Tag Archives: waffle

State of play.

I’m sure it is a reflection on my personality and its numerous disorders, but I have had more fun in the past couple of days by running around Azeroth picking flowers than I did trying to level my Warrior Priest in Warhammer Online (named Didymus incidentally, replete with white whiskers and an eye patch. It was such a lovely concept to me, I had the RP all worked out, but it just wasn’t to be). Azeroth is revitalised and rejuvenated, populations are again soaring, bands of adventurers heading into the depths of the deepest dungeons once more in order to earn as many Old World achievements as possible before the Lich King arrives and demands a damned good six of the best, stiff upper lip, “No, sir, please sir, I’m sorry!”, wooshing of the cane, large school exercise book down your underpants in order to cushion the blow. Isn’t it? Wasn’t it? Marvellous.

I’ve gone back to one of my numerous level seventy characters, it is no minor coincidence that I picked the one with epic flying mount, and have decided to investigate the revamped world of the war and of the craft. The war is the standard Blizzard fare, with large events occurring around the world to mark the next incoming raid boss of doom! You’ll never defeat this one! Until we nerf them all to buggery-and-back when the next expansion arrives. Poor old Illidan Stormrage, forever bragging at the release of the Burning Crusade that we “are not prepared”, to which the players simply responded “That may be so, but if it’s alright with you we’ll just wait out here until they nerf you. Shouldn’t be too long, and what are you going to do in the meantime? You can’t leave your bastion, and your minions seem to be making surprisingly little impact on the Outlands. It’s almost as if they’re pinned to the areas where they stand, and can’t advance at all”. So apart from avoiding being transformed into a zombie at every turn – guy can’t even go to the toilet without a zombie popping out of the cistern and getting all plague carrier on your arse. Not a pleasant experience, I can tell you – most people are just generally running around like loons and revelling in the new achievements, which you can get for just about everything. There’s definitely one for being molested in the bottom by a zombie popping out of the toilet. Couple all of this with the Halloween event that is currently under way, and WoW is right now the dictionary definition of magic and mayhem.

Always two there are: the war and the craft. I’ve decided to pick the new Inscription trade skill on my character, he’d never really got into a crafting profession and so I thought it would be good to try out this neat profession which, seeing as I decided to level-up the complimentary herbalism skill rather than spending the equivalent to the national debt of the United States buying herbs on the auction house, has the nice bonus of requiring me to run around low level areas again; by combining this herb gathering activity with trying to unlock all the exploration achievements that I missed whilst levelling the character originally, I have hit that sweet spot, that MMO erogenous zone, which pleasures both the explorer and the achiever in me; by which I mean the part of me that is an explorer and a achiever, I don’t literally have an explorer and an achiever ‘in me’. I’m not that sort of person. Well ok, maybe I am, but not in this instance.

The other bonus to all of this is the complete lack of pressure, it’s that easy going feeling that you have when you set yourself a goal and are not instead trying to satisfy the inhuman intent of some designer’s sadistic skinner box fetish. It means I can hop into the game for twenty minutes and actually accomplish something tangible and meaningful to me because I, and I alone, set the goal.

It hasn’t all been ‘work work work’ as the orc peons would say, I’ve also tried my hand at a few other games. Dead Space was high on my list of games that will potentially make my underpants expand, so I grabbed that one to play over the weekend. Alas, on the PC version at least, it gives me chronic motion sickness. The camera is hideous, and for a game that is about survival horror – where scripted events and sounds are designed to make you look all around you to find out if that multi-jawed, slathering alien really is breathing on the hairs on the back of your neck – I find it boggling that they would make the camera so bloody restrictive. I can’t believe it was intentionally to help with the atmosphere, and I know the third person perspective camera can be done in a way so as not to cause this because I played all the way through Resident Evil 4 (at least twice) without it ever triggering my motion sickness. Most frustrating! Perhaps it works better on the consoles, but I also found the movement of the character to be really awkward as well, so in the end I had to give up on the game, which is a real shame because the small amount of the game that I managed to play seemed really quite excellent. It appeared to be an intriguing cross between System Shock and Resident Evil, and I would have liked to have played further, but one finds it ever so tricky to play any game with a keyboard full of vomit.

In other gaming news: I’ve been playing World of Goo, a game which thankfully does not induce vomit, unless it is possible to vomit with joy and wonder, in which case I imagine I’m due a veritable deluge of diced-carrot-fortified avgolemono. I’m only part of the way through chapter two at the moment, so hopefully once I’ve experienced the game a little more I’ll be able to write a reviewlet. I’m also hearing many good things about Fable 2, to the point that I’m seriously considering investing in an Xbox 360; then again I’d also like to play Little Big Planet when it is eventually released, but that would involve the purchase of a Playstation 3, and I’m not sure I can justify the purchase of both consoles on the basis of wanting to play a game on each. Decisions decisions.

In the meantime I’ve ordered Left 4 Dead via Steam, there’s Farcry 2 which m’colleague has been tweeting good things about so far, and GTA IV has its PC release sometime in the near future. If it isn’t out already, to be quite honest I’m having trouble keeping track of the myriad packages of gaming joy that are available at the moment. I think there’s at least one plastic-instrument band-a-like game coming out soon too, Guitar Hero World Tour maybe? Such that, once again, I shall unleash my fearsome rhythm skills on an unsuspecting world. My playing style has been compared to a drunk octopus and a spider on amphetamines trying to make love on the frets of the guitar. I think it’s an insult, although one can never be sure.

All things considered, it’s almost enough to make one chunder from the overwhelming choice. I think I’d better go and have a lie down with a bucket. In a non-matrimonial sense, for all you bucket fetishists out there.

Fraud and falsehood only dread examination.

Hush, and venture in quietly dear reader, you have stumbled upon Melmoth as he rests his weary head and escapes from the troubles of the world. However, through the magic of modern day blog technomagy we can, unseen, ride pillion upon his very thoughts. Hark and listen, as we travel through the dark pits of his maladjusted mind:

<Wobbly wavy dream sequence>

Examiner: “Mr Wimplebottom?”

Mr Wimplebottom: “Yes, that’s me.”

Examiner: “Hello, I am to be the examiner for your test, are you ready to go?”

