So, this year has been a fun-filled ride so far and I haven't made time for this blog. Or training. Or gaming. Or pretty much anything.

This morning, I spent a couple hours and updated this year's training log, my weight tracker, and the current Wish List. Some is better than none, I suppose.

I wrote this back in May and intended to edit it to be cleaner and better presented, but I'm clearly not going to "find the time" to do that, so here it is in it's ugly glory:

We tried out Shaiya - a "mature" rated MMO. It's also free-to-play (F2P) so the only thing lost by trying it out is a little time.

THE BAD

My first impression is that this game really needs a publisher. It looks EXTREMELY amateurish and unfinished. The text popups break in the middle of words so a quest might tell you something like:
" Go out into the wilderness and ki
ll seventeen wild tree monkeys. B
ring back their tails."

Really?!? You couldn't even program a way to make the text break on whitespace?

Monster names are often truncated. Only the first dozen or so letters are displayed so a long name gets appended with an elipsis. For example, if the monster were called "Thantalorn Evil Quest Monster" (a very long name) it would display as "Thantalorn Evil ..." The only saving grace is that it is displayed that way -everywhere- so you can kinda match up the truncated names in the quest log to the truncated names in the game world.

The font that use for names is a 1-pixel wide simplex font that scales to always be microscopic and annoying.

THE GOOD (sort of....)

The world graphics are very nice, albeit a bit dull in palette choices. The first time you come into view of a big city and the different sections of the model draw in, you go "wow!" It would be nice if they had used more dynamic colors though. The whole game feels a bit... brown.

The character models are very attractive. This is the first game in which the male characters actually look sexy and strong. Oddly enough, they are actually more attractive than the female models.

Skills can be trained as soon as you level up, no matter where you are. You don't have to visit a trainer, you just pop open the skills window and train right there and then. On the other hand, with no real way to know what skills are valuable and which are fodder, it's easy to gimp yourself early on. With a limited number of skill points and more skills than you could afford to buy, choosing the "right" skills to train can be a challenge.

Quests are standard MMO faire. Step one: go kill ten moneys, bring back the fur. Step two: go kill five elk, bring back the antlers. Step Three: go kill seven sealakel (??) and bring back the scales. Yawn. But you do get "free" equipment and weapons for doing them.

Leveling is superfast and easy. In four hours of play I've leveled three characters up to level 10+. I only died once and that was because I wasn't paying attention. The PvE game is almost mindlessly simple.

THE GREAT

RvR is very similar to DAoC. You go through a portal to the "Borderlands". You initially zone in to a "safe" area with friendly guards. Passing through a large gateway, you enter a land full of MOBs and enemy players. The "game" (so to speak) is to capture and hold a central tower. The tower becomes stronger (or weaker) depending on how many smaller capture nodes your side holds. So the RvR action becomes a large zerg at the central point, while smaller premade groups roam around capturing the smaller nodes. If you've ever played in a DAoC battleground, this is almost the same feel. The "borderland" areas are even level limited, to make it a relatively even paying field. The first area is limited to level 1-15. One significant difference is that it won't kick you out if you level up within the borderland zone. So as long as you do not log out you could be one, two, three or more levels above the limit for that area. Couple this with not needing to train and you often will have one or two people that are almost invulnerable wandering around.

Unfortunately, there are only two factions, like WAR and WoW.

THE WTF???

When you make your first chracter, you can start in "easy" or "normal" mode. Easy limits your level and how many skill and stat points you get per level. Normal gives you a nominal amount. Once you reach level 40 you can start a new character in "Hard" mode. Hard mode characters get extra points each level. So a level 10 "hard" character will wipe the floor with a level 15 "easy" character. This means that the first character(s) you make are essentially throwaway toons no matter what you do, and you'll need to grind out a character to level 40 before you can really play the game... by restarting and throwing away that progress.

Even weirder, when you reach level 50 on a "hard" character, you have the option to start a new "Utilmate" mode toon. These get a ton more skill and stat points, but come with a major drawback. If you die in PvE and are not resurrected within three minutes... that character is dead. Forever. Yes, they have permadeath. But supposedly the extra stat points make up for it. Personally, I’m not convinced.

CONCLUSION

We only played this game for a handful of hours, so its hard to say whether it is any good. I'm enjoying the character development portion. Thus far I've tried a Fighter (melee DPS), a Ranger (stealth DPS), a Mage (ranged DPS) and a Defender (melee Tank) on the "good" side. The roles play as one would expect.

