Played my Lore-master for a good 5-6 levels last night - yeah - definitely back to "my" class. Getting Blinding Flash was a huge deal back ages ago when I got it on Vendraen, and was a huge deal on Vendrayn last night. Pre-BF and Post-BF, a Lore-master is just not the same. Those that have played it know what I mean.

So now it's on to level Vend and see new things, eventually. Have to level through the beginning levels first though.

Short post this morning; just wanted to comment on Vend's progress. :)

Ok, so it was inevitable. I was enjoying the heck out of the Hobbit, and the Hobbit-ness of the Shire, and all was good. Then I was at the Michel Delving bank area, and saw a level 65 Lore-master that happened to have nearly the same appearance settings as my original Lore-master, Vendraen, that is on the banned account.

"Damn it, that's .. me!", I said to myself, and then I logged off and logged in as the character you see above. I played a Lore-master nearly exclusively through Alpha and Beta, and well into release. I fought (sometimes bitterly) for changes I felt would make the class better, and out of all the classes in LOTRO (and I've played them all), it's definitely the one I'm best at and like the most.

It's not a "true" pet class, in the vein of UO Tamer, SWG Creature Handler, or similar classes, but it's the closest thing LOTRO has right now, and it's also a kick-ass class in other respects. There's quite a few ways to play it, and the way I play is pretty "in the thick of it."

Lore-masters have many skills related to melee combat - even though they wear cloth and are thought of as a "mage" type. Later on, they even get a Trait that allows wielding a staff and a sword at the same time. Melee damage output is not small, if you Trait and gear for it. And, using the Raven pet for it's high Flank! rate allows you to keep yourself alive, as later on, Flank! procs allow you to heal yourself.

Starting over is a little painful - I remember all the things I could do before, but can't yet, since I don't have the skills at my low level. But, I know the content forwards, backwards, up and down, so I should level quickly and in no time, return to my former power.

We've got our radio and power supply. We have our 80-10m (and possibly 6m) antenna, and a 2m/70cm antenna to boot (and a mount for it). We have a roof tripod and a 10' mast with a 5' extension if we need it. Actually we have two roof tripods thanks to WB9CZC!

What we don't have is those antennas installed. See, I have an annoying fear of heights. Yeah, I know, residential roofs are only about 16' high. I know. I tried 3 times yesterday to get up there and just couldn't do it. I will keep trying though, but I'm not overly hopeful. SPK isn't afraid of heights at all, but she has a shoulder injury and can't go up right now.

It'll get worked out eventually, one way or another I guess. I'm just excited to get everything setup and be able to operating the amazingly nice radio we've got! I'm hoping we can get it done ourselves, and not have to have club people do it all for us - after all, we're going to need to be able to add/maintain/etc antennas throughout our involvement in the hobby anyway. We'll see.

Back when I was playing LOTRO very seriously, I, as many people do, started a second account, and while my "real" high level/Lifetime subbed account is still banned, my alt account is just fine. The highest level character on it is level 18 and I have very little money and other "stuff", but the account's valid and I'm playing.

I'd been away so long, it would have been best to start a new character anyway! So, I started a Hobbit Burglar and went about the early levels. Seems they've done a small amount of re-tuning of the Shire quests, but not a lot. It's still a lot of back and forth between the little towns, but that's ok though as I'd planned to take it slow and enjoy the sights, and that's what I'm doing.

I've got no idea how long I'll be playing - as I know LOTRO doesn't satisfy all the needs I have in gaming (though, I don't think any one MMO does or can). But for now, Bolleni's enjoying his stroll through the early levels.

Something I've noticed is that, even though I've been gone for ages, nothing's changed with the community. People are still extremely helpful on the public chat channels, and there's a definite lack of Norris jokes and [Anal] links. Thank "Bob."

Ok, so, I went from 1-2 posts a day (or most days) to almost nothing, and with it went, I feel, my writing skills. I've got to get back to it!

We've been fairly busy of late. With our various food-related hobbies, bicycling, Ham radio, and my gaming, and her working, we have very little "free" time most days - but most of our time is spent doing things we find fun.

Finally got a chance to watch Zombieland yesterday - great film, if you like zombie films of course. Also watched Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather" (both episodes) and that was great too. We also have gotten back on our bikes over the last week and that's been great! Feels good to be out on them again! We won't be riding as hardcore (just no time for it) as last summer, but it's still good fun.

We're still working on getting deeper into Ham radio, and we've got a deal arranged with a local Ham to buy a used Icom IC-746PRO with power supply for an insanely good price. That'll give us all the capabilities and features we'll ever need and we're very excited to get it in. It's at Icom currently being reconditioned and brought back to "better than new" status.