Mr Wimplebottom: “Ah, er, yes, I think so.”

Examiner: “Very well, if you’ll follow me outside and we’ll get underway shall we?”

<Outside>

Examiner: “Right, Mr Wimplebottom, before we get underway I just need to take you through a few formalities.”

Wimplebottom: “O..ok”

Examiner: “You are Clarence Aubrey Wimplebottom of 23a Cuckfock Lane, Fartingberry?”

Wimplebottom: “Yes, that’s me.”

Examiner: “Excellent. And you are aware that it is a criminal offence under article 3.14 of the Muhmohway Code to undertake this test on behalf of another person.”

Wimplebottom: “Yes.”

Examiner: “Very good. Before we head out, I just need you to stand over here, and read for me the name of that character standing over there.”

Wimplebottom: “The large orc warrior with the purple fedora?”

Examiner: “Yes, that’s the one”

Wimplebottom: “Uh, eff you en kay one enn four tee zero arr”

Examiner: “Good. Ok Mr Wimplebottom, if you’d like to take me to your character, we’ll get underway shall we?”

Wimplebottom: “It… it’s the paladin over in the corner there.”

Examiner: “Very well, lead on.”

<Seated on the shoulders of a paladin>

Examiner: “All set?”

Wimplebottom: “Y..yes.”

Examiner: “There’s no need to be nervous Mr Wimplebottom, just take your time and remember what you’ve been taught by your instructor and you’ll be fine. Now, in your own time, if you could take as out of the test centre, and as we approach the town centre I’d like you to look for a group at the first opportunity.”

Wimplebottom: (in the trade channel) “LFG 4 QST AN STUFF !!!!111”

Examiner makes a note on his clipboard.

Wimplebottom: (glancing sideways at what the examiner is doing) “Oh. Oh darn it. Sorry. Sorry! I know this, it’s just… I’m very nervous.”

Examiner: “Everyone is nervous Mr Wimplebottom, just try to relax and remember what you’ve been taught.”

Wimplebottom: (in the looking for group channel) “Hello, I’m a level five paladin, looking for a group to the Forest of Doom. I have several quests there including [That’s Not My Chastity Belt] and [The Dark Hedgehogs of the Deathening] and I would like to find some like-minded adventurers to join me on my quest.”

Examiner makes some notes on his clipboard while nodding approvingly.

Wimplebottom breathes a sigh and relaxes.

<Later, travelling through the Forest of Doom>

Examiner: “Ok, Mr Wimplebottom, when I tap your paladin on the shoulder pads, thus, I want you to perform an emergency heal of a fellow adventurer who is in danger without them having to ask for aid.”

<Later, questing with a group in the Dungeons of Davina Darknickers>

Examiner: “At the first opportunity, I’d like you to pull your character over and then perform a full party buff with the appropriate buffs according to class.”

<Later, while soloing in the Dessert Sprinkle Desert>

Wimplebottom: “Oh great, there’s another person doing their test here and they need the same quest mobs that I do. I always have trouble remembering what to do here.”

Examiner looks ahead and remains silent.

Wimplebottom: “Oh yes, it’s his right of way because he was in the area first, but I can merge from the outside if I indicate to him my intentions and he waves me through.”

Wimplebottom: (whispering to other adventurer) “Hello, are you on the quest [Defeat 100 Token Sprinkle Toads, Just Because]? If so, may I join you? I’m sure we will be able to complete the quest quicker together.”

Examiner gives an approving smile.

<Later, back at the Test Centre>

Examiner: “Right Mr Wimplebottom, if you’d like to park your paladin in a safe place and log out.”

Wimplebottom looks anxiously at the examiner.

Examiner: “I’m happy to tell you Mr Wimplebottom that you have passed your test and have qualified for your character license.”

Wimplebottom breathes a huge sigh of relief and beams with joy.

Examiner: “You had a few minor fails. You ran through several populated areas whilst jumping and spinning around and generally acting like an arse. There was also the incident with the mining node and the person fighting a mob beside it.”

Wimplebottom: “I know, I shouldn’t have taken it, I just assumed they didn’t want it.”

Examiner: “Assumption is a dangerous thing Mr Wimplebottom; there are rules for a reason. Other than those two failures and the fact that you had several occasions where you typed in all capital letters…”

Wimplebottom: “That was an accident, I did apologise!”

Examiner: “Mr Wimplebottom, you were holding down the shift key while typing, and you apologised when you remembered that you were on your test. Anyway, as I said, these minor failures were not enough to fail you overall, so you are deemed qualified and responsible enough to take your character out into the game world on your own. Congratulations.”

Wimplebottom: “Thank you!”

Examiner: (scribbling on the clipboard) “If you will take this assessment form into the main office and present it along with your temporary license, they will issue you with your full license. Good day to you Mr Wimplebottom.”

<Wobbly wavey dream sequence>

Remarkable!

So there you have it, dear reader; Melmoth sleeps ever on in his wonderful weird world of MMO character driving examinations and chocolate coated slippers, but we must leave this sphere of unawakening and travel elsewhere, for to stare into the mind of Melmoth is to stare into the lemon-scented abyss of rotisserie madness.

Fare thee well!

A Druid in training must be a bard before he is a priest.

Having seen over on Book of Grudges that the Warhammer Online Open Beta client was finally available for download by those of us in the rural gaming backwater that is the European Union, my mind was sent wandering along those ancient paths that wind through the Forest of Contemplation, and after several minutes of travelling I found myself once again breaking out from under the canopy of foliage and into the open spaces of the Grove of Character Class Cogitation. It wasn’t really so much of an angst-ridden introspection on why I can’t just pick a goram class and stick with it, but a more general ponderment as to the number of classes and the variation.

Concerning the number of these classes there can be no question, there is most definitely a number of them, and ‘dat shit be huge yo’ as I believe the children of today say down on the roads and byways. Can we really say that there are twenty honest to goodness classes, though? Everyone is aware of the mirroring of classes between the forces of Order and Fanboys, sorry Destruction, and that, for example, the Warrior Priest and the Disciple of Khaine could probably be considered one class for all intents and purposes. Alright one and a third classes. Fine, one and half classes but that’s my final offer. You push a hard bargain. What I’m driving at, perhaps slightly too fast to avoid a nasty collision which will give us all hideous whiplash-related injuries, is that the philosophy behind the classes is essentially the same, albeit with slightly different spells and weapon styles. Consider these classes as conjoined twins, separated at birth through complicated and lengthy surgery, and split down the middle as best as possible. Of course, whichever twin you’re playing, the other twin will always seem to have gotten the better deal, and if you read some of the more ‘passionate’ forums it would seem that there are many class pairings where one twin was given the only available head and the other twin was given a second arse in compensation. Such is the nature of sibling MMO rivalry.

