Hard to Go Back to 3 Minions

For all of Aion's foibles, I really enjoy the mob and map layouts. Especially those in the areas adjoining elite mob zones.



There are mobs that run away and call for help when they get low on hp. You can control their direction of fleeing by the way you face 'em.

The overseers call out the moment you engage them, and any labourer within a wide radius will answer the call.

Mages hit hard and die easily. Warriors last longer but have sneaky tricks like putting up a defence shield for a while, healing and so on. And they tend to run.

And then you have these guys, completely invis to me, the raiders. I love 'em. In a suspiciously empty looking area, you can bet one of these are there. There are a few classes, the scout classes especially - rangers and assassins - that can detect them in stealth, as well as some edible pills for the rest of us if we wanted.



But I like it as is, because imagine if these were elite invisible raiders (of which there are a few in the elite zone), what usually happens is that the rangers and all will really help the templar tank to scout / mark / and often tag them with a bow. Sorta oldschool cooperation and "realism" there.

Or the tank could do it the hard way, with memory, and a body pull.

Patrols wander all over the place in these zones, so you really have to be on the ball and have a situational awareness of where you are, and what their paths are.

Throw in the added complication of having enemy rifters from the other side come in from time to time...

... some fancy hiding spots where the mobs won't run up to and will leash back before getting to you...

... a teleporter that puts you on top of a very high place...

... the ability to GLIDE from any high spot to a lower spot, with great results if your entire team has decent gliding skill, and with highly unpredictable results if one of them misses a safe zone and lands into a group of mobs.



It's crazy and it is uber fun use of the entire map layout / scenery.

Here's one last screenie. A big world boss that we're about to charge towards. A few of those platforms are actually moving platforms, so you have to super mario your way across, apparently.

Either that or we may be able to just glide down to it from where we're standing. Who knows. Waiting for the tank's call. :)

The Genesis of Virtual Desire

Defeat Arthas and get a chance at an uber-epic ultra-rare mount, The Lich King's own horse, Invincible!

I was gonna post more, maybe mention something about marketing and advertising, and the ease with which a virtual good (which boils down to essentially a new art asset) can be turned into a desirable luxury by virtue of scarcity and the tendency of people to indulge in e-peen/prestige comparisons.

But there's really nothing more to be said.

Clueless or Con?

A couple days ago, I got very lucky in one of my rolls during a group foray into elite mob territory, and won a lvl 40 Sorceror Stigma stone, Curse of Weakness II. This gives an apparently desirable PvP skill once equipped.

Seeing as I'd literally paupered myself buying the Ankle Snare stigma for myself, I was heartily inclined to selling this stigma fast and for big money.

Checking it out on the trade broker, there was a ton of "Curse of Weakness I" going for cheap, and only one "Curse of Weakness II" put up at 1 mil kinah.

Darn, so that set the upper limit of this thing, and there was no way I could release this for 2-3 mil. On the other hand, I probably didn't have enough money on me to afford the auction house fee either if I set the price too high.

I settled for 950k for mine. It's close to 1mil, but with enough shaved off to put my stone first in the buy list, and used the old psychological marketing trick of $1.99 being a bargain over $2.00.

---

Not three hours after that, I was soloing mobs in the Abyss, when I got a strange tell. "Hey" says a guy called Shinobinaku or something to that sort.

My first impulse is not to reply, in case it is some horrible gold spammer trying to see if I'm receptive to his wiles.

There's silence, and I start getting worried that maybe it's not a gold spammer, they usually just start the tell with a "Hey, wanna buy some kinah today, buddy?" solicitation anyway.

I click the linked name to check, and it's a level 50 Sorceror from a guild I'd never heard of, but the name looked respectable and not some kinah farm bot legion.

Hmm, what if he's testing if -I'm- a bot, is my next thought. After all, I am playing a glad, the premiere bot class, and methodically massacring mobs. I look all around, but don't see anyone. Hmm, probably safer to reply.

"Yeah, what's up?" I go.

Level 50 Sorc says "You know the Curse of Weakness II you've got up on the broker? LOL, don't you know the price?"

I'm thinking, what, was I really such a moron that in my effort to undercut the other guy, did I put it up below vendor price (I didn't check) and this guy is either coming to rub it in, or be a good samaritan to tell me about it?

I decide on a short curt "nope" in the hopes that he'd either elaborate on his point, or pick up on the fact that I couldn't be arsed to talk further.

Level 50 Sorc goes "Lol, well, the correct price point for it is somewhere around 400k-600k. That's what the stigma has always been selling for. The 1mil guy you undercut is some bot who saw there was currently no other stone up and put it up for an absurd price."

I'm thinking, oh really? Good for me then if I managed to catch a market high. Supply and demand, y'know.

I go, "Yeah, so?"

He goes, "I'll buy it from you now for 600k."

Aha. So that's his game. Little does he know I am quite the market crook myself, in my effort to earn legitimate kinah, I am not above buying up cheaply priced goods and repricing them higher to take advantage of high-levels/impatient gold-buyers who think they are very rich.

Besides, he's a fucking level 50. They earn 1-3 mil easily. I heard the level 45s in my guild saying that level 50s can spend upwards of 30mil just in an ATTEMPT for a nice weapon, so they think nothing of spending 3mil on a lowbie alt. The 300k difference - he probably just needs to pop a white weapon to vendor and get it.

Even at level 39-40, the white weapons I popped vendor for 150-240k.

So I tell him, "Look, I'm flat broke. I haven't bought my level 40 skill books yet. I need the kinah. I can wait 8 days, I just put the auction up."

And he goes, "Well, I'm prepared to pay you 600k right NOW. Just take it down!"

Hello, 950k is not even enough for ALL my skill books. Why the hell would I take your 600k?

"No thanks," I go.

He returns, "I'm not in a hurry, but I'm prepared to pay now. Suit yourself. You can regret it later when the price goes back and you get undercut by bots."

I roll my eyes. These stigma stones do NOT drop like rain. Supply is limited. There is very little chance that bots will pop these buggers in sufficient quantity, especially since NCsoft is on a bot crackdown rampage.

I tell him "I'm not in a hurry either. I got eight days to wait. Maybe we can work something out if they don't sell in 8 days."