Speaking of food "hobbies," we're still mainly eating what you'd call "real food" - nothing (or very little) processed, everything made by us from base ingredients, and > 90% of our meats are grass-fed or pasture-raised. No feedlot fed meat here! We also make our own yogurt (from Ooooo, Deadly Raw Milk of course), and sometimes cheese. It's made fairly dramatic changes in our sense of well-being, especially in her case. It's also very cool knowing that out in our freezer we have enough meat to feed us for a long time. We've got most of a whole goat, and 1/4 of a cow, along with a good amount of pork and 3 whole chickens. :) She is the Bread Whisperer™ and always makes sure we have good, homemade bread at hand for our meals. Mmmmm.

I still game, just nowhere near as "hardcore" as I used to. Longasc teases me for being too casual, but I really just don't have the time to set aside for the 4-5+ hour gaming sessions like I used to. I still have a lot of fun though. Most of the modern MMOs are very casual-friendly, so I take full advantage, jumping in sometimes for 10-15 minutes, or maybe as long as an hour when I can. STO is a lot of fun played this way.

We recently dumped our iPhones and switched back to Verizon for Android-based phones. We got the Droid Incredible by HTC (2 of them - thanks Jill! - you own!). The Android OS is amazing, and being free of Apple's prison, er, "walled garden," is just awesome. Also, the phones are super fast, even when running multiple apps. No more rebooting once a day to get the UI to not lag. Could not be happier with these devices and the Android OS.

Anyway, that's the nutshell version of what we've been up to. I will try to update a lot more often again, and hopefully can follow through on that.

Ok, so I promised that today I'd begin a series of posts over @ Nomadic Gamer on MMO gaming under Linux. And I fully intended to! The problem is, as I'm sure you've all noticed, I haven't been blogging much lately, and when you don't do things as often, you lose the knack for it. So I don't feel my writing quality is up to Nomadic Gamer's standards, so I'm holding off posting there for a while.

Anyway - my main machine is not running Linux anymore as of a week or so ago. Everything was working fine; I was playing STO and had LOTRO running too. Then WINE updated to -RC4 and STO died. I was on vacation and didn't have time to figure out what went wrong with RC4, so I put W7 back on the machine so I could "just play." That's one of the problems with Linux - things get updated OFTEN - so sometimes things will be non-working for a day or so. I really like running Linux as an OS. It's 10000x nicer than Windows, but I also need stuff to work all the time, and games are always the problem. So back to W7. Sigh.

In other news, I'm semi-sorta-playing STO again. I'm probably the only headstart/Lifetime player that's only Commander 4 still, but there you have it. ;) It's still a very fun game and they've made a TON of improvements since launch, and continue to do so. I started a Klingon character - and that's fun - but my main is still Sevok, my Federation character. Hopefully by 2013 or so, I'll hit Admiral 5. ;)

So after having been licensed for only about 2 weeks - and only on the air a little under a week - we headed off to our club's Field Day event. This is a yearly event for ham radio operators where you setup "in the field" using alternate power (generators, solar, etc) and try to contact as many stations as you can in these conditions.

It was a lot of fun! It was a first time for both of us operating on anything but our local 2 meter repeater - and we operated on the 80, 40, 20, and 15 meter bands. We contacted stations in quite a few U.S. states as well as Canada, and it was amazingly cool. Not sure how many contacts we made - I made probably around 20 and she made probably around the same. We weren't really trying to push it; just having fun. :)

Tuning through a radio band, listening for something that sounds like a voice, then fine-tuning in to make it more and more intelligible, until you finally hear a "CQ field day CQ field day CQ field day", then transmitting the club call and hearing it come back from the other station... amazingly cool! Just can't put in into words. I'm trying... but failing. From the first contact through the 20th, it was just really cool; something you don't get just messing around on the local repeaters (which are still very cool in their own right!)

Another cool thing is we got to check out quite a few different radios. There was an Icom IC-7000 and a Yaesu FT-857, 847, and FT-920 among others. The one we were actually using to make our contacts was the FT-920, and it's amazingly nice. It's an older unit, but still very feature packed. It also has a lot of controls on it. There seems to be a trend in the newer designs towards less controls and smaller cases, so in order to change a lot of settings, you have to delve into menu trees. It seems much more efficient to have as many functions on separate controls as possible. The 920 definitely fits the bill there. I think we'll be seeking one out on the used market as it's a discontinued model.

Anyway. If you were working field day, and worked a contact from W9REG, it might have been me! If the voice was female, it was definitely KC9SPK. ;)

73!

Not dead.

Just on a 2 week vacation. :) I'll be back at work Monday 6/28 and will be doing a blog series @ Nomadic Gamer on MMOing under Linux - sort of. Heh.

Anyway - received my license and call sign from the FCC a few days after the last post - I am KC9SPL. Also have my first radio, a Yaesu VX-7R quad band handheld. Nice radio; I'll be doing a review/etc of it soon.

Anyway - until next entry...

As of yesterday morning, I'm a licensed ham radio operator. I passed both Technician and General class exams - and my wife passed Technician! We don't have our callsigns yet, as it takes a few days for the FCC to get it into their database, but it shouldn't be long.

