Anson the Gnome

Yes, I was laid off today. Lots of stuff going on, but mostly things about which I should or would rather not say. I'm planning on renaming the journal, to cut out 'nc,' but I'm still trying to decide on the new name ('anson' is already taken).

Well, I was pretty hopeful about the extent to which we were taking additional information into account in PVP matchmaking, but a lot of it is getting pulled back. I still feel that we should take more than just ratings into account when matching opponents, but we don't have sufficiently accurate information on exactly how your level or power rating (i.e., your power relative to how powerful you could be at your level) affects the outcome of matches.

Also, with an upcoming patch, we're getting rid of unbalanced (size-wise) matches in rated PVP. This makes me sad, but the reality is that - try as we have - we haven't been able to really nail down the balance issues here. As we balance dominant strategies and level the playing field on a per-player basis, it seems that opponents of differently-sized groups boil down to two results: the larger team is well organized and wins, or the larger team is not well organized and loses.

The skill of the smaller team comes into play insofar as they have to be able to take advantage of disorganization in the larger team, but really, being in a bigger team and being even moderately organized is a very dominant strategy. We're leaving in the ability to participate in these matches via duels, and we'll be gathering data on them to see if we can do better in the future... but ratings (and rankings) won't be affected by these matches after the patch.

Similarly, we're going to gather more data before we put back in match-making adjustments based on level and power rating. I think it's the right thing to do - use all the information we can to make better matches - but in the absence of knowing just how much level and power rating are worth (and they might well not be linear adjustments!), a better adjustment is no adjustment.

Last Wednesday I attended a presentation in Austin Community College's on-going First Wednesday Video Game Seminar series on Mac game development. Their focus was Objective-C and Cocoa and (obliquely) iPhone game development. It was also fairly focused on what they were doing, and had done with Mac game development, rather than the breadth of development happening in the Mac game market.

I was kind of disappointed, though, because they didn't even mention Carbon, and were dismissive of ported games. Years ago I got to do Cocoa (and, previously, OPENSTEP) programming in Objective-C, and I really liked it. For a desktop application, nothing beats Apple's Interface Builder for designing interfaces and tying that interface to your code. But for games... Interface Builder doesn't really have anything to offer, and Cocoa doesn't have a lot to offer either. For cross-platform games, Cocoa has zilch to offer, because it dictates language choice. Indeed, even Apple documentation indicates Carbon is likely better suited to the task.

I really enjoyed the presentation, and I'm a fan of Cocoa, but I felt like everyone already working on a non-Mac game was left out in the cold by it. On the other hand, if you're interested in writing a game from scratch, and you want to target Mac users... Cocoa is definitely a great way to do it.

I just finished reading through Richard Bartle's Independent MMO GDC Keynote slides. I think it was a good read, and mirrors a lot of my observations about where we could go in ten years, and where I want to be in ten years.

Everything arrived yesterday, and I spent a few hours pulling out the old pieces and putting in the new. Worked like a charm, although I did screw up the backplate a bit and had to bend some aluminum tines out of the way for network cable. Now I'm going to go through my backlog of 'great games I should play one day' and try to catch up.

But first, I had to get some quality time kicking ass in Dungeon Runners. :-)

EDIT (24-Apr-2009): After moving this blog to s9y, this post has become a monumental spam trap. I suspect it's because some idiot spambot is looking for dead blogs that end with "last post" - so I have changed the title from "one last post" to the above.

EDIT (22-Jun-2009): all comments disabled for this entry. See above.