City of Mall Cops

I'm annoyed.

Not just with one particular game, but with most of the MMO games out there. I'm not annoyed at the constant downward spiral of your character's effectiveness that happens as the devs pile up more and more nerfs to slow the advancement rate of their player base. I'm not annoyed at the inevitable bugs that cause things to not work right, or let other people leapfrog ahead of you because they find (and abuse) and exploit before you ever hear of it. I'm not even annoyed at the hours of grinding that every one of these games requires to become something more than a Level 1 Toilet Scrubber.

I'm annoyed at the forced grouping mindset.

I'm not a hardcore anti-social bigot who'd rather cut off me own hand than deign to group with people kind of player... but neither am I the log in and look for a group after 5 seconds kind. I group with friends (if they're on when I am), and I sometimes feel like grouping just to be different.

I RESENT the game designers who promise that their game will be playable solo, and then proceed to adjust the level of everything to assume you're in a group. Oh yes, you *might* be able to solo things in City of Heroes/Villians... if you're willing to leave your mission difficulty set at the easiest level, and thus spend weeks grinding through things.

I wouldn't be so upset if it had always been like this. But when I started playing CoH, you really could solo. Yes, people who grouped would level quicker than you did... but you never hit the brick wall of needing a group to get through a few missions. Each set of patches has made it progressivly harder to solo, to the point that once you find that particular kind of foe that slaughters you with ease... you have to group, or avoid any content that might include those mobs. Ever.

At least Blizzard came out and said, right at the start, that if you wanted to do the higher end dungones, you'd need to group. They didn't mention that to PvP effectively, you'd also have to group, since you can't get the high-end gear any other way... but that's ok. You could always join a PvE server and avoid that too.

It just feels like those old "role playing" games where you died, over and over and over, until you found the one right word, or the right object to give the NPC, and then it'd let you pass as if you were best buddies. I don't mind being overpowered, but I hate the feeling that if I had just chosen one power differently, or carried the right item, I would have won easily.

*sigh*

Snow!

Well, it looks like the weather droid lied again. It was supposed to snow briefly yesterday, and then get colder today but be clear with no chance of precipitation. No chance, mind you.

Come here... look out the window... see that? That looks like more than a slight chance of snow to me. I'd have to say that it looks a bit more like a bunch of snow sitting on the ground, than clear skies and sunshine. Of course, I'm not an expert on these things.


That's what it looks like out the screen door on the side of my house. You can see the amount of snow on the edge of the fence, and my car.





My cat is not overly thrilled with this development either.

Well, at least I did get some of the garage itself cleaned out and rearranged. There's still more to do, and Kim's truck needs to be relocated... but I don't think much is gonna get done today.

Today seems like a good day to play Civ 4, poke at my java code a little, and perhaps see if the fireplace still works.

/me shuts the door and wanders back inside with a pair of slippers.

Garage Day

It's that time of year again.

Time to put on the warm clothing and wander out into the big meat-space and try to clean out the garage so I can park my car in it this winter. Last winter, we had a houseguest's possessions taking up the space my car would normally have occupied, and so some disorganization still remains to be cleaned up.

I hate cleaning... in fact, I'm not overly fond of most aspects of meat-space, but some things just have be done. I'm hoping for a call about a job today, so I'll probably use that as an excuse to avoid venturing out -- at least until it warms up a little bit more.

If that stupid lottery would cooperate, I could avoid all this unpleasantness. A small win of a few million dollars would let me avoid cleaning AND jobs, as long as I invested it wisely. With no house payments, I could live off as little as 10K USD a year, and I'm sure I could get 5% interest on a million dollars without too much hassle.

Oh well... I'm sure some employed person in California won it, and so my garage will have to be cleaned by me, personally.

[edit]
10:00AM -- It's SNOWING!
[edit]
12:32PM -- It's DAMN COLD out there!
[edit]
Just a note to the spammers.... piss off, eh?

Dark and Light

A few of you might have heard about this game. It's been in the works now for... five years? Not sure, but I know it was supposed to be out last year, and was at E3 back in 2003, and is still stuck in beta testing. In any case, they have a new tactic.

They're releasing a prequel, supposedly this month (which gives them 15 more days). It will use the same game engine the "real" game does, but be free to play for six months. In April, the real "Dark and Light" is supposed to go live, set 1,000 years after this prequel game.

It's an interesting game, looks like a Shadowbane style with more of an original (pre-SOE) Everquest feel and a very in-depth crafting system. I really wonder about the six month trial though.

If you got to play a game for six months, and were then asked to pay to play the sequal... would you? There have only been a couple of MMO's that have held my interest for more than six months, ever... so I have my doubts.

Still... check out their website and decide for yourself.

No, no... over there!

For now, I'm redirecting the top level page of my own web site to this wonderful blog of joy.

Why? Well... I'm lazy. My homepage is in pretty sad shape, and has been for some time. I've had ideas on how to rewrite it a few times, but each time I did a little work on it and then decided killing elves, or blowing up spaceships, or conquering the world was more interesting.

So, until I get ambitious and find a way to make it work the way I want it to work, I figure it may as well point to something other than Amy the cat.

HTML sucks

I hate HTML. Once upon a time, HTML was a way to format page content, so it would be readable and have the same general formatting on any kind of output device. You could read an HTML man page on your snazzy Sun 3/60 running sunview and using Mosaic, or sitting on your VT220 terminal using lynx. Simple.

Then the internet went commercial in 1992. Netscape and Microsoft began beating their chests over whose browser did more. Advertisers appeared. Pointy haired bosses knew they wanted to be on that interweb thing, and who cared how readable things were, those buttons needed to be blue!

Now, I want something simple. I want a nav bar on the left, and content on the right. I want them both to fill the page, and if I put too much crap in the nav bar, I want it to scroll. To be even pickier, I want a graphic at the top of the nav bar that doesn't scroll, but sits up at the top left and stares at you. I don't want to use FRAMES!

Is that so hard? Apparently so. Lots of things that work in one browser, or one version of another browser... nothing so far that works correctly everywhere.

I hate HTML.

WoW

Just so you didn't think I was biased towards a single game, I also picked up a game time card for my World of Warcraft subscription yesterday. I haven't quite decided when to plug it in though. For those who don't know, game time cards are used with online games as an alternative to using a credit card for monthly billing. They were originally developed for young kids who could buy the game (Everquest probably), but didn't have a credit card and couldn't convince the parents to let them use theirs. I've discovered they're a great way to avoid paying for games you don't play anymore though. With a recurring bill, you get tagged $15 each month for your game subscription, regardless of your usage. The rub comes when you have almost stopped playing the game, but haven't remembered (or are too lazy/reluctant) to cancel your subscription. Using game cards, you buy two months at a time, and then it stops unless you plug in another one.

World of Warcraft is a fun game, but I got tired of it a few months ago. On PvP servers, it's all about ganking or playing in a group to avoid being ganked. As a level 47 warrior who got 99% of those 47 levels solo, I was starting to be the target of roaming gank squads, and I didn't care to be forced to run instances with others. So I moved on. Now, with a new expansion coming, I feel like being around for that, at least for a month or two. Buying a game card now means I can have a two month fix of the game whenever I feel like it, which might be today, or might not be until the expansion actually gets released.