Melmoth's Inferno

Prod.

2008-03-12T22:49:00.003Z

Good lord, it still works after all this time. I would have thought that the ol' post bearings would have rusted solid by now, or perhaps the main comment transmission would have blown.

It's been a while! And there are reasons why this is so. I'll go into those reasons, but not here, I'm afraid. I fear the gates of the Inferno will still remain firmly welded shut (it's all that heat, you see).

Head on over to Killed in a smiling accident. for a continued lack of gravitas and serial blatherings from myself, and others...

2007 in review.

2007-12-31T22:45:00.000Z

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.

Thought for the day.

2007-12-21T17:37:00.000Z

Holy trinity for PvE: Tank, DPS, Healer.

Holy trinity for PvP: DPS, Crowd Control, Bait.

Festive daze.

2007-12-18T16:38:00.000Z

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.

He who would search for pearls must dive below.

2007-12-11T18:56:00.000Z

Following on from previous blog developments, how has the random visitor to the Inferno changed in the past four months or so?

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...

Cool down the moon energy of the left nostril.

2007-12-08T15:15:00.000Z

Cool-downs on skills are a curious thing:

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."

Readability.

2007-12-06T16:02:00.000Z

Blog reading level

Must have been my use of the word 'cockboat' in an earlier post.

In the news.

2007-12-03T19:10:00.000Z

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...)

Thought for the day.

2007-12-01T13:02:00.000Z

Regarding Warhamer Online's Tome of Knowledge:

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]

MMOon on a stick.

2007-11-30T14:09:00.000Z

I was reading an article over at Kinless' blog about areas of meaningful activity, where they ask at the end:

Do any of you have more ideas about “meaningful activity” that could be incorporated into the game to get people out of Shattrath and back into the world?

As pitiable as it may sound, I quite enjoyed the photography element in Bioshock. For those of you who haven't played that game, the photography element was a mini-game where you took photos of enemies and, once you had collected enough shots of a particular enemy, it earned you a 'research' bonus which granted you various character improvements, such as extra damage, for example.

I think that a mini-game along the same lines within an MMO could be quite a lot of fun. It would have players searching out locations, flora and fauna and taking pictures of them to earn bonuses or vanity items. For example, take a picture of all the various species of tiger in WoW and get yourself a mini tiger vanity pet to run around after you. It could well have players visiting old areas to find various mobs and locations. If mobs or items were deep inside some of the old-world dungeons then you could even get people running those dungeons again to get to the photo bonus objects.

What better than photography to make one open their eyes again, focus on more than the mundaneness of their immediate surroundings and see the vast expanse of the world anew.

Thought for the day.

2007-11-27T11:01:00.000Z

I was reading a thread on Usenet about pornography recently and it got me thinking. Firstly I was marvelling at the improbability of finding a thread about porn on the Internet, I mean, what are the chances? Shockingly, however, the discussion was at least attempting a sane and rational look at pornography and erotica, especially with respect to the strangeness that is sex as a fully-fledged industry. Admittedly it became progressively stranger, as Usenet threads are wont to do, until it veered wildly into considering what aliens would make of our sex industry if they visited the little pit of abasement at the end of the universe that we happen to call Earth. At such a point one can only surmise that the topic of tentacle porn would shortly follow, which is as good a Godwin's Law for porn threads as one is going to get, and hence your humble narrator left forthwith.

It did however, as I have already related, trigger a train of thought.

Pornography has been with us for quite some time, but it would seem safe to say that it is only in mankind's recent history that a true industry has sprung up around the luxuriant idea of sex as relief through performance and art. The basic premise is this: as mankind has advanced, sex has become less of a basic fundamental need for survival and more of an indulgence. With indulgence comes over-indulgence, and with over-indulgence comes abstinence and a desire to attain a more seemingly healthy balance. And here is where the porn industry steps in, for the desire is still there within many people although they do not wish to carry out their desires themselves, and thus they live out their fantasies through others, while they remain safely ensconced behind the protection of a glass screen and an 'off' button.

The thing is, it's not just related to the porn industry, and this is where I hope to drag this discourse, kicking and screaming, back on to the topic of MMOs. Firstly though, let's look at the food industry. Again, as mankind has advanced (and obviously this outlook is taken from a western world perspective) food has become less of a basic fundamental need for survival due to its abundance, and therefore has become more of an indulgence in certain areas of society. As the obvious signs of over-indulgence set in, with obesity and heart disease becoming far more prevalent than these societies could hope to counter, people start to enter the abstinence cycle and eat less, and more healthily. Here is where industry steps in, and what we have now is essentially porn for food lovers, with TV shows abounding with luxuriant foods, celebrity chefs travelling the world to indulge themselves in an orgy of gastronomic gangbangs, and adverts with hot, steamy puddings, naked from the oven and just begging to be covered in cream.

So what does this have to do with MMOs? Well, in recent times there have been numerous concerns relating to the amount of time indulged in MMOs. Many players themselves are starting to realise that the sheer scale of time that they devote to nothing more than a pixelated spreadsheet simulator is possibly unhealthy, perhaps bordering on clinical obsession. Is it long, therefore, before we enter the cycle of abstinence with respect to MMOs? Has it already begun? I believe it has. MMO porn thy name is Raids.

"Oh yeah, show me the epix baby, show me the epix."

The similarities are stark: bold, brash starlets are presented to the viewer, prostrating themselves on the bed of raid content as they display their epic assets, but peer behind the facade and more often than not one will glimpse the unhappiness, insecurity or personal sacrifice of the superstar raider. The top raiders are the porn stars of the MMO world, gazed upon with the hungering eyes of players who, despite desiring the epic image that these starlets portray, are secretly happy that they have not had to suffer the trials and degradation that these raiders have gone through to thrust themselves into the public eye. Instead, the average player will observe, sate their epic-itemed desires, and then return to the comfort and safety of an ordinary adventuring life.

So the next time that you see an MMO raider standing at the post-box in a major town, with their purple bits proffered for all to see, just remember that raiders, like porn stars, are people too.

WoW fhtagn.

2007-11-22T10:44:00.000Z

At the behest of Sir Bildo the Creepily Gazed, I decided to play a little more of my Draenei priest in World of Warcraft last night in order to see just whether the latest patch, 2.3.x, could really improve what I dub the 'mid forties death grind', where all but the most exceptional of one's characters are usually abandoned, floating in the lifeless inky void of the quest hole.

A little back story: I currently have two level seventy characters, the druid was my main for the majority of the game when, I think it's safe to say, fully half the known world was playing WoW. I played my paladin in the rare gaps when friends weren't online in an attempt to not advance my druid too many levels ahead. After the initial rush, pun intended, was over I had a level sixty druid and a paladin in the mid forties where he'd been abandoned in the dark depths of questing hell, where even the light of the holy often failed to reach him. After a significant break I returned to WoW, as any player who has been touched by the game's dark chaotic tentacles is wont to do, and found that a friend, who was looking for a change from their raiding main, had a character who was also stuck in the mid forties. We teamed-up, worked our way through various quests that wouldn't have been possible solo, and mutually boosted one another through the slog, like a couple of mountaineers battling their way against the blizzard to eventually break through the cloud cover and, gasping frosty breaths, lay eyes upon the sunny summit. From then on it was the plain sailing of sunken temples and black-rocked depths as others succumbed to the Cthulhu-like pull of the Elder Game, allowed a little of the insanity to enter their lives once more, and returned to adventuring with us. Come the time of the Burning Crusade I found little trouble in getting both my level sixty characters to level seventy, and although many a group adventure was had, soloing was always an option when others weren't around. The Burning Crusade came and went, extinguished as quickly as a candle in a waterfall, and the migrating players took wing and looked for the warmer climes of other games. I hung around though, and took the opportunity to explore the new content at the other end of the scale, creating my Draenei priest and blasting through the first twenty levels of excellent new quests, slowing somewhat as I went through the enjoyable but many-times-undertaken quests in Darkshire and Redridge, until eventually (having worked through all of the Night Elf areas up to Ashenvale in order to become Exalted with Darnassus by level forty, and thus be able to buy my Draenei a graceful, lithe kitty as a mount rather than some monstrous waddling mutant pachyderm) I hit a wall at around the mid forties and I drifted away from the game on the flotsam of disenchantment.

Fast forward to yesterday, which is an impressive manoeuvre if one thinks about it, and it was with some anticipation of disappointment that I took the five and a half hour journey from Ironforge to West Feralas where it had been determined that there were probably quests that I had yet to undertake. I found some quests of suitable level range, some below my character's current level which are always good for warming-up and getting back into one's stride, and a few more challenging ones. What followed was a couple of hours of insane experience gaining, loot gathering and general all round OMG and indeed, as those kids say, WT to the F. Yo. My character gained a level and half in what seemed like the blink of an eye and, although I'm not sure if this was due to the recent patch or that luck was having a day off from being a shrewish harridan and was now a lascivious lady of loot, I gained my first ever epic world drop, a mountain of green items, a fourteen slot bag and more pearls than I've ever seen.

Certainly, if Blizzard are trying to entice players back to the game, then this is a fine way to go about it, much to the chagrin of the 'dedicated', 'hard working', 'skilled' 'elite' of the game's upper echelons I'm sure. I shall certainly be returning to my priest again tonight, and although lady luck might not be putting-out with the amply lubricated lootual favours this time around, I can already see the summit of Mt. Grind where the Outlands Express awaits to whisk me onwards to the golden land. Either that or I'm being fed a pleasant dream, an enzyme-induced euphoria, while the Elder Game wraps its dark velvety tentacles around my head and sucks away the last remaining ebb of life force through my brain.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh WoW R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

WoW fhtagn.

Stone the crows.

2007-11-20T14:21:00.000Z

The current character that I'm playing in City of Villains, as part of the Monday n00b Club's excursions into all things Strike Force, is a true favourite of mine even though the power-set combination that he utilises is deemed to not be amongst the more 'uber', 'down with the kids', 'too hip to be cool' combinations. Inspired somewhat by other's detailing of their characters I thought I would ramble on a little about the character that makes me smile every time I come to play them of a Monday evening. A Stone/Dark Brute, he is an absolute joy to play, and despite having not yet gained some of the signature powers of either power-set, nevertheless each gaming session sees me with a face of childlike wonder and merriment, grinning through a bottom jaw set firmly away from the top one as if each had been magnetised as an opposing pole, watery eyes wide open trying not to blink and miss a moment of the utter carnage that is centralised around the ground zero, the focussed point of fury, that is my character.

Stone Melee and Dark Armour are interesting power-sets because they both give up a little of their primary function - that of damage for melee and resistance/defence for armour - in order to have a little more capacity for utility. For these two power-sets the utility provided is that of soft and hard control elements through which develops a very nice synergy, alas it is a synergy at a price, and that price is three pounds, fifty four pence.

Oh, sorry, that's the price of my lunch. The price of synergy for these power-sets is in fact Endurance, great oceanic swathes of that beautiful bright blue bar which is the steam locomotion, the petroleum ignition, the controlled nuclear reaction, in essence the 'power' to any hero's 'super'. It's a high price to pay, and it leaves the player running a tightrope between not taking mobs down quickly enough and not being able to take them down at all. There's nothing worse than hearing that dreaded "BWOOOoooo" as all your toggle powers (generally these relate to armour and status protection) shut down and you're left standing amidst a horde of angry hooligans slavering for blood, at which point your character's limp and impotent body allows for nothing more than a meek smile and a gentle covering of the wibbly bits before taking a beating that would make the eggs in an omelette admit that life was really pretty good, all things considered.

Stone Melee

New Improved Inferno, now with headings! It'll never catch on.

In short: stone melee rocks in all senses physical, metaphysical and metaphorical. It is for me the quintessential melee power in the City of Supers series of games, with its huge thundering attacks that encapsulate everything that the Fresh Prince and Jazzy Jeff preached unto us in their song about the joy of boom, right down to the shake-shake-shaking of the room; one feels an instant urge to let rip a wild eyed maniacal roar of laughter as foes walk headlong into fists of solid stone or are flung through the air on the end of a rock mallet, and the dangerous part of this adrenaline rush is the need to fuel it further, to continue smashing saints and pummelling the penitent for as long as your fingers will maintain a point with enough resistance to depress a key, until several hours later you are mashing chunks of keys at a time with the bruised and bloodied knuckles of what remains of your abused and ravaged hands. Now take into consideration the need, nay the very desire of a Brute archetype to keep fighting, for the more that the character fights the greater his rage builds, and as we all know, with great rage comes great responsibility.

I jest of course, because with great rage comes wild abandonment of reason and the reduction of intellect to that of a gibbering marmot that never bothered with school and instead spent all of its days down at the Nevada arcade playing Bubonic Fighter Alpha and Virtua Groundhog.

It is hard to describe to anyone who has not played a Brute just how completely the developers have managed to tap into the essence of our cave dwelling ancestors, to hit that primal nerve that triggers ancient genes long forgotten in the darkest depths of the brain, from a time when the RFC for flight as a method of survival had yet to be ratified, and fight was the protocol of the day. When you are beating upon enemies and they, in turn, are beating on you, then the rage bar builds, and with that comes a seemingly exponential increase in damage; when you stand still and are not in combat the rage bar will decrease until it is nothing and hence, therefore, are you. Given such a choice: between glorious, dry-mouthed, heart-pounding combat, raging amidst the waves of the enemy as they crash and break against your coastal form, immovable as the land itself, and like such, only to be gloriously defeated if the waves determine to rise up so high as to drown you beneath them in a tsunami-like torrent; or to stand limp and feeble, like some frail old man unable to summon even the strength to draw up his incontinence pants to maintain his dignity at the bus stop where he stands, and where moments ago the elastic on his underwear decided unkindly to fail him.

Then I say there is no choice at all.

Having said that, it is clear that allowing the combination of the stone melee power-set with the Brute archetype is in absolute contravention of several articles of the Geneva Conventions.

It is worth noting that I'm feeling this way without having taken a couple of the signature powers of the stone melee set yet. My character is currently level twenty five and has been developed more on the Tank side of the Tank/DPS hybrid scale that Brutes straddle, mainly due to the fact that as the rest of the formation of the Monday n00bs consists of a Stalker and a couple of Corruptors, it seemed like a good idea to have someone to absorb the bulk of the enemy's ire. This meant getting Dark Armour's shields and damage aura (which acts as a very nice field o' taunt and beats having to shout "Yo Mamma!" all the time) set up early along with the requisite power pools of Fitness (for the lovely and ever-needed endurance booster that is Stamina) and Leaping (for not only the essential travel power but also Acrobatics, which prevents my character spending most of the game getting up from being knocked down); the tank-like setup left little room for actual attacks, and so he has the minimal number of attacks that I felt would put out a decent amount of damage once the rage bar got going but also wouldn't suck down a lot of endurance before I had Stamina and various other powers slotted with Single Origin enhancements, which make all the world of difference to how a character plays. As such, he has Stone Fist, Stone Mallet and Heavy Mallet only, and is missing the lovely soft-control Fault power, and the insane damage with extra disorienting goodness that is Seismic Smash.

Considering how much fun it is to play with just three powers, I can't wait to see how things go when the entire arsenal of smash is fully assembled and he realises his full potential. I foresee much tongue-lolling, dribbling and drying-out of the eyeballs.

Dark Armour

Dark armour has toggles, and plenty of them. A toggle power is one that is turned on and left on until you decided to turn it off or it is forcibly turned off by the enemy. In return for whatever ability this toggle bestows upon your character you pay a small debt of endurance that constantly ticks away at a set amount over time; inherent endurance regeneration and the extra boost to this provided by powers such as Stamina mean that you can invariably run one or two toggles with little effect on the overall, um... endurance of your character in a fight. However, the more toggles that you run the more likely you are to chew through your endurance once a fight begins in earnest since you will eventually overcome your natural regeneration from simply running the toggles alone, and the larger amounts of endurance required to power your attacks, especially with an endurance hungry power-set such as stone, becomes very noticeable indeed, until the point that you hear the dreaded "BWOOOoooo" and big bald men in leather jackets come around and repossess all of your toggle powers due to your lack of payment to the endurance lenders. So a few toggles are manageable, more toggles become a problem, and dark armour has a lot of toggles; there are toggles for basic resistances and obscure forms of damage such as fire; toggles to counter status effects such as sleep and hold; there are toggles for damaging your opponents and for fearing and disorientating them, and there are toggles for repelling small Yorkshire Terriers in smoking jackets, for defrosting your car in the morning and for washing wool at sixty degrees without shrinking it.

In return for this drain of endurance the dark armour wearer is blessed with respectable protection from nearly every type of damage that the enemy can throw at them, and on top of all that they get some lovely soft-control powers to prevent the enemy from even having the chance of attacking them in the first place. Alas, the control power of the dark armour set doesn't come until the later levels and as such my Brute will have to wait some time for this pièce de résistance of the set, irony intended, since all the powers I have taken up until now are actually to do with the resistance of damage, whereas the pièce de résistance is not.

So far the tactics for dark armour - as much as I have developed any tactic other than a Leeroy Jenkins-like charge into the midst of huge crowds of angry protagonists accompanied by a vague hope that the rest of the team noticed my disappearance beneath the angry writhing mob, and more importantly can be bothered to help dig me out again - is the common sense option of only turning those toggles on that are required at the time: if the enemy is mainly firing guns and punching my character, then I only need the most basic armour, if they shoot flames or energy beams then I use the specialised 'Other stuff that isn't punching or shooting' shield for dealing with that while turning off the basic armour, and when a boss or arch-villain comes along, well, it's a case of turn everything on and hope that he runs out of health before I run out of endurance.

And so far, fighting alongside an awesome team of fellow villains, the tide has always turned once it hit the rocky coast. Or, at least, when the rocky coast hit it back.

It is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance.

2007-11-14T13:51:00.000Z

From the Cryptic Blog:

"Traditionally, there have been two dominant design motivations for instancing:
[...] Secondly, in the early days of MMORPGs one of the ongoing problems was
players camping valuable spawns or drops, effectively locking other
players out of content."

And the devs of the various MMOs weren't having players doing that!

Not when they could create raid instances and lock the majority of players out of the content themselves. Why should the gankers and campers have all the fun?

MMOon on a stick.

2007-11-12T10:54:00.001Z

Welcome to my new feature, MMOon on a Stick. Here I'll just dump out random ideas that, riding on the back of cosmic rays, have struck my head and burrowed their way into my brain. They'll be fanciful, bizarre, incomprehensible, impossible, and all other sorts of ibles. It's just a quick dump of the contents of my brain when I think "Hey, what if?"

The first cranium crusader, and inspiration for this post, is as follows:

I was thinking about the hunter class in WoW, having been playing one for the first time recently. I've been enjoying the dynamic that exists between the hunter and their pet, with the pet as tank and moderate DPS and the hunter as DPS and moderate healer. It became clear that this worked well as a duo, but that once a hunter joins a group of adventurers their pet is often a mediocre tank compared to a warrior, and the hunter is not often the highest DPS compared to Rogues or Mages or Warlocks; I daren't suggest that hunters are mediocre DPS lest I call down the firey brimstoning wrath of a hundred thousand million hunters. Hoo boy, there are a lot of hunters, don't ever annoy them, they'll rise up and devour the world.

Anyway! What I thought was this: once the hunter joined a team, what if they could turn off their pet and in exchange get a boost to their DPS or crowd control abilities, such that they could contribute that much better to a defined role in the group. Extrapolating this a little further, it seemed like a fun idea to have any class have abilities that helped them to solo, but which they could turn off when joining a group in exchange for becoming a more pure class of tank, DPS, crowd control, healer, burger vendor, accountant or what have you.

Taking the superimposed reduction of this extrapolation into its primary quanta and then running it backwards through an inverted induction field (what?), I landed at the following: have players with skills that are unlocked based on the composition of the party. For example: with no healer in the party all DPS/Tank characters would have their innate healing abilities unlocked, but at considerably reduced DPS due to certain combat powers becoming locked and unavailable to them; they will be able to achieve the same content as they would with a healer, but it will be more difficult for them as they will have to concentrate on healing themselves at the same time, and it will be a slower, tougher fight due to their reduction in DPS. If a healer were to join the party the self-healing skills of the DPS players would be locked, but their greater DPS skills would become available, meanwhile the healer class's DPS skills would become locked but their more powerful healing skills would become available.

Changing the makeup of a character in this way seemed like not only an interesting additional dynamic to the game-play, but could also go somewhat towards alleviating the problems of solo play as a non-DPS class and group play when no healer is available. I use the healer example here, but it could work equally well for tanks and crowd control classes too.

So there you go, the self-induced public craniotomy that is Moon on a Stick.

Aspire rather to be a hero than merely appear one.

2007-11-12T09:18:00.000Z

I was reading an interesting discussion on Zen of Design about how to address the public’s innate desire to play as Batman or Wolverine in the forthcoming Marvel and DC MMOs; I haven't any contribution to make to that discussion other than the fact that if you think having some "Kekeke LOLZ" person playing as one of your nearest and dearest intellectual character properties is a good idea, you must have been snorting the Joker's dandruff. I mean, just go on to an MMO server, any server, any game, and turn on general chat and listen for five minutes. Ok, that, that right there is going to be what it would sound like in Professor Xavier's school for the 'gifted':

Cyclops: "Wolverine is FAG!"

Wolverine: "I am not! I kik ur ars in PvP. QQ more Siklops you == teh lose"

Cyclops: "Ur just got overpowered regen FoM character."

Rogue: "Hey guys, can't we all just get along."

Wolverine: "Show us ur boobs Rouge!"

Cyclops: "LOLZ!"

Beast: "LOL!"

Rogue: "Oh please."

Cyclops: "Jean Grey has the better boobs."

Wolverine: "NO WAI!"

Beast: "Yuh uh!"

Jubilee: "Reported."

Cyclops: "What who?"

Cyclops: "Who u reporting I not done anything."

Jubilee: "I'm reporting you and Wolverine."

Cyclops: "We didn't do nothing."

Wolverine: "Jubilee got no boobs."

Cyclops: "LOLZ!"

Beast: "Ha ha"

Iceman: "ROFL!"

Storm: "Hey what about my boobs?"

Letting players loose on your carefully crafted IP is just going to end in tears and far too many screenshots of Wolverine and Cyclops trying to gangbang Rogue or Magneto or each other. So what to do? I'd like to see the game building a story of your character as a hero in their own right. Starting off the game as a civilian could be an interesting ploy, it allows you to build the story right from scratch and work your way through one of the most interesting parts of any hero's story, the act of transformation. Bruce Wayne's struggle and eventual coming to terms with the bats in the cave beneath Wayne Manor for example, which represented more than a phobia of flying rodents, but a struggle with helplessness and fear. Peter Parker's horror and confusion at his newfound power, followed by jubilation and freedom and then regret and the oppression of responsibility. It could be argued that these moments, above all things, make these characters what they are, to themselves and to their audience. The act of discovery is beautiful in its own right, so why deny your players the chance to experience this with their own characters, and perhaps provide a unique bond between that player and their virtual alter ego.

It would beat starting the game as a low powered hero.

Officer: "Help! Infernus! There are people stuck in the bank's vault; they're running low on air and it's been frozen shut by the icy Dr. Blain!"

Infernus: "Sorry officer, I'm only a low powered hero. My powers are quite limited. I can reheat that cup of coffee for you though, if you'd like."

Officer: "I, uh... sure."

Infernus: "Ok! It'll take me about twenty minutes or so, but then it should be nice and steaming again. Stand back now. Infernus calls forth the inferno of Hades to do his bidding!"

<A little puff of smoke and a tiny match-like flame spring forth from the palm of his hand>

<Infernus grins sheepishly at the unimpressed policemen>

Have your players start out as civilians and have them pick the route they want to go through to become the hero of their choosing. A player could run missions at the local military facility if they wanted their hero to be the result of scientific military experiments, or perhaps they will find a military battle-suit that they steal and use for the good of mankind. Once the basic concept of the hero has been decided through pre-hero quest choices the transformation mission would be undertaken. Lord of the Rings Online has shown that the instanced, scripted mini quest is very viable as a method of storytelling, and I imagine it could work well in the super hero genre as well.

But it shouldn't stop with the drama of the transformation, the life of a super hero is defined not just by the villains that they fight and the wrongs that they right, it's also about the struggle with anonymity and with being misunderstood, it's about having to leave loved ones behind or neglected, and it's about the crushing responsibility of power over the lives of others.

It's about human nature when faced with the unnatural.

And this is the problem that Marvel and DC have with their games; in my view their heroes are compelling because of the story surrounding them, it's not about the flashy powers (if you think about it, most of them have a very limited range of powers), it's about the way that they use them and the stories that result from the use and misuse of these gifts, as a normal human being comes to terms with the extraordinary and the resulting moral decisions. The problem is that the MMOs of the past have never been the greatest medium for the telling of tales where the character is concerned, oh yes there are stories, stories abound, but they are not about the character, they are about the world the character lives in, or they are about the lives of the NPCs with which the character interacts. What I'd dearly love to see in these future super hero games is a new take on MMOs, where storytelling becomes an integral part of the player's game, such that a player becomes so involved in the story of their character, where to live the decisions, victories and failures of the character becomes so integral to their idea of a super hero that they do not care to play as that meat-headed Wolverine, because their character's story is more compelling to them.

The super hero genre unlike any other has the ability to break the boundaries of MMO convention just as their characters break the boundaries of human endeavour, but it may well take a super human effort on the part of the developers to make it a virtual reality.

In the news.

2007-11-09T08:51:00.001Z

NCSoft and Mythic decided to go their separate ways after attempts to merge their franchises City of Heroes and Dark Age of Camelot resulted in the disappointing and poorly received game of lycra-wearing female protagonists in a medieval setting: Dark City of Cameltoes.

Ward robe.

2007-11-09T07:00:00.000Z

I got up this morning, washed and then hopped into my outfit for work:

I first put on my lycra cycling shorts since these provide the most comfort and flexibility while seated in a chair all day; the knee-length thermal socks were next, because it's getting a bit chilly and they provide excellent frost resistance. I choose a pair of Birkenstocks for my feet as, although they only have moderate armour, they give a generous bonus to my comfort rating and provide sweat reduction. I wear a bra these days because, although it's not really designed for my class, it gives huge bonuses to my support stats, so I popped one of those on. Next I shrugged myself into my fireman's vest: great elemental protection and it also provides a small bonus to seduction checks! I decided to go for a bowler hat today instead of the deer stalker on my head slot; I prefer the deer stalker for general use, but today I was going to be grinding my London commuter rep, and you have to wear the bowler to be able to interact with them. London is a noisy place though, so I put on my ear defenders first, these provide a massive resistance to all forms of aural attack, although you do get a bit of a negative modifier to detect speeding taxis when you're crossing the road. Luckily the bowler hat reminded me that I had a nice silk tie that also temporarily boosted my company rep, so I popped that on my neck slot. I wasn't sure what to go for in the eye slot, so in the end I stuck with my stalwart ski goggles; you just can't beat anti-glare and immunity to grit in the eye! A pair of shiny rubber marigold gloves next, pretty much standard fair for anyone having to touch the doors on public transport, plus their superb water resistance would stand me in good stead if I had to deal with any impromptu plumbing quests: the sink at work has been leaking for a while now. I strapped on my workman's utility belt, which is excellent for providing extra slots to carry food and stationary and any other loot I pick up during the day. The cricketer's box went on next - it's so nice to be able to stack armour over your basic clothing - and these make one's privates uncrushable against fellow commuters swinging their briefcases wildly around during the frantic morning rush hour. Finally I checked outside and it looked as though it was going to be a pretty cold zone that I was heading out in to, so I decided to grab my wife's pink dressing gown and put that on my back slot, it has just about the best cold resistance that I know of and it boosts snuggle and cosiness stats as well.

And there you have it, probably the best London commuter outfit that you can get outside of the major raid instances such as Savile Row!

Memelmoth.

2007-11-05T12:19:00.000Z

The bushido bladed Stormgaard did tag me earlier in the week with a self-wrought meme about five lessons that one has learned from playing MMOs. My post is somewhat delayed and I should apologise, but alas it is not really entirely my fault for I am somewhat cursed with a rather fickle muse. When my muse is around I can write for hours, draw moderately splendid pictures (if I do say so myself) and undertake other such creative outlets without batting an eyelid. However, they're very rarely available and more often than not when I call on them for aid I get a rather abrupt and abusive answer-phone message which tells me in no uncertain terms where I can stuff my desire for creative stimulus. When they do finally show up they have a stinking hangover, the whiff of alcohol and cigarettes is about them and they sport a rather brutish six o'clock shadow of stubble, which is all the more frightening a proposition when you consider that my muse is female. For those of you who are aware of the more UK centric comedians, my muse could be likened to Jo Brand if she'd gone on a six day drinking binge with Mick and Ronnie of Rolling Stones fame. It's not so much a gentle seductive inspiration in the creative arts than a big lady with a fag hanging from the corner of her mouth shouting "Get on and write something you lazy oik! I'm going for a cooked breakfast; there'd better be something on that paper when I get back or I'll give you a thick ear". Charming. I should probably delete the above before she gets back, otherwise I'll be for it. I'll do that in a bit, but first I will attend to the meme at hand, so without further ado here are five lessons that I've learned whilst playing MMOs:

1) In any MMORPG the NPCs are the heroes.

It took a while for me to learn this one, and with each new game came the watery wide eyed, hand clasped, bottom lip biting look of hope that accompanies the prayer that this time I would be able to adventure with my character through strange and wonderous lands, and that with these exploits would come fame, fortune and perhaps a little bit of what I believe the hip young crowd call 'looking like a bad-ass'. What actually transpired each time was that I would adventure through oddly familiar and generic lands, and with those adventures would come the realisation that I was a mouse on a treadmill of ever increasing RPM that I would eventually no longer be able to keep up with, at which point I would be flung off and into the cage bars of reality, and as my blurred vision from the impact began to clear the reality that slowly came into focus showed me that I really was quite inconsequential in this world, that I was a mere pawn in the affairs of NPCs. Those damnable NPCs, with their matching sets of clothes and armour who, whether going shopping or standing in a field in the middle of nowhere, look ten times more awesome than I ever will. NPCs who have an arm missing but still fight better than I can with two, who wear blindfolds and yet have powers so awesome that they can lay waste to an army of opponents when I have barely etched a noughts and crosses board on the armour of one of them. NPCs, and mobs too, have incredible powers that players are just begging their trainers to instruct them in; huge damaging spells for next to no mana, heals that could top-up the health of entire continents of players in one go, debilitating powers that could lay waste to those same continents. It wouldn't be so bad, but here is my character, with many years of time spent adventuring the lands, and all he has to show for it is a slightly limp mace and a shield which I found out the other day is really just a large chocolate Christmas tree decoration in disguise; really, the shield does look like one of those chocolate Christmas tree decorations, I imagine my dwarf hiding behind it as the enemy swings some magnificent, deadly and glorious battle axe which strikes through the tin foil wrapping and gets stuck in the 20% cocoa base, at which point my dwarf peers out over the top of the shield with a huge cheesy grin and perhaps takes a little bucktoothed nibble of chocolate as the orc desperately tries to pull his gummed-up weapon away.

Could instanced worlds help alleviate this annoyance and give players a greater standing in these virtual lands in which they spend so much time inhabiting? I envisage a lobby for players to login to and tweak around with their characters, trade items and meet people but then they enter an instanced world limited to a very small number of people, perhaps a guild per instanced realm; recruitment would also take place in the lobby and there would be a default realm for the unguilded. In this way the uniqueness and involvement of a player would by multiplied by a huge factor, and the players could perhaps be more powerful in this world compared to NPCs because they come from a limited band of heroes rather than a horde of maniacal adventurers that would challenge the crowds at the January sales for sheer loot grabbing ferocity. There's often a fairly high registration on the outrage-o-meter when 'instanced' anything is suggested to players, but Guild Wars has shown that this can work successfully on an instance per group ideology, what I'm suggesting is that the actual realm would remain intact between sessions, such that when you return to the realm, rather than having a fresh world where everything has reset, you would be known in the land, if you'd helped the village of Gankton from being set upon by all the other local villages (serves them right for moving into a place called Gankton, to be honest) then the villagers there would remember your deeds, and perhaps the other villages would also remember...

Anyway, that was an ever so slightly tangential ramble, and suffice it to say that I don't believe that it would be entirely viable to create such a thing in the near future, so until then I will just have to remember the lesson that my shields will always be made of chocolate, my character will always look like a patchwork lunatic and NPCs will always be the coolest kids on the block.

2) MMOs are really social simulators for the government.

