Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Left 4 Dead.

Braaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnns.

Plants vs Zombies

In somewhat of a departure from our usual programming, I wanted to point out a cool PC game that's out now. A friend of mine works at PopCap as a developer and hooked me up as a Beta tester for the latest game he's been working on. It's a fairly straightforward idea where you buy plants to kill zombies (of course, right?) but the game is ridiculously deep. The single player campaign is probably worth 40 hours of gameplay, but then there's a ton more game modes to keep the fun going. It's surprisingly addicting, and easily my favorite activity during boring conference calls at work. Totally pwns Minesweeper. You can buy it at GameStop or download the free trial directly.

Good Times

Thanks to everyone who logged in for clan night tonight. Was an awesome reminder of just how fun Left 4 Dead can be. There's a lot of play left in the game with the new Survival Mode and the two new Multi-Player maps that are still new to most everyone. Please keep me honest in balancing teams, as it can become unbalanced pretty quickly. If you're feeling picked on, speak up and I'll try my best to equalize things.

Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Left 4 Dead.

The first clan night blog post with e-mail push enabled. Nobody should have a technological reason not to show up.

Halo Wars Title Update

The Halo Wars title update should be out in the wild in the next day or two.   Here is what's coming:

General

• Flaming Warthog and Honor Guard Wraith skins now available in multiplayer to players who have those skulls.
• The option to show Unit Hit Point bars above units is now available.

Balance

• The number of points to reach all ranks has been reduced. General now requires 2.4 million, down from 3.2 million, and other ranks have been reduced accordingly.
• The max number of points you can get in a single match has been capped.
• The Prophet of Regret’s land speed is now reduced to match other leaders.
• Vampire Tech Upgrades now increase damage done by 15% in addition to their other effects.
• Anders Cryo Bomb Upgrades now cost 50% more supplies.
• Anders Hawk Upgrade now costs 50% more supplies.

Bug Fixes

• Multiplayer Matchmaking and Connection improvements have been put in. Players should find that their 2v2 and 3v3 teams no longer split up.
• 'Ready for the Sequel' Achievement should now be rewarded properly.
• Units on Exile and Crevice should find it easier to traverse the map.

Clan night tonight. 9pm PT. Left 4 Dead.

The new maps and Survival mode are super duper fun. Get your butts on-line! OmniscientDeath will be hosting games this week, look for his party on-line. If he's not in your friends list, you can either add him manually, or find him in my friends list.

Xbox Live Activity

With last week's XBL activity update, Halo Wars has now dropped out of the top 10 list. This is the final nail in the coffin for Halo Wars, officially removing it from clan night consideration. OmniscientDeath, BeerMonkeee and I are still playing it pretty regularly, but I definitely could not tell anybody to go out and spend $60 on this game when you could just borrow it from us later. Left 4 Dead continues to be strong in the #7 spot and will continue to our primary clan game for the near future. Survival Mode has been a lot of fun on the weeks with only a few players, and Versus mode should be tons of fun on the new maps. Halo 3 and Halo 2 continue to reign at #1 on top of the overall and orignal Xbox lists. If folks are interested in trying either one for a clan night or two, I am happy to consider it, just leave a comment here.

Braaaaaiiiinnnsssss

There's not going to be clan night on Tuesday due to a Cinqo de Mayo poker conflict locally. But I'll probably be on XBL tonight starting around 8pm PT if folks would like to play some zombies. Leave a comment below if you're interested.

XBL Activity

DLC really drives Xbox Live activity. The Mythic Map pack DLC pushed Halo 3 back on top of the lists, above the two Call of Duty games. And the Survival pack DLC bumped Left 4 Dead all the way up into the #5 spot last week. Halo Wars clings to the top 10 in the #10 spot.

Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Left 4 Dead.

Be sure that you have downloaded the free Survival DLC pack before you play tonight (preferably before 8pm). It's relatively small at 101MB, so shouldn't take that long. And because I've linked it here, you have no excuse for not having it ready, since you can send it to your Xbox remotely.

Also, I'll have to drop at 10pm, which typically means clan night ends. So get on early so that you can get your games in.

Left 4 Love

This wallpaper hit the interwebz today. Original posted here.

1337 DMV

This dude is even more dedicated than I am.

Halo War Updates

Details on two upcoming downloads have been released by Ensemble Studios.

The first, a free title update, was previously posted about on this blog. They've also announced some tweaks to the air units:

• The Covenant Vampire is getting a boost, with its attack damage being increased by 15% with every upgrade.
• The Anders' Hawk, is being made more expensive, going from 900 to 1350 supplies. In addition, her Cryo Bomb upgrades are also going up by 50% at every level.

