Name: Tim Dale
Date registered: December 6, 2010
Oct 20 2011
Previously on How To Murder Time! “…Information security is one of those tiresome airy-fairy subjects until something goes wrong on your own patch…”
And now the conclusion! In rather predictable fashion I’ve now become a little bit RAGING PARANOID about online security and passwords as a result of it all, although it is somewhat reassuring to note that it wasn’t just me, and news sites seem to now be picking up on what turns out to be a fair sized rash of identical hacking stories to my own:
Eurogamer: XBL accounts hacked to buy FIFA packs
Ars Technica: As Xbox Live-FIFA 12 fraud continues, Microsoft’s response becomes maddening
Giant Bomb: Microsoft, EA Claim FIFA Isn’t Causing Rash of Xbox Live Hacks
Lots of mealey-mouthed damage limitation fluff from EA and MS there “We don’t comment on security”, “Don’t give out your passwords”, and so far, my own account is still suspended and under investigation (at my own request), and I’m still £60 out of pocket on the credit card.
My raging paranoia hasn’t been helped by receiving an unrelated email from Turbine, telling me that they think their forums were just hacked, and would I like to think about changing my password?
The nature of the medium throws doubt and uncertainty on the innocent and the victim. “Are you sure it isn’t your fault somehow?” they ask. Well, I was, but now I’m not so sure, hence my newfound paranoia, and associated Twitter ranting. It’s a vicious spiral of distrust which eventually ends up with me demanding to be paid my salary in gold nuggets, which I then stuff under my mattress, in my house that I never leave!
Get a grip, I hear you think, and indeed, that is the trick. Somewhere between just tweeting my bank details and hoping everyone only takes what they need, and becoming some shotgun-totting backwoods hermit who fears electricity and hates government, there must be a middle ground, combining caution and usability, suitable for continuing to usefully live in an increasingly online digital age.
I can’t do much about the original problem itself, squarely an EA/MS fault, but there were things I could have done differently and better. Here are some security tips I’m currently implementing which should help stop this kind of thing in future. Many of them were suggested by Askgar in previous comments! Feel free to add your own or dispute these – only YOU can stop me being robbed again!
Unique Usage Passwords
Use a different password for every online service. It may help to use a different account name as well. The reasoning here is straight forward. If, to pick a random example, EA are flipping idiots and just give out Xbox Live passwords to anyone who phones them up and asks nicely, then that’s bad. The Xbox Live account is in for a clearing out that its legitimate owner won’t forget in a hurry!
Much worse though, is when that Friend of Humanity goes on to successfully log into PSN, WoW and your bank with the same details. It makes sense to try the login on multiple similar services, because some people are lazy, or just have trouble keeping forty or more different usernames and passwords straight in their heads.
I did this a lot, but have now made them all unique. I’ve re-learnt how to write letters with a pen, and now I keep them in a physical book. Old-school! I’m in trouble if my flat is burnt down or robbed, but it’s more about making disaster less likely, than removing it altogether. They might take the PC, but probably won’t take the innocuous looking book under the pile of junk on that other shelf.
Particularly important with peripheral systems; forums, fan sites, etc. While Triple-A MMO Corp may have watertight security, do you really know or trust amateur owner-admin of Triple-A MMO Fansite dot com? I don’t. Using the same password for both makes the MMO’s security dependent on the integrity of the fansite owner. If you’re happy that everyone who ever asked you to create a password online is to be trusted, then you can probably ignore this one.
Strong Passwords
See XKCD comic here: http://xkcd.com/936/
Long beats complex, although in my recent paranoid password reset adventures, it’s dismaying to see that some online systems have password length limits of as little as eight characters. In these cases, use them all, and go with the punctuations and numbers, as suggested. EVE Online wins here with a staggering 64 character password limit. I approve!
Online systems could do more to improve this, but within reason. Runes of Magic wins the HtMT Ultimate Security Award here. On my recent attempt to retry the game, I went through all the forgot/reset password stuff to get back in after long absence, only to find it then wants a second password at character select, the resetting of which proved to be so bureaucratic and awkward that I gave up and will probably never play it again! I wish I’d written that down two years ago, and it does illustrate the dangers of security, which can become so secure even authorised users are kept out!
Remove Payment Methods
This one is what got me. If my XBL account didn’t have a permanent set of credit card details saved as part of itself, the Friend of Humanity would have just stolen 120 leftover MS points I wasn’t using anyway and then moved on, rather than gone on a 6120 point spree. I’d still be cross, but would not now be distrustful of all online payment as a whole. This is because online shops value One-Click Impulse Purchasing over security and this should not be encouraged.
Of course it suits Microsoft for me to be able to give them money by just pressing ‘A’ four times. (I’ve heard stories of six year olds, and dogs, racking up huge bills because of this sort of nonsense.) However, it doesn’t suit me that someone pretending to be me can steal £60 from me by just pressing A four times, thanks to their own flawed security procedures.
It’s not just MS though, and it is telling that in Turbine’s account management pages, upgrading to a subscription or buying Turbine Points is a one-click operation, but to remove attached credit card details, (because, to pick an example at random, their forums have just been hacked), requires a string of grovelling emails, and probably will each time I want to buy stuff from them in future.
In a sensible world, we should be required to re-enter our details every time we want to actually buy a thing, after which, those details should be deleted. It’s more awkward for us, but serves to disconnect automatic links which can be easily abused, as I found out to my cost. As it is, I am not happy with online services having my credit card details any longer than is absolutley necessary to make a purchase or renew a subscription.
I guess the real point here is not distrust of the service provider so much, but prevention of hackers stealing from you by tricking the service provider into thinking they are you. I’m fairly sure Microsoft isn’t out to steal from me themselves, but some other bugger did trick them in to being an accomplice in a theft of my stuff anyway.
Game Cards and Paypal
On the subject of not just leaving your credit card details on a post-it note stuck to the shop till, why use one at all? Many online services have one-off points/time cards which provide an identical service, in a more secure manner. The underlying account isn’t any more secure, but at least it contains no onward money links. My paranoia recently sent me to GAME to test this out. I bought two £9 Station Cash cards (worth 3000 SC or two months of subscription for thier non-F2P games), which I then took home. Scratch off the back, enter the code and then spent the points on EQ2X Silver and one of those floating island player houses I was going on about a while back. Still have some points left, but it’ll only be those that get lost if my Station account gets hacked. Oh…did I mention the latest SOE account security panic, making for three security incidents relevant to my interests in as many weeks. These buggers are at it all the time, and everywhere!
Paypal is a useful alternative, requiring another password on a different system to be entered before cash is dispensed. This password is different to the purchasing applications one – see point one, above. I guess one day Paypal will be hacked, but I guess we’ll all have bigger problems than missing EQ2 points to worry about on that day.
Sadly, some systems offer neither points/time cards or Paypal options – Amazon being one example. Treat these with caution, and try not to leave the payment details on file unless actually in the process of paying. Remove them after the pruchase, if you can. With an increasing move to F2P design, it should become easier to find risk free ways to charge up the MMO MicroPoints that don’t expose the credit card.
Authenticators
My bank now makes me use one of these, a physical gizmo that tells me a number to type in when asked by the website. I do worry what happens when I put the authenticator on a 40C Non-Coloureds Spin Cycle, as I inevitably will one day, but anything that requires a physical object present to log in, can only help. CCV numbers on the back of credit cards work in a similar manner – you need the card in your hand to use it – and since the primary worry I have is people in remote places across the world pretending to be me online, this sort of thing does the job. WoW offer these and I think SOE have one too. It’s annoying that we have to pay extra for them, but they are probably worth the cost for extra peace of mind. You only have to worry about burglary or assault now!
Secret Questions
Quick tip here; lie. The person at the other end of the Lost Password Helpdesk isn’t marking you for accuracy. All they care about is that the answer you give matches the answer you said you would give when you filled out the form two years ago. Treat it as another kind of password rather than a General Knowledge Quiz with “You” as the specialist subject. When asked for your mother’s maiden name, make one up. With surprisingly little effort, some Friend of Humanity can look up your mother’s maiden name, but unless they’re already inside the system they are trying to break in to, they won’t know exactly how you lied about it on the original form. As long as you can consistently remember the lie and repeat it back correctly later on, you’re fine.
