When WOW was still white hot and The Guild was all the rage in MMORPG circles?



Remember the Team Zaboo vs. Team Fawkes shipping wars?  Well I do.  I seem to be drawn to shipping wars.

Truthfully I haven't been playing many games lately.  I've been pulled into the MOOCs 8th circle of hell in which I spend my time watching video lectures, debate Greek myths in class forums and write 2 to 3 paragraph essays.  All of this voluntarily, mind you.  It doesn't leave a lot of time for MMORPG busy work.

I do have time card time for WOW and I still log in from time to time.  I've been meaning to finish the new legendary quest line for LOTRO.  But...life just doesn't give enough time.  Sigh.

But I remember when...when I spent too much time in games.  It was fun and it was frustrating, I'm not sure if I would do it all again.  But it was strange and amazing time when these games were almost mainstream.

Long Live the New Flesh

There is a ramping up of motion capture hype in regards to Philip Rosedale's new VR Hi-Fi.

And of course, it is all another sign of what Mediabastard (another SL alumnus) calls the aptly named Media Induced Psychosis or MIPS for short.  Mediabastard was the one who really tuned me into Marshall McLuhan and the Medium is the Message theory.



Watch the video, then read the comments...also read Ciaran Laval's blog about the video here.

Now imagine if you were face to face with someone in deep conversation.  But what you saw were the "expressions" that were "captured" for the Hi-Fi avatars.  Honestly...would you accept those expressions in every day life?  Or would you deduce that there was something wrong with your conversation partner if his/her mouth continually hung open?

One of the things that Mediabastard and Jaron Lanier write about is dumbing ourselves down to accept the new media hype, the latest thing.  Lanier wrote that current AI is only acceptable because we have to take ourselves down to its level.  In a way that we would never do for another human being.  In essence, we are denying our own humanity and highly evolved senses to buy into AI/VR media hype.  Because it is cool and the idea is exciting, we are willing to accept the good enough, the very large shortcomings.  People may think, that it is only temporary but it isn't.  It changes us.  This technology is not making us better.  It is devolving our own advanced social processes.  This would not be the first time we have all degenerated because of technology.  Lanier pointed out that people now feel more comfortable typing into devices rather than having conversations.  That young people have a harder time with eye contact due to technology.  He also concluded that this is no surprise since technology is developed by a group of people who by and large have problems with the interpersonal aspects of life.

Technology people are more likely to suffer from forms of autism or have conditions on the spectrum.  They use technology to cope with a world that at times baffles them or even frightens them.  I have nothing but empathy for them.  Not being able to hold a comfortable level of eye contact nor being able to properly read facial expressions is akin to being blind on a very basic level.  Imagine all the visual information about friends, loved ones, and strangers that is lost simply because you can not see it.

These are the kind of people now involved with motion capture in VR technology.  They can't see where they are going wrong.  But they are asking people who do know, to get excited over the promise of Mocap not the shoddy way it is designed.  The great majority of it depending upon all of us dumbing ourselves down to accept a facsimile of "human expression" in VR that in real life we would rightly conclude is evidence of mental disability.

Mocap could lead to problems of a new generation not being properly able to read real facial expressions much in the way young people now cannot hold eye contact.

Where Mediabastards MIPS theory comes in, is that no one can see that they are making gargantuan amends to accept these poor simulacrums because the ideas are so alluring.  We are embracing the illusion, the psychosis over the reality.  THAT is quite frightening.

So...death to videodrome...long live the new flesh indeed.

The VR Hat trick

The hype is starting.  The VR hype.  The Snowcrash fantasy that never dies, now colored by Ready Player One fantasies.  Also a side helping of transhumanism via Singularity.

I'm not adverse to big dreams, big hopes, and big ideas.  But there comes a point where reality needs to take the main stage.  Reality has not come to the VR business, in fact most ignore it.  As in they ignore the fact that Second Life is the one and only successful VR ever.  But because it didn't fulfill some fantasy from a science fiction book, it is decried as a failure.  A failure that is losing customers, losing money, losing content and, most pointedly, it is not Snowcrash.

Is Second Life declining?  It is hard to really argue that it is not.  Like it's MMORPG sister juggernaut, WOW, it is an old warhorse platform that is starting to really show its age.  But as of yet, nothing more advanced or more attractive has taken its place.  There have been contenders, from the many opensim worlds to the more advanced Blue Mars and Cloud Party.  Blue Mars failed and was sold to Ball State University who use it as research.  Cloud Party was just as empty and sold to Yahoo as soon as it received the offer.  The Opensim worlds remain remote also rans that no one ever visits except for those who are disappointed in Second Life.  So if Second Life is the only VR left standing...why is it a failure?  Most likely because the populace turned it into their fantasy, fantasies that are more life affirming than Snowcrash.

You see the problem with the Snowcrash VR mavens and the transhumanists is that they have a dirty little secret.  They WANT the fascistic world, the outright misery of a world gone bad that forces the fictional people in their favorite books to hide inside a VR.  Inside that VR, they become the gods, the artists, the politicians and the enforcers.  They want us to dance to their tune.  They want us to experience their rights free world in which a twisted form of corporate communism reigns with an iron fist.  Our only recourse to individuality is the ability to choose a funky avatar.

Damn did they try hard to push that sop in Second Life.  Fortunately, the people in SL fought tooth and nail for "land" rights, intellectual property rights and free speech while wearing funky avatars.  We didn't eschew real world living for a fantasy prison.  We didn't "move" into a VR and make it more real than real.  Instead we made VR an extension, a playground for relaxation.  Second Life is a virtual Club Med not a dystopic altworld.  That was what got up the nose of Philip, Mitch, Corey and the rest.  We just weren't good enough, we were real and not fictional.

