I Came Here to be Podkilled

I was podkilled in EVE for the first time about a week ago. Since my ship was destroyed about 2 hours ago, and the station I fled to camped, I figured I'd write about it.

I was doing something stupid. I was flying my big, slow, clumsy industrial Iteron through lowsec. It was very late, I was on autopilot.

Everyone who plays EVE knows just how dumb that was. But for those readers who don't, let me explain.

One travels through systems by alternately jumping through a jump gate and then warping across a solarsystem to the next jump gate in your path. If you are actively piloting a ship, you can jump to right on top of the jump gate, and very likely be able to jump through the gate before any bad guys camping the gate can lock on to you, even in a slow ship. Unless they put up a Warp Interdiction Bubble, in which case you are screwed, since it drops you out of warp early, about 10k away from the gate, which gives them plenty of time to disassemble you into valuable and easily accessible minerals and parts.

On autopilot though, you don't warp directly to a jump gate, you warp to 10k away and use normal propulsion to close the distance. That give bad guys plenty of time to deal their dirt.

I remember thinking, "what's that flashing? Is that a laser?" I only barely had time to wonder whether I could crawl to the gate in time when pop. When your ship goes boom, you eject in your capsule, which is also warp capable, though has no weapons or armor. However, in less time than it takes for me to write this, that too was destroyed, and I woke up in a medlab far away, or rather, my clone did. Podkilled.

In a strange way, I was happy about it. EVE had seemed safer than it ought to be, I hadn't really seen any bad guys or bad stuff happening. This reassured me, they were there all right. And what I had lost wasn't all that valuable.

Tonight was a little different. I docked in a lowsec system. She was waiting for me when I came out in a Dominix, a Gallente battleship. My Vexor, a cruiser, was no match for it. Locked, webbed (slows my speed), and scrambled (to prevent warp) and crushed. But then something odd happened. My pod was not locked. It was not popped. I went back in the station eventually, watching the station shoot at the criminals. Ineffectually.

So there I was back in the station. With local showing all manner of red-tags outside. Why did I dock here? Why did I ever think it was something I could get away with? And how am I ever going to serve up some payback? I couldn't play any more, because it was clearly unsafe to go outside and try to go back to my base, get a new ship and keep going. I could afford the loss, and the ship was insured, so I can get on with earning more money. But I can't play the game right now, since sitting in a foreign station is boring.

I find myself wondering how a company can survive when its paying customers have experiences like this. I'm not going to quit over this, it's true. But is that true of many people?

In fact, I burn for revenge. The thing is, I have no idea how to manage it. It seems as though players with a five year lead on you have an unconquerable lead, both in money and in skills. But I'm keeping a list.

I still have my goals, and I'm still going to work for them. I want to . I don't want to do stupid, rash things, like docking/undocking with anyone unknown in local. But I don't want to let those fears grow too large either. This mishap has cost me perhaps a million ISK, and some time. I can still work on my goals, I just have to make sure that what I earn from doing dangerous things is enough to cover the costs on those times when it all goes elliptical.

Maybe that's how it works for CCP. People like me who will get back in the game, which makes their commitment to playing even stronger, since they have suffered for it.
I know mine is.

After all, I came here to be podkilled.

The Elements Have Been Warded

I logged on EQ2 yesterday, hoping to do something with my friends in Shards of Glory. I was pleased then, to find that Mandoralen was going to host a raid on Ward of the Elements, the two-group raid zone off of Lavastorm.

I'd been in there once before, and it didn't go well. We managed to kill exactly one trash mob. But folks were saying they had been there last week and killed some stuff, so I figured it had to be better, right?

It was better. We cruised through the first part of the zone having only a few glitches with the trash. The Lord of Water died easily, with Mando running between two towers doing something.


Phritz showed up late, because his son had a soccer game. Then, about the time we got to Digg, the Earth Elemental:

Phritz: I have to turn into a buffbot for about 15 mins, to take my other son to his soccer practice. I'll autofollow on Tolly.

