Tag Archives: zoso

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

Montage ensues, to the soundtrack of..

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

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

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

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

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

2359 hours
Level 49 and nine bubs, nearly there!

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Sunday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1100 hours
WWWWWWWWWASADWASDAWDWSDWADASWDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD[text buffer overflow]

A Week in the Life of an MMO Addict: Saturday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Doctor, Doctor, I’ve been CAPTCHA’d

I understand why blogs and forums might need to employ a CAPTCHA; there’s one on this very site for comments, added after spam-bots decided our massive readership would be really interested in wombat accessories or whatever other rubbish they’re peddling (blame/praise Melmoth for the word choice, though).

The Age of Conan forums employ a captcha whenever you want to search, which seems slightly over the top to start with (possibly to stop DoS attempts, I dunno). It suffers from one oh-so-minor flaw, though: it doesn’t show you a slightly deformed word to recognise, it vomits forth a Jackson Pollock tribute which allegedly contains six numbers and/or letters, though you can’t tell ‘cos they’re strangely distorted and rotated to start with, then a five year old has been let loose on them with a whole box of crayons (and not one of those little boxes with about six colours, oh no, we’re talking jumbo deluxe party selection). There were obviously plenty of people posting, maybe it was just me having trouble with the thing; I went to search on “captcha” to check, only I had to… oh yeah, pass the captcha…

Figuring it might only be required for non-registered users, I went to sign up, completed the form and… oh look, it’s a captcha (understandable, on registrations). After a mere thirty or so reloads, I finally found one where the resident child had missed most of the letters with the crayons and got through, and sure enough that avoids the need on every search. Except by that point I’d got bored and forgot what I was looking for in the first place, and went off to YouTube to find the source of this post title (6 minutes in), but at least I’ll be ready next time I need to search. So long as I can remember the login…

Nice post. Tideyman’s?

Killed in a smiling accident is brought to you in association with Tideyman’s Carpets. Remember, nothing soaks in to a Tideyman’s!

Advertising. Its creeping, insidious presence is getting everywhere, it seems. Rest assured, though, this blog will always be a haven of product-placement-free tranquillity, and will return after these messages from our sponsor…

Tideyman’s Carpets: nobody walks all over us. Except people who buy Tideyman’s Carpets! And then walk all over them.

Last week, there was an NCSoft announcement introducing in-game advertising for City of Heroes. Needless to say, this prompted a brief, polite discussion on the forum for a couple of days before everyone returned to deconstructing Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments. No, hang on, I’m thinking of something else there… It naturally prompted a wide ranging and frequently heated debate ranging over advertising, product placement, privacy concerns, the ultimate meaning of life, and whether one can, in fact, haz cheezburger.

I’m somewhat ambivalent myself. I can certainly see the point of the anti-advertising lobby (especially when articulated by the great Bill Hicks), but on the basis that the genie won’t go back in the bottle, I can generally live with product placement and adverts so long as they aren’t too intrusive; I don’t really mind what kind of watch James Bond wears, but pointing it out in dialogue is a bit clunky (the recent version of Casino Royale: “Rolex?” “Omega” “CHA-CHING”!) There’s a post about adverts in Brothers In Arms, a bit of a puff piece, but at least it shows they try and blend things into the environment; I can even buy the argument that they’re doing players a favour in making things more realistic. The City of Heroes adverts should be fairly similar, placed on billboards that already exist in-game. Sounds fairly reasonable, and there’ll be an option to turn them off if they turn out to be particularly garish.

Potentially more insidious than the mere presence of adverts in an online game is the possibility of associated data gathering. Now, in general, I like the idea of targeted advertising, so long as it’s based on information I volunteer myself and I know what I’m letting myself in for. If I search for hatstands on Google, it’s sometimes helpful when it pops up a sponsored “BUY HATSTANDS HERE!” link (as an option, if I want to look there). I think Amazon’s “My Store” is pretty nifty, suggesting things I might like based on what I’ve bought/rated, though it shows a distinct lack of imagination (“After buying a Radiohead album, you reckon I might like… every other Radiohead album? Steady on there, Amazon, let’s not go too crazy!”) It’s not a huge leap from there, though, to the looming shadow of the Panopticon, where the insurance company can check your online shopping from the supermarket and raise health insurance premiums because of all the high fat food you’re buying, and you lose out on a job because the employer found some embarrassing photos of you on Facebook. The recent revelations about Phorm in the UK (today’s exciting instalment) show it’s not exactly tin-foil helmet stuff, the amount you need to worry depending on how far you believe Phorm’s assurances about anonymity (general conclusion would seem to be: not very). Again, though, there doesn’t seem to be too much to worry about that in City of Heroes, I don’t believe it has any interaction with the rest of your ‘net use, so won’t run into the dangers Penny Arcade warn of…

I’ll give the adverts in CoH a go, if it means more money for NCSoft to invest in the game, so much the better, but I hope it’s not the start of a slippery slope, there’s nothing worse than terrible, blatant advertising, so don’t forget: when you think carpets, think Tideyman’s, the deep shag that really satisfies.

