Tesco – a policy too far.

In a world where alcohol is becoming more and more of problem, Tesco have instigated policies, that that limit the consumption of…….bread rolls. A friend of mine had a party 2 weekends ago and needed some bread rolls. He went into our local Tesco to buy 85 bridge rolls. ‘Sorry sir, you can only buy 65 rolls, its store policy’. Now we wouldn’t want anyone binging on bread would we.
But they were quite happy to sell him 10 packs of cheap lager, a litre bottle of vodka, a bottle of gin, a bottle of scotch and 6 two litre bottles of cider.
Nice one Tesco, once again you have instigated policies that contribute to the well being of our community.

Diesel

Diesel

Last year the second of my two cats, that we had had from kittens (from Stapeley Grange RSPCA) passed away. LaLa was 12 years old and one of the most affectionate cats that I have ever met, second only to her brother, Spikey, who developed diabetes at ten and lived another 12 months before we found that he had a tumour. Anyway those 2 little white bundles of joy brought us so much happiness and our 2 little girls missed them. Anyway, last weekend we decided to get a new cat. So after much discussion with SWMBO it was agreed that I could have the one cat that I had always wanted, a British Short Hair Blue. For those of you who dont know what one of those ‘blue cats’ is, it is the cat off the Sheba advert. Their coats are a blue / grey colour with very dense fur. Their eyes (when mature) are a golden orange colour and they have large round heads.
We hunted through the internet and found several breeders with kittens for sale within driving distance. After an afternoon out, driving and looking, we found a breeder with 2 Blue Boys, 1 Black and one Chocolate Girl. It took all of half an hour to make our minds up, so off we went to pick up a cat carrier, supplies and some cash. 2 hours later we arrived back home with our own 13 week old kitten, who we have christened Diesel.

Welcome to the family Deisel

Garden Furniture

My wife walked out onto the patio the other day and decided that she hated our Teak garden set, to the point that she said that she hated eating off it. Why ? Because as with much Teak furniture, especially in UK climes it turns a silvery-grey colour.  Apparently the natural oils in the wood oxidize, turning the outer layer from golden to silver-grey. Personally I love the colour, but She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) got her way and so I started to work.

Firstly any lose or vegetative matter was removed, then it was given a liberal coat of wood furniture restorer, which is mild caustic solution. This was left on for several hours, then removed with a wire brush and a hose pipe and there underneath was the beautiful golden colour of the wood. After being left to dry for an hour or 2 in the sun, it was given a light sanding with a palm sander and then had a generous amount of teak oil rubbed in.

I think for the future that I am going to get a furniture cover for the tables and chairs, as I don’t fancy spending another day, next summer doing the same.

Modern Warfare

Since deciding that my life was too hectic to play MMOs, I finally ditched my PC altogether – I gave it to my 2 young daughters to play their games on, I live on my MacBook Pro now. Anyway, having a very sympathetic wife who decided that as I had made the ultimate scrifice (giving up my beloved MMOs) she would buy me an XBox 360 so that I at least had something to game on. At the time I thought ’she doesnt understand, console gaming is for lightweights and kids’ but I accepted it with grace. Nearly 2 years on and my 360 Elite gets a hammering almost everynight. As I was weening myself off MMOs I started playing BF2 (on my PC) which I really got into. Looking for something similar on my XBox I found Call Of Duty 4 – Modern Warfare.

It took me a while to get into it, but slowly it got me hooked. I think that Infinity Ward have done a stirling job, the game as a whole is nice, except…..

Except that I play a sniper (being old I dont have the reflexes like I did when I played CS) so the long gun is the weapon of choice and here’s the rub, the sniper always feels like it was an afterthought. Why ? Firstly many of the maps are too small for a sniper to effectively play a sniping role. There are no real sniping perches that many games provide. The unlocks for the sniper- are well – pathetic. All the other classes get the ACOG Scope – which is designed as a low light, image stabilised close to medium range scope, or they get the excellent red-dot scope. Snipers unlock is an ACOG – WHY ? It has a maximum effective range of 300 – 400m, why not give us a nice x10 Leupold or Schmidt & Bender. Give us a scope that is befitting of the weapon – The Barrett is accurate upto and over 1500m, so why on earth would you fit a x6, 400m max scope on it ?

