ATITD Diary - Day 16 - Me? A Vet?

There are probably still more than a hundred people better than me at ATITD, of course, but today I realized that I have inadverdently progressed without realizing it to an "intermediate" player stage.

Advanced Blacksmithing opened today. And with it, anvils and the minigame of trying to make a grey polygon more 3D and matching a particular goal.

Normally, there are four tools you use for this. The round hammer and the ball peen hammer, made of iron. The shaping mallet, made of lead. And the wide tungsten chisel, self-explanatory.

Problem is, no one has found a tungsten mine. Previously, because casting was bottlenecked by silver, by the time we came around to this, practically all the metals were dowsed and discovered. With the silver requirement being removed from casting, we have raced ahead to advanced blacksmithing, with only three potential tools.

The good news is, the main functionality of smithing is often the ball peen hammer, with a bit of shaping mallet thrown in. In my opinion, anyway. I'm not sure what the master smiths think.

Bad news, the tungsten chisel is an easy way to make a high quality carpentry blade (needed for carp shops to plane wood), and is the staple of many carpentry guides as well as carp blade macros. This means for wiki followers who ape stuff blindly, they are somewhat screwed without a tungsten chisel.

The resident research queen of our humble region (chatty, noisy, a decent center, but I can't help but feel she's a little frightened or intimidated by me - she always offers me trades when sometimes I wouldn't mind just helping out. Still, not looking a gift horse in the mouth) tried a couple times to make a carp blade, and presumably failed miserably as she just wouldn't shut up in the channel about not being able to without her precious tungsten chisel.

(Previously, while in another region, I overheard a conversation in region chat about the same topic, except the vet there was advising a newbie that even without a chisel, 5500 quality carp blades are still quite achievable.)

Her despair drew another person, whom I wasn't sure was a newbie or not, to her aid. She shoved the tools at him, and said, here you try, all you need is 3500+ and it can be installed in a carp shop. Then she logged off for the night.

In the meantime, I was working on setting up my own anvil with tools. As two tools came freshly out of the forge, I gave it a shot. Recalling past experience with the smithing and the tools, after about three aborted attempts of 3k quality which were discarded to reclaim back the metal, I made my first blade from sheer guestimating with just the ball peen hammer alone. Final quality: 5560. Oh ho, so I could reach the standard the vet in the other region spoke about.

My last tool came out of the forge, the shaping mallet. Hmm, that sounded familiar. Didn't we start with a shaping mallet with force 8 for even the normal carp blades? Checking the guide, I was correct. And by replicating most of the steps, with an adlib in the middle with the ball peen to replace the chisel, I started to churn out passable blades of 5.5k-6k, highest being 6130.

It isn't anywhere near perfect, of course. With the chisel, one can attain 7k carp blades quite quickly. But it seemed ok enough to install into my carp shops.

Sometime after this, I heard the new guy asking on the channel if anyone had permissions to install the carp blade into the guild carp shop. Somehow his permissions were set quite low as compared to most other people. Since the research queen was offline and most everyone else was, I decided to come by, even though I don't have high permissions either. Turns out I had just barely enough to put the blade in the carp shop, so the guy gave me his three carp blades he had churned out... at 3.5-3.6k quality.

I was debating whether to speak up and offer to teach him the secret of 6k carp blades minus a chisel, but since I am nowhere near a real expert, I decided discretion would be the better part of valour, and just left it as is.

In other news, I hired a real vet to do the work I doubt I could ever manage. The husband of the dynamic duo I knew from Bastet is bloody freakin' fantastic at blacksmithing. So I chatted him and queued up an order for two 9k hatchets (those things go through wood and trees faster than a WoW goblin lumberjack cyborg thingummy). His wife wanted either 4 papyrus baskets, 24 linen or two slaughter-livestock type insects out of it, plus the 40 iron required to make the hatchets.

Since my region is fucking hopeless for papyrus, and I have gotten a grand total of two insects from slaughtering livestock, I took the linen deal. I have tons of leftover lint anyway. Hope to get the shiny shiny hatchets tomorrow. My wood supplies have diminished to critical levels.

Laws to Live With

The first ballot of Telling 6 just started today.

In ATITD, one of the more curious things you can do to affect the game is to propose laws that get voted on by citizens (players), the winning one then gets coded in by Teppy.

The sheer innovativeness of this concept is often ruined by human nature in practice.

•  People are lazy to create laws, that involves a lot of thinking and writing and care to avoid loopholes that can be exploited by an evil Teppy, similar to how a GM will deliberately misinterpret someone's "wish" in D&D. 

•  People are frightened of such potential to alter the game they already like (for the worse if the coder is feeling mean) and thus vote "No" on many things, causing about 90% of the laws to not pass.

•  Teppy can tech veto any law or portion thereof that is too hard to code (and does so with a fairly depressing frequency.)

• And even if both the people and Teppy are in agreement that a law should pass, RL being RL and good intentions and all that, it may take the length of the Telling before a passed law gets implemented (aka coded.)

Still, there is one law that is often passed without failure at the start of every Tale. That is the DPA, or the Departed Persons Act.

One of the problems of sandboxes wherein you create your own stuff and buildings and landmarks is the frustrating fact of player attrition and limited resources/lebensraum. This is most observable in Wurm Online, which does not have such an act, where you end up wandering a graveyard of a landscape of gutted, rotting buildings of people who have long since lost interest in the game, being unable to find room to put up your own stuff and having no rights or privileges to affect the existing buildings except to squat like hobos in the empty shells, making use of their public furnaces and anvils and stuff. All the desirable spaces near good resources are long gone. This, of course, does not make a new player want to stick around either.

A Tale in the Desert solves this with the DPA. A player that has gone unpaid or quit for a length of time waives his right to his stuff. Any other player can come down and claim it or tear it up.

There are, as all human laws go, still flaws with this. While it is very nice for new players to get a boost by stumbling across someone's abandoned compound and taking advantage of the resources therein, it is more often the case that the building will get claimed by a power player or guild watching quit players' belongings like vultures, ready to lap them up the instant the clock ticks over.

There is also little to no incentive for a quit player to return once the time limit is up, since he or she very well knows that all his stuff will be gone. Scooped up and assimilated by a hungry horde. The retorting argument is of course, then one should very well not quit and keep paying Teppy the sub fee, and everything will be kept for you the same as before. Most other MMOs though keep your characters and belongings on deep freeze and don't give them away.

On the opposing hand, I can also understand the situation where a newbie or a guy you know won't be staying long comes by and sets up shop in a distressingly close distance away, forming a visual eyesore that plagues you and your OCDness every time you log in or wander by.

(While most players on ATITD now know to give people a decent amount of space to act as their territory, I ran into a subset of this when some player came by and set up an Empty Hand Puzzle next to mine, except she didn't seem to know how to rotate or reposition the EHP, so creating this weird hole in the ground that sunk my puzzle, and looked ugly as hell. I was /this/ close to chatting her and begging her to reposition the goddamn thing, but I thwapped my OCD in favor being nice and have rationalized it away as helping to draw attention to my puzzle in a long string of identical looking EHPs.)

In cases like those, you would be LOOKING forward to the DPA time limit, so that you could do something about the freaking eyesore.

Thing is, a lot of the old veterans have entitlement issues and anything that isn't theirs is a freaking eyesore. :)

One of the things which I feel is the biggest crying shame about DPA and its variants is the removal of a player's legacy and effect on an existing Tale. A clean Egypt is a sterile one, whereas an Egypt that has many buildings and items to look at is an interesting one.

But what can one do? If you have a variant of the law that just makes things claimable (but not tearable down) or public use (without again being able to tear down), there is still the potential for eregious eyesore to turn up in a place most unwanted. So you have to be able to tear down something eventually. But if you can tear it down, people go after it like vultures.

This Tale, there are three variants of the DPA law proposed by different parties, which posits the interesting choice to the players: when is a good time limit that balances both stances above?

In previous Tellings, the time limit was 60 days. This was felt to err on the safe side, a player gone for two months, well, is not too likely to come back, whereas for financial reasons, players might have to skip a month of paying for ATITD. On the negative side, if you're waiting for the chance to tear down or claim someone's stuff, 60 days is an eon to wait.

We have a 60 day option this time around. We also have a 40 day option, as well as a 14 day one.

It should be interesting to see which option the majority of the playerbase prefers. Will it be human nature to go for the lesser evil and pick the 60 day option for self-preservation's sake? Will having three choices make it more likely that people will vote yes to one of them, instead of no, if there was only one DPA choice?

Unity

The marketing announcement regarding Statesman's death brought me out of the desert long enough to skim my rss reader and do a light scan of the City of Heroes forum once again.

