The reasons given were declining usage and the Bizarro world excuse that killing it would lead to a better user experience.

I cannot speak to the former, except to say that Google pushed a lot of people off the bus themselves when the screwed up the UI for a few weeks, but the latter still smacks of “More people using Google Plus would make the user experience there better.”

I point at the work they have done to further integrate Blogger into Google Plus as evidence of what is important to Google.

But whatever the reason, there was much talk about jumping ship before the July 1 end date and the “declining user base” ran off and pretty much swamped every comparable service.  Numbers clearly mean something different at Google.

I too began looking around.  I put together a list of possible alternatives, which I will reproduce here:

• Netvibes
• NewsBlur
• Bloglines
• Feedly
• The Old Reader
• Tiny Tiny RSS
• Like Hack

And then… I pretty much did nothing.

July was still a ways away.  There seemed no point in joining the rush.  And who knew if Google would change their mind.  Stranger things have happened.  So I decided to let things settle down a bit.

Now the dust has settled.  Or I hope it has.  We have about six weeks left in the life of Google Reader.  So I am wondering how things are going for people who have moved off of Google Reader.  For this, I will use a poll.

Feel free to embellish your choice or warn people off of bad choices in the comments.

Meanwhile, Google continues to do its best to make me not use Google products.  In addition to Google Reader, they are also shutting down iGoogle, which has been my default home page for years now.  They have been tinkering with YouTube, including making me link my YouTube account directly to Google Plus, which ended up unpublishing all of my videos for a while.  More on the “what is important to Google” evidence pile.  And they let Bob Scoble loose with Google Glass, which everybody calls Google Glasses, because that is what they are, which sent the message, at least to me, that they are perfect for crazy people.

And then there is Google Plus, the gifted child at Google, the web app on which they are devoting their focus.  How was that last update for everybody?

I swear, every time I look at Google Plus, something happens to piss me off.  They banned me for using a pseudonym, then quietly let me back a couple months later.  Then they made changes, screwed up my account, linked it to YouTube, which screwed up that account, and now they have made their bad UI even worse for the moment.

Yes, I realize that “bad” is relative.  You might like only being able to see four our less posts at a time, each with a big picture, the author’s avatar, an excerpt of the first paragraph, and the first few comments.

My view of Google Plus at the moment

Me, I read a lot of things online.  If I cannot see 20 or more headlines at once, I end up doing too much scrolling.  I want a list with title, author, source, the first sentence of the post, and maybe a general topic tag.   A UI like the  one they are pushing is high on the list of reasons I do not invest much time in Facebook.  The interface does not suite my needs.

The irony here is that, if Google gave me a UI more suited to my needs… make it an option if not the default… added in RSS feed reading with the ability to share with circles and the like, and just stopped pissing me off for a little while, I would probably go use Google Plus.  There are already people there I would follow.

Ah well, the life of an outlier.

Whatever happened, we need to find out why it happened. But clearly it should not have happened.

-Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland)

We are reaching that time of the year when the sun is shining and various members of our regular Saturday night instance group are sometimes lured outside to see the world, visit relatives, or move across town or across country, judging from past experience.  The summer hiatus is nearly upon us.

Which would be fine, except that so far 2013 hasn’t been the best of years for the group getting together.  Take the weekend before last.  Four of us were available.  We got into Rift.  We poked around.  We ran into the Exodus of the Storm Queen instance.

Four Enter… plus a dino

You can tell that is a recent picture because the little orange dino pet from the recent Raptr promotion is there by my side.

We went through the first two boss events and then ended up at the third boss, Valthunder, where we again failed the DPS check, being short on person, and ended up in the usual state of affairs.

I’ve been dead in here a lot

Then we chatted a bit, did a hunt rift, and called it a night.

So it has gone.  The five of us haven’t been on together since the first weekend of the year.

I am going to guess that it isn’t for lack of desire.  It isn’t as though one person has said, “screw it” and just stopped showing up.  All of us have missed weeks and then have come back.  There is usually a notification in advance that somebody won’t be on because of some event or another.

And now we are at the point where we traditionally break for summer, usually reconvening in late August for a return to our game of choice.  So the lack of a full group will continue.

Which means Rift, as least for our main characters, is probably off the table for a while.  Not that there is anything new coming in Rift that would impact us greatly.  There will be a summer festival of some sorts.  I forget what they did last year.  And some tweaks no doubt.  But the biggest news of late is the free to play transition which means… pretty much nothing to the group.  There is another zone coming in, and signs that we might be getting some more dimensions options to decorate.  But given the state of my own dimension, that isn’t a big draw for me.

So the question becomes, what should the summer be about?

Should we carry on as we have been?  We have a set of intersecting games depending on who is online.  We play World of Tanks when it is just the boys.  We play Need for Speed World sometimes when the group includes some combo of Earl, Potshot, and myself.  We were playing the Neverwinter Nights 2 with just me and the Potshots.  But we still end up with intersections of people where Rift is the only game in common, and four player Rift only gets us so far with instances.

(I did suggest the last time around that we could just get the dungeon finder looking for group tool to assign us a DPS player, but we eventually decided that having one person in the group not on Skype with us would end up feeling odd.)

So should we let Rift go fallow for the summer (unless we all happen to show up) and go for a nostalgia run?

We could go back to the Lone Lands in LOTRO and play some more anachronistic music with Anderson Cooper.  My corp in EVE is looking into a summer run in LOTRO.  The server they have chosen is Brandywine which, of course, is not one of the servers where I have characters.  That is always the way.

Music… and Anderson Cooper

We could get some scrolls of resurrection for WoW (Earl is still subscribed) and see what has changed in Azeroth.  It could become the summer of dailies and pet battles.

We could even go really old school and take another stab at EverQuest.  That is doable in groups of less than five.

I think most of the group has Guild Wars 2 at this point.  Oddly, despite its “no need to group” focus and its “every man for himself” view on roles, I think it could work as a group game on the overland content.  I ended up standing by myself in a bunch of group events, so bringing your own group would clearly be a help there.

Or is it time to explore something new and different.  Neverwinter is out, which is new, but I am not sure how different it really is nor do I have a sense of how noxious the free to play aspects of the game are.  There are crazy ideas like Darkfall or Planetside 2 or the like, which promote grouping but where level differentials do not keep people from playing together.  Or we could explore co-op games.  There is Diablo III, which at least three of us own, or Torchlight II, which is damn cheap for what you get.  There is even Borderlands 2, which Gaff made me buy a few weeks back when it was on sale ($25 for the game + all DLC up to that point), but which I am so hilariously bad at on my own that I haven’t gotten very far and have pretty much stopped playing.

I think MOBAs like League of Legends are out, primarily because I cannot stand the genre.

Is there anything else we should be looking at as a possible summer hiatus game?

We were not, and actually sold the house for what we were asking a couple weeks later.  But there was no possibility that we were going to come to an arrangement with the person who made that first offer.  Their offer was so insultingly low that it made it completely unlikely to be able to negotiate any deal at all.

—

We have a garage sale at least once a year.  Often we have two, one in the spring and one in the fall.  Just the process of finding stuff to sell helps us keep the house clear of clutter, so that our home, with the exception of my office and my daughter’s room, feels clean, open, and spacious.

We tend to put out all manner of things on the driveway for sale.  I often have a pile of books that have made it into the category of “won’t read again” out on a table.  At one garage sale I had done a big purge and had 40+ paperbacks lined up, with the asking price was 25 cents each.  Cheap enough that anybody with an interest would pick them up, and it wouldn’t kill me if I decided to give a couple away to any kid who looked like they wanted to read one.  And, as always, quantity discounts are available.

A woman, who rolled up in an expensive car, offered me a dollar for all of the books, and then started gathering them up like it was a done deal.  A dollar turned out to be exactly the right price to start a fight.

In the cold logic of hindsight, it was just an offer I could freely reject.

In the reality and emotion of the moment, it was insulting.  I started with “no” and worked my way up to using them for kindling before I would sell her one at full cover price.  Her offer stayed at a dollar throughout, leavened with sneers and insults.  But we could have stopped after our first pass through offer and rejection, as no deal was possible after that point.  I cannot imagine she thought her negotiation technique was going to be effective.  It is always interesting to meet people who are worse at interpersonal relationships than I am.

—

What did those two little stories have to do with anything?  We’ll get to that.  First, a foundation of words needs to be built.

With the announcement that Rift is moving from the once traditional monthly subscription model to a cash shop driven free to play model, there have been the usual range of reactions, from feelings that no good will come of this to expressions of joy at the demise of yet another monthly subscription barrier to entry.  Some people really hate the subscription idea.

My own response is somewhere in between.

Good things will come of this change.  I know that.

More people will play Rift.  It won’t make it suddenly popular with people who wouldn’t play a fantasy MMORPG in the first place.  But people who wouldn’t otherwise commit to $15 a month will want to play.

An annoying amount of words, and some irrelevant pictures, after the cut:

More players can be a boon like no other.

Some of my favorite periods of time in several games… EverQuest II, EverQuest, and even Lord of the Rings Online… came right after the transition to free to play.  New players show up and old rush back to the game.  The population balloons.  There are people playing again throughout the range of levels.  The auction house becomes viable again.

The experiment with EverQuest II Extended in particular was amazing.  The Freeport server, on which it was hosted, quickly became very popular.  Old players voted with their dollars, copying characters over to be a part of this vibrant experience.

Many versions of the Frostfang Sea

This seems to be the norm, the big surge in players after the change over.  And though when the model was extended to all of EverQuest II, there was some grumbling from long time players about not wanting low commitment freebs in the game, I think that passed quickly and people in general appreciated having more players in the game.

This is part of what I will call “The Happy Time” after the transition to free to play.

Star Wars: The Old Republic is in that zone now.  Rift will be there soon.

And as the population rises, the money will roll in.  There will be plenty of people buying the one-time upgrades, like bag slots and character slots and special souls and the like.  Reports of an increase in revenues is part and parcel of the new model.

Not everybody will be happy.  This is a change, and if you liked things the way they were, then change may not be in your best interest.  Certainly if you are a crafter in Rift, the idea that the cash shop will be selling gear… not the very best gear, but likely better than you will be able to make… will no doubt put a damper on your spirits.

And some people won’t like the PLEX-like REX.  I think REX is great idea… if the currently moribund Rift economy can support it… but there has always been a faction that thinks it is cheating, an exploit, an ability to opt out of the in-game economy, something that keeps players from being invested in the game.

But over all, barring any technical issues, things should start off well.  You can look forward to an exciting summer in Telara.

And then the first blush of enthusiasm will fade.  Populations will drop… not back to pre-F2P levels, but they will peak and subside.  The purchases of one-time upgrades will taper off.  The reality of the situation will begin to influence how things move forward.

In the end, the game must have revenue to survive.

When you need a subscription to play, that may drive people off.   But even with the smaller population, the revenue is predictable.  Unless you do something to piss off your whole subscriber base, you will likely have about as many dollars this month as next month and the month after that.

And, more importantly to me, it means that the focus of the team supporting the game is to provide enough content to keep people subscribed.

That can lead to good and bad.  I think we have to look at WoW as the primary practitioner in that arena.

I am not sure anybody is gushing with joy at the way daily quests have evolved in WoW or that reputation grinds are fun for the whole family.  Certainly, the pile of dailies and such at the end of the Burning Crusade expansion were a complete turn off for me.

On the other hand, raids and instances also get added.  And I have to admit that I had a good time doing all of the Argent Tournament stuff and running Wintergrasp just about every day once I was up to level cap in Wrath of the Lich King.

And even Bobby Kotick is saying that WoW needs to push out content more frequently to protect its huge, if leaking, subscriber base.

