I had some fun playing dress-up with dolls:
This again from Alice. I slightly edited the result to look bit more like me, like the fuzzy beard. Go play!
P.S.
Do not mouse over the image…
Tag Archives: Blog
Regional elections
Regional elections in Italy: the left wins nearly everywhere and by a good margin.
(If you don’t have any idea about Italian politics just think at Bush vs Kerry and Kerry winning. With the difference that in Italy we still have some appearance of actual politics and not just TV-drama. More subjects and less adjectives, you know.)
Finally something good :)
Rhetoric in politics
Oh, I’m having too fun. Sorry if I pass a moment over italian politics:
1- Berlusconi starts a political campaign in preview of the next regional elections. His main argument is to backup Bush tactics and use the anxiety as a main scheme: “The Left” leading the nation is a menace.
2- Berlusconi is on TV. He explains that what is wrong in our nation is that it isn’t a complete democracy. In his words a complete democracy is a nation where the population doesn’t fear the other political part at the government. Where there is an alternation with no fears.
3- Berlusconi tells that this isn’t possible in Italy because the other political side is a menace, so not a viable alternative.
Now. I guess it’s obvious how these points are recursive and directly contradictory. He is the one to fear the other side and use this fear to mantain his government. At the same time he explains that it’s the fear that “forces” him to be at that place in order to “save” the nation from the other political part. He is a Holy Rescuer.
So he accuses that in Italy we don’t respect the other political part. But why we cannot do this? Because the Left is “the evil” and we cannot tolerate it. A tautology. You can only vote for me or it’s Doom. If you vote for the other side you are going to destroy the nation. A direct demonstration of respect for the other political part. He creates the arguments that bring to a tautological conclusion: vote for me because there is no choice.
He creates the rule for a democracy: a possible alternation where each side respects the other.
He creates the reason why the rule above isn’t respected: the other side is a menace, the alternation isn’t possible.
The second point feeds the breaking of the first rule: there is no choice, you can only vote me.
It’s like hiding drugs in the pockets of your opponent and call the police.
On the other side it’s absolutely true that everything that Berlusconi says is sistematically decontextualized and distorted by the press.
Slowing down
The more the time passes the more I lag behind on my own schedule of “things to write about”. Recently I also have the desktop filled of lengthy text files that I refuse to post because written too awfully. It seems that I cannot pull the thoughts together and write down something interesting and comprehensible. It doesn’t even pass my personal check of quality.
I have a lot of stuff to “parse”. A few sequels to past arguments like the problem of the secondary market and my critique on the mudflation. In this second case I want to delve on what I’d propose as an alternative, because that’s exactly where I wanted to go. Then I wanted to write a short article about the “role of healers”. I believe this is one of the fundamental problems, with the healers being the most needed, unreplaceable class and, still, the less popular. It’s something that should be considered directly and my solution is probably even too elementary, but working. I have an half article about “questing”. How to build interesting quests? How they can be structured? When they are completely useless? I have to write down a cumulative post to Jeff Freeman’s article about clustering, joining and organizing together the few points I already commented. An article about why surveys are always bullshit, an article about why SWG was and still is flawed and why it won’t move if the approach isn’t changed (and it’s all Raph’s fault in leaving behind his responsibility). An article to explain why we are getting clones of similar games, because there are -more than good- reasons. An article comparing mmorpgs to the comics market, Marvel vs DC, characters->powers vs powers->characters (processes of identification). Brian M. Bendis writes that Spider-Man 2 is the Star Wars of this generation. But why SW is lagging behind and isn’t able to hook anymore as before? What brings instead legions of fans to love the Lord of the Rings? Cultural patterns vs formal patterns…
Sometimes I also feel like forgetting everything. I pile up plans for articles and then I simply forget what was exactly my point. How stupid.
Anyway. For at least the next week and half I’ll be busy with RL. So I’ll zone out of here as much as possible. The fact that I’m writing this is to force me to zone off or I know that nothing would change at all if I do not draw a line. (that’s was the reason of this entry, then I got carried away as always)
Lengthy un-contextual P.S.
One of the unwritten articles was an analysis about an old Squaresoft masterpiece, “Vagrant Story”. In particular there’s a system used for the combat that at first glance would be extremely interesting to deploy in a mmorpg. It would allow (in my idea) to create an absolutely balanced environment that would still grant an -high- degree of specialization and, at the same time, avoid completely the cookie-cutter commonplace. So I tried to delve more but I got stuck -completely-. I thought about it for more than an hour and felt my brain like filled with vapor. I suck even as a wannabe designer. I really couldn’t understand how it may work even if it’s absolutely simple.