What the hell, leave options open, right? Besides, I was prepared to GIVE the stigma free away to a guildmate if I had to. Someone gave me one (less desirable, but still useful) and I could always return the favor. It's just that I really needed the kinah after my impulse purchase of last post.

But frankly, having used the trade broker to gain a small but steady kinah flow, I was sure the stigma wouldn't last the 8 days before being sold.

He finally gives up in a huff and stops sending me whispers. I grind some mobs a little longer, then I log off for lunch and a nice nap. (Yay for an off day).

---

3-4 hours later, I get up and log back on again. A message flashes on my screen that something of mine has sold at the trade broker.

Oh yay, maybe some of my fish have finally sold, maybe I'll finally have some spending money.

I go to check it out and what do you know, Curse of Weakness II has sold for 950k. The other guy's 1mil Curse of Weakness II is still there.

I check the level 50 Sorceror's armory page out. He still has Curse of Weakness I equipped. Guess he either hasn't bought it or didn't have the shards to pay to equip it, whatever, he missed his chance there.

Call me snide or vindictive, but I had to rub it in. Not even a day had passed.

A search found him still online, so I sent him a whisper. "Hey, just to let you know, Curse of Weakness II is no longer in my possession. It has sold for 950k. The wonders of a free market and too-rich people. Take care!"

*smirk*

5 minutes after that found me camped out in front of my skill trainer, buying the most crucial essential skills I needed. I actually still need more to finish it up, but the 8 skills I managed to buy with that 950k has made my combat efficiency go way up.

This leaves me with the final wondering thought: was the sorc really attempting to con me like I suspected, or was the poor guy just plain clueless about economics and market forces?

lolrage

This is what comes of trying to sneak in some Aion at 2am.

Or rather, I started at 12.30am to get in a spot of clam harvesting because for whatever obscure economic reason, that particular crafting resource is selling really well and I need the money bad.

I've got 1/4 of an experience bar to go before level 40, and I had heard that the skill books at that point cost a good 1.2 mil to afford.

Hovering at about 1.1 mil, I thought I'd see how many clams I could pick up in an hour and hope to offload them for about 2500 a piece.

At 1.30am, I'd gotten over 230, which is quite a respectable 570k if I can offload them all in a couple days. Except that out of greed, habit, and a B5 DVD playing in the other monitor, I thought I'd keep at it for a while longer until that episode ended.

Warned by some sixth sense, at around 1.50am, I looked up just as the harvesting progress bar ended to see an red enemy Elyos charging straight at me. Egads, a ranger with a fancy bow.

Having learned from 20 past levels of faceplanting that turning about and running was quite hopeless, I tried the opposite and charged him too. The little squirt kept squirming out of reach and laying stun after stun, slow after slow, immobilize after immobilize on me.

I burned up lesser healing potions to try and break the immobilize (though I admit I didn't have greater healing potions on hand, I don't know if those would break the slow). I used up all four means of regaining hp I had - two skills, two types of potions. I got maybe 3-4 hits in on him, and he got about 30.

I fell over, raging. Seriously raging.

Perhaps it is the accumulated humiliations of twenty levels, where I rationalized it away as a level disparity. Well, I was level 39, this guy was level 44, when I later looked him up on the character database site.

Rationally, it's possibly still quite disparate a match, with me in hopeless gear at that, but this guy only had a gold bow and he was wearing greens and blues at most.

Maybe it's hormones but this particular death really pissed me off. To the point that I marched straight to the auction house and bought a stack of 50 greater healing potions for 56k in preparation for the NEXT time I get jumped.

Then I stared at the highly desirable but VERY EXPENSIVE stone that gives a special skill to gladiators, known as Ankle Snare. It apparently does a 10 second immobilize that is not broken on hit (but can be removed using a potion.) It might possibly help a melee glad catch up to someone trying to kite him, though since I have never used it, I cannot tell how many counters there are for it.

This baby normally sells for millions, though there was one time I saw the price plunge to 280k, but I couldn't even afford it then.

The cheapest it was going for this night was 780k. I had 950k in my pocket.

I stared at it for 10 more seconds, and then I hit the buy button.

Talk about an impulse and rage-driven purchase.

This quite fubars my skill book purchase for level 40 unless I get a couple lucky drops, and if my harvesting venture pans out.

But I am just SO tired of being run around and kited and shot like a pincushion. If it is my latency at fault, then I'm still going to have a problem regardless.

*sighs* Well, I have to work on them one at a time. Next up, somehow obtain 20% run speed boots. That's either group a lot, or pay 500k to obtain the materials needed.

P.S. As an addendum, after re-equiping with my new uber-expensive immobilize skill, I went tearing back to the same spot I died, hankering for revenge and more than 75% sure that I was going to die miserably again.

Another level 44 gladiator was broadcasting the location of a ganker Elyos in the same area. Aha, I think, did he die to the same ranger that offed me?

I get to the nearby town and see the 44 glad standing at the entrance with only half his hp. Then he starts running out of town, a level 50 cleric from a different guild hot on his heels. !!! I tear after the two of them, hoping they will lead me to the bloody ranger and we can all swarm the bastard.

Well, we run past his white-winged corpse. Sheesh. Someone got to him before I did. :(

Then I see another red diamond that indicates another Elyos on the edge of my radar, and so do the other two Asmodians. We tear off chasing it down, and find ourselves in a big old scrum with 5-7 of us, and 3 of them getting the worst of it. With my crap speed, I only manage to do one AoE attack that finishes one of them off, but they had already been quite worked over by the horde.

Not exactly the climatic vindication I had been hoping for, but grrr, better than dying again. There were also a number of other glads in that scrum, a 47, and a 50. I can only hope that my pvp life improves when I get into the 40s range and start accumulating passably decent gear. *mutter, grumble*

This Cyborg World of War...

Tobold has been doing a series of posts on WoW Addons lately.

WoW. I mean, wow.

I had no idea.

There's add-ons for one click healing. I haven't read the actual description of the add-on yet, but I presume this means you have 40 squares of people, and when you seen the green bar is low, you just clickie on the square and the add-on pretty much decides for you which spell is the most efficient to use to regain that much hp.

My bad, I just went back and read it, and apparently the SmartCast feature in combat was taken out in WoW version 2.whatever. So now you can just do one-click out-of-combat buffing and what not.

