Surprisingly Small Fruit Salad (GW1,EQ2, WoW, Wurm Online)

So with life being very whirly and disconnected just now, there is less time to play. Plus if you remember I decluttered my hard drive and gave the laptop a new lease of life by doing a destructive restore – and I’m not in a hurry to add too many odds and ends. They’ll accrue eventually.

GW1 – To the amusement of all mum finally got a character out of pre-searing and is (4 years late) completely hooked. There are an awful lot of reasons why I like playing this. We all do.

Here are some of the reasons we like it then (trying out this blog editor at same time, Iets see how bullets go) :

it runs well

• it runs well
• it runs well (ok enough of that)
• it looks good
• the combat is fun and direct and unfussy.
• it is immersive due to the very beautiful graphics and the music helps too
• the story provides some extra immersion without being clumsy or obtrusive
• I like the sense of being on a journey through strange new lands, fighting my way, that theme works!
• there is no sub – I don’t feel any pressure to log on lest I waste money
• there is no nagging at all in fact
• in all the time I have attempted to play it it has always felt fresh and properly supported, if pared down
• I am not a second class player, I am equal to all … (edit: this post is already threatening to get rather large, I’ll leave it there)

Soo what stopped me from getting more involved for four years? Believe it or not, baggage limitation. Nothing as immersion-breaking as having to stop and empty your inadequate bags too often. And no, I’m not going to pay to remove the irritant.

(Guild Wars 2 runs ok on the other machine but not well enough for anyone to want to spread. One copy will do but if it ever gets better, we will buy more. We have 3/4 copies of GW1)

And….

EQ2 – Surprise! Yes me too. I am surprised I went back to this. I can play it until the point where the in-your-face marketing gets me (alas not long before that happens).

They have only themselves to blame that I barely spent money here because this is a great game. I love the rhythm of going out and adventuring, then coming home to decorate or just mess about in my home(s) so by rights I should be playing more and spending more.

I even like browsing the cash shop and treating myself now and again but all the other constant “buy, buy, buy” stuff gets on my nerves big time so I hardly bother. (The items are really nice when I do look).

I am planning to play bronze (totally free) on one account and play Gold (full sub) on one account for a month or two (already have a silver account) in the interests of finding out if any of their payment plans are remotely coherent and/or comfortable. I doubt it. Plus, since they double-dip I will not be subbing for quite some time. The money thus saved will go to buying some not-all-that-new expansions. Only then will I do the Gold experiment. i.e. dont hold breath.

So…  their only recent sale is this:

I may rust though.

which is rather nice, I must say, though it cries out for more holes. The inside spaces are lovely shapes. But they need windows for max atmosphere! It would also, to me have been a no-brainer for this to be able to travel, but it’s pretty good as it is. It is a house by the way. I think the carnivorous plant suffers from sea-sickness but I do have a few other bits and bobs I can use to furnish it 🙂

In its favour, EQ2 now runs very well at medium-ish settings and is still playable if cranked up, so it looks like they have worked on that part. Still haven’t managed to see through my windows in New Halas though. Hardware? Setting I am missing? Anyone know?

Wurm Online – is too interesting not to play just now, but I very soon won’t have time for Wurmstyle time-hogging. It’s a real shame that it’s so life-unfriendly. I’m not quitting but have no idea how much or when I’ll be able to play and anyway at times I won’t have internet making the expense truly worthless. If all I’m paying for is to log on when I can and repair stuff because that’s all there is time for, some hard decisions might be made. I’ll keep going for now though and see how I feel as time passes. I still just like being there, so there is that.  Much as I love Wurm I have to note the contrast with EQ2 where after a few months complete absence I could simply walk back in to all my stuff, and all the things I had made, arranged and achieved – without loss. I realise that it’s a different style of game. But a barrier to re-entry is a barrier to re-entry and padding (high proportion of repetitive maintenance tasks) is padding.

WoW – I finally dropped my sub. It’s still my old slippers though and I’ll go back now and again. Again, I’m time limited, no point in paying if I can’t play.