The pace of PvE is pretty slow and bland (just like every other MMO) and the RvR action is insanely fast paced. We spent only 30 minutes in the first RvR zone and every time we saw a red enemy name, we were dead in 2-3 hits - faster than we could figure out what was going on. That's normal for the first venture into PvP in a new game.

I have a feeling that if we devoted the time to become familiar with the game, figure out how to recognize the other classes and gain some experience with the skill system that RvR would be fun and competitive.

In the past week and a half, I’ve played seven “new” games. I put the word “new” in quotes because one of them is actually an older game that I’ve played before, but haven’t seen in a while. It was a fun experience. In chronological order:

Aye, Dark Overlord!
This is a cute little story-telling card game. One player is the Dark Overlord and then he asks his minions to explain their failures. The minions (everyone else) have to come up with a story about how it wasn’t their fault, deflect blame and pass the buck to another player. The catch is that the buck-passing story has to involve one of three “hints” that every player draws randomly from a deck of cards. The person passed to then has to continue the blame avoidance by pointing the finger at a different player using one of their hint cards. If a player is unable to pass the buck, or can’t come up with a reasonable story, or if the Dark Overlord simply decides so (the Dark Overlord is the ultimate judge during gameplay) they get a Withering Look. Get three Withering Looks and you lose!! This is fun because everyone wins (expect the loser). The drunker everyone is, the more fun this is.

A Game of Thrones
This is an AWESOME strategy board game based on the George R.R. Martin book of the same name. It has about a million rules and uses cardboard chits, token, counters and card as well as a beautiful game board that is 2 feet wide by 4 feet long. It can be played by three to five (we played with four) and completely captures the intrigue, strategy and feel of the books. I found it unusual in that it is a “war” game, but the winner isn’t decided by the one who has the biggest army. It is very reminiscent of Diplomacy in that you really have to work with (or against) your fellow players. If you don’t make alliances, you simply cannot win. It started out slow. The first few turns took a long time to resolve (partly because we were still learning the game) but around the fifth turn, the game really got super-interesting. We only played seven turns but it took about 4 hours to complete. It has a nice mechanic that if the game doesn’t resolve with a victor by the end of ten turns the game juts ends and the highest score wins. I’m really looking forward to trying this one again as soon as we can, but this one will require some hard-core gaming geek friends.

Worms
Kyle actually bought this on my PS3 when he was visiting over the weekend. This game is the latest installment of the venerable “artillery” genre. Not that anyone would ever recognize it as that. Oh sure, you have the same base concept: choose an angle and a velocity with varying “wind” and then fire. But the “tank” is actually a little cartoon worm, you have four of them, the terrain is anything but flat, being made up of a psychotic mish-mash of over-the-top cartoon landscapes, and your gun is a wide variety of rockets, grenades, airstrikes and flamethrowers, each of which reacts to the environment slightly differently. Kelly, Kyle and I played this well into the wee hours and had a blast doing it. This was a great PSN purchase!

Linger in Shadows
I bought this PS3 “game” because I saw it has trophies and it was only $3 on PSN. It really isn’t a “game” per se, more like a semi-interactive 6-1/2 minute long graphics demo. It basically plays a really weird movie, and you can move the camera around (within limits) and change some of the items in the environment, in real time. There are a total of six “puzzles” and ten “hidden” items, all of which grant a trophy. It took me a grand total of 45 minutes to unlock all sixteen. Aside from being a trophy whore, this would have been a colossal waste of my time even at the low price.

Noby Noby Boy
I had heard a lot of good things about this PS3 game and since I was already on PSN, I bought it too. I played with it for about two hours and I’m still not entirely sure what the heck this thing is. I can’t recommend it because it is simply mind bogglingly weird. You control a worm-like creature (the “boy”) which you move by jiggling both analog sticks. One stick controls the front, and the other stick controls the back. The middle parts just get dragged along. One of the most annoying things is that the camera follows the midpoint of the “boy” which means that often you can’t see what you’re doing at all. And there doesn’t seem to be any point of goal that I could discern. It’s just your worm-thing in a very small square world. Another $10 down the drain.

Eye of Judgment
This is the one older game I’ve already played. I have a soft spot in my heart for collectable trading card games, even though I pretty much suck at them, and this one is no different. I pulled it out to grab a few more trophies and managed to beat all of the pre-made decks on “normal” level. I only lost a few times to the computer. I don’t have many card, but I do have a generalist deck that has a few nasty tricks in it and when it worked, it worked big. The problem with this game is that it never really caught on and due to its age, the only people still playing are super godlike experts that would kill me in five turns. I really wish there were a new-ish TCG that was moderately popular, could be played online and didn't require a small fortune to play.

