Sunday, March 27, 2011
Balloon Diaspora
No more desktop at my parents home, and too lazy to lug my laptop there. Using my father's laptop and played some Indie games.
Balloon diaspora is cute. It's actually a very simple game, so simple it barely qualifies as a game. But you can admire the cute 3d rendering and writing about an exotic culture. It feels like a demo game that can potentially be fleshed out into something bigger. But now it remains a cute art product.
Balloon diaspora is cute. It's actually a very simple game, so simple it barely qualifies as a game. But you can admire the cute 3d rendering and writing about an exotic culture. It feels like a demo game that can potentially be fleshed out into something bigger. But now it remains a cute art product.
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Another Cheshire Cat
I watched a History Channel special tonight tracing the era of comic books, all the way through the Golden Age, Silver, Bronze and Modern ages of comics.
In it, there was some commentary about how comics both reflected to some extent the mainstream thought of that era, and possibly subverted it as part of a younger counter-culture. For example, Silver Age comics largely followed the mandate of the Comics Code Authority, but the younger writer-artists started to veer away and test the boundaries by including topics like drugs (even though they only wanted to include goodie goodie preaching type messages about how only villains did them, the CCA was freaked out about even mentioning the word.) Successfully breaking this barrier brought on the Bronze Age, of more mature themes being included in comics. Until crazies like Frank Miller and Alan Moore took it one step further and wrote Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen, which subverted it even further to the superhero as anti-hero, and heralded the Modern or Dark grim and gritty age of comics.
Being somewhat curious as to what the post-modern era holds in terms of comics and a reflection on our population's consciousness (if we skip past the anime craze period just a little), I fancied this would be the rise of webcomics and started flipping through those randomly considered to be the top web comics as crowdsourced by votes.
Besides a lot of gaming (both tabletop and computer) and programming related strips, I found the others consisted mostly of original worldbuilding-type fantasy/sci-fi daydream/fanfiction concocted by various artist-authors, following fanfiction-esque themes. There were also a number that dealt with LGBT or even 'adult' themes, veering further into the once previously off-limits gender and sexual boundaries.
And then I found Garfield minus Garfield.
Which I think heralds another interesting footnote in the post-modern era where interests are branching out in all sorts of different directions... the advent of black humor and neurosis as something that produces a chuckle.
Obviously, it's not a new genre. The wikipedia article for black comedy stretches way back to 1935. It just strikes me as being a lot more part of mainstream culture (see shows like Dead like Me) now as compared to the old days where the films were a lot more cult in nature.
Maybe it's just me imagining it. Maybe folks like Weird Al Yankovich have always been there from the beginning. Still, I have to say I get a really black, bleak and yet enjoyable laugh out of Garfield without Garfield.
(And yes, the whole lengthy post boils down to wanting to essentially twitter / share the link. But how can I do that without commentary? Just wouldn't be me.)
In it, there was some commentary about how comics both reflected to some extent the mainstream thought of that era, and possibly subverted it as part of a younger counter-culture. For example, Silver Age comics largely followed the mandate of the Comics Code Authority, but the younger writer-artists started to veer away and test the boundaries by including topics like drugs (even though they only wanted to include goodie goodie preaching type messages about how only villains did them, the CCA was freaked out about even mentioning the word.) Successfully breaking this barrier brought on the Bronze Age, of more mature themes being included in comics. Until crazies like Frank Miller and Alan Moore took it one step further and wrote Dark Knight Returns and The Watchmen, which subverted it even further to the superhero as anti-hero, and heralded the Modern or Dark grim and gritty age of comics.
Being somewhat curious as to what the post-modern era holds in terms of comics and a reflection on our population's consciousness (if we skip past the anime craze period just a little), I fancied this would be the rise of webcomics and started flipping through those randomly considered to be the top web comics as crowdsourced by votes.
Besides a lot of gaming (both tabletop and computer) and programming related strips, I found the others consisted mostly of original worldbuilding-type fantasy/sci-fi daydream/fanfiction concocted by various artist-authors, following fanfiction-esque themes. There were also a number that dealt with LGBT or even 'adult' themes, veering further into the once previously off-limits gender and sexual boundaries.
And then I found Garfield minus Garfield.
Which I think heralds another interesting footnote in the post-modern era where interests are branching out in all sorts of different directions... the advent of black humor and neurosis as something that produces a chuckle.
Obviously, it's not a new genre. The wikipedia article for black comedy stretches way back to 1935. It just strikes me as being a lot more part of mainstream culture (see shows like Dead like Me) now as compared to the old days where the films were a lot more cult in nature.
Maybe it's just me imagining it. Maybe folks like Weird Al Yankovich have always been there from the beginning. Still, I have to say I get a really black, bleak and yet enjoyable laugh out of Garfield without Garfield.
(And yes, the whole lengthy post boils down to wanting to essentially twitter / share the link. But how can I do that without commentary? Just wouldn't be me.)
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
How Difficult Do I Want My Games to Be?
While I've been a little too busy in real life to seriously worry about the gradations of difficulty in games and my corresponding levels of commitment to them...
(For example, I am on off day today making up for duty on Sunday. I had big plans to work on about 3-4 different work-related projects, on my off day, and maybe put together a GTD list of all the other amorphous crap bouncing around my mind because there seem to be about 36 different work-related things and 10 other personal-life things that are undefined and bugging the hell out of me. Before tomorrow. Except that after ingesting lunch and puttering about, I kind of laid down on the bed at noon, and woke up at 5.30pm. God, I hate afternoons. This may call for some late night thinking then. I often don't plan enough. I do wonder though how this lack of planning relates to my gaming. Is it a symptom, a cause, or simply natural preference? )
...it has been one of the items bouncing around in my mind for me to reflect on as I play my way through life and various MMOs.
Ever since my last induced breakdown on the City of Heroes forums, following a really crappy discovery attempt to gather sufficient players to playtest the BAF, wherein I discovered more about my lack of ability, will and motivation to lead a horde of disparate players and my lack of patience to wait and wait for 11-23 other players to 'get it' and my lack of stick-to-it-ness determination (or spare time) to try, wipe, try, wipe repeatedly until won, than anything really objective about the trial...
...I have more or less concluded that I will be quitting City of Heroes after April 18. Of course, my account is a three month type and my next billing cycle starts April 5 or thereabouts, so there is going to be some lag time of impact once I cancel. I suppose by July, I will be able to see more clearly whether to change my mind and start the cycle again, or to bow out gracefully until they develop content that interests me.
The truth is that I don't really like the standard MMO endgame. Or perhaps I am not suited to the endgame. Once I have seen all the content once or twice, the novelty factor wears thin and the grindiness of the repetition sets in and all the frustration inherent in difficulty/obstacles to reward (be it computer or socially induced) starts to take its toll.
Tobold has an interesting article up about raid encounter classification. In which he divides it up into scenarios that challenge the strongest (A), challenge the average player (B) and challenge the weakest (C), and the differing amounts of margin for error for each.
I distinctly prefer type A challenges, type B challenges less so, and steer quite rabidly away from type C ones.
Why is that? Mostly due to the margin for error and lack of time/patience to put off gratification and sit about training people until we get a reward together. Mostly because I am here for the extrinsic reward, rather than any intrinsic enjoyment in getting along with other people. (Others, I believe, differ on this point. They enjoy the teamwork and communication inherent in a group setting.)
For any type B or type C challenges in which I find my patience wearing thin, I have two reactions. Either grit my teeth and tough it through until I pick up the desired reward (assuming I see light down the end of the tunnel, and that the total time of aggravation is less than relative happiness of getting said shiny) or throw my hands in the air and give it up completely as being impossible to achieve for a person in my set of circumstances. Certainly, I will not be playing through the content again after successfully doing it once or twice, because the experience produced is intrinsically not fun.
Take the case of the two Rift dungeons I have tried: Iron Tombs and Deep Strike Mines.
Iron Tombs is a lvl 17-19 dungeon. People entering are often top-loaded in levels at anywhere from 20-24+, mostly because there are a bunch of other quests and rifts and distractions which yield xp before they even think about maybe doing a dungeon. There are a couple of cute gimmicks/mechanics in the bosses (Fight a melee, ranged and healer bosses separately, then all together. Run into a demarcated area to avoid the fiery breath of another boss) but nothing too crazy, and ultimately, it is a type A tank-and-spank with a lot of room for error.
You can do it with one strong tank and one strong healer. You can have two or three hybrid tanks and two or three hybrid healer types and most likely still manage it. You could cc if you needed to, but most don't. Most chance mixes of PUGs succeed more often than fail (most leaders are WoW conditioned to look for a tank and healer then stack on the dps). As a result, I see lots of people requesting for IT groups in channels.
Deep Strike Mines is a lvl 24-27 or 28 type of dungeon. I've run this on-level, a little high at 29, and then again at about lvl 30. The layout is less linear, with dead ends and curling platforms from which you can fall if you're careless. The trash mobs hit distinctly harder, challenging the tank's and/or healer's specs. The bosses range from tank-and-spank with a couple gimmicks (knockback or some adds or things you have to burn down quickly or the boss heals) to the last boss whose gimmick favors ranged dps by a certain margin, and has a bucketload of hp, while also hitting pretty damn hard.
Most hilariously, I've heard DSM called BDSM by one of my guild members, who started my third foray into the dungeon. I have to agree.
On my first attempt, with a PUG, I took on the role of tanking. This team had fairly little coordination, and they were probably not terribly confident about a tank that didn't know the dungeon. I found the trash mobs hitting very hard, and my self-heals were juuust about narrowly keeping me up along with the healer's attempts. We wiped a few times on the 3-4 grouped trash mob pulls. One member wordlessly quit. I decided to run off myself after the healer quit from a wipe induced by a hasty dps who pulled a large group of (later, I found out, unnecessary) mobs.
I spent a long time pondering 'blame' or at least responsibility from this terrible go at DSM. My automatic response is to assume that I am at fault. (This is probably aberrant from a lot of other people too quick to blame others.) This makes me feel emotionally upset, and takes a hit on my in-game self-esteem, along with inducing a lot of build pondering/guide reading to see if there was any way to improve my tankiness. I eventually decided there was not that much I could do (still open to improvements, though) at that point in level and at that point of gear, and that it was the team's healer whose spec wasn't strong enough.
On my second go, I took on the primary healing role. The cleric tank was just about on-level, but fantastically sturdy. (I later asked the player for some tips about his spec, because he was staying upright a lot longer than I did. Besides some venture into parry, and damage mitigation, there didn't seem to be much difference though.) I found healing fairly challenging, to the point that I had a pretty narrow focus on the tank and ignored most of the other damage on dps (mostly self-induced by not running away from exploding crystals). The dps on my second attempt was the weak link. We got through to the last boss without too many problems, at which point we found ourselves not having enough dps to burn down the last boss fast, and not enough situational awareness to attack crystals that healed the boss fast enough, to the point that I ran myself dry of mana keeping the tank upright. I admit, I did not attempt dps'ing because it was taking all of my concentration to keep the tank upright, so I wasn't a -fantastic- healer, just a borderline functional one.
On my third and finally successful run at it, this was a 4 out of 5 person guild group with one outsider who knew the dungeon (a lot better than we, to be honest.) I left the tank and healing roles to two other guild members, switching back to my preferred hybrid role of offtank/offheals/dps as required. (They assumed I dps'ed, no doubt.) The healer was possibly a bit more spec'ed than I was, she had a staff spec, but I did notice that on the pulls that I predicted would hurt a lot, her healing alone would not have kept up the tank. Instead, I threw on burst heals to offer some breathing room. I was also on group heal/support mode in the sense that all my melee hits trickled a steady stream of itty bitty heal over time to the rest of the party. Our dps meanwhile was distinctly over level, a lvl 37 mage offered to come along, which probably made up for any lack of dps I outputted while trickle healing. I like to think that I spotted the last bosses' healing crystals a lot faster than the previous group's dps did, and we executed the last boss with distinctly less problems than my first two attempts.
All in all, I have to call DSM a more type B or even type C encounter. It calls for higher healing and more sturdy tanking by comparison to IT, and more on-the-ball dps. A random PUG going through it is more likely to fail than not. Though teamwork and communication and willingness to spec change would mititgate this to a small extent. After succeeding once, I have to admit that I'm not readily doing it again, unless a guild group wants to go and is asking for an over-level filler. There's just too much hinging on the chance that our team combination is just right (and the custom has not yet been developed to discuss specs and change them on the fly yet.)
