I didn't turn up for that SG meeting which was conveniently set at 7:30am Monday my time, but from what I heard it was a dirty laundry airing session. After that, more dirty laundry airing on the SG forums before codename Foundation and Visionary left.
The main leader and the newly promoted sub-leader posted on the board asking for suggestions on how to move forward. Members posted their suggestions, praising the leadership for staying calm and hoping everything will be rebuilt in time. The leader made announcements, called an emergency meeting which I attended all of 15 minutes of before I had to head off to work, where he (and the new subleader) made announcements basically. I saw that only two other people and a coalition member decided to turn up because everyone was sick of the whole business.
Of course everyone was sick of it. I got the feeling that certain people were like me. We had certain opinions about the whole business, but we just didn't want to voice it out. This was from the brief conversations I've had on the SG global chat. (Curiously the only officer online was dead silent.) Now I don't what other people's specific opinions were or their reason for not voicing out. But for myself, the reason was that my notions aren't what they're looking for because it calls for a fundamental management-style, and that's not going to happen.
Maybe it's coming from a RL background where every day you hear the 'management', from MP to the dean to administrators, make non-stop announcement of some plan they have where they're going to do this and that. At some point you become deeply cynical and the talk just goes in one ear and goes out the other. The only thing that is any use is action, and I don't see any intrinsic changes action-wise.
All this leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and a great deal of disapproval for how things were handled. Not handled now when they have already come to a head, but when things were still brewing. One of the leavers is now painted as the bad guy. But there are people with lots of energy, an urge for dominance, and rather shifty ethics. But the choice is not simply between letting them dominate and organization, or kicking them out to maintain stability. If you have a leader who can manage such people and gain their loyalty, they will be a boon to your organization.
Why does drama come about anyway? Drama comes about when people care about something enough to take a stance. Drama is not good, but isn't caring about something (the organization and its direction) desirable?
People who cared left, leaving officers who curiously fall silent every time the two leavers started quarrelling, and a leader who did not step in to deal with the situation when it was brewing. Same leader who promoted the bochap officers (because... fill in the blanks). And that's what's causing the bad taste in my mouth.
Why are people so suck-up? I can barely control myself and not come out strongly against the behaviour of the people making the 'stay calm and move forward' annoucements. Fine, I'm going to keep quiet, but I'm not going to even bother responding to the survey. If you don't have anything good to say, don't say it, and I'm certainly not going to bother with sucking-up.
Which makes me want to just leave. But at which point I should apply my own advice to myself, which is whatever, enjoy playing with the people you like, and ignore whatever shit is going on that you don't.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
15 Minutes of...
Slept early last night so I got up with some spare time this morning. At 6.30am or so, I decided to get my game on.
Couldn't shake the lure of trying Wurm one more time, so I logged on, admired and screenshotted my pit, and then started wandering around like an itinerant hobo once more. I walked around in a wide circle, encountering numerous homesteads, and not enough spare land to do anything with. I foraged some, came across a farm with not enough fences around their fields and two fields in perfect harvest condition, looked around, saw no one in the vincinity and made off with a haul of two pumpkins and two corn. Clutching my ill gotten gains, I was determined to get out of town, but following the shoreline led me around in a confusing circle once again.
Ready to give up, I turned into a nearby mine, resolving to just work on some mining skill. Alas, the mine was on a settlement deed, so I was prevented from making any use of it. Exited, meandered around again, overheard a conversation between folks on global chat on how Minecraft was a banned word around Wurm, and logged off.
Well. I believe I know why minecraft was a resounding success and wurm considerably less so.
Pace of progress. And soloability.
As an amusing contrast, I offer what took place in 15 minutes from 7.30 - 7.45am in WoW. Picked up a few quests from the local outpost past Brill, went to kill a few murlocs for their fins, killed a quillboar named boss, popped my first green weapon of my modest 9 level lifetime - an axe which got promptly equipped - and finished up with a "unique" quest of scaring away baby murlocs, which amounted to right clicking on green npcs, watching my character auto-perform a scare emote animation, and the murlocs affected by an aoe scare effect which made them run in all directions. Seemingly randomly after one or two such scares, the murloc would be "scared to death" or exhaustion and collapsed, yielding a notch on the quest tracker.
By 7.40 or thereabouts, I was on the loop back to the outpost, turned in my quests and got quest prompted to the next outpost. I jogged there, picked up the next quest and logged off, time to head to work.
A neat, efficient, possibly too cleanly packaged, to-do progress packet, done in 15 minutes.
That certainly seems a far cry from what i remembered of the WoW of old, in which the back and forth run to kill this specific mob with this type of name, and the second repeat quest back to the same area for the other specific mob with that type of name, and now your last quest to the same place (past all those aggressive mobs you've killed twice before) to the big boss leader was rather common.
Hmm. More on simplicity and complexity later.
Couldn't shake the lure of trying Wurm one more time, so I logged on, admired and screenshotted my pit, and then started wandering around like an itinerant hobo once more. I walked around in a wide circle, encountering numerous homesteads, and not enough spare land to do anything with. I foraged some, came across a farm with not enough fences around their fields and two fields in perfect harvest condition, looked around, saw no one in the vincinity and made off with a haul of two pumpkins and two corn. Clutching my ill gotten gains, I was determined to get out of town, but following the shoreline led me around in a confusing circle once again.
Ready to give up, I turned into a nearby mine, resolving to just work on some mining skill. Alas, the mine was on a settlement deed, so I was prevented from making any use of it. Exited, meandered around again, overheard a conversation between folks on global chat on how Minecraft was a banned word around Wurm, and logged off.
Well. I believe I know why minecraft was a resounding success and wurm considerably less so.
Pace of progress. And soloability.
As an amusing contrast, I offer what took place in 15 minutes from 7.30 - 7.45am in WoW. Picked up a few quests from the local outpost past Brill, went to kill a few murlocs for their fins, killed a quillboar named boss, popped my first green weapon of my modest 9 level lifetime - an axe which got promptly equipped - and finished up with a "unique" quest of scaring away baby murlocs, which amounted to right clicking on green npcs, watching my character auto-perform a scare emote animation, and the murlocs affected by an aoe scare effect which made them run in all directions. Seemingly randomly after one or two such scares, the murloc would be "scared to death" or exhaustion and collapsed, yielding a notch on the quest tracker.
By 7.40 or thereabouts, I was on the loop back to the outpost, turned in my quests and got quest prompted to the next outpost. I jogged there, picked up the next quest and logged off, time to head to work.
A neat, efficient, possibly too cleanly packaged, to-do progress packet, done in 15 minutes.
That certainly seems a far cry from what i remembered of the WoW of old, in which the back and forth run to kill this specific mob with this type of name, and the second repeat quest back to the same area for the other specific mob with that type of name, and now your last quest to the same place (past all those aggressive mobs you've killed twice before) to the big boss leader was rather common.
Hmm. More on simplicity and complexity later.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Extra Sparkly New World
So after being thoroughly bored to tears in Wurm, I was ready to go on cruise control and do something more closely related to easy fun.
I decided to go for it and made a new undead hunter in WoW to re-learn the ropes.
Again, I ran into some vaguely disorientating new experiences. I could have sworn that hunters didn't start with a pet before. Well, now I had a pet spider running around tanking for me even before level 10.
I couldn't seem to find a bow at level 1, but it mysteriously appeared at level 2, with no ammo cost. (For all I know, I could have had it at level 1, because I started with arcane shot, but I was so impressed with the axe on my back I might have gone into melee mode automatically and just ran up close to whack things with the axe.)
I had an NPC companion, Darnell, who accompanied me for the first few newbie quests and hilariously carried about 10 corpses on his back for me when the quest said to go get 10/10 such items. Very theme-parky. Especially since I didn't run into a single new player in the zone. (I guess everyone is waiting on Cataclysm proper. And Forsaken are passe, it's all troll druids that are the rage now and worgen/goblins soon(TM).)
Ran around. Killed stuff. All the skills seemed streamlined down to almost nothing. I had arcane shot and steady shot, that was it. Oh, and hunters now use focus, not mana. Guess they got tired of bottomless reservoirs at high level? Did some quests. They may have changed. They may not have. I don't have the experience to tell. But they probably did, since the New Player Experience is what they were intent on changing this go around.
I think what Blizzard is now desperate for is new blood. So many jaded hardcore vets these days. Hence the promotion of WoW for $5 for those who haven't yet given it a shot.
It wasn't horrible. And it wasn't great or exciting or new or wow (forgive the pun). It was...pleasant. Pleasantly amusing.
I guess I shall just theme park as long as I can stand it, now that the ride has smoothed itself out considerably.
I decided to go for it and made a new undead hunter in WoW to re-learn the ropes.
Again, I ran into some vaguely disorientating new experiences. I could have sworn that hunters didn't start with a pet before. Well, now I had a pet spider running around tanking for me even before level 10.
I couldn't seem to find a bow at level 1, but it mysteriously appeared at level 2, with no ammo cost. (For all I know, I could have had it at level 1, because I started with arcane shot, but I was so impressed with the axe on my back I might have gone into melee mode automatically and just ran up close to whack things with the axe.)
I had an NPC companion, Darnell, who accompanied me for the first few newbie quests and hilariously carried about 10 corpses on his back for me when the quest said to go get 10/10 such items. Very theme-parky. Especially since I didn't run into a single new player in the zone. (I guess everyone is waiting on Cataclysm proper. And Forsaken are passe, it's all troll druids that are the rage now and worgen/goblins soon(TM).)
Ran around. Killed stuff. All the skills seemed streamlined down to almost nothing. I had arcane shot and steady shot, that was it. Oh, and hunters now use focus, not mana. Guess they got tired of bottomless reservoirs at high level? Did some quests. They may have changed. They may not have. I don't have the experience to tell. But they probably did, since the New Player Experience is what they were intent on changing this go around.
I think what Blizzard is now desperate for is new blood. So many jaded hardcore vets these days. Hence the promotion of WoW for $5 for those who haven't yet given it a shot.
It wasn't horrible. And it wasn't great or exciting or new or wow (forgive the pun). It was...pleasant. Pleasantly amusing.
I guess I shall just theme park as long as I can stand it, now that the ride has smoothed itself out considerably.
The Pit
Last night, I got throroughly bored in Wurm Online for the second time. I thought to give Wurm another shot, after their new (certainly sparkly) tutorial - which got a little wordy and text-dump at the end, not to mention, was still incomplete and under construction - and the change which put free and premium players on the same Freedom Isles server.
The mix of new and old players was not...shall we say, all that the devs might have hoped for. Certainly, there is a logic behind having new players that can learn from the old players, even through eavesdropping on channel conversation. But the basic fact is that the community must be accepting of new blood. About 75% of the time, there were sullen oldbies complaining about how newbies were tearing up the landscape and making a mess, not respecting personal property, distrusting any strangers that wandered innocently onto their territory as folks who would pick up any stuff not nailed down (or "on deed" or "locked" in Wurmspeak).