Or we can look at EVE Online.  CCP has eschewed the tradition of selling expansions, tossing one out to its space faring audience at the rate of about twice a year.  Keeping new content flowing to keep subscriptions has been their model, and they have been very productive on that front.  Look at all the expansions:

(Expansion screens stolen from the EVE Online Facebook page.)

That is a lot of expansions.  That is an EverQuest-level list.

And they all came with the monthly subscription fee.  No extra charge.

You can argue about how expansive any one of those were individually.  Crucible was, for example, mostly about fixing stuff and quality of life in general, though it was popular because of it.  Incarna, which really tried to bring something new, lead to riots and required the CSM to talk CCP off the ledge. (Pro tip: Monocles were not the cause.) Other expansions have often been focused specific aspects of the game.  With so many things to do in EVE though, there is a lot of ground to cover, so somebody always feels neglected with every expansion.

But the point is, CCP is focused on keeping people subscribed to the game.  Their revenue model depends on keeping a large (compared to anything except WoW) subscriber base engaged.  That is the behavior that the subscription model rewards.

When a game transitions to a cash shop driven free to play model, the broader player base is no longer the focus.

Yes, you still need to feed people into the game, so there is still some incentive provide general updates.  But the people who count are the people who are buying things at the cash shop.  That is the revenue stream for the game.  The company needs to focus on that to survive.  So, for example, we have EA living up to their promised SWTOR update schedule with a drop that does nothing but add items to the cash shop.  It isn’t hard to tell explain why that is case, and it certainly illustrates where the focus has to go once a game depends on the cash shop.

And what happens when the happy time ends and those one-time items and easy sales start to dry up?

Well, first, there is the hope that they won’t.  If you haven’t made your game too easy to level up in already or haven’t already handed out lots of experience boost potions and the like (a failing of EverQuest II), if you have thrown in enough useful items, like good gear, if you have a popular housing mechanic that people enjoy that will provide lots of cosmetic sales, things might last for a while longer.

But the company still has to focus on creating new things for the cash shop.  And unless they are really savvy, some market saturation is going to occur.  There is a threshold beyond which it becomes difficult just to find things in your cash shop when items multiply.  There are gimmicks that can extend this.  You can have special, limited time items.  You can do the Disney routine and rotate some popular items to “the vault,” bringing them out now and again to spur sales.  The KV-5 in World of Tanks is a good example of that.  That gets an “oooh, its back!” from somebody whenever it appears for sale.

The focus on the cash shop is not without impact on your user base.  When every email I get from a game is about what is on sale in the cash shop this week, when game events focus heavily on things like selling giant pink cow mounts, when the launcher ad details every currency sale, when the game has to pop up a window every time I log in to tell me what new items are available to buy, when a window pops up to tell me I can buy more daily quest slots, when every dialog has a link to the cash shop, when the game opens up a browser page when I log out to get just one more chance to try and sell me something…

Well, it takes a toll.

It creates a different atmosphere.  It influences how I look at the company and its game.

I realize that I am in an economic relationship with the company.  I was when it was monthly subscriptions.  I am still when it is a cash shop model.  But when every interaction I have with the company involves them trying to sell me something, it changes the relationship for me.

Then, when they start trying to sell me something I actively dislike… even more that giant pink cow mounts… the problem is compounded.

For me, it is lock boxes, or card packs, or other pseudo-gambling purchases where you pay some money for the chance of getting the item you want.  That is where I start to growl.

You can tell me I do not have to buy them, that they are purely optional.  In turn, I will point you to the two little stories at the top of this post.  Cold logic does not always rule.  Emotion is always a factor.  I won’t stop playing a game out of hand because of lock boxes, but it becomes another aspect of my relationship with the game, one that makes me want to avoid the cash shop as much as I can, one that makes me think less of the company running the game.

And the problem is that lock boxes seem to be the way a cash shop driven game needs to head to be successful.  Star Trek Online went that way.  EverQuest II hopped on board that train.  Need For Speed World is all about the random card packs now.  And I expect that Rift will end up there as well.

As has been reported elsewhere, the transition to free to play is a mixed bag of positives and negatives.  As Raph Koster said, not evil, but different.

In my own experience, the initial experience can be quite positive.  But over time, it seems like another race to the lowest common denominator, that cash shop focus becomes cash shop mania.  And frankly, I play these games in part as an escape from the modern world and the focus on buying and selling.  When it intrudes there, it is just that, an intrusion, and I am not sure I am better off seeing capitalism in its more naked form in this particular case any more than I would be if a publisher decided to put ads in the middle of a novel.

And I do not know what the answer lies, where a company can go that makes enough money to support the game but keeps it from becoming an endless and odious exercise in the hard sell.

My ambivalence towards the game continues however.

I like the connection with EVE Online, the idea of continuing the struggle on the surface of planets, the possibilities of the combined in-game markets, and, most of all, the idea of bombing DUST players from orbit while in my spaceship just for the sheer hell of it.

That last bit represents the height of my interest.

But shooters… and console shooters… just really are not my thing.

So, while I have a PlayStation 3, I still have not bothered downloading it.

It has been in open beta for months, and was available to EVE players even before that.

I am not on the Derek Smart “just going to fail” train, but I wouldn’t bet heavily on success either.  Player numbers are starting to become available.  But I couldn’t tell you if they are good or bad yet.  How much is enough with a free to play game?

Meanwhile, I just haven’t seen or heard anything that makes me want to play yet.

DUST got a boost with the Uprising update.  That all sounds good.  But there isn’t the anything I just have to have, anything that is a big draw.

Maybe, like EVE, it would benefit from more public drama.

Or, maybe, like EVE, it will start slow and build over time.

Where will it be in a year?

Another subscription MMO caves in, unable to make a go of things on monthly fees alone.  Or they feel that the grass must surely be greener on the free to play side of the fence.

Of course, my prediction was back when Scott Hartsman was still on board and before they put the cash shop interface into the game.  And with WoW, the game Rift sought to out do by speed and emulation, dropping subscriptions in huge, game killing chunks (for any game except WoW), the subscription model takes has taken another blow.

Anyway, Trion has announced that Rift will go free to play come June.  They have a video and such on the official site.  And a producer’s letter.  And a FAQ.  And an interview over at Massively to reinforce all of this.

They will even have something called REX, which sounds remarkably like PLEX.  You think?

The beginning matrix of who will get what has been announced.

Rift, Storm Legion, and free levels

People who subscribe will now be called “Patrons” and will get a set of benefits.  Will they be worth $15 a month to people?

Call me “Patron”

That feels more like World of Tanks, what with the short term options available.  They are certainly trying to mix in all they can.

But still, the cash shop will now rule the roost and new content will likely falter while Trion begins the endless race to figure out what will sell best.  Those who buy from the cash shop will drive the game going forward.

Some people will be cheering, feeling that every game needs to be free, that there is only one right model.

Others, whom like me, have been unhappy with the rot that cash shops can bring, will be less enthusiastic.

Either way, it will change the game.  Nobody can deny that.  And it will likely bring in some new players to start.  But eventually the cash shop chase will begin.

What do you think?

Addendum: Green Armadillo has some thoughts on Rift’s new plan.

Early in the week I started a few games on the largest map size (going with the Lakes option, so lots of land warfare) with a dozen competing civilizations and the usual complement of city states until I got a situation that looked good.  The first time out I was wedged in a corner between the Huns and the Mongols, which did not bode well.  The next time I was the Huns, but I managed to get into a war of annihilation with three other civs very early in the game, and while I managed to get to peace while still holding on to my capital, I was set back so badly that any rematch was going to go badly for me.

The third time out I drew the Germans which helped me build up my military quickly and avoid getting penned in early.  The Germans have a somewhat imbalanced attribute that allows them to recruit barbarians to their side a certain percentage of the time when they defeat a barbarian camp.

Loading… still loading…

I actively went after barbarian camps, which allowed my city production to stay focused on buildings and wonders.  You don’t get the best units that way, but you get a lot of them.  My barbarian strategy actually ended up yielding too many units and some points, though I was able to gift them to city states in return for influence.  The Germans also pay less for land unit maintenance, so that helped with the budget.

I ended up playing all the way into Sunday evening in sessions of an hour or more.  In the end it was down to five civs, all of whom feared my military might and all but one of which, the Carthaginians, who were my game-long ally, I was chipping away at, declaring war, taking a city, getting another city as part of a peace settlement, and then turning to the next in line.

However, my enthusiasm for conquest was starting to wain, so I decided at around turn 1,100 to just go for the cultural victory and end it about 30 turns later.  I saved before I started, so I could go back and continue the military victory… or the political victory… or the religious victory.  All were still viable.  But I was tired of waiting.

I was tired of waiting because, in the last 500 or so turns, that was what I was doing most of the time; waiting.  I would make my moves, update production, tweak some improvements, then end my turn only to wait and wait while the computer handled each of the other civilizations, the city states, and finally the barbarians.  Then the game would come back to me.

It is a truism of the Civilization series that each version is launched at a time when they really need the next generation of CPUs to run them effectively.  I remember getting a new computer and seeing the time it took to play a game of Civ II drop dramatically.  I recall writing a note to Firaxis about the slow performance of Civ IV back when it launched, at a time when I had a pretty high end machine in terms of processing power.  Their response was quite snotty in my opinion and could be summed up as  “play smaller campaigns if performance matters to you, there is nothing wrong with our game.”

So I am left wondering when we will reach the point where average CPUs will be up to the task of speedy turns in Civ V and where the bottlenecks really lay.  The game appears to at least be multi-core aware.  Looking at Task Manager, at least four of the eight cores in my CPU look like they are in use, though none of them are capped out or even showing usage beyond 50%.  So the game doesn’t seem CPU bound.  RAM appears to be available, so it isn’t like the game is paging out constantly… or it shouldn’t be in any case.  And while there appears to be some issue with I/O… the game takes me four long minutes from launch before I can resume a game already in progress… and four minutes might not seem like much time, but try sitting in front of your screen waiting, clicking to skip through any video possible, and listening to the required speech about your civ and its leader, then it is the “watched pot” scenario… I cannot imagine that they are doing much of that for each turn.

So when will we be set on this front?

I hope that the next Civ V expansion, Brave New World, will include performance improvements like those that came with the Gods & Kings expansion…  yes, performance was even worse at launch… because CPUs not only are not getting faster in the ways they used to back in the day, but the CPU doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor at the moment.  A long campaign like last week’s, where the last third of the game was mostly me waiting on the computer, puts me off the game.

But it does make me want to dig out my Civ II disk, which is still lost somewhere in my office.  The game isn’t as sophisticated as Civ V, though there is some appeal to its sometimes crude simplicity.

A simpler time…

But the game itself runs like a dream, the AI zips along, and most of any match is spent doing rather than waiting.  There are many reasons I always go back to that game, and speed is certainly one.  Yes, you can get mired into epic stalemates, but at least the turns move quickly.

The idea was to inflict blogging on as many newcomers as possible by getting a bunch of old cranks to give semi-useful and often contradictory advice about blogging.  And link whoring.

As is clear from that, I went for a humorous/cynical/sarcastic spin on the whole thing.  That was because, in the past, I have read so much horrible, inappropriate, or just bad from all rational perspectives advice on blogging that it practically puts me at the laugh/cry fork in the road.  And I always choose to laugh, which doesn’t make me very popular at funerals I must admit.  I end up thinking “A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants” and it is all down hill from there.

Yes, there are a lot of nuts and bolts things you can speak to about themes, fonts, statistics, comment moderation, spam, and the like.  But when it comes to the actual motivation and philosophy of blogging, the only universal I could come up with is:

Be the blog you want to read.

Which isn’t very helpful.

