Ahoy! For whatever reason I’ve not much felt like posting recently. Given that I rather fancy watching some Colbert report, and that means posting it here, I thought I’d better write a proper post first!
I’ve not logged into WAR since I went to visit my Dad over Christmas. His computer can’t handle it, so I took EQ2 along, figuring I’d have a fiddle around with the Frostfell events during any break from filling my face with food, watching Sci-Fi (a great weakness of both me and my Dad!), and arguing geopolitics.
I only played maybe three or four hours during the week I was there. When I got back to Norwich, I just kept on logging into EQ2.
So, I keep meaning to log into WAR. I don’t hate it, and my subscription is still running. I do also still quite want to become the greatest Engineer on my server, but you can only really play Warhammer Online during prime-time, because you can do very little of interest on your own.
EQ2, on the other hand, I can always be doing something that feels fun and productive. It is, of course, not productive in any world-improving sense of the word, but it is at least fun! Maltheas has done more quests than anyone else of his level on any server, and I take a certain amount of satisfaction in that. I can chat to people I like, and shut the idiots out. I can turn off all the global chat channels without missing out on anything I need to know. In WAR, I have to work with those idiots, which I find a little stressful, and I think that is probably what is causing me to hesitate when my mouse-clicker is hovering over the WAR icon. I just have enough negativity to contend with at the moment without foolish Order faction nonsense. I do need to get back to it though, seeing as that’s what all my friends are playing at the moment.
Apparently today is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. I have been a bit on the rubbish side since I got back, as may have been concluded by my lack of posting. Amongst other things, the war in Gaza has made me rather miserable. How reasonable the Israeli PR folks make it sound to kill a thousand people, including over 300 children. Cluster bombs and white phosphorous have been rained down upon one of the most densely populated places in the world. In a sane universe there would be prosecutions for that sort of thing.
Tomorrow things change. Change for the better, perhaps. I am filled with hope and dread, for I find it hard to place my faith in anyone, god or man, and deep down I expect to be disappointed. Yet deep within, there is a small voice which whispers “Cometh the hour, cometh the man!”. Our world is teetering on the edge of multiple precipices, and it is now that we need a hero to lead us through all the sacrifice and joyous endeavour that will be necessary. If Obama can do that, and lives up to all our hopes, what a story that would be for future generations. If he turns out just to be another politician, then I’m doubtful of there even being many more generations.
Think happy thoughts. We’ll find out very quickly which path he will tread.
The only half-decent version of the Gloucestershire Wassail I could find. There are about a thousand choral attempts at it, but for me that is the opposite of what a good wassail should be.
Of course, in the Old World of Warhammer, there is no Christmas, but every race has it’s own way of marking the Winter Solstice. For the Dwarves, it is the opportunity to finish off last year’s ale. It is more than an opportunity; it is a holy task. The harvest of the past Autumn has been laid in enormous vats and barrels, lazily fermenting. Soon it will be ready to drink, but first it must be transferred into kegs and casks for storage and transport. So it is that at the Solstice, the Dwarves make a point of emptying their kegs to make way for the new ale, in a tradition known as Keg End.
A good Dwarven ale keg can be centuries old, and will have been reused every year, with each previous brew still lending subtle notes of flavour to the new ale. The oldest kegs are prized possessions, honoured above even hoarding gold, having been passed down through several generations of a clan. In the ale that is poured from them can still be tasted the slightest echo of the brews of old.
The festival is therefore not named for being the end of the keg, but from the tradition that, in order to get every last drop, the keg is turned up on its end. To waste the smallest amount would be an insult to the ancestors, and is considered an ale-crime. This is why Dwarves often challenge manlings with “Are ye goin’ ta finish that?”, before, indeed, finishing it. The ancestors demand no less.
Continuity and tradition are central to the Dwarven character. The true meaning of the Keg End celebration is to welcome the ale of the New Year, but to always remember that the new is born from the old, and carries within itself all that was best of that which came before it.
A tense moment at the Sony World Chess Championships
Thankyou SOE for giving me an excuse to recycle old pictures! It turns out all the slippery slope arguments I made (Dig back a few posts in my EQ2 category for a whole host of yelling on the subject) back when the Exchange servers were being launched were right. Want some xp? You can now buy xp potions straight from SOE for a few dollars using Station Cash.
“Station Cash is your virtual currency to buy in-game items!”. Hmm, is it really a virtual currency when it is gained in exchange for dollars at a cost of $1 per 100 Station Cash. If the conversion rate is set in stone, then it isn’t another currency at all. It’s just dollars using a funny name. Calling it virtual just tries to make it feel less like spending real money.
At any rate, I hate this whole business passionately. When xp bonus potions are available at an extra cost, it is in the interest of the company to design the game so that xp is in short supply, to encourage people to buy them.
A level playing field for both friendly and unfriendly competition with other players has always been at the core of the attraction of MMO. That is why so many people object to gold selling at a visceral level. It feels like cheating. Well, it was cheating, right up until SOE came out and said it’s alright to buy in-game advantages with real world cash.
