For Orlando

From a vigil held in Bangkok, Thailand, for the victims of the Orlando shooting.
From courierpostonline.com Photographer: Dario Pignatelli, Getty Image

Friday Musings

Yeah, it's a gloomy kind of day today --both outside, where it's rainy, and inside at work-- so my mind has turned to more whimsical musings.

• Do Elves ever get seasonal allergies? When I see the Night Elf pic below, all I can think of is that in September and October, I'd be miserable.

From walldevil.com, based on a Blizzard artwork.

• Unlike their common counterparts in fiction, the dwarves in Terry Brooks' Shannara series are scared as hell of being underground. (It was mentioned heavily in the very first book about how the Dwarves had to deal with all sorts of things underground during the years that they "became" Dwarves that it left a scar on their collective psyche.) Why don't you see that sort of thing more often in Fantasy fiction?
• The Star Trek Next Generation Federation jumpsuit is one of those outfits that flatters most forms, so why did Cryptic Studios feel the need to sex up their loading screens and whatnot? There's absolutely no need, and I can tell you from having been to Star Trek conventions before that a well done ST:TNG jumpsuit does VERY well all by itself without having to unzip or sexy up anything. To quote George Takei: "Oh mmyyy....."

I'm not posting the pic from A New Dawn, as it likely shows
someone from the alternate ST "Imperial" universe. (From reddit.com)

• I realize that for the sake of continuity that Governor Saresh had to disappear from Taris' questlines on SWTOR, but I still miss her. Even though my Smuggler was unable to successfully flirt with her. (Hey, it fit that the Old Man would find an older woman like Saresh attractive.)
  

  

  Yeah yeah yeah. I've heard that one before, Saresh.
  From Reddit.com

  
  
• Yesterday I pulled out my old copy of The Tolkien Scrapbook (now called A Tolkien Treasury) and perused the articles inside. The article The Evolution of Tolkien Fandom by Philip Helms reminded me how I really really wanted to run my own fanzine back in the day, using mimeograph to put everything together. But I never a) had the money for a mimeograph machine, and b) never really had the oomph to start and keep running a fanzine all by myself.
  
  And now the Tolkien fanzines at least are either mostly gone or have evolved into real scholarly works, and I'm not that into the History of Middle Earth series. Blogging is about as much of a "fanzine" mentality as I can handle.

A copy of Orcrist #3, circa 1969/1970, published
by the University of Wisconsin Tolkien Society.
From tolkienguide.com

• I've been tossing around the idea of splurging on a used Xbox 360 so I (and the mini-Reds) could play the Mass Effect trilogy (among other titles) without having to buy multiple copies of the game for the PC. I'd consider a 360 over the current gen consoles because the multiple disk games (such as ME2 and 3) aren't quite ready for backwards compatibility with the XBone, and the PS4 is now going to release yet another version of the PS4, and I don't want to get on that treadmill. Besides, I'm more likely to find a used 360 (or even a PS3) at garage sales than the current gen consoles, anyway.

As if I don't have enough things to do.
From masseffect.bioware.com

• The Boss has the day off, and is over watching Muhammad Ali's funeral procession on television (thank you, Chromecast). And the news just broke a short time ago that another sports legend, Canada's Gordie Howe, passed away. The fact that it is raining outside is somehow appropriate.

EtA: Fixed some grammatical issues.

The Greatest Has Fallen

The year 2016 continues to be hell on icons.

Some people remember him as that D-Con Fogger pitchman.

Others remember him from Saturday cartoons.

Others remember him from the movie starring Will Smith, or the When We Were Kings documentary.

Others still remember him from his moment in the sun at the 1996 Olympics, his body shaking violently from Parkinson's, as he held aloft the Olypmic torch.

Some still remember him as Cassius Clay, the young man who won the Light Heavyweight Boxing gold medal in the 1960 Olympics.

But for those who saw him fight in the ring, he was always Muhammad Ali, The Greatest.

And if you didn't think he was The Greatest, he would tell you he was. And use poetry to back it up. Yeah, and his fists, too.

Ali knocking down Sonny Liston in 1965.
From The Guardian.

But Ali finally succumbed to a respiratory ailment overnight, and died at the age of 74. I'm certain that Parkinson's disease, that he battled for over thirty years, helped do him in.

***

Back when boxing was found on national television --without the need for pay per view-- Muhammad Ali conquered the media. As the undisputed Heavyweight Boxing Champion, Ali was more than just a celebrity. He had a quick and sharp mind, using it to recite his own poetry and to comment on all sorts of things. Oh, and to also get into the heads of his opponents.

He was past his prime when I was a kid, and my first memories of him were that of a poster child for staying on longer than he should have. Thankfully, time has erased those last years of his boxing career, focusing instead on his finest moments in the ring. And his humanitarian efforts.

Muhammad Ali was one of those larger than life personalities that you simply never forget.

Rest in peace, Ali.

Did Somebody Call for a Hammer?

In case you lived under a rock the past week --or didn't know anything about Activision Blizzard-- you'd know that Overwatch was released into the wild.

And now they've begun throwing the ban hammer around.

According to The Daily Dot, Blizzard has banned roughly 1500 accounts out of China as part of their attempt to stay ahead in the cheating arms race.

While others are applauding the swift action to keep people from cheating on the game, I'm skeptical whether they can keep up the pace with cheaters without devoting a lot of resources to constantly monitoring the situation.

Judging by my experiences with a certain MMO from Blizzard, I'm not exactly sure that they'll be able to keep up over the long haul. I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I'd frequently report toons with racist/sexist names or people who behaved badly in the game. But as time went on, I began to realize that the reporting did little good: when a person with a overtly racist toon name is L76 and playing in a battleground, that means that either nobody reported them or that the admins didn't bother dealing with the issue. And with people who leveled in the days before the instant L90 (or whatever it is now), they couldn't avoid people even if they tried.* And for that person to be playing in BGs....

I am glad that Blizz is starting off strong, but they now have to commit to follow through for the long run. And judging by at least one of their other properties, I'm not so sure that commitment will be there.






*And if anyone knows about that, it's me. I'd play at odd hours, serverwise, and even if you leveled simply by node farming or killing monsters out in the field you will still run into other people from time to time.

Friday Funny

Okay, after kind of a rough week at work, here's a YouTube "Honest Trailer" that I've been laughing at. It's a couple of years old, corresponding with the release of Warlords, but it is still accurate.

This Is Not Good

I'd been channeling my inner Leia when I first saw the trailer for Warcraft: The Beginning.