So like Vladimir and Estragon they all wait for Godot Snowcrash.  He is coming don't ya know!  He is just a few hours away and he promises to arrive.  If they just get more people and more technology, Godot Snowcrash will appear with his holy Oculus device.  All the while they ignore the flesh and blood reality of the only successful VR ever made.  My forecast is that the Snowcrash will never arrive.  But the second coming of a Club Med Second Life?  Almost certainly.

And hopefully, sometime in the near future, someone will take away Lucky Kurzweil's hat.

I launched an IPO and all I got was a Lousy T-Shirt!

Welly, Well,  Well, Well

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/03/25/facebook-pays-two-billion-bucks-to-acquire-oculus-rift-company/

Facebook just purchased the current darling, Oculus Rift.  They thank the fools who invested through Kickstarter and saved them money in research and development.  Now they can pick up patents and an almost shelf ready project for peanuts.  Obviously they expect the technology will be worth more than just 2 billion in the future.

This sale goes beyond VR for the masses.  It will spell the end for Kickstarter.  Simply because the "investors" AKA Suckers will now realize that IPO investing requires more than just cheap t-shirts and early access to whatever they funded.  Especially when a company like Oculus used that goodwill money not to allow small investors company ownership via stock options, but to roll it over into a company sale.  This is an ethics free move on Oculus' part and their small investors could rightfully sue for fraud.

Kickstarter is just another get something for nothing that Silicon Valley LOVES.  They want programming for free via open source.  They want workers for free via work clubs (more like online sweatshops).  They want graphics and art for free via social networks like Flickr, Pinterest and Tumblr.  They want content for free via Creative Commons.

Is anyone seeing a pattern here?

The only reason why these companies and owners get mega millions/billions is because they are depending on free work, free content and free money from the customers.  They have no development overhead because all of us are paying for it.  The rest is just gravy.

We, the investors, need to step back and demand more for our money.  We have to make demands and get off the animal farm.  Because that is all we are now to the tech industry, slaughterhouse animals.

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It has been awhile...

I just haven't been playing games lately.  After about 2 months break for all games, I just went back to visit TERA Online.  It took some time getting used to my Popori Archer again.

I'm not a great player and the quest text boxes are like tiny walls of text.  So I mistakenly started soloing BAMs (vicious orisks and brutal orisks) and could not figure out why they were taking so long to kill.  I died a few times, finally settling on a system of just running around, dropping traps, during monster pauses shooting off a poisonous DOT and getting some more elaborate shots.  The great thing about the BAMs now is that they seemed to have nerfed the gathering requirements for them, so instead of 10 or more monster kills, you just need 3 to 5.  Because of this, they have also taken off the party needed warnings off the quests.  Which is why I started taking them on, otherwise I would have just ignored them.

Anyway, this was a video linked on the TERA forums.  I think it is a guild recruitment video.  But it is so sweet and inventive. Poporis are the best.

NOT Elins though, Elins just creep me out.

My travels in game world...

have been lackluster.  Outside life pulled me from my mmorpg hobby and now I'm wondering if I will continue with games much past next year.  The only game I play regularly now is Lord of the Rings Online. But even my time in that game has taken a hit.

Halfheartedly, I tried to get back into RIFT.  But not long after I re-subbed, they announced their Free to Play conversion.  Luckily it hasn't had a big effect on my characters.  All of them were on decent population servers and were not forced to move due to mergers.  But I've lost the incentive to level and the only thing I do when I log in, is putter about in my dimension house.  Boring, I know.

I did enjoy Tera for a bit.  That was the game I thought I was joining when I signed up for GW2 because I had them mixed up.  The graphics are beautiful and the game play is interesting.  But due to lack of time, I haven't logged back into my Popori Archer character in more than a month.

So now, I'm trying to decide if I should keep Rift and Tera for the times I feel the need to log in or just delete them to free up space.

I suppose it was nostalgia for when I was new to games that made me sign up for a few months of WOW. But I returned to find a vastly different game from just last summer.  The servers that contained my main and second most played character had gone belly up since my last log in.  I mean really died.  They were both once bustling with activity.  At first, I thought I would carry on, but going from one empty area to another was depressing.  Even the cities were desolate.  I was also disappointed in the hype surrounding the Siege of Orgrimmar update.  I thought the game would include a lot of story material for non-raiders then leave the actual boss fight to the raiders.  But NOPE, you have to raid if you want the story to progress at all.  At first I laughed but then it just further depressed me.  Even despite losing a large portion of the player base and "merging" servers (cross realms), the developers still insist on forcing everyone to play the way they think their game should be played.  It struck me as a obtusely ungenerous, more in the spirit of the appropriately named expansion Cataclysm which caused the free fall in subscribers.  Up until the Free to Play explosion and glut of games, Blizzard could get away with forcing people into certain play modes.  But now so many other options are out there plus with no subscription tag!  Blizzard no longer has the ability to throw its weight and haze its player base.  They should really change their ways since they are shrinking noticeably now.  My two high levels are now on more crowded servers.  But who knows how long they will last?

I won't even discuss the coming shut down of WAR.  The thought of it makes me so sad.  I'm holding a bit of hope for Camelot Unchained but even my short time in gaming has shown me to be skeptical of everything until I'm actually in the game.  And even then it is still questionable.

