Ark's Ark

I’m Also Proud of the BBC

As most of you know, I’ve been doing work for the BBC for a decade or so, but I’ve been a staunch supporter and fan of the Corporation since long before I ever had any connection to it, and I get quite nervous – and more than a little angry – when the knives come out for the BBC, as they very much have been of late. It’s particularly annoying since the Beeb, as a public service broadcaster which is (in effect if not strictly technically) more or less publically funded, is never in a position to defend itself, even against its most partisan critics.

So I thought I’d write something which expresses how I feel, and how I believe a fair majority of the British public feel, not that you’d ever know it from reading the papers (who, needless to say, have their own entirely selfish reasons for wanting rid of the BBC). I wrote this song, Proud Of The BBC, and we’ve been doing it on our current tour. The response the song’s been getting has taken me completely by surprise (standing ovations, people wiping away tears) and I’ve realised I may actually have started a bit of a “movement” here, so we’ve decided the song has to come out as a single, and that means making a video. – Mitch Benn

It’s sometimes hard to explain to non-Brits how central the BBC is to the life of our nation. I feel an attack on the BBC almost as if it was an attack on a member of my family, which is a bit of a problem considering the BBC is attacked constantly.

The BBC is under threat like never before, with talk of privatisation. The BBC can’t defend herself due to impartiality rules, and most other media outlets (especially those owned by Mr Murdoch) have their own reasons for wanting her destruction. The hope is that the public will be able to show our support by getting this song to chart when it is released at the beginning of November. I want the BBC to still be around for future generations, and not just another sad tale of something special that was lost.

Let’s do this thing!

New Minecraft Hell Dimension details released.

( Update: Hey, Minecraft Hell fans! The Halloween update has launched, and I now have a video of my first adventures there! )

Notch has just released this picture of the new Hell Dimension which will be part of Minecraft’s Halloween update. We already knew that Hell is a parallel dimension to the main Minecraft world that you will be somehow able to “step sideways” into, and back. It has the property that a single square there is equivalent to a much greater distance, allowing it to be used as a dangerous form of fast travel around the world.

â€œIf you are going through hell, keep going.â€ - Winston Churchill

It’s impossible to tell from that picture whether we’re in a canyon on the surface or underground. It is possible that Hell might not even have a sky as we know it. We can see no water, nor vegetation. Bare rock, and lava are the order of the day (or endless night). The ground burns, and the very walls cry out for mercy. Churchill’s advice is apt. It does not look like somewhere you would want to spend a great amount of time. Only the brave, or foolish, would choose to use it’s space-warping properties to travel quickly around the main Minecraft world, and even they would not tarry.

â€œIt is occasionally possible to charge Hell with a bucket of water, but against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vainâ€ – Doris Fleeson

Would one bucket be enough? I think I’ll fill my inventory with buckets of water before I visit that tumultuous place.

I have some other musings on the Halloween Update here, in episode 10 of my Minecraft Video series.

DDO: European players are still hanging in Limbo.

It has dropped a little off the radar, so let’s catch up with how the transfer of European DDO accounts from Codemasters to Turbine is going.

Essentially, it isn’t.

On August 19th, 2010, the European Dungeons and Dragons Online servers were shut down, meaning that the characters that European players have been playing since launch were lost to us. We are still waiting for our characters to be transferred, as promised, to the US servers.

What will happen to European characters?

Character data from the Codemasters European DDO service will be passed to Turbine after the Codemasters Online service is closed on August 19, 2010. We will be providing free character transfers to the new global service and players will be notified when the character transfer is available. As a welcome and thank you, Turbine is offering all current and former European players 5,000 free Turbine Points, worth nearly â‚¬50, when they transfer their character(s) to the global DDO service

We haven’t got those points yet either, seeing as we can’t get them until the accounts are transferred.

I have to ask “What the hell is going on over there?”. How hard can it be to convert/merge the character databases? Maybe it is really really hard, but if that is the case then they shouldn’t have shut down the European servers until it was ready! The players may have had minimal warning about the server shut-down, but Turbine certainly did not, and should have gotten the processes sorted.