And I have nothing for any subsequent existential crisis which might result from realizing that you don’t actually want to read your own blog.  But it seemed better than telling somebody they need to put a picture of a cat in every post or whatever the SEO experts are saying of late.

Anyway, there was much enthusiasm.  Lots of people trotted out advice of all sorts (a list of some of the posts here), some of which was actually more useful than I expected.  Nobody actually told people to post pictures of cats.  The usual wet blankets had to chime in that it was all a wasted effort, because that is what wet blankets do.  Why deny them their place.

In the end, by my count, 110 new blogs were created and were being blogged on by new bloggers here in Blogsylvannia.  I have them all listed and linked in another post.

But now that a dozen months have flown by, I thought I would take a look at the mortality rate for NBI blogs.  Of 110 who started, how many are still active?

The answer is 30, or 27% of those that started.

Active is, of course, subject to interpretation.  My bar for being considered an active blog was still being at your URL (or having noted a forwarding address) and having posted something on or after April 1, 2013.

That leaves the following blogs, which you should go visit and congratulate.

1. Adventures of Danania, Supergirl of Lorien
2. Ald Shot First
3. Altaclysmic
4. Beyond Tannhauser Gate
5. Bloodthorne
6. Casual Aggro
7. Casually Vicious
8. Conveniently Placed Exhaust Port
9. Dreadblade
10. Elfkina vežička
11. Funsponge
12. Game Delver
13. Goetia’s Letters
14. Mighty Viking Hamster
15. MMO Juggler
16. MMO One Night a Week
17. Neurotic Girl
18. Ravalation
19. Red Neckromonger
20. Sephora’s Closet
21. stnylan’s musings
22. That Was An Accident!
23. Unwavering Sentinel
24. Vagabond Goes for a Walk
25. Warlockery
26. Warp to Zero
27. White Charr
28. Why I Game
29. Wynniekin’s Adventures
30. World’s End Tavern

Is that a lot or a little, good or bad?

I suppose it depends on your point of view.  The only other data I have on the subject is from when I did The Great Survey of Linking Blogs back in September 2011.  During that I went back and checked on all 281 of the outgoing links for blogs that at some time put me in their blog roll.  I found that of 263 unique blogs, 74 were still active, which totals up to about 28%.

So 27% from that sample size seems to be about par for the course, as far as I can tell.

New World Tavern and Casual Aggro did similar round up posts, though their criteria was a bit different (as were their counts), so they came up with 40% and 25%  respectively.  As they say, your mileage may vary.  Avatars of Steel also has a post about the NBI, while there is a class of 2012 badge up for participants over at Ravalation.

And what of the other 80 blogs?  A bit on that after the cut.

I have put the remaining blogs into three categories, one of which is an exception cases.

The exception is Giddeon’s Hammer, which got consolidated into a general blog by the same author.  So does that count as still up or not?  I decided that, since there were no game related posts since April 1, it did not.  But it gets a special mention here at the top.

Then there are the deleted blogs.  When you visit their URL, they are no longer their or their domain has been camped or taken over by some other entity.  There were 10 of those.

1. Beyond Reproach – Deleted
2. Big Numbers – Deleted
3. Glimpses from Middle-earth – Deleted
4. GnomeGates.com – Deleted, domain camped
5. Horn & Ivory Gates – Deleted
6. Mistress of Illusions – Deleted
7. MMO Asylum – Deleted
8. Noob Raider – Turned Japanese
9. SWTOR from Scratch – Deleted
10. Windy Acres Ranch – Deleted

Which leaves us with 69 blogs still around but no longer being updated.  Those are actually the most interesting of the bunch, since those have a last post date.  So we can see how long people lasted at the effort.  The first four months saw more than half of those whole would stop give up.  But that seems reasonable, as people figure out whether the blogging is for them or not.

• May – 12 stopped
• June – 9 stopped
• July – 7 stopped
• August – 6 stopped

After that drops start to slow down, but people keep dropping.

• September – 4 stopped
• October – 5 – stopped
• November – 3 stopped
• December – 3 stopped
• January – 2 stopped

Then there is a sudden surge.  I am not sure what happened in February.

• February – 11 stopped
• March – 6 stopped
• April – 1 stopped (said farewell)

Which brings us to the full year.

Beyond this point is my data set of blogs I considered inactive and the date of their last post.  You can double check me for errors, if you are so inclined.

• Raspberry Jammed – May 4
• Adamant Nomad – May 11
• Battlemastered – May 13
• Omens of Onterion – May 17
• Eons and Eons Away – May 17
• MMOARprz – May 17
• My Staff is Bigger Than Yours – May 18
• We do it the WASD Way! – May 20
• Toastman’s Blog – May 21
• Wynnie goes F2P – May 25
• Middle-earth Initiative – May 28
• Donovan Drones – May 30
• thenotsonewnoob – June 2
• /con mmob – June 4
• Not Too Heavy – June 5
• Newbie Hobbit – June 11
• The Diverted Muse – June 17
• Lotro Family of Flosiin Nightsong – June 21
• Crafty’s Corner – June 21
• AntiPlasmaFrequency – June 25
• Gaming for Introverts – June 29
• EVE All Night – July 1
• Real Adventures in Fake Worlds – July 1
• Argus or Bust – July 1
• Gaming Abroad – July 9
• Horrible Ball of Fire – July 13
• commentarilies – July 23
• Warcraft Street – July 25
• The Roaring Silence – August 1
• Wald’s Wanderings – August 8
• Geo’s Ironman Challenge – August 15
• The Altoholic – August 15
• Stabby McStabStab – August 19
• The Incidental Analyst – August 23
• Warrior Needs Time Badly – September 21
• Backseat Game Design – September 22
• Lotro Cinna – September 25
• Click to Loot – September 26
• Aggrolicious – October 7
• TFScribbles – October 14
• Flask Half-Empty – October 24
• Priest All The Things – October 29
• Auction House on Farm – October 29
• Deathstomp – November 1
• Landroval Style – November 7
• Kaw Kaw! Get in the Bag! – November 25
• Trippin Tyria – December 18
• The Poison Mushroom – December 21
• Unliving a Death Knight – December 23
• The Butterfly Gamer – January 1
• The 10th Level of Gaming Hell – January 17
• Diminishing Returns – February 1
• TL-DR – February 1
• Bad Tauren – February 1
• Musings of an Altoholic – February 7
• Kemwer Game Blog – February 7
• Renai Hunter – February 7
• The Blue Haired Geek – February 9
• The Frugal Gamer – February 10
• Image Heavy – February 11
• Saali in Taborea – February 12
• Malefic Incantations – February 21
• Divinity’s Reach – March 1
• Brazokie’s Blog Space – March 3
• Scattered Thoughts – March 9
• Hipstalotro – March 14
• Inside the Magic Shop – March 20
• The Loony Bin – March 30
• Healing Mains – April 11 (said farewell)

There was the 1.08 patch for Diablo III, rolled out on US servers the day before yesterday, which was touted as bringing serious improvements to the game, including changes to the surprisingly popular auction house.

Unfortunately, one side effect was the introduction of a bug that allowed players to basically create gold out of thin air… or virtual thin air… thus putting the whole in-game economy in peril.  I don’t think that was the auction house fix they were looking for, and continues along with Diablo III’s somewhat hard luck tale.

Oh, I remember that

Blizzard jumped right on this, once they noticed it, shutting down the auction house. They have since reported that the bug has been fixed.  However, there remained the question of what to do.  There was talk of a complete roll-back to a pre-patch save.  However, they chose to do it the hard way, opting to manually fix each account that used the bug.  I have not seen any word about people being banned for using what was obviously an exploit, but I suspect there will be some sanctions.

As of this time, the auction house on US servers remains closed, and will stay so until all current auctions expire.

The updated has been fixed and should roll out without the exploit on EU and Asian servers.

Then there was the Activision Blizzard quarterly report where, after a rise in subscribers with the release of Pandaria and then holding steady the next quarter, a drop of 1.3 million subscribers was announced for the past quarter, the subscriber base moving from 9.6 million to 8.3 million players.

I once wrote that WoW dropped more subscribers than SWTOR had in total.  This time around it apparently dropped more than twice as many.

As has become a standard part of these sorts of announcements, it was stated that most of the losses were in China, which have a much smaller impact on revenue, it was allowed that there were subscription losses in the west and that the company expected the subscriber base at the end of the year to be smaller than it is now.

Expect nothing new for WoW this year I guess.

Bobby Kotick was quick to point out that WoW remains one of the most successful video game franchises and, no doubt, continues to be insanely profitable.

The quarterly report is available here.

The cover in good condition

I used to pick up that book and read through sections all of the time, to the point that the book looks very worn out.  There wasn’t anything particularly startling or new or exciting about the content of the book, except that it was history, which I enjoy.

What drew me to the book was the format.

At its heart, the book is a simple listing of details, year by year, decade by decade, in chronological order, without breaking them out into the usual topics.  So rather than reading just about WWII or the Great Depression or any other events that we tend to look at in a vacuum, everything is woven together, giving a better sense, to my mind, of the complexity and parallel nature of history.

There are always a lot of things going on at once.  Just because the Korean War was going on did not stop politics, the arts, diplomacy, and a whole host of other conflicts, brewing, in progress, or otherwise, from continuing apace.  The world never stops.

Of course, the book’s title is a bit misleading.  As it was published in 1985, it was only an almanac of roughly 84% of the 20th century.  And since no update or revision was ever done, the 20th century ends with Reagan’s re-election, while the Cold War continues on.

Still, I enjoyed the book immensely.  I have never found another work that combined the detail and parallel flows of history so well.

And to a certain degree, that book influences what I have ended up trying to do with this blog.  Part of the blog is a chronicle of my own gaming adventures.  But I also try to include bigger events, things that are landmarks in the time stream of gaming, not because I aspire to be a news site, but because they indicate what else was going on in the field.

It is an attempt to make my own almanac of gaming I suppose.

After the cut, there are lots of words about the distortion of memory, old games, and what I was playing when in a general sense, along with some charts.  The charts are an attempt to provide a framework for memory, and are a work in progress themselves.

You have been warned.

Into the reality of things.

Making this almanac is easy enough to do accurately if I post as things happen.  However, I often like to cover items from the past.  Memories of TorilMUD, the Atari 2600, that season when NBA Jam ruled, and many more such tales come up.  But I sometimes have trouble placing them just right when it comes to the timeline of my life.

Human memory… or at least my memory… is deeply flawed.  I have had quite strong memories of things that did not happen when or in the way I remember them.

Back in high school, when I started working at a grocery store, there was a clerk at the store who enjoyed hazing the new employees.  He was basically a jerk who enjoyed being a bully when he could get away with it.  However, when I think of that time… some 30 years ago now… my memory appears to have deleted his voice and appearance.  Instead, in my memory has substituted in the voice and image of George Clooney… post ER haircut… attempting to pin demeaning nicknames on me and trying to get me to do his work.

And I know it wasn’t George Clooney.  But my memory has lost enough detail from that time that I cannot even recall if he sort of looked liked… or sounded like… George Clooney, because all I can see and hear in my brain is George Clooney.

Or, to put this on a more game-focused theme, I can distinctly remember sitting on the couch with my brother, playing the Atari 2600 in the house I consider “the one I grew up in.”  We were on the crappy black vinyl couch, MGA 19″ color television (which replaced the 13″ black and white that used to take 5 minutes to warm up) across the room, Atari 2600 on the floor before us, cables snaking out to the TV.  And the game on the screen i my memory is Adventure.

I can conjure that image up as clear as day.  It is especially vivid because the game is in color, as that was before the Atari 2600 was banned from the family room because the RF modulator box that hooked the console up to the TV was blamed for any bad TV reception.  So any time after that, my memories are of playing on a little 10″ Sony portable TV in my room.

