Flyv's Warcraft Blog

End of this blog, and nethack

Given the incredibly infrequent posts of the past few months, I think it's time to declare this blog over. I started this blog when I was playing a lot of serious Warcraft, sifting through all the feral druid theorycrafting. I had a lot of fun doing playing WoW and doing the research but eventually got tired of the game and worried about the lack of return on my time. I don't miss WoW at all. It's a fun game and if I had nothing else to do I'd gladly play it, or Rift, or whatever. I suspect sometime in the next few years I'll get deeply into whatever new MMO is again. But for now, I'm glad to be playing other games (Lego Star Wars III), flying airplanes, and doing various non-game projects.

I just read a nice article about how modern action RPGs owe a debt to the Roguelike game tradition, which reminded me of the year in college I played a lot of Nethack 3.0j. Even back then I was writing about games, on rec.games.hack. I finally managed to win the game but I couldn't find my post about my Ascension, so instead I'll close out this blog with a stupid death post from December 30, 1991. (For context: eating corpses in Nethack confers useful buffs.)

I haven't won nethack yet, so this death particularly hurt me.. I find that I do stupid things when I have been playing for a long time. What's the record for physical time to solve the game? It took me about 3 hours to get to dlevel 21..

There are no doubt spoilers here.

Playing a priest, lousy strength (10), lousy intelligence (10), but a very convenient spellbook of haste self.

Early on (dlevel 3?), I found an armour dealership that had, among other things, a cloak of displacement, a blessed +1 cloak ofprotection, boots of speed, and some gauntlets of power. Fairly convenient when you have enough tripe to convince your pet to shop for you. AC goes to -4.
along the way, I run into a blessed potion of invisibility. "Do you wish the invisibilty to be permanent?" Sounds good to me ;)

A couple of lucky sacrifices got me Fire Brand and Frost Brand.

Next thing I hit was a bones level. The character I found had *14* rings on him, and me with only one blessed scroll of identify. Such a shame. I settled on the ring of warning and the ring of conflict,and tossed the rest of them down the sink.

Ring of conflict + invisibility + speed = nothing kills you. I took out a huge beehive (7x4), a barracks, a treasure zoo, a big throne room. No trouble at all, they didn't even attack me. It was ridiculous. Somewhere along the way I realized my warning was useless and traded the ring of warning for a +5 ring of protection. AC -12, in case anything tried to hit me.

So what killed me? That treasure zoo was full of neat corpses, including a black dragon corpse. So, I ate it. It was tough swallowing the whole thing, but I was ok. But one level farther down I killed a violet fungus, ate it and choked to death.

ARGH! Nothing was going to kill me. I was invincible. And I choked to death on a violent fungus?! Sigh. There is a bones though with lots of nifties. If I ever get to level 21 again..

 

Feral druid blog for Cataclysm

I don't play WoW anymore, but I still enjoy keeping up with it from time to time. Kalon, the last blogger from back when I was playing and posting about WoW, has lost some enthusiasm for raiding and theorycrafting.

Helpfully, he points to a new manbearcatcrowseacow who's taken up the mantle of feral druid blogging: Alaron (the Fluid Druid). Also news that Yawning, the guy behind the Mew feral druid model, has quit. Too bad. But there's Shredding Attacks now too, looking promising.

I wonder if Rift is coming out at just the right time?

 

League of Legends

League of Legends is the most interesting game I've seen in awhile that I knew nothing about. It's the successor to the Defense of the Ancients map, itself a sort of logical continuation of what Warcraft 3 did in adding heroes to RTS games. Only with a tower defense spin. And it's a really interesting, complex game. But I get ahead of myself.

In LoL you play a Champion, a little dude who runs around and kills monsters and enemy champions. The map you play on is a tower defense style map, with several lanes from one end to the other you fight your way down. Lanes are protected by towers, and also waves of little creep mobs spawn on occasion and run down the lanes. The map is symmetric and it's very much a PvP game: your champion, towers, and creeps vs. the enemies.