Granted, there is many grains of truth in this. There's very little accountability for new characters - old players are often wont to make new accounts to profit via griefing, and new players don't understand territory, property rights or the unspoken "culture" of the game or the place. Couple that with a better than 50/50 failure chance to make anything, because newbies have pathetic skill to begin with, and there's a strong incentive to take a few shortcuts - be it being a hobo out of somebody's house or mine, and so on. The alternative is being social (and how many folks do -that) and then committing to becoming someone's labour slave in return for stuff you can't make (rather feudal, eh?). Or collaborating as a group all at one time - but you'd normally need to be irl friends for that, or at least on the same time zones.
This time around, I tried not to be attached to any property - dragging a cart around, and trying to make a whetstone or a mallet to need another whetstone or mallet to finish the tool was highly annoying - and focused on skilling up in an effort to improve my experience.
As you can imagine, skilling up meant LOTS of other-screen-surfing because Wurm still has the stupidly annoying habit of progress bar crafting - which means you select an option and click.... then wait for 14 seconds for the progress bar. Or 18 seconds. Or 9 seconds. Or 11.
I ran around to deserted areas and chopped a whole bunch of trees down. Then I chopped them up into logs with an axe. Then into planks, shafts and kindling. Then left the pile of items lying around because I had no strength to carry them anyway. (Can you see why oldbies hate newbies? At least I bothered to hide my handiwork - other newbies just go for the nearest tree they see in the starter town.)
I couldn't find a mine. I had wandered really far off from the beaten track and roads, and there is no in-game map in Wurm. I couldn't be arsed to use an out of game map, so I just wandered around getting more and more lost. But it was ok because I had no property to my name to speak of. When I die (eventually), I will turn up in the starter town. With hopefully more skills leveled.
So I thought: maybe I'd MAKE a mine. I couldn't find any rock or a convenient mountainside either - which is how I think most mines get started. So I thought I'd start from really scratch. Bare dirt.
I ran into a problem when I tried to dig into the side of a grassy slope. My dig skill was approximately 0-1. I had no skill to dig on such steep slopes!
So I ran around looking for somewhere flat. I eventually stumbled onto a road. With sand around the side of the road. I checked around, there was no one nearby on local to view my dubious antics.
Then I started digging into the sand at the side of the road. (I couldn't touch the road itself, because only premium paid players are allowed to affect roads. Fair enough.) And digging. And digging. And though the ground underneath me seemed to kind of shift, I really couldn't see what effect I was having at all.
What made matters even more tricky was that after each successful dig (remember, long progress bar in which I spent the time browsing RPGnow for Black Friday offers), I got a bunch of 20kg dirt in my inventory. I could only hold 4-5 dirt. 4 dirt I could walk at a decent pace. 5 dirt I slowed down noticeably. 6 dirt, I became encumbered.
If I dropped the dirt, I would terraform the place I was standing on back to normal. So I had to walk (slowly) to somewhere else to drop the dirt. I had also read that dirt could flow back downhill. Hmm.
I eventually abused the road restriction I had as a free player by using it as a limit. I walked across the road and dumped dirt there. When the dirt pile got too high and threatened to flow back across the road, the game stopped me from dumping any more dirt because "I am not allowed to affect the road". So then I just moved to the right and dumped more dirt there.
I had to read the wiki before I finally got a little bit of the hang of terraforming. Turns out it is the corners of each tile that you need to affect.
o - o
| |
o- o
Assume my terrible ascii drawing is a square tile. Instead of standing in the middle of the square and digging (like most people would assume), one has to stand at each of the "o"s and dig, in order to lower it by a height. Basically, the wiki explained, imagine the "o"s as long pillars, and the tile is just a texture joining the four pillars together.
By this point, I was in a 'dig' 'dig' 'dig' stupor. My stamina was a mess. I hadn't had a drink, so the stamina regain was crappy. And I was halfway to starving because the nearest free food & drink barkeeper is probably a million miles away at this point. Who cared, I tried surviving last time and it was a mess - couldn't hunt, animals killed me, couldn't fish, no cotton to make string for a fishing line, and foraging for food left no time to do anything else, ditto attempting to cook casseroles.
I was just going to dig until I starved or a wolf ate me, whichever came first.
So I lowered that one tile over and over, about 20 digs each corner, until I noticed... with considerable amusement, that I was standing in a modest depression with other tiles about me turned to dirt. (I also had to do some tree cutting in order to free up this one tile, so there were chopped logs and fallen trees about the place.)
And across the road, there was an opposing little hump, the mound of dirt I had excavated out of the (maybe waist or knee high dirt pit.)
Alas, the slopes to the one-tile pit became so steep that I could not dig further (on my modest dig skill, which had raised to 6... or so.)
Best of all, I hadn't even hit rock yet. I was still on dirt.
So much for a mine.
It was about that point when I decided that 2-3 hours spent digging in Wurm was truly a waste of my time, when I could be making catacombs in Minecraft, on a theme park ride in WoW, or playing Recettear in considerably less masochistic fashion. Heck, even ATITD has it beat in terms of progress: time ratios.
The mix of new and old players was not...shall we say, all that the devs might have hoped for. Certainly, there is a logic behind having new players that can learn from the old players, even through eavesdropping on channel conversation. But the basic fact is that the community must be accepting of new blood. About 75% of the time, there were sullen oldbies complaining about how newbies were tearing up the landscape and making a mess, not respecting personal property, distrusting any strangers that wandered innocently onto their territory as folks who would pick up any stuff not nailed down (or "on deed" or "locked" in Wurmspeak).
Granted, there is many grains of truth in this. There's very little accountability for new characters - old players are often wont to make new accounts to profit via griefing, and new players don't understand territory, property rights or the unspoken "culture" of the game or the place. Couple that with a better than 50/50 failure chance to make anything, because newbies have pathetic skill to begin with, and there's a strong incentive to take a few shortcuts - be it being a hobo out of somebody's house or mine, and so on. The alternative is being social (and how many folks do -that) and then committing to becoming someone's labour slave in return for stuff you can't make (rather feudal, eh?). Or collaborating as a group all at one time - but you'd normally need to be irl friends for that, or at least on the same time zones.
This time around, I tried not to be attached to any property - dragging a cart around, and trying to make a whetstone or a mallet to need another whetstone or mallet to finish the tool was highly annoying - and focused on skilling up in an effort to improve my experience.
As you can imagine, skilling up meant LOTS of other-screen-surfing because Wurm still has the stupidly annoying habit of progress bar crafting - which means you select an option and click.... then wait for 14 seconds for the progress bar. Or 18 seconds. Or 9 seconds. Or 11.
I ran around to deserted areas and chopped a whole bunch of trees down. Then I chopped them up into logs with an axe. Then into planks, shafts and kindling. Then left the pile of items lying around because I had no strength to carry them anyway. (Can you see why oldbies hate newbies? At least I bothered to hide my handiwork - other newbies just go for the nearest tree they see in the starter town.)
I couldn't find a mine. I had wandered really far off from the beaten track and roads, and there is no in-game map in Wurm. I couldn't be arsed to use an out of game map, so I just wandered around getting more and more lost. But it was ok because I had no property to my name to speak of. When I die (eventually), I will turn up in the starter town. With hopefully more skills leveled.
So I thought: maybe I'd MAKE a mine. I couldn't find any rock or a convenient mountainside either - which is how I think most mines get started. So I thought I'd start from really scratch. Bare dirt.
I ran into a problem when I tried to dig into the side of a grassy slope. My dig skill was approximately 0-1. I had no skill to dig on such steep slopes!
So I ran around looking for somewhere flat. I eventually stumbled onto a road. With sand around the side of the road. I checked around, there was no one nearby on local to view my dubious antics.
Then I started digging into the sand at the side of the road. (I couldn't touch the road itself, because only premium paid players are allowed to affect roads. Fair enough.) And digging. And digging. And though the ground underneath me seemed to kind of shift, I really couldn't see what effect I was having at all.
What made matters even more tricky was that after each successful dig (remember, long progress bar in which I spent the time browsing RPGnow for Black Friday offers), I got a bunch of 20kg dirt in my inventory. I could only hold 4-5 dirt. 4 dirt I could walk at a decent pace. 5 dirt I slowed down noticeably. 6 dirt, I became encumbered.
If I dropped the dirt, I would terraform the place I was standing on back to normal. So I had to walk (slowly) to somewhere else to drop the dirt. I had also read that dirt could flow back downhill. Hmm.
I eventually abused the road restriction I had as a free player by using it as a limit. I walked across the road and dumped dirt there. When the dirt pile got too high and threatened to flow back across the road, the game stopped me from dumping any more dirt because "I am not allowed to affect the road". So then I just moved to the right and dumped more dirt there.
I had to read the wiki before I finally got a little bit of the hang of terraforming. Turns out it is the corners of each tile that you need to affect.
o - o
| |
o- o
Assume my terrible ascii drawing is a square tile. Instead of standing in the middle of the square and digging (like most people would assume), one has to stand at each of the "o"s and dig, in order to lower it by a height. Basically, the wiki explained, imagine the "o"s as long pillars, and the tile is just a texture joining the four pillars together.
By this point, I was in a 'dig' 'dig' 'dig' stupor. My stamina was a mess. I hadn't had a drink, so the stamina regain was crappy. And I was halfway to starving because the nearest free food & drink barkeeper is probably a million miles away at this point. Who cared, I tried surviving last time and it was a mess - couldn't hunt, animals killed me, couldn't fish, no cotton to make string for a fishing line, and foraging for food left no time to do anything else, ditto attempting to cook casseroles.
I was just going to dig until I starved or a wolf ate me, whichever came first.
So I lowered that one tile over and over, about 20 digs each corner, until I noticed... with considerable amusement, that I was standing in a modest depression with other tiles about me turned to dirt. (I also had to do some tree cutting in order to free up this one tile, so there were chopped logs and fallen trees about the place.)
And across the road, there was an opposing little hump, the mound of dirt I had excavated out of the (maybe waist or knee high dirt pit.)
Alas, the slopes to the one-tile pit became so steep that I could not dig further (on my modest dig skill, which had raised to 6... or so.)
Best of all, I hadn't even hit rock yet. I was still on dirt.
 |
| The Pit of DOOM (TM) |
So much for a mine.
It was about that point when I decided that 2-3 hours spent digging in Wurm was truly a waste of my time, when I could be making catacombs in Minecraft, on a theme park ride in WoW, or playing Recettear in considerably less masochistic fashion. Heck, even ATITD has it beat in terms of progress: time ratios.
Storm in an E-Club
I was going to write something about the recent monkey farms, but then something else interesting came up.
Sometimes you wonder if all human associations are in the end doomed to follow in the same pattern, because people tend to come in certain flavours. When you mix certain flavours together, you get the same soup.
This isn't completely truth because depending on the personalities of the people involved that is layered on their basic template, sometimes they can still work together. To continue with the analogy, skillful seasoning with herbs can make the soup still drinkable. But a lot of times the seasoning requires some kind of practical concern -- you still need to work and make money, or it's difficult getting another sponsor, or responsibility to someone even higher up, etc.
