It is all about the time sink

The time sink game is all I’m playing at the moment. It has many levels and challenges.

I have three writing mini-projects going at once, a few games to try to play, and a family to look after. The three writing projects have deadlines which are looming so I really should be doing those with all my spare time, but I find them difficult to write them without spending large blocks of time. When I write I need a good 1-2 hours of time to get anything new written. I can review my own work in much smaller time blocks, but there is only so much review that can be done before it is called procrastination. New text needs thinking time.

A pc game however can be 30 minutes to 1 hour if I know what I’m doing (like WoW), or need a heap more (like 2-3 hours) if it is a game which is new to me like Elder Scrolls, EvE, Star Wars. I guess I could go play D3 too if I wanted some hack and slash fun, and D3 is the game I’ll fall back to when all else fails.

The writing is all based around pen and paper role-playing games (for a Deathwatch mini-module and a fan made Ars Magica supplement), and I’m enjoying the process of trying to create something for a critical audience. Writing for your own sake is easy, writing for an audience who will read, review, editorialise, and point out incongruity is much harder. That could be part of my hesitation too. The projects are not commercial things, so I’m not targeting a commercial level quality, but still thinking it has to be better than my typical notepad scrawl.

As far as computer games go, WoW is still interesting to me. I have some gripes which will come out below, but as I write this I’m really just mouthing off about an errant kid who I like, but pissed me off recently.

I think it is interesting that WoW Insider has announced cut-backs to their blog staff across all games, and wow is significantly affected. That would not happen if the revenue was flowing well, and that is telling about the users of these games, and the market in general. Even though the subscription rate is ok-ish the players themselves are not putting up with any kind of silly or boring content anymore. I think repetition will be the next thing that MMOs have to have less of to keep their audiences, and that will be a huge problem for almost all the theme park style games. Players want more content, more often, with no drop in quality or they go elsewhere. They might return when the new content drops, but almost all the players I speak to are not willing to wait. They go elsewhere. And they should too.

WoW and Guilds

Well there is a doozy here to tell. Many of our raiders either left for greener pastures, were removed for being painful, or left for life reasons. That then caused another round of departures, as others had to ponder leaving too. Then some of those greener pastures were not as good as advertised, so those people began looking around again. Because I’m fed up with being treated like a revolving door, and fed up with the whinging, a few were told they were not welcome back. I think most people would support a player making the “right” call for themselves, and forgive a lot of how that was communicated or made. We’re all human. I think a Guild has to also make the “right” choices too, and that means sometimes enough is enough.

This was not a great time for our guild, but also not unexpected at this stage in the game. The downtime between expansions is always crappy for guilds, with only the strongest ones staying focused. Add in some continued drama, a few people who think they are special snowflakes, and you’re left with very little to do. There is no lever by which a player can be controlled (such as an employment contract for compensation) so “managing” difficult people is next to impossible for any prolonged period.

That leaves us with a guild of social players and no “serious progression” raids happening. Frankly I’m glad that some of the pains-in-the-arse players are gone. I’m sad that we lost great people too, and even more so that it might lead to others leaving. At this point though it is not something to fight, but something to accept. I want players to be having fun, and that is far more important than rubbish about which guild you belong to, or she-said-he-said malarkey. I am glad it is “over”. I’m glad that the people who are staying will not have to wonder why such stupidity is tolerated. It is not tolerated anymore.

I can now login without having to think about somebody getting shitty about some illusory problem. Finally, no dramas from World of Warcraft. Yeehaw! I do not even understand why in hell some people require the input that they do; it is like they are not adults at all.

I’m even happy that the people who left are getting what they like from their game time. It is good to think that people can go somewhere and be happy, and it is very possible (and even a certainty in one case) that a problem only existed because of the people involved. Dissolve the problem relationship permanently, and the fun comes back. More power to them. I hope they’re all killing digital monsters, and looting wonderful pixels.

I’m really not having a go, just talking through what happened. I’m sure the choices were not perfect, nobody makes perfect choices all the time.

Bygones are bygones. – TyphoonAndrew.

