Life | Secret Agent Cat

Posts Tagged ‘ Life ’

With Your Head on the Ground and Your Feet in the Air

I just had a revelation (shocking, I know) while listening to the latest Relics of Orr (because I’m just that narcissistic). But I think ArenaNet has just up-ended everything.

No, I know that’s not news, but bear with me.

Dynamic Events are cyclical and repeatable.

Personal Story is personal and the missions within can only be done once.

Dynamic Events are GW2′s replacement for Quests.

Personal Story is GW2′s replacement for storyline and (speculatively) end-game.

Conclusion: The leveling process is repeatable, the end-game is not (unless you make a new character)

I don’t know about you, but I have been trained and conditioned to think of the end-game as something that continues. I was never in a really high-end raiding guild (we weren’t terrible, but we were no ensidia either) so for me there has always been one more goal on the horizon, something to keep me going until the next expansion came out.

That ties into what Tasha was talking about in our last episode. A pay-to-play game has to have that one extra goal that you just can’t quite reach or you won’t continue to pay. Players must be kept busy.

I’m suddenly consumed with curiosity over GW2′s dungeons. We know there will be dungeons, there have been allusions to a dungeon ‘system’, and we know they aren’t ready to talk about it yet. I’m suddenly interested, I want to know!

Well Zhaitan be in a dungeon or will he be in our Personal Story? The answer to this question is very important to me. I want to be able to go beat on Zhaitan again if I want to. I really like the Zaishen quests and the opportunity to go back and do old content with a group of real people all over again.

I just… I just… I don’t know I don’t know!

The reason I’m so anxious about this is because of the newbies. The newcomers to the Guild Wars franchise. A repeatable end-game is what everyone is used to and if it’s not there I think ArenaNet could be setting themselves up for a firing squad. Innovation is great and I love being able to do something different but a robust end-game is just not something you muck with.

We know there won’t be dungeons which require you to grind endlessly for armor and weapons (yay), but will there be something to keep people coming back to the dungeons? I’m thinking my fears are probably unfounded, but this not knowing has me nervous. I want GW2 to succeed. Being the care-bear that I am I also want everyone to like it.

When I was in college I was astonished at how mean the wow-heads were. These were fanboys of WoW (even before release) who were so rabid that any attempt at a serious discussion about the merits of other games or shortfalls of WoW (graphics, even in those days) was met with such a savage outpouring of livid vitriol that I was thrown into flashbacks of 6th grade bullying. And this wasn’t even over the internet, this was face-to-face. Really, it was bad. It took me two years to even look at WoW because of personalities like that. It’s a deep fear of mine that ArenaNet will make some miscalculation and our beloved Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 will be drowned in an avalanche of hate.

I say I want GW2 to be wildly successful because I want to have fun. But maybe I just want it to be my big brother and go beat up the kids who called me names.

———-

I’d like everyone to take a moment of silence, please. I came home today to find my husband in the backyard, in the rain, with a shovel.

We have been nursing a cat that showed up on our back step since last Friday. The local shelters were full and we couldn’t afford vet care, so we did what we could. He (the cat) was weak and thin. We think he might have been injured. He ate and drank freely (though not much) and did his best to use the litter box we provided him. We think he was someone’s pet once (though all our neighbors denied ownership), and we think he might have run afoul of the young kids who tear up and down our street in their cars.

He would have been a beautiful cat. He was a black tuxedo type with white on his muzzle, paws, and chest with long fur, though definitely not a persian type. We never meant to keep him.

My only wish is that we’d had a gun so that his final six hours had not needed to happen. You’re in a better place now furball, I’m sorry you had to hurt so much.

2010: 08/17
CATEGORY: GW2 Speculation
10 comments

Murmur and Ebb

Like the flow of the tides.

When my computer imploded (a combination of demanding it run Aion at max graphics and a faulty motherboard) I was forced to live solely in the real world. I don’t say that meaning to imply that I’m some kind of virtual-space junkie or even that I’m abnormally antisocial and afraid of human contact.

