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Sneakin’ Around: My Country for a Horse

Gaming
Kaens in leather.
It was the only clean outfit, or something like that.

I need a new look.  I suppose I could always go with the dinner suit or the dress from last week, but I’d rather not.  To the left you’ll see a picture of me in my adventuring attire.  It looks like standard leather stuff, and that’s the problem.  I need to find a way to look less like I’m itching for a fight, while still retaining some stats so that I can survive the occasions when I’m trying to run away from one.

Browsing my way through the auction house, I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that remaining in leather is going to be hard if I want to get a look that I like, and might instead have to go with cloth in a few areas.  Obviously, as I level I will have more options, but for now I can only wear what I can wear, restricted by level, and so I am limited in my choices.  Still, there has to be something better than this.

Another issue I’ve been having is that my desire to leave town was bottoming out.  I mean, in Stormwind I can safely earn a few thousand exp every day and never have to worry.  But I decided to venture out and checked in with the Hero’s Call board to see where I should go for a level appropriate challenge.  I suspect I’ll constantly be back tracking, looking for old low level quests to pad out my growth, but I wanted something exciting and challenging.  The board said to go to Darkshire in Duskwood.  So I flew out to the logging camp and then headed out on foot.

I love exploring, but sometimes, running on foot through places you’ve already explored can be boring, but what option do I have?  Anyway, after a long trek there, I discovered that like much of the world the people of Darkshire just want me to kill stuff.  Everyone, that is, except Abercrombie.  He had a great series where I was sent out to deliver or gather things and everything was going swimmingly until he asked for some ghoul ribs, which you can’t find just laying around.  I was very disappointed to not be able to continue working with him, but on the bright side, I made a couple of levels and got past 20.

The horse.
My feet thank you, Abercrombie.

Level 21 and riding high…

The Great Divide II

Gaming
Orcs vs Humans
Pick a side, forever.

Last week I wrote about levels dividing players.  This week I’d like to look at another thing that divides players: Lore.

Now, Lore itself doesn’t really divide players, but design decisions made to support Lore does.  In World of Warcraft, you have two sides, the Alliance and the Horde, and every race in the game belongs to one side and not the other.  If you want to play an orc, you are Horde.  If you want to play a human, you are Alliance.  Now, if you want to play a human and your best friend wants to play an orc, you are screwed.  One of you is going to have to cave and play another race.

WoW isn’t the only game that does this.  In almost every game on the market that decides to define “sides” to enable a Realm vs Realm style of PvP play, they draw arbitrary lines in the sand and toss races on one side or the other.  This needs to stop.

Now, when I say Lore is the problem, I’m being a tad flippant.  In truth, from a database and coding viewpoint, it’s probably far easier to assign races to sides than to flag individual characters and then check the flag for any action for which side matters.  But if we assume the problem isn’t technical, that a human could be on either Horde or Alliance, then the only thing holding us back is Lore.  Humans and Orcs are on different sides because the Lore says so.

Of course, the solution to Lore problems is… Lore!

Why not have the majority of humans be Alliance, but a splinter faction have gone to the Horde?  Apply to same logic to each and every race in each and every game.  Even if you don’t want the Lore of your game to support a race being on both sides, you should allow your players to “betray” their side and go to the other.

Some people will say that dividing people into sides by race it to make finding enemies easier during those PvP/RvR interaction.  And yes, spotting an orc and knowing he’s a friend or foe at a glance is easy.  Know what else is easy to spot?  The same thing FPS games have been using for a long time: colors.  When a player enters an area of contention, just slap a colored tabard on them, red for one side and blue for the other.

Dividing players into sides is a perfectly valid design decision, but there really isn’t any good reason, in my opinion, to divide them along other lines as well.

Sneakin’ Around: Flowers, Fish, Ore and You

Gaming
Gone Fishing
I'm no mage, but look at me cast.

One of the main reasons I returned to the idea of leveling without fighting was because Blizzard added experience rewards to mining and herbalism.  That isn’t to say that I gain exp entirely from those activities…

Each race in the game has a progression.  Humans do their starter area, then Goldshire, then the logging camp area, and then they move on either East or West.  Night Elves move through Teldrassil toward Darnassus and then they’ll hop the boat to Darkshore.  And so on.  Being that I’m skipping every quest that requires killing, I have to keep rotating through the progressions and picking up the handful of delivery, exploration and true collection quests (true collection being where you get items off the ground or out of boxes and not from the lifeless corpses of your enemies).  And since I’m traveling a lot, I pick plenty of flowers and mine a bit of ore as I go.