What's neat is the game has a nice rhythm to it, an ebb and flow as each side presses the advantage. Also it has a bunch of really complex theorycrafting underneath it. I've barely scratched the surface but it's clear that a bit of research can give a player an advantage.

LoL is free to play. You can spend money for various boosts, mostly increases in how fast you earn experience. I can't quite tell if any of the for-pay options give you a competitive edge in PvP. I think not, but I'm not positive.

Fable 3: how to ruin an ending

I just finished Fable 3 and I'm pissed. Long story short; I got screwed when the game advanced too quickly and removed my ability to choose how to finish the game. Rest of this post contains broad spoilers about the structure of the game and the main events. I don't think it'd ruin the game for you, but if you want to play Fable 3 with no idea what happens, stop reading. (Personally I give the game a 3 out of 5, definitely skippable.)

The main story arc is in two parts. Part 1: develop as a hero and overthrow your brother, the tyrant king. Part 2: become the king and make a series of difficult choices. The choices in part 2 are interesting: you can either do the good thing (say, making a lake a nature preserve) or doing the evil thing (draining the lake and strip mining the lakebed). The catch is the evil thing makes more money for your treasury and you're told you have 1 year to save up enough money to build up defenses against the Big Bad and save your people. There's even a handy counter: days remaining, money needed to save people.

I liked the second part of the game, it was nuanced storytelling and required making actual difficult choices. (Presented to you by your secretary Hobson, no less). It also presents a pretty bleak moral view of the world, that leaders have to be jerks or else their people die. But ok, I can go with that. And I had a trick! I did all the goody two-shoes choices, spending all the money. But I had my own personal real estate fortune. My plan was to make enough money off of rent to cover half the kingdom's needs, then sell all my real estate to make up the rest and save the world! So clever.

Then I got screwed. I'm sitting there with 121 days to go, doing my story, when I turned in a quest and suddenly a big SAVING appeared on the screen. Then I'm teleported to the Narrator telling me my time is up, I'd made my choice, and all my people are going to die. No warning, no chance to tie up loose ends, no chance to use my money to save my people. I still had 121 days left, wtf? And the game doesn't keep old saves, so no way to go back and undo the damage.

I finished the game. And got a big rewarding speech about how I was a hero and saved the kingdom. Followed by a popup text saying I was a scoundrel and the few remaining people left alive all cursed my name forever more. Now the kingdom is largely empty, no NPCs wandering around, and my game is essentially over. Reading comments online I'm not the only person to have been tricked this way.

Two big mistakes ruined Fable 3 for me. One was triggering the endgame sequence without warning. The other was not having any way to go back to a previous save. Both are really amateur mistakes to make in a game that's supposed to be so polished.

 

What I'm playing

Still working off the fall gaming orgy, here's what I'm playing:

• Fable 3. Sitting down to play this intensively, but 12 hours in I'm finding it pretty tedious. There's not enough choice in the main line and the side activities are boring. It almost feels like the last gasp of story-driven classic RPGs. But it's beautifully done and more fun than not, so I'll stick with it. I just reached the big inflection point in the game where you become the king and have to make hard choices for the health of your kingdom, it's interesting.
• Super Meat Boy. What a fantastic little platform game. Totally worth playing. The key innovation is that each level is very hard but also very short (5-20 seconds), with no penalty or delay for dying and trying again.
• Bit.Trip Beat. Pong meets Rez. Very simple gameplay but the music is great. It's also too hard on the PC. The iPhone version lets you resume midway through a level, but on the PC you have to start at the very beginning each time.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Only played a little bit of multiplayer so far, but boy is that interesting! It's much like deathmatch in an FPS only subtlety and stealth are rewarded instead of aiming skills. Interesting game.
• Lego Harry Potter. My partner and I played this together, a first for us, and had a great time. We finished the main story but I hope we go back to start getting all the extra collectibles.
• World of Keflings. I really liked Kingdom for Keflings, it's a weird game, sort of an RTS but without any conflict. Just building. The sequel seems to have more story and character, which frankly I could do without, but a quick look suggests they kept the parts of the first game I liked.
• Minecraft. I'm mostly bored with it, not to mention fed up with the hideous bugs, but it still holds my interest. My current single player project is building a mob tower: a tall dark building that spawns monsters, then kills them with a lava knife and collects drops via water currents.

