Terrorizing

No, wait. It’s “Tera Rising.” Same difference, I suppose.

I’ve been tinkering a bit with Tera and Firefall, two members of the more action-oriented MMO breeds that are emerging lately. They still have cooldowns, but eschew tab targeting and RNG combat resolution in favor of direct aim-and-fire/attack mechanics. Firefall goes for a level-free sandbox approach, while still maintaining a sense of progression via gear upgrades, while Tera stays closer to the tried-and-true with its quest lines, level-gated skill purchases, and NPC levels. However, both are from the School of the Chainmail Bikini as far as female armour design goes.

I’ll write more about both of them soon. Ish.

Production Values

Well. As I tweeted the other day, in video game terms, I died, but I have respawned. I was wanting to pick up Ye Olde Towne Bloge again, but I was scratching my head about my production processes for screenshots and videos, because, while I surely had some at some point, I did not write them down. Then I thought, hey, it’s a small-time video game blog, so why worry?

Instead of worrying at all about that, I’m going to gradually be updating the play with me page to reflect other games I’m in, and possibly spend a little time skimming the parlance page as well. And somewhere along the line, I’ll probably even write a little tidbit on whatever MMO I’m playing the most at the time, which realistically will probably be CO.

Finally, the whole publish-daily-at-7-P.M. thing is out the window, at least for now.

Questions? Comments? Corrections? Leave a Comment!

This Is How You Win

I haven’t really been playing MMOs much lately. I popped in to LotRO for a minute to pick up the next set of maps that were made available for the Summer Festival. I didn’t feel like playing, so I was glad that my HNT had enough tokens leftover from last year’s Summer festival, because all I really had to do was take her down to the Party Tree, talk to an NPC, and then log. Grief is a funny thing. Not funny ha-ha, but, you know. Everything I was enjoying when my world shook has left me feeling this odd empty sensation when I try to find any joy in it. More than anything else, this is why I stopped pressuring myself to keep producing for the blog like I had been before. I still have confidence that I’ll pick it back up to around the same level eventually, but right now my heart is just not in it.

So what have I been doing instead, you may ask? In real life, the usual. Things I Dare Not Mention™. As far as games go, though, I’ve been playing League of Legends. It’s just been fun. Shorter, sweeter play sessions, totally different game mechanics, lively and interesting characters, etc. This is not to say it’s without its faults, however. Just like most PvP-oriented games, there are plenty of insecure jerks who love to rage whenever the slightest thing goes wrong. You’ve probably run into the type; they die, or miss a killing blow, or blah blah blah, and it’s always someone else’s fault. Everyone else is a noob, and fifteen or twenty other words I won’t recount here.

Sometimes this gets to me. I don’t lash out at these people, but it is kind of tiresome to feel the futility of using Riot’s reporting features to select "Harassment: Offensive Language" and see no feedback. I greet everyone at the start of nearly every game with the same general sentiment. Something like, "Good luck and have fun, everyone! Thanks in advance for playing with me! :)" Some people like that, and comment on me being "the one nice person on the Internet." Some reply with the shortened version, GLHF. Still others flip out, because they find sportsmanship repugnant. Or something. These players are there in my PUGs, and then, like bad gas on a windy day, or Keyser Söze, they are gone. So what can I do that will not smack of futility?

I can win. Not just win, but win with a Champion loaded with a skin that is sure to enrage them. This is where Taric comes in. He’s a very low damage, but very hard-to-kill character, who has massive armour, can heal himself and others, boost his allies’ attack damage, and stun enemies, CCing them. Frankly, as far as Champions go, he’s nothing inherently special; they all have four active abilities and one passive ability, they all fill at least one role, and they all have at least two skins, which change appearance and sometimes sound for that character. But what makes Taric special is that his "Armor of the Fifth Age" skin is pink.

Let me clarify what I mean by that. It is PINK. If that by itself does not inspire you to take up arms as Taric on the Fields of Justice, then surely this will:

At the start of the game with the stats screen below, the Lee Sin player, AuzyPhreak, joined with the Renekton player, SirTrollsAlott, in saying some incredibly vicious and vile things in responce to me saying my usual thing.

