Telanoc: You want to know the three secrets to ATITD Rob?
Telanoc: 1) Invest in infrastructure. Even if you aren't going to use it all the time, it will in the long run.
Telanoc: 2) Don't be a dick. People will help you a lot, unless you are a dick
Telanoc: 3) Don't be afraid to try. You might fail, but then you will know
Pameow: almost agree, one thing, you can be a dick and do it solo!
Pameow: but a lot easier to do point 2
Pameow: can you add point )4) tel, make goal commensurate with amount of playtime and committment, and be prepared to change goal if needs be
Telanoc: That is true Pam
Telanoc: Oh, and there really is a point 5) Don't compare yourself to anyone but yourself. You aren't going to be the best at everything. You can try, but don't sweat it if you aren't
Pameow: I so love that one, condensed to compete against yourself
One of those things that keep drawing me back to A Tale in the Desert is the sense of oldschool camaraderie... the MUD-like continuity, if you will... the tangible sense of history, with wise old vets (and their evil mirror counterparts, the elitist jerks).
It's just...nice.
Maybe it tweaks some ancient Explorer desires in me, that there can be secrets and trivia and knowledge to accrue. Too often, MMOs are just "Raraarrgggh, level level gold gold kill big boss!" with blinders on.
Telanoc is an ATITD developer, and has played since Tale 1, so every now and again, he's got interesting stuff to share. Yes, a lot of GMs and devs are also players in ATITD, and while there is probably some of that oldschool "I know an imm!" cheating going on, eh, it is very MUD-like.
(Let's face it, Ascendere had an imm's ear. As our own imms got more powerful up the scale, we got away with more shit too. Not to say there was any open rules breaking, but we're talking, "hey, this mob is stuck, or this thing isn't working, can you check it for us?" "haha, plspls, auth this name" kinda social engineering stuff.
Let's not even TALK about Inconnu and Kali either, eh?)
But sometimes, this sort of insider knowledge can be helpful for the game and for veteran players' continued enjoyment. As fruitless as our joint Inc/DS/Asc venture into Kali's crazy revamped Tower of Despair was, there is a certain spice to knowing that an imm is watching your every move and basically being beta testers for something.
Something else that was quite curious is an incident I missed in ATITD. The discovery of silver. I wasn't online for the crucial 12 hours, so I missed all the excitement and people dumping mines willy nilly. Curiously enough, gold caps the silver vein, and usually there's room enough only for 3-4 mines at most. So a selfish group can easily hog all the gold and ruin future progress.
On T4A, they pretty much left it be, assuming that 1000+ players would be able to find more silver, and some folks will be bound to make their gold mines public. On T4B, because there's only about 350 players and not very many hardcore vets, it's less likely another vein of silver/gold will be found. Curiously enough, a public gold mine turned up, built by Telanoc.
Now did he just luck out and build his silver mine and find it gold, then decide to share it? Or did he have some insider dev knowledge as to where the gold was (easy enough for a dev to set their stats high enough to detect it) and go plonk the public mine down to make life easier for Egypt?
Anyway, sidetreked. Commentary on the wisdom itself.
The infrastructure is something I'm slowly getting a handle on. My first time in game was the common newbie mistake of making the bare minimum because we just wanted one of every type. This can become a pain the moment anything is time dependent cos there's a lot more waiting involved.
I ran into the mistakes of making -just- enough and not having stockpiles. Which meant of course, every time you have a recipe for a piece of equipment that requires 100 bricks, 50 boards, 8 rope, etc. you'd end up picking grass for futurebricks, getting wood and slate for futureboards, growing flax seeds for futureflax for futurerope. And that's just a blinding pain to switch activities like that. Learned quite early on to have a ton of these common materials on hand in a warehouse where one can just pulled them out and dump them into things.
I still didn't envision a big enough compound for my future needs. After losing the will to expand my dinky little compound any further, I migrated across the peninsula to the huge guild next door and gradually lost the will to hang around attempting to pass tests.
I lost sight of point 4). Which is to have an envisioned goal. Or rather, I did have an envisioned goal. Try out all the activities and minigames in ATITD at least once, or see it at least. I hit that to the limit of Teppy's future game Test releases, and then I got bored waiting for 2 months with nothing new to do.
Point 2) is amusing. I've been helped a lot. I guess I know how to project myself as essentially harmless. :P
Point 3) is like some sort of subliminal message to randomly trial-and-error stuff. I get the urge to run around dumping mines in random places every time I read that, in the hope of striking the lottery.
But well, it's a whole life lesson too.
Point 5) is something I wish more people would really follow. Admittedly, I used to feel it myself, and still do, from time to time, even though I'm not really mentally built for people comparisons.
It's all tradeoffs of time. Yes, the vets know how to manage time better, and thus will have more stuff. That goes without saying.
But if one focuses here, then one is unable to focus there, and so on. Unless one plays 24/7 with bots, but one is still limited eventually.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Words of Wisdom from Telanoc, ATITD dev
Unedited for now:
Pameow: make the goal = the time committment
Daniels: Robkin is pretty hardcorel ol
Telanoc: Wait, people spend less than 18 hours a day here?!? :)
Pameow: hehe
Robkin: my time here will slow down some
Daniels: nothing wrong with that
Robkin: but I still will have a good amount of playtime
Telanoc: You want to know the three secrets to ATITD Rob?
Daniels: on t4a, I was a power player... but I had friends who played slower, but passed twice as many tests as me
Robkin: I have watch your youtubes on making steel
Tamutnefret: Tale 3 was about the only one I cared about tests in :)
Robkin: Have fun, do what you what and have fun
Daniels: Oh.. help it helps when we get alloys :)
Tamutnefret: Allllloyyyyys
Telanoc: 1) Invest in infrastructure. Even if you aren't going to use it all the time, it will in the long run.
Tamutnefret: Alloys are the new silver!
Telanoc: 2) Don't be a dick. People will help you a lot, unless you are a dick
Daniels loves alloys.. and nods to tel
tehm: I want to find rainbow sprinkles in my food to tell me I'm close to a masterpiece
Tamutnefret: lol
Pameow: hehe
Panya: hahaha
Pameow reading Teanoc's points
Telanoc: 3) Don't be afraid to try. You might fail, but then you will know
Robkin: very true Telanoc
Pameow: almost agree, one thing, you can be a dick and do it solo!
Robkin: I have to say i 'm very happy with the group in RSRS
Daniels nods.. and don't get pissed at bugs ;P
Tamutnefret: Now now Pam, not this tale :)
Pameow: but a lot easier to do point 2
Tamutnefret: Some you squash the bug, sometimes the bug squashes you.
Robkin: speaking of bug I need to put another cage out and get another cage
tehm: lol
Pameow: can you add point )4) tel, make goal commensurate with amount of playtime and committment, and be prepared to change goal if needs be
Telanoc: That is true Pam
Telanoc: And I keep telling you, you were never a dick in T3 :P
Robkin: i was fennec trap checking and found 3 cages within 20 cords of each other
Robkin: got to love people yo udrop cages in fennec trap areas
Telanoc: So I once thought I found a great spot for a cage, nothing around forever in the run up, so I placed it. Only to crest the next hill right into someone's camp
Robkin: lol
Telanoc: Oh, and there really is a point 5) Don't compare yourself to anyone but yourself. You aren't going to be the best at everything. You can try, but don't sweat it if you aren't
Robkin: I figure that out
Pameow: I so love that one, condensed to compete against yourself
Robkin: too much to do to do everything
Robkin: everything I have passed , has been better easy cause I was earl to do it
Telanoc: Some tests work better if you do them later, some not
Pameow: these points would be great on the guild page Tel, can we put them up?
Telanoc: Sure Pam
Pameow: ok :)
Telanoc wonders if people still read the New Player Guide on the wiki
Pameow: make the goal = the time committment
Daniels: Robkin is pretty hardcorel ol
Telanoc: Wait, people spend less than 18 hours a day here?!? :)
Pameow: hehe
Robkin: my time here will slow down some
Daniels: nothing wrong with that
Robkin: but I still will have a good amount of playtime
Telanoc: You want to know the three secrets to ATITD Rob?
Daniels: on t4a, I was a power player... but I had friends who played slower, but passed twice as many tests as me
Robkin: I have watch your youtubes on making steel
Tamutnefret: Tale 3 was about the only one I cared about tests in :)
Robkin: Have fun, do what you what and have fun
Daniels: Oh.. help it helps when we get alloys :)
Tamutnefret: Allllloyyyyys
Telanoc: 1) Invest in infrastructure. Even if you aren't going to use it all the time, it will in the long run.
Tamutnefret: Alloys are the new silver!
Telanoc: 2) Don't be a dick. People will help you a lot, unless you are a dick
Daniels loves alloys.. and nods to tel
tehm: I want to find rainbow sprinkles in my food to tell me I'm close to a masterpiece
Tamutnefret: lol
Pameow: hehe
Panya: hahaha
Pameow reading Teanoc's points
Telanoc: 3) Don't be afraid to try. You might fail, but then you will know
Robkin: very true Telanoc
Pameow: almost agree, one thing, you can be a dick and do it solo!
Robkin: I have to say i 'm very happy with the group in RSRS
Daniels nods.. and don't get pissed at bugs ;P
Tamutnefret: Now now Pam, not this tale :)
Pameow: but a lot easier to do point 2
Tamutnefret: Some you squash the bug, sometimes the bug squashes you.
