OT Rants

Yeah so I haven’t updated for a while. Y’all never send me email anyways….

I am pissed about a bunch of stuff, in no particular order.

1) The damn teletubbie that was supposed to perfom at my daughter’s 2nd birthday party never showed. Bastard.
2) Intel showed on their web site that RAMBUS is SLOWER than plain old DDR SDRAM and yet Intel continues to tow the RAMBUS line and sell that crap.
3) The Siege Perilous server is moving to the East Coast. Fuckers.
4) Battle.net is never up and running.
5) I can’t buy a Nvidia Geforce MX yet.
6) The new case for my wife’s PC still isn’t here, so she’s always using my PC to run Napster!
7) The SeaChange video servers at the office keep crashing. Fix the damn memory leak! I’ve given you guys over half a million dollars.
8) The new Horatio Hornblower episodes are nowhere in sight.
9) George W. Bush is still running for president.

OK, I feel a little better.

Designer Dragon Speaks

Raph Koster, aka Designer Dragon, orginal designer of Ultima Online post a long essay on lessons learned from UO. Here’s the best part.

In an odd sort of summary… Being safe from evil is, in my mind, an uneven tradeoff for the fact that you don’t get to be heroes anymore, in that you can just opt out of fighting evil. It may be nobody wants to be heroes except when it doesn’t count, when it isn’t challenging, that people would rather fight “pretend evil” than the real thing, but I don’t personally believe that. I still think people are better than that. I know this is an odd and probably controversial (perhaps even stupid) position to take, but it’s how I feel. I think that the greatest value of interactive entertainment is when it engages you for real, and teaches you things for real.

He’s right. And it is exactly why I don’t like Trammel or games with PvP switches. I want to be a hero when it really matters.

A report from E3

I went to E3 on Friday. Due to my job, I am able to make Sony give me E3 passes. I have no connection to the gaming world professionally. I went as a typical gaming otaku (look it up). My brother flew out from Washington D.C. to see the show. He gets PAID to write articles on sports gaming. He had the wicked cool “Media” ribbon attached to to his badge. He even had appointments with game designers. I had a day off from work and a note pad. Here’s what I saw:

Shadowbane – I walked over the GOD area in the show (not the invite only place where the actual Shadowbane movie, playmates , & beer was.). I said to a couple guys hanging around, “Where’s the Shadowbane demo?” A big guy with long hair and gleam in his eye said “I’m Balseraph, part of the Shadowbane team.” Paydirt. He looked at my badge and realized I wasn’t important, but continued to talk to me anyways. He told me about the ‘promised lot’ but said it was for media only, I told him I didn’t need to go and he seemed relieved. I explained that I was from Siege and that many there viewed the shard as the last stand against the PK switch and many were eager for Shadowbane. He got excited and said ” We will take every Siege player!” He feels that the games blend of combat, alliances, strategy, and new ideas about territory will pull the hard core gamers to SB. We discussed AC & EQ and he dismissed things like monsters spawning in the same place and dropping the same loot as ‘insane’. Too bad spawn campers, SB ain’t for you. He described how there was only one world, spread across servers that will span the globe. For example if you are in New York and you move to the part of Shadowbane that is hosted in Hong Kong, you are at an disadvantage, where as if you are in the part of SB hosted on the East coast, you got a home field advantage. Go read Lum’s site for more details.

Soverign – Verant’s next game. Looked neat with air/sea/land combat. Kinda neat MULEesque resource trading system. The neat thing is you pay for oil or steel and then actually convoys leave by land or sea to deliver it. The convoys can be intercepted and destroyed. Sweet, eh? There will be many worlds from 32 to 500 players in each. Seemed neat. You basically start to build your own little city. As the city grows, so can your defenses. When you logout your city is still attackable and you can call in your forces to defend it. I asked three different people what happens if you get attacked while off-line. They all had the same pat answer like ‘your forces can be called to your base to dug in for protection.’ Maybe I’m missing something, but seems to me that people will beat the hell out of your city while you are away. Not sure if I’ll pony up $10/month for this one, but it will hook a lot of non-RPG people.

Anarchy Online – I wandered over to this both and wasn’t expecting much. The guys working there were wide open and described everything. You can play Corporate, Rebel, or neutral. The game is set to release this fall! It was hard to understand the Norwegian (or whatever accent that was) but basically there’s no fighting in town, but anything goes outside town! Suh-weet! I’ll be trying this one for sure… Lum reviewed this one in detail too, go read his site.

Everquest – Although I don’t like EQ, I stopped by the booth. I watched a GM ‘summon’ players to some high level zone and let them bash monsters. There were several Evercrack junkies watching the GMs every move for HOURS on end. I still don’t get what people like about this game. All those sparkles everywhere? How do you know what’s going on? The worst part for Verant was that for part of the show, there was connectivity to the net. The EQ GMs had to resort to using GM monster creation tools to entertain the junkies.

Chronx – Around 3 years ago, before UO there was a game called Chronx. Chronx is a game based on collectible card games, basically it was Magic the Gathering Online. You played opponents on line and bought cards online line as well. I was surprised to see that Sony has bought Chronx and was pushing it at E3. I picked up the CD. I’ll probably waste some hours with it tonight.

Eidos – I wander through this both looking to play Daikatana. Instead of finding DK, I actually bumped into Stevie ‘Killcreek’ Case and John Romero. I really bumped into them with the ‘Excuse me’ and stuff exchanged between us. My thoughts: Romero is shorter than me and I could kick his butt :), Killcreek looks great. Like the approachable girl next store, not a surgically enhanced booth babe.

