Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Warcraft - Azeroth Priests Are Easy

Another World of Warcraft-only post.

Received opinion is that priests are rare in WoW because they are hard to solo, challenging to play and that about half of the ones that exist are actually being played for the sake of guilds.  Having recently joined a guild that is, indeed light on the priestly fellows, I decided to try quickly levelling a priestly type.  Thus Etruscan was born.  Or reborn, or something.  He's undead.

Man, I must be missing something.  I'm good with druids, myself, but I've never managed to take one to level 14 without a single death.  I only realised last night that I don't know where the graveyard is for Tirisfal Glades (though I suspect it's going to involve Deathknell and Brill).

Yes, it helps to be able to heal myself.  But I've probably only done that mid-combat half a dozen times or so, when I've had to pull two or three linked mobs of my level, such as the Scarlet Bodyguards and Captain Verrache(sp.?).  He handles adds with absolute disdain.  He finishes fights against solo mobs of up to a level or two above on almost-full hitpoints with almost-full mana.  He almost never has to delay between fights.  His damage output is almost rogue-ish at this level, and massively higher than a druid before level 20.  And on more than 25% armour from Inner Fire, I'm better armoured than anyone at that level except feral druids, pallys and warriors.

You see what I mean?  Are people not using a good wand?  That would make fights extremely slow and much harder.  I'm attacking for 13.5 damage per second, which is better than my druid did with anything before the blue Wailing Caverns' reward Crescent Staff, and the auto-attack is every 1.5 seconds, which hammers enemy spellcasters as it disrupts their casting.  Plenty of my spells are instant, so I can kite with them.  While the wand is only for when not moving, it doesn't use any mana.

As it is, my full, huge (thanks to the auction house and intellect equipment) mana pool is available for Smite, shadow dot attack, Power Word: Shield, armour buff, then another PW:S as required.  I had a look at him last night after the patch, and the cooldown on PW:S seems to have been halved (unless I just learned a new rank and didn't spot a cooldown change), so I can pretty much always be 100% invulnerable to damage.

This is by far the easiest character I have yet played, druid included.

My other impression is that the Glades are even more atmospheric and well-designed than Mulgore and Ashenvale.  It has a gorgeous and consistent aesthetic that is implemented across everything from graphics and mission design to character dialogue.  That said, the trash mobs (dogs, spiders and bats) get very tedious.

Music Reviews - Secret Machines, Trivium, Be Your Own Pet

Oh, much as loathe Apple and wish them ill, the convenience of the purchasing system is as tempting as a cheerleader with a big bag of sweeties and beers...

I went onto the iTunes Music Store last night with the intention of buying The Secret Machines' 10 Silver Drops, and came away laden down by five albums, most of which I am pretty pleased with.  Here are a few notes on the first three I've listened to (I'm saving Takk by Sigur Ros as a treat for myself til later).

Be Your Own Pet's eponymous album was released in the last week, and is a fun, frenetic and fresh record that owes huge debts to Blondie, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Kills.  They do indie punk pop as well as the Jesus and Mary Chain did rock and roll, which is very well indeed.  Some of the riffs wouldn't be a million miles out of place on a Dead Kennedys album, although if you want to know what they sound like, you can't really find a better example than Daisy Chainsaw's Love Your Money, complete with bouncy, half-spoken-half-squealed female singer.  The sparse guitar-bass-drums-vocalist sound is pretty homogenous throughout, but you don't have time to get bored when most tracks don't even reach three minutes.  Won't work if you don't like female singers who are a bit, erm, wilfully kooky.

The Secret Machines' 10 Silver Drops was released here last week as well, but in everything else but a shared membership of MTV2's playlist, it is a world away from Nashville retro-punk.  The sparse, edgy production of Be Your Own Pet is a world away from the gentle, rich, deep sound of the opening track, Alone, Jealous and Stoned.  By track two we have cellos and backing vocals and the prog influences really become apparent.  Track three is the clincher: Lightning Blue Eyes.  It bears resemblances (in tempo and use of a semi-quaver-paced, repeated figure in the bass) to their excellent track Nowhere Again from Now Here is Nowhere, but in true prog style it moves on towards glorious excess, with occasional suspended fourths, and a chord sequence in the chorus that will yank at your heart if you have one.  By track four we have songs breaking the eight minute mark  Keith Emerson would applaud such behaviour.  The producer really had a field day here: gating, sustain, delay and chorus effects everywhere.  Obviously, hugely varied throughout in the progressive tradition, which demands displays of musical virtuosity through a mastery of all forms*.  This is a real cracker of an album and should get the band some decent mainstream exposure this year, if they are not smothered by a hundred, horrendous Coldplay clones.  My absolute favourite of the three.