Whilst on the subject of the Barrett, it is, potentially the weapon with the greatest penetration in the game. That .50 BMG round is going to go through near anything (it is designed as an anti-materiel rifle) it will even shoot through armour plate and the bulletproof glass on attack helicopters. So why on earth do you need to hit someone twice, or have to have ’stopping power’ perk to kill someone who has ‘Juggernaut’ on. OK I accept Juggernaut represents or is equvilent to Kevlar Body Armour and Ceramic Trauma Plates – but even they are not gonna stop a .50 round shot at 2 – 300m. Why do I need ‘Stopping Power’ – which is supposed to be armour piercing rounds – being hit by this gun is NOT going to slightly wound you, it will punch a hole the size of a melon in you. C’mon Infinity Ward – you did your research, you added the weapons (mostly fairly accurately) then you just degrade the sniper weapons, because they dont fit your game model – Lame.

Which brings e on to another issue with the Barrett develops in excess of 10,000 ft/lbs power. That is enough kinetic energy to punch through 3″ armour plate – so why in BF4 does it barely shoot through mud brick walls, when some monky with a 9mm or 5.56mm SMG is drilling holes in the same wall like it was cardboard ?

One thing that I loved in CS was the fact that bullets had a spray pattern, which got wider over distance. In Modern Warfare I get sniped over 5 – 600m by a player with a LMG and an ACOG scope – because there is no spray pattern. So I get 5 rounds at best, he has 60+ – pointless. Infact many players say that the best sniper weapon in the game is the M4 with an ACOG – go figure.

Ghilie Suits – Why dont we get these as an unlock ? A modern sniper, with a ghilie suit in similar terrain is almost undetectable. Even with a UAV overhead you would be hard pushed to find a sniper. So what do we get in MW ? A little red dot that pinpoints exactly where we are. So all that happens is, snipers get ‘nade spammed, noob-tubed or the area gets hosed with automatic fire. And please dont say use the ‘UAV Jammer’ Perk as that means that I lose my ‘Deep Penetration’ perk, so all of the ‘Juggernaut’ kiddies run around like they are invulnerable, as I am lucky to get a +1 against a moving target. C’mon Infinity Ward – give us a ghilie suit unlock that doesnt show us up on radar – or at least only shows us up for 5 seconds after we shoot.

Some of my other game issues are:

Claymores.- once again it didnt take five minutes for the Juggernaut brigade to work out that you can actually run through 2 Claymores and be almost unscathed

Autofire Controllers – these are the scurge of the game and shame on you Microsoft for licensing their production and use. They ruin the game. full stop. They allow players to run round the map with sprint on (almost) permanently. They turn single shot weapons into fully automatics – like silenced pistols and they seem to increase the fire rate of fully automatic weapons, so that facing them is like being fired upon with a mini-gun (which I do not believe are in the game yet). I hope that IW can write some scripts into MW2 that detects their usage and either re-adjusts fire rates or disables them altogether.

Airstrikes – I cannot tell you the number of times I have been spawned in the middle of an airstrike, only for it to happen time and time again. 2 issues here: 1. IW can you make your AI a litle more intelligent, so that it doesnt spawn players in the middle of an airstrike. 2. The number / ease of geting airstrikes, can we eather make them harder to get or limit their number per round. This isnt Berlin 1944 with the RAF carbet bombing, its supposed to be modern warfare, where you get 90 seconds of fast air, if you are lucky, in an entire battle.

Oh maybe a third issue, lets have some friendly fire ON, so that airstrikes kill anyone in their blast radius, not just selectively killing enemies.

One thing that I will say is never has a game polarised its players so much on a single game issue – Juggernaut, the vehemence that this draws from players is almost on a par with finding out someone is hacking or cheating. – me included.

Finally MW2 – will I buy it, probably. Will I pay the £60 release price, not a chance, I’ll wait, IW makes some good games, but they’ll have to do a lot better than MW for me to spend that kind of cash on a new release.

So I played Conan….

