Made The Big Time At Last

Watching the world go by
Surprising it goes so fast
Johnny looked around him
And said "Well I made the big time at last."
--Shooting Star by Bad Company

I was watching some college football yesterday* on ESPN. If you've ever seen a sporting event on ESPN, you'd know that a staple of ESPN's coverage is the ubiquitous ticker at the bottom of the screen that every other sportscast seems to have added to their own coverage. The ticker covers all sorts of sports, and a measure of a sport's popularity in the US is whether it gets a line on the ticker. For example, about 20 years ago you'd never have seen soccer on the ticker outside of MLS scores, but now there's coverage of the Premier League, La Liga, the Bundesliga, and Italy's Serie A.**

Even knowing this fact, I was surprised to see this on the ticker yesterday:

I know that eSports has been broadcast on ESPN and other channels in the past, but this took me by surprise. Oh, not that FNatic lost --I don't follow eSports enough to know whether FNatic had won any LoL Championships since xPeke left the team-- but that League of Legends was even on the ticker at all.

Well done, eSports. You've now made it to the big time.

And I'd love to have been in a bar somewhere watching a bunch of college football fans when THAT showed up on the ticker for the first time.





*Yes, American football. And "watch" is a relative term here, as I was cleaning and doing the laundry.

**As a measure of soccer's penetration into the US monolith, NBC broadcasts the Premier League, FOX Sports the Bundesliga, and ESPN will show the occasional Serie A and La Liga match. ESPN and FOX also share broadcast rights for MLS, and ESPN streams the second tier US league the USL over its ESPN+ service. Even the National Women's Soccer League gets airplay on ESPN, and anyone who says that the women's league doesn't have quality soccer hasn't watched a match. Quite a few players on the US, Canadian, Brazilian, and other national teams play in the NWSL. While I doubt that soccer will ever displace American football in the national consciousness, soccer is rapidly closing the gap in popularity between it and the other "big four" American sports leagues: baseball's MLB, basketball's NBA, football's NFL, and hockey's NHL.

So, When Does Drusera Show Up?

In addition to the announcement that Her Universe will be designing clothing for Overwatch in additionto WoW, Blizz introduced another Overwatch character, Ashe.

The animated short, Reunion, I found fascinating because while there's a lot of Blizz in the short, there's also quite a bit of Wildstar. I was not expecting to get that Wildstar vibe as much as I did, but the short was a Western / SF mashup, so maybe that's it.

Regardless, here's the short:

At the Intersection of WoW and Fangirls

Ashley Eckstein, known among Star Wars fans as the voice of Ahsoka Tano, Anakin Skywalker's apprentice*, is also known for the geek clothing company Her Universe. She saw a need for clothing for fangirls, and she built Her Universe into a globally recognizable brand. Although Hot Topic now owns Her Universe, Ashley retains creative control over the brand**, and she remains its most visible champion.

As such, when this dropped on the Her Universe FB page, I sat up and took notice:

From the Her Universe FB page.

This is going to happen sometime today (November 2nd, 2018), so this should prove to be a very interesting panel discussion at BlizzCon. I may not play WoW any more, but I really love this. (Besides, I'm banking on WoW Classic to pull me back in.)

If you want to skip anything about the panel and just go check out the WoW gear Ashley and Co. have designed, go to the Her Universe website.

Oh, and Happy BlizzCon, con-goers!

Sure, stick Saurfang next to the Devil.
Because Orcs, I suppose.

*Sorry, no spoilers here.

**I'd asked her FB page about that when the buyout was announced, and she said she explicitly wanted control if Hot Topic acquired the company. She was excited about the prospect of teaming up with Hot Topic over geeky stuff going forward.

What Was That Magic Word Again.... "XYZZY?"

A long time ago, I played a video game on a teletype machine.

During the summer after my 5th and 6th grade years, the younger brother of a neighbor would visit from New York City for a few months. While he was a year older than me, his sister was significantly older than him, as she was married with a toddler. I suppose geeks recognize each other, no matter where they're from, and he and I became fast friends. While I was reading Lord of the Rings, The Sword of Shannara, and The Belgariad, he was reading Dune and X-Men. He introduced me to the Elfquest comics, which were unlike anything I'd seen before then.* We'd often take bike rides down to the local strip mall to spend a few hours playing video games wherever they could be found, or we'd spend time playing with his brother-in-law's Atari 2600 and collection of games.

