The design and business of gaming from the perspective of an experienced developer

Month: July 2008

How To Lie With Graphs

Now, don’t get me wrong, I haven’t played Conan since I discovered my female barbarian was nerfed by her own damage animations.  That being said, I find articles like this one a little obfuscating.  Oh noes!  Funcom is down to half its value!  Sky!  Falling!

Looking at the longer view, we see that Funcom is… exactly where they were before they launched Conan. Which is to say, the launch of Conan probably overinflated their value.

Also note that in both graphs, the graph starts at 15, instead of 0.  The net result is that a casual graph reader would think they lost 80% of their value from their peak, when instead they’re down half.

Should Funcom be doing better?  Probably.  But it’s not nearly as gloomy as the original article suggests.

Down Goes Illidan

Last night, my guild finally managed to take down Illidan Stormrage, the end boss of the Black Temple.  It was an enormous amount of work to get there.  I think I joined the guild about this time last year, and back then we were taking babysteps into Serpentshrine Cavern, struggling with Lurker.

According to WoWJutsu, 5.18% of all U.S. raiding guilds have gotten down Illidan, which amounts to roughly 4000 of ‘em.  (That being said, with our fresh kill, we rank in the low 2000s).  Split the difference, and assume that each guild has about 35 raiding members (probably low), and you’d guess that about 100K people have popped Illidan.  A small fraternity, but actually not as small as I expected. Continue reading

Rush Fail

Sorry I haven’t been around lately, we’ve been hard at work to get an internal demo done, and it’s been leaving me just crispy enough to not feel like posting much of anything.

As a reward for your patience, here is a video of Rush failing at Tom Sawyer in Rock Band.

© 2024 Zen Of Design

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