Feels like it's been a fairly
busy three or four days, but it hasn't really, it's just been a lot of
traveling interspersed by periods of heavy thinking.
…Damn…looking over my last
post I was about two steps from going totally bananas. I’m doing a lot better
now. It’s fine.
After I got my claim
transferred to my local job centre I was removed from the full time
employability skills course. This is to say that my last advisor hasn’t
contacted me about not attending it and my current advisor signed me on
Wednesday so providing my money is in my account on Monday then there shouldn’t
be any issue.
I’ve also handed in all the
evidence required to my local housing benefits office to get my claim
transferred from the previous housing office to this new one. I’m not entirely
happy about this as they said it would take two weeks to process and that’s
more time than I have until I need the money to pay my rent at this hostel, but
it’s one of those cross checks. Every time they go to pay your housing benefit
they check your address with the job centre’s records, and if the two don’t
match it isn’t paid.
So yeah, everyone is updated
with all the evidence they need and the new job centre isn’t trying to put me
on any type of employability skills program here so I have all the time I need
to get my revision done for my exam on the 08/11/14.
On the other hand it’s a 50/50
bet if I’ll get my JSA on Monday and my HB on the following Monday. All I can
do is get up early and check first my bank and then the offices to find out if
there are any issues and if I can get the money that day because the hostel I’m
staying in won’t take ‘I’ll have it in a few days’ for payment. ‘No credit’ is literally
splattered across the walls of the reception area so…we’ll see what happens
come Monday.
For now I’ve gotten plenty of
rest, rebuilt my sanity from something like sand to, if not rock, then at least
gravel, so I’m not longer giggling like a crazy thing and my left eye hasn’t twitched
since I was at the housing office on Tuesday.
Still haven’t sent the bloody
medical forms to the MPS. Sorting out the JSA and HB cost me too much in bus
fare so there was not enough left to get to my doctors AND pay for the forms.
On the upside, this means that
I’ve got plenty of cash to buy food and that with, not that I need it after a
super cheap veggie run at a local Morrisons [seriously, those guys are selling
veggies at ½ the cost of Sainsburys and Tescos, it’s amazing].
On the downside, I’ve told
them I’ll send it to them every Monday for the past three weeks and failed
every time because of costs of moving acom, and then that fucking employability
skills course being three hours down the road. Next Monday I’ve got bank fees
which takes away the money I need, followed the week after by the fees for my
resit exam. So two weeks Monday [assuming everything remains stable] is when I’ll
be able to actually fucking pay for and send them.
The fact that the forms are
basically nothing more than a guy’s signature that confirms I’m in perfect
health [not that the Doctor even fucking CHECKED to make sure I was] just
pisses me off even more.
Anyway, point is that here and
now and until Monday morning I don’t really have any issues [about four days],
apart from waking up this morning feeling horrible.
I think the heat in the dorm I’m
staying in messed with my thyroid or something because I spent a couple of
hours radiating heat from my skin like a patio heater. Didn’t feel too bad
after I went out and got a can of Monster caffeine, but you could’ve cooked a
side of bacon on my bald head.
Then spent way too long playing
Hearthstone after I worked out a somewhat epic build for the Hunter class and
was able to get from lv20 [entry] up to lv16. Currently at lv17 because it’s
more or less the luck of the fucking draw if you get a good hand or not and I
tend to lose about 45% of my matches through bad hands and opponent lucky ones.
Today was the first bit of
real morning relaxation I’ve had in a couple of weeks though so I earned it I
think.
Just writing this and then
going to grab some lunch next. After that I’m gonna add a bit more to my book
on computer games design before either doing some revision, or going to have a
shower and then doing revision, one of those.
I’m really liking the work I’m
doing in my computer games design book actually.
I’ve structured the content in
just the right way so as to explain the basic skeletal structure of computer
games and then explain in detail the flesh which can be selected to hang from
it for the gameplay.
It’s still in the very early
stages but what I’ve done so far isn’t just correct but also right, in some
fundamental way.
Still need to rewrite the
introduction and things though so it’s less ‘raving madman who’s one step from
committing his first homicide’ and more ‘professional erudite scholar of
computer games design’.
The content still has an edge
to it that implies that if you don’t understand what I’ve written then you have
no fucking business designing a computer game, but hey, that’s what makes it
good.
I’m no elitist, I don’t care
who studied what and where, but I don’t tolerate fools and the industry is full
of them.
I’ll write it. I’ll call the
readers idiots on every other page. And then when said idiots take offence, I’ll
enjoy [in my sick and perverted way of thriving on ‘The Fight’] laughing at their
ire. I’m a fucking genius morons, and you are not. I am right, and you are
wrong. Just because that’s a fact doesn’t mean you get to be angry about it.
No, it’s not the right fucking
professional way to go about doing business with a lot of people, but it is the
way someone abused and ignored for three decades takes his small revenge on the
masses; being a passive aggressive dick whilst also being uncontestably right
about everything everyone else gets wrong.
Fuck everyone. The last couple
of weeks have taught me one simple fact; if I want to get anywhere in life then
someone else is going to have to pay for it. In time, energy, money or simple
fury, someone else is going to have to cough up if I want to rise because
otherwise people will just keep shitting on me. And enough is ENOUGH.
Clawing out my insides with
hunger right now so wrapping this up. Still listening to Papa Roach. Still
enjoying it immensely, especially Alive [N Out of Control]. Wanna go get some
exercise today but probably tomorrow because my vision just went funny
[seriously fucked up morning]. Watching ‘How to Get Away with Murder’ which is surprisingly
interesting for its pacing and content flashing backwards and forwards like it
does.
OH: Stopped talking to that
lady friend of mine. One day last week she started telling me about a friend of
hers that just released a computer game into the market, and then about it’s
bad reviews.
So you’re telling me, whilst I’m
currently more angry than I’ve been in my entire life, about someone with the
money to do the thing I’m best at in the world who released a whole actual game
who fucked it up.
Yeah, we’re not friends
anymore. I mean, I don’t need people, I really don’t, and at a time when I’m
hating them more than usual this person stabs me in the heart without even
realizing.
Plus her medical issues have
gotten worse and don’t appear to be getting better any time soon. Plus after I
stopped making efforts to contact her she didn’t make any effort to contact me.
I want sex. I want someone
around, actually around, not just online, who can provide me real help and
interaction who doesn’t piss me off. Who isn’t a fucking moron.
I don’t need it though. Hell,
I don’t think right now is even the right time for that kind of thing given the
work I need to get done. It’s just a distraction that messes with my head and
emotions. But it’s also a base desire of being a human.
I want sex. And having someone
around might be handy and make me feel good, and I can help them and care for
them too.
The issue is that anything the
same shape as myself causes me nothing but headaches and raised blood pressure.
Humans are the enemy. There isn’t one in existence who would be a partner to
me, only a trusted enemy who I would have to fucking babysit most of the time
to curb their stupidity. A drag. A weight. Another problem.
It’s just the way it is.
Better off alone...but I want sex.
Fucking humans man. Fuck being
one too.
Anyway, getting edibles…
Showing posts with label Computer Games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Computer Games. Show all posts
30/10/2014
12/10/2014
The Best Ones Always Show Up The Day After Tomorrow...
