Toldain Talks

Fabulous Red Hair is not a Game Mechanic, Either

2012-01-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

Raph Koster has a post up that seems to explain why I like DDO so much compared to other games. Provided you squint at it a little bit, and relabel some of the nodes. It's called "Narrative is not a Game Mechanic".

He develops a picture language that has yellow circles as user inputs, black boxes to represent the 'black box' of game mechanics, and blue squares to represent feedback. All of these are necessary to have a game:

Cut the input, and you have a screensaver.
Cut the problem inside the black box, and you have a slideshow.
Cut the feedback, and you have something ridiculously confusing that no one will tolerate.

You can diagram the structure of a game thusly, with the size of the boxes representing the complexity or weight of the components. Here's a sample.

Feedback can take the form of narrative action: point the camera at a window and press A and you get a fast cutscene of Batman gliding off the rooftop just ahead of the explosion! That's a small input, a small black box, and a big feedback.

Raph points out that this leads to a problem: The narrative cutscene gets old pretty fast. You've seen it before. Due to a well known process known as "hedonic adaptation" fun things lose some of their fun through repetition. (Or is that systematic desensitization?)

Ok, most of the MMO's I've played don't rely all that heavily on narrative feedback. Yeah, there's some cutscenes, and a nice death animation, but the big feedback comes in the loot. And I think that has the same problem, if a bit slower. What turned me off of EQ2 was exactly this: Going into an instance with a group had absolutely zero focus on the black box. The inputs were well determined and done as quickly as possible to get the loot. But the loot was random, so mostly you didn't get the loot that you wanted (How many times did I do Vault of Eternal Slumber, never to get Praetor's Guard?)

The simple terminology for this is "I hate grinding".

Ok, so most of the instances I run in DDO don't drop anything I actually upgrade to. But they are interesting. One reason for this is that the game system itself is interesting. And that's true because it's D&D. It was developed to be interesting on the tabletop, where there is no cinematic cutscenes. Although there is, to be fair, loot. Well, at least sometimes. My daughter's game is notoriously lean on the loot.

We get rewards: success. Sometimes its obvious what to do, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes (in DDO) we have to try again, or snatch things back from the Precipice of Wipe. That's just darn fun when you can pull that off.

Granted there is also the more visceral, media-based feedback: Holding a dance contest in the middle of the dungeon to see which demon is the best dancer ranks right up there. It's just fun to see them dancing when Karayasama uses Otto's (Theoretically) Resistable Dance. It's also fun to see which outfits show off the fabulous red hair to best advantage. But those sorts of things existed in EQ2, as well. They probably aren't quite enough to drive continuing subscription on their own, and they aren't game mechanics.

The striking thing to me is that as black boxes go, DDO isn't very black at all, maybe 18% neutral gray. At least to me, the D&D mechanics are second nature and public. There is a die roll, but that's the only element that is unpredictable. Everything else is based on mechanics from the tabletop RPG, where how everything works is spelled out.

Yet, it's still fun. Interest comes from not knowing what the mobs will do, and not knowing whether your spells or swings will miss, hit, or crit. Reacting in the moment is the joy.

The past few Mondays, Karayasama, Johnson (the cleric) and Marty (my tank with thief tendencies), have been running instances in Sentinels of Stormreach. And we have been tearing them up on Normal difficulty. Maybe it's time to move to Hard? Our ease surprises me a bit. Different groups have had more difficulty with these instances, particularly the Bazaar. (Remember how I mentioned the Precipice of Wipe?). We blasted through it. Not that it wasn't complex, it was just that we handled it.

Does this mean we're going to get bored with DDO and stop playing? Well, it might. We play a lot less. Karaya is playing SWTOR now, and I'm stuck on Skyrim. I'm not sure what Phritz is doing, and Lobilya is playing Skyrim, too.

Ancient Greek Punishment, The Game

2012-01-09T17:17:00.000-08:00

The science blogger Jennifer Ouellette linked this on Google+ and I just had to share.

Pippin Barr, a lecturer and researcher at Center for Computer Game Research at IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark studying "video game values," created this devious little game. Players take on the role of different characters from Greek myths (and, oddly, the non-mythological philosopher Zeno) and act out their punishments: Prometheus shakes off the vulture that tries to eat his liver; Tantalus reaches for fruit and water pulled just out of his reach; Sisyphus rolls a rock up a hill. It seems winning is dependent on your masochism — or your ability to write an auto-playing script.

However, I have read claims that an auto-play script doesn't, in fact, help. Still, I'm getting really, really close on the Sisyphus level.

If that isn't art, I'm not red headed...

Toldain Darkwater, Skyrim Edition

2011-12-29T14:19:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve, someone on my Google+ stream mentioned that Skyrim was on sale for 33% off. (For the next 3 hours or something). I was lost at that moment.

The rest of my family had already been playing it on their gaming computers. Lobilya and Thing2 had been playing it since launch. (And swapping stories about it at shared mealtimes, too.) Thing1 spent her savings on an XBox360 and the game. Given she plays her XBox on the TV in the same room where my gaming computer is, I could hardly not stop and watch her while flying cross-country on Randolph the Reindeer in Vanguard doing the latest Unicorn Rescue.

So I was primed. It took most of the evening to download, which was fine, because Christmas Eve was otherwise taken up with presents and food and general celebration. At your left you see the PC version of Toldain Darkwater, Skyrim Edition. Unfortunately my fabulous red hair is covered by that hood. It's cold, you see...

The game is achingly beautiful. For example, the lighting effects. That shot was taken at the top of the mountain on a cloudy, stormy day. The light is very white, and very dim. It's different at other times and places. The walk up the 7000 steps made me very nostalgic for the backpacking trips I took as a teenager.

********

One of my favorite novels by Roger Zelazny is Roadmarks. It describes a road that is a time travel mechanism, traveling along it moves one through time and space and there are exits at many interesting places in history. Chapters are labelled either One or Two. Here's what Roger said about it:

“I did not decide until I was well into the book that since there was really two time-situations being dealt with (on-Road and off-Road—with off-Road being anywhen in history), I needed only two chapter headings, One and Two, to let the reader know where we are. And since the Twos were non-linear, anyway, I clipped each Two chapter into a discrete packet, stacked them and then shuffled them before reinserting them between the Ones. It shouldn’t have made any difference, though I wouldn’t have had the guts to try doing that without my experience with my other experimental books and the faith it had given me in the feelings I’d developed toward narrative.”

Bethesda is no newcomer to making Fantasy RPG games, and the world of their games has been developed over several titles. Skyrim's full name is Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim after all.

Skyrim reminds me of Roadmarks for two reasons: First, it's full of non-linear storytelling. There is a Main Plot, much like chapters labeled One in Roadmarks. But that is such a small, small part of what makes the game interesting and engaging. It's not so much that there are a lot of side quests to choose from as there are entire lifestyles to choose between. You can develop and express your character by joining the Empire or the Rebels (they are called Stormcloaks). You can marry someone and set up a household (or many!)[EDIT: You can have many houses, not many spouses. You only get one of the latter, but it can be of whatever gender you wish.] You can aspire to political power, stay in an ivory tower or be a hermit, it would seem. You can aspire to be a master smith or enchanter. You can try to collect all the books in the game. There's no reward for it particularly save for the satisfaction.

The other similarity with Roadmarks? Dragons. In the case of Skyrim, lots of them. I'm hoping to write another post about the battle I had with a Dragon this morning.

But this post is about the sandboxiness of Skyrim. After the initial stuff, which is pretty linear, I went over to a den of bandits to clear it out on behalf of the Jarl of Whiterun. When I finished it, I looked up at the mountain it was on and thought, "Hey, that sort of looks like a path up that mountain, I wonder if I can go up it." I could.

I climbed to the absolute top of that mountain. On the way up, I ran across a Vigilant of Stendarr (The God of Mercy). He invited me to visit their lodge on the other side of the mountain. When I got near the top of the mountain, there was a little shrine there, with fires burning and offerings made. I'm not sure to whom. The peak was nearby. I climbed to the top of the rocky outcrop, just because it was there. Just below the outcrop was none other than Talsgar the Wanderer, a bard who likes to get out of the inn and have adventures, dammit! He had apparently just bested two bandits. On that mountaintop.

Continuing down the other side I found a temple to Mehrunes Dagon, which was locked. And well it should be, since, as I found out later (through reading in-game books!) that Dagon was at the center of the Oblivion Crisis (Elder Scrolls IV, I think), and must needs be safely locked away. I kept walking.

I visited the lodge of the Vigilants of Stendarr (The God of Mercy). Their slogan is "May Stendarr have Mercy on you, because the Vigil will not!" Yes, they're crazy. But they were nice enough to me.

I kept walking. I fought a few creatures and ended up on the northern coast in Dawnstar. The Jarl there was Skald the Elder, but he acts like a child, and everyone says so. When they aren't talking about the nightmares they are having. There was a priest of Mara there, and Toldain is a follower of the Goddess of Compassion, regardless of her name, so I helped him. We set things right at the Nightcaller Temple, but he had a habit of saying, "Oh, did I forget to mention...?" In the end, the nightmares were ended.

There are so many more adventures. Those all were Two. Eventually I got back to One.

When the Nintendo64 came out, it brought 3D graphics into everyone's living room. Miyamoto Shigeru, in making Mario64 demonstrated that 3D meant a lot more than something looking nice. That game had a lot of non-linearity in it, along with a dose of "whatever works, works." There were known solutions, but not prescribed ones.

Skyrim adheres to this and makes it so much bigger. Combat isn't about memorizing a sequence of button pushes to get you through a game level. But it does have a fair bit of "fast-twitch" to it, more so than DDO. It's definitely heir to FPS games. Aiming matters, unless you aren't an aimer but a summoner or a basher. Then it doesn't matter. Much.

I'm nowhere near an expert on this kind of game, I've focused mainly on MMO's and economic sims. But it seems that the accomplishment of Bethesda on this game can be summed up in three maxims:

1. If you can see it, you can go there.
2. When you go there, there will be something to do.
3. If you can do it, it will work.

Most of my very considerable RPG experience has been with other people. My only wish is that I could do this, or something like this, with other people.

(UPDATE: "Morrowind" corrected to "Oblivion" Crisis in reference to Mehrunes Dagon, a very Lovecraftian name, by the way).

The Face is the Most Important Part

2011-12-15T16:04:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading the best post ever about female plate armor, a topic of long-standing interest here. It's written by someone who makes armor. No doubt for SCA. Via the most-worthy tumblr Women Fighters in Reasonable Armor.

Here's a taste:

Any artist working with human subject matter will tell you that the face is the most important part of the character. A headshot by itself can tell you everything you need to know about who a person is and how they feel. Sex appeal can come entirely from a beautiful face, the body doesn’t need to be naked as well.

I argue that this:

is more appealing than this:

The bare chest and boob plate add nothing to the femininity, sexiness, or appeal of the character. Focus on the face for character appeal, let the armor be a reflection of the setting and her role within it.

Well, that's kind of hyperbole to make a point. I wouldn't say they add nothing. But the face and the eyes, as he says, rule.

And the red hair. I'm just saying...

So, the question I'm pondering is: If it doesn't add anything, why do we keep doing it? Is it because the artists/medium in question can't do the former?

In Praise of Pink Sneakers

2011-12-09T08:42:00.000-08:00

Amina Mae Safi wrote a guest post at Geek Feminism Blog about having a Ladies D&D Night.

Last night, we had our first meeting. We began the processes of picking out our characters, and, obviously, learning much about one another in the process. We drank cheap wine, discussed who we’d take to the Yule Ball, made esoteric references to Tim the Enchanter, got excited about speaking Draconic and hacking shit up in dungeons, all while feeing free enough to admit excitement over planning our characters’ costumes and buying pretty dice.

No one derogatorily accused anyone of being “girly” the entire night, despite swooning over a couple notable nerd-girl heartthrobs (Han Solo, Sirus Black) or waxing nostalgic on old boy band crushes. It was the most comfortable I’d felt around a larger group of nerds in years. I was free to be a girl, in my own sense of the word, and free to be a nerd, in my own sense of the word as well. There were pumpkin Rice Crispy Treats and there was a suggestive drawing of Matt Smith on the walls.

What I’m trying to say, rather wordily, is that I felt actually a part of a community for the first time in my geeky life.

I love geek women. I'm married to one. She probably likes playing D&D more than I do. She doesn't make Rice Crispy treats, and she isn't all that fussy about clothing, either. She does, however, get excited about speaking Draconic, hacking shit up in dungeons, buying cool-looking ("pretty" doesn't really enter her vocabulary) dice, and Sean Cassidy (We have to count him in the category of "boy bands" don't we?). I think she leans to Han in preference to Sirius, she tends not to like facial hair. Although head hair of the fabulous red persuasion is quite to her liking. However, she's taking ME to the Yule Ball, thank you very much.

For some reason, I associate geek women with pink sneakers. Not the really fashionable ones, but the big clunky ones that go up to your ankle. They are meant for srs bznss! If you are woman and a geek, and you don't wear pink sneakers, I'm cool with that too. I'm sure there are lots of you, I've worked with many such women. Pink sneakers take something which seemed to denote a "boy"-hightop basketball shoes - and claimed it for girls, too. In my mind, it's simultaneously a stupid, gross oversimplification, and a fun metaphor. And for the record, I don't think Mrs Darkwater has ever worn pink sneakers, but I could be wrong on that.

I played one long tabletop campaign in the Call of Cthulhu system with four women, one of which was only there for part of the time. There were three other men playing, too, and the GM was male. We each had multiple characters, typically switching between them depending on which part of the plot we were advancing. One of the characters Mrs Darkwater played was male (we call that "gender bending", it's been part of my RP since the beginning.) Another woman also had one character who was male.

We once spent one entire run in Paris in 1926 while the women characters in the group stopped and shopped. The male characters represented the patient and the impatient. One of the women players had some books of fashions in that day, and we had a glorious time. The run ended with one character, the young actress, missing the train (The Orient Express, of course) and having to hire a motorcycle with a sidecar to catch up to it.

That run turned out to be one of the most memorable of the entire seven years the campaign ran, even though there were no cultists, aliens, or dark gods to be seen. Those would come later.

I would say that I don't understand why any man would not want women at his RP gaming table, but I think I do know. At least, I think I can think of at least one reason.

To be a man is to have your masculinity always in question. People will be eager to tell you that you aren't a "real man" and that they can show you how, for a small fee. Or if you will do their dirty work, that will make you manly, too.

This masculine insecurity drives men to find activities that signal that they are men, rather than "not a real man" (I don't really think that "not a real man" is synonymous with "woman" by the way.). One of those activities might be Dungeons and Dragons. It's happened that way for a lot of men, I think. They first played in their youth, when most activities were gender-segregated because of, "OMG COOTIES".

That wasn't what happened to me. I first played D&D in grad school, with a woman GM, and a group of male players that flipped a coin for each character to determine its gender. (At least one of those players, I found out later, was gay as well.)

We had a rocking good time. The GM had some romance subplots, but they weren't front and center during the run. When we played women characters, we tried to make them as believable as we could, and we were probably about as successful as we were with the male characters.

But we had fun. For me, fun with D&D and later with MMORPG's has always involved women. Sometimes, sexual feelings do come up, and I'd bet that that's true for women, too, in most any mixed group. Sometimes.

But that wasn't the point of our group, so that stuff didn't get any oxygen during our sessions, out of respect for our group. (I know of several relationships that started over D&D or MMORPGs).

To me, its fun to have different viewpoints at the table, and the true joy of tabletop RPG is getting into a group head space. It's like a great big canvas that the GM has sketched an outline on, and we're all filling it in and embellishing it. And I mean that not just in terms of character, but in combat, too. Combat is character. (If you don't know what I mean, try watching "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" again with this in mind.)

Sometimes, other players will bring in some twist that will take everyone's breath away. You can almost think of it as a derail, but really, we embrace it as an embellishment. This requires a DM to be pretty flexible about plots, though.

And so, people who are different than you are become an asset. As long as there is accord on the basic social contract of the campaign, diversity adds to the enjoyment of the game, it doesn't subtract.

So men, relax a little. Brace yourself to ignore the catcalls of "not a real man". If anyone tries to shame your masculinity, give them the Braveheart treatment (shown above). Well, at least in your imagination. You'll feel a lot better. They have an agenda, and it isn't to your benefit, count on it. They are trying to drive you away from something that you love! If there are women at your table, DO NOT hit on them, not there, not during the session. That breaks the social contract of an rpg session, which is to focus on play. It will irritate everyone else. And don't shame them for doing stuff that you wouldn't do. There might be consequences, it's true. Know that the consequences might make the story more interesting.

To women, I say "show up". If you're new to the game, listen and read. Ask questions. There's a lot going on, and some of the advice you'll get is really useful, others not so much. But feel free to play your character. Don't worry about "being a woman", be yourself, and know that it's ok. A little mental Braveheart for you might be good, too.

What everyone needs to do is find some accord on the basic social contract of the game, and that goes for all groups, not just the mixed gender ones. The group needs a few ground rules about how the game is going to work, and logistics. A few such possible rules:

Explicitly say that you're going to let players make mistakes and have failures. You can expect them to learn from these, but have a good time with it. Laugh when things go wrong. It makes a better story.
It's probably best not to bring sexual material into the game unless you are really, REALLY sure that everyone's ok with it. I mean REALLY sure. No, not that sure, even more sure than that.
Don't allow unlimited cross-table advice during combat. We use a mechanic called "idea roll" which is INT based if someone wants to suggest a course of action. Or they can shout out something short ON THEIR TURN. Otherwise, they can shut up. Maybe the new girl (or guy!) has a dumb idea, but maybe it isn't that dumb after all.

Finally any group needs a shared goal or focus that will pull the characters together. It might be rescuing kittens, it might be toppling evil overlords (Did I say "overlord"? I meant "protector"!), it might be pulling a heist. As long as everyone is on board with this, the group can tolerate an enormous amount of diversity. The way RPG's usually work, as long as that stubbled-cheeked, cowboy-boots-wearing, mass-murdering psychopathic lunatic is helping you, they get a pass. Why shouldn't the same go for the bubble-gum-chewing, pink-sneaker-wearing, fashion-conscious psychopathic lunatic?

D&D 4e Strikers: Math First

2011-12-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: I initially did the calculations using the wrong figures for Sorcerer Chaos Bolt bounce damage. Both weapon pluses and the Sorcerer secondary attribute bonus are added to the bounces. In addition, the secondary attribute bonus gains +2 at paragon tier. This makes the Sorcerer stack up very, very well, though the Ranger and Avenger still beat it on the difficult targets.

In a bit of a departure, I'm going to talk about tabletop RPG, and I'm going to indulge my love of math and graphs and analytics. You have been warned.

Both Ameron and Sndwurks of Dungeon's Master have claimed that the Avenger class is "broken". Ameron wrote "Avenger - worst striker ever" last March. I thought comments to that post had pretty effectively rebutted the claim, until recently Sndwurks posted a redesign of the Avenger class.

We engage in redesign or tweaks of classes all the time, so I have no issue with that. By all means, people should not play classes they don't like, and feel free to fiddle with them to get classes they do like.

But I have a problem with the idea that Avengers are "broken" - meaning that they don't acheive the damage output that other striker classes, particularly the Rogue and the Ranger, do. I think this is mistaken. So, I made a spreadsheet and a bunch of graphs. (I told you this post was going to be geeky!)

This post is going to cover the math. In the graphs below, I look at damage output of Rogues, Rangers, Avengers, Barbarians, Warlocks and Sorcerers.

I present graphs of damage per Standard Action (DPS) versus the roll needed to hit the mob. I think that mostly pluses to hit even out between the classes. There may be a few exceptions to this, but they will be relatively easy to deal with after the fact.

Arcane classes don't get the proficiency bonus to their attack modifier, but they generally attack defenses other than AC, which means that these effects tend to cancel each other out. It isn't perfect, but that's the assumption we're going with. For now.

In the scenarios below, I've generally assumed no feats are chosen to that add damage. I think these feats generally even out between the classes, and their effect is usually pretty easy to incorporate. Ability modifiers are assumed to be 5 in heroic tier and 6 in Paragon tier. The Paragon tier graphs assume that characters have picked up another +2 to damage (other than magic weapons/implements) somewhere along the line.

All damage calculations are based on using the expected value of any die roll. So Rogues are assumed to use a Short Sword (1d6 = 3.5) plus 2d6 (=7), plus Ability modifier damage (5).

Barbarians and Avengers are modeled with Greatsword. Greataxe is arguably better, but the proficiency modifier is one smaller. That can be modeled as a tax of 5% of damage output, that makes Greataxe damage output equal to .95*(6.5+5)=10.95 versus Greatsword = 5.5+5 = 10.5. High crit makes it a little better still, but the effect is pretty small. Barbarians use Devastating Strike, which adds an additional 1d8(4.5) damage to every hit. Avengers use Oath of Enmity, which allows them to roll twice and use the better roll, including crits.

Warlocks use Eldritch Blast plus their Curse (1d10(5.5) + Ability(5)+1d6(3.5)).

Sorcerors use Chaos Bolt and add a second ability score. I assumed that the second ability modifier was equal to 3. I think such builds are possible. Chaos Bolt will bounce when an even number is rolled and attack a nearby target, dealing 1d6(3.5) damage on a hit, with a possibility of further bounces. No target may be hit more than once. This is (1/2 + 1/4 + ...)*3.5 = 3.5, assuming there are enough targets. But there aren't enough targets, so we'll call the damage contribution from bounces 2, which is roughly equivalent to saying there's an average of two extra targets.

For Rangers, we face two separate questions. First, should we use melee attacks, for which scimitar is the best one-handed (all Rangers dual wield, right?) or do we use longbow with its superior damage? Second, do we Twin Strike or not?

The math works out like this: let

W be weapon damage, including any magical plusses, etc. that would be counted on both damage rolls of a Twin Strike,

Ph be the probability of a hit,

A be the Abiility score modifier,

HQ be Hunters Quarry damage, and

MHQ be (1-Ph)*HQ.

For maximum damage output, Rangers should use Twin Strike instead of any other At-Will power (or Basic Ranged Attack) when W+MHQ is greater than A. That is if the weapon damage, plus the proportion of Hunter's Quarry that you aren't going to lose is bigger than the rangers Ability score modifier. Here's a chart of MHQ and W+MHQ for Heroic and Paragon tiers.

As the caption says, rangers should pretty much always use Twin Strike. For a longbow, which is what's shown, W+MHQ starts out at slightly over 5 and improves as targets become more difficult, because taking two shots gives you a greater chance of dealing HQ damage. At paragon tier, W+MHQ starts at 8, assuming only a +2 weapon. Do you think an ability score modifier is going to be 9 at paragon tier? I don't. With a scimitar, W+MHQ starts at 4, not 5, so it might be the case that the easiest targets should be attacked with something else, but it's not going to matter much.

The second issue is which weapon to choose for the Ranger, longbow or scimitar. (They're going to be dual wielding, so scimitar is the clear melee choice.) Longbow has more base damage (1d10 vs 1d8) but scimitar is high crit, dealing 1d8 extra damage on a critical hit. Here's the chart:

Longbow wins over Scimitar. Any pluses to damage apply equally to both weapons, typically. No particular Ranger can switch like this between weapons, because they use different ability scores. (Unless they have twin 16's or something.) Both builds are fine builds to play. But for purposes of comparison with other striker classes we want to put the Ranger's best foot forward, and that best foot is Twin Strike longbow.

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Ok, that's all the preliminaries. Now for actual data. First with non-magical weapons, like you might be a first level.

There's no real big winner, but the Ranger is at the top of the pack. The Avenger is below par for the easiest third of targets, but after that climbs to the top on the hardest targets. If you're saying to yourself, "but those never come up", I'll address that later. This is just the data.

Soon characters get magic weapons. Magic weapons are modeled by adding 1 to damage, and an extra 1d6(3.5) of critical damage per magic plus. Just for fun, let's look at some +2 magic weapons, appropriate for higher heroic tier.

The Twin Shot longbow Ranger has now emerged from the pack. This isn't spelled out directly in the PH, but pluses to damage add to all damage rolls and since the attacks in Twin Strike are rolled separately, each damage is a damage roll. So they count twice.

The Avenger with Oath has caught up, being slightly behind only on those targets needing only a 2 to hit. Rolling twice means an Avenger is never actually missing these targets. Everyone else (except the Ranger) has those "I rolled a 1" moments. Additionally, the Avenger, like the Ranger, is getting a lot more criticals. So the Avenger is at the top of the pack on the harder targets.

The Barbarian is the laggard. However, the extra damage die of the Barbarian is built-in, it does not depend on any circumstance or positioning. it does not have to be set up, it can't be taken away by any normal means, so that's probably an ok tradeoff.

The Ranger in one campaign I run has a Vicious longbow +2. Vicious weapons deal an extra 1d12(6.5) per plus on a critical hit, rather than 1d6. So let's model that.

This doesn't change things much relative to each other, other than boosting the Ranger and the Avenger, who make two rolls per standard action, doubling the chance of a critical hit.

Let's look now at paragon tier. I assume that key ability scores are now providing +6 to damage, and that the Sorcerer has boosted his secondary as well, giving him +10. I also add another +2 to damage for things like Weapon Focus and damage type specialization. Sneak Attack does 3d6(10.5), Hunters Quarry and Curse do 2d6(7). Devastating Strike add now 2d8(9) damage. Can the Avenger keep up?

Yes, it can. The Ranger continues to excel, but the Avenger is right there in the pack on the easiest target, and matches the Ranger on the difficult targets. The big surprise for this tier is the Barbarian. Because he gets extra damage in d8's instead of d6's, it starts to tell.

We haven't discussed either the effect of tactics and cooperation, or the difficulty of enemies. That will have to wait for another post. Looking at these graphs, I'd have to say the Avenger is working as intended, and not broken at all. If anything is broken, it's the Twin Striking Ranger.

That's all for now.

Midnight in the Garden of Blood and Weevils

2011-11-29T08:02:00.000-08:00

Aubrey: Quick now, tell me. Which of those two weevils would you choose?
Maturin: I don't know, that one seems larger...
Aubrey: No you must choose the smaller, because as we know, in service to the Crown one is constantly forced to choose the lesser of two weevils.
Maturin: He who would pun would pick a pocket.

Ok, I made up the part about weevils. I needed a stupid pun, sue me.

The only thing in my life more fabulous than my hair - Lobilya - has not been feeling well the last couple of Mondays, which is when we have our regular DDO night. Since the other two consistent members of the group, Karaya and Phritz, have been playing Vanguard (I blame Karaya!), we've been focusing on that.

I'm bringing up a Monk, named Xiaowang Chen (I named him for one of the great Tai Chi masters of our time). Meantime, Karaya has started a goblin necromancer Gruktich. We did some stuff last week with Laddie who is a Vulmane (essentially a gnoll) Shaman. (Yes, he named his dog character Laddie Goodboy. He's such a plagiarist. That's completely different from naming your toon after a real life figure. Srsly!) This was on the starting island for goblins, in Kojan.

Over Thanksgiving, Laddie(Phritz) was AFK, so Xiaowang and Gruktich continued. However, our ship foundered somewhat on the rocks of the Garden of Xia'Liu. This is an area (I hesitate to call it a dungeon, since it's open air, and, like everything in Vanguard, there's no "zoneline" to get in to it.) that is guarded by clay warriors reminiscent of the terra-cotta warrriors, along with many other strange creatures. It's densely populated with challenging mobs - Yukionna which are a sort of humanoid spirit and are typically casters, Silvermane Foxes, disembodied energy beings known as Dancers, and ferocious killer dragonflies known as Tomba (the Japanese word for dragonfly is Tonbo, perhaps Tomba is from Chinese? Or maybe just an alternate rendering into romanji?).

The gardens are beautiful, done in a chinese style. Gruktich and Xiaowang worked their way patiently up the hill to the mountaintop garden, killing clay warriors at each Torii gate. When we reached the garden proper, we kind of started wishing that we were playing our crowd control toons, because the mobs definitely tended to swarm.

We died a lot. And so ran back. I managed to eventually remember that I had Feign Death, and thus avoided a few deaths. We didn't manage to make it to the third pagoda where we could finish gathering the waters and activate a spiriteye medallion. But we did roll in the experience, thanks to the double exp weekend on Vanguard. (I also got Toldain through a major diplomatic arc.)

So this Monday, with Lobilya not logging on, we went at the gardens again, with Laddie. First we ran him through the quests at the Gulgrethor encampment Khenvor. This orc clan is the sworn enemy of the Martok, to whom Gruktich (and all PC orcs and goblins, I believe) belongs. But we infiltrated them, and put on workers jerseys, and discovered a horrible secret about certain undead known as Loamites.

We also discovered that mentoring is implemented in Vanguard! So I switched to Toldain, and mentored Laddie, who was level 14 to start the evening. Mentoring worked out pretty well. The mechanic seems to be that those abilities that you gained after the mentored level are disabled, and those that are upgrades of a higher level are rolled back to the upgrade you would have had at that level. However, I had no visual cue for which abilities are cancelled, so that led to some awkwardness.

Even so, completing the quests at Khenvor was easy with this group. We had healing, tanking (from the pet) and crowd control. So we marched on down to Gulkar's Encampment and got Laddie (and Toldain) up to speed with the quests for the Gardens of Xia'Liu.

It was much easier with three of us than two. The addition of both healing and crowd control made most of the gardens run pretty smoothly. That is, it was smooth until we ran into the nasty snake people that guard the way to the third pagoda. (Their name eludes me, I think I've blocked it out of my mind.) These guys can oneshot any of us. Except the necromancer's pet, that is.

Fortunately Laddie can raise dead, even if only out of combat. This saved us an immense amount of trouble. He even has rez tokens that he can hand out that allows others to raise him. After a fair time experimenting, we found that if we stayed at maximum spell range from the snake people, they couldn't hit us with that nasty mojo. (I was killed once by two ranged autoattack hits.) They were nasty, but we made it by them.

And there we found the usual clay guardians and Yukionna guarding the third and final pagoda we sought. Except they all had an extra dot.

In Vanguard, mobs have a level (equivalent to character level) and a number of dots, which rates their difficulty. We'd been tackling three dot mobs for most of the Gardens, these had four. So they were going to have a lot more hit points, and probably hit harder (though not, it seems, harder than those horrible naga-type snake thingies.) Things were a little hairy on the first pull, as we got two, and the one I mezzed leashed for some reason. But we pulled it together, cleared them out, and gathered the water from the pool. I discovered that my Spiriteye Amulet worked in this location, but for some reason it didn't complete the quest it was associated with. This might have been due to Gruktich starting a combat as my amulet was going, but subsequent attempts failed with me.

Fortunately, since I was higher level than the other two, I didn't mind not completing that quest all that much. The point was to catch the others up, anyway.

I really enjoyed this run. (I really enjoyed duoing the Gardens with Gruktich and Xiaowang, too) All the classic level designer tricks were in play - there were nooks and crannies with hidden mobs and wanderers. All the skills that the three of us first learned in Everquest were still in play, and in addition, we had voice chat, which is something we never had when we played Everquest. Managing aggro and adds, developing tactics that fit your group, and just generally having to be on makes this for me.

And the use of Asian design motifs and plots set against orcs and goblins is fun, too. But there are no weevils in the Garden of Xia'Liu. None. Not a single one, not even a lesser weevil.

Where Rage and Zen Coexist

2011-11-18T15:18:00.000-08:00

Rita, aka Karaya, in a comment on my last post:

I definitely agree with your assessment that I work in that rage-to-master realm. Though I think there are two sides to that coin, and you and I each represent a side. This is really just an amusing brain-tangent; obviously the world isn't so categorical as this mental construct:

When I used to play Soul Calibur games all night with my friends, two of us were clearly the best players: Foley and me. For those who don't know, Soul Calibur is a console fighting game series, like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat (Though far superior to either, imo). I was unequivocally regarded as the best player in the group - the one to beat. But once I got into my groove, Foley still had a chance of beating me in any given fight. He was the only one. And everyone else pretty much dreaded having to play either one of us.

