Time for the Lottery Drawing

Things have changed a bit in 30 years, but dorm life apparently isn't one of them.

Sure, there's wifi (and network access in general), newer washing machines, smartphones*, and air conditioning**, but the dorms are filled with students, and students haven't exactly changed much over the years.

Our oldest mini-Red is now at university, living in a dorm with three other women. I've heard the common complaints ("classes are overwhelming at times") and emergency requests that comes with life from someone in music/band ("I need my flip folder sent to me so that I'm ready by Saturday's game"), but I've also heard items that are closer to a modern sensibility ("wifi sucks" and "I need to get this program loaded but the instructions for installing it are all screwed up").

"Hey Lazlo! Wanna see a demonstration of gravity?"
The dorm wasn't too far off this, but with a LOT
more cinder block and a lot less graffiti.
From Real Genius (1985) and getyarn.io.

By comparison, when I attended college you couldn't connect to the university owned network from your dorm or rented house until my junior year. And even then, you needed a modem to handle the dial-up connection.*** The internet? Ha! Good luck with that, because it was the province of only the professors and a few lucky students who could use the net for research purposes. (Remember, the web itself was about 7-8 years away.) The concept of using a word processor to write up a paper was still pretty alien, as very few students had computers that could even handle a word processor. I was lucky that my Freshman roommate had a Commodore 64 and a printer, but until I reached my Junior year I frequently relied upon my old Smith Corona electronic typewriter to write my reports.****

We still have my wife's old Smith Corona around.
I haven't seen mine in decades. From ebay.com.

The Commodore 64 --and, to a lesser extent, the Apple IIe-- were what my fellow students frequently had if they had any computer or game console at all in their dorms. The NES was still a rare find on campus as most students couldn't afford to have one in their dorm --you more often found a hand-me-down Atari 2600 than an NES-- so the C64 was also the primary games machine for a lot of students.*****

There are times when I really do miss this
machine. Considering they were built like
tanks, I suppose I could find one
if I really wanted it. From Pinterest.

While I have very fond memories of my roommate's C64 --it introduced me to Ultima IV and Infocom games such as Planetfall-- the gaming landscape today is a wee bit different than thirty years ago. Among other things, tech's integration with society has had a huge impact on the public's perception of gamers. The very concept of being a gamer has much more acceptance today than it did in the 1980s, when "gamer" as a slang or descriptive term really didn't exist.

What we call gamers today were basically lumped into generic bucket of "nerd" activities. Played D&D? Nerd. Played video games? Nerd. Owned an actual game console? Nerd. Was into science? Nerd. Was into computer science? Nerd. Watched cartoons? Nerd. Read comics? Nerd. Was into science fiction and fantasy? Nerd.

Life is hell when the Alpha Betas are in charge
of the frat council. From Revenge of the Nerds (1984).
From giphy.

Sure, those activities are still nerdy, but the term "nerd" was much more pejorative back then. Today, video games are big business. So are boardgames and pencil-and-paper RPGs. The list of top grossing movies dating back to (roughly) 2000 has been an 80's nerd's paradise. Hell, even MTV, that purveyor of hipster teen/twentysomething coolness, has had SF/F shows on their lineup.

All this has translated into today, where having a dorm roommate who plays video games or D&D isn't so out of the ordinary.

***

When I arrived at my dorm my freshman year, I walked past the hallways of people carrying boxes into their own rooms. Some had begun putting up posters of rock bands, hot bikini babes, and odes to greed.

Yeah, like this. This and the posters of Budweiser
swimsuit models pretty much scream '80s.
From Yahoo.

I walked into my dorm room, and there were a few boxes set neatly to one side. A signed photo of Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, sat on the two person desk next to a pair of prom photos. My roommate came through the doorway carrying a milk crate of stuff that had a copy of Dragon magazine on top, and I grinned. I was with another member of my tribe.******

This cover, actually. I remember the Mystic
College article very well. From rpg.net.

Fast forward to the other week when the oldest mini-Red was getting settled into her dorm, she put up a few posters --Rogue One among them-- and her roommate began talking about the copy of Smash Up that the mini-Red had tossed onto her bed. Thirty minutes later they were discussing D&D 5e and maybe getting a campaign together.