The soup we've ordered today is a certain RP SG that I've been involved in the past 6 months or so (my, time does fly). In just two days, it has gone from three leaders to one leader. The officers are still there but I don't really see any leadership coming from them, but more on that later.
One leader is newly promoted. He's bursting with energy and ideas. He comes up with a constant flow of improvements on the SG, rolls a tons of alts and turns them all into storyline plots that he wants people to join in -- usually the plots are centered around his characters but that's what everyone does -- basically he's the "happening" kind of guy. In RoD guilds he'd be the guy who's organizing runs everyday, and trying to get people to go after the big "order mobs", and levelling/brewing non-stop when he's not running. He'd want a run committee and a quest committee and pk committee...the good people stay and the slackers get laid off. The guild's gonna be the best thing ever and he's gonna make it so, it's people are going to say "GoX is where it's happening, they're exploring and running the big mobs".
The other leader has been there for some time. He was the survivor of an older upheaval and he wants stability above all. He wants the SG to return to what it once was, which was a cohesive group of close-knit friends who would get together automatically the moment they log on, even just to sit around and chat. He wants to just rebuild the original atmosphere of the SG by installing minimum activity requirements and teaming regularly. In RoD guilds he'd be the old-timer who likes to sit around guild recall to chat with people, and then have everyone go to run Justice/Zeus to get that pop item the everyone wants. While they wait for respawn everyone can chat and on the whole have a good time. The guild's going to be where everyone can be at home, and they're going to say to newbies, "GoX is a good guild to join, they take care of you and help you get started".
At first, everything started out well. We can call the two archetypes Visionary and Foundation. The two admire each other and get along well because they provide each other with what the other is lacking. But as time goes by tension starts to grow because their visions are different. Both want the best for the guild, but what they believe is "best" differs. In their eyes, the other guy is destroying the guild.
And as with the classical archetypes, Visionary is a bit moody and impulsive. Foundation tends towards being stubborn and conservative. Every time Foundation thwarts Visionary, Visionary's temper flares up, which causes Foundation views him as less trustworthy. So, Foundation gives Visionary less consideration, and when Foundation digs his feet in, Visionary feels Foundation is only giving lip service to compromise, which makes him get more frustrated, which leads Foundation to read him as less trustworthy, which leads him to getting even more frustrated...
Finally, Visionary has reached the last straw. He is grieved and enraged by the betrayal of Foundation, whom he once thought was his friend. He believes Foundation is using his elder status in the group to organise people against him and ostracize him. He behaves erratically and does some "sabo", then quits the group. Fine, he thinks, Foundation wins, he can have the group.
The next day, Foundation finds out. He feels responsible for everything that has happened and believes that everyone is blaming him for Visionary's departure. He's depressed that after all this, the group has become even more unstable. He must commit hara-kiri; without him everything will improve.
So there's only the main leader left, who seems on the whole pretty bochap about this conflict. But you can't blame him since he has to take care of his newborn son and it's clear where his priorities should lie. Which brings us to the officers.
Going into the more philosophical part...
The problem I see with the officers is that they're not acting like officers, which is to say they are not showing any leadership. Part of the entire problem was that the expression of leadership (I won't say burden since I don't know about behind the scenes stuff) was expressed only by the actual leaders, two of whole have left and the last one is trying to pick up the pieces.
What do I mean by "expression of leadership"? Simply said, when one is a leader, one no longer belongs to oneself but also to everyone else. One person doesn't make a leader, you can only be a leader in a group. Thus a leader has to express leadership by bringing people together and "leading" them. Yes, to act as a leader, one has to sacrifice part of one's privacy and become a public persona. In this sense, leadership is not just a privilege but also a burden; if you don't want the burden, then don't take up the privilege. If you want to play by your own self, do your own thing, hang out with your own friends...then don't be a leader.
Who would want to be a leader then? Here we experienced two being burnt out already. Sure, I don't want to be a leader, you don't want to be a leader... let the person who wants to be a leader lead -- there are people like that around who like to do this (my boss for example). Conversely don't put people in a leadership if they don't lead. They can be the best player, the friendliest person, the most active person, your good friend, whatever -- and they can remain that as a valuable member. It's possible to show appreciation to valuable members without putting them in the officer position. It's better to have only one or two leaders who lead, than have many people in the leadership who are not leading.
The reason for this is that members will expect leaders to do something -- lead something. When they log on and see all the officers doing their own thing, the resulting impression is either (1) "leadership is not even interested in their own organisation", or (2) "the leadership is doing their own happy thing and not keeping us in the loop". Then they will respond with (1) "then why should I be interested in the organisation?", or (2) "there's no point for me to be here then".
Latest Update:
Looks like one more officer left with Visionary. That makes two leaders and two officers disappearing. One officer gets promoted to leader, whom I've never experienced as trying to "lead" me at all. Dunno what's going on. But then I'm the patient type -- I'll see what happens.
Sometimes you wonder if all human associations are in the end doomed to follow in the same pattern, because people tend to come in certain flavours. When you mix certain flavours together, you get the same soup.
This isn't completely truth because depending on the personalities of the people involved that is layered on their basic template, sometimes they can still work together. To continue with the analogy, skillful seasoning with herbs can make the soup still drinkable. But a lot of times the seasoning requires some kind of practical concern -- you still need to work and make money, or it's difficult getting another sponsor, or responsibility to someone even higher up, etc.
The soup we've ordered today is a certain RP SG that I've been involved in the past 6 months or so (my, time does fly). In just two days, it has gone from three leaders to one leader. The officers are still there but I don't really see any leadership coming from them, but more on that later.
One leader is newly promoted. He's bursting with energy and ideas. He comes up with a constant flow of improvements on the SG, rolls a tons of alts and turns them all into storyline plots that he wants people to join in -- usually the plots are centered around his characters but that's what everyone does -- basically he's the "happening" kind of guy. In RoD guilds he'd be the guy who's organizing runs everyday, and trying to get people to go after the big "order mobs", and levelling/brewing non-stop when he's not running. He'd want a run committee and a quest committee and pk committee...the good people stay and the slackers get laid off. The guild's gonna be the best thing ever and he's gonna make it so, it's people are going to say "GoX is where it's happening, they're exploring and running the big mobs".
The other leader has been there for some time. He was the survivor of an older upheaval and he wants stability above all. He wants the SG to return to what it once was, which was a cohesive group of close-knit friends who would get together automatically the moment they log on, even just to sit around and chat. He wants to just rebuild the original atmosphere of the SG by installing minimum activity requirements and teaming regularly. In RoD guilds he'd be the old-timer who likes to sit around guild recall to chat with people, and then have everyone go to run Justice/Zeus to get that pop item the everyone wants. While they wait for respawn everyone can chat and on the whole have a good time. The guild's going to be where everyone can be at home, and they're going to say to newbies, "GoX is a good guild to join, they take care of you and help you get started".
At first, everything started out well. We can call the two archetypes Visionary and Foundation. The two admire each other and get along well because they provide each other with what the other is lacking. But as time goes by tension starts to grow because their visions are different. Both want the best for the guild, but what they believe is "best" differs. In their eyes, the other guy is destroying the guild.
And as with the classical archetypes, Visionary is a bit moody and impulsive. Foundation tends towards being stubborn and conservative. Every time Foundation thwarts Visionary, Visionary's temper flares up, which causes Foundation views him as less trustworthy. So, Foundation gives Visionary less consideration, and when Foundation digs his feet in, Visionary feels Foundation is only giving lip service to compromise, which makes him get more frustrated, which leads Foundation to read him as less trustworthy, which leads him to getting even more frustrated...
Finally, Visionary has reached the last straw. He is grieved and enraged by the betrayal of Foundation, whom he once thought was his friend. He believes Foundation is using his elder status in the group to organise people against him and ostracize him. He behaves erratically and does some "sabo", then quits the group. Fine, he thinks, Foundation wins, he can have the group.
The next day, Foundation finds out. He feels responsible for everything that has happened and believes that everyone is blaming him for Visionary's departure. He's depressed that after all this, the group has become even more unstable. He must commit hara-kiri; without him everything will improve.
So there's only the main leader left, who seems on the whole pretty bochap about this conflict. But you can't blame him since he has to take care of his newborn son and it's clear where his priorities should lie. Which brings us to the officers.
Going into the more philosophical part...
The problem I see with the officers is that they're not acting like officers, which is to say they are not showing any leadership. Part of the entire problem was that the expression of leadership (I won't say burden since I don't know about behind the scenes stuff) was expressed only by the actual leaders, two of whole have left and the last one is trying to pick up the pieces.
What do I mean by "expression of leadership"? Simply said, when one is a leader, one no longer belongs to oneself but also to everyone else. One person doesn't make a leader, you can only be a leader in a group. Thus a leader has to express leadership by bringing people together and "leading" them. Yes, to act as a leader, one has to sacrifice part of one's privacy and become a public persona. In this sense, leadership is not just a privilege but also a burden; if you don't want the burden, then don't take up the privilege. If you want to play by your own self, do your own thing, hang out with your own friends...then don't be a leader.
Who would want to be a leader then? Here we experienced two being burnt out already. Sure, I don't want to be a leader, you don't want to be a leader... let the person who wants to be a leader lead -- there are people like that around who like to do this (my boss for example). Conversely don't put people in a leadership if they don't lead. They can be the best player, the friendliest person, the most active person, your good friend, whatever -- and they can remain that as a valuable member. It's possible to show appreciation to valuable members without putting them in the officer position. It's better to have only one or two leaders who lead, than have many people in the leadership who are not leading.
The reason for this is that members will expect leaders to do something -- lead something. When they log on and see all the officers doing their own thing, the resulting impression is either (1) "leadership is not even interested in their own organisation", or (2) "the leadership is doing their own happy thing and not keeping us in the loop". Then they will respond with (1) "then why should I be interested in the organisation?", or (2) "there's no point for me to be here then".
Latest Update:
Looks like one more officer left with Visionary. That makes two leaders and two officers disappearing. One officer gets promoted to leader, whom I've never experienced as trying to "lead" me at all. Dunno what's going on. But then I'm the patient type -- I'll see what happens.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Clueless in Kalimdor
The last post was late, but the sentiment remains. Due to lack of time yesterday (got home at 12 midnight after an extended dinner appointment,) I managed to log on to WoW to be completely lost as usual.
I did however get a couple things done:
1) Since my skill bar was looking notoriously piecemeal, and I couldn't remember a single hotkey which I had tuned so assiduously to form change... I experimented and found my hotkey binds for bear form, cat form and travel form. (shift+b, shift+v and shift+n).
2) Since my skill bar had more holes in it than swiss cheese, I checked out my skills window, only to find that most of the skills have been revised for Cataclysm - with a note to go see your trainer. Barely any of the skills look like the familiar old ones, so I waffled around trying to figure out how to get back to town.
3) I was convinced there must be some type of recall to town skill, but only found a Teleport: to Moonglade. Being unwilling to teleport to the arse end of nowhere in druidland, I scanned my messy inventory and finally discovered my hearth stone. Oh yay, I triggered it and ended up in Thunder Bluff. Oh wait, didn't I bind to the nearest town in the land I was in?