If this trend continues, I forsee myself taking very limited part in Rift's endgame. There is a mitigating aspect because of the role flexibility, and I do want to see how raid rifts work, whether they lean more to type A or type C challenges.
Rifts, at present, are VERY type A. And the failure mode of Rifts isn't discouraging because there is the option of throwing more people at the problem. (I have heard of anecdotes where some people attempt a rift, fail a few times, then stand around waiting for more people to be attracted to the rift, wherein they complete successfully.) Personally, I have solo'ed rifts up to level 30 with very little issue. They often turn into duos though, because of said attracting properties of an open rift in the world.
Mind you, I may not complete the "bonus stages" when I'm all alone. I believe this clever semantic name does a lot to tweak perception. Rifts are normally stage 1-3 or 4. All these stages are soloable and duoable. Bonus stages open up to stages 4-5 (that I've seen so far) and have a difficulty meant for a larger group of people. Bonus stages are timed. If you fail to complete before the time is up, nothing obviously bad happens, only the chance for unlocking further bonus stages has just evaporated. On completing the stage you're at, badabing, the Rift closes and you get your commensurate reward. This is essentially 'success' type feedback, even though it may objectively only be partial success.
Conversely, in trials in City of Heroes, your entire team may execute up to stage 3 or stage 4 perfectly, and then wipe and time out at the last stage. It feels like failure, because the feedback is that of failure. You didn't complete stage 5. Oh noes. TRIAL FAILED flash across your screen. Teamwork and friendly communication (and commiseration - "nevermind, it was a good try anyway." "good job by all regardless") mitigates this to some extent, but not entirely.
This is like attempt number #2 of mine doing DSM. It wasn't abject failure, we left with okay feelings about each other, one of the members said "the important thing is we all stuck it out" and so on. But it was failure nonetheless. We didn't get the last bosses' loot, nor did I get my DSM completed achievement unlock. (Granted, we got the loot from the other bosses in front.)
So raid rifts intrigue me. Will partial attempts end up feeling more like partial success - we achieved something, even though we didn't get extra bonus or hard mode goodies, or feedback as failure - we didn't complete, let's start looking for someone to blame or at least resenting people for not pushing through a win?
(PvP warfronts, alas, are very prone to this problem, and it's unsolvable since one side wins and one side loses. Always. And humans by nature trend a lot more to seeking the easiest path and switching to the winning side to win with less effort.
There is a subset of humans who do the opposite and play the underdog for sweeter success, but it's definitely less - because the overwhelming majority wins happen even in FPSes where everyone tries to teamswitch to the winning team to the point where the computer has to step in and stop it for team balance. And even then, the losers will quit and log off instead, because it's no fun failing ALL the time without hope for success.)
I would be more inclined to stick with a game that casts failure as partial success. Or at least has interesting failure modes.
I would have given a great deal to have an in-combat rez during the last boss fight on my second DSM attempt. This is something that City of Heroes is actually very strong at, the ability to recover from most fights that result in one or two players dying.
The problem with the BAF trial that I tested is that it either doesn't matter (we failed at coordinating the escapees, which had very little visual feedback as to where the heck they came from and where they were going - a very cheap kind of difficulty commensurate with those quests which never give you a waypoint or even descriptive directions using landmarks, but expect you to either read the questgiver's mind or look up third party websites) or that the mobs and adds hit so hard that the rezzers can't rez effectively. Either the rezzers die, or the rezzees die in the next second because all the adds are uncontrolled.
Presumably the developers are hoping we will move towards some of the more typical MMO endgame strategies. A designated tank, a designated healer for each mini-team. Here, team 1 controls the adds coming from the west. Here, team 2 controls the adds coming from the east. Team 3 and 4, we burn down the main boss and rez in combat when required, and team 3 and 4 tanks, please remember to switch aggro as needed.
This is all very well, except for two little niggly things that still upset me:
1) They've built in a dungeon finder for the trials. Or essentially a PUG queue system that for a large-sized trial that is designed to have dungeon or raid-level coordination. It's not going to work. You need a social group willing to stick together and coordinate for hours on end for this type of committment - dedicated forumites may do a spontaneous one on Test, but regular players? 12-24 of them at a time? You can do it with Hami because it is scheduled at regular intervals (but spontaneous hami just doesn't happen as a matter of course.) The messages being sent through the design are conflicted. Meant for specially put-together teams, or PUGs can do it? Type A, B or C raid-level difficulty? Did we succeed or did we fail if we didn't complete all the stages?
In this sense, Rift is way more polished. I can tell where I stand with their various offerings - rifts are invariably more forgiving than dungeons. Chained rift invasion events are big zone-wide things that still have a good chance of success due to the number of players in the zone and the wisdom of crowds. Expert dungeons at level 50 are presumably a lot more raid-like and challenging for a small team. Dungeon raids are probably WoW clones in terms of levels of raid-like challenge. The only unanswered question as yet is raid rifts. I think the key is in whether one can easily add more players or if one is stuck with what one has got in the instance.
2) I didn't join CoH for an endgame. (Or for this type of strategic coordination. Lots of other dungeons in other games for that, all of which test my patience.) If I wanted to commit time to one, I think I would have a better chance doing it in Rift (or the next newest MMO clone that emerges.) WoW is already too established, fer example. Ditto AoC and EQ, the raid groups are already formed. More likely than not, I'd pick a solo-possible endgame style game - Guild Wars comes to mind quite readily. And ATITD has solo-possible continuing-game options, as long as you throw money at certain problems. Or I could just spend money on the next game and move on to something like GW2.
(For example, I am on off day today making up for duty on Sunday. I had big plans to work on about 3-4 different work-related projects, on my off day, and maybe put together a GTD list of all the other amorphous crap bouncing around my mind because there seem to be about 36 different work-related things and 10 other personal-life things that are undefined and bugging the hell out of me. Before tomorrow. Except that after ingesting lunch and puttering about, I kind of laid down on the bed at noon, and woke up at 5.30pm. God, I hate afternoons. This may call for some late night thinking then. I often don't plan enough. I do wonder though how this lack of planning relates to my gaming. Is it a symptom, a cause, or simply natural preference? )
...it has been one of the items bouncing around in my mind for me to reflect on as I play my way through life and various MMOs.
Ever since my last induced breakdown on the City of Heroes forums, following a really crappy discovery attempt to gather sufficient players to playtest the BAF, wherein I discovered more about my lack of ability, will and motivation to lead a horde of disparate players and my lack of patience to wait and wait for 11-23 other players to 'get it' and my lack of stick-to-it-ness determination (or spare time) to try, wipe, try, wipe repeatedly until won, than anything really objective about the trial...
...I have more or less concluded that I will be quitting City of Heroes after April 18. Of course, my account is a three month type and my next billing cycle starts April 5 or thereabouts, so there is going to be some lag time of impact once I cancel. I suppose by July, I will be able to see more clearly whether to change my mind and start the cycle again, or to bow out gracefully until they develop content that interests me.
The truth is that I don't really like the standard MMO endgame. Or perhaps I am not suited to the endgame. Once I have seen all the content once or twice, the novelty factor wears thin and the grindiness of the repetition sets in and all the frustration inherent in difficulty/obstacles to reward (be it computer or socially induced) starts to take its toll.
Tobold has an interesting article up about raid encounter classification. In which he divides it up into scenarios that challenge the strongest (A), challenge the average player (B) and challenge the weakest (C), and the differing amounts of margin for error for each.
I distinctly prefer type A challenges, type B challenges less so, and steer quite rabidly away from type C ones.
Why is that? Mostly due to the margin for error and lack of time/patience to put off gratification and sit about training people until we get a reward together. Mostly because I am here for the extrinsic reward, rather than any intrinsic enjoyment in getting along with other people. (Others, I believe, differ on this point. They enjoy the teamwork and communication inherent in a group setting.)
For any type B or type C challenges in which I find my patience wearing thin, I have two reactions. Either grit my teeth and tough it through until I pick up the desired reward (assuming I see light down the end of the tunnel, and that the total time of aggravation is less than relative happiness of getting said shiny) or throw my hands in the air and give it up completely as being impossible to achieve for a person in my set of circumstances. Certainly, I will not be playing through the content again after successfully doing it once or twice, because the experience produced is intrinsically not fun.
Take the case of the two Rift dungeons I have tried: Iron Tombs and Deep Strike Mines.
Iron Tombs is a lvl 17-19 dungeon. People entering are often top-loaded in levels at anywhere from 20-24+, mostly because there are a bunch of other quests and rifts and distractions which yield xp before they even think about maybe doing a dungeon. There are a couple of cute gimmicks/mechanics in the bosses (Fight a melee, ranged and healer bosses separately, then all together. Run into a demarcated area to avoid the fiery breath of another boss) but nothing too crazy, and ultimately, it is a type A tank-and-spank with a lot of room for error.
You can do it with one strong tank and one strong healer. You can have two or three hybrid tanks and two or three hybrid healer types and most likely still manage it. You could cc if you needed to, but most don't. Most chance mixes of PUGs succeed more often than fail (most leaders are WoW conditioned to look for a tank and healer then stack on the dps). As a result, I see lots of people requesting for IT groups in channels.
Deep Strike Mines is a lvl 24-27 or 28 type of dungeon. I've run this on-level, a little high at 29, and then again at about lvl 30. The layout is less linear, with dead ends and curling platforms from which you can fall if you're careless. The trash mobs hit distinctly harder, challenging the tank's and/or healer's specs. The bosses range from tank-and-spank with a couple gimmicks (knockback or some adds or things you have to burn down quickly or the boss heals) to the last boss whose gimmick favors ranged dps by a certain margin, and has a bucketload of hp, while also hitting pretty damn hard.
Most hilariously, I've heard DSM called BDSM by one of my guild members, who started my third foray into the dungeon. I have to agree.
On my first attempt, with a PUG, I took on the role of tanking. This team had fairly little coordination, and they were probably not terribly confident about a tank that didn't know the dungeon. I found the trash mobs hitting very hard, and my self-heals were juuust about narrowly keeping me up along with the healer's attempts. We wiped a few times on the 3-4 grouped trash mob pulls. One member wordlessly quit. I decided to run off myself after the healer quit from a wipe induced by a hasty dps who pulled a large group of (later, I found out, unnecessary) mobs.
I spent a long time pondering 'blame' or at least responsibility from this terrible go at DSM. My automatic response is to assume that I am at fault. (This is probably aberrant from a lot of other people too quick to blame others.) This makes me feel emotionally upset, and takes a hit on my in-game self-esteem, along with inducing a lot of build pondering/guide reading to see if there was any way to improve my tankiness. I eventually decided there was not that much I could do (still open to improvements, though) at that point in level and at that point of gear, and that it was the team's healer whose spec wasn't strong enough.
On my second go, I took on the primary healing role. The cleric tank was just about on-level, but fantastically sturdy. (I later asked the player for some tips about his spec, because he was staying upright a lot longer than I did. Besides some venture into parry, and damage mitigation, there didn't seem to be much difference though.) I found healing fairly challenging, to the point that I had a pretty narrow focus on the tank and ignored most of the other damage on dps (mostly self-induced by not running away from exploding crystals). The dps on my second attempt was the weak link. We got through to the last boss without too many problems, at which point we found ourselves not having enough dps to burn down the last boss fast, and not enough situational awareness to attack crystals that healed the boss fast enough, to the point that I ran myself dry of mana keeping the tank upright. I admit, I did not attempt dps'ing because it was taking all of my concentration to keep the tank upright, so I wasn't a -fantastic- healer, just a borderline functional one.
On my third and finally successful run at it, this was a 4 out of 5 person guild group with one outsider who knew the dungeon (a lot better than we, to be honest.) I left the tank and healing roles to two other guild members, switching back to my preferred hybrid role of offtank/offheals/dps as required. (They assumed I dps'ed, no doubt.) The healer was possibly a bit more spec'ed than I was, she had a staff spec, but I did notice that on the pulls that I predicted would hurt a lot, her healing alone would not have kept up the tank. Instead, I threw on burst heals to offer some breathing room. I was also on group heal/support mode in the sense that all my melee hits trickled a steady stream of itty bitty heal over time to the rest of the party. Our dps meanwhile was distinctly over level, a lvl 37 mage offered to come along, which probably made up for any lack of dps I outputted while trickle healing. I like to think that I spotted the last bosses' healing crystals a lot faster than the previous group's dps did, and we executed the last boss with distinctly less problems than my first two attempts.
