All posts by flosch

Time to Get Rid of my Authenticator

Even though I haven’t played WoW in ages, I still have my authenticator on my key ring. My office key ring, to be exact. That might be weird, carrying it around at work, but it had something to do with load balancing. I hate large key rings, so I have several small ones. At the time I picked up my authenticator, I had recently gotten my office keys, and that key ring was still mostly empty. That’s also the reason I never removed the authenticator, even after I stopped playing: it gave the keys some extra weight and volume that made me feel less likely to forget or lose them (it has worked so far!). Naturally, after all these years, it’s become a bit worn:

I'll use the chance to show off my keyring.

I’ll use the chance to show off my key ring.

Note the nice electronic office key that says “I’m a computer scientist, I use doors that need almost a second of thinking time before you may turn the key after putting it into the lock!”. One second doesn’t sound like much, but try it… nobody waits that long before turning a key unless they have to. It’s surprisingly disruptive. Oh, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all and you need to pull it out, wait 5 seconds, then try again. There’s also a MacGuyveresque mini ballpoint pen in a tube on the key ring. Because you never have a pen when you need it (naturally, now that I do, I never have paper to write on). Also there’s a bottle opener. Nice during the day for the few soft drinks that come with crown caps and even better during the night for beer. We tend to work long enough in summer that we sometimes end the evening with a beer or two at work, on our terrace. Actually, sometimes we have one even before we’re done… Hey, it’s Germany! Besides, the opener was a promotional gift by Opera (the web browser developer). They got cheated by their supplier though, I think. Their logo and slogan (“opening the web”) wore off within weeks.

But back to the authenticator. It still works and the front doesn’t look too bad, either. However, the back makes me worry a bit more:

I think that number might've been important...

I think that number might’ve been important…

Removing a broken authenticator from your battle.net account seems to be an obscure work of black magic. At least processes how to do it seem to change over time. At some point, I’m pretty sure that code on the back side, which you needed when you registered the key fob, was also required to remove it again, or at least saved you a lot of hassle (there still must’ve been ways to deal with lost or broken authenticators). These days, it doesn’t seem to be strictly required any more, but if your authenticator breaks, it’s still a lengthy and annoying process to get rid of it on your account. Seeing how I haven’t logged into a Blizzard game in months, I don’t see much reason to keep it secured with this authenticator. In fact, at the moment, the risk of getting hacked worries me less than the risk of locking myself out of an account I might want to use again at some point in the future.

Speaking of authenticators, do they even still sell the key fobs? I couldn’t find them in the battle.net store. Is it all smartphone apps these days? I’m a bit paranoid about the Android one, not the least because I imagine it can spectacularly break (like other such apps) if for some reason you lose the random seed or need to reinstall. I also heard it goes all crazy and judgmental on you if you use it on a rooted phone. Most importantly, it feels a lot less secure than a stand-alone key fob. Finally: can the app manage more than one battle.net account at a time? I have two accounts, one for each side of the ocean, with different games bound to them. If I get around to them again, I’d prefer to have an authenticator that can manage both accounts.

Mea culpa

In late 2006, for the first time in almost 18 months, I looked around for other games again. WoW had enchanted me for longer than any other game, even more than Diablo II had done in its day. But the vanilla age slowly came to an end, and the resizing of raid forces led to an unsavory fallout in my first guild, which collapsed over the fights of whom to keep and whom to kick. An exceptionally long honeymoon was over.

It was in that situation that I came across a game which promised so many things and sounded like it could be all that WoW was to me, just better. Harder and more group content at all levels, huge continents to explore, no PvP (or none to speak of) to influence PvE balancing… and, what was that? A melee healer who healed through dealing damage? I was intrigued. Vanguard had caught my interest. Sure, I read how the game still had quite a few bugs and how you needed a high-end computer to run it well. But that didn’t worry me too much. My computer at that time was pretty decent, and bugs? Oh well, I had seen my share of bugs in WoW. It couldn’t be that bad, right?

