WWII History Fail

A Real Life MMO

We were on vacation this weekend (kids on a two week fall break) and we took them to the revamped Stone Mountain Park  in Atlanta, GA.    This is probably going to be a long post so the tl;dr version is  this:  I spent time in a kid’s play area that was designed like an MMO, and it blew my mind.

A few years ago, Stone Mountain was taken over by the same company that runs Knott’s Berry Farm over in CA.  As a result, it took on less of a camping/refuge atmosphere and became more of a theme/amusement park area.  One of the things installed was the Great Barn.  Its a giant indoor funhouse, four stories up in the middle, with numerous different activities inside.  And as I sat and watched my kids and my neighbors kids (who had joined us on the mini-vacation) play, I began to see things with my trained gamer’s eye.   The whole blasted thing was one giant MMO.

Okay, we have four people but do we have all four gamer archetypes present?

When kids came in, they were stopped in an initial area where they could create their “farmer,” and get a special wristband that would track their progress in the different activities.  Can we say Achiever anyone?  In the center great room on the bottom floor, visible from just about everywhere, was an electronic sign proclaiming the top ten scoring farmers from each age group.  In that same great room, the “starter area” for the game, there are hundreds of balls (“fruit”) lying around in several different colors.  Farmers can spend time here gathering fruit for the activities, and the wise ones will grab a bag to extend their capacity (I didn’t get a chance to count the number of slots).  Farmers might also explore side rooms for additional fruit and bags, take them from other players, or perhaps speak with those leaving the game area to gather additional capacity.  Thus we complete the first echoes of Bartle underpinnings.

This fruit Economy as it were, is more complex than it might seem.  There are a finite number of fruits in the game, they are required for all the activities, save some of the explorer ones (ahem, slides, climbing nets, and side rooms).  Expended fruit, through a complex system of tubes, vacuums, and nets, are channeled back down to the bottom floor room out in the open and also in less visible caches around the side rooms.  Some of those side rooms are netted and hallwayed off from the main room, providing quiet areas for Socializing via benches and even through exchange of said caches to interested players.  Some Mini Games exist here in the form of small slides and riders for younger players or those who prefer to play alone for a while.  Killers can peg one another endlessly, as well as trying to defend themselves from the veteran players on the second Tier above.

But Dad, its hard to be an Achiever with all these Killers around!

Once one has completed the games and activities on the first floor, and gathered enough fruit for their liking, they may proceed to the second Tier of challenges and activities, either through Challenges such as climbing cargo nets, or via the Rapid Transport System..er stairs, at the back of the room, conecting to the Quest Hub (lobby) of each Tier (floor).  On the second floor, one engage Killer instincts by Bombing players on the first floor, completing Challenges involving expending various color combinations of fruit to gain Achievement points, or engage in the running gun battle with air guns that use the fruit as ammunition on two opposing sides above the open air great room below.  This second floor also allows for Socilization and Trading as farmers find that they need different fruit colors or different skills or even additional players (one challenge involves a crank system that requires cooperation) to play.  Some of the less assertive farmers simply go between the floors carrying loads of fruit for other players, especially those locked in battle (Crafting and Player Driven Economy at its best).  After completing a challenge, if you desire, just scan your bracelet, receiving the points and perhaps a prestigious place on the big board instantly.  Some of these challenges are again hidden in side rooms, requiring Explorers to hunt them down and use them or share their location with others.

On the third level, players are treated to a more hard core version of the PVP battles below, as it is harder to obtain ammunition, and there are less available guns for the players to utilize.  Moreover, slides dropping one down to the starter areas below are clogged not only with PvPers looking for more ammo, but also less hardcore players just looking to enjoy the ride!   Many community service managers are in attendence, regulating the flow on the slides to prevent jams and aiding players who are lost or have a problem.   There are also a few challenge type games here that can be played solo for the biggest point scores, but require more fruit and more complex expenditures of that fruit or more demanding hand-eye coordination to complete them.

A final, smaller area seemed to be available for those who wanted to complete their tour of the entire facility, but carrying my weighty bag of fruit and my one year old, I found that even since their was no Rapid Transport System to that level, I was not able to go there.   Thus it was completed – those with family obligations or too tied to their material goods would find themselves unable to participate in the true end game and…whatever it was that it had to offer.

My kids played for probably two hours in the area, finally giving up only when it closed down and we headed for the famous laser show.  Caretakers/Devs emerged to arrange the balls and bags in strategic positions, helping to reset the economy to accomodate the new batch of players that would arrive in the morning. 

Are we trapped?