What triggered my desire to make a post, though, was on considering the nature of the classes as a whole; specifically I was pondering about the classes that I have at level seventy in World of Warcraft and whether they were represented in Warhammer. I don’t know why, my brain just went barrelling off along this lane of thought like an excited puppy chasing a cat, and I was forced to follow at a stumbling jog as I was hauled along by the tentative leash that I hold over my mind. Anyway, I have three classes that qualify, my paladin and shaman are both present and correct in Warhammer, taking them as the hybrid melee/healer/caster types that they are, but I drew up short when considering the druid. The druid is the first class that I played and reached the original level cap of sixty with in WoW. I played it back before it was really cool (read overpowered) to be a druid, before we were feralised and became little Tasmanian bundles of whirlwinding furry fury. I will always have a soft spot for my Alliance druid, despite the fact that the model they use for the dire bear form looks like it’s suffering a permanent stroke, all twisted lips and tongue lolling. It’s swings and roundabouts though, the Horde’s bear form looks much cooler, but then they have to suffer the fact that their cat form has the body of a lion but the face of Danny DeVito after having been hit with a spade one too many times.

I came to realise just how underrepresented shape-shifting classes are, not just in WAR, but in many of the MMOs that I’ve played. WAR has the Marauder of course, but they really only shape-shift their arm, so they’re really a shareware shape-shifter: the fundamentals are there but the feature set is severely reduced. Other than that, I can’t really recall any shape-shifting classes in other MMOs that I’ve played, DAoC (the early years, at least, not so sure about more recent expansions), EQII, AC2, LotRO and many others. Is WoW the only major mainstream MMO that has decent, honest to goodness shape-shifters, or have I simply got brain ague, and I’m forgetting all the thousands of shape-shifting MMO classes that actually exist?

If I’m correct and the shape-shifter is indeed a rare entity in the MMOsphere, I have to wonder why this is. Clearly the WoW druid is a fairly complex beastie to put together, what with them being about five classes in one. Yes, five: you’ve got the Bear form tank, you’ve got the Cat form rogue, the Moonkin form mage and the Tree of Life form healer. And then you’ve got the humanoid form, where admittedly you generally only get to poke critters with your wooden staff until they get so annoyed that they turn around and bite your hippy-haired head off, but it’s still a form. In druid circles we call it Worm Food form. So yes, there are a lot of mechanics to squeeze in to the class, although being a true hybrid, they are all mechanics that are lifted more or less wholesale from the traditional pure classes. Also there’s the question of balance, if a class can do all things, then why would people play any of the singularly skilled classes? Well, the trick is that the druid does most things well, but not quite as well as a pure class would, and when coupled with the fact that some people just don’t ever want to tank, say, then these people are much more likely to pick a more restrictive class that does what they like to do, and does it better than anyone else to the exclusion of flexibility or support skills. In MMOs we call these people DPS.

So it’s not as if shape-shifters have to be the only overpowered class anyone will ever play, and it’s not as though they require a disproportionate amount of time to develop, being that many of their forms and abilities should sensibly be based on those that already exist for other classes, so again I do wonder why they don’t seem to be an option in many MMOs.

Lord knows you only have to look at Second Life to see the sheer volume of slightly odd types who like to turn themselves into animals and ‘do it like they do on the Discovery Channel’ with one another, if you know what I mean. Based on that evidence, you’d think a shape-shifting class would be compulsory in any MMO that took its subscription numbers seriously.

So in conclusion: World of Warcraft, 10 million subscribers because it offers druids and thus a chance at simulated furry sex in an environment far more appealing than Second Life; Age of Conan, failed to do well because their Bear Shaman couldn’t actually shape-shift into a bear, they went with boobs over bears, and they paid the price. On the Internet every third thing is a boob, if you want to titillate people online these days, go with bears.

I have to confess that I’m not sure that’s the conclusion I was really aiming for when I started this post.

Oh well, tune in tomorrow for my next post: “Gnomes in MMOs” and why I’ve concluded that they’re the reason for the current increase in benign prostatic hyperplasia in young male gamers.

Massive Effects.

Are badgers simply the criminal element of Ger society, and somewhere in the wild there is an as yet undiscovered policing subfamily of blue and white striped Mustelidae called the goodger?

Who knows! I must confess that it was just meant as a distraction, a piece of flavoursome bait placed carefully on the ground, covered in leaf litter and attached to a thick vine rope that will snag you by the leg, swing you up into the captive audience tree and force you to hang there so that I can bludgeon you with rather rudimentary ruminations regarding MMOs without risk of reprisal.

My apologies.

But hey, now that you’re here and conveniently immobilised hanging upside down by your mind’s leg (a bit like your mind’s eye, but it allows your mind to wander), I feel perhaps that you would be receptive to a little wistful blathering on my part about one of my favourite hobbies. If during the course of my diatribe you start to feel faint, hallucinate or develop an intense migraine, it is possibly just the blood rushing to your head as you dangle there, on the other hand these are also known side effects when listening to me for any extended period of time.

So the real question I want to pose is this: is ‘massive’ the wrong focus for multiplayer online RPGs?

