Category: True Life

The Personal Factor

One of the incredibly keen things about MMORPGs is that people from across the country, across the world, can play them together.
I mean, really. I knew Avo in high school, and we shared cuneiform clay tablets and everything. How cool is it that we can actually now, separated by half a continent, play CoH together?
Or there are the folks I’ve never, or would have never, met — Mal, Noelle, Ulric, many more — Sean, Ted, etc. — people with whom I can interact In Character and Out of Character, roleplay and chit-chat and discuss any number of surprisingly intense subjects (especially if they have to do with super-group and coalition politics). How neat is it that there are these keen people out there that I’m pleased as punch that I’ve met online, let alone the folks I’ve met in person — and how incredibly spiffy is it that I can just sign in any evening and interact with them virtually.
And, all that said and done, there is something even more rewarding about having the opportunity — solicited/intended or not — to actually sit in a room with some of these folks and game with them live. Engage in witty banter, hear the LOLs and LMAOs and ROTFLs from one’s bon mots, coordinate tactics (or take a break) with an unambigious tightness that only physical presence can allow.
It’s something I get to do with Margie, and it’s something I’ve been privileged to do with both some of the local Denver crew and with a couple of visitors over the past months. And it’s been really neat, and I count myself blessed for having had that opportunity.
Y’know, I;d pay $20/month just for the solo or PUG availability. To actually meet up with and interact with these folks, virtualy, and even moreso live, is worth a hell of a lot more than that.

Speciallly made for Malta missions

Just what you need the next time Crimson gives you a call.

Thor Shield is a polyester fabric bonded to a conducted material that effectively loops the electricity coming from a nonlethal electricity weapon back to the weapon.
“If you are hit, the Taser gun won’t work,” said Greg Schultz, co-owner of G2 Consulting in Tucson, Ariz., which invented Thor Shield. “We return the voltage back to the gun.”
Tasers and other electricity weapons work by jolting a person’s body with enough electricity to overwhelm their neuromuscular system. When fired, a Taser launches two probes, connected to the gun by wires. When the probes hit a person’s body, they create a circuit and 50,000 volts that pass through an individual’s system.
A hit from a stun gun is incredibly painful and knocks individuals instantly to the ground in most circumstances. For maximum effect, the probes need to land four inches apart.
Because Thor Shield is conductive, it can complete the circuit with probes without having the electricity pass through an individual’s body. In a video submitted by G2–and not independently tested by CNET News.com–Greg Williams, G2’s other co-owner, takes a jolt to the head from a stun gun but remains unfazed. He is wearing a cap made of the material, according to G2. He also remains nonchalant in a Thor Shield windbreaker after being repeatedly zapped.

No CoV in Tennessee, it seems

Or, for that matter, no CoH in Tennessee, either, if a certain state senator there has his way.

State Sen. Tommy Kilby of Wartburg has proposed a bill making it a misdemeanor for stores to sell or rent violent video games to anyone.
Kilby says he put the bill together after getting feedback from concerned parents and law enforcement officials.
The bill states games depicting violence against anyone including authority figures, such as police, should be outlawed.

So no more taking out RIPs on Mercy Island, I guess. Or seeing villains beating on cops in the Hollows.
Heck, what qualifies as an authority figure? How about the bad guys who “rule” in other Portal Corp-accessed dimension? Can I still actually try to take down Psychic Babbage? How about assaulting Arachnos agents when we’re ostensibly in Rogue Isles territory (as a hero or a villain)?
Are the bosses in the Circle of Thorns religious leaders? Do they qualify? Are we going to run into trouble with anti-hate laws, too?
Or, for that matter — as super-heroes, are we heroes considered authority figures, too? If we’re deputized in some fashion, I’d think so. Does this mean that all the villains will have to be nerfed to scream and run away?
Short of that, will I get in trouble if I take my CoH-loaded notebook to our Oak Ridge or Tullahoma offices?
Goofy.
(via Les)