Finally (from this bunch) is Trivum's Ascendancy.  Easy to nail this one down: it's Metallica from just over a decade ago, with vocals straight from Pantera: the ones that sound like they must be incredibly painful to perform, requiring a healthy growth of vocal polyps, and much beloved of Norwegian death-metal and grindcore.  I actually rather like this album, but I liked Pantera and early-90's Metallica so it's nice to have another album along those lines to see what they'd have been like together.  They even start off with the traditional piece of vaguely classical intro.  I can see Trivium making it quite big with time - Metallica did, after all - and they do have one of the more wonderfully pompous names in metal at the moment, making reference as it does (intentionally, I gather) to matters medieval and curricular.  Basically Metallica to Avenged Sevenfold's Iron Maiden.

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* The current masters of such wilful eclecticism are System Of A Down, who will gaily chuck a gypsy folk song or a large choral section into a song for 30 seconds, completely out of any context at all.  I foresee the possibility that one of their future albums will display a mastery of the polka form, alongside a piece of minimalist techno inspired by Aphex Twin and guest-produced by Autechre.  It should be remembered that two members of System Of A Down are utterly and completely mad.

Yay.. I am special!

My mum always said I wasn't different, just special...

Every week or so, someone sends round one of those quiz things at work, usually the BBC website ones assessing aptitude at various subjects.  This week was a questionnaire assessing tendencies towards autistic behaviour, originally printed in, to give the full citation, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 5-17 (2001), and based on work at Cambridge in 1998.  You can find it at Wired.

The article presented this as "are you a geek or autistic".  I was pretty certain that I would rate towards geek, towards the lower end of the scale.  The average control-group score was 16.4.  Eighty percent of those already diagnosed with autism or behavioural disorders scored over 32.  I scored 36.

36?!?

Of course, the idea that there was a binary opposition between geeky and autisticic behaviour patterns was a false one.  I see the traits that boosted my points score as being extremely useful in my job, allowing me - as they do - to hold large state machines and call stacks in my head, so long as nobody manages to hammer their way into my consciousness with a question about something.  And the idea that out-3-nights-every-week-minimum, social butterfly narcissist Endie is autistic is a moderately funny one.  But the bits of it I do, I do well.

Peace Activist Rant

I resisted the temptation to write anything in the immediate aftermath of the rescue of Norman Kember from his kidnappers.  On hearing that he had issued numerous statements, none of which had the good grace to thank those who risked their lives to rescue him (the British, Iraqi, Canadian, US and military and also the MI6 agents), my initial reaction was that I would gladly chip in the cash to pay for a flight back to Baghdad for him.

But I'm not sure how clear-thinking I'd be in the aftermath of such an ordeal, so I held my tongue.

Only cowards, the naive or the wicked wish to see us rid of our armed forces.  I am sure that Kember is one of the naive.  He is no coward, for sure - you wouldn't catch me in Iraq without a rifle and some heavily armed mates - and I refuse to believe that my co-religionist is evil.  I think he is thoughtless, selfish, reckless and senselessly careless of the lives of others, but not evil.  But he shares goals with evil men.  In the Canadian National Post, you can see how the Iraqi ambassador reacted:

"The Christian Peacemaker Teams practises the kind of politics that automatically nominate them as dupes for jihadism and fascism," the embassy's statement said.

"The statement shows they even share the rhetoric of the jihadists, even if they do it out of naivete. Despite their claimed affinity for 'non-violence,' this is false.

"Politically, they are on the other side of this war. Christian Peacemaker Teams are objectively on the side of the fascists, Saddam Hussein's loyalists and al-Qaida in Iraq."

I can see his point.  If you hope for something - in this case the rapid withdrawal of our forces from Iraq and the abandonment of the democratic, elected government of that country - look at the people around you who hope for the same thing.  In this case, they are Jihadists, Islamist, Wahabbists, Salafists and assorted, tag-along anti-Semites like the Socialist Workers Party.  If the goals of your allies are wicked, either they or you aren't spotting something about the outcome.

The repugnant Canadian hostages are more open about their disdain for those who saved them.  At least Kember was persuaded to release a graceless and clearly grudging "thank-you" to those who saved his life.  Loney and Sooden refuse to even help their rescuers by giving information that might save the lives of others in captivity.  They prefer to maintain their distaste for soldiers rather than help save others' lives.  I am quite serious when I say that they should stick to their glorious principles and hand themselves over to their kidnappers.  I hope that we make clear that any other such collaborationists will not be rescued.  If a soldier was scratched by a nail while saving them it would be too high a price.

Do I seem angry?  Do I seem harshly and needlessly judgemental?  I know of two young men who would have grown up, had families, bounced their grandchildren on their knees and died in old age surrounded by their loved ones but for the fact that they were called up to free Europeans from Hitler's Germany, in one case dying in a field in Normandy, victim of a sniper's bullet.  Those men might not have wanted to fight, and certainly didn't want to die.  But they understood that some evils will prevail until defeated in battle.  I have the greatest of respect for those "conscientious objectors" who served as medical aides in that conflict, and who suffered a great many deaths and injuries from amongst their ranks.  But they were wrong.

