Troll Racials are Overpowered

I agree, all the liberals should be deported

2012-01-29T09:58:00.004-06:00

We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America. - Rep. Allen West

I think this is a great idea. Not the bottom of the sea part, but the not in America part. America has been called "The Great Experiment", well this can be "The Even Bigger Experiment". Put all the leftists in Europe, all the conservatives in America, and whoever is left over can wander the earth forever with a candle in a turnip.

This would truly be a grand experiment. Finally we can properly test socialism and capitalism, with each run by ideologically pure people. In America there would be no socialism at all while in Europe there would be no capitalism at all.

Here's the practical implementation:
Create a $10,000 per year "liberal tax", which liberals must pay. This is retroactive to all years as a liberal, though much like parking garages, if you cannot prove your time as a liberal, then you must pay the full lifetime fee. This is only reasonable, because those old liberals have been taking social security for a long time. The immediate effects would be two-fold: first, about 20% of the debt would be paid off instantly and second, the liberals would leave America. It's not all stick. As a farewell present there would be one last socialist program: free plane rides to Europe.

Then America can finally be pure and free to prosper. Meanwhile, Europe can see how it is having a horde of uncultured immigrants who don't speak the language. And finally, President Gingrich can sign legislation outlawing the existence of Mexico, thereby fixing all problems, forever.

I'd rather have bots

2012-01-27T06:00:00.007-06:00

When I make friends in a game, I want to play with them. If they're not on, but I still want to progress, what should I do?

I could hope that enough people are online on my server so I can form a group. This used to be the method, but was rejected.

I could play with people from other servers who I will never see again. This is the current method.

I could play with bots, which, if we given them a slightly randomized AI and name generation are functionally identical in all positive aspects to the people from other servers. I will never play with them again. I will develop no ties to them, because I will never see them again.

There is a benefit to bots. A social benefit, in fact. Since I likely have no concern for the random players, I am likely to treat them worse than I would friends or same-server players. Not with cruelty, but you cannot expect generosity in this situation. I have every incentive to take all I can, without regard for their needs or desires.

If they are already dehumanized, why not replace them with non-humans and minimize the damage inflicted upon the helpless other?

P.S. I'd rather play with the friends I made from the first scenario.

New Blog Appearance

2012-01-26T20:33:00.007-06:00

I changed a few things around here. Deleted some clutter. Changed some color. Got a new template which also knocked out my google code, so I missed several days of seeing how many of you came here looking for Skyrim porn. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? What part of "troll racials are overpowered" sounds like a porn site? Though incidentally, I recall a study (I'm using the term loosely) which found that, contrary to blood elves being 'gay', trolls actually were depicted more often in gay warcraft art, though I don't recall if they had done anything to compensate for trolls being out longer (zing). I have no idea why I remember that. But while we're on the subject, I also recall a study that found that children of gay parents were slightly happier than straight parents. I can only assume this is because of a total lack of moral standards, since as any Puritan could tell you, "A Penny Saved is a Penny Burned," referring to their practice of burning children who might become witches, often refereed to as "pennies".

Anyway, does anyone have any thoughts on the appearance? Better? Worse?

It's like my parents always told me: "If you don't have anything nice to say, it's because you're surrounded by losers. Point that out."

-Klepsacovic

P.S. "alexstrasza porno picture"? Also, why did someone have to specify "free skyrim porn"? Was he finding nothing but pay sites? Should I be terrified by the possibility that premium skyrim porn is a potentially commercially viable enterprise?

A rep grind by any other name...

2012-01-26T06:00:00.000-06:00

Back in the dark ages, before I met other smart people in high school, before I had a PC in college, I had a Mac and not many games to play. But I had a few and a few good ones. One of those was Escape Velocity, a 2D game of space exploration, trade, and combat. It was a glorious game with many quests and stories to find and a great deal of flexibility. I'd almost call it a sandbox. I'm pretty sure it is still available to pay for (it's shareware). The first in the set was a solid bit of fun, though the mechanics of it meant that even if you'd helped one faction or another win, the galaxy didn't change very much. The second fixed this by adding a neat scripting system which could change planets based on certain mission results and ended up being, in my opinion, the best of the three. Finally the third added a ton of cool mechanics which made combat more interesting and had some pretty awesome storylines, but seemed to have gotten too big and too complex, in addition to having a strange method for picking a faction. Strange as in, oops, I seem to be a pirate now, or oops I seem to be a telepath who has been enslaved by the government and can only break free and play the game normally by going really far along the mission string. It was still a great game, just not quite as good as the second. But that's way more introduction than I intended.

The game had the option to demand tribute from planets. At first they'd just laugh at you and maybe get a bit mad too. But, if you had a dangerous enough reputation, they'd send out their defense fleet. Kill it all and they'd pay tribute every day. This was a handy way to be able to land on planets that sold cool stuff or were convenient save points (saving was done by landing on a planet, which made some exploration especially risky) even if the government of it was hostile, maybe because you'd been pirating their shipping for a few months.

The problem was that the combat rating system was... let's go with stupid. It was based on the number of kills you had, modified by the strength of the ships. This was a sum, rather than expression of the actual difficulty of any particular fight. Conceivably one could gain the highest combat reputation just by killing shuttles, the beginner ship which is more or less helpless. Conversely, destroying the most powerful ships around did not mean you'd have a high combat rating. It was a grind.

And it was as stupid in appearance as most rep grinds and their associated quests. "We'd love for you to save our town, you certainly look capable, and all those other people like you, but first, we need you to kill a hundred boar, so we know we can trust you enough to tell you to kill a hundred elves." Similarly, you could be flying a powerful ship, captured by your previous slightly less powerful ship, and still have a low combat rating. "Normally we'd kill you, but look at you, a Confederate Cruiser with added photon turrets, another neutron cannon, and improved shields and armor? Really? Come back after you've killed a few shuttles, and maybe we'll be impressed."

I'm not really opposed to rep grinds or requirements, but sometimes it seems sensible to have the game recognize that the player isn't random scum off the street, but is instead very well armed lowly scum off the street who will do anything for some money and doesn't care who ends up dead.

Thinking back on Insanity

2012-01-25T06:00:00.001-06:00

In a few months it will have been two years since Blizzard officially recognized my insanity.

Insane in the Membrane
Requirements:
Bloodsail Buccaneers (Honored)
Everlook (Exalted)
Ratchet (Exalted)
Booty Bay (Exalted)
Gadgetzan (Exalted)
Ravenholdt (Exalted)
Darkmoon Faire (Exalted)
And when I did it, also required Shen'dralar (Exalted), a faction which is no longer available due to how Cataclysm cataclymized everything. This makes it a bit easier (a lot easier, but taking a billion away from infinity doesn't do much overall), but also means it is still possible (I'm not a fan of people losing to deadlines). I think it was a good change, since it's not as if it's suddenly trivial.

The first requires destroying reputation with the next four. Which then need to be fixed. The easy way is to destroy the first. I did it the hard way and didn't. The next requires a rogue and the last is expensive.

The other week when I was visiting some friends, and possibly violating the ToS by playing her account for an hour or two (scandal!) the subject of this particular achievement came up. I imagine I was waxing nostalgic about everything before [current expansion].

This is the best achievement in the game.

It's actually an achievement (to the degree that anything in a game is), rather than just another something that you happen to get. You won't accidentally get this. You won't get this by someone carrying you. You won't get this by wandering over to somewhere and maybe see what happens. This is something you choose to do, actively, and with some concept that it is a completely absurd goal.

It takes a literal fuckton of time. Note that in modern language, "literal" has degraded to just mean "metaphorically with a lot of emphasis", or in this case "ten times as much", which means approximately a skrillion hours (same amount Ron Paul will cut from the deficit).

I liked this. It kept me entertained for a long time. Was this high-intensity screaming with joy fun? No. It was not fully voiced, fully animated, or even fully scripted to tell a complex and engaging story. But it did send me all over the place to find what I needed at whatever pace and in whatever order I wanted (with some accounting for optimization within the strange reputation system), something sadly absent in these highly-scripted, linear times.

It rewarded innovation. By which I mean it rewarded me for being an engineer. My mailboxes saved me a ton of time and gold. And I got ogre suits out of the deal. But it did reward innovation. Sure, the easy path was to go kill pirates and fix my Booty Bay reputation. But screw that, I'm playing both sides! I learned about Dire Maul and how it, this strange far-off instance in the middle of nowhere, could give a big piece of goblin reputation without destroying my Bloodsail reputation as well. I found myself with a lot of old junk, and turned it into even more gold. Turns out there was a market for cloth and old enchanting materials, both in low supply thanks to Burning Crusade pulling players out of Azeroth too soon to hear too soon.

"Gordok Ogre Suit, 40g, will make you look thinner in comparison!"

Maybe by now you're wondering, "but would you do it again?"

Maybe. I originally had a paragraph here about context and content and changes in the game, but in short: maybe, it depends on what the game is in which the achievement is embedded.

I liked having long-term goals, particularly those which did not require speculating on whether a raid group would get it's shit together or not.

My Civilization State of the Union Address

2012-01-24T23:10:00.007-06:00

America, I have reigned unchallenged over this nation for thousands of years. I have seen it grow from a single city to an empire as big as any other. I have grown it, but not without your help. You ate a lot of food, but here we are, with large, prosperous cities that can churn out military might, science, and gold.

We have needed all three of those. In our years we have suffered many unprovoked invasions. New York even fell to Russia. But we did not waver. We drew on our gold and we pushed them back. When the Romans attacked their first, second, and third times, we did not yield an inch of territory. They retreated, and with generous peace terms. When the Iroqouis, once our friends, launched a surprise attack, killing many of our brave men and women, we did not waver. Instead, we took the fight to them, seizing lands that they had stolen from Rome and from Greece and we took their capital, forcing them to submit to our desire for peace. But we are not conquerors and oppressors! From these lands we rebuilt the shattered Greek civilization, freeing ourselves from administrative burden and creating a buffer from the warmongering of Rome and Osininka.

Even in our darkest hour, we did not back down. Nation, you remember this. Some do not. Some did not survive to remember. In an unprovoked attack, Russia, our former trade and scientific partner, invaded our southern holdings, threatened New York again, and in an unspeakable atrocity, use three nuclear weapons against Washington, killing millions and crippling the heart of our great civilization.

But we did not waver.

With your help and support, I rallied our troops. We were caught off guard, but we did not stay in retreat. We regrouped and took the offensive. I am proud to announce that we have achieved total sea and land superiority. Our troops are approaching Moscow, to prove to the world that no matter the blow we are dealt, we will always stay standing and never leave justice undone.

I would like to thank the workers from all over the empire, including immigrants from Rome, Greece, Russia, and Iroqouisstanstan, who came to Washington, risking fallout and further attack, to clean and rebuild the land. Your selfless, tireless dedication to doing exactly what I tell you to do is the foundation of this great empire.

Finally, I would like to remind everyone that we've almost developed the B52 bomber, which will, thanks to our excellent training facilities, be able to bomb you twice per turn, right off the factory line. So don't mess with us again. If that doesn't convince you, rocket artillery are close behind and I already have several double-striking artillery, even one with increased range. Barring those, we now have secured the Russian uranium deposits and will soon be able to use them to similar effect.

Have a nice day.

I danced in the morning, when the world was begun

2012-01-24T06:00:00.001-06:00

And I danced in the moon
And the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven
And I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem
I had my birth.

Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he.

In the morning...

The raid dancing is not new.

Before I get into things, I want to note that I am using the term "bad player". I mean this in a very broad sense of "players who do not contribute to the death of the boss". That could mean slow reflexes, ignorance of fight mechanics, inexperience, poor gear, etc. It's not a value judgement or a measure of intelligence. I'm not using it as such and frankly, people shouldn't. But people who extrapolate from game skill to real life qualities are a topic for another day.

Let's go with the danciest of the dances, the Heigan dance. The floor explodes in a pattern, so you move with it. Such a terrible Lich King-era fight. Except it was recycled content from vanilla. But late vanilla, let's use that excuse, and only have earlier fights count. In that case, let's try Ossirian the Unscarred in the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj, where the raid was constantly moving to keep away from tornadoes and get the boss to the next available crystal, and clump up for meterors on the trash before him. Too late? Then let's go to Zul'Gurub and make sure everyone moves at the right time for bats and gets in the poison cloud just in time for Hakkar to drain them. It's still too late? Fine. We'll go to the very first raid and collapse for sons on Ragnaros, make our pretty ring of groups for Shazzrah, and get out of the fire from Gehennas. Alright fine, we'll go earlier, to Stratholme where you'd better get over here so we can AoE the skeletons and if you want something more dynamic we can go to BRD and better keep moving because these dwarves will respawn behind us in about 15 seconds, so stick to the clock and do not fall behind.

The dance has been there. But maybe the dance has changed. Maybe it's a dancier dance. A costlier dance. Ah... let's try that.

Failing to collapse for Sons of Ragnaros would likely get you killed or at least OOM and in a lot of pain, as well as putting one out of position for the AoE. Not a raid-wiper. Be out of position on Arthas and a Val'kyr will drop you off the side and a puddlefire is going to kill everyone. Dying as one of 40 makes you look like an ass, but is it the end of the attempt? No. Dying as one of 25 and killing everyone else is the end of the attempt. There's the change: the cost of failure has gone up.

Tobold had a useful classification which I can't find, but it roughly divided raids into three types: One stressed a few pre-selected players (Garr banishers, jugglers in ICC), another stresses the average (any DPS check), while the last stresses the worst players (puddlefire on Arthas). The first allows for good players to carry the raid, whether with good or bad players, meaning that if you can find a few solid players, they aren't likely to leave because the raids are succeeding. The second allows good players to carry bad players, but they must make an extra effort (or tuning must be low enough), so that they may down the boss but still feel cheated. Finally the last encourages serial dumping of the lowest players because no one can help them and even gear may not fix the problem.

I think WoW has been shifting from the second category (average) with some use of superstars (seriously, I was awesome at banishing, I even figured out how to make it something worth bragging about because I was so awesome) to ever more of the third type.

This doesn't make fights harder for people who need harder fights. It just makes failure more likely.

A good player isn't pushed any harder when the rest of the raid can screw things up for him. A bad player possibly cannot get better, being at some limit of reflexes or how much they care to learn or practice (everyone has their limit, but of course anyone lower than you is lazy). There may be some who are able to be good but have not yet been challenged, possibly quite a lot of them. In that case, the second category is a way to challenge them without making their lower performance the death of the raid. But for players who aren't very good and aren't going to be better, putting burdens on them is utterly pointless, worsening the game for both bad players (who now wipe) and good players (who wipe or have to waste time finding new players).

Ironically, as addons have gotten better at tracking DPS, DPS has become less important. Reverse that damnable trend! Have more DPS fights and yes, the much-maligned tank-and-spank. This allow the best players to prove their mastery of their classes (or badge grinds) without shoving everyone else out of the raiding scene. Have more fights where a few good players can carry the tricky parts, so they can shine without having to kick the duller players. Better and worse players can coexist, but the raid design puts them into competition rather than cooperation.

And let me put my banish key to work again, with a curse ticking on the boss and my healer bored with no damage to heal. Just don't ask me to move out of the puddles.

Proof that science is smarter than religion

2012-01-23T06:00:00.002-06:00

Ask a priest a question for which he has no real answer and he'll answer "The Lord works in mysterious ways."

Ask a scientist a question for which he has no real answer and he'll start writing grant proposals.

The Vatican might be pretty neat, but it has no particle accelerators.

In unrelated news, classes start today.

Equality of Opportunity, Equality of Outcome, Equality of Nothing

2012-01-22T10:58:00.004-06:00

In my left hand is a very valuable thing, it's a card, much like the Monopoly "get out of jail free" card, except it's a "have a job all your life" card. Get this card and you will never be unemployed unless you quit your job. Come rain or recession, you will have work.

In my right hand is a six billion sided die. It is a fair die. You all have your number, so when I roll it, you know who comes out on top. The winner gets the card.

Good luck, everyone.

*rolls*

And there we go, 67923 has won! Congratulations!

Quit whining, the rest of you. There was equality of opportunity.

Is excessive use of hyperbole killing democracy?

2012-01-22T06:00:00.002-06:00

Dunno, vote on it.

Minecraft: For kids whose mothers didn't get them a soldering iron for Christmas

2012-01-20T06:00:00.003-06:00

I'm finally playing Minecraft with friends, rather than alone. It's a lot more fun that one, with people to show off to. Inevitably, I found myself tinkering with redstone, because there's so much cool stuff to do with it. Of course it's a bit expensive to do too much tinkering on a live server, so I made my own little sandbox where I can figure out the general concepts. I'll still have to work out how to fit everything into the space I have.

Space is limited, obviously, because I'm trying to put hidden doors and tunnels everywhere I can, particularly within the castle we're building. My attempts to use paintings didn't work because we don't all have exactly the same textures and even the perfect painting won't cover perfectly. That leaves me trying to use redstone and sticky pistons, with the slight problem that I have never seen a slime.

In the meantime I built most of a theater. It also houses the Center for Advanced Door Research, where I will eventually design the doors of the future. The door to the Center is, of course, not a simple wooden door. Sadly, I have not yet had time to add the full security such an important facility would require, such as combination locks, lava traps, and obsidian walls. The local tyrant is unlikely to provide sufficient resources.

Over in my own sandbox I tinkered a bit, creating a few creations. Most notable are the elevator, an incomplete proof-of-concept, and a pulse-cutter. The pulse cutter does what it sounds like: it cuts pulses. A normal button press creates a long signal. This cuts it off partially, creating a smaller pulse. I think it could be useful for regulating the elevator pistons. More importantly, I think it would make for a better input signal when lighting a dance floor, which I hope to add to the lower level of the theater, once I have... 1452 redstone ore for the diodes, plus more for the wiring, which will be at least another 80. Maybe the floor doesn't need to be the full 20x20 (the circuit is bigger than the visible floor).

Screenshots!

The screen (still needs a screen)

The seats (I'm refusing to put in red velvet)

Lower Grand Room (see why I'd need a lot of redstone?)

Center for Advanced Door Research (ooh, secret inside shot! Those are the circuits for the door)

The snow is due to a snow golem wandering around. At least I think I got rid of most of the chickens.

The Diplomatic AI in Civ V is Random, Stupid, and Great

2012-01-19T06:00:00.002-06:00

Ai in Civilization IV was a nice set of visible equations and with a bit of math you could get along quite nicely. Civ V introduced a new mechanic: random dickishness. Are you five turns in and getting denounced for "trying to win the game the same way"? Or maybe the previously friendly civilization has suddenly turned on you? Maybe you're on your march to victory when suddenly the entire world turns on you.

Sucks, doesn't it?

I think it's great. Let's face it, the world is not run by Kissinger clones who carefully balance practicality with bombing Cambodia for no apparent reason. Instead it is run by people. People get mad and paranoid. They lash out for nothing. They attack when they cannot win and surrender when they could win. They are irrational and random.

The AI system in Civilization captures this very nicely. Is it annoying to get invaded by your friend? Well sure. But you know who hated getting invaded by his best friend? Stalin. By the analogy this makes the AI Hitler, which is why it's okay to kill them.

In RPG terms, the AI lost its aggro table. You can't tank it easily with bribes and religion, though I do miss religion. Instead it attacks, not quite at random, but close enough that you'd better bring some disc priests, which I'm pretty sure means having the Great Wall and a lot of crossbowmen.

Pirate This Post

2012-01-18T00:00:00.000-06:00

Apparently today is the day when everyone goes silent to protest SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Well, I don't know how to do that. I mean both in the technical sense that I don't know how to take this blog down for a day (maybe I could make it private, but that wouldn't say why) but also that I'm not very good at shutting up.

I believe government has a very important role to play on the internet. In fact, I believe that there should be a regulation enforced by any means necessary, and I mean any means. Violate this regulation and I believe the government should get to blow you up with a drone.

The Regulation:
No one gets to regulate the internet. No governments. No corporations. No person. No organization.

The internet is the closest thing the world has ever gotten to a truly free market. It is an engine of innovation and communication. Some powers don't like that innovation or that communication, so they try to stop it. They hate the free market because it threatens them. Free markets are unstable, just like democracies. Powers rise and they distort the system in their favor. It is necessary to counter them, put them back in their place. This is one of those times.

Piracy is bad. But overreaction and overreach are at least as bad.

It's a bit of a shame that Wikipedia is going dark, because without it, how will anyone know why it is down?

Maybe xkcd will be up. Maybe not. Either way, I think this comic fits.
http://xkcd.com/274/
Yea, just the link. I'd hate to accidentally pirate it. Maybe on Talk Like a Pirate Day.

I want to shoot him. Let me shoot him.

2012-01-17T06:00:00.001-06:00

ESRB Warning: Any sense of choice is merely an illusion.

Welcome to Star Wars: The Old Republic. It has some great story-telling.

Meet Tyresius Lokai, a slimy rodent who I really want to kill. I think they did a masterful job with this guy. He's a serial scammer who has managed to piss off pretty much everyone. Bounty hunters are sent to go kill him. And off they set, guns ready, and hoping to catch the previous guy who failed to do the job. Well, we meet him, and guess what: he's been bought off. Sold his ship and now hangs out with sexy twi'lek babes, doing what anyone else would do if loaded with credits. He's not the first to get bought off, since Mr. Slimerat got pretty damn rich with his tricks.

Finally though, I have him. It's been a long chase, but his droid is dead and my gun is ready. He offers to buy me off, throwing me what I think was a box of credits. I'm immoral, but that doesn't mean I'm unethical. This guy is going down. Beside, he's annoying. Whoever wrote this quest chain did a masterful job of making me hate him. I refuse the offer and he sets dogs on me.

But he's out of time and space. His ship isn't ready to take off and my blaster is ready. Time to get paid.

By him.

Even if I really want to kill him, even if I have already rejected his offer in order to kill him, I cannot kill him. Nope. I am magically compelled to take him on as a companion. That makes perfect sense! Why wouldn't I suddenly drop all my hatred and take on a huge risk like that?

Of course the game won't let me break my story. I mean, their story. That's fine. But is this really the only possible way? Did no one suggest the option to shoot him and as part of my reward I get to hire (for free) a companion which is exactly the same as him? It felt like I'd been playing a racing game and suddenly they replaced the finish line with a wall.

Not happy.

I'm looking forward to the trial or f2p.

Picking your resource pool

2012-01-16T06:00:00.001-06:00

Why am I predicting that my paladin in Skyrim won't work well? Resources. I need to divide my levels between health, magicka, and stamina.

The paladin would use melee attacks for most damage with strong healing to keep him alive as he wades into large groups of enemies. Melee attacks drain stamina. Healing uses magicka. Getting punched in the face uses health. That means I have to keep all three fairly high, or else I'll find myself lacking in damage, healing (health), or health, one of which contributes to enemies being alive, which means that indirectly, all three are factors in whether I die, which is usually a bad thing.

It's not really the base pool that concerns me. A bit extra or lacking here or there isn't my concern. Instead it is the regeneration that worries me. If I increase my magicka regen, that only affects half my resource pools (I'm dropping the concept of health as a resource). My melee is not helped. Or on the other side, more stamina regeneration does nothing for my healing. This means that I must balance my gear for two pools, always risking depleting one or the other too soon, with no ability to correct the problem.

Contrast this with a mage whose damage uses magicka and whose healing also uses magicka, so that the single stat is perfectly flexible. A shortage of damage can be made up for by risking lower health, while a lack of healing means a temporary reduction in damage.

It doesn't help that caster gear tends to be robes rather than heavy plate. Enchanting can help with this, so I'll leave it as a "player problem" rather than a "developer problem".

The Solution
Allow players to pick which pools are consumed by resources.

Change my physical attacks so that they use magicka. We can pretend that I'm not swinging my arms and sword with muscles, but magic, making it a sort of short-range telekinesis. A wizard did it!

For casters, allow destruction spells to consume health. This creates an interesting scenario where their health rapidly fluctuates, with enemy damage and destruction spells hurting them, interrupted for the magicka-using heals to renew it. Or they use the magicka for alteration and conjuration, supplementing their offense even more, but at a terrible cost. This would be a great setup for a warlock.

The Libertarian LFD Plot to Murder You

2012-01-14T06:00:00.001-06:00

Nation, we all know that this nation was founded based on a recognition of equality, namely, fuck that, why would we give the vote to poor people and women? We called it liberty and it was great. But, ever since that Big Government anti-liberty Jew* named Abraham Lincoln came in, I've lost my right to private property, by which I of course mean Negros.

* He had a beard and was named Abraham, so I'm pretty sure he was Jewish. Not that there's anything wrong with them. I have no problem with shadowy empires of wealth controlling the world.

But I wanted to talk to you about Looking for Groups, Dungeons, Raids, and how I get to murder you if I feel like it. So let's get right to that.

As we all know, I am the only one that matters. I know this because I said it's true and I'm the one that matters. Or maybe I read it in a book by some Russian Hollywood type, and you know how they are, and have been mindlessly parroting it ever since. Anyway, I matter and you don't. So when I go into groups, I look out for me, as number one, and everyone else can worry about themselves, though frankly I can't decide if they're too pitiful to worry about or too pitiful to be worth being worried about by. It's sort of like the question of whether God can make a rock so heavy he cannot lift it, except it's more like whether the rest of you scum are so scummy as to not even be worth your own existence. Because you're not me.

My point is this: Cheating you is not wrong, because it benefits me, and as we all know, the ideal is for everyone to look out for themselves. This is the foundation of capitalism, which has brought prosperity that those backward people of the past could never imagine, because they were too busy imagining silly concepts like whether anyone else matters. You see, it is just basic economics that if everyone looks out for themselves, a term known as rational self-interest, everyone them makes mutually beneficial transaction that make everyone better off.

Obviously that's a stupid idea. Why would I, looking out for myself, worry about whether we are better off overall? That's the job of socialists. I'm concerned about myself. So, with this in mind, I am going to take all I can for myself and if I'm feeling generous, hire someone to shoot you if you get uppity, rather than doing it myself. See, I'm a job creator. The deal is simple, help me keep down the rest of the rabble and I'll let you live. That sort of free enterprise entrepreneurship is the foundation of a healty economy. Note that I said a healthy economy, not a healthy you, so quit whining about the carcinogens.

Speaking of carcinogens: I get to poison you. It's very simple. First, I open a factory that emits toxic fumes and dumps whatever is left over in the water. I can do this because I employ a few people, which makes it job creation, and therefore okay. Then I realize that my scheme was flawed, so I sell it off to a firm that can cut costs and turn a profit. Being a job creator, I start my own firm and bring in investors. By investors I of course mean the money from the pension that I'd promised to workers of my factory. I use that money to buy my factory from myself, making me rich, and giving the workers' pension a worthless asset, which I then buy from them cheaply when the company is liquidated. Of course to cut costs I laid off those workers and with all the paperwork they'd have been unable to collect the pension anyway, so it's not like they lost anything. Now I have a giant building that puts toxic waste into the air and water, slowly poisoning you to death. You can't do anything about it because I am, theoretically, a job creator.