Graphic results

So Margie was having ongoing problems with the graphics on her machine, even after the card was replaced. Strange texture flashing and invisible buildings and other oddities.
Many mutters about CoX graphic tweaks and searching and cursing ensues for some weeks.
Finally, I suggest, “Hey, I just saw another mention of that ‘-useTexEnvCombine’ tweak — let me install it on your machine.”
Margie, desperate, agreed.
So while she was upstairs kissing Kitten good night, I opened up the shortcut …
… and saw it was already there.
And … um … realized I had put it in after her card went south and we were trying to run it on the native onboard graphics. And I realized …
… that was probably causing the problem now.
I never even thought of claiming I’d “fixed” it when I took the switch out.
I was just glad to see Margie’s graphics back to normal. 🙂

Valentine’s Day

Well, once our yummy dinner was done, we hopped on …
… well, that was after I’d commented to Margie that it was about this time last year that I’d roped her in persuaded her that playing CoH might be fun … and that we’d been doing it for a year now … and, damn, it’s been fun doing it with her.
Enough soppy stuff.
… and, of course, we had to play Mr. and Mrs. Azure a bit. Always fun, even if CC is a bit less chattery than before.
After that, we decided we’d do some Pocket D stuff. Mr. Ravenous from the villain side, Christmas Present from the heroes.
Well, the hero side (with Ravenous gimped down to 10) went okay. Actually, it went swimmingly. We tore through Council/Arachnos like knives through butter.
Then we went to the villain missions (with CP SKed to 12).
Yikes.
First off, CP being down a level didn’t help. Especially since everything was yellow and orange for me.
My being on … well the second level of reputation difficulty (“Zillions of ’em, Mr. Rico!”) didn’t help, either.
So we fought huge gobs of folks and barely survived even with the Drops of goodness from the bartenders. And that was just the first mob. The second was bad, too. The third —
— well, somewhere in there, we both died. And we decided, since it was latish and I really needed to reset to simple “Villainous,” we’d call it an evening.
So, out with a whimper. But still a fun evening.

Multitasking

Interesting study out on how video gaming helps train the brain to better multitask:

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks.
A new study of 100 university undergraduates in Toronto has found that video gamers consistently outperform their non-playing peers in a series of tricky mental tests. If they also happened to be bilingual, they were unbeatable.
“The people who were video game players were better and faster performers,” said psychologist Ellen Bialystok, a research professor at York University. “Those who were bilingual and video game addicts scored best — particularly at the most difficult tasks.”

See? All this CoH/CoV play is just to train my brain! It’s good for me!

Disco is not dead

Got the replacement video card in for Margie last week, so that’s all good (aside from the lack of footsie under the breakfast room table while we play), but now her network connection has turned flaky as hell. Adjustments and poking and prodding and the like have failed to resolve the problem, which has made CoHing a bit less than relaxing for her, alas.
Les posts this apropos note.

You were always on my mind …

Margie called from the office. “I need to ask you some questions. I have the blaster menu here.”
Cool! I was thinking about throwing together an electrical blaster (Cracklepop? Prairie Storm? Sturmy Drang?), and was thinking about what powers they have. Never run one before, at least not for a long time, so I had a few questions if she could look them up for me …
At least, those were my thoughts, but … wait … could she access CoH from work? “What?”
“I have the last year menu here.”
Oh. She was talking about food planning for the party Saturday.
*sigh*
I think she was laughing at me, not with me, when I told her.

Live and direct!

2006-01-12_aaronkate-mauler.jpgWith Kate and Aaron, two of our regular CoX co-players, visiting, it was no doubt inevitable that we would end up in some sort of mass CoX play session. And so we did, running around and bopping AVs after hours. We were over at the Testerfolks, and we had Kate, Jackie, Margie and myself out at the breakfast table, while Doyce, Stan and Aaron were in the office.
It was kind of interesting being able to just chit-chat en masse during play, to give verbal “Gather for Invis” commands to the team, and, of course, to see how folks play “in person.” Not much RP, but …
Gameplay-wise, it was not all that much of a challenge, a couple of rote face plants aside. With the players spread from 44 to 50, we could SK/RSK as fit the person whose mish it was, and we basically rolled through the missions — Hype doing his juggernaut imitation, Amorpha and Kin doing massive damage, Puck and Noelle and PC locking them down, and Shock keeping us alive. Good times.
Of the not-yet-50 crowd, Amorpha‘s about half a pip from 45, and Psi-clone‘s around 2 pips, with similar proximity for Puck Bunny to 46 and slightly more for Hyperthermian to 50. And, since I expect we’ll see at least one more repeat over the weekend, I suspect we’ll get a good chance to all ding by then.