I’ve recently started playing Mass Effect due to my need for a single player game that can be dropped at the scream of a baby (which is like the drop of a hat, only faster and requiring more poo clearing), and for the short amount of time that I’ve played it I’ve enjoyed the experience tremendously. However, somewhere at the back of my mind there is the parasite of dissatisfaction, nibbling delicately on my pia mater and making me wonder how much better the game would be if my two fellow adventurenauts weren’t controlled by an AI suffering dementia on a scale that would make HAL’s red eye turn green with envy, but were instead controlled by my close friends, who I am happy to report are not demented in the slightest. Although based on the witterings of this post, that may not be as much of an endorsement as I had intended. Fighting the parasite of dissatisfaction are the antibiotics of immersion, which help me to look past the fact that my compatriots in the game have had their intelligence modelled on the philosophies and theorems of an especially thick oak sideboard and their movement routines lifted wholesale from the frantic rampage of a hyperactive puppy with chronic diarrhoea, by pointing out that all the NPCs, every other character in the game in fact, is a paragon of subtle method acting and restrained existence. There are no crowds of people whizzing past me at full pelt blowing raspberries and emoting in spurious ways, no diplomats or traders spinning through three hundred and sixty degrees as they bounce back and forward between two spots of the queue they’re waiting in. None of them dance naked on top of the Citadel tour guide terminals. Everyone I speak to uses sentences, none of them talk in tongues, I mean not one person has shouted out in the alien embassies “HAI EVR1 LUVS ME COS I TLK LEIK GIBBON”.

The level of immersion is intense. Well apart from the times when I, as commander, tell my squad to move forward and hold a position; off we charge, assault rifles blazing, I’m taking a bit of damage, actually a bit more damage than I should if I was being given covering fire and so I search around for said coverers. Lo and behold, my squad have in actual fact run in the opposite direction to the one I commanded and are even now having a competition to see who can repeatedly ram their crotch the hardest into the sentry gun we skirted around earlier, while it merrily plugs away at the privates’ privates.

The thought that followed was: could I have had this experience in World of Warcraft? I’m talking about the immersion part here not the crotch ramming team-mate part, for that I’d just need to join the first pick-up group I could find. The answer was: quite possibly, if I’d taken the time to learn how to run a private (read pirate) server, a server where I just granted accounts to my friends, and perhaps a few of their closest friends. The world would still be populated with NPCs, the major cities would be no more empty than they currently are, Shattrath, Ogrimmar and Stormwind excepted, and yet the world would be entirely devoid of smacktards intent on ruining your gaming experience in whatever manner possible.

I then wondered, what if WoW itself was like that by default? Instead of logging into a single server with a population of six thousand people, what if guilds in the game actually had their own instance of a server? You’d log into your server and all the PCs would be guild mates, and they’d all (assuming you were sensible with who you invited) share the same goals and want the same things from the game. What advantages might this set-up have?

For a start, players would feel more like the hero in the traditional fantasy tale, part of a select group of individuals who were destined to change the world, not a nondescript part of the shambling mass of quest tourists and January Loot Sale fanatics that currently ravage Azeroth on a daily basis. The community would be small and close knit, and individuals in that community would have greater opportunities to make a name for themselves and create legends around their character. It would be easier to make player-driven storylines, because giving just one character the Immortal Songblade of Arsewhopping on a server wouldn’t mean that thousands of other players were missing out on having that item. It would also be easier to allow players on a small guild server to be able to affect the world around them in a way that mattered and changed it permanently, because again it wouldn’t be denying that experience to thousands of other players. I also imagine that the virtual world would feel less claustrophobic, because when you take your first tentative steps into the foreboding Forest of Dark & Doom[TM], you wouldn’t peer around the first set of trees only to see an entirely deforested swampland with the indigenous population of Flaming Hellforged Dire Wolves of Armageddon dashing past you, yelping and with their tails between their legs, as one hundred and forty adventurers clatter after them screaming “LOOOOOL”.

Not to mention that you could kiss goodbye to any gold seller chat and mail spam, because without an invite to your server, they’re not getting near you. There could be a public server for trial accounts, and I’m sure the gold sellers would make the place the home of their verbal fallout, but from a subscription sales point of view, it would only encourage players to subscribe and join their own private haven free from such unctuous spiced ham and the inevitable vituperation that follows.

There are many disadvantages even outside of the technical limitations, of course, but those that I have thought of so far are not all that bad, and certainly worth enduring to remove the smacktarded majority whilst maintain the ability to explore and adventure with others. Auction houses, for example, could be linked between server instances, so that all saleable items appeared to all players of the game, hence a universal economy would exist even with the worlds being instanced. And although there’s no real solution to the ‘fancy meeting you here’ effect, where you just happen to meet the same fellow adventurers day after day, you can look at it another way: Lord of the Rings would have been even harder to keep up with if the main cast had changed entirely on a daily basis, and besides, it’s not really any different from having a guild that you regularly group to the exclusion of pickup groups and others.

Obviously this is all dependent on the type of MMO. Planetside, for example, would probably be pretty dull with forty to fifty people on the server, although having said that, Starsiege Tribes didn’t have many more per game, and it was still brilliant fun, but then its maps were a lot smaller. EVE lends itself well to having as many concurrent players as its infrastructure can handle, but then its ‘world’ is actually a universe, which slightly edges out the two meagre continents of Azeroth in terms of ‘space for player to spread out in’.

Perhaps my point isn’t that these multiplayer games should not be massive at all, but that the measure of the massiveness shouldn’t necessarily be the number of concurrent players in the world but could in certain circumstances focus on the number of instances of the world. Just look at the constant demand for new servers from players in World of Warcraft, who want a fresh start and another crack at the world before everything has been done and completed; if the game offered you the chance to create a new fresh instance of the world whenever you wanted, and to only invite those people who you consider to be friends or to have the same play-style or mindset as you, would people find less of a problem with reaching the end-game and stagnating?

Although, all things considered, I have enough problems with alternative characters in MMOs, without the option of creating alternative worlds.

I think I just invented multiversitus.

Anyway, must dash, I can hear goodger sirens approaching; they must have found that stash of bread and milk I stole from old Mrs Crumbly’s garden.

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.

Let’s see, other than spending copious amounts of time covered in poop and vomit (have I mentioned the baby at all?), what have I been up to that might be marginally more interesting to those of you who come to read this blog on occasion.

