Monthly Archives: June 2007

We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it

After a bit of Lord of the Rings Online over the last few days, I’m not sure I’ll spend much more time in Middle Earth. It’s fun enough and all, but really just more of the same old MMOness. Van Hemlock has a great post, with a quote about Tabula Rasa: ‘…but Garriott emphasizes that the traditional trading of blows while keeping a sharp eye on your health, shortcut bars, and not much else is just “not great gaming.”‘ That echoes what I posted myself last week about graphics, ‘the “oooh, pretty landscape!” effect wears off the 17th time you’re running from Bree to the North Downs, and combat involves more squinting at health bars and cooldown timers than admiring flecks of realistically rendered spittle from the Warg trying to bite your legs’.

I think part of the problem is the class I picked, a Captain. I specifically didn’t choose a DPS class to break out of my comfort zone, and have come to the frankly shocking conclusion that I’m more comfortable *in* my comfort zone. Captains, being a sort-of-support class with a few heals and buffs, are particularly prone to the combat-as-staring-at-health-bars problem, but I don’t think it’s only the class that’s the problem. I was on a run through the Great Barrows, and it was just a bit… meh. Not much variation in encounters, no great excitement, couple of bosses, this one spawns waves of non-elite beasties, hey ho. Boss encounters in particular can be really dragged out affairs, due to power problems; you can either go in all-abilities-blazing, be out of power in the first 30 seconds and spend the next couple of minutes auto-attacking every three seconds, or carefully husband your power, which involves… auto-attacking every three seconds, to maintain enough power for an infrequent heal/special attack/buff application. There’s nothing really frustratingly terrible about the game, but then there’s nothing spectacularly good, and different, enough to really keep me there. Still, a change is as good as a rest, and has convinced me my forte lies with classes that don’t need you to pay any attention to anyone else’s health bars.

There’s always something to keep me in City of Heroes, though; the costume creator, if nothing else. I’ve been there three years now; I can tell, ‘cos you get Veteran Rewards every three months, and I’ve just got the “Addicted” badge for 36 months subscription. It’s just so pick-up-and-play-able… log in, select mission, beat up wrongdoers. I’ll probably mix that up with some single player gaming for a bit, while keeping an eye out for new stuff to play.

The world inside MMO bags.

Bags are big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big bags actually are. Outer space is nothing compared to the inside of an adventurer’s backpack (with apologies to Douglas). The wondrous thing is that – even though players are allowed to equip not one but many of these hugely incomprehensible, vastly improbable and wholly fantastical containers of every otter spleen and troll bunion that you grab as you roam the lands – the biggest complaint about bags is that they don’t have enough space.

The humble bag is the stalwart companion of adventurers everywhere, yet it goes unloved and unnoticed. Unnoticed, that is, until the day the adventurer needs to pick up that ultra-rare epic item and finds that they don’t have any bag space.

The Encyclopaedia Melmothia states that the average adventuring bag contains 16 slots, of which one slot can contain any item, up to and including an armoured chest piece. Let’s take a very rough estimate of a solid plate chest piece as being 1.5ft x 1.5ft x 0.5ft in size, or 1.125ft^3. Assuming perfect stacking, we can fit sixteen of these in a backpack without air gaps between them, so that’s a volume of 18ft^3 for the backpack or approximately 510 litres. There’s a special place in the Inferno for those of you checking my calculations in order to nitpick some minor mistake in this stupid example. Now, the bigger, more ludicrously sized real world backpacks that I could find from a brief search on Google were between 200-300 litres. So your average adventurer is carrying a pack which is about twice the size of that. Actually I’m wrong: adventurers are generally carrying four or more of these bags, which is about 2039 litres, or enough space in which to park a good size family saloon car.

Why is it that you can’t put items into a bag that is currently being carried in another bag? Well, imagine the potential recursion there, it’s like ‘crossing the streams’ of a pair of proton packs: if you could put items into a bag that was already in your inventory the first thing you’d do is fill your sixteen slot bag with sixteen slot bags; each of those bags could hold more bags, until eventually you’d have enough space to hold the entire world, at which point it would rip a hole in the fabric of space-time, opening a portal into the dark recesses of the cosmic nether, from whence Beryl Reid will come forth and dance the seven steps of chaos that will bring about the fiery doom of the universe.

Could happen.

Curiously, to my knowledge, nobody has considered the concept of ‘bags as weapons’. Considering the cubic volume that each slot of a bag can contain, all the budding Lord of All Destruction need do is fill each slot with iridium. The bag is now so heavy that, assuming they could find a trebuchet powerful enough to fire it, it would not just breach a castle’s walls, but entirely obliterate it and several miles of surrounding countryside. And that’s just a two slot ladies purse… Find a trebuchet powerful enough to overcome the planet’s gravitational pull on your main backpack, and you would cave-in half a continent with a crater to rival that of the Barringer Meteor. The strange thing is that in many games these adventurers, being of that stock that can perform heroic feats, can carry these backpacks around without batting an eyelid. So all they need to do is run up to the top of the cliff (for they can run everywhere when carrying that weight) and leap off, cannonball style into the castle beneath. Judges award extra marks for style and crater depth.

