Thought for the day.

“What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!”
         —- Lazarus Long

A motto for pre-release/beta MMO reporting among bloggers if ever I heard one.

Objectivity first; save the emotionally invested testimonies – good or bad – for when you’ve been playing the game for six months after release.

My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song.

And so, after almost four years of faithful service, my PC decided to retire from this world in a concussive fireball that took out one side of my house.

Or so I imagine it would have dearly wished, but instead it only managed a feeble putter and then refused to produce any activity other than hard disk drives chuntering to life along with the case light and fans; as tools-down picket lines go, it was pretty comprehensive, however. Not even a series of blunt POST beeps greeted me when I pressed the power button, that PC equivalent of R2-D2 flicking two fingers at you in what should be unintelligible parps, boops and beeps, but which you categorically know would translate to certain objectionable four-letter words if you could run it through a Babel fish.

Simply silence, and the faint blue glow of the power LED, staring out at me like the eye of HAL 9000 – “I’m sorry, I can’t do that Dave”.

I went through the various stages of PC rejection: Confusion, Shock, Panic, Anger, Distress, Regret, Despair. Moved on to quietly pleading to various deities which I remembered reading about at school, then pressing the power button while I kept my eyes closed, and waiting a short while before popping one eye open and scanning around with it to see if a miracle had occurred. Strange thing about miracles: not many of them ever recorded against the resurrection of dead PC components. I reached the final stage of PC rejection fairly quickly – sulking, gave up on joining my friends on our once-per-week Lord of the Rings Online gathering, and instead finished reading a book.

I carried on with the book reading the next morning, all the while my mind settled into that melancholy state where it considered the time involved in diagnosing whether it was power supply, RAM, motherboard or processor that had failed, and the effort in trying to locate replacement parts for an aging four year old system; balanced it against the cost of purchasing the best part of a new system, which although not entirely an issue, was depressing when one considered that the carefully selected hand-rolled system that I’d put together four years ago was still able to run most modern games with the settings whacked right up. My mind, as it is wont to do, then flittered from despair to rage, with thoughts of “To hell with it all!” and “I’ll just stop gaming!” and the corridors of my cortex bloomed like a time-lapse flower with wild fantasies, where I fancied I could spend what time I used to dedicate to gaming instead doing exercises and weight training and reading, whereupon I would become some sort of intellectual iron man, surrounded by adoring nubile college girls, who would coo and marvel as I bench-pressed a car while breathlessly reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins at them. Each fantasy would break apart as soon as my eyes inevitably wandered back to the black monolith sitting silently in the corner of my living room however, a magnetic anomaly, a thumping pulse radiating from it, a regular beat, drumming at the primitive gamer in me, drawing me back with its promise of other worlds and dimensions to explore.

So the order for new components will be placed in the next few days, and then I’ll spend time performing surgery on my old faithful companion, carefully parting the neatly tied vascular system of cables, replacing vital organs with upgraded versions, singing Daisy Bell all the while; eventually sitting back and hoping that, when the thermal compound sets and electricity once again flows through its veins, I will find myself with a loyal servant once more ready to give me another four years of exploring strange new worlds and new player populations.

I guess the nubile college girls will have to wait, it turns out that I’m a gamer yet, through and through, all the way down to my quad core.

KiaSAcast Episode 10

For those of you who are not monitoring our podcast RSS feed or stalking us on the Twitterverse, brace your main hats and hang on to your sails, because we’re pleased to announce that it’s time for KiaSAcast episode ten, that’s two WHOLE digits for the price of one! We’re too good to you, we really are.

This episode of the podcast includes:

– Introduction

– International MMO Soloing Championships

– Games we might play, but aren’t now for various reasons::

     – DCUO

     – Rift

     – World of Tanks

     – Planetside Next

     – Guild Wars 2

     – Firefall

     – The Secret World

     – Star Wars: The Old Republic (recorded pre Riccitiello announcement)

     – Neverwinter

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s list of games for 2011

Download KiaSAcast Episode Ten

MMO Libido.

I realised recently, in a moment of peculiar clarity, that I’m gradually losing my MMO libido. I suppose it could be due to my age; I’m getting to that time in life where the body starts to slow down, realises that it can’t carry on at such a pace and determines to stop expending energy on activities that, at a younger age, seemed the very essence of life itself. Of course, being male, I can’t help but entertain a small burning sphere of panic in my stomach that it’s simply because I’ve been MMOing too much, that I’ve spent too much energy locked away in my bedroom furiously MMOing by myself at a young age, and then MMOing at every opportunity with others as soon as I was able.