"I have a bad feeling about this" was my mantra whenever it would pop up on my blogger list as well as my Facebook feed. I remember how I really really wanted the Dungeons and Dragons movie* to succeed, but all it really did was become a punchline on how stupid the game must be to create a movie this bad. The mini-Reds would laugh at the occasional D&D Movie snippet that they'd find on YouTube, from Jeremy Irons' dreadful overacting to the actual use of the D&D metaterm "low level" in a description of a Mage in the movie.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

But still, I knew that there was a possibility that the Warcraft movie might turn out pretty good. For me, the major issue was going to be not whether they could find decent acting or direction, but whether the movie was going to be written primarily for the fans or for the wider audience. The former would go no matter what, but the latter were needed for sequels to happen. And for that to work, you needed to perform your world building gradually, following the example of Peter Jackson with the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.**

The worst thing that could happen? That you'd be required to perform research in order to understand and enjoy Warcraft: The Beginning.

What I didn't expect was to have a reviewer compare Warcraft not so favorably to the John Travolta adaptation of L. Ron Hubbard's SF pulp story Battlefield Earth.

The reviews aren't looking so good at the moment, with Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer sitting at 33% positive critical reviews.

And that doesn't even include the bad review that Kotaku published.

The commentary that I've been reading isn't exactly helping matters. When you've got fans hollering about how people should have done their research or played the game in order to appreciate the movie, that's not a good thing. That's the equivalent of telling fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that they should have read all of the backstory in the comics before they went to go see Captain America: Civil War.

Gee, thanks, Comic Book Guy.
From quickmeme.com

Things might change once more reviews are released, but right now it's not looking good for the Warcraft franchise.

Will I see the film in the theater? Not likely, as I rarely go to see movies in the theater***, but that doesn't mean that I won't hope for a decent turnout. But at the same time, the movie has to earn the turnout by being a good film that is accessible to the general public, and I'm not sure that Warcraft: The Beginning has what it takes.





*It it was at all possible, there were two sequels to the D&D movie. One went straight to the (then) Sci-Fi Channel, called Curse of the Dragon God, and the other... Let's just say that the other one --The Book of Vile Darkness-- is so bad that while it is listed in IMDB as a "TV Movie" I never saw it released onto television at all. If it did, I'd say it escaped more than was released.

**Even then, there were plenty of people who couldn't follow the details in the movie, but still liked it for the spectacle. And that was for an Academy Award winning trilogy. The problem with The Hobbit? Peter didn't follow the world building pace that he did in LOTR. Sure, a lot of the stuff was found in the LOTR Appendices, but it wasn't necessary to expand The Hobbit into three full movies.

***I typically don't have that much time to block off for a matinee, and that kind of leads into the second reason: it costs too much. I'd rather buy or rent the movie for little more than the cost of a theater ticket than have to deal with the decline in movie theater going etiquette. Oh, I've got stories to tell about theater and concert experiences.....

A Short FYI

Google has gotten around to enabling https connections to PC and other Blogger sites.

Therefore, if you want a secure connection, you can use https://parallelcontext.blogspot.com instead of the traditional http connection.

Carry on, good people, and Happy Friday!!

Happy Hour at the Prancing Pony

But Sam turned to Bywater, and so came back up the Hill, as day was ending once more. And he went on, and there was yellow light, and fire within; and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected. And Rose drew him in, and set him in his chair, and put little Elanor upon his lap.

He drew a deep breath."Well, I'm back," he said.
--The Return of the King, JRR Tolkien


Last week I finally finished the original Epic campaign in LOTRO, the Shadows of Angmar.

It's been a while, probably since the original time through the SWTOR Smuggler story, that I've been reduced to sitting and looking at the screen, saying, "Wow."

Yes, I'm a bit of a (lapsed) Tolkien geek, so it was only natural that I figured out who certain baddies were long before the game started bashing people over the head with obvious hints.*

I'd also quipped to the oldest mini-Red that while this was supposed to take place prior to the Fellowship leaving Rivendell, you can tell that this was designed for "MMO Middle-earth", as there'd be no way a player could get back and forth from Ered Luin to Rivendell to Angmar to Forochel in anything resembling a "short" 2-3 month time span.

But that's fine. You can't expect a game to maintain it's dramatic tension by adhering religiously to the full scope of Tolkien's creation. "Moving at the speed of plot" is the watchword here.

What stood out the most to me about Shadows of Angmar was that the LOTRO development team wasn't afraid to make one of the big baddies a woman, and a clever, cunning, yet complex woman at that. It is something that you'd not see in Tolkien's work itself, outside of perhaps Ungoliant or Shelob, but in a game designed for the 21st Century it worked very well.

I can see the Tolkien purists not liking the Shadows of Angmar epic questline, but then again I can also see them disliking LOTRO itself in the same way that they dislike the LotR movies: if it doesn't religiously adhere to the books, then it must not be worth playing/watching. What I do believe, however, is that you can remain faithful to the source material while expanding upon it. The devs made logical conclusions based on the source material, and that enhance the overall MMO experience. Even when the source material indicated some things, such as the Dunedain of the North maintaining some settlements in The Angle** after the fall of Arthedain, that didn't detract from the story driven placement of the hidden Ranger encampment of Esteldin in the North Downs.

***

The funny thing is, even with some revisions to zones such as the Trollshaws, LOTRO is still decidedly an Old School style MMO. The Epic questline takes you back and forth across Eriador in a way that is simply not done in WoW these days. While such trooping back and forth isn't realistic due to the timeline involved, it does provide an epic scope to the story.

Another thing that made my leveling easier was my familiarity with MMO tropes. While the mini-Reds will do their own thing and collect quests here and there, I'm so used to MMO-style quest collection*** that I just leveled very quickly without intending to. I'd not exactly say I power leveled, because to me power leveling is something that takes you from L1 through L50 in a week or two, but the mini-Reds kept remarking on how quickly I shot up to the low 50s. "When seven years playing MMOs you reach, leveling as fast you will" was my reply.

I also had the benefit of them having used my account for their initial forays into LOTRO, so they'd unlocked some areas --such as Forochel and Angmar-- without me needing to use my steady collection of Turbine Points to keep moving forward. But for me the biggest boon was that they unlocked the gold cap, which helped me out a LOT. Especially when I finally had to dip my toe into the auction house to buy a weapon, as my (then) current weapon was woefully inadequate for the zones I was in.

***

When the Epic storyline is complete, you really have a sense of accomplishment. It may not be THE epic storyline of Middle-earth at the end of the Third Age, but you can be satisfied that you struck a blow against the Shadow in the North.

But the best part? You didn't need to raid to complete the story. Sure, you can raid, but it's not the necessary to finish the Shadows of Angmar. I can see where this is the genesis of SWTOR's idea for the original class story to be completely separate --and designed for solo play-- away from the rest of the SWTOR stories. Sure, you can get a fellowship to help, but if you play it smart you can solo the Epic questline courtesy of the Inspiration buff.

Now, I suppose it's time to grind a bit to unlock the Moria expac....

