Ask not for whom the bell tolls.

On Tuesday of this week, Sony pushed out their Chapter 6 publish for Star Wars Galaxies. This publish was very much anticipated as it was loaded with features. Among them, the return of creature handler (sort of), increasing the difficulty of most PvE encounters, and a revamp to the rebel themepark.

I was somewhat leery of the combat changes. I am primarily a solo player in SWG. So much of what the developers do with SWG is designed around trying to get people to participate in PvP gameplay. When PvP isn’t happening, they come up with some other way to force it.

That is all well and good for those who enjoy PvP. To each his own. Myself, I would rather stretch my scrotum out to the point where I could put 1 testical up each nostril, have a bullseye painted on my nose, and then step into the ring with Oscar De La Hoya than engage in PvP… especially in SWG.

A while back, Sony introduced a new system to the Galactic Civil War. If you engage in PvP, you gain GCW points. As you get more points, you go up in rank. The higher the rank you receive, the more special equipment and buffs you have available to you. Once you progress into Officer ranks in the GCW, your rank actually decays. You have to gain a certain number of points just to maintain your current rank and then more on top to achieve the next rank. The higher your rank, the stronger the decay.

I don’t mind that PvPers have access to equipment and buffs that I don’t. It doesn’t bother me one bit. None of that special equipment or special buffs are needed for the PvE content that I engage in.

Until now that is.

The changes to the PvE content seem to have been determined to make the encounters challanging for someone with full GCW rank, rewards, and buffs. If you do not have those things, the choices seem to be to get a group or to not play.

I wouldn’t be complaining about the need for a group if I knew ANYone who actually did the PvE content. They might run through it once, but then it’s back to PvP where they can trash talk and act like a testosterone filled pre-teen trying to overcompensate for a non-existant nutsack.

I didn’t play Tuesday night. I learned many times over the years that it is really a bad idea to play the night after a major publish. The chances of a rollback are just too high. I logged in last night to check out the changes.

My first stop was the new rebel themepark. If this new themepark is similar to the old one, it will be a series of about 50 quests that get harder each step you progress.

So, I ran the first step which turned out to be insultingly easy. I got the quest which required me to walk into the room next door and click on a container and then walk around the building and click on 4 other containers. No big deal there. The second step required me to travel to another planet, find an Imperial base, and find some hidden plans.

Now, there are probably tricks I could have used to where I wouldn’t have had to fight at all, but I wanted to check out the new combat changes. So, I rode out to the location and scouted the territory. Outside the bunker were about 8 level 20 something stormtroupers and 2 single elite level 78 stormtroupers. I first cleared out the lowbies by separating them out and fighting them away from the mob. No problems. I then engaged 1 of the level 78’s. I had my best armor on, my best weapon, my best personal buffs, and the full line of entertainer buffs. This one guy, 12 levels lower than me, chewed through everything and killed me in about 5 shots.

I asked some of my friends in guild chat if they had done it yet. Of course, they all had and didn’t have any interest in helping because they were out PvPing for GCW points. I asked what tricks they used and every one of them said, “Use your General buffs and you won’t have any problems.” “I don’t have the General buffs because I don’t do GCW.” “Oh, forget it then. You won’t be able to do it.”

I ran around trying various encounters all night long. Any ordinary trash mob was no problem. Any quest mob had elite status and blew through me like a bullet through notebook paper.

So, my choices seem to be to either wait for a night where there isn’t enough PvP to entertain people and try to bribe them into helping me run a bunch of quests they aren’t even interested in or grind PvP points so that I can get the buffs.

Actually, I think I choose option #3… waiting to see if combat is retuned to everyone… not just the PvPers. If PvE content is going to require me to engage in PvP content to even stand a chance, there are plenty of other games out there that actually have content that I can play instead.

Whose line is it anyway?

Comic book artist Jim Lee once said in an interview that “art is simply a series of lines placed in relation to one another.” Easy for him to say. My stick figures don’t even look like stick figures.

Still, it is a surprisingly accurate description that can be used in other areas as well. Writing, for instance, can be described as a series of words placed in relation to one another and that definition would also be true. Honestly, what separates good writing from bad writing isn’t so much what is said as how it is said.

I have a note sitting beside my computer that I glance at more than a dozen times every time I sit down to write something. On it is a quote from Mark Twain who I consider one of the greatest masters at turning a phrase. He said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

Sitting on the bookshelf above my desk is a book written by Stephen King. This book is called On Writing and is a book about the act of writing itself. In the foreward, King lets you know exactly what you are in for. “This is a short book because most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do- not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t work when it’s bad. I figured the shorter the book, the less the bullshit.”