A DLC pack has also been announced. It includes new achievements, so I would assume that it will not be free. It adds three new multi-player game modes:

• Keepaway Mode: This is the Halo Wars adaptation of "Capture the Flag." Teams battle it out to capture a free-roaming Forerunner Sentinel to score points before the other team. Capture three to five sentinels to claim victory.
• Tug of War Mode: This mode is all about having a stronger army than your opponent. Defeating enemies is essential, but success is determined by a combination of the army, buildings, and resources left standing in the end.
• Reinforcement Mode: All active battle units are provided in successive waves. Adapt to their tactics and use the ever-changing set of units to outwit and outlast the enemy.

Strategic Options also adds four new Achievements worth a total of 100 points:

• One and Done: Score the winning point in a game of Keepaway against Legendary A.I.'s
• Pull Hard, Pull Deep: Win and never trail in a Tug of War game
• Freak on a Streak: Gain at least 15 population from a single wave in a Reinforcement game
• Living Loving Bug: Obtain a Scarab during a Reinforcement game

Left 4 Dead Survival Pack

Now available free for download on Xbox Live marketplace. Click here for direct download link.

No clan night tonight

There's a poker conflict tonight, so we won't have a formal clan night. I would expect some folks logging on between 9-11pm if you're looking for games though. The Left 4 Dead title update should be out today with support for the new multi-player maps and Survival game mode. If you don't get prompted for an automatic update when you launch the game, click here to look for an XBL Marketplace download.

Halo Wars Rock, Paper, Scissors in More Detail

Tim "Timotron" Deen, Lead Technical Designer on Halo Wars, gives more insight on the "Rock, Paper Scissors" aspect of the Halo Wars combat system.

Coming into any RTS (and Halo Wars is no exception) can be a daunting task for new players as they learn the relationships of the game units, especially game units that are not direct counter or game units that are just soft counters. As such this article will attempt to delve into a more detailed look at the Halo Wars counter system and dissect it for the players into a set of discrete rules and show how the rules apply to the game. Finally before we start a term used often in this article is “RPS” which is shorthand in a RTS for “rock paper scissors” and is used to describe the rule sets that govern which units win fights.

Now then a detailed look at the Halo Wars RPS reveals that it is a layered system of 3 RPS systems with a specific order of priority in application. Also each RPS system provides a different flavor to the game and serves to provide a specific combat flow purpose. Additionally the RPS relationships are split into the two separate buckets of “soft kill” and “hard kill”, “soft kill” relationships are where the units have a medium advantage in combat and “hard kill” is where units have a very strong advantage in combat.

• Highest priority RPS
  • Counter unit RPS
    • Counter units hard kill their countered unit type
    • Counter units are soft killed by mainlines that they do not counter

• Mid level RPS’s
  • Scout unit RPS
    • Hard kill counter infantry
    • Soft kill air
    • Soft killed by mainline infantry
    • Hard killed by mainline vehicles
  • Spartan RPS
    • Limited hard kill normal vehicles and air
• Lowest priority RPS
  • Basic unit RPS
    • Infantry beat Air
    • Air beats Vehicles
    • Vehicles beat Infantry
    • Mainlines are better than counters against buildings*

Note: * the cobra and wolverine has a minor siege counter role as a special bonus for UNSC.

The counter unit RPS provides hard counters to punish players who attempt to run a single unit army and is the highest priority counter system. Next the scout unit RPS provides balance in the early game against counter infantry and air before their main counters come online, while the Spartan RPS provides a specific counter to vehicles in tech level 1. Finally the basic unit RPS provides a low level bias to the combat so that the units not directly involved in a higher level counter system will still have a rule that applies to them.

The final item to cover in this article is to go over just what categories units fall into in halo wars for defining what they are. First all units have a role category assigned to them such as mainline or counter, and second they have a unit type assigned to them such as infantry or vehicle. The combination of those two items defines the unit’s base combat relationships to other units.

Unit Categories

• Role
  • Mainline unit
  • Counter unit
  • Scout unit
  • Special unit

• Type
  • Infantry
  • Vehicle
  • Aircraft

One caveat before concluding is that results will vary in actual game play due to players employing micro management of units and in situations where the opponent has superior upgrades or numbers. Now with that caveat said hopefully this article will give everyone an idea of how RPS design is expressed in Halo wars and why many of the units have the combat advantages that they do.

p.s. Here's a partial chart of Hard and Soft Counters below. Click for huge:

Surviving the L4D Survival Pack

From the developers this week:

Survival Mode pits your team against never ending waves of infected. Sounds simple. Just trap the survivors in a small part of a map, unleash the hordes, and record the longest time. Survival Mode, which will be released next week, is actually a bit more than that.

Our goals for Survival Mode are to deliver a mode of play distinct from Campaign or Versus, have games that regularly last under ten minutes, and emphasize competition with team play through leaderboards.

Survival Mode draws on the planning and communication aspects of a successful Finale or Crescendo event, while taking it to another level. It rapidly hits a fever pitch that only a well coordinated team will be able to successfully survive. Everything from simply covering a reviving teammate, to making every shot count to minimize reloads becomes crucial in Survival Mode.