The quests that I do get are quite exciting.  And dare I say, more exciting than when I do them with other characters.  For example, in Dolanaar a night elf asks for me to retrieve an Emerald Dreamcatcher from the Starbreeze village.  The village is swarming with furbolgs, and I have to sneak my way into the building where it is, and then wait for just the right moment to retrieve it.  There’s no time to hide again because I’ve been spotted, so I make a run for it.  With furbolgs right on my heels I dash through the village and onto the path and eventually they give up hope of catching me.  Later, I would pull a similar trick to deliver hearthstones to trapped miners and dig relics from the ice for the dwarves of Dun Morogh.

Of course, I don’t spend all my time picking flowers, mining ore and sneaking into buildings.  Sometimes I go fishing.  In Stormwind there are even people kind enough to have a couple of quests for me that involve catching fish.  And I also spent some time tracking down people for the Lunar Festival.

Level 12 and climbing…

The Pig And Whistle.
Forget it, Jake. It's Old Town.

While bumming around in Stormwind, I decided to ask a guard what inns I could stay out in the city.  They gave me two fine choices, one in the trade district and one in the dwarven district.  Neither of those was what I was looking for.  Both locations are extremely crowded, being near the auction houses and all.  Lots of foot traffic and spell casting at all hours of the night.  I needed something quiet, away from the action, so I headed to Old Town and there I stumbled across a lovely little place called the “Pig and Whistle Tavern” and while not strictly an inn, and clearly not considered one by the guards of Stormwind, they were willing to let me hang my hat there, and with some fine brews on tap and good food from the kitchen, I think it will do quite nicely.  It helps that it’s a stones throw from just about everything I want out of Stormwind.  And even though I’m not overly fond of WoW’s in-your-face puns and pop culture, this one I like.

Sneakin’ Around

Gaming
Kaens
Kaens, human rogue

Years ago I tried an experiment that I originally titled “Sneaking Sixty” and then after the Burning Crusade released was retitled “Sneaking Seventy“.  I had to give it up because exploration exp got killed at some point so that you couldn’t walk a low level character into a high level area and get gobs of exp for surviving the journey, and there just weren’t enough quests to get the job done.

However, with the release of Cataclysm (actually I believe it was in one of the patches leading up to it), they’ve added experience to mining and herbalism.  So, since “Sneaking Eighty-five” sounds less cool that the two previous incarnations and because I’m certain the level cap will continue to increase, I’m reviving this experiment as “Sneakin’ Around”.

On the Moon Guard server, Kaens, a human rogue, will endeavor to make his way through the World of Warcraft without killing anything.  He’ll ferry documents, deliver messages, fish, mine ore, pick wild flowers and explore the world, all without a weapon in his hand.

Of course, upon logging in, I am faced with a dilemma: the very first quest is to kill things.  So now I must decide, can I just forgo the entire newbie area or will I need someone to “assist” me through a few quests to get me on my way?  The answer… next time.

Tell Your Customers

Random Thoughts
We (don't) Care!
Don't let this be your motto!

Currently, I deal with two companies on a regular basis to whom which we pay a lot of money.  One of them, a co-location facility, is fantastic at communication.  Every time they have scheduled maintenance or even unplanned issues, I get an email.  In fact, I get several.  For a scheduled issue I get an announcement, a reminder, a notification of start, a progress update if the issue is long enough, more if the issue keeps going, a notification of resolution and an after action report.  For unscheduled issues it’s the same only without the lead time.  I even get these emails when the issue isn’t going to affect us, just so I know what is going on and on the off chance that is does end up affecting us.

The other, to whom we pay much more money and they handle out internet and phones, we get nothing.  Even when we have outages, getting an explanation from them is like pulling teeth.  Our internet access, which is needed for our customers to use our products, goes down for twenty minutes, or bounces up and down for several hours (down for 30 seconds, up for 3 minutes, down for 20 second, up for a minute, down for a minute, up for 5, etc..) and the best I get from them is “we’ll look into it”.

Having worked in the telecom industry, and from dealing with various companies over the years, I know that all this equipment is monitored and logged.  Someone, somewhere had to have gotten notification of the problem, so why didn’t they toss out an email that said, “Hey, we are seeing issues in XXX area and some of our customers may be affected. We are working on it!” and later a nice “We found the problem and it was resolved!”  I mean, shit, the co-location facility provides an after action report with more detail than I know what to do with…

The failure was in the 3rd card of the router in room 3E1 that caused packet loss to the network that exceeded the threshold and switched the room to its backup route at the same time room 3E2 was being fault tested which overloaded the network and crashed it.  Our customers in 3E2 were immediately switched to their primary route experiencing only a few seconds of outage but room 3E1 was offline for 63 seconds while the backup route was restarted.  The 3rd card of the router in 3E1 was replaced and the room was placed back on its primary route within one hour.  We have scheduled a replacement of parts of the backup route for tomorrow to ensure it doesn’t crash again when it is needed.  Next week we will begin a full equipment test of all routes that should take two weeks to complete to ensure this same issue doesn’t happen to the other rooms not affected at all by this issue.

