The Google search term “squirting blondes” resulted in a hit on this blog.

Blog level +1

It happens that I was in a troll temple the other day, killing the trolls there. Not in real life, of course. That would be silly. In real life I was leading a secret monastic sect of knights in a raid through the forgotten sewers of old London against the forces of darkness. As you do on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Anyway, I can’t remember if there was a reason for killing the trolls other than they seemed fair game at the time, what with me being an adventurer and they being monsters with hideous 80s-throwback hairstyles, enough reason for any man or mouse! So there I was killing indiscriminately when a patrol rounded the nearest corner. Now these fellows were pretty tough, and I had been carefully (read cowardly) picking my fights in order to maximise a one-on-one engagement of the non-matrimonial variety. “I’m fair rumbled”, I think to myself in some sort of bizarre Olde English that I only use when thinking to myself, but I’m determined to finish the fight before the inevitable trolling that will shortly be forthcoming. I dispatch the troll that I’m fighting and, thinking that running away like a four-year-old is the better part of valour, I head pell-mell to the nearest safe spot. I then watch in mild wonder as the patrol walks right up to the spot where I was just fighting, where the broken and mutilated corpse of what I can only assume was one of their temple co-workers is laying, have a bit of a look around, you know because they’re on the lookout for trouble here, and then turn right around and wander back the way they came.

One can only begin to envisage the scenario back at Temple HQ:

Chief Troll: “Right you two, you’re on patrol duty around the temple perimeter. Any sign of trouble and you raise the alarm, ok? Think you two knuckleheads can manage that?”

Timothy: “Sure thing, Chief”

Trevor: “Yeah Chief, no problem”

<Timothy and Trevor wander around the perimeter>

Timothy: “You’re a peon at work. Good. Good. And you’re another peon, well done. Ok”

Trevor: “You’re a guard, that’s fine. And here’s a priest, lovely. Lovely.”

Timothy: “And here we have the corpse of Tony, who appears to have been smashed to a pulp with a large blunt instrument of war. Ok, good, good.”

Trevor: “Well I think that’s everything, shall we head back to base, Tim?”

Timothy: “Sounds like a plan to me, I’m dying for a nice cuppa.”

<Back at base>

Chief Troll: “Back already? Well, report you two.”

Trevor: “Nothing untoward, chief, ten peons working, five guards on over-watch, four priests on duty and the horribly bloodied corpse of Tony from human resources.”

Chief Troll: “Tony is a corpse?!”

Timothy: “Well… yes. We thought it was ok though, there was nobody about so we thought it was probably nothing.”

Trevor: “Yeah, he probably tripped and fell on a stone tablet.”

Timothy: “Five or six times until his skull was… oh dear…”

Chief Troll: “I’ll say it’s ‘OH DEAR’. GET BACK OUT THERE AND SEE WHAT’S GOING ON.”

<Trevor and Timothy make their way out again and return shortly thereafter>

Chief Troll: “Well?!”

Timothy: “It’s ok chief panic over, there’s nothing.”

Chief Troll: “Nothing to report? Well that’s a relie…”

Trevor: “No chief, there’s nothing out there. You know, they’ve all gone.”

Chief Troll: “Gone, whaddya mean gone? The peons aren’t working?”

Timothy: “Gone chief.”

Chief Troll: “The guards, where are they?”

Timothy: “The guards are gone chief.”

Trevor: “Well that’s not strictly true, Tim, Toby was there.”

Timothy: “Ah, that’s true.”

Chief Troll: “Well that’s something, get him in here so that we can find out what’s going on.”

Trevor: “Ah, well there might be a small problem, you see it was only his head.”

Chief Troll: “Only his… well where’s the rest of him?!”

Timothy: “Gone, chief.”

Chief Troll: “GET BACK OUT THERE AND DON’T COME BACK UNTIL YOU HAVE SOME INFORMATION.”

<Five minutes later Trevor comes back>

Chief Troll: “WHERE’S TIMOTHY?!”

Trevor: “Who? Oh! Well, he was here when I left, I just didn’t notice that he’d gone.”