4) Regardless, I went trooping off to the druid trainer anyway, and found out that all the missing skills had to be re-bought. For cold hard silvers. Fortunately, some avid abuse of the auctioneer add-on the previous time had left me 500 gold in the black (yay for millions of rich max level characters), so I didn't turn a hair at paying silvers.
5) Being completely confused and reluctant to rearrange my skill bar, I thought I'd get some quests crossed off my quest log. Flew back to Ashenvale on a wind rider - fortunately that hasn't changed and a big tall tower is very noticeable and memorable - and wandered around completely puzzled that the mobs are about 10 levels lower than me. I could have sworn that I was in a level appropriate zone doing Fed Ex and Kill Ten Rats quests when I got bored stiff. It was also taking hell of a long time to run anywhere and the zone was distinctly bumpier and higher gradient than I (vaguely) remembered it being.
6) It eventually hit me that I might have stumbled onto one of the Cataclysm/Shattering changes when I finished a bunch of sub-level quests and was asked to do a 'unique' quest - wherein one sat on a windrider wyvern and flew around an automatic path doing dive bombing of a target - ie. a vehicle quest, was my best guess. There was a lot more warlike activity going on in the Horde areas too (as in characters preparing for war, not players - the place was deserted of players - for which I was exceedingly thankful since I am on a PvP server and I got smashed the last time I ran into an Alliance player the last go around.)
7) Checking out a WoW wiki confirmed my suspicions as they showed the maps pre and post-Shattering, and gave a synopsis of how the place had changed after Cataclysm. The Horde is busy preparing for war and invading half of Ashenvale. And there is a big volcano that has 'sploded in the middle of the map. Oddly enough, from being an 18-31 zone, it has now been streamlined and revised into a level 20-25 zone - which explained why I was running around completely lost and bamboozled as a level 31 druid.
Not without some irony, I noted that one of the new -low for my level- quest rewards gave me a blue item that was a significant improvement over the green pants I had been wearing previously. I guess there has been some re-itemisation there too.
I'm not even sure I can continue again in the middle of Completely Lostville. Maybe since the Shattering has already taken place, I should make a new character and start again from the get-go until I know which the next level appropriate zone to visit.
I did however get a couple things done:
1) Since my skill bar was looking notoriously piecemeal, and I couldn't remember a single hotkey which I had tuned so assiduously to form change... I experimented and found my hotkey binds for bear form, cat form and travel form. (shift+b, shift+v and shift+n).
2) Since my skill bar had more holes in it than swiss cheese, I checked out my skills window, only to find that most of the skills have been revised for Cataclysm - with a note to go see your trainer. Barely any of the skills look like the familiar old ones, so I waffled around trying to figure out how to get back to town.
3) I was convinced there must be some type of recall to town skill, but only found a Teleport: to Moonglade. Being unwilling to teleport to the arse end of nowhere in druidland, I scanned my messy inventory and finally discovered my hearth stone. Oh yay, I triggered it and ended up in Thunder Bluff. Oh wait, didn't I bind to the nearest town in the land I was in?
4) Regardless, I went trooping off to the druid trainer anyway, and found out that all the missing skills had to be re-bought. For cold hard silvers. Fortunately, some avid abuse of the auctioneer add-on the previous time had left me 500 gold in the black (yay for millions of rich max level characters), so I didn't turn a hair at paying silvers.
5) Being completely confused and reluctant to rearrange my skill bar, I thought I'd get some quests crossed off my quest log. Flew back to Ashenvale on a wind rider - fortunately that hasn't changed and a big tall tower is very noticeable and memorable - and wandered around completely puzzled that the mobs are about 10 levels lower than me. I could have sworn that I was in a level appropriate zone doing Fed Ex and Kill Ten Rats quests when I got bored stiff. It was also taking hell of a long time to run anywhere and the zone was distinctly bumpier and higher gradient than I (vaguely) remembered it being.
6) It eventually hit me that I might have stumbled onto one of the Cataclysm/Shattering changes when I finished a bunch of sub-level quests and was asked to do a 'unique' quest - wherein one sat on a windrider wyvern and flew around an automatic path doing dive bombing of a target - ie. a vehicle quest, was my best guess. There was a lot more warlike activity going on in the Horde areas too (as in characters preparing for war, not players - the place was deserted of players - for which I was exceedingly thankful since I am on a PvP server and I got smashed the last time I ran into an Alliance player the last go around.)
7) Checking out a WoW wiki confirmed my suspicions as they showed the maps pre and post-Shattering, and gave a synopsis of how the place had changed after Cataclysm. The Horde is busy preparing for war and invading half of Ashenvale. And there is a big volcano that has 'sploded in the middle of the map. Oddly enough, from being an 18-31 zone, it has now been streamlined and revised into a level 20-25 zone - which explained why I was running around completely lost and bamboozled as a level 31 druid.
Not without some irony, I noted that one of the new -low for my level- quest rewards gave me a blue item that was a significant improvement over the green pants I had been wearing previously. I guess there has been some re-itemisation there too.
I'm not even sure I can continue again in the middle of Completely Lostville. Maybe since the Shattering has already taken place, I should make a new character and start again from the get-go until I know which the next level appropriate zone to visit.
Doing Everything But Playing WoW
And not for the lack of trying either. I've just been stuck in 4.72gig updates/downloads for a good 24 hours or more by now. I really don't know how 11 million Blizzard fans put up with WoW's patching.
I hear once Cataclysm comes in, they will significantly revise their patching system with some cues from games like Guild Wars, where all you need is a small download at the start, and you can stream the rest of the crap in the background as you are playing.
I hope so.
In the meantime, Steam has been proving a marvellous distraction as their Black Friday sales are offering all kinds of delicious deals for $5 usd. While it may not be on the same scale as vanilla WoW for $5, there's nothing like getting some games you were already eyeing at about 75% off. Especially the indie games.
One of the past indie packs is fantastic, because it offered Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, along with a few other games I had been intending to try (Gish, Jolly Rover, And Yet it Moves, etc.). Hell, for 5 bucks, I would have bought Recettear alone.
I took it for a spin, and I haven't laughed or enjoyed myself so much in ages. It's styled in a very typical Japanese anime style of game, with cutesy girl and cutesy fairy, yet with an amazingly witty and self-deprecating sort of English translation. (Thank goodness they kept the Japanese voices too, so it plays like a subbed anime.)
I could describe the premise - fantasy trope turned on its head by centering game and tale around being the proprietor of an item shop - but it doesn't do justice to the actual gameplay, which sports a blend of simplicity and polish in its mechanics.
It's part standard Japanese storytelling in the vein of Phoenix Wright and numerous Nintendo DS games (where you get a bunch of conversation exposition in text - a la Final Fantasy style), part turn-based visiting of other item shops to accumulate stock and a simple haggling menu of setting the appropriate numbers for buying and selling from your customers, and part very simple hack-and-slash dungeon crawl when you send your pet adventurer out to grab "free" items from dungeons (except you pay in terms of time and hope you don't screw it up from lack of arcade skill.)
I really should have tried the demo out long ago. Except if I did, then I might have bought it at a less cheap price, so maybe it's good I didn't.
I hear once Cataclysm comes in, they will significantly revise their patching system with some cues from games like Guild Wars, where all you need is a small download at the start, and you can stream the rest of the crap in the background as you are playing.
I hope so.
In the meantime, Steam has been proving a marvellous distraction as their Black Friday sales are offering all kinds of delicious deals for $5 usd. While it may not be on the same scale as vanilla WoW for $5, there's nothing like getting some games you were already eyeing at about 75% off. Especially the indie games.
One of the past indie packs is fantastic, because it offered Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, along with a few other games I had been intending to try (Gish, Jolly Rover, And Yet it Moves, etc.). Hell, for 5 bucks, I would have bought Recettear alone.
I took it for a spin, and I haven't laughed or enjoyed myself so much in ages. It's styled in a very typical Japanese anime style of game, with cutesy girl and cutesy fairy, yet with an amazingly witty and self-deprecating sort of English translation. (Thank goodness they kept the Japanese voices too, so it plays like a subbed anime.)
I could describe the premise - fantasy trope turned on its head by centering game and tale around being the proprietor of an item shop - but it doesn't do justice to the actual gameplay, which sports a blend of simplicity and polish in its mechanics.
It's part standard Japanese storytelling in the vein of Phoenix Wright and numerous Nintendo DS games (where you get a bunch of conversation exposition in text - a la Final Fantasy style), part turn-based visiting of other item shops to accumulate stock and a simple haggling menu of setting the appropriate numbers for buying and selling from your customers, and part very simple hack-and-slash dungeon crawl when you send your pet adventurer out to grab "free" items from dungeons (except you pay in terms of time and hope you don't screw it up from lack of arcade skill.)
I really should have tried the demo out long ago. Except if I did, then I might have bought it at a less cheap price, so maybe it's good I didn't.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
One Born Every Minute
And I'm not sure if I'm talking about a sucker or a WoW player.
I seem to now qualify under both headings, because I read about the latest Black Friday promotion launched by Blizzard, in which they invite folks to buy vanilla WoW for $5, burning crusade for $5 and wrath of the lich king for $10.
Being that I went and bought the battlechest a year ago or so to fiddle around with a cow druid who made it to cat level (or lvl 20ish), wrath of the lich king for $10 usd is kinda tempting a steal.
Who knows, I might create the 11 millionth death knight in an effort to experience the much talked-about starter zone introductory missions!
Of course, there is a catch. Or rather, with Blizzard, many catches.
Apparently, shortly after my 2 month game time expired, WoW/Blizzard introduced this whole new improved Battle.net which "strongly encourages" you to merge your WoW account - or not play at all or something along similar lines.
So in order to buy WoTLK at 10 bucks, I would have to make a FREE Battle.net account. Or look up my old ones, which I have promptly forgotten all but maybe the username of. Some lackluster "forgot password" attempts later, I wasn't even sure if I had one, and to which email account it might be linked to.
Nevermind, let's make a new one. It's FREE, anyway. Telling the truth on my region immediately shoved me into the sea.battlenet website, where I uncomfortably tried to check around to see if they had the $5, $10 WoW promotion, and ended up with a "page not found" message. Erm. Not getting the promotion would rather invalidate the point of the battlenet account.
So I moved about a decade back in time and professed to be a resident of the good ol' US of A, yadda yadda.
Enter Sucker territory as I check out my account management page to see the $5, $10 deal, and I sit and wonder if I should merge my current WoW account or just buy a new one - since I am effectively attaching it to a pseudo-battlenet account.
Eventually, I come to the conclusion that I really don't like WoW that much anyway, and the worst thing that could happen is that the account is lost via banning or hacking, and it was already money spent, and it seems pointless to spend more money on something I don't love, and *shudder* I really didn't want to level up in the Barrens one more time to level 20 in the extremely boring tauren and orc zones.