There's add-ons for showing you how much aggro each person has, so you can tank more easily.

There's add-ons for telling people YOU'RE STANDING IN THE BLOODY FIRE, GET THE F OUT OF IT... which explains why about half the people in my Warhammer guild team fighting a new mob that spurted a gob of acid on the floor had insufficient situational awareness to get the hell out of it, even after I had a) suspected something was wrong due to my hp plummeting, b) taken a while to observe my combat log to ascertain I was taking damage, c) spotted the tiny damage-over-time icon on my character that explained about the acid in a pop-up tooltip, and d) moved out of the acid while exclaiming over chat to MOVE OUT OF THE ACID.

It took them about 30 seconds longer and two other teammates screaming to make them realize something was up.

This is what happens when you rely on your UI's add-ons and someone else's video takedown more than actually looking at the virtual world's feedback.

Sorry. Just sour.

To think that I tank based on observing whether the mob is focused on me or is attacking someone else. Hmph.

I don't know that I'd go as far as to agree with Tobold's accusation that using add-ons is easy mode. To an outsider, the necessity to use all these add-ons is a scary barrier and steep learning curve in itself.

But I'm certainly shocked at how reliant WoW raiders appear to be on these things. Talk about the ultimate in cyborg technology. How in the world did the rest of the other MMO world raid with barebones UI?

P.S. Another of his recent posts indicate that the balance in WoW heroics has shifted to the point where people are doing AoE tanking and AoE damage to clear trash. I cannot help but think of freaks in a dumpster and a giant fireball nuke over 5 years ago and start laughing at the cyclic nature of things.

What Category is This?

Today, I got my first social engineering tell in Aion.

Sure, I've got plenty of gold spam whispers, gold spam mails, gold spam apologies over the combined worlds of City of Heroes, Warhammer and Aion. (How odd, the spammers never bothered setting up camp in Age of Conan - I guess they smelled imminent collapse just as fast as we did.)

This morning marks the first time some randomly named character sent me a whisper, telling me that my account has been banned because it has been detected participating in real money for Kinah activities and to please go to XXX site with na-ncsoft and other legitimately looking but ultimately bogus words in the link.

Wow, they must be getting desperate. And I have to say, I bet a ton of people fall for it. Those not net savvy enough or forewarned or just with a teensy bit of guilt on their minds for using RMT perhaps.

I immediately blocked the character and sat through 15 minutes of inconvenience attempting to submit a petition via Aion's somewhat dodgy UI and lousy character limit.

I didn't manage to copy all of the whisper that was sent to me before running out of space, but presumably the intent of the message came through.

I also realised that I didn't quite have a name for this sort of activity.

Gold spam conveys a spammed advertisement for gold. That's not quite it.

Social engineering is too long and clunky and this specific type of activity is only a subset of this category.

Account theft is what it HOPES to be, but you cannot accuse the fella of having stolen your account yet unless you participate in it and follow through with being stupid.

Attempted impersonation of an NCsoft staff is also sort of factually correct, but misses the point and the urgency of getting this mongrel offed as soon as possible.

Harassment, nuisance, being a pain in the arse, and so on is too general as well.

Using scare tactics in order to encourage someone to visit a keylogging site and/or enter their name and password is too specific.

Oh. It just hit me. Phishing. Is that what this is called? Or at least the first step of it.

Sucks that I have to think so long and hard to figure out exactly what type of attempted criminal or at least iffy behavior needed to be reported.

The Endless Reset

Since I'd recently been making so many comments about A Tale in the Desert, I thought I'd pop over to the wiki to see what's changed.

The answer was... not much... and everything.

In other words, the current Tale was plodding on through its interminable mid-game, heading inexorably towards end-game in 4-5 Teppy months (which tend to be longer than RL months, just like developer release dates extend from 2009 release to...summer 2010!)

Yet, there was a set of intriguing discussion plans left on the front page wiki, about Teppy and his pack of GM's "clever" idea to open new Tale 4 server shards every 3 months.

This, as usual, brought the expected yeas and nays from the populace wanting to get their say in on whether this was a good idea or not. The major key hinges on whether this move will increase and expand the ATITD playerbase with new players who stick around longer (as Teppy is hoping it will) or whether it will split and fragment the existing playerbase to the point that none of the populations become functional enough to survive to mid or endgame (as naysayers and pessimistics predict it will.)

It's an intriguing idea.

Personally, my first impulse reaction was, cool, I might just give ATITD another go because I liked the structure of the starting months. The barriers and bottlenecks are shorter, and easier to break through, with quantifiable short-term goals. I got seriously bored with the midgame because there was nothing to do but chores that marked time once I got into a communal guild which shared all their goods. (x2)

The interminable wait reminded me, in a bad way, of RoD, where nothing ever changes, except at the slow hands of the volunteer imms who do a half-assed job at best.

So why does this slow midgame exist in a paid subscription game like ATITD? Well, because Teppy can't kill his lifeline. The devs meter out the release of Tests slowly so as to drag out the length of time people hang around on a subscription.

Now he's thought of another clever way to maintain a flow of subscriptions from the appeal of the startgame. AND he's free to let the release of Tests now be player-driven, instead of dev-driven, because he's got new server shards springing up every 3 months like mushrooms.

It seems to me like this is a spin on an evolution process here. Some shards are bound to founder and wither away. Some shards might take off, thanks to some conjunction of the stars of Fate and other factors.

The real question is, does he have enough of a playerbase to gamble with?

How many people is he going to piss off with such a changing set of situations and never choose to come back, versus how many people will start coming back given new territory and new opportunities to work with?

How many people will end up 3 month migrants to various server shards (with the potential for an unbalanced, competitive, griefing behavior to develop because of lack of accountability) and how many end up staying to settle a particular shard?

Will there be enough people hanging around one shard to build a diverse-enough community not to stagnate into an insular small-town full of inbreeding, or worse, not enough players around to finish Tests that require huge numbers cooperating... leading to mass quitting or mass migration in droves to the next Promised Land... coming in 3 months?

Will all the vets stick together on one shard, leading to only one server having all the skilled experts to consult? And is that a good or bad thing, if the newbies have room for new blood to become new experts, or will they crash and burn without any vet support?

Who knows... These things are impossible to predict without first trying them out. The backup plan if all goes to hell is to say screw it and merge the populace again for Tale 6. I suppose Teppy figures if more people try ATITD, the more might stick around for Tale 6.