You've been fed a lie all of your MMO life, you're not playing games, you are in fact playing thinly disguised advanced social simulators run by government funded agencies. Never before have governments had the opportunity to study such social behaviours as mob mentality, crime, love, betrayal, cliques, in fact the whole Lord of the Flies shebang, without having to be accountable for the resulting harm that comes to their electorate. Reward vs Punishment, how group learning works vs singular attempts. How do the 'top' guilds form? Why do they form? What factors cause them to splinter and fracture, and what is the effect of the resulting fallout. There is so much information that can be gathered, and probably is, as to how social networks perform under various situations, it's a gold mine of data to anyone who wants to know how to make friends, influence people and take over the world.

A tad extreme, but you never know! Which is why you should always do things to confuse their data collection. I suggest acts of sabotage such as randomly stopping in populated server areas and spinning on the spot for two minutes, buying all the cheese in a shop and giving it to passing PCs, running backwards into all dungeons that start with the letter 'd', forming huge groups of fellow players and then travelling across the land while other players pretend to be herding you like cattle, and standing naked on a mailbox while dancing for the general population. Wait, scrub that last one.

3) It's just a game.

So simple to state; so difficult to master.

4) Give a chance to all things.

Games, guilds, players, they all deserve a chance before they are dismissed to the pits of mediocrity, melodrama and moronisity. Case in point: I probably wouldn't have played CoH at all if it wasn't for the enthusiasm of others, I had already written it off as being from a developer that I'd heard little about, and a game of which there had been little buzz within the pages of those gaming journals that I read at the time. Another example: I left my WoW guild prematurely, it turns out, because it looked to me as though a clique was forming and that the guild was going to consist of a few people running instances and using the rest of us to fill the holes in their dungeon running schedule when they were missing a member of the cool kids; shortly after I left the guild a huge wave of new people joined and it looks as though the guild was probably pretty good for all involved in the end. Lesson learned.

It's worth trying games whenever you can; betas are useful in this fashion, it's nice to be able to determine that a game is not for you, and not having to buy the box to find this out is a boon, but it's worth remembering that it's also a good way to find those pieces of gold that are hidden in amongst the silt that is the general gaming market.

Give players a chance. Some people are truly wonderful but have the unfortunate knack of coming across as being obnoxious when their speech is distorted in the refractive index of a textual medium. Before taking offence to something someone has said in game, try to take a look at it from another perspective, see if there's any way to interpret it in a more favourable light. Sometimes this will work, and you might realise that the other player wasn't insulting the honour of your pet hamster, but was merely trying to convey a joke that doesn't work without the complexities of vocal inflection and facial expressiveness. Sometimes the element of confusion has been introduced by your own prejudices, and is not in fact the fault of the other player in the slightest. Sometimes a simple typo can change the entire meaning of sentence.

And sometimes people are just arsing cockbags.

Just as a quick aside: out of curiosity I checked what my spellchecker thought cockbags should really be, it suggested cockboats which is apparently the unfortunate name for a small ferry boat and not, as I surmised, a supplementary vessel for astonishingly well endowed men who couldn't fit it onto a yacht for fear of getting it caught in the rigging.

5) I am uniquely not suited to MMOs.

But I play them anyway. I forever seem to be out of a guild and I am often playing solo more than I'm playing in groups. This is the fault of nobody else, it is purely a failing of my own through my uncanny ability to project my real world social ineptness even unto virtual worlds where nobody knows my name and where nobody can readily determine my painful shyness and incompetence in casual conversation. Still I let it affect me, and thus it often spoils what could otherwise be a great experience.

In MMOs nobody can hear you scream in anguish at your inability to socialise. Unless you miss the mute button on the microphone, I suppose, and even then it's just a strange gurgling sound as you try to string vowels and consonants together.

Sometimes though, just very occasionally, you get a group where things go fantastically well, where the conversation flows like honey on hot toast, where the adventures are epic and where time's very flow is halted, you feel as if you're momentarily caught by Matrix bullet time as the camera pans around your frozen form and then everything accelerates again, so quickly in fact that before you know it you find the dawn is stretching its luminous fingers underneath your door and around the edges of your curtains.

In the end it is those moments that keep me playing, because the sheer unadulterated joy of bonding with others and creating mutual enjoyment through the medium of gaming is worth all the solo pain and social aggravation that shrouds it for the rest of the time.

And there you have it, five things that I've learned, and now I shall have to depart with haste, dear reader, because my muse is back and she seems to be carrying a really rather shockingly big stick which I fully believe she intends to swing with some venom towards my cockboat.

The gospel according to St. Dev.

2007-10-31T11:32:00.000Z

1: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2: And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the forums were awash with complaints that the darkness was too dark, and that this was an outrage.
3: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
4: And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And the forums were split into the people who would play light and the people who would continue to play dark anyway, and the players of light complained that the players of dark were going to be miserable PKers, and the players of dark complained that the players of light were going to be too powerful and should be nerfed.
5: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the forums filled with criticism about the names, and that they sucked and nobody would play a game with 'day' and 'night' in it. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
6: And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
7: And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
8: And God called the firmament Heaven. And the forums overflowed with speculation on what heaven was and how it would affect those game mechanics of day and night. And the players of light claimed it as their home zone, which the players of dark objected to vehemently, and proposed their own zone which they didn't know what the hell to call. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
9: And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
10: And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. But the forums erupted in complaints that the travel times would be too long, and nobody could get from one dry land to the other because there was no way to cross the sea, and the complaints were so great that God had to lock several threads.
11: And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12: And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13: And the forums said that the design was flawed based upon their speculation that seeds must be some kind of impossibly difficult boss mob and that having them all across the land would make their lives a nightmare and that it was clearly an outrage. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
14: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
16: And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
17: And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18: And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
19: And the forums for the players of the dark exploded in outrage, that this was clearly favouring the light and could not be tolerated. Many threats to leave and never even play in the beta were levelled. And the players of light lold at the players of dark and proffered that they should QQ more. And God had to go back and redesign huge parts of the system to try and balance the dark by adding special matter to the universe. And the evening and the morning were the many, many, many sodding days of wasted effort.
20: And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
21: And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
22: And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.
23: And the forums complained that the spawn times were too restrictive and that they would consume all the resources too quickly. And there were many complaints about the name 'whales', and also as to why this was the only creature name to have been revealed so far. And wild speculations abounded as to what whales were. And the names of other creatures were made-up. And God had to release information about haddock and jellyfish and krill and dolphins and seals. And then he had to spend days explaining and mollifying forum posters who couldn't understand why whales and dolphins and seals would breath air when they live in the sea. And the evening and the morning were several days spent heavily drinking and smoking.
24: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
25: And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. But the forums were filled with complaints that lions were too overpowered and should be balanced, and crocodiles shouldn't be allowed to travel so fast on land and in the water. And many, many complaints were levelled at the point of wasps, because they were rubbish and caused the players great pain for no reason. And God spent several weeks redesigning and reworking beasts, and created bees to replace wasps, but then forgot to take wasps out anyway because he was tired after pulling one too many all-nighters.
26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. And the forums went super-nova over this new epic class and how overpowered it was going to be, with it's dominion over everything. And the forums speculated that man must be able to run faster than a cheetah, swim faster than a shark, fly higher than an eagle and be stronger than a bear. And the forums whined and whinged and complained that God should nerf this class otherwise they would never buy the game ever! And God decided to delay the open beta and said that he would rework the player classes to cope with these problems.
27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And now the forums complained that the two epic classes weren't similar enough, and the female players complained that the male players were overpowered and the male players complained that the females had better character creation options.
28: Nevertheless God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. And still the forums were filled with whines and complaints and bitter unreasoning anguish.
29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat, what more do you want you ungrateful gits. And the forums filled with moans that this made the game easy mode, and that there would be no challenge now, and they would never play such a game.
30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very, very late. And the evening and the morning were the six hundredth day.
32: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And forums were filled with community managers to stem the tide of outraged and unconstructive whinges from beta players and God worked on bug fixes and other things that he hadn't had time to finish, but he still never got around to fixing the duck-billed platypus.
33: And on the seven hundredth day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seven hundredth day from all his work which he had made.
34: And God blessed the seven hundredth day, and sanctified it: because he could finally get some rest and would not have to listen to all those pathetic whiners again until he made the first expansion.

Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel.

2007-10-30T10:07:00.000Z

I was enjoying a nice cup of tea and a good book the other day when I was assaulted by my cat - jumping from out of that ethereal plane which only cats can inhabit, allowing them to sneak upstairs without you seeing or, as in this case, leap seemingly out of nowhere from just behind your head, legs gathered together as if performing a tuck dive but which, in fact, form a perfectly focussed point that when aimed directly at one's groin causes pain on levels that can approach registration on the Richter Scale. As if the sheer shock of such an unexpected assault followed by the continent-shattering levels of crushing pain weren't enough, the planning behind such an attack becomes clear mere moments later, and I can only imagine that amongst the vast arrays of apparatus that cats have at their command in their umbral realm, wedged between huge banks of humming monitor stations and clicker-clacking ticker tape reports, there is the lit fuse for the cat's explosive assault: a large red lightbulb that sometimes illuminates brightly, underneath which is the faded, peeling label that reads "Owner drinking hot beverage".

Mopping scalding tea from an already bruised block and tackle, if the dear reader catches my drift, I took the time to curse the rogueish nature of my cat who had now somehow managed to shadow step through the aforementioned magical cat realm out into the garden and was staring smugly in at me, safe from verbal or physical retaliation beyond the kitchen window. I had at that moment pause to think about my statement, even as I eyed the miscreant moggy: rogue was indeed the class that fit the feline's infuriating fetish for furtive forays, but was that the only nature of this particular puss?

In short, what MMO class is my cat?

Rogue is the obvious starting point. For sheer backstabbing subtlety and raw damage per second, my cat had only moments ago clearly demonstrated with devastating effect her prowess in these areas. It takes little imagination to envisage a lonely trek to a long forgotten temple in a far away land, where under the tuition of a harsh but fair master she learnt these ancient techniques, honing her martial arts against wooden practise dummies, then other feline students until finally facing off against multiple masters of the art at the same time, all to a rising and rousing musical score. Training complete, my cat was sent from the temple by her now dying master to hunt down and rid the world of small angry dogs that had gotten too big for their own boots. It sort of breaks down around here (if it ever got started for any of you), because my cat seems to have been waylaid in her quest to fight the good fight against canine kind, and instead put her years of martial training into use predominantly by curling up in a ball and sleeping on my lap. She twitches when she dreams, so I can only imagine she's having suitably epic flashbacks to the monastery, and churning over in her subconscious as to why she didn't choose to abandon her training and leave with Wei Lin to search for the ancient treasure of the seven mystic dragons.

Admittedly my cat has more adventures in my mind than she does her own.

The whole 'purring, sleeping, cute bundle of adorable fur' thing breaks any idea of my cat being a Rogue, clearly when she's in this state she radiates a feeling of wellbeing and quiet contentedness that is infectious to such a degree that it should probably be classified as a disease. It is my resolute belief that any conflict or diplomatic situation could be resolved amicably if all parties were made to sit down and discuss the problem in front of an open fireplace with a snuggle of recently fed and incredibly cosy cats on their laps. Yes, a snuggle of content cats, you define a better collective noun.

No question, the holy grail of peace for all mankind lies with the satiety of cats.

In this respect the cat can be thought of as a healer, not all cats are this way, some are definitely and defiantly bundles of pain, pointy at five out of their six ends, and would quite happily fall feet first into the more combat orientated classes. My cat is a healer though, so this narrows the field somewhat, and for the ever so slightly whimsical nature of this rambling we'll say that the field is defined by those classes available in World of Warcraft, partly because the majority of people will know of those classes but mainly because it allows me to crowbar this post into the MMO theme of the blog.

The Paladin class could be a cat class, for certain cats at least: the pious old warrior who would like to think that he can do DPS but in the end finds that he is far better suited to simply receiving assault after assault before strolling off and finding a human lap in which to curl up and begin his healing phase, while simultaneously and inadvertently crushing his owner under his sheer weight. I imagine the big old tom cats - you know the ones, they seem to have been in the neighbourhood since it was first built in 1764 and show no sign of leaving this mortal coil any time soon - who plod around their territory with all the swagger and self assurance of a silverback gorilla, with the same content belief that nothing and nobody can harm them, and with which comes the lethargy and ponderous prowling of one who has never known what it is like to be bested in mortal combat. Other cats, dogs, trees, small children on bikes and even moving cars have been faced down by this veteran of the concrete jungle, he's taken his share of beatings and yet walked away seemingly unscathed. When finally he is outnumbered, when the hordes of neighbourhood cats have temporarily put aside their inter-faction bickering to take down this old world colossus, he simply looks at his watch whilst twiddling his whiskers, excuses himself with a mention that it is time for his tea, and then he is gone. Ever had that moment when you looked out of your kitchen window and saw your old tom cat out in the road with an oncoming car charging at him, driver and cat both oblivious to the impending collision? You close your eyes and wait for the inevitable, sickening crunch; only you hear nothing and upon opening your eyes there is no traumatic scene of carnage and your old templar of the tarmac is intertwining himself between your legs and calling for his tea. Bubble and hearthstone isn't just for getting out of dire combat situations with the cat mafiosi, you know.

It quickly became clear to me that my cat was not a paladin; it also became somewhat clearer that I was suffering some mild form of post-traumatic stress disorder from the blow to my boll... um, ego, and that this had made my mind wander in such a weird way. Well, weirder than usual, at least. It quickly became clear that my cat was also not a priest: healers extraordinaire and not inconsiderable DPS, they shun melee and do their most potent damage when in the form of a shadow. I imagine priest class cats to be those alley cats who skulk around at night, their wailing and caterwauling enough to wake the dead, a form of psychic scream if you will, putting all kinds of fear into the minds of small children and grown adults alike, who lay in bed, heart pounding and pulling the bed sheets up higher around their head to shield themselves from the banshee that is surely clawing its way up the very side of the house. During the day these hell sirens transform into the mild mannered cats of little old ladies, and spend their time healing the souls of those who offer them the Samaritan sanctity of a comfy lap. Again, not my cat, who does not so much let out haunting banshee wails, but instead emits a sort of pathetic croaking that sounds like someone is throttling a lamb that has been a heavy smoker all of its short life.

In the same way that my cat does not frequent dark alleys, she is also not a nature lover like the druid. Druid cats are those that are always out in the wild, enduring the bracing elements to bring you back wondrous presents from the forest mother, like the unidentifiable entrails of small animals. They create masterful arts of nature in your home, specialising in the medium of mud and your freshly cleaned kitchen floor, perhaps with a little leaf litter thrown in for good measure. And maybe some more entrails. Druid cats are also the ones that get themselves stuck up trees, forgetting that they don't in fact have a flight form. My cat is not a druid either: the only thing that she's ever brought back from outside was a pair of Action Man trousers, which she dragged in backwards through the cat flap and then stood over proudly, croaking in that strangled-lamb-tracheotomy manner a message which I believe was requiring praise and acknowledgement. We never found who those trousers belonged to, but somewhere some kid has an Action Man figure who fights his battles 'privates to the wind'. My cat has also never got stuck up a tree, in fact I've never seen my cat climb higher than the sofa, although I am adamant that some form of ladder and platform arrangement must be used to gain the trajectory and velocity of her more formidable 'lap attacks'.

And so by deduction, mad reasoning and if nothing else default, my cat would appear to be a shaman. It seems to fit well enough, a little bit of healing intermingled with extremes of burst damage that leave her opponents wounded and gasping for breath; she can take on a ghostly form, at least I assume she has some manner of power aiding those stealthy and speedy excursions into cupboards and under beds where she knows she's not allowed, and when she's particularly threatened or stressed she has the ability to lay down water and earth totems which, alas, don't disappear after a set period of time but can only be dispelled with a scrubbing brush and detergent, and even then the lingering oral debuff remains for many hours, even with the windows open; when she's older I imagine that she could also develop a particularly devastating air totem.

So there you have it, my cat is not a rogue but a shaman. And now I plan to take revenge on her for the 'burst of flame' hot tea incident earlier in the week by catching her unawares and strapping an ice cube to her forehead.

Frost shock!

Cats as a class, have never completely got over the snootiness caused by that fact that in Ancient Egypt they were worshipped as gods.
-- P.G. Wodehouse

There's no school like the old school!

2007-10-25T06:40:00.000+01:00

In between defeating demons - I should point out that down here in the Inferno we don't condone banishing our own, but, well... Bat'Zul was kind of an arse, always getting really drunk at the end of century parties and trying to shag the boss's wife. So he had it coming. - and running amok with my druid in World of Warcraft, I've managed to sneak in a little time with the zestily named Orange Box.

There's not a lot of point in reviewing said item when Zero Punctuation can do so with much greater finesse. And much faster too, as it appears that the man does not actually breath air as the rest of us do, but perhaps has a small gill or gland that absorbs air through a form of osmotic reaction and stores it in a small sack under his chin, thus feeding the life-giving gas to his body without him having to interrupt his verbal deluge. I imagine something akin to a bagpipe and it's constituent apparatus, but in a form that only Terra Mater could devise in her eons long evolution of the shape of all things.

Having completed Portal in a couple of hours (and savoured every minute of it) I moved on to trying out Team Fortress 2. I played the original way back in the day and enjoyed it tremendously, and so it was with fevered anticipation that I awaited the new edition, especially as folk such as those at RPS had given it the two thumbs up, special edition, OMG! OMG! OMG! coverage. Suffice it to say that I really enjoyed the game, and if anyone out there ever wants to know what is meant when MMO bloggers talk about 'polish' in a game, if some outsider wants us to quantify and qualify exactly what is going through our heads when all the outsider can think of is a bunch of game developers whipping out the Mr Sheen and a duster and buffing the game CDs to a furious shine, then TF2 is pretty close to a perfect representation, in my mind. They have taken the concept of "The Incredibles meets Team Fortress Classic" put them in the blender of game implementation and created a perfectly smooth and deliciously fruity cocktail of team orientated game play.

Anyway, the reason for my posting - and believe it or not it wasn't to waffle asininely for three paragraphs about random things - was that having played both TF2 and City of Heroes in recent days, and with the very obvious doffing of the proverbial hat to The Incredibles by the simply jaw-droppingly pretty graphics of TF2, I realised what needs to be done: while Sony Online Entertainment grafts away at a DC Universe, and Cryptic crafts a successor to City of Heroes in the Marvel Universe, some enterprising developer needs to create an Incredibles-a-like MMO. It's already been demonstrated that the graphical look and feel of the Pixar film can be captured in a game in such a way as to make grown men weep with joy. Well ok, me, it makes me weep. And what could be more fantastic, incredible if you will, than being able to play comically over the top super hero characters in a setting like Metroville, where the whole thing lends itself to a light hearted and child friendly environment, but which can have the subtle and cleverly layered adult jokes and nods to 'real' comic super hero conventions that the film does.

The Incredibles MMO, it would be... would be.... hoom, hrum, I know there's an appropriate adjective but incredibly it has escaped me for the moment.

Warcomic.

2007-10-16T11:40:00.000+01:00

So a preview of the World of Warcraft comic is out.

And now, a little spoiler from our impish insider at Wildstorm:

Apparently, after the last page we see on the preview site, the human wrestles the crocolisk from off of himself, skins it, and then kills another fifty four of them, until the watching orcs realise that he's a bot, report him to a GM and then move on.

Wither?

2007-10-10T06:40:00.000+01:00

I've mentioned before that I'm not really one for the serious analysis of the MMO market, the games or their design; I started out that way, but too many others are all ready doing it, and far better than I could ever be bothered to.

Making light of the industry and its games is easier, for me at least.

I did however have a small vent a while back and received some encouraging feedback from the general bloggerati.

A small addendum, then, to that original post, the basic thrust of which was:

So here we are in the tree of MMO life, where Everquest saw the graphical MMO genre explode out from its roots, and World of Warcraft brought it into the branches of mainstream popular culture as perhaps Half-Life did for FPS games. And now we begin to see the influx of MMOs released in the wake of this success, and the weight of all this extra growth that isn't needed begins to damage the tree, it weighs it down and forces it to spend resources in keeping these branches alive which would be better spent in growing a few stronger and healthier branches. And if nobody comes along to prune it, eventually it will wither and fail, until it is a gnarled trunk unrecognisable from its former glory.

Today we have news that Gods & Heroes is to be cancelled in favour of Perpetual focussing their collective effort on their Star Trek based MMO instead.

Yesterday we had news that WAR is stuck in the trenches and the limited beta has now been closed entirely for a period in order to allow for what, one can only assume, is some major emergency reworking of some fundamental part of the game.

It is a few months ago now since Van Hemlock's supernatural kiss of death upon the niche yet ambitious Auto Assault, and more recently the blogreel has been spattered with tales of the latest saga of Ryzom.

Even the stalwart golden child of the current MMO crop, Pirates of the Burning Sea, has not been without the odd delay, which means that its release date is pushed back - along with nearly every other anticipated MMO of 2007 - into at least the first quarter of 2008.

And need one even mention the delays to release, and the lukewarm beta response, that Tablua Rasa has experienced?

My problem is this: I'm not sure what this means with respect to the tree analogy; the cancellation of AA, G&H and Ryzom seem to be a pruning of the weaker branches, allowing for more freedom on the part of these companies to produce newer, fresher and more healthy growth. However, the delay of nearly every significant MMO title of 2007 still seems to me to be indicating the suffocating effect that all this extra growth is having on the MMO market, and that the phenomenal success of World of Warcraft still casts a monstrous shadow over the rest of the canopy of games, thus blocking out their light.

It will be interesting to see how the MMO market shifts in the coming year or two, whether WoW's domination will finally break, whether the current crop of anticipated MMOs (when they are eventually released) will produce more than just another batch of fresh blooms, that burst forth in all their fragrant glory only to wither away to nothingness too soon after. Will frameworks like Metaplace actually shift the market in an entirely new direction? Will it, perhaps, seed an entirely new market tree, one we cannot yet predict because the opportunity has never been presented before?

If nothing else I'm still glad that I, like many others, have built my house in the MMO tree, and I wait with a fervour of anticipation the next major development of the surroundings.

War does not determine who is right.

2007-10-09T08:32:00.000+01:00

World of Warcraft, then. I've always wondered what exactly was involved in the 'craft of war' within this MMO for the masses, but the other night I received a small hint of what it might entail. I was out questing with my level seventy druid and had found an interesting quest chain that I was enjoying working through. However, coming towards the end of the chain I received a tingling sensation from my Adventurer Sense[TM] and I got the distinct, yet subtle impression that it was all about to get a little bit tricky and complicated.

Me: "What's next, oh recently met this morning person; oh possessor of much shiny loot; oh giver of passages of text that compel me to undertake tasks that your own parents wouldn't be prepared to do for you?"

Quest Giver: "Oooooooo, it's all about to get a little bit tricky and complicated!"

My adventurer sense really is that good.

It turns out that the couple of bits of crystal that I'd been hunting for all this time were not, in fact, in the handbag of a defenceless little old lady who wanders the marshes around Telredor. Nor were they being used as dradles by the infant offspring of the over- exfoliating contentious objectors of northern Nagrand. And neither were they being used in the bedding of the small fluffy herbivores of the Oasis of Calm, Peace and All-round Non-aggressive Nicety. No, apparently these crystals were wedged beneath the fiery arse cracks of a couple of twenty foot tall mega demons who had liked the look of the shiny pebbles and decided to use them as some form of demonic butt plug(*).

(*) May not represent actual quest text.

And so it's off with the Fel Leather gloves and on with Marjorie's Marigolds of Giant Demonic Buttock Mining, and away I go to have a look at these fellows. And so begins the craft of war...

The first rule of Warcraft Club is, you do not talk about Warcraft Club.

The second rule of... uh...

You see, the problem is, they didn't really think those rules through, because after you've stated the first rule you run into the slight snag of not being able to talk about it any more. There were actually one hundred and forty seven rules of the super secret Warcraft Club, but rule one was the only rule anyone ever knew. In fact, nobody knew who the other members were, where to meet or even what the club was actually all about. It was the second worst club in the world.

It was, however, just slightly more successful than the worst club in the world: the super secret Craft o' War group - formed shortly after it was realised that the Warcraft Club wasn't going anywhere - had the unfortunate first rule that you absolutely, positively, must talk about the club at all times. This certainly overcame the issues presented by the Warcraft Club rules, but alas was not entirely conducive to keeping a secret school of war very much of a secret. Two hours and thirty four seconds after the Craft o' War club was formed the core members were rounded up and shot, partly for being involved in an underground movement for training in internecine warfare tactics, but mainly because they were all clearly idiots.

Where in the Inferno was I? Oh yes! The craft of war.

The first rule in the craft of war: Scout out the objectives.

Scouting is probably a slight understatement. In normal warfare a scout would generally observe the enemy encampment through some sort of optical magnification device from half a mile away, make a note of numbers, patrol routes and any other such information that they can glean, then high-tail it out of the area before they were discovered. In the craft of war, the scout can walk into the enemy encampment, have a good old nose around of what's going on and maybe even carry a small clipboard with them and take a survey of a few wandering patrols:

Scout: "Excuse me! Excuse me, sir! I was wondering if you had a little time to talk to me today about the reinforcement capabilities of your camp here."

Throgg: "Oh... uh... no. Throgg real busy right now. I, ahhh, I talked to previous person further up the camp, yes that it, spoke to one already, must get to bank before it closes, sorry."

Scout: "Come now, sir, just a moment of your time to detail patrol movements over each twenty four hour period."

Throgg: <Walking faster now> "Noooo, Throgg not interested."

Scout: "Well, can I ask you to take this leaflet? It details who we are, and why we're going to be attacking your camp later this afternoon."

Throgg: <Snatches leaflet> "Ok! Ok! Now leave Throgg be!"

And the great thing is, once you've scouted around, you won't have to do it again: the enemy won't react to you roaming around their fort by, say, reinforcing the gate guard, switching patrols around or even plugging up the gaping great hole in the perimeter that you waltzed in through, they'll just carry on as happy as ever, although one or two might be grumbling about the recent influx of street surveys.

The second rule in the craft of war: Plan an escape route.

It's always a good idea to plan your escape route should something go wrong. Generally though, your escape route is going to be your entry route, since you'll have cleared a neat little path right through the centre of the enemy camp, and the enemy certainly won't consider the trail of corpses of their nearest and dearest comrades in arms to be any reason to follow the trail on to its source, namely you.

"Throgg not remember this many corpses of Groth and Strugg and Krung last time he patrol past here. Oh well. Throgg not see any hoomans, so on Throgg goes."

The third rule in the craft of war: Have a little go.

This is a fierce demon you're facing, and you don't know quite where in that megalith of a butt he might have stashed the crystal. It looks like you might have to defeat him outright and then search the corpse due to the concern that trying to pick this particular flatulent pocket might cause you more than a little harm. Never fear, however, because you can take this chap on as many times as you like so long as your escape route is clear, for despite commanding legions he will never call upon them when he is set upon by troublesome adventurers. For example, if you want to know if your rooting spell will hold him, just stand back a bit and cast it; if it fails he'll charge after you, certainly, but you can just saunter away from him, perhaps while smoking a pipe and twirling a cane in your other hand. Keep walking nonchalantly along, because just as he is about to reach you he'll suddenly remember that he left the iron on, or he forgot to feed his cat, or perhaps he hears the tinkling tones of a nearby ice cream van, and he'll turn tail and rush back to camp as fast as his cloven-hooves will carry him.

"Curse you to all four corners of the fiery underworld you puny mortal, you dare to taunt me?! I will DESTROY YOU, I WILL UTTERLY... oh hell, I left my socks drying in the oven. <Turns around and legs it back to base>NEXT TIME ADVENTURER. NEXT TIME!".

The fourth rule in the craft of war: Clear all the minions in the area.

You've cleared a huge swathe of mobs on your way to their leader, but always hang around for a bit to see if there are any patrols that you've missed. You may have to wait a while though since the patrols, although eminently predictable, may range far and wide in the most illogical and utterly bizarre manner possible. Thus, it may take some time for various patrols to reach that point, five feet in front of the person they're supposed to be guarding, where you are currently camped.

"This is the seven thirty south western patrol, calling at Far Away, Further Away, Way Way Too Far Away, All The Way On The Other Side Of The Map, Half Way To Nowhere In Particular and Stratford Upon Avon."

The fifth rule in the craft of war: Have another little go.

While you're waiting for patrols don't be afraid to have the odd pot-shot at the demon commander when you feel you have enough room. The boss will have entirely forgotten you since two minutes ago, and certainly won't have developed any strategies to undermine what you attempted last time.

The huge pile of his guard patrols' corpses seems to be entirely uninteresting to him. Maybe he's deep in thought, perhaps composing an irritating Muzak tune that he will unleash on all the elevators of the world; he's not an evil demonic commander for nothing, you know.

The sixth rule in the craft of war: Buff up.

A small delightful picnic a few yards away from your target is always a wonderful way to boost the morale of yourself and any other members in your party. Be sure to bring a nice bottle of Beaujolais nouveau!

Don't worry though, as well as not being able to see for more than a few feet in front of their nose, demonic commanders are notorious for their complete lack of the sense of smell.

The seventh rule in the craft of war: Charge!

Attack for all you're worth!

You've had some light exercise, a delicious light lunch, and a quick round of 'toy with the mob', so you should be ready by now.

The seventh and a half rule in the craft of war: Run away!

I told you those patrols took a long time to come around.

The seventh rule in the craft of war: Charge!

Ok, you've finally cleared all the patrols, including the seven thirty south western service, so it's time to try rule seven again. Yes, rule seven again, we're not wasting a new rule because you didn't clear all the patrols; did you think the fourth rule was there for fun?

The eighth rule in the craft of war: There is no rule eight.

And for good reason.

The ninth rule in the craft of war: Run away!

Don't be complacent in your victory, for the demonic commander does, at least, have one trick up his sleeve. Once you've defeated him and retrieved your crystal, wiped off the goo and stored it away, do not then take time to gloat, because as you stare at the very corpse of the one who you but moments ago defeated, the very same demonic commander will also, through some bizarre and incomprehensible spawning process, be looming up over your shoulder ready to deliver you to your doom, and this time he put his socks in the airing cupboard to dry...

And finally, the tenth rule in the craft of war: You absolutely must or must not talk about the craft of war depending on the situation, but the general idea is that we'd like to keep it a secret so use your common sense and discretion.

Oh wait, sorry. That's incorrect, the tenth rule is: Never wear a lilac cummerbund with a white dinner suit, it just isn't the done thing in polite society.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.

2007-10-05T12:58:00.000+01:00

I find myself bumbling around in City of Heroes and World of Warcraft at the moment, playing neither of them with any real passion but enjoying the short stints of play that I do embark upon. I'm surprised by this newfound ability to play in ever smaller slices of my daily time pie; although in truth these can't really be seen as a slices, but more as the simple pleasure of scraping out of the filling and eating that alone, leaving the overly thick and unpalatably burnt crust of housework and chores until later. The arcade-like accessibility of CoH allows for this brief gorging, with its lack of loot and, more importantly, a community that seems not quite so hell-bent on turning the game into a bizarre new TV 'talent' show called Loot Idol, the game's society does not present that cognitive dissonance that can be found in the more time-intensive MMOs where a considerable investment is required for any real return in gaming satisfaction.

Curiously though, I am also currently experiencing that same feeling in World of Warcraft, and the reason is an interesting one. Well, interesting like the ingredients on the back of a packet of crisps are interesting when you're waiting for a train and have nothing else to read, but I'm bored, you're here, so let's just pretend that it's full of fascinating e numbers and calorie counts, shall we? The reason that I can play in such short periods of time and gain satisfaction at the end of it is due to a couple of factors. For one, I'm playing one of my level seventy characters and therefore, level wise, there's nowhere for me to go, nothing to crave and no new abilities to desire. No level based restrictions whatsoever. Now this is interesting in itself because there are plenty of other artificially introduced restrictions and 'levels' in the form of reputation and raid attunement and such, but they don't register with me as being The Game. What I mean by The Game is that when I sit down and play an MMO for the first time the simple challenge that is presented front and centre is that you are level one and have something like two abilities that you can use to advance in the game; advancement, and hence The Game, is that you will gain in level and with each of those levels you will gain new or improved abilities that will allow you to continue further in your player experience.

A quick aside: those two new abilities you get will allow you to stab innocent folk in the mediastinum, set innocent folk alight or explode innocent folk into a fine cherry vapour mist. A character never starts out with abilities that allow them to help innocent folk across the road, sell Tupperware or build housing for innocent folk to hide in so that they don't get stabbed in the medulla oblongata. Ok, those are crap abilities, but perhaps starting out with skills in diplomacy or crafting might be an interesting change from starting out with the ability to effortlessly slice and dice an orc into fillets suitable for a Gob Kebob.

