Thursday, December 30, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Cataclysm, and Why I Like It
I'm a geek. I admit it, and I'm okay with that. And for those of you who aren't quite so far gone as I, you may not have heard that in the recent past, the newest expansion for World of Warcraft was released - Cataclysm. There's been plenty of discussion by fans and haters and everything in between, but this is my take.
...And if you don't care about WoW, or at least my views on it, you may as well stop now. You'll be bored out of your mind within two paragraphs. :)
First, a little summary. World of Warcraft currently consists of two worlds - Azeroth and the Outlands (formerly Draenor). Blah blah, stuff happened, blah blah, and then the great black dragon Deathwing awoke and broke from his lair on the elemental plane. When he burst into Azeroth, he weakened the walls between Azeroth and the elemental planes, releasing a plague of spirits and elementals; and the shock of his arrival caused massive destruction. Earthquakes, tidal waves, floods... Whirlpools, mountains falling and rising, etcetera. Deathwing himself damaged or destroyed numerous locations on two of the three continents (the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, but not Northrend, which was generally unaffected). On top of that, his allies and dupes - mortal and otherwise - are assaulting both the Horde and the Alliance in a wide-spread offensive on countless fronts... And chaos is everywhere.
Yay marketing-speak and advertising. :) But anyway... When it comes down to it, they took a huge amount of what people were used to about the game and turned it on its head. Enormous changes were done on many - if not most - aspects of the game, and people are still getting used to everything being so different. Some people hate it; some people left specifically because of the changes; and some people were on the fence, at least when it came out. I hadn't heard anyone actually happy about the changes... Until they were done. Now? A lot of people are loving it.
There are some really quite valid complaints. The most common one is that healers got the short, mucky end of this stick. Mana regeneration got nerfed all to hell, meaning they run out and stop being fully effective much more often - I've had instance runs where the healer runs out of mana on every single pull. Even worse, while hit-point and damage numbers are shooting up (at level 80, I had about 50,000 hit points and a 40k single attack was both cripplingly strong and almost unheard of; at 85 with my gear as of last night, I have 120k hit points and 40k single strikes are commonplace from even normal monster pulls in instances), their healing spells did not get significantly stronger. This means it can take several times as many spells to heal the same percentage of a character's health, just making the mana problem that much worse.
There are other complaints, too. Several characteristics were removed entirely; gear was simplified; Jewelcrafters and Enchanters who had large numbers of old patterns got screwed when they suddenly became duplicates, with no compensation; the talent trees were completely re-done, with talent numbers being cut in half, in some cases reducing variety severely; and even some favorite features (Druid tree form, anyone?) are now just gone. Levelling, too, is slanted more towards speed - several classes had key abilities shunted to much lower levels (druid Cat form from 20 to 8 is the example I keep hearing, but there are others), experience bonuses are rampant, and power-levelling is faster than most would believe if done right. And on top of everything else, all the old quests were simply removed - all the level 1-60 quests were replaced with new lore for the new state of the land, as Azeroth was brought up to the current time. Even that the level cap only went up 5 - from 80 to 85 - instead of 10 like the first two expansions is a common complaint.
On the other hand... The crew at Blizzard put an incredible amount of work into this, and it shows. First, the effort put into revising Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms just blows me away. The zones are all just flat-out better. They're better-designed, more interesting, and just fun to go around and explore. Little nooks and crannies with interesting things are everywhere - made better by flying mounts now being usable in the "old world".
To expand on the revised zones, most of the quest lines are different too - re-written from scratch in most cases. The writers obviously had fun with this, and it shows. The quest lines range from tragic to comedic to epic, and I'm repeatedly impressed with the quality of them. I hit the level cap after doing one and a half zones (Mount Hyjal and part of the Twilight Highlands), but even if I didn't have other reasons I'd want to do all the quests in the other zones (Vashj'ir, Deepholme, and Uldum) just to see all the storylines. The Harrison Jones storyline is something I would have been incredibly sad to miss, for example.
