Upon Request

Atheren commented on my last post about wanting more guinea pig pics (in so many words). Ask and ye shall receive...

Bleu and Brie are back at home.
Have I mentioned that their original owner
was a French teacher?

They're back up in Milwaukee just in time for pretty nasty air conditions due to wildfires in Minnesota, Manitoba (Canada), and Ontario (Canada). My oldest reports that they can't even see down the street due to the smoke, and her eyes hurt when she went to a store right across the street.

"I thought it couldn't get worse," she
reported this morning. "I have been proven wrong."

Oh, and if that isn't enough, my youngest now has a cat. Say hello to Mooch.

I'm allergic to cats, so I don't think Mooch will be visiting any time soon. Still, I can probably handle her in short doses as long as I take some Benadryl. But I have been told she's very affectionate...

Gaming Weather, Part Two

This is what greeted me on Friday morning:

The top numbers are the indoor
temperature and humidity,
the bottom is the outside ambient temp.

Couple that with 21 MPH winds, our -6.5F/-21.4C felt like -31F/-35C.

Brrrr.

The cold alone was enough, but if that were it I could handle that sort of cold temperature. But the wind...

Oh boy, that wind was something.

As in, lots of four letter curse word somethings.

You step outside and even if you're bundled up in thermal undergarments in addition to regular clothes and a parka, and that blast of cold wind just sucks all of the air right out of you in a gasp.

From memecreator.org.

To shovel the snow out to the cars so that we could even scrape them off and start them up, I had to do the "little kid" routine and do something for a couple of minutes and then go back inside to warm up. Even those chemical pack "hand warmers" couldn't keep up with the cold temperatures, but at least they gave it the ol' college try. 

From Pinterest.

Between that and the lack of services --our trash pickup was cancelled, with a "we'll be back to pick it up next Friday!" from them-- and the lack of people on the road, it wasn't that bad. Just annoying.

Right now it's a balmy 10F, so... Yay?

Gaming Weather, that's for Sure

I believe that someone, somewhere, had to have said that it'd be a cold day in Hell before Messi and Argentina finally won a World Cup.

Uh oh.
From Associated Press, photo by Martin Meissner.

I do know that people said as much concerning the Cincinnati Bengals and the Super Bowl this past January.

Double uh oh.
From Associated Press, photo by Charlie Riedel.

So... Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. Time to turn on the heater down below.

***

Time to batten down the hatches, here comes the Snowpocalypse.

From The Weather Channel.
NOAA's forecasts are more detailed
but the maps a bit cruder in design.

Okay, that's being a bit self serving, but most of the US is (or will be shortly) in the grip of what is being called a bomb cyclone, along with temperatures low enough that's not been seen in quite a while. 

From The Weather Channel.
Just search for "bomb cyclone."

Here in Cincinnati, the forecast is for -2F/-19C with wind chill reaching -28F/-33C (or worse), so...

Not gonna be fun outside, that's for sure.

I guess that means its time to play some games!

EtA: Corrected a grammatical error.

Hail and Well Met

Some thunderstorms and the occasional stray tornado blew through our area last night. Luckily the damage found nearby was minimal --only a few downed wires and flash floods-- but the lightning and wind woke me up at around 1:30 AM. I rolled over and eventually went back to sleep, but in that half-awake state I mumbled to myself that "at least I didn't have to worry about this crap on Taris."

Hail this size you won't find in a steaming jungle with toxic swamps.

Which actually was a pretty good point.

Well, outside of the fact that I'm not so sure I'd want to fight Rakghouls and thunderstorms at the same time: "Rak-nado! Coming to the SyFy Channel in 2018!"

Weather has always been a tricky thing in MMOs. The classic single world MMO, such as WoW or LOTRO, could have weather easily integrated into it, but the multiple world MMO (such as SWTOR and to a minor extent Wildstar*) weather takes a back seat to an individual world's atmosphere. Think of it this way: while you can spend a lot of time --gamewise-- in a WoW zone or an entire continent (think Northrend, for example), your average time spent on a small slice of a planet in SWTOR is comparatively small.

But even on games such as WoW, region shaking weather such as a monsoon or a hurricane or even thunderstorms is a very rare event.

The only pure weather event that I can think of that I see with (somewhat) regularity is the numbing and visibility killing fog that emanates out of Forochel in Middle-earth. I've seen that fog creep all the way down to Evendim** from time to time, which causes massive visibility issues for a game that tends to rely upon old-style line of sight for figuring out where the maguffin you're supposed to find is located. But rain and snow in LOTRO aren't that big of a deal, just like how they are in WoW.