And go back to SWTOR, too, I suppose.





*Well, to me they were obvious.

**Just south of Rivendell. It's location would be ideal to have the protection of the House of Elrond without drawing attention to itself.

***You know, the type that focuses on a single area from a quest hub and then you move onto the next quest hub. LOTRO isn't so neat and clean in that regard, but compartmentalizing the story by focusing on a single quest hub at a time speeds things up considerably. Besides, why would you want to kill all those bears twice??

A Real Life Intervention

I realize that as gamers, it's easy to focus on games or the entertainment world to such an extent that the real world is some other place way on the other side of the galaxy.* But there are times when the real world intrudes and you have to pay attention.

This past week has been one of those times.

I know this has gotten airplay as far away as Deutche Welle and NHK (Japan), but there are people who still haven't heard of the wildfires in Alberta, Canada. The wildfires, fed by a perfect storm of weather conditions, forced the evacuation of the entire city of Fort McMurray (80,000+ people). While the latest reports said that most of the city was saved, there has been a high personal cost.

From BBC.com.

Fellow MMO blogger and Blizzard Watch columnist Stacey Landry, who uses the name Vidyala on her blog Manalicious and webcomic From Draenor With Love, has family personally affected by the fire. Her brother, Matt Landry, and her sister-in-law, Aileen, lost their home to the fire.

To help her brother and sister-in-law get back on their feet, Stacey has created a GoFundMe campaign to provide some assistance. If you can, please help by visiting the site and helping to spread the word.

Matt and Aileen's Lost House Fund by GoFundMe




*Or ocean. But still reachable by flightpath. 

As the Old World Turns

When you have a Facebook group promoting your WoW "legacy server", like Nostralius has, you're not exactly hiding in plain sight*.

So, while it isn't exactly a surprise that Blizz eventually told Nostralius to shut it down, I am surprised at the latest news from the Nostralius front: the Nostralius team is scheduling a meeting with Blizzard at the Blizzard campus.

I can't imagine much coming out of the meeting, as Blizzard really holds all the cards here, but if this meeting does come out at least it gives them the opportunity to give the appearance of concern for what I'm going to dub the legacy community. I suppose I could call the pirates, or snobs, or whatever, but the reasons for wanting to play on a legacy server are likely as varied as reasons for playing on any MMO.

Well, outside of the "fun" part. I can't imagine anyone continuing to play for very long if they're not having fun.

But as for fun....

I'm in front of the Hobbit.

Some fireworks from the LOTRO 9th Anniversary event.






*I realize not everybody has a FB account, but if you don't you'll have to trust me that it really does exist.

Resisting The Sirens' Song

I've been debating what to do when I finally reach the limit on the LOTRO story and I have to start grinding Turbine Points to pick up another region. In this case, the next region is a biggie, points-wise: The Mines of Moria. I'm very sure I won't be able to grind enough points to purchase the expac before the 9th Anniversary special disappears, so I've come to the conundrum whether to break down and actually purchase some Turbine Points to get this taken care of.

In the meantime, I've been considering that maybe the SWTOR story has advanced far enough that I can jump back into it and not have the urge to stay up all night finishing the story.

And then, on the heels of the Nostralius server shutdown, came this in my e-mail folder:

Just like last time, the timing makes you wonder whether
someone from Blizz is actually reading this blog. Nah....

The thing is, I've done this already. I logged back in for a week and puttered around, but low level BGs were about impossible to get into, and Trade Chat was as bad as ever.* I wasn't about to break my traditional WoW expac methodology and use the instant-L90 boost when I prefer to start at L1 and level all the way up, and seven days is not exactly enough time to level all the way to L90 anyway.

If Warlords of Draenor is as awesome as the e-mail claims, I can wait. By the time my toons got from L1 all the way up to the current expac**, everybody had cleared out of the leveling zones. None of the insane competition for resources worked out well for exploring each new world.

The places that I pause the most and come back to whenever I level are the BC zones. I don't know why, exactly, but the BC zones just fascinate me. Northrend had the occasional hit and miss zone --Boring Tundra, anyone?-- but even Outland's stinker zone Blade's Edge Mountains had plenty of interesting quests and scenery to get lost in. It's a shame that Outland is basically on life support while the devs focus on the new shiny.

Thanks for the offer, Blizz, but I think I'll pass. Now, if you get around to creating a legacy server, I'd be very interested, but I already know the answer to that one.





*I hear people --the mini-Reds among them-- complain about some of the "sellers" on World Chat on LOTRO's Gladden-US server, and I laugh. If they want to see what a really bad MMO chat is like, they need to watch Trade Chat some day.

**If you count Wrath of the Lich King, I've done it four times. I could count my Warlock for a fifth time, but while he made it to Cataclysm's leveling zones he never got to max level. I got too burned out getting creamed in BGs in the Warlock-weak Cata expac.

2016 Has Been Hell on 80s Icons

I've been contemplating how to deviate from the usual focus of PC, but I kind of threw up my hands and said to hell with it.

Prince Rogers Nelson is dead.

While I may have technically been born in the 60s, I am most definitely a child of the 80s.

And that means the soundtrack of my teenage years includes hair metal, heavy metal, prog rock*, new wave, and Prince. Not necessarily in that order.

Make no mistake about it, Prince was an arrogant bastard, but he was also a musical genius. Unlike Yngwie Malmsteen** who, in his arrogance claimed he was better than Bach, Prince was by far Bach's successor in terms of innovation and sound and musicality. Of the musicians who came out of the 80s, he was one of the top icons of the business. Prince changed the way how music meshed --funk and rock, R&B and pop-- and he did it in such a way that popular music was never the same afterward. Like Nirvana in 1991 and David  Bowie in the late 60s, the music world changed when Prince burst onto the scene.

He was also the consummate professional in the same vein of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, never refusing to settle for "pretty good", and always trying to give the audience the best performance possible.

Prince's halftime show at the Super Bowl back in 2007 exemplified this, playing in a driving rainstorm:

Prince was also a very private man who was very protective of his music. Hence, while I'd love to have a Machinima available --set to Prince's music-- I couldn't find any that hadn't already been taken down.

Rest well, Prince. At least you made it past 1999, man.




*Rush. 'Nuff said.

**For the record, I do have his Trilogy album. He's good, but nowhere near as good as he thinks he is. Musicians need confidence to get out on stage and play, but Yngwie makes me roll my eyes.

Where's a Demon Hunter When you Need One?

Looks like WoW's latest expac, Legion, will drop at the end of August.

That's a very very long time for "not much" in the context of new content for Azeroth, but we'll see how that pans out. In terms of context, they're going back to one of their favorite baddies --Gul'dan and the Burning Legion-- so in some respects it'll be a blast from the past.