Well time really has been at a premium so MMOs were the first to suffer the +1 Pendulous Axe of Time Management. It’s hard to find an MMO that one can dip into and play with very little commitment; it’s not just the relatively small slices of time that I am afforded to play at the moment, where travelling time in some MMOs would consume ninety percent of my play experience, but also the fact that it’s very hard to just abandon an MMO at the drop of a demanding baby’s +2 Hat of Vocalised Attention Seeking. In a single player game it’s very easy to hit a pause button, press escape to pull-up the options menu (which I suppose is the modern game equivalent of the pause key), or to just abandon the game very quickly wherever your character currently stands, knowing that when you return they will be standing where you left them, perhaps picking their nose or tapping their foot impatiently, but otherwise unscathed. Not so in an MMO: if you leave your character for even a fraction of a second, turn your head to look at something on the television, say, or look briefly out of the window at all the young healthy people soaking up their daily dose of vitamin D, perhaps bend down to rub some life into the numb slabs of jelly that pass for one’s legs, or so much as blink for longer than the requisite human system requirement of four hundred milliseconds, and a thousand angry mobs will have rained down upon your character and have reduced them to zero health points before you can say “By Chronos’ hairy arse! I glanced away for no more than the duration of the blanking period of my monitor! It’s not even visible to the human eye for crying out loud!”.

Having said all that, I have been dipping into City of Villains on occasion, for a quick half hour blast here and there, generally teaming-up with Zoso and or Elf; I’ve created a new character on which I can experiment with the power-set proliferation that occurred in the I12 ‘Midnight Hour’ update, and being that my love for the Earth Control power-set is unhealthy, and in fact illegal in twelve American states, I decided to create an Earth/Thorns dominator, and thus the Iron Cactus was born. Part man. Part machine. Part succulent spiny plant.

I may have also rolled an Electric/Willpower Brute, a Dual Blade/Regen Scrapper and a Willpower/Super Strength tank, although I haven’t played any of those characters at all yet.

But I’m not an altoholic![1]

I’ve also dipped into Guild Wars on occasion, essentially because, like a saucepan of dark chocolate and cream melted over a stove, it’s very, uh, dip-inable. I have a dervish, Wur Lin (WUR LIN! Whirling! As in whirling derv… ok, I was slightly inebriated and it sounded clever at the time) a monk, Mun Ki, (MUN KI. Monkey! As in monk eee… er, eh?) and an assassin, Tri Badism (TRI BADISM. Tribadism! As in… Ah. Well. Look it up some time, ey? Possibly not from work. And not if you’re under 18). Anyhoo, I think that’s plenty enough evidence of my, to be expected, curious naming conventions for my many characters.

But I’m not an altoholic![2]

Guild Wars is terribly easy to just hop into and play a mission or two, with the option of being able to drop it in an instant should a delightful ickle pink bundle of rabid screaming poo projection require one’s immediate attention. Admittedly most of my characters are in the early teens of the level progression cap of twenty, and this essentially means that they’re hardly anywhere at all in terms of game progress, but as with my never having reached the level cap in City of Heroes/Villains, for me it’s a game about the play, rather than the progress.

What makes City of Villains and Guild Wars so readily accessible to what I dub the Radical Casual player, the “It takes fanatical dedication to be this non-committal to a game” gamer? I think it’s a combination of things:

  • The short time it takes to travel anywhere. Both games have travel systems that mean you can get where you need to go, and be slaughtering your way through bags of XP in no time at all.
  • The short time it takes to make some progress. In both games, quests are readily available, relatively quick to complete, and generally not terribly complex. Yes, both games have deeper, longer, more complex missions at the higher levels, but they maintain this quick-access, easy goal, mission structure throughout a large portion of the levelling curve.
  • The time-minimal death penalty. Both games make it very quick and very easy to get yourself back into the fight, especially when you don’t have a rezzing character in the party. Both have penalties that could perhaps be considered more harsh than that in, say, WoW, because in WoW if you make the run to your corpse you suffer nothing but a little damage to your equipment which is easily repaired, but it is the length of that corpse run that hurts the Radical Casual player because it’s time wasted, and time is the defining limiting factor in their enjoyment of a game.

So that’s it for MMO, or MMO-like, games at the moment. As Zoso mentioned, many bloggers, of which we are no exception, seem to be experiencing the Anticipatocene era of the MMO timeline, sub-heading: “What We Do Whilst Waiting For WAR”.

My other gaming action in recent times has been Penny Arcade’s On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, a Final Fantasy-alike, with the various elements of a JPRG but with the rude, crude and not-for-the-prude humour that any fan of the online web comic would come to expect. With the speed of encounters, and the fact that they are not sprung on the player, but initiated by them at their choosing by walking into an area containing enemies, it’s again an ideal play style for those of us who have to regularly acknowledge a priority interrupt, we who experience random encounters of the tot kind. The game was entertaining enough to keep me playing until the end – the humour quite successfully treads that fine line of juvenile puerility without being obnoxious – but I found the combat mechanics a little frustrating, perhaps dull is the better description. I seemed to spend most combat encounters waiting for the most powerful combos to charge, and just blocking or healing damage the rest of the time, which essentially consists of pressing the spacebar a lot, or clicking a few menu options. I’m not sure if this is just indicative of the JRPG style of combat – it’s been a while since I last played Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Trigger – but seeing as the combat constitutes the bulk of the game-play, I think there could have been a greater emphasis on tactical decisions, perhaps the Tactics style of play might have been more engaging. Nevertheless, the story was fun, the writing and art direction excellent, and the game-play was certainly not tortuous, indeed the idea of having mini-games to play through to get the maximum damage from your high-power combos was a nice touch. I’ll certainly be purchasing the next instalment when it arrives. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is available on Steam and also through PA’s Greenhouse.

In non-gaming related activities I’ve been trying to read when I can, which seems to be predominantly in those periods where one hand is occupied in holding a bottle to Mini-melmoth’s chasm-like, gorging mouth hole. I fair blasted my way through The Lies of Locke Lamora, an easy to read fantasy heist with likeable characters told through fluid, playful prose. Charles Stross’ Halting State got me through many a late night feeding session. It is, however – like Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother – one of these near-future novels that rubs one’s nose in the techno-jargon of today, tweaked slightly in attempt to appear 1984-like in its predictive nature. Which, frankly, just annoys the hell-fired pants out of me, because it’s just a jarring interruption to show how clever and techno-savvy the author is, rather than a commentary on anything in particular. Constantly having your protagonists use ‘weird’ and ‘wonderful’ futuristic Google applications, by having them (in some sort of Star Trek parody) hax0r in an improbable fashion an application to produce an inverted BitTorrent flow through Google’s forward deflector shield, in order to undermine the authorities in that hip, cool and subversive manner that only asocial computer nerds can manage, is just tedious, frankly. If you want to see a near-enough-to-be-scary prediction of the future that was written in recent times (1984 is still the unassailable granddaddy, and the story that every author of this type of book should strive to achieve), then you read Gibson’s Neuromancer. No Google, no 5000 jiggerbyte iPods or Xbox 2020 editions, but it still predicts a future that we can overlay on our current reality, like a virtual map, and plot the route, as clear as the neon-bathed streets of a Chiba district at night, that humanity is taking.

