(No, not the album by Spock’s Beard.)
Updated Look
When I started this blog, I searched around for a nice theme. I wanted something simple, slightly austere, and most important of all: no pictures that I had to make, because I suck at those. I started with Titan, which I modified to my liking.
Titan, however, is more or less a made-from-scratch theme. Which is all fine, but over time, I had a harder and harder time maintaining my changes, and to get Titan play nice with nifty plugins. It required jumping through hoops here and there (which might completely be due to my changes and not the original Titan theme; all my experience with CSS, for example, comes from trial and error.) I decided I needed something new and more maintainable, and that the best bet would be to modify a standard wordpress theme, so I’d get a Titan look with a twenty-something feel.
I tried about half a year ago with the then-current twenty-twelve, but didn’t have much success. I got lost in endless cascades and flexible, but complicated definitions. I gave up.
Twenty-thirteen made it much easier for me to change it to my liking. I played around for about a week now, and am now at the point where I like what I see. Expect minor tinkering here and there in the near future.
Bottom line: If something doesn’t work any more, please tell me.
Quote of the Day
Because I love and collect aphorisms, re-appropriated or not:
I’ve read that the seriousness with which you approach raiding is a lot like how fast you drive a car: everyone faster is a lunatic, and everyone slower is a moron.
Review: Papers, Please
First of all, as you can see from the, again, quite long absence, I’m not really back in the groove of regular writing again. There were also some work-related, but especially personal things that came up and kept me away from playing and writing because, frankly, they were more important to take care of. I still don’t want to give up, so I’ll try with an unusual game that I stumbled across.
The Game
I’m not even sure whether Papers, Please is a real full-fledged game. It has the basic requirements, I guess: you have a goal, means to reach that goal, and rules you have to follow to do so. Even if the rules constantly change, and the goal isn’t much more than “do your work well enough to survive on your salary”. That used to be enough for a game in the old days, and I guess it still is.
As the game tells you: “Glory to Arstotzka”!
The setup and the rules you have to follow are somewhat tedious (by design). You are a citizen of The Great Arstotzka, a Soviet or post-Soviet nation with fascist undertones, who has recently finished a border war. You have been assigned the position of immigration control at a reopened border post. Your job is to check passports, all day, every day. And boy, are there a lot of forgeries (I guess that can be attributed to the game nature). Let a person in or send it back? At the end of the day, you get evaluated for performance. How fast were you? How many mistakes did you make?
The main screen. You’ll be staring at this a lot.
The UI is as minimalistic as the game’s premise. One static screen, with a few sprites. Low resolution. Clunky interface. This is actually my main gripe with the game: I don’t mind retro design, and I every now and then play old games. However, a little bit less mouse-dragging and clicking would have made the game less tiring for my mouse arm which, after a day of office work, is happy if it doesn’t have to do more than necessary of that. The cramped interface is actually one of the main enemies you have to fight. In the later stages of the game, where you have to juggle a passport, travel permit, travel supplement, work permit, audio transcript of interview, and your rulebook, your workspace is so small that you have to drag around stuff constantly to check documents against each other. Your other main enemy is time. Too slow processing immigrants? Tough luck, your salary is based on the number of people you process each day. Hope that your savings can offset rent, heating, food for your family. And pray nobody gets ill and needs medicine… On the other hand, work too fast and make mistakes? Missing a wrong gender entry, or a mismatch in names between travel permit and passport, or that the issuing city of the passport is not in your list of valid issuers? Citation! First two each day don’t cost you, but from then on, you’ll be fined, which eats into your salary big time.
Your working desk seems to be designed to not be able to hold all required documents. It gets worse than this later on.
All of this doesn’t necessarily make for a very compelling game. But it’s not the game itself that makes it interesting, it’s rather the atmosphere. The orders you get each day are from a faceless entity, and feel arbitrary. One day, immigrants need a small transferable travel ticket, the next day a personalized travel permit. The next day work immigrants need a work permit. Then you are instructed to treat your citizens preferentially. Then there’s an attack on the border post, and the government blames a neighboring country. You are instructed to subject all citizens of that country to “random body searches”.
“You detain people, I give you money.”
In short, your instructions are strict, feel arbitrary, and are hard to understand. The way you are talked to doesn’t help endearing your government to you either. Then the moral choices start. Let a woman pass even though she forgot to buy a travel ticket, simply because she says it’s her first chance to see her son in years? Or what about the couple, the man who has an immigration permit, but there’s something wrong with his wife’s papers? The man who is desperate to get medical treatment in Arstotzka that he can’t get at home? What about the shady guard who visits you and tells you that the government pays him for every detained person, and he’s willing to give you some kickback if you funnel him people? When you realize that the money you earn from your job cannot keep you afloat if you’re unlucky enough to have a bout of flu in your family, you might be grasping at straws like this.
Beyond The Game
The compelling thing about Papers, Please is that it puts you into the role of a small cog in a large, inhuman machine. You can “just follow your orders” and not alert the guards to the pimp who’s smuggling women, because his papers are in order. You can separate the couple I talked about above. And for all of this, you are rewarded with an increased salary. And in the end, you can always justify it by saying that “this is what I had to do to survive myself”. On the other hand, the first two mistakes each day are not punished. You can try to save these for the cases where you bend the rules to help out desperate people. The game puts you in a situation where it is very easy to say “I was only following orders, this is what I had to do”, while actually giving you at least limited choice.