I cannot even understand those who say it is better to impose sanctions - to starve comfortably distant, unseen children to death while the elite eat caviar - rather than send our volunteer soldiers in harm's way.  And I am repelled by those who say that if we cannot interfere everywhere, we should not do so anywhere.  That is like saying that if the lifeboats only hold one hundred, and two hundred stand on the deck, all should drown.

When there are no more evil people in the world, we will not need men in uniform to defend us from them.  And until the Rapture, we have that need.

Agendas Beat Truth

In the Academy, there is a hierarchy.  Everybody knows that the physicists and theoretical mathematicians are extremely intelligent, work hard to get where they are, and base their results on reproducible results, the scientific method, rigorous proofs and the like.

At the other end of the scale are the softest subjects, which include many of the so-called "social sciences".  Of these, the politically-motivated areas that share a methodology and grounding in proof with, say scientology are the worst offenders: gender studies, queer studies and the like.  These are agendas looking for a subject.  Such is their (quite justified) inferiority complex that they attempt to obfuscate and complicate their discussions, cloaking what they say in pseudo-science and critical theory.  Ironically, while attacking the idea of objective truth and absolute proof (very problematic for a Guardian reader) they ape those very elements wherever they can.

I don't write flame posts.  Look back, if you can bear the tedium, at my previous posts.  I grew out of internet flame wars back in 1993 or 1994, although the usenet posts do survive.  But... oooh, this makes me mad.

Now, Bonnie Ruberg is a nice person with interesting things to say and a very explicit agenda.  But her ongoing obsession with what she calls "transvestism" (people using toons of the opposite gender) in MMO's has become a somewhat wearying and one-paced addition to the generalist, virtual worlds blog Terra Nova.

Her first post was, frankly, laughed out of court.  It addressed well-worn and cliched areas and almost everyone knew how the conversation would pan out, from long experience on a variety of forums.  I think that the unwritten rule in the Houses of Parliament - make your maiden speech interesting and uncontroversial - is a wise one to stick to whenever delurking.  Anyway, she threatened more ("You may have won this round, my pretties, but I have author rights on this blog...  You cannot stop me and you have no /ignore function!"), and now she has delivered.

She claims it is an informal "study" [Edit: "Survey", not "study".  Thanks Aaron] of why individuals use characters of the opposite gender in online games.  She starts from the idiotic presumption - unforgiveable for someone of her intellect - that this is simply a variety of real-world cross-dressing.  She offers no evidence for her confusion of terms, despite receiving a mauling last time out.  Proof by blatant and repeated assertion.

In fact, look closely and the "study" is her posting on her blog regarding why people represent as other genders and getting responses from her readers.

Did it not strike her that credibility requires that she point out one or two details about such methodology?  That what she got was a study of individuals who read a blog on sexuality and gender in gaming?!?  A self-selecting study constituted entirely of those who chose to respond, mainly publicly!  So she got a bunch of touchy-feely responses from people who read her blog.  We tend to read blogs whose tone we generally agree with (see the bloglists of any left- or right-wing American blogger for evidence here).  So Bonnie suggested a theory on a number of occasions on her blog, then asked a question on it, and presents the results as some sort of "science".  Thousands of years of progress in logic and scientific method and this is what it comes to.  Politics.

A proper study, for what it would be worth (very little, I suspect) would have a sizeable cohort selected and weighted according to the demographics of the players (someone like Nick Yee, who brings real credibility and rigour to the genre, could help here).  I'd give you huge odds that the results would be the stunning conclusion that the bulk of those representing as another gender are men who like to look at pretty girls.  Not a stunning discovery, and unlikely to get the plaudits clearly desired.  It's all, I bet, about the elf-boobies.  The Lara demographic.

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Disclaimer  I should add, in the interests of openness, that although my main characters - Agamemnos and Gracci - are both male, they are Taurens, which presumably, in Bonnie's agenda-driven world, makes me some sort of furry.  In SWG I did play a female character for a while, because in the words of PvP Online, if I am going to spend dozens of hours looking at an ass, it had better be an attractive one.  Bonnie hates that argument, of course, and simply refuses to believe it when it is raised.  It doesn't advance her agenda.  Truth be damned.

Phear /\/\y m4d l33t sk1llz

Another totally World of Warcraft post, best ignored by the unaddicted.

I just checked last week's honour rankings for the Moonglade WoW server, and my newish PvP alt is the highest-ranked person at level 29 or below, which isn't bad since I am only level 27 in the current weekly stats (I've gained a couple since).  I've not really spent much time at all in the battlegrounds yet, but when in there I've been doing a lot of flag captures (usually 2 out of 3) and a lot of killing.

I've found a good pattern that wins almost every time: a kind of rope-the-dopes double play.  Take last night, where after three 3-0 wins in half an hour we had the alliance team on almost full defence, with seven of them in their flag room.  In response, I had our team set up with five in defence, three midfield and a normally-suicidal two in attack.  5-3-2, funnily enough, being my favoured Championship Manager formation as well :) ...

