Author Archives: tony

TNF – Raids in August and Important News

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Raids in August

There will be a TNF Raid on August 9th. Meet in PoK at the usual time (8pm UK, 9pm Europe, 3pm US Eastern). Targets have yet to be decided.

Important News

I have a penchant for melodrama, so I make no apologies for the tone of the following news.

Everything that has a beginning, has an end.

In November 2004 (the 6th to be exact) a few of us raided Overlord Ngrub in the Torgiran mines. Lessi will know the insane amount of planning that went in to that raid, I took screenshots, I planed the route, I worked out a strategy, I drew up diagrams. It was the start of a 4 year rollercoaster that none of us could imagine.

A few weeks later Siddhaya ran some raids against Luclin targets, Zelnithak, The Va`Dyn. Soon we were ‘in’ Ssra taking out legendary targets we had simply dreamt about. I remember those first raids with complete clarity. The Siddhaya & Grayhelm Saturday raids eventually turned into TNF, with a charter (too long, we never did get it short), a structure, and a solid raid team.

We achieved the impossible, truly. Casual raiding, without any significant bitching, no serious falling out, no catastrophic collapse. We progressed without being a progression force. We grew, we accepted anyone, we handled loot in an adult and relaxed manner.

And we took on and killed the mightiest in Everquest.

2005 Sat Apr 09
Target: Kael Drakkal – The Avatar of War

2005 Sat May 14th
Target: Kael Drakkal – King Tormax

2005 Sat Jul 30th
Target: Plane of Innovation – Manaetic Behemoth

2006 Sat Jan 7th
Target: Plane of Tactics – Rallos Zek the Warlord

2006 Saturday 8th April
Target: Plane of Fire – Fennin Ro the Tyrant of Fire

2006 Saturday 14th October (in conjunction with PoTM)
Target: Plane of Water – Coirnav

2006 Saturday 21st October (in conjunction with PoTM)
Target: Plane of Air – Xegony

2006 Saturday 2nd December (in conjunction with PoTM)
Target: Plane of Earth B – The Rathe Council

2007 Saturday 20th January
Target: Ikkinz, Chambers of Destruction (Ikkinz 4)

2007 Saturday 27th January
Target: Plane of Time – Complete

2007 Saturday 10th March
Target: Uqua, The Ocean God Chantry – Complete

2008 Saturday 5th January
Target: Tunat`Muram Cuu Vauax

2008 Saturday 26th January
Target: Anguish, Overlord Mata Murum

It has been an astonishing four years. Both myself and Siddhaya are honoured to have raided with you all. To have challenged at the time, some of the toughest content in EverQuest with casual players and beaten it convincingly in the right way.

However, the time has come for myself and Siddhaya to step down. There is no single reason, no single cause. Simply that it is harder to commit every single Saturday, harder to find the time to research the targets, harder to find the energy and enthusiasm that the raid force deserves.

August 9th will be our last raid together with TNF as raid leaders. We may finally go and raid Crushbone, or maybe we’ll revisit the Guardian of the Seal, or perhaps we’ll go kill some random stuff in Theatre of Blood or go and wipe to Vishimtar, who knows. Turn up and find out. We’d love to see you there.

Before deciding this, both myself and Siddhaya had already found ourselves unable to commit to raids on the last three weeks of August (due to summer holiday or work). So, we propose TNF takes a break in August.

The question for you all, is what will happen to TNF going forward after August. There are really three options.

1. Some folk volunteer to take up the leadership role and TNF remains as it is now.
2. Some people wish to start up a raid team, but want a fresh start, and start something new to replace TNF.
3. People feel that they need a break and nothing is started immediately.

All three of those options are fine options. The decision is really in your hands. Myself and Siddhaya will support you in any way we can.

It has truly been an honour, a privilege and a complete blast spending Saturdays with you guys. Well over 120 unique people have raided with TNF over the last four years, maybe more. We thank you for everything.

What makes a fun MMORPG?

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Anyone who has known me in the last few years knows I play EverQuest. I used to play EverQuest a lot, and in recent months that amount has decreased. It’s done that before, and then I get re-interested. There’s a long standing joke that you never quit EverQuest, everyone comes back. In EverQuest I’ve been a regular player, a guild member, a guild officer (a few times), a guild leader (for a short time), a raider, a casual raider, a grouper, a hard-core raider, a raid leader. I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online rolplaying game) ‘fun’, and what a game needs in order to make it as accessible as possible.

If you’ve followed the history of EverQuest or played you’ll know it had a pretty strong focus on ‘the group game’. In the early days it was tough to solo anything, impossible for some classes, challenging and slow for others. Grouping was really the only way to achieve any significant gain. This wasn’t an issue, there were many, many players also looking for groups. As the game has grown, and inevitably the player base has shrunk (and the number of low level characters shrunk and the number of places for people to go and hunt grown) that focus on the group game is causing some pain.