All in all, I have to call DSM a more type B or even type C encounter. It calls for higher healing and more sturdy tanking by comparison to IT, and more on-the-ball dps. A random PUG going through it is more likely to fail than not. Though teamwork and communication and willingness to spec change would mititgate this to a small extent. After succeeding once, I have to admit that I'm not readily doing it again, unless a guild group wants to go and is asking for an over-level filler. There's just too much hinging on the chance that our team combination is just right (and the custom has not yet been developed to discuss specs and change them on the fly yet.)
If this trend continues, I forsee myself taking very limited part in Rift's endgame. There is a mitigating aspect because of the role flexibility, and I do want to see how raid rifts work, whether they lean more to type A or type C challenges.
Rifts, at present, are VERY type A. And the failure mode of Rifts isn't discouraging because there is the option of throwing more people at the problem. (I have heard of anecdotes where some people attempt a rift, fail a few times, then stand around waiting for more people to be attracted to the rift, wherein they complete successfully.) Personally, I have solo'ed rifts up to level 30 with very little issue. They often turn into duos though, because of said attracting properties of an open rift in the world.
Mind you, I may not complete the "bonus stages" when I'm all alone. I believe this clever semantic name does a lot to tweak perception. Rifts are normally stage 1-3 or 4. All these stages are soloable and duoable. Bonus stages open up to stages 4-5 (that I've seen so far) and have a difficulty meant for a larger group of people. Bonus stages are timed. If you fail to complete before the time is up, nothing obviously bad happens, only the chance for unlocking further bonus stages has just evaporated. On completing the stage you're at, badabing, the Rift closes and you get your commensurate reward. This is essentially 'success' type feedback, even though it may objectively only be partial success.
Conversely, in trials in City of Heroes, your entire team may execute up to stage 3 or stage 4 perfectly, and then wipe and time out at the last stage. It feels like failure, because the feedback is that of failure. You didn't complete stage 5. Oh noes. TRIAL FAILED flash across your screen. Teamwork and friendly communication (and commiseration - "nevermind, it was a good try anyway." "good job by all regardless") mitigates this to some extent, but not entirely.
This is like attempt number #2 of mine doing DSM. It wasn't abject failure, we left with okay feelings about each other, one of the members said "the important thing is we all stuck it out" and so on. But it was failure nonetheless. We didn't get the last bosses' loot, nor did I get my DSM completed achievement unlock. (Granted, we got the loot from the other bosses in front.)
So raid rifts intrigue me. Will partial attempts end up feeling more like partial success - we achieved something, even though we didn't get extra bonus or hard mode goodies, or feedback as failure - we didn't complete, let's start looking for someone to blame or at least resenting people for not pushing through a win?
(PvP warfronts, alas, are very prone to this problem, and it's unsolvable since one side wins and one side loses. Always. And humans by nature trend a lot more to seeking the easiest path and switching to the winning side to win with less effort.
There is a subset of humans who do the opposite and play the underdog for sweeter success, but it's definitely less - because the overwhelming majority wins happen even in FPSes where everyone tries to teamswitch to the winning team to the point where the computer has to step in and stop it for team balance. And even then, the losers will quit and log off instead, because it's no fun failing ALL the time without hope for success.)
I would be more inclined to stick with a game that casts failure as partial success. Or at least has interesting failure modes.
I would have given a great deal to have an in-combat rez during the last boss fight on my second DSM attempt. This is something that City of Heroes is actually very strong at, the ability to recover from most fights that result in one or two players dying.
The problem with the BAF trial that I tested is that it either doesn't matter (we failed at coordinating the escapees, which had very little visual feedback as to where the heck they came from and where they were going - a very cheap kind of difficulty commensurate with those quests which never give you a waypoint or even descriptive directions using landmarks, but expect you to either read the questgiver's mind or look up third party websites) or that the mobs and adds hit so hard that the rezzers can't rez effectively. Either the rezzers die, or the rezzees die in the next second because all the adds are uncontrolled.
Presumably the developers are hoping we will move towards some of the more typical MMO endgame strategies. A designated tank, a designated healer for each mini-team. Here, team 1 controls the adds coming from the west. Here, team 2 controls the adds coming from the east. Team 3 and 4, we burn down the main boss and rez in combat when required, and team 3 and 4 tanks, please remember to switch aggro as needed.
This is all very well, except for two little niggly things that still upset me:
1) They've built in a dungeon finder for the trials. Or essentially a PUG queue system that for a large-sized trial that is designed to have dungeon or raid-level coordination. It's not going to work. You need a social group willing to stick together and coordinate for hours on end for this type of committment - dedicated forumites may do a spontaneous one on Test, but regular players? 12-24 of them at a time? You can do it with Hami because it is scheduled at regular intervals (but spontaneous hami just doesn't happen as a matter of course.) The messages being sent through the design are conflicted. Meant for specially put-together teams, or PUGs can do it? Type A, B or C raid-level difficulty? Did we succeed or did we fail if we didn't complete all the stages?
In this sense, Rift is way more polished. I can tell where I stand with their various offerings - rifts are invariably more forgiving than dungeons. Chained rift invasion events are big zone-wide things that still have a good chance of success due to the number of players in the zone and the wisdom of crowds. Expert dungeons at level 50 are presumably a lot more raid-like and challenging for a small team. Dungeon raids are probably WoW clones in terms of levels of raid-like challenge. The only unanswered question as yet is raid rifts. I think the key is in whether one can easily add more players or if one is stuck with what one has got in the instance.
2) I didn't join CoH for an endgame. (Or for this type of strategic coordination. Lots of other dungeons in other games for that, all of which test my patience.) If I wanted to commit time to one, I think I would have a better chance doing it in Rift (or the next newest MMO clone that emerges.) WoW is already too established, fer example. Ditto AoC and EQ, the raid groups are already formed. More likely than not, I'd pick a solo-possible endgame style game - Guild Wars comes to mind quite readily. And ATITD has solo-possible continuing-game options, as long as you throw money at certain problems. Or I could just spend money on the next game and move on to something like GW2.
Flow in Gaming
I caught myself thinking about capping the S/L defence on my dominator recently.
*Fiddle fiddle on build designs*
"Let's see...I already have too much recharge, if I switch this and that, do this and that...tada! S/L cap!"
But then I caught myself and wondered, "So what?"
So what if I can perma-dom, perma-hasten, and S/L cap?
So I can try to solo all content?
If I am soloing all content, who am I showing off the "leet build" to?
...To show off the "leet build" to other people, would be to get onto a team content with them, and run off to solo the team spawns, or survive while they all die...which actually proves how much I suck since my job is to control the mobs?
Is it fun being a tank mage?
I think it's fun trying to build a tank mage. Every little piece of enhancement you get into place gives you a little achievement buzz. You designed something, you're seeing the design fall into place. Yay!
Then you finish the build, and you look at the completed whole with a satisfied sigh, take it out for a spin and marvel at how wonderfully it plays.
Then you get bored and go play something else.
* * *
Was moving a lowbie through all the tip missions to see the different ones they've created. Some are pretty funny. Caught myself thinking "but constantly switching alignments doesn't give any rewards!".
Doh. But I'm playing to see the different alignment tips.
Getting hooked on rewards. Got to stop.
* * *
There is something wrong with the game. During regular gameplay, everything is running so smoothly because everyone is so "leet", and or every strategy is so in place, or death is nothing to be feared, that there is no challenge.
Now there is the challenge of Master of -. I went for a few and it was such a military style affair. The leader would be barking out instructions. You were expected to follow or you were screwing everyone else up. Same thing for those "raid"-style events. It's fun to coordinate like this a few times. After that it's just no longer interesting.
Sometimes the leader would be someone who was considered a "community leader" or something. Seems like a leader of another type of community rather than the one I want to be in.
* * *
It's the hard situations that I remembered having "fun" in. Trying to clear Infernal with two people. Trying to survive the crazy Hess TF ambush on a blaster. Etc. Trying to keep people alive, trying to stay alive, because it was hard, and dying was a Big Thing. (Not because it was actually a Big Thing, but it was viewed as a Big Thing and so nobody wanted a Big Thing to happen.)
It's not grinding to leetness. And then having everyone feeling so leet they can only boast about their leetness -- screw the rest of the team I'm charging ahead yar yar yar I soloed everything you better keep up cos I want max-rewards at max-efficiency.
It's not going on team content where everyone is only thinking about the rewards they are getting at the end -- and so are you because this content is actually boring and offers no risk.
It's not following a military style operation every time you want to do some team content. If I wanted to do that I would have joined the military.
* * *
Ironically, wasn't this what we've always wanted. We wanted an end to punching bag AVs.
But somehow the feeling isn't of using skill to overcome challenges. It's the feeling of grinding to overcome challenges. The sheer numericals of a horde of +4s smacking you is just that. Grind military style to get your shards or threads to build your leetness and "level up" so those enemies become easy then you win!
Let's see how I20 turns out. If it gets worse, I'll have to quit.
*Fiddle fiddle on build designs*
"Let's see...I already have too much recharge, if I switch this and that, do this and that...tada! S/L cap!"
But then I caught myself and wondered, "So what?"
So what if I can perma-dom, perma-hasten, and S/L cap?
So I can try to solo all content?
If I am soloing all content, who am I showing off the "leet build" to?
...To show off the "leet build" to other people, would be to get onto a team content with them, and run off to solo the team spawns, or survive while they all die...which actually proves how much I suck since my job is to control the mobs?
Is it fun being a tank mage?
I think it's fun trying to build a tank mage. Every little piece of enhancement you get into place gives you a little achievement buzz. You designed something, you're seeing the design fall into place. Yay!
Then you finish the build, and you look at the completed whole with a satisfied sigh, take it out for a spin and marvel at how wonderfully it plays.
Then you get bored and go play something else.
* * *
Was moving a lowbie through all the tip missions to see the different ones they've created. Some are pretty funny. Caught myself thinking "but constantly switching alignments doesn't give any rewards!".
Doh. But I'm playing to see the different alignment tips.
Getting hooked on rewards. Got to stop.
* * *
There is something wrong with the game. During regular gameplay, everything is running so smoothly because everyone is so "leet", and or every strategy is so in place, or death is nothing to be feared, that there is no challenge.
Now there is the challenge of Master of -. I went for a few and it was such a military style affair. The leader would be barking out instructions. You were expected to follow or you were screwing everyone else up. Same thing for those "raid"-style events. It's fun to coordinate like this a few times. After that it's just no longer interesting.
Sometimes the leader would be someone who was considered a "community leader" or something. Seems like a leader of another type of community rather than the one I want to be in.
* * *
It's the hard situations that I remembered having "fun" in. Trying to clear Infernal with two people. Trying to survive the crazy Hess TF ambush on a blaster. Etc. Trying to keep people alive, trying to stay alive, because it was hard, and dying was a Big Thing. (Not because it was actually a Big Thing, but it was viewed as a Big Thing and so nobody wanted a Big Thing to happen.)
It's not grinding to leetness. And then having everyone feeling so leet they can only boast about their leetness -- screw the rest of the team I'm charging ahead yar yar yar I soloed everything you better keep up cos I want max-rewards at max-efficiency.
It's not going on team content where everyone is only thinking about the rewards they are getting at the end -- and so are you because this content is actually boring and offers no risk.
It's not following a military style operation every time you want to do some team content. If I wanted to do that I would have joined the military.
* * *
Ironically, wasn't this what we've always wanted. We wanted an end to punching bag AVs.
But somehow the feeling isn't of using skill to overcome challenges. It's the feeling of grinding to overcome challenges. The sheer numericals of a horde of +4s smacking you is just that. Grind military style to get your shards or threads to build your leetness and "level up" so those enemies become easy then you win!
Let's see how I20 turns out. If it gets worse, I'll have to quit.
