Public Quest Placeholder

Ever since Tobold put up some kind of spam comment block, I have found it impossible to post comments to his blog, even with OpenID and all. Anyhow, I doubt that he cares. He just seems like a magnet for trouble and controversy, rather than his stated goal of intellectual discussion.

Still, a latest post he put up purporting to ask for a discussion on public quests made me attempt a response. Since Blogger is still preventing me from posting comments to his site, I am not going to waste it and am dumping the thing here. Basically, it is about the "viability" of public quests, and how one can make it viable.

(This has generally been prompted by the latest blogosphere discussion about how Rift's rifts are now getting boring and repetitive and how DOOM is coming because people are ignoring them in favor of running on automatic and questing for rewards, racing to max level to raid, etc.)
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• Scale public quests to the point that a significant part can be completed solo and a sense of accomplishment attained. Larger groups = larger challenge = bonus rewards up to the point of desired group size participation.

One unmentionable MMO (aka Rift, I can clarify this in brackets now that it's on my own blog) did this better than the other unmentionable MMO (Warhammer). The latter was level-based with too clear demarcations of level range, rigid roles, and if you couldn't find a holy trinity, you are better off not bothering with the public quest. Wrong recipe for encouraging participation.

• Add rewards that still have some meaning for the wrong level range assisting in the public quest, but not too much to the point they hog it.

• Better yet, dispense with levels altogether or use a sidekick mechanism - something I look forward to seeing in Guild Wars 2 to see if this idea works.

• Have the public quest have consequences that affect the world if not solved. (The extent of the consequences might have to be carefully trial-and-errored.)

• How do you define the 'success' of a public quest? Is it when it is unignorable and -everyone- converges onto it? Or is it to be one viable MMO activity among many? This affects the level of incentivization one might want to set.

• Is a public quest a means to tell a zone or character story and progress the lore or make the world more dynamic or immersive in some way?

• Possibly, change the public quests from time to time, season to season, so that the mechanical metagame nature doesn't have time to become too terribly repetitive.

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I dunno. Do you call DOOM because not everyone raids in an MMO? Or crafts? Or roleplays? Or runs dungeon instances? Or PvPs?

Hell, I would like it when we hit the day when questing is optional once more. Not every game has to be an on-rails linear experience of Fed Ex this, collect cooking recipe of bodyparts that.

Seems to me that the issue should be, have players stopped participating in public quests because they are forced to, or chose to? Also, are players participating in public quests because they are forced (pushed, badgered, peer-pressured) to, or chose to?

If participation has died a natural death from everyone having done it too many times before, maybe it's time to renew that content, or retire it, or let it fade away into obscurity for newbies to do, while coming up with something else for the oldbies.

Linear quests in starting zones and shared/common lowbie areas are just as guilty of this over-repetition to boredom syndrome. (Not to mention, certain grindy raids.)

Fickle Vagaries

The MMO audience is a tough beast to keep happy and contented. I don't envy Scott Hartsman and Trion one bit this weekend.

Basically, the world event has not gone all that according to plan, despite a very promising Phase 1 which lasted several weeks, allowing for hype to build up and people to steadily grind out their rewards. A delay in Phase 2 led to a bit more bribery with phase 1 extended another week, with additional rewards, which was very well done, in my opinion and left a majority of players with nothing much to complain about. Why would they? More rewards, more stuff to do, more to grind, and all at the player's own pace.

Phase 2 on the other hand was a scheduled event in which all the zones are attacked by lots of death invasions and rifts at the same time, and 3+ big bosses per zone. This boils down to a tank-and-spank for about an hour, presuming you got past the server queues in time, made it to a level appropriate zone and were lucky enough to pick up a shadetouched cache of the appropriate level as a reward.

Phase 3 meanwhile was a one location deal in the level 50 area of Stillmoor, buried amongst elite level 50 mobs, involving scripted NPCs confronting each other, and no real combat uber boss to speak of.

Phase 2 issues were mainly the extreme contrast of rapidly progressing to the next phase under an hour, as compared to the weeks of Phase 1. Basically simultaneous invasions going on in all zones, it also suffered from lag and server performance, to the point of me (and others) having 24k - 36k (yes, in the tens of thousands) of latency before the server puked us out. Fortunately, the server also reserves our positions for a while, so there was never a frustration issue tacked along where you would be spat out and have to queue again. However, all those who didn't get in at the beginning were left stuck in an 1-2 hour long queue - sure, this is specific to Wolfsbane and a few other servers who have both American/Aussie populations and are fanatically popular - but few queuers remain rational for long, especially when they are anticipating missing out on cool rewards.

