I dislike personalising disagreements. Sometimes though, the behaviour is so outrageous that avoiding that isn’t an option. This is one of those times. There is a gentleman, a maker of games, who has been quite unpleasant to some fellow bloggers I’m somewhat fond of. If you’ve spent 5 minutes in the MMOverse, then you’ll know who it is I mean. He is an expert is personalising arguments, so it is hard to not do so in return. My life has left me with a profound dislike of bullies who throw their weight around, and the inclination to stand up to them.
It is said that if you blog his name three times he will appear. And threaten to sue you. Frankly I don’t need to have to listen to his silly self-aggrandising nonsense here.
Anyhows, by way of venting, I present a brief guide to arguing with people on the internet:
2. If something bad has occurred, blame an underling. Force that underling to post an excruciating account of how everything is their fault, and how you should fire them. Make sure they point out how awesome you are. Remember, the credit is yours, but the buck stops anywhere else.
3. The best form of defense is attack! Claim the people who pointed out the bad thing you did to be the real villains, who desire nothing more than to bring down the giant of the industry that is you. Pay no heed to whether they or their colleagues have written rather generous positive posts, or even support your attacks on their fellow bloggers. Bridges are to be burned. You don’t need those nerdy gaming writers anyway. Not when you can just copy other people’s press releases.
16th of May Update:
4. If someone accuses you, with absolute proof, of plagiarising the words of Developer B, accuse Developer B of plagiarising from Developer A at location X. Make sure you insult your accuser’s journalistic integrity for not discovering this before posting. Even though Developer A was never AT location X, and has no recollection of saying it. Making stuff up about your fellow developers is just as fun as making stuff up about bloggers! (Awesome work there, n3rfed!)
In the last few days I’ve been revisiting Fallen Earth. I tried the trial for a couple of days a few months ago, but didn’t really get into it. Having scored a free month from Massively, I’ve come back to give it another try, and I’m finding it more engaging than before. Maybe I’m just in more receptive mood, or it could be something to do with all the patches that have been applied in the meantime. I’m having fun. And so is my horse.
Fallen Earth's version of Arkenor, with his trusty steed, Mintball.
It’s a weird game, in a good way. Combat is First Person Shooter style, which makes it both exciting, and usually quite short, one way or the other. If, like me, you’re not actually terribly good at FPS any more then this might give you some problems, but I’m slowly getting the hang of it again. Being a bit rubbish at combat is not necessarily a problem anyway, as you gain xp for harvesting and crafting. Not just crafting xp that only makes you better at baking cakes. The real stuff. Technically you could hit the level cap without very much combat at all, though harvesting ingredients does lead to the occasional unpleasantness with the local mutated fauna and flora, so you’d want to at least have some rudimentary combat skills.
Crafting seems quite deep, with just about everything in the game being craftable, and so many different ingredients that my bank is set to burst. To my joy, the only thing that stops me from working every craft is time, as unlike the other skills, crafting skills improve through use rather than needing points put in them. To craft an item can take a significant amount of time, but you don’t have to stand about waiting. You just set it off, and go about your business. You can queue up to 20 crafting jobs that will trigger in order, providing you have the ingredients in your inventory. How I am managing to bake and sew while riding about shooting things I am unsure, but it beats having to watch a progress bar. You continue to work through your crafting queue when you’re offline, which is particularly handy for lengthy jobs, like the parts I am putting together for building my All Terrain Vehicle. At the moment most crafting jobs takes between 1 and 10 minutes, but I think that will increase as I move to higher level items.
The game engine is smooth and pleasant, and the UI is responsive. Inevitably, given the setting, the colour palette tends towards earth tones, with very few bright colours. It’s a dirty, rusty, decaying sort of world, but perhaps if mankind can learn its lessons it will bloom again. It’s also a big world with, so far as I’ve seen, no instant travel. You receive a basic horse early on in your career, which makes this a lot less painful. Later you can get faster horses, and a variety of mechanical vehicles. At the moment that is quite sufficient for me, though I will be interested to see exactly how long it takes to get from the furthest high level reaches of the game world back to Sector One. Maybe we could try to get the old train lines working again.