I'm tempted to keep an eye out and give it a try on a new server shard. The key to how long I stick around is how fast I can find a support group, honestly. I think the communal guild thing is the way to go as you don't have to reinvent the wheel, plane the wood, grow and weave the cloth from scratch just to have a cart to hitch the horse to, all by your lonesome.

The other playstyle that I'm highly open to considering is doing it in a duo. A lot of duos have the advantage of both being a small compact partnership to build a tribe around, as well as a privacy/hermit/protection factor that you can't get in a communal group.

*hint hint*

Just putting out feelers. I should be level 45-50 in a month or two in Aion, which hopefully means that I can continue on a more relaxed pace and have some hardcore time to devote somewhere else.

Deep Thoughts

I have too much crap bouncing around in my mind right now. Sitting up and brooding like a mother hen from 3.30am-5.00am with nothing at all settled. I'm in that particular frame of mind that likes things settled, and gets all antsy when nothing is.

It is... annoying.

Especially since what I'd most like to be doing is hedonistically enjoying playing Aion, with double xp weekend coming up too.

Except I feel all restless with unresolved issues that have been left a long time to fester and appear to be growing increasingly urgent. Which sucks.

I have terrible patience for progressive improvement, I dunno why. The moment I fix my mind on something, I want it all done. Completely. Now. And I obsess over it until it gets done. This plays havoc on my system if it is something medium or long-term that has to be achieved in incremental steps.

It's ironic because you'd think I'd have learned better control playing Aion, where each level is pretty much an exercise in patience, and you get a quarter way through the level bar each day of -hardcore- playing if you're lucky.

Oddly enough, because Aion progress is entirely within my control and I can see it quantified and worked on incrementally, I can handle it for the most part except when I start obsessing about pushing just a bit harder to hit the next level goalpost because it's sooo near.

Real life things, especially work-related real life things, are so much less numerically quantifiable because progress hinges upon this and that and talking with various random people and waiting for -them- to be ready, so there seem to be so many damnable delays.

Flocking Together

Every now and then, I come across those incidents and happenings that always leave me with the discomforting feeling that I'm not much like everybody else.

Ravious from Kill Ten Rats talks about the comfortable herd mentality of sitting at the level cap and logging in daily to do mild upkeep and tinker around with whatever you like... without the burning need to level/catch up to everyone else.

It occurs to me that I'm more comfortable by myself puttering about, doing my own thing.

I just don't have a burning need to hang with people.

EXCEPT... in a situation where I don't really want to be there in the first place and am not sure where I fit in, then I go find familiar faces to just stand there and engage in meaningless small talk (all the while thinking in the back of my mind that this is a gigantic waste of my time, lemme outta here, wtf am I doing here, etc.) because it is apparently mildly socially acceptable to stand around with a milling group, versus not being present at all and labeled an anti-social irresponsible hermit.

Surely most people who hang around with people (in-game or out) are not hanging together because they don't know what to do, and don't really want to be there.

I guess I'm still working on this whole interdependency concept.

If you hang around with people long enough, they become familiar enough to you and 'attuned' to you so that they become friendlier and are then willing to do you favors, provided you recipocrate, and thus 'collaborations' happen and everyone benefits in mutual win-win?

Is that the concept? Of networking? It's perplexing.

Frankly, I've always gone by the more hearts and minds route of doing nice things for people first (smiling, saying hi and thank you and meaning it, spontaneous gifts of chocolate) and then asking politely (and sometimes a little doe-eyed mournfully) for what I want.

Maybe this is more for the hoi polloi than the power players of politics.

But it leaves me feeling like I have a mild case of Asperger's syndrome every time I get confronted with one of these odd social situations that everyone else thinks/feels one way and I think/feel another.

P.S. Another case in point: my CE just recently left the company. So we had a great big farewell. Quite a number of people were in tears and just caught up in the wave of emotion of ze thing. Meanwhile, I was wondering what the terrible hoohaa was about, it's a positive change for the guy, really, after 14 years in one place, to move on to new challenges.

Then there was a special farewell song number which reduced some folks to more tears... while I was trying not to wince in a socially inappropriate manner at the caterwauling at certain parts of the chorus where... shall we say, people with more heart than talent at singing were regaling us with their passion.

Followed by the completely mind boggling fact that many people love to repeat the obvious over and over. "Wow, so-and-so was crying during the event. Oh, I saw so-and-so trying not to tear up." On and on.

Still trying to figure out the appropriate reply to statements like that.

Um. Yes. I believe that observation is factually correct. So? What is the comment meant to imply? Does the demonstration of visible emotion indicate something positive or negative regarding the other's character? Or do you just wish me to agree with you because it is reinforcing and reassuring in some manner to garner agreement?

That's what goes on in my head anyway. I normally just settle for echoing the other party and go "Yes, I saw it too." And let the rest of my unspoken thought rattle around in my mind for fear of letting others know how crazily different I am from them.

Because the mainstream are mean to different people.

But sheesh, I really don't get it.

Orcland Raiders Suck!

They pummeled me to a draw.



I am tickled pink by my Chaos Blood Bowl team.

As the members level up, they get to pick not just the regular skills every Blood Bowl player has access to, but also 'mutations' as well. Then these mutations turn up on the virtual miniature as well!

My MVP is the guy with two heads (lets him dodge better) and an extra arm (picks up ball, catches, and so on).

What's the Point?

I was playing Blood Bowl (the computerized version) last night when it hit me.

I had spent upwards of 4-6 hours on this singleplayer game, 1-1.5 hours per Blood Bowl match, in an elaborate chess-like turn-based game working my digital miniatures to greater gold and glory in a big sports campaign (didn't sleep until I won the trophy for one competition, either.)

If you look around, plenty more people are investing this sort of time into Torchlight, Dragon Age, Fallout 3 or Oblivion. For very little tangible return.

So why is it that people feel obliged to ask "What's the point?" of an MMO, but they don't direct the same question to playing singleplayer games?

Aren't singleplayer games even more pointless pursuit in the search of the elusive quantity of fun? You're not even interacting with anybody but yourself!

(This is great setup for a sexual analogy, but let's not go there...)