There's a huge psychological component to SC when you know your opponent as well as my friends know each other. You really get insight into the way that person thinks in a high-pressure, fast-paced contest over the course of milliseconds. You develop an instinct for anticipating her/his next move. Not to mention, we played so much of that game that our respective characters became extensions of our own limbs, really. So it was all about the mental game.

Now, as the night went on and we played battle after battle against each other, we'd get warmed up and start thinking and reacting faster. And faster still, to keep up with each other.

At our peaks - in our grooves, if you will - we each had a distinct method of mental processing.

Foley's method we called "Synapses", following a battle during which he commented that his "synapses [had] to fire faster to keep up!" His processing during our battles would take place consciously. He had to focus on my movements and keep his knowledge of my idiosyncrasies in mind, and make constant active decisions to counter my actions.

My method we called "Zen". Once I got in my groove, my processing mostly seemed to take place subconsciously. In fact, at times I had to be careful not to actually focus on anything, as I'd risk "thinking too much". I would tend to stare *through* the screen and watch both our characters in my peripheral vision. I would act and react instinctively.

Somehow I see a bit of a parallel when I compare you and me in the role of MMO enchanter. And I think it's most visible in DDO, illustrated by our choices of Wizard and Sorcerer, respectively.

You tend to study the situation at hand and try to consciously choose your tools and strategies to match it. When you fail, your reaction tends to be "I brought the wrong tools" or "I had the wrong plan", and you adjust accordingly.

I go into a situation with the same set of tools every time and no real plan. Because my tools (spells) are always the same, they're practically extensions of my body. I don't do much planning 'cause I hold myself to the standard that my skill should be sharp enough to handle any situation on the fly. When I fail, my reaction is "This is a worthy foe" or "My skill is lacking and must be honed further".

So in our approach to the spider cave, I see you focusing on the spawn cycles, the wandering patterns, the placement of mobs in that particular situation. Then you consider your tools and draw up an over-arching strategy (subject to adjustment, of course).

I, on the other hand, focus on my reaction time, my awareness, my instinctive understanding of myself and the fundamental mechanics of the game. In my mind, if those items are sharp enough, I will be victorious.

Now regardless of where each of us *focuses*, obviously there is overlap in our experiences. And both of us failed many times and then eventually succeeded. It's just interesting to consider the contrast of styles between the two high elf enchanters of Glory ;)

The difference she describes is real. I've played Soulcalibur a bit. Mostly I played Xiang Wa. I would never try to beat anyone with speed and reaction time, but rather with "timing" or what is called "meiei" in many martial arts. I would look for "gaps" or opportunities and hit them.

This involves some cognition. But it needs to go down into the "fast path" of the brain to execute. So I wouldn't make too much of the differences, we're more the same than different.

The graphic at the top is the Zen Mistress' keyboard layout for DDO, which she shared with me a little while ago, as described for her cleric. It is wildly remapped from the "out of the box" layout. I adapted this for my DDO characters, and it's starting to work, though it's a strange position to have my hands in relative to the keyboard.

I Came Here To Be Podkilled: Vanguard Spider Cave Edition

2011-11-17T07:43:00.000-08:00

I learned a new phrase recently, "rage to master". I have a feeling that at least some of you have a gut-level understanding of what that is, but I'm going to tell you anyway, and relate it to my current gaming, so there! (He says with a toss of his fabulous red hair!)

I've been playing Vanguard again. Karaya suggested it, she said she had run out of things to explore in DDO, so while keeping our regular group time, she was going to go explore the vast world, and challenging gameplay of Vanguard - properly this time.

As it turned out, I had played Vanguard for a while, and was entranced by some parts of the game - the diplomacy system, for example, and the crafting system. The combat gameplay featured classes that by and large followed the Everquest archetypes, with a couple of added twists. And I absolutely hated the models they used for high elves. My face, in Vanguard was positively skeletal.

They replaced those models with something a little more healthy looking, fortunately. So I re-upped and started poking around. Some of the best gear is dropped by quests offered by a group known as the URT - United Races of Thestra. (Thestra being my home continent.) I'm starting to get an impression of URT as a bunch of incompetent nincompoops who keep asking me to do horrific things to cover for their mistakes, but never mind.

One quest in particular, given out at Shoreline Ruins, has us investigating the disappearance of a roughly 10 year old girl while her family was at the medieval equivalent of a beach home. The clues finally lead us to a cave facing the northern ocean. The girl is in a cocoon at the back of the cave. The cave is infested with spiders.

These spiders see through invisibility. So no dice there. I had to fight my way through it. Now, I am a psionicist, which is Vanguards version of an enchanter. So I die very quickly when things go wrong.

I spent probably 10-12 hours last Saturday trying to finish this quest. It would go like this: I approach the cave, buffed. I pull something and start my root-and-rot sequence. Something would wander by and add and I would die. Or, maybe I'd make it a ways into the cave first. And something would respawn on me and I'd die. Or mobs that were around a corner would come when I pulled and I'd die. At first I wasn't using a charmed pet, but after a while I did. Which added the charming new failure mode of "Charm starts to break just as you pulled". Along with the failure mode of "Charm starts to break immediately on recharm and since it was in the middle of a fight, you die."

Every possible wrinkle or complication that can make this difficult was used. The level designer of this cave used every trick that he or she could muster. Hidden mobs, wanderers, fast respawn, and a few mobs that are tougher than the rest and respawn randomly. Psionicists have a snare, and so can kite, but it's not really possible in a restricted space, such as that cave. By the time you've killed your way to the back, the mobs in the front have respawned.

My youngest child, taking a break from playing Skyrim, wandered past and watched me playing for a bit. "Why do you play this game?" she exclaimed, somewhat bemused by the uncharacteristically foul language gracing my lips. It was hard to explain.

All I could manage was a vehement, "I can do this!"

There were lots of little internal metrics that told me that I was getting better at it, and that's something I enjoy. For example, the number of kills I could do between deaths was getting bigger. I revised my damage sequence and the mobs were dropping faster. Sometimes now, I could throw up my fast root when things had gone bad and run away and survive. My experience bar was moving forward even though it was three steps forward, and two steps back when I died.

And I was learning every spawn point, every hidden mob and every aggro range in that cave. I knew what to do in each situation.

At about midnight, I reached the back of the cave, freed the girl and started to fight my way out. This has an extra dangerous aspect to it. Respawn is roughly timed to take place after death. Since I'd killed the mobs from the front of the cave to the back, they would respawn in that order. Which means that when I first hit the edge of the respawned mobs on the way out, I would be standing in the spot where the next respawn would take place - at any time now.

My first attempt failed. So did my second. Part way out, lose it, lose the girl. I had to go all the way back to the back of the cave to get out. My second attempt failed as well. As it turns out, Psionicists have an evac ability. So I started to wonder, "Will the girl come with me when I evac?" If it didn't work, she'd be stuck in the cave and I'd have to fight my way in again.

I decided to chance it. It worked. I took her back to the quest-giver, logged out and collapsed into my bed, happy as a clam. (Ok, I chatted with Phritz a bit first, getting him started on the diplomacy system, for which the tutorial is more than a bit lacking.)

I was describing my Saturday to a friend and she said, "Rage to Master". I blinked. She said that the phrase was coined by someone who studies gifted children. Apparently that someone is Ellen Winner

I found a quote from the book on this wikipedia page (it seems a bit dodgy, but the quote seems good enough).

Gifted children have three telltale characteristics, Winner says. First, they begin to master an area of knowledge, or domain, such as math, drawing or chess, at an extremely early age, before starting school. Second, they need little help from adults in that domain, solving problems in often-novel ways, with each discovery fueling the next step. And third, they have what she describes as a rage to master their domain, working at it intensively and obsessively, often isolating themselves from others in order to pursue it. These children push themselves, achieve "flow states" in their work, and beg their parents for the books, musical instruments or art supplies they need to feed their passion. They need stimulating environments to develop their talents, Winner says of these children, but the demand comes from them, not the parents."

Winner may be describing the extreme cases, but I've seen this phenomenon play out a lot in significantly less rarified air. I often feel cheated if I am with a group that has a known, set strategy for a dungeon or an instance and just want to grind through it quickly.

All the deaths I had meant little to me. They were data points, not judgements. My blood was up, and so there were exclamations and expletives, but the deaths were quickly forgotten. Getting to a flow state includes a lot of failure. And that flow state is like a drug, really.

I don't really think this fits into the Bartle personality type of Achiever, by the way. I am not highly motivated by extrinsic rewards such as in-game "achievements". Leveling is good, but not the point. Standing in one place grinding away for hours with basically no variation and no risk isn't terribly interesting. I'm not a bot, don't make me play like one.

I'm pretty sure Karaya is like this, too. That's probably how she got good enough at videogames that her parents say, "She made a deal with the devil" There was no mention of any crossroads, though. I mentioned the spider cave to her and she said, "stupid spiders".

Phritz also has his moments. When we take the Bartle test, we all come out as some degree of Explorer/Socializer. And right now, we're exploring Vanguard. Normal people think we're kind of crazy, but if you're someone who reads this and thinks, "Yeah, right on!" drop me a line in-game.

No Rez Options for You!

2011-11-10T16:39:00.000-08:00

SOE announced today that Everquest II will go "Free to Play. Your Way". I don't think they are talking about me. I like the DDO FTP model much better than what SOE is offering. All servers will convert to a FTP model wherein aspects of gameplay are restricted except for those accounts paying the monthly fee.

Because of the strenuous objections of the current playerbase to anything that smells of "pay to win", SOE is not going to offer the following items in the RMT store which had been in the FTP-dedicated servers:

Power potion

Health potion

Self-rez scroll

Wand of Obliteration

Rune of Devastation

Mastercrafted Equipment (all)

Tradeskill Components

Some of the items on this list are standards in DDO. Rez tokens, power and health potions, for example. Mastercrafted equipment seems kind of a problem for those hoping to make ingame currency from selling these items. So I can see dropping that. Tradeskill components? As in raw materials? That's kind of crazy that they sold that, but sure, spend your money if you don't want to go gathering.

I just don't care about this stuff the way I used to. But lots of the EQ2 players seemed to still. At a guess, they are operating out of a sense of competition (in a PVE game). It's not like EVE where every aspect of it is PVP. If someone else has success by spending more money, so what? How does that impact you? Prestige I'd guess. But we've had people cheating - remember the ghosting scandal? - in EQ2 for a long time for nothing but the prestige of being the first or the "uber" guild on the server.

The thing that really kills the FTP plan for me is the restrictions on Silver accounts. See below:

[I'm stealing bandwitdth from The Ancient Gaming Noob for that chart. Wilhelm, let me know if my meager traffic is a problem and I'll self-host. I'm mostly feeling lazy.]

With a Silver (never mind Free) account, I can pay extra if the package doesn't include the race or class I want. (But the fabulous red hair comes for free!). However: I can't have Master-level abilities. I can't get Legendary and Fabled drops. I can't have more ingame coin than 20 gold (!) per character level. I can't have more than 40 quests in my journal. My access to the broker would be "Restricted". And I can't send in-game mail.

In short, Toldain would very hamstrung as a Silver toon. Most of his gear and abilities would downgrade. Most of his fabulous wealth (which came from manufacturing and playing the jewelry/spells market) would be gone, or maybe just inaccessible.

So, for him, my choice would be: go back to the old subscription, at what appears to be a slightly higher price, or go home.

Ok, I kind of get that they are worried about spam from gold-sellers. But wow. You can't send mail on a Silver account? Can't you just charge a few coppers for an ingame mail?

*******

Back to that competition thing. Today the news also broke that Zynga executed a "take-back" of stock options from some of its early employees. There's this story, which says that the executives were motivated to avoid a "Google Chef" moment. [If you didn't know, Charlie Ayers, the first chef Google hired, left the company after its IPO with $20 million. I say, good for you, Charlie!]

But this story says that the motivation was to make Zynga a "meritocracy". [Hat tip to Psychochild for pointing it out.] I'm doubtful. The story isn't sourced, but it reads like it came straight from the keyboard of Zynga's president, Marc Pincus. According to it, Pincus was deciding to demote people rather than fire them. What a great guy! Let's just say that he has a track record of being psychologically manipulative, given how their games work.

In Silicon Valley, early employees get bigger stock grants. That's just how it works, and when a company IPO's some people will get more money than other folks think they "deserve". And that bothers some people. Let's set aside whether Marc Pincus is one of those people who is bothered.

It has been my impression that game companies have sort of a license to abuse their workers, based on the fact that the workers often think that working as a gamedev is the greatest job in the world, and something they would do for free. But the particulars of this case, only the employees at Zynga know.

I play DDO now (and I've started back with Vanguard, but that's another post). The idea that someone is buying RMT hirelings and rez potions and buffs doesn't bother me in the slightest. It doesn't take away from my accomplishments at all. That's what's at the core of the "Free to Play. Your Way". Current players don't want to see their accomplishments cheapened. But that's inevitable, it happens even without rez potions, as people level up.

I once was on their side, but I don't see the point any more, not in a PVE game. Your game is not my game. Live and let live.

I Didn't Start the Fire, But She Stood In It, Asking For Healing

2011-11-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

Our Monday night group started Ruins of Threnal this week. The group we had rocked the first half hard. In attendance were Marty (Officially Martinier dePasolai) Fighter 5/Rogue 5 - Plate tank and backup sneaker. Lobilya, Rogue 8 (or 9, I forget). Karayasama, sorceress 12(?) and dance queen, and Worstof, Ranger 9ish, he with heavy repeating crossbow.

Anyway, the dps laid down was amazing to me. I had run this before with Toldain, Jonnson (a cleric 9), and Vironet (Ranger 9). Our only real dps was Vironet, except when Tolly steps in with a lightning bolt or something. The difference was startling. Karayasama did not bother charming anything, stuff died too quickly. She did however, infect many an outsider with disco fever.

Flesh reavers, by the way, look ridiculous when they dance. Gargoyles, on the other hand, are pretty decent dancers, the wings really add that extra something. I really want to see a beholder dancing now, though that would mean someone would have to get within melee range of one, which could be a problem. The best way we've found to kill beholders is to hide behind a rock while Vironet does the "pop up and shoot" thing.

But there are no beholders in the first half of Threnal. Lots of stuff that died really fast and hard. I'm not really sure why that is, but everything was working that night. I think our focus and coordination was better, and we were more patient. Lobilya would sneak in the vanguard, about 10 yards ahead of me (as Marty). She's spot something, call it out, and we'd stop and let them come to us.

The first one in would typically try to rush past me at the "weak underbelly". I'm guessing it didn't like all those bolts that Worstof was throwing at it. (I think he probably used up 2000 bolts on the evening). I would trip it, and as often as not, it would fall on its face, at which point I (and sometimes Lobilya) would hack it to little bits. Sometimes it would start dancing. Either way, it was clumsy. Once in a while, it would fall down, and then immediately spring up dancing. Karayasama is apparently the equivalent of Gene Kelly singing "Gotta dance!"

We had two cleric hirelings along. Mine was Marissa, I think her name is. After fighting our way through some rough caves, there is a section that looks more like a dwelling place, with smooth walls and grates on the floor at intersections. Grates that shoot fire out of them every so often.

Now, most people have enough sense to stop doing something that hurts. Not Marissa. She would stand on the grate in the fire, taking damage, and she would say, "I'm going to need healing soon."

...

Never mind that "you are the healer!" Get out of the fire, for Marr's sake!

The issues with hirelings haven't gone away, and honestly, this particular problem wasn't recently introduced, it's always been there. AI is hard. Once I attended a talk where Ed Feigenbaum, then the chairman of the Stanford Computer Science Department claimed that in five years, there would be no more need for programmers because AI would take care of anything.

That was in roughly 1982. AI is hard, harder than you think. Even if you think it's hard.

I wish Psychochild all the luck in the world. We need better AIs in gaming. I would like hirelings with enough sense to get out of the fire that is killing them, and to heal themselves rather than asking for healing. It might well be that user-created AI's are the way to go, and that's what Storybricks is meant to support.

I've played one Final Fantasy game, I think it was 11 or maybe 12. Anyway, you could program AI's for your group of characters. There was a prioritized list of "if-then" rules. All of the form "If is true then perform on

As you progressed in the game, you got the ability to get more interesting and useful conditions and targets. Actions were typically actions that you could do by hand, switching to that character and doing it by hand.

I like this. I haven't seen much followup, but I haven't played subsequent FF games (It was a bit too grindy for me). It suits the programmer that I am quite well. But most people aren't programmers, so I don't know if there's much popular acceptance.

However, imagine if I could make a similar AI for my DDO healer hireling and share it with others, even sell it for in-game currency? It relieves the gamedevs of trying to do it, and gives me a source of ingame income. I'm all over that.

Just be sure to give me a "dance" action I can put into the AI.

In Which I Am Schooled

2011-11-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

[Warning: I'm not going to talk about gaming at all in this post. If you aren't interested in art and culture in general, drive on. I'll have a gaming post up soon.]

Specifically by Rita / Karaya / Jaqueline Heat. She said, in response to my offhand jibe at Death Metal...

Easy there, slugger. Let's not turn into the very people we're trying to admonish. Some of the best, most supportive people I know happen to be death metal heads. I myself keep a few death metal favorites on my iPod. That Cannibal Crap guy speaks only for himself.

Then, in a later comment, she mentioned this song - We Will Rise, by Arch Enemy

The sum total of my experience with Death Metal consists of two or three songs on Rock Band III and this. The songs on Rock Band III gave me the following impression: Fantastic chops, not much musicality. A deliberate pose of ugliness and transgression. Deliberate distortion of vocal sound to the point where it doesn't really sound human. I presume it is meant to be heard as demonic, but maybe that's a holdover from the days of Black Sabbath?

The above track is better. The chops seem to serve a musical idea, which is linked to an idea in the lyrics. Transgression is definitely a tool in Arch Enemy's arsenal, and an important one.

I am the enemy
I am the antidote
Watch me closely
I will stand up now

So I see the attraction of this art that someone who is a member of a marginalized group might feel.

So, when I said, of Cannibal Corpse, "What do you expect from a Death Metal head?" I was thinking of the transgressive pose that seems a defining feature of Death Metal. But here's the thing: The "transgression" in his rant is of the most superficial and banal sort. The guy's handle is "Cannibal Corpse" for pete's sake. If I saw someone in an MMO named "Cannibal Corpse", I would think, "Wow, that guy has no imagination at all, and is desperate to impress everyone with how badass he is."

And the sentiments expressed in the video - that the Alliance is weak and foolsh - is likewise squarely in the mainstream, and uses a mainstream mode of expression - taken to the extreme. It was so far taken to the extreme, I read it as satire.

I don't know that I'll have any DM on my iPod going forward, but I'd like to revise my comment:

Instead of "What do you expect from a Death Metal head?" I emend that comment to "What do you expect from someone who calls himself 'Cannibal Corpse'?"

He Stood Up, and We Count Him

2011-11-01T17:26:00.000-07:00

A message from Blizzard president Mike Morhaime:

Dear members of the Blizzard community,

I have read your feedback and comments about this year's BlizzCon, and I have also read the feedback to the apology from Level 90 Elite Tauren Chieftain. I'd like to respond to some of your feedback here.

As president of Blizzard, I take full responsibility for everything that occurs at BlizzCon.

It was shortsighted and insensitive to use the video at all, even in censored form. The language used in the original version, including the slurs and use of sexual orientation as an insult, is not acceptable, period. We realize now that having even an edited version at the show was counter to the standards we try to maintain in our forums and in our games. Doing so was an error in judgment, and we regret it.

The bottom line is we deeply apologize for our mistakes and for hurting or offending anyone. We want you to have fun at our events, and we want everyone to feel welcome. We're proud to be part of a huge and diverse community, and I am proud that so many aspects of the community are represented within Blizzard itself.

As a leader of Blizzard, and a member of the band, I truly hope you will accept my humblest apology.

- Mike Morhaime President, Blizzard Entertainment

Well said, sir.

Via gaygamer.com with a tipoff from Wilhelm (presumably of TAGN) in comments of my previous post.

UPDATE: Fixed link to The Ancient Gaming Noob (Linking again for karma.)

Stand Up and Be Counted

2011-10-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

Blizzard, I expect better of you. You are the company that challenged the great gamer/nerd prejudice that orcs are bad. To you, orcs were kind of cool. And then undead and trolls, too. But, apparently, not gay people.

Well, I'm sure you're happy to have gay people work for you and play your games. I bet you're a pretty progressive employer.

However, at the end of the latest Blizzcon, you showed a video featuring George "Corspeater" Fisher, from Cannibal Corpse talking about his love of the Horde, and also his hatred of the Alliance, which was described using homophobic language. If you follow this link, you will find a version of the video shown. If you watch it, be warned, it's so very, very NSFW.

What did you expect from a Death Metal head? It's pretty clearly meant to be a joke, just way, way too far over the top. But some people aren't going to be able to take it that way. There are lots of instances of that, and I've been on the other side, attempting a joke that others found hurtful.

And George clearly ascribes to the idea that if he doesn't use the word "fuck" or a derived form twice in a sentence, he wasn't being "authentic" or something. He's clearly of the "don't use a normal word when I can say something offensive" school of thought.

The video was bleeped out, but they showed it anyway. Does that make sense to you? How was this decision made? Let's offend over half of your audience? I can appreciate how someone just thought it was funny, and kind of mocking. There's a thread of self-mockery in George's tone, it seems to me.

But would someone who has been beaten for being gay hear that? Or someone who has been humiliated repeatedly for being not quite "manly" enough?

I'm not sure Blizzard has made an official response yet. It seems to me the Blizzard is a fairly progressive employer and fosters a gay-positive workplace. But WoW players, and particularly raiders, use some of the most vulgar language out there, including homophobic slurs. So, will they affirm their own values when doing so might upset some of their best customers?

I expect them to stand up for what they pretty clearly believe in.

Was That Psychic or Thunder Damage?

2011-10-27T09:39:00.000-07:00

There's nothing to be said about this. They have more videos, too.

I Came Here To Be Podkilled: Ataraxia's Kingdom Edition

2011-10-25T08:31:00.000-07:00

Ok, ok, there aren't any pods in DDO. I didn't get podkilled. I did get TPK'ed, though. Wiped, if you will. "PK" could stand for "player kill" or "pod kill", after all.

This happened last week, in Ataraxia's Kingdom. And in the spirit of ICHTBPK, I resolved to blog about failure, just so that you, dear reader, will get some fun out of my misery.

It happened last week. Yours truly, he of fabulous crimson follicles; Lobilya, trap-mechanic and general back-stabber, Cheeves, a Paladin 6/Rogue 3/Confused lots, and Vironet, Ranger 9.

It didn't end well. It didn't even start well. Our hirelings (level 9 clerics), were very aggressive and pulled too many mobs. And at other times, they would go inactive and do nothing until given a command, even though they were set to "guard" or so on. Summoned creatures were similar. This was the overland zone in Ataraxia's Haven, before we ever got to the dungeon. We also had a kind of "scatter in many directions" issue, and a few deaths. I learned, much to my irritation that in spite of being called "Wildmen", they aren't, in fact Persons, and are not susceptible to Charm Person. Charm Monster wasn't working all that great, either.

The Duergar also swarmed us, but at least they could be charmed. However, I was somewhat slow to target and cast, that didn't help. But we struggled by, helped enormously by having cleric hirelings who could raise dead, and finally made it to the dungeon.

The first part consisted mostly of killing Scrags, a kind of sea troll. That wasn't too bad, but I was running very low of spell points. We had decided to do the dungeon on hard. After all, someone (Vironet?) had done it before, and thought it wasn't too bad. I ran very low of spell points. There was only one rest shrine in the zone, and it being Hard, I could only use it once.

But we managed the Scrags, and we managed to get the two keys that would get us into the lighthouse to where Ataraxia was being held prisoner. That's when the truly horrible stuff happened. In the next room, we got swarmed by Duergar. Including a named. I charmed several of them, but had trouble picking out the enemies from the friends in the melee. It didn't help that several of them both had very good sneaking ability, and a very good ability to see through our invisibilty/sneak/etc.

Vironet started backing off and kiting a Duergar Assassin, or so she thought. To me, she was kiting the named. Unfortunately, the named caught up to her and offed her, then went snuck. We had a discussion:

Me: "Did that named get you?"
Her: "I wasn't kiting the named, it was an assassin."
Me: "The named ran right past me after you."
Her: "I never saw him."

So, we were all dead, but some of us were close to the rez shrine. Like me. I rezzed my cleric hireling. I made myself invisible, then went to look for Vironet. Something like the following happened. I told the cleric to rez her, and an assassin materialized, saw through my invis, and one-shotted me with a backstab. I'm dead now, out of reach of the rez shrine. Vironet gets raised and the named appears in similar fashion and offs her, I don't think it was a one-shot, nobody is quite as wimpy as Elf of Paper. Quoth she, "Oh, there's the named."

Now we're all dead, and too far from the rez shrine. So we declare a wipe and recall. A short break and we want to try again. This time on Normal difficulty.

It isn't quite a replay, we get a little farther. In fact, we wiped when we entered the final room, had the door close behind us, and get swarmed by Duergar, including many Flamestrikes.

Ok, the mood of the group is getting a little sour. So we look for something else. Cheeves says, "Hey there's a quest we can do in the Harbor, something about outsiders invading. It's way over our head. Beholders are everywhere. Ice Flensers and Blood Reavers, too.

There were some fun aspects to it. Opening the first door, a troop of Fiendish Kobolds comes running down the hall at us, turns and runs through the door and disappears. They had no concern for us, they were fleeing in terror. My reaction was, "Dangit I can't target them, dang, dang, dang, HEY! Hahahahaha!"

The other fun bit is getting shot at repeatedly by Beholder eye-beams that had NO EFFECT ON ME WHATSOEVER! Muahahaha! I had my saves buffed, and my Deathblock robe on, and was bouncing around getting shot at repeatedly while others were actually shooting it. It all ended in tears, though, when I rolled a 1 or something on my save and was disintegrated. (By the way, I dinged 11 last night and can cast disintegrate now. And I'm just itching for some payback!) We mostly ended up dead and watching Vironet kite things around until one of the dungeon's tricks spawned a crowd that she couldn't manage on her own. Third wipe of the evening.

I won't say we were undaunted, there was some serious daunting going on. But we wanted a win now, pretty bad. And we got it by doing The Church and the Cult in House Phiarlan. We investigated the Temple of Vol, and discovered a horror at the end, a vampire! Our battle with him was epic, he'd turn into bats and disappear for a while, and then reappear elsewhere. He also blinded me. But it didn't matter, I could tab target him and shoot him anyway.

My biggest damage spell is Lightning Bolt. I have a hat that increases it's damage by 40%, and it usually hits for about 70. Unfortunately, Adran ir'Karsmore (the vampire) has rogue levels and Improved Evasion, and even when he failed to evade, he has some giant damage resistance, so even when I hit him, I did maybe 10 points of damage. So I went with the tried and true standby - Magic Missile. That did a little better. But we got him, and our feelings were saved, if not our honor.

*************

This week we redid the Ataraxia quest and were successful. But the party composition changed. Cheeves swapped out for Jonnson, Cleric 9. And we added Special Guest Star Jaliera, red-headed high elf Paladin 8. (She looks so much like me, you'd almost think we're related or something.) And we rocked it. I did much better targeting and charming, etc, because I'm using a new keyboard setup. More on that in a later post.

The main difference was control of engagement. We did much better at letting mobs come to us. With one fewer hireling and a person doing healing, we were much more solid on that front. So, we rocked the joint, freed Ataraxia, and then climbed to the top of the lighthouse to enjoy the spectacular view of the island, and do a little victory dance. Later, we did the other dungeon in Ataraxia's Haven, with similar success. What a difference a week makes.

Haywire Disco!

2011-10-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

This week our instance group took on Haywire Foundry, the last normal quest of Vault of Night.

The usual suspects were there again from last week - my fighter/thief Marty, the thief thief Lobilya Sackfill, Mr. "Have reapeating heavy crossbow, will travel" Worstof, and the incomparable Karayasama.

Karayasama's usual sorcerous tricks had be modified this week since the Haywire foundry has almost nothing that qualifies as a "person", being populated mostly by warforged, and mechanical dogs, in this mithril defenders. With the occasional ooze and elemental. So "charm person" and "dominate person" are out.

Instead, we had an attack of dance fever. More than once, we'd get 15-20 seconds into a combat and all the warforged attacking us would be dancing. I believe this is an application of Otto's Resistable Dance, but it seemed pretty irresistable when Karayasama was playing the tune. Do you know how easy it is to beat the crap out of someone who is doing a fairly awkward version of "The Twist".

But the warforged got their licks in. A couple of times, it seems that I felt tired, and just took a little nap, right there on the foundry floor. Mmmm, that felt good. Do you suppose those mutterings and gestures that warforged was making had anything to do it. I sure felt tired.

Nevertheless we got deep into the foundry without too much trouble. We defeated the three iron golems (with mithril defender companions) in the locked puzzle chamber by kiting them around and slowly eliminating them. Given that we are about level 9 now, there were a few deaths, but they weren't really a problem.

But then there's the destruct button.

Once you hit this sucker, it's hell-for-leather to the exit. Well, the real problem is, it's not actually to the exit, though it's near the exit. So you can't use Dimension Door to solve this problem. Such a pity...

No, you have to climb up pipes over lava, fend off maybe 20 Mithril Defenders, run down corridors, not fall into the collapsing pit and make it through the blast door before it closes. I did not make it. I was the first to climb up the pipes, but I waited there for the others, when I should have been tanking and killing a few mithril defenders to clear the way some. But I first waited, and then ran through them. Their damage plus the traps I hit did me in about 2/3rds of the way through.

Lobilya had a floor collapse into a pit of lava beneath her. She could perch on a rock, but the "Grease" spewed by the Mithril Defenders meant that she kept slipping off of it into the lava and taking damage. She died.

Worstof was slower than me, but made it through to the blast doors. Which had already closed. Either because of time, or because Karayasama had gone through them already. When the countdown expired, he died.

Karayasama made it through the blast doors, but got singed by all the fire elementals that spawn during the explosion. Her pet was able to eventually kill them all. But we were all dead, and with no rez shrine nearby. Cleric hirelings had succumbed, too.

Now as it turns out, the final chamber, where Karayasama had died was in the same large chamber that we entered through, after fighting an earth elemental and a couple of fire elementals. To finish the dungeon, you must cross this room on a high catwalk and grab an item in a small room.

So, this is what we did: Lobiliya recalled, and hired a level 9 cleric. Worstof dismissed his to make room. Lobilya re-enters and goes to the big chamber below where Karayasama's ghost is. Karayasama drops down (in ghost form, you get feather fall for free, what's going to happen? You might die?) and gets Raise Dead cast on her. But Karayasama does not confirm the rez until she is pulled back to her soulstone - up high above the chamber. Then the rez is in, the item is grabbed and the dungeon is completed.

Now that's winning ugly.

We don't really have enough people to do the raid that comes next, so this was probably the last we'll see of Vault of Night for a while. Though Lobilya suggested that if we each bring a hireling that will be 8 characters ... Maybe with a few more? (I have no idea what raid content is like in DDO).

Next we'll probably start on Ataraxia's Haven.

How Do You Spell Death? B-E-H-O-L-D-E-R

2011-10-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

Monday we challenged the third adventure in the Vault of Night series in DDO. I was playing Martinier de Pasolai. Marty is a split fighter/thief who first started out as a character in the obscure tabletop system known as Throwing Stones. That game represented your character as dice. Each side had one of three colors - red, silver or gold. Each color was worth one point in a stat - Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence. The idea behind Marty was that he was a melee fighter but his stats were balanced. I started with four dice, one each of a highly imbalanced and one balanced. So I had the same score in all my stats. Intelligence was used for initiative, so he had good initiative. After that, when I leveled up by gaining a new stone, I only added dice that had two sides of each color.

