Order of Eris – Page 20

April 10, 2005

Letting go

Recently Scott Kurtz (PvP creator) seemed to get really upset over Sesame Street changing Cookie Monster’s attitude towards cookies. I wonder when the last time he watched Sesame Street was. Is Sesame Street really something Kurtz watches and will be upset by this change. I don’t think so. I think this is more of the same “Lucas is ruining Star Wars” attitude. Scott Kurtz is not the only person who feels that Sesame Street is stomping on his personal memories by trying to do what it has always done, help kids grow up right. So, if you don’t like these changes to Cookie Monster, STOP WATCHING SESAME STREET! It’s not your show and chances are if you are posting about it on the web, it hasn’t been for at least a few years. If changing the message Cookie Monster delivers to kids helps those kids out, I am not going to resent it or try to rationalize how it somehow ruins my nostalgic memories of how things were.

Memories fade. Things change. You can not keep re-living the past forever. This is something people are going to have to make peace with. If it helps, it’s the very fact that things change that makes our memories of the past worth so much to us and others. So get over it! Let go.

March 7, 2005

Chinese Farmers and Wal-Mart

The corelation should be obvious. I imagine some people might not even know what I mean by “Chinese Farmers”, though.

The concept of farming in a massivly multiplayer online game is that you kill certain enemies or monsters over and over trying to “harvest” money or specific items. It’s really part of any MMORPG at any given time. You need money or you want a more powerful item, you might farm it. The “Chinese” part comes in with the business built behind selling in-game items and money for real world money. In theory, you hire a handful of cheap workers (hence the China part) and employee them to play the game for hours on end and sell the resulting items to other players. Maybe you are playing World of Warcraft and you need one hundred gold, you can buy it for $40.00 USD for example. Obviously this violates most MMORPG terms of service or end user license agreement. It also may cause problems for people trying to play the game where farmers are at work. I’m not totally convinced it’s a viable business model.

So, the Wal-Mart part is next. There are people who utterly despise Wal-Mart and feel that Wal-Mart is a destructive force that kills small businesses. Wal-Mart moves into a town and wipes out all competition. And the people who utterly hate “Chinese Farmers” will tell you that they ruin the game economy and make the game less fun to play. Neither would be around if there weren’t enough people throwing money at them to be profitable.

March 2, 2005

Half-Life 2

Half-Life, I never finished. I played some Counter Strike, and some Half-Life Deathmatch. But that was about it. The story never really grabbed me and I probably was playing on the wrong difficulty level. But, that’s all water under the bridge.

Half-Life 2 is a better game. I played it on easy, so sue me. I didn’t really care for the jumping puzzles and I didn’t want to see the normal or hard version of fighting off twenty four soldiers in a courtyard. So, I sat back and just played the game and it was fun. On easy I made progress all the time and it felt more like an interactive movie than a first person shooter normally does. I only had a few reloads where I really screwed the pooch. If you want a good game to play, Half-Life 2 is that. If you want a revolutionary game that will redefine the genre, this isn’t it. The graphics are better, the AI is better, the voice acting is better, it’s all better. But it’s not going to blow your mind, and I don’t think it should.

The plot is pretty good, too, though it does kinda end with an ambiguous situation. I realize it leaves the door wide open for Half-Life 3, but at some point you do want to feel like you figured something out. I’m not up for the X-File jerk-around-a-thon in a game.

March 1, 2005

Change of pace

I have rarely, if ever, mentioned where I work on this page. I just quit my job, so I might as well. I have been a contractor at IBM for over nine years now. Nine years on a year to year contract. And in that time I have been a team lead, an AIX deskside support technician, a sysadmin, an NLS expert, and Thinkpad support technician. That’s crazy. IBM should have hired me, or dropped my contract a long time ago.

Leaving a work environment like IBM is not easy. IBM makes even the most stable and business worthy companies out there seem like fly-by-night ventures that could go away anytime. IBM is dying from the inside, very slowly. Slow is the key word when I talk about anything IBM does. Slow to innovate and slow to die. That’s not the rule everywhere inside IBM, but in general, that’s all I saw. I worked in a place where managing two hundred users on a print server was prefered to setting up a Windows domain. If it involved something new, it meant having to hire (or keep on) skilled people who could understand the technology. I am really glad to leave that kind of mentality behind. Many times I was denied the option to set up more complicated solutions because no one else where I work could even understand it, much less every fix or maintain it if I were to leave.

