I have an inkling that one could write a whole bevy of sociological papers inspired by ATITD.
Take, for example, the Test of the Obelisk.
In its purest form, it is a Test of Architecture. Passing it nets you the reward of a fancy title, possibly an extra level and I suspect, the ability to progress to higher and higher titles of achievement in the Architecture field.
To pass, one must construct the tallest ever obelisk in one's region of Egypt. And have it standing undefeated for 2 days 8 hours in real time.
Of course, the bigger the obelisks get, the larger the cost of materials and time and effort involved - exponentially, so before long, you'll need a group working in unison or a very dedicated builder/botter/cyborg chugging away at it.
There are also a couple of underlying qualifiers that are not clear to a newbie in ATITD. One, you do not need to pass the Test to progress on in levels. All one needs to do is complete its Principles (a much simpler set of requirements) and voila, you score a level and can progress sans fancy title to try other Tests. (Later, of course, you may need the fancy title as a requisite for certain other tests.)
Two, there are other types of obelisks that can be built later on in the Telling. One is not locked to a 100-cubit obelisk forever. There are three more, that require different materials, and can be much easier to build with more advanced technology, especially if the first type of obelisk has risen to colossal proportions.
This Test leads to an amusing amount of conflict and social dilemmas.
I observe a group which I shall term the "highly cooperative" group. These people tend to be idealistic, trusting and believe everyone shares their same values, or at least will cleave to their agreed-upon rules.
This group strives to set up a queue system. It is the most highly optimal strategy if everybody cooperates. Take turns, don't build over each other, the minimum amount of resources are used for the Test and the minimum wastage for other goals, such as unlocking research technologies.
Alas, they are often threatened by the appearance of a minority group of "nonconformists" and also tend to react badly to the revealed existence of people who don't quite think as they do.
The nonconformists are a varied bunch. Some within the group are plain out-and-out griefers. Their goal is make people unhappy and have lots of drama and arguments explode onto the channels, the obelisk test is just a means to an end for them.
Other nonconformists are purists and competitors at heart. To them, the queue system cheapens the idea of the obelisk test, which is, after all, trying to show who the 'best' builder is in that region (if your definition of best builder involves the 110% dedicated making of obelisk materials). They're seeking to push the obelisk height higher to make the test actually meaningful, because the low heights involve very trivial amounts of resources.
There's one individual, known as Aluman, whom I can't decide whether he's a troll, a player with a yen to roleplay Devil's Philosopher Advocate, or a dev in disguise, or all three at once.
He does very little but to speak in full, complete sentences over various chat channels, asking probing questions of people and challenging their assumptions and beliefs and prejudices to the point of obnoxiousness.
His stated goal (over the Egypt global channel) of building a 70 cubit obelisk in Queen's Retreat brought a little firestorm of debate.
Amusingly, none of it came from Queen's Retreat residents. Most of us are accustomed to the annoyance of Aluman, and most of us have pretty much classified him as a troll and can't be bothered wasting any of our time engaging him in a discussion that he won't be convinced by anyhow. Ignoring him entirely lets our lives go on with little interruption and makes him cast about for more interesting conversation elsewhere (like on the global channel.)
Personally, I think some of the questions he asks are quite intriguing, if blatantly slanted toward the self-benefit side of the ATITD equation. (Mostly because the majority of ATITDians have thrown themselves into the communal good side for whatever reason.)
He's sort of like the Shadows and Morden. Kicking over the anthills to see what comes out. Because if you don't question, taking things for granted can lead to blind obedience and an oppressive established 'way of things' - Obey or Else, the Vorlons would say.
Now and then, I'm tempted to sit down and discuss philosophy with him. Except that I don't like the medium of the public channel. Setting up to debate there is playing on his troll turf, and encourages behavior that I don't want to encourage. So I stay silent, unnoticed and resolve philosophical questions on my own.
To me, what Aluman is doing is simply playing with and driving home the wedge between private good and public benefit, the social dilemma of ATITD. People who have not yet resolved their balance between these two opposite poles feel uneasy when questioned by him, and tend to answer in very simple, snap-judgement ways - which he tears apart ruthlessly, leaving them even more flustered.
Speaking for myself, the test of the Obelisk doesn't bother me anymore.
I'll admit that on first hearing about the Test, I went into all the above possible modes of thought, debating which would be the optimal strategy to succeed.
Over time, I've come to realize that passing this one Test or celebrating its ideals is not my primary goal in ATITD. I accept that there will be individuals out there who will be wholeheartedly dedicated to it. Fair enough. Their prerogative.
Me, I've chosen a more long-term strategic approach to this problem. And I begin to understand why certain veterans immediately advised people to shrug it off and leave it when some guy overbuilt the existing one.
Competing plays right into the hands of these purists who WANT people to fight against them. Suddenly the both of you (and any of your allies you've managed to pull along for the ride) are locked in a resource wasting competition because you can not and WILL NOT let the other side win and accept a loss on your part. Squandering all your energies for any other goals you may find important.
If you simply let them win, just like one simply leaves Aluman be, they have nothing to fight and nothing to do shortly after. They've won. Goal achieved. Done. Now they go looking for something else to amuse themselves with, and you can continue doing what you've been doing in peace.
They have succeeded in alienating themselves from the community by their antisocial behavior, whereas meanwhile I have been insinuating myself into it. When the other longer term goals arrive, with cooperation as another yardstick, who will have the better resources to succeed?
Different overall goals. Different optimal strategies. Who's to say who is right and who is wrong?
One can only accept that there are all sorts in this virtual Egypt. Some prefer to stay on the self-profit side of the social dilemma, and vice versa. Others find a more comfortable balance somewhere in between.
A certain amount of free-riding goes on. A certain amount of monopolies and resource hogging by the privileged group goes on. A certain amount of public goods get constructed and used, to the breaking point and beyond.
And what the hey, social dilemma or not, life goes on.
What another neat microcosm of human society, all wrapped up in a pretty desert package.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tragedy of the Commons
...and other social dilemmas.
It's all so FASCINATING!
After scanning through a partially-available Sociology text on Google Book Search, I located the precise topic that I was intrigued by - basically how groups form and how individuals within the group relate to each other and the management of goods and resources therein.
Looking up the term "social dilemma" on Google has opened my eyes to a whole world of sociology and economics that I hadn't really known existed beyond the basic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Still reading up on it, but I can see so many applications of this in ATITD where theory matches really closely with practice. (And the mismatches and wondering why that is the case are also fascinating.)
More on this later.
It's all so FASCINATING!
After scanning through a partially-available Sociology text on Google Book Search, I located the precise topic that I was intrigued by - basically how groups form and how individuals within the group relate to each other and the management of goods and resources therein.
Looking up the term "social dilemma" on Google has opened my eyes to a whole world of sociology and economics that I hadn't really known existed beyond the basic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Still reading up on it, but I can see so many applications of this in ATITD where theory matches really closely with practice. (And the mismatches and wondering why that is the case are also fascinating.)
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Public Good, Private Benefit
It's a rare game that has me thinking and chewing on some lofty philosophical thoughts. Perhaps it's the elegant simplicity of the timesink tasks, mixed with the depth of multiple systems to master, that exposes the high drama inherent in a chatroom, aka spontaneous tribal society-building and interaction.
It started with a little breakdown. Or maybe a localized implosion. I don't know what you'd call it.
See, there's this newbie, called Atheus, who started off playing ATITD about the same time as me. He has been rather verbose on all the chat channels, very enthusiastic and exuberant and generally a 'model newbie' or 'dream citizen.'
Personally, I saw him a teensy bit like a rival. Because he seemed to be wriggling an 'in' into the established cliques a lot faster than I could, and inherited a nice friendly mentor and so on.
Still, I am more of an aloof hermit-y sort, prefering to be as independent as possible and accepting help only if I cannot figure it out (and often, I can, with some wiki reading and lots of practice). So he and I are different there, and I do not truly begrudge him the close inclusion into the established society because it's unlikely I'd fully embrace it anyway.
And then one night he turned into a raging Dr. Jekyll of his former self, raving at his mentor and the guild, and most of us still have no idea what set off this berserk rant.
Part of the problem is that he never elucidated precisely what his beef was.
It seemed to be some sort of sudden unleashed anger that guild ranks even existed. That there was the potential to lock out lower ranks from using certain bits of equipment (even if in actual fact, very little was actually locked.) Coupled with rage at a general old/new rich/poor divide that had a strong potential to exist in the future, with the threat of the older veterans hogging rare resources and turning it into a monopolistic enterprise upon which newbies might be forced to eke a miserable existence as slaves and beggars hoping for handouts.
And he seemed abruptly very miffed at the thought that he had sacrificed a bunch of his time to help the guild, perhaps above and beyond the call of duty, and was considering a sudden reversal into self-centeredness (or selfishness) to build up his own equipment and compound and monopolize his own set of resources.
The above summary is, of course, far more eloquent than he could piece into words, and is simply my best guess (which could be utterly wrong) as to his position and what was driving him batty.
On the opposing front, we had his mentor, Salinor, who was taking personal offense at the implication that he was a self-serving rat bastard of an elitist oldbie.
With, imo, just cause because this bunch of veterans are the least selfish individuals I have ever seen in ATITD (I did me research, not to mention, got verbally assraped in beta by a far less understanding but very community-known individual for simple newbie ignorance in a territory far far away from Khartoum.)
See, even though the potential for lockout using guild ranks exists in theory, in practice, the Mixed Nuts guild is a public works guild that opens practically everything to public use. Nearly every single piece of equipment can be used by Anyone, or a bare Initiate (lower than Member) of the guild.
The only exception was a) a compression furnace that was still in the process of being built. Building rights are locked a little higher, because the elders don't want a random public joe -tearing down- the unbuilt structure, and b) some flax combs which were locked to either Initiate or Member-only, I forget. Mostly because flax combs break after a certain number of uses, and this piece of equipment is something you learn how to build for yourself in the freaking tutorial, fer chrissakes.
Sometimes, I am aware that certain elders do temporarily raise the permissions on equipment because they are in the midst of using them, and are scared that some random joe will stop it in its operation and make off with their resources.
To me, it's perfectly understandable.
And sometimes, because they are human, they do forget to reset the permissions after that, and go OOPS, later, and fix it.
But really, how is this a vast conspiracy of legacy players out to lock out the newbie?
(Because real monopolies would set up their own big fat compounds and you wouldn't even get into their guilds for any access, period.)
The vets don't need you, the random newb, for sporadic contributions and benefits. They can churn out 1000 boards a lot faster than we can. In fact, they do, because they need to contribute about 8000 boards and that many bricks just to keep the guild slots open to accept new players. And despite them begging for contributions because they'd get RSI otherwise, they are still doing the lion's share of the work. Because they are generous-hearted enough to want to welcome and help newbies.
Then there's the issue of mines. And access to the rare ore/metal resource they represent.
See, metals come in veins drawn in funky lines that Teppy likes the look of all over Egypt. To find them, you have to dowse for them (a time-consuming process that you can only do once ever 30seconds-2 minutes) and have enough perception stat to see them (another time-consuming heavily luck-based process at the moment until we unlock another technology).
Once located, you can place a mine. Mines cost 20 leather this Telling, so they are a fairly expensive investment. Most people will place for their private small guilds to use, because they do break after some usage and require more resources to repair. Mines cannot be put within a certain distance of each other.
This, of course, naturally leads to the threat of monopoly. Any idiot can see the potential. Once the set number of mines are placed in a row, that's it for that vein. You've got to hope that another such vein exists somewhere in Egypt and that you can find it and the travel distance would be a turnoff too. Without that rare metal access, you may risk being locked out of whatever technology requires it, and may have to trade things for it, if the evil mine overlords even deign to recognize your existence.
But this is where mining cooperatives and altruistic public guilds come in. If you invest the effort getting to know the people in the first sort of guild, and pass whatever membership requirements they have, you can have access to their mines - of course, what sort of hierarchical structure they want to set for certain mine usage is up to them, and you'd have to play by their rules.
Mixed Nuts is the second sort of guild. Salinor, our resident mine expert, is dedicating his time and effort to locating at least one of each vein and placing at least one public mine on them.
Yes, PUBLIC mine. That means, any Tom, Dick, Joe, Harry and Tutankhamen, not even in our guild, can use them. And BREAK them. Without bothering to repair them. And it's going to cost OUR guild resources to fix them for general public use again.
If that isn't a selfless act, I'm not sure wtf is.
His hope is that we can at least make sure there is some public access to every type of metal there is, so that newbies are never locked out of the technology tree.
Of course, he's only one guy. His efforts may not be enough to cover every last scrap of metal type there is, and Mixed Nuts may end up with limited access to top tier metals. That's just fate if that happens.
So I don't know why Atheus was freaking out over our guild channel for. He seemed to be taking some kind of personal affront that there were -other- guilds out there, reserving stuff for their own use, and that this seemed some sort of supreme injustice and old player conspiracy in the making.
Um. Maybe he just realized it now. Yes, the possibility for this sort of thing exists in ATITD. No, ATITD is not some sort of general love-huggles-wuggles socialist or communist or communal affair where everyone will share everything equally, regardless of how much hard work you put in, or the people you sucked up to or cybersexed this morning.
It's a people game, fer goodness sakes'. It's a grand sociological experiment. And people are DIFFERENT.
Personally, I'll confess that I am a LOT more self-serving in nature than the elders of this public guild.
My first impulse, on seeing the row of mines carpeting the precious ore vein resource and all the locked out guild-only structures was to think, OMG, I need to somehow network my way into mine access with certain guilds, and second, I need to plunk down my own mine on at least the common metal types so that I have bargaining chips to trade up for higher metals.
:P
Then I ran home, looted my storage for enough leather to make a mine (thank goodness I strategized this in advance and set up a sheep farm plantation) and hogged my own copper and iron mines over the next day or two.
My third impulse, though, was to think about what I could spare for the Mixed Nuts guild, and separate out half of my spare leather for the guild pool for more mines, and after I had looted my fill of the initial iron frenzy, I donated my iron mine to the guild for other members to use too.
To me, and I think to a number of veterans in the Mixed Nuts guild, ATITD is a game where you must find your own personal balance between private benefit and public good.
Some people thrive heartily on being overachievers, or griefing others, on being the uberest hermit or part of some blackmail guild that is out to monopolize a rare resource and make all of Egypt bow down to their demands. ATITD is a sandbox - and yes, the potential for this exists. With plenty of drama to boot.
(At least because the stated goal is cooperation, there are structures in place that necessitate some cooperation, unlike Eve where you are practically encouraged to be mercantile and Machiavellian.)
For me, I don't think there's any real value in going the other extreme either. Where you are so selfless that you give yourself 110% to the running of your public guild and get stepped on by any person who decides he will take just a bit more than he gives back (and there are plenty out there.)
In those cases, you are at the mercy of the group. Your fortunes are Siamese-linked to the rise and fall of the guild. And you might even be a little bit of a parasite by doing so, because you cannot support yourself and need to rely on the help of others to get by. And woe betide them or you if they don't quite meet your expectations of how much help you SHOULD receive or think you DESERVE.
For me, what I'm trying to use the guild for is to bootstrap myself out of the bottlenecks that require a community to cooperate. If I can skip some agonizingly tedious techs and crummy equipment usage because the public works has better stuff to work with to produce my own good stuff, I am so there and pawning off them.
In return, though I may not selflessly sit there carving 7000 boards for the guild because I hate the very activity and find it hard to even make a thousand for myself, I try to excel at accumulating resources which I do enjoy making my own little personal empire out of and dropping what I can spare, (say 25-50% of my wealth) to the guild to put to good use.
Sure, it's a little more long term a sort of investment to work towards. It's not as obvious. It's not as blatant as sitting there for 8 hours collecting wood for boards and getting rewarded by a rank increase because the guildmaster appreciated the help (and our darling Atheus got his increase, while I'm still a lowly member because I only contributed an hour of my time at most and small amounts of wood and slate).
To me, it makes me a lot LESS at someone's mercy and lets me relate to the guild from a position of power.
I don't HAVE to donate anything to the guild. I -could- hoard it all for myself. I choose not to. I choose to share what I can spare. I do have my own personal stocks and store that I make use of. If the guild appreciates and notices what I do for them, great. If they don't, shrugs. I'm benefiting from their public works compound and that's what I can give to them in return.
Fancy titles are just that. Fancy titles. I do not have to worry about hoping for access to some rare piece of equipment in the public works compound because it's not set to allow my rank to use it. (Not that such a thing exists.) Or have to worry that there are five other newbies queued up to use it, and will any of them snatch and run with my stuff?
Because that same piece of equipment can be constructed in my compound. For my own use. Sure, it'll take a bit more time to work toward that goal. Sure, I'll take shameless advantage of my 12 hour reversal to log in when everyone else is sleeping to have 100% use of the public works equipment with no queue or necessity to socialize or have people nearby watching me.
But the idea is to use it only until you can make your own and no longer have to rely on the public works. Because if you hog it and treat it like your own compound, always open for your use, then where the hell are less fortunate newbies going to go? :)
Anyhow, that's my outlook on where I'm going in this game. Any time I'm locked out for good with no way out of the slave-to-the-rich hole, my subscription will be cancelled, the devs can worry about their lost revenue and try and fix it for the next Telling or not give a fuck at all, up to them.
But meanwhile, still benefiting, so offering something mutual in return.
I'm also considering reading some sort of sociology textbook again because all this societal stuff and spontaneous tribal communities and people interplay is just so fascinating to watch.
It started with a little breakdown. Or maybe a localized implosion. I don't know what you'd call it.
See, there's this newbie, called Atheus, who started off playing ATITD about the same time as me. He has been rather verbose on all the chat channels, very enthusiastic and exuberant and generally a 'model newbie' or 'dream citizen.'
Personally, I saw him a teensy bit like a rival. Because he seemed to be wriggling an 'in' into the established cliques a lot faster than I could, and inherited a nice friendly mentor and so on.
Still, I am more of an aloof hermit-y sort, prefering to be as independent as possible and accepting help only if I cannot figure it out (and often, I can, with some wiki reading and lots of practice). So he and I are different there, and I do not truly begrudge him the close inclusion into the established society because it's unlikely I'd fully embrace it anyway.
And then one night he turned into a raging Dr. Jekyll of his former self, raving at his mentor and the guild, and most of us still have no idea what set off this berserk rant.
Part of the problem is that he never elucidated precisely what his beef was.
It seemed to be some sort of sudden unleashed anger that guild ranks even existed. That there was the potential to lock out lower ranks from using certain bits of equipment (even if in actual fact, very little was actually locked.) Coupled with rage at a general old/new rich/poor divide that had a strong potential to exist in the future, with the threat of the older veterans hogging rare resources and turning it into a monopolistic enterprise upon which newbies might be forced to eke a miserable existence as slaves and beggars hoping for handouts.
And he seemed abruptly very miffed at the thought that he had sacrificed a bunch of his time to help the guild, perhaps above and beyond the call of duty, and was considering a sudden reversal into self-centeredness (or selfishness) to build up his own equipment and compound and monopolize his own set of resources.
The above summary is, of course, far more eloquent than he could piece into words, and is simply my best guess (which could be utterly wrong) as to his position and what was driving him batty.
