http://www.wilfridwong.com/2010/05/26/life-as-a-business-analyst-a-comic-relief
http://tamingdata.com/2010/07/08/the-project-management-tree-swing-cartoon-past-and-present/
BP Spills Coffee
Maybe we should all take a page from nature and use iterative evolutionary design.
Trying to narrow down and list out a huge chunk of requirements in long marathon meetings is just doomed to corporate stupidity and failure.
Why no, there is absolutely no relation to any current going-ons in my life at all.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
More Reasons Not to Be A Starcraft II Early Adopter
As if the Blizzard RealID-real name fiasco wasn't enough, and the unspoken hints to link Battlenet accounts to Facebook or what-have-you social networking sites, I have just found out today that Starcraft II has officially released worldwide... and that there are regional locks on the Battlenet servers.
In other words, in the service of providing you with perfect ping in your multiplayer matches, you get to huddle in your geographic regions playing with only the regions the company deems as part of your "community."
Did I mention that the people responsible for upkeeping the South-East Asian / New Zealand / Aussie Battlenet server is IAHgames?
Yep. They of the Granado Espada, Dragonica and Animal Kaiser fame, as well as the Hellgate: London fiasco which they are desperately trying to sweep under the rug and pretend it never happened.
Somehow, they have cleverly managed to sweet talk Blizzard into allowing them to support and distribute all their games - that's right, Diablo, WoW, Warcraft, Starcraft, the works. Maybe because they are the only relatively well-known games company in Singapore and they can do decent marketing posters and promotion events all right.
I await if they can handle the tech support deluge. I visited their offices, I cannot begin to imagine how they are going to cope with community relations for a simple game forum with a population size Starcraft II's popularity would produce.
One good thing has come out of the Hellgate: London fiasco. They have learned their lesson and are not going to region-lock Singapore out of North America. Any Starcraft II box here will be able to connect to the SEA Battlenet, and will also include a NA client for connection to NA Battlenet - which is a good back-up in case IAHgames screws up, I suppose. And makes them some friends by assuring people that they can continue to play with their American compatriots... players with Euro friends are screwed, presumably.
I read a Singaporean blog pondering the wisdom of buying a US digital copy for $59.99 usd versus the $109 sgd the Starcraft retail is selling for here.
Yeah, did you do a double take at the price? I did. PC games cost $50 here, normally, with new releases rising up to $66 or so. Why the fuck is an ordinary non-limited edition box selling for the price that is usually reserved for deluxe e-peen metal boxes with shiny things and an art book inside?
It's not even an MMO. Which admittedly sells for inflated $75-110 prices here to make up for the fact that you've bought an entire virtual world and will not be coming back to the brick-and-mortar shop for quite some time.
Did I mention that Wings of Liberty is only Part 1 of the big triple-decker story campaign or what not?
Perhaps I should do what I did for Diablo and World of Warcraft, and walk around blissfully unaware of whatever latest Blizzard hit the hoi polloi 'mainstream' gamers (such an oxymoron) are playing. 3-4 years later, knowing Blizzard's longevity, they will have packed it all up in one of their nice Battlechests, and I can pick it up then to sample - without getting sucked up into the latest Tamagotchi-type gamer fad Blizzard always seems to inspire with their releases.
By then, all the bruhaha about Battlenet and real names might have reached some kind of uneasy equilibrium, servers stabilized and patches and fixes made, and so on and so forth.
In other words, in the service of providing you with perfect ping in your multiplayer matches, you get to huddle in your geographic regions playing with only the regions the company deems as part of your "community."
Did I mention that the people responsible for upkeeping the South-East Asian / New Zealand / Aussie Battlenet server is IAHgames?
Yep. They of the Granado Espada, Dragonica and Animal Kaiser fame, as well as the Hellgate: London fiasco which they are desperately trying to sweep under the rug and pretend it never happened.
Somehow, they have cleverly managed to sweet talk Blizzard into allowing them to support and distribute all their games - that's right, Diablo, WoW, Warcraft, Starcraft, the works. Maybe because they are the only relatively well-known games company in Singapore and they can do decent marketing posters and promotion events all right.
I await if they can handle the tech support deluge. I visited their offices, I cannot begin to imagine how they are going to cope with community relations for a simple game forum with a population size Starcraft II's popularity would produce.
One good thing has come out of the Hellgate: London fiasco. They have learned their lesson and are not going to region-lock Singapore out of North America. Any Starcraft II box here will be able to connect to the SEA Battlenet, and will also include a NA client for connection to NA Battlenet - which is a good back-up in case IAHgames screws up, I suppose. And makes them some friends by assuring people that they can continue to play with their American compatriots... players with Euro friends are screwed, presumably.
I read a Singaporean blog pondering the wisdom of buying a US digital copy for $59.99 usd versus the $109 sgd the Starcraft retail is selling for here.
Yeah, did you do a double take at the price? I did. PC games cost $50 here, normally, with new releases rising up to $66 or so. Why the fuck is an ordinary non-limited edition box selling for the price that is usually reserved for deluxe e-peen metal boxes with shiny things and an art book inside?
It's not even an MMO. Which admittedly sells for inflated $75-110 prices here to make up for the fact that you've bought an entire virtual world and will not be coming back to the brick-and-mortar shop for quite some time.
Did I mention that Wings of Liberty is only Part 1 of the big triple-decker story campaign or what not?
Perhaps I should do what I did for Diablo and World of Warcraft, and walk around blissfully unaware of whatever latest Blizzard hit the hoi polloi 'mainstream' gamers (such an oxymoron) are playing. 3-4 years later, knowing Blizzard's longevity, they will have packed it all up in one of their nice Battlechests, and I can pick it up then to sample - without getting sucked up into the latest Tamagotchi-type gamer fad Blizzard always seems to inspire with their releases.
By then, all the bruhaha about Battlenet and real names might have reached some kind of uneasy equilibrium, servers stabilized and patches and fixes made, and so on and so forth.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Completed Unrelated to Gaming...
I wish some people had better reading comprehension. Including *ahem* my boss.
Who consistently skim-reads email so fast that she doesn't seem to register the exact words I have written.
Perhaps my verbosity is an impediment.
I am quite perplexed on how to say the same thing twice, without making them look stupid, since they obviously didn't get it the first time.
Who consistently skim-reads email so fast that she doesn't seem to register the exact words I have written.
Perhaps my verbosity is an impediment.
I am quite perplexed on how to say the same thing twice, without making them look stupid, since they obviously didn't get it the first time.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Guessing Playstyles via Achievements
So I'm looking at the Alien Swarm global achievements, trying to make head or tail of the percentages.
Interestingly, the most successfully scored achievement is Technician Secured, with a whopping 60% of all players. All they have to do is finish a mission without the tech getting killed. The question is, what are the other 40% of players doing? Surely they're not finishing missions and getting the tech killed compulsively all the time?
I can only surmise that the 40% are: players who downloaded and started the game, but didn't like it after playing the tutorial, or had it crash to desktop unplayable, or play it strictly offline, thus not earning any achievements. Or if Alien Swarm counts all players as people who own the game (and everyone who uses Steam owns the free Alien Swarm), then they are people who never even started the game.
In other words, they are throwing off the stats.
So what if we take away that 40%, and recalculate achievements based on the 60% of players who at least played it once online?
My math is poor, but I'm assuming this will work. The next achievement up is Hat Trick, with 58% of all players getting that - which is complete 2 co-cop missions online to earn a Team Fortress 2 parasite hat. So if we take 58/60 = 0.967. That means 96.7% of players who at least played one mission (going to just call them Alien Swarm players now) bothered to play through two missions, if only just for the damn hat.
Quick and Dead is up next. Kill a Swarm Boomer before it inflates. 86.3% of AS players managed to do that - which is quite easy, just spray and pray at anything in sight and chances are likely that you'd manage a kill once. :)
Ditto Shield Down. 75.1% of AS players managed to finishing blow and killeth a shield bug. Again, some fancy spraying and praying.
Zero Mortality and Protect the Tech are next at 70.3% and 66.8%. We're coming into the averages range now. Most people who played managed at least one normal mission with no deaths and managed to guard the tech on some mission (a landing bay first mission would do fine) - which is quite easy if you just by chance happen to get one or two vets who breeze you past it.
But a goodly number (30-35%) also haven't quite managed to finish a mission before dying or getting the tech unhurt. Which suggest they are folks who dabbled a bit, maybe got pwned in a few missions and haven't found time to play AS again. Normal casualties of any game.
65.8% of AS players managed a fast reload once. That's promising, even if it's by chance or by purposeful design to score that achievement. 63.8% managed Clear Firing, killing 25 drones without friendly fire with 4 marines in the mission. I'd suggest this number as the general population of AS players whom you might meet online, semi-irregularly. You might see them playing with their friends when asked to.
55% of AS players managed Seal of Quality, which is to seal a door with the welder. I'd point this out as an important number too. Why? Because it's a really easy achievement to score if you were a completionist. A welder comes at level 1. There are weldable doors in any level. So this is the number of players who are obsessed with achievements enough to just get the shiny badge and/or are bothered with a semblance of strategic planning in blocking off drones. The other ~11%? I presume they just shoot things and don't bother with strategy or loadouts much.
48.5% of AS players managed Under the Gun, to roll under a Swarm Ranger projectile. Tellingly, the number is going down. Some of us are not so twitch-oriented. I didn't get this for a long time, I would just move away from the projectile. It took some special effort to roll for the badge once, for me. Others might just roll and get it by chance. Who knows.
Around 41% of AS players got Close Encounters (kill 20 swarm with melee attacks in a mission) and On the Ready Line (killing 1000 swarm). These guys have played enough missions to score 1000 swarm kills and they have started melee'ing. I'd say this number indicates the regulars in the AS player population, be they those who seek out public games or those who just play with their dedicated group of friends. But they play AS regularly enough.
40.1% of AS players have completed the Jacob's Rest campaign on Easy difficulty or harder. This badge is scored even if you started with Normal or Hard. So it's another good indicator that 40% are the regulars, they've played through the campaign once at least. Some might stop here, having 'seen the story' and all the available maps.
Of course, at this point, you start wondering. Wait a minute, reverse those numbers... and you're telling me that the majority (60%-ish) of people who tried Alien Swarm never bothered to finish the campaign yet? Wow. I guess attrition rate is fairly high. Free game, I suppose. Folks try, don't like it, or are casuals who haven't had the time to play it through yet - seeing that the game's only been out a week.
Sure makes you wonder how many people who buy a game ever managed to -finish- a game. Me, I'm guilty as charged.
38.3% of AS players cured an infested marine. 37.3% completed a mission with better than 90% accuracy. 36% managed a group heal with the heal beacon. 34.2% punched a parasite. 32.3% managed to complete a normal campaign.
Time to drill down again, because the comparison is losing meaning. Let's take our presumed 'regulars' population now, the folks who managed an easy campaign. So I'm going to divide by 40, the above numbers.
95.75% of our regulars cured an infested marine. 93.25% completed a mission with better than 90% accuracy. 90% managed a group heal. 85.5% of them punched a parasite. Now the numbers make a decent amount of sense. Amongst the regulars, whom we can presume are willing to go medic once, if just to cure parasite infestation, and we can presume that a small subset of them prefer to shoot parasites than ever flail around close to one.
About 69.5% of our regulars managed Gunslinger, 5 fast reloads in a row, and Scrambled Eggs, all swarm eggs destroyed without any hatching. Again, approaching the average here, a majority did manage it once (if only just for the achievement), but a decent subset of them can't.
Ok. Enough drilling down. Back up again.
25.5% of AS players killed 5 swarm with smoking barrels in a single mission. Not sure what we can say from this one. Some do it by chance, accidentally shooting barrels. Some do it on purpose, shooting barrels to blow aliens up. Some people don't blow red barrels up because it maketh big explosions and couldn't be arsed to do it on purpose for the achievement, and while others are the same but they went to get the achievement anyway.
What I find quite amusing are the weapon kill achievements. 23.8% killed 250 swarm with an Autogun, over the 19.1% Assault Rifle. I guess the difference are those people who are in love with heavies and dakka dakka and would always choose the big heavy weapons guy in Team Fortress. After all, you start with an assault rifle as a medic or officer. 16.5% for the Prototype Rifle - ie. we have a significant drop in folks who play as a tech.
Next most popular are flamethrowers and tesla cannons - I presume this indicates the popularity of those two weapons for their swarm stunning capabilities. Vindicator is up next, people like the shotties. At one third of the popularity of the flamethrower and tesla cannon, we have the SMG (or PDW), shotgun and sentry gun, trailed by the Minigun (ain't tried it either), and the twin pistols and hornet barrage.
Chainsaws and rail rifles are about the same dismal popularity, at one third the SMG/shotgun. Quite amazing, considering how much use I get out of the chainsaw, but I guess folks haven't caught onto it yet, and it's gotten a bad name as a melee weapon in a ranged game.
Laser mines, marksman rifle, incendiary mines, all not scored by too many - they are just too specialist in use to get 250 swarm kills unless you're really doing an for-achievement thing.
40.2% of AS players managed an Easy Campaign.
32.3% of AS players managed a Normal Campaign.
11.5% of AS players managed a Hard Campaign.
1.17% of AS players managed an Insane Campaign.
80.3% of folks who managed Easy managed to handle Normal.
28.6% of folks who managed Easy managed to finish the Hard campaign.
And there you have the casual versus hardcore divide. Many folks are fine doing it on normal difficulty. Only some folks look for a challenge and will go on to hard. Obviously, time is a factor, and perhaps we will see this skew more in the hard direction as the game gets older. Or maybe not.
2.91% of folks who managed Easy, managed to come to grips with the Insane campaign. And there you have it. Those who can only be called ultra-hardcore, be it whether they finished it uber-fast near release when the tesla cannons were unnerfed (hey, finding and using near-exploits is ultra-hardcore exploration) or if they managed it by some other means - such as solo Insane rush, or massive team coordination.
And even less achieved than those are all the speed runs, and outstanding execution - a campaign without any marines dying. Those take serious united teamwork and time.
Meanwhile, the least doable stands as security expert, 10 computer hacks without access being logged. Which shows how un-understandable the 1s hacking process is, or reliant on luck, especially since only the Timor Station computer counts, I think, I dunno.
Lastly, we have Kill Them All and Nuke From Orbit at 0%. 25,000 and 100,000 swarm. Those are going to take some serious time to achieve. Not even a dedicated farmer has got that yet. :)
Interestingly, the most successfully scored achievement is Technician Secured, with a whopping 60% of all players. All they have to do is finish a mission without the tech getting killed. The question is, what are the other 40% of players doing? Surely they're not finishing missions and getting the tech killed compulsively all the time?
I can only surmise that the 40% are: players who downloaded and started the game, but didn't like it after playing the tutorial, or had it crash to desktop unplayable, or play it strictly offline, thus not earning any achievements. Or if Alien Swarm counts all players as people who own the game (and everyone who uses Steam owns the free Alien Swarm), then they are people who never even started the game.
In other words, they are throwing off the stats.
So what if we take away that 40%, and recalculate achievements based on the 60% of players who at least played it once online?
My math is poor, but I'm assuming this will work. The next achievement up is Hat Trick, with 58% of all players getting that - which is complete 2 co-cop missions online to earn a Team Fortress 2 parasite hat. So if we take 58/60 = 0.967. That means 96.7% of players who at least played one mission (going to just call them Alien Swarm players now) bothered to play through two missions, if only just for the damn hat.
Quick and Dead is up next. Kill a Swarm Boomer before it inflates. 86.3% of AS players managed to do that - which is quite easy, just spray and pray at anything in sight and chances are likely that you'd manage a kill once. :)
Ditto Shield Down. 75.1% of AS players managed to finishing blow and killeth a shield bug. Again, some fancy spraying and praying.
Zero Mortality and Protect the Tech are next at 70.3% and 66.8%. We're coming into the averages range now. Most people who played managed at least one normal mission with no deaths and managed to guard the tech on some mission (a landing bay first mission would do fine) - which is quite easy if you just by chance happen to get one or two vets who breeze you past it.
But a goodly number (30-35%) also haven't quite managed to finish a mission before dying or getting the tech unhurt. Which suggest they are folks who dabbled a bit, maybe got pwned in a few missions and haven't found time to play AS again. Normal casualties of any game.
65.8% of AS players managed a fast reload once. That's promising, even if it's by chance or by purposeful design to score that achievement. 63.8% managed Clear Firing, killing 25 drones without friendly fire with 4 marines in the mission. I'd suggest this number as the general population of AS players whom you might meet online, semi-irregularly. You might see them playing with their friends when asked to.
55% of AS players managed Seal of Quality, which is to seal a door with the welder. I'd point this out as an important number too. Why? Because it's a really easy achievement to score if you were a completionist. A welder comes at level 1. There are weldable doors in any level. So this is the number of players who are obsessed with achievements enough to just get the shiny badge and/or are bothered with a semblance of strategic planning in blocking off drones. The other ~11%? I presume they just shoot things and don't bother with strategy or loadouts much.
