I Can Haz Secret World?

I got a notice from FunCom that I have 2 weeks free of Conan (also heads up: a free week of LotRO starts tomorrow).  But that wasn’t the interesting part of the email:

Subscribe for 3 months and get guaranteed access to the closed beta test of The Secret World + the reward above*

Oh shame on your FunCom!  You tempt me to send you money for a best test…I’m wise to your ways.  But am I strong enough to resist?

Updates

Some quick updates:

Fallen Earth: I have about a week left on my trial key, and I’ll have a write up ready to shoot to you all with my take on the game.

Alganon: I’m not sure what kind of NDA I’m under for this game (not alot of good communication thus far, as you may have noticed). I believe the game releases Dec. 1, but whenever the NDA is lifted, I’ll have a write up on this one as well.

EVE Online: Coming Soon ™ a new post: Battleships…I was doin’ it wrong.

What Drives Gamers Nuts

Follow, if you will, the sequence of events here, especially those highlighted in RED:

SilverElf4,You have been added as part of the last wave of Alganon beta testers before its launch on October 31, 2009. Your MyAlganon account “SilverElf4″ has been upgraded to have immediate beta access. You don’t even need a beta key! Simply login to your MyAlganon.com account and click the “Beta” button to get instructions on how to download the client. Once you are finished downloading, installing and patching the beta client use your MyAlganon login account name and password to login and play the Alganon beta.

******************************* 

Greetings,

 

I received my invitation to the last round of Beta testing before launch and was very excited.  I have downloaded the client from http://www.myalganon.com but when I run the client and put in my account name and password, it tells me that the information is invalid and will not download the installer.

 

I’m not sure what to do.  I used the same account name and password as I used to access the page with the beta client as supplied in the email.

******************************

Hi, 
 
In regards to your issue of not being able to download the client, we’d like for you do try and manually re-enter your beta key again on MyAlganon. To do this go to you profile page, scroll over My Account and select Enter Key. Right now, this will take you to a purchase page, so you need to click the “Already Purchased Alganon? Click Here to enter your game key” link found just about the Billing Information section. Enter you key and try downloading the installer again. Let us know if this works for you, and if not let us know and we’ll go from there. 
 
Regards, 
 
[censored]
CSGM 
Alganon 

 

Yeah…so I forwarded that original email.  That was about 30 hours ago…still no response.   Contrast this with Fallen Earth, who hit me up with multiple emails back and forth within 24 hours.  My issue is now resolved and I played the game last night (more on that in a later post).   Meanwhile, Alganon, who issued me this invite on Saturday, has emailed me once in 4 days, and has not resolved my issue, and indeed seems to have revealed a deeper issue. 

My only real question is – how does this happen?  Is this a case of game developer specific “left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing” syndrome?  Different departments not talking to each other, etc?  Does that also explain the poor response time as well?

Betas Galore!

Just a quick note. I’m doing Fallen Earth now, which while its technically not beta…it basically still is. And I got an invite on Saturday to participate in the last round of Alganon Betas before its launch.

And I’m sad to say, despite having had the FE client for 4 days, I’ve yet to be able to play the game. But kudos to theirs support team for their timely responses and aid, even if there is no end in sight to the bugs I’ve encountered.

Alganon on the other hand, needs to get its stuff together. As of this morning, I still can’t even download the client. And I haven’t heard back from their support team *at all*.

More on EVE and the ultimately bizarre and yet awesome conclusion of our first war dec later on.

Gearing Up for War

We got War Dec’d this weekend by the local griefers club. I’ll do what I can to keep you updated on the war effort, but I don’t want to give any free press to the griefers, or give anything away in our own efforts.

To clarify, anyone, including the group that war dec’d us, is welcome to play the game anyway they want to. And that includes me and how I’m going to be playing in the weeks to come…

WWII History Fail

The Oddest Search Term Yet

“anti imagesize:1366×768″

Apparently there is a movement afoot to reduce image sizes, and I’m seen as an ally of this group.

I’m not one to complain about traffic so..uh…fight the good fight people! I’m with you all the way!

On a Business Trip

Back Friday…

Twilight Imperium

So two weeks ago, I had a chance to finally play Twilight Imperium, a game that has been on my “to play” list for about 5 years now.  It was everything I thought it could be.  It was however, a slightly different than normal playing experience, I think, since we only had three players – my dad, my brother, and myself.  The game normally should be played with 5-6 players.  Thought their are rules for only three, we found them to be lacking a bit.

Twilight Imperium: Its Good to Be The King

First off, kudos again to Fantasy Flight Games.  Because they host the rules to all their games online, for free, my family members and fellow gamers were able to read and digest them well in advance of our first game.  That made the first time through a lot less awkward than it normally is for a new game.  It also let me see what all I could look forward too if I bought the expansion for TI, which I now intend to do as well.  Good business practice, as I understand it, requires some risk, and FFG hosting their rules online is paying off for them, at least where me and my family are concerned.

