Record of Motion

Even though I had previously stated that I would be playing ShadowBane until it shuts down on July 1st, I have changed my mind. An MMORPG without the MMO is no fun at all. Especially one like ShadowBane, where the entire end-game revolves around PvP combat. There is almost no one on anymore. I am officially pronouncing ShadowBane dead to me.

The second MMO I played (with the first being that craptastic game Runescape) was Anarchy Online. It was fun, but getting stuck in the Temple of the Three Winds for 3 months unable to level because I kept dying just before I got enough XP is NOT fun. So I stopped playing, found ShadowBane, and never looked back. Until now. I’ve installed AO again, and relearned all my nanos and attacks. In the past couple of days I went from level 50 to level 65. No small feat (IMHO) after my previous inability to level. I also got involved in a bit of intrigue regarding a previously banned player. More on that once I find out whether I can blab about it without guild repercussions if anyone finds out.

Yesterday I got an unexpected email from feedback@susestudio.com. It was telling me that I had been accepted into the SUSE Studio Beta! Now, I applied when the service was first announced, several months ago, and had completely forgotten about it. But nonetheless I was excited. Tonight I got a chance to try it out. I’m rebuilding my current workstation using it, and will see how it runs by building a disk image, using their ‘Testdrive’, and then downloading and installing the disk image. Expect a review of it before this time next week.

According to ArsTechnica, the EU is still going after the Microsoft Anti-trust case. When this case first started, I largely sided with Opera. But now, not so much. What about Ubuntu? Canonical bundles Firefox with Ubuntu. True, FF is FOSS, runs on pretty much anything, and is not produced by Canonical, but what other difference is there? And what about Apple? They bundle Safari, which they themselves produce, is not open-source, but also runs on many platforms, with Mac OS X. Why shouldn’t they be forced to do the same as Microsoft? Release their operating system sans the browser.

In the past I’ve been vehemently anti-Redmond, but sometimes my concious gets in the way of being a FLOSS politico. In the days when no average-Jane even knew what a browser was, Opera may have had a point (my jury’s still out on that). But now I’m not so sure. Unfortunately, I have to side with Redmond here. It’s their product in their package that they produce. They get to decide what goes in and what doesn’t and as long as they don’t lie about those contents, nobody should be able to do anything against them. Now this case just strikes me as suing Ford because they put Ford engines in their cars and not GM engines. (and so the saying is proven true, all tech articles will have a car analogy, ATAWHACA. That’s fun to say! At-uh-Whack-uh)

Yes, this is another ShadowBane post. YASBP.

More mine fights…a bane (city siege) that I missed because I live on the wrong continent…and making friends with an old enemy. When I say old enemy I mean ‘Since I started playing’ old and when I say enemy I mean ‘I hate your guts with a vengeance’. I’ve played ShadowBane for about 2 years. When I started playing, a player going by Willix ganked me. In-game it is said: “Once is fine, Twice is Unlucky, Thrice is War.” We have no rule for five times. Within two days. There isn’t a way we should’ve met that much. He was level 68 and I was level 34. He should have been way of on the Isle of Oblivion in the middle of the Ocean, but no, he was in Phaedra’s Prize, ganking me. A couple of PMs revealed that it was, indeed, intentional.

Fast forward to two months ago. The Redemption server, where we played, had been shut down. I had become a Council Member in my guild of Violence By Design. And WillixShopper got invited. More PMs revealed he was the same person. I had chosen a new name to avoid some old enemies who had a legitimate reason to kill me, so he didn’t recognize me and we kept it that way. He begged non-stop on Nation chat for an hour, so I kicked him from the guild.