(For the record, the narrative idea of Statesman dying is something I consider both fitting and intereting, in story and conflict terms this disrupts status quo and leaves a power vacuum for more story progress. From an unable to dissociate the name with the person who adopted it as his Marty Sue, good effing riddance and about damned time. The actual implementation of the story arc, whether it's done properly or not, merits a big "meh" of disinterest from me - I'll see it if I ever return as a subscriber, and no big loss if I don't.)

More importantly, there was something I picked up from the glance over the forums that led to another of those late-night revelations.

Boards.cityofheroes.com has been reflecting a great sense of DISUNITY and has been doing this for some time. Smiley Girl doesn't help, of course. One gets the feeling that there are these vast separate camps of people, all playing different games, none interested in understanding or helping each other. It's just a lot of name-calling and dismissal of each other's viewpoint, overt or otherwise.

It didn't use to be that way. I remember when there were fun long threads about scary PUGs, joke threads about gone to the Americans and kill skulz, how you should never call a defender a healer and so on. The key point is, there was a shared culture, of how some things are done or not done here. If you argued that a defender was a healer, a 75% majority or more would shush you, with varying degrees of intensity.

This is not to say that the shared view was good, or even correct, but that there was a shared view to begin with. "This is how we are in this game. Learn to be like us," went the subtext.

Nowadays, there is no shared "we." It's one "I" speaking for an imagined we, and then another "I" going hell no, I disagree, speak for your own effing self, there is no "we."

This creates an underlying stress and disturbance every time I read the CoH boards. An undercurrent of tension that puts me off from both the forums and the game.

In contrast, I have that sense of unity in ATITD. (Not Eve, I'm sure, so it's not a sandbox thing, just a design or community thing.)

This is curious, because I am quite aware there are many different kinds of people who play ATITD, not all of whom get along, many having different viewpoints and motivations from each other.

But since the overall goal of the game requires cooperation within this one social network, you'll find a strong incentive to live and let live. Sure, you can get conflict when two headstrong stubborn players decide they'll butt heads together, but for the most part, many residents seem to have figured out many of the social strategies from seeing them happen once too often.

Achievers rush to compete and complete. Those that find such things less important shrug and let them win, doing stuff at a pace that makes sense to them. The achievers don't find time to laugh, scorn or wave their elitism in the others' faces, because they are too busy chasing the next Test or tech, and often working extra for the public good. This turns over-achievement into a socially positive goal. (Which leads to people pulling shit crazy stunts like 48 hour stints without sleep, but I guess that is part of the design.)

Perhaps it is also the small scale nature of the server. Or the one shared global chat channel. Egypt feels united, even more so than RoD with level 50 avatar chat.

Folks are willing to help newcomers and each other. People are also generally more mellow. The incentives to cooperate and work for the public good are very strong. Especially when you can shine as an individual while in the public spotlight.

The GMs are players. Often old timer players, who play a lot more actively than RoD imms. They are discouraged from stealing the personal limelight, so they do Tests and gain levels a little more slowly than the fast players. Some spend their time being "centers" where they actually head a guild dedicated to helping newbies, public facilities, and generally making the game more accessible to less experienced players.

Less extroverted characters find ample amusement in various minigames and there are always some hermits, who do their own thing by themselves, harming no one.

But everyone is part of this shared community of understanding, that these are the ATITD cultural rules and norms, that is polite, this is rude, etc, etc.

Unity. And it makes being in the game, or rsther, the world, so much more... relaxing and peaceful.

Food, Transactional Analysis and Staying out of the Loop

12/12

I am writing this after suffering from a bad bout of indigestion / acid reflux the past few hours, after I've gone to bed. After unsuccessfully trying to cure it with some clumped up ENO salts (does it mean it has gone bad, and isn't effective anymore? I don't know), I decided to get out of bed, go to the kitchen and rummage for a hot drink. No cereal drink. Saw a packet of dehydrated rice soup, so mixed that with some miso and drank it. That seemed to work.

Sitting in the kitchen, I was struck by a revelation, as “revelations” tend to come in the middle of the night. I'm going to put this down so I don't forget it when I go to bed.

Actually I can pinpoint the reason for this indigestion. My mother made me not one, but two burritos filled with mashed up avocado, cheese and fish meat. I ate one, and put the other in the fridge. But even one was too much. I think that the ability to put one into the fridge is an improvement over the past, when I would eat both. But the correct response is to eat neither and put both in the fridge. Then, tell my mother I don't need to eat them.

My diet for most of the week is generally very light, mostly salad / veggies and a small serving of potatoes or rice. It's not me trying to be healthy, it's just that I like the taste of such food. I sometimes eat a whole chunk of fish or an entire plate of fried rice, but only once in a few days, when I get the craving, usually after heavy exercise. So my stomach simply cannot handle – nor should I even train it to handle – the type of food I get in the weekends. Meat, more meat, meat soup, the fake “pizzas” and “burritos” and “pancakes” that my mother believes I like (and I can't dissuade her of that notion).

I must make the response of a reasonable man, and say no.

I feel, really, that my mother is out of control. My father too, but with buying alcohol for me. Both of them really if you look at it. They believe that I want or need some food, and they want to give me what they believe I want or need, whether I want or need it or not. It is not possible to tell them what I want or need, because they do not take feedback on such matters from me. More on that later. But now, even if I manage to convey to them what I want or need, they will provide it in excess. My father is the second, because he actually tends to be the observant one, and he knows I like alcohol. (This makes controlling my intake harder, so I suppose I must control harder.) My mother is the first.

Now....why do they do that? It's just the chinese parent thing. They focus on food. Food is the root of all health and the cure of all ills. But wait, there's more. There is nothing as too much food making you ill, there is only too little food making you ill. This is a culture of 5000 years of rural deprivation. Meat is good, it cures ills. Eating meat makes people strong and healthy. Eat as much meat as possible. In the poor rural where such a belief formed, it was absolutely true! People did not have enough protein and fat. Eat rice to get strong. Eat lots of rice. Again this was absolutely true for rural farmers who had to do a lot of physical work and lacked protein. No longer true today, but the culture is there, and the underlying causes for such cultural beliefs have become displaced, out of time and space.

As I sat in the kitchen drinking my rice soup, I suddenly realised that I had to change my internal relationship with food, and my relationship with parents. I must dissociate food with “precious things” in my mind, when food comes from my parents. Food obtained by myself can continue to be precious things in my own private life. In other words, I must think of my food as food, but my parents' food as just objects in a stall. This is not unlike how when you go to the cafeteria, you don't need to eat everything in the cafeteria. The hawker makes in excess, and of course they would like you to buy all of it, but you don't have to. The food in the hawker's stores are just objects. They only become food when I buy it, take hold of it, and mentally declare this to be my food.

This is the same thing with my parents. They have made a lot of food, and they would want me to eat all of it. The coin in the exchange is not material money. The coin is emotional coins. When I eat their food, I am “paying” them in emotional coins, and these coins make them feel good. This goes back to the complain I often make about this food situation, where I say they are doing it for themselves and not for me, because they doing something for me just makes them feel good about themselves. But now, we have set it out clearly. As emotional hawkers, of course they want to get as much emotional coin from me. Just like monetary hawkers, who want to get as much monetary coin from me.

The next step along the thinking is this: if my parents cannot control themselves, because the undercurrent of all of this is that they are emotional hawkers, I will just have to control myself. This is not because I am mean, cruel to my parents, or selfish. For the sake of my own health, I will say no. If my mother makes two burritos, I don't have to eat “at least” one. If she makes a giant pot of fried rice, I don't have to eat “at least” a bowl. This, I think she has realised, so she adapted her tactics into making as many different types of food as possible rather than one type in bulk. This then forces me to eat “at least some” of each type. See – emotional hawkers. Therefore, I have to adapt too. She can cook whatever she wants. What she cooks are objects that have nothing to do with my food.

This would be easy if she, like the hawkers, just stood there waiting for you to come get the food. (Fortunately, my father is like that. So with regards to alcohol it's more of a self-control issue.) My mother is more like a salesman. She will nag me to eat constantly. And the next part is a bit of a pop psychology from transactional analysis.

When I say parents, I think at this time I expect them to behave like adults, and treat me as an adult. But they cannot. They are stuck as parents, and to be parents, they need a child. Therefore, they cannot not treat me as a child, because they cannot stop acting like parents, otherwise they will become parents to a blank air. Why can't they stop acting like parents? No – it is not age. This has nothing to do with age at all. It is an individual thing, a cultural thing. Why? Because nothing about age says anything about someone acting in "parent" mode. These modes are inherent in everyone.