I'm pretty excited - I've been interested in amateur radio for over 20 years, and indeed operated a little, let's say, outside the law, back in California in the early 90's. And now, I'm fully and legally licensed. :) Should be an exciting adventure.

BTW - if you're thinking of becoming licensed yourself, I can highly recommend HamTestOnline and the ARRL's study books. We used both of these resources in studying for our licenses and both are excellent!

That's a screenshot (and it's linked to the full size shot) of my desktop as of right now. It's Ubuntu 10.04 - and I'm not running a dual boot setup. My machine's all Linux, all the time.

My attempts to move to full-time Linux have been chronicled here for years, and are the stuff of legend. ;) There's always been something that sent me running back to Windows, though. But, this time, since I'm not seriously playing anything, I just went and did it. No dual boot, no comfortable fall-back to Windows. I installed Linux as the only O/S.

And I'm very happy I did! STO runs under Linux (via WINE) as do many other games. Of course all the utility and productivity stuff you need is available. It's only been games that stopped me before and as time goes by, more and more games work under WINE.

Install was fast. I didn't time it, but I'm the most impatient person in the world, and I didn't even take note of the time. I spent a few hours, of course, configuring the desktop the way I wanted. Got a good background from Digital Blasphemy. Installed conky for the info window you see over on the right. And of course avant-window-manager for the nice dock you see on the bottom.

I'm still not dead. :D

I just haven't written, as I realize about 98%+ of people that come here are probably looking for gaming-related posts. I'm planning to do all my gaming blogging @ Nomadic Gamer, as I'd mentioned before, but I've not had any to do, as I'm not currently playing anything. For the first time in probably more than 5 years, I don't have any sub active. There's just nothing "grabbing" me.

As to other subjects, well, we've been doing a lot. I've gotten back into shooting, and she's also learning to shoot. We're also about to become licensed Amateur (Ham) Radio Operators. On June 5th, we'll be taking our exams and we expect to pass easily. We've also recently purchased a rather nice tent and will be making some camping trips this summer - some "just to camp" and some because it'll be cheaper than staying in a hotel, and hopefully more fun as well. We're also still heavily involved in food-related activities. :)

I'm just not sure which, if any, of those subjects would be interesting to people within reach of this blog. I suppose I can work on gaining new audiences - so that's probably what will happen.

Anyway! :)

I haven't written much lately, as there just isn't much "happening." I'm playing Warhammer Online, but there's really nothing "exciting" to write about. I play, it's fun, and things are good. Heh.

I'll be doing my future gaming-related posts over @ Nomadic Gamer. It's a multi-author site that's pretty heavily promoted and I'm hoping that'll give me some more exposure. Plus it's a WordPress site, so maybe that will get me some more interaction since everyone and their cat has a WP account and thus can comment/interact without making Yet Another Account™©.

But that also means I've got to step up the quality of my writing, so I haven't made my first post there yet. I'm working on one but it's probably a few days from being awesome enough to post there.

As far as non-gaming stuff goes, well, let's see... We got a fairly high end home coffee roaster, and have been home-roasting batches of coffee. We've been buying fresh-roasted whole bean for years, but figured it was time to take the next step and roast our own, and have not been disappointed! We've got a HotTop "B" model and it flat-out rocks. I'll have a post on that fairly soon I'm sure.

I'm also still working on cheesemaking, but that's an interesting "process" learning how it works. :) I'm able to make basic curds and they're damned good, but I want to make "real" cheese, so I've got to buy or construct a proper cheese mold so I can mold the curds and press them and such. I'll get there.

She's got about 1000000000 vegetable plants started in the garage and we'll soon have our own vegetable garden. :D Lettuce, chives, tomatoes, cilantro, red peppers, and umm, "some other stuff" (can't remember!), are all happily growing.

Playing Warhammer Online again for the past week or two has made me realize there's a lot that a lot of players just don't "get" about "PvP" in some of the newer MMOs. I'll talk mainly about WAR, since that's what I've been playing - but I remember these same issues in Battlegrounds in WoW as well.

WAR is specifically a "Realm vs. Realm" (RvR) game rather than strictly a "Player vs. Player" (PvP) game. I think a lot of people, when they see "PvP" as a feature, think it's mainly one player vs. one other player - so they end up, maybe even subconsciously, having a very "solo minded" attitude about it. That it's all about their performance and what they can personally do. The problem is that WAR is very much about teamwork, as the game is really Realm vs. Realm, and you need to do things to help out your team - even if it's stuff that doesn't pump your numbers on any scoreboard.

"Support" classes have it tough, of course. The scoreboards all show damage and healing - so of course people constantly want to do things that'll pump up their numbers on either of those meters. But what about other, useful things, such as rooting or staggering the enemy so that people can get away, or catch the enemy in order to kill them? That kind of thing doesn't show on any meter, but sometimes can mean the difference between win and loss when done at the right time. If you only worry about your personal scoreboard numbers, you tend to only use damaging or healing abilities as they're the ones that pump numbers. When too many people play that way, your side tends to lose.