Blizzard – I saw both Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3. I tell you they look damn good. The Blizzard folk were running the games and they seemed complete. Personally I dig Warcraft more that Diablo, but they both will be big hits.

Kornelia – Kornelia is a female Quake 3 player. Let me rephrase that, Kornelia is the best Q3 player I have ever seen. I must have watched 15 deathmatches where she took on an opponent and killed him 7-0. She didn’t get fragged once. Truly amazing. I saw guys try ever trick, but she was simply too good.

PSX2 – All I can really say is I’m buying one. The games look good, they even have an Unreal Tournament port with the same maps as the PC version. Buy stock in Sony now.

I am l33t!

Yes, my faithfully Droogies, I am the 3l33t dewd of the day!  Today
I clicked on a Slashdot story and low and behold, I had moderator privledges.  Yes, my hacker credentials are complete.  You wish you were me don’tcha yah?

For those that don’t understand the magnitude of this, go read slashdot and become aware.

Enough is enough

There is simply too much damn whining going on! Look it’s enough that I have to deal with my 4 year old begging for a pop-tart in the morning. When I get to work I expect some god damn quality surfing. What do I find? Whining. From battlevortex to Lum to the COB Dev board all you wankers are going off like frigging schools kids. “Don’t just give ’em stat loss, put ’em in jail!” “Get rid of the rep system and bring back Dread Lords!” “So and So ganked me a called me a bad name!” “They nerfed the foobar skill!”

You know, I’ve got a solution for you all. Pencils ready? Shut the fuck up and play the god damn game!

That’s right. Shut your damn pie holes! (copyright Alora of UDL) Launch UO or AC or EQ and play the damn game. All this whining is making me sick. Go play Unreal or Quake for an hour. Not much bitching there, just gaming.

If you have a need for mindless chatter then feel free to discuss anything from my mighty PvP prowess to the need for craftable masks in game. Just quit the whining, you smarmy cheese eaters.

I simply cannot wait until PSX2 arrives and I can r0xx0r people in peace.

A solution to the Stat Loss debate

Currently, the hot debate in the UO Dev circles is whether or not to eliminate stat loss in the PvP+ lands in the upcoming Felluca/Trammel thingie. Personally, I would hope that Anti-PK groups alone would be enough to stop PKs and keep non-combatants, it seems to work on Siege. With the introduction of the PvP- lands, IMHO, I think that stat loss should be removed completely. After seeing Lum’s poll, I realized that many, many players don’t agree.

As longtime Anti and a player on Siege Perilous, the only shard with no stat loss, I’d like to bring up an idea. Let’s go over a few facts here:

1) Murderers need to be punished in some way for their deeds.

2) Permanent stat loss is too harsh a punishment for a game.

Many might are argue that loss of town privileges alone is a big enough punishment for murders, on an advanced shard like Siege, that’s all we ready need. Everyone is fine with that system on Siege. I can understand how others feel that harsher punishment is needed. Many players just want to be a merchant and not worry about things like combat.

Permanent stat loss is not the answer either. Ultima is a place where players are given the ability to shape the world more than in any other MMORPG. Taking 20% statloss on GM level skills is simply too harsh. Let’s be generous and say that an unfortunate victim loses 5,000 gold to a PK. How long does recovery take? A night focused on gold making? Let’s say a PK dies and gets stat lossed from 100 magery to 80. You are talking about weeks to recover from the death. It is simply too harsh.

The solution? Taking a hint from Asheron Call’s vitae penalty, the solution is simple, TEMPORARY skill loss. We can argue about the details, but the idea is simple. If you are a PK and get killed, you take a temporary loss of stats. After some amount of time, your skills return. The idea is to put a damper on the endless killing from the days of the Dread Lords.

My initial idea would be a that your temp stat loss is equal to your short term murder count, capped at 20%. So if you have 10 murders on your count you take 10% loss. If you decide to be mass murderer, you’ll take 20%.

Recovery of stats is probably up to discussion. I would suggest that stat loss is reduced by 5% once a day. No need to sit online waiting it out, make it an automatic change. Consider that it would take a 20+ kill PK four days to fully recover. If you can’t agree that taking four days to recover is a harsh enough penalty, you need to consider joining a MMORPG with a complete ban on PvP combat.

Well, what do you all think?

My fix for Blue Healing

You need to read the Player Interaction Changes at uo.com to make sense of this.

The problem with the proposed positive/negative/consent plan is that guilds declare war on other guilds to form alliances. Since there is no seperate way to declare alliance, warring must be used.

In the current plan, there will still be a way to ‘blue heal’ if guilds use guild wars for alliances.

If official alliances were allowed, the change to the current plan would be minor.

If a Non-Guild War guild is allied with a War Guild, the Non-Guild War guild can decide to do ‘positive acts’ on their ally. Once a Non-Guild War member has commited a positve act on an ALLIED Guild War member, the Non-Guild War member is now flagged the same as the War Guild member for some time, thus becoming vulnerable in the guild war.

For example:

Guild A and Guild B are allied
Guild B and Guild C are warring

Guilds B and C are fighting. Guild A is watching. If a member of Guild A does a postive act on a member of B, that Guild A member flags the same as a Guild B member and is vulnerable to attack by Guild C for 5 minutes (or whatever time sounds good).

Make sense?