But this is very much a WoW-at-a-crossroads release. Blizzard is no longer releasing sub numbers, so there won't be that metric to scale against, but they absolutely need a healthy WoW to keep other projects afloat. WoW's profits allow Blizzard the luxury of taking their time on projects to get them "just right" (the soon to be released Overwatch) or to kill a project when it simply isn't working out (Titan). Without those profits, it is likely that (for example) Heroes of the Storm would have ever seen the light of day, as it required a completely different mindset from Blizzard's development team.

Notice I didn't include Activision in this listing. Activision, well, likely has other plans for its Blizzard sibling, and those probably include maximum profit for minimum work. If Legion stalls out early like Warlords did, then that might be the last major expac for WoW; Activision will demand more Heroes of the Storm and less WoW from the Blizzard development team.

Here's to hoping that the MMO standard bearer doesn't fall victim to the bean counters and get put off to a steady state level of support.

A Server's Last Minutes

The Vanilla WoW server Nostralius, a "private" WoW server that existed in a somewhat illegal manner outside of the WoW-verse, had to shut down the other day after a cease-and-desist letter came from Blizzard's lawyers.

Someone had managed to capture the final few minutes of Nostralius (Horde-side) and posted the video on YouTube:

Blizzard may not be under any obligation to provide any Vanilla (or BC or Wrath) servers for those fans, but there certainly is a demand for them.

And now for some Lighter Fare

After the emotional rollercoaster that was the Overwatch short film Alive, I figured you'd want something a bit happier and lighter in tone.

Sure, I could have gone completely off the rails and posted about the NCAA Men's Basketball National Title Game, but not everybody is a college basketball junkie like I am.

But I really like Sneaky Zebra's YouTube videos of cosplayers at Cons around the world, so I thought I'd give them a signal boost for their latest video, from WonderCon 2016:

And, for those more interested in MMO cosplay, their BlizzCon 2015 music video:

Sneaky Zebra also has a Patreon Page, so you can support their work.

No, this isn't Frampton Comes Alive

Blizzard released another short film for Overwatch, and this one hits you right in the feels.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

And before anyone asks, no, I can't play shooters. But I wish this was a third person angle game.

I Guess Blizzard Wasn't Channeling Sir Mix-a-lot After All

Today's graphical correction has been brought to you by Overwatch.

Seems that Tracer, the Brit with the cockney accent who can teleport around the battlefield, has a very, um, un-Tracerlike victory pose:

From The Mary Sue.

Maybe Tracer would pose like that --in private-- but this pretty much goes against everything we have, both in-game and out-of-game, about Tracer so far.

Some fans voiced their concerns about Tracer's pose, and the Blizzard devs agreed and removed the pose from the game.

Amazingly enough, the commentary has remained (relatively) civil on the Blizzard Beta sites, although I can imagine that it won't last.


EtA: Well, that escalated quickly.

Paging Neil deGrasse Tyson...

...white courtesy phone, please.

Sorry, but I just had to add this.

Okay, not really, but typically during an MMO's nighttime I don't often look up. I'm more used to the focusing on the baddies on the ground, and besides, the sky at night in MMOs changes depending on what zone you're in.*

Some MMOs don't even bother changing the sky based on the time of day --I'm looking at you, SWTOR-- because the background scenery is only important enough for the imagery it presents to you as part of the story.

Lord of the Rings Online, on the other hand, is a bit different.

For starters, some baddies only come out at night, such as trolls, and any quest that involves getting rid of the trolls that roam the countryside in, say, the Trollshaws** close to Rivendell, means that you have to wait until the sun goes down before you can go troll hunting.

This is where LOTRO's sped up game time comes in handy, so you don't have to wait for the night time on whatever time the server is set for to actually go troll hunting. If you play only from 2 - 4 PM at your local time in a game that keeps a true 24 hour game clock (WoW, for instance), you'd never actually see the night sky unless you played on a server on another continent. LOTRO's in-game clock is so fast that an in-game "day" is slightly over 3 hours of real time.

Well, this is nice and all, but on one of those times when I was travelling through Evendim (swimming across Lake Nenuial because, you know, a F2P player doesn't have access to things such as boats that make such travel easier), I happened to look up at the night sky above me.

Ithil (aka "The Moon") is off screen above and slightly to the left.

I'm by no means an amateur astronomer, as what qualifies as a telescope in our house is an old Stevens 3" reflector that I received as a Christmas present back circa 1981***, but I know enough about the night sky that I picked out this immediately:

Apparently my toon has good eyes, as I can only see about 7 or so in real life.

The Pleiades. Right next to the tower at Tyl Ruinen.

Now, when Tolkien wrote the stories about Middle-earth, he grounded the tales by referencing real world items and putting his own spin on them. The Moon became "Ithil" in Sindarin (one of the Elvish languages), "elephant" became "oliphaunt", etc. The Pleiades became Remmirath (in Sindarin), or the Netted Stars.

I realize that MMO skies aren't going to be astronomically perfect --the developers have way too many other items to worry about to be concerned about getting the night sky in Northwest Middle-earth in the Autumn completely accurate****, but I still found it surprising that the devs took the time to get The Pleiades right.

I might have to go back and see if I can find Orion in the sky.





*Think of how cloudy with an eerie glow Icecrown Glacier is in Northrend, and you get the idea.

**I know, I know. Silly name. But Tolkien wrote it that way and put it on his maps.

***I still occasionally drool over a Celestron, Meade, or Orion telescope catalog, wishing I had the money and time to do some stargazing on a regular basis. I even considered trying to build my own telescope, but I realized after crunching some numbers that I'd be better off simply buying my own telescope than trying to make my own. And I think my wife would be very upset if I took years to finish another one of my "projects" around the house.

****Tolkien does reference Remmirath and Menelvagor (Orion) in Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.


EtA: I just had to add the Airplane scene after the fact.

The Doom that Came to Nexus

It's only natural that I, having come lately to Wildstar, am the last person on the planet to find out about its impending doom.

I'd just run smack into the attunement wall which requires you to run instances to progress further in the story, so I was wondering what to do about Wildstar when Syl posted this that referenced layoffs at Carbine.

Off on an article chase I went. Which lead me to this article from Polygon.

Which is ironic, to say the least, because I think that in the end Wildstar got more right than not.

I know that when I initially checked out Wildstar I wasn't so sure about the sexy female designs/armor as well as the heavy dose of Texas in the attitude of the game, but I eventually came around.* The story sputtered at first, but eventually got going around L20 or so. It's unfortunate, however, that a significant part of the storyline doesn't end when attunement begins.