Burnout Paradise
Well, I didn’t actually play this. I loaded the disc into my PS3 and patched it to the current version, but never actually started the game….

On Wednesday, a lot of people that I’ve been associating with for a LONG time (almost nine years now – time flies!) lost their jobs. I’m uncharacteristically not going to go into what actually happened, nor why. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t involved and I don’t know what conversations happened behind closed door. I do know that they were very talented people and they did not in any way deserve what happened to them. I also know that a few other people who I have very little respect for are still employed by the same company. It certainly lessens my opinion of that company as a whole, knowing that the upper management is willing to throw good hardworking people off the bridge and keep less valuable assets employed. Enough about that before I start to really rant!

Anyway, as a result of this, Karen “found” several of my friends on Facebook. While not a perfect solution, it prompted me to start a Facebook account of my own. It’s a neat little tool, but I’m not in love with it. I’m still unsure as to how much value it has overall. Like Wikipedia, it seems like the more “free time” one has, the larger footprint one can put on the Facebook community and also like Wikipedia, it allows people with strong political and/or religious views a nice perfect pulpit to spew rhetoric. Unfortunately, the only people hit on Facebook are people who are “friends”; that is, people who are connected to your personal network. Based on the people who have “found” me there – whether directly or indirectly or via connections with other people (to its credit, Facebook does have a really extensive organic network of friend-of-friend-of-friend linking!) I’m even less sure about it as a social tool.

Maybe it says more about me, but it is like meeting an old high-school or college acquaintance for the first time in twenty years and then having them instantly more in next door to you. I’m sure that some people would find that perfectly fine – Karen, for example seems to really enjoy it – but the level of immediate intimacy with near total strangers is a bit disturbing to me. Even I recognize their names from my past.

And that's really the key thing. I don’t consider my past to be a wonderfully happy time. Prior to about a half-dozen years ago I wasn’t particularly enjoying life in general (with very few rare exceptions). I pretty much hated everything about high school, but I had a lot of fun in the year after I graduated and went through a period of “better living through Chemistry”. When I entered my first long-term-relationship (which later turned into a marriage) my life took a major downturn and only got worse from there. There was a short bright period of time when I left the workforce became a full-time college student at my local Junior College. And then when I transferred to a 4-year school, my life turned into a living Hell. I can only think of three good things that came out of my college experience:

1. I graduated and that allowed me to get a job that I -love- working for a great GREAT employer.
2. The bullshit that happened while I was at Cal Poly (which, to this day, I consider to be the single biggest mistake of my life) ultimately led to the dissolution of my marriage (which I consider to be the second biggest mistake of my life), and
3. I ended up with a great friend (who, ironically, was a large part of the aforementioned bullshit)

Without any exaggeration I've been happier in the last five years than any other time in my life. Sure I've had rocky spots and trying times in the last half-decade, but prior to that it was mostly bad times interspersed with good stuff. More recently it's been almost universally great with a very few abysmal periods. Having people continually remind me of the less-than-happy times in my past is not a joyful experience. I’d prefer to simply forget most of my past life. And Facebook is not a good tool for that.

We made our first trip to the mountains in a long time this weekend. Kyle graciously let us stay at this family cabin at Echo summit. The trip up was wrought with minor disasters throughout the day. It started out as a late start, due to Kyle and Karen being hung over from a late night of drinking. (I was smart enough to retire at midnight and was instantly asleep whilst they continued to celebrate the end of the work week.) We forgot a whole slew of items while packing. Loading the car was problematic. At the ski rental place, it turned out one of the missing items was Karen’s insoles, so I went home to get those. And then I had to go home again to get a checkbook because the lift passes were cash/check only no credit cards. Then we had to stop for fuel. The stop at In-and-Out burger took about 17 years because they were busy and then when they finally got our order, they had forgotten to get our drinks. When we got to Kyle’s mothers home to pick up the cabin keys, the snow pants that Kyle needed were missing. When we got to the cabin, it turned out we needed a Sno-Park pass. The list goes on and on. It was one minor thing after another all day long.