Robkin: speaking of bug I need to put another cage out and get another cage
tehm: lol
Pameow: can you add point )4) tel, make goal commensurate with amount of playtime and committment, and be prepared to change goal if needs be
Telanoc: That is true Pam
Telanoc: And I keep telling you, you were never a dick in T3 :P
Robkin: i was fennec trap checking and found 3 cages within 20 cords of each other
Robkin: got to love people yo udrop cages in fennec trap areas
Telanoc: So I once thought I found a great spot for a cage, nothing around forever in the run up, so I placed it. Only to crest the next hill right into someone's camp
Robkin: lol
Telanoc: Oh, and there really is a point 5) Don't compare yourself to anyone but yourself. You aren't going to be the best at everything. You can try, but don't sweat it if you aren't
Robkin: I figure that out
Pameow: I so love that one, condensed to compete against yourself
Robkin: too much to do to do everything
Robkin: everything I have passed , has been better easy cause I was earl to do it
Telanoc: Some tests work better if you do them later, some not
Pameow: these points would be great on the guild page Tel, can we put them up?
Telanoc: Sure Pam
Pameow: ok :)
Telanoc wonders if people still read the New Player Guide on the wiki
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Patience Has Its Own Reward
Woot. L4D2 sale is FINALLY on. I nabbed it. Cleaned out enough of my hard disk to download it. Happily, it downloaded at a blazing 1.2 mb/s. I see Valve has a nice huge fat wallet and pipeline.
Ironically, I haven't had time to play it yet.
Hence the post topic's title, which also refers to other things.
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising expansion is taunting me on Steam for $29.99. I greatly desire it. I am a complete Warhammer 40k fan. It's actually not that much in the larger scheme of things - canceling the LOTRO subscription, small as it is, managed to make my dad comment, "wha, spent so little this month?" as he looked through the credit card bill. (And yes, there is no such thing as privacy in this household.)
It's just that after buying THQ products at full price for 3+ games and expansions, to see it offer 50-66% sales on Steam practically every quarter last year, it is quite galling to buy their next game at full price.
If I exercised a little patience, it would be mine. Course, I wouldn't get to play it until -later-, but that is the advantage of buying full price versus discounted. *sighs*
In other news, Aion seems to be falling further and further off the radar. I might stop. I think I will check in on the NCsoft page and see how many months I have left to go on that. I can always renew when I get the urge. (Vanity in leet armor only goes so far for me, I guess.)
At the same time, we have the last survivor on the MMO backlist. City of Heroes. Call me greedy, but the vet awards they are dangling are too appealing to let go of my subscription at present. I like the insider factor of getting first dibs at closed beta access and what not.
The question is: should I pre-order? Honestly, I'm not so sure anymore. The advantage of pre-ordering is to unlock dual pistols and demon summoning earlier. Except I'm not playing and not likely to play seriously until Going Rogue opens out new content - I might check out the spiffy new graphics of Dark Mirror, but...
If I wait, I get Going Rogue, 30 days, and the Item Pack for $39.99.
If I buy it now, I get Going Rogue and preliminary access to the stuff they might dangle first for $29.99. And then I have to upgrade with a separate purchase to the Item Pack, with no 30 days. Let's face it, the price point is going to be at least $5-$10. Likely ten bucks, following all the other packs. So I'd lose out on 30 days and gain pre-access to dual pistols and demon summoning for the same price.
Ie. paying a month's subscription for the privilege of pre-access.
At the moment, I rather get another free month as I'm not currently playing.
My current online poison is doing quite well. There is something terribly appealing about dual-alting and macro'ing on a game that actually legally allows it (as long as you're not AFK macro'ing - at which point they have grounds to do horrible things to you. There are folks who push the boundaries, but I am not the type, I'm not in a hurry to be first at anything in the game anyway.)
The keys are patience and self-defined goals.
The first key I understood in the first Telling I played. Time is a resource. All subscription-based MMOs would love folks to remain subscribed longer. So the best way to avoid any kind of fight is to let the most competitive guys win and lose interest, at which point you step in opportunistically before the lackadaisical ones, and voila, ding ding.
The second key, alas, gave way to laziness and expediency the first time around. Being new and not able to pre-anticipate the oncoming changes, I found myself trailing further and further behind the vets. To the point that my dinky little compound became quite pointless to maintain, and it was easier to sit and share Zfree's guild facilities.
Except... for the burden of social obligations. A shared resource warehouse means you feel obligated to replace the stock as quickly as possible, lest the others think you are a parasite. You feel obliged to do more in order to look good. You end up having to say "Hi" every time you log in and engage in chitchat.
The faster folk get all the building and hard stuff done first. Leaving nothing to do but maintenance chores. The layout is not decided or controlled by you, so you have to adjust to somebody else's decor.
There are advantages too, of course, I'm just laying out the one-sided perspective of why it got burdensome.
So this second try at the fourth Tale has been an eye-opener in different ways. While I'm now coming from a large guild background and desire that sort of layout, I get to build it incrementally all by myself now.
I don't have to worry about falling behind for a while, because there is a humongous guild known as Camel Sands who has set up explosively huge public works at the centre of town.
There's no way I'm catching up with their level of industry, but I don't need to. I just need enough stuff to keep myself going.
Ironically, I haven't had time to play it yet.
Hence the post topic's title, which also refers to other things.
Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising expansion is taunting me on Steam for $29.99. I greatly desire it. I am a complete Warhammer 40k fan. It's actually not that much in the larger scheme of things - canceling the LOTRO subscription, small as it is, managed to make my dad comment, "wha, spent so little this month?" as he looked through the credit card bill. (And yes, there is no such thing as privacy in this household.)
It's just that after buying THQ products at full price for 3+ games and expansions, to see it offer 50-66% sales on Steam practically every quarter last year, it is quite galling to buy their next game at full price.
If I exercised a little patience, it would be mine. Course, I wouldn't get to play it until -later-, but that is the advantage of buying full price versus discounted. *sighs*
In other news, Aion seems to be falling further and further off the radar. I might stop. I think I will check in on the NCsoft page and see how many months I have left to go on that. I can always renew when I get the urge. (Vanity in leet armor only goes so far for me, I guess.)
At the same time, we have the last survivor on the MMO backlist. City of Heroes. Call me greedy, but the vet awards they are dangling are too appealing to let go of my subscription at present. I like the insider factor of getting first dibs at closed beta access and what not.
The question is: should I pre-order? Honestly, I'm not so sure anymore. The advantage of pre-ordering is to unlock dual pistols and demon summoning earlier. Except I'm not playing and not likely to play seriously until Going Rogue opens out new content - I might check out the spiffy new graphics of Dark Mirror, but...
If I wait, I get Going Rogue, 30 days, and the Item Pack for $39.99.
If I buy it now, I get Going Rogue and preliminary access to the stuff they might dangle first for $29.99. And then I have to upgrade with a separate purchase to the Item Pack, with no 30 days. Let's face it, the price point is going to be at least $5-$10. Likely ten bucks, following all the other packs. So I'd lose out on 30 days and gain pre-access to dual pistols and demon summoning for the same price.
Ie. paying a month's subscription for the privilege of pre-access.
At the moment, I rather get another free month as I'm not currently playing.
My current online poison is doing quite well. There is something terribly appealing about dual-alting and macro'ing on a game that actually legally allows it (as long as you're not AFK macro'ing - at which point they have grounds to do horrible things to you. There are folks who push the boundaries, but I am not the type, I'm not in a hurry to be first at anything in the game anyway.)
The keys are patience and self-defined goals.
The first key I understood in the first Telling I played. Time is a resource. All subscription-based MMOs would love folks to remain subscribed longer. So the best way to avoid any kind of fight is to let the most competitive guys win and lose interest, at which point you step in opportunistically before the lackadaisical ones, and voila, ding ding.
The second key, alas, gave way to laziness and expediency the first time around. Being new and not able to pre-anticipate the oncoming changes, I found myself trailing further and further behind the vets. To the point that my dinky little compound became quite pointless to maintain, and it was easier to sit and share Zfree's guild facilities.
Except... for the burden of social obligations. A shared resource warehouse means you feel obligated to replace the stock as quickly as possible, lest the others think you are a parasite. You feel obliged to do more in order to look good. You end up having to say "Hi" every time you log in and engage in chitchat.
The faster folk get all the building and hard stuff done first. Leaving nothing to do but maintenance chores. The layout is not decided or controlled by you, so you have to adjust to somebody else's decor.
There are advantages too, of course, I'm just laying out the one-sided perspective of why it got burdensome.
So this second try at the fourth Tale has been an eye-opener in different ways. While I'm now coming from a large guild background and desire that sort of layout, I get to build it incrementally all by myself now.
I don't have to worry about falling behind for a while, because there is a humongous guild known as Camel Sands who has set up explosively huge public works at the centre of town.
There's no way I'm catching up with their level of industry, but I don't need to. I just need enough stuff to keep myself going.
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Maps of the Underworld
One thing I've certainly ruined myself for is playing ATITD without a second account again.
It's quite admirable how the game is designed to be playable singly, have additional options and smoother flow when playing with another (be it your own mule or a friend) and expand further into advantangeousness in a group of 4 (be it two people with mules of their own, or four singles or a mix thereof), and further on into 7 or 11 or 21 or larger groups.
I have gotten very comfortable with dual-logging and ferrying things from one place to another on an alt while the main is off doing work I have to pay attention to. I just recently married myself (:P not blind yet!) and am delighting in the bonus known as spousewarp - which allows you to teleport to wherever your spouse is, -without- paying any travel time or any cost at all.
Unenhanced stat timers are (and I suspect, designed on purpose) to last about double the length of time it takes to click and operate whatever it is you're doing.
This means as one player, you're stuck waiting for 5-7 seconds (an interminable amount of time) for the one stat to refresh, unless you get a stat bonus by some means or another.
With a second person around (your friend or your mule), you two can alternate the action, and you have about 2-3 seconds wait time in between, which feels distinctly better a wait.
I've also recently discovered two quite fun activities which are MUCH better done in a duo whose minds a single person controls. Prospecting for marble and dowsing metal ores.
Marble prospecting is one of those hardcoded 'duo' activities. This frustratingly essentially locked me out of it in the Tale 4 Server A (henceforth T4A). Well, yes, I could have asked another human to do it with me, provided they had the same time I had, and the patience to wait as I learned how to prospect, or maybe they would have just ordered me around 'stand here, wait there' and did it by themselves. If I'd been a little less paranoid and more resourceful, I could have married another real human being, then dual-logged his/her character (didn't know how to run two clients at that time, no impetus to learn), but yea, me, not paranoid? Ha, dream on.
