Monthly Archives: May 2008

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Monday

Monday, 1322 hours
Huh? Where am I? What’s… man, I must’ve just dozed off there. What time is it? Half one, phew, only lost a couple of hours. /played time is… 70 hours 52 minutes? My god! It’s Monday! I’ve lost an entire day. Thank god it’s a bank holiday, I used up all my leave this year on the stress test. And that day where I stayed home refreshing the browser ever 2.3 seconds applying for closed beta. And they demand a signed note from the doctor after all that sick leave I took for the last game launch, it’s like they didn’t believe I happened to catch the Black Death and malaria the same week it launched.

1324 hours
Good news is, I fell asleep onto the keyboard, so with the continuous input at least my character wasn’t automatically logged out. Login time saved right there.

1326 hours
Even better news, I feel asleep onto the “turn right” and “attack” keys in the middle of an area with respawning mobs, and I’ve gained two levels in that time. By my calculations, the XP gain per hour improved by 4.3% in my sleep. Some might say that shows gaining levels requires no skill whatsoever and is merely a function of time spent in game, but it’s obvious that I’m so uber I don’t even need to be awake to show off my mad skillz.

1328 hours
Getting a bit rancid, maybe I should go for a shower? No way, can’t afford that much time. I’ll give myself a quick spray of deodorant.

1329 hours
Turns out I left the deodorant upstairs. Can’t spare the time to go and get it. Sprayed under my arms with the compressed air I use to blow dust out of the PC case, that’ll do.

1334 hours
Right, level 48, just two more levels, here we go now.

Montage ensues, to the soundtrack of..

Grinding, grinding, grinding,
Grinding, grinding, grinding,
Grinding, grinding, grinding,
Ecks Peeeee!

Grinding, grinding, grinding
Though the sun is blinding
Grab the loot I’m finding, Ecks Peeee,
Pick up fang and paw and feather,
Then skin ’em for the leather,
And onto the next bunch on the map,
All the things I’m craving,
Arenas, housing, raiding,
Are waiting right at that level cap,

Slash ’em up, loot the corpse,
Loot the corpse, slash ’em up,
Slash ’em up, loot the corpse,
Ecks Peeeeeee,
Kill the mobs, sell the trash,
Sell the trash, kill the mobs,
Kill the mobs, sell the trash,
Ecks Peeeeeee,

Keep slaying, slaying, slaying,
No matter what they’re saying,
The vendor keeps on paying, Ecks Peeeee,
Don’t try to understand ’em
Just stab, loot and frag ’em
Attack anything that isn’t tame,
My add-on’s calculating,
There won’t be much more waiting,
‘Til I’ll be a part of that end game,

Slash ’em up, loot the corpse,
Loot the corpse, slash ’em up,
Slash ’em up, loot the corpse,
Ecks Peeeeeee,
Kill the mobs, sell the trash,
Sell the trash, kill the mobs,
Kill the mobs, sell the trash,
Ecks Peeeeeee!

2359 hours
Level 49 and nine bubs, nearly there!

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Sunday

Sunday, 0000 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Five levels to go.

0100 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Five levels to go.

0200 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Five levels to go.

0300 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Five levels to go.

0400 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Five levels to go.

0500 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Four levels to go.

0501 hours
Belay that, still five levels to go. Turns out it was actually church bells ringing, not the “ding” sound for level 46.

0515 hours
DING LEV… no, wait, church bells again.

0530 hours
DING LEV… no, wait, church bells again.

0545 hours
More church bells, well, they’re not catching me out this time!

0547 hours
Turns out I dinged level 46 two minutes ago.

0600 hours
Still grinding mobs for XP. Four levels to go. Haven’t slept for thirty hours, but no ill efefcts notiacble.

0700 hours
Stlil grindign mobs fro XP. Fuor levesl to go.

0800 hours
Stlil ginrdign mbso fro XP. Furo lveesl to og.

0900 hours
liSlt gdnriign smob rfo PX. ruFo lvesle ot og.

1000 hours
liilt gdnrSign sofb rmo Pu. rXFo lveoes tl og.

1100 hours
WWWWWWWWWASADWASDAWDWSDWADASWDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD[text buffer overflow]

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Saturday

Saturday, 0000 hours
Just a couple more quests and I’ll be able to participate in open-world PvP… ahh, the cut and thrust of dynamic combat against a thinking, cunning opponent, that’ll be the stuff, none of this tedious, repetitive grind, killing ten rats, twenty bats, thirty gnats (tricky one that, until I found the Flyswatter of Insecticde), forty hats. I don’t know why they restrict it anyway, they should let anyone of any level join in! The whole world should be at war! Only cowards don’t want to join the glorious battle!