It's a bit sad because when I share all the information tidbits about various things with them, I am thinking that I am sharing amusing information with adults, as an adult. But now I realise that in their mode, they are treating me as a “little professor” child telling them about what it has learnt. This is why when my mother asks me to clean the house for her weekly, and I did it since it is reasonable request, she then wanted me to drink soup to “get a reward” (her words). If you look at it this way, it's disturbing and rather sad.

And when I say “no” to them, they don't consider it to be an adult telling them no. In their minds it is a “rebellious child” saying no to what parents know best, so they must be more controlling / give in to humour me. No wonder whenever I lose my temper in the past, they find it funny and start to laugh. "Oooh little kid is throwing a tantrum, hahaha!"

And of course, because they are constantly sending parental transactions, they keep luring me to responding with a child transaction, and I fall right into it. It takes two hands to clap. Losing my temper in anyway, criticizing them, is all “rebellious child” to them, and makes it even easier for me to slip into the child transaction mode. I really do not need to give them any further reason why I don't want to eat, other than that “I am not hungry, so I am not eating”, or “I don't want to eat that, so I am not eating”. This response is a reasonable response expect from any adult by any adult, given by any adult to any adult. Examine your interaction with any other adult colleague or friend – isn't that true? Yes it is.

As to my worry whether we will all become this way when we get old – the answer is no. Not while we are maintain awareness of our own behaviour. Not while we make sure that we can move between all modes of behaviour and not get stuck in one. Complaining about our parents, is in fact, trying to be parents. This way, we emulate them, to complain about parents (as senile children) and complain/control our own children, if we have any. Do this for the next ten to twenty years, which is when I guess they started complaining about their parents and their children, and we'll end up like them. I believe the correct response is to treat them as adults with a problem, and to come up with creative ways to manage them while retaining self-control.

This extends beyond parents. This extends to our interaction with others in our life and in our social games. Getting together to complain about the world is after all what is associated with grumpy old people. It is a statement of “they should be how I want them, but they're not, they're , so they suck”. Do this for the next ten to twenty years, and we'll end up as grumpy old people who can only complain! No, the way to save ourselves is to change our mindset. We must say “these are adults with idiosyncrasies – just like we have our own idiosyncrasies. We have to manage them – how do we manage them?” The bright side is that often times you can actually just stop interacting with people that end up unmanageable, unlike your parents. But there are also plenty of people that we cannot stop interacting with, like our colleagues, our bosses, or even the annoying guild-mate or fellow who has set up his compound next door in our social gaming.

And I am sure as we manage them, we'll find that sometimes their way is right too. Perhaps some of their ways are right, and some are wrong. Perhaps our way is wrong. Then we must learn, change, or adapt/compromise. But isn't this what being young is? Lose this ability, and we'll truly be going in loops.

So I issue the challenge: can we continue to evolve our own behaviour?

Virtual Sociopolitics and Choice

Egypt had their first set of Events this weekend: Run For The Hills and Run Back From The Hills.

As in all things ATITD, they make ample fodder for discussion and analysis.

When they first popped up on my calendar of events, I took a cursory glance through at it, went "meh" at the prizes on offer, and decided I wasn't going to haul ass for hours across the better part of the continent in an effort to compete with the veterans.

See, the named prizes are nice, but with the exception of the first glorious microphone part, not great. Canvas and linen are nice, since it is tedious and wasteful to make them at this stage with student looms that break and consume prodigous amounts of twine (aka flax moar). Stones are always nice prizes since they require a massive group dig or sufficiently advanced tecnology and rich soloist willing to pay for 3-4 accounts. Garlic is nice for people who haven't found their personal garlic growing spot - and for the first damn time in a Telling, I actually found one of my character's spots and can grow 9 at a go. So "meh."

I was not the only player to think that way. The other rich and slightly know-it-all dual boxer in the neighborhood (that has made it this Telling's goal to make a well stocked public works) was also advising new players of this, echoing my thinking without me having to say a word. I figured, well, there's probably no way I can get to a phoenix stadium (the goalpost) in 30 minutes in time to tag it anyway, and there will be hordes of people competing, so unless it was opportunistically in the neighborhood, I wouldn't move a muscle.

Enter the interesting bits of ATITD. See, there are a couple crucial differences between the other dual-boxer and myself. He appeared to be more veteran, more power-gamer and achievement oriented than I. He can do things effortlessly with macros that would probably tax me. But at the same time, he happened to be more focused and less well-connected than I. If I recall correctly, he has his own private guild of himself and his alt and a public guild for the public works.

Me, I like to work my way into as many chat channels as possible, this is how I learn, and knowledge is power. It so happens that I am in the region's research guild (headed by a somewhat snooty pair or three that tends to disregard most people but the channel is a good mix of new and old players of the region with a passing interest in contributing to research - I fear an implosion of drama soon here, honestly, we are the fourth most advanced region and most people's interest is likely to wane as we play catch up, and the snooty three are slightly over-zealous).

And more importantly, I somehow made friends with an oldtimer that was playing on Bastet, and he let me into their chat channel of old guildmates on this server.

The Event started. A stadium opened in literally the northeast most nowhere of the map. People got to commenting on its absolute unreachable-ness in 30 minutes and nonobvious bombshell 1 was dropped by the wise oldtimer from prior event experience. It turns out that the assumption that the previous stadium would be invalid when the next one was announced was simply that, an assumption. More than one stadium could be active at one time. The key was whether 10 people had tagged it. Oh ho, so in fact, the more remote the area, the better chance someone far away couldn't be arsed to run there.

A few people in the channel were playing the Event for the heck of it and kept us updated as to their distance from the stadium. Finally, the first tag of our group happened. OMG, went the announcement, I got a pepper seed!

Pepper seeds are prized commodities, by the way. They are given out as event prizes and grilled peppers are a cheap way to double carrying capacity in the early game from 500 to 1000. Turns out that careful rereading of the event text hinted at a "special prize" given to those 10 who tagged. I skimmed it, mea culpa, and so did hundreds of others, no doubt.

Enter excited discussion whether the others on the way in time to get more pepper seeds. In one sense, I was relieved. Worse case scenario, I was sure the oldtimer would be nice enough to either loan me access to the seeds to grow or trade me the final product. On the other hand, I like to beholden to no one. I enjoy contributing from my own position of power and unneediness. Dammit, I was going to tag at least one stadium and score one pepper seed of my own in the next 24 hours!

(The nice thing about ATITD, you can't say they're not fair. With 12 hour events back to back, that covers every timezone with a decent amount of fairness. They also promote hardcore wide-awakeness at godawful hours, but you can't have everything without some sacrifice.)

I had one advantage. This was the first stadium. I knew about the pepper seeds and most of Egypt did not. No global chat yet, barely any time for the news to filter its way through the networks of vets, and no chariots to speed up getting from place to place.

I put aside what I was doing, tidied up, parked my alt near a nearby stadium in the off chance it would be called while I was online, and stocked up on grilled cabbage (+2 speed) to go road running to... wherever.

The second stadium was called. This time in the far Northwest of nowhere. About 4000-5000 coordinates separated the first and second stadium, and the same amount of distance from my home compound to the vincinity. Good news, there were more or less a set of roads I could run along to meander my way up there. Even better news, I was in the second most northern region, so with the exception of people in the topmost region which might have hared off to the northeast, all the people in the central and south Egypt (the two main tech producers River Plains and Seven Lakes) were much further away than I.

(As a bonus, I hadn't collected my seeds from the university of that region yet, which meant I had to go there sooner or later. I was intending later, after chariots were up, but well, I was going there NOW.)

Couldn't get any better than that. So off I went. I'll spare you the 45 minutes of running time, but suffice to say I saw a bunch of scenery change, some of it more interesting than others, overheard about 3-4 people on the region chat huffing and puffing there, calculated there were maybe another 3-4 people staying silent like me also on the way there, kept my fingers crossed, and tagged the stadium as possibly the 5th-7th person. Which meant I got a shiny pepper seed.

HURRAH! Success, goal achieved. I could have teleported back home that instant, but I decided, what the heck, there was 5 minutes more to the next stadium announcement, and I had passed an uncalled stadium on the way to the target. So I hoofed it back to the stadium, hoping that I might strike it lucky. After all, I could zap back after the announcement.

As luck would have it, that stadium was not called. But a stadium in the same region WAS. It was about 200-300 coordinates northeast of my position. (And 5000-7000 coordinates away for anyone else not running towards this region for stadiums) Those were good odds. More jogging later, I waltzed away cheerfully with a second pepper seed.