On the opposing front, we had his mentor, Salinor, who was taking personal offense at the implication that he was a self-serving rat bastard of an elitist oldbie.
With, imo, just cause because this bunch of veterans are the least selfish individuals I have ever seen in ATITD (I did me research, not to mention, got verbally assraped in beta by a far less understanding but very community-known individual for simple newbie ignorance in a territory far far away from Khartoum.)
See, even though the potential for lockout using guild ranks exists in theory, in practice, the Mixed Nuts guild is a public works guild that opens practically everything to public use. Nearly every single piece of equipment can be used by Anyone, or a bare Initiate (lower than Member) of the guild.
The only exception was a) a compression furnace that was still in the process of being built. Building rights are locked a little higher, because the elders don't want a random public joe -tearing down- the unbuilt structure, and b) some flax combs which were locked to either Initiate or Member-only, I forget. Mostly because flax combs break after a certain number of uses, and this piece of equipment is something you learn how to build for yourself in the freaking tutorial, fer chrissakes.
Sometimes, I am aware that certain elders do temporarily raise the permissions on equipment because they are in the midst of using them, and are scared that some random joe will stop it in its operation and make off with their resources.
To me, it's perfectly understandable.
And sometimes, because they are human, they do forget to reset the permissions after that, and go OOPS, later, and fix it.
But really, how is this a vast conspiracy of legacy players out to lock out the newbie?
(Because real monopolies would set up their own big fat compounds and you wouldn't even get into their guilds for any access, period.)
The vets don't need you, the random newb, for sporadic contributions and benefits. They can churn out 1000 boards a lot faster than we can. In fact, they do, because they need to contribute about 8000 boards and that many bricks just to keep the guild slots open to accept new players. And despite them begging for contributions because they'd get RSI otherwise, they are still doing the lion's share of the work. Because they are generous-hearted enough to want to welcome and help newbies.
Then there's the issue of mines. And access to the rare ore/metal resource they represent.
See, metals come in veins drawn in funky lines that Teppy likes the look of all over Egypt. To find them, you have to dowse for them (a time-consuming process that you can only do once ever 30seconds-2 minutes) and have enough perception stat to see them (another time-consuming heavily luck-based process at the moment until we unlock another technology).
Once located, you can place a mine. Mines cost 20 leather this Telling, so they are a fairly expensive investment. Most people will place for their private small guilds to use, because they do break after some usage and require more resources to repair. Mines cannot be put within a certain distance of each other.
This, of course, naturally leads to the threat of monopoly. Any idiot can see the potential. Once the set number of mines are placed in a row, that's it for that vein. You've got to hope that another such vein exists somewhere in Egypt and that you can find it and the travel distance would be a turnoff too. Without that rare metal access, you may risk being locked out of whatever technology requires it, and may have to trade things for it, if the evil mine overlords even deign to recognize your existence.
But this is where mining cooperatives and altruistic public guilds come in. If you invest the effort getting to know the people in the first sort of guild, and pass whatever membership requirements they have, you can have access to their mines - of course, what sort of hierarchical structure they want to set for certain mine usage is up to them, and you'd have to play by their rules.
Mixed Nuts is the second sort of guild. Salinor, our resident mine expert, is dedicating his time and effort to locating at least one of each vein and placing at least one public mine on them.
Yes, PUBLIC mine. That means, any Tom, Dick, Joe, Harry and Tutankhamen, not even in our guild, can use them. And BREAK them. Without bothering to repair them. And it's going to cost OUR guild resources to fix them for general public use again.
If that isn't a selfless act, I'm not sure wtf is.
His hope is that we can at least make sure there is some public access to every type of metal there is, so that newbies are never locked out of the technology tree.
Of course, he's only one guy. His efforts may not be enough to cover every last scrap of metal type there is, and Mixed Nuts may end up with limited access to top tier metals. That's just fate if that happens.
So I don't know why Atheus was freaking out over our guild channel for. He seemed to be taking some kind of personal affront that there were -other- guilds out there, reserving stuff for their own use, and that this seemed some sort of supreme injustice and old player conspiracy in the making.
Um. Maybe he just realized it now. Yes, the possibility for this sort of thing exists in ATITD. No, ATITD is not some sort of general love-huggles-wuggles socialist or communist or communal affair where everyone will share everything equally, regardless of how much hard work you put in, or the people you sucked up to or cybersexed this morning.
It's a people game, fer goodness sakes'. It's a grand sociological experiment. And people are DIFFERENT.
Personally, I'll confess that I am a LOT more self-serving in nature than the elders of this public guild.
My first impulse, on seeing the row of mines carpeting the precious ore vein resource and all the locked out guild-only structures was to think, OMG, I need to somehow network my way into mine access with certain guilds, and second, I need to plunk down my own mine on at least the common metal types so that I have bargaining chips to trade up for higher metals.
:P
Then I ran home, looted my storage for enough leather to make a mine (thank goodness I strategized this in advance and set up a sheep farm plantation) and hogged my own copper and iron mines over the next day or two.
My third impulse, though, was to think about what I could spare for the Mixed Nuts guild, and separate out half of my spare leather for the guild pool for more mines, and after I had looted my fill of the initial iron frenzy, I donated my iron mine to the guild for other members to use too.
To me, and I think to a number of veterans in the Mixed Nuts guild, ATITD is a game where you must find your own personal balance between private benefit and public good.
Some people thrive heartily on being overachievers, or griefing others, on being the uberest hermit or part of some blackmail guild that is out to monopolize a rare resource and make all of Egypt bow down to their demands. ATITD is a sandbox - and yes, the potential for this exists. With plenty of drama to boot.
(At least because the stated goal is cooperation, there are structures in place that necessitate some cooperation, unlike Eve where you are practically encouraged to be mercantile and Machiavellian.)
For me, I don't think there's any real value in going the other extreme either. Where you are so selfless that you give yourself 110% to the running of your public guild and get stepped on by any person who decides he will take just a bit more than he gives back (and there are plenty out there.)
In those cases, you are at the mercy of the group. Your fortunes are Siamese-linked to the rise and fall of the guild. And you might even be a little bit of a parasite by doing so, because you cannot support yourself and need to rely on the help of others to get by. And woe betide them or you if they don't quite meet your expectations of how much help you SHOULD receive or think you DESERVE.
For me, what I'm trying to use the guild for is to bootstrap myself out of the bottlenecks that require a community to cooperate. If I can skip some agonizingly tedious techs and crummy equipment usage because the public works has better stuff to work with to produce my own good stuff, I am so there and pawning off them.
In return, though I may not selflessly sit there carving 7000 boards for the guild because I hate the very activity and find it hard to even make a thousand for myself, I try to excel at accumulating resources which I do enjoy making my own little personal empire out of and dropping what I can spare, (say 25-50% of my wealth) to the guild to put to good use.
Sure, it's a little more long term a sort of investment to work towards. It's not as obvious. It's not as blatant as sitting there for 8 hours collecting wood for boards and getting rewarded by a rank increase because the guildmaster appreciated the help (and our darling Atheus got his increase, while I'm still a lowly member because I only contributed an hour of my time at most and small amounts of wood and slate).
To me, it makes me a lot LESS at someone's mercy and lets me relate to the guild from a position of power.
I don't HAVE to donate anything to the guild. I -could- hoard it all for myself. I choose not to. I choose to share what I can spare. I do have my own personal stocks and store that I make use of. If the guild appreciates and notices what I do for them, great. If they don't, shrugs. I'm benefiting from their public works compound and that's what I can give to them in return.
Fancy titles are just that. Fancy titles. I do not have to worry about hoping for access to some rare piece of equipment in the public works compound because it's not set to allow my rank to use it. (Not that such a thing exists.) Or have to worry that there are five other newbies queued up to use it, and will any of them snatch and run with my stuff?
Because that same piece of equipment can be constructed in my compound. For my own use. Sure, it'll take a bit more time to work toward that goal. Sure, I'll take shameless advantage of my 12 hour reversal to log in when everyone else is sleeping to have 100% use of the public works equipment with no queue or necessity to socialize or have people nearby watching me.
But the idea is to use it only until you can make your own and no longer have to rely on the public works. Because if you hog it and treat it like your own compound, always open for your use, then where the hell are less fortunate newbies going to go? :)
Anyhow, that's my outlook on where I'm going in this game. Any time I'm locked out for good with no way out of the slave-to-the-rich hole, my subscription will be cancelled, the devs can worry about their lost revenue and try and fix it for the next Telling or not give a fuck at all, up to them.
But meanwhile, still benefiting, so offering something mutual in return.
I'm also considering reading some sort of sociology textbook again because all this societal stuff and spontaneous tribal communities and people interplay is just so fascinating to watch.
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Serendipity: Sweet and Sucky
ATITD is a strange mix of careful methodical planning and sweet dumb luck (as long as you recognize the opportunity and stop to take advantage of it.)
Running about in Egypt is slow, and Egypt is big, so exploring is not something a huge amount of people do. While I'm not personally thrilled about the runspeed, I do recognize that it's a deterrent for many, thus providing a niche for those interested in it.
Me, I don't mind doing it, if only for the thrill of tromping around in places few people go and finding things that are my personal secret only. I'm just getting very adept at multitasking in another window while click and running - hence all these blog posts, lots of RSS reading, some video watching, unsoweiter.
The monotony is broken up by a number of things.
There is the random herb. Foraging is a learned skill. Once you have it, you may attempt to harvest the herb using one of 12 different methods (cutting tap root, scraping stem pith, etc.) Problem is, the herb isn't identified for you either.
So people have created their own massive foraging wiki, complete with picture guide. Coming in late simply means you get to play amateur botanist, identify the correct herb, and use the discovered herb foraging method. Still, there are a couple of mystery unknown herbs left, with methods yet to be discovered via trial and error.
There is dowsing. Again, another skill lets you make a dowsing stick and try and find various metals, dependent on your perception. Egypt being as huge as it is, this makes finding veins of ore a chancy affair indeed.
Veins have been laid out by the devs in some kind of unknown pattern. So one has a couple of options. One could demarcate an area and do some kind of search grid across it, taking down meticulous notes in a systematic search (preferably with help, I presume). One could just stop and randomly dowse, hoping to strike it lucky.
Dowsing attempts are on a timer too, so one cannot spam it either.
There are sheep. Oh, those evil evil sheep. The little critters have been responsible for halting me in my tracks many times and making me reverse direction home once more. See, sheep spawn in the wild. Up to as many as 6-7 at once. The spawns hang around for some unknown time, and then despawn.
Sheep are 300 weight. (Heavy buggers.) So you can only carry one of them at a time. They can be brought back to a sheep pen to be slaughtered (100% chance) for leather, or domesticated and allowed to breed moar sheep for futureleather. Problem is, by the time you run back to your compound's sheep pen with one of them, the others will most likely despawn. Unless yer lucky and they just spawned and it's really near to thy sheep pen.
You could kill them right off, then and there, but chances are low, probably 10%. You could try and get friends to race over and grab them so they aren't wasted futureleather. You could attempt to hold as many of them as possible, and then stay overloaded and unable to move until people get the sheep off you, or you drop them and they despawn shortly after.
Since I normally wander in the deserted areas where no living soul is to be found, any time I see a sheep spawn, I tend to slaughter them all but one, hoping to get lucky, and then grab the last and settle down to an eternity of trying to decide if I should run back home with it (normally forced to offload some junk materials in my inventory to do it) or just try killing the dang thing. Usually I end up running home, because my sheep empire isn't completely established yet.
And there are random acts of veggie growing. I've made it a point to carry some jugs of water and at least one type of veggie seed with me at all times. So now and then, when I feel like it, I plonk down a veggie and test grow it to see if the yield deviates from the norm.
Ironically, when I'm on a determined hunt to do a search grid of coordinates for optimal yield, I generally get crap yields. Every time I'm out looking for something else and decide 'what the hey, let me test grow a veggie,' I hit upon something intriguing.
This time it was onions. Sand near my compound grows 4 onions. This is shabby. Sand nearer the town compounds grow 5 onions. Better, but dammit, someone found a magic 19 onion patch. How can I settle for 5 or less?
I happened to be out looking for a good camel pen site. As mentioned previously, I was hoping to find someplace deserted with little competition for stockpiling the hugest waste of a straw mound ever. Had to be near a grass patch though, so I could make straw then and there, and not have to cart across trackless sand 450 bales of straw at a time. I hate ferrying things.
I found a good spot. And then just before I build the construction site, I wondered... wait, what if I'm building over a prime magic onion patch? So I dropped an onion seed to test it out.
And got 7 onions back in return.
Damn! It's not 19 onions, but it's better than the norm, and bears investigating. So I ended up sidetreked in a little cross-pattern search grid trying to see if things changed a little north, west, east or south of the area.
The good news is I got 7 onions back at each of those locations, but of course, now I started wondering if camels caused pollution and whether I'd regret dumping a big fat dung-spewing camel pen on top of an area with 7 onion yields. So I ended up moving a little northeast of the area to find another camel pen spot, which also yielded 7 onions, but seemed away from the big patch.
(New addition to list of things to do: bring moar water, moar onion seeds, carpet bomb the area with onions to hunt down the best yielding area fer onions.)
Running about in Egypt is slow, and Egypt is big, so exploring is not something a huge amount of people do. While I'm not personally thrilled about the runspeed, I do recognize that it's a deterrent for many, thus providing a niche for those interested in it.
Me, I don't mind doing it, if only for the thrill of tromping around in places few people go and finding things that are my personal secret only. I'm just getting very adept at multitasking in another window while click and running - hence all these blog posts, lots of RSS reading, some video watching, unsoweiter.
The monotony is broken up by a number of things.
There is the random herb. Foraging is a learned skill. Once you have it, you may attempt to harvest the herb using one of 12 different methods (cutting tap root, scraping stem pith, etc.) Problem is, the herb isn't identified for you either.
So people have created their own massive foraging wiki, complete with picture guide. Coming in late simply means you get to play amateur botanist, identify the correct herb, and use the discovered herb foraging method. Still, there are a couple of mystery unknown herbs left, with methods yet to be discovered via trial and error.
There is dowsing. Again, another skill lets you make a dowsing stick and try and find various metals, dependent on your perception. Egypt being as huge as it is, this makes finding veins of ore a chancy affair indeed.
Veins have been laid out by the devs in some kind of unknown pattern. So one has a couple of options. One could demarcate an area and do some kind of search grid across it, taking down meticulous notes in a systematic search (preferably with help, I presume). One could just stop and randomly dowse, hoping to strike it lucky.
Dowsing attempts are on a timer too, so one cannot spam it either.
There are sheep. Oh, those evil evil sheep. The little critters have been responsible for halting me in my tracks many times and making me reverse direction home once more. See, sheep spawn in the wild. Up to as many as 6-7 at once. The spawns hang around for some unknown time, and then despawn.
Sheep are 300 weight. (Heavy buggers.) So you can only carry one of them at a time. They can be brought back to a sheep pen to be slaughtered (100% chance) for leather, or domesticated and allowed to breed moar sheep for futureleather. Problem is, by the time you run back to your compound's sheep pen with one of them, the others will most likely despawn. Unless yer lucky and they just spawned and it's really near to thy sheep pen.
You could kill them right off, then and there, but chances are low, probably 10%. You could try and get friends to race over and grab them so they aren't wasted futureleather. You could attempt to hold as many of them as possible, and then stay overloaded and unable to move until people get the sheep off you, or you drop them and they despawn shortly after.
Since I normally wander in the deserted areas where no living soul is to be found, any time I see a sheep spawn, I tend to slaughter them all but one, hoping to get lucky, and then grab the last and settle down to an eternity of trying to decide if I should run back home with it (normally forced to offload some junk materials in my inventory to do it) or just try killing the dang thing. Usually I end up running home, because my sheep empire isn't completely established yet.
And there are random acts of veggie growing. I've made it a point to carry some jugs of water and at least one type of veggie seed with me at all times. So now and then, when I feel like it, I plonk down a veggie and test grow it to see if the yield deviates from the norm.
Ironically, when I'm on a determined hunt to do a search grid of coordinates for optimal yield, I generally get crap yields. Every time I'm out looking for something else and decide 'what the hey, let me test grow a veggie,' I hit upon something intriguing.
This time it was onions. Sand near my compound grows 4 onions. This is shabby. Sand nearer the town compounds grow 5 onions. Better, but dammit, someone found a magic 19 onion patch. How can I settle for 5 or less?
I happened to be out looking for a good camel pen site. As mentioned previously, I was hoping to find someplace deserted with little competition for stockpiling the hugest waste of a straw mound ever. Had to be near a grass patch though, so I could make straw then and there, and not have to cart across trackless sand 450 bales of straw at a time. I hate ferrying things.
I found a good spot. And then just before I build the construction site, I wondered... wait, what if I'm building over a prime magic onion patch? So I dropped an onion seed to test it out.
And got 7 onions back in return.
Damn! It's not 19 onions, but it's better than the norm, and bears investigating. So I ended up sidetreked in a little cross-pattern search grid trying to see if things changed a little north, west, east or south of the area.
The good news is I got 7 onions back at each of those locations, but of course, now I started wondering if camels caused pollution and whether I'd regret dumping a big fat dung-spewing camel pen on top of an area with 7 onion yields. So I ended up moving a little northeast of the area to find another camel pen spot, which also yielded 7 onions, but seemed away from the big patch.
(New addition to list of things to do: bring moar water, moar onion seeds, carpet bomb the area with onions to hunt down the best yielding area fer onions.)
Monday, December 22, 2008
The Planning of Projects
The strategic sandbox nature of ATITD is quite a refreshing change from the tactical linear nature of most standard MMOs.
I find myself having a lot of fun reading up things on the wiki, plotting my next architectural conquest (er, project) and then running around in-game assembling the materials required. An inbuilt to-do list that doesn't require kill X rats and take this to Y NPC (and then bring it back.)
Come to think of it, there are no NPCs. No quests dictated by some guy who tries to tell you a story, but really, you need to kill Z boars for me. In return, I shall give you theez leet lewt. And hav sum XP while yer at it...
There are schools and universities that you approach instead. Sure, they are still going to give you a list of tasks to do. But the crucial difference is that you can wait on doing them, and still have fairly rewarding experiences.
Yes, some content, some skills, are gated by levels. You cannot choose to stay at level 1 and expect to do everything. I suspect that as you get higher up in levels, your choice decreases and you must do some things you dislike if you wish to progress further. To me, that's fair enough, since you cannot claim to be an adept, a sage of Egypt if you are only skilled in one realm of seven.
Perhaps it is the Explorer in me that thinks of Egpyt as being very large, with many areas undiscovered land. Mayhaps it is just ignorance on my part, and skilled veterans have been able to carpet sweep the entire area for resources with bots and an indepth mathematical analysis while I'm just running around doing random and occassional desultory systematic searches.
One thing that does worry me is that rarer resources may end up monopolized by reclusive guilds. If there is no access to them at all, then my interest in ATITD will wane most sharply.
In fact, success in ATITD looks to be quite a chancy thing. And I wonder if that is why it is a niche game, with many people losing interest halfway through the Telling. If there is very little to look forward to, then there is no point staying after a while.
