Author: Zubon

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Scheduling Promotions

NCsoft surely has people better trained in marketing than I, but I feel obliged to suggest that they wait a week or three after releasing a new City of Heroes update before sending out the “welcome back weekend” invitations.

  1. Some number of players will re-subscribe on their own, and immediately after the patch is the most likely time for that. Take their money. Granted, many will do so on patch day, before the welcome back weekend announcement, but it is a bad idea to give someone enough free play time to complete all the content. I do not know how long it would take to try all of Issue 13’s new toys, but Issue 12 was one weekend of content unless you started a new character. Give people a chance to buy it before you give it away.
  2. You want a little time after the update to issue your first fix to it. These are not necessarily game-breaking issues, but they are things people will notice on their welcome back weekend, and you will not want to show them off. When I log in a character, receive one of the new badges, and the badge description is an error message, that does not tell me that great care was taken with the new patch. When I make a character to try the new power sets, I notice that “The ‘Copy Current Colors Across Body’ button does not function correctly unless a subcategory is selected.” The chat text color from previous issues is still there, to indicate how quickly these get addressed. The two best new bugs must be that trading items can delete them (!) and that players cannot move inside their bases (but only in the French and German versions).

I also feel obliged to note that the elemental shields look great.

: Zubon

Day Jobs

City of Heroes is having a welcome-back weekend to celebrate the release of Issue 13. Even if you are not now interested in playing, if you think you might be in the future, it is worthwhile to log on and shuffle your characters about. Having your characters logged off in many areas can earn you badges, and those badges come with bonuses and powers. Walk your characters to a hospital, train station, or such, and you are golden.

If you happened to have logged at one of those spots, you get retroactive credit for however long you have been logged off. All the characters on my main server were at one … except my main, who was five steps away. Oh well.

Bonus fun: head to Ms. Liberty and time how long it takes you to see Captain America! (Shields are a new power set.)

: Zubon

Never Is, But Always To Be

For those of us fond of allusions, “hope springs eternal” is always a winner. It sounds positive, but it is one of the darkest sentiments you will find. The full quote is:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest

In other words, (vain) hope is all you have; the blessing is never coming, always in the promised future. It gets better: this entire section of the Essay on Man is about how bleak the future is. The lamb frolics in the morning before going to the butcher in the afternoon, licking the hand that raises the knife. This is the kindness of a God who cares no more about the death of a hero or a sparrow, the bursting of a bubble or a world: at least you have fruitless hope and are too ignorant or stupid to see doom coming. This is, by the way, intended as an optimistic argument, because hey, you have that hope, and it will be worse if you ask for more.
Continue reading Never Is, But Always To Be

Horrors of Design

The flash game challenge of the week at Kongregate is Rage 3. Adventure map 4 exhibits two large, very common problems. First, successive keys are at opposite ends of a large map, so go all the way to the bottom to get the key to open the gate at the top to open the gate at the bottom to open the gate at the top to open the gate at the bottom to open the spring at the top. Second, after doing so, you discover that you must be level 6 to enter the last boss’s room. There is not enough experience in the entire adventure game to bring you to level 6. You must either grind the map a few times or play the arcade mode to build up experience. Grinding, in a platformer. Also, mention the level requirement before sending someone all the way to the bottom to get the key to open the gate at the top to open the gate…

: Zubon

Comic Book Bleg

I have a few long-boxes of comic books I want to get rid of, mostly from the 1990s. Is there an orthodox way of doing so in this modern digital age? Ebaying one at a time, or even in batches, seems like a lot of work for limited return. Swinging by the local comic shop seems like very little work for almost no return. Our audience seems like the sort that must have encountered this problem sometime.

Oh, and have you seen comic book legends revealed? That one’s for you, Hudson!

: Zubon

Efficient Trolling

Arnold Zwicky blogs at Language Log (and if you read only one linguistics blog, it should probably be Language Log). Earlier this year, he wrote about caring for his late partner Jacques. Jacques had brain cancer, and the best treatment available only moved him from impending death to inevitable dementia, an Alzheimer’s-like decline a decade down the line. Arnold spent twelve years caring for him.

