Category: Random Thoughts

The general category for posts on this blog.

The Postman

Random Thoughts

This weekend I got my first job to level 20 in Free Realms.  Postman.  To be honest, I would not have thought this would be the first, but grinding postal jobs is relatively easy.  Unlike cooking, it requires no supplies, and unlike pretty much all the other free jobs, you can just sit at the mailbox and play the mail sorting games over and over.  Throw on top of that a star bonus, and I went from 14 to 20 very quickly.

The reason I chose to focus on Postman was because I wanted to create a guild, and you have to be level 15 in some job to do that, and Postman was at 14.  My next closest was Brawler at 10 and Chef at 9.  Adventurer was also at 9, but that job is the longest/hardest to level since you have to actually run around discovering stuff.

So, anyway, with my Postman job at 20, I created my guild. <and what army>  Initially I was going to go for an alternate spelling, like calling it the “anwatt army” or “ahnwot army”, but in the end I decided just to go traditional, so now in game I appear as “Jhaer Buegren <and what army>”.  If you haven’t gotten it yet, its a play on the idea of when you say you can beat someone and they retort, “Oh yeah? You and what army?”

Of course, I am the only member of my guild, because my friends list is STILL empty.  I just can’t seem to get online on the same server at the same time as the people I know who play.  Perhaps in the future this will change.  If you are playing Free Realms and want to join, let me know and I’ll look for you.

In the meantime, I’m still grinding out quests trying to see if I can exhaust the free content.  Sanctuary is getting pretty bare, and I’ve put a large dent in that area with the hedge maze that I can never remember the name of… the real trick is making note of the repeatable quests.  No offense to the game (or any game for that matter), but repeatable quests are rarely designed to be truly repeatable.  Sure, you can do them over and over, but the quest text often doesn’t lend itself to explaining WHY I can repeat it.  If you have lost something and I have found it, seeing that you’ve lost it again and I can find it again is particularly lame.

The freeloading continues…

The Problem with Ticketmaster

Random Thoughts

I absolutely understand why there are service charges on tickets.  I get it, and I even support it.  People need to get paid for their work, and since musicians actually get so little of their album sales they take the lion share of the ticket sale, and the promoter, the venue, and the staff, and of course running a service like Ticketmaster isn’t free, so they need a cut to pay for running their service that lets you get the tickets.

The problem I have is that the presentation of the service fee blows.  They sneak up on you.  I go to the site, find my concert, see the ticket price is $23, pick my ticket amount, hit the “Find Tickets” button and then, WHAM!, now they are $32 each.  You know, I don’t mind the $9 service charges, I understand them, but it would have been nice to have seen, on the original price listing page, an all-inclusive price.  Even if it was shown as “$23 (+ $9 service fees)” or “$23 ($32 with service fees)” or just “$32”, something to let me know upfront what the total cost per ticket is going to be rather than slapping it on at the end.

This is ultimately why people dislike Ticketmaster.  It is not the service charges, it is the presentation of the service charges.  People just don’t respond well in any context when they are given a price, and then at a later point told the actual purchase price is more.  I mean, if you went to buy a car and the price tag said “$23,000”, but once you talk to the sales rep he explains that there are $9,000 in service fees, so to drive it off the lot you have to pay $32,000, you’d be a tad upset that the price tag didn’t tell you that upfront.  Or how about if you went to a restaurant and bought a steak dinner listed as $23 only to find out there is a $9 preparation fee. Sales tax is one thing, since its a relatively fixed amount, but seeing a service charge after you’ve seen the original price is another, especially with Ticketmaster service charges being as unpredictable as they are.  I’ve seen $100 tickets with a $9 charge, and I’ve also seen $9 tickets with a $15 charge (yes, the service charge was almost twice the price of the ticket).  There is nothing on the initial page that lets you know what your final price might be.

Anyway, that’s my gripe of the week.

The Art of the Pull

Random Thoughts

This past weekend I spent my time in Free Realms grinding out some Brawler levels.  I was only level 4 and had that stupid “Get level 5!” as my only brawl quest.  Well, I had other quests for the brawler, but they all required that I fight things recommended for level 5 and over.  So I went and found a few random encounters and got level 5, then set about questing again.