Eventually we got to the ski mountain and had a GREAT time. Kyle got to take his very first ever snowboard lesson and he had a blast. Karen and I skied together for a few hours and then we split up for the last few hours of the day. I skied Sierra from top to bottom non-stop several times. The longest run on the mountain is over three miles in length and it took a considerable time to go that far. As I write this, my legs are sore from the exertion but I’m already looking forward to our next ski trip!

Despite the multitudinous minor setbacks, Kyle’s cabin is ideally located for a trip to Sierra. I hope we can do it again before the winter ends. Although at the current rate, the winter should be over in about a month.

In other news, about a week ago, I ended up leading a Warband in WAR and figured out why WAR’s RvR won’t work for casual players. See, I’m no stranger to leading groups. In Camelot, I knew so much about the game that people would just start following me and even thought I would never ask to lead, I always ended up leading a small group around, roaming and killing other people... or attacking and capturing towers… or seiging or defending a castle. WAR, on the other hand, has “warbands” which is 24 people in a single ubergroup. Despite that, the options of “what to do” when you have a group are much much more limited than Camelot. You pretty much can’t attack a keep unless you have a full warband, and if there is even a small defense force, you need two warbands. The parallel to a Camelot tower would be the WAR battlefield objective, but even one full warband is overkill for that and they become trivially easy. Open field player-vs-player fights are few and far between; the only place you really find enemy players is either at a keep or an Objective. So the group size is either optimally a small group of six (and limited to Objectives) or a huge zerg of 50+ people and limited to keep takes. The moderately sized group of a dozen people really doesn’t have any fun options.

To make matters worse, once you’ve captured the keeps and objective in your area (which takes about an hour total) there’s nothing left for you to do! So unless you just happen to be online at the right time, you’re basically stuck with all of the fun stuff already done, or not enough people to try doing it. This really is going to hurt the casual player who can only play for a few hours at a specific time every day. If it isn’t the “right” time, they’re never going to see any of the fun content. And that’s a shame because the fun stuff is REALLY fun. I wwas left very disappointed with the leadership experience.

Finally, I’ve been playing a small MMO called Wizard 101. It’s a totally kid-based MMO that strips away all of the fancy graphics and complex gameplay. It’s is basically a MMO skeleton. It still has all of the basic MMO concepts and gameplay paradigms, but without the “flash” to distract you. It’s actually quite entertaining.

They’ve done several things which I find simply amazing to keep it kid-friendly and kid-safe. Even something as simple as name generation has been sanitized and modified to prevent abuse. Chat doesn’t use a blacklist of “bad” words, instead it uses a “white list” of allowable words. And even then, “bad” combinations of “good” words are still filtered out of chat.

The core combat mechanic is a collectable-card game or CCG. Like any CCG, you have a “deck” that you build from cards. During each 30-seocnd combat round you choose to play one card from your “hand” which is exactly six randomly selected cards from your deck. Your deck size is limited by your equipment, and the cards that you have to choose from are gained as you level up. So when you start the game you have a deck with a maximum size of 10 but only five cards to choose from (each card can be put into the deck a maximum of three times). By the time you reach level 10, you can buy a deck size of 20 and you should have around 15 different card types… AND you can put up to four copies of each card in your deck. The effect is that as you level up and gain additional cards and a larger deck, you see a nice steady progression of power.

Of course, when you strip away the trappings, you get to see the MMO skeletons in the closet too. Like all MMOs, this one is not immune to “the grind”. There comes a point in the game where you aren’t doing anything new, you’re juts finishing things up and the challenges aren’t very challenging, they’re juts taking time. That’s “the grind” – you just “grind” out the gameplay to move on to the next area. Some people would say this is a pacing “problem” but its part-and-parcel of every major MMO out there today and I think that perhaps MMO designers have gotten a little too stuck on the idea.

To me, the fun part of the game is seeing my character grow and advance. When I get a new spell, or a new attack or even new equipment, I’m happy. When you start out, advancement is fast and furious. There is an imperative to give the player the basic toolset to compete as quickly as possible. Once past that, you’re going to see “fluff” advancement, upgrades to existing abilities and bigger versions of the same thing you already had. And to keep the player form finishing the game in just a few sessions, the advancement slows to a crawl. When you are level 1, you might need to kill ten snakes to get to level 2. When you are level 100, you might need to kill 100,000 snakes to get to level 101. In theory, this is supposed to simulate that it is harder to learn to become a master than it is to become an apprentice. In reality, it’s just a artificial way to stretch out gameplay and keep people paying monthly subscription fees. That’s “the grind”. And it is just as annoying in a kid-friendly MMO as it is in a major MMO.