JC's Thought Dump

Tales From Britannia #1

2011-10-26T21:24:00.004-04:00

My recent diatribe has caused me to reminisce about the past. I thought it would be nice to post some old UO stories.

This is a story of a pre-Trammel event that my good friend Danelle D'babrak had setup. She owned a nice Two-Story Wood and Plaster house near the entrance of Ice Dungeon. It was a very popular PVP spot in those days.

She had decided this week to allow the house to decay. The day it had turned to the "In Danger of Collapsing" stage there was quite a crowd. I think there were between 10 to 20 people there.

Now lets take a moment to explain an old game mechanic. Back then you could declare your house as public or private, but it worked differently. Public houses simply left the front door unlocked and let you place vendors. A private house still let people inside but they were flagged attackable to the owner and friends.

So the crowd had gathered and made their way all through the house due to the doors being left unlocked. A couple hours before the collapse was due to happen a situation presented itself where a person we didn't like very much was almost trapped between some furniture. We prepared to attack and waited for the perfect moment.

When the time looked right I shut the front door and we struck. I can't remember whether we killed him or not. We probably did. The funny thing is my closing the door refreshed the house. The jig was up and everyone went home.

But they came back the next time =]

I will post more stories in the future.

I am not dead yet

2010-12-01T20:04:00.002-05:00

I realize I should post an update here. I am side tracked by real life stuff. My work on UOGuide has ground to a halt. This blog is also suffering. I still want to get to the series on how I would revamp UO.

I hope to have more time to spend on UO related stuff in the near future. If I don't manage to post again, have some good holidays.

Making the Big Screen

2010-09-27T23:29:00.003-04:00

After watching the boat PVP video to make sure it uploaded without any issues, I saw a curious related video. It was by IGN and it was talking about the Stygian Abyss expansion. I decided to check it out.

To my surprise the game footage they showed looked very familiar.

Our Guild has made the big screen! Well internet screen. A screen is a screen. At least one person likely watched it on their television. Maybe.

Copy Don't Create

2010-09-14T00:46:00.003-04:00

Someone has put together a slideshow explaining where Zynga got all their game ideas. It is being discussed a lot on Slashdot. There is also a mention at the end of the Slashdot summary about the story I talked about yesterday. They called it an "underground platinum purchase program". Sounds catchy.

The how I would resurrect UO articles are still in the works. I have got some of the next one done and have plenty of ideas for all of them. UOGuide has just been taking up all my UO time lately with the new Event Calendar. I did a few fixes today and will likely work on some more improvements tomorrow.

One startling figure I stumbled upon today was UOGuide's database query count has increased 4x since the Mediawiki update. I suspect it has something to do with the search suggest. The site appears to be holding up, but I may disable it for a day or two to see if it drops the query number back to normal.

$500 Buy-in on your MMO

2010-09-12T20:40:00.002-04:00

It has been pointed out that there is a top-teir purchasing service for Zynga's games (creator of Farmville). If you want the most bang for your buck you need to spend $500. Oh wait, that is actually $500 or more.

How can such a thing be anything but completely irresponsible of a game company. These points you buy get you absolutely nothing but virtual goods. If someone wants to spend $500 on these points then go ahead. But you don't encourage that type of behavior by giving a bonus for spending so much.

When someone is addicted to a video game, perhaps Everquest, at least they are not spending all their money on nothing (unless they are buying swords and stuff). Casual games are going to end up getting regulated similar to the gambling industry if this keeps up.

The worst part about the whole thing is you have to pay by wire transfer. They don't take credit cards at this level. Obviously because buyer's remorse is big factor. Oh you bought 1,000,000 pounds of feed for your cows, but realize it will take 200 real life years to use it all up? Boo hoo.

New Event Calendar on UOGuide

2010-09-10T22:57:00.002-04:00

I made a calendar from scratch to keep track of UO events on UOGuide. Head to any page on the site to see it. Major development headaches include:

Working with Mediawiki in general
1/3 of the development time was spent dealing with time zone conversions
Figuring out how to do the popup when hovering over a day on the calendar
Thinking I was near completion until I remember 2 more things that I couldn't launch without doing..................a couple times

I hope it becomes popular and useful for the UO community.

How I Would Resurrect Ultima Online

2010-08-30T15:53:00.005-04:00

This is part of a series of articles on how I would update Ultima Online to be a game new people would want to play in 2010 and bring old players back.

If you go to any UO forum, you will find topic after topic of how someone would improve the game. Some ideas seem to be common sense, others are shot down for being too like another game. Stratics used to have a forum called the Ideas Den in which players would vote on what people came up with. Some of those ideas translated into real additions to UO, the most notable being house customization.

When I am playing a game, I will often think of how the experience could be improved or added to. This is likely why I took up programming. On the websites I manage, I carefully consider each addition and constantly look for ways to improve what already exists. This is why I have a major issue with how the current UO website is constructed. But we can go into that later.

Since I have been playing UO the longest, it is no wonder I have had so many ideas. One of my most cohesive and extensive idea was for a faction overhaul (I will try and find a link later). Just a day ago I had a new idea how to fix the vendor system and make it not a tedious click fest. About 10 years ago I even had an idea which World of Warcraft eventually implemented, the talent system. I don't believe I had ever posted this anywhere. Basically, once you reached 100 skill you could opt to spend skill points in a variety of abilities/spells. For example a Mage could spend 5 skill points to learn a new spell. Maybe I could go into more detail later.

When am I going to get to the fixing UO part? It is coming up. This is meant to be a series of several articles broken up into sections. There is a lot needing to be done and I don't want to write an entire book in one sitting. Here are some of the topics I am thinking of:

Introduction - You are reading this now
Problematic Game Additions - Changes added to the game which are bringing the game down or drove people away
A New Client - Yes, another brand new client is needed unfortunately
Core Game Changes - What needs to be done on the server side
Reaching a New Audience - New features which will draw people to the game
Don't Forget Current Players - Making sure not to cause another wave of people to leave
Conclusion - Pulling everything together

These are just a rough outline. Articles may be combined, added or removed depending on what I write about. I think it is time to start getting to the fun stuff, fantasizing about UO.

Since I am just tossing ideas out there, I could assume there is an unlimited amount of money available to make this happen. But that would not be fun in my opinion. The idea that this could actually happen is why I want to write this. So this is not going to be an off the walls illusion where there is a 100 million dollar World of Warcraft budget.

In my opinion, I estimate it would cost 10 million dollars of investment to bring UO to look and act like a game put out in 2010. Over UO's lifetime, EA has easily made over 100 million dollars on this game. Lets assume an average of 100,000 subscribers (UO peaked at 250,000 and it is estimated there are currently 50,000) paying $10 per month for 14 years. That comes out to $168,000,000. Of course you need to add in development costs and server upkeep. But then there is other revenue such as character transfer and everything they are selling in their store. It is safe to say EA has made a lot of money which is why UO is still around.

So I think a 10 million dollar investment is a bargain considering the money to be made in a MMO. The next question is where does that money go? Well the bulk is to paying developers. Estimating a $50,000 salary per developer, you could hire 20 for one year at $1,000,000. This means a team of 100 could be added for 5 million. I think 100-150 people would be the team size, so there goes 1/2 to 3/4 of the budget!

Most of the team would consist of artists. The new client will be by far the most labor intensive part of the revitalization process. There are thousands of pieces of art which need to be redone. Lets assume there are 2,000 item graphics that need to be created (I will try to get a more accurate count later when we discuss the new client). Lets assume, on average, 1 artist takes 1 day to recreate one item. How many artists will be needed to to make all those items in one year? WikiAnswers says there are 260 work days in a year. So it will take 8 people making about 250 pieces each to redo all that art.

Isn't math fun? If you are making something brand new, we couldn't have such exact numbers. Since UO already has a set number of systems, items, creatures, etc. it is a lot easier to get numbers on how much it will cost in a certain time period. Of course these are my own estimates, only EA could figure out the exact costs.

I think that is about it for the introduction. Next article will be identifying the additions which drove people from the game and why people leave in general.

If you wish to submit feedback about this or any other blog post, my email is available in the right column of this page.

Bringing Vendor Shopping Back

2010-08-29T12:36:00.004-04:00

While replying to a topic on U Hall Stratics, I had a sudden solution how to fix the current issues with vendor shopping.

I think a very "UO" solution would not be to create a global search system as many are asking for. Even the developers said in the recent Town Hall that they did not want to create a World of Warcraft style auction house Instead you could ask (by which I mean setup search options) the vendor if they had the item or better. If the vendor does, a bag would be displayed with all the items that fit your criteria.

For example if you are searching for a Swordmanship item which has at least 40% damage increase and 40% hit lower defense, the vendor will display every sword that fits this criteria. Now you will only be browsing those exact items. If the vendor does not have anything, he will say so saving you dozens of clicks.

A system like this would maintain the uniqueness of UO's system but also make shopping a lot more convenient and much faster. The system could even be expanded so you can specify many different items you are looking for, which would be better than current search sites where you go one by one.

My next few blog posts will be a series on how I would handle revitalizing UO as a whole. It is something I have been thinking about for a while and would like to write out some articles on it.

Darkfall Again

2010-08-24T13:43:00.003-04:00

I have been really busy with a lot of stuff, not playing many games except Starcraft II when I have a chance.

I remembered last year when I was keeping up on Darkfall, I would look at Google Trends as a sort of way to measure interest in the game. At the time Darkfall was in a downward trend and I predicted that eventually it would fall below UO.

Surprise, surprise; it has.

It also appears to have leveled off quite a bit and is in the same slow downward trend UO is in. Actually, UO has been going up recently. That is encouraging.

But a quick trip over to the Darkfall forum revealed another piece of ominous news. Or rather a lack thereof. There has been no game news posted since July 14, over a month ago. Maybe they all took a summer vacation? But this was definitely not the right time as an "expansion" (really a large publish) was supposed to launch about 2 months ago.

While the game is lasting longer than I thought, it is quite clear that it is walking dead at this point.

Blizzard Subsides

2010-07-12T15:11:00.002-04:00

Blizzard has backed off of their plan to display your real name in their forums. We are still left to wonder how they ever thought it would be a good idea in the first place.

With the Starcraft II beta back up we get an interesting look into how many people are playing World of Warcraft at any given time. There is an information box which displays the current active players, numbers of Starcraft games going, etc. The graphic shows all players for WOW and SC combined. The number has been as high as the 800,000's and as low as 200,000. It would be interesting if someone were to try and chart the WOW activity levels.

I Don't Accept Your Terms

2010-07-10T22:21:00.004-04:00

I got an email today informing that the Terms of Service for the Playstation network have changed. What has changed? I have no idea as the email just informs me that there was a change, possibly many changes, or maybe they fixed a spelling error. Perhaps it is my fault entirely for not memorizing the terms when I signed up for an account.

So I won't be accepting their terms if they can't put in the effort to inform me what has changed in their massive legal document. I will keep using my account though. This is a funny line:

Please don’t use our Sites if you don’t agree to these Terms of Service because once you are on our Sites, you have to follow the rules.

You linked me to your website so I could read your terms of service. So basically you are tricking me into agreeing by linking to your site for the document you directed me to review?

I know this is nitpicking, but if a company wants their Terms of Service to be respected they should put in the effort to make it easier for the end user to understand them. Many people don't read these things as it is and it is frustrating for the people who do when you just toss out something and expect us to understand it.

Customer Irritation Level

2010-07-07T21:07:00.003-04:00

We are now a day and a half into the fiasco that is announcement of what RealID is really for, taking away your privacy. You know it isn't going well when you make the national television news in Canada.

There are now nearly 30,000 posts on the US forum, nearly 10,000 on the EU forum, thousands on every other WOW forum and even videos on Youtube getting ten of thousands of views. The overwhelming response is negative. Some of the defenders are likely trolling, which is ironic.

Now people are starting seeking information other Blizzard employees, they don't have to look very far. Just pull out their Burning Crusade manual and flip to the back. Developers always want people to look at the credits, right? I don't think they intended to be for this reason. This is exactly why you don't publish your information unless you have a good reason. If you piss someone off, it just makes it easy for them to find you.