THIS IS HOW YOU WIN

I said nothing back to the other team through almost the whole game, but the more game-related and less sexualised part of what they said was that I would be the worst Taric ever. Silently, to myself, I worried they would be right. I’m not that great at this game in the first place, and I’m that much worse at playing Tanks. But I took heart, remembering DevilJade’s words from the video. I said to myself, you are Taric, you are INVINCIBLE. All through the game, I thought to myself, THIS IS HOW YOU WIN. If I was about to make a stupid play or overextend, I’d back off a bit, throw some heals around, and try my best to doooooominate the battlefield without dying. Finally, when our victory was assured, I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I allowed myself the childish delight of quoting DevilJade’s video in the chat channel for both teams. I hurriedly typed this out as their Nexus melted for all to see:

[All] mmopiateDotCom (Taric): THROUGH THE PERSEVERANCE
[All] mmopiateDotCom (Taric): AND THE DOMINATION
[All] mmopiateDotCom (Taric): THAT IS TARIC!!!

This prompted still more bad language in the stats view from AuzyPhreak, but fortunately we were all spared by Riot’s chat filter. In case the numbers are hard for you to make out, I finished with 5 Champion kills, 19 assists (I helped kill 19 Champions), but only 2 deaths. The Lee Sin player finished with 4 Champion kills, and 6 assists, but 11 deaths. The Renekton player, slightly better, finished with 6 Champion kills and 4 assists, but 7 deaths. There are a couple ways to look at these numbers.

Usually I just add the kills and assists, and subtract the deaths to create a kind of net Champion fight score for the match. In this case, that means I finished with a +22, since I contributed to 24 kills, but died twice. From that angle, Lee Sin finished at a -1, and Renekton finished at a +3. A much more satisfying way to look at it, though, is to realise that I, alone, as Pink Taric provided my team with more kills or assists than both of those two combined, and all while hitting us with barely over 10% the same amount of deaths.

It’s worth noting that Lee Sin and Renekton are both considered DPS Champions, who should generally be leading their teams in Champion kills and/or assists. Taric, on either team, should be nowhere near either of them for kills. And yet, early on, right after their verbal abuse, I helped our Morgana player, Sadyztyk, get First Blood (the first Champion kill of the game) on one of them. It went downhill for them from there.

It was all incredibly satisfying, and one of the brightest spots I’ve had in weeks. I friended DevilJade in the chat interface, and thanked him personally. He gave me permission to embed his video in this post, which I gladly took. Then, I played one more game. It was much less acrimonious, but equally satisfying. Maybe even a bit moreso… because there were two Pink Tarics. But mine was the one that carried the day. (Okay, Kennen helped.)

AND THE DOMINATION

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No, No, No, Wrong

So I’m still not doing well personally, and one area of my life where I’ve found that there is a fair amount of stress over which I can exercise some control is this blog. For awhile, I was thinking that the writing was what was stressing me out, but after more thought, I’ve concluded that it isn’t the writing, it’s the deadline. I do still enjoy playing, and I do still enjoy writing, but at this point in my life, giving myself another deadline on top of all the ones that are more or less imposed upon me seems self-destructive.

Killing the blog isn’t an acceptable solution, so my next (and hopefully last) big change-up here will be to simply remove the deadline altogether. I will retain the same publishing time, 7p EST, for anything I write, I just won’t be forcing myself to produce something every day. I can’t say for certain until I try things this way for awhile, but my sense is that I will write more than I have been, because the outside pressure to produce will be gone.

Your best bet, if you like the game-related stuff you’ve seen here so far, is probably to use the "subscribe" widget to the right, which will allow WordPress to just email you when a new post is up on this blog. If that doesn’t strike your fancy, you can always just follow me on Twitter, since every post is automatically publicised there, or Like me on Facebook for the same reason. Or you can get really old-school and just refresh the home page every day just a few minutes past 7p EST and see if it’s different.

Thank you again for your continued readership and support.