Basically the system works on three rows of “dichotomies”: Fire/Water – Earth/Air – Light/Dark. Plus “physical” that is a special case. A weapon will react to an element by developing the opposite affinity. This means that the more you hit a salamander (fire) the more your weapon will be water-based. So the more your weapon will hurt that mob-type. At the same time your armor also develops affinity. But the same type of affinity, meaning that it becomes more efficent protecting against that element.
This means that the more you fight a fire-based mob the more your weapon develops a water affinity (dealing more damage) and the more your armor develops a fire affinity (protecting more efficently). The concrete result is that you’ll be able to fight that class of monster progressively more easily, while becoming weaker against other types (or not?).
How the fuck this translates to a mmorpg? The first stage was about figuring out that Square doesn’t give a damn about this. The system is probably unique to the character while the mobs don’t use it directly. So it’s already planned to not be balanced. But how this could work on a multiplayer scenario where your weapons and armor develop “affinity” (so they specialize)? Will all the players choose one, and only one element to maximize? Will the players chose to remain strictly neutral? Will the players go with an hybrid? What the fuck happens when someone full-fire goes against one full-water?
I really drown in there. I cannot understand how it could work even if I believe that it could generate something actually fun. What happens when someone full fire goes against a neutral player? Who wins?
Help!
(in my mind I imagined a slider going like “+10 fire <-- 0 neutral --> +10 water”. Now, a +10 fire against a neutral would deal damage based on the relative position, so 10 spaces equal to 10 damage. But the neutral guy would be able to resist 10 damage since that’s the gap for his armor. He’d also deal 10 damage to the fire-based guy who would resist exactly 10 damage. Always zero as a result. Fire vs water are also again supposed to nullificate each other. So, how the fuck this system is supposed to work if the result is always zero?
I mean.. Okay, I know that if I hit the fire based guy I’ll progressively to do more damage to it. But the fire based guy will also progressively develop a resistence to my progressively powerful weapon. So the result is “nothing at all”?
And is someone able to draw from this an actual working and interesting mechanic?)
Alliance instances quest guide – updated
Since the servers died again I took advantage and updated my guide to the quests in Alliance’s instances with the last informations I was able to gather. In particular I added the quests related to Maraudon, Zul’Farrak and Sunken Temple. As always as spoiler-free as possible, the aim is just to point to the NPCs that give those quests in order to “complete” as much as possible. If you know something I’m missing leave a comment somewhere.
The guide can be found through the “Repository” linked in the “Resource” section of the sidebar or directly here.
World of Tards
So today I logged in World of Warcraft after more than a week. I see someone asking for group for Sunken Temple and I decide that I have enough time to try it. At he end the group doesn’t include that guy. It’s me (51 warrior), a player I know already (Yonti, 52 mage), a guildie (Snagle, 53 Rogue) and two guys on the same guild, Dis (54 priest) and Korpen (57 pally). In general I build even parties but Dis asked me to invite the pally.
We go in and Dis wants to lead. After a few kills he asks me to make him the group leader. I ask why since it’s not that something changes in the game if you are the group leader. Firstly he tells me that it makes sense to be the leader if he is going to lead (?), then he tells me that he needs to because he will have to switch the loot mode because of some kind of drop related to a quest. Yes, sure. I tell him that he’ll have to say when he needs this inexplicable change and I’ll do for him. He shuts up and we move on.
Basically we move up a ramp and along a corridor running around a big room with a hole (pit) in the middle. There are balconies with mini bosses all around, we kill them. Then they say me that we have to go in the pit. They tell me I have to go first, fall from the balcony, run through elite mobs and then jump in the pit. I say them that, maybe, there’s a more logic way to do this since the place is filled with corridors and, supposedly, there’s one leading there. They insist.
Okay, I fall down the balcony, run through the mobs and jump in the pit. The pit is HIGH. There are wandering elite mobs on the bottom but the fall kills me directly. I wonder what’s the point of doing this. I ask them what is supposed to happen next. Then the rogue falls down and dies, the pally survives and the priest too. The mage dies before reaching the pit.
We are blocked, the priest cannot res the mage. The pally tells me to go up (yes, because I can fly) and res the gnome girly mage. I tell him I’ll do with a CPR. Obviously the problem isn’t solved by writing idiocies so I figure out we have to die and simply restart from entrance but I wait to understand what the fuck the two guys are thinking (they speak together in ventrilo). From here I managed to save the chat.
I tell him that I’m not going to continue without her. It’s a group and we do not drop players just becuase their illogic plan didn’t work out.
