GW2 - First Beta Weekend

Welp, I just quit RIFT an hour ago. I think after one more month of making some plans to accomplish what I want in ATITD, I will be quitting that too. That will leave City of Heroes as the only off and on sub game that I may decide to subscribe to, or not. I figure it will last till June or whenever GW2 launches, where the "or not" will come in.

Yes, it was -that- good a Beta Weekend. I got Guild Wars 1 beta weekend flashbacks honestly - beautiful world, lots of potential for future playthroughs, and a damnably good fun time exploring and making gradual progress through something that feels and plays quite new.

I was having so much fun, I practically forgot to take screenshots, so this is the meagre selection accompanied by piecemeal commentary.

Character Creation
Works as advertised. Seriously, watch one of the ubiquitous videos on youtube for the whole deal. Smooth, polished, a very decent amount of customisation. I was Charring the entire weekend, so pretty much fur color, fur pattern, face shape, horns, eye color, and a bunch of facial and body sliders. Clothing has three dye areas to apply dyes to.

My first GW2 character. He had to be a big burly Charr, of course. And I went with Guardian, because melee support in heavy armor just sounded ridiculously drool worthy.

The personal story questions turn up in character creation, altering the starting look of your character slightly with shoulderguards or a helmet or mask, etc.

I made a decent variety of Charr while attempting to see if the personal story changed very much with regards how the questions answered. One of the bigger changes appeared to be the legion you were from, Blood, Iron or Ash Legion.

The female Charr are quite interesting. They are a little gender dimorphic from the male Charr in terms of their horns and face shape, and the way their body slouches such that their face angles lower than the males - but thankfully, they are not purple humans with elf ears and boobs. (Now the elementalist -clothing- however... I dunno why they need belt buckles there...)

Iron Legion warrior and Ash Legion necromancer respectively. I have no doubt that I'm going to have to be buying character slots out the arse when the game goes live - I was intending to just keep to the eight professions, but I dunno if I can control myself, there are five races and so much story branches and so much Charr...

Questing and Leveling
Dynamic quests 3.0, I guess.

If Warhammer did it first with version 1.0, where stuff happened in the overland and you had to physically find people in the same geographic region sporting the holy trinity in order to succeed at it, and if RIFT did it second with version 2.0, where stuff happened in the overland as demarcated by map icons and people in the vincinity could just hit a button to "join group" and success was more flexible because different classes could pinch hit the tank/healer/dps roles...

Then GW2 refined on the formula some more, because stuff happens in the overland and it's marked by map icons and waypoints, and success/failure at them chains into related events and you don't even need a join group button anymore and by god there is no such thing as a tank or healer any more in this game.

This honestly takes some getting used to. I don't think anyone is really accustomed to it yet, it is quite a learning curve. No ally has stronger heals than your own personal heal. So there's no way you can stand still against a mob and just soak aggro. You will die. Many of us died many times while attempting to learn how to run off when needed.

The good news is, any one can rez. And everyone pretty much tries to rez each other, except when it's too risky to do so. It makes for more interesting partial success battles, rather than all-or-nothing success or fail, though admittedly it is quite annoying when you're the one lying there dead and waiting for someone to come get you. (On the other hand, rezzing and walking back would suck even more, so yeah.)

 

This was one of the more memorable pitched battles from spontaneous group formation. We get a lot of that in this game. It is good. It also worries me that six months down the line, maybe there won't be so many people at specific dynamic quest spots - something that plagued both Warhammer and RIFT. I'm not sure if GW2 can escape the stale content fate of all matured MMOs.

A level 10 group quest with a SERIOUSLY 'broken' OP ranger NPC whose hail of arrows would one shot anyone in the vicinity of the red ground effect circle. Except you have 0 seconds between seeing the red circle and getting whacked by the damage, so you can't even dodge out of it. To make matters more interesting, the tunnel that we are chokepointed at has falling rocks. Falling rocks that do serious damage and knock you down. Mass carnage.

I still have no idea how we managed to push through it, but the two times I saw it, I think it was both critical mass of 10-15 players and a heckalot of condition spammage from any profession that could - knockdowns, slows, dazes, the works. Anything that stopped the killer rain of arrows.

Personal Story
Seemed quite nice. Eventually will be fully voiced, I think. Characters have that old Guild Wars appeal. Plot was decent. Your friendly NPC differs depending on the 'best friend' question you answered in character creation, so I could get an egomaniacal male Warrior, a shady male Thief, a slower-on-the-uptake male Guardian, a steady female Elementalist, or an innovative female Engineer. I got the warrior for my Guardian cos I wanted someone in melee that I could support. Also from an RP aspect, it seemed appropriate to humor a hot shot.

This was one of the more amusing exchanges - We sniffed out (haha, Charr) a bunch of explosives that were loaded onto some pack animals by saboteurs. Alas, our method of defusing them was Blood Legion direct, rather than Iron Legion... we kinda just smacked them on the rump and let them run a safe distance away before.... BOOM.

The aftermath:









Vanity Shots
Just wandering the world and wanting something to remember her by.

1) Near the ruins of Ascalon city with lots of ghosts, a chance pair-up with another player that looked like something out of a buddy movie.

(And my sword was hawt. Some random player told me in local "that sword is epic" and I had to agree. Titan weapons, er, greatsword, for the win.)

 2) Being reminded that my sword is hawt, so I had to pose for it to remind myself further. The Charr combat crouch is awesome with that sword.

There was also a steam sword before this, which was like a chainsword out of the Warhammer 40k universe. It made an evil revving sawing sound when I attacked.

3) Complete serendipity. While stuck trying to decide on a suitably Charr surname, I figured Somethingbane was always a good fantasy warrior bet, and since Charr hate the Flame legion, Blazebane was it.

Now, Charr from the same warband always seem to keep one part of the surname the same, so you could have a Burn warband and Charr with the surname of Burnwhite, Burnsteel, Burnfast, etc.

Imagine my glee when I found Charr with the Bane name, and even better, they were a dynamic event, in which the three of them would patrol off to the nearby ghost-infested ruins and wreck havoc. So I joined in and kept pace and formation. It was ridiculously fun and cool to pretend like I was part of the same warband.

4) This was a nice touch. A voting feature where different people can pick different options to influence the course of dynamic events. This one controled the type of enemies we fought. There was another that would send an NPC on a path either north or northwest, presumably triggering different dynamic events.


Cities
My god, the size of the cities. Silly me, I didn't take any screenshots of the Charr's Black Citadel - it rivals Ogrimmar, imo, though it is fairly ugly in an industrial cartoony way. It is also very vertical and the staircases and lifts were making me completely lost. Still haven't explored all of it.

The human city of Divinity's Reach though... Wow. Whyever would they want Ascalon back? I felt like a rural country bumpkin Charr when I visited.

The camera angle was absolutely insufficient to cover the scope and scale of it. Literally so tall and vertical, you could jump down and die if you wanted to. Here's me risking life and limb by running along the ledge instead of the pavement like normal humans. And yes, Charr run on fours like a cat when they aren't toting weapons in bipedal combat mode, it is uber cool. Better than the worgen animation.