This appeared on a linguistics blog because of Jacques’s particular problem: avoidance of evidence that he was in California. I encourage you to read the whole thing. He could read normally, but he could not consciously process the word “California” if it implied that Jacques himself was in California. For him, license plates were blocked, news reports were garbled, and postcards were illegible, but only the parts implying that he was in California. National news that mentioned California would have been fine; you could see those anywhere. His brain was effectively reading ahead, recognizing the word and the context, blocking it from his conscious awareness, and then rationalizing why the word was not there.

Prof. Zwicky has some comments about similar dementias. Others in the comments share their stories about caring for family members and their cases of implicit and explicit awareness. The dialogue draws out more details. It is a heart-rending account of loss.

And then one commenter tossed in, “TL;DR” Five characters, and I wanted to track the IP to put a brick through someone’s window or skull.

: Zubon

Introduction to the Kingdom

My occasional references to Kingdom of Loathing seem to miss many, so this is your briefing. Kingdom of Loathing is a silly browser-based fantasy adventure game with a limited number of turns per day. It makes mocking or ironic use of the familiar computer RPG tropes, and most of the game text is humor-based. The graphics are stick figure-based. Over time, it has developed a loyal following, an active economy, and a sort of meta-game developed by/in cooperation with the community.

You pick one of six classes: melee (Seal Clubber, Turtle Tamer), ranged (Accordion Thief, Disco Bandit), or mage (Pastamancer, Sauceror). A Sauceror might protect himself with a Jalapeño Saucesphere and attack with a Saucegeyser, while a Seal Clubber uses Musk of the Moose Ox to find enemies to beat down with his Lunging Thrust-Smack. The three types of classes each lend themselves to different play strategies.

Your goal is to save King Ralph XI, who has been imprisoned by the Naughty Sorceress. Along the way, you level up by completing quests like killing rats at the Typical Tavern, making a Bitchin’ Meat Car, or helping the Deep Fat Friars. Once you save the king, you can hang about and mess with whatever you like (content keeps going), or you can Ascend and start over. Ascending lets you make one skill permanent, and you can get your stuff back (eventually) from Hagnk’s Ancestral Mini-Storage.

Along the way you will fight monsters like filthy hippies, chowder golems, vampire clams, zmobies and zobmies (at The Misspelled Cemetary), and spooky gravy fairy ninjas. You might stab/club them with the ridiculously huge sword, shoot them with a bubblewrap crossbow, or channel your pasta spell through a Gnollish slotted spoon.

It might be worth checking out the wiki for more silliness. You will want that link anyway, because it is probably not possible to reach and defeat the Naughty Sorceress without some spoilage.

: Zubon

Hating Some Random Idiot

I rarely see someone hit almost every single thing I hate about idiots on the internet, and yet here it is. The anonymous commenter consistently calling Tobold “tob” is a wonder.

First, the writing style indicates stupidity, a complete indifference to expressing himself coherently, or most likely both. The random capitalization and punctuation, and lack thereof, is especially effective. Sadly, I do not spot a “u,” or better yet: “ur.” Second, he willfully misinterprets the author and then condemns him for the made-up version. Third, bonus, he interprets his lack of reading comprehension as Tobold’s dishonesty. Fourth, “why can’t you just admit I’m right?” Fifth, “I’m not a fanboi, you’re a fanboi, and you’re a hateboi too!” Sixth, the scorn for the VNBoards community is really quite touching given the context. Seventh, the classic “longtime reader, and this is not what I expect from you.” Eighth, repeating the same thing across multiple comments. Ninth, replying to himself twice in a row. Tenth, representative statistics in support of your position are laughable and shameful! lol!

I should stop at a top ten, but his last comment (as I write this) has its beautiful self-defense. Those disagreeing are “tobold fanboi lol.” He objects to being called a troll, calls the other commenters communists and McCarthyites, and ends on some confused notion of democracy and why must all you intolerant communists insult people who disagree with you?

I very rarely need the mod button here, except for spam. I want to be able to ban people on others’ sites. And IRL.

: Zubon

Great Moments in Testing

Back Alley Brawler, City of Heroes animations developer, combines awesome with oops:

When we were testing the invasions on the training room, I logged into Galaxy City while an invasion was going on, flagged the BABs trainer as invisible, stepped into his spot and made myself visible, and then joined in the fight against the Rikti.

After it was all over I went back to the trainer to make him visible again, but being invisible…I couldn’t find him to target him. He was completely invisible, even to me.

A couple of days later we got a bug report through QA about the Invasion causing trainers to disappear.

: Zubon