He had no choice but to follow orders either, or so he said.
This is a quite accurate way of depicting a totalitarian system. As I come from Germany (and like to read about history), I feel like I’m quite informed about our history, including our dark spots. Most people who made the Nazi system work weren’t evil in the normal sense. They just did their job, did what they were told, and didn’t question what they were ordered to do. This is the frightening thing about it, and the reason why totalitarian systems work so well. You don’t need many evil people; you’d never get enough of them have them personally control every corner of a country. What you need is to make the average Joe feel like they should follow orders, either because you make them feel good about following them (rewards, instilling a sense of “being part of something important and great” – the Nazis were among the first who effectively used mass media for manipulation by means of Gleichschaltung), or because you make them feel bad about not following them (instilling fear, making an example of select cases). The human mind is very malleable. A person can be ruthless in their day job (in this game: detain the immigrant with a simple typo mismatch in their documents), and still be a loving parent at home (worry about earning the money to get medicine for your kids).
I’ve only played the game about halfway through the “storyline”, but I’ve noticed that I tend to have little mercy for my immigrants. Since I have problems keeping track of the more complicated rules, and can’t check all of them without spending too much time, I cut some corners during inspection, so I’m reluctant to use my two “free” daily citations to help out people. And I tend to detain people when there is even a hint of foul play. After all, there are regular terrorist attacks on the border posts by people let through. Or is it rather because of the kickbacks? Since money is so scarce to come by, and you will be homeless and lose the game if you can’t pay for at least your bare necessities every day, there are incentives to make you behave immoral. I first thought this is one of the main drawbacks of this game: as much as I like the retro style, it makes it hard for me to empathize with the pixel people in front of me. I only see them for seconds each, and their faces cannot convey emotions to me because of technical limitations. I was ready to say that this is where the game ultimately fails: that the gamification incentive (earn as much money as possible) is not properly offset by a feeling of moral obligation.
On the other hand, there is enough food for thought. Isn’t there a lot of gamification in morally shady areas in the real world, too? Managers get bonuses for short-term boosts by laying off people without caring for long-term developments. Soldiers get shiny medals if they kill others well and often enough. All of these work because people drift into a dangerous mindset slowly, without noticing it, and because there are rewards waiting for them to engage in that behavior. The game might at least trigger some introspection and make you spend some time with the question of how easy it can be to slip up and become a tiny cog in an evil machine, in which case it is a success after all. Yes, of course, it’s easy to argue that “it’s just a game”. But isn’t it also easy to become an armchair criminal by “just following orders”?
Getting Your Trinity Right (or: in Defense of CC)
Lots of talking about pros and cons of the holy trinity again recently. One thing that irks me a bit is that often, the trinity is implicitly defined as “tanks, heals, DPS”. Which isn’t true, of course. The classic “holy trinity”, as it appeared in EQ, didn’t even have DPS in it. DPS was merely something you added once you had constructed the actual trinity. After all, every could DPS… somewhat.
No, the role that always gets forgotten, which is something that saddens me greatly, is crowd control. For the classic holy trinity, you brought a tank, a healer, and a CC, which in EQ typically meant a warrior, a cleric, and an enchanter. And CC is a great asset! Plus, what’s more fun that to play a class that can completely shut down your enemy? But it seems that true CC classes died out over the years. First, their defining trait was distributed among other classes. Suddenly, most classes had one weak CC power, but the master of CC disappeared. But, here’s the thing. Many players that ended up with a CC ability didn’t like playing CC. They wanted to play DPS or heals. So they complained about having to do CC in groups and raids. And the developers listened and did away with CC requirements. So, these days, many encounters are designed to not use CC any more. Just go in and AoE everything.
Keep that in mind when you talk about removing specialized tanking and healing roles from a game. There’s a good chance you’ll end up with a situation where everybody has to tank and heal a little. And people will complain. Especially those DPS that now complain about long queues in games like WoW, and will then complain about suddenly having to do some tanking and healing themselves, which is something that they didn’t sign up for. And if developers listen to that, too… we’ll be without tanking and healing too, and it’ll be even more of a zerg fest than it is these days without CC on trash.
Allegiance, Betrayal, and Oh So Many Warning Boxes!
(I started this post in December last year [!], but it never finished it, and it got stuck in my draft box. So don’t be surprised I talked about a character being 50 that in the last post was already 85.)
With Tabascun, my half-elf swashbuckler at the level cap and at a bit of a dead end, I focused again on my army of low-level alts. Well, not exactly an army, unless you compare to it a country like Liechtenstein, I guess. I first tried my Ratonga Dirge. Didn’t work. Somehow, the dirge gameplay totally bores me. It feels quite sluggish and slow. I wonder whether there’s some tipping point after 40 (my current level) at which it becomes more fluid and dynamic, but at the moment… no. Maybe my 20 Fae Inquisitor? Cool combination, but right now, also not my fancy. Just too damn slow to kill stuff. 22 Erudite Mage? Almost, but not quite. So I rolled up yet another character. Enter my Iksar Illusionist, Hazzlash M’Hamza! I still am proud of that name, I find it fitting for an Iksar, and it has a nice ring.