So don’t let me hear you complain about ‘falling damage’ either, because technically when you jumped off that small hillock, you shouldn’t so much have landed as plummeted, thundering through the planet’s crust on your way to the core.

Technically, with that volume of space, you could get inside your own bag. You’d only take up a couple of slots, and then all your friends could carry you around! Better still, you could all get in, take a slot each, stick a couple of wheels on and you’ve got yourself a mode of transport. Just whip out that horse you conveniently keep in a slot in your handbag, attach some reins and away you go.

Slots themselves are curious defiers of the nature of space: some items such as potions will stack, such that you can carry enough in a single slot that it would probably match the volume of our example chest piece, but then some seemingly random small items, such as fish eyeballs, won’t stack. Thus you have an entire slot taken up by something that would comfortably fit up your own nostril. Yes, it would fit comfortably. No, don’t ask me how I know this. It seems strangely accepted throughout the MMO world that you can have a sixteen slot bag full of sixteen pieces of heavy plate armour, or the same sixteen slot bag full of sixteen fish eyeballs.

Bags are curiosities for sure.

So next time you run out of space in your bags, remember, you’re actually getting a pretty good deal in general, and if you continue to complain then Beryl Reid will come and smack you with her handbag.

And you don’t want to know how many slots that thing has.

Get sick, get well, hang around a ink well

Another weekend without much to report, this time from being wiped out by a cold/flu-type-thing, which with typically marvellous timing has worn off just in time to get back to work again.

I did get as far as signing up for the Warhammer: Age of Reckoning beta on Friday, prompted in no small part by Paul Barnett’s evangelising as typified by the latest video podcast linked by Melmoth. I’m still weighing up my “to be(ta), or not to be(ta)” policy, and although, rationally, I tried to argue with myself that it’s better to give a game a while to mature rather than charge in to the almost-finished version, I put forward what I considered to be quite a strong counter-point, that with two very distinct factions it should be possible to play one during beta without “spoiling” the other for launch. This approach worked fairly well for WoW, as the guild I was in were going to be Alliance, so I played various Horde characters in the two open betas. Then again, I’d definitely decided to play a Hunter in release, and was therefore playing a Rogue for a change during beta, and that didn’t quite turn out as planned (as Victor Kiam might have said, if he’d played WoW a lot rather than buying Remington, “I liked it so much, I carried on playing a Rogue after release!”)

You looked for work and money and you walked a rugged mile

I haven’t had much free time for proper adventuring in Lord of the Rings, but I have been doing a bit of housekeeping; selling off old quest rewards I’d been keeping around “just in case”, auctioning assorted bits of dropped loot, storing some potentially useful things in the vault, and spending some time in the craft hall turning bagfuls of ore and hides into assorted armour pieces.

This seems to involve an awful lot of running around. As far as MMOG towns go, Bree seems pretty similar, size-wise, to Stormwind or Ironforge, but the Lord of the Rings town planners could learn much from their Warcraft equivalents. (If there are any town planners. I don’t think I’ve encountered them as NPCs, I’d probably remember quests like “Go and tell the bloke at number 37 he didn’t get planning permission for those fortifications so he’ll have to take them down”, or “Compulsorily purchase these three properties so they can be knocked down to make room for a bypass”). In Stormwind, the hearthstone point, bank, auction house and gryphon point are pretty close to each other. In Bree, everything is miles apart, it’s like the place was designed by some evil PE teacher. “I’ll just do a spot of crafting!” *run to the crafting hall* “Ah, I need a Deranged Wombat’s Nose for this item, I’ve got one in the vault. I’ll just go and fetch it!” *run halfway across town to the vault* “Oh. No. It’s a Morose Wallaby Nose I have here, my mistake. Hmm… maybe I could get the right nose at auction…” *run three quarters of the way across town to the auction hall* “Nope, no Deranged Wombats here. Oh well. I’d better go hunt them in the North Downs. At least I can ride there… from the stable right slap bang diagonally over in the other corner of town!” (Though at least in that last case, you can ride from one corner of town to the other for a mere 1 silver).

In the process of making bits of armour, I progressed from Journeyman to Expert in both Tailoring and Metalsmithing. One quick tip here: as you get near the next “tier” of a crafting profession, it might be worth having a quick look at the quest you’ll be sent on to get to the next level (there’s a splendid guide which seems pretty good for listing them). The Metalsmith’s Expert quest, for example, “Will of the Iron, Part II” involves making a Feather Weight Shield, which needs an iron chain, steel braces and an iron band; had you known that *before* you got sent on the quest, you could have made those components in order to gain the skill necessary to be given the quest in the first place. If you see what I mean. It’s a bit Catch-22. Not that it’s a disaster if you haven’t made the items already, but as you can’t develop the crafting skill any further until you finish the quest, any potential skill gains are wasted, which is a little annoying.