I don't mind raiding being behind an attunement wall, because that's part of Vanilla and BC that I wish was still around to an extent. But there's a caveat there: having a decent portion of the storyline behind that attunement wall leaves a lot of players hanging. SWTOR fixed that problem by two methods: a class storyline that ended in a solo mode, and an overarching storyline (in the expacs and KotFE) that had a solo mode, even for the group content. WoW fixed the problem by leaving as much of the story as possible outside of the raid content itself.**

While I do realize that Carbine's focus was old school hardcore raiding, I do think that the story and game would have been a big hit as a standalone game. Or as an MMO that embraced a newer design for endgame, aka not falling into the MMO trap of "the game begins at endgame".

There will always be one nagging thing at the back of my head regarding Wildstar: why didn't the Dominion simply use all of its available resources across many worlds to simply crush the Exiles? It's a bit different when you're trying to play whack-a-mole across a galaxy, but on one planet? It should have been clobbering time.





*Or got used to ignoring it. Your choice.

**It also create LFR, which has been either a boon or a bust depending on who you talk to.

Lok'tar, friend! Have you come to serve the Horde?

If you remember this post and were wondering where the hell the Horde was, here you go.

I was in the vicinity of UC last evening and I was behind this car:

Yes, that symbol on the left was unmistakeable:

I decided not to embarrass the youngest mini-Red by shouting and waving. Still, Thrall would be proud.

What's over the next hill? Bears, that's what.

I've been spending the past week re-acclimating myself to the old school MMO design of LOTRO.*

The concept of item wear during normal use --which typically only happens when you're killed in an MMO-- is still part of LOTRO. I'd made it to roughly about L24 or L25 before my Champion died the first time**, but I had to periodically stop and visit a vendor to repair my worn items.

The old style quest hub concept, which I detailed a few posts ago, was very much in evidence in the Lone Lands and the North Downs. You'd think you were finished with a quest hub, but once you turned everything in another set of 6-10 quests would suddenly pop into being.

I can't say I mind the old quest system so much, but it sure would have been nice if Tolkien had dreamed up a bit more variety in the enemies department. I'm getting tired of killing orcs, bears, wargs, boars, birds, and spiders wherever I go.***

This is the reason why bears are now on the
Middle-earth endangered species list.

The thing that still surprises me, after all this time, is how faithful LOTRO is to the source material. Even the items that they made up for the MMO, such as the refuge of Esteldin, fit in so well that unless you're a Tolkien geek you'd never notice they were made up.

True story: I was goofing around in the North Downs, if you want to call goofing around slaughtering trolls en masse, when someone asked in World Chat just how much of LOTRO is made up****. The asker thought that Archet, Combe, and Staddle were made up (they weren't) and that Esteldin wasn't made up (it was). When someone mentioned that The Forsaken Inn, for example, was referenced in the novels but never fleshed out, the asker exclaimed that he thought that was another made up location.

***

Naturally, in MMO space you can't afford to have distances as far apart as they really were in Tolkien's Middle-earth.

For example, the distance from The Forsaken Inn to Weathertop was a couple of days of foot travel on a good road, and the distance from Buckleberry to Bree was much a good day's travel by pony, too.

Compressing Middle-earth does have one huge positive, however: that people can remain engaged with the MMO without extraordinary effort.

I know there are people out there who like to explore, and they would love the vastness of Middle-earth as Tolkien envisioned*****, but to be completely honest a real trip from Bree to, say, Weathertop would be 95% boredom coupled with 5% adventure. (Or sheer terror. Your choice.) Eriador in particular is so empty in stretches that it is simply impractical to expect it to hold a player's attention without gobs and gobs of additional "kill ten rats" type of quests. And really, there are far too many of those quests in LOTRO as it is, as that was the quest design structure of the time.

So while it does kind of irk me that some aspects of the game, such as political contact between The Shire and Ered Luin not exactly following the pattern of Hobbits not named Took or Brandybuck, I'm willing to ignore it in favor of playability. Besides, a lot of the political and racial tensions in Tolkien's works do find their way into LOTRO itself. The end of the Elven low level zones in Ered Luin, for example, is predicated upon the traditional misunderstandings between Elves and Dwarves, and the open refusal of the chief constable in Bree to work with the Rangers ends up hampering his ability to handle the brigand and orc incursions into Bree-land.

***

But there's one item that is definitely NOT in Tolkien's works that I'm glad that Turbine has taken: Tolkien's viewpoint toward women.

Yes, JRR Tolkien was a product of his times, and yes, he patterned the stories surrounding Middle-earth after the Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythic tales he so loved, but both The Hobbit and LotR are a primarily a sausage fest with the few women in the story reduced to a secondary or tertiary role.

As a guy, I never really noticed the lack of women in the novels. Even comparing it with other stories from the early 1920s up through the 1970s, such as Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, Howard's Conan stories, or Moorcock's Elric and other stories surrounding the Eternal Champion, the women in the novels are primarily there to be a) a love interest, b) a plot device to explain/move the story along, or c) for sexy fun times' type of window dressing.

The Peter Jackson adaptations of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, however, did make an attempt to address the lack of women in the stories by enhancing Arwen's role (by giving her the additional duties fulfilled by another minor character, Glorfindel), providing more screen time for Eowyn to be badass on the battlefield, and emphasizing Galadriel more. And, yes, creating the role of Tauriel for Thranduil's realm.

Still, LOTRO goes a step further by integrating women into all facets of life in Middle-earth. Women are guards, warriors, craftspeople, farmers, nobles, etc. And more than that, they are also important NPCs in each region.

Who is the hero whose quick actions saved Trestlebridge from attack by orcs? Aggy Digweed.

Who is the hero who stormed the Red Maid's territory in the Lone Lands to stop the nightmares of Hana the Young? Her sister, Elsa the Bold.

But the best part? Some of the enemy NPCs and bosses are women, too.

Not my video, but Andraste's ability to hang out 

in the Barrow Downs alone merits my respect.

***

Perhaps because of the old school feel of LOTRO, I've got a fondness for the game. I can go back in time and relive the design that was current when I started playing WoW, without having to worry about any story continuity issues that Cataclysm inflicted on Azeroth.

But more than that, I can enjoy the Middle-earth that I used to read****** come to life in an MMO, without it looking too hokey or snarky concerning the events in LOTR. Bree itself fascinates me in a way that I never expected, since it was just a metaphorical bump on the road in the novels, but seeing it truly come to life like this gives you a much greater appreciation of Tolkien's vision.

Besides, they've got a good band that plays on Friday afternoons on the Gladden server.





*The mini-reds have informed me that I've been playing LOTRO waaaay too much. Go figure.

**As is usually the case, I tried taking on more and more enemies at once until it finally caught up with me.

***And the Dead. You'd think I dropped in on The Walking Dead: The MMO from all the wights I've been killing.

****Yes, I know how silly it is to be arguing such a thing in a fictional world. At the same time, staying true to the source material is always important for immersion.