Hazzlash in his stylish “Guarding of the Learned” robe.
Iksar always fascinated me. I have a thing for anthropomorphic animal classes in MMOs. Maybe because, for all their repetitive tropes, they’re still more diverse and inventive than your same-ol’ skinny-elf-stout-dwarf-bumbling-gnome-evil-orc. Plus, the concept lends itself more to stylization without going overboard with comic-style looks. Much harder to fall into the uncanny valley with a bipedal lizard or tiger.
The choice of the Illusionist was a strange, in a way. First, they officially are a “support class”, being masters of crowd control and energy regeneration. After my experience with the slow dirge, I hadn’t expected to end up with another support class in EQ2. Second, they are a pet class! *gasp* That is extremely unusual for me. For some reason, I couldn’t get myself to play pet classes for years.
My first ever MMO character (that I played for longer than the abortive UO and EQ tries back in the day) was a hunter in WoW, and I loved her. Female orc hunter, with a wolf. (And a wolf mount, and a worg pup.) Awesome combo. I raided with her during Vanilla, and loves the quirks of the class. Then BC came around, and my first guild collapsed. I tried a paladin, and ended up maintanking on him for the next couple of years. Ever since then, I couldn’t get myself to play a pet class again. So for the first time in seven years, I’ve been playing a pet class. It probably helps that, with mercenaries around, every class is a bit of a pet class in EQ2 now. That eased the way back into that mindset.
So I said that Illusionists are a support class, officially. They are in the unfortunate position that their forte, crowd control, fell out of favor years ago. These days, CC is a very niche thing, and most of the time, tanks just AoE tank as much as possible. That would leave Illusionists in a bit of an awkward position. Thankfully, they more than make up for it with very nice damage, some power regeneration abilities to make sure your healers won’t run out of mana, and a permanent, reliable mirror image pet. (Their “sibling class”, the Coercer, trades more powerful regen for an unreliable, mind-controlled pet, that may break free at the most awkward moment.)
With that combination of pet and powerful spells, the levels flew by. Soon, I was close to level 50. Now, 50 is an important milestone for me. On the one hand, it opens up the content of the first EQ2 expansion, Desert of Flames. I remember from my swashbuckler that I really liked the overarching “Peacock Club” story line that unfolds over the 10 levels you can spend in the desert and its enchanting Arabian Nights city, Maj’Dul. I’m not alone in that sentiment: I heard many people say that this is one of their favorite signature quest lines. Back when I was playing my swashbuckler, there were no mercenaries in the game, which meant that I never finished the final parts. Now, with a pet and a mercenary on call, I should be able to finish the quest line and finally see the end. (This also holds true for content from later expansions: many of the signature quest lines like to end in dungeons – as they should, in my opinion, if they involve big bads. But that is a topic for another day.)
The second reason that level 50 is important is that it opens up another line of AA abilities that you can train, and access to deities. Technically, you can become a follower of a god even earlier, but there isn’t much point to it, because the quest line can only be finished at level 50, at which point you get a pet symbolizing your god, which conveniently also buffs you.
For my Swashbuckler, the choice had been simple. Bristlebane the Trickster, Norrath’s equivalent of Bacchus or Loki, was an obvious choice for that class and the way I imagined my swashbuckler to behave. My Illusionist made it much harder to decide. Bristlebane again? Boring. Solusek Ro, the Prince of Flame? More something for a mage. The Tribunal? That one is reserved for my Inquisitor, if he ever reaches level 50, because that would fit perfectly. In the end, I decided Quellious, the Tranquil One, might be a good fit. Quellious is about meditation and finding truth. And shouldn’t an Illusionist try to understand truth, so he can then bend it fighting against his enemies?
I ran into a bit of a problem though. When I went to the prophet to profess my newfound faith, he wouldn’t talk to me and my “evil ways”. What? Oh. Right.
Allegiance
Everquest has a relatively lax approach to factions. While there are “good” and “evil” cities, everybody can group with everybody else, form guilds, and so on. Every character starts as either good or evil, but apart from limited access to a few cities and quests, this does not have any impact on gameplay. Allegiance is decided in three ways: some races can only be good or only be evil; some classes can only be good or only be evil; and if both your class and your race are “neutral”, it is up to the player to choose at character creation. Illusionists are neutral, but Iksar are evil. Quellious, on the other hand, is a good-aligned deity, so no tranquility for me until I become a goody two-shoes. Or at least can show citizen papers of a “good” city.
One of the many things that EQ2 does amazingly well, and so much better than most other MMOs, is the way you switch your allegiance if you want to. There are two different ways to do this. On the one hand, switching between citizenship of cities of the same alignment is relatively easy: you talk to the ambassador, get sent off to do some sort of citizenship course that might involve interviews or community service, and bam, you’re done. (This is not a figure of speech: the quests can involve such things as asking you questions that you have to answer, or picking up trash from the streets.) A bit like applying to become American if you’re British, I guess. On the other hand, joining an opposite city is more problematic. Think about becoming a Soviet citizen if you were an American. In the 50ies. That process comprises three steps:
- Betraying your old city, becoming an exile and hated by all.