Phase 3 was indeed somewhat sad. It compressed all the Phase 2 issues, by being only at one location, wherein all the server's population would try to congregate as a massive flashmob there, plus the added "fun" of excluding anyone who wasn't 50 (or say late 30s up for the masochistic) since the map is level appropriate and contains many many red aggressive mobs scattered all over who chase after you and unhorse you and tend to kill you with one hit (thanks WoW exponential system).

The scripted NPC event also managed to bug out on Wolfsbane, leading to furious chat spam worthy of Barrens chat, a neverending stream of griefer-wannabes and griefer-callouts who spent time fighting the bugged Alsbeth and yelling at the griefers to STOP attacking so that the event could start, along with a ferocious stream of friends and alts being directed via their guilds and optimistic hope to get to the mob so they could /kneel and get a funky one-off legacy title.

There were literally so many people packed in that you could only see a small circle of people around you at one time.

Eventually the GMs got the message and managed to restart Phase 3, and this time, the event worked satisfactorily... if you consider satisfactorily watching the equivalent of a scripted cutscene where Cyril of the Guardians and Asha from the Defiants traded insults with Alsbeth and each other... decide to work together to stop Alsbeth forming a mutual truce for a day, Alsbeth runs away into the portal leading to the River of Souls, wherein the truce breaks down because Cyril doesn't want Asha to have access to the holy soulstream, Asha retorts "who the hell's asking you" or something along those lines and runs in anyway, calling on the Defiants to join her, and Cyril goes "grrr, I gave my word for truce today, but watch out for a bloody tomorrow" and eggs on the Guardians to go "After them!"

(Nyah, nyah, Defiants rule, we get there first. Guardians are left in our wake.)

Actually I suspect there was supposed to be a bit of a scrum in Phase 3, because there was a point where we were called on to "Defend your heroes" and the conversation afterward leading to truce made reference to the numerous fallen this day. Presumably it got taken out due to performance issues - the mass of players gathered there would not have been able to see any mobs, let alone fight them - or concerns about the design - forced PvP on a PvE server would probably generate lots of bitching, or general anarchy and chaos, unsoweiter.

The amount of raging and QQ centred around the world event has been unprecedented in the history of Rift's forums (not that they've been on for that long). I admit I'm curious to see how Trion will handle this situation and fall on their sword gracefully and in a politically, non-game-sabotaging manner.

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Personally, I found the event rather enjoyable, even if it is obvious that it flopped with a whimper leaving Trion with lots of damage control to do.

Admittedly I was hardcore enough (and lucky enough) to fall asleep really early last night from being chronically tired and happened to jerk up just in time at 3am-ish without an alarm clock and go, shit, wasn't the event today? Else I might have slept through it like normal people.

I then attempted to log in, and faced a 2 hour queue on Wolfsbane, at which point I resigned myself to not seeing the event and surfing the forums to read the whining for a while, and started to gather that it hadn't started yet and they were going to stagger out the running of the event for different servers over 2 hours. (Probably because each server needs to be specially babied and monitored for the event, which brings it to its knees in the ultimate stress test ever.)

From good fortune, or maybe sneaky intentions, they brought the servers down to start up the event, conveniently fubaring the existing queue. I was able to hop right in once the servers came up and were unlocked.

Following that, a server announcement was made, covering the two major points from the forums. Phase 2 happens in ALL zones, level-appropriate, so PLEASE spread out and don't all glom into Stillmoor. And as long as you fight something, you'll get credit, went the plainative plea, rather reminiscient of the little boy's attempt to stop the sea from flooding Holland with his own fingers in the dam.

Being that I was level 38, I surmised I had two choices. Either remain in a level-appropriate zone, fighting off invasions and rifts like the everyday automated invasions, striving for a reward. Or I could attempt to make my way to the one location in Stillmoor to get once-in-a-game's-lifetime event pictures, assuming that I could somehow survive the gauntlet of mobs. Oh, and I'd never ever been to Stillmoor either.

