Pick of the week. 11.05.08 edition

Not a new song, but certainly a good one for the week.

edit:  I’ve decided that I can’t just leave it at one.

I’ll go back to totally new things next week.

EA to strip customers of games for inappropriate forum behavior?

Apparently EA is rolling out a new system with their new forums-a ban on the forums is a ban from their games.  Because users sign into the forums using their masteraccount information, they can restrict access to any online content those games provide… and are apparently willing to flex that muscle to keep conversations appropriate and pro-EA.

Couple this with the DRM PR disaster that was Spore…. not a pretty picture for EA, which is a shame since they seem to be poised to release more “fresh” IP like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge.

11.03.08 UPDATE:
EA has come forward to say that they will not be banning people from games for forum misconduct.

Pick of the week- 10.28.08 edition

In an effort to expand my musical appreciation, I’m going to try to find something new everyweek to feature and listen to.  I’ve been listening to Pandora a lot at work since its one of the few sites that isn’t blocked and I rediscovered Pelican and Isis in my collection last week.  After plugging them in and adding a couple bands like Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky, Maserati came up.  Which brings us to my first pick.  Initially I wanted to pick “I Have a Dagger, It’s Shaped Like a Lightning Bolt” off their first album, 37:29:24, but its out of print and wasn’t on youTube or Last.fm, so you’ll have to live with Inventions off their latest record:

Maserati
Inventions
from: Inventions for the New Season
2007 Temporary Residence
You can listen to the Pandora Station that I pulled this pick from here.

Evolution

I went back to world of warcraft.

I’ll take a second and let the feeling of defeat that I hope that sentence communicated sink in.

Defeat?  Yes, defeat.  At least for the time being WAR is just too much for me to commit to.  The grind is mindless and boring.  No, I’m not saying that WoW’s isn’t mindless, and it’s CERTAINLY boring, but its over. The fact of the matter is that I have a level 70 character that I can play end-game content with.  I don’t feel like there’s enough reward to warrant the months of casually grinding endless scenarios to reach 40 in warhammer.  It’s a good game with a lot of potential, but not for me right now.  Maybe that will change next month when Wrath of the Lich King is supposed to come out and I’ll have to grind to 80, but who knows?

Speaking of which, I’ve been around WoW a long-ass time.  I wouldn’t consider myself an expert on anything, but I was looking over the old patch notes last night and realized that I’ve been playing WoW since somewhere around 1.2.  Mara was in the game when I started and Diremaul wasn’t.  In preparation for the new expansion, I was thinking of doing a series of posts documenting the extreme changes I’ve seen the rogue class go through–the evolution of the metagame.  There’s a really good read on what a game is, and what the metagame contributes to that here.  Everytime the powers that be change something in the game they effect the metagame.  We’ve seen a fair number of changes, the diligent folks over at shadowpanther have gone to great lengths to put them together here.  While I disagree with some of their distinctions between buff, fix, and “usefull addition” it’s a pretty good list.

I’ll try to get started on that tonight, but I’ve got a million things to do… (like farm Baron’s mount, and level enchanting.)

The soundtrack to my Life.

Would probably end up being old MIDI files from the Legend of Zelda.  Seriously.  One of my co-workers posted this today, and so I thought it would be fun to do while I ate my Life.  (the cereal, no joke–hence the capital “L”)  This ended up being my list:

 

Opening credits:
“An orgy of critics” – Say anything

Waking up:
“Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (reprise)” – The Beatles

First day at school:
“Andrei” – Squarepusher

Falling in love:
“The Reaping” – Coheed and Cambria

Breaking up:
“Through her eyes” – Dream Theater

Prom:
“Something in the way” – Nirvana

Life’s okay:
“Spitting Venom” – Modest Mouse

Mental breakdown:
“The Dance of Eternity” – Dream Theater

Driving:
“The Great Destroyer” – Nine Inch Nails

Flashback:
“Adagio”- “Various Artists”… looks like I mislabeled a CD.

Getting back together:
“Sin” – Nine Inch Nails

Wedding:
“Summer’s End” – Foo Fighters

Final battle:
“Dethharmonic” – Dethklok (perfect.)

Death scene:
“Ten Speed (of God’s Blood and Burial)” – Coheed and Cambria

Funeral song:
“J’aime pas l’Art” – datA

End credits:
“Testify” – Stevie Ray Vaughan

 

Some funny stuff.  My funeral is apparently going to be an Indie rave.  I was sad that the following song didn’t come up, though because its probably the most awesome thing ever.

In other, unrelated news, some of my college friends were featured on G4. (greg and will don’t have websites, so I can’t link to them… they were supposed to be “of” and  ”my”)  From what I can tell, Will put it up on instructables and AOTS grabbed it. I was sad that I was too hung-over to actually go to that Halloween party where they won.