Lambda Sector Preview
Disclaimer: This post is not breaking any NDA (I think). Everything written below occurred during the open testing when the Beta server was open to all active accounts. On the whole not really much effort, just pop in to see what's going on, and provide some data for data-mining (or invisible spying devs). There will be another testing from the 23rd-28th March. I am not sure I will test this time around.
Logged on, saw the horrible new team UI. Well -- maybe it's not horrible, but just takes some getting used to. Still, fiddled with its size while queuing up for the Lambda Sector trial.
First try. Felt entirely clueless and staring at all the other people in the trial. Sent out a few sentences on the league channel, but nobody answered. I started wondering if people didn't have the league channel on their tab, which turned out not to be the case because after a while some people made some comments.
But on the whole, nobody talked, everyone went to do their own thing as if everyone knew what was going on or they didn't care what was going on. Your typical "I am IO-ed out and I am going to solo this" kind of attitude you get in TFs these days. For the first part that worked since it was "clear N mobs".
Then things quickly fell apart. Finally, some instructions got through. Clear mobs in the yard, clear turrets, kill Warwalker, split team into two to grab two sets of glowies. This splitting part was a complete mess, but it was shortly over due to the all-too-short timer. Then Marauder appeared, and all descended into utter chaos. I didn't know what to do, nobody said anything, a bunch of people quit, and finally someone pointed out we couldn't finish on 5 people, and the last of us agreed to quit.
* * *
Queued for a few times, zoning in and out of the Lambda Sector but never getting a proper team to even start.
* * *
Finally, hit into a map with 8 people. This time, everyone was talking from the start. One of them told everyone on local and broadcast to put "League" on their tab, going through how to do it. An de-facto leader was nominated -- the only one who knew what was going on. And he described what we had to do. Kill mobs -- in the middle of that, the tank quit.
Oh...I recognized that tank from his forum name. Tsk.
Nevertheless the 7 people left continued. Kill mobs around courtyard. Being a dominator with a ridiculous amount of ACC from the nerve alpha slot was useful. Ha, don't ever let them tell you Nerve alpha is useless. Anyway, got a work-out trying to control everything together with the controllers. Clear towers, killed Warwalker.
The split the team into two parts to grab two sets of blinkies was utter failure again. People just got confused where to go, and the mobs were too tough for 3 or 4 players. It was a die-fest, but the counter went down and we regrouped. Miraculously, there was no rage-quit.
At this point we knew it wasn't going to work. We didn't have enough pacification grenades (2 total) for Marauder, or molecular acids to seal up the doors of the courtyard before the adds to Marauder became overwhelming. But somehow everyone still continued with the spirit of "might was well learn something".
First few spawns, no idea what was going on, dying left and right.
Then somehow, we got it. When we got the message for new supplies, rush in, the scrapper and blasters would hit the containment chamber and supply crate as much as possible while everyone else tried to control the spawn around the objective. Once that went down, flee off. The mobs would chase a bit, then forget us and despawn when the "supplies withdrawn" message appeared.
Then the counter ended. Lots of good feelings all around and optimism.
"That was fun"
"Learnt a lot"
"Got the hang of it"
"Thanks for sticking out"
* * *
And so. Two failures, but one was an "ugh" and the other was a "yay".
What's the difference?
Me fight the World, vs Teamwork
Silent cowboy, vs communication
I wonder if the second team was CoX in the past, and the first team is CoX in the future.
But as long as people like in the second team are playing and testing, why worry that they will change into people like in the first team?
Logged on, saw the horrible new team UI. Well -- maybe it's not horrible, but just takes some getting used to. Still, fiddled with its size while queuing up for the Lambda Sector trial.
First try. Felt entirely clueless and staring at all the other people in the trial. Sent out a few sentences on the league channel, but nobody answered. I started wondering if people didn't have the league channel on their tab, which turned out not to be the case because after a while some people made some comments.
But on the whole, nobody talked, everyone went to do their own thing as if everyone knew what was going on or they didn't care what was going on. Your typical "I am IO-ed out and I am going to solo this" kind of attitude you get in TFs these days. For the first part that worked since it was "clear N mobs".
Then things quickly fell apart. Finally, some instructions got through. Clear mobs in the yard, clear turrets, kill Warwalker, split team into two to grab two sets of glowies. This splitting part was a complete mess, but it was shortly over due to the all-too-short timer. Then Marauder appeared, and all descended into utter chaos. I didn't know what to do, nobody said anything, a bunch of people quit, and finally someone pointed out we couldn't finish on 5 people, and the last of us agreed to quit.
* * *
Queued for a few times, zoning in and out of the Lambda Sector but never getting a proper team to even start.
* * *
Finally, hit into a map with 8 people. This time, everyone was talking from the start. One of them told everyone on local and broadcast to put "League" on their tab, going through how to do it. An de-facto leader was nominated -- the only one who knew what was going on. And he described what we had to do. Kill mobs -- in the middle of that, the tank quit.
Oh...I recognized that tank from his forum name. Tsk.
Nevertheless the 7 people left continued. Kill mobs around courtyard. Being a dominator with a ridiculous amount of ACC from the nerve alpha slot was useful. Ha, don't ever let them tell you Nerve alpha is useless. Anyway, got a work-out trying to control everything together with the controllers. Clear towers, killed Warwalker.
The split the team into two parts to grab two sets of blinkies was utter failure again. People just got confused where to go, and the mobs were too tough for 3 or 4 players. It was a die-fest, but the counter went down and we regrouped. Miraculously, there was no rage-quit.
At this point we knew it wasn't going to work. We didn't have enough pacification grenades (2 total) for Marauder, or molecular acids to seal up the doors of the courtyard before the adds to Marauder became overwhelming. But somehow everyone still continued with the spirit of "might was well learn something".
First few spawns, no idea what was going on, dying left and right.
Then somehow, we got it. When we got the message for new supplies, rush in, the scrapper and blasters would hit the containment chamber and supply crate as much as possible while everyone else tried to control the spawn around the objective. Once that went down, flee off. The mobs would chase a bit, then forget us and despawn when the "supplies withdrawn" message appeared.
Then the counter ended. Lots of good feelings all around and optimism.
"That was fun"
"Learnt a lot"
"Got the hang of it"
"Thanks for sticking out"
* * *
And so. Two failures, but one was an "ugh" and the other was a "yay".
What's the difference?
Me fight the World, vs Teamwork
Silent cowboy, vs communication
I wonder if the second team was CoX in the past, and the first team is CoX in the future.
But as long as people like in the second team are playing and testing, why worry that they will change into people like in the first team?
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The Heftier They Are...
In a great bout of irony, it is my latest external hard disk purchase which has opted to essentially brick itself. (I exaggerate for effect, the disk itself is fine, but see below.)
I'd bought it barely one or two months ago, just before Chinese New Year. A remarkable 700 odd gigabytes worth of storage (that's about the combined sizes of both my desktop's hard disks), in order to transfer off and backup the remains of my old old college laptop (more than a bit of overkill, seeing in those days, our hard disks being 1-2 gb would be spectacular already.)
I -had- hoped to use it to transfer and sort some of the files on my existing bulky external hard disk backups, at some future point in time.
Alas, good intentions led to me carrying the itty bitty 2.5" hard disk around, with the USB cable still plugged into it, in my laptop bag, and I have to admit I pretty much forgot about it mixed in with the rest of my shtuff (mouse, hard disk for work, power cables for this and that, etc.)
It appears the bag has taken more than its fair share of hard knocks, and one of those knocks may have strained the USB cable, which in turn placed some strain on the USB 3.0 connector and receiving socket (which, if you'd remember, was locked tightly in an embrace.)
That's one receptacle, by the way, just seen from a whole bunch of different angles. You see those two teeny bits of metal sticking out from the lower pictures? That is apparently where the solder to hold the receptacle in place goes, whereas the ten itty bitty coppery-colored pins may or may not be (but likely are) micro-soldered onto the circuit board for power supply or data transfer purposes or something else cheem like that.
Remember that bit about Archimedes and a lever? Tight fitting USB cable into receptacle... banged around a bit... two microscopic points of adhesion = one USB 3.0 receptacle rattling around and finally rattling right out.
Well, fuck.
Promptly picked it up and discovered that it fit more tightly on the USB cable than into the socket.
Dire threats from my dad about the hard disk possibly doing horrible things to my computer if I dared to plug it in to a powered USB connection (metal, rattling about, maybe sparks or short circuits on the drive's motherboard or the desktop's, I dunno) but it dissuaded me from experimenting for the moment. His suggestion was to go get it exchanged, after all, it's supposed to be five year's warranty.
That was all very well, but after a herculean search, I found the original casing and warranty card... but no receipt. This was Chinese New Year season, y'know. Loose bits of paper get thrown away in the frantic effort to clean up house to receive guests, and other bits get stacked up in gigantic piles of objects sandwiched together.
Well. That's not good. Especially since a quick Google revealed that there is no official Ovation website, and that all the people with hard disk problems have to cart it over to some weirdly-named company down by MacPherson Road, wherein they will promptly exchange it 1-for-1 with very little fuss.
(Which, of course, implies that quite a lot of people have these problems by the cartloads until the workers are completely jaded. Except... without a receipt, it's unlikely I'm going to get an exchange with that little muss or fuss.)
And even if I did get it exchanged... I kinda wanted the data on my old one more. Like now.
So in usual barely controlled INTP-tinkery type fashion, my hands and nails were soon prying away at the sides of the case wondering why there were no visible screws and what the hell held it together. Enter a handy dandy pocket screwdriver, and I had soon popped it open, feeling that secret little thrill from understanding the insides of these pieces of electronic equipment (I've dismantled my gamepad controller and my printer's printhead and those were cool too. Especially when I managed to put them back together in working fashion.)
And of course, that's when I finally figured out what I said above, about teensy bits of solder and if not shoddy worksmanship, then crappy design planning.
Fortunately, my dad knows a little more than me about these things, so when I brought the disemboweled remains of the hard disk to share and lament the shoddy engineering design, grumping about not having a receipt and wanting the data out of it, he magicked up a SATA/IDE USB 2.0 Cable that he had used for transferring data out of an IDE hard disk, showed me that the hard disk could actually be unplugged from the tiny piece of circuit board which was apparently a USB/IDE connector of some kind, to reveal a perfectly well-functioning IDE socket.
Cool.
Said hard disk went into the magicked up cable, power was duly plugged in, and the other end went into the USB port on my computer and data is being recovered from the perfectly fine hard disk, previously crippled by a shoddy connection.
If only all data recovery jobs were this simple. The cable's price tag said $35, really not too shabby a deal for this sort of thing.
I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to get the hard disk itself replaced (after putting it back together again like Humpty Dumpty), assuming I either spend the effort to find the receipt or just go there and bang table a little until they decide to mollify me. Or if I should just consider it a hundred buck lesson to no longer bother with the dinky portable 2.5" varieties. They look cool, but they sure aren't sturdy at all. Or perhaps it's USB 3.0 and the very design to blame.
I'd bought it barely one or two months ago, just before Chinese New Year. A remarkable 700 odd gigabytes worth of storage (that's about the combined sizes of both my desktop's hard disks), in order to transfer off and backup the remains of my old old college laptop (more than a bit of overkill, seeing in those days, our hard disks being 1-2 gb would be spectacular already.)
I -had- hoped to use it to transfer and sort some of the files on my existing bulky external hard disk backups, at some future point in time.
Alas, good intentions led to me carrying the itty bitty 2.5" hard disk around, with the USB cable still plugged into it, in my laptop bag, and I have to admit I pretty much forgot about it mixed in with the rest of my shtuff (mouse, hard disk for work, power cables for this and that, etc.)
It appears the bag has taken more than its fair share of hard knocks, and one of those knocks may have strained the USB cable, which in turn placed some strain on the USB 3.0 connector and receiving socket (which, if you'd remember, was locked tightly in an embrace.)
 |
| Imagine Tab B connected into... |
 |
| ...Socket A |
Those pictures are not the brand I was using (Ovation, using Western Digital hard disk, if you must know), but they will suffice to illustrate what promptly happened.
If we take a closer look at what is actually inside Socket A, and the corresponding USB 3.0 receptacle...
Remember that bit about Archimedes and a lever? Tight fitting USB cable into receptacle... banged around a bit... two microscopic points of adhesion = one USB 3.0 receptacle rattling around and finally rattling right out.
Well, fuck.