DEATH by BLOG!

Via Slashdot, I just found out I’m in mortal peril. When they talk about the “nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet”, I know just what they mean, it’s not easy coming up with random waffle here every couple of days (apart from weekends, public holidays and when I can’t be bothered).

Actually, it is *quite* easy. And if I get stuck I can just post links to the New York Times. Mind you, the advertising revenue isn’t so hot, the Welcome Break, Low Wycombe still haven’t sent us the promised 74p, makes me glad I cleared them out of little bottles of shampoo at the time, the bastards.

Worlds of Fantasy on the BBC

The BBC have been doing a series, Worlds of Fantasy, about… err… Worlds. Of Fantasy, strangely enough. Unfortunately they stuck them on at the same time as Torchwood, and I never got organised enough to record the repeats, but huzzah! for iPlayer. The first was fairly so-so, looking at child heroes. The second was better, devoted to Tolkien and Peake with contributors including the incomparably magnificent Joe Abercrombie. The third I found most interesting of all, what with goodly chunks of, amongst others, Pratchett (I thought Hugh Jackman’s rig in Swordfish was ludicrous Hollywood invention, turns out they just got PTerry’s actual setup and scaled it down a bit), Moorcock, Lemmy, Richard Bartle, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and Neil Gaiman (I’d like to withdraw the previous labelling of Joe Abercrombie, he’s in fact comparably magnificent to the comparable magnificence of Neil Gaiman). Anyway, I’d entirely forgotten about it as per usual until Melmoth mentioned it, and I just caught it before its seven days on iPlayer expired. If you happen to be reading this within about 24 hours of the posting date, you’ll be just in time, otherwise sorry! It was good, though.

Now I’m goin’ to hell

A couple of weeks in to Hellgate: London, and I’m still rather enjoying it. I’ve performed a highly complex statistical analysis of what I most like about the game; I’m afraid the results utilise some incredibly advanced theoretical modelling techniques to represent the concept of “fun” in a thirteen-dimensional topographical waveform that might be a bit advanced for you earthlings, but hang on to your hats and and see if you can follow along. Here we go…

There’s loads of loot in Hellgate. I like loot.

Hrm. Maybe it’s fairly simple after all.

Course it’s not just the loot, the general running-around-shooting-demons (and zombies and beasts and freaky floating head things with tentacles that just appear right next to you and go EEEEERRRRRUUURRRURUR) side of things is also good. As a Marksman, and concentrating on passive skills for the most part, it’s extremely FPS-y, there’s only a couple of active skills I frequently use. Loot, though, definitely gives it an “oh, go one then, just one more round of the mini-game” impetus (the mini-game consists of three icons that appear on screen challenging you to kill x of a certain type of creature, or make x kills using a certain type of damage, or pick up a certain type of loot; once you fulfil the three criteria, voila! More loot!) Aside from the mini-game, rare mobs and named bosses are fairly common (well by definition they can’t be that common, but they’re common for rare things. If you see what I mean.), and they explode in a particularly satisfying shower of money and, oh yes, loot! I do seem to be getting quite lucky, though; Hellgate uses the good old green/blue/orange uncommon/rare/legendary loot classification, and I’m pretty much kitted out in legendary gear now, whereas Melmoth only has a couple of bits.

Hitting level 20, I wandered off to Stonehenge to make the most of being a subscriber. It’s fun enough, plenty more demon, zombie and floating-tentacle-head shooting fun. I got the items needed to unlock Moloch, the super-uber-head-demon-beast chap, so Melmoth and I popped in to say “hi”, maybe have a cup of tea, then while there it seemed rude not to unleash a devastating rain of fire and destruction upon him. Unfortunately Melmoth was much lower level than Mr Moloch and scarcely able to scratch him. On the plus side, he made an excellent diversion, enabling me to stand and shoot the beastie for the ten straight minutes to knock his health bar down to around 75%, at which point a bunch of priest things spawned that healed him back to full health by the time we could clear them. Another twenty minutes, Moloch at 50% health, back came the priests… half an hour, 25% health, oh look, it’s the priests… If they’d spawned again at 1% health I think I might’ve gone on a mad rampage around the living room, or at least said “tsk”, but fortunately they didn’t, so a mere hour and a half of constantly shooting the big ol’ demon netted the spoils (of a couple of legendary items for me, and… none for Melmoth. All that +luck gear must be paying off.) Next time, maybe recruiting a few more people might make it a bit quicker…

The best thing about Hellgate, though, is Lucious Aldin and Techsmith 314 (well, maybe second best, after UBER LEGENDARY LEWT). Unfortunately I seem to have finished their missions for now, I’m rather hoping they’ll make a comeback later on. As a taster of the crazy madcap japes these two get up to, if you don’t mind a few spoilers see the quest walkthrough for “That’ll Get Infected“. Already, “bio break” has been replaced in our online conversations with “I think I need to use the privy-OF DESECRATION!”