*****The late Karen Wynn Fonstad's work, The Atlas of Middle-earth Revised Edition (Amazon and B&N), is well worth the price for people who love maps and created fictional worlds. While she references Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-earth series, she doesn't allow it to overwhelm the original material from the primary sources (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales).

******And play in, courtesy of Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP). It was a competitor to D&D back in the 80s and 90s, and I loved the skill based system. Their sourcebooks had a default setting of the mid-Third Age, about 1500 years before the events in LOTR, so there was still a Dunedain kingdom in the North and a Dwarf kingdom in Moria. And those sourcebooks were fantastically written and detailed. Even though I haven't played the game since the early 90s, I still have all of my sourcebooks; they're that good.

Just Another Friday Afternoon in Bree

Gladden server, roughly 5 PM EST.

No, your eyes to not deceive you, those are a bunch of toons --with similar names and outfits-- dancing in unison.

I'm there as well, but just off the screen to the left.

Breaking the Unwritten Rule

I was goofing off on Dromund Kaas last night, figuring I'd go do a daily or two, when I got in line to take out a 2+ toon in the Temple.

Another toon in front of me asked me and the player behind me to join up as a group, and I figured why not. It saves on waiting around for additional spawns, and you can burn down the boss more quickly.

But. (You know this was coming, right?)

Once the boss dropped, another toon who'd just run into the room ninja-ed it first.

Ahead of about 5 people/groups.

"Did he just do that?"

"What a dick!"

"Fucker!"

"Come back here, asshole!"

I shook my head. I bit back my "Well, that's someone embracing the Sith Code for you" rejoinder, because I shouldn't have been surprised at all.

***

I've not seen much ninja-ing of stuff since the height of Cataclysm, but it does still exist.

There was the one time I was on my Trooper and I joined an ops group to take down the World Boss on Tatooine. We were waiting for the last couple of stragglers to join us at the location when a lone Imperial ran up and summoned the World Boss, blocking us from taking credit for it.*

Then there was the 1/2 hour I'd spent grinding my way through mobs in the Field of the Dead on Age of Conan, sneaking around and attempting to reach a boss at the far end of a long flight of steps, when a high level toon rode up and dispatched the boss just as I was fighting off the last mob or two.

And I'd really rather not talk about the times I'd been ganked or ninja-ed while leveling Q back in the day, particularly in the Arathi Highlands. At 3 AM server time.**

***

What drives someone to take someone else's hard work and capitalize on it for their personal gain?

It's not like MMOs have a lock on this sort of bad behavior. If you work at a company of any real size, you know of at least a few people who attempt to sabotage or (at least) take credit for other people's work on a regular basis. And some corporations seem to actively encourage this sort of behavior, too, given how they handle annual performance reviews.***

Is it the nature of the MMO reward system that encourages Machiavellian behavior, or is it the other way around?

I suspect that a lot of this is absorbed by people while growing up, believing that this is how they ought to act to get ahead in life. From my own experience, I had a grandmother who used to say things like "If you've got someone who looks like they might run you over to get ahead, go and get them first! Get them before they get you!" And this in spite of the fact that she always considered herself a proper God-fearing woman.

However, a certain percentage of people get their amusement out of the pain of others. These are the people who give YouTube comments a bad name, or those who dox people they don't like (or espouse views they don't like). When confronted, you often get a defensive "hey, lighten up!" or a "it's just goofing around", or even the occasional "hey, they deserve it for [insert whatever pissed them off here]!"

Whatever the reason, there's a subset of MMO players that enjoy ninja-ing, and while they tend to gravitate toward certain games, no MMO has a monopoly on this behavior. This leads me to think that the Machiavellian tendencies were always there in people, but the online and anonymous nature of MMOs encourage ninjaing. The reward system doesn't shape behavior to the extent that some could argue, because by and large ninja behavior is the outlier, If the reward system were causing the behavior, I'd expect it to be condoned in blogger press as an acceptable method of playing the game. (It isn't.)

***

After the 2+ boss was ninjaed, our group switched world instances and found one empty of any sort of line. We dispatched the boss quickly, and that was that.

Well, kinda.

One of the group members dropped, but the other player and I teamed up to finish the other Dromund Kaas Heroics in short order. We chatted throughout the short adventure, and ended up friending each other. In a bizarre sort of way, were it not for that ninja, I'd have not made another acquaintance in SWTOR.

I'd just rather not have a ninja as the catalyst for that.





*He died almost instantly, but it was such a dick move that he should be grateful that his PvP flag wasn't set to "on."

**Which you'd THINK would be the safest time of day to be out in a PvP world. But nooo.....

***The worst types are those that grade on a strict bell curve, with only the highest rated people getting the raises. That means getting that highest rating, whether by backstabbing or working 90 hours a week (and I've seen both in action), makes it open season on everybody who is a good employee. Other people deliberately move to bad teams so that they can be the top banana of a bad group without having to put much effort into it. And still others will lie and cheat and steal in order to get ahead.

Hitching a Ride to Duillond and Back

I've been making time this week to do some low level questing in LOTRO with the mini-Reds. Considering that I only leveled up to around L16 or so the last time I played before ceding the game to them, I figured it wouldn't take too long to go past that.

I'd forgotten that the initial leveling process for LOTRO is a bit like the pre-Cataclysm WoW system as you tend to get shuttled around quite a bit in the low level zones. For example, if you start as an Elf (as I did), one of the quests takes you up to Duillond to try to convince the brother of a quest giver to forsake Middle-earth and take a ship to the West.* That brother then sends you out to find the remains of a sword used by a Dunedain compatriot long ago, and then once secured you're sent all the way back to the initial quest giver. That quest giver then sends you up farther north to yet another hub. The back and forth in the middle, while important to the quest line, is a bit tedious to a brand new toon who has to hoof it back and forth.**

That's me, a glorified messenger boy.
(No, I haven't created any female toons yet.)

By the time Cataclysm was released and SWTOR dropped, the leveling experience had been tweaked to minimize back and forth movement throughout a zone: you collect your quests, do them, and then once you turn them in you're sent to the next quest hub. The back and forth of the previous example would have been eliminated, either by a form of phasing that would cause the two brothers to be together at Duillond (Wildstar or post-Cata WoW), or a Story Zone instance (SWTOR).

The quirks of questing aside, LOTRO still holds up well. World Chat was lively yet thankfully free from the sewer level of filth and trolling found in WoW's Trade Chat. My oldest was a bit annoyed at people feeding a few trolls, but to be honest those trolls were pretty mellow compared to those I've seen on most other MMOs.

Another part of the game that let you know you were in LOTRO was the competition for resources in the low level zones. While there are still instances of people ninja looting, I found people being respectful of others when they were fighting the baddies next to a quest object they were looking for. I suspect that the (relatively) quick respawn times helped alleviate that issue***, but still that speaks to the average LOTRO player that they weren't acting like jerks simply because they could.