Sometimes, the sandbox nature of the game itself can become overwhelming. My region has been so enthusiastically researching things that I'm not caught up on lots of the technology yet.
Current Goals:
1) Get myself a glass scythe and papyrus basket to cut grass with.
This involves digging up a ton of limestone and soda (get flint first), getting a lot of wood, and stoking a fire over a firepit.
The basket involves growing more papyrus, drying said papyrus, and weaving it on a loom. If I don't have enough twine, I may have to grow some more flax. Or wait for nail technology to come out. :/
2) Try mining.
Except I shall have to locate some sort of guild with a mine. The two current more or less public ones that I'm in do not have any mines that I know of yet.
Either I can try and ingratiate myself with certain private guilds, or I can embark on a great solo dowsing project to find some mines (assuming they are there to be found), or I can wait and hope that someone in my guild finds a mine they want to share with everyone.
3) Work on remaining Tests
I'm still sitting on the Initiation into Thought and the Initiation into Art and Music. Both seem to take up a large amount of materials for something that just sits there, waiting for people to look at it. Alternatively, I could wait and just solve 3 puzzles (in three weeks once they get around to pointing out where these puzzles are, across the continent), or I could rip down my sculpture, which seems a horrendous waste of materials.
Do something, get it done right and all, y'know? I'm half thinking of making some kind of Pharaoh design, but boy, it'll take a while to do.
4) Consider getting myself a small warehouse to store stuff. I seem to collect an immense amount of crap from time to time.
I have a sinking feeling this will mean lots of bricks and boards. I rather wait until I can harvest more grass first, actually.
5) Grow MOAR veggies
I could grind tons more cabbages. I could sit down in a grassy area and try to figure out how carrot waves shift with time. I could attempt another great garlic pilgrimage to solve the persistent mystery of everywhere 1 yields. My sheep eat a crapton of onions, and 5 onion patches aren't enough when I know there's such a thing as a 19 onion magic patch. :( And there's leeks, which I'm not sure what they're used for, but blah.
I could try and figure out exactly how they yield more seeds too. But it seems a little pointless because sometimes they need a male and female avatar at the same site. I'm not a couple playing ATITD, and I'm not dual-boxing just for some dumb seeds.
6) Run into the desert to set up a camel pen in the hope of catching a camel.
This is a gamble. Because the world is apparently divided up into unspecified camel regions, and the open pen with the most amount of straw in it, catches a camel at the stroke of midnight and loses all the straw. So I have to find a place that hopefully a lot of people do not go, while still being near enough that I can get to semi-conveniently to fill with tons of straw, or else my camels will starve.
Assuming that I can even catch a camel in the first place. Some places have no luck with 10k straw, some have 2k-3k straw and no camel, and some smart/lucky bugger went into the eastern desert and caught one for 500 straw, I hear.
Plans plans plans. :/
I find myself having a lot of fun reading up things on the wiki, plotting my next architectural conquest (er, project) and then running around in-game assembling the materials required. An inbuilt to-do list that doesn't require kill X rats and take this to Y NPC (and then bring it back.)
Come to think of it, there are no NPCs. No quests dictated by some guy who tries to tell you a story, but really, you need to kill Z boars for me. In return, I shall give you theez leet lewt. And hav sum XP while yer at it...
There are schools and universities that you approach instead. Sure, they are still going to give you a list of tasks to do. But the crucial difference is that you can wait on doing them, and still have fairly rewarding experiences.
Yes, some content, some skills, are gated by levels. You cannot choose to stay at level 1 and expect to do everything. I suspect that as you get higher up in levels, your choice decreases and you must do some things you dislike if you wish to progress further. To me, that's fair enough, since you cannot claim to be an adept, a sage of Egypt if you are only skilled in one realm of seven.
Perhaps it is the Explorer in me that thinks of Egpyt as being very large, with many areas undiscovered land. Mayhaps it is just ignorance on my part, and skilled veterans have been able to carpet sweep the entire area for resources with bots and an indepth mathematical analysis while I'm just running around doing random and occassional desultory systematic searches.
One thing that does worry me is that rarer resources may end up monopolized by reclusive guilds. If there is no access to them at all, then my interest in ATITD will wane most sharply.
In fact, success in ATITD looks to be quite a chancy thing. And I wonder if that is why it is a niche game, with many people losing interest halfway through the Telling. If there is very little to look forward to, then there is no point staying after a while.
Sometimes, the sandbox nature of the game itself can become overwhelming. My region has been so enthusiastically researching things that I'm not caught up on lots of the technology yet.
Current Goals:
1) Get myself a glass scythe and papyrus basket to cut grass with.
This involves digging up a ton of limestone and soda (get flint first), getting a lot of wood, and stoking a fire over a firepit.
The basket involves growing more papyrus, drying said papyrus, and weaving it on a loom. If I don't have enough twine, I may have to grow some more flax. Or wait for nail technology to come out. :/
2) Try mining.
Except I shall have to locate some sort of guild with a mine. The two current more or less public ones that I'm in do not have any mines that I know of yet.
Either I can try and ingratiate myself with certain private guilds, or I can embark on a great solo dowsing project to find some mines (assuming they are there to be found), or I can wait and hope that someone in my guild finds a mine they want to share with everyone.
3) Work on remaining Tests
I'm still sitting on the Initiation into Thought and the Initiation into Art and Music. Both seem to take up a large amount of materials for something that just sits there, waiting for people to look at it. Alternatively, I could wait and just solve 3 puzzles (in three weeks once they get around to pointing out where these puzzles are, across the continent), or I could rip down my sculpture, which seems a horrendous waste of materials.
Do something, get it done right and all, y'know? I'm half thinking of making some kind of Pharaoh design, but boy, it'll take a while to do.
4) Consider getting myself a small warehouse to store stuff. I seem to collect an immense amount of crap from time to time.
I have a sinking feeling this will mean lots of bricks and boards. I rather wait until I can harvest more grass first, actually.
5) Grow MOAR veggies
I could grind tons more cabbages. I could sit down in a grassy area and try to figure out how carrot waves shift with time. I could attempt another great garlic pilgrimage to solve the persistent mystery of everywhere 1 yields. My sheep eat a crapton of onions, and 5 onion patches aren't enough when I know there's such a thing as a 19 onion magic patch. :( And there's leeks, which I'm not sure what they're used for, but blah.
I could try and figure out exactly how they yield more seeds too. But it seems a little pointless because sometimes they need a male and female avatar at the same site. I'm not a couple playing ATITD, and I'm not dual-boxing just for some dumb seeds.
6) Run into the desert to set up a camel pen in the hope of catching a camel.
This is a gamble. Because the world is apparently divided up into unspecified camel regions, and the open pen with the most amount of straw in it, catches a camel at the stroke of midnight and loses all the straw. So I have to find a place that hopefully a lot of people do not go, while still being near enough that I can get to semi-conveniently to fill with tons of straw, or else my camels will starve.
Assuming that I can even catch a camel in the first place. Some places have no luck with 10k straw, some have 2k-3k straw and no camel, and some smart/lucky bugger went into the eastern desert and caught one for 500 straw, I hear.
Plans plans plans. :/
Saturday, December 20, 2008
The Compulsion of Cultivation
For the first time in many many years (say, 10 or so?), I'm feeling the engrossing gripping compulsion very similar to my first step in RoD. I suspect it's mainly the chat, mixed with a strong helping of new systems to learn, and a heady touch of timesink.
In order now, let's discuss the chat: I was very picky about my region of choice to settle in. It has a few key 'centers' who are outwardly generous and vocal about the benefit of all. This works to everyone's betterment, and it makes the chat nice to listen to, more often than not. Very important in a timesink-y game.
Timesinks are timesinks. They aid immersion. They prompt chatting because there's nothing else to do while waiting in between clicks, or running from place to place, and like magic, chatrooms build community.
I've often thought that WASD movement was responsible for the MMOs of today being generally quiet places, because everyone's too busy running from place to place with their hands on the keyboard and not enough time to settle down for a long conversation. Especially if you're liable to get attacked by a hostile mob every few hundred paces (*cough* artificial placement *cough*) or accidentally fall down a cliff and break your neck (*cough* AoC WAR *cough*).
As for the new systems, well, that's why I came and decided to stick around for a bit. The minigames and new nuances to learn are addictive. Half-dependent on luck, half-dependent on persistence, and mostly tests of patience and waiting and/or repetitive motion, they are unabashedly timesinky grind.
The problem for an Explorer like me is that they are timesinky grind with the reward of doing it much better or more efficiently than everyone else if only you know the secrets behind the system.
Take, fer example, cabbages. I actually didn't think I liked the minigame of growing vegetables that much in theory, unlike bricks, which are still a hopelessly addictive Zen affair. (Left unchecked, I think I would offline grind grass for straw and just make 100 brick racks to make bricks for fun.)
See, the addictiveness of bricks is that two of the ingredients are basically free. With no effort except a bit of mathematical ratio calculation, you can grab any quantity you like. The other ingredient is grass and waiting time. Grass used to be the limiting factor, because I would have to just move back and forth picking 1 grass at a time per 2 seconds or so to get enough future straw.
However, after picking enough grass, you have the option of setting it as an offline chore. Which means you log back in with about 200 free pieces of futurestraw. Much less than if you were there, picking constantly, but what the hey, it's free.
After this, the return comes back 6 bricks at a time for 3 mud, 1 sand (essentially free resource) and 2 straw. It's an equal return in quantity, almost. You feel like you accumulate a lot of it really fast.
This is unlike charcoal making in a firepit, for example. In this, you spend 200 wood to get 24 measly pieces of charcoal after 5 minutes. If you wished, you could spend an inordinate amount of time of your choice attempting to stoke a fire for slightly increased amounts (28-35 or 48 if you were really good and willing to spend 1+ hours at the same stupid firepit.) But you risked stoking it wrongly, and ending up with 12-13 pieces of charcoal. What terribly depressing return.
Back to veggie growing. Cabbage has been the first bane I chose to work with. After running cross country for 3 rl days on and off to 7 of 11 far off places to get vegetable seeds and getting cabbage seeds back from 3 of them, I figure it was a hint from the server to GROW MOAR CABBAGE.
I try growing it somewhat near my compound. This involves a process of planting the cabbage in the ground, watering it once, waiting for an indefinite time for it to grow in size, watering it again, waiting for the size swelling, watering again, unsoweiter until it is ready for harvest. This takes about 4 waterings.
Except that if you lag or slacken in attention and miss a watering, the vegetable shrinks in size and you have to repeat. Overwatering kills the vegetable, causes it to just return a seed. Try again, in other words.
My personal goal was to get at least 100 cabbages to unlock cooking.
I went through the false starts of trying to plant 4 seeds at a time, getting hopelessly confused as they didn't grow in order, but swelled up at the worst possible times to throw off my peripheral movement detection and make me forget which had grown when. I killed a number with overwatering. Many shrunk on me and consumed more water than was necessary.
And Finally, the "Harvest the Cabbages" option came up, and I clicked it with great relief.
Only to get 1 cabbage and 1 seed back in return.
W. T. F.
Obviously, I was doing it wrong somehow. Checked the wiki. Some two people reported getting yields of 22, 23 cabbage. (?!) But no one really knew how, and when cabbage yields return such a bountiful number.
Aha. A secret. I likey secrets.
So off I go, planting one cabbage over and over in every single place I could think of, trying to crack the cabbage code. 66 plantings and much running about later, I was left with 66 cabbages in my inventory and an overwhelming disgust for the brassica.
I give up with a huff to do other things. A while later, I'm traipsing cross-country in the hope of finding a nice tall mountain to test drying some papyrus. Apparently the higher the altitude you dry it at, the more seeds you get. For no reason at all, except someone started mentioning cabbages on chat, I stop in the middle of a big expanse of green grassy hill and go, "what the heck, let me try growing another cabbage."
I nearly choke when my one single seed throws 20 cabbages in my inventory at the end of it all.
*blink* *4 seeds get hastily thrown down just in case it was a time-based effect or shifting location patch*
80 cabbages land in my inventory after I go through the whole shebang.
*gasp* *hyperventilates* *does more planting* *notices a constant 20 cabbages despite time passing*
Now my curiosity kicks in and I start shifting coordinates and test planting more and more cabbage to see if I can get a higher yield. I note that there seems to be a vertical strip along this particular region of land, going southwards yielding less, and northwards yielding more until hitting a certain point and subsiding.
Finally, I mark my best located spot for myself, a 23 cabbage per seed site. I am suddenly elated and filled with adrenaline, running home loaded with 300 cabbages. My goals have shifted from somehow getting 100 pathetic cabbages for myself to unlock a skill, to eyeing the 4000 cabbage research donation for the whole region.
I'm thinking I can knock off a significant chunk of that, keep some kickback for myself, and all before sharing my secret spot with other people for their betterment too. And before I know it, I'm staying up half the night, ferrying cabbages back and forth as the limiting factor, growing hundreds of the lil buggers.
The satisfaction of the independent discovery is sweet victory after great torment.
Now I have designs to work on the remaining seeds for high yield spots/methods after finishing up my Grand Cabbage Goal. 2110 cabbages have been grown. Which ain't too bad for a newbie. If I feel like it, I'll make the other half at some point.
All the above has its dangers. I need to be wary. It's all very well for me to reprise a few fun sleepless nights of my youth in December, but taking it a little too far will make me end up with an extended case of narcolepsy.
And of course, most hazardous of all. I cannot care too much. We all know where too much emotional investment leads. 8 years of MUDing, not all of it enjoyable.
For now, ATITD is fun because any drama does not really concern me. I note that there are points where the game creator himself builds in conflict. And knowing human nature, I suspect people will indeed come to harsh words (if not blows, since there is no killing in ATITD), and some serious competition and social outcasting action will be in effect at a later point.
But since getting ahead in ATITD should not be my main goal, I'm not really worrying about it if I stay level 4 for the rest of my time here.
Yes, I'm aware that stuff is gated, and I might not be able to see certain things if I don't make a certain level. So be it. I'm just here to muck about with what I can. I'm attempting to soak into the spirit of the community slowly and contribute in small ways, in the hope that I can benefit from the whole, but it's just a hope, not ambition, not burning desire, not an obsessive drive.
Because in the end, ATITD's Egypt is Teppy's playground, just as RoD is CoE's playground. The citizens within are ants for his amusement, and it's really very silly to react in deep passionate ways to artificial stimuli. At the moment, I enjoy what I'm messing around with, so I will return the kindness of someone coding this stuff for me with being present and being subscribed for a month.
But I doubt ATITD's the kind of game that you really want to pay in 3, 6, 12 monthly installments for, because things can change too fast in that time.
In order now, let's discuss the chat: I was very picky about my region of choice to settle in. It has a few key 'centers' who are outwardly generous and vocal about the benefit of all. This works to everyone's betterment, and it makes the chat nice to listen to, more often than not. Very important in a timesink-y game.
Timesinks are timesinks. They aid immersion. They prompt chatting because there's nothing else to do while waiting in between clicks, or running from place to place, and like magic, chatrooms build community.
I've often thought that WASD movement was responsible for the MMOs of today being generally quiet places, because everyone's too busy running from place to place with their hands on the keyboard and not enough time to settle down for a long conversation. Especially if you're liable to get attacked by a hostile mob every few hundred paces (*cough* artificial placement *cough*) or accidentally fall down a cliff and break your neck (*cough* AoC WAR *cough*).
As for the new systems, well, that's why I came and decided to stick around for a bit. The minigames and new nuances to learn are addictive. Half-dependent on luck, half-dependent on persistence, and mostly tests of patience and waiting and/or repetitive motion, they are unabashedly timesinky grind.
The problem for an Explorer like me is that they are timesinky grind with the reward of doing it much better or more efficiently than everyone else if only you know the secrets behind the system.
Take, fer example, cabbages. I actually didn't think I liked the minigame of growing vegetables that much in theory, unlike bricks, which are still a hopelessly addictive Zen affair. (Left unchecked, I think I would offline grind grass for straw and just make 100 brick racks to make bricks for fun.)
See, the addictiveness of bricks is that two of the ingredients are basically free. With no effort except a bit of mathematical ratio calculation, you can grab any quantity you like. The other ingredient is grass and waiting time. Grass used to be the limiting factor, because I would have to just move back and forth picking 1 grass at a time per 2 seconds or so to get enough future straw.
However, after picking enough grass, you have the option of setting it as an offline chore. Which means you log back in with about 200 free pieces of futurestraw. Much less than if you were there, picking constantly, but what the hey, it's free.
After this, the return comes back 6 bricks at a time for 3 mud, 1 sand (essentially free resource) and 2 straw. It's an equal return in quantity, almost. You feel like you accumulate a lot of it really fast.
This is unlike charcoal making in a firepit, for example. In this, you spend 200 wood to get 24 measly pieces of charcoal after 5 minutes. If you wished, you could spend an inordinate amount of time of your choice attempting to stoke a fire for slightly increased amounts (28-35 or 48 if you were really good and willing to spend 1+ hours at the same stupid firepit.) But you risked stoking it wrongly, and ending up with 12-13 pieces of charcoal. What terribly depressing return.
Back to veggie growing. Cabbage has been the first bane I chose to work with. After running cross country for 3 rl days on and off to 7 of 11 far off places to get vegetable seeds and getting cabbage seeds back from 3 of them, I figure it was a hint from the server to GROW MOAR CABBAGE.
I try growing it somewhat near my compound. This involves a process of planting the cabbage in the ground, watering it once, waiting for an indefinite time for it to grow in size, watering it again, waiting for the size swelling, watering again, unsoweiter until it is ready for harvest. This takes about 4 waterings.
Except that if you lag or slacken in attention and miss a watering, the vegetable shrinks in size and you have to repeat. Overwatering kills the vegetable, causes it to just return a seed. Try again, in other words.
My personal goal was to get at least 100 cabbages to unlock cooking.
I went through the false starts of trying to plant 4 seeds at a time, getting hopelessly confused as they didn't grow in order, but swelled up at the worst possible times to throw off my peripheral movement detection and make me forget which had grown when. I killed a number with overwatering. Many shrunk on me and consumed more water than was necessary.
And Finally, the "Harvest the Cabbages" option came up, and I clicked it with great relief.
Only to get 1 cabbage and 1 seed back in return.
W. T. F.
Obviously, I was doing it wrong somehow. Checked the wiki. Some two people reported getting yields of 22, 23 cabbage. (?!) But no one really knew how, and when cabbage yields return such a bountiful number.
Aha. A secret. I likey secrets.
So off I go, planting one cabbage over and over in every single place I could think of, trying to crack the cabbage code. 66 plantings and much running about later, I was left with 66 cabbages in my inventory and an overwhelming disgust for the brassica.
I give up with a huff to do other things. A while later, I'm traipsing cross-country in the hope of finding a nice tall mountain to test drying some papyrus. Apparently the higher the altitude you dry it at, the more seeds you get. For no reason at all, except someone started mentioning cabbages on chat, I stop in the middle of a big expanse of green grassy hill and go, "what the heck, let me try growing another cabbage."
I nearly choke when my one single seed throws 20 cabbages in my inventory at the end of it all.