I mention it because I have spent so much time in virtual spaces. So much so that when I came back to the real world there was a sense of disconnect. Suddenly the world I live in feels new.

I live catty-corner to a small baseball diamond and enjoy a large garden on my corner lot. While I was outside, getting dirt on my typing fingers and crisping my pale gamer complexion, I suddenly started noticing sounds. I’m not talking about the wind in the trees (I have none) or the birds (I ignore their name-calling). I’m talking about the distant chatter that carried across the road from the baseball diamond. I’m talking about the faint crunch and scrape that a wheeled carraige makes when it travels over slightly run-down concrete.

My small town gets a good amount of foot traffic. As I’m working outside I can hear snippets of conversation as they swell and die off depending on how close the speakers are, and how boisterous their discourse.

And suddenly, out under the sun, while admiring the worms, I was reminded of a grand idea I had for the future of MMO gaming back around 2005.

Right now, the best a game can do to immitate a living breathing world with sounds is to have some kind of looping background track, triggered by zone. The clever producers will layer multiple background tracks, fade them in and out depending on area, and stagger the looping.

It’s a good short-cut, but when I look down and squint at a chat log to see what other people in the zone are saying I’m left feeling the disconnect. Or I should say, I felt nothing at all. I was so used to relying on a chat-log for the murmur and ebb of the world around me that I took it for granted as something that just was.

In 2005-06, somewhere around there (in the era between my college and professional life at the very least) I tried out Dungeons & Dragons Online. Now, when I think back to what I thought of the game, three things stand out (all positively). The active playstyle, the DM-esque narration in the dungeons, and the in-game voice chat in groups.

This was great! It’s like couterstrike, jumping in and being able to chat with real people! Then, a little worm of an idea began to work at me.

Would it be possible to institute server-wide voice chat systems? Would it be possible to engineer them in such a way that a voice is broadcast from the player’s avatar so that one could walk down a crowded market street and hear the general chatter of the community? A snippet of conversation here, a waft of someone’s intense barter there.

As only a lowly graphic artist I have no idea if a system like this is even possible with today’s technology, but I like to think it’s a nice thought.

(for any who miss my Guild Wars 2 themed posts, I don’t really have anything new to say that hasn’t already been said and I hate repeating news)

Oh, I do have one thing.

The next GW2 class to be revealed? My money's on that one.

2010: 06/04
CATEGORY: Uncategorized
8 comments

To Take A Road Less Traveled

It’s a curious experience to be able to look ahead and see all the possibilities that lay before you.

Most of the time I feel like I muddle through my life in a fog, living day to day and simply hoping and praying for the best. I grew up learning to plan. Once I was out on my own I learned that plans very rarely go the way they are supposed to. So I learned to make back-up plans, and back-ups of those. Now it’s not uncommon to have three or four plans waiting behind the first.

It’s been a hard road.

Right now, though, in relation to this blog, I can see it all.

In my previous blogging life I might not have been terribly popular, but I did pay attention, and I am a quick study. The Guild Wars (2) blogging community is in its infancy, and laying dormant. There’s a mere handful of us waiting with baited breath for every scrap of news from ArenaNet, eager to squak like magpies about it whenever we can.

What we’re doing right now is busy-work. We know we’ll be blogging about Guild Wars 2, but for now there’s not much to talk about. I suppose this is what a fetus might feel like were it as self-aware as myself and possessing similar knowledge and experience.

We are incubating. We are also racehorses in the stocks, and I can see the road ahead.

It is broad and twisting, rich with byways that lead to green and lush pastures, flush with sunshine. I can see so many possibilities for a community and future to come, the diversity and richness limited only by how popular Guild Wars 2 will become.

I have the gift here of a breather. I am sitting back, enjoying Guild Wars 1, anticipating Guild Wars 2, and imagining all the possibilities ahead.

Will I become a theorycrafter? In the spirit of Phae and BRK will I become an indespensible resource for my chosen profession? Will I focus on community building and guild planning? Will I feature videos, continue with my artwork features? Will I degenerate into nothing more than ‘a day in the life of Tiger’ blog?

I don’t know, but the possibilities are endless, and I can see them all.

