Tag Archives: I could make a little list

PC Gamer Says EVE Online is #12

When my wife saw the cover of the September issue of PC Gamer magazine, which I am still getting thanks to the failure of The Official World of Warcraft Magazine (read about that trail of tears), she said she could see a blog post in the making.

She actually reads the blog and knows me better than I imagine.

You see, the cover was taken up with a giant graphic announcing that this issue included PC Gamer’s staff picks for the Top 100 PC Gamed of ALL TIME.

Really, Of All Time

And as any long time reader knows, I love me a good list. Or a bad list. Or any sort of arbitrary ranking.

I love when a group decides to pull out some select number of items and declares them the best, most influential, or otherwise notable. It says so much about the people who make the list, and about myself when I disagree with the choices.

And I always disagree with at least a few of the choices. Whether it is games that defined the Apple II games or Ten Ton Hammer listing out the Top Ten PvP MMOs, I always find something to complain about. Such lists are an argument waiting to happen, but in a fun way. Viewed correctly, such a list at least makes you think and look for the reasoning.

Of course, the first pass through the list was to search for my chosen genre, MMORPGs. The first thing my wife asked was, “Is World of Warcraft on the list?” followed quickly by, “And what about ‘Jacked up and good to go?'” a reference to the original StarCraft and probably how much I played it back in the day, given that she remembers it more than a decade down the road.

The first MMO on the list was EVE Online in 12th position, which is where the title of this post comes from.

The second was World of Warcraft, close behind in the 15th slot. Not a bad showing for MMOs in the top 25% of the list I guess. One fantasy based MMO and one science fiction, which also happen to be, perhaps not accidentally, the two big hold-outs in the subscription versus F2P struggle.

And after that… nothing. That was it for MMOs. No EverQuest, no Ultima Online. The early champions of the genre were left out and nobody else was worthy.

Well, I suppose if you are going to make a list from PC games of ALL TIME and limit it to 100, prime candidates are bound to get left on the cutting room floor.

So I started browsing through the list, checking titles and dates to get something like the flavor of the list, to see if I could spot any sort of trend.

My initial gut reaction was that most of the games on the list were pretty recent in terms of PC games of ALL TIME. There were some entries from the latter half of the 90s, with a special spot set aside for Doom and Secret of Monkey Island. But those were the two oldest games on the list, and they stood out because their age.

I compare this to Time Magazine’s attempt at a Top 100 Video Games of All Time list, which wasn’t even limited to the PC, but included consoles and arcade games. And in that they managed to find room for titles from the 70s and 80s. But then they left Minecraft off the list.

My first reaction was that the staff was probably much younger than I… a surprising number of people are these days… and that the prime formative period of their gaming psyche came about in the mid-to-late 90s. They might never have played Seven Cities of Gold or the original Wasteland.

My second reaction was that perhaps we were working with different definitions. For me “PC” means personal computer, and it a generalized thing that includes everything in my personal timeline from the Timex Sinclair 1000 to my current 64-bit Win7 box, and quite a few side paths along the way, including a series of Mac OS machines.

But to a lot of people, “PC” probably means Windows box, something that has been reinforced by both Apple and Microsoft in recent history. So if I read “Top 100 PC Games” as “Top 100 Windows Games,” the list makes a little more sense. In the timeline of Windows, the less said about things before 1990, the better.

In that context, I suppose the list makes more sense, as Windows games only start coming into their own with Windows 95, which brings us to the late 90s and blah blah blah.

Then again, I could be overthinking this… a common issue for me… and it might be that the team that did the list just thinks newer games are better. That seemed to be the point of view with Complex Gaming and their Top 50 list, a list which put EVE Online in the #1 spot. It certainly fits the “complex” side of the equation.

Ah well.

I would like to link to the list so that you could read it yourself, but it appears to be a print edition only feature. It made for a dramatic cover that no doubt got a few people to pick up a copy. And I am sure that they would not appreciate it if typed out the list myself. But I will leave you with their top five games.

I suppose the first choice isn’t a huge surprise. They justified it well and frankly liked it for all the right reasons; scope, freedom, mods, replayability. The next three are probably not very controversial. I haven’t touched any of the Mass Effect games, but you can hardly be any kind of a gamer and have not heard people going on about them. I have played through Half-Life 2 and spent a bit of time with Team Fortress 2, but they are not really my thing. (And HL2 plus Garry’s Mod made for one of the best video game based comics ever.)