Mandoralen: Ok, Phritz you should be fine. We've never wiped on this guy before.

After much hilarity where we all attempted to get onto Digg's platform without falling off, or getting killed by Digg, we were set.

We wiped.

We revived and ran back, but Phritz was a rock, keeping guard over Digg. Phritz didn't move a muscle, no sir.

The second try we wiped too. I had the pleasure of dying to an ae and then getting ganked again right after someone revived me. That was the first of three times that happened to me.

But the third try was the charm, and just when we finished it, Phritz was back, saying, "Hey, I'm dead". "No, Phritz, you're just keeping an eye on Digg."

Dayakara, pictured above, was tough, but we got her in the end. That was another of my pop and drop fights. The third was Gelidus Ventus, I think.

Then when we got to Captain Grush, we wiped early on the first couple of pulls. Then Phritz announced that his son's soccer practice had ended an hour early and he had to go get him. So he went on buffbot. This apparently is our good luck charm, since this time the pull went smoothly. Now most of you probably know this but Grush is an extremely long fight. My family was kind of getting antsy, we were going to go out for dinner. I told them I'd break at 5:30. Our successful pull was at 5:15. At 5:30 they were all standing around looking at my screen wondering when Grush was going to drop. Finally he did, I think I used Peace of Mind five times in that fight.

I was busier than a caterpillar with athlete's foot in that fight, since I needed to do power maintenance as well as dps. So I didn't get a screenshot of him. Maybe next time.

This is the kind of thing I love about EQ2. As a solo game, it has lost my interest, but I still love to hang with my friends and do cool stuff like crash the Ward of Elements.

Accounting for EVE

I spent some time looking over EVE business/manufacturing tools, and came up with a few interesting items.

• EVE Income Analyzer is a free download Windows desktop app that downloads your wallet and produces lots of interesting reports on sales and trade. It has nothing useful for manufacturing other than sales reports.
  


• Manufacturers might do well to start with the Manufacturing Profit tool at EVE Industry, and a forum thread about it is here. This seems a really good tool to figure out "how much is training skill x to skill y going to be worth?" How much is broker relations or better standing at the station worth? And how much is manufacturing research going to be worth?
  


• For automatic import of data, Dedaf's Production Spreadsheet can import both character skill data and Eve Central price data. If you are running Excel 2003 or later. Probably a later version is better, Excel 2003 xml support is still shaky.
  


• EVE-Online Multiuse Economic Efficiency Planner, or EVE-MEEP will download and store your wallet data, price data from a variety of places (Eve-metrics and Eve-Central). You can do filters on your wallet transactions, I only wish it would then perform a summary. It has tools to help planning production efficiency, scheduling, research probability, skills, even a reprocessing calculator. I've tried it and it has a few bumps, but worth a look. Windows only.


• EVE Central data is a little bit like Wikipedia. Full of lots of interesting and useful data, but maybe not completely reliable. So an ingame corp named Arcelor Capital publishes both a manufacturing cost tool, and regular price data updates. It isn't free, it costs 10m ISK. In the forum thread introducing it, lots of people say they are signing up.

Nowhere did I find the tool that I really wanted. I want to be able to be able to figure out not how much money do I think I will make, but how much money *did* I make with product X. Because I want to know whether it was worth my time or not. Unfortunately, there isn't quite enough data in the cash journal xml to let this be automated. It's hard to match up sales, tax payments and broker fees. That's accounting.

So here I am, a game blogger writing about accounting, which to many is the spokesperson for boring. The truly beautiful thing about EVE is that if you don't like this kind of thing, you can pretty much ignore it and fly around doing something else, like pirating, or running missions. There's such a rich ecology in EVE, there's a niche for you. Maybe you become a contract hauler, a researcher, an explorer. Whatever. And you're never locked in to that job, you can always learn some new skills and do something else.