One day, I stopped by their house to find him sitting at the dining room table with what looked like an electronic typewriter in front of him. As both his sister and her husband worked --and his nephew was in daycare-- he was frequently alone for the day. But what surprised me was that he wasn't reading or playing around with the Atari**.

"Hey, you have to see this," he said as he pulled me upstairs and sat me down in front of the machine. It looked like an electronic typewriter, much fancier than the manual or IBM Selectric typewriters I'd been exposed to before now, only that it printed on rolls of thermal paper.

"It's a typewriter," I finally replied.

"No, it's a computer."

I raised an eyebrow.

"Okay, it's not a computer by itself, it connects to a computer over the phone."

"What do you do with it?"

"You can do stuff with it, like play games."

That caught my attention. "What sort of games?"

"An adventure game."

"Oh? Can you show me?"

He shuffled his feet. "It costs money to connect, so I'm only allowed to play for an hour. Okay?"

"Got it."

Reaching across me, he flipped on the power switch and typed in a command he'd written down on a pad of paper next to the machine. I heard a screeching sound, an electronic "bounce bounce", and then the machine sprang to life, printing out a "Connected" onto the roll of thermal paper.

"Now, we do this...." he typed in the command "adventure" and suddenly the following popped out:

From the wikipedia page. I finally gave up
after spending a few hours trying to find the roll
of paper I kept from that session.

Now, I have to explain that this was before my exposure to Dungeons and Dragons; this was sometime in the Summer of '81, and I was first introduced to D&D in the Fall of '81. I knew and loved the Atari 2600 game Adventure, even though the "dragons" looked a lot like ducks.***

The player, carrying a sword, having just slain
the green dragon.
From defunctgames.com.

Still, the concept of a written adventure game, where you can interact with a computer just like you were writing your own novel, was amazing to me.

I quickly discovered that what I thought were some pretty basic ideas, such as "cage bird", got me a "What do you want to do with the cage?"**** The words "kill snake" resulted in "Attacking the snake both doesn't work and is very dangerous."

"Aaargh," I grumbled. "It's not doing what I want to do! Why won't it just capture the bird?"

"Yeah, my friend replied. "I've found that a problem too."

Due to our scattershot attempts to figure out how to get the bird in the cage, bypass the snake, and then not get killed by the dwarf (trust me, this makes sense in the context of the game), that hour passed by very quickly.

My friend reached over and turned the teletype machine off.

"Oh man," I pleaded, "another five minutes?"

"Um," he began, and looked at the gigantic pile of paper that we had hanging off the machine.

"Oh. Whoops."

"Yeah," he replied. "I think I'm in trouble."

He ended up getting grounded for a few days because of all of the paper that we used up, not to mention that he'd already played for an hour before I got there, so we technically played an hour longer than he was supposed to play. But I did get to keep the roll of paper, so somewhere around the house is a record of that game session, my first true adventure game session.

***

I bring this up because I've been reading a book titled A History of Video Games in 64 Objects by Jon-Paul C. Dyson and Jeremy K. Saucier, who founded the World Video Game Hall of Fame out of The Strong Museum of Rochester, New York. The 64 objects in question stretch from the precursors of video games up through the present (yes, including Pokemon GO), but for me the objects of greatest interest were from the early days of video games.

The cover may not look
like much, but it's a fascinating
read. From Amazon.

The book didn't include Colossal Cave, but it was referenced in a couple of the articles, especially the one about Zork. Making an engaging game utilizing the 70s era tech --or, in the case of Pong, essentially 50s era tech-- was amazing. The genius behind those games, forging ahead into the unknown and creating the modern software industry along with Lotus, Oracle, IBM, and other heavyweights of IT, can often be obscured when looking at those days from our current perch: an era of smartphones, VR, and multiplayer online games. There's more power in my 4-5 year old smartphone than can be found in the cutting edge Athlon PC I had back in 1999, and the amount of computing power that these early video games consumed is infinitesimal by comparison. But what they lacked in pure computing power they made up for in cleverness and replayability.