This week there was a major patch called Blood Sports. The main feature is a sort of PvP arena that you can pop in and out of as desired. I haven’t tried it yet, mostly because I suspect it would involve a lot of me being punished for being under-equipped. I’ll check it out when I feel a little less like a puny newbie.
In addition, the level cap has risen from 45 to 50, and a new world area has been opened up to support that. That obviously doesn’t affect me too much either yet. There have also been a whole swathe of skill rebalancings, which probably do affect me, but I hadn’t had time to get to used to how they were before, so I probably won’t notice. The Fallen Earth 1.4 patch notes can be read in full after the jump.
If you fancy checking this rather unique MMO out, there is a ten day trial available over on the official website.
Warhammer Alliance has been serving the needs of the Warhammer Online community pretty much since the game was announced. In an astounding move today, Games Workshop has filed a lawsuit against Warhammer Alliance demanding it hand the site over to GW, and pay damages. Curiously they’re also insisting on a trial by jury, in the US state of Maryland, which is likely to be inconvenient for the defendants, and makes the whole business much more expensive.
There are some obvious flaws in the lawsuit. It claims that the domain was registered in 2009 with the intent of cybersquatting, but a whois check clearly shows that the domain was registered in 2004. Not to mention that I know the site is older than 2009 because I’ve been posting there a hell of a lot longer than that. It is a provably false claim.
In this post Mark Jacobs, producer of Warhammer Online, laid out why there would be no official forums. Oh, and he posted it ON WARHAMMER ALLIANCE. IN 2008.:
That’s why I don’t want to have official forums. Whether it was SOE, Blizzard or us, official or semi-official forums are exactly like I described above for every successful MMORPG that I have played or watched from afar (and that is *most* of them). The unsuccessful ones were even worse. The problem is that most people who read the boards are looking for information and a reasonable number of people want to cause trouble, “grief” the forums or simply get their jollies by saying and doing things that they wouldn’t do in real life. As usual, a small percentage of people make life more difficult for everyone else. Back when games had hundreds of people playing, well, no big deal. We ban those guys and life returns to normal. With millions of subs for WoW and hopefully lots and lots for WAR, well, it becomes much more complicated, difficult and soul-sucking for the devs and the community people. I wouldn’t want anyone to go through what Sanya and I had to go through (and she had it worse since she is a woman and that brought out the worst in some people) in the early days of DAoC. How she and other community managers put up with the kind of name calling, insults, vulgarity, profanity without losing their minds is amazing.
So there were no official forums. Instead, fan-based ones were intended to fill the gap, and this was encouraged by Mythic, who got all the benefits of a forum without having to pay to host or staff it. Warhammer Alliance ended up being the main one of these, being used by the developers to interact with players. Games Workshop is SHOCKED that a forum for Warhammer Online might mention Warhammer in its name. If mentioning the name of the game that you are about is indictable, then just about every game-specific website is in a whole lot of trouble. Will they go after Warhammer Vault, or Warhammer Stratics? The Warhammer Online wikia? They all carry at least as many adverts as Warhammer Alliance.
Last year, in an about turn, Mythic decided it wanted to have official forums after all, but that clearly does not suddenly cause existing forums to retroactively become inappropriate.
It has been a couple of decades since I stopped liking Games Workshop terribly much. They used to be a nice little independent gaming company here in the UK that railed against the unfair practises of the big guys, such as TSR (remember them?). It didn’t take too much success before they became “the man”, and realised how high they could push their prices (I used to pay 50 pence for 3 lead miniatures), but this lawsuit is outrageous, even for them.
It is unclear at this time as to whether Warhammer Alliance will dispute the claim. Given the potentially crippling costs of defending this suit, I would not blame them for just backing down, even though it would be another victory for bullying corporations. I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t be certain of the lawsuit’s legal merits, but it is certainly a disastrous bit of public relations.
The full text of the lawsuit is after the jump. The legalese will make your head spin, or at any rate it set mine into a whirl, but it is worth a read.:
I will get around to continuing my Mortal Online exploration. I’ve still not hit the play button, so as to see it with fresh eyes.
