Why I Think About Storybricks Most Mornings… September 9, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Humor.Tags: Manpower, Namaste, Storybricks
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Along my route to work there is a Manpower office. They have a sign on their building with the corporate logo.
Which you have to admit, is at least mildly similar to this:
This means that almost every morning on the way to work I think, “Hrmm, the Storybricks logo is a lot like the Manpower logo.” Which is probably not exactly what Namaste intended.
Then again, I have worked at some places where temps have been treated a lot like NPCs, so maybe the parallels are not that much of a stretch.
Vast Goon Conspiracy Ensnares Even Its Foes! September 8, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Goonwaffe, Speaking from Ignorance, The Goons
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The Goons, not content to infiltrate CCP and subvert democracy, have apparently co-opted their foes on and off the Council of Stellar Management as well.
Take CSM member Tredbor Daehdoow, who was, in his own words, the target of Goon smear campaign as part of the last CSM election.
Tredbor, who had this to say about the Goon’s CSM goals.
And that is exactly why The Mittani and his buddies are running for CSM. He’s realized that it is actually very, very effective at influencing CCP, and he wants to try to use it as a vehicle to advance his own petty in-game interests, at the expense of the vast majority of the players of EVE.
And while he managed to overcome the Goon onslaught and get elected to the 6th CSM, he is probably in the corner of, “Goons are bad, mmkay?”
And yet Tredbor seems to be pretty much on board with The Mittani’s views about the lack of focus on Flying in Space (FiS) development in the game, as stated in the now famous/infamous Nuclear Winter Goon CEO update.
The Mittani speaks... and he has a cool icon!
And there is Shadoo, who is not on the CSM but who is, The Mittani says, “…at the moment, my enemy,” and who seems to see merit in the goals of the agenda of the Goons.
Apart from the first few paraghraphs feeding the new found pubbie empire, that is a pretty good stab at where EVE is at and what needs to be looked at. A good CEO update for sure.
Microfixes are no longer enough to keep this aging game afloat, radical changes are needed which I have no doubt CCP will not have the balls or the resources to commit to without a strong as fuck kick in the ass.
Nerfs focus on fixing shit in isolation, but unless you address the core of the issue the imbalance will simply shift to something new. Just like it did with supers.
So you have to admire the guile and power of the Goons and their CEO/Spymaster, The Mittani. They are apparently unstoppable in their drive to get what they want, able to turn their foes to their point of view and subvert the company itself.
We might as well just change the company name from CCP, Crowd Control Productions, to GCP, Goon Controlled Productions and declare the age of Pax Goonicana… Goonaria… Goonatopia… hrmm… the Empire of the Goons!
Unless, of course, they actually have some sort of legitimate point that resonates with their friends and foes alike in 0.0 space. (Along with some people at CCP who care about that aspect of the game.) In which case this might just be another example in the long, long tradition of a specific sub-group within a game complaining as loudly as they can manage that the company just doesn’t get it.
But EVE is a sandbox, and especially so in 0.0 space, so the content is all player driven. They couldn’t possibly need anything beyond the most minor changes related to FiS.
It is obviously a Goon conspiracy. Damn them!
[Addendum: More on "What The Mittani Wants" in an interview over at MMORPG.com.]
[Addendum 2: And there is a humorous take on the whole thing.]
The Drop in WoW Subscribers Means Changes All Over… September 8, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Humor, World of Warcraft.Tags: Perfect World Entertainment, Phishing, RuneScape
11 comments
Rather than the usual round of WoW phishing attempts, I have seen a batch of these lately…
Greetings!
It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell your personal RuneScape account(s).
As you may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of Agreement.
If this proves to be true, your account can and will be disabled…
All with the same message, the same badly disguised bogus URL, and all delivered to the same email address that gets all my WoW phishing attempts. (Which, of course, is NOT the email address I use for WoW or Battle.net.)
No doubt handiwork of the same trolls.
