It was a slightly greater year than 2006.
My predictions for 2008: it will be an even greater year than 2007, but not as great as 2009.
Have a mirthful new year.
Monday, 31 December 2007
Friday, 21 December 2007
Thought for the day.
Holy trinity for PvE: Tank, DPS, Healer.
Holy trinity for PvP: DPS, Crowd Control, Bait.
Holy trinity for PvP: DPS, Crowd Control, Bait.
Tuesday, 18 December 2007
Festive daze.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my game dev. sent to me:
Twelve spammers spamming,
Eleven griefers ganking,
Ten mobs a-bugging,
Nine ninjas looting,
Eight raids a-wiping,
Seven zones a-lagging,
Six guilds amdramming,
Five SECOND pings,
Four camping bots,
Three class nerfs,
Two total noobs,
And a QQ talent in my skill tree.
Have a Merry MMOmas.
Twelve spammers spamming,
Eleven griefers ganking,
Ten mobs a-bugging,
Nine ninjas looting,
Eight raids a-wiping,
Seven zones a-lagging,
Six guilds amdramming,
Five SECOND pings,
Four camping bots,
Three class nerfs,
Two total noobs,
And a QQ talent in my skill tree.
Have a Merry MMOmas.
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
He who would search for pearls must dive below.
Following on from previous blog developments, how has the random visitor to the Inferno changed in the past four months or so?
Yes, sir, I'm getting the message. Loud and clear. And disturbed. No, I still haven't got your order for blue skinned, cloven-hooved, shamanic-alien copulation material in stock yet. So terribly sorry.
They absorb the life force of gerbils through a proboscis that they keep hidden beneath their ludicrously large hair.
Is that a command? Do you mind if I don't? It's just that he's forty five, married and quite a good mate; I don't think our friendship would be the same afterwards.
They certainly are! Why, I'm driving along in my car right now, both hands on the wheel, and yet by the power of cybershorts alone am I still able to make this blog post...
draenei erotica
draenei porn series
draeni porn
draenei porn (six times)
Yes, sir, I'm getting the message. Loud and clear. And disturbed. No, I still haven't got your order for blue skinned, cloven-hooved, shamanic-alien copulation material in stock yet. So terribly sorry.
how do porn stars have such good stamina
They absorb the life force of gerbils through a proboscis that they keep hidden beneath their ludicrously large hair.
shag with boss
Is that a command? Do you mind if I don't? It's just that he's forty five, married and quite a good mate; I don't think our friendship would be the same afterwards.
cybershorts handy
They certainly are! Why, I'm driving along in my car right now, both hands on the wheel, and yet by the power of cybershorts alone am I still able to make this blog post...
Saturday, 8 December 2007
Cool down the moon energy of the left nostril.
Cool-downs on skills are a curious thing:
There's nothing quite so frustrating as being a hero, super or otherwise, and leaping into the midst of combat with a 'Stand thee back!' and 'Never fear!' only to glance at one's skill bar and realise that nine out of ten of the best powers are on cool-down. Admittedly there is some argument for learning not to jump into the middle of a cliché of villains without having first checked whether one can do anything more than perhaps distract them with the dance of the seven veils, but where's the sense of adventure in that?! The sense of imminent personal pain and death is clear for all to see, I'll concede.
It's a curious evolution and is yet another mechanic that seems to be nothing more than sand thrown into the delicate moving parts of the player experience. There can be no doubt that cool-down mechanics, where a skill is disabled for a set amount of time after it has been activated, solve many rankling problems that would otherwise plague developers striving towards that incongruous mixture of restrictions and barriers that we know as 'balance'. Yet from the player's perspective, there can be few things more annoying than having an ability that will solve the current problem at hand and not being able to use it due to an artificial restriction. I say artifical restriction because cool-downs seem to be a strand at odds with the rest of the wily woven web of balance that entraps all players, the foundation of which is that set of mechanics that we shall call skill enablers. Skill enablers are the mechanics that limit the amount your character can do before they become exhausted, in World of Warcraft it is the rage of the warrior, the energy of the rogue and the mana of, well, everyone else. These mechanics serve as a way to control what a player can achieve and, with only a modest suspension of disbelief, make a reasonable amount of sense. Cool-downs, on the other hand, just leap out of the screen and pull down on your tie in that way that makes the knot so incredibly small that you need nanotechnology to get in there and unravel it. Annoying. I was trying to say that they're really, quite terribly annoying. What do you mean you don't wear a tie whilst playing so you wouldn't know? What do you wear, then? I'll tell you now: a tie is the only garment of clothing that I consider a necessity when playing an MMO!