So what's the solution? From a game mechanics point of view, I'm not sure there is one. I guess game designers could start working on a way to track "assists" somehow. Maybe count how many times a player used CC vs. another player that was then "soon after" killed - and then consider that a "kill assist" and show that kind of thing on a scoreboard. The real solution, though, has to come from players. In a game that's about teamwork, players need to start thinking for the team and not worrying about the scoreboard. I find that when my side wins, it's a lot more satisfying than simply seeing my character top a scoreboard. And you usually get more out of it from the game too - XP, "renown," or whatever else the game in question awards for winning.

As a follow-up to a previous post, the matter of my LOTRO account is closed; Turbine will not budge, and I'm ... well ... done. Without my hard-earned characters, and somewhat more importantly, my names that I've used for the past 13 years, I just can't see returning. Plus, I have to admit, I am a little bit angry they are not willing to look at multiple ways to interpret data. Anyway.

Thank you to you-know-who-you-are for getting the matter re-appealed, even though it didn't work out.

And now back to our regularly scheduled insanity!

It was (I believe) Stargrace of Nomadic Gamer (NomadicGamer.com) that coined the term "Nomadic Gamer" - meaning someone that moves from game to game fairly frequently.

That pretty much describes me to a "T" since my post-EQ1 days. I'll stay with a game for maybe 2 or 3 months, sometimes only a month, and then go to another one. Sometimes I come back to a game - usually I will, in fact. I've tried to fight it - trying to even "force" myself to stay with a game when I've felt the "pull" of another. I think now it's time to accept that I am a Nomadic Gamer and just enjoy the process of getting to see a lot of different games.

So, with that out of the way, my current "home" is Warhammer Online. As I posted last week, I'd been missing some good PvP action, and right now, I don't think there's a better PvP game for me than WAR. I like the "fast, get in and fight" nature of the Scenarios most of the time. And when it's time for more involved action, there's the open Realm vs. Realm action of BOs/Keeps and such.

In typical "me" fashion, I'm playing lots of different characters. Sure, being an alt-o-holic limits your progression speed, but as they say "It's Not a Race™" and I'm in no hurry. I have a Squig Herder, a Disciple of Khaine, a Magus, a Marauder, a Shaman, a Choppa, a Sorcerer, and a Witch Elf. I do have an Order character, a Witch Hunter, but he's not getting played much as I don't know ANY Order players.

Among those, I don't even have a favorite - I sort of just log in, pick one, and go for it. They're all fun, and they're spread out across a few Tiers. The Magus is 40 and doesn't get played much, as a year away from the game makes it hard to pickup a max-level char again. The DoK and SH are 30 and 31 respectively, and get played quite a bit. Shaman and Witch Elf are in T2, and the Marauder and the rest are all T1. Population seems to be good across all the Tiers, now that the original 50+ opening day servers have been condensed to just 4. Warhammer's fun.

My EQ2 (and by extension, EQ1, SWG, and Vanguard) account is still active, and I'm still planning to play EQ2, as the PvE is leaps and bounds better than WAR's - it's just that right now, I'm enjoying the PvP/RvR action a bit more, so that's where I find myself logging in.

Next week: Hello Kitty Online? Haha - who knows! :D (Actually - about 90% of the MMO people I follow on Twitter play Wizard 101 and claim it's a good game even for adults... I suppose I'll have to check it out someday.)

As that screenshot, dated in 2002 shows, UI customization in MMOs has been around for a long time. I can't remember exactly when they added the capability to EQ1, but it was probably a year prior to that shot. Since then, interface customization has grown by leaps and bounds!

EQ1 only allows "skinning" - that is, all you can change is how and where things are displayed. You can't actually "program" the UI like you can in WoW and Warhammer, but you can still do a lot to the UI.

The evolution of my EQ1 UI...

I spend a lot of time designing and tweaking my UI in games that allow me to. I often say I "can't" play with the default UI on games like WoW or Warhammer. That's not exactly true - of course I could play on the default UI setup, it's just that with addons and customization you can really get a UI tailored to how you think and react, and I believe you end up a better player.

A longterm friend and I both heavily play this metagame, and we often spend hours on IM discussing UI and keybind setups. It really is a detailed, complex metagame.

The more modern MMOs, such as WoW and Warhammer really let you change the UI to suit you. Both of those games have a full-blown programming language, LUA, built into the client, and they expose much of the client API to the UI, allowing you to really make cool modifications to the game's UI.

Let's start with WoW's default, "as installed", UI:

Certainly that's not "unusable" but from my point of view it has several problems that are easily fixed. First, the unit frames, that is, the displays of the player's and the target's health and such, are up in the corners of the display, away from the center of the action, where your eyes should be focused. Also, the hotbars display and other UI elements are a little too "heavy weight", taking up a lot of screen real estate.