Of course, I’ve never played RuneScape, so this is even less worrying that WoW phishing. Oh no, an account I never had in the first place is in danger of being banned!
RuneQuest, Yes, RuneScape, No
Meanwhile, in the same batch of email, I received a note from Perfect World Entertainment, makers of… nothing I can recall ever playing. I guess they are publishing Torchlight now, which I have played. But I did not buy it from them. Still, at some point I created an account there, I just cannot remember why. It certainly wasn’t for Rusty Hearts and a discount gamepad.
That email said:
You are receiving this email because your account may have been accessed without your authorization. We have changed your account’s password and are requiring you to change your password before you can log back into our games. Please go here to reset your password:
And there was a URL below on which you were invited to click. Only this one looked legitimate. I still didn’t click on it, going rather directly to the Perfect World site and resetting my password via the interface they provide there.
I wonder if Perfect World has some sort of incident or if this was just another, slightly more clever phishing attempt.
How about for you? Any rise in non-WoW related phishing attempts at your end?
Were you getting that many WoW related ones in the first place? At one point I was getting one or two a day.
Coat Tails, Guides, and Career Choices September 6, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Facebook, Humor, World of Warcraft.2 comments
Facebook ads seem designed to make me chuckle and shake my head at the same time. Tonight I got a two-fer.
First there is a little riding on coat tails. Maybe somebody will confuse our game with that successful Zynga game! Dumber plans have worked before… just not that frequently.
And then a plug for a WoW leveling guide!
Really, I don’t want to bag on WoW here, it is what it is for better or worse, but in the post-Cataclysm game is there really any call for a leveling guide? Isn’t “talk to the NPC with the exclamation mark over his head, follow the arrow on your mini-map to the spot highlighted, complete the requirement listed on the right side of your screen, then turn the whole thing in” about as simple as it can get? And doesn’t the game pretty much lead you around on a leash through at least the first 60 levels? And hasn’t the cuts in the experience required pretty much guaranteed that you will out level content long before you finish it all?
Of course, P. T. Barnum was right, though with the increase in world population, I am going to guess that suckers are born at an interval much smaller than one minute these days. Some such will buy this guide, and a few will no doubt think that their $35 has been well spent.
Then, on a more disturbing note, I have to wonder what aspect of my Facebook profile triggered this particular ad.
I suppose it is possible that this ad will end up being excellent career advice for somebody, I just cannot picture the scene. There you are on Facebook and suddenly, “Oh, psychology! Why didn’t I think of that?”
But then, I see 308 people already clicked the “like” button, so what do I know?
EQ Progression Servers Remind Us Why Instancing Started in the First Place… September 5, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest, MMO Design.Tags: Fippy Darkpaw, Instancing, Raining on the nostalgia parade, Rants without Reason
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While I have not been playing on the Fippy Darkpaw for several months now, I have been keeping an eye on it and occasionally mentioning events on the server.
Somebody has to do it, I suppose, and after the big (for them) build up to the Fippy Darkpaw launch back in February, SOE has since seemed determined to keep a lid on all information about how things are going.
Me, I would have made the roll-out of each expansion a front page item on EQ Players. The purpose of the progression servers is to SELL nostalgia for the game. Actually mentioning what is going on once in a while might actually help serve that purpose.
But such is life. One more disappointment from SOE. Add it to the list.
So, there being no official information coming out about the time locked progression servers, I am pretty much left with the time locked progression server forum as a source of news.
Fortunately, SOE implemented RSS feeds for their forums, so I can subscribe and let new messages find me. And this also means when SOE deletes posts from their forums, I can still read them. At least if the reader grabs them in time. SOE forum moderation is very quick to lock, edit, or delete.
So you can get posts like this.
Subject: So GMs need to start gettin involved in the Raid targets..