Hmmm. Too much information?
I find it hard to put myself in a mindset that can accept cool-downs; I always envisage a warrior unable to perform the ability he did but a second ago use, yet is still able to perform any number of other combat feats, just not that specific one, not for another six and a half seconds at least. You slammed your shield into the enemy's face to great effect, and now you can't do it again? Why on earth not?! Was it perhaps too effective, and you think it would be better to give the enemy a fighting chance? Are you afraid that you have exhausted poor Kenneth, your shield, and you want to give him a chance to recover before slamming him into a sold object again? Perhaps you have some sort of religious belief system whereby you can cave-in the skull of an enemy using a solid wall of metal, but only after you've spent the ten seconds it takes to say seven Hail Marthas and cross yourself in penance. How about we say that you have a strange injury that causes you incredibly specific temporary amnesia every time your jar your arm in a specific way, such that you can't remember how to perform that action again for a short period. Yes, let's say that. Let's say anything, anything at all that gives me a fighting chance to reconcile the utter stupidity of not being able to perform a basic action that you performed flawlessly only a microsecond ago.
And relax.
No, not 'and relax', because furthermore the more powerful the ability the longer the cool-down. If you spent half a lifetime's worth of gold at the money grabbing freeloader that you call a trainer, in order to learn a powerful ability that can help turn the tide of a fight whenever you use it, then it goes without saying that you can only use that ability once every blue moon. Which is quite the undeniable shame, considering that ninety nine percent of the time that you're in a fight which requires such intervention you'll find that if you cast your gaze fleetingly upwards the moon that you are fighting under just happens to be bloody well WHITE. OK, OK, lemon-scented oak-soaked barely with a hint of camembert, or whatever those twits in the emulsion paint marketing department have decided the colour of the moon is today.
Oh, I'm so very glad that I sold my castle and half my lands in order to buy this ability that, having now used it, I can't use again until the wedding of my great great grandchild.
Still, in the end cool-downs are there to protect us from ourselves, otherwise we might be faced with characters with stupendous powers that they could use at will, and wouldn't that be plain madness:
Darth Vader: "Your powers are weak, old man."
Obi-Wan: "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
Darth Vader: "Nice try noob, but I'm not falling for that; I know you're just stalling because your Jedi skills are on cool-down."
Obi-wan [raising arms in the air and closing his eyes]: "Oh bum."
[Bvvvvwwom]
Luke [Standing beside the grounded Millennium Falcon]: "Ben! No!"
Spirit of Obi-wan: "Run, Luke! Run... Your blaster trigger-finger is still on cool-down!"
Spirit of Obi-wan: "Now how in the name of the Force am I supposed to make this corpse run from Dantooine back to the Death Star? Bah, I'll just stay as a ghost, at least I can't get ganked by Vader any more and I won't have to listen to that green imp bleating on at me: 'Fix the leaking sink, you must', 'Be nice to my aunt when we visit, you will', 'My supper, on the table it is not.'" [Hands deep in his robe pockets, shoulders hunched, he grumbles off into the distance, kicking at stones, through which his foot passes without stopping.]
There's nothing quite so frustrating as being a hero, super or otherwise, and leaping into the midst of combat with a 'Stand thee back!' and 'Never fear!' only to glance at one's skill bar and realise that nine out of ten of the best powers are on cool-down. Admittedly there is some argument for learning not to jump into the middle of a cliché of villains without having first checked whether one can do anything more than perhaps distract them with the dance of the seven veils, but where's the sense of adventure in that?! The sense of imminent personal pain and death is clear for all to see, I'll concede.