More advanced setup forms of this type have a user-enterable questions instead, which helps a lot here. Make it fairly obscure, but memorable to you!
Many of these tips are designed to deliberately break linkages, to internally compartmentalise our online selves. It can be very easy to create an online gestalt which is made up of many interlinked systems; accounts, logins, forum personas, avatars and so on, all of which lie behind only one universally shared and weak password. Get that from some weak link out on the periphery and the entire online you is laid bare, including the important stuff in the middle; the bank, the credit card, the employment records, the real you.
By resisting the pressure from these online services to create a unified one-button purchasing network around ourselves, and by resisting our own laziness, we can partition our online lives; insulate them from each other, so that if one element of it is compromised, the rest of them remain untouched. Pre-emptive damage limitation is fairly easy, but takes a moderate and sustained effort to keep it up.
All in all, I’ve learnt a lot in these last few weeks, so that’s something I suppose! I don’t even do MyFriends or BookFaces or SpaceVilles or the like, so have no security ideas for those, other than to not bother in the first place. Hopefully someone can comment on those!
With any luck, I’m preaching to the choir here and you all know all this stuff anyway, but if anyone reading this has learnt something, then that’s good too! If not, then I hope I’ve amused somewhat with tales of my own naivety! Regardless, good luck out there, remember that they are all out to get you, so don’t let the buggers get your monies!
Back to talking about things that aren’t online security soon!
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/10/20/partitions%e2%80%a6.html
Oct 13 2011
It probably says something that the way we’ve chosen to celebrate the new Lord of the Rings Online expansion, Rise of Isengard, is to pretty much hang up the game en masse, with both the Monday and Friday static groups deciding to find new entertainments. It’d be unfair to blame this on anything Isengard has or hasn’t done; it’s probably great if you like that sort of thing. Spinks and Melmoth describe it as more of the same, a kind of Enedwrath Plus rather than anything distinctly new or different. More of the same is great if you liked what went before, but is less so if you were just about getting bored of it all beforehand anyway.
My own new catchphrase applies to me too; if it isn’t fun, don’t play it, so its time to move on, like David Carradine off of Kung Fu. I’ve moved in two directions at once this time which is a neat trick. More on The Friday Thing another time, but the Monday Night Static Group, plus Friends, is on holiday in City of Heroes: Freedom, their recent F2P conversion relaunch, and to be honest, it really does feel like a holiday. I’d played before, of course, but had forgotten just how seriously they take the Serious Business of MMO Gaming, which is largely “not in the slightest”.
Solo gameplay in CoX is pretty lacklustre, as ever, but group nights in there are absolutely bonkers, and I love it. For a start almost every MMO problem I’ve railed about in the last few years is a solved problem in this game.
Their insanely flexible mentoring system makes Character Level an obsolete concept, especially in terms of that tedious Friends Wanting To Play Together Thing that many MMOs grudgingly pay lip service to. It really doesn’t matter what level any of us are. It doesn’t matter if any of us have missed a week, or even just don’t like the way the character is handling and want to reroll from scratch one unexpected week. We just group up and it sorts all that out for us. We then go out and beat stuff up.
The mind-boggling array of archetypes, powers and pools means that Group Composition is basically obsolete. I’m still not sure what our group actually consists of, and I find myself thinking of its members in terms of character concepts and costumes rather than archetypes. Bring the player not the class indeed! There are some Corruptors? One of us is a Scrapper? I’m not sure I know to be honest and that’s great. I guess some of us heal and buff? The never-ending flow of healing and self-rez Inspirations (potions) means we don’t really have to worry about that stuff anyway. “What class should I be?” asked one of newer members. “Anything you like” I replied. I always say that, but this time, meant it. So we all turn up on the first night with a bunch of superheroes with powers that just sounded interesting, and it still worked. Every group is a Concept Group in CoX! We then go out and beat stuff up.
The surprisingly configurable difficulty settings mean that Game Balance is obsolete. Through various NPCs, (Hero Corps Field Analyzers and Fortunata Fateweavers) we can set a number of options which can set mission difficulty from facerollingly easy through to brick wall impossible and anywhere in between. We’re still experimenting with the options here, but it’s refreshing for an MMO to let its players decide what kind of night out they want. I’m not adverse to challenge, but I do like to indulge in the occasional cakewalk too. We choose the type of experience based on the collective mood. If we use these NPCs correctly, it will always be just right. We then go out and beat stuff up.
If there is any problem left to conquer, it’s that of arbitrary maximum group size, which here is eight. There are nine of us most Mondays, but that isn’t an insurmountable problem; we just take turns sitting out on a per mission basis, and if I’m honest, I don’t much care what the missions actually are or whether I need a particular step on a specific arc. I’m just there for the mayhem of it all and will happily get no ‘tick’ for the job. The job itself is reward enough, which is rare in MMOs these days. They have some kind of raid type functionality, but I’m not sure if the missions themselves can handle that. I don’t care, we just go out and beat stuff up.
Moment to moment play in full-group CoX is mad and is one of those few games which will cause me to just start spontaneously giggling uncontrollably at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Eight supers all going nuts with overlapping pyrotechnics against waves and waves of hapless thugs, robots, aliens and zombies. And that’s just the ‘stock’ powers; the single target bolt, the big wind-up punch, the long-range AoE blast, etc. Pretty much every power set has at least one Comedy Superpower as well; mostly involving entertaining ragdoll physics which is just a joy to watch kick off. I’m a Peacebringer this time and mine is being able to turn into a flying energy squid thing which can spam ranged AoE Knockbacks. I can also make everyone else in the team fly, whether they want to or not! Plenty of others get them too though, hilarious punctuation in the ongoing prose that is our sustained massive technicolor rolling overkill. We feel powerful in a way few MMOs allow us to be, even at High Levels, and most of us only dinged Level 20 out of 50 this week.
I’m reminded again of the exaggerations of it all. The Tankers are indestructible aggro black-holes compared to Standard MMO Tanks. The Blasters and Corruptors are explosive hurricanes of elemental fury compared to Standard MMO Wizards and Hunters. Masterminds bring armies, not pets. Dominators control instances not individuals, and can subvert combat itself if they don’t feel like being hit today. Stalkers undetectably annihilate bosses and don’t bother stopping to pick pockets. Peacebringers turn out to be accomplished Druid types on steroids, shifting effortlessly to entirely different classes on the fly, litterally. Healing, Taunting, Group Auras and Stealth are available to everyone as optional add-on power sets. Supers do not need vehicles or mounts, they get to functionally be one at level four. Monsters come at you in the dozens, not the threes and fours of Standard MMOs. In the starting area no two players look alike and can look awesome from level one. Massive shoulderpads are soooo last season dah-links. And if you get bored of the stock content, there are several thousand player-made missions you can try instead, or failing that, just go and make one of your own.
Pretty much everything is turned up to eleven and it is brilliant!
The nuts and bolts of the F2P implementation seem reasonable enough, running mostly on a system of points-based unlocks; one-off purchases to buy the usual array of goods and services, character slots, the newer power sets and costume parts and so on. They do the increasingly standard triple tier membership system, as seen in LOTRO, DDO, etc, etc offering the VIP pseudo-subscription along with premium and free memberships too.
The points are about $5 for 400, and character slots are about $6 each, which I think is a little steep. Theres a fair bit in there that I think is a bit steep, but value on individual items is very subjective, and that’s the good thing about it all – only buy what you think is fair! I do.
Regardless of all that, the game seems functionally playable without spending anything at all if nothing takes your fancy – entirely cheapseating new players still get two character slots and access to CoH, CoV, most of the core archetypes and power sets and almost all of the older content, which being an MMO of that age is fairly prodigous! Returning players will likely have more slots and can use those to unlock access to old characters.