B/c from watching Redacted and what they have pretty much said is they dont care if your in there way. Thy dont care if your about to engage they will run over you. I saw this with vindi.. 2 guilds sitting there waiting they bum rushover ad say F you and take it anyways… They are crude and just plain dont care. O yeah an the Revamp CT shouldnt be in yet… so all those earings they got ect shouldn’t be awared to them and should be taken back and the new CT taken out. But do GM’s care? I would say not till you get a ton of petitions against them for KSn mobs.. (which will happen) b/c we all know on this TLP server Redacted does not care about any other guild.. (yes stated by some of YOUR members Redacted) So when will GMs get invlolved.. When we train Redacted back for the BS they do to us? Or will you all do something about it now.. JUST like last expansion… Redacted has always been this way… even on ther other server as Redacted but different… but hey SOE… if we keep this up who knows how the server will go…. downhill or uphill…
The word “Redacted” was substituted in by Piestro, the EQ community relations lead, because naming names in the forums is against the rules.
This post also illustrates one of the three flavors of posts that seem to come up regularly in the time locked progression server forums, guilds fighting over raid targets.
Left to itself, multiple guilds hanging around waiting for the same target ends up being survival, or at least success, of the fittest contest. And while some (the winners no doubt) see this as right and good, SOE has it somewhere in their head that all of the people out there are paying customers. And so the game masters, such that they are, get involved now and again, policing those waiting for a given target and determining who was there first in adequate force.
This, of course, leads to more forum posts:
Subject: wtb
Pocket GM to grant raid targets to guilds who cannot mobilize fast enough to beat real players. And have such a high attrition rate due to bad management that most of their guild is comprised of boxes being run through 3rd party programs. PST to 2nd rate guild in Fippy.
P.S. It has come to my attention that they already have one.
Please disregard.
Just a guess here, but I am going to say that this guy was in the guild whose name was redacted by Piestro in the first post I quoted. These sorts of posts go back and forth.
And this is exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind whenever I read somebody’s piece on the evils of instancing, because this represents a good chunk of the reality of the situation. I recall on an episode of Shut Up We’re Talking Karen responding to an assertion that PvE is not competitive. Her response was essentially a recap of guilds and the very real and very aggressive competition for bosses in a non-instanced MMO, with EQ being the poster child.
So if you are one of those dreaming your happy dreams of an MMO without instancing because it is bad for “community,” make sure you have an answer for this situation. EQ is an example of what happens. Either the company has to put a yard duty on the playground to make sure everybody plays nice or the whole thing becomes Lord of the Flies, and neither is a good answer.
I suppose instancing does not have to be the answer, but it seems to be the one companies choose. People revile WoW for instanced content, but even EverQuest II had raid bosses in instances from launch to keep some of their most vocal customers from complaining about the spawn camping situation.
What other choice is there?
And for those of you waiting for me to tie up that thread I left dangling, the other two regular post flavors in the forums are “something is broken” and “I wish I could change something about the progression servers.” Some of the latter are amusing, but generally only the former have much value.
Question of the Day September 5, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, World of Warplanes.Tags: Wargaming.net
3 comments
Wargaming.net did an interview with MMO Crunch about World of Warplanes the other day. There isn’t really much information in the interview. Wargaming.net didn’t seem ready to talk about much of substance about the game at this point.
So, perhaps sensing that nothing substantial was going to get passed along, the interviewer decided to go for the “wouldn’t this be totally cool” level of questions. And so this was asked:
This one’s a long shot, but I need to ask it. When a plane is shot down, will the wreckage crash onto the battlefields in World of Tanks?
Now wouldn’t that be cool? At least the first time it happened?
Wargaming.net agreed that it would be cool but, no, that won’t be happening.
History Display at the Nintendo World Store September 4, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in DS, entertainment, Nintendo.Tags: New York City, Nintendo World Store
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My wife and daughter had an opportunity to go visit New York City last month. Thanks to plenty of points available to redeem on our credit card and a friend who was doing professional services work for a company in Manhattan, this was a low cost opportunity. Points took care of the plane fare and they got to stay with the friend at a rather awesome location.