Promptly picked it up and discovered that it fit more tightly on the USB cable than into the socket.
Dire threats from my dad about the hard disk possibly doing horrible things to my computer if I dared to plug it in to a powered USB connection (metal, rattling about, maybe sparks or short circuits on the drive's motherboard or the desktop's, I dunno) but it dissuaded me from experimenting for the moment. His suggestion was to go get it exchanged, after all, it's supposed to be five year's warranty.
That was all very well, but after a herculean search, I found the original casing and warranty card... but no receipt. This was Chinese New Year season, y'know. Loose bits of paper get thrown away in the frantic effort to clean up house to receive guests, and other bits get stacked up in gigantic piles of objects sandwiched together.
Well. That's not good. Especially since a quick Google revealed that there is no official Ovation website, and that all the people with hard disk problems have to cart it over to some weirdly-named company down by MacPherson Road, wherein they will promptly exchange it 1-for-1 with very little fuss.
(Which, of course, implies that quite a lot of people have these problems by the cartloads until the workers are completely jaded. Except... without a receipt, it's unlikely I'm going to get an exchange with that little muss or fuss.)
And even if I did get it exchanged... I kinda wanted the data on my old one more. Like now.
So in usual barely controlled INTP-tinkery type fashion, my hands and nails were soon prying away at the sides of the case wondering why there were no visible screws and what the hell held it together. Enter a handy dandy pocket screwdriver, and I had soon popped it open, feeling that secret little thrill from understanding the insides of these pieces of electronic equipment (I've dismantled my gamepad controller and my printer's printhead and those were cool too. Especially when I managed to put them back together in working fashion.)
And of course, that's when I finally figured out what I said above, about teensy bits of solder and if not shoddy worksmanship, then crappy design planning.
Fortunately, my dad knows a little more than me about these things, so when I brought the disemboweled remains of the hard disk to share and lament the shoddy engineering design, grumping about not having a receipt and wanting the data out of it, he magicked up a SATA/IDE USB 2.0 Cable that he had used for transferring data out of an IDE hard disk, showed me that the hard disk could actually be unplugged from the tiny piece of circuit board which was apparently a USB/IDE connector of some kind, to reveal a perfectly well-functioning IDE socket.
Cool.
Said hard disk went into the magicked up cable, power was duly plugged in, and the other end went into the USB port on my computer and data is being recovered from the perfectly fine hard disk, previously crippled by a shoddy connection.
If only all data recovery jobs were this simple. The cable's price tag said $35, really not too shabby a deal for this sort of thing.
I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to get the hard disk itself replaced (after putting it back together again like Humpty Dumpty), assuming I either spend the effort to find the receipt or just go there and bang table a little until they decide to mollify me. Or if I should just consider it a hundred buck lesson to no longer bother with the dinky portable 2.5" varieties. They look cool, but they sure aren't sturdy at all. Or perhaps it's USB 3.0 and the very design to blame.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
My Kingdom for a Dastardly Duo
Just tried the second dungeon on the Defiant side tonight, known as Deepstrike Mines. I might have figured out that something was up when I see a lot less PUGs advertising for DSM, over the first dungeon Iron Tombs.
Long story short, I managed to get into the group when I offered to tank, though I did warn them that I hadn't done the dungeon before and received stoney silence from three people in the group with one last guy bothering to communicate that no prob, nothing special.
Mobs hit pretty hard, and right away it was pretty obvious that either I was a little squishy or the one healer wasn't cutting it fairly well. Been staring at my build since though, and a video of another party going through the mines, and with the exception of 15% damage reduction that I don't have the points to pick up yet, I don't think I was the terrible one.
I suppose I could have been more assertive and asked if anyone had cc and so on. Truth is, I'm kinda a timid tank, especially when I don't put together the group. No one said anything about their specs either, so that was a mistake too. Essentially 3 dps and either one healer or half a healer, I dunno.
Communication was hell. After one or two wipes and near-misses, I'd identified the type of mob spawn that was giving me trouble, and then the one talking dps decided that we could kill a mob spawn double that, I was in the midst of typing asking for some cc, when the rogue decided he would sneak in and cc one, but forgot his pet was visible, so everything aggro'ed, and we wiped again. Healer quit at this point. (One of the other dps had wordlessly dropped too.)
At which point, I decided to salvage what was left of the situation and bow out too, but feeling somewhat inadequate. I always have this problem. I keep questioning myself if there was something I could have done.
Most likely the reality is that there were a lot of other factors and possible things that could have offset my tendency to squish. Such as buffs and support builds and/or someone else bothering to offheal or offttank or cc. After all, they squished really fast after I died, which suggests they weren't capable of tanking it either.
But I still feel like an insecure wreck for daring to tank as a *gasp* cleric, because warriors are *supposed* to tank, y'know. (Say the naysayers.)
Of course, reality coldly points out that there WERE two warriors on that team, and they wanted to dps, and wanted someone else to tank. (And someone else to heal.) So the old argument has no leg to stand on, in this case.
So I guess it boils down to bad nightmare PUG and a whole lot of wishing that I had one of those dynamic duos going on where one guy tanks and one guy heals, and they always do this together and become real pro at it. Or hell, I'll settle for hybrid healtanks that split aggro or something.
I miss my first Iron Tombs teams when we had a whole load of tank specs - a mage with a tank pet, a rogue with a tank spec, me, and a whole load of excess heals from random folks. :(
Long story short, I managed to get into the group when I offered to tank, though I did warn them that I hadn't done the dungeon before and received stoney silence from three people in the group with one last guy bothering to communicate that no prob, nothing special.
Mobs hit pretty hard, and right away it was pretty obvious that either I was a little squishy or the one healer wasn't cutting it fairly well. Been staring at my build since though, and a video of another party going through the mines, and with the exception of 15% damage reduction that I don't have the points to pick up yet, I don't think I was the terrible one.
I suppose I could have been more assertive and asked if anyone had cc and so on. Truth is, I'm kinda a timid tank, especially when I don't put together the group. No one said anything about their specs either, so that was a mistake too. Essentially 3 dps and either one healer or half a healer, I dunno.
Communication was hell. After one or two wipes and near-misses, I'd identified the type of mob spawn that was giving me trouble, and then the one talking dps decided that we could kill a mob spawn double that, I was in the midst of typing asking for some cc, when the rogue decided he would sneak in and cc one, but forgot his pet was visible, so everything aggro'ed, and we wiped again. Healer quit at this point. (One of the other dps had wordlessly dropped too.)
At which point, I decided to salvage what was left of the situation and bow out too, but feeling somewhat inadequate. I always have this problem. I keep questioning myself if there was something I could have done.
Most likely the reality is that there were a lot of other factors and possible things that could have offset my tendency to squish. Such as buffs and support builds and/or someone else bothering to offheal or offttank or cc. After all, they squished really fast after I died, which suggests they weren't capable of tanking it either.
But I still feel like an insecure wreck for daring to tank as a *gasp* cleric, because warriors are *supposed* to tank, y'know. (Say the naysayers.)
Of course, reality coldly points out that there WERE two warriors on that team, and they wanted to dps, and wanted someone else to tank. (And someone else to heal.) So the old argument has no leg to stand on, in this case.
So I guess it boils down to bad nightmare PUG and a whole lot of wishing that I had one of those dynamic duos going on where one guy tanks and one guy heals, and they always do this together and become real pro at it. Or hell, I'll settle for hybrid healtanks that split aggro or something.
I miss my first Iron Tombs teams when we had a whole load of tank specs - a mage with a tank pet, a rogue with a tank spec, me, and a whole load of excess heals from random folks. :(
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Fairy Isle in Blocky World
The underwater world and the island farm didn't turn out as well.
Started retiling the house with sandstone and clay after my colleague said it looked medieval. Look! A tiled linoleum floor! Too bad wall texture aren't shiny enough.
Made an orchard...not sure whether to turn it into a farm or tree-farm...
Still want to make an underwater world...but it would need a lot of coal to make glass. And that means mining.
Maybe I should buy my own copy of Minecraft. :P
Started retiling the house with sandstone and clay after my colleague said it looked medieval. Look! A tiled linoleum floor! Too bad wall texture aren't shiny enough.
Made an orchard...not sure whether to turn it into a farm or tree-farm...
Still want to make an underwater world...but it would need a lot of coal to make glass. And that means mining.
Maybe I should buy my own copy of Minecraft. :P
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Garden wall in blocky world
After 6 hours on Minecraft...
This is the house that Jack built
This is the other view of the house that Jack built, with an indoor pool.
This is the stairs going down to the (incomplete) bedroom.
This is the 'Living tree fence' that is still being grown/pruned.
This is the house that Jack built
This is the other view of the house that Jack built, with an indoor pool.
This is the stairs going down to the (incomplete) bedroom.
This is the 'Living tree fence' that is still being grown/pruned.
Failure is Rarely Interesting
Or, put differently, in video games, failure is rarely interesting. (The Sims again comes to mind as a game that makes failure interesting. I fail in my friendship bid and now I’ve got an enemy. What other video games make failure a part of the story?)
--- Chuck Wendig, Once Upon a Playtime II: Revenge of the Gamestory
The linked blog post and comments are full of crunchy bits on story, and what makes story in games, and the possible significance of storyworld/setting over actual story. We'll talk about those at another time, including the interesting concept of self-created player narrative from 'blobs' or storylets or bits and pieces supplied by the game into one's own personal story for one's character (which is stuff you can find in gamebooks, Echo Bazaar, certain tabletop RPGs and maybe but not quite Interactive Fiction), as contrasted with the more linear railroaded cutscene forms.
What I do want to discuss is the concept of a failure state being interesting.
Many games don't do this. Game over. The End. You're Dead. Fade to Black. Insert New Coin into Slot to Restart.
(Which is probably how the abrupt, unrewarding failure state developed - through arcade games that wanted to keep you paying for new lives to play.)
But in games in which you now buy a box and expect to be able to play to completion without inserting coin into slot, it pretty much becomes 'reload save game' on death or failure.
Some FPSes and action games have evolved to the point where they don't even bother to make you select a save, they resurrect you at previously demarcated autosave points or at your last save, etc. Some don't even bother with health any longer - as long as you don't take an excessive amount of damage in a certain scene, you're fine and invincible and immortal taking seconds to regenerate health like one of the superheroic military werewolves of my invented fantasy/sci-fi milleu. (Except you're supposed to be a regular Joe in World War II, that is.)
RPGs are less creative on the whole, fail and you reload to replay the last battle in which you or your entire party wiped. Or instead of reloading, you resurrect. Same idea. Planescape: Torment already broke the standard RPG mold when they wrapped this 'breaking the fourth wall' concept neatly into the story. The Nameless One really truly does have many lives (to screw up with) and will keep resurrecting in that dingy morgue until he gets it right or reaches some sort of final end.
Online RPGs or MMOs, rather, lifted the same idea lock, stock and barrel. Die, and you get to go to your own respawn point, often far away from the battle you wanted to fight and that killed you. Innovations here were more developments of convenience. With multiplayer, it meant that certain players could actually resurrect you on the spot, instead of you having to wander your way back to your corpse.
(Of course, the fantasy trope is that only the priests or clerics get to heal and rez. And the amateur designer thought this would make the class 'wanted' or 'desired.' Unanticipated side effect: making all the other classes less wanted or desired. Or the other flaw was that it was just a stopgap 'encouragement' measure for a class that wasn't that interesting to play to begin with.)
Then of course, they got rid of decay, equipment loss and finally corpses because people gradually lost patience with the possibility of losing equipment when your corpse decays. But the bottom line remains. Screw up and you die and get to go back to square one and restart and try it again. The failure state is black screen boring and a screeching halt to any sort of narrative.
It doesn't have to be. And certain games are slowly but surely carving out pioneer paths through this wilderness.
One of the most memorable moments I ever had in an MMO was one of the first attempts at the Terra Volta reactor trial in City of Heroes, when +3 Skyraiders were a genuine scary threat to innocent newbs attempting it at minimum level expecting to succeed. Usually this ends in utter unfun floor-smearing instant failure. We lucked into a team combination that wasn't overpowering strong (not enough damage, tanks + controllers), and yet not utterly weak. Somewhere on the last wave or penultimate wave, a cascade of failure events brought down one tank, then another controller, and then the blaster died and so on until only I was left on the last tank.