Or I could just cut out the middle man and start burning bricks of sulfur on my front lawn while children are walking to their socialist public school. If you complain by ringing my doorbell, I will take that as a sign of aggressive trespassing, a clear violation of my few remaining rights to property and privacy, and get to shoot you. That's the beauty of libertarianism, it gives me the right to poison children and murder you if you say anything about it.

You may wonder how this is relevant to LFD. That's because you haven't been paying attention.

What we're seeing here is a concept known as an externality, which is, roughly speaking, when an interaction has effects on individuals beyond those directly involved in the interaction. Think of it like if I am in a gunfight with a Negro and he misses, because they hold their guns weird, so the bullet that was supposed to hit me instead hits an innocent bystander. Notice how despite both of us aiming at each other, a third party was still hurt. Now we could point out that the problem is that a Negro has a gun, a set of perfectly acceptable state-level laws which should have never been repealed, but that's just the limit of the analogy. The problem is that everything has effects beyond the one single interaction, such sulfur dioxide or flammable drinking water.

If people focus solely on their own well-being, then they will fail to account for externalities. I obviously won't, because being able to pollute makes my operations cheaper. You won't because I've lied to you for years about how the unregulated market is perfect and thanks to a terrible education system mixed with just enough racism, you believe it and think that getting strange forms of cancer at age 35 is either normal or caused by gay people, depending on whether we're having our two minute hate, also known as a Santorum rally.

Within the context of LFD or LFR, this means that, contrary to the supposed goals of individualism, no one will take any personal responsibility, but will instead look out for themselves by heaping as much blame and pain on others as is possible. That's the great irony of hyper-individualism, by promoting total disregard for others, it ignores any personal responsibility. Why would I take the blame for my own problems when I can blame you and put the cost on you? I will ninja all I want and it will be your problem, not mine. I will wipe us and blame you. I will ditch the group if I perceive the slightest possible upset and won't care, because all the cost of that action is borne by you, not me. With no system to hold me accountable, I certainly won't, and you won't be able to.

And that's why I'm a libertarian in LFD.

I can hear you now, screaming that I'm just a strawman libertarian, that real libertarians would never poison children for personal gain, that they take responsibility for what they say and do. And I laugh. Please, tell me, if we're all going to be free, who can tell me to do anything else? Not government, of course, that would be excessive regulation, which which I mean any regulation. Not society, because you're all just a bunch of rabble who, of you had any actual power, would be here with me, defending it.

I want to share with you what I call the Flower of Liberty.

No, you're not the flower. You're in the middle and the petals are all my private property, which you don't get to cross. You are, of course, free from any government rules, taxes, or regulation. But don't cross my property lines.

Be free, little one. And hold your breath if the wind shifts; the southern flowers have the sulfur burners.

Virtual Materialism

2012-01-13T06:00:00.003-06:00

If I can buy it, it's worthless.

I had too far to walk, so I did my usual thing, thinking too much. Along the way I wandered back to WoW and my abandoned banks and bags. Filled. With what? Gold? Certainly some. Herbs and ores and badge loot? Some as well. Generic things. Commodities.

I started thinking of my own material situation, or of hypothetical situations. What if I had a million dollars? I'm not sure what I'd buy. Certainly I'd buy an end table and some pictures for my sparse walls, not to suggest that the end table is for the walls. I'd buy a very nice computer. Maybe even a TV. Maybe not the TV, seems pointless. And then what?

Maybe I could consume. Not buy, but consume, like real Americans do. I could buy shoes to not wear and cars to sit in traffic. For what?

Symbolism. These things are not all that great, but they symbolize wealth. I guess that's nice for some people. For me, I think a bank balance makes a good symbol of wealth. But then why is my long-lost paladin decked out in Judgement and wielding a Thunderfury and who knows what silly other items?

They are not wealth! They symbolize something different. They symbolize experiences. Thunderfury is time in Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, a reminder of times I enjoyed. The armor as well. Somewhere a scepter is waiting as the last step to opening Ahn'Qiraj, a useless item these days, but a reminder of the quest chain, one of the longest ever. A reminder of time and experience.

No badges can buy that. And similarly, what can money buy? I cannot think of what money would buy to remind me of anything. It would have none of me in it. I suppose we could draw on Marx and his thoughts on how workers have become separated from the product of their labor. I work one job and buy something else; entirely disconnected. Or I farm randoms for badges, like an assembly line putting in a rivet all day every day, and I get back something in which I had no part in the creation. None of what I have is unique, but it is mine, by my creation, by my action, so it is bound to me. It gives a new meaning to items being soulbound.

Maybe someday I will build my own house, or at least remodel it. I've done that a lot, but almost never where I live. So there are dozens of houses with me in them. My brother's house as well; wood I stained and a very nice ceiling design that I installed. I was relieved when they decided not to move just yet, because they could not have bought that house.

There's a new way to look at the evolution of WoW, from the cottage industry of little loot tables to the factory of badges. I suppose I'm just a Luddite.

Blizzard announces plans for new Warcraft-themed MMORPG

2012-01-11T06:00:00.003-06:00

I don't normally do news, because for the most part "news" just means a copy-paste of whatever someone said followed by some pointless commentary from the supposed journalist topped off with a request for comments, all of which end up somewhere between "best new game ever" and "that's so stupid", with a swirl of Nazis and at some point someone spells Microsoft with a dollar sign instead of an S. Speaking of which, did you ever realize that 75% of the letters in Nazi are also present in Blizzard? And if you consider that r looks a little bit like n, that pushes it up to at least 90%. Just saying. Anyway, "journalism" in the form of out-of-context quotes, commence:

"If there is one thing we've learned from WoW, it is that there is a lot of demand for the Warcraft IP, especially in a persistent online environment."

"The Warcraft missions gave a lot of action, but it often felt like the story was put to the side. We want to really show the players what they are fighting for by getting them personally involved in the story and battles."

"The bit of branching in Starcraft turned out to be popular, so we're taking it to the next step in this new MMO, allowing players to not just pick a different order to do quests, but letting them even just wander this vast world of Azeroth and see what they find."

"Customizing the hero units in Warcraft 3, finding the obscure trinkets from demonic portals hidden away from the narrow path, people really enjoyed that a lot. We want to bring that to this game, the ability to customize to fit how you want to play, and to find something new and interesting when you go off the path a bit."

And of course some ignorant asshole from marketing: "This is the time of the franchises and spin-offs. The Old Republic is capitalizing on Star Wars, Lord of the Rings Online is building off the success of putting a bunch of hot guys and elves in the same movie, and of course EVE online is striking a chord with the Christian crowd."

I was most encouraged by this last quote: "We all still remember NGE and you can trust us that we're not going to radically alter the game to bring in a few more subscribers."

Wrath of the Lich King killed Wrath of the Lich King

2012-01-10T06:00:00.003-06:00

When I think back on my raiding experience in Burning Crusade, I also think back to my raiding experience in vanilla. There was much I didn't finish in vanilla, or didn't even start, and BC gave me another shot at it. With ten levels and a few tiers of gear inflation, I could go back for another crack at it. Certainly it was not the original experience, an inevitable thing given that we were acting as 10 or so people taking the place of 40, with new class mechanics breaking all sorts of old rules. But it was something, to intentionally misquote an old towel advertisement, almost, but not quite, entirely like the raids.

Treadmills don't give much sense of progress. We gain more levels and gear, and so do our AI enemies. So where are we now? Nowhere new. But we can get a sense of progress when we walk backward off the treadmill, thereby gaining a greater sense of our gain in power as well as the way this metaphor has gone off track. In BC I was stronger than in vanilla and I knew this because in BC I could solo Garr and a few other bosses, where once I could not even glance the wrong way at a trash mob. And in Wrath of the Lich King I knew I was stronger because I could solo Karazhan and bring small groups to other places as well.

The sense of being incomplete was part of what drove me. I'd tried and failed and now I would try again. There were bosses I'd not killed, interesting drops I'd not gotten, quests left undone, AQ gates, anyone? One could say that this is evidence of an elitist, overly restrictive game design. I don't think so. I much preferred to have something left over.

At the least it was a radical change of scenery and way of playing. Having raid content when I'm supposed to do that raid content is nice, but it gets to be the same thing over again, the same cruel loot tables, the same distribution problems, the same shortage of the same class or role, the same thing just in a differently painted room. Old raids offer something different. It's not quite trivial, it's not quite new and not quite old, it's entirely useless and yet, through that uselessness, entirely liberated. When the loot becomes a toy rather than a deserved, demanded reward, people are nicer about it. It's simply a different experience, raiding old raids, than anything else in the game. Raid old raids is a form of content, accidentally created with the Burning Crusade expansion.

But Lich King killed that. The rolling nature meant that I'd done all of the raids, except some of Ulduar which I was sick of anyway and that one place they added near the end that no one did. There was no sense of incompleteness. I felt as if I was done. Bosses dead, badges farmed. There was nothing I'd want to go back for, except maybe Shadowmourne, but by the end I'd grown to hate Icecrown Citadel. Too many months in the same place, farming the same badges, off the same bosses, with the most miserable architecture imaginable. Blue and grey are sorrowful, while at least the red and oranges of vanilla and BC had some fire to them, some happiness or at least rage.

When I felt stalled before, I could go back and progress in the past, going backward for another path forward. Lich King used up all the forward. So when I stalled in Cataclysm, I had nowhere to go back to, nowhere else to go forward, and so I left.

Skyrim gets rogues right

2012-01-09T06:00:00.004-06:00

This cannot possibly go badly.

I was expecting to get one decent hit, and then promptly get flattened.

Instead, my rogue was fast. Very fast. He got off a solid hit, then followed it up with a slash and a finisher, with the giant dead before it could respond.

He's certainly squishier than the paladin I hope to make someday, for which I have low expectations (melee and healing don't seem to mix well, ever). While he has more armor than my mage, he's stuck in melee for damage and is less mobile (no fast bow movement yet), with pitiful healing as well. It's not all bad news. Shields seem to actually do something, not just blocking, since the bash ability has many uses, from interrupt to set-up for counter-attack.

It's the stealth that ruins rogues. In WoW it is the absurdity of combat, that strangest of mechanics which gives mobs the amazing ability to always know my exact location, regardless of line of sight, light, and noise. Once in combat it is often impossible to get out until one side is entirely dead. Being in combat negates stealth and sneaking. If you're not sneaking, why are you a rogue?

Skyrim actually pulled it off. Enemies may be alerted, without being omniscient, though I have noticed that they are sometimes at the opposite extreme, searching in the exact wrong direction: "I think I saw something! Over here in this brightly lit corner behind me, nowhere near those suspiciously well-placed shadows where if I squint I can just barely make out the silhouette of an elf." Even if they spot me they are not permanently on my tail. But I might question why, if someone next to them just died to an arrow to the chest, they would ever revert to a fully relaxed state. I'm not saying they would be permanently hunting for me, but the order of events should never go like this:

1 - Fellow bandit dies to arrow in the chest (knee wounds, while notoriously debilitating, also also rarely fatal)
2 - "What was that?"
3 - NYD bandit wanders around a bit, looking for something.
4 - NYD bandit returns to corpse of dead fellow bandit
5 - "I guess it was nothing."

My rogue feels right. He can sneak around and pick of targets here and there. He avoids groups when possible, waiting for wandering members to be isolated. He can, if things get really bad, go toe-to-toe with enemies, but it is not a pretty process. When fighting wolves, one of the finishing moves is to kick them before stabbing them. It really helps reinforce the idea that my character is a huge jerk.

This one time, he killed an entire instance full of bandits, except one guy, patrolling near the middle. Now he can finish his patrol and know that not only is everyone dead, but that he's surrounded by the corpses, and surrounded by his own failure as a guard. I'm imagining him as an utterly broken man. Or, if he's like me, he's looting their corpses and throwing out the bits that have a low value/weight ratio. I hope he's not like me. I frighten myself. It's pretty hit or miss if I kill everyone in a place or if I only kill the one and only one target, leaving all the rest leaderless and shocked. I killed a woman at her wedding. Then I stole her wedding dress. My first ever murder was a bard who charged too much for his awful singing. When told to pick who should die in order to join the Dark Brotherhood I killed all three of them, but picked the woman with the family first. Sometimes I beat rabbits to death to steal their souls, in order to recharge my mace that steals souls, which was gifted to me by a definitely evil demon prince.

Oh yea, screw stealth, what's the point of being a rogue if you can't be an utterly evil person? Maybe I should try this Star Wars game; I've heard it has some unsavory classes.

I thought I was bored with dragons

2012-01-06T06:00:00.003-06:00

But these people showed me a whole new level of indifference.

Afterward their only remark was "ooh, shiny" as I healed myself up a bit.

In related news, I love the random killing blow animations. With that demonic mace I'm using they look especially effective. It's quite a fun weapon to use, nice and solid with enough spiky bits to make it clear that whoever just got hit is, at best, in crippling pain. My favorite part is when they are almost dead and stagger a bit saying how they give up, and then I beat them again and see their soul get torn out.

My 5-5-5 Plan

2012-01-05T06:00:00.002-06:00

What I'm currently playing: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Civilization V, and Poker Night at the Inventory, which has five players and is only here so I could get a third five.

Here and there I read annoyance or anger over the habit of publishers to stick to just a few franchises and slightly tweak them over and over for massive profits. I think that's not at all the problem.

Here I am playing the fifth in two series, after having played the fourth, and in the case of Civilization, the third (I won't count my brief time with Civ II). I like these series. Are they just incremental steps in the series rather than innovative new games breaking new ground? Well, yes. What's wrong with that?

The Civilization series has it's formula: build cities, kill everyone else, rule the world, using a mix of city management and planning as well as military strategy and tactics. Until V it didn't have any major deviations from this formula. Sure, IV added some features and the expansions added more and we got more nuances to the civilizations, but ultimately it was the same general game. V brought the biggest change with the wargame-like combat, for which it ended up receiving criticism. Maybe it wasn't innovation, but it certainly ended up being an argument against change. People knew what Civilization was and that's what they wanted. And there's the whole reason for the franchises, at least on the consumer side: we know what we're getting. I know that some companies consistently make good games and some series are consistently good.

Similarly, as I see it, Skyrim is a much prettier Oblivion with some nice added mechanics, but it is essentially the same game. I don't mind this at all. Oblivion was a fantastic game for me and so far, Skyrim is performing well. The fact that it was not a dramatically different game was what sold me on it: I knew what I was getting and I knew that was a gameplay and type of story that I enjoyed.

I think the true problem is this: first person shooters and sports games. They're stagnant. I believe that they are doomed to be stagnant, at least until something changes dramatically. "Shoot guys in this hallway" has its limits. Crysis pushed this out by often giving an island rather than a hallway, and I commend it for that, but that's a harder model to go with and I don't think it is going to catch on. Open areas are harder on the game, harder on the AI, and frankly, I think many people don't even want that much flexibility. I know I played the Halo demo for a long time because it offered convenient point and click violence, without much need for planning or any thought at all.

I do like the shooting people gameplay, but the typical hallway shooting just doesn't do much for me. It's too scripted, too restricted, and in general, lasts only a few hours. I don't see much sense in paying $50 for an afternoon or two. Maybe I'm just spoiled by too much WoW, which as linear as it has become, is still a wide-open sandbox compared to 99% of FPS. Maybe that's why I enjoyed the Stalker games so much, for their combination of shooting people and sandbox.

I don't like sports games much because unless they go in the silly direction, such as anything featuring Mario or that one NBA game we played back on the N64 (Hang Time?), they just seem stupid. This is of course, my opinion, which is how we know it is correct.

You probably noticed that I'm leaving out that all-important multi-player experience. No one is paying $50 for a few hours of scripted AI. They're paying $50 for months or years of online play with friends and enemies. That's great, but it's not for me. So for me, a single-player player, they aren't worthwhile.

We've now established that franchises are good, except when they make games I don't like. Why would anyone make these bad franchises and why would anyone buy them? Well obviously, they make them because people buy them, like in the classic movie: "if they come, you will build it." So why buy them? If the previous game was playable and fun, why buy the new one if it is only incrementally better? Slightly better for a few hours of single-player isn't worth it, but slightly better over months or years of play, now that is worth it.

But why not make a much better game? Because that's harder! And riskier. Franchises are safe. Customers know what they are getting and companies know what to make. New ideas might not work. Putting major changes into an existing franchise risks its security. Putting them into a new title risks a lot of money, and who will be the customers except the people already buying the incremental upgrade? It's risk with little reward.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go back to Skyrim and ponder why the Dwemer ruins remind me of a combination of Gnomeregan and Titan ruins, complete with their own degenerate race that breaks through walls to kill everyone, which look like exceptionally ugly elves.

Zero Means Zero

2012-01-03T06:00:00.001-06:00

Microwave, World of Warcraft, please, sit. I want to talk to you about a problem we've been having. Maybe we need some historical context for this, you know, for perspective.

*sigh*

Where do I even begin? Okay, here's roughly how I remember it, and not directly copied from Wikipedia.

"By the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the Babylonian mathematics had a sophisticated sexagesimal positional numeral system. The lack of a positional value (or zero) was indicated by a space between sexagesimal numerals. By 300 BC, a punctuation symbol (two slanted wedges) was co-opted as a placeholder in the same Babylonian system. In a tablet unearthed at Kish (dating from about 700 BC), the scribe Bêl-bân-aplu wrote his zeros with three hooks, rather than two slanted wedges."

"Records show that the ancient Greeks seemed unsure about the status of zero as a number. They asked themselves, "How can nothing be something?", leading to philosophical and, by the Medieval period, religious arguments about the nature and existence of zero and the vacuum. The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea depend in large part on the uncertain interpretation of zero."

See that's where I think it came from. You're like the Greeks. Except not quite. Maybe you're like... Anyway, my point is that you're stupid.

Counting goes 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. Counting down goes toward zero and... Okay imagine that you're running a race and there is a countdown so it goes 3, 2, 1, GO! What? No. No that's just stupid. I have never ever run a race that went 3, 2, 1, 0, GO!

Look, let me just say my bit and you can go back to being stupid.

If the timer is at 0, that should mean you turn off, not beep a bunch and keep rotating the food for a few more seconds. And if fear is at 0 seconds that means it is DONE. I am SICK and TIRED of getting KILLED because you think that ZERO LASTS TEN SECONDS!

Er.

Well yes, thank you for joining me here today.

Skyrim: Porn Edition

2012-01-02T06:00:00.005-06:00

Add a second to the tally of lonely women living in the middle of nowhere who suggest staying a while and complaining that the guards never give any alone time.

Skyrim has made quests a bit more interesting, even more so than they were in Oblivion, relative to choiceless quests so often found in extremely popular MMORPGs. I first heard this in relation to the Dark Brotherhood line, which didn't surprise me, since the quests in Oblivion were some of the best in the game, competing only with the Thief's Guild for general awesomeness. Let me put it this way, when dealing with chaotic, but not necessarily evil demons, it is very hard to actually anger them, so feel free to follow your own path.

Crafting is now done with equipment at locations, such as forges, cooking pots, and alchemy tables. Also, there is not crafting that does not involve turning corn and rice into stamina potions. I don't know yet if I will care much about the expanded crafting system, but I suspect I'll learn more when I make my second character. At some point I hope to make a rogue sort of evil guy, who follows the right path overall (saves the world) but in the wrong way (kills half of it for fun).

I forgot to mention the assistant at the inn in Falkreath. She's very friendly. Friendly. You know what I mean. The first lonely woman I ran into seemed fine. Family got killed, she killed the killer, so now she lives in the woods, surviving despite people trying to kill her. Strong. It seems perfectly reasonable that she'd be a bit lonely, given her years of isolation excluding bandits. If this was a party-based game like Dragon Age, that seems like a set-up to recruit a party member. Then I ran into the inn assistant who insisted on pointing out what a big strong man I am. Maybe that's her job. She seemed to be wearing a strange mix of warm clothes and exposed legs and cleavage that made me suspect that it is her job to flirt with customers while not freezing to death. Then there was the woman at the inn, who wanted me to stay a while, despite not renting any rooms.

I'm not sure what to make of the politics in Falkreath. On one hand, the new Jarl seems like the corrupt type to push out his uncle to be the big fish. On the other hand, the uncle also seems a bit paranoid, so maybe it was a legitimate move to remove him. There does seem to be a lot of imperial activity, understandable given the rebellion, and with a rebellion, it seems like a good idea to install puppets.

Speaking of rebellions, I don't think there are quite enough to keep track of. We've got the Talos agitators, the Forsworn who are whining about being conquered thousands of years ago, the Stormcloaks who want independence, but are also enemies of the Forsworn, the corrupt Silver-Bloods who make the Koch brothers look like upstanding citizens, and of course, rumors of a dragonborn, which mostly means the guards ask me to stop shouting so much. Yea, they want me to stop shouting. Once right after I killed the dragon that would have turned their little town to ashes.

I think I've been playing WoW too long, because I figured, if guy tells you to join in the prison escape, you join in the prison escape. I didn't recognize that I could stab him during the process. So now there's some crazed racist guy running around worshipping demons. At least most of his friends seem to have died and I didn't get blamed for the three guards I killed or the dozen or so people I was framed for killing, or in a dozen or so cases, actually killed. What I'm trying to say is that all the killing was justified and the only unjustified one was a frame. I had nothing to do with it! Honest!

Speaking of hijinks ensuing, I got into a drinking contest. I figured it would be like the punching contests, but with alcohol. Instead I woke up finding that I had trashed a temple and fondled their statues. And at some point I kidnapped a goat and sold it to a giant. Sanguine's Rose was a much more interesting weapon in Oblivion.

So yadda yadda killing thousands of more people, next thing I know I'm a thane or two and I've got this woman following me around carrying stuff when I ask. I figured I should visit the mage college and along the way got attacked by a dragon. Somehow this particular fight didn't go very well. I found myself caught in a full blast staying alive with heals, but without the mana to retaliate safely. Then it died. I had some running to do, on account of not wanting to get hit by the giant either.

Between feeling lazy over the holidays and playing Skyrim for the majority of the hours in the day, I'm probably going to be posting infrequently still. Maybe Wednesday I'll try to find all the things Skyrim does better than Oblivion and see if I can find anything it does worse. Before I forget: merchants having limited gold available makes a lot more sense than the Oblivion model of limited gold per transaction, but it sure is annoying at some times, especially early on when I found myself stuck in some little nothing town. That's what I get for wandering off the first chance I got. Maybe that's why the start of the game has me literally tied up; it was the only way to ensure I'd do at least something when I was supposed to.

A Wander Through Skyrim, part one of too many

2011-12-31T06:00:00.004-06:00

Rather than try to rehash my half-formed and half-forgotten thoughts after the fact, I'm going to do what I did with my WoW starter posts, that is, constantly interrupt myself to write down what I'm thinking of the action at the time. I suppose if someone read deeply enough into these posts they'd be like a walkthrough of a sort. A really useless walkthrough.

I don't like "action" at the start of games. I'm in a new world with a new game and having to run around at the start tends to disorient me. Oblivion had a much better first start, sticking me in a small cage for a while while Captain Picard talked about stars. And I couldn't quite hear the dialogue early on ad had to put my system volume much higher, with the game already maxed out. I expect to be deafened if I play anything else (take note of the use of if vs. when and consider it part of the review). It feels a bit like Oblivion with prettier graphics and an inexplicably worse interface. That's an impressive feat, given that Oblivion already had a pretty bad interface, particularly for spells. At least now it seems to break them up better into restoration vs. destruction (Are there no other types? Don't answer) whereas Oblivion seemed to have "all powers" "active effects" and "random assortment of some of the powers".

The continuous casting is pretty nice so far. I can't explain why, but I like the feel up of it more than the magical quanta of Oblivion. On the other hand, holding up my glowing hands constantly makes me wonder when I'm going to hear a crackling voice over the radio, "Hit em with the combo! Zap em and whack em!"

My first death came early on, when I was picking up a cabbage. I couldn't quite get the other, so I tried to jump onto the cart for a better angle. Then the physics engine woke up on the wrong side of the bed, stuck me through the cart, and threw us both against the wall until I was dead. Thankfully, I quicksave compulsively after even the most minor of events (excluding death by cart), so I wasn't set back very far.

So stuff happens and I kill a bear with an arrow in the knee and next thing I'm being told we should split up but meet him at such as such place where his father works or something and I'm thinking:
1) We just met and you think we need to break up?
2) Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I'm not into men.
3) We just met and you want me to meet your father? Woah, slow down there!

So I did the logical thing and wandered off aimlessly. I caught some flowers and killed a couple bandits. Then I met some hit woman living in the mountains where I was searching for a dragon. She taught me to shoot a bow and I didn't kill her. Then I wandered some more and died a few times to a Sprig monster that seemed to kill me with magical floating bugs. But eventually I wandered into a town and did my first alchemy and got annoyed that it gives the option to randomly combine ingredients when none have known effects, failing to carefully explain to the noob that you're supposed to eat the ingredients raw and if they don't kill you, use them for potions. So I ate a bunch of stuff and then needed some healing. Then I went off to kill a great beast and wandered into a cave that I should have guessed was a bad place to be, based on the large quantities of blood. Shriekwind Bastion isn't exactly an inviting name either.

Things were going quite well until I found myself incapable of seeing the chain to opena door. Eventually I googled it and got through, but this annoyed me, to be searching outside for information. Then I ran into a master vampire who demonstrated a remarkable ability to kill me in three hits on the middle difficulty while also being faster. I searched again and didn't find anything special beside him supposedly being vulnerable to fire, and yet he was still taking a long while to die to my double-casted fire, or at least a long while relative to the three seconds needed to kill me. Even after putting the difficulty at the lowest I found myself chugging potions to get him down. I guess that's a boss? Maybe I'm not supposed to be here at level 3.

More later, but that's enough of this round of rambling.

Limbo

2011-12-28T06:00:00.008-06:00

I'd heard good things about this game, so I finally gave it a try. Hm.

Let's start from the beginning. So, a screen is here with some grey and some black and maybe it is trees. Right. Is this a loading screen? Some sort of credits? An intro? Nothing seems to be going on. I did have to press any key to continue, so I'll do that again. Nothing. A? No. D! Nope. Space bar must do it.

Oh, arrow keys, gotcha. Neat. So let's run along now. Let's run along as demonstrate one problem with puzzle-solving games.

I don't think the same way you do. Sometimes I think this is because I am smarter than everyone else. Other times I think this is because of some undiagnosed mental illness. Usually I figured everyone has their brain wired a little bit differently (but mine is still wired better :P).

So what do we do when we see a giant spider? Well let's see, I saw a trap in that tree back there. That must be significant. The spider seems to be pretty tall, so maybe I can lure it back to the trap. Huh. It doesn't move. Well, maybe I can climb it! Nope, can't climb it. Maybe there was something else back there that I missed, like that previous puzzle that I tried to do the wrong way (we'll get to that one). Oh. Yes, of course, the trap fell on the ground. Well let's just drag that right back here and okay, problem solved.

Rewinding a little bit, let's see right here we have some water and a box. Hm. Well let's see, my swimming isn't so great. So I drown. Maybe I can float on the box. Nope. Maybe I can hang on to the box and sort of have-swim, half-float, then climb up at the end. Nope. Uh... shove box out farther and do a jump-jump maneuver. Also nope. Oh well of course! This time the usually background nothing trees are in fact the solution, I just need to climb a bit and push over the conveniently rotten one and walk across.