Chief Troll: “GET. BACK. OUT. THERE. BEFORE I TURN YOUR NIPPLES INTO BATH PLUGS.”

<Four hours later and there’s no sign of Trevor or Timothy>

Chief Troll: “Marvellous. Just… marvellous. I suppose I should raise the alarm, and go and see what’s happened.”

Chief Troll: “Or I could just carry on standing in the same spot I always do, and wait to see if anyone turns up. After all, it’s probably nothing.”

Either there’s a severe shortage of recruits for the position of guard, or Tony in human resources drew up the most bizarre list of requirements for applicants:

‘Can’t see over fifteen feet in front of you? Total lack of spatial awareness and inability to hear anything quieter than a demi-culverin fired three inches away from your head? Unable to identify the sights and sounds of comrades being slaughtered nearby unless you’re within spitting distance? Join Her Majesty’s Royal Troll Guards today!’

Often you’ll find guards standing outside a gate, usually there’s two of them – one for each side of the gate, just in case anyone tries to sneak past! – and they’re standing about five feet from one another. Now, get yourself within fifteen feet of them and they both rush after you like rabid bees, all furious activity with the pointy hurty parts and intent on destroying their enemy. For about another fifteen feet in a straight line, then of course they get bored and go back to standing around. But if you pull one of them, and for those of you not familiar with MMOs, pulling is just an MMO term for fighting like a pussy:

“Théoden King! Helm’s Deep is breached and the hordes are through to the keep!”

“Ooooh dear. Well there’s quite a lot of them, I suggest we hide back here, and try to get the attention of one or two at a time. Perhaps throw rocks at them from a distance and make rude insinuations about their heritage.”

“My liege?”

“You know, we’ll just hide back here as a group, trick one or two into coming and we’ll slaughter them in a heroic and testosterone-laden manner. Then we’ll trick another couple into coming and do the same to them.”

“My king, there are ten thousand orcs at the gate, surely…”

“Ten thousand you say? Hoo! Well, we’d better get started, this could take forever. Pull!”

Anyway, pull one of them from a distance and as long as you’re more than fifteen feet away then many-a-time just the one guard will run off down the hill as the other one stays put. You then proceed to slaughter the guard, with up to five or six of you ganging-up and making the poor fellow literally explode in a crimson blossom of corpse petals along with all the associated death wails and blood-curdling, ear-ravaging battle cries (although the latter is usually just me on Skype, I tend to get a bit carried away when playing as a dwarf) whilst their colleague stands at the gate and doesn’t bat an eyelid. You can imagine them standing at the gate when their friend runs off down the hill, and they’re calling “Doug? Doug?! Where are you going? Fine, sod you then if you’re not going to tell me!”, and then when their colleague is screaming in agony and to all twelve gods of the Umbra to save them, the guard back on the gate is saying “No Doug, I’m not coming now. You had your chance, but you chose to run off and ignore me. I’m not interested now, whatever it is”. Of course, five seconds later the remaining guard does find out what it is. And that it hurts very much.

And when the band of adventurers approaches and gets within his mole-like eyesight range, does he raise the alarm for the rest of the camp like any sane guard would? Does he run like the wind and try to get help? No, he takes the party on single handed, and finally when he’s almost dead, with an axe buried up to the hilt in his skull with half of his body on fire and the other half frozen in ice, only then does he think:

“You know what, it probably isn’t nothing.”

Many of the saints, sinners and supplicants have named it ‘burnout’, ‘slump’ and other such terms, for me MMO life at the moment is fractured. There is no one game that dominates my time over all other games, and indeed MMO games are not dominating my leisure time at the moment either. I could probably go into seriously deranged depth about the psychological ‘hows’, ‘whys’ and ‘do you mind if I don’ts’ for this, but for me it’s quite simple: I’ve given three or four MMOs my undivided attention over the past years, and every time I crack open a new MMO, it’s like I’m playing some bastard hybrid child of one or more of the previous games.

No, this isn’t a post about innovation.