2010: 05/12
CATEGORY: Blogging
4 comments

Progressing Backwards – Teaching Your Raiders How to Learn

I’ve seen it twice now.

The first incidence went largely unnoticed by me. It happened right when I was joining the guild, getting insta-geared from Kara, Mag & Gruul’s, and just learning how to tank. Every new encounter was a new experience to me, everything was fresh. I had no concept of ‘on farm’.

A wipe on Al’Ar was just a learning experience to me. Struggles with Leo were just kinks to be worked out. For the rest of the guild though, they were painful slaps to the face. This was content many of them had already seen and conquered and suddenly, through attrition and replacement, they were fights with which they were struggling.

I knew all this, but I didn’t know how they felt. I couldn’t understand why they were having trouble filling out the raids, why people didn’t want to sign up. Surely if we push a little harder these bosses will be conquered again right? It’s just a little hiccup, just trying to get the newbies (like me) up to speed, right?

I guess some didn’t see it that way and were quickly becoming disenfranchised. And so fewer people signed up to raid and more were recruited and needed to be brought up to speed until I’m sure it felt, to some of the old hands, that they were running with an entirely new group of people.

And so, progression went backwards.

As for the second time I’ve seen it? Why, that was last night. Three hours of raiding, plague down, Saph down, Kael down, Malygos still lives.

We really were having a pretty good night up until Saph, then things started turning pear-shaped. There wasn’t particularly anything I could point to specifically though, just a lot of little mistakes that kept adding up. Kael was even worse and while we did eventually kill him (along with doing Just Can’t get Enough) it certainly took us long enough and was a sloppy kill on almost all fronts.

Then, as we are wont to do, we headed over to Malygos. I can’t remember if we took two or three stabs at him. We’d all ressed and were buffing when someone mentioned that unless we could kill the dragon in 2 minutes the raid was over (It was 9:58, we usually call raids at 10). This was answered by a few immediate disconnects.

Without a word.

I think that upset me the most. It wasn’t the fact that the dragon is still alive, it’s that we had raiders who left without a word. Traditionally, when it’s time to call the raid and the boss is not yet dead we take a vote of who wants to continue and who wants to stay.

We could have done A Poke In The Eye if some people weren’t so hot to light out at the first signs of trouble.

Now, I can even understand why some people are feeling discouraged, but I’m starting to get mad. I combed through the WWS report and made a spreadsheet of who died to what and when and who dropped before the tanks. I know who’s not pulling their weight.

There’s also nothing I hate more than calling people out for their own incompetence. When I mess up I like to know it, but I don’t want to be screamed at. If there’s something I’m having trouble with I try to fix it. If I can’t fix it I try to find out why. I’m always looking for the roots of problems. If a leaf is sick but the stem is healthy is there something wrong with the trunk?

With that mentality I hate pointing at someone and saying “You are screwing this up, fix it!” That’s not the right way to fix a problem. I can’t stand in front of my car and stare at the dented hood and scream “You are dented! You are fail!” Nor can my neighbor stare at me and say, “Your hood is dented, it offends me greatly, fix it!”. I have not the money to pay for fixing my hood, his ridicule does nothing to help me magically find the werewhithal within my budget to fix my hood.

Same with guildies who are performing sub-par. Just like I know very well my hood is dented and that it doesn’t look very nice, there’s a good chance that under-performing guildies know they’re underperforming. The trick is making sure they know there’s a problem and being able to offer help in finding a solution.

I’m not advocating fixing the problem for them, but helping them learn how to troubleshoot their own shortcomings.

I noticed night before last that sometimes Swipe was insufficient to pick up the second landing drake. Someone mentioned a targeting macro and my thought process flowed something like this:

Swipe is on the GCD -> Sometimes the dragon aggros a healer and gets out of swipe before it can land -> The dragon needs to be targeted and Faerie Fired at

What followed was an attempt where I first tried to right-click between dragons. I kept grabbing guildies and other ancillary mobs. Then I tried tab-targeting. Ancillary mobs were still targeted and it was taking too long to cycle through from dragon to dragon and I was getting confused about what I had targeted. It was taking too long. After that wipe more thinking was done:

Manual targeting takes too long -> I need one button that does this -> make a macro -> will the GCD be a problem? -> /target mobname aspects of a macro have nothing to do with the GCD -> Can I have more than one /target mobname aspec to a macro? -> I don’t know, but I’ll sure as hell try it out.

