Asides – Page 8 – Kill Ten Rats

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[GW] Tooth Enamel and the Aging Adventurer

This weekend, as I was taking a chocolate bunny from the remains of a land-going fish assassin, a man carrying 1250 ingots of iron in a belt pouch remarked to me that it was unrealistic that he could salvage wood from charcoal. I had trouble hearing him speak from a different continent, partly because of the way 13,507 gold coins were clinking in my pockets, but he strangely evoked another worry in me.

My character has not consumed anything but candy and alcohol for the past three months. “Not even skale fin soup?” No, allergies. To some, this just sounded like college, but he is getting on in ranger years, and I became seriously worried about the state of his teeth. Perhaps the alcohol will kill the bacteria?

: Zubon

Platform Independence

Say what you will about their product, Taco Bell is serious about getting people to take customer satisfaction surveys. The back of the receipt asks you to visit this website, or call this number, or scan this barcode to connect on your mobile phone, or text them “TACO” to have the link sent to your phone. The survey is asking you to do something for them for the minute chance of a reward, and they are making it convenient to do so. Most companies make it more difficult to give them money.

: Zubon

#takeyourmodelswhereyoucangetthem

Safe Design

When I worked in traffic safety, a critical point was that systems need to be forgiving. A momentary lapse in attention or judgment should not lead to disaster. Granted, we live in the kind of universe where that’s just the way it is, but your design should seek to minimize that rather than to wrap people around trees.

In terms of game design, I am thinking about UI rather than combat here. Most games have figured out that one-click character deletion is a Bad Thing. Most games let you lock items or bags so that you cannot accidentally sell or deconstruct an important set of gear. Another aspect is that these need to be sufficiently customizable: if there are too many “click OK to confirm” screens, you start automatically clicking OK without thinking, which is just a more tedious version of not having the warning. As a player, I want to be able to pick what is hidden, what gets a warning pop-up, etc.

In terms of hardware design, I need a computer case whose power/reset buttons have a panel over them. I want it to be like the self-destruct button you’d see in a movie, with the clear plastic cover you need to flip before hitting the big red button. I’m not worried about myself in this case. I have a cat.

: Zubon

Unbattening Hatches

I assumed that most of our readership would be focusing on Guild Wars 2 last week, so I didn’t want to interrupt. Let’s ease back in with an off-topic post. I could find some way to make this link on-topic, maybe connect it to this old post, but why bother? As I have said, primate brain, fire, ooh.

The inherent awesomeness of that link is increased by the subsection “Examples with Zombies.” People don’t always believe me when I tell them that the CDC has a web page on preparing for the zombie apocalypse. The Infernal Retaliation picture, to note, is not an example, because he set himself on fire; the alien he is fighting loses its powers around fire, like Superman with kryptonite. Under the “comic books” tab, however, read the X-Men example. Choice.

Game commentary returns very soon.

: Zubon

SOPA Kills Ten Rats

This post is going up as huge sites are blacking out in protest against the horribly-created legislation in the U.S. Congress. This post is more than an assent; it is a warning.

As written SOPA (PIPA) could end Kill Ten Rats, and the countless other MMO blogs you enjoy. We create our posts based on copyrighted and trademarked materials. Screenshots, fantasy race names, locations, characters, etc. are all property of someone else. Sure, even with some criticisms most companies are pretty cool with our [fair] use because talking about their games is usually a good thing. Yet given the huge archive we are sporting, all it takes is one corporate suit angered at one post written three years ago to possibly shut Kill Ten Rats down if SOPA would be enacted.

We are firmly against piracy, as evidenced big time by our ridiculous Steam libraries. Yet, such strong legislation must also be made to strongly protect our free speech. Â A “strategic lawsuit against public participation” (SLAPP) is already a thing this century, and SOPA would just make it worse.

Please consider writing a respectful, constructive note to your Congressperson or Senator on SOPA (PIPA) or head to the EFF to learn more. Many have feedback forms on their .gov websites making it fairly easy to have your voice heard.

Sincerely,

The Kill Ten Rats crew

Powers of Two

This is a fundamentals post. You need those sometimes. Today’s goal is to know your powers of two.