Here's my WoW UI as of December of 2009:

Note that the unit frames have been pared down to just what's needed, and most of the UI elements are relocated to a "focus zone." This isn't the best the UI could be; I'm always refining and tweaking my game UIs.

The two main things I first look for when seeking addons are a lightweight unitframes mod, and a good hotbar mod. Most game's default unitframes are pretty overblown. They usually have a large, animated portrait of the character, which wastes both space and CPU cycles. They're also usually too big. So I look for a good, clean unitframe mod. For hotbars, I need something flexible and that reminds me what keys are bound to what. I'm a keybinder - clicking simply takes too long. Hitting a key is much faster than moving a mouse and clicking; there's just no way around that.

After those two things are handled, I generally try to find a good quest log managing mod, a good minimap mod, and if it exists, a good "Grid" type party/raid frame mod. Other things I look for/use are totally specific to the game - such as Recount for DPS/healing tracking in WoW, or HorizontalMechanicBar for tracking class mechanics in Warhammer.

So - what about you? Do you heavily play the UI Metagame, or do you just install the game and play with what "The Man™" gave you?

This morning, mucho comedy from "back in the day" in EverQuest I. Every time you reload this page, a different quote will appear below. Many of them are not "family friendly" but all of them are funny and were saved for one reason or another. ;) There are between 100 and 200 quotes in the randomizer. Have fun! :D

(Note: I'm Sevok/Sovek.)

I think that's a large part of why I've been a little unfocused with games lately. There is still a tiny chance that I can get the LOTRO account unlocked, and if I do, LOTRO will be a primary focus.

Or, I guess, I can just wait until 2036 when the ban expires! :D

Yesterday's post mentioned a "complex casting system" in a game some friends and I tried to design a few years ago. I was reading through the forums where we were doing this design work (they're still up, hidden), and was going through the long thread where we discussed said magic system. I decided I'd cut-n-paste the main design post into a blog post. Sure, this represents many hours of conversations, thought, and design on my part but it's not like there's anything super proprietary or anything in it, and I'm sure hundreds if not thousands of other caster players have thought up similar systems. And, it'd need hundreds more hours of work to refine into something "real" that could be put into a game. I like to promote discussion on design and such, so here it is...

The "research mockup" referred to in the text is:

******** CUT AND PASTE OF MAIN DESIGN POST ********

Magic System Proposed Design
Version 2.0 (10/23/2006)

Overview

The magic system I'm proposing here is fairly complex, and is designed to provide a much "deeper" caster experience than the simple "buy scroll, you have the spell" type system we've seen in almost every MMO. I've tried to work in some features that make it a little more accessible for the "lazy" or more casual player that wants to play a caster, but doesn't want to learn the complex system. In the end, though, to be a really "good" caster player, you're going to need to learn the more complex system.

The system is based on the premise that in order to "learn" a spell, that is, have it in your spellbook and be able to cast it, you first have to research it. This is done by using the spell research interface, which I have made a crude mockup of -- you can see that at the following URL:

You can see from the mockup that spells are made up of Words, Components, and Sigils. More on that later. Casting (and Research) will be controlled by a number of skills. These will be arranged into trees TBD later. They will be specific skills such as Summoning Demonic Entitles rather than more generic skills such as Alteration like EQ1 has. When you try to Research a spell, a skill check will be done on the skill(s) the spell is tyring to use, and if you succeed, the spell will be learned and added to your spellbook. If you fail, you might lose some or all of the components, or if you fail really badly you might die.

When you want to cast a spell you just select it from your book, or hit the hotkey you have it bound to. A skill check will be done on the spell's skill(s) (the skillcheck for research and cast will be slightly different) and if you succeed you cast the spell, if you fail something bad might happen.

When you start the game with any casting skills, you will have in your spellbook some basic starter spells. You can use these for a while, they'll be enough to be effective. You'll also be able to use these as the basis for learning the spell system. You can look at any spell in your book to see how it was composed and can reason out from that how to create other spells.

For the non-interested, casual, or lazy player, there will be the option to buy spells at certain skill levels from some NPCs. They won't be the "super duper cool-ass" spells you could have, but they'll be enough to play the game and be somewhat effective.

Research

The heart of the spell system is Research. Again refer to the research screen mockup at

As you can see, spells are made up of Words, Components, and Sigils. We'll talk about each one in order.

Words are the main thing that describe what the spell will do. There will be a number of magical languages a caster must know in order to do magic. These will be individual skills in the skill trees. We'll invent a few languages, and use a few from the real world. I definitely want to have Sumerian, Celtic, and probably Enochian. We can invent the rest. We don't need full languages, just the words needed to arrange spells. As you can see in the mockup, the player doesn't have to actually memorize the language -- the words are displayed with the English meaning in parentheses. You simply drag the words from the Words tab on the left, onto the layout section on the right. You have to arrange them in proper order, of course, and we can have varying grammars in the different languages for flavor and to add difficulty.