First item on the agenda, pre-event (since they were spacing it out) was to GET to Stillmoor and lock in a porticulum bind point. This led to a regular adventure in itself since the road to Stillmoor is not a clear straight one - it meanders through Guardian territory, there are a couple of dead ends and tall cliffs and underground tunnels, there are rifts that sidetrack you (cos I was still hoping to earn enough Otherworldly Sourcestones for the Guise of Death), unsoweiter.

Got there eventually. Came back to the nearest level appropriate zone in time to see Phase 2 start. As mentioned, this was a whole bunch of death rifts and invasions and big colossi bosses going across all 11 zones. As you cannot be in 11 places at once, you settle for being in one as part of a big impersonal mob, doing your teensy part while you watch the other zones fight off their invaders via your quest update screen. All in all, not too bad. One or two lag disconnects. My fight participation mostly consisted of my melee tank/druid cycling a grand total of 3 ranged attacks (ie. social loafing in order not to get disconnected or maimed by some unanticipated AoE), but hey, I got to see them dead and I got the quest credit for it.

First big bad. Note the three bosses in the World Event Quest list. We killed them all really quickly.

Then this big bad popped when the first three died. Lookit the hp on that thing.

Over in an hour or less. Probably less. This is Wolfsbane, after all. The crowd is phenomenal.

Phase 3 triggers. All the 30s-40s mill about uncertainly. Guild chat has been forming raid groups of 50s for an eternity and now all the rally banners are coming out to teleport people to them. Me being shy, I didn't want to take up space as a level 38 in a level 50 raid group. Nor am I content to mill abount waiting to be led, truth to tell. I'm a savvy soloist, and I jettison my PUG group and ride for the porticuluum and my prior bound point in Stillmoor.

My map is, naturally, covered in fog of war. Fortunately, there is a never-ending stream of level 50s (and ambitious level 40s+) coming out of the porticuluum and riding towards the area of Alsbeth's showdown. So I kinda follow the zerg, trying not to get hit by the 1001 red mobs getting mount-kited on my slooow 60% speed mount (the rest are on 90% and 110% speed mounts), and every so often getting one shot killed.

Also fortunately, it isn't very far from the porticuluum point, so with every death, I try and resurrect at the very edge closest to the zerg's direction, and basically corpse-walk my way to the location with a happy 10-20% soul vitality left. At which point, I am safely lost in the big crowd of 50s, and get to witness the event, anticlimatical as it was. But hey, I was there!

My first look at the area. Cyril's there, bigger than life. Alsbeth is stuck in the ground. Asha's nowhere to be seen.

Bored lost people being bored and lost, we abandoned those having too much fun yelling chat insults at each other, and went to kill this strange Baron in the hope that it would spawn Asha. Alas, it didn't.

Eventually, Asha arrived, fashionably late, after Phase 3 was reset by the powers-that-be. Lots of people managed to get the title before that. I think that can only be a good thing, in order to stave off all the future whining.

I like this. This picture encapsulates why it's so hard to give MMO players nice things. The NPCs are trading slightly corny insults with each other, we are ostensibly in the presence of history in the making, but alas, nothing in the design allowed us to contribute to it in terms of combat or whatever, so players make their own... decidely lore-inappropriate... fun. :)

Promptly after Alsbeth turns tail and runs, the entire server promptly crashes before you can even say, "What, that's it?"

15 minutes later, I log back in to see everyone level 50 heading into the portal for the River of Souls raid and getting an achievement, and I think, what the heck, one more death and fly into my own instanced version of the River of Souls - meant for 20 level 50s.

Ironically, the server is so lagged from opening up all these instances and awarding achievements that I actually manage about 20-30 seconds of running through an unpopulated zone, before all the big uglies showed up with way too much hp and damage for me to dream of aggro'ing.

So yeah, the portal to the River of Souls has officially opened. The 50s now have another raid content to chew on, I'm still in no hurry to get there.

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http://forums.riftgame.com/showthread.php?167307-River-of-Souls-World-Event-Wrapup

I might be biased, but I think he had a pretty good run of falling on his sword in a conciliatory manner there. They probably drafted this after their "learning experience" (the less forgiving might term it "debacle") on the European servers (poor guinea pigs) and spent time crafting and polishing it while anticipating all kinds of hell being unleashed on the NA servers.