Goal, match and set. I could go home happy now. Except that I had crossed this lush grass oasis in the middle of the desert on my way to the stadium, and it was full of plants and flowers and most probably herbs that no one had even touched this Telling yet. So I spent the remnants of that half hour circling round and round this giant oasis, telling myself I had to come here again, this was a fantastic discovery, no wonder the Bastet powergamer pair settled here in Tale 5, foraging a hundred debens of herbs, watching them respawn as I ran around its perimeter.

Bing, went the next stadium announcement, and there it was again, a stadium about 2000 coords east of where I was. Chances weren't that great this time, as it was a lot closer to the northern most region of Old Egypt, so it was likely people would run there. Sure enough, after crossing a bunch of scenery that suggested the designer got really bored in the area (and might be good for a Test in the future), it turned out there was a group living practically on top of the stadium and all the seeds had been swiped.

Oh well. So I teleported back home, having gotten myself nearer to it in pursuit of the next taggable stadium. Which I got back just in time to hear the know-it-all advising people again not to bother with the Event because the prizes weren't worth it. To myself, I chuckled.

Information is truly power.

To cap it off, I somehow managed to fortuitously log in when the second Event was running and the one and only stadium in our region was called naught but 4 minutes ago. This was at the deserted Oceanic/Aussie time - when 3/4 of the people on your friends list and in the region show as offline because they are busy sleeping, and the others are probably Aussies. Two furious multi-boxing and running minutes later, I scored perhaps the 6th and 7th tag on the stadium and walked away with two more shiny pepper seeds. (Others in the region had also opportunistically grabbed them with great cheer.)

Three hours later, when know-it-all logged in and did his regular checks on his compound and public works, you could hear the double-take in his chat when he asked in regional, "How the heck did peppers get into my public works donations chest? Who got pepper seeds?!"

Others let him know of the hidden prize, and I like to imagine a certain amount of chagrin and swallowed pride in the "Ah" he gave in response. Maybe that's just me projecting, though. Cos I get such a kick out of knowing secrets and mysteries and such trivia. So MUD-ish.

Here's the log of the events discussion:

2011-12-11 12:57:11 Telanoc: Good morning Egypt! The winners from the Run to the Hills Phoenix Race are as follows: For "Kinds" Bobowatu won with all 7 different kinds of Phoenix Model. For "Total" we had a tie with 7 total each between Bobowatu and lil. The prize went to lil.

2011-12-12 01:12:47 Telanoc: Hello Egypt! Welcome to a quick wrap up of our first event of Tale VI

2011-12-12 01:13:52 Telanoc: First, the administrative stuff... For the event "Run Back from The Hills" Pheros won both microphone parts. Good show there!

2011-12-12 01:15:06 Telanoc: Now, to the longer part of the show. I am interested in people's feedback about this event, it being our first. What did you like? What didn't you like? That sort of thing

2011-12-12 01:15:34 Nchanter: Dear Developer Telanoc: Please fix whaever but caused the staduims to get sent to System instead of Events for future versions of this event. It got spammy. Thanks!

2011-12-12 01:16:12 Telanoc: Already fixed, I had forgotten to tickle a bit before the event and didn't want to change it will they were running

2011-12-12 01:16:22 Feyth: how many parts are there to make a microphone?

2011-12-12 01:16:30 Telanoc: Three, hence the reason we gave four

2011-12-12 01:16:39 LehmanHotep: I would have liked the travel time limit communicated better. I used up most of mine on chores without realizing it.

2011-12-12 01:17:35 Telanoc: Ok, that ia valid. No problem we have is that having done many of these things so often we forget what isn't "common knowledge"

2011-12-12 01:18:30 Kanixihk: was the fact that you could still get a seed after 30min intended?

2011-12-12 01:19:26 Telanoc: Yes, and no. If you look at the text of the event it said the first 10 tags get a seed, but the stadiums were announced thirty minutes apart. It is spliting hairs, but the wording was intentional

2011-12-12 01:20:59 Jaby: It was fun: Got some seeds! It's rather different without chariouts.

2011-12-12 01:22:17 Telanoc: Well, the lack of the chariots was the main reason I wanted to do this event. It should have required a little thinking about how to win rather than just blind running to get there. If people did that or not, well that I can't say

2011-12-12 01:23:28 Xofia: When hosting multiple events for different timezones has it ever been considered limiting entries to just one event per person

2011-12-12 01:24:01 Telanoc: No, if you want to spend all day every day in game, we aren't going to discourage you :)

2011-12-12 01:24:06 oDiS: I'm sure if people knew it was going to have pepper seeds handed out, or if it was planned a little further in advance, we would havee planned our acro lines and digs around the event instead of conflicting. Anythign that makes early tale life a little easier is much appreciated.

2011-12-12 01:24:41 Telanoc: But that is the heart of the game most of the time oDis, choice.

2011-12-12 01:25:15 Eugie: Number one complaint I heard was that the seed wasn't mention as a reward for tagging a stadium (first 10).

2011-12-12 01:26:09 Telanoc: We had started a telling or two ago telling all the prize events. Before that we did not, and I honest found those better, a surprise. Plus I think it decreases people gaming the event to win the "good" prizes

2011-12-12 01:26:33 Pauven: It's unfortunate that if you're not in the stadium's region, it's pretty much 100% sure that you're not getting any seeds. 7L got no love today.

2011-12-12 01:27:46 Telanoc: Which stadiums are picked are random by the system, we have no control over that. That being said, the system should pick the same stadium twice, so the more stadiums picked the more spread out they would be

2011-12-12 01:28:15 Axhakumu: According to the Calendar, the event had about 20 minutes remaining when the ending announcement appeared. I was wondering why that was?

2011-12-12 01:29:09 Telanoc: Well, that is a little quirk of the events system. The event controller works in real time, so if I say it should last 12 hours in the controller, it will send the announcemnt out 12 hours later.

2011-12-12 01:29:54 Telanoc: But the actual 30 min timer between stadiums is in Teppy time, which is longer than 30 mins. I have to guess about how long to let the event run for to cover for that, sometimes I guess poorly

2011-12-12 01:30:06 Shikari: yeah I enjoyed it, not much I can say besides the travel time issue someone already adressed

2011-12-12 01:30:26 ellorin: more such events would be fun

2011-12-12 01:30:32 Sobe: I enjoyed the events.. I only hope we see events Often..and that it doesnt die off..

2011-12-12 01:30:38 Blueshift: I thought this was an unusual first event. Since chariots are not open and it takes longer than 30 minutes to run to a distant stadium, it's really just a luck game more than anything

2011-12-12 01:32:07 Telanoc: It is figured an average person can cover about 2000 coords of the map in 30 mins, more or less. So it should have been possible for people to run for it. I was hoping that early in the telling all the areas would be so full it would be worth the try

2011-12-12 01:32:22 Boudikka: It seemed that those of us with a southerly exp point were at a disadvantage. Is this just something I shoudl plan for in future?

2011-12-12 01:32:34 Telanoc: It is random, so there is nothing to plan for

2011-12-12 01:32:43 Nchanter: Given the fact that regions aren't evenly destributed throughout egypt, it felt, even if it wasn't, like the event was biased towards people living in teh northern regions that are smaller and closer together, vs the southern more spread out bigger regions.

2011-12-12 01:33:30 Telanoc: Hmmm, we might have to adjust the placement of stadiums. Not just for the event, but for the test if that comes to pass as well

2011-12-12 01:33:54 Kalixta: It would have been nice to get some sort of smaller prize just for tagging to encourage people to do it. After running for two and being too late, I decided my time was better spent elsewhere, but I know that is my choice.

2011-12-12 01:34:19 Telanoc: That isn't a bad idea, though I am not sure we can do it.

2011-12-12 01:35:04 Hirokache: The wording seemed to imply that the next stadium would only be announced after 10 tags, or was I the only one to read it that way?

2011-12-12 01:35:24 Telanoc: I thought the wording was clear, but then again I wrote it.

2011-12-12 01:35:29 ellorin: I liked it it was a good way to start the tale off before the chariots are up

2011-12-12 01:35:30 Azunar: I think that the reward did not worth the time consuming event like this one ^^ But it's only my 2cent

2011-12-12 01:36:12 Azunar: It seems that regions don't have the same number of Stadiums no ?

2011-12-12 01:36:24 Telanoc: There should be 4 stadiums per region, 42 total

2011-12-12 01:36:51 LehmanHotep: How many of the lower tier prizes ended up being awarded, after ties came in to play?

2011-12-12 01:37:31 Telanoc: I don't know off the top of my head, other than "not enough". This would have been a good place to use Proportion instead of "Top X"

2011-12-12 01:38:31 Telanoc: Hmmm, as people pointed out, I can't do math tonight. There are 42 stadiums in Egypt, of that I am sure

2011-12-12 01:39:30 Catote: 26/37 stadiums were far down (below -4,000) or far hight (above +4,000). People living in the middle of Egypt didnt have much chance.

