Free game time delayed; scared fit

I had all intent to start the free 7 days of wow, and play this past week. Typical for my gaming lifestyle there was a hitch to starting on time and this time the reason is a doozie.

The house was going to be quiet and evenings clear of work distractions. I had cleared my work schedule a bit, and the kids were to be in bed early.

However I didn’t content with getting seriously sick, in fact a heart attack.

While going to bed late last Saturday I suddenly felt the tell tale numb left arm and hand, chest pain, dizziness, sweats, sore jaw, etc. A few minutes later we called the ambulance and it was straight to the hospital, all lights and sirens…no waiting. Paramedics confirmed the reduced heart function as we zoomed to the emergency department. A few scary hours later the incredible doctors had sussed that the heart attack wasn’t normal, especially given my youngish age; and they scheduled me for an angiogram (a camera on a long wire which is fed up inside your heart) a day later. Crap eh.
In the interim I sat in the hospital having a nerve wracking wait to find out if I was in real trouble, how much, and thanking my dumb luck to live near a good hospital.

Thankfully the angiogram confirmed it wasn’t a typical heart attack. Instead of the cause being blocked arteries and poor diet which is darn serious and totally life shattering, what I have is an infection in the heart and surrounding tissue; called myocarditis.

So now I’m home and recovering strength gradually. It’s been a week since the event and my strength isn’t back to normal, but it’s close; nor has my fear of exertion. Knowing that the anti inflammatory drugs are in my system should give confidence, although I can still hear the words of warning from the cardiac doctor very clearly – “take it very slowly. Or next time it’s likely worse.”

I’m told my recovery for this type of heart attack is far faster than normal heart attack, but it’s still two weeks off work and medication for three months. Little pain really compared to what it could have been. The minutes before the ambulance arrived and the experience of being wired twelve different ways to an ECG machine was harrowing. Tubes everywhere.

So I’m writing as a way to reinforce a promise I made to myself during the few days where I didn’t know what the diagnosis was – to improve my health and diet. Considerably. Permanently. From that day forward I’m going to reduce weight (I’m built like a typical nerd, round in the middle), eat better, and avoid junk. Where I choose to indulge it will be moderate. Controlled.

I don’t want to be one of the folk in the bed next to mine on Saturday in the Alfred Hospital. Triple bypasses, life long medications, painful processes, and scary procedures.

Saying it online gets it out into the world; where friends and family will see and understand. If I start to stray a little I hope folks will help reign me in a bit too.
Not that I think I’ll forget what a heart attack was like any time soon. Hopefully back to normal and continue to get fit next week.

Happy living, TyphoonAndrew.

Casually playing Adventure Era

A nifty little game called Adventura Era by Game Insight & Krivorukoff has me a little distracted (thanks to Tobold’s post). I’m playing enough that my wife first asked “what is that you’re doing” and then “put that down”. It’s a good game, and playing it on my mobile means that I always have it around when I want to, but I can also ignore it I choose.

Nothing really bad happens if you don’t play. Well, ahem, it is frustrating to come back to the game after 3-4 hours and ALWAYS find three monsters attempting to ravish my humble village, but paying off the monsters is part of the resource sink mechanics. It happens every damn time! So now I’ve decided to move almost all of my important buildings away from the areas with the monsters, so that I’m almost unaffected by them. That will take some additional effort and a bit more grinding that I like, but afterward I’ll rarely pay the 15 food, 50 lumber, or 100 stone resources that they need to be shushed and sent away when my cyclops-for-hire yells at them.

Apart from the basic build, expand, research cycle which repeats as your village increases in size and resources there are aspects of the game which I think are clever. The game is all about expanding your resource pool, and deciding when to spend your resources in the various resource sinks. All of the progressive choices are forgone conclusions, where you have to do X to get to Y, so start saving, building, or expanding. I don’t mind that the game is extensibility on rails, as I’m not looking for life changing gameplay. I’m looking for overly simplified entertainment. It allows small choices with almost no side effects, so for me the game’s fun is about efficiently. What worked, what do I need to plan for now, so that I’m not resource locked for too long later.

