Khevor's Landing

I have not played an MMO in some time.  I have yet to find anything that interests me.  Most MMOs are the same thing over and over again: grind, level, gear, rinse and repeat.  There simply is no fun in that.

I’m also a player that tends to prefer solo vs. group.  I don’t like groups or the very idea of them.  If I want to take on something, I don’t want to call out “Looking for Group for x” then wait to see if anyone responds.  It’s asinine, to say the least.  Where’s the immersion in that?  Earlier levels allow you to solo without too much issue in most MMOs.  As you progress beyond the ‘dreaded’ level 20, groups are, pretty much, a requirement.  That’s not progression; it’s the exact opposite as now you *have* to depend on others to get anything done.

It’s hard to get involved in a world (read:immerse) if you’re being jarred out of it every time you turn around.  The need to look for a group – no immersion there.  The need to gain keys, items, flags, whatever, to enter certain areas that can only be acquired through raids… yeah.  No.  The inability to enter certain areas simply because you’re not a certain level yet.  Um… huh? Do I have my level tattooed on my forehead so that some invisible bouncer at the door to the area can say, “Nope, you can’t enter here yet.  Come back when you’re level x.”

Static combat is another problem.  When you can practically hotkey your entire combat strategy for pretty much any situation is counter-productive.  I’m reminded of Homer Simpson’s job at the nuclear power plant.  All he does all day is push a single button, eat donuts, and goof off.  Well, take a good look at your combat strategy for whatever MMO you’re playing.  How is that any different?

Well it would appear that someone in the MMO developer industry feels the same way.  If you’re tired of the status quo of MMOs (like I am), read *this* article: http://www.arena.net/blog/guild-wars-2-design-manifesto

If you ever played Tabula Rasa, remember those bases that got attacked regularly by legions of enemies.  Any player that was in or around that base came running to defend it.  No party formation required – you just went ahead and started shooting.  Those times were some of the best I’ve ever had in any MMO – and, it would appear, the creators of Guild Wars 2 has that very concept in mind but on a much broader scale.

You can’t tell me that this game doesn’t sound like it’s going to be a lot of fun.

It has been a long time in coming, but I decided to put the site back up.  I can’t really remember why I took it down other than it was being a pain in the ass.  Having said that, it still is being a pain in the ass but I figured it was high time that I did something with the site.  After all, I did pay for it.

My last entry was in March 2010 and here it is August.  I can honestly say that very little has changed other than ridiculous heat and high humidity (the former would be tolerable without the latter).

In gaming, I have all but personally boycotted games released by EA.  The Sims 3 releasing expansions and next to no useful patches (read:patches that add features but don’t correct game-breaking bugs and glitches) that ram dynamic advertisement capabilities in-game down our collective throats; Mass Effect 2 having downloadable content that is more fluff than content; Dragon Age expansions that cost nearly as much as the base game but lacks anything remotely close to the in-depth development of the base game (read:throw a bone to the player-base and call it a feast).

I would elaborate on all of these things but, quite frankly, I’m tired of even thinking about it.  While I recently reinstalled The Sims 3, it still has outstanding bugs – all of which have been around since the release of the base game – that have yet to be addressed in any patch or expansion.  Customer support is unresponsive (at best) and the forums are filled with ‘wait and see’ hopefuls.

In other news, I totally deleted my Facebook account during the whole privacy issue that made headlines a few months ago.  I don’t miss it.  If anything, it’s a relief not having to deal with it.  Facebook went from ‘something interesting’ to a ‘nightmare of spam’ in short order.  Heaven forfend if you decided not to visit Facebook for a couple of days.  You’d come back to hundreds of notices and friend requests from strangers due to games you might be playing.  Then you find out that all of your personal information by default is totally visible to the entire internet unless you manually go in and change your privacy settings.  By the time this was discovered, it was already too late.  Search engines had already crawled all through your profile and cached it awaiting enterprising bots to harvest key bits of information for the purposes of spamming you via e-mail or other places.

On the technical front, I had to update my computer components.  This update resulted in my gaining a dual-core processor (finally) and the nVidia 9500GT video card (as well as a new CPU fan).  My old components were not handling the tasks I was throwing at it very well and my old video card was visually cracking under the pressure (odd artifacts on the screen even when not in a game) and overheating to temperatures exceeding 90°C.

On a personal front (details of which will not show up here), things have been going moderate to well.  The future looks fairly bright but I still hold reservations of what is yet to come.  After all, getting hopes up for great things to happen is akin to begging for something to throw you down.  Even still, I’m content and that’s a good thing.

As of tomorrow, I will have been sick with the flu for 3 weeks.  The bulk of the symptoms are gone, thankfully, but I’m still feeling tired, a persistent cough, as well as pressure issues with my ears (i.e. ears pop or stay popped or won’t pop as necessary).  I was reading through the differences of symptoms between “regular” flu and the swine flu and I have no idea which I may have had.  Admittedly, the seasonal flu has never lasted more than a week with me in the past.  Also, the flu has never made me vomit although I know many others have suffered that particular symptom with any flu.  I’m one of the lucky ones that never had that symptom and this time around has been no different.  Having said that, I have had all of the symptoms as related from various sources of both types of flu (except in severe cases of H1N1 that ended in long-term hospitalizations or death).  It’s not really important now, I suppose given that the bulk of the flu is gone and now I just have the aftermath.  With all of the coughing, and head-cold “symptoms” that I have now, my sense of taste and smell are dramatically diminished.  I haven’t figured out if that’s an advantage or disadvantage yet.