Sure, when you finish a game like Colossal Cave or Zork, the game is over, but so many games of that era utilized randomization to an extent that no replays were ever the same again. You select the third option on Atari's Adventure, and you're never sure where all of the pieces are. Hell, you may even end up in an impossible victory condition, because the lack of computing space meant that the developers of Adventure couldn't spend precious lines checking to see if you could actually access some of the areas where the items were hidden. But far from it being merely a "feature" of the game, it meant that there were going to be times when you simply couldn't win. To a player now used to customizing D&D encounters and devs constantly tweaking raid and instance bosses in MMOs, the concept of "sometimes you just won't win" is pretty alien. And also refreshing.

I remember playing Santa Paravia --an early country simulator game-- back in 1983 on the Tandy TRS-80 Model III. While I figured out how to manage my way to victory, no two games ever started out the same. Having several years of drought early on meant years of difficult choices, while several years of plenty allowed me to splurge on beefing up troops and walls in preparation for attacking my "friendly" neighbors. The game prepared me for more advanced play with Sid Meier's Civilization series as well as team management games such as Age of Empires or Starcraft. I actually have a printout of the source code for Santa Paravia somewhere, and I occasionally thought of converting it to a language I know, but I never really did. I just enjoyed playing it too much to want to dig in and "ruin" the game by tinkering with it.

***

What do those games have that make me so nostalgic for them?

Well, not much, really. The gameplay isn't that deep, and there's nothing spectacular about the games in the same way as when I walked through the Dark Portal in WoW that first time and ended up in Outland. Sure, I played them at an impressionable age, as I did with other games such as Asteroids or Pac-Man, but no arcade game held my attention like these early computer games did. I may have loved Galaxian, but Colossal Cave made me want to program for a living. I certainly sucked at Defender, as I also did at Car Wars*****, but Car Wars held my attention that Defender never did.

Nostalgia is pretty strange in that there are no set rules as to trigger nostalgia. Things that I am definitely not nostalgic for, like parachute pants and disco music, bring people out of the woodwork. Some people --my wife for one-- love-love-love Ms. Pac-Man, while I'm kind of meh about it. But you know, that's fine. I'm nostalgic for games such as Colossal Cave because they changed the way I looked at things. Because of that day and that teletype machine, I'm sitting here typing away on a blog about gaming. I work in IT partly because of the path that began with that game. Other people may have their own lives changed because of some game that they began playing for the first time today, and I'm not being trite or melodramatic about it. This sort of thing does happen.

I remember when the oldest mini-Red was about 10 or 11, the entire family went to the symphony. We went about 4-5 times a year#, but this particular concert seemed to really catch the attention of the oldest mini-Red. After the concert ended and we were waiting for the crowd to clear out before we got up and left, she sat in her seat with a very serious look on her face. Her eyes never leaving the musicians, she said, "Someday, I'm going to be playing on that stage."

She claims she doesn't remember that moment, but I do. It was a game changing moment for her. I know, because I've been there.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm trying to not cheat and look at a FAQ on Colossal Cave while I'm trying to get that bird in the cage.




*Mainly Star Trek, The Avengers, and Spider-man.

**Or watching cable television. Being in the throes of puberty, cable was our access to what we considered "adult" entertainment. Our local cable at the time had HBO, The Movie Channel, and Cinemax and my friend's sister got all three. We disdained HBO, because they only put R rated content on in the evening, but we got to watch plenty of Mel Brooks movies and all sorts of what they called "sex comedies" or "romantic comedies" back then on the other two channels during the day. My mom in particular was very prudish, and anything not rated G (or PG that wasn't Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, or whatnot) was very suspect in her eyes, so seeing all of these movies were a revelation to me.

***The mini-Reds used to call Atari's Adventure "The Ducky Game", which had "the mean ducks" in them.

****This was how I was first introduced to one of the main rules about computers: they do what you tell them to do, not what you want them to do.

*****It's not only a card game by Steve Jackson Games, but also a pencil and paper RPG and a computer game for the Commodore 64. The latter is what I played, and boy was I bad at that game.