In the introduction to The Elements of Style by William Strunk, E.B. White refers to what he calls “the masterly Strunkian elaboration” which goes, “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

I spend a lot of time reading. I also spend a lot of time proofreading for friends. Sometimes, I proofread work documents or e-mails before they are sent out. Other times, it is a writing assignment for some class they are taking at night. The requests that really make me laugh are the documents brought to me by people who are paid technical writers.

It doesn’t make me laugh that technical writers bring me things to proofread. Even the best writers need someone to proof their work some times. It is inevitable that you are going to make mistakes in your writing. That’s just one reason why professional writers generally have a large support group who read every word they write. It is also one of the reasons why they have editors.

What gets me is that some of the most glaring mistakes that I have seen have come from technical writers and I honestly don’t understand why. I don’t expect every person on the planet to know the difference between “to” and “too” or “effect” and “affect,” but I do expect someone who is a paid writer to know the difference. Making that mistake once is one thing. Making it five or more times in the same document makes me want to go back in time and flog every English teacher you have ever had.

I received an e-mail from an old co-worker this evening. I wouldn’t exactly say that me and this person were friends, but we were friendly. We both applied for the technical writing position at that company. I was an internal applicant and she was an external applicant. For reasons unknown to me then, she got the job. She then proceeded to send me every single document she wrote with a request to proof it for her. Now, when I am almost a year out of that company, she is still doing so.

I do it when I have the time to. I am just always amazed at how poorly she actually writes. The document she sent to me today was actually about how to properly document work performed. Here is an excerpt: “When u submit you’re documentation, you need to make sure that you use proper grammer and puncuation. Trying to reed thru a document filled with errors is frustrating and time consuming.”

At first glance, I spotted 6 glaring errors and all I could do is just shake my head.

I am not perfect. I make a lot of mistakes when I am writing. Some of them I catch and some of them I don’t. Most of the time (but certainly not all of the time) when I make a mistake, it is simply because I am typing too fast and I hit a wrong key. I generally catch most of those mistakes as I make them. I am notorious about not proofing my own work though. That’s not entirely true. I do go back and proof my work and correct mistakes that I find, but it is almost always days, weeks or months after the initial draft. It all depends on what I am writing.

This site, for instance, I don’t proof at all. If I catch it as I am writing it, I fix it. If I don’t, I don’t. Short stories, articles, and other things that I might be working on, however, do get a good proofreading by me before I show it to anyone else.

I do expect that people will make mistakes that they might not spot at first or even second glance, but come on. If you are actually writing a document about writing properly, at least make an attempt to use proper English and spelling.

I actually didn’t mean to go off in this direction. I was sitting on the couch earlier reading Shakespeare of all things. I came across one of my favorite quotes of all time and thought it would be fun to come in here and write an entry about quotable passages by certain authors. Before I even made it to the computer, I had 10 or more quotes ready at hand.

The quote that sparked it all is, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” That is from Act 5, Scene 5 of Macbeth. I love that quote because it is just such a flowery way of saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff. Eventually you will be dead and it won’t matter anyway.”

Another of my favorite quotes is actually just a part of a passage from JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. The full quote is, “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost.” The part that I love is, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

I love that quote because it is just a very elegant collection of words. When I read them, I see just a hint of sadness with hope on the horizon. It sums up nicely how I feel most days… wandering and alone, but not truly lost.

This post, which did wander and got lost several times, is brought to you by apparent schizophrenic tendencies.

Some torches simply can’t be passed.

It is quite amazing to see how strongly people have reacted to Sanya Weathers returning to writing web commentary. In just two posts, she garnered more reaction and comments than most bloggers see in weeks.

The simple truth is that there are people who simply belong running a website dedicated to talking about all aspects of the gaming world. She is one of them. Steve Danuser and Scott Jennings are two others. Back when most of us old-timers began our MMO playing days, there just weren’t a whole lot of websites out there about the games we played and there were virtually none that were direct, hard-hitting commentaries on the gaming industry.

I remember that for a very long time, the staple websites that I hit every single day without fail were Allakhazam’s, GU Comics, Mobhunter (now run by Loral but it was started by Moorgard), Lum the Mad, and Tweety Rants. There were other sites I visited, but those 5 were sites that I could no more miss than I could miss my morning cup of coffee.