Another thing I'll throw out there, though, is that the boss fights in instances are *fun* again. In Wrath, they got too simple - crowd control became quickly useless, and tactics were mostly unnecessary. The boss fights are downright hard again, and heroics take effort and work. They'll still get easier with better gear - they always do - but to me right now it looks like they'll still be harder even when gear maxes out... And better yet, they're just *interesting* again.
My favorite boss fight so far has to be the very very end of Deadmines Heroic. There's an extra boss in Heroic - Vanessa VanCleef, the daughter of the (now deceased) former head of a band of thieves. When you meet her, she has a little monologue where she talks about how she isn't as good in combat as her father, but she's *much* better with poisons... As she then uses mind-affecting drugs to throw you into a Nightmare. You run through a gauntlet of stylized, nightmarish versions of all the earlier bosses in the instance - dodging fire and ice to fight the Ogre mage in an inferno hell, holding off massive and strengthening waves of spiders to fight the Goblin engineer, dodging rotating walls of lightning to fight the Foe Reaper, and saving the Worgen Admiral's family from rampaging Worgen only to fight the Admiral himself as he murders his wife in a berserker rage. Then you actually fight Vanessa after descending through the personal hells of all the bosses, fighting wave after wave of foot-soldiers as she runs around and causes havoc in the group - and periodically needing to swing on ropes away from the deck of the ship to escape the huge explosions she sets off in an effort to trap and kill you. It's frenetic; it's difficult; and it's fun and interesting to go through. I'm truly impressed by whoever scripted that whole sequence.
As a last note... Possibly the best quest line I've done so far, by the way, isn't even in one of the new zones - it's in an old zone, with three guys who weren't there before the expansion. A gnome, an orc, and a dwarf are sitting on a little hill in The Barrens, drunk off their asses, next to the enormous scar Deathwing left in the land; and if you go talk to them they talk about the day Deathwing came. You talk to them one at a time as they tell you the story of how they drove Deathwing away, and the quests are carried out from the point of view of the one currently telling the story. First, the Dwarf talks about how he went down the scar, punching things and breaking through rock walls, until he got to Deathwing and punched him in the face - throwing him to Kalimdor. Then the Gnome corrects the Dwarf as he talks about how he used his world-shrinking device (...Yeah, gnomes have a lot of jokes associated with them) to make himself huge, then hunted through the clouds for Deathwing... Only to realize Deathwing was hiding in the sun! O.O So he, of course, grabbed Deathwing by the throat and threw him to Kalimdor. Then the Orc tells the *real* story, about how he hopped on his motorcycle - rescueing one of three girls or a Blood Elf guy in the process - and drove up the scar, dodging rocks, until he gets to the far end... Where he remembers his motorcycle can fly, and he flies up onto the mountain to fight Deathwing in a knife fight. The fight is interrupted, however, by a dwarf running up and punching Deathwing and a giant Gnome stalking past...
Trust me, it's funnier to walk through. :-P If you play and haven't done it, do it. It's worth it.
...And if you don't care about WoW, or at least my views on it, you may as well stop now. You'll be bored out of your mind within two paragraphs. :)
First, a little summary. World of Warcraft currently consists of two worlds - Azeroth and the Outlands (formerly Draenor). Blah blah, stuff happened, blah blah, and then the great black dragon Deathwing awoke and broke from his lair on the elemental plane. When he burst into Azeroth, he weakened the walls between Azeroth and the elemental planes, releasing a plague of spirits and elementals; and the shock of his arrival caused massive destruction. Earthquakes, tidal waves, floods... Whirlpools, mountains falling and rising, etcetera. Deathwing himself damaged or destroyed numerous locations on two of the three continents (the Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, but not Northrend, which was generally unaffected). On top of that, his allies and dupes - mortal and otherwise - are assaulting both the Horde and the Alliance in a wide-spread offensive on countless fronts... And chaos is everywhere.
