if it was released today.

Mostly, anyway.

Black Mesa is not without its flaws. In fact it’s riddled with them in spite of the incredibly polished and professional job the developers have done updating Half-Life. Several of these issues spring from the fact that the developers are amateurs no matter how skilled they might be, and their inexperience with game design does show in a couple of places. Grenades¹ are a good example: there is no crosshair for throwing them and they’re a little heavier than your standard FPS grenade — which are not problems in and of themselves — but there’s also (utterly inexplicably) a small random factor attached to where exactly Gordon is going to throw it, which is not exactly what you want when you’re trying to grenade a sniper’s nest or machine gun post. Too often you throw one grenade, miss, and correct the throwing angle to what it should be, only for the random factor to kick in and the grenade to bounce off a bit of scenery and come flying back in your face. I eventually gave up and just ignored snipers rather than going through the hassle of taking them out with such an inaccurate weapon, which is generally not a player reaction you should be going for. There’s other raw bits and pieces scattered throughout Black Mesa which mostly pertain to level design and puzzles; it’s not that the new elements that have introduced are bad as such, its just they’re incredibly poorly signposted and leave the player with little idea of what they’re supposed to do next.  But I’m not sure I can hold these particular sins against the Black Mesa development team when Residue Processing is a thing that exists.

Oh god. Residue Processing is a rare case of Black Mesa’s 1:1 update of Half-Life backfiring horribly. Black Mesa’s version of Residue is (as far as I can recall) a near perfect recreation of the Residue Processing levels in the original game, and they have not aged well at all. The general design thrust behind Residue Processing can be summed up as “Let’s take away all of the player’s weapons and make them do jumping puzzles for an hour!” Wow, yes, I fucking love jumping puzzles, especially really obtuse ones inside a twisted Escher-esque network of conveyor belts and incinerators. To be fair jumping puzzles are scattered throughout the game, but they’re isolated incidents; you just do the jumping puzzle in front of you and then move on to shooting some marines in the face, and in general they do a good job of breaking up the gameplay and providing some variety. In the specific case of Residue Processing it’s nothing but jumping puzzles for over an hour, with nary an enemy to be seen in the whole thing.  I absolutely hated that hour and I was miserable throughout.

Residue Processing is very much an aberration though. Mostly Black Mesa is a faithful recreation of Half-Life, and Half-Life is a game that mostly plays just as well as it did back in 1998. There’s so many bits of Black Mesa that are stuck in my head even now, a week after playing it – the fight with the helicopter on the cliffs, the warehouse full of tripmines and explosives, the dam, the whole “Forget about Freeman!” sequence. The last fight with the assassins is probably the best and funnest FPS gun battle I’ve had in years, fighting with all my weapons against an enemy that is weak on paper but which is incredibly mobile and can take advantage of the omnipresent crates to move vertically, vaulting up and over onto gantries and walkways to fire down from above. You’d expect Half-Life’s gunplay to be dated after fourteen years of Halos and Call of Duties, but it still shines through just as strong as ever and is even refreshing in a way. If I take off my game reviewer glasses for a second and treat this as a mod, it’s utterly incredible that a modding team can put out a product of this quality no matter how long they’ve had or how skilled they are. They could have put a price tag on it and I would happily have paid £15-20 for it, which is about as much as I’m willing to pay for brand new AAA releases these days. That it’s free to anyone who owns a Source game² is more than a little bit mind-boggling³, and I really hope the people behind it get some sort of acknowledgement for the Herculean effort it must have taken them to get this thing out of the door. In some ways it’s sad that a modded update of Half-Life is one of the best games I’ll end up playing this year, but there it is. They just don’t make them like this any more, and that is a crying shame.

(And the absolute best thing about Black Mesa? It finishes just as Gordon jumps into the teleporter taking him to Xen, which is basically Residue Processing if it was textured to look like the inside of somebody’s colon. Good choice, Black Mesa developers. Good choice.)