Having said all that, Halting State isn’t a bad book, other than for that minor personal nitpick, which probably nobody else shares. Oh, and it mentions Scotland far too often to be subtle, often enough to be blatantly jarring after a while. Yes, we get it, you’re Scottish, and a big fan of Scotland and you believe in it as a nation, and you probably hate the English, and all that, so it’s not the UK, because that would include the English and they don’t deserve any advertising unless it’s in a bad light, such as a Hollywood villain. So it’s a story about how the Scottish police were called into investigate a Scottish crime in the heart of Scotland’s Scottish hi-tech infrastructure, or Scotlandstructure, as they call it in the Scottish suburbs of Scotland’s Scotlandscape. There’s a subtle subliminal message in there, but I’m just not quite getting it.

In other news, Mrs Melmoth and I are taking Mini-melmoth to Scotland on vacation this year. No idea why, it just seemed like a good idea.

[1]May be a lie. Regulations and guarantees apply. This statement does not affect your statutory rights.

[2]Yeah, ok, it’s a lie.

All seven and we’ll watch them fall.

Having just read Zoso’s post today on cancelling his Age of Conan subscription, I had a quick chat with him about it and found out that although he’d unsubscribed, he’d left it just a fraction too late and the first set of subscription fees had already been processed. It was only shortly after this that I read Stropp’s post stating exactly the same.

And you begin to realise that the reason the MMO blogosphere seems to be endlessly recycling the same topics is that, in general, we’re all following exactly the same path; we’re all on an MMO-like treadmill in real life, grinding out the same old topics as everyone else just as we grind out the same quests in our MMOs, not because we’re unoriginal or lacking in ability, but because we’re all destined to experience the same real life content, there’s no other path to follow.

And then one wonders that if that’s the case, who is the master developer of this sub-game of real life that is named MMO Enthusiast, who is the generic overlord presenting us with this real life grind, and why?

My theory: it’s just like The Matrix. We’re all in a non-consensual hallucination generated by a dominant race of artificial intelligences, except in this version they have a separate section – away from the main power generation – which is reserved for MMO bloggers, where we are harvested not for our energy but for our contrasting and extreme experiences of joy and of lethargy, purely for our blog posts, for the raw unadulterated word count on topics revisited on an almost hourly basis for time immemorial.

Why? My guess is that sometime in the early days of the conflict between humanity and the AIs we forced a buffer overflow in the masochism section of their neural networks, and now they read and read, transfixed with a perverse need to repeatedly endure, through the medium of blogs, the seven successive sensations of an MMO enthusiast: Scepticism, Confusion, Wonder, Addiction, Frustration, Ennui and Withdrawal.

Inestimable blessing and bother.

An explanation, then, of why I left the Inferno to smoulder quietly deep beneath the tectonics of the blogipelago, and instead moved over here into the slightly less flame-ridden confines of fatal joviality.

Within the next week the first mini Melmoth is due to arrive in this great wide world, and rumour has it that this event can be somewhat consuming of a person’s time. Apparently, parenting isn’t as easy it appears on Friends. Who knew? I’d bought a monkey to act as a babysitter and everything.

So it appears that I won’t have much time for playing MMOs or writing on blogs or, anything really. For a while, at least. So I’ve moved over here to Killed in a Smiling Accident such that, when I disappear for a while, the blog won’t stagnate because Zoso will still be here updating you with today’s Hat News. Now. And hopefully, if I can claw myself out from under the pile of nappies, swim through the steaming lake of vomit, cross the barren plains of This Used To Be A Lovely Living Room And Now It’s A Wasteland, and finally climb the hill of mounting bills, I’ll be able to pop back here and update you with the latest happenings in House Melmoth, and possibly try to relate it to MMOs, or something entertaining or funny. Or maybe it’ll just be a short three-line message crying for help. The fun and adventure of ‘when and what’ will be yours to discover!

Raising a child. Mercy. Talk about epic quest lines.

Although I really should try to stop thinking of it in MMO terms, if nothing else because of the dream where I’m in the delivery theatre watching expectantly and waiting excitedly for the arrival of the new born, and then I stare in horror as a yellow exclamation mark slowly appears top-first from between Mrs Melmoth’s akimbo legs, followed shortly thereafter by mini-Melmoth’s head. Yes, that one never fails to be somewhat unnerving.

I wonder if that’s what Native Americans mean when they talk of a dream quest? No wonder they were all sweaty and mumbling afterwards.

Still, it was after this dream, when I was in my sweating and mumbling meditative after-trance, that I experienced that moment of clarity and inspiration that is so often sought after. The great spirit of the MMO appeared before me and spoke in its curiously repetitive and grindy voice, and it whispered unto me a thousand lost secrets from the seven ages of man. Then it took them all back in a giant nerf patch and character wipe.

What is a nerf patch anyway? It sounds like some sort of elbow protector made from the skin of a small burrowing mammal. “Here we see the lesser spotted nerf in its native environment. It has been tunnelling from the safety of its burrow, upwards towards the surface, for nearly four days. Slowly, after a gargantuan effort, this tiniest of creatures gently breaks the surface and sees sunlight for the first time in its five years of existence.” *WHAP* “And now it’s skinned and used to make patches for clothes”. Of course, the whole nerf patch industry collapsed after people realised that applying a nerf patch to a hole in one part of your clothing simply opened another, bigger hole somewhere else entirely, and usually in a more embarrassing place.