It’s simply a statement of fact. The reason that Lord of the Rings Online held my attention until the character’s mid-twenties and was then shelved is because I’m lazy. I’m lazy in the fact that, after I’ve burnt through the initial content (about twelve times as I roll new alts and soak up all the new classes, races and starter areas) I hit the Charon factor. The Charon factor is that feeling that you’re just repeating the same journey, in a slightly different way, and that you’re merely ferrying your current PC across the wide abyss, not because it’s enjoyable or an adventure, but because it’s plainly what has to be done. And so you ferry your character along, you don’t feel for the character, you don’t form any kind of bond with it, you don’t care for it, you can’t empathise with it, in fact you begin to hate it. You hate your character for making you sit down and trudge through the same old landscapes, killing the same old monsters the same number of times (that being far too many times) because that’s what it wants you to do.

No really, it’s not about innovation.

Disappearing, it would seem, are the days where many people would commit large parts of their lives to shepherding around a virtual character, because their sense of adventure has gone. Even people who have only played WoW will have begun to see the language of the matrix, will have begun to see behind the stage curtain and notice the rigging and crew used to convey the world they were believing in, and that it is in fact a carefully engineered façade. And once you begin to see the sets, costumes and props of your world you then become familiar with them, and very quickly do you notice them in the next MMO that you play, and the next one after that. And the more MMOs that are released the easier it is for Alice to see that in this looking glass world, she’s simply a pawn. You no longer see the lever as a means to obtain a pellet, you see it as a plain and simple lever, one that you’ve pulled a thousand times and which you know will provide the same result the next time you pull it, and the next, and that that result is no longer satisfying.

It’s about catharsis.

I find myself these days playing MMOs a lot less than I used to, and I don’t focus on one MMO but tend to flit between them, paying for a month here and a month there. I also find that I am less excited about upcoming MMOs than I used to be, I know the names of the ones that are coming, and I know what Amazing Unique Revolutionary Features [TM] that they employ (most of which revolve around you killing ten rats in New! and Exciting! ways), but I just can’t believe the hype any more. Because I know how they will actually turn out. We all do. For me it means that I’ll probably try them, get past the initial ten or twenty levels where classes and locations are fresh and the rats die in new and interesting ways, and then I’ll catch a glimpse of the stage in a certain light, and I’ll recognise the set and crew from the last MMO production I was watching, it’s just that the set has had a fresh lick of paint and the crew are wearing different overalls.

And you know, I’ve been through this before.

FPS games were my absolute joy back in the day. From Wolfenstein 3D I was hooked, and I devoted many hours to playing various FPS incarnations, getting all psyched-up about the upcoming releases of Quake, Half-Life and Unreal and its tournament brethren. But at some point in time the genre really took off, before that point you’d only had a few games and they were executed well and brought something genuinely unique to the table, Quake was perhaps the king of the land at the time, and suddenly developers were churning out thousands of FPS games, all very much alike even though each one touted New! and Exciting! features. There were still the big releases, games which my friends and I spent plenty of time enjoying, but eventually the FPS genre seemed to lose its way, to strangle itself in its own desire to entangle every idea and theme and wrap it in the latest and greatest FPS imagery. I’m still amazed that we never saw a My Little Pony FPS.

So here we are in the tree of MMO life, where Everquest saw the graphical MMO genre explode out from its roots, and World of Warcraft brought it into the branches of mainstream popular culture as perhaps Half-Life did for FPS games. And now we begin to see the influx of MMOs released in the wake of this success, and the weight of all this extra growth that isn’t needed begins to damage the tree, it weighs it down and forces it to spend resources in keeping these branches alive which would be better spent in growing a few stronger and healthier branches. And if nobody comes along to prune it, eventually it will wither and fail, until it is a gnarled trunk unrecognisable from its former glory.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

This is the way the genre ends
This is the way the genre ends
This is the way the genre ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

— Bastardised from The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

In many MMOs eating food is a downtime activity used to restore a character’s lost health, and drinking restores mana for magic users. There are many curiosities with the nature of these mechanics, so let’s extend our culinary cognisance and see what the Inferno has to offer on the subject.

But first I just need to grab a quick snack.