Well after SOE launched Rise of Kunark I quit playing EQ2 – it really killed the game for me. I stumbled around somewhat, playing BF2 and a bit of CSS but nothing really grabbed me. A few months later many of my guild moved over to the latest new thing Age of Conan and I decided to go and see what all the hype was about, what a huge mistake. For me if an MMO doesnt grab you by the genitalia and give them a gentle tweak in the first few hours, it is unlikely to do so later on. Conan from the outset was horrible. Character animation looked like something from EQ1, combat although novel at first was the same old button mashing and the quests – well we may as well have been back to kill 10 rats. To make matters worse, this was not an item centric game – it had no real focus on character development.

Please do not take this as being some sort of xenophobic comment – but the game felt decidedly European in its design (I am English btw). US MMOs have a style, Korean MMOs have a style Conan felt like it was designed and built by the European Union – a hotch-potch of all the worst traits of any game, decided by democratic process and built by pseudo-politicians (Euro MPs arent real politicians) and marketed bt Saatchi and Saatchi. It was a triumph of style over content (much like most of the crap that comes out of Brussels).

In many ways Conan did me a favour, it made me realise that MY hayday of MMOs is over. i will not be able to recapture those spine tingling days of EQ1, crawling through dungeons, with 5 other unknowns, grinding on mobs and trying to reach that elusive camp, waiting for a named to pop and wiping. Gone is the mature(ish) adult banter that would arise, often whilst medding, between bulling mobs. EQ1 for me was MMORPGs Magnum Opus, due to its timing, and my time of life – neither which are recoverable.

I know there are many gamers like me for whom EQ1 was their first MMO and were at a time in their lives where they didnt have the commitment of children and had time to burn. Now we are grown up, with children and what we should realise is that they are now our real life avatars. Our efforts should be spent on gaining that +1 to Int or +2 to Dex as they will be be our true legacy, not some bunch of pixels or sats on a database burried in a datacentre somewhere. Life is a much more difficult MMO that EQ or WoW will ever be and when you have children, the rewards (in general) are far more rewarding, but that is to say I still sometimes see them as hoard of evil goblins training to my zone line.

Levelling The Playing Field

As I have said in previous posts, I honestly believe that the future of MMOs is likely to be a hybrid of the current MMO style and a twitch type combat system, a la Huxley, Hellgate London and to a degree Planetside and now SOE’s The Agency. The problem with bringing in a twitch based system to an MMO arena is it skews the playing field. Why?

It is a fact that as we get older, our reflexes slow and there is little that we can do about it. During my occasional forrays into BF2 and CS:S, I regularly get my ass handed to me in sling, so more and more I tend to play sniper classes, as the range gives me that little bit of edge back.

In traditional MMOs, progression very much equates to time invested, in twitch games it is very much down to reflexes and dexterity. So how do you create a game, that caters for both the young and the old without disenfranchising one or the other ?

The key lies in  offering 2 different lines of advancement. One line being reflex based, out and out gung-ho, head to head combat, the other lies in stealth, planning and puzzle solving. For example if it were a martial arts based MMO, you could choose to play a Samurai or Shaolin Monk - all out, hand to hand or close quarter combat. Or you could choose to play a Ninja or Lin Kuei, planning your attacks and carrying them out using diversions and stealth. By offering the gamer alternative choices of obtaining the same goal, the playing field becomes more even.

Combine this with other choices for players, support roles as a team member – supplies, healing, engineer etc or as a solo player – saboteur, sniper, transport (most of these will translate easilly to SciFi, Fantasy, Oriental etc) and the pure twitch element’s requirement is somewhat deminished. Even in a PvP environment the ranged or stealth player could hold their own, using traps (invisible to otherplayers), smoke screens and diversions to gain advantage, whereas the pure twitch player has the element of fast reflexes and greater melee type damage. Take this one step further and you could have a duo say of a Samurai and a Magician – but the magician has the art of disguise. The Samurai appears frail under the magicians illusion, whilst the magician himself is invisible or becomes a mount – an attractive target in any PvP environment. A ninja goes for the one shot kill against what he thinks is a frail trader, only to be confronted by a Samurai with 15,000hp ! In any real battle, it is only the very strongest and toughest that flaunt their presence publicly – tanks mainly, everyone else uses camoflage, stealth, speed, strategy and planning or superior firepower to win their battles. So it should be in MMOs, ganking a mob may be well and fine, if you have the numbers and strength to do it, but trapping and poisoning it may also work just as well, but with much fewer players!

