Monthly Archives: May 2011

Introducing KiaSAplayer for Kinect.

We here at KiaSA Industries Inc. have been hard at work on the next evolution in MMO optimisation for the past year, and we’re pleased to finally announce the imminent release of KiaSAplayer 1.0 for Microsoft’s “controller-free gaming and entertainment experience”, Kinect.

What is KiaSAplayer?
KiaSAplayer is an artificial intelligence learning system that uses Microsoft Kinect’s visual recognition system paired with our patented robotic USB KiaSArms to learn and play raid boss encounters in World of Warcraft in the most optimal fashion. Using the Kinect camera, the KiaSAI will perform all the keyboard and mouse interactions required to complete a raid boss encounter within a 0.34% tolerance of ideal spreadsheet-planned strategy.

What can KiaSAplayer do for me?
Have you mastered looking up strategies for your class on Elitist Jerks? Tired of being the very best at copying the precise talent spec and gear list required to be accepted by elitist players? Well, KiaSAplayer takes you to the next level by removing you from the game altogether!

Humans are inefficient and prone to mistakes, and despite a naturally occurring ability to learn and adapt, developed through millions of years of evolution, they still aren’t as optimal or accurate as a simple machine when it comes to performing rote repetitive tasks. KiaSAplayer will make you the best that you can be, by removing you from the equation for success.

Before: YOU + OPTIMAL CHARACTER COPIED FROM EJ + TANKSPOT STRATEGY + RAID = WIPE
After: KIASAPLAYER + OPTIMAL CHARACTER COPIED FROM EJ + TANKSPOT STRATEGY + RAID = SUCCESS

“Able to handle the most complex of optimised skill rotations, whether it’s 1, 1, 1, 3, 4, 1, 1, 2, 1, 4, or 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 4, KiaSAplayer relays a limited number of numerical keypresses with ruthless precision and has made me the optimal gamer that I am today” — Geoffrey Bethebest

And don’t worry, since KiaSAplayer is linked directly to the Internet it can download all the latest boss strategies from Tankspot, all the latest builds from Elitist Jerks, and all the latest excuses for why your class is underpowered from Blizzard’s forums! There really is nothing left for you to do but put your feet up, relax and wait for the pointless purple pixels to roll in.

Can I play my character at all?
We wouldn’t recommend it. Humans have a natural tendency towards curiosity, experimentation, exploration and adventure. These are dangerous, non-optimal desires which should be eradicated in such a serious environment as an MMO. After all, people’s lives are at stake here; the world economy balances on a knife-edge depending on the server-first success of the top 0.27% of World of Warcraft raid guilds; mankind’s greatest advances in the last ten years can all be directly linked to the crafting of a new Thunderfury; and our angry wrathful God can only be appeased – and the repeated threats of apocalypse averted – when raiders gain their latest Tier shoulders and quickly gem them according to the immutable holy law of the scriptures.

Buy now and get the KiaSAplayer Brian Blessed celebrity voice chat pack for only £4.95! Comes with 150 raid-ready voice commands that your KiaSAplayer can bark out over Ventrilo, including:
DEE PEE ESS… DIIIIIIVE!
NO, YOU FOOLS! GET OUT OF THE FIRE!
ARTHAS IS ALIVE?!
and many more!

Couldn’t I just dance around on the mailbox in Ironforge for a bit?
What if you type /dance incorrectly? What if you’re not perfectly aligned to maximise the number of viewers able to see your perfectly enchanted butt in all its ludicrously swollen glowing Tier X glory? Can you keep up the work ethic 24/7? Can you really stand the pace of mailbox dancing? Remember, everything in World of Warcraft is either serious business or worthless frivolity deserving of nothing but derision and ridicule. Mailbox dancing is no exception.

I’m sold! How do I begin KiaSAplaying?
Simply purchase your KiaSAplayer kit for £133.75, unpack it, place it in front of your PC, and follow the simple connection and calibration start-up guide.