The first thing to note about food in MMOs is the sheer amount and variety of food that heroes carry around with them. It’s astonishing. Imagine yourself on a family outing to a park somewhere and you’re taking a picnic, maybe you’ve got a nice hamper and you’ve filled it with all sorts of goodies; you get to the park, and hauling the hamper out between three of you you nearly cripple yourselves under the monstrous weight of the thing, you lug the hamper the twenty yards it takes to find the right number and variation of trees to create a scene from a Jane Austen novel, and then you all collapse from exhaustion and try to find the strength to open the lid of the hamper and lift out the roast turkey with all the trimmings, the barbecue, the fondue, the umbrellas for when it inevitably rains, the backup fondue, the small diesel generator to power the microwave… Ok, so maybe that’s just my picnics, but anyway, there’s a lot of food, and it’s heavy and a pain in the buttocks to move around. Now imagine that you’re doing that whilst carrying a ten foot sword or staff, whilst wearing armour or flowing mystical robes. Now fight a horde of twenty orcs.

Let’s just say that the gateaux is going to be slightly ‘pancaked’ (and don’t even ask what the pancakes look like) and the martinis are going to be very much on the shaken side of things.

Nevertheless, in MMOs it is an absolute certainty that even in the deepest, dankest dungeon, adventuring groups across the land will be pausing next to a pile of fresh corpses exuding cerebrospinal fluids, rat nests full of disease ridden rodents and pits of strange and unnameable slimes in order to whip out a raclette and accompanying condiments, and having elevenses whilst trying to avoid getting cave mould in their Clos du Mesnil.

In skiing they have après-ski, and in adventuring you have après-abattage.

I think the NPCs are missing a trick here. Just set-up a restaurant at a suitable depth in any dungeon and wait for the adventuring clientele to come flocking in:

“Hello? Is that Lou Liches? Yes we have a table booked for a party of five under the name of Thrognar the Red. Seven thirty? Yes, that’s us. I’m just phoning to let you know that there’ll only be four of us now, I hope that’s not a problem, it’s just that one of our party has been unavoidably detained by a pit trap full of vipers. Oh wonderful, I’m glad it won’t be a problem. We should be there on time, but we do have to defeat Mordon the Undying Betrayer of Gotland just before we get to you, so we might be a few minutes late, but I imagine we’ll be in need of some serious food by then. Tell me, do you have anywhere that a magic user can cast his wand about after drinking, if you know what I mean?”

Now don’t get me wrong, adventurers have to eat, but many of the items of food that they carry are these absurdly wonderful gourmet items that wouldn’t last five seconds being stacked next to daggers, rope, items of armour and whatever else is in an adventurer’s backpack. Take the humble pie for example: it’s probably one of the more robust items on the menu of heroic foodstuffs, but one whole pie is usually good enough to restore a depleted health bar once only, and a health bar is generally depleted after every other fight at least. So heroes carry around something like one hundred and seventy five pies in order to keep themselves going, and do you know how many calories that is? I mean, I know adventurers are an active lot, but seriously, never mind being able to find their way back out of a dungeon, it’s a miracle that they can fit back out.

Who ate all the pies? Now we know.

This pie-eating madness could almost be forgiven, except that every fantasy MMO has these stick-thin females, with non-existent armour that protects them from the strike of a two-handed battle axe, and there they are between fights scoffing pies and steaks and the like. I can see the Female MMO Fitness Workout DVD coming out soon: basically girls, just eat whatever the hell you like and as much as you like. Essentially, eat like a pig if you want, just make sure you kill forty or more orcs a day and you’ll fit into the tiniest outfit imaginable, and as an added bonus your breast size will triple!

Considering the sheer variety and culinary diversity that exists in MMOs these days and seeing as adventuring folk spend so much of their time masticating, why not making eating into a mini-game? Yeah, you could make it such that combining foods into ‘courses’ will enable bigger and better buffs as well as healing and replenishing mana. If you have a small soup starter and manage to follow it up with the lamb shanks and roasted vegetables, you’re allowed to try for the power combo finishing desert item! But only if you ate all of your brussels sprouts and you used the correct spoon for the soup. Otherwise the buff fails, and you go straight to bed without getting to fight Bregnip the Merciless.