Howdy. I guess the nerves hadn't woken up yesterday because most of my muscles are currently complaining about their ill treatment. -.-
... *spends some time staring out of the window in McDonalds* ...
Lady friend has apparently caused more damage to herself. Torn something which sounds like an integral part of her organs and infection has returned or something. Last week the thing that's meant to be healing her or something was dislodged and she opted not to go back to the hospital, mostly, I think, because her friend was visiting this weekend. This is probably going to result in major surgery next week because some holes will have healed up.
I'm too tired to care very much really. Not a very cleaver thing to do, ignoring your doctors and gaining even more hospital time and yet more down time healing.
So there's that.
Why is it that the only mentally compatible individual I've met this one that seems intent on hurting herself...
I'm once again parked in McDonalds. Just for today, and then tomorrow I'm going to the library once I've paid rent, done laundry and shaved my head. Not storing anything more in that damn hostel fridge. Four different thefts occurred this week; two of butter, an entire loaf of bread and four large potatoes.
Started rewriting my computer games thesis in Google Drive along the lines of a technical manual. Think I said yesterday...or I just tweeted it...could be, but anyway, I've organized it into 3 sections - front/body/back matter - in accordance with some of the principles of the Wikipedia article on Book Design. The front and back sections mirror each other with contents/index and so forth. The body section is the big one.
I was just going to write the books content into ad hoc articles and then publish it at the end of the year, which is essentially what I plan on doing still, only modified, and then add to that for the 2015 edition, Doing it this way will build it into a compendium on games design which grows like a fungus and stays current with modern theories and methods for implementation. This is especially handy if I write anything platform or kit specific which is highly transitory and only temporarily relevant to how the industry does it.
I say my method of construction is modified because yesterday I realized how I had set up the thesis and decided to use the same methodology again.
The basic tenant of how to design games in my literal book is that you start with analysis of what already exists. This is to say that you need some way of categorizing computer games which exist right now so your contribution to the industry has a defined type and you can then check out other titles of the same type for general structure, what worked and what didn't, and then implement the best subsystems into your game.
So the way I've laid the book out is so the first section is Analysis [Categorization] which firstly serves to outline the virtual shell of all computer games [there really is an almost (note almost as there are, of course, exceptions) uniform structure to all games as you essentially require the same functionality in the same general format regardless of your game], then secondly follows that up with a redefinition of genre identification [which includes only 5 genre's with subgenres for categorizing anything more specific, and definitively does not include the fucking Action or Adventure genres, which are blatant misnomers carried over from the TV and Movie industry where they are in fact apt].
The next five sections then serve to identify and categorize the various systems and information which are iconic to any given genre. The Strategy [Information] section for example serves to identify the base quantified attributes of anything and everything within a virtual interactive environment - what, why, when, where, who, and how essentially. Then the Roleplaying [Setting] section serves to identify the representation of those attributes in a presented form - the last section quantifies the figures, whilst this one presents it graphically. Platforming [Environs], Racing [Interface], and Combat [Interactions] build upon these principles until you have a fully functional virtual interactive system. To change the game you just need to define or not define where the goal posts are in terms of need and objective.
I'm still kind of unpacking information from the back of my personal library - think of it like unlocking layered zip files...seriously, I write one layer down in Google Docs and then a few more zip files decompress and dump a fuck ton of information back into the forefront of my consciousness. Apparently that's how my brain does business. It stores absolutely everything but so as not to drive me bugfuck insane it compresses a fuckton [which are proper units of measurement don't cha know] of it and puts it in storage until I try to recall it and then it spools back out into active memory. Yesterday when I started the process of recall and documentation it felt like someone was frying my forebrain with electrodes and I went to bed with a headache.
The human brain is an amazing place, and either mine's a special one or other people just don't try to think about the world around them. :P
Gonna go widdle, have a drink, play a few matches of Hearthstone and then focus on getting the last of my coursework done. I'm probably just tired and not especially in high spirits due to the crappy food and caffeine I've been getting lately [if healthy veggies and a fuckton of pasta can be considered crappy anyway].
Get some proper fruit, cheese, bread and stuff tomorrow, some Monster Assault, and start revising for my exam resit. That's the ticket. And focus on getting into the police force. My lady friend's activities are her own concern for now. I've always thought it was too soon to be so focused on one person, but she's the only one around who seems to give a shit about me at the moment so.
That's the point really. For all the women and a few men who've shown sexual interest at me over the last few weeks, only one has shown real concern and offered to buy me food, rather than what I could give them. She might be a bit silly, not traditionally the type of girl I'm interested in physically, and not nearly on my level mentally, but she puts up with my batshit crazy and actually gives a flying fuck about my well being.
At the end of the day, what matters more?
See you on and on...
... *spends some time staring out of the window in McDonalds* ...
Lady friend has apparently caused more damage to herself. Torn something which sounds like an integral part of her organs and infection has returned or something. Last week the thing that's meant to be healing her or something was dislodged and she opted not to go back to the hospital, mostly, I think, because her friend was visiting this weekend. This is probably going to result in major surgery next week because some holes will have healed up.
I'm too tired to care very much really. Not a very cleaver thing to do, ignoring your doctors and gaining even more hospital time and yet more down time healing.
So there's that.
Why is it that the only mentally compatible individual I've met this one that seems intent on hurting herself...
I'm once again parked in McDonalds. Just for today, and then tomorrow I'm going to the library once I've paid rent, done laundry and shaved my head. Not storing anything more in that damn hostel fridge. Four different thefts occurred this week; two of butter, an entire loaf of bread and four large potatoes.
Started rewriting my computer games thesis in Google Drive along the lines of a technical manual. Think I said yesterday...or I just tweeted it...could be, but anyway, I've organized it into 3 sections - front/body/back matter - in accordance with some of the principles of the Wikipedia article on Book Design. The front and back sections mirror each other with contents/index and so forth. The body section is the big one.
I was just going to write the books content into ad hoc articles and then publish it at the end of the year, which is essentially what I plan on doing still, only modified, and then add to that for the 2015 edition, Doing it this way will build it into a compendium on games design which grows like a fungus and stays current with modern theories and methods for implementation. This is especially handy if I write anything platform or kit specific which is highly transitory and only temporarily relevant to how the industry does it.
I say my method of construction is modified because yesterday I realized how I had set up the thesis and decided to use the same methodology again.
The basic tenant of how to design games in my literal book is that you start with analysis of what already exists. This is to say that you need some way of categorizing computer games which exist right now so your contribution to the industry has a defined type and you can then check out other titles of the same type for general structure, what worked and what didn't, and then implement the best subsystems into your game.
So the way I've laid the book out is so the first section is Analysis [Categorization] which firstly serves to outline the virtual shell of all computer games [there really is an almost (note almost as there are, of course, exceptions) uniform structure to all games as you essentially require the same functionality in the same general format regardless of your game], then secondly follows that up with a redefinition of genre identification [which includes only 5 genre's with subgenres for categorizing anything more specific, and definitively does not include the fucking Action or Adventure genres, which are blatant misnomers carried over from the TV and Movie industry where they are in fact apt].