Big aside: I understand now why some capsuleers are reluctant to leave their station. As Tipa documents, we just got wardecced by a corp that appears to typically blockade an important hub world, Dodixie, for money. Several corps seem to be on their list. So if you want to do business there, you need to contract with someone else to do your shipping. It's dangerous out there in space.

On the other hand, those who do like this stuff engage in conversations about what the right way to do accounting for EVE is, and what are the tools that are needed, and whether banks are smart or dumb to ask for the kind of data they ask for.

READ THIS ONLY IF YOU ARE A FINANCE/ACCOUNTING GEEK
The discussion in the above mentioned thread has a lot of energy over whether to use LIFO, average cost or item selection. I find myself firmly on the side of LIFO, with the addition that if raw material prices drop significantly, I would be inclined to take a charge off, and revalue my raw material inventory lower. Take the bad news up front, that's how I feel. Otherwise, you are living in denial.

This stuff is incredibly engaging.

UPDATE: Added reference to EVE-MEEP

Nullsec Sociology

The dev team of EVE Online is really going where no dev team has gone before.

In this post, developer Grayscale outlines the rationale for changes to some game mechanics upcoming in EVE's upcoming expansion Dominion. First, he talks about the problems they see: [I've translated some EVE-centric jargon into my own words to make this more readable for a general audience]

So anyway, here we are today. Nullsec is largely the domain of large, 2-3000 member PvP alliances, grouped up into inevitable coalitions and engaged in not-quite-impossibly large wars. Costs are mosty covered at the alliance level by a combination of old money and high-value moon minerals. The latter continue to rise in price due to ever-increasing demand from invention, and [the fallout from an exploit last year]. Most of the space that's up for grabs is owned by a clone army of ideologically-distinct but functionally-similar alliances, making the entire political landscape depressingly homogeneous. The state of the military art is not much better - [fleets of little ships] are wheeled out for [highly specialized actions] and then packed away before they can fall victim to [multiple giant little-ship-killers], leaving huge capital fleets to park themselves in front of a never-ending procession of starbases. And the smaller groups, the newer organizations hoping to gain a foothold in the Great Game, are left begging for crumbs around the edges. Who's going to let security-risk nobodies into their back yard when they'll never be able to compete pay as much as a single [high value mining] moon?

The notion that most of nullsec is closed is fascinating, and mirrors what human beings often do. Japan closed themselves for nearly 300 years. China's emperors forbade trade. Jared Diamond describes how New Guinea tribal societies were so closed that literally thousands of languages developed in one large (and unknown to the West until the 1930's) interior valley.

Next, Grayscale says what he thinks is important about nullsec:

Nullsec is cool and different and awesome because of emergence. It's not the most populous area of the game, sure (and more on this shortly), but it provides one of EVE's most compelling and unique experiences. It does this because, by and large, we let you the players call the shots. [...]

By giving players and player organizations tactical and strategic freedom, we allow a situation to arise where each challenge is different from the last, because every time there are different people involved making different decisions which result in different outcomes. [...]

[...] The more decisions that players can make, the more emergence you get, and the more interesting the experience is. Therefore, a primary development goal in nullsec is to enable players to make decisions, which can be boiled down to two directives.

First, try to give players tools. [...]

Second, try to avoid telling players what to do or how to do it.

This is pretty interesting stuff, and nobody else is even trying this. So, what are the EVE devs going to do about the current situation. First, let's talk about the "sovereignty system". For non-EVE players, this is a head-scratcher. EVE has several NPC governments, which do or don't get along with each other, and this drives story and some interaction in the areas where there are NPC cops (known as CONCORD). This space is known as highsec. The sovereignty system among other things, describes which government is sovereign over each system. It's displayed on your screen prominently in every system you are in in high- (and med-) sec.