Oh Bother

Eve Online, yeah, EO.  *sighs and shakes head*

What do you think about when this game is mentioned?  Spaceships? Space? Wild scandals in which players gang up on other players in order to make them commit suicide?  More scandal in which a popular blogger (Mintchip) was hired as community manager by CCP and led to slander and pillaging of her character?  Ayn Rand idol worship?

So having only 4% of the player base claim to be female is surprising?

Although CCP claims not to worry about this minuscule number, I have a feeling that they do anyway. Why?  Because, even though most male gamers don't admit it, any game that attracts a large female player base makes money.  Lots and lots of money.  Really, what developer would turn up their nose at money?

So now CCP has a hit a wall with subscriptions and their mostly male player base holds part of the blame.  But still the majority of the blame is due to CCP's lax policing of outrageous behavior.  They don't govern against harassment, threats, cheating (in fact their own devs took part in early cheating scandals), the list goes.  The player government had that famous scandal with the Goon Squad suicide campaign.  I haven't looked into what happened to Mintchip, but I've seen the comments on her recent vlog post and they weren't nice.

I do have to say that the hiring of Mintchip is due to CCP holding out a tentative hand to female players.  Mintchip has a fun vlog and she is one of the few female gamers who is very enthusiastic about EVE Online and it's sister game DUST.  At times I have been leery about Mintchip's giggly female persona but I never thought that she wasn't serious about her gaming hobby or the games she enjoyed.  The reason for my hesitant support was not because of jealousy over a younger, pretty female gamer but because her behavior was bound to attract misogynist male gamers of every age.  It also made me angry that I even had to worry about this, because it shouldn't matter if Mintchip wanted to be flirty.  She is young and pretty and has every right to enjoy being so.  But now she is accused of sending sexy photos to someone for game money.  Is it true?  Don't know.  More likely it was embellished by jealous male gamers to get her fired.  Even it if was true, SO FUCKING WHAT!  None of us know the details except for the stories spewed on game boards and youtube comments from a bunch of men screaming like sexually frustrated, hysterical Church types.

I'll be pissed if CCP folds for these screechers.  Seriously these men need someone to get Freudian on their asses.

Anyway besides the previous story, why doesn't Eve Online attract women?

Is it because the avatars are just spaceships?  Partially, I've written about that in previous posts.  But not totally.

Is it the PvP?  There are plenty of women who enjoy PvP.  My friend who got me into games (WoW) played on a PvP server and she enjoyed it immensely.  I, myself, loved WAR to death.

You know why it doesn't attract women?  Take a look of that screenshot in the header that I've included with this post.  Look at that godawful UI.  I mean seriously.  You want another gander at it?  Look at an official screenshot of it.

Holy CRAP!  What the hell is going on in there?  It literally takes a few weeks to learn all the menu and sub-menu systems.  There has to be a better way.

How do you drive your ship?  Do you see it on that nightmare of a UI?  Nope.  

Another reason, there is no codified attempt to guide the player into missions or crafting.  After the tutorial (which is better than when I first signed up), the new players are left high and dry.  The developers figured that the rest of the training would be completed by the many player corporations in the game.  Which considering the bullying scandals, is laughable.

The questing....whatever there is of it,  is enjoyable.  However, and a BIG however, whatever questing there is in the game is spotty, ridiculously arcane and purposely obscure.  Even if a player manages to follow the quests/agent missions in the game, there is a ridiculous jump in skill levels.  Since the game does not label its levels or allows easy tracking of skills, it is possible for a player to accept a mission that they cannot complete but won't know it until they accept the mission.  That leads to the PvE faction that gave the quest to permanently ban the player from future quests.  Nice.

I won't get into the crazy that is mining/crafting.  The UI doesn't even tell you how to fly your ship much less how to mine.

Whatever.  I would say to CCP, if you want to attract female players do the following:

1 - Properly police your user base in game and out (forums), even the popular players/corporations.

2 - Clean up that UI

3 - Ban obscurity in everything.  The mechanics of every feature must be transparent.  It isn't dumbing down.  Believe me, the main features of the gameplay can stay as is without alteration.  But it is not shameful to allow the player to easily understand how, why and what.

I have a feeling though, that CCP has painted themselves into a corner.  Any change would alienate the players they have, but no change will continue to keep females out of the game.

The closure of a game...

A few days ago, Tiny Speck announced that they will be closing Glitch.

I am rather saddened by the news but also extremely unsurprised.

When I started to play the game last year, it amused and charmed me.  It also had a rather grim, creepy, horror tale vibe that appealed to me.  Despite its cartoony graphics, the game reminded me of the more involved gameplay in such games as Second Life and Eve Online.  Strange as it may seem, Second Life and Eve Online share quite a number of gamers between them.  Glitch entered this strange relationship and became a third in a gaming triangle of weird, wacky, dangerous and thought provoking games.

Tiny Speck's announcement that its closure was partly due to being unable to find a large audience, unspoken was that the audience it did have didn't pay it enough.

Well I don't think the game's audience should be blamed for outright mismanagement on Tiny Speck's part.

They didn't promote their game enough.  They heavily relied on the word of mouth viral idea.  Which isn't a bad thing but it should be done ALONG with regular marketing.  The viral needs to get started than as people become more curious more professional marketing should take up the slack.  Tiny Speck just did the viral and never backed it up with concrete advertising.  The actual marketing they did do was in the form of one release trailer two years ago, that baffled prospective fans and gave them no idea what was actually IN the game.



I mean really, even myself (a fan of the game), said WTF WAS THAT?

