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.

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.

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.

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.

Meeting the parents

I have been preparing for the first time my daughter would bring home some boy (or girl, either is fine by me, but assume boy for the moment for stereotypical hilarity) and I would get the chance to do my Suspicious Dad Act.  You know the kind, where the father of the girl is extremely suspicious, hostile and quiet, staring at the wretched beast his precious little girl just dredged up from the gutter.  I have the option of getting out my axe and sharpening it up right in front of him while having one of my eyes twitching erratically, or perhaps making comments about barrels of lime and burial sites that nobody ever would think to check.  I could also be really friendly of course and try to make things smooth and jovial but that wouldn't be nearly so much fun.  While I haven't really got to do this sort of thing yet I wonder how much of the hostile father thing is usually just an act put on because it is so much fun to do and how much is real suspicion on the part of the old man.

Today Elli came home and announced that she has a boyfriend.  She is just turned 4 unfortunately so the normal speeches and glowering simply aren't rational - it isn't like they even understand what that means.  The trouble is that the boy she chose is actually the boy in her class that I don't like!  I don't have to conjure up a bunch of resentment towards him only based on the fact that he might do something to my innocent little daughter since I already find him irritating.  Now what do I do?  Clearly the reasonable approach is to say "that's nice dear" and worry not at all about it but I feel like I may lose out on that 'first boyfriend' window of opportunity and end up not getting to do my Suspicious Dad Act.  Obviously I *could* just do the act the first time I end up having dinner or some other event with a real boyfriend as she gets older but some deep part of me says that I have to do it the first time - just firing it up at some random point isn't the same.

One thing I almost did was laugh when I heard the girlfriend/boyfriend news but I managed to kibosh that fairly effectively - it would not do to make fun of Elli.  While I know that this fling isn't going to be anything real in the relationship sense it is important to her and it is going to help her explore the breadth and depth of human interaction and making light of her fumbling about would be cruel.  That said, it is hard for me to figure out precisely what I should say.  Is it better to just ignore it, or better to ask her if she is going to stay with him forever and see if she wants to get married?  Should I try to act like I would if a friend of mine were to say they were in a new relationship or some entirely different way?  This is the sort of thing that child advice books don't have a lot of coverage on (not that I hold with following their instructions anyhow) as they focus advice for first relationships at much older ages where the kids are doing something that actually resembles dating.

I guess I will just smile, ask a few easy questions and change the subject.  No need to sharpen the axe or get a barrel of lime since the offender in question is, after all, 4 years old.

Time for something new

In CiV units can be upgraded as time goes by.  For example, a Warrior can become a Swordsman, a Longswordsman, a Rifleman, an Infantry and finally a Mechanized Infantry.  This is particularly important because units get experience so after fighting many battles your Warrior can upgrade and retain all of his combat benefits from experience.  If you play well you can end up making only a handful of units in the stone age and simply upgrade them all right into the modern day.  Unfortunately for the base game these upgrade paths applied to only a few specific units and others simply became obsolete.  This means of course that in a long game any unit without a proper upgrade path is going to be junk for the player, but fine for the AI since they rarely manage to keep their units around for long timespans.

The first solution to this strange imbalance I saw was by Thalassicus.  Thal added some new upgrade paths to the game, though they weren't quite as straightforward as the one in the paragraph above.

Spearman to Pikeman
"So Thog, we used to use spears, now we are supposed to use these pikes instead?  Is this gonna work?"
"Yes Grog, just point the sharp end at the guy on the horse, same principle."

That works.  The next step is a little stranger.

Pikeman to Lancer
"So Thog, we used to stick people on horses with pikes, now we are supposed to put the pikes away, get on horses ourselves and learn to use lances?"
"Yes Grog, we used to smash horse units, now we just do it from horseback."

The next step is very strange indeed.

Lancer to Anti Tank Gun
"Thog, this is BS.  We just learned to ride horses and now we have to get back off our horses and use these crazy tank guns?  Why did we go to horseback back there?"
"Grog, just point the gun at the tank and stop trying to think.  This is a game, not a simulation."