48.5% of AS players managed Under the Gun, to roll under a Swarm Ranger projectile. Tellingly, the number is going down. Some of us are not so twitch-oriented. I didn't get this for a long time, I would just move away from the projectile. It took some special effort to roll for the badge once, for me. Others might just roll and get it by chance. Who knows.
Around 41% of AS players got Close Encounters (kill 20 swarm with melee attacks in a mission) and On the Ready Line (killing 1000 swarm). These guys have played enough missions to score 1000 swarm kills and they have started melee'ing. I'd say this number indicates the regulars in the AS player population, be they those who seek out public games or those who just play with their dedicated group of friends. But they play AS regularly enough.
40.1% of AS players have completed the Jacob's Rest campaign on Easy difficulty or harder. This badge is scored even if you started with Normal or Hard. So it's another good indicator that 40% are the regulars, they've played through the campaign once at least. Some might stop here, having 'seen the story' and all the available maps.
Of course, at this point, you start wondering. Wait a minute, reverse those numbers... and you're telling me that the majority (60%-ish) of people who tried Alien Swarm never bothered to finish the campaign yet? Wow. I guess attrition rate is fairly high. Free game, I suppose. Folks try, don't like it, or are casuals who haven't had the time to play it through yet - seeing that the game's only been out a week.
Sure makes you wonder how many people who buy a game ever managed to -finish- a game. Me, I'm guilty as charged.
38.3% of AS players cured an infested marine. 37.3% completed a mission with better than 90% accuracy. 36% managed a group heal with the heal beacon. 34.2% punched a parasite. 32.3% managed to complete a normal campaign.
Time to drill down again, because the comparison is losing meaning. Let's take our presumed 'regulars' population now, the folks who managed an easy campaign. So I'm going to divide by 40, the above numbers.
95.75% of our regulars cured an infested marine. 93.25% completed a mission with better than 90% accuracy. 90% managed a group heal. 85.5% of them punched a parasite. Now the numbers make a decent amount of sense. Amongst the regulars, whom we can presume are willing to go medic once, if just to cure parasite infestation, and we can presume that a small subset of them prefer to shoot parasites than ever flail around close to one.
About 69.5% of our regulars managed Gunslinger, 5 fast reloads in a row, and Scrambled Eggs, all swarm eggs destroyed without any hatching. Again, approaching the average here, a majority did manage it once (if only just for the achievement), but a decent subset of them can't.
Ok. Enough drilling down. Back up again.
25.5% of AS players killed 5 swarm with smoking barrels in a single mission. Not sure what we can say from this one. Some do it by chance, accidentally shooting barrels. Some do it on purpose, shooting barrels to blow aliens up. Some people don't blow red barrels up because it maketh big explosions and couldn't be arsed to do it on purpose for the achievement, and while others are the same but they went to get the achievement anyway.
What I find quite amusing are the weapon kill achievements. 23.8% killed 250 swarm with an Autogun, over the 19.1% Assault Rifle. I guess the difference are those people who are in love with heavies and dakka dakka and would always choose the big heavy weapons guy in Team Fortress. After all, you start with an assault rifle as a medic or officer. 16.5% for the Prototype Rifle - ie. we have a significant drop in folks who play as a tech.
Next most popular are flamethrowers and tesla cannons - I presume this indicates the popularity of those two weapons for their swarm stunning capabilities. Vindicator is up next, people like the shotties. At one third of the popularity of the flamethrower and tesla cannon, we have the SMG (or PDW), shotgun and sentry gun, trailed by the Minigun (ain't tried it either), and the twin pistols and hornet barrage.
Chainsaws and rail rifles are about the same dismal popularity, at one third the SMG/shotgun. Quite amazing, considering how much use I get out of the chainsaw, but I guess folks haven't caught onto it yet, and it's gotten a bad name as a melee weapon in a ranged game.
Laser mines, marksman rifle, incendiary mines, all not scored by too many - they are just too specialist in use to get 250 swarm kills unless you're really doing an for-achievement thing.
40.2% of AS players managed an Easy Campaign.
32.3% of AS players managed a Normal Campaign.
11.5% of AS players managed a Hard Campaign.
1.17% of AS players managed an Insane Campaign.
80.3% of folks who managed Easy managed to handle Normal.
28.6% of folks who managed Easy managed to finish the Hard campaign.
And there you have the casual versus hardcore divide. Many folks are fine doing it on normal difficulty. Only some folks look for a challenge and will go on to hard. Obviously, time is a factor, and perhaps we will see this skew more in the hard direction as the game gets older. Or maybe not.
2.91% of folks who managed Easy, managed to come to grips with the Insane campaign. And there you have it. Those who can only be called ultra-hardcore, be it whether they finished it uber-fast near release when the tesla cannons were unnerfed (hey, finding and using near-exploits is ultra-hardcore exploration) or if they managed it by some other means - such as solo Insane rush, or massive team coordination.
And even less achieved than those are all the speed runs, and outstanding execution - a campaign without any marines dying. Those take serious united teamwork and time.
Meanwhile, the least doable stands as security expert, 10 computer hacks without access being logged. Which shows how un-understandable the 1s hacking process is, or reliant on luck, especially since only the Timor Station computer counts, I think, I dunno.
Lastly, we have Kill Them All and Nuke From Orbit at 0%. 25,000 and 100,000 swarm. Those are going to take some serious time to achieve. Not even a dedicated farmer has got that yet. :)
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Speaking of Gameplay...
It's ironic. Massively was just talking about whether you'd prefer a game to live up to your expectations, or come out of nowhere to bowl you over. Of course, they were doing it in the context of MMOs, which are so costly to make that you -have- to hype and market your product if it isn't meant for a niche audience, so the only viable option is to just pray that it vaguely matches up to what you expect out of it.
Alien Swarm, on the other hand, is a game that I haven't been keeping tabs on because it's not in any of my interest genres (come on, top-down shooters, isn't that the province of cheapo $5 indie games like Alien Shooter or whatever?) and comes swinging heavy handed out of left field as the gateway drug to Steam.
I find it amazing that such a deceptively simple-looking game with a standard premise contains such lasting replay value to the tune of me clocking up 36 hours on it in under a week (which alas, says a lot about my current levels of sleep deprivation.)
I believe the depth of gameplay stems from the cunning design decision to offer a variety of strategic choices but a limited slot loadout.
1) Number of players playing the game (1-4)
Here you get the choice of a full group challenge, with all the requisite cat-herding of coordinating multiple players. Or you increase your difficulty by doing it as a smaller group of 2-3 people, which allow the friends-only small group likers to find their niche. Or by tinkering with a console command, you play it solo, which sends the difficulty flying through the roof but provides a different kind of 'survivalist' strategic gameplay for crazy soloists who love that sort of thing.
2) Which character and class you choose to play? (8 choices, 4 classes)
Self-explanatory, different things come in handy at different times, so there is some significant planning involved at higher levels of difficulty (be it the standard difficulty settings or if you change people numbers.)
3) What equipment will you choose to take? (lots unlocked by level)
Ditto, see number 2.
4) What difficulty are you playing on?
Ditto, see number 2 and 3.
5) What type of meta-game are you playing?
This is king. It really is. Whoever created the Steam achievements for this game deserves a medal in game design. Let's face it, a lot of players are motivated like little rats for these virtual shinies. By devising these correctly, you nudge players into playing differenet metagames that your game can support. And by god, can Alien Swarm support a LOT of these metagames, including some not originally designed.
You have your standard 4-man shoot aliens get to the end game. That's the simple baseline that a beginning player will follow. They complete the campaign on easy and normal, racking up their story badges and getting familiar with the map levels, and then they start trying on hard and insane - which forces more strategic planning, more familiarity with the loadout options, more cooperation with each other, etc. And they do this because they're chasing xp and levels too, like good little hamsters on a wheel.
Somewhere along the line, it becomes obvious that you can play different types of metagames. You could clear all the aliens (except for the one or two drones who will always spawn and come at you to keep you on your toes). You could start running past the aliens to complete the map more quickly, because after all, there are shiny speedrun badges. (And then you realise the times are set so competitively that you're going to need a major cooperative and strategic effort between competent players because of the cunning map design that can branch in different directions.)
Combine these together and you get massively different games out of the same codebase, tickling different people's playstyles. One could do a solo insane survival/"speed" challenge - whereupon tons of replay value is gained by trying it over and over, practising to get good at 'this turn, that corner, shoot here, whack barrel, remember to flame this alien there' all by your lonesome. One could also do a 4-man cooperative challenge, wherein you try again and again to get your parts just right and for all the team synergies to come together to victory condition.
About 12 hours ago, I just had one of the most memorable epic experiences in game-playing in my quest to attain the Insane Campaign badge. The roadblock was the last mission - Timor Station. I'd taken to attempting solo tries at the badge, following the forums' strategic suggestion of using the tech Vegas, a flamethrower for the stun and a chainsaw for the damage. The trick was I left my solo game open to public to join.
Midway through umpteen attempts, getting really familiar with the alien spawn patterns of the first section, and adept at my flame and chainsaw, or flame and dodge past combos, I would have random weirdos joining in.
Half of them were way past their depth, naturally. The sheer craziness of Timor Insane would drive them off before long. But the other half, ah, that's the group I wanted. Those just as driven as I to get that last niggling campaign badge, and having enough familiarity with Alien Swarm to attempt Timor Insane.
The first few possibly successful attempts were with a Japanese or Korean group (I assumed, since I just got a lot of squares in people's names and talking) that joined more or less simultaneously. They played in a pretty coordinated fashion, some guy taking the marksman rifle to shoot the big bugs, one flamethrowing, etc. We smashed through about 3/4 of the level and proceeded to get facestomped by 4 shield bugs and lots of harvesters, because they blew their ammo load so lavishly in the few sections. Cue us throwing ourselves into the fray about 3-5 times before one quit and the other two followed soon after.
The next two guys to join in were cvoQ and <>. They had quite high ping and knew it. I'm talking 300-400ms. They said as much in broken English "we have high ping, but we really want this. pls don't kick"
Hell, I just want people who can work together in a team and are serious about the attempt. Best buds are my favorite people to play with because then I have a good duo to rely on, and all I have to do is not screw up my own end and look like an asset to them. Hey, if you can live with the lag, I have no issues, I'm the host and I have 5-25ms ping. :)
We waited for one more random pubbie to join in and went for it. Multiple times. Changing loadouts according to individual preference at first. The two were mic'ing to themselves in a complete unrecognizable language, I wondered if they were Euros. Then Cyrax took charge, after asking any suggestions? to which I said I had no clue, and making small changes to our loadout. "let's try two medic" "take tesla sentry" etc etc. And we progressively got better and better, as we started getting a feel for each other, and getting past stage after stage.
We made it to the shield bugs and got facestomped naturally. But we were committed to this. We wanted it bad. We were running out of ammo, so Cyrax asked me to carry an ammo load too (we were carting at least 1 or 2 at this point). I had one more gun to pick, and I normally carry a flamer as does everyone. But flamers just didn't seem to be cutting it on the larger bugs. So I scanned through my loadout list, thinking, what the hell does high damage and doesn't use up too much ammo? I couldn't trust myself with a rail gun or marksman rifle, my aim is the shits, especially when I get freaked out, and there's so much freakout on Insane. I like a shotty, but I wasn't playing Jaeger or an Officer, so the standard shotty has terrible ammo capacity. And then I saw it.
The Chainsaw. It does big damage. Wtf, was I certifiably insane? The chainsaw is a melee weapon. It's a good secondary. I'm carrying an ammo load though. I'd have no primary gun. Oh what the heck, I thought, and grabbed it. I'd look like a right idiot running around like a chainsaw Rambo, but... it doesn't use any ammo, and I was confident of my ping and dodging like heck skills.
And you know what? It turned out to be the key. Between random multiple attempts of me being a medic with a medigun and a chainsaw, and the random pubbie dropping in and out and getting replaced by one or two way out of their depth, eventually, the tech position freed up and I snatched up Vegas (with his melee damage bonus) and I trusted my own survival rate and caution (if the tech dies, mission fails).
One of the random pubs who had quit for a while made it back - gunoki - and he was a good sport, turning into a full on peace medic healer with medigun and medpack. I was the tech with a chainsaw and an ammo load. Cyrax was another medic with flamethrower and medigun. And cvoQ was our Officer/SW (we kept trying different things, Jaeger/vindicator - Wolfe/autogun). We all picked tesla sentries for the slow/stun effect with the shield bugs.
And by god, we knew we had this as we ran through multiple attempts getting our timing just picture perfect.
Cyrax flamed the small stuff, the Spawn and the parasites. As he flamed the big guys to hold them in position and stopped the moment I got there, I would chainsaw the momentarily stunned beastie into zillions of pieces in 1-4 seconds flat - which was far better than 50 rounds of ammo emptied into each big thing. cvoQ alternately held back and vanguard as required per section. gunoki had his people to heal back and forth in places.
The amount of coordination is really hard to describe in words. From my point of view: Cyrax takes out 3 Spawn, flames a harvester, I move up and chainsaw, cvoQ helps with shotty.
Next, I knew that I had to be in a certain location -there- to head off an alien spawn climbing over the railing, help Cyrax whack a harvester, fall back to let him flame some Spawn. cvoQ and gunoki are meanwhile guarding our back from onrushing Drones climbing over the back railing. We hit the warhead button and the door panel.
And then follow Cyrax literally on his footsteps through two Rangers, two drones, dodge one Boomer, chainsaw massacre a Mortar as Cyrax flames 3 eggs and u-turns, both of us dodging mortar rounds all this while. On the u-turn, we meet up with gunoki and we spam heal up, cvoQ has headed down to engage the second mortar, Cyrax rushes down to flame it, I follow up to chainsaw it to death. The two engage a harvester with spawn, I follow up to kill it, having held off one or two back drones to save our peace medic gunoki.
At the same point, which is right by the rocks which require a mining laser to cut through, a bunch of drones drop, Cyrax flames wildly, we all individually take them out as best we can... meanwhile I run to the rocks with the chainsaw to open them out without having to swap for a mining laser.
Next up, a whole bunch of parasite eggs and one parasite. Cyrax and cvoQ go up to flame and shotty them. Me and gunoki guard our back from drones. I head up to the tech hack door and just chainsaw it down. I actually waited for the parasite to go away to the left, but on hmm, second thought, if I ever try this again, I bet I could drop the door on the parasite. I head back down to a special spot to chainsaw the last wave of drones.
Cyrax comes up and flames the parasite and spawn. I follow him up. He heads right to flame harvester, a ranger or two, and hit the button for the bridge. I go left, chainsaw through two spawn eggs, one ranger, drop a tesla right on the railing where a horde of drones spawn. gunoki follows me to keep me healed up. cvoQ helps Cyrax and rearguard. I proceed to massively chainsaw the drones down, while hotfooting it away from the mortar rounds who are unreachable, but help to destroy the drones too, and watch the vent for rangers which spawn. cvoQ and Cyrax join us as the bridge drops in place.
Up on the bridge, two sections of 7-10 parasites. gunoki and I hold back, dodging mortars. Cyrax goes up to flame them to death, cvoQ guarding his back. We go up and left and brief respite. Ammo drop, medpack drop, heal up.
Two pairs of ranger/harvester now. Cyrax goes up, flames, we do chainsaw/shotty on one pair. Cyrax turns right. Next pair goes down. One mortar gets flamed. It goes down. Next harvester gets flamed, it dies too. We're now at the next stage of biomass holding the bomb back. Cyrax/cvoQ clear the two spawn eggs there. The biomass is flamed and incoming wave. I sit in the pocket and hold new rearguard against a sporadic drone drop from the ceiling. The three head backward to fight off a wave of drones and rangers and things. The door is meanwhile getting banged on, and I position myself just so against a corner. My tank/aggro sense helps here, because I discover by chance that a drone wave heads in a straight line towards the nearest enemy. Angling just right, with chainsaw revving, the drones bang the door down and run straight into the chainsaw in a most satisfactory manner. (Come to think of it, I could also try bringing the door down onto them.)
Next up, the shield bug and harvester phase. Cyrax goes north, drops a tesla sentry, flames. I head up and chainsaw the shield bug held in place. We go left, gunoki and cvoQ hold off our back with drones, Cyrax and I go up to deal with two more shield bugs using teslas. It's extremely chancy here because I get hit by spawn from the harvesters near by. More aggressive flames would help. To be honest, I think freeze grenades would work too. We worked out we didn't need that much ammo load, so I carried a sentry gun in our last attempts. This gets dropped to help clear spawn. We go right and shotty/flame/chainsaw the horde of harvesters blocking the last rocks to be mined, falling back as needed. One more drone wave comes from wherever, front or back, to be held off. Oh yes, gunoki has picked up a mining laser at some point, having exhausted his medigun, so we open the way.