Ok. Sidetreked. Back to business. To prospect for marble requires one person to 'attune' themselves to a particular type of marble, and have the perception stat be high enough to detect it. They get loads of slate, and then has a second person be within 30 coords of them, and hit 'prospect.' This sends a little circular scan out between the two parties, and if any of that marble is present, two slate breaks. If not, one slate breaks. The idea is to narrow down that distance until both parties are standing practically on the same space, at which point, you drop your stone quarry and voila, marble!
This is both a very nice close duo activity, or a dual-account paradise. In one, it takes a little longer but you get to chat and verbally discuss what to do as you're doing it. In the latter, you're pretty much mumbling and taking notes with yourself and moving the two folks exactly where you want them with none of the false starts and errors the moment a second real person gets involved.
I like it.
Besides the fact that it eats slate, meaning I have to macro for more (thank goodness for a fantastic slate macro written by this other ATITD player). If I want to macro on both chars, I have to open my laptop though, so that is somewhat annoying.
It sorta reminds me of a kind of mapping. And we all know how fanatical I got about mapping in RoD - for whatever reason, the idea of a systematic, methodical approach to unlocking secrets only a few people understand is very thrilling to me. (Yes, I am aware this is called scientific research IRL, but then, in a game, I can stop when it is no longer fun without worrying about any other consequences, and in a game, there IS a right answer programmed in.)
The only slight hitch is that until automated gearboxes arrive, I can't actually pull the marble out of the quarry with two people. I need four.
Fortunately in T4B, I seem to have attached myself to a pair of vets that provide the other labour. Or rather, they attached themselves to the area I had staked out for myself (across the river) and turned themselves into neighbors. It's all good, because I'm at that stage in the game where I need intermediate/advanced-level guidance and listening in to their guild chat and trailing along like a shadow is doing wonders for my knowledge.
Which brings me to the other activity which could turn into a long-term project was I so inclined...
Mines. The heartblood of Egypt. In T4A, the bulk of the dowsing for metal ores was done by a very pro group of players, about 5-7 in number. We were greatly fortunate in Zfree (our guild) to have one of their number (Amhur) within us. I think he was mutually making use of our guildmaster Wampak's prodigious building capacity to provide materials for mines - so whatever he dowsed, he could dump a mine or three on the spot to immediately claim a substantial share for ourselves before opening it up to others.
The other thing they were doing was massively overdosing on herbs and chocolate. See, eating herbs provided stats. And herb-stacking, or eating a second herb before the first one wore off provided about x2 the amount of stats. For a while, before Teppy the dev caught wind of it and fixed it so that there were diminishing returns.
Then chocolate was given away as a contest prize, and our guild won about 3-5 each player. The choco-stack exploit was born. Teppy had fixed herbs, but he had forgotten chocolate. So now, eating a herb, then eating a chocolate, then eating a second herb again provided the same crazy stacked stats as before. We pooled nearly all of our chocolate into a little box for Amhur.
(Eventually Teppy discovered this little exploit too, but he rather liked the idea, so he fixed it such that eating chocolate would now 'recall' the stats that were previously affecting a player, but the crazy stat-stacking effect was nerfed for good.)
But what, you may ask, was this obsession on stacked stats for?
Y'see, the increasingly rare metals are only detectable on dowsing with high enough levels of perception. The frequency of dowsing is determined by how high focus you have. And the range of detection of an ore vein is determined by how high your con is. High dexterity increases the speed at which you run across wilderness.
So basically we had a supercharged Amhur racing across Egypt finding metal via random dowsing, and then following the metal veins and doing his thing, whatever his thing was, he never told us much.
No doubt, there were maybe 1-3 other folk doing the same thing, possibly supported by groups of others, but that was about it. The 4-5 of them got together in a dowsing guild, discussed their little theories amongst themselves, but at the time I had lots of other things to worry about learning, and found that inching along 2 coords at a time by myself clicking a button every 10-15 seconds was an exceedingly boring affair, and didn't bother further. After all, I had open access to the guilded mines once they were built, I'd leave it to the pros to do the scut work.
Enter T4B, and it's suddenly a whole different story.
Y'see, Teppy never intended for chocostack. Nor did he intend (much) on folks plonking random mines down and hitting greatly searched-for metal veins. Except in Tales 1-3, that is exactly what happened when Egypt as a whole hit the research bottleneck of Casting, which requires Silver. at a perception of 19 to detect - except you cannot get much higher perception than 4, 7 if you're crazed and lucky on herb spawns, as none of the techs like cooking for stats and so on are unlockable until Casting is opened.
Catch-22.
In Tale 4 A, chocostack brought us the metal. But now, in T4B, we do not have that any longer. We are down to two options, rely on a random hit to find silver (of which, many will be doing) or deduce what Teppy intended us to deduce about the patterns of metal veins.
We had an interesting breakthrough last night. Or at least tehm did. He is apparently tehmoosh from T4A, and whom I note was in the same pack of 7 that Amhur used to run with. He has a friend with him called Verix, who is a vet all the way from Tale 1, I just don't know his T4A name yet. The two of 'em have fascinating conversations with each other.
The weird neighbor is pibe, who is an odd blend of vet and enthusiastic newbie, and somewhat full-on strangeness. It's ok, we can't all be intellectuals, we'd end up killing each other, so it's good we're all at least somewhat different. Verix stays more at home, but he seems to be a planner and a strategist. He's hopefully good at cooking. He's quieter. tehm is a charismatic guy who communicates with all of Egypt, does trades, runs around dowsing and doing other shit, etc. pibe's good for not making me have to reinvent the wheel. lol.
I guess I am the weird slacker dual-logging powergamer who builds ambitious structures but at a slower pace than everybody else. I can't help it. There are tech bottlenecks which are SO obviously bottlenecks. There are also public works guilds who willingly grind through the bottleneck, and then open up the equipment so that other people can skip the scut work, and now my neighborhood's guild which I am gaining access to.
Rationality insists that I don't run the same merry-go-around as everyone else. I mean, SOMEBODY has to use the stuff the public works guilds put out so that their effort does not go to waste, right? All I need to do is wait a couple of days, they grind through the bottleneck, and by using their equipment for just a few times, I get the starter material I need to make my own advanced equipment without having to grind through the basic, tedious, inefficient model.
Whoops, sidetreked again. Anyhow, dowsing. tehm was tracing out a copper vein (1 of 2 metals we can detect reliably with 0-2 perception) when he noticed an odd gap of 5-6 coords where he found only 'sand'.
His prior knowledge must have helped him suspect something fishy, as copper does not usually do that, and higher level metal veins override the lower level ones. If there was a metal that needed a higher perception to detect, it would register as 'sand.'
So he dumped a mine in the spot, and voila, it came up Zinc.
Now Zinc, from prior work by others across past Tales, and as noted in the wiki, is a circle. Of about 120 or 150 coords in diameter (reports vary.) At the CENTER of the Zinc circle, is Lead - which is one of the bottleneck metals needed to open Casting.
This is the point where I came in and overheard tehm and Verix talking, one Zinc spot on the map and no idea in which direction the circle goes.
I invited myself (politely) into their little dowsing party. The hope was to discover another gap in the copper vein - which might of course indicate Zinc, and with two Zinc points known, a circle could be figured out with a bit more precision than knowing one point.
tehm was dowsing in one direction, so I thought I'd go in the other direction, and that's around the time I discovered that if I dual-logged and dowsed, the timer ended at a very tolerable pace, and I could trace out a vein more effectively than doing it alone. I was quite hooked.
Alas, RL matters called, and I had to head out. I think the tale ends with them not finding a gap like they'd hoped, stacking 4 perception to detect Zinc, discovering the Zinc circle that way, finding lead in the center, and then following the established pattern 100 coords east and 100 coords north to hit more lead.
There's a ton of other unknown patterns regarding the other metals though. Previous publically available dowsing maps have been sketchy at best. In theory, following copper and iron veins would be able to lead us, without much more higher perception, to the other metals.
I just might try it out some day, when I am free. Presumably 6-12 months later in the Tale, things will slow down as in the previous server, and that would be a good time to do all this sort of research piecemeal for improved understanding.
Why not? It's not as if I really want to pass Tests (beyond opportunistically getting levels) or build a Pyramid for endgame (oh god, I hate pyramid block pushing with a vengeance.) But the quest for understanding, ah, now that is tempting for an Explorer type.
So much so that I'm tempted to cancel Aion, but bleh, I might need a change in 2-3 months.
It's quite admirable how the game is designed to be playable singly, have additional options and smoother flow when playing with another (be it your own mule or a friend) and expand further into advantangeousness in a group of 4 (be it two people with mules of their own, or four singles or a mix thereof), and further on into 7 or 11 or 21 or larger groups.
I have gotten very comfortable with dual-logging and ferrying things from one place to another on an alt while the main is off doing work I have to pay attention to. I just recently married myself (:P not blind yet!) and am delighting in the bonus known as spousewarp - which allows you to teleport to wherever your spouse is, -without- paying any travel time or any cost at all.
Unenhanced stat timers are (and I suspect, designed on purpose) to last about double the length of time it takes to click and operate whatever it is you're doing.
This means as one player, you're stuck waiting for 5-7 seconds (an interminable amount of time) for the one stat to refresh, unless you get a stat bonus by some means or another.
With a second person around (your friend or your mule), you two can alternate the action, and you have about 2-3 seconds wait time in between, which feels distinctly better a wait.
I've also recently discovered two quite fun activities which are MUCH better done in a duo whose minds a single person controls. Prospecting for marble and dowsing metal ores.