Bottom line is, I enjoy my singleplayer games, and I enjoy my MMOs, even if they don't do anything but give me warm fuzzy feelings in return for my time.

---

Why do people find it necessary to flagellate themselves searching for the meaning of life in the one true MMO that will replace all forms of entertainment by being the ultimate total immersion experience, then whine about a pointless grind when they can't find that holy grail?

The grind IS gameplay. For that game.

I don't find it necessary to whine that a racing game involves pressing the accelerator and brake button repeatedly in strategic places while going in CIRCLES around a racetrack, and that we 'level' and progress through the game by grinding through tons and tons of racetracks.

If you like it, you play it? If you don't, you don't?

What in the world is different about MMOs? Is it the fact that there is a monthly subscription to justify and rationalize spending? (Nevermind that a singleplayer game costs about 2.5 months subscription.) Is it that the standard MMO, aka WoW in everyone's minds, plays the bait-and-switch gameplay card? So one has to put up with gameplay one does not like, in order to get at gameplay one does?

Different games test different things. Some test tactics and strategy. Some make you use your brain a lot. Some challenge your reflexes, or your visceral response. Some are about persistence and endurance. In return, you get varied kinds of enjoyment and fun.

Why do we keep whining that one MMO didn't give you the fun that you liked? Maybe, just maybe, it isn't trying to be all things to all people.

No Elves

I grinned.

I guess this means I have Teen Crude Humor.

---

I'm quite surprised I haven't paid attention to the game until now, when it's jumping off the top seller charts in Steam and made MMO headlines about how their females are covered in full body armor.



Personally? First three, ok. Fourth one, utterly hot. Big tall Sakura Wars Kanna-lookalike in MECH booted armor.

Fifth one makes me want to run away screaming. There's something distinctly proportionally not right regarding the limb size, positioning and the muscle striations.

Can't say I like the saturn-style power-ranger-esque white and colored boob design, but well, women's lib didn't happen overnight, neither will digital women's lib, I guess.

---

On the actual game front, the FAQ on their website was quite intriguing.

4 'wide' classes: meaning the Assault class can switch roles between a tank and bomb-spraying demolitions guy, the Engineer class can set up defensive turrets as well as run offensive combat drones, the Medic has build alternatives of standard support healer and offensive bioweapons expert, the Recon is stealth/sniper, etc.

Expanding types of gameplay: FPS skill on a basic individual player front, RPG build/stats skill will be tested as you get more advanced, teamwork skill, and then big overall strategic territorial conquest game between guilds (agencies) that...miracle of miracles, RESETS every 45-60 days.

Ye gods, a planned reset. A planned reset. I've been waiting 8 years for a game to pull one of these off properly, let's see if it works.

If they balance and design the overlapping layers well, it can make for some really good deep gameplay. When Natural Selection overlaid RTS atop FPS, the additional learning complexity made me a believer. The problem is if they -don't- do it well, and you end up with cookie cutter builds and a few individuals who overpower any semblance at teamwork and strategy, etc.

Things that put me off slightly: It's in third-person perspective. They explain it pretty well, because jetpacks, grappling onto ledges, melee combat and diving into cover do require a third-person perspective for best situational awareness. Neither can you see your cool armor without it. I just have some hesitancy due to very bad experiences with Tabula Rasa where your paper doll pivots in a retardedly strange manner.

Servers are in North America and future plans are to group by big geographic region. Kudos for remembering to address Asia/Pac and Oceanic concerns. Too few people remember the billions that exist here. Boo for saying you're just 'constantly evaluating' the possibility of a data center in this region based on demand.

300+ ms ping is really quite horrific for an FPS. I've struggled with 230ms on Oceanic servers, which is ok. North America and Team Fortress just don't coincide though.

Of course, Global Agenda is not really an FPS, so they could be telling the truth that some Oceanics didn't have too big an issue with it in alpha. Or it could be just marketing speak.

Open Beta starts today. Looking forward to seeing what people think of it. Except the other news about Global Agenda is how they're having network issues and people can't log in, so their beta launch is delayed.

(Launch time teething woes are NEVER a good sign. Even if it is just beta.)

The Conundrum of Completion

A random surfing of Google will reveal that a goodly number of people are grappling with the question of why we never finish our video games. As contrasted with the apparently higher percentage of people who will finish a movie or read a book to its end. (Frankly, I’m a little dubious about the second example, I have a hunch that quite a number of people these days haven’t finished their books either.)

Of course, the devil’s advocate question that immediately jumps to my mind: is that such a big deal?

True, finishing things is important. We’ve been brought up to think that way ever since we accumulated homework and test papers, which grew up into work/research projects with deadlines attached (“seriousz bizness, yo”) and even the most die-hard procrastinator eventually clues into the fact that there are consequences for completion (or the lack of it.)

But we’re talking about playing games here. Keyword: play. Did we ever ‘finish’ play as a kid?

A toy is open-ended until you grow bored of it. Games might have beginning, middle and ends but some weren’t made that way. Take pacman or the simpler arcade variants – they consisted of harder and harder difficulty levels until you either failed and gave up or were one of the few percentile who worked at learning the game relentlessly until you cycled through all the levels the art designer cared to draw and possibly hit a “The End” screen.

Thus birthed the proud elite who could declare that they ‘beat’ the game.

In general, it seems like narrative game variants who are closer kin to a storybook deliberately make it possible for more people to reach “The End.” The arcade action types fall toward the purposeful separation of the skilled or the ‘hardcore’ (or those with significant time to invest in practising) versus the hoi polloi, the pretenders or the ‘casuals.’

Sometimes a game can contain just too much content for a busy adult to spare time to play through. I can game 2-4 hours every night; it’ll probably take me 2 months to make my way through a game like Morrowind or Oblivion on ONE character if I didn’t get bored first.

Admittedly, a personal flaw comes into play here. I have the video game attention span of a butterfly. If I grok the patterns of a game after a while, and the story + gameplay isn’t a captivating enough experience to invest the hours into it, my subconscious triggers a bunch of emotional and hormonal glands whose joint command directive to my brain and body is ‘Bored, go putz with something else. More shiny, please.”