Notable exceptions that you’ll have to pay extra for include the new-ish Going Rogue 1-20 starter options, the newer powerwsets like Time Manipulation and Dual Pistols, the Incarnate post-L50 stuff, the new ‘One Must Die’ story arcs, and the usual array of costume sets that they’ve been charging extra for for ages anyway. Sente has lots more reliable observations and comentary on all that stuff here.
I’m gushing, clearly, but this exact sense of liberation hits me every time I return to CoX from any other more Standard MMO. That sense of ‘Why aren’t all MMOs like this one?’ It’s not prefect, certainly. Such flexibility comes at the price of distinctiveness. Warehouses and Sewers repeat often and despite there technically being over 300 ‘classes’, many of the powers within those are similar across different power sets, just with different particle effects. Also, soloing in CoX and full-group rampaging in CoX are very different games, and the soloing one isn’t the greatest. Best appreciated if you bring a big mob of friends with you. And also some people just don’t like Superheroes, meaning CoX is never going to be for them, which is fair enough.
I expect I will get bored of it in time, again, but then that’s probably just me and probably quite normal. But the whole thing presents an almost entirely carefree experience which possibly comes the closest to the kind of thing I think I may have been trying to find all along. Whatever else it is or isn’t, for me right now, it’s a breath of fresh air and just the tonic I need.
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/10/13/exaggerations.html
Oct 07 2011
So I was hacked. Information security is one of those tiresome airy-fairy subjects until something goes wrong on your own patch, and then suddenly it becomes an obsession to be shared with anyone who will listen!
TLDR; EA allow people steal to money from random XBOX LIVE users, using FIFA 12.
The long version where I show my working;
So I get home and get on with some unrelated stuff that doesn’t involve the PC or Xbox360. Later on, I check my email and find that Microsoft are grateful for my recent purchase of 1000, and then 5000 Microsoft points, for a total of about £60. Uh-oh, thinks I, and go into full-on paranoid detective mode.
Various checking about my various membership and account web pages at Xbox Live shows a surprising chain of events. Apparently, at about 6:45pm I used an Xbox in an entirely unknown location to buy myself 6000 Microsoft points, then log in to FIFA 12, a game I don’t own and over the course of about an hour, spend a total of 6140 points. A neat trick considering that at the time, I was watching telly and staring at my 360, which was off. On the plus side, I also managed to complete 4% of FIFA 12 and gain 2/45 achievements; “New Club In Town” (Create your FIFA 12 Ultimate Team club) and the ironically named “I’ll Have That One” (Open your first pack in FIFA 12 Ultimate Team).
The purchases were confusing; 25 x “GOLD PACK Game Consumable” for 60 points each, 25x “PREMIUM GOLD PACK Game Consumable” for 120 each and 25x “PREMIUM SILVER PACK Game Consumable” for 60 points a go. I wish it said somewhere what game those were for, but I did my Googling and found these interesting threads:
Giant Bomb: Live account hacked? FIFA 11 related
and
Xbox.com: Fraudulent Charge of Premium Gold Packs
Of particular interest is the Giant Bomb thread, which is talking about identical problems in FIFA 11, yes Eleven, which seem not to have been remedied for FIFA 12. Fascinating post by ‘eatkill’ further in which I’ll quote:
happened to me last week . $110 worth of xbox live points spent on “in-game consumables” in FIFA 2011. Contacted EA also since my password was changed also. The rep told me its a problem with the game, there is some way that someone can trick xbox and EA into gaining access to your accounts. I was told they have been trying to fix the problem for months, but it wont be a problem with FIFA 2012. I’m still waiting a resolution.
I find it very concerning that someone can create a product I don’t use that puts my account at risk.
You and me both, pal. A bug or design flaw which allows random strangers to be robbed of real life money goes unfixed for a whole year.
So heres how I think it goes, The Great FIFA 12 Wayne Rooney Caper:
Some amount of guess work up there, after all, I’ve never actually played FIFA 12, but it is backed up with reasonable internet corroboration. There is a definite Step 3 Profit here, a somewhat convoluted cyber smash-and-grab which by the sounds of it, goes on all the time. Not an especially glamorous caper, but a sound and repeatable one.
And this is just me, googling about. I imagine the nice Microsoft Support Lady that I immediately phoned, who should have the entire audit trail in front of her, is likely to find out a lot more. I talked to them and got the account frozen and promises of investigation and reimbursement, although it’s probably going to be a fortnight or so before its all back to normal. Annoying because the 360 has an irritating necessity to tag many of its save games to a profile I can’t now get at for the duration of the investigation. I am NOT restarting Final Fantasy XIII again – I may not live to see the end of a second play through!
The support lady reassured me that all they’d have seen was a bunch of x’s with four digits on the end from inside the Xbox UI, so its unlikely my “FIFA Fagin” will be able to use the card for outside general purchases, but now I still have to do the usual watchman’s round of online systems, checking all the other metaphorical padlocks are still unbroken. I’m just glad my online bank recently introduced physical authenticators.
To their credit, MS Support were professional, helpful and reassuring, so I’m not too worried about it all, but it does make me cross, and mostly with EA.
Summing up; FIFA 12 is a den of cheating scumbags, EA are cynical profiteering idiots, Microsoft are surprisingly helpful but should put some serious pressure on EA, and probably should think about introducing an authenticator for in-console point purchases.
And I probably should have known better than to leave my payment info linked as part of the profile. If I did anything wrong here, it was that. I might trust Microsoft, but do I trust everyone Microsoft trusts, and everyone they trust?
Much as it might suit Microsoft (Or Sony, or Nintendo, or Steam, or whoever), the console has NO need to constantly have access to payment details – these should be a one-off thing that must be entered each and every time I want to buy stuff.
None of this is possible without a one-click attitude to online shopping that we should all learn to do without. We don’t just leave our wallets behind on the counter in real life shops to make things easier next time we visit the shop – we shouldn’t do it online either.
The Information Age is a double edged sword. We become the centre of an increasingly fragmented, attenuated and ephemeral sphere of connections, passwords, accounts and security questions, all only as strong as our own memories and the competences of the system designers involved, and with the increasing complexity of it all, we lose more and more control over who we are and what we own.
At the same time, with more and more systems and logs and audits in place, time itself becomes a more controlled thing. If things happen that weren’t intended, time can indeed be rewritten. Backups, rollbacks, simple remote controls that make the last twenty four hours never have happened, as far as the credit card or account status system cares at least. Goods and values can be remotely evaporated and recreated anew, from nothing, at the press of a button.
If I’ve learnt anything from this experience, it’s that knowing the password is nowhere near as important as knowing the answer to the secret question. As long as you can still prove that you are you, everything else is editable.
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/10/07/investigations.html
Oct 06 2011
I have this thing about wasted food. It causes me anxiety bordering on the pathological to see good food being thrown away, so this time of year is especially hard on me. Whole trees, which have been spending the rest of the year patiently and painstakingly manufacturing edible spheres of useful carbohydrate, just start flinging them at the ground, mostly out of spite!
After grumbling along such lines in the presence of people who actually have apple trees, my bluff has been called and I’ve ended up with several unexpected carrier bags full of windfalls, and so this year I’ve been forced to actually do something about it all, rather than look like a hypocrite, nutterist or both.
Crumbles and pies are all very well, but there really are a lot of apples to deal with here, and I want to make them last, so I’ve gone with chutney and a Spiced Apple Chutney recipe shamelessly scrumped from the BBC Food Website.
It’s surprisingly easy! You’ll need:
Pretty much any apples seem to work here, which is the whole point. One average sized supermarket carrier bag of well-meant windfalls will produce about a kilo of useable apple bits, once you’ve peeled them and cut out the nasty bits. Peel, quarter, then cut out the core and top and tail. Takes a while and is the most fiddly bit. I recommend doing it on the sofa with a cooking show on the TV, so it feels like your participating!
You’ll also want:
All commonly available stuff and not too expensive.
Step 1. Bung everything into a large pan on a high heat. I use a 28cm high-sided stir-fry pan and it all just about fits. An actual Preserving Pan for jam-making and such probably works well here, but isn’t necessary. Carefully stir so everything is all mixed in and bring to the boil.
