I’m always intrigued by how the spammers try and get comments onto threads, the latest approach is to copy someone elses comment verbatim, but hoping that it gets posted so that their name-url link is published.
On huge blogs with a lot of comments it might actually succeed. On a tiny blog like this with about 40 comments, it’s pretty easy to spot the dupes instantly.
This turned into a bit of a rambling piece – so I thought I’d add this paragraph at the top. I wanted to write something to compare the difference between helping friends catch up in levels within EverQuest and Lord of the Rings Online. This is it. Oh, additionally I’m helping one or two friends level in LotRO at the moment (one new player, one player with a high level toon already). This post is not a complaint, I’m happy helping them, this is just a comparison.
One of the major differences between the old guard of EverQuest and the new guard (if they can be called that now) in online gaming, WoW, Lord of the Rings Online etc. is the source of experience points, used to increase levels. In EverQuest the primary source was and still is killing enemy creatures. If you wanted to gain levels you went out and killed stuff. There were quests in EQ (the name kind of implies it), but they had nothing like the structure or managed-activity that quests in more modern games possess. And they didn’t give anything like the same amount of experience points.
If you had to collect some orc bracers for a quest, you got most of the experience from the killing, and a tiny amount from the quest itself. Note: there were some variations to this, in some cases handing in rewards from quests gave you a nice little boost of XP, but as you levelled past the early teens that kind of thing vanished.
EverQuest finally evolved a task and quest system, which tried (but ultimately failed) to mirror that present in games like WoW and LotRO. However even with that addition the primary source of XP was killing stuff; the quest might get you somewhere, might give you a reason to kill them, but grinding out levels and AA (alternate abilities) meant killing hundreds and thousands of creatures. There was also a strong mantra of not rewarding risk-free actions. If you could do something without risk, EverQuest either quickly added risk or removed the reward.
This is not the case with Lord of the Rings Online (I’m more familiar with that game than WoW). Most of the XP you obtain while you’re levelling is from quest and deed rewards. Killing a few creatures might net you a thousand XP, completing a single quest might net you 4,000 XP. That quest might include collecting flowers or defending someone from a few creatures. The non-XP rewards (items, etc.) are more likely to be restricted to higher risk higher effort quests, but actual XP is given out pretty freely. It scales of course, you get more XP later on than you do early on, and there are some long-ass quests which give out the same XP as some very quick quests. But the point is, the killing is a side activity. You don’t see people going out and grinding by just killing stuff to get levels. You can do, but it takes longer than it would to go to a new area, get 15 quests and burn through them. Quests in LotRO are level restricted, you need to be within 5 levels of them to pick them up (i.e. if you’re 37, you can see quests up to level 42). This helps ensure people don’t leapfrog rewards.
These two primary levelling mechanisms affect how you help friends catch up in levels, or what happens when people play with different schedules / game-time. In EverQuest if a friend was a few levels behind, or didn’t play as often you’d help them catch up by doing what you always did, find the best mobs in the game for giving XP and kill them until your eyes bled. Everyone won. If your friend was really downlevel you might have to pull some tricks to ‘powerlevel’ them because you might not be able to group, and you might have to burn through some non-XP giving mobs to help them, but once they were at a certain level (where they got XP with you in the group) then the best way to get them more levels, was kill the enemy. If a few of you played at different times or with less or more frequency it didn’t really matter. Quests (outside of progression quests, which I’m not going to cover) were generally a smaller part of the non-raiding game.
In Lord of the Rings Online however, the quickest way to help someone level, is help them complete level appropriate quests. Anyone gets XP in the group regardless of what levels you are (if the creatures would normally give you XP), so level 60 characters can group with level 10 characters and the level 10 character will get XP from the kills. There’s a reduction, but since kill XP is already the minor part of levelling it’s not such an issue. The key is there’s no reduction in quest XP, regardless of the size of the group or the level of the characters involved. But here’s the rub. If people play at different rates, they get to different stages in the quests, and those quests may have pre-requisites beyond just levels for their acquisition. As a result, you end up re-doing the same quests over and over if people log on with different frequency.
For example, friend A is on, and you help them complete 15 quests and they get a couple of levels. They move on to a new area. The next day, friend B is on, and you go through a few quests with them until friend A logs on again. Now however, friend B can’t get the quests in the new area because they’re a level too low and they haven’t finished the pre-requisite quests in the old area. So, friend A now has to go through the same content they did yesterday along with the person helping, to catch friend B up. The next few days things are even, then friend B pulls ahead doing some stuff solo, and the following day you repeat this all again.