For any readers who have not reached exponents in their math classes yet, this just means 2×2=4, 2x2x2=8, 2x2x2x2=16, 2x2x2x2x2=32, and so on. Even if you are completely innumerate, you have surely noticed that the numbers 128, 256, and 512 proliferate around computers. These are higher powers of two. Computers are binary (two-based), so everything tends to be in powers of two. We talk about gaming here, and lots of things in games are 50% chances, coin-flips, however they phrase it: it is all 2s, and if you know the basic math behind what is going on, you will better prosper and be emotionally and intellectually prepared for the likely outcomes. There are two that I want to focus on today.

2^5=32. 1 in 32 series of 5 coin flips will be all heads, another 1/32 all tails. If there is a 50-50 chance of something happening, there is a 1/32 chance of its happening (or not) 5 times in a row. That’s roughly a 3% chance: unlikely, but not exactly a rare event when you are doing something hundreds of times, so be ready for it. As a concrete example, if you are playing Tyrant and a Xeno Forcefield comes out, you can probably take it out in one attack. On average, it regenerates (refills its hit points) once, but about 3% of the time, you will need to knock that wall down 6 times before it stays down. Given how much you play whatever game it is, you may hit the 1 in 32 chance every day. Watch for it, plan for it.

2^10=1024. Ten doublings gives you a thousand. This is a convenient bit of quick arithmetic to keep in your head, mostly because it stacks. If ten doublings is one thousand, twenty is one million, and thirty is one billion (American billion or British milliard). Doubling adds up quickly. There is the old story about asking for a reward of a single grain of rice/wheat on the first square of a chessboard, 2 on the second, 4 on the third, 8 on the fourth, and so on. A chessboard has 64 squares, so it will still be a few from the end when we clear 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Doubling is powerful, and most people lose track of how the exponents work. The easy math to remember is that 10 doublings gives you another set of ,000 on the end of a number. Use this to estimate large quantities.

: Zubon

A Word of Thanks

My last post has actually opened my eyes a lot. I had a conversation with a friend about my post, and while my original point about ‘seeing no change is tiring’ stands, I feel like I see something differently now. I see that I am in a minority, but more importantly that the majority are not idiots or catering to the lowest common denominator. Getting change and trying to overcome the cost to change in any arena is fucking hard work.

After the discussion my respect for all real minorities working for real-world change has risen a hundredfold. Questions of “how can they not see” or “how can they not want change” that comes across in real life issues every single day must be damn near insufferable. Here I am the minority of a stupid MMO mechanic’s club.

It’s a tough dichotomy to not only want change but also to assume that people content with what I want changed are not idiots. I’ve always believed that I have been mindful in life of my actions and their effects around me. Yet, I feel like my world view has been a tadÂ solipsistic.Â And, I especially apologize for my McDonald’s and K-Mart comment.

Our hit counts tell me that I do better to share love, so that’s how I will keep on trucking. Thanks for reading our fine blog. Excuse the mess.

–Ravious

My Dog Ate It

Commenters have raised the issue of lagging out due to a pet’s having eaten the router. They went on to start the real question: how much will this affect performance, and how can we mitigate it?

Is your dog small or thin enough that a wireless signal can still get through? Will it matter if you have a long-haired cat? Are the essential pieces small enough that they could be sufficiently whole after the plastic case has been devoured? And how much battery life does that thing have?

: Zubon

Born too Slow (or Bound too Long)

A post over at Hardcore Casual resonated with me. In it Syncaine writes in the title “This is what happens when the MMO genre sucks and I have ‘nothing to play’. The rest are his thoughts on otherwise passing the time. Except for Guild Wars 2 news, I know I’ve been a little quieter. My style is more about writing what I play, see, and experience. When I played Rift, I wrote about Rift. I have not wrote a Rift post in awhile, ergo…

I have been playing PC games though. I fell in love with the bargain priced Magic the Gathering’s Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012. I have the usual smattering of first-person shooters headed by Team Fortress 2. I am still not sure why I bought Serious Sam (again), but it brought back memories. Then TrackmaniaÂ² Canyon. I’ve been playing that enough to warrant a brand new blog. It’s community is so online based that it feels similar to an MMO community, and there are developer updates, mods, and tournaments that keep things rather fresh.

Continue reading Born too Slow (or Bound too Long)

Serious Business

A community which cannot or will not realise how insignificant a part of the universe it occupies is not truly civilised. That is to say, it contains a fatal ingredient which renders it, to whatever extend, unbalanced. This is the story of one such community.
— opening lines of Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss

: Zubon