Markee Dragon made a 30 minute video response to this. I listened to it in the background as I did some work. He brought up a lot of good points like people who are in situations where they handle sensitive information, they can't post. I saw a post saying a teacher would be risking their job because it is against their rules of conduct. He also brought up another good point about the mass discrimination there will be against people with Chinese names. You know, the whole gold farming stereotype.

Towards the end of the video, Markee revealed that he came across an interesting tidbit of information when working with EA. They have a "customer irritation level" metric. It is used to measure the player response to game additions. The goal is get the bar as high as it will go while staying just below the level where players press the cancel subscription button.

Blizzard Is About to Ruin the Internet

2010-07-06T21:44:00.004-04:00

It looks like companies just don't understand the internet anymore. First Facebook wants to make everything about you open to the public. Now Blizzard is going to force you to display your first and last name if you want to post on their game forums. There are many reasons why this is a terrible, terrible idea.

The first being is stalking. There have been so many cases of people getting harassed through the internet. People have commit suicide over it. Has anyone every pissed you off so much in a game you wish you could beat them up? I haven't, but I've seen this reaction countless times on forums and talked about on Xbox Live. Now Blizzard is going to give them the first piece of information to really do some damage to you.

What can someone do with a name? Well if you have a Facebook account or Myspace than you are going to be easy to find. From there they will be able to locate a lot of forums you post on, possibly your phone number, your email, etc. Now they can harass you in many ways.

But what if they want to take it beyond playful phone calls at 2AM in the morning? You managed to get them so mad that they want to steal your WOW account. Blizzard asks for your first name, last name and email to retrieve your Battle.net password. If you post on the forum, your attacker knows your first and last name. That can be used to find your facebook and email address. Once the attacker has that, they go to your email and activate the forgot password recovery. If you selected the question what school did you go to and have it listed on your Facebook, you are in deep trouble now. They have full access to your email account and possibly many other places such as your bank, personal message and any number of forums you post on. All that is left is to reset the Battle.net password and delete you WOW characters!

Security on the internet is designed around private information. What is the name of your first pet. Who is your favorite teacher. What is your birthday. Many of this is now available for all the world to see. The final piece of the puzzle is connecting your online persona to your Facebook profile. When that happens you are one huge target for whoever does not like you.

I think Blizzard is going to back track on this idea fast. There are already tens of thousands of posts all over the internet about this change. From what I gather the response is overwhelmingly negative.

One final note, what is Blizzard going to do if someone has a legitimate name that has something obscene in it? If Blizzard attempts to censor it they will likely be liable for a discrimination lawsuit. They would also have to disable the world censor on their forum if that person wants to include their name in their posting.

RealID is a real disaster.

*Added*

A Blizzard employee decided to test out this new policy by posting his name. We now know he lives with his mother and will likely go home to a full answering machine. Funny enough, later on in the topic he warns people that just because you know someone's name does not give you the right to find out more information of said person. Then the topic was locked.

Modern War Addendum

2010-07-05T15:00:00.002-04:00

While playing yesterday I remembered one of the points which was apparently replaced: sniper rifles. It is absolute nonsense that someone can one hit kill you with a sniper rifle. If you get shot in the head, okay. But there should be no difference being hit with an assault gun and a sniper rifle in the chest. Even more frustrating is "quick scope snipers" that run around and one shot kill you. They have unlimited range, one hit kill and only have to aim at you. In comparison to a shot gun which has a tiny range, and won't kill unless you hit dead center.

Also I experienced another moment of extreme latency when I knifed a guy, completed the whole animation and saw blood, but he didn't die. When he killed me I saw he was actually laying down and I knifed into thin air.

This will be my last rant about MW2.

Britannia Manor

2010-07-03T20:29:00.002-04:00

I saw a link to this documentary about Richard Garriott's house and life on Stratics. It is interesting seeing where his game design perspective is coming from. He sure likes to collect a lot of weird stuff. In it he mentions his first game, Akalabeth: World of Doom, netted him over $150,000 right out of high school. It was such a success because most games at the time were on the level of Asteroids, just lines and text.

Moderns Warfare 2 is Bad List

2010-07-03T10:44:00.005-04:00

I was considering making a top 10 video about things that suck about Modern Warfare 2. That is never going to happen because it would be a lot of work and by the time I could get to it, we would be on Modern Warfare 5. So I'll just post it here. These are not in order of sucky-ness.

Host Migration - If you are going to do player hosting, you could at least make it so that host migration does not fail so much. It seems like at least 1/3 of the time migration fails and the match ends. This is especially frustrating when the game is seconds away from ending and the host quits to avoid a loss. Other improvements could be made such as making the screen black so someone can't spend 5 seconds spotting you.
No Guns Only Mode - It would be so great to have a guns only mode. No claymores, C4, grenade launchers, RPGs, kill streaks, thermal, heartbeat sensor or anything. Just bullets flying everywhere. I think a lot of people would enjoy this.
Lack of Bug Fixes - After two or three patches, there hasn't been a single new bug fix. The bug where you get stuck with the bomb case in your face remains. One night I was in a game where some enemies were invulnerable in a domination match. Someone pointed out that a couple guns don't work with silencers. They are releasing new maps, couldn't they do fixes also?
One Man Army - Many people agree that this perk is unbalanced. It gives you unlimited ammo. People don't even use it for the intended purpose, switching classes. They spam the same class over and over, recharging a grenade launcher or RPG. I think a nice fix would be to make it so the ammo level remains the same. So if you use 2 grenades, switching to that class again will not return them. Combine this with point #6 and you really have no idea where to shoot.
Hit Detection - It is too generous.
Latency - This just kills the game on a competitive level. I can watch a kill cam and see my opponent step into a doorway, but he never appeared on my screen. The person hosting the match always has an advantage over everyone else.
Bullet Penetration - Bullets can go through anything. Why even have a FMJ attachment? I swing around a corner and watch bullets clip the corner to kill me. If you don't have FMJ, then your bullets shouldn't go through 75% of the stuff they are currently able to. It makes it impossible to take cover.
Spawning - It is just horrid. I have posted a video of one occasion which was slightly unfair. There is so much room for it to be improved but the developers just don't care about it. This highlights how they view the game, as a casual shooter.
Hacking - Basically they have never attempted to stop it. There are thousands of people on the top of the leaderboard with 16 billion points or something. I see those people with the modified usernames all the time. Sometimes I am in games which are acting really weird and it is obvious someone is doing something. I bet someone who ends up hosting a match could lag out specific players or the entire enemy team. It certainly feels like that has happened on a couple of occasions.
$1,000,000,000 and nothing to show for it - Activision made well over a billion dollars on this game and show absolutely no sign of supporting it beyond the map packs, which make them at least $100,000,000 more per release. How about a tournament mode? How about addressing any of the concerns listed here? I would love to see what the player activity numbers are. I suspect there is a huge drop off starting in January and then spikes with the map packs. Then compare that to another game like Call of Duty 4 which was going strong well after a year of release.

I had to redo the list because I lost my text file. It isn't exactly the same and I had better examples for each point. This list does not mean I think MW2 is a bad game, it is just a pity that stuff like this makes it very frustrating. Good online matches are few and far between. Maybe 1 out of 10.

Why UORares Was Broken

2010-07-01T20:26:00.002-04:00

I did a bit of investigating today to find out why the UORares Item Database submit form was not working anymore. There is an administrator panel in which I am supposed to see items awaiting approval, but it was always blank. It did work at one time because I added a couple dozen items when it first opened.

The cause of the issue was an invalid itemid being assigned when submitting the form. A simple changing of +1 to +2 fixed it. If for whatever reason you wish to submit an item, it will sit waiting for me to approve it. One other thing broken is images don't get saved. I'm not really keen on spending time to fix that considering the site is not used anymore.

I am saddened that the bug was not with the administrator control panel itself. There is no doubt that over the past 6 years that some people have attempted to submit a variety of items. There was no error message indicating the item was never received. I was hoping there would be some to approve.

It is interesting looking at the code for one of the first PHP applications I had written. There are so many things I know now that would make it require a lot less lines and be a lot more efficient. It is in fact so bad I can't to reuse it for anything. Every line literally needs to be rewritten. At least it still works.

Anyone Remember UORares?

2010-07-01T02:55:00.002-04:00

It has been about 5 years since UORares went inactive. I was put in charge of the site back sometime in late 2003 I believe. Unfortunately it died a slow death due to the rare community falling apart due to developer neglect. If only we had Event Moderators back then.

Every once in a while (with the while being over 2 years) I like to post some news. By some chance if someone visits UORares and does not know about UOGuide's newsletter, now they will. I also changed the poll, but it appears to be broken. Votes are not being accepted.

Speaking of the newsletter, I am very happy how it turned out. It was a lot of work but I am proud of making it. I did receive a bit of criticism for the banner. It was put together in about 15 minutes to add a little color. If anyone wishes to make a better one it would be appreciated. I am hoping the construction of the July newsletter will have a lot more contributor's. If I am to do this every month I won't have much time to work on other site projects.

How about something funny? The fanboi wars between Apple and Android are always a source of comedy. Someone has made a funny set of videos showing the ridiculousness of the arguements. One involves someone trying to purchase an iPhone at a regular cellphone store, the other is a misguided attempt to get a non-iPhone repaired in an Apple store.

UOGuide Newsletter

2010-06-28T22:02:00.002-04:00

Since about the time I first setup UOGuide, I always wanted to do a newsletter. It is just one of those things websites used to do. You don't see it much anymore. The UO team has done one randomly for the past couple years but it has been a while. The first one will likely go out tomorrow night.

If you haven't yet signed up, you should.

I have spent a lot of time working on both UOGuide and our guild website for HOT Guild. I added an arcade and gold modifications to make things a bit more interesting on the forum.

The Mediawiki developers said the next version, which has the nice new Vector skin, was going to be out weeks ago. I was hoping to be able to implement it by now. Oh well, maybe next month.

I have a lot of big ideas for new features on UOGuide. Hopefully I will be able to get one or two added during July. In the mean time I am trying to promote all the stuff UOGuide can already do, such as host a guild website and personal page, or promote a fansite.

If I can improve the UO community just a little bit, that would be a nice thing.

Factions is on the Brink of Ruination

2010-04-21T15:47:00.002-04:00

I just had to post a quick rant after reading the developers idea on changing Town Sigil corruption.

So, instead of being a constantly ongoing battle open for potentially all towns, the game instead would be a series of concentrated battles for single town at a time. At any given time, all online players would be able to tell what town's capture window is open. The idea is to capture that town's sigil, hold it for a short time to corrupt it, then successfully return it to the town. Failure of any faction to do so means the town goes uncontrolled until it comes up for capture again the next day.

This just can't be happening. I was so excited about them updating factions. But now every change they unveil or idea posted is dreadful. This latest one just lowers my expectations to the lowest point.

Everything about this proposed idea is wrong. Instead of huge epic fights over all 8 cities, you are regulated to a single one at a time. One week a city will be available at 2PM, the next at 2AM. Why did they take out 24 hour corruption timers? Because it was so difficult to guard for that amount of time. Now they want you to fight 24 hours a day every day. No 3 day breaks. The entire concept of town ownership is tossed out the window. Towns are going to be swapping hands every day.

I really wish Draconi and the gang was still in charge.

Kitchen Sink Forever

2010-04-05T22:29:00.003-04:00

There is yet another video out showing footage of the infamous Duke Nukem Forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CwHzclyYnI

From this is becomes crystal clear (even though we knew already) why the game was never released. They tried to cram too much stuff into one game. Underwater, driving, interactive slot machines, destructible environments...................plus whatever else we haven't heard of yet. That is just too much for a brand new game to take on.

You can add some neat stuff here and there. Maybe vehicles. Maybe underwater. But not all at once.

They claim the game was close to release. In reality it wasn't. They just kept adding more and more. Development was destined to go on for eternity. Or in another word, forever.

Lord of Ultima

2010-03-20T01:37:00.002-04:00

I guess I missed the initial announcement because today I read on Kotaku that Lord of Ultima is now in open beta. It is a browser based game in which you build cities and do battle against the world. I am trying it out and it is okay so far. I've played a couple browser games and this seems to have a lot more features than most. It also has pretty graphics.