I couldn’t get into the closed beta because I was too late for that, so I spent my time reading Silky Venom and some other community sites. The people were so excited! They couldn’t wait. And I couldn’t either. I decided that this game would be the next big thing. Maybe not as big as WoW; even back then, I didn’t trust the people who claimed it would be the legendary “WoW killer”. And why would it have to be? It would be for the “real MMO gamers”, like those that played Everquest back in the day, a game for people like the guys (and occasional girl) in my old guild who had told nostalgic stories of the good old days of MMO gaming. And after all, Vanguard was made by the same person who had designed Everquest! I preordered the collector’s edition.

Vanguard's Collector's Edition goodies: cloth map, sound track, art book, the whole lot. That box had been collecting dust on my shelf and not been opened for a couple of years by this point, I think.

Vanguard’s Collector’s Edition goodies: cloth map, sound track, art book, the whole lot. That box had been collecting dust on my shelf and not been opened for a couple of years by this point, I think.

Naturally, I was in for quite a shock. When I got my open beta access, I immediately rolled a Kurashasa disciple. But what was that? Instead of an open, free world, I was stuck in what looked like a gaudy space ship with faux gold applied everywhere! I mostly went through claustrophobic hallways and used teleporters to travel around. This was not what I had signed up for! From chat, I learned that this was just the starter zone, so I decided to ride it out. Sure enough, I eventually made it to the surface of Telon.

Wow! I was quite impressed by the scenery. It made me forget the weird equipment textures, where every piece of armor seemed to have been polished until it gleamed in the sun like a brass pitcher. Sadly, it didn’t make me forget the bugs. Oh, the bugs! Had I said earlier that WoW also had its share of them, so how bad could it be? Unplayable, that’s how bad it could be. The game crashed every hour or so. The camera angled around weirdly. NPCs were unreachable or completely missing.

I was a bit disappointed, I’ll admit. But I still thought all would be fine. Deadlines are for extending, not for keeping, right? They’d never release the game in that state, right?

… right.

Mea culpa

So I abandoned the game. I went back to WoW and bought The Burning Crusade. A bunch of people from my former guild had reformed, and I joined them. We thought we could pick up enough people on our way to 70 to raid. In the end, that wasn’t happening, the guild bled players, and I decided to call it quits. Vanguard beckoned.

By then, it was late spring, and the game was running a lot better. It only crashed about once a night or so. I played my disciple (or did I reroll one? can’t remember) until around level 20 or so. But I couldn’t help but notice that something was amiss. The awesome group content? It was almost inaccessible if there were no groups to be found. And those people who had not left the game by then (which is most of the people who had bought it) were already too high level to be in my content bracket. I loved my disciple to death, and if I found groups, I found healing with him one of the most fun things ever. Juggling offensive and defensive target, HoTting, direct heals, wipe saves with feign death and evac… it felt awesome. But I was tired of sitting around evening after evening waiting for the occasional group, wasting my time killing turtles for two minutes of fighting and 0.1% experience a pop.

Mea culpa

So I abandoned the game again. I went back to WoW again, and found an awesome guild who I’d play with until late WotLK. When that guild also succumbed to slow, but constant loss of players, it was Vanguard that I turned to first. I tried to like it. I still did. But the population situation had gone from bad to worse. It was even harder to find anybody to group with, and the game was plain painful going solo.

So I abandoned the game for a third time. I rerolled on a different WoW server (this time on the European side, so tabula rasa for me), found yet another guild, raided, had fun. Only I didn’t really. Just half a year later, I quit WoW for good (at least until now… never say never with MMOs). I started trying out lots of different MMOs and writing this blog.

Vanguard still beckoned, but this time, I remembered why I had left. I played other games. I told myself, “if only they could solve the population problems”. Game after game went F2P. Those events typically led to a huge influx of players into the game, though rarely for more than a short time. I realized, “hey, if they ever do that to Vanguard, you could go back and finally might be able to play the game you love the way it’s meant to be played!”. When they announced Vanguard’s move to F2P, I was looking forward to it.

