I think my impression of Playstation Home is best summed up in the following:

After logging in and creating my character, I wandered over to the theater, were I was able to sit my avatar down in a seat and watch somewhat grainy stramed video, in this case movie trailers, at a funny angle in a portion of my screen, partially blocked by the heads of other avatars, while countless other players milled about and not only chatted, danced, and did other visually distracting things, but merrily plugged in their headsets and asked "Hello? Hello? Can anyone hear me?" followed by fart sounds and childish laughter.

In other words, Home lets me enjoy the same advertising I could download from the store, except it also reminds me that the internet is full of jerks and idiots and I get to share this virtual space with them. I guess that was bad enough to distract me from the absurdity of buying cargo pants for my avatar for 49 cents from a virtual mall.

I'm gonna start right off with my new pet peeve. Warhammer Online's official subtitle is "Age of Reckoning" so the game ends up being commonly abbreviated as WAR: (Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning). I guess the O just gets dropped. WOAR?

I have to admit, a week ago I didn't think I'd have picked up Warhammer Online at all, let alone shopped around to get it the day it came out. I recently got back into Final Fantasy XI with the advent of the Level Sync system and other content added in the September Update. I'm also not a big PvP keener, and I know that PvP (or RvR if you want to adhere to EA Mythic's marketing catch-phrases) is a cornerstone of Warhammer Online. Plus there's the very big slight that they wouldn't give it to me for free. I mean, come on.

But I read a number of reviews leading up to the release and I ended up buying it afterall. It turns out I'm actually quite pleased with the game. Its quite a fun game to just pick up and play, without the feeling of having to grind content, meet objectives, or somehow plan out how best to dedicate the next two years of your life to a game.

For one thing, the game's very easy. Easier than WoW, if such a thing can even be possible. The game doesn't make any pretenses about what it is: it's a casual MMORPG with plenty of PvE content while you level up and a PvP-driven end-game. What's refreshing is how well the casual part of the game design is integrated into the overall experience.

For one thing, the game features 'open' parties: you can make an open party, and anyone nearby can just join your party, just like that. No more searching for people to invite, you just start up an open party and people can jump in if they want. Why would they want to? Well, there's these public quests. Public quests are quests to which anyone can contribue and simply reset after they're finished. The people who contribute the most get the most loot out of them.

What's interesting is that the public quest replace quests where groups are required from typical MMOs. Instead of using the same quest mechanic for solo and group quests, Warhammer Online uses the 'quest' mechanic for solo quests and the 'public quest' mechanic for group quests. Well, at the lower levels, at least. There might be group quests later on, I just haven't seen any.

What's also nice about these public quests is that you don't actually have to group up to contribute. You don't even have to coordinate or cooperate or communicate with the other players on the public quest. That said, you probably won't win the quest without the three C's; the bosses of the public quests generally decimate solo players. Trust me. I've been on the recieving end often enough to know. But it's still nice that you don't HAVE to adhere to stereotypical grouping situations. It's a lot like the campaign battles introduced to FFXI with Wings of the Goddess, another reason I've been really enjoying FFXI again lately.

The RvR aspect is also handled quite nicely. First of all, RvR areas are separated from the PvE areas, so, on a normal server anyways, you don't have to worry about getting killed by another player while you quest. Secondly, each area in the game has its own RvR area, as well as a scenario (think: battleground), designed for players of that area. I'm not entirely sure about the mechanics, but I think there's some sort of level cap or balancing that goes on, so you don't get level 40s (max level) running around in the newbie zone owning it.

While I'm sining the praises of Warhammer Online, let me touch on the classes. I've only played one so far, the Disciple of Khaine, which is a healer-type for the Dark Elves. But I've heard enough about the other classes to be able to deduce the general sense of class design in WAR: do lots of different neat stuff. The Disciple of Khaine uses soul power to cast spells, and gets soul power by performing combat moves on enemies. So you get to dual wield swords and slice up enemies to fuel your healing spells. If nothing else, it's certainly original. You get to be a melee DPS class AND a healer, simultaneously. All the other classes seem to have the same notion of hybridization. I think some other healer classes use dps spells to improve their healing spells or something. Frankly, I haven't been this excited about trying out completely different classes in a long time.