Buffs from food is a wonderful tacked-on after thought isn’t it? I mean, how does an adventurer eat a wolf testicle pie and suddenly gain mightily in strength for half an hour? Do wolves have magical testicles that imbue arcane energies into a person? Wouldn’t that be the worst evolutionary design ever. Every wolf would be biting off his own ‘bits’ in order to make him stronger than his rivals and then when the strongest of them all has finally become leader of the pack he can’t breed. Maybe they would develop an Amazon wolf society, where the females were in charge. Makes sense, in a ‘none of this last paragraph made much sense’ sort of way. Anyhow, eating a pork pie and suddenly being able to bench press an elephant, or eating cheese and suddenly being more intelligent but only for thirty minutes! is totally bizarre. And what if you melt cheese on a pork pie and eat that, does that count? What happens then? Are you suddenly able to bench press an elephant with your brain? Can your pectoral muscles calculate pi to four hundred places? Food would become dangerous, you wouldn’t know whether to put mustard on your pie in case it combined in some weird way that gave your nipples the power to whistle dixie every time you’re struck in combat. For thirty minutes only.

Buffs from food don’t last that long, and one can imagine this is because the food item has perhaps passed on its way through the adventurer’s body. Yeah, we’re talking toilets now. Why are no dungeons equipped with toilet facilities? I mean, I know these places are run by evilly evil overlords from the evil dimension, but no toilets? That’s just a whole new level of evil, man. Not once in an excursion do you get a hero going “You know what, I’ve been down in this dungeon for four hours straight, I’ve seen sights that would make mere mortals crap themselves inside out, and I haven’t had a chance to relieve myself in all that time”. And thank goodness, can you imagine with the amount of food that gets eaten and the number of drinks that are quaffed, what would happen if nature was allowed to take it’s natural course? An outside observer would watch a bunch of hardened folk, grimly venture in to the entrance of an ancient ruin, only to be washed out again four minutes later on a tidal wave of excrement; hidden entrances to the place would suddenly become clear as geysers of faecal matter erupted from them twenty feet into the air.

So along with all their other skills, such as melee mastery and fireball flinging, adventurers come ready trained with the ability to ‘hold it in’. At least until they get to Lou Liches.

All-in-all it’s a wonder that MMO adventurers don’t just drag a cow along down with them on their dungeon delving deeds, they could all grab a bite from it in between fights without the need to crack open the picnic hamper. Don’t worry though, the cow has a health bar, so all they have to do is feed it something and it’ll be fine to carry on…

At this point on our journey we’ll stop to take a brief look at the undercurrent of sexual tension in the MMO space by exposing the hidden meaning to several common MMO terms thus revealing their sordid alternatives.

Those who are of an easily offended nature may want to avoid delving this deep into the Inferno.

MMOhhhhh terms:

Meat Shield: Underwear.

Grind: What lovers do after they’ve removed their meat shields.

Two-boxing: See ménage à trois.

Ding: The result of a successful grind. Generally happens more quickly when two-boxing.

Spawn: The (sometimes unexpected) appearance of a new being when people have been grinding for a while.

Gold Farmer: Grinding where the sun don’t shine.

Buff: It is considered good form to give your partner a decent buff before you start grinding.

Solo: Buffing yourself because there’s nobody to grind with.

Bot: A device to allow females to solo more easily.

Bind on Equip: When improvised bots go wrong.

Instance: The female sexual organ.

Twink: The male sexual organ when it’s ready for grinding.

Nerf: The male sexual organ after grinding and a ding.

Instance run: The female sexual organ after grinding and a ding.

Rez: When a male is ready to grind again.

Gimped: Those people who like to grind whilst wearing full-body leather meatshields.

Lag: When one person fails to ding during a good grinding session.

Wipe: Something that is bound to occur if there’s been a lot of grinding and several dings.

DPS: Someone who’s a little too enthusiastic with their grinding technique.

Con: If it cons red, you’ve been grinding too much.