Fast forward to two days ago. I log on to find that my new guild, Bohse Onkelz now has WillixShopper organizing a mine fight! I keep quiet, and ask him about Ponchous (my old character). He tightens up, and asks me who I am. A little dialog and he apologizes. I end up in the mine fight that he organized, and he saved my neck – twice. I did my fair share of fighting, but when some idiot player brings one of the rarest items in the game to a mine fight, you don’t want to die after looting it. When you die, anyone can loot anything in your inventory. I already had the item, Willix asked for it and I gave it to him. All seems well, but I’m keeping my eye on him. He is a Thief after all…

Yesterday was a rare event: our guild picked up a seasoned EverQuest player. He was new to ShadowBane. So we got him started, I helped him level to about level 30, helped pick a profession, and gave him some gold to train with. This is how our guild works. New player or new alt, we pitch in to get you/it to level 75 as quickly as possible. It’s good for you and good for our guild. So, turns out he has managed to strike upon an uber build first time. Dual swords, Heavy Armor, and Low Int/High Str. A slightly abnormal Warrior type in that not only is he high Str instead of high Con (strong instead of tough), but he also has the ability to heal himself. So, he is killing reds (AI controlled monsters that are way above his level) along with my level 75 theif (to whom they are whites, way below my level). I can’t wait until he gets to try the mine fights. I’m half expecting him to be able to 1-hit-kill a druid. Or at least 3-second-kill one, while inside a maelstrom of AoE spells.

Lots of fun happening!! Many more mine fights and one or two more banes coming up.  If only ShadowBane wasn’t shutting down July 1st, there would be even more than that.

Yeah, I know most of the people who read this will be totally uninterested, but maybe someday a gamedev will read it and decide he likes the idea, and create the next shadowbane. Anyway, ShadowBane is a hybrid MMORPG/MMORTS. Guilds can build cities complete with defenses, item shops, spawns, etc. But in order to maintain such expensive structures and allow new expansion (and more cities! My Nation of 5 guilds currently has 3 fully built cities), guilds need to capture mines. Mines produce a stead flow of resources, but cannot have defenses built around them. To make up for this, they can only be attacked during a 1-hour slot each day. Mine fights usually last about 10 minutes, the last 10 minutes of the hour. Why? The defending guild usually has more than one mine, and not enough people to defend all of them. They need time to get there. My guild’s strategy is something like this:

1. Gather around mine and keep away other players.
2. Wait till 30-40 minutes into the hour, then start ‘bashing’ the mine (you need special tools to attack a mine, usually we have 5 ‘bashers’ and everyone else keeps them and the ‘prospector’ (discussed below) alive)
3. Wait for the other guild to show up
4. Pwn other guild in PvP
5. At the 45 minute mark, one of our two ‘prospectors’ (players who have used one of 4 rune slots to allow them to capture mines), will begin capturing the mine, which takes about 10 minutes. One priest keeps the prospector alive, while the other priests keep the defenders alive.
6. The other guild brings in it’s Druids and Furies (who have incredibly powerful Area of Effect spells) and kiters (who drag us into the AoE range) and spam us with 4-5 different AoE spells dealing ~600dmg (for reference, with buffs my Thief has 2658 HP, which is low for a combat player) every 5 seconds (Last night, we had 4 dealing between 400 and 750 damage every 5 seconds. That comes to about 2400 damage every 5 seconds. More than enough to kill me before I had a chance at hitting a caster. These spells have graphics which virtually blind you, making it tough to find the casters in the first place, or even get out of range!). IF the casters are killed the spell stops. The catch is, the casters are at the center of the maelstrom.
7. A ninja cap guild tries to steal the mine by coming in at the last minute, killing our priests and prospector, and prospecting the mine.
8. The Defending guild attacks the Ninja guild, while we are caught in the middle of the AoE stun/damage range.
9. We get prospector #2 on the mine
10. Most of us die now. Those who live sit back in Stealth laughing and watching the Ninja fight the Defenders without realizing we switched prospectors on them, and the Defenders fight back, unable to see through the AoE hailstorm that a new prospector is on the mine.
11. We capture the mine.