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1. On the plus side Black Mesa gives you the option to roll your grenades along the floor instead of throwing them, which is such an incredibly good idea I’m amazed it’s taken until now for someone to put it in a game.
2. At least I think that’s the criteria for getting access to the Source SDK Black Mesa requires to run. At any rate, with the number of copies of Half-Life 2 and its associated Episodes sitting around in people’s Steam inventories it shouldn’t be too hard to get hold of a Source game if you don’t already have one.
3. In terms of the amount of work that’s gone into it, not that I actually think they should try to charge money for it and get sued by a zillion different people all at once.

The post Thoughts: Black Mesa. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Cards on the table time: I used to play the original CS mod a lot. Everyone has the game that takes over their life when they’re 15/16 years old and have way too much free time. Counter-Strike was mine. As a result this post may get more than a little bit ranty. But dammit, it’s justified.

I am not going to waste my time talking about what Counter-Strike is. The only reason you could possibly have avoided picking up at least some cursory idea of what it’s about is if you’ve somehow spent the last fifteen years trapped in amber and have only now been awakened by scientists who want to harvest your precious, precious DNA. It’s a multiplayer game where there are terrorists and counterterrorists and everyone shoots each other and has a wonderful time (in theory). Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (or CS:GO) is roughly the same game as the original mod as far as the shooting people bit is concerned; it has a somewhat faster pace that puts even more emphasis on fast reaction times and the ability to get headshots with the AK that makes me a bit sad, but it is recognisably Counter-Strike. That’s fine. If I can into get a good game of CS:GO I have a wonderful time. That’s not the problem. The problem is the number of barriers the developers (Hidden Path, responsible for the excellent Defense Grid) have put in between me and finding that one good game of CS:GO in the first place.

Barrier #1: Matchmaking and game modes.

There is a matchmaking system in CS:GO which the game heavily favours for finding servers¹. This is to be expected given its simultaneous XBLA release and it’s not inherently a bad thing; L4D had matchmaking – or at least an automated server search – and I didn’t hate that. What I do hate, and the thing that seriously makes me question what both Valve and Hidden Path were thinking with this, is the way the matchmaking bounces off the various game modes available. There are four of them, which is approximately three more than in the original CS, and they go something like this:

Arms Race. A literal abomination that should never have been loosed upon this world. It’s CS with all the tactical gameplay, clever thinking and knife-edge tension stripped out. In short, it is Counter-Strike without the things that made Counter-Strike Counter-Strike, instead rolling all of the worst parts of Counter-Strike into one mode full of two-second respawns and twitch-shooting. Arms Race is what would happen if you made a really shitty post-Quake Team Deathmatch mod for the Counter-Strike engine². The worst thing is it’s actually supposed to be like this, and I can tell because there is, no joking, an actual achievement you can get for spawn-camping the enemy start zone. People are supposed to enjoy this. People are supposed to enjoy this. I just can’t get my head around it.

Demolition. Slightly better because it keeps the weapon progression system of Arms Race while stripping out all of the stupid crap: everyone gets one life and there are objectives like plant/defuse the bomb. It at least has a justification for being in the game even if I personally would never play it because of the existence of…

Classic mode. There are actually two of these, Casual and Competitive, and I’ll get into just why this split was a monumentally dumb thing to do in just a second,  but this is the closest thing to the Counter-Strike an old player of the game will know and love, with buy menus and bombs and hostages and so on. Consequently it’s the thing that I’m trying to spend my time in game playing. Unfortunately I keep running up against barrier #2.

Barrier #2: The five player team limit.

While custom servers can have pretty much any number of players per team that they want, the original CS settled on eight players per team as the default. So did CS Source.  CS:GO plumps for reducing that number of players to five for Classic Competitive mode, however. I don’t like this. I think it’s the single biggest act of sabotage against the CS formula present in CS:GO because I can take or leave all the other stuff, but I have this five player limit practically forced on me if I want to play Counter-Strike as I recognise it. It’s not just that I don’t like things that are different, either; here are just a few ways it makes it downright impossible to find a good game of Counter-Strike anywhere on the internet.