So we delve in pretty quickly – and really, TI is a smooth playing game anyway because of the division of rounds into actions, to keep people from wandering from the table for that second bag of Doritos and falling into watching that late football game in the next room…not that that has ever happened to me.  The game involves the usual take over the universe, build armadas formula, but with a couple of nice wrinkles.  First is that you pick a “strategic action” card at the beginning of each round, giving you a bonus that you can execute at some point in your turn.  If your economy needs a shot in the arm, grab the Trade card.  Trying to keep your undergunned systems safe for another turn while you stockpile weapons?  Think about picking up Diplomacy.  The catch:  you pick in turns, and if someone picks the vaunted Initiative card to let them go first, they may not pick it again next round.  So what you want is not always available.  In the three player game though, you pick *two* cards instead of one, and this was the primary week point we found.  More on this later.

The other nifty thing about TI is the way movement works.  You activate systems (spaces on the board) rather than units.  And when you activate a system, you can move things in and out of it, produce with it, war in it, etc.  It takes a round or two to get the hang of, but it really seems to speed up the game and allow for some flexibility.  Normally you might mass a big armada in one area and then blitz the map with it.  But since here you activate the target system instead of the armada, you can invade said system from several places at once.  On the flip side, remember to build last – since once you activate a system, you cannot move into or out of it anymore.

Theres a beautiful balancing act then that plays out each turn, as players try to clear objectives or KO players home worlds to win the game.  One of the strategy cards is “Imperial” which gives you 2 victory points and allows you to unveil a new objective card to all the players, allowing everyone to possibly claim more points.  Now this may seem powerful, and I thought so too.  Which is why, in our game, I started picking it every turn.

Now that wouldnt work too well in a 6 player game, where it would mean that you got no other real bonuses to the turn, and you went last in the round.  But I was playing an alien faction that always got to go first in actions (not in picking cards), and since there was only three of us, we all picked two cards.  So I got victory points each turn, and got bonuses too.  It took my brother and dad about 3 turns to realize what I was doing.  But both of them figured they had fleets big enough at that point to crush me before I could eek out a VP win.  They were wrong.  They forgot that since I got to go first, and we got to pick two.  Well…on the next turn, I picked Imperial again, with them laughing at me.  And then Diplomacy.  That stalled my brothers fleets a turn, and I managed to put together a stalling force of carriers loaded with fighters.  I knew they wouldnt win, I just needed to hold him off a turn.  My dad, a bit tired and still miffed at me over an earlier family fight (they just moved in down the street from us – and we are having boundary issues already lol), apparently didn’t quite get it, and made no move to advance on my with his own fleets, heavy with cruisers.

So now I’m at eight points.  And they manage to grab up Diplomacy and Imperial from me.  What they missed though, was when I grabbed the Initiative card.  It was all over but the crying and they still didn’t see it.  I blocked my brothers insanely overwhelming force with my hordes of fighters, a few other things happened.  And then it came time to pick cards.   I got to pick first since I had Initiative.  And you know what I picked.   And since my race always got the first action.  And since the game is over as soon as a player hits 10 VP.    Well, I won.  (-:

Sneaky and underhanded, I know.  But they should have seen it coming, right?  My brother wondered aloud why he would bow to anyone as Emporer when he had him by the throat, with dominating fleets above his homeworld.  We conjectured that VP indicated, at least in part, the popular support of a players claim to the throne.  This would mean that he might have the fleets above my homeworld, but that enough of his admirals no supported me that the fleets were no longer really “his.”  Anyway, it was over quick.  5 turns and one action into turn 6.  But it was alot of fun, and I love the complexity of having to deal with politics, economics, and military channels/attacks/feints from players every turn.  Excellent game.  The trick will be finding more people to play with.  Or at least, not doing the two card thing anymore.  (-:

Limiting Factors Part II: Leverage

So I went to fit my Apoc last night with whatever I could. I’m not one of those peopel that trains Large Energy Turret to five before I by a battlesehip, you see. The cap is fairly stable, some CPU fitting issues, and I’m working on those, but I really wanted it cap stable with the Armor Repper running.

So I thumb through my skills, and that whole idea of Limiting Factors rears it head again. There’s lots of ways to increase the cap on your ship, and for me in particular there were three ways.

So I chose the one that gave me the most Leverage over the Limiting Factor. The thing that I could improve with the least amount of investment that gave me the greatest result. Because there is more than one way to skin a cat.

So, to improve my cap, I had a few possibilities:

Change modules: improves cap but at the cost of tank/dps, cost: mid

Train Energy Management 5: improves cap, cost: high (16 days training)

Train Controlled Bursts 4: lowers cap costs of turrets, cost: mid (3 days)

Train Fuel Consumption 3: lowers cap cost of afterburner, cost: low (8 hours training)

My Leverage here at first glance is the AB training, though that only helps in fits with an AB, and only then with AB running. So really the best solution here is Controlled Bursts, a skill I had almost forgotten about. The great thing is that this is a skill that will improve my cap across the board, and not just with the Apoc, or the Prophecy – it will help with any ship I may roll out, save those with Projectile weapons, of course.

After I realized that, I went back over my skill list looking for options. There’s so many skills and angles in EVE its easy to forget about an option or to overlook some favorable Leverage you may have in your playbook already.

Food for thought as I finish laundry and enjoy a few hours of peace on my day off as my little(st) one naps.