Except, of course, we moved out of that house in 1978 and the Atari 2600 game Adventure did not ship until 1979.  And if I strain my brain looking for details, I can picture myself walking from our next house, which we only occupied for 11 months, so it is the border line between a lot of things, up the street to the Longs Drugs on Keily and Homestead to buy the game.  Only did that same walk to buy other games, so maybe I did not buy that game.  And I cannot even begin to peg how I even heard about the game to know to go to buy it, though it is quite possible that I just walked up to Longs, having accumulated the requisite $30, to stare at what they had.  That seems to tickle a memory.  But somehow I ended up with it.

And the mental image of my brother and I sitting on the couch could just be from a picture somebody took of us sitting there.

So my memories are suspect unless I can put some concrete details around them.  This is especially true when it comes to when something happened.  I describe in the About page my problems with memories falling into specific timeline buckets, and that anything in the last 6 months might as well have “just happened” when it comes to recollection at times.

With this in mind, I attempted this past weekend to put my gaming memories into timelines.  I decided to start with bigger picture items, the first of which involves what I was playing video games on at any given point.  I ended up with this chart.

Game Platforms

If you click on that image to view it in a larger, readable size, it is a list of the platforms on which I have played video games and the years those platforms were active.  The date range starts in 1973, which might as well be the dawn of time for me, as memories of things before that are pretty much a jumble and very hard to assign dates to.  And they didn’t involve video games in any case, except maybe playing Pong.

It starts with arcade game, the classic 25 cents a play in a venue like Time Zone or the big arcade at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk.  That actually runs in parallel with the next two, the Pong console, with four versions of Pong, and the Atari 2600, but fades out in the mid 80s when the Apple II shows up.  The Apple II gets replaced with a Mac SE in 1987, which leads to a series of Mac.  There is some time with both Mac and Windows.  Windows picks up in 97 when Mac related jobs are at low ebb and I end up working on Windows development tools.  I think EverQuest puts the nail in the coffin for the Mac.  I remember burning our wedding music CD on a PowerMac 8500 (a mix-CD was our wedding goodie) while camping the Qeynos sewers on a 400MHz Pentium II Dell box.

After that Windows rules the roost.  The Wii, the DS Lite, and the PlayStation 3 all show up and fade.  The latest edition is the iPad, but I am still not sure how much influence it has on my gaming.  There are a few games I play, but I more often read news or web sites on it.

In looking at that chart, one of the things that shows faulty memory is the Apple II and Mac eras.  In my mind, the Apple II seems like it was around a lot longer, while the Mac era doesn’t “feel” like it lasted that long.  But then a lot of other things were going on during that time frame, which no doubt dilutes the memory.  And then Windows sneaks in due to work.

From there I decided to map a parallel chart, which is related to connectivity.  This basically indicates the influence LAN and online games and how I was connecting to them.

Connectivity

In the beginning there was no connectivity.  Then I bought that Apple 1200bps modem from Potshot and the world changed.  Then there was the Mac and easy LAN connectivity.  That dies off essentially when work security policies forbid the installation of any non-approved software, killing off the after work gaming that used to be our work bonding exercise.

Then dial-up internet and games that could use that.  Then there was that brief but sweet period of ISDN, after which we moved two miles, which might as well have been the dark side of the moon when it came to internet connectivity and it was back to dial up with a brief dalliance with something called “Sprint Broadband,” a wireless service that required a 30 foot mast be placed atop our house to get line of sight to a cell tower across the valley in Milpitas.  The throughput could be good, but the latency was such as to make gaming impossible.  And then AT&T (née SBC, née Pacific Bell, née AT&T, in that comic corporate circle of life) was finally able to deliver the lowest tier of ADSL to our home, and the age of always on internet had finally arrive to our home.

And after that, I put together a timeline of important and/or influential game genres for me.  I clipped this to just be multiplayer and/or online games, so this chart actually starts in 1986, with the acquisition of that modem.

The Genres

These are not all the gaming genres I play.  Turn based strategy, single player cRPGs, translations of board games, and quickie arcade games have all hung around longer than this chart.  So I chose to call it Online Genres.

The first genre isn’t even really a genre, but an online service, GEnie.  It was there I played Stellar Emperor, Stellar Warrior, Air Warrior, GemStone, and a number of other online games.  That was the dawn of the era for me.  That moves to MUDs with the advent of internet dial-up.  TorilMUD was the main one, but I played others over that time, though I stopped, and restarted, with the death and rebirth of TorilMUD.

First Person Shooters started as an after work LAN game, with Marathon being a requirement at the office at one point.  I can still pick out people from that era by the terminology that slips in some times. (e.g. “I am gathering” for “I am starting a game, join me.”)  That era ends with the Desert Combat mod for Battlefield 1942.  I played shooters after that, but they ceased to be a big deal. (Though you could clearly make the case for World of Tanks being a shooter.)

Then there were Real Time Strategy games, which started for me with Warcraft II, included Age of Empires, Age of Empires II, StarCraft, and Total Annihilation, though I came to that last title somewhat late, after both expansions were out and Cavedog was releasing the last of their add-on units on their web site.  Those were all heavily work related, played after hours on the LAN at the office, and died off thanks to company policy as much as anything.

And then there are MMORPGs, which for that first bit of the chart, meant EverQuest.  Then there is the gap of busy life and bad internet, and which resumed with the launch of EverQuest II.  And then things move to WoW, I start the blog, and the rest is written down here.

So now I have a few charts to help provide a framework for memory.  The question is, where to go from here.

I think the next project is to do a more detailed list of MMORPGs over at least the time frame of the blog, to see what I was playing when.  I am not sure I need to go month by month… though my month in review posts would make that possible… but maybe quarter by quarter.

Is there another, broader set of data I should try to chart?

Or is this too much thinking about memory and the past already?

First, the bad news: EA bags Star Wars games rights

Still waiting for the good news

-Headline over at The Register

The word has gone out that EA has acquired the rights to the Star Wars franchise when it comes to video games, something garnering about as many cheers as a wicked step-mother in a Disney story.  It is hard to be happy about the prospect of the potential for uninspired games with always online DRM which require servers that EA has a propensity for shutting down as soon as they think they can get away with it.

Of course, Disney should get its share of jeers as well, as not only did they farm out Star Wars video games to the likes of EA, but they did so on the back of laying off most everybody at Lucas Arts.

Wasn’t this easier when it was just George Lucas pissing us all off, but we would occasionally see a decent Star Wars game rise amongst the trash?

(Direct link to video)

The video is probably best viewed over at YouTube in a larger window.  It is available at all resolutions up to 1080p, at which point the explosions are surprisingly detailed.

The video is running at 2x speed.  Time dilation was slowing things down to between 10 and 20% normal, but speeding up the video beyond 2x did not “feel” right, as things got very choppy.

The music is “Akat Mountains” from the EVE Online sound track (all of which you can find over at Sound Cloud), which I included because I had the sound off in EVE, so it would otherwise be a silent movie.

10 Year Ad Banner

CCP was handing out goodies… cosmetic gear, special ships, and fireworks with launchers to mount on your ship.

Redeemed

To see the fun, you really needed to log into one of the key trade hub systems, which are Jita, Amarr, Hek, or Dodixie.

Jita, of course, is the most popular.  However, I think it lost out compare to Amarr.  My main happened to be in Amarr, while I had an alt in Jita, so I was able to check out the fun at both stations.  And while each had fireworks, and both had almost the same population in local, Amarr had Chribba and his Revelation.

Capital Ship at the Amarr undock

Of course, not being a reinforced trade hub like Jita, Amarr also had time dilation.

20% was the best I saw it while I was on.  It fluctuated between 12% and 17% for quite a while, then dropped to 10% as more people piled into the system.  The price we pay I suppose.  There was no time dilation in Jita.  But, as I said, there was also no Chribba.  So I think Amarr got the better show.

Chribba rolled out his Revelation for a while.  Then switch to a Widow black ops.  He appeared to open a jump bridge a few times, as we got a distortion field around the undock, similar to what you see when a titan opens a bridge, only this was darker in color.  And then he got out the Revelation again.  Most people seemed to be targeting his ships with their firework launchers.

I think CCP was in on the act as well.  I saw CCP Falcon in local, and for a while Amarr station was within a green sphere of light.  And I guess CCP Fozzie was around as well.

I'm in Amarr, orbiting @ChribbaVeldspar's Veldnaught and enjoying the fireworks show! #tweetfleet #eveonline #eveis10—
CCP Fozzie (@CCP_Fozzie) May 05, 2013

Pretty neat stuff.  Not something you see every day in Amarr.  I have a pile of screen shots after the cut.

And so I took to this idea and have, over the last 6+ years, created any number of graphics to fit into that banner space.  Some I have been quite happy with.  If you have visited here very often, you have probably seen the EverQuest chessboard banner which I put up when I am feeling nostalgic.  Others have been less pleasing.

But one of the challenges of creating a banner is the size.  To fit in that space at the top of the blog, the graphic has to be 730 pixels by 140 pixels in size.

Size Sample

When I picked the template, I did not give the size much thought.  Later, when I was trying to make banners, I began to realize what such mail slot-like dimensions really meant.  Basically, any banner graphic is very heavy on horizontal relative to vertical, with the ratio being more than 5 to 1 in favor of the left-right bias.  That is a wider ratio than Cinerama.

So I have to find pictures or screen shots where what I want to capture is in a very narrow vertical zone, but spread out on the horizontal plane.  So I have, over time, developed a sense of what pictures might work and which will not.  There are a lot of screen shots where I have to shake my head and move on because the vertical element required to get across the message or feeling I want is too much.

And if the aspect ratio were not enough, the template itself works against me.  I have to take into account that there are two tabs that stick up into the banner at the bottom left.  So I cannot let anything key to the image get covered by that.

And then there is the name of the blog itself, which the template superimposes over the image.  I don’t want anything key being covered by that.  Plus, I need to make sure that the banner contrasts enough with the blog name so that it can be read.  I do have the option of turning the blog name off, in which case I can lay it out myself on the banner image.  I have done that a few times, but I do not make a habit of it.

I also have to maintain the banner images manually.

Today, with many of the new templates, you can upload banners, crop and edit them, and even setup a list of banners from which the template will draw at random.  However, way back when I started, WordPress.com templates required you to provide a URL to the banner.  No storage, no editing, and no randomizing.  And while they have updated some of the templates, the one I use (Regulus) is still pretty much stuck in 2006.

All of which has left me with a collection 730 by 140 images saved away in various directories of my hard drive.  I have tried to collect them all together in one post.  If you are interested to see what I have created over the last few years (or what a few other people created as part of a contest at one point), all the ones I could find are after the cut.

There are about 90 in the gallery at this point, but I keep finding more.  And I know there are still more store away somewhere.  I used to put them up on Image Shack, but I cannot find many.  I did not adopt the convention of putting “banner” in the image name until I was well into making them.   So I suspect the list will grow over time.

Banner mania after the cut.

And now I have them all in one place where I can find them, so I know the URLs when I want to change which one is displayed.  Go me.

But an actual, sit down at the terminal, computer game.

It was Star Trek.

A friend’s dad had to go into the office one weekend and brought us along to show us the game that somebody had put on the accounting computer.  He left us to poke at it while he went off and did his work.  A clear waste of government resources back in an age when most people didn’t really know what a video game was, outside of Pong and Tank, and where the idea of a computer game probably would not have occurred to them.

It was a very simple game.  You were tasked to clear out the galaxy of hostile elements with a limited set of resources.

Star Trek in vt52

It was a pivotal moment in my life.  We were entranced.

