Month: February 2011

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In Line At Disney World

As I sit waiting for the server to come back from what seems to be the daily or so Rift downtime, I really hope the latest queue-avoiding trick is being fixed. It’s a rather blatant code error that I’m not going to explain, as each time someone explains it in public chat there are even more people doing it. However, people use it to avoid the queues, going AFK for multiple hours, such as their jobs, and come home and instantly get in. It’s annoying for those of us who have to wait in the queue, although even playing on the much-maligned Faeblight, I don’t find them that bad. Last night I logged in to a proposed 90 minute queue, but I got in in just over 30 minutes. Today I logged in twice, both times with no queue, in the morning and early afternoon. I’ve seen the queues going down every day, and expect as the “Race for 50” pack finishes and logs out in boredom, and the afk exploiters get booted, it will simply be a full server.

To me, the queues are good, in that they throttle the people coming in to a (barely) reasonable level, and except for the second day, I’ve never had to wait for over an hour. I’ve waited that long at Disneyworld to go on a 37 second ride. I just login to the queue and go get other stuff done.

[GW2] The Depth of a Norn

The norn can be hard to understand. We want them to be giant, animist, shape-shifting Vikings, but that’s too simple. That’s not depth; that’s just a bunch of cliches rammed together in some fashion where a lesser fantasy game would conclude a new race has been made. ArenaNet didn’t stop there. They gave them life and purpose. I find too often in many fantasy games (MMOs, solo, or even table top), we just handwave some of the most important questions on a new race. It’s when there are actions by the race that make us stop and think because it feels wrong, it feels not human, that we find depth.

The first time I saw this was when I read Lord of the Rings. Elves never made sense to me. They are leaving? They are sad at Man? Buck up, you point eared snobs! I thought they were just full of themselves, except for Legolas. He’s a pretty cool guy. Finally I realized in playing Lord of the Rings Online watching Glorfindel’s face get painted by the sun in the shadow of leaves that Tolkien had given them depth. A depth I could only realize if I thought like an immortal elf that had seen all this before. They wouldn’t make sense in human motivations, and I feel ArenaNet has given the norn the same treatment.

Continue reading [GW2] The Depth of a Norn

[Rift] Emmobilized


Cool Rift Pic
Embattling Life

No, that’s not an accidental typo. The English prefix “em,” along with it’s sister “en,” means “to make into.” So, empower is to make something with power. Subsequently “emmobilized” would mean to “to get people in action for action, like war.” In Rift, every time a rift event drops, the players around mobilize. In a zone-wide invasion event, it seems sometimes that the whole zone answers the call to repel the planar intruders. Except, “emmobilize” is not a word.  “Immobilize” is. In much of my time in Rift’s Head Start, I have felt immobilized despite all internal intentions to the contrary. I have hope that soon the clouds will clear.

 

Continue reading [Rift] Emmobilized

Import Quality

I have somehow gotten this far without blogging about the Alchian-Allen Theorem, but it is an economic principle you should understand in this international games market. It also applies to cartoons and dating, so stick with me through the econ.

Let’s start with those cartoons. You should expect anime in the English-language market to be of higher average quality (or at least broader appeal) than the anime in Japan. Why? It is not worth the cost to translate and localize crap shows. Fan-subbed series should be of lower average quality because companies will have already brought over the more lucrative (higher quality and/or more popular) titles. (Notable exceptions: bootleg fan-subs torrented while something is still mid-season; shows that are “too Japanese” to survive localization but are great if you know the culture.)

More generally in entertainment, you should expect the titles imported to be some of the best ones that country/language/culture has to offer. At least, you should expect them to have broad appeal, which is often but not always a sign of high quality. (Can I stop doing that disclaimer? Assume “better” means “better bottom line,” which is often associated with quality but sometimes with appealing to the lowest common denominator, which is not always bad either.) Lineage and Aion are probably the Korean MMOs with the most appeal in the Western market, ditto the Final Fantasies from Japan. Weird licensing issues pop up, but if the money is good enough, you can expect those highly profitable games to come over. Second tier, maybe. The equivalent of our crap games? Not worth shipping. You may have noticed other titles coming over using lower fixed costs, notably less effort at localization (contribute your favorite lousy, completely unprofessional translation) and less advertising, and you may have noticed that many of them are really poor. (The same applies in the reverse direction. WoW has many Chinese subscribers; has Age of Conan been localized for China?) As fixed costs drop, you should expect more options but lower quality or more narrow appeal. Recettear had a great localization, but a limited number of people will get excited about a fantasy adventure game where you run the item shop.