0047 hours
That’s the 50 Slightly Bigger Rats Than The Previous Set Of Rats Tails handed in to the NPC, DING LEVEL TWENTY ONE! To the zone with open PvP!

0051 hours
Zone loading… zone loading… here we go, oh yes, this is the life, watch out foul enemy, I’m coming for… what? I’m dead? DAMMIT stupid bug, I’ll just rez and… I’m dead again, huh? Combat log… Aragown hit you with a fireball for 5,407 points of damage? NAME VIOLATION REPORTED TO GM! /who Aragown… level 37? Already? What sort of sad case is level 37 already? Hm. Looks like he’s walking off, OK, I’ll rez and… Ouragon critically backstabbed you from stealth for 7,123 points of damage?

0134 hours
GM Neville: How can I help you?
STry1d3rrr: I keep getting killed!
GM Neville: By other players, in an open PvP zone?
STry1d3rrr: Yes!
GM Neville: I’m afraid that is working as intended.
STry1d3rrr: But… they’re higher level than me!
GM Neville: Yes, due to customer demand, PvP is totally unrestricted in this zone. Is there anything else I can help with?
STry1d3rrr: Well… the people who keep killing me also taunt me by then making a nice cup of PG Tips!
GM Neville: Yes, I suspect they’re quite surprised by the result of the /teabag emote as well.

0158 hours
“… in conclusion, the concept of open world PvP is reddikyouless, and the devs are idiots for including it.” Post to forum, click.

0243 hours
Thank god, I managed to get out of there while the gankers were occupied with another dumb schmuck who stuck his head in at level 21. Right. I’m going to get to the level cap in PvE, then I’ll show them.

0317 hours
60 Even Bigger Than The Last Lot Of Giant Bat Fangs handed in to the NPC

0442 hours
70 Quite Similar To The Last Lot Of Rats, Only Wearing Stilts So They’re A Bit Bigger Tails handed in to the NPC

0610 hours
80 Tails From Giant Rats Dropped Into Combat By Giant Bats and 80 Fangs From Giant Bats That Drop Giant Rats Into Combat handed in to the NPC

0723 hours
Dead rats, dead bats, what d’you think about that, huh? Fat cat in a top hat, thinks he an aristocrat, yeah, c’mon now.

0724 hours
Maybe I should lay off the ultra-caffeinated energy drinks.

0916 hours
The next quest line’s in the farmyard muck
Fetch the farmer a rabbit, a chicken and a duck
Feed the sows and the cows and the farmyard cats
Kill some hogs and some dogs and the farmyard rats
Jug the hares, catch the mares, grow a pound of pears
Sheer billy goats in hairy coats
You get a horse (of course) and a ton of turnips
DING LEVEL 35!

1438 hours
If there are 1,000 other players on this server, running the same quest lines, I calculate we will have wiped out the entire animal population of the world seven times over by the time we’re all level 25. Also, the bandit groups in Forest of F’tang must have had, at the very least, 97,000 members (assuming a consistent drop rate of one bandit badge per 2.78 bandits). No wonder the three members of the village militia need our help holding them off.

1515 hours
Level 42, oh yeah, feel that percussive slap bass.

1636 hours
Time since parking the car on the drive with the game: 28 hours, 16 minutes. /played timed: 28 hours, 9 minutes. Must work on that seven minute gap next time. Note to self for next game release: leave a front window open and remove windscreen from car. If I don’t wear a seatbelt, I can ram the car into the wall, and the momentum should fling me straight out, through the window and into position. Clear three minute saving.

1928 hours
Levelling really slowing down now. Quests getting harder to find, almost like the developers had concentrated more on the earlier zones in the knowledge that normal people would take three months to hit level 40 so there’d be time to patch more content in after release. Reactions also dulled by fatigue.