Last section, a ton of parasites and spawn eggs. The sentry gun gets mounted up. The three go in to clear. As the very valuable tech with no way to defend myself - chainsaw+parasite=bad, I get to sit at the top staircase in the middle and scream like a little girl if a parasite comes near me. Oh, and I suppose my auto scanner helps to alert them with little red dots to where the parasite is. When everything is slowly cleared, I come down for the final hack.
This by the way happened once only, since we wiped without the sentry gun on parasites when they were unaware there was an egg up front, and I now describe our epic win. Anyway, I come down for the hack.... Cling clang goes the timer. Detonation sequence activated.
Run run run run. Cyrax beats me to the punch, and I let him go first, because he has the flamer to briefly stun the spawning aliens, and I hope to god that he remembers there are parasites on the bridge. CvoQ and gunoki follow hot on our heels. I try in passing to chainsaw a few drones to help out the rearguard but it's halfhearted because I'm full on running.
And OH GOD he DOESN'T remember there are parasites that spawn, or maybe he has no more flamer ammo, but whatever the case, I see him reeling around infected as I race past him. He has thankfully flamed the rest into oblivion. BANG he explodes, spewing more parasites that the last two are guaranteed to run into, and I know there's nothing for it but me now.
Sure enough, cvoQ mustn't have been able to shotty the onrushing parasites in time, because we get another cutscene death of one of them exploding, I race forward another few seconds. And then the last guy explodes, more cutscene interruption, and I dash forward yet again, dancing around the waves of drones that are just popping up.
Thank goodness I've done this last run countless times on other difficulties before, so I roughly know what spawns when, but this is Insane, and shit pops up in Insane that doesn't turn up anywhere else. I have one last Tesla sentry left. I'm saving it for the big room where I know a ton of shield bugs and crap pop up. I make it, and sure enough, at least 3 shield bugs and a horde of uncountable things appear. I throw down the tesla, dodging like an inspired running back and somehow make it past them to the ending edge.
gunoki is going NICE. NICE MAN. Because they're all dead and spectating me and praying for me to win...
...but wait, it's not over yet, because there are still precious breaths to wait as my rescue ship arrives to pick me up, and a literal TRAIN of aliens are coming straight at me. I hold out my chainsaw and pray. The drones splat themselves onto it. But NO, a shield bug is stomping up in my face with two more coming up, and MORE drones from all angles.
I make a mad dash down and left, they follow, I run around the crates by the landing pad, wondering in that split second how I'm going to lead them on a merry go around while the ship arrives. There is a heart stopping moment when I'm literally backed in from all sides by aliens. Thankfully, the nearest are drones, operating on sheer instinct and adrenaline, I swing my chainsaw for a split second to clear the way and let go of the mouse button (because operating a chainsaw slows down my speed, and Vegas is not very fast to begin with) and -just- make it back to the edge as the ship arrives, a breath away from getting flattened.
MISSION COMPLETE
dear fucking god, is my shared exhalation to them, as the Insane Campaign achievement pops up for three of us - Cyrax, cvoQ and me. The two of them are going jaaaa and JAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. And I presume that's yes in whatever the hell language they speak. (Turns out they are from Czech and Slovakia after looking up their Steam profiles later. No wonder I couldn't make out whatever they were saying over the mic.)
We share a calmer round of thank yous, gg, smiley faces and nices, before we head off for a long and well-deserved break. Presumably gunoki still has the other levels to complete on Insane, but he has finished the most difficult of them by far. I couldn't see his profile on Steam, presumably he's got it on a private setting.
So see, you CAN pug and get some great teams. Just takes some patience. :) Sure, it'll probably have gone faster in a hardcore group of friends coordinating over mic or in the same room, but not everyone has that kind of luxury. Long live PUGing.
Alien Swarm, on the other hand, is a game that I haven't been keeping tabs on because it's not in any of my interest genres (come on, top-down shooters, isn't that the province of cheapo $5 indie games like Alien Shooter or whatever?) and comes swinging heavy handed out of left field as the gateway drug to Steam.
I find it amazing that such a deceptively simple-looking game with a standard premise contains such lasting replay value to the tune of me clocking up 36 hours on it in under a week (which alas, says a lot about my current levels of sleep deprivation.)
I believe the depth of gameplay stems from the cunning design decision to offer a variety of strategic choices but a limited slot loadout.
1) Number of players playing the game (1-4)
Here you get the choice of a full group challenge, with all the requisite cat-herding of coordinating multiple players. Or you increase your difficulty by doing it as a smaller group of 2-3 people, which allow the friends-only small group likers to find their niche. Or by tinkering with a console command, you play it solo, which sends the difficulty flying through the roof but provides a different kind of 'survivalist' strategic gameplay for crazy soloists who love that sort of thing.
2) Which character and class you choose to play? (8 choices, 4 classes)
Self-explanatory, different things come in handy at different times, so there is some significant planning involved at higher levels of difficulty (be it the standard difficulty settings or if you change people numbers.)
3) What equipment will you choose to take? (lots unlocked by level)
Ditto, see number 2.
4) What difficulty are you playing on?
Ditto, see number 2 and 3.
5) What type of meta-game are you playing?
This is king. It really is. Whoever created the Steam achievements for this game deserves a medal in game design. Let's face it, a lot of players are motivated like little rats for these virtual shinies. By devising these correctly, you nudge players into playing differenet metagames that your game can support. And by god, can Alien Swarm support a LOT of these metagames, including some not originally designed.
You have your standard 4-man shoot aliens get to the end game. That's the simple baseline that a beginning player will follow. They complete the campaign on easy and normal, racking up their story badges and getting familiar with the map levels, and then they start trying on hard and insane - which forces more strategic planning, more familiarity with the loadout options, more cooperation with each other, etc. And they do this because they're chasing xp and levels too, like good little hamsters on a wheel.
Somewhere along the line, it becomes obvious that you can play different types of metagames. You could clear all the aliens (except for the one or two drones who will always spawn and come at you to keep you on your toes). You could start running past the aliens to complete the map more quickly, because after all, there are shiny speedrun badges. (And then you realise the times are set so competitively that you're going to need a major cooperative and strategic effort between competent players because of the cunning map design that can branch in different directions.)
Combine these together and you get massively different games out of the same codebase, tickling different people's playstyles. One could do a solo insane survival/"speed" challenge - whereupon tons of replay value is gained by trying it over and over, practising to get good at 'this turn, that corner, shoot here, whack barrel, remember to flame this alien there' all by your lonesome. One could also do a 4-man cooperative challenge, wherein you try again and again to get your parts just right and for all the team synergies to come together to victory condition.
About 12 hours ago, I just had one of the most memorable epic experiences in game-playing in my quest to attain the Insane Campaign badge. The roadblock was the last mission - Timor Station. I'd taken to attempting solo tries at the badge, following the forums' strategic suggestion of using the tech Vegas, a flamethrower for the stun and a chainsaw for the damage. The trick was I left my solo game open to public to join.
Midway through umpteen attempts, getting really familiar with the alien spawn patterns of the first section, and adept at my flame and chainsaw, or flame and dodge past combos, I would have random weirdos joining in.
Half of them were way past their depth, naturally. The sheer craziness of Timor Insane would drive them off before long. But the other half, ah, that's the group I wanted. Those just as driven as I to get that last niggling campaign badge, and having enough familiarity with Alien Swarm to attempt Timor Insane.
The first few possibly successful attempts were with a Japanese or Korean group (I assumed, since I just got a lot of squares in people's names and talking) that joined more or less simultaneously. They played in a pretty coordinated fashion, some guy taking the marksman rifle to shoot the big bugs, one flamethrowing, etc. We smashed through about 3/4 of the level and proceeded to get facestomped by 4 shield bugs and lots of harvesters, because they blew their ammo load so lavishly in the few sections. Cue us throwing ourselves into the fray about 3-5 times before one quit and the other two followed soon after.
The next two guys to join in were cvoQ and <
Hell, I just want people who can work together in a team and are serious about the attempt. Best buds are my favorite people to play with because then I have a good duo to rely on, and all I have to do is not screw up my own end and look like an asset to them. Hey, if you can live with the lag, I have no issues, I'm the host and I have 5-25ms ping. :)
We waited for one more random pubbie to join in and went for it. Multiple times. Changing loadouts according to individual preference at first. The two were mic'ing to themselves in a complete unrecognizable language, I wondered if they were Euros. Then Cyrax took charge, after asking any suggestions? to which I said I had no clue, and making small changes to our loadout. "let's try two medic" "take tesla sentry" etc etc. And we progressively got better and better, as we started getting a feel for each other, and getting past stage after stage.
We made it to the shield bugs and got facestomped naturally. But we were committed to this. We wanted it bad. We were running out of ammo, so Cyrax asked me to carry an ammo load too (we were carting at least 1 or 2 at this point). I had one more gun to pick, and I normally carry a flamer as does everyone. But flamers just didn't seem to be cutting it on the larger bugs. So I scanned through my loadout list, thinking, what the hell does high damage and doesn't use up too much ammo? I couldn't trust myself with a rail gun or marksman rifle, my aim is the shits, especially when I get freaked out, and there's so much freakout on Insane. I like a shotty, but I wasn't playing Jaeger or an Officer, so the standard shotty has terrible ammo capacity. And then I saw it.
The Chainsaw. It does big damage. Wtf, was I certifiably insane? The chainsaw is a melee weapon. It's a good secondary. I'm carrying an ammo load though. I'd have no primary gun. Oh what the heck, I thought, and grabbed it. I'd look like a right idiot running around like a chainsaw Rambo, but... it doesn't use any ammo, and I was confident of my ping and dodging like heck skills.
And you know what? It turned out to be the key. Between random multiple attempts of me being a medic with a medigun and a chainsaw, and the random pubbie dropping in and out and getting replaced by one or two way out of their depth, eventually, the tech position freed up and I snatched up Vegas (with his melee damage bonus) and I trusted my own survival rate and caution (if the tech dies, mission fails).
One of the random pubs who had quit for a while made it back - gunoki - and he was a good sport, turning into a full on peace medic healer with medigun and medpack. I was the tech with a chainsaw and an ammo load. Cyrax was another medic with flamethrower and medigun. And cvoQ was our Officer/SW (we kept trying different things, Jaeger/vindicator - Wolfe/autogun). We all picked tesla sentries for the slow/stun effect with the shield bugs.
And by god, we knew we had this as we ran through multiple attempts getting our timing just picture perfect.
Cyrax flamed the small stuff, the Spawn and the parasites. As he flamed the big guys to hold them in position and stopped the moment I got there, I would chainsaw the momentarily stunned beastie into zillions of pieces in 1-4 seconds flat - which was far better than 50 rounds of ammo emptied into each big thing. cvoQ alternately held back and vanguard as required per section. gunoki had his people to heal back and forth in places.
The amount of coordination is really hard to describe in words. From my point of view: Cyrax takes out 3 Spawn, flames a harvester, I move up and chainsaw, cvoQ helps with shotty.
Next, I knew that I had to be in a certain location -there- to head off an alien spawn climbing over the railing, help Cyrax whack a harvester, fall back to let him flame some Spawn. cvoQ and gunoki are meanwhile guarding our back from onrushing Drones climbing over the back railing. We hit the warhead button and the door panel.
And then follow Cyrax literally on his footsteps through two Rangers, two drones, dodge one Boomer, chainsaw massacre a Mortar as Cyrax flames 3 eggs and u-turns, both of us dodging mortar rounds all this while. On the u-turn, we meet up with gunoki and we spam heal up, cvoQ has headed down to engage the second mortar, Cyrax rushes down to flame it, I follow up to chainsaw it to death. The two engage a harvester with spawn, I follow up to kill it, having held off one or two back drones to save our peace medic gunoki.
At the same point, which is right by the rocks which require a mining laser to cut through, a bunch of drones drop, Cyrax flames wildly, we all individually take them out as best we can... meanwhile I run to the rocks with the chainsaw to open them out without having to swap for a mining laser.
Next up, a whole bunch of parasite eggs and one parasite. Cyrax and cvoQ go up to flame and shotty them. Me and gunoki guard our back from drones. I head up to the tech hack door and just chainsaw it down. I actually waited for the parasite to go away to the left, but on hmm, second thought, if I ever try this again, I bet I could drop the door on the parasite. I head back down to a special spot to chainsaw the last wave of drones.
Cyrax comes up and flames the parasite and spawn. I follow him up. He heads right to flame harvester, a ranger or two, and hit the button for the bridge. I go left, chainsaw through two spawn eggs, one ranger, drop a tesla right on the railing where a horde of drones spawn. gunoki follows me to keep me healed up. cvoQ helps Cyrax and rearguard. I proceed to massively chainsaw the drones down, while hotfooting it away from the mortar rounds who are unreachable, but help to destroy the drones too, and watch the vent for rangers which spawn. cvoQ and Cyrax join us as the bridge drops in place.
Up on the bridge, two sections of 7-10 parasites. gunoki and I hold back, dodging mortars. Cyrax goes up to flame them to death, cvoQ guarding his back. We go up and left and brief respite. Ammo drop, medpack drop, heal up.
Two pairs of ranger/harvester now. Cyrax goes up, flames, we do chainsaw/shotty on one pair. Cyrax turns right. Next pair goes down. One mortar gets flamed. It goes down. Next harvester gets flamed, it dies too. We're now at the next stage of biomass holding the bomb back. Cyrax/cvoQ clear the two spawn eggs there. The biomass is flamed and incoming wave. I sit in the pocket and hold new rearguard against a sporadic drone drop from the ceiling. The three head backward to fight off a wave of drones and rangers and things. The door is meanwhile getting banged on, and I position myself just so against a corner. My tank/aggro sense helps here, because I discover by chance that a drone wave heads in a straight line towards the nearest enemy. Angling just right, with chainsaw revving, the drones bang the door down and run straight into the chainsaw in a most satisfactory manner. (Come to think of it, I could also try bringing the door down onto them.)
Next up, the shield bug and harvester phase. Cyrax goes north, drops a tesla sentry, flames. I head up and chainsaw the shield bug held in place. We go left, gunoki and cvoQ hold off our back with drones, Cyrax and I go up to deal with two more shield bugs using teslas. It's extremely chancy here because I get hit by spawn from the harvesters near by. More aggressive flames would help. To be honest, I think freeze grenades would work too. We worked out we didn't need that much ammo load, so I carried a sentry gun in our last attempts. This gets dropped to help clear spawn. We go right and shotty/flame/chainsaw the horde of harvesters blocking the last rocks to be mined, falling back as needed. One more drone wave comes from wherever, front or back, to be held off. Oh yes, gunoki has picked up a mining laser at some point, having exhausted his medigun, so we open the way.
Last section, a ton of parasites and spawn eggs. The sentry gun gets mounted up. The three go in to clear. As the very valuable tech with no way to defend myself - chainsaw+parasite=bad, I get to sit at the top staircase in the middle and scream like a little girl if a parasite comes near me. Oh, and I suppose my auto scanner helps to alert them with little red dots to where the parasite is. When everything is slowly cleared, I come down for the final hack.
This by the way happened once only, since we wiped without the sentry gun on parasites when they were unaware there was an egg up front, and I now describe our epic win. Anyway, I come down for the hack.... Cling clang goes the timer. Detonation sequence activated.
Run run run run. Cyrax beats me to the punch, and I let him go first, because he has the flamer to briefly stun the spawning aliens, and I hope to god that he remembers there are parasites on the bridge. CvoQ and gunoki follow hot on our heels. I try in passing to chainsaw a few drones to help out the rearguard but it's halfhearted because I'm full on running.
And OH GOD he DOESN'T remember there are parasites that spawn, or maybe he has no more flamer ammo, but whatever the case, I see him reeling around infected as I race past him. He has thankfully flamed the rest into oblivion. BANG he explodes, spewing more parasites that the last two are guaranteed to run into, and I know there's nothing for it but me now.
Sure enough, cvoQ mustn't have been able to shotty the onrushing parasites in time, because we get another cutscene death of one of them exploding, I race forward another few seconds. And then the last guy explodes, more cutscene interruption, and I dash forward yet again, dancing around the waves of drones that are just popping up.
Thank goodness I've done this last run countless times on other difficulties before, so I roughly know what spawns when, but this is Insane, and shit pops up in Insane that doesn't turn up anywhere else. I have one last Tesla sentry left. I'm saving it for the big room where I know a ton of shield bugs and crap pop up. I make it, and sure enough, at least 3 shield bugs and a horde of uncountable things appear. I throw down the tesla, dodging like an inspired running back and somehow make it past them to the ending edge.
gunoki is going NICE. NICE MAN. Because they're all dead and spectating me and praying for me to win...