*blink* *4 seeds get hastily thrown down just in case it was a time-based effect or shifting location patch*
80 cabbages land in my inventory after I go through the whole shebang.
*gasp* *hyperventilates* *does more planting* *notices a constant 20 cabbages despite time passing*
Now my curiosity kicks in and I start shifting coordinates and test planting more and more cabbage to see if I can get a higher yield. I note that there seems to be a vertical strip along this particular region of land, going southwards yielding less, and northwards yielding more until hitting a certain point and subsiding.
Finally, I mark my best located spot for myself, a 23 cabbage per seed site. I am suddenly elated and filled with adrenaline, running home loaded with 300 cabbages. My goals have shifted from somehow getting 100 pathetic cabbages for myself to unlock a skill, to eyeing the 4000 cabbage research donation for the whole region.
I'm thinking I can knock off a significant chunk of that, keep some kickback for myself, and all before sharing my secret spot with other people for their betterment too. And before I know it, I'm staying up half the night, ferrying cabbages back and forth as the limiting factor, growing hundreds of the lil buggers.
The satisfaction of the independent discovery is sweet victory after great torment.
Now I have designs to work on the remaining seeds for high yield spots/methods after finishing up my Grand Cabbage Goal. 2110 cabbages have been grown. Which ain't too bad for a newbie. If I feel like it, I'll make the other half at some point.
All the above has its dangers. I need to be wary. It's all very well for me to reprise a few fun sleepless nights of my youth in December, but taking it a little too far will make me end up with an extended case of narcolepsy.
And of course, most hazardous of all. I cannot care too much. We all know where too much emotional investment leads. 8 years of MUDing, not all of it enjoyable.
For now, ATITD is fun because any drama does not really concern me. I note that there are points where the game creator himself builds in conflict. And knowing human nature, I suspect people will indeed come to harsh words (if not blows, since there is no killing in ATITD), and some serious competition and social outcasting action will be in effect at a later point.
But since getting ahead in ATITD should not be my main goal, I'm not really worrying about it if I stay level 4 for the rest of my time here.
Yes, I'm aware that stuff is gated, and I might not be able to see certain things if I don't make a certain level. So be it. I'm just here to muck about with what I can. I'm attempting to soak into the spirit of the community slowly and contribute in small ways, in the hope that I can benefit from the whole, but it's just a hope, not ambition, not burning desire, not an obsessive drive.
Because in the end, ATITD's Egypt is Teppy's playground, just as RoD is CoE's playground. The citizens within are ants for his amusement, and it's really very silly to react in deep passionate ways to artificial stimuli. At the moment, I enjoy what I'm messing around with, so I will return the kindness of someone coding this stuff for me with being present and being subscribed for a month.
But I doubt ATITD's the kind of game that you really want to pay in 3, 6, 12 monthly installments for, because things can change too fast in that time.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Shadow Twins or Mirror Opposites?
The more I play ATITD, the more I start to wonder if I might at least attempt a free trial of Eve Online without being permanently scarred for life.
Without ever playing Eve at all and judging only by screenshots and hearsay, I'm seeing a few similarities between what I'm doing in the desert and what I might be doing in space.
For one thing, the UI is exceedingly menu-driven. *click* *click* *right-click* *click* *pin this menu up* *click some more* *worry about my mouse breaking and set TAB button to work as *click* instead*
I gather that ships in space work also with lots of menus all across my UI. It's less traumatizing than I thought it would be. Just takes getting used to the nonstandard viewing and control system.
The pace of getting anywhere is slower than a hamstrung snail. I'm spending about 5-10 minutes of running time getting to my region's 'city center' and I'm just a couple river banks' away.
Getting up into the region northmost of us takes a good 20-30 minutes' jog. I can't believe I managed to avoid the days of Everquest and WoW and its ilk that forced the same thing, just with nasty mobs
The pace of getting anything done is also just as slow and methodical. And it can involve a ton of planning. Strategizing offline, project management and what not are quite essential for productivity.
Watching the veterans can often boggle the mind. I see them with heaps of apparatuses (or is it apparati?) happily mass producing goods that I can barely wrap my brain around.
Fortunately, one can still get by at a slower, cottage industry pace in ATITD for now. In Eve, I think I feel quite insecure unless surrounded by the right corporation. And I'd still be scared that people would be out to backstab me, since that is the accepted norm.
In ATITD, there are all sorts. Most will at least pay lip-service to cooperation, if only for self-betterment later on. Others are genuinely good-hearted and play ATITD as a social 'helping' sort of game, which is quite useful for newbies, instead of being thrown into the rough, cruel reaches of empty space in Eve. I suppose if I did enough research, I might be able to find the proper mentoring corporation, but blah, if the minigame is not fun, what is the point of learning menus?
Skill training in ATITD is very much different than in Eve. For the desert, it's all about sitting glued to your client, figuring out puzzles, recording information or waiting and clicking at the correct times. In Eve, I hear one sets the skills and then waits, and waits for days.
Conflict and drama seems to be part and parcel of these highly social-oriented MMOs though. In Eve, it's open season. Eve is 'honest' in that it doesn't hide the fact that people -are- out to get you. Just go get them before they get you, (or Be Prepared) is pretty much Eve's philosophy in play, methinks.
In ATITD, it's more what you make of it. I get the impression of an experimental sandbox with a slightly sadistic team of scientists pushing buttons to see how different people react. It's no Eden, but you don't have to develop a paranoid outlook either. It's very..human.
Some people are going to stay quiet and not participate, and they may even go to the extremes of being a hermit. Some people are going to disagree with each other, and get into loud quarrelsome arguments over the regional chat channel. Some people want things fairer, or more structured, some people want things more free and easy. Some people react badly to being pushed into doing something, while some people follow the herd and cheerlead from the sidelines.
What the dev team does, is set up a sort of 'roleplay' story, cunningly designed in the manner of all good GMs/Storytellers/whatever you call 'em to push people's buttons and make them dance or react in predictable or unpredictable ways.
Your reaction is your choice.
For myself, I have quite clear goals in ATITD. I'm mucking around with a little cottage industry. I'm trying out what I can, with a minimum of fuss and grind, and attempting to wiggle into friendly communities for the purpose of reward via social community (warm fuzzy feelings from helping and being helped) and access to systems that require a number of people to cooperate.
I am avoiding: things that require me to do things I consider distinctly unfun, and excess drama or meanspiritedness.
So I generally react to the global Egypt chat (full of lots of drama sorts) and storyline with quiet amusement, analyzing it from one step removed.
Fortunately, my choice of region is on the whole, a lot more like me and saner. But it's still diverse enough to be amusing at times. It's just not toxic, like certain other regions. *shudders*
For example, a recent Test of the Obelisk got me smiling. In this Test, you are required to build a big fat obelpenisk to stick out of the ground. To pass, your obelisk must be the tallest -ever- in the region for a period of one Egypt week (or 2 RL days and 8 hours).
Naturally, the higher your obelisk, the more materials it is going to cost. And things get exponentially worse the taller it is. A 7 cubit obelisk, the minimum, requires a couple hundred bricks and stuff. Maybe an hour's work or less. A 30 cubit obelisk requires several thousands of bricks and other stuff. By the time you get into the 40-50s, we're talking 20k bricks and worse.
Immediately, there was an uproar over regional chat when it was announced. Apparently, they had just changed it in this telling from one RL hour to above amount of mindboggling time.
Some people started to beg/insist/plead for a queue system. Of course, the problem is whether everyone respects the queue or not. There are no means to enforce it, y'see, save for the threat of social outcasting and what not. Cynics point this out to them. They retort. Yadda yadda.
A hilarious prisoner's dilemma, fully blown up into multiplayer scale.
If everybody cooperated, people could take turns to build obelisks, increasing one cubit at a time, for the period necessary, and lots of people would pass.
But of course, human nature being what it is, there are bound to be people who will attempt to shortcut the system, or never buy into it in the first place, and build something bigger right off.
And it may not be out of a desire to win either. It could be some newbie who genuinely does not know there is a queue. It could be someone just heavily into Architecture and less into the social aspect of ATITD who doesn't give a fuck about other people. It could be a griefer who gets his jollies out of watching people scream their heads off over regional chat, and twitch to his tune, rather than really hoping to win.
To me, this is exceedingly cunning design on the devs' part. It strives to short circuit most regions' attempt at cooperation and contribution to university tech research as people divert their energy into outputting tons of bricks and things to outdo each other. It's an immense materials and time sink. It gives rise to a lot of drama and cunning plans and conflict.
Already in my region, one of the calmest of the lot, we have had about 3-4 hours of obelisk discussion. We've had an attempt at setting up a queue by some vocal people who wanted to let their popular people go first, followed by first come, first serve. We've had someone (newbie or from an older Telling) short this out by building a 10 cubit obelisk, go straight into protestation and denial when confronted over chat, and saying awkwardly that he quit. We've had people get exceedingly grumpy over this, since now the standard obelisk size has been raised for everyone. We've had people who say to forget it, he's new, it's done, let's move on, let's not get sidetreked from our main cooperative research goals.
I've seen people who are amazingly forgiving and tolerant of any kind of behavior. (And I wonder why and what their motivations are.) And people less so. (Which is a lot more understandable, if sometimes unpleasant to hear them growling about it over region chat.)
And we've had a reclusive half-hermit half-griefer? completely overwrite the 10 cubit obelisk by building a 30 cubit obelisk in its place. Complete with "LOL" written in mud buckets at the foot of it. (So I guess I'm not the only one to figure out mud graffiti in ATITD.)
The uproar over regional chat was hilarious once more. Y'see, anyone who takes the test can at any time, 'meditate' and find out what size obelisk has been built, and the coordinates of it. Running there will let you click on it and find out its owner. "Who was it? Who was it?!" went the cries over chat. "WTF?" "Why did they do that?" Out came a name, and then the discussion started as to who it was, and if it was griefing.
Again, we had the amazingly forgiving apologists. Oh, he's a recluse, maybe he just likes to build architecture, he did contribute a ton of things for research, let him be, yadda yadda. We also had those who were exceedingly cheesed off by this act of community disrespect, saying they wouldn't help him out in anything and so on.
And we had one individual who just couldn't tolerate the injustice of letting him win, and announced that he was going to build over this 30 cubit obelisk because it wasn't right. So he did.
Now we have a 31 cubit obelisk in the region of Queen's Retreat. The queue system has been abandoned. It'll be amusing to see if this lasts the 2 days 8 hours, or if someone else will reset it with a 32 cubit one.
Me, like a lot of the others, we are not freaking out over it. To get a level out of this, all one needs to do is build a 7 cubit one, and tearing it down gives you back most of the materials. Officially 'passing' the test is where the nastiness sets in.
Later on, as technology improves, there are other obelisks that can be built as well. For probably less pain.
To me, it's more important to think long term, get in with a good group of people. Ultimately, if they like you and want to help you progress, I can see 10-20 people being able to output as many bricks and crap necessary to build however tall an obelisk, over a solo individual effort, no matter how hardcore the one person is with multiple accounts.
My personal choice is to react with absolutely nothing over regional chat. I happen to think that complaints are a big eyesore. Not to mention, big phallic objects sticking out of the ground. I'll build a cheap 7 cubit one to get my level, and then tear it down cos it's fugly. (At least ATITD allows that as a valid choice. Do a bare minimum to pass and break the level barrier. Be challenged a lot more in 'hard mode' to get a fancy title and the next goal point. Forcing everybody to compete would make me quit in a big hurry.)
But I reserve the right to tit-for-tat. I have marked the 30 cubit individual's name (and his spouses' or second account name), and will not contribute any of my votes to help him progress in any other test.
Still, one thing's for sure, there won't be anyone coming in to 'sneak attack' our region with an obelisk. Other more deserted regions probably have shorter obelisk heights than ours, and they will be targeting those, no doubt.
Without ever playing Eve at all and judging only by screenshots and hearsay, I'm seeing a few similarities between what I'm doing in the desert and what I might be doing in space.
For one thing, the UI is exceedingly menu-driven. *click* *click* *right-click* *click* *pin this menu up* *click some more* *worry about my mouse breaking and set TAB button to work as *click* instead*
I gather that ships in space work also with lots of menus all across my UI. It's less traumatizing than I thought it would be. Just takes getting used to the nonstandard viewing and control system.
The pace of getting anywhere is slower than a hamstrung snail. I'm spending about 5-10 minutes of running time getting to my region's 'city center' and I'm just a couple river banks' away.
Getting up into the region northmost of us takes a good 20-30 minutes' jog. I can't believe I managed to avoid the days of Everquest and WoW and its ilk that forced the same thing, just with nasty mobs
The pace of getting anything done is also just as slow and methodical. And it can involve a ton of planning. Strategizing offline, project management and what not are quite essential for productivity.
Watching the veterans can often boggle the mind. I see them with heaps of apparatuses (or is it apparati?) happily mass producing goods that I can barely wrap my brain around.
Fortunately, one can still get by at a slower, cottage industry pace in ATITD for now. In Eve, I think I feel quite insecure unless surrounded by the right corporation. And I'd still be scared that people would be out to backstab me, since that is the accepted norm.
In ATITD, there are all sorts. Most will at least pay lip-service to cooperation, if only for self-betterment later on. Others are genuinely good-hearted and play ATITD as a social 'helping' sort of game, which is quite useful for newbies, instead of being thrown into the rough, cruel reaches of empty space in Eve. I suppose if I did enough research, I might be able to find the proper mentoring corporation, but blah, if the minigame is not fun, what is the point of learning menus?
Skill training in ATITD is very much different than in Eve. For the desert, it's all about sitting glued to your client, figuring out puzzles, recording information or waiting and clicking at the correct times. In Eve, I hear one sets the skills and then waits, and waits for days.
Conflict and drama seems to be part and parcel of these highly social-oriented MMOs though. In Eve, it's open season. Eve is 'honest' in that it doesn't hide the fact that people -are- out to get you. Just go get them before they get you, (or Be Prepared) is pretty much Eve's philosophy in play, methinks.
In ATITD, it's more what you make of it. I get the impression of an experimental sandbox with a slightly sadistic team of scientists pushing buttons to see how different people react. It's no Eden, but you don't have to develop a paranoid outlook either. It's very..human.
Some people are going to stay quiet and not participate, and they may even go to the extremes of being a hermit. Some people are going to disagree with each other, and get into loud quarrelsome arguments over the regional chat channel. Some people want things fairer, or more structured, some people want things more free and easy. Some people react badly to being pushed into doing something, while some people follow the herd and cheerlead from the sidelines.
What the dev team does, is set up a sort of 'roleplay' story, cunningly designed in the manner of all good GMs/Storytellers/whatever you call 'em to push people's buttons and make them dance or react in predictable or unpredictable ways.
Your reaction is your choice.
For myself, I have quite clear goals in ATITD. I'm mucking around with a little cottage industry. I'm trying out what I can, with a minimum of fuss and grind, and attempting to wiggle into friendly communities for the purpose of reward via social community (warm fuzzy feelings from helping and being helped) and access to systems that require a number of people to cooperate.
I am avoiding: things that require me to do things I consider distinctly unfun, and excess drama or meanspiritedness.
So I generally react to the global Egypt chat (full of lots of drama sorts) and storyline with quiet amusement, analyzing it from one step removed.
Fortunately, my choice of region is on the whole, a lot more like me and saner. But it's still diverse enough to be amusing at times. It's just not toxic, like certain other regions. *shudders*
For example, a recent Test of the Obelisk got me smiling. In this Test, you are required to build a big fat obelpenisk to stick out of the ground. To pass, your obelisk must be the tallest -ever- in the region for a period of one Egypt week (or 2 RL days and 8 hours).
Naturally, the higher your obelisk, the more materials it is going to cost. And things get exponentially worse the taller it is. A 7 cubit obelisk, the minimum, requires a couple hundred bricks and stuff. Maybe an hour's work or less. A 30 cubit obelisk requires several thousands of bricks and other stuff. By the time you get into the 40-50s, we're talking 20k bricks and worse.
Immediately, there was an uproar over regional chat when it was announced. Apparently, they had just changed it in this telling from one RL hour to above amount of mindboggling time.
Some people started to beg/insist/plead for a queue system. Of course, the problem is whether everyone respects the queue or not. There are no means to enforce it, y'see, save for the threat of social outcasting and what not. Cynics point this out to them. They retort. Yadda yadda.
A hilarious prisoner's dilemma, fully blown up into multiplayer scale.
If everybody cooperated, people could take turns to build obelisks, increasing one cubit at a time, for the period necessary, and lots of people would pass.
But of course, human nature being what it is, there are bound to be people who will attempt to shortcut the system, or never buy into it in the first place, and build something bigger right off.
And it may not be out of a desire to win either. It could be some newbie who genuinely does not know there is a queue. It could be someone just heavily into Architecture and less into the social aspect of ATITD who doesn't give a fuck about other people. It could be a griefer who gets his jollies out of watching people scream their heads off over regional chat, and twitch to his tune, rather than really hoping to win.
To me, this is exceedingly cunning design on the devs' part. It strives to short circuit most regions' attempt at cooperation and contribution to university tech research as people divert their energy into outputting tons of bricks and things to outdo each other. It's an immense materials and time sink. It gives rise to a lot of drama and cunning plans and conflict.
Already in my region, one of the calmest of the lot, we have had about 3-4 hours of obelisk discussion. We've had an attempt at setting up a queue by some vocal people who wanted to let their popular people go first, followed by first come, first serve. We've had someone (newbie or from an older Telling) short this out by building a 10 cubit obelisk, go straight into protestation and denial when confronted over chat, and saying awkwardly that he quit. We've had people get exceedingly grumpy over this, since now the standard obelisk size has been raised for everyone. We've had people who say to forget it, he's new, it's done, let's move on, let's not get sidetreked from our main cooperative research goals.
I've seen people who are amazingly forgiving and tolerant of any kind of behavior. (And I wonder why and what their motivations are.) And people less so. (Which is a lot more understandable, if sometimes unpleasant to hear them growling about it over region chat.)
And we've had a reclusive half-hermit half-griefer? completely overwrite the 10 cubit obelisk by building a 30 cubit obelisk in its place. Complete with "LOL" written in mud buckets at the foot of it. (So I guess I'm not the only one to figure out mud graffiti in ATITD.)
The uproar over regional chat was hilarious once more. Y'see, anyone who takes the test can at any time, 'meditate' and find out what size obelisk has been built, and the coordinates of it. Running there will let you click on it and find out its owner. "Who was it? Who was it?!" went the cries over chat. "WTF?" "Why did they do that?" Out came a name, and then the discussion started as to who it was, and if it was griefing.
Again, we had the amazingly forgiving apologists. Oh, he's a recluse, maybe he just likes to build architecture, he did contribute a ton of things for research, let him be, yadda yadda. We also had those who were exceedingly cheesed off by this act of community disrespect, saying they wouldn't help him out in anything and so on.
And we had one individual who just couldn't tolerate the injustice of letting him win, and announced that he was going to build over this 30 cubit obelisk because it wasn't right. So he did.
Now we have a 31 cubit obelisk in the region of Queen's Retreat. The queue system has been abandoned. It'll be amusing to see if this lasts the 2 days 8 hours, or if someone else will reset it with a 32 cubit one.