To me, people make mistakes. It's how they pick themselves up, and respond in a timely manner, and learn from them so that they aren't repeated again, that is important.

Other pundits are a lot less understanding, and some have an agenda and vested interest in seeing Rift fail, or at least, fall flat on its face every now and again, and are now having a field day crowing about it from the blogosphere mountaintops. Shrugs, no such thing as universal acceptance. Not even everybody likes Minecraft or Portal. :)

With 250 more sourcestone in the mail, this will help me buy the Guise of Death, the last thing I really wanted from that lineup of rewards. (Screw the blue and purple rings and trinkets. Many like them, but I bet there will be more of these stat-based rewards down the road and these will only get thrown away later.)

The treasure cache is a really good bonus, considering that all active subscribers (and presumably characters) will get a lottery chance at this. I never even took some alts for a spin this event.

And most importantly, all the legacy achievements and titles will be retroactively awarded, and the sourcestone drops will continue until morale improves, which lets us wrap it up with a little more closure than Phase 3 gave us.

Presumably Trion now has hung big LESSONS LEARNED signs on their cubicles and will attempt to formulate slightly less ambitious and slightly better designed events that take into account server population sizes. No doubt, all the other MMO devs are watching and taking notes as well.

Ultimately, I can only think it a good thing. Far better to try and log a note in history (infamous as it might be), than to never try at all out of fear. WoW had their runaway plague and other stories. Rift has this one. They just need to not make the same mistakes again or the loyalty of their audience (never patient to begin with, and fickle and whimsical) will steadily erode away.

Musing on Group Work

Melmoth from Killed in a Smiling Accident made a great post about the inherent difficulty of tanking (and learning how to) in a liable-to-be toxic environment. It hits the nail on the head and rings of so much truth that it isn't even as funny as his regular posts. Just too much serious and sad to be offset with a few attempts at humor.

Nor are there any easy solutions. If there were, MMOs would have implemented and copied it off each other long ago.

Part of it is a communication issue. And that again can be broken up into technical design and social attitude components.

The technical design challenge of communication is just how are players to communicate?

Typing? Not everyone can type at the speed of light. I can, but I make no bones about how the WASD mouselook controls and rapid response combat does horrible things to my will to converse in a typical MMO - my brain just cannot process fights and produce meaningful conversation at the same time, the same parts of my brain are being used or something, maybe to hit the correct keys on the keyboard. In ATITD meanwhile, I can go on and on with really long sentences since I don't have to hit '1' '2' '3' 'E' 'W' 'X' every 3-5 seconds or so.

Voice? Then you bring in the having a microphone issues, the real world mixing with fantasy world problems of discrimination and accents and ageism and what-have-you-isms. Some people don't process audio very well anyhow.

Nor do certain others process text or reading very well, come to think of it. So what is left? Either a new as yet uninvented way of communicating must be introduced into MMOs... Something akin to the emotes/actions/one-button keypresses like F7 = Ready! and avatar gestures of CoH? Maybe a one keypress scroll wheel similar to FPSes where simple words like Yes, No, Going ahead, You go, can be expanded into full fledged immersive voice-recorded sentences with avatar gestures?

The other possibility is to remove the need for players to communicate at all. Crowdsource the solution, so to speak. Rift's rifts are a pretty decent example of this. Though I suppose as the difficulty increases, a shifty pressure is put on certain people to at least type a few sentences like "bring the werewolves to the stone" and so on.

Dungeons are trickier. Just what is the sweet spot of dungeon communication? Is it one where no one talks but everyone magically knows what to do? Is it one where people take a few moments to assign roles and then stays silent for the rest of the time? Is it one where an unfortunate wipe or two necessitates some re-strategizing?

And just how do you control or influence or encourage or offer little design nudges to players to speak up in a positive light, instead of overwhelming negative with little patience? This question brings us to the second aspect of social attitude.

While hate is a strong word, I have to rehash my deep disappointment in WoW's attempt at blending accessible design and the gear/raid loot ladder together because it is a recipe for lousy social attitude. Players are subtly taught via the game's design that one can selfishly do it all by themselves, one's primary goal in the game is to get the leetest shiniest gear of them all by winning it from 24 or 14 others (or n-1 raid members), in the fastest, most optimal, less painful/stressful manner possible, and that people are disposable and a dime a dozen where they came from (tons of people per server to cross-server dungeon with, after all.) Why shouldn't they act like spoiled self-centered brats? There's no consequences.