Marble prospecting is one of those hardcoded 'duo' activities. This frustratingly essentially locked me out of it in the Tale 4 Server A (henceforth T4A). Well, yes, I could have asked another human to do it with me, provided they had the same time I had, and the patience to wait as I learned how to prospect, or maybe they would have just ordered me around 'stand here, wait there' and did it by themselves. If I'd been a little less paranoid and more resourceful, I could have married another real human being, then dual-logged his/her character (didn't know how to run two clients at that time, no impetus to learn), but yea, me, not paranoid? Ha, dream on.
Ok. Sidetreked. Back to business. To prospect for marble requires one person to 'attune' themselves to a particular type of marble, and have the perception stat be high enough to detect it. They get loads of slate, and then has a second person be within 30 coords of them, and hit 'prospect.' This sends a little circular scan out between the two parties, and if any of that marble is present, two slate breaks. If not, one slate breaks. The idea is to narrow down that distance until both parties are standing practically on the same space, at which point, you drop your stone quarry and voila, marble!
This is both a very nice close duo activity, or a dual-account paradise. In one, it takes a little longer but you get to chat and verbally discuss what to do as you're doing it. In the latter, you're pretty much mumbling and taking notes with yourself and moving the two folks exactly where you want them with none of the false starts and errors the moment a second real person gets involved.
I like it.
Besides the fact that it eats slate, meaning I have to macro for more (thank goodness for a fantastic slate macro written by this other ATITD player). If I want to macro on both chars, I have to open my laptop though, so that is somewhat annoying.
It sorta reminds me of a kind of mapping. And we all know how fanatical I got about mapping in RoD - for whatever reason, the idea of a systematic, methodical approach to unlocking secrets only a few people understand is very thrilling to me. (Yes, I am aware this is called scientific research IRL, but then, in a game, I can stop when it is no longer fun without worrying about any other consequences, and in a game, there IS a right answer programmed in.)
The only slight hitch is that until automated gearboxes arrive, I can't actually pull the marble out of the quarry with two people. I need four.
Fortunately in T4B, I seem to have attached myself to a pair of vets that provide the other labour. Or rather, they attached themselves to the area I had staked out for myself (across the river) and turned themselves into neighbors. It's all good, because I'm at that stage in the game where I need intermediate/advanced-level guidance and listening in to their guild chat and trailing along like a shadow is doing wonders for my knowledge.
Which brings me to the other activity which could turn into a long-term project was I so inclined...
Mines. The heartblood of Egypt. In T4A, the bulk of the dowsing for metal ores was done by a very pro group of players, about 5-7 in number. We were greatly fortunate in Zfree (our guild) to have one of their number (Amhur) within us. I think he was mutually making use of our guildmaster Wampak's prodigious building capacity to provide materials for mines - so whatever he dowsed, he could dump a mine or three on the spot to immediately claim a substantial share for ourselves before opening it up to others.
The other thing they were doing was massively overdosing on herbs and chocolate. See, eating herbs provided stats. And herb-stacking, or eating a second herb before the first one wore off provided about x2 the amount of stats. For a while, before Teppy the dev caught wind of it and fixed it so that there were diminishing returns.
Then chocolate was given away as a contest prize, and our guild won about 3-5 each player. The choco-stack exploit was born. Teppy had fixed herbs, but he had forgotten chocolate. So now, eating a herb, then eating a chocolate, then eating a second herb again provided the same crazy stacked stats as before. We pooled nearly all of our chocolate into a little box for Amhur.
(Eventually Teppy discovered this little exploit too, but he rather liked the idea, so he fixed it such that eating chocolate would now 'recall' the stats that were previously affecting a player, but the crazy stat-stacking effect was nerfed for good.)
But what, you may ask, was this obsession on stacked stats for?
Y'see, the increasingly rare metals are only detectable on dowsing with high enough levels of perception. The frequency of dowsing is determined by how high focus you have. And the range of detection of an ore vein is determined by how high your con is. High dexterity increases the speed at which you run across wilderness.
So basically we had a supercharged Amhur racing across Egypt finding metal via random dowsing, and then following the metal veins and doing his thing, whatever his thing was, he never told us much.
No doubt, there were maybe 1-3 other folk doing the same thing, possibly supported by groups of others, but that was about it. The 4-5 of them got together in a dowsing guild, discussed their little theories amongst themselves, but at the time I had lots of other things to worry about learning, and found that inching along 2 coords at a time by myself clicking a button every 10-15 seconds was an exceedingly boring affair, and didn't bother further. After all, I had open access to the guilded mines once they were built, I'd leave it to the pros to do the scut work.
Enter T4B, and it's suddenly a whole different story.
Y'see, Teppy never intended for chocostack. Nor did he intend (much) on folks plonking random mines down and hitting greatly searched-for metal veins. Except in Tales 1-3, that is exactly what happened when Egypt as a whole hit the research bottleneck of Casting, which requires Silver. at a perception of 19 to detect - except you cannot get much higher perception than 4, 7 if you're crazed and lucky on herb spawns, as none of the techs like cooking for stats and so on are unlockable until Casting is opened.
Catch-22.
In Tale 4 A, chocostack brought us the metal. But now, in T4B, we do not have that any longer. We are down to two options, rely on a random hit to find silver (of which, many will be doing) or deduce what Teppy intended us to deduce about the patterns of metal veins.
We had an interesting breakthrough last night. Or at least tehm did. He is apparently tehmoosh from T4A, and whom I note was in the same pack of 7 that Amhur used to run with. He has a friend with him called Verix, who is a vet all the way from Tale 1, I just don't know his T4A name yet. The two of 'em have fascinating conversations with each other.
The weird neighbor is pibe, who is an odd blend of vet and enthusiastic newbie, and somewhat full-on strangeness. It's ok, we can't all be intellectuals, we'd end up killing each other, so it's good we're all at least somewhat different. Verix stays more at home, but he seems to be a planner and a strategist. He's hopefully good at cooking. He's quieter. tehm is a charismatic guy who communicates with all of Egypt, does trades, runs around dowsing and doing other shit, etc. pibe's good for not making me have to reinvent the wheel. lol.
I guess I am the weird slacker dual-logging powergamer who builds ambitious structures but at a slower pace than everybody else. I can't help it. There are tech bottlenecks which are SO obviously bottlenecks. There are also public works guilds who willingly grind through the bottleneck, and then open up the equipment so that other people can skip the scut work, and now my neighborhood's guild which I am gaining access to.
Rationality insists that I don't run the same merry-go-around as everyone else. I mean, SOMEBODY has to use the stuff the public works guilds put out so that their effort does not go to waste, right? All I need to do is wait a couple of days, they grind through the bottleneck, and by using their equipment for just a few times, I get the starter material I need to make my own advanced equipment without having to grind through the basic, tedious, inefficient model.
Whoops, sidetreked again. Anyhow, dowsing. tehm was tracing out a copper vein (1 of 2 metals we can detect reliably with 0-2 perception) when he noticed an odd gap of 5-6 coords where he found only 'sand'.
His prior knowledge must have helped him suspect something fishy, as copper does not usually do that, and higher level metal veins override the lower level ones. If there was a metal that needed a higher perception to detect, it would register as 'sand.'
So he dumped a mine in the spot, and voila, it came up Zinc.
Now Zinc, from prior work by others across past Tales, and as noted in the wiki, is a circle. Of about 120 or 150 coords in diameter (reports vary.) At the CENTER of the Zinc circle, is Lead - which is one of the bottleneck metals needed to open Casting.
This is the point where I came in and overheard tehm and Verix talking, one Zinc spot on the map and no idea in which direction the circle goes.
I invited myself (politely) into their little dowsing party. The hope was to discover another gap in the copper vein - which might of course indicate Zinc, and with two Zinc points known, a circle could be figured out with a bit more precision than knowing one point.
tehm was dowsing in one direction, so I thought I'd go in the other direction, and that's around the time I discovered that if I dual-logged and dowsed, the timer ended at a very tolerable pace, and I could trace out a vein more effectively than doing it alone. I was quite hooked.
Alas, RL matters called, and I had to head out. I think the tale ends with them not finding a gap like they'd hoped, stacking 4 perception to detect Zinc, discovering the Zinc circle that way, finding lead in the center, and then following the established pattern 100 coords east and 100 coords north to hit more lead.
There's a ton of other unknown patterns regarding the other metals though. Previous publically available dowsing maps have been sketchy at best. In theory, following copper and iron veins would be able to lead us, without much more higher perception, to the other metals.
I just might try it out some day, when I am free. Presumably 6-12 months later in the Tale, things will slow down as in the previous server, and that would be a good time to do all this sort of research piecemeal for improved understanding.
Why not? It's not as if I really want to pass Tests (beyond opportunistically getting levels) or build a Pyramid for endgame (oh god, I hate pyramid block pushing with a vengeance.) But the quest for understanding, ah, now that is tempting for an Explorer type.
So much so that I'm tempted to cancel Aion, but bleh, I might need a change in 2-3 months.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
The Whiner
I wonder how long he will last.
There's a guy in our huge research guild of server shard B who whines incessantly.
He's also small-minded enough to really forment drama, what with his clear lines of demarcation against Stillwater and anyone else not 'us' basically. What is even more amusing is that he considers anyone in Shabbat Ab who is not part of his small research guild circle not 'us'. He had been bitterly declaiming everyone not helping out with the leather donation a while back, and basically insulting 80% of the people who were actually IN the guild, listening to his chat channel, because he never actually visibly saw any contribution from us.
Obviously, we all contribute in our own small or large, open or sekrit ways. I'm sure none of us appreciate our contributions challenged by this guy either.
The latest mini-drama from him has been his lazy-man's circumvention of the Principles of Thought. He basically made a one-click win Empty Hand Puzzle and spammed guild chat until he got his seven 'Good' votes to pass the principles.
He drew a certain amount of disapproval from the vets, but managed to con enough newbies and kind souls into getting him the votes.