It's not all bad. There were at least two occasions where I was running or rolling right along and saw something come on the screen and instantly understood: "yep, that is going to crush me" or "yep, I gotta keep hopping and keep this rolling before a spider eats me" or "yep, I say yep a lot in my fake dialogue, despite it rarely being a word I use while gaming." So that was good. I liked that. It felt like it had some of the flow going like in Mirror's Edge.

But I'd guess I only played for 10 or 15 minutes (or I have no sense of time and Steam says 23 minutes). That's not very long for me when I'm on break from anything remotely like work or school for at least a couple weeks. I ended up quitting, frustrated, thinking "this stupid game." Maybe I'll come back to it later, possibly with a better impression. In the meantime, I can watch Firefly and wonder why I only get around 200-500kb/s at home.

Passive Patricide

2011-12-27T06:00:00.007-06:00

If Luke had just learned to heal Vader might have lived.
That's what happens when you don't learn to heal: your dad dies

-Iapetes

I'm stealing that.

-Klepsacovic

Is it plugged in? Idiot.

2011-12-26T06:00:00.016-06:00

If you're the sort of person who remembers this sort of thing, you might remember that a bit back I had some random crashing issues related to Civilization V. Fun stuff. I decided it was due to the RAM. So I did the logical thing:

No of course I didn't run a RAM test. That takes too long! Instead I pulled one one of the sticks and replaced it with two older ones. Yea, wrap your head around that. I'm just that good. At first things seemed better. And then not. This suggested that it was either the other stick or something entirely different.

I went with the third option: ignore it and just start playing Civ IV again.

Then one day I went poking around again and noticed something odd: one of my replacement RAM chip wasn't fully seated. Huh. So I gave it a good shove back in, checked all the others, and for good measure, stuck back in the "bad" stick.

No more crashes.

So no, it was not plugged in.

At least that's not quite as dumb as my headset with the non-functional microphone. I mean, duh, of course I want "mute" set to off. Months later I flipped that switch and have not stopped talking since.

Apparently there was a Christmas yesterday, which would explain why people kept giving my boxes wrapped in strangely flimsy paper and why I had a strange compulsion to put perfectly usable items in similarly oddly-wrapped boxes. Short version: I have Firefly and Serenity DVDs, a lot of tea, and some nice dress shirts, as if I were not classy enough already. Next to me, Trump looks like a barbaric pig, and not just because that's because what he is.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have ten thousand cookies to eat.

I Hate Christmas

2011-12-23T06:00:00.001-06:00

I used to enjoy Christmas. I'd eat cookies and get legos and it was a lot of fun.

These days Christmas isn't any fun at all. In terms of school it means a major crunch as everyone stuffs finals and projects into the last week. That week is, of course, right before Christmas, leaving me little time to shop. Oh sure, in magical fantasy land I could do my shopping before then. But no one writes lists until around then anyway. Maybe other people can get by without lists, but that requires a level of social connection that I do not achieve. I pride myself on remembering the names of family.

Of course it doesn't help that people mostly just talk about work. Why not hobbies? Anyone can work any job (take this in context), but hobbies actually tell you about who a person is. Without them, I am left wondering without the slightest clue. It's on par with St. Valentine's Day for holidays dedicated to making introverts feel bad.

It's also just plain too much socializing. A gathering now and then is nice. I wrote this on Thursday after spending too much time trying in vain to find gifts, wondering why stores exist if they don't sell anything worth buying. Then the evening was spent watching Christmas movies. The next day (today) will be occupied with a trip downtown to the German market, which was a lot of fun in high school when I went with my German class, but now it's likely to involve a lot of walking in the cold and making fun of stuff for no good reason, before heading back home. That night my brothers and I will go to dinner with my uncle, a Christmas tradition that bucks the trend by always being a lot of fun.

The next day is of course Christmas Eve, a name which makes no sense if you actually break it down. The day will be spent rushing around to make food to take to my brother's house where I will spend far too many hours being bored by talking to people with whom I share no common interests. One of these days I should retaliate and subject them to a mob by mob description of grinding for Insane in the Membrane.

But hey, next day is Christmas, when I can cringe when I see that I have, as usual, given relatively few gifts, and am not certain whether anyone will want them. Then I can, rather than enjoying the gifts I've received, spend even more time in excessively large groups. For context, I don't much like any more than five people, and even then, it has to be of a composition that doesn't cause two pairs and an extra sitting around awkwardly (me).

None of this results in me getting enough sleep either.

Merry Christmas, from all of us (just me) here at Troll Racials are Overpowered.

Did Trion get hacked or is this a marketing scheme?

2011-12-22T23:59:00.001-06:00

I got this legitimate-appearing email regarding Rift, which says scary things backed up by their own website, among them,

We recently discovered that unauthorized intruders gained access to a Trion Worlds account database. The database in question contained information including user names, encrypted passwords, dates of birth, email addresses, billing addresses, and the first and last four digits and expiration dates of customer credit cards.

You should have continued, uninterrupted access to RIFT, and we do not anticipate any disruptions to your playing time.

Nevertheless, if you own the RIFT game, you will be granted three (3) days of complimentary RIFT game time once you update your password and security questions.

I don't own it, so nothing for me here just yet.

Additionally, once you update your account and set a new password, your account will be granted a Moneybags’ Purse, which increases your looted coin by 10%, even if you have not yet purchased RIFT.

Wait, what?

I can see giving some gift to subscribers for all their mental anguish (ma epics might possibly be gone!), but "even if you have not yet purchased RIFT"...

"Hey guys, we got hacked and your information might or might not have been compromised, but you know what? Here's some free gold if you start playing!"

Weird.

In defense of insanity

2011-12-22T06:00:00.004-06:00

Blizzard's writers have a standard way of making new bad guys: take some good guys and make them go insane. Violin: bad guys. This method is criticized for being lazy and formulaic. I disagree. The nature of the Warcraft universe requires that any true enemies be either innately evil or have been corrupted/gone insane.

Look at it in context. Within the real world greed is a powerful driver. It pushes people to do stupid or evil things. But how powerful can greed really be, in the Warcraft universe? In the real world, greed can get you killed. That's nothing in Warcraft. In that universe, greed can get you tortured for all eternity, and I don't mean "I read in a book that if I am greedy I'll get tortured for all eternity", I mean that you have literally seen demons and magic and know quite well that eternal torture is a strong possibility.

When there are forces that seek to unmake reality itself, everyone is on the same side. This idea first came to me from the Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card, my number one writer for veiled homophobic writing. In the series the hero is in a fight against the Unmaker, a being who seeks to unmake everything, somewhat reminiscent of the Burning Legion. A wise old man tells Alvin that even Satan, the obvious enemy of God, would on his side in this, because Satan wants to rule something. Even evil hates chaos.

From this perspective, we can see how it makes no sense at all to ally with the Burning Legion. There is no reason to trust the demons. Given their propensity for cruelty, it is not hard to imagine them turning on all their allies and destroying them as well. Any alliance is merely putting off the day of personal horribleness while increasing the chances of it coming. It would be like guaranteeing you won't get cancer today by taking a drug that doubles you risk of cancer tomorrow.

One cannot ally with chaos, one can only join chaos. Think of when you see a protest. The protestors are thinking of a cause, a reason. You may disagree with them, but odds are, they are sane. Now contrast that with a riot, of broken windows and arson and police being attacked. Are those people thinking or considering the costs and benefits of throwing a rock through a window? No. They are chaotic. They are, temporarily, uncontrolled, inhuman, and insane.

Think of Kael'thas, who had once sacrificed everything to protect his people, and who then joined the Legion. It could be nothing less than corruption of his very nature, insanity. There is no future for his people in the Legion. Similarly, the Lich King could not be just an angry prince who went a bit too far. He had to be corrupted because only that would allow him to turn against his father, kingdom, and the very world. Merely being a little less empathetic and a little more fanatical would not do the trick. The Scarlet Crusade is another group which is not merely extremist, but entirely out-of-touch with reality. They would not otherwise attack anyone on sight as Scourge (note that I did not say "possible" or "suspected").

Beside the enemies, think of our own actions. When the world is at risk of ceasing to exist, are we going to quibble over small matters? We may argue strategy or tactics, but when there is a demonic army coming, it's not so important whether there is a troll standing over there. We're not going to go raid Stormwind just because Varian talked some smack while Deathwing is cataclysmizing the world.

On the other hand, there is also the "really stupid, short-minded idiot" method, of making someone a threat to the world not because they are evil or in league with evil, but because their sheer stupidity is threatening survival: for example, Garrosh and other orcs who kept picking fights during the campaign in Icecrown. I wouldn't call them evil, but we'd definitely have been better off killing them before they could do any more damage.

Either way, we're not likely to be flying off to a raid against a reasonable person with whom we have a legitimate disagreement.

A philospher walked into a bar

2011-12-21T06:00:00.001-06:00

And said "Which sort of bar are you refering to? The ambiguity makes it impossible to offer anything close to an accurate prediction, particularly given the impossibility of prediction unless we assume cause and effect, but maybe that's just me assuming the assuming cause and effect allows us to make predictions and oh god I've gone cross-eyed."

The theist and atheist look at him, puzzled. Then they went back to shouting.

"How can you possibly have anything to look forward to without knowing the wonderful things behind this door? The room is filled with possibilities!"

"So is the rest of the house. It's filled with the possibility of all the stuff I bought when I moved in. What's the big deal about this one room?"

"You inherited this house from your grandfather and clearly this room was important. Thing of all he means to you, all you owe to him, and you cannot even accept that he gave you this wonderful room?"

"He gave me a house, that's pretty wonderful enough."

"Aha, so you acknowledge the existence of your grandfather!"

"Uh, yes."

At this point the philosopher chimes in.

"We cannot actually prove his existence, as he is no longer capable of direct interaction with this world, existing only as a memory, a memory which could be false, making any actions based on it illogical."

"What the fuck?"

"In fact, I'm not sure either of you exist."

By now the scientist has returned and overheard much of the conversation. He pondered the mysteries of the universe, such as why he only brought two bullets.

A voice drifts in...

"Hi! I'm a psychologist and I can explain to you why people often fail to anticipate future problems. Furthermore, you are referred to as a generic scientist, which given that psychology is a science, means that I should be redundant. However I understand why this oversight occurred and have developed a series of exercises we can use to work on this social issue..."

*bang*

*bang*

The scientist was found innocent of killing the philosopher because we cannot prove that the philosopher ever existed and he'd have wanted it that way.

An atheist, a theist, and a scientist walk into a bar...

2011-12-20T06:00:00.010-06:00

By "bar" I mean "door", and by "walk into" I mean "stand in front of".

They try the knob, but it's locked. There is a weather strip at the bottom so they can't see in at all. The scientist sets about tapping on the door and attempting to move it around in its frame.

Meanwhile the atheist and theist begin to argue.

"What wonderful thing musts be in this room."

"It's empty."

"Of course it's not empty. Why would someone lock an empty room? Why would there be a room for nothing in it? No, it is logical that there would be something in there."

"We had no proof at all of anything in there. It's illogical to assume anything at all, especially that the imaginary items are 'wonderful'".

"You're just being blind. The room is clearly there. It is clearly artificial. It must have a purpose."

"It must have been built. We cannot assume it has a purpose. We definitely cannot assume that purpose is to store 'wonderful things'".

"You're being ridiculous, you cannot even see inside. Anything could be in there!"

"Also, nothing could be in there."

At this point the scientist is thoroughly annoyed with their attempts at philosophy based on poor logic and zero evidence. Thankfully, he carries a gun for these situations, but with one bullet; he's almost a pacifist, but not quite. But what should he do with it? He sees only one way to silence both of them.

He shoots the door, blasting a small hole in it.

Immediately the two combatants switch to physical methods, shoving each other to try to peer inside. It's a small hole and they block the light every time they look, not that they can concentrate, since they keep pushing each other away before they can focus on the dim conditions. But they are at least certain of one thing: the room is dark.

Finally the atheist has come to the conclusion he already had.

"See, I told you it's empty!"

"But it's dark, it could be in that shadow right there."

"The entire room is shadows!"

"Exactly, just imagine all the wonderful things!"

The scientist wanders off to ponder uncertainty and whether a coin flip would determine if God plays dice, musing that the true answer to Schrödinger's cat was to think inside the box.

Bosses are too small

2011-12-19T06:00:00.002-06:00

Shintar did not seem to enjoy fighting Deathwing much because he is too big to see. The sense of scale gets all thrown off and things just get confusing and disorienting.

The solution is obvious: Make him even bigger.

If Deathwing were even bigger, we could have the fight on him.

Phase one: Dodging claws as you run toward him with the goal of everyone being securely hanging onto a claw before he takes flight.

Phase two: Stab his ankles. Gnomes do 50% extra damage due to having a higher ankle-stabbing skill. Much of this phase is "dance" as you have to move to avoid him smashing you against walls.

Phase three: Climb onto his back and attack the plates. As they are broken, fire blasts out, breaking LoS and being an instant kill. It is important to kill them in something like a reasonable pattern. Black dragons are the main opponents, swooping in to grab people and fly them away. You must kill them before they can fly too high, somewhat like valkyr and LK in ICC.

Phase four: Deathwing is spewing fire from everywhere and clawing like mad. The goal is to run away and hide, fighting through waves of enemies while he slowly drags himself along after you (remember, his ankles are a mess). The phase ends with the escape ship flying away, a 30 second timer which begins when the first person is fully on board.

Phase five: You fly away and Deathwing explodes in the background, showering the deck with loot.

Eliminating Test Anxiety

2011-12-17T09:11:00.010-06:00

I have my last final of the semester in a bit under four hours. So test anxiety and stress are right on my mind. Some people deal with these with studying. Psh. It's a stats exam, so of course I spent last night teaching someone the basics of energy in chemical bonds. This morning I'm writing this and I can't imagine missing "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me", the NPR news quiz which is in less than an hour.

Most importantly though, I deal with tests with creativity, with applications of my vast knowledge, some of which is psychological. See where I'm going with this? Yep, I have my own way to deal with stresss based on proven psychology. We all know the "flight or fight" response. But have we ever truly applied it? We get all worked up over an intellectual challenge, but prepared for a physical challenge. So why not fix that so we can focus on thinking?

The general idea is to allow the flight or fight response to manifest itself fully, activate, and then go away. In specific applications this means I release a couple tigers into the building before exams and then we can all fight them or run like wimps. Once that's done, we're in the perfect mental state to tackle t-tests, z-tests, and of course, f-tests, which make a great stats exam pun. It makes sense, what is a bit of over-hyped algebra compared to tigers trying to kill you?

I'm still left with one nagging thought about regression. We (our classes) describe them as taking four general forms: level-level, ln-level, level-ln, and ln-ln, but no cow-level.

It's like social loafing, but the opposite

2011-12-14T13:10:00.028-06:00

What was supposed to be a three-month project is being done in about three weeks. So we're working our asses off. All the other groups think we're crazy. Maybe we are, and were, even before this.

The final bit of the project is a paper. A mere 20 pages, a trivial length for 5 people, and perhaps too short for the scope of the topic. But that's what we have to work with. The main idea is that there is a paper to write, with grades going to 5 people.

Some people would be social loafers. They'd know that 4 other people are there to do it. If I don't edit, they will. If I don't write enough, they will. If I disperse profanity throughout the paper, they'll catch it. To some extent this is true, that I am allowing them to pick up some slack, because that's what teams are for, distributing the load, playing to strengths.

But I cannot just sit back and let them do it all. I know it won't be as good as it could be. So here I am now thinking that the paper is good enough. I'd turn it in for myself. But it isn't a grade for 1 person; it's for 5 people. Any problem is multiplied. Maybe I'd accept an imperfect grade, but I cannot impose that on 4 other people. That's the wrong thing to do.

So I end up inversely socially loafing, doing more because of others, rather than less.

It reminds me a bit of raiding. When I solo I don't mind the deaths because it's entirely my own risk, my own cost, my own failure. But in a raid, if I screw up, I screw up for 9 or 24 other people. Or 39 once upon a time. That's not a good feeling. Early on, when everyone is making mistakes and raids aren't quite so difficult, it's manageable. But eventually it gets to me, it stresses me and angers me, that my mistake is hurting others, and I don't want to be that person.

But what is my benefit from working twice as hard at the raiding and preparation? It's a terrible scenario where the cost of not preparing is massive, hurting me a little and added up over everyone, a lot. But the extra work to fail less? Minor benefit to me, and also to the raid, because then someone else does it wrong and I cannot fix it for them. It's like Tobold would say now and then, with a raid testing the weakest member, rather than the strongest, or the average.

I like tests of strongest or of average. In the former, one weak member may cause no harm at all. In the latter, one weak member may have little overall negative impact. Not none, but little enough that it can be compensated for. But when the weakest member decides the outcome, then it's a race to remove the lowest, and then there is a new lowest, and in theory you remove all the low ones and have a core of high ones and then everything is good, but that's a chaotic process, a disruptive process, a particularly unfun process when everyone is under attack.

So that's that. And I really hate doing citations. I wish I could just paste in the source link. Here, professor, you want my sources, here is the agency budget and newspaper articles investigating it. Alas, I cannot do that.

In unrelated news, I think I'm going to hold off on buying Skyrim, as I've just started playing Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl again, with the excellent Oblivion Lost mod, and this time I plan to explore a bit more. Last time I had played a bit, hated the UI, and eventually rushed off because I wanted to see Chernobyl after I watched one too many documentaries on it. I'm looking forward to giving the Zone a better look. I'm not looking forward to the next leg of my journey, which is going to the underground X-18 laboratory, which is filled with mutants and dead babies in jars. It's a terrifying place. I might have gone there sooner, but during the day I don't have time and there is no way I am going there at night, not if I plan to sleep. It's a remarkably good game, which you should definitely buy. If you saw my review many months back I'd been less kind to it, but I think the mod, which is free and easy to install, improves it a great deal. Despite already having a reputation as a frightening and unforgiving world, the mod makes it even harsher. Because what we really needed were mind-controlling hostile mutants taking over the few safe areas. I take that back, two. There were two safe areas. Unless the military got aggressive, then only one. Or with the mod, none.

WoW has definitely moved away from world toward better gameplay. Stalker manages to have solid gameplay but without sacrificing the world. And what a world it is.

Students, good luck with finals. Parents, good luck with offspring with finals. Teachers, good luck with students with finals. Everyone else, you better be buying the rest of us some great Christmas gifts.

Crysis

2011-12-12T06:00:00.001-06:00

As part of an aggressive campaign of procrastination, I finally played Crysis. Thankfully, despite also featuring a conflict between America (good guys) and North Korea (like China, but not a major trading partner, so okay to portray as universally evil), it was not a huge pile of crap.

If you remember my review of Halo, which you shouldn't, because I never wrote one, I was a bit annoyed that the game starts off by firmly establishing the Covenant aliens as the Threat to Humanity and just as you're in the habit of sticking grenades to elites and meleeing hunters to death, suddenly the flood comes and you're spending all your time shooting popcorn. A twist is cool and all, but it felt like too much, too soon.

Thankfully, Crysis avoids that. There are several solid hours of using advanced technology to kill North Koreans in a variety of imaginative ways, such as shooting them with guns, shooting them with other guns, beating them to death with guns, and using guns to shoot nearby things which then explode and kill them. And this one time I ran over a guy with a humvee, but that was only because I missed with my gun. In all seriousness, the physics do offer some neat options beyond just shooting them, such as explosions and making roofs collapse on them. Or, use strength mode and one punch will send them flying.

Along the way the game gives fairly open areas to work in. It's not quite a sandbox, but you're given more than just "use this route if you like to get shot or this route if you are smart". Rather than walled-in levels, you get bits of map in which you can freely move about. Not everyone needs to be killed to complete the objectives, but since killing is half the fun (the other half is their screaming), I almost always did a sweep to make sure I didn't miss anyone.

The open areas give you options, as well as your enemies. You might think you're so sneaky to stealth over to the ledge and then use strength to jump over and hit them from the other side, but it turns out they were already going that way to try to sneak around and flank you. Yep, the ol' double-switcheroo. You can attack from all sides and get attacked from all sides.

I actually found myself getting a little antsy, when were the aliens going to really show up? I wanted to shoot some! Sadly, I had to continue to make do shooting North Koreans. Oh the drudgery of mindless human slaughter. But finally, after a few attacks by aliens who somehow always knew when it was a cutscene so we couldn't shoot back, finally I got to get stuck in a mountain and wander into their cave temple base thing. Yea.

The game ends up making Marines look like total pussies, not because they are, since earlier one takes on the giant scary monster that is the second to last boss single-handed to buy time, but because they are contrasted with the super-human guy. Oh what's that, a little rock fall has me stuck half a mile under a mountain? You guys go, I'll just find some more guns and shoot a hole out if I need to. What's that, gravity just went away? No problem, I'll just float right along and shoot anything else that flies. The carrier is getting blown up? Hang on, I need to go get my nuclear grenade launcher, but not before I go into the nuclear reactor and sheer strength to push down the malfunctioning control rods.

Sadly, the game gets a bit less awesome toward the end. Due to the necessity of having a bajillion aliens attack rather than just a few at a time, the player is given various unlimited ammo weapons, such as an alien gun and a humvee machine gun. Even though the game was never stingy with ammo, it was something to at least pay some attention to, making this a strange contrast which I didn't much enjoy. The flying part was even worse, until I realized that while the gun was an ilose button, the missiles were an iwin button. The last level on the aircraft carrier suffered from some major bugs. The game didn't seem to be certain whether I should or should not fall through the floor, so I had to keep going back a few save points to find one where the floor was properly defined as being impenetrable to feet. The really bit aliens were also at times unsure of whether they should be on the flight deck or a hundred feet up.

The ending might have been really cool, but it ended up being more of a relief that I had finally gotten past the physics bugs and could now play again, just in time to realize that the game was over. And that they definitely wanted me to buy a sequel.

My suggestion is to buy it; it's only $20 on Steam. Maybe in a few years I can give you an outdated review of Crysis 2. And in a few weeks, Crysis Warhead.

He was no dragon, fire cannot kill a dragon

2011-12-10T06:00:00.003-06:00

A concerned reader sent me this distressing news: Nefarian is no longer immune to fire damage. Shocking, I know.

Gameplay vs. Simulation
Using wording shamelessly stolen from Nils we can see that what is happening here is a weakening of simulation in favor of gameplay. It is easier to balance the encounter, and gives classes more options in their talents, if one tree of magic is not blocked. It also doesn't make much sense that a powerful black dragon is vulnerable to fire. These are the same dragons who come from eggs stored in a cave where lava is all over the place and whose mother, and/or wife, and/or sister, since dragons are weird like that, breathes fire all over the damn place, including on the eggs. His distant cousins under Wyrmrest have a tendency to throw waves of lava around with no damage to themselves. Fire just is not their main problem.

At an extreme I could see it. I'm sure if Deathwing started spewing fire they'd get toasted. Just like we can imagine that a sufficiently powerful mage could damage Malygos with arcane damage, but that bridge has been crossed, burned, and washed away. Not as if that fight demonstrated much gameplay-simulation tradeoff since it didn't do either very well.

I replied with this line from Game of Thrones: "He was no dragon, Dany thought, curiously calm. Fire cannot kill a dragon."

Not at all a waste of time
I'm being sarcastic. Changing the fire-immune status of a boss who has been old news for three expansions was a waste of time. It is an attempt to balance content that doesn't need to be balanced because it's already trivial.

It's all connected and I can prove it because I'm saying it very loudly
Dragon Soul comes out or came out or something, I've not been paying much attention, and people say it is too easy. Dragon. And at the same time, another dragon is retuned. Don't you see? The devs wasted all their time testing Nefarian to make sure he's balanced for level 85s soloing him for hats rather than testing the new raid. Normally I'd make a chalkboard drawing some dragons and an arrow or two, maybe with an exclamation point, but this is far too serious for mere chalkboards. Instead, I'm going to just leave you with this chilling thought:

P.S. Someone please leave a chilling thought in a comment; I'm coming up blank.

Ignorance Recognition Week is Coming

2011-12-09T06:00:00.001-06:00

AKA: Finals week.

I'm not sure I'll have much to post. This isn't due to lack of time, but due to brain damage caused by excessive thinking.

At least my final project is going well. So far what I've taken away from it is that avoiding regulatory capture is hard, but working for a captured agency is pretty damn fun! Look up the Bush-era MMS Royalty in Kind offices and tell me you'd not want to have a job filled with sex, drugs, money, more money, drugs, and in all likelihood if you quit, a higher-paying job in the industry you were supposed to be regulating. Sure the IRS brought in more money, but I bet they didn't have half as much fun.

In unrelated news, it is getting cold. This causes my bike-riding to be a little uncomfortable. At least my face freezes quickly enough that I never really feel it.

Ability Dance vs. Movement Dance

2011-12-07T06:00:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I talked about a great game that you might enjoy if you enjoy that sort of think (my apologies to President Lincoln for the butchering). I also talked about the interruptions of raiding, in particular, about how many boss abilities break the flow of abilities. At first glance this may seem inevitable, that if the encounter is going to be dynamic we must be interrupted. I disagree, with that vague strawman that I just created.

Sticking with the boss AoE, how can we deal with this without running away? Well obviously there is the "make the healer's deal with it" approach. I'm not a fan of that one. Let's backtrack: why are we running away? To avoid the damage. We can do that other ways, and in dynamic, reactive ways, which do not break the flow of play.

Anti-magic shell is one approach: have the DK drop it in time and it will negate enough damage to make running out pointless. This has the downside of placing the burden on one class, though it does add some coordination skill opportunities.

Let's imagine remaking the boss special so that rather than an AoE, it is a single-target, instant-kill, on a random play. Everyone is going to run out still, especially the tanks! Or, we could drop grounding totem. Now players can keep playing but the shamans will be reacting.

Fights could include some sort of added player ability, such as temporary immunity to a spell tree. Incoming AoE? Trigger the ability, but don't go running around and breaking your flow.

With these suggestions, players will still be reacting to the fight, paying attention, but without running all over like headless chickens.

Even with movement, it can have better or worse implementation. Grobbulus was a fight which I did not much enjoy. The constant movement was a physical problem, of actually pressing the right buttons while maintaining movement. It wasn't that it broke flow so much as it never allowed it in the first place. In contrast, I enjoyed being a slime kite on Rotface, where while I was moving and therefore my abilities were limited, it all fit together into a coherent set of actions, much like my vague example the other day where I enjoyed picking up streams of adds; in this case I am using fewer abilities in favor of more movement.

I don't mean to suggest that movement itself is bad. As I just said, it can be enjoyable, but it seems that devs often take "dynamic fight" to mean "players run around a lot" rather than "there are events for players to react to", with reactions including more than just standing somewhere else.

Mental Momentum and the Dances

2011-12-06T06:00:00.003-06:00

I recently started playing Mirror's Edge in some ways it reminds me of raiding in WoW. There is often a single set of correct moves, with only slight variation. Though not always; I've sometimes surprised myself by finding new paths on the fly.

