Some Thoughts on Poison Crafting

Taken from a post to the forums. It's interesting how much negative feedback I've received on this from people in my guild, justified solely by the notion that poison crafting is an innate skill and therefore it should be treated differently from other crafting. But in the end aren't the other tradeskills complex and difficult because that's fun for us? If they make us unhappy why bother with them? To me it's the complexity of the professions and the challenge of collecting recipes that make them worth pursuing.

Poison Crafting - More interesting, please!

Playing my first rogue, I was dismayed from early on that after the initial quest our poisons were just freely given to us. There are no problems or challenges involved in raising the skill or in acquiring the materials.

This and all games are at their best when they present the players with problems to solve and challenges to overcome, so I offer a wish list I've been mulling over.

1. Let's see the Shady Dealers stealth around town, and switch towns from time to time.

2. Let's see them have faction alliances and longer respawn timers so that losing your poison vendor hurts and people protect him, maybe even escorting him from town to town.

3. Require some poisons to be mixed at Ravenholdt Manor. Let's see a battle there. Let's see a shaky peace there.

4. Allow Herbalists to harvest some of the ingredients. Place them in areas just a little too hard for a rogue who's just learned that recipe. Make some ingredients only available via Herbalism. Make a few of them soulbound.

5. Make some the poison Alchemy recipes, and let's maybe see Enchanting get involved a little.

6. Give us a specal bag to hold poisons in.

7. Make the poisons deteriorate after 2-8 hours if they aren't in the poison bag, so that we have to contact and place orders with other players.

9. For extra credit, let's see some poisons only available from players in the opposing faction.

There's no need to throw out or render useless the existing poisons. While all of them need to be a little more trouble to make, a whole range of new poisons could be added without ruining the old ones, featuring slight but desirable variations in DPS, fail rates, charges, duration, stacking, cost, and allowed combinations.

The Problem with Guild Wars

Last summer, before I rediscovered World of Warcraft, I fell madly in love with Guild Wars. I was disappointed in or intimidated by every other MMO out there, and most of all Factions is just really, really nice. But the last few times I tried getting back into the game it couldn't hold my interest. In fact it made me angry.

Fine, don't have an auction house. It's not as though Blizzard ever copied anyone's ideas. It's not as though Guild Wars is 90% Diablo II. So they filter WTB and so forth onto a Trade channel, which no one uses. It's an EULA violation to evade the filter, but the only means of reporting violations is (last time I checked) buried in the website and requires inclusion of a screenshot. Well is that even fair? What if I don't just want to single out five or ten people? What if I want to report everyone?

So it is, as near as I can tell, literally impossible to use the general chat channel for general chat. Even if you wanted to, the only other people watching tend to be those stupid or angry enough to tolerate or thrive in such an environment.

I asked for help with a quest I was stuck on. A guy helped me then asked if I'd like to join his guild. I figured what the hell. There was only one other member. I figure he must have done this before, and maybe it'll be fun helping put a new guild together. He gives me some gold for recruiting, because the game charges gold for that.

I don't log in, then I do log in. I don't know how to give him his gold back. I feel like a thief. How do you find another player in Guild Wars? Ask the de facto tradebot channel that is the main chat window if anyone knows him? The world is split into a thousand pieces.

I didn't have this trouble in Anarchy Online back in 1991. In 1993 the chat system for Asheron's Call 2 not only broke for several months but continued to work often enough that people kept trying to use it. There was no way of knowing whether it was working or not at any given moment. Were the other players busy, or did they not see what you said at all? This may have been the singular factor in the game's demise two and a half years later. The only detail that challenges it is Turbine's bald, proud contempt for their player base.

Guild Wars is set up worse than this, and yet it recently inched out Eve from the number one spot on mmorpg.com's chart. This is not a small or meaningless accomplishment; over 65,000 people voted in the website's awards last year. You could fairly argue that Guild Wars is the most widely loved game in the world right now. Why? How do people put up with it?