What about maintaining my MMO subscription?
Not to worry, KiaSAplayer is Internet connected and therefore has access to all your registration and credit card details thanks to Sony’s innovative new Open ID database system. Once you’ve connected KiaSAplayer to the Internet it will update your MMO subscription automatically, and additionally purchase for itself any KiaSA Industries OPTIManALTM upgrades or peripherals, allowing it to play your game to the best of your ability to pay for it.

Can I at least watch my KiaSAplayer play?
We recommend not interfering in any way while your KiaSAplayer gains the transitory soon-to-be-made-redundant-by-the-next-expansion achievements, server ranking and laughable bragging rights that the top-tier World of Warcraft raiding business provides. Your best option is shutting KiaSAplayer in a room on its own and then taking yourself off and playing something else. How about a nice card game where competition and enjoyment are more important than simple optimisation, like Magic: The Gather… oh, wait. Well how about Settlers of Catan or RoboRally? Or a bit of Portal 2 co-op? You could even try raiding with friends, y’know, people you actually like, that sort of thing.

But without elite WoW raiding, how will I learn all the valuable life skills that it confers?
My dear customer, real life is already plenty full enough of people looking down on you and sneering because they feel they are superior within the bounds and rules that they have invented purely to make themselves feel superior. Why on God’s beautiful green Earth would you want to learn that from a game too?

Optimisation is passé, so don’t delay, buy a KiaSAplayer today!

KiaSAplayer: the optimal way.

Thought for the day.

“What’s fairly unusual about this within the realm of action RPGs is that really your character is three characters, because the team you select do not fight together, but can rather be swapped in and out of the fight at will. In certain situations they share abilities, too, so while you might be controlling claw-dude, you also get insect-tree dude’s healing AoE thorns to help you out. It’s a peculiar setup (like much of the game) but it works rather well, especially since you can swap out monsters to take on specific challenges as required.

It works even better in co-op, because the fact that you have three monsters in your pocket means that you can be the damage, or the tank, or the healer at any time. Need two damage dudes and one healer in your group? No problem! More tank, sir? It’s instant, and easy. It’s a splendid take on the MMO notion, but totally versatile and dynamic. This, I would argue, is one of a number of instances of superb design in Darkspore.”

             Extract from Jim Rossignol’s musings on Darkspore.

Since action RPGs are starting to inherit and experiment with MMO ideas such as the holy trinity of tank, damage and healer, perhaps MMOs could return the favour and start experimenting with action RPG ideas such as ‘totally versatile and dynamic’ game-play.

Starting out in World of Tanks

Tempted by World of Tanks, but don’t know where to start? Going to the website and downloading and installing the client is probably a good first step, after setting up an account of course. Assuming you’ve got a PC, that is. And an internet connection. And some biscuits. The biscuits aren’t essential, but you might get peckish; digestives are good, though difficult to dunk in a cup of tea unless you’ve got an especially large mug. Hang on, this has gone slightly off track, let’s assume you’ve managed to sort out an account, got the game installed, and you’ve started it up and logged in. And have some biscuits. Digestives or otherwise.

So, you start off with three Tier 1 tanks in your garage, one from each country currently represented in the game. I say “tanks”, that’s stretching it a bit; they’re more the inter-war experiments that generally pottered up and down in front of generals before slowly toppling over or sliding into a ditch while the generals tutted about them never replacing horses and swigged gin. Imagine a Morris Minor wrapped in aluminium foil for protection with a bloke leaning out of the window with a spud gun, that would be the sort of terrifying death machine you run away from in a Tier 1 tank.

Still, faint heart never won a 15 vs 15 arena-based armoured vehicle death match so pick a tank, hit the “Start Battle” button and get in there. It doesn’t really matter which nationality you choose, World of Tanks exists in a parallel dimension where German, Russian and US tanks band together to fight their common enemy: different German, Russian and US tanks. You should only get shoved into battle against other Tier 1 or Tier 2 light tanks, so at least everyone’s in the same boat. Or tank, as the case may be. Though everyone’s in a different tank, 30 people in the same tank wouldn’t work at all.