Thing is, I don't want to go back to the old EQ or even old MUD days of yore when there were far too many consequences and too many social ties/binds/alliances to complicate matters either. Who has the time for all that drama now?

Smallness of the server (100-300 odd people) and a shared global chat may also be important in building such a community. In an MMO though? It just seems like a recipe for having your eyes deep-fried by selfish people who decide to use it as their personal conversation vehicle. Not to mention, gold spam.

I can't help but think of ATITD where it is so MUD-like, you can recognize all the names of the people who log on, you hear them talking and chatting, when you see them, you say hi and well, there's downtime and there's a certain amount of social incentive to make that connection because both of you are cognizant of the fact that later down the line, each of you may need each other for something, and you may be neighbors or people living in the same region.

This may be part of the problem. We are nomads in our MMOs. We have no home. (If we did, it is instanced and the 120824th copy of some town or another.) We are disconnected from and not part of the world, which is just backdrop and scenery. We have no opportunity to bump into the same people and become familiar with them. Different people have differential leveling speeds and separate themselves rapidly anyhow. People jump geographic regions and map levels in a flash, and are no longer limited to a certain locality. How can you build trust and positive good feeling when every man is an island solo questing for himself?

(Admittedly, the ATITD global Egypt-wide chat is moderated. So were the MUD chat channels. And Fallen Earth, which has a certain notable reputation for a helpful community and surprisingly un-horrible chat channels, is also moderated by GMs.)

Rift offers little baby steps towards very teensy wordless interactions. You may party up temporarily on big global rifts and see the same names for a while. You may duo or just share a quest reward for a couple seconds, or a friendly healer/buffer may decide to help you out against a mob that is handing you your ass, a simple /wave or thanks just to acknowledge the other is there. Really baby steps. This wasn't new once. It was expected. It was etiquette. It was player mindset and attitude. Somehow lost after WoW.

We aren't there yet on Rift. It still has a lot of the WoW disconnectedness. Dungeons are still a random luck of the draw problem if you aren't in a guild group. Maybe your PUG has someone who knows what they're doing. Maybe not. Maybe the opposite... And sometimes they refuse to talk. And there's no social consequences beyond lost time for everyone and really bad grumpy feelings all around. But no positive learning experiences either.

Ironically, I have to say I felt there was more communication and interaction in Aion. Maybe because of the difficulty, which is so critical that you really have to rely on each other, or else. Often, the OR ELSE. But despite it leading to so-called deeper bonds of feeling or mutual enforced reliance, it's still a little too hardcore to tolerate for long. Truth is, I don't really want to feel forced to talk, even if I will find it more memorable later on. I want to WANT to talk.

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Course the other part of the tanking issue is not just the communication to the team aspect. There's coordination to the team aspect, there's learning how to tank (or heal) as a specialized skill, and there's learning the dungeon specifically.

I've always wanted to learn how to mark properly. I've also always been so scared of marking because it doesn't seem like a common habit here in Rift (Aion's culture was different, maybe because you'd wipe if you didn't mark) and one is always so fearful of PUG (im)patience and thinking you're too slow or hesitant a tank. What is the proper pace to set as a tank anyhow?

With a group of 3-4 friends, it would be different. You'd expect them to be able to wait patiently as you learned. But somehow, with PUGs, with strangers, it's different. Is there any way to make them less of a stranger? Or do we move the tank's learning elsewhere, away from the judging eyes and accusatory whines of lazy dps who expect the world?

I'd really love practice dungeons, or NPC allies and things to figure out one's skills, builds, gear in a solo or duo type of way before building up to the big leagues and mean streets of PUG RL university. We learn how to kill stuff efficiently solo, but we don't really learn how to tank or how to heal. In Rift, at least there's rifts to do some of it, but it's really not the same. Stuff can die too fast with too many people around. The build that is most effective soloing a rift may not be the same as the one that can block/parry/accept heals well. And little tank tricks like pulling, LOS pulls, aggro, etc. are never really taught in an explicit tutorial-y manner. Why not?