It's a little irritating, since my own Empty Hand, which I made quite tough this time around, has only managed to garner 2 survivors out of 76 tries at it. And for all I know, the 2 voters may have made 30 tries at it to try and solve it. :)
The urgency was in getting enough levels to start the Test of the Singing Cicada, as the sooner you start it, the less competition there is in folks running around.
Still, besides one round of delay, another Test managed to open and I got my level through other means anyhow. So yeah, patience has always been the key. That, and a slow cultivation of long-term reputation, I presume.
Let's see how long he lasts.
There's a guy in our huge research guild of server shard B who whines incessantly.
He's also small-minded enough to really forment drama, what with his clear lines of demarcation against Stillwater and anyone else not 'us' basically. What is even more amusing is that he considers anyone in Shabbat Ab who is not part of his small research guild circle not 'us'. He had been bitterly declaiming everyone not helping out with the leather donation a while back, and basically insulting 80% of the people who were actually IN the guild, listening to his chat channel, because he never actually visibly saw any contribution from us.
Obviously, we all contribute in our own small or large, open or sekrit ways. I'm sure none of us appreciate our contributions challenged by this guy either.
The latest mini-drama from him has been his lazy-man's circumvention of the Principles of Thought. He basically made a one-click win Empty Hand Puzzle and spammed guild chat until he got his seven 'Good' votes to pass the principles.
He drew a certain amount of disapproval from the vets, but managed to con enough newbies and kind souls into getting him the votes.
It's a little irritating, since my own Empty Hand, which I made quite tough this time around, has only managed to garner 2 survivors out of 76 tries at it. And for all I know, the 2 voters may have made 30 tries at it to try and solve it. :)
The urgency was in getting enough levels to start the Test of the Singing Cicada, as the sooner you start it, the less competition there is in folks running around.
Still, besides one round of delay, another Test managed to open and I got my level through other means anyhow. So yeah, patience has always been the key. That, and a slow cultivation of long-term reputation, I presume.
Let's see how long he lasts.
Monday, March 01, 2010
Big Sheep Drama in Little "Shelbyville"
I never fail to marvel at how adroitly ATITD can get under peoples' skins. Before you know it, emotions are flying high, insults, whines, name-calling as well as long intellectual and philosophical debates are flying across the chat channels, and people are indulging in socio-politcal PvP in words and actions.
And no, I'm not talking about the obelisk queue. We'll get to that in due time. Suffice to say, the usual debates came up. The usual debates continued to be unresolved.
No, I'll like to tell the story of how little ol' calm, patient, unruffled me was nearly emotionally undone via a hot button I didn't know I had.
---
The story starts with Mining. Or rather, the research of the technology to be unlocked.
Each region has universities, in which this 'research' takes place. The minigame here is simply to be the first to unlock it via dumping in huge quantities of resources according to the laundry list it requires of you.
Why would you want to be the first? Region pride is one. That your region was hardworking and grindy enough to come together to unlock the tech speaks well of your region's general game prowess, organizational capacity and penchant for cooperation. Simple convenience is another: ATITD's traveling time is no small matter, and if you're visiting universities to learn tech, it may as well be in the region you live in so that you have a shorter run. Everyone else has to come and visit YOU.
This adds up to long term attraction of newbies and a bigger population because all roads eventually lead to the region that leads in technology research.
So yes, the region I'm staying in this round, Shabbat Ab, has a thriving research guild. Almost fanatical.
Yet I'm not 100% comfortable with the guild. For one thing, it's located in too small a space to expand over time, and nearly on top of a copper vein to boot. I have my sincere doubts over its long term lebensraum, with 45/50 members crowding the woodwork. No one really lives at the research guild, unlike my previous home guild which was both industrial-sized and home to its GM. There are practically no stored resources available because it's either all chucked into the universities for one research or other, temporarily locked away by the guild elders for that purpose, or open to ANY member of the guild to be taken or used as they so desire. There is no selection criteria either for joining the guild. Some of its guild elders have no prior experience with Telling 4, they left during T2 or T3, and so are dependent on wiki reading and listening to people they trust about T4 to make certain decisions. Or not.
So I would be quite a fool to trustingly place my own long term future in ATITD in the hands of this guild, no?
Besides, my goal this round is to play part-time industrial. I have a mule alt. I was uber-impressed with my compatriots from the previous server: both the GM with a fabulous industrial compound set up by 5+ people building their own individual compounds and then adroitly subsumed into the conglomerate, and a deaf dual-alt'er who absolutely destroyed on Tests, with his main even on ones that required hearing as a clue-in, and followed up with his alt not far behind (though I helped his alt do the hearing thang for one Test).
So yes, I build my own mini-guild uber-compound-wannabe, and along with this, I set up my sheep pens. I managed to run SEVEN sheep pens the last time, on my lonesome, and voluntarily supported the hardcore guild's OTHER 7-8+ sheep pens with an onion supply. Admittedly, that ate about 2-3 hours each day in onion growing. This time, I had my eye on four.
(Maybe five, or six, I dunno, still thinking about it.)
Enter a steady workstream of 1200 bricks each sheep pen, and scads of onion-growing and long cross-country runs for wild sheep to haul back to my pen, and I was the proud owner of 3x4 pairs of breeding sheep.
In fact, although one of the nicer, more mellow Elders of the research guild, my across-the-river neighbor, pointed out one spawn of sheep to me - of which I took one male, the other distinctly research-obsessed Elder came around begging for sheep to form breeding pairs for the research guild.
I gave him two males that had just reproduced. He came and grabbed them both, despite another guildie bringing yet another male, because one of the sheep in the research pens just bred, producing a female with no mate... so he said, and so I shrugged and said, ok, go nuts.
They did go nuts, because they built a fabulous sheeparray. The Blood Fields, we called it. A 5 x 5 grid of sheep pens. Each can hold 3 pairs for maximum breeding efficiency.
Ok. All good. All cool. This is a joint region research thang after all. They're doing it for all of us, so that we can unlock Mining. There is a horrible 480 leather bottleneck, after all. (One sheep = 2 leather. One camel = 6 leather.)
The camels, by the way, have been swiped up by an uber-powerplayer in our region. Her megalopolis-sized compound is the stuff of legend. It gives my previous hardcore guild a run for their money, and dwarfs anything I could ever dream up. It's built on the backs of THREE mule alts, who spend all day macro'ing grass for camel straw. In addition to those three mules, there are two mains who may or may not be the same player - I'm not 100% sure. They're either related via RL family, or the same person. Anyhow, they have about 5-6 camel pens going in their compound, with about 15k straw in each pen, so they pretty much have all the camels bar a few.
The uber powerplayer is interesting, because she's really not all that bad. Just -very- very focused on Tests, grinding and being one of the first, and somewhat egoistic and VERY attention-craving (as can be expected of a personality willing to pay $14x5 to dominate a game). One main has a more naive yet prideful schtick, bringing to mind a younger kid's ego. The other is a quieter, more focused adult powerplayer who will leave you in the dust without you ever knowing, but if you don't bother her, she doesn't bother you.
It's hilarious to see the hate of the region for her. Mostly the newbies and those focused on 'fairness' find her exceedingly offensive. Me, I leave her alone. She doesn't bother me. The research Elder I respect the most can talk with her very well - heck, he talks well with me too, he's got masterful charisma and political skill. In fact, he somehow persuaded her into donating oodles of leather for Mining. About 85 pieces, if I recall correctly, a veritable fortune in these leather-scarce days.
Leather-scarcity and region pride. A hotbed for future emotional downfall. Our neighbor region is Stillwater, whose researchers have been continually thumbed up the nose by our researchers down here and beaten to the punch on practically every technology there is. It's quite an amazing feat, because the guys up in Stillwater are mostly existing vets from T4 servers, and the better money was on them to dominate.
All we are in Shabbat Ab are a couple of T4 vets, many of which have quit a year past, returning T2 and T3 players, a bunch of enthusiastic but clueless newbies, a couple of hermits and industrials, etc. A very colorful mixed variety.
The Stillwater folk are NOT happy with us, of course, and in the manner of all rationalization have drawn certain lines in the sand between us, including giving Shabbat Ab the somewhat derisive name of "Shelbyville." Frankly, I didn't know what the heck the reference was until I googled. I guess I'm not a Simpsons fan.
Some of the more emotionally-driven members of our region's population, about 75% of our research guild included, have risen to the bait and taken on the challenge of grinding them into the dirt with the fires of industry and what not.
The Elder I still respect talks with the Stillwater researchers, but welp, the small cogs in our guild revel in the schadenfreude and other petty related emotions.
---
So, enough back history, on with the incident(s). Turns out Stillwater has had enough of uppity Shabbat Ab, and raced madly to get Mining unlocked before our region did. They went pell-mell on leather collection and trading, and jumped to about 300/480 Leather, while we were still sitting at 0/480 - with a count of maybe 170ish leather if we slaughtered our sheep and jeopardized our future leather growth.
The research-obsessed Elder (oh hell, let's just use names, Beak) took to logging on every 3-4 hours and BEGGING for leather over the region channel. Announcement after announcement about how far Stillwater was ahead of us, and asking for leather donations, etc.
If not for the somewhat selfish reason of needing to plonk down 5 mines on top of the iron vein that is right in my compound's front and backyard before my irritating neighbor creates a territorial faux pas drama incident, I would probably have given him my leather stock, or a good half of it, and contented myself to wait a little longer for sheep rebreeding for more complex metal mines.
And there was something a little subconsciously fishy, I felt, about all this. The guild was sitting on 25 sheep pens. 25! Surely SOME sheep were breeding. But we never got a fixed leather count. Beak went on and on about 69/75 breeding pairs that the guild needed for the pens and so on, he was literally 'borrowing' poor little newbies 1-3 breeding pairs ('to be returned once mining is opened'), unsoweiter.