Me, like a lot of the others, we are not freaking out over it. To get a level out of this, all one needs to do is build a 7 cubit one, and tearing it down gives you back most of the materials. Officially 'passing' the test is where the nastiness sets in.
Later on, as technology improves, there are other obelisks that can be built as well. For probably less pain.
To me, it's more important to think long term, get in with a good group of people. Ultimately, if they like you and want to help you progress, I can see 10-20 people being able to output as many bricks and crap necessary to build however tall an obelisk, over a solo individual effort, no matter how hardcore the one person is with multiple accounts.
My personal choice is to react with absolutely nothing over regional chat. I happen to think that complaints are a big eyesore. Not to mention, big phallic objects sticking out of the ground. I'll build a cheap 7 cubit one to get my level, and then tear it down cos it's fugly. (At least ATITD allows that as a valid choice. Do a bare minimum to pass and break the level barrier. Be challenged a lot more in 'hard mode' to get a fancy title and the next goal point. Forcing everybody to compete would make me quit in a big hurry.)
But I reserve the right to tit-for-tat. I have marked the 30 cubit individual's name (and his spouses' or second account name), and will not contribute any of my votes to help him progress in any other test.
Still, one thing's for sure, there won't be anyone coming in to 'sneak attack' our region with an obelisk. Other more deserted regions probably have shorter obelisk heights than ours, and they will be targeting those, no doubt.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
The Search for Consensus
Reading two troll comments which thread-necromanced an old Kill Ten Rats post entitled "Warhammer Online: Biggest Failure Ever" made really wonder about human nature.
Why is it that we insist on googling for people who make the same statements as us?
Are we so insecure in our opinions that we seek validation that someone else out there thinks like us?
Do we want to be in the majority to feel justified feeling the way we do?
Is there a sense of vindication that comes from going "Aha, he agrees with me, therefore he is smart" and "Boo, he disagreed with me, stupid post, dumb a$$hole!?!1one!"?
Logic dictates that there are bound to be people who think the same, people who think differently, and a lot of people in the middle who don't give a fuck. :P
(Normal distribution curve and all, y'know.)
Still, I guess most humans are ruled by a little less logic and a lot more emotion.
I wonder what evolutionary advantage there was in feeling good when you found people in agreement with you? Not getting killed over a disagreement, maybe? That's assuming that someone didn't kill you for being a prick while you were engaged on said search for consensus opinion...
Why is it that we insist on googling for people who make the same statements as us?
Are we so insecure in our opinions that we seek validation that someone else out there thinks like us?
Do we want to be in the majority to feel justified feeling the way we do?
Is there a sense of vindication that comes from going "Aha, he agrees with me, therefore he is smart" and "Boo, he disagreed with me, stupid post, dumb a$$hole!?!1one!"?
Logic dictates that there are bound to be people who think the same, people who think differently, and a lot of people in the middle who don't give a fuck. :P
(Normal distribution curve and all, y'know.)
Still, I guess most humans are ruled by a little less logic and a lot more emotion.
I wonder what evolutionary advantage there was in feeling good when you found people in agreement with you? Not getting killed over a disagreement, maybe? That's assuming that someone didn't kill you for being a prick while you were engaged on said search for consensus opinion...
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Happiness is...Breadth or Depth?
It seems I have turned into quite the dabbler this holiday season.
I can't quite seem to settle down into any one game and play it in an extreme hardcore fashion until I get to the end. It's been an hour here, two hours there, maybe 8 hours in game A for a while, another few in game B, before puttering around again.
It's leaving me feeling both satisfied and discontent.
I like the variety. There are so many games out there, no one game is the ultimate all-encompassing monster, the beliefs of WoW fanatics not withstanding. Trying them out allows me to sample them while making sure my graphics card expenditure is not wasted, and I just like knowing a little bit about everything.
I can't help but feel a little envious about those who dig deep and straight down into a game's innards and basically play the heck out of one before moving on to the next soon-to-be-in-the-discard-pile. I wonder about the sense of achievement they get. Is the buzz better or more relieving?
This restlessness is caused, in part, by me hitting roadbumps along the way in my chosen games to play deep. They're not seriously impassible roadblocks. They're just little niggling irritations that raise the activation energy high enough that I'm reluctant to do them, or force me to wait, etc.
Fer example, my Marauder is level 35 in Warhammer, having literally ground my way past the last two or three levels in an attempt to make myself eligible for city siege attendance. Then I find that the server stability is still prohibiting any serious mass zerging of any fortress, and victory point contesting is quite agonizing at times if there's not enough opposition. Again, it's not impossible, I hear they took the Empire fortress lord yesterday, when I wasn't logged on. But it now seems like I may as well wait until the fates align and I see one, rather than working hard for it.
My mad grind has also resulted in bagfuls of clogged inventory. Though I have recently graduated from the school of Selling Vendor Trash Without Guilt, I have thus far obtained failing grades from the university of Selling Useful Crafting Items Without Using Them or Destroying Potential Tome Unlock Items. No doubt I have enough materials to raise my apothecary skills, except that I'm missing one crucial ingredient, potion stabilizers. To get those, I will have to devote some time to slaying wolves mindlessly.
Contemplating the state of my clogged inventory makes me reluctant to log on until I'm ready for the zen of wolf-slaying. So Warhammer falls out of the option list for a bit.
There's ATITD. My new pet grind of interest. I like my new relaxed attitude to taking the grind slow, while listening in to the region chatter and letting the hardcore fanatics unlock stuff for everyone. I just now have a waiting problem on my hands.
I'd like to pay for one or two months of ATITD. But I'm just not at all secure with typing my credit card number into the client, letting it be stored by the small one or two or three-man company of eGenesis, and potentially hacked by any random dude bored enough to look in ATITD's way.
Are there any payment alternatives? Well, the website mentioned Paybycash. So I go check that up. And Paybycash doesn't have ATITD listed there anymore. Blah.
So now I'm stuck with about three options. Option 1: Contact the devs, and ask if there's an alternate way to pay. There's Paypal. All I need is a valid email address and I will cheerfully forward about 2-3 months' worth of subscription to you. I place a billing call and though there are 0 people in the queue ahead of me, I'm still waiting. I suppose 9pm on a Sunday night in EST means no real hope of an answer in a tiny company. I'll have to wait until working hours and see.
Option 2: I could open a teeny tiny bank account, get a debit card for it and just put in a couple hundred for online purchases. Then see if the debit card number is acceptable. This would involve far too much backend work on my part though, and it may just be easier to overcome the addiction to repetition out of sheer laziness.
And of course Option 3: I could just say screw it, this is way too much work for something meant to be a game, and leave my trial account to rot.
Option 3 is open and quite attractive if I should fail miserably with Option 1. It depends on how dearly they want my money and the quality of service offered me, I suppose.
My backup drug of choice is Fallout 3 for now.
I'm enjoying it greatly. It blends some of the better elements of Oblivion (FPS perspective, 3D game environment with great graphics) with a bit of Mass Effect character inspiration and dialogue choice and incorporates some important soul elements of Fallout (the lore, SPECIAL, perks, VATS for a turn-based flavor.)
I'm having fun roleplaying/immersing in it. Perhaps it's the choice of character, but I fit in the gameworld really well.
It just has an IRRITATING habit of crashing to desktop at important junctures, or killing me off when I forgot to save for the past hour and the last autosave wasn't far from that point either.
So after about 2-3 hours of really enjoyable immersive game, I'm suddenly flung out to my nice scenic desktop facing the prospect of replaying a certain expanse of area, depending on the last time I saved.
Can we say activation energy = very high? Propsect of start game again != appealing.
And maybe I should just go lie on the bed and sulk instead.
I can't quite seem to settle down into any one game and play it in an extreme hardcore fashion until I get to the end. It's been an hour here, two hours there, maybe 8 hours in game A for a while, another few in game B, before puttering around again.
It's leaving me feeling both satisfied and discontent.
I like the variety. There are so many games out there, no one game is the ultimate all-encompassing monster, the beliefs of WoW fanatics not withstanding. Trying them out allows me to sample them while making sure my graphics card expenditure is not wasted, and I just like knowing a little bit about everything.
I can't help but feel a little envious about those who dig deep and straight down into a game's innards and basically play the heck out of one before moving on to the next soon-to-be-in-the-discard-pile. I wonder about the sense of achievement they get. Is the buzz better or more relieving?
This restlessness is caused, in part, by me hitting roadbumps along the way in my chosen games to play deep. They're not seriously impassible roadblocks. They're just little niggling irritations that raise the activation energy high enough that I'm reluctant to do them, or force me to wait, etc.
Fer example, my Marauder is level 35 in Warhammer, having literally ground my way past the last two or three levels in an attempt to make myself eligible for city siege attendance. Then I find that the server stability is still prohibiting any serious mass zerging of any fortress, and victory point contesting is quite agonizing at times if there's not enough opposition. Again, it's not impossible, I hear they took the Empire fortress lord yesterday, when I wasn't logged on. But it now seems like I may as well wait until the fates align and I see one, rather than working hard for it.
My mad grind has also resulted in bagfuls of clogged inventory. Though I have recently graduated from the school of Selling Vendor Trash Without Guilt, I have thus far obtained failing grades from the university of Selling Useful Crafting Items Without Using Them or Destroying Potential Tome Unlock Items. No doubt I have enough materials to raise my apothecary skills, except that I'm missing one crucial ingredient, potion stabilizers. To get those, I will have to devote some time to slaying wolves mindlessly.
Contemplating the state of my clogged inventory makes me reluctant to log on until I'm ready for the zen of wolf-slaying. So Warhammer falls out of the option list for a bit.
There's ATITD. My new pet grind of interest. I like my new relaxed attitude to taking the grind slow, while listening in to the region chatter and letting the hardcore fanatics unlock stuff for everyone. I just now have a waiting problem on my hands.
I'd like to pay for one or two months of ATITD. But I'm just not at all secure with typing my credit card number into the client, letting it be stored by the small one or two or three-man company of eGenesis, and potentially hacked by any random dude bored enough to look in ATITD's way.
Are there any payment alternatives? Well, the website mentioned Paybycash. So I go check that up. And Paybycash doesn't have ATITD listed there anymore. Blah.
So now I'm stuck with about three options. Option 1: Contact the devs, and ask if there's an alternate way to pay. There's Paypal. All I need is a valid email address and I will cheerfully forward about 2-3 months' worth of subscription to you. I place a billing call and though there are 0 people in the queue ahead of me, I'm still waiting. I suppose 9pm on a Sunday night in EST means no real hope of an answer in a tiny company. I'll have to wait until working hours and see.
Option 2: I could open a teeny tiny bank account, get a debit card for it and just put in a couple hundred for online purchases. Then see if the debit card number is acceptable. This would involve far too much backend work on my part though, and it may just be easier to overcome the addiction to repetition out of sheer laziness.
And of course Option 3: I could just say screw it, this is way too much work for something meant to be a game, and leave my trial account to rot.
Option 3 is open and quite attractive if I should fail miserably with Option 1. It depends on how dearly they want my money and the quality of service offered me, I suppose.
My backup drug of choice is Fallout 3 for now.
I'm enjoying it greatly. It blends some of the better elements of Oblivion (FPS perspective, 3D game environment with great graphics) with a bit of Mass Effect character inspiration and dialogue choice and incorporates some important soul elements of Fallout (the lore, SPECIAL, perks, VATS for a turn-based flavor.)
I'm having fun roleplaying/immersing in it. Perhaps it's the choice of character, but I fit in the gameworld really well.
It just has an IRRITATING habit of crashing to desktop at important junctures, or killing me off when I forgot to save for the past hour and the last autosave wasn't far from that point either.
So after about 2-3 hours of really enjoyable immersive game, I'm suddenly flung out to my nice scenic desktop facing the prospect of replaying a certain expanse of area, depending on the last time I saved.
Can we say activation energy = very high? Propsect of start game again != appealing.
And maybe I should just go lie on the bed and sulk instead.
Chatroom Parallels
Out of boredom at work today, I logged into the Ascendere forums to sneak a look at how the Order was doing. Yes, I still have access. The benefits of being old like dirt (but not older than Grandma Covellia, fortunately) or a "legacy player" as the ATITDians would say.
There were 702 new posts waiting for me.
Wow. A couple random thoughts flashed through my mind. One being that phpBB3 is a damn reliable forum board if it kept a year's worth (the earliest was dated sometime early 2007) of posts flagged as 'new' for me.
Scrolling through most of them found them to be either induction discussions or reports on new areas, and whatever item was found, etc. And a couple of funny logs.
Um, ok. At this point, I had one of those funny feelings which I'm not very proud of, but human enough to admit having. A little surge of black jealousy and bitterness, followed by a tinge of regret. Those that remained had gone on with their lives of making heaps of alts, running mobs, exploring new areas, and generally learning a lot more than I could ever dream of, scoring their moments of successes along the way. Meanwhile, I own absolutely nothing to my name (but a naked pixie with pocket change) in RoD now.
I can never go back.
And that has a certain sting to contemplate.
Well, of course, I can always start all over again, in theory. But I also know that it wouldn't be an endeavour I want to attempt or a worthwhile investment of my time.
Logically, I know that I no longer enjoy the leveling process in RoD. The skills are not thrilling enough for me. I have no clue where to find good leveling mobs. I have been spoiled with the presence of pocket mage/cleric buff/heals following my lowbies. And three storages worth of leveling equipment from A-Z. The vets can all level way faster than I can. And character upkeep is a pain.
The runs have gotten too hard for me as well. Necessitating different classes for special mobs would bring me back into leveling hell. The risk of losing equipment, and/or having to grind favor mindlessly in order to get my corpse back is too off putting. And I'd probably never achieve Geandakin's level of power again because the goalposts have been moved. (Worse, the really old folks have even more inequitable distributions of equipment power to their name.)
Speed of updates was sporadic. Quality of them even more unpredictable - since I mislike areas with no clues and assumptions that we should just kill everything, sac everything, do everything with anything and see if something happens. (And how can I tell apart the good ones from the duds?)
So yeah. Sting of nostalgia, nothing more.
Still, I see some amusing parallels and intriguing differences with ATITD, my new dabbling game of interest.
Reading some of the ATITD forums yielded some unhappy people who had played Tales 1 and 2, but were turned off by levels introduced in Tales 3 and quit.
My suspicion is that the game changed on them. Made it too hard to achieve the same things they were used to achieving. Suddenly they couldn't chase crickets without first having to jump through hoops doing things they didn't enjoy doing in order to get the level needed to unlock the activity. The challenge went up and brought people out of flow and into frustration.
Cue the mirror of my leveling experience with RoD. I can't do it. I seriously cannot. I keep thinking how easy it used to be, and how grindy horrible the current activity I am now engaged in is. I keep mourning the fact that I am now a nobody, no reputation, no recognition. I keep getting unpleasantly surprised at something made more tedious, or stumbling across encounters and areas I no longer recognize, and find it too difficult to learn.
So I am not surprised that they cannot be coaxed back into ATITD once it changed forms either.
Someone asked them why the heck are they lurking around the forums bitching then. Move on.
I suppose that's the commonality of small chatroom games. It's so easy to care too much, and want things changed. Especially when ATITD holds out the vague hope you can, versus RoD's bureaucratic glue trap.
One interesting difference about ATITD is that they have a built-in reset. They change each Telling. No two ways about it.
We can surmise that the change is going to send some people away screaming. But more importantly, I think it might just bring in enough newbies to offset it. You can advertise, and because everyone resets on common ground, enough beginners might decide, why the heck not, and give it a go.
RoD, meanwhile, is accumulating the depression of games that have expansions after expansions built atop it. It becomes too hard to start out as a newbie. There's too much content to ever hope to learn or master. Where do you start? Is there some kind of guide?
Honestly, I'm not sure where the hell to start attacking Moria in LOTRO. The patch notes swamped me, because I wasn't keenly interested to know or understand the previous patches before. By being out of touch with CoX for an issue or two, I no longer know what has changed when or where the new content is. It's done half on purpose, because I want to surprise myself again with CoX, but I also run the risk of turning myself off from it if I no longer know where to begin.
No wonder people need straightforward guides.
Personally, I think ATITD is on to something by implementing a level system, even if it's done poorly at present (according to some.) Basically they set up goalposts to follow, so that those who are new have some task to strive towards, and break content up so that it's not intimidatingly plonked onto someone at once.
However, it may just have set itself up to turn a certain group of oldbies off after one Telling. Once they've learned all they can conceivably achieve, they may give up and not want to reinvent the wheel again the next Telling, especially if it got harder to boot.
There were 702 new posts waiting for me.
Wow. A couple random thoughts flashed through my mind. One being that phpBB3 is a damn reliable forum board if it kept a year's worth (the earliest was dated sometime early 2007) of posts flagged as 'new' for me.
Scrolling through most of them found them to be either induction discussions or reports on new areas, and whatever item was found, etc. And a couple of funny logs.
Um, ok. At this point, I had one of those funny feelings which I'm not very proud of, but human enough to admit having. A little surge of black jealousy and bitterness, followed by a tinge of regret. Those that remained had gone on with their lives of making heaps of alts, running mobs, exploring new areas, and generally learning a lot more than I could ever dream of, scoring their moments of successes along the way. Meanwhile, I own absolutely nothing to my name (but a naked pixie with pocket change) in RoD now.
I can never go back.
And that has a certain sting to contemplate.
Well, of course, I can always start all over again, in theory. But I also know that it wouldn't be an endeavour I want to attempt or a worthwhile investment of my time.
Logically, I know that I no longer enjoy the leveling process in RoD. The skills are not thrilling enough for me. I have no clue where to find good leveling mobs. I have been spoiled with the presence of pocket mage/cleric buff/heals following my lowbies. And three storages worth of leveling equipment from A-Z. The vets can all level way faster than I can. And character upkeep is a pain.
The runs have gotten too hard for me as well. Necessitating different classes for special mobs would bring me back into leveling hell. The risk of losing equipment, and/or having to grind favor mindlessly in order to get my corpse back is too off putting. And I'd probably never achieve Geandakin's level of power again because the goalposts have been moved. (Worse, the really old folks have even more inequitable distributions of equipment power to their name.)
Speed of updates was sporadic. Quality of them even more unpredictable - since I mislike areas with no clues and assumptions that we should just kill everything, sac everything, do everything with anything and see if something happens. (And how can I tell apart the good ones from the duds?)
So yeah. Sting of nostalgia, nothing more.
Still, I see some amusing parallels and intriguing differences with ATITD, my new dabbling game of interest.
Reading some of the ATITD forums yielded some unhappy people who had played Tales 1 and 2, but were turned off by levels introduced in Tales 3 and quit.
My suspicion is that the game changed on them. Made it too hard to achieve the same things they were used to achieving. Suddenly they couldn't chase crickets without first having to jump through hoops doing things they didn't enjoy doing in order to get the level needed to unlock the activity. The challenge went up and brought people out of flow and into frustration.
Cue the mirror of my leveling experience with RoD. I can't do it. I seriously cannot. I keep thinking how easy it used to be, and how grindy horrible the current activity I am now engaged in is. I keep mourning the fact that I am now a nobody, no reputation, no recognition. I keep getting unpleasantly surprised at something made more tedious, or stumbling across encounters and areas I no longer recognize, and find it too difficult to learn.