...but wait, it's not over yet, because there are still precious breaths to wait as my rescue ship arrives to pick me up, and a literal TRAIN of aliens are coming straight at me. I hold out my chainsaw and pray. The drones splat themselves onto it. But NO, a shield bug is stomping up in my face with two more coming up, and MORE drones from all angles.
I make a mad dash down and left, they follow, I run around the crates by the landing pad, wondering in that split second how I'm going to lead them on a merry go around while the ship arrives. There is a heart stopping moment when I'm literally backed in from all sides by aliens. Thankfully, the nearest are drones, operating on sheer instinct and adrenaline, I swing my chainsaw for a split second to clear the way and let go of the mouse button (because operating a chainsaw slows down my speed, and Vegas is not very fast to begin with) and -just- make it back to the edge as the ship arrives, a breath away from getting flattened.
MISSION COMPLETE
dear fucking god, is my shared exhalation to them, as the Insane Campaign achievement pops up for three of us - Cyrax, cvoQ and me. The two of them are going jaaaa and JAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. And I presume that's yes in whatever the hell language they speak. (Turns out they are from Czech and Slovakia after looking up their Steam profiles later. No wonder I couldn't make out whatever they were saying over the mic.)
We share a calmer round of thank yous, gg, smiley faces and nices, before we head off for a long and well-deserved break. Presumably gunoki still has the other levels to complete on Insane, but he has finished the most difficult of them by far. I couldn't see his profile on Steam, presumably he's got it on a private setting.
So see, you CAN pug and get some great teams. Just takes some patience. :) Sure, it'll probably have gone faster in a hardcore group of friends coordinating over mic or in the same room, but not everyone has that kind of luxury. Long live PUGing.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Gameplay, Lasting Replay Value - Overrated?
I wanted to write a muse on what draws me to a game, what I find fun, and the immersive experiences and flow I crave when playing games.
Along the way, as I thought about how often I pick up and put down games without ever playing them through, thus negating any possible argument about lasting replay value being one of my important 'good game' factors, I thought about the criteria of 'gameplay' itself.
What in the world is good gameplay to me? Is it the same as what others, especially reviewers, call good gameplay?
To answer that question, I have to first define the term and answer the question of "What is gameplay, anyway?"
I foolishly tried to google the question. At which point, the pit fell out from under me, I ended up with a dozen browser tabs open with various articles, blogs and university game design powerpoints, and I'm no closer to getting a handle on this elusive element of gameplay.
I think it's about choices and consequences, about immersion and experiences while playing the game, and also involves a certain amount of interactivity.
But I can't for the life of me get the definition resolved to satisfaction just yet, so this post will have to hold as a placeholder for now.
Along the way, as I thought about how often I pick up and put down games without ever playing them through, thus negating any possible argument about lasting replay value being one of my important 'good game' factors, I thought about the criteria of 'gameplay' itself.
What in the world is good gameplay to me? Is it the same as what others, especially reviewers, call good gameplay?
To answer that question, I have to first define the term and answer the question of "What is gameplay, anyway?"
I foolishly tried to google the question. At which point, the pit fell out from under me, I ended up with a dozen browser tabs open with various articles, blogs and university game design powerpoints, and I'm no closer to getting a handle on this elusive element of gameplay.
I think it's about choices and consequences, about immersion and experiences while playing the game, and also involves a certain amount of interactivity.
But I can't for the life of me get the definition resolved to satisfaction just yet, so this post will have to hold as a placeholder for now.
Content with "Content"
I missed replying to this article on Massively, about Content Contentment. So I'm going to muse about it here. It's an interesting question. I've never given serious thought about what content means to me.
My first stab at it would go something like this: Any new change in the game that looks like I will possibly get to experience it.
I'm not very picky about new and shiny. Anything new and shiny I can try, I will. Of course, the staying power behind the new and shiny is a different thing entirely.
I'm fine with avatar customization options, new ways to look prettier. Especially if I like how they look and will use them. They become much less intriguing if I think they are horrible and won't ever use them. Free would be a happy price to pay for them, up to about $5. A $25 celestial horse is right out - *shudders* I never did buy the Grenth and Dwayna costumes, even though I do think they still look pretty hawt. In terms of lasting gameplay value, this is pretty low down on the scale for me, it won't make me stick around a long time.
How about new lore? If it's -just- new lore, say, new story pages posted on a website, I'm afraid that for me, it is around the same level as avatar customization. Cosmetic only.
New enemy groups and factions? Now we're getting somewhere interesting, because the assumption is that we get new-looking mobs, new skills or combinations of powers to face off against and figure out new strategies for, and possibly new levels of sacks of hp. Done properly, you get new lore in the bargain. So there's more new story and things to discover. Gameplay value - significantly higher. I would be less thrilled if these were raid or world bosses that require huge numbers of players to take down, since that would mean my personal useability of the 'content' is much lower.
New map levels? Hell yes. It may apparently just be scenery, but I believe level layout is uber important in making things feel different - simply by defining where you can and cannot go. Bonus points if it makes use of verticality and other sneaky tricks like traps or geysers or whatever.
New areas and zones? Yep. This brings in new quest NPCs, new enemy groups, new map levels, new lore and so on and ties it in altogether in a believable world locale. Obviously, this takes a long time to do right, but it's the nicest kind of no-change-to-the-underlying-game-itself content.
New game mechanics and systems? Some people don't like this. I do. Only because it changes the game itself and makes it a new game. Something new to learn. Fair warning: it may change the game to the point that I no longer enjoy the game and decide to quit. I guess it's a gamble. If the underlying game stays the same, you'll get people getting bored and attrition wearing away at the game. If you change the game too unrecognizably, or make it too challenging for folks to enjoy, or in some way change its atmosphere and experience into something a player doesn't like, then you've lost them too.
So I guess to me, they are ALL content. And I'm fine with all of them.
The kicker is, will that content make me continue to stay in your game?
More on that, coming up in a future post...
My first stab at it would go something like this: Any new change in the game that looks like I will possibly get to experience it.
I'm not very picky about new and shiny. Anything new and shiny I can try, I will. Of course, the staying power behind the new and shiny is a different thing entirely.
I'm fine with avatar customization options, new ways to look prettier. Especially if I like how they look and will use them. They become much less intriguing if I think they are horrible and won't ever use them. Free would be a happy price to pay for them, up to about $5. A $25 celestial horse is right out - *shudders* I never did buy the Grenth and Dwayna costumes, even though I do think they still look pretty hawt. In terms of lasting gameplay value, this is pretty low down on the scale for me, it won't make me stick around a long time.
How about new lore? If it's -just- new lore, say, new story pages posted on a website, I'm afraid that for me, it is around the same level as avatar customization. Cosmetic only.
New enemy groups and factions? Now we're getting somewhere interesting, because the assumption is that we get new-looking mobs, new skills or combinations of powers to face off against and figure out new strategies for, and possibly new levels of sacks of hp. Done properly, you get new lore in the bargain. So there's more new story and things to discover. Gameplay value - significantly higher. I would be less thrilled if these were raid or world bosses that require huge numbers of players to take down, since that would mean my personal useability of the 'content' is much lower.
New map levels? Hell yes. It may apparently just be scenery, but I believe level layout is uber important in making things feel different - simply by defining where you can and cannot go. Bonus points if it makes use of verticality and other sneaky tricks like traps or geysers or whatever.
New areas and zones? Yep. This brings in new quest NPCs, new enemy groups, new map levels, new lore and so on and ties it in altogether in a believable world locale. Obviously, this takes a long time to do right, but it's the nicest kind of no-change-to-the-underlying-game-itself content.
New game mechanics and systems? Some people don't like this. I do. Only because it changes the game itself and makes it a new game. Something new to learn. Fair warning: it may change the game to the point that I no longer enjoy the game and decide to quit. I guess it's a gamble. If the underlying game stays the same, you'll get people getting bored and attrition wearing away at the game. If you change the game too unrecognizably, or make it too challenging for folks to enjoy, or in some way change its atmosphere and experience into something a player doesn't like, then you've lost them too.
So I guess to me, they are ALL content. And I'm fine with all of them.
The kicker is, will that content make me continue to stay in your game?
More on that, coming up in a future post...
Mass Weekend Industry
Despite being seriously tempted to recant on my cancelled Aion subscription, I have decided to stick it out for at least a month or two of no Aion. Perhaps I can resubscribe once 2.0 hits sometime in September, assuming that I haven't gotten distracted with the dual something shiniers of Going Rogue and Guild Wars 2.
ATITD Tale 5 on the main shard is launching sometime August 5th. There is a tremendous temptation to go check it out, especially the new mining and new fishing systems.
However, one thing is for sure. I will not be indulging in mass industry on the main shard. The only way I will survive there is to attach myself to a nice humongous research-type guild and do the social contribution thing.
Two possibilities arise, not altogether incompatible with each other -
1) I could make contact with Wampak, the old Zfree guild leader, though I feel a little embarassed having dropped off the face of the earth. I did explain that I had been recently promoted IRL and just had no time for the game - which was true then.
2) I made chance friends with tehm (tehmoosh) and Verix, and while tehm has lost interest in shard B, Verix tells me that he is pondering shard A's new reset, though who knows how long he'll last. However, tehm has contacts with Pascalito and Ariella, who are one of THE established hotshots of the server. If I could get in with that group, I would be super-set. Doubly encouraging is Pascalito's entry on Facebook's ATITD page, where he volunteers to mentor anyone joining the game. Maybe he just wants new slave labour, but hey, what do I have to lose?
Back on shard B, the main bulk of my infrastructure and industry lies. And you know, it is a good comfort zone.
It helps that there is a crazy hardcore Aussie pair devoted to making resources public, as they have managed to build 13+ of 42+ Raeli ovens where I haven't even managed to build any. Slowly, but steadily, we must be running out of good spots to put Raeli ovens. But I feel less worried and less frantic that I will be locked and shut out of anything. The public resources are always there. And I'm sure there has to be one mountaintop that is so far away that no one on shard B wants to run to.
That's the nice thing about Bastet. There's only 300-some people, and the lebensraum is greater. There are a couple of big industrial lockout guilds, but meh, let them have their fun.
Having watched shard A from beginning to end (well, watching from the outside anyway), I am beginning to understand the population ebb and flow patterns.
Eventually, folks get bored and quit and voila, they free up resources, and all the painstakingly collected Raeli tiles are now free for someone else to claim.
Or they don't quit and they stick it out sitting on their gallant hoard and become the new titled Oracle of something or other, which only entitles them to... slaving away on a humongously costly monument, sitting around begging for other lower ranked people to contribute (what, those same people your selfishness encouraged to quit the game?), and then having Teppy play a cruel trick with a vote that could nullify your achievements/monument in favor of new tech. Oh, and I guess they get bragging rights too. To whoever cares to listen.
I'm actually greatly amused by the vote. It neatly sets up the Explorers vs the Achievers. Out-group focused vs In-group focused. Do you go for new techs that will benefit ALL of Egypt, and bring new game systems and mechanics to fiddle around with? Or do you go for maintaining the status quo of creating new competitive Tests by re-affirming what the monuments stand for, with all the hardworking Test-passers names inscribed on it and everything?
Obviously, I'm in with new and shiny, research for -all-, and a number of research folks on shard A also seem inclined in that direction. The question is, how many of the other subset are left on shard A and which way will they swing? Towards new change and novelty, or back towards the same old?
Regardless, owning a substantial piece of virtual territory in shard B is a good comfort zone to fall back on, as I've mentioned before. Practically no one comes by where I've chosen to set up. It's nice, it's quiet, and it's just me and my alts and all MY junk. Stress on MY. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's part of a collector tendency, but I have this chronic urge to own things, and know they are always going to be there. It's nice to be guildmaster of your own shit... er, stuff.
Being self-sufficient there means that I am more secure in venturing out and trying something experimental with social stuff. It's like a secure home base with which I can always retreat to, in case I get stung by anything.
I did some mass beetle growing over the weekend. I have immensely pretty beetles. Remind me to post pics of them at some point.
I also did some mass charcoal-lizing. It still isn't enough. I nearly filled all my forges and casting boxes, before getting tired and feeling like I was running out of wood in a hurry (I get insecure once I drop below 9k wood.)
Then I got distracted and decided to cast a ton of gears and bearings and things, in preparation for impending automation. Which burnt up about half the charcoal I just made. And I don't think I've got all the gearwork I need for automated machines yet, so I'll have to do it again at some point.
I'm really not keen on metal, but I made myself do it anyway. I macro-mined for two hours (can't wait for it to be gotten rid of in T5) on two alts, accumulating plenty of ore that I can't carry away to smelt until I make myself a carry recipe.
I tried to experiment for 1-2 hours on food cooking pairs, and got some data into my spreadsheet, but couldn't find any good and cheap pairings for what I wanted.
I grew some barley to restock my cooking ingredients and made a reasonable amount of light, medium, dark and burnt barley, malt and wheat in my grain oven.
My long term goal is still to build a deep well of my own. And probably make it public after that. I did some calculations, and the amount of metal I need is mind-boggling. It's going to take at least one week of double-alt macro-mining for two hours. And possibly be ten days, depending on how fast I macro-mine, and if I want to sacrifice any recipes to it.
After getting ore, I'm going to have to smelt it down, which takes 15 minutes for 150 metal - I haven't decided if I want to make myself another gyration cell... it'll speed up the process but gyro cells are so expensive and it'll sidetrek me yet again.
And then casting the screw gears themselves would be a lot of beeswax and a lot of time and a lot of charcoal in the master's casting box.
It's immensely crazy for something that should be a community project, but... you know, it also seems like a fun and ambitious and yet doably achievable by one person type of thing.
ATITD Tale 5 on the main shard is launching sometime August 5th. There is a tremendous temptation to go check it out, especially the new mining and new fishing systems.
However, one thing is for sure. I will not be indulging in mass industry on the main shard. The only way I will survive there is to attach myself to a nice humongous research-type guild and do the social contribution thing.
Two possibilities arise, not altogether incompatible with each other -
1) I could make contact with Wampak, the old Zfree guild leader, though I feel a little embarassed having dropped off the face of the earth. I did explain that I had been recently promoted IRL and just had no time for the game - which was true then.
2) I made chance friends with tehm (tehmoosh) and Verix, and while tehm has lost interest in shard B, Verix tells me that he is pondering shard A's new reset, though who knows how long he'll last. However, tehm has contacts with Pascalito and Ariella, who are one of THE established hotshots of the server. If I could get in with that group, I would be super-set. Doubly encouraging is Pascalito's entry on Facebook's ATITD page, where he volunteers to mentor anyone joining the game. Maybe he just wants new slave labour, but hey, what do I have to lose?
Back on shard B, the main bulk of my infrastructure and industry lies. And you know, it is a good comfort zone.
It helps that there is a crazy hardcore Aussie pair devoted to making resources public, as they have managed to build 13+ of 42+ Raeli ovens where I haven't even managed to build any. Slowly, but steadily, we must be running out of good spots to put Raeli ovens. But I feel less worried and less frantic that I will be locked and shut out of anything. The public resources are always there. And I'm sure there has to be one mountaintop that is so far away that no one on shard B wants to run to.
That's the nice thing about Bastet. There's only 300-some people, and the lebensraum is greater. There are a couple of big industrial lockout guilds, but meh, let them have their fun.
Having watched shard A from beginning to end (well, watching from the outside anyway), I am beginning to understand the population ebb and flow patterns.
Eventually, folks get bored and quit and voila, they free up resources, and all the painstakingly collected Raeli tiles are now free for someone else to claim.
Or they don't quit and they stick it out sitting on their gallant hoard and become the new titled Oracle of something or other, which only entitles them to... slaving away on a humongously costly monument, sitting around begging for other lower ranked people to contribute (what, those same people your selfishness encouraged to quit the game?), and then having Teppy play a cruel trick with a vote that could nullify your achievements/monument in favor of new tech. Oh, and I guess they get bragging rights too. To whoever cares to listen.
I'm actually greatly amused by the vote. It neatly sets up the Explorers vs the Achievers. Out-group focused vs In-group focused. Do you go for new techs that will benefit ALL of Egypt, and bring new game systems and mechanics to fiddle around with? Or do you go for maintaining the status quo of creating new competitive Tests by re-affirming what the monuments stand for, with all the hardworking Test-passers names inscribed on it and everything?
Obviously, I'm in with new and shiny, research for -all-, and a number of research folks on shard A also seem inclined in that direction. The question is, how many of the other subset are left on shard A and which way will they swing? Towards new change and novelty, or back towards the same old?
Regardless, owning a substantial piece of virtual territory in shard B is a good comfort zone to fall back on, as I've mentioned before. Practically no one comes by where I've chosen to set up. It's nice, it's quiet, and it's just me and my alts and all MY junk. Stress on MY. I'm not sure why, perhaps it's part of a collector tendency, but I have this chronic urge to own things, and know they are always going to be there. It's nice to be guildmaster of your own shit... er, stuff.