Mea maxima culpa

The day came, the way went. I didn’t play Vanguard. I abandoned it again; this time, I didn’t even bother to try. Why? I think something newer and shinier caught my attention. In all fairness, TSW was an awesome game. It did a lot of stuff right, plus, at that time, I was just burned out on Fantasy MMOs.

Still, I feel like I let down the game that I had always been fascinated with. Maybe, the longer I didn’t play it, the more it became a canvas to project my ideas for a perfect game on. It’s probably the same with Vanguard as it is with EVE: it’s more fun to think or read about than to actually play. But I feel like I at least should have given it another chance back when it went F2P.

I’m not devastated, but I have this feeling in the back of my mind that a game that I loved is going to die, and I have to blame myself for that, because I never gave it the support it needed to survive. Maybe part of it is that, I just realized, this is the first MMO I played for more than a weekend that is going to shut down forever. Maybe that’s why I feel more strongly about it.

But I guess there always has to be a first time.

Talking To The Wind, or: When Comments Fail

It seems it’s always feast or famine with posts around here… though the current ones have more to do with the blog itself than with actual content.

Seems at some point in the recent past, Jetpack’s comment feature broke. Comments didn’t go through. I should’ve become suspicious when the number of spam comments went waaaay down. While I always updated the blog with the newest versions of software, I never realized that the coments had broken. I posted so little that I wasn’t surprised that there were no comments. I figured I was simply talking to the wind. I just noticed today when I went over a pre-migration checklist.

Long story short, I can’t figure out what the problem is, so at least for the time being, the standard comment form is active again. It doesn’t look nearly as spiffy, but at least it doesn’t eat all comments.

Of course, I might be talking to the wind anyway, but at least now, there is a chance for people to answer again!

Dual-Use Post

Two short bits of information:

Migration Period

No, not that migration period.

No, not that migration period.

First, the short-term one. I will have to move the server this blog resides on. If all goes well, it’ll happen this weekend. If not, some time later in the first half of February. You probably will see some hiccups, and the server might be unavailable for some time (for the tech-savvy people: that’s mostly because the IP will change and, sadly, I cannot influence the DNS caching times). It’ll be back.

Hibernation Period

Now for the medium-to-long term one. As you’ve noticed, my posting volume has gone way down. To be honest, and even though that makes me a bit sad, I fear that this won’t change for some time. I’m currently in the phase of writing down my dissertation for my PhD. It’s not quite going as I had hoped, but the effect on this blog is that, after spending most of my time writing proposals, papers, and (in the little time that remains) dissertation sections these days, I’m too tired of writing to write on this blog in my free time. I just want passive entertainment in the evenings. However, I’ve not given up on the blog yet. If I ever do that, I’ll let you know. For now, I’ll just write when I feel like it, because keeping a strict schedule will definitely sap the fun out of it. I still feel like eventually, I’ll get back to it.

Motivation By Singing

The other day, I spent a long car ride with a couple of colleagues, and we talked about this and that. Among other things, about singing and about unusual motivational techniques. That reminded me of a story from my WoW raiding days, and with the help of some friends from back then (oh Facebook, glorified White Pages of the late naughties), I was able to reconstruct most of the story from memory.

*   *   *

Raid leading is a lot like herding cats. Every guild seems to have a few people who are constantly late, unprepared, didn’t bring consumables, or are simply incapable of following even the easiest instructions. Nevertheless, everything can go exceedingly well some nights. Other nights… not so. In addition, every guild seems to have bosses it nails with just minimal efforts, while it struggles with others every week. And while some bosses are more notorious than others, it seems every guild picks its personal bogeymen without much rhyme or reason.

