I kind of expect incompetence from retail employees but sometimes I am left truly stunned, aghast at the enormity of their uselessness score.
On Saturday Wendy and I decided to buy a new computer. (She wants to use it to play WOW with me again. Yay!) We walked into Best Buy with the idea of just buying a computer there. We gave them our general needs - a gaming focused machine, good graphics card, ~$800 price range, desktop.
You might think this was a slam dunk for the salesperson. We aren't overly picky about our requirements, our price range is reasonable, we are actually ready to buy and not just window shopping. Everything is going this guy's way today.
You would be wrong.
The sales guy spent most of our visit on his smartphone looking at the Best Buy website trying to figure out what they offer in terms of computers. He tried to show us some things on a display model but couldn't get it to get off of the basic display screen. He ended his presentation by informing us that they might have a model that could potentially fit our needs but it might not be in stock and he wasn't sure about the specs.
Then he gave us directions to a computer store nearby.
Dude! We are literally *surrounded* by computers! Your store is a computer store!
So we went to another computer store, found someone who knew lots about tech, and got them to figure out a machine that would work for us.
I don't know how much blame to lay at the doorstep of Best Buy and how much to blame the salesperson, but overall this experience has set a really high bar for most incompetence.
On the other hand he did end up directing us to another store where we got exactly what we wanted so maybe he is delivering great service after all by sending us away from Best Buy. Depends on your point of view, I suppose.
Showing posts with label WOW. Show all posts
Showing posts with label WOW. Show all posts
Monday, August 10, 2015
Friday, March 13, 2015
Two Minds, One Game
I have been playing World Of Warcraft quite a bit lately and have been examining it through the lens of my two personalities. Passion finds WOW, particularly doing challenging raid content in WOW, to be thrilling and wonderful. When I am able to sink fully into the experience and let Passion run the show playing WOW is a great experience. As with most things Passion is happiest when slamming into a difficult challenge with nothing held back. I think the primary reason behind this love is that The Director has no need to worry about what happens if Passion plays too hard.
When playing board games I want to use every possible tactic to win. Passion wants to use the technique known as Popeing where a player tries to convince others to do something beneficial for the player in question. Often it involves talking about how other people are winning, or pointing out strategies that benefit both of them but not other people. I know that most people don't enjoy it when I do this so The Director has to stay in charge to keep things under control. The game is still fun, but it is even better when Passion is in charge completely and no tactic is out of bounds. That rarely happens in board games.
In computer games the pixel opponents do not have feelings. They do not care if they win or lose. All they do is try their best to kill me and my job is to destroy them in any way I can. Passion can hurl me against my opponents with reckless disregard and The Director can be deep and silent, confident that Passion is having a grand time and nobody is being trampled in the process.
That describes much of my struggle in this regard really. Passion wants to be unleashed, to attack, to scream and shout, to be a berserker. The Director knows how much joy will come from that, but refuses to let Passion be in charge when it would be destructive to those around me. This is true right from sex to games to socializing. There is always a constant internal battle between duty and mad fervour.
It has been good for me to have that outlet, to experience the rush and intensity of Passion's zeal. I know that when I can do that on a regular basis I feel better about everything and WOW provides a great way to find that. Wendy notices this too, the sense that I have a deep well of satisfaction that comes from pursuing activities like this. It gives me a reservoir of happiness that lasts throughout my day, even when Passion is quiet and far away.
When playing board games I want to use every possible tactic to win. Passion wants to use the technique known as Popeing where a player tries to convince others to do something beneficial for the player in question. Often it involves talking about how other people are winning, or pointing out strategies that benefit both of them but not other people. I know that most people don't enjoy it when I do this so The Director has to stay in charge to keep things under control. The game is still fun, but it is even better when Passion is in charge completely and no tactic is out of bounds. That rarely happens in board games.
In computer games the pixel opponents do not have feelings. They do not care if they win or lose. All they do is try their best to kill me and my job is to destroy them in any way I can. Passion can hurl me against my opponents with reckless disregard and The Director can be deep and silent, confident that Passion is having a grand time and nobody is being trampled in the process.
That describes much of my struggle in this regard really. Passion wants to be unleashed, to attack, to scream and shout, to be a berserker. The Director knows how much joy will come from that, but refuses to let Passion be in charge when it would be destructive to those around me. This is true right from sex to games to socializing. There is always a constant internal battle between duty and mad fervour.
It has been good for me to have that outlet, to experience the rush and intensity of Passion's zeal. I know that when I can do that on a regular basis I feel better about everything and WOW provides a great way to find that. Wendy notices this too, the sense that I have a deep well of satisfaction that comes from pursuing activities like this. It gives me a reservoir of happiness that lasts throughout my day, even when Passion is quiet and far away.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Another world
I am back into playing World of Warcraft. Strangely enough it was at Wendy's urging - she seemed to think that I needed focus, direction, something to give me that sense of achievement. Most people default to the assumption that my spouse must be grumpy that I play games so they tend to be floored when I say that mine encourages me. This is why my posts have been somewhat sparse as of late - somehow writing about the world is less urgent because it occupies a smaller place in my mind.
It has been a strange sort of trip back into another world that I inhabited to constantly and deeply for years. I feel almost as though the real world is fading, like my real life is a fake and the real world is the one I inhabit while at my computer. I am keeping up with all the things that I need to do but much of what I do for fun here and there is crumbling in the face of my desire to slay monsters and take their shiny stuff. I get the shopping done and cook dinner but when it comes time to maintain the web of relationships I occupy I find it hard to put in all the time necessary to see all the people I want to see. The smaller, newer, more tenuous connections fade away because I simply do not have the energy and time to put into maintaining them, much as I might wish otherwise.
I am finding new community though. For years I played with my group of real life friends, mostly game geeks from the University of Waterloo, but by and large they have quit WOW and are focusing on things like children and jobs and other distractions in the 'real' world. For the first time in a long time I had to go out and find a new group of people to play with. I put up an ad, essentially a resume of both my personality and my playstyle, and although it took awhile for someone to approach me about it I found what seems to be a really good place. It is full of people that seem to have a lot in common with me both in terms of playstyle, skill, and life situation. I wrote my ad without trying to embellish anything because I figured that I want a guild that actually wants me and I seem to have hit on it.
Perhaps all you have to do to find people that you can have fun with is to find a random spot on the internet and talk about who you are and what you want. At least, that seems to have worked for me.
It has been a strange sort of trip back into another world that I inhabited to constantly and deeply for years. I feel almost as though the real world is fading, like my real life is a fake and the real world is the one I inhabit while at my computer. I am keeping up with all the things that I need to do but much of what I do for fun here and there is crumbling in the face of my desire to slay monsters and take their shiny stuff. I get the shopping done and cook dinner but when it comes time to maintain the web of relationships I occupy I find it hard to put in all the time necessary to see all the people I want to see. The smaller, newer, more tenuous connections fade away because I simply do not have the energy and time to put into maintaining them, much as I might wish otherwise.
I am finding new community though. For years I played with my group of real life friends, mostly game geeks from the University of Waterloo, but by and large they have quit WOW and are focusing on things like children and jobs and other distractions in the 'real' world. For the first time in a long time I had to go out and find a new group of people to play with. I put up an ad, essentially a resume of both my personality and my playstyle, and although it took awhile for someone to approach me about it I found what seems to be a really good place. It is full of people that seem to have a lot in common with me both in terms of playstyle, skill, and life situation. I wrote my ad without trying to embellish anything because I figured that I want a guild that actually wants me and I seem to have hit on it.
Perhaps all you have to do to find people that you can have fun with is to find a random spot on the internet and talk about who you are and what you want. At least, that seems to have worked for me.
Monday, September 23, 2013
The hierarchy of video game sins
Grand Theft Auto 5 launched recently. Everyone seems to be of the opinion that if you like a game where you get to be a violent lunatic running around a dystopian city murdering, robbing, and destroying indiscriminately it is a great game. There is just one fly in the ointment: In order to get through the game you need to guide your character through a graphic torture scene where you use a variety of implements to inflict horrors on another person. People have predictably flipped out over this but I think they haven't any ground to stand on.
It is clear that torture scenes are troubling. In World of Warcraft where a very tame 'zap the guy till he talks' scene was instituted people freaked out and the torture scene in GTA5 is an order of magnitude more brutal. People really do not like torturing others - something about the intense suffering involved really triggers sympathy in a way that combat does not. I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that in games when you fight enemies they rarely show any sign of suffering or damage until they are dead. There are two states for an enemy mook: Attacking you furiously and lying on the ground. Being sad or terrified doesn't figure into it, unlike in real life. In a simulated torture scene though the person being tortured is desperate, scared, and mentally falling apart and that triggers sympathy in us that never appears in stand up fights.
Given that I think it is extremely understandable that we have more empathy for a torture victim than a random person gunned down in a moment of savagery but I don't think that means that it shouldn't be portrayed. If we are okay with games making entertainment out of massacring pedestrians then we really can't be too picky about torture which certainly is lower on the badness scale than mass murder. Just because a thing is more disturbing does not mean it should be banned. It does mean that such a game should have a 18+ rating on the box because that rating is in part meant to reflect how disturbing it is though.