I also like the way that money really isn’t being begged for at every turn. The game is free and thankfully you can avoid the nag-ware style of other mobile/social games. My Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and other followers have no bloody interest in how many pets or lumber yards I have; just as I don’t give a damn about theirs.This is a casual distraction, not a thing to brag about on social media (but then isn’t most of social media a free casual distraction seeking to commercialise your attention?).

Each advance takes time, and during that time you can be clicking to earn your coins, rather than spending real money. It does not have a long life though, as I’m already seeing the increase in the repetition for grinding money, which is expected but undesirable for me. I can just as easily be entertained by my rss feed, so something that feels like work will have an expiration date.

For now, as the village’s ruler…I kind of pity those small virtual pixel-folk. They’re lucky I’m not give the option for human sacrifice to increase build time. Hmm, maybe something to recommended for v2.

Happy clicking, TyphoonAndrew

You Sir, Yeah, You Are Being Hunted

I picked up Sir, You Are Being Hunted on a sale for a lazy $17, and I kind of like the adhoc short play style of the game.

Death One – shot to death by a random robot patrol on the main island. To my credit I did figure out what the baloon was doing, but I think I didn’t move far enough away. Found one fragment next to the stones, but spend much of mu short life looking at the inventory, trying to understand how food works.

Death Two – ran out of Vitality and starved to death. Interesting that I was trying to play it safe, but as my character stated to really drop I ran everywhere and was spotted a heap of times.

Death Three – Afk and I assume slaughtered by a host of nasty robots.

I’m really enjoying it.

Panoramas and Banners for fantasy themed blogs

As a blogger I never seem to have the “right” image, and get tempted to hike images from anywhere. Well, shamefully I do admittedly hike them, but I try to grab my own, or take them from folk who are willing to give freely.

I found that “The Other Tank” Blog has compiled a batch of images which are perfect for bloggers to use for wow-related banners and panoramas. Even better he has supplied a batch of these in zip file shared via DropBox for anyone to grab. Darn fine work sir!

Happy Killing, TyphoonAndrew.

A few more thoughts on WoW p5.4

Now that I’ve seen more and read more about how people are using the new content and features in patch 5.4 for WoW; I’m impressed.

The standout items are the raid encounters and the proving grounds. Both I’ve not really stepped into much of either yet but both have created such an effective response from the players that they seem to be the aspects that will be remembered the most. The new raid benefits from the way the lore of the Destruction of the Vale cannot be ignored in the game. A straight up clever and direct call to players.

A Quick Collection of Banners

This gallery contains 34 photos.

I thought I’d quickly share some of the banners from across this site which have been borrowed from all sorts of places & themes. I didn’t realise until this post that when the blog started I used screenies of my … Continue reading →

Those who must be left behind, on purpose.

A long time ago in my guild there was a player who needed to be removed. The story around why was typical in an online game, an ego was out of check and was disruptive to many of the other guild members.

He wasn’t special, wasn’t an officer, and was certainly one of the rudest people I’d had the displeasure of talking to closely. What made is worrisome was how many months later the same person was still out in /Tradechat bad mouthing the guild, the characters involved, and still sending rude whispers. A truly enlightened bastard who appeared to get his enjoyment from the game by bothering others.

Recently in the guild we also had to tell a few people tone it back. They did, and everything seems to be ticking along without issues now. When the Officers and I were talking through the situation with the recent guys the enlightened bastard’s character name came up as a point of reference. The recent guys were not even close to the E.B in the long past, but EB is still out there playing.

It got me thinking… about not wanting to ever see the EB again. Not under any circumstances.

Now my ignore list solves that problem for me, but I also have a responsibility to my guild. I think MMO games like World of Warcraft could do with a Guild based parma-ban feature.

When set the PLAYER’s account is stopped from being a member of that guild. This stops somebody from alt switching, it makes removing somebody who is really vitriolic easy, and means the other guild members who might have invite ability will not and cannot be pressured into letting the person rejoin.

Block them permanently. Anyway, just a thought.

TyphoonAndrew

Related articles

• Officers’ Quarters: When to give up (wow.joystiq.com)

Can the Trinity be damned?

Can the trinity of tank, heal, damage roles in online rpg games be removed? Really?