The next five sections then serve to identify and categorize the various systems and information which are iconic to any given genre. The Strategy [Information] section for example serves to identify the base quantified attributes of anything and everything within a virtual interactive environment - what, why, when, where, who, and how essentially. Then the Roleplaying [Setting] section serves to identify the representation of those attributes in a presented form - the last section quantifies the figures, whilst this one presents it graphically. Platforming [Environs], Racing [Interface], and Combat [Interactions] build upon these principles until you have a fully functional virtual interactive system. To change the game you just need to define or not define where the goal posts are in terms of need and objective.
I'm still kind of unpacking information from the back of my personal library - think of it like unlocking layered zip files...seriously, I write one layer down in Google Docs and then a few more zip files decompress and dump a fuck ton of information back into the forefront of my consciousness. Apparently that's how my brain does business. It stores absolutely everything but so as not to drive me bugfuck insane it compresses a fuckton [which are proper units of measurement don't cha know] of it and puts it in storage until I try to recall it and then it spools back out into active memory. Yesterday when I started the process of recall and documentation it felt like someone was frying my forebrain with electrodes and I went to bed with a headache.
The human brain is an amazing place, and either mine's a special one or other people just don't try to think about the world around them. :P
Gonna go widdle, have a drink, play a few matches of Hearthstone and then focus on getting the last of my coursework done. I'm probably just tired and not especially in high spirits due to the crappy food and caffeine I've been getting lately [if healthy veggies and a fuckton of pasta can be considered crappy anyway].
Get some proper fruit, cheese, bread and stuff tomorrow, some Monster Assault, and start revising for my exam resit. That's the ticket. And focus on getting into the police force. My lady friend's activities are her own concern for now. I've always thought it was too soon to be so focused on one person, but she's the only one around who seems to give a shit about me at the moment so.
That's the point really. For all the women and a few men who've shown sexual interest at me over the last few weeks, only one has shown real concern and offered to buy me food, rather than what I could give them. She might be a bit silly, not traditionally the type of girl I'm interested in physically, and not nearly on my level mentally, but she puts up with my batshit crazy and actually gives a flying fuck about my well being.
At the end of the day, what matters more?
See you on and on...
01/07/2014
On Operations...
Hai! :O
Just realized what time it is, 10pm, and that I've not made a blog post yet. Also got a doctors appointment tomorrow afternoon which I can't forget about too [hint, hint to self], especially seeing as I'm wiping spit off my bloody monitor from explosive coughing right now.
Let's make this quick cus I'm vadeing college work at the moment to write this and I need to get the hell on with that...
---
SHEL - When The Sky Fell (Official Music Video)
---
Watched 24 S09E10 this morning, which is all kinds of epic. Really enjoying that at the moment and wish there was 12 more episodes [24 with only 12 episodes is just weird] but what they've done is quite cool.
It was weird seeing her from The Red Wedding playing the bad guy, but it's so very, very epic seeing Jack in 'That was me being polite, I'll do whatever the hell I want when I want and we both know you can't stop me doing it' mode. In all the other seasons he was working under authority, and now he's still doing good but authority of any kind can kiss his ass, it's awesome.
That's the kind of freedom I want out of the world; I know best and will do what I think is right and not only should you not stop me doing it but trying to stop me once I set my mind to it is impossible.
Some day.
In other TV news: been trying to remember for several days now where I've seen the actor who plays the protagonist in Perception before, and then remembered it was Will and Grace, a US sitcom where he played this gay guy as a lawyer I think.
Gay guy lawyer in sitcom to FBI consultant paranoid schizophrenic brain specialist. GG. And he's hot too [no homo...well, half homo cus I'm bi, but I'd hit that].
It annoys me though that this thing is on it's third season now and Lie to Me got cancelled after two. Granted it went off the rails at the start of season two, but I'd rather have a continuation of season one than this. But Perception isn't a bad watch, though it does seem like every other show is a...what do they call them? Police procedural isn't it? But I've not seen a show about a paranoid schizophrenic before, and the self-reflective episodes appeal to me because half the time I think I'm several ants short of a picnic.
There was a show in 2013 called Dracula. It was a supernatural period piece featuring a rework of the traditional Dracula story. And I thought it was fucking excellent. The story was good, the action was awesome, his struggle to hide his nature was epic, the whole wireless electricity idea was very steam punk, and the black Igor was inspire. And then it got shit canned by ABC after one season. I fucking hate it when that happens. And it didn't deserve it.
Revolution got cancelled after two seasons, which was understandable because it went right off the rails after the first season, but there was nothing wrong with Dracula. Someone should pick that shit up as a novel concept and go to town, they'd make millions for the rework of the classic.
---
I mean, it's a comparative analysis. You walk around not thinking like other people, you see what they don't, they tell you that you should feel this with this stimulus and you start to wonder what's broken inside your head when disassociated people tell you the same thing.
If sanity is measured by the consensus, and I don't think like everyone else, who is the madman here; me or the rest of the world? Personally I believe I'm functionally dysfunctional; I might not be like everyone else, but I'm not unhappy about that and I do get my work done [when I have any to do anyway], so what's the harm?
Well the harm is that sometimes I run into annoying lil troublemakers who decide that the big freak is too freakish to be allowed and his entire existence must be questioned and ostracised. There's a price you pay for originality, and that is rejection by your peers. Doesn't matter if it's in terms of social behaviour or professional conceptualization, if you don't measure up to someone else's standard of normal sometimes people give you a lot of grief over it in the belief that unless you're like the rest of the apples you must be poisonous rot, rather than a banana.
That's humans, and people wonder why I'm misanthropic and oh so cynical.
---
With my adoption of Google 'Chrome' as my browser of choice at the moment after years of using Firefox I decided to go check out the rest of Google's product range.
This was after I restored the drag scroll functionality I have in Firefox to Chrome anyway with the 'Scrollbar Anywhere' extension. This should be included by default in all browsers as it's the best way to precisely control scrolling when you're reading for example and want a slow slide down the page.
I've adopted 'Docs', 'Sites' and 'Drive' from this list.
Docs is basically MS Word online and saves the files to Drive, online cloud storage. Sites can be set up to be like an editable PDF document, so you write a chapter introduction, and then write each sequential part under it. Automatic headings you could say and a great way to categorize content of a book or something. I think it might be useful for writing my computer games development thesis rather than Codex Mundus maybe.
I can see why the meme about Google becoming our new overlords was made after looking at this list cus let's face it, if you go around making a lot of high quality free online software which works neigh perfectly you're going to go a long, long way.
If they made Google 'Games', a computer games studio with their own console I'm sure they could corner the fucking games market easily.
Strangely though you never really hear about their products. Everyone knows about the search engine, the translator, and maybe even the blogger, and Google+ pops up every now and again, but a lot of this stuff isn't well known I don't think. I've not seen it in the places where I hear about associated online services like them anyway.
---
After thinking about this for a while I did realize how virtual computing could work though.
I mean, if you had a device with great graphical processing capacity and display plus a powerful on-board router which could access over the internet something like Google 'Docs' and 'Drive', then you wouldn't need a PC with it's own hard disk drive and processor, you'd just access Google 'PC' for example and they'd do the operations and send the results to your screen.
Alright, so that comes with a whole bag of complications ranging from a spectrum of privacy issues, both in regards to your host searching your files for information combined with inception of files on route between the host server and your work station, and operational issues, including what programs you run, what files you access, and your personal activity history.