So I am not surprised that they cannot be coaxed back into ATITD once it changed forms either.
Someone asked them why the heck are they lurking around the forums bitching then. Move on.
I suppose that's the commonality of small chatroom games. It's so easy to care too much, and want things changed. Especially when ATITD holds out the vague hope you can, versus RoD's bureaucratic glue trap.
One interesting difference about ATITD is that they have a built-in reset. They change each Telling. No two ways about it.
We can surmise that the change is going to send some people away screaming. But more importantly, I think it might just bring in enough newbies to offset it. You can advertise, and because everyone resets on common ground, enough beginners might decide, why the heck not, and give it a go.
RoD, meanwhile, is accumulating the depression of games that have expansions after expansions built atop it. It becomes too hard to start out as a newbie. There's too much content to ever hope to learn or master. Where do you start? Is there some kind of guide?
Honestly, I'm not sure where the hell to start attacking Moria in LOTRO. The patch notes swamped me, because I wasn't keenly interested to know or understand the previous patches before. By being out of touch with CoX for an issue or two, I no longer know what has changed when or where the new content is. It's done half on purpose, because I want to surprise myself again with CoX, but I also run the risk of turning myself off from it if I no longer know where to begin.
No wonder people need straightforward guides.
Personally, I think ATITD is on to something by implementing a level system, even if it's done poorly at present (according to some.) Basically they set up goalposts to follow, so that those who are new have some task to strive towards, and break content up so that it's not intimidatingly plonked onto someone at once.
However, it may just have set itself up to turn a certain group of oldbies off after one Telling. Once they've learned all they can conceivably achieve, they may give up and not want to reinvent the wheel again the next Telling, especially if it got harder to boot.
The Seduction of Shelter
Housing.
Where would we be without it?
And why do some forms of virtual player housing 'work', so to speak, while others do not?
I started thinking about this when I realized what I was doing in ATITD and Fallout 3.
I was strongly compelled to stay up and catch the initial construction wave in ATITD because I didn't want to lose 'my' spot. I was scared that if I wasn't there and bagging the territory first with a compound, some other guy would come along and set up near there, forcing me to go away. But but, it was 'my' water lily pond, dammit.
I'd barely been in beta for 2-3 days. But somehow, the nature of the game had made me very possessive over that teeny tiny speck of land and resources.
I guess partially because it's simulationist. Your avatar is supposed to be a citizen of Egypt and you're running around, literally looking for a place to settle down, and you construct with sweat and blood and lots of finger tapping and mouse movement, your house-compound in a place that YOU chose. And your enjoyment comes from if you made a good decision as to whether the surrounding area and resources and people can fill your needs.
And that's exactly what I did. I spent quite a few hours in beta nomadic, looking for the perfect place, and when I found it, I knew it was the place for me. There were many other spots somewhat like it, but this one was mine, so to speak. I wanted it.
I did run around again to see if there were any other possibilities, there were some with potential, but I kept coming back to this little water lily pond. It wasn't the best ever, I'd have to run further off to get big quantities of wood, but somehow, it FIT. It was home.
Strange, but true.
I caught myself doing something similar in Fallout 3. Watching Jeremiah (finally, jms' work after B5 comes to Asia) on the Sci-Fi channel instilled too much longing for a post-apocalyptic story roleplay game, and I caved in, went to Tec-Drome and bought it.
Not to give away too many spoilers, but if you make certain decisions, you get given a house key in the starting town of Megaton. The place is called "My Megaton House" in a very Oblivion-ish vein, and I found myself seriously getting into it and using the place as a base of operations. I'd keep retreating back to the town and my house after getting wounded, and looking forward to a long nap on my bed to heal up. Sometimes I'd just come back because I was deep into roleplaying a foray into the wilderness, and when it got too dark, it just made sense to 'go home', 'sleep' and 'wake up next morning' to try again.
The hell?
I was never this involved with a house in Oblivion. My LOTRO house doesn't have the same appeal.
It made me wonder what were the key differences, if any.
I think it has to do with significant effect on gameplay, ease of travel back and forth, and the player's level of simulationist immersion.
In Oblivion, you could buy too many houses. In practically any city/town if you had the money. IF. I never quite got to that level of richness, without cheating anyway, and if I recall, after installing a mod or two with a house, it didn't really feel like it was really 'my' home. And worse, sometimes home was just too far away when you were adventuring in some other city, so it was inconvenient to go back to.
In LOTRO, this is also a problem. The housing areas are just too distant from the real questing areas. Yes, you could teleport back (once every HOUR) with a skill and some money for travelling rations (goldsink alert!). How were you going to get back to quest though? Gallop for hours on horseback? Or use your bind location wisely. (Yet another hour cooldown!)
There's no significant advantage to going home. In Fallout 3, if you sleep for a certain amount of time, you become Well Rested and get 10% xp. I happen to be roleplaying a paranoid sharpshooter, and it just wouldn't feel right to catch a long sleep on some grungy ghoul's bed in the middle of nowhere. Power naps of an hour to heal up are fine, but my character would only be able to relax if she was home in a safe location, so sleeping deeply means I gotta get back home. Fortunately, there is a fast travel option to locations you've visited before, so all this means is I pull up the map, click, and voila, I'm back in Megaton and heading home. All intervening travel hours are just deducted as non-important to the story.
In LOTRO, home is a place to store stuff to be shared between characters on the same account. That's all very well when I need to transfer things, but I've bought all the unlockable storage space, and it's crammed full with shtuff and I'm not actively playing all the characters right now, so there's no reason to go back regularly. The house is also a place to put up decorations you've collected, but there's not that many decorations unlocked that frequently, so again, no impetus to head home.
And the real immersion-breaker for me in LOTRO is the exposure of housing instances. It's impossible to feel like you've got a unique deal when you know there are about 40 housing estates (aka the same copy of the map), and all the houses are in the same spot in each instance.
Your significant choice becomes, which particular house clone along these similar roads has the 'nicest' view or is nearest to a shopkeeper? And which can I afford to upkeep, because someone has factored these desirable factors into the upkeep cost?
Each house is exactly identical otherwise. There are only a few places to put decorations into, and not that great a variety of decorations, so everyone ends up putting elm trees and wells and similar items in the same places, and the feeling that you've customized your house becomes rather...empty.
What the heck, you're better off out questing for xp and earning money and incrementing bars so that you can pay the goldsink of 'owning' a house and the all-important shared account storage.
Even CoX does it better with the ability to really redecorate a supergroup base how you like it, even if it's not exactly a 'home.'
Where would we be without it?
And why do some forms of virtual player housing 'work', so to speak, while others do not?
I started thinking about this when I realized what I was doing in ATITD and Fallout 3.
I was strongly compelled to stay up and catch the initial construction wave in ATITD because I didn't want to lose 'my' spot. I was scared that if I wasn't there and bagging the territory first with a compound, some other guy would come along and set up near there, forcing me to go away. But but, it was 'my' water lily pond, dammit.
I'd barely been in beta for 2-3 days. But somehow, the nature of the game had made me very possessive over that teeny tiny speck of land and resources.
I guess partially because it's simulationist. Your avatar is supposed to be a citizen of Egypt and you're running around, literally looking for a place to settle down, and you construct with sweat and blood and lots of finger tapping and mouse movement, your house-compound in a place that YOU chose. And your enjoyment comes from if you made a good decision as to whether the surrounding area and resources and people can fill your needs.
And that's exactly what I did. I spent quite a few hours in beta nomadic, looking for the perfect place, and when I found it, I knew it was the place for me. There were many other spots somewhat like it, but this one was mine, so to speak. I wanted it.
I did run around again to see if there were any other possibilities, there were some with potential, but I kept coming back to this little water lily pond. It wasn't the best ever, I'd have to run further off to get big quantities of wood, but somehow, it FIT. It was home.
Strange, but true.
I caught myself doing something similar in Fallout 3. Watching Jeremiah (finally, jms' work after B5 comes to Asia) on the Sci-Fi channel instilled too much longing for a post-apocalyptic story roleplay game, and I caved in, went to Tec-Drome and bought it.
Not to give away too many spoilers, but if you make certain decisions, you get given a house key in the starting town of Megaton. The place is called "My Megaton House" in a very Oblivion-ish vein, and I found myself seriously getting into it and using the place as a base of operations. I'd keep retreating back to the town and my house after getting wounded, and looking forward to a long nap on my bed to heal up. Sometimes I'd just come back because I was deep into roleplaying a foray into the wilderness, and when it got too dark, it just made sense to 'go home', 'sleep' and 'wake up next morning' to try again.
The hell?
I was never this involved with a house in Oblivion. My LOTRO house doesn't have the same appeal.
It made me wonder what were the key differences, if any.
I think it has to do with significant effect on gameplay, ease of travel back and forth, and the player's level of simulationist immersion.
In Oblivion, you could buy too many houses. In practically any city/town if you had the money. IF. I never quite got to that level of richness, without cheating anyway, and if I recall, after installing a mod or two with a house, it didn't really feel like it was really 'my' home. And worse, sometimes home was just too far away when you were adventuring in some other city, so it was inconvenient to go back to.
In LOTRO, this is also a problem. The housing areas are just too distant from the real questing areas. Yes, you could teleport back (once every HOUR) with a skill and some money for travelling rations (goldsink alert!). How were you going to get back to quest though? Gallop for hours on horseback? Or use your bind location wisely. (Yet another hour cooldown!)
There's no significant advantage to going home. In Fallout 3, if you sleep for a certain amount of time, you become Well Rested and get 10% xp. I happen to be roleplaying a paranoid sharpshooter, and it just wouldn't feel right to catch a long sleep on some grungy ghoul's bed in the middle of nowhere. Power naps of an hour to heal up are fine, but my character would only be able to relax if she was home in a safe location, so sleeping deeply means I gotta get back home. Fortunately, there is a fast travel option to locations you've visited before, so all this means is I pull up the map, click, and voila, I'm back in Megaton and heading home. All intervening travel hours are just deducted as non-important to the story.
In LOTRO, home is a place to store stuff to be shared between characters on the same account. That's all very well when I need to transfer things, but I've bought all the unlockable storage space, and it's crammed full with shtuff and I'm not actively playing all the characters right now, so there's no reason to go back regularly. The house is also a place to put up decorations you've collected, but there's not that many decorations unlocked that frequently, so again, no impetus to head home.
And the real immersion-breaker for me in LOTRO is the exposure of housing instances. It's impossible to feel like you've got a unique deal when you know there are about 40 housing estates (aka the same copy of the map), and all the houses are in the same spot in each instance.
Your significant choice becomes, which particular house clone along these similar roads has the 'nicest' view or is nearest to a shopkeeper? And which can I afford to upkeep, because someone has factored these desirable factors into the upkeep cost?
Each house is exactly identical otherwise. There are only a few places to put decorations into, and not that great a variety of decorations, so everyone ends up putting elm trees and wells and similar items in the same places, and the feeling that you've customized your house becomes rather...empty.
What the heck, you're better off out questing for xp and earning money and incrementing bars so that you can pay the goldsink of 'owning' a house and the all-important shared account storage.
Even CoX does it better with the ability to really redecorate a supergroup base how you like it, even if it's not exactly a 'home.'
The Origin of Egypt (Take 4)
Well, I gave into temptation last night. Which results in slight zombification at work today, but the morning's not too bad yet, afternoon siesta time may be when I'll get all grumpy and red-eyed. :P
I figured that the start of any ATITD Telling only occurs once in however many blue moons, so I might as well log on at 1am and catch the first wave of construction / community-building frenzy - not to mention, stake out my 'ulu' water lily pond with a compound so as to dissuade any other hermit from building near there.
To my great amusement, my initially quiet but friendly Khartoum is turning out into the next hotbed of Egyptian activity.
Except it's no longer Khartoum. We all logged in to find that practically all the region names have changed. I started to appreciate the time I spent in beta, because I didn't panic like 50% of the logging-in populace, asking what region is what over chat, and just started to teleport-hop to find an area I recognized.
Fortunately, the map has not changed, so when I stumbled into Queen's Retreat and recognized the characteristic triangle of roads I'd become accustomed to in Khartoum, I knew I'd found the old region.
Scanning around, I recognized the regulars' names around the place - along with a horde of newbies - so that was additional confirmation that this was it.
I started chugging along with my construction and skill gaining like an old hand (yay for beta practice!) instead of adding to channel spam or sitting around looking lost in lag and trying to figure out unfamiliar menus.
Speaking of channel spam, I was most pleased with how the regulars managed to calmly handle a couple of 'trolls' who seemed out to irritate people - answering questions civilly and just ignoring the more egregious comments.
The chat channels must have sounded just as appealing to many people shopping around for a region, because there were a number who proclaimed that they liked the area and were coming to settle in too + lots of friendly welcomes.
Helping along this accumulation of bodies was the fact that Queen's Retreat was one of teleport-possible areas for newbies (and the number of people in the area could be seen to be one of the most crowded).
Apparently, the historically crowded areas of Karnak (aka Saqqarah), Kush (now aka Meroe) and Seven Lakes (aka goodness knows what) were all teleport-inaccessible, forcing people to run there if they wanted to settle in their old spots.
As someone joked over the chat channel, Queen's Retreat was going to be the home of lazy people who couldn't be arsed to run anywhere else.
Personally, I suspect there'll be quite a lot of those. Run speed was apparently sped up in this Telling, but I still find it on the edge of barely tolerable, close to snail-like. Fortunately, Warhammer and LOTRO have been 'training' me on patience in this respect. I definitely wouldn't have lasted in the previous incarnations of ATITD.
The friendly inclusivity was still in attendance over the region chat channel, despite the now crowded nature of the area. The regulars were involved in a massive push to tech up to Guild Construction so that they could form their guild halls and create public works for everybody. This bodes well for later - I'll have a guild to join and public works to use.
I couldn't bring myself to contribute to the massive need for donated materials yet though. It's all I can do to play some Charmed episodes in the other screen and just putter around collecting crap for myself. 100-400 bricks are goals that I personally find barely doable for myself and a challenge. The donations require somewhere in the scale of 2000-4000 bricks and boards plus other things. It boggles the mind.
Logically, I know that if everyone in the area just contributed 50-100 bricks, we'd probably be done - but y'know, human nature and all, I just don't see myself doing that until one is more established in the community and has a vested interest in getting that technology. It's not like I need to build a Guild Hall at this point in time - the other fellows who want guilds can do it for me. Selfish, perhaps, but hey, they're more invested in the game than me.
I am content to wait it out a bit and space out the 24 free hours I get in my trial before deciding if I want to face the inconvenience of linking Paypal to Paybycash and then using Paybycash to pay for an ATITD sub - because there's no way in hell I am giving my unmasked credit card number to such a small potentially drama-filled operation.
Lurking and watching the opening hours has been an interesting experience. Apparently all the hardcore crafting achievement veterans have roamed about in the first few minutes and picked off many/all of the placed special starter resources like papyrus and medium stones - meaning the rest of us will have to wait for papyrus seeds to drift down the Nile in the course of time, and for a group dig for medium stones.
The socializers have been busy over the chat channels, of course, and thus slower in getting started and settled in than the busy crafter bees.
The Tests have been slowly opening up every few hours or so, by dint of a special "Story" chat tab. The Pharoah has died, so now there are these two sons Sami and Warim going at each other in a soap opera drama fashion. Sami has recently returned from Greece, and wants to be Pharoah and believes in his farming people, while Warim is the cynical brother who is contesting and blocking his claim while heaping scorn on people content to be 'farmers' and challenging the citizens of Egypt to strive for more sophisticated achievements.
Gameplay-wise, each Test is only opened up for the entire Egypt if someone 'demonstrates' mastery of whatever principle. That generally means accumulating a heckload of resources the fastest and racing to a school to show off. I don't know if that means they lose the resources afterward. The reward is that they get their name announced to the whole of Egypt (possibly recorded in time) and then the Test unlocks for everyone.
It's rather amusing. The rep-hungry achievement crafters will no doubt be crazy motivated to be 'first!' And everyone else just benefits from their race later on. Me, I'm leaving all these hardcore fellas to do the dirty work, I'm just along for the ride.
Story-wise, this is also quite amusing backstory. As someone mentioned, oh no, we can't even start off with "Low Drama" now. We seem to have ramped up into medium or high drama by the devs already. I can foresee that some people are going to try and support the putative 'good guy' Sami, while the more ambitious might just fall behind Warim and so on.
I suppose in a game without any coded means of violence and killing things (with the exception of sheep and camel slaughter), you still gotta have conflict -somewhere- cos human beings wouldn't be human beings without it.
On more personal news, through industrious 'hard work' aka repetitive motion, I have managed to stake out my old beta haunts with a compound.
This time, I appear to have some distant neighbors visible on the horizon. I was a little freaked out to see what appeared to be a husband and wife team in a little oasis place a medium-far distance away. (Bad memories of cliques last a lifetime.) But I figured there had better be room to spread out where we were, neither of us were exactly on each others' doorsteps, and maybe not everyone was as obnoxious as the foursome I had run into earlier in beta.
Another name has been visible across the river, and that disturbs me less. A solo guy, separated by water we can't cross except for a little isthmus nearby, that's perfectly cool. It's not as if we can spread our compounds over water, and there won't be any resource competition cos he's taking stuff over there, and I'm getting stuff from my side of the river.
Honestly, I'm not that worried about acceptance this time around because all I need is a general goodwill community, and the Khartoum guild of regulars is providing that. Worse come to the worse, I can pick up and go someplace else (hopefully after I have researched some salvage skills so I can get some return of resources invested).
I like the Khartoum area, because as someone mentioned, and just as I also discovered during beta - there are a HEAP of hermitable places with good resource locations in Khartoum. It's a big area. There's lots of water around - unlike Upper Egypt (my first unfortunate starting location) - and quiet places with lots of trees and sand and mud and clay and what not.
Also it's well-structured. The schools are in the center of the area, surrounded by three roads that form a big triangle. The universities are a little south and east of the schools.
All the crowd-happy people are going to be situated right smack near the schools, forming a little metropolis of activity in the center. The guild of regulars is taking up residence on an island in this metropolis and setting up the public works right over there. The research-focused tech-donating people will gather nearer the side of the universities.
The semi-hermits? Well, there's room for them along the three road triangle, nearly all of which are also close to a river resource, and all of us can run down the roads to the center of town when we need to. I picked the northwest side to be further away from the crowd, but I can get to town in about 5 min's run when I want to learn skills.
The real hermits have options too. Beyond the triangle of roads, I've seen a valley oasis just opposite from me (I was eyeing that as a possible site, but gave it up as less scenic), another area of green stuff on the map which must contain potential site locations, and far to the southwest, there are more green areas, an obscure valley that I ran to in beta before giving up running back as a lost cause and a looooooooong road to a tarpit surrounded by more green. And as I see on the wiki map, and overheard over region chat, there's one more island of green FAR to the southwest that people have been pondering occupying, but it's just way too distant from anything to consider. Lots of hermit options. I just don't envy them the run to learn skills. Perhaps after all the skills necessary for self-sufficiency are learned, some people might retreat there.