I am sure the fact that it was called Star Trek, and represented the Enterprise fighting Klingons helped.  Star Trek was a big deal at the time, which was at least a year before Star Wars.  Maybe two.  It also pre-dated my Atari 2600.

We had such a good time with the game that my friend and I ended up creating a board game version of it so we could play at home.  We were engrossed.  It was the first in a series of games we created by piecing together the mechanics we discovered from other games.  Our home version got more complex over time.

It also got us to go out with horded allowance money to buy games like Star Fleet Battles as time went on, both to play them and to see how they dealt with spaceship combat.  There was even a foray in to naval miniatures rules and the like.  It was a heady time.

Anyway, I bring this up because over at The Register, the have a short piece up about the history of the original Star Trek game as part of the Antique Code Show series.

On one hand, it is a pain that we have not yet made another run at Exodus of the Storm Queen.  On the other, with just Potshot and I, the possible alternative game choices are pretty large.

I threw out “Boom or Vroom,” putting up World of Tanks versus Need for Speed World as an opening bid.  Potshot said “vroom,” so we were off to race cars for the evening.

This is the upside of the free to play model, that we can just decided to play that night, patch up, and get going without having to worry about a subscription or anything.

Of course, the first item up for discussion was, what should we drive.

The last time we got out onto the streets we started of with a variety of different cars, but finally decided we should all buy the same car and leave it stock, so that there were no vehicular stats tilting the races.  Our decision back then was to all buy the Lancia Delta HF Integrale Evoluzione.

This time we thought we ought to get something new, so it was off to the car dealer.

We were tempted by the Ford Capri being offered.  That was a car we both grew up around as an import sold through Ford’s Mercury brand dealerships.  I still like the styling of the ’70-’73 models.  However, NFSW was only selling a very tricked out race version of the car.

Not Street Legal

Both Potshot and I lean towards vintage cars, but prefer street models, not the heavily modified race cars.  We grumbled a bit about the game not catering to our demographic with their more modern super cars and race prepped vehicles, and continued down the list.

I eyed the Jaguar E-Type for a minute.  If it had been the convertible or the 2+2 body styles, I might have insisted.  But they only had the 2 door coupe, which always looks odd to me.

Eventually Potshot found a car on which we could both agree.  It was vintage, a formidable racer, and not outrageously over-styled.

More after the cut.  Words, pictures, video, etc.

The car dealer had our car.

We went with the Porsche 914-6.

Early 70s Porsche

The race prepped version of the Porsche 914s of our youth, the body lines were still intact that is looked more like the street car than a track only configuration.

After purchasing them, it was time to customize.  I have said before that the car customization… paint and vinyl and cosmetic parts… is one of the high points of the game.  The interface is suboptimal in my opinion seeming, as Potshot pointed out, to feeling the need to reinvent the wheel on a couple of UI fronts.  But it is still outstanding overall and I reiterate my call for multiple “wardrobe slots” for each car since the only way to change a car is to undo what you have already done.

We both kept it reasonably simple.  We did not want to spend the evening doing custom cars, as that is a solo activity.

I went with a simple yellow paint job.  My uncle had a Porsche 914 in that color.

Yellow 914

I tinkered with racing stripes for a bit, but decided to leave it as just a solid color.

Potshot went with a silver finish, a racing stripe, and a number.

Silver bullet

From there it was off to the races.  We started off with just the two of us in some sprints, which are point A to point B courses, to get a feel for the cars.

I have to say that another strong point of the game is how they manage to give cars their own unique feel given the crude simplicity of the control system.  My Nissan 2000 GT-R is a B 599 rated car, which means it is effectively equal in performance, yet the two cars drive nothing like each other.

The 914 is low slung, tightly sprung, and prone to suddenly flip over or go up wildly on two wheels if you pop over a curb or something during a hard turn.  And if you use the parking brake to unstick the rear wheels during a turn… something that works very well on my GT-R… you are likely to end up facing the wrong way if you are not careful.  But otherwise, it sticks pretty hard to the ground with its low center of gravity and shows little body lean in turns.

We ran a few races.

914s on the freeway

914s blazing through Palmont

Eventually we got the measure of the car and wanted something a little more challenging.  Two people racing is fun, but really isn’t enough.  When we had three before, the third person multiplied the fun considerably.

So we decided to join public multiplayer races to pit ourselves against the general public in the game.

Which is where we ran into a problem.

As a group, you can create private matches quite easily.  But if your group wants to join a public match, there does not appear to be a method to “join as group.”  At least I could not find one.  So we tried to both join the queue for the same race… and ended up in different versions of the race.

Eventually we were reduced to the count down to button click to make sure that we got into the queue at the same time.  That seemed to work.  Only we then ended up in a race with just the two of us.

Fortunately, once you finish a race, you have the option to run it again.  So we stayed with the same course for a while, and with each round more people joined.  This lead to some great races with no evidence of hacking or cheats.  Not bad, considering on any given night, if I run five races, I will see something extremely dubious in at least one.  I have seen a proliferation of a “start early” cheat/hack lately that basically lets a player take off while everybody else is still waiting for the go sign.

I also ended up having probably my best (and luckiest) come from behind victory ever.  I had Fraps up and was recoding races in hopes of capturing something interesting.  A good race, a horrible crash, or a blatant hack would do.  And so I was able to capture the lucky run.

(Direct link to video)

That is the Bristol & Bayshore course, and I fall behind right away, running in 6th place out of six initially.  But, as I said, being behind actually makes for a more amusing video.  You can see people crashing about, hitting each other and objects on and beside the road.  At a couple of points there are lamp posts pin wheeling back towards me.

And, of course, other cars.  NPC cars go flying at various points.

But at just about the 2 minute mark into the video the race comes to its last big turn, a sharp 90 degree cut at the water tower that will punish you for coming in too fast.  At that point I was in 4th place and going way too fast to make the turn.

Too fast to turn

However, I happen to be lined up just right to strike the Subaru Impreza in front of me.

Hitting the Subaru

That gave me enough of a bounce in the right direction that I was able to correct and head towards the finish line without shedding much speed at all.

Hey, that worked!

I sent the Subaru off into the pack.  You can see the other cars headed towards, or flattening out against, the course barrier in the first shot.  The Subaru blocked them while I ran off to the finish line.

Best race ever.

We ran a few more races after that, but for me the peak of the evening had been reached.

So we called it a night soon after that.  Again, Need for Speed World manages to annoy and delight.

Need more retro cars and better group management, but once you get past that, there is fun to be had.

Notes on the video.  That is my first attempt to upload at 1080p, which Solf recommended previously.  Since I have a 4:3 aspect ratio monitor (1600×1200), there will be black bars on the sides, probably making the video even less viewable in the narrow format of my blog.  But if you go to YouTube and select 1080p format, video quality should be better.  If you actually watch it… and almost nobody watches my car videos… feedback would be appreciated.

The music, put in to cover the fact that Fraps only recoded Potshot’s side of our race commentary (I have to fix that), is Dog Pound Hop from the Ren & Stimpy sound track album You Eediot! It happened to be just the right length and fits in well with the video I think.  Plus I like the song.

NOT the official drink of Kickstarter

As I pointed out as part of the Kickstarter pattern, the campaign hauled in about as much in the last two days of the run as they did during the first big day.  More people showed up for a last minute contribution.  You can see how that played out with this chart over at Kicktraq.

Or you can just go with this.

In a word: DING!—
Camelot Unchained (@UnchainedKS) May 02, 2013

Plus, once they met their $2 million goal, they were able to open up PayPal donations as well, which accrued nearly another $30K up to this point and which will no doubt remain open for those who want in on the founder deals.

And on top of all of that, there is the additional million dollars from other investors and the $2 million dollars that Mark Jacobs is personally kicking in, giving City State Entertainment more than $5 million to create its niche, RvR, no-PvE focused MMORPG.

So now it is time for them to go build a game.

And, as usual, I cannot help but compare how this campaign went with how Lord British and his Shroud of the Avatar Kickstart finished.  While the two games are different in substance as planned, they were both what I would call personality driven campaigns, Lord British on one hand and Mark Jacobs on the other, around proposed fantasy games that hearkened back to their roots as designers and which were both squarely aimed and their long term fans.

Lord British had a more modest goal, one million dollars, and ended up just past the two million dollar mark at the end.  Mark Jacobs set a more aggressive goal, one that was in question with only three days left in the campaign, but which ended up just shy of 2.3 million dollars.  (PayPal contributions as they stood at campaign end included for both.)

Lord British brought in more backers, with 22,322 pitching in on Kickstarter, compared to 14,873 for CU.  But the average pledge per backer was $151 for CU, while Lord British fans gave an average of $86.

Over at Kicktraq you can look at the Shroud of the Avatar and Camelot Unchained numbers to see how things shaped up in each campaign.

Both campaigns were examples of how is being viewed by larger projects.  Rather than being a primary source of funding, these were marketing campaigns that raised awareness, identified a core audience, got data and buy-in from them, and made a pile of money in the process.  How else can a company do that before they have actually made a serious start on a game?

And success in Kickstarter, and delivering on promises, can make a difference in funding.  I got a note… well, it was really a link to a video… last week from Hidden Path Entertainment that they got funding to go ahead with Defense Grid 2, largely based on their Kickstarter performance.  So it can make a difference.  And I’ll get a copy of that when it comes out for free, having been a supporter.

There are still plenty of small campaigns out there for projects that could otherwise not find funding along with fundraising efforts and the like.  Jason Scott wasn’t going to get funding any other way for his documentaries (or his storage unit), and Planet Money, a podcast I enjoy, is doing a T-shirt fundraiser on Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is just becoming more things to more people as time goes on and people get used to it.

Anyway, now comes the long wait for the games that were funded.  But at least I will likely shut up about Kickstarter for a while.

The count at ~20:09 UTC

I hope you didn’t pledge a lot of money hoping nobody would call your bluff.  The time to pony up is nigh!

Anyway, with 19 hours left to go, we shall see how much more money they can collect.

And then, of course, they have to actually make all that stuff they have been telling us about for the last 29 days.

Cry “Funded!” and let slip the dogs of unrealistic expectations!

Addendum: Oh, yeah, stretch goals.  I bet they have had this graphic ready for a while.

What do we get for going over?

I am not sure what they really mean to me… what else is new…  but there they are.

All three of those tanks are now fully upgraded.  It is just a matter of playing my way forward until I hit the next tier.  I just have to focus.

Wait.

What is that?

Garage slots are half price?

I had better buy a few of those, just to have them.  I will need them eventually, right?

Then, of course, after my requisite daily first wins, I start poking through the tech trees, just to look.  And eventually I am driving around in this.

M37 on the field

The M37 self-propelled gun.

How did I get there?  More after the break.

Ah, self-propelled guns, the long range striking element of the game.

I haven’t really done much with artillery in World of Tanks.  I have an SU-26 in the garage that I play every so often.  But the SU-5 was such a change after the SU-26 that I stopped working up that tree.  And then there was the French experiment, where I got to the AMX 105AM.  I save that for team nights when we haul out two or three together.

But Earl, he has been all about the arty.  While most of my battles have been in heavy tanks, he has focused on SPGs.  He has worked his way up to at least tier IV in all of the SPG trees, and into tier V in most.  And he seems to be the most enthusiastic about the US line of guns, and the M7 Priest in particular. (Though others have been less enthusiastic about it.)  So I thought I would give that a try.

But that meant getting up the tech tree.

I had enough free experience to skip the T57 (which might have been a mistake, but I can go back), and so jumped right to the M37, the tier III SPG.

That actually started off very well.  I had wins in my first five battles, including one where I got a mastery badge.