All of this comes without me ever once having to call anyone.  Meanwhile, our telecom tells us:

We think there was an outage in XXX, which shouldn’t affect you but might have, and since your service is up now I’m going to close the ticket.

And this is after calling to open a ticket, waiting three hours, escalating through four levels of management and threatening to cancel our service and go with another provider.  I wish I could say that my threat was more than empty, but as I said, I used to work in telecom, and this is par for the course.  No matter who we switch to we’d get the same level of information about failures out of them.

Seriously guys… if there was a line out, or an equipment failure, or someone crossed a line or rebooted something they shouldn’t have, just admit it.  Tell me exactly what it is so that I understand that you actually know what happened, because your current level of non-communication only leads me to believe that you have no idea what happened.

This applies to just about every business in the world.  Admit fault, explain failure and detail resolution.  Even if it all goes over your customer’s head, you have at least demonstrated that you know what you are doing.  Hand waving and secrecy just makes your customers have less faith in your abilities.  If your team is competent, you should want to show it off.

Paintball

Random Thoughts

I had never played paintball.  So, when a deal popped up on Living Social a while back, a few friends and I (who had also not played paintball before) bought in.  It took a long while, but we finally went.

In a word… meh.

I suppose I can see the draw that some people have to it.  Being able to shoot other people isn’t something you get to do very often.  But overall, it was fairly lackluster.  First off, there were four of us and we mixed in with a larger group, and they put two of us on one team and two on the other.  Frankly, I’d have had more fun with my friends being on my team since I had no desire to shoot my friends.  Next, they lead a team to each end of a field which was dotted with forms of cover.  They counted to three and said “Go!”  People ran to cover and then started shooting.

The first round we played, my team won.  I didn’t shoot anybody.  In fact, I spent most of the time trading shots with another guy who eventually got shot by a teammate of mine.  We had spent nearly the whole time swinging out, shooting and then ducking behind cover.  Then, suddenly, we just sorta won.

The second round we played, my team lost.  I got shot… kinda.  I mean, my gun got shot.  I didn’t even see it happen, but a ref told me I had been hit and there was paint on my gun.  Umm… okay.  I watched from the sidelines as a repeat of the previous game happened.  People hiding, swinging out to shoot occasionally, and when one team was down enough players one dude ran out from the side and shot the last two players on the losing team.

The third round, I can’t tell you who won, because I don’t know.  The full seven minutes ran out and they called it off.  Not that it mattered.  I got shot in the first fifteen seconds.  By my own team.  I ran forward to a position (we were on a different field this time, larger, more cover, a spot of trees in the center, and more people too), I was crouched over, and then felt the painful sting of being shot, right in the gap between my shirt and my pants, right on the skin.  If I were so tattooed, I’d have been shot on the tramp stamp.  The girl who shot me (and I know it was a girl because the only people behind me were three girls who refused to leave the original, completely out of range, bunker) was no more than ten feet away.  That freakin’ hurt!  Team kills count, so I was out and I walked off the field and walked off the pain.

Round four, same larger field, other side.  We found good cover and began shooting our foes.  Minutes went by of a pitched battle, and I think I shot someone… I don’t know, because with like thirty people on each side and so many paintballs flying around it gets hard to tell if it was me or some other shooter.  All was going well, and then someone on the other team, who was sitting out of traditional range, switched to mortar fire.  He couldn’t hit us firing straight, so he started arcing his shots.  I’m going to pause here and tell you one of the rules of the field: if someone is hiding behind a low barrier, you are not allowed to come over the top and shoot them from above.  This rule exists for two reasons, 1) shooting down on someone’s head can really hurt them, and 2) them shooting upward at your chin (and by virtue of the equipment, the gap between your face and mask enabling them to possibly hit your mouth and nose) can really get you hurt.  So back to the mortar moron… if he’s arcing, that means that the paintballs are coming from above, you know, as if he was shooting down on us.

Boom! Headshot!
Right on the top of my head.

Yeah.  Some people suck.  That really hurt.

Anyway, despite how much I’ve written here, the day was basically a check mark.  Play paintball?  Check.  No reason to ever do it again.