So what the heck, I merge the account, and am about to pick up WoTLK for $10, when the marketing gimmick pops up and says, BUT WAIT, you can pre-order a digital edition of Cataclysm NOW for 37% and play immediately when it launches on Dec 7 (and WoTLK is bundled into the price FREE)...
... Except it was a lot more eloquent than that - it just used pictures. One big cataclysm box. A plus sign. A smaller WoTLK box. And 37% off.
(Or maybe they think their WoW audience is more or less illiterate. Not that far off a guess, I guess.)
I click on the "Learn more" button to check out the cunningly hidden price. $49.99. Ok, 50 bucks. Take off the price of WoTLK, and it's 40 bucks. Did I want to buy Cataclysm for 40 bucks, or $52.30 sgd?
Ehhh. Well, the POINT of doing this now is to putz around in the lowbie zones before Cataclysm, see "The Shattering", and then see what's changed post-Cataclysm. Including maybe play a *rowr* Worgen because I am a closet furry. Except to play a worgen, I must buy the Cataclysm cos it's basically a prestige race for an expansion. Which means I have to buy it -someday-.
And what are the chances of Cataclysm dropping in price? Let's face it. Locally? Zero. WoW is so big. So popular. They are still selling the battlechest full price, more or less, $50-80 sgd, and people are buying. I bet Cata goes for $80, at the very least, when it launches. Digitally, it might eventually drop, like what Blizzard themselves are doing now. But probably only from Blizzard - unless Steam gets their hands on WoW. I'm surely not picking it up from Best Buy or places like that.
Long story short, I convince myself to freaking upgrade to Cataclysm now, and suddenly, not only did I not just get a cheapo WoTLK deal, I have suddenly become a poster boy for WoW: Cataclysm early adoption and given Blizzard 50 bucks instead of ten.
Oh dear lord. There's one born every minute.
To top it off, since my account has been frozen since running out of game time, I have to sign up for a monthly subscription. The good news is that they accept Paypal, since I'm quite paranoid about keeping a payment method stored on anything remotely related to Blizzard, even more so than Apple.
Sighs. At least now with the exchange rate being what it is, I am getting a better deal than trying to buy a 2 month time card for $45-50 sgd - not to mention the inconvenience of frequently frequenting a brick-and-mortar place. I didn't bother with the three and six monthly ones though, I still have some rationality remaining. Will probably end off my stint in 1-2 months. We hope. Unless the hardcore raider bites me or something horrible like that, at which point, you may point to this blog post and laugh. :(
The more hopeful scenario is I will just end up with a folder full of furry postcard screenshots before giving up. Again.
I seem to now qualify under both headings, because I read about the latest Black Friday promotion launched by Blizzard, in which they invite folks to buy vanilla WoW for $5, burning crusade for $5 and wrath of the lich king for $10.
Being that I went and bought the battlechest a year ago or so to fiddle around with a cow druid who made it to cat level (or lvl 20ish), wrath of the lich king for $10 usd is kinda tempting a steal.
Who knows, I might create the 11 millionth death knight in an effort to experience the much talked-about starter zone introductory missions!
Of course, there is a catch. Or rather, with Blizzard, many catches.
Apparently, shortly after my 2 month game time expired, WoW/Blizzard introduced this whole new improved Battle.net which "strongly encourages" you to merge your WoW account - or not play at all or something along similar lines.
So in order to buy WoTLK at 10 bucks, I would have to make a FREE Battle.net account. Or look up my old ones, which I have promptly forgotten all but maybe the username of. Some lackluster "forgot password" attempts later, I wasn't even sure if I had one, and to which email account it might be linked to.
Nevermind, let's make a new one. It's FREE, anyway. Telling the truth on my region immediately shoved me into the sea.battlenet website, where I uncomfortably tried to check around to see if they had the $5, $10 WoW promotion, and ended up with a "page not found" message. Erm. Not getting the promotion would rather invalidate the point of the battlenet account.
So I moved about a decade back in time and professed to be a resident of the good ol' US of A, yadda yadda.
Enter Sucker territory as I check out my account management page to see the $5, $10 deal, and I sit and wonder if I should merge my current WoW account or just buy a new one - since I am effectively attaching it to a pseudo-battlenet account.
Eventually, I come to the conclusion that I really don't like WoW that much anyway, and the worst thing that could happen is that the account is lost via banning or hacking, and it was already money spent, and it seems pointless to spend more money on something I don't love, and *shudder* I really didn't want to level up in the Barrens one more time to level 20 in the extremely boring tauren and orc zones.
So what the heck, I merge the account, and am about to pick up WoTLK for $10, when the marketing gimmick pops up and says, BUT WAIT, you can pre-order a digital edition of Cataclysm NOW for 37% and play immediately when it launches on Dec 7 (and WoTLK is bundled into the price FREE)...
... Except it was a lot more eloquent than that - it just used pictures. One big cataclysm box. A plus sign. A smaller WoTLK box. And 37% off.
(Or maybe they think their WoW audience is more or less illiterate. Not that far off a guess, I guess.)
I click on the "Learn more" button to check out the cunningly hidden price. $49.99. Ok, 50 bucks. Take off the price of WoTLK, and it's 40 bucks. Did I want to buy Cataclysm for 40 bucks, or $52.30 sgd?
Ehhh. Well, the POINT of doing this now is to putz around in the lowbie zones before Cataclysm, see "The Shattering", and then see what's changed post-Cataclysm. Including maybe play a *rowr* Worgen because I am a closet furry. Except to play a worgen, I must buy the Cataclysm cos it's basically a prestige race for an expansion. Which means I have to buy it -someday-.
And what are the chances of Cataclysm dropping in price? Let's face it. Locally? Zero. WoW is so big. So popular. They are still selling the battlechest full price, more or less, $50-80 sgd, and people are buying. I bet Cata goes for $80, at the very least, when it launches. Digitally, it might eventually drop, like what Blizzard themselves are doing now. But probably only from Blizzard - unless Steam gets their hands on WoW. I'm surely not picking it up from Best Buy or places like that.
Long story short, I convince myself to freaking upgrade to Cataclysm now, and suddenly, not only did I not just get a cheapo WoTLK deal, I have suddenly become a poster boy for WoW: Cataclysm early adoption and given Blizzard 50 bucks instead of ten.
Oh dear lord. There's one born every minute.
To top it off, since my account has been frozen since running out of game time, I have to sign up for a monthly subscription. The good news is that they accept Paypal, since I'm quite paranoid about keeping a payment method stored on anything remotely related to Blizzard, even more so than Apple.
Sighs. At least now with the exchange rate being what it is, I am getting a better deal than trying to buy a 2 month time card for $45-50 sgd - not to mention the inconvenience of frequently frequenting a brick-and-mortar place. I didn't bother with the three and six monthly ones though, I still have some rationality remaining. Will probably end off my stint in 1-2 months. We hope. Unless the hardcore raider bites me or something horrible like that, at which point, you may point to this blog post and laugh. :(
The more hopeful scenario is I will just end up with a folder full of furry postcard screenshots before giving up. Again.
So Many Managers, Not Enough Do-ers
I read this and I laughed and laughed and laughed.
If only I could leave this lying around where someone could read it...
...but that would be terribly passive-aggressive of me and not very nice :)
So I will do the grown-up thing and just chuckle and incorporate it into my own learning and self-improvement.
There's a ton of other relevant articles on that site as well. I somehow take great comfort in knowing that this seems such a universal human condition. It must be, what with Dilbert being so popular and all.
If only I could leave this lying around where someone could read it...
...but that would be terribly passive-aggressive of me and not very nice :)
So I will do the grown-up thing and just chuckle and incorporate it into my own learning and self-improvement.
There's a ton of other relevant articles on that site as well. I somehow take great comfort in knowing that this seems such a universal human condition. It must be, what with Dilbert being so popular and all.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Taxi Driver Stories and Cases of Mistaken Identity
Two things happened at Popular tonight.
One, I came across a book entitled "Diary of a Taxi Driver," supposedly written by the most highly educated taxi driver in Singapore, a PhD by the name of Cai Mingjie, who apparently got booted from IMCB by A*STAR for the flimiest of reasons. According to one side of the story, anyway.
(I hedge these since I neither want to be sued by a lawyer, or raked over the coals by the gahmen, or abducted by the ICA... and on a more serious note, because there's usually another side to the story, if not a third. As Kosh says, understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side and the truth.)
From that oh-so-gossipy-and-scandalous-draw that Singaporeans are always attracted to, like rubbernecking a traffic accident from another lane, I flipped through the book to find a bunch of rather amusing blog post anecdotes about his brief stint as a cabby.
Despite wondering why the Chinese-educated seem addicted to little parable storytelling (did I mention my CE's weekly stories) - of course, a fair consideration in retrospect will also reveal lots of Westerners doing the same, and what is my own blog, if not storytelling for a really tiny audience of two... so it's really a human thing - I found the guy's stories a rather fun read.
Part real diary slice-of-life style of a seedier side of Singapore that only cab drivers cruising around at 4am are privy to, part gussied up fanciful imagination and wording, and part sociological insight.
Neither the author or the people he describes comes off smelling like an angel. They sound very ordinary, full-of-issues humans. But I found it both revealing nonetheless, and educational in its own right - as I read through each account, I started labeling each encounter as passive, aggressive, assertive, passive-aggressive, etc, since I've got that on the mind at the moment, trying to learn and practice the best way to handle a social encounter (ie. generally, you want to be assertive except for special cases.)
It was also fun to spin the imaginative wheels and take the scenario somewhere less realistic from time to time, imagining him walking in and eavesdropping on possible Mafia bosses, etc.
Since it was originally from a blog, I decided to save on $21.98 (even if it was less 20%), since I'm cheap that way, and go scour the web for it. Found it, albeit in reverse chronological order, and full of terrible trolling in the comments which is really not worth reading, despite an ingrained comment-reading habit - whyever are Singaporeans such horrible trolls? Is it that sense of entitlement thing going on, mixed with heavy doses of impatience and anger?
---
Anyway, we're back to Two, the second thing that happened at Popular, and this ALWAYS freaking happens to me. Warning: rant coming up.
What the frick is it about some Singaporeans and apparently judging by appearances, and yet not observing enough?
Wherever the hell I stand, and it's usually a Popular because I like to browse in a book store rather than a clothes shop, people come up to me and ask for salesperson help.
Xiao jie... or Miss. How much is this? Where can I find so-and-so? Can you help me blah-blah-blah...
And sometimes it's not even polite, it's a very low-class, Oi, or abrupt demand.
Okay, firstly, I do not even dress like the Popular salespeople. I am wearing my Giordano men's shirt - often blue or grey - and Giordano pants. If you confuse me with the salesperson in a Giordano shop, I would understand. The Popular salespeople wear BLACK t-shirt with RED collar of a completely different material, and they have a LANYARD hanging down their necks (I've stopped wearing mine outside of work absentmindedly more than two years ago, honest!)
Second, I am not standing around looking bored and straightening things on shelves. I am often nose-deep in a book I'm browsing - have you ever seen a salesperson allowed to do that on their work time? I am doing CUSTOMER-y things.