Back in the days of EverQuest, I played a monk.  The reason I chose a monk was because the guy who introduced me to the game said it was hard to play and was the class least reliant on equipment.  And it was true, in the beginning.  My monk was about 80% effective when “naked”.  Of course, as the game expanded, monks became just as reliant on gear as every other class.  But the point is, I played a monk.  One thing monks did in EQ was called “pulling”.  If you aren’t familiar with the term, it means that my group would pick a safe spot to sit and I would run out and find monsters for us to fight, dragging them back to the group for the kill.  The reason monks did this was because they got a skill called Feign Death which allowed them to escaped monsters if they happened to get too many chasing them.  Play dead, monsters go away.  As all monks did, I learned the observable mechanics of the game, how monsters would walk back to spawn points at different times, how some would “reset” their “hate list” upon reaching their spawn, and lots of other little things.  Over time, as I observed more and became a better puller, I used Feign Death less and less.  I learned how to pluck a single monster from a group just by standing in a particular place a particular distance away at a particular angle.  Honestly, being a puller in EQ was probably what kept me playing for so long.  One of the main reasons I quit was at the high end game during raiding your team only needed one or two monks for pulling, and any extra monks were just a part of the killing team.  Auto-attack is boring, especially after a life roaming zones in search of danger.

The point of that little trip down memory lane is to preface the following: Monster pathing and aggro hasn’t changed much over at SOE.

I find myself going under equipped and lower level than I should into brawler fights and using my monk skills to splits monsters and fight them one at a time when they are clearly intended to be fought in pairs or threes.  You can even run from most groups of monsters and watch your “radar” to see when most of them turn around and go home, leaving just one tenacious follower to combat.  I’ve even gone so far as to defeat “events” that clearly shouldn’t be something I do alone.  In one quest instance, you get to a certain point and it triggers waves of monsters to attack.  If you stand and fight, you have to take them on 3 or 4 at a time, but instead you can run off to the side and hide, wait for all the waves to show up, and then use aggro and positioning to pluck them one at a time out of the mess.  Sure, it takes longer, but seeing as how actually finding people to group is one of the most difficult things to do in Free Realms, taking the time and doing it on my own is preferable.

Anyway, I managed to get myself 4 levels doing Brawler quests, and then I headed back to Sanctuary to see if I could exhaust it like I did Seaside.  I haven’t yet, but I’m getting close.

XI

Random Thoughts

From 1998 to 2009, as of today, this blog officially goes to eleven.

I put up a pretty good summary post last year at ten, but the Spinal Tap fan in me just couldn’t let this year go by without a mention.  Now that that’s done, I’ll mosey along…

Use the Tools Provided

Random Thoughts

The fundamental problem with Web 2.0 and social networking tools is a lack of blocking and filtering options, and when they exist the reluctance of users to use them.

When I look at a site like Twitter, I think they have done it right and provided the proper tools to manage their brand of social networking, and yet I see so few people using them.  If you were to look at my account, you’d see that I have around 44 people following me (I say around because that can change at any time).  I could easily have 200 followers, but it wouldn’t mean anything.  Every person who follows me, I read their account, if they are say the kinds of things I want to hear I follow them back.  If you follow me and I don’t follow you, it doesn’t mean I won’t follow you in the future, it just means that what I read so far didn’t excite me enough to add you to my main feed, but I’ll check back later to see if that changes.  If, however, I read your account and find what you have to say in poor taste or your account is nothing but advertising, I will block you.  (Keep in mind, I don’t base this on a single tweet, it has to be a long held pattern.)  Blocking on Twitter has the effect that not only do I not see you, but you can’t see me.  More people need to do this.  I see spamming accounts following thousands of people, and unless that is thousands of other spam accounts, it means people aren’t blocking.  And this behavior isn’t limited just to Twitter.  Any social network site that publicly displays how many “friends” or “followers” you have is subject to it.

The problem, of course, is that the number becomes too important.  That number shouldn’t matter.  Why should I care if someone has eleventy billion friends?  The thing I should care about is whether or not the content that person produces is worth reading.  In the end, that’s the thing I consider the biggest failure of Web 2.0.  It is supposed to be about the content, but most sites wind up including some number like views or friends counts that becomes the focus over the content.