And so I made my macros that I talked about yesterday.

I like to think that I’m a smart cookie who learns quickly and picks up things easily. But, believe it or not, learning is a learned skill. If someone is going to suss out their own issues and find solutions they need to know how to go about it.

This is where the raid leaders come in. What should follow are low-key, one-on-one meetings with a focus of finding the root of the problem (be it ping, a too-cluttered interface, a habit for (poor use of) key-turning, etc), and once the problem is found, an offer to help find a solution.

It won’t help anything if you find the problem and just tell them to fix it. If you know the solution don’t just shove it in someone’s face, ask questions. Nurture their innate sense of logic.

If you drop breadcrumbs of questions that your troubled raider can follow they will eventually arrive at the solution themselves, you will only have guided them.

This might sound like more trouble than it’s worth. You might think “I already know what the problem is, why can’t I just come out and tell them?” Because, if you do that you’re only giving them fish. A good raid leader teachis his (or her) raiders how to fish.

By helping them walk through a logical progression towards a solution you have shown them what that path of thinking looks like. You will have given them a new set of problem-solving skills and the next time they have problems they’ll be more likely to ask those questions for themselves and will eventually find themselves perfectly capable of diagnosing and fixing a problem on their own.

I am personally a wonderful example of this.

When I started playing I was always linking gear into guid chat and asking which was better. This continued for a VERY long time. I had a vague idea of what I wanted but I couldn’t tell you if I wanted that piece with more hit or that piece with more agility. I really didn’t know the difference.

Then someone told me I could hover over the numbers in my character panel and it was like a whole world of understanding opened up to me.

I used to get so frustrated looking for quest mobs and items then a friend took me by the hand and showed me Thottbot. Eventually I found my own way to WoWhead. A google search for feral tanking consummables for raiding kara led me to The Big Bear Butt. I noticed he wrote about a lot of other things to do with bears too, I noticed he had links. Clicking through led me to other bloggers and then the blogging world started to open up to me like a flower greeting the dawn.

I realised “Hey, I can do this too, maybe putting my thoughts to the keyboard will help, maybe others will come and help me”

And so I started the blog.

I didn’t start playing WoW knowing how to play, or even knowing how to learn how to play.

Tutorials get you up and moving enough to be functional, but to nurture true excellence and dedicated, knowledgeable, and quick-learning raiders, you must help teach them how to learn.

2009: 03/20
CATEGORY: Game Mechanics
5 comments

Feral Charge [Car]

Non-WoW related post today. Skip if you like, but I recommend you take a look at what I have to say. It’s a guide of sorts, and yes I’m putting it on my sidebar.

I’ve got readers from all over the place who I’m sure have family that live all over the place. Holiday season is here and chances are you’ll be driving around. What I’m going to share with you is what I’ve learned about driving in awful weather.

Some History:

I grew up in a small rural town. My first experiences driving involved my Grandfather’s truck and a hayfield. At thirteen I was fetching the car for my parents from the parking lot at Sunday Church. At 15 I began drivers education through my High School but didn’t get around to actually getting my license until I was most of the way towards 17. I took my official test for my license amid heavy blowing snow and passed with flying colors (yes even the paralell parking bit).

At 18 I moved to Chicago for college and learned what city driving was like. (It’s kinda like tanking, you want to max out your avoidance and always be alert). The thing about driving in Chicago is everyone tailgates. If you’re not tailgating someone you’re going to get cut off. Some other idiot is going to speed up on the side of you doing 90-something and swerve in front of you. It sucks, and it only perpetuates the problem. So in Chicago I learned to be alert and defensive in my driving.