Of course, not on my 3x first victory

The M37 starts of decent and, as with all low tier tanks, the upgrades come quick.  In just a few battles I had everything upgraded and was on the path to the M7 Priest.  I had already squandered my free experience on the last KV-4 upgrade (the bigger engine makes a noticeable difference) so just worked my way along until I could train for that next tier.  But eventually I got there.  My M37 turned elite and I had a stock M7 Priest in my garage.

Things do not start off rosy with that SPG.  You need the suspension upgrade before you can even fit a camo net.  So I had to roll out in a completely stock configuration.

An Unfrocked Priest?

This was not helped along by the fact that I was on the losing side in the first two battles, so it took me three to save up enough for the suspension.  And they were awkward fights for me.  Not only is the M7 somewhat unwieldy stock, but the base gun has a serious range deficiency after playing the M37.  I had to trundle all over the battlefield trying to get in range.

On the third match we won, which gave me enough experience for the suspension upgrade, which then let me mount a camo net to help me stay hidden, plus a gun rammer and a gun laying drive to help me aim and shoot more quickly.  Now I have to get out there and play until I get the upgraded gun, and which point I can, it is said, just sit back and rain shells down to smite my foes.

We shall see.

There was also the big 8.5 patch that came out this past week.  All patches seem to be big patches with World of Tanks.  I have already learned to respect the new Indien Panzer when I am out in the KV-4.  It can be a tough nut to crack.

I have also gotten to play on the new map, Pearl River, a few times.  I am at the start point for it in the M7 picture above, which was the first time I was on it.  A new tank on a new map is not an ideal combo.

I would describe the map itself as “Dragon Ridge smooshed down.”  It is the same southeast Asian theme, put into the game do doubt, as Potshot phrased it, to celebrate all the great clashes of armor that took place in the tropical rice paddies of the region.  Yeah.

It seems to be a decent map with lots of place to hide.  My only minor complaint so far is that the design seems set on blocking you from getting up on some high points.   That starting point is in a little bite out of a mountain that is blocked on a couple of sides.

Of course, people were already saying, “I hate this map” in chat.  We shall see if people hate is as much as Dragon Ridge, a map I miss.  Dragon Ridge was a different map and the hills made heavy tanks dog slow, but it was a change up.  And it allowed for some of the best comedy moments.  Ah well.

There were also some under the radar changes that did not make the patch notes.  Tank names were no big deal and the UI change was obvious.  But the change in the daily reset time… when one day officially transitions to another for purposes of sales and events… like special XP multiplier events… threw me for a loop.

Previously, the daily reset for victory bonuses and limits on purchases was 17:00 PDT (20:00 EDT). With the launch of the 8.5 Update, this time has changed to 04:00 PDT (07:00 EDT). This change was made based on customer feedback so that more people would have a better chance to play through all of their first victories of the day.

Years of EVE, working with overseas offices, Linux, and what not has trained me to accept UTC midnight as a reasonable time for dates to transition.  That works out to 4pm local time here in California, or 5pm when we have Daylight Savings Time in effect.  I have my blog set for the day to transition on UTC.  Some other games, like Need for Speed World, do the day transition at that time.

I have been known to start playing World of Tanks an hour before midnight UTC, get my first victory bonuses, then when the day transitions, get them again, thus doing two days of bonuses in one fell swoop.  And since the bonus events go in on a Friday, you could squeeze out four days of bonuses on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday event.

No more of that… which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.   But on Saturday afternoon I was really confused as to why the date transition did not take effect.  Ah well, one more… or maybe one less… time element to keep track of in my mind.

A Google moment turned April into a record setting month for the blog pretty much out of the gate.  My quick coverage of April Fools at Blizzard for this year managed to get on the first page of results for a number of salient searches and… well… sent a lot of traffic this way.

Page Views Gone Wild

The previous record was actually set last April, though that was driven by links to my Burn Jita posts.  This year, Burn Jita wasn’t a hot topic and page views were about at the average-ish line across the event.

If you look at the gap between the dark bar, which is unique visits, and the light bar, which is total page views, it seems like people actually stopped to look at the links I had in the post, which included the past few years of April Fools.  The “Most Viewed Posts” section below bears this out.

Upon seeing the sudden spike in traffic, I tried to incorporate as many links out to other blogs as I could in order to “share the wealth” such that is was.  So a few other blogs got some traffic out of this.

April 1st and 2nd were about equal the whole month of February, which was when the impact of the Google image search changes showed up.

The downside of such a moment of Google fame is that the traffic is not very… sticky.  I would be happy if out of all those people, one or two returned and left a comment now and again.  And, of course, those two days will now skew the default graph on the stats page for a full month.  Plus I keep looking at those two bars and feel like I should be reminded of some historical moment.

Never Forget… something…

As with the big dip in page views in February, the big spike this month is essentially meaningless in the big picture. I like to try and figure out why these things happen, and they make the part of me that enjoys statistics thrill.  But it isn’t like I get paid for page views.

And, of course, I bet Google is going to kill off some more page views come July when they kill off Google Reader.

I haven’t switched to a replacement yet.  I am waiting for the other providers to accommodate the surge before I move.

One Year Ago

Last April set a daily page view record.  What is it about April?  I know you are going to say “April Fools,” but the record was actually set because of the Burn Jita event.

Yeah, the Burn Jita event.  It made for my most popular YouTube video ever.  And it lead right into Hulkageddon V and its OTEC connection.

Elsewhere in EVE, the LEGO Rifter got 10K votes, the War in the North seemed to be winding down with RAZOR back in Tenal and six fleets stalking Venal. Raiden managed to lose a bunch of sovereignty, by accident, which finished that up.  All that was left was to say we didn’t want that region anyways.  We also made conga lines, experience time dilation, and followed DBRB through high sec to kill some super caps.  And Seleene became the chairman of the Galactic Student Council.

I was also syndicated occasionally on EVE News 24.  I don’t think I got paid for all of that.

I also made a list of small features I wanted other MMOs to copy.

Lord of the Rings Online hit the five year mark.

Potshot and I were wandering around EverQuest again, looking for lost dungeons.  We were not buying any $25 bags though.

In Rift, the instance group was driven out of King’s Breach.  But Trion added in fishing, so we could do that instead.

And it was April Fools at Blizzard.

Five Years Ago

I made up something for April Fool’s Day.  I thought it was amusing.

Lord of the Rings Online celebrated a year of being live.  Book 13 introduced, among other things, fishing.  And my video problems with the game proved to be a bad video card, so I was actually able to get into the game.

Computer Gaming World/Games For Windows magazine ceased publishing as part of the ongoing demise of print media.

In EVE Online I made the big move from Caldari to Amarr space.  I also began producing Badger transports for fun and profit.  CCP introduced the whole Council of Stellar Management thing, which I dubbed The Galactic Student Council.  My opinion on it hasn’t changed much since.

Meanwhile in WoW one million people in China logged into WoW at the same time.  There is still no report on what would happen if they all pressed the space bar at the same time.  While that was going on, the instance group finished up the Slave Pens and the Underbog and began the long struggle with the Mana Tombs.

I was looking around for Tetris on the Nintendo DS.  You would think that would be easy, right?

And then it was Tipa’s turn to bang the EverQuest nostalgia drum, so I joined in yet again.

New Linking Sites

The following blogs have linked this site in their blogroll, for which they have my thanks.

• Critical Hit
• MMO Gumbo

Please take a moment to visit them in return.

Most Viewed Posts in April

Per the top of the post, April Fools at Blizzard dominates the list this month.

1. April Fools at Blizzard – 2013
2. April Fools at Blizzard – 2012
3. Blizzard Blindsided by Diablo III Auction House Popularity
4. Running Civilization II on Windows 7 64-bit
5. April Fools at Blizzard – 2011
6. WoW Dance Battle System!
7. Ignore Burn Jita? Is That Your Plan?
8. April Fools at Blizzard – 2010
9. Burn Jita Held Over for an Extended Run
10. Age of Empires II – HD Edition, That’s What I’m Talking About
11. What is it with Me and Storm Legion?
12. Camelot Unchained Kickstarter Unleashed!

Search Terms of the Month

animal jam: non fair membership abilities
[Welcome to free to play]

trion merge with blizzard
[Heh, copy Blizz, yes, merge with Blizz...]

brothers in arms or camo for arty?
[Camo]

world of warcraft bdr g1b good 4 money
[A BDR G1B would rule in WoW... in WoT, not so much]

Spam Comment of the Month

Do you have a spam issue on this website; I also am a blogger, and I was wanting to know your situation;
[From a spam comment linking to "genuine" Prada items]

EVE Online

A quiet month in New Eden for me.  Burn Jita was an exercise in precise, clinical destruction.  The fleet ops I went on all ended up with no action for me.  I made some money speculating on ice products.  A rumor went around before FanFest about ice changes, so I bought up half a billion ISK worth in Amarr and relisted it for double what I paid.  That sat until the announcement at FanFest, and which point it sold.  Easy money.  And then the price dropped back down.

Oh, yeah, and CSM8 elections.  Congratulations to the winners, which includes Jester, who will now have to suffer the fate of getting exactly what he asked for.

Need for Speed World

I have actually played this game every single day this year.  I log on, I do the gem hunt, I log off.  Elapsed time for each session is generally under 10 minutes.  It was part of my plan to see what sort of rewards you would get for the daily hunt as time went along.  I thought I would be done at that point.  But then they added achievements.  And for just another hundred or so gem hunts in a row, you get a special car.  So I am in for the long haul on that.

Rift

After sulking about Storm Legion for quite a while, I actually pressed on into it with a recommended solo build for my warrior.  It is okay.  Will I press on and finish though?  Meanwhile, the instance group… has failed to show up consistently since the beginning of the year.  So we still have yet to finish the first Storm Legion instance, Exodus of the Storm Queen.

World of Tanks

I continue working with my KV-4.  Tier 8 in a heavy has turned out to be pretty fun.  I do dread those matches with three or four SPGs on a side though.  You cannot hide under cover forever, and getting caught in the open is murder.

Coming Up

We will know how the Camelot Unchained Kickstarter saga ends in a couple days.  Success will mean City State Entertainment getting to work.  Failure will mean… well, we shall see what it means.

I have a blog anniversary coming up… for another blog.  But I am going to write about it here because nobody reads that blog.  Though, to be fair, it is all about pictures instead of words.

Neverwinter is going to show up.  I think it is open beta or pre-release or taking money from the general public as of today even.  I have been averting my gaze from it so as not to spoil anything in advance.  The call of Forgotten Realms will probably ensure that I will download that at some point, but I won’t be in for the day one rush.

Maybe… just maybe… the instance group will do Exodus of the Storm Queen this month.

Morning of April 29

It could happen.  In looking at the records of similar campaigns on the various sites that track them, projects can pick up as many pledges in the last two days as they did on the opening day.  Camelot Unchained had a $550K opening day.  You can see a pledges and backers by day chart here.  So it is well within the realm of possibility.

I wonder, in a general Kickstarter campaign way, how certain aspects of the way things have been done have helped or hurt them.  Mark Jacobs has been very forthright about the niche appeal of the game, and certainly the “No PvE content” aspect is sending some people away.  But that is to be expected.

Other things though, like tiers that allow limited backers, do not appear to have been used… well? correctly? efficiently?  To my mind, that is supposed to create a sense of artificial scarcity to get people to pledge right away.

The first four limited tiers ($25, $50, $55, $110) have a combined total of 25,000 “limited” slots, which is roughly 2.5 times the total number of backers up to this point.  If your limited tiers are still open and available with only three days left to go on the campaign, I have to think they are not working as designed.

The tier price points also seem to be a bit confusing.  In past campaigns, there has been a pattern of regular price points ($25, $50, $75, $100) which are often the limited tiers, and then a slightly more expensive unlimited tier above each that gives just a little bit less than the limited tier, to encourage people to pledge right away.