So he had a bit of rogue and even bard (mostly just persuasion) in him. I was surprised to find that, in that system, he was really good at counterattacking, and knocking people to the ground or disarming him. A typical fight would go thus: Marty would hold off three guys, Patrick (a caster) would befuddle, paralyze, or otherwise drop other opponents into a pit, and Lucy would charge around the battlefield, leaving grease spots behind her.

Often, when those three guys attacked Marty, they would all fall down. This was fun. But Marty's personality was fun, too. He was a "gladiator" - think professional wrestling done with armor in an arena. Some of the fights were fixed and Marty was the guy to "make sure the public had a good time and didn't cotton on to the idea that the outcome was, er, predetermined"

Anyway, this doesn't translate to D&D or consequently DDO very well, but I have gone with - highish INT and CHA, split fighter/thief (5/5 after last nights ding!) . In DDO he is a trap mechanic with no spot whatsoever, and is good with Bluff (bluff pulling rocks!) He has Combat Expertise, which he loves, and Improved Trip, which he also loves, and Improved Feint, which seems less useful.

Also, he's dabbling in Use Magic Device, and he has the Least Dragonmark of Finding. So he often picks up wands in dungeons that he can use.

All of this stuff is probably way off the "power curve". He has very low hit points for a plate tank of his level, for example. If he was keeping and holding aggro, the sneak attack dice he gets wouldn't be as useful. However, it is all to frequently the case in DDO that whatever target "cannot be influenced". Say, all undead, for starters.

But Marty has multiple "attack modes", and this came in useful last night, as we were doing The Jungle of Khyber, quest 3 in the Vault of Night series. With Marty were Karayasama (she who dominates), Lobilya, halfling thief, and Worstof, Phritz' ranger (he of the repeating heavy crossbow).

The Jungle of Khyber isn't a jungle at all, but a cave (the opening to it is in a jungle, though!). Our mission is to track down, and rescue Veil, a drow rogue who is being pursued by a construct from the plane of Law, an Inevitable. Last week, we wiped when we pulled too many of the drow at once. This is a problem the encounter intends to give you, as the drow wander around a lot, and the archers among them love to retreat back up the corridor, leaving you to chase them or be filled full of holes. Meanwhile their casters will drop Flamestrikes on you.

But we got through that stuff this week, with a little more care, a little more caution and some better firepower. Marty is very effective against casters, but he has to go into "caster mode". He switches out his normal +2 adamantine plate for some studded leather with spell resistance. He sneaks up on said caster, trips him with a sneak attack, and proceeds to beat him mercilessly (sneak attack damage applies while they are prone!). This works pretty well. Also, I get my evasion, so some of their area attacks miss me altogether.

The next area brought us beholders. Ugh. We see a beholder up ahead, buff up and I charge. I engage it, but I'm dropped by a disintegrate thrown by the SECOND beholder who was down a side passage. Karayasama gets one of the beholders charmed, and it kills the other one. Since we have ninth level cleric hirelings along, I am rezzed and all's right with the world. With the help of a minor globe of invulnerability, we circle the remaining beholder and drop it quickly when the charm comes off.

We manage the beholders in the next cavern pretty well, mostly by "popup" missile fire. My cleric hireling threw in a flame strike or two for good measure.

After that there were more drow, and those were pretty much ok as we avoided the worst of the swarming. Next is a giant chamber with a waterfall and a high cave with extra mobs and experience. I missed the jump to the extra stuff so stood below and watched as my comrades first killed one mob, then got slagged by the other. Fortunately they were able to get rezzes even as I had to take an paniced phone call from my daughter who is college regarding finances. It seems her first of the month deposit hadn't showed up yet.

Five minutes later, we take a ride on a geyser and fight some more drow, and I get another phone call from said daughter to the effect of "never mind, the money just showed up." Evidently, these things post at 11pm PDT.

The penultimate chamber (sadly, there's really no way to score "penultimate" Words With Friends, is there?) is a killer. There's a main chamber with a few drow guarding it. No problem, right? There's a small room to the right with a rez/rest shrine. Onward, to the left is a door, behind which and around a corner lie three nameds: a drow caster, a troll, and a beholder.

The caster was easy. I bluff pulled him ran back around the corner to the main chamber. He chased me, fired a lighting bolt which seems to have missed everyone, and died to our combined fire.

The rest was not so easy. I attempted a bluff pull of the troll, but the beholder joined him. What ensued was 2-3 minutes of chaos as we battled the beholder and troll, died and rezzed at the shrine to do battle again. Sometimes the deaths were immediate. One time, I was hit for 200 points of damage, which I presume was from a Disintegrate. Under tabletop rules, we calculated that this meant that the caster level of that beholder was at least 17th. Or else there's some kind of spell critical hit rule. This little intermezzo often resulted in the beholder sitting in the room with the rez shrine. Bad, but we managed to get him a little farther away.

The action hit a pause when we were mostly all dead and wondering what to do. Lobilya was back in the chamber where the nameds had started, at negative hit points. But the troll had followed her. We thought he might be camping her, but when she hit -10 and died for real, he didn't move. So we had managed to split the two of them, after all.

Ok, we can get this now. We all rezzed and mobbed the beholder, who went down - after dealing out just a few more fingers of death, negative levels, and disintegrates. We then waited for all the death debuffs to expire. I had six, I think. For a minute after you rez at a rez shrine, you lose a "level" - hit points, and base attack bonus and saves, mostly. These don't count concurrently, so I waited 6 minutes as each one expired and my hit point total slowly climbed back up to its normal, anemic (for a plate tank) level.

Then we fought the troll, who was also pretty easy by himself.

After that, The Inevitable was anti-climactic. Some of us had done it before, and knew enough to bring weapons that could actually damage him. I tried to hold him in his starting room with a shield wall, but after pausing briefly, he squeezed around me and started chasing ... someone. Probably Karayasama. We kited him. Nobody died, I think. At one point he turned on my cleric hireling, who did not have the sense to run away and kite him. He hit her with some kind of area effect stun where he hit the ground. But she didn't go down and he soon got bored and went back to chasing someone else. Meanwhile we are chipping away at him getting "glancing blows" often. Since he ignored me (Intimidate does not appear to influence him). I turned my Combat Expertise off, and just chased him like a wild man, poking him with my brand new +1 Anarchic Rapier.

Eventually he fell, and we gave a cheer, and logged off. It's a long dungeon.

I Didn't Know "Intitle" Was a Word, Even Between Friends

2011-10-04T16:27:00.000-07:00

But Words With Friends evidently thinks so, and backs up Karaya's play of it in our current game. Since it's 7 letters, she got the 50 point bonus. Which goes on top of the 50 point bonus she got for "deathcup". Two bingos in one game. I'm toast.

Strangely, she isn't beating me by as much as my first game with **Milia**. I can no longer remember the 7-letter bingos she made in that game. Apparently the memory is too painful to carry for another 3000 years of life. I believe the sum total of 7-letter plays, which empty your rack and score a 50 point bonus is: Opponents 5, Tolly 0.

Wow, I suck at this game.

P.S. While I'm thinking about it, the dictionary for this game is cracked. It allows "jetes" ??? That's French, right? I did not think foreign words were acceptable. Oh, and "moggy"??!? What the frak?

Karaya Rocks - Team of One Edition

2011-09-27T08:50:00.001-07:00

I got this message on Facebook from Karaya, detailing how she swapped out her three levels of Rogue for Sorceror levels. (We're talking DDO here) She's Sorceror 11 now:

So I lesser reincarnated Karaya today. She has Dominate Person now, along with a plethora of other new tricks.

We did the Ruined Halls in Kundarak as a test run of my new powers. And by "we", I mean Anvil, Bearded Devil, Hobgoblin Cleric, Hobgoblin Infiltrator, Trogolodyte Warlock and me. Quite the pickup group, no?

Last night she described to us a bit of how she sets up her hotkeys. For example "Tab targeting" isn't on the Tab key any more, but on the numeric keypad. I assume other powers are nearby as well, moved from the QWERTY number keys to the numeric keypad, so that one hand can drive and the other can target and cast.

Overheard In Tolly's Car Coming Home From Lunch

2011-09-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

Toldain: You know, Karaya posted on my Facebook wall today, saying "OpenTTD is so dumb. Why do I keep playing it???? Damn you, Tolly!!!" I responded. "Yes, it is dumb. And very engaging. Bwahaha!"

SpawnOfTolly2 (aka Jaliera): You would think by now that you would have learned to use your Enchanter powers only for good...

[I just discovered that you can download height maps of Europe, Africa, the UK, or the Continental US to play (build trains, and roads, and airports and stuff) on. Also a bunch of alternate AIs. Abandon all hope.]

An Elf's Best Friend

2011-09-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

Recently, Michael Abbot of Brainy Gamer posted that "Games Aren't Clocks".

The thesis is:

The primary function of a clock is to tell time. We may admire its appearance or the intricacy of its inner-workings, but the moment it ceases to function, its value diminishes for most of us. What good is a clock that can't tell time?

What is the primary function of a video game?

He decries criticism of video games based solely on gameplay:

I say it's time to let go of our preoccupation with gameplay as the primary criterion upon which to evaluate a game's merits. It's time to stop fetishizing mechanics as the defining aspect of game design. Designers must be free to arrange their priorities as they wish - and, increasingly, they are. Critics, too, must be nimble and open-minded enough to consider gameplay as one among many other useful criteria on which to judge a game's quality and aspirations.

I can't say that I can endorse this. More later.

In response, Dennis Scimeca of Punching Snakes retorts, "Games ARE Clocks". After bemoaning the state of terminology for games, and quickly touring the breadth of video games (going from art games like Jason Rohrer's Passage, to The Sims, he concludes:

Where I agree with Abbott absolutely is in our need to view games holistically. Mechanics are not the end-all of appreciating video games, but asking critics to divorce such a defining characteristic from our appraisal of the medium seems untenable to me. The better course of action is to help identify and define new genres and forms for creators to work in which are similar to, but different than, video games, such that said creators have the choice to focus on design aspects they are interested or skilled in, without the burden of also having to deal with the aspects they aren’t.

Yeah, I'm pretty much there. Kate Cox, of Your Critic is in Another Castle, adds to the discussion with the observation that failure (and success) is an important, maybe even essential component of what makes a video game.

At its most basic, a game is something playable. Whether it's got a story or not, no matter the genre, system, or type, a game is something that requires player input. You, the consumer, are in some way integral to this experience. Whether you push one button or speak a word into a microphone, whether you wave your arms at a motion sensor or deliberately hold still when you could act -- a game requires you to contribute. That's the sum total of the agreement on our current definition of "gaming," and really that's quite a low bar. Small wonder, then, that we keep looping through these arguments.
We don't just have a win / lose dichotomy anymore. We do have completion and backlog; we have sandbox and short story. But every title I can think of -- every title I've ever played and a thousand more I haven't -- has either a failure state or a success metric, and some have both. Our metrics aren't necessarily competitive, and they might be imposed by the player rather than intrinsically by the game. There are little successes and big ones, game-ending failures and completely surmountable ones, but every pixellated problem I've ever pounced on has at least one or the other.

I can't really disagree. But the clock metaphor is all wrong. You wind up a clock and then never touch it. Well, you used to. Now you just put the batteries in. Or plug it in. Maybe you adjust the time every once in a while, or you have to set the clock when there's been a power outage, say, from a big hurricane that blew through. Just as a random example.

No, video games aren't clocks. A video game that worked like a clock would be boring. Clocks are useful, but they aren't exactly engaging or exciting, or interactive. There is certainly clock failure. (See above hurricane mention).

No, video games are dogs. And I mean that in a good way. Dogs are always happy to see you. Dogs, at least your dog, is more interested in you than anyone else on the planet, including your spouse. A dog will gaze deep into your eyes with the question, "What are we going to do now?"

I often play fetch with a pit bull named Doughnut. She's adorable and she likes me. I take the chewed up tennis ball and I tease her with it. I might throw it high in the air or against the fence or just a bounce on the ground. I might try to fake her out and she might go for it or not (there's the failure, Kate!). She has her own agenda, but it's always in response to me. (Dougnut might not read this blog, but her master does. Hi Doughnut!)

Yes, that's what's important about a video game - there's space in the game for me. The experience reacts to what I, the player do. Not always in a good, or desired way, but it reacts. When gameplay components seem to players to be afterthoughts, or poorly developed, the message to players is: You don't matter. Your choices and/or skill aren't important. This computer program is a vehicle for me to demonstrate my awesomeness to you, so bow down!

Understandably, players don't respond well to this. How would you like it if your dog suddenly started acting like a cat? And the snootiest, haughtiest cat around, to boot.

(Once upon a time, our neighbors had a cat that was the most dog-like cat I've ever seen. She would fetch and had that same "what are we going to do now?" gaze that dogs do. But I digress.)

Games are not something you watch, they are something you participate in. If that participation seems an afterthought, a little pushback is understandable, maybe even in order.

A Whole New Kind of Gamification

2011-09-20T14:01:00.000-07:00

The problem of determining the exact structure of a certain protein of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (M-PMV) has eluded scientists for 10 years. We know the chemical formula for such proteins, but not their shape. M-PMV, which is closely related to HIV, and produces AIDS in monkeys, produces its proteins in a big block, like most viruses. It then cuts them apart into usable components with a protein called a protease. Proteases are built like scissors, having two parts that are joined together. If we could figure out what the halves looked like before they joined together, we could come up with ways to prevent them from joining, and thus shut down the virus' operations completely.

However, scientists have bee working on this problem for 10 years with no success. Complex computer programs and tons of computing resource couldn't crack it. Until Firas Khatib, a researcher at the University of Washington (Go Dogs!) took the problem to the players of a protein folding game called Foldit.

The Foldit players had no such problems. They came up with several answers, one of which was almost close to perfect. In a few days, Khatib had refined their solution to deduce the protein’s final structure, and he has already spotted features that could make attractive targets for new drugs.

Foldit is a game, full-stop. It's a massively multiplayer game, but not a roleplaying one. Collaboration is possible, and there are message boards and wikis about it.

I feel that the best approach to "intelligent" tasks is that of human-machine partnership. Foldit is a computer program that doesn't solve protein folding at all, but instead reduces it to a task a human being can easily comprehend and fiddle with. Many of the players of Foldit have no technical background at all. The operations on proteins have names like "tweak" and "shake".

Furthermore, by having lots of teams work on the problem, when some of them go down a bad path, it doesn't sink the whole project. They just get pwned by other teams, learn from it and move on.

Phritz sent this to me, but the quote is from Ed Yong's blog at discover.com, which I highly recommend

What Has Tolly Been Up To Lately - Doh! Edition

2011-09-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

Somehow in my roundup of gaming yesterday I neglected to mention something I've been fooling around with - Golemizer. This little game was made by Dave Toulouse. In it you play a mad scientist who makes golems to do things for him - things like mining and killing other golems for fun and profit. You can build houses and furniture and grow (and cut down) trees and plants and flowers.

Also, there are zombies. You can make zombies. You can kill zombies. You can set 100 zombies loose in your basement (which you've built) and rock out to "Zombie Jamboree".

I first heard about Golemizer on Psychochild's blog. When I had a meetup with him last month he mentioned it again along with it's creator. I had started an account some months ago but then literally forgot the name of the game, so I couldn't log in.
Also, something was shiny. But Brian mentioned it and I thought, with a toss of my fabulous red hair, "Oh, I must get back to that and play with it a bit more."

So I've been fooling around with it a bit, building golems and transistors. There is a consistent playerbase, but it isn't a large one. It's kind of an economic/crafting focused game, though there is fighting. I've had trouble finding stuff that will sell on the market, despite prices that seem low. I think there isn't a lot of volume.

Dave is launching a new game, called "Star Corsairs". He writes about it here, with some good business advice as well. I've played a little of Star Corsairs, too, and it seems like it has some potential.

So, I'm a bad, bad elf for forgetting that. Dave has accomplished some amazing things, and built some fun games.

What Has Tolly Been Up To Lately?

2011-09-15T15:00:00.000-07:00

Posting has been sparse, but gaming hasn't. I thought I'd give a quick once-over of the gaming I've been doing.

I've been playing a little City of Heroes on Mrs. Darkwater's account. I kind of don't want to start a paid account when they are so close to launching a FTP feature. I have made two characters. One is a ninja named Kenji, who is a 15th century Ninja brought forward in time by the Nakamura family to battle a grave threat to humanity. Natural based katana user, with the defense/speed powers, and he's a good guy.

The other is a mage who uses Domination powers and has fabulous red hair. Figuring out his name is an exercise left to the reader. This has been fun, since the control aspects are a kind of gameplay I like. Fighting multiple opponents this way is a lot like juggling.

I've continued to play DDO. Most recently, this Monday, Phritz, Lobilya, Karaya and I ran through Stromvaulds Mine and Stormreach Outpost. Phritz, Karaya and I did it several months ago with different characters. This run was a lot easier, even though we completely forgot how to deal with the final encounter of Stormreach Outpost. So there was a wipe thingie there, but we figured it out and rebounded victoriously. I love this sort of thing, as I've said before. Lobilya (aka Mrs. Darkwater) finally unlocked the Drow race on her account, and she's now working on leveling one up. Or maybe two. Even Spawn of Tolly 2 is getting back into DDO after a long hiatus.

I'm finally giving Civ V a rest. I managed to win a game on Immortal difficulty and a duel map. I was the Ottomans, my opponent was Catherine. We each had our own continent. I used the Ottoman's ability to recruit barbarian ships to build a navy that gained absolute sea mastery, and then managed to take Catherine's capital for the win. I love Janissaries.

I tried several times to win a game with Rameses that focused on building wonders more than killing everyone. I did not find this to be possible. I'm taking a break from this now.

Instead I downloaded from Steam the Sid Meier Track Pack, consisting of Railroads, Railroad Tycoon II Platinum, and RR Tycoon III. I've started in on Railroads and it's a whale of a good time. I love watching the trains run all over the place. Just today I found out about a game called OpenTTD (based on Transport Tycoon Deluxe). That game looks dangerous.

There's been the usual assortment of tabletop RPG. Game systems include 4e, 3.5, Pathfinder (a new purchase for us) and Hero Systems.

It's pretty clear that it's going to continue to be difficult for me to play much Eve Online, despite how much I like it. As an economic building/trading/selling game, it has no equal. But it requires a lot of time in predictable chunks, and my time does not seem to come in predictable chunks.

There Must be Some Taxes in There Somewhere...

2011-08-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

K. Cox has been ruminating about death in video games. It got me thinking about Chain World, the introduction of which, by its designer Jason Rohrer, is below

Simply put, the Chain World idea is: Play a game of Minecraft (modded somehow). When you die, pass the game (on a USB stick) to someone else. Tell them nothing about what you were doing.

This idea gives death in a video game a real meaning, and creates mystery and history and anticipation. A brilliant idea.

But things took a strange turn. Or maybe it wasn't strange, considering the topic of the game, which was to create a game about religion. The person Jason gave the game to, in the above video, decided to use the game as a charity fundraiser. There's lots more weird tidbits, such as this: He made a video which purports to show him throwing the stick into a lava pit. Wired Magazine calls the whole mess a holy war, which I think is apt.

“This was totally not something I would have wanted to happen at all,” Rohrer says. “On the other hand, it’s interesting that [Ji] would take something that I had done and irritate me with it.” If religion is about customs and rituals, not sacred text, Ji was a gift to Chain World, enriching it beyond the means of its creator.

Art imitates life, but not in the way you think.

Bartle Test Results, no Jaymes Sighted.

2011-08-04T08:58:00.000-07:00

This is from the fun quiz up at gamerdna.com. Click on the image to take it yourself [Actually, follow the link in the update, it's better, -toldain], and report the results in comments.

Personally, I think it overestimated my explorer score at the expense of my achiever score, but probably not by a whole lot. I tend to stick with games longer than my explorer friends.

As a secondary influence, it describes me as an Explorer Socializer:

Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.

Huh, it's almost like they're describing someone who writes posts about the math and psychology involved in games. Do you know anyone like that?

Thank you for your support.

UPDATE: Here is a much better link for taking the quiz. You'll have to register to get your results.

Pizza and Storybricks

2011-08-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, I had Pizza in Palo Alto with Brian "Psychochild" Green, along with spouses, girlfriends and daughter. We had a great time swapping stories of RPG's and MMORPG's and crazy stuff we'd done in them. Brian works for Namaste, which is running a demo at GenCon this week of Storybricks, a brand new technology and approach which Namaste is trying to bring to the market.

It's my sense that Brian (and possibly others at Namaste) want to make MMO's more like tabletop RPG's. Which I love, so that's good.

Phil Carlisle of Namaste says this:

What I’m more interested in, is the ability to actually feel like the world is allowing me to play a role. That I’m part of a story and can explore the world while the story unfolds, where the drama of the world evolves over time and where the mechanics of play in the world are less about accruing items and more about social play. Which I guess is why I’m here working for Namaste.

Yeah, that's the cool thing about a tabletop campaign - the stuff your characters do matters. This could play out at the level of lore. Stephane Bura, also of Namaste, writes:

lore is useful for giving some context to the players’ goals: there are Demon Princes and Forger Kings, pick a side and kill the other one. It’s the wrapping paper on the quests. There is some reason, somewhere, why it’s important to slay demons in this game. This is comforting for some players because it brings a sense of order to the world – a sense that the developers know where they’re going. This kind of lore is also useful for setting up worldwide events and giving context to new content. However, even if lore distilled through quest texts can be very well written, most players skip it (trust me) because, in the end, it’s inconsequential. Players have no influence over such lore and its details have rarely any bearing on what they effectively have to accomplish.

But that's only one level of lore. Stephane goes on to write about others:

So, there’s this magic item called the Scepter of Life and it control plants. A King owns it. You can bet that the farmers in this kingdom have a completely different life from your stock farmers’. They don’t fear droughts and they don’t need to take care of their lands so much. They’re much better at harvesting, since they do that all year-long. Inns serve soups, salads, jardinières and pies, as much as you want. Commerce is based on the exports of virtually free food, with dozens of caravans and shipments leaving the kingdom every week. Nobles fight over the amount of woodland and arable lands they control. The woodcutters have the most powerful guild. No imagine how all this would change if the Scepter of Life were to be stolen by some Demon Prince…

And the world is ready for virtual worlds that are like this. Liz Danforth, who is joining with the Namaste crowd at GenCon, says this:

Something has fundamentally changed in our expectations about entertainment and our interactions with the things we love. We expect to participate, tinker with someone else’s creations, to contribute and to share what we make. When Time magazine featured an article about fan fiction and the writer gets it entirely right, warts and all … Time magazine for heavensake! … the world has truly changed (and is continuing to do so).

So there's a hunger for worlds that players can change, and canvases which are collaborative and expandable. That hunger goes back to Tolkien, who imagined Middle Earth to be a place where others would dally, and write songs or stories about. This is an entirely different approach to fiction from that of, say, Lois McMaster Bujold, who ascribes to "just in time" world creation. There's a lot fewer continuity issues to fuss about her way, to be sure.

Anyway, I got a demo today of the Storybricks system pretty much as it will be demoed at GenCon. Kelly Heckman of Namaste took time out of her own preparations for GenCon to show me the latest build. What I saw was in two parts. The first was a screen that looks like the graphic I've posted above. The second was a typical Medieval street scene, with a guard, a citizen, and a thief. I watched as Kelly added Storybricks to say that the citizen would be happy to see me and the thief would be angry. The guard stayed neutral. As the player character approached each of these characters, it triggered animations that portrayed those attitudes. The guard turned to look at me, but showed little emotion. The thief glared and put a hand up in the universal stop sign. The citizen seemed very happy to see me.

These are the basic building blocks of storytelling. I've seen this kind of thing in a few places before. Specifically, once you did enough writs for the Qeynos Guard in Everquest 2, guard members would sometimes stop and salute as you ran past them. I have to say, that felt fantastic. Presumably this was done, for EQ2 via special ad-hoc programming in a scripting language and added to the guards. Storybricks, at the level that was demoed to me, would codify that kind of thing, and make it easy for content creators, be they professional or amateur, to add this kind of thing to a virtual world.

Tools matter a lot. I don't think it's a coincidence that writer productivity is a lot higher now than they were in the days of Tolkien, who wrote all of his manuscripts by hand in soft pencil and then wrote over them in ink. And at that level, Storybricks already looks to be something useful. The system will allow one to describe changes in attitude. For example, you might retrieve a Philtre from a crypt on behalf of a shopkeeper, and he will be grateful when he finds love. You might think that the point of the episode was that sword of smiting that the player gets, but it might be that the point was to make people happy, because that would foil some other plot. Or make someone like you. The potential for matchmaking is there, and that will definitely encourage competitive shipping. I can see it now: Factions competing between making Bella like Edward or Jacob more.

Err, never mind. Namaste isn't really promising that. But they're dreaming about it. Psychochild described to me, over that pizza, how you could have instances in which Bella preferred Edward and instances in which Bella preferred Jacob. (Actually he was talking about the dictator of Freeport Lucan D'Lere who has a crush on Bella and .... never mind) And by their interactions with those instances and the characters, one of those realities would get promoted to the default reality. ( I think we can safely say that three-ways are out of the question.)

So, I think they are on to something that players will like, and that's possible. It's a big job, though. But they have the sort of goals that, even if they don't make all of them, they will still probably get something very cool. My only request is a Storybrick that says: "If (elf has red hair) then (NPC thinks he's fabulous)"

Why Do I Game?

2011-07-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

K. Cox of Your Critic is in Another Castle asks "Why do you Game?" She wants as many responses as possible, so please, hustle over there and give her your comment. She's a fellow member of the Golden Horde, and good people. Go, then come back here, and read my thoughts.

I like solving puzzles. I can't remember ever not liking this. They might have been jigsaw puzzles as a kid, or wire-loop puzzles, or math problems or whatever. I get a charge from getting the answer. It's what's missing when you do the same instance for the twentieth time-there's no puzzle. So that's one reason.

I like crunch. I like being able to grind through some numbers and gain insight by doing so. This is one of the big appeals of Eve Online to me. I did several posts here about the combat math of EQ2 and how it works. This is related to solving puzzles, but not exactly the same thing. Combat isn't a puzzle, but it generates some interesting questions, such as "Which is better, the +4 plate armor, or the +2 plate armor with 3/- damage resistance?"

[If you don't like crunch, skip this paragraph] It turns out that there's a pretty precise answer available to you for the above question (It's DDO oriented, by the way). Making one's armor class worse by -2 means that you are taking 10% more damage on every swing that an enemy swings at you. For that to be better than 3/- damage resistance, the average damage per hit would have to be over 30 points to be of more benefit, because 10% of 30 is 3. At level 8, that just doesn't seem to be the case.

I like computer gaming because I'm an introvert. I like people, but interacting with them uses up energy. An intellectual challenge, time alone with the computer, actually charges me up. (And wipe that smirk off your face, that's not what I'm talking about!). Gaming brings me serenity, it is often very soothing. Although you might not think so if you were to listen to me curse at Alexander the Great after he declares war on me for the fourth time. But really, that's but a moment's ripple. The problems one encounters in the game world are by and large tractable. You can just start a new game, or a new character, after all. Some might call this "escapist". I invite them to closely examine figure 1. I call it therapeutic.

One of the primary reasons that I like tabletop RP so much is that I'm a frustrated actor. I did drama in high school, and was reasonably good at it. I love projecting a character, and making other people laugh because they know the character, and know how vain he is about his hair. Just as a random example.

Which brings me to another reason I game: It's social. I like doing things in teams. And yes, I'm an introvert. No, that isn't comfortable, but it's true. One of the reasons I loved being an enchanter so much in EQ2 is that it was very group focused, and very tactically focused. So there's the social, and the puzzle aspects of it. Enchanters didn't do so much damage themselves, as much as they enabled a group to achieve far, far more, both via mezzing and via buffs.

Finally, I like creativity. Games like Sim City or Civilization (and Eve) appeal to me because there's a lot of freedom and not just one narrow "right answer". There's definitely things that don't work, but obstacles can be taken as inspiration, rather than deterrents. I've always liked taking a group that doesn't have the "ideal" composition and being successful with it. One time Chuman, Conseca, and Toldain took down a boss named in Lavastorm. That was a Paladin, Wizard, and Illusionist in EQ2. We had no idea if it would work, but it did.

Why do you game?

The Xorian is Deciphered

2011-07-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

Last night we tackled a DDO quest called The Xorian Cipher. It's described as level 8, very long, and extreme challenge. We played it on Normal difficulty.

In attendance were Karayasama (Sorcerer 7, Thief 3), Profundo (Bard 9, played by Phritz), Thio (Fighter 6 or 7, played by Lobilya), and your favorite 3000-year old (Wizard level 10). I brought along Tower, a level 8 fighter hireling, and Profundo brought a level 9 cleric hireling to fill out the group. Tower is warforged, so I can heal him, and I've focused some enhancements and gear on doing that well. Profundo's healer gave us the ability to raise dead during the heat of battle. This was quite useful.

I died a lot. In this dungeon there are maybe a dozen rifts, which spawn these strange black glowing energy globes. They wander around aimlessly, and if they touch you they cast a random spell on you. And I do mean random. We got Bull's Strength, Enfeeblement, giant heals, Polar Rays for 100 hit points (that was one death for me), and Stone to Flesh (another one, after something else beat the crap out of me).

There are runes near each rift that allow you to close it, activated by either high Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma. We had all three available. But finding the runes and getting them turned off while there are cultists and undead chasing you isn't the easiest.

The craziest fight came late in the dungeon where we were forced to split up, standing on each of four pedestals to proceed further. Karayasama and I went one way, and Profundo and Thio the other. Karayasama and I managed to clear through a couple of encounters without too much trouble - making a few opponents switch sides at the beginning of battle can do that - and found ourselves in a high arched opening overlooking a giant hall with skeletal archers, a rift, and four named undead who shot lightning bolts.

Profundo and Thio had made it to this hall and were having serious trouble. Thio dropped early. Profundo had survived, with the help of his healer. I summoned my teleporting devil, hoping he would jump down and join in. But he was reluctant. I stood in the doorway as close to the edge as I could, trying to get him to engage. The archers evidently had arrows that did a sonic with a stun, or one of the nameds could do that. I stood there like a fool while they drilled me. Well, I stood there like a fool before that, too, but never mind. I died and the demon did not engage. Quoth Karayasama, "Tolly, you have to dodge in and out, don't just stand there!"

Now that I'm dead, I jump down into the chamber and order Tower to engage. He's doing ok, but he can't manage by himself and eventually he dies.

Ok, things are bad. I think at some point maybe Karayasama got tagged too, I'm not really sure. But it turns out that down a long hall leading from the big chamber is a rest shrine and a rez shrine. The first time I try it, I am tantalizingly close, the cursor even changes to the correct icon, but I'm recalled to my soul stone before I can click. The next two tries are not as close. The fourth time I make it, and my hair is once again red and fabulous. (Rezzing is great for split ends!) I rest and recharge all my mana, too. I call Tower back and he rezzes. I get another summoned creature (another devil, in fact). Profundo, I think has stayed alive, or rezzed himself. We push back down the hallway, killing skeletons, but avoiding the nameds. I grabbed someone's stone, maybe Karayasama's and run it back to the shrine. Profundo grabs the other one.

We're all back in the game, and I start putting up electrical resistance and protection. Which is good because the nameds have decided to chase us into the shrine area. But the resistances are enough to turn the tide and we prevail. However, the orbs from the rift claim another victim - Thio - and we pause to turn off the rift before we recover Thio's soulstone.

When the dungeon is cleared there is jubilation. That was sloppy, to be sure, but we pulled it out, turning what seemed to be disaster into success, though success with a high repair bill.