Components are physical things you have to have in order to use the spell. These are things like herbs, incenses, charms, amulets, talismans, wands, staves, etc. Some components will be consumed when casting, either every time you cast or randomly, and some will never be consumed (such as Amulets). For example, say we have a Blort Demon summoning spell. The components are Asafoetida powder and a Blort Demon amulet. One unit of the Asafoetida powder will be consumed when you cast the spell, while the Amulet will not.

Some components, like wands or staves, will be held (automatically) when you cast the spell.

We can control how expensive/annoying the component system is by carefully deciding how to set the consume/maybe consume/never consume flags for each spell.

Sigils specify the scope and scale of the spell. Scope is what the spell effects: yourself, a target, or an area of effect. Scale is how powerful or "big" the spell will be. We can invent our own sigils or just use a weird font like the one I used for the mockup. Probably best to make up our own. Sigils will also be used to mitigate spoiler site effects (more on that later, though). Sigils were originally (in version 1.0) "Gestures" but after talking extensively with Zar this weekend, we came up with Sigils. They're easier to put in the game, and I think will "look" and "feel" much more mystical and "cool".

So, once you've arranged the Words, Components, and Sigils you think will define a valid spell, you hit "Experiment..." and if you've arranged a valid combination, and pass the skill check(s), the spell will be added to your spellbook and you can then cast the spell anytime (assuming you have enough mana and the components). If you fail, you won't learn the spell, the system won't tell you what caused the fail (bad combination, or failed skill check), and based on how badly you fail, you might die. Twisted Evil

Casting

Once you've got a spell in your book, casting is easy. You either select it right from the book, or press a hotkey you've assigned it to. If you have enough mana, of course, and the components needed, you'll cast the spell. If you fail the skill check(s), you fail, and if the fail is bad enough (critical fail), you might die.

That's really all there is to casting -- it's a simple casting system like most other MMOs. The complexity is all in the way you acquire spells (research). Casting needs to be simple, because you're not going to want to have to do complex actions while a mob is trying to make you into its dinner.

Rituals

I'm proposing another class of spells, called Rituals, that cannot be researched. Rather, you learn them from quests or from ancient tomes you might find in the game. These will usually require the participation of multiple characters, and be very complex. But the effects they have will be very impressive indeed. I will expand on this later.

Random, Unsorted Thoughts

When summoning or animating things, part of the "sentence" you will construct will include a clause for "under my control". If you leave that out, you create a "dumbfire pet" like the Necromancer rat summon that EQ2 has (used to have?). The "under my control" part causes a Will stat check. If you fail, the pet is "dumbfire" and will probably kill you. Razz Especially if it's a really powerful demon and you're just a Neophyte level caster. So, yeah, you might pass the skill check to summon that really powerful demon ... but if you can't control it, you're dinner. So you have to use your head when casting summons.

Spoiler site effect mitigation: To control the effect spoiler sites have on the magic system, the sigil alphabet will be randomized on character creation. Twisted Evil So what means "target" for one character might mean "self" for another. Would be kind of unfortunate if someone thought they had a "Kill" spell but used the sigil that meant "target" for another character, but meant "self" for them.

Skill trees: I haven't worked out how I want the skill trees to work just yet. I'm almost there, and will post on it later. It will probably have 3 trees: Harmful, Beneficial, and Summoning. We can use this to control power and prevent people from becoming "superbeings" by learning everything.

Spell books in libraries: I do plan to have readable books in libraries and other places, and some of them may give you spells you likely won't figure out on your own. Of course, you'll have to pass the skill checks, but it'll be really cool for players that explore and such.

******** END OF CUT AND PASTE ********

So there you have it. What do you think of this design, on a basic level? Is it something you'd like to see in a game? Or is it too complex? Or not complex enough? ;)

About three years ago myself, my wife, and some longterm friends decided to try to develop an MMO together. I know - insane! But we had no idea just how insane. ;)

It started with my wife and I talking over a long weekend. We theorized about a very popular television IP and how it would be perfect for an MMO. It had interesting races, a really cool (modern day) setting, and tons of other things that made it, in our minds, a perfect IP for an MMO. Of course, we do not have and in no way could ever afford a license to use said IP - so we figured there would only be two ways to pull it off. One, it could be done "on the sly" and then if it was cool enough the owners of the IP might be on board with continuing the project. Or two, change just enough that it appeals to fans of the IP, but make it different enough that no legal guns could be aimed at the project.

We then began talking about this idea on the forums where the aforementioned friends hang out, and several of them thought the idea sounded cool and wanted in on the project! It was now a "project!" I setup separate (and very private) forums and a (equally hidden/private) wiki for the project and we went forth with it.

Some concept art was created - in fact the artwork in this post is concept art from that project; one of our friends is a very talented artist. For about a month or two, it seemed like this could be a reality. No, we didn't believe we could create a full blown MMO with "just us"; rather we hoped to get the bare workings of something to show, and then try to find venture capital to make it happen for real. We had two programmers (myself - I've been programming as a hobby since I was 10, and professionally since I was 19; and another friend on the project), a excellent artist, several very creative design/story type people. We really did have the right mix to make something barely showable.