So, in the upcoming expansion:

• There will be a sovereignty system which will aim to describe who is sovereign in an area, rather than prescribing a particular method of conquest.
• There will be a way to increase the resource intensity of a system that is somewhat labor intensive. (This would be farming on planetside.)
• The value of minerals mined from moons will be reduced.
• Territory held will incur upkeep costs.

There are also some revisions to the way that stations are conquered, but that seems a bit more technical.

They are hoping that this will encourage nullsec alliances to allow settlers, since the settlers will increase the value of the territory, and more revenue will be needed to finance (through taxes) upkeep costs.

The hope is that differentiated strategies will emerge, because there will be more people making decisions, giving a greater chance for differentiation. I see difficulties here.

There are powerful forces for convergence of strategies. Internet forums and other outgame communications permit players to find out when one strategy seems to be working better than another. Divergence, of languages for instance, is dependent on isolation. There isn't much here.

Human beings are huge copycats. The phrase "monkey see, monkey do" would be better as "human see, human do" since homo sapiens is the biggest imitator in existence. And we tend to copy those who are powerful, even if the behavior copied has no bearing on what made them powerful. In game terms, if alliance A with strategy X were to defeat alliance B with strategy Y, you can count on all the observers saying how dominant strategy X is, and to start copying it. This is what human beings do.

I think asymmetric strategies must be based on asymmetric terrain. Europe and China were both repeatedly conquered by "barbarians" emerging from the Central Asian steppes who usually had developed new technology centered around the horse. This is because they terrain well suited to the horse, whereas China (and Europe) had terrain suited to agriculture.

This differentiation exists in Eve, but the agriculture terrain is highsec. So I think the hope for asymmetric conflict in nullsec depends on highsec corps deciding they want to colonize nullsec systems, and coming up with the wherewithal to hold them. The nullsec natives will object to this colonization, of course. And that will be good, at least from the EVE design viewpoint.

EVE: The First 24 Hours

I've now spent my first 24 hours in EVE Online, and I think I'm solidly hooked. My score so far is 12 missions completed, about half a million ISK in the bank, and three ships, a Velator (my starter ship), a Navitas (pictured above warping to a jump gate), and my brand-new Intaki, which is slow but has a big cargo hold. I've splattered about half a dozen Serpentis, and got myself agression-flagged for it, that was kind of a surprise.

I've been a shameless coward, warping away from a few fights that it looked like I couldn't win, and hiding in a dock waiting for my aggression timer to expire. At one point I visited an asteroid field with several wrecks that were marked as "Serpentis Scout" or "Serpentis Initiate" I assumed these were NPC's, but when I opened one up and started to loot it, the game told me I was going to steal from XXX, did I really want to do that. At the same time a Serpentis Spy showed up on scans and started shooting at me, and some odd things happened with my aggression timer, in spite of the fact I decided not to loot.

After about 5 shots it developed that my weapons could not harm the Spy in the slightest, so I ran. Fast, if not hard. I didn't have enough energy to make it to my warp target so I came to a dead stop in interplanetary space, breathing hard. Eventually I made it home. Fun times.

The tutorial line I decided to follow was the merchant line. It had me doing spy-type work, breaking codes and taking salvage, as well as shopping and buying things, transporting them to where they needed to be. My final mission was to make some Antimatter Charge S, and thus learn how manufacturing works. I gathered my materials, hired the assembly line and then had the following (virtual) conversation:

"Here's the stuff you wanted."

"Sorry, that's not nearly enough."

"Wait, you said you wanted five thousand units, not five hundred? Hey, it's just one little zero, how important can it be? Umm, I'll get back to you."

Since there was a bonus payment for finishing the mission within a time limit, I decided to stay up until it finished so I could make the delivery. However, 5000 units takes a lot longer to manufacture than 500. Thus it was that my contract finally delivered at about 0300 local time. I killed the intervening time with mining ops. The intro to the merchant path said that you'd be hiring other people to do this kind of thing for you. I hope that happens soon. Though it was profitable.