- Doing chores for another city, becoming a tolerated member at the fringe of its community.
- Becoming a citizen of a new city.
- Potentially changing your subclass. Yes, I said there would only be three points. It’s not technically, only incidentally, part of allegiance switching though, and I’ll come back to that one later.
So the path was clear to me. Qeynos was beckoning. I wasn’t really happy with my current city anyway. “Neriak, City of Hate” might sound nice on business cards, and it’s cute that it’s inside a glimmering cave, but it’s full of Dark Elves. Not sure how exactly you build up a community on the concept of “instilling as much hate and fear in everybody else”, especially if that includes citizens doing that to each other.
How did I end up in the city of the dark elves anyway?
A Tale of Two (then Four, then Six) Cities
In the good old days (or maybe not so good. No idea, didn’t play back then), it was easy. There was Qeynos, and there was Freeport. After the tutorial island, you continued in a suburb/village close to your home city, or, in the case of Freeport, aptly named “racial ghettos”. Freeport always was a bit of a dump… You spent your next levels inside that village, then went out into the open for the first time, either in Antonica or the Commonlands. This was in stark contrast to Everquest, where almost each race had their own starting city… most of which were devoid of any life, because players congregated in a few places. Which probably was the reason they didn’t repeat that for EQ2. (And potentially laziness. I’m sure it takes a lot of time to create 20+ starter areas in a quest-driven MMO).
Later on, SOE added a few more cities: Kelethin and New Halas for good characters, and Neriak and Gorowyn for evil characters. At some point, they removed the starter island, and with it the choice to officially start in either Qeynos or Freeport. Even later on (at some point in 2012), they also removed the possibility to inofficially start in either city, by choosing a different one and running over. All villages and ghettos are now cordoned off and unavailable, instead recycled as instances during a few select quests.
So, being an Iksar and therefore evil by default, I had the choice between Neriak and Gorowyn. Gorowyn has this tiny problem that it is the city of the Sarnak. See, Iksar and Sarnak… don’t get along very well. In fact, Iksar consider Sarnak inferior and enslaved them for a long time. So Gorowyn was kind of out. The game didn’t prevent me from starting there (see what I said about the lax approach to factions?), but it felt wrong. All that was left was Neriak. Oh well, so Neriak it was. As I said, I never really warmed to the city, though. Too dark, too “everybody hates everybody”, and too damn confusing to navigate! I thought about switching to Freeport for some time, but in the end, I decided Qeynos would be so much better anyway.
Betrayal
I’m sorry Simr… Szmar… Sssszzz… Dave, I can’t let you do that.
So it was settled. I would have to get out of Neriak, then, free of my former shackles, apply for Qeynos citizenship. Each city has its own betrayal quest, which typically start with a situation that highlight the downsides of each ideology. In the case of Neriak, you find a boy in an alleyway harassed by thugs (and I assume about to be kidnapped to be sold as a slave). The thugs weren’t very polite, and when I tried to point that out, they even attacked me! (In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, they were thugs after all, and this is an MMO, so we kill everything that moves and is attackable, right?)
So I had to show them some manners. I’m sure their bodies were made good use of by the city once they were found. After that somewhat unsavory affair, I could talk to the ambassador and ask some additional questions that were not quite toeing the faction line:
Smooth, very smooth. I guess my character would also ask whether there’s “other stuff for sale under the counter *wink wink nudge nudge*”.
Thank god the old “it was just a test! Haha!” still works.
As it turns out, maybe (just maybe) the ambassador was the more subtle one of us two. Magister De’Pater, who you are sent off to, is in fact quite dissatisfied with the current rulership and is willing to make you a conspirator if you sneak into the palace and steal some documents.
I’ve never seen you before, but you seem like the trustworthy type, so will you help us with a conspiracy that will mean our death if anybody tells the queen?
Connections, how convenient. Why don’t I have any? Oh, probably because I hate this city and want out of it.
After that, things start heating up. You’re sent to rescue Reverend Valac, another conspirator, and in the course of that are attacked by assassins. Barely making it back to De’Pater (as a nice touch, assassins start to pop wherever you go in the city), you realize that he’s not happy with how things are going and shoos you off to go into hiding. Poor Valac seems to be in the same boat, while De’Pater, a man with the right connections, probably will head off to another party with open bar and hot dark elf dancers.
It seems that, despite the fact that you can change back to your original city with some extra work, SOE wants to make extra sure nobody ends up in limbo. There are a lot of warning boxes on the way. At this point in the betrayal line, you will see the first one:
Are you absolutely sure?
And for good measure, the Reverend will ask you again, too. In his defense, he probably doesn’t believe in pop-up warning boxes that he can’t see:
I know you said this so-called “warning box” already asked you, but we don’t believe in things we cannot see, so I’ll ask you again.