Also, it looks like it won't be a terrible repeat to try out other classes. There are six races in the game, and each has a completely different path from level 1 to 40, paired together in a good vs evil duo. So, in a sense, you can play the game six times, using a different class each time, and never repeat content (except the PvP stuff, of course, when you do it from the other side). That's not to say you can't switch areas though, the flight masters are all linked, so from the begining of the game you can fly over to another path and do it instead. Still, from my early experience in the dark elf area, I only saw other dark elves.

In conclusion, my first few days with Warhammer Online lead me to the topic that its a Casual MMORPG done right. Emphasis on casual, of course, becuase I don't have the same sense of hardcoreishness that makes FFXI or even WoW quite so demanding. Still, I was looking for something to do until Wrath of the Lich King came out, and with that nearly exactly two months away from the release of Warhammer Online, WAR seems to fit the bill perfectly!

When I first played Atlantica Online (after I was done balking at the huge number of files) I rather enjoyed the game and I gave it a rather favorable preview. Sadly, closed beta 1 came to an end, and I waited eagerly for CB2, only to be greeted with some very dissapointing news. Ndoors introduced a 'stamina' system which would limit you to 100 fights a day. The idea seemed so horrible, I didn't even try the second beta for a few days; but, of course, I had to log in and write a report.

It turns out the stamina system isn't quite as disasterous as I suspected. In fact, I never actually managed to run out of stamina. Then again, I never actually felt free just to fight stuff and have fun with the game the way I did in the first beta: there was this strong uncomfortable pressure to make every single fight count. Despite coming to the second round with considerably more experience than my first trip through the game, I did not make it as far and certainly didn't enjoy the experience anywhere near as much.

Ndoors took some time to respond to the stamina system here. Their primary reason for incorporating stamina is that too many players were overlooking the multiplayer elements of the game: grouping, guilding, and PVPing. Don't get me wrong, of course you want to encourage interaction in a multiplayer game, but the bonus XP for grouping and the added item slots for guilding already seemed like fine motivators. The real niggler here is PVP.

PVP is the poor man's excuse for end-game content. While some games, like WoW, rely on complex raid instances for end-game, these require tremendous effort to create and polish. Other games, like Everquest 2, just innundate with expansion content: higher level cap, more stuff to do. PVP, on the other hand, takes care of itself. Compare the effort needed to put together Sunwell in WoW, versus adding an extra season of Arena together. PVP is, as far as maintaining subscriptions is concerned, easy money.

Ndoors has already tipped their hand. Look at what they said about the lack of player interaction in Atlantica: "we believe that this will hurt the long-term relationship we hope to have with all of you.  By incorporating new features like Stamina, it will open up more opportunities for you to get involved in the world of Atlantica, especially when you start reaching the upper levels of 90 and above." In other words: if they don't use stamina to slow down progression and force players into pvp, players will beat the game, get bored, and leave. And stop paying!

The stamina system, you see, lets you get stamina back by winning PVP battles. They want to force people into PVP so that, even if players don't enjoy it, the players looking for a rich PVP environment have plenty of opponents to massacre. Sadly, Ndoors fails to realize an important fact: players who enjoy PVP will PVP anyways, and players who hate PVP will simply stop playing a game that forces them to do it. I nearly quit raiding in WoW because of the need for a PVP trinket for the Archimonde fight. I'm still bitter at Blizzard for forcing that pill down my throat.

But anyways, the problems go further than this. The rewards for PVP should be more than enough to get people playing it. The prize money for winning in the free leage blows away whatever you can get fighting monsters. Kill a monster for 100 gold, or another player for 1 million? The absurd influx of currency from PVP has rendered the game's market irrelevant. Prices vary so wildly the whole experience of buying or selling anything is about as pleasant as getting beat up by another player in an attempt to get 3 more stamina so you can kill 3 more monsters.