Learning the dungeons themselves is something else altogether. The common accepted route is to go stare at a video or at a guide someone else wrote, in order to know what to expect. Everyone is scared of discovering it the hard way unless one is in a tight group of very patient friends seeking 'firsts.' Otherwise, it's just more efficient for someone to tell you what to expect/do.

I don't know what can be done to solve this. Right now, it's pretty much me (or say, a tank) being self-motivated enough to hang around after a successful group has completed and run the length of the dungeon to slowly know the layout. Rift allows me to view the dungeon first as a dps or heal role, relying on others who have done it before to run us through as a tank.

In theory, at least I remember in the first and third dungeon that the 'M' key works and a dungeon map exists in Rift (and also in LOTRO and DDO) so that an uncertain tank can actually refer to it. And there are a few quests with labeled waypoints. But really, in practice, learning while one is in the spotlight under the bright glare of strangers paying attention to your every move with close scrutiny is not something that many people are thick-skinned enough to do.

Plethora of Unchoices

Now that the RIFT free weekend is over, I found myself wondering what I should play.

I don't feel a strong desire to play City of Heroes anymore. It seems to be a choice of either soloing some random missions I've done countless time before, or logging on during the USA prime time to repeat the two incarnate trials to death. I'm still interested in the RP aspect, but have more or less given up on finding non-drama, non-cliquish people who are actually online during my playtime.

There's always the twinge of possessiveness about how once my subscription runs, I'm going to lose all the characters and the work I've put into their builds and enhancements. But nothing lasts forever.

Then there's Minecraft, which is always available to play. But the initial challenge of surviving the 404 cave has passed into a standstill. With my base established and my tree farm going, I'm unlikely to die unless I do something stupid. Plus, I have a backup of the world to reload even if I do die. So, not really any urge to play it.

So there's the question of, do I really want to spend US$50 to play RIFT for another month? I deleted the game from my hard drive, but it seems to download quickly so I can reinstall it anytime I want to play it again. Like all MMOs it tends to be pretty addictive, at least at the lowbie levels. But so far (at level 12), it seems to be like WoW in terms of the talk to questors, kill mobs, get xp. I'm not sure if it will end up anywhere. The steampunky/otherworldy graphics and settings are more appealing though.

After some search in the forums, I found out why everyone is gunning for the death rifts and ignoring the annoying other rifts that were ripping up my NPC quest givers and interrupting my leisurely questing. Human nature never changes...

I installed Guild Wars again, and looked through all the patch notes. Looks like Mesmers got a buff. And I realised I never did complete or even get far through Eye of the North. Logged in to see if I can do something. Whoa - they had a character authentication now. Dug through my brain and even old screenshots to see if I could find a character name. Thankfully found something in photobucket and managed to get in.

Everything looked confusing. Tried to put a skillbar together and manage my heroes. Then remembered why I had stopped. This skill I wanted had to be bought in Luxon factions, but only if I unlock a title by buying it with more Luxon factions. This NPC and that NPC had to be upgraded. But I had to find some kind of something to do it. Ugh. Mind exploding. Let's close the game.

Or maybe I should put a freeze on the gaming and try to focus on my work, but I find myself unable to concentrate on work either. Maybe some kind of post-flu malaise of indecisiveness and laziness all over.

The Long Road to Queue Yoo Eye Tee

So I heard Issue 20 hits today. Or was it yesterday.

It makes a very low overall splash in the MMO blogosphere that I frequent, mostly accompanied by distant shrugs or sneers about CoH moving to join the rest of the world seven years on in implementing raid-style endgame.

On the board forums, it makes the impact I expected. A bunch of folks ranting, a bunch of folks calling for calm, a bunch of folks saying let's wait and see, things will get better, or not.

Frankly, my gut feel is that people will adapt (or leave), stuff will settle, and things will move on.

The real question is, will I be moving on with the game to wherever it moves?

In this learning period, there are a lot more failures than successes. Successes (of which there seem to be a decent number, or at least people posting to brag) appear to come from organised groups, usually pre-formed, using teamwork and communication, taking time to explain and being very patient about everybody's learning curves until yay, sweet success, and everybody gets it.

To soften the blow of failure, there are a bunch of partial rewards of different sorts of incarnate currencies, some of which use a progress bar (I think, people were talking about 18% progress or 31% progress of incarnate xp), and some of which are just funky named Astral and Empyrean merits of one sort of another.