We’ve been sliding down this slippery slope since the Exchange Servers, via the collectable card game, Legends of Norrath loot cards, and it will eventually end up with anything in the game being available direct from the developers for a price. PvP will be decided not by skill, but by who has the deepest wallet, and that makes me very sad indeed.
In preparation for patch 1.1.0 we’ve now opened the European Test Server, Shifting Isles. This server runs on a Core rule set and while it’s in English, players from any language community are welcome to join the server.
To participate in the testing process either create a new character on the Test Server or copy an existing character from the Live servers to the Test Server.
To copy a character. follow these simple steps:
Go to the “My Account” page
Click the “Character Server Copy” button at the end of the page
Select the character you want to copy
If the name already exist on the test server you will be prompted to change it
Confirm
Note that only rank 10+ characters can be copied to the test server.
To connect to the test server launch testpatch.exe from your WAR install folder. Note that you don’t need two separate installs. Warpatch.exe will keep connecting you to the 1.0.6 Live servers.
Naturally, any progress you make with a character on the Test Server will not carry over to your original character on the Live servers and vice versa.
Please remember that the version of the game running on the Test Server is a beta version of an upcoming patch and therefore everything is subject to change.
See you on the Shifting Isles!
The character copying page seems to be up and running, so I’ve sent Osgard over to perform some investigations! See you there!
Amusing as ever, though I felt rather bad for Colin being dragged out in front of the camera like that, especially when he is not responsible for the QA failures. Coding errors do happen, as I know to my cost from my modding. That’s why you always test thoroughly before you unleash your work upon the public.
What I did not hear, and what I did not hear from Mr Jacobs in his post below, was any sort of apology for wasting our time for the last two months.
Folks,
Paul and Colin were trying to be funny. That’s Paul’s style and Colin is one of our most trusted, talented and valued guys. If they can poke a little fun at things…
And by the way, Paul also makes fun of himself and doesn’t take himself too seriously (well, most of the time ).
Bugs happen, design errors happen and nobody’s perfect. Well, except for some folks on the Internet who never make mistakes at their jobs and neither should anybody according to their posts.
A sense of humor is a wonderful thing and necessary, especially nowadays.
Mark
Thing is, if they actually did apologise, I’d accept it. Taking responsibility for your mistakes, and then apologising is the mature way of dealing with situations like this. Instead we have the bizarre spectacle of a company director telling his customers they need to get a sense of humour, and that they aren’t perfect, so they have no right to expect a product that works properly.
We’ve been saying it was broken for a very long time, and Mythic refused to listen. The central reward mechanism for RvR was completely broken, and nobody at Mythic noticed. I find it irritating that Jacobs chooses to turn the attack back upon the critics, rather than admit that the failings were serious.
Some people, whose blogs I will not link to, have known how to game this broken code and assure themselves of the gold bags. This knowledge has been passed around quietly and looking back now I am fairly sure I have seen people in Keep attacks I have taken part in using the technique. Honest players have lost out.
Mythic’s QA clearly did not perform any reasonable tests upon a vital component of RvR. We have been constantly assured that it was working as intended. We have gotten to this point where it (maybe) is getting fixed, two months after release, only because the players have had to force Mythic to listen to us by raising an unholy fuss on forums and blogs. Maybe we are arrogant back-seat drivers without the talent to make a game as wonderful as WAR, but we were also right.
Mythic needs to start listening more. If the news over at the Warhammer Alliance is right, an official forum in in the works, which may make this easier.
Update: Sometimes posts appear on some other WAR blogs that bare a striking similarity to what I write here. Often I expect it is simply synchronicity, or great minds thinking alike. I do, however, just want to point out that the time-stamps on this site are UK times, and the time-stamps on the other blogs may be US times, so you need to convert to decide which of us posted first. Just worried people will think it’s me copying them.
Yes, it is December once more, and as usual, Matt over at X-Entertainment has succeeded in making me feel nostalgic for the days I spent as a teenager in the US. The UK never really had a lot of video game advertising on the television, but in the US during kids TV, we were barraged with everything from Nintendo, to Atari, and then back to Nintendo again, because actually that’s pretty much all there was. Every game was presented as if it was the greatest creation ever conceived of, and to be honest they were often pretty cool. Twenty years on though, even I have to look at them and wonder what the heck we were thinking:
“Ms Pac Man, don’t you know. Is more than just Pac Man with a bow.”. Which was good, because I don’t think the video-game world was ready back then for it’s first transvestite hero.
Holy crap! It’s Mr Hooper from Sesame Street! You can trust Mr Hooper to not be selling you a lemon. Mr Hooper would never lie to us.
My favourite moment is when the annoying small child says “Those are supposed to be ghosts.” Even she knew that they just looked like coloured blobs on the horrible Atari 2600 version.
As I’ve mentioned here before, in the 80’s, if something were even slightly popular with kids, there would eventually be a breakfast cereal made of it:
