Rift to go Free to Play on June 12 May 14, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Rift.Tags: Free-To-Play, PLEX, REX
8 comments
I was wrong.
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.
Waiting for Civilization May 13, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Other PC Games.Tags: Civilization II, Civilization Series, Civilization V, Performance Issues
6 comments
Last week my focus was a huge game of Civilization V.
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.
New Blogger Initiative a Year Later – Who Survived? May 9, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment.Tags: Community Service, I could make a little list, Linkwhoring, NBI, New Blogger Initiative, Newbie Blogger Initiative
20 comments
It was just a year ago that Syp kicked off his Newbie Blogger Initiative plan.
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.
- Adventures of Danania, Supergirl of Lorien
- Ald Shot First
- Altaclysmic
- Beyond Tannhauser Gate
- Bloodthorne
- Casual Aggro
- Casually Vicious
- Conveniently Placed Exhaust Port
- Dreadblade
- Elfkina vežička
- Funsponge
- Game Delver
- Goetia’s Letters
- Mighty Viking Hamster
- MMO Juggler
- MMO One Night a Week
- Neurotic Girl
- Ravalation
- Red Neckromonger
- Sephora’s Closet
- stnylan’s musings
- That Was An Accident!
- Unwavering Sentinel
- Vagabond Goes for a Walk
- Warlockery
- Warp to Zero
- White Charr
- Why I Game
- Wynniekin’s Adventures
- 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.
Blizzard – WoW Subscribers and the Diablo III Economy May 9, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, Diablo III, entertainment, World of Warcraft.4 comments
So far this week has not bee full of good news for Blizzard.
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.
Memories, Timelines, and the Bigger Picture May 8, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment.Tags: blah blah blah, Charts and Graphs, GEnie, George Clooney, Misty water colored memories
7 comments
There is a horribly worn out old book on the book shelf in my office. It is a soft-bound copy of The Twentieth Century – An Almanac.
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.
Quote of the Day – No Love for EA May 7, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment.Tags: Disney, EA, Quote of the Day, Star Wars, The Register
3 comments
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?
Fireworks in Amarr May 6, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Amarr, EVE has sound?, YouTube
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A supplement to my post yesterday about the EVE Online 10 year birthday celebration in Amarr. If screen shots of the fireworks were not enough, here is some video of them hitting Chribba’s Revelation dreadnaught and Widow black ops battleship.
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.
Party in Amarr – EVE Celebrates 10 Years May 5, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.Tags: Meaningless Milestones
5 comments
This was the big 10 year anniversary celebration weekend for EVE Online.
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.
The Blog ‘Banner Art’ Post May 3, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in blog thing, entertainment.Tags: Banner Images
2 comments
One of the reasons I chose the current template for the blog way back in 2006 was that it had a nice little area at the top where you could put your own graphic as a banner.
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.
The First Computer Game I Ever Played May 3, 2013
Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Ancient Gaming, entertainment.Tags: Star Trek
11 comments
Not an arcade video game. I think I played Pong first.
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.