ICC was the last raid instance our guild did before it folded in the autumn of 2010. We were quite successful as a close-knit 10-man group, but suffered from the all-too-common problem that our 25-man’s progress was always lagging behind. 10 dedicated raiders, and 25 people with time constraints or no interest in harder raiding rotating in and out of the remaining 15 slots. In ICC-25, we struggled the most with Saurfang and Sindragosa (ok, and with Arthas, but final bosses don’t qualify for the bogeyman list). This story happened on one of our 25-man raid nights in ICC. We had already spent half the previous night struggling with Saurfang, mostly due to Blood Beasts eating the raid, before we finally killed him. Bashing your head against a wall is never fun, especially when the wall comes with an unskippable cutscene long enough to become its own meme. (“We named him Dranosh. It means ‘waste 90 seconds’ in Orcish.”) In the end, our raid leader got people to focus, we killed him and moved on.

The next night, our main raid leader was unavailable, so I had to lead the raid, something I hate to do. At least the night started well, but soon enough, we faced Sindragosa. Spreading out for Frost Beacon so that the ability couldn’t chain to unaffected people turned out to be as problematic as ever. On more than one attempt, instead of the targeted 5 people, we ended up with half the raid frozen into ice blocks and dying. It was a massacre, and the mood tanked almost as badly as I did (I’m not good at tanking when I have to raid lead at the same time). After half a dozen attempts and telling people off, I decided it was time for special measures. The stick hadn’t worked, so maybe the carrot was in order?

“Alright people. Focus. I want y’all to focus. No lollygagging, no clusterfucking, no 15 ice blocks after each Frost Breath. I’m tired of this shit. You know what? Here’s a reward. If you focus, and we kill her now, I’ll sing ‘Amazing Horse’ to you over Vent, both male and female voice.” (In case you don’t know it, here’s the song. Not safe for work, children, or mentally stable people, you know the drill.) Weebl’s songs had been a staple of jokes in the guild for some time, so everybody knew which song I meant.

The mood changed. People chuckled. The sheer weirdness of that “reward” seemed to be incentive enough.

We killed Sindragosa the next pull. And yes, I gladly sang. It ended up being a moment all of us still remember to this day. It’s the stuff nostalgia is made of.

Quote of the Day

“Wait, so you’re annoyed that you’re getting what you wanted?”

“I’m an MMO player […]. What am I supposed to do when they actually listen to us?! It’s like they have no respect for the process!”

I’m completely out of the MMO loop, again. I feel like the pendulum might swing back soon, though. I still hope for some posts to flow again.

No time

It’s been a slow week for the blog again. At least I had the post on Monday. (Which I actually had written last week, but being the sneaky bastard that I am, I decided to save it for slow times, which came soon, so it all went according to plan!)

The week has been time-consuming at work. That’s not all though, because when I was done, I rushed home every day to focus on this:

The command and lander module of a Saturn-like (though not really Saturn-look-alike) rocket, orbiting the Mun.

The command and lander module of a Saturn-like (though only vaguely Saturn-look-alike) rocket, orbiting the Mun.

When I first heard about Kerbal Space Program some time ago (months? half a year?), it sounded interesting, but I didn’t have the time to check it out. Last weekend, I read an article about the space race, suddenly remembered the game, and tried it out.

Since then, I’ve spent every free minute in the game. I’ve eaten in front of the computer, or not eaten at all at home. (Yes, really.) It probably won’t last more than a couple more days before I get bored, though. You know the Bladerunner quote with the relationship between illuminative and temporal quantities of wax-based light sources.

I’ve built my share of exploding rockets and other shenanigans, but I’ve always rescued my Kerbals by virtue of the “load quicksave” and “revert flight” buttons. With some help from the excellent wiki, I’ve gone into orbit, visited Minmus, pulled off gravity slingshots, and practiced synchronizing orbits and docking in space. The last one is by far the hardest and most frustrating part. I’m just not very good at it. It seems to require the same abilities that you need to neatly land on a landing strip in a flight simulator, something that also took me ages to learn… I always landed at a sideways angle, which makes the runway somewhat useless (and the plane, too, afterwards).

