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Server Issues

Book 14 went live this week. Players have wondered a bit about the “players must do this 1/day quest 70,000 times before the new zone will open.” Depending on how many high-level characters your server has, that is up to a month to unlock. There is more or less continual speculation that the zone is not done, or at least has not been tested.

Something about Book 14 was not tested, because the game has not run properly all week. The mail or auction house might stop working for hours. You might rubberband or hit invisible walls. The invisible walls are the most interesting to me, because they show how the game divides up the zones. Many of the walls align with existing terrain features like shrubs, hills, and fences.

I was in The Shire when the latest wave of server wonkiness hit. I was trying to run the mail quests on a new character, but I could not cross an open field. I ended up mapping the range of those invisible walls, since I ran other miscellaneous quests that took me to the wall on the far west, and I found the corner where it met the south wall. Unfortunately, that was on a slope. Hop down the hill, bounce back, fall, bounce, fall, bounce, motion sickness. /stuck still worked, so it looked like I was tap-dancing in place for the minute it took to engage. And then I was at a loading screen until I alt-tabbed.

Servers went down at least twice on Friday. Depending on your time zone, the current downtime might have come on Friday, too. Servers are down as I type this, a 7 hour downtime on Friday night. Someone is having a late night in Westwood, after the previous fixes failed to take. Either time.

: Zubon

I haven’t seen much that is new, just lots of new rewards for the old. Lots of rebalancing and bug fixes, some new bugs added. I’m not to Book 14 yet. I did the Moria prelude: underwhelming, but it must appeal to some folks’ RP sensibilities. Except that I can still see all the fellowship members, even though I watched them leave. Which is probably necessary since they are the contacts for your legendary trait books.

ESL in /gu

I want to ask if some people in my guild are non-native speakers. I was thinking of going with “where are you from?” and hoping the answer is Germany (or such). Maybe ask about a time zone.

I think it would cause unnecessary unhappiness in guild chat if I were to ask directly. If the person is a native speaker, his natural follow-up question is, “Why do you ask?” My other guesses were “small child,” “illiterate,” “stupid,” “lazy,” or “family pet”; “foreign” seemed like the most charitable assumption.

: Zubon

(“Foreign” is not a bad thing. It is an explanation for why they cannot speak English very well. My Spanish isn’t so good. They have worthwhile thoughts that they have trouble expressing. If he is just stupid, that is really the best I can hope for.)

Too Soon?

We are approaching the end of the first presidency since the invention of lolcats. The idea struck us: why don’t we write a visual history of the administration in lolcat? Maybe start with a cat dangling from something “hai im chad”; segue into a picture of Justice Scalia with “u can has presidency.” “Invisible WMD” on a map of Iraq seems obvious. Then the problem arose: is there any tasteful way to make a 9/11 lolcat? “Oh noes” just doesn’t seem to cover it.

: Zubon

Online Surveying Bleg

My workplace would like to do an online survey, but we do not have the capacity to recruit survey participants. We can write the survey, but putting it on Survey Monkey and asking around will not do it for us. I have taken surveys through Greenfield Online, but I have no idea what online survey companies there are, who is good, etc. Can anyone recommend an online surveying firm that supplies its own respondents? We are going to be looking for a limited age range and geographic area (of the United States).

Thanks!

: Zubon

Frodo, One Year Later

[Original review]

A year ago, I decided not to subscribe to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. The option for Founder’s pricing ($200/lifetime) made other payment plans look like bum deals, and I was not then convinced that the game was worth playing for enough months to justify it. If I had known then what the game would look like today, I would have recommended buying the lifetime account. Founder’s pricing is again available, and available anytime from an existing Founder’s account holder, so I now own a lifetime account to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢.

The game vaults the “worth playing” bar, with prospects for better things to come. No, it is not revolutionary. It is EQ/WoW/DikuMUD with graphics: Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG. But it is a quality implementation of that model of play, with excellent graphics, support for several playstyles, better roleplay options than in most games, and plenty of little fun things. It has a PvP game that I, an EASK, enjoy and play regularly.

There is a great sense of a world, particularly coming from the heavily-instanced City of Heroes. The quests set the right tone as you move from the safe homelands through hard-pressed borderlands and into enemy-controlled territory. There is more content in each area than you need to outlevel it, so there is much to explore and content for replay.

Continue reading Frodo, One Year Later

How Alts Happen

I made a Minstrel a week ago so I could pick up a couple more trade skills. He holds stuff, he eventually crafts, great! I got him in the kinship today, so that I could use the kin storage chests to transfer items. I went on a trade skills supply run across a few zones, then went back to kin storage to transfer it.

After logging on the other characters for their toys, I brought on the baby Minstrel. He had done nothing outside the tutorial area except pick up the quests when you first enter the real world. Grab all his stuff from the kin box, and head to Thorin’s Hall. I can hit the vault there and maybe crunch some of these trade skill supplies into points. Oh, cave claw along the way, lets zap him to get a click on the deed log. *bing* Oh, I have a quest that needs some of those. Hmm, and I need this cave to the north. I can hit that before swinging by Thorin’s Gate. Fight goblins on the way up, collect the items in the cave, fight goblins on the way down. *bing* First deed complete, basic goblin-slayer in Ered Luin (new title). And I hit level 7 along the way.

Hmm, those cave claws and the items I picked up are half of two quests. I can redeem them at Thorin’s Hall, so let’s get the other halves before heading in. Zip across, collect a few items, whack a few enemies along the way. Quest done, done, done, trade skill quest done with the items I transferred at the kin chest. Let’s do my own trade skill stuff, which gives me a new weapon, oh and that other quest done. Just a couple more quests before I’m done in the area, so I might as well clean up and move on. Quest done, level 8.