Games need to be able to depict desperate and savage occurrences. They aren't everyone's cup of tea but that isn't the point - just like in film, books, or other media we have freedom to create whatever stories we desire as long as we don't hurt real people. With that freedom in place many games are going to show horrendous violence and that is okay. Just like in other media you aren't required to view it if you don't like it. I have no desire to play through GTA5 myself but I think that it is important that others be able to and we need to resist foolish knee jerk reactions that blame violent video games for real life situations that are entirely unrelated.
It is clear that torture scenes are troubling. In World of Warcraft where a very tame 'zap the guy till he talks' scene was instituted people freaked out and the torture scene in GTA5 is an order of magnitude more brutal. People really do not like torturing others - something about the intense suffering involved really triggers sympathy in a way that combat does not. I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that in games when you fight enemies they rarely show any sign of suffering or damage until they are dead. There are two states for an enemy mook: Attacking you furiously and lying on the ground. Being sad or terrified doesn't figure into it, unlike in real life. In a simulated torture scene though the person being tortured is desperate, scared, and mentally falling apart and that triggers sympathy in us that never appears in stand up fights.
Given that I think it is extremely understandable that we have more empathy for a torture victim than a random person gunned down in a moment of savagery but I don't think that means that it shouldn't be portrayed. If we are okay with games making entertainment out of massacring pedestrians then we really can't be too picky about torture which certainly is lower on the badness scale than mass murder. Just because a thing is more disturbing does not mean it should be banned. It does mean that such a game should have a 18+ rating on the box because that rating is in part meant to reflect how disturbing it is though.
Games need to be able to depict desperate and savage occurrences. They aren't everyone's cup of tea but that isn't the point - just like in film, books, or other media we have freedom to create whatever stories we desire as long as we don't hurt real people. With that freedom in place many games are going to show horrendous violence and that is okay. Just like in other media you aren't required to view it if you don't like it. I have no desire to play through GTA5 myself but I think that it is important that others be able to and we need to resist foolish knee jerk reactions that blame violent video games for real life situations that are entirely unrelated.
Friday, August 2, 2013
What is weird
I have been watching Black's Books recently. It is a British comedy about a drunken, crazy bookstore owner and his friends. They get up to all kinds of wacky hijinks that generally start off with 'so I drank way, way too much wine...' I found it funny because in some ways the lives of these characters are so absolutely nuts as sitcom character's lives tend to be and they make my life look fairly boring in a lot of respects. I don't often take a job at a burger joint just so I will have a warm, dry place to spend the night because I locked myself out of my home, for example. Nor do I end up at friend's houses trying to figure out what horrible thing I did during a drunken stupor at the party the previous evening. I just don't have that level of bizarre and interesting going on.
Then I got to wondering if maybe I was looking at it all backwards. Clearly the lives of these characters are very different from my own but I think they are actually closer to the norm in a lot of ways than I am. (Well, the burger joint story probably isn't.) I have issues with getting into confrontations with authority figures who can't deal with the fact that I go about barefoot everywhere. Not a lot of people have that issue. I get into fights on the internet about the proper way to build an excel simulator for a Retribution Paladin in World of Warcraft. This is not a thing most people can relate to. I spend a lot of time arguing about the ethics of various Hanabi strategies and whether or not they make winning the game too easy. Ethical arguments about cooperative game conventions are *fascinating* by the way. Also if you play games you should play Hanabi. It is phenomenal. (And these are just the weird things I am telling you about... imagine what the rest of my life is like!)
Despite the fact that the characters in Black's Books drink way too much and do completely ludicrous things I think their lives are actually a lot closer to the norm than mine. Figuring out exactly what stupid thing you did during an alcoholic haze just isn't that weird after all, not next to refusing to wear shoes. It makes me feel a little bit weird to realize that even though sitcom characters in a ludicrous comedy are really weird I am even weirder than them. Granted I like being weird and I have no particular interest in trying to be normal and a distinct distaste for trying to *appear* normal but somehow being weirder than those buffoons is a bit unnerving.
Then I got to wondering if maybe I was looking at it all backwards. Clearly the lives of these characters are very different from my own but I think they are actually closer to the norm in a lot of ways than I am. (Well, the burger joint story probably isn't.) I have issues with getting into confrontations with authority figures who can't deal with the fact that I go about barefoot everywhere. Not a lot of people have that issue. I get into fights on the internet about the proper way to build an excel simulator for a Retribution Paladin in World of Warcraft. This is not a thing most people can relate to. I spend a lot of time arguing about the ethics of various Hanabi strategies and whether or not they make winning the game too easy. Ethical arguments about cooperative game conventions are *fascinating* by the way. Also if you play games you should play Hanabi. It is phenomenal. (And these are just the weird things I am telling you about... imagine what the rest of my life is like!)
Despite the fact that the characters in Black's Books drink way too much and do completely ludicrous things I think their lives are actually a lot closer to the norm than mine. Figuring out exactly what stupid thing you did during an alcoholic haze just isn't that weird after all, not next to refusing to wear shoes. It makes me feel a little bit weird to realize that even though sitcom characters in a ludicrous comedy are really weird I am even weirder than them. Granted I like being weird and I have no particular interest in trying to be normal and a distinct distaste for trying to *appear* normal but somehow being weirder than those buffoons is a bit unnerving.
Thursday, October 11, 2012
The valuation of time
Recently I have been wondering if the way people perceive a time investment is changing on a global scale. In particular I consider the following scenario: Somebody invites me to travel somewhere for an event and I don't want to go simply because I could do so many other things instead of commute. If I am going to spend an hour getting somewhere, an hour getting back, and two hours at the event then the event had better be pretty damn good. Instead of two hours spent on annoying travelling I could be killing internet monsters and taking their stuff so the two hour event needs to be a *lot* better than killing internet monsters to make up for how much worse the travelling is.
I know I think this way. (I don't claim people should think this way, just that I do.) What I don't know is if this sort of thinking has become more widespread as connectivity in our society increases. I know that when I consider the people in my life that are significantly older than me I notice that they spend a lot more time travelling to places than I would ever consider doing and they put a lot more emphasis on goals over journeys than I do. I spend a lot of time considering and evaluating each part of an activity including all of the set up and arrangements. I don't use placemats because although placemats may look nice they need cleaning and washing and fussing over and overall I deem the benefits not worth it. I could be spending that time levelling up!
When I read about what was considered the norm for housework 60 years ago my eyes just bug out of my head. Cleaning windowsills monthly? Dusting weekly? Sweeping daily? Are you off of your trolley? I like a clean house but I can keep it looking entirely presentable with a pretty small amount of effort and I cannot fathom how I would spend thirty five hours a week cleaning. Sure, a condo is way less work than a house but it isn't one tenth as much work. I can't help but wonder if these norms were at least in part due to people valuing their time much less. If you don't have anything interesting to do then it makes sense to clean the house more but when there are people who are wrong on the internet I can't see how cleaning the windowsills (again) is going to happen. Facebook, email, forum wars, and video games all suck people's time away.
So is it just me? Am I the only one who chafes at the idea of wasting time in traffic to the extent that I don't want to do anything? It isn't the events themselves which are stopping me; this isn't an introvert thing. When somebody wants to go to a movie at the theatre one block away I don't mind going because nearly all the time spent is going to be fun. What I can't comfortably do is ignore the setup time for doing things that are far away or require lots of other prep. What I don't see is people in previous generations doing that same math and arriving at the same conclusions and I suspect, but clearly can't prove, that it is due to the ubiquitous distractions that the internet provides.
I know I think this way. (I don't claim people should think this way, just that I do.) What I don't know is if this sort of thinking has become more widespread as connectivity in our society increases. I know that when I consider the people in my life that are significantly older than me I notice that they spend a lot more time travelling to places than I would ever consider doing and they put a lot more emphasis on goals over journeys than I do. I spend a lot of time considering and evaluating each part of an activity including all of the set up and arrangements. I don't use placemats because although placemats may look nice they need cleaning and washing and fussing over and overall I deem the benefits not worth it. I could be spending that time levelling up!
When I read about what was considered the norm for housework 60 years ago my eyes just bug out of my head. Cleaning windowsills monthly? Dusting weekly? Sweeping daily? Are you off of your trolley? I like a clean house but I can keep it looking entirely presentable with a pretty small amount of effort and I cannot fathom how I would spend thirty five hours a week cleaning. Sure, a condo is way less work than a house but it isn't one tenth as much work. I can't help but wonder if these norms were at least in part due to people valuing their time much less. If you don't have anything interesting to do then it makes sense to clean the house more but when there are people who are wrong on the internet I can't see how cleaning the windowsills (again) is going to happen. Facebook, email, forum wars, and video games all suck people's time away.