Besides the name, it doesn't have a thing to do with the Ultima or Ultima Online universe. Everything is generic fantasy. Perhaps there is some stuff later on or little easter eggs. The naming is purely to bring back nostalgic feelings. Get people to play.......and eventually pay.

While the game is free to play, there is a store where you can purchase diamonds. I assume other stuff will be sold in the future. Limited edition items or city decorations. The possibilities are as endless to which a wallet can be opened.

Will have to see how this game turns out.

In other news, Markee Dragon's redesigned website has opened. I have to say I am not a fan of the new design. The old one was unique and interesting. Now it is generic game blog 37452 with standard game screenshot backdrops. Also what is up with going with a blue color scheme? Even the dragon is now blue! Bleh.

Activmoneyism

2010-03-15T02:21:00.003-04:00

The price of the first Modern Warfare 2 map pack has been revealed. What would you expect to pay for some new maps? Does $3 sound good? Well there are going to be 5 of them. Maybe $5 or $8 or even $9.99.

Tough luck. It is $15! And there isn't anything else announced thus far. Just 5 new multiplayer maps. That is 1/4 the cost of the original game. It is quite obvious this is a huge money grab. There are 25 of million of copies of MW2 out there. What is $15 x 10 million? More money than 99% of video games will ever make. For 5 freakin maps, two of which are being brought back from COD:4.

It is clear now why Activision forced out the people who were possibly standing in the way of this gold train. They probably want to start pumping map packs out en mauss. They could easily be doing at least 1 new map a month. Keep people hooked on MW2 like it is a MMO. In the mean time they are not patching any game bugs or issues, just major exploits.

Even more astonishing is Activision is holding back royalty payments to Infinity Ward staff. Delayed payments means interest. The longer they hold the money, the more Activision reaps.

There is just no end to their corporate greed.

House Cleaning Dragon

2010-03-13T14:38:00.003-05:00

It looks like Markee Dragon is cleaning up his act. He was never a saint to begin with, somehow getting himself perma-banned from UO way back. In a story he explained when Origin invited him to a fanfest, he told them he was banned. They unbanned him I think. Ah, the good ol' days.

He posted a video announcing the changes to his website and a bit on why it was happening. It boils down to game companies not liking his support of breaking their game rules (item sales, scripting, botting, etc.). So it is hard to do business with people who you are causing headaches for. I imagine he is doing this mostly because he has some new business plan or idea, and that revenue from these illicit operations was simply not worth holding on to anymore.

Oh well.

I Realize This Blog is Here

2010-03-11T00:36:00.002-05:00

I haven't been playing UO lately. After a month of Stygian Abyss, I had done pretty much everything the expansion had to offer. I ran the two new champion spawns dozens of times, worked up Mysticism, and slayed all the Peerless. It got boring pretty quick so I took a break. I planned on starting back again in January, but I was having serious wireless connectivity issues. In fact I still am, just having mailed the router back to the manufacturer for repair today. But I am mostly not playing because there is nothing to do.

I play UO to PVP. For the past 8 years there has only been one type of PVP available: Champion Spawns. I've run them all a thousands of times. Gotten every power scroll in duplicates. It just isn't appealing anymore. I was very excited when factions was being worked on again. There were a lot of nice changes and additions. Unfortunately that no longer appears to be the case. First Draconi is let go and now Sakkarah. It is hard to be enthusiastic when EA is making every effort to prevent UO from being updated.

There are more faction changes in the works, mentioned on Stratics forums and in the House of Commons chat. However, it appears they are dumbing down the system. Reducing it from 4 to 3 factions, reworking points so they are about doing all different things instead of killing other players. To me it sounds like they are trying to shoehorn Warhammer Online ideas into UO. And if you didn't know, Warhammer Online isn't doing very well. In fact it probably has many fewer subscribers than UO.

I make no promises when the next blog post will be.

Pet Dyes

2009-08-31T23:12:00.002-04:00

I've come to the conclusion that I'm just not good at blogging.

Quite out of the blue the developers wanted to survey people on pet dyes. This was apparently part of the Stygian Abyss expansion, yet did not come out during open beta even though it was implemented. We were also informed that closed beta testers had been polled on this potentially explosive content addition, yet not a single one posted about it once the NDA was lifted.

There was not any magic behind it, it was straight pet dying. Same as you could with a dye tub on test center except the number of colors were restricted. You were shown a Dragon, Giant Beetle and Llama to base your judgment on. Besides Trammel, the most repeated put down I think there is for UO is the bright colors. It is often mentioned in discussions I see in various forums.

I was opposed to this. Having a dozen different color Dragons is going to just look terrible. Then there are the ~80 other creatures in the game you will get to dye. I can imagine a Harrower with 9 different color Greater Dragons on it and it is just horrid.

Apparently I was not alone in this assessment. A seemingly crushing amount of people were opposed to this. Yet the developers claimed that only 40% were opposed. Do you really want to tick off 40% of your player base over something that is just pet dyes? I think the other 60% will get along just fine without pink Dragons.

I posted earlier today that the developers should consider shelving this addition. It was detracting focus from the expansion which is just over a week away. Do they really want to tie such a blemish to their first expansion in literally 3 years? A little while later it was announced that they were doing just that. They are also going to consider doing more than just adding dye tubs for pets.

Promoting Stygian Abyss

2009-08-13T21:02:00.003-04:00

I updated the Wikipedia page on the Stygian Abyss expansion. While it could be considered poor form to make Wikipedia articles on your own products, I think it would be a good idea for companies to fill out pages with the general information if it isn't already there. It is free advertising after all. And where do people usually go when they want to learn about something? Oh yeah, the Wikipedia page on your program which listed the publisher and a link to your home page. =/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultima_Online:_Stygian_Abyss

Makin' A Game

2009-07-08T21:22:00.002-04:00

Wow, one whole month without a post.

For a very long time I have had many, many ideas on games I would like to make. Well I am finally going to do it. The other night I had new revelations on how to deal with certain problems. For example the game I am going to be making is a MMO and the single biggest issue was how to prevent new players from being utterly crushed by existing ones without adding in arbitrary restrictions, such as anyone level 50 can only attack down to level 40.

I have half a dozen solid ideas which throw off normal MMO conventions. These ideas I have not seen anywhere in the market I am targeting. In fact the entire game premise is something I've not seen done yet.

Of course I won't be able to make this game on my own. Well I could, but it would take much too long. I am going to have to hire some people and form a real company. No idea what to call it yet.

The initial team is only going to consist of 3-5 people. Of course there is myself who will be doing a lot of the design and programming. I'll need to find a writer, server architect, and up to two other programmers. Later on I expect to bring on someone to do interface design, graphic design and customer relations. I'm not exactly sure how to go about finding these people yet. With the economy the way it is I'm sure there are tons out there who would be interested in doing something like this.

I'm sure over the coming weeks I'll have a lot more to post on this..........if I get to it.

Online Distribution

2009-06-07T01:21:00.003-04:00

Blizzard may be patching every day but I am certainly not posting that quickly.

Recently there was an uproar in the UO community about how Stygian Abyss is going to be distributed online online. In other words, it will not be sold in retail stores. Some UO players feel this hurts the game due to a lack of shelf presence. What they do not realize is that the video game business is at a point now where having a box on the shelf no longer equals game success.

This has been further reinforced this week by Sony's and Microsoft's commitments to online publishing. Sony has gone so far as to have no physical media at all in their latest handheld, the PSP-GO. Until very recently Eve Online was online distributed via online sales. They were growing subscriptions the entire time, up to around 400,000 now I think.

The industry has evolved, just as nearly everything does. Anyone heard of a thing called newspapers? They are in big trouble because most people get their news through the internet. It is faster, cheaper and more convenient. Just as downloading a video game can be.

Whether the Stygian Abyss expansion is a success depends on the content. Unless they decide to release a Nintendo Wii version, which then a box on the shelf would make a difference.

Blizzard Publishing Every Day

2009-05-27T22:36:00.003-04:00

I stumbled across a link to some WOW publish notes. It appears that Blizzard is now pushing out fixes virtually every day. And it isn't just one or two critical things needing fixing, it can be a dozen of fixes. They must feel very confident about their publishing process to be able to do it every day. Well with a game that has 12 million people playing, I guess you need to ramp up publishing to that speed.

On the subject of Blizzard, it appears they are over the "we have how many subscribers?" shock and are getting down to business. They were making so much profit per year but were not working on anything. Now they have Starcraft II, Diablo III and a secret MMO project all in the works. Plus with all that money coming in they have an unlimited amount of time to polish their games. These titles will probably be the most refined in the history of video games. Starcraft II likely would have been released up to a year or more ago from a publisher such as EA who likes to rush things out the door (Warhammer Online). As long as World of Warcraft keeps going, in four or five years Blizzard could be a one studio game producing powerhouse. Their no longer restricted in terms of time and money with a gravy train such as WOW under their belt. But who knows how long that will last.

Plus what is up with taking 18 months for an expansion? They should be able to knock that down to a yearly release. As time goes on players are going to get more and more bored. With no news on an expansion yet it doesn't sound like they'll have one ready. Who knows, maybe it will be a big surprise.

I need to post something

2009-05-25T20:24:00.002-04:00

I am so bad at this. I need to try and post more often.

So what should I post about? I guess I should comment about Darkfall. The game is in an obvious downward spiral. The shop to purchase the game has finally been opened for several days, perhaps permanently. I don't play the game so I have no idea what the population situation is, but with the developers sticking with a one server implementation, it appears they have exhausted their backlog of players iching to play. That certainly does not bode well if the amount of people quitting is as estimated.

Darkfall promised a lot and has utterly failed in almost every field a MMO can possible fail in. Poor user interface, bad lag and disconnections, a multiple of hacks, unending amounts of exploits, substandard graphics, no community management, a website with the latest announcements about beta, no marketing, unfun PvM, sparse PvP, unbalanced mechanics favoring huge numbers and alliances, etc. It just goes on and on.

Darkfall is in such bad shape that quite possibly it could end up shutting down by the end of the year. Aside from some current die-hard players, no one has any faith in the future of the game. People who cite potential are only fooling themselves. Everything has potential. UO has potential. Shadowbane had potential. Potential is only worth something if it can be utilized, which Aventurine has demonstrated an inability to access. They can't even update the main website for the game after 3 months of release. Darkfall is likely to go down as the worse MMO in history unless by some miracle the game can be salvaged.

Suspended from Darkfall's Forum

2009-05-05T18:53:00.002-04:00

I've been meaning to write something about Darkfall for a while. Well today a review came out that gave the game a 2 out of 10. That is pretty bad. Anyway, I post on the Darkfall forum asking if this is the first review of Darkfall and get suspended for it. Here is what I recieved:

Dear JC the Builder,

You have received an infraction at Darkfall Forums.

Reason: THREE - You may not excessively communicate the same idea, phrase, or create spam within the community; you may not create any thread or post for the sole purpose of causing unrest in the community; you may not cause any sort of disturbance within a thread with the intent of ruining it; and you may not make one line posts such as IBTL, IBTB, BUMP, etc. Moderators are at their full discretion to enforce the spirit of this rule.
-------
Please refrain from trolling, thank you.
-------

This infraction is worth 10 point(s) and may result in restricted access until it expires. Serious infractions will never expire.

Original Post:
http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?p=3345212

Quote:

Can someone link to another review of Darkfall? I am having trouble finding any. Does this mean the first official review of Darkfall by a gaming website gave it a 2 out of 10? That is not good.

All the best,
Darkfall Forums

That was almost immediately after I posted it. Aventurine appears to be in full damage control mode. Their developer Tasos wrote a rebuttal almost as long as the review itself. He claims that the reviewer spent almost no time in the game. No play session lasted more then a few minutes. Eurogamer replied saying the reviewer spent around 9 hours. I'm sure more details will come out soon.

Someone replied to my post saying there is one on MMORPG.com. But there isn't, the closest is an opinion piece. No review with a score. After almost a full page of responses later, no one has replied to that person and stated this. The vast majority of replies are just remarks dispariging the reviewer and investigative posts of his MySpace or other reviews. I think this event shows the current Darkfall community in its true light. And that light isn't very bright at all.