I miss playing, and I know someday I'll look back to AC2 and think, "I should have learned my lesson and played Guild Wars while I could, and now it's too late." But right now the idea of playing the damned thing makes my skin crawl. Kind of a drag considering it's my second favorite game.

For the first time in over seven years of this I'm close to hitting the level cap of a legitimate MMO that isn't Guild Wars and they go and raise it.

I'm having a lot of fun, though. Still in Hellfire Peninsula with my quest log overflowing. It seems never to end, like a tall, cracked Barrens with a hell of a lot more pigs and scarier music. God I love Hellfire Peninsula. I might love it more than Felwood. It may be the greatest fantasy game setting ever.

That's why I first took to World of Warcraft - the setting. Some of it. I'd been miserable starting out a night elf in Teldrassil. It reminded me so much of the irritating, precious new age shops I'd frowned at in Santa Barbara when I walked past. (I grant a loving exception to a place called Boon Mee, because the place was a reliable source of Tangerine Dream soundtracks as well as bookends in the shape of ducks and lamps in the shape of ladybugs.) You know the place, though. La la nature spirituality dreamcatchers wolves indians Great Spirit incense Yanni night elves.

In Blizzard's defense, they did Teldrassil the Blizzard way, and the characters who live there spend much of their time calling on their naïve, idealistic youth to serve the balance of nature by massacring harmless, blind herbivores and leaving their carcasses to rot unused in the forest. In my later undeath I had a soft spot for Thunder Bluff's deliciously vile Melor Stonehoof before I ever approached the Hunter's Rise. It's this sort of thing that makes me certain Blizzard hasn't lost an ounce of their giddy Diablo nastiness.

We shall discuss Melor Stonehoof and Diablo in a future entry, but suffice it to say that in spite of this element I could only take so many doting centaurs and so much gooey wisp-air, and I needed badly to get the fuck out of that place.

I'd flirted with a PvP realm in the form of a dwarf, which meant spending time in Dun Morogh, perhaps Azeroth's loveliest setting. I had no friends on that realm, though, so I was alone. I thought perhaps, though, that I might secure passage for my poor night elf to Khaz Modan, and so I asked.

We - my ancient friends from Subspace and points west, now relocated to Azeroth - took the boat to Darkshore together, and from there to the Wetlands, and they escorted me through the Wetlands.

After perhaps a month or two of suffering this syrupy game in hopes of someday growing to like it, I fell completely in love with the setting as intended for people who are not secretly night elves in real life. Why did I start this game out as a night elf? I have no idea, and I eventually abandoned the character, but for now I was finally in a murky, frightening place full of softly menacing music and heartless crocodiles. When we turned the corner and I finally saw Khaz Modan from below, that was the moment.

We went up through those tunnels, through the mountains, in and out of the jutting rear overlooks of Ironforge, and I thought: someone finally got this right. Someone who reads finally made a fantasy game, and it's too bad no one who appreciates fantasy fiction this much is making movies these days.

(I'm really only taking a cheap shot at Return of the King and the The Two Towers.)

Having visited all of Azeroth, I believed they had covered everything - mined all of world geography, history, and fiction for every possible setting. An enormous crater populated with dinosaurs and pirates? We've got it. California wine country? No problem. Every road movie ever made unless you count Lolita - check.

I arrived in central Hellfire Peninsula with its impossible fish-eye vistas and my jaw dropped. What the hell, man? How do people come up with this stuff?

You can tell me that this is simply a matter of corporate whiteboard powerhouse design gone way over the top, but I don't believe you. The creative team for World of Warcraft is actually quite small. There are a lot of designers credited - the entire company, in fact - but when I boil it down I see seven game designers and, more interestingly, nine level designers.

Nine level designers for all of Azeroth and Outland combined, inside and out.