A centralized mass database of not just user details but user PC's would be the holy grail of hacks, and nothing online could ever be considered unhackable.
Then you need to consider acts-of-god. One accident and 10,000 PC's and people's virtual lives are destroyed at worst in made in accessible at best for an indefinite amount of time.
You could do it and it'd probably be awesome to be able to access from anywhere and run super high powered programs that would take a £10,000 PC to run yourself for a low monthly fee or something, like internet access. But you would lose quite a lot freedom and run quite a lot of risk in so doing.
Centralization makes things much more efficient, but decentralization makes them much safer.
As with most things, a lil of a both are probably a good idea; keep the PC but some things, like games for example, could be turned into virtual services where the processing is done somewhere else and you just get the gameplay. If you can make the wifi efficient enough anyway, but that's improving all the time.
It's an interesting concept anyway.
---
Opened Gumtree sometime this afternoon and put some credit onto my phone. Sent out about six texts to various ads asking for viewings. Got two replies and a bunch of places I need to visit to consult with them about available properties to rent in London. Going to look into it and make phone calls tomorrow and doing college work today.
And by doing college work I mean looking like this a lot of the time whilst reading and making a copy of the course materials into a 600 page [so far] word document.
It's so stupid. They have this online website called Moodle. All the college course materials for my certificate in basic policing course are on there, plus several dozen online quizzes which I need to complete in order to pass the course. The rest of the marking criteria consists of exams done from week 5 through to week 10. I aced, by my own surprise due to sleeplessness and flu, the week 5 exam. Got two on Saturday for the week 6 exam.
And basically what I've been doing is opening each annotated presentation, handout, and eWorkbook, as they call them, on Moodle and copying them into a giant word document, which means copy, paste into notepad to shred the website formatting, paste into word and adjust for double returns and bullet points, etc..
After that the online quizzes are simply a matter of reading the question list and using the search function to find the answer in the word document, writing it down and then selecting the right answer from the multiple choice quiz. Easy.
The issue is that copy, paste, adjust for formatting task takes fucking ages and is dull shit.
Granted to get through week 1-4 I basically watched all of 24 whilst copying and pasting, except for those bits where I needed to do the quizzes and revise for the exams, which was fun, but it stills boring as hell.
This course should be taught as activities. Or given to each person in a giant lump that they can search through and read as required to answer questions. This 'do a lot of reading' approach is laborious nonsense.
And the tutor just tells us information that's in the presentations during the 8 hour fucking tutorials as well. Badly presented nonsense I could do without. Exams, OK, but I'd rather spend 8 hours reading the course materials, which I hate doing, than sit there being told what's in the course materials verbally.
Le sigh. Gotta do it if I want to pass the course and get hired though, so only 10 more weeks to go and then I'll be free to review the material as needed for whatever the actual police training will require me to know. Doing it in practise will be a hell've a lot easier for my practical minded brain to absorb than reading it I can tell you that.
I just wish whomsoever wrote my course materials understood the concept of the paragraph because no case study should be a half A4 page of solid text, ye gods.
---
I am having a slight issue with the concept of dispute management.
It doesn't seem like you're allowed to express anger even when it's a justifiable emotion. Someone does you wrong and any normal human being should be angry and express it as a signal of behaviour on the part of someone else which isn't acceptable.
But as a policeman it seems the most you can do is state deadpan your point of view to maintain calm in the situation. Logically I can see why, and I'm rarely angry about anything, even in the face of blatant rudeness. I treat events as information and not as emotional generators by default, it's just who I am.
On the other hand, anger serves a purpose in conversation the same way words do; to imply meaning through emotion is as essential as stating information.
I have full right to be angry at the fitness instructor who totally lacked empathy for my situation during my Day 2. But I doubt I would get away with expressing that with my reasoned point of view, especially given that she reprimanded me on the basis that my attitude was off. Her behaviour was unacceptable, and that point should be made, but deadpan delivery doesn't express my point of view, it simply states the facts. She offended me deeply for what she did given the circumstances and anger is the appropriate response. I'm not seeking resolution to the circumstances, I just want to convey that she acted like a right stone cold bitch without actually saying it. I don't care about apologies either. I just need to make sure she hasn't disabled my application, and appeal if she has.
All in all, it's not my methodology I'm questioning here you understand, it's the perspective of those who will be evaluating and training me in law enforcement. I have methods and those methods will probably work, but will they match the marking criteria written by a lesser mind who believes protocol supersedes context?
Will I be failed based on someone's perception, regardless of the effectiveness of my actions? It's happened before, but given the amount of work I'm putting in here I don't want it to happen again.
---
In a lighter note: when I become a copper I'll be a constable, or police constable, or PC. I'll be PC Miles. I'll evolve into a computer, lol. They said I could become anything, so I because a personal computer.
And yes, I am such a freaking nerd. xD
---
And that's about it.
Got a customer survey from the guys behind TOME: Immortal Arena, and replied with my professional opinion about some aspects of the game. Already wrote about them here and been writing this for an hour and half now so I don't wanna rehash.
I did realize though that the male voice [which is unusual for games which normally go in for female voice actresses] they use during play to announce towers being attacked and things is actually Bruce Campbell, the fucking bas ass mother fucker who played Ash in the Evil Dead franchise.
It's quite possible I'll never forget the line 'Your top tower thingy fell down'. xD
---
OH: and I also looked into maybe doing some freelance writing and things.
A helpful human, @JoeThreepwood on Twitter, gave me some tips in that area, like don't work for free, cover games editors don't already know about, like indie titles, and write pitches to send to editors, not whole articles.
Might be an interesting writing sideline to working for the police seeing as I write a hell've a lot anyway [I mean, look at these blog posts], but I don't have time right now seeing as I need somewhere new to live on Monday and have not one but two exams on Saturday.
Right now though I'm starving hungry and want to get a couple more hours of college work done before snooze and going to the doctors tomorrow where they'll hopefully tell me what the blood hell this throat issue is and how to cure it. I need some fucking exercise for crying out loud.
Have a good one.
Just realized what time it is, 10pm, and that I've not made a blog post yet. Also got a doctors appointment tomorrow afternoon which I can't forget about too [hint, hint to self], especially seeing as I'm wiping spit off my bloody monitor from explosive coughing right now.
Let's make this quick cus I'm vadeing college work at the moment to write this and I need to get the hell on with that...
---
SHEL - When The Sky Fell (Official Music Video)
Watched 24 S09E10 this morning, which is all kinds of epic. Really enjoying that at the moment and wish there was 12 more episodes [24 with only 12 episodes is just weird] but what they've done is quite cool.
It was weird seeing her from The Red Wedding playing the bad guy, but it's so very, very epic seeing Jack in 'That was me being polite, I'll do whatever the hell I want when I want and we both know you can't stop me doing it' mode. In all the other seasons he was working under authority, and now he's still doing good but authority of any kind can kiss his ass, it's awesome.
That's the kind of freedom I want out of the world; I know best and will do what I think is right and not only should you not stop me doing it but trying to stop me once I set my mind to it is impossible.
Some day.
In other TV news: been trying to remember for several days now where I've seen the actor who plays the protagonist in Perception before, and then remembered it was Will and Grace, a US sitcom where he played this gay guy as a lawyer I think.