Sometimes games are designed to never be finished. Or to have various insurmountable degrees of completion by intention. Are you done with a game if you have seen all its maps and levels on ‘easy’ mode? Or must it be on ‘insane’ or ‘nightmare’ to count? What about the use of a cheat code? What about separate ‘challenge’ maps that have increasing high scores and leaderboards to defeat in the vein of oldschool arcades? Or 100% collected all Achievements? Or hidden trophies/banners/tokens, what-have-you? Maybe it doesn’t even have a “The End” (of the singleplayer story) screen – cue MMOs and its ilk.

So frankly, I don’t question why we never finish games. I think it’s only natural.
Instead, my pile of shame becomes the games I haven’t started. Or given a try. Despite the box or the demo or the free trial just sitting on the shelf or its digital equivalent, with the imaginary Alice-in-Wonderland sign pointing to it saying “OPEN ME.”

In it, lies the potential for a wealth of experiences – memorable moments, emotional resonances and the buried capacity to achieve a flow state, intellectual or otherwise.

My only excuse? Nigh-on full hard disk capacity. Leaving me to juggle between the games already existent on the desktop that are congruent with present mood, before getting off my arse to delete and CD-install /disk swap around to new games.

A Strategy Game With No Strategy

Eufloria - A Commentary
I wanted to like this game. I had developed a fondness for minimalist biological-systems reminiscent games since Fl0w, which I enjoyed the heck out of. This hankering for more big things eat small things gameplay led me to Osmos, which is a decent enough puzzler, and eventually led me to try out the Eufloria demo since this is the last chance to stock up on 50% discounted Steam games for 2010 until the next weekend deal.

Here's a good third-party review of Eufloria from IndieGames.com, which again is closest to most of my feelings about this "game."



Interesting (The Innovative and Weird)
Minimalist Real Time Strategy - I really wasn't expecting an RTS. Turns out the pretty flower like seedlings are actually units, which you can point towards different asteroid circles to colonize.

Pros
Pretty Biological Growths - I love the abstract, fractal-y sort of patterns that build up into root and branch-like structures. It's crazy that three colored ovals put together in a certain way remind one of graceful flies and flower petals all at the same time. The way the simple units swarm and attack another colony is a surreal joy to watch, dipping in and out of spirals, bursting into little pastel puffs of color as their digital lives are spent.

Relaxing Ambience / Playable in an Office - It's got the standard funky indie chime-like music, though I don't think it can hold a candle to Osmos' music. It has such a slow and relaxing pace that you could easily alt-tab and go read an article in the other monitor... or conversely, alt-tab and quickly hide the game when you're ostensibly supposed to be working in an office (I tried doing this with Torchlight over the holiday season, shhh... didn't work out well at all - ambushed by mobs on a laggy laptop, was awful.)

Cons
Somnambulant Pace - Problem is, you're going to be wishing you had a fast forward button. x10. It takes time for your Dyson trees to grow more seedlings, to do stuff with, so you'll be sitting around waiting a lot for your population to amass.

A Difficulty Level That is Like This ----------------------------------
aka utterly flat. Or that's how it was for the first 5 levels of the demo, and I couldn't stand going on to level 6 even though the demo allowed me too.

As the review points out, Eufloria's ultimate problem is that it doesn't ramp up the challenge in a way that rewards the player for using different tactics.

Over the course of the 5 levels, I found myself trading off as many seedlings (10 per) for as many Dyson trees I could grow to "pharm more seedlings!" I left a sentinel force of 8-10 seedlings to orbit protectively around the asteroids along the fringes of my territory, because the opposing force would tend to send only about 1-4 'scout' seedlings to test the waters.

Asteroids in the 'back end' of my territory became seedling factories, which I shuttled to the front to build up imposing forces of 30-60 orbiting petals of doom. Following which, I performed the equivalent of a Yamato Battlecruiser rush by sending all of the little zerg seedlings from the front into an unstoppable mass of 80-100 seedlings.

After all, my farms would produce more seedlings which would replace my guardian force, and I could always rush back the offensive force should my own asteroid get attacked.

More often than not, the horde would completely overrun the hapless asteroid I had sent it to, I would plant a tree, and then move the rest of the force on, providing reinforcements as my farms produced them.

One hour of this, and five map levels later, I questioned whether I wanted to even continue with the demo, let alone pay $10 USD for this experience. The answer was no. Seen enough.

Conclusion:
Try the demo to see the pretty digital plants grow. It's free.

Russian Colour Farming

The Void – A Commentary

I recall glancing at the Void on Steam a few times, and thinking it seemed like an FPS set in a surreal setting where you would probably shoot things with colour. Just goes to show you how first impressions can be wrong – but then I mistook World in Conflict for an FPS too from the Steam page and screenshots. After trying the game out, I have the distinct impression that I am playing a weird hybrid cross between Harvest Moon and a random indie game like the Path.

Despite Eurogamer’s poor reputation with reviews since the Darkfall debacle, I find myself in agreement more often than not with their Void review.

Interesting (The Innovative and the Weird)
Painting with Colour Mechanic – The Void is certainly… different… from normal FPSes. On paper, I like gesture-based command gameplay. It’s something not often done, I see it more frequently on the Nintendo DS making use of its touchscreen. I really wish they would select easier symbols or use better symbol recognition though, because I screwed up the Donor symbol multiple times on my trees – with serious impending long-term consequences. And I’m not the only one with this problem.

Colour Farming Mechanic – Sometime amid cycles 2 and 3, when I had finally figured out the general shape of intended gameplay, I started getting the weird sensation that I was playing Harvest Moon, SimFarm, or some other farming/harvest type of crafting game in surreal First Person Perspective . I hadn’t discovered mining colour yet, so my staples involved picking coloured weeds and desperately siphoning off colour like some sort of chromatic herbivorous vampire off my agricultural attempts while letting it bleed off to let time advance so that more trees would grow in the next cycle, etc.

I quite liked the whole baiting with colour thing with the fireflies, but again, if the Donor symbol worked more often than 40% of the time, this would have been more enjoyable.

Colour Resource Management Mechanic – This is one strange central mechanic. And I do agree with what one of the developers said on the forum, they quite misjudged how high to ramp up the difficulty level, because the hearts process colour at a scarily fast pace. Especially when you’re playing through on your first try without reading tons of third party websites before, where the impulse is to stuff your hearts as full as possible with colour, instead of running on life support with only one heart.