And then there is Deus Ex, which I really have no recollection of at all. It was apparently quite a thing and I missed it completely. But it came out when I was still absorbed with EverQuest the first time around, as well as Diablo II, StarCraft, and a few other games I would consider classics. We can’t get them all. There are only so many hours in the day. Heck, just the other day a co-worker admitted to me that he had never seen The Wizard of Oz. I am not sure our culture makes sense without having seen that.

Anyway, another list examined. I await the next one.

Charting the Relative Natures of MMO Economies

I think that by this point in time, some fifteen years down the road from the launch of Ultima Online, having a player economy is one of the hallmarks of games I consider to be MMOs, at least when I use the term.

If there is no player to player economy, then the game is something else to my mind. World of Tanks, not an MMO in my book. EverQuest certainly is.

And desire for a player driven economy stems from the deep in the roots of the genre.

In 1993 I was playing TorilMUD, arguably the precursor of EverQuest, which was very much a gear driven game. Despite there being no mechanism at all to handle or encourage a player economy, one spontaneously appeared. The desire to exchange gear for trade or coin, the need to create an economy, was so strong that an unofficial one was started and developed its own rules and customs. And it became popular enough that there were standard prices for certain items. We would sit around in Waterdeep and people would do shout auctions for items, which you would bid on with a direct tell to the seller. And it you were looking for something, you would shout out a “want to buy” or WTB.

The economy become very popular very quickly, to the point that the people running TorilMUD were not quite sure what to do with it. First they tried to contain the amount of spam it caused in town, putting a limit on the number of yells you could do over a given period of time and then by trying to get us to do this in a single room rather than shouting across a whole zone. Eventually, an auction house was implemented, though the devs put the auctioneer in out of the way places, as I think they were still suspicious of the player driven economy.

This suspicion came, in part, from the fact that the player driven economy pointed out flaws in the game. With little to spend the in-game currency on besides items from other players, some people began to amass huge quantities of cash. This, of course, drove up the price of everything in the player economy because the long term players could afford to drop a lot of coins on things they wanted for themselves or alts.

But the whole sinks and faucets and inflation aspect of the currency is another discussion.

Likewise, when EverQuest launched, there were no tools to drive a player economy. It formed around the Commonlands tunnel where people would go to buy and sell, very much in the model of TorilMUD. This popped up again for a bit on the progression servers, at least until the bazaar showed up.

The Plane of Knowledge kills all this...

Nostalgia at the tunnel

I was thinking about all of this and trying to fit MMO player economies into a two dimensional system for comparison.

What I came up with was how much of a requirement the player economy was to play the game and how much friction there was to engaging in the player economy.

The first seems pretty reasonable to gauge. Can you play the game, or can you get very far in the game, without engaging in the player economy. For example, in EVE Online, you have to use the player economy to play the game. You could, I suppose, try to avoid it. In fact, it might be an interesting experiment to see what you could do without it. But I imagine that it would be a long, slow grind to completely avoid the market and it would limit what you could accomplish.

Most other MMOs make the player economy somewhat optional, and have moved more in that direction over time. The combination of quest rewards and game difficulty have moved in the direction of keeping players independent of the player economy.

Friction, on the other hand, encompasses a whole range of things, such as:

How easy is it to access the market?
How easy is it to buy and take delivery?
How good is the UI?
How high are the fees/taxes on transactions?
How stable is pricing?
Do enough people use the economy to make it viable?

And it is with this that you start to get all over the map. For example, Guild Wars 2 and EVE Online are oddly similar in how easy it is to view the market. You can bring it up in the UI wherever you are. On the other hand, while GW2 shows you everything on the market in the game, EVE limits you to your current region.

Anyway, in order to compare these, I made a little graph and put down where I thought certain games might sit on those two continuum. This is what I ended up with.

Click to make readable

The X axis is friction, and the mixed bag of items that represents. The Y axis is how much of a requirement it is to engage in the player driven economy. For a few games I made entries for past states of the game and how they seem currently.

EVE Online is, of course, the game furthest down the required end of the spectrum. I also put it midway along the high end of the friction scale. On the one hand the market is chopped up by regions, there is no delivery so you have to go get the item from the station in which it was listed, this leads to interesting price differentials based on convenience, there is a double tax/fee system, and then there is the whole contracts economy to confuse the issue. And pity the poor capsuleer in the middle of nowhere in need of something.