February 23, 2005

New Hardware

I replaced Yes’ hardware. New case, motherboard, RAM, etc. Seems to be working out well. Time to look into upgrading the operating system next.

February 14, 2005

Making Peace with a Game

I can’t play a massively multiplayer online game without reading someone’s tirade about how broken the game is. That alone is not a big deal, and such rants are pretty common for every type of game people play. I certainly have spelled out my issues with games I have played in the past. What really confuses me is that someone can write a five paragraph essay about how some development group doesn’t “get it” or has caused them undue suffering yet this person will continue to play the game. Very rarely do I see a laundry list of complaints that ends with the phrase, “And that’s why I cancelled my account and will not play this game any more.” It seems evident to me that the game is worth playing, but the resulting complaining is not unlike a sixteen year old’s view of a pimple on their chin. These issues are not the entire game, but that’s the focus of forum posts, blog entries, and online news articles.

Massively multiplayer online games have some very predictable issues that are inherent in their design. Things that you use and experience in the game are going to change. Other people are going to find ways to profit or advance faster than you. Some of these problems are just perception based, and others are simply part of playing an masively multiplayer online game. My advice is to make peace with the genre or stop playing. Complaining about how one group of players is moving up some ladder faster than you, or getting more resources than you, is a fact of life. No matter how level the playing field, someone is out there getting more of something faster than you can. And when you break down and try to join that group, doing whatever they are doing, you should expect the game to change so that there is no more advantage there. All these behaviours are not conducive to actually playing the game. When a change in the game can cause you to stop having fun, you are left two options. You can quit the game, or you can develop an attitude that allows the game to change while you continue to enjoy it. And if you can’t do either of those, I’m sure you can get a job making the next great MMORPG. Just remember that what goes around, comes around.

January 24, 2005

What about WoW?

I’ve been playing World of Warcraft for a few months now. I think that this is the most enjoyable MMORPG that I have ever played. It’s probably a combination of who I am playing with and how I have approached playing that has made it so fun to play, but the game design has also played a large part.

I was playing my hunter class character and thinking about the concept of having a pet in the game. I know other MMORPGs have done this, but it always seemed poorly implimented or very flat. The ammount of control a hunter has over their pet, the complexity of pet growth, and the interface for pet interaction, all contribute to a really polished and interesting class to play. I could say the same for almost every class and race in the game.

I know that many people have been upset with server problems, but when the game you are trying to play is this good, it seems worth it. We’re not talking about Asheron’s Call 2 here.

January 12, 2005

A server called “Yes”

Typically, my Linux servers will just die. Memory, hard drive, motherboard, etc. Something just stops working. Then I rush out, buy a new something and fix it. But my current server has been slowly dying. One ethernet adapter requires me to rebind it to the switch after the driver loads. No idea why. The power supply fan won’t spin up on its own. I have to start it going so the system won’t get too hot and die. And the network adapters cause the machine to hard lock when I transfer files to or from the machine with Samba. That’s not even rational!

So, I think I’m going to have to pull the plug soon and build a new system. Even before this one is totally dead. The little issues are starting to add up.

December 22, 2004

Cosmos and WoW Mods

Blizzard did a great job designing the user interface for their game, World of Warcraft. The interface is clean and non-intrusive to the game experience and manages to still be very powerful and handy. The best part about it is that anyone with XML and Lua knowledge can add to, and modify, the interface. Everything from adding a clock to changing every part of the interface you see on the screen.

Cosmos is one such modifcation to the WoW interface. It’s the heavy-weight mod and is crafted from many smaller AddOns and mods. When I first started using it, it felt unorganized and clunky. Some of the features, though, were so useful that I felt I had no choice. Either go without or take the good with the bad. As time went on, I learned more about what AddOns really were and how Cosmos was not designed strictly as one. Proper AddOn design resulted in code that did not require manipulating Blizzards code. This design concept of the AddOn being stand-alone also meant that when Blizzard updated certain interface files, your AddOn code would not break. It also keeps one AddOn from interfering with another AddOn. All good ideas that Cosmos clearly broke. And that is why, on principle, I have stopped using Cosmos and started writing my own replcement for the one feature I could not un-integrate from it.

Cosmos also caused my client to crash when exiting the game. No idea why that happened.

December 20, 2004

The Spam Problem

Well, I am trying a new method to prevent automated spam postings on my web page. If you want to post a comment, you’ll have to identify a random series of characters from a gif file. Hopefully this will put an end to the google ranking spam.