Good players distort team skill levels far more than they would otherwise. One good player on a team of eight has far less impact than one good player on a team of five. With less people around to average out the skill levels and less people on the enemy team to chew through before they get rewarded with a win, good players can pretty much just rely on their shooting skills to Rambo their way through the game – and remember, this is the game responsible for the infamous one-shot-kill AWP sniper rifle. If you’re stuck on the other team then there’s pretty much nothing you can do until the map ends and the teams reshuffle slightly, but even this may provide no relief due to the tendency of good players to be backed up by friends communicating over a private VOIP channel.

Fewer players means less player turnover. This means you are almost certain to get matchmade onto a disorganised team currently taking a beating. Nobody wants to stick around to be instakilled every game and rack up loss after loss after loss, which is understandable, but this just creates a situation where one team is constantly having its players quit to be replaced by new ones, and as a result they can never get their act together as a team. Eight players on a team provided something of a cushion against this, as the matches went on longer and the losing team could often feel like they were putting up more of a fight than they actually were, prompting people to stick around and start working together to try and improve on that performance. Certainly I can’t remember many matches in the original that were over in 32 seconds, anyway.

Finding a game as a group is nigh-impossible. Ten potential player slots in a game. A group of three players wants to join the same game, which requires the matchmaking system to find a game that is 30% empty. The rules of internet gaming dictated that they will either be stuck looking at a “searching” dialogue for ten minutes as the system tries to find them this mythical game server, or else they will be dumped onto an empty server populated entirely by bots. Admittedly once they’re in the matchmaking system then throws more people in after them, but they still have to grind out a round or two against mostly bot opposition and I don’t expect that state of affairs to last once the post-release mania dies down a bit.

There’s more, but these are the three factors that result in CS:GO being massively one-sided and unfun if you’re unlucky enough to get stuck on the wrong team. The rationale behind five players per team is that that’s the number commonly used in competitive matches between organised clan teams. There is a world of difference between an organised clan team  and a disparate group of public players, though; eight players is necessary to compensate for that skill difference, because otherwise you wind up with the situation we have now where there are groups of two or three clan players running around shredding the opposition in game after game after game. Fun for them, I’m sure; not so fun for me and my friends who are average at best.

“But Hentzau, “ I hear you cry, “that’s Classic Competitive! If you want a larger player count why not play Classic Casual?” It’s true that Casual has a ten player per team limit, which is a little on the large side but would at least be more tolerable. However, Casual mode also has baby features like free armour and defuse kits, no player collision, no friendly fire and reduced kill rewards, and it’s an all or nothing package. I want to play grown-up Counter-Strike with full-sized teams, not the kiddie version.

Barrier #3: The custom server browser.

Okay, so the combination of the matchmaking system and the game modes makes it nigh-impossible to find a satisfying game of CS:GO that way. What about finding a custom server? Surely that’s what gaming on a PC is all about? Well, I’d love to, but unfortunately CS:GO is still using the archaeological relic released with Half Life 2 back in 2004 as a server browser, and it gives you almost no useful information about the game server you’re joining other than the map and player count. Big changes will be flagged somewhere but small changes won’t, which is why I’ve joined too many servers that looked normal but which had unlimited money or banned weapons or something. Perhaps one day I’ll find a server that replicates CS circa 2001 in every way (and adds the silencer back on to the M4 to boot) but the horrible archaic server browser is putting a definite crimp on that particular search for the moment since I don’t ever know what I’m going to get without physically joining the damn things.