More on a New UO Client

2009-04-23T00:22:00.003-04:00

Continuing on with what I posted yesterday, I know there would be a couple issues trying to graft a 3d engine on the current UO world. A real one, not the one we saw with 3rd Dawn. Perhaps more than just a few problems too........

But I don't see anything that would outright prohibit it. The world might need a bit of changing so it isn't full of flat forests with trees laid out in unusually symmetric patterns. Perhaps the 1st person would only be available inside dungeons and buildings. I see this type of upgrade as the easier of two paths to restart the game. The other being a huge effort to bring 1997 isometric graphics to 2009, not 2001 which Kingdom Reborn tried to do. Even then, if that was the only upgrade performed the developers would need to combine it will a huge amount of game play enhancements in the all realms: PvM, PvP, sailing, housing, crafting, etc. Every single system would need a new and involved feature.

For UO to reverse its decline, you need something compelling to draw the attention of every MMO player out there. There needs to be something enticing them to at least give UO another 14 day trial. It all needs to go in simultaneously so when you login you see lots of other people playing with you.

The Stygian Abyss has the potential to do this. That is quite a big if there though, considering we have little idea of what is going on. At the moment it sounds like an average UO expansion. New dungeon(s), a couple new skills, a new system to revive crafting, etc. That is not going to cut it by a long shot. It might help maintain the status quo, but it is unlikely to turn subscriptions around.

As far as expansions go, the last two sucked. The most recent Mondain's Legacy was billed as a return to the game's "roots". Virtually everything about it failed. Recipes are nothing more than an one time annoyance, crafting quests in Heartwood are all "make x and have a 0.01% chance of getting a good drop", and the whole elf thing was just a marketing ploy to begin with. It didn't really "expand" the game at all. The same thing with Samurai Empire. New lands and two new skills which had a pitiful amount of abilities. It is no wonder players have lost interest in UO over the past 6 years. The game has gotten absolutely stagnate in terms of content additions.

If you go look back at the patch notes from 1999, 2000, and 2001 it appears they are doing stuff every single month. Not only that, but there was already so much stuff to do that you didn't hang off of every publish. It just added to your list or fixed stuff. In the past 2 years the majority of publishes have been to either fix/launch the Kingdom Reborn client or event related. The problem with events is they are short term.

I think I got a little off track in this post. I'll just end it here and try again another time.

UO Client Trailers

2009-04-21T23:16:00.003-04:00

Here is a trailer for a new UO client I have thought up. If I had the patience, time and knowledge on how to do this, I think it would look really great. But I have none of those so you will just have to pull out your imagination and work with me.

So there is an ancient looking book which opens up to the first page. It shows a screenshot of a player sitting in a small house. There is a chair and a table. Maybe an empty bookcase. There is also a date, 1997, at the heading of the page. The page then turns to 1998. A few decorative items are added to the house. Perhaps some furniture introduced with The Second Age expansion. Do you see the theme?

As this is going on there is a narrator explaining what is going on. He is saying something like "For over a decade, Ultima Online has been growing and expanding....." I've not put a lot of thought into what the narrator says. So just know that it is there. Use your imagination and put words in his mouth. He won't mind.

So the pages keep turning. 1999, 2000. Maybe the leaves on the trees outside die showing that the changover to Trammel. As the years go on, two or three items are added to the house showing the growth of the game. When you arrive in 2008 it is filled with stuff. Then the announcer says something like "a lot has changed, but none more so than what is to come". The page turns once more to 2009.

You are greeted with a much larger image. It looks pretty much the same though. But something is different. The graphics are sharper and more clear. The page notes that the resolution is in 1280x720. The screen then zooms in on various parts to showcase the new high definition graphics. It looks exactly the same as the 2D client except much better. It is on par with what you see in Blizzard's Starcraft II and Diablo III screenshots. There is a fireplace going showcasing the new lightning effects.

The screen zooms back out to standard view. Now players would probably be very happy with this. It looks like an isometric game released in 2009. But then the narrator brings out the big twist! He rotates the camera angle. "For the first time you can now see all angles of the game world". You get to see the back of a house for the first time. There is full rotation, 360 degrees. This is it, the big new improvement for the client. The new hook to draw people in. You can zoom and rotate the camera. It looks spectacular. Everything UO players have been waiting for 10 years.

The screen begins to fade. But the narrator tells it to stop. He's not done yet. You have to see the best part. The screen snaps back to standard view. It starts to zoom in you think. But it is not the same this time. It goes over the shoulder of the avatar. Could it be? Yes it is! First person view. You are now staring at the desk, where you were writing. You look up at a painting on the wall. It is so big. It then switches to 3rd person over the shoulder view and whips around. You see a closeup of the avatar's face. It has an actual expression. Then the door opens behind into a bright light. The narrator says something like, "take your first step into the new world". End trailer.

First things first, I think up until the rotatable camera part could be applied to the upcoming Stygian Abyss client. A trailer similar to that would be absolutely killer as long as the client is solid.

As for the rest, you are probably wondering how that can all be done. It has been stated that camera rotation would be impossible for UO. It is as the client is being designed. For some reason the developers wanted to stick with sprites. Unfortunately that means you are limited to one field of view. I believe that switching to polygon models would have been possible. There may have been a tiny reduction in art quality, but what you would gain (camera rotation and 1st/3rd person perspectives) would make up for it. Plus all the graphics are being redone in high definition polygon models. So the walls of the house, the desk, the chair, the avatar, etc are all polygons. I would really like to see some comparisons of UO creatures done in polygons to see how much of a difference there would be.

The reason Kingdom Reborn was shunned was because it changed the look of the game. In my dreamt-up client you will be virtually unable to notice a difference in "classic" mode. You have the exact same perspective and all the art is the same, except in higher quality. You can take advantage of 1st person or rotating the camera if you wish. Or you could turn off those features and play UO the same way you did back in 1997.

If Mythic is serious about having UO have a place in the MMO marketplace they need to one of two things. Either bring the client up to Diablo III and Starcraft II art quality or add a 1st/3rd person perspective. Kingdom Reborn was a failure from the very start because it was no where near close to that.

One more trailer idea I had was for the new 1st person perspective. It opens with you traveling through an iconic UO dungeon such as the entrance of Deciet or maybe adventuring into the Wrong Troll room. The narrator is talking to you saying things like "Doesn't this place seem familiar? Have you been here before?" Chances are that person has if they played an MMO other than World of Warcraft. The trailer just ends with a shot of the UO symbol. Something like that would drive interest in UO to something unseen in a decade.

Youtube Revenue Solutions

2009-04-21T01:54:00.002-04:00

I read about how Google was losing a ton of money on Youtube. Just a few ideas I had on how they could try and stop that.

Implement Buffering - When you click to load a Youtube video, it currently loads the whole thing. If you visit a page that has it set to auto-play and you won't want to watch, you click pause. But the entire video still loads. That is a ton of bandwidth wasted. Sometimes you also begin to watch a movie and decide it isn't worth watching the entire way through. Youtube should implement buffering such as Hulu and some of the Asian video providers do. It only loads a certain amount and then stops. The bandwidth and subsequent cost savings could be huge. The developers could even add a feature to the menu bar where you can load the entire video if you wish, but buffering is on by default.

Video Subscriptions - This may not be a huge money maker, but I'm sure there are at least a few people out there who would like to sell their videos to people. Youtube could have a program where they manage all that for you. All you handle is making the videos and driving the subscribers. Youtube handles the rest from payments to video access.

HD Embedding - Do you run a website and want to host videos on it? Well Youtube could stream HD content right to your website without a watermark. You just pay either per view or for bandwidth. Currently HD embedding is possible on external websites, but is not an official supported feature.

Advertising Over Time - At the moment the advertisements that appear beside videos stay there no longer how long you are watching. On a non-video website you are always switching pages and thus viewing an array of ads. Youtube could swap out banner ads every minute or so to increase the amount shown.

I had two or three more ideas but unfortunately appear to have forgotten them when I thinking about it last week. My own fault I suppose for taking so long to write this post.

Raising the Lower Reagent Cost

2009-04-12T15:43:00.002-04:00

So I'm doing a Lord Oaks champion spawn last night with our guild. It gets to second second stage. I start summoning Earth Elementals to deal with the wisps. There isn't much going on so I start thinking about the act of summoning an Earth Elemental and how it is funny to create something out of nothing (because I have 100% Lower Reagent Cost, it takes not reagents to cast any Magery spells). I jump to thinking that it might be an idea to change Lower Reagent Cost to be less effective on higher level Magery spells.

You see, ever since LRC (the abbreviation for Lower Reagent Cost) was introduced 6 years ago with the Age of Shadows expansions, it has been a disease on the game. When the people who designed item properties did so, they expected that it would be impossible for players to get 100% of anything. They even let you get as higher Lower Mana Cost as you want. If a cap was never introduced, we could be casting spells using no mana today!

So getting 100% LRC was probably thought to be virtually impossible. And if you did manage it you would be sacrificing other properties in the process. But here we are today where neither has proven true. Virtually every magic caster runs around with 100% LRC and every other important property.

Over time a few developers have expressed opinions that LRC needs to be dealt with. Reagent use was supposed to be a key balancing factor in casting magic spells. It prevented players from fighting indefinitely and more importantly acted as a gold sink due to only being able to acquire reagents from NPC vendors. But, of course, players have gotten so used to running around with no worries that any time it is brought up there is a huge backlash.

Well back to my idea. What if higher level spells required reagents? For example you need 2 reagents to cast an 8th circle Magery spell. None of the 8th circle spells are vital. You can still use your full array of healing and attacking abilities even if you run out of reagents. You just can't resurrect other players, summon elementals or cast Earthquake. All of which are very powerful spells and should require physical items to pull off. This system can also be applied to 7th circle, requiring 2 reagents or 1 reagent. Then 6th circle would be 1 reagent. For example. If you try to cast Resurrection under this system it would randomly select 2 reagents you must have and use.

I haven't seen this type of solution proposed for balancing LRC before. It could also be expanded to high skill Necromancy spells. I think this proposal could be sold to the general player base if it was thoroughly explained how the removal of reagents has negatively impacted the game.

Sound is so Complicated

2009-04-09T23:39:00.004-04:00

Special Note: This isn't very interesting. I wouldn't read this post unless you are wondering how to create a setup where you can record sound from a specific game without voice chat being included from Teamspeak/Ventrilo.

I've been working for a couple weeks to get the sound settings on my computer to a place where I can do what I want, which is basically record game sound without voice chat. Yesterday I finally got it down.

Before this all got started I had to have my regular headset and then used some iPod earbuds to listen to both computers at the same time. Main computer ran UO, laptop ran Ventrilo. It was not ideal at all. For one, the headphones were pressing against the ear buds and causing ear aches which were annoying. I also had to reach for the laptop keyboard every time I wanted to talk in voice chat.

To begin I tried various means to route the sound from my main computer to a laptop and then to my headset. I bought a cable to plug into the headphone socket and pipe all sound to the microphone socket. But that wouldn't work because then all my UO sound is going to broadcast in voice chat. So I bought a splitter to bypass connecting to the laptop. But when I had both computer on there was terrible static. I've been informed it has to do with the different groundings and I could have purchased a device to eliminate that. So the setup could have worked but I'm glad it didn't.

So then I look into methods of streaming sound over my network. I am able to use VLC to stream a movie, but can't find any method to do just computer sound. Plus there is a terrible delay which I'm sure there is a way to correct with some buffering options. But I can't buffer game actions so everything would be out of sync.

Then I read about more methods and decide to look into purchasing a sound card. Currently I was using the motherboard sound jacks. I hop on to Newegg and see the selection. I notice some Audigy cards and suddenly remember I have a computer with a sound card in it. The computer is about 8 years old so I didn't think the card would be compatible. I thought my computer (Dell Vostro 200) only had PCI-Express slots. Which was pretty silly of me because I bought a PCI wireless adapter and installed it when I bought the thing. Anyway, I rip out (literally, it was jammed in there) the sound card from the old computer, which turned out to be an Audigy 2 Platinum or something, and installed it into my current one. Their still updating drivers for it. When I downloaded it the last update was March 9.