2011-12-12 01:40:38 Telanoc: Again, the system is supposed to pick them at random. Assuming an equal distribution of people and stadiums it should be moot. Of course the "middle of Egypt" tends to be more crowded, but these are parts of the trade off

2011-12-12 01:42:03 Leghk: and not one announced stadium was labelled "seven lakes" if i'm not mistaken - unless i missed noticing a early one yesterday

2011-12-12 01:42:31 Telanoc: Seven Lakes got one. As I said, it is random, and since it is two events there are two pools

2011-12-12 01:43:26 Telanoc: Ok, I am going to close this portion of the chat and move on after one final thought

2011-12-12 01:44:15 Telanoc: The winners of all the Microphone Parts were nominally new players. Some one asked the other day about events being veteran friendly. I think that shows that even the new players can win.

2011-12-12 01:47:37 Telanoc: Now to the next part...

2011-12-12 01:47:41 Nchanter: I want a heptathalon next!

2011-12-12 01:47:45 Feyth: When will the next event be?

2011-12-12 01:48:27 Telanoc: Will we probably do this one next, it is very early telling friendly. Though I don't really like this event as much. It really give an advantage to veteran power gamers

2011-12-12 01:49:03 ellorin: Please can we have some more role playing events this tale too

2011-12-12 01:50:00 Telanoc: We will, some will be obvious, some hopefully not so much. One of the things that I believe makes a given telling the most interesting is the interpersonal conflicts that drive Egypt forward.

2011-12-12 01:51:04 Telanoc: For those of you that remember the auction for the first microphone in T4, the players ended up spending absurd amounts of flax to win the mic. Mostly because the two main bidders didn't want the other one to have it.

2011-12-12 01:51:16 Nchanter: >.>

2011-12-12 01:51:20 Philadelphia: i agree with Elly

2011-12-12 01:51:26 Shikari: herbing evnets are nice

2011-12-12 01:51:52 Telanoc: Herbing events would be nice, since you all don't know all the methods yet.

2011-12-12 01:53:01 Avanya: (the winner of the microphone parts today is not new. He played a lot on Bastet. A LOT. :) )

2011-12-12 01:53:08 Telanoc: Well, there you go

2011-12-12 01:53:45 Telanoc: Some one mentioned about the first microphone being important to Egypt, and it is, but the winners will have to choose what they will do with it.

2011-12-12 01:55:35 Telanoc: All right, to finish up. I am generally happy with the way this event ran. Considering some of the cock ups the first events have been in previous tellings, this one was near perfect. I hope you all had fun and if not, well others of different kinds are coming.

2011-12-12 01:55:38 sarah: u are all making me curious now....who won teh mic?

2011-12-12 01:55:56 Telanoc: Bobowa-something, lil, and pheros

2011-12-12 01:55:58 Feyth: Id like to see alot more events that dont rquire general knowledge of the game, some events like the herbing event new players dont know as well where to look for the rare herbs

2011-12-12 01:57:04 Telanoc: Hence the reason I think a herbing event before all the harvest methods are know would be more fun. It lessens that advantage. Otherwise, point taken

2011-12-12 01:57:23 Telanoc: Ok kids, I am going to close this down for now and go hopefully fix a chariot

2011-12-12 01:57:36 Telanoc: Be well Egypt where ever you are!

 As much as I enjoy the reference to the T4 microphone contest (since I do remember it, though without knowing who the people were at the time), I'd like to bold the statement I find most interesting here:

Telanoc: But that is the heart of the game most of the time..., choice.

Choice and conflict. The things ATITD does best. What will you choose to do with your time in game?

ATITD Diary - Day 4

T6 Week 2 Day ?

After the first two days of push, I've had to ease off and leave about 16h gap in between logging in. Work, commute time and sleep. Leaves only about 4-6 hours of play if I go to bed by 2am.

Today I took it relatively easy, yet productive.

Sheep needed onions, bad, so that was first on agenda.

Also sharpened 100 sticks for controlled burn research (we are nowhere near first or fastest, more like fourth, and I don't know when people might give up, but we'll see, I've half a mind to work slowly and steadily on it as a goal over the long term, even if others have reinvented the wheel elsewhere. Omly showstopper is some things are truly horrible to accumulate, so it defeats the purpose of unlocking in four places at once. Once chariots get built, it will be easier to get to the other Universities.)

Found an excellent wood spot. It gives 50 wood per round turn. Problem is, I have not been able to get a macro working for it. So I did it manually.

The nice thing about being in a quiet region, it feels like Bastet in terms of competition for resources. Ie. None at all. I'm a little scared that people may move off or quit and leave me alone out here, but I guess I am ok being a hermit, as long as some other people in the game elsewhere.

The thing is, I find part of the fun of ATITD is doing nice things for other people. I spent an hour and a half gathering about 1500 wood to donate to controlled burn, which was at 4000/8000 wood. A balance is important though. After the third trip to uBody (each time one can carry only 497 wood), I started feeling antsy and decided not to take the other 1000 wood over. Brought it home instead, will need it for boards and charcoal eventually.

Did sheep hauling and sheep culling. A guy called Kubilai has devoted himself to building an awesome public works facility. He asked for donations of leather for a mason's bench and said he needed 20 (12 were pledged.) Since he was not online, I sent him a chat earlier to say that I had 10 more spare leather to pass to him. 8 hours later, he hadn't logged in yet, different timezones. Got enough leather so I went ahead and made the mason's bench he had set up. Should be a nice surprise when he logs in.

Discovery-wise, have found 6 and 7 onion spots. Should make growing slightly easier in the future.

Productive day all things considered.

Saying Yes to Everything

And now for a real world interlude...

As the years pass, I fear I am becoming both more cynical as well as occassionally depressed (and sometimes manic.)

It is that time of the year again when job and performance appraisals are rolling around. Subconsciously, I always get this little chill deep down in my heart that squeaks "oh no, I'm not worthy" and fear others judging me. It is an odd mix of inferiority complex and perfectionism, that I'll never measure up or score as well as others, that no one understands me so why should they judge me, all they ever see are the surface appearances that leave a mistaken impression anyway and if I could get away with it, I'll sit around brooding about all the bad things people are going to say about me and find fault with.

I try not to let it get to me. Outwardly at least, I'd like to put on a brave front. I don't think it's helped by having an ultimately controlling, manipulative, passive aggressive boss (of bosses, now) that has ulterior motives for "lying" on job appraisals.

Really, job appraisals are shite anyway, for all the flaws mentioned in the article above. Badly written, badly designed, badly filled out, and badly completed. They have very little meaning in the great scheme of things. And the last thing I would want on my tombstone is the epitaph - scored "5"s on her job appraisal, since that would probably be preceded by the words - hounded by boss into early grave. :p

So in order not to take it to heart and let it get to me, I have been experimenting with a defence mechanism known as "say ok and yes to everything" without really giving a damn and continue doing whatever the hell you're doing on your own system of time and priorities. Address shit that is going to blow up, and adapt and flex with the rest, cranking down the doable tasks while letting everything else just figure itself out and develop on its own.

Certainly, unless it is important and strikes some kind of INTP or INFP moral chord, it seems a waste of breath to argue or protest or in any way disagree. If it does hit the above, then all bets are off, sorry, it's a personality trigger, I wouldn't be me if I didn't take a stand or not shut up about those things.

There is the danger of overcommittment to the point of not being able to cope. But to be honest, I hit that point a year or two ago and I've been running on overcommitted and drowning for the last year. Everyone's got a limit.

Unfortunately, stuff doesn't seem to take no for an answer.

If honesty and rational discussion fails to work, then I guess the only other option is say ok, and just let it keep stewing until it is time to bring it off the boil and address it.

I always get grumpy that everyone sees the stuff that I fail to cope with, because then it becomes a problem, and they never see the stuff that I do address and fix before it becomes a problem and everything continues to run smoothly.

With that kind of an impression, what kind of appraisal do you think I can get? An inaccurate one, obviously.

And that is somehow a personality hot button trigger for me. I don't mind fair assessments. I don't even mind objective criticism if it is offered in the spirit of good advice and better improvement in the long term. It'll sting a little bit going in, but I get over it quickly and can look at it and say, ok, decent point, let's add that to the accumulated sum of knowledge of stuff that can be done better like so.

Judge me unfairly, inaccurately, based on wild guesses and subjective feelings with no ground in reality though, and I get very pissed for being unjustly criticised. They just don't get it. They never ask my viewpoint or are interested in hearing it if I tell them, they'd be happier going around in their little bubble world.

It's a no-win kind of scenario.