As things started to get more and more detailed, that's when problems started happening. The whole project ended up being a very interesting insight into what must happen in MMO development. First it was races. We fought bitterly over which races would be included. Hell, we had some knock down, drag out fights over what to name the races! Yes, race names. Fights. Seriously! Haha.

Perhaps the worst fight was over the magic system. I'm a longterm caster player; I always play casters, and usually pet-based casters. I have always wanted a very complex, deep magic system in an MMO, instead of the simplistic "buy a spell and cast it" type of system that has become the norm. I'm maybe the only player that liked Asheron's Call's original magic system, where things were randomized on character creation, and spell power was greater/lesser based on how many in the world knew a spell. Hell, I didn't think it was quite complex enough! But it was a start. A friend that was on the project is a similar caster fan, so I figured we'd be totally in sync on a complex magic system. Oh hell no. Not even close! Heh. The crude mockup of a research interface preceding this paragraph is my work. I spent perhaps 100 hours documenting my ideas for a magic system that was complex and based on personally researching spells and so forth. The other caster person... didn't quite get it and ... well, we ended up not speaking for a few months when the project was aborted.

Actually, most of us didn't speak for a few months. We're all still friends and we're all over the failure of the project. :) But, wow, what an insight it ended up being! If actual, longterm friends get into fights that badly over game design issues... imagine what people who's only connection is being employed by the same company must go through! Heh. And this was confirmed recently when someone in another community I'm a part of gave us all an insight into what goes on. He's on the dev team for a very big upcoming title, and he detailed how some meetings go. There have been near fist-fights in some of them! And this is an AAA+ title we're talking about. Bottom line: game development is passionate!

Shame our project never went anywhere though; we really did have a lot of good ideas, and looking back over the wiki we created, that's still true. I'm glad I've kept the wiki and forums to look back on.

Yeah, it's shameless self-promotion, but oh well. Click my Bioware Social link to help me out in the Bioware Bazaar. Here it is: >>> LINK <<<<

That's all for now. :)

I haven't had a ton of gaming time lately, but what time I have had has been spent in EQ2. It really is a great game, with tons of things too do (too many sometimes - it's hard to decide what to do!). Quite a few friends are playing, and with the few random guild invites we've done, there's always quite a few on with the PM tag. So, I've been pretty happy playing EQ2. :)

I still miss LOTRO, a lot, actually, but without my original account, I can't really go back. I do have the second account, but all my years-old names, pre-release era characters and the like, I just really can't make a go of it. :/ Maybe someday Turbine will relent and unlock it.

The only thing I DO sometimes miss in gaming is some PvP. Sure EQ2 has PvP now, but honestly, the game was not designed from the ground up to have PvP and I can't imagine it's very good. The PvP I miss the most is the always available, "jump in and go for it" Scenarios and world PvP of Warhammer Online actually. I could always hit "join queue" and within a couple minutes be in a good PvP scenario and it was (almost) always a lot of fun! And the world PvP was fun too. Not sure how it is now as it's been many months since I played, but I think when the PvP itch gets too strong to resist, that's what I'll re-up. I don't have the reflexes for AoC PvP anymore, and EVE ... well, yeah, no.

The info on The Secret World that came out of GDC is very interesting. Interesting skill system, where you have 7 active and 7 passive skills you can slot in at any one time. Should avoid some of the "skill overload" that you get in other games, where you've got 3-4+ hotbars worth of skills to manage at all times. TSW's going to be very interesting!

Anyway - not much else to write about at the moment. EQ2's fun, but I haven't done anything "exciting" - mainly I'm just questing on my Necro and playing random alts now and then. I'm on Station Pass, so I've got seemingly endless character slots to mess with. ;)

I am an "Advancement Driven Player," aka "addicted to the ding." Levels, skill numbers, whatever the character advancement mechanic is in the game I'm playing, I always seek to see that go UP up UP! The problem is, the scales are never linear.

When you start a new MMO, the advancement comes fast, then eventually starts to really...slow....dooown. Back when there wasn't a lot of choice, well, I just stayed with it and settled for slow advancement. Now, with 100000 choices, the problem is the thoughts start to creep in. "Well I'm only level 15 in that game, I can get some levels really fast instead of taking 3 days to gain a level here..."

I know that most MMO developers choose a number of hours they think (or hope - ha!) an "average" player should take to get to max level, and then design around that. The problem is, that number of hours is usually skewed such that the last, say, 20% of levels take as much time to achieve as the first 80% - or thereabouts. Players like myself would do better, and stay more focused, if the curve were linear. To use an overly simplistic example, let's say you want it to take 100 play hours to reach max level, and there are 50 levels. So, why not scale things so that it takes 2 hours per level? Or, if you want to give players fast levels - expand the scale. So 100 hours to max level, but there's 200 levels - so a level every 30 minutes-ish?