As we left, and I continued to marvel at what I saw with a gamer’s eye, I had one  final terrifying thought…what if I had it all backwards.  What if, instead of building a play area for kids, designed like an MMO, instead the MMO’s that you and I played were designed like kids play areas.  Perhaps in the final say, we are not only being treated like children, but we love it so much, we keep coming back to the same Barns, day after day, not really expecting or hoping for improvement, content in the channeled reality with which we are presented.

Three Way Showdown

A few nights ago, someone in our little crew had a brilliant suggestion.  With my brother trying to be a Rifter loving pirate, we should loadout some frigates and do some pvp for real.   So we finally carved out some time.  And I had the best time I’ve had in awhile.

Of course, being the trouble maker I was, I knew I wouldn’t bring a Rifter.  And my buddy caught on quick and showed up in his Dramiel.   That might seem unfair, but my brother, with his focused training regimen, has quickly ascended to fitting some t2 gear to his Rifter.  With Gallente Frigate 5 and now Amarr Frigate 5 under my belt, I had a choice.  But I decided to stay true to my new Amarr love and fit a Punisher. 

And I won.  Again…and again…and again.  the only time I lost was when my buddy had switched out to his repping Domi and was repping bth my brother and I at the same time.  He stopped finally, but my brother had just reloaded, and I had only a few rounds left.  So I had to stop and reload and he didn’t.   Granted, against the t2 autocannons it was very, very close.   And I’m not sure my buddy quite has his Dramiel fit perfected yet, but still, it was something to be proud of.

And it made me wonder.   Everybody I’ve heard of always lauds the virtues of the Rifter as the best T1 combat frigate (I’ve seen some minority arguments for the Tristan though).   Why not the Punisher?  Is it the lack of the third mid slot?  I can see where that would be problematic against other pvpers who would try to disengage  if they fell behind.

It also gave me a solid “Eureka!” moment.  I didn’t realize that I had all the preqs done for Assault Ships.  I mean I think I knew but I didn’t quite know.  You know?  Anyway, I need to train my gunnery skills a bit more for t2 weapons, but…well it was so fun, I gotta get me one. 

But which one?  With two maxed out frigate skills…do I go:

Enyo?  Ishkur?  Retribution?  Vengeance?

I’m leaning towards the Ishkur (I had solid drone skills) but I love the look of the Vengeance and the armor resist bonus (also what I love about the Punisher).

Taking your input….nnnooow.  Ding.

Annoying Kids

So the merger continues to go fairly smoothly.  We’ve pretty much mothballed BB-I, and set up some alts to watch over it.  We plan to drop leave corp today and join the one we are merging with tomorrow.

Plans for our first POS are progressing.  All the components are bought, the trick now is just deciding which moon we want to make our own.  And when to set up to escort for that pesky hour of anchoring and onlining.

But one thing is not progressing.  One thing is regressing.  The other corp has a new member.  Who says he’s 17, but judging from conversations I would guess is more around the 12-13 age range.  Which should be fine.  I deal well with teenagers.  And annoying, loud-mouthed, ADD, types in all caps ones I can usually tame and get on track.  But this one…

This one knows how to push everyone’s buttons.  The whining, the kiddy speak, the bragging, the “pet me please, cuz I did something marginally good” mentality.  The assumptions that if we are online, we must be online to play with him.  We must be online to help him accomplish his goals.  Because whatever else we are doing in the game is inferior to what he is doing.

We’ve come close to assining his continue presence in the new corp as a dealbreaker on the merger.  I should have more patience and be more of a mentor I know.  I think maybe because EVE has so few people like that, it makes it that much harder to deal with them.  In WoW, it was a given – that person was going to be in the game, every night, and probably in your PUG, so you just did what you had to ta get by.  But here, you are not braced for it, and its hard to know just how to balance your reaction.

Especially when, since its EVE, there is a possibility that guy is an alt whose only purpose is to spy on and disrupt your operations.  If thats true, so far its working.

But, in an attempt to rally my patience, and in honor of this guy driving me nuts, I dug deep into my psyche.  And remembering this made me feel better.  Because now  I can give all of you a window into my world while reminding myself how I should *not* act (despite the title, it is quite SFW):

 

For those of you who don’t remember the cartoon: in a nutshell, it involves Chester repeatedly getting Spike into trouble by confusing the harmless Sylvester with the lethal, recently escaped from the zoo Black Panther.  Hilarity insues.

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!

Corporate Mergers

I need to break out my blueberry almond martinis, as we successfully negotiated a corp merger last night.

So my five capsuleer BB-I corp will be merging with an eight member local corp to give us more staying power and more market power.