Raiding and other past times are not The Game to my way of thinking because they are clearly an artificially tagged-on treadmill for people who have completed The Game. Specifically, raiding is based on loot progression not character progression. If I returned my character to earlier areas and gave him the same gear as he had back then, he would not only be able to defeat those encounters more easily, but could also take on harder content that he wouldn't have been able to when he was the appropriate level. The character improvement is the intrinsic part. So anyway, tenuous as that argument may seem, it's how I feel about current MMOs and therefore, because there's no XP bar silently staring at me from the top of the screen projecting a contorted face of anger and derision that says "You don't do enough to fulfil me, I'm leaving you for another hero who has a bigger sword with which he can satisfy my needs", I can play for as little time as I want and then log-out without feeling as though I should be doing more for my bunny boiler of a progress meter.

Another factor that allows for brief spurts of WoWgasm is that travel time is short. Outlands - where most of the quests that I can undertake are to be found - is pretty small as it is, add on top of this fact that I can now fly and therefore not only travel in a straight line to my destination but do so without drawing aggro from crap animals along the way, and travelling becomes a minor break between having fun rather than a major expedition that would make Sir Ranulph Fiennes blanch. This again makes sense within the context of The Game: I'm done, I've hit the level cap, I'll either re-roll, leave or repeatedly hit my head against the reinforced glass wall of raid content; so because The Game is over, there's no need to keep things like artificially slow travel in the way of play any more since there's no levelling progress to restrict and obstruct in order to keep people in the bulk of the content.

Finally the other joy that immediately springs to mind is that I can pick the quests that look and sound interesting, rather than feeling the need to complete any quest I can lay my hands on so that the Experience Mistress won't release the Hounds of Achievement to hunt me down and deliver their own special brand of frothing, tooth-laden guilt. Thus, I have the freedom to say:

"I'm sorry Farmer Bob, but stuff you. Stuff you, and stuff your crops that are being overwhelmed by rats. Perhaps if you hadn't built your farm in The Valley of Rats on Plague Island, next to that giant rat hole where Gorgonra the terrible red-eyed queen of rodents lives; perhaps if you hadn't decided to grow a specific crop that can only be considered the crack cocaine of the rat world; perhaps if you had developed some form of basic hygiene rather than just defecating where you stand through a flap in the back of your dungarees; perhaps if you had built something, anything that might be considered a defence against a rampage of rodents, rather than a picket fence and a scare crow that wouldn't bother Terrified Tim the Timid of Treenton, who is scared of absolutely everything, including the thought that someone might cure him of being scared. Then I might just find it in myself to be bothered to waste my time chasing ten of the little bastards around and bringing you their measly little hides so that you can reward me with a piece of moss and half a button.

It's deliciously refreshing. Although that might just be the air I'm breathing now that I've moved on from Farmer Bob's rat infested poo pile.

The main problem I have with these brief but enjoyable sojourns from the real world is that this style of play does not provide a lot of material for a blog: "I logged on. I did a couple of quests. I fed Farmer Bob to Gorgonra. I logged out" is hardly compelling reading and I don't have the inclination to make it sound more dynamic or epic, it's just not my thing, and I'm certainly not experiencing anything new and irritating that would inspire a tirade of biting satire or comedy situations.

I'm afraid that I'm not one to talk just for the sake of it, so if it's a bit quiet here then it's simply because I'm waiting for more fuel to fire the Inferno.

Thought for the day.

2007-10-01T14:19:00.000+01:00

If I were a quest giver, I'd get heroes to:

Mow the lawn. Reward: Mighty Blade of the Grass.

Fetch the shopping. Reward: Whatever change there is from a tenner.

Clear out the loft. Reward: +20 to dust resistance. New ability: Cobweb camouflage.

Clean my car. Reward: Dropping covered helmet of Pij'Eon. Disclaimer: Might be a plastic bucket full of dirty car water.

Sort out my sock drawer. Reward: The Wholly Holey Sock of Holiness.

Feed my cat its medication tablet. Reward: -50hp. -1 eye. +20 tetanus resistance.

Cook dinner. Reward: The follow-on quest "Washing dishes is propitious".

Do the washing up. Reward: Prune fingers of the Marigoldless.

Perform my job for a day. Reward: Ah hah hah ha ha! Hooooooo.

Answer the door to cold callers. Reward: -5 Int. +5 Stam.

Watch daytime TV and summarise it for me. Reward: -20 Wis. New ability: Train small dogs to cook banana fritters while they ride a unicycle.

Clear away the horde of youths hanging around the local shops and being a nuisance. Reward: One thousand gold; it doesn't really matter what the reward, no adventurer has ever returned.

Fix the leaking cistern. Reward: +20 water resistance. New ability: Swear like a gangster rapper.

Level my current character in the latest MMO grind-fest. Reward: None. As well you know.

Perform any other task that people define as 'character building'. Reward: I dunno, +1 in a stat, or something. Apparently.

Thinking about it: if I could get enough adventurers on the books I could start a cleaning company, I'd just tell them that it's a rep. grind and they'd be all over it like a WoW forum on patch day. I'm not sure what Johnny Homeowner would make of a van full of heavily armoured, beefy heroes and buxom heroines unloading on their driveway, though.

Melmoth's Municipal MMO Maids, coming to a zone near you soon.

Hey! Teacher!

2007-09-21T08:00:00.000+01:00

It's curious how the nefarious population of City of Villains has a university; the game mechanic of the university is to give characters a place to learn about and participate in the recently introduced crafting system. Clearly the developers work on the hero side first and then transfer as much of the effort as possible directly into CoV, converting any glaringly obvious heroic insinuations.

One wonders, though, what a villain university or school would be like...

"Johnson, did you do your homework again? What is the matter with you boy? If you carry on completing coursework and paying attention in class you'll find yourself out of this university before you can blink, and then you'll probably have to get a job wearing spandex and helping old grannies get their cats out of trees. Is that what you want?"

"Right! Who was that? Come on, own up, which one of you wasn't throwing paper planes behind my back? Someone wasn't throwing them, I can tell. It was you was it, Packard? Well, as a punishment you can go and help old people cross the road for a day. Actually make that two days, because I'm fed-up with you owning up to your crimes, a good villain doesn't own up to anything. Are you some sort of pansy hero, Packard? Right! Three! Three days, because you're not even arguing with me over the point. Go on, get out!"

"You! You behind the bike sheds. Stand still, laddie! Right, now, why aren't you smoking? Explain yourself!"

"Well, Franklin, apparently you've been bullying young Thatcher here and stealing his lunch money. What? Oh I'm not punishing you for stealing the money, Franklin. No. But you see, Thatcher tells me that you've been failing to steal all of his money, that he's been keeping some of it hidden from you. You're a slacker Franklin, so you can be in detention this evening. Top snitching there Thatcher, you can have a house point."

"Evening everyone. First order of this detention session: you're all in further detention for bothering to turn up to this one."

Memelmoth.

2007-09-17T11:30:00.000+01:00

The voluble Elf has tagged me, and I can never resist a jolly good memeing, especially from friends.

Four jobs I have had in my life (not including my current job):

Level 37 sandwich filling crafter.

Level 14 filing clerk.

Level 17 office furniture installer.

Level 21 teacher's assistant.

All summer jobs I'm afraid; I've been at my current job since, well, forever really.

Four films I have watched again and again:

V for Vendetta.

Gladiator.

The Fellowship of the Ring.

Valmont.

Like most people, I expect, there are several more films I could list here, so I've tried to pick a representative sample.

Four places I have lived:

Leeds, England.

Various places

In the county of

Kent, England.

I lived in Leeds when I went to university there. Other than that, I've stayed pretty close to home.

Four Programmes I love to watch:

Battlestar Galactica.

Heroes.

Firefly.

The Mighty Boosh.

Again, there are plenty of others both new and old, but this is a set of those that I've watched relatively recently and enjoyed tremendously.

Four Places I have been on vacation:

Hawaii.

Dubai.

Venice.

San Francisco.

I think San Francisco is still my favourite place, although Venice is a close second.

Four of my favourite foods:

Beef Wellington.

Risotto.

Saffron cake.

Gypsy tart.

I like food. This is barely a pebble on the peak of the food mountain of my victual desires.

Four favourite drinks:

Port (Warre's Otima is divine).

Tea.

Bitter (Waggledance is a favourite).

Elderflower cordial/juice.

This makes me sound like a drunkard fop. Which might be accurate.

Four places I would rather be right now:

In a cottage in the Lake District, writing a book.

On a manned mission to Mars.

Diving in the Red Sea.

On stage at Shakespeare's Globe.

And I'd also like a pony.

Four People I Command to Do This:

Van Hemlock

Changling Bob

Sean

Hexedian

Not so much command, as extend the embracing arm of memefulness. I'm only allowed four, so I've tried to pick people who haven't been tagged and have commented here. Apologies to anyone who might have wanted to do it. And apologies to those tagged who don't want to do it. Maybe you can all get together, swap out the people who don't want to do it with those who do, and then send fax confirmation in triplicate to me, and I... ah bugger it, it's just a meme.

As the wise Yoda once said:

"Do, or do not. I don't give a toss, and I'll be dead in the next installment anyway."

Or something.

Weakened.

2007-09-17T09:21:00.000+01:00

It was a fairly humdrum weekend in the Melmoth household with respect to gaming. I continued to level my 'Thief of' characters in City of Comicbookclichés, but singularly failed to meet any of the fellows of our super-group over the weekend; there is an indicator in the super-group window of when people had last played their character, and it seems that we've all been active at one time or another in the same day but never at the same time. Perhaps we need to implement a Justice Calendar which, when attached to the Freedom Fridge with the Magnet of Emancipation, would schedule crime fighting in a single badly scrawled entry.

"Batman, remember we're fighting the Joker tonight at 7pm. Love and kisses, Robin."

"Appointment with Dr Doom at 4.30pm. Remember to take stool sample. To fling at him. Johnny."

"HULK SMASH PUNY VILLAINS. SOME TIME BETWEEN 11AM AND NOON. STAY OUT OF HULK'S WAY OR ME SMISH YOU TOO. NOTE TO SELF: NEED TO DO TAX RETURNS BY THURSDAY."

Soloing in CoH is manageable, but the real fun comes from teaming with others. Extra bonus fun points if those people are competent folk whom you know, rather than pick-up group nutters.

In a fit of desperately wanting to play a bearded dwarf with a big axe and adventure in strange forested lands where orcs roam, I once again subscribed to Lord of the Rings Online for a month to see if I could get back into that. After a installing the game from the disks and then downloading and patching several gargantuan updates, my kilt-wearing dwarf was once more smoking a pipe in the Prancing Pony and enjoying the role-playing atmosphere:

"And he said. And then she said. And then he said that she said."

"Hello! U looks nice, wanna come back to my room??????/"

"Lord Darkbrooding looks brooding. And dark. In a cool dark and brooding way."

"And I said to them 'you're not in our special club of very excellent people' and then I stabbed them."

"Arrgghh! I'm covered in bees!"

That last one was me after five minutes of listening to 'deep' and 'meaningful' discussions: always be sure to throw in random Eddie Izzard quotes to liven the incredibly oppressive atmosphere of role-playing environs. It's the law.

I picked-up play with my dwarf guardian who is in his late twenties, and made my way to the North Downs since I had a few solo quests there; I had considered diving straight into a pick-up group in one of the instances available to my character at that level, but thought that perhaps spending a few minutes learning what all those buttons on the screen were for was perhaps the more sensible course of action. After many, many minutes of meanderings, like some sort of peripatetic loot basket, I finally reached the fields of Fornost where I had been charged with the task of killing bears. Oh well, I guess it's fractionally better than boars; I recalled shortly thereafter that I killed boars in the previous quest. Sigh. Four minutes of running around like a loon trying to find bears found my character stuck on a seemingly moderate slope in the landscape; a known bug, that one would think would have been fixed by now. The only way to escape the jaws of the adventurer-grasping landscape is to use the /stuck command which returns you to your last bound point, in my case the Prancing Pony where I started off some thirty minutes of faffing around ago. There was nothing to do but to type /stuck and wait to warp all the way back to where I started. Whilst I waited for the unstuckness to occur (for which there was no countdown timer to be seen) a mob decided to spawn nearby; a ranged mob, who immediately decided that I looked like fair game, and started plinking away at my health bar. I could do nothing in the meantime, other than spin on the spot in a manner which I hoped conveyed my extreme anger and annoyance at this cowardly attack, in some fanciful effort to convince the mob that attacking me was going to lead to its painful demise just as soon as I'd taken the ten minutes to run back to where it was. It was now a race, with the stuck command ticking away in the background, would it trigger before the mob finished me off? Was the stuck command even working? Maybe I'd mistyped it, and I wasn't in fact about to escape at all. I went to type the command again to make sure, but was then struck by the thought that this might reset the timer, if it was indeed counting down, and thus leaving me with longer to wait before death or unstuckness took hold. It was while I was in the grip of the complex moral decision of whether to type the stuck command again or just bugger it all and go and get a packet of crisps, that I warped back to the Prancing Pony with a modest fraction of health left. Faced with the run all the way back to the fields of Fornost or logging off and eating crisps until everything started to take on the semblance of potato, I took the salty baked saturated fat option.

Suffice it to say that the above experience didn't sate my need to get all medieval dwarf on some critters' arses, so I popped my head back into World of Warcraft, rolled a dwarf alt and burned through the first ten levels of content there. Ahhhhhh. Those first ten levels in World of Warcraft are the salty baked saturated fat taste sensation of the MMO levelling world, high in monosodium glutamate and everything.

Other than that, the weekend was predominantly taken up with doing Other Things. Reading, catching up on various TV series that I have on DVD, and generally not sitting at my computer for four or five hours straight. I hope a decent MMO hits the stores soon, because otherwise I might get used to this variety which is spicing up the grand MMO of Life and find it more addictive than playing any virtual grind. Heck, next weekend I plan on taking a look at this thing that you Earth people call 'outside'.

Be wary of men wielding dead languages.

2007-09-12T10:51:00.000+01:00

I hadn't really thought about preparing a review for Tabula Rasa because reviews from several other bloggers are already out there, and say pretty much all there is to say; if I were going to write about the game I'd try to put a humorous spin on it, but I'm afraid that I'm not seeing one. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of jokes to be had, but they're not the light-hearted ribbings that belong here.

I was, however, listening to the ol' iPodule this morning, and the lyrics to one of the songs became slightly warped in my mind - Warped mind? Me? - and seemed apt:

Lost in time I can't count the words,
I said when I thought they went unheard,
All of those harsh thoughts so unkind,
'cos I wanted you.

And now I sit here, I'm all alone,
So here sits a bloody mess, tears fly home,
A circle of errors, seen before,
'cos I wanted you.

Weak as I am, won't sub. to you.
Weak as I am, won't sub. to you.
Deep as I am, I'm no-one's fool.
Weak as I am.

-- The 'Inferno review of Tabula Rasa' version of Weak, by Skunk Anansie

They touted Tabula Rasa as a blank slate, as in a fresh start; what they seemed to forget is that Tabula Rasa is also the new mind in its primary state, before it receives any of the impressions and understanding gained from experience.

Tabula Rasa indeed, then.

Thought for the day.

2007-09-11T08:45:00.000+01:00

If real life had an MMO UI overlaid, what would it look like to you? How would it affect your life?

I'd probably have low health, but high mana.

My bag slots would be nearly full all the time.

Most slots would be taken up with chargers for electronic devices.

I'd be able to scroll back through previous conversations with my boss and prove that I didn't agree to work thirty hours of overtime this week, or any week for that matter.

Never be caught short! I would know exactly when I was next going to need to go to the toilet based on that ability's cool-down.

Based on the tooltip information from the debuff icons present, I would be able to tell exactly what illness I was suffering from and instruct the doctor accordingly.

People wouldn't be able to sneak up on me because I would see them approaching on my mini-map.

My bank balance would be available, so I'd always know if I could afford to buy that shiny new gadget. Not that that stops me at the moment.

Road rage incidents could be avoided as you'd be able to con other drivers nearby.

If someone fell over in front of you, you'd know whether they'd hurt themselves badly by the small text number floating up the centre of your vision.

You'd never lose the kids on a family outing, because you'd see their group portrait fade when they went out of range, and you could find them by highlighting said portrait and following the big friendly arrow at the top of your vision.

Hand-written shopping lists would be a thing of the past: just follow the quest objectives in your tracker

Sex would become slightly more mundane, as you'd know when the magic moment was going to happen by watching your cast bar. However, women would have a harder time faking because men could 'enable enemy cast bar'.

If your wife sees you smirk at that last one, you would at least have a pop-up option that allowed you to resurrect at the nearest shrine...

Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world.

2007-09-06T10:49:00.000+01:00

MMOs employ many different ways to mitigate damage: parrying, shield blocks, genuine evasion and armour-based resistances are but some of the examples. However, nearly all MMOs still also make use of the ancient and mystical Chinese technique of Open Palm Lotus, Forehead Dragon Slap.

Or in mundane terms: attacking any space that is immediately adjacent to your opponent. The dreaded miss.

<Our noble barbarian hero. Rethgood the Redolent, is sneaking up to stab an unsuspecting, sleeping ogre lord in the back>

Rethgood: "Ha haaaaah! Your head will be mine, ogre lord!"

<Rethgood swings his sword and misses>

Rethgood: "I missed?! But I'm the greatest swordsmith in the land! I, who hath duelled Rodderick the Really Rather Good Swordwangler of Popthekettleon, and won! I, who bested Fiona the Fierce of Frangipane, the greatest sword fighter the world had ever witnessed until I found the miniscule gap in her chain-mail bikini that enabled me to strike the bronzed body beneath! I, who..."

Ogre Lord: "Og, yuk, ders a ooman in me snoozechamber! Ow it get in dis place? Wurz me slipper so I cuhn squidge it."

Rethgood: "How can I possibly miss from melee range against a prone target? Never mind, I shall not miss you a second time you filthy beast!"

<Rethgood swings and misses again>

Rethgood: "By the seven gods of the Vitamin Sea! Another miss?! What fel magic is this?"

Ogre Lord: "Stop yer flailin about ooman, yer creatin a draft."

Rethgood: "Stay still, damn you."

Ogre Lord: "I not move from me bed yet, wat you talkin about clooliss?"

<Rethgood swings. And misses.>

Rethgood: "I don't understand... how can I miss? I'm standing close enough to smell whatever it is that's living in your belly button..."

Ogre Lord: "Ey! You leave Charles out of dis."

Rethgood: "You have a creature living in your belly button, and it's called Charles?"

Charles: "Will you keep the noise down out there; some people are trying to meditate."

Ogre Lord: "Don you mind der ooman, Charlie, I'm gonna sort im out."

Rethgood: "I can't take much more of this; I pray to the iron god of Monopylae to guide my sword to strike swift and true!"

<Rethgood swings. The ogre lord leaps from the bed>

Rethgood: "There! You definitely moved!"

Ogre Lord: "Weeeellllll, you waz gonna hit me dat time."

<Ogre lord smacks Rethgood upside the head, yo, for 200 points of damage>

The miss becomes more absurd the bigger the enemy. How can you miss a fifty foot tall mountain giant? Admittedly you're not going to be doing a lot of damage. Shouldn't be doing a lot of damage, but that's never stopped role-playing games from pitting adventurers against monsters eight times their size or more, and letting them win. Does an adventuring party of five bees ever reasonably stand a chance of defeating a human being? I mean, they've got envenomed weapons, the power of flight, various fear spells that they can cast (such as Bernard's Aural Harasser of Humming Just Behind Your Ear), yet we still know that unless they get some, quite frankly, munchkin-maddeningly awesome combination of crit rolls, or they just happen to find a mob with a serious weakness to bee stings (I knew I should have worked on bee sting resistance instead of fire and nature), they're not going to win. But adventurers defeating fifty foot tall giants? No problem! Hell, in some games dwarves - dwarves! - make a profession out of slaying giants! What in the Inferno sort of tactics do they use to accomplish this? If you've ever seen Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay's dwarven Giant Slayers you'll know that they not only pit themselves against creatures ten times their own height, but they do this whilst wearing minimal armour and wielding a small twig. Or something. So how do they defeat giants who are, by their very nature, really quite big. Gigantic, if you will. Do they train in assassination through toenail clipping? "Ha, I've given him a nasty subungual hematoma there, if he doesn't get any medication for a month, and infection just happens to set in, he could die within the year! Or perhaps just lose the toe. Still: For Karak Kadrin! And all that, old bean". Yeah, I like to mix frothing dwarven battle-cries alongside eccentric upper-class English phrases, it really puts your fellow adventurers off guard.

The point being, as alien and unexpected as a 'point' is to any of my blog posts, ignoring the improbability of being able to do enough damage to cause the giant to stop picking his nose and peer down at you, missing any monster that has toes the size of a farm outbuilding is not really terribly reassuring. You literally, although virtually, missed the side of a barn. And you want to be a great adventuring hero? Hmmm.

So, what if an adventuring party is fighting together and one of the melee players misses a mob, does he not then have to roll to see if he hits one of his fellows who are in melee with him? The friendly-fire roll, if you will. And if he misses them as well, then surely it follows that he then has to roll to see if he chops off his own head due to missing everything else in the immediate vicinity. And in the vastly improbable event that he misses that roll too, well, then perhaps a horde of small animals should burst out from all corners of the battlefield and laugh for two seconds in the manner of Chip 'n Dale the Walt Disney chipmunks, disappearing quickly thereafter.

The problem is that in MMO combat you generally stand still, the mob stands still, and you both stand toe-to-toe and slog it out until one of you is dead; you don't aim in combat, you select which character to attack and then your aiming is represented by a dice roll. A dice roll is all you have to express the dynamism of combat, and the on-screen representation is two figures standing next to each other, swinging their weapons in one or two animations over and over again in a stunningly mundane battle of attrition. Seeing that combat is such a staple of MMOs, that the main focus of questing and levelling invariably involves running some form of virtual life through with your virtual sword, one would think that an obvious way to break away from the pack and make a name for yourself would be to try to crack the mould on the tried, tested and tedious method of combat as it exists today. We can all accept mobs dodging out of the way, but considering currently how close the melee player is generally standing to them, and the fact that neither of you is moving much, I can't help but imagine that it's perhaps the sort of dodging that you see in cartoons, where the character bends improbably at the midriff and forms a question mark shape to one side of the blade thrust, and then flips and bends in the opposite direction at the next blade thrust, which cuts the air where the dodger's body was moments ago.

City of Heroes is especially hilarious because it animates your misses whilst making no attempt to animate the enemy having evaded, so you can stand right next to a mob, shoot a bolt of fire from your hands at point blank range, and it shoots off at an improbable angle into the ceiling. I can only imagine that those superhero outfits are really quite itchy, and just as my hero is about to launch their bolt of flaming death (that's not a euphemism by the way) they get an irresistible urge to scratch somewhere sensitive and tender, and therefore flail about shooting flame everywhere other than at the enemy as they try to contend with their own spectacular spandex spasms. With the collateral damage that heroes must cause with all their powers missing and striking the floors, walls and ceilings, you can imagine that insurance premiums in Paragon City are astronomical in value. What's more, you can simply miss the most blatantly easy targets; only last night a fellow spandex wearer was heard to utter "I can't believe I just missed a stationary parked car".

The dilemma is such: if, like World of Warcraft, you make it easy for new players to hit mobs so that the game is fast and fun and painless, they will have an expectation that they will always be able to do so, and the strange phenomenon that as their hero increases in power they are more likely to meet mobs that they are unable to hit seems to be incongruous with their experiences up to that point. If, however, you take the route that City of Heroes takes, that your low level character will miss, and miss quite a lot, but will gain in power until they are practically unable to miss even if they try, the early game experience can be very frustrating to the new player who may not understand that things will improve eventually, and it is therefore quite likely to put players off of the game entirely.

Perhaps all that needs to be done is to remove the 'miss' from areas where it is inappropriate due to its vast improbability, when in melee combat or using ranged powers at close quarters, for example. Considering that most MMO combat is now, and will likely be for the foreseeable future, based upon the fickle fling of fate's fancy, rather than any skill on the part of the player, it would be nice to present that combat in such a way as to not make the player regularly experience the most base helplessness that comes from a fumbled attack roll.

And it should be fixed soon, lest the armies of barn walls become confident in their power to evade attacks, and march upon the homelands of these floundering fighters and destroy them every one!

Nemesis of the sock thief.

2007-09-04T21:19:00.000+01:00

Unlike the mild mannered Thief of Socks, whose light-hearted removal of Joe Blogger's socks means that Joe is merely left with an odd pair and looks a bit daft when he goes out on a date, the dark-hearted Thief of Keys hides your car keys at the most inconvenient time, when you're most in a panic and need to get somewhere fast; at other times the key thief will cause you to believe you've misplaced your front door key, especially when you're standing on your doorstep, cross-leggedly in need of a pee.

Oooo, he's evil.

Thought for the day.

2007-09-03T10:17:00.000+01:00

World of Religions Online: a new faction based MMO.

Coming to every gamer's place of worship soon.

Memelmoth.

2007-08-29T09:16:00.000+01:00

Attack of the meme! Hoom, sounds a bit like the title of a bad 1950s sci-fi movie.

"My god! Memes!"
"Run for the hills, the memes are coming!"
"Martha, fetch me mah gun, them thar god damn memes are after the sheep again".

One man and his fight against the invading horde of... The Memes!

Anyway.

THE RULES. YOU WILL OBEY OR BE DESTROYED. THE MEME COMMANDS IT.

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. List eight (8) random facts about yourself.
3. Tag eight people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving them a comment on their blogs.

So then, eight factual facts of factitude:

1. I am not currently, nor to my knowledge have I ever been, the Earl of Huntingdon.

2. I once tried to overcome my irrational fear of bees by joining the bee keeping society at school. On my first trip to the hive, twenty or more bees got inside my bee keeping suit and stung me about the head.

3. I have a completely rational fear of bees. Because they're little evil genius bastards.

4. I'm a software engineer who works in the aerospace industry where I'm part of a team that builds some of the leading pilot interface technology in the world. We build this using 1970s processor technology. Each day when we leave the site we have to go through irony-decontamination procedures so that we don't flood the world outside with our deep sense of discordance between reality and our ideals. Nevertheless, the next time you fly on a jet airliner, remember that there's a chance that the lunatic from this blog wrote some of the software running on it.

5. I'm introverted enough to be painfully shy and retiring even in online games, where nobody knows who I am and will very likely never find out. Once I get to know people and feel more comfortable around them I still have a propensity to remain silent until someone else speaks first.

6. I once sat with an adult tiger; we formed quite a bond and she licked my arm like a house cat would. It really hurt, and my whole forearm was raw for the rest of the day. Despite that, I still prefer tigers over bees.

7. My first introduction to gaming was the Warhammer 40k source book. I was probably ten years old and I didn't even know what it was at the time, I was just drawn to the shiny blue Ultramarines fighting on the front cover. My first introduction to computer gaming was Arcadians on the BBC B microcomputer. Shortly thereafter I started writing my own games. They were rubbish.

8. In the time it took you to read this blog entry I will probably have drunk a cup of tea. I drink a lot of tea. I do not, however, regularly wear a bowler hat, wield a long black umbrella or a walking cane. I do not sport a handlebar moustache or wear a pin-stripe suit. I don't say "Chin chin" or "It's just not cricket, old boy". I could drink tea for England, though.

So there you go, eight things that you'd probably rather not know about me.

The Meme commands further tagging of people, which is always the awkward part. Who to tag? Who not to tag? Who has already been tagged? I don't know about you, but at school if you tagged the wrong person, even if they were actively playing the tag game, you'd get clocked on the nose. Ok, maybe that was just me.

So I'm going to disobey the meme, scallywag that I am, and say that if you've commented on the Inferno and you'd like to partake in this meme, please feel free to undertake it, let me know here and I'll add your name to The List. That probably covers about eight whole people, so I'm only being partially disobedient.

Don't fear The Memes.

He came to steal your socks.

2007-08-28T08:32:00.000+01:00

He stayed to save your world.

The Thief of Socks, my latest character in City of Heroes.

An Illusion/Kinetics controller, he plays very differently from the other controller characters that I've played, in the fact that he sacrifices control abilities for greater damage and utility.

I'd been put off of Illusion as a power-set in the past mainly because of the pets factor: I've never been a great fan of pet classes, partly because pet classes seem to have a stigma of 'easy mode' attached to them, but primarily because it's like taking your own pick-up group with you wherever you go. Pet AI in most MMOs falls into one of two categories:

a) You have to tell them what to do, in excruciatingly painful detail:

"Go forward two paces. Ok, left a bit, left a bit more. Too far! Right a bit. Ok attack! No! Attack the enemy not our group warrior, damnit! Ok, why have you stopped attacking? Oh, the mob is dead. And you're not attacking the other mob that's standing right next to you because? Because I haven't told you to. Right. I dismiss you, you stupid pet. <pulls another poké ball from his pocket> Hyperactive Bouncing Pick-up Group Mage, I choose you!"

b) You can't tell them what to do, so it's excruciatingly painful in a different way:

"Go forward two paces... No, no! Forward. Two paces. That's not forward. Or two paces. Where are you going? Hey, we're not attacking that group of mobs, we're attacking these ones over here. Please! Come back. Are those cigarettes? Are you taking a cigarette break? I'm being violated by large green monsters here, don't you care? I am your MASTER and you WILL obey me otherwi... Hello? Hello? Oh, they’ve buggered off."

However, sometimes it's good to get out of the comfort zone and try something new, and although the Illusion power-set has an abundance of pets compared to other controller classes, the other powers in the set (invisibility and deception through illusion) tied in well with the theme of a miniature magical entity who comes in the night and steals odd socks from your airing cupboard, so I thought I'd give it a go. The Kinetics power-set has a host of useful team and self buffs which I thought would be handy to bring to a group, especially since I was going to be lacking the traditional control powers that people would expect of, well, a controller.

So far he's been a lot of fun to play and I've been able to mix and match solo and group play without any trouble. However, at his next even level he gains a new power and it will be time to grab his first pets, who are firmly ensconced in category b from above.

They'll be my very own pick-up group of sinners to summon at will to cause me intense psychological trauma. What in the Inferno am I thinking? I'll let you know how it goes, but if you don't hear from me in some time it may be that I'm off chasing around Paragon City trying to find where they're having their secret cigarette breaks, laughing over a cup of coffee about their stupid 'master' and his delusions of authority.

Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.

2007-08-22T13:25:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd take a brief interval from the main performance of this infernal MMO farce to acquaint you, dear reader, with those games that can currently be described as 'consuming my time'.

My gaming attention has been focussed primarily on a couple of games recently, whilst I wait for the next Great Game Rush to occur, and I have to say that it's been enjoyable to just pootle about here and there and not have to worry about a schedule; the whole 'I've got to get two levels, two hundred gold and one thousand rep. in five minutes or the bus I'm travelling on will EXPLODE!' thing gets a bit dull after a while. You know, now that I think about it, the number 76 bus has been awfully empty since I shouted that out from behind my laptop screen while sitting on the back seat that one time; there's always a huge queue of people in the morning still, but they're all so friendly, they just move aside, let me on, and wave me off. Polite society is alive and kicking in the south east of England, it would seem.

Where was I? Games! Always a handy topic of conversation in the Inferno. City of Heroes has been a weekday evening staple recently; it's such an easy game to hop-in to and play in short bursts, generally I will get something done, and if not, well I got to encase some villain in rock and then blast them through a wall using one hundred mile an hour winds.

Always soothing to the soul when you've had a bad day at the office

Again though, not the best topic of discussion when you're sat at the back of the number 76: "Yeah, I set him on fire and then blasted him and his friends off the top of the building, I'm amazed I didn't destroy the whole neighbourhood". Little old ladies have the most evil stares, and a staggeringly powerful handbag-swinging action.

The other game I've been playing on a regular basis is not actually an MMO.

<A stunned silence descends.>

In actual fact, it's an FPS.

<People start to get up and leave.>

It's not Bioshock!

<People turn back in interest.>

I've been playing Counter Strike: Source.

<An enraged audience storms the blog-stage and beats your humble narrator to a bloody pulp.>

I had relived the wonder days of FPS life recently by playing Half-Life 2 and its expansions, and hankering for a little hot DPS online action I decided to go that one step further and pick-up with an old friend: Counterstrike. An old friend who'd had a royal metric crap-tonne of plastic surgery and looked like some sort of shiny Mattel doll version of their former self, but nevertheless an old friend of whom I had fond memories. I won't go into too much detail, since it was quite painful; suffice it to say that had it been a reunion of the person-to-person variety, I probably would have ended up punching him somewhere delicate, pouring my hot drink in his lap, and then making my speedy getaway on the ever available and vacant number 76 bus.

Yes, I suck. I always suck at PvP. But when someone can shoot at your feet and get a headshot, well, I mean, it's just...

<punches his old friend somewhere delicate again>.