Being self-sufficient there means that I am more secure in venturing out and trying something experimental with social stuff. It's like a secure home base with which I can always retreat to, in case I get stung by anything.
I did some mass beetle growing over the weekend. I have immensely pretty beetles. Remind me to post pics of them at some point.
I also did some mass charcoal-lizing. It still isn't enough. I nearly filled all my forges and casting boxes, before getting tired and feeling like I was running out of wood in a hurry (I get insecure once I drop below 9k wood.)
Then I got distracted and decided to cast a ton of gears and bearings and things, in preparation for impending automation. Which burnt up about half the charcoal I just made. And I don't think I've got all the gearwork I need for automated machines yet, so I'll have to do it again at some point.
I'm really not keen on metal, but I made myself do it anyway. I macro-mined for two hours (can't wait for it to be gotten rid of in T5) on two alts, accumulating plenty of ore that I can't carry away to smelt until I make myself a carry recipe.
I tried to experiment for 1-2 hours on food cooking pairs, and got some data into my spreadsheet, but couldn't find any good and cheap pairings for what I wanted.
I grew some barley to restock my cooking ingredients and made a reasonable amount of light, medium, dark and burnt barley, malt and wheat in my grain oven.
My long term goal is still to build a deep well of my own. And probably make it public after that. I did some calculations, and the amount of metal I need is mind-boggling. It's going to take at least one week of double-alt macro-mining for two hours. And possibly be ten days, depending on how fast I macro-mine, and if I want to sacrifice any recipes to it.
After getting ore, I'm going to have to smelt it down, which takes 15 minutes for 150 metal - I haven't decided if I want to make myself another gyration cell... it'll speed up the process but gyro cells are so expensive and it'll sidetrek me yet again.
And then casting the screw gears themselves would be a lot of beeswax and a lot of time and a lot of charcoal in the master's casting box.
It's immensely crazy for something that should be a community project, but... you know, it also seems like a fun and ambitious and yet doably achievable by one person type of thing.
Monday, July 12, 2010
PCName, I need your help...
Something that strikes me as rather lacking in both today's RPGs and MMOs is the concept of dynamic NPCs that live lives of their own or at least create the illusion that they have free will and exist outside of the PC's universe.
Oblivion was the last such that I'd played, and basic as the NPC scripts were, they at least spent their lives in different places depending on the hour. This was similar to the meandering movements of certain mobs in the Realms of Despair. Since then, every NPC I've encountered comes across as pathetically static.
Yes, even in the vaunted Bioware titles such as Mass Effect 1 and 2, and Dragon Age... despite the careful art design, the passable animation, the near neurotic care taken to write each NPC with a background full of angst, conflict and tragedy so as to have thick bushy conversation trees after, it is my opinion that they lack a certain lifelike quality that made the NPCs of yore so compelling.
What makes the NPCs of games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, such as Aeris, Jaheira, Viconia and Morte so much more tangible standing beside the embodied avatars of folk like Garrus, Wrex and Liara?
I think there are at least three reasons at work. The first is an artifact of their times and difficult to recreate. They were simply the first to act in such a humanistic manner, and we remember their stories all the better for it. It helped that they were only partially voiced, and most of their speech was left in text - text being the far more powerful medium to tickle imaginations. These days, Generation Z has no such patience for creative reading. Give it to them as a full 3D movie experience, or not at all. We cannot hope to harness this except in indie games that harken back to ancient times.
The second could be solvable had we some control over the content in any game. The issue of quantity versus quality.
There are an insane number of NPCs to be met and brought into the party in Mass Effect 2. This ostensibly creates choice, any number of Shepards could have a myriad mix of aliens and humans in their group and still be viable, while roleplaying the xenophobia of their dreams. Of course, when you start adding potential NPC deaths in the endgame due to a weak party, and factor in most gamer's completionist tendencies - the choice seems like not that much choice at all.
From that immense horde, you get to pick a grand total of 2 NPCs to travel with you. Dragon Age is not much better, you get 3, one of which might be your pet dog. In Baldur's Gate, you run with 5 at a time.
The quality of NPC-NPC interactions is much deeper when you run with more NPCs, who might spout character specific quips from time to time. In Mass Effect, the illusion gets worn down when you realise the same lines are given to different NPCs to voice in slightly different, but ultimately the same meaning, ways.
The old-time NPCs stay with you through the journey of the game. This ties back to the quality of the interaction, rather than a simple swap n' go every time a new scene occurs.
Lastly, and the most key of them all, as hinted in the post title. The oldtime NPCs had dynamic interactions with the PC. They weren't afraid to ask, nay, demand the PC pay attention to them now. They would initiate conversations, not just stand there like statues hoping the PC would come visit them to talk.
Part of this is the engine, of course, Baldur's Gate triggered NPC conversations on a player choosing to 'camp/rest,' but the reliability of this was not under the player's control. If the NPC felt like it (with some obtuse calculations under the hood), they'd start the chitchat. If not, then you waited until the next time.
I dearly want to see more of this. Not in a badly programmed sense where you'd have NPCs trying to approach you to talk and the PC would promptly run off and thus create a train of galloping NPCs (a la City of Heroes citizen marathon following a flying hero). But in the sense of being able to ping and page the PC every now and then. Oi, I'm here, respond to me if you want.
There's an old buggy space sim I still enjoy every now and then. Nomad. Or Project Nomad. Or whatever you call it. You can play it without sound, but it loses everything in the silent translation. If one is able to wrangle the crappy Soundblaster driver into a semblance of life, then the universe takes on a completely new tone. NPC ships that dance about in space will ping and hail you every so often. You don't have to answer, since the dynamic conversation tree that follows is not all inspired, and mostly consists of "Hi, PC. I am so-and-so. Would you care to trade?"
But the point is in the pinging. The semblance that life exists and the world is not all about you. The ships fly about, answer distress calls from other NPC ships, zap in and out of system as they will. Sometimes you can hail them and they would rather not even deign to talk to you at all.
Too often, MMOs these days appear to think that the players ought to fulfill this role to each other. Except that players being players, tend to go out-of-character and out-of-story-universe every so often. Sure, there's social interaction, but there is no world immersion.
Oblivion was the last such that I'd played, and basic as the NPC scripts were, they at least spent their lives in different places depending on the hour. This was similar to the meandering movements of certain mobs in the Realms of Despair. Since then, every NPC I've encountered comes across as pathetically static.
Yes, even in the vaunted Bioware titles such as Mass Effect 1 and 2, and Dragon Age... despite the careful art design, the passable animation, the near neurotic care taken to write each NPC with a background full of angst, conflict and tragedy so as to have thick bushy conversation trees after, it is my opinion that they lack a certain lifelike quality that made the NPCs of yore so compelling.
What makes the NPCs of games like Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment, such as Aeris, Jaheira, Viconia and Morte so much more tangible standing beside the embodied avatars of folk like Garrus, Wrex and Liara?
I think there are at least three reasons at work. The first is an artifact of their times and difficult to recreate. They were simply the first to act in such a humanistic manner, and we remember their stories all the better for it. It helped that they were only partially voiced, and most of their speech was left in text - text being the far more powerful medium to tickle imaginations. These days, Generation Z has no such patience for creative reading. Give it to them as a full 3D movie experience, or not at all. We cannot hope to harness this except in indie games that harken back to ancient times.
The second could be solvable had we some control over the content in any game. The issue of quantity versus quality.
There are an insane number of NPCs to be met and brought into the party in Mass Effect 2. This ostensibly creates choice, any number of Shepards could have a myriad mix of aliens and humans in their group and still be viable, while roleplaying the xenophobia of their dreams. Of course, when you start adding potential NPC deaths in the endgame due to a weak party, and factor in most gamer's completionist tendencies - the choice seems like not that much choice at all.
From that immense horde, you get to pick a grand total of 2 NPCs to travel with you. Dragon Age is not much better, you get 3, one of which might be your pet dog. In Baldur's Gate, you run with 5 at a time.
The quality of NPC-NPC interactions is much deeper when you run with more NPCs, who might spout character specific quips from time to time. In Mass Effect, the illusion gets worn down when you realise the same lines are given to different NPCs to voice in slightly different, but ultimately the same meaning, ways.
The old-time NPCs stay with you through the journey of the game. This ties back to the quality of the interaction, rather than a simple swap n' go every time a new scene occurs.
Lastly, and the most key of them all, as hinted in the post title. The oldtime NPCs had dynamic interactions with the PC. They weren't afraid to ask, nay, demand the PC pay attention to them now. They would initiate conversations, not just stand there like statues hoping the PC would come visit them to talk.
Part of this is the engine, of course, Baldur's Gate triggered NPC conversations on a player choosing to 'camp/rest,' but the reliability of this was not under the player's control. If the NPC felt like it (with some obtuse calculations under the hood), they'd start the chitchat. If not, then you waited until the next time.
I dearly want to see more of this. Not in a badly programmed sense where you'd have NPCs trying to approach you to talk and the PC would promptly run off and thus create a train of galloping NPCs (a la City of Heroes citizen marathon following a flying hero). But in the sense of being able to ping and page the PC every now and then. Oi, I'm here, respond to me if you want.
There's an old buggy space sim I still enjoy every now and then. Nomad. Or Project Nomad. Or whatever you call it. You can play it without sound, but it loses everything in the silent translation. If one is able to wrangle the crappy Soundblaster driver into a semblance of life, then the universe takes on a completely new tone. NPC ships that dance about in space will ping and hail you every so often. You don't have to answer, since the dynamic conversation tree that follows is not all inspired, and mostly consists of "Hi, PC. I am so-and-so. Would you care to trade?"
But the point is in the pinging. The semblance that life exists and the world is not all about you. The ships fly about, answer distress calls from other NPC ships, zap in and out of system as they will. Sometimes you can hail them and they would rather not even deign to talk to you at all.
Too often, MMOs these days appear to think that the players ought to fulfill this role to each other. Except that players being players, tend to go out-of-character and out-of-story-universe every so often. Sure, there's social interaction, but there is no world immersion.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Survivalist MMO
I tried Wurm Online this weekend.
It's got good and bad bits. It's hard to liken it to any other MMO, except, dare I say it - Fallen Earth done right, in a fantasy vein.
Its design choices mesh with what it intends to do. In the same way that Eve Online provides a sandbox for empire-spanning operatic stories of political corporate cutthroats moving legions of people and ships around like little pieces on a chessboard, Wurm Online provides a sandbox for individual folks to join up into little tribal villages and townships, creating heroic epic stories of survivalists, adventurers and eventually/maybe leaders and kings at war.
It's Eve on a different scale.
It also reminds me of Unreal World, a survivalist roguelike. Except where in roguelikes, you're ultimately the centre of the universe the NPCs revolve around, in a survivalist MMO, you're a wannabe newbie hoping to work your way towards one of the centres of the universe formed by other players.
One of the things that first caught me off guard with Wurm Online is that it runs in Java. Relatively small clean download, which is a rarity in these MMO client days.
The second was that it was all in first-person view. Yep. No camera finagling. No seeing yourself in third-person. (Not that your avatar is that cool in art assets anyhow.) This no doubt helps immersion, as well as allows you to get thoroughly lost in the land.
I didn't find the nights that dark. Though apparently as a newbie, you get a little newbie light surrounding you. So the dark nights looked quite a bit like a Morrowind or Oblivion night, and try as I might, I couldn't seem to attract any horrible wolves and spiders and things to come eat me, though I spent quite a while floundering around in the woods while dragging a cart containing the only possessions to my name, like an itinerant tramp. Could be the whole 'deity light surrounds you' thing at work.
One thing I did detest was the very premise of the crafting system. It uses the standard MMO progress bar as timesink schtick. That means if I want to mine, I right-click a cave wall and select "mining = >mine" in the menu, and promptly wait 0:32 for the timer to run down - after which it plops some ore at my feet. If I want to cut a tree, I right-click the tree tile, and select "chop down" after which an 8 second timer runs and I chip away at the tree until it falls over. If I want to forage, I right-click grass, select "nature => forage" and wait another 12 seconds, etc, etc.
The one saving grace was that they had added in a fairly recent patch a check to make sure the grass patch hadn't been recently foraged (ie. yield nothing) BEFORE going through the 12 second timer. This also makes me shudder at the thought that previously, you'd spend a whole lot of minutes foraging empty grassland that had been pillaged by tens of newbies before you.
The other thing I detest about the crafting system is the use of a skill stat to dictate crafting success/failure on a percentage dice roll.
Yes, this is one of the standard crafting models. I suffered it in Aion. Other less hardcore games like LOTRO (possibly WoW too) adjust it by guaranteeing you a wimpier "standard" item, should your "crit chance" fail, but everyone only desires the crit items anyhow.
In Wurm Online, you start out as a pathetic newbie with 0 skill, and have to level it up in hardcore fashion. (And I mean hardcore, since after 6 years of running, they just celebrated a character which managed to reach the max of 100 in a particular skill score!) Skills are capped at 20 on the free server. If you're hitting 30 on the skills, you're doing pretty good, says the Wurm FAQ. At 50, you start getting titles to celebrate your achievements.
This makes the simplest of craft attempts an exercise in resource preparation overloading as a newbie. Say you want to cut a plank from a log. With 0 woodcutting (or whatever relevant skill it was, woodworking or whatever) skill when you first start out, the happily displayed chance of success is.. a whopping 9%. Um. Ok. After one or two guaranteed-to-fuck-up attempts, you raise your woodcutting skill to 1 - yay! And your chance of success is now 49%. At a woodcutting skill of 2 and some decimals up (after several hours of play, not all of which was spent woodcutting, fortunately), that brings it to a middling 51-53% for planks.
Good thing a tree yields a LOT of logs if you cut down one of the right age.
The thing that makes me want to break down and scream though, is the time factor involved with metal ores and cooking and pottery. Anything to do with fire, really. The more gimpy and newb and low quality your fire is, the longer it takes to do anything. This is, of course, "realistic." This also makes it a masochistic experience for most newbies to endure.
Even by leapfrogging this and using one of the friendly newbie-public forges, it takes upwards of 30 minutes to melt iron ore down into a workable lump of iron. On a newb campfire, you're lucky to get a result at 1h+.
Presumably, it wouldn't be so bad if you were the only one at the forge. Problem is, I was sharing the forge with 2-3 other characters, supposed newbies, but newbies that knew how to label ores by their own names, and apparently circumvent whatever coding there was to prevent theft in the newbie village. (Whenever I click on something not mine, the option comes up "steal" instead of "take." Since I didn't want to destroy my reputation and have NPC guards attack me, I decided not to even try.)
Problem was, when I dumped about 6 ores into the forge, and ascertained that those were mine, and wandered off. When I came back, the ores were no longer mine and were someone else's. I could have unwittingly allowed this (some chat convo later revealed that if you wander more than 2 tiles off, apparently, the ownership fades away.) But come now, did you expect me to idle for an hour at a forge while some lumps of metal melted?
I'm an ATITD player. I'm going to fucking maximise my time and do something else. That's what I do.
In order to save my sanity, I did in fact wander off further away from newbie central, and discover a nice open forge in the middle of a cave right near an iron vein, and no one around. So I fired the forge myself, fed it with wood (took a while to figure out how to do that right too), and dumped in about 18 ore in staggered bits, and managed to do some blacksmithing in peace.
The tech trees do not appear as well designed as my favored crafting game. Yes, ATITD has bottlenecks. But the bottlenecks are more or less optional (you do NOT have to build a pottery wheel as a newbie), and the public population has developed ways of making the bottleneck negligible - public pottery wheels, free jugs or a small amount of leather if you ask anyone, etc.
In Wurm, I've bumped into no end of them. With lousy skill, you can't make complete tools on the first go. You end up with "unfinished" items which require other items like a pelt to polish it, water to temper and a whetstone to sharpen. You look those things up, and find out you need a butchering knife (and a dead animal) for a pelt, and a stone chisel for a whetstone, and dammit, you were trying to make a blade for a butchering knife or the chisel in the first place. So your only option is to throw resource overkill at it. For every 3-5 unfinished items you make, you will eventually get lucky enough to make a finished one on the first go, at which point you can presumably finish the other unfinished items for way too many tools.
I have no idea how I'm going to get a dead animal because I'm so newb that a stray dog would be able to eat me for breakfast with negligible fighting skill.
Speaking of breakfast, Wurm Online has a hunger and thirst meter. Thirst, thankfully, is not so bad, since there are wells dug by other people that they graciously keep open, and there's hugging a river to go get some fresh water.
Food, though, I'm at my wit's end. For 24 real life hours of game play, you will get fed for free by NPC bartenders, as long as you stay near the starting villages. Of course, this makes the first few days of play extremely boring as well, since you are chained by the ankle to the starting village.