Finally it looks like I'm getting somewhere. So I setup Ventrilo to use the sound card and Ultima Online ends using the motherboard jacks. Here I run into another problem, how do I listen to both at the same time? Then I remember the splitter and give it a second try. At the time I thought the static was from the laptop, because I do get a little bit normally. There was none. Hurray!

So now I can record videos with all game sounds while excluding voice chat. In addition the sound card makes me sound a lot clearer. I'll also probably see a boost in audio quality for newer games. UO shows no noticeable difference from either on-board or from the dedicated sound card, as I would expect from a 14 year old game.

Faction Rankings Analyzer

2009-04-06T01:11:00.000-04:00

I've got the idea now to make a web application which would harvest and display all types of interesting statistics related to UO factions. Plus I would be able to eliminate all of the ridiculous point amounts some Asian players have run up. Then we would be able to see the real stats once again, plus so much more like which faction has the most players and graphs on how member counts fluctuate.

I'm probably going to get on this very soon because each day that goes by is another day of statistics lost.

Making Videos & Drafting Posts

2009-04-02T16:39:00.003-04:00

I've never been a screenshot person. I've played UO so long but have hardly any. What I am discovering though is videos are more my forte.

Some people have probably seen my channels on Veoh and Youtube. In the past year I've created and uploaded about 50 UO related videos. There are about 3 dozen more sitting on my hard drive which I have to get to some time.

I find it a lot of fun making them. At the same time I learn a lot about video (and now audio) editing. Plus, this creates a record of things I do along with big fights. The other day I noticed that my videos on Youtube have been viewed over 27,000 times. Combine that with Veoh and that is a lot of hits. (I don't know the total because Veoh does not list that anywhere)

Very recently I decided to start doing narrated videos. My first being a historical tour of the Tower I placed when Trammel opened up.

JC's Tower Tour [Part 1]
JC's Tower Tour [Part 2]

Originally I was using Veoh mostly due to the quality of the video. But now Youtube offers HD consistently and does not have many of Veoh's drawbacks (annoying advertisements, annoying related videos taking up the whole page, annoying removal of nice features for me to use).

Another narrated video I plan on making soon is one where I explore the history of UO houses I've owned/used. There is a lot of interesting stories there to tell.

Finally, there are a couple blog posts currently in draft form. One in particular I hope to get posted soon is about a design for a 7th Champion Spawn type. This is an idea I've been kicking around since they first introduced the whole system.

iPhone for Gaming

2009-03-27T01:55:00.002-04:00

I see a lot of people commenting how the iPhone is held back from having great games because it is touch screen only. Why doesn't a company make an add-on which will give you a D-pad and a couple buttons. If they manage the cost of $10 or maybe even $20, then developers could just say you need this addon to play the game. Problem solved.

Equipment Models

2009-03-21T17:28:00.003-04:00

My thoughts on Tabula Rasa will have to wait as I wish to write about something else at the moment: equipment.

In any massively multiplayer online game that I know of, there is equipment. While it is just one part of the overall game, so many other parts depend on or influence it. From loot drops to crafting to trade to player progression, etc. Lets look at different ways equipment is implemented.

In World of Warcraft (from what I read on wowwiki), equipment does not break. Even when its durability reaches 0 it just goes into a state where it provides not benefits. Your items stay with you always when you die. The only time you upgrade is when you find something better.

In Eve Online your equipment is your ship and modules. It never wears out with use. You can freely swap out anything you want. If you die you drop it all. The ship is destroyed along with half your modules. The other half drop to your corpse. You are constantly acquiring new ships and modules to replenish.

In Ultima Online's past your equipment wore out with use. You could get equipment repaired but the maximum effectiveness dropped a little. Eventually you must replace everything. If you died then you lost it (unless you managed to loot it back). You had to constantly be acquiring new equipment to keep your current level.

In Ultima Online today there are significant changes. Your equipment still wears out but you can cheaply boost it's life span indefinitely. Equipment also lasts much, much longer between repairs. Item insurance (fixed at 600 gold per item) means you get to keep all your items for relatively little cost. Thus the only thing you go after is better equipment or powder to keep up your current set.

World of Warcraft's equipment model depends on new pieces to be constantly introduced to the game in order to keep things interesting. New items are usually very difficult to obtain at first. Later on the difficulty is toned down and in turn the equipment becomes more common. Eventually giving way to new and better stuff. One example of this is the tiered armor sets introduced each season. They are even numbered so you know which are the latest and greatest. Currently up to number 8.

World of Warcraft's model is to consistantly introduced new equipment and obsolete older pieces.

Eve Online's equipment model depends of players dying and needing new items. New equipment is introduced into the game, but it usually serves a specific purpose and does not replace currently usefulness. While there are new "tiers" (referred to as Tech II, and recently Tech III) , they are much more expensive than base items. And as mentioned earlier, when you die you lose it all. Thus, no equipment is made obsolete because cheap models and ships are useful in their own situations.

Eve Online's model is to periodically introduce new equipment which expands into completely new areas or add slightly more powerful modules which are more signficatly more costly than originals.

Ultima Online's equipment model was tied most closely with real life. As was what Richard Garriott intended which his design. Players acquired items, used them, wore them out or lost them and got new equipment. The level of your equipment depended on how much you were willing to work/pay for. Game expansions added brand new equipment which was different from what was already available. Never replacing it.

Ultima Online's original model was to add new types of equipment, but no enhancements on the originals.

Now on to today's model. From the Age of Shadows expansion onward, equipment was modified to be fully repairable akin to the World of Warcraft model. This however was stated to be a bug in the code which unfortunately was not fixed for a long time. The introduction of Item Insurance made it so player's no longer had to worry about item loss on death. Now the constant progression of always going after the latest and greatest equipment began. Many items are now considered trash, and as such are never looted from creature corpses. Most player crafted equipment also past the point where it was no longer used by anyone. Expansions since (Samurai Empire and Mondain's Legacy) added new equipment once again. But a lot went unused by players due to it being below current equipment types in usefulness. For example some new weapons such as the Compsite Bow and Bokuto have replaced the normal Bow and Halberd.

Ultima Online's current model is to add either better equipment which replaces current items or equipment which is ignored for various reasons.

The current UO model is very broken.

What is so Difficult About Making a Good Post?

2009-03-17T21:28:00.002-04:00

I participated in the final hours of the Tabula Rasa universe and am currently working on getting a video uploaded of it. Unfortunately I didn't realize I had it set to my usual UO setting of 800x600 recording area instead of full screen. So you get a really good shot of the chat window (which as you can imagine is going crazy the whole time) and about 1/3 of the game area. It is too bad that it turned out this way because I collected a lot of great footage including a run through of the Earth level with all the monsters just standing there because the server was lagged out. Well if I had to pick a small area of the screen to get the chat window would have been it.

There (might) be a post on my thoughts about this tomorrow.

Also when I went to uninstall the game it was quite a hassle. First there wasn't any uninstall utility in the root folder. So I went to Add/Removed programs and tried to locate it there. It wasn't under "T" for Tabula Rasa. It wasn't under "N" for NCSoft's Tabulas Rasa. It wasn't under PlayNC (which is the launching utility for NCSoft games). Can you guess where it was? Yes, it was under "Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa". Arn't we all glad UO isn't named "Richard Garriott's Ultima Online".

What is so Difficult About Making a Good Game?

2009-02-23T00:00:00.001-05:00

What is the thing game programmers always say. That they want to make fun and successful games. Something like that. You know, when they apply for their job or write down their life goals. But then they get hired and are told what to do. They do it even though they know it won't be fun or successful. But they have to, because their manager/director/king told them to.

It is just so amazing to me how many games have the potential to be good but are run into the ground. Say for instance Warhammer Online. The game is billed around never ending war. Big PVP battles and never ending fights. That sort of stuff. It sounds like loads of fun!

The director who made the game probably hopped in a couple scenarios and had fun. It is fun.................the first couple times. Which is all he played. And it could continue to be fun..................if there are people queuing up to take part. But is quickly degrade into a grind for experience which they don't see. And the director doesn't realize that people are not having fun because they see good numbers of participants. But if you go to any forum or solicit player feedback, he would hear how unfun his game is.

Warhammer Online has 2 aspects of PVP, Scenarios and Realm vs Realm. Scenarios are downright boring after a while. They rely on too many variables (class types, people queuing up, server population balance, group cohesion) and thus can be considered not fun. When I played some rounds we could not even leave the starting area. We were trapped like new players in a guard zone. Except we had much less freedom. So Scenarios are not a reliable source of PVP.

Then there is RvR combat. You run around taking battlefield objectives and keeps. If no one shows up to defend you just kill monsters. No PVP at all. That can happen a lot. If you do see some defense, it is just a huge choke hold fight. You are trying to break down a door to get inside. Then another door. Then run up some stairs. There is never a big open battle or chance for large engagement. The sides are usually very lopsided.

What is my point here? The point is there is no solid PVP experience in Warhammer Online. They launched with this and have not done anything to correct it. Instead of trying to move the game in a new direction they tweak it. But it never becomes more fun, just more standardized. The people who quit are not going to return because suddenly the Keep Lord does not bug out and kill himself. Or you can no longer use a certain buff on door hit points.

Warhammer, as do every game, needs to have some consistent fun that keeps you wanting to play.

The Toilet Clashes with the Drapes

2009-02-22T16:53:00.002-05:00

Two in a row. Could it be?

What should have been a rather simple and innocent decoration contest has turned into a new source of player complaints and controversy. One winner is now requesting that the UO developers pick another design instead of his own. I don't see how it can get much worse than that.

The main point of contention that I can see is some of the winning designs go a bit further than adding some new shrubs and window dressings. We haven't seen every winner yet (mainly because for some inexplicable reason the winning designs were not posted with the results) but two include a moongate. The winner who is requesting his design be pulled had the moongate along with a stable, archery range, arcane circle, forge, and tailoring amenities. About the only thing missing was an ankh for tithing chilvary.

This contest was obviously a response to how the community team for Asian shards decorate their banks every so often. I have gone and seen those designs and they were nothing like this. They did not repurpose the bank into a replica of Luna. They added some tables, chairs, flowers and maybe a little dock. If it is Christmas they put up some trees and snow. That sort of thing.

The fault here I would place on the person who designed the contest rules. It should have been more strict as to what you can do. After some time a note was added telling participants that multi-story banks would not be allowed. I would really like to see some of those designs. There was probably one that added at least 2, perhaps even 3 new floors. It would have been taller than Lord British's Castle.

There should have been a bullet point that stated you could only add decorations. No additional functions such as moongates or teleporters or forges. There should have even been one encouraging people to keep it light and not stick an item over every tile of the banking area. Perhaps even be a rule where they had the freedom to make alterations on the submitted design.

We'll have to sit back and see where this goes. I would expect a statement about the entire contest situation no later than Tuesday, otherwise the bickering is only going to get worse as more designs are released by the winners.

Taking the Game out of the Game

2009-02-21T21:11:00.002-05:00

Getting back into a posting flow is turning out to be quite difficult for me. You may or may not have noticed this.

Yesterday it was announced on the Stratics U Hall that the rewards at Event Moderator events were being modified. Many avid MMO players would call this a nerf. They would be 100% right.

In the past few weeks there have been complaints on Stratics about the rewards being given out. I didn't say a lot. I am actually thinking about going back and counting how many there were. It has been posted that one of the EM staff said that Stratics complaints were the main reasoning behind the reward distribution change. Since the announcement there have been at least 200 replies commenting on it. It would be interesting to see how many are for and against this change.

The change itself is as follows. No longer are Event Moderators allowed to give a limited amount of an item they choose. Now they have to give the same item out to everyone. The "winners" of the event get a slightly better item with their name and date attached. Isn't that just grand?

Of course it isn't. Let me relate to you all a past event I had the pleasure of participating in. We had to find these Orge Lords who stole some grapes. They were scattered throughout the land. After defeating them we looted the grapes, of which I can say there were certainly not enough for everyone to have. You had the chance to turn in those grapes and get a bottle of Delucia wine. That was the event. If that event ran today either the grapes would not be lootable or the Event Moderator would have to offer them to everyone. But then why would we go retrieve them if there were plenty left over? It kills the entire story of the event.