The Divinity's Reach map says it better than any screenshot in one location could:

 ...
...
Words fail.

PvP
I eventually tore myself away from the PvE today long enough to at least -try- out PvP. Basic PvP has one mode - conquest - a territory control sort of objective game. It's passably decent, though probably not at all properly balanced yet.

My starter PvP traits/skills were set for a mace/shield and two-handed staff combo. It was meant as a sort of melee support / aoe dps-support blend, imo, but a) I wasn't used to those, b) it is impossible to hit players running around like headless chickens with the mace/shield that has no leap/teleports/knockdowns or immobilizes and c) it is impossible to support players running around like headless chickens with the wimpiest set of maybe-heals ever. I felt useless, I -was- useless, and I lost game after game.

I eventually got distressed enough to google up the answer to "Where the hell can I get other weapons in PvP so that I can equip better weapon skills?" Turns out, a fairly unobtrusive NPC in the corner was holding the free PvP weapons.

I swopped to a more offensive greatsword and sceptre/focus combination. The greatsword deals fairly nasty crits in close range, but it's hard to get in close range, so it has a leap, as well as a chain-pull skill. The sceptre deals decent medium-range damage, has a mini-ground-aoe that can be traited for health regen, and an immobilize. The focus had a line-based ball that helped allies/damage foes (not easy to aim) and a shield that absorbs four hits or it explodes into groovy aoe damage.

Throw in a health regen/aegis-y shout, a knockdown signet, and a runspeed shout, and suddenly in my next few games, I was topping the charts. The Guardian seemed a little OP on health this beta, it is very hard to kill a Guardian 1 vs 1 because you have so much godawful health and ability to heal up (sorta like WAR's warrior monks), and with me being so offensive, I was winning most 1 vs 1 fights - though it took me a while to whittle them down. Couple that with a runspeed shout, and I was capping the uncontested points. If a lone guy showed up, no problem. 2 or more, then start running like hell and delaying tactics if one couldn't run. It takes forever to kill a Guardian, so that's time 2-3 players are tied up and you hope to god the rest of your team is doing something useful in the meantime.

In the end, one of the toughest fights I ended up on was where there were 2-3 Guardians per team. Utter chaos. Especially with a mesmer that was cooperating with them (mesmers create a ton of illusionary clones in GW2), and a ranger who was picking people off in peace, thanks to the utter chaos.

Conclusion: It was okay. I feel there needs to be more in order to get the competitive PvPers interested though, -more maps (there were only two cycling), different objective-based games, possibly even more skills - but maybe they'll add those in later.

WvWvW
I almost didn't get to try this feature out. The portal to get in had a queue. A damnably long one from how long I waited. Pure chance that it triggered just as I was about to map out to PvE and give up.

Man, I would have missed out. This is Warhammer RvR done right, imo.

Here's the map overview. The first thing that is very obvious. There are three teams. Or rather, three worlds fighting it out. Green, Red and Blue.

An overpopulated world server has its advantages. I was on the Darkhaven server, and we were the Green team. Horribly dominating, as you can see.

The second thing that is less obvious. There are four maps to fight on. Eternal Battlegrounds is the one where you expect everyone to clash on. Each world has their own color Borderlands to fight and guard.

Now this was apparently lost on worlds Blue and Red, or maybe they didn't have the numbers or the guild organisation to defeat the keep lord once taken. This is important because holding certain locations give you "supply" as a resource.

"Supply" is used for repairing walls and gates of forts and towers and keeps, and also for building some disgustingly overpowered siege weaponry. Each player can haul only 10 supply from location to location, and there's quite a lot of running in this map. Supply camps offer supply caravans that slowly move 35 resource (option to upgrade later when people are rich and have more money) from camp to keep. (And yes, they can be attacked, and defended.)

You literally can and probably have to lay siege to the big keeps in order to take them. I can just envision now, the smaller guilds will be running around whacking supply camps, being guerillas, etc. Big PUG zergs will form naturally, forming offensive lines and fronts, pushing and shoving back and forth.

In the map, you'll notice, red and green were fighting in the north, and green and blue were fighting in the southeast, via the orange crossed sword indicators. The stronger you are, the more you'll end up fighting battles on multiple fronts and spreading out your army... Natural balance at work.

It should be very interesting once the commanders start being rich enough to actually buy their access to the region channel to order people around from location to location. Ditto once people start being rich enough to afford the various siege weapons. Mostly we were using a lot of cheap arrow carts - which decimate infantry via rain of arrows.

An interesting tactic they did was to rename all those in the opposing teams as Blue Invaders, Red Invaders, etc. One, it depersonalizes them, making them seem more like mobs, rather than scary players for the PvE inclined. Two, you can't spike down so easily an army one by one if there's no name to target by.

Attacking a gate. An arrow cart is being controled by the guy on my left, raining death on the crowd in the gate. (And no doubt, vice versa on our zerg as well. Which is why I'm not IN there.)

Wall defence. Did I mention these maps are BIG? Seriously, so much bigger than even the Tier 4 keeps in Warhammer. It feels very much better as a result. 

 Attacking again. Big old siege golem someone managed to afford. I think it's a suit you can actually enter in and stomp around. It sucks up a heck load of damage. I think 25 of us were aiming at it trying to break it down, and only got it to halfway. Fortunately it dumps out its driver at the halfway mark, I think, so it was disabled in the end. (Until the next time some guy managed to climb in and drive again.)

Defence shot. This is the big keep in the middle. It is BIG. Catapult and cannon and yes, pitch-filled cauldron in the background.
 

Re-taking one of our supply camps from Blue. They snuck into our Green Borderlands world to grab one of these. We weren't going to let them have it now, were we? It was a brutal brutal fight, took forever to overwhelm them and re-take it back. There was a guild called [BEAR] that was holding onto it quite tenaciously - about 5-6 of them, working together quite well. Swamped by numbers in the end.
 

 Rain of arrows! Rain of arrows!

Why yes, that is a trebuchet.

Why yes, it is firing a dead cow.

It makes a fun poison cloud mist below. I like to think that it is very disorientating and will make any enemy players choose to get the hell out of that area.

The catapults and trebuchets have an interesting firing mechanism. You actually have to turn them with keys 1 and 3 bit by bit. And key number 2 actually fires the shot - but it has to be held down a certain time in order for it to fire a certain distance.

So you literally have to adjust it and use previous shots to guide your estimates. A spotter would also come in very handy, as there is no way I can see the enemy from where I am. I just have to guess where the front is, via my team's zerg when I can see them, and estimate a little further back is the enemy zerg. Possibly along the road... and lob a test shot to see. If I see damage numbers or a combat log message, then.. success!

"Nestum" McFlurry El Cheapo

A couple days ago, I was reading about McDonald's off the menu dessert mashups - and the only one that sounded like it might taste pretty good was the Apple Pie McFlurry.

Basically, buy a vanilla ice cream cone, buy an apple pie, ask for a cup and spoon, and voila, a do-it-yourself McFlurry with apple pie flavor.