The last step:

Anti Tank Gun to Helicopter


"Thog, I fought horsemen for 3000 years and now you want me to learn to fly a damn whirlygig?  I quit."
"Wheeee, helicopters are fun!"

So Thog and Grog the spearmen end up piloting helicopters.  This is the best path available, despite how bizarre it looks, so I basically accepted that all units should be carefully levelled up and survive to the modern era with incredible skills and powers.  The problem with all this is that in the game you really do only make 10 military units, all of them in the first 1/3 of the game, and by the end you have an invincible army of supermen. The only way the computer can deal with this is to throw more and more dudes at you, but that just levels up your units even faster, to the point that sometimes in the endgame you are zerged by so many units that moving foward is impossible; they fill every space with a dude.  This is a terrible situation.

The solution I came up with today is simple, and basically the opposite of everything else that has been tried.  I removed all upgrades completely.  Thog and Grog the spearmen may be level 10 and have every ability in the game but we are in the medieval period now and they cannot stand up to heavily armored opponents.  They must retire (disband) and the player will actually need to make more dudes.  It should feel like military spending is part of the game again because an army will need a constant supply of new, upgraded troops.  Also because the player isn't going to have ludicrously high level units all the time they are likely going to have units die fairly regularly.  I suspect that this change will make the highest difficulty levels pretty much impossible but I think it will make the game feel a lot more natural and make the AI much more challenging without having to resort to giving it such stupendous cheating benefits.

Lots of people won't like my solution very much because it is fun to have an incredibly powerful army of units who have been around forever, but to make that game hard requires giving the computer far too many silly bonuses.  I want a really tough challenge that doesn't involve dozens of hours of wading through endless hordes of enemies; just because the game is hard is no good reason for it to take 4 times as long to click through.

Happy Birthday

To Brightcape, that is.  1 year ago I made my first introductory post.  I figured I would muse here on whether I accomplished my goals and what things look like when compared to what I thought they would be when I set out.

In that post I noted that many, many blogs end up being 3 posts of real material perhaps followed by a picture of a cat or 'hey guys I haven't updated in a while... ooops" and then silence.  I certainly didn't do that, as I logged 244 posts, not including this one.  I was hoping to hit 250 as some kind of artificial benchmark but I fell just shy; I noticed two weeks ago that I was going to be very close to the mark and could hit it if I just did 7 posts a week but I decided to stick with my natural posting pattern and not bother shooting for a particular post count.  I was also tempted to just make 6 posts each consisting of one word but that would be far more pathetic than clever.

When I started I really had no idea what my audience would be like.  I figured a few of my family members and a few of my friends would read what I have to say but I have ended up with readers from 10 countries totalling about 124 pageviews each day.  That certainly isn't breaking records, nor is it the sort of readership that lets you live off the advertising, but it is a lot higher than I figured I would have.  It certainly means that I have managed to get a lot more people than my immediate circle interested in what I have to say.

I think my biggest struggle is trying to make posts that all the various groups who read Brightcape will enjoy.  I love games and talk about them a lot but if I make a games post that most hardcore gamers will find interesting my family will mostly be at a loss, and I am not at all confident that the hardcore gamers that found my blog on EJ or the WOW forums care much about my 'this is what is going on in my life' posts.  I have often thought that I should split up my blog into two and make one specifically about games and one about my personal life.  The trick is that a lot of my philosophy, religion and psychology posts start from one of those areas and meander quite a bit and people in either sphere might be interested.  Because so much of what I write ends up crossing boundaries it would limit me significantly if I were to create two blogs I think.

If any readers out there have ideas they want to share for new things for Brightcape now is the time.  Is there a new project I should try and blog about, sort of like my barefoot or bible projects?  Is there a topic or type of post you like and want to see more of?  What do you think?  If anyone has anything interesting to share on the direction of my blog or things you want to see me do, please do speak up.

Lastly I want to thank everyone who reads, but particularly so those who comment and engage with me on various topics.  I often find myself challenged by comments and forced to really rethink my beliefs and opinions and I value that learning opportunity very much.  I look forward to continuing to argue with you going forward.