That is the gist of it. It’s incredibly fun. Last night almost 120 people got involved in the massive PvP brawl at the end. I landed 4 kills (1/30th of the number of players) and 12 assists (1/10th of the number of players). Those are unusually high numbers for a thief. Normally I show up, scout, and die. For some reason my Guild Leader decided I had done extraordinarily, so he said I could have a favor of him. I haven’t taken that yet. Eventually I will. When WillixShopper the Aracoix Thief shows up again. Then, I have a score to settle.

If Shadowbane had any time left for history, today would go down in it. The Elite Vorgrim Armor drops from mobs who spawn once every 30 minutes. The armor has a <10% chance of dropping per kill. It cannot be stolen off the mob without killing it. And it is heavily camped. (There are also Vorgrim Daggers, Bows, and Staffs). Today I went from having no vorgrim to having almost a full Thief set. I somehow managed to dodge ALL of the campers, beat the odds, and loot a whopping 2 daggers in a row, the chestpiece, the gloves, and the bow. Along with getting a Dexterity of the Gods rune (Dex +2, Max Dex + 40) rune that let me max out my dex to a higher score than most people can even dream of: 180 without buffs. (262 with my current equipment and buffs). In short, I had a 1 to 1 million chance of getting all of that equipment consecutively (i.e. no dropper came up empty), and I did it. Most people spend weeks camping the Vorgrim armor to get where I got in about 2 hours. Ridiculous, no? Anyway…my toon is also about to hit the level cap on there, so then he will be the Perfect Thief™. If anyone wants to join me during the last days of ShadowBane, go to http://chronicle.ubi.com for more info. I play on the Thurin server and my main character’s name is Aeri Atlanis. You can /who Atlanis to see if I’m using an alt as well. Good night!!

Our pastor is a foreman and today in church he told us this story:

One day a couple of years ago, a job I was working on with, oh, about 60-65 guys was behind almost two months. I got a call from the office, apparently they wanted to see me right away. I went to them and they told me to give 20 guys the pink slip.

“Why?” I asked, “We’re two months behind!”

“The computer said to,” they answered calmly.

“But have you seen the mountain of pipes we still have to put in this building? We’re behind as it is we need these guys!”

“Doesn’t matter. Computer says to fire ‘em, out they go.”

So, reluctantly, he went and gave the 20 men their pink slips and last checks.

This is where computers should not be used: to model people. It’s one thing to keep a schedule on a computer, it’s quite another to do something because the computer (which definately did not have all the data) said to. Computers are perfect for mathematical modelling like is used for  hurricane prediction, ice core planning, and other scientific fields, but a computer cannot model the human mind. They are not yet that powerfull. My pastor’s point was a completely different one, but my point is this: Businesses should not use computers to map progress of a project. They should have people do it. People can handle the complexities of it more efficiently than any computer that a business has access to. Storing the current status of a project on an intranet is a perfectly fine and usefull thing to do, but having the computer determine the status of a project is a bad idea. In this instance the job took almost 6 months longer than it was supposed to. More than likely nobody will ever read this, but during this story I got several pointed glances from my pastor. I was just glad I don’t do project or cost/benefit modelling! Our pastor could stare down Chuck Norris.

Before I begin you need a little background:

I have played almost every MMORPG in existence. Everquest I & II, Asheron’s Call, WoW, Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, EVE Online, Runescape, etc. The list goes on but I can’t think of any more now. I am by no means a new MMOer. The three games I have spent the most time on are Anarchy Online, WoW, and ShadowBane.

Now continuing:

ShadowBane is the greatest MMORPG ever created. Ever. Posting nethack scores doesn’t count. MUDs are good, but the old SB RolePlay servers were at least as good. So, here is what makes ShadowBane the best MMORPG ever, and why it didn’t pwn WoW.