I am genuinely in awe of and envious of these people. And the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that to find a parallel for what has been and is being accomplished by these people you have to look beyond art and entertainment. I think you have to compare it to the significant developments in transportation, government, agriculture. Don't think of WoW as the new Star Wars; think of it as the new rail transport, the new atomic bomb. The arts simple haven't discussed attempting anything that falls under the same heading.

Or I could be wrong. I hope I am, because if there's something else like this going on right now I'd love to be exposed to it.

*yawn* huh? wha?

Yeah, I do that sometimes.

You missed two months of forgettable guild drama. I think I'm going to tell everyone about it here because it's been pretty ridiculous. Ridiculous online drama isn't very interesting, but the real life crap that was going on behind it is worth telling.

Later. For now let me get back on track.

Tip for the day: If you miss the zeppelin from Orgrimmar to the Undercity, get on the one to Grom'Gol instead. It'll arrive at the Durotar tower shortly after the one headed to the Undercity leaves. Shortly after it reaches Grom'Gol, the other zeppelin will arrive.

This is much faster than waiting another six minutes for the next UC blimp at Durotar. It also gives you the option of jumping off at the Bulwark. Careful, that's a longer fall than it looks - a little over 2800 damage for me last time I went, and I landed on a hilltop.

(slight return)

It was an okay summer for three reasons. One, I fell back in love with Guild Wars. Two, I finally figured out how to enjoy World of Warcraft. Three, I didn't play Urban Dead at all.

This morning I had Firefox open for some reason. (Come to think of it, I was looking for a torrent of the new Guild Wars soundtrack.) I saw Kevan's blog on the link buttons and noticed he's made a new game. Haven't played that yet, but for the first time in months I felt like playing Urban Dead. So I fired her up.

I had thrown myself out the top floor of a police station and was still laying dead on the ground. I pulled my rotting body up to a more or less standing position and wandered a few blocks north to the infamous Craske Triangle, curious about the fate of my beloved Cornelius General Hospital and hoping the revive point I set up would still be active. It is, but the Necrotech building it relies upon is overrun and the hospital is at death's door, so we'll see.

My evil twin Vacuos was miraculously still breathing God's clean air, but he'd awoken in a mall which had been entirely taken over by the walking dead and torn apart, so he high-tailed it back to Marven Mall, where he is now sleeping soundly in the gun store.

Some goth kids we're friends with lay dead in the streets of Vinetown. They got up and shambled up the road to the nearest revive point. The plan is to make their way soon to the City Zoo, where they intend to convert the reptile house into a gloomy nightclub staffed by Adult Swim fans and standoffish DJs.

After I see to the Craske situation I must seek out my old confidante Bake Hayes and see what he's up to. Then I've got a score to settle with the world's worst fire department. And there's the matter of redistricting the entire city.

One thing at a time. Someone remind me.

What the fuck is wrong with me.

I wrote an update yesterday then saved it without posting because I didn't feel it was "finished," and discovered three others like it written over the course of the past month and a half. Something tells me I've been taking this a little too seriously without even realizing it.

So I think sometimes I'm just going to shoot my mouth off, just like the good old days. Sometimes it won't be about games. Sometimes it will be wrong, or stupid, or mean, or both, but at least it won't be sitting in My Documents longing desperately to be hit by a stray text search just to fulfill the basic need for human contact.

If the article is about a game, it'll say so in the title from now on. So anything with a title like "what the fuck xyz," you can safely skip it without missing out on the cigarette-smoking-man subplot.

I'm also going to do this.

As Above - Kevan Davis' blog (my favorite)
GoodShit - a perfect blend of odd finds, weird history, and naked ladies (almost as good)
the Virgo Supercluster entry at Wikipedia - because so many people don't know where we are
Robotech - maybe the greatest television series ever
the best kitten ever getting ready for TF2

Guild Wars Factions

I am so madly in love with this game that I've now played it until I can no longer possibly justify spending another moment at the computer. Well, here I am writing about it, but not much.

Now I am become flamebait, the tipper of cows.

I finished Half-Life 2 yesterday. First game I've finished in recent memory.