The last fight went easier, though I died due to stupidly throwing multiple lightning bolts at the named hellhound right from the start. Doh! Fortunately nobody else was so stupid, the hireling raised me, and we grabbed the loot and did a victory dance!

This is how I like to dungeon. I don't demand that stuff be completely fresh - Karayasama had done part of the dungeon before, and helped us speed things along. But it's the polar opposite of what running instances in EQ2 had become: Pull all the mobs in the room and burn them down. No real danger or risk. Any puzzles or lore are completed by someone else that had done the instance dozens of times before I can even read them.

I understand the mentality, and if I had ground through an instance a dozen times or more, I'd be in a hurry. Because I would be farming them for drops or points or whatever, and feeling impatient. But I don't play D&D or RPG's to farm, I play them for adventure. Running something for the fiftieth time and concentrating on efficiency is kind of the opposite of adventure.

Not that there isn't a place for that. That's more the realm of economic/strategy gameplay. Such as mission-running or ratting in EVE. Of course you're repeating it, the mission itself isn't the adventure.

When No Doesn't Mean No: Update

2011-06-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

There's a flurry of reaction to my last post about the Eve fracas. (Or is it a rumpus?)

Brian "Psychochild" Green, in comments says to be careful:

It's also kind of unfortunate that this was "leaked". Often developers discuss a design topic openly to get information. It might be that design issues are discussed with direct, declarative statements in the company culture. "Not all virtual purchases will focus on customization:" might really be a suggestion. Hard to say how an Icelandic company's culture affects the discussions.

The first article, the "pro" and "con" definitely felt this way. I considered the possibility of the second, written by the Director of Content, as advocacy, but it's hard to support that. Given his name and where the magazine states that he lives, he's clearly a native English speaker as well. I don't think it was advocacy.

Brian also mentions another issue:

One comment: Here's a company where getting scammed in the game is not against the rules, and even allowed. So, you're surprised when they compare something to prostitution and don't find it to be a negative? :)

Dang, there's a big difference between doing stuff in-game and out. Which is why I (and most Eve players from what I can tell) still think that account hacking, keylogging, client mods and so forth are unacceptable.

Last Friday CCP Zulu posted on his blog:

...

Therefore we dedicated an entire issue to exactly that topic. It‘s worth mentioning that the topic of the issue was "Greed is good?" as a way to ask a question that would then be debated back and forth and often exaggerated purposefully to draw contrasts and make points. The result of that is now widely available on the internet.
[I got that the point of the magazine was debate, by the way. I simply could not reconcile the tone of one article with advocacy, as opposed to, done deal]

The opinions and views expressed in Fearless are just that; opinions and views. They are not CCP policy nor are they a reliable source of CCP views as a company. The employees who submitted articles to that newsletter did exactly what they were asked to do, write about theories and opinions from an exaggerated stand.

While it‘s perfectly fine to disagree and attack CCP over policies or actions we take, we think it‘s not cool how individuals that work here have been called out and dragged through the mud due to something they wrote in the internal company newsletter. Seriously, these people were doing their jobs and do not deserve the hate and shitstorm being pointed at them.

Well, I read the issue of Fearless and responded to it. I mentioned by name the authors of articles. I expressed my feelings in a way that was direct, but less abusive than what you will see in Jita local in any given 5 minute period.

The tone of CCP Zulu's post is pretty defensive. After that came an email purported to be from CCP President Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, sent to a mailing list called ccp-global. This looks like an internal memo, but since it's provenance is very unclear, I'm not going to reprint it. The tone of it is "We did a great job, and don't worry about the pushback, it will die down, it always does." He goes on to say that they have sold 52 monocles so far.

If you don't understand that this is an internal memo, it looks like the most tone-deaf message ever written, comparing well with "Well, despite an unfortunate disturbance at tonight's performance of An American Cousin, the gate receipts are way, way up!"

Today CCP Zulu has another blog post up. It begins:

The tone and demeanor of my blog on Friday did not correctly portray my emotions towards the community and player base at large. I love and respect EVE and its community on a level that's hard to really do justice in words. However I let my frustration take charge of me, fueled by emotions that had built up due to a breach of trust we at CCP have been experiencing over the past few days. I know that sounds ironic considering those are the exact same feelings you have been having towards CCP.

For that I am sorry.

He goes on to announce that they will be holding a special meeting with CSM (the player representative's council) to discuss this issue. I presume the "breach of trust" he mentions refers to the leak of not only the issue of Fearless, but Peterssun's internal email.

Ok, my other commenter on the last post, Sara Pickell, has an interesting hypothesis. She begins

Your also taking as rote someone who was completely ignored in the actual implementation as we have it. Paragraph 3 is literally him suggesting the polar opposite of the current pricing structure.

Hmm, start small and innocuous and widespread. Which isn't what happened. Fair point. That seemed odd to me, too. Sara goes on to note a progression in the language.

"we must sell our units of virtual currency" - "First, we don’t want to" - "Instead, we
want to" - "we will most
likely"

If you pay attention, the times when he gets the most technical and becomes the most confident he uses the least strong language. The last one was a strong contender for answering a problem he clearly understood well and he used his softest language.

Hell if you get the mental tone right, it sounds a lot like satire... Holy shit, I think it is satire... Wow... just... wow.

I think Sara is right. Satire is very tricky business and depends on the audience and the comic being on the same page, and having some trust. As well as some very precise tonal indicators. Way back when I was a brand-new professor, I had an inclination to joke when students asked me what would be on the midterm, "Oh, if you can do all the problems in Chapters 1-10 in less than 30 minutes, you'll probably pass..." Nobody laughed at these jokes. So I developed a rule which I stated: "Students don't find jokes about tests to be funny."

I've had lots of occasion to refer to this rule in the past few weeks. Lous CK has a joke that goes like this, "I would never rape a woman unless I had a good reason, like I wanted to have sex with her and she didn't want to." I find this funny, but discussions in the past week or two indicate that many women don't find it the least bit funny. The humor depends on understanding that the point of view is exaggerated and offered for mockery.

In yet another example, I went to see Jonathon Coulton in a live performance in early 2009 in San Francisco. (JoCo is a musical humorist, or is he a humorous songwriter and performer?) The show was fronted by Paul and Storm, another duo combining music and humor. In one of Paul and Storm's songs, the punch line in one verse was based on the van that the Mexican was driving was full of illegal aliens.

Said punch line was met with stony silence on the part of the audience, and that included me. "Aww, come on! It's satire!" called out Paul and Storm. More stony silence. They moved on, and the rest of their act was enjoyed by all. At the time, I thought to myself, "They have no idea how painful the immigration debate has been here in California over the years, have they?" Some jokes just don't work with some audiences.

At least here in America, we are used to corporations taking every advantage of us that they can. There is little that is sacred to them, and when we buy a car, for example, they love to keep adding things on that we must buy. There are no human feelings that go unexploited. For example, someone's love for his family turns into a need for expensive life insurance.

And during the last two-plus years, the unemployment rate has seen lots of Eve players out of work due to no fault of their own. The ones that have kept their jobs have very likely seen their hours stretched while their pay been as stagnant as that pond just outside of Qeynos. The one with the meteorite in it. And we are also accustomed to corporations not so much outright lying but exercising creative loopholes. And sometimes outright lying, and worse.

Make no mistake, Eve players love Eve, and are terrified that CCP will try to exploit that love, and ruin the game in the process. So, this joke isn't funny. However, it wasn't meant for them.

I assign about an 90% probability to the article in question being satire, and meant ironically. It's only 90% because living 3 million years has given me some skepticism about everything. (The fabulous red hair doesn't make me skeptical, just sexy).

If it's really satire, then it's very reassuring, by the way. It shows that it was expected that every CCP employee would understand immediately that the program described - the selling of ammo, ships and faction through RMT - was way beyond anything CCP had any intention of doing. As Gandalf would say, "That's a very comforting thought."

Update: Corrected spelling from "Sarah" to "Sara" Pickell.

When No Doesn't Mean No

2011-06-24T15:06:00.000-07:00

Eve Online recently launched its latest expansion Incarna. As part of the expansion it introduced a microtransaction market, through which players can purchase items by spending a currency known as Aurum. Aurum, as I write this, can only be obtained by purchasing a PLEX, the same ingame item that can be redeemed for play time, and instead redeeming it for Aurum.

The market is thin, and mostly consists of vanity items, boots, skirts and, of all things, monocles.

As it turns out, Incarna introduced full-body 3d avatars for the first time to EVE. However, in the game as it is today, these avatars are only used in your Captain's Quarters, which can only be occupied by you. So, it seems, nobody can see these vanity items, with one exception - monocles. To add insult to injury, the real world cost of said items is pretty stiff - upwards of $50 to $80. There are no low priced items, and nothing that seems functional.

As if this weren't enough, a copy of an internal newsletter (with the title Fearless) was leaked to the general public. This particular issue was titled "Greed is Good?" and had a picture of Gordon Gekko on it. On page 7 is a pro-con debate on having microtransaction items available that enhanced gameplay in Eve Online. You can download it here.

Kristoffer Touffer is described as "a driving force in CCP's game design department" Kristoffer says

I would like virtual goods sales in EVE. In fact, I’d like to sell a lot more than vanity items. Does this mean I’m an evil capitalist that, unless stopped, will cause the entire company to catch fire and be buried at sea by a secret team of Navy SEALs?
Let’s hope not, although that’s the impression I get sometimes when interacting with our customers. There is a pretty overwhelming perception amongst EVE players that these changes are bad. I think they’re brilliant, but our players
don’t. We’re going to face an uphill struggle, and the reason many of us never talk about this publicly is that we’d be burned at the stake by the players.

Kristoffer gives an example of what kinds of things he'd like to see sold in game:

I’ll give you an example of something I think provides value to our customer, which I’d like to sell. Right now, you can store 50 personal fittings on our servers. That’s more than enough for the average EVE player, but for a subset of our users, it’s too small a number. Why not be able to add more storage space for a small amount of money? You’d even be able to upgrade it multiple times if you needed and permanently add this benefit to your character, making it even more valuable. And you know what? If you don’t like paying for this, you can always buy a PLEX off the market, and never have to get your credit card out. I think that’s pretty goddamn cool, and I’m not entirely sure why that makes me Hitler to some EVE players.

Which touches my first question: Why have Aurum at all? Why not just make everything ISK based? You can already buy ISK in game from CCP by buying GTCs, converting them to PLEXes and selling them on the market. I have a guess at why they introduced Aurum: So they can sell it or give it away directly eventually, and set their own price for it, rather than letting the market decide, avoiding in-game market arbitrage as well.

On the same page, John Turbefield is described as a "Renowned master of spreadsheets and works his Excel magic in the Research and Statistics department". He is "worried that the rules are changing:"

Virtual goods sales can be positive in certain circumstances. However, when you introduce something that can create an imbalance where others can’t compete with their spending power, you inevitably decrease their satisfaction with your product. As such it is essential that a game is designed from the ground up to incorporate any major virtual goods sales that fall outside of this. PLEX (and time codes before that) work extremely well as they not only largely replace a black market for ISK, but provide substantial benefits to other players in the form of offering additional subscription options. The negatives caused from the ISK for real money trade such as hacking and botting are reduced as their profitability declines. PLEX differs from typical virtual goods sales because we allow players to pay their subscriptions this way using in-game currency.

To me, virtual goods sales are far less appealing when the gameplay is affected and they aren’t replacing a black market. When we’re adding additional things into the game that enable users to gain an advantage over other people for real money in a way they simply wouldn’t be able to if we hadn’t done so, then it becomes an issue. I feel that if people have already paid a subscription fee then unless there is a good reason for the overall community to introduce a gameplay-affecting virtual goods
sales (such as with PLEX), then gaining an in-game advantage isn’t justifiable. More revenue is of course an aim, but making our customers feel like they are being ‘double billed’ to be able to play on the same level as others is just a step too far.

The most visible example of another game introducing virtual goods sales is certainly LOTRO. It is worth pointing out though that they made almost everything microtransaction based and at the same time removed subscription fees. Because other games with very different communities and very different gameplay styles are able to do something it doesn’t mean we can do the same thing with the same levels of success. EVE is a far more complex game with significantly more social interaction, which changes a great
deal about how you can approach virtual goods sales. While it’s true that others, such as Blizzard have gone down the microtransaction path, they have not implemented any gameplay affecting items. They also do not offer a microtransaction to gold conversion as we do with PLEX. [Actually, Eve offers a gold to MT conversion, not the other way -toldain]
I don’t oppose the concept of virtual goods in the case of vanity items, merely in cases where the monetization of items impacts the balance of the game.

Well, that was kind of long, but I wanted you to really get the argument being made. John touches on the idea of "double-billing", which is pretty important to overall sentiment. He also tries to explain something that puzzles me as well.

CCP already sells currency within its games, via the PLEX mechanic. ISK can be used to buy things that enhance your gameplay, and gain an advantage with. I've heard players respond to someone complaining about how long it took to earn enough ISK to buy a carrier with, "Sell some PLEXes!"

Furthermore, characters can be bought and sold for ISK. So if you want an "endgame" character, capable of flying Titans, let's say, you can. Buy a crapload of PLEXes and buy both a Titan and a character who can fly one. Be careful that its in space where it's safe to log on, though.

Ok, so why are the playerbase so upset? First, players, because they are people, really resist change. And they are wary of being ignored because that's what big companies do, right?

However, the worst is yet to come.

On page 9 of the same issue of Fearless Scott Holden writes an article called "Delivering the goods: virtual sales in Incarna" Scott Holden is described on Page 3 thus: "As Director of Content Design, Scott works from the Atlanta office overseeing all content for the EVE property; he regularly shuttles between our offices and his homeland of Canada."

CCP is in the process of adopting a virtual sales model for its game products. While this model has
always been intended for World of Darkness and DUST 514, you may be wondering how this will
work in EVE Online. Specifically, how will this new strategy unfold in Incarna?

In short, it’s the same in Incarna as elsewhere: we give players the means to buy stuff in addition to their base subscription, offering things like new “nano-paints” that allow one to customize ships while docked; new articles of virtual clothing, tattoos, and other avatar customizations; tokens for customizing Captain’s Quarters and so on. Not all virtual purchases will focus on customization: some will simply be new items, ammunition, ships, etc. that can be purchased outright. The devil, as always, is in the details.

You don't have to read much further than this to get the picture. New items, ammunition and ships? The player base of Eve is not naive. They've seen other games. The MT items are always just a little bit better than the normal items. Ammunition and ships really hits Eve players in the gut. Put this together with the perception that the current items are really overpriced and what is the prediction that a reasonable player will make?

Currently one round of T2 ammunition costs something like 200 ISK, depending on just what kind. That's less than one cent, probably that's 100 of them for a penny. My math may be wrong, but it's tiny, when put in terms of Euros or USD. Will that be true of the MT version of ammunition, which you know will be just that much better than even faction ammo?

But that difference is really really important to Eve players. A battle could turn on that difference, and losses of billions of ISK could turn on that battle. So of course they would have to buy it, regardless of whatever insane price is charged through the MT store. Either that, or quit playing the game. So when the Director of Content Design for Eve says, "we're going to sell ammo and ships", that seems like a done deal, doesn't it?

The player base has been very clear that it doesn't want this, as is evidenced by Kristoffer Touffer's remarks shown above.

Many of the players I've met in 0.0 are pretty much all-in when it comes to playing Eve. They have multiple accounts. They play long hours. At least one appears to be logged in all day long while at work. They play so much that they fall asleep at the keyboard. And now the feel that CCP is trying to squeeze more blood from that turnip. As I write this there is a serious rage on the forums and some sort of protest flash mob in Jita 4,4.

Every aspect of Eve is PvP. Even the most carebeary (careberry?) of carebears is enmeshed in economic PvP. There's competition and cooperation. The competition is what makes the cooperation so delightful. So even the non-hardcores sense that the game would be deeply changed by what Mr. Holden suggests, strike that, he didn't suggest it, he flat said "it's happening".

Holden goes on to describe another item contemplated for sale through MT, faction standing.

One other service we’re looking at is selling faction standings. We want to offer convenience for a price. As an example, your friend might give you free tickets to see her band play simply because the two of you are friends; meanwhile, other fans have to pay for a ticket because, well, that’s how it normally works. The more noteworthy the band, the more those friendships (and thus the tickets) are worth. If that doesn’t seem quite an accurate analogy, think of it like this: you can develop a friendship by “spending” your time, or you can pay to get the same benefits that friendship would otherwise allow. (I’m sure you can think of a few other situations where one might temporarily “buy” services otherwise gained only through social interaction.)

Wow. Just wow. He's comparing (correct me if I read this wrong) what they want to do to prostitution, and saying, "That's why we should do it!" Do you seriously believe that people like this, as opposed to merely tolerating it? And why they might not want to see it intrude on their precious leisure time, fantasy world? Do you have a shred of empathy for those players who play Eve because they can buy PLEXes with ISK, play for free, and still remain competitive? Can you understand why players might prefer a game where their ability to play the game matters rather than the size of their bank account? If you can't, you should be fired immediately, do not pass Go, do not collect 2 million ISK. No "Director of Content" should be so clueless about what players want in their virtual worlds.

Imagine you had ground missions and spent tons of ISK on building faction with the Caldari. Now all that means nothing, and you feel like a sucker. Is this what you want to have happen to your game? I don't.

What makes this much, much worse is the fact that CCP said, to the Council of Stellar Management that there would be no gameplay-affecting items available through the MT store. Pretty much at the same time Holden was writing this, I think. Mr Holden clearly believes that it will blow over and players will drop their opposition over time. Why do I know that? Because he says so:

First, we don’t want to glut the virtual market with too many offers right out of the gate. Instead, we want to provide a steady stream of digestible goods and services over a long period of time, allowing cus- tomers to sample and purchase as they get used to the new model. We want to cater to long-term customers who will gradually acquire a taste for our wares.

It's never pretty to see someone openly plotting a seduction. Or is that the right word? Do you really think we'll get used to that in time, or that we'll go away only to be replaced by other people who don't care? Will we embrace ships, or merely be so beat down that we won't put up much of a fight. Scott, "no" really, really means "no".

There's another paragraph he writes that's nearly impenetrable. I'll reproduce it for you.

Regarding the notion of “virtual sales in Incarna,” though, I’d like to elucidate one point before closing: Incarna cannot be considered a product distinct from other parts of EVE. Incarna and “flying- in-space” (and in due course DUST 514) are merely aspects of the EVE Online experience; in virtual sales, as in development as a whole, we must all adopt this way of thinking. Thus, we will not and cannot focus on virtual sales only within the In- carna environment, nor build that environment around such sales; rather, we will effect a universal strategy of micro-sales throughout the EVE experience. So, as a play- er, while you are inside a station, you will find gameplay that links to other aspects of the game and that also presents you with virtual purchasing opportunities — just as you will while you are in space or on a planet fighting as a DUST merc.

I've been in the corporate world for years, and can usually translate corp-speak. But this kind of has me baffled. Could this mean he was thinking of Dust514 (which will be F2P) when he said "ammunition"? No, because he said "ships", too. Maybe this is just cross-selling.

Eve as it stands, drives away the instant-gratification crowd. I will never forget an exchange I witnessed in the noob channel on my first night playing Eve. Someone asked, "How long does it take to skill everything up and go PVP?" The reply was "Twenty years!" To me, that felt good. It felt like I had found a home. But selling stuff like ships via MT? That's instant gratification land, and would be a massive change to Eve.

It's as if just anybody could have fabulous red hair, just by dropping some cash, rather than cultivating one's style over the course of 3 million years.

Mass Effect 2: When the World Doesn't See Your Gender

2011-06-21T13:56:00.000-07:00

Slowly catching up to the MMO world, Mass Effect 2 allows players to customize their avatar - Shepard - with a variety of looks and either gender. Here's a YouTube video paying tribute to FemShepard:

Lesley of Twowholecakes.com writes about what it's like to play Mass Effect 2 with an avatar that's a lesbian woman of color.

When Brown Lady Shepard is rude, or curt, or dismissive, the reactions she receives from others are not to her gender or her race, but to her words. Why? Because the character was written with the expectation that most people will play it as a white dude, a character for whom reactions based on gender or race are inconceivable. He’s “normal”, y’see. In real life, and in most media representation, we are culturally conditioned to respond differently to a big ol’ white dude with no manners than we do a woman of color doing the exact same thing. The white dude is just a jerk, but there’s often a built-in extra rage factor against the woman of color, for daring to be “uppity”, for failing to know her place. This distinction is often unconscious and unrecognized, but it’s there. In Mass Effect, no matter what my Shepard says or does, not only is the dialogue the same as it would be for the cultural “default”, but the reaction from the other non-player characters is the same. (The only exception to this is the handful of times that Lady Shepard is called a “bitch” — I suppose Dude Shepard may get called a bitch too, but I doubt it. I find it fascinating that they would record specific name-calling dialogue in this way.) Brown Lady Shepard waves her intimidation up in a dude’s face and he backs the fuck down, just like he would if she were a hyper-privileged white guy. My Lady Shepard faces no additional pressure to prove herself because of her background; if she is dismissed, it’s on the basis of her assertions, and not because she’s a queer woman of color from a poor socioeconomic background — even though that’s exactly what she is.

There's a joy here that I find very appealing. This is the joy of liberation. I would take nothing away from this, but I have one thing to add: the "big ol'" part of "big ol' white dude" matters.

I'm a white dude who is decidedly not "big ol'". I still enjoy male privilege, but people feel a lot more free to let me know they don't like what I'm doing than they would someone a foot taller than me. Of which there are quite a few in the world. I would like to, you know, feel that I exist.

Tall guys make more money and have more sex. You can manipulate how aggressive people are in the ultimatum game just by altering the size of their avatar in a virtual reality. You can put numbers on it.

Actually, it's even more subtle. Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailensen manipulated a virtual reality so that subjects thought themselves to be taller than their counterpart, even though their counterpart in the ulitmatum game percieved them as the same height as themselves. Under these conditions, the subjectively taller person would make more agressive splits, and reject unfair splits more frequently as well - just because they perceived themselves to be taller.

Yee and Bailensen make no report on the effects that having fabulous red hair might have, however.

Biology isn't destiny. Napoleon and Jet Li come to mind. As a martial artist, I have physically dominated men who were much larger than myself. It was in training, but still, some of these men had a serious mental block about whether I could do this, even as I was doing it. This experience is not that dissimilar to the experience of some women martial artists I know.

Anyway, I don't play many console games these days. But I'm really getting tempted by Mass Effect 2.

Why Instances are Better?

2011-06-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Dan Ariely talks about an experiment that addresses questions of human meaning and purpose. I got about two thirds of the way through this when I realized that this is quite relevant to MMO's, and suggest that instances will keep people coming back a lot longer.

If you kill the boss and watch him respawn before your eyes, it kills your sense of accomplishment much faster.

Scratch Your Neighbor, What's Underneath

2011-06-08T16:21:00.000-07:00

A cleric, or a fighter, or a ~~thief~~ rogue?

Under a Grey Sky on a Grey Sea

2011-05-24T10:30:00.000-07:00

The next hour was to be the edgiest of my life, as the Hood screamed into battle. There was little for me to do in the build-up to action, and I became a somewhat frightened observer. Dawn had been at 0200, and now I could see great patches of cloud that threatened rain, if not more snow and sleet. There was a heavy swell from the north-east, which slapped the great ship and produced a haze of water that showered over the bows on to the long forecastle and beat against the side of A and B turrets. Under a grey sky on a grey sea we charged towards an enemy who threatened the lifelines to Britain. Even a technicolor film of this morning would not have brought out a brighter hue.

Ted Briggs, Flagship Hood, The Fate of Britains Mightiest Warship

I spent most of the weekend playing Civilization V, as Elizabeth of England, King difficulty, archipelago map. Last night I completed a science victory, my first win at this difficulty. This morning, in my RSS reader, Brad DeLong posted a first-person account of the sinking of HMS Hood by the KMSS Bismark, taken from Ted Brigg's memoir. Synchronicity abounds!

The link to DeLong has just the relevant bits. It's long, but gripping, and fits nicely in the "I Came Here to be Podkilled" vein. The Hood was sunk on 19 May, 1941, a few days over 70 years ago.

****

I played the game with England on an archipelago map because I love ships, and want them to be relevant. A bit of strangeness happened last night. About 10 turns away from winning, Genghis Khan, whose Mongol Horde had been my friend for the entire game, realized that if he didn't do something, I would win. So he invaded me. But the invasion went nowhere, because the Civ AI does not understand how to fight with sea power. It does a creditable job with landlocked battles, but doesn't do so well at invasions.

One of the critical mechanics changes in Civ V from Civ IV is that all land units can embark, having sea transport built in to them, once the required tech is researched. However, unless you are Songhia (the kingdom of river pirates), any fighting vessel may eliminate an embarked land unit by simply sailing on to its square. The killer can even continue sailing, if there is movement left, but the murder counts as the unit's attack for the turn.

For me, managing a sea invasion works in three phases.

Establish control of the appropriate body of water. This means eliminating all hostile seaborne fighting units.
Use bombardment to eliminate non-garrisoned land units along the coast. Take advantage of the fact that most of them can't shoot back, especially during the early phases of the game.
Only then can you bring your embarked land units into the game. Take cities by first reducing them with naval bombardment, then a single land unit can finish them off.

However, the AI will just skip step one, form a combined fleet, and sail them all over, hoping for the best. This is probably because we don't understand how to make AI's execute multi-stage plans very well. So I beat off Genghis, losing maybe one ship in the process. He was feeling vindictive, so he dropped a nuke on St. Petersburg (I took it from Russia, but that's another tale). This did a lot of damage, but was irrelevant. I was just a few turns from winning, and even a complete loss of St. Pete would not have made any difference.

After beating off Genghis, I noticed Caesar had a fleet in the water heading for me. That's the fleet in the shot above.

I'm the ships with the red icons. The white line with a red fringe is my territorial border. London is to the southwest, maybe 8-10 hexes. My last spaceship part was built on a different island directly to the west and northwest, and is in the water, on its way to London for the win.

I've just blown up two submarines. One was in the hex I've marked "SS", while the other was in the hex that my destroyer is now occupying. Rome's two destroyers, marked "DD", have been hit by cruise missiles from my missile frigate which is barely visible far to the west. The rest of the Roman units (with purple icons) are embarked land units. I have a couple of battleships just offscreen to the west, as is a carrier. The submarines were very dangerous to them, one of those subs can easily one-shot a battleship. But that threat is eliminated, the Roman fleet is all going to die. They can't run fast enough to get away, but the AI probably doesn't even realize that it needs to. It can't see my other units.

A funny thing happened as I took this screenshot. I guess my finger must have slipped and hit another function key because the game, at that moment, without going through any intervening menus, launched me into a different game, one that Darkwater Daughter Number One had been playing as China. I had turned to look at something on the TV and when I turned back, the beautiful slaughter-in-waiting was gone.

I was able to restore to an autosave position, but the position was one prior to the Khan's declaration of war against me. So I replayed the defense, and this time he declined to nuke me. When Caesar, showing friendship, asked for open borders, I refused him, and his fleet never came. Really, a much more boring path, but the result was the same.

Apropos of Nothing

2011-05-10T09:20:00.001-07:00

Since I can't play Everquest, or EQ2, due to SOE being down...

I wish I knew who to credit for this work. I found it at Striking Thoughts, written by Bob Patterson.

Here is the original (for reference)

Zombies All Around Me

2011-05-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

...I be hackin' them all up.

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

If you are a clueless old dude like me, you probably didn't know that this is a parody of "Like a G6" by Far East Movement.

Fabulous Failure Fun

2011-05-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

Today seems to be the day for lots of people to complain about the lack of failure in MMORPG's. Except they didn't really say it that way.

First up, Psychochild links to Tobold who links to an article by Doctor Professor titled "Addicted to Fake Acheivement". Doctor Professor describes the difference between a performance orientation and a mastery orientation:

It turns out there are two different ways people respond to challenges. Some people see them as opportunities to perform - to demonstrate their talent or intellect. Others see them as opportunities to master - to improve their skill or knowledge.

Say you take a person with a performance orientation ("Paul") and a person with a mastery orientation ("Matt"). Give them each an easy puzzle, and they will both do well. Paul will complete it quickly and smile proudly at how well he performed. Matt will complete it quickly and be satisfied that he has mastered the skill involved.

Now give them each a difficult puzzle. Paul will jump in gamely, but it will soon become clear he cannot overcome it as impressively as he did the last one. The opportunity to show off has disappeared, and Paul will lose interest and give up. Matt, on the other hand, when stymied, will push harder. His early failure means there's still something to be learned here, and he will persevere until he does so and solves the puzzle.

The language he uses demonstrates that Doc has a definite preference for mastery orientation, by the way.

The two kinds of players are separated by failure. Someone who is performance oriented - or who might be otherwise described as just looking for a little mindless fun - will walk away from an activity that serves them repeated failures.

Next is Pete Michaud's article "Achievement Porn"

One salient example is our education system. Like a role playing video game, one educational challenge leads to the next, with each challenge being trivial for the people who are at the right level to undertake it. After years on a treadmill that’s too easy to fail at, players—students, in this case—are acclimated to the game of education, rather to real achievement. Their work for those years is not valuable at all, and often doesn’t even simulate what valuable work would be like: they have only managed to repeat patterns they’ve been shown back at the educators. This is the game.

An all-too-common complaint about the educational system. Just keep going and you will move through the system. There's no real failure here. Pete says "The easy part to culling the bullshit is to ask yourself: Is this activity making a positive, tangible difference in my life or anyone else’s life?" I think this misses the point. As Psychochild points out, self-actualization is pretty important.

Finally, Syncaine complains about upcoming changes to Rift:

While the above is not yet live, and hence I have not experienced it myself, it looks like Trion is nerfing expert dungeon difficulty. That’s pretty sad, because honestly right now they are a solid challenge while not being min/max/ubergear hard (some are too long thanks to trash, but that has nothing to do with difficulty).
[...]
Casuals: Why MMO players can't have nice things.

Syncaine has some pushback from commenters, claiming that "casuals" are necessary for the financial success of MMO's such as Rift. He holds up EVE Online as a counterexample, but Eve Online was launched with an investment of $2 million, not $100 million. Eve is not different in this one dimension, but in many dimensions. The accomplishment of EVE Online's design is that the game has an easy mode, and you can stay in that easy mode for a long time, or you can choose harder stuff. There is no "leveled progression", but there are lots of invitations to do harder stuff.

Where is the failure? In comments (hat tip to Wilhelm Arcturus, who has several comments there):

At a high level, I don’t think it’s really that difficult; design content so either someone improves, or they don’t progress. The current model is basically “if you play well, you progress 2% faster. If you drool on your keyboard, it will take you a extra day to become a god-slayer”. That’s pretty terrible for long-term player education.

I think this is the same discontent - there's no failure, as such.

I have spent the last 10 years or so learning to love failure, primarily through the vehicle of martial arts, specifically ju-jitsu. If you go to throw someone and they don't fall down, the failure is obvious. It's also pretty darn frustrating and embarrassing. At least, until you learn to remap the meaning of a failure. I now teach ju-jitsu to kids every week, and one of the most valuable experiences I can give them is failure. The normal social meaning of failure is "I'm a loser" - it's shameful. We give them failure in an environment of laughter, affection and fun. I want those kids to lose their fear of simple failure. It's ok to be afraid of getting shot or losing money, but the fear of the shame of failure itself isn't very functional.

There's a reason I post every single time I get podkilled in Eve. Sometimes, the stupid burns, but I want to learn from it, and celebrate it. Because that's how I'll get better. So, I'm kind of there about wanting failure.

I haven't played Everquest II for nearly a year now. There are two reasons for that. The first is social. I ended up being online with pretty much nobody else I knew from my guild, and lonely. Leveling yet another alt, by myself, just stopped being interesting.

The other reason is that I too felt the game was now too easy. When the PUG you are in pulls an entire room and then burns them down in a button-mashing frenzy, then hustles off to do the same thing in the next room and then the next instance, and then...