Another area that is sadly lacking in many modern MMOs is puzzle solving. The problem is, with spoiler sites being so prevalent, static puzzles are without challenge. What Devs need to do is incorporate dynamic or random puzzles, that challenge the player. Puzzle solving is not age dependant and therefore is equally challenging to both the older and younger players. Lara Croft – Tombraider is a classic example of how puzzles can work well in a game, unfortunately though, most of these type of puzzles are static and not dynamic.

Overall the model for many of the current MMOs is pretty similar, if you understand the mechanics of one, it isnt hard to translate that to any of the others the only thing that really differs are the levels of risk/reward. I know that there are a few variants emerging from the traditional MMO model, the most succesful of thes ebeing Eve, but even in that game progression still equates to time invested.

I think the problem is currently that too many investors saw the success of World of Warcraft with its huge subscriber base and expect any new investments to follow the WoW model. Well sadly I think that is a dead-end road. WoW was succesful for a lot of reasons, its mechanic being only one of many. That alone is not sufficient to create a sucessful MMO. The Warcraft IP has a long and succesful pedigree that it traded on, Blizzard had a huge established playerbase in Battlenet, I could go on, but wont. In my opinion the game as an MMO is mediocre, but the game as a game (a medium of entertainment) is absolute genius.

So what of the future? Well we have seen the death and near-death of several MMOs this year, Gods and Heroes. Car Wars, Vanguard and I predict we will see many more, as investors blindly expect developers to follow a model that is not only flawed but was unique to Blizzard and truth be told cannot be recreated, we will see another tranche of mediocre MMOs that are set to fail, even before they launch.

Only when someone with enough vision and understanding of the Massive Gaming Demographic (which is currently 18 – 35 years old, I believe) decides to move away from the EQ1 / UO / DAoC / EQ2 / WoW model and starts again from scratch will we truly see a true 3rd generation MMO with the potential to capture the hearts and minds of millions of players again.

‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’

A big thank you to Darren at ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ podcast.

I listened to podcast number 5 last night and he has voted Split and Defiled blog of the week. ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ is one of the newer MMO / gaming podcasts, but its quality is superb and is now another ‘must listen’ on my weekly list of MMO / gaming podcasts that I download to my ipod. If you haven’t listened to it yet, get over to the ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ website, download it and give it a listen.

Darren is also known as The Common Sense Gamer and is long time blogger and commenter on the gaming world in general. If you haven’t read his blog, I suggest that you hop over to his site and have a read.

I cant mention ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ without mentioning Cuppy who used to be Darren’s co-presenter on the podcast. Cuppy sadly had to leave Shut Up. We’re Talkling as she landed, what I hope, is her dream job as Community Relations Manager with Areae Games. Cuppy also has her own blog, Cuppytalk , another fantastic insight into the world of games, anothermust read for avid gaming fans. Anyway, a big hi to Cuppy

 

Finally I wanted to say that ‘Shut Up. We’re Talking’ is part of the Virgin Worlds Collective. Which is a series of podcasts about gaming and MMOs, which Brent, who hosts the Virgin Worlds website and podcast has brought under one umbrella. The Virgin Worlds podcast was one of the first MMO podcasts that I listened to and I look forward to his weekly round-ups of the Massively Multiplayer gaming news, as his knowledge and insight of the gaming and especially the MMO industry is second to none. Go listen

Busy…

Real life has been a bit hectic over the past few days, hence no posts. I just wanted to let people know, that I haven’t disappeared and that normal service has been resumed.

Jitter

Gaming Diary – Sinking Sands Carpet Quest

Jitter has been saving for a new mount. What I really wanted was either a

Mistrunner or

 

Nightmare, but it would leave me broke. So on hitting 47 I decided to go and do my Carpet of El`khazi Quest. It is a 4 part quest kiven to you by El`khazi the carpet vendor in SS. Me and another guildie, Ryuwo a 70 ‘Zerker duoed all of it upto the 4th quest (at this point I’d like to say thankyou to Ryuwo, without him I wouldnt have got as far i this game as I have already). On reaching the 4th part I called on another guildie a 52 Fury and his friend a 47 Manaburn Wizard, a 55 Wizard friend of mine and a guildie from my original EQ2 guild (Synergy) called Benjirii a 70 Monk. We wiped 5 times on the Djinn. First time his AoE hit the healers and casters and killed us stone dead. Four more wipes and I was ready to give up (the 2 tanks were mentoring to 55) so we tried on last time.