I wore a silly grin for the next five minutes.

As I later texted my brother-in-law, "Sometimes, you just win the roommate lottery."




*The dorm that the oldest mini-Red lives in was built in the 50s/60s and had places for telephones hung on the wall. But --surprise surprise-- those phones are now gone. If your kid doesn't have a cell at this point then they can't call anybody without a laptop or tablet using Skype. Of course, some teenagers might read this and think "Who CALLS anybody anymore?" I guess I'm getting old...

**One of the universities we visited during the selection process was my and my wife's alma mater. During the group tour it came out that yes, we were alumni, and one of my fellow parents asked me what I thought of the dorms that they were presenting. "I'm amazed that they have air conditioning," I replied. "All of the main dorms didn't have A/C when I was here."

"What do you remember the most?"

"The smell. Imagine 40-50 guys on one floor, with no A/C, and the smell of sweat and dirty clothes. It got really fragrant at times."

***My housemates and I my senior year pooled our money and splurged on a second phone line so we wouldn't tie up the main phone by connecting to the university.

****Remember Wordstar? It was a competitor to Wordperfect at the time, and it's software could fit onto one 5.25" floppy disk with enough space for your papers. That meant if I had access to a PC around campus, I could pop in the floppy, start Wordstar, and work on a paper. It did have one major flaw in that if you got too eager and began to pull the floppy before it completely stopped spinning, your data file would get corrupted. I sadly discovered this the night before my final in my Advanced Lab class, where I lost 3 lab reports at 11 PM. The data was there, but unrecoverable. I had to rewrite those 3 reports --each report 20-25 pages long-- plus the one that was unwritten by 8 AM. I still don't know how I managed to write about 80 pages in one night, but I was so hyped up on coffee, adrenaline, and sheer terror that after I turned in all the papers I simply couldn't get myself to calm down and sleep for another 4 hours.

*****The NES back in 1987 ran typically from $100-150, with the deluxe set $179. In 2017 dollars, that's $220-330 for the commonly found versions of the NES and $400 for the deluxe set (courtesy of the inflation calculator at saving.org). These numbers are pretty much in line with what a new PS4/XBox One/Switch costs in 2017.

******You can buy those milk crates --even though they don't hold milk anymore-- at all of the discount stores such as Target and Walmart. Another nod to things that never change.

And for the record, yes, we did have some non-geeky posters on the wall too. Like the obligatory 6 foot tall poster of Samantha Fox. Yes, THAT poster. And yes, when my parents visited my dorm room later that year, I thought my mom was going to have a heart attack. (They never even noticed the D&D stuff tucked in a corner.)

Years in the Bunker

In case you hadn't noticed, Ophelie of Bossy Pally is back posting after an extended hiatus. She's been focusing on single player games these days, and she's been working her way through the Mass Effect series.

Her most recent post was about single player versus multiplayer games, their profitability, and the potential future of Mass Effect titles. While I think that ME will make a return after the bones of the system (the Frostbite engine in particular) are fleshed out enough to accommodate the RPG that Bioware wants to create, the lure of cashing in on ME style multiplayer might pull the game in a direction that fans of Bioware RPGs might not like.*

That said, a link to this article by Kotaku author Jason Schreier really caught my eye. It was a detailed article on the development process for ME:A, and everything that went wrong in development. (TL;DR: a LOT went wrong.) Schreier even mentions in the article that it was amazing that ME:A actually shipped at all, given all of the issues with the development process.

But for me, reading the article felt like deja vu.

***

As I alluded to in a previous post about the potential issues of new software releases, I worked for several years in a software development house. Those five years were some of the best years of my life, when I worked hard for bosses that both pushed me beyond what I thought my limits were and yet respected my effort and output. I made some friendships that are still going strong today, and the skills I learned during my years in the barrel (so to speak) still serve me well today.

But those five years were also among the most stressful I ever experienced.