Anyway, a vestigial glimpse of insight remained, and I was gifted with the solution to labour pain! Not a cure, as such, but a way to cope with it that is beyond the reach of any mere mortal medicinal aid. It was simply this: a few weeks before the due date, sit the expectant mother down in front of a computer and open a web browser to the World of Warcraft web forums. For two weeks, make her read the posts there, every single drivelling, mewling one. Labour pain after that is going to seem like a hazy bounding jaunt along small country lanes in the springtime. And before an aerie of angry Internet mums swoops down on me from the great heights at which they monitor the Internet below, I am not meaning to trivialise the pain of labour, merely to indicate just how bad MMO forums are. Moving swiftly on!

It seems to me that children are the most demanding quest givers that you’re ever likely to encounter. We begin with the starter area quests: the initial grind of changing ten nappies (an hour); ‘feeding’ quests where the reward is cracked nipples, although admittedly not mine, unless I’m doing something very wrong, because as we all know men get resistance to that as an inherent racial trait at character creation; and cleaning (cleaning baby, cleaning baby’s clothes, cleaning the walls of baby’s projectile orifice effusions). It’s a rough start to your adventures as a parent class, and one is often going to wish that they’d just stuck with one of the comparatively easier pet classes such as cat owner, dog owner, hamster owner… crocodile wrestler, tiger-scrotum flicker.

Fair enough, one of those is a touch off the mark because as we all know, cats own you. A case in point: when a baby poops everywhere it’s because it doesn’t even understand the concept of a toilet yet, whereas when a cat leaves a steaming pile of chocolate blancmange in the middle of the lounge carpet, it was most likely to demonstrate their displeasure with your tardy service at elevenses and luncheon. That’s why a cat is never around when you discover the mess, but once you’re fully occupied on all fours, struggling to get the lid off of the carpet cleaner whilst simultaneously maintaining a hold on your nose, the cat will turn up and gaze at you with a look that says “Hurry up and clear that mess will you? And then fetch me my slippers! Do I have to do everything around here?! And when you serve me my tea this evening I want it in a silver dish. Silver! Not porcelain! Or else! There’ll be a rich chocolaty coating on the stairs tomorrow morning…”

Where were we? Oh yes. Current indications from speaking with other parents is that the baby comes with three talent trees in which they can specialise; generally they will be a hybrid of some sort, spreading points between the various trees, but as with most MMO talent systems, if they spec. heavily in one tree, they will only have a enough points to spec. a little way into a second tree.

The three trees are: Cuteness, which is your basic healing line, and like most healers, it’s almost impossible to find anyone specialised that way; Poop, a formidable ‘defence through offence’ line; and Vocal, which is a pure DPS line. So as you can see, if your baby is specialised heavily into Vocal, they tend to be less well specialised in cuteness and poop power. Poop specialised babies, however, tend to be less well specialised in the cuteness and vocal trees; parents of Poop specialised babies may mistake this as the indication that they have a cute and quiet child, but that cute little smile is soon revealed into the smug vindictive little sneer that it really is upon opening of the nappy, and the lack of vocals were evidently just a ruse to make sure that you are caught unawares by the festering payload that has been delivered. Also, a word of warning: if you think you’re having it rough with that ‘Stealth attack’ talent, wait until you experience the full force of the ‘Expedite excretion’ talent which, on activation, clears the cool-downs on all of baby’s poop powers immediately. As I said, the Poop tree is for defence, or tanking, and there’s nothing like a secondary surprise attack mid nappy change to keep a parent’s aggro while other siblings DPS them down with their vocal abilities.

And so, after the madness of forced late-night grinding sessions, we move onto the lengthy story arcs of education, discipline and entertainment. There’s a bare minimum of eighteen years of content in those. I tell you, whichever developer came up with this adventure certainly knew the meaning of polish and innovation. There are highs and lows, unexpected plot twists and multitudinous possible endings. You not only level-up as a parent, but you’re wholly responsible for levelling-up this little pink bundle of adventure, this distilled essence of noob.

Of course, once your child reaches their teenage years they get the puberty respec, where they generally give up their baby talent trees for three entirely new trees: Indignant Rage, Irrational Rage and Furious Salivating Wolverine Rage.

Can’t wait!

We read to know we are not alone.

Zoso wrote to me at work this morning – I’m offline in the evening at the moment for reasons that I’m sure I’ll go into in a meandering and flannelling fashion sometime soon – huzzahing the fact that we’re both set for a rhino riding rampage in Age of Conan should we ever reach the heady level of the forties in said game. He also mentioned, however, that we would at least have our bonus order belts for extra carrying capacity in the meantime; apparently you get a free belt in lieu of the mount which you can’t use until level forty. This was news to me, and I realised that I’d not fully read the deal before making my order for the game, I’d just skimmed it and hit purchase.

And now I worry that I’m speed reading various things in real life as though they were quest texts, and I wonder what sort of trouble that could get me into in the future:

You are purchasing blah blah blah Conan blah blah rhino blah blah blah blah blah early access blah blah. Blah blah blah 24 pounds blah. Blah. Blah blah blah.

Yes, yes, yes. Whatever. 24 pounds, rhino, early access. It’s all there, just let me purchase the thing already. Click. Click. Done.

<Two months later>

%ding dong%

Me: “Hello?”

Delivery Man: “Good morning sir, a delivery for you.”

Me: <Looks at delivery note> “Hmm, there seems to have been sort of mistake.”

Delivery Man: “Sir?”

Me: “Well, it’s just that this seems to be a delivery note for a female African black rhino implausibly called Conan, an artificial insemination kit and twenty four pounds of black rhino semen.”

Delivery Man: “That’s right, sir. One rhino and an ‘early access’ insemination kit. Starting a breeding program are we sir?”

Me: “I… really didn’t read that order properly, did I?”

<Another delivery man arrives>

Delivery Man 2: “Morning, sir. Just sign here for your order of a warhammer on a line, an aged Nganasan shaman and twelve dismembered heads.”

Me: “Oh dear.”