Run along to the next town, drop off quest done, done, done. One is a click-and-come-back, and it passes me by another quest (done), so let’s clear that river and … small detour, talk to that guy after clearing the river (done), head back. Hit a few birds and cats along the way to get another quest half-done. And back to that second town, another quest done, level 9. And somewhere in there I completed another deed, the first for completing quests in Ered Luin.

Luckily, I am out of blue bar (rested xp), so I can go to bed now. But tomorrow, if I want, I can finish the quests that take me from here back through the starter area and back, then the first group quest and on to the middle-sized city in the middle of the zone… And I’m 3/4 of the way through the first bar of a trade skill, so I just need a bit more bronze to finish that out… And so it goes.

: Zubon

Self-Set Standards II

If you proudly tout yourself as “Best PC Game Ever,” that is a lot to live up to. Even if the game is really really good, it will rate “below expectations.” If your “revolutionary MMO” is Everquest +/-5%, we will mock you; if your “WoW-killer” gets 100,000 subscribers, your marketing has turned a viable, sustainable, successful game into a disappointing failure.

Rick Astley’s Greatest Hits describes “Rick’s true legacy: as one of Britain’s best and most underrated blue-eyed soul singers.” Fair.

: Zubon

There are a few good songs on the album beyond the classic. The video really does add something.

Sexist DPS

Ever have one of those stories you meant to blog about, but you put it off for a few days, then assumed that everyone knew and there was nothing new to say a week later? Part of the fun of Age of Conan is that, with its patch cycle since release, everything is forever new.

With a hat tip to, oh, everyone, female characters do less damage in Age of Conan. Not on every possible attack, but at least on that revolutionary melee combat that will change everything, female characters do less damage. They have longer animations with no corresponding improvement in damage. There is no evidence that this was intended, although you can easily find comments about how women should do less damage in a Hyborean setting (and if you think so, try a Gorean setting). No one properly tested the differing animations. [fixed that for you – ed.]

And it will not be fixed for months. This is understandable: check and possibly change every animation in the game, get it right this time, and see if there are related balance issues. These are good things to check before selling the game, but they are biting that bullet. In the meantime, this is very convenient for bloggers. You get stories when the bug is noted, when players test it, when Funcom confirms it, when Funcom announces the delay to fix, when the fix eventually arrives, post-fix testing, each of several patches to fix the fix, and every patch in the meantime when you can snark, “Funcom is looking at female characters’ animations again. But they’re still just staring at the boobies! lol!” So I’m getting my shot in now, between waves.

: Zubon

Also Annoyingly Linear

The problem with annoyingly linear is not that it is linear, but that it is annoyingly so. Done well: Portal, a puzzle game where the whole point is to get from Point A to Point B. Done not too badly: the last level of Portal, where the tile set changes but there is still just the one path and someone has conveniently painted signs as if this too were a planned part of the enrichment center activity.

Done fairly badly: City of Heroes office buildings, where each set of elevators only goes between two floors. To get to his office on the top floor, the boss must walk about a mile and take five or ten staircases (on the strange multi-story floors). The shapes of the floors have no connection to each other, despite the normal outside appearance. Darn non-Euclidean architects. This one is bad in terms of logic and suspension of disbelief, not gameplay; as a gameplay element, the buildings are fairly straightforward tubes of monster to smash. The gameplay problem is when things are less linear, and you must find the last three enemies standing behind a rock around a corner on a small incline on a spur off the third path on the second level, who did not notice when you fired some grenades and a sonic wail at their boss twenty feet away.

Done badly: Garth Agarwen in Middle Earth’s Lone Lands. Garth Agarwen is an outdoor instance, your group’s own chunk of the red swamp. There are a few loops and dead-ends, and a fork separating the two big bosses, but mostly it is a path that winds around itself. It faces the same strange architecture whereby you go through every room to get to the back. It is as if you took all the hallways out of your home and put a door on either side of each room. And sometimes the door is a trapdoor leading to your basement, then up to the catwalk you built near the ceiling to get to the trapdoor up into the bathroom, through the door in the back of the shower into the laundry room, slide the oven aside to get into kitchen, take the door to the kids’ room, out the window into a fenced portion of the backyard, climb the ladder to the top of the shed, then walk across the board into your bedroom window to get your cell phone, which already went to voice mail, dangit. Was that oven-slide a one-way passage? I need to use the bathroom. It might be faster to jump out the other bedroom window and walk around to the front door, assuming the dogs haven’t respawned.

Again, this is not necessarily bad gameplay, although it is annoying to see a teammate just above your jumping height when you know it will take a hundred yards of running to reach him. Could you just throw me a rope? Or when you shoot an enemy and must wait a minute while he navigates all those corners on the way to you. Or when you try to think about the enemy actually living there. Okay, it’s annoying.

: Zubon

Open Mic Night

Can you please turn on “push to talk,” at least until you get over that cough? Or until you sell those cockatiels?

I confess: I discriminate against pre-pubescent males. Something about the voice of the twelve-year-old boy coming from the Orc Reaver grates. It is bad when they are whiny or needy, but perhaps worse when they are the group leaders who are trying to instruct incompetent adults. The modern age is full of examples of small children explaining technical matters to their elders, but I do not need it in my headset for an hour. I know he’s twelve, but just listen to him when he says that we are moving out.

Turn on your voice chat in PvP. Yes, I mean you. I don’t care if you don’t have a mic; listen. Stop blowing into the mic.

: Zubon