I’m not alone here.  Trent Reznor, a person who has embraced social networking but is now turning away from it, had this to say:

We’re in a world where the mainstream social networks want any and all people to boost user numbers for the big selloff and are not concerned with the quality of experience.

The power to make social network sites better is in your hands.  Use the tools provided.

Storming the Brain

Random Thoughts

So, as previously noted, I’m working on a little side project for myself and as I get into it and through it, I figured I would blog about steps that I have taken and maybe get some discussion going.

To begin with, I had an idea.  It was a very general sort of thing which I then nailed down to a few specifics.  In this case, what I am building is a web based tool, so I nailed it down to being web based, likely written in PHP, and with a database for a back end, likely to be MySQL.  With the initial idea fairly solid, the next phase is the brainstorming…

How I usually approach this is to get out a blank piece of paper and ask “Given no limits at all, what features can this thing have?”  And I start filling out the page with lots of craziness.  After I have a nice sizable chunk going, I start to go through the list and try to group them.  The first group is the “1.0” version, these are the features that are absolutely required in order for the product to be worthwhile, the foundation, the core.  Of course, in my world, version 1.0 is almost never the release product.  1.0 is the version you test the waters with to see if people actually want what you have.  Once you’ve locked in those base features, you take all the rest of your ideas and start looking for ways to group them together.  In my opinion, you never want a release of a product to be scatter shot, adding tiny features all over.  It is better if your release overhauls one section and really fleshed out one piece with new ideas and fixes, at least until tiny scattered fixes are all that is left.

Once I’ve got most, if not all, of my original brainstorm ideas grouped together, its time to actually make the core a reality.  Brainstorming is part of the iterative design process.  When the core is done, we’ll do another round of brainstorming before deciding what elements will make the next release.

Have any things you do in your brainstorming design phase of a project?  Feel free to share…

200

Random Thoughts

It has been very close for a while now, but I finally hit the mark, and maintained it for a few days (maintaining is the key).  Two hundred pounds.

The best part about this is that I am doing it slow and steady.  I’m watching my diet, but I don’t feel like I’m starving or cheating myself.  I’m exercising, but I don’t feel like I’m “working out”.  I’m just getting leaner, and stronger, and feeling better.  I don’t think I would ever actually want to do one of those crash diet and exercise programs where you lose fifty pounds in two weeks because I don’t think I’d actually keep the weight off.  But the way I am approaching it, breaking one bad habit at a time and instilling one good habit at a time, it feels good and I doubt I’ll have trouble sticking with it.

I’m still doing my 100 push-ups and 100 sit-ups daily (most of the time, some days I skip but I’d like to think I still hit 5 days a week).  Before spring got here I was doing a cardio step thing once a week, but I’ve since replaced it with mowing the lawn and other yard work.  I use a push reel mower for the lawn.  Look it up, you’ll think I’m crazy.  But crazy like a fox…  I’m to the point now where I’ll keep the yard work and try to add a cardio bit somewhere in the middle of the week.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for now.  199, here I come…

Left 4 Dead 2

Random Thoughts

The big news out of E3 for zombie afficianados so far is Left 4 Dead 2.  Hopefully this doesn’t mean that Valve is abandoning the original and keep releasing content for it.  Anyway, the new game has four new people and the setting is New Orleans.  I can’t wait to fight the living dead while running through the graveyards of this town…

Here is the trailer.

Oh, and its releasing in November.

Colin

Random Thoughts

I’ve always been interested in low-budget film making.  When I wear my writer’s hat, many of the ideas I scrawl on paper are ones that could probably be done admirably for a couple dozen thousand dollars or more… but with the help of Facebook and other volunteer avenues, one man has made a zombie film, Colin, for the low low low budget of just $70.  Yes, that’s seventy dollars.

Apparently it is wowing people at Cannes, so I really want to see it at some point… in the meantime, take a look at these clips:

The movie looks rough, and “shakey camera”â„¢ doesn’t have many fans, but I’ll be keeping my eye on it.