So is it just me? Am I the only one who chafes at the idea of wasting time in traffic to the extent that I don't want to do anything? It isn't the events themselves which are stopping me; this isn't an introvert thing. When somebody wants to go to a movie at the theatre one block away I don't mind going because nearly all the time spent is going to be fun. What I can't comfortably do is ignore the setup time for doing things that are far away or require lots of other prep. What I don't see is people in previous generations doing that same math and arriving at the same conclusions and I suspect, but clearly can't prove, that it is due to the ubiquitous distractions that the internet provides.
Monday, September 24, 2012
Give me one more hit
18 months ago I quit World of Warcraft. It was my addiction, my passion, my motive for doing things for seven years. Tomorrow at 3:00 am the newest expansion for WOW launches and I am preparing to get up at 2:55 so I can log on immediately and score up some realm firsts. For the first time I will be doing this alone as Wendy is not planning on joining me in falling back into our old habits. We used to schedule a week's worth of holidays for her so the two of us could play together but no more; WOW will fail to grab her again in its cold, icy clutches.
Of course it isn't the game so much that is grabbing me but the social opportunities. WOW is where the action is. All kinds of friends are planning on playing again and the opportunity to hang out with the boyz while having fun blowing up monsters and taking their stuff is too much too pass up. Truly it doesn't matter what game it is we are playing so much, as long as I have a good community to play with I will be pretty happy. Sthenno is even contemplating resubscribing to WOW at fifteen dollars a month just as a chat window to keep up with us; you know that something is lacking technologically when you do that.
I liked Pounda's characterization of my situation. "So Blizzard has stolen your friends and is willing to rent them back to you for $15 a month?" We need this focus, this place, to create the social environment that we all want. There is enough inertia to WOW and it is a good enough social platform that a rejoining seems inevitable for many or even most of us. I wonder how many other old friends I do not speak to regularly will end up drawn back in by the allure of geek chat and watching numbers get bigger. Those two things together are some kind of magical elixir, one so addictive that it is nearly impossible to break the habit permanently.
I suppose I should feel guilty about breaking my dry spell and hitting up the crack pipe once again. I don't though. Time to kill dudes, eat them, and take their stuff. Also, make spreadsheets to optimize said activities.
Of course it isn't the game so much that is grabbing me but the social opportunities. WOW is where the action is. All kinds of friends are planning on playing again and the opportunity to hang out with the boyz while having fun blowing up monsters and taking their stuff is too much too pass up. Truly it doesn't matter what game it is we are playing so much, as long as I have a good community to play with I will be pretty happy. Sthenno is even contemplating resubscribing to WOW at fifteen dollars a month just as a chat window to keep up with us; you know that something is lacking technologically when you do that.
I liked Pounda's characterization of my situation. "So Blizzard has stolen your friends and is willing to rent them back to you for $15 a month?" We need this focus, this place, to create the social environment that we all want. There is enough inertia to WOW and it is a good enough social platform that a rejoining seems inevitable for many or even most of us. I wonder how many other old friends I do not speak to regularly will end up drawn back in by the allure of geek chat and watching numbers get bigger. Those two things together are some kind of magical elixir, one so addictive that it is nearly impossible to break the habit permanently.
I suppose I should feel guilty about breaking my dry spell and hitting up the crack pipe once again. I don't though. Time to kill dudes, eat them, and take their stuff. Also, make spreadsheets to optimize said activities.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Kill Montezuma!
Wendy loves to tell me what to do when I am playing games. Recently I have been playing a lot of Civilization 5 and she has taken to watching me play sometimes asking me to explain why I am doing things and sometimes to give me advice. You might think if you know the two of us that I would be the one who is constantly attacking the enemies on a relentless campaign of destruction and that she would be advising me to make peace; you would be wrong. She takes tremendous delight in ordering me to start wars with everybody and wants nothing more than to see me extinguish enemies completely. A little bit of conquest, taking some land, killing some soldiers, these are not enough for her; she wants annihilation.
I totally get the desire to watch someone play a video game and kibitz. It doesn't have to be a video game though, I really enjoy sitting quietly while people work on problems of all kinds. Just being silent, in the presence of a person who can talk sometimes but who is focused on a task I can observe is very soothing for whatever reason. There are some games that this does not work at all for like World of Warcraft or Portal, for example, but I love watching tactical games like CiV and roguelikes like Diablo.
I remember one person in university in particular who absolutely loved watching others play video games, so much so that he characterized himself more as a video game watcher than a video game player. He could talk with great authority about the tiniest minutiae of games he had never actually played because he spent hours watching people work on the hardest challenges those games had to offer. We all get that to some extent as I can talk at great length about Star Trek (despite not considering myself a fan of the series) and surely everyone else absorbs information in the same way from those who share their hobbies.
I totally get the desire to watch someone play a video game and kibitz. It doesn't have to be a video game though, I really enjoy sitting quietly while people work on problems of all kinds. Just being silent, in the presence of a person who can talk sometimes but who is focused on a task I can observe is very soothing for whatever reason. There are some games that this does not work at all for like World of Warcraft or Portal, for example, but I love watching tactical games like CiV and roguelikes like Diablo.
I remember one person in university in particular who absolutely loved watching others play video games, so much so that he characterized himself more as a video game watcher than a video game player. He could talk with great authority about the tiniest minutiae of games he had never actually played because he spent hours watching people work on the hardest challenges those games had to offer. We all get that to some extent as I can talk at great length about Star Trek (despite not considering myself a fan of the series) and surely everyone else absorbs information in the same way from those who share their hobbies.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Mustache attack
Last night I went to kiss Wendy and...
"Argh! Your mustache crawled up my nose and stabbed me!"
"Ummm, how is that possible? It isn't that long right now."
"I don't know, but it attacked me."
"Okay, how about kissing like this instead..."
"Ow! It did it again. Why have you set your mustache on Aggressive?"
"Fine, I will set it to Passive."
"Why is it attacking me?"
"Should I trim it short?"
"No, then it will just stab me in the lips instead."
"How does it even do that anyway? Also, why did this never happen until a few years ago... I have had this goatee for 16 years."
"I don't know but keep it away!"
Given that my mustache is apparently engaged in savage assaults against my wife's lips and inner nose?!? I think it is time to try out the clean shaven look for a while. I have had my goatee since I was a teenager with only two very temporary reprieves as far as I can recall and both were on Hallowe'en. The first was to dress up as Mulder from XFiles to be part of a Mulder/Scully costume team and the other was to dress up as Hobo to be part of a Sky/Hobo costume team. Now boldly I go to the land of the whipped man where I shave my precious facial hair to please my lady. Next thing you know she will be wanting me to get a job or something...
"Argh! Your mustache crawled up my nose and stabbed me!"
"Ummm, how is that possible? It isn't that long right now."
"I don't know, but it attacked me."
"Okay, how about kissing like this instead..."
"Ow! It did it again. Why have you set your mustache on Aggressive?"
"Fine, I will set it to Passive."
"Why is it attacking me?"
"Should I trim it short?"
"No, then it will just stab me in the lips instead."
"How does it even do that anyway? Also, why did this never happen until a few years ago... I have had this goatee for 16 years."
"I don't know but keep it away!"
Given that my mustache is apparently engaged in savage assaults against my wife's lips and inner nose?!? I think it is time to try out the clean shaven look for a while. I have had my goatee since I was a teenager with only two very temporary reprieves as far as I can recall and both were on Hallowe'en. The first was to dress up as Mulder from XFiles to be part of a Mulder/Scully costume team and the other was to dress up as Hobo to be part of a Sky/Hobo costume team. Now boldly I go to the land of the whipped man where I shave my precious facial hair to please my lady. Next thing you know she will be wanting me to get a job or something...
Friday, December 17, 2010
Neuroses
I have some issues with obligations and debt. Most people who have debt problems have problems that they have too much debt, but I go the other way. I HATE debt. I hate it so much that it colours many of my other interactions in my life where I go very far out of my way to avoid ever being in debt to anyone. This isn't just financial debt though, but also social debt. I don't like to be in the situation where I owe anyone anything; that feeling that someone might just wander by and ask me to do something I don't want to do but feel obligated to do because I owe them is intensely uncomfortable for me. This is even true with people I very much like and trust as just the idea that I have that debt outstanding is anathema. I am the guy who always insists on getting separate bills and always wants to discuss terms of repayment before anything else. This may well be all tied in with the fact that I always repay my debts; the very idea of not paying what I owe is simply unacceptable. When my inlaws lent me money to buy my condo I paid them back on time and with interest. We had not discussed interest beforehand and I expect they would have been perfectly content to get the principal back but I figured out the average rate of interest over the loan period in Canada and paid them the precise amount. Doing that made absolutely sure there is no debt whatsoever since we both gained and nobody was put out.
I don't know why I am like this. I don't recall any particular instance in my past where I was burned by being indebted to someone and my parents aren't like I am. They don't go into debt but they don't have my paranoia of unclear contracts. My father got into a business with his brothers without contracts and lawyers being involved and I would never do such a thing. I trust my brother tremendously but if that situation were ever to arise for me I would absolutely insist on everything being in writing and legally bulletproof ahead of time before ever signing my name. It is funny for me to watch people who aren't like this as I just can't fathom doing what they do. At one point Hobo and Full Bed had a apartment together and they shared bills pretty much at random. One person would pay for the phone at one would buy groceries and the other would pay the moving guy and they did not keep track. Despite the fact that I would trust either of them completely to attempt to keep their end of the bargain that is not an agreement that I could live with. I would be happy paying all the bills and collecting my due regularly or having any other absolutely equitable arrangement but just figuring 'It all equals out in the end' makes me shudder.