Priest: “There’s the Ogre lord, attack in the name of the king! And his foxy daughter!”

Warrior: “Raaaaarghhh!”

Ogre Lord: “Puny fleshpods, me smish you!”

Warrior: <Holds up a finger> “Oh, hang on a second, I’m not sure if this is the right weapon to be fighting ogres with.”

Priest: “What?!”

Ogre Lord: “Guards! Hit oomans wit yer hurt makers!”

Warrior: <Rummages through backpack and pulls out an abacus> “No, that’s not the right one, that’s for orcs.” <Rummages some more, littering the floor with abacuses> “Ah ha, here’s the ogre one! Right, I just need to calculate my DPS average and then we can perform a reverse linear interpolation based on his percentage health to determine overall hit points!”

Priest: <Surrounded by four angry ogre guards> “Mother.”

Warrior: <Takes a swing at the ogre lord> “A hit. A most palpable hit! How are you feeling now? Would you say that you’re feeling ninety five percent healthy? Or perhaps it’s more like ninety two percent?”

Ogre Lord: “Ow, yoo make my not-left-arm bleed! Raaaagghh!”

Warrior: “Hmmm, right arm is bleeding and he’s pretty steaming angry, we’ll call that eighty nine percent.” <flicks some beads on the abacus> “Good news, I think we can defeat him in another ten rounds of combat!”

Ogre Lord: “Yoo never stop me, I are in der vincey ball!”

Priest: <Dodges another ogre guard attack> “Just kill him already!”

Warrior: “Your crown will be mine in a mere ten hits, and then the king’s daughter will be rewarding us tonight in ways that are illegal in four other virtual worlds!”

Ogre Lord: “Actually old chap, I fear you’ve made a slight miscalculation. You see, I’m actually a mountain ogre, whereas you’ve been using the spreadsheet, sorry abacus, for standard ogres. We’re an entirely different phylum, and quite unique in our general power and ability”.

Warrior: “Really?”

Priest: “For the love of all stereotypically, misogynistically portrayed horny king’s daughters, stab him and then help me!”

Ogre Lord: “Indubitably my dear boy. Look, here’s the correct abacus, just take a quick gander”.

Warrior: <whistles in admiration> “Impressive! Says here that you guys can hit for anywhere between one hundred and two hundred hit points!”

Ogre Lord: “Most certainly, but you’re using that abacus with the armour bead over to the left which indicates a plate wearer such as your good self. If you move that bead over to the right…”

Warrior: <Flicks a few beads and calculates> “Good grief, it says that even a standard mountain ogre guard can hit a cloth wearer for anywhere up to one thousand hit points in a single shot!”

<Ogre guard hits Priest for nine hundred and ninety nine hit points of damage. Priest dies>

Ogre Lord: “You’ll also see that in the notes section there’s a calculation which shows that an ogre lord generally has a retinue of two ogre guards.”

Warrior: <Looks up from his abacus to see four angry ogre guards surrounding him> “Waiiiit, that’s not two guards!”

Ogre Lord: “My dear fellow, it is a fallacy to rely on the exactitude of numbers.”

Warrior: “…”

Ogre Lord: “Bash im in der noggin boyz!”

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Can we do without all the numbers? Would it be possible to remove the numbers from the fore of MMORPGs, and would it make for a better game?

In current MMORPGs, everything seems to come down to spreadsheet crunching: this weapon is better because it does 0.2 DPS more in an offhand which has a swing timer that is 1.5 times that of the main hand; this spec is better because it allows an extra 20 mana regen per second whilst achieving a mana efficiency rating of 35% return on investment over a period of ten years at an amortisation schedule of three monthly intervals (terms and conditions apply).

In combat you already have the con system. You have the enemy’s health bar. Why do you need to see how much damage you’re doing to the exact hit point? Sure, have flashy effects in the game for critical hits and the like, because these are exciting things that should feel powerful and meaningful, but don’t show every little numerical detail of how the combat is resolved.

If you break it down to the raw numbers, show the roots that feed the trunk of your game, you remove a large chance for immersion, magic and mystery.