Here's the trailer from EA, which has game footage, so you have some context. The clip isn't perfect, since what it shows is a pretty linear path, as well as one where most of the movement points are highlighted. That's what all the red is: objectives, particularly points to jump or doors to get through, are highlighted red.

There are other levels which are around on themselves. in which you cannot clearly see where you are going next. Think of it like going into a boss fight blind. What do you do next? There's no good way to know, beside looking up the fight, of course. But that's cheating!

Mirror's Edge is a game of momentum. You will spend most of your time not just moving, but moving based on how you were before: a jump into a roll, straightening up for a jump and climb followed by a sprint for the speed to get over a bigger gap, halfway along which there may be a bar to grab and quickly release, using it just for a second to avoid plummeting to your death.

The result of that, and of course good level design, is that you don't need to know what is next. Instead it tends to be what makes sense. Not always, but in general I have not had to stop and stare around wondering what to do, nor do I need to reload to know what to do. It all flows.

Contrast this with raiding, in which nothing flows. Play and now stop. Phase two: play and now stop. Phase three: play and now stop. Even worse than the major interruptions of the phases are the special abilities, with the generic "boss is going to AoE, run away" being the easiest to picture. There is a flow to the DPS or tanking, with one ability coming after the other in a chain that you can learn and master and in my experience, it can feel pretty damn good to get a good run going. But then it's time to run away, and all the flow is gone. Start over again, interrupted, mentally disrupted.

This doesn't mean that a target switch is itself a problem. When tanking I loved steady streams of adds, for the flow of finding, targeting, grabbing, juggling the rest of the mobs meanwhile. It was a smooth process, uninterrupted by more adds because they were part of the process.

Some of this is due to the mix of challenge and practice. Long-learned practice can feel like intuition. The third add is dead? Well of course we all run to the other corner! This is an illusion. There is no logical process that says that "third add dead means we should stand over there", not unless we add another step of "third add dead which we know from previous attempts triggers phase two which starts with an AoE over the rest of the room". Going back to the clip, I've done that particular run, successfully, but less smoothly. I had stops here and there, interruptions, not because of any flaw in the level, but from my own lack of familiarity with the game. With more play I've gotten smoother. Though wall running still causes problems.

Can raiding be more intuitive? Can it have more flow, with one action logically following the other, not because of what we've been told to do, but from what we can figure out along the way? This would be much harder to design, but I'm sure it is possible.

Trivial task experts are annoying

2011-12-05T06:00:00.001-06:00

"So that's what I sounded like..."

Between classes I work at a grill on campus, making burgers and fries. Note that these are much better than McDonald's burgers and fries. But that's beside the point. Recently, a more senior employee returned, someone who has worked there longer than I have and may have worked in food service before. In other words, someone who knows more than me.

I'm not slow or incompetent and I follow the food safety standards in both letter and spirit. But there are things that she knows that I don't, such as slightly better technique for burgers to make them a little bit better. Nothing dramatic, but worth knowing. So it's not as if she's nitpicking every damn little pointless detail. There's someone else who does that, who I do not believe has ever smiled.

It's annoying to me. The thought process is something along the lines of this: I'm doing an adequate job and have little incentive to improve beyond that, please stop bothering me.

Which brings me to my opening line: "So that's what I sounded like..." That's me. Or was me. I was the person telling people who were doing well enough that they weren't doing this little thing right. Change this thing or that thing. It's not that I was wrong or that all of it was trivial and pointless, but damn, it's annoying being on the other side!

The real kicker may be the triviality of it all: a burger joint, a trivialized heroic. In the context, performance improvements just don't mean much. But some people just cannot keep their damn mouths shut and have to point out everything. It's mentally painful for us to not point out the deficiencies of others and sometimes we're lucky enough to be in an area where we are the experts of the trivial task. For her it is food. For me it was WoW. And damn are we annoying.

4% Is Exciting

2011-12-04T06:00:00.000-06:00

You, person whining about how passive talents are boring, please shut up. About that specific subject, not in general. Passive talents are exciting. EXCITING!

Let's walk through things a bit. Here is a level 51 rogue. What does he have going for the next level? Well let's see... nothing. Next? Nothing. Only at level 54 does he get envenom. Woo! Excitement! In... three levels.

Now let's give him a Terribly Boring Passive Talents-Filled Talent Tree (TBPTFTT). Next level he can... well actually I'm not sure what talent he'd take at level 42 because the trees already got butchered. So let's say he's combat and will get Improved Sinister Strike for 4% damage to sinister strike, a terribly boring passive talent that I just made up and which he took after having picked up the 31 point talent which was exciting: Super Sinister Strike, which is like Sinister Strike, but it does more damage and adds a buff to increase his Sinister Strike damage by 25% for 20 seconds, with a three minute cooldown, which because it is a button makes it Fun & Exciting. In time he can get an entire 5 points for a total of +20% damage to Sinister Strike which leads into Even Better Sinister Strike which causes his Sinister Strike to have a chance (Ooh, no stated chance! I bet it's a PPM! Quick, theorycraft the slow weapons! Or maybe fast! What is the poison mechanic this week?) to reset the cooldown on Super Sinister Strike and also Improve Sinister Strike will now apply to Super Sinister Strike.

In other words, he hits level 42 and presses another button. Wee. WEE! INDEED!

That added button makes level 42 just a little bit more rewarding and eagerly anticipated. And level 44 too! With this boring passive talent he now has something to look forward to for level 42. It's not a big thing, but it is something. Contrast this with the typical nothing. Now what is boring? Yea, NOTHING. Nothing, outside of philosophy, is pretty fucking boring.

The boring passive talent isn't just a button. It's also a tantalizing possibility. Now there is that box that says 1/5 Improved Sinister Strike increases the damage of Sinister Strike by 4% and if you mouse over it also says that 2/5 would increase it by 10%. Right there, that is room for growth. Oh man, 2/5 is on its way. And then 46, that's 3/5! 48 gives 4/5. And then... oh shit, it's level 50! Ooh, side-track time to get that sweet 40 point talent (note that there may not actually be a sweet level 40 talent, if not, shift things up or down by 10 levels and you'll find one). But level 52, bam, box is filled up with a 5/5 and now he can see that Even Better Sinister Strike is at an empty 0/2. Looks like he has a plan for level 54 and 56. Sweet. Who knows what 58 will be, but damn, it's only going to be one point before level 60 and we know level 60 is going to ROCK.

But leveling ends and now... Now he's just a level 85. Or 97, whatever the level cap is for MoP. Now he's filled up his tree and there's nothing left. He can respec. And now, well now those passive abilities are pretty damn boring. Woop-dee-doo, 4% damage to Sinister Strike. Who fucking cares? On the other hand, Super Sinister Strike... also, who fucking cares? He's now making exciting choices anymore. He's picking the talents that he's supposed to have. There aren't going to be any exciting talents because there is no more advancement and no choice. Blame the level cap and excessive optimization, not the TBPTFTT. You thought I wasn't going to get to use that. Idiot.

"But," you say, "we have MoP now and we don't have all those silly talents. We have Fun & Exciting choices." Like hell you do.

Science in the News

2011-12-02T06:00:00.002-06:00

It's been an exciting week for science, just like last week, except last week was too hard for me to understand, so I ignored it, just like global warming.

New Hope for Hypochondria sufferers
Researchers have found a multi-stage program which could dramatically ease the symptoms of hypochondria for those who suffer due to the previously untreatable condition. One major problem is that those who have the condition refuse to accept that they have it, in favor of hundreds or thousands of often-obscure diagnoses. The first stage involved dramatically broadening the list of symptoms, thereby causing any given person to fit the new criteria for hypochondria. New symptoms include: shortness of breath, lack of desire to increase the rate of breathing, sleepiness during late hours of the day, and a desire to stay awake during later hours of the day. The second stage involved planting claims on websites and non-peer-reviewed medical journals, suggesting that hypochondria is under-diagnosed and that doctors are intentionally refusing to diagnose or treat it. Doctors believe the new program will encourage those with the condition to seek a diagnosis for hypochondria, thereby relieving the suffering of the doctors.

Chinese Cyberwar Plot Goes Unnoticed for Decades
A series of high-level defections within the People's Liberation Army have brought startling information to light. It turns out that as far back as the 1970s, China had sought to infiltrate the World Wide Web and Internet and destroy them from within. Plots included the spread of disinformation and personal attacks, a technique they branded "trolling". Individual elements included spreading conspiracy theories regarding government plots and the creation of wikipedia in the hopes of destroying all other sources of information. American cyber-war specialists and sociologists were shocked: "We figured people were just assholes, we never suspected that we were all decent people and it was the Chinese all along."

Government Denies Adding Paranoia-Causing Chemical to Water Supply

Lucas Wins NASA Deal to Create Next 'Moon Landing'

Taser Releases 'Solid-State' Variant

Bipartisan Vote Approves Funding to Create 10,000 New Jobs Based on Arguing About Global Warming

Nature Magazine Warns Readers About Possible Extinction of "Letters to the Editor" Page.

Reporter: Laser Was the Brightest Thing I Ever Saw

Civ IV: Part IV: Cities

2011-12-01T06:00:00.005-06:00

Cities are the foundation of any civilization. In fact, the world civilization comes from the word "civilopedia" which was an ancient text tradition of storing information about cities, which has since split into the worlds "city" and "wikipedia".

Civ V uses the next generation of city management interface, and in this case, the next generation is really fucking stupid. Kids these days... In Civ IV it is easy to queue up production; just shift-click the next thing you want in line. Civ V added the ever so slightly useful ability to rearrange the queue items, but did it by shifting the queue to a different menu, so for 99% of use, it is less convenient by a lot. In Civ IV I would regularly queue up units and buildings, no longer in Civ V. To top off the bad production management system, in Civ IV if a producton item has any progress, clicking another item will put the new item at the front of an automatically-created queue, so that a temporary shift in production is a one-click affair, such as if you find yourself needing a jail for anti-war protestors while building a bank. At times Civilization is disturbingly realistic.

Population management has been made less convenient as well. To rearrange the tiles being worked you must open a submenu which is usually minimized, a small issue, and perhaps nice to avoid accidentally clicking and screwing up all the tiles. Specialists have been given a pointlessly less convenient interface. It used to be that adding a specialist meant clicking the up or down arrow for the specialist. Now they are manually assigned to specific buildings. Why? I do not know. They don't have any different production. So rather than a simple click, you must instead find the correct building, which is in alphabetical order, so library and research lab aren't right after each other as would be convenient for someone trying to assign more scientists.

On the plus side, conquered cities no longer have zero culture. Culture is now based on the city rather than the civilization, so conquest doesn't result in a bunch of culturally-dead cities which revolt and join a nearby third party at the first possible opportunity.

When you're sick of micromanaging and don't trust the AI to not fuck it up and spam great people points, both games offer ways to indirectly control cities. Civ IV offers the vassal system, in which a foe who has finally realized that he is utterly defeated will capitulate and must then pay tribute and join you in future wars. This has the downside of making everyone else mad, but also more scared, so they capitulate more quickly, thus proving the domino effect and making Nixon not seem so bad after all. Civ V instead uses the puppet system, where you still conquer every damn city, but by puppeting them rather than taking direct control, you can gain the benefit of their science and gold and suffer less unhappiness, but cannot tell them to make anything in particular and they will never make units (or at least I've never seen one).

If I had to choose one or the other, I'd go with the vassal system. It reduced the repetition of conquering city after city of a defeated foe. But I like the puppet idea. Could these be mixed? Puppets seem like a good system for conquered city states. For larger territories, looks ridiculous to have half the planet consisting of puppet cities. A city here and there makes sense, but at such a larger scale there must be some overall government. For this, vassal states seem like the simple solution: allow large groups of culturally-related cities to be collected into a new civilization which would be a vassal to the larger civilization.

In the area of rapidly building up new cities, Civilization V is far better. Hurrying production in IV required either huge piles of gold or mass murder and neither of those are practical since you can only murder people in the one city. Horribly unrealistic. This meant that starting a new city meant a very long time slowly building up population and buildings. Contrast that with Civ V which has turned gold into a significant mechanic (that's another post right there) and allows you to quickly build up population and production, for a price. With a granary, watermill, and hospital, a city can have a production of 9 food right away, with aqueducts and medical labs speeding up growth indirectly, and there are multiple buildings which add production, all of which mean that a brand new city can quickly get the food and production to build itself.

Looking only at the city management itself, I think Civ IV was superior, since the purchasing of buildings is part of the great change to gold (oops, just spoiled that post).

Your friend asks if they should try WoW

2011-11-30T06:00:00.004-06:00

How do you answer?

For all my complaints, I think I'd still say yes.

Having played it recently, even after having played much newer, more graphically-detailed games, I can still say that WoW looks good. It doesn't look realistic, but it looks good. It is getting dated, but I don't think the graphics are going to seriously harm it for another few years. And frankly, Im not sure I want to play with the "I want a pretty game" crowd.

You can still jump in and play, without wondering what all these buttons do. Not that there are a ton of buttons early on.

Ultimately I think the issue is expectations. When I play WoW I expect, or wish for, a different game than what it is now. A new player would not have that burden. Without that burden, I think they could have a great deal of fun.

For reference, I've given a little bit of time to lotro, rift, and eq2 and none of them quite caught me. I just felt disconnected from my character, as if I were controlling a marionette with very loose strings. Also, the fonts: I am very used to WoW's fonts and eq2 and lotro did not work for me. Has anyone else had a problem with the different fonts between games? I know it sounds silly, but I often felt like I was reading over someone's shoulder rather than reading words meant for me.

Rotting castles don't need to burn

2011-11-29T06:00:00.007-06:00

Sandboxes are trouble. If we build too easily, the world runs out of space. If we destroy too easily everyone is afraid to build. We're not all online at the same time.

Here's my vague, generalized solution:

You can build anywhere. However destruction by players can only happen in contested areas.

Safe areas are safe to build and travel in, hence the name, but are resource-poor, so you cannot hope for much more than a hut and a rusty sword. Yes, the sword could be newly made and still rusty. The local iron is just that bad.

Contested areas would have more resources and better resources. These would be the places to farm. And the places to build if you want to take control. In these places, you can die to anyone, your buildings can be destroyed by anyone.

However safe areas are not places where you can just build away and never worry. Buildings will rot, decay, and be worn away. This would be a percentage of the cost, so that more expensive buildings require more upkeep. They won't fall down in a day, but after a few days of game time they will fall apart until they are ruined and need to be rebuilt. "Game time" is the time you are logged in and time offline if you are leveling skills (such as in EVE). To prevent permanent structures being built by people who never log in, even offline there would be a very slow decay; not so fast that you feel you must log in every day, but so that if someone is inactive for a couple months, they aren't cluttering up the world.

To maintain structures you will need to go out to the contested areas. You can gather and return home, but not without risk.

The overall goal is to allow players to destroy other's buildings without it being a game of waiting until they are offline and then torching everything in the night. You'll instead need to starve them.

Various mechanics would work behind the scenes to keep things running as intended. Resource gathering would be slightly more efficient when the server has more players, so that players are discouraged, though not blocked, from sneaking out when no one is around, while those who operate at peak times are rewarded for the risk of being out when the bandits are too. There would also be an attempt to keep players in more or less the same real life time zone, partly to keep out the dirty foreigners, partly to keep a sense of time (day-night cycle would be related to RL), and partly so that players are taking similar risks.

There will be a risk-reward relationship in this game. Players who want no risk at all could stay in the safe areas and would consequently have pretty awful homes. Players who venture out can get more resources and have nicer properties and items, but will still be limited. Those who take big risks, building directly in contested areas in order to gain control over them* will be able to get more and better resources, but will need them to survive out there. In general it should be balanced so that players will see benefit to building in risky areas but without being so much that everyone feels forced into FFA PvP.

* Control would be physical, not based on game mechanics drawing borders. For example, you might have walls to enclose properties, preventing others from chopping your trees and keeping your herds in place. There could also be traps and magical protections, but nothing that would stand entirely by itself. The goal is still to have players be able to log out without wondering if in the morning everything is gone, but without logging out being a guarantee of safety. One specific mechanic might be self-repairing walls, which can use existing stockpiles to maintain themselves, so that you can log off and survive, but if you don't get back and replenish your stockpile, the walls will be down within a day or so.

Of course everyone loves a good fire, so I will add this bit: even in a safe zone, a building under 10% integrity can be set on fire and will burn down regardless of repairs. Outside safe zones, buildings, if they can be reached (walls will be pretty important), can be set on fire at any integrity percentage, but may be harder to light or will burn slower and can be doused and repaired. So sorry, you don't win just from one good torch toss.

I've not considered how NPCs would fit into this world. Maybe they too would build and gather. I certainly don't want them to be just passively waiting around to be killed or as just a generic malevolent group of bandits.

In closing, I want to let everyone know that I never had a sandbox as a kid. Instead, I had the far superior "dirt place", which was an approximately 5'x12' area next to our house which had no grass in which they used to store coal. It probably gave us all cancer, but coaldirt is a much better structural material than sand, especially with easy access to the hose.

P.S. Thanks to Adam for the inspiration.

Civilization IV part II: A turn

2011-11-28T06:00:00.001-06:00

I don't enjoy making decisions without proper information, especially when that information is available but is obscured by a bad UI.

Example: At the start of turns in Civ IV you get bombarded by new production order requests. You cannot get rid of these until the cities have their orders. So stumble through and get them out of the way, and maybe you gave sensible build orders. Then go look up tech progress, where your enemies are, what techs you can buy, and then go back and change a few cities. Civ V has a much better system, with new production being something you just need to pick before the end of a turn, similar to new research and giving orders to units.

And yet, Civ V managed to create all sorts of annoying problems when dealing with turns. Automated units act at the start of the turn, rather than at the end. This means that exploring units have a bad habit of blundering into big groups of barbarians. Hitting "end turn" results in a giant pile of truly awful game design. Units with movement points remaining will demand that you use them up or skip action, which in the case of workers means a lot of moving a unit one more tile, intending to have it build something, but nope, you released the mouse and now you are DONE. Sometimes the remaining movement is because a worker got scared, a useful indicator of enemies nearby but not necessarily in your territory, except you cannot move units to defend, because your turn is DONE. All you can do is shuffle the worker off somewhere.

The autosave for a turn is effectively done at the end of a turn in Civ V, so that the turn numbers are all off by one.

Both games force decisions on conquered cities, though both also allow for an inspection of the city first. At least in V you can raze a city later, though doing so will require annexing it, raising the culture cost of social policies. It would be nice if these were also handled the way production is: get it done before the end of the turn. This might be a problem because of how culture borders are drawn and affect movement speed, but that's a non-issue in IV because newly captured cities have very weak borders.

They're Everywhere!

2011-11-25T06:00:00.001-06:00

Chatting at work I found that I am surrounded. At least one supervisor plays Modern Warfare 3. A few employees do as well. More chatting found that of the three people I was working with one night, one plays Fallout 3 and played a ret paladin in BC, another plays EVE and is a new Goon, and yet another plays Skyrim (sadly, pirated) and used to play WoW (started in LK, clearly this means LK players are people who demand reward with no work*).

* This is sarcasm. If we're looking for other correlations based on a sample size of one, he also quit during Cata, for no specific reasons.

Now I know what you're thinking, but no, we're not all that prepared for a zombie apocalypse, because the building is mostly glass and weapons are not allowed in the building. Though we do have a decent bit of food, much of it is on the first floor. While the stairs are a bit too wide, they are not blocked by walls, so as the zombies go up along the predictable path, people all along the balcony can shoot. However once the zombies are up, there are few additional barriers. Even worse, there are outside stairs, which lead to higher floors also with lots of glass. Beside the roof, pretty much any location is an easy way to get surrounded and overrun.

This post is in no way influenced by the sight of hordes of shoppers on Black Friday.

Happy Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T06:00:00.005-06:00

307.007 million in the US
7 billion in the world
That gives us about 4.39% of the world.

So happy thanksgiving to the best 4.39% of the world. Like my parents always said: choose your grandparents wisely.

And some for you too, Canada. You should be thankful. Without us you'd be the top hat to a completely empty land.

Civilizations IV and V

2011-11-23T06:00:00.005-06:00

Apparently my Civ V crash problem was not fixed by my RAM switch. It must have just been coincidence that it seemed to be better. Maybe my world was a little bit smaller that game. In light of this, I decided I'd jump back to Civ IV. Being what I am, I decided to compare them, not in a vague sense of which was better, but actually seeing how each felt moment by moment. Having played Civ V for a few months, what is Civ IV like?

As might be expected, my first reactions were negative. It's an uglier game. Whether the UI was better or worse in any approximately objective sense, it was confusing for a player used to a newer game. Way to not have backwardforward compatibility! Beyond that, I was just generally confused. What was good anymore? I remembered rivers were good to build on, but my cities wouldn't have a watermill building. Is there a best first tech? In V I go for pottery so my second construction is a granary. I went with pottery because I had some wheat nearby and it made about as much sense as anything else.

There are a lot of inconvenient aspects. Just about everything is a special tradeable resource that you want connected to your cities, so I was building more roads. Thankfully they were free. Also thankfully, the bear was just a little bit too slow and my settler did not get eaten. But that reminded me that cities are helpless and need units sitting in them or else barbarians wander in and take over everything. Now I absolutely must have a spare warrior built. I don't have a Liberty social policy tree, so I need to make my own workers, which stops city growth. Now I'm at needing a worker for any improvements, a warrior for my next city, and the settler for that next city, which is going to be pretty slow.

I can't find the happiness count. Oh, it's all city-based.

I'll have more later as I play more, but for now, I'll end with this idea: Civilization V is about civilizations, while Civilization IV is about cities.

Future Research Outside the Continuum of Established In-Game Reality

2011-11-22T06:00:00.009-06:00

Let's all pretend this is about Skyrim and not Oblivion so I can feel hip and with it. 'K? Good.

Yesterday I wrote that when we get information later in game can matter earlier, turning what would normally be "additional research" into "outside research". This specific subset might be classified well as "future research". It's not that our characters cannot do it, they just need time travel.

Enter Klepsacovic, the destruction, restoration, alteration mage who wears heavy armor and specializes in punching people. He had a great idea: Use the sign of the Atronach (no normal regen, but absorbs spells). This would give him some great ways to solve problems. For example, if his problem involved casters, he could absorb their spells and have tons of magicka, which could then be used to burn, freeze, and/or zap their faces in/off/inside-out. Against melee he would fall back on his heavy armor and skills at punching people in the face.

Unfortunately, Klepsacovic failed to know a few key future facts. The first was that he would not be an invincible punching wall of death against melee. Instead, he would get hurt sometimes, and need to heal. Heal with magicka which he could not regenerate. The second was that there are a lot more physical attackers than magical. Third, the casters he does fight tend to summon... more melee.

He was essentially dead on arrival at the first real fight. He did, just barely, manage to fight off the enemies near the closest Ayleid ruins and headed inside. At which point he found himself struggling mob by mob, grateful for the places he could sleep as he crawled through a maze of melee.

Then God swooped in and changed his birthsign from one that crippled him to one that helped him regenerate mana faster. Sadly, God could not easily change his specialized skills, and so he remained cursed by a predilection for hand-to-hand combat in the false belief that the use of weapons would hinder his spell-casting, a myth learned from an old story about an age of dragons, but in which only a few dragons get slain, rather than a more recent story in which dragons have replaced rats for the job of being killed in sets of ten.

Thankfully, Klepsacovic was blessed with the Prophecy of Levels which foretold a Great Doom in which too many levels were had and marginal attributes were increased, to the Great Doom of All, and with this knowledge of the future to come, he did avoid the Temptation of the Bed, by which I mean the other Temptation of the Bed, not the one you're thinking of, since there is none of that going on, but in his single-minded zeal he did find himself with great skills of Destruction and Restoration but without sufficient magicka to use his greatest abilities, and thus did he succumb to the Sleep and when he awoke found that he had murdered a man and would find himself on a Dark Path, his soul at risk of too heavy a burden of infamy and only by the timely intervention of a Guild of Fighters did he save his soul and avoid the cruel words of angry city guards.

In other words, because I didn't know what enemies I'd be fighting later on, I picked a birth sign which made my character very weak, and resorted to the use of the game console to pick a new birth sign. Then I killed a guy for what I'm sure was a totally legitimate reason not at all related to a vampire hiding his identity and found myself in a secret society of murderers who were all really nice and helpful. Later on I think I will rob some monks.

National Bad RAM Day

2011-11-21T08:08:00.013-06:00

I just made it up. Deal with it.

My computer had developed a habit of suddenly restarting while playing Civilization. I thought it might be overheating because I hadn't put back on the side panel of the computer, with a fan in it, which might be the main source of incoming air. That didn't fix it and I didn't really think it was overheating anyway, based on the "touch stuff and see if I get burned or zapped" test yielding negative results (in the diagnostic community, negative means positive, which is the least confusing thing we say).

My next suspicion was a bad stick of RAM. So I did the logical thing, switched them into the other pair of slots. That didn't fix it, which confirmed my suspicion.

Finally I resorted to pulling out one of the two 2gb sticks and replacing it with a pair of 512mb sticks from my old computer. This wasn't as big of a loss as it sounds, since Windows only seemed to recognize 3.5gb of the supposed 4gb total, so I only lost 512mb. Maybe there is some performance impact from having the unpaired stick, but I've not noticed. It is certainly offset by the reliability gain.

Coming tomorrow, plus or minus a month, Skyrim!

Outside Additional Research

2011-11-21T06:00:00.001-06:00

Andenthal's comment on Friday suggested a distinction between "outside research" and "additional research". I agree that there is a difference, but it is a blurry line.

Given enough time and perseverance, I would never need outside research for any game. Why not? Because given enough time, I can figure out any mechanic.

That's where I draw the line, on the vague continuum of "too much time."

I think we can agree that it is asking a bit much for every player to take out a few months to learn new mathematical techniques and gather data to understand a game. At that point, "additional research" has clearly crossed into "outside research".

Beside the time cost, there is that future use consideration. Is a +5% damage to elementals good? Yes? I'm sure it is useful, but how useful relative to the talent/perk/slot it is replacing? We can play play ahead and see how often we run into elementals and how challenging these are, thereby having the data we need to evaluate the usefulness of the +5% damage to elementals talent.

At first glance we might call that "additional research". It fits better into the "outside research" category. This is information which is unavailable on the first play, so right there, start the game, you need outside research in order to properly evaluate the talent, barring dramatic game actions such as NPCs using all their conversations to talk about how hard it is to kill elementals.

Developers could negate this issue by making talents easy to change, so if later on you encounter many elementals, then you can switch for 5% more damage against them. Or they could make it easy enough that whether or not you have 5% more damage against elementals, you will still beat the game with minimal profanity. These are both side-stepping the issue of whether the game is self-contained, by which I mean, if you play the game with some thought and consideration, you will, without opening Excel, know enough to make good decisions. Not necessarily the best possible decisions, but good decisions.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm running 50,000 pirated copies of Skyrim on a botnet to determine the disposition change formula based on either number of units traded or value of items and I need to get this done before the FBI or Russian Mafia get suspicious.