Minecraft

Gaming
Sphere in a Box
The top of the box is pulled back to reveal the construction within.

A few weeks ago, I caved in and bought Minecraft.  It is a fun little game.  The game can be played single player, or multiplayer.  Currently, multiplayer is a little broken – the monsters can’t hurt you, in fact, nothing can hurt you, so jumping off stuff is fun!  Multiplayer servers can also be modified to allow players the ability to summon items instead of mining them.  The picture to the right is what I’m currently building on one such server.  If you want to spend some time, you can go through the map of that server and see all the awesome things that people are building.

Anyway, the one thing I really dig about this game is that it shows what an indie developer can do, and that high end photo realistic visuals aren’t needed if the game is fun to play.  Minecraft is a blast and it has a very 8-bit look to it.

The game is still technically in “Alpha” (the phase before Beta, which is the phase before release), however you can purchase it now for about $15, which gets you the Alpha and free upgrades to future releases.  If you wait until release you’ll have to pay double, at least, and you’ll miss out on months of fun!

Another thing I like about this game, and the buzz it is getting, is the idea that, if embraced, some of the free form creation that exists here might find their way into other games, other MMOs.  Though I do think it will work best on a small scale.  Can you imagine World of Warcraft allowing people to make their own buildings and destroy terrain?  Insanity!

Dragon*Con 2010: The Aftermath

Dragon*Con

Day Four is done, and the con has drawn to a close.  The MMORPG Track’s final panels ran smooth, and it was great to have about forty people come by to tell us what we did right and wrong and looking forward toward next year at the Post MMOrtem.

Today, the day after, is about sleep and unpacking and staying off my feet as much as possible.

This year was my first on staff with Dragon*Con and the MMORPG Track, and I have to say that I really enjoyed it.  Not only are the track staff a great bunch of folks, and it helps that I really enjoy the subject matter, but just being a part of the staff just feels great.  I lost count of the number of times people asked me for help on where to find things or what was going on and I was able to help them out.  (It is also a testament to my many years of attendance and that I’m a giant schedule/map memorizing nerd that I knew what to answer most of the time.)  Plus, there are bonuses.  Like, you know when you are walking through the tunnel and you see some people stopping to take photos even though there are signs that say not to and you can’t do much but maybe yell at them?  Well, when I saw that, I just walked up, put my hand on their shoulder and said, “Hey, great costume, and you guys deserve to get photos, but you can’t do it in the tunnel. Please take it to one of the hotels on either end where there is more room.”  And the best part?  They listened and moved.  Not once did anyone ever give me a tough time, they just said sorry, smiled and moved.  Sure, a bonus like that doesn’t get you to skip lines, but it does earn you the gratitude of the dozens and dozens of people who were stuck in a slow tunnel thanks to the photo takers.  It feels good to help make the con a good experience for the people who attend.  I’m really looking forward to being a part of it again next year.

Well, maybe… on the last day, the wife and I got some Chinese food and I got quite possibly the best fortune ever.

Best Fortune Ever
click for full size version

Yep, that says I will be the President of a small country.  So, I might be busy.

Happy Valentine’s Day

Pictures
Birds flying high You know how I feel Sun in the sky You know how I feel Reeds driftin' on by You know how I feel It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life For me And I'm feeling good Fish in the sea You know how I feel River running free You know how I feel Blossom in the tree You know how I feel It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life For me And I'm feeling good Dragonfly out in the sun you know what I mean, don't you know Butterflies all havin' fun you know what I mean Sleep in peace when the day is done, that's what I mean And this old world is a new world And a bold world For me Fooor me Stars when you shine You know how I feel Scent of the pine You know how I feel Yeah freedom is mine And I know how I feel It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life hu It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life It's a new dawn It's a new day It's a new life It's a new life For me And I'm feeling good
A dizzy heart...

Just a quick picture for the day… while drawing this, I hit some button in gimp that caused the program to lock up.  Since I hadn’t saved the file I decided to just let it sit.  The program wasn’t responding but it was cranking at 50-60% CPU.  It took nearly 2 hours, but finally gimp came back to life and I didn’t have to start over.  *wipes sweat off his brow*

Happy Halloween!

Pictures

Have a safe and happy Halloween!

A little more than a doodle, but a doodle just the same.
A little more than a doodle, but a doodle just the same.

Finally back for another Saturday doodle and it being the day that it is the doodle fits the theme.  I limited myself to black and orange, and I’m not 100% happy with the moon, but it is what it is.  I even messed around with some layering and putting in a border.

Trick or treat!