And this is why the Inferno is primarily reserved for the absurdities of MMO life, because not only can I spit out no more than two syllables of FPS mockery before frothing at the mouth and falling into a strange catatonic state that requires medical intervention to alleviate, but because the absurdities in FPS games are made doubly worse because often the game is trying to convince you that it is real. That this could really happen. Look! It's the real world! And if aliens invaded, you'd be able to defeat them by getting shot FIFTEEN HUNDRED THOUSAND THOUSAND HUNDRED THOUSAND times, and then applying a small CONVENIENTLY PLACED medikit or herb (HERB!) that repairs all your wounds, all the while firing a GIGABAJILLION rounds of ammunition from your indestructible, non-misfiring gun of choice, whilst CONVENIENTLY finding ammo clips for it just lying around. LYING AROUND. You'll go into a kitchen, you know, wander in and help youself to some stranger's house, and there'll be a young mother with her new born child there eating, but she'll JUST HAPPEN TO HAVE five fully loaded clips of ammunition for the PIECE OF ALIEN WEAPONRY YOU PICKED UP THIS MORNING ON THE MOON...

Code blue! Code blue! Fetch the defibrillator.

Oh hades, my head. Where was I? Oh yes, BLOODY FPS GA...

Code blue!

Uh-oh, dangerous feedback loop!


40 GOTO 44
41 PRINT "AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON"
42 PRINT "THE NUMBER OF WEAPONS YOU CAN"
43 PRINT "CARRY AROUND IN ONE GO."
44 PRINT "Ah, there we go".

Ah, there we go. So those are the two games that I've been predominantly playing, along with dabbling in getting my Monk/Necromancer to level twenty in Guild Wars: Prophecies in order to get down with what the cool kids are playing, but also in preparation for the Eye of the North expansion... patch... content update... thing. Having played both an MMO and an FPS (you don't have to boo every time I say FPS) I noticed a minor but interesting dissimilarity in one particular game mechanic, which I'll hopefully delve into in another post.

And now, the beta song!

I'm not in any betas!
At least none that I can tell you about.
And even if I was, I couldn't give you details of them.
But I'm not in any. Not really. No.
WINK. WINK.

Chorus
Oh it's NDA and NDA with NDA.
So the NDA is not as good as NDA.
And the NDA is NDA, but NDA is only NDA.
NDA, the NDA, oh NDA!

Actually, I'm not playing any betas. I hear gasps from this modest virtual auditorium! And I must hang my head in shame before the MMO blogorati, for it is not Madame Fate's hand that has dealt me into such ignominy, but my own petulant perfidy. I would like to claim that it was some form of sneak-peak gaming asceticism that nobly drove me to avoid the temptation of getting in to an MMO before the writhing, pulpy, sweaty, multi-limbed fundament that is the hoi polloi, but really it boils down to a more practical and mundane reason: I have decided not to apply to the recent spate of betas. Cutting off my nose to spite my face? Maybe, but I'll get to play the games eventually, and at the rate with which I seem to tire of an MMO game at the moment it's probably best for me to extend the time between games as much as possible.

I did, however, receive a beta invite anyway; having subscribed to several NCSoft games in the past I'm well aware of their tendency to attach a beta bomb to games that they are publishing such that, when the time is right the bomb detonates, delivering a devastating wave of beta invites to every subscriber that they've ever had. Even if you only thought about subscribing: beta invite! Went to the website once? Beta invite!

I played the game for a few levels because, well, it would be rude not to, but I left it at that. I won't be playing any more until release because I don't want to spoil the experience, and so I can't tell you anything about it, and even if I could well...

<The Curtains part. The lights go up. The chorus line appears on stage. Fireworks go off in the background. Elephants with can-can dancers on their backs, ride through on unicycles.>

It’s, Ennnnnnn Deeeeeee Aaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy!

Da da de dum dum dum. Da.

Thought for the day.

2007-08-20T09:25:00.000+01:00

Consider Earth as an MMO for the Gods, with our lives controlled by their fickle whim, and the day-to-day grind of life played out through us for the entertainment of these inconceivable supreme beings.

What would their forums look like?

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters.

2007-08-15T17:12:00.000+01:00

Rethgood the Redolent was in trouble. Somewhere, out beyond the jade curtain of the forest lurked an ancient evil. And it was looking for him. With his back against a tall gnarled oak he let out a slow painful exhalation, realising that he had been holding his breath yet again. He listened to the sounds coming from the surrounding forest for some time, trying to see whether he could determine from wither his impending doom approached. Then the cry came, screeching through the dank foliage like the sound of a thousand elephants crying out in unison upon discovering that they'd all simultaneously and most improbably forgotten the way home after a heavy night out. Sweat beaded about his brow as he ducked out from behind the tree, battle axe at the ready, and made a crouching run across the glade. He had reached no more than half way before stopping abruptly; there, calmly watching him with the steely look of quietus in its eyes was his nemesis, the one who had hounded him across a quarter of the country of Grindland.

There stood the Death Shrew of Khuridim.

One inch of unbridled antediluvian fury, it's tiny whiskers all a-twitch with unreasoning malevolence, the amber eyes of the shrew did not leave him. Without warning it leapt for him and the battle was joined!

Rethgood slumped to the floor and let out a bestial cry. As he nursed his injured left leg, hideously ravaged around the ankle, he looked towards the shattered corpse of the Death Shrew and noticed a subtle glinting amongst the ruin of bones. Hauling himself over, his savaged leg dragging limply behind him, he picked up the remnants of the tiny shrew body in his hands and carefully parted the fur on its back from where he had seen the glinting. And there it was. Parting the final few hairs back had revealed the mighty Immortal Songblade of Nefronggrevat! Its six foot blade, impaled in the back of the miniscule shrew, had remained hidden all this time, and now it was Rethgoods for the taking. With some effort he pulled the mighty blade from its shrivelled shrew sheath and tested its weight. It was heavy even for the seven foot tall barbarian, and it would have to be worn across his back due to its almost unwieldy size, but he now possessed one of the mightiest weapons in the land! And his friends had said he was a fool to hunt the shrew, that the greatest weapons of the land would be found on the evil warrior overlords who looked down upon the land from their lofty castles. Ha!

Rethgood turned the shrew over in his hands as he searched the body; in a small cleft beneath its chin he found ten gold coins, four silver pieces and seventy two copper pieces. In the fold of its neck he found several large sheets of silk cloth, enough to make a fine strap for the Songblade to sit in until he could have a real sheath made. Just behind that was a potion of healing. Surprised that the shrew had not used it during combat, Rethgood could only surmise that the shrew had quaffed one earlier in the fight and was unable to use another due to that curious immutable property of potions: once taken the imbiber is suddenly rendered completely unable to remember how to take another potion for precisely two minutes thirty seconds, after which the memory of how to drink potion-like beverages is suddenly returned to them. Finally, just behind what remained of the shrew's left ear Rethgood found a large tome, its bindings covered in an ornate script that appeared to change shape in the light, he would have to take it Tina the Archmage of Mestonville, to find out what it contained.

Rethgood looked at the large pile of items that he had found, and then looked towards his meagre backpack, tucked behind the oak tree where he had left it earlier. He wondered if he was going to be able to fit everything into his bag, or whether he was going to have to throw some items away, he hoped not and he now regretted looting the shrew so hastily, rather than popping it easily into his pocket and looting it later when he got home...

Seriously, if I loot another piece of giant, spiked armour from a pigmy mouse and then can't find room for it in my backpack, I'm going to make a really teensy weensy area of the Inferno, and then cram all the loot-mechanics developers into it.

"Why Melmoth, that's impossible: they'll never fit!" I hear you cry. Well, it will be fun to try, and then perhaps they'll understand that in the Inferno WE OBEY THE LAWS OF EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY. Unless we have a letter from the doctor saying that we are exempt.

Thought for the day.

2007-08-13T07:41:00.000+01:00

Pacman as a sandbox game:

Developer: "There you go, have a play."

Player: "Well, what do I do?"

Developer: "Anything you like!"

Player: "Ok, I think I'll go talk to those ghosts over there, make friends."

Developer: "Ok, you've made friends with the ghosts. See how they start to follow you around."

Player: "Nice! Ok, I think I'll explore a bit. Ooo, what's this glowing item over here?"

Developer: "Explore! Find out!"

Player: "Well it's different to the smaller glowing items I've been eating. I'll try to eat it though."

Developer: "You feel different."

Player: "In what way? Oh ok, I get it! I have to work it out. Hmm, I'll ask my ghost friends if they have any idea."

Developer: "There, you've walked up to your ghost friends, eaten them and spat out their eyes."

Player: "Ok I... wait, what?!"

Developer: "You're a bad person. Bad, bad, bad!"

Build a sandbox game, don't try to force your game into a sandbox.


A man said to the universe: 
"Sir, I exist!"
"However" replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
 A sense of obligation." 
                  -- Stephen Crane

One for All or Alts for One?

2007-08-09T17:33:00.000+01:00

As Zoso so rightly stated, although we seem to play together harmoniously, we are chalk and cheese when it comes to our approach to characters in MMOs. If you imagine us walking down the quiet country road of MMO progression, he would be the calm, sagacious traveller, walking the straight path with unswerving focus. A look of determination mixed with serenity is on his face as he takes in all the sites and sounds whilst making good progress. I, on the other hand, would be a small yappy dog, running around his legs in frantic circles, bouncing up and down in a near coronary of delight and then dashing off into the hedgerow, distracted by some random movement or change in the shadows. Sometimes Zoso waits patiently for me to burst back out, all tail wags and plant-matted fur. Sometimes he carries on, knowing that I'll catch up again, but that I'll most likely be an entirely different sort of dog. Sometimes I come back as a cat.

And sometimes he has to wade into the undergrowth, wrestle a bear into submission, and then prize its jaws open so that I can sheepishly crawl out from its gullet, ears flat back and my tail between my legs.

In short, I like alts, and while Zoso and others are making steady progress on their main characters, I'll be frantically trying to level-up my latest and greatest, this is definitely the one, I'm never playing anything else, character and catch up with them. On a bad day that character will be in an entirely different game.

So in the tradition of Zoso's post I'll have a go at exploring my motivations for my altoholism. *Reclines on the psychologists couch* I suppose it all started as a child, where I was raised in the wild by a pack of wandering miniature poodles... Hello?

Hellooo?

Zooosssoooo, I think I broke the psychologist agaaaaaiiin.

A little confession: I don't finish games. I can count the number of games that I have completed on one hand. Ok, two hands. Maybe two hands and half of one foot, but that starts to get a bit painful. Either way, it's not very many in the grand scheme of my gaming life. In general the games that I have completed have been exceptional examples of their genre, original and have provided motivation for me to continue playing in the form of, and here comes the revelation, entertainment and enjoyment. Games need to have a challenging element to them, it's in their nature: Pacman would be a pretty boring game if there were no ghosts in it. However, the challenges have to be such that you can achieve them through more than sheer luck, and the penalty for failure should not be so harsh that it makes you feel pain: golf would be a lot less popular game if the penalty for failure to reach par for a hole was that you had to go right back to the beginning of the course and start again. Therefore I see challenges in games as both enabler and potential destroyer of my enjoyment of the game, and MMOs provide a get-out clause when it comes to dealing with these challenges, namely the alternative character, or alt.

The thing with a new character is that you know you're going to face encounters that are pretty easy, designed with the new player in mind as they are, and that there is going to be little challenge to them at all. The fun thing about this is that it leaves you free to set your own challenges, which you can make as difficult as you choose. The thing I enjoy about rolling a new character with respect to challenges is that I know the content slightly better and I can organise quests in ways that optimise their execution to allow me to achieve more in less time. It's this dramatic sense of achievement, combined with the freshness of a new character class that is quite seriously addictive to me. It's like I have my own drug dealer inside my mind "Pssst, hey kid, want a hit? I've got new characters here, never been played. Check out all the lovely new abilities on this class, should get you high as a kite for hours, that one", "Ok, ok! Give me a hit of paladin, and a couple of baggies of new starter area quests". Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

I mentioned freshness in that last paragraph, and that's a big one for me. After a while in your adventuring career you get to that point where you've achieved a new level, and as you enter town your trusted mentor is beckoning you with a smile that promises advanced training. Actually it's the smile of someone who knows he's about to fleece you for all your worldly possessions in exchange for a bit of crappy advice, but you're still a young adventurer so you don't know this. Anyway, you reach the mentor and after handing over every copper penny you've ever earned - you're even made to strip down to your underwear to make sure you aren't hiding a little purse of gold somewhere on your body, thankfully Bernard's Body-Cavity Bag of Distinct Discomfort dropped for you earlier in the day, you just hope it doesn't 'drop' now while you're being searched - and finally you're ready to receive your training, which turns out to be an upgrade to two of your existing spells. Oh, thanks. So what you're saying is, my spells don't naturally increase in power as I do, and they don't naturally increase in power as I use them, you know, with practice, they only increase when I've paid some smug git in my home town a whole load of money. Yes, I can see how the process of evolution would develop that. Luke Skywalker never had this problem:

Luke: "Master Yoda, I have learned so much already, and I have come to learn further the ways of the Jedi."

Yoda: "No. No new powers will you learn. Only slight and insignificant upgrades to powers that you already know."

Luke: "But Ben said you'd train me..."

Yoda: "Sucker, you are. Grind womprats you will."

Yoda: "Your money, give it to me now."

Yoda: "Noob."

With an alt everything is different and exciting and new! Not only do you gain new and interesting powers but because you're blasting through content that you know about, you gain them at an even more accelerated rate than you do when initially playing a new character. It's the crack cocaine of the alt world, a big hit and everything is 'yeah' and 'wow' and 'I can take on the world'! But like any drug, the down is always just around the corner, and eventually one day you're walking in to town and there's your mentor with this huge grin on his face...

I don't even need levelling rewards to be new powers necessarily, I would be perfectly happy receiving the odd 'party trick' power, where you are able to turn yourself into a stove, fire peanuts from your belly button at high velocity or blow smoke rings with your eyes. Just something that adds a little variety to the day-to-day game. I believe Everquest II has such powers (although perhaps not quite the ones described) and I also believe that they have a pretty constant stream of new abilities through a large part of your adventuring career, but I haven't played it in anger so I can't be sure.

So yes, in part it's because I have a short attention...

Uh, where was I? Oh yes, to some extent I have a short attention span and constantly hitting the same buttons to activate the same powers without any chance of a change of pace really depresses me; I don't know whether I'm fickle or if justified boredom is taking hold, but at some point I know that I am in need of a change or I will quit the game.

However, I'm not sure that I would be quite so ready to abandon a character if I could empathise with it in any way, but in general characters to me are just that, virtual avatars to allow me to interact with the game world. A lot of this comes down to the lack of customisation in many games. Never in any game have I been able to play a Yoda-like character, a cloth wearing class with melee skills and a few magic tricks up their sleeves, for example. Things are dictated so stringently when you create your character that it's very hard to create a connection when most of the input into how that character is formed is out of your control, you get pseudo-customisation, but to fit in with the game world it is very much limited. Since you can't create your character the way you want, because the race you want to play can't take on the profession you want to play, you create alts to fill in the gaps and you play the single character you've always wanted through a mixture of 'lesser' characters. If I could create the character that I would like to be, I imagine that I would connect with it on a more fundamental level, because I do want to feel like I'm connected to the character in some way, I really do. It hasn't happened yet in any MMO that I've played.

Failure to empathise, to want to make great, any character that I play is possibly the reason why I have joined the ranks of the MMO nomads at the moment, those players who wander from game to game, doing a little bit to save a kingdom here and destroy the evil empire there. Maybe it's a symptom of the next stage of the disease that is altitus: new characters are no longer enough, now the game world and mechanics need to differ to stem the ennui. I'm hoping that it's not the case, that I've just run out of steam on the current crop of games, and that the next wave of new talent will deliver games that give you characters that you feel happy about investing your time in, because you want them to do well, because their doing well is achieved through you having fun and being entertained, not because you had the iron nerves and enough caffeine on tap to grind your way to victory.

I live in hope that if not soon, then in the future, I won't need to be a yappy dog anymore.

And if not, well, then there'll be plenty more fuel for the Inferno.

Ding!

2007-08-07T16:05:00.001+01:00

The Google search term "squirting blondes" resulted in a hit on this blog.

Blog level +1

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard.

2007-08-06T17:48:00.000+01:00

It happens that I was in a troll temple the other day, killing the trolls there. Not in real life, of course. That would be silly. In real life I was leading a secret monastic sect of knights in a raid through the forgotten sewers of old London against the forces of darkness. As you do on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I can't remember if there was a reason for killing the trolls other than they seemed fair game at the time, what with me being an adventurer and they being monsters with hideous 80s-throwback hairstyles, enough reason for any man or mouse! So there I was killing indiscriminately when a patrol rounded the nearest corner. Now these fellows were pretty tough, and I had been carefully (read cowardly) picking my fights in order to maximise a one-on-one engagement of the non-matrimonial variety. "I'm fair rumbled", I think to myself in some sort of bizarre Olde English that I only use when thinking to myself, but I'm determined to finish the fight before the inevitable trolling that will shortly be forthcoming. I dispatch the troll that I'm fighting and, thinking that running away like a four-year-old is the better part of valour, I head pell-mell to the nearest safe spot. I then watch in mild wonder as the patrol walks right up to the spot where I was just fighting, where the broken and mutilated corpse of what I can only assume was one of their temple co-workers is laying, have a bit of a look around, you know because they're on the lookout for trouble here, and then turn right around and wander back the way they came.

One can only begin to envisage the scenario back at Temple HQ:

Chief Troll: "Right you two, you're on patrol duty around the temple perimeter. Any sign of trouble and you raise the alarm, ok? Think you two knuckleheads can manage that?"

Timothy: "Sure thing, Chief"

Trevor: "Yeah Chief, no problem"

<Timothy and Trevor wander around the perimeter>

Timothy: "You're a peon at work. Good. Good. And you're another peon, well done. Ok"

Trevor: "You're a guard, that's fine. And here's a priest, lovely. Lovely."

Timothy: "And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good."

Trevor: "Well I think that's everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?"

Timothy: "Sounds like a plan to me, I'm dying for a nice cuppa."

<Back at base>

Chief Troll: "Back already? Well, report you two."

Trevor: "Nothing untoward, chief, ten peons working, five guards on over-watch, four priests on duty and the horribly bloodied corpse of Tony from human resources."

Chief Troll: "Tony is a corpse?!"

Timothy: "Well... yes. We thought it was ok though, there was nobody about so we thought it was probably nothing."

Trevor: "Yeah, he probably tripped and fell on a stone tablet."

Timothy: "Five or six times until his skull was... oh dear..."

Chief Troll: "I'll say it's 'OH DEAR'. GET BACK OUT THERE AND SEE WHAT'S GOING ON."

<Trevor and Timothy make their way out again and return shortly thereafter>

Chief Troll: "Well?!"

Timothy: "It's ok chief panic over, there's nothing."

Chief Troll: "Nothing to report? Well that's a relie..."

Trevor: "No chief, there's nothing out there. You know, they've all gone."

Chief Troll: "Gone, whaddya mean gone? The peons aren't working?"

Timothy: "Gone chief."

Chief Troll: "The guards, where are they?"

Timothy: "The guards are gone chief."

Trevor: "Well that's not strictly true, Tim, Toby was there."

Timothy: "Ah, that's true."

Chief Troll: "Well that's something, get him in here so that we can find out what's going on."

Trevor: "Ah, well there might be a small problem, you see it was only his head."

Chief Troll: "Only his... well where's the rest of him?!"

Timothy: "Gone, chief."

Chief Troll: "GET BACK OUT THERE AND DON'T COME BACK UNTIL YOU HAVE SOME INFORMATION."

<Five minutes later Trevor comes back>

Chief Troll: "WHERE'S TIMOTHY?!"

Trevor: "Who? Oh! Well, he was here when I left, I just didn't notice that he'd gone."

Chief Troll: "GET. BACK. OUT. THERE. BEFORE I TURN YOUR NIPPLES INTO BATH PLUGS."

<Four hours later and there's no sign of Trevor or Timothy>

Chief Troll: "Marvellous. Just... marvellous. I suppose I should raise the alarm, and go and see what's happened."

Chief Troll: "Or I could just carry on standing in the same spot I always do, and wait to see if anyone turns up. After all, it's probably nothing."

Either there's a severe shortage of recruits for the position of guard, or Tony in human resources drew up the most bizarre list of requirements for applicants:

'Can't see over fifteen feet in front of you? Total lack of spatial awareness and inability to hear anything quieter than a demi-culverin fired three inches away from your head? Unable to identify the sights and sounds of comrades being slaughtered nearby unless you're within spitting distance? Join Her Majesty's Royal Troll Guards today!'

Often you'll find guards standing outside a gate, usually there's two of them - one for each side of the gate, just in case anyone tries to sneak past! - and they're standing about five feet from one another. Now, get yourself within fifteen feet of them and they both rush after you like rabid bees, all furious activity with the pointy hurty parts and intent on destroying their enemy. For about another fifteen feet in a straight line, then of course they get bored and go back to standing around. But if you pull one of them, and for those of you not familiar with MMOs, pulling is just an MMO term for fighting like a pussy:

"Théoden King! Helm's Deep is breached and the hordes are through to the keep!"

"Ooooh dear. Well there's quite a lot of them, I suggest we hide back here, and try to get the attention of one or two at a time. Perhaps throw rocks at them from a distance and make rude insinuations about their heritage."

"My liege?"

"You know, we'll just hide back here as a group, trick one or two into coming and we'll slaughter them in a heroic and testosterone-laden manner. Then we'll trick another couple into coming and do the same to them."

"My king, there are ten thousand orcs at the gate, surely..."

"Ten thousand you say? Hoo! Well, we'd better get started, this could take forever. Pull!"

Anyway, pull one of them from a distance and as long as you're more than fifteen feet away then many-a-time just the one guard will run off down the hill as the other one stays put. You then proceed to slaughter the guard, with up to five or six of you ganging-up and making the poor fellow literally explode in a crimson blossom of corpse petals along with all the associated death wails and blood-curdling, ear-ravaging battle cries (although the latter is usually just me on Skype, I tend to get a bit carried away when playing as a dwarf) whilst their colleague stands at the gate and doesn't bat an eyelid. You can imagine them standing at the gate when their friend runs off down the hill, and they're calling "Doug? Doug?! Where are you going? Fine, sod you then if you're not going to tell me!", and then when their colleague is screaming in agony and to all twelve gods of the Umbra to save them, the guard back on the gate is saying "No Doug, I'm not coming now. You had your chance, but you chose to run off and ignore me. I'm not interested now, whatever it is". Of course, five seconds later the remaining guard does find out what it is. And that it hurts very much.

And when the band of adventurers approaches and gets within his mole-like eyesight range, does he raise the alarm for the rest of the camp like any sane guard would? Does he run like the wind and try to get help? No, he takes the party on single handed, and finally when he's almost dead, with an axe buried up to the hilt in his skull with half of his body on fire and the other half frozen in ice, only then does he think:

"You know what, it probably isn't nothing."

Thought for the day.

2007-08-06T07:18:00.000+01:00

I think people have simply not yet realised how the Lich King's wrath has manifested itself:

"I will crush the lands of Azeroth beneath a mediocre expansion, and the mountain of gnomish Death Knights will be piled so high as to blot out the sun and turn all the world to winter! Mu ha ha ha haaaaaa!"

On the bright side, if ever there was an opportunity to recreate the Knights Who Say 'Ni'...

Hollow

2007-08-03T11:02:00.000+01:00

Many of the saints, sinners and supplicants have named it 'burnout', 'slump' and other such terms, for me MMO life at the moment is fractured. There is no one game that dominates my time over all other games, and indeed MMO games are not dominating my leisure time at the moment either. I could probably go into seriously deranged depth about the psychological 'hows', 'whys' and 'do you mind if I don'ts' for this, but for me it's quite simple: I've given three or four MMOs my undivided attention over the past years, and every time I crack open a new MMO, it's like I'm playing some bastard hybrid child of one or more of the previous games.

No, this isn't a post about innovation.

It's simply a statement of fact. The reason that Lord of the Rings Online held my attention until the character's mid-twenties and was then shelved is because I'm lazy. I'm lazy in the fact that, after I've burnt through the initial content (about twelve times as I roll new alts and soak up all the new classes, races and starter areas) I hit the Charon factor. The Charon factor is that feeling that you're just repeating the same journey, in a slightly different way, and that you're merely ferrying your current PC across the wide abyss, not because it's enjoyable or an adventure, but because it's plainly what has to be done. And so you ferry your character along, you don't feel for the character, you don't form any kind of bond with it, you don't care for it, you can't empathise with it, in fact you begin to hate it. You hate your character for making you sit down and trudge through the same old landscapes, killing the same old monsters the same number of times (that being far too many times) because that's what it wants you to do.

No really, it's not about innovation.

Disappearing, it would seem, are the days where many people would commit large parts of their lives to shepherding around a virtual character, because their sense of adventure has gone. Even people who have only played WoW will have begun to see the language of the matrix, will have begun to see behind the stage curtain and notice the rigging and crew used to convey the world they were believing in, and that it is in fact a carefully engineered façade. And once you begin to see the sets, costumes and props of your world you then become familiar with them, and very quickly do you notice them in the next MMO that you play, and the next one after that. And the more MMOs that are released the easier it is for Alice to see that in this looking glass world, she's simply a pawn. You no longer see the lever as a means to obtain a pellet, you see it as a plain and simple lever, one that you've pulled a thousand times and which you know will provide the same result the next time you pull it, and the next, and that that result is no longer satisfying.

It's about catharsis.

I find myself these days playing MMOs a lot less than I used to, and I don't focus on one MMO but tend to flit between them, paying for a month here and a month there. I also find that I am less excited about upcoming MMOs than I used to be, I know the names of the ones that are coming, and I know what Amazing Unique Revolutionary Features [TM] that they employ (most of which revolve around you killing ten rats in New! and Exciting! ways), but I just can't believe the hype any more. Because I know how they will actually turn out. We all do. For me it means that I'll probably try them, get past the initial ten or twenty levels where classes and locations are fresh and the rats die in new and interesting ways, and then I'll catch a glimpse of the stage in a certain light, and I'll recognise the set and crew from the last MMO production I was watching, it's just that the set has had a fresh lick of paint and the crew are wearing different overalls.

And you know, I've been through this before.

FPS games were my absolute joy back in the day. From Wolfenstein 3D I was hooked, and I devoted many hours to playing various FPS incarnations, getting all psyched-up about the upcoming releases of Quake, Half-Life and Unreal and its tournament brethren. But at some point in time the genre really took off, before that point you'd only had a few games and they were executed well and brought something genuinely unique to the table, Quake was perhaps the king of the land at the time, and suddenly developers were churning out thousands of FPS games, all very much alike even though each one touted New! and Exciting! features. There were still the big releases, games which my friends and I spent plenty of time enjoying, but eventually the FPS genre seemed to lose its way, to strangle itself in its own desire to entangle every idea and theme and wrap it in the latest and greatest FPS imagery. I'm still amazed that we never saw a My Little Pony FPS.

So here we are in the tree of MMO life, where Everquest saw the graphical MMO genre explode out from its roots, and World of Warcraft brought it into the branches of mainstream popular culture as perhaps Half-Life did for FPS games. And now we begin to see the influx of MMOs released in the wake of this success, and the weight of all this extra growth that isn't needed begins to damage the tree, it weighs it down and forces it to spend resources in keeping these branches alive which would be better spent in growing a few stronger and healthier branches. And if nobody comes along to prune it, eventually it will wither and fail, until it is a gnarled trunk unrecognisable from its former glory.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

This is the way the genre ends
This is the way the genre ends
This is the way the genre ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

-- Bastardised from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

An undead berry is a Lichee?

2007-07-31T15:26:00.000+01:00

In many MMOs eating food is a downtime activity used to restore a character's lost health, and drinking restores mana for magic users. There are many curiosities with the nature of these mechanics, so let's extend our culinary cognisance and see what the Inferno has to offer on the subject.

But first I just need to grab a quick snack.

The first thing to note about food in MMOs is the sheer amount and variety of food that heroes carry around with them. It's astonishing. Imagine yourself on a family outing to a park somewhere and you're taking a picnic, maybe you've got a nice hamper and you've filled it with all sorts of goodies; you get to the park, and hauling the hamper out between three of you you nearly cripple yourselves under the monstrous weight of the thing, you lug the hamper the twenty yards it takes to find the right number and variation of trees to create a scene from a Jane Austen novel, and then you all collapse from exhaustion and try to find the strength to open the lid of the hamper and lift out the roast turkey with all the trimmings, the barbecue, the fondue, the umbrellas for when it inevitably rains, the backup fondue, the small diesel generator to power the microwave... Ok, so maybe that's just my picnics, but anyway, there's a lot of food, and it's heavy and a pain in the buttocks to move around. Now imagine that you're doing that whilst carrying a ten foot sword or staff, whilst wearing armour or flowing mystical robes. Now fight a horde of twenty orcs.

Let's just say that the gateaux is going to be slightly 'pancaked' (and don't even ask what the pancakes look like) and the martinis are going to be very much on the shaken side of things.

Nevertheless, in MMOs it is an absolute certainty that even in the deepest, dankest dungeon, adventuring groups across the land will be pausing next to a pile of fresh corpses exuding cerebrospinal fluids, rat nests full of disease ridden rodents and pits of strange and unnameable slimes in order to whip out a raclette and accompanying condiments, and having elevenses whilst trying to avoid getting cave mould in their Clos du Mesnil.

In skiing they have après-ski, and in adventuring you have après-abattage.

I think the NPCs are missing a trick here. Just set-up a restaurant at a suitable depth in any dungeon and wait for the adventuring clientele to come flocking in:

“Hello? Is that Lou Liches? Yes we have a table booked for a party of five under the name of Thrognar the Red. Seven thirty? Yes, that’s us. I’m just phoning to let you know that there’ll only be four of us now, I hope that’s not a problem, it’s just that one of our party has been unavoidably detained by a pit trap full of vipers. Oh wonderful, I’m glad it won’t be a problem. We should be there on time, but we do have to defeat Mordon the Undying Betrayer of Gotland just before we get to you, so we might be a few minutes late, but I imagine we'll be in need of some serious food by then. Tell me, do you have anywhere that a magic user can cast his wand about after drinking, if you know what I mean?”

Now don't get me wrong, adventurers have to eat, but many of the items of food that they carry are these absurdly wonderful gourmet items that wouldn't last five seconds being stacked next to daggers, rope, items of armour and whatever else is in an adventurer's backpack. Take the humble pie for example: it's probably one of the more robust items on the menu of heroic foodstuffs, but one whole pie is usually good enough to restore a depleted health bar once only, and a health bar is generally depleted after every other fight at least. So heroes carry around something like one hundred and seventy five pies in order to keep themselves going, and do you know how many calories that is? I mean, I know adventurers are an active lot, but seriously, never mind being able to find their way back out of a dungeon, it's a miracle that they can fit back out.

Who ate all the pies? Now we know.

This pie-eating madness could almost be forgiven, except that every fantasy MMO has these stick-thin females, with non-existent armour that protects them from the strike of a two-handed battle axe, and there they are between fights scoffing pies and steaks and the like. I can see the Female MMO Fitness Workout DVD coming out soon: basically girls, just eat whatever the hell you like and as much as you like. Essentially, eat like a pig if you want, just make sure you kill forty or more orcs a day and you'll fit into the tiniest outfit imaginable, and as an added bonus your breast size will triple!

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into 'courses' will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Buffs from food is a wonderful tacked-on after thought isn't it? I mean, how does an adventurer eat a wolf testicle pie and suddenly gain mightily in strength for half an hour? Do wolves have magical testicles that imbue arcane energies into a person? Wouldn't that be the worst evolutionary design ever. Every wolf would be biting off his own 'bits' in order to make him stronger than his rivals and then when the strongest of them all has finally become leader of the pack he can't breed. Maybe they would develop an Amazon wolf society, where the females were in charge. Makes sense, in a 'none of this last paragraph made much sense' sort of way. Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn't know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you're struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Buffs from food don't last that long, and one can imagine this is because the food item has perhaps passed on its way through the adventurer's body. Yeah, we're talking toilets now. Why are no dungeons equipped with toilet facilities? I mean, I know these places are run by evilly evil overlords from the evil dimension, but no toilets? That's just a whole new level of evil, man. Not once in an excursion do you get a hero going "You know what, I've been down in this dungeon for four hours straight, I've seen sights that would make mere mortals crap themselves inside out, and I haven't had a chance to relieve myself in all that time". And thank goodness, can you imagine with the amount of food that gets eaten and the number of drinks that are quaffed, what would happen if nature was allowed to take it's natural course? An outside observer would watch a bunch of hardened folk, grimly venture in to the entrance of an ancient ruin, only to be washed out again four minutes later on a tidal wave of excrement; hidden entrances to the place would suddenly become clear as geysers of faecal matter erupted from them twenty feet into the air.