That's not what appealed to me about these games. I'm more puzzle/strategy/skill oriented. There were a few instances that had puzzles in them, but the groups I was in had someone who had done it before and just did the stuff with little comment in chat. I had no chance to fool with the stuff myself.

There's nothing to keep me engaged. Keeping me engaged may not have meant only failure, but exploration and mystery. But exploration and mystery have that element of failure. This is where failure is truly necessary to enjoyment: Consider a novel or a movie. As it goes along, you form expectations about what's going to happen next. Would the novel be interesting if all those expectations were accurate? If you were never wrong? No, it would be boring. Agatha Christie novels would lose something if she wasn't so good at fooling you. But she is, and it feels good to be fooled. It must, or we wouldn't read the next one, or complain about how other writer's plots are easier to see through.

So I play Eve Online, and DDO and Civiliazation 4. I'm currently trying to win Civ on harder levels, and on different maps. I'm exploring the space, different maps, different sizes, different game speeds. Surprises are fun, but there wouldn't be any if you were never wrong.

What I don't agree with, though, is the idea that MMO's take no skill. They do. I've been developing those skills for more than 10 years. (More than 30 if you count tabletop experience). It should not be surprising that I'm good at them. It's often hard for people to see their own skills.

We've been playing DDO for about a year now. Going back to the starting dungeons on the island, we find that we blow through them now, they seem much easier than they used to be, even with minimal twinking. I think this is an unmistakable sign that we are more skilled. (When I say "we" I mean me and Mrs. Darkwater).

And yet, we keep finding new modules, new instances that can kick our butts. It's glorious. (Vault of Night, I'm looking at you!)

"Re-mirroring Storm"

2011-04-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

You may have heard about problems with Amazon's server farm earlier this week and, I think, last weekend. I just ran across a technical description of what happened:

When this network connectivity issue occurred, a large number of EBS nodes in a single EBS cluster lost connection to their replicas. When the incorrect traffic shift was rolled back and network connectivity was restored, these nodes rapidly began searching the EBS cluster for available server space where they could re-mirror data. Once again, in a normally functioning cluster, this occurs in milliseconds. In this case, because the issue affected such a large number of volumes concurrently, the free capacity of the EBS cluster was quickly exhausted, leaving many of the nodes “stuck” in a loop, continuously searching the cluster for free space. This quickly led to a “re-mirroring storm,” where a large number of volumes were effectively “stuck” while the nodes searched the cluster for the storage space it needed for its new replica. At this point, about 13% of the volumes in the affected Availability Zone were in this “stuck” state.

After the initial sequence of events described above, the degraded EBS cluster had an immediate impact on the EBS control plane. When the EBS cluster in the affected Availability Zone entered the re-mirroring storm and exhausted its available capacity, the cluster became unable to service “create volume” API requests. Because the EBS control plane (and the create volume API in particular) was configured with a long time-out period, these slow API calls began to back up and resulted in thread starvation in the EBS control plane. The EBS control plane has a regional pool of available threads it can use to service requests. When these threads were completely filled up by the large number of queued requests, the EBS control plane had no ability to service API requests and began to fail API requests for other Availability Zones in that Region as well. At 2:40 AM PDT on April 21st, the team deployed a change that disabled all new Create Volume requests in the affected Availability Zone, and by 2:50 AM PDT, latencies and error rates for all other EBS related APIs recovered.

I don't think any gaming companies were affected, though Zynga might have been. But I don't care. I love failure analysis in general, and in computer systems in particular. I'm such a geek. A 3000 year old, fabulously scarlet-coiffed geek, to be sure, but a geek, through and through.

UPDATE: The outage started just after midnight April 21 PDT.

Crunch and Fluff

2011-04-26T16:15:00.000-07:00

Brian "Psychochild" Green asks the question "Why all this number focus?" in MMO's today. To clarify, he's talking about number focus on the part of the game designers.

I played a lot of D&D in college, along with other RPGs like Paranoia, White Wolf's Vampire and Werewolf, etc. I met my GF of 16 years playing D&D. Our group played together for nearly 4 years, and some of us played virtual tabletop RPGs and MMOs together later. Now, we weren't originally the most story-focused group. We often played Vampire: the Masquerade in the "fanged superheroes" mode rather than purely as the goth "oh my tortured soul" way. Personally, I liked Werewolf: the Apocalypse better for this style of play, but we did some good role-playing as well.

Playing DDO for a bit has put this into stark contrast. Despite being a fairly power-gaming heavy group, I don't think I focused on stats nearly as much as I have in DDO. For example, in DDO, you have items that give bonuses to your individual stats. I might find some Ogre Power gloves that give +1 to +6 Strength. These items are pretty common in the game and increase in power with levels. In my pen and paper games playing 3rd edition for several months, we saw 0. That's right, none. Even back in university playing power-gaming-focused 2nd edition we had less than a half dozen items that increased stats after years of regular play and multiple parties.

Lest you think this is essential to the genre, I offer a counterexample: Legend of Zelda. Link has no stats at all. There is no "build".

As a player, I often think that high stats are the refuge of the unimaginative. The obvious thing to do for a fighter is push your AC and hit points to the maximum. The obvious thing for a dps focused role is to maximize damage output - for a melee type that means STR and weapons.

But why game designers? I'm not sure. Maybe they think that the endless quest for improving gear is what motivates player to keep playing. And for a long time, it did. I think there are other things that will motivate people though. Things like autonomy, mastery and purpose.

But designers face the same dilemna as players. If a player strays from the defined path, they risk failure. And they will fail on their own. If you can't tank the raid boss when you have the best hp's and AC on the server, then it wasn't your fault. But if you don't have the best numbers then it was your fault.

For a designer the success criteria is different. If a designer got rid of the gear/numbers grind, then when players stop playing after a month, they will be second guessed. And the bigger the budget of a game, the bigger the repercussions if a game flops.

Psychochild's commenter Stabs has a really interesting comment:

I feel diku MMO is a soap bubble about to burst into dozens of different types of games. The only thing holding it together is the feeling you have to add every feature to attract every type of player (eg WAR crowbaring in a rudimentary and ridiculous form of crafting, mocked in the latest Kiasacast, when they suddenly worried about not appealing to the crafting sub-market). There are many game elements that just don't work together any more - open world gameplay conflicts with instancing, battlegrounds kill rvr (the losing side just queues for honour on a plate rather continue with asymmetrical conflict).

It's a good time for games.

[The link to a definition of "diku" is mine, -toldain]

They Really Do Have More Fun, No Really

2011-04-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

I've decided I'll spend the next three million years as a blonde. I think it looks fabulous, don't you? I will set the trend for the Wilhelm Arcturus Decade. I'd start a Facebook page, but I don't want to look like a copycat, a silly bird.

Speaking of silly birds, maybe I'll be able to get one as a pet, now that
CCP announced that they will be introducing mounts and pets to their popular MMO, EVE Online. I'm really looking forward to earning some of those achievements.

And it will let me stand out when I go to Psychochild's campaign rallies. He announced today that he is running for president, on a promise to fix all the bugs. I say, we need to refocus our military spending and put a lot more enchanters into the military. I mean, come on. We all know that enchanters are a big force multiplier. Instead of fighting 1000 enemy soldiers all at once, we could kill them off one at a time! Think how much less mana our medics would have to burn! And with Clarity making our gasoline and jet fuel last longer, we'd level up our military that much faster for the endgame!

I haven't heard from Tipa yet today, but knowing how much she loves Wizard101, she's probably playing with her new pet.

I Came Here To Be Podkilled: Pride Goeth Before A Fall Edition

2011-03-31T09:36:00.000-07:00

I've been riding high lately, pleased with my evasion of a gatecamp. This happened perhaps a week ago. I was in my Iteron V, with a cargohold full of POS fuel. That happens a lot lately. I loaded up in a station, where we keep the fuel, checked local and undocked. On undock, I started a warp sequence to the gate to the next system over, where the POS I was going to refuel was.

Now the intel channels had been showing some red activity in our space, but it was a small number, and in the other direction from the system I was headed to. I'm feeling a bit impatient, though, to get my chores over with and get on to other things. In the time while I was undocking, though, a red entered the system. I didn't notice right away, I had just checked local before undocking. So just about the time I entered warp, I noticed.

I hit control space frantically in an effort to abort, but it was too late. So the 20 seconds or so I spent in warp had me on pins and needles. When I hit the gate grid, my fears were confirmed, the red was there, and in a Sabre. As I come out of warp, a bubble goes up.

I announce my issue on my corp Teamspeak, in what I'm sure is a bit of an anxious voice. I'm advised to "get out of the bubble". I look around and see that while the bubble is still up, the sabre is gone, not visible on the grid. This gives me a moment to collect my wits, and recall some advice that a friendly reader had eve mailed to me, based on my last encounter with a Sabre.

I burn to zero on the gate and sit, waiting. Another blue transport, a Badger shows up, and is caught by the bubble. My fingers aren't yet working well enough to type the bubble/camp into the intel channel, and he was likely in warp before I could have finished it in any case. The Sabre reappears, likely it was cloaked. My targeting alarm goes off, he's targeted me. I take a deep breath, thinking "focus!". I check the outline of the sabre, it's blinking, both in space and on the overview. My shields are down a little. I jump through, knowing he can't follow me.

Local loads before the new system grid does, and there are two reds. Was this a trap? Have I gone from bad to worse? But the grid loads and I'm alone. I align for the pos with all haste and get into warp, seeing no one. I'm safe. The other two had gone via a bypass route, and were too slow to get me. It didn't occur to me at the time that the Sabre pilot had made it possible by aggroing me before his backup was in position. He's dealing with a lot, too, and wants to limit his exposure at the gate. His bubble will time out at some point. For all he knows, there's a dozen blues warping to that gate.

It's exhilarating to outrun someone in an industrial. I'm feeling good.

Nuke LaLoosh: Can't you just let me enjoy the moment?
Crash Davis: The moment is over.

-from Bull Durham

Which is probably why, when I finished my chores on Monday night and jumped into my Megathron to join corpmates in a ratting rampage, I took another risk with reds about. Or maybe it's just that I like the color red. It does look fabulous on hair after all.

A red gang had gone through my station system, and on to the next one, where the jumpbridge I wanted to use was. Intel showed that their scout, at least had gone on to the next system past that. And then there were several minutes of silence about them on intel. So I undocked, warped to the gate, and jumped through.

I instantly knew that i was toast. All six ships were there, including Vagabonds and Cynabals. I had no chance, they blew through my considerable tank like tissue paper. And so it was back to the station, feeling like a fool. I loved that ship, it had nearly doubled my ratting output. We estimate the loss at about 120 million ISK. I've been saving my pennies, being a miserly old elf, but as Meclin says, "It burns". Meclin, or as we call him, "Skippy", after his alt Scipia Mortalis (Or is that his main? I'm never quite sure), provided me with some new implants from spares that he had. It was probably time for me to upgrade them anyway.

Last night I began collecting the minerals to make a new Megathron. Time heals all wounds, even burns.

How I Learned to Love Solusek's Eye

2011-03-15T10:14:00.000-07:00

So what's a high elf with fabulous slightly-reddish tinted hair doing in a wretched hive a scum and villainy like ~~Mos Eisley~~ Freeport? I like the dungeons here, that's why. And I guess I just like slumming.

I leveled to about level 20 in Najena. The first real group I got was by the pool, surrounded by goblins and a few "skeletons" that were deep red to me. But my group, many of which were red to me, could handle them, and they liked the fact that I could breeze them. No mezzing was necessary to this group. That was around level 16 or so, though I had started lower than that. I had one group where there were two enchanters, the other had charmed a minotaur as a pet and was using it to dps. This worked surprisingly well in a group setting. I did buffing, dps, and the occasional mez when needed. This got me through level 20 or so, and stuff started turning mostly green and light blue. Time to move on.

So I moved over to Solusek's Eye, or Sol A, as it's known. Groups can be slow to get in to, but when I get them, I've zoomed. I've had a camp in the Foreman's room (#11 on the linked map), near the Efreeti and Kindle (South of #3), and in the Bar(#15). Each of these camps has netted me two dings, in the course of 3 or so hours of play.

Waits for groups can be long and frustrating, because the usual modus operandi of all groups in Sol A (and Najena, too) seems to be: be slightly overpowered, and pull widely. That cuts down the number of groups that the ecology can support. And apparently as I level up, it will be even more difficult, since the available camps/mobs becomes less when playing classic.

And so I spend the time trying to get better at fighting with a charmed pet. I'm still something of a noob at this, but I'm managing to actually make some progress now. The first time around in EQ, I never was able to master this, I usually ended up dying when the charm broke and now 2 mobs were trying to eat me.

That of course happens, but probably the crucial issue is management of my HP and mana. You must keep yourself set up to deal with, erm, contingencies, because they happen. Boy do they happen. I've decided that the best thing to do when you've just regained control of the situation with about 5% hit points left is to gate out, heal, and try again. Especially when you've run out of bandages.

But eventually I would get a group, which I strongly prefer. In these groups I got to engage in classic Everquest enchanter gameplay: Breeze, Haste, mez, mez, mez, and mez some more. All while managing text chat conversations with a group of people who were strangers an hour before. Four of my Efreeti group were returning players who said similar things, that they hungered for the old-school EQ gameplay. However, the level of play seems, in general, to be much better now than it was back then. Well, mostly.

Last nights camp, in the Bar, went really well at first. Our tank, a barbie warrior and I were on the same page, and he let me control extra spawns, focusing on burning down the targeted mob and controlling it. When the bar itself started to respawn, things could get hairy. But that's when I get busy. Since it's indoors, I can't use an overhead view to speed up targeting for mez, (A technique I learned from my heroine, Karaya). So I move around a lot, and I've been known to stand on tables. No dancing as yet though.

There were a couple moments when the pops happened right as I was rebuffing, and so, I my routine looked like this:

Mez. Sit for enough mana. Mez another. Sit for enough mana. Mez another. Resist! Sit for enough mana. Mez.

However, no one died. Well, the puller once got rooted and killed, very quickly, before we had a chance to help him. But not on the big respawns or pulls. I love this. No other game has this gameplay. Interestingly, many others in the group felt the same way. The more chaotic situations that the dungeon designs provide for mean that defensive skills matter. Rooting, snaring to prevent adds when the mob runs, etc.

Many of the other MMO's I've played reduce to DPS and healing. Maybe the stickiness of the tank matters, but often the mobs die so fast that it doesn't really. In EQ, everyone has to be thinking and aware of what the others are doing.

As an example, here's how my last group ended. The warrior left, having dinged. (And he was getting sleepy, I think.) So we had a ranger pulling, and another one dpsing. He wasn't as sticky as warrior was, and more squishy, but we had both a shammy and a druid, so it wasn't a big deal. What was a big deal was his inclination to run off and pull more stuff when there were still mezzed mobs standing around our camp. A second druid joined our camp, and he had the inclination to put dots on a mob that I had just mezzed. Both he and the other ranger, it seemed, had forgotten about the whole "make an assist button" thing.

But still we coped with that. Then the second (dpsing) druid started afk-ing for phone calls. This was at 11pm PDT, mind you. Who is calling him at that hour? And multiple times, too? The second (halfling) ranger then afk'ed. We picked up a second shammy, who wanted to melee, but our first shammy moved into a corner behind the bar, and seemed to not be doing anything, the pulling ranger went to pull while I had the bartender mezzed, and so there we were: I had no mana, the shammy was trying to melee down a goblin, one ranger was MIA and the other was staring at a wall, the other shammy was sitting in a corner. Oh yes, and the newcomer druid was on a phone call. When I read the words "Evac incoming" from druid, I nearly woke up the rest of my household with a cheer.

I sent her a tell: "good call" She replied, "Yeah, that was getting stupid." And she kindly ported me to Commonlands, where I went and sold stuff.

I think maybe everyone was getting tired. Or something. The good news: I'm now level 27, and Clarity-enabled. (And yes, I did bring that spell with me into the dungeon.) And my cash situation is pretty good. I didn't get any of the good sellable gear drops, but there was lots of reasonably nice trash drops, selling for multiple plats. But I can probably afford a few upgrades from the sellers in the Commonlands, scum and villains though they are. I'm probably going to stay in Sol A for at least another 5 levels. After that, I'm not sure what's next. Maybe Sol B, if it works, or maybe even Lower Guk.

Yes, It Really Is a Global Game Now

2011-03-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

I got this Eve mail from someone in my alliance (TNT) this morning.

For those of you who know I live in Tokyo Japan I just though id send an e-mail letting you know i'm ok. Tokyo didn't get hit to bad. All the severe damage is in the northeastern part of Japan. It was one hell of a shake that lasted about 6 min and constant aftershocks lasted for 3 hours afterwards. I'm from Ohio so i have never realy experienced any earthwaukes till I moved to Japan. We have had many but nothing like this. It was crazy. All the rail systems and airports are shut down so Tokyo is at a stand still. There are mobs of people everywhere becuase they can't get home withough the trains running. Anywiay im good and thankfully still have power and internet.

Fly safe,

And here's some footage:

More on Jumpbridges in 0.0

2011-03-11T11:17:00.000-08:00

Researching my previous piece I ran across this essay by Numtini, who is in Goonswarm.

Her narrative is this:

It seems that everyone is out to “fix” Eve. Rather odd since we all play it and presumably enjoy it. The last CSM started with the proposal that low sec space was broken and the chairwoman ran on a platform of fixing it. It ended with nulsec dwellers eyes bugging out at the CSM gleefully supporting a proposal to “fix” nulsec by removing jump bridges with the specific stated intention of making it more miserable and time consuming to get anything done there.

She goes on to say:

Here is the problem. There is no lowsec. There is no highsec. There is no nulsec. There are two kinds of space in Eve: Secure and Insecure. Secure Space consists of highsec empire and sovereign nulsec. You know where you stand and you can go out and play your game because if someone interferes with you, there will be consequences from a third party. It doesn’t have safety necessarily, what it has is predictability.

She goes on to say, and I think she says it well, that the state of Sovereign 0.0 is the product of intention:

I know it pecks at the livers of some folks that large parts of nulsec are this safe, but it’s the outcome of a series of very complex systems produced by the game designers and tens of thousands of players efforts over a period of years. Players were given the tools to build a civilization and they did what humanity has done for the last 10,000 years–they built a civilization. To expect human beings to do otherwise is ludicrous. We instinctively create order out of chaos. Nobody wants to live in Somalia. Get over it.

I find myself nodding to this. However, there's also some all-or-nothing thinking going on here. The issue, to my mind is that the power of a blob can be projected for 30 systems in within one's home territory. So, if you have the biggest blob, you can control all the systems within 30 jumps. What if that 30 was somehow changed to 10? You would still have sov space, which had a constructed civilization, even if it is feudal in nature, it's still a civilization. But there might be 10 civilizations in nullsec, instead of just 2. I think that would be a positive.

Sending Mittens to Iceland

2011-03-11T09:30:00.000-08:00

The Mittani, sometimes known as Mittens, is running for Council of Stellar Management. How did I find out? I got an email from one of my alliance leadership. We aren't in Goonswarm, but we share space with them, and fought with them in the war that destroyed IT.

Okay, it looks like everyone and their brother has decided to vote this year.

This means we need EVERYONE to vote for their designated delegate.

Odd numbers in your character name = Vile rat, Even numbers in your character name = The Mittani

Click the names to get directly to the voting pages

(Ideally, you should log on the goon forum, vote, then post how many accounts you voted with in the exit poll, this makes it a lot easier for the campaign managers to keep track)

Voting this year is vital to keeping our way of life in nullsec as we know it, if we don't vote, a bunch of empire retards will shit all over our jumpbridges, and we dont want that to happen.

Vote today!

CSM is a group of players who get to have some meetings with the developers of Eve Online and bring to them the concerns of the playerbase at large. Many former CSM members are somewhat pessimistic about the influence of the CSM. But not The Mittani. In this interview with TenTonHammer, where he writes a regular column, he describes how he felt that the lobbying of players was important in getting rid of Titan Doomsday weapons. (By the way, there's some really cool video of a dozen or so old school titans setting off doomsdays around a station in the above interview.)

So he's kind of an ideal guy to put up there for CSM on the burning issue of the day, which is jump bridges. CCP devs recently floated the idea of limiting or getting rid of jump bridges altogether. Of course, jump bridges are a significant part of everyday life in 0.0, and nobody screeches harder than when someone is trying to take something away from them. The more psychological term for this is "loss-averse", and I think that a loss of X dollars garners the same attention and emotional weight as a gain of 5X dollars, to put some numbers on it.

And apparently X is very large when it comes to jump bridges. In the EVE Devblog today was this eye-opener:

CCP has just taken the newly-introduced Hours for PLEX feature offline. The Account Management option was added to provide a more convenient way for EVE Online players who need a few hours of game time added to an expired account, allowing them to log in, redeem PLEX, and keep their account active.

Subsequently, we discovered that the feature could potentially be abused in the CSM voting process, and have temporarily disabled the Hours for PLEX offer. In meantime, CCP is reverting to the older system that was previously in place for reverse-redeeming PLEX.

People have been using Hours for PLEX to reactivate inactive characters to vote for CSM, despite the knowledge that if they didn't buy a PLEX during this four hour period, they would lose the ability to do so, and have to do things the old way. I have to guess that it's the jumpbridge issue is fueling this. By the way, this is metagaming, and as such, I don't really think it's acceptable behavior.

But there's more at stake here than simple loss of "our way of life". In point of fact, I don't use the jump bridges all that much, and mostly it's a time saver. We have two jumpbridges that take us most of the way to highsec, through Torrinos. This turns the traversal of about 15 jumps into 2 jumps. This was a big win for me when I first came out here a year ago. I would go through fairly frequently, so that I could sell and buy stuff in highsec.

However, as the economy in our space has developed, I've used them less and less. At one point during last years war with IT, one of the POSs in the JB chain became damaged, and when the response to the CTA to rep it was unimpressive, our then masters in Tau Ceti Alliance decided to leave it offline. Which is how we learned to get along without it, making more use of jumpclones and alts to buy and sell, and jump freighters and carriers to take stuff in and out.

We also have some jumpbridges in our home space, that give us some tactical options for home defense and save me time whenever I have to go refuel certain poses. These are nice, but I don't think they are creating the problem that CCP sees.

The big problem affecting the game is the blob. In any navalesque war game I've ever played, ships are kept together in as big as blob as possible, since, when they are split up, they are much more vulnerable. Combat in 0.0 follows this rule. There might be more than one flleet, but they are reallly working together. So fleet fights keep getting bigger and bigger, which gives everyone the motivation to keep that big fleet together.

Jump bridges extend the reach of the blob. So do Titan bridges, but they require a fair bit more coordination to use. With a jump bridge network, ships can come rushing from virtually all parts of 0.0 to wherever they are needed in probably 15 minutes, with no coordination required.

So, is blob warfare fun? I don't think so. It's fun to win, certainly, and its fun to get a carrier or dreadnaught killmail. But I never found the basic activity of a blob CTA fun. Mostly it's sit, sit, sit, and then maybe fight with huge lag, and the nagging feeling that I'm not the slightest bit relevant to the outcome.

By contrast, I've had lots of fun in smaller fleets with 10-20 ships.

So, blobs aren't fun, and we all know by now that they produce huge lag. I'm of the opinion that CCP is doing all that it can, but there are some very difficult issues with lag. Things on the order of laws of nature. They are doing a whole lot, and there will be more, but the blob is growing faster than their ability to make it run smooth. But I don't think that's the only issue.

At this point 0.0 is down to two factions, the North and the South. If you want to have any life at all in 0.0, you will be beholden to one of these two, and you will be expected to field significant ships in significant numbers in the blob fights. Dominion did have the effect of getting more people into 0.0, but it had the unintended (in my opinion) effect of putting most of those new people into blobs.

The political organization of 0.0 is more or less feudal. In order to keep your space you must provide both rent and warriors, which are paid to your feudal overlord, who, as everyone knows, has the ability to come and beat you down if you don't pay. And the feudal overlords keep the very best stuff for themselves. In particular T2 construction has pretty much become completely cartelized. There are a handful of players in the game that control all the Technetium moons, and they don't sell that Technetium on the open market, they use it to make T2 ships in a virtual monopoly. At least, that's what the price signals are saying. It is not possible to do T2 manufacture profitably unless you have access to a rare moon. And most corps, even those in 0.0 do not.

Let's make one thing clear. I don't hold this against the people who have accomplished this. Eve is a game, not life. I am accustomed to playing wargames with my friends during which sessions we try to rip each other's faces off. Within the game, that is. What did you think I meant? Some friends and I started one play by email game with an alliance that took over most of the game world, prompting the game developer to tell us that we had "ruined his game". But it was definitely fun for us, and for those few other players that liked the challenge of trying to blow us up. See, there was this time when I snuck a spy character into an enemy castle and TOOK THE ENTIRE PLACE OVER!!! But I digress...

No, the lords of 0.0 are doing their thing. I don't really approve of abusing Hours for PLEX to rock the CSM election, but I think that it's overly optimistic about the CSM. They are responding to conditions in the game and using what works. They are highly creative. But if the game gets to the point where a few people having fun can spoil the fun of a whole bunch of playing customers, it's a problem that affects their bottom line. And if they are the ruthless bastards that would make them worthy of being called capsuleers, they won't mind offending the few in order to enhance, or at least preserve, their own bottom line.

Where Were You When...?

2011-02-23T09:52:00.000-08:00

I see that Wilhelm2451 was online for the Vox kill I was totallly jealous of. (So jealous I just dangled a preposition. Sorry about that, Mr. Eames.)

This is what I was doing.

Exercise for the reader: What zone is this, what part of the zone, what level am I, what am I wearing? Some of it will take guesswork, but not much.

The Dark Side of Nostalgia

2011-02-22T14:43:00.000-08:00

I've been spending time on a nostalgia trip in Everquest, reliving my origins as a high-elf enchanter from Felwithe with red hair. The hair, I have to say, isn't fabulous yet. It's barely hair at all, and only sort of red. it was the best I could do with the 1999-vintage character models which allow for zero customization, just about 6-8 choices of face.

But up until Monday, mostly the nostalgia was good. Sunday there was one thing: Someone at the orc hill in Greater Faydark advertised in OOC (out of character) chat as needing more. I responded with a tell with my level and class (I think it was 5 chanter at the time). I get an invite and accept. I arrive at their camp about 10 to 15 seconds later only to find that I've been kicked from the group. A couple of tells asking what was up get no reply.

This is the dark side of nostalgia. I didn't make muster for some reason, or there was a conflict, or a favorite, and I'm on the outs.

I eventually got into another group in the same area, and after a chaotic start things settled down and I dinged 6.

Then came Monday. Groups didn't seem forthcoming in GFay, so I got a sow from a friendly shammy got a mail quest from Kelethin for Freeport and set off for the Butcherblock Docks.

By the way, Chuck Norris doesn't take the boat from Butcherblock to Freeport, he walks.

I just though you should know that.

I am not Chuck Norris, so I took the boat. Of course, while waiting for it, I broke out the fishing pole and fished up several seaweedy sandals. Fun times. Then when the boat showed, I promptly fell off the dock and in consequence, missed the boat.

The good news it the boats run very frequently now. There's no hour long wait for the next one. It's 15 minutes. I am careful to not fall off the next time, and we zone into the Ocean of Tears and begin waterskiing.

Really, the boat is that fast now. it seems like a hydroplane, not a sailing ship. But the slow boat was not exactly tolerable.

This creates a visual curiousity. The game sends my client updates on the positions of other toons in my area (in this case on the boat) roughly once every two seconds. In between these times, the client tries to figure out where the other avatars are by applying inertia and gravity - the toon will stay where it is, or continue on its course, and will fall when appropriate.

What the client doesn't do is apply the motion of the ship to the passengers on it. Let that sink in a minute.

******

Yes, the other passengers of the ship keep sliding off the back of the ship and falling into the water, as far as my view of them is concerned. They then reset to the deck of the ship and slide off again. And again. And again.

They are spraying out the backside of the ship like some sort of Soylent Green rocket fuel.

Ok, that part wasn't nostalgia. I've never seen that before.

*****

I got to Freeport and everything is different. This zone, The Commonlands, and the Desert of Ro have all been redone. In NRo and EC, the plan has stayed the same, more or less, but the look updated. Not so in Freeport. There are only two zones now, East and West Freeport, with North Freeport apparently mostly merged into West Freeport. All the elements are there, but they seem to me to have been somewhat rearranged. There's the Ashen Order, but it's nowhere near the Stage that somehow was associated with Quellious the Tranquil. However, I didn't find this just yet. Instead, it was lunch time and I logged out.

When I came back from lunch I found the mail delivery guy, and I also found that the mail pouches were NORENT, and had evaporated during my offtime. Uhh, I remember that now....

So off I go into NRo and find a group. We start at the edge of the desert proper, but that's a bit too easy so we push forward a bit. Things get hairy when a monk trains a few madmen through us. Oh, yes, I remember that. Hostile, competetive behavior. If anything, the years have increased this, since all the carebears have gone off to other games that prevent this sort of things. Games such as, well, almost any other game, except for EVE Online. Another game I've been playing a lot of lately.

Just what does that say about me?

Well, I run to the EF zone and escape death. I come back and things go well for a while. Then a pull of one snake turns into a pull of 6 snakes, and I don't have enough mana to mez them all. We wipe. And I have another jolt of memory. I have forgotten to bind in Freeport, and now I'm being asked to revive in Greater Faydark. Wow, I've just committed a classic EQ blunder. More nostalgia, but it isn't the good kind.

I assuage the pain by first running a bunch of mail quests: Akanon, Felwithe, Kaladim and BB docks all to Felwithe for a nice bit of change and modest experience. I also stop in Kaladim to turn in a bunch of Crushbone belts for more items (I can use them but they are good money) and experience.

I turn them in in Kelethin and get the mail for Freeport again. Go to the docks, don't fall off, laugh at the boats human-jet-propulsion, get off the boat, BIND RIGHT NOW, deliver the mail and go look for a group.

There is no group forthcoming. While I'm soloing, a world-wide announcement comes up: the guild Twisted Legion has defeated Nagafen. On the seventh day after the server has started.

I begin to remember why I stopped playing Everquest.

There following was an interesting discussion on global chat. Nobody from Twisted Legion participates. There are a variety of claims. First, that this was the sort of thing that killed the previous progression servers. Next, that this is a voting server, and one can frustrate "them" by simply leveling to 30 within 90 days and voting against progression. Furthermore, the claim is made that Vox and Naggy aren't hard, and that a few players should be able to ninja in and get a kill.

I really would like to understand that last statement better. I have faced one of these dragons exactly once, on my monk, whom Lady Vox used as a sort of human yo-yo, alternately summoning him and fearing him to run away. And then we wiped.

I don't really think that we knew what we were doing at the time, and I would very much like to know better. How is this possible? What sort of gear and tactics are used? How can I solo Vox?

Because, it must be admitted, I'm kind of jealous. I'd like to do something that is outrageously cool, though I tend to the creative rather than the insomniac no-life kind of coolness. But throwing down with my posse in the attempt accomplish something is an experience I treasure. Like what we did to buy the high-level guildhall with Shards of Glory a smallish and somewhat casual guild.

Since I took that screenshot, Vox, Phinney and Inny have fallen also. There is a claim on the forums that TL leapfrogged another guild that was killing its way through the giants defending Vox, and trained them. Did I say something about hyper-competitive behavior?

Further research indicates that mage pets seem to be the key to this whole thing, buffing them up, and giving them better weapons, etc., they can tank much better than any player character. This is the game we are playing.