Game difficulty

2011-11-18T06:00:00.006-06:00

This post was supposed to come before yesterday's. I apologize for self-contradicting in the wrong order.

My game would not have trivial mode. Or story mode, whatever you want to name it. It would, however, have easy, normal, and hard.

Easy
- Low twitch requirements
- No need for outside research on optimized builds, but talents or the equivalent are not random. Sorry, necromancy archer thief.
- Pulling cannot be reckless. If there are a dozen enemies, you still need to wait for some to wander away or use some sort of crowd-control to deal with them.
- This is for people to just jump in and play, without spending time planning out every last step, but while they are playing they will still be thinking.

Normal
- You have to be somewhat quick, but not like a Korean Starcraft player.
- Some outside research will be necessary to avoid mistakes* but you won't need to perfectly optimize everything.
- Those dozen enemies will need to be dealt with even more carefully, possibly requiring clever use of the game environment for concealment or as an opening attack, such as making heavy things fall on them.

* By mistakes I mean running into unexpected mechanics, such as the leveling system in Oblivion that had me leveling up from marginally useful skills while enemies got stronger much faster.

Hard
- I personally do not expect to beat this. Nor would I want to, because for me personally, this is the point at which a game ceases to be fun.
- You will need to be fast and constantly aware.
- Failure may have significant costs.
- Outside research is absolutely necessary.
- You may need to play through areas at lower difficulty to get a feel for the environment before you play again on hard.
- You don't get any additional shinies or lore. You just get the satisfaction of knowing your capabilities. And getting to brag to others. If they care.

Normalizing Enemy Difficulty

2011-11-17T06:00:00.004-06:00

Why do RPGs so readily allow us to create stupid builds? For example, that person has a stupid build.

What if they're not stupid, but creative? Why shouldn't the heavily armored mage who uses magic to stealth be unable to beat the game? This build would probably fail in a typical RPG. But it doesn't have to.

Add a system to measure the effectiveness of a build and adjust the game accordingly.

Think up your excuse plot as you like, but the general idea is to have the player fight a series of enemies which are representative of what they will encounter in the game. So they'll fight some armored melee, some flimsy casters, some archers who refuse to stay in place, and mixes of them, with varying strength. From these fights the game can determine approximately how well your build handles each of those enemies and adjusts their strength relative to each other. Now your build which is great against casters thanks to a quick attack from stealth does not need to be utterly useless against other melee. This will adjust both up and down, so that you'll still be stronger against certain types and weaker against others, but you won't ever fight an enemy which is trivial or impossible because of your build choices.

After the initial tests it would continue to adjust enemies for a bit longer, to ensure that if you got crushed by a certain archetype it was due to the build and not just ignorance of how to handle them. If you start rolling over a certain type of enemy, it will adjust accordingly.
For arbitrary numbers, let's imagine that against your build (and skill at playing it) a melee has difficulty 10, a mage difficulty 2, and an archer difficulty 6. Melee would be reduced in power, mages increased, and archers left about the same, so that when you venture out, melee might be at 7, mages at 4, and archers still at 6. You'll still see melee as harder than mages, but not so dramatically. This might be the difficulties at the "normal" setting, so dialing up to "hard" would make them 10, 7, and 9, while "easy" would be 4, 1, and 3. These examples aren't on any particular scale, just that bigger numbers are a harder fight.

Note that all this does is adjust the relative power of enemies. There is still an overall difficulty setting which can shift all of them up or down.

Coming tomorrow, an uninspiring, uncreative opinion piece on game difficulty.

If you want to see content, go to YouTube

2011-11-16T06:00:00.000-06:00

If you want to experience content, then asking for it to be gutted is counter-productive.

Raiding isn't about 25 random people wandering around in a big room. It's about people playing together, over multiple sessions, to overcome some sort of challenge. It's not for everyone. I don't mean that as "not everyone is allowed to do it", but "not everyone wants to do it".

Make raids for raiders. Make youtube videos for people who want to see content. Make other content for people who want other content.

PSA: Oblivion 75% off Tuesday-Thursday

2011-11-15T14:59:00.005-06:00

Normally Elder Scrolls: Oblivion is $20 on Steam, which I think is worth it. Currently it is $5. That's four times worth it. That puts it at 1/12 the price of Skyrim.

Math says you should buy it and math is never wrong. Unless I forget my calculator and do it in my head. Then there are problems.

5 too many and 15 too few, it's the amazing 10-man!

2011-11-15T06:00:00.005-06:00

The week before today, also known as (aka) "last week" to you kids these days (yktd) I made some claims regarding raiding, such as suggesting that easymode raids would be nothing more than oversized dungeons and that oversized dungeons are stupid.

Well long story short, Upper Blackrock Spire, Karazhan, and Alterac Valley (before they ruined it).

UBRS
This was a good start to a flame war back in the day. Someone would say something about raiding and not being able to raid and then someone would say that UBRS was a raid and someone else would say that is stupid. It was a raid and it was not. It was true that to create a full UBRS group of 15 people, or 10 after they did some changes to a few of the high-level instances, you would need to use the "convert to raid" button and would then have raid bars and all that stuff. It was raid-sized-ish, in the sense that anything more than 5 players required a raid. It was still smaller than the smallest raid of 20 people for ZG (or AQ20 later on).

It was essentially an oversized dungeon with the occasional raid-like element, such as one person being able to ruin everything. The loot was mostly blues, with some extremely rare epics (if you saw one drop ever you were lucky). This was the standard for the high-level instances at the time. Fights weren't quite faceroll, but most of them weren't especially tough. Mistakes could get you killed, but patient clearing minimized the risks. Randomly placed quest chains would lead through the instances. They'd take an hour or two to complete, though depending on the level of PvP activity at the time, just as long to get inside.

I loved that place, despite it not properly fitting with my "no oversized dungeons" philosophy of the previous post.

In fact, maybe that's what made it so great. It was a 5-man that you could bring a crowd to. Bring your friends! Bring your enemies! Bring someone with the key otherwise we're going to have to hire someone and that's a bit of a pain! This was quite handy because it was like meeting three groups at once, a useful thing back when meeting people in groups was how you formed guilds.

UBRS was a strange sort of place. You'd go in and do some raid-like stuff such as struggle to find a competent hunter and a druid (not competent, just a druid) and people would find new and creative ways to wipe the group. Bosses could have some interesting mechanics, but nothing too major. It was somewhere between raiding and 5-mans, but clearly on the side of 5-mans.

Karazhan
This was the best raid ever. Hands down (unless we're doing OWS finger waving things in which case it is hands up, but seriously, stop doing that). Nothing comes close. Why? Why indeed.

You know what? I could go on all day, night, tomorrow, and probably keep going about everything that was great. But I'm not going to. That's right, I'm just going to say that Karazhan was awesome and was a 10-man raid, and then walk away.

Alterac Valley
This is one case where I think having more people was critical. It was the sheer number of people that made AV what it was. Well that and an unusually important PvE element in a BG which was gradually nerfed into oblivion, somehow taking the PvP with it, until it was reduced to a boss race and I went home to cry.

Alterac Valley was the oversized place. There were a lot of people and there were a lot of flags and graveyards. It was like Texas if Texas were colder and the immigrants shot back more often. I think in this analogy the Orcs are Texans and the Dwarves are immigrants, which reverses just about everything we'd usually expect, given the dwarvish love of guns and the orcs being illegal aliens.

In a sense, AV was an oversized AB. You'd run around and try to capture flags and then the other side would try to take them back. Then people would yell at you to fight at the flag and someone else would run around behind everyone else and capture it. So then we'd all fight on some other road. Then at the end the winner would fight a boss while a bunch of idiots tried to wipe them, much like raiding. Mechanically, AV was like a giant AB, but by making it so big, it made it different.

It's not the size that matters, it's what you're trying to do with it.
UBRS isn't an easymode raid, it is an oversized dungeon and does not pretend to be anything else. Similarly, back when several of the dungeons were 10-mans, they were oversized dungeons, not easymode raids. Part of this is that they were not easymode, at least not at the gear level of people who ran them.

In contrast, an easymode raid will not be an oversized dungeon. It will pretend to offer challenges, and then not. It will pretend to require coordination, and then not. It will put on all the appearances of a real raid, and then not be that.

Karazhan, while a small raid, was not easymode. It would kill you and kill you again and then make you play chess. Then kill you for losing at chess. It was small so you could round up people without too much difficulty, though certainly nothing compared to an automated tool that can bring in anyone and then just as easily get rid of them so you don't accidentally form any human connections. With the attunement changed, Karazhan was accessible without being trivial. If someone still won't run it, then the raid is not the problem.

Government Accountability or Lack Thereof

2011-11-14T09:41:00.009-06:00

Hey Britain, WAKE UP. Especially you, lazy government employees. And you, BBC, you dropped the ball on this one. Or walloped the loo or whatever ridiculous phrase you have.

Downing Street is overrun with vermin because the ...

Okay on second thought, it appears that NPR had the BBC as its source for this story. So good job, BBC, I'm glad to see you're so proud to be taking over American media. Anyway, government incompetence.

No. 10 Downing Street's semi-official mouser is being defended despite mouse sightings at the glorified shack. Even worse, since being brought on in the winter, "Larry" has caught only 3 mice as of June. Either that place has so few mice that an official mouser is a waste of taxpayer dollars, or as you ridiculously call them, pounds, or the mouser us utterly incompetent. Or lazy.

Just look at that lazy, lazy cat.

Purple Pixel People

2011-11-14T06:00:00.002-06:00

On Friday masterlooter suggested

There are players that like to raid (read: defeat difficult encounters with many other players), and there are players that want purple pixels.

I'm sure he didn't mean it as a dichotomy for the overall population, but for the population that raids. In other words, some people raid to raid and some people raid for loot. Even then, it's a bit of a stark divide. I raided because I enjoyed it, but I definitely liked the loot as well. I know that my preferences are not universal, but I think that the particular trait, being able to enjoy both an activity and the reward from it, is universal, or fairly close. People can enjoy raiding and enjoy getting loot and may raid partially for loot and partially for the experience.

In fact, I think these are linked, and that's the root of the problem with easymode raids. Despite my absurd claim that loot has intrinsic value based on the number attached to it, it doesn't. Loot is relative. Relatively relative.

Gear rewards have two parts: the gear (tool) and reward (reward). Higher stats make me better able to play and are a useful tool when attempting to kill internet dragons. But the loot itself, regardless of the stats, has a reward aspect to it, which is derived from the experience. The loot is a symbol of the experience. For example, getting Thunderfury was effectively useless as a tool because by the time I got it it was a couple expansions behind and was more useful to a different class anyway. But as a symbolic reward, it was tied to many experiences. It drew from my early days in MC and the status of such a weapon back then. It symbolized the time I had spent farming MC in BC and LK. It symbolized a social effort to get the raid members I needed and to find the materials as well. Also it just looks awesome.

From that we can see that the gear reward is not a matter of the stats or power of the item, but of the meaning it carries for the player. Certain tier pieces in BC symbolized having struggling and succeeded to kill a tricky boss. These days the stats would be laughable, but the symbolic meaning is still there.

Over time this meaning has become ingrained in the item system. Higher level gear came from higher level raids which required more perseverance, more struggle, more skill (please don't argue this last one, it never gets anywhere). With this pattern firmly established, it would be easy to see how the connection could get reversed. Gear, carrying the symbolic meaning of some achievement, could substitute for the achievement. To a limited degree this can work, with badges giving that tier piece that never dropped or in my case, going back later to get the badass sword that shamans could not use. If an experience gave loot, then it is not unreasonable to think that the loot implies the experience. Loot can become fun.

That connection relies on the loot, the reward, being linked most strongly to the specific experience. There can be side links, such as the badge system, but the reward should primarily invoke the main experience, such as killing a particular boss.

That connection can be distorted or broken if the reward changes sources. If a chest piece started off coming from a very hard raid, we'd link it to that raid. If much easier content began to give that reward, then the link changes. This is not necessarily a bad thing. That easier content could be a lot of fun, in which case the reward switches the link from challenge to fun. For some that is better, for some it is worse, but objectively we can't say that the item is degraded. However, if the easier content is not fun, then the reward switches the link from challenge to drudgery. In that case, the item is degraded.

So to get back to the Purple Pixel People, there may be people who are attracted to purple or big numbers, but they are a minority. Most people are instead attracted to the symbolism of the items and how they evoke an experience, maybe fun, maybe challenging, maybe social. The reward is a means to an end, the end being the experience. This can happen directly, with the reward-as-tool allowing them to confront and overcome the challenge. It can happen indirectly, with the reward giving them the image of one who has overcome the challenge, like putting on a uniform to appear authoritative, or lacy underwear to appear pretty. Not that I am suggesting that I or any other raiders, former or present, do or have done that.

There is also status. Good gear confers, or is hoped by the player to confer, status. "Look at this gear and know that I am a badass." This works as long as the gear is primarily linked to something badass, such as killing something badass. If the gear is instead linked to spending ten hours a day watching My Little Pony (before the remake of it), then even if it could also be gotten from a world-first Sargeras kill, it wouldn't confer much status.

Maybe I haven't quite convinced you, so I'm going to make you an offer. I'm running an MMO and if you want, I can give you a full suit of Awesomeslayer Armor which has +tenbajillion^7 attack damage power. Do you want it? Let me assure you, this armor is way better than anything else out there. Do you want it? Better question: Do you even care? Probably not. The armor has no link to anything, no symbolic meaning and no clear usefulness, given that for all you know my MMO was made up on the spot to prove a point. What if I said that it has a particularly purple shade of purple text? No? Okay.

In conclusion, Purple Pixel People are an irrelevant minority that are not protected under anti-discrimination laws so I can safely say that. If people appear to want epics, it is because they want epic experiences. It is because they want content. That does not mean it is content that showers them with loot. In fact, a loot shower may be counter-productive, as well as dangerous if we were to imagine the literal scenario.

No Easymode Raids!

2011-11-11T12:45:00.002-06:00

Raiding isn't a nice activity. It demands time, lots in the game, lots outside. It demands difficult-to-form groups, whether by size or by rigid class makeup, or both. It is an exclusive activity. It excludes people. It can, of course, be tweaked to excluded fewer people. Consumable timesinks can be reduced. Gear timesinks can be reduced. Saving IDs week to week can reduce the per-week time needed to advance.

But raiding is not an inclusive activity. Raiding is not something that should reach out and embrace you and invite you in. Nor should it demand that you do it. It should just be there, silently waiting, possibly giving you a hostile glare until you meet its standards.

All this "PUG-friendly" or "easymode" raid stuff is nonsense. It's just redefining raiding. I know there aren't distinct lines, but if raids get smaller, easier, and shorter, why are we calling them raids? Why would we make something like that? It's redundant! There is already a 5-man content type: regular dungeons and heroics. These fit the model of "PUG-friendly" raiding Tobold pushes

do *not* have studied the "dance" on YouTube,
do *not* have spend hundreds of hours gearing up before even trying the first boss in the first raid,
do *not* have an uninterrupted block of 4+ hours available,
do *not* consider wiping 400 times before the first boss kill reasonable,
and finally do *not* have above average skills in moving fast or playing their character extremely well.

Except perhaps the last one, 5-mans and heroics are all of those. So why make easymode raids too? What are they adding? Is it the size of the random crowd? I'm just trying to imagine the conversation here.

"Hey boss, we have some new dungeons for you to look over." "Great, let's see them." "Check it out, anyone can get in, it's not too hard, not too many out-of-game requirements." "Yea, it's great, but could you figure out a way to have a lot more people?" "Why?" "I don't know. It's a great dungeon and all, but maybe it just needs five or twenty more people."

There's the problem, right there. Somehow this absurd idea got out that everyone wants to raid because somehow being in a huge group makes everything better. It doesn't. When I think back to the typical random, the last thought on my mind was "You know what this group needs? Even more of these people." It wasn't that they were bad, since for the most part they did well enough. It was that they were not people. It's an asocial experience to run with randoms. Adding even more random people does not make that any better. If anything it would make it much worse. Have you ever been in a big group but felt left out or generally just not part of it? That is random raiding.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a player never seeing anyone a second time, ever.

Facerolling through heroics wasn't much fun. Making that bigger isn't going to fix it.

5-man content has been long-neglected, with Blizzard papering over the flaws of it with game mechanics rather than content fixes. Random heroics were their attempt at filling heroics that no one wanted to run and to get people who didn't want to run heroics to keep running them. LFD was their way to fill up heroics that people were done with. These did not fix heroics. Nor will random raiding fix raiding, if it is even broken. I don't believe it is. Instead I believe that LK pushed a bad philosophy that everyone should raid and everyone should raid one tier of content.

Raiding isn't for everyone. So don't make it for everyone. To do so would be as ridiculous as trying to design a Hummer to appeal to Prius owners. They are different markets and no amount of hybrid fuel-cell solar-powered hemp-tailored-seating will change the basic fact that a Hummer is a really big vehicle for people who need or want a really big vehicle and a Prius is a small car with fancy stuff to make it fuel-efficient for people who like to be fuel-efficient. Different markets.

If we imagine and accept that only a fraction of players want to raid, then what about the remaining fraction? Note that this remaining fraction might be a bigger fraction. Also note that non-raid content can still be fun for raiders without being raid content and without being a gateway to raid content. There you go: don't waste time turning raiding into not-raiding, which raiders won't want to do because it's a crappy version of raiding and non-raiders won't want to do because it's a crappy version of raiding. Instead, make non-raid content! That isn't a daily!

-Add more outdoor content, that isn't in the form of dailies.
-Add more 5-man content, some of which is not done in half an hour.
-Add sets to non-raid content.

Coming next week: I find the exceptions that make the ideas in the post sound stupid.

Better is Different

2011-11-11T06:00:00.003-06:00

Are 3 and 4 different numbers? Yes. But they are still numbers, so we can line them up and say that 4 is bigger than 3 and if we're talking about money 4 is better and if we're talking about debt 3 is better. If your bank account goes from 3 digits to 4, that's better. But what if you're measuring something and it goes from 3 to D? Well sure, D is the 4th letter, so maybe we can say it is higher and depending on the perspective, better, but it is also different.

Better is different, but different is not always better.

What is better for you can be worse for someone else. Or for the same person, some parts are better, some parts are worse. This is what has been happening with WoW.

But let's not get into vague ideas like lobby vs. world. Instead, let's talk paladins.

A long while ago there was no such thing as Forbearance. This meant that a paladin could use divine shield right after blessing of protection. Back then there was no mass dispel, so beside a bug involving lag and shamans, divine shield could not be removed. And it lasted 12 seconds. Take note of that time: even with a GCD that is enough to use a hearthstone. It was pretty sweet.

On top of that, Divine Protection used to be a funny sort of spell. It was basically a bad version of divine shield. Priests had a spell like this as well, one of their heals. And of course paladins had a purify spell which was like cleanse but didn't remove magic. Anyway, Divine Protection made the paladins completely invincible just like Divine Shield, but didn't last as long, and made the paladin unable to attack. Of course they could still heal.

Now imagine, as a melee class, trying to fight someone who can heal himself, wears plate, and has three different ways to become entirely immune to physical damage. Not easy!

Over time their toughness has been nerfed. Heavily. Now the bubbles last less time and can be removed, along with triggering forbearance.

It's not all bad though. It may be better overall. Better, but different. Losing all that durability has gone along with some other changes.

Damage has gone up significantly. Paladin damage is no longer a joke. Oh sure, run your numbers and you might find it is too low (I have no clue where it is these days), but wherever it is, it's definitely higher than it was. Mana regeneration is higher. Control of damage is higher. Just plain hitting things hard is higher. If a paladin wants to DPS, they have some chance at it. This was not always the case. People wrote songs about it.

Despite the durability of a paladin, they were not popular tanks either. With almost no regeneration, since back then it mostly came from spirit and seal/judgement of wisdom, which was nowhere near adequate, especially since using seal of wisdom would mean a huge aggro loss. It didn't help that only warriors had tanking sets. Even in BC paladins were in an awkward spot in gear design, using up stats for intellect before mana generation was sorted out in LK (mostly). On top of mana problems, aggro wasn't so easy either. While righteous fury gave a major boost to holy damage aggro, it was a magic ability and could be removed. This was trouble for some bosses. Again, even in BC there was a boss that would spam dispel magic, which made him very tricky to tank, since righteous fury was expensive.

Despite the durability, a quirk of the spell scaling system meant that using a low rank of flash of light with good gear could result in incomparable efficiency. Even with the crap regen, paladin healers could go for a long time, thanks to getting a good bit of healing out of a very cheap spell. So maybe they were good healers. For one target. Spamming one ability for hours on end. While wearing a dress that was clearly not designed for them, so it was not even remotely flattering. Ugh. Terrible times. These days there is gear designed for it, so the priests don't whine so much. The spells are more interesting. Even I, a person who never quite enjoyed healing, can say that paladin healing has improved.

And yet, and yet...

It was fun to see a rogue kill himself punching my shield while feeding me reckoning charges so I could punch back twice as often. I'm not saying that the same punch was giving both, since obviously if you're blocking you aren't getting crit, so no reckoning, at least until they changed it.

A paladin soloed* a level 60 40-man raid boss. At level 60. Thanks to an old old version of reckoning. Balanced? Perhaps not. Awesome? Yes.

* I suppose you could argue it was a two-person operation, since the rogue did help.

This video is why I made a paladin, made her protection, and an engineer. This shit was the shit. For some perspective, those plans were not easy to get, coming from what was not a particularly hard raid, but it did require 40 people and had a low drop rate. My first shields were made by another engineer, who it turned out was about to drop it (my timing is incredible), because it wasn't good enough. Psh. Who needs stupid stats when they can make mind-control helms and cloaking devices? That running around he did in the place with the skeletons, that was Scholomance, back when it was level 60, and really not a place for someone to be soloing. Of course a mage did it(the entire place) because they wish they were as good as warlocks. Of whom I cannot find a video of one soloing it. I'm sure I saw it... Surely a warlock can do anything a mage can do, but better; that's the whole point of them!

Anyway, balance was a hazy concept back then. Things are better now. Better, but different, and different isn't always better.

Down with the Squish!

2011-11-10T06:00:00.001-06:00

There's this "squish" idea floating around.

Let me make this clear: this is a terrible idea. Sure, it has some fringe benefits regarding inflation, but the main impact of it is negative: punishing success.

The true problem is idiots who make stupid assumptions. The main stupid assumption being that everything is relative, so that item levels must show relative gains rather than absolute gains. Wrong. Economic relativity is a myth used to justify the greediness of lazy people.

Let's try some basic facts.
1) Item level has increased since vanilla
2) Raiding participation has increased since vanilla.

Hm...

Let's try a basic labor supply model.

As we can see here, the Demand for raiders is at 100%, meaning that Blizzard wants everyone to raid. Since it is vertical, it indicates that Blizzard wants everyone to raid, no matter how many epics or item levels it takes to get them. The horizontal lines are essentially "price ceilings": Blizzard's determination of how many epics players can get. This is the wage rate. Now look at the Supply line, which clearly shows that as the available epics increase, there will be more raiders. This perfectly fits the trend, at least until Cataclysm, when Blizzard screwed up the market for epic raiders by trying to make us wear blues.

Note that when there are enough epics, players will give 110%. This explains the success of heroic raids.

So what does the squish do on this graph? Obviously it sets a new "epic ceiling" somewhere above the vanilla level but below the cataclysm level. This will reduce the number of raiders, harming the epic economy.

In other words, the "squish" will kill raiding, not save it.

Is the government kidnapping Cataclysm players?

2011-11-09T13:52:00.031-06:00

People keep throwing around wild theories for why subscriber numbers are down. Some people say that Cataclysm was a failure of an expansion. Other people say that something happened with China so WoW lost people from there. And still others claim it was a massive, near-simultaneous burnout, which merely by coincidence is during this expansion, suggesting that even if Blizzard had released an expansion called, and containg the relevant content: "Journey to Awesomeland: Let's all be Awesome, but not too Awesome, because that would ruin the fun, so let's go to Awesomeland and be moderately Awesome. Woo!" Yea, these wackos think that expansion would have been a 'failure' too.

Let's consider something more reasonable: the government is kidnapping Cataclysm players. I'm not saying it is part a sinister conspiracy to brain wash a large population which has already been trained to ignore morality in favor of following orders and getting rewards, in order to create a thinking but perfectly obedient army of super-soldiers. That just sounds ridiculous.

Instead I'm saying that on December 7th, Blizzard released Cataclysm. Within two weeks a man set himself on fire and the Arab world rose up. Coincidence? To us, probably. But governments are understandably nervous of the potential radicalizing effects of a game based on perpetual violence and killing whoever is most powerful. They may see the mass detention of WoW players as a simple cautionary measure to prevent more uprisings. And maybe the data supports them. One September 17th Wall Street was occupied. A month later Blizzcon was held and people yelled a lot while at the same time, people yelled a lot in New York and other cities. Again, the links are tenuous, but cannot and should not be ignored. The "squish" is proposed which would flatten item levels and essentially reduce the ilevel wealth gap, while a man who proposed a flat tax is accused of sexual harassment, not long after a homophobic rant at the previously mentioned Blizzcon. It all fits together just a little too well to be ignored.

Add to that the widespread and by democratic principles, correct, fear that gamers are violent asocial monsters and it is obvious that it would be negligent for the government to not be locking up WoW players en mass. Of course I saw this coming, which is why I quit, changed my name, and fled to a foreign country. Well, technically it is still part of the US, and my name is the same, and I think of it as more of a passive "lost interest" rather than an active "I quit", but beside being completely inaccurate, my point stands.

And that point is: run while you can, they are coming for you, and they are perfectly justified in doing so.

You monster.

One last data point: the prison population is going up while the WoW population is going down. See?

Cataclysm is not the problem with WoW. Mass arrests of WoW players are the problem.

And what's with all the unmarked white vans driving around?

Medal of Honor: Now with Beards

2011-11-09T06:00:00.001-06:00

Do you remember my review of Homefront? Well, this game has a similar "doesn't feel quite right" vibe to it. But it is not a worthless pile of crap either. I would recommend it, just not at full price.

I think the problem is that I thought it would be realistic. This was probably stupid of me, since a realistic portrayal of war would be a lot less fun.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my impression of war in Afghanistan involves a lot of the following:
- IEDS
- Trying to not shoot civilians
- Having a really hard to identifying civilians

I as a player never had to deal with any of these.

There were a lot of scripted events that included these or similarly unfun problems in war. In one cutscene a trigger-happy general ended up having us fire on Afghan soldiers. There were a couple scripted bits involving rigged objects, such as corpses and huts.

I as a player never had to wonder if something was rigged. I ran where there were no bullets and that was about it. Maybe this is because of gameplay. It would be a bit frustrating if there were random IEDs that could kill me. It would be pointless if they were in fixed locations that I could just remember.

I never wondered if I might shoot a civilian. If there was any uncertainty, it was scripted, and merely waiting would yield the answer. While waiting I was not in danger. The closest to this involved a few areas where I was shooting with friendlies nearby, which can be hard to identify if I am using heat vision. But that's okay, friendly fire seemed to either do no damage or was small enough to not matter.