Or so the theory goes. I decided to try it, since I was feeling peckish. Total cost: $1.70, which wasn't too bad, considering a sundae goes for $1.50 and the real McFlurry is like $2.20 or more?

To my immense amusement, I then discovered that the amount of ice cream you get in Singapore (at least at my local McD's) for the vanilla ice cream cone is insufficient to McFlurry an apple pie.

It's 50 cents, what did I expect, I guess. (That's if my calculations are correct and the apple pie is $1.20, but I could be mistaken.)

It is, however, sufficient to macerate the entire sugar wafer cone into, which gives it a decent "Nestum" textured flavor (with zero potential health benefits unless you used real Nestum I suppose)

By the time I ran out of sugar cone, there was maybe two tablespoons of fairly melted vanilla ice cream left, which I gamely attempted to flurry 1/3 of an apple pie with. The melt factor was bad though, so it ended up as apple pie crumble with liquid vanilla cream. Not as nice as hoped.

I do however recommend the DIY Wafer Cone McFlurry. Without even worrying about the apple pie, it's even more El Cheapo and pretty nice.

It *is* about the journey

This ain't your grandmother's MMO! I'm really spazzing out on Dark Astoria.

The schizophrenic devs have struck again, and this time Dark Astoria is hitting the bullseye on what the traditional non-raid crowd wants over and over, insofar as I am counted as the traditional non-Itrial crowd. I'm a mix of both actually.

I-Trials will still be there. They have their place.  If I actually want to incarnate someone, I would just do a bunch of Itrials, which I find quite fun if I'm in the mood for it. Dark Astoria is just content, with incarnating as a side effect. It is how to level beyond 50, which is what the whole incarnate idea should have been in the first place until the whole raid-devs content started appearing.

What Dark Astoria sends a strong message that it is about the journey. And because it is about the journey, the replayability instantly skyrockets.

Let's take the Dominator I started out with. Go into Dark Astoria...and a new villain group appears. They have some similarity to another villain group in First Ward. From the metagaming perspective, I as a player know the story of First Ward, but my Dominator PC doesn't. The contacts starts wondering about the villain group and the PC is just as clueless.

Then I am sent to chase after two NPCs. A a player, I recognise them as some having appeared now and then in some Midnight Club related arcs. I see the first NPC, and I started up a conversation. NPC is really hostile and pissed at me...because she remembers that my ex-villain PC beat her up (a few times) and stole stuff from the Midnight Club, some 20 levels ago! Yikes. I have the option to respond in a hostile or placating manner. I pick the placating manner. I don't know will happen if I respond in a hostile manner. So I will want to do the Oroboros thing later and try the hostile manner.

Same thing happened again when I met Ajax. That's the invulnerable guy or something right? From my metagaming mind I know he's the Mysterious Letter Writer's servant. Whatever. Play through, and at the end, he suddenly makes a reference to me and the idiotic shit I pulled off with Dean MacArthur.

What? Dean who? Is it another villain arc I did? I opened my contacts list, went to the inactive villain contacts, and sure enough, there was Dean MacArthur, with his contact bar full. Suddenly I remembered. I had set up a bunch of psionic resonators to cancel Ajax's invulnerability and then beat him up. Another nameless body that was a minor speedbump on my road to glory. Errr, no hard feelings dude. That was some 20 levels ago, surely you don't hold a grudge that long! :P

Then I started play with my Scrapper, who was a Praetorian and had gone through the First Ward arcs. Same scenario...but this time, when the contact starts speculating about the new villain group, my PC who has an in-game knowledge of the First Ward story tells the contact about what happened and who these new villains are! Neat.

Scrapper is sent after the two NPCs again, but when I talk to the NPC, she was friendly and overjoyed I had turned up since my scrapper had never beaten her up.

Then I went off, talked to another NPC where I had previously chosen a friendly interaction with the Dominator, and tried the challenge them choice...and they attacked me. Of course they got spanked.


Still, it's awesome. What you did matters. They must have used some kind of tracking method on the newer arcs, and my technical mind thinks it is the badges. All of the new missions and story arcs give up some kind of badge. Different ones depending on what you did. This then makes me wonder -- if I did Oroboros and chose alternative outcomes, would that mess up the whole badge-checking thing?

Hmmm....

Revelation #2 or #3 or Whatever

I lost count.

But a funny thought hit me on the way off from work.

My reaction to City of Heroes is very much like my reaction to my place of work.

Loved it once. Still fond of it, still like its good points. Also seen past the looking glass and saw the ugly bits. Distinctly uncomfortable with the way it's headed. Time to move on.

Maybe I'll be back one day when it gets better, or when my mindset changes to the point that I can accept that the changes were for the better.

Or then again, maybe not. There are other MMOs in the vast wide world.

Short Spurts

That's all my life has developed to, these days.

On one hand, I suppose I don't really mind. Realm of the Mad God, my current addiction, is built for short spurts of gameplay. High flow gameplay, as one dances around streams of bullets, farming the gods in godland for the low chance potion drops like a slot machine with the one difference that the moment-to-moment reward is challenging, good strategy and good reflexes yielding success.

When I get tired of that, I jump into Skyrim and live out a day or two, a quest or two. Now Skyrim is not really built for short spurts, but we adapt. Fortunately, enlightened games of this age allow saves anytime anywhere, so even if all I get to do is smith a few daggers, harvest a few flowers, talk to a few people and then have to leave, that's how it is. It helps that I pushed through and finished the main quest, so my destiny is pretty much 'complete' - the rest of it is simply an immersive roleplay of life in Skyrim, wander here, putter there, help out someone in need, feed every 2-3 days because I'm a vampire, get trapped and tricked into doing evil by a Daedra, that sorta thing.

I did start a new game with a new character, with plans to go a different path. Instead of sneaky outsider Imperialist-leaning vampire mage/thief archery with one-handed weapons, light armor and bound swords, this one is going to be a true blue viking-style Nord warrior with two-handed weapons and heavy armor, and possibly go werewolf and side with the Stormcloak rebellion. But short spurts mean limited time to invest in this, so we'll see how it progresses.

I've had a semi-renewed interest in Spiral Knights. They've improved on a number of things. Some months ago, I vaguely knew they sold a new option called an Elevator Pass, which basically acts like a month's subscription - canceling all energy costs for a month. Vaguely, because while I heartily approve of a game which allows more people their choice of how they would like to pay money to a company to play in a way they like, I'm more for the microtransaction option since that allows me to bank stuff comfortably for months until I feel like taking the character out for a spin again.

Missions are new. And I like missions. It would be a smidgen nicer if I didn't already have all the recipes and rewards of the lower tier that I'm now working through, but I like that the missions have a bit of story to them, and are comprised of basically two levels. Instead of feeling obliged to hack and cleave my way through 4-5 levels until I hit the rest zone, I can finish the two levels of one mission and feel satisfactory progress has been made. Short spurts, y'see?