Coupled into this was a slight self-guilt trip over me sitting pretty on 12 breeding pairs. I had also been wandering far cross-country on TWO chars to grab sheep and drag them back to my pens for slaughter. The regional begging got me to slaughter the sheep instead of making a new 5th pen that I was considering (if only out of fear that someone would walk by and point out the mini-leather cottage industry I had going on), and I counted my leather and it totaled 45, breeding pairs not included.
This is far from the 100 I need to plonk my mines down, so I sat pretty and quiet and didn't reveal that I had any leather open for donation, even though there were strong exhortations to, flying everywhere to everyone.
Instead, since I am not immune to region pride, I thought I would go wild sheep hunting instead. I mean, the breeding pairs I own are from hard work cross-countrying and spending offline navigation travel time to haul the sheep back, with two chars. But I could certainly donate any new wild sheep I find, since they hadn't crossed the personal mental border into 'my' property/territory yet.
I scoured every grass patch within 2-3 regions of Shabbat Ab, and since we're a central region, that pretty much means I ran far to the north and south and even to the east until the end of the world a couple times.
Naturally, as I'm out doing this, the sheep decide to spawn at my compound. My neighbor across the river (a friend of the guy I respect) calls out to the guild that there's a sheep spawn by my place. "OOOOH" Beak goes. "Come on everyone, let's run there and grab them!" With nary a by your leave as to whether I minded.
Ok, fair enough, sheep spawns are anyone's game. Even if they are by someone's compound. Even if they are home, which I patently wasn't (since I had gone out looking for sheep for the guild.) But I was mildly rubbed the wrong way by the lack of courtesy, not a single person addressed me directly and said, "hey, we're taking these sheep for the guild, all right?" I just got the sense of this massive jovial glee to swipe it out from this rich landowner's nose - perhaps I'm imagining things, but whatever.
It doesn't help that though I come down and do stuff for the guild, I picked wood, I picked slate, I spun jugs and what not, all I get is a very offhand 'thanks' from this guy Beak, and my guild rank stays happily at the very first level of trust. There are clueless newbies who are ranked higher in trust level. If not for the Elder I respect, tehm, from whom I get do get acceptable levels of courtesy and acknowledgement... Well. Pfft.
Whatever. I continue sheep hunting. I find sheep. I make the offer in guild chat. There's sheep at this loc. Want to run up and get them?
"OH GEEZ" Beak goes. "That's too far to run. lol"
Hmph. Alrighty then. Suit yourself. I grab a sheep for myself, and I try and slaughter the sheep in the wild, which results in most of them running off. Bye-bye potential leather.
Some time later, I hear tehm doing the same thing in the guild chat channel, and he's just lamenting the fact that he's only scored hits on 3/20 sheep. That's 40 could-have-been leather!
But Beak is content to sit happy in this one region and WHINE continuously for leather donations, in some attempt to guilt-trip people into donating.
Another member, some middle-of-the-trust-level guy who does like tons of bricks and grindy work, sidles up to Beak's side and complains about oh, our research guild does all the work and no one helps us. No one will give us any leather. Those selfish bastards. We are doing this for them too. Yadda yadda.
Hello, I want to tell him. We ALREADY gave at the office. We have no leather to donate to you now because Beak took all our sheep LONG AGO. All 5x5 sheep pens worth. Why are you still eyeing our remaining 1-4 pathetic sheep pen remnants with greedy lust?
Anyhow, I stay quiet. I don't want to start drama in a guild channel. What's the point? Just creates ill feeling, wot?
Finally, I get tired of sheep hunting and decide to do some personal stuff. I notice I'm trailing behind on levels, so I get out my limestone digging apparatus and my trusty macro and start jogging to the limestone patch to the tune of Beak's continual regional pleading for leather donations.
I run into sheep. Right by a guild member's compound (he's in), a little ways south, but still in the same region. But if I turn around, grab all the sheep and sit around waiting for someone to run to me, it would be a waste of my limestone picking time. I could also run my alt over to ferry them, but if I go through all that effort, I'm keeping the bloody sheep and I have no pens to put them in.
So I pick up all the sheep and drop them (to keep them from despawning for two hours, supposedly). Think better of my philantrophy and pick up one for myself. Then I announce over guild chat that are four sheep available, if anyone wants to run them over to their pens.
I get absolutely ZERO interest from the channel. Beak must think it's too far or something. Again.
I shrug, and continue on my merry limestone picking way, a sheep of my own around my neck.
---
All this time, we've had crazy updates from the Stillwater side, who are in mad leather procuring frenzy. They creep closer and closer, 300/480 leather done, 350, 400, etc. They globally announce that they want leather donations too, just 70 left! And so on.
Beak is fretting over the guild channel. On and on.
Well, of course you don't have as much leather than them, you aren't hunting very hard for it. You're just asking over and over whether your Blood Field sheeparray is breeding or not. And for people to give you more leather.
Whatever.
Beak logs off. Some hours later, late into the wee morning hours, while I am still out looking for sheep for the hell of it, if only to salvage the 2 leather per sheep for myself, I hit my -calm-almost-breaking- incident.
Since I live right along the Stillwater/Shabbat Ab border, I have the fun ability to jump between regional chat channels by hiking a screen's distance or so. I hear the massive celebration in Stillwater of a guy named Humbuk who is spotting wild sheep, and the joint efforts of Stillwater folk who mass RUN over there to pick them up, and put them back in pens to slaughter. Hoorah! 10 leather more! 20 leather more!
This sticks in my craw somewhat because I just tried the same strategy and it got pointedly rejected by Mr It's-Too-Far before it even got to the cooperative group phase.
The guild is asking about how much leather we have. Some random member. And going, wow, wonder how Stillwater is getting so much leather that fast. Oh noes, we are going to lose to them. *whine*
Well, I snap in polite clipped text over the channel, "here's what Stillwater is doing. They are running down wild sheep to put leather in the pot. Since we seem content to wait until our sheeparray breeds, we ARE indeed going to lose to them at this pace. Too bad, it won't be long until the sheeparray does breed, and then we just be a few minutes or few hours behind. Big effing deal." (I said it a teensy more politely, but not really.)
"Now wait a minute," one of the ATITD GMs (yes, they do play the game too, just at a slower pace as they are not supposed to compete with players in Tests) go, "we DO so run down sheep."
"Yeah, only when it's nearby," I tell her. "I made the offer for sheep further off, and no one wanted to get any." The implication being that Humbuk and his Stillwater gang are indeed scouring every region they can find of sheep.
Anyway, I catch myself losing it and flying off the handle, and continue, "well, I'm tired, and caught up in Beak's enthusiasm."
(Pissed off by Beak's whining for leather donations but lack of action, rather, but I can't come out and say that over the guild channel, can I?)
"Nevermind, I will go back to being my patient self and watching the sheep breed. :)" ==> smiley face is important! Smile even when you don't feel like it!
In fact, I take some time to really catch myself and psychoanalyze my outburst. For whatever curious reason, I am in fact quite emotionally roiled. Not to the point of outright anger, but I'm certainly not in a Zen meditative state. Obviously, I have some kind of unresolved hot button with this state of affairs.
I'm not sure what it is, but I think it has something to do with incongruency of words and actions. That I was somehow annoyed at this guy begging for leather donations, and hitting good-hearted newbies who are giving him their life savings, even, instead of the big powerplayers that he's probably hoping to guilt trip or annoy long enough to shut him up.
---
I went back to semi-meditative in the next hour. ATITD is just extremely good at creating this sort of conflict between public good and private interest, and when I start getting too uptight about this sort of thing, I remember some previous server's incidents with a guild guy called Atheus (newbie, came in same time as me) who would explode with incoherent rage over the chat channel over other peoples' perceived lack of generosity/selfishness and how our guild GM Wampak and other members just sorta talked him down / ignored him as appropriate and basically said in a very Zen manner that everyone has to find their own balance between how much they want to give and how much they want to keep for themselves.
At which point, he decided he was going to hoard a lot more to himself because apparently the selflessness he was outputting was not yielding the emotional payoff he had been desiring/craving.
And you know what, despite how selfish that sounds, that's okay. It's okay to be self-centred. Despite a general morass of hoi polloi who are vocally demanding that you be a communist and share everything or give away everything on your back to the greater good (or to them, the worst ones will tell you.)
I calmed down growing tons of onions for MY sheep. Mwahaha. Then I made tons of bricks for MYself. And I tinkered around, made the two charcoal hearths that I had fallen behind putting up, relived the experience of making charcoal and was indeed relieved that I still had the knack, and settled down to some flaxing in preparation for mines, remembered I hadn't picked up glassblowing yet either, ran to get it, set up MY glazier's bench and made plans for fitting extras into the glass compound...
About this time, the general alert sprung up that Stillwater was about 40 leather away from unlocking Mining. And were getting impending donations that would very soon hit close to the mark.
Like a bad penny, Beak showed up. Goodness knows if he was lurking around on an alt, if he had friends who gave him a RL ring, if he was just indeed obsessed enough to keep spying on ATITD's status before he headed to work, but he caught wind of the general alert.
Asked a couple of questions. General guild members were in distress. Me, I kept my head down. Had enough.
Then he goes, "Ah, screw it."
For a second, I wonder if he's lost it and is about to quit. Then he goes, "I'm gonna turn it all in now."
General perplexity over guild chat. Sutenhotep, one of the guild Elders who has been quite quiet thus far, starts explaining.
Turns out, they've HAD the leather to unlock Mining since morning. They've just been stalling to allow more time for the massive sheeparray to breed leather for mines.
The begging for leather donations had been a secret, elaborate ploy to let them keep more sheep alive in the sheeparray, again for future mine leather and future research.
Obviously, none of us hoi polloi guild members are in the know about any of this.
It turns into a massive race to the university with the ton of leather needed to dump in and start the unlock clock ticking. "Yay" the guild members have shifted about-face. "Go Beak-man!" "You the man" "Rock on!" "Whee, we beat them!" Yadda yadda.