I should stress once again that I have found the occasional game of CS:GO that was good, and I have enjoyed these games immensely. The fundamental gameplay of Classic Competitive may be a tad faster and floatier than I’m used to, but my skills all transfer across both the jump from 1.6 to GO and the intervening decade of time okay and I still do quite well for myself. Get two balanced teams locked into a thirty round game and Counter-Strike is still one of the most engrossing multiplayer experiences out there. It’s just that the way the game is set up now is a curious collection of concessions to new players who have never even seen an FPS before mixed in with “hardcore” modes for the clanners, with no happy middle ground for players like me who just want to play classic CS without being headshotted from across the map the moment I step out of spawn. Prior to CS:GO I wouldn’t have said there was anything particularly unusual about me as a player. Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps CS players really are split into these binary camps of drooling morons and 24/7 clanners who have been playing nothing but 1.6 and Source for the last ten years. I doubt it, though, and judging from what my friends have said I’m definitely not alone in my assessment of CS:GO’s metagame elements. Poor show, Valve. Poor show.

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1. It’s kind of hilarious when you click on the “Community Servers” option and a message pops up which basically says “Are you sure you can handle the PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWER of the custom servers?”
2. Yes I know it’s based on the popular Gun Game mod for the originals. I was being ironic.

The post The Curious Case Of CS:GO. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is a story about a hat.

Thanks to its focus on hats and a real money shop in which you can buy said hats, Team Fortress 2 tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes about being the world’s premier hat simulator. With 235 hats currently in the game along with many, many variations on the theme – Strange hats, Unusual hats, Vintage hats, paintable hats – these jokes do have a seed of truth in them, for all that Valve (presumably) use the proceeds from hat sales to create massive, regular and entirely free injections of new content for the game, which itself went free-to-play a couple of years back. A lot of people dismiss TF2’s hats  as one of those weird internet phenomena that only obsessives really care about. This would be a mistake, but it’s true that a casual player of the game like myself doesn’t usually give hat trading any significant thought. However, a short while ago I happened to have my attention directed towards the hat economy purely by chance, and what I discovered absolutely fascinated me.

It all started a few months back when I got an unsolicited friend request on Steam from a user who appeared to be a complete stranger to me. We had no friends in common, no groups in common, he had no name that I recognised – there was absolutely nothing to link us in any way. I declined the request, not really wanting to deal with the sort of person who would just send out random invites to strangers, but I was nevertheless puzzled at just what would drive someone to do this. Steam isn’t like other social media; there’s no e-cred for having a zillion friends on there, and I hadn’t put enough time into TF2 to think anyone would be interested in the paltry selection of items visible in my Steam inventory.

That is, until an actual real friend of mine also got a friend request from the same user a few minutes later. Being a bit more outgoing than I am (also he may have been drunk at the time) he decided to engage the guy in conversation to find out why on earth he was pestering multiple people like this. And the answer he got back was fairly surprising: he was a TF2 trader, and he wanted Bill’s hat.

This was what first piqued my interest: that despite not putting all that much time into TF2, and despite having a rather threadbare inventory, I could still possess an item valuable enough to make somebody pelt the owners of it with random friend requests in the hopes of persuading them to part with it. That’s a lot of effort to go to for a hat.  Previously I’d thought that TF2 trading took place amongst a relatively small clique of players – just the people who actively offered and responded to trade requests in server chat, as well as those who used specialist trading websites to seek out specific items – but this was the first evidence I’d had that it might go a little bit deeper. That the hats in TF2 might have some kind of intrinsic worth that went beyond their aesthetic quality as vanity items or their completionist value as part of a collection.

Why is Bill’s hat in particular so valuable? What gives it its value? What would drive somebody to do the internet equivalent of cold-calling just so that they could acquire more Bill’s hats? To answer this I had to delve into many of the specifics of the way TF2 trading works, the TF2 item system, and the curious economy that has materialised around both.

As a very quick primer, items in TF2 can be acquired by picking them up from “drops” during play (actually a semi-random timed reward system), by crafting them through the game’s crafting system, by buying them from the in-game shop, by trading with another player for them, or by getting them as a promotional bonus for buying/pre-ordering some other game on Steam. However, not all items can be acquired through all methods. Some items cannot be traded for. Some cannot be crafted. Some do not drop during play. Certain one-off promotional items have effectively had their supply cut off, leaving a fixed number of those items in the system which will never increase or decrease. These different factors can come together to make some items very hard to get, and it’s the difficulty in acquiring the items which gives them their inherent value, as you’d expect. After all, rarer is always more valuable. Past this, though, the TF2 economy behaves in some very strange and unexpected ways.