It's a curious evolution and is yet another mechanic that seems to be nothing more than sand thrown into the delicate moving parts of the player experience. There can be no doubt that cool-down mechanics, where a skill is disabled for a set amount of time after it has been activated, solve many rankling problems that would otherwise plague developers striving towards that incongruous mixture of restrictions and barriers that we know as 'balance'. Yet from the player's perspective, there can be few things more annoying than having an ability that will solve the current problem at hand and not being able to use it due to an artificial restriction. I say artifical restriction because cool-downs seem to be a strand at odds with the rest of the wily woven web of balance that entraps all players, the foundation of which is that set of mechanics that we shall call skill enablers. Skill enablers are the mechanics that limit the amount your character can do before they become exhausted, in World of Warcraft it is the rage of the warrior, the energy of the rogue and the mana of, well, everyone else. These mechanics serve as a way to control what a player can achieve and, with only a modest suspension of disbelief, make a reasonable amount of sense. Cool-downs, on the other hand, just leap out of the screen and pull down on your tie in that way that makes the knot so incredibly small that you need nanotechnology to get in there and unravel it. Annoying. I was trying to say that they're really, quite terribly annoying. What do you mean you don't wear a tie whilst playing so you wouldn't know? What do you wear, then? I'll tell you now: a tie is the only garment of clothing that I consider a necessity when playing an MMO!
Hmmm. Too much information?
I find it hard to put myself in a mindset that can accept cool-downs; I always envisage a warrior unable to perform the ability he did but a second ago use, yet is still able to perform any number of other combat feats, just not that specific one, not for another six and a half seconds at least. You slammed your shield into the enemy's face to great effect, and now you can't do it again? Why on earth not?! Was it perhaps too effective, and you think it would be better to give the enemy a fighting chance? Are you afraid that you have exhausted poor Kenneth, your shield, and you want to give him a chance to recover before slamming him into a sold object again? Perhaps you have some sort of religious belief system whereby you can cave-in the skull of an enemy using a solid wall of metal, but only after you've spent the ten seconds it takes to say seven Hail Marthas and cross yourself in penance. How about we say that you have a strange injury that causes you incredibly specific temporary amnesia every time your jar your arm in a specific way, such that you can't remember how to perform that action again for a short period. Yes, let's say that. Let's say anything, anything at all that gives me a fighting chance to reconcile the utter stupidity of not being able to perform a basic action that you performed flawlessly only a microsecond ago.
And relax.
No, not 'and relax', because furthermore the more powerful the ability the longer the cool-down. If you spent half a lifetime's worth of gold at the money grabbing freeloader that you call a trainer, in order to learn a powerful ability that can help turn the tide of a fight whenever you use it, then it goes without saying that you can only use that ability once every blue moon. Which is quite the undeniable shame, considering that ninety nine percent of the time that you're in a fight which requires such intervention you'll find that if you cast your gaze fleetingly upwards the moon that you are fighting under just happens to be bloody well WHITE. OK, OK, lemon-scented oak-soaked barely with a hint of camembert, or whatever those twits in the emulsion paint marketing department have decided the colour of the moon is today.
Oh, I'm so very glad that I sold my castle and half my lands in order to buy this ability that, having now used it, I can't use again until the wedding of my great great grandchild.
Still, in the end cool-downs are there to protect us from ourselves, otherwise we might be faced with characters with stupendous powers that they could use at will, and wouldn't that be plain madness:
Wise trainer: "BEWARE!"
Hero: "Ok!"
[Hero looks at wise trainer. Wise trainer stares back through squinted eyes.]
Hero: "Uh... beware of what?"
Wise trainer: "Eh? Oh, right. BEWARE..."
Hero: "Yes, we've done that bit."
Wise trainer: "Don't INTERRUPT me in the middle of a BEWARING!"
Hero: "Sorry."
Wise trainer: "I don't know. Heroes these days, ALWAYS butting in, think they know better. Why, when I was younger... bah, now I've FORGOTTEN what it was that I was SAYING!"
Hero: "BEWARE!"
Wise trainer [looking around in mild panic]: "What? Where?!"
Hero: "Eh?"
Wise trainer: "You said 'Beware!'. Beware what?"
Hero: "No, no. 'Beware' is what you were saying."
Wise trainer: "No it wasn't. You just said it."
Hero: "Yes, yes, I know. But I was saying it because that's what you were... oh never mind, can we just get on with it?"
Wise trainer: "BEWARE!"
[Hero makes a rolling hand gesture in an attempt to speed things along]
Wise trainer: "The POWER that I have bestowed upon you can DESTROY the entire WORLD, however, you can use it but ONCE every ten years!"
Hero: "So I can destroy the entire world."
Wise trainer: "Yes."
Hero: "But I have to 'beware', because I can only do so once every ten years."