1. Deep, deep lore. Lore is everywhere. Almost all the items have lore. The few NPCs that there are have lore. Every freakin’ thing in the game has lore. I have never been so drawn into a computer game (not counting Morrowind).
2. Free PvP. After noobland (a small island off the coast of the main continents), there are only 2 no-PvP zones. To some people, this was a turn off. As a PvP lover, this was heaven.
3. Thieves could actually steal. Yes, that’s right. If you played a thief, you got the Peek and Pick Pocket powers. So even though thieves routinely get their butts whooped in PvP (until you get dual Vorgrim Daggers), they were still fun to play.
4. Sneak turned you invisible. And there was no friggin’ way for other players to see you! None! Zip! Nada! The only Sneak-breaker is an AoE! Scouts, and the Bounty Hunter runes (which I spent 3 weeks camping before finally scoring a ninja loot) let you see them, but until they are HIT they remain invisible to everyone else.
5. The classes were well balanced and made sense. Yes, as i mentioned in #4, Scouts can see sneaking people. Priests could raise dead, Necromancers could raise skeletons. Druids had nature magic and were the primary AoEers. Assassins were high-dps. You get the picture.
6. The races were exagerated. It cost skill points to play certain races, such as the Vampires and Aracoix. But with good reason. Vampires have no MP, but instead use HP for everything. That sounds bad, but they also get the Vampire’s Kiss ability, which lets them drain HP from pretty much anything. And Aracoix could fly. I’ll give you time to read that a few times. THEY COULD FLY!!!!!!!!!!!! What other MMO lets you do that from the start of the game (FlyFF doesn’t count!).
7. The land was big, but not too big. Just big enough that you could run across it (because there was no transport system other than Runemasters, who could insta-port you from city to city), but wouldn’t want to. Flying could take you across oceans and get to places no one else could.

And now why WoW killed it:

1. At launch, a couple of crackers teleported the one safehold (aka No-PvP city) into the middle of the ocean. Oh, and the lag was bad.
2. The graphics were sub-par and the game is a memory hog.
3. Free PvP. That’s not for everyone, but for those who love it, WoW has it too, it just looks prettier there.
4. The advertising was targetting at hardcore players, not everday people. The few TV spots made parents want to shield children’s eyes with the beutifully rendered battles and dark magics.

Anyway, I’ll be playing Shadowbane till they shut it down. The rest of you can go back to your WoW (or Runescape) now.

Why in the world does Adobe Illustrator not have an export batcher? I have 188 high-res photos to export from .ai to .png in 2 different sizes (thumbnail and fullsize). It makes my life much more frustrating. I did get ~40 done today, but I would’ve had them all done with a batch processor (not counting cropping off some whitespace afterwards, but that’s quick enough). On a slow computer the exports take awhile, and I have to load, preview export, resize, and export each individual one manually. Isn’t the point of computers to automate routine tasks?

Besides that, my day went pretty well. I just finished up a new song, the first one I’ve done any post-processing on in awhile. It turned out pretty well. And I got my hands on a copy of Neverwinter Nights Diamond. That was the reason i didn’t post yesterday.

One last thing: today I worked more on my work-in-progress Pen-and-Paper RPG: Twin Lands. You can check it out at http://smithy.ath.cx Any comments would be appreciated.

Today was my first day working what some would call a real job. As in 9-5 desk job (or in my case 8-4). I am, as I mentioned before, working on the backend of my employer’s site.  But I am also modifying the frontend to work with said backend . Right now the whole thing is encapsulated in 4 files: .htacces, item.php, items.php, and br_db_abstract.php  (br stands for my employer’s name. First one to guess it gets  a cookie!) It’s your average-ordinary-everyday-mod_rewrite+PEAR::MDB2+inline-php-prints. Pretty standard stuff. It’ll list the items in a category (items.php). Display the item (item.php) and allow it to be ordered. The db_abstract is to keep the connection code out of the main PHP pages. Anyway…today went well. Nothing really happened besides that. Just the hubbub of normal work. It’s not like I normally don’t spend most of my day coding during the summer months (only some days! no worries, I’m not a fat junk-muncher). I think I’ll actually enjoy this…