To top off the strangeness of it all, while I could always perfectly identify enemies, the intel we acted on seemed to be absolute garbage. They expect a few guys and there is an army. This created a lot of dissonance for me.

Speaking of armies, I was not expecting the Taliban and Al'Queda fighters to be so willing to run straight into my shots. Sure, some of them are fanatics who want martyrdom, but it appeared that 99% of enemies were hoping to die while the remaining 1% were in charge of retreating and getting shot in the back. I know that Afghanistan had some of the traditional style of war: "a bunch of guys with guns shoot at each other for a while", but I don't think I ever dealt with a hit-and-run or any ambushes which did not involve at least 30 enemies who of course all died. Not a single suicide bomber.

It was symmetric warfare: what they lacked in technology they made up for with numbers. Lots of numbers. I'd have my fancy guns and awe-inspiring air support and they'd have lots of people. As best as I could tell, the US had around ten thousand soldiers and the Taliban had around ten bajillion. I suspect we were secretly fighting the Chinese.

I ran into a few bugs. Nothing disastrous, but annoying of course. At one point the Taliban units didn't all spawn, so they couldn't all die, so I couldn't advance, despite the area being clear. Going to the previous checkpoint fixed that. At another point, it seems that one of the kills was part of a scripted event: grab guy and bash his head, then drop down. But for some reason it was possible to find a gun before that point, which seemed to disable the bash guy's head script, making it impossible to move forward.

On to the good parts:

The stories are pretty interesting. I won't spoil them, but I felt like they tied together well. Everything felt connected, with a real sense that what one group was doing was not isolated, but was part of a network of support and cooperation. In this aspect it felt a bit more like a real war than the random and disconnected campaigns from the standard "shoot a million Nazis" WWII FPS.

In general, beside the one general, the American forces looked totally badass. Pinned down? Air strike is there in 30 seconds. Still pinned? More air strike. Still pinned? There is an American badass a second away from killing everyone. Maybe this as the true point of the game: to make America look badass. Of course it also looked incredibly expensive (precision munitions aren't cheap!), but definitely cost-effective, especially if we consider that until you bomb a bunker it has unlimited reinforcements. Though there was the one mission where, as best as I could tell, we lost the entire ground army except for eight guys, four of whom were not present at the battle. This might explain the ready availability of air support; there are hundreds of aircraft supporting eight people.

The gameplay itself is pretty good. In general I found myself using the given weapons, usually some sort of American gun. But at a few points I found myself picking up other guns due to being unable to get to anyone to beg for ammo. There is enough variation in the guns to be worth a little thought (though not a ton). When I had a machine gun, I took advantage of the huge capacity, a necessity given the long reload time. I often didn't use the sights, because if my goal is to throw lead in a general direction to keep people scared, accuracy seemed pointless. In contrast the assault rifles had me firing in more controlled bursts. The shotgun got some use near the end, when I found myself short on ammo, unable to get to allies, and unwilling to trade my scoped gun for an enemy gun with just iron sights.

The ammo was a mixed bag for me: given that there are a few infinite respawn parts, it was nice that friendly AI could give me more ammo. But it also seemed a bit strange that they are apparently all carrying a billion rounds. Overall I thought it was a decent compromise: I can only carry so much and have to take some care, but I won't find myself getting saved at a checkpoint with no ammo.

As would be expected, the game is on rails, but they aren't quite as narrow as I expected. There is some side to side room for maneuvering, which could lead to actually choosing different tactics rather than just "shoot better". The health system is the popular "wounds heal very quickly" system, which I like. I also appreciated that checkpoints are not too widely spread. I am easily annoyed by repeating long scripted elements and for the most part, I did not have to.

The friendly AI can actually contribute. At one point an objective was completed by the AI getting the last kill. Of course I still need to "push" the group to keep it moving, but that seems reasonable, since these guys aren't big on leaving anyone behind, particularly when there are only eight guys left.

As for the enemy AI, it isn't omniscient, though it does seem more perceptive than I'd expect. It won't see out the back of its head, but often out of the corner of its eye. That's fine by me, since it means I can move around a bit and flank them without things getting silly. In contrast, compare the extremes where the AI always knows where you are, or in Splinter Cell: Conviction where it will remember a last known location, and then obsess over that location, going straight for it without seeming to consider that the player can move.

The single-player campaign took about 4-6 hours. I know that is broad. I forgot when I had started playing. It was daylight savings and my sleep clock had decided to take advantage of the time change by screwing up my sleep horribly. I was on around 4 hours of sleep, so please pardon the inexact game time.

So overall, I'd recommend this game if you like shooting people and need to lose a few hours. But don't pay $50 or whatever they charge these days.

Realism, Simulation, Immersion, Choice, and Accuracy

2011-11-08T06:00:00.001-06:00

Nouns!

Realism! Check out the details on this gun. This game doesn't have to be 20 Gb, but if you want guns that look this good, then it does. You'll want a new video card too. Newer than that one. What do you mean I don't even know what card you have? This is a new, realistic game, of course you can't handle it!

It seems to me that when developers talk about realism they aim for visual realism. They make it look like what it is supposed to be. Presumably looking like it is good enough. But if visuals and sound (I forgot sound) are all it takes, then we'd all have PTSD from all those war movies. And from the similarly visually stunning FPS that they keep churning out.

Visuals do not guarantee immersion.

The problem is simulation. What is being simulated? I'm reminded of the 'simulator' we had for driver's ed back in high school. We'd all sit in our little driver's seats with a decent recreation of a steering wheel, gear shift, turn signal, pedals, and other stuff which I'm sure is important (aren't you glad I don't drive much?). It was realistic. The visuals weren't so great, being projected a bit far away on the big screen at the front of the room.

It was a great simulation in all aspects, except two: immersion and choice. Notice how I said the visuals are projected on the screen? Yea, one screen for all of us. We watched a film from a driver's seat and were meant to react to it, but there was almost no feedback. The car went forward whether I braked or floored it. The car turned left regardless of where the wheel was. It didn't even matter if the car was 'on'.

Sound familiar? How about your average FPS? As much as WoW is 'on rails', it is a gloriously free and open-ended sandbox compared to your average FPS. Assault this objective! Do not try to climb over the fence. Except that one fence that is scripted to be climbable. You must climb that one. Is this like war? Well sure, there are times when taking any other path will get you filled with bullets, shrapnel, poison, or dirt which is moving at a high speed relative to your body despite being, from most perspectives, stationary. But can you imagine a soldier that he cannot flank the enemy by hopping a fence or crawling around the back way, that he will instead attack a dozen enemies head-on? And of course he never, ever has backup or the option to retreat. That last one is realistic if we're talking about Soviet soldiers in WWII, but outside of that one specific example, which admittedly covers a lot of territory and numbers, there are some options.

The problem is that immersion requires not just appearance, but also choice.

This may mean a loss of historical accuracy while also being more historically realistic. Washington could have done things differently. He had the choice. He happened to take the choices that led to me being here in the best greatest country ever put here by God, in contrast with other countries which were obviously put here by Satan. But he could have ended up as a Loyalist. He had the choice and if we were to play the American Revolution FPS, we'd better get the chance to betray all we stand for in return for evil British gold.

On a side note, FPS aren't quite as much fun before semi-automatic weapons. I played one based on the Civil War once. It was a bit annoying. You'd shoot and then take approximately ten minutes to reload and shoot again, making it slightly more interactive than a vanilla paladin, but that's another story.

There are narrative limits. I cannot imagine the size of the budget required to write, script, and test the endless possibilities for Mr. Pre-President. We'd need sci-fi-style cloning just to get enough writers. So fine, let's force him to be a traitor. But does he have to freeze his ass off in Valley Forge? Can he pay Benedict Arnold so he doesn't pull a Benedict Arnold?

This may be why I enjoy Civilization so much. It isn't historically accurate, and come to think of it, it isn't historically realistic either, but it's something historical. It captures the possibilities. It shows how decisions matter. The butterfly effects of choices are often amazing to see. The potential for greatness, and evil, is nearly limitless. Because of this, despite what the mechanics or graphics might lack, it achieves a level of realistic immersion.

This semi-sandbox sort of play is a source of replay value. The 'story' is different each time. Maybe one game I find myself in a peaceful world where science and cultures are the 'wars'. At another time, I may see perpetual war, shifting alliances, and half a continent burned down (I still maintain that I had no territorial ambitions, which is why I destroyed it all).

Even when there is an overall developer-created narrative path, sandbox elements can help. Take Stalker for example. Ultimately you will do the final thing, whether it is killing the C-Consciousness or dying horribly in Shadow of Chernobyl or leaving the Zone in Call of Pripyat. Yea, a bit of a strange ending: you leave. No great discoveries or victories, merely escape. But along the way there are choices. You can side with various factions. Traveling you can try to protect fellow Stalkers or leave them to their deaths. Or assist them in dying. Maybe you skip half the missions and beeline for the ending cutscene, a choice which sounds remarkably stupid to me, but which sounds quite a bit like the leveling-skippers of WoW. I actually played through CoP a few times, finding more that I had missed and seeing what choices I could make differently.

Admittedly these are essentially cosmetic choices. The economy in the game is easy enough that a vendor benefit isn't needed. A few weapons are different, but nothing is unavailable, just a little harder to get. But it is enough. I can play as I would if I were actually there. Or, as I would if I were actually there but not hiding in a corner weeping, because let's face it, there is no way I'd be going into a dark cave, alone except for the scary mutants lurking all around.

And yet, as much as I might praise choice and various approaches to realism, sometimes it's nice to take the straightforward route and shoot Nazis in the face.

WoWing around again: Hillsbrad (Horde-side, just in case Alliance has quests here too)

2011-11-07T06:00:00.001-06:00

"Yes, this horse IS made of STARS."

"Bears are soulless beasts put upon this earth to torment us."

"The mine spiders refuse command and are running rampant."

Yea, we're off to a good start.

Rogues, take note when shackling webbed prisoners: they do not die, they despawn. That means your combo points cannot be used for recuperate. It's a small problem given the general harmlessness of enemies, particularly when overleveled.

Moving on to other entirely unacceptable failures of game development: the murlocs do not flee.

On the plus side, Dumass is the best-designed escort NPC ever. Mostly because he acts like a normal escort NPC but has the dialogue to back it up.

Sludge Fields: Who keeps screaming? And then, like any good quest will do, the question is answered. But while we're talking about good quests, is it really necessary to retcon all the player actions from vanilla? I realize that respawns and that sort of thing were all necessary mechanics in lieu of a dynamic world, but did they have to rewrite the stories as well? It doesn't seem like a good way to bring back old players if every other quest says "you did nothing." The quest in question and the associated book were good reads, but would anything have been lost by renaming the NPCs?

I feel bad for Jenny Awesome. All the quests seem to have been miswritten and used "he", but the Forsaken know she's a she. For some strange reason, the quest to save the humans is not repeatable. Lost opportunity there, Blizzard!

Apparently the Forsaken have begun recycling. Oh look, Helcular is here, brought back by "a group of heroes" WAS THAT SO HARD!? Now if he'd quit whipping out his rod at every opportunity...

Quest objective: "Explain to Orkus that he is standing in shallow water." This all ended in sadness, and not just because of how the quest turned out.

Tarren Mill requires level 21. My time was done. But at least I got to fight angry slimes.

Sometimes it is safer to fight to the death

2011-11-05T06:00:00.000-05:00

I love how Civilization gives us the tools to create our own history, and just like historical world leaders, commit atrocities on a scale that the human mind cannot comprehend.

I noticed that the Iroquois were a bit big and powerful. This was not a good thing and it could not end well. The last time someone got big and powerful they attacked me and I had to burn down a couple of their cities and capture an allied city state. Serves you right, Ramesses II. All I wanted was to be left alone and by burning down your cities I proved that I was only neutralizing a threat and had no territorial ambitions. Beside Japan.

Anyway, the point I was trying to get at was that I attacked the Iroquois. My plan was to burn down about half their empire and then take a generous peace offer. Then I'd burn down half of Germany, because they were making me nervous too. I went about it in a systematic fashion, capturing a city, burning it, capturing the next, burning it. Just being a reasonable world leader looking out for the interests of his people.

Somehow, he successfully recognized that my army was larger and more advanced (don't mess with the Cho-Ko-Nu). And then he offered a treaty. A very generous treaty. He gave me some gold. And every single city beside his capitol.

I just want to reiterate, this was a defensive war and I have no territorial ambitions.

So I burned down the entire empire that he'd handed over to me.

The populations of the cities you see add up to about 68. I'd already burned down two cities of around 5 each by this point. The demographics screen wasn't of any help. Maybe the census doesn't bother with people who are going to be immolated soon. Or it excludes foreigners. But I'd put the deaths in the millions.

For some context, I have conveniently played on an "earth" map. That put the burned-down area as approximately the entire European portion of the former USSR.

In related news, Australia seems to be completely overrun with barbarians.

Spake English!

2011-11-04T06:00:00.004-05:00

Sometimes I hear people speaking something other than English, such as Mandarin or English English. I do the logical thing and yell at them. Then we argue, usually about the geopolitics of the day. I'm a bit of an ideologue and refuse to budge from my principles, such as denying the existence of the Welsh. It all gets a bit confusing because they keep on speaking their non-English language, so we do a bit of arguing past each other, but I assure you, I argue past them a lot better.

But these arguments are a lot more productive than the average one regarding casuals. At least when I start random arguments with foreigners (I assume they are foreign, since Americans speak English) they recognize that we might see eye to eye (metaphorically, some of the old English English men I yell at are a bit hunched) but are not speaking the same language, so some meaning gets lost in the lack of translation.

The casual-harcore arguments never have this benefit. I say casual and you say casual and the word sounds the same, with maybe one person saying it more like "cash-ual" and another more like "ca-zhual", and maybe a "cassual" to complete the mix. But the minor variation in sound fails to alert us to the not-so-minor variation in meaning.

Is casual a time thing? How much time?

Or maybe it is an interest thing. This one seems strange, since someone playing a game they aren't interested in sounds more like "stupid" than "casual".

Is it the fullness of the care cup? Competitiveness? Research? Social ties?

We could look up the dictionary definition, but that wouldn't be of much use, since we're not going to all suddenly switch to the meaning used by Oxford. Beside, they're sorta elitist about their words.

I wonder if we should even bother to use the word. In *ahem* casual conversation it could still be of some use as a generic pointer toward a direction on a spectrum, but if we want to say something more than that? Useless! Worse than useless, counter-productive!

Imagine if one day WoW removed targeting in favor of aiming, so that spells and attacks had to be manually pointed at targets. An FPS player might like this. An RPG player who is more used to the 'sticky' system might not. Certainly the targeting makes it a bit harder, but is it hardcore? The FPS player might say yes. The RPG player might say no, that it is dumbing down and ruining the genre to suit the stupid FPS players.

It is almost as useless as the terms conservative and liberal. Less so only because at least casual doesn't suddenly flip in meaning when going from America to Europe the way liberal does. Apparently over there "liberal" means "libertarianish" (this is Europe we're talking about) whereas here it means "nannystater who takes your money to force black people to get abortions", in contrast with "progressive" which means either "person who wants to improve things" or "cancer".

We need a new word. Or no, no mere word, but a format. A code. I suggest these parameters for measurement, on scales of 1-9 with 1 being lowest and 10 highest. Roughly-speaking, higher scores are more 'hardcore', but I want to emphasize the "roughly-speaking" part.

Time investment: Ranges from "now and then" to "second job"
Emotional investment: Ranges from "meh" to "It's not stalking if I plan to murder the loot ninja at the end."
Knowledge: Ranges from "Press buttons and pretty!" to "I've found a bug in the boss code showing that he is using 'Hyperspace Doom' a tenth of a second sooner than intended"
Customization: "I changed a couple keys so I stopped pressing quickload instead of quicksave" to "my keyboard cost more than your computer and I have a contract with Apple to redesign my UI"

This would give scores ranging from 4 to 36. It would start at zero, but I'm pretty sure that if someone has a time, knowledge, or emotional investment of zero, they are not playing the game. Even a customization of zero suggests that they may or may not have a keyboard. The reason it goes 1-9 rather than the more common 1-10 is that this way it all fits into a 4-digit code, a convenience which I'm sure will be appreciated when everyone in the world adopts my new standard for game communication.

It still needs some work. For example, emotional investment is going to be linked to all of the rest, with emotion and time forming a feedback loop. Knowledge can be expected to generally increase with time and emotion, and may increase customization. These are not perfectly independent factors. It may not be appropriate to have them all on the same scales. Customization may call for a wider range, in fact, since buying special hardware just to play a specific game strikes me as pretty hardcore. Or it may merely follow from a high emotional investment.

For myself during the height of my WoW days, I'm estimating scores something like this:
Time: 7
Emotion: 6
Knowledge: 8
Customization: 5
I spent a lot of time, cared quite a bit, knew a lot about the game, mostly within lore but a great deal about classes and raids, but my UI was a sort of on and off thing. The off coming with a new patch where I'd have to check the "load out of date addons" box and put up with constant UI errors until one day I got around to downloading an updated version. That might sound like less than 5, but considering I had a bar, gear, UI, and multiple AH and mail addons, I think that makes 5 a minimum. If it wasn't all so haphazard I'd probably put it higher.

That would make me a 7685 or 26 combined, or 72% harcore. That sounds about right to me.

What's your score?

He's So Tough

2011-11-03T06:00:00.005-05:00

The captain was a tough guy; there was no denying that. At night after we had too much to drink we'd all sit around and play a game where we'd make up ever more outrageous stories of how tough he was. We were supposed to go until someone was obviously lying, but somehow it never happened. He was just that tough.

"The captain is so tough, I heard he plays Russian Roulette every night."

"That's him!"

"I heard he plays with only one empty."

"Tough!"

"I saw him. He uses a pistol."

"Woah..."

It was my turn.

"I heard he doesn't bow to social pressure and risk his life over a pointless game with no payoff."

"You're lying."

"No really, I can't believe he'd be so dumb as to..."

*bang*

"To the captain!"

F$#%ing gaffes

2011-11-02T13:21:00.028-05:00

I find gaffes funny. And that's about it. At the moment someone said something silly; so what?

It annoys me when I see people try to attach more meaning to it. For example: recent thing with Rick Perry and the American Revolution.

The Texas governor answered a female student’s question on the topic by saying that one of the reasons our founding fathers "fought the revolution in the 16th century was to get away from that type of onerous crown."

Is he saying that the Revolution was in the 1500s (which would be pretty bad)? Actually, no! Here's what I think happened:

What do we call the 1900s? The 20th century. Notice how the year and the century are off by one? I get this wrong a lot. I'll say 19th century to refer to 1900s. It's a conversion that we have to make all the time. Year + 1 = Century From this we can see that Perry's mind just had a little reversal: Century + 1 = Year, so if the year was 1700s then century is 16th.

It's a minor, extremely minor, mental mixup.

Minecraft and why everything is over budget

2011-11-02T06:00:00.002-05:00

I thought I'd done a decent survey of the caves near my desert town. They seemed wide, but shallow. I could easily enough dig them out. Layer some dirt, pour in some water, and I could have a neat green valley next to my desert town. It wasn't a two-hour project, but it was something I could get down in a reasonable bit of time.

Then I did some more exploring.

It turns out it is a lot wider than I thought. Which is fine. But it is also deeper. A lot deeper. "I can find lava" deep. I haven't even explored all of it yet, because I keep finding scary things and getting scared by them. Apparently randomly-generated geography doesn't care about planning.

The project is getting to be intimidating. I'm not sure how to take on something of this scale. I really could use a few million unemployed people in Minecraft. That's how we built stuff back in the Depression and it was good. If I'm remembering my history properly, the Hoover Dam, built entirely by hand, was so amazing that the mere existence of it kept Mexico out of World War I, Zimmerman telegram or not. My point is that digging one shovel of sand at a time is very slow and a horde of serfs would be useful. Alas, I have no serfs.

So I did what anyone does when the hoped for goal becomes impractical: I made a slightly helpful but ultimately symbolic anything. In this case it was a bridge that made it slightly easier for me to walk from the desert to the forest. Rather than using the readily available sandstone, I used to more rare cobblestone and gravel (I've not been digging in mountains much, so these aren't as common, but I do have sand). These look better. Then I built a structurally-pointless arch, or possibly suspension, it's hard to tell when everything has zero structural significance. I suppose the stone deck supports the gravel, but that's all.

Maybe someday I will be able to screenshot a forest in a desert valley, but not today. Today is neither the day for screenshots, nor for the courage of men failing.

What's so gay about gay marriage?

2011-11-01T06:00:00.014-05:00

I'm not sure who this post is aimed at, maybe social conservatives, but I don't think many read my blog. So let's classify this like most posts of this sort: someone shouting into the void and wondering if it hears.

I'm trying to puzzle through opposition to gay marriage. I suppose the root of it is the belief that gay sex is an abomination. Fine, let's run with that and say that we want to stop gay sex. Does blocking gay marriage stop gay sex?

Well let's see, do single people have sex? Yes. Straight and gay, single people have sex. Marriage is an ineffective abstinence-enforcer.

But maybe if we all just firmly believed in the sanctity of marriage and purity and all accepted a moral framework that says no sex until marriage, then it might work. But if we're going to create an imaginary world where everyone believes in the exact same code of behavior, then why not just imagine a world with no gay people, like they do in Iran (true story, there are no gay people in Iran.)

Unfortunately for you, social conservatives, people have sex outside of marriage, so blocking gay marriage does not stop their abominable activity.

Or is the sex a lost cause and the goal is just to not legitimize gay sex? Legitimize it for whom? The gay people don't seem to have much problem with it either way. You won't accept it either way. So who is going to think "oh hey, they're married now, I guess all that gay sex they've been having is okay; maybe I'll have some too"?

Maybe the goal is to stop the spread of gayness? Marriage is a strong argument for adoption, and if gay people start adopting children, they might convert them. I'm not quite sure how that happens. Maybe gay people have gay bedtime stories. It couldn't be some sort of sexual act, since there is no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, unless they're just really good at hiding it, but given that you've already caught one sexual deviation, they probably aren't.

It seems to come down to this: gay marriage must be stopped because gay people might adopt and read theoretical gay stories to their children, thereby causing there to be more gay people, until one day straight people are a minority and are forced to breed just to make more gay babies, all the while being mocked for their sexual deviance. I'd hate to live in a world where straight people are attacked and oppressed for having the wrong kind of sex.

Running with the gay bedtime stories theory of gayness, I must wonder, where did all the gay people come from in the first place? Some studies put the number around 10%. That's a lot of gay bedtime stories. Surely we'd have noticed 10% of children being forced to read gay bedtime stories, especially since those children were all raised by straight parents. Are gay people sneaking into their rooms after the parents leave and reading them two gay stories to cancel out the presumably straight one read by the straight parents? That is a terrifying thought.

Maybe these sneaky gays are responsible for other events as well. Maybe they steal socks out of the dryer and unzip our flies right before we present at meetings. Maybe they are the reason bottles empty so quickly and checks bounce. Clearly gay people are not mere homosexual humans, but are actually poltergeists.

Let me go on the record and say that I am against poltergeist marriage.

My point is that I find opposition to gay marriage to be absurd.

I have to come clean about this

2011-10-31T06:00:00.002-05:00

I want to start off to make sure we're all in the right context with this: this isn't a long-term thing. Not yet, at least. It only started recently. But it's so good. Not good good, but it feels good, you know? While I do it, it's pretty nice. I know it's not doing me any good. It's not helping those who rely on me. It's probably just annoying to anyone else. Laughable, really. Well, if it wasn't a problem.

I like to think of myself as a gamer. I like the sound of it. But maybe that's not an accurate term anymore. Maybe if I can kick this, but that's a maybe, an if, and frankly I'm not sure how likely it is.

I asked a friend who know a bit about this stuff if he could help me try it out. His girlfriend knows more and maybe she could have helped me, seen what was going on before it was too late. But maybe it was too late the second I considered it. Once I took that first step, it's like the final road with no sidepaths. There certainly isn't a high road. I'm not saying I blame my friend. He did what he could with what he knew. He didn't know better and I should have known that. I'd just wanted to try it out. Something different. A new experience, you know?

And no, this isn't some long-winded roundabout joke about how I tried another MMO. It's about something more real. Or at least something that we see the financial aspects a bit more, with the few big-timers who can get rich off it while the rest of us, well we do what we do.

I made a void ray. I liked it. So I made another. And another. Pretty soon I had a dozen void rays and not much else. But it did the trick. And then I started another game and a dozen void rays got someone scared and hiding behind a wall of turrets with their command center already destroyed along with the expansion. That was supposed to be the last game of the night, but then I started another one. This didn't go as well. Considering my almost total ignorance of protoss mechanics, I think I did okay. With a bit more care I might have pulled off a win, thought it would have been close.

They might be expensive and terrible against lots of small enemies, but damn; they're so flexible. Air or ground, they can hit it. They can fly. I'm so used to terran armies, mostly based on the ground, since while their power isn't weak, it is the ground that they rule. Well, and any air that has marines under it. They are powerful, but harder to move around. Voids rays, those can go anywhere. And wow are they impressive against buildings.

Maybe I can shake this. I hope I can, because I don't think there is any future in it. Maybe you can take this as a cautionary tale. Void rays are not "one-time fun, one time and done. They are not a one-time thing. Maybe they're fun once, but when you find yourself sucked in and trapped, that fades.

I hate that I almost like this expansion

2011-10-28T06:00:00.002-05:00

I know almost nothing about MoP. I haven't cared much. I looked up one of the talent trees, thought it looked ridiculous, and that was about it.

I want to keep it this way.

In my mind there is a picture, a vague stort of picture, but a nice one. In this picture in WoW the sun is out and the grass is green,. There are vaguely Japanese buildings in the background (yes, I know where pandas are from) and everything is peaceful. But not like a nelf elf area where everything is peaceful but strangely purple. Maybe the picture is Nagrand (I loved that zone) with some paper houses and no floating rocks.

I really like this picture. This picture makes me want to spend $50 and log in to do... something. Maybe I just ride around and look in the buildings. Maybe out of view is a cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there is something to fight. But not something demonic or undead. Maybe it's like the cats on Quel'Danas, unchecked growth but not corrupt.

This picture is entirely in my head. It has almost no basis on what will actually turn out. It's internally-generated hype that will only lead to disappointment as I learn more. And I hate that.

Pandaren are fine, l2p

2011-10-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how Blizzard will make an entire expansion of it, but we can worry about that bridge when people are whining a week in with no content. In the meantime, I want to address the panda-haters.

You think they look silly, are a joke, and do not at all fit in? I agree. You know what else looks silly and is a joke? Gnomes. Incidentally, the biggest problem with gnomes is their inability to be druids and turn into even more cute bears. Let's all picture a gnome bear form and say daw. Dawwww! So cute.

Warcraft is a flexible franchise. It isn't quite clear how it does it, much like the typical super-power battle in anime where everything is driven by shouting and angry faces. Somehow it works. It will be weird for a while. I don't recall having a particularly positive reaction to draenei, especially with the retcon, but they work. They fit in now. Maybe it took some mental rearranging on my part, but it happened and now draenei are just fine. Don't worry about whether a race fits in; it will, eventually.