One strangeness: An agent at a different College site sent me an email (or maybe more than one, I'm a bit hazy) saying she liked what she heard about me and wanted to offer me more work. But when I went over there (while waiting for my manufacturing run), she said she had no work for me. Thanks for nuthin' babe! Luv ya, buh-bye! Maybe my skills aren't right? But then why send me the email. Sigh, I'm probably being noobish.

When I told Phritz that I was interested in playing Eve, he said, "I heard you need a spreadsheet to play that game". My reaction, having played now, is "Yes, isn't it cool?". I have a spreadsheet. I used it to figure out whether to refine before selling. Answer: No. Also, to figure out which ammo types were profitable to make for immediate sale. Of course, I have no idea of the relative effectiveness of each, but I'll figure that out eventually, I'm sure.

I haven't yet gone to any game guides. I haven't been this clueless playing an MMO since Everquest, and I kind of like it. Playing with stuff, trying stuff out, and discovering things, that's part of the fun. Eventually, I'll join a corp (hint, hint), and word of mouth is an acceptable way to learn tidbits. Eventually, I'll probably break down and look at guides, but right now, I'm having too much fun splashing around in the puddles.

All About EVE

One of the first things I do when I play a new character-based game is ask myself, "How do I make Toldain in this system?" Yes, I know, I'm stuck in a rut, but I'm 3000 years old, what do you expect? In EVE, I was faced with some interesting possibilities. It seems Gallente was going to be my race, since they were the most friendly seeming. Which matches up well. I ended up being forced to choose between the best background and skills (Intaki Artist), the best stat profile or the best appearance. I chose to go with Intaki Diplomat, seeing as how the EQ1 version of Toldain was extremely charming.

By the way, that picture up there is Bette Davis from the 1950 Oscar-winner All About Eve. If you haven't seen it, stop that mining this instant and go rent it and give it a watch. It has few explosions except for most of Bette Davis' lines, but still worth two hours, assuming your skills are queued up.



Anyway, here's what Toldain looks like. Not as pretty as he might be, but somewhat elfin, and with fabulous red hair, for sure. And as a capsuleer, he is immortal. I think his eyes are so sunken because he was up really late last night waiting for a manufacturing run to finish so I could get the speed completion bonus to the mission...never mind, I'll talk about that in another post.

I'm not sure there is such a thing as a mezzer in EVE, maybe some kind of ECM that I'm way too much a noob to do anything with? I look forward to finding out about all this kind of stuff.

In any case, Tipa has inspired me to give EVE Online at least a 14-day trial.

So, I'll be letting you know what's happening. Coming soon, spreadsheets and

Life Beats CGI

Completely off topic, I just wanted to share this image of Saturn eclipsing the sun from the Cassini spacecraft. This observation led to the discovery of more rings around Saturn.



Here's a bigger version.
The entire set of photographs is here, on the Smithsonian website.

Risky Business

Today I take inspiration from Brian "Psychochild" Green's latest post and from a pickup group I ran in Veksar last night.

Psychochild starts by citing some train nostalgia in a post by Gordon of We Fly Spitfires. From there he points out the the fun part of trains was the spice:

But, I suspect this is one of the reasons why Gordon remembers trains fondly: because they were a disruption. As some of the comments on my previous post indicate, some people want a little spice to the encounter. Going in and simply doing the memorized pattern gets boring. Trains were definitely an unpredictable element, since they were based on other players' behaviors.

I think this is basically correct. I certainly have some train nostalgia. Once I was in Karnor's Castle with some friends near the entrance when a big old train comes screaming out of the castle and running down the other side of the big hall. I didn't feel like running, but there were too many to mez. Pretty much on a lark I decided to charm one. As soon as whoever they were chasing zoned out, they all turned on my charmed mob. This being Everquest, it took maybe 8-10 seconds to kill it, at which point I charmed another. They all turned on him. I thought, "Hey, I'm on to something". Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm washed that train right out of my beautiful red hair. Fun times.