Yay marketing-speak and advertising. :) But anyway... When it comes down to it, they took a huge amount of what people were used to about the game and turned it on its head. Enormous changes were done on many - if not most - aspects of the game, and people are still getting used to everything being so different. Some people hate it; some people left specifically because of the changes; and some people were on the fence, at least when it came out. I hadn't heard anyone actually happy about the changes... Until they were done. Now? A lot of people are loving it.
There are some really quite valid complaints. The most common one is that healers got the short, mucky end of this stick. Mana regeneration got nerfed all to hell, meaning they run out and stop being fully effective much more often - I've had instance runs where the healer runs out of mana on every single pull. Even worse, while hit-point and damage numbers are shooting up (at level 80, I had about 50,000 hit points and a 40k single attack was both cripplingly strong and almost unheard of; at 85 with my gear as of last night, I have 120k hit points and 40k single strikes are commonplace from even normal monster pulls in instances), their healing spells did not get significantly stronger. This means it can take several times as many spells to heal the same percentage of a character's health, just making the mana problem that much worse.
There are other complaints, too. Several characteristics were removed entirely; gear was simplified; Jewelcrafters and Enchanters who had large numbers of old patterns got screwed when they suddenly became duplicates, with no compensation; the talent trees were completely re-done, with talent numbers being cut in half, in some cases reducing variety severely; and even some favorite features (Druid tree form, anyone?) are now just gone. Levelling, too, is slanted more towards speed - several classes had key abilities shunted to much lower levels (druid Cat form from 20 to 8 is the example I keep hearing, but there are others), experience bonuses are rampant, and power-levelling is faster than most would believe if done right. And on top of everything else, all the old quests were simply removed - all the level 1-60 quests were replaced with new lore for the new state of the land, as Azeroth was brought up to the current time. Even that the level cap only went up 5 - from 80 to 85 - instead of 10 like the first two expansions is a common complaint.
On the other hand... The crew at Blizzard put an incredible amount of work into this, and it shows. First, the effort put into revising Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms just blows me away. The zones are all just flat-out better. They're better-designed, more interesting, and just fun to go around and explore. Little nooks and crannies with interesting things are everywhere - made better by flying mounts now being usable in the "old world".
To expand on the revised zones, most of the quest lines are different too - re-written from scratch in most cases. The writers obviously had fun with this, and it shows. The quest lines range from tragic to comedic to epic, and I'm repeatedly impressed with the quality of them. I hit the level cap after doing one and a half zones (Mount Hyjal and part of the Twilight Highlands), but even if I didn't have other reasons I'd want to do all the quests in the other zones (Vashj'ir, Deepholme, and Uldum) just to see all the storylines. The Harrison Jones storyline is something I would have been incredibly sad to miss, for example.
Another thing I'll throw out there, though, is that the boss fights in instances are *fun* again. In Wrath, they got too simple - crowd control became quickly useless, and tactics were mostly unnecessary. The boss fights are downright hard again, and heroics take effort and work. They'll still get easier with better gear - they always do - but to me right now it looks like they'll still be harder even when gear maxes out... And better yet, they're just *interesting* again.
My favorite boss fight so far has to be the very very end of Deadmines Heroic. There's an extra boss in Heroic - Vanessa VanCleef, the daughter of the (now deceased) former head of a band of thieves. When you meet her, she has a little monologue where she talks about how she isn't as good in combat as her father, but she's *much* better with poisons... As she then uses mind-affecting drugs to throw you into a Nightmare. You run through a gauntlet of stylized, nightmarish versions of all the earlier bosses in the instance - dodging fire and ice to fight the Ogre mage in an inferno hell, holding off massive and strengthening waves of spiders to fight the Goblin engineer, dodging rotating walls of lightning to fight the Foe Reaper, and saving the Worgen Admiral's family from rampaging Worgen only to fight the Admiral himself as he murders his wife in a berserker rage. Then you actually fight Vanessa after descending through the personal hells of all the bosses, fighting wave after wave of foot-soldiers as she runs around and causes havoc in the group - and periodically needing to swing on ropes away from the deck of the ship to escape the huge explosions she sets off in an effort to trap and kill you. It's frenetic; it's difficult; and it's fun and interesting to go through. I'm truly impressed by whoever scripted that whole sequence.