At the start of the battle there’s a 30 second countdown to allow the participants to prepare, discuss complex strategy and catch up on Twitter, when the timer reaches zero UNLEASH HELL! Or at least rev the engine a bit, drive forwards a few yards, stall, then drive into another tank, apologise, reverse into somebody else, apologise again, and then get into action. Actually you can’t stall, don’t worry about that, but it’s not a bad idea to wait a few moments for other people to move away. 15 tanks in close proximity all wanting to go in different directions often end up resembling Parisian traffic, with a similar level of collisions, gesticulation and shouts of “priorité à droite!”

While waiting for the chaos to subside, you can press F1 for a full list of controls. The important stuff is WASD for moving, mouse to turn the turret, mouse wheel to zoom in and out, left click to fire. Your team show up as green dots on the mini-map, the enemy (when discovered) are red dots; convenient red or green diamonds float over the top of tanks to make spotting them a bit easier, and if you have line-of-sight to a tank and move your cursor over it the outline glows red or green. Remember: green stuff is on your side (DON’T SHOOT IT!), red stuff is the enemy (SHOOT IT! LOTS!), if you’re red/green colour blind then things might be a bit trickier (though a game mod may help).

There are two ways to win a battle: destroy all the enemy tanks, or capture the enemy base. Bases are the big flags marked “I” and “II” on the map, if you park within the white circle that surrounds the enemy flag then a counter starts ticking up, if it reaches 100 you win. Charging headlong towards the enemy base usually isn’t the best plan, though, your opponents tend to unsportingly shoot you a lot, so better to focus on shooting them instead. This is where cohesive teamwork can really come into play, though in random pick-up matches there’s not too much chance of that; apart from anything else on the European servers you might be on a team with a mix of people who are fluent in only one of French, Polish, English or LOLSPEAK, so trying to give orders would take as long as getting the scores in the Eurovision song contest (“Attaque sur la droite! Atak na prawo! Attack on the right! LOL ATAK RITE LOLOL! Luxembourg, nul points!”) Probably the best thing for the first few matches while you get used to the maps is to try and follow two or three other tanks at a slight distance (so they get shot at first), and take random potshots at any enemy tanks that show up.

There’s a green circle in the middle of the screen around your gun sight, this is the shot dispersion circle. Your shot may end up anywhere in this circle, and friendly fire is possible, so be particularly careful if someone on your side is anywhere near the line of fire. You probably noticed the circle gets really big when you drive around, making it incredibly difficult to hit anything past point blank range; ideally you want to stop and let the circle get as small as possible before firing for the best chance of a hit, but bear in mind that being stationary also makes you an excellent target. After you fire the circle turns red and starts ticking around, once complete it turns green again and the gun is reloaded for another shot. The good news about the starting popgun is that it reloads quickly so you can blaze away, the bad news is you’re unlikely to do much damage, much like the German anti-tank gun “derisively dubbed the “Door Knocker” (“Heeresanklopfgerät”, literally “army door knocking device”) for its inability to do anything other than advertise its presence to a T-34 by futilely bouncing rounds off its armor”, but you might get a lucky shot, and it’s not like you’ve got anything much else to be doing.

Around this point some rotten bounders on the other side will probably be shooting at you as well, quite possibly leading to your unfortunate demise. After exploding you can keep watching if you like, but you don’t need to wait for the fight to end; hit Esc and leave the battle, you’ll still qualify for any rewards you earned, but you can pick one of your other terrifying armoured death leviathans and launch straight into another battle. The results of any previous fights will show up in the bottom right corner of your garage once the battle ends, so you can see later if your heroic sacrifice spurred your team on to glorious victory, and more importantly how much experience and cash you came out of the battle with. As you accumulate experience you can research upgrades for your tank, and as you earn cash you can buy and fit them; more on upgrades, tech trees, different tank types and advanced tactics (like “hiding in bushes”) in the next exciting instalment.

A player’s role is certain, rigidly defined, and perhaps unnecessary.