Citizenship
Once you confirm, you will end up hated by all cities. Congratulations! On the upside, you now have access to Haven, the neutral town of all exiles. On the downside, “town” is somewhat of an exaggeration. It’s more a hole in the ground, with few amenities, and nobody ever is there because I don’t know of anybody who ever stayed exile by choice for a long time. I wanted to make screenshots to show the dreary cave, but sadly, it was during Christmastime (remember how I said this post had been stuck half-ready for quite some time?), and everything was “decorated” (and I use the term loosely here) with giant sugarcanes and other abominations, so I passed. In a way, it made the place look even more hideous.
At that point, a guildmate informed me that betraying to Qeynos was a bad idea. Wait, what? Thankfully, what he meant made sense and didn’t mean I had wasted a lot of time for nothing. He simply suggested I should betray to Kelethin and change to Qeynos afterwards. The main reason is that, as I said, you end up hated by everybody, and you will need to do repeatable reputation quests to build up your reputation with a city before you can apply for citizenship. I guess being hated by the others doesn’t immediately give you credit. His point was that the Qeynos quests were very drawn out because you spent a lot of traveling to and from the quest giver. Kelethin, on the other hand, offered a quest for killing orcs which resided almost immediately next to the quest NPC.
Within a few hours, my reputation was high enough to talk to the ambassador and apply for citizenship. The rest of the process was surprisingly straightforward. I had to show that I could speak Faerie, but the requirements can’t be very high: the quest required me to talk to a grand total of 3 people. Turns out the whole thing was a prank because Faes speak Common. Pesky things! I remembered to flip them off once I was on my way out to Qeynos. For now, I had to stay polite, because I was invited to an audience with the Queen to finalize my documents.
Please sign where I mark the documents with an “X”.
Anybody ever noticed how MMO rulers seem to not have an awful lot to do? They just stand around all day and seem to be so bored out of their minds that they jump at any opportunity to meet any random adventurer who finishes a low level dungeon or wants to hand in his citizenship papers.
The game was not done with me yet, though. I had to confirm my subclass after betrayal. One of the interesting twists of the allegiance system is how it ties in with “good” and “evil” classes. Each class in EQ2 comes in two “flavors” or subclasses. (In fact, you cannot play the actual “class”, which is only an umbrella term for the playable two “subclasses”. The terms used to make sense many years ago, but this post is already long enough, so I won’t take the detour to explain that history this time around.) Some of them are neatly divided among allegiance lines. For example, Paladins are always good, while their subclass counterparts, Shadowknights, are always evil. Switching your faction automatically means switching your subclass. This is, in fact, a nice and in-game way of a class change. Of course, sibling classes already share a lot of abilities, but many class-defining abilities are specific to each subclass.
Neutral classes, such as my Illusionist, have the option, but are not required, to change their subclass when they switch faction. I chose to stay an Illusionist because I liked the class. Of course, and maybe understandably in such an important question, this also didn’t go without its share of warning messages:
Are you sure you want to change into what you already are? Fear the consequences of staying the same!
If you switch, you might have to pay again…
Less understandably, neither of them makes a lot of sense. The first one is seriously outdated, because spell levels are now saved and will not be downgraded to their Apprentice version any more, and it’s been like that since 2010 (or so the Internet tells me). More hilariously, the lowest spell tier isn’t even called “Apprentice I” any more, and that renaming happened in mid-2009. The second warning still made sense in December when I made the screenshot, though is outdated now too, since in March SOE did away with “premium classes” that you had to pay extra for if you weren’t a subscriber. Plus, there is really no reason to pop up that box in the first place after I choose to keep my current class.
Epilogue
Hazzlash, citizenship documents in hand, made his way to the Qeynos ambassador, and, after some street-cleaning work, was accepted as a citizen. He found out that, even with a mercenary, the Peacock Club quest line ended prematurely for him, because after a group quest phase, it progressed to raid quests. (Plus, by that time, I had lost interest. In the end, I stopped playing EQ2 altogether for some months, and only returned recently.) At the moment, he is in his high 80ies, and I have hopes that, if I make it to at least 90, I might be able to actually get groups for reasonably current content with him, which should be much easier than with my swashbuckler, because enchanters and bards are the two classes that seem to be sought after the most, while DPS is a dime a dozen like in every game. Reverend Valac never became happy in Haven, and sneaks back into Neriak on a regular basis to help other adventurers betray the city.
Signing Up for EQN Beta as a European
Quick one. I haven’t really watched a lot of the EQN reveal videos. I typically don’t do that kind of stuff, because I tend to react negatively to the staged and artificial hype-building that goes with those events. I wouldn’t mind trying out EQN once the beta comes around, though.
Turns out you can’t sign up for the beta as a European, though. Well, not with SOE at least. If you want to do the beta, you have to sign up via Pro-Sieben/Sat-1, which understandably a lot of people don’t want to. (On the other hand, that company hasn’t lost all your user accounts to security leaks yet! Might only be a question of time, though.)
The question is, of course, if that means that SOE will want to do one of the most despicable things in online games: split people by region. Really, I feel extremely strongly about that point. It should never, ever, be done, under no circumstances whatsoever. I’ve been bitten by these stupid restrictions too often.