As a last note... Possibly the best quest line I've done so far, by the way, isn't even in one of the new zones - it's in an old zone, with three guys who weren't there before the expansion. A gnome, an orc, and a dwarf are sitting on a little hill in The Barrens, drunk off their asses, next to the enormous scar Deathwing left in the land; and if you go talk to them they talk about the day Deathwing came. You talk to them one at a time as they tell you the story of how they drove Deathwing away, and the quests are carried out from the point of view of the one currently telling the story. First, the Dwarf talks about how he went down the scar, punching things and breaking through rock walls, until he got to Deathwing and punched him in the face - throwing him to Kalimdor. Then the Gnome corrects the Dwarf as he talks about how he used his world-shrinking device (...Yeah, gnomes have a lot of jokes associated with them) to make himself huge, then hunted through the clouds for Deathwing... Only to realize Deathwing was hiding in the sun! O.O So he, of course, grabbed Deathwing by the throat and threw him to Kalimdor. Then the Orc tells the *real* story, about how he hopped on his motorcycle - rescueing one of three girls or a Blood Elf guy in the process - and drove up the scar, dodging rocks, until he gets to the far end... Where he remembers his motorcycle can fly, and he flies up onto the mountain to fight Deathwing in a knife fight. The fight is interrupted, however, by a dwarf running up and punching Deathwing and a giant Gnome stalking past...
Trust me, it's funnier to walk through. :-P If you play and haven't done it, do it. It's worth it.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Getting into my car this morning, I opened the passenger door to what struck me as an immensely strange sight - what distinctly appeared to be a large pile of shaved carrots. I just stared a moment - my not-yet-quite-awake mind couldn't imagine why someone would break into my car, leave a pile of carrots, and then close it up again. It took me a moment of thinking to realize that it wasn't carrot, but frozen orange soda - I'd left an unopened can of diet Fanta in the car the day before and it had exploded.
I don't recommend it. It's far messier when melted, and the melting is fairly inevitable.
I don't recommend it. It's far messier when melted, and the melting is fairly inevitable.
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Tonight's game? Ticket To Ride Europe (I got totally robbed by my brother-in-law... Picking up tickets on the second-to-last turn and having two of them already completed, indeed...), and then LCR.
With LCR, of course, the discussion changed it from "Left, Right, Center" to "Left, Right, Chug" - the new drinking game my sister and brother-in-law are going to have at their new-years-eve games party.
It was an immense amount of fun, and I even came out $7 ahead on the dice!
With LCR, of course, the discussion changed it from "Left, Right, Center" to "Left, Right, Chug" - the new drinking game my sister and brother-in-law are going to have at their new-years-eve games party.
It was an immense amount of fun, and I even came out $7 ahead on the dice!
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Old & New
The following appeared in today's "Dear Abby". I copy it here because, to a number of people who knew me beforehand and now, it expressed better than I've ever been able to how I feel sometimes. Obviously the situation isn't the same, but the sentiment applies.
-----
Dear Abby,
My beautiful 20-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. I am writing this not only for myself, but for all parents who have lost a child, and to all of the wonderful people who asked, "What can I do for you?"
At the time there wasn't much anyone could do to help, but after two years I have an answer: Accept me for who I am *now*.
When Rachel came into my life, it changed me profoundly. Losing her did the same. Her father and I work hard to honor her memory, but we will never "get over it" to the degree of being who we were before. I am different now in some ways - I think - better. I am kinder, more patient, more appreciative of small things, but I am not as outgoing nor as quick to laugh.