One thing that always stuck with me from my experiences with World of Warcraft pick-up groups was that in the vast majority of cases people referred to one another by their role or class, not by character name. ‘Healer you suck’. ‘Tank can’t hold aggro’. ‘Weak DPS’. In WoW, and many MMOs of the traditional form, the players pick The Rogue, The Priest, The Warrior, which are further generalised into The DPS, The Healer, The Tank. It’s akin to games such as League of Legends, where players pick a character type to play which primarily defines the player’s role in the group, the abilities they will have to available to them, and the general strategy they will need to follow; nobody in LoL picks Irelia, the Will of the Blades in order to expand on the story of her spiritual companionship with Soraka, the Starchild.

Admittedly there are many players for whom that is the desired system. But I also get the feeling, however, that an equally large portion of the traditional MMO player base desire not to be classified as a character type, but as a character; they want to be a Shepard, a Geralt, or an Altaïr. They wish to be a character, but in an environment where they can share adventures with other players.

It comes back to the thorny issue of defining what is meant when we say RPG. For some this is categorically defined by the role you play in a group, it is a system forged by levels and stats which enables you to fight dungeon monsters. For others, however, that is only one part of the definition, the other being about storytelling and playing a character.

In the case of role-playing, some people like to play the function, other people like to play the part. Role-function, and role-part.

I’m beginning to wonder if Star Wars: The Old Republic is meant to appeal to the latter audience. At the moment it seems to want to bridge the two, carrying with it much of the role-function baggage from the more traditional MMOs, while also trying to introduce the more character-focussed style of the role-part, more often encountered in single player MMOs. My concern is that, in trying to appeal to the general market of MMO players, Bioware have given up the chance to break the traditional mould and bring a truly innovative character-based RPG to the massively multiplayer genre. The danger is that TOR will frustrate traditional role-function players because it focuses too much on character and story and not enough on the optimisation of stats and abilities, while at the same time leaving enough of the relics of the role-function system in place to leave cold those players who want to play a part in a story and not concern themselves so much with increasing arbitrary stats in order to be able to defeat a dice roll. In trying to take a bold new direction, I wonder if Bioware didn’t free themselves enough from the shackles of the traditional MMO form, and will thus end-up pleasing nobody. At best they may have come up with the most expensive way yet for players to play alone, together.

For a pioneering role-part MMO for the mainstream market, we should perhaps instead look to the studio best known for bringing a successful MMO to the market which breaks many of the traditional MMO rules; CCP’s World of Darkness MMO will hopefully be influenced more by EVE Online and White Wolf’s Storyteller system than by World of Warcraft and Dungeons & Dragon’s munchkinised dungeon crawling, and as such will stand a better chance of appealing to that different but significant market within the MMO genre that Bioware were perhaps intending to target with TOR.

The clearest way to the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

After a week of holiday pleasantness I’ve once more picked up my adventuring in otherly worlds. I’m definitely in a Good Place with respect to my MMO habit at the moment, finding myself able to go out and wander around a zoo or arboretum without that subtle cloying feeling tugging away at me, whispering serpent-tongued tales of the levels and loot on which I am missing out. What would happen to the rat let out of its operant conditioning chamber and released to the wild? Would it run around the woods desperately pulling at every plant branch and stem, hoping for a pellet of food to drop out? Does the rat adapt once more to the new world that surrounds it, or does the world take on the form and function of the Skinner Box to the rat’s heavily conditioned mind?