I’ve been distracted by the small matter of the UK General Election. Voting is today, and I shall be spending tonight glued to Mr David Dimbleby and his gang on the BBC, as the results come in. In preparation I have a bag full of comfort food, as I doubt it is going to be a pretty business for a progressive.
In honour of the day, here’s a little thing I made a couple of years ago, after Liberal Democrat finance-wizard Vince Cable suggested that Gordon Brown was very much like Mr Bean. The government had just lost millions of citizen’s financial records, and in the US a new catch-phrase was sweeping the land: “Don’t tase me bro!”.
Mortal Online is a sandbox-style skill-based MMO developed by Swedish developers Star Vault. With the client available for download from their website at the moment, I thought I’d take a bit of a peek. I’ve not really been following it, so it’ll be a voyage of adventure.
As ever, this is still open beta, and things are subject to change. Originally due to launch last year, Mortal Online has been delayed several times with its last promised release date March 2010. No new release date will be announced until a desync issue is cleared up, giving time for any problems to be dealt with. I can only look at what is in front of me though, but I’ll try to be fair.
So let us begin.
Mortal Online - Race Selection
First you pick your species. We have good old humans; the Alvarin, this land’s version of the elves; the Oghmir, who seem to be hairy beastmen; and the Halfbreeds, who are ostensibly half-orcs, but look rather reptilian to me. I’m going to be boring and go with a human.
Mortal Online Character Creation - Picking your bloodline.
Next you pick your race and age. As a human I can choose up to 4 bloodlines in my ancestry, each of which will affect my cap in various stats. The first race you pick also determines what appearances you can choose from. Your age also affects the stat caps. Generally speaking, the older your character, the higher his intelligence and psyche can go, but you start losing physical attributes.
With that sorted, we move on to deciding his appearance.
Oh. Oh my.
I’m not a prude. Really I’m not. I just wasn’t expecting to suddenly be confronted by fully modelled male genitalia. It’s polite to give some warning. In the interests of keeping this blog vaguely safe for work I won’t embed the screenshot, but you can see it here. Female characters are equally unclothed. It’s not awful or anything. Just seems a bit unnecessary, and I could see it putting some folks off.
Anyhows, there’s the usual collection of sliders (though thankfully not for *that*), and hair choices, though having only ten hairstyle options seems a bit limited these days. Finding it quite difficult to create an educated looking fellow with what’s available. You can only change your face, rather than your body, so I won’t be able to be mildly overweight as I like to do when given the option. Nevermind. This slightly wild-looking beardy chap will have to do. Hopefully they’ll let me put some pants on soon.
I notice that when I move the camera, or spin him, it takes his hair a little while to catch up with the rest of him, like an ill-mannered wig. Hopefully that doesn’t happen in the game proper. I had a bit of a problem at this point, as when I finished designing my character, the next button in the top right refused to acknowledge being clicked. Starting over from scratch and trying again had the same problem. Eventually I got it to work on the 4th try, though I’m not sure what, if anything, I did differently.
We next pick a starting profession. Mortal Online is skill-based, rather than class based, so this just decides what skills and equipment we start with. My acolyte, starting with some basic magical ability, can later learn anything the blacksmith apprentice or scout can.
Lastly, you choose your first name and surname, and your starting city. I was expecting at this point to also select my Deva name, which is a sort of shared soul between all your characters, but it appears that fascinating idea may have been dropped.
So far, I have mixed feelings. It is glitchier and has more placeholder information than I would expect at this stage. Still, there does seem to be a decent base, and character creation, while vital to get right, is less important than what you experience in the game itself.
I still have no pants, but I appear to have mugged a caveman and stolen his Flintstonesque mandress. Tune in next time, as I hit the “Play” button.
I’ve been suffering from a lack of strategy gaming, so I picked up UFO:Extraterrestrials on Steam this morning. I love the old XCOM games, and the Aftermath series was also passable, so I figured I’d give this more recent remake a try. This was a mistake.
It started with some of the worst voice-acting I have ever sat through:
And it carried on from there, badly lacking polish of any sort. And this was UFO:Extraterrestrials GOLD, the improved version. You should not be able to fail with a UFO game, but they had somehow made controlling your squad so painful and joyless, paired with graphics and animation straight out of the early 90s, that I could not go on. It felt like shareware, and not in a Commander Keen / Doom sort of way. A waste of good money. Bah.