However, at least for th beta, there’s a workaround. When you try to sign up via everquestnext.com, you first have to provide your credentials, and then are sent in an infinite loop back to the main page as a European. However, if you directly access the page behind that check, you can sign up without any problems. I did that by using a link that a helpful player in EQ2’s general chat posted: Everquest Next Beta Signup. I was cautious and scouted the link, because you never know whether it’s a scam. Since it’s a station.sony.com domain though, I don’t see anything suspicious about the link.
I can’t promise you you’ll ever get a beta invite – who knows, they might check for residence before they send them out. If I had to guess though, they won’t be that rigorous in their checks – if they don’t even just do it lottery-style anyway.
I signed up with my SOE account, got a registration confirmation, and now will just wait and see.
Zones and Zone Lines
Every now and then, people argue whether “zones” in an MMO are a good or a bad thing. Just today, the discussion came up again in replies to a post by HarbingerZero. I first wanted to answer there, but then I ended up with a full post. So here you are!
First of all, I think we have to make sure that we don’t conflate two concepts into the word “zone”. When people think of zones, they can mean two different things:
- Self-contained pieces of terrain, which you can only leave for other zones through specific points and loading screens.
- Thematically grouped areas (the “snow zone” or the “lava zone”) which are connected to other zones without load screens.
I’ll call the first one “technical zones” and the second one “thematical zones”.
Technical zones
Everquest (both I and II) is probably the king here. Many original EQ zones were quite small, and to change from one to another required you staring at loading screens, sometimes for a long time. This was probably more a technical limitation that anything else: by keeping each zone small, the number of players that could interact with each other also was kept low. Keep in mind that, in an extreme case, each player’s actions need to be sent to every other player in a zone, so you end up with quadratic growth – which is never a good thing. Of course, things like “spheres of awareness” (I will only be informed by the game about things happening in my view range) help a lot. Still, you’re typically limited by your servers’ computing power, because it is much, much harder to have more than one server handle a zone, because you run into the classic parallelization problems and open yourself up to a lot more bugs (which are hard to debug, to boot). So, historically, small, self-contained zones made a lot of sense.
Small zones also make it easier to handle and redistribute the load. In EVE Online, each star system is a zone, though the loading screen in this case is the warp tunnel, so it’s hidden from plain view. Most star systems in EVE are almost completely empty almost all the time. Each server therefore handles a bunch of zones. However, if a system suddenly becomes very active (think of those several-thousand player battles), this architecture allows them to dynamically redistribute the load. The server sheds all its other systems off to other servers, and focuses on that one system only. (It’s still often not quite enough, so EVE uses a trick called “time dilation”, in which everybody in that system slows down by a certain percentage. Everything goes slower: flying, shooting, etc. That allows the server to keep up with the load.)
On the other hand, we see that these days, it’s not really necessary to have these “hard” zone lines. WoW created an almost zoneline-free world in 2004. LotRO did so, too, and even has “dynamic layers” in which copies of an area are created if too many players flock in one spot. (Though I’m not sure whether that’s for technical or game design reasons). I don’t remember enough of the even earlier games to speak about them, but didn’t UO have no loading screens, either?
So if it is technically possible to make a world without loading screens, is there any other reason to have them in your game? I can see an argument for them in a world that switches between multiple-instance zones (“instanced dungeons”) and single-instance zones (“open world”). In that case, the loading screen does not only mask the potential waiting time to process the additional load on the server (create a new copy of the zone, etc.), but it also functions as a visual cue to the player that they are transitioning from one presentation of the game world to another.
Perfectly rectangular EQ zone. Also note the curved or “Z”-style exits, designed so you will never have a view of the adjacent zone, which of course isn’t there at all.
Other than that, in my opinion, there is no compelling reason to have zone lines with loading screens in your game. They only detract from your experience. They chop the world into tiny blocks that are only roughly pieced together. When I go from home to work, I don’t have to stare at a loading screen when I pass a certain point. When I go on vacation, I don’t have to pass 15 checkpoints with loading screens, either. Loading screens have no equivalent in the real world, and they also don’t give us any benefit by being better than what we’re used to from the real world. Also keep in mind that the strict separation means that I can’t “peek over” into the other zone. Even if I’m standing right at the zone line, I can’t see what’s happening on the other side. That often leads to the infamous “rectangle with mountains around it” zone design, with zone exits with curved or bent tunnels that make sure I won’t catch a glimpse of the adjacent zone – which of course isn’t even there, because the zone is all there is, as far as the server is concerned.
My opinion: only chop up your world into zones if you have to for technical reasons. Otherwise don’t.
Thematical zones
Back in the day, before MMOs, before 3D graphics, before high-quality 2D graphics, there was a very technical reason for zone themes. Remember Super Mario Bros? Outside level, night level, castle level, and so on… The memory, computing and display power were so limited that it made sense to only have a small set of tiles available for each level. Palette shifting (recoloring existing visual assets) saved space, so you had levels that used the same assets in different colors. For the same technical reasons, every level was also separated from the others by a technical zone boundary.