So along with all their other skills, such as melee mastery and fireball flinging, adventurers come ready trained with the ability to 'hold it in'. At least until they get to Lou Liches.

All-in-all it's a wonder that MMO adventurers don't just drag a cow along down with them on their dungeon delving deeds, they could all grab a bite from it in between fights without the need to crack open the picnic hamper. Don't worry though, the cow has a health bar, so all they have to do is feed it something and it'll be fine to carry on...

Thought for the day.

2007-07-31T14:13:00.000+01:00

If drinking restores mana for a magic using character, surely it follows that urinating uses up mana.

Casting spells also uses up mana; so is urinating a form of conjuring?

Gives a whole new meaning to a wizard waving his wand about...

The MMOhhhhh

2007-07-12T08:39:00.000+01:00

At this point on our journey we'll stop to take a brief look at the undercurrent of sexual tension in the MMO space by exposing the hidden meaning to several common MMO terms thus revealing their sordid alternatives.

Those who are of an easily offended nature may want to avoid delving this deep into the Inferno.

MMOhhhhh terms:

Meat Shield: Underwear.

Grind: What lovers do after they've removed their meat shields.

Two-boxing: See ménage à trois.

Ding: The result of a successful grind. Generally happens more quickly when two-boxing.

Spawn: The (sometimes unexpected) appearance of a new being when people have been grinding for a while.

Gold Farmer: Grinding where the sun don't shine.

Buff: It is considered good form to give your partner a decent buff before you start grinding.

Solo: Buffing yourself because there's nobody to grind with.

Bot: A device to allow females to solo more easily.

Bind on Equip: When improvised bots go wrong.

Instance: The female sexual organ.

Twink: The male sexual organ when it's ready for grinding.

Nerf: The male sexual organ after grinding and a ding.

Instance run: The female sexual organ after grinding and a ding.

Rez: When a male is ready to grind again.

Gimped: Those people who like to grind whilst wearing full-body leather meatshields.

Lag: When one person fails to ding during a good grinding session.

Wipe: Something that is bound to occur if there's been a lot of grinding and several dings.

DPS: Someone who's a little too enthusiastic with their grinding technique.

Con: If it cons red, you've been grinding too much.

Combinatorial, my dear Watson.

2007-07-09T11:08:00.000+01:00

Priest: "There's the Ogre lord, attack in the name of the king! And his foxy daughter!"

Warrior: "Raaaaarghhh!"

Ogre Lord: "Puny fleshpods, me smish you!"

Warrior: <Holds up a finger> "Oh, hang on a second, I'm not sure if this is the right weapon to be fighting ogres with."

Priest: "What?!"

Ogre Lord: "Guards! Hit oomans wit yer hurt makers!"

Warrior: <Rummages through backpack and pulls out an abacus> "No, that's not the right one, that's for orcs." <Rummages some more, littering the floor with abacuses> "Ah ha, here's the ogre one! Right, I just need to calculate my DPS average and then we can perform a reverse linear interpolation based on his percentage health to determine overall hit points!"

Priest: <Surrounded by four angry ogre guards> "Mother."

Warrior: <Takes a swing at the ogre lord> "A hit. A most palpable hit! How are you feeling now? Would you say that you're feeling ninety five percent healthy? Or perhaps it's more like ninety two percent?"

Ogre Lord: "Ow, yoo make my not-left-arm bleed! Raaaagghh!"

Warrior: "Hmmm, right arm is bleeding and he's pretty steaming angry, we'll call that eighty nine percent." <flicks some beads on the abacus> "Good news, I think we can defeat him in another ten rounds of combat!"

Ogre Lord: "Yoo never stop me, I are in der vincey ball!"

Priest: <Dodges another ogre guard attack> "Just kill him already!"

Warrior: "Your crown will be mine in a mere ten hits, and then the king's daughter will be rewarding us tonight in ways that are illegal in four other virtual worlds!"

Ogre Lord: "Actually old chap, I fear you've made a slight miscalculation. You see, I'm actually a mountain ogre, whereas you've been using the spreadsheet, sorry abacus, for standard ogres. We're an entirely different phylum, and quite unique in our general power and ability".

Warrior: "Really?"

Priest: "For the love of all stereotypically, misogynistically portrayed horny king's daughters, stab him and then help me!"

Ogre Lord: "Indubitably my dear boy. Look, here's the correct abacus, just take a quick gander".

Warrior: <whistles in admiration> "Impressive! Says here that you guys can hit for anywhere between one hundred and two hundred hit points!"

Ogre Lord: "Most certainly, but you're using that abacus with the armour bead over to the left which indicates a plate wearer such as your good self. If you move that bead over to the right..."

Warrior: <Flicks a few beads and calculates> "Good grief, it says that even a standard mountain ogre guard can hit a cloth wearer for anywhere up to one thousand hit points in a single shot!"

<Ogre guard hits Priest for nine hundred and ninety nine hit points of damage. Priest dies>

Ogre Lord: "You'll also see that in the notes section there's a calculation which shows that an ogre lord generally has a retinue of two ogre guards."

Warrior: <Looks up from his abacus to see four angry ogre guards surrounding him> "Waiiiit, that's not two guards!"

Ogre Lord: "My dear fellow, it is a fallacy to rely on the exactitude of numbers."

Warrior: "..."

Ogre Lord: "Bash im in der noggin boyz!"

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Can we do without all the numbers? Would it be possible to remove the numbers from the fore of MMORPGs, and would it make for a better game?

In current MMORPGs, everything seems to come down to spreadsheet crunching: this weapon is better because it does 0.2 DPS more in an offhand which has a swing timer that is 1.5 times that of the main hand; this spec is better because it allows an extra 20 mana regen per second whilst achieving a mana efficiency rating of 35% return on investment over a period of ten years at an amortisation schedule of three monthly intervals (terms and conditions apply).

In combat you already have the con system. You have the enemy's health bar. Why do you need to see how much damage you're doing to the exact hit point? Sure, have flashy effects in the game for critical hits and the like, because these are exciting things that should feel powerful and meaningful, but don't show every little numerical detail of how the combat is resolved.

If you break it down to the raw numbers, show the roots that feed the trunk of your game, you remove a large chance for immersion, magic and mystery.

There are a many examples of games where you aren't presented with the raw numbers, yet the games are fun and involving. I was playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii again the other day, and you don't even have enemy health bars in that game. You know what? It actually adds to the tension and enjoyment of combat: have I put enough shots into that guy to take him down? Is he going to get back up? Should I waste some ammo making sure? Do you think he'd mind if I took his jacket? At a basic level of abstraction, if you need to show that the ogre lord is really rather tough you can reflect it in the health bar, make the size of the bars relative such that a warrior facing off against an ogre that has twice as many hit points will see that the ogre's health bar is twice as big as his, he'll get an idea of how much effort it will take to defeat the enemy but it won't be an exact science involving slide rules and logarithmic charts.

The developers will still have the numbers in order to balance things and, you know, be able to create a working computer game, but abstracting these things away from the players seems like a way to make the game more than just Logistical Spreadsheet Combat Simulator IV. A sword which gives +Str and +Stam, could instead simply 'con' green to a warrior, and red to a mage. You could further adapt the 'con' of an item based on what the character currently has equipped. If the sword mentioned earlier gave less benefit to a warrior over his currently equipped sword, it would con orange or red to him, indicating that it wasn't an upgrade. Would the lack of focus on stats ruin it? Is it about making the power of an item tangible, evident to others so that you can show it off or work out exactly how many Pico seconds less it will take to kill a given mob? Could the fact that it's the most powerful weapon you've discovered on your adventures so far be enough?

Numbers allow people to min/max which is a form of enjoyment to some, but they also allow people to discriminate against those who don't min/max. Removing the numbers could be used as an attempt to remove a level of elitism from these games, when such elitism is so unwarranted.

Pen and paper games use dice rolls to simulate whether lady luck is smiling on the character, and stats are used to represent a characters abilities, because that is the way that seems to work best when you have to perform combat calculations yourself. But now we have these computers, and they can do all these complicated calculations of hit rolls and bonuses and skill point adjustments for us, so we should be able to sit back and enjoy a good game; except that the tradition of PnP was brought over wholesale, without perhaps considering the nature of the medium that they're being brought to, and thus computer based RPGs are heavily reliant on presenting the player with numbers when they could be put to better use in obfuscating the numbers and presenting us with a game that does all the hard work of calculating if another +1 to Charisma is really going to make the pot-belly dwarf barbarian succeed in seducing The Countess Snootington.

For the curious the answer is no, the seduction still failed. It might have been something to do with the fact that he was twiddling his nipple piercing whilst attempting the seduction. Hey, it works in the local tavern, how was I to know that it was considered bad form at the royal court?

Thought for the day.

2007-07-03T07:27:00.000+01:00

"Anyone who wants to know the human psyche will learn next to nothing from experimental psychology. He would be better advised to abandon exact science, put away his scholar's gown, bid farewell to his study, and wander with human heart throughout the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling-hells, in the salons of the elegant, the stock exchanges, socialist meetings, churches, revivalist gatherings and ecstatic sects, through love and hate, through the experience of passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge than text-books a foot thick could give him, and he will know how to doctor the sick with a real knowledge of the human soul." -- Carl Jung

"Or he could spend five minutes in an MMO." -- Melmoth

Roles Per Guild.

2007-06-28T12:16:00.000+01:00

Welcome to your first guild, friend! To get you started, here's a brief list of potential members and how to identify them:


The Guild Leader
 Quote: "Holy crap, is this guild still going?"

 Most likely to: Turn up when it'll interfere with guild operation most.
 Least likely to: Be a leader.

The Raid Leader
 Quote: "No, I don't care that Tony has contributed five copper
         less to the guild funds. <takes swig of vodka> No you can't start a
         raid, we're in the middle helping this guy with his attunement. <drags 
         on a cigarette> No, I don't care that Tina is wearing the guild tabard
         as a thong again. <drinks vodka from bottle> No, I will not tell the
         healer group to 'Heal Better' in raids <drags on two cigarettes at the
         same time> No, I will not tell the DPS group to 'Go crit themselves'."

 Most likely to: Go postal.
 Least likely to: Have fond memories of their last five years in MMOs.

The Suckup
 Quote: "What do you think we should do, Raid Leader?
         Yes, that's what I was going to say too, you're so right.
         Raid Leader! Raid Leader! Tina wore my guild tabard as a thong again, and
         then gave it back without washing it!"

 Most likely to: Be ganked by their own guild.
 Least likely to: Take any action without approval in triplicate.

The Mouth
 Quote: "EVERYONE LISTEN TO ME I'M SAYING STUFF I'M JUST GOING TO DRIVEL ON NOW 
         ABOUT TOTALLY NONSENSICAL IRRELEVANT GARBAGE BUT YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION
         BECAUSE I SPEAK IN ALL CAPS AND I'LL BEAT YOU DOWN IF YOU DARE TO SPEAK 
         AT THE SAME TIME EVEN IF IT'S TO AGREE WITH ME WHICH IS TERRIBLY UNLIKELY."

 Most likely to: Have only just reached teen age.
 Least likely to: Breathe between sentences.

The Loot-linker
 Quote: "Hey look at these everyone! [Sword] [Shield] [Armour] [Bow] [Dildo] Shit.
         loot-linker has disconnected from the game"

 Most likely to: Link to a kitchen sink in guild chat.
 Least likely to: Have an item that other people don't know about in every 
                  excruciating and tedious detail.

The Psycho
 Quote: "Oh, so you like the Assassin class do you?! So you're some kind of racist
         then are you? Nazi lover. Of course you all love Nazis, it's not like 
         anyone loves me!"

 Most likely to: Take Tom Clancy novels too seriously.
 Least likely to: Be a florist in real life.

The Internet Lovers 
 Quote: smooch slurp giggle sigh hug

 Most likely to: Sit in public areas and force their deep emotional connection
                 down everyone else's throats through the medium of emotes.
 Least likely to: Be together once they meet in real life and realise that
                  they're of the same sex and neither one of them is gay.

The Silent One
 Quote: "Night all."

 Most likely to: Say "Night all" in the same room as the Internet Lovers when
                 they're in the middle of a cybersex session, scaring them
                 witless because they had no idea that anyone else was there.
 Least likely to: Be remembered by anyone.          
                                 
The Attention Seeker
 Quote: "Look at me I'm doing something crazy! Look how crazy I am!
         OH MY GOD MY ARMPITS ARE ON FIRE... cool!"

 Most likely to: Be run over by a dragon whilst wearing their underpants on their head.
 Least likely to: Be mistaken for the Silent One.

The Drama Major
 Quote: "Myn gentil fellowes, in feyth ich haue had a joly tyme! 
         Verily and forsooth!"

 Most likely to: Stay in character at the most inappropriate moments.
 Least likely to: Be understood.

The Drama Llama
 Quote: "I quit, you all suck! I am back, love me! You all hate me, I quit!
         I'm baaaaack!"

 Most likely to: Quit the guild.
 Least likely to: Resist rejoining the guild five minutes later.

The Clique
 Quote: "... do we know you?"

 Most likely to: Quit the guild and form their own. With a latin name.
 Least likely to: Like you.

The Real Life Champion
 Quote: "Hey look at the new car I bought. My new computer has seven graphics cards.
         I'd love to stay and play, but I have to go and pick up my new computer
         in my new car whilst having sex with five attractive members of the
         appropriate sex."

 Most likely to: Work at McDonalds.
 Least likely to: Wash.

The Levelling Machine
 Quote: "Hrm, I have twelve raid-worthy characters, which would you like me 
         to bring?"

 Most likely to: Wake-up one morning with the sickening realisation of what a
                 horrid waste of time and energy it all was.
 Least likely to: Recognise the big glowing ball of fire in the sky.

The Alt King
 Quote: "Hi! What? It's meeee. Oh, yeah, I re-rolled. 
         This new character is way better, I just wasn't getting on with the 
         last one."

 Most likely to: Have rolled three new characters by the time you finish reading this.
 Least likely to: Reach the next level on their current character.
 
The Knowledge Font
 Quote: "You are quite wrong. As can be seen by the four spreadsheets I have
         produced with special information that only I know because I'm the dev's
         favourite and they whisper to me in my dreams."

 Most likely to: Talk over someone else to prove that they know the answer too.
 Least likely to: Avoid being sickeningly smug in any situation.

The Good Guy
 Quote: "Hey! Are you guys groovy? We're all groovy! Let's all be groovy 
         and just get along. Groovy."

 Most likely to: Not cause guild drama, and to play calmly and happily to the 
                 best of their ability.
 Least likely to: Exist in any guild. Alas.

Toon on blondes.

2007-06-27T11:03:00.000+01:00

The next generation of MMO players are already in training in games such as Toontown, and your intrepid adventurers of all things massive and multiplayer ventured forth into this strange new world to find out what MMO means to younglings that may never have heard of Everquest or World of Warcraft.

After getting past the initial hurdle of the hideous installation process, which involves Internet Explorer (AND ONLY INTERNET EXPLORER. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED), ActiveX controls, Flash installations and multiple webpage bizarreness, the game loads and you're presented with the character creation screen. Character creation is a simplistic affair, although it still offers more customisation than certain popular MMOs that one could mention. Zing! Take that, Big Kid's MMOs!

To start off with you choose the sex of your character and then Minnie or Mickey Mouse will lead you through the rest of the creation process depending on your choice. The girls go with Minnie, the boys with Mickey, in case there are any deviant 'Minnie Mouse fanfic' writers out there. Next you can choose what sort of toon you will play, such as a monkey, dog, cat or rabbit; height, body shape and head size can be altered, followed by body colour, which can vary from limb to limb as demonstrated by my lovely assistant Prof. Spiffy Frinkelzilla in the picture from yesterday's post. Clothing options come next, which includes style and colour, although you scroll through the options one at a time and each colour choice is effectively a new item, so if you don't like the Hawaiian shirt option you have to scroll through all the colour choices for that shirt style until you get to the next one. A minor niggle really, although for inveterate character customisers such as myself it got a bit frustrating when I had picked a shirt design and then found a pair of shorts I liked the look of but which didn't match that shirt, thus forcing me to scroll back through many items to find a new style of shirt that I liked. Whether people will be focussing on that niggle, or on how much effort I put into creating a cartoon character for a three day trial of a game for seven year olds is open for debate. But Sir Monty was the coolest cat on the block by far, which considering he is in actual fact a rabbit, shows just how cool we're talking here.

Finally name generation is required, and this is where the 'this game is for kids' aspect is highlighted for the first time. You can choose a name and type it in, as per normal MMOs, but it will be sent for approval before being allowed in the game, so no cartoon characters called Bugs Bunny69 or the Cockulator, which is a seriously good thing for a kids game but also not a bad idea for a Big Kid's MMO either, in my opinion. The other option, if you don't want to wait for approval, is to pick from a list of approved names which you build into a combination; there's an optional title, a forename and an optional surname which is made of two separate words combined, 'thunder' and 'nerd' seemed appropriate for me, so I went with that. There are some awesomely bizarre names in the name selection menu, and you can therefore create some weird and wacky combinations without too much trouble. My wife, who was staring over my shoulder in mild bemusement at the antics of Zoso and I, was particularly tickled by a duck we saw named Fat Max Spacklefoot; kudos to you Fat Max, the ministry of silly names salutes you!

Once you've created your masterpiece of anthropomorphized slapstick, you're popped into the game's very brief tutorial which, as with most MMOs, introduces you to the basic controls and interface elements. The game uses the arrow keys to steer the character around and there's no mouse look, which is excellent in the fact that you won't see any characters spinning through three hundred and sixty degrees at improbable speeds, but it does force you into becoming a keyboard turner by default. Being used to slightly more flexible controls as we Big Kids are, this made the thing feel very clunky, but I imagine it would translate well to the various console platforms which is perhaps the main motivation behind the restrictions. Also, this is a game for kids so, you know, I probably shouldn't be expecting a scriptable UI and multi-macro keybinds. Besides, you get used to the controls in short order as you progress through the introductory quests.

And quest you do. It really hits you quite quickly that Toontown is indeed a fully-fledged MMO training ground for kids, a staging ground for raising the next generation of virtual warriors and warriettes.

The basic concept of the game is thus: Cogs are invading Toontown and you need to help stop them. The Cogs are robots which manifest themselves in the manner of various 'dull' themes from the real world, such as bankers, lawyers, bureaucrats and Pop Idol. Ok, not the last one. Not that I discovered anyway; it's probably an end of game boss, thinking about it. These semblances of seriousness are prone to self-destruct under the onslaught of a player character's good ol' cartoon tomfoolery, or Gags. Gags are the character abilities of the game; as you level up these abilities you can gain more powerful versions of them, and as you perform quests you earn the opportunity to learn new classes of gags. You start off with two basic attacks: throwing a pie at the mob, or squirting water at them. It was hard to progress far into the game, but we did get far enough to see the next class of gags, one of which was an AoE attack and the other was a group heal ability; as Zoso pointed out, if people have the opportunity to shout out "HEAL MEH!!1" it must be a proper MMO.

And a proper MMO it is.

It has the grind of a proper MMO, with the two new classes of gags requiring an inordinate number of quests to be performed before you qualify to go on the final 'gag quest' to earn the right to use that class of gags. You can only pick one of the two new gag classes at any one time, so assuming you wanted to learn the other class of gags, you'd have to grind out a whole load more quests. New gags within each class are earned by using the existing ones. To level up throwing gags, you throw pie at mobs and each time you do your progress is shown on a meter to let you know how far you've progressed. Throw enough pies and you get the chance to throw... bigger pies! For slightly more damage! It's easy to mock, but when you think about it it's exactly what you get in a lot of popular MMOs these days; many of the rewards for achieving the next level on your character are just the same abilities, but ever so slightly more powerful.

Observing an MMO distilled into its most basic essence so that it is accessible to children makes you realise just how much smoke and mirror schemes are employed to give the sense of achievement and purpose that is the foundation of the grown-up games.

Mmmmm, deep. Ok, it was about as deep as a paddling pool. Speaking of paddling pools: combat! Nice link, eh? Smooth. Seamless. I should be on the radio. Speaking of radios: combat! Combat in the game is a matter of running up to a mob until you make contact with them, which will then initiate combat mode. As MMO training for kids, this can only be forging a new generation of Leeroy Jenkins and tanking cloth wearers who think that the only way to pull is to throw yourself bodily at the enemy, but it keeps things simple and obviously that's the name of this particular game. Actually the name of the game is Toontown, if it was called Simpletown I don't think it would go down so well, less so if they shortened it to Simpleton. Anyway! Once in combat your available abilities pop up on the screen, you pick one, and if you're fighting several mobs you pick which one to aim at. You don't group in the game, instead anyone can join a battle in progress up to a maximum of four players. This is quite a refreshing way of doing things, as it doesn't matter if the mob is nearly dead or at full health, if there's a space and you join before the mob dies then you get credit for helping defeat it. It's open to abuse, obviously, but this is a game for kids so I'm not sure that AFK Whore and XP Leech is likely to be a part of their vocabulary. The combat is turn based, where the toon group takes a go, then the Cog gets to return fire. The group gets twenty seconds or so to take their turn, so if you're used to Guild Wars pace you're probably going to think the world has stopped turning, but for anyone being introduced to the genre for the first time it provides enough of a sense of urgency to be entertaining, especially if you're seven years old.

To further it's classification to proper MMO status, mobs wander the streets and will add to the combat if they come close enough to your group while you are fighting, where everyone is locked stationary in position until all engaged enemies are defeated. The respawn rate was pretty crazy in some areas, and for such a 'basic' game it actually got pretty hairy on several occasions as additional mobs joined the fight just before we finished the current batch. At one point we had so many adds that defeat was inevitable and it prompted Zoso to jokingly exclaim "I donut leik this game. It's too hard. I'm going back to something easy for seven year olds. Like WoW". To which I could only cry "Forsooth!". They've got eight million customers, but you can be sure that Blizzard still feels the burn of biting social commentary from a couple of obscure MMO bloggers. Oh yes.

Once you've completed your quests (and quests can take an age to complete, because just like in 'real' MMOs, mobs of the type that you need for your quest are never to be found until after you no longer need them, then you can't move for that type of mob but can't find the new ones you're looking for) you can warp back to town, where warping is represented by you pulling a comedy hole out of your pocket, popping it onto the floor and jumping into it. Nice! This same animation is used for a lot of the cool travel warping abilities; a really cool one is the ability to warp to the location of anyone in your friends list. Genius! Absolute joyous revelation! Alas, anyone trained on Toontown is going to hit serious shellshock once they delve into one of the world-spanning, FedEx delivering, ever-running MMOs that the big kids play.

You have a limited number of gags to use before they run out, but never fear for they are easily recharged by hopping on the magic tram and visiting one of a number of mini-game areas. As with combat, anyone can jump on the tram while it's waiting at the station, and then whoever is aboard when it leaves joins together in a quick one minute mini-game which is selected at random. There are various games, the ones I played either involved cooperating as a team and getting a group bonus if you all achieved the goals (such as a perfect round on swimming through a bunch of rings), or they involved competing and trying to outperform the other players in the game to get the biggest reward. Even in a game for seven year olds, PvP is a brutal gladiatorial struggle to the death! Well, not 'to the death' so much as 'for greater quantities of jelly beans', where jelly beans are the currency that you use to replenish your stock of gags. Again, good training for the hostility of future MMOs, and some players were probably a little too desperate to win the Apple Catching tournament, or Minnie Mouse's dancing competition. I caught myself at one point in a game desperately shoving other player characters out of the way in order to get the best position to catch the juicy red appley rewards dropping from the sky, suddenly I realised the full horror of the barbaric PvP training camps that were churning out the next wave of gankers. Then I slapped myself and realised that seven year olds running around and enthusiastically nudging each other out the way is all part and parcel of playing at that age, and I was perhaps being a little too fatalistic in the face of cartoon animals chasing after fruit. It was late and I'd had a lot of coffee. Coffee makes me weirder than usual. On the scale of weirdness, that's very weird, to non-experts.

And that's about the gist of it for the short time period we played. Disappointingly for an MMO demo. a whole raft of functionality was disabled to the trial player, so I couldn't, for example, try the go-kart racing or the chat functionality; for chatting in the trial you're limited to selecting phrases from a menu, but it's very well implemented, with a huge range of phrases sensibly and tidily organized in menus, allowing you to spam 'Rock and Roll' over and over, or explain exactly what quest you're on and how many mobs you need to complete it. Rock and Roll! One final feature that I'll mention that was available in the trial, although I didn't play with it much, was player housing in an Animal Crossing stylee, allowing you to furnish the place with rewards and vendor-bought items!

I know! Player housing. From the outset. These seven years olds are spoilt I tell you! Why, back in the day there wasn't any housing to speak of, you just covered yourself with a sheet if you were lucky enough to have received such a rare drop, otherwise you hid under a tree! And that's only if your coal-powered graphics engine supported trees...

Who framed Billy Blogger?

2007-06-25T22:45:00.000+01:00

Inspired by Van Hemlock's Operation Cheapseats, and with Zoso pointing out that a cartoon MMO does in fact exist in the form of Disney's Toontown. Your intrepid explorers of other worlds set out to investigate the three day trial of this epic MMO.

And boy, did we have a lot of fun on day one!

Introducing your hosts for the event:

Zoso (left) and Melmoth (not left).

More to follow!

Sigh. Fie.

2007-06-25T10:16:00.000+01:00

Summer: when a young poster's thoughts turn to flights of MMO genres. Actually it's more about the lack of such MMOs than anything, but the question to my mind is: will they add any depth to the MMO market? The problem is not with the different genres themselves - I'm as keen as the next grindmonkey to play a decent sci-fi MMO - but whether these games will be anything more than a fresh bed sheet to place on the well worn, lumpy and slightly mouldy mattress of MMO design.

Everyone is talking about the potential StarCraft MMO. Blizzard, in one of their 'Ahhhhhhh! No, not ahhhhhh!' moments has recently announced StarCraft II. Of course, everyone in MMOland who wants to see a StarCraft MMO has slaughtered the customary sacrificial ten rats, rummaged through their entrails and soothsaid that this is clearly the staging ground for the announcement of a StarCraft MMO. I can tell you that they're right, and I'm proud to be able to print a small excerpt from a design document, smuggled out from the depths of the Blizzard Empire:

Welcome to the great Terran refinery of Vespeneforge. In the centre of this great futuristic city are the fiery Plasma Drivers that power the Terran industry. Around this core, Terran crafters can be seen refining minerals and vespene gas and turning them into hundreds of utterly worthless objects such as Bronze Combat Pistols and Power Swords of the Monkey. The commerce ring, which surrounds the great plasma core, harbours all manner of goods vendors that players will just never visit because all the items they sell were too expensive to buy at level one, and are useless compared to their current gear at level two. However, it's a handy place to go if you ever find yourself in the need for Protoss cheese (just don't ask how they make it, but be sure that it involves bodily functions) or a Zerg burger (Mmmm, tastes like Terran!).

There's also the intergalactic financial trade house, where players can try to sell their otherworldly garbage, whilst dribbling over neon-purple weapons such as the Minerite Reaper, the mighty gun Raled'kohr or the legendary laser sword Cashbringer.

Travel between locations is swift: players can jump on an automated hover bike and let its autopilot take them to one of many pre-programmed destinations for a small fee. Later, when they've gained enough levels, players can purchase their own hover bike for greater freedom, and when they finally reach the level cap they'll have the option to buy an epic hover bike which goes a bit faster, has slightly fancier decals and more chrome trim. Travel between planets is simply a matter of waiting for a giant galactic barge, which arrive at the local space docks at regular intervals.

Players will be able to pick from a range of weird and wonderful classes, such as the Space Warrior, Galactic Doctor and Cosmic Psychic! Players can also participate in a number of excellent gathering professions, whether it be as a celestial herbalist harvesting space plants, or as an astro-miner gathering minerals with their laser pick...

Can't wait!

Tabula Rasa is obviously on the radar when it comes to the sci-fi MMO invasion's second wave, but will it do enough differently to make a difference, or is it going to rely on the fact that it's in a sci-fi setting to do most of the work? With the slightly more frenetic combat - sticky aiming reticules and such - it seems as though they're trying to change the dynamic of interaction with the game and move away from the standard fare. The thing that grates with me at the moment is Logos. Logos is magic. Logos is the guys there saying, "well we've got this wonderful sci-fi setting, we've added a few blasters in, but it's not fantastic enough. What we need is magic. Let's make something that isn't magic, but is really. I know, we'll call it Logos, which is like Legos, and everyone loves Legos, right?" Ok, nothing to do with Lego, I know. It's like someone found Arthur C. Clarke's three laws, got to number three - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.- and thought, "Oh thank the lord! We were wondering how to crowbar magic into this game, and now we don't have to worry! Dave, see if Asimov came up with any laws that will allow us to cram some orcs and elves in too". Now I haven't played the game, so obviously I'm going on the titbits that have been dribbled out at various events, but from what I can tell, Logos is an arcane language that once learned will let characters perform weird and wonderful abilities, such as buff their team-mates and damage enemies. Sound familiar?

Logos sounds excellent as a game mechanic, but it just annoys me when RPGs (and PnP games are often as much at fault) try to force fantasy staples into a sci-fi setting. Why? It's sci-fi, for crying out loud. What, you don't think that there's enough potential for compelling, wondrous adventures without magic and orcs? You've got spaceships that you could craft like bases in CoH; ship-to-ship combat; planet invasions and mechs. Alien races; androids; cyborgs; power armour and mechs. Hover bikes; VTOL cars; teleporters and mechs. Lasers; phasers; tasers and light-sabre razors. Space stations; space nations; space crustaceans; mechs; rockets; electric sockets and blasters in your pockets. AI; VR; RSI; mechs; cyberspace; cybernaughts and cybershorts. With all this and more, in the name of the Spaghedeity, why do we need magic, elves and orcs in a sci-fi setting?

Oh, and mechs! Those lumbering platforms of shiny metal death. I forgot to mention those.

Shiny metal death? I think I just invented a new music category there. Take the smiley, happy banshee vocals of REM's Michael Stipe and place it over the thrashing guitar monstrosity that is Napalm Death. If that doesn't ruin a generation of music listeners, nothing will.

Anyway.

I would love to see a decent original sci-fi MMO (one that is slightly more accessible then EVE, although I do enjoy pootling around in that from time to time), but the reason I want to see one is not so much for the change of setting, as welcome and refreshing as that would be; no, the main reason I want to see a sci-fi MMO is that it might force developers to break the train of generic fantasy MMO staple that is being fed to us regularly with an ever so slightly different IP as back-story. City of Heroes took the comic book genre, made a game that was based on fitting in to that universe and made a great game that broke many of the foundations of MMO tradition. If you were to create a cartoon MMO, based in the ACME world of the Warner Brothers, say, it would be much easier to break the common themes that MMOs tend to share, and go for something original and wacky, which might in its construction reveal new ways to approach the idea of how to present MMOs to an ever expanding and diverse audience. The danger is that, in the RP world, most sci-fi has evolved from a fantasy setting, just look at Warhammer's 40k with its wonderful futuristic setting, and it's orcs, elves and dwarves. No, calling them Eldar and Squats does not make them a unique sci-fi race. Sorry.

If developers are going to reap the rewards of the sci-fi genre, they need to approach it from a sci-fi mindset, by reading the Asimovs and Arthur C. Clarkes and building a game around those settings, rather than taking Generic Fantasy Setting Number Six and trying to wedge a game into the mechanics that support that world.

And it should probably have mechs.

Or else.

Thought for the day.

2007-06-22T07:24:00.000+01:00

Compare and contrast:

In quantum mechanics each electron must occupy its own energy state. When electrons are compressed together, as they are in a white dwarf, the number of available low energy states is too small and therefore numerous electrons are forced into high energy states. When this happens the electrons are said to be degenerate. The pressure caused by this effect is known as electron degeneracy pressure; it is the force that supports white dwarf stars against their own gravity, and because the pressure arises from this quantum mechanical effect it is insensitive to temperature.

In forum mechanics each poster must occupy their own outrage state. When posters are compressed together, as they are in a popular MMO forum, the number of available low outrage states is too small and therefore numerous posters are forced into high outrage states. When this happens the posters are said to be degenerate. The pressure caused by this effect is known as forum poster degeneracy pressure; it is the force that supports MMO forums against their own egos, and because the pressure arises from this forum mechanical effect it is insensitive to flames.

So there you go, conclusive proof that all those people who post nothing but bitter invective, trolls and flame-bait to forums are not only inevitable, but are actually preventing the forum from collapsing in on itself, forming a black hole and destroying the world!

It is a great art to saunter.