 

Here's what's on deck:

• Civilization V. The big patch finally came out and apparently the game is more balanced and challenging. Time to go back to it.
• Fallout 3: New Vegas. Again, a big patch, this one fixing some of the horrible game-breaking bugs they launched with.
• Glitch. Not a traditional game by any stretch, a collaborative social game from the team that created Flickr out of their initial project, Game Neverending. Still in closed beta.
• Dead Space, Gratuitous Space Battles, Psychonauts, Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, Plants vs. Zombies, Hitman: Blood Money. These are all games I bought during Steam sales and haven't played.

 

And what's not on my list:

• Any sort of MMO. Warcraft Cataclysm has zero appeal for me. I hear they've made class mechanics more interesting with a bias towards priority queues, so the gameplay is more fun, but it's way too much of the same addictive game I stopped playing. And no other MMO out there now looks interesting to me. Rift is the new darling but I predict it won't last long.
• Any sort of Facebook game.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops. I played a lot of this in the fall, but I'm bored with it now.
• Starcraft 2. I never finished the single player game, and I never met my goal of getting competent and multiplayer. I've got such a love/hate relationship with RTS games as it is and SC2 emphasizes all the stuff I hate.

Single button RPG

The Flash game Super PSTW Action RPG is worth playing for 5 minutes for the lulz. OTOH between this and Fable 3, I'm tired of playing ironic winky winky RPGs. Give me epic story with no calling attention to how silly the RPG genre is!

Minecraft PvP

I'm mostly bored with Minecraft, but play occasionally on a polite cooperative server with limited resources and very creative people. Our regular server was down, though, so we went to a temporary new server with no rules of politeness and an explicit invitation to PvP. It was fun, but not much fun, here's my observations for our group:

I've had the most Minecraft fun in weeks on the temporary PvP server today. I also had the most unpleasantness. It reminded me a lot of Eve Online, only without any purpose. Like M, I think PvP Minecraft is not for me.

Highlights: finding a skeleton spawner, building a drowning trap to collect lots of arrows. Dropping lava on various high points to watch it go. Lowlights: feeling bad for killing people. Losing all my stuff to S. Having my drowning trap blown up with TNT by R. Feeling bad for trying to lava bomb R's house only to find it was someone innocent. (Sorry, F!). Then the highlight of them all, the best reward: killing R, looting a stack of 64 TNT, then using the TNT to blow up all the diamond armor he'd dropped just as he was coming to pick it up. Take that!

PvP Minecraft was sort of fun, but the moment you get too engaged or take it seriously it's upsetting. Eve Online is like that too and I came to enjoy it, because the tension of "this is awfully real and someone can kill me" makes for a powerful experience. I think the reason Minecraft fails as PvP is there's just no structure. No purpose to killing each other, no teams, no territory. Just the miserable pleasure of ruining someone else's day. I haven't pulled the legs off a spider since I was about 11, it stopped being fun.

Fall gaming orgy

It's that time of the year again when all the big games get released in the same 4 weeks. I wish publishers wouldn't do that, it's overwhelming. Presumably it's to capture Christmas gift sales, but seriously, does that drive that much product? Anyway, here's what's on my radar. Mix of Xbox and PC games. I also play iPhone games, but there's yet to be a really compelling one.