Y'know, I honestly don't feel that this is bad design.

I do feel, however, that this is very narrowly-focused, "unpolished," design that changes further the game I used to enjoy into a strange market economy loot-accumulating repetitive grinding experience for a number of currencies used to buy increasingly personally meaningless rewards.

It makes me very uncomfortable supporting the direction of such a game, because this is in opposition to my personal gameplay preferences. To the point where I am seriously considering saying to heck with the loyalty reward, there seems to be no conceivable way I'm going to benefit from the vanguard weapons and armor unlock at level 1, because I have totally lost my taste for playing the game.

There is very little point making new level 1s when I don't like where level 50 is going, and I'm not enjoying the immediate journey of getting there.

I don't feel the least bit excited or raring to go to try out the lambda trial. (Although I hear it is possibly easier than the BAF, maybe.) It just feels like a chore to have to earn this to get that, unsoweiter. When I get home, all I'm dying to do is to log into Rift and go check out the next mountaintop or undersea puzzle.

Guild Wars and ATITD are standing around as backups, and to be honest, given a choice between hitting a huge stone with a sledgehammer in peace and quiet and running around to pick up gravel ad nauseam, and sitting around listening to people talk, explain, fail, blame, fight, die, wipe for the same amount of time (an hour or less), the bored to death hermit option seems distinctly more attractive.

Let alone making steady progress on teensy achievement bars for my very own pretty Hall of Monuments and GW2 toys. Which is all the grindiness I would ever desire, with a lot more peace and quiet and personal accomplishment built in.

You know, what the hell, let's do it. The thought of saving 40 bucks (USD, mind you) by quitting in time for the next billing cycle is suddenly a lot more attractive than the thought of all my CoH character slots having glowy weapons unlocked without any need to spend vanguard merits.

Already have a glowy weapon in Rift, thank you. And I'm sure GW2 will have glowy, flamey things by the microtransaction boatload.

(pause for the account log in. Couple quick clicks for the survey. Long essay in the last comment box...)

I am leaving City of Heroes after seven years, and giving up the Loyalty Rewards perk for staying through the month of April because I am no longer comfortable with the direction the game is heading, nor have I been having fun and feeling inclined to log on.

The focus on endgame, increased loot and assorted currency rewards has gotten to a point where it is no longer 'optional' and has changed the feel of the community for the worse.

Increased difficulty is all very well, but the current design of Issue 20 encourages and espouses raid philosophies I left other games and came to CoH to avoid, and the masochistic idea that repeated failures before achieving success is "fun."

The game is increasingly focused on the destination, of becoming "powerful", of improving one's stats and powers by repeating the same boring missions or task forces ad nauseam. The immediate combat experience and interesting story arc/mission designs that feed into the moment-by-moment experience of excitement and having fun are sorely lacking.

Interacting with a community that is skewed towards the former is no longer pleasurable, only forming stressful arguments, and the increased developer silence on the boards also make it no longer the same CoH I once loved.

As long as the updates continue to focus on achievement-based and grindy currency-buy systems, I no longer feel that my subscription money is being well spent to support a game which is heading in directions I do not personally enjoy.

I may return when there is more focus on low and mid-levels, rich lore-based story arcs, increased variety of tilesets/art assets, overarcing campaign stories continuing across issues, changing spawn sizes and locations and other such content.

There. I feel a weight off my shoulders. That's it. Done.

With great timing too as I quit on impact of I20, just before my three-month billing cycle, maintaining my moral stance against pointless grindy raids (especially when they are treated as the be-all and end-all of the game by community and developers).

I may or may not have any effect on where CoH is going. I might be a minor unnoticeable little bump in the road roadkill, ground under the wheels of a semi going places. But hey, at least I feel better for being true to my own preferences.

In the meantime, there are elemental rifts, pixelated blocks, and 7-hero teams to play with.

Oh, grape vines and beetles too. If I could spare the time. And I should keep grinding Investigating to get in the sack with the Melancholy Curate and his sister... if I had a long-enough break at work to do that, that is.

P.S. This now makes the blog a badly named one. But I'm a bit too lazy to move. And no, I do not like Wordpress. Even if it is fancier. :P

The Skirting of Starch

In an interesting turn of events, it isn't until about 2 weeks and a couple days into my experimental foray into a "low-carb" diet that I have begun developing moderate craving symptoms.