Add in that there may be 5 or 6 people, playing at different times, and with different levels, and you can see how this gets complex very quickly.
I love the LoTRO levelling mechanism. I think being rewarded for exploring, finding things, and for activity which doesn’t always involve killing the enemy is the right option. I think level restricting quests is the right option. But it certainly makes it less trivial to help friends catch up than with EverQuests approach of ‘kill until you can’t kill any more’.
While LotRO is far more casual friendly than EverQuest, it also imposes some issues if people play at different times. Someone is always going to be a level behind, going through quests you’ve already done trying to catch up. Unless you all agree to only play those characters at the same time that you’re all on, but with a bunch of adults who have lives to live, it’s not a realistic option.
Maybe, if more than half the people in a group have completed the pre-requisite quests, then other people in the group can get the follow-on quests as long as they remain grouped. Maybe the quests available to a person should be based on the highest group member up to a maximum of 10 levels rather than 5? Not sure. Maybe it doesn’t need to change. Soon we’ll all be 60 (or 65) and grinding out deeds, virtues, access quests and legendary items and all this will be a misty dream. But I thought I’d blog about it anyway.
NB: Yes, I know that the vast majority of quests in Lord of the Rings Online can be completed solo. In fact, it’s more efficient to do some of them solo. Only the small fellowship and fellowship quests really need more than one person. However, it’s a social game, about being social. More-over, you can complete much harder quests if you have some help (completing them while they’re red or orange) and hence get more XP for them as a % of your current level. None of that is the point really, the point is that the quests are great, but they make helping friends level, or keeping a bunch of friends at the same level, much harder.
Ironic that my ‘not much blogging’ post was the 1000th post on this site? Well, I think it’s ironic. Alanis Morissette may disagree.
So my rate of blog posts has slowed over the last few months from the peak of 2008. You may ask ‘is it the fault of Twitter’, have my astounding insights been dulled and diluted by a desire to spout 140 character chunks of wisdom? Actually, it’s because I’m playing a lot of Lord of the Rings Online and various PS3 games really. On top of that we had a June and July from hell madness where we had visitors left right and centre and went to weddings and generally were out having a life.
I think Twitter is to ‘blame’ certainly for a reduction in the 2 line blog posts I would sometimes make and perhaps Twitter is a better place for that kind of thought anyway.
But mainly it takes some minutes to sit down and write a blog post or a movie review (increasingly, for films which have been out for several years and no one wants to read reviews about) and those minutes are at the moment taken up with Lord of the Rings, the PS3, the garden, the house or life.
I’m sure as Autumn sets in and Winter gets a grip on our goolies, I’ll be here more often, shivering out a few words of painful insight that you didn’t want to read in the first place.
I recently completed this game on the PS3 and wanted to write a short post about it. It’s such an unusual game, and yet I enjoyed it a huge amount. The game is a mixture of anime, first-person shooter, turn-based strategy and roleplaying game, without really being any of those things fully. The game story unfolds through the use of animated stories about a bunch of central characters who have become involved in a war. Various chapters open up as the story develops, and each of those chapters has a number of battles. The stories aren’t interactive, you watch and listen. But the characters are interesting and the plot engaging.
When you get to a battle, you take control of a squad of troops who you can equip (and you can research new equipment), and train (to improve levels and gain new abilities) and then run through the fight. The battle itself is a mix of first-person and turn based. You pick a character to control from a turn-like map, you then control that character directly in first-person mode, running them through the battle dodging bullets. When you want to engage the enemy you switch to a control system that stops time and lets you aim at a single target, at which point you fire your weapon and then return to real time. You cycle through your squad, moving them and engaging the enemy over a number of rounds to achieve your objective. When you do, you’re rewarded with more story and more chapters.
That’s an ugly description of a beautiful game. The artwork is superb, the characters quirky and amusing and the game play truly engaging. If you have a PS3 this is a must buy – and it’s been out long enough now that you should be able to pick it up quite cheaply.
We’re treating / painting our fence! Takes about an hour to do a single panel, slightly less now, and there’s 10 panels left on the side of the house with the most fence. Some photo’s for proof! We’re using the same stuff that our next door neighbour used first on her side of the fence, so she chose the colour which we actually quite like.
