Category: General

I am glad that you are still enjoying Wizard101 or Warhammer Online or Fallen Earth or whatnot. I like seeing your enthusiasm for a game that most of us are not playing. Keep blogging about your adventures. One of the reasons we have this huge blogroll is because there are so many people sharing their joy in the games that fit them best.

Take a moment to click on a new name. Read about something you have never played, maybe something you would never like because you are not built that way, and see if you can see what this person sees.

: Zubon

Someone in the current corporate entity has spent the last year holding a fire sale on the goodwill that Blizzard spent a decade building. You can almost see some parts of the company working to maintain the customer’s faith, hope, and trust while other parts are strip-mining that resource. Anyone else have more metaphors I can mix in here, maybe something about BP?

Because I lack trust in the company’s businesses practices, and in light of the Battle.net requirement, I cannot seriously consider buying Starcraft 2 unless I know there is a hacked version available. I need to know that I can pop in the disk and the game will work, without an internet connection and without whatever requirements the corporate office decides are a good idea next year.

We have reached a point where the DRM has gone beyond annoyance to threatening to make your game unplayable at someone’s future whim. I am actually looking for reassurance from the pirates, in whose goodwill and long-term thinking I seem to place greater trust. We still trust the developers to make worthwhile games, but how much do you trust the corporation that employs them?

: Zubon

There is a difference between being wanted and having someone want something from you.

: Zubon

I don’t like games where randomness dominates. Some can be fun, if we take them completely unseriously, but the less your actions ultimately matter, the less interesting the whole thing is. As the non-controlled element becomes larger, the virtue of winning goes to zero and the frustration of losing goes to infinity (or also zero, as you stop caring). “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Continue reading Learned Helplessness

A mood improvement technique I have been trying is quitting on a high point. If things go really well, call it a night. If things are as good as they can reasonably get, don’t wait for them to get worse, just take your win and leave. The two things you remember most of your experiences are the most extreme case and the last thing that happened; if you make them both the same positive event, you double-win.

: Zubon

Title reference: in Margaret Weis’s Star of the Guardians trilogy is the claim that the Greeks used this phrase to express “this is the high point in your life.” That is a bit more extreme than logging off.

I recently received the usual e-mail asking me to help some African official move millions of dollars through my bank account. I was obviously selected carefully, because he had 30kb of names in the “to” field. The interesting twist on this scam was that it was supposed to be gold, not US currency, and the e-mail had links to several stories about commodities markets and the gold standard.

The gold-sellers who are trying to steal your account information through phishing e-mails are often insufficiently sophisticated. Some are very good, with copies of real companies’ sites and artful URL deceptions. Most seem to rely on bulk, making a token effort and sending it to as many people as possible. If you get a 0.01% hit rate when sending a million e-mails, that’s not bad money for the effort.

The 419 scammers are intentionally being unsophisticated. Many of them really do speak better English than that, or at least have access to someone who does. The ruse has two purposes in the scam. First, the kind of person they want to take advantage of is more likely to respond to an unsophisticated request. Either you are charitable, and therefore feel sorry for them, or you are predatory, and therefore think you can put one over on them. Either way, you are drawn in. Second, assuming you are drawn in, if they manage to get money from you once, they can plausibly claim a misunderstanding and try again on the same victim. He does not look bright, and his English certainly is poor, so he has a convenient excuse for whatever goes wrong; come on, give him another chance.

As ever, don’t click the links, don’t give out your info, yaddah yah.

: Zubon

My offline gaming has explained my online gaming history to me. I am a carebear because I want to play with friends, not against them.

I can be intensely competitive, but I prefer to be cooperative. We should all be on the same team. We should all win. I would rather have an allied victory than conquer the entire board; even in a single-player 4X, I have this unhealthy tendency to let others grow and prosper rather than playing aggressively. The joy of PvE is that we have two sides, and all the Ps are on one side of that divide.

I like my PvP in small, discrete units. FPS games are conveniently concentrated doses. Games with “duels,” “matches,” and “rounds” are usually the right length. If I need to log in more than once for a “campaign,” we are probably not in my element. I don’t want to spend days dwelling on how to destroy you. I can be rather good at that, but those are not thoughts I like having in my head.

I have had some pen-and-paper RPG time lately, and I like working as a party. If there is serious intra-party conflict, I would rather skip sessions when the problematic players/characters are present. I played Diplomacy this weekend, and eight hours of suspicion and war were incredibly engrossing but not how I want to regard my fellow players. I have also been playing some Eurogames lately, and I enjoy the common characteristic that, while the games are interactive and competitive, there are fewer instances of directly striking at each other, and players are rarely eliminated mid-game.

I do have a fondness for games where it is many-against-one, with a dungeonmaster-equivalent who is explicitly “against” and not a neutral arbiter. Those are hard to find and balance. Isn’t there a zombie FPS in which one player is effectively L4D’s Director, sort of a RTS versus his FPS friends? [Zombie Master — thanks, Mikeful.] I like that notion more than survivors versus infected.

: Zubon

It’s official: the shark has finally jumped in World of Warcraft…
(Nota bene: very, very, very minor location spoilers for Cataclysm)
Continue reading Epic!