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Don’t miss this one (Wurm forum-post (wow!) scrnshots & yes, award pls)

I hope its ok to link forum posts – sometimes they disappear before people even know they have been there. Well: http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/70253-wurm-deserves-an-award-for-its-environment/

ourstuff down below is fun and all but we could never in a million years do anything like this (and we know it).
I wish someone would just show this thread to the right people (the ones that gather nominations/organise awards). Wurm so does deserve an award and a lot of recognition for this work.
I defy anyone to show me another published, running game with a persistent working ambient environment that gets even close!

In search of PlanetGardenShed

A thing unexpectedly fell into place, resolved and ceased to be such a huge drain on my time (well, while it evolves for now on someone else’s watch anyway – after that it will be back to me in another form for another while).

And a personage recently informed me that anything you do can be creative. So true. However I will not be spending my blessed, shiny, rescued hours arranging the potatoes in interesting patterns or pretending I’m happy doing some other endless repeating task, noes, I’m going for the motherlode!!!!

… mumble mumble…. woolly hat, thermos…. hamster…

for I need a planet to call my garden shed. Yes, TWoFB is off ice and moving forward for as long as this amazing windfall of time lasts. Don’t know if you read the Vague Plan, but it’s learning the tools where we’re at in the process.

I also intend to give the whole game project its own proper website at some later date (much later), where it can grow in a shape that suits. This blog is more my fun thing and things I’m interested in and that affect me get a mention (including the process of making a game), but I don’t sell anything here

Engage!

Hmmm… dunno…nice though

PlanetBanana!!!

  oooh….errr, maybe not

Possibly….

My spaceship could do with some Zazz don’t you think?

What? What’s wrong with it? Tch….young people…. really….. grumble…..

  Hehehe 🙂 Here’s the real one 🙂

But I still I need a nice flat place to build and store devjunk – and time is waning.

Here I think.

Well that’s it for now, out of time.

We’ll camp for tonight in the Mum I: Hobo Class, Series 1 and make for those hills I spotted some time soon. Someone unpack the lucky procedural cloud. We’re here.

(That was us practicing skydomes (Blender) and gradients (Gimp) with some uv mapping and (by meee) box modelling.)

WTB /apply spam timer

While I’m in a tetchy mood might as well bring this up. Kchat and Global I mostly keep turned off nowadays since every conversation is interrupted by the same small band of mutually adoring twits – not only Wuhtuhsuhs  and Wuhtuhbuhs do this, though that lot wreck interesting topics continually but there are just people who can’t stand anyone else chatting coherently. Or just have to see their name up there. If you /ignore, you make yourself ignorant to what is going on – don’t see why there is a right to spam-interrupt continually, but not a way to get them to bliddy shut up for ten minutes.

It’s not repeat messages I’m talking about so much, more just dominating chat with incessant yittering for the sake of looking prominent.

How great would it be to have an “/apply spam timer ” vote for this heftily annoying (socially inept!) quite small group of ego-bloats?  Not a mute, one of those vote things. If enough people “/apply spam timer”  you,  you have to wait a whole ten minutes (at least) between comments. Some people would probably explode from the tension of hauding their wheesht (being quiet) that long.  Hehehehehehe!

Hahahaha!

A woman can dream…

Perimeters! (II)

Update (July 2013): (Just in case someone decides to necro this) : the perimeter debate has died down for now. It appears every now and again, when perimeters cause friction. We may not have seen the last of it yet. Or maybe this time everyone really is happy with it. Who knows.

http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/69521-new-deed-placement-perimiter-rule-good-or-bad/

It is a true delight to see the Wurm Online players debating this prickly subject with the same creativity and thoroughness as they tackled the Pink Pearl deed-grab rule loophole. (Yay!)

This one is muuuch tougher though. It’s very tangled because of all the functions perimeters are supposed to support some of which conflict/overlap.

It really would help to separate those out and establish them properly so they don’t collide, then have a good argue about the details using some commonsense principles like:    “deed holder > new player > passing scavenger”     for example, though that might not turn out to be the case we’d need a debate to work it through.