In order, the front including the half panels, the side, to show the difference between treated and untreated, and lastly, the remaining 10 panels.
The garden’s doing pretty well although we’re coming to the end of summer. The grass we seeded has grown in and we’re starting to get it tidy, and the flowers are really doing well and have looked great throughout the summer.
This year has seen us do more for the house / garden than we’ve ever done for any property we’ve ever lived in, without a doubt. There’s so much in the house we should still get sorted (but we’re just so bad at doing it, well, I am, Grete tries to encourage me, but I mainly just stall and fob her off) but getting the garden sorted has been such a good thing and I’m glad Grete has been able to enjoy it while the weather has been good.
For your delectation and delight.
If you own cats, you know that they demand photo’s be taken of them in stupid positions.
 |
First of all, this is Bubbles receiving a head scratch, well, until we started holding her ears down obviously, to make her look dumb. She doesn’t mind! She just loves having her head scratched so she’ll let you get away with pretty much anything as long as you don’t stop. |
 |
Fiz just can’t help but climb into bags. Anywhere, any time, any bag. She loves them. She’ll sit in them for hours if she can, just watching the world of non-bag go by. |
 |
Here our two cats spend some quality time ‘together’. They kind of tolerate each other, proximity to food calms them down (the only time they’ll sit next to each other is while they eat), but once out in the garden, there has to be a regulation 10 feet between them otherwise it’s war. |
 |
This is Fiz’s second favourite place to sleep, on Grete’s shoulder like some demented parrot. She walks all over Grete’s desk, face, shoulders, head and lap until Grete finally relents and lets he lie like this. It only ends when Grete’s arm is so numb she can’t hold it there any longer. |
|
And here was have Fiz’s first favourite place to sleep. On the back of the sofa in the lounge, which usually has some kind of blanket draped over it, while we sit on the sofa and watch TV. She stretches out her full length and slowly slips behind the cushions, pushing us further and further off the sofa. Sometimes it takes her minutes to actually crawl back out of there when we get up to leave. |
 |
Despite the fact that the whole house is cat friendly and there’s a lot of soft furnishings, the cats just love to kip in awkward places. Bubbles is sleeping on the third shelf of the unit in the dining room, mere inches from the top of their soft, plush cat furniture, and on top of a bunch of pointy plastic miniatures (HeroQuest)! They both take turns kipping here, especially when it’s raining outside for some reason. |
|
Bubbles just loves the sun! This is her in the middle of the year taking in some rays, on her back, looking fat as usual. She lies like this, with her fluffy tummy on show until you’re dragged in and forced to tickle her, at which point she closes all four paws on you like some demented furry Venus fly-trap and savages your arm. |
 |
And lastly Bubbles, in the cat-pike position. Back legs out straight, front legs grabbing them, head tucked in. Only the Russian judge gives her less than a 10.0. |
When you’re overweight and diabetic, when you know you should be losing weight and controlling what you eat, ordering take-away food could be seen as failure. It certainly feels like failing. It doesn’t mean I don’t do it – and in fact, because I feel like it’s failing I usually end up ordering the worst possible thing (more calories than you can shake a stick at), because since I’m failing, fuck it, might as well fail in style.
But it’s not a good place to be mentally. Food and emotions are already tied together too much (feeling good, why not eat to celebrate, feeling down, why not eat to cheer yourself up, eaten too much, better feel guilty, feeling guilty, why not eat to cheer yourself up. repeat). So feeling like a failure every time you order take-away food doesn’t help, it just drives the circle even faster.
So I decided to redefine success.
Now, the normal position is ordering take-away food. That’s normal. Success is not ordering take-away food. There is no failure option. Every day I don’t order take-away is a success. I’ve achieved a goal. I eat the chicken and veg or whatever other bloody meal I can pretend to enjoy and I succeed. If I get take-away then that’s okay, it’s normal. Tomorrow I have another chance at success.
It’s a much better head-space to be in. Might feel like cheating, but I think that it doesn’t matter. You have to be in control of how you feel to some extent, in order to manage what you eat and actually survive. If I have to cheat by moving the goal posts to do that then I will. It hasn’t (and won’t) lead to me eating more take-away food, but it’ll certainly lead to me not feeling so bad about it if I do (which in turn means I don’t eat even more crap), and every day I eat something boring and tedious and with the vague semblance of being healthy I’ll feel like I made progress rather than being stuck with the status quo.