Step 2. Turn down heat to simmer for about an hour. You’ll want to have a well ventilated kitchen for this; open the windows, extractor fan on. I didn’t and it turns out that if you boil vinegar for an hour in an open pan in an enclosed space, you are then unable to stop crying for the next four hours. The air gets a tad sting-ey! As you simmer down, the apples shrink and it all fits in the pan much better. Give it a good stir every ten minutes or so.
Step 3. While that lot is cooking down, prepare some jars. The above ingredients should make enough chutney to fill about four normal sized jam jars, if the jam is taken out first. Wash them out, scrape off the old labels if you can (particularly if they didn’t contain foodstuffs to begin with), and be sure to sterilise the jars and lids. Sterilizing the jars stops that nasty fuzzy mould munching away on your hard won produce during the months in the cupboard! I use Milton Sterilising Fluid, which you can find in the ‘Baby Needs’ section of most supermarkets, for baby bottles and such, but failing that, just bake the jars and lids in an oven at Gas3/170C for 10 minutes. For god sake, don’t then pick them up with bare hands. More ways to sterilise here, but don’t just skip it entirely, or after two months the pantry will resemble some of the more horrifying scenes from the end of Akira.
Step 4. When the mix is about the colour of brown sugar and a glossy consistency, turn off the heat. The picture above should be a fair guide since I stole it from the same page that I also stole the recipe from. Ideally, there should be no free-running liquid. Beware over-cooking as I did on my first go – it’ll turn almost completely black and gain a terrifying density that can damage local space-time. The difference between Apple Chuntey and Asphalt is about 35 minutes. It should still contain recognisable bits of apple!
Step 5. Carefully spoon the stuff into the jars. A dessert spoon will be easiest, as I discovered to my cost; the spoon needs to fit inside the jar otherwise you might as well just fling the pan roughly in the direction of the jars and hope for the best. If you do this while the mixture is still hot, do the lids up and then let them cool, the contracting air inside the jar will cause a drop in air pressure and make the big clickey button on the lid not click, which is neat and professional! Once sealed, leave the jars to cool before storing away in a dark cupboard for three months or so. With that much vinegar involved, the stuff shouldn’t need refrigeration, and indeed, this kind of embalming is what cavemen did before coldness was even invented! Some sort of label is a good idea at this stage, preventing disconcerting condiment-based russian roulette three months down the line.
Autumn apple chutney made about now should be matured nicely in time for Christmas, but even dolloping barely cooled leftover pan scrapings on some bread with some cheddar is very tasty, if a little rough. It makes for a very tangy and aromatic sour and savoury accompaniment to cheeses and you won’t want huge amounts of it in one go. It seems to be fine for vegetarians, but I’m not going to lie to you; if you have an apple intolerance, your head will probably go up like the Hindenburg, so watch out for that. I’ll have to let you all know what it tastes like when you’re supposed to eat it, but seems an excellent and rich alternative to standard sandwich pickle.
Best of all, I can rest easy knowing that several bags of wilfully discarded apples did not get landfilled! I’m doing my part!
(This post has nothing to do with Steve Jobs, by the way. I barely knew the man and genuinely do have a lot of apples to deal with just now.)
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/10/06/preservations%e2%80%a6.html
Oct 04 2011
Additional Gaming Archaeology 101 bonus study notes here, to go with our recent lecture on System Shock, for extra course credit!
Review: System Shock 2, by Irrational Games/Looking Glass Studios (1999)
Forty-two years after the mayhem on Citadel Station, the Tri-Optimum starship Von Braun is embarking on a historic journey to test a new faster-than-light drive. Along with the UNN Rickenbacker, they travel to the distant Tau Ceti system and remarkably, discover a distress signal. An investigation of the source goes badly and introduces a hostile force to the two docked starships which rapidly takes control. As a UNN soldier, you are awoken from cryo-sleep directly into the ongoing crisis with only missing memories, a hefty wrench, and the radio voice of computer specialist Dr Janice Polito for guidance. It’s up to you to take the two ships back!
While the first game is a thing apart and for all the reasons I went on about in the podcast, something special, System Shock 2 is very much a mixed bag. It plays in a manner similar to the first game with you, the Bruce Willis type, trying to deal with a series of increasingly powerful threats through a variety of fetch and carry type objectives, fighting off the roaming forces of adversity along the way; mutants, robots, etc, and the basics of it all work well. The engine is a huge improvement on the first game, with the sprite-based monsters now completely replaced by 3d models and the whole thing looking (for it’s time) slick and detailed. The gunplay is more fluid than SS1’s admittedly sluggish pistols and assault rifles and the introduction of Psi Powers (Magic) does increase the variety available to the player.
What lets the experience down, for me, is the introduction of some very arbitrary RPG Elements to the whole outing, which are an odd choice. The introduction of a stats window, experience points for completing objectives (Cyber Modules) and point-spending to specialise in an almost Talent-Tree style set of skills seems jarring and unnecessary, given that the first game got by well enough without any of these features. They hark back to the game’s ancestry in Ultima Underworld, where little character sheets and choosing to be a fighter, thief or wizard made a lot more thematic sense. System Shock 2 even offers these three paths as career choices during the disguised character selection process at the start; dressed up in future parlance ‘Marines’, ‘Navy’ and ‘O.S.A.’ This then sets up an irritating system of gated content prevalent throughout the game; you must have X points in Y to use this gun, or open that box.
Worse still, a pre-emptively savvy foreknowledge of just which points to spend where is if not essential, then extremely advisable, to be able to deal with the various challenges the game throws at you, and cross-training is a must. Trying it purely with Weapon, Tech or Psi skills alone is a recipe for disaster. A purely weapon specialist will end up with broken guns all the time, a pure Tech won’t be able use any guns in the first place and a pure Psi will run out of Psi Hypos (Mana potions) very quickly using them as ammo for the gun-like psi attacks. To get through you need quite a bit of everything. Balance is shaky at best, which can be viewed as a part of the challenge, but also means that in reality, much of the stat system is built on red herrings and dead end incorrect choices, and if you need it all anyway, why bother with choices and scarcity at all?
Successors would go on to use these RPG Elements too, Deus Ex, Bioshock, et al, now-familiar systems which force us to choose, spend points and specialise, rather than excel at everything and anything simply because we are alone in a world where it’s fine for us to be The Hero. These days only Bethesda seem to just shrug and let us be awesome at everything (Morrowind, Oblivion) which ironically enough, was one of the things that made System Shock such an enjoyable romp – precisely this freedom to do it all and be awesome.
Beyond the stats, ammo scarcity is a problem. It adds to the pressure of a game which is very much about the sci-fi survival horror. Guns degrade and break at an alarming rate, bullets are rare and respawns are frequent and sudden. It isn’t really a game about clearing levels, more just getting to the objectives alive. Also a shame, gone are the Cyberspace interludes, now replaced with dull connect-the-dots stat-regulated PDA puzzles, which literally amount to tossing a coin three times in a row, and are more about amassing the right kind of weighting stats than doing anything for ourselves, as in the wiring puzzles from the first game. This too would show up in the Multitools and Lockpicks of Deus Ex, and is something of a loss, a movement to the generic stat based, and away from innate player skills.
New to the sequel is research, which I do like. Various enemies drop unidentified organs which can be researched, another stat-regulated task, but also needing various chemicals which become something of a rewarding scavenger hunt around the store rooms of the two ships. Finishing the shopping list gives damage bonuses against that enemy type or unlocks the use of new weapons and equipment. Again, this is seen in Bioshock with the research camera gameplay, which I also quite liked.
Despite all the mechanics bitching, System Shock 2 is an outstanding example of what Looking Glass always did best, creating a thrilling and engrossing action movie which we star in and direct at the same time. The story telling is a definite advance on the predecessor and makes for a satisfying overall experience, making you want to deal with all the adversity, both in-game and the game itself, fight through it all and see what happens next. Shodan returns, which is not much of a spoiler given the massive Shodan face on the box art, but the twists and turns, reversals and revelations are still fresh and sharp to me even today, after countless replays. The supporting cast of obsessive doomed diarists are in full characteristic flow, with audio logs and emails carrying the bulk of the narrative in a surprisingly effective manner that is still emulated today. Delacroix’s dogged resistance, Korenchkin’s visionary smugness and Diego’s bitter determination all bring the adventure to life, and Polito is just plain brilliant.