There are a many examples of games where you aren’t presented with the raw numbers, yet the games are fun and involving. I was playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii again the other day, and you don’t even have enemy health bars in that game. You know what? It actually adds to the tension and enjoyment of combat: have I put enough shots into that guy to take him down? Is he going to get back up? Should I waste some ammo making sure? Do you think he’d mind if I took his jacket? At a basic level of abstraction, if you need to show that the ogre lord is really rather tough you can reflect it in the health bar, make the size of the bars relative such that a warrior facing off against an ogre that has twice as many hit points will see that the ogre’s health bar is twice as big as his, he’ll get an idea of how much effort it will take to defeat the enemy but it won’t be an exact science involving slide rules and logarithmic charts.

The developers will still have the numbers in order to balance things and, you know, be able to create a working computer game, but abstracting these things away from the players seems like a way to make the game more than just Logistical Spreadsheet Combat Simulator IV. A sword which gives +Str and +Stam, could instead simply ‘con’ green to a warrior, and red to a mage. You could further adapt the ‘con’ of an item based on what the character currently has equipped. If the sword mentioned earlier gave less benefit to a warrior over his currently equipped sword, it would con orange or red to him, indicating that it wasn’t an upgrade. Would the lack of focus on stats ruin it? Is it about making the power of an item tangible, evident to others so that you can show it off or work out exactly how many Pico seconds less it will take to kill a given mob? Could the fact that it’s the most powerful weapon you’ve discovered on your adventures so far be enough?

Numbers allow people to min/max which is a form of enjoyment to some, but they also allow people to discriminate against those who don’t min/max. Removing the numbers could be used as an attempt to remove a level of elitism from these games, when such elitism is so unwarranted.

Pen and paper games use dice rolls to simulate whether lady luck is smiling on the character, and stats are used to represent a characters abilities, because that is the way that seems to work best when you have to perform combat calculations yourself. But now we have these computers, and they can do all these complicated calculations of hit rolls and bonuses and skill point adjustments for us, so we should be able to sit back and enjoy a good game; except that the tradition of PnP was brought over wholesale, without perhaps considering the nature of the medium that they’re being brought to, and thus computer based RPGs are heavily reliant on presenting the player with numbers when they could be put to better use in obfuscating the numbers and presenting us with a game that does all the hard work of calculating if another +1 to Charisma is really going to make the pot-belly dwarf barbarian succeed in seducing The Countess Snootington.

For the curious the answer is no, the seduction still failed. It might have been something to do with the fact that he was twiddling his nipple piercing whilst attempting the seduction. Hey, it works in the local tavern, how was I to know that it was considered bad form at the royal court?

Welcome to your first guild, friend! To get you started, here’s a brief list of potential members and how to identify them:

The Guild Leader
 Quote: "Holy crap, is this guild still going?"

 Most likely to: Turn up when it'll interfere with guild operation most.
 Least likely to: Be a leader.

The Raid Leader
 Quote: "No, I don't care that Tony has contributed five copper
         less to the guild funds. <takes swig of vodka> No you can't start a
         raid, we're in the middle helping this guy with his attunement. <drags 
         on a cigarette> No, I don't care that Tina is wearing the guild tabard
         as a thong again. <drinks vodka from bottle> No, I will not tell the
         healer group to 'Heal Better' in raids <drags on two cigarettes at the
         same time> No, I will not tell the DPS group to 'Go crit themselves'."

 Most likely to: Go postal.
 Least likely to: Have fond memories of their last five years in MMOs.

The Suckup
 Quote: "What do you think we should do, Raid Leader?
         Yes, that's what I was going to say too, you're so right.
         Raid Leader! Raid Leader! Tina wore my guild tabard as a thong again, and
         then gave it back without washing it!"

 Most likely to: Be ganked by their own guild.
 Least likely to: Take any action without approval in triplicate.