When you're on the inside of a development house there is an occasional tendency to get consumed with the work that's right in front of your face. Teams who work together day in and day out develop the feeling that their (piece of the) project is the most important part and frequently miss warning signs. But if you can break out of that silo, you can also see a train wreck coming a mile away. Sometimes it's salespeople who overpromise to critical customers without asking in advance "can we do this?"; sometimes it's the defection of critical personnel that a company had relied upon for years as a hero to fix the emergencies at the last second; other times it might be the promotion of people who prove to be incompetent at managing a development team; and then there's the occasional directive from the top to change direction in a project. Sometimes you might just get three or even all four.

I've been in good releases and bad releases, but the one that still haunts me is the last release I was involved in, which was a real shitshow.

This particular release was a perfect storm of overcommitments to customers, loss of senior staff to higher paying jobs**, an inflexible deadline set by said commitments, and major stability issues with the development environment. In spite of all of the (new) development staff we had, there were personnel shortages during the entire release cycle as the company had underestimated the new devs' capabilities.*** I was our team's representative on the weekly release meeting, and every week there were major complaints from all of the QA teams about the quality and stability of the product. We felt that the product needed at least 2 months to straighten out all the bugs, but we were informed by upper management that was simply not possible.

Things were so bad that they had to create a tiger team dedicated to simply having a workable daily environment for devs to code with, because every other day it seemed like some new code change would crash the entire system. I got drafted into that team for a couple of months, and I lost a lot of sleep because my pager (remember them?) would go off multiple times a night letting me know that a build had failed and we needed to find what code change broke the system.

In the end, you can kind of guess what happened: the product shipped, it was incredibly buggy, and the company took a lot of flak for it. A year and a half later, the company was gutted of "overpriced personnel" and sold to a competitor.****

So yeah, I know what it's like to be in Bioware's shoes with the result of the ME:A release.

***

The thing is, the development cycle didn't have to be that way.

Blizzard is practically alone in not announcing a release date until it feels that the software is ready to go. But that's because while Blizzard has given themselves a ton of goodwill from the gaming community over the years, they have also their reputation as a producer of good and stable games at stake. Of course, they have had their share of release fiascos lately --such as Diablo III and Overwatch-- so they're not immune to problems either. But I do believe these issues also stem from the pressure that Activision is placing on Blizzard to release on a regular schedule, in much the same way that ME:A would have benefited from an extra year of work rather than release on a date set long in advance (whether internally by the staff or externally by the suits).

The ME:A release disaster was another perfect storm of staffing, management, focus, new tech, and time. And the Bioware Montreal office paid the ultimate price by being shut down and absorbed into EA Motive. But this disaster should be used by Bioware to focus on the weak points and improve them, not to go and hide. Shelving the (single player) Mass Effect franchise would be the wrong solution to the problems of ME:A.

Now, if only the suits would let Bioware work out the solutions...





*Think of it this way: Blizz was known for the Diablo, Warcraft, and Starcraft franchises. Now, along comes Heroes of the Storm, Hearthstone, and Overwatch. The money that Blizz gets out of the latter three have muscled aside the original three, and so guess where the development dollars go? While WoW still pumps out content but it is no longer the star of Blizzard's lineup, and that means that WoW will take a back seat to content for the new titles, which are correspondingly cheaper to develop and maintain. (Such as a lack of story content to the level that WoW/Diablo/Starcraft have.)

**This was the late 90s, when the original dot com bubble was inflating rapidly. I knew several of these people very well, and almost all of them cited the desire to a) make more money and b) feel appreciated. While this may sound at odds with my statement as to how I was respected, you have to realize that these people had been taken for granted by management that they'd be around to clean up everyone's messes. They'd been around for a decade or longer, and they'd realized that the internet revolution was passing them by, so they jumped ship.

***The new devs also had an alarming lack of discipline. If they were assigned to work on boolean logic issues, we'd frequently find them deep within the mathematical algorithms instead, claiming that they wanted to see where the bug led them. We had to explain numerous times that it's not your job to worry about the algorithms, we have an entire math team to handle that. Hand the bug off to them and let them deal with it. Curiosity is one thing, but when you've got 10 bugs to work on and you need to get them fixed in 3 days you don't have the luxury of drilling down past the code you know.