Anyway, I would sneak onto the ledge invisible, and call for a runner.  This usually meant sticking Mark of the Wild, Thorns, Regrowth and Rebirth on Bartuc, a level 27 shaman, and he would immediately sprint for the flag.  The extra 600-odd health he had pouring in from my buffs and heals would sometimes get him far enough to shift into ghost wolf once outside, and then he was as good as home with us dominating midfield.

But with seven of them using stuns, roots, hamstring and other movement-restricting plays on him, he would usually only make it about 20 yards past the cliff.  Foolishly but predictably, they would return the flag.  Meanwhile I am in cat form, hidden, sitting next to the flag point.  It appears, I sieze it, and sprint out.  The allies coming pouring back up to recapture it and I - with talents spent on 30% speed increases in cat form and the ability to sprint at 50% faster once every 5 minutes - tear past them, shifting form as necessary to discard roots and using my Insignia Of the Horde if they slap a fear on me.  I even have time to go to autorun and chat with my team on the way back about the best route in.

This works with only one shaman or druid, too: we sometimes used a hunter as a sacrificial runner.  He goes into the tunnel, gets killed halfway down it, I grab the flag and sprint out over the cilffs.  They literally cannot catch up.  Still sucks to be ally :)

How to defend?  Hold the ledge, don't leave the flag room empty when chasing the flag, don't return the flag until you have a couple of hunters or warriors there to get the next runner, and defend in midfield against the second runner: don't run up an empty tunnel.

Webrowser Strategy Game

If there is one thing the Germans are good at, it's keeping the French in their place.

But if there is another thing they are good at, it is writing sim/strategy/planning/management-type games, preferably with numbers and resources and stuff.  I've been playing just such a multiplayer SimVillage-type game - Travian - for a week or so, and it is fun, with an attractive and simple web-browser interface.

My village of Romans finds itself near to some unpleasant-looking Teuton raiders from another player, but my economic base is sound and I am gambling a wall and a bunch of praetorian guards will see him taking his brand of Allemanic hi-jinks elsewhere.  No Varus I, my legions will not be heading off into a swampy wood for him to pick off any time soon.

Cash for Coronets

You can tell that I am a Daily Telegraph reader, as I am prone to shaking my head sadly and bemoaning the state of politics in Britain.  The fact is that things were better when those in parliament gained their money from non-political routes: when they were of independent means.

Tony Blair admits that £14.5 million were smuggled into the Labour party as "loans", in order to avoid the need to publicise who the donors were.  This was done to get around the legislation that he himself had brought in earlier in his government.  In return, the donors - sorry, lenders - were to be given peerages, although that has been blocked now that the story is out.  How I detest that sanctimonious liar.

The loans route seems, if anything, far more of a case for public scrutiny,  You give me 14.5 million pounds in donations and I will be grateful to you. I may even make a special effort to grant you the odd hearing.  But you have nothing over me.

If you lend me 14.5 million pounds?  Well, that is a different story.  And if, like the Labour party, I have no real means of paying it back, then you can write your own policy documents.  Consider my cap doffed.

Bioware to put the RPG in MMO

Abalieno/HRose informs us that Bioware are to make a virtual world.  Well, he actually says that they're giving us a fantasy MMO, but I can hope that that translates into a virtual world.  Bioware, after all, are the people who gave us, arguably, too much world in Knights of the Old Republic, and gifted us the surrealistically huge playspace of Baldur's Gate.  Surely, I whisper to my precious, they will give us player houses and cities and all sorts of Raph Koster-ish delights.  Surely?  After all, project lead appears to be James Ohlen, who was involved in all those great Bioware RPG titles.

But I'm less certain than I might be.  Here's why: World of Warcraft.

WoW will suggest a certain approach: do the basics, do it well, and release a limited feature set when balanced.  This is a danger, but I hope that Bioware are canny enough to know that they cannot produce yet another diku and hope to just steal the game away from Blizzard.

What interests me are two other names that have been hired for the task: Richard Vogel and Gordon Walton.  Vogel was senior prducer at Origin on Ultima Online, which was, 7 or 8 years ago, already more of a world than Blizzard have yet created.  A world of gankage, but still a world.  He worked there with sandbox-Tsar Koster, and both went to SOE, not that we should judge them for that: I suspect that the influence of each was visible in the high targets of Star Wars Galaxies.  In any case, I hope that he'll pick up where UO and SWG left off: a world with games.

Gordon Walton has been at both EA and SOE, and as a result I loath his prior affiliations, but he's a creative type, and once again someone deeply involved with the SWG experiment.  So long as he and Vogel didn't get too badly burned by that episode, then hopefully they'll be capable of coming up with a real treat.  And I trust Bioware to just as great a degree as I distrust SOE.

Gankage and Pwnage

If you are not interested in World of Warcraft, MMOs or PvP in games, this is not the post for you.