The wizzy’s hit the Djinn with everything incuding manaburn then the tanks when hell-for-leather on him, with the 2 healers out of AoE range and healing like crazy, we took the Djinn down in under 40 seconds and I got my Carpet.

Well I was told it couldnt be done with group level of 55 max, but we did and Jitter now has his carpet. I seriously do want one of the Mistrunner or Nightmare steeds, but i think that I will do the Warg quest next and get a Warg.

 Maybe one day, when I have 19pp to spare I’ll buy Jitter a horsie as well, but for now I have my new Axminster Steed and I am happy.

A big thankyou for everyone who helped me.

Raiding Guilds and Plat Farmers

Everyone who plays MMORPgs pretty much hates plat farmers (except thos people who buy plat off them, that is). Very few MMOs seem to be exempt from their presence these days and with the rise in numbers playing MMOs, since the WoW explosion, so respectively have the numbers of Asian companies Plat farming.

My question is, why do we hate plat farmers so much?

I think the answer stems from the fact that they perpetually remove, from the normal player base, those mobs, which have the potential to drop the nicest lewt. In early MMOs, such as EQ1, this was a particular issue as camps were very specific, hard to get and often had well known specific loot tables. So if you wanted a Lodizal Shell Shield, you had to camp Lodizal – the named turtle that spawns every 12 hours in Cobalt Scar. Now here lies the rub, very often Lodi was perma camped by guilds – ‘farming’ him for his shell section, so that they could gear up large numbers of their guild. This is a very noble sentiment, guild wise, but in the eyes of the remaining playerbase their action is identical to that of the Plat farmer – yet this behaviour is often more tollerated. Similarly in EQ2, Stiletto, an NPC Ratonga, which spawns amongst the giants and gnolls in Thundering Steppes drops a note which starts a Heritage Quest – Stilettos Orders Intercepted, which at the end rewards you with a Manastone, an item especially desired by priest classes. Stiletto is a difficult spawn to find, it took me 5 hours of camping his spawn area on my server to find and kill him. That 5 hours was after returning twice to find a Norwegian Guild perma camping him with a lvl 70 Guard and a lvl 40 healer – I asked them what they were doing and replied perma camping him for their guild. This annoyed me insanely, but I accepted it as part of the game, had a 4 man botting group being camping and farming him, I would have reported them instantly – for disruption of the game. Hypocracy on my part, I know. FYI on Splipaw, Stilettos Orders sell for upward of 60gp, which to me was alot at lvl 30.

Then we come onto the major contested mobs, fabled dragons etc who are perma farmed by the big raiding guilds, with the excuse tha they are gearing their guilds – which maybe true to a certain degree, but these guilds also are the ones selling many of those fabled drops on their vendors, demanding 10s even 100s of plat for items – in my eyes this activity is no better than a Plat Farmer. Yes I know that someone is going to say, raids are skilled, hard work, yadda yadd yadda – I say that is bullshit. Once a guild has a specific mobs worked out, they raid like clockwork, with almost guaranteed kills everytime – that is how they ‘farm’ the items that they need, the skill required drops very rapidly. I would argue that quad boxing a bunch of farming bots is probably as skillful as running a x3 or x4 group raid.

I realise that this article is probably going to bring a lot of hate with it, especially from raiding guilds, or guilds who farm for their playerbase, but logically their actions are no better, oftentimes, than the Asian Plat farmer who is probably earning a living to feed his familly.

Finally we have to look to our own playerbase, we hate plat farmers with almost a religious zealotness, yet we seldom hold recriminations against friends and fellow guild members who buy Plat for real world coin, so that they can buy that next Master spell, or fabled piece of gear. I know friends of mine, one who raids with top level guilds on both his WOW and EQ1 servers, who have not only bought plat but Ebayed characters as well. Do those guilds care ? Do they hell. All they care about is that they have 2 of the top specced healers on their servers respectively, which allows them to raid even harder targets, more often.

What I suggest is next time we decide to Report / Petition someone spamming you with Plat sales, see if you can report a guildie or friend as well for purchasing an ebayed toon or buying some of said Plat!!