View from the Room
They got to spend a week there and did quite the range of tourist things.
At my behest, they stopped at the Nintendo World Store at Rockefeller Center. It is the only Nintendo store in the US.
While there, my wife took pictures of a display case that had a variety of old Nintendo systems, which I thought I would post here.
Display Case #1
Display Case #2
Display Case #3
Display Case #4
Display Case #5
Display Case #6
I will say that, while the more recent GameBoy DS units are undoubtedly an advance over the past generations of Nintendo hand held devices, they aren’t as interesting to look at as some of the older units.
Need For Speed World Police Chase September 4, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Need for Speed World.Tags: YouTube
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I was playing around with FRAPS, mostly in hopes of being able to take better quality screen shots in Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine’s JPEG compression is set too high for my tastes.
Anyway, with FRAPS up and active, I managed to catch the end of a Police chase in Need for Speed World.
I had to use an instant cool down buff to end the chase, but the video will give you an idea of how indestructible cars are in the game. The video also became much darker in tone once YouTube finished processing it. I will have to remember that for the future.
I wish I had had FRAPS up and going when the game was broken a few weeks back.
EVE Online and the Age of the Cormorant… September 2, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Fall-stalgia, Misty water colored memories, Nostalgia, Screen Shots
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Here I am, just about five years after first jumping into EVE Online. As I said previously, I feel in my gut that when my subscription lapses in a few day, it will be a long time before I return to New Eden. My capsuleer will be headed for a long sleep.
And the reason is that nothing about the game really inspires me at this time.
EVE requires inspiration. Being a sandbox, you have to set your own goals and pursue them. I have managed to create my own modest goals at various times. Some were simple, like aspirations to fly certain ships. Others were more complicated, like delving into manufacturing and tech II blueprint production.
Most came to fruition, some quite profitably. My days as a minor tycoon, buying and selling in EVE’s dynamic market, made me about double the ISK that all my other activities combined.
A few failed or came to no real net benefit. Tech II turned out to be a money sink, at least the way I went about it. The cost of getting into a freighter never really benefited me that much. And the W-space station plan failed, ironically in the huge volume of space, for lack of a place to raise our control tower.
But there was a point, early on, when just playing the game, just being in space and flying around, was inspiration enough. I tend to think of that time as the age of the Cormorant.
The Cormorant, the Caldari destroyer, was the first ship I really flew on a regular basis. This was primarily prompted by the fact that the very first mission I drew post-tutorial was “Worlds Collide.”
That mission and I have a history.
After losing my Ibis frigate, I decided to work my way towards the biggest ship I could potentially afford. For me, that was the Cormorant.
I managed to scrape together the ISK to get the skills and buy the ship and fittings. For the tier 1 version of “Worlds Collide,” this proved to just about adequate for a complete noob. And so began the run with the first ship I really considered to be mine.
And today I can bring back a glimmer of that feeling, that sense of sheer joy for the hell of it, that sensation I got when playing EVE Online early on in my career, but just looking at some of the screen shots I took at the time.
This is why I take so many screen shots.
And so I give you images from the age of the Cormorant, with a little commentary after each.
Cormorant Docking
That was what EVE seemed like to me early one. I was a tiny ship in a land of giant objects, my tiny little trails marking my path across space.
Cormorant Classic
The classic graphics version of the Cormorant. Back then, this was the only ship model.
Asteroid Pass
Again, a small ship in the giant sea of space.
Guns Blazing!
My Cormorant cutting loose. This has to be the mission “Avenge a Fallen Comrade.” I was probably at the part where you must destroy the station, which allowed me to go into an orbit, turn on weapons, and then work on getting a screen shot. The dust discharge from the rail guns in the wake of the ship is a nice touch. I cannot recall if that effect is still in.