The end of the world as they know it

We’ve had a slight taste of this in CoH, since CoV came on — especially in the weeks immediately afterwards, when Paragon felt like a freaking ghost town. I mean — arriving at the Talos tram station, or the Steel Canyon Yellow Line, and having them empty? Yeesh. Things seem to have picked back up a bit, of late. Mercifully.

“Anybody out there?” I type, but I already know it’s pointless. There’s nobody anywhere near me. For almost an hour, I’ve been wandering around a desolate plain: Gray clouds scud slowly over rough quartz mountains, while a few birds wheel in the air near mushroom-shaped trees. I never see another living soul. It feels like the end of the world.

And in fact, it is. I’m inside Asheron’s Call 2, an online game that is scheduled to die in two weeks. It never acquired enough players to make it self-sufficient, so the game’s owner — Turbine — is going to do something that only happens rarely in the world of online play: On Dec. 30, it’ll flip the power off on the remaining servers, and an entire world will blink out of existence.
Interesting. And disturbing.
(via Collision Detection)

Marvel-ous

Marvel and NCSoft have settled the lawsuit by the former against the latter. Huzzah. Quoth CuppaJo:

Marvel Entertainment, Inc., NCsoft® Corporation, NC Interactive, Inc. and Cryptic Studios™, Inc. are pleased to announce today that they have amicably settled all claims brought by Marvel and all claims brought by NCsoft, NC Interactive, Inc. and Cryptic Studios, Inc.

The parties’ settlement allows them all to continue to develop and sell exciting and innovative products, but does not reduce the players’ ability to express their creativity in making and playing original and exciting characters.
In other words, no nerfs to the costume designer (or, for that matter, the Claws primary).

Therefore, no changes to City of Heroes® or City of Villains’™ character creation engine are part of the settlement. The parties have agreed that protecting intellectual property rights is critically important and each will continue aggressively to protect such rights in accordance with all applicable laws.
In other words, the devs will still turn your green giant brute “Bruce Purplepants” into “GenericHero470,” and “Wylvoreen” the Claws Scrapper will suffer a similar fate.

While the terms of the settlement were not disclosed, all parties agree that this case was never about monetary issues and that the fans of their respective products and characters are the winners in this settlement.
Regardless of the ludicrousness of the first half of that “agreement,” the second half is certainly true.

Character sketches

Best/scariest CoV design I’ve seen to date: Eggman, who is, esseintially, a giant chicken. Small monster legs in yellow, bright white body (including “wing” shoulders) with red trim, bald with a red crest, a yellow beak/breath mask, smoking a cigar …
Coolness.
Then, at Le Peep this morning, my eye was caught by a lady with longish blond hair wearling a short black pleated skirt and highish black leather boots, and I’m all, “Hey, I could make her in the character designer.”
I was even more amused to find out that Margie had spotted the same lady and had the same reaction. We decided her name would be Le Femme Peep, and our only question is whether she’s a hero or a villain …

Talk about a timed mish …

The government of China is forcing online game manufacturers to start coercing players to get off after 3 hours of play (and taking a 5 hour rest).

In China yesterday, the government agency that oversees the online game industry said that testing of a system to regulate the number of hours gamers spend online will be ready for deployment this October.

The system will impose penalties on players who spend more than three hours gaming online. The system is slated to be fully operational in late 2006 or early 2006 and will be compulsory for all massively multiplayer online role-playing and online casual games.

“This timing mechanism can prevent young people from becoming addicted to online games,” Xiaowei Kou, the deputy director of the general administration of press and publication (GAPP), said during a press conference in Beijing.

According to the Interfax news service, an official arm of the Chinese government, the system reduces the ability level of a player’s online game character if the game is played beyond the three-hour limit. Basically, play more than three hours and the system cuts a game character’s ability by half. Play more than five hours and the system reduces a game character’s ability to the lowest level possible.
Sounds like another reason not to move to China …