An old question, and perhaps one which is both too subjective for each game style in question, and also blisteringly obvious for MMOs. Blessing of Kings has a great post where the discussion thread is the perfect primer for the issues and the potential degrees of how effective the solutions will be. A darn good read.

To me it is all about degrees of effectiveness vs the suspension of disbelief. No solution I’ve ever read provided a summary for an MMORPG that has no role based system, without a set of quasi-magical powers to manipulate the monster’s behaviour. And that is not what might really happen.

If nine of my friends and I decided to attack a giant, I don’t think the giant would understand taunts enough to only swing at one person, or that two of us were good at recovering from wounds so might be better to kill early. The giant is going to kill easy targets, targets that hurt it a lot, and then the rest of us.

Similarly a grizzly bear will attack one of us until it can get a good meal, unless we keep poking it with spears in which case it will hurt the spear carrier and probably ignore any others just standing to the side waving their hands (healing, caster dps).

In MMORPGs I don’t think it can be totally removed. I don’t think I’d want it removed either. We have a method which is essentially in support of the fun, and while the mechanics of that illusion might be tweaked, the illusion is useful.

Just pruned the front page blog links

I’ve pruned dead, gone, missing, or content changed links and blogs from the my warcraft & pc gaming blog’s homepage (ya, this one you’re reading); and thought it might also serve as an invite to readers and subscribers to tell me about things that should be there. So many of the resources from 2007 through 2011 are gone.

So allowing that it is WoW or gaming related – what do you visit that’s worth linking, or should I link to you?

Maintenance is fun. TyphoonAndrew

SC2 Heart of the Swarm Cinematic

Its a darn cool cinematic. Plenty of zerg, plenty of humans, cannon, zerg rushes, and the fall of a colony world. I might dabble in this methinks.

WoW players raise $2.3 mil for Sandy Relief

Warcraft players raised $2.3 Million for Sandy relief through puchased of entirely option in-game widgets and toys. At last a feelgood aspect of MMO games, instead of a typical angry rant. 2.3m for any charity effort is bloody nice work, and not bad considering we’re a bunch of no-life basement dwellers; with violent tendencies.

Kind of makes you feel good. See we do have souls. Kek.

World of Warcraft Players Raise $2.3 Million for Sandy | Geekosystem.

2012 in review

The WordPress folks prepared a 2012 annual report for my blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 60,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 3 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

The balance that a few strange days brings

These are strange days (and a post not really much about wow, but all about gaming life). My gaming took a dive on the week end when we went away briefly for a break over the weekend. Its by-the-by that is was family focused and also very much fun. I loved the fact we got away for a bit, saw some family, and was also looking forward to the Sunday and Monday night gaming. New level 90s have so much to do in Warcraft. Sunday came around and I played till late and crawled into bed just in time to rest before the working week. We had a slight hiccup on Saturday with the newborn’s health, but didn’t think much of it by Sunday night. It was great.

Monday started as normal and then my 5 month old was hospitalised and everything melted away to stress. You get a new perspective when your kid is in a hospital resuscitation room with a few doctors and nurses around, they all looked concerned, and the outcome was not clear. I’m not used to being powerless to help and the most useless person in the room, and when the doctors start saying those long sentences which mean “I don’t know yet”, you get stressed. I get it now; the stress about late reports, staff issues at work, or even playing an addictive video game is meaningless to the stress of a sick baby. It was a new experience for me as a new parent. Frankly I was telling the world to **** off until I knew more.

Now that she is home again my stress is far lower, and all the things I missed seem largely still irrelevant. A late report? Big deal. Missed a few meetings? Get over it. Nobody bloody died. I saw families in that hospital who have real issues to grapple and the trials which hit the average office worker are just silly by comparison.

What I hope is that I can maintain the apathy for how important these things actually are, as I noticed that I was communicating clearly and sharply when I was really stressed, and that communication got results. Being outside the detail granted a perspective and authority that I liked, and all that changed was me in my reaction to the stress of the events. I’ve always advocated a healthy work and life balance, and extended that to gaming too. Nobody should ever feel pressure to play when they have serious stress to deal with (duh). I did in fact play online on Monday for a short period, but all I thought about was family and it was to get to somewhere which was an escape. My brain needed to be distracted from what was going on.