Scratch one frigate!
Explosions were both more and less dramatic back then. I am pretty sure that this was a missile kill, just given the range. The six rail guns would chew up a target over time, but a standard missile was close to a one shot kill and could reach out a long ways. I would target the missile launcher separately at more distant targets while I would close for the guns.
Swooping Cormorant
Again, back in the mission “Avenge a Fallen Comrade.” That odd-shaped asteroid is always the key. Here are trails, a feature long since removed from the game, describing the arcing flight of the ship. Of course, I probably have some screen shots buried some place that show the flaws in trails. You could get very odd kinks in your trails and once in a while your ship would appear to be about 15 degrees off center from the trails.
But when trails were behaving, they were quite pretty. I miss them.
Those are my Cormorant screen shots. They represent a simpler time for me in the game.
Those pictures, and many more, are available at my “other” site, EVE Online Pictures.
It Is September and My Subscriptions Will Soon Lapse, Should I Care? September 2, 2011
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Need for Speed World, World of Tanks, World of Warcraft.Tags: Free-To-Play, MMO Subscriptions
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Due to a quirk of timing, my three current, active, recurring online gaming subscriptions will all lapse in the next ten days.
Those subscriptions are:
- EVE Online
- SOE All Access
- World of Warcraft
I have a habit of subscribing in 3 month increments and then quitting a game just after the billing date passes, leading to a long lag time between cancellation and the actual end date for access. I always start a game with an optimistic point of view.
Certainly, subscribing to EVE for 3 months based on Incarna was an act of the purist optimism. I could have saved my money and gotten about 95% of the entertainment just watching the fireworks that ensued. But I felt I had to be there.
SOE was the combination of getting back into EverQuest II and running around in EverQuest on the Fippy Darkpaw server. EQII lead to quick burn-out with our guild leveling effort. The EQ adventures were fun, and I keep thinking I want to go back, but somehow it always ends up being the 4th item on a list where I can only manage the first three. Even now I am tempted to keep the subscription on the off chance I *might* find some time to play EQ. But the rational part of my brain knows that there is really little chance of that happening.
And then there is World of Warcraft, which I could of sworn I cancelled back in April, but which billed me again in June and, well, there you are. Here I was telling people I was part of the 600,000 departing players and I wasn’t. Well I will be soon. I saved that cancellation confirmation email just in case.
And so all of my recurring subscriptions will be gone. Even my daughter became bored with WoW, Animal Jam, and her brief fling with Free Realms on the Mac. Instead she now seems intent on devouring every bit of Warriors literature. So her subscriptions as well have all lapsed.
If I had achieved that state say, five years ago, it pretty much would have meant NOT playing any MMOs.
But today?
Well, Lord of the Rings Online is an oddity, in that I have a lifetime subscription, so technically that has not lapsed, what with the game still being up and me still being alive. (Lifetime meaning their lifetime or mine.)
But the free to play options are pretty broad at this point. Even if I did not have a lifetime subscription to LOTRO, I could still be playing it. Likewise, because we focused on the EQII Extended server for our Norrath experience, I can still go back and play there as well.
And the options available now that do not required a credit card are wide and varied. I have spent a good chunk of time with World of Tanks and Need for Speed World, neither of which require anything beyond account creation and a client download.
I think back to the early days of EverQuest, when there was some anxiety about thing like whether your characters would be saved if you unsubscribed from the game. There were, if I recall right, a couple of subscription MMOs that did just that. But now you would have to be insane to consider deleting characters, given how many players return to a game at various intervals.
In a way, EverQuest and EVE Online are hold-outs from a different time, each being available only as part of a recurring subscription plan. Even World of Warcraft has an unlimited trial these days. I wonder when Rift will go that route?
The world has changed, as it has a habit of doing.
Where once if I had said my subscriptions had all lapsed, I would be playing no MMOs, now it just narrows the field of choice a bit.