Thankfully my own operant conditioning machine was waiting for me when I returned home, and so it was that I found myself staring at a desktop full of icons and not knowing what to do. The rat, thoroughly confused to be back in the chamber after its brief sojourn into the wilds, is now overwhelmed by the choice of levers to pull. So I played a sort of Russian roulette and the icon which ended up being highlighted was that of Everquest II Extended. I’ve dabbled in the game a few times, but this time I resolved to actually get somewhere, rather than spending seven straight nights in the character creator and then getting to level five before burning out. It helps that EQIIe has a limited selection of races and classes to choose from, and based on the fact that you have to purchase the others from the store or subscribe to the game, I made the assumption that these are the runt races and crap classes, from a popularity point of view. Then again, you never know with SOE, they hardly seem to be the Kings of Common Sense based on current events, after the debacle of the PSN break-in, their website currently reads:

We have had to take the SOE service down temporarily. In the course of our investigation into the intrusion into our systems we have discovered an issue that warrants enough concern for us to take the service down effective immediately. We will provide an update later today (Monday).

If the intruders had any sense of humour they’d break into that page and change it to an Epic Fail demotivational poster.

I picked a Half Elf from the runt races because it was the only race where I could make a female who didn’t look as though she was suffering the anaphylactic aftershock of being attacked repeatedly in the face by a bunch of botox-injecting bees. I did however have some free Station Cash from when I, like the rest of the world, logged in and played the revolutionaryTM Free Realms for the seven and a half minutes it took to complete the first four mini-games and reach the inevitable interminable grind. So I thanked my past self for suffering yet another massively multiplayer disappointment in order to give my future self (my future self in the past that is, who is currently my present self. Well, I say currently, but of course the self of me that typed ‘currently my present self’ is now a past self and this is my current self. This is my current self. This is my current se… okay, this could take a while) some Station Cash, and I went ahead and plumped for a Mystic, a shaman class of the usual sort: melee, healing, buffs, a familiar, the usual sort of hybrid affair. It seemed like the sort of class I could get on with, and if all else failed I could spend my time pretending to be a member of the Board of Shaman, DJing with my familiar, and shouting at random passers-by that they know nothing of The Crunch.

The previous time I tried EQIIe I went for the new starter area, assuming that it would be the best of the lot, and so I found myself at Pilgrims’ Landing in New Halas, the winter wonderland. Of course, there’s a slight issue when it comes to wonderlands and the wintriness thereof: snow tends to make everything look a bit… bland. Adventuring in a land where everything is white and indistinct because all the white blends into all the other white, and the few landmarks are big white things, next to large expanses of flat whiteness, tends to get me down a bit, a snow-blinding of the soul. My dreams were of fields full of vivacious colour and dappled light over which a cackling God of Winter came and ejaculated his cold whiteness until it blanketed the land. I decided to stop playing. Not least of which because I was always expecting to find a chapter of the K.K.K. around the next corner, and I was worried that my character was going to look to them like she was their Grand Poobah.

This time around I settled on the Nursery in Greater Faydark. I’ve always enjoyed the myth and legend behind the Fae in their many incarnations, so I headed to their home in EQIIe to see how the fair folk fared there. I haven’t got terribly far yet, but that’s because I’m taking my time and enjoying the journey. The class is fine enough, I’m low level so I can’t expect too much from it, but there are perhaps too many buffs and heals at this stage, and not enough attacks; obviously it is a support class, and support it shall, but EQII is not EQ, and despite EQ requiring players to group up just to navigate themselves past the login screen, EQII is quite eminently soloable, and thus the developers could perhaps have better considered the need for the more useful soloing abilities to be lavished upon the player before the more group oriented abilities were revealed. Still, the class can solo quite well, albeit in a terribly repetitive 1-2-3, loot, rinse, repeat, fashion for the time being. The joy I’m getting at the moment is from the forest of Faydark, with its tree city of Kelethin, and the atmosphere that has been created there. It’s very much the same sense of awe and wonder that I remember feeling when I entered Ashenvale Forest for the first time as a lowly Tauren, having spent my time up to that point running around the dry and desolate Barrens. It’s a combination of many things, the reverent ethereal ambient music, the magnificent magnitude of the expanse of ancient groves, and the fact that I’m probably just a sucker for the abundant mythical allusions that can be drawn from ancient woodland.

Of course it all broke down fairly quickly, stunned out of my reverie by NPCs who wanted me to run curious errands for them. More on that in the next post, but suffice it to say: they know nothing of The Crunch.