Oh, I promised you sex. This applies to human interactions as well. If you have a long-distance relationship, you will probably expect it to advance by leaps and bounds when you meet in-person, because you did not fly 5000 kilometers just to watch TV together. Similarly, if you go to something like E3, PAX, BlizzCon, etc., you are going to expect a really good experience when you drop hundreds of dollars to attend; if you go to something more local, your expectations will not be as dialed up, and you are not as invested. Let’s re-phrase that: if you live in Anaheim, you might go to BlizzCon if you think it looks pretty good, but if you live in Boston, you are only going to BlizzCon if you think it will be really awesome; same convention, different thresholds and expectations. These kinds of raised expectations can go well or lead to really huge disappointments as all the dreams (and money) you had invested in this person or convention crash on the shoals of reality.

: Zubon

Quote of the Week

Inertia is the inclination of moving objects to keep moving, and for stationary objects to stay put. Once you get going in EVE, it’s easy to keep going. The skill queue charts your course, you have your market ops and your research and the ongoing political situation with your allies and enemies, and it’s just easy to keep moving in that space.

But should you stop — your skill queue empties out and you forget what you were training to do, nobody in game remembers you anymore, your research seems pointless and you are no longer connected to the game.
— Tipa

It applies generally.

: Zubon

Shoot The Messenger

I know who has the toughest job at Trion now. Not the poor sap who has to balance 38 souls so that one doesn’t become so far ahead/behind another that no one rolls it (see recent Rogue rebalancing). No, it’s the server admin who 30 minutes ago had to walk up to Scott Hartsman in the middle of what was a textbook launch (queues are going to happen) and tell them that the servers were having issues and that they had to bring them all down.

Think they drew straws?

Ps – They’re back up, go play!

[Rift] A Faeblight We Will Own

Blogger compatriot and Rift guildie, Moxie, over at her blog Battle Priestess has posted our guild’s 22 week server event list. The great thing about these events is that they are inclusive to our whole Rift server, Faeblight. Granted the first couple of weeks are going to be a tad more Guardian oriented due to their location, but once we hit contested zones and invade the dirty-heathen Defiant zones, it will be a server wide event. All are welcome to join in the fun.

The Gaiscioch Family is not new to these community-organized events having been instrumental in keeping a Warhammer Online server alive with a very popular Battle for Badlands event. They have been doing these awesome events since Dark Age of Camelot. I am also excited to see how the automatic system and Rift GMs will respond to such a focused server event. We know that Rift GMs have the ability to call down the in-game Events themselves, and I hope they do so during the community-driven events.

Good luck to all those starting today with the Rift early access. If you are still looking for a server, Faeblight is going to be a happening place on both sides.

–Ravious
hi ho the dairy oh

Double Billing

A friend of mine is finishing law school and preparing for the bar. He has an ethics exam to take, and since he is a WoW player, I am worried. There are presumably ethical rules against charging more than one client for the same work (although it is normal billing to do work for multiple clients in the same hour and round the charge for each up to a full hour). MMOs teach us that you should always get paid twice. If you are killing a monster, it should be for a quest or in a dungeon on the way towards a boss that drops something you need, ideally one that counts towards an achievement and drops components you need for crafting. It is even better when you can find multiple quests for the same enemies, multiple achievements that need them, etc. This poor law student has years of Skinner box training to undo.

: Zubon

[GW2] Sons of Svanir Sect

Norn week is in full swing with an overview post on Monday and a two-for-Tuesday posts on norn chatter and culture and the huge norn architecture. As usual though, ArenaNet puts layer and layer of material in their “simple” articles. For instance, in the first post fans are already dissecting one picture of a female norn standing inside somewhere holding what appears to be a long-range rifle. This one picture provides speculation on unreleased professions, size of the norn, size of their housing, ad infinitum. One other little gift caught me completely off guard.

The Sons of Svanir, a group of norns holding allegiance to Jormag, has been well known for awhile. Many, including myself, believed that these norn were evil. They worship an Elder Dragon bent on freezing the world; the same dragon that sent the norn retreating to the Southern Shiverpeaks. Svanir was the corrupted nornbear players had to defeat in the Eye of the North. And this is their concept art? Yeah, I would have no problem running my greatsword through a swath of the Sons of Svanir.

Continue reading [GW2] Sons of Svanir Sect