Then there was the time we were working on a friends epic in Rathe Mountains and the mob turned out to be a chained spawn. You know, kill one and the next one spawns instantly on the spot. Well, we ran, and another guy in the zone got the aggro. He was mad, and trained us with other giants. I asked him what that was about, and when he said we had trained him, I explained that no, we were just clueless. At which point he changed his attitude and helped us kill the mobs we needed.

Lobilya, my RL spouse, loves to tell of the time she knocked a gnoll into the big pit up at the top of Blackburrow, and listened to the shouts from below of "train to zone", and watching the gnolls boil out. Some higher level players would deliberately do and wait at the zone line to battle large numbers of gnolls at once. Very memorable, and fairly manageable. If you didn't want to deal with the trains in Blackburrow, you went somewhere else.

Psychochild goes on to say:

To put it in more basic game design terms, we're looking at risk as an enhancement to fun. Risk means that there's a chance for something good or something bad to happen. If you manage to overcome the obstacle and get the good result, it can feel great!

I'd just like to point out that there's plenty of risk in EQ2, and it's still due to player interaction. My PUG in Veksar last night is a case in point. Most of the others in the group were mythical wielders and competent players. Good attitudes, too. Unfortunately for us, the tank was not at that level, and clearly did not have much experience tanking for that level of play. I expect most of his game experience was soloing. We had a rough start, and the other players had to tell him to put Amends on the wizard. Once that was done, things settled down a bit with the Mystic pet pulling. It also developed that the Paladin didn't have a good concept of holding aggro on a group via wards, heals and blue AE's. So we wiped on the group just before the climb down.

But the worst was the final boss. We tried that pull many times and it just wasn't working. It developed that the tank was in offensive stance. And not using a shield. And having trouble keeping aggro on the adds. The leadership of the group had promised a very fast run, and was feeling impatient, so there wasn't a lot of instruction or communication. They were used to just blasting through a dungeon with minimal chatter. Eventually, the leader kicked the tank and two-boxed his own guardian to finish the dungeon. I felt a bit soiled, but I stayed. Another group member left before the finish, claiming it was raid time.

My point is this: There's still risk in the game, risk attributable to players. The game design set up this paladin for this fall. EQ2 is basically a two-track game: You can level up to 80 soloing and doing quests and feel like you have done well in the game and still be woefully unprepared for dungeons like Veksar. You don't know the tactics, you don't know expectations, and you don't have the gear. There are some very tough dungeons out there, and people still don't like dying a lot, because it represents Failure, and they have been trained by the solo game to expect Success.

When it comes to player-created risk, the critical thing is whether the players have chosen to accept that sort of risk. For example, consider recent posts of Tipa's about PvP in Eve Online. Or one of the first writings about PvP in Everquest, which I have thought of ever after as "You Came Here to Kill People".

Not everyone is going to choose these risks, and game companies naturally want to serve as large a population as they can. So they make two-tracked games, or games where players find it difficult to give other players grief. PvE risks are known and very controllable. PvP risks are not.

Another aspect of Blackburrow trains is that they encouraged cooperation across groups. The train is a threat to everyone, so it makes the players natural, spontaneous, allies. Even shouting "Train!!!" is a cooperative act.

I've long been an advocate for game designs that allow spontaneous socially-positive acts. Driveby buffing, etc. Much of that has been relaxed from launch, and that's good. But the opportunity to do this is greatly reduced, since most of the fighting now takes place in instances rather than dungeons.

All You Need is (Shard of) Love!

After completing the access quest, which starts for Qeynosians outside the NQ gate in Antonica, I went into the Shard of Love with guildies Karaya, Exit and Index. It seems that Erollisi Marr is still missing and there seems to be a problem with her home, the Plane of Love. I've been an adherent of Erollisi Marr for 3000 years. So naturally I jumped at the chance, and we investigated. There was no sign of her, her guardians have suffered serious memory loss, and the place is afflicted by lots of doleful listlessness, muck of neglect, and other such problems.