It isn't the money. I have enough money that these sorts of arrangements with reasonable people would never break me, it is the principle of the thing. I never want a small sum to cause resentment nor do I want to be bitter because someone owes me and doesn't feel obligated to pay. Something deep in my brain is desperately concerned with these things beyond all reason and necessity and although I recognize that I cannot make it go away just by knowing. Most people aren't like me and that can cause problems. Many people just want somebody to pay the bill, or they want to borrow some cash here and there and they figure it all works out. That is comfortable for them and not so much for me. It is a struggle for me to live within that framework and try to let go of my need for certainty and equality in the pursuit of peace. I wish everyone was more like me of course (I am not unique in that regard...) but acknowledging that they are not and trying to compromise is a uncomfortable necessity.
This actually came up yesterday in my WOW guild. I have a ton of gems acquired by buying in bulk at ridiculous prices. Based on past experience people expect me to bring gems to raids and supply them to anyone who wants them for free. This I find intensely frustrating. I know some people view it under the lens of "Sky has boatloads of money in game, so why would I pay him?" but that just makes me even more nuts because I play the money game for fun. Having others spend my money away wrecks my money game, and this is hard to communicate because nobody else I know plays the money game the way I do. They simply get enough to get by and stop worrying about it, so for them the situation of giving away 40 gold when they have 400,000 gold is painless but for me it is not. Obviously I don't need the money but I despise that sense of entitlement, of inequality, of debt. I buy things from people and I pay the going rate. Just like anyone else I am willing to spend time to help my friends but I draw a big, thick line between money and time in WOW. In many ways that makes absolutely no sense because money = time but it is a line I have drawn in order to make the money game fun for myself and erasing that line makes the money game no good at all. You might wonder why exactly I would torture myself over the precise correct policy to follow in supplying my friends with gems when the amounts in question are trivial compared to my fortune. You would be smart to wonder that, and I don't have a good answer aside from the obvious that everyone is a little bit crazy and this is my particular variety of crazy. I have resolved to try to set aside that conundrum and simply give away gems. I will ignore the cost and pretend it isn't there. Now we will see if I can manage to convince the mad, debt obsessed portion of my mind to submit to the greater good.
I don't know why I am like this. I don't recall any particular instance in my past where I was burned by being indebted to someone and my parents aren't like I am. They don't go into debt but they don't have my paranoia of unclear contracts. My father got into a business with his brothers without contracts and lawyers being involved and I would never do such a thing. I trust my brother tremendously but if that situation were ever to arise for me I would absolutely insist on everything being in writing and legally bulletproof ahead of time before ever signing my name. It is funny for me to watch people who aren't like this as I just can't fathom doing what they do. At one point Hobo and Full Bed had a apartment together and they shared bills pretty much at random. One person would pay for the phone at one would buy groceries and the other would pay the moving guy and they did not keep track. Despite the fact that I would trust either of them completely to attempt to keep their end of the bargain that is not an agreement that I could live with. I would be happy paying all the bills and collecting my due regularly or having any other absolutely equitable arrangement but just figuring 'It all equals out in the end' makes me shudder.
It isn't the money. I have enough money that these sorts of arrangements with reasonable people would never break me, it is the principle of the thing. I never want a small sum to cause resentment nor do I want to be bitter because someone owes me and doesn't feel obligated to pay. Something deep in my brain is desperately concerned with these things beyond all reason and necessity and although I recognize that I cannot make it go away just by knowing. Most people aren't like me and that can cause problems. Many people just want somebody to pay the bill, or they want to borrow some cash here and there and they figure it all works out. That is comfortable for them and not so much for me. It is a struggle for me to live within that framework and try to let go of my need for certainty and equality in the pursuit of peace. I wish everyone was more like me of course (I am not unique in that regard...) but acknowledging that they are not and trying to compromise is a uncomfortable necessity.
This actually came up yesterday in my WOW guild. I have a ton of gems acquired by buying in bulk at ridiculous prices. Based on past experience people expect me to bring gems to raids and supply them to anyone who wants them for free. This I find intensely frustrating. I know some people view it under the lens of "Sky has boatloads of money in game, so why would I pay him?" but that just makes me even more nuts because I play the money game for fun. Having others spend my money away wrecks my money game, and this is hard to communicate because nobody else I know plays the money game the way I do. They simply get enough to get by and stop worrying about it, so for them the situation of giving away 40 gold when they have 400,000 gold is painless but for me it is not. Obviously I don't need the money but I despise that sense of entitlement, of inequality, of debt. I buy things from people and I pay the going rate. Just like anyone else I am willing to spend time to help my friends but I draw a big, thick line between money and time in WOW. In many ways that makes absolutely no sense because money = time but it is a line I have drawn in order to make the money game fun for myself and erasing that line makes the money game no good at all. You might wonder why exactly I would torture myself over the precise correct policy to follow in supplying my friends with gems when the amounts in question are trivial compared to my fortune. You would be smart to wonder that, and I don't have a good answer aside from the obvious that everyone is a little bit crazy and this is my particular variety of crazy. I have resolved to try to set aside that conundrum and simply give away gems. I will ignore the cost and pretend it isn't there. Now we will see if I can manage to convince the mad, debt obsessed portion of my mind to submit to the greater good.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
On scaling, or not
WOW has had some issues with scaling in the past. The best examples of this are dps warriors throughout the history of the game (for scaling too much) and shadow priests in TBC (for scaling too little). Scaling is a word that is horribly abused throughout the WOW community by people who fail completely to understand what it means. "Poor scaling" is regularly used to mean "I am bad" or "My class isn't powerful enough" instead of what it actually means which is that the class in question does not adequately improve given general stat increases compared to other classes. Dps warriors have historically been terrible at the start of expansions and then overpowered at the end because their rage scaled so much. Cataclysm seems to have several reduced this and it appears that rage will not scale out of control this time. Shadow priests in TBC simply gained no benefit from any stat but spellpower and since their first pieces of gear had almost as much spellpower as their top tier pieces they basically never improved at all.
Ret paladins at the moment are suffering from terrible scaling. The main problem is that there are 5 secondary stats - Hit, Expertise, Mastery, Crit and Haste. Hit and Expertise cap out fairly quickly for everyone, so there are 3 stats left. Ret paladins gain relatively little from Crit compared to other classes but aren't really abysmal - just weak. Unfortunately both Haste and Mastery give Ret paladins the same benefit - more buttons to hit to do more damage. The problem here is that Ret paladins are already nearly GCD capped anyway so more buttons is actually a very weak mechanic, particularly when both stats give more Templar's Verdict casts and TV is the third best attack we have. To give an example, say a Fire mage gets enough Mastery to gain 100 dps. Then imagine they gain enough Haste to get 100 dps. What happens if they gain both of those things? Their dps goes up by 220 (guesstimate). Now imagine the same thing happens to a Ret paladin. Instead of getting a 220 dps gain they get a 180 dps gain. The additional procs from Mastery and Haste interfere with each other and cause lost procs, not to mention the fact that Mastery in particular is absolutely trash for Ret paladins.
Right now Ret paladins are behind the curve in damage, not immensely so, but we are on the weak side. This is going to rapidly escalate as we get raid gear and secondary stats begin to pile up. There are plenty of solutions for this problem, some of which will work temporarily and some of which will work for the whole expansion. Blizzard needs to give up on the idea that a class which is nearly GCD capped can scale with two different stats that give them more buttons to hit. Actually making that work would require strikes that do truly immense amounts of damage such that they are worth hitting over whatever else would have been in that spot and that type of strike is going to unbalance pvp dramatically if a string of procs occurs. Since haste is supposed to be the 'do more' stat across all classes that means mastery simply needs to get rewritten. If the amount of mastery gained per point was doubled or trebled it would make it temporarily quite good but long term there would still be problems. Mastery needs to be something passive that simply makes more damage happen, and it could be as simple as a flat damage increase like Arcane mages get or extra strikes that proc like Arms warriors. Whatever it is it needs to get away from the 'more buttons' idea that would work for many classes, but specifically not the class that got it.
Ret paladins at the moment are suffering from terrible scaling. The main problem is that there are 5 secondary stats - Hit, Expertise, Mastery, Crit and Haste. Hit and Expertise cap out fairly quickly for everyone, so there are 3 stats left. Ret paladins gain relatively little from Crit compared to other classes but aren't really abysmal - just weak. Unfortunately both Haste and Mastery give Ret paladins the same benefit - more buttons to hit to do more damage. The problem here is that Ret paladins are already nearly GCD capped anyway so more buttons is actually a very weak mechanic, particularly when both stats give more Templar's Verdict casts and TV is the third best attack we have. To give an example, say a Fire mage gets enough Mastery to gain 100 dps. Then imagine they gain enough Haste to get 100 dps. What happens if they gain both of those things? Their dps goes up by 220 (guesstimate). Now imagine the same thing happens to a Ret paladin. Instead of getting a 220 dps gain they get a 180 dps gain. The additional procs from Mastery and Haste interfere with each other and cause lost procs, not to mention the fact that Mastery in particular is absolutely trash for Ret paladins.