One of the keys to the TF2 economy is, well, keys. Keys are the item underpinning nearly all of the transactions that go on in TF2’s trading backend. Keys have a fixed value since they can be bought in the in-game shop for £2. You’re supposed to use them to unlock the many, many crates that you’ll pick up as a simple consequence of playing the game for an hour or two; doing this will consume the key and reward you with a random item from a set list determined by the particular crate you’re trying to unlock. However, since they’re a tradable item which has this fixed value attached to them, the key has also become the de facto currency of TF2. You can use keys to pay for many of the more valuable items being offered up for trade on websites such as this one, and the fact that the key is such an ubiquitous medium of exchange means that it allows direct comparisons between the values of two seemingly unconnected items. The key means that TF2’s economy – which started out as a pure barter economy, remember – actually has a common monetary unit.

A second, possibly even more important element of TF2’s economy are the one-off promotional items I mentioned above. These are items which were awarded to players for participating in a time-limited event and which can no longer be acquired by any method. As a highly relevant example, 107,147 TF2 players preordered Left 4 Dead 2 on Steam prior to its release. This means 107,147 TF2 players received a Bill’s hat as a reward for preordering. Three years after L4D2’s release there are still 107,147 Bill’s hats in the game. However, because Bill’s hats cannot be created or destroyed by any means, and because they can be traded to other players, Bill’s hats have a much higher key value than other hats that are far rarer numerically but which can be created through crafting or picked up through drops. This constant expansion of the supply for such hats not only dilutes their value as they become more common, but the potential for the quantities of these hats to eventually outstrip the number of Bill’s hats in the game has been noted by the trading community and factored into their key value.

Let’s look at some numbers. There are 107,147 Bill’s hats in circulation. A Bill’s hat can currently be had for as little as eight keys, although a more common price is nine keys, or eight keys plus some refined metal (a key is currently worth 2.66 refined metal and so refined metal is used as small change. Crazy, huh?) Painted versions of Bill’s hats increase the price by one or two keys since paint has to be bought in the in-game shop and it costs a fair bit of real money. By comparison there are only 6,904 Warsworn helmets in the game, but because they are craftable and the supply is increasing the going price for a Warsworn is just three refined metal, or 1.12 keys.

It doesn’t stop there, either. Other promotional items with fixed supplies carry even higher premiums, to the point where many traders will no longer directly accept keys in exchange for them even though keys determine their value (as an analogue, imagine trying to pay for your weekly grocery shopping with a huge bucket of small change). You remember the 2010 Steam Christmas sale with the seemingly-usless coal? And that seven lumps of coal could be traded in for a special TF2 hat, the BMOC? You‘ll probably wish you’d done that now because BMOCs are worth 16-18 keys. The Earbuds — a promotional reward for TF2 players who participated in the game’s launch on Mac — are worth 25-27 keys, or three Bill’s hats. And finally there’s Max’s Severed Head, released to tie in with one of Telltale’s awful desecrations of a beloved Lucasarts property and which goes for a staggering 52 keys. Or two Earbuds. Or four BMOCs.

Now, that the supply of these items is fixed is probably not responsible for their full value in the eyes of TF2 traders. I suspect that a large part of their worth is based on the simple fact that the community as a whole perceives them as valuable, desirable items. In other words, much like modern coinage, they are valuable simply because society agrees that they are an acceptable medium for representing the value of goods and labour. However, if there was no limit on the supply of these items they would be useless in such a role. With keys the limit is provided by the real-money requirement to acquire a key in the first place as well as the fact that keys are constantly flowing out of the system as they are used to unlock crates. With these promotional items, the limit is an actual physical one on the number of items available.