Meanwhile, I appear to be content where I am. I have achieved citizenship. My mini-compound is built. I have constructed an indoor chest.
(Storage options have been changed this Telling. During beta, we could build chests outdoors. Now we can't. We need to build either flax baskets that decay, or eventually warehouses. My indoor chest is about twice as big as the 'large chest' of beta, and needed twice as many bricks, but I'm satisfied. And also thrilled about changes because I like that all the old experts may not have all the answers when things change.)
I'm in the midst of expanding my compound to fulfill the Test of Architecture and gain level 2. Unlike the last two times in beta, this time I'm not in a hurry to get it all done within 2-4 hours. It'll get done, when it's done. It's not like that many skills/techs are unlocked yet at the universities anyhow. I can wait. No rush.
Note to self:
Future article titles?
The Charm of Construction
The Captivation of Cultivation
I figured that the start of any ATITD Telling only occurs once in however many blue moons, so I might as well log on at 1am and catch the first wave of construction / community-building frenzy - not to mention, stake out my 'ulu' water lily pond with a compound so as to dissuade any other hermit from building near there.
To my great amusement, my initially quiet but friendly Khartoum is turning out into the next hotbed of Egyptian activity.
Except it's no longer Khartoum. We all logged in to find that practically all the region names have changed. I started to appreciate the time I spent in beta, because I didn't panic like 50% of the logging-in populace, asking what region is what over chat, and just started to teleport-hop to find an area I recognized.
Fortunately, the map has not changed, so when I stumbled into Queen's Retreat and recognized the characteristic triangle of roads I'd become accustomed to in Khartoum, I knew I'd found the old region.
Scanning around, I recognized the regulars' names around the place - along with a horde of newbies - so that was additional confirmation that this was it.
I started chugging along with my construction and skill gaining like an old hand (yay for beta practice!) instead of adding to channel spam or sitting around looking lost in lag and trying to figure out unfamiliar menus.
Speaking of channel spam, I was most pleased with how the regulars managed to calmly handle a couple of 'trolls' who seemed out to irritate people - answering questions civilly and just ignoring the more egregious comments.
The chat channels must have sounded just as appealing to many people shopping around for a region, because there were a number who proclaimed that they liked the area and were coming to settle in too + lots of friendly welcomes.
Helping along this accumulation of bodies was the fact that Queen's Retreat was one of teleport-possible areas for newbies (and the number of people in the area could be seen to be one of the most crowded).
Apparently, the historically crowded areas of Karnak (aka Saqqarah), Kush (now aka Meroe) and Seven Lakes (aka goodness knows what) were all teleport-inaccessible, forcing people to run there if they wanted to settle in their old spots.
As someone joked over the chat channel, Queen's Retreat was going to be the home of lazy people who couldn't be arsed to run anywhere else.
Personally, I suspect there'll be quite a lot of those. Run speed was apparently sped up in this Telling, but I still find it on the edge of barely tolerable, close to snail-like. Fortunately, Warhammer and LOTRO have been 'training' me on patience in this respect. I definitely wouldn't have lasted in the previous incarnations of ATITD.
The friendly inclusivity was still in attendance over the region chat channel, despite the now crowded nature of the area. The regulars were involved in a massive push to tech up to Guild Construction so that they could form their guild halls and create public works for everybody. This bodes well for later - I'll have a guild to join and public works to use.
I couldn't bring myself to contribute to the massive need for donated materials yet though. It's all I can do to play some Charmed episodes in the other screen and just putter around collecting crap for myself. 100-400 bricks are goals that I personally find barely doable for myself and a challenge. The donations require somewhere in the scale of 2000-4000 bricks and boards plus other things. It boggles the mind.
Logically, I know that if everyone in the area just contributed 50-100 bricks, we'd probably be done - but y'know, human nature and all, I just don't see myself doing that until one is more established in the community and has a vested interest in getting that technology. It's not like I need to build a Guild Hall at this point in time - the other fellows who want guilds can do it for me. Selfish, perhaps, but hey, they're more invested in the game than me.
I am content to wait it out a bit and space out the 24 free hours I get in my trial before deciding if I want to face the inconvenience of linking Paypal to Paybycash and then using Paybycash to pay for an ATITD sub - because there's no way in hell I am giving my unmasked credit card number to such a small potentially drama-filled operation.
Lurking and watching the opening hours has been an interesting experience. Apparently all the hardcore crafting achievement veterans have roamed about in the first few minutes and picked off many/all of the placed special starter resources like papyrus and medium stones - meaning the rest of us will have to wait for papyrus seeds to drift down the Nile in the course of time, and for a group dig for medium stones.
The socializers have been busy over the chat channels, of course, and thus slower in getting started and settled in than the busy crafter bees.
The Tests have been slowly opening up every few hours or so, by dint of a special "Story" chat tab. The Pharoah has died, so now there are these two sons Sami and Warim going at each other in a soap opera drama fashion. Sami has recently returned from Greece, and wants to be Pharoah and believes in his farming people, while Warim is the cynical brother who is contesting and blocking his claim while heaping scorn on people content to be 'farmers' and challenging the citizens of Egypt to strive for more sophisticated achievements.
Gameplay-wise, each Test is only opened up for the entire Egypt if someone 'demonstrates' mastery of whatever principle. That generally means accumulating a heckload of resources the fastest and racing to a school to show off. I don't know if that means they lose the resources afterward. The reward is that they get their name announced to the whole of Egypt (possibly recorded in time) and then the Test unlocks for everyone.
It's rather amusing. The rep-hungry achievement crafters will no doubt be crazy motivated to be 'first!' And everyone else just benefits from their race later on. Me, I'm leaving all these hardcore fellas to do the dirty work, I'm just along for the ride.
Story-wise, this is also quite amusing backstory. As someone mentioned, oh no, we can't even start off with "Low Drama" now. We seem to have ramped up into medium or high drama by the devs already. I can foresee that some people are going to try and support the putative 'good guy' Sami, while the more ambitious might just fall behind Warim and so on.
I suppose in a game without any coded means of violence and killing things (with the exception of sheep and camel slaughter), you still gotta have conflict -somewhere- cos human beings wouldn't be human beings without it.
On more personal news, through industrious 'hard work' aka repetitive motion, I have managed to stake out my old beta haunts with a compound.
This time, I appear to have some distant neighbors visible on the horizon. I was a little freaked out to see what appeared to be a husband and wife team in a little oasis place a medium-far distance away. (Bad memories of cliques last a lifetime.) But I figured there had better be room to spread out where we were, neither of us were exactly on each others' doorsteps, and maybe not everyone was as obnoxious as the foursome I had run into earlier in beta.
Another name has been visible across the river, and that disturbs me less. A solo guy, separated by water we can't cross except for a little isthmus nearby, that's perfectly cool. It's not as if we can spread our compounds over water, and there won't be any resource competition cos he's taking stuff over there, and I'm getting stuff from my side of the river.
Honestly, I'm not that worried about acceptance this time around because all I need is a general goodwill community, and the Khartoum guild of regulars is providing that. Worse come to the worse, I can pick up and go someplace else (hopefully after I have researched some salvage skills so I can get some return of resources invested).
I like the Khartoum area, because as someone mentioned, and just as I also discovered during beta - there are a HEAP of hermitable places with good resource locations in Khartoum. It's a big area. There's lots of water around - unlike Upper Egypt (my first unfortunate starting location) - and quiet places with lots of trees and sand and mud and clay and what not.
Also it's well-structured. The schools are in the center of the area, surrounded by three roads that form a big triangle. The universities are a little south and east of the schools.
All the crowd-happy people are going to be situated right smack near the schools, forming a little metropolis of activity in the center. The guild of regulars is taking up residence on an island in this metropolis and setting up the public works right over there. The research-focused tech-donating people will gather nearer the side of the universities.
The semi-hermits? Well, there's room for them along the three road triangle, nearly all of which are also close to a river resource, and all of us can run down the roads to the center of town when we need to. I picked the northwest side to be further away from the crowd, but I can get to town in about 5 min's run when I want to learn skills.
The real hermits have options too. Beyond the triangle of roads, I've seen a valley oasis just opposite from me (I was eyeing that as a possible site, but gave it up as less scenic), another area of green stuff on the map which must contain potential site locations, and far to the southwest, there are more green areas, an obscure valley that I ran to in beta before giving up running back as a lost cause and a looooooooong road to a tarpit surrounded by more green. And as I see on the wiki map, and overheard over region chat, there's one more island of green FAR to the southwest that people have been pondering occupying, but it's just way too distant from anything to consider. Lots of hermit options. I just don't envy them the run to learn skills. Perhaps after all the skills necessary for self-sufficiency are learned, some people might retreat there.
Meanwhile, I appear to be content where I am. I have achieved citizenship. My mini-compound is built. I have constructed an indoor chest.
(Storage options have been changed this Telling. During beta, we could build chests outdoors. Now we can't. We need to build either flax baskets that decay, or eventually warehouses. My indoor chest is about twice as big as the 'large chest' of beta, and needed twice as many bricks, but I'm satisfied. And also thrilled about changes because I like that all the old experts may not have all the answers when things change.)
I'm in the midst of expanding my compound to fulfill the Test of Architecture and gain level 2. Unlike the last two times in beta, this time I'm not in a hurry to get it all done within 2-4 hours. It'll get done, when it's done. It's not like that many skills/techs are unlocked yet at the universities anyhow. I can wait. No rush.
Note to self:
Future article titles?
The Charm of Construction
The Captivation of Cultivation
Thursday, December 11, 2008
So I lied...Egyptians do that, wot?
I couldn't get brick making out of my head.
I have a little bit of a... problem when it comes to repetitive Zen-like tasks, y'know? For whatever reason, the ease and challenge level of brick making is well tuned to become an activity I enjoy.
First, you need 4 Boards for Flimsy Brick Racks. So you run around picking wood from trees for a couple minutes, accumulating 100-200 Wood.
The Wood needs to be converted into Boards using a Wood Plane. Wood Planes are set up using Slate and Stone Blades (which are made from 2 Slate). So you run around the shoreline grabbing a ton of Slate.
Then comes your wood processing mini-factory. As a newbie, I set up one. After observing people, on my second round, I went up to 2, then 3, then 4. You set all of them in motion with a hotkey over and over to chug out Boards.
Complications arise when the Stone Blades break. So you better have replacements on hand, or you end up running down the shoreline again. Therein comes the learning factor, for a certain amount of boards, you know there'll be roughly this much breakage, how much Slate should you stock up beforehand so you don't break your routine and kill productivity...
Now I have a ton of Boards, that can be set aside and stored for Brick Racks and other constructions.
Back to Bricks. The Brick recipe is 3 Mud, 2 Straw, 1 Sand. Mud and Sand is easy. Any shoreline (you did set up your compound near a shoreline with mud/sand/trees/water/maybe clay, right?) will provide an unlimited amount.
The basic Straw recipe is pick a bunch of Grass (move left and right on a grassy area, clicking the mouse button or tab button), drop on the ground and wait a couple seconds to minutes depending on how much grass was in your bundle, and it dries to Straw magically.
Now that all your ingredients are in place, here comes the mini low-budget brick factory, set up 9 or 12 Flimsy Brick Racks in a grid, and move the mouse over each, pressing B to set up your bricks like little rectangular chocolates in them.
Wait a bit, and each will draw, changing color. That's your cue to hit T over each and pick up 6 bricks for each rack.
After 5-10 uses, the Flimsy Brick Racks decays, leaving only your bricks behind. So you better have Boards stocked up to make more.
And why do I sound like such an expert on early stone-age brick making?
I found a couple articles on the ATITD wiki and forums (http://www.atitd.net/forum/showthread.php?t=9925) which explained that ATITD wasn't a utopia, unlike what most newbies expect, that there were bound to be personality clashes and disputes over the ratio of 'public good' and 'private benefit' and that fights were perfectly normal and to be expected.
After thinking it through, it seemed rather stupid to get turned off the entire game by one unreasonable insular individual, existing in a low population region of Egypt.
This week was the FREE week after all. Public Beta. Free. Trial. And I was on leave, with time to kill. Did I mention Free?
So I decided to make an entirely new character, and scout out all the regions, listening to the region chat before deciding which area to settle in. Criteria? Bigger crowds, less insularity. And which region sounded like a conglomeration of people that are most like me? (Naturally.)
There was a bit of slight disappointment that I couldn't teleport to the most crowded region ever - crowds mean that technologies get researched faster, though there's more competition for resources, of course.
I made do with the areas they allowed me to teleport to. One area, Kush, sounded quite crowded, but the defacto 'leader' (aka the noisiest individual who seemed to organize most of the activities and lead conversation) seemed more interested in his own research and talking to his fellow peers, while egging on the general community to pool resources together.
Another area, I forget now, sounded just like Freedom at our nonpeak hour. Short phrases, lack of punctuation, and the 'lol's bouncing back and forth had to be seen to be believed. I got out of there in a teensy bit of a hurry. :)
Then I found Virtue. Thank god, not the roleplaying Virtue, or I would have fallen over myself to run away.
But the presentably crowded, reasonably friendly, open to newcomers but not pushy region of Khartoum. There was nice chat to listen to over the region channel, people would stop to answer newbie questions, and no one pushy individual leader, but about 3-4 community spokespeople who treated each other like peers.
I had plans this time to be a semi-hermit. If I set up all my crap in an area where there were no neighbors on the horizon, there wouldn't be anyone to lecture me about respecting peoples' space. I already live in an Asian country where people get packed together like sardines in HDB flats, thank you. Maybe my definitions of 'enough space' are different from yours.
All I needed was to find a slightly-out-of-the-way, but still runnable-to-civilization-in-5-minutes spot.
Then I found IT. Near the shoreline, with mud/sand/water access. Wood-yielding trees about. There was even a tiny patch of clay a little ways down, and a bigger patch further down sound. No other people in sight. And a pond with pretty lilies and some diverse species of flora in the vicinity.
Sold.
Mainly by decorative features. I'm a sucker for vanity and customization. I figure it's the one thing that could give away my true gender (besides my tendency to be over-garrulous in text).
As you can see, I was a busy little bee for about 8-16 hours over two days.
The touch of prior experience helped, as I knew enough to ignore the newbie prompts (which make you reinvent the wheel and go back and forth a couple of times) and go nomadic for a while, collecting skills and tech from schools and universities, and roam until I found the perfect place to settle down.
Knowing the tech trees helped, so I didn't have to break up productivity cycles into chunks of "oh crap, this broke, I ran out of that resource, etc."
And I even manged to join in what would be the equivalent of a 'raid' elsewhere, I suspect. Something that is difficult or impossible to do solo, but easier as a big group and even easier with less people and the correct gear later on.
A 'dig.' Unfortunately, that was before I figured out the correct esoteric hotkey to take screenshots. It was hilarious, though. About 12-15 people standing around, facing off in different directions, doing nothing but a low movement wrist-raising 'dig animation' and an ever-widening and closing hole of dirt.
The idea is apparently to widen the dirt hole big enough for stones of various sizes to pop out. And one or two designated pickers run about, collecting it all. It can, apparently, last hours if you want to dig enough medium stones for an entire region's researched technology.
We only spent about 30-45 minutes (getting together and getting shovels time included) because we just settled on enough medium stones for each of us and one for the public works (so 15 or 16ish).
I overheard another region doing a dig for their research. That one took 3-4 hours because they were out to get 145 medium stones. *faints*
Definitely drama potential here, imo. You've got to seriously trust the dig organizer to aportion out everything fairly. The one that Khartoum ran seemed very reliable and inclusive, because they welcomed all newbies and were happy to distribute shovels to those who didn't have one (I had 3 already, so I was a little further advanced than some) and treated it more like a social gathering event.
It was certainly more people than I had seen for the rest of my time in ATITD. All the neighbors came over to the clambake, in a sense.
And they seemed much nicer than the ones I had met previously.
This means I now have a dilemma again. I'll fess up. I'm fascinated by the crafting systems of ATITD. I would really like to see what the later skills and technologies look like, because those are the more painstaking ones. It'll be cool if I could set myself up as a niche provider of -something- other people are not good at.
Overhearing some people discussing flax 'genomes' - aka coded strings of letters, and figuring out which codes do what (dwarf/giant varieties) blew my mind. Not something I probably would be interested in, but the whole idea that this level of sophistication can exist in a game... Well, it's like nethack, y'know? Systems built on systems, and the depth is...wow.
I'm not broke. I could afford 1-3 months of ATITD, on my December bonus alone. It's cheaper than buying a Playstation game or going out to the movies and what not (I haven't seen Kung Fu Panda, Hellboy 2 or Bolt and I'm still waiting for someone else to buy 'em :P).
I'm of two minds about the small close-knit communities. It still makes me uneasy, but an inclusive one harkens back to the nostalgia of the MUD - with all its ups and down. It's -different- from your usual MMO, for sure.
And I NEED a community that is accepting of semi-hermits and has an open Public Works facility for anyone to use, because there is no way I can get past those roadblocks on my own, without a lot of time.
The present beta Khartoum provides that. And if the same people stay on, there's nothing to suggest the real game's Khartoum will be too different. And there's plenty of room and resources in this region, plenty of hermitable areas.
HOWEVER, these people exist in EST. For the past two days, I have been doing 1am-11am stretches because I can, and I prefer the time reversal.
No such thing next week, and the months after that, once work starts again.
I'd be down to sneaking in a couple hours per day at non-peak hours (possibly at a more relaxed pace) and only overhearing what chat remains on the chat tabs when I log in. If the public works exist then, I can still make use of it, and have the whole place to myself.
It'll be weekends before I can do the time reversal and actually interact with whatever community exists.
I also have this unending stream of guilt that I have way too many games and no hope of ever completing them all. Problem is, I'm not sure that limiting them is the way to go either, because I'm bound to dabble in -something-.
Need to support CoX. I'm playing Warhammer. Try as I might, I'm just highly reluctant to drop LOTRO, and $10 a month is not that much different from the lifetime $199, I have more peace of mind paying in installments (if I ever get my salary flow cut off, then I can stop the expenditure too.)
The question is, do I want to dabble in ATITD? For a while? Until I've explored what I came to, just like with KoL?
Not bad for less than 24 hours of online time. If I space out my personal achievement and rely on the more hardcore ATITD folk to open the path for me, I could probably do a more balanced diet of 1-2 hours of ATITD to work towards some of the later techs to try out.
I have a little bit of a... problem when it comes to repetitive Zen-like tasks, y'know? For whatever reason, the ease and challenge level of brick making is well tuned to become an activity I enjoy.
First, you need 4 Boards for Flimsy Brick Racks. So you run around picking wood from trees for a couple minutes, accumulating 100-200 Wood.
The Wood needs to be converted into Boards using a Wood Plane. Wood Planes are set up using Slate and Stone Blades (which are made from 2 Slate). So you run around the shoreline grabbing a ton of Slate.
Then comes your wood processing mini-factory. As a newbie, I set up one. After observing people, on my second round, I went up to 2, then 3, then 4. You set all of them in motion with a hotkey over and over to chug out Boards.