2345 hours
Ding… level… 45. Quests… totally dried up apart… from Mayor Placeholder… who requested… Set Quantity Here of Select Body Part Or Generic Possession from Choose Mob Type. Must… keep… grinding…

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Friday

Friday, 0000 hours
AT LAST! All the waiting has been worth it. The last three years, hanging off every tantalising rumour, every bit of concept art, monitoring seven forums constantly, devouring every word from the developers, reading the double meanings in what they say, the triple meanings in what they didn’t say, applying for super secret closed testing, applying for the closed beta, applying for open beta, subscribing to FilePlanet just to get the chance of a key for stress testing, planning my main character, planning the alternative builds for my main character, planning my main alt, rehearsing in my mind the exact clicks and keypresses to complete those initial tutorial quests in minimum time, I AM READY! GAME SHOP, OPEN YOUR DOORS, RENDER UNTO ME MY PRE-ORDERED GAME, PRE-ORDERED COLLECTORS EDITION OF THE GAME, PRE-ORDERED BONUS PRE-RELEASE PACK, PRE-ORDERED PRE-RELEASE DELULXE PRE-GAME T-SHIRT PRE-ORDERED POST-RELEASE SPECIAL EDITION USB PERIPHERAL oh and that Nintendo DS Nasal Training game with Smell-o-meter plug-in.

0001 hours
Seems the game shop doesn’t open until nine o’clock.

0900 hours
COME ON, OPEN THE DOORS, IT *IS* NINE O’CLOCK, THIS WATCH IS SYNCHRONISED WITH AN ATOMIC CLOCK, YOU KNOW! Yessssssssss, here we go, grab the stuff, hand over two month’s salary, back to the car, GO GO GO!

0930 hours
Really, officer? That fast? But it’s an emergency! It’s release day! Even now, the slavering hordes are at the gates of our territory, don’t you see? We must smite them back, DRIVE THEM INTO THE SEA, KILL THEM ALL, MOUNT THEIR MANGLED SKULLS UPON OUR PIK… ow! Ow! There’s no need for handcuffs really…

1430 hours
That trip to the police station has really put a dent in my plans, I’m going to have to triple box levelling just to get back on track, right, main character. Race, sorted, class, yes, name, “Strider”. What do you mean, it’s taken, I’M ALWAYS STRIDER! Dammit. Right. “Aragorn”… taken. “Eragon”… taken. “Drizzt”… taken. “Perrin”… taken. “Garion”… taken. “Belgarion”… taken. “Balinor”… taken.

1452 hours
… taken. “STry1d3rrr”… YES! I HAVE IT! I AM STRY1D3RRR! To the initial quest giver, click, click, yes, click, over here, click, I know, I know, land in mortal peril, kill three gobolds JUST GIVE ME THE QUEST, click, click, my god so many noobs OUT OF MY WAY BOZOS, DO YOU NOT SEE MY DELUXE COLLECTOR’S SPECIAL EDITION PRE-ORDER PRE-RELEASE CLOAK OF A VERY SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT HUE TO THE NORMAL ONE click, click THAT’S MY GOBOLD DAMMIT, click, NO I DON’T WANT TO DUEL, attack, attack, YES! I HAVE KILLED HIM! I AM THE MIGHTY GOBOLD SLAYER, TREMBLE, WORLD! Loot, my god, two copper, this sucks the loot is terrible I got three copper in beta THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!, next gobold, GODDAMN KILLSTEALER right that’s you reported to the GMs, over there, a character called Strider? Reported for naming violation! Anyway, next quest, next quest, come on, I’m seveteen seconds behind schedule as it is!

1924 hours
LEVEL ELEVEN, YES! Two minutes eight seconds behind schedule, but I can make up some of that by not bothering to boil the kettle for this Pot Noodle and just chewing it straight out of the cup.

2149 hours
Haha, the noobs are thinning out now, my uber-levelling skills honed in beta are paying off. Hmm, a whisper from Aragone NAME VIOLATION REPORTED TO GM, “Hi there, want to team up to take on Gutstomper?” Reply: “LAWL NOOB no wai I’m totally going to solo Gutstomper”

2154 hours
“… in conclusion, I am disgusted by the riddickyewliss adjustment in the difficulty of the Gutstomper encounter since beta there is no way it should have been changed even if the quest did indicate it is for five man groups and it was an obvious bug that caused him to repeatedly play the /dance emote instead of attacking players.” Post to forum, click.

2157 hours
Whisper to Aragone PETITION TO GM UPDATED HIS NAME HAS NOT BEEN CHANGED YET: “hey i will help you with Gutstomper if you really need but i get first roll on lewt”

2359 hours
Not a bad day, some time made up after the initial delays, good thing there was a buy one get one free offer on UltraCaff SpazzJuice so I had extra empty bottles, that shaved a good minute off allotted Waste Evacuation breaks. Soon I’ll hit level 21, then I can get to the serious PeeVeePee instead of this lolnoob PvE stuff!