I don’t think that it’s necessarily conditioning on the part of MMOs that has caused this, because I understand that there are plenty of people out there who play MMOs and read the quest text in full, and that these people are still able to lead fulfilling and healthy lives. I think, in fact, that my altitus is as much to blame as anything, what with constantly rolling new characters and repeating old content, one generally begins to accept quests automatically because they’ve been experienced before. This is habit forming, though, and eventually you begin to see every set of quest text as an overly lengthy interruption to your game-play, even if reading that text would take only a matter of tens of seconds. It’s often a false economy though, even with the excellent quest trackers in modern MMOs, the quest text is usually there to explain where you are required to go, and what it is that you have to kill ten of this time. So you end-up revisiting the quest text, skimming it to find the pertinent information, and wasting more time than if you’d just read it all in the first place. Alas, the habit is formed, and it is a strong one: text is your enemy and must be ignored at all costs!

The problems lies with the fact that it translates too easily into the real world; it crosses that ineffable boundary between fantasy and reality and haunts your ways, like when you’ve just woken from a dream and have yet to shake it off as the fictional creation of your subconscious. Of course, you soon realise that there is not, in fact, a giant space octopus with tentacles made of creamy pasta and a single fulgurating eye of pure topaz trying to steal the collection of George Clooneys from under your bed.

I’m sure you can relate to the experience now, because even if you don’t skip the quest text, I think we’ve all had that dream.

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.

The distance doesn’t matter; it is only the first step that is the most difficult.

We’ve all been there in one MMO or another. You stroll up to an NPC and you click on them to initiate a conversation or perhaps to barter with them. I say barter, but of course MMO NPCs are just about the worst entities at bartering in the world.

Adventurer1: “Hello! I’d like to sell this Two-handed Axe of Rawr that I found inside a catfish this morning, please.”

Vendor: “Hello! Very well, I will pay you fifty silver for the axe.”

Adventurer1: “A fair price. It’s a deal.”

Adventurer2: “Hi. I’d like to sell this Two-handed Axe of Rawr that I no longer have any use for. Now, I understand that it’s a bit worn around the edges and it could do with a bit of a clean but…”

Vendor: “Hello! Very well, I will pay you fifty silver for the axe.”

Adventurer2: “Oh. Right. Uh, great! Thanks!”

Adventurer3: “Well met. Here I have the shattered haft of a Two-handed Axe of Rawr that I pulled from the bloodied corpse of your father after I killed him earlier today.”

Vendor: “Hello! Very well, I will pay you fifty silver for the axe.”

Adventurer3: “No. I don’t want to sell it. I’m threatening you with it. It’s broken anyway, because half of it is still buried in your father’s head.”

Vendor: “Hello! I have considered the item more closely, and I will pay you fifty silver for the axe.”

Adventurer3: “Look. Forget the axe, I don’t want to sell it. I’m here to convince you on behalf of the local landlord to pay your rent. You’re massively behind on your payments and he’s had enough. Here’s a pile of papers itemising the rent that you now owe, totalling some five gold pieces. We’re not sure what you’re doing with all your money, Vendor, but pay up soon or…”

Vendor: “Hello! Very well, I will pay you seventy five silver for the pile of papers.”

Anyway, as I was saying, you stroll up to an NPC and click on them to initiate a conversation or what have you, and nothing happens. Well, either nothing happens or you get a message such as:

You are too far away to interact with that object.

I can’t interact with the NPC? Look, I just want to talk to them. I’m standing right next to them for crying out loud! If I drew my sword I could stab them clean-through from where I’m standing; admittedly with the size of epic weapons in some MMOs that could put me anywhere within a radius of about seven miles… But look, I can see them, I can make out the passive guppy fished look on their face that tells me that they’re going to offer me fifty silver for this axe, even though it’s rusted through and covered in marmoset entrails and peanut butter (long story). My character must have the weakest voice in the entire known world! He should be titled Frank the Faintly Spoken and crowned international five hundred metres whispering freestyle champion. He must have a voice so mellifluous that it is deflected and wafted away by the beating of a butterfly’s wing on the other side of the world.

I’M STANDING RIGHT NEXT TO YOU, YOU FOOL, WHADDYA MEAN I NEED TO GET CLOSER?!

I always panic that one of these days I’m going to get no response, so I move a bit closer and *click*. Still no response. Move a bit closer *click*. No response. A bit closer…

And then the NPC pounces! He grabs my character by the collar and gives him a smackingly wet kiss, flops my character backwards in his arms and cries “Ah, my little darling, it is love at first sight, is it not, no?”

Could happen.

I worry too about the armour that our characters wear in these games, with spikes and blades and all manner of sharp pointy extrusions; you approach the NPC and *click*. No response. So you move a bit closer and *click*. Still no response. A bit closer… and as you try to buy that KitKat or gisarme glaive or Tidyman’s carpet, you impale the vendor on your shoulder spikes. Do you know how hard it is to wash vendor out of your armour? All the high level players don’t bother any more – not enough time what with the raiding and all that – so they just leave the vendors there. So when you see all these high level characters running around with skulls hanging from the spikes on their shoulders, you’ll know they got too close to a vendor whilst trying to start-up a conversation. And those with skulls hanging from their head gear? Let’s just say Monsieur Amour the Vendor got a nasty little surprise when he tried that sloppy wet kiss of his.

And they move away! Damn their ‘very limited circle of about ten yards so people can always find them’ mobility! So you wander up and are told you’re not close enough. So you move closer and try again, and you’re still not close enough. Move closer. Nope. Move closer. Nope. Move closer… success! The vendor window pops open! Then, at that exact moment, whatever weird schedule they’re on, whatever bizarre routine it is that they follow, requires them to move five yards to the left. And off they go. And now the bloody vendor window closes because they’re too far away! So you run up to them and *click*, but you get no response.

They’re either all evil genius bastards, or it’s Monsieur Amour the Vendor slapping a wet kiss on you and then running off shouting “Chase me big boy!”.

But that’s not the worst of it.

The other day I was in World of Warcraft’s Stormwind city and I was trying to get this little kid NPC to give me the next stage of a quest, so I *click* and get no response. So I move a bit closer and *click*. No response. Closer. *Click*. No response. So I’m practically standing in the same space as the kid now, and I’m frantically *clicking* away… Why. Won’t. You. Bloody. Well. Talk. To. Me.

And then sirens.

So I’m writing this now from the Stormwind Stockade, apparently that was the wrong kid. The charges are harrassment of a minor, and worse, apparently.

To top it all off there’s this freakily-bearded dwarf here called Kam, who keeps trying to *click* on me, and I’m running out of room and excuses to move away…