Gay guy lawyer in sitcom to FBI consultant paranoid schizophrenic brain specialist. GG. And he's hot too [no homo...well, half homo cus I'm bi, but I'd hit that].
It annoys me though that this thing is on it's third season now and Lie to Me got cancelled after two. Granted it went off the rails at the start of season two, but I'd rather have a continuation of season one than this. But Perception isn't a bad watch, though it does seem like every other show is a...what do they call them? Police procedural isn't it? But I've not seen a show about a paranoid schizophrenic before, and the self-reflective episodes appeal to me because half the time I think I'm several ants short of a picnic.
There was a show in 2013 called Dracula. It was a supernatural period piece featuring a rework of the traditional Dracula story. And I thought it was fucking excellent. The story was good, the action was awesome, his struggle to hide his nature was epic, the whole wireless electricity idea was very steam punk, and the black Igor was inspire. And then it got shit canned by ABC after one season. I fucking hate it when that happens. And it didn't deserve it.
Revolution got cancelled after two seasons, which was understandable because it went right off the rails after the first season, but there was nothing wrong with Dracula. Someone should pick that shit up as a novel concept and go to town, they'd make millions for the rework of the classic.
---
I mean, it's a comparative analysis. You walk around not thinking like other people, you see what they don't, they tell you that you should feel this with this stimulus and you start to wonder what's broken inside your head when disassociated people tell you the same thing.
If sanity is measured by the consensus, and I don't think like everyone else, who is the madman here; me or the rest of the world? Personally I believe I'm functionally dysfunctional; I might not be like everyone else, but I'm not unhappy about that and I do get my work done [when I have any to do anyway], so what's the harm?
Well the harm is that sometimes I run into annoying lil troublemakers who decide that the big freak is too freakish to be allowed and his entire existence must be questioned and ostracised. There's a price you pay for originality, and that is rejection by your peers. Doesn't matter if it's in terms of social behaviour or professional conceptualization, if you don't measure up to someone else's standard of normal sometimes people give you a lot of grief over it in the belief that unless you're like the rest of the apples you must be poisonous rot, rather than a banana.
That's humans, and people wonder why I'm misanthropic and oh so cynical.
---
With my adoption of Google 'Chrome' as my browser of choice at the moment after years of using Firefox I decided to go check out the rest of Google's product range.
This was after I restored the drag scroll functionality I have in Firefox to Chrome anyway with the 'Scrollbar Anywhere' extension. This should be included by default in all browsers as it's the best way to precisely control scrolling when you're reading for example and want a slow slide down the page.
I've adopted 'Docs', 'Sites' and 'Drive' from this list.
Docs is basically MS Word online and saves the files to Drive, online cloud storage. Sites can be set up to be like an editable PDF document, so you write a chapter introduction, and then write each sequential part under it. Automatic headings you could say and a great way to categorize content of a book or something. I think it might be useful for writing my computer games development thesis rather than Codex Mundus maybe.
I can see why the meme about Google becoming our new overlords was made after looking at this list cus let's face it, if you go around making a lot of high quality free online software which works neigh perfectly you're going to go a long, long way.
If they made Google 'Games', a computer games studio with their own console I'm sure they could corner the fucking games market easily.
Strangely though you never really hear about their products. Everyone knows about the search engine, the translator, and maybe even the blogger, and Google+ pops up every now and again, but a lot of this stuff isn't well known I don't think. I've not seen it in the places where I hear about associated online services like them anyway.
---
After thinking about this for a while I did realize how virtual computing could work though.
I mean, if you had a device with great graphical processing capacity and display plus a powerful on-board router which could access over the internet something like Google 'Docs' and 'Drive', then you wouldn't need a PC with it's own hard disk drive and processor, you'd just access Google 'PC' for example and they'd do the operations and send the results to your screen.
Alright, so that comes with a whole bag of complications ranging from a spectrum of privacy issues, both in regards to your host searching your files for information combined with inception of files on route between the host server and your work station, and operational issues, including what programs you run, what files you access, and your personal activity history.
A centralized mass database of not just user details but user PC's would be the holy grail of hacks, and nothing online could ever be considered unhackable.
Then you need to consider acts-of-god. One accident and 10,000 PC's and people's virtual lives are destroyed at worst in made in accessible at best for an indefinite amount of time.
You could do it and it'd probably be awesome to be able to access from anywhere and run super high powered programs that would take a £10,000 PC to run yourself for a low monthly fee or something, like internet access. But you would lose quite a lot freedom and run quite a lot of risk in so doing.
Centralization makes things much more efficient, but decentralization makes them much safer.
As with most things, a lil of a both are probably a good idea; keep the PC but some things, like games for example, could be turned into virtual services where the processing is done somewhere else and you just get the gameplay. If you can make the wifi efficient enough anyway, but that's improving all the time.
It's an interesting concept anyway.
---
Opened Gumtree sometime this afternoon and put some credit onto my phone. Sent out about six texts to various ads asking for viewings. Got two replies and a bunch of places I need to visit to consult with them about available properties to rent in London. Going to look into it and make phone calls tomorrow and doing college work today.
And by doing college work I mean looking like this a lot of the time whilst reading and making a copy of the course materials into a 600 page [so far] word document.
It's so stupid. They have this online website called Moodle. All the college course materials for my certificate in basic policing course are on there, plus several dozen online quizzes which I need to complete in order to pass the course. The rest of the marking criteria consists of exams done from week 5 through to week 10. I aced, by my own surprise due to sleeplessness and flu, the week 5 exam. Got two on Saturday for the week 6 exam.
And basically what I've been doing is opening each annotated presentation, handout, and eWorkbook, as they call them, on Moodle and copying them into a giant word document, which means copy, paste into notepad to shred the website formatting, paste into word and adjust for double returns and bullet points, etc..
After that the online quizzes are simply a matter of reading the question list and using the search function to find the answer in the word document, writing it down and then selecting the right answer from the multiple choice quiz. Easy.
The issue is that copy, paste, adjust for formatting task takes fucking ages and is dull shit.
Granted to get through week 1-4 I basically watched all of 24 whilst copying and pasting, except for those bits where I needed to do the quizzes and revise for the exams, which was fun, but it stills boring as hell.
This course should be taught as activities. Or given to each person in a giant lump that they can search through and read as required to answer questions. This 'do a lot of reading' approach is laborious nonsense.
And the tutor just tells us information that's in the presentations during the 8 hour fucking tutorials as well. Badly presented nonsense I could do without. Exams, OK, but I'd rather spend 8 hours reading the course materials, which I hate doing, than sit there being told what's in the course materials verbally.
Le sigh. Gotta do it if I want to pass the course and get hired though, so only 10 more weeks to go and then I'll be free to review the material as needed for whatever the actual police training will require me to know. Doing it in practise will be a hell've a lot easier for my practical minded brain to absorb than reading it I can tell you that.
I just wish whomsoever wrote my course materials understood the concept of the paragraph because no case study should be a half A4 page of solid text, ye gods.
---
I am having a slight issue with the concept of dispute management.
It doesn't seem like you're allowed to express anger even when it's a justifiable emotion. Someone does you wrong and any normal human being should be angry and express it as a signal of behaviour on the part of someone else which isn't acceptable.