Right now Ret paladins are behind the curve in damage, not immensely so, but we are on the weak side. This is going to rapidly escalate as we get raid gear and secondary stats begin to pile up. There are plenty of solutions for this problem, some of which will work temporarily and some of which will work for the whole expansion. Blizzard needs to give up on the idea that a class which is nearly GCD capped can scale with two different stats that give them more buttons to hit. Actually making that work would require strikes that do truly immense amounts of damage such that they are worth hitting over whatever else would have been in that spot and that type of strike is going to unbalance pvp dramatically if a string of procs occurs. Since haste is supposed to be the 'do more' stat across all classes that means mastery simply needs to get rewritten. If the amount of mastery gained per point was doubled or trebled it would make it temporarily quite good but long term there would still be problems. Mastery needs to be something passive that simply makes more damage happen, and it could be as simple as a flat damage increase like Arcane mages get or extra strikes that proc like Arms warriors. Whatever it is it needs to get away from the 'more buttons' idea that would work for many classes, but specifically not the class that got it.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Telling a Story
In the new Cataclysm zones in WOW there is an entirely different style of play while doing quests. In the old game quests were largely optional - you could do them or not and nothing changed and if you ignored some of them it really didn't matter. In the new model things are completely different because quests are telling a gigantic story with your character at the heart of it and you cannot avoid nor skip them. To complete each of the zones in question and see the final quest you have to do absolutely everything in the zone first. Because of the new phasing technology employed everywhere you also have to do everything in precisely the order the quest designers set up. The number of options available to the player is thus very small in terms of what comes next. That is offset by the fact that quests are now vastly better. There are all kinds of boss fights you can do solo, the world actively changes to reflect the things you as a player have accomplished and the things you do feel much more epic because you can see the effects of your efforts. The new style is much better for those who want to experience a story or watch a movie or feel epic but much worse for those who want freedom to explore and do their own thing.
There are many complaints about WOW but two big ones over the years are that:
1. Quests the players do have no impact on the world and nothing changes no matter what supposedly has been done.
2. WOW is too much of a theme park where the player is forced onto the straight and narrow instead of simply going out there to see what can be seen.
Clearly Blizzard decided that the first complaint was one they should address - and they did! The question is whether they went too far, and I think they did, but only a little. The trouble with this new model is 100% of the quests are mandatory so having bizarre, challenging or strange mechanics either have to be made trivial or they end up annoying a lot of people. In particular the jousting quest in Hyjal would have been a good place to have a little side quest - you could do the jousting or continue with the main questline. I would enjoy it greatly if the main plot series was designed in the current fashion but there were side quests, things that weren't entirely necessary to advance the plot, scattered around. While I don't like to give him too much credit, Gevlon actually had a neat idea to have the main questline for a zone have red ! and ? markers so players know that these are the really important quests to do and have optional ones be the normal gold colour. Everyone recognizes that you can't tell the epic story without a strict chain of quests but giving players the option to complete a few extra things at the current hub or move on to bigger and better stuff would be nice.
All in all I really did like questing through the new zones and the phasing, new and better quest/bossfight mechanics and epic storytelling were a lot of fun. I do wish though that I could push ahead with the story and leave a few of the 'go find me 6 bottles of rum' quests for later. A happy medium between the old way and the new way looks to be the best way from where I sit.
There are many complaints about WOW but two big ones over the years are that:
1. Quests the players do have no impact on the world and nothing changes no matter what supposedly has been done.
2. WOW is too much of a theme park where the player is forced onto the straight and narrow instead of simply going out there to see what can be seen.
Clearly Blizzard decided that the first complaint was one they should address - and they did! The question is whether they went too far, and I think they did, but only a little. The trouble with this new model is 100% of the quests are mandatory so having bizarre, challenging or strange mechanics either have to be made trivial or they end up annoying a lot of people. In particular the jousting quest in Hyjal would have been a good place to have a little side quest - you could do the jousting or continue with the main questline. I would enjoy it greatly if the main plot series was designed in the current fashion but there were side quests, things that weren't entirely necessary to advance the plot, scattered around. While I don't like to give him too much credit, Gevlon actually had a neat idea to have the main questline for a zone have red ! and ? markers so players know that these are the really important quests to do and have optional ones be the normal gold colour. Everyone recognizes that you can't tell the epic story without a strict chain of quests but giving players the option to complete a few extra things at the current hub or move on to bigger and better stuff would be nice.
All in all I really did like questing through the new zones and the phasing, new and better quest/bossfight mechanics and epic storytelling were a lot of fun. I do wish though that I could push ahead with the story and leave a few of the 'go find me 6 bottles of rum' quests for later. A happy medium between the old way and the new way looks to be the best way from where I sit.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Basic Training
When playing WOW you first level yourself up by bashing monsters in the head for 85 levels. This used to be incredibly simple and straightforward - you run up to the monster and beat on it until it dies, then you go to the next one. Eventually you find that your level is at the maximum and the next step is to start raiding, which is destroying difficult challenges with many people. The challenges of raiding are substantial compared to soloing, and in particular it requires all kinds of skills that you simply had no place to learn while soloing. The classic example is getting out of the fire. Bosses in raids put fire on the ground and you have to not be in it, because it will burn you very badly. Sometimes the fire is actually poison, or frost, or whatever, but it is bad. The trouble was that when soloing this never, ever occurred and a new raider would find themselves trying to master a skill they had zero opportunity to learn on their way up. This was a flaw in the game's implementation, that skills that are considered baseline and necessary in the endgame did not appear at all in the early game.
Cataclysm has changed all this, and done it beautifully. Previously when a monster in WOW was supposed to be hard to solo it would simply be given a few more hitpoints and it would do massively more damage. It was much harder certainly but generally the tactics required were no different. In Cataclysm there are all kinds of solo encounters with monsters that have immense hitpoint totals but who do very little damage, thus the fight can continue a long time, just like raid encounters. These encounters also have mechanics exactly like raids in that bosses put fire on the ground or do incredibly destructive attacks that can be entirely avoided with proper reactions. People like myself who have raided forever will mostly find these mechanics very simple but they do still lend an air of grandeur to a solo encounter that was sorely lacking before. The screen will give you instructions on how you can avoid these terrible attacks
"Overload Zingband is casting a Shadowbolt Volley! Find someplace to hide!"
If you hide behind a pillar or somesuch the Shadowbolt Volley does nothing, but if you just stand there and take it you will die. Just like in a raid you need to be constantly attacking the enemy and occasionally dodging their devastating moves. It is wonderful!
The combination of giving a little basic training to newbies and providing a bit of fun, variety and epic feel for a veteran is a great one and this is one of the great success stories of this new expansion. Now if you level up to max and get started raiding you will definitely have experience in dealing with all kinds of raid challenges - interruption of casting, movement, line of sight strategy and many others. There are a lot of things that cataclysm did right but to my mind this is the biggest - make the transition from soloing to raiding smoother and make soloing feel much more meaningful in the process.
Cataclysm has changed all this, and done it beautifully. Previously when a monster in WOW was supposed to be hard to solo it would simply be given a few more hitpoints and it would do massively more damage. It was much harder certainly but generally the tactics required were no different. In Cataclysm there are all kinds of solo encounters with monsters that have immense hitpoint totals but who do very little damage, thus the fight can continue a long time, just like raid encounters. These encounters also have mechanics exactly like raids in that bosses put fire on the ground or do incredibly destructive attacks that can be entirely avoided with proper reactions. People like myself who have raided forever will mostly find these mechanics very simple but they do still lend an air of grandeur to a solo encounter that was sorely lacking before. The screen will give you instructions on how you can avoid these terrible attacks
"Overload Zingband is casting a Shadowbolt Volley! Find someplace to hide!"
If you hide behind a pillar or somesuch the Shadowbolt Volley does nothing, but if you just stand there and take it you will die. Just like in a raid you need to be constantly attacking the enemy and occasionally dodging their devastating moves. It is wonderful!
The combination of giving a little basic training to newbies and providing a bit of fun, variety and epic feel for a veteran is a great one and this is one of the great success stories of this new expansion. Now if you level up to max and get started raiding you will definitely have experience in dealing with all kinds of raid challenges - interruption of casting, movement, line of sight strategy and many others. There are a lot of things that cataclysm did right but to my mind this is the biggest - make the transition from soloing to raiding smoother and make soloing feel much more meaningful in the process.