I log off, have dinner and play Eve for a while afterwards. When reds show up and ruin my ratting, I log off and go back to Everquest. I try in EC and trigger some more unpleasant memories. This time the memories of just how much swarming and social aggro there is among the wild animals of the Commonlands. I've got the bruises and deaths to show it. I group with a wizard for a little while, but instead of just sitting down at Orc 2 and killing stuff, he keeps running off, checking on other camps. He doesn't say for what, and while he's gone I'm steamrollered by two kodiaks and a spider, I think it was. He disbands me when I say I was killed. Apparently I'm incompetent.

No other groups are to be had. It's late, I'm tired, and I'm pressing. Due to a strange interaction between XFire and Everquest, I have to either have no voice chat with Karaya, or have my mike always on. I choose the latter, and Karaya seems quite amused by my, erm, forceful exhalations. I think I died five times last night. But I still have level 7.

So that's the dark side of Everquest - hyper-competitiveness in the form of kill and camp-stealing. Bad groups, and poor communication skills. The sense that one wrong move and the game slaps you, and so do the other players. Feeling like you are behind the curve one week after launch. I've paid for a subscription though, at least for a while.

I really, really want a piece of Vox. I'm going to have to find a guild, though.

I Had to Swim to Work, and It Was Uphill, Both Ways!

2011-02-18T16:15:00.000-08:00

Like so many others, I couldn't resist trying on my former glory in Everquest's launch of it's new Progression Server, Fippy Darkpaw.

But I am behind the curve and the downloader was very very slow. It stalled out several times, and I would cancel and restart it to get more progress. I'm sure it didn't help that Mrs. Darkwater was downloading it to her computer too. Hers finished the night before mine though. My download didn't finish until noonish yesterday.

So, naturally I took the rest of the day off.

First, there was character selection. This is where the fabulous red hair started, after all. Or maybe I should say, this(?!!?) is where the fabulous red hair started? Sheesh! Because I'm a trial account, I guess, the options available for appearance are extremely limited, maybe 10 different faces with no customization options. I took the one for which the hair looked vaguely red, but really it looks more blonde once in the game, and silver-gray from behind. Which is where I'm looking at mostly.

Perhaps if I decide to pay up and play, I'll be able to look just a tiny bit more fabulous.

Ok, High-elf enchanter check. I have a dagger, some food and water, a lantern and a backpack. Oh, and two spells. One gives me a slight boost to AC, the other does 4 points of damage and weakens the target a tiny bit for a little while. Not exactly overwhelming.

But my first obstacle is to get out of Felwithe. There's this whole big pond in the way, between the enchanter's guild vendors and the rest of the city. And water is just a bit hard to get out of. Ugh. Mrs. Darkwater gave up on the elf she thought she'd try and decided to make a troll shaman, Jasper, instead.

But I'm persistent (some might call it stubborn), and eventually I find the right spot, go to first person, look straight up, and try to move forward. I'm on dry land! Shouldn't there be a trumpet fanfare?

Part of the difficulty is that the keyboard isn't set up to use wasd for movement. I'm using the arrow keys for now, and switching to mousing left handed. But the game comes equipped with keyboard mapping, so I may implement wasd in the very near future. No WASD!!! Wow, this feels like archeology or something.

Then there's the zoning. You are walking along, and all of sudden the screen freezes for no apparent reason. WTF? Oh yes...eventually the famous words appear: LOADING...PLEASE WAIT

Greater Faydark near Felwithe is very crowded, and so many people are wearing green robes, you would think that it's graduation day at the University of Oregon. And yes, I'd forgotten the standard issue thong for female wood elves. Not that male wood elves are all that clothed.

I buff up and pull my first mob, a bat. No, excuse me, it's "a sylvan bat". I poke it for a while as it gnaws on me, and eventually I worry it to death. This is not going to be easy. Any pull of a yellow results in near-immediate flight to the guards and a long rest. Some kind soul stops to watch me and hands me a worn great staff, saying "You need this more than I do". And he was right. With the worn great staff, I can now down level one sylvan bats with ease!

My youngest stops to watch over my shoulder. I am finding my utter incompetence hilarious, and she finds it infectious. We join together in mocking not only how bad my character is, but how bad I am at running these controls. This is inexplicably fun. Eventually, I go into Felwithe to sell things, and buy a few more spells and some tiny daggers. These allow me to summon the enchanter pet, a disembodied shield and dagger that will attack anything that takes a swing at me. I can't give it commands though, that will have to wait until I learn Charm.

But he follows me around, at least sometimes. Sometimes he gets lost or has pathing issues and has to be resummoned. (Remember pathing issues?) One time he was stuck in a little hollow and was just furiously swinging about, apparently looking for a way out of a shallow 1-meter depression.

But his dps is another big boost, and we ding level 2. A little later and it's time to be off to my RL martial arts class. It's just as well, since GFay is swamped now. It's prime time: 6pm PST, and the whole USA is home from work and wanting to walk to little adventurer's old school in the snow.

Yellows are still a gamble, some of them are manageable, but others require a hasty retreat. But my running, unlike my swimming, is swift and sure. I haven't yet died. Eventually, I ding level 3, and since I'm having difficulty keeping my eyes open, I head off to bed.

Officially, Fippy and it's sister server (there was so much demand they started a second) are Locked/Voting progression servers. What this means is, each expansions features and geography will only be introduced when

Certain ingame actions are accomplished. I'm thinking that for the first swing, dropping Vox and Nagafen will count.

Then, after a grace period of 90 days for the first expansion, and probably 60 days thereafter, an ingame vote will appear, and the next stage will only be opened when a majority of voting players vote to move on. There is talk of a minimum voting level, perhaps 30.

I saw players of level 14 last night, and Wilhelm saw a 15. So, I'm thinking that the first raid on Naggy/Vox might take place within the month.

I Came Here To Be Podkilled: Belated Double Jeopardy Edition

2011-02-14T16:45:00.000-08:00

In the week before Christmas, I lost two ships and got podkilled both times. That was after 229 days of not ever being killed. And just now, February 14, I'm getting around to writing about it. What can I say, ouch! I've been "too busy" - as in, double ouch.

The first death was in YA0-XJ, a Goonswarm Sov system right next to the TNT-sov constellation I live in. Before we had stations up in our area, I melted all my loot drops and kept my ore there, since it is a refining station. And sometimes I put up mineral buy orders, too.

But then we got a station in XCF-8N. I decided to move all my stuff that was in the YA0 station over there. It's a manufacturing station, not a refining one, but that sort of worked too. Especially since I can rat in XCF.

Thus I had my Iteron V out, jumping the systems from XCF to YA0 and watching the intel channel. There was a report of a red gang in the next system over from YA0, but I thought I would have time to at least get into the station before they showed up in YA0. I was wrong.

The chat log in the intel channel looked something like this.

[Somebody at 06:24:15] Red gang now in YAO
[Me at 06:24:30] Engaged at FMB gate in TXME, Halp Halp!

There are two noteworthy aspects to this:

First, the first report in intel of the gang's presence in YA0 came about 15 seconds before my call for assistance. Allowing for the time it took me to fumblingly type it, as well as do what I could to escape, that first message probably appeared in intel at pretty much exactly the same time I was first engaged. Not much help there. I did know that the gang was nearby, but they system they were in has many neighbors, they might have stayed there or gone any of a number of other places. Lucky me.

The other thing to notice is that I was so befuddled I didn't report my location correctly, I was at the TXME gate in YA0, but I said, er, something else. Well, really, I typed it. What I said on Teamspeak was, roughly,

"Oh shit, I'm gonna die!"

"Wait, maybe not" [My ECM burst worked for a moment, and broke the lock that the first ship had on me]

"Yeah, I'm gonna die" [As the other 5 ships in the gang show up and lock me and blow me up very neatly. At the TXME gate in YAO.]

And die I did.

I built another Iteron V and named it "Expansive Regret", but you can call it "Expensive Regret" if you must. It's lows full of Cargo Expander II's.

My other loss was in EC-P8R. This is our gateway to hisec/Jita. I was carrying a load of stuff for sale in Jita, and expecting to return with things like datacores and some T2 components. I was, of course, in the Edward Fitzgerald, my Viator, equipped with Covert Ops cloaking device. (It's kind of a ghost ship, you see).

Our alliance/coalition has a jumpbridge one system over from EC, in EWOK-K. So I jumped through and assessed the situation. Intel said there was a couple of reds camping the EC/EWOK gate. Hmm, need to be careful, thinks I, but no reason to abort, just for a couple of ships. I'm flying a cloaky hauler, after all, and I've slipped through more than one gate camp with it. Not only can it cloak, but it gets into warp smartly.

But some caution is advisable. There is a third system G-M418, that adjoins both EC and EWOK. After sitting at a safe in EWOK for a while, I figured I'd do an end around and come through G-M.

The first thing I notice when I come through the gate is another ship on my overview, but my overview isn't set up correctly, and I'm not sure if it's a red, since it's showing secstatus. Not to worry, my gate cloak will last a bit and I confirm with local, it's a red, and he's flying a ship called a Sabre.

If you know EVE, you know that spells trouble. Sabres are a class of ship called a heavy interdictor. They can generate warp bubbles all on their own. Just as I selected the EC gate to hisec, hit warp and hit cloak, he dropped a bubble. He didn't manage to target me, I was good on that score, but I hadn't got away, the bubble had me trapped. He must have seen where I was, because he headed for me and when he got within 2000m, my cloak went away. After that, I was easy pickings, and heavy lag on my explosion meant I was back in the station before my pod was painted on the screen.

I don't think I'll have trouble remembering the class of a Sabre any time soon. Or ever.

I managed to get through to Jita later that night in my pod and buy and fit a new Viator, which I flew back safely the next day. But the two losses put a dent in my wallet that only now has been filled back in.

Meet the New Fabulous

2011-02-03T16:45:00.000-08:00

I managed to get some screenshots of my new look, using the new EVE character generator. My main problem with it is that despite my best efforts, the nose is too big. Ah well, they just didn't make their character generator to accomodate high-elves that had been in cryosleep for 3 million years. I took this from an ingame screenshot, so the resolution is poor. There's a better one in the loading screen, if I was only willing to poke around in the filesystem more, I could probably find that. All hail laziness!

For comparison, here's the old look. Definitely a bit more hippy-dippy, which is good. The new Toldain is a bit too buttoned down. It was a choice between a uniform or a T-shirt, and Toldain would definitely not be wearing a T-shirt, unless it were a rare vintage T-Shirt, such as one from the star-studded Concert for Felwithe, or an original Matari Revolutionary Brigade t-shirt. But the wart on the face? Not a chance! I think I like the expression on the old one better, but it's my own fault. The chargen had an enormously detailed expression capability, with individual muscles highlighted. Like the new character, the nose is also larger than elf.

This, if you didn't know already, is Gloria Swanson. Well, she has her hair covered, I wonder what she has to hide? But otherwise, she's looking pretty good. I'd kill for her lighting, mine is about as soft as I could make it, but still comes off as harsh. Her nose, however, is just about exactly the right size. I hope she quits the game soon and lets me have her stuff.

What to do in Eve

2011-02-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

Nice graphic/flowchart here - What to do in Eve

I Wasn't Ready For My Closeup, Mr. Eve

2011-01-21T10:06:00.000-08:00

Tuesday the final installment of Incursion, the latest Eve expansion, launched. Part of this expansion was a brand-spanking-new character image generator. The prior one was simply a two dimensional portrait generator, with a limited set of options.

I was eager to try to recreate Toldain with this toytool. First the hair options - haircolor - red, check. A fabulous hairstyle was a bit more of a problem. I decided on the cornrow braids with pony tail. Since it was pretty much the only pony tail. There was at least one other hairstyle that had the right level of pansy-elfness to it, but it was very unkempt. Not bad if you want to promote the "I look this good without even trying" sort of fashion statement. But not really me.

Once you have finished with the model, there's the portrait that will be used in and out of game. There are choices for background pose, and lighting. And expression on your face, right down to manipulating the key facial muscles. It takes a bit to figure out, but the result is fantastic.

On the portrait screen, there are four squares, for four different snapshots, so you can try different poses and compare. But it is far from clear which snapshot is the one that will be used by the game, both in-game and via the xml external data feed. And only one will be used. My guess was that the top one would be used.

I logged in, to get started looking at my PI, which had also had some modification. (I'll write another post about that later).

But I was quickly dissatisfied with my portrait. One reason for this is that its display in chat windows is very small. I made my shot with the camera pulled back a little showing my shoulders (which look disproportionately wide). It doesn't read at all when it is so small. Some folks who were smarter than me (probably they had practiced on Singularity, the test server) made very close closeups, close to the point of cropping part of the head. These seem to work much better (even though they would hide part of my hair).

I poked around a little and couldn't find any way to get back into the character generator to redo my portrait. It turns out that there was none. And many players were in the same boat as me, wanting a do over. And like always, they haven't been shy about saying so. So CCP Caedmon responded:

We are implementing UI fixes that we hope will resolve the above two issues.

Change 1: Change the "Save" button to "Finalize". "Save" implies that it is possible to go back and make adjustments later. "Finalize" is just more... final.

Change 2: When players click "Finalize" they will be presented with a dialogue box like the one below. The dialogue box shows the portrait snapshot that the player currently has selected.

So far, so good, but can I fix my portrait?

We understand that many players proceeded into game under the impression that they could come back and make adjustments later; whilst other players didn't end up with the portrait they believed they had chosen.

We want to ensure everyone has the portrait of their choice. So now that we have made the UI clearer we will give all characters who have already completed character customization a chance to recustomize. This will be a one-time recustomization to be used during the grace period.

Ok, I can redo my portrait. Marr be praised! But only once, and during a grace period. Boo!

Finally, CCP Caedmon says this:

We will be introducing the ability to repeatedly recustomize characters in a future release. The current plan is to introduce this at the same time as we release tattoos, scars and piercings so players can take advantage of these new assets.

Ok, I'm happy with this. So why wasn't this available at launch? Other MMO's let you change your hairstyle and costume, and sometimes have an ingame portrait that is visible when you click "info" on another character. Simple oversight I guess. A lot of other MMO's don't have this feature, and it isn't as important to them as it is to Eve, in which the only visual representation of a character is their in-game portrait. Once Incarna launches, that will cease to be true, but for now, it's not too surprising that people care a lot about their portrait. And that applies to everyone that plays Eve, even if they don't have fabulous red hair.

I guess you can chalk it up to squeezed developer resources, and a shaky launch process. And no, I'm not showing you my portrait, I plan to do some more work. For one thing, I think my current nose is a bit too big. I wish there was some way to make my ears pointier...

I Am Flynn

2011-01-14T10:22:00.000-08:00

I saw TRON: Legacy just before Christmas. Twice. I loved it for some very personal reasons.

When I'm not pretending to be a 3000 year old high elf, I'm a computer scientist and developer. I've worked on some games, I've worked on operating systems, I've worked on system software such as compilers and linkers, and I've worked on a silicon compiler as well.

When I was in grad school, I went to see TRON with a bunch of my CS grad school friends. We saw it in Sunnyvale, in the heart of Silicon Valley. We stayed for the credits so we could see where it said that it had been rendered on a Cray supercomputer (THE most powerful computer at the time)

Tron was fun for us in that it invoked all sorts of little things that were a kind of "secret" lore at the time. Tons of concepts in computing were given physical manifestations. Overall, though, it was kind of a dumb movie, but I loved it because for once, my life was up on the screen. I'm not a hot pilot, or a whip-bearing archeologist, or even a county sherriff who thinks we need a bigger boat. But here's my world, being portrayed by Hollywood, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

The same holds with TRON: Legacy, primarily in the character of Flynn. Flynn is a programmer, a very talented one. I am a programmer, and I have a few decent credits, nothing so astonishing as Flynn. Flynn dresses like Steve Jobs and decorates his house as though he were in an Apple commercial. My own house could be an Apple commercial, as I own probably half a dozen computing devices made by them.

Flynn spends a lot of time in the film's present practicing meditation and action through inaction. I have been studying Tai Chi for years. One of the companies I worked for, Silicon Graphics, had a CEO - Ed McCracken - who was known for his practice of Transcendental Meditation.

And then there's the central idea of the plot - that Flynn created CLU as an agent of himself, in a kind of parthenogenesis. By the way, programming seems to me the closest equivalent our world has to Athena's creation, springing from the brow (the locus of thought) of Zeus.

But it's gone wrong. CLU manifests the same issues that HAL did, or Skynet did - what we see as valuable, he only sees as imperfection. But Flynn's response to this is not that CLU must be destroyed, but that he must be re-integrated.

I love this part most of all, and it's got nothing to do with computing. Evil is not something perpetrated by some unknowable other, it is the product of good desires carried out to extremes, and in denial of the consequences. To Flynn, the error was not anything that CLU did, but in turning him loose.

And if I am Flynn, it must follow that I am also CLU, which is a sobering thought.

****************************************

At Terra Nova, Timothy Burke writes that in the MMO world, World of Warcraft is CLU. Psychochild discusses the issues of order vs chaos in MMOs thus:

In general, many people strive to impose order on chaos. Along came World of Warcraft and imposed order on MMO gameplay. Using deep pockets, Blizzard created a world that was more orderly and stable than other competitors... and, perhaps more importantly, a lot more popular and financially successful than those competitors. The wild nature of the other games had been diminished in favor of a tightly scripted and controlled environment which people flocked to in large numbers. For some people, this is frustrating because with all this order there's no room for the chaos needed to show new possibilities in game design. People keep chasing after the order imposed by Blizzard, but can't quite match it for various reasons.

I don't think that World of Warcraft is evil. It's exactly what its developers and players want it to be. Which is pretty much an argument in favor of Wow = CLU. However, I don't think that its success has all that much to do with the imposition of order, on the transition from "open gameplay space" to "closed gameplay space" And I argue that because Everquest II, which launched one month before World of Warcraft, had many, many features which promoted order and structure, most of which were despised by the player base. No, it has everything to do with how well it enabled solo play, via the same quest-heavy structure that EQ2 had, only EQ2's was oriented to groups.

EQ2 promoted group play endlessly, with group-only encounters, group bonus experience, group-only buffs, and shared experience debt. Well, that last was meant to enhance good group behavior, but it didn't work out so well. The crafting system was highly structured and also was meant to impose more interdependence among crafters. The player response to this was to make alts to do the crafting of needed subcomponents. Independence and self-reliance are a high value among MMO players, and WoW let them do that.

The other two pillars on which the success of WoW rests are, in my opinion, low system requirements and the Blizzard sense of humor and story. The success of WoW certainly has spawned many imitators of the solo-friendly, quest heavy style, but few of the "low system requirements, but still looking good" variety. Which has kind of stifled creativity, but don't blame Blizzard, they are us; they are me, and I don't even play WoW much any more.

Mitten's Choice

2011-01-10T15:49:00.000-08:00

The Mittani, Goonswarm leader, has a very interesting post up about events that are very close to home for me. His thesis is that Eve offers a paralyzing amount of choices to the veteran player, and that one of the things that successful alliances and corps provide is structure and direction.

Interesting stuff it is.

One of them most interesting quotes was at the end:

In EVE, as in modern society as a whole, what we think we want is often not what we actually desire. We think we want choice and freedom and the ability to do anything at any time, yet in practice people want to be given some kind of purpose and a direction. That doesn’t mean that people want to sign on to an authoritarian organization which micromanages and abuses them (see OWN Alliance) but that we should be mindful of the anxiety and effort pointless decision making causes - and the strategic risk which stems from this, with members quitting or not logging in because of it.

OWN Alliance used to be our neighbors. They left. As I have heard it, they stopped paying rent to the Goons, though I have not heard the source of their unhappiness. I've also heard that Test Alliance Please Ignore (TEST), another resident of Deklein, trolled them mercilessly, and that this contributed to their departure. As it turns out, TEST has now been disinvited to continue living in Deklein, and has been trolling my alliance that "we will be next". I don't see it, but what do I know?

*************************************

Anyway, thinking about choices and structure:

One of the approaches I take to any new game is, "How can I recreate Toldain in this new game?" This gives me some additional structure, a way to sort through the material of the game. That structure was really valuable in EVE, though my efforts to recreate Toldain have only been partially successful. I have fabulous red hair, it's true, and the upcoming new character generator may even improve on it. But the part where I'm a charismatic fellow who can turn an enemy into an admirer, not so much. There is no such thing as "charm person" in Eve. I can't make rat ships fight for me instead of against me. And I certainly can't do that with the human opponents. At least, not with any game mechanic.

Mezzing is there, sort of. One can jam an enemy with Electronic Countermeasures (ECM) or use other electronic warfare to make it hard for them to attack you. These measures don't seem all that effective or useful in pve combat though, so I've mostly ignored them.

One of the decisions I made early on was to boost my Charisma score and train my Social skill. It was my first skill trained to 5. I only barely understood what that did for me, though now it's clear that its mostly (exclusively?) useful for missioning to gain faction. Well, I hardly ever do that at the moment, since I live in 0.0. I clone jump to Empire every so often, and go harvest datacores from the research agents I'm running. Then I run a few missions to boost faction with corps, so I can hire even better research agents. So it isn't completely wasted.

I've long since respecced though, and shifted my respec points into Intelligence (another enduring Toldainish quality) and Perception (kind of new territory). I've been training a lot of R&D skills. Toldain is also a crafter, and I always pick jewelry if I can in other MMOs. Fine work, high beauty, no heavy lifting - it's perfect for a pansy elf such as myself.

If only players could make implants, I'd try to make those. As it is, I chose to make drones (after the obligatory apprenticeship period making ammunition at close to zero profit margin.) Because you see, they seem to me like a pretty necklace decorating a beautiful ship.

Hey, that's the best I can do.

When I started playing Eve I first heard about Goonswarm as the bad boys of Eve, and I still think that reputation is deserved. But the more I look, the smarter they seem. They are more organized and thoughtful than most everyone else, and they are very good at motivating their troops. While they don't seem to be the least bit afraid to wear the black hat, they have remained friends with certain other alliances in the game for a long time. Mitten's latest article doesn't do anything to damage the impressions I've had.

Scary Beholders

2011-01-07T14:42:00.000-08:00

Lately, Phritz (playing as the dwarven bard Profundo) and Karaya (Playing her badass drow rogue Veltena) and my redheaded self have been playing through an adventure pack in DDO known as "The Vault of Night".

Barrow d'Kunderak, in house Kunderak, wants to get his band adventuring party back together again, and asks you to contact his old partners. We did the first two earlier, and in "Prison of the Mind" we ran into beholders. And went splat.

I'm level 8, and Profundo, and I think Veltena are both level 7. So we're a bit under level for these adventures. "Prison of the Mind" ended with a fight with a high level caster that kept casting Disintegrate at us. And no, he never ran out of spell points. Boo!

We beat him, and the beholders, but it was ugly and involved a lot of reviving and drinking of grape juice in bars to regain my spell points.

Which set us up for doing the next step last Wednesday night. We had to travel through the "Gateway to Khyber" zone to do the "Jungle of Khyber" quest. Which was in a cave, not a jungle.

It wasn't in Afghanistan either. Though it maybe vaguely looked something like Khyber pass, pictured at right.

(I have a congenital defect that seems to render me incapable of taking screenshots during an adventure, so the picture of Khyber Pass will have to do. Anyway...)

We zoned into "Gateway to Khyber" We started across a big bridge. It had fallen down, so we had to go back and try the trail. I tried the trail on the right, while Profundo and Veltena tried the trail to the other right. Somehow we were spotted by trolls and attacked about the time I caught up with them. Veltena's hireling healer died. Oops! Assorted bad pulls later, and one nasty trick where some trolls spawn right in a perfect place to stand while you single pull from the next group later, and most of us had managed to die at least once. But we found the entrance and were in. They are trolls after all, we can handle trolls.

Bluff pulling is standard procedure for us. When Veltena bluff pulls trolls, I think it goes something like this: "Come over here big boy, I've got something to show you!"

Once inside, things are still pretty rocky. We lose the healer again at a point where there are drow archers and a mage in elevated positions where we can't melee them. The mage loves to throw ice storms and fireballs at us. We wipe.

So we have to go again, from the beginning. "Gateway to Khyber" goes much more smoothly this time, we have the zone down, and Veltena is still sexy. And she doesn't need a philtre of bluff +30.

We get past the drow mage on the catwalk like this: Veltena throws a dagger at him then dodges out of the way of the return shot of ice storm, fireball or whatever. Eventually he dies. I was dead all the while; during the fight in the previous room I moved a bit too close to the door to the room with that mage. I believe a transcript of the session might go something like this:

Me: "What the....? The ceiling is falling on me!!!? Ouch! Aughhhhhh!"

Veltena: "That was an ice storm, Tolly"

Me: [Silence because I'm dead]

But we get past the trolls and the drow and then we run into beholders. Tower, my melee hireling, can do pretty well against them, as long as he saves versus disintegrate. Unlike me, though, he can survive it if he doesn't. I can't take 187 points of damage, that's about 3x my maximum hit points. Another favorite beholder ability of mine is the anti-magic ray. I get hit with one of those and I'm a spectator. And they are quite liberal with it.

But some of these beholders are in spots where you can't melee them easily. And they won't pull to you either, they will just sit at range and throw disintegrate at you, with negative levels and anti-magic instead of fries as a side dish.

This is where Veltena remarked, "I really like how they made beholders really scary in this game, as opposed to in EQ" Who can remember going to East Karana and just trashing those stupid plushy versions of beholders? These are not your mother's beholders.

Veltena uses the dagger-and-dodge method to take a few more of these out. And we come to a room with a named troll in it, a drow caster, and a named beholder. The drow caster is bluffable, and comes around the corner expecting a warm embrace from Veltena. And he gets one, sort of. One down. The other two are more difficult. But our cause is aided by the fact that there is a resurrection shrine nearby. Of course, your redheaded correspondent stupidly trained the mobs into the room with the rez shrine, only to die there and leave them guarding it. Fortunately, Tower was able to rez and train them back out before dying. Eventually we dropped the beholder, mostly by letting Tower melee him with me repairing Tower.

And then the troll was more straightforward, though tough. Those last two were DC 19 and 17 respectively if memory serves.
(UPDATE: Rita/Veletena claims that the named beholder was CR 17 and the troll was only CR 12. She's probably right.)

And then we were on to the final battle of this dungeon, fighting the gigantic golem named Inevitable, who is pursuing Veil, the rogue that once was part of Barrow's adventuring party. Well, it turns out she's a vampire now, but that doesn't really matter, since she's just going to stand in this circle of protection while we fight the giant golem, M'kay?

The golem bested us. There's no way to revive, since once you start the encounter, all the doors are locked shut. While Tower was meleeing, I alternated between casting Cure Serious and using my wand of Cure Critical Wounds, because I avoid some recast timers that way. It still wasn't enough, I couldn't keep up. Once Tower dropped. I got off a couple of damage spells which found their mark, and Inevitable started chasing me. This went on for quite a while, but Veltena wasn't really able to stick any damage on the golem. Note for future runs: we need Anarchic weapons to avoid Inevitable's damage resistance. I'm not sure how Profundo died. I think it was 2am in my time zone by then, and we called it rather than run the whole two dungeons a third time. But next time we'll get him!

Dance Like No One is Watching

2011-01-03T07:33:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year!

Latest News From Baubleshire

2010-12-14T13:55:00.000-08:00

Fissible Wockle, Director General of D.I.R.T.Y., today announced a wholly new enterprise area for the coalition: plastic clockworks. These new-fangled "plastics" are the result of advanced baking experiments, carried out by the bakers of Baubleshire, and in particular, Ms. Roselia Goldencrust, who has collaborated with D.I.R.T.Y. in the past. Also involved in the project was one of Paineel's science contingent, Saihah Al'Lah, who connected the research with mechanisms used in Paineel's observatories.

The initial project shown below was a clockwork mechanism meant to calculate the precise timing necessary to aim Paineel's giant observatories, and calculate eclipses and other astronomical events for the purposes of summonings and dismissals.

(Via Phritz. Thanks!)

Last Night in Stormcleave Outpost

2010-12-09T16:20:00.000-08:00

Last night, I got to do one of my favorite things in MMORPG's - go through content completely cold, and a little under powered. It makes for exciting times, and this was no exception.

Wednesday is our regular guild night in DDO. When Karaya finally logged in, after a long evening (for her) of roller derby, we decided to try Stormcleave Outpost, a level 8 quest given in an inn in House Deneith. There were three of us, Phritz, Karaya and me. None of us had done it before, and it said it would probably take a group, so that was perfect.

Karaya played Veltena, her level 7 drow rogue. Phritz brought Profundo, who is a dwarf, level 7, and most of those levels are bard. And of course, there was yours truly, he of 3000 years, 8 wizard levels and fabulous red hair.

I brought along the fighter hireling Tower, because he's warforged, and I can heal him pretty well. Also, I've taken a feat that gives my hirelings, charmed creatures, and summoned creatures all a boost to their stats. Add a Bull's Strength to Tower and he's a serious force on the battlefield. And I can stay invisible, which keeps me from getting killed. Mostly.

Phritz brought a drow cleric, I don't remember his name, though.

The first part of the fun, for me anyway, was figuring what spells to hang. I didn't look up the zone on the internet, I just read what the quest giver said about it, which was that giants and their minions were invading Stormcleave Outpost, and could we please help?

Giants probably have good Fort saves and bad Reflex saves. Will saves could go either way. I guessed that they would not be subject to Charm Person, but would be vulnerable to Suggestion, so I prepped that. I also prepped Grease, because I liked the idea of seeing giants falling down. Profundo wasn't so happy with me though, since more than once I sent him sliding toward pools of lava, though never actually into one. Dwarfs are supposed to be tough to knock over, right?

I had just found the special material components for Stoneskin so I prepared that along with Wall of Fire, just to switch from my usual of Summon Monster IV and my energy protection spell, which didn't seem likely to be useful.

I also ditched all the spells specific to controlling undead. Woops! We no sooner got into the outpost when the guards started telling us about the necromancer and his minions that we needed to kill. Oh well, thinks I, I still have Wall of Fire, that will do a number on the undead.

Double Woops!

When we finally got to the necromancer and the undead, they were "charbone" or something like that, and invulnerable to fire. Things got pretty dicey in the final wave of maybe 6 or so of them, but to my surprise, I was able to charm the boss (well, really he was a sub-boss) and he killed all of the rest of the skeletons for us. At which point he fell easily to Tower, Profundo, and a lightning bolt or two from me. (Veltena was a ghost at that time, succumbing to the wave of charbones, I think.)

But I get a bit ahead of myself. We entered the zone and had to search for the entrance to the dungeon and some optional quest goals. We wandered around a bit, killing some kobolds, and clearing a camp of ogres that was there for no reason other than to get us to spend our resources to no great purpose. Kills do count toward bonus experience, if you manage to finish the mission, that is.

Things went ok outside the main dungeon and inside as well for most of the run. Our standard operating procedure was to have Veltena single pull ogres, minotaurs or giants singly using Bluff. Her hide/sneak skills were handy in scouting out new situations as well. We had some trouble with pets and dwarfs getting too close to the action and pulling multiples, which is when Mesmerize and Suggestion came in to play. On single pulls, though, I let Tower do all of my work for me.

We had a few deaths which were easily fixed at nearby rez shrines, and we were doing ok resource wise too. Though our bags were becoming very full, because we were picking up a lot of stuff to advance the quest.

We had to light 8 runed towers, and this powered up a portal that took us to the final boss. There, it turned out that four shards we had found were keys to debuffing the final boss. There were four rooms with force fields over them, and lit crystals. Four corresponding crystals were behind the General, the biggest giant of them all.

Remember that bit about dwarfs gettiing too close and pulling too much? Some dwarf with us ran a bit too close and pulled the general. I tried to tank him with Tower, but Tower did not last very long, that guy hits hard. In short, we wiped.

However, we were able to revive and come back in before the zone reset and tried again. This time we were able to deactivate the crystals and pull the mobs from the rooms thus opened up back into the tunnel and kill them one by one. Veltena did the bulk of the work here, sneaking and hiding and taunting.

At this point we tackled the General and while I could say he went down so easy it was disappointing, I would be lying. It felt good. Mostly I healed Tower until he died.