I have, as a rule, never been a PvPer (Player vs Player, i.e. fighting other people instead of the computer) in MMOs.  An explorer by nature, I dabble with socialising and achieving, but my sole experience in the killer archetype was when my Star Wars Galaxy character - a Teras Kasi Master/Master Doc found itself (in that "a stopped clock is right twice a day" way that SOE's constant 'balancing' made inevitable) the PvP flavour of the month.  I would run around Coronet starport's entranceways murdering rebel scum, and I can't pretend that I didn't get a real buzz from the "danger" of it all.  But I usually role-played it by hanging around rebel starports in my Stormtrooper uniform and hassling the locals.

Anyhow, in the couple of weeks I suddenly started PvPing in World of Warcraft.  I play on a roleplay server - Moonglade - and I suspect that I would find it much harder going on an open PvP server, but I have been finding it a lot of fun.  I don't even know how it happened.  I don't remember how I ended up in there after months of ignoring the battlemasters.  The devil probably made me do it.

Th first thing that had to change was my character spec.  My latest alt, Gracci, is a Tauren druid, and that makes for some good options, but the resto build I used for PvE and instances had to go, and I spent my gold piece and joined the growing... herds?... packs?... of feral druids that everyone loves to hate.  Two weeks on and I am already sergeant rank, although until I reach level 30 I can't get promoted again.

What I have learned is that skill counts.  By level 26 my druid could take out any other level 29 character - rogues, warriors and other druids included - if the opposition wasn't up to scratch.  I also learned that the Horde tends to win, and suspect that this is because of being honed by endless, outnumbered Sundays at Crossroads into a highly-tuned ganking team.

Of course, a team with Teamspeak, it seems, will beat one without unless faced with absolutely insurmountable odds.  I have only fought twice with teamspeak, in two successive battles where we were outnumbered 10-8 most of the time by allies who were almost all 27-29 against our 22-27 plus one 29 priest.  We won 3-0, 3-0 in a matter of minutes each time and then the allies went to bed.  This reflects my experience in America's Army, in Dungeons and Dragons Online and elsewhere about efficiency.  In combat, I guess, communication is king.  Who'da guessed?

Druids do seem to have distinct advantages in PvP: if one druid, in cat form with the 30% speed increase takes the flag, and I wait in the tunnel with rejuv, regrowth, healing wind and then entangling roots I can make sure that they'll get away.  Everyone fixates on the flag-carrier and don't realise that they are unkillable and then uncatchable so long as I live.  We are the wing-forwards of WoW, able to tackle, play in the backs, scrummage, ruck and maul.  Mainly maul.  I can only imagine the opposition's faces when they see our attack team running at them pause, and then they are suddenly are faced by five cat-form druids, each with mark of the wild, thorns, regrowth and stamina/intellect buffs using assist to buzzsaw through them, one at a time, two seconds per kill.  That seven man attack is dead in no time.

The final battleground last night we won to nil.  I mean that not one of our team died in a 3-0, 10 v 10 battleground.  Ally deaths were probably c. 110.

Now I hope you didn't read that just in caseI said something non WoW.

In other news

In the links at right, a new blog from friend and colleague Mark, aka Mighty Cornholio.  We can only hope that he brings to his blogging the thoroughness and application he shows in his emailed daily gaming updates, and not the reckless incompetence he brings to driving games on XBox Live.

Ultra-ultra-fast internet access

The Times is today carrying a story about a trial of a new technology allowing 2GB per second internet access.  The lucky residents of Shoreditch will be the recipients, which I can only presume was chosen because that (extremely deprived) area must download more pr0n than any other location in Britain.  Goodness knows what else you'd do with such a fat pipe.  I know, I know: it would let doctors use virtual reality to conduct operations across the blah blah...  That's what people always say, because it sounds worthy.  Clearly, lag is not a problem to these cut-happy surgeons.  Maybe they can do the operations from safe, non-litigious domiciles.  Like Shoreditch,  large parts of which have no meaningful legal system.

But 2GB is a lot.  I languish on 4MB at the moment, so that would be a five hundred times increase.  I dunno what that would let me do.   I suspect that I could download a year's worth of my TV viewing in a day, or something stupid like that.  I suppose I'd rather it gave me a fully immersive 3d environment.  But then I live in Edinburgh's New Town, which is a pretty nice 3D immersive environment as it is.  The shading effects on the trees outside are pretty hot, too.  Insert your own references to Nozick, the Experience Engine, and pointless French hyper-reality theorists here...

Some D&D Online reviews

I think that the really striking thing about the Dungeons and Dragons Online launch period has been just how dramatically split opinions are.  The people that hate it, really hate it.  No, really.  The first real reviews of it from generalist gaming publications - at Gamedaily (4.5 out of 5) and Eurogamer (8 out of 10) - are far more positive than I expected, and I can't help but thing some really low marks will balance these.  MMO forums, on the other hand, already have a fairly even split between those who like it a lot and those who hate it.  F13, for instance, is a notorious geek-rant-fest - although also a great source of info - and is universally, mob-lynching-negative amongst those who are posting.

