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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

The Cream Sinks

J. and the Australian Gamer Podcasters have realized an important truth, namely that most user-made content is crap. Then again, most x is crap for all values of x. The question, I comment there, is whether you have tools to separate the wheat from the chaff (to jump metaphors). The goal is to set a million people loose, let it be 99% crap, and still get the work of 10,000 talented people (and remember that even talented people produce a lot of crap to get their good stuff).

Editing is hard. I will not even get into that here, except to note that many companies edit their own stuff too poorly to consider harvesting user-made content. If your internal content-production still gives mostly crap after filtering and editing, what hope do you have?

Continue reading The Cream Sinks

Ethic in WAR, Day Two

Last night in Warhammer Online felt like a waste of time. Being in a limited head start really kind of sucks. There is not enough people playing. I ran around to 5 or 6 public quests and it was like a ghost town. Nobody around, at all.

I rolled up a Warrior Priest (check out them boots!) and decided to level up some before I join a scenario or enter the RvR areas. I pushed him up to rank 6 by doing quests and I have to say the class bored the heck out of me. Assuming I now know all about this class (kidding), I will be abandoning him as my main. I really enjoyed playing the Bright Wizard with my wife on Sunday so I think I am going to switch the Warrior Priest over to our duo and use the Bright Wizard as my new main character.

I’m hoping the second group of head start folks playing will make the public quests useful and I still have yet to do any RvR stuff. Long overdue for that.

– Ethic

Weekend Recovery

I spent far less time than usual in MMOs this weekend. I am still in the habit of being in my computer chair, but I had a few reasonable play sessions rather than a continuous binge. The weekend felt so much longer.

MMOs are great for flow, as well as being ideal Skinner boxes. Time gets away from me (and the wife in the back row: “I know“). It was like getting hours and hours back. I’m not sure what to do with the cognitive surplus yet. I’ll probably blow it on another game. I hear that Spore is out.

: Zubon

Ethic in WAR, Day One

The Warhammer Online Collector’s Edition head start began yesterday and since I still had a functioning CE head start code on my account (I had canceled the order) I was able to play. The following is a summary of my adventures on day one.

I had to work in the morning but I thought I’d try to reserve names before I had to leave. Found out the start was delayed for a few hours. Off to work. Spent all day at work reading about people having long queues and other issues. Finally, time to go home.

Continue reading Ethic in WAR, Day One