MMOs have often not deviated much from this zone idea. Have a look at this (pre-cataclysm, but it didn’t change much afterwards) map of WoW’s Searing Gorge, a typical “lava zone” with lots of dark ash and open lava pools:
Circle are entry and exit points, arrows show the adjacent zones’ themes.
If you leave lava-land, you can either go to snow-land, or temperate-grasslands-land, or desert-land. That doesn’t really make much sense at all, geographically speaking. There is no savannah between the temperate grasslands and the desert. A lot of the other transitions aren’t impossible, (snow to grasslands, lava to the others), but the combination of all of them in so little space is quite implausible. In addition, even though there are no loading screens, the zone lines are very visible. Note that I chose searing Gorge also because there are three distinct entry and exit points. Other zones are more open, but you also get the same border-like feel when the scenery suddenly changes.
I collected some examples of what I mean. Click the images for larger sizes and captions with explanations! (Also, it’s the first time I used this gallery feature. If it doesn’t work as intended, please tell me.)
Looking from Searing Gorge into Badlands. Spot the zone line!
Standing on the bridge between Durotar and the Barrens. A bit more subtle, but still noticeable.
Border between Bree-land and the Lone-lands. Looking towards Bree-land: green grass, birch and linden trees…
… turning around: suddenly a more mediterranean feel with stone pine-like trees.
At the other end of the zones: Lone Lands still with a dry lands feel…
…but the Trollshaws suddenly feature reddish mountains and spruces?
This, perhaps more than all the other things people mean when they say “theme park”, reminds me of theme parks. Bored of Desert Land? Visit Lava Land! It’s just around the corner! I wonder where the preference for that sort of design comes from. Is it because each zone gets a few design sketches, and then a staff of people who populate it without much interaction with the designers of the adjacent zones? It doesn’t feel very world-like at all.
This behavior isn’t restricted to zone lines, though. Often, you end up with “sub-zones” that have a different feel. The evil camp in the forest, the fiery mountain in the plains. Palette shifts are very popular for these kinds of areas: Just change the “dominant” color, as if somebody put a color filter in front of your camera. You know what I mean: when you stand in green fields, then take a step forward, and suddenly the sky becomes purple and the grass you stood on turns gray, then you take the step back and everything is as it was before. It always felt silly to me. Why would the whole sky suddenly change color from one second to another? Why would the grass suddenly look dead and burned, and, even worse, look fine again if I take a step back? The colors support the theme of the zone, I get that, but the change is so sudden that it feels silly. I thought these days we wouldn’t have to resort to such drastic hacks any more. A more gradual change should be easy enough to implement, shouldn’t it?
I guess that’s what it comes down to, when I look at all those points: gradual change. A desert doesn’t suddenly become a forest within two steps, light doesn’t change that drastically either. A good world should have gradual changing scenery. Yes, that probably also makes it a lot larger, because you need more space to go from snow to savannah. That’s a good thing in my book, though.
MMO Ennui
It’s that time again. I come home after work, eye the icons on my desktop (I don’t use my desktop for pretty much anything, but I do keep my game shortcuts there), and just sit there staring at them. I had a pretty good run recently, played a bunch of LotRO, EQ2 and EVE. However, the last couple of days, none of the games could really captivate me.
LotRO was the first to fall off. During the time I didn’t write, I pushed my Hobbit Warden the last couple of levels to the level cap. However, I never really got to the point where I enjoyed Rohan. Too on-rails, too grindy, too… I don’t know. I guess part of it is that there’s nothing at the level cap I really want to do. I’ve exclusively soloed to the top, and as such, I never collected any experience with grouping mechanisms. Wardens will be expected to tank in groups. I don’t think I want to dive straight into that cold water. So all there is to do is grind dailies (blech) or level an alt.
EQ2 had the best run of the three. After hitting level cap on my Swashbuckler late last year, I started an alt Illusionist who, after my general MMO hiatus in spring, is sitting at 85 at the moment (long-lost post about him in my post queue). I’m somehow missing the motivation for the final push to 90, though. From there I should be able to get groups and waltz my way to 95 and 320 AA easily (or at least that is the hope). I switched guilds from a US-based to a Euro-based guild, but it for the most part stopped raiding around the time I joined, which led to reduced attendance in the guild overall. Nobody really quit, but people just play less, and there are still not a lot of people on to play with. I basically switched from one guild with low attendance due to time zone issues to another guild with low attendance due to other issues. I probably should try and find a larger and more active guild, but I always feel like I’m abandoning people when I leave a guild, even if I’ve only been there a short time and not really contributed much.