Eyes :: Female

As everyone knows, in real life, only women have eye shapes that vary based on ethnic background and genetics and the like. This is probably why GA smartly only has this option for controls for the eyes on female Agents, in addition to the 11 other controls that male Agents get. That’s a total of 12 separate parameters, for those of you keeping track at home. 11 of them are sliders, just as they are on all of the options for male eyes, but females get a 7-position multimodal switch for that last (or, technically, first) control of Eye Shape.

Feature	Setting
Eye Shape	7
Eye Height	Slider
Eye Spacing	Slider
Eye Depth	Slider
Eye Exposure	Slider
Eye Size	Slider
Eye Corner	Slider
Brow Height	Slider
Brow Depth	Slider
Brow Furrow	Slider
Outer Brow	Slider
Brow Corner	Slider

Makeup Ain't Gonna Fix That, Honey

It’s possible to break things in this interface about as egregiously as the broken nose break I showed you earlier, by maxing everything but the first two sliders. This has the effect of pushing a portion of the underlying eyeball out past the skin that should be covering it, and since the layers have no sense of collision or other means of being aware of each other, it just renders atop the skin. It’s not quite as subtle as the Hookerlicious look I shared with you previously, but it does have a certain sense of awesome all the same.

As for the actual eye shape options, though the differences are subtle, they are noticeable (but you will probably have to fullscreen the video to tell):

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Sony’s Overflowing Bucket of Fail

Sony is big. Very, very big. So when they announced that they had been hacked back in April of this year, people took notice. There was even a congressional inquiry. Now, many people who know much more about how all of these things work have already commented on Sony’s failures in regards to security, their obligations to their customers who entrusted their data to Sony’s care, and so forth. So I’m not going to talk about that today. No, I’m going to bitch about the small stuff.

You may notice in that second link that the poster, Patrick Seybold, mentioned a Welcome Back program, with incentives and consolation prizes to try to make amends to their users who were locked out of Sony services for roughly a month. He said:

We told the subcommittee about our intent to offer complimentary identity theft protection to U.S. account holders and detailed the "Welcome Back" program that includes free downloads, 30 days of free membership in the PlayStation Plus premium subscription service; 30 days of free service for Music Unlimited subscribers; and extending PlayStation Plus and Music Unlimited subscriptions for the number of days services were unavailable.

Sounds tasty, right? I mean, sure, it’s not going to give you back the time you lost explaining to the guy at 7-11 that your card really does work, only to get home and find out that Sony had your bank cancel it, because they may have had a copy of a card of yours from ten years ago on file. On the other hand, chances are you didn’t actually lose hundreds of real dollars, so getting free copies of games like inFAMOUS and Killzone: Liberation is pretty cool. In theory. In theory, communism works. But in practise, what happens when you try to actually take Sony up on these apologetic offerings is something like the screen grab below.

メンテナンスのお知らせ

Now, I can understand having problems like this. I mean, you’ve got something like 50 million or more people hammering away at your site with abandon, at all hours of the day and night. They’ve missed you, and you know it, so you’ve put presents out on the table for them. The problem is that when you changed your locks, you forgot to give them new keys. Even that wouldn’t be so awful, in fact it makes perfect sense; but when we try to update our passwords, we get the "site maintenance" notice. On day one, on day three, and on every other day since the thing was put up in the first place, actually.

After a few days, having apparently gotten word that some customers couldn’t get things to work in the browser, the page added some directions for how to do it from one’s PS3 or PSP, telling people to use the XMB. Nevermind that Jill Average is going to have to figure out what that even stands for in the first place, but once she does, she’ll be told by her game system that she has to update her credentials, and be given a URL to visit in order to do so. Guess what she sees when she gets there?

The final nail in the coffin for this PR disaster is the fact that this "Welcome Back" program is only available for 30 days, and those 30 days are up very soon. In a nutshell, if you can’t login already, chances are, you’re screwed. You got shut out of Sony’s services for about a month. Your bank and credit cards were all cancelled. Sony promised to give you shiny things to make up for it, but told you had to get them before a certain time, and their services look like they realistically won’t allow you to prove you’re you in time to get them. A four-letter word comes to mind, and though it’s fit to print, it’s probably the harshest term that could be used.