A lot of games have other advancement paths besides levels. "AA points" are one of course - and that helps somewhat - but a lot of times you need 5-10 or more AA points to get anything, and then usually those things have such a small effect on your character's performance that it ends up feeling not worth it. Gear is an advancement path too, and that helps - but again sometimes there's the problem of too little gain and/or too much time needed.

I don't have a good solution - I'm merely commenting on how I play and why I see myself losing focus on a game. When the advancement starts coming too slowly, I invariably end up switching games or rolling an alt. Basically, "advancement driven players" need somewhat frequent (and noticeable) gains in character performance/skills/etc, or we can tend to lose focus and switch characters (which isn't bad for the game, because we stay) or switch games (which of course, IS bad for the game).

How's that for an interesting collection of unrelated hashtags!? Well, that's what happens when you blog about everything you're doing, rather than focusing on one subject. ;)

I haven't written much lately, mainly because there hasn't been a lot to write about. I haven't been "heavily" playing any particular game. I'm still playing EQ2, AO, and STO randomly/when I get a chance, but I haven't been playing a lot and I haven't had anything super awesome to comment about in any of those games, or in the gaming world at large.

I've been in the "investigative stages" of getting into a couple other diversions/hobbies. I've wanted to homebrew for about 15 years and we just checked out an awesome homebrew shop in Indianapolis on Saturday. We'll probably be heading back there soon to pick up the gear we need to get started. Hopefully within a month or two we'll have our first batch of beer! Everyone we know locally will have a bunch of free beer - woot!

As I mentioned before, we have access to a supply of awesome fresh-from-da-cow milk - 2 gallons a week to be exact. So, I've been experimenting with cheesemaking. Doing it the old-fashioned way, without any commercial products such as rennet and packaged cultures hasn't yielded the best results - so we picked up some rennet and cultures at the homebrew shop mentioned above. Yeah, they have cheesemaking (and winemaking!) stuff too. It's a great shop. Hopefully further experimentation will yield some good cheese.

That's a batch of Irish soda bread my wife made last week. It was insanely good! She's been learning The Ways of the Bread™ lately and has been picking it up... like she was born to it. :D We've had some seriously awesome bread for the last 2-3 weeks.

I've also begun the process of re-entering R/C flying - helicopters to be exact. Helis were actually the first thing I was involved with in R/C flying, but I switched to airplanes early on. I want something I can fly at a large schoolyard more easily - and a heli fits the bill quite nicely. I got a rather insane deal on a used fairly high end model from a soldier stationed at Guantanamo Bay, oddly enough. It'll be here in 15-20 days and I'll post plenty of pics, I'm sure. It's a Miniature Aircraft Ion-X V1 for those that know the model. I have a transmitter coming from another source, and Phoenix Simulator coming from the manufacturer. Sim practice is pretty important with helis; they're a lot more difficult to fly than airplanes.

So that about covers it! The Health Issue mentioned in a previous post seems to be finally getting worked out. At some point, when it's all completely resolved, I'll have a post on it, from the perspective of a family member (since it's not me that's physically going through it). Suffice it to say, the thyroid is a fairly important part of your body. :D

One game that I've been excited about for quite some time is Funcom's "The Secret World." There is not a lot of information out there about it yet, but what is out there is awesome. And what Funcom has done with complex ARGs for the game has just been ... awesome. But now GDC is on, and according to a couple of posts (one and two) we can expect some concrete info soon!

What we do know is that the game will be set in the present day, in our world. The locations will be based on real locations in our world. The premise is that all/most of the legends, conspiracy theories, and so on are true - and you're a member of a secret society vying for control. The character development system will be skill-based rather than level based. And that's pretty much it. But that's enough!

Playing Anarchy Online again, Funcom's first MMO, I have been reminded again how awesome a more open, skill-based character system is. AO's character dev is complex, as I mentioned in my wall-o-text AO post. Hopefully TSW's will be even deeper.

I'm hoping to get involved in early beta for TSW. I'm playing AO, EQ2, and STO, sure, but I really miss the beta process. The last major beta (Alpha, actually) I was involved with was LOTRO and that was years ago. I miss the process of seeing a game evolve through early alpha, to beta, then open beta and finally release. Ah well, soon hopefully. I had a chance back in October/November to get a guaranteed slot in the TSW beta, by buying a 1 year subscription to AoC but I wasn't able to take advantage at the time. Hopefully I'll win the random selection lottery again like I seem to so regularly. ;) I know a lot of times active posters at fan sites/etc get selected early on, but honestly, I never found a point in posting a ton about a game that nothing is known about and I'm not in testing for. Once I'm "in", my post count usually goes to 1,000 rather quickly. Heh. Just no point in idle speculation, in my opinion. We don't even know... anything, so there's nothing really to talk about.

Anyway... TSW... A title to watch!