I'm sad to say, my second Atlantica Online adventure has been thoroughly marred by poor design choices regarding stamina and the free league. As a player looking for a strong PVE experience, I feel utterly sidelined by the people at Ndoors. But it's not entirely uncommon, CCP and EVE Online certainly isn't PVE friendly either. Still, if the outcry on the forums are any sign to go by, the PVE community of Atlantica Online was a strong and significant portion of the gamer base, and efforts to appeal to this sub-group, possibly with a seperate PVE server without stamina or the free leage, might be worth considering.

 

PS: I finally got a hold of the Sid Meier interview I did with GameSHOUT back in 2005. Here is part one and here is part two. Enjoy!

I haven't taken the time to write a good opinion piece in a while, so here it is: my take on DRM vs Piracy. Should companies that make PC games apply some sort of digital rights management protection (such as SecuROM) to prevent piracy? If you were a a profit-maximizing company, you should not. This is because DRM costs money to implement, and its implementation does not recover any money for the company lost to piracy. Piracy certainly remains a thorn in the side of a company's profits, but DRM software does not help prevent it.

What does DRM do? Most prominantly, it makes it impossible to simply copy a game. If I buy a game, put the DVD in my computer, run a DVD copy program, and click 'copy,' the resulting copy, if the DRM works, won't be any good. On the other hand, DRM can be removed by hacking the game code and re-distributing it with a cracked executable, such as downloading an ISO from a torrent site.

So, consider the scneario where someone would be foiled by DRM. Maybe you bought a game and you want your friend to play it too. Your friend, however, refuses to buy the game. This means that the friend does not represent a potential sale of the game. You try to copy your DVD, but the DRM prevents it from working. What can you do? You can download a crack and make your copy work. But if you're downloading the crack, you don't even have to spend money on the writable DVD; you can just get your friend to download the full game, which he does.

The next time an interesting game from that company is released, you remember what happened last time. You know your friend will refuse to buy it and will pirate it. Why don't you just pirate it too? Now, the DRM implemented in the game has not only done nothing to prevent a case of piracy, but it has also discouraged a customer from buying the game.

On the other hand, if there was no DRM, maybe you'd keep buying the games from the company and making copies for your friend. What's important to stress is that the pirated copies do not represent lost sales, because the friend would not in any case buy the game; he would rather not play it than pay for it. What the company needs to do is focus on actual potential customers and design their strategy around them.

The people who honestly do buy games do not benefit from DRM. In fact, they are hindered by it. Many refuse to buy games with overly burdensome DRM. I, like many others, refused to buy Mass Effect for the PC, because of the anti-piracy impementation.

Here are two articles from Ars Technica, discussing two viewpoints on piracy: Stardock's and Capcom's. I largely agree with the Stardock approach: design for your customers, not your potential users. If your customers don't want DRM, don't put it in; simply stop worrying about the pirates, because you can't stop them. Capcom's view is that DRM does work, because cracked games are often buggy and people will want to buy the full product to get an un-buggy game.

This last point isn't very sound. Michael Fitch, of THQ, famously complained about pirates bashing Titan Quest as a crappy, buggy game because the pirates did a bad job of getting past the DRM. The game's copy-protection routines would cause the game to crash at numerous intervals. The result was that the game acquired a reputation as a bug-ridden crashaholic, and sales were cut short as a result. No one even thought it was buggy because it was pirated. No one immagined that copy protection would cause a game to crash.

But even if it were the case that people would buy the full game to get a bug-free experience, how many people are pirating a game with the intention of buying it if they like it? Frankly, not many. There's really three categories of pirates that I know of: collector pirates, never-pay pirates, and get-it-first pirates.

Collector pirates pirate everything, just because they can. They amass huge collections of pirated software, much of which might never be installed. These pirates might actually buy certain games that they actually want to play; but everything gets pirated for good measure, to go in the collection. Is DRM going to stop them? Nope. Even the buggy gameplay isn't an issue when the game just goes in a box like a trophy among thousands.