Truth be told, it isn't really strictly low carb, nor am I blindly following a structured diet ruleset with a fancy name. It certainly isn't zero-carb, which just sounds extreme to me. It's a "as minimal flour and starch-like carbs as you can conceivably cut out without making life totally miserable" diet, with the added bonus of being less stressed about non-trans fat fats.

Basically, no flour, no rice, no bread, no potatoes (I really miss that one), no noodles, no bee hoon, mee sua, hor fun/kway teow, marcoroni, pasta or what have yous made from tapioca or glutinous rice.

Besides noticing that practically every food stall or restaurant in Singapore has one of the verboten products mixed in with every dish that isn't a green salad, things haven't been so bad.

I've mostly been substituting with higher glycemic vegetables and fruits, preferably raw, aka homemade salads of unimaginable variety, or whatever looks good cubed in a bowl. Strictly speaking, I am sure cellulose is a carbohydrate and so is glucose, fructose and all the other nonsense that comes in colorful objects of plant origin. But cutting those carbs seem ridiculous, and the non-biology trained most likely do not mean those when they say "low-carb."

Fortunately, I like greenstuff, and my mother has been fairly cooperative on this attempt. (My last try at halving carbohydrates left me with a burning hunger for more rice during lunchtime. This is diet killing because I start supplementing with extra food bought from the surroundings, and MacDonald's is the only edible thing nearby.)

Steadily over the months, half a lunchbox worth of rice expanded to three quarters, then a full portion, at which point, portion control seemed to be pointless a diet plan.) Greedy humans are not made for rigorous robotic portion control via laboratory accurate measurements. Insteae, it is far easier to refuse any rice, period, and let her make it up by stuffing as many broccoli florets as she can possibly fit, turning lunch into a very passable, and stomach bulking cooked broccoli salad with random asian zi char toppings.

The novelty of salad design also carried me past the first week with nary a whimper. Baby spinach leaves of Australian origin are amazingly thick and chewy, yet tender, a far cry from our regular Chinese spinach leaves. No major limit on fat containing items means I can add dressing if I want to (but generally I don't). Instead, I cut myself a generous slab of good hard cheese (not the smooshy cheese spread crap) and cube it or crumble it, or microwave melty it. As they said, it does appear true that fat is naturally self-limiting, the satiety factor does in any greed for lard-like objects, you really don't eat too much of it before you don't want any more. Add on a boatload of fibrous water-filled vegetables and a moderate slab of protein, and well, it seems like you've eaten the same amount or more, without the explosive blood sugar bomb of starchy carbs.

The novelty factor of figuring out how to eat out was also interesting. Following the rule automatically negated all the fattening fried rice or noodles. One of the easiest ways to eat low carb is to order a meat slab from Aston's and sobbingly say no to all the starch ridden sides and settle for mushy garden veggies or just two green salads (pretty decent, must be factory prepared and just chilled.) Higher class places are remarkably obliging to special requests, I had a Coffee Club burger with no bread, no fries, add extra salad please, and it turned out very nice, even as my mum was fretting over what the waiters and cooks would say behind our backs. They didn't turn a hair. Possibly this low carb thing may be quite the modern fad. At those places thst serve Chinese food dishes with rice, it is quite easy to replicate the meat and veggie tasting customs of elaborate ten course meals on a smaller scale, and just refuse to eat any rice/noodles at the end of the meal.

I was hoping to try it out for a month to see if there were any noticeable effecte before softening up and allowing limited ingestion of not more than half a portion of carb.

Willpower failed a little today as an apple crumble cheesecake demanded my attention at the same time I had just intended to treat myself to a Starbucks cuppa (already with sugar). Now there was flour, sugar, and additional cream cheese and fat into the mix. Still, I suppose it is getting back on the bandwagon that counts.

I do seem to have dropped an average of 2-3kg in these two weeks, without any attempt at exercising. That's more progress in the right direction than I've seen in seven years or so. Hopefully it's not just water weight and I might stick to this for a whiile more until I get closer to optimal BMI.

I do freakin' miss me a good potato though.

Come with me if you want to live

Why yes, that was a fragmentation grenade