I don’t know whether it is Turbine or Codemasters that is responsible for all this. They won’t tell us which it is, so I’m inclined to blame both.

The flow of information has been terrible, and any European player who dares ask about it on the US forums gets shouted down and told to reroll. Imagine, their characters have essentially been deleted, and wanting to know when they can have them back is considered to be unreasonable. I appreciate that going F2P has given DDO so many new players that keeping hold of old European players might not seem worth troubling over, but it has left a rather ashen taste in the mouths of many players. Turbine have not played fair with us. As European players we’re pretty used to getting the short end of the stick from US developers, but losing your characters for 9+ weeks is particularly special.

Unfortunately, Turbine has adopted a rather weird attitude towards us. This was a response to a European’s complaint that all Euro characters will end up on the Ghallanda server, and if we want them to end up somewhere else we have to pay $25 per character.

Originally Posted by Tarrant
We’re actually giving you your characters, and $50 worth of points, for free. If you don’t want to transfer your characters, you don’t have to. We’re not charging you anything, and are in fact making a kind gesture by bringing them here and giving you points.

Mr Tarrant. You obviously feel that we’re terribly ungrateful for the bounty you have bestowed upon us. Let us be clear here. YOU (that is, Turbine) chose to sell the rights to DDO in Europe to Codemasters, and YOU blocked Europeans from having a US DDO account even if we wanted to. (Until F2P began). Then someone , either you or Codemasters, decided to end that deal and shut down those European servers. I’m not privy to what went on within your companies, but I’ll tell you one thing I’m sure of: It was not the players who decided to go shutting the servers down. What you call a kind gesture, I call the bare minimum that I would expect, and that was when I thought the transfer would happen on the same day the servers were shut down. The eight week wait takes it far below what I would consider the bare minimum.

A kind gesture? What was the alternative? That you’d just shut the server down and not take the opportunity to gain all of Europe’s players, every one of them a fee-paying subscriber? That you’d make it known that you were happy to just shut down European servers at will, with no recourse for the players? That would have killed Euro-Lotro overnight. If you don’t actually want European players, just say so!

Please do not call how European DDO players have been treated “kind”. It just comes off as incredibly patronising. They’re paying customers who have been messed around on an epic scale.

We’re told that transfers will begin on the 25th of October. I truly hope it goes smoothly.

Update: The transfers have happened now. I’ve written an up to date guide for European players who move to the US servers here.

Videopost: Minecraft, Day 10

I completely failed to do much of any interest in this episode. I chat a little bit about the upcoming Halloween expansion, and for some reason I keep calling gravel “granite”, which does nothing to make me any more intelligible.

On Self-Awareness

Sometimes, when the gaming news is uninteresting, I begin writing a post telling my fellow gaming bloggers to stop writing posts that tell other bloggers what or how to write. Within it I also protest how everyone else always generalises wildly. While doing that I make sure to throw some disparaging comments at “gamers”, even though both I and the readers fall into that category. Of course, I’m talking about those “other” gamers, not us.

Fortunately, my brain always shuts down from irony overload before I ca

The Return of the Card Strahd.

Just a quick post. I was chatting about Ravenloft on Twitter, and I happened to mention that I owned a lifesized Strahd von Zarovich that used to sit next to my gaming table as I terrorised my players in an AD&D campaign each week.

Now, you can’t go around making such incredible claims without providing some sort of proof. Thus it is that the Cardboard Count has returned from his exile in an upstairs cupboard, and once again roams my halls.

The Card Strahd Strahd Von Zarovich 550x732

The Card Strahd in full wobbly rage!

Question: Is Notch the Zoology Dragon?

It’s an important question that just occurred to me while I was contemplating the universe in the bath. This song pre-dates Minecraft by several years, but there are a number of striking similarities. Most notably that both Notch, creator of Minecraft, and the Zoology Dragon invent animals THAT ARE MADE OF CUBES!!! They have even both worked on the Cubification of Cows.

Cow. Cube. Cowuube.

Perhaps it would be best if we take the Zoology Dragon’s warnings seriously, and pay attention to the surface tension as we interact with the many creatures within the World of Minecraft.

Alexa