Unreliable Game Narrator - Is this the curse of an indie game? As mentioned in the Eurogamer review, you can’t quite shake the feeling that the person who’s taught you stuff may be lying to you. Am I really doing the right thing by strip-mining the landscape of colour in order to stay alive?

Pros
Surreal Beauty – The poetic language and random metaphor need not be commented on. Seems like every indie game needs some literary ambiguity to earn its indie stamp of approval. I am exceptionally fond of the trees of coloured light though, especially how they brighten and dim with luminosity of colour content. Others may enjoy the naked ladies, but being the sort who likes to play monsters in my MMOs, I find the art design of the Brothers quite intriguing, even if I’ve only seen small passport pics of them in my score/goals/who’s who screen.

Forums Support & Great Developers – These two things work in conjunction with each other. I’m quite pleased to see that the developers are very responsive towards their fans, especially the wiki article which said that the devs actually hung around in a comments thread on their pirated game on a popular Russian bittorrent server, responding to questions and encouraging people to buy the game if they liked it. Talk about a clever ‘soft’ way to build up fan devotion and loyalty. It’s true. If people like the game after trying it, they’ll be inclined to purchase if they have the cash to keep their favorite developers going.

I’m also impressed by the ‘bonus’ content that the developers just freely gave away on bittorrent. Why not? For an indie game it certainly builds goodwill.

Also impressive, the unofficial FAQ which addressed all the grumpy nitpicks I had about the game – where my 1680x1050 monitor resolution went, why the heck won’t the game recognize my Donor glyph, and why I keep getting dry heaves lurching about in the world. Haven’t tried using any of the suggested fixes yet, but at least I’m not alone in facing the problem, and someone recognises there’s enough of a problem to warrant keeping a list of suggested fixes around.

Cons
Motion Sickness – I honestly don’t know if it’s the head-bobbing at fault. It could be the ‘stutter’ effect on moving as someone pointed out in the abovementioned forums. It gets me a little grumpy that I will have to go through trial-and-error complicated tweaking in order to NOT feel discomfited… I generally don’t have a problem with most FPSes, except Half Life 2 (which was apparently a field of vision issue). I wonder if The Void has a FOV control?

Slow Pacing – This in conjunction with motion sickness makes the game doubly hard. The default run is bloody slow. It’s not much quicker than the walk. Perhaps this was done to make the blue ‘speed’ colour more significant, but I sure don’t get much of it at the beginning, necessitating a weird moon-hop where I mini-superjump around to get anywhere at a decent pace, resulting in further motion sickness.

Difficulty – There’s games which are founded on trial and error and slow exploration and discovery. There’s games which use a time limit to add pressure. A game which incorporates both, with the penalty of failure being death and reload, is HARD. No two ways about it. I’m already bitching quite nastily about Dragon Age being quite tough because I have to trial-and-error to find out what encounters I can survive, with a death penalty of reloaded game, and they don’t have any time limit. I’m certainly not thrilled to discover from reading that The Void has a 35 cycle limit to complete the whole game. I was midway through cycle 4-5 where I finally dried up out of colour on my first go. I’m not sure I can last so many repeated trials at resource management with so slow a pace before I finally give up.

Ironically, to address this, the developer provides cheats. While I heartily approve of the responsivity, I really question the rationale which says, ok, here, use these console commands, cheat your way through this to experience the story and finish the game – before even providing any strategic hints.

Is this a game or is this a story? Is the resource management mechanic an intrinsic part of the game to be mastered, or just an obstacle in the way of story completion? If it’s not even related, should it even be in the game? Can’t the game just be about doing stuff with colour without having to harvest, farm and juggle colours?

Conclusion
I do think all games are worth a play-through, if only to figure out what’s different and what’s not. The Void contains innovative mechanics by the paletteful (pardon the pun), and is so definitely worth a look.

I do find moment-to-moment gameplay an important criteria in retaining my attention on a game though, which is more of a sticky issue where The Void is concerned. There are instances which I find quite magical – infusing color into the trees, powering up something which apparently is a Brother trap, baiting fireflies, but most of the game is a very slow plodding nauseating (in a physical manner) drag which makes me question how long I can repeat it without resorting to a cheat code. Most tellingly, someone wondered on the forums if there was a noclip flight style cheat – maybe he’s sick of climbing staircases and platforming?

I guess I’m finding it quite difficult to resolve the underlying game mechanic with its story setting. The time limit and harsh death penalty forces me into a metagame mindset, which then makes me feel like I’m playing some sort of twisted Harvest Moon/Lost in Blue farming/survival sim where I need to make a net profit in order to stay alive. But my ultimate goal is to visit all the sisters and chambers in order to find out what is going on, aka a discovery/exploration type of goal, since I don’t even know who I am?

It doesn’t match any of my set genre expectations of survival horror adventure game, that’s for sure. Not much horror. Not much adventure. Plenty of survival. And they missed out the farming and resource management part.

All in all, quite strange.

The Sandbox is Really a Sandy Corridor

Whoever set Dragon Age's pacing and gating locks got it all wrong.

In RPGs, especially Bioware ones, we are used to certain areas being locked out and inaccessible if you're not a certain level. Often, there are story-based 'keys' to fetch on item-errand quests or unclimbable invisible walls and other such tropes. Take things to a crazy extreme, and you get the oft-laughed at situation in Neverwinter Nights where all you really want is to get past a goddamn city gate, and the game essentially sends you on the equivalent of Hercules' 12 Trials (or 4 special zones) in order to prove to the gatekeeper that you're plague-free...or a demi-god or something.

In Dragon Age, the designer was a bit too super-sensitive about such story locks, and instead decided to take a page from MMOs. (Again.) In MMOs, ostensibly, we are locked out via certain zones having monsters far above your level, which suggest, after a few deaths, that you better not be in there yet.

However, they forgot to look at the REST of the design factors that make this viable in MMOs, as opposed to Dragon Age.

MMOs are already broken up into such level-based zones, which are often clearly demarcated from the get-go. Such and such is level 35-50. This place is level 5-10, etc. Even if you cannot tell, wandering in the vincinity will let you 'con' a mob, and see exactly what numerical value it is. Mobs are also all generally color coded for difficulty, so if you wander into a region full of a sea of red names, the tendency is to meander back out in a hurry... without engaging any of these monsters in battle and subsequent horrific death.

