Category: General

I had a new roof put on the old homestead. The contractor finished a bit late, but he got most of it done. At least 90% of it is up there, which should be good, since I don’t use all my rooms at once anyway. He has a maintenance plan, under which time is split between building new rooms at the same quality and putting up some shingles in the existing gaps. I am thinking of signing up for the multi-month subscription.

: Zubon

What is up with the people who trawl from blog to blog hating a particular game or developer? They must spend more time doing that than the fans spend writing about them. And they are quite often within the first few commenters, so they must be camping that RSS feed.

: Zubon

Do you know him? He is a legal legend, a bored and/or unstable prisoner who has launched cases against almost every noun known to exist and not a few adjectives. Previous complaints have run to 57+ pages of defendents, including George W. Bush, Pope Benedict XVI, Accuweather.com, Nuclear Power Plant, Tony Danza, Magna Carta, “tsunami victims,” “Jewish workers at NBC/Universal,” Plato, “various Buddhist monks,” Denny’s, “Vern Minni Me,” Michael J. Fox, PETA, Liberty Bell… Virtually Blind reports that he has filed a amicus curaie brief in a case against Blizzard. Sadly, the brief is a single page and relatively coherent in comparison with his previous work.

Some suggest that we ignore trolls, in meatspace or online. This one is sufficiently entertaining to be worth noting.

: Zubon

Yes, he really claims a “©” in his name.

If I have linked you here in a discussion, hi, maybe you are someone rational and thoughtful with whom I am having a disagreement. Given the level of discourse on much of the internet, I must assume until proven otherwise that you are willfully misunderstanding me in order to spew hatred at The Enemy. Feel free to re-read whatever it is that you are disagreeing with to see if you can get the point, since I am not going to argue about the point that you seem to think I have made.

I keep resolving not to argue with mischaracterizations of my arguments. You know the process: someone takes something superficially similar to what you said, attributes it to you, then attacks you for “saying” it. See also “strawman.” You think that clarifying what you said will help. Occasionally it does, but usually the attacker is unable or unwilling to grasp distinctions or perhaps wanders off after calling you Hitler a few times, only to be replaced by someone a few posts later who did not read the clarification or has a slightly different way of misunderstanding you. Basically, you cannot have a discussion in good faith with someone who has decided to hate you, especially if they have decided it would be a loss of face to realize that they hate you for things you never said or did.

I keep failing to uphold this resolution. There are sites I cannot visit because the trolls are too good. I get drawn into arguments. Some of those people are not even trolls; they really seem to believe that I believe some nonsensical version of my beliefs. Maybe that is a defensive rationalization: “there can be no reasonable objection to my beliefs, so my opponent is obviously a crank.” It feels like a misunderstanding you can correct, but that is like trying to get a picture on a radio by sending really good television signals.

I can usually restrain myself after the first round. I say, “x“; someone responds, “x’ is wrong, y“; I explain that I said x, not x’, which is different because of a, b, and c; he responds, “y!!!“; I realize this probably is not going anywhere. Usually. I have mostly lost the felt need to reply to simple contradiction or obviously false/idiotic statements. Mostly. I have also learned that I do not share the population mean for obviousness.

: Zubon

It might be nice to have a teammate who is thinking about what he is doing, but what I really want is a player who does not need to. A good, experienced player is not actively thinking about playing as a process. It is a series of practiced actions that fall below the conscious level, freeing his higher mental processes to think about other things, such as larger strategies or making amusing conversation during combat.

It works for anything your brain does. I am typing, but I am not consciously thinking about where the keys are on the keyboard. I just think about what words I want to type, and my fingers are already in motion. I don’t even need to think about how to spell the words that I am using. The only way this could be more efficient would be to connect my brain directly to the computer, but then I would need to develop the new neural patterns to make letters and words appear on the screen that way.

Continue reading Unthinking Teammates Wanted

It’s two paragraphs, so I either quote the whole thing or link it. China has banned selling virtual property but never enforced it. China has now added a tax, which I suppose is like the US government’s requirement that you pay taxes on illegal drug sales.

: Zubon

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution

I like to think. As the industry moves towards the mass market, meta-game thoughts are becoming less valuable. This is good for the games as games, but I can still miss the returns to planning and the value it held for Exploring game mechanics.

This encompasses all the forms of character-planning, number-crunching, min-maxing, meta-gaming, and other ways you can think about the game mechanics while not playing it. If you see a spreadsheet showing the trade-offs between different stats, that is an example. If you see a suggestion to take a certain combination of powers, that is an example. If you see a naming system for elves, that is not an example.

This is pretty clearly the domain of the hardcore. If you know and understand the equations for whether a shot hits in EVE Online, you are hardcore, whether or not you play all that much. If you have ever made a table showing input and output prices for your in-game produce, you are hardcore. If you just dive in and play, the numbers be damned, you may not be hardcore even if you spend a lot of time in-game. If you do not think about the game when you are not playing, you are probably not hardcore.

Continue reading Nothing to Think About

I appreciate readers and writers who are aware of distinctions. Here on the internet, we have nigh-infinite room to work out fine details, and we can discuss subtle gradations of merit and failure. We can identify the good and the bad in things, and encourage the one while mourning the other.

I mourn when I see so many unable to develop a thought more precise than “wow sux” or “wow rox.” We could say that WoW has taken the standard DikuMUD model to is most successful implementation, with a strong solo game that moved the entire industry from farming-based leveling to quest-based leveling, with a heavy focus on late-game raiding and weak PvP content. We could discuss the changes over time, both in the game and in the industry as a result of the game. We could discuss the effects of a strongly solo-friendly leveling game or the relative merits of multi-hour PvE raids. But it can be hard to hold that discussion while surrounded by screaming children.

I can’t even tell how many are interested in seeing gradations. One uncomprehending post can throw off an entire thread, either in my perception of it or with people trying to corral it. And then someone else will post the same thing, not bothering to have read the replies that reiterated the fine distinctions. I suppose this is why the news is in sound bites.

It is important to understand that things can have both good and bad points, and saying the good outweighs the bad (or vice versa) does not eliminate those finer points. We can even recognize that, due to our different preferences, we might disagree on whether some of those points are good or bad, or agree on every particular but have different weightings so that a good game for me is bad for you. Ultimately, there is no good, just good for or good at.

: Zubon

Just so we have a single post to refer to this single point:

A modern MMO has skills that scale with level. You acquire the skill once, and its numbers increase with you. If your game has something like Fire Bolt I-VII or Lesser/Moderate/Greater Sudden Strike, it better have come out before 2005.

See City of Heroes (note: 2004) or The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ for how to do this properly. See Asheron’s Call or World of Warcraft for how to be old school. See Dungeon Runners for an attempt to cut the difference.

Having single skills that scale with level allows you to do reduce some of the harm caused by having levels. See sidekick, mentor, and exemplar systems across various games. Having many levels of skills hides the fact that players are not getting anything new this level while creating hell levels and erratic power curves.

: Zubon