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Is Yahtzee Happy?

I know that I complain a lot about the games I play. Complaining is kind of what we do here in the blogosphere. And then there is Yahtzee. Yahtzee is the popular video blogger who likes Portal, Psychonauts, Guitar Hero, and cursing whilst wearing a hat. That seems to be all the joy that he receives from gaming. When he does give praise, it usually comes in the form of, “I like this part of the game; if only it were not wrapped in in the flaming, feces-covered corpses of a thousand dead puppies who all had their eyes gouged out by the falling horns of unicorns that were decapitated by evil monkey pirates, who were in turn raped to death by the even more evil developers of this festeringly putrid game.”

Only it sounds better in his accent.

: Zubon

Kind of hard to argue with the webcomics comment. It has pretty much been like that since hitting First and Ten.

I’m not dead

But I’ve been playing Spore a lot, hence the absence.

How is it? Mini-review: It’s like going on a date with a cute girl. She’s smart, funny, makes you laugh, very easy to be around her and you two have a blast. Then you take her home at the end of the evening and realize she’s really a man. As in, she actually has male equipment in the crotch locker. So what do you do? Call it off then? Or go through with it anyway so you don’t finish destroying a great date?

That’s what I’m debating.

In non-gaming news, got ourselves a cheap telescope yesterday. Thought I’d get my oldest son interested in science with some hands-on observing time, and we had a great time with it last night. The moon wasn’t up when we went out, unfortunately, but I could show him the disc of Jupiter, a couple of stars and told him how to spot the Milky Way, and what it was.

It was a very nice night that made me warm and fuzzy. One of the most honored and solemn duties of any geek is to pass the torch to future generations. I feel I’ve started doing that last night.

Engineer at Level 10

Pretty much the same as ranged DPS anywhere, but I like the turrets and multiple, stacking, instant-cast damage over time (DoT) abilities.

The Engineer’s big class feature is the turret. You get three options: long-range, short-range AE, and medium-range grenade turret. I have not been using that last one much, although I might toy with it. It fires the fastest, with an occasional AE. The short-range one is a flamethrower, although sadly the graphics are fireballs rather than a huge cone of fire unless it gets a good roll. None of these are as game-changing as I might have hoped; the extra damage is nice, and it occasionally pulls adds off you, but most of your offense comes from you. This is not the Lugian Tactician.

Continue reading Engineer at Level 10

Realm Balance

Hypothesis: There are far more players interested in RvR on Destruction than Order.

Expected outcomes: Order scenario queues are trivial, while Destruction scenario queues are lengthy. Open-world RvR will be dominated by Destruction. At lower tiers, when scenarios are the dominant method of gaining renown, Order will have an advantage; they will have more practice in each scenario and RvR generally, along with higher renown rank. Leveling will be faster on Order, if you use scenarios to level. In the long run, Destruction will dominate most servers in tier 4, because they will have more active players in RvR in the open world.

Data point: I spent more than an hour in a queue on Destruction, perhaps two hours, without getting into a scenario. I have never waited five minutes on the Order side. After waiting the one to two hours on Destruction, I switched to order, ran seven to ten scenarios in quick succession, and gained two levels.

Corollary: There may be more people interested in Destruction generally. It is the evil faction, really evil not just Horde, and it is a naturally attractive element to the hardcore PvP population in a game that promotes itself as the PvP alternative to WoW. Carebears are more likely to want to be pretty elves with white lions than heavily scarred goblins with biologically improbably squigs.

: Zubon

True to Comic Books

Many comic book writers, artists, and publishers are truly lousy at keeping deadlines. I recall the early days of Image, with about two comics that managed to publish monthly. This proud tradition continues today, with monthly comics that publish five times a year and quarterly comics that will someday get their second issues. Others take the “fast, good, or quick: pick two” approach, consistently arriving on time, under budget, and guess about the quality.

The City of Heroes developers are aware that yesterday marked four months since their last Issue. That was the major update where two evenings was enough time to finish all the new content available without making new alts.

So if you noticed that I have not been posting much about City of Heroes, that would be why.

The funny thing is, the game is supposed to have been getting increased attention since the NCSoft acquisition. Maybe it is taking longer than expected to train the new hires, or maybe they are re-writing half the game. They did, however, find resources for two new microtransactions options: rent a rocket pack for all characters for a month ($5) and the Cyborg pack with costume pieces, emotes, and a Self-Destruct power ($10). Is it still “micro” at $10? The Cyborg bits are, at any rate, a permanent account upgrade.

: Zubon

What We Did Wednesday Night

a herd of CoWs I made my Shaman the night before retail release. After leveling a bit and connecting with the guild for some public quests and RvR scenarios, we decided to hit open world RvR. By the half-way point, we had a full warband. Smile for the camera, guys!

The night before the game went live, we had almost filled a 75-person Ventrilo server. I am not used to being part of a large guild. It is kind of nice. I have many voices to learn. I may go insane trying to match name to character name (across multiple alts) to blog name.

: Zubon

Lifetimes in Needless Clicks

Warhammer seems to have decided that players need to scroll through and clickwrap-sign one useless, unread document per login, rather than two. This is intended to be a fig leaf for court action, despite Mr. Jacobs’s explicit statement that they do not expect players to read it every time. I will leave you to Lum for discussion and commentary, including links to meta-drama (what the blogosphere is all about).

Instead, I was curious about how many lifespans will be consumed by this click-through that will never benefit anyone, except the legal bloggers who explain why that argument did not work in court. The original stated plan was to waste thirty seconds per player per day (see the link), so the new plan is fifteen. There may be some plus or minus for a variety of factors, but I am going to hand-wave that away and assume it is a wash. You skip some days, you crash a lot some days, your graphics card is choking today, whatever. Fifteen seconds per player per day: how long until that consumes an entire lifespan?

Or, since this is the blogosphere, Mythic, how many people have you killed today?!!!?!

Life expectancy in the United States is 77.8 years. With eight hours of sleep per day, the average waking lifespan is 77.8*365.25*16*60*60= 1,636,787,520 seconds. Dividing by 15, it will take 109,119,168 player-days to have an entire lifespan spent scrolling and clicking. If Warhammer is a modest success with 100,000 subscriptions, this will consume one lifespan every three years. Warhammer has shipped 1.5 million units, which would take 72 days to consume a lifespan, so the time included with those boxes will get us almost half-way to the first one.

I like the “1/3 years/100,000 subscribers” calculation. That seems easy to multiply. If Warhammer gets 300,000 subscribers, it wastes an entire human lifespan per year on the scroll-and-click-through.

You can also argue about MMOs in general wasting human lifespans.

: Zubon

I know I have a post somewhere about how many lifespans a bug taking x minutes/player/day would consume, but my search fu is failing my tonight. Sleepy.

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