The cake of world RvR is a lie.

I decided this weekend to put WAR down for a while.  I got really discouraged by the endless scenario grind and the general lackluster feeling of both my zealot and magus.  I started a black orc (named Kgb), but really didn’t want to push another lowbie through tier1.  So instead of busting out guitar hero 3 which is my go-to game for downtime, I decided to catch up on a series I had started a long time ago and never got to finish:  Half-life2.  I played episode 1 from start to finish over the weekend, and also managed to complete Portal.  I have to say, Portal is quite possibly the most fun single-player game I’ve ever played in the last 3 years.  That doesn’t say all that much when you consider that 90% of my game time in those years was spent playing WoW.  It was a damned good game though.  There were so many little things that added up to a great experience.  The game could have been confusing, disorienting and nasuea inducing, but it was crafted in such a way that it was challenging, fun, and delightful.

I wish there had been cake.

I went back to warhammer on Monday, a day that was a federal skip day.  Like senior skip day, except government approved.  A couple of friends of mine from WoW had recently come over to play with the rest of us and had caught up to me… not all that difficult a task since I play maybe an hour or two a day during the work week.  After some difficulty with the in-game chat, which is terrible by the way, we got hooked up and went off to go kill things.  My tank friend and myself managed to duo a PQ hero down to ~30% when a horde of people came along and helped us kill it off.   I mention this only because I really have a fun time bending and stretching the limits of how things are supposed to be done. This wasn’t a wild departure from what the developers planned I’m sure, but coming from a class in WoW that you just didn’t NEED to get things done it was a good time.  WoW was all about the holy trinity: a tank, a healer, and a mage.  1 to take the damage, 1 to heal it, and one to provide free food, water, and CC. I used to love going on stealth runs with friends to see if we could down a certain boss.  

Later that night I got together with another guy and we decided we’d wander around and kill anyone we came across, which was a whopping 3 people before we got zerged.  I was really surprised to see how much experience we got for killing someone though.  We downed a guy 2 levels above us and each got 2200 XP.  as much as a lame 15 minute quest to gather some wood, or save a guy’s daughter from being raped by trolls. This gets back to what I feel is the biggest challenge facing WAR’s lasting potential.  The night could have been a lot more fun, we wandered around for about an hour and ran into 3 people.  The town we flew into from the capital city had 50-75 players in it, all just waiting for their scenario queues to pop. Leveling is a game of queuing for scenario after scenario and in each tier there’s a single popular scenario that will pop time after time after time despite you queuing for all of them.  So you play the same mini-game a couple hundred times and then move on to the next tier when you level out where you’ll play a different mini-game a couple thousand times…. etc.  The issue is that it’s the best XP/hour and most people are interested in hitting the level cap as quickly as possible so it’s the way to go.  Lets call this “WoW-syndrome”.  This is because there was next to nothing to do in WoW unless you were level 60.  Once you were 60 you could start collecting the armor sets, go on raids, do battlegrounds, be worth a damn in world PvP… so everyone rushed to 60.  The easiest way to level past a certain point was to just sit in a field and kill a million boars… quite possibly the most mind-numbing 4 days of my life was the grind from 58-60… i was playing 4-8 hours a day killing the same things over and over and over and over so that I could go on a raid with my guild and have fun.  Why did I have to wait til 60 to have fun?  Why should I have to wait til level 40?  I don’t.  Most people are glossing over the fact that controlling lower tiers is the key to controlling the highest tiers.  Most people don’t realize that when they get to 40 and haven’t done anything but instanced PVP they have no idea how to handle themselves in an open environment.

I put up with some decidedly annoying factors in the game like everyone looking the same, and the spells animations being choppy because I write them off as how the game was optimized to provide LARGE scale battles between hundreds of people.  This 10 versus 10 mini-game pvp isn’t going to cut it for me anymore, if WAR continues down this path we’ll see most people go back to WoW where the pvp minigames are worse, but the combat and general feel of the game is better.  There’s a good long read on the subject here.

fallout3 invades the Metro Center

I have a picture that I’ll put up when I get home, but I was excited to see the posters go up for Fallout3 all over the Metro Center metro station on Monday of this week.  I can’t decide if its because its Fallout, or because they replaced a bunch of anti-union, anti-PETA and anti-lawyers (though I can’t say I disagree with the last one) posters.  Apparently if you overeat you can sue the restaurant for giving you too big a portion.  This is what I learned from the anti-lawyer poster.

