Author: Zubon

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Dark Elf Bastards

A great thing in the Warhammer lore is that the dark elves really are that evil. Everyone is violent if not genocidal, but the dark elves get a category of their own.

Most of it involves slaughtering peaceful high elves. Look, they are lining up for honorable combat; to the siege weapons! A graveyard full of mourners; free ambush chance! A tower of poets and researchers; kill them all! The public quests really felt right: slaughter the people who are just standing there, wait for someone to come check on them, then gank him too. Knock over some pillars while you’re there. I know that most of the game is fighting the other side, but it is about assaulting a keep, fighting back an assault, or at least hitting opponents who were asking for it. Dark elves raid temples because they like kicking nuns in the face.

Just to make sure you know you are in high elf lands, there are unicorns early on. *stab* Take the Butchering trade skill for extra credit.

A quest involves poisoning someone on your side. Showing off his magnificent bastard stripes, your contact then sends you to plant evidence that he did it. Your commander knows that his best poisoner would not be so sloppy as to drop his gloves during an assassination, so you are sent to kill the guy who seemed most likely to frame the guy who framed himself.

Oh, and that graveyard? Right-click to detonate the mourners’ flowers. You gain nothing for it, there is no reward or reason: you are just blowing up their flowers.

: Zubon

The Cream Sinks

J. and the Australian Gamer Podcasters have realized an important truth, namely that most user-made content is crap. Then again, most x is crap for all values of x. The question, I comment there, is whether you have tools to separate the wheat from the chaff (to jump metaphors). The goal is to set a million people loose, let it be 99% crap, and still get the work of 10,000 talented people (and remember that even talented people produce a lot of crap to get their good stuff).

Editing is hard. I will not even get into that here, except to note that many companies edit their own stuff too poorly to consider harvesting user-made content. If your internal content-production still gives mostly crap after filtering and editing, what hope do you have?

Continue reading The Cream Sinks

Weekend Recovery

I spent far less time than usual in MMOs this weekend. I am still in the habit of being in my computer chair, but I had a few reasonable play sessions rather than a continuous binge. The weekend felt so much longer.

MMOs are great for flow, as well as being ideal Skinner boxes. Time gets away from me (and the wife in the back row: “I know“). It was like getting hours and hours back. I’m not sure what to do with the cognitive surplus yet. I’ll probably blow it on another game. I hear that Spore is out.

: Zubon

Witch Elf

Witch Elf Tobold talks about his Witch Elf in a way that defines “This thread is useless without pics.” So there you go. Want to know what she looks like in armor? That is her armor. Her armor is actually called “halter.”

Oh, and if someone is running away from you in PvP, throw a dagger in his back. Witch Elves get that at level 1, and it includes a snare if you hit the target in the back.

: Zubon

A Week with Warhammer

Recommendation:
If you would like a sequel to World of Warcraft with a team-PvP focus, buy Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. If you are waiting for something new and original, keep waiting.

Take note: that is “buy it” not “buy it after the major bugs are fixed.” This is my fifth re-write, and it was only yesterday that it changed from “wait” to “now.” Once the new bugs from Thursday’s patch are fixed, the game is ready to go live.

I do not think I have ever said that about an MMO. There could be massive bugs and a lack of content hidden beyond the open beta level cap, but as far as I can see, they are almost good to go. Servers are solid, with only one crash to desktop and one server flop, and it is a fully competent implementation of DikuMUD with graphics. If you like MMO gameplay, the classes are good takes on it, and they are fun.

If you do not like standard MMO gameplay, had hoped for something new, or are waiting for something better, pass on it. Mythic added a couple of cards but did not shuffle the deck much. This could be a very large expansion pack to your current game, except for that “start anew” thing.

Continue reading A Week with Warhammer

Tech Support Pissiness

It has been noted that nothing gets me in Yahtzee-mode faster than technical issues. I sometimes start to feel bad about this, until I remember that an MMO is a service not a product. We put up with a lot of bugs. A lot of bugs. Like, hey, whoa, a lot of bugs. If you cannot list 20 bugs in your current MMO, you are not trying, and that is before considering balance issues like “this quest is brokenly difficult and gives you jack for a reward.”

I’m an MMO player, meaning I’m a masochist, so I deal. If the bug is an account or log-in problem, I’m not a player, so I can’t deal. I can fume. Oh look, a convenient form I can send in (web form; they’re not going to give you an actual e-mail address to contact). Someone will get back to me in one to two business days. You can fill in how useful that is.

Those are infrequent. The ones that upset me more often are the ones we do put up with. Example: the boss of an instance resets half-way through and breaks, so he cannot be fought. Wait on tech support, and you are helpfully informed that they know about the issue, nothing to be done; feel free to reset the instance and start over. And we come back the next night or next week to try again. How many times have you had some variation on this discussion: “We completed it but did not get the reward.” “That sounds unfortunate, but we cannot give you the award. Is there anything else we can help you with?” I have it far less often than I used to, back before I gave up hope. Getting useful tech support is a pleasant surprise because it really is a surprise.

: Zubon

I shouldn’t blog late at night.

LHC4U

The Large Hadron Collider goes live today. Some people have been concerned that it will accidentally destroy the planet (see first reference), if not a good chunk of the universe. Such worries are overstated; there is an infinitesimal chance that it will destroy part of France.

Just in case, though, watch this site. If the message of the day at “Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the earth yet?” changes, take the relevant precautions.

: Zubon

HT: Daniel Drucker

Update: xkcd rings in again.

The Operational Wisdom of Head Starts

Wow, that first day hit to your new MMO’s servers is going to suck, isn’t it? It will be the busiest time your game has ever had, and it will be the first time you see all its problems. Thousands of people will be hitting your account creation, billing, download, patching, and log-in systems at the same time, and thousands are already prepped to go complain about how slow/crowded/whatever these things are.

Enter head starts. People will pay you a bit more for your game in advance, or they will pre-order, or both. Open the server a couple days early and let them give it a dry run. If the account creation system has problems, oh well, you already know these are paying customers. You’ll get it fixed by the time the masses arrive. When those masses arrive, a first lump of players has already moved past the very beginning content, spreading server load and reducing crowding in the newbie areas. These are probably the hardcore players anyway, so get them in a little early to start setting up guilds and the player-based in-game infrastructure your game expects. You have spread out account creation, downloads, patching, log-in, and early content, and you got people to pay you more/sooner for the honor of helping you. Good call!

: Zubon