Swamped by enemies, with piss poor damage, it was only a matter of time. I had pretty much resigned myself, when a chance comment by a teammate, "Got an awaken?" led me to check my tray and yes, I did have one! Stuck in rooted and surrounded by a mass of Skyraiders like flies to honey, I struggled to the nearest player I could see and shoved him my last awaken. (I don't think I was smart enough at that stage to examine powersets and check who could rez. I might have just asked who could rez and needed it.)
He staggered upright as I heroically attempted to pull all aggro away from him, ran a couple steps away from the fray, ate an AoE and fell smack down on top of another player. Or something like that. Oh no. That was it, I thought. But apparently this close vicinity allowed the other (dead) player to shove him another awaken, or something like that. Somehow I saw one player stagger upright again. And then another as he got rezzed. And another.
By this time I was close to dying, and I may indeed have died and gotten another rez at some point, but the bottom line was that the team survived, and pulled out the win from the jaws of defeat. It was indeed failure, Terra Volta trials are blindfolded easy these days if you bring overleveled people or stack buffs or just people who know how to play, but it was interesting failure with a chance to recover from it.
This is something I hope works out well for Guild Wars 2. The new 'downed' state offers a middle line between success and failure. As long as a few players survive, they might hold out long enough to revive the group - partial failure, but it offers the chance for interesting heroic narratives - I saved the others. I sacrificed myself for others. Unsoweiter.
The necromancer class in GW2 has an even more interesting failure state. When 'downed,' they get to turn into a spectral form with death shroud and get a number of kickass powers. I'm not sure if they can recover from this state back into life, or if they will inexorably slip away into death like GW1's decaying minions But damn, who wouldn't want to get some revenge on the thing that killed you before dying? Mutual kill for the dramatic, if not actual, win.
Take Echo Bazaar, the origin of all this failure state speculation of mine. There are negative stats that you don't really want to increase that quickly. Wounds. Scandal. And Nightmare. Ah, good old Nightmare. I was dreading the failure state when Nightmare hit 8 - afraid to find out what would happen to me, and what the hell would happen when I went insane. Would it be irrevocable?
Eventually, I did smash right through the threshold and landed in a new area known as 'a state of some confusion.' When you go mad, you get new storylet choices - the goal of which is to reduce your Nightmare stat to zero, in order to get out and get back to Fallen London.
This is a failure state. You're wasting actions grinding and trying to get out and get back to whatever it is you were trying to do. But it is Interesting with a capital I at the same time because there's new narrative. There's even an opposite sub-goal in which you can try and maintain Nightmare long enough to Track Down the Manager (whose purpose I am still trying to figure out).
By golly, I wouldn't want to go insane from nightmares often, but when I'm there, at least I still have interesting stuff to do and strive for and look forward to. I take it that Wounds and Scandal work in similar ways. I'm not in a hurry to increase those, but when I do fall into those failure states, I am confident they will at least be somewhat interesting to experience.
I am reminded of a few MUDs in which death was a soul-walking experience. One ends up in some sort of maze or netherworld, and one has to solve some sort of puzzle, or contact some cleric in order to help you out of it. They may not have been implemented that well, but the idea was there. Of trying to make death and failure interesting.
More MMOs need to do this.
Rift has a very basic version of this for the player. The first death is a light slap on the wrist, you turn into a ghost that can soul walk and move away from the fray, because you're coming right back to life in five seconds or so. The subsequent deaths follow the respawn at a rez shrine, now hoof it back to your grave model - which is less fun. None of this is actually interesting though, it's more about shortening the inconvenience time.
But what Rift does have, is interesting failure states for their public quest events of Rifts and Invasions. In the sense that if the Rifts are left alone (as they would be if no one bothered, or if players tried and failed and got scared off - which they rarely do), they pump out little invasion packs that fixate on a quest hub, and travel along roads to get there.
If you ignore the invasions, then interesting consequences happen. You no longer get to travel unmolested along roads. It's the mobs' territory and they will steamroll over you if you were blissfully unaware and rode right into them. They walk all over your quest hubs and demolish your wardstone (all your quest NPCs respond and react and fight back and die if you don't help them) and stick their own planar idol in its place. And sit there ravening. Oh, and the planar idol pumps out its own invasion forces.
There is, of course, the chance of recovery back to success or normality. (Without it, it would just be frustrating.) The events trigger and scale to the number of players in the zone. The AI director (to steal a term and example from L4D) knows what the players are likely to be able to cope with.
The rift mobs have been tweaked to be more easily pullable and separated from their groups - which is a crucial strategy for insufficient numbers of players to eventually whittle their way to victory, even if they have to suicide kamikaze each mob, assuming sufficient motivation to. When they all leashed together more tightly during beta, one could see people getting frustrated and deciding to move off after dying too often and not being able to find a tank sturdy enough.
It's a tricky balance point, no doubt. How to make failure interesting, but not SO interesting that people are lining up to trigger the failure states. But one worth looking for.
--- Chuck Wendig, Once Upon a Playtime II: Revenge of the Gamestory
The linked blog post and comments are full of crunchy bits on story, and what makes story in games, and the possible significance of storyworld/setting over actual story. We'll talk about those at another time, including the interesting concept of self-created player narrative from 'blobs' or storylets or bits and pieces supplied by the game into one's own personal story for one's character (which is stuff you can find in gamebooks, Echo Bazaar, certain tabletop RPGs and maybe but not quite Interactive Fiction), as contrasted with the more linear railroaded cutscene forms.
What I do want to discuss is the concept of a failure state being interesting.
Many games don't do this. Game over. The End. You're Dead. Fade to Black. Insert New Coin into Slot to Restart.
(Which is probably how the abrupt, unrewarding failure state developed - through arcade games that wanted to keep you paying for new lives to play.)
But in games in which you now buy a box and expect to be able to play to completion without inserting coin into slot, it pretty much becomes 'reload save game' on death or failure.
Some FPSes and action games have evolved to the point where they don't even bother to make you select a save, they resurrect you at previously demarcated autosave points or at your last save, etc. Some don't even bother with health any longer - as long as you don't take an excessive amount of damage in a certain scene, you're fine and invincible and immortal taking seconds to regenerate health like one of the superheroic military werewolves of my invented fantasy/sci-fi milleu. (Except you're supposed to be a regular Joe in World War II, that is.)
RPGs are less creative on the whole, fail and you reload to replay the last battle in which you or your entire party wiped. Or instead of reloading, you resurrect. Same idea. Planescape: Torment already broke the standard RPG mold when they wrapped this 'breaking the fourth wall' concept neatly into the story. The Nameless One really truly does have many lives (to screw up with) and will keep resurrecting in that dingy morgue until he gets it right or reaches some sort of final end.
Online RPGs or MMOs, rather, lifted the same idea lock, stock and barrel. Die, and you get to go to your own respawn point, often far away from the battle you wanted to fight and that killed you. Innovations here were more developments of convenience. With multiplayer, it meant that certain players could actually resurrect you on the spot, instead of you having to wander your way back to your corpse.
(Of course, the fantasy trope is that only the priests or clerics get to heal and rez. And the amateur designer thought this would make the class 'wanted' or 'desired.' Unanticipated side effect: making all the other classes less wanted or desired. Or the other flaw was that it was just a stopgap 'encouragement' measure for a class that wasn't that interesting to play to begin with.)
Then of course, they got rid of decay, equipment loss and finally corpses because people gradually lost patience with the possibility of losing equipment when your corpse decays. But the bottom line remains. Screw up and you die and get to go back to square one and restart and try it again. The failure state is black screen boring and a screeching halt to any sort of narrative.
It doesn't have to be. And certain games are slowly but surely carving out pioneer paths through this wilderness.
One of the most memorable moments I ever had in an MMO was one of the first attempts at the Terra Volta reactor trial in City of Heroes, when +3 Skyraiders were a genuine scary threat to innocent newbs attempting it at minimum level expecting to succeed. Usually this ends in utter unfun floor-smearing instant failure. We lucked into a team combination that wasn't overpowering strong (not enough damage, tanks + controllers), and yet not utterly weak. Somewhere on the last wave or penultimate wave, a cascade of failure events brought down one tank, then another controller, and then the blaster died and so on until only I was left on the last tank.
Swamped by enemies, with piss poor damage, it was only a matter of time. I had pretty much resigned myself, when a chance comment by a teammate, "Got an awaken?" led me to check my tray and yes, I did have one! Stuck in rooted and surrounded by a mass of Skyraiders like flies to honey, I struggled to the nearest player I could see and shoved him my last awaken. (I don't think I was smart enough at that stage to examine powersets and check who could rez. I might have just asked who could rez and needed it.)
He staggered upright as I heroically attempted to pull all aggro away from him, ran a couple steps away from the fray, ate an AoE and fell smack down on top of another player. Or something like that. Oh no. That was it, I thought. But apparently this close vicinity allowed the other (dead) player to shove him another awaken, or something like that. Somehow I saw one player stagger upright again. And then another as he got rezzed. And another.
By this time I was close to dying, and I may indeed have died and gotten another rez at some point, but the bottom line was that the team survived, and pulled out the win from the jaws of defeat. It was indeed failure, Terra Volta trials are blindfolded easy these days if you bring overleveled people or stack buffs or just people who know how to play, but it was interesting failure with a chance to recover from it.
This is something I hope works out well for Guild Wars 2. The new 'downed' state offers a middle line between success and failure. As long as a few players survive, they might hold out long enough to revive the group - partial failure, but it offers the chance for interesting heroic narratives - I saved the others. I sacrificed myself for others. Unsoweiter.
The necromancer class in GW2 has an even more interesting failure state. When 'downed,' they get to turn into a spectral form with death shroud and get a number of kickass powers. I'm not sure if they can recover from this state back into life, or if they will inexorably slip away into death like GW1's decaying minions But damn, who wouldn't want to get some revenge on the thing that killed you before dying? Mutual kill for the dramatic, if not actual, win.
Take Echo Bazaar, the origin of all this failure state speculation of mine. There are negative stats that you don't really want to increase that quickly. Wounds. Scandal. And Nightmare. Ah, good old Nightmare. I was dreading the failure state when Nightmare hit 8 - afraid to find out what would happen to me, and what the hell would happen when I went insane. Would it be irrevocable?
Eventually, I did smash right through the threshold and landed in a new area known as 'a state of some confusion.' When you go mad, you get new storylet choices - the goal of which is to reduce your Nightmare stat to zero, in order to get out and get back to Fallen London.
This is a failure state. You're wasting actions grinding and trying to get out and get back to whatever it is you were trying to do. But it is Interesting with a capital I at the same time because there's new narrative. There's even an opposite sub-goal in which you can try and maintain Nightmare long enough to Track Down the Manager (whose purpose I am still trying to figure out).
By golly, I wouldn't want to go insane from nightmares often, but when I'm there, at least I still have interesting stuff to do and strive for and look forward to. I take it that Wounds and Scandal work in similar ways. I'm not in a hurry to increase those, but when I do fall into those failure states, I am confident they will at least be somewhat interesting to experience.
I am reminded of a few MUDs in which death was a soul-walking experience. One ends up in some sort of maze or netherworld, and one has to solve some sort of puzzle, or contact some cleric in order to help you out of it. They may not have been implemented that well, but the idea was there. Of trying to make death and failure interesting.
More MMOs need to do this.
Rift has a very basic version of this for the player. The first death is a light slap on the wrist, you turn into a ghost that can soul walk and move away from the fray, because you're coming right back to life in five seconds or so. The subsequent deaths follow the respawn at a rez shrine, now hoof it back to your grave model - which is less fun. None of this is actually interesting though, it's more about shortening the inconvenience time.
But what Rift does have, is interesting failure states for their public quest events of Rifts and Invasions. In the sense that if the Rifts are left alone (as they would be if no one bothered, or if players tried and failed and got scared off - which they rarely do), they pump out little invasion packs that fixate on a quest hub, and travel along roads to get there.
If you ignore the invasions, then interesting consequences happen. You no longer get to travel unmolested along roads. It's the mobs' territory and they will steamroll over you if you were blissfully unaware and rode right into them. They walk all over your quest hubs and demolish your wardstone (all your quest NPCs respond and react and fight back and die if you don't help them) and stick their own planar idol in its place. And sit there ravening. Oh, and the planar idol pumps out its own invasion forces.