Quests in MMOs are also broken up by these level-based zones, so you have to go to the area to get your full money's worth of fetch and kill 'em quests. Furthermore, the quests that point you to the zones in MMOs are very often set for your level - once you hit level 5, a quest will point you to the level 5 zone, ditto when you hit level 20 and are ready to 'graduate' onto the next zone.

Conversely in Dragon Age, the STORY is everything. After a decently paced linear tutorial and introduction on railroads, the game ostensibly opens up and lets you go anywhere you want. Your choice. You gotta rally the three races and the mages to your banner (each conveniently in a separate zone), you can go to two main cities, or one of your party mates -strongly- suggest you stop over by a dinky little village before heading elsewhere.

EXCEPT, as you later find out through nasty trial-and-error and some third party website reading, the two main cities have encounters with a challenge level set for level 10s, the mage and human places are for level 6+, the elf place is for level 7+, and the dinky little village is supposedly set for level 5+. I forgot what level the dwarves are, probably 6-8+.

Your party meanwhile at this point is about level 4-5 if you're lucky. Level scaling is supposed to bring down the levels, but as you'll soon discover, set piece battles are less about slight differences in numerical value and more about how much fucking crowd control and other utility options you have to stop 15 skeletons eating your face.

Of course, your NPC options at this point are a) a warrior, b) a mage with no heals and limited crowd control. If you go to the dinky little village, you may get a) a warrior, b) a rogue. That's some tanks or DPS depending on how you spec them, but where are the heals and support? I guess if you didn't pick the right PC from the start, you're kinda screwed.

According to the forums, you are thus best advised to head straight for the mage tower to pick up your friendly healing NPC, or was that the human place?

For sure, if you try roleplaying as I did, and figure that a city elf might want to check out how her country cousins live as her first stop, you will promptly be plonked down into an intended for level 7+ zone and funneled through a dungeon crawl with a DRAGON (mini, though it is) and should you sneak past that after dying 7 times, be confronted with a set piece ambush encounter of 12+ skeletons intent on eating face who will CHASE you down with no aggro wearing off, only to find out that you cannot change zones while in combat.

This, say the designers, is intended to let me know that I might not be skilled enough for this encounter yet and that I should come back later.

So hang on, let me get this straight, after dying and reloading my game several bazillion times to try out a few dozen strategies that don't work, you want me to reload again to retrace my steps out of 3 dungeon crawl maps to go back to the elves and say, hang on guys, all your quests are on hold until I gain a few levels?

(Suspend some story disbelief here, in RP terms I'm saying: the werewolves can keep eating you guys for a while longer, I'm going out to the humans and the mages for some more adventure levels and pick up the healer NPC before I can fight the dragon and the skeletons blocking the way to the werewolves' lair in order to free you guys from the curse)

Ok, I lied a little. I probably won't -need- the healer NPC because my damage mage picked up a heal when she leveled. I'd probably have a much easier time of it with an NPC specced for it though, regardless of how annoying her personality might be.

But I'm kinda miffed to find out that there are ways I'm -supposed- to be playing this game. Cookie cutter ones. And yet, with no better design to encourage this cookie cutter-ness except by dying horrendously on 'normal' difficulty setting.

Speaking of which, the default settings of Dragon Age are all wrong. A couple nights ago, I tweaked my mad characters again and got them to hold in place by toggling the option. They no longer attack -anything- unless told to, but at least they stay still and don't squirm all over the place. I tweaked my mage's tactics once again and actually got her casting heal and damage spells on a regular basis, while staying at range intelligently, and she's quite a sight now - but seriously, why do I have to programme individual NPCs for this? I didn't have to do this crap for Baldur's Gate, KOTOR or Mass Effect, the default worked decently, what's changed?

Sometimes, I'm tempted to just quit my city elf rogue roleplaying game, roll up a PC mage, run straight to pick up the damage mage NPC and the healer mage NPC, run to pick up the Stone Golem 'premium content' NPC tank, and then mow through the rest of the game that way.

Trusty AI

I've finally gotten a handle on what disconcerts me so in Dragon Age combat. I can't trust my characters to act intelligently. Or indeed, do what I tell them to. I can issue a move order, the PC in question will head towards where I point them, and halfway there the AI will take over and decide charging headlong at the enemy which has crossed their path is a better response.

This really aggravates me because I then have a tank who will not draw threat on the correct enemy, a rogue which will NOT move into position to backstab (yes, I know there are 3 other loose enemies, but you are not a tank, you are DPS and supposed to be burning the one target down before the tank dies) and a mage who liked to run up and thwap things with her stick before I figured out that I could switch her tactics to ranged. She still however does not cast spells intelligently, forcing me to manual control her, which leaves the other two open to getting mauled. At least the dog is simple enough to handle.

Meanwhile, the game enjoys sending about 8-10 NPCs after my party of 4. Without decent crowd control or heals or indeed any semblance of taunting, this often feels patently unfair when you're still fighting for control with your own characters.

http://toblender.com/comic/dragon-age-ai/

Contrast this with World in Conflict's AI, which is so intelligent, I can issue a move order to any squad and they will shoot at any enemy within range, often eliminating them before I even register their presence, as long as I move them in a combined arms fashion with anti-tank to take care of the armor, anti-air to take care of helicopters, etc.

You can only deal with overall strategic command if you can trust your units to take decent care of themselves and give a good accounting.

On an MMO front, this has implications for companion types, I expect. LOTRO's skirmish companions seem bare bones enough - the melee'rs tangle up in melee, you can very slowly blow a horn to direct them elsewhere, the archer shoots, and my favorite, the healer just stands back and heals the crap out of me and other fighting NPCs. She's not smart enough to back away when things charge her, but I suppose that's where my tank and aggro control comes in and feels important - so Working As Intended.

Guild War's AI now. Generally quite decent as long as you've got the right skills. Heck, you can trust your party to hold their own even if you accidentally die, and they'll get around to rezzing you when they can. It's still quite masterful how they made even a PvE encounter feel a bit like a PvP fight, but in this case, the AI is good on both fronts, and so is balanced.

In Dragon Age, I feel like I'm commanding a bunch of uncoordinated retards up against spetnaz commando hireling mercenaries. Recipe for utter humiliating faceplanting defeat, anyone?