Mitigating that friction is that if you go to the right system, usually Jita, you can find what you want to buy, and there are so many buyers and sellers competing that there is price stability.

At the other end of things is Guild Wars 2, where you can list to sell anywhere and just have to find the right NPC to pick up items you have purchased and proceeds from sales. The friction is so low that low that lots of people engage in the economy, so commodities for crafting and the like are readily available at reasonable prices. How much a player is really required to participate is a wild guess on my part. Gear provided by your personal quest line seemed good if you kept up, but I have no idea if that carries on through the game.

In the middle, well, a few other games. I ranked LOTRO‘s friction higher than most because of the low participation and the annoying locations and mediocre UI of the auctioneers. On the other hand, you don’t really need it, and doubly so since Turbine started selling very good armor in the cash shop.

EverQuest II was high friction at launch in some ways… you had to be online to sell, sales were restricted to the storage space of your home (which you had to have to sell), and fees pushed players to go visit players directly in their homes. And, if you were crafting at the time, there was the interdependence of the crafting skills that required you to use the market or use up your four character slots to make crafting alts. On the other hand, when you buy something on the broker in EQII, it appears right in your inventory. A lot of that got smoothed out over time, but dependence on the broker went with a lot of that.

EverQuest started at high friction, you had to be online and see the right person on the auction channel selling something you wanted. Later the Bazaar came and you could get a listing, but sellers had to be online, in the Bazaar, and you had to go find them. Finally, things got to offline selling in the more recent expansions, though I think you still have to show up at the Bazaar.

I ranked TorilMUD even higher on friction, if only because the player base was so much smaller. When your player population is a few hundred, and only 256 can be on at a time, your buying and selling options are pretty limited.

And in the middle there is World of Warcraft, which used to have a segmented market, but which has since been unified. The UI for it has gotten better over time, and the addons for playing the auction house have grown more sophisticated, but the need for the auction house has diminished over time as quest rewards in the form of gear have become more regular and standardized through the leveling process.

So there is my chart. It is pretty much a gut-level, unsubstantiated work at this point. Where do you think I am right and where am I clearly wrong? And where would other games fit on the chart?

And, of course, where do you think MMOs should sit on that chart? What would be ideal, if anything?

New Blogger Initiative a Year Later – Who Survived?

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.

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.

Continue reading →

20 Games that Defined the Apple II

A little video my friend Scott sent me.

Direct link to video.

The games shown are, in chronological order:

Not a bad list. A lot of the games on it were on multiple systems, so I think they more define computer games in the 1980s rather than the Apple II specifically. But not bad. I played most of them.

If I were making the list I would probably strike Battle Chess and California Games from the list, as they came so late in the the cycle. Prince of Persia is a bit questionable for me as well, as I played it on the Mac much later on. But Wasteland was the last Apple II game I ever bought, so that plays into it. What defined Apple II games for me came much earlier in the life of the platform

Instead I would add Aztec and probably Autoduel. I would also substitute in Epoch (which doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry) for Elite, Ultima III in for Ultima I (which I think was just a better, more popular game), and probably Seven Cities of Gold for one of the over-represented-on-the-list RPGs. And I would have a strong desire to get F-15 Strike Eagle in there somewhere. And Pinball Construction Set. And Taipan! as well.

There is the problem with making such lists. I can look at all those Apple II games and pull out quite a few great ones.

And, as a side note, Oregon Trail is one of the games in the video I never played.

At least not on the computer.

Instead, that was a game we played as a teacher driven role playing game when I was in 7th grade. True to the spirit however, when people refer to playing the video game version it sounds exactly like our role play version. As young boys, my friends and I all loaded up our wagon with guns and as much ammo as possible and most of us went on to die of dysentery.

Complex Gaming Declares EVE Online Best PC Game of All Time

Complex Gaming has a list, and we all love lists! Well, I love lists.

This list is a list of their Top 50 Best PC Games of All Time.

And their top pick on the list is EVE Online.

Stuff blows up in space!

I cannot imagine that will cause any controversy.

Actually, the whole list is pretty controversial to me and seems pretty heavily weighted towards more recent games. I would argue about whether Civilization V should be on the list relative to past versions. (I prefer Civ II still, and I know there are Civ IV partisans out there.) And should both Torchlight AND Torchlight II make the list? And both StarCraft AND StarCraft II? Really?