There is, of course, the chance of recovery back to success or normality. (Without it, it would just be frustrating.) The events trigger and scale to the number of players in the zone. The AI director (to steal a term and example from L4D) knows what the players are likely to be able to cope with.
The rift mobs have been tweaked to be more easily pullable and separated from their groups - which is a crucial strategy for insufficient numbers of players to eventually whittle their way to victory, even if they have to suicide kamikaze each mob, assuming sufficient motivation to. When they all leashed together more tightly during beta, one could see people getting frustrated and deciding to move off after dying too often and not being able to find a tank sturdy enough.
It's a tricky balance point, no doubt. How to make failure interesting, but not SO interesting that people are lining up to trigger the failure states. But one worth looking for.
Everyone Else's Fault But Mine
So I've been playing Rift, and decided to join the mega-guild of The Older Gamers, having determined that there were no other smaller guilds that would suit me on my chosen server during my timezone. In some ways, it works well for me. It's a big pool of affiliated people. You see each other around. There's the guild channel for forming groups for dungeons (and the secondary option of regional chat to pull from the public pool.) And when we do an event, we can make up an entire raid and it looks uber cool to have twenty people standing around zerging things. There's a lot of people, so one still has relative anonymity, one doesn't feel obliged to chat if they don't want to, and there's still people talking on guild channel.
Which, of course, leads straight to pet peeve(s) of the day. With so many people in the guild, chances are likely that they are all not like you. And have different standards of civility and behavior and so on.
On the forums, there were apparently one or two incidents on the Teamspeak server of generational clashes, where the 'younger' TOG'ers were throwing around f-bombs and sh-ts every five words or so, and the 'family group' TOG'ers were getting very tired of the vulgarity, especially if they were using speakers and the entire household (kids included) were treated to surround sound cussing.
This, fortunately, does not bother me overmuch.
However, tonight, a overly chatty guildie was pretty much pushing all my 'ugh' buttons and making me want to shove guild chat into another chat window so that my eyes could be spared from automatically reading his inane comments. First, it was lame cheesy jokes. On cheese.
Ok, mildly annoying, but I can ignore it.
Then it was random comments that revealed his ignorance on the game and mechanics, plus random stabs at game designing that went far off the mark (perhaps intentionally, as a 'joke.')
Sighs. I'm biased and prejudiced, yes. I have elitist tendencies and I tend to pre-judge people who act like experts while showing that they really know nothing. But nevermind, this is what gamers tend to do. (Meaning both what he did and what I felt about it.)
And last of all, this is the crucial whine/rant that pushed me into doing my own personal whine/rant on this blog... he started commenting about PvP. Or rather, how our faction sucks at the PvP warfronts (aka WoW battlegrounds or WAR scenarios, ie pre-made arenas with objectives.) And consistently loses.
Some other guy agreed with him, saying they've lost every single warfront they tried, our faction sucks. A more sane voice of reason from a third guy comments neutrally that it's probably because the 'evil rebel' faction tends to attract less healers.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking: Y'know, I've WON practically every warfront I've played lately.
And yes, I recently swapped to a healer/dps hybrid for PvP, with emphasis on the instant heals and HoTs - and there are usually only 1-3 (4 if we're lucky) healers (me included) in a pool of 10-15 players on one side. But that's enough to win fairly consistently 60-75% of the time. (Presumably the other side doesn't have as many healers, or cannot identify our side's healers quickly enough to take them out yet.)
But that's just it. Why is it everybody else's fault but mine to some people?
I'm not a great healer. I'm not even spec'ed as a pure healer. There's usually one pure healer that tops the leaderboard charts, and I'm ranked 2nd or 3rd or 4th. But by offering supporting heals to the rabidly blind warriors and rogues who chiong at the enemy and keeping them alive for just a teensy bit longer than usual, by pumping clerics and mages full of secondary heals and helping to kb away or dps down any random rogues that wander into the back line, that seems to tilt the tide enough for some effect.
I don't see them altering their specs when they feel something is wrong.
Funny story. My first few PvP warfronts, I took my melee-centric heal-tank spec into battle. While he was practically unkillable should a rogue be so nice as to cozy up next to me and fight me one on one, I found him pretty useless for anything else but a few supporting spot heals and a lot of aimless trying-to-run-up-to-people-running-away-from-me wading through molasses (cos I got slowed and snared) and one or two tickles with my few ranged spells on long cooldowns. We lost a lot more warfronts then. I wonder why.
So I switched to a spec that had heals and HoTs and supposedly AoE damage. And my win/loss ratio went up to about 50/50. It was still not playing very well because the AoE damage component had long cast times. I'm not a very good player when I have to anticipate 1.5 to 2 second cast times. And no one stays still in PvP long enough for any of my high mana consumption AoE to hit effectively. (As contrasted with a PvE scenario with a pet tank herding stuff, I suppose.) And the time I spend locked in a spell animation trying to do damage to someone running out of range, is time I don't spend healing the random rabid people running out of their own healer's range into a ravening mass of 5 enemies.
New respec time. This time I found another offensive soul to replace the AoE damage soul. This one had a very decent instant cast DoT that sneakily did a lot of damage (while healing me for 90% of the damage done) and a 2 second player-based AoE mini-nuke that increased damage the more things it could hit within ranged (sorta damage reflecting off each other.) I don't get to fire the mini-nuke so often in PvP (it rocks face in controlled PvE situations though) but I did put together a very decent instant-cast burst attack chain that can make a non-healing enemy backpedal quickly because half his health is disappearing.
And as I said, our faction appears to win 3 out of 4 warfronts now.
It's not as if it's hard to change specs in Rift. The money cost is minimal. 3 classes out of 4 can heal if they wanted to. The last class, the warrior, cannot heal - but they do have a void knight spec that is apparently designed to neutralize magic-using classes (reflect spells, mana-draining, etc.) There is a mage spec called a dominator (hahaha) that is specialized in cc of all types.
For heaven's sake, if everybody on our side sucks, YOU'RE evidently not helping either.
If more people realized that and attempted to improve their play juuust a little bit, I would almost guarantee an improvement. Of course, you could always just complain and whine and rant that everybody else is not playing up to standard and keep doing the same old thing (and since everyone else thinks like that and keeps doing their same old things), everyone will keep entering warfronts and losing.
In. Hole. Stop. Digging.
Common sense, no? But it ain't common anymore.
*pants* Ok. Pet peeve worked out of system. I'm alright now.
On a related note, being part of a big guild also seems to make one a huge target for attacks. Not in PvP, no. Our forums seem to have been compromised by a webscript or code injection of some kind, possibly from an ad. Roughly 24 hours ago, while I had a ton of website tabs open, including the TOG forums, Zonealarm triggered an alert saying that Wscript.exe wanted to communicate out to the internet... to some kind of Ukraine IP address.
Aiiieeeeee. No no no. Deny deny deny access.
Then I cussed and swore and spent the next 24 hours downloading AVG and Malwarebytes and Kaspersky (whose latest install version wanted to make me remove Zonealarm - hell no. I eventually found a ye olde virus removal tool that played nice with ZA. That was the only program that did manage to find a supposed trojan lurking in my Temporary Internet Files directory under a 20.tmp and a load2.php filenames, dated and timed the approximate same date and time that ZA triggered the alert.)
I presume that was the culprit. Still not relaxed yet. And I'm a little scared to go back to the forum pages now (because others have reported their anti-virus programs triggering and blocking stuff from the same forum).
Constant vigilance, I suppose.
Which, of course, leads straight to pet peeve(s) of the day. With so many people in the guild, chances are likely that they are all not like you. And have different standards of civility and behavior and so on.
On the forums, there were apparently one or two incidents on the Teamspeak server of generational clashes, where the 'younger' TOG'ers were throwing around f-bombs and sh-ts every five words or so, and the 'family group' TOG'ers were getting very tired of the vulgarity, especially if they were using speakers and the entire household (kids included) were treated to surround sound cussing.
This, fortunately, does not bother me overmuch.
However, tonight, a overly chatty guildie was pretty much pushing all my 'ugh' buttons and making me want to shove guild chat into another chat window so that my eyes could be spared from automatically reading his inane comments. First, it was lame cheesy jokes. On cheese.
Ok, mildly annoying, but I can ignore it.
Then it was random comments that revealed his ignorance on the game and mechanics, plus random stabs at game designing that went far off the mark (perhaps intentionally, as a 'joke.')
Sighs. I'm biased and prejudiced, yes. I have elitist tendencies and I tend to pre-judge people who act like experts while showing that they really know nothing. But nevermind, this is what gamers tend to do. (Meaning both what he did and what I felt about it.)
And last of all, this is the crucial whine/rant that pushed me into doing my own personal whine/rant on this blog... he started commenting about PvP. Or rather, how our faction sucks at the PvP warfronts (aka WoW battlegrounds or WAR scenarios, ie pre-made arenas with objectives.) And consistently loses.
Some other guy agreed with him, saying they've lost every single warfront they tried, our faction sucks. A more sane voice of reason from a third guy comments neutrally that it's probably because the 'evil rebel' faction tends to attract less healers.
Meanwhile, I'm thinking: Y'know, I've WON practically every warfront I've played lately.
And yes, I recently swapped to a healer/dps hybrid for PvP, with emphasis on the instant heals and HoTs - and there are usually only 1-3 (4 if we're lucky) healers (me included) in a pool of 10-15 players on one side. But that's enough to win fairly consistently 60-75% of the time. (Presumably the other side doesn't have as many healers, or cannot identify our side's healers quickly enough to take them out yet.)
But that's just it. Why is it everybody else's fault but mine to some people?
I'm not a great healer. I'm not even spec'ed as a pure healer. There's usually one pure healer that tops the leaderboard charts, and I'm ranked 2nd or 3rd or 4th. But by offering supporting heals to the rabidly blind warriors and rogues who chiong at the enemy and keeping them alive for just a teensy bit longer than usual, by pumping clerics and mages full of secondary heals and helping to kb away or dps down any random rogues that wander into the back line, that seems to tilt the tide enough for some effect.
I don't see them altering their specs when they feel something is wrong.
Funny story. My first few PvP warfronts, I took my melee-centric heal-tank spec into battle. While he was practically unkillable should a rogue be so nice as to cozy up next to me and fight me one on one, I found him pretty useless for anything else but a few supporting spot heals and a lot of aimless trying-to-run-up-to-people-running-away-from-me wading through molasses (cos I got slowed and snared) and one or two tickles with my few ranged spells on long cooldowns. We lost a lot more warfronts then. I wonder why.
So I switched to a spec that had heals and HoTs and supposedly AoE damage. And my win/loss ratio went up to about 50/50. It was still not playing very well because the AoE damage component had long cast times. I'm not a very good player when I have to anticipate 1.5 to 2 second cast times. And no one stays still in PvP long enough for any of my high mana consumption AoE to hit effectively. (As contrasted with a PvE scenario with a pet tank herding stuff, I suppose.) And the time I spend locked in a spell animation trying to do damage to someone running out of range, is time I don't spend healing the random rabid people running out of their own healer's range into a ravening mass of 5 enemies.
New respec time. This time I found another offensive soul to replace the AoE damage soul. This one had a very decent instant cast DoT that sneakily did a lot of damage (while healing me for 90% of the damage done) and a 2 second player-based AoE mini-nuke that increased damage the more things it could hit within ranged (sorta damage reflecting off each other.) I don't get to fire the mini-nuke so often in PvP (it rocks face in controlled PvE situations though) but I did put together a very decent instant-cast burst attack chain that can make a non-healing enemy backpedal quickly because half his health is disappearing.
And as I said, our faction appears to win 3 out of 4 warfronts now.
It's not as if it's hard to change specs in Rift. The money cost is minimal. 3 classes out of 4 can heal if they wanted to. The last class, the warrior, cannot heal - but they do have a void knight spec that is apparently designed to neutralize magic-using classes (reflect spells, mana-draining, etc.) There is a mage spec called a dominator (hahaha) that is specialized in cc of all types.
For heaven's sake, if everybody on our side sucks, YOU'RE evidently not helping either.
If more people realized that and attempted to improve their play juuust a little bit, I would almost guarantee an improvement. Of course, you could always just complain and whine and rant that everybody else is not playing up to standard and keep doing the same old thing (and since everyone else thinks like that and keeps doing their same old things), everyone will keep entering warfronts and losing.