I have vague guilt pangs about RIFT and ATITD, to which I am still paying monthly subs to. I find it hard to release the RIFT sub, the company is doing a lot of things well, and I enjoy the convenience of being able to log in to check it out whenever. Thing is, the WoW model, even a WoW 2.0 model done well, holds very little draw for me after some time has passed. Gear progression means nothing to me beyond enabling me to see content, I just like to see what interesting new spin they've done for rifts and chronicles.

ATITD is... odd. It's a lot I'm paying, to maintain two accounts to it. But I have problems maintaining interest in the midgame - mostly because I don't have the insane globs of time to spare figuring out what goal to attempt next, attempting the goal which probably will take 2+ hours, and rinsing and repeating. On the other hand, I don't want to let go of it because then I won't come back until the next Tale, and I've spent so long building up my resources, it'll be nice to actually have them to hand when I want to give it a go again. I might give it a go again. Who knows?

Permadeath Throes

It sounds odd, but in the last two games that I've been playing besides Skyrim, I've gone back to square one with no progress besides being older and wiser.

And I've been finding it fun, or at least, honest and refreshing.

Patching Minecraft to 1.1 revealed a considerable amount of changes, including the food and xp systems, breeding of farm animals, and enchanting. Not to mention, seriously sturdier armor to the point where I begin to suspect a bug... And a new hardcore "permadeath" mode where your entire world is deleted if you die.

For sheer kicks, and desiring a brief interlude of Minecraft with an inevitable ending, I punched in on the hardcore mode with "Permadeath" as a world key.

 That spawned me in a swamp biome with brownish biome-compliant withered trees echoing the ominous tone. 

 Before I could change my mind, an inviting hole in the ground beckoned me.

 It turned out to be a rather long, interesting sequences of tunnels that eventually petered out into a ravine, but more importantly, yielded a ton of iron far faster than nearly any other world I've played.

 Before I knew it, I was decked out in iron armor, and rampaging through as if on adventure mode, chasing Endermen, zombies and more.

And yes, even the odd creeper or two. There were a few explosions, but to my surprise, they didn't seem as lethal as I remembered. The iron armour was surprisingly durable, and having a full food bar regenerates back half health in a short period of time.

It was about this time I realized permadeath wasn't going to be as short-lived an affair as I thought, settled down, started building a tower up, digging a staircase to bedrock below, widening out to make a small underground tree startup nursery, changing my mind to turn the grassland I had settled on into a forest grove instead, dug half a moat into the beach sand while attempting to get glass for skylights, dug an underground wheat farm (One no longer crushes farmland while walking on it!), built a fenced grass plot with new shiny fence gates, attempted to fish some cows into said plot, realized holding wheat lures in the cows much easier, bred a little cow calf, which promptly fell down the back steps into my tower and necessitated the building of a back door to the tower while shoving the baby bovine out, dug down to bedrock, found diamonds amazingly quickly, in just sufficient quantity to build an enchanting pedestal and a bookcase, which necessitated a gravity-defying renovation and widening of the brand new second floor of the tower to accomodate a 6x6 enchanting room, while getting shot off the new adjoining walkway by bored skeletons, eventually got around to enchanting some items, started getting ambitious and went down to bedrock again to create obsidian from lava with the last three diamonds in a new diamond pickaxe, built a nether portal a hill away, had a thrilling and cowardly time being on tenterhooks setting up a netherworld hq/shelter while hit and running zombie pigmen, went back to the overworld surprised I was still alive, ran out to slaughter some other mobs for enchanting xp, got pelted by 2-3 skeletons a foot away from the door of my tower, didn't think I was in that much trouble and was still rampaging through spiders when suddenly, from out of my field of vision completely, hsssBANG.

Red screen. One button. "Delete world."

Wow.

Then there's the Realm of the Mad God. Which has been my sick little 15 minute turned 5 hour addiction of the past month, which has finally made it onto Steam as a free-to-play title.

All power to it, I say.

It's certainly a far sight better than my two aborted attempts at trying to install Lineage II to give their "truly free" model a try. (I'm on my third attempt, and I'm about to give up if it fails and wait for Aion to become "truly free.")

I couldn't resist taking the Steam version for a spin (achievements!). Unfortunately, the current Steam client is a tide bit laggy in terms of FPS and suffers from some input lag - or at least I found it so on the laptop on a mobile broadband while at work... But still playable.

I also found it interesting to observe that I fared far better than a number of (presumably) Steam newbies by virtue of the fact that I've played ROTMG a bunch before. I died less, shot at stuff with better aim and generally progressed faster through knowing more about the game (as compared to the first time I played it, certainly.)

Alas, hubris was cut short at lvl 17 - when I was just thinking that I might actually get this first Steam character to lvl 20 without *gasp* dying. One was caught between three lethal snowballs from an Ice Demon, and despite desperately mashing the Escape to Nexus key, it was a couple split seconds too late between the slowed response time, the laggy input and internet connection.

Out came the gravestone and the score screen to summarize the short-lived bytes that were my first Steam account's character.

The End. Ready for a new beginning, whenever you are. As I said, refreshingly honest. These are games with an end point built in. Who needs an endless grindy endgame, or incrementally numerical progress to the point where one is bored shitless but there's still another ladder to climb? Permadeath games offer a natural stopping point, a place to take a breather, until the next attempt, until the next try to do even better.

I rather like that. (What I don't like is when someone else can inflict that stopping point on you prematurely, but that's a different story. Here, we're talking roguelike permadeath. You screw up, your character dies, you gain knowledge for the next time, easy to repeat and continue.)
 More games should give this a go. Have the guts to say:

Game over. Try again?

Please Hold While We Update Your Life

After what seems like three weeks of nearly no MMO (or indeed, any kind of game) play, I've decided that I have sufficient time today to check in on a few games that I've had the urge to play but held back because I couldn't spare the huge blocks of time.

I'd previously held back because subconsciously I was afraid I'd sink back to old blinders-on habits and fall back into the unexamined life rut of letting an MMO kill time while I stagnated/failed further at work. My last burnout crisis was a huge wake up call in terms of kicking me in the behind and getting me to look more closely at the details of my life.

It's not going to be a fairytale magic wand change here. A pattern established in 8 years doesn't disappear in a month or two of willing it to happen - not unless I really wanted to force drastic changes, and I don't think I'm that desperate yet.

But certainly, I've dug up a new commitment to learning a lot more skills in the course of this year and working a few changes in the span of 3-6 months with more mindful attention paid to what I'm doing. Call it a longform emotion sort of game of change.

The trouble with the longform emotion, of course, is that I'm not very practiced at the long term interval progress measurements of change. My attention span tends to fritter in a month or two. Still, one has to practice in order to get anywhere.

Ironically, neglecting the rut I had fallen into for a couple weeks leads to a ginormous backlog of RSS feeds that went unread, and a remarkable amount of patching required to check out the games I had in mind - RIFT, Minecraft, Skyrim and maybe Guild Wars if there is sufficient time.