Competitors to EverQuest (World of Warcraft being the most famous) have taken a different slant. You can achieve significant gains without ever grouping, and even if you do need to group to complete a certain goal, you can be sure the time investment will be short, 10 minutes maybe, or 30 minutes, and you can achieve your goal and move on to other things together or alone.

In the current EverQuest many goals take hours and hours of time investment to achieve. This is both the reason it has been so successful and its biggest curse. For some people that challenge and time investment is what keeps them in the game, but for many it’s just not possible to invest four or five hours at the keyboard to achieve (and in some cases, not achieve) any significant gains. And yet there are people who claim WoW is ‘too easy’ and many who have played it and burned out quickly because there is less challenge and less content.

I’ve not played WoW to any significant level so I can’t comment on the specifics, but I have played a few MMORPG’s, and I do now, after 7 years or so, know what I want from a game. I’m not sure a single game can actually provide this, but this is what I think it would need.

  1. It should be possible to achieve something without assistance, at any level of the game, in around an hour. The question of course is what counts as ‘something’ and ‘achievement’. For me, it must progress the character, it should be possible to log on and within an hour or so have achieved something which has progressed your character in terms of power. Obviously in the early stages of the game that progress will be quite large, and in the later stages that may be quite small, but it should still feel like an achievement.

    This is necessary because people can’t and won’t commit huge amounts of time to a game, but if the game lets them achieve things in shorter time periods they will feel they are able to make progress even if they can only ‘pop in’.

  2. It should be possible to group with your friends and achieve stuff, no matter how many or few of them are on at any one time. It should be easier to achieve goal X with two people than with one, no matter what classes those players are. It should get easier with more people, regardless of class. Of course, this doesn’t preclude a good balance of classes making something which is very challenging doable against a random set of classes making it more challenging, but it should still be possible to achieve progression regardless of group make-up.

    Too many times I’ve been in a game with 2 or 3 friends, and we’re not able to achieve something or progress with just those friends because we don’t quite have the right classes, or someone has had to fall back to a less-favoured character to fill the space, or to 2-box a character to bring a required class along.

    If 12 of my friends log in, we should be able to find something that challenges 12 of us, and the tools should support that. Obviously there needs to be a limit, but fixed group sizes are restrictive. The growing concept of ‘groups’ and ‘raids (collections of groups)’ is limiting. There should be a single concept to cover a ‘collection’ of players, and if that’s 2, 6, 11, 15, then so be it. Groups should flex to cope with the number of people present, the number of people present should not be massaged to ensure they fit into the game’s group structure.

  3. People should be able to join in or drop out, within reason, regardless of where you are and what you’re doing. If someone feels they’ll be tied in to doing something for three hours, and if they leave that endeavour will fail, they may feel less inclined to help out because they may need to sort out some washing or chores in the house. However, if they know they can help out and then head out without dooming the mission, or that if they turn up late they can catch up, then the result is a more inclusive experience.
  4. I’m sure this one will be controversial. Your gaming skill should not be the biggest factor in your ability to progress. It should be a factor sure, but MMORPG’s are social games, they should be inclusive, not exclusive. They should allow people to come together, form groups, go and achieve stuff, and not have to worry about whether the person playing the Barbarian Scalp Beater is able to press keys as fast as the person playing the Gnome Invoker. Sure, players with more skill should be able to achieve things more quickly, or more efficiently, but players with less skill should not be precluded from achieving anything.
  5. There should be no exclusion to who can communicate with who. There should be no geographical barriers in-game or in the real world. I detest the current approach of restricting servers based on geographical location. The internet has destroyed the boundaries of country and continent and MMORPG developers appear to be putting them back. If I choose to play on an American server with the associated latency and in-hours-patch times, that’s my choice. If my American friends want to join us on a European server they shouldn’t have to lie about where they live and buy a different version of the game to do so. This is a high tech world, solve the technical problems if there are any, solve the billing issues, get it right. Give us back the global player base. In-game, friends lists, inter-character communication and similar features should not be restricted by in-game faction or alliances. I want to know if my friend Bob logged on, even if he’s playing the most hated of evil enemies I have in the game. And I want to be able to /tell him so.
  6. There should be content that can not be beaten alone, or even with small numbers, but that content should never be core content or required content. There should be content that can be beaten alone, or with small numbers but doing so requires many hours of time invested, not necessarily all at once, but again, it should not be core or required content. It should be luxury content, additional content, some extra for people who can find the time. The core game should be accessible to all.