I find it somewhat amusing to look back on the last decade. Many people have come and gone in both the industry and as players. A new generation of gamers make up the primary audience and there seem to be fewer and fewer old timers left all the time. Some get frustrated and leave for good, some find other things to occupy their time with and some pass on.

I can think back to my early MMO days and I can actually remember the names of nearly every site I read. Most of them have either vanished completely or are now in other hands. As far as I know, GU Comics is actually the only site still in the hands of the site creator.

I am sure that Sanya’s new blog will gain her a new following just as Moorgard and Lum both have new readers as well. They all 3 also have a lot of old-time readers who have welcomed them back like old friends… friends they likely will never actually meet or know beyond a few writings and postings here and there.

The MMO world has changed drastically in the last decade. It no longer even vaguely resembles the community I stepped into back in ‘99. It is nice to see that some things haven’t really changed.

Punching my weight

If you ask any gamer out there, “What would be your dream job,” pretty much every one of them will answer, “I want to be a game developer.” If that is not their first choice, it is most likely in their top 10.

I have to admit that I have had moments where I thought I would love to be a game developer, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is not something that I could do. Don’t get me wrong. I have put together some ideas for what my dream game would be. I even went so far once as to completely outline the game idea, show it around to some friends who were also gamers to get their opinion, and then began to flush out the idea once I got some positive response. I think that, in the end, I had nearly 1500 pages written. The document included an outline of the overall game concept, descriptions of areas, pages and pages of history and lore, quest designs, racial descriptions, and about 100 pages or so of text detailing the overall theme of the game.

The problem is that I am not a programmer. I am (or at least try to be) a writer. To the best of my knowledge, there are not too many (if any) game companies out there who have a position on their roster entitled “Guy who comes up with cool shit, outlines it, hands it off to the programmers to make, and then goes out for coffee.” If there were, I would be applying for that position like a son of a bitch.

Back when I was in college, I tried my hand at programming for a while. I was actually pursuing a degree in Computer Information Systems, but the degree plan required me to take 12 hours of programming. I figured that if I enjoyed programming and had a knack for it that I might just change to a programming degree.

Well, I definately didn’t have a knack for it and enjoying it didn’t enter into the picture.

One of my problems is that I like to expand upon an idea and really see how far I can take it. That included programs. I remember one assignment where we were supposed to just program a basic calculator. The requirements of the assignment were to create a program that asked you to enter in a number, asked you to enter in a second number, and then define the operation… either addition, subtraction, multiplication or division.

Most of the people in my class did it very basic. They stuck right with the outline and ended up with a program that said, “Enter first number:” and then asked “Enter second number:” and finally asked you to enter A, S, M, or D for addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. It would then spit out the answer.

Not me. Hell no. I wanted to go bigger and better and really do something impressive. I wanted to show a graphical calculator on the page and, when you entered in the parameters, you would see the appropriate button move and the information appear on the calculator display. Where my classmates created their program with about 100 lines of code, mine was somewhere in the area of 27,000 lines.

Then, when I went to compile the program, it failed.

I spent days in the lab at school reading a line at a time. I couldn’t find the error, so I printed the entire mess out. It was so long that it took roughly a half ream of paper to print and I slowly worked through page by page… line by line.

On the last line of the last page, I finally found my error. I forgot 1 damn period which caused the entire thing to fail. I remember my instructor walking into the lab to check on me right at the instant that I hurled the entire printout across the room with a shouted, “MOTHER FUCKER!”

Trying to fight back the laughter, my instructor calmly bent down to begin picking up the mess of paper and said, quietly but gently, “Perhaps programming isn’t for you?”

I have no doubts that I could learn. I simply don’t think I have the patience for it. I have downloaded trial versions of software such as Maya and Visual Studio and 3D Max and played around with them. I generally make it for nearly 10 minutes before I’m ready to drive my keyboard through the monitor in a rage.

Would I like to be a game developer? I would like to create game ideas and leave the coding for those with the patience to do it. Until someone is willing to hire me on with a title of “Creator of Cool Shit,” I guess I’ll just have to keep writing about what other people have done and sit over on the envy bench while the starters play.

And there was much rejoicing…

It seems that Sanya (aka Tweety) is returning to her roots… in a much more mellow capacity. Still, mellow or not… tantrum filled or not… cursing up a blue streak or not, there will be a very loud *sigh* of relief heard all across the blogosphere at her return.