Instead, it is a bit of a muddle.  Why would you have competing $50 and $55 limited tiers, for example?  Why nothing at the magic price point of $100?  I know $110 is just a bit more, but in my experience, $$100 is often a mental threshold.

And then there is what you get for each tier, which I find to be unnecessarily complex.  The $50 and $55 price points mentioned above differ on so few points as to make me wonder why you would make them two separate tiers.

Ah well, brighter minds than my own no doubt have a narrative to explain the complexity.  And they certainly did well selling the higher level tiers.  Of the 75 pledge slots at $2,500 and above, only 6 are still available.

And it is too late to change any of that in any case.  The next three days will tell the tale.

So I am always surprised when I run into things that indicate that not only are there more such servers out there, but there are enough that somebody would have found and played enough that, when listing out their favorites, it can be made into a top ten list.

Basically, this person has a YouTube channel that looks to be dedicated to looking into a reviewing WoW private servers.

I suppose a game as popular as WoW lends itself to this sort of proliferation.

Dammit, I meant to pick Mullen, not Hardaway!

-Heard in the test lab, circa 1994

After last week, I figured it was time to fill in the gap in my posts about consoles I have owned.

Is It The Shoes?

I started off in video game arcades and such, with Pong and Tank, Space Wars, and the great invasion from outer space.

Then there was the Atari 2600, which brought video games home one Christmas many years ago and probably saved me a mountain of quarters.

And then, in 1983, after much longing, I made the jump to gaming on the personal computer.

While there are no hard lines between these events… I did not throw my Atari 2600 away the day the Apple ][+ showed up, and I still went to arcades with my friends well into the mid 80s... these were points of transition.  My main focus moved from one to another.  And by the time I was playing online games like Stellar Emperor or Stellar Warrior in 1986, arcades were a thing of the past and I had given away my Atari 2600.

The depth and complexity of games on a personal computer surpassed what was possible in the previous two mediums and I paid little attention to them.

From Downtown!

Time moved on, as it insists on doing.  There was college and a job and then another job and then a layoff and a job in a computer store where the employee discount caused be to spend more than I actually earned, and then finally the job which, when viewed from more than 20 years down the line, begins a haphazard chain of events events, populated by unlikely set of interconnected characters, that somehow looks like a career when I put it on a resume.

And I don't even have to fudge things, except to make them all fit on two pages in a typeface readable without a magnifying glass.

It is like I MEANT to do all that.  That I sat down and planned it out in advance.

But back to 1992.

At this new company I was immediately involved with a project that ended up quite successfully, made the company a bunch of money, and put us in a new market.  As a reward, everybody in engineering involved with the project was given a card.  Each card had either an "N" or a "G" on it.  The letter was an indication of what present you would be given at the company Holiday party.  (My temptation was to title this post "Christmas 1992," but I relented.  Unlike the other two posts, the bulk of this happens after Christmas.)

Our boss, one of the key founders and an insanely dynamic and inspirational character, thought it would be great fun to keep things a mystery and taunt us with possible meanings for the two letters in the build up to the party.

Eventually it was the night of the party.  There was a big pile of wrapped boxes.  Each box had either an "N" or a "G" on it.  And, after dragging out the announcement as long as possible, our boss finally handed out the first two boxes, one of each letter.

Those who had an "N" got a Super Nintendo.  Those with a "G" got a Sega Genesis.

I had a card with a "G" on it, and I was disappointed.

I had, at that point, never really heard of Sega.  Nintendo was at least a name I recognized.

I offered up mine in trade for a Nintendo, but there were no takers, which just confirmed my theory that I had gotten the lesser of two choices.

I was totally unaware of the console wars that were raging, where Nintendo was the 800 lb. gorilla and Sega was the plucky upstart.

Puts Up A Brick!

I took the unit home and set it up.  It came with Sonic the Hedgehog which was a bright and colorful game.  It was a huge way forward from my Atari 2600 days.  But Sonic was not really my style.    I pressed on with it for a while, but never really got engaged.

Sonic gives the finger

I purchased a few other games for the system, but of them I can only recall Desert Strike and F-15 Strike Eagle II.  And even those two are only hazy memories.  Sonic is more vivid in my mind, though that might be because I bought the Virtual Console version for our Wii. (And it turns out I had only gotten worse at.)

The Sega Genesis languished in the family room while I went back to my computer.  The games looked good and played well.  But I had Civilization to play obsessively.  What did I need with shiny by shallow arcade games?

Can’t Buy A Bucket!

Meanwhile at work we kicked off a big project for an iconic fruit flavored computer maker just up the road.  Our boss had used his contacts to crash a party and get us in on their upcoming laptops, one ultra-light and one ultra-cool.  Basically, he talked us up while denigrating the internal team in Paris that was slated to do the project for the company.  The icing on the cake was claiming we had a working prototype for the required device.

In the end, this all worked out and became one of the most lucrative projects ever for the company.

In the short term it was a scramble, starting with making a prototype.  There were actually two deliverable, one critical and one slightly less critical.  We worked all summer and delivered the first one on time, but we had an issue with the second.

In November, when we looked to be within striking distance of finishing the second phase, I declared I would not shave or get a haircut until we shipped.  We were in serious crunch mode, with long days and weekends being the norm.  We just needed to power through and finish.

Is It The Shoes?

To cut to the punch line, I shaved off my very thick beard the following May.

In the mean time, a group of us were at the office pretty much all waking hours.  However, it wasn’t like there was always something to do.  We would run tests trying to capture this one catastrophic failure scenario that would not allow us to ship.  We would find one way to make it happen, then it would stop happening.  Then another way would be found.  And when it would happen, we would have to analyze what was happening on the machine, which was difficult as the “catastrophic” end of things really meant that the power manager would shut the system down.  So there was a laptop hooked to a logic analyzer where, once we had a scenario, we had to repeat it.  And it wouldn’t happen.  Or it would happen, but the logic analyzer would fail to capture it, having reset itself to another mode or some such.  How I hated that damn thing.

So there was a lot of waiting involved.  At one point one of the devs said we needed a video game or something.  I mention the Sega and knew that my girlfriend at the time had a 13″ TV sitting around doing nothing.  I said I would bring them in.

He’s Heating Up!

I brought in the Sega and TV.  We found a spot on one of the racks in the back of the lab where the TV fit in.  The Sega sat on the rack below.

I only had the RF connector that came with it.  Somebody noticed that the TV had an S-video port on the back and brought in a cable for it, at which point the video quality took a huge leap.

While I had two controllers, the games I had were all single player focused.  Sonic would allow two players, but you had to take turns.  But there wasn’t much interest in that.  The Sega sat there and got occasional use, though it mostly just went through the Sonic demo mode.

And then somebody brought in the game.

Boomshakalaka!

At this point in time, I cannot even remember who brought it in.  But one day we had NBA Jam in the lab.

And everything changed.

That game was the savior of our sanity.  We were there, in the office, in the lab, every single day from January 2 through to the end of May in what became the never-ending crunch time.  In at 9am, break for dinner at 6pm, back at work at 8pm, home at might night.  Sleep and repeat.

And whenever possible, play NBA Jam.

I am not a basketball fan and rarely indulge in sports based video games.  But there was something very special about NBA Jam.  It was an funny, engaging, over-the-top game.

He’s on fire

The graphics were very good for the time and the controls were simple, leading to that “minutes to learn, ages to master” magic that keeps people engaged.

We all ended up with specific “claimed” players.  Mine was the Warriors player Chris Mullen whose in-game version could hit a 3-pointer from the sideline with incredible regularity.  I had to fight to keep hold of him.  And was I ever pained when, in a hurry or just blurry from the long days, I accidentally ended up with Tim Hardaway instead.  I have no idea how he played in real life, but he was the suck in the game.

We became very good.  And very competitive.

We played no other game on the system.  It was NBA Jam all the time.

And the catch phrases from the game, done in a very Marv Albert voice, became the catch phrases for the project.  The key ones are in bold in this post.  We would shout them out all the time.

There is a picture of the team at the end of the project.

Most of the team

We look tired but happy.  I am down front with the long hair and a thick beard.  We have beers in our hands and the device itself, problem solved after all those months, front and center.  One of the special, durable Sega Genesis controllers somebody bought… we had worn out the originals… and the NBA Jam cartridge appear as well, having been deemed vital to the project.

He’s On Fire!

And then we went outside, looked around at the mid-day light, and wandered home to see what was left of our personal lives.

My girlfriend had been asking pointedly about when I was going to be done with her TV.  When I asked why she needed it, I was told that wasn’t the point.

The point was that she had checked out of the relationship and was seeing somebody else (which given my almost continuous absence for all those months was pretty reasonable) and was collecting things up before announcing it.  I gave her back the TV and we went our separate ways.  Somehow I ended up with her cat.

Meanwhile, nobody had a spare TV to replace the one now missing in the lab.  We stopped playing the game.

We stopped doing almost anything.

We were slated to work on a new project almost immediately.  However everybody was so burned out that project status meetings all summer were basically announcements of no progress.  The lead developer took a weeks vacation after the project and didn’t show back up in the office for almost two months.  He would call in every Monday and apologize, saying he just couldn’t come to work.

This is what happens when the idea of crunch time is abused.  You pay for it later.  I have carried that lesson with me ever since and have fought back against every project manager notion around “couldn’t we bring in the ship date if we assumed people were working Saturday?”  Weekends are often the only slack time you have to make up slips, so if you schedule them, you lose that buffer.  I have also categorically refused to let myself or my team ever work seven days a week again.

Back at the office, work was shuffled around.  Despite our dazed lethargy, sales went so well that we were able to hire new people, so we brought in some new faces to actually get some work done that summer.

Then we moved buildings.  A lot of the team moved on to other jobs.  I hung around for a while.  Those who remained were eventually all as productive as before.  I sold the Genesis to a co-worker, having gone back to PC games.  One of the new kids would bring in his new Sega Saturn so we could play Virtua Fighter on the overhead in the cafeteria.  That was pretty cool.  But I didn’t want to actually own one.  And since the move included a network upgrade so that we had Ethernet in all the cubes (a serious upgrade from all those PhoneNet connectors strewn about the old place), we moved on to playing Marathon and Bolo at the office.

And thus ended my second video game console era.  It was short, but it left an impression.  For years afterwards if I ran into anybody on the project team, saying something like, “Is it the shoes?” in that right tone of voice would bring up laughs and memories of those days.

I had not been actively avoiding the game.  But whenever I was looking for a game to play, I would get to Rift, give a little dejected moan internally, and move on to something else.

I just wasn’t that into it, and I was trying to figure out why.

A lot of unexplored land

Thinking on it, I came up with three possible factors.  They were, put simply, the character/class/soul revamp that went in just before the expansions, the change in how quests and story flow were handled, and the general increase in landmass that came with the expansion.

Nice theories.  They seem reasonable.

And certainly the first one, the class revamp, was a big pain in the ass.  Having to go back and relearn how to play your character… and the multiple roles on your character… was a big deal to me.  I have managed to get healing sorted out on Hillmar, my cleric, and I think I have his DPS soul working.  But my warrior and rogue characters are still pretty opaque and my mage is probably dead to me at this point.

But still, are these the things that were keeping me from logging in?

I decided to push the point, force myself to log in, and get through the first zones and levels just to see what I could see.

What I did after the cut.

Ah, into Storm Legion.

I did not want to take Hillmar out for fear of getting too far ahead of the regular group, so I picked one of my other characters.

I went with Sanperre, my warrior.  I redone his soul after the revamp and brought him into Storm Legion, but he was barely cutting it.  That was probably because I was not playing his new soul choices correctly.  So I decided to cheat.

