Perpetually Bored

For the entire weekend, starting Friday night until Sunday night, I did absolutely nothing but play Bad Company 2, and I feel great about it. No looking for group for hours, no putting up with people who make a nuisance of themselves, but pure fire fights from the moment I wake till my brain cells die on me, and my eyes and neck scream bloody murder.

I’ve not mindlessly lost myself in such intensive rounds of a game for perhaps more than two years, since the local Battlefield 2 community died out. I enjoyed every bit of this weekend, and I’m ready to do it all over again the next, and the one after.

I find myself unable to game casually. For me, it’s all the way or not at all. Having being turned down from a few raiding guilds on Najena, I find it hard to swallow the feelings of rejection and turn to one of the more casual ones.

Being able to excel and achieve is an important goal for me, not just in a game, but anything else I do. This is the same reason that allows me to dedicate myself to one particular game and nothing else for years. I’d much rather succeed at one than be mediocre at a few. The sense of achievement and accomplishment are huge motivators in my gameplay. When the chances of them start diminishing, I find myself rapidly lose interesting in the game concerned.

What’s your playstyle?

Without the slightest trace of shame, I consider myself being very good at troubleshooting technical issues that arise on my own systems. I can dig rather deeply, analyze process calls and determine which program is loading what module that’s faulting. I pride myself at being able to solve issues without resolving to reformatting, which in my opinion, isn’t a real solution.

However, when someone rings and tells me, “my computer just blue-screened on me”, I find myself at a lost on how to react. More often than not, I find myself unable to come to a solution remotely.

I’ve been running this through my head because, you guessed it, I received just one such call tonight. I believe a large part my problem is due to the fact that I know very little about what goes on in other people’s computers. Contrast this to my own setups, where I am cautious of, and maintain and a good inventory of what applications I install. Thus, when an error occurs, it is significantly easier for me to backtrack and reproduce the problem.

Another contributing factor is freedom of action. I have full control over my own systems and even the network it resides within. This kind of liberty is often not present when dealing with other people’s computers.

To make complicate matters, people do poorly when it comes to describing the exact problem they’re facing. Having the exact error message, especially in blue screen situations, can go a long way in solving the problem. Although most aren’t very specific, some error messages put a high probability on the fault being hardware related other than software (PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA comes to mind), greatly narrowing down the source of the problem.

I’m curious as to how others respond when another individual highlights a problem to them. How do you go about gathering as much information about the situation and the events leading up to it as possible in order to make a few educated guesses as to where the problem lies? Is there is standard operating procedure that you follow?

It’s been almost two months since I planned on downgrading my mobile phone plan but I’ve still not gotten down to doing it. I’ve meant to on a number of occasions, but the crowd at my service provider’s, SingTel, outlets scare me. The crowd outside is reminiscent of the queues for bread in the cold winter of February 1917 in St. Petersburg, except that it remains constant all year round, never seeming to shrink. Most of them are subscribing to a new line. In a country of five million, and each individual is estimated to have an average of 1.5 mobile phones, it astonishes me how much the telecommunications industry can keep growing, and the endless amount of customers they pull in each day.

Over the course of last weekend, I hit Lvl 90 and moved to the Najena server. Najena has a good fraction of population that are Australians, who has a rather similar timezone to mine. It’s about two to three hours ahead of me in Sydney, depending on if Daylight Savings Time is in effect. That was the motivating factor behind my move. I had hoped to be able to get groups on the nights that I do come home from base and perhaps even raid some.

Now that I’m over here on Najena, I’m disappointed and find myself regretting my move. The (low) frequency of groups hasn’t changed compared to being on Antonia Bayle. Despite there being a little more chatter in the channels during my evenings, I wasn’t getting into any groups at all. On the raiding front, although there are number of guilds that do carry out raids in the evenings, compared to zero on AB, none of them seems too keen on recruiting a Wizard. I’m stubborn though, and I love my class. I’ve been playing a Wizard since launch, and I’m not going to reroll to a class that is greater in demand. Logging in and staring at my screen for the next couple of hours depresses me.

I find myself in a bit of bind. I love the game, but I’m caught in a stagnant position and there doesn’t seem to be any way that I can improve my character. With groups being hard to find and raiding opportunities almost non-existent for me, I’m cut off from a good part of the game’s content. My passion for Everquest 2 only goes so far before I  start to question my next month’s subscription and source for other avenues of entertainment.

Has anyone noticed that the con system in Sentinel’s Fate is extremely unpredictable? There are some single ^ named mobs that have a ton of HP and are able to beat the crap out of me, such as the Forlorn Drake in Toxxulia Forest, despite me being able to solo a number of ^^ or ^^^ named heroics just fine. On the other hand, some of the Epic x4s in The Hole can be easily one-grouped, and there are even Epic x2s in some group instances.