While the technical direction may have lost some of its edge compared with the first game, and now facing up against the likes of Half Life (1998), in terms of engaging story-telling, that nebulous ‘intelligent first person shooter’ terminology, Looking Glass surpassed themselves in the sequel to create a memorable romp which still deserves the title of ‘classic’ today.
Looking Glass would go on to release only three more games before going bankrupt in 2000; Flight Unlimited III, Destruction Derby 64 (N64) and Thief II: The Metal Age, which seems almost criminal. However, they live on in spirit, in a host of modern classics almost all of which contain gameplay and features first honed in these two games. We all owe a lot of entertainment hours to System Shock and System Shock 2, even if we’ve never played either of them.
As for getting hold of it and playing along at home, the game is still owned by EA and is not Abandonware, whatever that even means. It is not currently in production so second-hand purchases of the original box run is about the only way to find it today. Best bet is probably Ebay, who seem to have some new for $269 and used for $25. Perhaps if we’re lucky, it’ll turn up in the future on some download service like Good Old Games or Steam, but don’t hold your breath as the legal side of it all is enough of a nightmare that even the mighty corporation that is 2K Games had to go and make “Bioshock” instead of the “System Shock 3″ it so clearly really is.
Having got hold of it, it will likely need extensive patching to work on modern OS – Through The Looking Glass has lots of help for that here, patches and workarounds and the like.
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/10/04/machinations%e2%80%a6.html
Sep 28 2011
On with writing about things that aren’t computer games and a book review!
Review: Blood Music, by Greg Bear (1983)
Vergil Ulam is a maverick biotechnologist working on groundbreaking bio-chips destined to usher in a new era of computing power, obsolescing the transistor age. But unknown to his employers, and on company time and resources, he secretly stands on the brink of inventing something far more revolutionary, ‘noocytes’; biological self-aware computers mere dozens of cells across, based on his own white blood cells. Botched attempts at corporate espionage unleash these new forms of life at first into Vergil himself, and ultimately into the world at large.
Blood Music is one of those examples of science fiction which I often gush so much about; combining the awe-inspiring majesty of worlds that might yet come, with a fascinating and compelling narrative journey through the lives of the people whom these worlds affect. Bear is no fumbling amateur when it comes to the vast ideas and unbound scientific imagination, as seen in his later works Eon and Eternity (And if you insist, probably the game-tie-in Halo novels), and in Blood Music we are treated to an exhaustive glimpse into the terrifying possibilities of the flesh and the mysteries of inner space.
It’s hard to categorise the novel because it touches on so many themes. What starts as a character-driven tale of scientific and corporate espionage quickly spirals out of control and takes on shades of corruption-based survival horror, ramping swiftly up to apocalyptic fiction of the most world-wrecking sort. Beyond, it moves into the vast, the ineffable and the purest kind of wide-reaching speculative fiction; matters of cosmological significance.
The journey precedes at a fair old crack and sometimes to the novel’s detriment; the various stages of the book could all do with further and more in-depth examination and I often felt we were being hurried along to the next catastrophe before a sufficient analysis of the effects of the previous ones were carried out. The work started life as a short story and was expanded to novel length, and it does feel like it – perhaps not expanded enough.
Despite this, I couldn’t put it down. I have a particular thing for tales of apocalypse and Blood Music is a breathtakingly complete one; almost effortlessly destructive, and yet by consequence of the manner of in which the world is destroyed, manages to become a surprisingly hopeful story by the end. Visionary in scope, Wikipedia says it is “the first account of Nanotechnology in science fiction” and while all the horrors of the now familiar Grey Goo scenario are present, Bear manages to take this to new levels of squeamishly entertaining Body Horror with the intimately biological nature of the goo; the nightmare of our own bodies turning against us from the inside. The lavish descriptions of what happens to its victims stop just the right side of nauseating, making for powerful scenes. Under no circumstances should there be a film adaptation!
I don’t know enough biology to say how ‘Hard SF’ Blood Music is, in particular the likelihood of the key mechanism by which the noocytes even exist, but it conveys enough pseudo-science to make the reader shrug a hearty “why not?” and roll with it. If there is magic at work, it’s a very subtle and ordered kind which obeys consistent, repeatable laws, and very much a case of ‘sufficiently advanced technology’.
Beyond the Squick, greater ideas are plumbed, in particular the idea of the Singularity, a difficult concept to approach cold. Bear leads us to an understanding of what such a thing might entail, and to be honest, science doesn’t get bigger than that; what happens at the very far end of a scale in which computing power just keeps doubling? Mind expanding tales of infinite minds, which almost leave the reader giddy with possibility.
Blood Music is also in large part a tale of characters, which are well enough realised; believable people who avoid the SF pitfall of being one-dimensional walking arguments, counterarguments or expositions. Despite being almost the exact opposite of extra-terrestrials, the noocytes are still essentially alien and unfathomable, so it becomes the people; the instigators and survivors that we turn to for some kind of comprehension, only to find that they are almost as bewildered as we are. The counterpoint of Bernard’s dogged scientific grappling and Suzy’s emotional bewilderment form a particularly effective and poignant balance in the later sections.
The whole thing finishes with an ending that matches the rapid pace throughout, kicks status quo out of the park, and left me with a somewhat jaw-dropped ‘gosh!’ feeling. The book really does make you think, in particular paranoid dark ruminations about those otherwise innocuous aches and twinges you sometimes get in normal life, which is nice!
Hugo Checklist for those playing along at home: 1984 – Best Novellette, for it’s original short story publication.
Amazon are listing for £5.24 here, but other shops are available!
Look out for more, well, pretty much anything that takes my fancy, in future posts on How To Murder Time!
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/09/28/coagulations.html
Sep 21 2011
When did Fun become a dirty word? Did I miss a memo? Pretty much everywhere I look these days, I see blog posts and comments and forums full of people railing at each other, and the MMO genre; telling people off for wanting things to be “fun”, for wanting to “enjoy themselves”, for not enjoying things that are “too difficult” and not least of all, “using sneering quote marks” too much. I must confess bewilderment at this point. I thought fun was the whole point of the exercise, no?
It’s a subjective thing and different for everyone, but I find it hard to believe that there are folks out there, real live human beings with internet access and everything, who seem to be opposed to the concept of fun itself, heaping scorn on it as if it were a merely minor distraction from the serious business at hand. Careless fun costs lives! Lately the objections seem to arise from the same usual topics.
Firstly, the eternal Difficulty Debate, which is actually very easy to solve. Game designers should offer more user selectable difficulty modes (Lotro Skirmish settings and Tiers, Guild Wars Hard Mode, WoW Heroic/Normal Instances? DDO Dungeon Door Menus, Etc), and then players should stop giving a damn how much easier a time of it other people might be having and focus on playing the game that they enjoy.
Banging on about The Good Old days, talking about rampant unwanted always-on PvP in UO, or 2000 hour level progressions in EQ is amusing, but unhelpful. Those days are unlikely to return any time soon, but there are niche games today that still uphold those ideals; EVE, Darkfall, Wurm Online, EQ Progression Servers, Anarchy Online, A Tale in the Desert. Go play those. The only reason one could find to object to end game content being also available in a user-selectable face-roll option, is that you hate other people and don’t want them to enjoy themselves. Afterall, if you are never going to pick the face-roll option yourself, why should it matter that it is there at all? Someone got the same pixel loot as you with far less effort? I thought the effort was its own reward, surely? Whatever happened to Quiet Satisfaction?
This does cut both ways though, and people should also stop bitching about the inaccessibility of end-game raid content they’ll never see, because odds are, if you aren’t there doing it already, you’re probably not going to enjoy it if you do actually get there. Hell, to hear of it, most of the people who are already doing it now aren’t enjoying it either. I’m not even sure is about enjoyment at that stage anyway, more obsession. The only reason one could find to demand the reengineering of a part of the game you aren’t using anyway, is that you hate the people currently using it and want them to have less fun. See above re: focusing on the bits of the game you do enjoy.