I was prepared
I have a tolerant wife. This is a good thing for me, because I tested it a little this week. On Tuesday I woke up at 3:00 in the morning to start gaming like a maniac and played through the day and she was amused, though not so much by being woken up in the middle of the night. I failed to get 2 of the 3 achievements I was aiming at for this expansion that day and was very concerned that I would fail further, but that was not to be the case. The proof, as they say, requires pix:
The tricks involved in getting it were several. First, I had to buy a very specific recipe that took 4 days to acquire. It became available at 4:00 in the morning on Friday so to avoid anyone else beating me to the punch I woke up in the middle of the night for the second time in 4 days to play video games. (Did I mention my wife is tolerant?) I stood beside the questgiver as 4:00 ticked over, completed the quest immediately and began crafting, which is the other tricky part of the equation. You see, the recipe that I used to get to 525 became extremely unreliable by the end. To get from 524 to 525 I had a 9% chance of success each attempt, and the previous ones were similarly bad. The trouble with this is that with a new expansion just coming out the cost of materials was hideously high and I wanted to be very sure to succeed so I needed to spend a TON of cash to make sure I didn't fall slightly short of my goal.
Ziggyny was doing some math using Markov chains a little while ago on profession skill up chance. He gave me the numbers for my chances of success and they weren't nearly as pretty as I was hoping. I was crafting Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamonds, and thankfully I had alchemy capped so I could actually make them myself. My expected number of Diamonds necessary was 47 and I got myself up to 68 stored up. According to Ziggyny I had a approximately 90% chance of success with 68, and it turned out I only needed 42. I spent a boatload of money buying ore from people (A lot of my suppliers seemed to think it was an early Christmas with the outrageous prices I was paying) and now I have 42 of a single gem cut. To be fair, that gem is by far the most needed gem so the server demand will vacuum them up in an instant; whether or not I can recoup my costs or not is another question entirely.
I feel good, I feel great! That feeling of having 3 goals, all of which should be entirely reachable, and failing utterly at the first two while the last remained at best uncertain was terrible. The feeling of completing the third and watching my competitors bitch and kvetch about how they should have gotten it themselves was a wonderful thing indeed. In this instance I was prepared.
The tricks involved in getting it were several. First, I had to buy a very specific recipe that took 4 days to acquire. It became available at 4:00 in the morning on Friday so to avoid anyone else beating me to the punch I woke up in the middle of the night for the second time in 4 days to play video games. (Did I mention my wife is tolerant?) I stood beside the questgiver as 4:00 ticked over, completed the quest immediately and began crafting, which is the other tricky part of the equation. You see, the recipe that I used to get to 525 became extremely unreliable by the end. To get from 524 to 525 I had a 9% chance of success each attempt, and the previous ones were similarly bad. The trouble with this is that with a new expansion just coming out the cost of materials was hideously high and I wanted to be very sure to succeed so I needed to spend a TON of cash to make sure I didn't fall slightly short of my goal.
Ziggyny was doing some math using Markov chains a little while ago on profession skill up chance. He gave me the numbers for my chances of success and they weren't nearly as pretty as I was hoping. I was crafting Chaotic Shadowspirit Diamonds, and thankfully I had alchemy capped so I could actually make them myself. My expected number of Diamonds necessary was 47 and I got myself up to 68 stored up. According to Ziggyny I had a approximately 90% chance of success with 68, and it turned out I only needed 42. I spent a boatload of money buying ore from people (A lot of my suppliers seemed to think it was an early Christmas with the outrageous prices I was paying) and now I have 42 of a single gem cut. To be fair, that gem is by far the most needed gem so the server demand will vacuum them up in an instant; whether or not I can recoup my costs or not is another question entirely.
I feel good, I feel great! That feeling of having 3 goals, all of which should be entirely reachable, and failing utterly at the first two while the last remained at best uncertain was terrible. The feeling of completing the third and watching my competitors bitch and kvetch about how they should have gotten it themselves was a wonderful thing indeed. In this instance I was prepared.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Castles in the Sky
A castle in the sky is a fantasy staple, a place of wonder and magic. In each of the WOW expansions there has been a castle in the sky, though they share little besides that general title. I love this song, btw.
This is Tempest Keep from the Burning Crusade. It is certainly a castle in the sky with multiple sections floating up in the air over the bizarre and otherworldly Netherstorm. It was not only the site of many, many wipes to Kael'Thas but also 4 gigantic crystal palaces.
The level of detail on Dalaran in Wrath of the Lich King is much better. It is a friendly, happy place, familiar and entirely human instead of a crystal fortress constructed by a inscrutable race of godlike entities. It is also ripped out of the ground wholesale and flown around instead of being placed here in some deliberate fashion. The feel really works, it is a fantastical human city torn from the ground by great magic, and yet still very much a human city.
This is the crowning achievement. The Vortex Pinnacle is in Cataclysm and it is the best castle in the sky yet. It is an ivory tower, a masterpiece of architecture floating on a cloud. Literally the buildings go down into the cloud you can see there and vanish in the mist. The effect is stunning visually and is a good showcase of the leaps forward the game has made in making beautiful scenery for the players to gawk at. Surely after I run through the Vortex Pinnacle a dozen times I will ignore the scenery and the gorgeous artwork that makes it so compelling but as I am still at that delicate, impressible stage I will gush a little and let the praise fall easily from my lips.
While I am obsessed with numbers and with the balance of the game I do find it so enjoyable to run around the world and see all these strange and beautiful things. There is just so much of me that loves the idea of exploring a fantastical, magical kingdom and seeing all the wonders and horrors it has to offer that for a little while my math brain can take a back seat.
This is Tempest Keep from the Burning Crusade. It is certainly a castle in the sky with multiple sections floating up in the air over the bizarre and otherworldly Netherstorm. It was not only the site of many, many wipes to Kael'Thas but also 4 gigantic crystal palaces.
The level of detail on Dalaran in Wrath of the Lich King is much better. It is a friendly, happy place, familiar and entirely human instead of a crystal fortress constructed by a inscrutable race of godlike entities. It is also ripped out of the ground wholesale and flown around instead of being placed here in some deliberate fashion. The feel really works, it is a fantastical human city torn from the ground by great magic, and yet still very much a human city.
This is the crowning achievement. The Vortex Pinnacle is in Cataclysm and it is the best castle in the sky yet. It is an ivory tower, a masterpiece of architecture floating on a cloud. Literally the buildings go down into the cloud you can see there and vanish in the mist. The effect is stunning visually and is a good showcase of the leaps forward the game has made in making beautiful scenery for the players to gawk at. Surely after I run through the Vortex Pinnacle a dozen times I will ignore the scenery and the gorgeous artwork that makes it so compelling but as I am still at that delicate, impressible stage I will gush a little and let the praise fall easily from my lips.
While I am obsessed with numbers and with the balance of the game I do find it so enjoyable to run around the world and see all these strange and beautiful things. There is just so much of me that loves the idea of exploring a fantastical, magical kingdom and seeing all the wonders and horrors it has to offer that for a little while my math brain can take a back seat.
I was not prepared
Yesterday was the launch of Cataclysm. I woke up at 3:00, managed to actually log in at 3:30 or so due to massive login server overload and began levelling. I had 3 achievements I wanted to get and by noon two of them were already out of reach and the third was looking frightening. I was not prepared.
If I had decided to get the realm first Alchemy I would have gotten it no problem. It took 8 hours at least for someone to get it and I could have beaten them and not even spent overly much money doing it. Instead I went for realm first paladin 85 and failed. My assumptions were not particularly accurate; getting to 81 required 1.7 million XP, so I figured that the progression would be similar to the last expansion and I would need something like 10 million XP to go from 80 to 85. On this assumption I figured I could be done levelling within 12-15 hours, perhaps quick enough to be completed before supper. I was wrong, as the XP curve went
1.7 M
2.2 M
3 M
5 M
9 M !!!!!!
That 9 million for the last level was hilarious. When I hit 84 (the same time several other people hit 85!) and saw that number I just laughed out loud. I was not willing to level for another 8 hours as I had already done 14 hours straight at that point.
It was certainly a brutal disappointment. I was monitoring my competitors and there was only one person I needed to worry about and he was just slightly ahead. That feeling of being behind and having absolutely nothing I could do to fix that was just wretched. Of course, being behind at all was my own fault for not preparing sufficiently. It turns out that running dungeons is a very bad way to level, and also that knowing every quest ahead of time is a significant advantage. If I had been absolutely serious about getting the paladin achievement I would have played on the beta server and levelled the whole way through so I would know all the zones, all the quests and exactly how hard everything was. I would have found out that I needed to level as protection instead of retribution once I hit Deepholm and I wouldn't have wasted any time looking for quest stuff because I would already have known where it was. If I had run the dungeons on the beta I would have known that they are challenging, take a long time and are not good experience and I could have just quested. Doing those things would have given me the victory, I am certain, and now I have nothing but the ashes of broken dreams.
That, and the option to spend nearly my entire amassed fortune, the result of years of accumulating money, to buy realm first jewelcrafting. The cost of doing so is so prohibitive it is insane, yet it is the sole remaining shining light I can salvage from my failure.