Is it tattooed on my forehead - ask me anything, I will help you with great customer service -?
What's often hilarious is that I will grumpily reply that "I do not work here, I do not know" in either English or broken Mandarin, and they will only hear the part about me not knowing, and keep asking more questions, to which my reply is STILL "I do not work here" (how the fuck should I know, has as yet been left unsaid), and after a great comedy of errors, they will finally get the message and go look for someone else.
Occasionally, they have the grace to look embarrassed at how dumb they are, once it actually hits them that I really don't work there. Usually, they look jilted, or unhappy, like I just gave them the finger or something.
While I often toy with the fantasy of really being vulgar (but that's just rude, and doesn't reflect well on me personally)...
...One of these days, I am going to fuck with their minds and just not reply or react. I will continue to look curt and grumpy and buried in my book. Wouldn't it be a scream if they raised their voices or complained to the store manager about the horribly rude staff standing over there who refused to help?
One, I came across a book entitled "Diary of a Taxi Driver," supposedly written by the most highly educated taxi driver in Singapore, a PhD by the name of Cai Mingjie, who apparently got booted from IMCB by A*STAR for the flimiest of reasons. According to one side of the story, anyway.
(I hedge these since I neither want to be sued by a lawyer, or raked over the coals by the gahmen, or abducted by the ICA... and on a more serious note, because there's usually another side to the story, if not a third. As Kosh says, understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side and the truth.)
From that oh-so-gossipy-and-scandalous-draw that Singaporeans are always attracted to, like rubbernecking a traffic accident from another lane, I flipped through the book to find a bunch of rather amusing blog post anecdotes about his brief stint as a cabby.
Despite wondering why the Chinese-educated seem addicted to little parable storytelling (did I mention my CE's weekly stories) - of course, a fair consideration in retrospect will also reveal lots of Westerners doing the same, and what is my own blog, if not storytelling for a really tiny audience of two... so it's really a human thing - I found the guy's stories a rather fun read.
Part real diary slice-of-life style of a seedier side of Singapore that only cab drivers cruising around at 4am are privy to, part gussied up fanciful imagination and wording, and part sociological insight.
Neither the author or the people he describes comes off smelling like an angel. They sound very ordinary, full-of-issues humans. But I found it both revealing nonetheless, and educational in its own right - as I read through each account, I started labeling each encounter as passive, aggressive, assertive, passive-aggressive, etc, since I've got that on the mind at the moment, trying to learn and practice the best way to handle a social encounter (ie. generally, you want to be assertive except for special cases.)
It was also fun to spin the imaginative wheels and take the scenario somewhere less realistic from time to time, imagining him walking in and eavesdropping on possible Mafia bosses, etc.
Since it was originally from a blog, I decided to save on $21.98 (even if it was less 20%), since I'm cheap that way, and go scour the web for it. Found it, albeit in reverse chronological order, and full of terrible trolling in the comments which is really not worth reading, despite an ingrained comment-reading habit - whyever are Singaporeans such horrible trolls? Is it that sense of entitlement thing going on, mixed with heavy doses of impatience and anger?
---
Anyway, we're back to Two, the second thing that happened at Popular, and this ALWAYS freaking happens to me. Warning: rant coming up.
What the frick is it about some Singaporeans and apparently judging by appearances, and yet not observing enough?
Wherever the hell I stand, and it's usually a Popular because I like to browse in a book store rather than a clothes shop, people come up to me and ask for salesperson help.
Xiao jie... or Miss. How much is this? Where can I find so-and-so? Can you help me blah-blah-blah...
And sometimes it's not even polite, it's a very low-class, Oi, or abrupt demand.
Okay, firstly, I do not even dress like the Popular salespeople. I am wearing my Giordano men's shirt - often blue or grey - and Giordano pants. If you confuse me with the salesperson in a Giordano shop, I would understand. The Popular salespeople wear BLACK t-shirt with RED collar of a completely different material, and they have a LANYARD hanging down their necks (I've stopped wearing mine outside of work absentmindedly more than two years ago, honest!)
Second, I am not standing around looking bored and straightening things on shelves. I am often nose-deep in a book I'm browsing - have you ever seen a salesperson allowed to do that on their work time? I am doing CUSTOMER-y things.
Is it tattooed on my forehead - ask me anything, I will help you with great customer service -?
What's often hilarious is that I will grumpily reply that "I do not work here, I do not know" in either English or broken Mandarin, and they will only hear the part about me not knowing, and keep asking more questions, to which my reply is STILL "I do not work here" (how the fuck should I know, has as yet been left unsaid), and after a great comedy of errors, they will finally get the message and go look for someone else.
Occasionally, they have the grace to look embarrassed at how dumb they are, once it actually hits them that I really don't work there. Usually, they look jilted, or unhappy, like I just gave them the finger or something.
While I often toy with the fantasy of really being vulgar (but that's just rude, and doesn't reflect well on me personally)...
...One of these days, I am going to fuck with their minds and just not reply or react. I will continue to look curt and grumpy and buried in my book. Wouldn't it be a scream if they raised their voices or complained to the store manager about the horribly rude staff standing over there who refused to help?
Monday, November 22, 2010
Bystander Effect?
Picture this. Small event ongoing, guest of honour talking to room of forty or so people. Room is quiet and respectful.
One of the ladies in the front row has some kind of dry tickle in her throat or lungs / chokes on something and begins to cough. And hack. And cough and rasp, looking embarassed, holding up a tissue to her mouth, and does not recover in a short period of time. She decides to flee out of the room, coughing and hacking echoing back to our ears.
It gets louder, freed from the confines of politeness to the GOH, like she's coughing up a lung or a clot of dried blood. Then it gets quiet, like she's run away further from the room's vicinity or collapsed and fainted/died.
In the midst of all this, everyone keeps their seat and continues listening to the GOH talk. Including the organizers who know the lady more closely than I, and including my boss, who is usually big on customer service.
One or two minutes pass, turmoil rumbles through my mind, and I just cannot sit still any longer. I need to check on the lady - what if something's happened to her? Maybe I can get her a glass of warm water or something.
I jump up, edge around the quiet gathering, and check if there's a styrofoam cup in the water dispenser in the room. There's not. It's empty. Typical.
I exit the room anyway to check on the lady. She's not in sight, but wandering by the lift and toilets reveal the sound of desperate ugly hacking in the restroom. Oh dear. Well, at least she's not dead or fainted yet.
Feeling somewhat embarassed to just walk in and check on her (because she herself looked very embarassed at her coughing fit), I try and think of somewhere else to rustle up hot water and settle on going all the way up to the fourth floor to the offices, grab a styrofoam cup, fill it with 3/4 hot 1/4 cold water (I am a master mixer of lukewarm water, having done this for both my mum and myself when I'm miserable with ze flu), and carry it down the lift to stand outside the toilets, wondering "oh great, what now..."
I have sort of outsmarted myself because I have this obsessive hygiene thing going on and carrying drinkable water into a public toilet is not the first thing I'd do, and not the first thing I'd drink either if someone did that for me.
Maybe the lady has recovered and wandered back into the room, at which case I'd look a bit of a right fool hanging outside the toilet with a cup of water in my hand, but at least when I return to the room, I can look like I've kindly exited to get her a glass of water to offer her then.
Fortunately, while I'm standing around outside, with my ears perked up like an alert cat, listening for any further hints of respiratory distress emanating from the toilets, the lady exits, looking a touch more recovered, and I'm left looking like a golden haloed angel as I offer her the warm water like an SIA air stewardess and ask her if she's all right.
All's well that ends well. In the midst of her thanking me and drinking the water, the other two organizers finally came down to check on what had happened to her and saw me talking to the lady, situation well in hand. Which is the most timing-appropriate choice, of course.
Still, I didn't really do it for praise, or thanks, or even the afterglow of warm fuzzy feelings from doing the right thing. (Though sadly, my boss has apparently no clue to what I did, so I will continue to look like a disorganised, aloof, incompetent in her mind and on my yearly performance appraisals.) Nor can I refute that it's nice if other people know how nice I was, I'm only human.
I did it basically because I couldn't stand sitting there pretending not to notice that another human being was in some kind of distress.
And of course, because I was in control of that situation and I knew where to get help and things.
So I cannot point any fingers at most of the people in that room, because they were strangers to where they were and would not have known where to get a glass of water (though they could have perhaps checked to see if the lady had coughed a lung out), but I do have to scratch my head questioningly wondering why one other person did absolutely nothing, during and after. No names, but we have previously mentioned facades and false appearances before.
And lastly, I have to admit that I was familar to a certain extent with the lady in question, whom we have met before, so she wasn't a stranger and I felt comfortable enough to offer her some assistance.
Still, if the same event happened to a stranger, but who was also a guest whom I was supposed to be looking after, I'd like to think that I would have done the same thing.
Or maybe, if the person was not even a guest that I was supposed to be looking after - except that would be a little more dubious as I'd have to check a) that it wasn't a trick to knock me down and rob me b) that there might be other more closely-related family or proper hosts around, and c) I'd have to know where to get water, and I might not bother being so hospitable to someone who wasn't a guest...
... but I'd probably at least go up and ask if they were okay. And left after that if they indicated they were okay, in between hacking coughs.
One of the ladies in the front row has some kind of dry tickle in her throat or lungs / chokes on something and begins to cough. And hack. And cough and rasp, looking embarassed, holding up a tissue to her mouth, and does not recover in a short period of time. She decides to flee out of the room, coughing and hacking echoing back to our ears.
It gets louder, freed from the confines of politeness to the GOH, like she's coughing up a lung or a clot of dried blood. Then it gets quiet, like she's run away further from the room's vicinity or collapsed and fainted/died.
In the midst of all this, everyone keeps their seat and continues listening to the GOH talk. Including the organizers who know the lady more closely than I, and including my boss, who is usually big on customer service.
One or two minutes pass, turmoil rumbles through my mind, and I just cannot sit still any longer. I need to check on the lady - what if something's happened to her? Maybe I can get her a glass of warm water or something.
I jump up, edge around the quiet gathering, and check if there's a styrofoam cup in the water dispenser in the room. There's not. It's empty. Typical.
I exit the room anyway to check on the lady. She's not in sight, but wandering by the lift and toilets reveal the sound of desperate ugly hacking in the restroom. Oh dear. Well, at least she's not dead or fainted yet.
Feeling somewhat embarassed to just walk in and check on her (because she herself looked very embarassed at her coughing fit), I try and think of somewhere else to rustle up hot water and settle on going all the way up to the fourth floor to the offices, grab a styrofoam cup, fill it with 3/4 hot 1/4 cold water (I am a master mixer of lukewarm water, having done this for both my mum and myself when I'm miserable with ze flu), and carry it down the lift to stand outside the toilets, wondering "oh great, what now..."
I have sort of outsmarted myself because I have this obsessive hygiene thing going on and carrying drinkable water into a public toilet is not the first thing I'd do, and not the first thing I'd drink either if someone did that for me.