I just don’t seem to have the raging passion for it these days. When I was younger, all I could think about was MMOing. I’d be sat in class at school and thinking about MMOing; I was desperate, a slave to my passions, so much so that I’d invent ways of sneaking out of class, finding a quiet spot somewhere, and knocking out a quick few levels, before slinking back into class. Then I’d spend the rest of the lesson worrying that everyone knew that, actually, I hadn’t been to see the nurse, and that they had (in that typical irrational teenage nightmare) all spontaneously developed the ability to read my mind, and thus knew precisely what I’d really been up to.

Maths class was always the most difficult because that’s when Mrs Fotheringby taught us. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mrs Fotheringby would look like in a chainmail bikini, and my mind would run riot with images of her crushing orc heads between her thighs, and then admiring my wizard’s staff and asking if she could hold it for a little while. I’d often dream about going delving around in dank dungeons with her, and wake up in the night all hot and tangled-up in sweaty sheets to find that I’d logged-in and dinged a level, and I wasn’t really sure how.

It’s not that I don’t like MMOing these days, quite the contrary, it’s just that I can take it or leave it now. The passion I once had, which seemed to burn like wildfire throughout my body and enflame my very soul such that I thought I would go mad from it, has gradually dwindled to a more manageable pile of embers which can sometimes be fanned back into a flame, but mostly just gently smoulder and keep me from getting entirely cold on the whole idea. It seems to be a slow Decline over Time, a subtle DoT, the main effect of which appears to be a measured draining of my desire for MMOing.

For example, I find that I still quite enjoy watching other people play MMOs, and that when I do, it sometimes gets me in the mood to play too; but I’ve also noticed that I have many more evenings these days where I consider playing an MMO, and in the end decide to just snuggle-up, with a nice hot chocolate on the bedside table and a good book in my hands.

I’ve even tried new things in MMOs in order to spice things up a bit. I once attempted to explore my masochistic side by trying some PvP, but I quickly found that repeated butt-whippings and tea-baggings at the hands of strangers really didn’t do it for me. Well, that’s not strictly true: when you have a really good PvP MMOing it’s hard to go back to just MMOing the standard way, by yourself or with others, but such experiences are unfortunately rare, and most people in the PvP MMO scene seem to be in it simply for the abuse they can inflict on others. I bought myself a new toy a while ago too, thinking that perhaps experimenting with new ways of playing might help to spice things up a bit, and to my credit I’ve stuck with it all this while, even though it felt very strange at first and gave me cramp on numerous occasions, usually right when I was in the middle of dinging a level, which is awkward and uncomfortable and generally ruins all the effort that has gone into building up to the ding.

I would like to reiterate that I don’t have problems with MMOing, you understand, there’s no searching through patent circulars and risking links on spam emails to purchase for myself a pill that will allow me to log-in. No, my ability to log-in is unaffected, but I just find that once I’m in, I don’t have quite the drive to get to the next ding that I used to. I suppose one advantage is that it takes me a lot longer to ding these days, thus the anticipation is greater, and sometimes it can take me several tries before I ding; as a young man I could ding several times a night, but those experiences were often rushed and fumbled, and rarely resulted in any satisfaction, they were invariably empty and hollow, and merely fanned my desire to ding again, and quickly, because this time it would be more meaningful. Better experience.

In parallel with this decline in MMO libido I find that I am not so instantly smitten with the next good-looking MMO that comes along, but generally find myself wanting to stay with those that I’ve known for some time. I can still appreciate an attractive MMO with the best of them of course, but I rarely find myself slavering after it, or furiously writing lengthy prose about its every perfect detail apparent to my eyes, in a vain attempt to exorcise the demons of my passion. I find myself preferring a slightly more classical look to my MMOs, what others might now call old fashioned, and it makes me cringe to witness those that were once beauties desperately, and to my mind futilely, trying to reinvent themselves in order to compete with the younger generation. Some have aged gracefully and are as desirable to old-timers like myself as they were when we were all younger, but others have become monstrous parodies of their former selves, amorphous blobs of ill-advised and unwarranted invasive surgeries – ineffective attempts to chase after and retain the glory of their youth.

Am I worried about the decline in my MMO libido? Not really, no. If I’m honest I sometimes look wistfully at the younger generation who are still revelling in their newfound passions, and where their desires and enthusiasm seem as boundless and mysterious to them as a new-found dungeon entrance, waiting agape for someone to thrust forth and explore its darkening depths; but as I said before, I’m still able to enjoy regular MMOing, it’s just that I do so at a different pace than I used to. But no matter how much I slow down, and no matter how much my MMO libido declines, I don’t in all honesty think that I’ll ever entirely lose the urge to get myself logged-in and grind away for an hour or two, in order to experience another glorious ding.