Consider that the trailer was released two years ago and it stated that release was Spring 2011.  By the time I joined, Fall 2011, the game was barely out of beta.  It wasn't even accepting open sign ups.  I believe I just sent in an email to Tiny Speck and a few weeks later, I received an invite.  Truthfully I don't even know how I won this invite because I heard that a lot of people never received one.  Was it a lottery system?

Why did a newly released game need a lottery system?  Why did it need to throttle and bottleneck its audience?  Again, it could be my previously stated thought that the game wanted to be a viral success.  But we also need to get a more reality based reason, this game could not properly scale with its potential audience.  Prokofy Neva, in regard to Second Life, has often thought that Linden Lab purposefully throttled its audience due to scaling issues.  I think Tiny Speck did the same with Glitch.

In fact they slowly allowed more and more people into the game Fall 2011 into Winter 2012.  And most of these new people were due to established players sending out personal invites.  Mind you, there were still potential fans waiting for invites from their emails to Tiny Speck.  Apparently most of these people were ignored.  And that had to create a kind of blacklash to the Viral goodness that Tiny Speck was trying to establish.

One of the major signs that the game was not scaling properly was centered in the issue of housing.  The housing in Glitch of Fall 2011 consisted of the player becoming authorized with a game permit.  This required the player to apply and wait in a crazy office staffed by lazy NPC monsters asking inane questions.  It was a hilarious send up of any professional bureaucracy.  After receiving a permit, the player had to gather up game money then buy a house in a desired district.  Each district had its own style of houses and different sizes from hovel to mansion.  However within each district was a number of "streets" shared between a few players.  Once these streets were full, the housing was sold-out.  It turned out to be an incredibly popular gameplay option with the game's fans, it forced Tiny Speck to constantly be spewing out new districts along with their streets.

As I said, the game was failing in the scaling area.

Instead of working with the issue, Tiny Speck did the worst possible thing to do, they pulled their game out of release state and sent it straight back to Beta.  Yes.  Crazy wasn't it?  Whatever marketing they had planned (and it had to have been more than just that one awful trailer) was nixed and signups were closed.  Even personal invites were no longer an option.

What did this mean for the game?  Their audience was kept small ON PURPOSE!  It was not allowed to grow.  They never left BETA.  They used the illusion of all those potential fans, languishing on a wait list, as a reason to throw more money away on the game.  They counted the proverbial birds in the bush rather than the one in their hands.  So folks, they ballooned their costs in man hours, game assets and other development on an illusion of more fans.  Meanwhile back in reality, those potential fans chalked off their unreceived invites and rightly deduced that the company was mismanaging its game, then moved on.

I even saw this problem and left the game because of it.  The ill conceived beta was mainly to deal with the housing issue.  In place of what the game had, the houses were now all free, turning a previous achievement and valuable commodity into something worthless.  The new houses were ugly as sin.  The ways to "expand" these new houses were slipshod and unappealing.  Of course, the small fan base was ecstatic over these changes.

However the game never opened up its signup page again.  It didn't even allow players to send personal invites until just before the closure announcement.

And their announcement had the gall to state that the game never received the audience they thought it would attract.

Well its hard to get an audience if you don't allow them into the front door.

Of course, there was also a problem of the game being built on Flash.  Which is dying and being superseded by HTML 5.  Obviously Tiny Speck wasted all of its money on the jackass BETA ONCE AGAIN plan instead of getting a start on reconfiguring its code into the new standard.

Well no use crying over the mistakes.

It is a shame.  The game had potential, it had a potential audience.  Which the company allowed to slip away.  A cautionary tale.

Hamster Lovin

Second Life was the first program that got me into massive multi-player worlds. In fact, I think I found SL so easy to learn because I was not a gamer. So the arcane UI was not a hinderance. It did however make learning WoW's UI a torturous experience. Anyway games come and go but I always find time to wander a bit around SL. A lot of people find the place daunting and unfriendly but to people willing to stick out the learning curve it becomes more like "Cheers". Fall is the best time in Second Life. People are starting to gear up for the holidays and the major shopping events and hunts begin all over the grid. Right now the place for SL hipsters to be is The Arcade Gacha Event.

The Gacha events have taken up the slack of the much missed and very much loved Seasons Hunt event. Unlike treasure hunt events, Gacha events are a bit like going to Atlantic City. You put a bit of money into a slot machine and win various different prizes. It can be addictive. Especially for popular items. The Arcade Gacha Event is set up like an old Victorian, Atlantic City pavilion. It is filled with little slot machines which contain numerous variations of prizes that consist of furniture, clothing, knick knacks and avatars. The big hit of this event is Beetlebones' Hamster.

This adorable hamster is a mesh based avatar that a player can wear. It comes in various colors. The price to play and win a coveted color is 100L (around a $1 real money). So far, I have only 4 colors.

The Arcade event is extremely crowded and I haven't been able to get back after my first visit. But I will be heading back to bet on more hamsters and other fancies.

For those interested, Second Life will be coming to Steam soon. There are some changes being made to accomodate this new partnership. Perhaps it will even out the steep learning curve. Who knows? If it does, then you too can be a hamster.



The Hamster vid is from Larcoco's Flickr stream

Some Time Later...

It's been some time after the release of Guild Wars 2 and updates are trickling into the gaming blog/news community.  Tobold had an interesting post regarding falling play numbers for GW2.

This is not a surprising result to me or many other people.  In today's game environment, new mmorpgs only have a small window of opportunity to make a mark.  GW2 attempts to keep this window open with their buy2play formula.  The company is, in essence, trying to recoup their expenditures as close to the front as possible.  Then glide on store purchases.