From hiveminer.com and flicker.com.
When it is nighttime, that fog is really creepy.

In fact, I'd argue that the only big "weather" event for WoW was back in Cataclysm, when Deathwing would randomly blast an area with his dragonfire in a "hellfire and damnation" souped-up version of a global/raid/world boss.

My "Stood in the Fire" achievement came in the
Blasted Lands after a 5-man run, but I unfortunately never
took a screenshot. This was from viktdk.wordpress.com.

The big problem with a huge weather event is that it would require more than just "oh look, rain" on screen. You need to implement a form of phasing, where you have trees losing branches and rain (or snow or hail) bouncing off of houses and other "background" items. And for all of that effort, you'd expect the devs to put in a few quests as well. I mean, why go to all that extra work just for a background effect when people are clamoring for raids, instances, and questlines? I can see where at the height of WoW the devs there could tinker with that sort of thing, but the age of the 10 million subscriber MMO seems to have passed, taking with it the budget necessary for such side projects.

In the end, I guess that MMOs will continue to do what they have, and have a region with "rain" or "snow flurries" which turns on and off from time to time. It's a shame, really, because no matter how MMOs add and modify regions, without the impact of weather --and severe weather-- the world will feel static after a while.

Without having to worry about dodging downed tree branches.





*For those not aware, in Wildstar some of the zones are actually on moons of Nexus.

**Unless that's a bug, but hey, I don't mind bugs like that.

A Few Miscellaneous Thoughts for a Rainy Wednesday

It might not be pouring where you are, but is sure is outside of my window.

Although it looks gloomy, I don't mind.  Not today, anyway, when the plants have woken from their (excessive) Winter slumber.

Which reminds me; I was perusing old patch notes --really really old patch notes-- for WoW when I came across the note announcing the grand improvement of Weather in Azeroth.  That surprised me a bit, since I'd assumed that having rain fall randomly in a zone would be a minor thing.  Still, it wasn't there at release, but showed up sometime prior to BC.

While some other MMOs seem to not bother with things such as graphical changes based on the time of day or having "weather" impact the scenery (::cough:: TOR ::cough::), they get around other issues such as seasons by focusing on a small part of a planet for the questlines.  MMOs based on a single world don't have such a luxury, and yet they never seem to change the scenery in a zone based on the season.

I can understand the reasoning behind a reluctance to concentrate on these things --it not only takes up valuable developer time but adds to the horsepower needed to run a game-- but the next time an MMO touts "Weather" as a feature I'm going to be a bit skeptical.

***

It was bound to happen, but somebody finally started using raid announcements in WoW BGs.

Ever since WoW changed BG chat to Raid chat, I was waiting for some BG leader to decide to take advantage of Raid announcements to start ordering people around.

If you know nothing else about pickup BGs, you should know that there's always someone who thinks they can lead, and there's always about 5 people ready to tell that person that they're doing it wrong.

Now, inject raid announcements into the mix.  Wait for everything to combust, and.....

Oh yeah.  You can see what's coming, right?

This all went down in Arathi Basin.  That BG confounds the Alliance more than it has any right to, and I've no idea why.

As I waited for the BG to start, I perused the lists to see how the classes broke out.  Then the announcements began.

Need 5 people to cross water to assault BS
5 people pls
We'll kick ass
Need 5 people to cross water to BS

Okay, I thought, this is different.  So when Arathi Basin began, I parked myself down at the Stables to watch the show.*

Of the 15 people on our team, 14 crossed the water to the Blacksmith.

"...and nobody went to GM or LM," I said in chat.

"Keep pressing to Farm!" the Raid announcement replied.

You can pretty much guess what happened from there.  The assault on the Farm collapsed, and the Horde rallied to push against the Blacksmith and the Stables, capturing the Blacksmith.  The BG began to fall apart at that point, for whenever a Raid announcement came "5 to GM go!", about 10 toons wheeled and went to the Gold Mine.

"What a bunch of idiots!" one person grumbled.

A DK pulled up to a stop next to me.  "Stop sending those messages!" he said in chat.

"I know what I'm doing!" the BG Leader replied.

"No you don't!  This isn't a raid!"

"Shut up!"

I just kind of rolled my eyes at the spectacle.  While the raid announcement does have its use, in a pick-up game it's a bit of overkill.




*I've kind of given up on being on offense in AB when so few people actually play defense on bases they capture.  Given that --as a Rogue-- I'm usually in the shadows, an apparently empty base is a far too inviting target for the opposite faction.