I know people mean well when they encourage me to get on with my life, but this *is* my life. My priorities have changed. My expectations of what my future will hold have changed. Please extend to me again the offer of "anything I can do" and, please, accept me as I am now.
-Different Now in Riverview, Fla.
-----
I didn't lose a child. I gained and lost a wife, and gained a child. I'm... Different, and recently I have been realizing I'm never going to be the Robin that people knew back in undergrad, back in grad school. My ambitions are different. My motivations are different. My fears are different. I think differently, and I react differently. Some changes are negative, and some are positive - I can see that clearly. But they're there.
The funny thing is, I have had people say that to me - that it's okay, that I'll get over it, that everything will be back the way it was. It won't. My life is different, irretrievably so. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a good thing; it's just a fact. Things will be okay. Things will get better. But I *won't* be over it. It's not something to be removed from my life; it's something that's part of my life, and always will be. I can run away from my past, or I can include it in my future, but I can't get rid of it either way.
It's been a year since my divorce, three and a quarter years since my separation, and longer than that since things fell apart. You may not like who I am now, but...
This *is* who I am, now. And I'll keep on changing, just like everyone else... But I'll never be the person I was ten years ago.
-----
Dear Abby,
My beautiful 20-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. I am writing this not only for myself, but for all parents who have lost a child, and to all of the wonderful people who asked, "What can I do for you?"
At the time there wasn't much anyone could do to help, but after two years I have an answer: Accept me for who I am *now*.
When Rachel came into my life, it changed me profoundly. Losing her did the same. Her father and I work hard to honor her memory, but we will never "get over it" to the degree of being who we were before. I am different now in some ways - I think - better. I am kinder, more patient, more appreciative of small things, but I am not as outgoing nor as quick to laugh.
I know people mean well when they encourage me to get on with my life, but this *is* my life. My priorities have changed. My expectations of what my future will hold have changed. Please extend to me again the offer of "anything I can do" and, please, accept me as I am now.
-Different Now in Riverview, Fla.
-----
I didn't lose a child. I gained and lost a wife, and gained a child. I'm... Different, and recently I have been realizing I'm never going to be the Robin that people knew back in undergrad, back in grad school. My ambitions are different. My motivations are different. My fears are different. I think differently, and I react differently. Some changes are negative, and some are positive - I can see that clearly. But they're there.
The funny thing is, I have had people say that to me - that it's okay, that I'll get over it, that everything will be back the way it was. It won't. My life is different, irretrievably so. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a good thing; it's just a fact. Things will be okay. Things will get better. But I *won't* be over it. It's not something to be removed from my life; it's something that's part of my life, and always will be. I can run away from my past, or I can include it in my future, but I can't get rid of it either way.
It's been a year since my divorce, three and a quarter years since my separation, and longer than that since things fell apart. You may not like who I am now, but...
This *is* who I am, now. And I'll keep on changing, just like everyone else... But I'll never be the person I was ten years ago.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Christmas Cracker jokes are *always* the highest quality...
Q. What is a minimum?
A. A very small mother.
-----
Q. What award is given to door knocker designers?
A. The No-Bell Prize.
A. A very small mother.
-----
Q. What award is given to door knocker designers?
A. The No-Bell Prize.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Jingle Bells...
According to my son (who was singing it loudly, and repeatedly, while I was trying to get him into PJs) the lyrics are:
Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way!
Oh what fun it is to run
And don't forget the sleigh, HEY!
It was way too cute for me to correct him. :-P
Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way!
Oh what fun it is to run
And don't forget the sleigh, HEY!