If its not that, it’s F2P is Killing Gaming. What with DCUO throwing in the Subscription towel, it’s pretty much just WoW and SWTOR left now and I doubt those will be long. Again, an easily solved problem; almost all the western MMO conversions of recent years offer a VIP pricing option which is basically just the normal subscription. Go sign up for that if regulated monthly payments are important to you.
I’ve always thought that a F2P ala carte menu is in fact a laser-like scalpel of consumer power. With a monthly sub game, you have one single point of binary feedback. You either Like Entire Game or Don’t Like Entire Game, and you vote with the entire subscription; yes, no. Free to play is far more discriminatory. Yes, unscrupulous manufacturers of Skinner Boxes can erect pay walls everywhere in them, but here’s the thing, we don’t have to pay. If these games add something stupid to the cash shop, we can boycott or ignore it. They soon get the message and don’t try that nonsense again. Only giving them money for bits of the game you like, is also sending a message. It’s all very Darwinian and free market, I’m sure. Mind you, if everyone else is sending the wrong kind of message, then its probably time to seek out a more on-message niche to go play in.
It does all require us to exercise a certain willpower though, and to inform each other. Instead of cranking out yet another tired old misanthropic rant about how crap all other players are, about how the casuals are ruining everything and about how no one likes eating broken glass anymore, and how that this is a bad thing for the industry, why not redirect some of that withering criticism at individual cash shop items. Let’s have some analytical scorn I can use! Casual Stroll to Mordor do a good job at this with their recommendations bit for Lotro’s store, reviewing individual deals and such; I want to see more people dissecting the cash shops in other games! There’s probably a real blogging niche to be filled there for the dedicated, enterprising, unjaded, multi-game would-be blogologist. This is a dawning age of consumer review of features, not just reviews of whole games, because the feature is the new smallest unit of game purchase. They way I see it, Free to Play is a great thing for us, the players, but we have to organise, and have to learn to use it to our advantage, and not theirs.
I’ve never heard of a F2P MMO changing to a monthly sub model, so I guess the F2P world is here to stay. Instead of bitching about a lost golden age all the time, let’s use some of that famed adaptability that we hate the casuals so much for not possessing, and make the F2P age work for us. Only buy the stuff you want to. Make the buggers work hard for their MicroPoints! Also, stop giving a damn if Johnny Random wants to buy his way to the end of the game. He’ll be satiated soon enough and in the mean time he’s subsidising your free character-building broken-glass crawl. Everyone wins! Unless of course, you simply hate Johnny Random and want him to have less fun than you, in which case, rant! Rail! Be cross on the internet! I enjoy watching people be cross on the internet – it’s a lot like screaming at a tornado; its exhilarating and cathartic, but no one can hear you over the sound of their own screaming, and ultimately you just end up with a face full of high speed airborne cattle.
Because it is the internet, and therefore I am right and you are wrong, I thought I’d list some of my own thoughts on fun. Fun facts! Please imagine it’s a funky Storybricks diagram if that helps you relax!
Your own observations may vary, which I think is probably the core of the problem. In a way it’s quite distressing, to see so many people so apparently miserable because of things going on in and to a hobby which should always primarily be about having fun. Perhaps the ranting is a fun kind of metagame in itself, a perfectly reasonable reaction to not having fun doing the actual thing that was supposed to be fun in the first place. Or something!
I’ll finish this glib undirected counter-rant with the advice I give all my friends when facing gaming angst, injustice, uncertainty and burnout – If it isn’t fun, stop playing! Plenty of other games out there, and to be honest, if week after week, all you are posting is the myriad ways in which Game X is rubbish, one does have to wonder why you still play Game X at all. Go try Game Y for a bit!
I shall indeed be trying to follow my own advice, and if my Cohost’s ongoing breakdown is any guide, do look out for lots more future posts here that are nothing to do with computer games at all!
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/09/21/redefinitions.html
Sep 12 2011
More positivity, that’s what’s needed! As is often my way when feeling lost, frightened and confused by the big chaotic world of MMOs, for much of last week I ran away and hid in Oblivion, one of the best offline MMOs ever made. The grouping is a bit weak, but the class progression is top notch; i.e, you get to be, do and have everything by the end. I AM the goddamned trinity!
Of course to hide in it, I first need to have it installed, which I realised I’d not done since my last PC rebuild. As soon as I did that, I then remembered what a shameless and lazy Xbox 360 port the PC version always was, and that I was missing the painstakingly scoured and collected catalogue of mods I’d tweaked the thing with, and so set off on a real life adventure of my very own, to Pimp My Oblivion!
Back now. Was quite a short adventure, and basically a click through to here:
Which is an astonishingly huge free repository of user-made tweaks, modifications, updates, new content and even fixes for the venerable Bethesda classic. I can’t recommend the place highly enough. The game is over five-years old at this point and even so, on this fairly random day of writing, the Nexus is listing five completely new files added and about twenty edited ones; folks tweaking the tweaks and updating the updates. I suppose at this point, it would most appropriate to describe Oblivion as a community or scene, rather than game, despite being a world in which each player is the lone occupant and sole hero.
I’d been there before, of course, but not in a while and far from what I was expecting; a mostly historical archive, stagnant and static, it seems the Oblivioneers have been busier than ever, and the scale, scope and sheer unpaid effort that has gone into the bigger mods is impressive. Some are more projects than mods, with multiple staffers, version histories, change logs and huge ambition, and large as the game itself is, it is easily dwarfed by the sum total of contributions to this site.
First stop, and the very minimum I consider to make the game playable at all, is a decent UI mod. Having been designed to be playable on an SD television from about eight feet away, the default UI tends to BE A BIT ON THE LARGE SIDE, particularly when viewed at 1600×1050 resolution, from less than two feet away, so I usually went with the BTMod UI tweak, which just halves all the fonts, allowing twice as many things in all the menus and less migraines all round. This time around though, feeling daring, I’ve gone with the more elaborate DarNified UI which is a lot more detailed and customisable, offering all sorts of font options and a general rework of almost every in-game window for a much smoother ‘for the PC’ experience. It also rejiggers the hud elements to discrete and out-of-the-way locations and even provides a helpful weight/value/condition info when looking at pickupable objects, useful for thieving types.
Next lets spruce up the world! I always remember me, a long time Morrowind obsessive, being blown away at just how good Oblivion looked, even if I had to turn down the detail a bit to play smoothly. Fast forward to today and I now have a PC that’ll cope with everything turned on, and I want more! Again, the default game does the best it can with Xbox 360 Specs in mind, but seems to be capable of a lot more, if unshackled by creative tinkerers.
A simple but weighty mod is this one, which is basically some bright spark opening up the default landscape texture files in Photoshop, doubling the size and giving it a bit of Gaussian blur. Straightforward, but effective, making Oblivion’s famous distant vistas a much more smooth and more pleasing sight. This one is more elaborate and does all sorts of clever things I don’t quite understand to improve weather, foliage, night skies, wildlife and so on.
The Environment section of the website is full of this sort of mod and more. Various mods deal with more realistic water effects, weather systems and the like, and quite a few do a number on the various towns and villages, improving night-time exterior windows with lamp glow, streamers of smoke rising from chimneys, and cluttering up the streets and lanes with more scenery objects, if the PC can handle it!
Let’s not forget the people! By and large, Cyrodil is the Land of the Ugly Stick, which is great for that authentic peasant-based roleplaying experience, but many of us are more superficial than that, and it did get rather lampooned over the matter. I think this problem is high up on the list to fix for Skyrim.
Not to worry though, as probably the largest section of the Nexus is devoted to prettying up the people. The much neglected playing-with-dolls aspect of the default game is rectified with mind-bending thoroughness, with an enormous variety of mods aimed at turning grizzled, leather-faced, warty and desperate adventure-folk who sleep in hedges, into his and hers lingerie models who work part time in the more risque kind of fancy-dress shop.