As it stands for perimeters:  passing scavenger > new player’s enclosure > deed owner.  And roads > everything. That is,  the paying customer  benefits least (scavengers can use this land without having to deal with the consequences or fix the mess, deed owners can use this land but must live with the changes made or else they have to repair all damage including that caused by others.)

Oopth.

So far I’ve seen perimeters are meant to be: buffers between neighbours, wilderness, extra land for newbs to build, prevention of contiguous deeds, prevention of other deeds/players  too close, reservation for expansion, room for roads – all given as a purpose for this strange system. There may be more. It’s too much and it’s a mess.

And current enclosure rules make it even more of a mess since the perimeter restrictions can be circumvented, almost all of them, by using enclosures, a loophole exploited most bigly (is that a word?) by established, skilled players, I may add, who claim large pieces of land simply by creating enclosures. Increasing decay, by the way, would affect the skilled up landgrabbers least, and penalise new players most. If anything needs a one-tile buffer to stop them being made side-to-side, it is enclosures. They are often deliberately used to block access. They should be size limited too – they are protected areas for new players and people trying the game to make use of, so it is rumoured.

(This thread goes very quiet when large undeeded enclosures are brought up, I notice.)

I haven’t even mentioned the griefing possibilities perimeters allow.

It would be deeply good to fix perimeters.

We haven’t quite got there yet, but deed owners are fast becoming the mugs who pay for things everyone else finds rule-approved ways of getting for free. But it’s Wurm, could go in any direction. It has a habit of wobbling up to a precipice and not falling in. If I was to start playing right now I wouldn’t bother with a deed (disadvantages substantial,  advantages continually diminishing), I would only skill one premium and keep that up only intermittently as required. And I would not suffer for it, in fact, I would prosper.

Fireflies

We don’t have enough bugs???

Heartened by the existence of Moocs

(Massive Open Online Courses)

Now that my life experiment with ignoring the passive media is over, I do dip my toe into one sided information delivery now and again. Saw this article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/nov/11/online-free-learning-end-of-university

I absolutely believe in free and readily available, high quality, real education for everyone, everywhere. There’s no way we’ll keep the world without it. The insistence on monetising such basic things as learning is suicidal for our species as a whole and the world we live in. There are still people walking around who go all wibbly at the sight of an equation!

These are free for now, lets hope it stays that way.

These are to university standard, and wherever you are, whoever you are, if you have the net – you can use them. Now all we need to do is get everyone on the internet eh, and the hive mind will be a live mind. I love the internet. It really is like our collective brain making the first synaptic links and waking up, demons and all. Very strange and very wonderful thing.

Stripped of their cultural cottonwool and flushed out, the not so great characteristics we share with crocodiles and such turn out not to be all that mainstream after all as the less loud and more peaceable amongst us not only find a voice, but discover that in their wishing for a better world they are not, after all, a tiny, marginalised, discredited, deluded minority.

The opposite.

Ha!

Life on Wurm

We have another downtime today…

After the last one, my own animals were all staidly where they should be but at Xalorum’s deed the horse field was depressingly empty. (I did join there as a villager, and I love being part of it – thank you Xal. Indeed some alliances are very, very cool indeed. Something special there.)

So there has been some chasing about after stray horses, a lot of checking that things are ok. Life on Wurm has been checking on stuff and trying to remedy the damage. I personally am ok with this, because it’s soo exciting to be on the sidelines of something developing. But it’s not a joy for everyone, that’s for sure. I also have the luxury of not being too heavily invested in anything ingame, an unexpected benefit of not having a lot of time to play, so I can afford to just roll with events.

And there really are some interesting things going on – lookit this picture from the forums (credit to headhunter!) – the dyes!!! This should go on the main site imho.

http://forum.wurmonline.com/index.php?/topic/69283-dye-changes-magenta-yellow-and-cyan-now-possible/

The ferns were just …. ferns in the grass. One day maybe we will get them in earthenware pots. And I’m still trying to think of a plausible way for drapes to be extremely useful in pvp, so that there might be a chance of those…

My pumpkins are back! On low settings I have been farming invisible pumpkins for some time. (You get used to it.)