I talked to a fellow C-section friend a while back. She never finishes anything either. I said to her, "You're a C-section, aren't you!" I can spot us from a mile away.

She says to me, "No, I couldn't even go through with that."

Apparently they'd decided to do a caesarean and gone through all the preparations, then she goes and pops out au naturale style. I wonder if you can get your money back when that happens.

So I decided recently I need to quit starting new things and focus my time on finishing what I've started, and I'm a bit proud of myself for finishing both a game and a book in the same week. Lord knows how long it's been since I pulled off that double whammy. Thing is, yes, Half-Life 2, hell of a game. Monstrous accomplishment, work of art. Game of the year? Best game ever? What the fuck?

No spoilers here, except in the most nonspecific and general way, but have these people never before played a game with a satisfying ending? How about a disappointing yet neverthelesss cathartic ending? How about one where you get to see what happens?

I felt a little bit like I did when I left halfway through Unbreakable to use the bathroom then came back 5 minutes later to see the final lines of dialogue and the credits rolling.

Oh well. Yes, it's a great game, but let's not kid ourselves. It's no Quake II.

/duck

O bitter defeat!

So I think I finished Urban Dead. I lost.

UD is a great game, but its players leave much to be desired. I've been in a fight with the fire department over barricading levels for a hospital they don't use. I spent two weeks lobbying for a guild relocation then watched as everyone got lost on the way. Every day I log in and see important buildings breached and multiple people killed because the buildings' residents refuse to put up strong barricades just in case someone gets stuck outside.

The pessimist in me suspects that the better a multiplayer game is, the more fatally it will be hamstringed by the essential unworthiness of its players. I give you Subspaces's Trench Wars, I give you the crib death of every great Tribes variant. Countless diabolical and clever Counter-Strike maps put out to rust. Anarchy Online's initial (and acidental) territorial fighting, and the beautiful overland hunting game sucked into the bowels of the earth. Asheron's Call 2.

Yes, the players did ruin Asheron's Call 2. If anyone wants to debate that with me we're going to take it outside.

So I moved all three of my characters to different locations within striking distance of the Giddings Mall, which I consider vitally important for reasons I can't be bothered to explain after all this. The idea was not to play sneaky zerging games but rather to be separately of a common benefit. This resulted only in my becoming three times as frustrated with the human side in the game.

So I've decided not to be quite as helpful anymore.

Whether this just means being a self-serving asshole or turning in earnest to the dark side, I'm not sure. So presently I'm on a soul searching break, a journey of self-discovery through the blood-caked food courts of poor, forgotten Malton.

Maybe it's time to get the cable turned back on and play a real game.

Knee Deep

What is it with web games? Why do I like them so much all of a sudden?

Right, it probably has something to do with my Internet connection being incapable of supporting any other type of online gaming. I'm thankful for this, though. Were it not for my inability to play more technically demanding games I might never have discovered Urban Dead, which has become my favorite game, or Nexus War, its spiritual successor just as UD is said to have been the spiritual heir to Vampires!.

I've gone on quite enough about Urban Dead, but I'll say a word about Nexus War, because it's beginning to sink in. It doesn't resonate with anything universal like humans versus zombies, and for me it lacks that special intangible that gives me a sense of place and atmosphere in a game. It might simply be that the interface is too nice.

But I will say this: It's a real, full-blown MMORPG in the style of Vampires! and Urban Dead, complete with item trading, crafting, guild housing, castle raids for lack of a better term, and lots of other stuff. It's really, really complicated and I'm only just now getting the hang of it. But I'm starting to really enjoy the game.

Hopefully I'll get my cable back in this week and I can start writing about the real stuff again.

A cockmonger approaches. Command?

Read Great Blogs and the Important of Reciprocity [sic], and then read poor Tobold's typically meek response. Tobold I love you to death, man, but you have got to grow a middle finger.

I don't know, what do you guys think? Should I add a list of self-aggrandizing assholes to the sidebar on my own page?