Complications arise when the Stone Blades break. So you better have replacements on hand, or you end up running down the shoreline again. Therein comes the learning factor, for a certain amount of boards, you know there'll be roughly this much breakage, how much Slate should you stock up beforehand so you don't break your routine and kill productivity...
Now I have a ton of Boards, that can be set aside and stored for Brick Racks and other constructions.
Back to Bricks. The Brick recipe is 3 Mud, 2 Straw, 1 Sand. Mud and Sand is easy. Any shoreline (you did set up your compound near a shoreline with mud/sand/trees/water/maybe clay, right?) will provide an unlimited amount.
The basic Straw recipe is pick a bunch of Grass (move left and right on a grassy area, clicking the mouse button or tab button), drop on the ground and wait a couple seconds to minutes depending on how much grass was in your bundle, and it dries to Straw magically.
Now that all your ingredients are in place, here comes the mini low-budget brick factory, set up 9 or 12 Flimsy Brick Racks in a grid, and move the mouse over each, pressing B to set up your bricks like little rectangular chocolates in them.
Wait a bit, and each will draw, changing color. That's your cue to hit T over each and pick up 6 bricks for each rack.
After 5-10 uses, the Flimsy Brick Racks decays, leaving only your bricks behind. So you better have Boards stocked up to make more.
And why do I sound like such an expert on early stone-age brick making?
I found a couple articles on the ATITD wiki and forums (http://www.atitd.net/forum/showthread.php?t=9925) which explained that ATITD wasn't a utopia, unlike what most newbies expect, that there were bound to be personality clashes and disputes over the ratio of 'public good' and 'private benefit' and that fights were perfectly normal and to be expected.
After thinking it through, it seemed rather stupid to get turned off the entire game by one unreasonable insular individual, existing in a low population region of Egypt.
This week was the FREE week after all. Public Beta. Free. Trial. And I was on leave, with time to kill. Did I mention Free?
So I decided to make an entirely new character, and scout out all the regions, listening to the region chat before deciding which area to settle in. Criteria? Bigger crowds, less insularity. And which region sounded like a conglomeration of people that are most like me? (Naturally.)
There was a bit of slight disappointment that I couldn't teleport to the most crowded region ever - crowds mean that technologies get researched faster, though there's more competition for resources, of course.
I made do with the areas they allowed me to teleport to. One area, Kush, sounded quite crowded, but the defacto 'leader' (aka the noisiest individual who seemed to organize most of the activities and lead conversation) seemed more interested in his own research and talking to his fellow peers, while egging on the general community to pool resources together.
Another area, I forget now, sounded just like Freedom at our nonpeak hour. Short phrases, lack of punctuation, and the 'lol's bouncing back and forth had to be seen to be believed. I got out of there in a teensy bit of a hurry. :)
Then I found Virtue. Thank god, not the roleplaying Virtue, or I would have fallen over myself to run away.
But the presentably crowded, reasonably friendly, open to newcomers but not pushy region of Khartoum. There was nice chat to listen to over the region channel, people would stop to answer newbie questions, and no one pushy individual leader, but about 3-4 community spokespeople who treated each other like peers.
I had plans this time to be a semi-hermit. If I set up all my crap in an area where there were no neighbors on the horizon, there wouldn't be anyone to lecture me about respecting peoples' space. I already live in an Asian country where people get packed together like sardines in HDB flats, thank you. Maybe my definitions of 'enough space' are different from yours.
All I needed was to find a slightly-out-of-the-way, but still runnable-to-civilization-in-5-minutes spot.
Then I found IT. Near the shoreline, with mud/sand/water access. Wood-yielding trees about. There was even a tiny patch of clay a little ways down, and a bigger patch further down sound. No other people in sight. And a pond with pretty lilies and some diverse species of flora in the vicinity.
Sold.
Mainly by decorative features. I'm a sucker for vanity and customization. I figure it's the one thing that could give away my true gender (besides my tendency to be over-garrulous in text).
As you can see, I was a busy little bee for about 8-16 hours over two days.
The touch of prior experience helped, as I knew enough to ignore the newbie prompts (which make you reinvent the wheel and go back and forth a couple of times) and go nomadic for a while, collecting skills and tech from schools and universities, and roam until I found the perfect place to settle down.
Knowing the tech trees helped, so I didn't have to break up productivity cycles into chunks of "oh crap, this broke, I ran out of that resource, etc."
And I even manged to join in what would be the equivalent of a 'raid' elsewhere, I suspect. Something that is difficult or impossible to do solo, but easier as a big group and even easier with less people and the correct gear later on.
A 'dig.' Unfortunately, that was before I figured out the correct esoteric hotkey to take screenshots. It was hilarious, though. About 12-15 people standing around, facing off in different directions, doing nothing but a low movement wrist-raising 'dig animation' and an ever-widening and closing hole of dirt.
The idea is apparently to widen the dirt hole big enough for stones of various sizes to pop out. And one or two designated pickers run about, collecting it all. It can, apparently, last hours if you want to dig enough medium stones for an entire region's researched technology.
We only spent about 30-45 minutes (getting together and getting shovels time included) because we just settled on enough medium stones for each of us and one for the public works (so 15 or 16ish).
I overheard another region doing a dig for their research. That one took 3-4 hours because they were out to get 145 medium stones. *faints*
Definitely drama potential here, imo. You've got to seriously trust the dig organizer to aportion out everything fairly. The one that Khartoum ran seemed very reliable and inclusive, because they welcomed all newbies and were happy to distribute shovels to those who didn't have one (I had 3 already, so I was a little further advanced than some) and treated it more like a social gathering event.
It was certainly more people than I had seen for the rest of my time in ATITD. All the neighbors came over to the clambake, in a sense.
And they seemed much nicer than the ones I had met previously.
This means I now have a dilemma again. I'll fess up. I'm fascinated by the crafting systems of ATITD. I would really like to see what the later skills and technologies look like, because those are the more painstaking ones. It'll be cool if I could set myself up as a niche provider of -something- other people are not good at.
Overhearing some people discussing flax 'genomes' - aka coded strings of letters, and figuring out which codes do what (dwarf/giant varieties) blew my mind. Not something I probably would be interested in, but the whole idea that this level of sophistication can exist in a game... Well, it's like nethack, y'know? Systems built on systems, and the depth is...wow.
I'm not broke. I could afford 1-3 months of ATITD, on my December bonus alone. It's cheaper than buying a Playstation game or going out to the movies and what not (I haven't seen Kung Fu Panda, Hellboy 2 or Bolt and I'm still waiting for someone else to buy 'em :P).
I'm of two minds about the small close-knit communities. It still makes me uneasy, but an inclusive one harkens back to the nostalgia of the MUD - with all its ups and down. It's -different- from your usual MMO, for sure.
And I NEED a community that is accepting of semi-hermits and has an open Public Works facility for anyone to use, because there is no way I can get past those roadblocks on my own, without a lot of time.
The present beta Khartoum provides that. And if the same people stay on, there's nothing to suggest the real game's Khartoum will be too different. And there's plenty of room and resources in this region, plenty of hermitable areas.
HOWEVER, these people exist in EST. For the past two days, I have been doing 1am-11am stretches because I can, and I prefer the time reversal.
No such thing next week, and the months after that, once work starts again.
I'd be down to sneaking in a couple hours per day at non-peak hours (possibly at a more relaxed pace) and only overhearing what chat remains on the chat tabs when I log in. If the public works exist then, I can still make use of it, and have the whole place to myself.
It'll be weekends before I can do the time reversal and actually interact with whatever community exists.
I also have this unending stream of guilt that I have way too many games and no hope of ever completing them all. Problem is, I'm not sure that limiting them is the way to go either, because I'm bound to dabble in -something-.
Need to support CoX. I'm playing Warhammer. Try as I might, I'm just highly reluctant to drop LOTRO, and $10 a month is not that much different from the lifetime $199, I have more peace of mind paying in installments (if I ever get my salary flow cut off, then I can stop the expenditure too.)
The question is, do I want to dabble in ATITD? For a while? Until I've explored what I came to, just like with KoL?
Not bad for less than 24 hours of online time. If I space out my personal achievement and rely on the more hardcore ATITD folk to open the path for me, I could probably do a more balanced diet of 1-2 hours of ATITD to work towards some of the later techs to try out.
Monday, December 08, 2008
Done with the Desert
A Tale in the Desert was one of those MMOs I always told myself I'd try one day. And since they're just switching over into the Fourth telling, it seemed a good time to try out the public beta and see if I wanted to get in from the ground up, so to speak.
After all, a civilization game is lots more fun when you're hauling yourself up from your bootstraps, rather than in the midst of established culture politicking. To my immersion-seeking, asocial self anyhow.
Downloaded and installed the client. Graphics aren't anything spectacular, but functionally decent enough. It had this irritating habit of fatal error'ing and crashing every so often, which led me to restart the damn program enough times to end up on the 'frequently used' part of the start menu - in under 8 hours or so.
The technology building / crafting aspect is rather fun and addictive, for anyone who gets a bit of a buzz out of Progress Quest. (Guilty as charged.) It's quite clever how it all stacks on each other, and you find yourself trying to design ways to mass produce as much as you can, in a sort of productivity/time management/resource game.
Fer example, wood is harvested from trees. You run back and forth between trees to pick it up, different trees give differing amounts and so on.
Boards are produced from wood, and to do that, you need a wood planer, which is made from slate harvested at the shoreline.
Brick making is an involved little game all on its own, and so is flax-growing and all the other stuff produced from it.
However, I ran into problems with the other aspect of ATITD - which is the people. It's a social game. So there are these cliques all chattering away on the global channel, which you feel awkward breaking into. You try and be civil to anyone who passes you, even when you'd rather be running about like an industrious ant doing your crafty stuff.
And the social pretty much shits on the solo crafting aspect because after a while, you can't do it by yourself anymore. There are bottlenecks designed in the process that force you to rely on other people's stuff or waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel. The peer pressure suggests you'd better conform to what the big research guilds need to invent, cos that's what everyone else is doing.
The irritating thing about it is, because there's been three previous Tellings, it's like a secret code that no one bothers to tell to newbies. Everyone already knows what they're supposed to be doing. Or even if they are new, they harken back to some earlier golden age of First or Second Telling. The clique-y aspect gets on my nerves.
Most hilariously, in my search to optimize my resources and placement of my compound, I managed to plonk my house in the middle of 4 people who were apparently some kind of tight knit family, and had made a guild just for themselves.
Because they apparently had grand plans to occupy all the open space around them (nevermind that it's still beta and might be reset in a week), they'd pretty much staked out the area and assumed everyone knew.
Here comes my noob self, looking about at the currently small houses... Obviously, I go, ooh, there's a nice open space here. And start building!
1000s of bricks and 2000s of wooden boards later, this bitch comes over stiffly, going 'a word of ancient wisdom for you. This is very bad, you have built right in the middle of my family's houses.'
*blink* Like I was supposed to know that the four people around me were uber-tight. I thought the natural thing was for citizens to mingle and congregate and sort of build little squatter compounds to form a city together. But nooo, this is apparently some sort of sacred territory I have crossed.
She sits there staring at me. I blink back at her bemusedly. She continues to rant on, saying that she does not want to spoil my new experience to ATITD, but this is very very bad.
Ok, so you know I'm a newbie. Apparently it's obvious in the clumsy way I'm arranging my crap all over, being some sort of inadverdent eyesore. So um, tell me what you'd like me to do. Cut me some slack. Give me something to work with here, y'know?
I have to ask her what she wants me to do about it to get a straight answer out of her. And the answer is basically uproot everything, my family will give you some resources to help make a new compound elsewhere.
Let's see, you want me to uproot about 6 hours of work, when I haven't even learned any skill that can give me back any resources from tearing down crap, and accept whatever charity you can give me to get started again elsewhere?
*sighs* Evidently this is a very long term sort of game. But I'm not in it for the long haul. I tell her so. This is a trial account, I'll be gone in a day.
After a long pause, she goes, ok, on the condition that you move all your stuff outside the compound inside, and tear down everything when you're done, and if in 3 day's you decide you are staying after all, then you must leave my family's area and yadda yadda yadda blah blah.
An entire paragraph's worth of terms and conditions. I don't have the heart to tell her I haven't even seen such long paragraphs way back in the MUD. I give her a one word 'sure' reply and turn back to my own stuff, a new distaste in my mouth.
I hate this sort of social maneuvering. Whether it's Eve, in which you can openly attack anyone you don't like, or in ATITD, where the threat is social outcasting from achieving anything substantial... it strikes me as a sort of cult-ish way to make people conform to your in-group.
The hermit and rebel in me cannot take it. Especially when they come into conflict with the 'good lil girl' part of me that wants to play nice and be universally liked and live up to everyone's image.
So eventually, after puttering awhile longer and realizing that I'd pretty much hit the wall of what I could do solo, I compromised.
I took down all my stuff because I am a civil person. I left my chest full of resources open to any public to plunder. And I probably would have done all that anyway even without the selfish bitch bothering me.
(And I know she's a selfish bitch because I overheard on the region channel, that she 'stole' one of the camel resources from another person. Or rather, they must be out being competitive achievers for the same resource, and she got the camel. The sharing or cooperative charity bit can come later, after she did the initial breeding and all. Strange way to build up one's ego, come to think of it.)
Then I let my rebel out to play a bit, slightly off to the side of bitch's compound.
Since I didn't ever intend on coming back, I decided to indulge in a bit of landscape graffiti in the vein of Second Life and Eve's can-art. I dropped little pails of 1 mud all over to spell out some funky letters. Nothing vulgar. Just "OOK!" To say that I wuz here. And made some kind of mark, that someone would have to clean up.
I'd just about had it with conforming to rules.
And that ultimately, is why ATITD fails to enthrall me personally. Too many "need tos" and "should dos" and "ought tos." In a sandbox environment. The contrast is off-putting.
After all, a civilization game is lots more fun when you're hauling yourself up from your bootstraps, rather than in the midst of established culture politicking. To my immersion-seeking, asocial self anyhow.
Downloaded and installed the client. Graphics aren't anything spectacular, but functionally decent enough. It had this irritating habit of fatal error'ing and crashing every so often, which led me to restart the damn program enough times to end up on the 'frequently used' part of the start menu - in under 8 hours or so.
The technology building / crafting aspect is rather fun and addictive, for anyone who gets a bit of a buzz out of Progress Quest. (Guilty as charged.) It's quite clever how it all stacks on each other, and you find yourself trying to design ways to mass produce as much as you can, in a sort of productivity/time management/resource game.
Fer example, wood is harvested from trees. You run back and forth between trees to pick it up, different trees give differing amounts and so on.
Boards are produced from wood, and to do that, you need a wood planer, which is made from slate harvested at the shoreline.
Brick making is an involved little game all on its own, and so is flax-growing and all the other stuff produced from it.
However, I ran into problems with the other aspect of ATITD - which is the people. It's a social game. So there are these cliques all chattering away on the global channel, which you feel awkward breaking into. You try and be civil to anyone who passes you, even when you'd rather be running about like an industrious ant doing your crafty stuff.
And the social pretty much shits on the solo crafting aspect because after a while, you can't do it by yourself anymore. There are bottlenecks designed in the process that force you to rely on other people's stuff or waste a lot of effort reinventing the wheel. The peer pressure suggests you'd better conform to what the big research guilds need to invent, cos that's what everyone else is doing.
The irritating thing about it is, because there's been three previous Tellings, it's like a secret code that no one bothers to tell to newbies. Everyone already knows what they're supposed to be doing. Or even if they are new, they harken back to some earlier golden age of First or Second Telling. The clique-y aspect gets on my nerves.
Most hilariously, in my search to optimize my resources and placement of my compound, I managed to plonk my house in the middle of 4 people who were apparently some kind of tight knit family, and had made a guild just for themselves.
Because they apparently had grand plans to occupy all the open space around them (nevermind that it's still beta and might be reset in a week), they'd pretty much staked out the area and assumed everyone knew.
Here comes my noob self, looking about at the currently small houses... Obviously, I go, ooh, there's a nice open space here. And start building!
1000s of bricks and 2000s of wooden boards later, this bitch comes over stiffly, going 'a word of ancient wisdom for you. This is very bad, you have built right in the middle of my family's houses.'
*blink* Like I was supposed to know that the four people around me were uber-tight. I thought the natural thing was for citizens to mingle and congregate and sort of build little squatter compounds to form a city together. But nooo, this is apparently some sort of sacred territory I have crossed.
She sits there staring at me. I blink back at her bemusedly. She continues to rant on, saying that she does not want to spoil my new experience to ATITD, but this is very very bad.
Ok, so you know I'm a newbie. Apparently it's obvious in the clumsy way I'm arranging my crap all over, being some sort of inadverdent eyesore. So um, tell me what you'd like me to do. Cut me some slack. Give me something to work with here, y'know?
I have to ask her what she wants me to do about it to get a straight answer out of her. And the answer is basically uproot everything, my family will give you some resources to help make a new compound elsewhere.
Let's see, you want me to uproot about 6 hours of work, when I haven't even learned any skill that can give me back any resources from tearing down crap, and accept whatever charity you can give me to get started again elsewhere?
*sighs* Evidently this is a very long term sort of game. But I'm not in it for the long haul. I tell her so. This is a trial account, I'll be gone in a day.
After a long pause, she goes, ok, on the condition that you move all your stuff outside the compound inside, and tear down everything when you're done, and if in 3 day's you decide you are staying after all, then you must leave my family's area and yadda yadda yadda blah blah.
An entire paragraph's worth of terms and conditions. I don't have the heart to tell her I haven't even seen such long paragraphs way back in the MUD. I give her a one word 'sure' reply and turn back to my own stuff, a new distaste in my mouth.
I hate this sort of social maneuvering. Whether it's Eve, in which you can openly attack anyone you don't like, or in ATITD, where the threat is social outcasting from achieving anything substantial... it strikes me as a sort of cult-ish way to make people conform to your in-group.
The hermit and rebel in me cannot take it. Especially when they come into conflict with the 'good lil girl' part of me that wants to play nice and be universally liked and live up to everyone's image.
So eventually, after puttering awhile longer and realizing that I'd pretty much hit the wall of what I could do solo, I compromised.
I took down all my stuff because I am a civil person. I left my chest full of resources open to any public to plunder. And I probably would have done all that anyway even without the selfish bitch bothering me.
(And I know she's a selfish bitch because I overheard on the region channel, that she 'stole' one of the camel resources from another person. Or rather, they must be out being competitive achievers for the same resource, and she got the camel. The sharing or cooperative charity bit can come later, after she did the initial breeding and all. Strange way to build up one's ego, come to think of it.)
Then I let my rebel out to play a bit, slightly off to the side of bitch's compound.
Since I didn't ever intend on coming back, I decided to indulge in a bit of landscape graffiti in the vein of Second Life and Eve's can-art. I dropped little pails of 1 mud all over to spell out some funky letters. Nothing vulgar. Just "OOK!" To say that I wuz here. And made some kind of mark, that someone would have to clean up.
I'd just about had it with conforming to rules.
And that ultimately, is why ATITD fails to enthrall me personally. Too many "need tos" and "should dos" and "ought tos." In a sandbox environment. The contrast is off-putting.