I can’t work out if axes parry or not. Or if they do if they should… I’m sure it will all come out in the wash.

Those are the things that affect me most. There is a list of changes on the website, but these always strike me as terse and incomplete. Usually find out the extra stuff from irc, or of course Twitter which some people insist on using instead of the official “news” on the site to give out information. It’s annoying – I’d prefer everything to be in one easily accessible place including all the juicy small details. Let’s hope the feverish, all-accepting obsession with social media subsides at some point so we can go back to having ungated competitions and a lucid plan for documenting changes in an accessible official place.

Hrmph!

Got sidetracked there… and today’s bit from irc is:

Wollschaf
gaah I broke unstable

10:58
Wollschaf
it’ll lead you to the test server for now

10:58
Tich
er, i’m using unstable, seems ok to me. or did you just break it

10:58
Wollschaf
just now

Oh dear…

Playing Monopoly

Ever since we distinguished ourselves from the basic slime, control of supply has been the immediate aim of wannabe millionaire higher algae. On games throughout the world with a trading basis, people attempt to control supply and destroy competitors…

It is not a higher strategy, it’s only a few steps more cerebral than hit the guy and take his stuff.

This is my first post using Windows Live Writer which has lurked on my computer for long enough. I did some research looking for an open source or developing alternative to use as a blog editor… maybe one that would work with Open Office. But has to be said, this is the best and it is free.

Just one problem…

Windows isn’t going to support it much longer. Which means we’re left with this or a very few alternatives most (if not all) of which have died and are not being worked on, with posts from 2008 or so on their shrivelled blogs and forums.

That’s not the free market working, that’s it dying.

Which is why, leddies and gents, governments all over the world make monopolies (and cartels)

Illegal.

Designers of trading games would do well to take heed. If a few are controlling all, if trading only happens at the top – design ways to challenge control of supply into the game plox. Monopoly is fine in a game setting, but you don’t want to be left with only the few winners playing.

Hmmm might be an interesting Wurmday…

http://wurmonline.tumblr.com/

collision…   multistorey… update….

….     [10:06:11] 3 minutes to shutdown. Reason: Maintenance restart. Up to thirty minutes downtime. (suspense, suspense…)

irc: Manny: “This update contains the new collision code. Multistory housing is not done”

Aw.

(some servers back up – 12 noon). Placeholders for ferns!

Ooooh

animals escaping all over the place!!!!…. champions, hell-horses, aggros

Aaaaah

I don’t dare look at my deeds – anyway I gotta go, but irc has been a lot of fun this morning

Here’s the bit where all hell broke loose a few lines after Rolf said he was going off to lunch:

accwin	wow everything gone wrong troll walking freely on deed…
11:22	dipse	champion?
11:22	accwin	yes
11:23	Tokeri	thank you sincor
11:23	accwin	dog gone out of the pen
11:23	dipse	yeah all big animals learnt how to escape it seems
11:23	sincor	Champion deer escaped there pens, 2 of my champs trolls where running free.
11:23	accwin	best they now can go in and out of house i dont rly wish to kill it…
11:23		*** Ame joined #wurm
11:23		*** Madboy joined #wurm
11:23		*** Ame is now known as Amethys
11:24		*** reddd joined #wurm
11:24	Madboy	so is it possible to build multi storage houses .. my bad english put a stop to understanding the news
11:25	sincor	not yet, Code for it is near done tho.
11:25	reddd	Errrrrr
11:25	reddd	All champ animals have gone walkies
11:25	reddd	And Hell horses are dying to templars
11:25	reddd	Since this update
11:25	sincor	Yip reddd the update let all ago’s and Champs out of there pens
11:26	reddd	Roll back pl0z
11:26	sincor	^ I alreasdy heard someone lost a 5 speed hellhorse
11:26	Madboy	what happened to the experimentals ??  bulls and cows loks like the old ones
11:26	Madboy	Holy crap =)  we got champs crocs and bears on deed =)
11:27	Madboy	better not go home then