If I had decided to get the realm first Alchemy I would have gotten it no problem. It took 8 hours at least for someone to get it and I could have beaten them and not even spent overly much money doing it. Instead I went for realm first paladin 85 and failed. My assumptions were not particularly accurate; getting to 81 required 1.7 million XP, so I figured that the progression would be similar to the last expansion and I would need something like 10 million XP to go from 80 to 85. On this assumption I figured I could be done levelling within 12-15 hours, perhaps quick enough to be completed before supper. I was wrong, as the XP curve went
1.7 M
2.2 M
3 M
5 M
9 M !!!!!!
That 9 million for the last level was hilarious. When I hit 84 (the same time several other people hit 85!) and saw that number I just laughed out loud. I was not willing to level for another 8 hours as I had already done 14 hours straight at that point.
It was certainly a brutal disappointment. I was monitoring my competitors and there was only one person I needed to worry about and he was just slightly ahead. That feeling of being behind and having absolutely nothing I could do to fix that was just wretched. Of course, being behind at all was my own fault for not preparing sufficiently. It turns out that running dungeons is a very bad way to level, and also that knowing every quest ahead of time is a significant advantage. If I had been absolutely serious about getting the paladin achievement I would have played on the beta server and levelled the whole way through so I would know all the zones, all the quests and exactly how hard everything was. I would have found out that I needed to level as protection instead of retribution once I hit Deepholm and I wouldn't have wasted any time looking for quest stuff because I would already have known where it was. If I had run the dungeons on the beta I would have known that they are challenging, take a long time and are not good experience and I could have just quested. Doing those things would have given me the victory, I am certain, and now I have nothing but the ashes of broken dreams.
That, and the option to spend nearly my entire amassed fortune, the result of years of accumulating money, to buy realm first jewelcrafting. The cost of doing so is so prohibitive it is insane, yet it is the sole remaining shining light I can salvage from my failure.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
I am prepared
On Tuesday the 7th of December the 3rd WoW expansion - Cataclysm - launches. There are all kinds of things associated with a new expansion like new zones to explore, new dungeons to clear out and new quests to do. One of the more important things to the hardcore maniacs is the new feats of strength. In particular there are feats of strength for being the first paladin to level 85 and being the first to level any given profession to 525. Being as I never got any of these feats of strength when the last expansion launched I have decided I am going to get 3 of them for Cataclysm. This is not easy.
The thing is that being the first paladin to level 85 basically requires you to login at 3:01 in the morning when the servers first come up and play continually (and frantically!) until you hit 85. From my time on the beta test realms I think I should be able to do it in about 15 hours of playtime which means that I can most likely be done by Tuesday evening if I just wake up in the middle of the night and play right through. I have a full set of 25 daily quests ready to cash in and hearthstones set to the appropriate hubs. I will login at 3:01 and have all 25 cashed by about 3:05, then I head out and start questing immediately in Mount Hyjal. When I hit 82 (which I should do faster than basically everyone due to my timing and daily quest preparation) I immediately stop and go to Deephome, which requires level 82 to enter. The idea there is to get ahead of the pack of people so it will be easier to complete quests since no one else should be around. Theoretically I finish Deephome and then go to Twilight Highlands where I finish off my run to 85. Levelling with a zillion other people around is always a mess and things take a long time but hopefully I can get ahead of the mob and stay there. There isn't much finesse involved here, just raw playtime and focus.
The other goals I have are to get the Jewelcrafting and Alchemy feats of strength. Alchemy is possible extremely quickly and only requires a bunch of materials, basically the limiting factor is just having enough cash to buy all the herbs and gems you require. I have an enormous amount of cash but at 3:01 nobody will have any herbs or gems at all - no amount of money will solve that. I will need to wait a few hours for them to get picked and mined and then run around advertising that I want to buy them for outrageous sums. Some people of course will refuse at any price since they want them for their own professions but I figure most people just need to be offered a big enough pile of money. Alchemy should be fairly cheap to level - at 250g per stack of herbs/ore it would only cost 5000g or so. Jewelcrafting is another beast entirely. I figure I will have to spend 80,000g to level jewelcrafting to max at 250g/stack, a truly substantial number, particularly considering that stacks might go a lot higher than that. Fortunately to level Alchemy I need to make Shadowspirit Diamonds, and to level Jewelcrafting I need to cut Shadowspirit Diamonds, so I can just feed myself the materials I need. Also Shadowspirit Diamonds are absolutely necessary for high end raiding so I can certainly sell them on the auction house and try to recoup my costs. The question is whether or not I can convince someone to pay 900g for one gem, which is what I will be paying to make it approximately. Seems... a bit steep.
The thing is that being the first paladin to level 85 basically requires you to login at 3:01 in the morning when the servers first come up and play continually (and frantically!) until you hit 85. From my time on the beta test realms I think I should be able to do it in about 15 hours of playtime which means that I can most likely be done by Tuesday evening if I just wake up in the middle of the night and play right through. I have a full set of 25 daily quests ready to cash in and hearthstones set to the appropriate hubs. I will login at 3:01 and have all 25 cashed by about 3:05, then I head out and start questing immediately in Mount Hyjal. When I hit 82 (which I should do faster than basically everyone due to my timing and daily quest preparation) I immediately stop and go to Deephome, which requires level 82 to enter. The idea there is to get ahead of the pack of people so it will be easier to complete quests since no one else should be around. Theoretically I finish Deephome and then go to Twilight Highlands where I finish off my run to 85. Levelling with a zillion other people around is always a mess and things take a long time but hopefully I can get ahead of the mob and stay there. There isn't much finesse involved here, just raw playtime and focus.
The other goals I have are to get the Jewelcrafting and Alchemy feats of strength. Alchemy is possible extremely quickly and only requires a bunch of materials, basically the limiting factor is just having enough cash to buy all the herbs and gems you require. I have an enormous amount of cash but at 3:01 nobody will have any herbs or gems at all - no amount of money will solve that. I will need to wait a few hours for them to get picked and mined and then run around advertising that I want to buy them for outrageous sums. Some people of course will refuse at any price since they want them for their own professions but I figure most people just need to be offered a big enough pile of money. Alchemy should be fairly cheap to level - at 250g per stack of herbs/ore it would only cost 5000g or so. Jewelcrafting is another beast entirely. I figure I will have to spend 80,000g to level jewelcrafting to max at 250g/stack, a truly substantial number, particularly considering that stacks might go a lot higher than that. Fortunately to level Alchemy I need to make Shadowspirit Diamonds, and to level Jewelcrafting I need to cut Shadowspirit Diamonds, so I can just feed myself the materials I need. Also Shadowspirit Diamonds are absolutely necessary for high end raiding so I can certainly sell them on the auction house and try to recoup my costs. The question is whether or not I can convince someone to pay 900g for one gem, which is what I will be paying to make it approximately. Seems... a bit steep.
Monday, November 22, 2010
The World Will Shatter
Tomorrow the World of Warcraft will shatter. Deathwing will rise up out of the ground causing incredible carnage and destruction and reshaping the very landscape. This is an incredibly ambitious project by Blizzard, to release a brand new version of the entire old world at the same time as a new expansion offering all kinds of new content. It certainly made the expansion take an incredible amount of time, far longer than people really felt was reasonable, and shortly we will get to see if all of the waiting was for a good reason or not. Watching the behaviour of the players on the night before the cataclysm is very interesting indeed - so many are desperately running around trying to complete all the things that will vanish forever tomorrow.
There were people feverishly trying to recruit players to go and attempt extremely difficult achievements that are going away tomorrow. I would normally advise against trying to do very hard things in very little time, but trying to do them with random people who have no idea what they are doing makes the proposition even worse. Somehow even though these achievements have been around for 20 months the fact that they are going away is enough of a push to try any desperate action to complete them even though there was no particular incentive to do so last week. Champion of Ulduar is a rough thing to do with a group of guildies who are experienced raiders and know the fights - getting trade chat puggers to try it is a bit of a joke.
Several factions are going away tonight when the servers go down and there of course were people desperately hawking reputation materials knowing that tomorrow they will be worth absolutely zero but tonight they might be worth a fortune. It sounds a little like tickets to The Big Game where the seller hopes there is some guy truly desperate for it right now but if no sale is made then tomorrow those tickets are worth less than nothing. There is an escalating game of chicken going on with those who really want to finish off a faction grind fighting those who have hoarded these items for no good reason and everyone knowing that the entire thing vanishes in but a few hours.
The world will be fresh and made anew and those who are nutty completionists like myself await the new quests and zones with baited breath. I cannot wait to rip around the old world doing all the quests there are even though their rewards and difficulty are both utterly trivial. It is that need to see it all, do it all and have every person in the world run out of tasks for me that consumes me. Those like me are also preparing for that mad rush to be the very first person to get the new Loremaster title and achievement. I cannot say exactly why I pursue these things so intensely - there is no real challenge aside from the time sink but nonetheless I must go and do it all. Maybe it is just that need to know that the great hero Redcape has solved all the world's problems, rescued the damsels in distress and slain every villain there ever was.