So I end up more jaded and depressed year after year. *wry chucke*

Home is Where the Heart is

What a wild and crazy two days it's been...

Since the stroke of Sunday midnight, through all of Sunday and a carefully preplanned Monday off, I have been spending most of it double-logged onto virtual Egypt, with four hours of sleep on the first day (six hours in the afternoon were pre-slept in preparation on Saturday) and another six stolen somewhere in the middle, before going to bed properly Monday night for a Tuesday work day.

There is something about A Tale in the Desert that drives me to Herculean excesses reminiscient of the MUD days. Fortunately, it is only for a couple of special days, else I would not be able to cope. But oh, what a wonderful feeling I get out of it. No other MMO, not Eve, not CoH, not Wurm nor Guild Wars can produce such a complex blend of eagerness, adrenaline, sociability and drive.

It has been interesting to see how people have chosen to settle this Tale. There are more regions, resulting in more fragmented territories and chat channels. Midland Valley has Universities and Schools very close together and is the second northernmost region. A small ensemble of self sufficient pairs and veterans from earlier Tales, especially recognizable from the Bastet shard have chosen to gather there, myself among them. There are fewer newbies out in force and our region is more laid back and less pushy with research, but we've got a public works set up and it is looking like a number of us will be in for a fairly long haul. Hard to say though, as Bastet residents are pretty flaky on staying power.

North of us is Old Egypt. A fair sized group of ATITD vets from shard A are holding ground there and are pushing research avidly, but the names look like second-stringers.

River Plains is south of us and it is trending toward the most populous region. Many names I recognize here, really old vets from multiple Tales that are friendly to newbies, as well as people who like to congregate near crowds. My guess is a fair bit of newbies are attracted here. Zfree, my old newbie-devouring handholding guild, is in this region and Wampak is still going strong at its head. The two Aussies that built the public works on Bastet and are crazy awesome pro with like four characters or moe in their stable are also here, much to my admittedly selfish relief - both Pameow and Tamunefret are quite friendly, and the guy can create the land's most high quality hatchets for a pittance in trade.

South of River Plains is a small gap, which is part of a huge region known as the Hinterlands. Essentially it is all the leftover bits after drawing a few small rectangles to demarcate the named regions on the map. This makes for a very -interesting- chat channel as you can be communicating to some guy way north or way away from your position. tehm and merek (Verix), two guys I fell in pretty closely with on Bastet, are in this region with four other characters and possibly two real people, apparently old guildies. They are also across the river from Midlands Valley, so they're essentially part of MV as well as a little ways into River Plains.

Further south of the gap, in what I used to know as Meroe, is the region of Seven Lakes. This is the region of the uber clique vets, a number of which used to be part of the region of Stillwater (ironically, I think that is near to where we are now.) Certainly I recognize the notorious Tammie among them. They are likely to be both strong contenders for research aswell as Tests. They've so far commandeered most of the demonstration of Principles to open them for the land.

The other regions, South Egypt (aka our old southernmost Queen's Retreat), Cat's Claw Ridge, Four Corners, Sinai, etc. look to be sparsely populated by hermits of the quiet-seeking sort.

A notable aside goes to the Desert of Nomads, where the most famous guild of ATITD the Followers of Anubis (FoA) have settled down. Breaking from a tradition of the last 5 Tales, they have announced their decision to retire from the hardcore research grind and have run off to seek rest and relaxation. Time will tell whether they will get stir crazy, if they have something up their sleeves, if someone else will step up to the heavy duty research chore of opening techs for all the land, or if they will have to be begged out of retirement to help.

As I've said before, there's something magical I get out of ATITD that I was only able to get from the old MUD days. The sense of knowing the whole community, a sense of place and belonging, of recognizable famous names walking past you on your way to somewhere else. This could be a Dunbar's Number effect, the max players on ATITD range from 400-900, a very MUD-sized number, and they tend to stick around longer with the same names. Name recognition has a value here that does not exist in the big MMOs except with guilds. People are also unique for their personality, not just a class and a role in combat that can be interchanged with a better behaved bot.

This could also be due to being able to stake out territory, create a home base from which to venture out from. I remember in RoD having favourite "rooms" to hang out in. Often, once you're in an org, it would be guild recall point or a special order hangout zone like the Asc log. In ATITD, home is your compound, and public home is normally the area by the Chariot Stop where people gather.

In standard MMOs, you rarely have a personal home. Some exceptional MMOs might create a special guild hq or hall or superbase for your org, but because it is instanced away from the rest of the world and the meat of content, one would have to be very bored and hopeful to hang out there assuming you might run into another person.

Public areas in typical MMOs are even worse. A big city is chaotic, full of bank, auction, crafting and gold farming alts standing around, especially on mailboxes and other essential services - not real people that you could get to know.

Eve might have been a contender, except it is so huge and predicated on distrust and not knowing what has happened in different pockets of space.

ATITD, well, ATITD gets that small town feeling just right.

I Love the Smell of New World in the Morning

It's 27 hours away from the launch of Telling 6 of A Tale in the Desert.

I find that I am keyed up to such an eager pitch that I have been whistling in the shower and singing in an annoying repetitious fashion "I love the smell of new world in the morning!"

Guess this answers the question of whether I am going to be playing ATITD.

Whereas entertaining the thought of learning Eve Online (and/or multiboxing) and learning multiboxing RIFT more resembles an "Hmm, intriguing exercise, iinnteresting..." sort of sentiment.

It only took approximately 2.5 days of entertaining the thought of returning to ATITD to get me into this state of hyper-excitement.

I still don't know what the hell I'm going to end up doing six months from now in the desert, but it seems I'll be damned if I miss the start of this Tale. Again.

It's such a great time. Everybody's excited. Everyone's on a level playing field. The world is new and unexplored (more or less), some of the things have changed around, and things are new and the world is alive!

Guess it's time to start planning my land claim strategy while I cruise about from star to star shooting NPC pirates in Eve.

The Opposite of People-Centric

A sudden revelation hit me forcefully while spacing out during one of our regular interminable meetings.

You can tell who is married or not by looking at the fingers of people's hands to see if there is a wedding ring on the ring finger.

Obviously there is a caveat in that some "singles" may have neglected to put it on that day or some true singles just like wearing shitloads of rings, but by and large, the correspondence holds.

It also hit me forcefully that I have seen some of these people 5 out of 7 days weekly for over 7+ years and I simply never bothered to notice.

If there is a word for the antithesis of people-focused, that would describe me to a T.

Allergic to RP

Not really, but it just seemed like a good heading.

The City of Heroes boards was sporting a thread on "Hatred and Roleplaying," which had an interesting premise, but shortly devolved into pointless crosstalk where everyone has already made up their minds and aren't interested in actual discussion. So my impulsive urge to revive my forum avatar in order to partcipate died fairly stillborn.

But I'm still intrigued by the underlying question. "Why do MMO players tend to make fun of RPers?" The OP then used to it convey his rather complex roundabout hypothesis that the people who scream the loudest about gays are themselves closet homosexuals (oh wait, I meant RPing and closet roleplayers.) Which doesn't really fit Occam's Razor to me.

One of the generalizations was touched on. The association that "all" RPers are E-RPers. Or at least the assumption that the only weird people who would use the /emote command are likely to also accidentally xchan or mistell (sidetrek: now that's another interesting thing to explore, the use of xchan, mischan or mistells - was there a historical development semantics-wise?) a really embarassing conversation involving someone else's naughty bits. At which point, cultural mores about sex take over regarding people's behavior ("freakish," "weird," "keep it private," whatever), and which are then applied with a broad tar brush to all RPers.

Surely that's not all of it.


There's a generalization that RPers are bad 'actual-game' players. This is not a new generalization. It's been extant since MUDs. It probably stems from the grain of truth regarding player motivations. A Socializer interested in interacting with others may not have a strong Achiever need to excel following the rules and reward structure set up by the game. As a result, less urgent focus on min-maxing or perfect performance, etc. There are, of course, exceptions - who often shut people up in a spectacular manner by trouncing them with their ability, but it's sort of like the generalization about gamer girls (being whiny healer drama queens, until you meet the odd ones out.) Ie. possibly 60-70% true, if I were to pluck a number from the air - a majority holds true, but there's still a significant minority who don't fit the mold.

I don't know. I find myself in an odd straddling situation here. I've RPed (on a MUD at any rate, and even explored the concept of MUSHes.) I used to like reading RP logs. I probably still would, except I can't find any still generated and published, let alone good quality ones. I would be happy to be a tabletop roleplayer, except I can't find people nor time, and I probably am in the 0.1% of the population to make a hobby of collecting roleplaying manuals and game books (though it's gone virtual nowadays. I can only fit so many Billy bookcases in my room.)