#I still say that symphony or pops concerts' tickets are incredibly cheap for the experience, particularly if you're comparing them to rock concert tickets. Believe me, when I saw The Who in 1989, I thought paying $20 for a ticket was really expensive. How naive I was back then....

Standing Stone Jumps on the Bandwagon

Following the lead of other MMO companies that are reliving their early days, Standing Stone is creating Legendary Servers for LOTRO.

The idea is to start with only the up to L50 --the Shadows of Angmar quests-- are unlocked, and slowly unlock new areas over time. Like Rift Prime, the Legendary Servers are only accessible by subscribers (VIP Members) or lifetime VIP members.

While some items will be old school --no PvMP play or legendary weapons (at the start), for example-- other items such as the available classes and races are current. So yes, you can play as a High Elf on the Legendary Servers. And if a zone was reworked over the course of time, the reworking remains intact. I suppose that is a good thing, because having to go back and put back in klunky zone layouts and quests (such as Mines of Moria before the reworking several years ago) would have been labor intensive.

It's not a Vanilla server in the same vein that Rift Prime or the upcoming WoW Classic were, but that's fine. Standing Stone is more interested in recreating the feel of starting fresh in LOTRO's story, without any of the temptations of zipping along and bypassing everything to get to the current state of things.

It's also a way to entice people to subscribe to experience the Legendary Servers, for a relatively low amount of personnel and server costs. Now, just as long as Standing Stone isn't on their last legs....

And the Gods Laughed

No more than a month ago I thought that Rift Prime was doing well enough that Trion has kept the server going for the time being. In retrospect, I should have likely not invoked the Gods of Irony, because there was some pretty eventful news surrounding Trion.

Trion, developer of MMOs such as Rift and NA publisher of ArcheAge, has been sold to the German company Gamigo. While sales or spinoffs of games and game divisions isn't unheard of in the video game world*, what is more unheard of is what happened after the sale was announced: Trion laid off almost all of its staff.

That has happened before in the game world, when boardgame company Avalon Hill --best known for games such as Diplomacy, Civilzation, Squad Leader, and other wargames-- was bought by Hasbro. Hasbro's representatives at the time expressed displeasure at the loss of the AH staff**, because they thought they were getting the entire TAHGC staff, but I chalk that up to the owners of Avalon Hill, the Dotts, being greedy asshats.***

So why Trion laid off its staff is currently an unknown, I can't imagine that Trion's staff knew that it was coming to that degree. After all, the Rift Prime server just released the Storm Legion update, and there were still livestreams scheduled even as of last week. Obviously, all of this is going to come crashing to a halt while Gamigo takes over assets, but given that Rift Prime is still in existence (as of this morning, at least) the Rift portion of Trion is still hanging in there. They even set up the Autumn Harvest event on servers as of last week, so Trion's staff was planning on being in place at least.

As for ArcheAge, Trion was the publisher, so basically Gamigo takes over the publishing portion of that arrangement.

But what portends for the ex-Trion staff? Its entirely possible that Gamigo hires them on as a third party, or they'll simply take the assets and then change direction. I perused the games that Gamigo currently has, and I don't think they have a game out there like Rift. I'm only vaguely familiar with Aura Kingdom, and most of the others seem to be MOBA, PvP, or strategy oriented games. Even the games listed as "MMORPG" don't really fit what we're used to in AAA MMO space. I raised an eyebrow when multiple game descriptions include "an engaging story" while at the same time emphasizing the eye candy in the toon pictures.

If this is the sort of game that Gamigo puts out, then I'm not sure how exactly Rift will fit in. ArcheAge will fit in much better than Rift, for certain. Even Devilian would have fit in better in Gamigo's lineup than Rift, to be honest. If Gamigo tries to change Rift to match its other game titles, I'd imagine that Rift would become unrecognizable to its current and former playerbase.

So here's wishing the best of luck to the Trion employees who were laid off.


EtA: I've done some more digging on Gamigo, and apparently they are a "maintenance company". They purchase F2P games and then amp up the cash store and P2W purchases to a level that would have made the "old" Rift P2W controversy tame by comparison. No new development, just a bit of fluff, and that's pretty much it.