So at this point, a fall in the number of hours played are not a worry for GW2.  What would cause worry is a fall in store revenue.  Anet has not released any kind of serious financial health information on the game (except that it sold 2 million copies), so we can't tell if their store is a success or failure.

Since the game marketed itself as casual friendly and no subscription, the creators may have counted on the ebb and flow of players.  They released the game knowing that Blizzard was going to send out a big expansion (Pandaria) in the same time frame.  I feel they knew they would lose players to the biggest game in the industry.  The question is, how much did they plan around that fact?  Will Anet crumple into a heap much in the same way that SWTOR did when it flagged in numbers?

It is still too soon to tell.  As for me, my own hours in the game have flagged.  This is not due to falling interest in the game.  I still enjoy it.  But I find myself engaged in RL activities and I feel that is much healthier than loafing about in an mmorpg.

Also, for the record, I did not buy nor do I plan to buy Mists of Pandaria.  I'm taking a wait and see attitude toward WOW right now, especially since I felt burnt from the Cataclysm expansion.  The expansion I am thinking about buying is, crazy enough, RIFT's Storm Legion.

To Rohan

A few months ago I received an invitation to participate in Turbine's Riders of Rohan closed beta program.  The email didn't make an impression on me since I decided to write it off as a phishing attempt.  To my surprise the legitmacy of the email was confirmed when I logged into Turbine's LOTRO forums and was able to see the Closed Beta discussion site.

I downloaded the program to both my Windows computer and to, my surprise, my Mac computer as well.  The majority of my play time was dedicated to testing the Beta client for the Mac.

Mac Client

As far as performance for the Mac client, I had no major problems.  My Mac is a mid-2007 and it ran the beta client rather well.  My graphic settings ran comfortably on mid to high.  There were a few strange artifacts here and there (such as flickering) but those problems were also shared by the windows client too.  However, I can't vouch for the client staying playable for older macs for the release in October (if they release the mac client with ROR).  Many things could change and that may make the client unusable for older macs.  As of now, it works amazingly well.

Rohan

I don't want to release too many spoilers for the new expansion.  But to just say that right now, the quest stories for Rohan are very interesting.  Every quest left me waiting to learn more as I traveled to each new quest hub.  The graphics are outstanding.  The Turbine art team really went to great lengths to capture the area from Tolkein's books.  The area now has new music scored by the Chance Thomas (returning due to popular demand).  All I can say is that theme used to introduce the player's entrance to Rohan is wonderful.

Game Play and Mounted Combat

Regular game play has not radically changed in this expansion.  Everything is still the same for most classes with some added tweaks.

The real change comes with mounted combat.  Mounted combat is not like the mount system used in WoW's Lich King expansion.  Turbine is really taking chances with this new system and tailoring it to act as closely as possible to real world dynamics.  Each class has mounted attacks that closely mimic their regular combat technique.  But just punching out these attacks are not where the difficulty comes into the picture.  Every player must learn how to maneuver their mount around enemies.  The horse mounts are based on heavy combat destrier models used during the Middle Ages.  Since they are large and muscular, they don't turn on a dime once they are up to full speed.

This is where Turbine has added in a special trait line, in which players can choose between speed or strength or a mix for their mounts.  If you choose a quicker horse, a player will gain speed and manuverability over health.  These horses suited for DPS classes need to keep moving since being unhorsed is an ever present probability.  Believe me, you don't want to be unhorsed in the middle of an NPC warband.  The trait line geared for strength and health are for the tank classes.  But that doesn't mean a player gets to stand still while attacking.  A player needs to move to build up fury for their mounted attacks.

The mounted combat tutorial does give good basics but the majority of the learning curve is spent in regular combat.  Once you learn how to maneuver the mount into and out of combat, it makes this new fighting style very exciting.

Delayed Launch

ROR was originally set to release today, the 5th.  But due to various bugs, the date was pushed back to October 15.  I believe that was a very good decision.  The major reason why this was done was to ensure that mounted combat was as smooth as possible.  There will little issues with mounted animations and manuverability.  I believe Turbine is really close to the end result so an extra month is just what was needed.  There were also little graphic anomalies during quest instances and some broken NPCs.  Which shouldn't be too hard to fix up.

All in all this will be Turbine's most exciting expansion in quite awhile and I'm looking forward to it.

The launch of the good ship GW2

So it has been a little over a week since GW2's launch.  This is counting my extra days because I pre-purchased.

And I must state that I am satisfied with the game.

The problem that irked me the most, the female caster armor, looks as if it has been addressed.  The starting gear is still that atrocious bikini miniskirt lacy underwear number.  But as soon as I was able to level up the tailoring craft, the outfit turned into a harem dance girl outfit.  Still a little squicky but not as bad as the mini skirt.  Later on a quest reward gave me an even better looking shirt with fuller coverage.  The character still looks sexy but just not the stripper-in-search-of-a-venue look.  I'm hoping that as the character levels there will be a consistency in the gear.

The game has been crowded beyond imagination from the first day I logged in.  Most thought that the majority of players were the pre-purchase crowd and things would be smooth for actual launch day.  The auction house was down for the majority of the headstart.  Which most overlooked since the game had not officially launched.  So I know that I was hoping that it would be up for opening day.

It was not.