Nowadays I also find myself quite ready to make fun of RPers. In a general sense, mind you. I don't mind the person behind the character, I had plenty of RPer friends once upon a time. Nor would I be so crass as to do it in public. It's more of finding the -activity- quite silly? I find it hard to put into words.

There is the practicality aspect of it. This may be a personal thing, but the idea of being an avatar in a three dimensional world, yet typing into a teeny tiny chat channel in order to RP seems both ridiculous and archaic. It was okay in MUDs and MUSHes, where world is composed of text and words are the medium by which both commands and environment are represented. When you emote in a MUD or MUSH, you alter more than you do in an MMO, where an emote triggers either a wisp of words that scroll in a tiny chat window, a speech bubble if you're lucky, or a canned animation. It is so much harder to self-express in the typical MMO setting.

Use your imagination! Some people argue. At which point, I then ask, if I'm using my imagination this much, I could RP on a forums message board, or just go ahead and write fanfiction or ordinary fiction. Both of which utilize a more 'word' medium over that of 'polygons.' Or I could use a software better built for the purposes of RP, such as those that facilitate tabletop roleplaying, or multiplayer ones like Neverwinter Nights, or even Minecraft, which allows a player or GM to alter the world more readily than a stock MMO.

Then there's the people and drama aspect of RPers that leap readily to mind when I hear the word.

It's amazing how much people like to squabble, and how much conflict and drama gets created in the midst of RPing. I'm not precisely sure why. Some people are naturally drama queens and like attention. Some people crave power, or love to manipulate others. Somehow the RP arena is a phenomenal draw for those who love to play games with words. Sometimes IC mixes with OOC because once you start mucking around with people's emotions, it's hard to maintain degrees of separation between player and character feelings, and everything becomes just people.

Then there's the fact that everyone has slightly different tastes when it comes to roleplaying, and it's all a big compromise until someone can't take it anymore and explodes on someone else for 'not doing it right' or as expected. (Which ironically, is not limited to RP. See ragequits in dungeons and raids. Human interaction thing, I guess.)

So what you get are tribal cliques of people who clump together in little circles looking inward and (not to be too vulgar, but I can't resist) wanking off to their own little beats of the drum. In other words, self-selected in-groups and out-groups.

Is it any wonder that both sides don't like each other? It triggers all our human (or I should say, ape or primate) instincts. Outsiders, not-us, alien, bad. Eeek eek, ook ook, akk ahhhk.

And I could probably say the same thing for raiders also. Tribal cliques clumped in their own circles, with supremacist views. Except they act more like fascists than hippies, so there's less ridicule and more hate for the 'elitists' who couldn't care less because they're so certain of themselves anyway.

Or PvPers. Who also have their own cliques. But they are like gangsters in that their cliques will band together like brothers and harass everybody else. And -want- to be hated.

Perhaps ridicule is not such a bad thing after all. Maybe it actually implies a certain 'omega male' sort of tolerance. We may make fun of you, but we still like you, you're pretty harmless, that kind of a deal. And you're still part of the pack.

Back in a Year?

So. The Player Summit has announced plans for the "solo" (able) Incarnate path.

They're converting Dark Astoria (old zone revamp, check) and Banished Pantheon and Tsoo (old mob faction revamp, check) into an Incarnate zone.

Street sweeping (old under-used player activity, check) will award Ixp (or is that iXP, how do you abbreviate that?)

One-off repeatable missions will award threads. And the story arcs should award the Incarnate merits with some kind of timer limit on them, and can be repeatable via Ouroborous. (All rewards covered, check)

Old DA will be accessible via Ouroborous for those (like me) in desperate love with the fog and the crazy magic salvage rate of street sweeping. (Oldtimer nostalgia pre-empted, check)

On paper, this sounds both mollifying and with some potential.

In fact, I wouldn't mind the unspoken incentive to start running 8 man street sweeping teams again because I really miss that 'feel' in the Hollows, Boomtown, Striga. It theoretically ought to be able to be done solo, of course, given enough IO builds or heavy inspiration overdoses.

Really, the main showstopper now is waiting to see the implementation of the mechanics. Depending on the drop rate and how difficult all the above are to complete successfully, this could spell the difference between 95% abandoning the Trials for good, a mass wailing and tantrum throwing on the forums by the legions of faceplanted soloists, or a healthy balance between the solo/team/Trial size spectrum where folks will cheerfully mess around in DA and earn shit at an achievable level, while those that feel like it can queue for their Trials and get a boost to their reward earning rate now and then.

I am an understanding person. It's going to take a while for them to tweak this in Beta. I hope they do take the time to tweak this carefully in Beta so that we get the third and latter option between the extremes.

I'm just not going to be paying or playing the game until it shows up on Live, in a reasonable form.

An optimistic estimate says they might have it out by March (Nov-Dec are typically slow months due to the Christmas holiday season), and they BETTER spend some time with this Issue in beta.

This might make it run straight aground into the start of Guild Wars 2 beta preview weekends (we can hope), but I've never been opposed to maintaining more than one sub or committment to a few games at one time.

If so, and all is well and successful, I may be able to be back with a CoH sub around March. (Note the very big "ifs".)

That would make it a year since I stomped off the forums in a hoary huff at the "forced" my way or the highway non-option style of the game. My god, what a glacial pace of development. What a wasted year (in terms of me enjoying anything CoH and Paragon making any money from people with my gaming preferences.)

I sure hope they made some money from the hardcore raiders (all 1-3% of them in any game?) and the F2P people (now this group is more likely to add to their revenue).

In this intervening year, it has become Trion's gain where I was concerned. I got up to level 50 with a good mix of dynamic and quest content, soloing, exploring AND teaming in dungeon instances.

I'll never make a raider simply thanks to my awkward timezone (US and Europe raid times are right out, Aussie times begin at 5-6pm my time when I'm still slogging at work, and critical mass for Singaporean raiders don't exist outside mainstream MMOs like WoW.), but I have very casually progressed (probably 10x as slowly as most people) through the very carefully balanced stepping stones for group instancing - from normal difficulty to T1s to now T2s, with a side helping of solo Chronicles to ease the itch.

It is funny. I tried the 'normal' difficulty instance of the new zone that launched with update 1.6 (it is frickin' huge with lots of soloable stuff to do, btw) and I was almost alarmed by how easily we blew through it in 15-20 minutes. Most of us were no doubt overgeared. I'm sure a fresh 50 will find it a decent challenge.

Instead of requeuing to do another dungeon on the same difficulty with the same team, I quickly made my excuses and left, to queue for the more 'rewarding' in terms of challenge and reward T2 version of the same instance. Me, a non raider, primarily non-group oriented player, -choosing- of their own accord to do a harder version of the dungeon because it was more fun with a higher 'brain-on' challenge level.

(We wiped about 5 times during that dungeon by the way, but it was very enjoyable because the dungeon was new, everyone was learning it and developing the strats and wasn't impatient about it.)

Now THAT is proper progression.

Coming Up For Air

Somewhat reluctantly, but since I just completed the Mages College storyline quest that sets you up as the Arch-Mage of the college, it seemed a good stopping point to catch my breath.

Certainly, the entire storyline itself was very hard to pause (as it comprises of a "dwarves digging too deep and releasing an ancient evil" kind of plotline, and if one wants to immerse, one has to pretend that the ancient evil is not going to wait while one gallivants across the breath of Skyrim and back, picking flowers, chasing other storylines and side quests and so on).

So worth it though. I get this very nice Arch-Mage's study that I was coveting from the moment I stepped in as a lowly Apprentice.

Now the next challenge is going to be deciding how to take out all the hoarded crap in three wardrobes (books, assorted weapons/armor, miscellaneous) that I stuffed into my assigned dormitory room and move it up here. Without a carrying capacity boost (surely there must be a spell I am missing somewhere.)

I haven't been enchanting, smithing, or alchemying in my crazed rush through the mage storyline, and I'm level 21 with a LOT of catching up to do.

There are so many other quests I dunno if I'll be able to take a in-game week to just chill out in my mages college. I'm so easily distracted...

 The College is really a nice looking place. When it isn't snowing. As in full blizzards and snowstorm gray sleet and hail. Which is about 1% of the time.
  

The dungeon atmospherics are really very good. Apparently they are all hand-crafted and there are about 120 of them, that are doled out in pieces via side quests and some kind of AI director. Some nice interactive puzzles in them too.

Whiterun. But I immediately got Rohan / Gondor vibes. They have a dead tree in the courtyard too. Which you can go on a quest to renew.