Hooked on Earphonics

I’ve never been much of an audiophile. Maybe something to do with growing up with cassette tapes, and early music collections largely consisting of C60s full of stuff taped off the Top 40 (listening in, Record and Play depressed, Pause button on, finger poised, hoping they’d announce the track name before the intro so you’d have some warning, isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Jumpers for goalposts etc.)

For wandering-around-style audio I stuck with a tape walkman for a long time, up to the late 90s, but eventually getting tired of taping my CDs just for the walkman I tried a portable CD player for a bit. It was bulky and vulnerable to skipping when jolted (or knocked, or tapped very gently), necessitating balancing it on top of the head and walking around like a girl at a Swiss finishing school. Excellent for posture, I’m sure, but a touch inconvenient. Fortunately MP3 players were just starting to take off, so I soon ditched the CD player for a Rio 500. With a massive 64Mb of onboard memory, I tinkered around with bitrates when encoding MP3s to squeeze as much as possible onto it, and found an audiophile-horrifying 112kbit/s fairly listenable (though even my tin ears couldn’t take 96kbit/s). With such a range of not-especially-high-fidelity sources there’d never seemed much point getting earphones of stunning clarity, so my prime criteria was “whatever happens to be cheap at Dixons/Argos/Poundland/Some Random Market Stall”, which would invariably get a dodgy connection within a few months, and when eventually no amount of twiddling would get sound back in the left ear it was on to the next bargain set. Moving on from the Rio to hard-drive based Archos and Creative units, space was no longer an issue so I went crazy with higher bitrate MP3s, but stuck with cheap headphones, until a few years back I got an iPod, and with it a rather splendid gift of Shure E2c earphones.

As opposed to the “sort of nestle in the outer ear”phones, like the set that come with the iPod, the E2c are “sound isolating earphones”, or “canalphones”, or “shove ’em right into your lug ‘ole”phones. They come with no less than nine types of sleeve (three sizes of each of three different types) to get a good fit in the ear, and it took a fair amount of fiddling to sort out the most comfortable set of sleeves and to adjust to the sensation of having something wedged in the ear. Once used to them, though, they were excellent; they substantially cut down on background noise, making it much easier to listen to spoken word like stand-up comedy or podcasts while out and about without cranking the volume up to crazy levels, but it’s not total isolation to a dangerous “not hearing traffic” level, you still have awareness of what’s going on. In an open plan office they’re perfect for cutting down general background chatter, likewise on planes, trains (and automobiles, if you’re a passenger and not keen on the driver’s musical selections). Piping the music directly into the wearer’s skull cuts down on the noise for everyone around them as well; I used to sit near a chap, and while it was fun identifying the CD he was listening to from the tinny version emanating from his earphones, the Shures would have been most helpful (to replace his earphones, not to strangle him with the cable, why would you possibly think that?) Speaking of the cable, it’s nice and long, long enough to stretch from an iPod in cargo trouser pockets without having to wander around with a permanent hunch. Sound quality, as I think we’ve established, isn’t my strongest point, but for what it’s worth I’d say it’s very good. Better than Poundland Deluxe Specials, at any rate; I’ll leave in-depth debates to the expert Amazon reviewers (LAWL TEH BASE SU>< ).

Three years on, the original set are somewhat battered from almost daily use, with several bits of tape covering breaks in the cable shroud, and the jack bends at a curious angle, presumably from a time when they were connected to a PC and I decided to wander off without removing them… Despite all that they still work, but when I was buying a bunch of stuff from Amazon and poking around the site, as you do, I noticed they were doing Creative EP-630 shove ’em right into your lug ‘olephones for all of seven quid, so I thought I might as well grab them as a backup, just in case. The Creatives aren’t bad headphones at all; sound-wise, I can hardly tell the difference between them and the Shures (unsurprisingly), but the cable’s just a smidge too short to be ideal, they’re not quite as easy to fit (less to get hold of when shoving them into the ear), and the Shures are designed so the cable loops over the top of your ear, so if an earphone comes out it helpfully dangles there rather than plummeting to certain doom. I’ll keep the Creatives as spare backups, but I’m really comfortable with the Shures now, so I got another pair of E2cs. Just in time, it turns out, as they’re now discontinued in favour of the SE range.