But as a policeman it seems the most you can do is state deadpan your point of view to maintain calm in the situation. Logically I can see why, and I'm rarely angry about anything, even in the face of blatant rudeness. I treat events as information and not as emotional generators by default, it's just who I am.
On the other hand, anger serves a purpose in conversation the same way words do; to imply meaning through emotion is as essential as stating information.
I have full right to be angry at the fitness instructor who totally lacked empathy for my situation during my Day 2. But I doubt I would get away with expressing that with my reasoned point of view, especially given that she reprimanded me on the basis that my attitude was off. Her behaviour was unacceptable, and that point should be made, but deadpan delivery doesn't express my point of view, it simply states the facts. She offended me deeply for what she did given the circumstances and anger is the appropriate response. I'm not seeking resolution to the circumstances, I just want to convey that she acted like a right stone cold bitch without actually saying it. I don't care about apologies either. I just need to make sure she hasn't disabled my application, and appeal if she has.
All in all, it's not my methodology I'm questioning here you understand, it's the perspective of those who will be evaluating and training me in law enforcement. I have methods and those methods will probably work, but will they match the marking criteria written by a lesser mind who believes protocol supersedes context?
Will I be failed based on someone's perception, regardless of the effectiveness of my actions? It's happened before, but given the amount of work I'm putting in here I don't want it to happen again.
---
In a lighter note: when I become a copper I'll be a constable, or police constable, or PC. I'll be PC Miles. I'll evolve into a computer, lol. They said I could become anything, so I because a personal computer.
And yes, I am such a freaking nerd. xD
---
And that's about it.
Got a customer survey from the guys behind TOME: Immortal Arena, and replied with my professional opinion about some aspects of the game. Already wrote about them here and been writing this for an hour and half now so I don't wanna rehash.
I did realize though that the male voice [which is unusual for games which normally go in for female voice actresses] they use during play to announce towers being attacked and things is actually Bruce Campbell, the fucking bas ass mother fucker who played Ash in the Evil Dead franchise.
It's quite possible I'll never forget the line 'Your top tower thingy fell down'. xD
---
OH: and I also looked into maybe doing some freelance writing and things.
A helpful human, @JoeThreepwood on Twitter, gave me some tips in that area, like don't work for free, cover games editors don't already know about, like indie titles, and write pitches to send to editors, not whole articles.
Might be an interesting writing sideline to working for the police seeing as I write a hell've a lot anyway [I mean, look at these blog posts], but I don't have time right now seeing as I need somewhere new to live on Monday and have not one but two exams on Saturday.
Right now though I'm starving hungry and want to get a couple more hours of college work done before snooze and going to the doctors tomorrow where they'll hopefully tell me what the blood hell this throat issue is and how to cure it. I need some fucking exercise for crying out loud.
Have a good one.
28/06/2014
On Saterday...
And so it comes to this.
I woke up this morning not in the mood for being alive.
You ever have mornings like that? Where you just wake up and all of 'You' screams in burning agony that reality exists and you're in it? The unfair part is that I don't drink or take drugs of any kind. I just have a genius brain that goes PING occasionally.
Watched some Californication, which I'm really enjoying now it's got to S06 and the crazy nonsense have turned into mad gold. Then crawled to the hypermarket and bought salad and things. Did food shopping for the next week today basically because I ran out of bread and most of my protein type items. Then came home and ate tortillas and chicken, bacon, sweetcorn mayo on seeded bread until I was full.
Wish I had bought more caffeine than a single tin, but low on funds until Monday so. Some coke would've been a good idea though, and I'm in fact sitting here wondering if going for another walk might be a good idea. Probably not though cus the short walk to the hypermarket and back resulted in my lungs trying to evac from my chest.
Fuck I need a doctor to check these things out before I stop breathing. Fortunately I've got an appointment on Wednesday so.
---
Played a couple of League of Legends matches after foods, and that reminded me why I stopped playing that dam shit.
That's why. I've won that game. Won it and should be worshiped as it's presiding god. But see there? Says 'DEFEAT' in big fucking caps at the top of the screen cus my allies are a bunch of mother fucking idiots who don't defend the fucking towers.
---
Hearthstone too, might be single fucking player but fully half of that shit is pure fucking luck, whilst the other half is how much gods dam coin you've spent on buying 'Cards' made of 1's and 0's.
That sort of bullshit annoys the crap out of me. It's one thing to play a physical game and fork over cash for individual bits as each bit needs designing and manufacturing, but art is dirt fucking cheap and digital distribution of software is becoming prevalent over hard copy cus that shit is stupid cheap, so where the fuck you do you get off charging me 1.99 per 6 pack of cards mother fucker?
---
I did just gain closed beta access to Kixeye's new MOBA called 'TOME: Immortal Arena', as I do sometimes because despite appearances I do keep up with new game releases and sign up for beta's like other people scratch.
Haven't played it yet for about three reasons.
The first is my PC is ageing and needs replacing [ah, the wonders of being terminally unemployable] so I'm not sure if it'd even run that well.
The second is that I tried mother fucking Dawngate and found that Waystone are a bunch of idiots who describe their game as a 'Fast Paced MOBA' when their shit is possibly the most convoluted and lacking in focus game I've ever played. And I don't really feel like going through that shit again.
And the third is I should be doing my college work or at least writing games design on Codex Mundus but given my existential crisis [though it was less questioning my value than questioning this universes] I don't feel much like doing anything.
On TOME though, and Dawngate for that matter, these new MOBAs, especially in the case of Dawngate, are pissing me off quite a bit because their developers are effectively ripping off League of Legends, which currently trumps any MOBA out there in terms of gameplay efficiency in the same way World of Warcraft made everyone it's bitch for a good decade.
---
The issue is that their designers have missed a few fundamental points in the design which are essential not only in League of Legends but in MOBA design in general.
They're a bit nebulous, but if I was going to put a name to a few of them I'd say the following:
In character design they've missed one of the key points of fictional mirroring.
Riot Games have done the same thing with League of Legends; taking that which exists in the geek and nerd zeitgeist and creating an icon of it to resonate with the gaming playerbase.
These new MOBA's haven't grasped that this concept is the best way to design a 'Legend' character roster.
Riot Game's take meme's and turn them into champions and/or skins, like the Bear Cavalry meme and one of Sejuani's skins.
And then they got vampires, ninjas, pirates, a Lich, a Skaven, an armored bear, a Golem, a Naga, and even a Trent. Those bitches got style mother fucker.
The Dawngate and TOME don't have style. DG has a walking tombstone and an anthropomorphic kitters and TOME have a Satyr, but that's about it.
Even the older MOBA's like HoN and DotA 2 don't usually hit the mark in good champion design, choosing, like the newer ones, to pull something out of their ass and miss the mark entirely.
I'm not saying that originality is a bad thing, but if you want to win this lil game you need to strike a cord, make a 'Legend', populate your roster with both fun to play champions [and they'll always be champions, not shapers or guardians or some stupid shit] but also those which stand out.
Surprisingly, but not surprisingly as it's fucking Blizzard, Heroes of the Storm by Blizzard is getting it right with their roster which made of every icon from their uber long running RPG and RTS franchises Warcraft and Starcraft.