****By then I'd already left the company, as everybody could see that the CEO was going to cash in by selling us and getting his golden parachute.

Fifty is Nifty

Hard to believe a little wargamer get together has evolved into this:

From Geekdad.com. And yes, I've been there, just
not on a Thursday right before the opening.

Or this:

From icv2.com. I was in there... somewhere.

But Gen Con turns 50 this year, and the geeks have descended upon Indianapolis.

If you were, like me, hoping to go to Gen Con 50 and you don't have a ticket, you're out of luck. All of the tickets for Gen Con 50 sold out this week, and the tickets for Thursday (the first day) and Sunday (Family Fun Day) sold out well in advance.

I'm reduced to watching livestreams from places such as Boardgame Geek's twitch.tv stream, but I don't mind. I'm just happy that my clan has showed up to game in numbers not seen before at Gen Con.

If you want to see the BGG twitch.tv livestream, here you go:

Watch live video from BoardGameGeekTV on www.twitch.tv

Just Horsing Around

Yesterday I spent some time hiking at one of the local public parks. This particular park has a riding center attached to it* that the mini-Reds have either volunteered at or attended a week long "horse camp" during the summers, so during my hike I was entertained by the sight of horses out in paddocks or with riders coming back from a supervised trail ride.

I have a love-hate relationship with horses. I love that my kids enjoy spending time with them, and that my in-laws were able to indulge that love by helping them to attend horse camp, but I personally don't see eye to eye with horses. They don't like me very much and I'm happy to return that aloofness. Still, that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate what the horse (and the ox) have done in human history.

You can't talk about a pre-steam engine society without mentioning the horse and the ox. They were the primary means of plowing the fields for millenia, and when there was no access to running water both animals provided the means of powering items such as forge bellows and workshops.

And, of course, there was the transportation provided by these animals, which brings me to MMOs.

***

Horses (and other magical beasts) are kind of glossed over in MMOs. They are a primary means of transportation, yet beyond that they are little more than decorations. This is obviously a design decision, as the effort it would take to model the care and feeding of a horse (or even a drake) would be dwarfed only by the in-game effort needed to keep a horse as viable transportation. Besides, people don't typically play MMOs to simulate equine care and feeding.

But still, items such as understanding language or handling mounts would make for a more realistic MMO.

Back in my high school (and part of my college) days, I DMed a campaign in Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP) system. One of the nice things about MERP was that it was skill based, but on a level basis as well in much the same way as 3.x D&D (and Pathfinder) is today. But one of the biggest quirks/features of MERP was that languages and riding were on a skill system too. For example, skill in a particular language ranked from a 1 to 5: 1 for being able to speak a couple of phrases ("Hello" or "Need to piss"), up to 5 for being able speak like a native.

These skill levels are the equivalent in WoW of the old weapon proficiency skill, where you had to spend time with a weapon to build up enough proficiency to wield the weapon effectively. This went away prior to Cataclysm, but I still remember it fondly as one of the quirks to WoW that made the game more realistic, along with having to train with a trainer to gain new skills.**

How an equine skill system would work in an MMO is something that I would think is similar to the level system for a mount that Archeage has***, but instead of having a mount trailing along behind you in combat like Archeage an MMO could have a player spend time and/or money at a stable to "train" their mount. A reward for this training would be better speed and the occasional bonus of an instant in-game transportation (which would be a real boon to F2P players in games such as LOTRO).

***

Still, this kind of begs the question "Why bother?"

True, if the design goal is to bash in a raid boss' head, then adding mount skills won't add a thing to the game. This is why WoW got rid of weapon proficiency skills and trainer visits in the first place.

But if the design goal of the game is to immerse yourself in a game world, then a mount skillset could be a valuable part of the experience. Of my regular games, I'd say that LOTRO is the game where immersion is a design goal. Sure, SWTOR does a pretty good job of immersion in its own right, but LOTRO is the only MMO I play where you have in game bands that get together and play on a weekly basis. But even LOTRO doesn't have immersion as a primary design goal any more, as players only seem to want to talk about endgame (Mordor) these days.