Last night/early this morning I woke up for a few hours and felt somewhat hungry.  Not usually an issue, I just grab something quick and that’s that.  Not this time.  I didn’t feel starved when I started but after the first sandwich, I suddenly felt ravenously hungry and didn’t feel satisfied until after five sandwiches.  It was the strangest thing.  I don’t normally eat like that.  Shortly after that, I went back to bed and woke up about an hour and a half ago.  I’m guessing that experience is/was my having spent 36+ hours awake the day(s) before that trying to get my housework caught up (which, btw, was mostly successful).

In any event, I haven’t been doing much other than playing games (as you can tell from previous entries).  I played Mass Effect 2 to death and then played Mass Effect a couple of times for the purposes of importing the character into ME2 later.  My son was over this passed Sunday and mentioned Dragon Age – a game I forgot I even owned (go figure).  So I re-downloaded it (digital ownership does have its advantages) and installed it.  I’ve been playing that now instead.

It’s been a nice change of pace, really.  However, with the patch to version 1.02a and subsequently 1.03, I’ve noticed a new issue cropping up.  All of my installed and registered DLC‘s are showing up as not authorized when I attempt to resume a game (that I was playing just hours beforehand).  A cursory search led me to the problem.  Apparently if you skip the introductory movies, the Dragon Age: Origins Content Updater service doesn’t have time to start and even when it does start and you try to resume, you’ll get the same error.  You have to quit the game, stop the service, start it again (as using the  restart service option doesn’t seem to work), then start up the game.  That’s the only way the damned thing will recognize the DLCs as authorized.

In EA‘s infinite wisdom (note the sarcasm), their need to put in some form of DRM to prevent piracy is actually pushing people into it.  The more they (publishing companies) try to prevent piracy and protect against copyright infringement, the more they’re driving people to find easier methods with less hassle (and less technical problems) to play their games or use their software.

The issues people are having with this content service with Dragon Age is another example of, what was supposed to be, a seamless DRM method not working properly.  Look at the games that used Starforce, for example.  Starforce was another DRM system that failed so miserably that some gaming companies removed it from their software entirely (egosoft’s X3 series being a prime example).  When are they going to wake up and realize that DRM doesn’t work?  It’s not stopping software piracy at all.  All it’s doing is forcing legitimate customers into looking at piracy as a method to get around the errors that DRM systems are causing.

I’ve almost completed the Mass Effect Checklist program I’ve been working on.  Since the last time I mentioned this (two entries ago), I didn’t realize how much work would be involved in the Planetary Checklist part of the program.  Thankfully, I’ve gotten passed it (despite fighting with having this damnable flu).

Save and load functionality and some aesthetic functionality are all that needs to be done.  Save and Load shouldn’t be too difficult to implement – it’s just a matter of taking all of the input the user puts in and transferring it to a simple file that can be loaded again later.  Not a big deal.  The tricky part is the aesthetics that I want to finish up.  When you’ve selected a cluster, I want the icons on the Planetary Checklist screen to have a nice, green checkmark on them to indicate that you’ve been to all the worlds in that system.  If you’ve been to all the worlds in a given cluster, I want a nice, green checkmark to appear over the cluster in question on the map.

Also, I was building custom tooltips for the clusters on the map so you could see in a glance what cluster that is (since there are no labels).

Once all of that is done, then I can safely say that the program is done.  When that happens, I’ll package it up and post it here in case anyone else (besides myself) is interested in it.  I don’t image there’d be too many (if any) people since most people have a printer and can actually print and use Teryx’s pdf Checklist.  I figure, what the hell, put it up anyway because you just never know.

Update:
I created a new subdomain (projects.khevorslanding.ca) for the sole purpose of having a place to put anything I work on (including the Mass Effect Checklist program).  So this entry will be the last for this project.  From here on in, it will be at the new site.  This site will still be for everything else though.

It seems I just can’t overwhelm myself with tasks enough, these days. On top of the C# program I’m currently working on (it’s better than 70% finished at this point too) that I mentioned in my previous post, I have also decided to undertake a new project.

If this is your first visit here, then you won’t know what I’m referring to, but to those that have visited before, my site is… bare. I did have a feature-rich, Windows Aero-based theme running here but I found too many issues with it. The biggest (read: most annoying) issue was the ridiculously large amount of empty space at the end of the entry list on the main page. I made a cursory attempt to track down the problem myself but decided to hell with it and went to find something that would cause less eye-strain and headaches.

That brought me to this lovely framework you are currently looking at called “Thematic Theme Framework“. It’s not so much a theme as it is a skeleton of a theme. Over the next little while, whenever the mood strikes me, I’m going to be working on it to personalize my site again. I just haven’t decided yet how I want my site to look or what “theme”, if any, I’m going for. I’ll figure it out as I go. That’s usually how I do things anyway.

Update: After playing around with things briefly, I came to the conclusion that I’m not ready to delve into another serious website design project yet.  Instead, I downloaded and installed a WordPress Theme called ‘Arjuna’.  That’s the theme you’re looking at now… quite nice really.  (Mar 4.’10 @ 12:10am)