A balanced view is rarer, but you can see one at

The comments I see from those who detest DDO tend to reflect that it expects things of the players.

"And combat was annoying... i hated needing to block and attack." (Anandtech)

OK, if you want easy-mode, character-skill-centric combat then D&DO isn't for you.  This requires you to watch the opposition for the tell-tale swing of their attack, or keep an eye open for their special attacks.  It's less classic MMO, and more FPS - First Person Slasher.

"got my ranger to 4 today. Thought i can use spells finally, then i realize, oh 11 points in wisdom = you no get spell points. Becoming more dissapointing by the day" (Anandtech)

Yes, it is possible to build any legal D&D character you like, and that means sub-optimal ones.  This is not World of Warcraft.  Yes, you can gimp yourself, so either read the manual or the D&D rulebook.

And so on.  The biggest complaint is that the game is not really solo-able: you have to group.  Yes, you have to group.  Dungeons and Dragons is a group, social activity.  I can only imagine the mockery if the system had been changed to make the solo-to-60 playstyle of WoW (which I also love) possible.  Another big complaint is that the health and mana pools take time to regenerate.  Huh?  You just got slashed with a sword, and you are complaining that spending 4 minutes in a tavern is too high a price to pay for healing?

I can't wait to start using the built-in voice communications to play as a group with others: all I've done is same-room play at the moment.  I'm intrigued, in that I always thought that that would be immersion-breaking.  But in this context, recreating a D&D session, it seems more natural: Marina the roguish mage is always voiced by my mate Cakes.  that's how it is, and doesn't stop me enjoying pen and paper D&D.

Something in the game's favour that I should have made more of in my previous post is the scripting.  The adventures are far more interactive, with people behind doors hearing and reacting to you; fiddling with secret altars leading to caverns collapsing around you; other (npc) parties wandering the same dungeons as you are, looting happily, and so on.  There is nothing in Warcraft, even in the instanced areas, that matches the complexity of the DDO scripting.  I am actively noting stuff for use in my PnP campaign.

SWG vs Eve Online Usage

A rather naughty little hacker used a packet sniffer to investigate the total users figure for each server in Star Wars Galaxies, allegedly on a Friday evening at peak time.  Numbers lifted from here and here.  I am gobsmacked that the post at the latter - Lucas Arts' forums - has not been locked and deleted.

ID: 24 - Name: Europe-Infinity - IP: 195.33.138.101 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0334
ID: 23 - Name: Europe-FarStar - IP: 195.33.138.75 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0133
ID: 22 - Name: Europe-Chimaera - IP: 195.33.138.41 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0331
ID: 1C - Name: Shadowfire - IP: 199.108.197.130 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0518
ID: 1B - Name: Wanderhome - IP: 199.108.197.103 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0462
ID: 1A - Name: Tarquinas - IP: 199.108.197.87 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0456
ID: 19 - Name: Starsider - IP: 199.108.197.50 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0414
ID: 13 - Name: Tempest - IP: 199.108.7.148 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0457
ID: 12 - Name: Valcyn - IP: 199.108.7.111 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0455
ID: 11 - Name: Sunrunner - IP: 199.108.7.73 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0493
ID: 10 - Name: Scylla - IP: 199.108.7.50 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0457
ID: 0F - Name: Naritus - IP: 199.108.8.137 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0496
ID: 0E - Name: Kettemoor - IP: 199.108.8.117 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0522
ID: 0D - Name: Intrepid - IP: 199.108.6.178 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0456
ID: 0C - Name: Flurry - IP: 199.108.6.133 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0473
ID: 0B - Name: Radiant - IP: 199.108.198.70 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0266
ID: 0A - Name: Lowca - IP: 199.108.198.36 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0227
ID: 09 - Name: Kauri - IP: 199.108.196.178 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0245
ID: 08 - Name: Gorath - IP: 199.108.196.131 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0271
ID: 07 - Name: Eclipse - IP: 199.108.196.101 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0397
ID: 06 - Name: Chilastra - IP: 199.108.196.84 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0357
ID: 05 - Name: Bloodfin - IP: 199.108.196.40 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0441
ID: 04 - Name: Corbantis - IP: 199.108.6.105 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0460
ID: 03 - Name: Ahazi - IP: 199.108.6.79 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0520
ID: 02 - Name: Bria - IP: 199.108.6.53 - PortA: 44463 - PortB: 44462 - Population: 0722

About 10,400 concurrent, peak-time users.  That's a third less than Eve Online's Peak Users.  Of course, there's always going to be a lot of brand pull for Eve that a minor product like Star Wars can't match.  Erm...

Warhammer Online Article Leaked

Abalieno, at his Cesspit, points out a leaked PC Gamer article about the forthcoming revised Warhammer Online MMO currently under development by Mythic.  He also hosts a scan of one of the pages of the article, with lots of pictures showing in-game screenshots.  Yet again, the Cesspit comes through with the news.