Intriguingly, though, the supply of these promotional items in circulation is actually decreasing. Once people manage to trade for a Bill’s hat or a set of Earbuds they prove strangely reluctant to let it go, and so a significant quantity of traded items effectively form part of a player’s savings. Here, though, there’s a definite disconnect between the real-life economy and the virtual economy. If you save real money it will likely be stored in a bank account somewhere, but it won’t just be sitting there; the bank should, in theory, be taking your money and putting back to work in the system on their behalf while paying you a healthy rate of interest in exchange. In TF2, players hoarding items like this is more akin to stuffing your savings into a sock which you keep under your bed. It’s not exactly helpful to the economy as a whole, and the gradual decrease in supply is creating a slow upward pressure on the price of these promotional items.

One thing I was concerned about when writing this piece was that it was all very well and good trawling trading sites for the approximate current prices of TF2 items, but that all this would give me was a snapshot of the current state of the economy. It would tell me nothing about what it was like six months ago, or a year ago, or three years ago. I had no clue how the economy had changed over time. To try and rectify this I got Jim to put me in touch with Losty, a TF2 player who is fairly heavily involved in item trading. Losty told me that Earbuds have increased in price by 50% since they were introduced, while the Christmas BMOC hats were also steadily creeping up in terms of key cost. Interestingly I got the impression that Bill’s hats had suffered a somewhat smaller relative price increase compared to the other limited edition items, and I think that might be because the larger quantity of Bill’s hats in the system — when compared with Earbuds  (44,532) and BMOCs (12,453) – is cushioning the decrease in supply.

(It’s also probably worth taking a brief look at the number of keys in circulation. There’s a staggering 280,192 of them sitting in people’s inventories, but only 7,208 — or 2.6% — of those have been acquired through trading, suggesting the number of keys actually circulating through the system is comparatively small. It’s certainly a much lower percentage than the 18.6% of Bill’s hats that have been acquired through trading, and would seem to indicate that keys lend their fixed value to other items without often being involved in trades themselves. I interpret it as TF2 traders either preferring not to get real money involved in the system all that much, or just spending it on other things such as paint. It’s not really a fair comparison because keys can be bought and used up while Bills hats are static, but the quantity of keys that are being traded is still rather smaller than I was expecting.)

Of course many of the hats that can be found up for trade can also be purchased in the in-game store for a fixed sum, effectively putting a cap on their value in terms of keys. Certainly there is no hat in the store (that I could find, anyway) with anywhere near the asking price of eighteen pounds a Bill’s hat would appear to demand in equivalent key value, and this is going to act to keep the key cost of many of the mundane hats down. This is why I used a comparison hat – the Warsworn helmet – with many of the same qualities as the Bill’s and which isn’t available for sale in the store, but which is craftable and thus has a supply that isn’t fixed.

Finally there’s the story of refined metal. Refined metal is acquired through a convoluted crafting system that basically requires 18 unwanted weapons in 9 matched pairs to create one refined metal. You’ll pick up maybe one or two weapons per hour of playing TF2 – less if you play constantly – and so crafting even one refined metal is a huge pain for a single player to do. This “labour” cost, for want of a better term, is part of what gives refined metal its value as small change in the TF2 economy. It has other uses besides  acting as money, as it constitutes a required ingredient of many of the higher-level crafting recipes in the game. In particular you can combine three refined metal to make a random hat, and this is interesting to me because most hats are apparently worth about 1.33 refined metal on the open market.  Again, there are probably a number of factors at work here – not least that a hat crafted by somebody else will likely have a “Crafted by PLAYER” in the item description which gives it that slightly-worn second hand quality, like a book with somebody else’s name written inside the cover – but it’s nevertheless a strong indicator that TF2 traders put a far higher emphasis on the potential use of an item over the end product. If you craft together those three metal you have a small chance of getting an awesome hat, and a much larger chance that you’ll get a crap hat that you’ll only be able to flog for less than half the cost of the materials required to make it. It does say to me that the random element of crafting hats also provides much of the value of the metal; that while the metal is unused, that small chance of getting an awesome hat is a tangible thing that has worth. It’s kind of like gambling in that regard.