Never-pay pirates simply refuse to ever pay money for software. Maybe they can't afford it, maybe they think the prices are too high, whatever. You could try negotiating with them to sell your product, but chances are they'll pirate it anyways because "free" is always cheaper than whatever you're charging. If DRM actually worked, most of these would probably be stuck with not playing rather than paying for a game. As a result, they don't represent lost sales.

Get-it-first pirates are people who want the game as soon as possible, probably because your marketing has been so effective. If the pirated version is leaked out onto the 'net before the store version hits shelves, they'll pirate it. They're also likely to pirate a game if it means they'll get it before the store opens that day. They might also be too lazy to actually go to the store, so they can get it first by downloading it than by walking somewhere. These customers are easily satisfied by offering a quick direct download service, not by implementing DRM. Lost sales, yes; but DRM is not the way to capture them.

On the other hand, what are the effects of DRM? First and foremost, you spend money on licensing it. That's a nice chunk of change down the pooper. Secondly, you frustrate legitimate customers, people who might actually have bought your game if the DRM wasn't there. Thus, the price of DRM is actually lost customers, not gained customers. Your fight against piracy ends up costing you and doesn't protect your product in the least.

The conclusion is simple. Do what Stardock does: omit DRM entirely. Fight pirates by finding a way to make them want to buy your product, not by trying to make them have to buy your product. Because they NEVER have to buy it, and until you accept that, you'll never be able to beat piracy.

I'm not entirely sure what motivated me, but I'm learning to code all over again, this time some basic PHP stuff. I was chatting with Nebu on MSN and he suggested some basic hello world type stuff, so that's what I started with. Check out my first PHP program here. You put in a name and age, it writes them to a text file, then reads the text file. It's not much, but as any coder knows, readning and writing to files is a crucial starting point.

Next up, as per Neb's suggestion, a guest book! Well, I went with a simple shout out thing at the bottom of my index page. I hope it works, let me know if you find any bugs! (but, in all honesty, don't try to break it, there isn't all that much error checking...) But do leave me a shout out before you go! :)

Although it's a bit brute-forcing the issue, I'm sure I could come up with a simple PHP script that will take these sorts of news posts as text files and, from that, build a list of the most recent files, archive the rest, and generate the RSS feed. Still, can't be as brute-force as me updating the XML file by hand every time I post an update, eh?

Now if only I could wake up my inner artist so I could finally complete my web page layout with the nice graphic bar at the top of the page!

It's been over half a year since I last updated my website, but since I've actually gone and showed it to some people recently I figured I should re-start the whole thing. First major change: I've updated all of my online game status, eliminating a bunch of games I simply don't play at all and adding a few new ones. Some of the levels might be off - I haven't actually checked PSU in a while - but I did add server names. Sort of a must have, that, eh? I left FFXI in there in case I ever have cause to re-visit it; it's the only inactive game I might go back to.

I did, however, add a forum. Yay! I found a nice perl-based forum that didn't use MySQL, so I can be cheap and not upgrade past the lowest hosting level. Check it out, let me know what you think, and hopefully even put it to good use. I enabled guest posting, so you don't even have to register if you don't want to.

I've also gone ahead and written a little bit of XML: yup, my very own, poorly made RSS feed. Give it a try: just click here and, if you use Firefox like I do, add it to your toolbar. I've put in links to the main website, a shortcut to the forum, and I'll update it whenever I add a new news story to the main page!

Warhammer Online
Sylvania
Soulrift
Chosen 17

Final Fantasy XI
Kujata Server
Character: Telsia
Mithra 75 DRG
64 WHM 61 RNG
LS: Chaotic Union

Everquest II
Lucan D'lere (RP)
Character: Pyria
Kerra 64 Warden
Craft: 72 Tailor

Atlantica Online
Telsia 61 Axe
Thebes Server

Requiem
Valdes
Character: Telsia

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