Isn’t the whole point of the con system to provide a the player with a feedback of the estimated difficulty of the mob? While some over and under-cons are are typically the case, they don’t deviate too far from the expected margins. This is drastic.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs told WSJ staffers to ditch Flash and replace Flash-based content with other web standards—a move that’s doable, but not necessarily trivial.

via Steve Jobs to WSJ: ditch “dying” Flash technology.

I’m seldom in agreement with Apple’s philosophy of doing things. However, this is one bold move that I applaud and would want manufacturers to follow.

The trouble with Flash is that, like the less popular Java, it is essentially an external application that is being embedded in a web page. Having to depend on an external application is bad for security. It is my belief that executable code should never cross from the browser on to the desktop for no good reason. What’s more is that the use of Flash goes against one of the fundamentals of the web: accessibility. Content in Flash is encased in its own container and not text-searchable. If a website is designed entirely in Flash, there is no way for a search engine to index the content of it, neither is there a way to link to a specific page within that flash content. You can’t point a hyperlink to a particular frame of Flash content.

It’s time that we took up the axe against Flash and replace it with newer and web-friendlier technology, such as HTML5 and JavaScript. I’m glad that at least one company sees the problems behind Flash and is taking decisive action to move the world away from it.

I figured that since everyone would be busy questing away trying to level, I’d attempt to snag a few discoveries from tradeskilling. I was able to get most of the server-wide discoveries for the level 80 – 82 Provisioner crafts, making an adventure level in the process too from all the mobs I had to kill while harvesting. I had to leave for work then, and when I returned, I was twelve hours behind. All that can be discovered had been discovered by then.

That was when I started going through the adventure quests and exploring. The land mass is huge, and although I did enjoy the view offered while traveling on the NPC mounts from point to point initially, the long duration of the travel soon became rather irksome. I got annoyed, I got impatient. The disc-shaped mounts looked fantastic though, and riding on them reminded me of my Magus in Warhammer Online.

Taking the advise of the public, I found my way into a Hole group, where I experienced the fastest leveling I’ve ever done in EQ2. My group found a spot where large encounters of mobs constantly spawn, and with very little respawn time inbetween too. With full vitality and a 55% experience potion, I went from level 82 to 85 in about two hours. I finally understood the reason behind the significant amounts of level 90s I’ve seen in game barely a day after launch. There’s been much debate over whether the high amount of exp given by the group mobs in the Hole are intended  or a result of some mathematical formula gone wild. Either way, now that the game has already been launched in such a fashion, it’s too late to ponder over if which was the desired outcome but accept the situation as it is.

Asides from the whole international cd key fiasco, launch day went by very well. The server came up on time, and remained up. Performance was also good, despite the heavier load. I think the development and members of the IT team did a really good job with the load balancing and scaling.

I’m thankful that I didn’t have to experience any of the issues that the intentional player base is experience trying to obtain keys for Sentinel’s Fate, due to me winning a copy of the game from the trivia Stargrace held on Twitter yesterday. Hugs to you Stargrace, I’m eternally grateful.

In the history of EQ2 expansion launches, this one has to be the worst. The sites that SOE partnered with either didn’t accept orders from specific countries, or ran out of keys in the case of DLGamer (who also refused to accept Singapore purchases, btw). Worse still, DLGamer heavily oversold and accepted the money of players even though they did not have the products to back it up.  When Kiara visited the #EQ2 IRC channel on ZAM during the hours leading up to launch, she was faced with an anger mob of international gamers, who were out to lynch.

Despite me sharing many similar sentiments as the players who were not able to obtain the game, I felt that Kiara was being treated unfairly. Without her, it is possible that no international customer would have even been able to play on launch day itself. Rather, the responsibility for the whole fiasco lies with the invisible people in upper echelon of SOE’s management, the cold businessmen in suits. At the end of the day, the international community still constitutes a sizable force in the playerbase and there’s no reason to treat them as second-rate customers just because they do not live in North America.

I still have not quite figured out how I am going to obtain Sentinal’s Fate on launch day yet. Kiara mentioned over at the community forums that the marketing team has been working on allowing international customers to purchase Sentinal’s Fate digitally on launch day. The idea of delaying digital orders until a week after launch is a poor marketing decision, and flies against all logic. While most companies are looking to champion digital distribution as a means  for rapidly distributing their products without the messy and cumbersome logistical lines, implementing an artificial  delay seems to foolish.

I think SOE did realize that,  and made some noble efforts to amend that decision. However, at the time of this writing, none of the pre-order sites catered for international customers seem to be accepting orders from Singapore. DLGamer seemed to offer it, until I attempted to pay for it, and there wasn’t a single payment option listed for my country.

Sentinal’s Fate is still not listed on Steam yet. Hopefully it accepts my order there, otherwise it looks like I’m getting screwed. Sigh.