Category: General

SWG used to have something called a “Friday Feature”.  They would show a tiny piece of something from a future update, or highlight some aspect of the game.  The Friday Feature was sometimes just a list of statistics, and sometimes it was just a rehashing of information already on the forums, but it was always there, and it always kept me thinking about SWG on Fridays.  Even though I’ve stopped playing SWG, I still keep checking the web page each Friday to see if anything new has been added to the game.

The Friday Feature was really a great way of getting a share of my head-space.  The more I think of a game, the more likely I am to go back and play it, or try it for the first time.  All the controversy with Darkfall actually had me in their store on multiple occassions to try and buy the game.  News stories about an EVE corporation leader scamming his friends actually contributed to my husband downloading the trial.  He even went on to purchase EVE.

By contrast, Final Fantasy XI was terrible about letting American players know what to be thinking about.  I can’t speak for their Japanese players, but Americans had no clue what was new in the game until it was already out.  Blogs and forums help fill the void, but there’s nothing like hearing from the horse’s mouth tid-bits about what’s coming next.

Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance’; You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be pleasantly surprised by the next update that promises to solve all the problems, but you must be surprised. Can you flip a fair coin and get heads 10 times in a row? Sure, that is only a 1-in-1024 chance, it must happen all the time in a world with many coin flips. But if someone is taking your money based on that coin, after 10 flips, you should be looking for a two-headed coin.

“They have learned their lesson” is rarely a safe assumption. If someone did a lousy job last time, you must raise your probability that he will do a lousy job next time. Otherwise, you are taking bad work as evidence that good work must be coming. Do you take good work as evidence that bad work must be coming? If you take both good and bad work as reasons to believe that good things are coming, you are shaky on concepts like “evidence” and “reason.”

To end on a concrete example, before turning it back to Mr. Russell, Age of Conan had what was by all accounts a miracle patch at the end of beta, and perhaps several post-launch. At it still had that quality we have come to expect from Funcom.

I wish to propose for the reader’s favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

: Zubon

Yesterday I promised you thoughts on each of the eight demigods in Demigod. For those of you who were just itching with anticipation, click for more words. For those who could not care less, this will not take up much of the front page; sorry if you are getting this via RSS. Continue reading Demigods

There you go. I would avoid caring about it for a few years, but some of you have been hoping for it since Warhammer Online was announced. Perhaps that is how they justify “one of the most eagerly anticipated MMOs on the horizon” [citation needed].

I am going to assume it is vapor and forget about it until they reach open beta, but feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

: Zubon

Demigod is similar to Defense of the Ancients All Stars (DotA), but feels more like Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War than Warcraft 3. It has that pacing, with the back-and-forth around flags.

If you don’t know DotA, it is a custom map for Warcraft 3 that constitutes a new game and is starting to spawn a new sub-genre. You control one hero (of 80+) who levels up and buys items in classic CRPG fashion. Your goal is to destroy the enemy base, which is guarded by towers along the three entry paths. Waves of troops spawn at the end of each path at each base, crashing at the intersection. You support your troops, destroy enemy troops, and fight the enemy heroes doing the same, until one of you destroys the other’s base. It is a great game, and Warcraft 3 is worth buying just to play it.

Demigod is a lot of fun, and I’m not even playing it to its full potential. I have been playing alone with computer bots, learning how the heroes work. It is possible that it will all turn to ashes once I play real humans, who exploit imbalances instead of relying on an “as intended” AI, but I have been enjoying my time. I expect it to be even better on the LAN.

Continue reading Demigod

Running through my head: “There’s a badger badger badger on your lawn…” The images would fit together well, too.

: Zubon

Once you’ve done everything, there’s nothing left to do.

Extension: unless you like doing it all over again.

: Zubon

All this time, we were probably just waiting for an application like this.

I’m feeling a bit like that engineer at the aluminum plant that got the visit from Montgomery Scott in Star Trek IV.

I have a year of A Tale in the Desert time under my belt. I play a variety of games that a major studio would not bother to spit on. I will not speak ill of someone else’s niche, except to mention if I tried it and it bored or annoyed the heck out of me. Which is to say, if you are like me, this is not your niche.

Now if you pretend that your niche is The One Game, and people only avoid it because they have personality problems you have diagnosed… I still probably will not bother to speak ill of it, because you need some seriously powerful delusions to rise to “worth mentioning” on this here series of tubes. I do not even mention a lot of the games I try, because it is not worth it to write a few sentences about them. Too trivial for a blogger to bother with: ouch.

: Zubon