Despite an admitted surge of region pride, I can't help but feel slightly betrayed by all this goings-on. What they've demonstrated is that they are perfectly willing to lie in order to cover something up. They've damaged their trust factor. I will certainly think twice and analyze whatever these guys say several times before I put any stock into what they're saying.
And definitely, I'm following first principles: only give away to others what you're willing to lose totally from the get go. Never sacrifice what you cannot afford for someone else, they might just stab you in the back and leave you with less than nothing.
In retrospect, I realize that Beak has been very evasive about exactly what the leather count was - I even chatted him once directly about this because I was trying to figure out if I could spare anything - and was nearly prepared to give away about half my sheep wealth, except I told him the sheep were breeding and if we disrupted them, they might stop breeding. At which point, he said, keep them there and donate the leather from their offspring.
I went OK, and started slaughtering offspring, though my natural hoarding tendencies won through and I sat on my leather pile instead, waiting to see if there would come an emergency point where they were sitting at the university with 460/480 leather and Stillwater about to beat them...
Fortunately, that didn't happen and I still have about 2 mines' worth of leather, plus all my breeding pairs intact. So I scooted past the leather deception with nary any economic damage, but only a certain amount of disgust and distrust.
Phew. Yay for people being people.
And no, I'm not talking about the obelisk queue. We'll get to that in due time. Suffice to say, the usual debates came up. The usual debates continued to be unresolved.
No, I'll like to tell the story of how little ol' calm, patient, unruffled me was nearly emotionally undone via a hot button I didn't know I had.
---
The story starts with Mining. Or rather, the research of the technology to be unlocked.
Each region has universities, in which this 'research' takes place. The minigame here is simply to be the first to unlock it via dumping in huge quantities of resources according to the laundry list it requires of you.
Why would you want to be the first? Region pride is one. That your region was hardworking and grindy enough to come together to unlock the tech speaks well of your region's general game prowess, organizational capacity and penchant for cooperation. Simple convenience is another: ATITD's traveling time is no small matter, and if you're visiting universities to learn tech, it may as well be in the region you live in so that you have a shorter run. Everyone else has to come and visit YOU.
This adds up to long term attraction of newbies and a bigger population because all roads eventually lead to the region that leads in technology research.
So yes, the region I'm staying in this round, Shabbat Ab, has a thriving research guild. Almost fanatical.
Yet I'm not 100% comfortable with the guild. For one thing, it's located in too small a space to expand over time, and nearly on top of a copper vein to boot. I have my sincere doubts over its long term lebensraum, with 45/50 members crowding the woodwork. No one really lives at the research guild, unlike my previous home guild which was both industrial-sized and home to its GM. There are practically no stored resources available because it's either all chucked into the universities for one research or other, temporarily locked away by the guild elders for that purpose, or open to ANY member of the guild to be taken or used as they so desire. There is no selection criteria either for joining the guild. Some of its guild elders have no prior experience with Telling 4, they left during T2 or T3, and so are dependent on wiki reading and listening to people they trust about T4 to make certain decisions. Or not.
So I would be quite a fool to trustingly place my own long term future in ATITD in the hands of this guild, no?
Besides, my goal this round is to play part-time industrial. I have a mule alt. I was uber-impressed with my compatriots from the previous server: both the GM with a fabulous industrial compound set up by 5+ people building their own individual compounds and then adroitly subsumed into the conglomerate, and a deaf dual-alt'er who absolutely destroyed on Tests, with his main even on ones that required hearing as a clue-in, and followed up with his alt not far behind (though I helped his alt do the hearing thang for one Test).
So yes, I build my own mini-guild uber-compound-wannabe, and along with this, I set up my sheep pens. I managed to run SEVEN sheep pens the last time, on my lonesome, and voluntarily supported the hardcore guild's OTHER 7-8+ sheep pens with an onion supply. Admittedly, that ate about 2-3 hours each day in onion growing. This time, I had my eye on four.
(Maybe five, or six, I dunno, still thinking about it.)
Enter a steady workstream of 1200 bricks each sheep pen, and scads of onion-growing and long cross-country runs for wild sheep to haul back to my pen, and I was the proud owner of 3x4 pairs of breeding sheep.
In fact, although one of the nicer, more mellow Elders of the research guild, my across-the-river neighbor, pointed out one spawn of sheep to me - of which I took one male, the other distinctly research-obsessed Elder came around begging for sheep to form breeding pairs for the research guild.
I gave him two males that had just reproduced. He came and grabbed them both, despite another guildie bringing yet another male, because one of the sheep in the research pens just bred, producing a female with no mate... so he said, and so I shrugged and said, ok, go nuts.
They did go nuts, because they built a fabulous sheeparray. The Blood Fields, we called it. A 5 x 5 grid of sheep pens. Each can hold 3 pairs for maximum breeding efficiency.
Ok. All good. All cool. This is a joint region research thang after all. They're doing it for all of us, so that we can unlock Mining. There is a horrible 480 leather bottleneck, after all. (One sheep = 2 leather. One camel = 6 leather.)
The camels, by the way, have been swiped up by an uber-powerplayer in our region. Her megalopolis-sized compound is the stuff of legend. It gives my previous hardcore guild a run for their money, and dwarfs anything I could ever dream up. It's built on the backs of THREE mule alts, who spend all day macro'ing grass for camel straw. In addition to those three mules, there are two mains who may or may not be the same player - I'm not 100% sure. They're either related via RL family, or the same person. Anyhow, they have about 5-6 camel pens going in their compound, with about 15k straw in each pen, so they pretty much have all the camels bar a few.
The uber powerplayer is interesting, because she's really not all that bad. Just -very- very focused on Tests, grinding and being one of the first, and somewhat egoistic and VERY attention-craving (as can be expected of a personality willing to pay $14x5 to dominate a game). One main has a more naive yet prideful schtick, bringing to mind a younger kid's ego. The other is a quieter, more focused adult powerplayer who will leave you in the dust without you ever knowing, but if you don't bother her, she doesn't bother you.
It's hilarious to see the hate of the region for her. Mostly the newbies and those focused on 'fairness' find her exceedingly offensive. Me, I leave her alone. She doesn't bother me. The research Elder I respect the most can talk with her very well - heck, he talks well with me too, he's got masterful charisma and political skill. In fact, he somehow persuaded her into donating oodles of leather for Mining. About 85 pieces, if I recall correctly, a veritable fortune in these leather-scarce days.
Leather-scarcity and region pride. A hotbed for future emotional downfall. Our neighbor region is Stillwater, whose researchers have been continually thumbed up the nose by our researchers down here and beaten to the punch on practically every technology there is. It's quite an amazing feat, because the guys up in Stillwater are mostly existing vets from T4 servers, and the better money was on them to dominate.
All we are in Shabbat Ab are a couple of T4 vets, many of which have quit a year past, returning T2 and T3 players, a bunch of enthusiastic but clueless newbies, a couple of hermits and industrials, etc. A very colorful mixed variety.
The Stillwater folk are NOT happy with us, of course, and in the manner of all rationalization have drawn certain lines in the sand between us, including giving Shabbat Ab the somewhat derisive name of "Shelbyville." Frankly, I didn't know what the heck the reference was until I googled. I guess I'm not a Simpsons fan.
Some of the more emotionally-driven members of our region's population, about 75% of our research guild included, have risen to the bait and taken on the challenge of grinding them into the dirt with the fires of industry and what not.
The Elder I still respect talks with the Stillwater researchers, but welp, the small cogs in our guild revel in the schadenfreude and other petty related emotions.
---
So, enough back history, on with the incident(s). Turns out Stillwater has had enough of uppity Shabbat Ab, and raced madly to get Mining unlocked before our region did. They went pell-mell on leather collection and trading, and jumped to about 300/480 Leather, while we were still sitting at 0/480 - with a count of maybe 170ish leather if we slaughtered our sheep and jeopardized our future leather growth.
The research-obsessed Elder (oh hell, let's just use names, Beak) took to logging on every 3-4 hours and BEGGING for leather over the region channel. Announcement after announcement about how far Stillwater was ahead of us, and asking for leather donations, etc.
If not for the somewhat selfish reason of needing to plonk down 5 mines on top of the iron vein that is right in my compound's front and backyard before my irritating neighbor creates a territorial faux pas drama incident, I would probably have given him my leather stock, or a good half of it, and contented myself to wait a little longer for sheep rebreeding for more complex metal mines.
And there was something a little subconsciously fishy, I felt, about all this. The guild was sitting on 25 sheep pens. 25! Surely SOME sheep were breeding. But we never got a fixed leather count. Beak went on and on about 69/75 breeding pairs that the guild needed for the pens and so on, he was literally 'borrowing' poor little newbies 1-3 breeding pairs ('to be returned once mining is opened'), unsoweiter.
Coupled into this was a slight self-guilt trip over me sitting pretty on 12 breeding pairs. I had also been wandering far cross-country on TWO chars to grab sheep and drag them back to my pens for slaughter. The regional begging got me to slaughter the sheep instead of making a new 5th pen that I was considering (if only out of fear that someone would walk by and point out the mini-leather cottage industry I had going on), and I counted my leather and it totaled 45, breeding pairs not included.
This is far from the 100 I need to plonk my mines down, so I sat pretty and quiet and didn't reveal that I had any leather open for donation, even though there were strong exhortations to, flying everywhere to everyone.
Instead, since I am not immune to region pride, I thought I would go wild sheep hunting instead. I mean, the breeding pairs I own are from hard work cross-countrying and spending offline navigation travel time to haul the sheep back, with two chars. But I could certainly donate any new wild sheep I find, since they hadn't crossed the personal mental border into 'my' property/territory yet.
I scoured every grass patch within 2-3 regions of Shabbat Ab, and since we're a central region, that pretty much means I ran far to the north and south and even to the east until the end of the world a couple times.
Naturally, as I'm out doing this, the sheep decide to spawn at my compound. My neighbor across the river (a friend of the guy I respect) calls out to the guild that there's a sheep spawn by my place. "OOOOH" Beak goes. "Come on everyone, let's run there and grab them!" With nary a by your leave as to whether I minded.