That's how you fucking design a MOBA cast, though I admit they had a distinct advantage given that they're drawing on the popularity of their own IP's. All they had to do was identify the most popular characters and go to town.
---
I hear though that they cocked up the storyline in HotS by explaining how the champions work together and why they're fighting in the game's universe as 'It's all magic, trolololol'.
League of Legends ain't perfect, but at least they gave it the ole college try, and I would've expected more from Blizzard. Other MOBA's either phone in their backstory [give it a half-hearted go or try to make it unique and special and producing something totally ignorable] or do what I heard Blizzard did and simply provide an excuse.
Stories in MOBA's are tricky things. The idea behind the game is to produce a strategic combat simulator. But the origins of the MOBA genera are RTS games [Defense of the Ancients, the original MOBA, being a mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos] which are a blending of topdown combat and a campaign story.
MOBA's need a campaign story which supports both the reasons these champions exist, and why they keep fighting on the same field of battle, and why death doesn't mean the champion is dead.
In League of Legends this is because the champions are avatar's for political powers, and on the fields of justice they're merely copies from the physical template of the individual that are under the command of a Summoner.
Makes sense and there's a certain story there that the player can look into which is never really developed or included in the actual client.
Fine, that's sufficient, but if you go beyond that then you're getting into realms of the RPG and it's not really required for your game. You need some sort of setting, but it only needs to cover the system, not be a standalone component of the design.
---
I said above that The Dawngate was slow, and it is, but it's ethos on 'Breaking the Meta' is also responsible for it's massively snow bally matches and lack of gameplay focus. Plus the clarity of the maps is almost non-existent.
Play a match of DG and, after you've chosen a non-iconic champion, you'll enter into a match whereby there is no flow to the gameplay.
League of Legends [as I said, the thing is epically designed so it is my first port of call for a reference, the only real issue is that Riot Games are mismanaging the fuck out of it] you do your pre-match and then you play a match and review it in post-match. Or you choose a champion you want to play in a given role, you play a match in that role, and you're prep and skill determine the outcome.
This process isn't well defined in DG. When I played it I couldn't find the Summoners Rift process of Blue > Wight > Wolves, Red > Wraiths > Golems. There're just monsters all over the place, a big bad in the center of the map, and then alters to consider, and towers, and everyone moves really slowly and BLAAAH...there's no flow to the gameplay.
Towers, alters AND jungling on one map makes each DG match almost as long as as an LoL match for each component, so like 3 times as long easily, but then they made the towers regenerate, the alters recoverable, and added in twice as many monsters on either side of the map as they're are in all of Summoners Rift, the biggest LoL map.
Someone took a good look at LoL and thought, 'that all works really well, so we'll take some of that shit and add in more of it for even more fun'. That's like saying, hey football is a well loved sport on this planet, so let's take it, add in two more goals on the top and bottom of the pitch, and make it so every player has a ball and there're 2 goalies for each goal...oh, and each match goes on until one side is 50 goals above the other side, so if they're evenly matched the game goes on for days, like a game of fucking Quidditch.
Fucking long dull chaos man...or at least it would be as the matches I played usually ended when one side simply snow balled and walked over the opposition.
That sometimes happens in League of Legends, but at least you can see why cus someone cocked up and fed or allowed the other side to feed. It doesn't happen as a matter of bloody course.
I stopped trying to play Dawngate however after I got sick of the lack of map clarity. League of Legends recently announced a redesign of their premier map for clarity in graphical presentation, and the preview screen shots look all kinds of fucking epic. You need to be able to tell whats what and where you're going and what you're doing. It needs to be quick, it's needs to be snappy, and it needs to be efficient.
Dawngate isn't. DotA 2 isn't. I'm not fucking touching HoN. Haven't played HotS yet, but want to. And I might install TOME but I don't think it's going to run properly for me.
And I think I'm about done here. Tired of writing [see inverted existential crisis]. Going to...in fact the name of my games thesis is current League of Legends Redux cus I never got around to changing it before making these blogs, but anyway, I'm going to base my game thesis MOBA on League of Legends cus it's just that fucking good.
---
Right now I'm gonna watch some more Californication and then do some college work at last. Write more nonsense tomorrow and maybe even do some programming plus college work.
Monday I start the search for new accommodation, moving out a week tomorrow. A week today I have 2 exams on my police course so I really must hit the books soonest. Wednesday I go to the fucking doctor for my throat, and hopefully haven't died of whatever it is by then.
Yup.
I woke up this morning not in the mood for being alive.
You ever have mornings like that? Where you just wake up and all of 'You' screams in burning agony that reality exists and you're in it? The unfair part is that I don't drink or take drugs of any kind. I just have a genius brain that goes PING occasionally.
Watched some Californication, which I'm really enjoying now it's got to S06 and the crazy nonsense have turned into mad gold. Then crawled to the hypermarket and bought salad and things. Did food shopping for the next week today basically because I ran out of bread and most of my protein type items. Then came home and ate tortillas and chicken, bacon, sweetcorn mayo on seeded bread until I was full.
Wish I had bought more caffeine than a single tin, but low on funds until Monday so. Some coke would've been a good idea though, and I'm in fact sitting here wondering if going for another walk might be a good idea. Probably not though cus the short walk to the hypermarket and back resulted in my lungs trying to evac from my chest.
Fuck I need a doctor to check these things out before I stop breathing. Fortunately I've got an appointment on Wednesday so.
---
Played a couple of League of Legends matches after foods, and that reminded me why I stopped playing that dam shit.
That's why. I've won that game. Won it and should be worshiped as it's presiding god. But see there? Says 'DEFEAT' in big fucking caps at the top of the screen cus my allies are a bunch of mother fucking idiots who don't defend the fucking towers.
---
Hearthstone too, might be single fucking player but fully half of that shit is pure fucking luck, whilst the other half is how much gods dam coin you've spent on buying 'Cards' made of 1's and 0's.
That sort of bullshit annoys the crap out of me. It's one thing to play a physical game and fork over cash for individual bits as each bit needs designing and manufacturing, but art is dirt fucking cheap and digital distribution of software is becoming prevalent over hard copy cus that shit is stupid cheap, so where the fuck you do you get off charging me 1.99 per 6 pack of cards mother fucker?
---
I did just gain closed beta access to Kixeye's new MOBA called 'TOME: Immortal Arena', as I do sometimes because despite appearances I do keep up with new game releases and sign up for beta's like other people scratch.
Haven't played it yet for about three reasons.
The first is my PC is ageing and needs replacing [ah, the wonders of being terminally unemployable] so I'm not sure if it'd even run that well.
The second is that I tried mother fucking Dawngate and found that Waystone are a bunch of idiots who describe their game as a 'Fast Paced MOBA' when their shit is possibly the most convoluted and lacking in focus game I've ever played. And I don't really feel like going through that shit again.
And the third is I should be doing my college work or at least writing games design on Codex Mundus but given my existential crisis [though it was less questioning my value than questioning this universes] I don't feel much like doing anything.
On TOME though, and Dawngate for that matter, these new MOBAs, especially in the case of Dawngate, are pissing me off quite a bit because their developers are effectively ripping off League of Legends, which currently trumps any MOBA out there in terms of gameplay efficiency in the same way World of Warcraft made everyone it's bitch for a good decade.