On my Storm Legion post, pkudude99 commented about several things, including his own warrior build and posted a link to how he had configured it and the macros he was using.  I decided to take that wholesale and use it, in the hope that it would at least get me past the “playing my class” issue.

And it seemed to work.

There is a macro each for single target builder, AOE builder, single target finisher and AOE finisher.  So those four buttons, plus charge, to rush an opponent and that skill that pulls one two you and I was good.

I also went to the auction house and found the best weapon I could for him.  Due to a rather slim selection, that ended up being a one handed mace, so he had that and a shield.  Fortunately as an armor smith one of the things he can make is shield spikes, so the enemy takes damage with each block.

Thus equipped, I headed to the Cape Jule zone.

I chose that zone because my warrior had already worked his way into Pelladane previously and I wanted to start in a fresh zone.  I had initially started my rogue in Cape Jule, where he died horribly and constantly, so I also figured it would be a good ability to play the class.

With a warrior and the build and the equipment upgrades as they came, I was actually able to get through Cape Jule pretty handily.

Key Achievements

Being done there left me just shy of level 52 and put me on the road to the next zone, City Core.  However, when I arrived at City Core, I found things started off a couple of levels above me.  In Rift, that can be a problem.

So I took the hint and went back and finished off Pelladane as well.

Key Achievements

That put me just over the level mark into 53 and opened up the next zone, Seratos.

Zone Progress So Far

Done with that, I have some observations on the Storm Legion expansion so far.

Story

Each of the two zones has their own story and quests that lead you through it.  Each wraps up in a final fight or event that basically finishes things up for the zone, but leave the overall tale of the expansion still going.  For example, Crucia comes along when you defeat her champion, promising more conflict to come.

Meeting Crucia…

There is an achievement both for finishing a certain number of quests and for finishing the story line.

My problem is that the first time through a zone, unless the story is really strong and told more through what you do than what is written in the quest text, I tend to lose the thread of the story amongst the mechanics of getting things done.  So many “kill this, collect that” shopping list entries later and suddenly I realize that things have come to a head.

Post Cataclysm Redridge in WoW is a zone with a really strong story that forces you to pay attention.  For all of its flaws and reliance on pop-culture references,  I remember what happened there still, and I only went through it once.  Cape Jule and Pelladane are not that strong.  Not even close.

But missing the story is more my flaw than the game’s I suppose.  And generally I have to do a zone twice to pick up the nuances.

Pacing and Progress

The problem with easy and quick progress is that it is addictive and sets expectations.  When I ran my last character through Rift to level 50, the levels seemed to fly by.  That is gone with Storm Legion.

And since I did that run to level 50 just before Storm Legion came out, the change was jarring.  The slow pace was part of what made me feeling like I was doing things wrong.

But slow is not necessarily bad.  I cannot, on one hand, complain about out-leveling zones in one post and then turn around and whine that leveling takes too long in another, and expect to be taken seriously.

So, feeling that I need to choose one over the other, I will take the pacing that Storm Legion offers.  It actually seems to be about right so far if you want to see the whole expansion in one pass.  I had to do Cape Jule and Pelladane in order to be ready for the next zones.  That is probably as it should be.

I admit that it helps that planar attunement levels still come pretty often.  That gives a small sense of advancement while you are watching that main experience bar crawl along.

Carnage Quests

It took me a while to take these in stride.  I went from trying to knock them out as soon as I got them, to avoiding them if I could, to trying to pick them up as soon as I found them but not stressing over getting them done.  Inevitably the story line drags you through the mobs you need to kill.  And the fact that there is an achievement for finishing all such quests in a zone clicked with my OCD nature.

Controls Points, Scattered Quests, and Hunt Rifts

Along with traditional quest lines from NPCs, there are the quests you pick up in the field from objects on the ground.  If carnage quests are on-the-fly kill ten rats quests, then these are their collect ten widgets brethren.  And they are fine as far as they go.  The only thing that bugs me is that until you pick them up, every possible collectible piece for the quest appears on your mini-map as a “quest here!” icon.  So you look like you are wandering into the quest hub from hell.  I get why they chose to do it that way.  Design is often a compromise.  But that means it won’t always sit well.

The other regular activity each zone are what I would call control point battles.  There are daily quests… a few in each zone… to go to a particular point, clear it of bad guys, revive the source stone and defending equipment, and then defend it from bad guys seeking to wipe it out.  20 waves of such will satisfy the quest.

Defending such a point

The initial problem for me was that you need planar charges in order to revive and power everything up.  Since I did not do much on Ember Island before Storm Legion, the only way I knew to get planar charges was to close rifts.  That is a slow way to build them up.

So I generally avoided those daily quests until I discovered the crystals around the control points which, when slain, recharge planar charges.  A quick jaunt over to one and I could be full up with 9 planar charges and on my way.  And then the control points were much easier.  They were also pretty much the only point at which I interacted with other players.

There were not many other players to be seen in these zones on the Shatterbone server.  A couple now and again, but I mostly felt like I had the zones to myself.  But the daily nature of the quests and the fact that they reward you with source stone currency meant that there were public groups to be found.

And then there were the hunt rifts.  I found out that those… and killing the harbinger that appears… seem to be group activities.  And the lures cost 10K palanarite.  I’ll save those for the right moments.

Equipment and Crafting

Going through the quest chains meant getting equipment upgrades, so I figured I would just skip crafting for the time being.  My warrior does mining as well as armor and weapon smithing.  I gathered ore whenever I could, to level up the mining, but just stored that away.  Gathering professions seemed to advance more slowly than before, so I used every opportunity to mine.  It is a good thing that there were a lot of constructs that could be mined after being slain, as ore nodes alone wouldn

Or I did until I checked on what I could make.  The plate armor items my warrior could craft were noticeably better than what I was picking from quests.  So I started in on that.  However, materials quickly became a bottleneck.  I got up a couple of tiers, but then started needing higher level leather, which was extremely expensive at the auction house.  Likewise, when I looked into weapons, I ended up needing wood from foragers which was simply not available.  And the usual alternative, getting out alts to harvest, seemed like a less than profitable goal, as I would need to get their harvesting level up quite a bit.  That would mean spending time on that rather than pushing through the zones.

So I opted to stick with gear from drops and quests for the most part.

As for the look of the gear, I think the Storm Legion plate armor is pretty decent.

Plate set in a purple area

It certainly looks better than the chain cleric gear Hillmar has picked up.  That makes him look like a giant lawn gnome.  Fortunately, the wardrobe slots let him hide that.

The Zones Themselves

The most embarrassing thing about the first two zones is that I have trouble telling them apart.  I went to the wrong portal more than once from Meridian or Tempest Bay.  Neither had a character that made them stand out from the other.  Green grass, hills, some mountains, a shoreline… it all sort of melded together into one composite mental image.

Only the mobs distinguish them, and even those are not that different.  Storm Legion soldiers make up a large number in either of the two zones.  And I couldn’t place the zone where a given mob was if asked.  I got out my rogue, as he has the butcher skill that lets him harvest leather, to see how much work it would be to get him up to striped leather.  I had a 50/50 chance of just guessing the right zone, the one with the skinnable rhinos nearby, and I guessed wrong.

Now however, I am through the two initial zones, up to level 53, and facing two new zones.  And one, Seratos, looks as big on the map as the two zones I just finished.

So far, Storm Legion isn’t as bad as I was thinking it was.  But neither is it as exciting or distinctive as I had hoped.  I suppose I will see if the expansion can pick up the pace with the next two zones.

There was apparently some attempt at deception in declaring the Burn Jita event over before everybody went home in hopes of luring some more freighters back into the system.  But things now appear really over, with some of the key players off to Iceland and FanFest.

Mission Complete

Image source: the internet… I forget where exactly.  Sorry.

The tally posted over at The Mittani shows that 142 freighters, 13 jump freighters, 10 basic industrials, and 2 Orcas were blown up in the event, along with a few choice targets of opportunity. (A best/worst kills lineup is available.)  That is a considerable increase over last year’s totals.  Jita remains the most violent system in the game this month. (It was in third place for the month of April last year with the first Burn Jita, which is where it usually sits most months.)

April Stats as of Today…

The victim count sums up to around 573 billion ISK destroyed, which using the current in-game valuation of PLEX (515 million ISK per) rolls out to about $27,000 worth of destruction, given the only real world to in-game currency conversion mechanism we have.  Nobody literally lost that much, but all of that ISK could have been used to buy that much in PLEX.

In all, the event felt, as was received, differently than the last time around.  The lack of fuss surrounding the pending event has been attributed to the CFC not making a big deal before hand in hopes of catching people unawares.  Not that I think that was really necessary.  Anybody who were paying attention knew it was coming.

Those who did not pay attention… well… surprise… and confusion!

On the confusion front, a newer member of our corp sent out a corp-wide email letting us all know that The Goons were going to attack Jita and that we all ought to steer clear.  I hope somebody explained to him that we were invited to the party.

The reaction from CCP was particularly muted.  Last year they were giving interviews and playing up a huge player driven event as being exactly the sort of thing they want happening in EVE Online.  They also took the time to put up a banner on the login page to warn people that the event was taking place.

click to enlarge

This year there was no talk and no banner.  I do not know if the whole thing was no big deal to CCP this time around, or if they were simply too busy wrapping up the CSM elections and preparing for FanFest, but things sure were quiet on that front.

On the blog front, it was pretty quiet as well.  No calls to action, either to get people out to blow things up or to defend Jita against the CFC.  There were some posts about Goon conspiracies, Goon contempt, and what happens to morons.  But it wasn’t treated as a big deal.

Over at The Mittani, the summing up post includes an interview with Warr Akini about what it took to setup the event.

I expect that anything which remains to be said will be overshadowed by Fanfest posts and announcements, which will include what we can expect from the Odyssey expansion this June and who will be sitting on CSM8.

And so we move on.  Ships blew up.  Some people are angry.  Some people are happy.

Just another day in New Eden really.

But while I find many of these apps interesting, I don’t actually use my iPad to take pictures.  To start with, the iPad is kind of bulky.  And then there is the fact that it takes pictures in 720p, which would have seemed like fine resolution for a digital camera… about 12 years ago.

So who needs photo editing on a device when you don’t use it to take photos?

But every once in a while I notice an editing app… in this case because it came up in the Apps Gone Free app, which I recommend to all my fellow cheapskates out there… that does pique my interest.

In this case, the app was Vinylize Me.

This app lets you create vintage looking album covers, into which you can incorporate your own photos.

That sounded pretty neat, so I grabbed it.  But then I didn’t have any photos on my iPad.  So I took some screen shots of pictures from the blog in Safari and used them to make a few samples.  Click on them to view as a larger gallery.

Not the best work in the world, but I think it shows some potential.  I have to figure out a good use for the app, but I like the idea of it very much.  You can change most of the text, tint your photos, swap out the “stereophonic” banners, manipulate the colors, and even add aging affects to make it look like an old LP that has seen some use.

The images in the gallery above are actually one quarter size of the output the app gives you.  The pictures I used were low resolution… they came from iPad screen shots after all… and looked very grainy at full resolution.  They would look better if I just imported the pictures from my computer rather than being lazy and taking a few screen shots.

Full resolution is 2448 by 2448 pixels, which seems to be about the size of an actual LP sleeve.

The main downside to the app is that you are limited to the templates they have provided.  You cannot add your own or edit the basics of what you are given.

Technically, this is an iPhone app, which means that it is half size on the iPad screen by default.  But unlike some iPhone apps, it looks okay when set to fill the screen.  (Unlike, say, that World of Tanks app.)

Anyway, another goofy app that amuses me.  And the results look better than the last such app I played with, Halftone.

I don’t think I quite have the hang of that one.