I wonder how one would approach that final room if one's party could not sneak pull the way Veltena was. Usually there is more than one way to handle things. Perhaps the General is mezzable? Or maybe a good fighter with a good cleric behind her could tank him when blocking with a tower shield, using Intimidate to keep aggro while the rest of the group cleared the other rooms? There are lots of possibilities, not the least of which would be to simply wait a few levels and then just tank and spank your way through it.

I love this open-ended aspect of DDO. There's always more than one way to do things. And depending on who you are, some things will be hard and others will be easy. Most of all, I love that I can mez named mobs. Or charm them and have them kill all of their own minions. EQ2 would never let me do that. That's gonna stay with me for a while.

If you are interested in this kind of play, drop me a line. Flame of the West is small, and probably going to stay that way, but we have room for a few more crazy people who like to be unorthodox and creative. We're on the Ghallanda server; drop me a line.

Let Me Stand Next To Your Fire (And Type The Lyrics Into /say)

2010-12-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

Via The Ancient Gaming Noob, here's a video made in WoW synced (in real time) to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire". I love this stuff. I want to make something like this, even though I know nothing about video production.

You're probably better off clicking through to YouTube and watching it fullscreen, so you can see the lyrics shown in speech bubbles as the POV character runs by them.

Hack Update

2010-11-30T17:08:00.000-08:00

My EVE account was restored just a bare two days after I discovered that it had been hacked. It would have been one but for a snafu with Customer Service (They didn't see my typed reply the first time, since it came after a bunch of stuff I quoted. Sigh.)

In the meantime, I downloaded and ran Avira and ran a system scan. I found no less than four intrusions, one of which was a JAVA trojan. All of them were banished to a place where all the hair is blonde, and all the ears are rounded. (Mind you, I have nothing AGAINST blondes as such, but life without red hair is, well, unthinkable).

Ouch. I have avoided using virus scanners for years, because they have this tendency to kick in at awkward times and make your frame rate go to that place we were talking about in the previous paragraph. And it worked, mostly because I never opened things or clicked on buttons that I shouldn't have. I never sent my browser into those bad neighborhoods, either. Life, apparently, has got more complicated.

My corp was hit along with me, since I had just received some new corp roles, due to becoming Skyforger's US Time Zone POS Manager. So the corp wallet got hit for about 2 billion, and my wallet for about 1 billion. All of this was restored with my personal account.

I'm impressed by the speed with which CCP realized that I'd been hacked. In less that 24 hours from my last login, the deed had been done and detected, and my account frozen. They did not mention to me how they figured this out, but I can make a few guesses. Large ISK transfers probably raise a flag, as does a change in login IP address. IP addresses can roughly be correlated to geographic location, so that's probably another flag. All of these flags prompt further investigation: where did the money go? Is there any prior connection between these characters? And so on.

The most bizarre thing is that the EVE version of Toldain was put up for sale on the EVE official forums. Cheeky! I guess that was in case I didn't catch on all that fast. I had email in my inbox from a potential buyer from my own alliance when I got back in game. I had to explain to him that I had been hacked, and he offered condolences.

I am lucky, I think, that I had just done a clone jump to Gallente space before I got hacked. There wasn't all that much that was valuable in my hangar. Still there was stuff that could have been sold instantly and the money siphoned off. That didn't happen. Instead, my toon was flown roughly 20 jumps to the site of a Skyforger corporate office, which was where I found it when I logged in. Fortunately, there wasn't much there in the corp hangar to be stolen. I guess that's what they were looking for.

After changing the passwords for all the games I play, I logged back on. Ginta was busy running a scan on his machine and changing his passwords, having been inspired by my situation. There was an alarmed evemail from our CEO asking me why I had taken so much money out of the corp wallet. However, out of game Eperor had sent me email saying he had realized I had been hacked, so no worries, and please get the corp funds reinstated when you petition. Which is what happened. It was gratifying to find out that my corpmates were so ready to believe that I had been hacked, rather than thinking me a thief.

Hmmm, but this is EVE. Should I be insulted that they don't think I'm a pirate? Is that disrespect? I'll have to think on it.

I Came Here To Be Podkilled, Dammit, Not Hacked

2010-11-23T08:49:00.000-08:00

I've taken to logging into EVE in the mornings and doing my PI then. I started doing this when I decided to do two 5-hour cycles per day rather than one 23 hour. (more stuff is extracted that way, and I wanted a cushion.) My evenings are more flexible that way.

So yesterday morning I logged in, cycled all my extractors (23-hour cycles, I have my cushion now) and then clone jumped to Empire. Finally all the wardecs against us had expired, and I needed some skill books. Got the book, started my training and logged out and went to work.

This morning I attempted to login but could not. Some poking about on the CCP website revealed that my account had been banned. Say what?

In my email this morning, now that I'm at work.

2010.11.23 10:52:00 GM Nova
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi,

This mail is sent to inform you that your EVE Online account, has been closed as the account security is compromised.

It appears that hackers have gained access to your account and have in all likelihood robbed it of ISK. Please reply to this email in order to open the account again and make sure to clean your PC of keyloggers and trojans before accessing the account again.

Regards,
GM Nova
Senior Game Master
EVE Online Customer Support

Best I can figure is that they got the userid/password from a forum somewhere.

Lawful Neutral?

2010-11-19T20:47:00.000-08:00

I Am A: Lawful Neutral Human Wizard (7th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-14

Dexterity-13

Constitution-16

Intelligence-18

Wisdom-15

Charisma-12

Alignment:
Lawful Neutral A lawful neutral character acts as law, tradition, or a personal code directs him. Order and organization are paramount to him. He may believe in personal order and live by a code or standard, or he may believe in order for all and favor a strong, organized government. Lawful neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you are reliable and honorable without being a zealot. However, lawful neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it seeks to eliminate all freedom, choice, and diversity in society.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle, wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise, they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience, and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical, animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable of casting very high levels of spells.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

***************************************
My Good-Evil axis score had 14 points for Neutral, 13 for Good and 0 for Evil. Meh.

Lawful is a fair cop.

What's your score?

Call of Duty: Black Ops

2010-11-16T11:03:00.000-08:00

When I was younger I was a full-on pacifist. I've moderated a bit now. And I practice martial arts, and play MMO's where I'm constantly killing things, and people. I guess that might make me a hypocrite to some, but the distinction between game and life has a strong boundary, doesn't it?

Watch the ad for Call of Duty: Black Ops above. What's your reaction?

Anyway, there have been mixed reactions to the commercial above. For negative, see Sam Machovech's piece on the Atlantic Monthly website. Basically, he's anti-violence, and anti anything that might inspire violence.

For a different take, look at this by Margaret Hartmann on Jezebel.

UDATE: In comments Machovech has confessed that he was more or less concern trolling:

I wrote this piece because I think there's a clear difference between the game of Call of Duty and the real-life violence of this ad, and I feared that mainstream media would focus on the latter as a means of saying "video games are bad." That's their job -- to drum up interest via fear and trolling.

That's what I hoped to combat with my phrase "these aren't the games I play." I do play Call of Duty games alone or with friends; I don't senselessly mimic real war.

Machovech seems to think that the ad is too realistic. Is there anyone who can't figure out that it's fake, a game, a fantasy? In about the time it takes to walk two steps through rubble in high heels?

How To (NOT) Get Your Girlfriend Into Games

2010-11-15T08:17:00.000-08:00

Show her this advertisement. That will be a real enticement.

Here's the advertising blurb for it:

Get Your Girlfriend Into Games! is a set of minigames designed specifically to engage any woman in video games entertainment. Best played in couples in versus mode. Suitable for children too!

I see this in a couple of ways. First, the man is fully clothed, the woman is, ahem, not. She is in a more comfortable, relaxed pose, and has a zombie stare at the screen. The text mentions that the game is "designed specifically to engage any woman". Basically, the ad seems to be a product of Objectifications R Us. With a surprise extra from the "women are equivalent to children" grab bag. I don't dispute that reading, but it isn't the only one.

To me, and I think to a lot of men who play video games, the woman sitting next to you on the couch playing video games with you is, at that moment, the most beautiful woman in the world. You might be a total shlub, but she is a goddess. Even in her curlers (do women wear curlers any more?) and bathrobe. I mean, you're breathing the same air, maybe almost touching each other. And she's joining you in one of your favorite activities, which, as far as you know, most women think of as a turn-off or competitor. Nerd Nirvana!

What this game and its ad says to me more than anything is that a lot of men would really, really like to have their partners join them in videogaming. And the company selling this game is bent on exploiting that desire. I seriously doubt that this game, even shorn of the offensive advertising, would do much toward enticing a spouse to play video games.

I happen to know several couples that play MMORPG's. For most of the women, they first got into the game through their husband/partner. So how did they do it? I'm not sure, because my spouse started MMO's the same time as me, and we both had tabletop RP background. She's special that way.

One of the qualities that MMO's have is that they almost all have a fairly gentle learning curve. And if you are playing together with a partner that has more experienced, most of the bumps can be navigated around. It can be tough to be a noob. But as the noob gains confidence, they start to strike out on their own a little, or more. It's a wonderful blooming, which I enjoy watching.

But there are a lot of videogames that don't have such a gentle learning curve. PvP games can be particularly brutal this way. You might have to go months before you experience any success. But there are other issues.

Tobi Beck is a woman who has served in the Army and has put on armor and done a considerable amount of fighting in the Society for Creative Anachronism. That's right, what we do with pixels, she does for real. She wrote a book about her experiences called The Armored Rose

At one point she lists five hurdles that she feels women need to overcome to be successful at fighting in SCA. I think that they have some relevance to playing PVP videogames. I'm just going to list a few of them. I personally believe that men face these hurdles as well. However, men have a lot of cultural support for overcoming them.

It can be fun to hit someone Most women (and not a few men these days) are trained to never cause anyone discomfort or pain. But in a PVP game, you are trying to ruin the day of the person sitting next to you on the couch. That's kind of breaking a big taboo for you. But for the experienced player, busting each other up is a bonding experience, and fun. In Tobi Beck's world, it involves actually getting hit on the head with a stick (you're wearing a helmet and the stick is padded, but still.) This can be adapted to, but it's got to be understood.

It can be fun to BE hit. In videogaming, this translates to losing, getting pwnd. This strikes at self worth. This may feel like punishment. This may feel like abandonment, like he(she) doesn't like you. It can be relearned though, and experienced as respect.

You can have fun with new people Tobi writes of women that can spar with a few people and enjoy it, but don't expand their circle to new people. I see this happening a lot in video games. We all hate PUGs, right?

I don't know where to take this that doesn't sound offensive or condescending. What advice would you give to someone who would like their partner to play more videogames with them?

Where "High Heat" Has a Whole New Meaning

2010-11-02T10:20:00.000-07:00

I watched the Giants win the World Series for the first time since 1954. In a sports bar in the Bay Area, no less. I normally watch sports from home, sitting on the couch, or lying in bed. But these days, I don't get cable, we just don't watch too much of it.

It was fun. The crowd was loud, but really pretty well-behaved. The most memorable moments for me were the deep flies. The first was Posey's long ball that Cruz ran down on the warning track, succeeding where he had failed on the prior batter, whose dying quail was just beyond his reach.

Then there was Renteria's game-winning home run. For most of the flight of the ball, the outcome was in doubt. Those of us in the bar were silent until we saw it drop safely in roughly the third row. By contrast, Cruz's home run for Texas in the bottom half of that inning was never in doubt. The swing, the sound and the lower hang time all said "home run".

What makes baseball special to me is suspense. Not knowing what the next pitch will bring. Not knowing if that fly ball will make it to the seats or get run down. I love that delicious moment when you don't know if the ball will be caught or not. I also love the little crazy moments, when what ought to be routine is not. But we didn't see any of those last night.

I have talked to some folks who really don't get baseball. They decry the lack of action. I get their point, but I think they miss the point of baseball. Which is suspense, not action. It is a Hitchcock thriller, not a Stallone action flick. The world is big enough to contain both.

But this thought got me wondering. Would it be possible to capture this sense of suspense and drama in an MMORPG? Or in some online game, not necessarily an RPG. MMORPG's seem to focus more on action, and it's understandable. There are a lot of Stallone fans out there.

Of course, maybe that game already exists. In Eve Online, at least in PvP. At least once I've been aligning while the target alarm is going. I did not know, nor did they, whether they would lock and scram me before I got into warp. And that would make all the difference. Kind of like waiting to see if that long fly is fair or foul.

But I'd like to see more things like this in MMO's. There are a lot of Hitchcock fans out there, after all.

Useless Venting

2010-10-22T11:25:00.000-07:00

FreeforAll just left a comment on Circles and Arrows and a Paragraph on the Back of Each One that said:

Great Blog, did You know you can earn Cash with this Blog by Joining Free Today and placing Our Banner on Your Site?

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Link spam deleted by me.

@FreeforAll (who probably isn't listening). Do you realize how thrilled I was to have a comment on this post, which I spent a considerable amount of time working on? And can you imagine my disappointment and frustration at finding a robot driven link spam comment. That begins with transparent flattery. You haven't even read it, have you? Well now I'm feeling down. This is not how we high elves do things. And yes, I am an old fart. 3000 years old, in fact. Get off my duff!

Furthermore, the robot message has highly erratic capitalization, though the spelling and grammar is correct. It leaves me with the impression that, were I interested in earning a little cash, your outfit would so very much be one that would not work for me or for my readers, who by and large, can capitalize things correctly. Even the half elves and humans can manage that, though probably not the Ogre. But he isn't trying to advertise on my blog.

You don't need to have fabulous red hair to advertise on my blog, but you do need to capitalize things correctly on a message that is going to be repeated millions of times across the internet. That's about standards.

Circles and Arrows and a Photograph on the Back of Each One

2010-10-21T10:20:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I noticed when I first started playing EQ2 was how behavioral it was. There was a pleasing tone, and a gfx display when you leveled. There was another sound every time one of your skills improved. There was audio cues, reward and punishment, for countering an event while crafting, and another sound for completing a quality tier during a crafting encounter. The electrons staged a celebration on your computer whenever you actually completed a recipe.

All of this seemed great. And it extended to quests, too. Completing quests got you rewards, experience and loot and praise.

So what did I do in response to all this? Basically, I trained myself to ignore it. I couldn't have told you why back then, but it seemed too much like I was being manipulated, being pulled toward a game-playing behavior that I didn't like. We know that now as The Grind. I leveled more slowly than many people, and did horrible grindy book quests, and tried to solo as an Illusionist back when that was hard and our DPS sucked. I avoided trying to maximize my DPS, preferring to try to maximize my ability to control an encounter. Unfortunately, this put me at odds with most of the rest of the players and the game designers as well. Eventually I gave in and respecced to high DPS. In EQ2.

Tipa posts today on "How I Killed MMO's (Can FFXIV give them a rez?)"

I don’t want to wait. I want to skip the boring parts and get right to the fun parts. Boring time is time I could spend doing something else. I don’t even bother pretending, when I start a new MMO, that I’m there for the long haul. Wizard101 has been the exception, here. I sub to WoW for a couple months every year or so, plan and enjoy some F2P RPGs until something else comes up, but — I’m going to be playing any given game only a few weeks, I’m never even going to see whatever end game you have cooked up. The first time the game gets boring for me, I’m gone.

There's some discussion of quest-text skipping, too. Tipa mentioned wanting to to skip through the cinematic story parts of the latest Rock Band edition at Best Buy. Because that's not relevant to getting the reward. But the part that made my day was this:

This is pretty consistent with research on intrinsic motivation. Children who are rewarded for drawing pictures tend to not draw pictures except when they are rewarded, and generally lose interest after a while. The link earlier in this paragraph is to an article with the subtitle "Creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if task is done for gain."

When I think of my career, I realize that I did as much as I possibly could to keep my intrinsic interest, and my creativity, alive. I need to get paid for working, it's true, and I wanted to be paid fairly. These things got discussed twice a year, at salary time. The rest of the time, I mostly ignored my pay when it came my work. I worked on things that advanced corporate goals, to be sure, but those goals were also in accord with my own personal goals and interests.

But this isn't always the case with games. I've been the grinder, at one time grinding out writs in Lavastorm to level the guild and to gain faction with the Concordium. I've skipped quest text myself.

The game makers seem to be catching on to this. EVE is famous for how sandboxy it is, and how little direction it gives its players. My current frustration with EVE is that it isn't quite sandboxy enough. I'd like to be able to produce new in-game items, such as an item named "A Lock of Toldain's Fabulous Red Hair", and hand it out as a gag. I'd like to be the only person in the game who could produce an authentic version of it, too. But I'm fine with someone else being able to produce a good counterfeit of it. That could produce fun, in the hands of people who want to play.

There are some serious technical issues with this: If every player did this, It would create massive problems in their databases. But I'm impressed with stories like this, where a very good time is had by all using only dice, blocks, graph paper, a few reference books, and a heaping helping of imagination.

It has been argued that the all-too-literal 3D gfx realizations of modern gaming leave too little to the imagination. But it doesn't have to be so. There are definitely games that think of themselves as canvas and palette.

As far as FFXIV goes, Tipa writes that it seems to lead one around by the nose a lot less. There seems to be a story in there, but you are going to have to go out and find it. I don't think this is quite the "canvas and palette" idea.

As regards DDO, which is what I'm mostly playing these days, there are some leanings. Yes, the game is entirely structured around quests and instances. However, the problems posed in these quests are somewhat open ended. You can go through the instances in "Hulk Smash!" mode. Or you can be more of a manipulator, such as Karaya "You're on my team NOW" Nydusi. (Ok, ok, I know you spelled your name that way in some game or another.) There isn't just one way to deal with any trap either. They can be jumped over, disarmed, tumbled through, resisted, or just plain tanked. In most cases. Each one is different. But there isn't one way to solve it. Sometimes Feather Fall is just what you need to deal with some situation or get the treasure. It's not that I care that much about getting the treasure, but it's that figuring out how to do it is fun.

Or another case in point: Soloing a wizard in DDO. The fundamental problem is that not only do you have few hit points and bad AC, you don't even have enough spell points to kill every mob in the instance. (This is in contrast to sorcerors, who probably do have enough spell points.) So, you are going to have to do something more creative. I've found one style that works pretty well, but there are probably more.

Have I ever given up and looked at the answer on the internet? Not once. As Tipa says:

I could go the web and find the next step already written out for me, with guides and arrows and hints and suggestions and 8×10 glossy pictures with a paragraph on the back explaining each one in great detail with times and dates and ….

Ahem. I think you mean "8x10 color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one"

(What can I say? I am that guy. I am the original "that guy". This sort of thing is bound to happen when you are 3000 years old.)

But it's a good point. There's one dungeon, early on, that I still don't quite understand all of how it works: What's that lever for? But maybe I will figure it out one day. And that will feel really good. And I'll be happy for them, but irritated that they got it first.

May you all have a Thanksgiving dinner that can't be beat.

You Load 16 Bits, What Do You Get?

2010-10-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

...pure awesome in Minecraft, that's what. The following video demonstrates a fully functional 16-bit ALU built out of "powered blocks" and other tidbits in the "game" Minecraft.

There's been a flurry of Minecraft attention lately, from this post by Alice that includes logic gates made out of powered stone blocks (also combination locks, and a link to the video above), and this one, highlighting art in Minecraft.

And then there was a recent post by Tipa, who says, "Every time I go to post about Minecraft, I end up playing Minecraft all evening." That's very high praise.

Cool stuff.

Update: I clarified what the video shows and how it fits with Minecraft.

How Dev0n's Tower Got Its Name

2010-09-30T09:19:00.000-07:00

I logged on to Eve earlier than usual last night, and got a special treat. Dev0n was on, staying up late while putting up a POS in our null-sec space. The POS was intended for his personal use, researching blueprints and manufacturing ships.

Dev0n loves to sing on Teamspeak, and, I presume, just in life generally. Since I have been gone on my cruise for a while, and hadn't talked to him for a while before that, I was greeted with his rendition of "Celebrate". "Celebrate good times, come on!"

"Hi Dev0n, it's good to hear from you," I said.

"You're lucky, because I'm up late. I couldn't sleep, I'm having a problem with my pain meds," said Dev0n. Dev0n lives in Sweden, so even though it was about 5pm my time, it was 2am for Dev0n.

"Pain meds? What happened?" I said. It's the polite thing to do right? I swear on my mother's grave that the thought, "Hey, I bet there's an entertaining story here" never crossed my mind.

"Oh, I shot myself with a nail gun. In the hand," replied Dev0n. This is the point where "Hey, I bet there's an entertaining story here" crossed my mind, you see.

"Wow, that's gotta hurt! You know it's best to keep your hands behind the gun at all times," I say. If that sounds unsympathetic to you, this is what passes for sympathy with this crew.

He said, "Well, I had a smaller nail gun, so it didn't have all the safety stuff on it. I wasn't even nailing something, just walking with the gun and suddenly I felt a BAM! I wasn't even sure what had happened until I looked down and saw a nail in my hand, which had gone through the bone. I pulled the nail out and went to the emergency room where they yelled at me for pulling the nail out because I might have got bone marrow poisoning."

"Yeah, you should never pull something like that out, just go to the ER and let them do it," I said, benefiting from having a nurse and first responder as a spouse.

There were several other conversational threads that evening. In one, Dev0n and Riotmaker were teasing each other. Dev0n was teasing Riot about being an "emo kid" (Dev0n is an "old man" at 25. Hah!) and making disparaging comments about "lazy mexicans at the POS" or some such, knowing full well that Riot has some Mexican-American heritage. This was the first I'd heard of it, but Riot's ability with the Spanish language was to become important.

For his part, Riotmaker was threatening to leave our corp and join Morsus Mihi if Dev0n didn't treat him better. Most of this was going on in voice chat, but bits of it spilled into corp text chat, confusing poor gwnorth into thinking the whole thing was real. I'll confess that I wasn't sure at first, since both of them have a very good deadpan.

But soon, in between bitching about how long it takes to anchor and online everything in his POS, Dev0n is singing another favorite, "I Feel Pretty". It's always a favorite of his, And he sings the first line.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty, so pretty and witty and gay.

The man has no shame whatsoever, I think. But before the homophobic banter can kick in, Shawn breaks in to finish the verse in a clear, agile baritone:

And I pity any girl who isn't me today.

I feel charming, oh so charming

It's alarming how charming I feel.

And so pretty that I hardly can believe I'm real.

Very well done, Shawn, by the way.

By then Dev0n has anchored and onlined his tower and is soliciting opinions for what to call it.

"I think you should call it 'I feel pretty'," says I. Dev0n says he loves the idea, but wants to use Spanish.

"How would I say that in Spanish," he says.

My Spanish is very very rusty, so I grope, typing in text chat, "Yo se bonito?"

"Yo soy bonito," Riotmaker corrects me.

"Doh. Well, I know pretty, too." I'm slightly embarrassed, but we're rolling now.

"No, tell me how to say, 'you are pretty'," says Dev0n.

"Well, use 'que tan bonito'," says Riotmaker. Google translates this as "how nice", but I think there's some idiom at work.

UPDATE: Magson informs in comments that "Que tan, Bonito?" is idiomatic for "How goes it, hottie?" Or as some might say, "How are you doing?"

And so it was done. I went down there and took a peek when I finished doing my PI deliveries. This is what I saw.

Did you guys want some time alone?

PvP or PvE?

2010-09-27T16:14:00.000-07:00

I've been on hiatus from blogging for a week or so, doing some other stuff. Of course, gaming is so engraved into my brain (which is covered by fabulous red hair, of course), that some of the stuff I've been doing, I've been seeing in gaming terms.

First of all, I took a cruise to Alaska. It was magnificent. I saw glaciers, sled dogs, spawning salmon, harbor seals, humpback whales, and ate baked Alaska for the first time in my 3000-year-long life.

When we were in Ketchikan, we took a walk along Creek Street, which is really a boardwalk along a creek. This creek has a fish ladder and a hatchery, and there were many, many salmon in it spawning. Watching them rest in an eddy before trying the next rapids, it seemed to me that the salmon seemed to live life mostly as a PvE sort of game. They didn't compete with one another directly, instead, they were all trying themselves against the current and against the predators. In short, for them life was a PvE game, like Everquest 2, or most of WOW, played solo.

Then, much to our surprise, along came a couple of harbor seals, who had swum up the creek about a quarter of a mile or more, and who feasted on the salmon schooling in the eddy behind three big rocks in the middle of the first major rapids. The salmon scattered, but not quickly enough. To the seals, life was predation. This is the PvP found in EVE Online, where it's often said that if you are in a fair fight, you're doing it wrong.

There were also humpback whales. For them, life is almost entirely PvE. These whales really don't ever compete with one another in any overt way, and they are known to exhibit complex team hunting behavior. Instance grouping or raiding. Or an EvE mining op.

It is far from clear how humpbacks select mates. Possibly the males compete by singing, or by seeing who can breach the biggest or longest. It is known that the males engage in stalking following a female candidate around during the southward migration. Whether this is PvP or PvE kind of depends on the viewpoint. But there's no dueling.

Dueling is the province of mountain goats and sheep. I saw a speck of white on one mountainside in the Tracy Arm Inlet that was reportedly a goat. Mountain goats are famous for the head-butting duels. This is like the PvP offered in special instances or by invitation in games such a EQ2, DDO, or WoW.

****

While I was on the cruise I did some reading on the Civil War. Specifically, I read The Battle Cry of Freedom. I highly recommend this single-volume treatment of the Civil War, by the way. I have seen Ken Burns' documentary, and I've read Bruce Catton's three-volume work on the Civil War, but McPherson's work tops them. There's so much there about the politics, the economics, and the social conditions at the time in America that I didn't get from that other stuff. He quotes lots of writing from the day, and I love how those guys wrote.

Reading it, particularly the earlier portions about the politics of the 1850's, I realized that, in gaming terms, the South was full of hardcore PvPers, while the North was much more a world of PvE players. Reading the quotes, you could just insert the word "carebear" into some of the Southern rhetoric, and it would not feel out of place in an Eve forum thread.

Lest you think I'm slamming PvP players let me assure you, I'm not. Eve Online is a game, not life. I have no problem with PvP players, but I have a big problem with a bigoted attitude that says that if you aren't a PvP player that plays in exactly the prescribed manner that I happen to play, you are worthless.

And that was the attitude of many Southern leaders, to be sure. Those who had to work for a living were lesser creatures, little better than the slaves on the plantation. The only virtue worth praising was the ability to conquer. This attitude led the South to ruin.

Development in the North had a different path. It saw the rise of factories and factory work. But it also saw the rise of the up-by-your-bootstraps Horatio Alger success story. Industrial projects only get built if there is a lot of cooperation between people. It requires a people who can compete in one area and cooperate in another. This is much more of a PvE attitude.

Anyway, that's what I did on my summer vacation. It seems that I'm stuck with gaming, and gaming is stuck with me.

I Married a Gamer Gurl, and She's a California Gurl Now.

2010-09-15T16:12:00.000-07:00

Ok, this party started with Katy Perry's video for "California Gurls". Just for reference, in case you haven't seen it, it's here. I'd embed it, for your convenience, but embedding has been disabled on the request of KatyPerryMusic.

Tom Lehrer once said that he quit doing satire when it became impossible to tell the difference between satire and life. That's kind of how I feel about this video. The song has nothing especially going for it...insipid lyrics, a beat out of a drum machine, and a highly processed voice. You knew that they have machines that will fix your singing to be in tune now, didn't you?

It may well be that Katy Perry has talent, but how could I tell? She wears a swimsuit with cupcakes on her breasts, and later sports two aerosol tubes as sort of nipple prostheses, spewing frosting. You would think that when you are 3000 years old, you have seen it all before, but this is new. She looks like she's channeling Julie Brown, but doesn't realize that it was a joke.

Ok, so why am I even talking about it? Because of the following parody, Geek Gamer Gurls, featuring one of my favorites, Seth Green.

EMBED-Geek and Gamer Girls Song - Watch more free videos

I got this from Kotaku, in a post titled "Geek and Gamer Girls Will Likely Be Irritated By This Video" written by Michael Fahey.

Michael says this:

I'm no expert, but I suspect that girls who enjoy geeky things like playing video games would just rather be considered gamers or geeks than having the word girl thrown in front of everything they do as a qualifier.

I on the other hand love rolling around naked with toys flying in the air, covering up my naughty bits. Look for that video to appear on Kotaku sometime after hell freezes over.

In the first place, Michael, I'd rather hear about what the video makes you think and feel, rather than your prediction of how it will make someone else feel, male or female.

K. Fox, of Your Critic is in Another Castle went comment-diving on the Kotaku thread. She came up with some gems:

I didn't really take any offense to the video. If anything, I laughed quite a bit, because there was some clever bits that they snuck in there.

Does it make girl gamers seem anything more than sexed up woman who play video games in sexy outfits? Not so much.

As a gamer myself (yeah, I left out the girl prefix) I've always been slightly sensitive to the plight of female video gamers. We're like a lot of you guys, we like to chill around in comfy clothes and play long gaming sessions. And it isn't just RPGs or anime style games, considering I'm always up for a good round of headshotting. --FinerFrenzy

There's something here that I would like women to understand. There is no definitive interpretation of any work of art, and parody videos are no exception. All art is an inkblot, and what you see in it depends on your experiences.

My experiences show me something other than what FinerFrenzy sees in "Geek Gamer Gurls". First of all, the central visual metaphor of "California Gurls" was that girls are like candy, frosting and cupcakes. A delectable treat to be consumed. Well, I won't deny that female skin draws my attention, at least for a while, but there's a big difference between women and cupcakes. For one thing, I had a heart attack five years ago, and I don't eat cupcakes any more.

The parody, "Geek Gamer Gurls" riffs off of this, comparing girls to videogames. That works a little better for me, since I still play videogames. But here's something else I think about. Gaming makes a woman more attractive, at least to me it does.

Sexiness is not objective, not in the slightest. What we see in visual media is a symbolic representation of a mental state. When you are about to have sex, your partner is the most beautiful creature on earth for those moments. There's even research that shows that men are able to rate attractiveness of women in photographs in various stages of clothedness, but when the photographs begin to depict the sexual act itself, this ability goes to zero. Got that? Zero.

So, I think the willingness and ability of a women to play videogames is a big plus. Any woman who will sit on the couch with me and kick my butt, or laugh it off when I get the upper hand is a big plus. It's someone I want to be around. Power is sexy, and it always will be. Gaming isn't the only criterion, to be sure, but a lot of the guys I know would really like to have a partner with whom they can share their passions.

But is that what the video represents? There's an inteview with Team Unicorn over on Star Wars blog.

Team Unicorn [...] includes actresses Michele Boyd (The Guild, How I Met Your Mother, Cold Case, Sons of Anarchy), Clare Grant (Walk the Line, $5 Cover, Black Snake Moan, Saber), Milynn Sarley (EA, TheGamerChick, LTA, Street Fighter High School), Rileah Vanderbilt (Hatchet, Frozen, Saber), and actor Seth Green (Robot Chicken, Family Guy)

Those are very strange credits for Seth Green, by the way. Where's Buffy, or The Italian Job? But that's show biz. And that's what this is: Show biz.

The parody was done by professional actors and actresses, and produced by a professional production company. I'm guessing the song is up on iTunes, and that's the monetization angle. I'm not against someone making a buck, but it makes me somewhat suspicious of their motives. A good deal of the Star Wars blog article has the girls discussing their geek cred. Which, sadly, makes me more suspicious. It's kind of like someone telling you "You can trust me!" It has the opposite effect.

Well, why does geek cred matter? It's strange to me that entertainers would think to pander to geeks and video game players. It used to be that one got more social juice from kicking us than from flattering us. But we have jobs and money now, I guess that's the difference. However, rather than the girls portraying girls playing games, they are portraying characters in games and movies dear to the hearts of geeks. Clothing themselves in the wrappings which are attractive to gamer geeks.

