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Why I Play Multiplayer Games By Myself

Akela Talamasca at Massively posted today about why he enjoys soloing through his favorite MMOs. This is something that I find myself enjoying as well and I’d like to share a few more reasons why it can be fun.

Akela lists his reasons as such:

Feeling of being a hero, not a nameless part of a team.
Inability to trust other players.
Time management.

For my situation, the first two certainly apply. I enjoy being the star of the show and I detest when other players lower my enjoyment of a game. Time management isn’t a big concern for me, as I tend to be the one scheduling the guild events and trying to get everyone together.

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Nicodemus in San Fran…

I’m going to be in San Francisco the evening of November 26th through November 28th for the Dow Jones Consumer Technology Innovations conference at the Sofitel Hotel. This is sort of last minute, so I am scrambling around to make arrangements…I need a pickup from the airport (SFO) around 11p on the 26th and a couch to crash on. Anyone interested? Otherwise, I’ll head over to couchsurfing.com because I’m cool. Email me.

Yes, we are presenting at the conference. Something wicked about AI-driven evolving and adapting ecologies, as well as dynamically scaling player driven economies. Yeah, no kidding.

Explorer Content

A week ago, I noted the degree to which Explorers can chew through content. Explorers explore not only geography but also mechanics, so complex play options with many interactions can keep us going for a long time. For a great example of this, head over to Van Hemlock and see what he has been doing with Guild Wars. With hundreds of skills available, but only one skill bar available at any given time, Guild Wars provides lots of options for builds. He has been taking single skills and making builds around them, then taking them out for test runs. Read some of his posts to see how those are working out.

: Zubon

I Don’t Use the Test Server

I do not pay to beta. Well, being an MMO player, I effectively do, but let’s minimize that.
I do not want to get bored with the new content before it goes live. Why play it on Test when I will probably be playing it a dozen times live?
I do not expect bugs that I find to get fixed. If you find a bug and report it, it will probably go live and get fixed later, rather than delaying the patch.
I do not expect my opinion to matter. If am not going to play Forum Warrior to defend my view of any changes, and they don’t seem to have much of an impact anyway.
I do not have enough information to test. Patch notes of “improved stability” do not help me. Some changes are made without notes, some of which gets noticed on Test. Other changes are in the notes but are not there, some of which gets noticed on Test. Documentation of what the content should be and do can be incomplete or flat wrong. Figure out what you want me to test, tell me, and then I may actually be able to test it.
A Tale in the Desert spoiled me. If you found a bug there, it could be fixed live. There was no “wait for the next build in five days.” If half of something is broken, testing the other half around that is going to be annoying if not completely meaningless.

: Zubon

Staying Out of the Console Wars

By being a PC gamer, I don’t need to deal with this. Don’t click that link. That is Jason Booth, arguing that development for the PS3 is harder than the Xbox 360, because all its superior features just give developers ways to work around its problems to bring it back to normal. And then several hundred people named “Anonymous” showed up to say things that I cannot bring myself to quote, even for explanatory purposes. There are about 500 comments as I write this, and I am scheduling this to post a week in the future so I can purge my brain before coming back to our own comments thread.

Before anyone comments here, there will be no PS3 vs 360 discussion. None. If you wish to post that fans of [the other system] are deluded fanboys and trolls, there, Mr. Booth already has a ruined comments thread for you, to say nothing of the hundreds of forums so polluted. I’m sure that bribery and fellatio were involved in all your opponents’ projects, yes, thank you.

: Zubon

Tabula Rasa Reviews

Tabula Rasa is sending out some choice quotes from various reviews and I thought it would be fun to pick my own quotes from the same reviews.

Lets start with the quote they chose from a Gamespy review:

“The MMO genre just got a serious dose of adrenaline thanks to Richard Garriott’s reinvention of online combat.” – Gamespy

Here is a quote from the same review chosen by me:

“… complaints about a memory leak and slowdown from the community … gameplay bugs … quests that won’t give the player credit for completing them … triggers that only go off for only a few members in a party, forcing players to run missions multiple times.” – Gamespy

Continue reading Tabula Rasa Reviews

City of Videos

Did you see the City of Villains trailer back in the day? See it again for the first time, in l33t. Because you know this is how half the people on your server would be playing that scenario. (Check the DM of the Rings link to the right for how D&D players would do Lord of the Rings.)

How about a different take on it entirely? In Korea, it is “City of Hero.” Just the one? I don’t know any Korean; maybe they pluralize like in Japanese. Anyway, here is the City of Hero promo video (labeled CoV for some reason). WISDOM appears very infrequently in the English-language version, but I imagine they show up a lot in City of Hero. Note that the American hero spends the entire fight immobilized and helpless while Korean mages and martial artists destroy undead by the score. Does the target audience feel pandered to?

: Zubon

Character Contemplations 4: De-Frosta (Dark Blast/Thermal Radiation Corruptor)

Dark side, new healer. Having seen the villainous versions of heroes sprouting, I made my own. A Corruptor, I thought, could be the best of all possible things. You get the support that I love from Defenders but the damage that Frosta brought me. As it turns out, all their numbers are fairly lousy, but it sounds nice in the abstract.

De-Frosta. Give her Thermal Radiation so that she has fire. Frosta was blue and white, so we want red and black here, and black gives us Dark Blast. This will be a different sort of healer, one with a little more kick, but with the extra damage prevention that Dark Blast provides. On the whole, a useful but not terribly fun character.

Continue reading Character Contemplations 4: De-Frosta (Dark Blast/Thermal Radiation Corruptor)

I Love My New Headset

How good is my new headset? I bought it in the afternoon, and that afternoon we went back to get one for my wife. Excellent sound quality, both input and output, with comfortable ear pads that muffle outside sounds. It uses a USB input, which is great for those of us who have not bought fancy sound cards. Plus, we can use them on any computer, and we are going to test Karaoke Revolution on the PS2.

I recommend the Logitech ClearChat Pro USB. Cheaper than a good sound card, and the guys on Teamspeak are no longer giving me crap about how low my voice is. Mute and volume control are on the earpiece, so you get to feel all sci fi as you control things by tapping your ear.

: Zubon

Recent Searches

Previously

It’s that time again. Maybe everything else I write is nonsense that no one reads, but our results show that you love to see how people get here. So do we!

This time, I am skipping questions covered previously. Yes, people are still looking for Istvaan Shogaatsu, sharding purples, and tips about Dungeon Runners and The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. I will not distract them from the proper threads.

Before we hide potentially naughty bits beneath the break, I will note that someone must be messing with us on the whole “atitd cybercat” issue. We get about 5 hits a day for that, all from returning users. I am beginning to suspect my fellow rathunters, who know how this question torments me.

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