There are several nameds, all of which spawn as ring events, and the drops are mainly house items and appearance gear. For example, there's a fireworks that gives you a rain of rose petals. And a love seat for your house. (Did I forget to mention that my house got a new room, and more slots for stuff! That will keep me busy for a while.)



For instance, there was a very unhappy fairy surrounded by angry bees. And those bees had quite a sting. On one pull, the bees flew down from their tree and turned in unison to look at me. Erk! My finger hadn't even reached the mez button before I was dead. I hadn't cast a spell or nothin'! But I was rezzed and we moved on.

After poking around and clearing stuff out, the guardian remembered enough to tell us to go to the Chapel of Love. I refrained from singing on voice chat, but only just barely. But first we had to defeat the guardian of the Chapel, Valoron.



Ok, so most of these mobs are tough, but nothing terribly special. We died a lot but that's because there were four of us, no healer, and the tank was level 72. Karaya's coercer pet was very handy, but I pulled aggro from it or others several times and died a lot as a result. Hmm, I guess my respec boosted my dps. Or something.

The paladin tried putting amends on me, but that mostly succeeded in getting HIM killed first. Level 72 is rough to tank that zone, though there's only one mob red at that level.

I won't spoil what the final mob is, or how the plot resolves because, for me, that's part of the fun. There are 3 collections in this zone, and an opportunity to harvest a pomegranate, which very likely is has a new recipe out there to make use of it.

Good times all around.

A Date with (Shards of) Destiny

I took time out from playing Rock Band: The Beatles yesterday to try EQ2's Live Update 53, which they are calling Shards of Destiny. I thought I'd give you a report.

First, I use the Station Launcher, and boy was I glad about that. It downloaded the patch while I was doing something else and not even thinking about the patch. I remembered it was patch day at about 2:30 PDT when Phritz, who was working from home, called me and suggested I start downloading it, since it was taking him quite a long time.

So I went to log in and went right in to the game. That's sweet! It took Phritz maybe another 20 minutes.

Once in game we found that all our racial and class training choices had been undone, and needed to be repicked, with some new options available. Also, many equipment items had been changed to be HEIRLOOM and thus attunable, and had been de-equipped. So, there was lots of housekeeping to be done on login, the moreso if you had alts. Since I wanted to try a lot of the different bits of the LU, I skipped bringing the alts up to date.

One of the things that was notable is that they have moved certain utility powers into the racial powers category, expanding the availability of these skills. For example, Kerran can now take training that lets them be trackers. So you can have a healer that tracks too, as long as you are Kerran. We high elves (along with dark elves) got the ability to port to a group member in zone. Recast every 12 hours.

I'm very happy to have this ability, and I note that my groupmates will likely be glad I have it too, since it will speed things up for them. Zones are very big these days, and can have dangerous stuff in them.

Next, I couldn't help but noticing all the whining going on in level chat about avatar gear being downgraded and de-equipped. The de-equipping is a consequence of said gear being made HEIRLOOM, which I think that raiders should welcome. Still, it's no fun having your gear downgraded. If I recall correctly, that happened once before, while Desert of Flames was the current expansion, and it wasn't just avatar drops that got downgraded.

I learned through hard experience that it's bad to take stuff away from players, and I figure the EQ2 team knows it, too. So I guess they had a good reason for it. Still, it's something that any gamedev should work really hard to avoid. Nuff said. (On that topic anyway, you can't make me shut up that easily.)

Ok, the next thing I did was to visit the Chronomancers (in Qeynos Harbor for Qeynosians) and then tool about Antonica at level 20, visiting points of interest and finishing quests to complete a couple of Antonican Achievements. The system works well and smoothly, and it was fun trying to remember where all the places in Antonica were. Sure, you know where Bramble Woods are and Gnollslayer Highland, but where, exactly, are the Watchtower Plains? Lonely Isle? Misty Isle?