Obviously, the game content should be interesting and engaging and impressive, but those are the things game developers would focus on anyway. The above 6 points are really the ones I have come to believe are critical for new non-niche MMORPGs.

Maybe I won’t go to America on holiday after all …

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From: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/content/article/2008/08/01/laptops.html?hpid=topnews

Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Security at what cost?

Cat in a Box

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We’ve just shipped Bubbles off to the vets again, hopefully to have her staples removed and hopefully the last visit for a little while. As soon as we started shutting doors upstairs she knew something was up, and starting pacing and hiding. However, it was still less stressful than it used to be, she sort of skulks around but doesn’t have anywhere to run.

In case you wondered, if you put a cat box standing up on it’s end, so the door is at the top, you can carefully lower the cat in, arse first, which is a hell of a lot easier than trying to stuff them in head first (at which point they turn into a cat with a thousand front paws).

Anyway, fingers crossed she’s ok and the staples can come out.

Fat Thin – Yin Yang

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I have decided, unilaterally, that thin people should thank me. I’m fat, mostly because I don’t exercise enough and have a sedate lifestyle, and I eat food which is too rich in calories. However, I have decided that in keeping with a Yin Yang approach to the world’s population, there is an overall balance generated by people who are thin and those who are fat. Yin and Yang describe the polar effects of phenomenon (thin vs fat people), but also share a duality that form the entire state (i.e. the weight of every living person).

There are two possible Yin Yang options.

  1. Thin people are thin because I am fat. In which case, those thin people should thank me for being Yin Fat and allowing them to be Yang Thin.
  2. I am fat because thin people are thin. In which case thin people should thank me for not complaining about this and just accepting that I’m the Yin Fat to their Yang Thin.

Either way, I’m doing the thin people of this world a service, and I think maybe just once in a while they should be good enough to admit it.

The Dark Knight

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My advice is, go and see The Dark Knight in the cinema. I echo Mark’s view that we should make sure good quality blockbuster movies (as opposed to low quality blockbuster movies) continue to get made because people are prepared to go and see them in the cinema. You do need to see this on the big screen to do it full justice, but it’s a solid, character driven movie with depth and quality acting that will work well in any format.

The Dark Knight is the second Nolan directed Batman movie and is without a doubt the darkest of any Batman movie to-date. This is no jolly on-screen action romp, no adrenaline fueled crazy rush of action, it’s a dramatic, well paced, solid and dark look into heroes, heroics and sacrifice. This is a modern, real Gotham city filled with modern and real people. There’s just that edge of decay that makes sure you know it’s Gotham but it could be anywhere in our current time, the story is contemporary and the people and emotions are built on a foundation of reality that makes the violence and horror of the Joker even more dreadful.

Heath is fantastic as The Joker, but he’s not a god. His performance is fantastic because the backdrop on which it plays out is also fantastic, everyone around him puts in amazing performances to make sure he doesn’t steal every scene. Bale is excellent, giving us a flawed and emotionally torn Batman without turning him into a caricature, and his counterplay with Heath is totally engaging. The story is as you would expect, a slight parallel to the first Batman movie (and probably some of the comics, although I’ve never read them), The Joker taking on the Mob, the City and Batman all together. There are no major flaws, although there are one or two places where I wonder if we missed an edit or are supposed to have to read between the lines a little.

The pace is good despite a slow start which worried me. There’s not as much direct action as I was expecting, and far more personal drama which is no bad thing. What action there is feels deadly enough and The Joker’s body count is certainly high enough to give the story an edge and a feeling of danger. All of the major characters see character development of one kind or another, and there doesn’t feel like any wasted space on screen or wasted time with any particular person. The dialog is dramatic without being melodramatic, and there are some really nice touches and emotional triggers (which I won’t spoil for you).

I was slightly dissapointed with the Bat Pod and one or two ‘moves’ felt pretty contrived (the wall flip) but it didn’t detract from my overall enjoyment, I just hope we get a new Batmobile in the next one (assuming there is going to be a next one). It’s a tiny complaint in what is otherwise a really, really enjoyable flick.

The end is simply brilliant in my view, simple, honest and deeply satisfying.

It doesn’t quite live up to the insane hype, but then what movie could; it does however deliver an excellent and entertaining 2 and a half hours of dramatic quality movie going fun.

Temptation

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The temptation to have a second bacon cob is high today, but so far I’m holding back. I know you were all waiting for this post with bated breath.

By the way, bated breath is the correct spelling, not baited (despite British newspapers getting it wrong more often than right). After doing some reading, bated is an abbreviated form of abated, and hence bated breath (abated breath) means almost not breathing or holding your breath.

Reference: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bai1.htm