Anyway, I’ve only ever played the first half-hour of fallout 1, but I know that many people are looking forward to the new game.  What better place to advertise a game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC than in Washington DC?  (It probably helps that Bethesda, the company who made the game, is local.)  I wonder who their target audience is with this move.  I see two possibilities: 1) Professional commuters with nothing better to do (at least after 11/4) at night than pass the hours with fallout.  2) school groups coming into the city for tours, etc.  The metro seems a suspect location for the latter because how many schools take the metro when they come?   I wonder what it costs to put up all that advertising, and what returns Bethesda will see on it.

It still makes me smile to walk past someone in a three piece suit puzzling over a fallout ad, much like this guy.

Meet Deprivation. Plus, my thoughts on WAR’s UI editor.

I decided a week or two ago to stop playing my Zealot (autumnrayne) in WAR and to instead try a DPS class.  I had made a magus to reserve the name Deprivation (stolen from a horde rogue on Archimonde)  So I camped Autumn in town and started to level the magus.  What a difference! I really understood why people were saying that the zealot needed a bit more offensive power. Even with the +25% dmg -20% healing tactic, Autumn took a good 2 minutes to kill something his level.  Deprivation can burn through a pile of enemies in a couple seconds.

I think that I’m going to try to keep a character in each tier all the time.  I love the scenarios and it’s so hard to predict what classes are going to be needed in the end-game.  One of the reasons I burnt out so badly at WoW was because I didn’t take my time and enjoy everything that the game had to offer. (not that it had that much…)  I messed around til 35, quit and then when i picked it back up again all my friends were 60, so I rushed to the level-cap.  Hopefully, taking my time and just focusing on having a good time will alleviate any burnout, and it will also give me a host of characters to play should one end up getting hit with the nurf a bit to hard.  Not to mention that WAR rewards you for taking your time and just exploring or messing around.  It really has a lot to offer people who are stopping to smell the roses and enjoy the game.   I had so much fun playing the magus that I took him all the way to 12.  I picked Autumn up again last night and pushed him to 16.  I’ll take him all the way to 22 and then roll another character… I’m thinking a tank this time.

I spend some of my time at work reading over the class forums and was delighted to discover that I had managed to have a great time rolling what seems to be considered the worst class ever. . . This was the same thing I had read about the zealot during Open Beta. (OB)  So now I’ve managed to have a good time with two of the apparently worst classes.

One of the things I really love about WAR is the UI editor (i stole this picture from the warhammer alliance forums.):

Warhammer in-game UI editor

In WoW you had to be a code-monkey to move anything around (or at least download someone else’s work)  Mythic has recognized that everyone is going to want something different in their UI-some will want the health bars at the top of their screen, some will want it next to their character.  The ingame tool to move, disable, and scale all of the elements (including the extraneous art) is incredible.  The only thing i wish I could do was save different layouts, sets of addons, and configs for different characters.  I set Autumn’s UI to show friendly healthbars when they were damaged.  It only takes a second when i play Deprivation to go in and change it to enemies, but why should I have to?  I downloaded a grid addon to make keeping an eye on everyone’s health a lot easier when I played my healer.  I don’t care what other people’s health is on my DPS character, can i get an option to load different sets of addons?  WoW did a pretty good job with this and I would like to see Mythic roll out this feature in the future as more people start to roll alts.

Since the MMO-world tends to be pretty full of its own terms and abbreviations, I’m going to attempt to put together a list of the ones that I use.  Check out the glossary page if you’re confused.

PS: and as a side note i reinstalled Quake 4 because i was having cravings for strafe-jumping fun…that might work its way into this blog in the near future.

I’ve been breathing through my mouth lately.

Welcome to my new blog.  Yay, another one.  This makes 3 for the record–I had my thesis, my random crap, and my website…  Oh and then there was that one about how blogging was for mouth-breathers and keyboard turners.  If these terms go over your head, you might want to look them up… but they make a nice segue into what this whole thing is going to be about: video games.  I’ll probably end up unable to avoid ranting about politics or something else, but for the most part our focus here will be on video games.  I’d like to focus on picking out elements to examine in the light of usability, but i’ll probably sneak some “OMG BW’s are OP” in there too.  (translation: oh my god, bright wizard’s are overpowered)  If you couldn’t tell from that snippet of awesome english skillz I’ve been playing warhammer online lately.

I don’t play a lot of games.  I play a few games, but I play the crap out of them.  My list of credentials includes over 150 days /played in the behemoth that is World of Warcraft.  (thats on a single character)  I’ve played most of the final fantasy games at least half-way through… even going so far as to try FF:tactics on my iphone.  It got an amazing .5 FPS.

Before this gets long-winded I’m going to cut it off.  I’ll try to be back at least once a week with articles of substance, and I will also probably keep a play-log of sorts as i feel like it.