I was shocked by the number of quests in Antonica that I had never finished, and this was with Toldain, not an alt. As it turns out, finishing gray quests will still count for the achievement, but you won't get AA points for them.

One of the most confusing points about the Achievements is trying to figure out why you have credit for this but not for that. For example, the only point of interest that Toldain has for Commonlands is Turmoil Cemetery. I know for a fact he's been to lots more places, but that's the only one they could figure out from my quest journal, I guess. Which is weird, since it's right in the middle of CL, I don't think you could get there without going over some of the other POI.

After that, I joined some guildies in Shard of Love, the new zone, after doing the access quest. I'll have more on that in a different post.

Back in 1999, Jonathon Baron wrote, in the essay "Shame and Glory": "Don't build a pyramid." This LU has taken that advice to heart. It's thin on new quests, but not so thin on expanding the possible goals and activities for players that are tired of the chase to be "uber". New recipes, acheivments, new mentoring possibilities, and missions to go to old dungeons and hunt down bosses, missions that change every day.

The vocal reaction in level chat was pretty mixed. Of course, many of the strongest voices are those that belong to top raiding guilds, and the LU wasn't terribly kind to them. A lot of trouble, nerfed gear, and not much new to do. But there are raiding Achievements, and maybe a new encounter, I'm not sure.

And the timing couldn't be better, business wise. Would you rather sit in a queue waiting to get in to Aion for three hours or go mess around filling out an Achievement or two with your old EQ2 toon? It's all about fun, right?

Apparently I'm turning into a Will Wright junkie. I just ran across an interview Wright did with biologist E.O. Wilson on NPR.

In it Wright mentions SimAnt, a game he made based on his interest in biology and his reading of Wilson. My first thought was, "Yeah, but how well did it sell?" Much to my surprise, it apparently sold 100,000 copies and was named Best Simulation Program by the Software Publisher's Association. So much for cynicism, and my notions of what is commercial and what isn't. Just to further rub salt in my own wounds, I remind myself that The Sims is the best selling game of all time. And it isn't really even a game by conventional definitions. There are no victory conditions, no phat l00t.

But what about The Sims Online? That didn't seem to work as well, shutting down August 1 of last year, after being rebranded as EA-Land in 2007. I never played it, I don't know what the problems were, though the Wikipedia article hints at problems with the in-game economy. Or maybe it was that whatever was interesting and fun about The Sims was spoiled by having other people around?

Anyway, we were talking about E.O. Wilson's interview. He stated that he thinks that games will be very big in education, and talked about having a virtual Jurassic forest that students could walk through with an instructor, walking away from the "I talk, you listen" format of college lectures. Honestly, I'd say the lecture is the one thing in college courses most likely to survive, though I agree that the printed textbook is in big danger.

It got me thinking though. What's the game that teaches people to do algebra or calculus in that sort of exploratory, toy-like way? Tying this back to MMO's, can any of this be a shared experience?

On the plus side, I've learned a great deal from board games and tabletop roleplaying, which is social. On the minus side, once you bring other people into the equation, you introduce the possibility of shame, which stifles learning.

As I said yesterday, I think that shame has to be addressed not with game mechanics, but socially. In fact, by striving to avoid shaming players, and allowing them to be successful at every step of the way, game designers may unwittingly be feeding the shame culture by creating expectations of success. I think this plays out in education with the whole "self-esteem" curriculum movement. I've come to see confronting failure as a critical part of growth.

Of course, game designers are trying to sell games as pleasant recreations, making players fail all the time might not sell too many copies. But I've continued to be astonished at how strict MMO gamedevs can get away with being to their customers. Games can have powerful effects through narrative and media. Isn't it possible to separate failure and shame? We do that in private all the time...