There were people feverishly trying to recruit players to go and attempt extremely difficult achievements that are going away tomorrow. I would normally advise against trying to do very hard things in very little time, but trying to do them with random people who have no idea what they are doing makes the proposition even worse. Somehow even though these achievements have been around for 20 months the fact that they are going away is enough of a push to try any desperate action to complete them even though there was no particular incentive to do so last week. Champion of Ulduar is a rough thing to do with a group of guildies who are experienced raiders and know the fights - getting trade chat puggers to try it is a bit of a joke.
Several factions are going away tonight when the servers go down and there of course were people desperately hawking reputation materials knowing that tomorrow they will be worth absolutely zero but tonight they might be worth a fortune. It sounds a little like tickets to The Big Game where the seller hopes there is some guy truly desperate for it right now but if no sale is made then tomorrow those tickets are worth less than nothing. There is an escalating game of chicken going on with those who really want to finish off a faction grind fighting those who have hoarded these items for no good reason and everyone knowing that the entire thing vanishes in but a few hours.
The world will be fresh and made anew and those who are nutty completionists like myself await the new quests and zones with baited breath. I cannot wait to rip around the old world doing all the quests there are even though their rewards and difficulty are both utterly trivial. It is that need to see it all, do it all and have every person in the world run out of tasks for me that consumes me. Those like me are also preparing for that mad rush to be the very first person to get the new Loremaster title and achievement. I cannot say exactly why I pursue these things so intensely - there is no real challenge aside from the time sink but nonetheless I must go and do it all. Maybe it is just that need to know that the great hero Redcape has solved all the world's problems, rescued the damsels in distress and slain every villain there ever was.
Monday, November 8, 2010
Coding
Today I really got back into coding in a big way. The iron grip of CiV has loosened some and I am now beginning to really hammer out my Retribution Paladin spreadsheet for the upcoming expansion. Going back to coding after a long vacation really reminds me of some of the incredible highs and lows that it brings; it triggers memories of long, late night programming sessions in the labs at university.
The trick always seems to be the details. I have the structure down no problem and I know exactly what logical path the code needs to follow. My math and logic skills have not degraded since last I worked on my spreadsheet but my knowledge of the programming language has become weak and doddering. This is not helped at all by the fact that VBA has so many issues with the documentation and with bugs in the code running it. For example, I wanted to round up a random number to an integer. I look in the documentation and see the ROUNDUP function which should do exactly what I need it to do. Instead it crashes my program every time I try to run it with a devilishly vague error message. I go through the documentation over and over, I go online and check the documentation there and try to redo and bugproof my code and utterly fail; ROUNDUP simply does not work. It turns out that I can just use the INT function instead and get the results I need but the fact that in a widely distributed Microsoft program a basic built in function crashes the program is wretched. Not that I can blame all my troubles on VBA and Microsoft! I keep forgetting to declare variables properly and VBA is happy to create and delete them on a whim, wreaking havoc with my program. I fail to initialize a few of my many, many variables and that causes all kinds of bizarre behaviour.
Strangely coding ends up being much like an addictive video game in that I lose time while doing it. I sat down early in the morning to do just a little work and ended up noticing that I was hungry hours and hours later. I kept thinking that I had lots of time to do the chores of the day but I ended up doing very little because huge chunks of my day just kept vanishing as I struggled against the machine and against my own incompetence. I love the feeling of a program that hums along, doing precisely what I intended. I love finally finding that stubborn bug and crushing it and watching the numbers flow just the way they should. That high of success is very reminiscent of a video game high I think, just as the drudgery of bug hunting is like the drudgery of killing more monsters to level up.
The most amusing part of all this is that I grumble about my code and Wendy comes over to try to help. She is good at coding and a fresh perspective really does help catch bugs a lot of the time but I have a tremendous independent, proud streak that wants to do it all myself. I don't want help, I don't want someone to wander along and crush the bug I have been hunting... then I still get the annoying part but without the sense of triumph at the end! Of course, I do want help because I want my program to work in the end and I want the bugs squashed, even if I don't get to do all the squashing myself. I am not going to order her away because she is really helpful, but a voice in the back somewhere is shouting
"NO! Don't accept help, you can do it yourself. If you let someone else fix the problem you LOSE!"
Strangely coding ends up being much like an addictive video game in that I lose time while doing it. I sat down early in the morning to do just a little work and ended up noticing that I was hungry hours and hours later. I kept thinking that I had lots of time to do the chores of the day but I ended up doing very little because huge chunks of my day just kept vanishing as I struggled against the machine and against my own incompetence. I love the feeling of a program that hums along, doing precisely what I intended. I love finally finding that stubborn bug and crushing it and watching the numbers flow just the way they should. That high of success is very reminiscent of a video game high I think, just as the drudgery of bug hunting is like the drudgery of killing more monsters to level up.
The most amusing part of all this is that I grumble about my code and Wendy comes over to try to help. She is good at coding and a fresh perspective really does help catch bugs a lot of the time but I have a tremendous independent, proud streak that wants to do it all myself. I don't want help, I don't want someone to wander along and crush the bug I have been hunting... then I still get the annoying part but without the sense of triumph at the end! Of course, I do want help because I want my program to work in the end and I want the bugs squashed, even if I don't get to do all the squashing myself. I am not going to order her away because she is really helpful, but a voice in the back somewhere is shouting
"NO! Don't accept help, you can do it yourself. If you let someone else fix the problem you LOSE!"
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Combat Modelling
I am working on building a combat modelling program in Excel for the WOW expansion due out in December. The only really tricky part about building such a program is figuring out how to model exactly what happens in combat and let the user know what sequences of abilities will be the most effective. The hardest part about doing this by far is the random elements that are sometimes involved. For example, in the last expansion I had to model an effect where 40% of the time a weapon swing would cause an ability to be usable right away. I ended up modelling it by having the program keep track of a variable that started at 1 and incremented each time it was checked and when it got to 21 it was reset to 1. I preset 8 different numbers (1,2,4,5,8,9,13,15) that would trigger a 'yes' result and otherwise the program assumed it was a 'no'. Doing this allowed me to make sure that over time 8/20 or 40% of the results would be yes, and this system worked out well. It wasn't random so it would generate the exact same results each time for any user but it gave results that were extremely close to actual game values.
The trick this time is I have % chances for specific things to occur that are not fixed. For example, my Hand of Light (HoL) ability has a chance to go off on each attack but the chance of it going off starts at 8% and goes up with the gear I wear. I need a modelling system that has the ability to model any particular % chance including decimal places and I want that system to also produce identical results each time it is run. Unfortunately the only way I know how to do this is to make the program run the simulation for huge time periods so that the really large numbers can smooth out the data; otherwise the results will be different on each run and will ultimately make it very difficult to draw useful conclusions. As I understand it I can control the seed that the program uses to generate random numbers but if that seed happens to be really wonky in some way my data would still be useless.
The only kludge I have been able to think up is to have a preset start sequence and then have the program check to see if the overall percentage so far is over/under the theoretical one and pick the next result based on that. For example, I just assign the program to have the ability go off on the 4th, 14th and 24th try of the first 30. On the 31st try we know that the current result is 3/30 or 10%, so if the theoretical chance is over 10% it goes off on the 31st try, and if the theoretical chance is below 10% then it does not. Either way it follows up by calculating either 3/31 or 4/31, checking against the theoretical chance and going again. This would at least give me identical results each run but it has big problems with plateaus. If I run a test with 300 attacks I might raise the chance from 9.99% to 10.01% and see a significant gain because it made that 300th result change in value, whereas going from 10.01% to 10.03% no difference at all will be recorded. I suppose I really have no way to avoid plateaus without using *immense* simulations so this may well be the best way to make this work. If anyone else has any suggestions please feel free to let me know though.
The trick this time is I have % chances for specific things to occur that are not fixed. For example, my Hand of Light (HoL) ability has a chance to go off on each attack but the chance of it going off starts at 8% and goes up with the gear I wear. I need a modelling system that has the ability to model any particular % chance including decimal places and I want that system to also produce identical results each time it is run. Unfortunately the only way I know how to do this is to make the program run the simulation for huge time periods so that the really large numbers can smooth out the data; otherwise the results will be different on each run and will ultimately make it very difficult to draw useful conclusions. As I understand it I can control the seed that the program uses to generate random numbers but if that seed happens to be really wonky in some way my data would still be useless.
The only kludge I have been able to think up is to have a preset start sequence and then have the program check to see if the overall percentage so far is over/under the theoretical one and pick the next result based on that. For example, I just assign the program to have the ability go off on the 4th, 14th and 24th try of the first 30. On the 31st try we know that the current result is 3/30 or 10%, so if the theoretical chance is over 10% it goes off on the 31st try, and if the theoretical chance is below 10% then it does not. Either way it follows up by calculating either 3/31 or 4/31, checking against the theoretical chance and going again. This would at least give me identical results each run but it has big problems with plateaus. If I run a test with 300 attacks I might raise the chance from 9.99% to 10.01% and see a significant gain because it made that 300th result change in value, whereas going from 10.01% to 10.03% no difference at all will be recorded. I suppose I really have no way to avoid plateaus without using *immense* simulations so this may well be the best way to make this work. If anyone else has any suggestions please feel free to let me know though.
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