2007-06-20T17:51:00.000+01:00

David: "Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome back to our coverage of the fourth international MMO Olympics. You join us here for the final of the Men's 100m Freestyle Saunter. I have to say the qualification event has seen some fierce competition, and it's a very exciting line up here of some of the great all-time MMO meanderers. Viewers out there will probably notice that there are only seven of the eight finalists present; unfortunately the Everquest entrant was disqualified after it was found that he was in fact being played by a power-strolling service."

Gordon: "I'm really looking forward to this, David. There are some top class professional amblers here. It takes real dedication to walk anywhere in the world of MMOs, and these are the cream. They really are at the height of ‘walking calmly and slowly’ to a destination. They've obviously been training hard for the event, I heard that the Vanguard player actually walked the entire length of a FedEx mission. Now that's hardcore."

David: "We're not allowed to call them hardcore, Gordon. They're Temporally Advantaged, in today's society."

Gordon: "Well I don't know anything about that. I have to say though, I'm also looking forward to the 4x100m Pick-Up-Group Relay later on this afternoon."

David: "Indeed it should be quite a spectacle, and the question on everyone's lips this year, as it is every year: will any group actually organise themselves quickly enough to get across the starting line?"

David: "Back to the current event though, they're approaching the starting line. And... they're off! Oh dear, a false start has been called."

Gordon: "I'm not sure what that was about, David, but it looks as though the Warcraft Hunter entry has been disqualified. Let's see what the video replay shows."

David: "Here's the start and... ah there we are, quite clearly just as the event starts the Hunter jumps in the air three, no, four times whilst spinning around 360 degrees in varying directions."

Gordon: "The crowd doesn't like it, David. Clear abuse of the laws of Newtonian physics and common decency, there."

David: "It's sad to see in this day and age of professional perambulatory jousting such a blatant disregard for Newton. Still, the remaining athletes having retaken their positions, and are under starter's orders."

David: "And they're off! It's a casual start by all, with the EVE player taking an early trail; they’re looking really very relaxed indeed."

Gordon: "Yes, it's a powerfully slow start by the EVE player, they're looking in great condition. I'm sure the confusion caused by suddenly having legs and being able to walk is definitely an advantage in maintaining a lackadaisical mosey.”

MMO Olympics. MMOO! I bet there are plenty of events for that one. I think I’d have to make the No Jump an event, where excitable players are fed caffeine-loaded beverages for an hour and then have to run their character up to a sand pit and not jump into it. Nor must they jump on the run up. Or on the way to the start of the run up. Or at the opening ceremony parade.

Or in their chairs at the PC. Even if they do need the toilet badly.

Running everywhere as a character in most MMOs is one of those things that we just accept as being a fundamental, unavoidable nature of the game. And we accept this because, in an ideal world, MMOs are first and foremost games. Entertainment. A bit of light relief from the drudgery of the day-to-day grind. A happy way to spend time, without bullies, cliques and social drama oppressing you. A way to escape from the irritating loons in life, who run down the street jumping every fourth step and spinning three hundred and sixty degrees improbably fast and really annoying the hell out of Newton...

Wait. I think I got a bit confused there.

I’ll come in again. MMOs are supposed to be games, and they can be, if taken at a casual level (we’re not allowed to call them casual, they’re Addictionally Challenged in today’s society - Ed.).

Did anyone just see an editor? Must be me. There’d better not be, I just had the house fumigated. “Editors coming in and editorialising your posts, eh mate? Yeah, they’re prone to do that, it’s in their nature you see. Don’t worry, a quick blast of this and we’ll have ‘em out. As an added bonus it’ll also get rid of any film critics in your wall cavities”.

Anyway.

There are those who don’t want to run everywhere: the stalwart RP crowd can be seen nobly and serenely wafting along; looking down on the hustle and bustle that goes on around them, as the piteous hoi polloi dash to and fro, getting things done. They calmly walk along. Making progress. Ever so slowly. Step follows rhythmic step. Until the moment that. They disappear. Behind. A. Wall. And then...

GO! GO! GO! Holy hindered speed, Snailman! Walking is so bloody slow! I’ve been online for an hour and I’ve only just made it to this wall, and I started right next to it! OUT OF MY WAY, I HAVE STUFF TO DO AND I’VE WASTED HALF THE EVENING WALKING. Oh crap, more people! Sod it. Yes, yes, I’m a role-player and I’m running. I’m role-playing someone needing to get something done in-game this evening before my wife wanders over and kicks me off the computer.

So yeah, you visit Lord of the Rings Online and travel to the town of Bree and everyone is running around like nutters! It’s like the Martians have invaded. Except it’s Lord of the Rings, so they don’t have Martians. But they have marshes... Marshians. That’ll do. And so you’ve got this fantastic contrast, with all these NPCs standing absolutely still, and all these Player Characters barrelling around like freight trains. Maybe that’s why NPCs stand so still: they’re all trying to move, it’s just that they take a step forward and vroom they’re nearly mown down by a Player Character. So they jump back in shock, gather themselves and then tentatively take a step forward vroooooom, neeeowww, zooooootfrooooot, as a stream of Player Characters hurtles past.

Ok, they don’t do the last one, that isn’t a speedy noise. I just ran out of speedy noises.

And what would it be like if they implemented collision detection in an MMO? MMO developers, make use of all those shiny Ageia PhysX cards and have character collisions with Newtonian reactions! It would be like the Keystone Cops. On fast forward. After you’ve smoked a lot of special herbs.

There’s no getting around it, if you’re not a Super Hero with amazing travel powers like Metro Man and his all-day travel card, or you’re just stuck in a vehicle most of the time like the Auto Assault and EVE players, running around non-stop with no penalty whilst carrying half the world on your back is just another one of those vastly weird but quintessential MMO quirks.

Thought for the day.

2007-06-15T12:44:00.000+01:00

Why are there no female dwarves in evidence in Lord of the Rings Online?

Picture a male dwarf without a beard; picture them instead with two beards, plaits and all, one hanging from each armpit.

Now picture them in a chain-mail bikini and thong.

Yeah.

It's standing procedure.

2007-06-13T11:20:00.000+01:00

Harold: "Morning."

Samantha: "Morning!"

Harold: "You're new here aren't you?"

Samantha: "Yup, just added with the latest patch."

Harold: "Oh! Well, welcome to town, it's always nice to see fresh faces."

Samantha: "Thanks! I must say, I'm all fired-up and ready, I've been on the NPC orientation day, got my Quest Givers pack right here. So what're you up to today?"

Harold: "Weeeelll, I thought I'd do a bit of standing around."

Samantha: "Standing around?"

Harold: "Yup, just standing. I like a bit of standing, me. In fact, that's pretty much all we do here in town. Stand, absolutely motionless. If one of those free-roaming adventurer types happens to run up to you, you can give them a quest to do."

Samantha: "Oh. Right."

Harold: "Make sure they run right up to you though; if they're more than two feet away, don't speak to them. It's our little game, keeps them on their toes."

Samantha: "Why?"

Harold: "Well, they're allowed to run around freely, enjoy the fresh air, get a change of scenery. Meanwhile, we're all stuck here, on the same spot, day after day. So we make sure they have to do as much running as possible; Arnold over there came up with the FedEx mission archetype one day, that one spread through the NPC ranks like wildfire. We had those adventurers running all over the land. That'll teach 'em!"

Samantha: "So... we just stand here?"

Harold: "Yup. Why, what were you expecting?"

Samantha: "Well, the NPC brochure made it sound a bit more dynamic."

Harold: "Oh, there are more dynamic NPCs. You know, some of us get to move around."

Samantha: "Really? Oh that sounds more like my sort of thing."

Harold: "Oh yes. Sometimes, you get to move over to a barrel, and put an item in it. Graham over there gets to put some seeds in that planting pot behind him every now and again, when an adventurer's quest requires it. Alright Graham!"

Graham: "Kill me."

Harold: "Ha ha, don't mind Graham, he's been here since Beta so he's probably just got a bit of cramp. You took out your KSA insurance, right?"

Samantha: "KSA?"

Harold: "Deary me, what are they teaching at NPC school these days? Knee, Shin and Ankle insurance: you're going to be standing on that spot, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for several years at least. The only time we get a break is when they take the server down for maintenance. Isn't that right Graham?"

Graham: "I can't feel anything below my nipples."

Harold: "Ha, ha. That's our Graham, always looking on the bright side."

Samantha: "B...bright side?!"

Harold: "Well, if you can't feel your legs anymore you're one of the lucky ones! The excruciating torturous pain is gone; it's one of the perks of years of service. And anyway, you probably couldn't move even if you wanted to, the legs become locked and the knee joints fuse after about six months. So get your standing position right, make sure your legs are a comfortable distance apart, because it won't be long before they're stuck like it."

Samantha: "But I want to move around! Why can't I move?!"

Harold: "Why can't you move around? Why can't you move around?! How would the poor adventurers find you then? Those poor simpletons would have to look for you; go asking other people in the area where they'd last seen you; maybe even have to use some brain power to deduce where you might be, based on the time of day and your profession, say. We can't have that! Their lives are hard enough, what with all the running around and killing defenceless animals for huge piles of gold and equipment."

Samantha: "But the animals move around!"

Harold: "Oh deary me, you really are fresh from the NPC propaganda machine aren't you? No, no, no. It's just not done; you can't have NPCs moving around in some sort of semblance of life, it would be chaos. You can't make things that are involving and dynamic, adventurers don't like it. They much prefer us to stand on the same spot, barely moving, for time immemorial.".

Harold: "Anyway, think yourself lucky that you're indoors. Ok, so you'll never get to see the sky again, but at least you're not stuck out in the elements all year round!"

Samantha: <runs off screaming>

Harold: "Here! You can't go running around like that, what if an adventurer needs to bring you some rabbit intestines in exchange for gold? I dunno, this new generation of NPCs are becoming more rebellious by the day. Wasn't that way back in our day. Time was that we'd be like a statue, a quest and loot vending machine in the shape of a humanoid. Isn't that right Graham?"

Graham: "I've never been to the toilet, you know."

Thought for the day.

2007-06-12T10:58:00.000+01:00

Conversations you never hear from PCs in the starter area of a game:

"Mum, I don't wanna be a hero! I don't want to go risking myself in battle, facing demons, travelling for miles a day and defending cities from tyranny, all with the risk of dying alone on some foreign field. I just want a quiet life, here on the farm with Harriot the pig and Donald the goose and my herb garden.

Look, there are thousands of heroes out there already! I mean, you can barely get into the village for all the heroes running around with their flashy abilities and armour and their bags full of various animal entrails that they give to random strangers. Heroes are a dime a dozen around here. I thought I'd just stay in the village and write down my thoughts about the world; you know, philosophise a bit about the meaning of it all.

What I'm trying to say is... I'm an NPC, Mum. A bystander! A quest-giver! I'm one of those immobile, nondescript, cash-laden, monologuing, storyline providers. I'm a Loot Font, Mum, and proud of it!

Which reminds me, Kenneth and I are going on an NPC Pride march in an hour and I probably won't be back for tea."

FedEx, fed up.

2007-06-12T07:15:00.000+01:00

We join our brave adventurer as he arrives at the house of Norom the Confounding with an ancient voluminous tome, which he discovered on the corpse of a small swamp slug. As you do.

Norom the Confounding: "I'm not sure what this is, can you take it to Haddockar on the other side of the world to find out."

Adventurer: "It's a tome."

Norom: "Pfff. Just take it to Haddockar, he'll know what it is."

<Five hours and three hundred crap animal attacks later>

Haddockar: "It's a tome."

<Seven hours, two hundred crap animal attacks and a wrong turn into the Tomb of Pain and Instant Death, later>

Adventuerer: "Haddockar says, it's a tome."

Norom: "A tome you say? Well, let's take look then! Hmm, I can't read it, you'll have to take it to Codur to decode the strange script."

Adventurer: "I can read that language. It's in dwarven runes. I'm a dwarf."

Norom: "Pfff. Just take it to Codur, he'll know what it says."

Adventurer: <mumbles> "It says you're a %#*!"

Norom: "Sorry?"

Adventurer: "Nothing."

<Five hours, one thousand crap animal attacks, a wrong turn and two hours running around the maze of paths in the Forest of Convenient Tree Formations (where there are huge swathes of open space that form a convenient path, until the point you need to go somewhere, and then suddenly there are only walls of trees that have grown so incredibly close together that you can't quite squeeze past. CONVENIENT), later>

Adventurer: "Norom wants you to translate this."

Codur: "Hmmm, they're dwarven runes."

Adventurer: "I know."

Codur: "You can read these, you're a dwarf."

Adventurer: "Really? I hadn't noticed. My beard must have got in the way."

Codur: "Stop wasting my time and take this back to Norom."

<Seven hours, two lag deaths, three drownings, four tickets for speeding and a wrong turn into the Cavern of Lazy Location Design Filled With Elite Mobs, later>

Adventurer: "Codur says that I can translate it."

Norom: "You can translate it eh? Well, have read and tell me what it says."

Adventurer: <mumbles> "It says you're a %#*!"

Norom: "Sorry?"

Adventurer: "It says that we shall find the Immortal Songblade of Nefronggrevat by following its instructions."

Norom: "Immortal Songblade, you say?"

Adventurer: "Yes."

Norom: "Of Nefronggrevat, you say?"

Adventurer: "Uh huh."

Norom: "Never heard of it. Take this to the librarian and get him to find us information about the blade."

Adventurer: "And where, pray tell is the librarian? How many miles, through rabid creatures and mud and biting insects and ogre camps, over mountains and through canyons must I travel to reach this librarian."

Norom: "He's standing right beside me."

Librarian: "Hi!"

<Looks at Librarian. Looks at Norom.>

Adventurer: "Can't you just ask him yourself?"

Norom: "Noooo. No. No. No. No. Yeaaaaaaaaa... no."

Adventurer: "Norom wants a book detailing the Immortal Songblade of Nefronggrevat."

Librarian: "I'm delighted to inform you that I just happen to have a copy on me now. Here you go friend, give this to Norom."

<Looks at Norom. Looks at Librarian>

<Beats them both to death with the book>

Congratulations! You have reached level 2!

The world inside MMO bags.

2007-06-04T10:25:00.000+01:00

Bags are big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big bags actually are. Outer space is nothing compared to the inside of an adventurer's backpack (with apologies to Douglas). The wondrous thing is that - even though players are allowed to equip not one but many of these hugely incomprehensible, vastly improbable and wholly fantastical containers of every otter spleen and troll bunion that you grab as you roam the lands - the biggest complaint about bags is that they don't have enough space.

The humble bag is the stalwart companion of adventurers everywhere, yet it goes unloved and unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, until the day the adventurer needs to pick up that ultra-rare epic item and finds that they don't have any bag space.

The Encyclopaedia Melmothia states that the average adventuring bag contains 16 slots, of which one slot can contain any item, up to and including an armoured chest piece. Let's take a very rough estimate of a solid plate chest piece as being 1.5ft x 1.5ft x 0.5ft in size, or 1.125ft^3. Assuming perfect stacking, we can fit sixteen of these in a backpack without air gaps between them, so that's a volume of 18ft^3 for the backpack or approximately 510 litres. There's a special place in the Inferno for those of you checking my calculations in order to nitpick some minor mistake in this stupid example. Now, the bigger, more ludicrously sized real world backpacks that I could find from a brief search on Google were between 200-300 litres. So your average adventurer is carrying a pack which is about twice the size of that. Actually I'm wrong: adventurers are generally carrying four or more of these bags, which is about 2039 litres, or enough space in which to park a good size family saloon car.

Why is it that you can't put items into a bag that is currently being carried in another bag? Well, imagine the potential recursion there, it's like 'crossing the streams' of a pair of proton packs: if you could put items into a bag that was already in your inventory the first thing you'd do is fill your sixteen slot bag with sixteen slot bags; each of those bags could hold more bags, until eventually you'd have enough space to hold the entire world, at which point it would rip a hole in the fabric of space-time, opening a portal into the dark recesses of the cosmic nether, from whence Beryl Reid will come forth and dance the seven steps of chaos that will bring about the fiery doom of the universe.

Could happen.

Curiously, to my knowledge, nobody has considered the concept of 'bags as weapons'. Considering the cubic volume that each slot of a bag can contain, all the budding Lord of All Destruction need do is fill each slot with iridium. The bag is now so heavy that, assuming they could find a trebuchet powerful enough to fire it, it would not just breach a castle's walls, but entirely obliterate it and several miles of surrounding countryside. And that's just a two slot ladies purse... Find a trebuchet powerful enough to overcome the planet's gravitational pull on your main backpack, and you would cave-in half a continent with a crater to rival that of the Barringer Meteor. The strange thing is that in many games these adventurers, being of that stock that can perform heroic feats, can carry these backpacks around without batting an eyelid. So all they need to do is run up to the top of the cliff (for they can run everywhere when carrying that weight) and leap off, cannonball style into the castle beneath. Judges award extra marks for style and crater depth.

So don't let me hear you complain about 'falling damage' either, because technically when you jumped off that small hillock, you shouldn't so much have landed as plummeted, thundering through the planet's crust on your way to the core.

Technically, with that volume of space, you could get inside your own bag. You'd only take up a couple of slots, and then all your friends could carry you around! Better still, you could all get in, take a slot each, stick a couple of wheels on and you've got yourself a mode of transport. Just whip out that horse you conveniently keep in a slot in your handbag, attach some reins and away you go.

Slots themselves are curious defiers of the nature of space: some items such as potions will stack, such that you can carry enough in a single slot that it would probably match the volume of our example chest piece, but then some seemingly random small items, such as fish eyeballs, won't stack. Thus you have an entire slot taken up by something that would comfortably fit up your own nostril. Yes, it would fit comfortably. No, don't ask me how I know this. It seems strangely accepted throughout the MMO world that you can have a sixteen slot bag full of sixteen pieces of heavy plate armour, or the same sixteen slot bag full of sixteen fish eyeballs.

Bags are curiosities for sure.

So next time you run out of space in your bags, remember, you're actually getting a pretty good deal in general, and if you continue to complain then Beryl Reid will come and smack you with her handbag.

And you don't want to know how many slots that thing has.

We pause this blog...

2007-05-31T16:25:00.000+01:00

...to bring you this important news story:

I'm trying not to do the 'linky, linky, editorial, I'm just going to point you to stuff' thing here, but anyone who's interested in developments in MMOs should go to the WAR Production Video Podcast page and watch WAR Production Video Podcast #7

For me this is great, because it's the sort of thing I'd be banging-on about if I had a suitable soap box, like, say a blog...

Anyway, the PR department (can you call Paul Barnett a department?) definitely understand about all things 'bear paw'; hopefully the implementation team will be assiduous in their execution of the ideas.

Here's hoping! And if not, the Inferno awaits...

We now return you to the irregularly scheduled ramblings of an English loon.

Thought for the day.

2007-05-29T16:14:00.000+01:00

MMO concepts that were turned down:

Carebear Wars.

Pirate Outlaws Online.

World of Hobbycraft.

High School Clique!

City of Agoraphobics.

Grind until you Die: Life as a Worker Ant.

Lord of the Dance Online.

Dark Age of Crufts.

Age of Plato: Symposium Adventures.

Grind until you Die II: Journey of the Spawning Salmon.

The Chronicles of Spelling Using Punctuation.

SpermQuest: The Fertilising.

The Shores of the Acheron: Swing low, sweet aggro.

2007-05-29T12:04:00.000+01:00

Along the shores of the Inferno we can witness the multitudinous annoyances of MMO life, played out for all eternity to those who chase the banner of The Perfect Grind. As your guide, it will be my unashamed pleasure to highlight some of the more popular thematic annoyances as we continue our tour. Let us begin, then, with a topic most appropriate for such a place: Low level mob aggro.

Outside the entrance to the king's palace.

Helen: "Ulfar! At last!".

Ulfar the Mighty: (Slightly out of breath) "Sorry I'm late everyone, I had a bit of trouble on the way in".

Samantha: "Ulfar, is there a small squirrel chewing on your arm?"

Ulfar the Mighty: "What? Oh, this. No, it's the latest in adventuring fashion. It's, uh... I... Oh who am I kidding. Excuse me ladies, I just need to run in a straight line for four hundred yards to get rid of it".

Runs off.

Comes running back, with five small animals all hanging from various limbs and appendages, all of them gnawing away in a furious and yet fruitless fashion.

Ulfar the Mighty: "Be right back".

Four hours later...

Helen: "Where the devil has Ulfar got to? We're supposed to be getting a quest from the king and the royal party is almost over."

A mound of forty or so writhing animals from around the countryside shuffles into the room, shifts around a bit and mumbles something unintelligible before collapsing in a heap on the floor.

In many MMOs mobs that are far below your character's level will still aggro. Admittedly it may be that the games will implement an aggro range, such that higher level mobs will aggro when you step foot on the same continent as them, and the vastly lower level mobs will require you to get fairly close to them before you get their attention, but invariably you will get close enough, and you will get their attention. And that's about all you'll get. They don't do enough damage to threaten your character, although it's just enough that if you're suddenly jumped by a suitably tough mob you will be disadvantaged. They don't give any XP because they're just too low in level, or if they do give XP it will be of any value you like as long as it falls between one and three. They don't drop any loot worth writing home about, in fact half the time it's just junk that will fill precious bag space, although just for added aggravation they will all drop the animal part you needed for that quest fifteen levels ago which you had to spend four hours grinding away for. Some of them will drop two, even if that part in question is, say, a nose...

The fact that these mobs can hit you at all is a total insult to your heroicalness. You're standing around in your armour of wonderment with its plus five bonus to Glinting Sexily in Sunlight, and suddenly a guinea pig sneak attacks you and starts doing annoying but negligible damage. This is a standard guinea pig mind you, not one of those dire, aged guinea pigs of yore, that would roam the frozen wastes of Niflheim and lay waste to entire villages with their mournful squeals, and who could only be appeased with a giant peanut from Yggdrasil. So there it is, this standard run of the mill guinea pig doing damage to you with its species' centuries-evolved ability to find weak spots in chain mail, and you have two options: fight or running away, because the feisty little fellow certainly isn't going anywhere, he's made the catch of his life and he's going to take you down, one hit point per hour until he is victorious and has avenged his entire family, who you killed five months ago for their noses. Your first choice will be, in all likelihood, to smite the foolish little critter, but unfortunately this will take an alarming amount of time. For a mob so far below you in levels it takes a surprising number of strikes to defeat it, as it dodges and parries blows that have felled demons. If that was the only fight you had in a day it wouldn't be so bad, but within five seconds of having defeated the mob, his brother will turn up and launch himself at you with wild abandon, possibly with a yell of "Freedom from nasal tyranny!" as he does so. Five minutes and three hundred guinea pig corpses later, you decide that running away would be the least frustrating option, besides, you need to empty your bags of all these sodding guinea pig noses.

Can there be anything more heroic than a full-armour-plated warrior running in a straight line with a train of small furry animals chasing behind them, some of which are crippled from previous battles and others so old they're in wheelchairs?

Thank you MMO developer for immersing me in this game, for convincing me that grinding away on your carefully crafted world will enable me to improve in power to the point that I'm known throughout the lands, cherubs sing my praises, cathedrals are built in my honour, demons cower at the mention of my name and small furry animals with only three legs will still make me run like a schoolgirl to get away from them. You don't read fantasy stories where the adventurers are travelling from one town to another, and at some point a wolf jumps out and attacks, and then a bird, and then another wolf, and a pack of rabid guinea pigs and another wolf, and a giant bear and a sabre-tooth duck. And even if you did, you wouldn't get a description of how the adventurers bravely ran away (Sir Robin, I'm looking at you) with all this wildlife trailing after them across the countryside. If someone wrote a fantasy book based on an MMO, it would be five hundred pages long, of which one hundred pages are just detailing the adventurers fighting off an endless stream of crap animals on their way between towns.

One hundred pages would describe the adventurers trying to form a group with the right class/race mix. Hmmm, The Book of the MMO, I like it. Coming to an Inferno near you soon!

The annoyance factor of low level mob aggro is so high that eventually you think 'sod it' and turn around and shout "Come on then you irritating bastards!" at which point you realise that all the crap mobs have stopped chasing you, and you're left facing the elite Fel Koala of Grungmar who promptly pokes you a new ar... well, you get the idea. If you look carefully before you begin your corpse run, you'll see all the low level mobs snickering from behind a nearby tree, flicking V signs and thumbing their noses at you. Those that still have noses.

And let's not forget the joy of the gathering profession in an MMO. If you think you're safe now that you're gathering in an area that you've out-levelled, guess again, there are more ways to defeat an adventurer than mere combat. Try to mine that ore and the mob attacks, and even though they're so low in level that they're effectively vegetation they'll still manage to get a hit in and interrupt you so you can't finish the task. So off you run, because killing them is too tedious, and just as you break their aggro range one of their friends, who was waiting for you, picks up the chase. So you run back in the other direction, past the ore that you note someone else is now mining, and pickup the original mob and two more of his friends as you go. Eventually you give up, turn around to fight them... and there's the Fel Koala of Grungmar, wearing an evil smile and punching his fist into the palm of his other hand.

A monstrous weekend.

2007-05-21T12:02:00.000+01:00

I managed to get some time in Lord of the Rings Online over the weekend, in-between DIY adventures: accursed plumbing epic quest line! Although I think I gained a level in Avoiding Unexpected Jets of Water, which is nice.

The odometer on my dwarf minstrel ticked over to twenty two and I received a nice aura - Tale of Heroism - which buffs the Will and Fate stats for the fellowship. What's more this is as handy for my minstrel as much as anyone, although Zoso's captain with their not insignificant power problems will probably appreciate it too. I say 'received' the aura, but in Lord of the Rings Online what this of course means is that I crawl grovelling on my belly to the trainer and give them all of my worldly possessions. They then taunt me with the skill training manual by waving it just above head height, making me jump for it; occasionally they will throw it to another trainer and back, both of them laughing at me until finally one of them drops it, and then as I scrabble around on the floor trying to pick it up, they take turns hitting you with a big stick.

Ok, I'm clearly exaggerating there. They don't have sticks, they just kick you a bit.

And pour honey over you.

And then cover you in feathers.

Having trained, I took my honey-glazed chicken dwarf to the Barrow Downs with the aim of trying to get a group into the Great Barrows; my dwarf has a whole plethora of quests to perform in this instance and I wanted to have a look in the place whilst trying to get my hands on some shiny quest rewards. I also wanted to make some money to replace my dwindling cash reserves post training extortion. This, as it turns out, was a Bad Plan. The Great Barrows is a fun instance, very atmospheric with some good dungeon-crawling events which I won't spoil here, but I think it is fair to say that it warrants a group that is at the very least at the level of the quests there, the highest of which is level twenty four. After the usual pickup group shenanigans at the start, with everyone charging in with cries of "Baruk Khazad" and so on resounding in the cavern, I waited for all of five seconds inside the entrance before a train of party members, with an even bigger train of angry looking elite spiders chasing them, came charging back up the tunnel and dived out of the instance. Then, of course, the nature of the pickup group swings the other way, and crazy words like 'tactics' and 'patience' are bandied about, and it takes time for people to look these words up and understand their meaning, and then tactics are discussed. When I say 'discussed', I do of course mean the pickup group definition of 'discuss' which reads:


dis·cuss /d?'sk?s/  Pronunciation[di-skuhs]
 verb (used with object)
1. to shout really loudly at other people until they are swayed to your point of view;
   call people names until they either leave or ignore you, esp. with respect to them
   learning to play, or being a noob.
2. to consider a particular topic in speaking or writing. Usually at volume, or in ALL CAPS.
3. Rare. To explore a problem with reasoned arguments.

See also: Bitching. Aggravating arse-wits. Humanity (doomed).

Approximately five hours later, the group had formulated the genius plan of the hunters laying traps, the guardian pulling aggro and everyone hitting things with sharp metal objects, and apparently my minstrel was tasked with the responsibility of healing. I know! A healing class. Healing. These were unique minds at work, that much was clear. We made fair progress after that, as most pickup groups do, until we encountered the first really tough part of the instance with a couple of really rather well health-endowed boss mobs. Try as we might - and we might have tried 'as we might' more than we might have. Or something. It was late and I was inebriated - we couldn't defeat them, and with my character's paper doll showing two items of equipment as being broken and the rest as severely damaged I decided to call it a night, much to the relief of everyone else who were obviously in the 'We shall not be beaten!' mode of instance running, where you know you can't win, but you keep beating your head against the wall in some sort of strange noble ritual of fruitless endeavour, until someone decides to quit and then you can blame all your failure on them "We would have beaten it if we'd had just one more try".

Yes, dear. Of course, dear.

At the end of that unsuccessful run, with little loot and no quests completed I returned to the town of Bree and found an NPC vendor who could repair my equipment. The bill: one hundred and forty four silver. Bear in mind that the most money I've had at any one time was about two hundred and thirty silver and you can see why going in to the Great Barrows, or any other instance in LotRO, is a Bad Thing if you're below level, in a pickup group, or like me, both at the same time.

In other adventuring news, I decided to grab the quest line for the Bone Man in the Barrow Downs - the area outside of the Instance of Costly Repairs - which requires you to speak to a ghost who haunts Bree and is only available during the game's night time. This meant I had a few hours to kill before the ghost would be available for interviews and requests to "do that walking through walls thing you do. Awwww, go on", and I didn't fancy adventuring on the minstrel in the mean time, at which point I remembered the Monster Play aspect of the game.

Monster play is a great way for someone like myself, with a hideous case of alt-itus, to play a different character without totally ruining my chances of ever getting a main character above level five. You find your local neighbourhood Fel Scrying Pool, there's one near Mud Gate in Bree, and use it. On your first time, you are presented with a choice of five level fifty servants of Angmar to play, you pick one, name it and you're flung headlong into the service of Sauron as part of a garrison in the Ettenmoors. In both normal and monster play your characters earn destiny points for performing certain feats of daring-do, and these are shared in a pool between all characters on both sides of the game. Once you've spent the points they're removed from the pool and you'll have to earn some more. In the normal game they can be used to buy temporary buffs, but in Monster Play they're used to improve your character. I created an Orc Reaver, a melee machine who looks a bit like me after a bad days DIY, and I upgraded him with the numerous destiny points I had received from levelling my various characters in the normal game before I finally decided on the minstrel. This allowed me to purchase a trait which improved his appearance, giving him a bit more armour and some cool looking weapons - you don't get items for your monster character like you do in the normal game, so this appearance trait changes just that, the appearance - and then I purchased a new skill and some other passive traits which boosted the character's damage, armour and avoidance abilities.

Basically you then get a huge number of quests that require you to either go out and slaughter, well everything really, and collect items from dead NPCs such as hobbit toes, or to collect general items such as fragments of troll stone from sun-struck trolls (they really should put on a higher factor sun cream) that are dotted around the landscape. Many of these quests are repeatable and will earn you more destiny points among other things, which you can then use to improve your character and take on tougher quests. Interestingly, to 'level-up' you have to take part in the PvP that Monster Play is really all about; killing other player characters from the free people of Middle Earth will earn you points that will eventually lead to your character gaining a rank. Once you've gained a new rank, further traits and abilities become open to your character for you to purchase such as advanced appearance traits that make you look even more fearful, thus reflecting your improved power.

An interesting interaction between Monster Play and the normal game is that of the shared Destiny Points pool: it may well be that to go raiding the tougher instances in the game you'll want to buy some buffs with Destiny Points. If you don't have enough points, you can dive in to Monster Play questing for a bit where all quests generally give out Destiny Points, and then switch back to normal play and buy your buffs. Encouraging players to try different parts of the game like this is quite a nice idea and it will be interesting to see if the interaction makes a noticeable difference to player participation in PvP. Already on the server that I play on there is a strong community on the monster side of the game, with some people having undertaken nothing but Monster Play since their normal character reached level ten, which is required for a player to participate.

I found my Reaver to be a standard melee class, playing a bit like the champion class, with a basic attack, an AoE arc attack and a very nice finishing move which can only be used when the target is below fifty percent health and which uses all your remaining power, but it is a nice burst of damage nevertheless. There are also a couple of utility moves, I bought one which allowed my character to regain some health and at the same time gain a small boost to its damage at the expense of some of its damage mitigation when he kills an opponent, and the Reaver comes with another ability as standard which allows you to fling sand into the eyes of foes, reducing by a decent amount their chance to hit you. All-in-all it's a nice change of pace compared to the minstrel and it should help to curb my alt-itus a bit, although the quests are quite repetitive and not too taxing. However, the PvP element requires enemy players, of which there are few of the appropriate level as of yet, so gaining ranks from PvP for the time being is either a matter of luck or waiting around endlessly, picking your sharpened teeth with your sword and twiddling the string of hobbit toes around your neck.

Notes from the boardroom.

2007-05-17T08:11:00.000+01:00

Colin: "Norman, you're looking glum, whatever is the matter?"

Norman: "You know, Colin, it's these 'player' critters; they're getting through our quests at an alarming rate, we need something to slow them down a bit, but we need to make it look like it's a cunning game mechanic..."