My hard disk crisis also meant I had to total a few other games in order to patch up these. Crysis went. It's been three years, I don't think I'm ever getting back to that game. And I also fried the piggs folder of CoHTest. I don't think I'm ever going back to CoX (in terms of a subscription), the new business philosophy has left a nasty taste in my mouth.

Wanted: Independent Team Player

Seriously, wtf. Every time I look at one of those job specs that go, we want someone who is a team player, that can work independently with their own initiative!

...I start seeing an irrational shade of red. I shouldn't let it disturb me, but somehow it does. These are the specs of someone who has not understood what the job entails, and in writing the description, just "bao ga liao" everything and cover their backside and put it all in.

It is a symptom of the terrible terrible bureaucracy we live in. The unspoken shame and fear that leads those in the public service to pleasing their bosses over the citizens, of chasing KPIs over thinking about what is really important, of resisting change and challenge in favor of the "what's not broke, don't fix it, and it hasn't broke or been broke in 30 years" status quo.

This is a very sore point for me. It's an anger trigger, if not a shame one. I feel...frustrated and burnt out every time I hit my head and encounter such things. Mainstream Singaporeans are exactly that, fearful and mainstream. Change is threatening. Improvement means they did something wrong, and of course, they would never do anything wrong. It's face, and it's fear.

My workplace is not the most hidebound of places to work, and yet I keep encountering the most hidebound of people. I have a sinking feeling it doesn't get any better anywhere else in the public service. Though, I did receive a surprise a couple of days ago when going for a corporatr organised workshop where they showed a training video created by some part of the public service which pointed out, in bravely succint difficult questions those selfsame issues of losing sight of the goalposts by following the weird comments of your immediate superior slavishly or chasing after the short term gain of numbers/KPIs for the quarter or the year.

I kept thinking, how did they dare to point this out, I should think they would have gotten crucified. The trainer also admitted she was surprised by the video.

Alas, despite some dilligent searching, I cannot find the video anywhere online. So it is either still deeply under lock and key and only brought out for the light of exposure in the odd training seminar or two or something along those lines, or it is some kind of super sekrit to be launched later via a new campaign vid. Cynicism suggests the former.

I am so... Tired. Change isn't happening fast enough. Stalwarts and diehards keep whining and sucking the life out of change. There is this conflict between innovation/good ideas and operational routine, and inertia wins nearly every time.

I want to leave, but I don't want to go from frying pan into an equally hot fire, so I want to figure out what I want to do. Haven't got there yet. Maybe I need a therapist.

The one good thing that has been coming out from this crisis is a newfound resolution to get off my butt and learn new shit. I've been putting off learning to drive forever, that's gotta change. I've been reading a lot more books in the past two weeks than I've attempted in the past two years.

The only thing that still upsets me is the amount of hours I waste every day in a job I don't get thrills out of, doing ridiculously ambiguous firefighting and daily chores. The money however is still a decently compelling argument for putting up with -some- of it temporarily.

Stress on the last word. I seriously need to work out what next, what now and now what. I... Just don't really know how just yet.

One Wicked Musical

On the spur of the moment, in my new quest to pay more attention to recreating and renewing myself rather than attempt to please other people, I flipped through a very old and ignored "To Do" list and realized I had the intention of purchasing tickets to both the Lion King and Wicked musicals that were showing in the Marina Bay Sands theatre.

I'm an irregular theatre goer at best, and neither show was on my list of must-sees (which normally only include Sting and any video game music concerts). To me, the Lion King was a good cartoon seen nigh a decade ago, paying a premium to watch a bunch of arty people in costumes reprising the songs of the Lion King sounded somewhat dubious. I put it down on the list mostly because one is always encouraged to try new things, especially things one does not think one will like.

And this other Wicked play, well, the premise of the story sounded interesting, but I didn't know the story or the songs - unlike Les Miserables, fer instance - so it would be paying a premium sight unseen for something that I might not even like...

Alas, I never got around to buying tickets for the Lion King, something I mildly regret now. Because today, equally spur of the moment after reading that list, I decided to treat myself and go watch Wicked before I ran out of chances (it closes end of March.)

I realize now that I greatly enjoy musicals. Especially ones with a clever plot, writing, songs and a spectacular cast - mostly Australians, not the original Broadway ones, but they were fantastic.

Wicked is a story set in the land of the Wizard of Oz, with a wonderful twist. What if the Wicked Witch of the West was the protagonist? It's an origin story, it's a story about labels and stereotypes and expectations and rewriting history to suit the victors (something that resonates especially for me this month), it had a dose of unexpected humor making it both tragic and comic...

...and I especially liked how cleverly the writers fleshed out and hinted at the three-dimensionality of all the characters with the brevity of a few songs. It would be easy to make Glinda the Good Witch a one-sided obnoxious antagonist to the Wicked Witch Elphaba recast in a new Harry Potter-esque geeky outcast light. But things only start out that way.

Elphaba's story, while fun to witness, is predictable in this new modern age. Born green, facing discrimination and unpopularity in the modern fairytale's equivalent of magic high school, standing up for the underdogs, she is a natural rebel against authority. Frustrated, disappointed, betrayed, it is no surprise when she finally hits a point of crisis and metamorphoses into the part of the Wicked Witch that events and history-rewriters were setting up for her.

There were some subplots that I did not predict, which added subtle nuances to the classic tragic story. A dash of romantic love, some foreshadowing of the lion, tin man and scarecrow of the Dorothy timeline, and the surprise of the tempestous relationship with Glinda - best enemies and best friends?

Glinda's story, on the other hand, was a true surprise. I had expected her to be cast as the villain, as the natural antagonist. There is an unspoken layer of subtext just below the outward appearances of popularity, success, glitz and glamour of obnoxious blond-ness that also has her just as equally tragic a hero as Elphaba.

The supporting characters and cast were great as well, fitting the story like a glove. Elphaba's sister in a wheelchair, two male love interests all metamorphosed into recognizable characters from the story.

The visuals were a treat, full of colour and spectacle and mechanical marvel. An animatronic Dragon and the Wizard of Oz mask/voice were very well done.

And the cast was rock solid tonight and on form. I feel especially fortunate that Jemma Rix and Suzie Mathers had such wonderful singing voices, and great acting chemistry together. Poor actors in a musical can give a play a very rote or awful quality. But them? Well, I can't wait to go see Wicked a second...or a third time.

Death of a Statesman

The recent schizophrenic nature of City of Heroes really start to show up when you compare SSAs with Itrials. I suspect that the developer base has been divided into two teams. The 'systems' people went ahead and did the itrials, which are amazing mechanistically, but end up little more than a paper-thin story covering what is really a constant spam of gimmicks that the lab-rat players must navigate.

The people who like to make stories get to run wild with the SSA...ending up with lots of cut scenes, lengthy dialogue trees, exposition, but a wreck in terms of anything novel in terms of playability. You kill mobs or kill a boss, then talk/watch a cutscene, kill more mobs or kill a boss, talk/watch a cutscene...and so on. They are definitely in the style of Going Rogue and First Ward, except with less polish and direction. (First Ward started out strong, then got confused in the middle. SSA start out confused and continue being confused. Does this say something about development schedules and content quality? Hmmmm...)