And yes, a girl who would think to dress up as Han Solo would be more interesting to me than one who would dress up as a cupcake. That's the part I can relate to here. But it's still a very masculine camera in this video. The performers don't portray women who play games, the women portray characters in games, so they aren't actually playing the games. You might reference it as cosplay, but it's pretty abbreviated. If they were selling that, they failed.

This doesn't grab me the way, say, "White and Nerdy" did. Keep working.

No, That's the Royal "We"

2010-09-10T08:24:00.000-07:00

I don't multibox. It's not a rational decision, by any stretch. I think it's kind of a purist streak, on my part. That, and it's an expression of my copper-pinching tendencies. (Did you hear that nickel squealing just now? That was me.)

In many of the games I play, it's no big deal that I don't do it, it isn't all that common. I've played with some very good multiboxers, too, who can multibox heal their way through an instance, though not one that's brand new in a new expansion. To each his or her own.

However, in EVE it's something of a requirement. I believe I saw a recruitment ad for Pandemic Legion that said flat-out that it was a requirement for anyone hoping to join them. Everyone and their clone has multiple alts, to drop cynos, to tank the belt for them, to do hauling, or salvaging, or maybe one for industry and one for pvp. Or more. Four accounts isn't that unusual, I know of at least 3 people in our corp who do this, there might be more.

Now I run multiple toons on one account in many games. And I will cross-twink them, and use them for different, synergistic activities. To some extent. At some point I will probably start an alt in EVE and park it in Empire, train it up just enough that it can place buy and sell orders, and be my market alt. That means shutting down Mr. Fabulous Redhead's training for a while, but the training urgency is getting less. And it would probably only take a couple of weeks to get the training I would like to have.

So, is it the cost issue? I could afford to pay for a second account, I just don't want to. I could also buy PLEX, and play for "free". My (somewhat pessimistic) estimate of my ISK-earning power is that it's 10-15M ISK per hour, so that would be 20-30 hours per month of earning, just to get the right to do it again next month.

It's not out of the question. That would take about one week per month, at the rate that I play. And maybe with an alt, I could make ISK faster.

But here's the thing. I think this isn't the right way to win EVE. EVE is a gigantic military/economic sim. Economic principles apply to EVE more than any MMO I've ever played. And the fundamental observation of economics, going back to Adam Smith, is that when we trade, we both get richer.

It seems that everyone in EVE strives for independence and vertical monopolies. The game is full of "do-it-yourselfers". And to be fair, there's an intrinsic appeal to this. Skyforger is working on building a station, made entirely out of components that we gathered and manufactured ourselves. It would be done much faster and cheaper if we just focused on making as much money as we could and bought the stuff. But it's cool to do things this way, so that's what we do.

But it's highly inefficient, economically speaking. Everyone who has an alt says it doesn't double their income, the gain is somewhere less than 2x. That's because it's still only one brain at work, and attention and time online has limits.

But the marketplace can tell you what other people are efficient at, and what you are efficient at. And if you want to do something that you aren't efficient at, you can figure out how to get more efficient.

The point being that the path I want to take through the game is one where I interact with others, a path that engages collaboration rather than isolation. This is space where group mining ops take place, and gang roams, too. So I'm not the only one who likes this aspect of the game.

I like doing this in the fantasy-based MMO's too. Long ago, Phritz's ranger, Cranston, and I would try to figure out ways to kill stuff in Everquest using just our skills. With Toldain, I would fear kite, and he would dps. And with Aquino, my monk, we ended up aggro kiting, using FD to wipe aggro. It was fun learning to do this, and fun learning how to leverage our skills. And when Toldain would duo with Lobilya's druid, Pakse, the fear kiting would take a slightly different form.

So, the most successful achievers I've run across in MMO's usually do multibox. And they will find something that works, and run it and run it and run it, night after night, whether it's ratting or mission running in EVE, or running instances in Everquest. I don't think I can do that, my attention span isn't quite up to it.

But I do want to play the game with other people. It's an MMO for Marr's sake!

Medal of No Shame At All

2010-09-02T11:46:00.000-07:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates is my favorite non-gaming blogger. Reading him, and commenting in his comment section challenges me to think harder and to see farther. And he's been known to play, and to write about video games and MMO's from time to time.

Today, the topic is Medal of Honor, which allows you to play a Taliban character during multiplayer mode. Politicians from Britain, New Zealand and Canada are unhappy about this.

Seth Seisal writes, in the NY Times, thinks this is due to a misunderstanding of the game:

If Medal of Honor let you play as the Taliban throughout an entire single-player campaign, then we would have a real controversy on our hands. Imagine the reaction to a game that included a mission where you were cooperating with Al Qaeda during the siege of Tora Bora and had to protect Osama bin Laden while spiriting him to safety.

That is not what is going on here.

I think it's probably accurate that the politicians in question aren't very familiar with videogames. And this doesn't seem all that different from steam-tunnel "D&D killed my baby" madness.

I'll take it as given that all my readers are familiar with video games, and multiplayer features of them. I've played many Bond villians during Goldeneye multiplay. However, as usual, TNC takes it a step farther:

[I]t must be said that the stories I love generally have a villain I can relate to, someone who I can almost ... see myself in. ...

As a maniacal "kill them all" villain, Magneto is, to my mind, just another foil. As a dude with a quasi-defensible, if ultimately amoral, perspective on mutants, he grabs me a little. When contemplating evil, I want to see some of myself. I need to feel the lure of evil, it's seduction. The devil must be luscious to grab me.

[...]

My sense is that video games will have to confront this, at some point. They probably already are. A video game told from the perspective of a Taliban insurgent isn't likely any time soon. Which is too bad. I think that's exactly the kind of video game that might help us get to some emotional truths about the past ten years.

And here we are again, at the videogames as art place.

First of all, I think videogames are doing this already. Not the Taliban specifically, mind you. But consider the story arc for Arthas in the Warcraft series. The fallen paladin is a familiar story to us, Darth Vader, anyone?

Then there's the quest line for Death Knights in World of Warcraft. That went to a very dark place, and people maybe didn't understand, but they felt it. Lest you think that only Blizzard does this, the quest lines in Ruins of Kunark had a great deal of moral ambivalence. You would tell one faction, "Ok, I'll go kill your enemies" and do so. Then you would go to the enemies, and offer to kill the people you were just helping. More than a few people felt dirty doing that, to which my response is: Good!

Still in the fantasy setting, DDO has some quests that have left me shaking my head. For one, The Silver Flame wants you to go to a place where there is gambling, smash the gambling tables and kill the guards. The games content people know what they are doing, since the loading screen for that instance has the message, "The Silver Flame is not afraid to enforce it's moral judgements by the sword." In other quests you are asked to steal and collect taxes.

I've actually begun to skip a few of these, for the sake of roleplay. That is, given the character I've created, and their situation, would they actually take this job if offered? I was talking last night with Boaz, an Eve corpmate (and reader! I have readers!!) who also plays DDO. Their group has mostly let go of the "must level faster" grind, and looks to just do something that's fun and interesting. Part of that fun is imagining what things your character would do, and what things they wouldn't.

My alt in DDO is Martyy, currently Figher 1/Rogue 1. Marty wears half-plate, but can bluff and sneak attack (and improved trip). As is typical for me, he started in another system in another (tabletop) campaign. So I have a good idea of his character. He's happy to be mob muscle, or muscle for the powers that be. But as he was smashing the gambling tables, he was thinking, "I'd rather be playing these tables, than smashing them. This job sucks!"

In Eve Online, players routinely commit acts of piracy, terrorism, and extortion. The game itself provides no moral compass. So, one of the joys I have is charting my own moral territory. Some of the missions in Eve have a decidedly dark side. In one series of five missions, you spend most of your time running around playing nanny for a rich heiress. Bringing her cash from Daddy, bailing her out of jail, etc. But then, in the final mission you find out that Daddy wants you to kill her, because he thinks her unworthy of his money. Outright, cold-blooded murder. As Milgram would have predicted, most people do so, with the thought, "It's just a game".

Let me be clear. It is a game. I'm very glad that there are pirates and miscreants in the game, as well as war opponents. I'm even kind of glad that there are scammers in the game. What I'm looking for is for someone to actually own their own black hat, to have the thought, yeah, I'm a bad guy, and here's why... Goonswarm, our allies and landlords, and notorious Eve bad guys, seem to really get this.

Because, you see, it's very easy to become a bad guy while still thinking that you are a good guy. That's how it works. Adolph Hitler was convinced that he was only doing what was needed to save the German people and the country he loved. German soldiers considered themselves honorable patriots, as Seth writes:

That thought has found expression in games for many decades. The Avalon Hill classic PanzerBlitz helped reshape the board game business when it was introduced in 1970 as an evenhanded simulation of the Eastern Front. When, as a child, I played as a German commander in that game or as a Japanese World War II admiral in the war game Flat Top, should my parents and teachers have been concerned that I was turning into a fascist?

In any case, my path, at least in Eve and DDO is to pick and choose my course, my quests, my missions, my code of honor. Not as I would choose, but as the character I'm playing would choose. Because it's more fun that way, and more interesting.

After all, it's just a game.

And the Hairstyle is Perfect!

2010-09-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

I've taken up a new MMO - new for me, anyway - Dungeons and Dragons Online. Dungeons and Dragons isn't new to me. For some reason, my wife and younger child both started playing this a few weeks ago. It's free to download and start playing, and they just couldn't stop talking about it. So I thought I'd get some firsthand experience with the "free to play" model, and see how my old friend translated to a MMORPG.

I'm loving it.

The "free to play" model doesn't seem terribly intrusive. Especially on the newbie island, you get reminded a lot that there is stuff to buy, but that tails off in Stormreach. Since I'm a cheapskate and a purist, I resist buying things to make adventuring easier. About the only things I'd consider paying for are new adventure packs and races/classes. Except the only race you have to pay for are drow and well, gosh. That's not really my style. Why be a drow when you can be a high elf? Yes, yes, I know, Drizzt and all that. But tortured, angsty, complicated ~~vampires~~ dark elves yearning to be good? Not really my thing.

But classes, on the other hand...You need to pay extra to play monk or favored soul, a variant of cleric. These have my interest. As alts of course.

Toldain, in DDO, is a wizard (now 4th level) specializing in enchantment magics.

There are some things in DDO that I find highly refreshing, and counter to trends. There are traps, and locked doors and chests. There are secret doors. The skills that you have matter. The game brings back a whole category of gameplay that was a staple of tabletop D&D - traps and secret doors. First you have to have someone out there who can notice danger - the Spot skill. Then you need someone who can search to find exactly where the trap is, or where that secret door is. Finally, once you can see the trap, you have a question as to what to do about it.

Some traps can be jumped over, or timed. They might have the "dropping blade" variety, and so you can try and time it to run through without being hit. Or you can bring someone along who can disable the trap, provided they've brought thieves tools. Or maybe you just avoid the whole thing. Meaningful strategic options, yum!

Speaking of meaningful strategic options, the wizard gameplay definitely highlights strategy as well. But let's talk about how the wizard/sorceror split plays out in the online version first. In tabletop D&D, wizards had a big book of all the spells they knew, out of which a few were prepared for the day. Each prepared spell was cast exactly once, if you wanted to cast Magic Missle more than once, you had to prepare it more than once. And at first level, you were likely to have no more than three prepared spells. The rest of the time you threw darts at the monsters from behind the fighter. Sorcerors, on the other hand, had no spell book. They could cast maybe four spells a day, but each casting could be any of the limited number of spells that they had in their head. This differentiation was introduced in D&D's 3rd edition, and provided a neat solution for accommodating different playstyles. For players and campaigns with more of a "we don't know what's coming next" feel, sorcerors worked better, but if you had the sort of campaign where you had a rough idea of what might be coming, and liked planning ahead, wizard filled the bill.

In DDO, casting 3 spells before resting would be severely limiting. Combats go much faster than they do on the tabletop, so the game needs to be tweaked appropriately. Thus there are spell points, and old and familiar idea. Wizards prepare spells in taverns or at rest shrines, and may cast each prepared spell as many times as their spell points permit. Spell points, along with hit points are refreshed in town and in taverns, and at rest shrines in dungeons.

Sorcerors, on the other hand, may cast any spell they know, provided they have spell points. But they can't scribe new spells from scrolls, like wizards can. However, they have probably twice as many spell points. So, they tend to use the same tactics in every dungeon.

In experimenting, I first tried making Toldain as a sorceror. After all, they use Charisma as their best ability score, and charm is my middle name. Toldain Charm Darkwater, right there on the birth certificate. Really! However, the first village features battles with Sahuagin, who, as monstrous humanoids, are not subject to Charm Person. Oops, one of my two first-level spells just became useless. This has something to do with why the game calls this path for the sorceror "extremely difficult" to solo.

So I'm a wizard. I get to think about what the dungeon I'm about to run in might/does contain, and which spells to use, and which tactics. Actual strategic thinking!

Gameplay for other classes also features some strategic thinking, as to choice of gear and supplies. Clerics and Paladins must also prepare spells.

DDO seems to embrace the idea of tactics in a way that few MMO's do. For example, terrain. Once upon a time, in Everquest, there was path-kiting. Miniscule wrinkles in terrain would make mobs take strange detours, while you could plug them. Mobs would also walk through walls to come and eat you, which seems unfair, since we couldn't walk though the walls. Finally, in DDO, mobs will block players as well as other mobs. And the pathing is much better.

The typical thing that you would see in an MMO is that a mob that is at range with no path to you would teleport to you, or even be able to hit you despite a large difference in altitude. Not so in DDO. If you want to stand the fighter in the doorway, and throw daggers from behind him, go for it! But be warned, taunt mechanics are somewhat weaker, though not completely gone. Use terrain and movement more, and taunt less.

But the mobs are using terrain, too. They will place ranged attackers on high inaccessible points, and force you to engage them in ranged combat, or have someone climb up to them. Climbing and jumping seem to have increased value, and points spent on the Jump skill will make you jump higher and farther. The game has a bit of a Legends of Zelda feel in many dungeons, where you need to find the right lever to pull in order to open the next door. And it has a bit of the qualities of a platform rpg, a la Prince of Persia, with the jumping around.

And there's a very different attitude toward sneaking. Sneaking is not seen as bypassing content, but as part of the fun. In the first part of Stormreach, there's even one dungeon in which the point is to steal something without killing more than 6 of the lookouts. You do not get experience for killing random mobs, but for accomplishing objectives. Which makes sneaking past things make a whole lot of sense.

There are other dungeons with a focus on traps, and at least a few with some genuine puzzles to solve. They don't seem to worry about the fact that one can look online to solve them. (So far I haven't, why spoil the fun?)

As you can tell, I'm really liking the game. I like the art choices, and the gameplay choices. I think it's an evolutionary step forward, even as it tries to bring what's fun about D&D into the MMO sphere. But the best part of all, the thing that makes it precious to me above all others (at least for now) is that my youngest child will actually play D&D Online with me.

Dungeons and Dragons Ate My Baby

2010-08-25T11:24:00.000-07:00

Via Neogrognard, I just ran across the original broadcast of the 60 Minutes episode investigating the role of Dungeons and Dragons in murder/suicides. It was run in 1985.

I highly recommend watching these, they are instructive.

The videos feature Patricia Pulling, who's son, Irving "Bink" Pulling committed suicide. Also Thomas Radecki, who is a psychologist.

srm complains:

Gygax and his PR dude came off as defensive and insensitive pricks who were using D&D money to shut down investigations. Remember that this is the height of the great Satanism scare of the 80s. It was a strange time.

There was never going to be another outcome. There is no argument to be made that will make you look better, if you're E. Gary. With 3.5 million people playing, and 35 deaths, you have no real case. If you are going to run the segment at all, you have to have some narrative to support it.

And it's always a strange time. There are people today who will swear that vaccinations cause autism, and refuse to have their children vaccinated. It's causing a whooping cough epidemic in California's Central Valley. People are strange, even redheaded elves have their kinks. They always will.

Of course, Dungeons and Dragons doesn't kill people. Nor does playing the online versions of these games. For some debunking of this stuff, The Escapist has a nice little encyclopedia of unfavorable media references. For example, his entries on Bink and Patricia Pulling.

(I have a little small spot of sympathy for Mrs. Pulling, who died in 1997. Stuff can go wrong with children, even when parents mean the best, and do the best they can. It seems she made some mistakes, and in her case, they turned out to be fatal for her child. That would suck.)

In some ways, the internet makes conspiracy theory mongering worse. People who are in the grip of a crazy idea can find other people with the same crazy idea much more easily, and reinforce each other. But that doesn't mean I want to shut down the internet, because that same internet let me do the research to debunk it.

So I come to how much I like the concept of Net Neutrality. If someone could pay off someone else to keep stuff that embarasses them off the internet, that would be a great, great loss.

"I Don't Think D&D Will Ever Be Mainstream"

2010-08-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

Stephen Radney-McFarland (aka srm) recalls a conversation he had roughly 10 years ago with Jeff Quick, then editor of Polyhedron magazine, and an employee of Wizards of the Coast, who were about to publish Third Edition Dungeons and Dragons. Those who follow the hobby know that this spurred a huge wave of interest in the game, reigniting the passions of 3000-year-old redheaded elves everywhere. That's not a very large market, though, so luckily for WOTC (and for the hobby) a lot of other humans, halflings, gnomes and dwarves were interested too. And a few half-orcs, no doubt.

Anyway, I loved this paragraph:

Learn from [...] outliers. They’re not afraid of their geek. And not just the outliers in RPGs. People paint their entire body when to go to watch football. Dressing up like the people of Mad Men has become vogue in some circles. Some men love their motorcycles more than their wives. We are all geeky about something. In modern culture where we spend the majority of our time in the fluorescent flicker of gray cube walls, our geek passions give us color. And this world needs more color.

Stephen recounts telling Jeff the quote that is the title of the post. But from the perspective of 10 years later, it seems that he was wrong. Wrong in a way that he (and I) never expected.

Roleplaying has become huge. In part this is because of games like Diablo and World of Warcraft. Adults are getting the basic idea of pretend play back in their lives. I never expected this, but I think its good.

I've seen Army Colonels say that they think D&D is good for the troops, teaching them valuable lessons in teamwork and boosting morale. I know a woman that runs a after-school/summer camp based on doing RPG with the kids, and injecting specific lessons about geography, math, and sociology into the runs. When you have to do a math problem to unlock the treasure, there's a little more motivation.

In about 1981, about a year after my first introduction to D&D, the local store stopped carrying any D&D related product. They had concluded that Dungeons & Dragons constituted demon worship, and wanted no part of it. My personal reaction was of the nature, "But don't you get it? We're killing the demons!" I don't know how much of this reaction is still out there, I would imagine very little.

The web has been a huge boon to the hobby, beyond the advent of MMO's. Sites like DriveThru RPG sell roleplaying stuff. and Think Geek specifically targets a geek audience.

Film and television has become laced with D&D and roleplaying sensibilities. The actual "Dungeons and Dragons" movie kind of sucked, it's true. But then there's "The Mummy". Steven Sommers, the director of "The Mummy", "The Mummy Returns" and "Van Helsing", plays D&D. There is a sensibility to these films that is very familiar to those of us who gather around the table with strangely shaped dice. Particularly when we've played a non-D&D game "Call of Cthulhu". John Rogers, writer of "Transformers" (the movie) and co-creator of the TV series "Leverage" not only plays, but has contributed to some of the D&D books. Vin Diesl not only plays D&D, it's what inspired him to try to become an actor. Karl Urban (Eomer) plays too. Dame Judy Densch runs a campaign for her grandchildren. The very-indy film "Rise of Dorkness" is an engaging, feature-length film about a group of D&D players and the characters they play. It is apparently funny even to those who have never played any tabletop RPG.

Anyway, Steven's post is really good, go read it. He has an embedded video that is really, really funny too, where the britcom "The IT Crowd" takes on D&D. Ne plus funny.

Geeking Out In Space

2010-08-23T17:04:00.002-07:00

CCP Veritas has a post up describing how he and his colleagues tracked down some issues with module reactivation in EVE. During my life as a programmer, I've come to love stories about tracking down elusive bugs, and this is a really great example.

We'll start at the first thing we noticed when digging at it: the system responsible for telling the server when modules should be turned off or repeated would get minutes behind in processing when fleet fights happen while other systems remain reasonably responsive. This system, named Dogma, handles module activation/repeat/deactivation, as well as the actual effects of those modules. [...]

Tasks on the EVE servers use a time-sharing technique called cooperative multitasking which, in short, means that a task has to willingly yield execution to other tasks, otherwise it will run forever. In this case, it would seem the part of Dogma handling module repeat and deactivation was being too nice - yielding execution too much.

Looking at the code some, a theory emerged as to why. There was an error case that stuck out as odd - if an effect was supposed to be stopped or repeated, but the effect system itself didn't agree that it was time yet, the code would throw up its hands and give up. If that error case gets hit, the processing loop would yield to other systems early. A code comment was very reassuring though - this error was supposedly "rare."

The "rare" error happened 1.5 million times in the month of June, 2010 on TQ.

Great story, and an interesting followup. By all means, read it. After I read it, I did some calculations, presented below:

So, it seems to me that the problem was really quite rare. And it happened all the time.

Geeking Out In

2010-08-23T17:04:00.000-07:00

The Long Lag: Favorite Quotes

2010-08-17T14:03:00.001-07:00

Today CCP Warlock posted a devblog called "The Long Lag". CCP Warlock has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the MIT Media Lab. If you didn't know, that's a pretty solid credential. She's working on lag and distributed system performance in EVE. It's always tricky when a computer scientist has to tell a non-specialist audience that they can't have something. It's tricky to tell the difference between the easy, the trivial, the hard, and the impossible, even if you ARE a computer scientist. If you aren't, you might often say things that sound a lot like, "Well, why can't I have that cloak of invisibility? Are you dumb or just lazy?"

I've read through her post, and her presentation at Para this year. I assure you that she isn't dumb or lazy. Forthwith are some of my favorite quotations, and my (and mine alone!) interpretation of them.

CCP Warlock: What both software and human groups are fighting at a very fundamental level is a nasty relationships between organizational structure and available real time communication capacity.
Toldain: There just ain't enough wires to go around people! In a fleet fight of 1000 pilots, each and every client needs to pass some information to every other client. To handle this you would need to have 1000 different wires coming into your house, connecting to your computer, to handle the communication need. And so would each and every other players. Well, maybe one wire can handle communication with 10 other pilots, but that only cuts it down to 100 wires needed. More than one message can't go down any wire at the same time, that's the nature of the problem. And we can't push harder on the internet to make the bits go faster.

CCP Warlock: Our goal is to not only give you the best possible performance across the cluster as whole, but also for specific activities like fleet fights, measured against the theoretical limits.
Toldain: Hey there players!!! There are limits to this. There are conceivably big enough fleet fights that no computer and no software can handle them correctly. When the company was started we were happy to get 1000 players just logged in at the same time, let alone fighting on the same grid! Ok, ok, we aren't performing up to theoretical maximum, and we really really want to fix it, but let's keep this in perspective: Getting an 8-processor cluster on a much simpler application to simply go 50% faster than a 4-processor one, never mind getting to theoretical maximum, was a major, major accomplishment back in the days that I [Toldain] worked for a major computer vendor.

CCP Warlock: From time to time we also discuss scaling issues with game design, since that is the only place where some of these distributed scaling problems can be solved.
Toldain: Help us please, game designers, you're our only hope! There's no freaking way that 2000 pilot fleet fights are EVER going to work! But the players are headed down that road, for perfectly good reasons as far as the game design is concerned. Please turn this battleship off of its present course!

CCP Warlock: Probably the most frustrating part is that based on past experience, when we do find this issue (or issues) it will be something that, in retrospect, appears incredibly obvious and silly to have caused so much pain. So we will continue to beat our heads against this problem until we solve it, and then I suspect we will beat our heads against the nearest wall for a quite a while afterwards.
Toldain: I have personally beat my head on that very same wall.

CCP Warlock: A complex system is a network of homogeneous components which interact non-linearly. Many scientific fields are currently blocking on complex systems issues.
Toldain: This stuff is really, really hard. Lots of scientists out there would give their eyeteeth to have some better tools to deal with this stuff, but the fact is that we find it easier to prove that certain kinds of programs and tools can't be made, than it is to do something as simple as figuring out how to put all your inventory into boxes. Even figuring out the simplest things can get you to the point where it would take from now until the heat death of the universe to figure them out on an input set the size of, oh, say, 1000. And still, we try to do something, doing nothing is not an option.

CCP Warlock Inventory: O(number of players) * number of items in the game. Eve players are packrats.
Toldain: Guilty as charged. Actually its worse than she says on this slide. The slide says the amount of database storage needed is proportional to the number of players times the number of items you can have. But I propose it gets another multiplier equal to the number of stations in the game. Unless they've done something really, really clever, which they might have.

Games As Art: The Marriage and The Divorce

2010-08-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

Let's beat the "games are art" horse just a little more, shall we?

First, there's The Marriage, by Rod Humble. It's a few years old, it seems. Play it for yourself, I'm not going to spoil it. The game seems to work just fine on my MacBook Pro under Wine, by the way.

Then there's My Divorce, by Brett Douville, which is a response to The Marriage. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work under Wine.

I recommend you play the games for a bit first, then read the commentaries provided by Humble and Douville.

Freeport Next

2010-08-10T14:20:00.000-07:00

What you're looking at is concept art for EverquestNext. That's a possible future Freeport above. There was some discussion of EQNext this weekend at the SOE Fan Faire, in which they described "lessons learned"

* Single world without the need to load zones
* Instanced dungeons
* Low system requirements
* Stylized character models
* Fewer classes, relative to EQII
* PvP from day one and “done right”

Wilhelm2451 of The Ancient Gaming Noob has a nice post up (or maybe it's a rambling Grandpa Simpson post?) in response to this in which he lists several "lessons learned" as implemented in EQ2 at launch. Lessons which turned out to be wrong, in his estimation.

I'm not really going to rehash it here, but it's highly amusing. I am going to add another few "lessons learned".

Faster-paced Combat is Good EQ2, as far as I know, was the first to distinguish between "in combat" and "out of combat" in determining the speed at which mana regenerates. It also made damage output of both players and mobs much bigger relative to the hit points of each. And casting times were faster, and more necessary. There was no more of the cleric mostly sitting on the ground meditating, and getting up every once in a while to cast a heal, then sitting again. There were no long waits after fights to heal. It became possible to move around a lot while fighting. I thought this was a good thing, but it's had an unforseen consequence: It's hard to socialize while fighting. Running an instance is mostly done in silence, with little opportunity for making new friends. Running in a competent group should be a bonding experience, it seems to me. It isn't.

Having a place where players are gathered together is bad There was the tunnel in EC, and the Bazaar, and PoK. Just being somewhere where there were a lot of people hanging out is one of the unique pleasures of MMO's. People like other people, and will clump together if you let them. Because of performance issues, and possibly some other fears, there is no such place in EQ2.

The only legitimate way to fight is tank and spank This is a personal pet peeve. There were dozens of fighting strategies that would work in EQ1: quad kiting, bow kiting, bard kiting, fear kiting, root and rot, mez-and-blast, charm fighting. Most of these are either completely gone in EQ1 or but a pale shadow of their former selves. And it was by deliberate design. I think the idea was that if some other character had some good tactic that you didn't have, it was seen as unfair. This sucks a lot of the fun out of the game for me, since I like trying unusual strategies and using them to fight stuff that ought to be too tough for me. Rather than make it impossible, I'd prefer them to not make it particularly rewarding. You know, experience for oranges and reds not really better than for yellows.

Just a few thoughts. Do you have any more?

The Great PLEX Explosion: Best Comments from the Forums

2010-08-09T15:40:00.000-07:00

To set the scene, yesterday a pilot got his Kestrel (a very small, cheap ship) blown up outside of Jita (a major trading center) while carrying 74 PLEX, an ingame value of 22 billion ISK. PLEX can be redeemed by the holder for 30 days of play time. Like all ship cargo, there is a random determination as to whether the loot survived the explosion or not. In this case, it did not.

PLEX are created when the owner of a Game Time Code (GTC) worth 60 days play time decides to convert that GTC into two PLEX as ingame items. So the real world dollar value of those PLEX was roughly $1300 US.

I'm reading a big thread on the Official EVE forums, and I thought I'd share with you some of my favorite comments:

If anyone has the heart, contract that pilot a new Kestrel

[Quoted Comment:] You are being naive. There are warnings and the guys losing them on kills like these are mostly traders and not people interested in the gametime. The long discussions are going to happen no matter what at this point. Just lean back in your comfy chair and enjoy the trolling and idiocy.

[Response:] HAHA! So if there IS a warning, he knew the risk of undocking with them... even if he's a trader. Perfectly legitimate kill then. Sounds like trading isn't this guy's strong point.

BTW.. how do you know my chair is comfy? you got eyes on me??

yes. !!PLEXes do drop.!!

It's just this was a stack, and as you remember stacks get processed all at once instead of individually. some people loaded up a frig with 4 million PLEXes (unstacked) on Sisi [SISI is EVE's test server-T.] then blew it up... 99%+ of them dropped.

I had lost much of the faith I once had in CCP. There has been endless threads about lag, imbalanced weapon systems, and the way in which CCP works, so there is no reason to go into detail here.

But then, something wonderful, something so beautiful as this happens. Making plexes movable was a great decision. It's things like this that makes me love EVE; this cold, harsh, and completely unforgiving universe.

There is this saying amongst developers:

Originally by: Rich Cook "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."

I guess it doesn't only apply in programming.

You can call it greed if you wish, but they are no different than 1000's of other vendors that offer physical gift cards that can be lost, stolen or destroyed instead of doing so purely by electronic means.

Here is the BIGGER point that you are all missing. If you take said gift card and get mugged and it is stolen you can CALL Bestbuy or almost any other retailer who offers gift cards and have a replacement issued and the old card canceled if you have the receipt. This is stated and posted in a number of stores and I know for a fact Bestbuy and Futureshop do it (they are the same company now anyway) as I used to work there years ago and have done it.

I worked for Best Buy myself, and still have friends employed there. It doesn't work that way. Wink

There are a lot of variables that you aren't bothering to include in your scenario above that would end in Best Buy denying you redemption of your gift card. In fact, it wasn't all that long ago that they stopped having expiration dates on their gift cards. Meaning that if you didn't redeem the gift card quickly enough it lost all value. And they are only 1 of thousands of merchants with similar policies.

So I've got a question. What's keeping, let's say, a CCP dev/gm alt from actually "buying" said Plex(s) and accidentally it/them?

P.S. This is exactly the kind of issue that Americans sue over.

Good thing CCP ain't American.

EVE: a cold, harsh universe. Stupidity has consequences. Essentially, you people are arguing that there should be exceptions to THAT.

Go play Farmville. It's clearly your kind of MMO.

So, from reading forums and killboard threads, the following picture emerges:

Aystra was carrying the PLEX to Jita, presumably for sale in a arbitrage bid. The value of the PLEX (22b ISK) represented the bulk if not the entire sum of his Alliance's (Small Alliance) Sovereignty fund. That is to say, the money that they use to pay for SOV upkeep, and for space upgrades and new Territorial Claim Units, and so on. He was popped by war targets who were not aware of his cargo, as he was attempting to dock. The ships that popped him (the killboard post is here.) were a Tempest and a Hurricane. No doubt they were fitted for fast locking. I would presume that one volley was sufficient to kill, it certainly looks that way.

One of the pilots on the kill has posted: I didn't even wanna post this kill.. I was like whatever it's just a kestrel... and when finally got
posted [which allowed him to see what the cargo was - T] I started to make squicky sounds I didn't
know I was able to make lol

According to ISD, the wreck was destroyed immediately after the kill, to prevent scavenger looting.

"I would probably be kicked out [of the alliance] if [PLEX] were to drop... I was the one that killed the wreck," concluded slickdog.

Interesting times we live in...