Maybe the lore will be awful. Maybe it will be great. Maybe the starting area will be the greatest or worst thing ever. We don't know. My assumption is that it will be like most of WoW: fairly fun in general, but possibly hit-or-miss in terms of any sort of emotional reaction, regardless of the 'legitimacy' of the race in question. Just look at my thoughts on the starting areas recently. The gnome story was a good one, but the initial area was just terrible. In contrast, the orc story wasn't particularly great in any way, but it sort of worked out into a bit of fun, and I still got to beat sleeping peons. My prediction is that if you play the pandaren starting area, when you finish you will not think "what a waste of time", and will instead be annoyed that you got dumped into some boring nelf area, like they did with the worgen.

I'm not suggesting that the expansion will be worth your money, or a sub either. I think the expansion will be good and the added content will be good, but it may very well not be good enough. What is good enough? That's something for you to decide. For example, I think that Coke is a good drink; it tastes good, it has sugar and caffeine that make me nostalgic for my hyper younger days, and on top of that it's very cheap. But the health cost, and low but still relevant financial cost, mean that I don't drink it very often at all. It is good, but not good enough.

Speaking of sugary water, did the Mountain Dew tie-in ruin WoW for anyone? It sure ruined it for me, for a very short time, and then I went back to doing whatever it was I was doing and complaining about my usual things. See? Warcraft is flexible and durable. It can withstand just about anything. It's like some mutated slime that devours all, turning it into a homogeneous goo of rat genocide. Maybe you don't like slimy rat genocide, but I'm not sure a few pandas are going to make it any worse.

The problem with confidence

2011-10-26T06:00:00.005-05:00

No one else was standing up to tackle the problem. The professor waited and waited. So I stood up. I would take up the chalk. I went up, took a bow for the applause, and began. In correctly. Yep, misinterpreted the problem from the very start. After that I got along a bit better and stumbled to the final number correctly. Which I then read backward and again was wrong.

Now everyone has another bit of argument against standing up.

I suppose I could tie the baseline psychological phenomena here to more important things like protesting tyranny, but somehow the a+b=c -> 10a+10b+10c thing never quite works.

Buying classic content

2011-10-25T06:00:00.017-05:00

Yesterday Tesh said this, responding to my "what would get you excited?" post.

I'm with Leah; drop the stupid subscription already and run with a GW business model. I'll pay for content, but paying for time pisses me off.

That would even allow for classic servers; players only play the "chapters" of the game that they have paid for, including the mechanics for those chapters.

I wonder how the pricing would work with that. If it was just content, then a base + expansions model would work well. But if each expansion has the corresponding mechanics, then I think a lot of players would be inclined to play an earlier tier, which I suppose works out. But for people playing BC or later, what do they buy and play? Do they start at level 60 outside the Dark Portal with BC mechanics? Or do they play up through vanilla with those mechanics and then suddenly have a dramatic shift at 60?

I'm not saying a system where we buy/sign up for an older mechanic-content bundle couldn't work, but it sure sounds hard to implement. I wonder if Blizzard even has the old mechanics locked in a safe somewhere, or if they are doing a Lucas and actively destroying all earlier iterations of their work. Then there is the problem of which mechanic set to pick. Are we going with the mechanics of the day before the next-expansion patch? By that I mean, vanilla would be patch 1.9.whatevertheydidbefore 2.0 and BC would be 2.9.before3.0, and so on?

It's not an easy thing to decide. WoW changed within vanilla. You can find people who are, or at least were, furious at how BGs destroyed world PvP. Ditto for guards, and the various ways they've been buffed over the years. Maybe we should have beta WoW. Or post-release but before all the class-fix patches. I wonder if any paladins are still mad about 1.9... Once upon a time there were no raids and dark iron ore was only found in one zone (rather than the generous two!) and before that maybe only instances. Should the vanilla server remove that dumbing-down casualizing killing of the hardcore running BRD for a handful of dark iron ore nodes? Should shamans get the good version of sentry totem or the one with marginal usefulness in WSG? Can fear still run players off cliffs?

Moving forward, should BC have the second tier of badge rewards? Should LK have the Dungeon Finder or not? In the mists of time I think we forget how late it was added, which, by the way, was at the same time as ICC, the last raid, not counting that place no one did. Should Cataclysm have uh... some major upcoming change or not? Will the Mists of Pandaren pack have the original Pandaren or will it use the 5.6 re-write where they are revealed to be the first wave of the Burning Legion's next assault? Write that one down, or you know, copy-paste, I called it here first.

I'm not trying to say that a pay-for-content and pay-for-mechanics system couldn't work. I think it could. But it wouldn't be easy. It wouldn't be cheap either (though "not cheap" is vague and relative). Could it generate the revenues to be profitable? I think I'd buy a vanilla pack for $40 or so, maybe add on a BC pack for $20. But is $60 from a few weirdos here and there worth the cost to separate out the content and mechanics and maintain them? Or even if we don't try to do the mechanics, if we just have a "pay for a higher level cap" system, will a few people paying $40 to play in old Azeroth (Cataclysm just made that part a lot harder) bring in the money to justify the coding and maintenance needed?

I suspect it could be profitable, but that isn't enough. It must be profitable enough to keep investors happy. It must also be profitable enough to offset the risk of subscribers switching to the potentially cheaper system. I don't think that last one is true just yet. Maybe when WoW losses a few million more they will try something radical, but I don't see that for a couple years or so (and that is assuming the downward trend continues).

Poll about BC

2011-10-24T21:08:00.016-05:00

I've moved the poll on to BC. At the current rate, we might get to Cataclysm before MoP has been replaced with the Oceans of Fish expansion. Yea, it's a fish-based expansion. I'm not predicting big sales on that one.

Anyway, there's the poll up in that corner. At some point I'll be getting relative fun polls, such as "did you have more fun during Vanilla or BC?" and "BC or LK?" and "LK or the past year of Cata?" Then we can make an ordering for them which I can then casually dismiss with some handwaving and bad statistical analysis if it doesn't support my views.

What would have gotten you excited?

2011-10-24T06:00:00.002-05:00

I'm cautiously pessimistic about Misty Pandarens and I have a strict policy of never talking about anything when it is relevant, so I am withholding judgement beside the first words of this post and what I said Friday. But let's imagine that hypothetically I was not particularly excited by the announcements and possibly other people were similarly not enthused.

What change to WoW, big or small, would get you excited? I mean resub excited, finding time on your calender excited. I don't mean "I guess I won't unsub yet, it looks good enough."

For myself, I'm going to add the pre-condition that the sub price drops to $1. This is purely to get over my strangely arbitrary cheapness and is not a reflection of what WoW is actually worth. I'd bet that at the current time it would still be worth $15 a month to me. I am not a rational consumer.

I'd like to see massive raids again. While we're at it, old AV or something similar, which mixes large-scale PvP and PvE. That type of content was something I loved, almost a microcosm of WoW, with everything going on in it: rep, questing, PvP, raiding, leveling, even farming for a time.

Dynamic zones. I don't think the unbalanced factions and players would work well with an entirely dynamic world. If we wanted EVE we'd play EVE. But it would be neat to see zones that players could change for a bit of time. Maybe we'd have an outdoor raid to unlock something, like another raid, or a really great farming area. That too, get rid of most daily quests and bring back farming, materials and mob kills, as the primary way that players actively generate income.

My first take on the new talent system

2011-10-21T21:46:00.008-05:00

Klepsacovic: I expect it will fail terrible
terribly
ah, irony

It's a big change. But it's not a big enough change. WoW needs a lot to change for talents to ever be truly choices. These changes are beyond just tweaking talents, or even redoing the system entirely. Raiding must change. Classes must change. Groups and soloing would need to change. Core mechanics like aggro and the near-universal immunity to CC and impairments that bosses enjoy would need to change.

I was exaggerating to say it will fail. I'm sure the new talent system will be fun enough and I doubt it will kill WoW. But the new system won't "fix" talents. I believe that is impossible.

Leveling is too slow

2011-10-21T06:00:00.002-05:00

You might have noticed me complaining that my warrior was too high for the Barrens by the time he got to them. Well that was stupid! Leveling is too slow, always too slow.

Even if level 13 was too high for Barrens, it was too low for instances. That's what I was interested in. I already knew the leveling game was a mess and hadn't been fixed, but what had changed in the intervening months on the grouping side, that was my real interest. For this, any leveling speed was too slow.

Leveling just gets in the way of the real game, by which I mean grouping at level 15.

Maybe this same lesson can be extended. Possibly it applies to level 85 and grouping then as well. That means that there are not merely 14 barrier levels, but an entire whatever that math would be. More than 14! Unacceptable.

But of course it's all just a trap. I rushed to get to level 15 so I could play in groups. And I did. But before I knew it I was level 20 and geared like a boss. Suddenly all that previous questing stuff was not just a waste of time, it was a really easy waste of time. So of course I stopped doing that. But then there I was, capped out at 20 and gearing up, but gearing up is really just a two-word way to say "running the same places over and over again with various random people who don't want to be there much more than I do."

Damn. Now that leveling thing doesn't sound so bad.

Consistency of Play

2011-10-20T07:59:00.005-05:00

Some people don't like that WoW starts off with success based on how you play. Then comes raiding, when your ability to play your class still matters, but progression is based on learning new dances, mostly meaning standing in particular places at particular times. They don't seem to think this is much fun.

They might be wrong. It could be that the problem is not the dancing, but raiding, that they as individuals have done it for too long. If they think the learning has shifted from class-based to dance-based, maybe they've just played that class for too long. Dancing may not be the problem at all.

I think they're right, though. I've found a similar pattern in other games. The core gameplay is one type, but some bits of content radically shift away from that.

Poor Rogues
Rogues may have it the worst. The sneaky types, maybe rogues, bandits, assassins, people who are supposed to be in shadows. For much of the game they can sneak. Much of the time they can stay hidden, strike for quick kills, and then vanish. Then come the bosses.

Bosses like to ignore stealth rules. They know where you are unless you're lucky and the devs specifically scripted the boss to be "dumb" and not always know where you are. Apparently not being omniscient makes you stupid. What all this means is that what your role is based on: quick damage from shadows, often with poor defense and health, is ruined. Rogues in WoW may have it the worst, but I have never run into a game that handles sneaking well when bosses are involved.

Minigames are stupid
I don't like minigames much. Maybe some here and there, as an idle distraction, but not much past that. I like to play the game I signed up for, not some gimmick that someone tacked on top of it.

RTS

If it is an RTS, I want base-building. I want to build buildings and units and if we're feeling really fancy, have upgrades and technologies. But the buildings and the units are essential. Given this, I don't like missions that give me a few units and tell me to navigate some strange maze of unusually well-planned and perfectly-timed traps. Does it require greater tactical skill to manage them perfectly with no economy giving room for error? Sure. But that doesn't make it more fun. Can you imagine a multi-player Starcraft game where everyone starts with a dozen random units are are told to duke it out? That might be cool, once or twice, but eventually it would get boring and annoying and we'd want our base-building maps back.

Economic management, so-called macro, is critical. Managing production and gathering, expanding well, getting units to where they need to be, these are critical to the gameplay, even before anyone has started shooting. It's like the American Civil War, in which big government accountants crushed the Confederacy, not through martial prowess, but through industrial might.

Splinter Cell
I like the sneaking aspect of the series. I like the finding paths through areas and better ways to kill everyone. I like when there are no bullets leaving enemy guns. Shadows and stealth.

The semi-recent one, Splinter Cell: Conviction is a fine game. I like some of the new mechanics and it was definitely worth whatever discounted price I paid for it. And at times it even gives a sneaky twist to the shootouts, with some shadows and enemies who remember last positions rather than just where I am always. But then there are the levels where I get dumped into a shootout. There is cover, but not much concealment, and of course since it is the middle of a fight, everyone has their flashlights out, so even if there was any space for hiding, I couldn't. These fights piss me off.

Let there be shadows! This doesn't mean that shootouts are bad by themselves. I've played FPS that were just constant bullets with barely any cover and they were fine. But those were what was consistent with the game. So within these games, it is often the sneaking levels that I enjoy less, and the vehicle fights even less than sneaking, such as the "we'll drive a truck and turn constantly so you can't aim, now shoot the tanks with perfect aim and hitscan shells" or the classic "enemy aircraft are coming, use this anti-aircraft gun with a painfully slow turn rate or we'll all die."

Last Bold Type
There is nothing wrong with a different play. Variety is nice. But when players expect, and are almost consistently given, one type of play, and then are randomly or unexpectedly pushed into a significantly different way of playing, that can be a major turn-off.

The Shocking Family History of Anthony Weiner

2011-10-19T06:00:00.001-05:00

It's not unusual to find that a family has changed its name since coming to America. Some do it to leave the past behind. Some have their names changed by immigration officials. Some change their names to avoid the latest fad in ethnic hatred.

I suspect my family was the second, but it could also be that we're more German than we think. But speaking of secret Germans: Anthony Weiner.

Once upon a time his family went by a common German name: Weimar, which is German for "German equivalent of smith". Then came the world wars, in which Germany took on the entire world, more-or-less single-handed*, but lost, due to not being America. In the process Germans became a little tiny bit unpopular in America, or perhaps a little tiny bit more so, considering Prohibition was partially driven by a desire to crush the Irish and German populations in America. Under these circumstances, the name Weimar was not a good one to have. Less so when Germany became known as the impressively incompetent (and mention economically oppressed) Weimar Republic, which gave us the face of hyperinflation (more media-savvy than Zimbabwe). So his family did the only sensible thing: changed its named to Weinar.

All might have been okay, but it appears that a prankster at the Department of Giving Ethnics Less Ethnic Names (DoGELEN (pronounced D-o-gellen, not dog-ellen)) decided to go one step further and change the name to Weiner. Since they still didn't speak English, they were unable to see the different between e and a, and did not question the change. It helped that at the time, while not many or for very long, there were still some German-Americans being interned during WWII.

He got the name Anthony after his equally-not-English-speaking parents (equal to his grandparents) mistakenly thought that Italians were not discriminated against.

D all this, he managed to rise to a fairly important political office, did some quality shouting, and then threw it all away by tweeting his penis, which sounds like a euphemism for something much worse. It just goes to show, Benjamin Franklin was right when he said,

“Why should Pennsylvania … become a Colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?”

*Austria hardly counts and whatever gains Japan gave for the Axis powers were lost by pulling the US into the war directly. Hence the now-corrupted phrase: "don't mess with Hawaii."

In related news, Texas Representative Ron Paul is refusing examination by doctors to confirm if he is actually 105 year old Ayn Rand.

WoWing Around Again: Silverpine

2011-10-18T06:00:00.002-05:00

Turn on the music.

First impression: Looks like someone is looking for a war. Big big Forsaken army, with lots of plague launchers.

You're just in time, Octondenub. It is Octondenub, right?

Grand Executor Mortuus looks at a sheet of paper.

Yes, that's what the paperwork says: "Octondenub."

Grand Executor Mortuus points to your name on the sheet of paper.

Yep, that's a Forsaken.

Garrosh arrived as I'd expect: jumping in and yelling the second he arrived. Things went uphill from there, with him actually sounding quite reasonable when questioning Sylvanas' use of val'kyr. Perhaps she could have phrased things better, saying that the Horde would lose its grasp on Lordaeron rather than the Forsaken. Maybe all the skilled tricksters of diplomacy died when the Apothecaries revealed themselves.

"They won't take out land without a fight!" - Forsaken soldier and something between irony and hypocrisy

As would be expected, the first quests involve ingredients for plague. And killing worgen. For which I was giving a Nubish Cloak. Like a nub, I was happy to get it.

I'm still not sure of the point of plague. It doesn't seem to actually be contagious. So it's a chemical weapon. But then I'm still not seeing the benefit over explosives, since it often seems to disperse quickly. I suppose it's one of those examples of how cultural norms drive weapon development. They died to plague stuff, so they make plague. I'm an American so I lean toward nukes and drones. Or ideally, nuclear drones (Get to it, Obama! We know it isn't legality holding you back.)

It really is an act of brilliance for a Forsaken to hide in an outhouse. It hides his stench. Quite clever. Poor Yorik.

After that there is more running. I see a very tall Ettin. It is elite and it wanders. Being so visible, it is a poor substitute for the Sons of Arugal, but I appreciate the effort.

"Goblins got us drunk" may be the worst excuse ever for getting your ass kicked by a bunch of Twilight fans.

"Within the butt of this bush chicken is a stick of dynamite." On one hand this means that the ettins are just another gimmick quest mob rather than a sinister stalker of nubs, on the other hand, it's a Forsaken quest involving an exploding chicken which is also coated with diseased organs, so that's a point up in my book.

I was sent off to kill spiders and rescue orcs, with a vague hint of 'if you see the broodmother that would be a good time to kill her'. Then I saw a rare spawn spider, but that was not her. So I ventured into the mine to find the broodmother, and found her I did. I got some nice boots. Then I broke out the victims near her and killed another spider (but not the last one for the kill quest). At which point I got the quest to kill her. Yet another case where it would be great if quest credit could be gained for quests not yet given. Apparently completing either the kill or rescue will trigger the matriarch quest, which is an improvement, and something I did not know quests could do.

Kill the refugees. Okay. That just sounds like a war thing to do, particularly for the Forsaken, who are unlikely to be shown and mercy in turn. Bring with a val'kyr to raise them as new Forsaken. Well... okay, I guess. It didn't seem like such a horrible thing back in Deathnell. Also, mind control them. Uh... With all due respect, Ms. Sexy Corpse Lady Queen, those are not new Forsaken, they are merely tools. The Forsaken are the free-willed undead, not slaves. If you want to kill humans and raise slaves, I can see the practicality of it. But do not call them Forsaken!

I won't spoil it, though it probably has been many times already elsewhere, but let's just say, that was a surprise, both what happened and the reaction of Agatha.

Then Sylavanas gives a speech which seemed to consistent mostly of cognitive dissonance with the quest I had done five minutes before. This was interrupted by a dungeon queue for VC, which as a rogue meant ending the cinematic so I wouldn't miss it. That seems to have broken the quest and I did not get discovery credit, so no FP from the Sepulcher, so I had to run back, then abadon it to remove the phasing that was hiding Sylvanas.

Then I got a quest called "Honor the Dead." This was paired with the similarly hypocritically named "Excising the Taint." The followup was triggered by the worgen killing and had me find a book. I can find books. Or I thought I could. Searching all over the place with no luck. No named mobs in sight, nothing. Eventually I was just running around without stealth. And got attacked in the barn. Huh? I didn't see anyone in the barn and I checked it twice! I see what you did there, Blizzard; you made a quest mob that spawns when the player is close, but not if they are stealthed, meaning that rogues can only do this quest once they are frustrated enough to run around aimlessly unstealthed, as opposed to being the purposeful, sneaky types that they are supposed to be. That's just stupid.

On the plus side, my brief trip into VC didn't totally screw up the mob levels. They're still green rather than grey. I'm guessing another dungeon run will fix that terrible problem of mobs giving xp.

Now I'm at the Forsaken Front. Does it ever not rain in Gilneas? I seem to be missing a few objects, because the quest herb and catapult shots have been replaced with blue and white checkered boxes. The ettin throwing boulders was a nice touch.

Then everyone died and everything was ruined. I don't think I've ever spent so much time as a Forsaken running away from imminent defeat.

So yadda yadda transimensional portal attunement, you know,a typical day. And then I saw a Witchalok. "What is a Witchalok?", you ask. Click the damn links! Also, they have doomskulls, which have a very high magnitude of doom. And, armies of wolfoids. Unless you're looking to take on a nearly-invincible elite, you'll want to avoid the doomskull. To top it all off, they are immune to sap. Can you believe it?

Godfrey really likes shooting people he doesn't like. Including other Forsaken. He fits right in. Perhaps too well...

The zone ends with a battle, in which I took no part because my job was to run really, really fast after Sylvanas while she shouted at people.

And that's Silverpine.

WoWing Around Again: Forsaken

2011-10-17T06:00:00.001-05:00

Let's start not at the start, with a quest, a murloc quest.

An old Forsaken man is lonely. He has money, but wants a murloc companion. I guess all the dogs around are plagued. So I go to the beach with a leash and instructions to capture a murloc, which of course requires a bit of uh, let's just say pacification. Hit it until it is at low health and then capture it.

What do murlocs do at low health? That's right, they run. Where do they run? Of course toward other murlocs. But not just any murloc, oh no, to the much bigger and more dangerous rare spawn murloc named Muad. I'm not sure who named him.

But to get to the point: I died. Deadered. Then I ran back and found the a minor vilefin oracle has higher relative DPS than me. So I died again. So far I think Blizzard has done an excellent job with the new Forsaken starting experience.

Arise, Octonde, and with your new undeath, do what we tell you to do, because you have free will now.
I wasn't quite sure why the one guy whose name I forgot seemed to instantly fall in line. Sure, I suppose if I was undead I'd join the Forsaken. It's really the only logical thing to do if just about everyone would kill you and there is a group of people who will fight beside you. But the change was so quick, and the mention of the Dark Lady seemed odd. If I found myself undead, my first few thoughts would not include my obligation to help Sylvanas, even if I was planning to join her.

But whatever, at least the guy has hands now.

There is the usual stuff of killing non-threatening wildlife and whatever the local evil is, in this case Scourge who walk in circle.

The murloc almost killed me a third time. Maybe I should learn mutilate off-hand.

I might need it to take on this elite level 5 quests. EPIC FOUR POINT EVISCERATE FOR 43 damage and I live with only a few health left. Go me.

It felt good bringing him the murlock.

Oh hey, a Redpath. I remember those fellas. They're all dead, except maybe the one at Light's Hope, unless he somehow died too. My guess is that Varian killed him, because that's what he does, kill things to ruin everything. Like Onyxia. I'm still bitter about that retcon. Anyway, the Redpath decided to start a faction of Forsaken, but clearly failed at his goal of "having elbows" and so of course I killed him.

And then I went to go kill more farmers and steal their pumpkins, because sometime tradition is important.

A Scarlet Letter
Poor Lillian, scared to be undead. So stubborn. Why? Of course no one likes being killed and then raised as a walking corpse, but she seemed unusually resistant, without being one of the mindless types.

Hey, spoilers!

The daughter of the High Priest of the Scarlet Crusade. Wow. Now that's an interesting situation. The Crusade was at least nice enough to capture, until orders, from her father, ordered her to be killed. But what a strange thing to say "You were too dangerous in life, and now you're far too dangerous in death." What was she? He called her a witch, as if he knew of something. She killed him with some sort of dark energy. Yep, sounds just like the new Scarlet Crusade!
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Protip: there are a bunch of sea cucumbers clustered under the big rocks.

Poor Gordo never got his gloomweed. Why do they keep sending him to pick herbs?

Somehow the rare spawn Lost Soul gave me 1200 xp. Unrested, no heirlooms, no hacked-in xp potions from the f2p future. For reference, level 7-8 requires 4500 xp. Looking it up on wowhead I learned that multiples can spawn, so of course I had to go find them. I found one and it gave 900xp. Hm. Less because it was lower level? I didn't check on either one. Or is this some strange diminishing return mechanic so we don't farm it for levels? I need a third one to see if I get 600. While I'm at it, a fourth and fifth to see if I can hit zero. For science! Log in the next day and kill one for 1237, obviously that includes some rested, but my combat log isn't showing the xp, so I can't subtract the rested. But clearly not headed for 600, or zero. A level 7 one was up and gave 1200 xp. They all give 6-slot bags. Totally worth killing! Except this science experiment has put me a level off the curve, plus whatever the screwed up leveling was doing anyway.

Apparently Lillian has been busy. By "busy" I mean "busy killing over a dozen Scarlet Crusade." That's pretty impressive for an NPC. Plot doesn't have that much killing very often. On the way there I was surprised at how many darkhounds carry small vials of blood inside themselves.

Dealing with the Worgen infiltrators was pretty neat. I liked that they didn't do the usual "they have stealth but really weak so you see them from across the town", but instead had some dust clouds to see them by.

Leper gnome! Aw, he's so cute. I wonder if he's being literal when he ask if I've "drained them of their ichor", I assumed the gnolls carried it in their pockets, not their veins. He's a smart little guy though. He knows that the offspring always seek revenge, so logically I should go scare... tadpoles. But why does it work while stealthed? Either they can't see me, or they can, and what is less frightening than a rogue failing a stealth check?

At level 11 the quests are still of a reasonable level. I hope that is maintained.

Lillian Voss continues to be a badass. I'll leave it at that.

Time for Silverpine!

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

2011-10-14T06:00:00.008-05:00

I didn't have to nuke France. I didn't have to nuke that city. It wasn't heavily defended. It wasn't of any strategic importance. It wasn't even a big city. It just happened to be in range and I just happened to have an atomic bomb. One of my own units was nearly killed in the blast. It was, by any reasonable calculation, a complete waste. The war was won and there was no one who needed intimidating. My vast and advanced army took care of that.

I have ruled this land for thousands of years. I have not been a kind ruler. Early on I decided that the English cities were in sub-optimal locations and burned them down, replacing them with my own settlers. Eventually I did it again, but never got around to building replacement cities. What you might call Africa has a vast empty area along the western coast. And what you might call Canada received similar fiery treatment as I rolled over the French army.

It wasn't always like this. We used to be friends. France was distant and did not threaten us at all. They had gold and I had resources. We traded together. We researched together. A war made no sense at all from any economic perspective. Even when their economy slowed and they had less to spend, they still were worth keeping as a friend. But then I noticed their culture. They could have been on the verge of cultural dominance of the world. This terrified me. All my land, wealth, and science could not stand up to the Utopia Project. So I did what I always did: I invaded. While their cultural power was without peer, their military strength was a joke. They did have a moderately effective air force, but fighter planes can only do so much against such a large army, and were helpless when they found themselves grounded when tanks rolled into cities.

All of it was a means to power. Friends are not friends, but friendly faces who ignorantly give us more power than we give them.

They should have saved China. China was the gateway. Once Almaty fell I had a route out of Africa and China in the Middle East was the first to fall. From China I could attack anyone. And I did. Persia was shattered and driven to the cold north. The Ottomans may be safe in the far east, but France looked safe on that distant continent to the west. On the other hand, I know they have the ability to create nuclear weapons. That war could be more trouble than it is worth.

If any courts existed with power, I'd be the first one against the wall, with a noose around my neck and poison in my veins just to be certain. I destroyed the greatest culture the world had ever seen. I killed millions. Maybe more. I burned down cities that did not conform to my vision, with no regard for the vision of others. Maybe I'd be against that wall, but I'm on the spaceship.

I wonder if Alpha Centauri has any alien life. They should be fun to kill.

Spaces, supplies, stats, and songs about shamans

2011-10-13T06:00:00.003-05:00

Spaces

I'm a two-spacer. I'm not quite sure why. But apparently, two-spacing is wrong. Modern fonts are designed for single spaces after the period. And yet, I am still, as I write this, using two spaces after the period. It's habit. Period tap tap. My thumb cannot help it. My right thumb that is. My left thumb, as far as I can tell, is nearly useless during typing. Lazy jackass.