Wise trainer: "That's quite correct. You MUST only destroy the ENTIRE world when it's really necessary, because you won't be able to do it again for AGES."
Hero: "Uh huh, well I don't think that that's going to be a problem. And why do you emphasise WORDS like that."
Wise trainer: "It's a CURSE, thrust upon me by that ACCURSED witch at number SEVENTY ONE."
Hero: "But you're able to cure curses aren't you?"
Wise trainer: "It's on COOL-DOWN."
Thursday, 6 December 2007
Monday, 3 December 2007
In the news.
I'm sure you've all heard the big merger news, but in case you hadn't:
It seems that Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Gamecock Media and Zoo Digital Publishing are set to join forces to form a game industry behemoth.
Look for Interactive Virgin Zoocock games in store near you soon!
(Mercy, the search terms that are going to hit this site now...)
It seems that Virgin Interactive Entertainment, Gamecock Media and Zoo Digital Publishing are set to join forces to form a game industry behemoth.
Look for Interactive Virgin Zoocock games in store near you soon!
(Mercy, the search terms that are going to hit this site now...)
Saturday, 1 December 2007
Thought for the day.
Regarding Warhamer Online's Tome of Knowledge:
It's a wonderful, powerful feature, which could potentially be the enabler for players to really identify with their characters and take pride in them. The WAR folks are always talking about realm pride, but they seem to be investing equally great an effort into developing a sense of character pride. Yes, there's definitely an element of the age old e-peen mindset about it, but the fact that the Tome also seems geared to tell the story of your character through many factors, not just those related to having hit other players over the head the hardest, means that it's not necessarily 'all about the epix baby'.
My thought though: if the Tome of Knowledge is indeed a complete scrapbook of one's character's adventuring life and not merely a few stats and titles, then please for the love of all that is holy, provide the ability to export the Tome into a document format that can be read outside of the game, pdf perhaps, or maybe XHTML based.
Blogs are a wonderful way to record the adventures of our characters, but if you have a feature within your game that already automates part of this - recording the basic history of a character - then exporting it would allow players to write around those raw facts and concentrate on fleshing out the spirit and feel of the game more, something which a data collection tool such as the Tome probably won't be able to capture.
If nothing else, I envisage myself in my eighties sitting in a rocking chair beside an open roaring fireplace, blanket across my legs and grandchildren all sat around my feet, and then relishing the groans and the looks of 'do we have to?' directed towards their parents, as grandad blows the dust off of his e-book, opens up his Tome of Knowledge, and begins to regale them all with the adventure of Gunberk the Dwarf vs the Dragon Ogres for the hundredth time. [crazy old man cackle]
But above all, I think what makes the Tome of Knowledge so special is that it’s your story. We are simply making a vessel to show you how you play Warhammer Online, and we expect people’s Tomes to express their different play styles and methodologies. While we are making one Tome, we are also making many. We are making your Tome. It’s waiting for you, and we can’t wait for you to come and check it out.
It's a wonderful, powerful feature, which could potentially be the enabler for players to really identify with their characters and take pride in them. The WAR folks are always talking about realm pride, but they seem to be investing equally great an effort into developing a sense of character pride. Yes, there's definitely an element of the age old e-peen mindset about it, but the fact that the Tome also seems geared to tell the story of your character through many factors, not just those related to having hit other players over the head the hardest, means that it's not necessarily 'all about the epix baby'.
My thought though: if the Tome of Knowledge is indeed a complete scrapbook of one's character's adventuring life and not merely a few stats and titles, then please for the love of all that is holy, provide the ability to export the Tome into a document format that can be read outside of the game, pdf perhaps, or maybe XHTML based.
Blogs are a wonderful way to record the adventures of our characters, but if you have a feature within your game that already automates part of this - recording the basic history of a character - then exporting it would allow players to write around those raw facts and concentrate on fleshing out the spirit and feel of the game more, something which a data collection tool such as the Tome probably won't be able to capture.
If nothing else, I envisage myself in my eighties sitting in a rocking chair beside an open roaring fireplace, blanket across my legs and grandchildren all sat around my feet, and then relishing the groans and the looks of 'do we have to?' directed towards their parents, as grandad blows the dust off of his e-book, opens up his Tome of Knowledge, and begins to regale them all with the adventure of Gunberk the Dwarf vs the Dragon Ogres for the hundredth time. [crazy old man cackle]
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