Colin: "Hmmm, it's a tricky one, Norman. If only... no."

Norman: "What is it, Colin?"

Colin: "No, it would never work, we would never get away with it."

Norman takes Colin's hand in his and pats it gently.

Norman: "My dear, Colin, if there's one thing we MMO developers have learned, it's that we can make those 'player' mammals jump through tiny hoops of fire into pits of boiling acid if we can put enough spin on it."

Colin: "Well... what if we made some of the mobs invisible?"

Norman: "Invisible, my dear fellow, whatever do you mean?"

Colin: "Well, I mean exactly that. Make mobs that are, in effect, and in actuality, not visible."

Norman: "But, 'players' would have to run around in endless circles for hours just trying to find them! Not only that, but it might even be that they're running around in entirely the wrong area and they'd never even know it. If we placed the not-entirely-within-the-visual-spectrum mobs in the middle of groups of plainly visible mobs, the 'player' things would have to fight through huge swathes of these normal mobs just for the opportunity to run around in circles to see if an invisible mob is roaming there."

Norman and Colin laugh nervously at the silliness of it. Then they stop and look at each other.

Colin: "It wouldn't work, would it?"

Norman: "It's genius, Colin, we'll get the programmers on it right away."

Colin: "I love you, Norman."

Norman: "Not now Colin."

Guess who spent ages hunting for invisible mobs in Lord of the Rings Online last night.

Thought for the day.

2007-05-16T07:07:00.000+01:00

In Lord of the Rings Online, isn't it a little dangerous to have player characters able to choose a crafting profession that allows them to create magical rings?

It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.

2007-05-15T08:26:00.001+01:00

It is not without some irony that this post started out being about trying to determine why I often can't stick with one character for any length of time, and it ended up being about something else entirely. I'll re-roll the other post soon, I just want to get this post to level 20 and see how it parses once it has its new abilities.

It's clear that developers recognise their players' desire for their characters to appear unique and for outfits to look, for want of a better word, coherent. Several games have implemented a 'locker room' functionality that allows players to try on items of clothing, especially bind-on-equip items, before they commit to actually wearing them. This allows you to reject Voton's Elemental Leggings of the Almighty Moon which turn out to be tight leather trousers with a hole in the back that allows your fat dwarven buttocks to hang out, for the ever so slightly more appealing full plate helmet with a flaming halo around the crest, which is unfortunately named Chizwizzle's Chamberpot. This is a Good Thing, but also typical fire-fighting and ignoring of the base problem: people care what their character looks like, and it's only the most dedicated of munckins that will pick the +5 Str Hat of Stinky Tom the Local Tramp over the +4 Str Hat of Captain Jack Sparrow's Sexual Appeal.

Incidentally, I think they missed an excellent opportunity to make the locker room a shared area between players, with some sort of mini game where you can gain modest XP by whipping other character's buttocks with a rolled-up towel. I know, I'm a game design genius.

I like the idea of starting off with poor looking equipment and working up to more heroic gear: LotRO does this very well, with low level hammers, for example, looking like something the character has grabbed from his tool shed to go chasing after those goblin kids from three doors down the street, "I know your Dad, young man!". Actually, if it was a dwarf, he probably has their dad's head hanging over his mantelpiece, in which case - in some crazy liberal society - you might view the goblins' retaliatory attacks on the dwarf's prize begonias as vaguely justified. Eventually you perform some epic or class quest and your character obtains a shiny weapon that you can actually believe has a bit of history to it, that has been crafted by a master weapon-smith and that wasn't just picked off the shelf at the local DIY store:

"What is that?"

"It is my mighty sword, Meeshurar, with which I shall smite my foes terribly!"

"That, my friend, is a small metal ruler, and the only thing you'll be smiting with it is the self esteem of the colleagues who have to fight alongside you."

Some people don't want to be the most powerful, some people just want to look cool, and of course the definition of looking cool is a very personal matter a lot of the time. The ePeen brigade who strut around in WoW with their swords that are twice the size of their own body, which they wield one-handed alongside a shield that doubles as the keel of a small luxury yacht look pretty daft to me, but those people probably think they look cool because in many games the size of your purple epic weapon reflects your relative power, although some more cynical members of the MMO community might say it inversely reflects something else.

The main problem with this 'size reflecting power' thing is that as a developer expands their game they generally have to create bigger and more exotic weapons to impress the people who are prepared to spend an inordinate amount of time grinding away to get them, and you quickly begin to realise why the majority of MMOs haven't implemented player collision routines or friendly fire damage: with the size of some of the one-handed swords currently in World of Warcraft a player would only have to back out of a narrow doorway and they'd have six people impaled on the weapon at their side. They'd spin around quickly to apologise and decapitate the bemused audience, who were standing five hundred yards away. Boss mobs in small confined dungeons would actually be defeated by laughing themselves to death through the comedy value of watching twenty melee fighters trying to draw their weapons and getting them stuck in the floor, the walls and each other. Having achieved the drawing of weapons with only a thirty five percent fatality rate, the melee players would raise their weapons in the air in a triumphant salute and promptly get them stuck in the vaulted ceiling.

It's not just size, though. You might get some of the more outstanding weapons glow with a ghostly light, or have flames springing from the blade as if the weapon itself was trying to manifest its inherent ability to cause pain and injury as a warning to others. As if a twenty two foot long serrated blade wasn't convincing enough. The problem lies with where the developer goes next, flaming swords become passé and 'so last season dahrlink', and so bigger and more enviable effects are applied, until eventually you have a bunch of people running around with weapons that have miniature galaxies orbiting the hilt and the ePeen brigade are comparing whose weapon has the most advanced civilisation living on it.

A simple example of personal preference: in LotRO I like the half-kilt/half-mini-skirt item of clothing for the dwarves, you can see evidence of it in the picture from yesterday. Yes, yes, I love dwarves, and more specifically dwarves in kilts. Read into that what you will, I'm sure Freud would have a field day. Actually, it'd probably be something really boring: "Dwarves in kilts? Ah, now that means you have a slight aversion to cranberries. Now if you'd said you liked cranberries, well, that would mean you're a hypertensive erotic cavalier with a penchant for fondling bowler hats at passing strangers". I'm not so keen on the full length smoking jackets though, they look excellent on elves, especially with their dandy hats with a feather in them, all very suave. On a dwarf the long jacket that almost reaches the floor looks like someone threw an old paisley sheet over a traffic cone and glued a weird bearded head to the top of it, like that one poor kid at Halloween who had ideas of being Frankenstein's monster, and ended up as 'kid under a sheet'. Dwarves don't do trenchcoats. It's the same with gloves: I like big chunky gloves, of which I've found examples in both medium and light armour, but I always seem to find better gear that is, unfortunately, in some skin-tight bondage-ventilated version; those gloves probably look foxy on elves, but on a dwarf it looks as though he's just escaped from a freak-show at the local circus, where he probably had to bite the heads off of chickens, or worse, pretend he was a Cosplay convention 'babe'.

And let's not forget colours too; LotRO, like Dark Age of Camelot and others before it, tries to remedy the 'I look like a principal from the Commedia dell'arte who was tragically involved in an explosion at a paint factory' by introducing dyes in order to allow players some freedom of choice. This freedom does come at some expense to the character, and there's the fact that it never seems to dye the part of the armour you actually want, it generally changes the black stitching to the Honeysuckle White With A Hint Of Saffron dye that you used, and leaves the main bulk of the armour colour as Oh My God My Brain Is Bleeding Out Of My Eyes. With a hint of lavender.

The really strange thing is, developers do sometimes put a lot of effort into character customisation, but it seems as though it's in the wrong place: the face. In the game of Real Life we're forced to play in a first person twitch gaming environment, and the resolution on this reality is pretty good, thus facial expression and facial individuality is a very important initial factor in determining the motives and attributes of a stranger. In most MMORPGs the majority of players play the game in a third-person view and zoomed-out quite considerably to allow a decent view of the surrounding terrain, therefore that elf running towards me may have the most stunning face ever, with a cute little dimple in her chin and a mole just above her top lip, but I'm never going to see it. I'll see that she is tall and thin; she isn't entirely naked, therefore isn't a warrior class in full plate, and I'll also see that her outfit has an interesting colour scheme that seems to be making my nose leak meninges. And that's with the elf wearing a hat: half the characters will be wearing a full-face helmet.

Ok, Moon On A Stick time: what would be nice is the ability to apply a 'template' to your armour which you could perhaps buy from a vendor for a nominal value, which would change the way that item looks in line with the template description whilst maintaining the existing stats. Better still, give this ability to tailors and armourers: they could create the templates instead of the armour items, you could imagine them applying a template as reworking a piece of armour to fit the client better. It could be that more expensive templates exist that change all items into a matching set of armour. What's more, why do I have to be shown wearing armour at all? I'd quite like my character to look like Conan the Cimmerian, for example, with a loin cloth, fur-lined boots and perhaps a green silk girdle for ultimate protection. I've played games where I can create this look at character creation, but before long you're wrapped-up in more armour than a Sherman tank. I can't understand how you can't have a Conan-like character charging around slaying stuff because 'it would be unrealistic and immersion breaking', when most female characters in most MMORPGs are forced to slay enemies whilst wearing a chain-mail thong; that part in Return of the Jedi where Princess Leia is a slave of Jabba the Hut is ruined now because all I can think is 'Pfff, as if he'd dress a slave in epic plate armour'.

Let the great chant of City of Heroes ring up to the heavens, because they got the idea of character customisation so right, it's a shame they forgot about game-play a bit towards the end there, but you can't have everything. The few promotional videos of The Chronicles of Spellborn that I've seen floating around seem to have a similar take on allowing freedom to customise character appearance, and I have to say I'm looking forward to trying it.

Giving the players a little more control over how their character appears is not beyond the ability of developers, we all understand that you have an artistic vision and that customisation is possible but a non-trivial factor to add to a game, but apart from our actions, appearance is one of the fundamental enablers in allowing players to express who they are.

And I'm a dwarf in a kilt.

Bloke in a dress!

2007-05-14T19:34:00.000+01:00

"He doesn’t have the victim mentality we usually request at this point of the debate…", cried the goblins, just before my dwarf put his spiked club through their noggins.

Thought for the day.

2007-05-11T11:52:00.000+01:00

The Recursive MMORPG: whereupon you play a character in a virtual world much like ours, who gains levels by playing a virtual version of The Recursive MMORPG and levelling up a character.

Wh... who are you?!

2007-05-10T08:45:00.000+01:00

I'm Batman.

Wait, sorry, Superman. No, no, no, the Hulk... I mean the Thing! That's it, yes. I'm definitely Wolverine... 's fellow X-Man: Cyclops.

Spiderman! And that's my final offer.

Daredevil! Damn it!

Ok, I'll stick with Batman. I'm Batman, yes, that's who I am. Batman. That's me.

Hello? Oh the bugger ran off! Well, no matter; I can catch him again easily enough, for I am the Flash.

Flame on!

As you can see, Tim Burton's Batman movie would have been ever so slightly more surreal had I been cast in the lead role, mainly due to my suffering from a severe MMORPG affliction: Multiple Entity Alternation Disorder.

We'll take the surrealism of 'lanky English nerd' portraying 'all-American super hero' as read.

It's quite difficult for me to put my finger on exactly why I flick around characters faster than the Roadrunner on methamphetamines, but seeing as I'm suffering a relatively strong bout with my characters in Lord of the Rings Online at the moment, I thought I'd try to document my, mostly irrational, reasoning as to why.

As I stated previously I had decided to initially try a hobbit burglar. Hence, once the log-in servers had deigned to let me in (do I detect the piquant tang of bitterness in air?), I rolled-up my character and entered in to that hellish den of iniquity and depravity that common folk call the Shire. Oh yes, don't be fooled, it's all butterflies, water voles and fragrant flowers on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you can find the sinister underworld of Michel Delving. For example, the mafia-controlled so called 'pie delivery service'; did any of you people actually look inside these so-called 'pies' to see what you were actually carrying? Underneath that fake pie crust were bags of Class A pipe weed. Didn't you ever wonder why you had to avoid certain hobbits? A 'hungry' is the hobbit mafia nickname for an undercover Bounder. So now you know.

Where in the Inferno was I? Oh yes, a hobbit burglar. Have you noticed that the majority of burglars are hobbits? Criminal underworld, I'm telling you.

Anyway! I reached level eight with my hobbit and everything was going well, but it was then that I made my first mistake. In wanting to not rush off in levels whilst I waited for others to find a character they were happy with, I decided to create a dwarf character to play around with; I do love my dwarves, but not in the way you're thinking you filthy minded sinners! So I followed my own advice and rolled a guardian and I got him up to around level six or so, but I found the reactionary/tanky/hit-me-baby-one-more-timey method of combat not really to my liking, certainly not for a quick side-character for a bit of fun. I therefore, instead, rolled a champion for a brief taste of hot dwarf on goblin DPS action.

It was at around about level twelve that I realised that I was enjoying this class an awful lot more than the burglar and thus I decided to stick with it as my main character. Again though, I'd slightly leapt off into the distance in level compared to others, so I once more thought to try a different class while I waited for them to catch up, a class that I didn't intend to play at all.

I imagine you can see where this is going.

It was around level fifteen that I decided I really liked my elven minstrel, and that I would instead make her my main character, I just couldn't get away from the fact that although I've played healing classes to death in Word of Warcraft, the main reason for this is... that I really enjoy playing healing classes. I berated myself for being so silly, and then told myself that I can't speak to me like that, which was followed by me telling me that I'll speak to me how I like because I'm in charge here, which in turn prompted me to say that I hate me, and so I told me to go to my room, at which point I stormed out, slamming the door in my face.

Um. With the minstrel sitting at level fifteen and waiting for others, I thought I'd pop back to the dwarf champion for a bit of a blast around, maybe skill-up some professions. Yeah, bad idea, I know. My love for dwarves - not like that - bubbled up to the surface once more. And the dwarf minstrel was born.

Oh dear.

And this is where we leave it, dear reader, with the dwarf minstrel being a level ahead of the others, but with the others now finally decided on what characters they will play, I find him lagging behind in the epic quest line, as he still has a couple of fellowship-required prologue quests to complete whilst the others are waiting patiently at the next stage: book one, chapter one.

The others don't know about the dwarf minstrel yet. Melmoth hopes the others don't hit him with sticks; they probably won't, they're getting used to the idea of seeing a different character turn up every day and introducing itself as the New and Improved Melmoth.

Flame on!

Thought for the day.

2007-05-03T16:31:00.001+01:00

If a Quendi and a Hobbit were to mate, would their offspring be a Qubit?

Burglar's Log(in)

2007-05-03T07:58:00.000+01:00

Well, it would have been a Captain's Log but as I mentioned before I couldn't bring myself to play those waist-leaners.

So, in the age-old tradition of reading any journal in the voice of Captain Kirk:

Can't... log... in. I am GETTING... very frustrated. THIS... is the third... day OF FOUR... that I have been unable... TO log-in to the Lord of the Rings Online SERVERS.

Spock! I... LOVE you!

The World of Warcraft release was pretty much as bad as this, and I know these problems seem to affect certain groups of players more than others, but with reports of the US having little to no logging-in problems, one has to wonder what Codemasters are doing differently.

Oh well, hopefully I'll be able to log-in and play tonight, although the shock of it might cause me some serious injury.

Still, looking on the bright side, if the log-in servers are still down it's another excuse to read through the entire xkcd archive again.

Like I need an excuse.

The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express...

2007-05-01T22:44:00.000+01:00

.. but I'm going to try anyway.

Zoso and I enjoy some leisure time in Celondim.

Upgrade to Elrondsoft Vista[TM] today.

Arm yourself, because no-one else here will save you.

2007-05-01T14:46:00.000+01:00

Would an MMO that heavily emphasised the group game, as opposed to the solo one, stand any chance of being successful? Is the big attraction of MMOs simply that you as a player are sharing space with other people from around the planet, or is it the opportunity to play alongside or against others that initially attracts people, but the current foibles with the way MMO games approach the concept of grouping often deters people and instead encourages them more into a solo style of play?

Looking around various blogs, a lot of people will mention the solo quests they performed in their 'journal of gameplay', or perhaps they have a frequent entry on their regular group's encounters. There is also the more occasional mention of guild groups, but very rarely is there a regular entry on pick-up groups, unless it's a tale of woe and frustration.

So, assuming that people would actually be happy to group more often than solo, is there any way that we can make group play more attractive? Is there some threshold where grouping suddenly becomes the preferable option over soloing in most situations?

The first obvious step is to have group game mechanics that empower the individual when they are part of a whole; it needs to be that the sum of the players is much greater than any player on their own can ever hope to be. This incentive, to make players perform extraordinary feats when part of group, is not new, but I feel it probably hasn't been exploited anywhere near its potential. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles and Lord of the Rings Online amongst others have implemented team-based abilities, such abilities are beyond the power of any one player but by combining their own powers, usually in some sort of timing/ordering based mini-game, they can achieve great power through cooperation and good play. This sort of idea is a great enabler of team play, it encourages people to play as part of a group, but more importantly it emphasises the need to work together as a group. Too many games have group content that essentially requires people to band together because greater numbers will win the fight, but there is little reward for working as a team during the fight, hence pick-up groups tend to perform poorly because they are made-up of several players all playing solo towards the same objective. If games could provide tangible rewards for working as part of a cohesive whole, then players might be more inclined to learn how to play as part of a team, random teams would be more likely to succeed, and thus people would be more enthused about teaming again.

The next enabler of group play would be to remove the idea of solo classes. Pick-up groups are often hard to form for anything other than basic content because there's the wonderful Holy Trinity of class design still entrenched in most MMOs, that of Tank, Damage and Healer. To try to counter this problem - that a group might be ready and raring to go but not have a healer, because healers generally suck at solo play and so there are very few around, since a smaller proportion of people want to play a non-soloable character in a predominately solo game - the hybrid class has evolved, they can usually solo and bring one or more Holy Trinity class roles to the table at the expense of not being able to perform any one as well as a pure class. This however fails to work because games are predominantly solo, so a hybrid has to be balanced so that they can't become a soloing machine: a class able to output high damage and be able to heal well would be overpowered compared to the pure Holy Trinity classes. However, group play is balanced towards a group of Holy Trinity classes, and thus a hybrid trying to fill the role of one of these pure classes often can't perform as well and the group will fail. If a hybrid can perform the role of a Holy Trinity class well enough for a group, then it's usually at the expensive of their other potential roles, they sacrifice damage to be able to heal almost on a par with a pure healer, for example.

What if everyone was a hybrid instead? What you would have is everyone with the potential to tank, deal damage, utility (crowd control, for example) and heal, but you perform one of those roles at the detriment of the others. For example: if someone starts healing the group then their ability to deal damage is reduced or negated, if someone uses their crowd control ability then it reduces the power of damage and healing for a while, but since crowd control is a utility ability rather than part of the Holy Trinity, it perhaps reduces healing and damage together but by a smaller amount than pure healing would reduce damage. This change in ability is only temporary, if the player who was healing stopped for some reasonable amount of time or perhaps after each encounter, the abilities would reset and the player could next time choose to deal damage at the expensive of healing. Thus each member of the group becomes flexible, and the group as a whole becomes adaptable to encounters on the fly: a horde of mobs coming over the hill, everyone switch to damage dealing and burn them down; a single powerful mob, someone take-up the tank role, a couple of people switch to healing, and the others split between crowd control for adds and damage dealing.

Thus, group composition becomes less of a chore because you always have what you need: players. Once the group is formed the people pick a role depending on what the group needs and you can get on with playing the game. It would still present problems, obviously, nothing is perfect; some people will always want to do damage only, for example, but then they won't get too far if they're in a game that empowers group play and encourages cooperation. You can't design a game for everyone, and it seems that designing a multiplayer game that really emphasises the idea of playing well with others would be a Good Thing.

Individuality and choice is important to players, and at first glance this would seem as though the 'everyone as hybrid' concept was going to end up as World of the Stepford Wives. However, just because you're doing damage, it doesn't have to be the same damage as other people, some players could be melee-focussed characters and some could cast magic, assuming a fantasy setting. If you went for a melee character, then damage would obviously be through weapons, but healing might be through bandages and medicine. A caster would throw fireballs and cast healing enchantments. There's still room for individuality, even though people can 'do it all'. Interestingly a melee healer would have to run around and get close to people to heal, they have armour to take damage while in melee range so that's ok, and bandages would probably heal for more because it takes time for the melee healer to get from person to person, but a good group might organise themselves in a way that makes it easier for him to run around and heal. Having simple ways to make the group work as a whole to make life easier for themselves is a good way to encourage cooperation. Some people will scoff at the idea of a person having to physically run around and heal, but is that maybe because they're entrenched in the 'healer stands at the back and plays health bar whack-a-mole' methodology? Why couldn't it be effective to heal in this way, if the game allowed for it? "A caster healer would be superior", I hear the voices cry. Well, maybe, but game mechanics might make it such that the caster healer is more likely to draw aggro on to themselves, or the bandages of the melee healer might add an additional minor buff to the group as well as heal, enough that it would balance out the slightly more flexible approach that a group could take with a caster healer.

In the end though, people are individuals and sometimes they just want to play on their own. This is where crafting, exploring and other such diversions would come in to play. These are still worthwhile activities, and can allow the player a little 'self time' without having to rely on others, but they are still able to socialise, maintain friendships and even make new ones. The crafter meets new people as they ply their trade and sell items, the explorer may well come across a group out in the wilds who could do with an extra member, they might join in, find the group fun and end-up playing with them for a while. It's possible to have the main theme of the game based around group play with alternative solo options as a sideline.

Strangely, MMOs seem to be inherently exclusive in nature, rather than inclusive, and I feel that questing is a big reason for this. What really needs to happen is the evolution of the pre-requisite and quest chain method of questing. It's all well and good to try to create a little continuity by having a chain of quests that lead up to a grand finale, and it's understandable that you have pre-requisites to stop people skipping to the final quest in order to grab the rotund reward at the end, but it's very restrictive to group play. What is needed is a quest system that empowers the group whilst not overly punishing the individual, and this is a tricky thing to balance. City of Heroes has a dynamic quest system where you are given random stand-alone quests that anyone can participate in, but they become pretty dull after a while due to their repetitive nature, and so they also include the old staple of quest lines too. As an aside: City of Heroes' dynamic grouping system is a much better example of how to make group play more accessible.

Thinking on quests as a chain, you start at the first link and work your way to the end link and then you've finished. What if you connect the start and end links, such that instead of a linear quest chain, you have a circular one? Thus it doesn't matter where you jump in on the quest line, you can still complete the chain. We think of quest lines as being 'perform A, then B, then C for result Y' but why? I, and many others, have already lamented the fact that players have little effect on their MMO world, thus starting-off with killing some badgers and finally working up to killing the evil lord Badgeron and his set of Badger Mafiosi doesn't mean anything in the fact that you haven't really defeated him, he's still there. Wait for three minutes and he'll pop right back as if nothing had ever happened. In fact the poor NPCs are stuck in their own Groundhog Day hell:

*alarm clock*

Badgeron: "Oh, what a wonderful morning. I'll make myself a quick cup of tea and then I'll see how the Badger Mafiosi are getting on with my latest nefarious scheme. Mu ha hah ha haaaa!"

Adventurers: "Halt thee, scallywag, we will not let your evil deeds go unpunished!"

Badgeron: "Accursed adventurers! You have meddled in my affairs for the last time! Prepare to meet your end"

*hack, slash, HEAL MEH!, crang, pow*

Badgeron: "I... am defeated. Farewell cruel world."

*alarm clock*

Badgeron: "Huh? Oh! It must have all been a horrible dream, thank goodness. Well, it's a lovely morning, I'll make myself a quick cup of..."

Adventurers: "Halt thee, scallywag, we will not let your evil deeds go unpunished!"

Badgeron: "Oh, déjà vu! But you're still going to die puny mortals"

*thunk, prang, HEAL MEH!, crash*

Badgeron: "Oh, cruel fate. I go now to eternity!"

*alarm clock*

Adventurers: "Halt thee, scallywag, we will not let your evil deeds go unpunished!"

Badgeron: "Wait. What?!"

*slash, chank, HEAL MEH!, zoink*

*alarm clock*

Groundhog day as an over-camped named mob. /shudders

The circular chain still presents the obvious problem that a player can now jump in at the point the recruiting group is currently at, but if it's a progression, then you're just stuck looking for a group, but simply at different point around the chain. Instead of linking quests by chains, how about linking them by area or NPC? It would work much like the reputation system of WoW (hopefully without the grind, if the quests are done well) where you could perform single quests that would build your overall reputation in that quest set to a point where you can then take on the final boss quest for that NPC. The single quests could be errands, killing some mobs in an area, or perhaps more complicated multi-part quests that need to be carried out in one go - defend the bridge from a wave of Badger Mafiosi, then escort the people trapped on the bridge through hostile territory to safety - then anyone can hop-in to the group and complete the quest the group is planning on doing, gain some XP and also gain reputation towards the final quest in that quest set. There will eventually be a point where you will have to form a group specifically for the final boss quest, but it is only one quest of many where you need people to all be at the same stage. Not only that but you could also have it so that the final quest will still reward some reputation for the quest set that it is a part of, therefore there's still worth in people who aren't ready to do the quest for the final reward in going and helping out.

And if nothing else, it's always amusing to watch Badgeron try to cope with another beating at the hands of your fellow adventurers.

*alarm clock*

Five reasons why I blog: Revenge of the Meme

2007-04-28T13:31:00.000+01:00

It has recently come to my attention that I have been tagged, deliberately, callously, and with beastliness of forethought by the Ancient One. And he didn't even buy me flowers.

Prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet: The shield of anonymity, it’s a powerful tool. It enables me to sit here and write whatever I choose, in whatever manner of voice that I wish to use, and then put it out for people to read and interpret and react to. Am I Melmoth, or is Melmoth really me? If I had a portrait painted who would I see? It’s wonderful to be able to experiment with who I believe I am without some of the more obnoxious constraints of societal intervention

Because I want to be a writer: Language is funny. Those who are naturally inclined to belittle and mock will have read that heading as me believing that blogging is a way into my becoming a writer. They are wrong, I’m very happy with my work as an aerospace software engineer; deep down I want to be a writer, even though I know that this will never come to fruition. The stumbling blocks are that I have no stories to tell, and I am not terribly good at writing, therefore, blogging is a way for me to live out my desire in some small way, to relieve the pressure of not knowing whether I can put something on a page and have somebody else read it and enjoy it.

Because the voices told me to: They’re so demanding.

Ordinary people can be insightful: You don’t have to be the lord king guru of all you survey to have good ideas, sometimes the little people have ideas too. Blogs are a wonderful medium to convey ideas, and the good ones will be picked-up by others and become buoyant, and the not-so-good ideas will settle to the floor of the sea of blogs, like so much detritus. It harms nobody, but it can empower them to better things.

It is part of my master-plan to take over the world: And if you think that blogging about MMOs is a weird way to go about taking over the world, you wait until you see the marmosets wielding tiny uchigatana and mounted on badgers. Oh, I wasn’t supposed to mention those yet...

I'll tag Zoso and Elf, because I haven't seen them tagged elsewhere yet. Plus they're the only other two people IN THE WORLD who read this blog.

The traveller has come. Choose and perish.

2007-04-27T10:58:00.000+01:00

With plenty of time to spend thinking about LotRO rather than playing it, I pondered on my final decision of class and race. And then I pondered on my pondering. And then it all got a bit existential; I think at one point John Wayne rode in on Neil Gaiman and tried to lasso me with rope made of Dolly Parton's eyelashes, which had been hand-rolled by Guatemalan maidens.

Anyway, when I woke up I decided to write a little bit on my method of character selection. I also decided never again to eat jalapeño peppers stuffed with cheese when drinking large quantities of port.

When it comes to fantasy MMOs I tend to be pretty set in my ways when it comes to the choice of race. I usually rule out playing a human pretty early on; it's not that I find playing a human in a fantasy setting dull, there are a lot of cool human characters in the fantasy genre, it's more that the representation of humans in most MMOs is just... wrong. We're not talking Uncanny Valley here, we're talking Ministry of Silly Walks. To my eyes, the human representation more often than not looks awkward and that grates too much for me to be playing one for any length of time.

When I was younger and playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, I used to love elves. Back in the day they were elegant, aloof and refined. Their weapons were unique and mysterious, their fighting style was unnatural and yet in complete harmony with nature. Surfing down staircases on a shield was a big no-no, in fact they had a punishment along the lines of rafanizou if anyone was caught doing that, but obviously it was a mystical and antediluvian ritual, with elven radishes which had been bred especially over a thousand millennia. These days elves seem to have been reduced to the status of pretentious, borderline-anorexic humans with pointy ears. They're the Paris Hiltons of the fantasy genre.

We're running out of fantasy staples, but never fear, because I like dwarves. I guess if I'm honest I am a dwarf at heart these days: grumpy, rough and ready, loyal and devoted to friends and really quite hairy. Well maybe not the last one, but I did try to grow a beard once, and in the end isn't that what counts? I like playing races that have some sort of obviously distinguishing height difference, mainly because it's something that will actually stand out in the World of Wealllookalike, so short of stature dwarves or hulking ogres always appeal to me. Dwarves are feisty, tough, usually in the thick of battle and rarely back down from a fight, and that's the sort of character that I admire. And if nothing else, there's always the beer; the vast vats of lovely, frothy-headed bitter ale.

I don't have any aversion to playing the more diminutive races, in fact I find them fun as I stated above, but there is a caveat in that I can't play the overly cute ones. I probably wouldn't play a fae in EQII, but I would play a Ratonga. I like the Yodas, the Angs and the Belkars of the fictional world. I make an exception for Sir Didymus, he's borderline cute, but so very funny with it.

Anyway, there's an outline of the general preconceptions and prejudices that I take with me when I approach a new game.

So I expect that you have an idea of what race I'm likely to have chosen - there will be an exam at the end of this post - but what follows is an outline of how the decision was refined and how I arrived at my initial character for LotRO. So let me take you on a journey further into the murky depths my brain; please wear the protective goggles provided at all times, and take time to read the instruction leaflet on how to assume the crash position correctly. In the event of excessive cynicism, oxygen masks will drop from the compartment above your head, please fit your own mask before attempting to fit masks to those less tolerant or understanding than you. Don't worry about John Wayne and Neil Gaiman, they're just after your Lucky Charms, and are mostly harmless.

It will be fairly obvious to those paying attention that fairly quickly I ruled out the race of man. (And woman). And woman, thanks Stan. They stand awkwardly, they're gangly, and they run like they've watched Forest Gump one too many times, including, the last time I played in beta, leaning into corners but from the waist-up only. I mean, what the hell? Maybe it's a Tolkien thing, I'm sure there is probably a five page song in the Silmarillion on why the gods made all humans lean around corners but only from the waist-up. Anyway, the one stumbling block at this point in my decision was that out of the choice of classes, the Captain was the one that first caught my eye, which is exclusive to the race of men. (And women). And women, thanks Stan. This made it a bit tricky, because the Captain class is very much my style of play: a jack-of-all-trades group support and all-round good guy. However, after a little research it seems as though the Captain class may be just a little too much of a JoaT, this coupled with their being a pet class which I can never really get on with, and the fact that I have played hybrids in WoW for the past *mumble mumble* years, meant that I could convince myself that this wasn't the class for me. So that ruled out playing a human, awwwww no waist-leaning for me.

Elves were a lot simpler to rule out, thanks Lord of the Rings the Movie, and your shield-surfing Legolas that has spawned a million "Kekekeke" bouncing clones. It's still hard to escape the fact that they're skinny humans with pointy ears, even with all the background lore behind them, I can't help but feel that. I know it's hard to make attractive humanoids in games, but those elves are pretty fuggly; we're not talking Liv Tyler fuggly, where the fuggly meter goes all the way around and comes back on the other side, and you actually find yourself deeply attracted to her even though you keep thinking of her Dad half the time. Maybe that's just me. No, the elves in LotRO just look like really bad plastic surgery mistakes: you know those celebrities who no longer look like they're part of the Earth gene pool any more? Put pointy ears on them, and you've got LotRO elves.

So, mentally kicking dirt into the weird-running, plastic surgery reject races meant that I had then ruled out the Loremaster class. At this point I had to review my reasoning again because I liked the idea of that class, I mean who doesn't want to be Gandalf? All the Legolas-loving men-in-tights can put their hands down. Gandalf is the sage. The wise man of ages. The force for good. If Tolkien had had just a shred of forethought he wouldn't have named him Gandalf the White, and the film would have instead gone: "Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me. Gandalf the Grey. That was my name. I am Gandalf the Daddy. And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.", and there would have been the classic line of "Who's your Daddy?" when he forced Sauron out from Theoden King. However, in LotRO the Loremaster is a strange class which doesn't seem to have a strong enough definition, and again there's the pet thing. Why do pet classes annoy me, well in this instance it's the choice of pets that you're restricted to:

Captain of Gondor: "Loremaster, the enemy horde outnumbers us by three to one, whatever can we do against such odds?"