In fact I think the game developers miscalculated how popular the game would be.  They were happy with the pre-purchase numbers and most likely did not count upon fence sitters (after all you can't hope for hypothetical crowds).  But it turned out that they showed up in greater numbers due to word of mouth.  I think I've spent more time on overflow servers than I have on the server that I chose to play on.  Even though the overflow servers were created to address large crowds and forestall the need to add extra servers (which may go empty a few weeks down the line), this nice solution groaned under the weight of all the players.  I heard of tales of disconnects, crashes and groups being split up due to being sent to different overflow servers.  The auction house has not been up yet.  ArenaNet has not opened up its forums so a true account of player discontent or lack of it is unknown.  However they did bite the bullet and started to add more servers.

Personally I haven't experienced any major problems.  The AH being down is inconvenient but not game breaking.  What would concern me would be actual problems with character attacks.  But unlike SWTOR that suffered from ability delay, GW2 is blessedly free of that problem.  The attacks are just as smooth as the ones in World of Warcraft.  Which is a very genuine achievement and it is practically the only game that has come close to that gold standard.

To conclude, I'm very happy with the game.  I can see myself spending time in its world more than I planned.

Hypothetical Gaming of Reality

This eerie and frightfully prescient little short film was showcased on HuffingtonPost.com today.

Yes we can laugh at the absurdity and shudder at the thought of people sitting zombie like in empty rooms staring into a Facebook inner space.  But the reality is, is that gaming tech developer's are already trying to make this dystopia a reality.

Check out my posts previous posts about gaming reality here and here.

The Third Cat

THE THIRD CAT from gorrr aka. Mosmax on Vimeo.

This was featured on New World Notes today in honor of the passing of filmmaker Chris Marker.

The machinima was created by Max Moswitzer in collaboration with Chris Marker.  It is a love note to "The Third Man" but this time around, starring Chris Marker's lovable feline.  It also features some of the most spectacular builds in Second Life.

The other shoe...it dropped

Well, well, well.

Just in the time to steal the thunder of GW's last Beta hype and ahead of LOTRO's hype of its new mounted combat reveals, Blizzard announces that Mists of Pandaria is releasing soon.  Real soon.

On September 25, stalwart WoW fans will be able to roll their favorite Panda class.  So the cancellation of their Blizzcon event did portend a nose to the grindstone release schedule as some hypothesized.  I believe this is the first time in many years that Blizzard has released before the Holiday season.

Interesting.  Competition is tight in MMORPGs today and Blizzard won't give up its crown easily.

Read all about it here at Blizzard's site.

Guild Wars 2 Beta Review

I have to admit the only reason why I was involved in the GW2 Beta events was due to a mistake. TERA was a game that I was not interested in but GW2 had garnered my interest due to the chatter about it around the WAR community.  Supposedly it was the game that would save the poor neglected PvP masses from the failing Warhammer Online.  Anyway TERA was released around the same time pre-ordering took place for Guild Wars 2.  I mixed up the grand opening date of Tera with GW2 and pre-ordered GW2 to my eventual dismay.  Because at the time of pre-order way back in April there was no opening date for GW2. ArenaNet placated the frothing fans by scheduling a number of Beta preview weekends every month.

The release date was finally announced and it will be August 28.  Grand opening for pre-orders will be August 25th.  Interestingly GW2 scheduled its release not long after Turbine's release announcement for its much awaited Riders of Rohan expansion.  Which caused quite a bit of comments since GW2 will be opening barely a week before ROR.  Many others wondered if Blizzard would counteract both and release the Mists of Pandaria expansion early to trounce all competition.  But so far they have remained silent on the Pandaria release date.  But they have canceled their beloved Blizzcon event this year.

In regards to Guild Wars 2.

It is a very good game.  I'm hesitant to pump it up anymore than it has been in the gaming press.  Because frankly it is at overkill even now.  There is also a problem of building false expectations in the community as a whole which was what happened to the Star Wars The Old Republic mmorpg.

Is it going to topple WoW?  No chance in purgatory.  But then again, no game ever will.  WoW is a phenomenom that could only happen in an exact place and time.  The time and the place have occurred and will not occur again.  So it would be best to put all thoughts of WoW collapsing in a failed heap out of mind.

Combat

The Combat mechanics were simple but interesting.  A character must use a weapon in order to learn its moves.  Hence if your character doesn't equip for example a two-hand sword, he/she will not know advanced moves special to two-hand weapons.  You will not be able to purchase knowledge of these weapons from a trainer.  That being said, training new weapons is not an overly time consuming undertaking.  Across all beta events, I thought the unlocking of new weapon skills occurred in a reasonably quick time.  If you take part in a combat event, you can unlock your weapon skills even faster.

What was nicely simplified is that there are not a great many moves to learn.  Most weapons only have about 5 to 6 skills.  The trickiness comes in on learning how to time these skills for great effect.  Some skills will stun monsters others will heal other players in the vicinity.  Also each weapon has a specialization.  A Guardian class character can wield a DPS two-hander or use a tank DPS/threat oriented shield and one hander.  Or a Guardian can choose a healing two hander and/or shield and one-hander.  Supposedly any character can switch between weapon specializations mid-fight.  However I personally noticed that I could not switch between a shield/one hander to a two-hander during a fight.  Whether this changes in the real game, I don't know.  But during Beta it was not allowed.

Combat is also subject to your proximity to the target and how well you can dodge the target's attacks.  A quick hit to the strafe buttons will move your character out of the way of a target and its attacks.  Some character's dodges are more fun than others.  A Norn will just roll out of the way but a little Asura will leap and somer sault through the air.  These special strafe/dodge moves are subject to cool downs and power supply.  So you cannot spend your time rolling or leaping out of the way in PVE or PVP.