These changes in the name of fairness are the same as how there is a push in education/sports to make everyone feel the same. No keeping score are that football game! Everyone gets a gold star on their report, even if the paper only has their name on it! No one is going to have their feelings hurt or might be encouraged to try harder next time.

When those Orge Lords invade Trinsic, no need to slay them. Just come back at the end and get your free shiny items with your name on them.

Disbanded Brothers

2009-02-08T23:08:00.002-05:00

I know I said I was going to start posting again on the new year. I guess this is just another shining example of how web blogs can be so sporadically updated.

In recent days there has been a lot of talk in the "MMO World" about how a certain alliance of guilds in Eve Online, consisting of thousands of people, was disbanded by a turncoat. I used to play a bit of Eve Online (did I already mention this? I am too lazy to check), so I know a thing or two about the game. There are huge areas of the game you can actually fight to control. That is why you need mega-alliances, to defend your space.

When the alliance was disbanded, control of that space was instantly lost. This might not be a big deal as long as you are not currently taking part in a huge war in which the enemy has been ruthlessly destroying you. Opps, it was. So now there is a huge rush into the enemies former strong hold, burning down down and stealing their assets.

While what happened was completely within the confines of the game and not exploiting a bug, I still think there is something not right here. Eve Online is and always has had an extremely high level of player espionage taking place. The game is even setup to encourage it. But to design the game in such a way that someone can pull something like this off is rather soul crushing to the people who spent years and years building it. There obviously should have been some mechanics in place which do not allow someone to instantly kick guilds out of an alliance and take it all to themselves unless you are the head person in charge (which this person was not).

There is so much interesting stuff lately to muse about.

New Year: New Posts

2008-12-29T22:48:00.001-05:00

I plan on restarting this blog on January 1. I got side tracked by my connection issues (which are still happening, blarg). See you then!

Corruption, In Eve Online, That's Unlikely!

2008-12-14T15:27:00.002-05:00

Two posts in a row, also unlikely!

Eve Online just can't seem to catch a break. It seems every few months another big scandal breaks. It is interesting because the actions of one or a few people can literally affect the entire game population. This is due to the entire universe running on one "server" (actually a giant cluster) or shard in a UO term. So if for example, and this is a complete impossibility, lets say someone was to amass minerals trillions and trillions of isk (the Eve currency) for free. This would be bad.

Oh wait, it did happen. Not only did it happen but it has been going on for 4 years. Not only was it going on for 4 years but it was reported multiple times but apparently those reports were closed without being investigated. Opps!

Some are claiming this is the largest exploitative operation in the history of any MMO. It is probably the most successful, but definitely not the largest seeing how UO developers removed 15 trillion duped gold a couple years ago. UO gold is worth more than Eve isk. Today I see Eve isk selling for 550 million per $35. That would only buy you about 35 million UO gold. And UO gold was worth at least double when the trillions was removed.

Let me give people who don't play Eve Online a better idea of the impact. Lets say every automobile manufacturer had to raise their prices by several thousand dollars per car because the price of raw materials to make steel skyrocketed. Now apply that to every other item that needs the same materials. The people who mine these minerals suddenly found out that instead of a lot left, there was nothing. The rug was pulled out from under them. That is the breadth of this exploit. A huge majority of the minerals on the market were from this exploit because it is so difficult to make them through normal game play. I would not be surprised if the Eve developers had to make changes to make these minerals easier to make because the entire game economy currently depends on it.

Isn't it rather ironic? Here we are in the midst of wall street scandals and a recession. Suddenly the same type of thing breaks out in a MMO. The market of space ship parts is going to get a lot more expensive, in the short term at least.

For this reason, it can be a good idea to split a MMO into several isolated servers. If something like this happens on one then it will only affect a small portion of your player base. UO used to be immune to this type of thing until they implemented character transfers. And what a headache those have been, being a major source of duping since their introduction. World of Warcraft also has character transfers but Blizzard restricts the amount of gold that can be moved. It is almost not even worth the cost. UO lets you transfer over 875 items each time which can translate into 875 million gold checks. Blizzard restricted you to 10,000 gold and I think they just raised the limit to 20,000. Plus you can only transfer a character once per month while UO let you do it without restriction until rather recently.

Putting aside everything said so far, there is even more to talk about. As I mentioned the person who initially discovered this bug actually reported it. That report was closed with a thanks, but nothing was ever done. For whatever reason, this player went on for the next 4 years to benefit from this. Other people have come forward claiming they also reported it over the years but nothing was ever done. In the past, Eve has suffered from some rather corrupt employees. It is possible that they were also trying to benefit from this new found exploit. It took the report getting to the right person this time for something to be done.

The results of this exploit are still coming out. The Eve team has yet to really explain the scope and impact. Going by the number of outraged players on their own official game forum, it is not something they will be able to keep under wraps as I bet they wish to.

Fleshing Out a Concept

2008-12-13T15:57:00.003-05:00

I am going to make a post today, damn it.

Even though I no longer play Warhammer Online, I still check out the IGN Warhammer discussion forum. Specifically, I like to see if Mark Jacobs has anything interesting to say. He is after all the one who is in charge of Ultima Online and is not the typical MMO guy in that he posts a lot. But that seems to have died down a bit now that Warhammer isn't the hit people were hoping for. He has stopped posting on the F13 forum from what I can see and has slowed down greatly on IGN. Before I stray too far, I think part of the reason he wants his own Warhammer Forum is so he can have much greater control.

Anyway, on IGN I saw this topic linked to on the Warhammer Alliance forum. From what I gather, most people on IGN think down about Warhammer Alliance, so this is a bit of a surprise and peaks my interest. Inside is a suggestion about how Mythic could fix the Open Realm vs Realm situation. While brief, it outlines perfectly one method that could be used. More importantly it makes perfect sense. So much so that there has been 472 replies and over 15,000 views in just 10 days. The response is overwhelmingly positive.

The design talks about how Mythic is on the wrong track. At every step, the rewards go to the individual person instead of progressing to encompass more people. The first level is killing another player. You get rewarded specifically for that instead of the current design which allows you to gain points through other means. If you can only gain credit for killing players to progress, then there is no way around it. This makes a lot of sense.

Then it moves on to Keeps. Once again Mythic only rewards ~5 players with elite loot no matter how many people took part. The author suggests changing it around completely. Make it so a guild can only level up by owning a Keep. At the moment a guild can level up through many other means and it is automatic. If you can only level by Keep ownership then players are going to want to defend those. Guilds will feel pride and be respected for their high level and accomplishments.

The next stage up is controlling entire areas. There is really no reward for this at the moment. Instead, owning certain areas could reward the controllers. You could have access to special dungeons or quests. The faction that controls them reaps the rewards. It would encourage players to struggle for the zones rather than plow through them for hopes of attacking the other capital city. A much more natural and balanced process.

Finally there is the capital city, which once again focuses on individual rewards as Keeps do. As he put it, "Sieging a Capitol. Just like Zone Control, this should not reward the individual, it should reward your Realm. Having best loot from City Sieges == epic fail."

Sometimes you can't just pick out one thing and try to fix it when the entire concept is flawed. It is quite apparent that major changes need to be made to the oRvR system in Warhammer to make it more engaging and rewarding for players. Mythic has intertwined too many non-PVP aspects into the equation and players are not embarcing it. World of Warcraft started making the same mistake when they added a bunch of boss objectives for Battlegrounds. Players began focusing on the PvM instead of the PvP.

The Faction system in UO had it right when the entire faction was rewarded with war horses and town guards. Unfortunately this became rather insignificant over time, especially after the Age of Shadows expansion. While the recent changes have helped give Factions new life, there needs to be greater incentives for players to want to capture and defend cities.

There is going to be a post tomorrow too.

Return of the Postings

2008-12-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

Internet is still up and down. I called 2 days ago and they said it was an outage in the area and they are working on fixing it. We'll see.

Today I watched a 55 minute speed run for Super Metriod. I never had a chance to play that game. Watching someone else makes me feel like I missed out. Playing games when they first come out is when you can have the maximum fun. Unfortunately picking up a 14 year old game like this one, while it might be interesting, won't have the same excitement as say Fallout 3. It is just so dated.

Anyway, one thing I was impressed with this run was all the hidden items. In the Metriod series there is a number of power ups that you have to collect to progress in the game. But there are even more, such as extra missiles, that are not required. Almost always the ones you don't need are hidden and you have to find them. Some are easy to stumble upon while others can be absurdly difficult. To the point where you would have to read a guide to find.

Ultima Online certainly has its share of secret areas. Early on there was hidden valley that could be accessed by a false mountain door (which is actually broken and you see the entrance clearly now). There was the underground mage laboratories and tower in the Hedge Maze (which was completely removed due to Kingdom Reborn client limitations). Hmm, maybe I should mention something still in the game. The door into the inner Khaldun chamber works on most shards. On the one I play Atlantic, it was stuck open for the longest time so you could just walk inside.

Actually it seems a lot of UO's secret stuff has just become broken or obsolete. The Terathan Keep levers don't work anymore. The Despise lever area doesn't appear to do anything. The door into the Doom mage shop was sealed accidentally at one point. A gate was added so you could just walk into the star room instead of clicking the brazier.

When you have a good train of thought it is terrible for something to interrupt it, such as my persistent connection issues. I had lots of good ideas for this post but they seemed to have whittled away. Something much better tomorrow I hope.

=[

2008-12-04T19:44:00.001-05:00

It was a good run

2008-11-30T17:54:00.002-05:00

Farewell dear friends......................

No, actually I have been having absolutely horrid packet loss for the past few days. I thought this had been resolved a week ago. Things were going fine but it seems to have returned for the time being. I am going to have to call up my internet service provider on Monday.

Unfortunately trying to get long posts up on Blogger is impossible when under this condition. I will try and resume again tomorrow.

Two Different Methods of Item Balance

2008-11-28T16:44:00.002-05:00

This post did not make it up on time! I'm sorry but after all the Thanksgiving excitement I just did not feel like sitting down and writing something. I felt more like sleeping.

Since the dawn of time players and developers have fought an epic battle over item balance. Developers would create items. Players would gather those items, combine them, abuse them. Developers would have to come down with the mighty nerf bat and swing it in many directions, breaking up these unbalancing combinations. The players would then come back and rebuild what had been ruined.

Actually for Ultima Online, this has only been an issue since the Age of Shadows expansion. Before that there were very few properties and items were designed to be expendable. That all changed though with dozens of new properties and equipment lasting forever. There is next to no information available as to the design and thought process when it came to making these new systems. So we can only go by experiance.

When Age of Shadows launched there were no cumulative caps on item properties. None. So you could stack as many as you could find. If I had to guess, I would say that the developers planned on balancing properties at the creation stage. They would only carefully evaluate what items could be introduced into the world. But even before new stuff was being added, the system fell apart.

One completely unbalancing property was Lower Mana Cost. At launch, it was possible for players to accrue up to 68% Lower Mana Cost. So an eight circle spell Earthquake which normally cost 50 mana, now cost 16. You could easily cast Earthquake, an extremely devastating damage spell, a dozen or more times in a row compared to just 2 before the expansion. If this was left alone, today it is most likely possible to reach 100% Lower Mana Cost. Meaning it would take no mana to cast any spell or use special moves!

Within about 6-8 months, more and more players were loading up on the new properties. It became abundantly clear that the system was out of control. Mages were now casting spells in the blink of an eye with 4 Faster Casting (which every 1 added reduced spell timers by 0.25 seconds). But there were so many bugs introduced with the Age of Shadows expansion, that is all they could handle. Unless something allowed a player to one hit kill another, it just was not on the table. It wasn't until over a year later that the developers sat down and tried to rein it all in.

Finally the hammer fell. Lower Mana Cost capped at 40%. Faster Casting capped at 2. Many other properties were capped as well. The fundamentals behind balancing the system flipped from a per item approach to a global approach. Now developers can add any item into the game they wish without having to compare it to everything else out there. This took an enormous pressure off the team in general and freed them up their creative ability. If they wanted to add a special helm with 20% Lower Mana Cost, it was possible. Some advantageous players would not be able to take the new helm and combine it with their other equipment to reach a new level of lowering mana consumption. They will always be limited to the 40% cumulative cap.