I'm a bit stubborn. This isn't to say that I am conservative, merely stubborn. I am dead set on how things should be, even if that is not how they actually are. Contrast this with conservative thought which is dead set that things are how they should be. And then for another perspective, try reactionary thought which says that things were best as they were. People aren't very consistent with these. They are conservative in some areas (I didn't want to give up Windows XP), reactionary in others (bring back vanilla!), and progressive in others (socialized gay abortions). Though the circular, or more accurately, helical nature of history means that while anti-Wall Street sentiment seems progressive today, it's actually a very old idea (and older if we look beyond the symbol of Wall Street to banking in general), or that once upon a time, the idea of capitalism was a radical new concept that was shattering the social order.

Anyway, I found an interesting article on spaces after periods. I'm not sure I'm going to change, mostly due to laziness and forgetting about this in a couple days.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html

Supply

I had my econ midterm yesterday. It went... well... ish. I knew the material, I just didn't know it fast enough, so I ended up rushing near the end and certainly lost some points due to that. But I think I'll still get a B, or as they call it in Canada, Zed.

It made me wonder if the problem was a matter of excessive intervention in the time economy. The professor set a maximum supply of time, and even made it impossible to exchange time among students, meaning that even if there were a few who had an excess personal supply of time, other students had a shortage of time. Perhaps we would be better off if we could instead bid for time. For example, give everyone the standard amount of time as one extra credit point. They could then trade time for points, so that students who desperately needed more time could give up some points with the expectation that they could get more through improved test performance, while students who needed less time could trade useless time for valuable points. Maybe I should send that idea to our professor.

After the example a few of us went to an Irish pub that I did not know existed. They had Guinness. This made me happy.

Stats
Stats midterm is next week. That worries me more than econ. Economics makes perfect sense: you take wildly false assumptions, plug them into an overly simplified model, and out fall answers that vaguely resemble reality if you don't look to closely. In contrast, statistics takes a vague stab at reality and can sometimes tell you if you're wrong, but stubbornly refuses to ever say if you're right. It's like a bad boss, but for analysis. And less readily understandable.

I'm not trying to suggest that I don't like statistics. I like statistics. I think we need more statistics and number-based analysis. But that doesn't mean that I personally am especially good at statistics or that I enjoy the work of fiddling with numbers to try to figure out what reality is. I take comfort in knowing that I am not a theoretical physicist.

Shamans
A statistically invalid use of machinema to analyze the perceived relative effectiveness of shamans within the game World of Warcraft.
Uploaded Sep 12, 2010
http://youtu.be/B36JPPjViFI

Uploaded Jun 6, 2011
http://youtu.be/vPPf6-kBQPQ

Happy Friday! Er. Thursday. Happy [this]day!

Google home page depicts shocking gay sex

2011-10-12T08:56:00.016-05:00

Here's the link to the infamous Google: http://www.google.com

The first G is a wooden block. It does nothing. Or does it?

The first O is a red ball of clay, which when activated, turns into a little red clay guy with a J on his head. He looks around. Then from the block pops up another red guy with a G on his head.

The G-guy jumps on the J-guy, with smiles all around. They wrestle and become one, in the process displaying the letters G and J, which clearly stand for Good Job.

Good job indeed Google. Is this the sort of shocking imagery that children need to see? NO! Those kids are at google searching for naked pictures of celebrities, wholesome, heterosexual desires but before they can do that you bombard them with this shocking depiction of gay sex, followed by a congratulatory message to those who managed to stomach the multi-second-long scene of depravity.

Also, Google, since I'm sure you were tracking, I only watched it multiple times to ensure that I was sure of what I was seeing and so I could give a full description, thereby saving my readers from the horrors to which you would subject them.

Let's see what Bing has.
Popular now: Demi Moore· World War Z· Zsa Zsa Gabor· NBA lockout· Republican debate

Those are all reasonable topics, though with a strange bias toward Zs.

Minecraft needs a badge system

2011-10-12T06:00:00.003-05:00

I've been digging and digging, hoping to find some redstone. I'd like to make gates for my town and pistons are the key. Also I want a compass so I don't get quite as lost when I am searching for the redstone that I need for my compass. ... Damn. And a map. I recently learned that I can make maps, but maps require compasses, so I need a map to not get lost while finding redstone for the compass so I can make a map to not get lost while listening to the song that never ends. It keeps going on and on, my friends. Some people started singing it not knowing what it was and they'll continue singing it forever just because it is the song that never ends...

My point is that this is a perfect example of the central tendency of means theorem or something like that, which says that as we take more and more sample means we'll tend toward the population mean, and will create a normal distribution, such that I don't have my stats exam until next week so why am I worrying so soon? Anyway, spend an hour mining and your odds aren't so great, but spend ten hours mining and it gets better. Larger sample sizes decrease variance, which we could loosely think of as fairness.

It takes a lot of time for things to average out to on getting their deserved redstone ore deposits.

Clearly what minecraft needs is a badge system. Merely running through a cave, whether it has redstone or not, should give "minepoints" which can then be redeemed for a selection of desired ores. Early on players might just get iron or coal, but as they advance they could redeem the same number of points for nicer things like gold and blue dye stuff. Months down the road Notch could implement diamond ore purchases.

It makes sense after all. I mean, why should a player run through a dangerous mine and possibly leave with nothing more than a few bits of iron and possibly his life?

Or maybe this doesn't make any sense at all. While it is redstone that drives me underground, my actual enjoyment isn't in receiving redstone, but in the gameplay itself. The fun is not the reward, and certainly not when it is handed out for trivial tasks, but in the exploration and adventure. Maybe the really deep chasm I found under my town doesn't have any redstone (it may take days to fully explore), but that's not the point. I go there because it is there. I have fun figuring out routes, whether in or out or looping back on myself ten times over while fleeing skeletons and spiders before I finally find the waterfall that I used as a ladder on my way down.

Yea, I made a ladder out of a waterfall. I was facing a really deep hole and it was either jump (die), dig around and around (boring), or dump the bucket of water and swim down. I didn't actually know why I decided to bring the water. Certainly not for this. But I figured, you gotta have a bucket of water. Everyone has one.

Minecraft needs rope too.

P.S. I am going to try to make tomorrow's post about Silverpine. Or maybe Civilization. My point is that I want to mix things up and not go on a Minecraft post binge. But maybe today's post isn't actually about Minecraft anyway.

P.P.S. I did eventually find a decent bit of redstone. As is typical, I found it within seconds of whining to a friend about my inability to find redstone.

Minecraft: Upon Pillars of Sand

2011-10-11T06:00:00.001-05:00

NPCs are idiots. They built this really nice village, then apparently fled, despite having more than enough torches to keep away hostile mobs. Except in the biggest house which had one torch, not enough to prevent a creeper spawning inside. And what I suspect was their watchtower or church, or both (though it lacks bells), which also had insufficient lighting on the upper levels.

This isn't the full stupidity. There is also the location. I haven't fully explored it, but on at least two sides of it, there are caverns. This means that the sand that is the basis of the desert can, if disturbed, collapse, into a cave that players need to dig out of. I'm actually understating it. On one side it's a small cave, apparently too narrow for hostiles to spawn inside. On the opposite side, there is a larger cave system, mostly unexplored by me, which extends an indeterminate distance under the town. What I have found suggests that it goes very far in several directions. The sounds I hear under the sand in other areas suggest that the cave system may go entirely under the town, possibly at a very shallow depth.

The town is built on pillars of sand.

I'm currently leveling it all out, to get flat roads, though is a major slope on one side and so I have to let it be a bit higher. Stage two is going to be digging out the bottom of the town and adding a foundation of stone, layered again with sand and gravel. This is to ensure that I don't cause a major cave in while trying to explore the caves. Instead I'd cause the major cave-in while digging at the surface, which I think might be better.

Future stages will call for the repair of a farm plot that fell victim to a creeper attack and the dynamiting of some nearby hills that overlook the wall. I plan to fill the resulting irregular holes with water. The ocean isn't far away and I have a bit of iron for buckets.

In the meantime, while I work up the will for a major project like digging up the entire town, I built another small house for storage and added a basement to the biggest one, with lots of windows so it doesn't feel closed-in.

As part of the beautification effort, I will, someday, clear out the valley being created by my excavations, smoothing out the bumps and opening it to the sun. Then I will line it with dirt, drop some water in, and plant trees. It will be a valley of life next to my strangely deserted town.

Minecraft: A Retraction

2011-10-10T06:00:00.002-05:00

I would like to offer a partial, sort-of correction to my earlier post The weakness of Minecraft as an explorer game.

I had not been keeping up well with the changes coming out, partly because when Minecraft updates, unlike WoW, I am not stuck sitting staring at an update screen with ample time to read the patch notes (mage armor has a new, unique icon). So I miss stuff. And the new stuff often doesn't appear in old worlds, since they have already been generated.

Well, I made a shiny new world and let's just say I was wrong.

Minecraft locations lack a significant sense of uniqueness. While they are all different, most places of the same biosphere look essentially the same.

Let's see, to start off, I have never started in a tree. Or on top of a tree. In the middle of a very dense forest. I am going to have a hell of a time once I make a flint. From there, I wandered my way toward what I am pretending is north (this is not based on looking at the sun, but off what my subconscious decided; H0 d=north) and there I found mountains of great mountainousness. And cliffs. After some digging the night came and creepers came and my unfortified position got blown up and I fell very far. Somehow I thought the first night had been changed to be safe, so I'd not bothered to wall off my stairs.

So already stuff looks different different. That was before I went out to the desert. Not so far away I found a town. A town which I initially suspected was filled with zombies, based on the zombie sounds. It turns out there is a cave system directly underneath the town. I'm in the process of excavating it, a process I began because initially I assumed the sandstone was a sign of buried Egyptians (my world education is a bit limited, but as far as I can tell, Egyptians turn into sandstone when buried). If I had read the patch notes I would have known that sand compacts into sandstone after 4-5 blocks. Anyway, town with scary things under it, much more interesting than the usual barren world.

Minecraft doesn't do beauty. This isn't a knock on the graphics; it just isn't a game that generates beautiful places.

Sunrise over the dense forest actually seemed a bit beautiful. And the town was sorta nice. I'm surrounding it with sandstone walls in the hopes of creating a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Also, so I can dig out under it and just worry about scaries in the caves without also worrying about scaries from everywhere else.

There are no people in Minecraft. There are none before you and none after you. What you find is the result of chaos and is meaningless.

Technically still true (in single player), but the NPC towns do imitate some sort of people having been there. T addition of Enders, a new type of mob which moves around blocks and may decide to attack you if you stare at it [insert feminist joke] adds some sort of pretend intelligence shaping the world, albeit randomly.

A pile of rocks and ancient ruins are different because of the human element, even if both are essentially just piles of rocks.

The piles of rocks have been supplemented with pretend ancient ruins, and not just the empty villages (why are they empty? SCARY! Real answer: Notch is busy). There are also, or will be 'soon', secret stongholds of the Enders, places of mystery and unknowns, both known and unknown, as well as unknowns knows and known knowns.

Minecraft is still a randomly generated world of random stuff, but it doesn't look quite as chaotic as before and imitates the existence of intelligent life, becoming a stronger explorer game in the process.

WoWing around again: Holy Cow

2011-10-07T06:00:00.005-05:00

Yep, a tauren paladin. Or more accurately, a sun druid, but does anyone say that? No! Because people like to use imprecise terms and overgeneralize. This is one cause of racism. My point is that anyone who says tauren paladin is bringing the world one step closer to the Fourth Reich.

The tauren are under attack from highly aggressive quillboar, driven from their dens by the cataclysm, who are, of course, neutral. Blizzard really kept the original vibe of the tauren starting area and did a good job of layering the low-level paladin experience on top of it, creating a top-notch incredibly dull experience.

I turned into an eagle and then got bored and quit.

Coming soon: Forsaken!
Sneak Preview: Lillian Voss is a badass!

Did you have fun during Vanilla WoW?

2011-10-06T16:55:00.012-05:00

There's a new poll over there in that there corner up there.

If you played in vanilla, did you enjoy it? You don't need to have played for the entire time, I didn't, but maybe a few months before the 2.0 patch, since the pre-expansion patches and changes can have a major impact on the fun of a game, sometimes positive, sometimes negative.

I'm not sure whether to exclude people who only played a short time, as in a few days or less. In that case maybe it just wasn't the type of game for them at the time, regardless of what the game was, but maybe that's important too. If you played for a good bit of time and quit, that still counts as playing, but if you quit because you stopped having fun, put it as a no vote.

Maybe I'm trying to hard to make this an accurate poll when I know it won't be anyway. So vote whatever you think is closest to the truth. Then we can argue about it. :)

Dungeon depth, bag space, loss aversion, and diminishing returns on wealth gain

2011-10-06T06:00:00.001-05:00

Value / Weight
This is the ratio that dominates my play in Fallout. I can't say I enjoy it very much. It's repetitive and best performed by a computer, except if all my loot came with a pre-calculated and displayed value/weight ratio, I don't think I'd enjoy that much. I don't know why I wouldn't. Just one of those human irrationalities.

But there is another problem: vendor cost may be lower than the value I place on it and the value I place on it is a bit murkier. Does a crafting material for my rail spike gun have a value related to the sell price of the gun? No! Well, sort of! No! If I valued the gun the same as the vendor cost, I'd be selling it, not firing it. So not only is the material vendor price almost meaningless, but the proportion of the material to the gun to its sell price is also meaningless. I still need to figure out what the gun is worth to me.

Picture yourself deep in a vault, dungeon, mine, or whatever else you can go deep inside and have a lot of trouble getting out. If you are a young child who knows Lassie, then you are in a well. With a bag filled with rail spike gun parts and boar spleens. Protip: empty your bags before falling in a well, noob.

Okay, you're deep in there and you don't exactly want to pull out a calculator after every kill to see what everything is worth and compare it to what you are picking up. Alright, 507/1.2 vs. 692/2.3 (yea, this one is obvious), but there is also an item of indeterminate value, aka the value I put on it, and weight of 7. Is 507/1.2 greater than x/7? I don't know. Okay let's see, if I can make that gun with this spike and a few other things, but I have extras of these, so maybe I should vendor them, but maybe later on I will run out and then I'll want these, and I can't really value something with an unknown supply...

Are you picturing yourself having fun yet?

We could easily bypass this problem by removing limits on bag capacity or in this case, carrying capacity. Everything would then have a value greater than zero, which given that there is always an empty space, zero is the alternative value to consider. Is this fun? I don't think that is much fun either, just running through the halls filling up bags that never fill up. There are no decisions at all.

Somewhere in here we want to decide a few times, a little bit, without being overwhelmed. By we I mean me.

Dungeon depth / Bag space
Here's the ratio to look at. Ideally over the course of a dungeon we want slightly more than we can carry, bags overflowing with valuable loot, so we're trying to pick out which items are gems and which are colored glass.

But what about the other two things?
Loss Aversion
People don't like losing things. Except bad things, but those are a special case. People don't like losing things that they like to have. This is not at all unreasonable. It is the opposite: very reasonable. And, we try to avoid losing things that we like to have, as an obvious extension of avoidance of negative experiences, in this case, the experience of losing things that we like to have.

I like having parts to make rail spike guns. I don't like dropping or destroying parts to make rail spike guns. I cannot quite determine how much I dislike losing parts to make rail spike guns because I don't have a value for them, so the bad could range from slightly more than none to infinite. I could, theoretically, be psychologically destroyed by the act of destroying a part for a rail spike gun. I suspect this is unlikely.

But beside this there is another set of words that I am going to put in bold type:
Diminishing Returns on Wealth Gain
Five bits of time into the dungeon I pick up an item with a value/weight ratio of 1/1. A pretty crappy item. I can also see that my value/time ratio is 1/5. Five bits further in I find a 2/1 item, but my bags are full, so I drop the 1/1 item for the 2/1. Now I have found 3 value in 10 bits, but can only carry 2 value, meaning that despite finding a more valuable item, I am still at a steady 1/5 value/time ratio. Another ten bits in and I find a 4/1 item, so I drop the 2/1 and now I have 4 value but over 20 bits and I'm finding that despite going deeper in, each unit of time I spend is not yielding any greater return than the one before.

"So where are the diminishing returns," you ask. Every bit I run in, I must also run out. But obviously all that is doing is doubling the time cost of everything. Now what if I'm also spending more time shuffling around these items and calculating costs, which is trivial with 1/1 items, but the 507/1.2 and 692/2.3 items are a bit more difficult, and we've not even considered the crippling indecision of the x/7 item.

Now consider that you run in and every bit you grab a 10/1 item. Then you run out of those and every bit you're finding 15/1 items. And then 16/1 items. You went from 10/1 value/time to 5/1 value time (replacing 10 with 15 rather than gaining 15) to a mere 1/1 time, as bad as if you were in that crappy first dungeon with 1/1 items laying around.

With generous teleporting you might just leave and come back, emptying bags each time, but that is effectively just the unlimited bag space with loading screens thrown in.

The Point
It's not fun to have really long instances with tons of stuff dropping in them, particularly when the relative value of the items is hard to determine. If there is a lot of 1/1 stuff but a clearly distinct set of 50/1 items, then players can more easily reject the 1/1 items as pointless. Absolute value doesn't matter as much as relative value. Choosing between a 1/1 and 50/1 is close enough to choosing between 50/1 and 2500/1 that it is probably better to start with the former scenario and only use inflation if you're trying to drive an economy or create the illusion of progress.

WoWing Around Again: Northern Barrens

2011-10-05T06:00:00.025-05:00

Doing no instances, and obviously with no heirlooms, I was level 13, with the mobs green, by the time I got to the Barrens. So there's that, the leveling is still screwed up. It got worse after I ran RFC and VC. Surprisingly, the RFC group stayed until the quests were done rather than ditching after the loot bag. I guess they all had the quests.

So the Barrens started off nicely. I got to kill plainstriders for their beaks, which of course they don't all have. I freed some wolves from a fire and killed some quillboar. Then I killed more quillboar, because, why not?

They wanted me to escort a caravan of kodo to the next hub over, which I assumed meant "slowly walk behind while the occasional quillboar causes every single NPC to stop walking for 10-15 seconds, then run back to where they started and give it another go." Instead I was given a big gun and told to shoot things from the back of the lead kodo. So of course I did, killing about as many passing zhevra and vultures as marauding quillboar.

Then I killed more quillboar and tortured one for good measure, which of course worked, because as we all know, hitting people causes them to want to give you useful and accurate information.

The Broken Body Parts Theory
There is a theory which attempts to explain the observation that body part quests have a drop rate of less than 100%. The theory states that "During the course of combat, body parts may be damaged, rendering them unsuitable for turn-in to the quest giver." This suggests that body parts always exist, but may not be able to be turned in. It held up to years of scrutiny. But I think its time is over.

I have obtained, from the same Zhevra, both "hooves" and a "broken hoof piece". The former are able to be turned in, while the latter is vendor trash. This seems to confirm Broken Body Part Theory, since the hooves with no adjective, which are presumably undamaged, can be turned in, while the broken piece cannot. But take note: these came from the same animal. Damaged and intact from the same beast. This means that zhevras not only have multiple hooves, but that some hooves can be damaged while others are not, meaning that, in theory, we could scavenge the few intact hooves from multiple zhevras to create full sets of hooves. More research is called for.

There is also the fringe "Probabilistic Theory" which claims that all items from creatures are randomly generated, independent of the combat state of the creature. This is obviously disproven by testing in the Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, where different kill orders of a certain group of bugs yields, with repeated tests, different items.

Back to the Barrens.

It's a bit hard to evaluate the zone when I'm overleveled. It's not that challenge is lost, because frankly there wasn't much to begin with, but that the feel changes. At yellow I kill at a regular pace with some pauses. At green I rush from one to the next, fueled by victory rush. And then at grey I slow again, as I stop getting victory rushes.

On the plus side, the quests have a nice structure, giving a bunch for an oasis, then the next. This was possible to do pre-cata, but took a tiny bit of effort to be sure to have all the quests and keep track of where chains went. It appears that hunters have gotten what is certainly a justified gift: Echiyakee now must be "Slain or Subdued", which means that hunters can now tame him for the quest credit.

Jumping back, there is a chain from Durotar which used to lead into the Barrens and then send players up some godforsaken mountain for the standard vanilla quest reward for lots of travel: almost nothing. Now the chain hits the Barrens and ends, with the quest ender saying essentially "Burning Blade can wait, we have the cataclysm to worry about." This annoyed me. Thankfully, the Burning Blade does get picked up later on, with a bit of "kill a bunch of them" with a touch of "take their precisely manufactured bolts" because for some reason evil demon cults stockpile engineering components. Also,

Waaaahhh! It's raining orc!!

Yep, goblin teleporter, with the instructions of "Stand still. And hold your breath in case you end up over the ocean..." On the subject of goblins, the samophlange quests were streamlined a bit, probably for the best, considering what they used to be. But maybe something is lost. I mean, how can you grow to despite goblins if all they do is teleport you around a bit? In the old version you ran halfway across the zone and then they broke it, sending you right back where you were, to someone else to break it even more. That breeds a proper hatred for the mutated miniature freaks.

Then I went on a ride in a goblin rocket, which I won't even bother with spoiler alerts, because it's pretty much expected: it crashed. Since I was in the neighborhood, some orc who happened to live next to the crash sight sent me to kill harpies. This offended me, that he would have the nerve to send me to kill not just low-ranking harpies, but also lieutenants, and when they were dead, the head harpy. So not only was the run there and back much shorter than it used to be, I only had to do it once. What an outrage.

I noticed a recurring theme, at least in my own mind, throughout the Barrens: "Okay, this is probably the last hub." This might have been based on being sent to Stonetalon pretty much right when I got to Crossroads (after only two quest sets). But finally, I was back in Crossroads and being sent on a caravan up north. Time to go! Wait, first, someone got kidnapped by the evil orcs, so go free him and while you're up there, see if you can save the world, if the opportunity comes up.

But finally I rode out, with my gun not just able to shoot and bash people (I gained that second one riding into Crossroads), but also I had some sort of anti-aircraft gun. I guess I don't know how to aim at anything more than 6 feet off the ground. But anyway, bang boom, crash, riders on wolves and scary flying things and jumping on my kodo and I'm beating them over the head with my gun and shooting people at a rate that seems unreasonable given that as I recall it was a flintlock gun and would have a firing rate of much less than one shot per second and would certainly have some sort of ammo capacity. On the other hand, wizards.

I suppose you could argue that the stuff at the Mor'shan Rampart (or is it a Bulwark? No, that's near the Plaguelands) is Barrens, but I'm putting it in with Ashenvale, which I might do one of these days.

Serves you right, Tobold

2011-10-04T14:38:00.063-05:00

No Facebook refund?

Apparently I was real enough for Facebook to accept my money, until they decided I was not real enough to keep my account.

Sorry, Tobold, but this is actually 100% your fault. You should be glad if all you lost was a bit of money. Be glad you weren't real. You see, Facebook is not just a pointless platform for bad games. It is a world-wide attempt to sucker in everyone, get their personal information, not credit cards, but actual personal information, and then peddle it to the highest bidder. And the lowest bidder as well, because why not maximize profits?

When you deal with bad people, bad things happen to you. Too bad!

But while I'm attacking people I respect, Tesh, you're on notice again for lazy nihilism.

“Fairness” is a pernicious concept. Life’s not fair. Business isn’t fair. It just is, and as long as the parties to a transaction understand what is offered, nothing more can or should be expected.

There is a difference between settling and giving up. Of course life isn't fair, giving up is the wrong way to go. Well, okay fine, for those who are getting the upside of that unfairness, then of course it makes sense for them to want to keep things unfair. We have to settle for less than fair, but never accept it, never give up and throw our hands up sand say "oh well, it's unfair, too bad."

"as long as the parties to a transaction understand what is offered"
And that's just plain a ridiculous assumption. Of course it works quite well when we're dealing with apples and a hundred tons of steel, not so well with an intentionally confusing and misleading ToS. Efficient markets rely on equal information, which your average ToS is designed to prevent, both by information overload, poor writing*, and through those two, encouraging the consumer to just give up and click accept.

Oh of course the consumer doesn't have to click accept. We could refuse the terms if we think they are unreasonable or too long to be readily intelligible. Of course if I tried to follow that rule I'd be unable to write this, having no internet access, no browser, no operating system, no video card, no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. All I'd have is the desktop which was given to me by a friend, who herself probably accepted an unintelligible agreement years back. I'd not be in an apartment and would not have electricity. Not that I could pay for any of that, because I'd have no bank account or credit cards. I would at least have a job, but I don't think they pay in cash.

Our world is based on absurd amounts of legalese. And now I'm depressed to picture that. We're fucked. Totally and absolutely fucked.

Now Tesh doesn't seem quite so dumb. In the face of all that, giving up seems like the only bearable option. Either that or terrorism, and I'm not much of a fan of terrorists.

*Lawyers, admit it, you write like shit. Your entire legal writing method, while theoretically meant to be precise and unambiguous, instead just makes it impossible for a normal human to read, requiring more lawyers to act as translators. You should all be deported until you can learn to write in English.

My opinion has no value

2011-10-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

The quoted section is outdated, but I'm including it because I think it is still worth thinking about.

I have no internet in my apartment and I am unlikely to do much online gaming from my laptop in a public space in the university. This makes me a non-customer for MMO companies. I am not a potential customer, regardless of the game, unless it could somehow cause a dramatic shift in the perceived value of an internet connection. Such a game is unlikely, since for me the cost is game + connection, while for the developer, the profit is limited to the game only.

Beside that problem, which has been solved, there is the time problem. I don't have quite as much time. I still have some, thanks to avoiding having a social life, but I don't have the time for my beloved all-day AV battles or full-afternoon BRD runs. I could run a random or two, maybe do some outdoor grinding. But I don't much enjoy quick runs. I want to play a long game, which I don't have time for. I don't want to play a short game, which I do have time for.

I want to play what I cannot. This is a pointless customer, like a poor man who wants a private jet. Companies should ignore them. They should recognize that there are fundamental problems with them becoming customers, things which will not be fixed by tweaks, because tweaks are too small and big changes would destroy the product the customer is after. It would be as if the private jet manufacturer decided to remove the liftoff ability to reduce costs, make the cabin smaller to only hold a couple people, simplify the cockpit controls, and change the wheels to a rectangular layout. In other words, replace their jets with minivans in an attempt to bring in poor customers who want jets.

Maybe this gives some perspective on my thought process, that whether I am intentionally considering it or not, everything I say is from the point of view of someone who is not a paying customer and will not be a paying customer.

I'm pretty sure that just makes me an asshole.

Damn.

P.S. a full third of you don't play WoW and half of you don't plan to buy the next expansion. So you're all bad people too. We should form a guild! Maybe we can find a game to play together.

A developer who truly understands RPGs

2011-10-03T18:46:00.011-05:00

So before we do too much more with the [bad guys], we're first going to loot, because that's what we do.

-Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning: Brigands Hall Demo*

My reaction: "NAILED IT". Then I made this post.