Naturally, the women get more of a makeover than the men, and their replacement bodies and outfits veer wildly from the understated but practical, “Like The Default Stuff, But With Some Curves”, though the more predictable plate-mail bikini “Red Sonia” look, right though to the amusingly indecent “Madam, Do You Have A Licence For That Snake?” I personally recommend the vast Apachi Goddess Store mod (Possibly NSFW link) as your one stop shop for misogynistic curves, saucepan lids of varying sizes and puritanical snakes.
The menswear section is more sparse, but does exist and seems to run to the costume and character outfits. Ever wanted to close an Oblivion Gate as Altair? Or a Nazgul? Or some guy with white girly hair from a Final Fantasy game I haven’t played yet? Well want no longer!
Many of the mods are functional things, mods for mods, and I particularly recommend the OMOD Oblivion Mod manager, which seems initially quite complicated, but seems to provide a handy way to keep track of the dozens of mods one can end up with. It also seems to offer a way to easily revert unwanted mods, and a mechanism to check if mods conflict with each other. With many folks just forging on ahead and making changes to the world without a central authority regulating it all, conflicts are inevitable. Several other tools exist that do a similar job, and some tools are there to help make these mods, in addition to Bethesda’s own TES Toolkit. One popular mod claims to fix over 1800 bugs with the default game, which just terrifies me. Probably holding off on applying that many changes all at once – I’ve not encountered anything unplayably broken about the default game anyway. The thing seems to have turned into a rallying point for ongoing user-based self-support for a game whose original makers have long since moved on. Remarkable stuff!
One large area I am avoiding at the moment, is new content; quests, items, dungeons and NPCs. A similar level of effort and variety exists here, but everyone has a different idea of what ‘too easy’ and ‘too hard’ are, and many of these additions are likely to break the game for me one way or another. I can peruse these once I’m done with replaying the default main story and side quests. I can see that the existence of this section must have shot down Bethesda’s own dabblings in DLC on the PC (Horse armour, wizard tower, etc), before they got off the ground. Perhaps that was always going to be a console thing anyway – why release a toolkit for the PC otherwise? I’d be fascinated to see which earned Bethesda more money in the long run though; early sales of DLC for the Xbox 360, or sustained sales of the default game on the PC, driven by the options offered by the strong and lasting modding support?
It all makes the game almost unique. With careful application of selected player-made mods, Oblivion actually improves with age and seems capable of keeping up with underlying PC development. Mind you, without a strong culture of enthusiastic amateurs who refuse to just drop the game and move on to the next publisher mandated Shiny New Thing Of The Month, and a decent set of tools, this could not happen. While for the Xbox 360 owner, Oblivion is old, busted and a thing of ancient history, for the PC owner, it does appear to be a gift that keeps on giving. The difference between launch day default Oblivion, and a fully modded up Oblivion of today is quite startling. And this is all just one game – they have sister sites for Dragon Age, Fallout 3 and New Vegas, and The Witcher too. I’m not even sure the release of Skyrim will kill this ongoing tradition off, and it seems to be quite a self-staining thing, an enthusiastic community indeed. I wonder how far they can take it?
For quite some time, I’ve been leaning hard toward just giving up on the PC and becoming a 360 gamer, but all the above does illustrate the perks of the PC. Mod communities are not nearly as insignificant as I thought. Perhaps I’ve just been going at the wrong mindset; maybe the three month rule isn’t nearly long enough.
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/09/12/modifications%e2%80%a6.html
Sep 08 2011
I became That Guy the other night and now, in hindsight, it was pretty unsettling. By That Guy, I mean the sort of MMO Gamer for whom I’ve always had a mixture of bemused pity and faint scorn, and generally I regard him with a fair degree of smugness, knowing that I could never be him. And then suddenly, there I was, Taking It All Too Seriously.
It was the first time our years-old LOTRO Monday Static Group had all been back online at the same time after a month or two of various absences, and it became apparent that while several of the gang had been off elsewhere, doing other things like holidays, sabbaticals and generally Living, I hadn’t, and had instead been reading wikis, playing stat-craft and min-maxing it up, and of course, dabbling in end-game Pick-Up Grouping.
This PUGing seems to have taught me all sorts of things about life at Level 65 in LOTRO, and not all of it was necessarily a positive education. Certainly I now know how to run T2 Stoneheight, how to ace the School and Library, how to deal with each boss in Samath Gul and what 12-step plan to follow to raise my max morale into the eight thousand plus range that won’t get me a fellowship chat window full of ‘???’ and ‘lol 5.5k tank wtf’ type greetings.
I do also seem to have learnt a number of other things into the bargain though. I now apparently regard dungeons as mere means to a character-improvement end, not adventures, I seem to have lost a great deal of patience somewhere along the way, my expectations have been considerably jacked up and I appear to have really bought into the ideal of The Progression. I’m still trying to work out if I’ve forgotten how to have fun or not.
We tried a variety of challenging six-man tasks, mostly at my achievement-addled insistence. It was our first week back as a proper team, but I didn’t really see that, instead seeing abstract algebras of Success and Failure; 6xL65, we should be here, doing this. Never mind that we’d never done that before, and in most cases, needed to remember how our classes worked, let alone the moves for Boss-Fight Quick-Step-Shuffle #37.
And at the time, it seemed perfectly natural to me that we should just crack to it, push push push, token quotas to be had, gogogogo! It went about as well as could be expected, which was not very, but the most disturbing thing about the whole night was not how many things at which we failed, but how uncharacteristically cross I was about it all. Everyone else seemed polite enough and eventually we logged off, but I can’t help feeling now that I owe a lot of apologies.
Like many human beings, I can indeed be an arse and generally I strive not to be. Perhaps this was just a bad day, but thinking about where I am ‘at’ these days with LOTRO, and by extension, MMOs in general, I do start to see something of a precipice, over which I might have started to stray. The End Game is very much a different game to the Levelling Up Game. I knew that, you knew that, we all knew that, but for the first time in my MMO life, I think I’ve started to see what that means. I’m rarely here at all, but this time is different, in that I’m trying to take it seriously and not just walk away; re-roll, make an alt, try a different game entirely, the usual escapes. I don’t know why, but this time, I’ve decided to dig in, do the work, read the guides, be the best Guardian I can be.
That might be part of it. I like tanking, I’m fairly good at it, and have enough pride to want to be very good at it, whatever ‘good’ means. Perhaps I’m seizing on a very unhealthy definition of what a ‘good tank’ is and investing too much in that. Does a good tank help strangers get at the loot faster? Is that the yardstick? Just whose approval am I after anyway? Five randoms on their own personal loot odysseys, or five good friends with whom I’ve had a lot of laughs?
I find myself mired with divided loyalties and disparate goals. Diminishing returns of fun mount up ahead of me. To go a little further, we must do a lot better, and for an ultimately eye-opening few weeks, I wanted it; I was beguiled. I saw myself up there, doing the raids, farming the marks and tokens, being the best, cultivating not friendships, but associations, contacts, a list of fellow professionals who might be relied upon to further the Progression. All in all possible future me who I don’t think I’d like that much.
That kind of life might be harmless enough for some, but clearly it does strange and unpleasant things to me and I do consider this to be a near miss and wake-up call. I have no idea what next for my 65 Guardian, currently absorbed in improvement for the sake of just improving. Rise of Isengard is here soon, but will merely postpone and not solve this dilemma. I have a 50 Minstrel who is still on the upward journey and I enjoy that, so maybe alts is the answer; repeatedly re-enjoying the journey and rejecting the destination, until the game itself palls. Perhaps my Guardian is finished. Well done, you made it, game over! Restart? Y/N.
As for the Monday Static Group, well, it’s the people that matter and whatever they all want to do, will be just fine with me. Having seen what else might be on offer, what other kind of life there is, I’ve decided that I’m happy enough to just tag along and have good times on voice chat. Whether LOTRO itself is even necessary at this point, I leave to others to decide. All very deep, I’m sure, and a useful reminder of perspective, which you can never have too much of!