***

These low level experiences, grouping up with the mini-Reds who were excited to share their favorite MMO with me, have been fantastic. Unlike the times when we play SWTOR, you can tell that while they like that game, they really love this one.

I can't say there have been memorable "can you believe we did THAT?" moments, but just having them there, doing their thing, or tagging along and healing while I putzed along, was great.

I wonder if this is what it is like for family who use MMOs to keep in touch across the country; these are the same tools that people use for guilds, but when family is involved the feeling is quite different. Even though they're upstairs and I'm downstairs.





*One nice part of LOTRO is that they remain consistent with the world of LoTR itself. While a reader of The Silmarillion would almost expect them to say "The Undying Lands", the quest giver here says "The West" instead, which is how the Undying Lands were presented in LoTR.

**Yes, LOTRO has Stable Masters who operate like a taxi or a flightpath, but you still have to reach places in LOTRO on foot to unlock those Stable Master points, particularly on the within-zone Stable Master locations. Unless you knew they were there as I did, a new player could just as easily have missed them and ran all the way across Ered Luin to complete this questline.

***Thankfully, they weren't as quick as found in Age of Conan, where a player would never be able to clear an immediate area of enemies before they started respawning. You have no idea how annoying that is, knowing that you'll never be able to clear things out enough to take on a boss without having to worry about a bunch of regular enemies jumping you from behind. And in Age of Conan, two mobs can take out one toon at level without blinking.

The Curse of Success

I spent part of last night watching a documentary by the PBS show Frontline. If you've never watched a Frontline documentary, they're very much worth the time.* This particular time, however, the Frontline documentary was on daily fantasy sports. Called The Fantasy Sports Gamble, it talks about the explosion of daily fantasy sports into the popular consciousness, whether daily fantasy sports such as Draft Kings and Fanduel are gambling or "games of skill", and how "normal" online gambling subverts US law to cater to US players.

While I'm not exactly planning on playing any of those games**, I did note one almost throwaway comment toward the end of the episode. One of the people promoting a lesser known daily fantasy sports site was emphasizing the growth aspect of some of the "lesser" sports in the US, such as cricket and eSports.

That got me to wondering just how we truly know that eSports are legit.

My quick conclusion is we don't.

Unlike, say, other sports or "sporting activities", such as football (both varieties), basketball, auto racing, and even extreme sports, there's a physical gamespace that people have to compete in. While the space could be tampered with, that tampering affects all competitors equally. But with eSports, the gamespace is virtual, and controlled by a central system. That central system becomes more of a black box, where you have to assume everything is equal for both sides***.

But what if it isn't?

And, more importantly, how can you tell if it isn't?

You have to assume that the code compilation for eSport games didn't include any tweaks to the code designed to adversely favor a specific build at a specific time, but with growing amounts of money involved, you can bet that organized crime is trying to find a way to game the system in their favor.

I'm not talking about players being paid to throw matches, as can be found in this article from Den of Geek, but the employees at the company from being paid by organized crime to make very small code tweaks that will favor one style of play over another. Between two evenly matched teams, just a small tweak of a cooldown or a very slight manipulation of a crit size would be enough to influence the game. Or, to put it another way, if there was a code tweak in a Mario Kart Tourney that someone playing Rosalina would have a larger than normal chance of getting a lightning bolt or a Bullet Bill. It may not ensure victory, but it would certainly tilt the game in favor of someone who plays Rosalina.

And what organized crime would want is not exactly a sure thing, as that would cause speculation, but a decent chance at a sure thing.

***

If you follow auto racing, some leagues enforce more standards than others. Formula One racing is at the "let 'em play" end of the spectrum, while NASCAR is at the "rules lawyer" end. But that "rules lawyer" end of the spectrum means that NASCAR spends a lot of time measuring and testing the cars and other equipment of their participants to ensure there's no funny business going on.

The reason why I bring this up is obvious: without extensive testing, that black box is more mysterious than ever.

It's not as if gamblers will not stop sniffing around what they feel is a sure thing. The sheer chutzpah of some gambling sites to sponsor soccer teams (such as Stoke City having Bet365 as their primary sponsor the past few years) shows that other places around the world have a different view towards gambling than the US'. But still, as eSports will become more popular and more money flows in their direction, there will be more attempts to manipulate the system for profit.

It goes with the territory, I suppose, just as long as eSports doesn't have their own version of the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

"Yeah, I'm gonna play some 2x2s tonight. Wanna come?"
From the movie Eight Men Out. From moviefone.com

*You can watch Frontline shows online for free, and they're definitely worth it. One of the best ones from last year, League of Denial, talks about the concussion epidemic in the NFL, and inspired the Will Smith film Concussion.

**Full disclosure: I have played Fantasy Football in "leagues" when I was in college and upwards of 10 years ago, but I've not played in years. I no longer even fill out a bracket for the Men's and Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament, because I tend to be lousy at picking who will win.

***Not counting individual build and toon differences; there's a reason why Blizz and other PvP-centric companies are constantly tweaking class and racial abilities to prevent the "new hotness" from cleaning up on the Arena or Battleground for too long.

Activision Hit By Layoffs

According to this gameinformer post, Activision's weaker results in the previous quarter have resulted in some layoffs and reorganizaton.

My previous speculations that Activision Blizzard is going to focus more on mobile and eSports games seems to be coming true, but at the cost of Skylanders and Guitar Hero.

Whether or not Skylanders is superior to the competition, Disney has heavy hitters and name brands in its' Disney Infinity line*, and LEGO has both name brands** and... well... LEGO it it's LEGO Dimenions line. This is one of those times where Activision is going to take a hit.

This makes me wonder whether Skylanders might have done better if it had a tie-in with other Activision Blizzard properties, such as characters from WoW or Diablo. Of course, those characters alone would push Skylanders away from its current family friendly space, but it might have also brought in more profits.

Will this impact Blizzard's end of things? That is uncertain, but given the downturn of Activision Blizzard's profits, there will be likely greater outside push for improving next quarter's --and next year's-- numbers. Overwatch and WoW are going to be in the crosshairs as investors will demand to see improvements to A-B's bottom line, and if they don't get it, I'd expect for Activision Blizzard to start hearing calls for more reorganization and spinning off properties that are work intensive yet not as profitable as they could be. With a lack of subscriber numbers to go by --Activision Blizzard no longer publishes those, remember-- that might include WoW.

Not that Legion didn't have enough pressure on its release.





*Disney has pulled out the stops for Disney Infinity, with Star Wars, Marvel, Disney classic movies, and others.

**Not counting LEGO specific lines (like NinjaGo), there's DC Universe, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future, and The Simpsons. At least; I'm sure I missed a few non-LEGO properties here and there.

How To Feel Old, Part Whatever...

It's been a slow week or so here at Red Central.