Maybe the lady has recovered and wandered back into the room, at which case I'd look a bit of a right fool hanging outside the toilet with a cup of water in my hand, but at least when I return to the room, I can look like I've kindly exited to get her a glass of water to offer her then.
Fortunately, while I'm standing around outside, with my ears perked up like an alert cat, listening for any further hints of respiratory distress emanating from the toilets, the lady exits, looking a touch more recovered, and I'm left looking like a golden haloed angel as I offer her the warm water like an SIA air stewardess and ask her if she's all right.
All's well that ends well. In the midst of her thanking me and drinking the water, the other two organizers finally came down to check on what had happened to her and saw me talking to the lady, situation well in hand. Which is the most timing-appropriate choice, of course.
Still, I didn't really do it for praise, or thanks, or even the afterglow of warm fuzzy feelings from doing the right thing. (Though sadly, my boss has apparently no clue to what I did, so I will continue to look like a disorganised, aloof, incompetent in her mind and on my yearly performance appraisals.) Nor can I refute that it's nice if other people know how nice I was, I'm only human.
I did it basically because I couldn't stand sitting there pretending not to notice that another human being was in some kind of distress.
And of course, because I was in control of that situation and I knew where to get help and things.
So I cannot point any fingers at most of the people in that room, because they were strangers to where they were and would not have known where to get a glass of water (though they could have perhaps checked to see if the lady had coughed a lung out), but I do have to scratch my head questioningly wondering why one other person did absolutely nothing, during and after. No names, but we have previously mentioned facades and false appearances before.
And lastly, I have to admit that I was familar to a certain extent with the lady in question, whom we have met before, so she wasn't a stranger and I felt comfortable enough to offer her some assistance.
Still, if the same event happened to a stranger, but who was also a guest whom I was supposed to be looking after, I'd like to think that I would have done the same thing.
Or maybe, if the person was not even a guest that I was supposed to be looking after - except that would be a little more dubious as I'd have to check a) that it wasn't a trick to knock me down and rob me b) that there might be other more closely-related family or proper hosts around, and c) I'd have to know where to get water, and I might not bother being so hospitable to someone who wasn't a guest...
... but I'd probably at least go up and ask if they were okay. And left after that if they indicated they were okay, in between hacking coughs.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Incentivization
It's kinda sad, but with all the games on my plate, and so little time to play them in, sometimes - okay, MANY times - I respond to simple achiever incentivization.
For the past 2-3 days, I have been playing Global Agenda to the point where I distinctly need to cut back soon or burn out. Why? Because they have promised an Anubis helmet for players who win 25 Mercenary PvP matches this week.
These are basically 10 vs 10 player objective-based matches. There is Control, where your team runs around trying to capture 2 out of 3 capture points in order to gain control and move a progress bar up to victory condition. There is Scramble, where the teams essentially scramble around to capture a randomly picked objective point. Breach is essentially Team Fortresses' Attack/Defend. One team gets to attack and capture a point, while the other team does their darnest to keep them off it until the timer runs out. Repeat x 3 points as they push progressively through it. Payload is also identically named. Big minecart thingmajig, one team pushes it on rails through the other teams defence gauntlet. The last is Demolition, a strange sort of capture the flag, in which a player runs a robot that spawns at one's spawn point into the other team's spawn point. This robot is big, sturdy, healable, and also does a bunch of melee damage. Most of the time, a team with 2-3 medics and an assault (think soldier/hwguy) in the robot will just bum rush the capture point and one simply cannot kill them in time. I'm not even sure a coordinated group of robotics (think engineers with gun/rocket/heal turrets) can stop them. Maybe they can, but it's not exactly the most balanced of scenarios as the matchmaking can be somewhat lax on the classes they pick.
Balance of the matches themselves seem quite even. Global Agenda is interesting in that they record stats for everything and leave it all open to the players to look at, in a manner akin to WoW Armory. (www.agendastats.com or the GA website itself). So I can literally look at a character and see the WIN/LOSS ratio of map the player has played, unsoweiter.
While this is mildly embarassing at times, I note that my average win/loss on pvp maps is an exact 50%, give or take 2%. While my gameplay is no doubt just about average, or close unto retarded territory, the effect of a 10 member team and its coordination (or lack of) is much stronger. Even the better players only have a 60% win/loss ratio in favor of wins, it's not an 80-100% sort of thing, you may be a god of that class, but if you're on a team of idiots, you're likely to lose regardless.
Of course, what this means for anyone hoping to win 25 Merc PvP matches is that he or she now has to play around fifty matches. In the space of 7 days, or so. And each match is a good 15-20 minutes, not inclusive of wait time for queues in order for the matchmaking to trigger.
I'd previously only played about 23 matches total, since I interspersed my PvP with some PvE as well. Now I turned into a match queueing freak hopping around in the Dome City lobby area waiting for the map to pop.
Long story short, I got my 25 wins, with plenty of losses too. Then I immediately jumped into a PvE mission for a change of pace and got repeatedly floored by a giant robot boss. Grr.
---
Before this, I was responding to incentivization in LOTRO. At least for a while. The Harvestmath event was going on, and there was a new Haunted Burrow haunted house fun instance. So I ran in to try it out, and discovered that it mostly consisted of running around in a dark, ostensibly scary, maze with one way doors/portals and those that didn't go anywhere or were locked, clicking on things. Each quest could only be taken one at a time, not all at the same time, and awarded 3 Fall Festival tokens each. So it boiled down to an extreme amount of running around the same places over and over. I looked hard at the stuff on reward for Fall Festival tokens, and decided it just wasn't worth the bother for some cosmetic wear.
---
Guild Wars was before that, and we all know the reason I took it up again was the Hall of Monuments. After the mad push to 15 points, I sort of lost steam and got distracted midway through trying to fight my paragon through the Tyria missions on both normal and hard mode at the same time.
Oh yes, part of the distraction was because Halloween had hit, so there was a lot of running around chasing event-time-only incentives as well.
---
I'm not completely sure that I'm 100% ready for City of Heroes yet. I logged in on a scrapper, did an Ouroboros mission arc, got 7 reward merits... couldn't figure out what to do next - so many options, all done before - and logged off.
I guess it doesn't help that I'm locked out of the Virtue TFs global channel because it's now full.
---
Ironically, I am back in very very casual fashion in ATITD Tale 4 B. This is the deserted desert shard with perhaps 10 players online if we're lucky, but is basically a solo'ers bliss.
I built a bunch of stuff that I was too lazy to build before - chicken coops, thistle farms, an ant colony and working on a silkworm farm.
I also started another vineyard of grapes and have been slowly tending it an hour at a time, in order to make wine that will have to ferment slowly for a week or more in the barrel, in order to bottle it and keep it for another few weeks to grow in vintage. Sounds insane, but considering I've been away for upwards of 2-3 months, the long term project doesn't seem so bad this time around.
For the past 2-3 days, I have been playing Global Agenda to the point where I distinctly need to cut back soon or burn out. Why? Because they have promised an Anubis helmet for players who win 25 Mercenary PvP matches this week.
These are basically 10 vs 10 player objective-based matches. There is Control, where your team runs around trying to capture 2 out of 3 capture points in order to gain control and move a progress bar up to victory condition. There is Scramble, where the teams essentially scramble around to capture a randomly picked objective point. Breach is essentially Team Fortresses' Attack/Defend. One team gets to attack and capture a point, while the other team does their darnest to keep them off it until the timer runs out. Repeat x 3 points as they push progressively through it. Payload is also identically named. Big minecart thingmajig, one team pushes it on rails through the other teams defence gauntlet. The last is Demolition, a strange sort of capture the flag, in which a player runs a robot that spawns at one's spawn point into the other team's spawn point. This robot is big, sturdy, healable, and also does a bunch of melee damage. Most of the time, a team with 2-3 medics and an assault (think soldier/hwguy) in the robot will just bum rush the capture point and one simply cannot kill them in time. I'm not even sure a coordinated group of robotics (think engineers with gun/rocket/heal turrets) can stop them. Maybe they can, but it's not exactly the most balanced of scenarios as the matchmaking can be somewhat lax on the classes they pick.
Balance of the matches themselves seem quite even. Global Agenda is interesting in that they record stats for everything and leave it all open to the players to look at, in a manner akin to WoW Armory. (www.agendastats.com or the GA website itself). So I can literally look at a character and see the WIN/LOSS ratio of map the player has played, unsoweiter.
While this is mildly embarassing at times, I note that my average win/loss on pvp maps is an exact 50%, give or take 2%. While my gameplay is no doubt just about average, or close unto retarded territory, the effect of a 10 member team and its coordination (or lack of) is much stronger. Even the better players only have a 60% win/loss ratio in favor of wins, it's not an 80-100% sort of thing, you may be a god of that class, but if you're on a team of idiots, you're likely to lose regardless.
Of course, what this means for anyone hoping to win 25 Merc PvP matches is that he or she now has to play around fifty matches. In the space of 7 days, or so. And each match is a good 15-20 minutes, not inclusive of wait time for queues in order for the matchmaking to trigger.
I'd previously only played about 23 matches total, since I interspersed my PvP with some PvE as well. Now I turned into a match queueing freak hopping around in the Dome City lobby area waiting for the map to pop.
Long story short, I got my 25 wins, with plenty of losses too. Then I immediately jumped into a PvE mission for a change of pace and got repeatedly floored by a giant robot boss. Grr.
---
Before this, I was responding to incentivization in LOTRO. At least for a while. The Harvestmath event was going on, and there was a new Haunted Burrow haunted house fun instance. So I ran in to try it out, and discovered that it mostly consisted of running around in a dark, ostensibly scary, maze with one way doors/portals and those that didn't go anywhere or were locked, clicking on things. Each quest could only be taken one at a time, not all at the same time, and awarded 3 Fall Festival tokens each. So it boiled down to an extreme amount of running around the same places over and over. I looked hard at the stuff on reward for Fall Festival tokens, and decided it just wasn't worth the bother for some cosmetic wear.
---
Guild Wars was before that, and we all know the reason I took it up again was the Hall of Monuments. After the mad push to 15 points, I sort of lost steam and got distracted midway through trying to fight my paragon through the Tyria missions on both normal and hard mode at the same time.
Oh yes, part of the distraction was because Halloween had hit, so there was a lot of running around chasing event-time-only incentives as well.
---
I'm not completely sure that I'm 100% ready for City of Heroes yet. I logged in on a scrapper, did an Ouroboros mission arc, got 7 reward merits... couldn't figure out what to do next - so many options, all done before - and logged off.
I guess it doesn't help that I'm locked out of the Virtue TFs global channel because it's now full.
---
Ironically, I am back in very very casual fashion in ATITD Tale 4 B. This is the deserted desert shard with perhaps 10 players online if we're lucky, but is basically a solo'ers bliss.
I built a bunch of stuff that I was too lazy to build before - chicken coops, thistle farms, an ant colony and working on a silkworm farm.