FAIL.

Eyes :: Male

On to the peepers! GA’s controls for the eyes on an Agent are rather intricate, though the iris colour control, as the pattern has established so far, is elsewhere, and not housed with controls for the dimensional aspects of the eyes. For male characters, the game offers controls for 11 separate parameters, all of which are sliders; there are no multimodal selectors, everything is managed by the upper and lower limits of each controllable aspect.

Feature	Setting
Eye Height	Slider
Eye Spacing	Slider
Eye Depth	Slider
Eye Exposure	Slider
Eye Size	Slider
Eye Corner	Slider
Brow Height	Slider
Brow Depth	Slider
Brow Furrow	Slider
Outer Brow	Slider
Brow Corner	Slider

Brow Pinch Break

With no multimodal selectors, the eye controls are among the most flexible of all control groups. In concert with the other controls, the player is free to accentuate any features they wish, and create a character with the appearance of any given ethnic background, one that shares many similarities with a celebrity, and so forth. I was going to do a video for this section, but it was quite dull. In fact, it was so dull that having no video seemed quiet a lot more exciting, to me. I will note, however, that if you max out all the sliders, it is possible to create a break that is similar to, though not quite as egregious as the broken nose break I showed you earlier; it appears as if the eyebrow is sort of folded in on itself when the Eye Height control is maxed along with everything else, creating a harsh line and an unnatural appearance, as seen to the right.

Questions? Comments? Corrections? Leave a Comment!

Scaling Back

As I mentioned about a week ago, as what happened before that continued to weigh heavily on me and on our whole home, I found keeping up with the blog and the schedule I’d set out for myself was becoming more work than play. While I still enjoy my gaming, and I still enjoy writing about it, maintaining my previous gung-ho schedule of a daily update, seven days a week, 365 days a year, has proven to be a bit more than I can take just now. I had debated just cutting things down to weekdays, but I wondered if I could even manage that for very long. I decided that it would be better to cut back too much, and scale production back up in the future, rather than missing the mark on guessing what I’ll be up for in the coming months, and having to scale things down even more.

Starting with today’s post, I will be running a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday publishing schedule indefinitely. The publication time will remain at 7p EST, but this means three posts per week instead of my previous production level of seven. I’m hoping that this will also improve the depth and value of some content, as I discovered that while doing a daily blog, there wasn’t really time to put together a complete walkthrough as the post for a single day. I had considered breaking walkthroughs up into smaller pieces and rolling them out over the course of several days, but while that works for things like the Over 9000 gag and all that led up to it, I felt it would make a true walkthrough difficult enough to follow as to make it more or less useless.

We’ll see how things play out; in the meantime, you can always follow me on Twitter, Like me on Facebook, or peek at the Flickr Photostream, even though it doesn’t actually have any photos. You can also Play With Me, though I must warn you I am probably still not the best company for the time being.

Hair Styles :: Male

GA gives male characters a lot less to work with in the Hair Styles department than female characters get. With a multimodal switch that appears to have 29 choices, it seems pretty close, but a closer look shows that a few of them, about four, look so similar as to be more or less indistinct from one another. As with the female models, the “Hair Styles” category for males does not cover hair colours; that comes later, in a separate block of controls.

Unlike yesterday’s video, there’s more than enough time in the 30 seconds that the free version of Fraps® lets me record in one block to go through all the options. You can even see my befuddlement at the ones that look the same, as the slider starts to wander around back and forth a bit, with no change showing on the actual model’s head.

Questions? Comments? Corrections? Leave a Comment!

Hair Styles :: Female

Continuing with our exploration of the kinds of controls GA gives players for customising the appearance of their characters, today we are going to take a peek at the Hair Styles for Females. Women have a multimodal switch with 30 choices, but it’s worth noting that the "Hair Styles" category does not cover hair colours; that comes later, in a separate block of controls. No, this category has but one member, and it is strictly with regard to the actual shape of the cut as it rests on the model’s head.

You can see these selections in the video above, as I try to zip through them in the 30 second limit imposed by the free version of Fraps®.

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