The TF2 economy is a surprisingly robust entity that mirrors real-world economies in a number of interesting ways, but that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its silly side. Since keys carry an actual monetary value and the value of many other items in the game can be expressed in terms of keys, it’s possible to very crudely put a number on just how valuable your TF2 backpack actually is. Mine is apparently worth just 63 dollars (and I imagine most of that is locked up in Bill’s hat). This guy’s on the other hand is worth $26,000. That’s not to say that he has $26,000 of liquid assets floating around in there, of course; if he ever tries to liquidate his portfolio I very much hope he’s prepared to accept $26,000 worth of keys in lieu of anything that would actually be of any use in a post-TF2 world, because while the world does contain people willing to pay $1,500 for a hat there can’t be that many of them out there.

The one question I haven’t addressed here is the one I asked at the start of the post, and which has only become even more intriguing in light of what I’ve learned here: why do people spend so much of their free time trading for hats in an online FPS? I asked Losty what the appeal was for him, and his reply was this:

For me it’s because I WANT IT ALL. OK, maybe not. For fun, my day off work is Tuesday and everyone else is at work so I started going to a trade server, and now it’s like a drug, a drug that can be worn on your head. Plus it keeps me playing TF2.

which I think means is that it’s more about the act of trading for him rather than any actual hats he might get out of it. I can relate to that; trading games and business sims wouldn’t be nearly as fun if we didn’t get some kind of rush out of buying low and selling high to acquire desirable items for the best possible price, and this carries the added element that you’re dealing with actual people rather than a brainless computer with no business acumen whatsoever. Even if TF2 hat trading still doesn’t sound quite like my cup of tea I can certainly see why people might do it now that I’ve discovered just how complex the economy behind it actually is.

After spending this evening trawling the TF2 trading sites I’ve come away with it for a new appreciation for what Valve have created here. How much of it was intentional? Did they really mean for keys to become adopted as the game’s currency when they introduced them? Did they know that Bill’s hat would become a lynchpin of the economy when they were planning the release of L4D2? I don’t know. I doubt it. However I do think that Valve as a company have a definite talent for instinctively identifying new systems and mechanics that seem stupid and unnecessary when they launch, but which are widely seen as utterly indispensible five years later. They may not have foreseen the impact Bill’s hat would have, but they were savvy enough to realise that the Mann-conomy update would introduce a viable business model that’d let them run the game as free-to-play for the foreseeable future. They are visionaries, for lack of a better word, and I’m entirely unsurprised they’ve hired a bona fide economist to study the economic systems they’ve created – both in-game and out of it – and give them some idea of what they should come up with next. I don’t know what it will be, but I can guarantee you this: no matter what it is, it’ll be be so subtly revolutionary that in a couple of years time we’ll be wondering how we ever got along without it. The hat economy is yet more proof, if any were still needed, that Valve are probably the most innovative developer in the videogame industry today. You dismiss it at your peril.

Many thanks to Losty for his invaluable insights into TF2 trading. Also thanks to Jim for his help in sourcing the various links scattered throughout this piece, as well as for putting me in touch with Losty in the first place.

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And a final footnote: my PhD is in physics, not economics. I have a smattering of advanced economics knowledge but mostly I understand things on the basis of supply and demand. Fortunately I happen to think the TF2 economy runs almost purely on a supply and demand basis, which is why I’m comfortable writing this article, but if you think I’ve got it wrong and that there’s something rather more nuanced going on here then please feel free to correct me in the comments.

EDIT: Okay so, first correction. I get quite adamant that the supply of Bill’s hats can’t decrease when in fact players can destroy any item in their backpack if they want to. However, given the absence of somebody going around buying up Bill’s hats en masse just so that they can destroy them (kind of like a really crappy version of Goldfinger) I don’t think this is going to have an appreciable effect on the total number of Bill’s hats in the game.

The post An Economy Of Hats. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.