I also started another vineyard of grapes and have been slowly tending it an hour at a time, in order to make wine that will have to ferment slowly for a week or more in the barrel, in order to bottle it and keep it for another few weeks to grow in vintage. Sounds insane, but considering I've been away for upwards of 2-3 months, the long term project doesn't seem so bad this time around.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Sent by my iPeen (luv, iWhore)
So I still don't know which fiend thought of using an email signature as a place to advertise the device the mail was being sent on. What I do know is that the number of "Sent by my Blackberry" and "sent by my iPhone" sigs have been steadily increasing to the point of being more common than spam.
Whatever purpose does it serve? We certainly don't feel the need to specify that this email was brought to you courtesy of an Intel Inside PC or sent from one's mulberry colored Macbook.
Is it trying to tell us that this was sent on a mobile device, therefore please excuse the terseness and typographical errors that often accompany sms'ing? Really, honest, my six year old wasn't answering my mail, it is only that of someone five to six decades his senior and too lazy to be arsed to proofread and hit backspace, you're totally not worth spending any more of my "cooped up on the plane" time over anyway.
Or is it more of envy and bragging rights? Hardy har, I have a blackberry or an iPhone, and you don't. Don'cha wish you had one too?
Whatever the intent, it serves as a particularly effective form of viral marketing, even as it contributes to utterly pointless extra text in emails.
As of a couple days ago, I have officially joined the ranks of the iWhatever Apple drones by purchasing an iPad. The oversized photo frame is unbelievably shiny in its allure, and I've never minded a bit of extra weight and bulk in a tradeoff for actually being able to see and read from an area larger than a postage stamp.
I have been discovering a world of cunning design. Elegant in its simplicity, and yet insidious.
The overall layout is effectively simple. A bunch of square icons allow one to call up separate app programs at will, while the home button brings one back to the initial menu of app offerings, neatly masking the fact that the iPad is incapable of real multitasking. It can save where you were in different apps, but you always have to cross Home and the app selection screen to switch apps.
Especially insidious is the hard linkage to iTunes and the soft linkage to the Apple app store.
What do I mean? Well, the iPad proved to be incapable of starting up from a factory fresh standpoint until you plugged it into a PC or Mac sporting iTunes. Let's skip attacking the assumption that everyone buying an iPad has access to a slightly less mobile device. I had to grumpily and ungraciously re-install iTunes knowing that it liked to access the Internet on its own every so often, according to Zonealarm. The next week or so of working on my PC is going to be interesting as I block and reblock its Bonjour services...
On the other hand, I have to admit that iTunes itself is a well designed program to fulfill its function, ie. To link the unquestioning consumer to a well designed store for all your Music and Movie needs (assuming you were in the States at least.) The extra podcasts and radio functionality is just a bonus. Especially insidious is the presence of social networking software like Ping, which sends info about your music viewing choices to Apple in exchange for additional recommendations of what your friends around you are viewing - a vast sheepy network of mainstream conformity. Fortunately, possibly in order not to get a lawsuit slapped on them, they explain the privacy options quite clearly and leave it as an opt-in.
The Genius opt-in on the other hand is framed in a tempting manner, leaving it as an open option for bored people to click on. Again, this offers to personalize recommendations of similar tunes or software in exchange for a slight privacy violation of sharing your content choices, presumably to more effectively target marketing and ads.
Fortunately, as I am a non-audio privacy junkie, I find it quite easy to resist and am only forced to install iTunes to get my iPad working, at which point I find it much harder to resist the siren call of the Apple App Store.
There's a big shiny blue square that announces its presence and people who can resist touching that button are in fact, better off not bothering to purchase any of the iWhatevers because barebones functionality is intentionally limited in order to sell lots of microtransactions off this store.
One is asked to sign up for an account on entering the store. It lets you not have to type in a payment option as yet, which is all very well because the thought of having my credit card info automatically stored on a mobile, easily losable device is kinda nightmare fuel. Still, I'm going to have to investigate the security options at some point - perhaps prepaid dollars? - because the apps are one of my primary reasons for picking up an iPad.
The increase in functionality by buying extra programs designed to take advantage of the mobile devices' features is quite irresistable, and the App Store makes browsing through them a fun experience, just like browsing Amazon or Steam. It is not without some irony that I note my preference for browsing virtual stores full of goods that actually interest me over physical stores full of clothes that evoke nothing but bad emotions.
For now, there is a rather freeing experience in being able to port this iPad places where it would be considerably difficult carting in a laptop. The bed, the dining table and the potty, for a start. Of course this assumes a wi-fi accessible at all those locations. If I wanted to pay through the nose, I could sign up for the 3G option, but that seems unnecessary at this juncture.
The last scary and thrilling thought is how accessible my email has become. I haven't used "proper" email programs in forever. My office email is only accessed via outlook on my office pc. I have steadfastly resisted buying or installing ms office on my home pc for years, so I have no outlook and was forced to use the clunky web access option. My personal emails are also all browser based.
I caved in and typed in my office email and password into this iPad, and the thing does all the work, effectively "pushing" incoming email and appointment invitations right into my calendar and mail apps. It's eyeopeningly amazing, even if it will give an IT department fits over the lack of security. The latter reason is why I am not likely to input any of my personal emails into this, but for work, well, too bad. The tradeoff of being able to check and respond to email anywhere means that a potential security lapse is an acceptable risk. Besides they switch the passwords every 3 months or so, I guess I know why now, because all the bosses no doubt have these potential security lapses embedded into all their portable devices.
I guess it is finally time for me to join the age of the multi-touch screen (which is amazingly fun and intuitive), even if I had to unwillingly join the cult of Apple to do it. *sighs*
This post has been brought to you by my one handed touch typing on the iPad keyboard, with extreme care taken to correct all my typos and wrong Autocorrect guesses without any arrow keys or delete keys, only a backspace and non-intuitive word selection with my fingers. I guess I should find an app or check to see if anyone else online has solved this problem without being forced to buy a keyboard dock...
Whatever purpose does it serve? We certainly don't feel the need to specify that this email was brought to you courtesy of an Intel Inside PC or sent from one's mulberry colored Macbook.
Is it trying to tell us that this was sent on a mobile device, therefore please excuse the terseness and typographical errors that often accompany sms'ing? Really, honest, my six year old wasn't answering my mail, it is only that of someone five to six decades his senior and too lazy to be arsed to proofread and hit backspace, you're totally not worth spending any more of my "cooped up on the plane" time over anyway.
Or is it more of envy and bragging rights? Hardy har, I have a blackberry or an iPhone, and you don't. Don'cha wish you had one too?
Whatever the intent, it serves as a particularly effective form of viral marketing, even as it contributes to utterly pointless extra text in emails.
As of a couple days ago, I have officially joined the ranks of the iWhatever Apple drones by purchasing an iPad. The oversized photo frame is unbelievably shiny in its allure, and I've never minded a bit of extra weight and bulk in a tradeoff for actually being able to see and read from an area larger than a postage stamp.
I have been discovering a world of cunning design. Elegant in its simplicity, and yet insidious.
The overall layout is effectively simple. A bunch of square icons allow one to call up separate app programs at will, while the home button brings one back to the initial menu of app offerings, neatly masking the fact that the iPad is incapable of real multitasking. It can save where you were in different apps, but you always have to cross Home and the app selection screen to switch apps.
Especially insidious is the hard linkage to iTunes and the soft linkage to the Apple app store.
What do I mean? Well, the iPad proved to be incapable of starting up from a factory fresh standpoint until you plugged it into a PC or Mac sporting iTunes. Let's skip attacking the assumption that everyone buying an iPad has access to a slightly less mobile device. I had to grumpily and ungraciously re-install iTunes knowing that it liked to access the Internet on its own every so often, according to Zonealarm. The next week or so of working on my PC is going to be interesting as I block and reblock its Bonjour services...
On the other hand, I have to admit that iTunes itself is a well designed program to fulfill its function, ie. To link the unquestioning consumer to a well designed store for all your Music and Movie needs (assuming you were in the States at least.) The extra podcasts and radio functionality is just a bonus. Especially insidious is the presence of social networking software like Ping, which sends info about your music viewing choices to Apple in exchange for additional recommendations of what your friends around you are viewing - a vast sheepy network of mainstream conformity. Fortunately, possibly in order not to get a lawsuit slapped on them, they explain the privacy options quite clearly and leave it as an opt-in.
The Genius opt-in on the other hand is framed in a tempting manner, leaving it as an open option for bored people to click on. Again, this offers to personalize recommendations of similar tunes or software in exchange for a slight privacy violation of sharing your content choices, presumably to more effectively target marketing and ads.
Fortunately, as I am a non-audio privacy junkie, I find it quite easy to resist and am only forced to install iTunes to get my iPad working, at which point I find it much harder to resist the siren call of the Apple App Store.
There's a big shiny blue square that announces its presence and people who can resist touching that button are in fact, better off not bothering to purchase any of the iWhatevers because barebones functionality is intentionally limited in order to sell lots of microtransactions off this store.
One is asked to sign up for an account on entering the store. It lets you not have to type in a payment option as yet, which is all very well because the thought of having my credit card info automatically stored on a mobile, easily losable device is kinda nightmare fuel. Still, I'm going to have to investigate the security options at some point - perhaps prepaid dollars? - because the apps are one of my primary reasons for picking up an iPad.
The increase in functionality by buying extra programs designed to take advantage of the mobile devices' features is quite irresistable, and the App Store makes browsing through them a fun experience, just like browsing Amazon or Steam. It is not without some irony that I note my preference for browsing virtual stores full of goods that actually interest me over physical stores full of clothes that evoke nothing but bad emotions.
For now, there is a rather freeing experience in being able to port this iPad places where it would be considerably difficult carting in a laptop. The bed, the dining table and the potty, for a start. Of course this assumes a wi-fi accessible at all those locations. If I wanted to pay through the nose, I could sign up for the 3G option, but that seems unnecessary at this juncture.
The last scary and thrilling thought is how accessible my email has become. I haven't used "proper" email programs in forever. My office email is only accessed via outlook on my office pc. I have steadfastly resisted buying or installing ms office on my home pc for years, so I have no outlook and was forced to use the clunky web access option. My personal emails are also all browser based.
I caved in and typed in my office email and password into this iPad, and the thing does all the work, effectively "pushing" incoming email and appointment invitations right into my calendar and mail apps. It's eyeopeningly amazing, even if it will give an IT department fits over the lack of security. The latter reason is why I am not likely to input any of my personal emails into this, but for work, well, too bad. The tradeoff of being able to check and respond to email anywhere means that a potential security lapse is an acceptable risk. Besides they switch the passwords every 3 months or so, I guess I know why now, because all the bosses no doubt have these potential security lapses embedded into all their portable devices.
I guess it is finally time for me to join the age of the multi-touch screen (which is amazingly fun and intuitive), even if I had to unwillingly join the cult of Apple to do it. *sighs*
This post has been brought to you by my one handed touch typing on the iPad keyboard, with extreme care taken to correct all my typos and wrong Autocorrect guesses without any arrow keys or delete keys, only a backspace and non-intuitive word selection with my fingers. I guess I should find an app or check to see if anyone else online has solved this problem without being forced to buy a keyboard dock...