The Mouth
 Quote: "EVERYONE LISTEN TO ME I'M SAYING STUFF I'M JUST GOING TO DRIVEL ON NOW 
         ABOUT TOTALLY NONSENSICAL IRRELEVANT GARBAGE BUT YOU MUST PAY ATTENTION
         BECAUSE I SPEAK IN ALL CAPS AND I'LL BEAT YOU DOWN IF YOU DARE TO SPEAK 
         AT THE SAME TIME EVEN IF IT'S TO AGREE WITH ME WHICH IS TERRIBLY UNLIKELY."

 Most likely to: Have only just reached teen age.
 Least likely to: Breathe between sentences.

The Loot-linker
 Quote: "Hey look at these everyone! [Sword] [Shield] [Armour] [Bow] [Dildo] Shit.
         loot-linker has disconnected from the game"

 Most likely to: Link to a kitchen sink in guild chat.
 Least likely to: Have an item that other people don't know about in every 
                  excruciating and tedious detail.

The Psycho
 Quote: "Oh, so you like the Assassin class do you?! So you're some kind of racist
         then are you? Nazi lover. Of course you all love Nazis, it's not like 
         anyone loves me!"

 Most likely to: Take Tom Clancy novels too seriously.
 Least likely to: Be a florist in real life.

The Internet Lovers 
 Quote: smooch slurp giggle sigh hug

 Most likely to: Sit in public areas and force their deep emotional connection
                 down everyone else's throats through the medium of emotes.
 Least likely to: Be together once they meet in real life and realise that
                  they're of the same sex and neither one of them is gay.

The Silent One
 Quote: "Night all."

 Most likely to: Say "Night all" in the same room as the Internet Lovers when
                 they're in the middle of a cybersex session, scaring them
                 witless because they had no idea that anyone else was there.
 Least likely to: Be remembered by anyone.          
                                 
The Attention Seeker
 Quote: "Look at me I'm doing something crazy! Look how crazy I am!
         OH MY GOD MY ARMPITS ARE ON FIRE... cool!"

 Most likely to: Be run over by a dragon whilst wearing their underpants on their head.
 Least likely to: Be mistaken for the Silent One.

The Drama Major
 Quote: "Myn gentil fellowes, in feyth ich haue had a joly tyme! 
         Verily and forsooth!"

 Most likely to: Stay in character at the most inappropriate moments.
 Least likely to: Be understood.

The Drama Llama
 Quote: "I quit, you all suck! I am back, love me! You all hate me, I quit!
         I'm baaaaack!"

 Most likely to: Quit the guild.
 Least likely to: Resist rejoining the guild five minutes later.

The Clique
 Quote: "... do we know you?"

 Most likely to: Quit the guild and form their own. With a latin name.
 Least likely to: Like you.

The Real Life Champion
 Quote: "Hey look at the new car I bought. My new computer has seven graphics cards.
         I'd love to stay and play, but I have to go and pick up my new computer
         in my new car whilst having sex with five attractive members of the
         appropriate sex."

 Most likely to: Work at McDonalds.
 Least likely to: Wash.

The Levelling Machine
 Quote: "Hrm, I have twelve raid-worthy characters, which would you like me 
         to bring?"

 Most likely to: Wake-up one morning with the sickening realisation of what a
                 horrid waste of time and energy it all was.
 Least likely to: Recognise the big glowing ball of fire in the sky.

The Alt King
 Quote: "Hi! What? It's meeee. Oh, yeah, I re-rolled. 
         This new character is way better, I just wasn't getting on with the 
         last one."

 Most likely to: Have rolled three new characters by the time you finish reading this.
 Least likely to: Reach the next level on their current character.
 
The Knowledge Font
 Quote: "You are quite wrong. As can be seen by the four spreadsheets I have
         produced with special information that only I know because I'm the dev's
         favourite and they whisper to me in my dreams."

 Most likely to: Talk over someone else to prove that they know the answer too.
 Least likely to: Avoid being sickeningly smug in any situation.

The Good Guy
 Quote: "Hey! Are you guys groovy? We're all groovy! Let's all be groovy 
         and just get along. Groovy."

 Most likely to: Not cause guild drama, and to play calmly and happily to the 
                 best of their ability.
 Least likely to: Exist in any guild. Alas.