Chicago gets a lot of snow, but in the city and the suburbs you don’t learn diddly about driving in adverse conditions. See, there’s a veritable army of snow ploughs and salt trucks that are deployed at the meerest hint of a snowflake. The roads are kept pretty much constantly clear. Unfortunately the ridiculous amount of salt on the roads will rot the bottom out of your car before you can blink, but at least you aren’t going to careen into a ditch because of hard-packed ice.

It wasn’t until I moved a bit east, after college that I learned what winter can truly do.

Some Stats:

I drive a 2000 Saturn SW2. For you non-car-types that’s a little Saturn Station Wagon with those new-fangled fiberglass dent-proof sides. Well, they’re not so new-fangled anymore, and not even in production.

Why?

For a station wagon, my car is cursed light.

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee? Well, I’ve got the floating part down. Under the right conditions I’ll float right off the road.

And I have.

Often.

Some Strategy:

First and foremost, as a convicted speeder, I want to tell each and every one of you that if you’re not driving on a dry, warm road, agressive driving won’t get you there faster, it’ll get you there dead. In my state we have a slogan about drunk driving “Arraive Alive”. This works for driving safely under adverse conditions as well.

I’m going to start from kinda bad, and work my way up to conditions that are simply impassable.

Medium Rain:

The important thing to know about rain is that it washes things. This might sound obvious, but let me explain.

During the course of cars and trucks using the roads they put off pollutants. These can be exhaust, oil from the engines, scum that falls off the bottom, dirt, even agricultural run-off contributes to the gunk that’s on the roads. When everything’s dry and warm this really isn’t a problem. Tires get good traction and everything is safe.

When it starts to rain, however, these road pollutants are loostened from the road and mix with the water that is now on the road. Anyone who’s washed dishes can tell you that oil will float on the top of water. This creates a very dangerous surface to drive on, and makes conditions ideal for hydroplaining.

Note: About the first 15 minutes of rain are the most dangerous. After the first 15 minutes most of the road scum has been washed away and you only have to worry about the water, not the combination of oil and water.

Hydroplaining: If you’re not sure you’ve ever felt it you probably haven’t. It’s a very curious feeling and one that makes my insides knot and my pulse race every time it happens. As you’re driving, no matter how nice your car, there will be some road vibration. When you start to hydroplane your car is actually ‘surfing’ on top of the skin of water that’s on the road. All vibration ceaces and handling decreases to almost none.
- What to do: First and foremost, take your foot off the gas. DO NOT slam on the brake, DO NOT make any sudden turns. While hydroplaining your car is NOT under control. Inertia is in charge here and it will keep you going straight (or slightly to the side if there’s a lot of wind). In most cases, once you stop applying forward motion gravity and friction will take over to slow you down and you will regain contact with the road. It’s important to not slam on the brakes either. Some tires may be in contact while others are still skidding. If one tire has traction and brakes it’ll act as an anchor and you could very well skid out of control. So, If you feel yourself Hydroplane, take your foot off the gas and coast until you feel your car reconnect with the road.

Heavy Rain:

Same story as medium rain, except there’s a lot more of it. Visibility will be awful and you have to watch out for ‘curtains’. Btw, if you don’t have your lights on, what’s wrong with you? Even if it’s raining in the middle of the day, even if it’s just a medium shower TURN ON YOUR LIGHTS! In rain during the day they’re not there to help you see better, they’re there to allow other motorists to see you. I almost killed myself driving in rain once because I came up on a silver car going 40 without his lights on. I could not see him until I was almost on top of him.

So, about those curtains I mentioned. In really heavy rain, more common with lots of wind, rain doesn’t fall evenly. There will be clear patches and there will be heavy patches, and there will be curtains; places where the rain comes down in a sheet so thickly that you can’t see through it. It looks like a wall in front of you. Simply slow down, and be alert. If you have your lights on, and everyone else has theirs on you’ll be fine, but be alert for idiots that think because it’s the middle of the day, no matter how heavy the rain, they don’t need their lights.

And that’s it for rain! Snow is a WHOLE other animal too, I’ll be expanding this guide in the future, but for the sake of getting this out and maybe helping someone here ye be