At the moment, I’m working on a Apollo-like Mun landing. (Cue nasal Bostonian Kennedy accent with weird mid-sentence rises: “achieving the goal? Before this decade is out? Of landing a Kerbal on the Mun? and returning him safely to Kerbin.”) This meant creating a command module, a landing module, and strapping both of them to a huge pile of highly explosive fuel, which then is lit.

That part went surprisingly well. Both parts then traveled towards the Mun, to prepare for a Lunar (I mean Munar… this is confusing) Orbit Rendezvous maneuver. The lander was stuffed with my old friend Jebediah Kerbal and his buddy Bob, and off they went.

That's actually not that small a step there.

That’s actually not that small a step there.

Success! We come in peace for all Kerbalkind, yadda yadda.

The landing itself wasn’t actually all that bad. I bounced off the ground about 2 meters on the first try, mostly because I hadn’t managed to completely control my lateral speed, but then gently set down. The hardest part is yet to come, though. I have to launch from the surface, synchronize my orbit with the command module, and dock to transfer my Kerbals all back into one pod and pool all the remaining fuel in the command module’s tanks. I just hope that maneuver itself won’t cost too much fuel, so I’ll have enough to make it back to Kerbin…

Belated Obituary for an Unloved Ability

I follow the RSS feed for WoW Archivist. It’s a fun read most of the time, and as someone who has stopped playing WoW, I like being reminded of the “good old times”. While I was on vacation, they published an article called “Spells we’ve lost” which I enjoyed very much. So many memories:

  • Eyes of the Beast for hunters. I remember pulling Shazzrah into Garr’s cave in Molten Core. 15-20 seconds of running through the tunnel. Then dodging trash groups. Then body-pulling Shazzrah with your pet, which invariably took one for the team, aggroing the boss. Then waiting another 15-20 seconds for him to make his way back through the tunnel. Hoping you didn’t pull anything else with him. I also remember this hilarious pull where a fellow hunter announced, “uh… I think I pulled some trash with him…”. Tense silent seconds. Then one trash group appeared. Then another trash group appeared. Then Shazzrah. Then yet another trash group. Then Baron Geddon. Of course it was a wipe, but I don’t think we laughed that much for a long time after. The hilarious double-boss-triple-trash pull became the stuff of legends in our guild.
  • Amplify/Dampen Magic for mages. Mages buffing the whole raid with one of the two, depending on which boss we would fighting, to get that small additional benefit of less damage taken or higher received healing. One of those great little quirky spells was removed.
  • Detect Magic, again for mages. An ability that didn’t do anything for most of its existence. (Orignally, buffs were hidden from view, and you could only see them when you cast Detect Magic. That limitation was removed very early on, but Detect Magic stayed around for much longer.) But as one of the few debuffs that would show up on the debuff bar, but not aggro the target, it was great before target markers were added to the game. Mages used it to show which target they would sheep. Every now and then, we used it for Garr’s adds which were constantly moving in a close group, to assign them to a warrior. (Most of the time we used a priest with Mind Vision.)
  • Divine Spirit for priests. The one redeeming feature of speccing Discipline in the early days. One priest was assigned to take one for the team, spec Disc, gimp their healing throughput, but provide this oh-so-yummy mana regen buff, to be used with the five-second rule that was still around back then, and gave casters another fun mechanic to play around with.
  • Curse of Doom timing for warlocks. Cast now, see massive damage in one minute. Time it so it hits when it’s most convenient (final enrages, annoying phases you want to get through as fast as possible).

Some people in the comments added their favorite spells that were removed. There were some paladins who bemoaned the demise of Righteous Defense.

Wait. Really? You cannot be serious.

Righteous Defense was probably the most annoying ability with the most misguided implementation in the history of WoW that I can think of. It’s a poster child of what happens when you try to give an ability to another class, but want to make it different for the sake of being different.