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/09/08/recognitions.html
Aug 31 2011
Who wants to read a good old fashioned Ranterbury Tale? Oh, go on then. Settle down and I’ll begin…
The Matchmaker’s Tale
So there I am, minding my own business, playing some increasingly diminishing-returns based solo Lord of the Rings Online self-improvement endgame, (which is all going to be made irrelevant by Rise of Isengard in under a month anyway), when I get a random tell of nowhere from The Matchmaker, to come tank a boss fight in the Lost Temple instance.
I should know better by now, but it gets me every time; I forget and get all aspirational. This time it’ll be different! This time it’ll work as intended! Also, I’d been hitting Hemlock’s Wretched Homebrew (See upcoming podast) a bit by then, and probably wasn’t on my usual suspicious guard, so replied with a few witty self-depreciating comments, in the hope they look elsewhere. “Never been there! Sounds like a giggle! Shall I bring a shield?”, that kind of thing. This didn’t seem to dissuade The Matchmaker, so in a spirit of ‘Right! I’ll show ‘em just how inappropriate I am as end-game tank!’ I joined up.
Not to say I was deliberately out to fail or wipe the group or anything like that; I am petty at times, but generally quite honourable, and anyway, that took care of itself in due course without me sabotaging anything. I arrive and find them all standing about at the first boss. Presumably the original group had yard-trashed their way to that point before I got there (accruing useful repair bill money on the way, I might add!), had a failed attempt or two at the bosses, and then something happened which left a suspiciously tank-shaped hole in the group, leading to my invitation. There’s a few ‘hi’ and before I can type ‘Can someone explain to me how to do this, or shall we just charge in?’, we just charged in.
It is astonishing to me now how anyone gets anything done in MMO group-play without voice chat. They must all be privy to some kind of quantum entanglement telepathy that I am not; six people managing, without any communication, or indeed, ever having met before, all simultaneously arriving at the same boss fight strategy at the same moment. I can only assume that seventy to eighty generations back, all the members of these PUGs shared a common ancestor, in whom this train of thought started; something about killing antelopes effectively I expect. Down the centuries, this strand continued, never diverging until voila! A thousand years later, six random people from all across Europe, in an internet game perform a flawless boss takedown without words being exchanged, because actually, they’re all the same person, in their miiiiinds! Holistic raiding, it’s the future!
As I say, Hemlock’s Wretched Homebrew did feature quite heavily that night. What actually happened is that we wiped so fast and hard that I literally had time to learn absolutely nothing from the attempt. Which is a shame, because we tried it three more times before the inevitable rage-quitting began, demonstrating, for a PUG, abnormally high levels of patience. The boss fight itself was almost irrelevant – it was the first one, it had some nonsense about keeping two bosses apart or they heal each other….I still have no idea. Did anyone get the number of that truck? I should probably watch a FaceTube Video or something.
All in all, nothing novel there; the usual tale of unrealistic expectations, unthinkable failure, unflinching intolerance and unrelenting acrimony, as we all went our separate ways to spend a fortune on repair bills and open another bottle of nasty homemade Chardonnay-Based Wine-Style Alcohol Drink. But then about an hour later, The Matchmaker is back on the line, asking if I want to try Samath Gul. I’m giggling a lot at this point and jump at the chance. I figure that rather than just saying ‘No.’ which would be the height of bad manners, I’d just go along and be so inadequate that they stop asking me. I’m odd like that, and it was a tad selfish and more than a little spiteful, I agree.
New group, new (to me) dungeon and off we go. To my horror, it actually starts working. It’s not an ideal run; we die fairly often, wipe once or twice, but we’re getting it done and I’m even learning stuff. This is partly because one of the other random conscripts The Matchmaker has found is as dubious about Quantum Entanglement Genetic Memory as I am, and instead takes the time to type out What To Do, in fellowship chat, at each boss fight, which helps a lot!
The run is interrupted at several points for substitutions; surprisingly not rage-quits, just people running out of time and having to log, and throughout, The Matchmaker is working some kind of advanced mental matchmaking system, a fascinatingly effective bespoke dungeon-finder system, all kept in one head. Contacts, past PUG folks, friends, kinship members, LFF listings, who lists; The Matchmaker, who seems a fair-to-middling actual player, is working wonders and managing to keep the group full and moving onward, conjuring up replacements seemingly on-demand, on the fly.
This approach works and we finish the place, killing all four of the bosses and even managing the Challenge task, and I’m left wondering if I haven’t got PUGs wrong all along. Of course a few days later, buoyed by an aberrant success, I answer the call and end up in a hellish Tier 2 boss attempt that went so badly that not even The Matchmaker could hold it together when the group-destroying backlash began. I stagger out, self-esteem in tatters and vowing never to PUG again, but sure enough, half hour later; it’s The Matchmaker again, recruiting. Try, try again and all that! I politely declined, still grumpy and being genuinely busy that time anyway, but I doubt I’ve heard the last from The Matchmaker.
By its nature, this stuff is very hit and miss, and it’s only half about the boss fights and strategies. It’s also about people skills – being able to work with others to get a thing done. Tolerance, Patience, Determination; for so many LOTRO players, these are just grind-based character augmenting statistics. I long for the day when, on joining a PUG, someone chews me out for having not enough Tolerance trait points; I may just ascend in a puff of logic to Ironic Nirvana on the spot!
It seems to me that facing such PUG antics on a day to day basis can do one of three things to an MMO player.
It can make them pitiless. Repeated failure leads them to expect failure, and if they look hard enough, they’ll find it abundance. Inadequate gear scores, insufficient DPS, the wrong kind of talents or spec – no one has a perfect character, so every statistic is up for scrutiny. The group exchanged eight words the entire trip, but oh no, it’s definitely the 0.75% of missing mitigation on the third ranged DPS from the back that wiped us, that’s the clearly problem right there! Be sure to tell the group about it using your angriest method acting, for maximum improved morale!
It can make them reluctant. Being on the receiving end of the above a few times, for the temerity of assuming that playing a computer game with other people might be more fun than grinding things solo, has been known to put people off Pick Up Grouping! Perhaps they decide that shiny as the virtual pixel rewards are, they just aren’t worth the hassle. The game literally has nothing to offer them that is worth the hours long session of anxiety, expectation, judgement and outright hostility that many PUG trips can become. Who can blame them? We do this stuff for fun, in theory. Hell, if I want to be verbally abused on an ad hoc basis, I can save myself $15/mo and go find a park bench with a tramp on it, give him a bottle of Hemlock’s Wretched Homebrew and I expect he’ll shout invectives at me for free, for as long as the booze holds out! And I’ll be outdoors, which is Healthy!
But in a lamentably few cases, it can make them optimistic. A rare kind of personality who takes all the horrors of pickup grouping in their stride, rolls their sleeves up and determines to make it work. Who won’t let minor failures and wipes get in the way of a much larger kind of ongoing victory. Who keep at it, in spite of the abuse of Group A and the cynicism of Group B. I’m at once in awe and slightly shamed by The Matchmaker, who clearly just keeps on going with it all, doggedly assembling group after group of random malcontents and repeatedly fighting adversity, little of it game-based, in hope for those times when it does all work. I’m not sure if it’s simple blinkered innocence, or a vast unhurried confidence, but whatever it is, it seems to work and I wish I had it myself.
Ordinarily, this is the bit where I go off on one and rant about idiot-strangers and swear never to PUG again, but reflecting on it all, I’ve decided to continue to answer The Matchmaker’s call whenever practicable in the future, because this rare representative of Group C should be supported. I don’t want the caustic and unrelenting entitlement of Group A to grind The Matchmaker down and turn them into a member of Group B, which will happen eventually. Perhaps a friendly face and voice of support amidst the typical uncaring machine that is the PUG might help slow or stop that. One face they know isn’t silently judging their attempts at leadership the whole way through, speaking up only to throw insults.
We’ll fail spectacularly and often, no doubt, but I start to find The Matchmaker’s optimism somewhat contagious; wouldn’t it be great if all PUGs were friendly, successful and fun? It has to start somewhere… why not with us?
Permanent link to this article: http://howtomurdertime.com/blog/2011/08/31/recriminations.html
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