On the MMORPG front, Ultima Online, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, Star Wars the Old Republic and, of course, EVE Online make the cut. No EverQuest and no Guild Wars 2 though.

And LEGO Star Wars III but not LEGO Star Wars – The Original Trilogy? Heresy!

Ah well, such lists are pretty much designed to stir up controversy. How do you pick 10, 20, or even 50 “bests” out of such a huge body of work without leaving something out?

Maybe I should work on my own list.

The Great Survey of Linking Blogs

Way back when I started this blog, I had some plans for how I would handle certain things, including the blogroll, the links in the side bar to other blogs.

My theory at the time was that a blog roll over a given size would cease to be of value to those listed. The more choices offered, the less likely any particular item would be chosen. So I planned to limit the blog roll, at various times, to 10, 15 or 20 blogs.

And they would be blogs I would keep tabs on. You would know, clicking on my blog roll, that you would end up on an active blog discussing MMO related topics. This would be a quality blog roll!

Of course, watching traffic over time, I discovered that the blog listed at the top of the blog roll got a majority of the traffic, and that the top three on the list accounted for almost all of the blog roll traffic.

This lead me to suggest to at least one blogger than he rename his blog to Aarhus Gymnastikforening. The name looks really interesting in English, it would get him the top slot on most blog rolls, and there was bound to be some residual traffic generated by confused Danish soccer fans.

(You can see why people generally approach me for blogging advice exactly once.)

Anyway, my initial theory of limiting the size of the blog roll meant I would not automatically reciprocate being linked on another blog with a spot on my own blog roll.

So I decided, by way of a thank you, to call out any blog that put me on their blog roll or other such list as part of my month in review post.

So since my October 2006 month in review post, I have done this.

I figured I would get through a few months on new blogs and then I would go back and rotate through the list again, adding in new ones as they showed up every so often.

But in what I consider an amazing turn of events, I have been able to list at least two new blogs a month (the average is a little over 4) in my monthly summary for 59 months straight. And I already have two blogs set for this month, so it will soon be 60 months straight.

So, first, wow! And, second, thank you all very much!

Having hit the five year mark, I decided to see what had become of all of those blogs. So I went through all of my monthly reviews and clicked on every single one to see what was going on. I also moved the data into a spread sheet and came up with a few status categories so I could quantify all of this.

One of my first surprises was the number of duplicate entries. I thought there might be 3 to 5 such entries. There were, in fact, 16 blogs listed twice, and one listed three times. Go World of Blogcraft, but call me a liar if I ever call you unforgettable.

So let me get to the numbers. Those will speak for themselves.

Total Blogs Listing (including dupes): 281
Total unique blogs listed: 263
Average blogs listed per month (no dupes): 4.49
Most blogs listed in a single monthly review: 13 (June 2007)
Least blogs listed in a single monthly review: 2 (more than a few times)
Number of listed blogs still active: 74 / 28%
Number of blogs moved: 12 / 5%
Number of blogs dormant: 108 / 41%
Number of blogs gone or otherwise inaccessible: 69 / 26%

For those numbers, the count is only for the URL I listed. I might have mentioned below that a given blog moved and then went dormant, but I only counted it as moved.

Now, if I was feeling really motivated, I would go back and chart the start date and end/last post date for the blogs that are dormant (not sure to what to do about the ones that are gone) to get some sort of life expectancy for a blog. But it is clear that most blogs fold up after a year or two. Such is life in the blog lane.

It was actually pretty neat going through the list. There were quite a few “Oh, I remember this blog!” moments.

Another surprise was… well… how many blogs I missed. I will be able to hit my quota for the next few months with obvious omissions. And then I can move onto the ones that have moved.

I have included, below the cut, all of the blogs listed in past monthly reviews. I removed the duplicates, keeping the first listing for a given blog. I also put a status message next to most of the blogs.

I went through the list in four sessions, and my thoughts on what to do with the list changed from session to session. So for some of the blogs marked as “Gone,” the name is there without the link to the blog. Later I decided to only kill the link if it went to a particularly noxious link-spam site. If you really want one of the original links, you can go back to the original month in review post for it.

My thoughts on what counted as “Dormant” wavered a bit as I went. In general, if a blog was not posting at least monthly and hadn’t posted in August, it was marked as such.

There is probably room for a study on how often a dormant blog will get revived and how successful such revivals end up being.

For those of you interested in the raw blog list, broken out by month, you will find it after the cut.