My one escapade into the wild did not end well, as I walked in an apparent circle (no compass, no map, no sense of direction) passing by many many many built up houses, saw no wildlife until lucking into a young stray dog, tried to kill it, failed miserably, ran away wounded, rested to heal (ie. just waited, because one was too newb to have bandages and things), fought again, got further mauled, watched as some other guy popped up and mashed it into the ground, butchered the dog and walked off with nary a word to me, accidentally fell into the water and got my cart stuck, tried to haul the cart off the mud, and due to injuries from the dog, fell back into the water and drowned because one was too weak to climb up again.
I've written off everything on my corpse and cart, since I have no idea where the incident occurred. On the plus side, I am back at the starting village where I will get fed by the NPC again, instead of starving to death.
Can I fish? Nope, I need cotton for a fishing line. Which is obtained with a lucky forage for some seeds, which you'd then have to plant, or something. But the grass by the starter village has been raped (or over-reaped) by newbs.
Obviously, I cannot hunt for food. The predators will eat me instead.
So I'd have to be a gatherer and forage for miserable berries and things. (See over-used grass.) Eating the raw berry also = negligible hunger satiation. So I could cook, maybe. Except cooking a stew or casserole involves placing the food into a pottery bowl (which thankfully, newbies have as a freebie now, and do not have to make from scratch anymore), and putting it in a campfire, and then waiting for 30 RL minutes.
I hear frying pans allow for "instant" meals. This I gotta try. Except I'd have to do a whole stint of iron ore mining and smelting again in order to maybe make a frying pan.
To me, Wurm Online's intriguing gimmick is also its downfall. It is the only sandbox that allows land terraforming. In fact, everything you see built up, is player-made. Even the newbie zone, which I gathered from some forums reading, was made by a GM's hand - presumably they get the resources free, but still placed by hand.
On Golden Valley, there is a LOT of build up. While one may marvel at the man-hours that went into it, one runs into the same problem I ran into on ATITD. Lebensraum.
A newbie can't build everywhere because the good spots have all been taken, and if you do, you're going to run into some unhappy people screaming at you, so better not risk it. Doubly confusing is my inability to check if the person is still playing, which means you either steer clear (or are forced to because they fenced it all up and your pathetic newbie self is still unable to pick a lock yet) or take refuge like a hobo wondering if the owners are going to come back at any second to evict you.
Apparently, there is more land on the premium pay servers. Which makes fair enough sense.
But the accepted solution to this is to just join a village. Ie. make nice with some veterans and offer your slave labour help until you learn the ropes and can contribute or make your way out into the wild. Kinda Eve-like. You could do this with ATITD too, but it's not the only road you're forced into.
A key difference I detect between ATITD and Wurm is this: skill-based crafting. As in, real player skill-based is to be found in ATITD. The minigames support actual thinking - actual exploration, up to the point of hardcore spreadsheeting and macro'ing. Sure, some of the chores take time, but there are no dice rolls involved. If you invest 15 minutes gathering grass, you have a guaranteed handful of grass every time you pluck it. In Wurm, if I spend the same amount of time poking at the grass, I might get random types of herbs and berries popping up, and I might get nothing at all if I was unlucky.
ATITD, then, allows for far more strategic resource management. If I run a macro, if I place these things so-and-so, if I start this going and then come back to that, etc. I speed up my resource collection over a newbie who has yet to figure out these things.
In Wurm, if you didn't do the grind, you're still pretty screwed as a newbie, and have to grind the skills out at some point in order to progress further. The grind can be masked by not attempting to grind and just playing the game and living "life" but ultimately, the progress counter is still ticking.
In ATITD, I could grow flax on a level 1 alt and still beat a newbie who is level 10 if that newbie never took the time to figure out efficient flax growing methods.
Presumably in Wurm, a veteran would be able to level up a alt faster from more game knowledge and bound keyboard shortcuts, but that veteran still has to invest time in getting those skills up to a decent tolerable level.
Land terraforming creates some fantastic landscapes though. Roads are built by players. Caves and mines are hollowed out by players. I've walked into caves that were dug nicely and evenly, and in other caves, the floor pretty much drops away into a pit. All the wooden buildings are player-created. (On premium, there are even stone buildings.) If you cut a tree down, that tree is GONE.
You can use a sickle (player-made) to harvest a sprout from it beforehand, and plant the little baby tree somewhere else, so that over time, you get another tree again.
Point remains though, not on any other game, can you influence the landscape as much as in Wurm Online. In ATITD, you can build structures and stuff, but the landscape remains inviolate, and in the hands of the artisan GMs. In Wurm, the players rule the land. (Leading back into the point of as a newbie, you're like a force of destruction hoping not to get caught by anyone, and left with nowhere to go.)
Wurm definitely makes for a better group story, should you be lucky enough to walk into the game as a group.
As a lone newbie player, things decidedly feel a little lonely.
It's got good and bad bits. It's hard to liken it to any other MMO, except, dare I say it - Fallen Earth done right, in a fantasy vein.
Its design choices mesh with what it intends to do. In the same way that Eve Online provides a sandbox for empire-spanning operatic stories of political corporate cutthroats moving legions of people and ships around like little pieces on a chessboard, Wurm Online provides a sandbox for individual folks to join up into little tribal villages and townships, creating heroic epic stories of survivalists, adventurers and eventually/maybe leaders and kings at war.
It's Eve on a different scale.
It also reminds me of Unreal World, a survivalist roguelike. Except where in roguelikes, you're ultimately the centre of the universe the NPCs revolve around, in a survivalist MMO, you're a wannabe newbie hoping to work your way towards one of the centres of the universe formed by other players.
One of the things that first caught me off guard with Wurm Online is that it runs in Java. Relatively small clean download, which is a rarity in these MMO client days.
The second was that it was all in first-person view. Yep. No camera finagling. No seeing yourself in third-person. (Not that your avatar is that cool in art assets anyhow.) This no doubt helps immersion, as well as allows you to get thoroughly lost in the land.
I didn't find the nights that dark. Though apparently as a newbie, you get a little newbie light surrounding you. So the dark nights looked quite a bit like a Morrowind or Oblivion night, and try as I might, I couldn't seem to attract any horrible wolves and spiders and things to come eat me, though I spent quite a while floundering around in the woods while dragging a cart containing the only possessions to my name, like an itinerant tramp. Could be the whole 'deity light surrounds you' thing at work.
One thing I did detest was the very premise of the crafting system. It uses the standard MMO progress bar as timesink schtick. That means if I want to mine, I right-click a cave wall and select "mining = >mine" in the menu, and promptly wait 0:32 for the timer to run down - after which it plops some ore at my feet. If I want to cut a tree, I right-click the tree tile, and select "chop down" after which an 8 second timer runs and I chip away at the tree until it falls over. If I want to forage, I right-click grass, select "nature => forage" and wait another 12 seconds, etc, etc.
The one saving grace was that they had added in a fairly recent patch a check to make sure the grass patch hadn't been recently foraged (ie. yield nothing) BEFORE going through the 12 second timer. This also makes me shudder at the thought that previously, you'd spend a whole lot of minutes foraging empty grassland that had been pillaged by tens of newbies before you.
The other thing I detest about the crafting system is the use of a skill stat to dictate crafting success/failure on a percentage dice roll.
Yes, this is one of the standard crafting models. I suffered it in Aion. Other less hardcore games like LOTRO (possibly WoW too) adjust it by guaranteeing you a wimpier "standard" item, should your "crit chance" fail, but everyone only desires the crit items anyhow.
In Wurm Online, you start out as a pathetic newbie with 0 skill, and have to level it up in hardcore fashion. (And I mean hardcore, since after 6 years of running, they just celebrated a character which managed to reach the max of 100 in a particular skill score!) Skills are capped at 20 on the free server. If you're hitting 30 on the skills, you're doing pretty good, says the Wurm FAQ. At 50, you start getting titles to celebrate your achievements.
This makes the simplest of craft attempts an exercise in resource preparation overloading as a newbie. Say you want to cut a plank from a log. With 0 woodcutting (or whatever relevant skill it was, woodworking or whatever) skill when you first start out, the happily displayed chance of success is.. a whopping 9%. Um. Ok. After one or two guaranteed-to-fuck-up attempts, you raise your woodcutting skill to 1 - yay! And your chance of success is now 49%. At a woodcutting skill of 2 and some decimals up (after several hours of play, not all of which was spent woodcutting, fortunately), that brings it to a middling 51-53% for planks.
Good thing a tree yields a LOT of logs if you cut down one of the right age.
The thing that makes me want to break down and scream though, is the time factor involved with metal ores and cooking and pottery. Anything to do with fire, really. The more gimpy and newb and low quality your fire is, the longer it takes to do anything. This is, of course, "realistic." This also makes it a masochistic experience for most newbies to endure.
Even by leapfrogging this and using one of the friendly newbie-public forges, it takes upwards of 30 minutes to melt iron ore down into a workable lump of iron. On a newb campfire, you're lucky to get a result at 1h+.
Presumably, it wouldn't be so bad if you were the only one at the forge. Problem is, I was sharing the forge with 2-3 other characters, supposed newbies, but newbies that knew how to label ores by their own names, and apparently circumvent whatever coding there was to prevent theft in the newbie village. (Whenever I click on something not mine, the option comes up "steal" instead of "take." Since I didn't want to destroy my reputation and have NPC guards attack me, I decided not to even try.)
Problem was, when I dumped about 6 ores into the forge, and ascertained that those were mine, and wandered off. When I came back, the ores were no longer mine and were someone else's. I could have unwittingly allowed this (some chat convo later revealed that if you wander more than 2 tiles off, apparently, the ownership fades away.) But come now, did you expect me to idle for an hour at a forge while some lumps of metal melted?
I'm an ATITD player. I'm going to fucking maximise my time and do something else. That's what I do.
In order to save my sanity, I did in fact wander off further away from newbie central, and discover a nice open forge in the middle of a cave right near an iron vein, and no one around. So I fired the forge myself, fed it with wood (took a while to figure out how to do that right too), and dumped in about 18 ore in staggered bits, and managed to do some blacksmithing in peace.
The tech trees do not appear as well designed as my favored crafting game. Yes, ATITD has bottlenecks. But the bottlenecks are more or less optional (you do NOT have to build a pottery wheel as a newbie), and the public population has developed ways of making the bottleneck negligible - public pottery wheels, free jugs or a small amount of leather if you ask anyone, etc.
In Wurm, I've bumped into no end of them. With lousy skill, you can't make complete tools on the first go. You end up with "unfinished" items which require other items like a pelt to polish it, water to temper and a whetstone to sharpen. You look those things up, and find out you need a butchering knife (and a dead animal) for a pelt, and a stone chisel for a whetstone, and dammit, you were trying to make a blade for a butchering knife or the chisel in the first place. So your only option is to throw resource overkill at it. For every 3-5 unfinished items you make, you will eventually get lucky enough to make a finished one on the first go, at which point you can presumably finish the other unfinished items for way too many tools.
I have no idea how I'm going to get a dead animal because I'm so newb that a stray dog would be able to eat me for breakfast with negligible fighting skill.
Speaking of breakfast, Wurm Online has a hunger and thirst meter. Thirst, thankfully, is not so bad, since there are wells dug by other people that they graciously keep open, and there's hugging a river to go get some fresh water.
Food, though, I'm at my wit's end. For 24 real life hours of game play, you will get fed for free by NPC bartenders, as long as you stay near the starting villages. Of course, this makes the first few days of play extremely boring as well, since you are chained by the ankle to the starting village.
My one escapade into the wild did not end well, as I walked in an apparent circle (no compass, no map, no sense of direction) passing by many many many built up houses, saw no wildlife until lucking into a young stray dog, tried to kill it, failed miserably, ran away wounded, rested to heal (ie. just waited, because one was too newb to have bandages and things), fought again, got further mauled, watched as some other guy popped up and mashed it into the ground, butchered the dog and walked off with nary a word to me, accidentally fell into the water and got my cart stuck, tried to haul the cart off the mud, and due to injuries from the dog, fell back into the water and drowned because one was too weak to climb up again.
I've written off everything on my corpse and cart, since I have no idea where the incident occurred. On the plus side, I am back at the starting village where I will get fed by the NPC again, instead of starving to death.
Can I fish? Nope, I need cotton for a fishing line. Which is obtained with a lucky forage for some seeds, which you'd then have to plant, or something. But the grass by the starter village has been raped (or over-reaped) by newbs.
Obviously, I cannot hunt for food. The predators will eat me instead.
So I'd have to be a gatherer and forage for miserable berries and things. (See over-used grass.) Eating the raw berry also = negligible hunger satiation. So I could cook, maybe. Except cooking a stew or casserole involves placing the food into a pottery bowl (which thankfully, newbies have as a freebie now, and do not have to make from scratch anymore), and putting it in a campfire, and then waiting for 30 RL minutes.
I hear frying pans allow for "instant" meals. This I gotta try. Except I'd have to do a whole stint of iron ore mining and smelting again in order to maybe make a frying pan.
To me, Wurm Online's intriguing gimmick is also its downfall. It is the only sandbox that allows land terraforming. In fact, everything you see built up, is player-made. Even the newbie zone, which I gathered from some forums reading, was made by a GM's hand - presumably they get the resources free, but still placed by hand.
On Golden Valley, there is a LOT of build up. While one may marvel at the man-hours that went into it, one runs into the same problem I ran into on ATITD. Lebensraum.
A newbie can't build everywhere because the good spots have all been taken, and if you do, you're going to run into some unhappy people screaming at you, so better not risk it. Doubly confusing is my inability to check if the person is still playing, which means you either steer clear (or are forced to because they fenced it all up and your pathetic newbie self is still unable to pick a lock yet) or take refuge like a hobo wondering if the owners are going to come back at any second to evict you.
Apparently, there is more land on the premium pay servers. Which makes fair enough sense.
But the accepted solution to this is to just join a village. Ie. make nice with some veterans and offer your slave labour help until you learn the ropes and can contribute or make your way out into the wild. Kinda Eve-like. You could do this with ATITD too, but it's not the only road you're forced into.
A key difference I detect between ATITD and Wurm is this: skill-based crafting. As in, real player skill-based is to be found in ATITD. The minigames support actual thinking - actual exploration, up to the point of hardcore spreadsheeting and macro'ing. Sure, some of the chores take time, but there are no dice rolls involved. If you invest 15 minutes gathering grass, you have a guaranteed handful of grass every time you pluck it. In Wurm, if I spend the same amount of time poking at the grass, I might get random types of herbs and berries popping up, and I might get nothing at all if I was unlucky.
ATITD, then, allows for far more strategic resource management. If I run a macro, if I place these things so-and-so, if I start this going and then come back to that, etc. I speed up my resource collection over a newbie who has yet to figure out these things.
In Wurm, if you didn't do the grind, you're still pretty screwed as a newbie, and have to grind the skills out at some point in order to progress further. The grind can be masked by not attempting to grind and just playing the game and living "life" but ultimately, the progress counter is still ticking.
In ATITD, I could grow flax on a level 1 alt and still beat a newbie who is level 10 if that newbie never took the time to figure out efficient flax growing methods.
Presumably in Wurm, a veteran would be able to level up a alt faster from more game knowledge and bound keyboard shortcuts, but that veteran still has to invest time in getting those skills up to a decent tolerable level.
Land terraforming creates some fantastic landscapes though. Roads are built by players. Caves and mines are hollowed out by players. I've walked into caves that were dug nicely and evenly, and in other caves, the floor pretty much drops away into a pit. All the wooden buildings are player-created. (On premium, there are even stone buildings.) If you cut a tree down, that tree is GONE.
You can use a sickle (player-made) to harvest a sprout from it beforehand, and plant the little baby tree somewhere else, so that over time, you get another tree again.
Point remains though, not on any other game, can you influence the landscape as much as in Wurm Online. In ATITD, you can build structures and stuff, but the landscape remains inviolate, and in the hands of the artisan GMs. In Wurm, the players rule the land. (Leading back into the point of as a newbie, you're like a force of destruction hoping not to get caught by anyone, and left with nowhere to go.)
Wurm definitely makes for a better group story, should you be lucky enough to walk into the game as a group.
As a lone newbie player, things decidedly feel a little lonely.
Thursday, July 08, 2010
Privacy Paranoia
Big shitstorm about Blizzard's announcement that real names will be tagged, without recourse (opt-out = don't use the official forums, ever) to forum posts... for games like Starcraft 2, WoW, etc.
Scary. Not sure I even want to play Starcraft 2 now. Time to make a whole set of fake names just for Blizzard.
I bet they will have an emergency meeting and recant. It's too big for them not to.
Keen (of keenandgraev.com fame) was the first guy who clued me in while I was browsing my RSS feeds at work. He didn't get it. Folks argued with him. He posted his real name as a challenge. Two folks posted his address and he started getting a bit spooked, but made an excuse that it was just a careless registrar regarding his domain, and that he had quickly gotten them to take it down.