I tonight is another game night where a week ago I was planning to play a lot. Now I’ll play it by ear, see how sick, stressed, etc the family is, and then perhaps login. What is odd is that before the weekend I would have also worked all night to complete a set of reports for my job, and now it really does seem immaterial. In terms of work, life, and game balance I think I’ve changed views a little. There will be weekends soon where I get to work overtime and give a lot of effort for my job, but for now relaxation is the order of the day.

Happy gaming, and good health.

XKCD ref to GhostCrawler?

Is this a ref to the GC? If so, its the best cross-over this month. XKCD wins.

Related articles

• xkcd’s 13-Gigapixel Webcomic (tech.slashdot.org)
• XKCD’s 14-foot-wide CLICK AND DRAG map (boingboing.net)
• Beautiful xkcd comic paints a whole universe in one panel [This Is Awesome] (io9.com)

TF2, Meet the Pyro!

A most excellent animation for TF2, Meet the Pyro!

Playing many games, casually.

I’m in that happy state where I get to play many games. World of Warcraft has taken a significant backseat due to real life events, and along with that I’ve chosen to look into the MoP Beta and the Diablo 3 Beta. The odd distracting iphone game gets a look too.

Playing of the big three games very briefly and casually is actually more satisfying in the short term than trying to play one game solidly. Initially I would doubt that to be true. In a nutshell I think being moderate has pushed my expectations, and I now find the small elements of fun amongst a range of games. For now its working. I am looking forward to the official release of Diablo so that I can see the full content and play online with some friends that it is hard to hook up with in other games. I would still like to get SWToR loaded and play that in the future when my PC has been upgraded, as the content was impressive enough that I think it will be a fantastic distraction.

There is also a set of play-by-post tabletop RPG games that distract me, and between them, the healthy posts from the players, and the rest of life short stint gaming is still working. So for now a quick 15 to 30 minute session will do, with much gnashing, power-ups, and gear to be swindled from the nefarious foes.

Happy gaming folks.

I’d love a D3 beta key!

Just saw the news that D3 betas have started the second round of offers; a lazy 100,000 keys – wow. As a player with an “annual pass” its fragg’n disappointing. I’m not playing wow much at the moment as I need to be distracted often, but D3 is a game where I think it would be plausible to play in small blocks (based upon D1 and D2).

Kudos to the lucky 100k folks, and to Blizzard – make with the key gents. Ta.

A modest charity effort – Iron Man Mode

Here is a tale of a group of gamers who are nutty enough to play popular games in Ironman Mode – that is using only 1 life. All so that folks will be chuffed, amused, and then donate to the excellent charity called Child’s Play.

“Clueless idiots playing the best games ever made…with only one life.”

Yup, they’re gamers being gamers, for a good cause. Go read about them – Iron Man Mode. Anyone who is willing to be that self deprecating is ok by me.

The dearth of time abounds, please standby

The end of the year is a time when hobbie time seems to evaporate, leaving me frazzled.  This year is no different with work deployments, shopping needs, appointments, training courses, and some such all stopping online gaming from happening.

I’d not be exaggerating to say that I’ve played less than 2 hours in the last two weeks, and about 10 minutes in the last 8 days. In fact yesterday was 5 minutes, which counts the loading screen.

I’m sure that the new year will see far more regular playtime, and a few more posts. For now at least I’m enjoying reading about how much fun the raid team are having – I’ll be blogging about the game again soon.

Happy (free time) holidays.

Five Year Anniversary

This month is the five year anniversary of this blog. November 9th 2006 to November 9th 2011 is a long time to be standing in the corner of the web, foghorn in hand, prognosticating the future.

Its been a great experience, and there have been some fantastic and bloody frustrating events over the years. Over 400,000 views…whew, no pressure. I’m sure WoW Insider get that in a day or so.

My first post was “A Presence in Warcraft” where I declared who my toons were and just pondered how I’d get better at the game. Now most of the posts are written with a tone which sounds like I know what I’m doing, and I’m better, but still learning.

Happy blogging, reading, and killing.