He also points out that it looks awfully like World of Warcraft.  To be honest, he goes rather over the top on this one, and goes point-by-point through the review, showing how each aspect of gameplay, from look to PvP, is supposedly derivative of its World of Warcraft equivalent.  I have to say that I disagree with him on almost every point he makes here, but the whole "Second Life already does that!" argument is only behind "we discussed that on MUDdev in 1996" in terms of cliche.  There is, as the Guid Buik says, nothing new under the sun.  Although padding out the battlefields with bots sounds a very useful addition.

But he is right that you could have shown me the screenshots, told me they were from the WoW Burning Crusade expansion, and I would have fallen for it: massively oversized weapons, spiky armour, virtually identical palletes for character models and landscapes.  Closer attention shows waist-high grass and better mountains, but the point, basically, stands.

Hasn't he played Warhammer?  I am a geek, as I have often proudly stated, and have my original, first edition boxed set.  I am playing the current version on Mondays.  Where does he think that WoW got the look?  I always thought that everyone took it for granted that WoW was basically a Warhammer tribute world, from the steampunk war engines, through character designs to the goblin engineers.

He has obviously had this pointed out a few times in the time since, as he has posted saying "what does it matter who was first?  There's no need for more."  he seems to suggest it should be dark and gritty.

Well, I admit that dark and gritty would be fun.  But that was the way the first attempt on a Warhammer Online MMO was going, and it folded, big time.  no doubt the cost of those hyper-realistic graphical models didn't help.  Maybe not a good idea to follow it in all aspects.  And anyway, you don't discard a graphical design, look and feel after 20 years, with hundreds of sourcebooks and models and thousands of figures put out, just because someone else ripped you off a bit.  You stick to what you are good at, you press home the advantage of your well-known brand.

More unforgivable is his suggestion that the class system is cribbed from Everquest 2, via Imperator.  Warhammer has always, since it moved from Warhammer Fantasy Battles to Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing, had the character system that you get a starting profession, you learn all it has to offer, skill by skill, then you choose another class from that profession's possible "exits".  That's Warhammer.  It predates Imperator by, oooh, decades.

It's a pity I hate Mythic's games.

Dungeons and Dragons Online First Impressions

On Friday, I received my Dungeons and Dragons Online pre-order from Play.Com.  I spent a fair number of hours at the weekend trying out a couple of characters, and I am not yet entirely certain what to think.  In general, though, my first impressions are really rather good on the world, overjoyed with the game experience proper, but a bit disappointed with the interface.

Much of this is the caution of the previously-burned: I loved my first hours in Star Wars Galaxies: "look, an AT-AT!  A tiny Mos Eisley!  Stormtroopers!".  It all went sour later and my naive enthusiasm began to look very jejune.  So I view this new girl in the class with a jaded and cynical eye.  She's pretty, fun and does all I have asked of her.  But I can't hep worry that I'm being led on.

This game drives home what a traditional MMO World of Warcraft is.  When you start World of Warcraft for the first time you see the mission-giver ahead of you, clearly marked.  In a matter of a couple of minutes you are killing ten rats (well, young wolves, kobolds, scorpids, nightstalkers, etc...) and getting "prizes": loot off bodies, mission rewards.  Within a matter of ten minutes or so you are level two.  It follows every rule in the Jessica Mulligan/Richard Bartle/Raph Koster Big Book of MMO Game Design about the newbie experience.  It is smooth and seductive.  It is the ultimate refinement of the Diku model.

Dungeons and Dragons Online: Stormreach is not like that.  It really feels like a traditional, if magical D&D session.  It feels like a three-dimensional version of the game of Neverwinter Nights you always meant to create, using the authoring tools to implement your own campaign world for your friends.  There is a dungeon-master voice narrating elements of the story as you move through dungeons. The same DM tells you when you make your listen roll and hear monsters beyond a door, when you make your spot hidden roll, and so on.  It really is like playing pen'n'paper D&D with a brilliant new GM's aid showing you the world.

It is pretty straight D&D 3.5, which means that it is much tougher to start off solo as a sorceror, for instance.  I discarded a character because my spell choices, while useful, simply wouldn't get me through the early quests (Summon Monster 1, to provide me with a tank, and Sleep, the first level fireball).  Starting again with Magic Missile and Summon Monster 1, I was all set: I needed caution, sneaking and smart spell use, but it was do-able.  I even got a "devious" bonus to my experience point award for murdering kobolds by surprise.  Going back and using a warrior was a breeze by comparison, and required far less thought.

But then, discarding the solo pley that D&D rarely involves, and playing instead as a party of two (warrior and bard), it all came together.  This was fun.  D&D is about parties, after all.  The twitchy play with diving, turning, rolling and lunging made sense.  It became more like PvP combat, with tricksy opponents, and nothing could be further from teh go-and-make-coffee style combat of Everquest.