 Anyway, Statesman is dead, although he's still in Independence Port.

 You start out at a seedy bar (ignore the force field generator in the picture willya?)...expecting to meet the Back Alley Brawler. There, the two of you are supposed to investigate the lair of Darrin Wade. Darrin who? It's a level 20-30 villain contact added in issue 13. He was pretty much a nobody, but now he's the Big Bad.

Skanky bar...

Whoopeedo. You find Back Alley Brawler there, in a stand-off with some of the Vindicators. Ms Liberty wants to go smack up Darrin Wade, and Back Alley Brawler won't let them. He doesn't move to follow me either...I guess the moment he moves, the four sidekicks are going to charge forward. So off I go.

BAB is having an argument with the Vindicators. Swan is thankfully missing.

At this point, you fight your way through some tunnels, and see a fake image of Darrin Wade taunting you. But it turns out to be just a ploy to get me away from topside, because at this point I get an SOS call from BAB. And like any good magic trick, they had switched the scene while I was gone. The Vindicators and BAB are having a stand-off with the villain sidekicks. Insults are traded, and a fight begins. With help from yours truely, the villains are beaten back.

Then the contact, Glacia, sends me to where Darrin Wade's lair is actually located. Again, I fight through some tunnels, and kill three Rularru bosses to unseal the way to Wade's lair, and there you have it. I think it's quite funny, because it really does look like a supergroup base, with a bunch of teleporters, energy and control items, etc. Wade isn't around, but you pick up some clues that indicate he has figured out how to drain Statesman of his power! Zomg! Well, and of course, like any good evil mastermind, this is his villain exposition. He lets you see all of his plans because he is already carrying them out and there's no way you're going to be able to stop him. Muhahaha!

Darrin Wade's one-person supergroup base, showing very poor aesthetic sense.

You rush to current-day Cimerora, now in ruins...

If this place looks familiar, we usually see it when it was spiffy and shiny.

But zomg, it's too late! Statesman has found Darrin Wade. And he declares Wade is going to go to jail and rot forever. But Statesman doesn't kill, so he's not going to tear Wade into widdle bits. Too bad, says Wade, Statesman does not kill, but he does.

Statesman points a finger...well four fingers at Darrin Wade.

Uhoh...it's a trap! Dear old Statesman has somehow, obligingly, walked over to the middle of the amphitheatre or what do you call it. But it's ok, we know he was dense.

"WAAAAaaaarrrrgh!"

At this point, we're treated to a cutscene of what flashes through Statesman's mind when he dies. He sees his grand-daughter, his ex-best friend Lord Recluse, and his wife. (Curiously, no daughter.) At this point, Darrin Wade and yours truly fights, but hurt him a little and he decides to run off, in true evil mastermind fashion. Instead, he summons an aspect of Ruladak the Strong to deal with me. I wish I could give you a nice screenshot, but here the wonky game mechanics started to fall apart. The aspect of Ruladak the Strong, the incarnation of other-dimensional world-eater godlike anger, is terrified of me. He keeps running off the edge of the amphitheatre. Maybe it's the caltrops. Or the acid mortar. A long, tedious fight dragged out where he kept fleeing in terror and I had to chase him. Once he went off the edge, he would get stuck in the geometry and I could not hit him...so on and so forth...

The Aspect of Ruladak the Strong, that terrifying moster, is scared of caltrops and has run to the opposite side of the map (the tiny red glow in the distance).

Stuck in geometry...again. He can hit me, I can't hit him.

Finally, I offed the annoying fellow, and checked on Statesman's corpse. Nope, can't rez him. I guess he got fed up and refuses to get rezzed anymore. You can imagine everyone making fun of him. "Lolzor nub, u walked on top of a trap." "Ok whatever, I'm not getting up. Screw u!"

And that's that.

Your Gamer Score is 75/122...

I kid, I kid.

But it's a fair bit eyebrow raising to think that I've at least sampled, if not fully played through or completed, approximately 75 of the games on this list of 122.

Give or take a few. And some others in the comments, Alpha Centauri being one of the most stunningly left out.

I gotta find time to try out a few more oldie but goodies.

Unfortunately, I just discovered Realm of the Mad God. It is a F2P mmo/shoot 'em up hybrid with roguelike elements. It is fast, bite-sized fun and a big complement to the long form ATITD I am playing now. I am lost...

I Believe in Public Works, Not Handouts

Sounds like one of them Michael Jackson songs, "I believe in public works, I don't believe in miracles, and certainly not handouts either..."

For the last four days or so, I have been taking a break from ATITD. Part of it is a psychological distance from the perceived enormous grind to get sheetglass, of which I need several hundred debens worth (for greenhouse and way too many terrariums), and part of it is enforced distance due to working 11 days a stretch without a break, and the cherry on top of the icing now is that I'm nursing a virulent cold (of the nose overflowing, dustbin-filling with wet tissue, miserable-feeling, sore-throat-inducing-from-the-sinus-overflow, no-damn-fever-yet-so-it's-hard-to-justify-going-to-the-doc variety.)

And my air-con in the house is broke (and the one in the office is on steroids and pumping weights), so my entire body has been feeling extensive thermoregulation issues and is still confused whether the cause is external or internal.

I finally log on for long enough to do more than basic maintenance work upkeeping the livestock, and decide that I'll take the first few steps towards the hordes of sheetglass I desire.

Tracing back the long chain, I go past needing limestone and flax and papy (all of which are onerous and time consuming) to thinking that I need to get well-behaved glazier's benches. This involves lots of tearing down work and rebuilding until you get one that doesn't do sharp horrific temperature drops. I normally don't bother, but this Tale, I got spoiled by the first bench I built, which was the epitome of well-behaved, dropping a sedately predictable 105 degrees. The rest of the benches which go 159, 146 and 169 are terrible in comparison.

I pick a bit of silt for firebricks, then I realize that all this would be better served if I finally get off my arse and put together 1000 charcoal for a better salvage skill. The wood pile has plenty for 1000 charcoal, but again, my infrastructure is lacking. I've been sitting on building two more charcoal ovens.

New project: Make 2 charcoal ovens.

That involves metal and forging, so I set to with my mines, which are, in a surprising turn of events, ridiculously near my compound for once. Forging also requires charcoal, so I take my existing two ovens out for a spin. While I'm happily (or routinely) grilling up my charcoal briquettes, this weird low level character comes up and stands really close to me.

That's already odd. Most people don't invade personal space to that extent, newbie or not. I click on them, because normally the first thing they want is a leadership petition signed or a harmony init introduction. Strange. They don't have either. The second thing they want is acro (the test of the Acrobat.) But she doesn't have that either.

Looking at her info, she is an Elder in a Ironworks guild from another region. This guild has been offering to make trades by producing all sorts of metal products for sale. Either she's an alt, or a RL friend/wife/kid/associate of one of the other Elders in the guild.

Without a word, she blind invites to teach me Fine Casting (a technology). I'm already learning something from my alt, so I click on no.