Have I Got MMOnews For You.

News reached us via /. that

“a recently opened Benihana branch in Kuwait sued 248am.com, a well known Kuwaiti blog, for posting a bad restaurant review about its food, asking for the blog to be shut and more than $17,500 in damages (5000 KD).”

KiaSA would like to state for the record that we’ve always considered Darkfall to be one of the finest MMOs ever made; that Warhammer Online was produced with perfect execution, delivering on every promise made by Paul Barnett; the incredible grind in Aion was simply a life affirming avocation; and that Tabula Rasa was probably just misunderstood.

Vanguard was still utter arse, though.

A scholar always treads on the path of righteousness

It’s a scholar’s life, being a scholar in LotRO. The other day I sought to improve my scholarlyness from Apprentice to Journeyman, so I schlepped over to Ered Luin for a chat with some Elf there.

“Ah, Zoso” she said “to prove to me how scholarly you are, I want you to compose a poem”
“Fair enough” said I; “There once was an Elf from Nantucket…”
“No, no, no. I want a ballad about Aiglos. You’ll need a Ruined Second Age Trinket, which you can obtain from vases found in a few terribly perilous ruins inevitably infested with hostile beasts, three Cryptic Texts from those same vases or possibly looted from the corpses of assorted monsters, and the Lost Stanzas of Aiglos which I gave to another random adventurer who promptly headed off into the middle of nowhere and got himself killed slap bang in the middle of an incredibly dangerous area.”
“Erm, right. Peril, death, peril, killing, danger, rifling through the pockets of blood-stained corpses, peril, poetry. Sounds like fairly standard academic research. I’ll get right on it. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless… well… it’s just I’ve been doing a bit of farming in my spare time, as us Historians are wont to do, and I just completed a quest for Farmer Barleymow over there to progress from being an Apprentice Farmer to Journeyman.”
“A quest, eh? That must have been challenging. I’ll wager you had to seek out an incredibly rare seed, protected by vicious birds who’ll give a nasty peck if you try and take it from them, and then you had to fertilise the seed with the dung of an albino Auroch, of which there are only known to be two, and it had to be watered with the tears of a Hero of the Second Age.”
“Not exactly, no. I had to read a book.”
“A book?”
“Yeah, The Kitchen Gardener: Grow Your Own Fruit and Veg by Alan Titchmarsh. It’s really good, lots of step by step guides, detailed pictures, it’s got a five star rating on Amazon.”
“But you had to ride for many leagues to obtain this book, no doubt?”
“He had a copy on him, just gave it to me. Or I could’ve got it delivered by 1pm the next day if I had to. Very convenient. So I was thinking, see, if there’s any profession where you ought to be able to improve your proficiency through reading, surely that would be a Scholar?”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? Nah. Bugger off and kill some goblins.”

Socialising on the internet is to socialising, what reality TV is to reality.

It’s not so much ’not wanting to play with others’ as much as it is ‘wanting to play with the right sort of others’.

Before introducing NPC party members and reducing the game to solo play, perhaps we could try a less drastic Facebook-style Like/Dislike for other players. A player can anonymously vote on other players that they encounter, giving them a ‘thumbs-up’ or ‘thumbs-down’ based on their experience with them. The LFD tool can then match groups of players based on their mutual like of one another.

Perhaps this is a little restrictive in a game with millions of players? What other systems do we know where millions of people can come together and find like-minded individuals who share interests via a network of friends? Thus, based on your own social network within the game – guild mates, friends list, etc. – we could also apply the ‘likeable’ weighting to players you have never played with before, based on whether your friends liked them.

Now take Slashdot’s comment system, where you can browse comments between a level of one and five, where level one will include everything from the common sense and the obvious, all the way down to the racists, trolls and other undesirables, and level five consists of only those comments that have been rated highly by others; looking at Slashdot you might begin to see a system for adjusting the level of ‘likeableness’ you’re willing to accept in your group. Set your acceptance level high and you’ll only get friends, guild mates, and people rated highly by yourself. Set it a little lower and you can open the search to those people who have been rated highly by your friends and guild mates as well.

We don’t need to remove everybody, we simply need to reduce the population down to a subset that is agreeable. At the same time, we need to cast a wider net than the one that pulls in only friends and guild mates.

If MMOs want to insist that they are games where people come together to socialise and play, if they want to justify their requirement of an Internet connection and payment models outside of the box price, then they could do a lot worse than look to the successes of the social networking sites before eliminating multiplayer society from MMOs altogether.