I hate titles like that, as they always make me want to just say “No, it probably hasn’t.” While I suspect history is far more interesting than we know, I’m not so up for evidence that has been rustled up with folks with the agenda of proving that our planet is less than ten thousand years old. I believe many wonderful things, and hope many others are true, but I have trouble with that one.
As it happens, I am considered one of the world’s leading experts on Arks of all kinds. OK, both kinds. The floaty type*, and the sort that blow things up and melt Nazis. I must be considered an expert on them because people from around the world are constantly coming to my website to seek my opinion on them, at least according to my site logs. Thus far they have been sorely disappointed, but today I shall grant their pleas, and I shall try to focus my deep understanding of Arkaeology upon this new discovery.
It is in the right place. Noah’s Ark was supposed to have come to rest in the mountains of Ararat, currently in Turkey, of which Mount Ararat is a part. This Ark has been found inside a glacier, and is apparently in quite good shape, considering. A glacier could help to preserve organic material, though glaciers, being ever in motion, are also rather good at grinding things apart into gravel.
The team, a collaboration between the Turkish Government and the China-based Noah’s Ark Ministries International Limited, won’t tell regular scientists exactly where the site is just yet, but they have provided some photos. Let’s take a look!
That certainly is very well preserved. From what I can see, it is taken inside the ship, in a cabin perhaps. The raised platform could be a bed, or a bench. I’m particularly impressed at the freshness of the straw, presumably left over from feeding the animals, of which you will recall there were 2 of each kind, except for animals deemed to be clean, of which there were 7. I’ve often wondered how Noah got his hands on polar bears. Carefully, one would suppose. The straw could also be bedding, I guess.
I’m unsure exactly what the structure in the middle of the picture is. It might be some sort of odd chair, but it looks a bit too complex for that. Probably is a container. I want to call it a chest, given the shape. Perhaps Noah kept his precious booty within it.
The team reports that carbon dating has shown the wood to be 4800 years old; more or less what you would expect it to be if it were part of Noah’s Ark. Curiously, and with splendid irony, carbon dating has been thoroughly debunked by creationist scientists, who say that it will always make objects appear to be far older than they really are, if they are from before the biblical flood, as they believe there was much more carbon about pre-flood. As the wood used to build the Ark quite obviously grew and lived pre-flood, it is odd that they have suddenly forgotten this objection. If carbon dating is reliable, then it shows the world is far older than 10,000 years, and if it is not reliable, then why are they using it?
In another part of the structure they have found a massive chamber.
To give you a sense of scale, a diagram shows a human coming up to about halfway up one of those horizontal bands, with the picture being about 7 people high. That’s a big…something. I’m not too sure quite what to make of it. It looks like three bands of vertically aligned, um, planks? It’s not clear how those bands are joined together, or what is stopping it from collapsing. It seems a very odd way to build a sea-worthy vessel, especially if that banded wall is the outside of the ship.
It looks almost like those wicker or reed blinds you can get, if you bashed them around a bit, soaked them in tea, and covered them with mud, even down to markings that resemble where the strings would go. Of course, those blinds are much smaller, and the diagram clearly shows that this chamber is huge, even more so if you consider where the camera would have to be to take that picture.
Also, what is going on with the floor? After 4800 years it still seems completely flat, but it has a weird texture to it. It doesn’t look like a ship’s floor. Almost like cobblestones. Even more like dungeon tiles.
I am, perhaps, being a little mean. While the pictures do look rather too good to be true, the involvement of Turkish governmental scientists does suggest this isn’t all just a hoax. Unless these governmental scientists happen to work for the Turkish Ministry of Tourism.
My Expert Arkaeologist opinion? Lets call it 3 doves out of 5. It’s a better effort than the rock that looked a bit like a ship that they found last time. If it is genuine, it might well be a find of great interest; an ancient building perhaps, but I’m betting against it being a ship.
*The Ark in my site’s title is supposed to, metaphorically, be of the floaty persuasion. A fine vessel with room for all in which I sail about in search of true things. I suspect certain of my readership might think it more as something which shoots gouts of flame.