I finish up my charcoal with her standing uber close to me, then I ask, "What's up?"


I get a chat window opened up by her (so she knows how to /chat people), and then an oddly captitalized sentence, "Can I Have a Medium Gear Please?"

Wut?

If she's a newbie, what the hell does a newbie want with a medium gear? There's almost nothing you can build straight off with one. Besides, it's a middling long process to make a medium gear, I don't have one, and I sure as hell don't believe in handouts to people, newbie or otherwise.

So I say, in as civil a manner as I can muster, "I don't have one, but you can use the mine here to get iron to make one."

My mines have always been set to public. Along with my compression furnaces, my charcoal ovens and hearths, and a bunch of other assorted equipment that are unbreakable if set to anyone can use.

They go OK. And run off to open my iron mine. I walk off to get ore from my copper mine cos I need the copper. I idly wonder if they know how to mine iron. But I don't get any questions, so I presume they are ok.

In under five minutes, lowbie stalks me again while I'm in the midst of mining copper. (I surreptiously lift all the ore from the mine, good thing I have 2 strength, because I wouldn't trust this lowbie as far as I can throw them.) "Can I Have Charcoal Please?" they go.

Hell no. I don't believe in fucking handouts, lady, and you're pissing me off. If you walk all the way to my public iron mine from another region and forget to bring charcoal, you're SOL. I already made my mines and furnaces public, BYODC or bring your own damned charcoal, I run a semi-public works, not a charity.

I bite my tongue on this and decide to play the diplomatic but relentless mentor instead. "You can make some from the charcoal hearths or ovens which are here."

Their reply, "I Don't Know How to Make Charcoal."

Yeah, right. I think you're a lazy bum looking for a handout. Still, I'll grant you the benefit of the doubt. I'm perfectly prepared to stand next to you and tutor you in the art of charcoal making because the gods know, I would have dearly appreciated one when I first started trial-and-erroring it.

"Well, the first step is to gather 250-300 wood from trees for a charcoal hearth," I continue mercilessly, erring on the side of overdoing the wood in case they were new.

Instead of running for the nearby trees, they protest, "I Don't Have Any Jugs."

Oh ho, so you know you need water (in jugs) to run a charcoal hearth, do you? (Though if you take it real slow, you can probably still make it without any water if you're not overly unlucky.) Tough, I'm not giving you any jugs either. You have a whole guild's worth of infrastructure access, including your own mines if I'm not mistaken, and you don't bring jugs or charcoal with you when you go to someone else's iron mines, wtf?

:"You can spin your own jugs from the public works building, just north of here."

I get a few more capitalized questions, like "Where is the Clay Patch" and "Where is the Public Works" which I answer, and in under five minutes, the lowbie logs off while staring at my compresion furnaces (having removed the ore they put into one, presumably without ever feeding it charcoal.)

I'd flipped the access rights to the other three furnaces, cos I was busy making copper, but I'd left the one for the lowbie, so they could do their stuff. I also flipped the permissions on my student casting box so they could use it for their medium gear if they wanted to.

Except that would need more charcoal, which they presumably didn't have or bring and didn't want to make.

Duh. Seriously, what the hell was that all about?

It's obviously not a complete newbie. Most complete newbies are more willing to learn than that.

It didn't really act like a 12 year old or younger. There's a kid or two in my region whose father plays ATITD, and you can tell a kid is piloting. They don't capitalize, speak in short form, and run up and down displaying signs of ADD. They mess about with things they like and avoid the long tedious chains of things they don't like. Occasionally they get conned or persuaded or bribed to do grunt work for someone (like their dad) cos they somehow like the repetitious activity that no one else can stand.

It's an Elder in a guild that trades metal, fer chrissakes, so it must have metal infrastructure out the wazoo. You'd think the other Elders would support it more.

Most alts are piloted by very decent players, and they surely wouldn't think twice about running home for charcoal, or just running home with the ore.

And if they spoke in terms that made more sense, like "I forgot to bring charcoal, could I borrow some from you and I'll pay you back later." or "I forgot to bring charcoal and I'm overloaded with ore, could I leave this ore here and come back, or do you have a grilled pepper that I could eat to carry this home, I'm overloaded?" I probably wouldn't mind spotting them that.

But what the hell was the long chain of begging for?

Is that the secret of their metal trading guild? Run little noob characters to various players and beg for one widdle gear please?

I dunno, but I hate handouts and I hate beggars. I don't give people fish. I'll give you the toolshop access to make a fishing pole and teach you how to fish, but wanting to take a shortcut and getting a fish handout?

Screw that. Screw you. And screw this cold, cos I'm still sneezingly miserable and no doubt, grumpier than usual.

Neptune's Pride: The Aspiration

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been my gamer literati hideout of choice since The Escapist plunged out of its heyday with foot in mouth (final straw: chasing off the Extra Credits podcast). They write some marvelous narratives about games, especially longform strategy games of 7+ friends that I can only dream about - such as Solium Infernum, and Neptune's Pride.

Yesterday, I found another blog courtesy of RPS who had given Neptune's Pride a go. The resulting tale is an epic worth reading - The Aspiration - Collector's Edition.

Especially since the guy managed to keep in roleplay character throughout, and constructed a fabulous operatic saga of betrayal and space empires out of the game.

One thing bears thinking about - the juxtaposition between the author HM, and another player Laura.

HM went into the game thinking that he wasn't going to have time for it. His personality was such that he did become borderline obsessive about it, from reading up strategies and tips on the game, to crafting a spectacular story out of it. He may not have ended up the victor on paper, but wow, what a fantastic tale and what glorious memories.

In contrast, Laura gave up before the game even took off, two days in. She just didn't prioritise it as highly as other things going on in her life and chose another winning move, that is, "not to play" at all. However, the one sour note in this otherwise perfectly understandable and very common happenstance was the rationalization in her part of the tale that Neptune's Pride is thus a bad, negative, "Facebook" game that of course, she was best not playing anyway.

To me, that seems... Undignified. Shallow. Sure, you can profess a love and a preference for faster paced strategy games, but there is something as well to the longform emotion. You can also respectfully decline not to play further, if it turns out not your cup of tea at all, but there is no need to jump and stomp on the game like it tried to sacrifice your baby, and ragequit in silence.

Look at Seance. Also female. Also newbie. Also bumrushed and popped like a pimple from the start. She stuck around to bow out gracefully.

For the record, I am wary of and mislike games that require you to set an alarm clock and live life around them and on their scheduled terms. I do think it's not very ethical design, and not very healthy to give one's life over completely to them, as it feeds an addictive personality/impulse turning it into a compulsion.

But I do respect that such games exist, that some people like playing them, and I don't mind reading their blogs to find out what makes such games so thrilling.

A month is not a very long time in the greater scheme of things, why not stsy the course if you commited to it?

Ultimately, I suppose, it shines light on the person. In one case, they view "game" as a disposable timewaster of no real importance. In another case, the "game" is not just a game because there is real people behind the character facades. Call me biased, but I much prefer and give kudos and respect to the latter perspective.