An aside – Wow characters can only belong to a single guild at a time, and therefore changing guilds is also inevitable. Why can’t WoW have more than one formal method to organise players. Cal them battle units, corps, whatever, but allow a way that players can stay in a guild they like, but also advance and be managed in another set of organisations. It might help players who have dual loyalties. We can cross-server raid all sorts of junk, but cannot organise characters in the same way in-game. I think that is a functional gap.

ESO Beta

This weekend I was given a ticket into Elder Scrolls Online Beta (thanks T!) and it looks like a reasonable game. As my friend told me “think of it as a good single player story, not as an MMO” and its a great game. There was an NDA which I briefly skimmed while downloading the game so rather than say anything questionable, I’ll just say that it is similar enough that I knew what to do, but was a little different. Graphically it will challenge some computers. This is not a game which will run well on a low spec machine.

Where is the value?

If I were to think about value for money when playing time sinks I not subscribe to Wow, Eve, ESO, or any other subscription game. I’d get back into Star Wars, or something like it. It’s free and has plenty of content I’ve not played. Or many of the other games out there that are free to play. I do like the idea of not having a wow subscription for a while to save up for something else. Perhaps it is time to pause my membership for a few months.

I’ve also got a 7 day trial of EvE sitting waiting, but I cannot bring myself to login just yet. It looks fantastic, and honestly I’d be playing more just to look at the pretty space pictures than actually want to do space battles. I don’t think that alone is worth a subscription cost. In fact a video of beautiful space scenes rolling in the background would almost be as appealing.

That’s not weird. Is it? Happy killing, TyphoonAndrew

A wonderful little laser battle in deep space

Update – and it’s been announced that the giant space battle will be commemorated by wrecked ships being permanently added to the game at the spot. Freak-ishly cool!

Kudos to the folks playing EVE and participating in battles of this scale. You’re doing something that takes a massive amount of time and energy, organisation, and is something that I find darn fascinating to read about. The image below is apparently what a super-laser looks like when fired from the largest ships, a Titan class.

image via Kotaku, a Titan class ship firing a super-laser, probably on another Titan.

The huge EVE battle recently had a few commenters (kotatu) in a flicker about how aspects of the game are like playing in a spreadsheet. Well duh!

The game’s ui pretty much is an overlay for spreadsheets, though. Remove the pretty space graphics, and what you have is a whole bunch of objects and their relative positions to each other.

I don’t know why Eve players get so defensive, many space strategy games come down to an overlay for spreadsheets but remain good.

For pity’s sake, almost every game is a graphic overlay over a heap of numbers, probably stored in a database of one sort or another.

Another odd comment was due to the slow-down in game time due to the very large amount of participants (a “time dilation”), which slowed the game to crawling time frames. It suggested that the maximum size of the battles be artificially capped so that the game still runs in reasonable speed. But that runs against what I thought was an the ethos within EVE – that the game itself has almost no rules and the players create the game environment. If the vendor starts assigning rules of battle they will be games, lied about, and all sorts of trouble.

I like that EVE is very unfriendly to the players. It is a key factor in why it is interesting that the game has survived for so long, and has such a passionate base of fans and players. It is a niche product.

The last comment I liked was one that was initially hidden by the moderators – which indicated that EVE wasn’t the game it once was because now three mega-corps control all the secured space. Well shit, that sounds like a wonderful reflection of how most of our culture would evolve too.

It seems that with no “game laws” from the game developers the community has organically created a dystopian model of the future where all the fun is controlled by three huge meag-corps. Think about that for a few minutes.

Again, kudos EVE, you’re a darn interesting experiment.

Other Games Worth Playing?

Are there any other games worth playing at the moment? (rant warning)

I’m downloading EQ2 trial at the moment, as a mate has said it worth checking out. The experience so far has been about the same level of patch frustration as WoW, but with an added crappy download screen. Why make the initial download only 80mb, and then have me sit through a 9 hour patch process? Dumb, but the standard way of doing things it seems.

Up front I’m very skeptical of how this game will compare, as I think World of Warcraft has a few things that suck, but on balance is pretty good (insert fanboy sarcasm). If EQ2 brings something new to the table, I’ll be pleased and impressed – especially if I can get to see any of it before the trial period expires.