Sure, I've played a bit of SWTOR and Jade Empire, but I've been both busy with work and making the first of what is sure to be many university visits.*

Our first campus visit was similar only in the sense that it
was ON a university campus. The temps were below freezing,
and it was only an hour or two after sunrise. I also managed to
embarrass myself by missing a step and falling down.
The oldest mini-Red was mortified. (from alamy.com.)

I did ask about internet connectivity --because it's important to be able to access your online gaming school work-- and it seems that for universities with lots of older dormitories, wifi has been a godsend. Not so sure about speeds, given than you've got potentially the entire student body using the same pipe at the same time, but at least there is internet.

***

There is a gaming angle to this, as on the ride back home the mini-Reds pestered me to create a character on their new LOTRO server, just so that we could hang out.

So I did.

Not surprisingly, I created another Elf Champion with the exact same name as my old main on LOTRO, because I can still do a Paladin-esque melee figher. Alas, the graphics for the buttons on the UI are still red and green and are as hard to read as ever.

It's kind of like this, only a lot fewer attacks (obviously), as I've only an L3 toon:

From lotro.com forums. A whole lot of red and green.

If you're red/green colorblind, this can be really bad.

Or, if you're just like me and have a hard time reading all the details, it can drive you nuts.

Still, the scenery is as beautiful as ever. Alas that the toon graphics don't match the scenery quite as well.

But for sheer immersion, LOTRO is hard to beat.

Now, to actually find the time to, you know, play the game. But with the mini-Reds around, I get the feeling time will magically appear...





*Where did the time go? Oh, right. Anyway, two years for mini-Red #1, then we go right into two years for mini-Red #2, and #3 is right after that. Six years of the college application process. Oh yay.

If I Could Jump Like That, I'd be in the Olympics

Origin has had another of those classic free games available that fell under the "yeah, I've kind of wanted to check this out" header: Jade Empire.

From origin.com. And yes, the freebie is Special Edition.

Thankfully, this 2005 release will run on modern widescreen monitors --even though the cutscenes are all 480i-- so it doesn't seem too out of date.

Yes, the old Bioware engine is a bit ancient compared to today's software, but the story is all there. And yes, it is a really good story.

(Well, duh. It's Bioware, right?)

After having played MMOs for so long, reacquainting myself with the "Save" feature was a bit of a shock. As well as dying on the second or third fight.*

Unlike its Bioware predecessors, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Jade Empire is made for the console controller first and the keyboard second. It has that Neverwinter design of using keys to move around and the mouse buttons to shoot, and after a couple of days my knuckles have begun aching. I think I'm going to have to break down and get a replacement XBox 360 wireless controller unit for the main PC, as the old one simply stopped working about 3-4 months ago.

Aside from those quirks, Jade Empire is shaping up to be a satisfying RPG.

I do wonder how Jade Empire would look if it were updated graphically to match the modern designs, however.

***

The reason why I bring up Jade Empire is that it's another property that makes me wonder how it'd work as an open world MMO.

Of the current AAA designs, the only one that has an explicit Wuxia connection of any sort is WoW's Pandaria expansion. I don't count Final Fantasy XIV, which is high fantasy (mixed with some steampunk), and I never played the Age of Conan expansion into Khitan. Other JRPG-influenced MMOs, such as Aion, don't cross into Wuxia territory.

There are some martial arts MMOs out there, such as Swordman and Age of Wushu, but neither command the level of interest that even SWTOR or LOTRO have. There was also 9Dragons, but it is shutting down in February 2016.

Still, it seems very odd that a genre that people are very familiar with, courtesy of Asian martial arts movies, the occasional breakout film**, and the numerous martial arts fighting video games, is underrepresented in MMO space.

***

One last non-related note:

Apparently Splatoon's Squid Sisters, Callie and Marie, have been branching out beyond providing the "news" when you login to Splatoon. To wit: they held their own Vocaloid concert recently, and there is a YouTube video of the event.

No, really. Apparently these Vocaloid concerts are a thing in Japan.

*I also reacquainted myself with some more esoteric language in my vocabulary.

**Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Or even the Kung Fu Panda trilogy.

EtA: Added the video.

Hold on Loosely

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

--Othello, from Othello, Act V

I've learned to not become that emotionally invested in RPG characters the hard way.

You know, by having your heart (metaphorically) ripped out and stomped on by events beyond your control.

My old WoW Mage, Nevelanthana, got her name from a D&D character I played in my current D&D 3.0 campaign. She was a bookish type, a scholar who didn't suffer fools, and for a while our only spellcaster. But she'd met her end when a group of harpies ambushed our group, mind controlled another player, and he attacked Neve. The player proceeded to roll three 20's in a row, resulting in instant death by decapitation.*

After finally getting a Wizard for our campaign, she was effectively one-shot.

While I couldn't control that game**, I allowed Neve to live on as a Sindorei Mage in WoW. 

While not exactly how I imagined her, this old screenshot
of Nevelanthana does picture her in her element:
a professor's living quarters, books and scrolls included.

She got to max level in the Cataclysm expansion as a Frost Mage, and in my own mind I envisioned her as the younger sister to Quintalan, my first character I leveled with back in Wrath.

As this was an MMO, Neve died numerous times while leveling, and with MMOs you just learn to accept character death as part of the game. Sure, games such as Baldur's Gate or Jade Empire have a "you die the game is over" situation, but there's always the save file to recover from. The game is just that, a game and not a novel, and I've learned through countless slogs that you can't become that emotionally invested in your main character.

So I was shocked when I found myself becoming invested in the latest SWTOR expansion, Knights of the Fallen Empire.

I'm not going to reveal any spoilers, and there are a few surprises in the main storyline, but for me, seeing this for the first time in a cutscene got me surprisingly emotional:

Chewie, we're home.

My comment above pretty much sums it up: We're home. 

The starship provided a true first home to you, and reaching the end of the first wave of KotFE Chapters and getting your starship back was such an incredible feeling. You may have lost everything else, but getting back your old starship gives you a grounding that you never knew you needed.

I don't know where the supporting cast found it, and right now I don't care. My starship is back, and I can breathe once more.

Who knew that I could learn to love again?

*I still can't believe he rolled like that, but what really got my goat was that he then proceeded to giggle insanely, while the rest of us were just stunned. This particular player doesn't play in our game group anymore, and I can't say I'm sorry to see him go. To this day, I still think he was just looking to sow chaos and to want to "do" as many female NPCs as he could find.

**This being D&D, after a few years of her being a ghost and doing whatever it is that ghosts do, she was recently given a new lease on life by the rest of the party, who had to travel into (effectively) the Underworld to barter with a Priest of the Dead to bring her back.


EtA: Edited the second last line to avoid saying "again" at the end of two sentences in a row. Things like that irk me.