Righteous Defense was given to paladins in the Great Paladin Revamp of TBC. It was their taunt. Only, it wasn’t. Take the warrior taunt. You need to peel a mob off a fellow tank (think boss trading), or a DPS or healer (think overzealous DPS, or threat resets). A warrior would target the mob, hit taunt, the mob would come to them. Easy.

Righteous Defense worked the other way round: instead of targeting the mob, you cast Righteous Defense on its target. It also worked on up to three targets. So if your fellow raid member had more than one mob on them, up to three (randomly selected) targets would be “taunted” to you.

Three mobs taunted for one cast. That’s three times as good, isn’t it?

Not really. If you had to trade mobs between tanks, but you had more than one on you, you couldn’t taunt selectively. You had to work with your fellow warrior to taunt back the ones you didn’t want to take off him in the first place. And pray he was a warrior. If he also was a paladin… well, good luck.

Even worse, the ability didn’t work properly for the longest time. (I can’t remember exactly, but I think by some point through WotLK, they had gotten it to work, for the most part. That’s 1.5 expansions.) Part of that was due to the unique “redirect”. If a mob was out of control after a threat reset, chances were it would ping-pong around like Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil. So you targeted the mob, hit your “follow” key, and Righteous Defense. Only, by that time, the mob would have chosen a new target, and your spell would fizzle. Congratulations, you were now useless for the next 8 seconds looking at your gimped taunt button counting down. 8 seconds is a hell of a lot of time for a boss to chomp through your poor DPS. Even if you macro’d the follow-and-then-cast, it would still happen. I blame lag for that (when you cast it, all was fine, but by the time your command reached the server, the mob had changed its target).

It was, by and large, one of the most painfully broken abilities that I had to endure as a Tankadin. Mostly because of its propensity to fail when you needed it the most.

So, to all who say that Righteous Defense is a missed ability: No. Screw you.

That’s all.

Dysfunctional Patterns of Playing

Belghast noted the other day how he is in a slump with Rift and EQ2. He’s logging in, but then stands around without anything to do. Something we all probably have had happening before. I remember doing that a lot in WoW when I was still raiding. I still wanted to pay on off-nights, but I realized that there wasn’t much to do, so I just idled around in Orgrimmar. It’s a dysfunctional pattern of playing: overestimating the fun I’ll have before I log in, which ends in disappointment. To me, this either happens when there is nothing to do, or when there are lots of things, but I’m paralyzed deciding which one to follow.

The opposite thing has happened to me with FFXIV lately. Instead of logging in and then being disappointed, I postpone logging in because I don’t know what to do; but when I do log in, I suddenly start a flurry of activities. In this case, I’m underestimating my fun. It’s a bit weird, but it has happened to me with a couple of games: when I have too many choices, the decision paralysis makes me end up not playing the game as much. It’s in realistic danger of being tossed to the wayside, replaced by a new game which lays out the way in a more obvious manner.

I’ll have to watch how I play FFXIV if I want to have sustainable fun in it (which I do). Otherwise, the game might end up in the sad bucket that TSW is in. I played the game for about two months from release, to about mid-Transylvania. Then I went on vacation, and when I came back I couldn’t decide what to do: which abilities to take? Which build to play? I postponed playing it more and more, until I had to accept I had stopped playing the game altogether. In the terms of this post, I stopped estimating my fun completely. For a year, I’ve been toying with the thought of trying it out again, but with every month, it gets harder to get back, if only because there are so many weapons to grind and stuff to do: where to start?

8 Bit Memories

Harbinger Zero did it. Syp does it regularly. If they can do it, so can I, right?

Some of these are from games that, while not completely forgotten by people who know their way around the era, are not quite as well-known to outsiders, because they’re not part of a popular franchise. You’ll also notice that there’s a large number of Game Boy tunes on this list. That’s because I owned a Game Boy, and nothing else. I only played NES (and Amiga, and later on SNES) at friends’ houses. But that is another story and shall be told another time…

More after the cut, because lots of embedded youtube videos follow