I consider the concept of mount skill something that would make for an interesting exercise, but given how MMOs are oriented less on the journey and more on the destination I can't really see an MMO actually doing this. A shame, really, because MMOs had the potential to be more than what they have evolved into.

*The riding center is publicly funded, but is also supported by people who pay for riding lessons. The riding center also has programs for the mentally challenged, called the Special Riders Program, and hosts an annual Special Olympics equestrian event. There's also a farm attached to the park, but it is managed separately from the riding center.

**I knew people who deliberately socketed a weapon skill that wasn't their most current weapon skill rank (for example, a Judgement that wasn't the current skill ranking but the one before that one) just so that they wouldn't use up so much mana or rage or whatnot when fighting. Sure, it was gaming the system, but they were deliberately sacrificing DPS for being able to stay in the fight.

***Guess which MMO I'm checking out now?

Oopsie

I think my last post, the TERA review, broke Blogger.

I was catching up on blogs this afternoon and I happened to notice that my post hasn't been updated on other peoples' blogs, which I found rather odd.

Courtesy of The IT Crowd.

From what I've read, it might be a side effect of the size of the sucker, given all of the images I used. I just hope it wasn't an unintended side effect of actually using the scheduler for the first time to post when I wasn't around. (Yeah, even after 8 years of PC I've never used the scheduler. I never felt the need to use it, I guess.)

Fun With MMOs: TERA

I first became aware of TERA when reports surfaced about the so-called "panty run". You know, the YouTube videos that showed a female toon half bent over, running in such a way that you could see her panties quite easily. It was designed to titillate, and meant specifically for the male gaze to a degree I'd not seen in an MMO since Age of Conan.

ALL of Age of Conan.

For the longest time, I just simply wrote off TERA because of that video and how much it disturbed me. This was an MMO I'd be embarrassed to have the mini-Reds --or my wife-- find me playing, and if I did play TERA it would be really late at night or early in the morning, like Age of Conan.

So why review TERA at all? Like I said in the previous post, if I'm going to be asked my opinion, I need it to be an honest one, not just a knee jerk reaction to what I've seen via YouTube. And the longer TERA has hung around the MMO field, the longer my curiosity has grown. How has this MMO survived out there? Is it all strictly a young male fantasy, or something about Asian MMOs that I simply don't get? You'd think that if the male fantasy angle were the thing, then Age of Conan wouldn't be on life support. And I'll freely admit that I don't watch anime (at least anime newer than the original Speed Racer and Star Blazers), so there's likely a cultural component I'm missing.

So I decided that the only way to understand TERA was to actually get into the game, so I downloaded TERA, made sure it was late at night, and clicked "play".

The original TERA box cover artwork.
Because of the En Masse logo, this was
for North America consumption.
From Wikipedia.

I'm FATE-ed to Repeat Things

I've occasionally mentioned the pencil and paper RPG FATE Core, which I really think is a fun and well designed game.

Well, the people over at uptofourplayers.com created a comic describing the basics behind FATE. It's incredibly well done, and worth a look.

***

In other non-video game related news, I've been involved in an AD&D 1e campaign these past few months. The DM had hit his mid-life crisis, and decided that rather than go out and buy and expensive car (or get a new spouse) he'd much rather play D&D again. So, he rounded up some friends who like to play the game --and I in turn rounded up the oldest mini-Red-- and we began playing in late Spring.

What are we playing, you ask? Well, a classic module set:

Against the Slave Lords, Modules A1 - A4.
From greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com.

Wizards of the Coast had re-released the original four modules along with an introductory adventure, calling it Against the Slave Lords:

From dnd.wizards.com.

I've not played these modules since the mid-late 80s, so I was psyched for a trip down memory lane.

The DM did not disappoint, as he kept the action going and the pace fairly brisk. Sure, we players could take a step back and argue about what to do next, but this was light years faster than D&D 3.x and 4e that I'd grown accustomed to.

Who did I play? A cleric, of course.

As for how things will work this Fall while the oldest mini-Red is away at college, I recruited the youngest mini-Red to cover for her for the time being. And really, it's been a blast.


EtA: Corrected a basic spelling error. Sheesh.