Why do I let this sort of nonsense piss me off?

The Plot Does Not Thicken

Good lord, I went a month without updating. It's just like the good old days, isn't it?

My free wireless withered away, and I found myself scrounging around on my laptop for an Internet connection. It's my own damned fault.

The zombies overran my fucking hospital complex in Heytown. I hate a few people and am a little disappointed in myself, but am none the worse for wear. Lessons learned and so forth. The Craske Triangle will persevere. Maybe you could even get off your ass and help out!

That said, it's been a while since I played anything other than Urban Dead. Actually that's not true. I fired up ZSNES and have been barrelling through The 7th Saga and Final Fantasy VI, neither of which I finished the first time around.

FF6 needs no introduction, of course, much less mooning advocacy, but The 7th Saga just might. I'll stop short of calling it the greatest console RPG of all time, but neither would I bet good money against that. Even if it didn't boast the fiercest, nastiest combat of the pre-Guild-Wars era, the fact that all your potential party members can strike out on their own and compete with you - even kick your ass in the tavern and steal your most precious assets - is so far ahead of its time, thus far to my knowledge only one miserable Wizardry game has even attempted to copy it.

And the music is wonderful, and the world is enormous, and you never really know what the hell is going on, and the moment you let your guard down the wrong combination of random assholes confront you on the path overland & hand you your severed head. All of a sudden a stupid zombie and a floating brain are healing & resurrecting each other, debuffing you, sapping your mana, and God knows what else.

Most people balk at the Guild Wars comment. Try soloing a Necromancer-Ranger sometime. I'm sure there are ways to make it easy on yourself, but if you don't... man are you ever in for a treat.

The Plot Thickens

I somehow managed to spend nearly all day and night playing Urban Dead, with just a three hour break to drink coffee and read a Greg Egan story.

I have taken over a hospital and am using it as a cornerstone for an impenetrable survivor fortress in eastern Heytown. You can read our hilarious wiki entry here.

A particularly valuable member of the Cornelius General Hospital Family is one Bake Hayes. He's started an Urban Dead blog which I've been enjoying. Also benefiting from quite a bit, since he's been motoring all around Heytown and Spracklingbank doing zombie head-counts.

Sorry I have nothing to say about anything else. Actually I have a scary Eve story to tell you, and an event idea for Anarchy Online which my guild rejected without comment... but right now I need ravioli and sleep, and sex. Well, two of the three should do the trick, but not at the same time.

Good News for Me

I just wrote an entry asking that one of you Urban Dead players search the Desensitised forums for any evidence of a forgotten early morning drunken rant by myself, because some time ago I was banned from there, and I was pretty sure I'd never posted.

Well it turns out I'm unbanned, so there goes that problem. And no, I never posted an early morning drunken rant, or anything else for that matter. Go figure.

It may be true that no good deed goes unpunished, but a happy corollary to this truth is that good things happen to people who sit around and hope their problems will just go away.

My Urban Dead Wiki Page

Not much on it at all, but I feel like linking it anyway. What the hell.

Nexus War - First Impression

I think I won't be getting too involved with this game. For reasons I can't quite pinpoint I've forgotten to play it most days, and even now I'd rather write something not very interesting about the game than actually play it.

It's got a nice interface. Maybe it feels too nice, too fancy. Part of Urban Dead's charm is that there's just nothing there but the game. Any bells and whistles come from the numerous Firefox extensions which have sprung up as necessity warrants. I'm probably balking on some deep level. How dare you try and upstage our glorious leader?

Likely it's partly just unfamiliarity. Lots of buildings that seem pointless but probably aren't. But the game also gives me a sense of purposelessness or at least overcomplicated purpose. I don't like that when I die I possess a new body, and to have all these mundane things like gas stations and apartment buildings in a fantasy world torn in half by a huge void is a bit jarring. But it's also fresh so I have some hope for recovery. And it's brand new.