Ok, fair enough, sheep spawns are anyone's game. Even if they are by someone's compound. Even if they are home, which I patently wasn't (since I had gone out looking for sheep for the guild.) But I was mildly rubbed the wrong way by the lack of courtesy, not a single person addressed me directly and said, "hey, we're taking these sheep for the guild, all right?" I just got the sense of this massive jovial glee to swipe it out from this rich landowner's nose - perhaps I'm imagining things, but whatever.
It doesn't help that though I come down and do stuff for the guild, I picked wood, I picked slate, I spun jugs and what not, all I get is a very offhand 'thanks' from this guy Beak, and my guild rank stays happily at the very first level of trust. There are clueless newbies who are ranked higher in trust level. If not for the Elder I respect, tehm, from whom I get do get acceptable levels of courtesy and acknowledgement... Well. Pfft.
Whatever. I continue sheep hunting. I find sheep. I make the offer in guild chat. There's sheep at this loc. Want to run up and get them?
"OH GEEZ" Beak goes. "That's too far to run. lol"
Hmph. Alrighty then. Suit yourself. I grab a sheep for myself, and I try and slaughter the sheep in the wild, which results in most of them running off. Bye-bye potential leather.
Some time later, I hear tehm doing the same thing in the guild chat channel, and he's just lamenting the fact that he's only scored hits on 3/20 sheep. That's 40 could-have-been leather!
But Beak is content to sit happy in this one region and WHINE continuously for leather donations, in some attempt to guilt-trip people into donating.
Another member, some middle-of-the-trust-level guy who does like tons of bricks and grindy work, sidles up to Beak's side and complains about oh, our research guild does all the work and no one helps us. No one will give us any leather. Those selfish bastards. We are doing this for them too. Yadda yadda.
Hello, I want to tell him. We ALREADY gave at the office. We have no leather to donate to you now because Beak took all our sheep LONG AGO. All 5x5 sheep pens worth. Why are you still eyeing our remaining 1-4 pathetic sheep pen remnants with greedy lust?
Anyhow, I stay quiet. I don't want to start drama in a guild channel. What's the point? Just creates ill feeling, wot?
Finally, I get tired of sheep hunting and decide to do some personal stuff. I notice I'm trailing behind on levels, so I get out my limestone digging apparatus and my trusty macro and start jogging to the limestone patch to the tune of Beak's continual regional pleading for leather donations.
I run into sheep. Right by a guild member's compound (he's in), a little ways south, but still in the same region. But if I turn around, grab all the sheep and sit around waiting for someone to run to me, it would be a waste of my limestone picking time. I could also run my alt over to ferry them, but if I go through all that effort, I'm keeping the bloody sheep and I have no pens to put them in.
So I pick up all the sheep and drop them (to keep them from despawning for two hours, supposedly). Think better of my philantrophy and pick up one for myself. Then I announce over guild chat that are four sheep available, if anyone wants to run them over to their pens.
I get absolutely ZERO interest from the channel. Beak must think it's too far or something. Again.
I shrug, and continue on my merry limestone picking way, a sheep of my own around my neck.
---
All this time, we've had crazy updates from the Stillwater side, who are in mad leather procuring frenzy. They creep closer and closer, 300/480 leather done, 350, 400, etc. They globally announce that they want leather donations too, just 70 left! And so on.
Beak is fretting over the guild channel. On and on.
Well, of course you don't have as much leather than them, you aren't hunting very hard for it. You're just asking over and over whether your Blood Field sheeparray is breeding or not. And for people to give you more leather.
Whatever.
Beak logs off. Some hours later, late into the wee morning hours, while I am still out looking for sheep for the hell of it, if only to salvage the 2 leather per sheep for myself, I hit my -calm-almost-breaking- incident.
Since I live right along the Stillwater/Shabbat Ab border, I have the fun ability to jump between regional chat channels by hiking a screen's distance or so. I hear the massive celebration in Stillwater of a guy named Humbuk who is spotting wild sheep, and the joint efforts of Stillwater folk who mass RUN over there to pick them up, and put them back in pens to slaughter. Hoorah! 10 leather more! 20 leather more!
This sticks in my craw somewhat because I just tried the same strategy and it got pointedly rejected by Mr It's-Too-Far before it even got to the cooperative group phase.
The guild is asking about how much leather we have. Some random member. And going, wow, wonder how Stillwater is getting so much leather that fast. Oh noes, we are going to lose to them. *whine*
Well, I snap in polite clipped text over the channel, "here's what Stillwater is doing. They are running down wild sheep to put leather in the pot. Since we seem content to wait until our sheeparray breeds, we ARE indeed going to lose to them at this pace. Too bad, it won't be long until the sheeparray does breed, and then we just be a few minutes or few hours behind. Big effing deal." (I said it a teensy more politely, but not really.)
"Now wait a minute," one of the ATITD GMs (yes, they do play the game too, just at a slower pace as they are not supposed to compete with players in Tests) go, "we DO so run down sheep."
"Yeah, only when it's nearby," I tell her. "I made the offer for sheep further off, and no one wanted to get any." The implication being that Humbuk and his Stillwater gang are indeed scouring every region they can find of sheep.
Anyway, I catch myself losing it and flying off the handle, and continue, "well, I'm tired, and caught up in Beak's enthusiasm."
(Pissed off by Beak's whining for leather donations but lack of action, rather, but I can't come out and say that over the guild channel, can I?)
"Nevermind, I will go back to being my patient self and watching the sheep breed. :)" ==> smiley face is important! Smile even when you don't feel like it!
In fact, I take some time to really catch myself and psychoanalyze my outburst. For whatever curious reason, I am in fact quite emotionally roiled. Not to the point of outright anger, but I'm certainly not in a Zen meditative state. Obviously, I have some kind of unresolved hot button with this state of affairs.
I'm not sure what it is, but I think it has something to do with incongruency of words and actions. That I was somehow annoyed at this guy begging for leather donations, and hitting good-hearted newbies who are giving him their life savings, even, instead of the big powerplayers that he's probably hoping to guilt trip or annoy long enough to shut him up.
---
I went back to semi-meditative in the next hour. ATITD is just extremely good at creating this sort of conflict between public good and private interest, and when I start getting too uptight about this sort of thing, I remember some previous server's incidents with a guild guy called Atheus (newbie, came in same time as me) who would explode with incoherent rage over the chat channel over other peoples' perceived lack of generosity/selfishness and how our guild GM Wampak and other members just sorta talked him down / ignored him as appropriate and basically said in a very Zen manner that everyone has to find their own balance between how much they want to give and how much they want to keep for themselves.
At which point, he decided he was going to hoard a lot more to himself because apparently the selflessness he was outputting was not yielding the emotional payoff he had been desiring/craving.
And you know what, despite how selfish that sounds, that's okay. It's okay to be self-centred. Despite a general morass of hoi polloi who are vocally demanding that you be a communist and share everything or give away everything on your back to the greater good (or to them, the worst ones will tell you.)
I calmed down growing tons of onions for MY sheep. Mwahaha. Then I made tons of bricks for MYself. And I tinkered around, made the two charcoal hearths that I had fallen behind putting up, relived the experience of making charcoal and was indeed relieved that I still had the knack, and settled down to some flaxing in preparation for mines, remembered I hadn't picked up glassblowing yet either, ran to get it, set up MY glazier's bench and made plans for fitting extras into the glass compound...
About this time, the general alert sprung up that Stillwater was about 40 leather away from unlocking Mining. And were getting impending donations that would very soon hit close to the mark.
Like a bad penny, Beak showed up. Goodness knows if he was lurking around on an alt, if he had friends who gave him a RL ring, if he was just indeed obsessed enough to keep spying on ATITD's status before he headed to work, but he caught wind of the general alert.
Asked a couple of questions. General guild members were in distress. Me, I kept my head down. Had enough.
Then he goes, "Ah, screw it."
For a second, I wonder if he's lost it and is about to quit. Then he goes, "I'm gonna turn it all in now."
General perplexity over guild chat. Sutenhotep, one of the guild Elders who has been quite quiet thus far, starts explaining.
Turns out, they've HAD the leather to unlock Mining since morning. They've just been stalling to allow more time for the massive sheeparray to breed leather for mines.
The begging for leather donations had been a secret, elaborate ploy to let them keep more sheep alive in the sheeparray, again for future mine leather and future research.
Obviously, none of us hoi polloi guild members are in the know about any of this.
It turns into a massive race to the university with the ton of leather needed to dump in and start the unlock clock ticking. "Yay" the guild members have shifted about-face. "Go Beak-man!" "You the man" "Rock on!" "Whee, we beat them!" Yadda yadda.
Despite an admitted surge of region pride, I can't help but feel slightly betrayed by all this goings-on. What they've demonstrated is that they are perfectly willing to lie in order to cover something up. They've damaged their trust factor. I will certainly think twice and analyze whatever these guys say several times before I put any stock into what they're saying.
And definitely, I'm following first principles: only give away to others what you're willing to lose totally from the get go. Never sacrifice what you cannot afford for someone else, they might just stab you in the back and leave you with less than nothing.
In retrospect, I realize that Beak has been very evasive about exactly what the leather count was - I even chatted him once directly about this because I was trying to figure out if I could spare anything - and was nearly prepared to give away about half my sheep wealth, except I told him the sheep were breeding and if we disrupted them, they might stop breeding. At which point, he said, keep them there and donate the leather from their offspring.
I went OK, and started slaughtering offspring, though my natural hoarding tendencies won through and I sat on my leather pile instead, waiting to see if there would come an emergency point where they were sitting at the university with 460/480 leather and Stillwater about to beat them...
Fortunately, that didn't happen and I still have about 2 mines' worth of leather, plus all my breeding pairs intact. So I scooted past the leather deception with nary any economic damage, but only a certain amount of disgust and distrust.
Phew. Yay for people being people.