I decided he still didn't get it. Some Googling later, grinning at an (updated 7 hours ago) registrar website, and finding out that Google still had his address and all in their cache, I sent him a nice long comment post with his real name, birthdate, age, address and phone number. His LinkedIn site with the college he was studying at, and the degree he was taking, his two emails, favored nicknames, his Steam profile, and his photobucket account (which to his credit, contained only game pics).
He had been smart enough to at least lock comments for moderation.
Sometime after, he locked comments for good, with an update that smacked faintly of whining that the folks most concerned about privacy were the meanies who were digging up all his information in the first place.
*wry grin* I probably wasn't the only one whose comments contained all that info.
Bashiok, some WoW mod who was trying to defend the post over on the WoW forums and posted his real name, exposed himself to an even bigger crapstorm. I didn't do anything, I don't know him and I can't be arsed.
But a ton of other WoW-forum-reading fanatics did. Besides the standard data profile of name, address and Facebook-related sites, they've got incriminating pics of him (looking like prime employee-avoidance material having dressed up as some kind of goth Viking), info about his family - he apparently still lives with his mom, tried calling his home number via Skype, etc.
Massively has caught on to the news, there are 150 comments, most of which rehash the same arguments, with a couple dumb folk posting their real names and other folk indulging in some casual Google datamining on them. I considered posting, then decided I rather not make myself a target there, period.
It's interesting to see how people who claim they "have nothing to hide" and diss privacy advocates suddenly backtrack when they realize they do have information (which isn't criminal in nature at all) they'd rather not have broadcast to the general public... including all the internet fuckwads out there.
There are always layers of information that we are comfortable revealing about ourselves, to varying groups of people.
Hell, someone determined enough and lucky enough could walk their way through my feeble attempts at placing some obstacles up and fly over here to nail me dead.
The point is not to make it easier for any random guy to do a couple Google searches and link your game life to your rl, though. That's just fucking scarier than scary.
Scary. Not sure I even want to play Starcraft 2 now. Time to make a whole set of fake names just for Blizzard.
I bet they will have an emergency meeting and recant. It's too big for them not to.
Keen (of keenandgraev.com fame) was the first guy who clued me in while I was browsing my RSS feeds at work. He didn't get it. Folks argued with him. He posted his real name as a challenge. Two folks posted his address and he started getting a bit spooked, but made an excuse that it was just a careless registrar regarding his domain, and that he had quickly gotten them to take it down.
I decided he still didn't get it. Some Googling later, grinning at an (updated 7 hours ago) registrar website, and finding out that Google still had his address and all in their cache, I sent him a nice long comment post with his real name, birthdate, age, address and phone number. His LinkedIn site with the college he was studying at, and the degree he was taking, his two emails, favored nicknames, his Steam profile, and his photobucket account (which to his credit, contained only game pics).
He had been smart enough to at least lock comments for moderation.
Sometime after, he locked comments for good, with an update that smacked faintly of whining that the folks most concerned about privacy were the meanies who were digging up all his information in the first place.
*wry grin* I probably wasn't the only one whose comments contained all that info.
Bashiok, some WoW mod who was trying to defend the post over on the WoW forums and posted his real name, exposed himself to an even bigger crapstorm. I didn't do anything, I don't know him and I can't be arsed.
But a ton of other WoW-forum-reading fanatics did. Besides the standard data profile of name, address and Facebook-related sites, they've got incriminating pics of him (looking like prime employee-avoidance material having dressed up as some kind of goth Viking), info about his family - he apparently still lives with his mom, tried calling his home number via Skype, etc.
Massively has caught on to the news, there are 150 comments, most of which rehash the same arguments, with a couple dumb folk posting their real names and other folk indulging in some casual Google datamining on them. I considered posting, then decided I rather not make myself a target there, period.
It's interesting to see how people who claim they "have nothing to hide" and diss privacy advocates suddenly backtrack when they realize they do have information (which isn't criminal in nature at all) they'd rather not have broadcast to the general public... including all the internet fuckwads out there.
There are always layers of information that we are comfortable revealing about ourselves, to varying groups of people.
Hell, someone determined enough and lucky enough could walk their way through my feeble attempts at placing some obstacles up and fly over here to nail me dead.
The point is not to make it easier for any random guy to do a couple Google searches and link your game life to your rl, though. That's just fucking scarier than scary.
Monday, July 05, 2010
Reviews, Twitter and Games
Doing some lunch time catch-up reading, and chanced across these two Escapist articles on games and their related reviews, criticism and word of mouth thereof. In Twitter We Trust and 1984 out of 10.
I find it rather surprising that the author of "In Twitter We Trust" actually relies on his Twitter hive mind - aka the people in his social network - to provide the decision-making info on whether he should try a game. To me, this smacks of following a very insidious form of groupthink, in which you closet yourself with like-minded folk and wade around in a tiny comfort zone.
But folks are different, I guess, and some people like to make decisions on gut feel, trusting to other people's emotional reactions, rather than through any structured logical process.
This simply won't work for me. For one thing, my tastes may meander far from the mainstream, and for another, I barely have any social network, let alone reliable game playing ones whose opinion I could/would trust.
So the next natural thought that occurs is: just how do I judge a game, then?
Well, I used to just type the name of the game + review into Google and scan through a bunch of reviews. These days, it's easier to shuffle along to Metacritic.
1) Check the Metacritic score.
Despite the second article's mournful criticism about the lack of a properly objective 1-10 scoring system, if one reads the metascore on a relative scale of 50-100, one can get a fairly good reading of the pulse of a game's popularity across game reviewers.
A 90+ score means it probably is pretty darn good and is a well-known company that may have possibly greased a few pockets here and there. 75-89 is decent. 60-74 means the game is middling to average, with possibly a few bugs and design problems here and there. 55-59 is on shaky ground. 45-54 means it's full of suck with one or two redeeming features. And below that, don't even bother - crap game, crap company that the reviewers didn't mind insulting for life, etc.
I'm fairly tolerant of giving most games a try, so anything 60+ passes the initial quality check. Below that means I must be really curious about a certain aspect and the game must be really cheap.
2) Check the metacritic User score and specific comments posted below.
This is generally unreliable, as it's a very small subset of users who bother to post, and most of them are either staunch lovers or haters to go through the trouble. The value is in comparing how far it deviates from the reviewer score.
A low reviewer score but high user score means it's a cult hit. A small subset of folk really love the damn game, and hopefully, in the comments below, you might be able to figure out exactly which aspects they like the game for.
Conversely, low user score and high reviewer score means something's possibly awry. Are there bugs and startup errors that prevent a portion of players from even getting past the install hurdle - would my system and I get affected by this? Maybe it's great for the first week, and then turns into a bundle of suck - which reviewers with their limited playtime would tend to miss.
If they're vaguely in agreement, then you can estimate if the game reviews, which will soon be read, are overhyping or underhyping, by how comparatively lower or higher the user score is.
3) Skim the selected comments from the reviews.
That gives some brief baseline coverage as to what various people thought of the game, and what the game features.
4) Check out IGN, Gamespot, and some random middle-score to low-score reviews.
I tend to avoid the highest scorers unless I'm curious to know what's so fantastic that a reviewer will gush about it. For a game that I'm totally hyped up about, I'd have read all the previews and reviews anyhow.
Despite the general sentiment that IGN and Gamespot are unreliable corporate review sellouts, I find both of them are quite useful in their description of general game features, to help me visualize what the game is about. I don't actually give much thought to the specific score (metacritic has already helped me with the numerical average). Subjectively, I find IGN to cover more the positive and negative aspects with more accuracy, Gamespot's descriptions tend to have more holes. User comments are also helpful to gauge the factualness of the review.
The random reviews give a sampling of what other folks thought about the game, and the low score ones on what the reviewers didn't like.
5) Mentally consolidate all the info gathered and do a gut feel "Do I want to try this game out?" versus a price comparison to see if it's worth buying at the current price.
My tastes are fairly eclectic. I like good FPSes, especially those with some sort of innovative gimmick. I'm not a terrible fan of 'great multiplayer play!' because the number of online FPSes I play regularly online can be counted on one hand, I need a semi-decent singleplayer.
RTSes are fine. As long as the camera isn't completely broken, the build tree and units are passably interesting, and the story is ok, I'd consider it. Lousy graphics and resolution is a minus, because in this day and age, all the eye candy is getting better.
Other strategy games I'm often intrigued by, though I know I can never maintain a hardcore focus on them for long, but it's just for the sake of trying them out. Ditto MMOs, adventure, sports and other indie games. Not a platforming fan, so it'll have to be good and different and talked about to consider.
6) If still undecided, try out a beta version or a demo if available.
I love games that offer this. It really helps to get the game clear in your head. I tried the Osmos demo and liked it enough to pick it up cheap. I tried Eufloria and didn't (too simplistic for the price.)
I wanted to pick up DEFCON, it's had rave reviews on metacritic, and right now, in a pack, it's priced at abt $2.50-$5.00 usd, which isn't horrible. Tried out the demo and decided against it. Objectively, it's quite aesthetically pleasing - haunting music, simple visuals, deep theme, and a strong multiplayer pvp challenge with considerable depth.
It just doesn't do much for me. It has a slow pace, with moments of aggravating micro (in the RTS sense of click unit, click order, click target, repeat on X amount of units) crunched into tense seconds. The depth is revealed in multiplayer challenges - and I have zilch people to play with (not going online to get beaten up, thanks.)
And ultimately, its design theme is aptly summed up by one 6-scoring dissident in the metacritic user comments. "The only way to win is not to play."
That's exactly how I feel playing DEFCON. Two opposing AI countries and I sat at relative peace for about 15 minutes, despite the DEFCON timer ratcheting down. The blue AI sent 1-2 ship fleets at me, which I surrounded and destroyed with my 3-5 fleets on standby. We sat, we waited, we waited some more. I got antsy and sent some fighter planes at the green AI's bases. They sent planes back, which got shot down by my anti-air. We waited some more. Finally I got impatient enough to test out sending a nuke, which triggered the obvious MAD retaliation chain, and the blue AI got into the act as well, and I ended the game before all the missiles had hit because it was painfully obvious that an aggressor would end up with all his cities in nuclear ruins, and if I didn't aggress, then we would just sit there locked in "finger over red button" standoff for all of eternity until my computer monitor blacked out or CPU gave way. It's a moral message, to be sure, but not a $5 game.
Gratuitous Space Battles was something I else I was attracted to. The graphics weren't to my taste, but the premise sounded spiffy enough. Alas, on trying it out, there was way too much fiddling with small objects to design your own ship and stat reading and tweaking sliders and designing AI combat scripts. Ie. Design for 30-60 minutes, hit the "Play" button and watch it all resolve (or not - return to drawing board.) Some folks like that sort of strategic play, I don't. End of game purchase consideration.
---
As to 1984 out of 10's complaint, I'm afraid I don't see what the big issue is. Seems like it's human nature to not to want to say anything bad, so you have to read scores on a relative, not absolute, scale.
On a score of 1-5, practically everyone puts 4's if they vaguely liked it. They put 3's if they're neutral or so-so about it. 5's are the one's you know they want to highlight. And they must really not be happy in order to score 1 or 2.
So just map the 5-10 or 50-100 score back onto a 1-10 absolute scale if it makes you happy. What's the big deal?
I find it rather surprising that the author of "In Twitter We Trust" actually relies on his Twitter hive mind - aka the people in his social network - to provide the decision-making info on whether he should try a game. To me, this smacks of following a very insidious form of groupthink, in which you closet yourself with like-minded folk and wade around in a tiny comfort zone.
But folks are different, I guess, and some people like to make decisions on gut feel, trusting to other people's emotional reactions, rather than through any structured logical process.
This simply won't work for me. For one thing, my tastes may meander far from the mainstream, and for another, I barely have any social network, let alone reliable game playing ones whose opinion I could/would trust.
So the next natural thought that occurs is: just how do I judge a game, then?
Well, I used to just type the name of the game + review into Google and scan through a bunch of reviews. These days, it's easier to shuffle along to Metacritic.
1) Check the Metacritic score.
Despite the second article's mournful criticism about the lack of a properly objective 1-10 scoring system, if one reads the metascore on a relative scale of 50-100, one can get a fairly good reading of the pulse of a game's popularity across game reviewers.
A 90+ score means it probably is pretty darn good and is a well-known company that may have possibly greased a few pockets here and there. 75-89 is decent. 60-74 means the game is middling to average, with possibly a few bugs and design problems here and there. 55-59 is on shaky ground. 45-54 means it's full of suck with one or two redeeming features. And below that, don't even bother - crap game, crap company that the reviewers didn't mind insulting for life, etc.
I'm fairly tolerant of giving most games a try, so anything 60+ passes the initial quality check. Below that means I must be really curious about a certain aspect and the game must be really cheap.
2) Check the metacritic User score and specific comments posted below.
This is generally unreliable, as it's a very small subset of users who bother to post, and most of them are either staunch lovers or haters to go through the trouble. The value is in comparing how far it deviates from the reviewer score.
A low reviewer score but high user score means it's a cult hit. A small subset of folk really love the damn game, and hopefully, in the comments below, you might be able to figure out exactly which aspects they like the game for.
Conversely, low user score and high reviewer score means something's possibly awry. Are there bugs and startup errors that prevent a portion of players from even getting past the install hurdle - would my system and I get affected by this? Maybe it's great for the first week, and then turns into a bundle of suck - which reviewers with their limited playtime would tend to miss.
If they're vaguely in agreement, then you can estimate if the game reviews, which will soon be read, are overhyping or underhyping, by how comparatively lower or higher the user score is.
3) Skim the selected comments from the reviews.
That gives some brief baseline coverage as to what various people thought of the game, and what the game features.
4) Check out IGN, Gamespot, and some random middle-score to low-score reviews.
I tend to avoid the highest scorers unless I'm curious to know what's so fantastic that a reviewer will gush about it. For a game that I'm totally hyped up about, I'd have read all the previews and reviews anyhow.
Despite the general sentiment that IGN and Gamespot are unreliable corporate review sellouts, I find both of them are quite useful in their description of general game features, to help me visualize what the game is about. I don't actually give much thought to the specific score (metacritic has already helped me with the numerical average). Subjectively, I find IGN to cover more the positive and negative aspects with more accuracy, Gamespot's descriptions tend to have more holes. User comments are also helpful to gauge the factualness of the review.
The random reviews give a sampling of what other folks thought about the game, and the low score ones on what the reviewers didn't like.
5) Mentally consolidate all the info gathered and do a gut feel "Do I want to try this game out?" versus a price comparison to see if it's worth buying at the current price.
My tastes are fairly eclectic. I like good FPSes, especially those with some sort of innovative gimmick. I'm not a terrible fan of 'great multiplayer play!' because the number of online FPSes I play regularly online can be counted on one hand, I need a semi-decent singleplayer.
RTSes are fine. As long as the camera isn't completely broken, the build tree and units are passably interesting, and the story is ok, I'd consider it. Lousy graphics and resolution is a minus, because in this day and age, all the eye candy is getting better.
Other strategy games I'm often intrigued by, though I know I can never maintain a hardcore focus on them for long, but it's just for the sake of trying them out. Ditto MMOs, adventure, sports and other indie games. Not a platforming fan, so it'll have to be good and different and talked about to consider.
6) If still undecided, try out a beta version or a demo if available.
I love games that offer this. It really helps to get the game clear in your head. I tried the Osmos demo and liked it enough to pick it up cheap. I tried Eufloria and didn't (too simplistic for the price.)
I wanted to pick up DEFCON, it's had rave reviews on metacritic, and right now, in a pack, it's priced at abt $2.50-$5.00 usd, which isn't horrible. Tried out the demo and decided against it. Objectively, it's quite aesthetically pleasing - haunting music, simple visuals, deep theme, and a strong multiplayer pvp challenge with considerable depth.
It just doesn't do much for me. It has a slow pace, with moments of aggravating micro (in the RTS sense of click unit, click order, click target, repeat on X amount of units) crunched into tense seconds. The depth is revealed in multiplayer challenges - and I have zilch people to play with (not going online to get beaten up, thanks.)
And ultimately, its design theme is aptly summed up by one 6-scoring dissident in the metacritic user comments. "The only way to win is not to play."
That's exactly how I feel playing DEFCON. Two opposing AI countries and I sat at relative peace for about 15 minutes, despite the DEFCON timer ratcheting down. The blue AI sent 1-2 ship fleets at me, which I surrounded and destroyed with my 3-5 fleets on standby. We sat, we waited, we waited some more. I got antsy and sent some fighter planes at the green AI's bases. They sent planes back, which got shot down by my anti-air. We waited some more. Finally I got impatient enough to test out sending a nuke, which triggered the obvious MAD retaliation chain, and the blue AI got into the act as well, and I ended the game before all the missiles had hit because it was painfully obvious that an aggressor would end up with all his cities in nuclear ruins, and if I didn't aggress, then we would just sit there locked in "finger over red button" standoff for all of eternity until my computer monitor blacked out or CPU gave way. It's a moral message, to be sure, but not a $5 game.