PVE

There are no set questing objectives except for a character's main story quest.  The main bulk of experience building is taking part in group "heart" quests that help various NPC's in an area, exploration, crafting and PvP.  That being said, I didn't notice a terrible grind between story quests.  However I would reach points where I didn't know where to go next.  So I spent a lot of time studying my map and deciding where to go.  But it never got to the point where I felt as if I were on a treadmill ala an Asian mmo grinder.

Difficulty?  This is hard to say because the difficulty levels for the story quests, heart quests, and events varied wildly during each Beta.  During the last Beta some of the story quests were akin to impossible and required exact usage and timing of skills.  The last Beta relaxed the difficulty level considerably.  I'm not sure if it will stay this way or be somewhere in between.

Class Areas/Graphics

Every area for each race is beautifully designed.  The human area is a typical medieval type village complete with big city.  The Norn race has a wonderful wintery area with rivers and fjords.  The Charr and Asura areas are filled with rather steam punk designs since they are both technological races.  The Slyvari is a pretty little forest area with various levels and tree house like city.

The graphics are very well done and look good across all levels.

The Bad or Character Selection/Armor

So far everything has been great about the game.  But what GW2 does bad, they do very, very, very bad.

Character selection is lackluster with no opportunity to craft a unique look.  Body types are the same shape no matter what is chosen.  The worst of the worst being the Norn and Human characters.  The facial characteristics of both male and female characters skew towards young.  And I mean very young.  Human characters in particular look as if their average age is 13 years old.  There is one old bone thrown to the players with one face being about 25 to 35 in both male and female selection.  Some players claimed they could change the facial characteristics more with the minimal sliders provided but I could not.  A 13 year old face will stay a 13 year old face no matter how much you change the shape of the eyes or nose.

The armor.  Oh God the armor.

Someone on the development team thought this outfit was fantastic and that every Norn and Human female character of the magic class should wear it.

I can not describe the true nature of its hideousness.  Or how much it looks like a clown outfit when compared to the soberly dressed NPCs and other character classes.

And when it is paired with the too young female faces, the game descends into truly creepy, Humbert Humbert territory.  Some players claimed that this look was to pander to Asian audiences.  So apparently, in their quest for more money, ArenaNet will force Western fans to play as underage schoolgirl characters in pink tutus with plenty of upskirt shots because Asian audiences like young flesh.

This is something no game should pander to, no matter what the culture.

The forums were filled with complaints about this awful design each Beta since April.  But there was no response from ArenaNet. Which can only mean they are dead set about keeping the underage jailbait characters.  Frankly that is a deal breaker for me if this character design is not modified.  I can only write off the box price as a loss and just leave the game alone.  And since ArenaNet doesn't consider me or anyone who feels the same as a true target for its game, I don't think they will see it as a loss.

Conclusion

It remains to be seen if this game will be a success.  I can see stumbling points in their character design and perhaps over-emphasis on PvP.  Who knows how their cash shop will fare in this weakening economy.  Truthfully I can only seem them holding on to the PvP players who are desperate to leave WAR and filling a niche spot in mmorpgs.

The rest, the rest will go to the Mists of Pandaria.  Even though they claim they won't.

Shadow of the Argonath - Chance Thomas

Although I really liked the "Rise of Isengard" expansion last fall, one of the main disappointments I had with it was that it did not have a new music score.  I believe one of the main reasons why I fell in love with LOTRO so much was the beautiful score composed by Chance Thomas.  His music captured the spirit of Middle Earth wonderfully.

Since ROI, I noticed that I was not the only one who wanted a new score.  The forums had a few posts regarding the absence of new music.  It seems Turbine took this into account and commissioned Chance Thomas to write new music for Riders of Rohan.

ROR will be released on Sept 5 and Turbine is in the midst of drumming up excitement by releasing snippets of Thomas' new score.  It sounds as gorgeous as the original score for the game.  I can't wait to hear more of it.  Turbine has also dropped hints that they may rerelease the old soundtracks along with the new one for sale.

Why?

So my time in SWTOR was a bust.  I did not pay for a subscription after my 30 days of free play time expired.

Incidentally I was given promotional time in RIFT.  Which I used to create new defiant based characters on a new server.  Not long after it was announced that the server for my original characters was being downgraded to a trial server.  So all my original characters had to be moved elsewhere.  I liked my original server.  It made me sad to see it disappear.  After that event, I lost the will to keep playing RIFT.

Another game I dabble in, Wizard 101, expanded to a new area called Zafaria.  It was interesting but it didn't catch my imagination as the previous areas.  Also Wizard 101 is in a strange state, it has attracted a great many raiding gamers.  So now the game is tuned to grinding for gear in numerous raid level instances.  They have changed their gear for mitigation stats and class boosts but with barely any morale on them.  The NPCs have been given boosts in damage and health.  All of this is not really that terrible.  But considering that the game began as a hobby for young children in grammar school and junior high, the high level raid type atmosphere at end game is extremely unnecessary.  KingsIsle was in a great position to experiment with different end game experiences because their main audience was not yet used to the WOW mmorpg end game paradigms.  Did they? NOPE.  They just tacked on raids and gear grind.  Thanks KingsIsle.  Now, like other mmorpgs, Wizard 101 end game story instances are only available for the 5 to 20% of the playing audience.

I'm not even going to get into the inflation on items in the company store.  There are many threads about that in the KingsIsle forums, and none of them have been addressed.  And it looks as if they never will be addressed.