About the best thing for Rift would be that some company with deep pockets and a love for the game would step in and purchase the game from Gamigo, but things look pretty grim for Rift.

As for ArcheAge, all bets are off. They do fit in with Gamigo's lineup better, and their development house is separate from Trion, but I've no idea what will happen there. I was working on a "Fun With MMOs" post on ArcheAge, but I might shelve that entirely. Or maybe I post it with the caveat that "this will likely be obsolete by the time you read this".


EtA: And here is the link to the official announcement from Gamigo AG. Here is one very pertinent part of the article: "It is expected that the Trion Worlds acquisition will add on gamigo group level revenues of at least USD 18 million in 2019." I have no idea where they're expecting those revenues to come from --outside of Trove, which according to the forums is apparently Trion's most profitable game-- without adding tons of cash shop items and P2W items. I could also see them attempting to sell some of the assets as well, or even license the game engines to other companies.





*For instance, there's Standing Stone, that was formed from ex-Turbine developers, that bought the assets to LOTRO. And even Activision-Blizzard itself was spun off from parent Vivendi into the "capable" hands of Bobby Kotick and his fellow investors.

**I can't find the reference to it, but it was in the Usenet group that followed board games, rec.games.board.

***They were arrogant enough to try to sue software developer Microprose for its release of the wildly popular Sid Meier's Civilization in the mid-90s, and they actually lost that lawsuit. The net result, however, was that both Microprose and Avalon Hill were financially weakened to the point of being sold off. Both, ironically enough, to Hasbro.

Reacquainting Myself with My Inner Min/Maxer

I suppose it doesn't come as much of a surprise that I've been focusing my attention on The Elder Scrolls Online a lot lately. I'm still working my way through the main questline, and dying quite a bit in the process.* The enemies aren't exactly that difficult per se, but I'm typically a "set the rotation and forget it" sort of player, and being forced to swap in and out different attacks in the slots is still a new thing for me to handle. Prior to ESO, the most I'd do for weapon/ability swapping would be to switch between a bow and melee on Age of Conan, and that was mainly done to aggro the mob I want to take down rather than engage close in and have several mobs jump me at once.**

After loading up on shards --and getting the skill that allows you a low percentage chance to fill empty soul shards after zapping an enemy-- I'm happily out questing for a much longer time than what'd be normal for someone who does tend to die an annoying amount of times. And that's a good thing, because it prevents all those deaths from disrupting the flow of the storyline.

I'm still not completely sold on the personal storyline, but I will give props to several of the side quests and zone quests. And I'll also give major props to what Zenimax did in The Rift --the Pact storyline, anyway-- with one of the NPCs from an earlier zone. I wasn't expecting that questline at all, to be sure, and I thought Zenimax did a good job of working that questline.***

And Sheogorath is as mad as a hatter.
But you knew that, right?
From elderscrolls.wikia.com

One thing I am having trouble with is the number of skill points I have. I'm trying to avoid spending the skill points in areas that don't directly affect my combat abilities, but I'm currently sitting on 7 unused skill points and frequently that goes over 10 until I find a few slots to use them. I'm not exactly sure where I got this embarrassment of riches, but were I not busy working on quest progression, these skill points would have found their way into non-essential slots, such as crafting.

I think I'm going to have to slow down my playing and start reading up on skill slot optimization, something I've not had to do for an MMO in, well, years. ("Hel-lo, Elitist Jerks!! I hear one of your people is now on staff at Blizzard. I guess that makes your work all the more legit, I suppose.")

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've some reading to do....





*Action oriented combat isn't my forte, especially when you play enough and your hands and wrists start to ache.

**AoC is still the only MMO I've played where I have to worry about being overwhelmed by more than one mob at once. Most other MMOs I've played may have that in spurts, particularly if you're undergeared or underleveled for the area, but you can be at the right level/gear in AoC and simply be overwhelmed by two mobs of three enemies each. And even if you manage to survive that, it's also likely that a third mob will wander in due to the overlap of aggro areas, and that's definitely the end for you. AoC was definitely designed for a lot of players in a single zone at once.

***Sorry, I'm not putting up details, because spoilers.