Loremaster: "Fear not little one, for I shall send my faithful companion to tackle them!"

Captain of Gondor: "Your faithful companion?"

Loremaster: "Yes, Alan, here"

Captain of Gondor: "Alan, is a small bird"

Loremaster: "Well... yes. But he is a fearsome fighter! He can perform great angry feats of rage if you give him a chance"

Captain of Gondor: "Loremaster, there are four hundred orcs out there, and you propose to attack them with a chaffinch"

Loremaster: "Alan is not a chaffinch, he's a lesser spotted wren."

Captain of Gondor: "Oh well then... Go on then, show us. Show us what mighty... "

Loremaster: "Alan."

Captain of Gondor: "What mighty Alan can do."

Loremaster: "Right Alan, this it, don't let me down. Off you go."

Alan: "Squawk!"

Loremaster: "There he goes. See! See him bravely attack the enemy head-on!"

Loremaster: "Oh dear."

Captain of Gondor: "They're... eating Alan. Is that a... dip? They actually brought some sort of herb dip, Loremaster."

*looks around*

Captain of Gondor: "Loremaster?"

Ok so the way the Loremaster class is implemented is actually a fairly clever way to get around the First Age Non-proliferation of Magic treaty of Middle Earth (Sauron is so getting a visit from the United Nations inspectors), but as I say, it just wouldn't work for me as far as I can tell, and so I could happily move on to the next race.

Dwarves. Now we're talking! Those hairy tin-barrels on legs, armed and dangerous even when they're doing the spring cleaning, they're the nutters favourite nut. Hopefully you've latched on to the subtle vibe that I like dwarves. However, class choice was a problem for me here. The Champion was my initial preference, but being one of the major DPS classes, everyone and his wife will be playing one, and this is a big turn-off for me. Flavour of the month classes are never on my list of Things I Must Do To Be Popular With The Cool Kids. The Hunter suffers like the Champion for the same reason, in my eyes. In addition, dwarf hunter? Eh? A dwarf. With a bow. Oh yes, I can see the dwarves of Tolkien, all lined up at the back of the battle with their bows. And then, when the battle commences and the Captain of Gondor orders the archers to attack, the dwarven archers all barrel down the hill, overtaking the charge of the Riders of Rohan, and then smacking in to Sauron's forces, beating them about the head with their bows and stabbing them with arrows. The Guardian is tempting, and I may well try a dwarf guardian at some point in the future, but the whole YO MAMMA issue puts me off, although I have to confess that I haven't played the class so I don't know how well taunting has been implemented in LotRO. And finally, the Minstrel. For me the dwarven Minstrel suffers the same as the Hunter: I have visions of the dwarf charging in to battle with cloth armour and clobbering enemies with a lute and garrotting them with the strings; any injuries in a party with a dwarf healer had better be curable with beer, because that's all there's going to be in the medicine kit. I hadn't ruled out the Minstrel, but playing one as a dwarf wasn't going to happen.

So finally I looked at Hobbits. The Hunter was more tempting with this race and certainly more believable, but again everyone goes for DPS, and so I rarely do. The Guardian similarly tempted me, since it's always fun to play a diminutive race with a tanking class, but seeing as I had already dismissed a dwarf Guardian, a hobbit one wasn't really any better. The Minstrel, could work very well: I like playing support and healing classes, and this was a strong consideration for a while, but I've played healing classes to death in WoW, and the whole Minstrel 'strumming his instrument in the middle of battle', if you know what I mean, just seems a bit weird.

"Hey guys, here's a little number I wrote the other day."
*strum*
"Die! Die! Die! You Orc bastards!"
*strum*
"Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here until the end of the battle. Try the salmon it's delicious."

Which left the burglar. I've never really gone for stealthy, tricksy little characters before, and the concept intrigued me. Even better, they're not the insane DPS machines of other MMOs, so they are less likely to attract the ADD-bouncing "Kekekeke!" player to them. What's more, they're actually a group support class in LotRO, providing debuffs and the opportunity to start the 'game-mechanic formally known as conjunctions' at will. A change of pace from healing seemed pretty good to me, and so with all the other options considered, this is the race/class combination that I settled on, with the alt-o-holic in me keeping the dwarf Guardian in mind for later, if I really take to the game.

I rolled my character on an RP server as I'm very much a fan of the RP in RPG, and I will always try to make sure I'm somewhere where I can at least get the opportunity to try it; this doesn't happen too often as I'm unfortunately a bit shy and retiring even with online anonymity as a shield, but having the opportunity to role-play even if it never comes to fruition, is something I aim for. I won't go into my deliberations on character naming, but a post on character background and professions is in the works.

So there we have it, a journey through the weirdness that I like to call my mind. Please stow your trays and return your chairs to the upright position, we will be landing in normality shortly. Flight attendants are now coming around to collect your sick bags. We hope you weren't too freaked out flying with Melmoth Airways, and we look forward to you flying with us again.

Have a sane onward journey.

Bumper bear

2007-04-27T06:40:00.000+01:00

My druid's bear form has a bumper sticker on its rump that says "Feral and proud".

But if I find out who stuck the "Wide load" sticker next to it, it's mangling time.

LotRO: Shadows of Angmar. First imdepression.

2007-04-26T18:37:00.000+01:00

Or should that be LotRO: Servers of Fubar?

Still, I'm sure the issue with the servers not restarting properly after a scheduled reboot will be sorted out quickly enough.

It's just ironic that I've just bought the game and a full house of offline servers is what greets me when I load it up for the first time.

Wait, it's not ironic is it? It's that other thing that sounds like ironic.

Bloody annoying. That's the one.

MMO Blogger All-stars

2007-04-23T14:31:00.000+01:00

As a thought experiment, I wondered what it would be like if a bunch of the more famous MMO bloggers out there, got together with the aim to creating a team/group/guild/fellowship/dance troupe within a game. It would be interesting to see how blogs differed on experiences when the group adventured together. It's possibly a recipe for eXtreme Dah-rama[TM] but it could also be an interesting insight into how different, experienced gamers see the content they play in direct contrast to one another. There's obviously the left-pond/right-pond time difference to complicate matters among other things, but sorting out details is left to others.

I'm more of a (dumb-)ideas person. Now, back to work on my battery powered battery charger...

The MMMO

2007-04-18T11:16:00.000+01:00

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was a disappointment for me. Not because the game wasn't any good, on the contrary, it was a lot of fun and I had many hours of enjoyable questing solo and with friends; I loved many of the features of the game, such as the spell combo. system, where you could trigger greater effects by having members cast the right spells in the right order in unison, something we're seeing emphasised in more recent MMOs such as EQII and LotRO. What disappointed me about FFCC was what it didn't do, and this is entirely my fault, because my overactive imagination went to work on a snippet of information before anything substantial had been revealed. Now this sort of thing happens all the time, the difference being that when my idea of what this meant didn't come to fruition, I didn't find the first forum that was vaguely related to the game and post an 'open letter to the devs' about how wrong they were, and how I knew everything about their game, and clearly they didn't have a clue. I was just a little disappointed for a missed opportunity, and then realised that I was probably being a bit overambitious with the idea anyway. As usual.

The snippet of information was that the Gamecube-exclusive game was going to have Gameboy SP connectivity.It seems pretty obvious that Gameboy == Portablilty will always evaluate to true. So the conclusion I jumped to was that FFCC was not going to be one game, but in fact two. Essentially I saw the Gamecube game being the main game, where you'd spend most of your time, but that there would be a Gameboy game that would allow you to continue the adventures of your character without having to lug around a console, a portable diesel generator and a reasonable sized CRT TV. I envisaged the Gameboy game having sub quests that would allow you to maybe gain slightly better items, or maybe prestige and nicety items that had no real effect on your character's prowess in combat, and perhaps to just play through various levels or stories for your character that had no bearing on the main plot. When you plugged the Gameboy in to the Gamecube to play the main game, the two would sync the items and events performed, and thus you would have those items in the main game. The reason I thought it might only be prestige items was that not everybody who had a Gamecube would have a Gameboy too, so making character advancement be based on the Gameboy game too would be a little unfair, although an awesome marketing ploy if you could make a game great enough that people would buy a Gameboy just to play the added content (which is certainly a phenomenon known to happen within the gamer market).

Of course, after being vaguely sensible I then went off on an imagineering-fest, where I had the Gameboy game being part of the main adventure, that you could play linked Gameboy adventures with other people and trade items with them. A lot of the enthusiasm for this was fuelled from my old Dreamcast. Ah, Dreamcast, how I loved thee... but down that road lies reminiscence of epic proportions, so I'll not travel there for now. Amongst the Dreamcast's awesome features was the fact that the memory cards had a little display and controls, and essentially doubled as a mini game console, we're talking more Tamagotchi than Gameboy, but it was pretty clever nevertheless. So in, say Sonic Adventures, you would have mini pets that you could collect, and you could do various things in game like race them, but you could also download them to your memory card and take them out and about with you, and essentially you had a mini Tamagotchi game that you could play. When you uploaded the pet again, the new and improved pet would be able to win tougher races, but also you could breed it with the stock of pets you had in the main game and pass on some of its new traits to other pets.

And so I was reading on Virtual Cultures about Richard Bartle's keynote presentation, and it reminded me of all the time I spent in MUDs at University when I was meant to be coding, and how text based adventures were great fun - still are great fun - and wouldn't it be good if we could encourage people to enjoy the wonders of text-based adventures. Now this could mean MUD, or it could mean Nethack, either way, the player's imagination is forced to work a bit harder, and seeing as some people seem to think that this is the only way to develop the 'player as hero' in MMOs - you know, it's the player's fault, they just aren't trying hard enough to imagine themselves as a hero - then this might be one way to develop that.

Mobile gaming could be a wonderful way to do this. The mobile device that is most accessible to players, and that a large majority of players will already own is the telephone. As technology develops in leaps and bounds, these devices are already capable of playing quite complex Java games: my current 'phone is quite basic by top-end standards, and yet has a Java implementation of SEGA Megadrive (Genesis to you leftpondians) games that look and play pretty well, certainly they're entertaining enough for me to play whilst sat at a station waiting for public transport, for example. So a text-based approach to a mobile MMO is easily achievable on the most common mobile device, and considering MMOs generally equate to some non-trivial level of time investment, going for a medium that isn't processor and hence battery intensive would be wise. Now, a 'phone's screen isn't the largest area to be reading swathes of text, so it would seem that a Nethack-a-like game, as opposed to a MUD would be more appropriate, with perhaps slightly more user friendly sprites than @, # and co. Ok, so not text-based in the end, but keeping the philosophy of text-based games like Nethack in mind.

The other great opportunity here is that a large proportion of mobile 'phones these days support wireless connectivity, and Internet connectivity; so the potential for wireless link-ups, or updating your character's progress to the main game server are there to be explored.

There are horrible complications with client trust, if you allow people to play a game offline and then update the online world with data from offline play, so that's a nasty hurdle to have to overcome, but I firmly believe it can be achieved.

Once you break out into the mobile world there are lots of fascinating ideas that can be thrown in to the mix. How about having the real world location that you're in effect the game in some way? Then there's the opportunity to have extra functionality when in close real-world proximity to other players. Players could have certain monster mobs associated with their copy of the game, if two people are playing nearby, the game could grab new monsters from the other player and introduce them in to your game. In fact, a clone of one player's character could be copied across and become an NPC for the other player to fight, and perhaps one of the cloned player's (now NPC) items would drop as a reward for defeating them.

The synchronisation between the platforms could be two-way as well. In the constant MMO, i.e. the one you would play at your PC, you could earn new content to adventure in for your mobile game; perhaps successfully defeating a dungeon would open up a version of the on the mobile game, which would allow your character to then explore. The 'constant' dungeon would require a group perhaps, whereas the mobile version was soloable. The mobile version wouldn't give you the great items that you would get in the constant one, but would allow you to play for prestige things, such as character titles or vanity items that you could in turn, transfer back to the main game.

The mobile game could be as simple or as involved as designers thought the market could handle, it would seem that the majority of mobile play would be in 'dead time' such as a long train journey or waiting at an airport, where people want to hop-in and play a quick burst of something, but be able to drop it quickly as well. Tobold recently posted about tradeskill improvement: you could easily have the mobile part of your MMO encompass several mini games that allow the player to create items and improve their character's tradeskill, which will then get synchronised to the main game, in an attempt to avoid the 'staring at a progrss bar' style of tradeskills of the moment. One advantage of this is that you could make the mini-games along the lines of Puzzle Quest, which are essentially Bejewelled with an RPG system tagged-on, without breaking the immersion or continuity of the main game.

There's no doubt that mobile gaming is a big industry and that people want to play games even when they're away on holiday; whether such 24/7 gaming is healthy or not is another debate, but if that is what people choose to do with their lives, why not cater to it. Even narrowing the field down to mobile 'phone gaming, their are multitudinous game companies that do very nicely from the downloadable game market, so gaming on 'phones is in no way a novel idea.

Tapping in to that market by tying it in to an MMO franchise might be an interesting adventure, though.

Where’s the street-wise Hercules?

2007-04-13T12:53:00.000+01:00

I rarely, if ever, feel like a hero when playing an MMO. It's not really a matter of power though; admittedly City of Heroes allows you to take on hordes of mobs at a time, in a super-heroic effort, whilst many other games will restrict you to taking on one or two mobs before the situation starts to get a bit sticky, but even in those less bonkers-odds fights you still feel relatively powerful compared to the mobs that are are highlighted as being in the level range of your character. Ok, so this level of power is artificially generated by allowing you to conveniently gauge how powerful your current opponent is and only pick fights that you stand a chance of winning, but I think that's fair enough in most respects: the Fellowship of the Ring would have been a very different story if Gandalf had instead shouted "C'mon noobs we can take him" and convinced the rest of the fellowship to stand their ground and fight the Balrog... I wonder if Tolkien had considered 'corpse run' as plot device?

Gandalf knew the Balrog was too powerful for the group to fight, so he sacrificed himself to save the rest of the group and inadvertently spawned a million copycat tanking mages in MMOs to ruin the instanced runs of groups everywhere. But that's another story.

Power isn't really the problem, it's the very nature of being the hero that just doesn't work. You notice I wrote the hero. In most cases the RPG in MMORPGs these days is taken as referring to a bunch of 'stats' that make up your character, which you increase Progress Quest style by slaughtering every living thing in the world, its children and its children's children, until you are king of the genocidal maniacs and your stats will no longer increase. The role playing part of RPG seems to have been cast by the wayside when it comes to MMOs, and the obvious reason for this is that the role most people want to play is the hero or anti-hero in a story. One of the exceptions to this idea of the player as hero is EvE Online, where it seems that the corps is the hero, the one that makes a name for itself, and players are perhaps more happy to play 'third cruiser from the left in a field of five thousand' as long as it furthers the status of the corps; it seems that the rise and fall of corporations drives the 'story' behind the game, and the players are part of that story, but never the direct focus of it. You would think that City of Heroes by its very nature - comic-book hero MMO - would allow the player to really feel like the hero, but it doesn't really work like that. In most comic books there are multiple heroes and villains operating in the world, yet the storyline tends to follow just one character or group, and occasionally mixes in other heroes in cross-overs and the like: it's the Amazing Adventures of Spiderman, not The Amazing Adventures of Every Marvel Superhero Ever Invented. In CoH you fight your way around Paragon City, thwarting evil doers and righting wrongs, but at every turn you see another hero doing exactly the same, and a lot of the time they have the same powers as you too! After a while, you realise that you're actually just part of the crowd and it's the NPCs like Statesman and Positron who are the real heroes. You're simply Mary Jane or Aunt May: there as a plot device for Spiderman. It's the same in World of Warcraft, where the famous NPCs are the main heroes and drivers of what little storyline there is. The players are just pawns in the games of NPCs. If you imagine a novel of WoW, it would follow the adventures of Malfurion, Jaina, Thrall, Cairne, Sylvanas and the rest. If players were ever mentioned they would be the messenger that runs in and interrupts a council of elders and their speech would start "My lord, I bring grave news...", or more likely a naked messenger bouncing into the room shouting "HELLOZ I WUD LEIK SOME GOLD PLIZ".

Players in MMOs are the Riders of Rohan to Theoden King, Red Squadron to Luke Skywalker, Gold Rings to Sonic the Hedgehog. The hero wouldn't get very far without the players, but the players aren't the hero. The story isn't about them. Now, some people won't care about this, they're happy to play NPCs' bitch, as long as they get to slaughter things and are rewarded with shiny items that show they've slaughtered more things and for longer than anyone else, they're happy.

But not me.

If I play an MMORPG I would like my character to be a part of a story, and I would like that story to be about my character in some way. I'd like to feel that my character has had adventures, and that these adventures were due to actions that my character took. If there are powerful NPCs in the game, I'm happy for my character to start out running errands for them, but as my character gains power and influence, I'd like to eventually help these NPCs as an equal, and perhaps eventually have them come to me for 'work'. I would also like the moon on a stick.

Ok, I don't actually want the moon on stick, mainly because I couldn't dual-wield it with my sun on a chain of interlinked rainbows, but also because I do understand that there are always limitations to what can be implemented in something as complex as an MMO. But there seems to be such little innovation in the market at the moment, everything is sticking more or less to the same formula whilst evangelising their innovative feature 'Look! now you can grind professions as well as combat skills' or 'Look! Now you can grind levels on an evil character that other players can then grind on' or 'Look! Now you can grind your character's crotch against furniture!'. Maybe not the last one.

Then again.

The first problem with the 'you as hero' in MMOs is the inevitable second M in the acronym: multiplayer. If you sit down and play with your character as the hero of a story, then Joe Journals over there has to be able to sit down and play as a hero in the world too. If there are four or five of you in the world wanting to be heroes, great, you've got yourself a fellowship and you're all going to do well (just watch out for that nut job who likes to tank with his mage). When you've got several thousand players in a world, all keen to be the focus of a story, things fall apart and the NPCs take over.

The second problem I'll highlight is the fact that most MMOs are not persistent worlds other than that they are, hopefully, always available to players. Changes in the world generally never persist, and there are obvious reasons as to why. If a new player logs in to your game, finds that his neighbour's farm was attacked by wolves and the neighbour would like you to join his posse to hunt them down, the new player is not going to get much joy if he gets to the area the wolves were last seen only to find that Joe Journals got there ten minutes ago, and has systematically destroyed all lupine wildlife in the area to the point of extinction. No wolves in the area to hunt, therefore no 'quest' to complete, therefore no reward or gratitude from your neighbour.

Or maybe there could be. The game Spore has created a buzz around its procedural generation of content, and although little is known about the technology behind it, the idea of it is intriguing. Procedural or fractal questing could be an interesting way to think of how to make MMO worlds more persistent whilst allowing players to affect it in their own way, for their own story. If we go back to the wolf example we can see how it might work on a very basic and trivial level: Joe Journals has killed-off the local wolf population, which is great for your neighbour's farm. Or is it? With the wolf population lowered, the prey of those wolves is now free to multiply and might overrun your neighbour's farm eating his crops, so he needs a hand with culling them somewhat; or perhaps the wolf pelts that are usually used for clothing are now in short supply, and you're required to come up with an alternative source before the winter season arrives; or maybe the local wolf population was all that was preventing the neighbouring village from getting through the hill pass and attacking you, so now you have to help defend the village from attack.

If NPCs in games are usually the heroes, but we want players to take on that role, could we let players be NPCs as well as PCs? That is to say, one of the defining roles of an NPC is to hand out quests to players to enable them to earn experience and rewards. Instead of having thousands of NPCs, have the majority of players as the givers of quests. In this way, you involve people in each other's story, at the same time as progressing their own. So your character has moved on from the village where you started after defending it from the wolf epidemic, and now resides in the city after being given a point of contact by one of the people you helped. You decide to look for work and find a poster outside the inn for one of the local guilds looking for new recruits. After meeting with the guild master you are tasked with accomplishing some task to further the guilds status, and when completed you gain a rank in the organisation. At this point, you can get another quest from the guild master, but due to the procedural nature of the quest system you also have some quests that you can give to junior members of the organisation, having these tasks completed for you will also gain you rankings in the organisation, perhaps more so than if you just hassle the guild master for work all the time. You have to provide suitable reward that other players will want to perform these tasks, and as you gain higher ranks in the organisation one of these rewards could be to promote other people. However, other players will also be gaining ranks in the guild, and you will have to compete to get players attention, thus making rewards more interesting and perhaps unexpected. Politics and intrigue can become entwined with your story, other players' stories and questing in general.

Now if you're a member of the guild of guardians, other players might be members of the assassins' guild, so not only have you got to deal with the intrigue within your own organisation, you have to deal with the other organisations working against you. The assassins' guild might, through various questing, open a quest to assassinate the governess of the town. This in itself will open the quest for one of the high ranking members of the guardians' guild to protect her, which they won't be able to do alone, so they give out various sub-quests to other players: attempt to infiltrate the assassins' guild to learn more about the assassination; undertake work at the governess's house in order to be in the area when the assassin's strike. Success or failure at a quest will allow other opportunities to prevent the assassination, while the other guild works at quests that will give them an advantage. If the governess is killed, a new governor comes to town, and perhaps they tax the guardians' guild more heavily, whilst turning a blind eye to some of the activities of the assassins. There will be a chance at a later date for the guardians to redress the balance and put a new governor in to power, but this level of semi-persistence is believable and immersive, town rulers come and go through politics and intrigue, and the story of the town and its development can be traced through the players who affected its change. Now these players might not be heroes in the traditional sense, they might not be recognised world-wide as achieving greatness, but within their story they will be, and that story will be unique to them even though other players have taken their part in it.

Like anything in 'moon on a stick' land, it's easy to pontificate on the "wouldn't it be nice"s and "oh, if only they could do this"s, and then leave the hideous complications of implementing such a thing to others, but for whatever reason, innovation in the MMO arena seems to be stifled. Don't get me wrong, there's innovation out there, clearly, but it's all evolutionary and based very much on the same foundation, and that foundation is that every player is a unique individual, just like every other player. It will be interesting to see if a developer will be brave enough to take a genuine leap to another level, and how that will work out for the players and their characters.

I'm still holding out for my hero.

String cheese.

2007-04-06T12:41:00.000+01:00

I've recently been suffering with an ear infection which, seeing as I have to use headphones at all times, has meant playing WoW with the sound turned off. So this got me thinking about sound within games. Sound obviously provides an atmosphere for an MMO, from the ambient sounds that help realise the world, to dramatic music scores which add emphasis on the heroic nature of the world's inhabitants. From the epic sound of battle on the open plain, to the blood curdling chill horror that can only be a male gnome laughing...

The problem I find with a lot of sound in MMOs is that it's very rarely dynamic in nature. When you enter a battle, the battle music (if there is any at all) fires up. What would be nice would be for different battle music to start depending on the opponents you were facing; if you're facing undead opponents, a haunting blood-chilling score could start, for example. Something that adds just a little more emphasis and atmosphere to the specific encounter. So far in WoW I've not missed having the sound in this case, I've just hummed the tune to 'Saturday night's alright for fighting', which works surprisingly well especially if you’re a dwarf. No, I don’t know why.

What would be even better is if when you were close to gaining aggro from a mob the music score changed a little. I have the strange feeling I’ve played an MMO where this happened, but I can’t remember for the life of me what it was, or whether I dreamt it one night after drinking a pot of out of date cream, which in all honesty is more likely.

Anyway. There’s not usually a way to judge how close you are to suddenly getting Gordon the Ogre King’s attention, especially when you can stand right in front of him but about nine feet away and he doesn’t spot you, even though you’re sharpening weapons, casting buff spells and summoning demons from the netherworld. Then you take one step further forward... “Hey! Where you come from? Me smish” cries Gordon. So clearly ogres have an eyesight range of nine feet, right? So why can’t you take one step back again? “Hey, where you vanish to?” One step forward... “There you are, I’m go...” One step backwards. “Hey! Gone again”.

Ok, so aggro ranges are a stupid immersion-breaking convention at the best of times, but they work in some situations better than others. Imagine you’re in a dark dank forest, it’s misty and you can’t see very far (probably slightly further than Gordon though). Instead of having mobs out in the open where you can see them and then walk around them at what you think is their maximum Gordon range, have them hiding away ready to jump out. However, as the adventurer approaches an area of danger, the music score changes to a slightly more sinister tone. The adventurer is then aware that danger is nearby, but doesn’t know precisely where, but his keen adventuring senses tell him that it might be an idea to cast some buff spells and to ready his weapon. He won’t necessarily be able to conveniently avoid the fight, but he will be prepared for combat and, more importantly, slightly on edge and apprehensive... immersed if you will.

When it comes to combat itself, again it’s an incredibly repetitive affair, so a little greater diversity would be welcome. What’s more, it would be nice if the majority of fights didn’t sound like the frenetic drunken mating ritual of two west-country farmers in a dark alley.

*ungh* *arr* *crash* *ugh* *meow* *thunk* *oh yeah* *krang* *chang* *clank* *yee-har*

And that’s if you play a male character. Pick a female character, and not only does your plate armour consist of a soup ladle and the ends of a pair of candle snuffers, but when you fight in combat you sound like you’re having a world-record-length multiple orgasm.

Dramatic music scores are always a fantastic way to make a player feel heroic, but again, they need to be used in context. World of Warcraft gets the dramatic part of it right; I remember walking my dwarf paladin up the Valley of Heroes (does that sound like a euphemism to you too?) and the Stormwind score suddenly blasting out; this chanting choir of voices accompanied by a melodic string accompaniment and rousing drum roll, and I looked at the statues towering above me, the captain of the guard in full-plate armour (he was male so it was full full-plate) mounted on his horse awaiting my arrival, and I felt I was entering somewhere important. That I was important, and that I would do well here. I felt as though they were saying “Here comes the mighty dwarf! He enters the hallowed streets of Stormwind! Hail to thee paladin!”. It was epic. Great stuff.

Then, later, I was walking across the square to the bank and suddenly the choir bursts in to song again, and I’m thinking ‘Oh kaaay’ why the epic song now? What is this moment we’re having? So I looked around but there was nobody but me. So what are they singing about now? “There goes the mighty dwarf! He’s off to fetch some boar intestines from the bank! Hail to thee chef!”. Um.

Then later on still, I had a quest to buy some cheese, and so I’m in the cheese shop trying to decide which variety the weird old ‘cat’ lady with the cheese fetish wants when the choir breaks out again! And now I’m thinking ‘what the hell?’ I mean, what are they singing about now? “There shops the mighty dwarf! He’s buying some variety of cheese. We’re not sure which. Maybe it’s Alterac Swiss, or perhaps he’s favouring the subtle taste of Mag’har mild”. Why do they keep bursting in to epic song all the time, and how do they know where I am?! And so I spin around quickly and the whole of Elling Trias’s Cheese Emporium is filled with a choir and orchestra and they’re all looking really embarrassed at being caught.

True story.

So now, every time I walk up the Valley of Heroes, as soon as the thunderous tones of the Stormwind theme break out, I shout “I’m not buying cheese today!” and they’re cut short.

Motivation is what gets you started.

2007-04-02T13:37:00.000+01:00

I took the Motivation Assessment over at the Daedalus Project after prompting from Zoso.

Overall Assessment:

The graph above is a visualization of your 3 main motivation components. Your Achievement percentile rank is 10%. Your Socializing percentile rank is 44%. And your Immersion percentile rank is 93%.

So I'm a vaguely sociable alt-o-holic that has no idea how to play.

Sounds about right.

The Flawed Prayer

2007-03-29T11:52:00.000+01:00

As said by Melmoth before each game session:

Our developer, who meant to leaven,
Shallow be thy game.
Thy MMO come.
Thy quests be done,
for loot as well as experience.
Give us this day our daily grind.
And make us run long instances,
Which give loot that is of no use to us.
And leads us not into Eden;
But delivers us to Cokaygne:
For thine is the rep grind, the nerfbat, and the monthly fee,
For ever and ever (and ever and ever).
Login.

101 ways to confuse yourself when playing an MMO.

2007-03-17T19:58:00.000Z

Number 1.

Have the game's sound turned off whilst playing your favourite MMO, with iTunes playing on random in the background instead.

At the exact moment you pull a mob, the Final Fantasy IV fight theme plays...

Das Ich und das Dress (Part the first).

2007-03-15T20:35:00.000Z

As MMO players we all take on the role of a character, to a certain extent, within the online world we've chosen as our virtual home from home, but what does that character represent to us, and what does it say about us? Concentrating on the more generic idea of an MMO - a game with various races, classes and professions - and ignoring for now those virtual worlds where your character is simply an avatar, presenting an interface to enable you to interact with others and nothing more (not withstanding the fact that it's fairly easy to draw conclusions about a person when their avatar is a ten foot tall dragon-scaled penis called Cecil), what, if anything, can we tell about the person behind the character when we examine the character itself?

Potentially the first thing we notice when first presented with another character is their sex, and immediately we enter in to interesting territory when trying to establish anything about the player behind the character based on this information. Although a lot of MMOs are RPG based, the role-playing aspect of this is often no more than 'I am playing the role of this class or profession', any need to relate to the character is often limited to the fact that if the character does well the player gets to explore more of the world, and if the character dies the player is set back in achieving this goal. It seems that it is rare for players to relate to their characters as an entity that is alive within the world that they are exploring, to play the role not just of the class they have chosen but of the character as a whole. Thus many male players will pick female characters; since the need to relate any more than superficially to the character is dismissed, the deciding factor often comes down to 'if I have to stare at the back of my character for hours on end, which arse is going to be most easy on the eye'. Female players seem to pick male characters less often, and this could be because women tend to relate emotionally to people and objects much more naturally than men do, and therefore playing a female character comes more easily as they can relate to it on a deeper level, in such a way as female to female friendships are often closer than their male to male counterpart.

If we know the sex of the player behind the character - we will try to avoid knowledge of the player when initially examining an area of character choice - does the choice of playing a character of the opposite sex indicate anything to us about the player? There have been many and varied studies on such behaviour, but the general conclusion would probably have to be 'not really' (I'm sure Freud would disagree). Most male players who pick a female character do so for 'aesthetic' reasons, and female players who pick a male character often do so because they wish to be assumed to be male, to avoid the still sadly prevalent and unfair (although, again, drastically improving for the better) image of female gamers as being less capable than their male counterparts. The more disconcerting trend is the opposite of the last example, where a male player plays a female character in order to aid their attempt to convince other players - specifically male players - that they are female player; often such meta-gaming is a harmless attempt to gain an advantage, usually gifts of items and help, from those members of the player community who are more susceptible to the scantily clad female form...

Another very interesting and contrasting area, but one that I couldn't speculate on, is that of gay players. Do the general trends with the gay player population follow the trends that seem apparent in the straight community, or do they differ? Polar opposite? A mix? Too varied to even attempt a generalisation? It would be interesting to know.

So it would seem that it's hard to establish much from the sex of the character alone; with female gamers still being proportionally in the minority compared to male gamers, even though their numbers are growing in leaps and bounds, the chances of a male character being played by anything other than a male are slim, whereas it might be suggested that a female character could equally likely be played by a male or female, if not still favouring the player being male. When you meet a new player for the first time, do you draw any inference from their character's sex? Does it affect your view of that player in any way? Consider it next time you meet a new player, it would be interesting to hear people's opinions and experiences.

Ok, so a character's sex isn't necessarily a great indicator of the player behind the veil, what about character race?

Things start to get a little more interesting with the introduction of character race into the equation. There are several things that can affect the choice of race in an MMO, and some of these choices may allow us to begin to develop the picture of the player behind the character, such that it becomes a little less blurred. It seems prudent to discuss the various factors that combine into the creation of a character separately and to then discuss them in combination with one another, but in discussing the choice of race of a character it is hard to entirely ignore the effect class distribution has on this area.

It would seem fair to say that in general most players will determine their character first and foremost on class, then race and then sex. In discussing them in the reverse order, we try to demonstrate how the least important choice seems also to give us the least information about the player, but that in combination with the other choices it will develop into a more important indicator than it was when considered in isolation.

Many MMO games try to encourage racial diversity by restricting the selection of some classes to only a few of the available races, and thus a large part of race selection boils down to whether your chosen class is available to that race. However, there are other factors that will affect the choice of race, some being more telling about the player than others. Racial-specific abilities in most MMOs tend not to divulge much about the player's decision in choosing that race, they are often minor niceties which are often overlooked by most players for the more important reason for racial choice: appearance. The appearance (and associated background, if any) of a race is probably the big deciding factor for a player facing the choice of what to play, and it can probably give us some insight into that player and the general player population in general.

Still to come: conclusion of racial choice; class choice; class development; names and affiliations...