This leads me to LOTRO.  This is where I went after I left SWTOR and I've long since given up on WOW.  I liked the expansion last fall called "Rise of Isengard".  It had interesting stories and well done phased content.  However there were a great many bugs in instanced areas.  Plus I was deeply disappointed that Turbine did not commission new music from composer Chance Thomas (I'm hoping this will rectified in the upcoming expansion this fall).

But as like all mmorpgs, I've hit the raid or lie fallow paradigm.  And the more I see this gated tactic in games the more I ask WHY?  WHY? WHY?  Why spend a great amount of monetary resources on end game stories, instances, items etc that only 5 to 20% of your paying audience will see?  WHY FUCKING WHY?  It doesn't make any sense and it is the very example of insanity.  You know what happens with this gated shit?  Every night, in any given MMORPG, are spammers looking for those last few players to fill out a raid.  PST! PST! PST!  And the people willing to go on these runs are denied because they are not geared for the encounter.  Because you have to run the instance to get gear for the instance.

I'm so sick of this, it is getting to the point where I don't want to play these games anymore.  And I'm sure a great many psychologists would encourage me to give up the gaming hobby.  Yet I go on.  Something has to give one of these days.  I suppose.  Or maybe a group of developers will get it and design a game that is inclusive to all players and doesn't use the gated tactic.  Or maybe not.  Most likely not.

The New Year

I haven't been gaming that much so far.  But when I do I'm in...

Star Wars: The Old Republic

It has been wearing thin on me.  I knew it would before I even purchased it.  But I went ahead and spent money on it.

The game is decent, but there are bugs.  The worst bug is an ability delay on class attacks.  Whether it is due to lag or poor coding is unknown.  But it is incredibly annoying.

The questing is rather linear and in addition to the many cut scenes, I feel as if I'm watching a film not playing a game.  That isn't a good thing.  Many times the quest stories are enjoyable so it is easy to ignore the strait jacket quality to the game.

Companion romance.  Why?  I'm baffled by this element.  And it seriously creeps me out when this computerized thing starts to flirt with my character.  Its as if my toaster oven suddenly started to recite romantic poetry to me.  People really seem to like it as well.  Is it more enjoyable than real flirting with another human being playing the same game?  In the middle of questing, when my "companion" suddenly growls that he needs to speak with my character someplace private, it makes me want to rage.

Group quests.  They are fun.  But already I'm seeing problems.  I'm a slow leveler and I'm behind most of the people I started playing with during the holidays.  Many have even reached level cap.  Which means there are no people to help run the heroic group quests in the area.  This problem is only going to get worse, not better as the population stabilizes and the majority are at end game.  Why don't designers take this into account?  Most of these games are designed as if they believe there will be constant streams of people barreling through their world.  That isn't and never will be the case.  It isn't even the case in World of Warcraft.  So why continue to design content that will be obsolete?  Why?

Ultimately, I'm not as big a fan of Star Wars as I thought I would be.  Yes, I loved the films as a child.  However they never became an obsession for me.  So running around in the Star Wars universe has left me underwhelmed if not down right depressed.  The world is extremely dystopic and filled with one steel fortress after another.  All of them are inhabited with robot drone guards.  Invariably, my character is forever entering caves to grab an item or speak with a certain person.  The cave is always designed the same way and filled with crowds of mobs that cannot be avoided.

I'm tired, I give up.  So I will not be extending my subscription.  Maybe if things workout better financially in the future, I may go back.  But not now.

Glitch

A few weeks ago, I heard talk about Glitch.  A strange, sweet and open ended VR built on Flash.  It intrigued me, so I signed up for an invite.

I received the invitation a few days later but neglected to create an account until this week.  What I discovered was some kind of mix between Second Life, Eve Online, Free Realms, other traditional mmorpgs.

It is most like Second Life which means it is open ended and completely free form.  There are traditional quests but they are mostly tied to the skill learning system.  Also objects in world can randomly drop quests if you discover them.  But otherwise your character wanders this kooky, pleasant, arty little paradise with no goals except the ones you create for yourself.  There are levels but the leveling system is vestigial only.  Gaining levels only grants minimal bonuses over lower leveled characters so there is no rush to level cap.  There is no combat system and the only PvP game play available is a racing game against other characters.

The premise behind the game is a mythology of many god giants who dream together.  And player characters are living inside that dream.  Each god rules over a particular skill such as Mining, Cooking, Farming etc.  In fact most of the gameplay centers around gathering materials to create usable items for yourself and other players.  If you aren't the type of player that likes crafting, a whole lot of crafting and make busy work, then this little game is not for you.  The learning system for these skills remind me very much of Eve Online's system but a little less arcane...only a little.  Each skill level grants bonuses in that particular skill, and some quests.

The game gives a very fast tutorial on what do with the basic objects and animals such as trees, pigs, and chickens.  A new character will get rewards for petting pigs and squeezing chickens.  The rewards will be put into the skill systems to create items.  The game also has an extensive achievement system so you will be rewarded over the most mundane things and very strange ones as well.

Built on top of this F2P is a cash shop that allows you to buy credits and use those credits to collect zany clothing for your glitch.  There is a very simple housing system which will be expanded upon in the future.  If so inclined, you can subscribe to the game which will give you monthly credits for the cash shop.

So far my first week has been enjoyable.  I love the artwork in the game as well as the little word pun jokes that pop up.  Although the visuals look childish, this game is definitely not for young children.  It was created for older teens and adults which means some of the jokes are on the mature side.  The community in the game is friendly and the customer service is upbeat.  If you ever wanted to waste a little time just fooling around and doing silly things, then this game is for you.