In. Hole. Stop. Digging.
Common sense, no? But it ain't common anymore.
*pants* Ok. Pet peeve worked out of system. I'm alright now.
On a related note, being part of a big guild also seems to make one a huge target for attacks. Not in PvP, no. Our forums seem to have been compromised by a webscript or code injection of some kind, possibly from an ad. Roughly 24 hours ago, while I had a ton of website tabs open, including the TOG forums, Zonealarm triggered an alert saying that Wscript.exe wanted to communicate out to the internet... to some kind of Ukraine IP address.
Aiiieeeeee. No no no. Deny deny deny access.
Then I cussed and swore and spent the next 24 hours downloading AVG and Malwarebytes and Kaspersky (whose latest install version wanted to make me remove Zonealarm - hell no. I eventually found a ye olde virus removal tool that played nice with ZA. That was the only program that did manage to find a supposed trojan lurking in my Temporary Internet Files directory under a 20.tmp and a load2.php filenames, dated and timed the approximate same date and time that ZA triggered the alert.)
I presume that was the culprit. Still not relaxed yet. And I'm a little scared to go back to the forum pages now (because others have reported their anti-virus programs triggering and blocking stuff from the same forum).
Constant vigilance, I suppose.
Friday, March 11, 2011
Adventures at the Top of the Blocky World
World 3 of Minecraft:
A slightly more ambitious attempt to do something different than a hole/cavern in a ground-level stone face, a castle watchtower and a walled beachfront resort with a growing MRT line made out of minecarts (see earlier Minecraft pics.)
I have been peacefully beavering away in this world for some time. Built a glass and wood house (hut) for my first few days, then went exploring and found a really tall mountain cliff, and deciding to mine UP instead of down. So my first long-lasting shelter consists of a tiny little semi-concealed back door
a small humble shelter area and a little staircase
up to what I would eventually treat as my front door
The top of this cliff was pretty grassy, and I flattened it out a bit more, thinking to have a nice foundation for a bigger house. There were all these livestock that kept turning up all around me though. Eventually converted all the sides into impromptu fenced farm funnel points. Anything that spawns anywhere on the mountain tends to fall down into the fenced off areas baa'ing and oink'ing and clucking away reproachfully at me.
It was a shame to build on top of my new grassy free-from-livestock lawn though.
So in true fantasy physics fashion, I present my three-story house on top of a cliff.
As in, jutting out of the cliff on 'reclaimed' cobblestone land
And this is me clearing the undergrowth at the base of the cliff with a casual forest fire.
(As in most of Minecraft's casually set and unplanned fires, the fire actually surprised me by jumping an air gap and started burning an arch of two very old oak trees that I had intended to leave around for an arched gateway. Ah well, I didn't like them that much anyway.)
Somewhere in between Minecraft updates, my pretty ever-burning log fire was destroyed. (Logs now burn up in a few seconds when set on fire.)
I eventually have to open a portal into Hell and get some Netherrack, which are the new everburning blocks now.
Meanwhile, my fireplace sat cold and empty and lifeless...
Until today, when I was minding my own business ferrying stuff from house 1 to house 2, I felt the fireplace watching me.
A slightly more ambitious attempt to do something different than a hole/cavern in a ground-level stone face, a castle watchtower and a walled beachfront resort with a growing MRT line made out of minecarts (see earlier Minecraft pics.)
I have been peacefully beavering away in this world for some time. Built a glass and wood house (hut) for my first few days, then went exploring and found a really tall mountain cliff, and deciding to mine UP instead of down. So my first long-lasting shelter consists of a tiny little semi-concealed back door
a small humble shelter area and a little staircase
up to what I would eventually treat as my front door
The top of this cliff was pretty grassy, and I flattened it out a bit more, thinking to have a nice foundation for a bigger house. There were all these livestock that kept turning up all around me though. Eventually converted all the sides into impromptu fenced farm funnel points. Anything that spawns anywhere on the mountain tends to fall down into the fenced off areas baa'ing and oink'ing and clucking away reproachfully at me.
It was a shame to build on top of my new grassy free-from-livestock lawn though.
So in true fantasy physics fashion, I present my three-story house on top of a cliff.
As in, jutting out of the cliff on 'reclaimed' cobblestone land
And this is me clearing the undergrowth at the base of the cliff with a casual forest fire.
(As in most of Minecraft's casually set and unplanned fires, the fire actually surprised me by jumping an air gap and started burning an arch of two very old oak trees that I had intended to leave around for an arched gateway. Ah well, I didn't like them that much anyway.)
Somewhere in between Minecraft updates, my pretty ever-burning log fire was destroyed. (Logs now burn up in a few seconds when set on fire.)
I eventually have to open a portal into Hell and get some Netherrack, which are the new everburning blocks now.
Meanwhile, my fireplace sat cold and empty and lifeless...
Until today, when I was minding my own business ferrying stuff from house 1 to house 2, I felt the fireplace watching me.
Monday, March 07, 2011
Browser here, Browser there
Spent the whole of Sunday (and some Monday) playing browser games when the desktop at my parents' place died. Had decided to set up my father's new laptop to be able to read and edit LaTeX so that I could do my work, but instead got distracted by the browser games I was fiddling with during the lengthy installations.
Browser games are really sophisticated these days. But our old choose-your-own-adventure style games still exist. Age of Fable let's you play different pre-made characters and set them to explore a fantasy Middle East-like world. You can also create your own characters but I haven't tried it yet.
One of the "happy endings" I got:
Browser games are really sophisticated these days. But our old choose-your-own-adventure style games still exist. Age of Fable let's you play different pre-made characters and set them to explore a fantasy Middle East-like world. You can also create your own characters but I haven't tried it yet.
One of the "happy endings" I got:
Sunday, March 06, 2011
Evolution of RPGs
And no, not the computer game kind. The tabletop versions. (Except not really, either. See why below.)
Honestly, this is a trumped up post in order to introduce a new flavor of hilarity I just discovered, known as "Action Castle."
Basically, think old text adventure game with crappy parser, played aloud with a GM as the computer narrator/parser and as many as 2-50+ players taking turns to do stuff.
It had a little time in the gaming spotlight when some guy caught the Penny Arcade fellows at a Q&A by surprise - though you can barely hear anything over the laughter of the audience. This was a slightly more organised PAX group that lined up to take turns.
I found it via casual browsing at RPGNow, which was being browsed not-so-casually and with some purpose because this weekend celebrates GM Day - a good excuse to slash prices off 25%. Not a major discount, but still a discount, which implied start browsing for cheap stuff that I might like, and/or one or two rare expensive stuff that I might not find for a long time at a discount.
Action Castle was 99 cents. Which seemed amusing enough to pick it up to flip through the few pages to see how it was supposed to be run and add it to my digital RPG collection. Now I don't have much hope of actually playing it, since this RPG is decidedly on the opposite end of the scale of RPG evolution. That is, social and meant for large groups, sort of party game-y or live action. (Of which, this Expedition with Mr Mirrors (in the same setting as Echo Bazaar's Fallen London seems to be the same sort.))
The kind of game that I've been playing (or want to keep playing) is on the other end. The solo - as in really one person solo - game. And maybe the duo eventually. And that's taken off too on the internet. Or at least folks have started to congregate on forums and talk about it and gather in an interest group for it (kinda ironic when you think about it, but basically people are sharing rules and variations and tweaks and then going off and having their own personal structured/random fun in their own worlds which may only interest them.)
To the point where others start to question the "fun-ness" value of it and indulge in the cheapshot version of "lol, you're on the internet, it's easy to find a game group"... Some interesting parallels with solo and group MMO play and their proponents could be made here.
Turns out there are board game solo variants too. And gamebooks are experiencing a new resurgence, especially with iPad Apps leading the way. Hell, the best news I've had in ages: say these with me now, Dragon Warriors and Fabled Lands.
Dragon Warriors is a set of books by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson. Yes, they of Blood Sword fame. They apparently wrote books about the Lands of Legend - which went out of print years ago, which I painstakingly downloaded and bittorrented over and over from the Underdogs (when it still existed) and other bittorrent sites. Then they went into print again, or rather in new revised pdf form. I rabidly pick them up because I want the authors to write more More MORE about the world which had a special place in my heart even before Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms.
Fabled Lands is by Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson. Now I have no idea if this Dave Morris is the same as the previous one (because there is apparently a UK and a US one, both of which wrote a number of gamebooks). I've never played their series of gamebooks before, but they were apparently revolutionary in terms of allowing one to explore an entire world. Solitaire. I picked up the Fabled Lands HD app and played it today on the iPad, and it is pretty fun. Too bad only one book is done.
If one cannot wait though, there is a lower tech, more true to the original text Fabled Lands App that runs right on your PC, and it is FREE. It looks pretty awesome too. Done with the blessings of the authors.
So yeah, solo to large group RPGs... they exist. And what a long way they've come. Let there be more ahead.
Also, for the ultimate in weird shit RPGs, indie RPGs toy with the craziest narratives and resolution systems ever. Just google.
Honestly, this is a trumped up post in order to introduce a new flavor of hilarity I just discovered, known as "Action Castle."
Basically, think old text adventure game with crappy parser, played aloud with a GM as the computer narrator/parser and as many as 2-50+ players taking turns to do stuff.
It had a little time in the gaming spotlight when some guy caught the Penny Arcade fellows at a Q&A by surprise - though you can barely hear anything over the laughter of the audience. This was a slightly more organised PAX group that lined up to take turns.
I found it via casual browsing at RPGNow, which was being browsed not-so-casually and with some purpose because this weekend celebrates GM Day - a good excuse to slash prices off 25%. Not a major discount, but still a discount, which implied start browsing for cheap stuff that I might like, and/or one or two rare expensive stuff that I might not find for a long time at a discount.
Action Castle was 99 cents. Which seemed amusing enough to pick it up to flip through the few pages to see how it was supposed to be run and add it to my digital RPG collection. Now I don't have much hope of actually playing it, since this RPG is decidedly on the opposite end of the scale of RPG evolution. That is, social and meant for large groups, sort of party game-y or live action. (Of which, this Expedition with Mr Mirrors (in the same setting as Echo Bazaar's Fallen London seems to be the same sort.))
The kind of game that I've been playing (or want to keep playing) is on the other end. The solo - as in really one person solo - game. And maybe the duo eventually. And that's taken off too on the internet. Or at least folks have started to congregate on forums and talk about it and gather in an interest group for it (kinda ironic when you think about it, but basically people are sharing rules and variations and tweaks and then going off and having their own personal structured/random fun in their own worlds which may only interest them.)
To the point where others start to question the "fun-ness" value of it and indulge in the cheapshot version of "lol, you're on the internet, it's easy to find a game group"... Some interesting parallels with solo and group MMO play and their proponents could be made here.
Turns out there are board game solo variants too. And gamebooks are experiencing a new resurgence, especially with iPad Apps leading the way. Hell, the best news I've had in ages: say these with me now, Dragon Warriors and Fabled Lands.
Dragon Warriors is a set of books by Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson. Yes, they of Blood Sword fame. They apparently wrote books about the Lands of Legend - which went out of print years ago, which I painstakingly downloaded and bittorrented over and over from the Underdogs (when it still existed) and other bittorrent sites. Then they went into print again, or rather in new revised pdf form. I rabidly pick them up because I want the authors to write more More MORE about the world which had a special place in my heart even before Ed Greenwood's Forgotten Realms.
Fabled Lands is by Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson. Now I have no idea if this Dave Morris is the same as the previous one (because there is apparently a UK and a US one, both of which wrote a number of gamebooks). I've never played their series of gamebooks before, but they were apparently revolutionary in terms of allowing one to explore an entire world. Solitaire. I picked up the Fabled Lands HD app and played it today on the iPad, and it is pretty fun. Too bad only one book is done.
If one cannot wait though, there is a lower tech, more true to the original text Fabled Lands App that runs right on your PC, and it is FREE. It looks pretty awesome too. Done with the blessings of the authors.
So yeah, solo to large group RPGs... they exist. And what a long way they've come. Let there be more ahead.
Also, for the ultimate in weird shit RPGs, indie RPGs toy with the craziest narratives and resolution systems ever. Just google.