Gratuitous Space Battles was something I else I was attracted to. The graphics weren't to my taste, but the premise sounded spiffy enough. Alas, on trying it out, there was way too much fiddling with small objects to design your own ship and stat reading and tweaking sliders and designing AI combat scripts. Ie. Design for 30-60 minutes, hit the "Play" button and watch it all resolve (or not - return to drawing board.) Some folks like that sort of strategic play, I don't. End of game purchase consideration.
---
As to 1984 out of 10's complaint, I'm afraid I don't see what the big issue is. Seems like it's human nature to not to want to say anything bad, so you have to read scores on a relative, not absolute, scale.
On a score of 1-5, practically everyone puts 4's if they vaguely liked it. They put 3's if they're neutral or so-so about it. 5's are the one's you know they want to highlight. And they must really not be happy in order to score 1 or 2.
So just map the 5-10 or 50-100 score back onto a 1-10 absolute scale if it makes you happy. What's the big deal?
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Hell is Other People
From whence comes this insatiable compulsion to compare oneself with others and judge ourselves by how others see us?
Does one's perceived social status in a community speak more about the perceiver than the perceivee?
I find myself running into this in ATITD since I have been presently in a holding pattern. There is a distinct sense of inferiority and foreboding that I'm not good enough, that everyone is ahead of me and I am going to lose out in some unknown manner.
It's such a stupid feeling. It's this sort of "Must Keep Up With Joneses" ploy that keeps millions of people racing around in WoW and other MMOs when they have ceased to enjoy the actual activity... or they might just conclude they'll never catch up and give up, when they might still enjoy other aspects of a game.
I don't face this with Guild Wars. Somehow, I have accepted that I'm just not as hardcore as many GWers, and I'm just gonna be on my little dabbling casual way because there are many others in my same boat and the game caters to us.
I could argue the same for ATITD. There are many others behind my level of technology, even, and the very definition of a sandbox is that it has room for us and our other nonstandard goals.
Some of it has probably got to do with inertia. It's really hard to get moving once you stop.
This evening, I've forced myself to get off my beetle-infested butt and make a run to all the universities with opened tech that I hadn't picked up. It's taken a goodly hour (with lots of sidelong internet catchup reading) but it's also somewhat uplifting.
One often forgets how big Egypt is, when safely ensconced in the warm security blanket of your own territory. It's nice to see differences in landscape and scenery.
Then there's the fact that in shard B, there are WAY more resources to go around than people, especially with the force of attrition, so I shouldn't get worried that there won't be enough left for me.
Does one's perceived social status in a community speak more about the perceiver than the perceivee?
I find myself running into this in ATITD since I have been presently in a holding pattern. There is a distinct sense of inferiority and foreboding that I'm not good enough, that everyone is ahead of me and I am going to lose out in some unknown manner.
It's such a stupid feeling. It's this sort of "Must Keep Up With Joneses" ploy that keeps millions of people racing around in WoW and other MMOs when they have ceased to enjoy the actual activity... or they might just conclude they'll never catch up and give up, when they might still enjoy other aspects of a game.
I don't face this with Guild Wars. Somehow, I have accepted that I'm just not as hardcore as many GWers, and I'm just gonna be on my little dabbling casual way because there are many others in my same boat and the game caters to us.
I could argue the same for ATITD. There are many others behind my level of technology, even, and the very definition of a sandbox is that it has room for us and our other nonstandard goals.
Some of it has probably got to do with inertia. It's really hard to get moving once you stop.
This evening, I've forced myself to get off my beetle-infested butt and make a run to all the universities with opened tech that I hadn't picked up. It's taken a goodly hour (with lots of sidelong internet catchup reading) but it's also somewhat uplifting.
One often forgets how big Egypt is, when safely ensconced in the warm security blanket of your own territory. It's nice to see differences in landscape and scenery.
Then there's the fact that in shard B, there are WAY more resources to go around than people, especially with the force of attrition, so I shouldn't get worried that there won't be enough left for me.
Twitter-like Snippets: Digital Jenga
Saw a Nintendo DS game in Best Denki. Electronic version of Jenga. Presumably drag out blocks with your stylus. Kinda misses the point, wot?
Ha. 140 characters exactly.
I cannot resist elaboration though. I bought a physical version of Jenga for about $19.90 on offer from Toys R Us some time ago. The DS game costs about $50.
Jenga is about the heart stopping tension of easing out tangible blocks, feeling the sandpaper textured smoothness of each woodcut, not daring to move a muscle or breathe in case the nano-changes in air currents tilt the precarious stack, and having a group to share the emotions with.
How in the world will a digital game replicate this when you can pretty much avoid touching the screen until you need to precision slide your stylus a couple of milimetres?
By the way, I had been keeping my eye out for a cheapo Jenga offer not because I like party games. I ran into a fascinating RPG that used it as a resolution system - yea, not dice, not cards, jus wooden blocks.
Dread: The RPG - Review at RPG.NET
http://www.gnomestew.com/specific-rpgs/dread-play-it-this-halloween-trust-us
The character creation system is also fantastic, consisting of GM-designed questionnaires filled with loaded open-ended questions.
eg.
= What is still packed in boxes even though you've been moved in for a year?
= What addiction do you hide from your friends?
= How did your handyman skills help you when you started performing exorcisms?
= How did you win the only brawl you have ever been in?
= What photograph do you keep despite the fact that you can never display it?
http://gamerchris.com/2009/12/08/dread-unauthorized-human-trials-a-report-and-light-review-from-mace.aspx
Ha. 140 characters exactly.
I cannot resist elaboration though. I bought a physical version of Jenga for about $19.90 on offer from Toys R Us some time ago. The DS game costs about $50.
Jenga is about the heart stopping tension of easing out tangible blocks, feeling the sandpaper textured smoothness of each woodcut, not daring to move a muscle or breathe in case the nano-changes in air currents tilt the precarious stack, and having a group to share the emotions with.
How in the world will a digital game replicate this when you can pretty much avoid touching the screen until you need to precision slide your stylus a couple of milimetres?
By the way, I had been keeping my eye out for a cheapo Jenga offer not because I like party games. I ran into a fascinating RPG that used it as a resolution system - yea, not dice, not cards, jus wooden blocks.
Dread: The RPG - Review at RPG.NET
http://www.gnomestew.com/specific-rpgs/dread-play-it-this-halloween-trust-us
The character creation system is also fantastic, consisting of GM-designed questionnaires filled with loaded open-ended questions.
eg.
= What is still packed in boxes even though you've been moved in for a year?
= What addiction do you hide from your friends?
= How did your handyman skills help you when you started performing exorcisms?
= How did you win the only brawl you have ever been in?
= What photograph do you keep despite the fact that you can never display it?
http://gamerchris.com/2009/12/08/dread-unauthorized-human-trials-a-report-and-light-review-from-mace.aspx
The Poetry of Passion
Filling up my long overdue placeholder about passion in a separate post.
This is inspired by an interview-ee who had a perfect pedigreed resume but lacked one crucial ingredient.
a sellout soul
mouthing words you think others want to hear
voiceless pale shadow
if one cares for nothing
there is no care for others
there is no trust from others
if one trusts in naught
Inspiration:
Hear the ring in the power of your voice
when you speak words that echo
true to the beliefs in your heart
climb a mountain powered by divine possession
follow the flag of faith for a cause that holds true
unerring lodestone
better a bright spark flaring for a glorious firework instance than dead inside
for eternity
better a lucifer crying wrath on all the hosts of the angels
resonating
through time
through history
regardless of readers' liking
Passion tells its own tale
Dead men tell none.
This is inspired by an interview-ee who had a perfect pedigreed resume but lacked one crucial ingredient.
a sellout soul
mouthing words you think others want to hear
voiceless pale shadow
if one cares for nothing
there is no care for others
there is no trust from others
if one trusts in naught
Inspiration:
Hear the ring in the power of your voice
when you speak words that echo
true to the beliefs in your heart
climb a mountain powered by divine possession
follow the flag of faith for a cause that holds true
unerring lodestone
better a bright spark flaring for a glorious firework instance than dead inside
for eternity
better a lucifer crying wrath on all the hosts of the angels
resonating
through time
through history
regardless of readers' liking
Passion tells its own tale
Dead men tell none.
Twitter-like Snippets: Bosses and You
Overheard young lady @food court bitching abt boss. Never say wat to do, jus plz process dis, pls action on this. Wanted to say "that's working life, dear."
Ok. I fail at this attempt. By the time I trim the above sentence to 140 characters, I completely lose the core insight. The gist is that the girl was frustrated by her boss' infuriating habit of not telling her exactly what was required out of her.
Immediately, what ran through my mind was the phrase David Allen likes to push in his GTD books. Paraphrased: "We live in a world of increasingly ill-defined 'work' and this ambiguity gives us significant amounts of stress. We have to learn how to put into place systems that help us deal with and process these amorphous chunks into 'doable' tasks to allow our minds to relax."
Even before I ended up head first in a managerial role, I've been in that girl's shoes, frustrated to the gills with my seemingly-incompetent supervisor, who could never articulate WHAT the HELL she wanted.
(It didn't help that she was an incompetent evaluator of quality either, so I tended to just follow the chain of command long enough to accord her a minimal amount of respect, then place the decision in the hands of higher authority, aka her boss. But that's besides the point.)
My present supervisor is now the same person who was her boss. There's still a significant amount of ambiguity in the work I'm supposed to be doing. Somewhat different in that I now have more authority to assign myself and define the work I need to do, instead of waiting for someone to assign it, but JUST as ill-defined before that.
I've come to realize that's how work is. (Or in life or a sandbox MMO.)
You learn how to deal with it. Stuff you can define and decide, you somehow grapple your way to defining it, or use a clearly-articulated system like GTD.
Stuff you can't define on your own because it hinges on other people, you learn how to sit there and pester them with questions and discussions until you FORCE them to define what the hell is it they want, in their minds, and therefore get it clarified by them in yours too. (This applies equally well to a boss, or to a group in a collaborative brainstorming.)
If they chuck it back in your court, then you jolly well take the opportunity with both hands and run. Aka define it yourself first. Then take it back, check if it meshes with their amorphous and ill-formed vision, get feedback and iterate it to death until it kinda-sorta fits or you run out of time, whichever comes first.
Sometimes they DON'T know how to process it themselves. That's why they ask you to do it, I wanted to tell the girl. "Please Action" is a horrible business-speak misuse of a noun into an amorphous verb. But they don't know how to figure out what the appropriate Next Action should be.
She was complaining to her friend that she then has to read all the damn mail and correspondence her boss chucks to her, and try to figure out what the hell to do from there.
Um, I wanted to say, that's life. That's work. That's you figuring out how to process amorphous stuff into doable chunks. That's GOOD. For your own personal growth and career.
Y'see, here's a little secret. Not all bosses know wtf to do. Some don't even care.
Personally, when I forward email down to my subordinates, I take the time to spell out exactly what the hell I want from them. Call it having learnt something from GTD and from the linear quest nature of MMOs, or from my own incompetent supervisor experience. Taking the time to define the work increases my chances of getting it back in a prompt manner, instead of having it chucked into a pile of "Hmmmmm" and sat on.
Call it learning from my own habits. Guilty as charged. Stuff I haven't figured out yet (and there are many, I understand the theory of GTD but it's so awful hard to put into practice and stay on the bandwagon without falling off) get completely ignored until it blows up.
Human nature, alas. We're all flawed beings.
I'm fortunate in that my own boss is leastways competent - she just loses track of all the balls she has juggling, and forgets that she hasn't defined things to certain people. So I just have to sit there and gently remind her that I haven't the foggiest idea what the next step is, and she normally has a clue.
If not, then my boss likes to engage in an out-loud discussion until she figures it out. It's not my preferred way of figuring things out (I like to brainstorm by myself first), but you live with and adapt to your boss' style.
You know the times I don't bother to spell out what I want? A couple reasons spring to mind:
- I don't really care about what happens next. They can do with it as they like.
- I expect them to know what to do from past experience
- I feel they're independent enough to decide and/or check back with me.
- Or I've given up on the person as coachable (it's wasting my time to train the person, they're not going to listen to good advice and is gonna screw it up anyway, they can dick around with their flawed judgment, I just want to distance myself from accountability/responsibility)
The last is not the healthiest or most mature type of reaction, but y'know, flawed human nature and all. Sometimes avoidance or passive-aggression is the appropriate choice for conflict situations that will resolve by themselves in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm afraid I took the latter way out in this eavesdropping situation and said nothing to the young twentysomething in the food court. Not really my business, after all. She seemed quite happy just venting. She'll figure it out, some day.
Ok. I fail at this attempt. By the time I trim the above sentence to 140 characters, I completely lose the core insight. The gist is that the girl was frustrated by her boss' infuriating habit of not telling her exactly what was required out of her.
Immediately, what ran through my mind was the phrase David Allen likes to push in his GTD books. Paraphrased: "We live in a world of increasingly ill-defined 'work' and this ambiguity gives us significant amounts of stress. We have to learn how to put into place systems that help us deal with and process these amorphous chunks into 'doable' tasks to allow our minds to relax."
Even before I ended up head first in a managerial role, I've been in that girl's shoes, frustrated to the gills with my seemingly-incompetent supervisor, who could never articulate WHAT the HELL she wanted.
(It didn't help that she was an incompetent evaluator of quality either, so I tended to just follow the chain of command long enough to accord her a minimal amount of respect, then place the decision in the hands of higher authority, aka her boss. But that's besides the point.)
My present supervisor is now the same person who was her boss. There's still a significant amount of ambiguity in the work I'm supposed to be doing. Somewhat different in that I now have more authority to assign myself and define the work I need to do, instead of waiting for someone to assign it, but JUST as ill-defined before that.
I've come to realize that's how work is. (Or in life or a sandbox MMO.)
You learn how to deal with it. Stuff you can define and decide, you somehow grapple your way to defining it, or use a clearly-articulated system like GTD.
Stuff you can't define on your own because it hinges on other people, you learn how to sit there and pester them with questions and discussions until you FORCE them to define what the hell is it they want, in their minds, and therefore get it clarified by them in yours too. (This applies equally well to a boss, or to a group in a collaborative brainstorming.)
If they chuck it back in your court, then you jolly well take the opportunity with both hands and run. Aka define it yourself first. Then take it back, check if it meshes with their amorphous and ill-formed vision, get feedback and iterate it to death until it kinda-sorta fits or you run out of time, whichever comes first.
Sometimes they DON'T know how to process it themselves. That's why they ask you to do it, I wanted to tell the girl. "Please Action" is a horrible business-speak misuse of a noun into an amorphous verb. But they don't know how to figure out what the appropriate Next Action should be.
She was complaining to her friend that she then has to read all the damn mail and correspondence her boss chucks to her, and try to figure out what the hell to do from there.
Um, I wanted to say, that's life. That's work. That's you figuring out how to process amorphous stuff into doable chunks. That's GOOD. For your own personal growth and career.
Y'see, here's a little secret. Not all bosses know wtf to do. Some don't even care.
Personally, when I forward email down to my subordinates, I take the time to spell out exactly what the hell I want from them. Call it having learnt something from GTD and from the linear quest nature of MMOs, or from my own incompetent supervisor experience. Taking the time to define the work increases my chances of getting it back in a prompt manner, instead of having it chucked into a pile of "Hmmmmm" and sat on.
Call it learning from my own habits. Guilty as charged. Stuff I haven't figured out yet (and there are many, I understand the theory of GTD but it's so awful hard to put into practice and stay on the bandwagon without falling off) get completely ignored until it blows up.
Human nature, alas. We're all flawed beings.
I'm fortunate in that my own boss is leastways competent - she just loses track of all the balls she has juggling, and forgets that she hasn't defined things to certain people. So I just have to sit there and gently remind her that I haven't the foggiest idea what the next step is, and she normally has a clue.
If not, then my boss likes to engage in an out-loud discussion until she figures it out. It's not my preferred way of figuring things out (I like to brainstorm by myself first), but you live with and adapt to your boss' style.
You know the times I don't bother to spell out what I want? A couple reasons spring to mind:
- I don't really care about what happens next. They can do with it as they like.
- I expect them to know what to do from past experience
- I feel they're independent enough to decide and/or check back with me.
- Or I've given up on the person as coachable (it's wasting my time to train the person, they're not going to listen to good advice and is gonna screw it up anyway, they can dick around with their flawed judgment, I just want to distance myself from accountability/responsibility)
The last is not the healthiest or most mature type of reaction, but y'know, flawed human nature and all. Sometimes avoidance or passive-aggression is the appropriate choice for conflict situations that will resolve by themselves in a reasonable timeframe.
I'm afraid I took the latter way out in this eavesdropping situation and said nothing to the young twentysomething in the food court. Not really my business, after all. She seemed quite happy just venting. She'll figure it out, some day.