Psychochild's Blog

I did a phone interview recently where I discussed ideas on how to improve random grouping. What I’m calling “random grouping” is perhaps best known from WoW’s Dungeon Finder (Looking for Dungeon or LFD) and Raid Finder (Looking for Raid or LFR) systems, where you indicate you want to run a dungeon and you are randomly matched up with other people. I share the common lament that random grouping systems don’t help players form social bonds within the game even if they would like to do so.

So, let me put my designer hat on and describe a system to allow for more socialization opportunities.
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Just in case you missed it, I did an interview with Shawn Schuster over at Massively: http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/02/20/talking-the-past-and-present-of-mmos-with-brian-psychochild-gr/

I talk about the past, present, and future of MMOs.
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Let’s get right to the point: I’m no longer with Storybricks. My work with Storybricks has come to a natural conclusion, and I wish the team every success.

This means that I’m looking for new employment opportunities. If you’re looking for an experienced technical game designer with a wealth of experience, let’s talk, shall we? You can reach me at psychochild@gmail.com

Read on for a few more details and what sort of work I’m looking for.
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I wrote a class for some Python code I’m working on, and I figured there might be others out there who would find it interesting. The class lets you set up a typical dictionary data structure (where hashable items are used as keys to look up values stored in the structure), but will allow you to do partial and case-insensitive matches.

A bit more details, and the code, after the break
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So, we dodged the bullet on that pesky Mayan apocalypse last year, and so we had to suffer through 2013. Okay, maybe “suffer” is a bit strong. Let’s go with “tolerate”.

So, what happened this last year?
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Here in the U.S., we celebrated Thanksgiving last week. The modern traditional celebration involves eating way too much, awkward time spent with family members, and usually some sort of traditional recreation like watching football or a parade. As a kid, I was told the holiday was to celebrate the generosity the Native Americans showed to struggling colonists; in recent years, however, the origin of the holiday has been reported to be much darker.

But, if you look at the name of the holiday, “Thanksgiving”, the core of what I celebrate is: giving thanks.

As a warning: this post is going to be a tiny bit more meta than usual. There’s some game design value here, but I thought taking a look at holidays and the meanings behind them might be interesting.
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Superstition is an interesting thing. As a kid, I remember playing Dragon Warrior on my NES and being impatient, I’d often tap the button to get through combat messages as quickly as possible. I made a little game of it, trying to time my taps in rhythm so that I’d get through the combat as fast as possible. Of course, sometimes it seemed that I’d get critical hits more often when I did that, so eventually I started tapping the button rhythmically to get more critical hits. (In reality, it was probably survivorship bias, where I noticed the critical hits more when I was doing the tapping than when I wasn’t. Also interesting to note that the later Super Mario RPG games would require you to tap the button during combat for extra damage/defense/etc.) But, in my mind a superstition was born.

Of course, MMO players have superstitions as well. And plenty of them.
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In grand Psychochild’s Blog tradition, I’m here to tell you news waaaaaaay after the fact. Anyway, this post is about the return of the Newbie Blogger Initiative! Do you write about game stuff, particularly MMOs, and want to get some attention to your writing? Want some experienced bloggers to lend some guidance while you explore the crazy world of blogging? Then this is the initiative for you!

Anyway, I signed up to be a mentor, so I should probably post something, right?
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My MMO poison of choice these days is Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). It’s a great game and I love it a lot. These days, I mostly play with a few fixed, or “static”, groups; however, I have played some solo characters on other servers when the fancy strikes me. But, for the most part, if I play the game I’m playing a character that plays with others.

Sometimes, however, the strain one has to go through to play with friends makes you wonder if other MMO developers actually play. Let’s take a look at a recent frustration.
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I hit a major milestone in with my main characters: I true reincarnated one of my characters. To those of you who haven’t played the game before, that might seem like an odd idea, but I think it’s actually a rather interesting and old idea.

Let’s take a closer look at it, shall we?
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