• Civilization V. It's beautiful and somewhat fun, but the AI is awful. Waiting for a patch to continue.
• Fallout 3: New Vegas. Waiting for a patch before buying. I'm no longer buying games that are broken at release.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops. Big dumb FPS shooter fun. I have it on the Xbox and am terrible, but liking all the level-up stuff in multiplayer.
• Fable 3. I hear great things, and I did enjoy the first two even if they were a bit disappointing.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. AC2 was so fantastic, and the reviews on Brotherhood are even better.
• Team Fortress 2. Old game, but still delivers beautifully.
• Zen Bound 2. $5 for a beautiful little puzzle game. It's nicer on the PC than the iPhone.
• Minecraft. I'm a member of a good multiplayer community, but Notch has so completely fucked up the server code it's not really playable now. Still, love it for an activity to do.
• Lego Harry Potter. Playing this with my non-gamer partner. He's having a hard time with the controls, I think maybe the Lego games have gotten too complicated for their own good. Still, lots of fun.
• Starcraft 2. I should really go back to this, both finish the single player campaign and do more multiplayer. But it just seems like too much work right now.
• The Witcher. I feel like I should play this, particularly after Andrew had good things to say, but I'm stuck halfway through the tutorial with non-enjoyment.
• Dragon Age. Another game I bogged down in, but would like to return and finish.
• Plants vs. Zombies. Bought it when it was cheap, everyone raves about it, but it seems too simple for me.
• VVVVVV. Old school platformer, really hard.
• Super Meat Boy. Another old school platformer, also really hard, but with some fun window dressing that makes me enjoy it more than VVVVV.
• Borderlands. This is a very generous game, still fun to play.
• Limbo. Arty XBLA game, I'm about halfway through and it starts to feel all sameish.
• Create. Looks like a fun physics toy.

I have a lot of free time. I like playing games. Even so, there are way more good games out there now than I possibly have time to play. Maybe the problem is my attention span for a game only lasts 1-2 hours a session now, no more staying up until 4am playing Ultima II. Still, how do people consume all these games?

Warhammer RvR History shut down

A year ago I was playing Warhammer Online. I made a website showing RvR history, demonstrating the status of the realm war as the fight went back and forth. The site worked pretty well but no one visited; my very biggest day, March 2 2010, had 90 page views! In the meantime the site was costing me $0.07 a week, the code recently broke, and Warhammer Online has largely failed as a game. So I'm shutting down the site, not that anyone will notice. I did take a backup of the data so if anyone wants a year's worth of history of PvP activity, I might have something interesting.

My real goal with that project was experimenting with Google App Engine and Javascript-driven websites. That worked out great. I was particularly happy with being able to use appengine to do the regular web crawl without any management on my part.

Warcraft 4.0 Holy Priest chakras: blessed complexity?

I'm not playing Warcraft right now. But I had dim sum with a friend who is and he was telling me very excitedly about Chakras in Warcraft 4.0, how they made his Holy Priest really fun to play. I haven't tried it myself, but from what I understand every 30 seconds the Priest can choose a new temporary specialization. You cast Chakra (30 second cooldown), then cast one of four primary Priest spells: Heal, Renew, Prayer of Healing, or Smite. Whichever you cast puts you in a special Chakra state that favours that style of spell. Go into Heal state and the next 30 seconds your heals crit 10% more and you get a new big instant heal spell you can use to be a great tank healer. Renew state? Better HoTs. PoH state? Better group heals.

What he liked about it is it made being a Holy Priest more complicated. Juggling Chakra cooldowns, making sure he chose the right state for the situation. I imagine it makes raid healing more fun, too, since each Holy Priest can switch roles on the fly. Sounds great.

So here's my question: did 4.0 overhaul class mechanics like this for other classes and roles? Has Blizzard moved to more complex abilities for people? One of the best blog posts I ever wrote here was Kitty: the most complicated DPS rotation in the game, it did a good job of characterizing why I really liked the complexity of feral druid DPS at the time. I love the idea that other classes might have gotten similar challenges in the new Warcraft patch.