Honestly though, I think the ripping off of mythic themes helps, more than hinders, Skyrim. The Nords are based of Scandinavian legends, so tales of epic warriors, bards and skalds, viking mead halls, snowy tundra landscapes with mountains and pine trees and wolves and worse all seem to blend together to form something that seems realistic and plausible, yet sprinkled with a generous helping of magic. Similar to Guild Wars.

Where Dragons and Giants fight, you know who will be the victor...

That would be me, of course. *dances on their graves*

"Errr, did you need any help?"

Turns out, no, she was a Hunter, and having a good time bathing. She wasn't like, drowning, or anything. And no worries despite random wolves and sabre cats roaming the same wilderness.

Whatever. I'm a mage, and I still like to keep light armour on, bow and arrows and a spare sword in case my bound sword poofs on me.

I'm so tickled to see the logo in game. It's not exactly Fourth Wall breaking, but I dunno, it feels odd and cool at the same time.

NOT Skyrim

Amazing what several dozen modders labouring away with love will do for an old game...

A Rift for All Seasons

After the Guild Wars Halloween high, I settled back down into a period of rather aimless 'low' for a time, mostly mindlessly playing Glitch (aka mining shiny rocks by watching the progress bars go, and then throwing said shiny rocks into an itemsink in the name of speeding up skill learning progress or currency counters).

Through this ennui, it came to my attention via Massively that Rift was gearing up for their 1.6 release of Ember Isle. The interview was full of interesting crunchy bits.

In 1.5, they released Chronicles, which are solo or duo dungeons. Which I was a masive fan of. The beauty was that you could earn the same currency as the Tier 1 and Tier 2 five-man dungeons, just at a slightly reduced rate.

Fer example, you earn 3 tokens by completing a T1 dungeon, 6 tokens by completing a T2 dungeon (which is apparently harder and has a gear check which I have wussed out of trying), and a token for every boss in the dungeon you defeat.

In a solo Chronicle, you normally earn 1 token per boss you defeat (though I noticed I sometimes seemed to earn a bonus token - either because it is the first time per 24 hours I did it, or I was soloing a duo dungeon or something along those lines).

In 1.6, you can surmise the focus is more skewed toward groups - but in a way that does not sideline the casual or the time-pressed. Ember Isle is meant to be a more challenging locale to explore - solo possible but difficult, presumably good for duos to traverse, and it will contain a big nonlinear dungeon for five-man groups - which presumably would suggest some communication and variety in the same dungeon. The dungeon will be set at varying levels of difficulty, normal (lvl 47-50) and expert T1 and T2.

They are also going to be experimenting with groups via the land itself. Sourcewells are some kind of spin-off of the invasion system. Rare mob spawns meant for groups and even late comers will get credit for it. And Instant Adventures - something meant to allow for drop in, drop out participation while keeping people together in a big zerg-y group reminiscent of launch days.

As preferential a soloist as I am, I can see no wrong with the quantity and fairness of the options presented. Hell, it made me want to check back in, and maybe get ready for the launch of Ember Isle. (With a multibox duo? Except I have barely any time to do that.)

---

In between patches, Trion runs their World Events. These are basically an excuse to grind multiple rifts for special event currency to buy your option of fancy toys and clothing, a couple of incrementally higher stat desirable items and/or a fancy mount. I participated quite avidly in their first Death event, gamely chased a few rewards for the Water event but got bored grinding, and kinda lost track of things when they had the Life event going.

Now it was Fire/Earth's turn together, and while grinding dailies is not on my absolute list of favorite things to do, greed for the Ash Strider, a chocobo-like mount persuaded me to give it a shot. Again, options.

With the event currency, you buy a level 1 egg for a pittance. As you close rifts, you get a separate blue currency token that allows you to level up the egg to level 2, 3, etc per blue token. At level 35, the egg hatches into your strider mount. What, one exclaims, I'm going to have to close 35?! Rifts - assuming they all drop the blue token? Well, no, apparently you can also buy the blue token for 75 event currency.

Each stage of Rift closure awards around 6 event currency, so if you manage a closure up to stage 5 or 6, you get a decent 24-30 event currency out of it. This turns into a curious dance of impatience and miserliness. Should you save the event currency and hope for more blue tokens - assuming one is not sick of closing rifts? Did I want anything else the vendor was selling? How much do I plan on playing - I heard the hardcore got their strider mount in 1-2 days, but this event lasts a month or more until 1.6 hits at some unspecified time - so one has still got time. Maybe.

The interesting change of pace for this World Event was a lack of daily quests. I got very sick and tired of collecting and turning in 5 dailies at a time. Turns out that after doing the two dailies, as I settled in to gallop across the landscape chasing rifts like a stormchaser runs after tornadoes, that I quite ENJOY closing rifts.

It helps that my cheaterbug cleric can solo all but one stage of a minor rift, and very carefully, the three minimum stages of a major rift. This means I can cheerfully attempt the thing by myself, and still profit, and if anyone else happens to turn up, the more the merrier. Some decent PUG duos and a whole team once formed that way.

However, I was still feeling insecure about my gear. I ran into one or two clerics who were beefed up with hp beyond recognition. Presumably, they were raiders. That's as well as it may be, my schedule and preferences just don't hold with raiding, so I was good if that was the only disparity.

I decided to check.



Some forums-fu revealed some "Best in Slot" tables like this one. To be truthful, I can barely make much head or tail out of it. I don't know if I will ever find some kind person to explain it all to me, but I roughly surmised that max spellpower and a hefty helping of wisdom are good items for me to aim toward, and the items are arranged from best on top to not-so-good below.

What I really wanted to call attention to, was the clever itemization and the inclusiveness of Trion's design for options to gameplay though.

R2 stands for Raid Tier 2. Obviously, it will be some of the best gear, as you can tell from the 580 armor. It's sold by a vendor, which means doing multiple tier 2 raids for currency tokens, that you slowly accumulate to unlock UBER powah. HK is Hammerknell, the third raid released, presumably a lucky drop that you can win. R1, or raid tier 1 vendor gear is not far behind. Which makes sense. RoS is River of Souls, the second raid released and GSB is Greenscale's Blight, the first easiest raid. So far, so good.

But note, to one's immense surprise, P7 and P5. These are Prestige Ranks. PvP ranks. They've cleverly slotted them to be decently comparable to raid gear. Now PvP gear has a PvP stat, Valor, that is useful only in PvP, and PvE gear has Focus, which one needs in order to hit stuff in the more hardcore PvE dungeons, so it wouldn't be totally ideal to use one in place of the other, but it -is- interesting to see the comparative scale.

The next bits of gear that drop are from raid rifts, as well as the tougher T2 dungeons. Again, options. Bring a heck load of guys to a big open world raid rift and luck into winning the drop, or bring five guys and play very well and luck into winning the drop with better odds.

Crafted gear is also starting to make an appearance at this stage. What do you need for crafted gear? Time, mostly, and a level 50 that has undergone progress bar grinding. Options again. Some people speed up the process of earning these special gear recipes by doing crafting rifts as a group - guilded or specially formed PUG or just opening them solo. Or you could sit in town and wait for 24 hours to go by to earn the special currency one at a time.

Intermixing with these are T2, then T1 gear from vendors. These are the stuff you can buy if you do lots and lots of T2 or T1 or even Chronicle dungeons repeatedly over and over. More grindy goals for sure, but more realistically reachable for people who cannot match their schedule with 20 people for 3-4 hours. Random drops from the T1 dungeons make the bottom of the pack (that the guy putting together the list bothered to include.)

Let us not forget the P1, P3 and P5 gear that are also neatly sprinkled in between. For some who really enjoy the FPS-lobby style PvP warfronts/battlegrounds/scenarios, this is also an achievable gear path for them.

None of the gear is by any means -easy- to obtain. All necessitate a certain amount of hoop jumping, be it  grouping with others, or repetitive actions - but I believe the objective is not so much the gear in and of itself, but as a desirable goal for one to chase, while doing the in-game thing one actually likes to do.

Rather than forcing oneself to do something else in order to do the originally desired activity. Aka PvPing to raid, or raiding to craft, or what-have-you.

P.S. The true irony of the last day of riftchasing has been the revelation of yet another option to get the Ash Strider.

After greedily exchanging a ton of event currency to rush to the strider mount (which after playing around with for three minutes, I decided I really liked my fiery "Recruit-2-friends-and-an-alt" horsie with the flaming hooves better), I also realized that I still like closing rifts and was going to continue - so blue tokens continue to drop. Fortunately, they bind to account, so I had the vague idea of, if I'm lucky, I'll earn another chocobo for an alt...

Then -another- Ash Strider mount just dropped on closing a rift. Must have been a 1% or 5% chance kind of deal.

So now my mage alt has a birdie mount, and I might maybe earn another one for the level 17 rogue. That would really be spoiling him.