I do not want to “start doing stuff” without the mage. I’m still not sure if they are trying to go back at her (but in this case why we didn’t come in the pit from the other way if now we are supposed to walk back at her?) or just continue without. So I specify better what’s the problem. This while Korpen (the pally) seems to want to explain me something. Later I understand that he isn’t going to tell me something, he just wants me to follow his character with mine, literally. Even if I’ll never understand why.
I guess it’s pretty obvious that something happened there. I was still hoping for some informations and figure out what they were thinking but Korpen starts to run. I understand what he wants so I run behind him. He runs around the pit, aggroing all the mobs. I imagine he is trying to run through the whole dungeon by training all of them? I really do not know. I just follow as he said. At some point (after the “gogogo”), with 6-7 elite mobs on him he stops and runs back to Dis (aggroing more). I really do not understand what is going on with all those monsters running around. The only plausible assumption I can make is that Dis tried to heal the pally while he was running back and so agggroed all of them. The pally probably took advantage to stone to Ironforge, still alive.
This is the moment between the mobs aggroing on Dis, the pally stoning out, and then the mobs walking back at their place since I didn’t move a finger. I didn’t move because all this happened fast and I was wondering what’s the point of running through all those mobs to just come back and fight a lost battle.
Howd ye die? I don’t know, mabe because you had ten elite mobs on you? The battle lasted no more than two seconds from beginning to end. And I really don’t know what else they expected to happen aside me being killed as well.
The rest is pure comedy.
Yes, why I nto sheep? Maybe because I’m a warrior. Maybe because I’m not going to mess with 10 elite mobs and four peoples party. At this point I really do not know how this Sunken Temple is supposed to work. If they were correct about jumping in the pit and all the rest.
For sure I’m still wondering how a player can reach level 57 without knowing that a warrior cannot fly, resurrect peoples and sheep mobs.
Raph Koster exhibits phat leet
Found via Alice. There’s a page with pictures of Raph Koster showing trophies. Including Lum’s priceless Fun Balls.
If you keep skimming through the pages you can find pics of Terra Nova guys, Second Life party and more.
Good stuff :)
Searching walk-ons for role-playing games
From a real italian newspaper:
“Special troops for Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq are being trained in Hohenfels, a USA military base between the mountains of Bavaria. For a more realistic tranining – in particular with the population involved – droves of “walk-ons” called “Civilians on the Battlefield” are hired: students, unemployed, fathers, pre retired, ex-military, globe trotters. Recruited with a sibylline announce on the newspaper through a society called Optronic: Searching walk-ons for role-playing games. 90 euros a day.”
More readable news can be found here:
HOHENFELS, Germany â€
Memo
Grimwell is starting to feel worst than Terra Nova. Goodbye.
Btw, saving comments before it’s too late.
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What you write here is a recurring topic over the years.
The point is: how does it play?
Ecology, like Artificial Intelligence, is interesting for the devs. To study it. Not to play with it. That type of stuff is *hard* to polish and misses completely the archetypes that make these games “genres” and then popular.
You attract geeks, because it’s interesting and maybe deeper. But not everyone is a scientists. What would matter is what you can build ON TOP of that system. And again you are working too much on a model hard to develop, manage and control to bring where you want (and deliver what to expect).
That’s an interesting experiments to draw conclusion from it and use those conclusion concretely. But I’m not sure if it could be a good game.
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I can explain my personal point of view.
I always draw a visible and sharp line between PvP and PvE. But considering PvP as everything involving a cooperation. Socialization is PvP for example in my model.
These games are just diluted copies of single player games on the PvE aspect, this is obvious. I don’t think the best way to go is to transform the PvE because PvE belongs somewhere else, imho.
Making something static more dynamic doesn’t addresses the core issues. It draws control away from devs, you have to face and solve what you didn’t expect to happen and your world must be generic enough to host this virtuality.
Virtuality means that a spot where you kill murlocks could become a spot where you kill goblins the week after. It may work in a barren world like SWG, where the world design is a fractal automatically generated.
My opinion, instead, is that PvE is ALL about the control in the hands of a dev. Completely. PvE is about stories and situations that must be as much handcrafted as possible.
So instead of creating virtuality and experiments I would focus in crafting. Give each spot of the world an unique look. Script every single mob so that it behaves in a different way, using the small area where it lives strategically. And so on.
Instead your virtuality is useful somewhere else. In the PvP. It’s in the PvP that you can offer a world to the players, let them toying with them. Here you can give control to the players even about some PvE elements. But it’s again about building layers and structures that work this way.
In this perspective the plan would be about thinking how the players interact directly and use the features of the game.
I mean: first you plan what you want to happen, then you give a shape to the features. And not: you build a feature like an ecology and then try to fit it into a game.