It was way too cute for me to correct him. :-P
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
So. Slashdot put this up today:
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/12/14/1350206/Jeopardy-To-Pit-Humans-Against-IBM-Machine
(and the yahoo news article it links to: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101214/ap_en_tv/us_tv_man_vs_machine)
It was quickly pointed out in the comments that this has come up before, but this is actually the first time I've seen it, and it's very interesting to me. Of course, in some ways the most interesting thing is the discussion of exactly what's going to be tested. The humans and computers have radically different limitations, after all. Humans tend to have limited databases of information (so to speak), but zero problem interpreting the question; computers tend to have vastly larger databases of available information, but problems with translating a question into a meaningful (and correct) query to retrieve the answer. So you could argue that, for a properly constructed set of questions on the part of the Jeopardy writers, it would be testing both the algorithm-writers down in IBM Research and the data absorption/recall of Jennings and Rutter at the same time.
Nifty stuff.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/10/12/14/1350206/Jeopardy-To-Pit-Humans-Against-IBM-Machine
(and the yahoo news article it links to: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101214/ap_en_tv/us_tv_man_vs_machine)
It was quickly pointed out in the comments that this has come up before, but this is actually the first time I've seen it, and it's very interesting to me. Of course, in some ways the most interesting thing is the discussion of exactly what's going to be tested. The humans and computers have radically different limitations, after all. Humans tend to have limited databases of information (so to speak), but zero problem interpreting the question; computers tend to have vastly larger databases of available information, but problems with translating a question into a meaningful (and correct) query to retrieve the answer. So you could argue that, for a properly constructed set of questions on the part of the Jeopardy writers, it would be testing both the algorithm-writers down in IBM Research and the data absorption/recall of Jennings and Rutter at the same time.
Nifty stuff.
Monday, December 13, 2010
If a moth flaps its wings in Princeton...
"Computers don't make mistakes, but they carefully execute every mistake *you* make."
Cute, isn't it? It does, however, parallel something I've repeatedly said to a number of people (including, to what I believe is her eternal frustration, my mother) - "Computers don't make mistakes. They do *exactly* what you've told them to do, whether you meant it or not." I was reading Slashdot this morning, of course, and one of the articles was "the top ten worst catastrophes caused by computers" or some such. The comments, in a lot of ways, were more interesting than the article; but I did pick up a few worthwhile links.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363580/when-computers-go-wrong
http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2005/11/69355
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
Interesting, funny, and just downright scary stories about the things computers do - because noone told them not to. This entire thing, of course, is inspired by both the Stuxnet worm and the Wikileaks DDOS attacks (more the former, but the latter has come up in most of the discussions about it that I've seen or been part of).
Anyway. Video and Audio entries put up on the other blog, some time soon. Tonight if we're all lucky.
Cute, isn't it? It does, however, parallel something I've repeatedly said to a number of people (including, to what I believe is her eternal frustration, my mother) - "Computers don't make mistakes. They do *exactly* what you've told them to do, whether you meant it or not." I was reading Slashdot this morning, of course, and one of the articles was "the top ten worst catastrophes caused by computers" or some such. The comments, in a lot of ways, were more interesting than the article; but I did pick up a few worthwhile links.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/363580/when-computers-go-wrong
http://www.wired.com/software/coolapps/news/2005/11/69355
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_5_Flight_501
Interesting, funny, and just downright scary stories about the things computers do - because noone told them not to. This entire thing, of course, is inspired by both the Stuxnet worm and the Wikileaks DDOS attacks (more the former, but the latter has come up in most of the discussions about it that I've seen or been part of).
Anyway. Video and Audio entries put up on the other blog, some time soon. Tonight if we're all lucky.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Name Hijinx
Random aside - one of the things that makes this type of thing so much fun. So while I was at the store yesterday dealing with getting a new phone, the saleswoman (salesperson? salespeon?) helping me asked the obvious question at one point - Do I have an existing account with them? "Why yes!" I said, and gave them my phone number. She typed it in, looked at the screen, looked at me, looked back at the screen, and then said "She doesn't have anyone else authorized to make changes to this account. Do you mind if we call her up?"
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