The controls are terrible, I should say.  Really, needs-three-hands unpleasant.  But you begin to forget them, except when you see all the WoW refugees right-clicking on things to speak to them or use them, and instead launching a blade through them.  Another pest is that the common instances - the taverns in particular - are the laggiest things I have ever seen.  You go through the door, then you wait for 20+ seconds for the server to communicate 70 player and NPC models to your pc.  Even the spaceport in Coronet wasn't this bad.

The graphics are odd, and I am, again, unsure what to make of them.  The character detail, both PC and NPC, is gorgeous.  Look at any particular model, be they building or character, and they look almost photo-realistic.  But as a whole they are slightly, disturbingly not quite right.  I think that the designers have entered Uncanny Valley, not a battleground in World of Warcraft but a point where representations of, for instance, artificial people are so close as to be a touch eery and even a little jarring.  But when you are in a dungeon, a proper fantasy setting with kobolds and metallic automaton dogs and the like, you leap out of the valley and become immersed.

But let's balance this: their servers stayed up at launch!  The client was stable!  I only found one dupe bug in the first half hour!  Yep, that's right.  If you want scrolls of Identify Secret Doors on Lysandor server, I'm your man.  What were they thinking?  I "made" ten as an experiment, tested I could get them out of the training instance, then stopped.  No duper, I.  But somebody shoot the testers.

In all, I was mildly disappointed until I remembered not to expect a traditional MMORPG.  Then, once I started treating D&DO as a "real" sesion of Dungeons and Dragons it was brilliant, superb.  OK, cast the caution away: I am loving it.  I want those extra spells.  I crave 2nd level...

Apple, I hate you more now than ever

I am a PC user.  Of course, I own a variety of consoles, which tend to cluster at the shiny end of the spectrum (PSP, 360 etc), but at heart I am a PC user.  The sort who always has at least half a dozen intel-based computers somewhere in his flat, of varying vintage and usage.  As such, I have an instinctive response to Apple products, which seem to me to be obtuse, obsessed with style over function, and all the other usual pc-vs-mac cliches.

But every now and then I will say "well, hats off to Jobsie, he's given me a reason to buy Apple this time".  Suitably suckered-in by my innate desire to be reasonable and open-minded, I'll spend money on an Apple product.  And then I'll remember why I hate Apple, and all their works.

Why did I buy a new iPod?  Why?  OK, be quiet at the back: I know that I bought a new one because I was stupid enough to get the last one stolen.  But you would think that I would have learned in the first year or so of ownership that they really are under-engineered, over-designed pieces of irritation.  The arguments are, again, well-rehearsed, but this is my blog, so I get to say them nonetheless.  Here is why I hate my iPod:

• The iTunes digital rights management is both stupidly pointless and horrible.  I can't simply burn 100 MP3s from a playlist to a cd and stick them in my sound system to use the superior speakers.  I would have to burn several CDs, name each track, rip each back onto the PC, then burn them back onto a CD in MP3 format.  So I can do it - no pirates were hurt in the making of this DRM system - but it's a total pest, so I don't.
• And iTunes also has a horribly restricted music library, unless you are either a) 12 and into horrible pop or b) 50 and into the same music you liked when you were 20.  I could not hate Michael Jackson and Eric Clapton any more if they were up on charges beside Gary Glitter.  Getting a Sigur Ros track or something by White Rose Movement means waiting 6 weeks after release if one is lucky.
• It couldn't attract any more scratches if it decided one evening, of its own volition, to try and drown my cat.  Which I can see it doing in its malign glory.  Mine lives in the felt pouch that it arrived with.  A month old, and my black video iPod no longer looks like it should share screen time with Hal in a Kubrick film.  Now it looks like Ken Loach has it playing the role of a Glaswegian schizophrenic who gouges himself with knives to let the voices out.
• It doesn't work.  Right now - at this very moment - it is displaying most of the cover art for the Jesus and Mary Chain's 21 Singles collection.  Well, it is actually displaying all of said art, but the botton quarter is shifted about 100 pixels to the right of the rest, and is wrapped around the screen.  Pressing buttons will not help.  Leaving it overnight didn't help.  The reset combination is as stuffed as the rest of the buttons.  All I can do is let the batteries (don't get me started on those!) die.
• Software updates are terrible to download and apply.  Mac users tell you that Apple are the epitome of interface designers.  But Mac users are stupid enough to buy Macs, so their opinion counts slightly less than that of my dumbass Persian Chinchilla eating machine: the stupider of my two cats.  The procedure for software updates makes even those of Real seem anything but creepy and not at all desperate, as well as wonderfully laid out by comparison.

And so on.  I will, unless they come up with a real step-change by then, not buy Apple again.  I don't remember why I did, this time.  Safety?  Because this one was black and shiny?  Because I believed that they must have got the interface right by now?  Who knows?  But I'm stuck with it now.  I think I'll go back to staring at the battery meter and willing it to die.