EVE is the most recent one I picked up again. At the moment, I’m sitting in my private corp again, population status: 1. I’ve been flying around a bit, doing some missions, but that’s really not something that can keep my interest going. EVE missions are quite repetitive and get boring fast. I’ve been thinking about re-applying to the Uni, but being a Uni member comes with some restrictions I’m not sure I’d want to carry right now (especially when it comes to where you are allowed to go and such). Plus, the Uni is specifically designed to be a transitory corp. Newbies join, and most leave after some time when they learned some ropes. As much as I liked the Uni, this transitory nature made it hard for me to completely feel at home. I’m slow in my socializing, so it sucked when people tended to leave about the time I felt I slowly started to get to know them. I’m still a bit scared about WH and Null, so I’m a little bit scared of finding a corp in one of those areas. Plus, I don’t have a lick of an idea how to go about finding a corp in EVE in the first place. It seems to be all about alliances, but you don’t apply to alliances, you apply to a corp that’s part of an alliance, and I don’t think I could name more than 5 corps without looking them up. And while those 5 would probably interesting places to be, and I’d gladly accept an invitation from them, they are also (highlighted by the fact that an EVE noob like me knows them) famous enough that they wouldn’t accept me. You know the saying with clubs and exclusivity…
At the moment, I’m also lying in wait for FFXIV. I’m having high hopes; on the other hand, I know that I’m almost certainly setting myself up for a disappointment. I don’t even know much about the game, just what I saw over the course of a bunch of beta weekend hours. I think I’m projecting my hope for a good community and lots of socializing and grouping onto a game that’s still mostly a clean slate.
Long story short, just like Syp, who seems to be at a point where he feels like he needs to restructure things, I also have to reconsider what I want. Looking at what I wrote, a common denominator seems to be that I want more social interactions in my MMOs. Soloing MMOs can get boring, surprise! I guess I’ll have to do some thinking and figure out what I want and how to go about it. Suggestions are welcome.
Thirty Million Skill Points
Don’t ask me how it happened. I was weak. For reasons I still cannot figure out myself, I resubscribed to EVE some time ago. And so the 30 million skillpoint mark came and went some time ago. Short look:
Spaceship Command 11,061,943 (*) Gunnery 6,271,210 (*) Engineering 2,939,845 (*) Missile Launcher Operation 1,670,950 Electronics 1,623,756 (*) Trade 1,338,235 Navigation 1,265,805 Mechanics 1,719,079 (*) Drones 911,217 (*) Industry 690,204 Leadership 421,824 Science 225,749 Social 198,435 Corporation Management 1,000 Total ~30,300,000
Asterisks denote categories that changed from last time. Unsurprisingly, since I am still in my Perception/Willpower remap, Gunnery and especially Spaceship command have seen the largest increase since last time. Sadly, since it’s been so long that I paid attention to my skills, I cannot really say what I picked up since last time. I think it was T2 Large Hybrids, so I can now fly Caldari and Gallente Battleships (or at least a good part of them) properly. I can also fly the Oneiros now, and other than that, made a decent spread across all the T1 hulls for the different races. I guess the idea was that, since I didn’t know where I’d end up, I better train a wide spread, so whatever they ask me to fly wouldn’t be too much of a train from what I got. Sadly, I didn’t take a snapshot of my skill level distribution this time around, but it seems I picked up a fair bunch of IVs and Vs.
What I’m Currently (Not) Doing
I’m at a total roadblock with EVE at the moment. I’m not with the UNI any more, because they kicked me after a long period of inactivity and when my API key ran out (can’t blame them for that, really can’t). I can’t do anything on my own, except maybe run missions, which gets boring fast. I have a couple of people on my friends list from the EVE university days, but I haven’t talked to them in months because I’ve been offline for so long, so I kinda don’t want to start the conversation with “Heeeeeyyyy… remember me? No? Well, damn. Anyway, can you vouch me into your alliance?” Even worse, I don’t even know what I want to do. Null? Low? Wormhole? it actually all sounds ok, everything would be better than what I’m currently doing. Which is a whole lot of nothing. I log in, stare at my chat windows and friends list (typically people are offline), then jet around in my interceptor from point A to point B, then queue another skill and log off. It’s basically Farmville in Space. Then again, I’m also worried that even if I ended up getting someone to help me with getting back into the groove, I’d have to bail out again eventually. I remember EVE being a good time-sink, and the rest of the year will probably be a lot of work for me. I basically want to finish a first version of my thesis document until the end of the year, and that might mean a lot of long working hours. Plus, there are other games around, too…
So yeah, enough of the morose attitude. If anybody has suggestions, shoot please. Otherwise, I’ll probably just let my subscription time out again.
The Mandatory Titan Test
Funny enough (and fitting for my whole love-hate relationship with the game), my “time until I can fly a Titan” has actually gone up from last time. I mean, what? How is that even possible? I guess it must have something to do with the skill reorganization, and the Titans must’ve picked up different prerequisites. I can’t figure out what they are, though. Jump Portal Generation maybe? In any case, if I won a Titan today, it would now take me another 128 days until I could fly it (difference between the four Titans is only about a day).
Plans for the Future
I think I covered the lack of those quite well. It’s been a year since my last neural remap, so I could, in theory, go for Int/Mem and pick up lots and lots of support skills. That would be perfect for a time in the game where I’m not doing much anything. On the other hand, if I end up doing anything in eve again, Perc/Will will probably be valuable, because it’ll allow me to train for ships and guns much faster. Then again, using my free remap now means the next free remap will come again sooner, and I have 3 bonus remaps available still. Decisions, decisions… Anyway, if I keep playing (or at least paying), and stay in Perc/Will, then I expect to pick up even more guns/missiles/ships. If I go for Int/Mem, most of the skills until the next milestone will go into Engineering, Electronics, and Mechanics.