Given the importance of pacing in Survival Mode, we need to define as precisely as possible how the difficulty ramps up during the course of a round. We have numerous variables to work with: mob spawn frequency, special infected spawn frequency, number of each type of special infected, total number of special infected, tank spawn frequency, total number of tanks, and so on. We need all of these variables to work together to create a fairly smooth difficulty curve.

If the curve ramps up too sharply, we find that teams of all skill levels tend to hit a wall at the same time. There isn't enough variation in the times to separate great teams from average ones. If the curve is too flat, then average teams will have a good experience, but really good teams can grind on long enough to cross the line from having fun to just getting worn out.

It might seem that just gradually increasing spawn rates and numbers of infected will create a nice smooth curve, but it turns out to be much trickier than that. Each type of infected has its own spawn schedule, so even though the individual spawn curves may be designed to be fairly easy at a particular point in time, sometimes they overlap in just such a way that the players find themselves in a really bad situation far earlier than we intend.

For example, a tank will be much harder to fight if a mob of common infected spawns at the same time - and nearly impossible if three hunters also show up right at that moment. A similar situation can happen due to variables outside our control - a team may not dispatch a tank or mob quickly enough, causing subsequent waves to start arriving and piling on to an already difficult battle. It's also hard to anticipate when teams will need to make an ammo run or heal up, both of which can be extremely difficult only a few minutes into the round. In order to help visualize these overlap points and the collapse of each spawn curve, we graphed out the wave behavior of infected over the course of a survival round.


The last variable we added was the "lull" - a short interval of time during which nothing new will spawn. Each lull gets slightly longer as the round progresses, but that's no guarantee the team will actually see the lull - it just prevents new infected from spawning. It doesn't help with infected that are already in the arena. Killing mobs and tanks as quickly as possible is the best way to ensure that a team can take advantage of a lull to heal, resupply ammo, or just move to a better location with more supplies.

Given the extreme pace of Survival Mode, the number of zombies killed in a single round often outnumbers an entire campaign. Even optimizing towards using pistols to eliminate common hordes, ammunition usually becomes an issue at some point. As ammo piles provide a unique infinite resupply for players, they tend to be in relatively less defensible positions in the Survival arenas. This means making an all important ammo run is rarely a safe proposition and requires good teamwork and planning. Timing your resources correctly to be able to make a run when necessary can make or break a team. The perfect pipebomb or well placed molotov can mean the difference between a cakewalk and catastrophe.

The Hospital Elevator, for example, might seem like an easy Crescendo Event to conquer. Hit the elevator button and holdout until the doors open for a quick escape. In Survival Mode, however, the area begins locked down. Areas open as the hordes come in, breaking down the doors to reach the survivors. In each room there are additional caches of vital pills, pipes, and Molotovs. By moving from location to location, using up the plentiful supplies as needed, a team can maximize their time in a game where the elevator never arrives to offer escape. In other maps, items may be less plentiful and require careful planning on their usage. Managing one's inventory and resources works hand-in-hand with teamwork in Survival Mode.

Xbox 360 Warranty extended for E74

From Major Nelson yesterday:

Hey guys, there have been a stories recently about the E74 error message that I wanted to address. The team is aware that a very small percentage of our Xbox 360 customers have reported receiving an error that displays E74 on their screen and after investigating the issue, we have determined that the E74 error message can indicate the general hardware failure that is associated with three flashing red lights error on the console. As such, we will be covering any repairs due to the E74 error message under the three year warranty we announced related to the three flashing lights error, as well as reimbursing any customers that have already paid for an E74 related repair. This applies to new consoles for the original retail purchaser, whether purchased before or after this change. You can read additional information on the warranty extension on the Xbox.com support site. Today’s announcement reaffirms our commitment to customers that we stand behind our products and deliver a great Xbox experience.

EXP Required for Halo Wars ranks

I've previously posted about the Halo Wars ranks, but wanted to provide a little more detail now that we've been playing it a little more. We've logged 11-20 multi-player games each over the last month, and averaged 2,136 points per game. We are all currently Recruits and have been consistently getting matched against teams with Majors and at least one Commander. Assuming our average of 23 minutes per game, these are the approximate number of games and times it takes to make each rank:

• Recruit (1 pt): 1 game (23 minutes)
  
• Lieutenant (80,000 pts): 38 games (14.5 hours)
  
• Captain (200,000 pts): 94 games (36 hours)
  
• Major (400,000 pts): 188 games (72 hours)
  
• Commander (800,000 pts): 375 games (144 hours)
  
• Colonel (1,600,000 pts): 750 games (288 hours)
  
• Brigadier (2,400,000 pts): 1,124 games (431 hours)
  
• General (3,200,000 pts): 1,499 games (575 hours)

The Ranks are clearly totally unrelated to TrueSkill, as our TrueSkill has been increasing exponentially without a corresponding increase in Rank.

Clan night tonight. 8pm PT. Left 4 Dead.

First come, first served. Show up as close to on time as possible.