Like the title says, this is not a judgment, just a first impression. I wouldn't mind getting a little posse together and bopping around around. Anyone interested? Leave a comment.

Oh yeah, here's the link.

Nexus War

I eavesdropped on a discussion in the Ridleybank Resistance Front's IRC channel. A fellow by the name of jorm is working on a new browser game called Nexus War. Some people who like Urban Dead quite a bit like this game quite a bit more. At a glance it looks too complicated and overly kind, but so is Eve. And I really like the place names. I'd write more but I haven't actually made an account yet and I'm kind of excited.

Why Urban Dead Works

I finally broke down and sent Kevan some money so I can infect my lovely girlfriend with the undead plague and not worry about the 160-hits-per-day limit.

I realized today with full force what exactly it is that appeals to me so much about this game. Not since Subspace has a game so organically woven conflict and incident out of its players' will.

I say woven not because it sounds silly but because for once a massive multiplayer game has not created, but allowed its players to create, its history, its political landscape, and even its rules. We see many of these elements in Eve and on Darktide, and I've always contended Anarchy Online reached for it with occasional success. These are all great games, and their enjoyability argues for the restrictions they've adopted - but I don't love them as much as I could, and for the most part no one will remember what happened in them and say: I made that happen and it changed everything.

Before now, only one game has really let you do whatever the hell you wanted, and more importantly forced you to deal with players who could do whatever the hell they wanted, to such an extent that the game had not rules but ethics and the deadliest weapon in the fight was inventiveness. That game was Subspace. Its successor is Urban Dead.

I'll finish with a story.

At the beginning of 2006, a horde of over a thousand zombies organized and began shambling from one shopping mall to the next. But for one such they found abandoned, throughout January they laid siege to and in time overran nearly every mall in the city of Malton. At the beginning of february they reached Caiger Mall and began their final attack.

But this mall was different. Bolstered by refugees from the fallen malls and a powerful, well-organized police department which ruled the neighboring suburb of Dunell Hills, Caiger Mall stood against the zombie threat. For six weeks the throng clawed at the barricades while breaking into nearby support structures and safehouses. Finally the zombies conceded defeat and moved on.

Caiger Mall was victorious. We made t-shirts. The Mall Tour '06 took their loss out on Dunell Hills, quickly moving through the neighborhood and destroying it block by block. If no good deed goes unpunished in life, it certainly should not in a game. I'm proud to have been a small part of the Caiger Mall defense, but creeping through the ruins of Dunell Hills searching in vain for any sign of life is something I can tell my grandkids about.

How did you spend the winter, you frightened little night elf?

Lazy!

Once again I've been a shit.

Urban Dead excepted, I started this page out as a sort of substitute to playing the games I really love. I think I've mentioned game block in passing; I won't go into it, ever, but suffice it to say I was spending a lot of time on games I don't care about. World of Warcraft, Oblivion, dabblings in the MMO curiosity of the week.

It sank in how important it is, at least in my world, not to do this. So I'm back to playing Eve and Anarchy Online each day and pretty much nothing else. So you won't hear about much else for a while, maybe.

Except for Urban Dead, of course. The rest of this post turned into another impassioned advocacy for that game, so it's now a different post.

MMO Blogs

I read Tobold's MMORPG Blog fairly often, even though it usually makes me pretty angry. Part of the inspiration for this page was a fairly nasty comment I wrote, but never posted, in response to one of his (in his defense, he admits it) thin-skinned posts about PVP. (Actually the post was about ninja looting or dice rolling or some other ridiculous modern-day endgame concern, but my response had more to do with the general attitude he and others have about PVP.)

I like being angry, though, as It helps me be a better griefer - know your enemy, right?. So I've got his feed on my Google page and everything, and sometimes it pays off. Tonight I discovered Play to Crush, and I'm in love. I'll even steal their link to the funniest thing I've seen in a long time.

I've got nothing of my own to contribute this morning so I'll end it there.