ATITD Diary - Day 29 - Vigil Dynamics

The vigil is a funny beast. This Test lures us into staying up late, for hours on end, turning out all our stockpiles, into an ever-higher, ever-increasing, ever-faster bid for absolutely nothing concrete but the hope that we might get more points to pass the test sooner, rather than later.

Basically, the Test of the Vigil is a scavenger hunt. You build a vigil fire for a cost in materials. At the start, requests for items show up every 15 minutes. Throwing said item into the fire nets you a "sacrifice."

The requests speed up as sacrifices increase, to 1 min intervals, and then apparently even quicker, to 2-3 a minute. The expense of the sacrifice varies randomly, but tends to get more alarming as time goes by.

Your final score at the end, is the total number of sacrifices you did, multiplied by the total number of sacrifices other people made.

This leads to an interesting juxtaposition of cooperation and competition, where it is in everybody's best interest to have a decent amount of people participating in the vigil - more stockpiles to draw from, more people taking turns means more breathing room when things get really hectic and so on, and it is also in everybody's best interest to ensure they have the most personal sacrifices out of the vigil fire. (eg. 30 sacs x 90 (120 sacs total) = 2700 points, whereas someone who did 20 sacs x 100 = 2000 points.)

This is sometimes solved by having a vigil caller, preferably someone impartial who has already passed the Vigil test, so that sacrifices can be divided out evenly between participants.

The expense of the sacrifice is another consideration. Ideally, you'd want everyone to take the sacrifice as it comes in their turn. But what if the person doesn't have the item? Do you give him another sacrifice and have someone who can afford the cost bear the brunt? Do you let the person who has the items get another sacrifice in, while the other person gives up their right to sacrifice in the round? Both solutions have been used. Other guilds prepare a massive stockpile for eventualities like this, so that they can provide materials to such stranded participants, out of goodwill, and the assumption that everyone does their part to prepare the stockpile.

In the first two weeks of the Test though, no one has passed, and no one can be considered impartial. Already in the last three or four vigils I've been in, there are varying degrees of "dishonesty" going on. Easy sacs can sometimes be stolen. The caller can purposefully not call a few sacs in order to fill it themselves.

Hell, even I have been guilty of a certain amount of sac "fixing" - as I entered two characters into the vigil, I intentionally gave one alt the other's sacs a few times, to skew the ratio of sacrifices from an even 32:32 for example, to 30: 34. My alt cannot complain, unlike a real person, but it benefits me to have at least one character winning the Test pass. I tried not to be too blatant about it, as winning scores are shown, so it would be very suspicious if one of my characters came out miles ahead of the other.

There are other ways of gaming the Vigil, and I've used a couple. One is to outlast the opposition. If you can stay on for 24 hours, putting in your sacs fair and square, one obviously gains more sacrifices than people who can only be online for 8 hours and have to log off.

The other is to deliberately end the Vigil. In our first vigil, it so happened we faced a very nasty resource of fish meat that no one wanted to contribute, and the participants, mostly another guy and me, decided "screw it" and were about to end it. It so happens that the resident drama queen logged on about 5 minutes before it was about to end, and pretty much gave us a hilarious amount of hell for doing so - presumably she wanted the fire to go on so that she could get more sacs out of it while we had to go, and presumably she suspected us of deliberately ending the fire before she could do so.

In our second vigil, a number of us were again quite happy to end it when another ugly resource popped up (a lot of leather). Admittedly, we wanted to end the vigil before the weekly test passes were scored, so that points could be counted on top of our existing points - so none of us had selfless intentions for doing so.

It so happens that my friend the Bastet vet showed up, and he argued for extending the vigil, and even brought all the expensive resources needed to keep it going. Do you think he had selfless intentions? Hell no, he obviously had some free time, so this was a good chance for him to get more sacrifices and higher scores if the vigil continued. Granted, a large extended vigils benefits all participants, by virtue of the fact that few others in Egypt can match the same feat, so everyone's scores are boosted higher. But one cannot deny the fact that one can boost one's personal scores by grabbing a bunch of sacrifices when your vigil mates have to log off or can't cope, either. :)

Having been on for nigh unto 24 hours, and facing significant depleted stockpiles (I generally don't sacrifice stuff that is too dear for me), I admitted defeat silently and logged off for the duration.

To my dry amusement about five hours later, when I logged on, my friend the Bastet vet was in high dudgeon because he was rather upset with the drama queen for deliberately (he says) ending the vigil with no reason and no real vigil killer, to the point he was nearly ready to quit the drama queen's guild, but he got ahold of himself and managed to calm down some (for which he has a good deal of my respect.)

Apparently, drama queen decided enough was enough and decided to end the vigil, and so intentionally withheld announcing a sacrifice that was quite easily filled. And then promptly filled in all the easy sacrifices around it. While the poor vet was off looking for really ugly resources in order to get his sacs in (they could very well have given the harder sacs to him - that was part of the reason why I buggered off too, because the previous caller was assigning me shitty sacs out of order that I was refusing to do).

So understandably, I think the poor guy felt more than a little used. Hence the vent to me.

On another amusing note, another guildie asked innocently about the vigil, and I also faked innocence and asked about what happened in that second vigil. What killed it? (As there is normally a vigil-killer that everyone admits is too fucking expensive to even consider.) Oh, went the admission, the actual item that killed it was this -easy item.-

(on purpose)


Me: ....?

Oh, yeah, dunno what happened there, why no one did that sacrifice, says drama queen's spouse (which I suspect was drama queen playing him). But there was another 250 leather sacrifice and 40 more cut stone after that (which are all expensive items, and were probably entirely fictional).

So what have we learned from this? That the drama queen is not entirely reliable, that another guildie whom I never liked anyway is probably dishonest and deceptive, that I still trust the Bastet vet over them and feel a little sorry that he got so carried away - but really, it was HIS freaking choice to both accept the sacrifices and to continue the vigil (which he argued for, mind you), so if you participate in a con game and get angry that you've been robbed...

Yes, it's still not right. It doesn't excuse the dishonest behavior from an impartial standpoint. But it really takes two to quarrel, two to clap, and so on. :P


Then again, are we not all using each other? That is how the nature of the Vigil progresses.

I played the same game. And when the stakes got too high for me, I said, no, I don't want to win that badly, I have other priorities that cannot be sacrificed just for a stupid first week vigil pass, and I stopped.

If I win this week, I will be delighted. I am hoping for it, because I chose to invest a significant amount of my Christmas and New Year holiday doing it, knowing the opportunity won't come again during normal work days. Then again, there are a lot of other people in Egypt, who could be burning insane vigil fires for all I know, all thinking the same thing, so competition may be a lot worse than imagined.

If not, there is the week after that, and the week after that, which will hopefully finish off all those who didn't win in the first week, assuming no one else got maniacal about sacrificing stuff.

And ultimately, it boils down to time again. In six months, when half the server has left due to burnout, drama or boredom, some of these tests will be much easier to pass... assuming you even wanted to do so then.