But this opened up an entirely new problem which have never been addressed. Well one developer tried, but the concept (decreasing returns) was just unpopular and hard to understand. With a set of hard caps, players now build suits in which they can maximize as many properties as possible. So instead of having insanely high Lower Mana Cost, they have the highest amounts of Lower Mana Cost, Lower Reagent Cost, Faster Casting, Mana Regeneration, Defense Chance Increase, resistances, and anything else they desire. I actually have a potential solution to this problem and was going to reveal it as part of a series of topics on the Stratics U Hall, but never got around to it. I will post it here some time soon.

All the trimmings

2008-11-27T00:00:00.001-05:00

Yesterday's post was not as good as it should have been, I apologize. As I sit here with the smell of baking pumpkin pie dancing around me I find it very difficult to concentrate on writing this blog post. Lets hope this one turns out better.

It is a funny thing in Ultima Online history about holidays. At first every holiday was celebrated. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Valentines, St Patrick's Day. Yes, there was actually an observance of St Patrick's Day where they gave out green mugs. It was a Mature rated game back then. I doubt they could get away with observing a holiday that is mostly about drinking and being drunk today.

For the first few years, there was always holiday related stuff to be found. But then it virtually stopped. I believe the whispering Valentine day roses were the last holiday observed. They still kept up with the Christmas..........I mean holiday gifts. But for some reason every other one was tossed out the window. Only in the past year or maybe 2 years have they begun doing more holidays. They even did an IOU card for April Fools. For Thanksgiving this year all champions are appearing as turkeys. Maybe we will be treated with something more on the actual day tomorrow (or today rather since this is getting posted at midnight). Who knows.

Other MMOs such as World of Warcraft tend to celebrate their own made up holidays instead of official ones. It is pretty much up to the game designers how they want to handle it. Warhammer Online had a week long witching event to coincide with Halloween, so I guess that would be considered an official holiday instead of a made up one. Either way is fine. If you decide to make up one it wouldn't be very easy to get into a winter themed one in the middle of summer. So as much as you would like to create your own, you are still bound by the real world.

In my opinion, a game that decided to observe holidays shows a more dedicated and loving team than one that does not. Holidays are something that are experienced around the world no matter where you live. A MMO world would be a rather dull place without them.

RIP: Roger Wilco - How we barely knew thee

2008-11-26T00:00:00.004-05:00

I was so busy today I almost forgot to write a blog post!

The way MMO gamers communicate today and expect from games is a world apart from a decade ago. When I started playing UO there was no guild chat or voice chat. All communication as done by overhead chat. If you became good friends with someone you would exchange ICQ numbers and be able to converse over a distance. Thus, unless you were standing next to someone in the game you could not communicate. Even more, there was no such thing as private conversation unless you went into a house.

When UO Renaissance launched there was a new revolutionary tool, the party system. You could party up to 9 other people and chat over any distance. This is most akin to the current today's modern chat box, but not quite. The message appeared for a short time and if you missed it then you had to read your journal. Unfortunately the journal is cluttered with all the other game text. And once it scrolled out of your journal (which only holds about 100 lines) it is gone.

Despite limitations, the party system made it possible to have truly private conversations for the first time. It was possible to stealth around and eavesdrop on other unsuspecting players, even in their own home! When the Age of Shadows launched in early 2003 that became impossible because homes could now be set completely private. Around this time gamers started to take charge of their own communication abilities with 3rd party voice chat programs.

Things would never be the same. Now you could easily coordinate any activity. You were no longer restricted by what the game offered. Speaking also freed up your hands. Could you imagine not being able to talk on the phone and do whatever (driving for example) at the same time? Now you could at least double your game playing efficiency.

In the Samurai Empire expansion UO finally added the long request guild chat feature, allowing communication to everyone you know at all times. In my opinion, this was the death blow for how communication used to be. No longer did you have to party someone you know or make sure you were both in voice chat. Just press \ and speak in private guild chat. Often you will encounter people in game asking why you never talk. Well I am, it is just through voice or guild chat.

While this is obviously progress, it ends up taking away from world immersion. But there is really nothing developers can do. Players will communicate however they wish to.

One caveat, UO did implement an IRC like chat room system before the Renaissance expansion. However usage was next to nil and continues to be so to this day. In fact the button for it was removed from the Paperdoll, although you can still access the menu via a macro.

PS - The title refers to a brief stint in late 2000 when some UO players tried to start communicating via voice chat. It was not popular and died out for some reason. Perhaps due to most still being on dial up connections. Voice chat didn't become big until several years later.

The Spirit of Discovery

2008-11-25T00:00:00.001-05:00

When was the last time you "discovered" something in a MMO? You are just going about your normal business when all of a sudden you find a new creature, item or area which you never heard of. With patch notes, developer comments, wikis, forums, fansites and everything else, there isn't much room left for secrets. For the upcoming UO publish 57, which I talked about a bit a couple days ago, some people are requesting the new loot drops be published by the UO team.

My line of thinking is if it doesn't need to be listed, don't. Let players discover this stuff on their own. It isn't as if this is a change to a skill or ability. These are decorations and artifacts which already exist in the game, just available in a new way. Some people will find it fun to explore these champions while the rest will find out within a short time what they carry.

A long time ago, some UO developer secretly slipped two new items into the game. After some time had passed no one reported finding them. I have no idea how long they were in, but it was long enough that a hint was provided that they existed. Players went out and found that Efreets carried daemon bone armor pieces. The other required a second hint (search some place cold), but was found to be the Glacial Staff on Ice Serpents.

If players were already inclined to search for secrets then these items would have likely been found without dropping hints. Or maybe some players knew about them and didn't tell anyone. That would encourage more to go out and explore. But I think UO, and many other MMOs, have reached a point where nothing gets added without a note. So players just read the detailed guide on whatever they want to hunt and go do that.

Playing backseat developer for a moment, if I was working on UO or any MMO, I would make it a point that at least one secret gets put in every publish. It could be something small like a new decoration drop or something bigger like a cave with a special monster spawn. If no one finds it after a few months, then maybe a hint would be dropped. The goal would be that players would be encouraged to find this stuff on their own without hints. It is something small that will enhance the gaming experiance without a lot of effort.

Adding new content in this manner will also keep areas in the game fresh and interesting. A lot of MMOs suffer from the area treadmill of expansions, new ones replacing older ones. While the thrill of discovey will only be open to the first few who find it, just knowing that you might be the one who makes the next one can ehance the experiance.

A House is Not Held Up by Paint and Trim

2008-11-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

These blog posts are turning out to be rather long. I am having to spend 10 minutes writing instead of the 5 I had anticipated.

When you build a house, naturally the first thing you do is pick out the paint colors and what type of moulding is going to line the walls. That is the foundation of a good house. Isn't it?

Of course not. But when it comes to games these days, players think that graphics are what sells. Pretty avatars and dazzling special effects can help draw someone in, but they won't stay if the floors are sagging and squeaky because the plywood under sheathing was not fastened correctly.

I am mixing too many metaphors in here. Let me just stick to gaming. Ever since Everquest came on the scene, there have been heated debates over whether UO should upgrade graphics to be more "modern". People advocating a more modern style usually point to the game released that week (Everquest, World of Warcraft, Crysis, etc). Can you imagine how great it would look to stack 10,000 explosion kegs and let them blow up with the Crysis game engine? Of course only 5 people in the world would be able to run it on their computer, but still it would look pretty!

The graphics for a game is the outermost part of the structure. Like paint on a wall, it displays the story and creatures and objects. It is not necessary for function (as proven by early games which had no graphics) but it helps define the experience. If you stripped out all the graphics from World of Warcraft and Everquest II, what would you be left with? Move north. Move north. Attack orc. Loot gold.

If a developer expects to make up shortfalls in their game with eye candy, 9 times out of 10 it isn't going to work. You might trick some people into buying the game but experiance will quickly spread through word of mouth. The movie industry does something similar when they know a film is going to bomb. They don't have advanced showings and just cross their fingers that they make back what they paid to produce the movie on the opening weekend. After that no one goes to see it because word spread how terrible it is.

Where is all this going? Let me try and spell it out. If you have a good game, it does not matter what it looks like. You just need to make it as solid and fun as possible. If you can afford nice graphics, then do it. But don't bite off more than you can chew and end up with inconsistent, cheesy and just plain bad looking art. UO has tried this twice now with Third Dawn and recently with Kingdom Reborn. The quality just wasn't there due to a rushed product and obvious budget constraints.

When I see people talking about how great Ultima Online used to be, they don't mention the art. They talk about additions or nerfs or expansions. If someone has seen a comment that stated "oh I would play UO but the graphics are just so bad!" please link me to it. Plus the people who chase after games for their art are just going to leave when the next game with jaw dropping visuals arrives later in the month. Chasing after these people for your game is futile.

Borehammer - Age of Scenarios

2008-11-23T00:00:00.003-05:00

The original layout was quite boring. I am quite partial to this design. It is the same as the one I created for the UORares website. Over time I will make more adjustments as I think of them.

I was going to write about this yesterday but then the whole closing of Tabula Rasa thing came up. Might as well write about what is most relevant that day! For the second time ever (the first being Eve Online), I went out to see what all this new generation MMO hoopla is about. I should mention I tried World of Warcraft for 14 days several years ago, but never intended to pick up the game.

The game: Warhammer Online
The lure: Massive PVP encounters
The result: I lasted 3 weeks

"Experience the glory of Realm vs. Realm! Declare your allegiance and join hundreds of thousands of mighty heroes on the battlefields of Warhammer Online" or so the website claims. War is not everywhere. When I played it was mostly in Battlegrounds...........errr........I mean Scenarios. They are the exact same thing from the way everyone talks (I've never seen the inside of a World of Warcraft Battleground). Two teams fight over objectives and try to reach the highest score. The problem is it is the same thing again and again and again and again. Even if your team wins all the time, it can be really boring. Only 1 out of 10 matches I would estimate were really fun for me. Most of the time one side overwhelmingly crushed the other.

There were a lot of issues with the Scenario system. The biggest being that it relied on random chance for both sides to be equal. Unlike World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online restricts Scenarios to be from the same server only. That is a major flaw in my opinion. Players are always complaining how they want to do more than just the single one people farm experiance in. If they just made it cross-server, then this problem would be eliminated. The sides could be more balanced too because the pool of players queueing would be huge. Sometimes you can begin and know that loss is inevitible because your team has no healers or tanks.

When I stopped playing, I never saw a Scenario go off with more than 15 people. But there was room for up to 36 people. I would have loved to see one with 30 on each side. That could have been exciting. The kind of fun boasted about on all the advertisements. But most of the time you only have 8-10 people. Less when they start leaving because your side is not doing well.

The worst part about all this is Scenarios are required if you want to level fast for the end game. But it can either go really well or not be an option depending on the Order/Destruction balance on your server. There are quest and monsters to kill, but it just doesn't go as fast unless you get with a group of people and run the risk of getting banned for killing mobs too fast.

All in all, I think Scenarios are one of the biggest issues in Warhammer Online at the moment but the developers don't want to nerf them. Instead they are frantically trying to make open Realm vs Realm (which I will cover in another post later on) more appealing. But it has completely back-fired on them. Now "mortal enemies" are gaming the system and just handing the keeps you capture back and forth to farm the rewards. It is just a huge mess.

Too bad there couldn't have been more matches like the one above ending with 1 point difference. One kill deciding the entire fight! Instead the spread averaged 200 points or more.

Tabula Setsa

2008-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00

For those who haven't noticed, this blog is updating every day at 12AM Eastern. There is this nice feature where I can set the time the posts go live.

We all saw it coming. Tabula Rasa lost its creator, Richard Garriott, just a few short days ago. He said it was because of a new found enlightenment on his recent journey into space. Conspiracy theorists probably conclude it is from solar radiation and he is now being controlled by aliens. Myself? I think he is just tired of making games. He has been doing it all his life. While he enjoyed a lot of success up to Ultima franchise including Ultima Online, things have not kept pace. While City of Heroes could be considered a success, it wasn't a hit. Now his latest creation, some kind of space universe, has met its demise.