As the weeks have unfolded, we’ve really found a niche in industrial dealings, and have run a few ops with this other corp for mining and exploration.  We’ve both benefited from them, and get along well with the other people, with one exception (a new player still learning not to talk all caps).  The goal is to become a neutral arms-dealer outfit for the current locale.

"The gun is free, but the ammo will cost you..."

Which will tie in nicely with my brothers new series of short stories for submission that will have a Casablanca flavor too them.

We are currently in the process of sorting through our junk.  BB-I will effectively get mothballed with my alt back in the CEO chair.  But we need to figure out whats going with us and what’s not, and who gets what.

Oh, and we also have to anchor our new POS.  Business is good….

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.  (-:

EVE Alts Take Pay Cut, Film at 11.

I’ve always said I didn’t want an alt in EVE.   Too much work – the headache of training them, of alt-tabbing in and out, of upkeeping skills…not to mention doubling my cost for playing the game for the sake of what amounted to a luxury item.
But CCP knows how to make a tempting offer, don’t they?  The Power of Two offer, which EVE has rolled out several times over the history of the game, seems to be back.

$50 for 6 months.  That’s hard to argue with…

6 months for 49.95

Having that extra account at your disposal is sometimes indispensable. It can help turn the tides on a difficult mission or turn a taxing task into a more efficient venture. A second account also means more places you can be at once, which makes monitoring the markets easier and reduces travel time. Trying out new and different skills Extra firepower on missions An extra hauler for miners A tag along salvager There are plenty of reasons to have a second account, and right now the biggest one is the Power of 2.

Offer valid only for newly created accounts. Existing accounts (trials included), active or expired, do not qualify for this promotion. Power of 2 may not be combined with other offers. Subscription of the new account will automatically renew after the six month period. Renewal will occur at the regular six month subscription price. Offer only available for Credit Cards and Direct Debit. Offer expires October 17th, 2009.

I wonder how this actually works.  I mean, my brother is thinking of starting play again….what if I start an alt account for him.  Then he gets to play for six months for almost half price.  Hmmm…then I would have a living alt, and all the headaches I mentioned above would go away….

Pardon me, I have some quasi-evil musing to do….

$22 A Month Subscriptions?

My wife called in last night to fight over a $20 service fee we had been charged for our account dropping too low (it hadn’t – our account minimum is calculated using savings and checking, not just checking…morons) and also noticed next to my $14.95 monthly gaming fee to EVE that there was a $2 or so “International Service Charge” attached  to it.  Round two on the phone started, and ended with Wachovia refusing to take that one off, claiming that they were withing their rights to charge us extra for having to exchange currencies, and that they were surprised it was so low - the lady claimed the charge should have been more like $7 a month, and would be so in the future.

Now, we’ve already established that Wachovia is capable of deploying morons – and actually, I’ve known that for some time because of other issues I’ve had.  So I’m not entirely sure I have been told the gospel truth here, so I did some digging.

*Real* ISK.

First of all, I found out that ISK doesn’t stand for Interstellar Space Kredit.  It stands for “Iceland Krona” in the international banking scene.  And that Wachovia charges a 3% international service fee for converting currency.  So I did some quick math:

$14.95 x 1.03 = $15.40 -$14.95 = $.45 in service fees.

Nowhere near $2 or $7 either one.

Add to this my confusion over CCP itself.  While they are originated in Iceland, they also have offices here in America, and so I’m not sure what kind of exchanging needs to go on at all.  And in their FAQ page, while they list all sorts of additional charges that one might get hit with, one for converting currency is not on the list.  And costs are listed not only in Euros, but also in USD, along with this sentence:

Prices are listed in Euros and US dollars. You can use the services of Yahoo Finance to convert the US dollar/Euros to your local currency.

Bold is mine.  This would seem to indicate that CCP accepts two kinds of currency – Euros and US Dollars.  So what is going on here?  Well…I have two weeks until my sub is up.  And I have at least one unpleasent conversation with Wachovia that will be taking place.  I do have some options though. 

At the very least I will be switching banks.  I cannot tolerate incompetence and/or swindling.  The economy is too bad to reward companies that fail in the most basic avenues of knowing their own policies and customer service.  I may also switch my sub over to Discover, though I don’t  know yet what their policies are either.  Hopefully this will not mean EVE costing me $22 a month to play.  I enjoy the game, but…

Anyone else out there ever have this problem?

Anyway, expect an extra post this week so I can regale you with the insanely underhanded way in which I won my first ever Twilight Imperium game.  And no, I didn’t cheat…