I have never tried the game myself. Actually I picked up a copy for $1 at Gamestop a couple weeks ago when they were on clearance. That is certainly a bad sign in itself when your game is no longer going to be sold at the largest game retailer in the country. I suppose I will give it a go in a couple weeks, see what it is all about. Learn more about why it wasn't well received.

But I can form a few theories by just reading the box. First of all it prominently displays Richard's name at the top of both sides. "A science fiction epic from Richard Garriott". I bet more than a few casual gamers have said "who is this guy?" The box doesn't say anything about it, just that he made this game. If you are going to display someone's name prominently on your product, it might be a good idea to have a sentence or two explaining who the heck he is. Perhaps something like, "Richard Garriott, the father of the modern MMO, of which millions of players now enjoy in a variety of worlds." Then someone may say "hey, this guy was the one who invented World of Warcraft? I should check this game out!" Not exactly true, but a sub is a sub.

The top headline on the back of the box, below an even bigger headline exclaiming who made this game, states "Explore massive alien worlds, immerse yourself in deep storylines, and face the consequence of the choices that you make." How many people are going to care about deep story lines? I am not joking here. Hardcore players rarely do. Casual players might have a passing interest. This is just not a selling point of games today. Deep story is not going to pull people in. It will help keep the people already playing. If you are going to advertise this on your box, at least tell me what the story involves. I don't even see the name of any alien race on this box. People read books for a deep story. People play games to have fun. Several games have actually had such convoluted stories recently, that it might turn some people off.

Next headline down, "Take Role-Playing to the Battlefield!" Are you kidding? Whoever designed this box is not very good at marketing. I just grabbed the box for Bioshock (real journalistic research here), lets see what is says. "Bioshock is a shooter unlike any you've ever played, loaded with weapons and tactics never seen." Unlike anything I've ever played? Hmm, that sounds interesting. It goes on to say how you can modify your DNA to fight and stuff. It actually tells you what the game is about. There is absolutely no mention on the Tabula Rasa box about this "deep story" that is supposed to draw me in. I was going to compare it to the Warhammer Online box, but that has nothing but a picture on the DVD package. I can't locate the sleeve that it came in at the moment.

You can't judge a book by its cover, but it certainly helps. The last thing I am going to nitpick, because there isn't much else to do since I haven't played the game yet, is this absolutely ridiculous blank space. There is a section that lists 3 features (consensual PVP, crafting & economy [whatever that means, what MMO doesn't have those?], and voice chat). The list itself is fine. The space underneath where you could fit 2-3 more points is not. It is just devoid of information or aesthetics. Is this an omen as to what the game itself will be like? I'll do another post once I actually try out the game.

Making a Reward Rewarding

2008-11-21T00:00:00.003-05:00

I am wondering whether or not I will be able to come up with a topic each day. This is actually pretty fun to do. I hope I will be able to keep up with it.

A rather big set of change is coming to Ultima Online. Bigger than perhaps anything else in the past 3 years. For those who don't follow UO, there has not been an expansion since August 2005. So this is no exaggeration. (I am purposefully ignoring Kingdom Reborn)

Publish 57 brings three new things to the game. There is the Scroll of Transcendence which will accelerate skill gain. There are decorative rewards being added to all champion spawns. Then there are the powerful new replica artifacts being added to champions as well. I am going to focus on the new item drop rates more than anything else.

When you add something permanent to a MMO, it needs to last. If you add a boss, there should be a reason that players need/want to defeat it over and over. At the moment there is no reason at all to do the champion spawns in Ilshenar facet because they drop no loot at all. This is not a joke. In fact none of the champion spawns added with Samurai Empire or Mondain's Legacy had special loot either. I can't imagine why this happened. Why would you go through the trouble of adding a boss and forgo a reason for players to defeat it?

Felucca facet champions are different because they drop highly desired Power and Stat Scrolls, unavailable anywhere else in the game. This draw is so great that all group PVP in UO has shifted to revolved around them. Massive guilds have been formed to fight rival guilds over this bountiful resource. The best scrolls, boosting you to 120 skill, used to only drop 10% of the time. After 5 years, that was changed to a 20% drop. Each champion could give out up to 12 power scrolls. The Harrower can give up to 16 stat scrolls.

Okay, that should be enough explaining. What I am getting at is these special rewards were added in summer of 2002 and are still sought after to this day. This is due to their very low drop rate, difficulty in obtaining them and being a one-use item. Our guild still spends virtually every night acquiring them unless there is something else interesting to do.

Instead of a 10% or 20% drop rate, the new rewards are designed to drop 90% of the time. Not only is the drop rate so insanely high, but some of the best rewards are shared among all the champions. There are 24 champion spawns located throughout Britannia. Unless the developers plan to swap out the decorations and replica artifacts every 6 months, this has no hope of lasting. We saw it with the Minor Artifacts, once insanely popular but now players throw them on the ground. Heck, we even see with the recent Halloween event. After the first 2 weeks, participation in the graveyards went way down. Once you own a piece of equipment in today's UO, you own it for life.

Unless the reward is a desired consumable, then you can't have a high drop rate. It only leads to disaster once every player has what they want for life and the market has so many that they are sold for less gold than it takes to gather in 15 minutes of hunting. The drop rate of 90% should probably be cut by 90%. A low drop rate also means when you finally get that item you want, it is that much more meaningful.

My take away strategy is you can always raise a drop rate which is found to be too low, but you can not easily reverse one too high as the items will be too numerous by the time you realize it.

MMO Video Files - An Untapped Feature

2008-11-20T00:00:00.000-05:00

As some of you may already know, I have taken quite the interest in making Ultima Online related videos this year. Most recently I am proud of the production showing a fight of the fabled Meraktus the Tormented, a spawn which had little information published about it. There are now 50 videos in total.

Something that I've had in my mind for a very long time is the creation of a program which let you record and play videos directly from the UO client. This tool does in fact exist. Unfortunately it is part of a suite of cheating software, otherwise I think it would be pretty popular.

What am I talking about exactly? Well in a normal video you have tons of image data. If you have any sizable collection of pictures or movies on your computer, you know that is what takes up the bulk of your hard drive space. In a video, each frame (of which there can be up to 32 frames per second) records the data on thousands of pixels to make up the image. For a completely uncompressed 800x600 video running at 24 frames per second, that is 11,520,000 pixels which need to be accounted for, or roughly 32MBs of data. For one second of video!

Of course that is not the entire story. Algorithms known as codecs are used to compress that data into a more reasonable size. A good quality video is going to still need about 10-20MB per minute after all is said and done.

But what if you didn't store the video as image data. What if it was stored like this....

[00:00:01] [sound] [greater heal]
[00:00:01] [mobile] [dragon turn west]
[00:00:01] [mobile] [dragon walk west]
[00:00:02] [mobile] [dragon fire breath player]

Text data takes up an insignificant amount of space in comparision. In fact this is how your game client knows what is going on. The game server sends data which is measured in the kilobytes per second instead of megabytes. If the client saved all this data to a file and then had the ability to play it back, you have a video player!

This technology has most recently been prominently featured in Halo 3. In that game the server actually saves all the data and lets players who wish to download the video file. But that is now how it would work for a MMO, the client would do the saving.

I think the first MMO which does this is going to have a major hit on their hands. This is a completely unused technology. I cringe at what would happen if Blizzard implemented it for World of Warcraft. Of course I would love to see it for UO.

Going even one step beyond, though this would be a massive undertaking. It would be so utterly amazing if a website could be designed around playing these tiny UO files. As is, you would need a copy of the Ultima Online client installed on your computer in order to play them because that is where all the image data is stored. But UO's style of art would is actually very good for use in Flash movies. It should be possible to make a website in which you could upload the UO movie file. The site would then run a program which would compile a flash movie, pulling all the relevent UO graphics, animations and sounds. Then you could watch it like any Youtube video.

Of course the file size would not be insignificant. But it would not be anywhere near as large as a normal video file. Instead of having to record every frame, it records the graphic one time and moves it around. One mobile which might take up 2-3MB of video data would only take 100KB in a flash movie. The rest of the client functions could be mimic down to the smallest detail. I wrote a special algorithm several years ago to copy UO's talk-over-heard text exactly. From the 2-tone coloring of spell text to how many characters fit on one line to the unique font style. It was actually very interesting to do.

Anyway, this was just something I've been thinking about for a long time. Perhaps one day it will happen.

Make sure you complain to the right person

2008-11-19T00:00:00.001-05:00

Two quick blog related notes:

1) I am going to try my best only to post once per day. If I didn't set this limit then I would probably end up spending way too much time on this.

2) I have disabled commenting for the time being because I just don't want to have to deal with moderating them. I'd rather just spend my 5 minutes writing the post and that be it. If you really want to send me a comment then there is always private message via Stratics or UOForums. Some day in the future I will enable it.

Ok, on to a topic. This past week Ultima Online players have been experiencing heavy latency and packet loss. This is the worst seen in several years at least. It affects a wide variety of players all over the country.

One thing people should know is that this isn't just a UO issue. There have been major internet slow downs, an unusual amount, this week. This does not explain all the lag, but it is one source. For me I have been facing a triple threat. There is the general lag, then the EA lag (now identified as coming from the ISP near EA's servers) and 10% packet loss within my own home network.

Anyway, there was a reveal of some interesting changes coming to the next UO publish. Immediatly people started replying quite rudely that this developer should be focusing on the lag and forget about what she is working on. Stratics moderators have since removed most of these replies.

This person's job title is "UO Associate Game Designer". I don't see anything about network administrator in there. People often take out their anger and frustration at the wrong people. I'm sure she feels sorry about what is going on, but there is literally nothing that she could personally do about it. The world continues to turn whether or not the internet is down.

I guess this post didn't really go anywhere. I thought it would. Next time I will be sure to post something more insightful then this.

An Event is an Event

2008-11-18T00:06:00.002-05:00

As is frequently the case, there is quite a few players requesting that the UO halloween events be extended. The event itself began October 29 and is scheduled to end on November 17. That is 20 full days for every player to participate, just shy of 3 weeks.

If you didn't have a chance to get out and take part in 3 weeks then it is just tough cookies in my opinion. You can't please every single person. To let every player take part this would have to be changed from an event to a content addition, something permanent. You would have Skeletal Liches terrorizing graveyards forever. That wouldn't be very desirable.

People who ask for event extensions are at least as numerous as the ones who plan on the event ending as assigned. Some people will organize their play scheduals around an event if they know it is limited. An extension would mean that their hardship and hard work was for not.

Unless there is some drastic situation, such as the game servers go down or the event content did not happen as planned, then there can of course be changes made to the schedual. But to give an extension just because it is requested is not good. One glaring issue is that Halloween was almost 3 weeks ago. It doesn't look good to be ringing in the new year with trick or treating.

Instead of clinging to the current event, players should focus on what the future holds and what exciting new event they can take part in.

A blog you say?

2008-11-17T15:38:00.002-05:00

Finally a place to post pictures of my dog or rant about how terrible my job is!

Actually, no. I am not going to do that. There are already literally millions of blogs that do that. Why would anyone want to read about your day to day activities anyway. Unless you are some movie star, then they have entire TV shows and newspapers dedicated to that. They don't even have to write their own stuff. If you have to do it yourself, chances are no one is going to care.

This is going to be a blog about thoughts and ideas I have. It is mostly going to be based on the MMO Ultima Online, video gaming in general and possibly other things. The intended audience is for anyone interested in reading about this stuff.

Why am I starting a blog? Because I don't feel there is an appropriate forum anywhere for this stuff. On Stratics U Hall there is a multitude of issues, one of which being any good topic I start gets locked because the moderators don't feel like doing their job. I have tried to post in the past on our own guild forum, but the general community there is not kind to it. First of all most hate my guts because I am the administrator. Second, due to hating my guts, anything I post is going to quickly be put down faster than a raccoon with rabies.

Thus, this was created. A place where I can just dump my thoughts, a thought dump if you will. It is nice that I came up with that name so quickly. Otherwise it would have been left blank like my profile.

The next post is going to be about world events and players complaining that they should be extended indefinitely.