---
The issue is that their designers have missed a few fundamental points in the design which are essential not only in League of Legends but in MOBA design in general.
They're a bit nebulous, but if I was going to put a name to a few of them I'd say the following:
In character design they've missed one of the key points of fictional mirroring.
Terry Pratchett's Discworld series [where I live half the time in my head] was so successful because he used the narrative design trick of mirroring the real world in fiction. The Last Continent for example was effectively about Australia, but he called it XXXX [a type of beer], and the content of the story was a reflection of what the idea of Australia is in the zeitgeist, the minds of readers.
Riot Games have done the same thing with League of Legends; taking that which exists in the geek and nerd zeitgeist and creating an icon of it to resonate with the gaming playerbase.
These new MOBA's haven't grasped that this concept is the best way to design a 'Legend' character roster.
Riot Game's take meme's and turn them into champions and/or skins, like the Bear Cavalry meme and one of Sejuani's skins.
And then they got vampires, ninjas, pirates, a Lich, a Skaven, an armored bear, a Golem, a Naga, and even a Trent. Those bitches got style mother fucker.
The Dawngate and TOME don't have style. DG has a walking tombstone and an anthropomorphic kitters and TOME have a Satyr, but that's about it.
Even the older MOBA's like HoN and DotA 2 don't usually hit the mark in good champion design, choosing, like the newer ones, to pull something out of their ass and miss the mark entirely.
I'm not saying that originality is a bad thing, but if you want to win this lil game you need to strike a cord, make a 'Legend', populate your roster with both fun to play champions [and they'll always be champions, not shapers or guardians or some stupid shit] but also those which stand out.
Surprisingly, but not surprisingly as it's fucking Blizzard, Heroes of the Storm by Blizzard is getting it right with their roster which made of every icon from their uber long running RPG and RTS franchises Warcraft and Starcraft.
That's how you fucking design a MOBA cast, though I admit they had a distinct advantage given that they're drawing on the popularity of their own IP's. All they had to do was identify the most popular characters and go to town.
---
I hear though that they cocked up the storyline in HotS by explaining how the champions work together and why they're fighting in the game's universe as 'It's all magic, trolololol'.
League of Legends ain't perfect, but at least they gave it the ole college try, and I would've expected more from Blizzard. Other MOBA's either phone in their backstory [give it a half-hearted go or try to make it unique and special and producing something totally ignorable] or do what I heard Blizzard did and simply provide an excuse.
Stories in MOBA's are tricky things. The idea behind the game is to produce a strategic combat simulator. But the origins of the MOBA genera are RTS games [Defense of the Ancients, the original MOBA, being a mod for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos] which are a blending of topdown combat and a campaign story.
MOBA's need a campaign story which supports both the reasons these champions exist, and why they keep fighting on the same field of battle, and why death doesn't mean the champion is dead.
In League of Legends this is because the champions are avatar's for political powers, and on the fields of justice they're merely copies from the physical template of the individual that are under the command of a Summoner.
Makes sense and there's a certain story there that the player can look into which is never really developed or included in the actual client.
Fine, that's sufficient, but if you go beyond that then you're getting into realms of the RPG and it's not really required for your game. You need some sort of setting, but it only needs to cover the system, not be a standalone component of the design.
---
I said above that The Dawngate was slow, and it is, but it's ethos on 'Breaking the Meta' is also responsible for it's massively snow bally matches and lack of gameplay focus. Plus the clarity of the maps is almost non-existent.
Play a match of DG and, after you've chosen a non-iconic champion, you'll enter into a match whereby there is no flow to the gameplay.
League of Legends [as I said, the thing is epically designed so it is my first port of call for a reference, the only real issue is that Riot Games are mismanaging the fuck out of it] you do your pre-match and then you play a match and review it in post-match. Or you choose a champion you want to play in a given role, you play a match in that role, and you're prep and skill determine the outcome.
This process isn't well defined in DG. When I played it I couldn't find the Summoners Rift process of Blue > Wight > Wolves, Red > Wraiths > Golems. There're just monsters all over the place, a big bad in the center of the map, and then alters to consider, and towers, and everyone moves really slowly and BLAAAH...there's no flow to the gameplay.
Towers, alters AND jungling on one map makes each DG match almost as long as as an LoL match for each component, so like 3 times as long easily, but then they made the towers regenerate, the alters recoverable, and added in twice as many monsters on either side of the map as they're are in all of Summoners Rift, the biggest LoL map.
Someone took a good look at LoL and thought, 'that all works really well, so we'll take some of that shit and add in more of it for even more fun'. That's like saying, hey football is a well loved sport on this planet, so let's take it, add in two more goals on the top and bottom of the pitch, and make it so every player has a ball and there're 2 goalies for each goal...oh, and each match goes on until one side is 50 goals above the other side, so if they're evenly matched the game goes on for days, like a game of fucking Quidditch.
Fucking long dull chaos man...or at least it would be as the matches I played usually ended when one side simply snow balled and walked over the opposition.
That sometimes happens in League of Legends, but at least you can see why cus someone cocked up and fed or allowed the other side to feed. It doesn't happen as a matter of bloody course.
I stopped trying to play Dawngate however after I got sick of the lack of map clarity. League of Legends recently announced a redesign of their premier map for clarity in graphical presentation, and the preview screen shots look all kinds of fucking epic. You need to be able to tell whats what and where you're going and what you're doing. It needs to be quick, it's needs to be snappy, and it needs to be efficient.
Dawngate isn't. DotA 2 isn't. I'm not fucking touching HoN. Haven't played HotS yet, but want to. And I might install TOME but I don't think it's going to run properly for me.
UPDATE: I tried playing TOME: Immortal Arena after I wrote this. Turns out it's a browser title, quite snappy, no BS, closed beta so a couple of bugs. And I prefer stand alone clients rather than a system built on a system on a system, game > java probably > FireFox, but it was playable and I enjoyed it, so GG.
Few flaws in the UI design, no champion grid, odd rune/mastery champion customization system. On the other hand the auto-buy was nice, the lack of last hitting was actually pretty good even if it makes the gameplay too easy [just cus it's typically annoying, doesn't make it bad games design; some things are difficult, annoying AND fun by way of challenging], plus the stand-out-of-combat-for-HP regen made the gameplay much more efficient.
That's the thing with new MOBA's; everyone wants theirs to be quick and dynamic, but if you make it quicker you make it less complicated. League of Legends has this balance between speed and depth which doesn't diminish either. That's my view anyway.
League of Legends is teh shit. It badly needs some customization of champions and maps. And the ranked system needs seriously fucking rebooting for rewarding individual play rather than team effort cus I'm fucking beyond sick of being demoted cus of ELO Hell and all the fucking noobs. And Riot Games can rot in the hell for being more about the money these days than the craft. But it's the best MOBA out there pro tem.
And I think I'm about done here. Tired of writing [see inverted existential crisis]. Going to...in fact the name of my games thesis is current League of Legends Redux cus I never got around to changing it before making these blogs, but anyway, I'm going to base my game thesis MOBA on League of Legends cus it's just that fucking good.
---
Right now I'm gonna watch some more Californication and then do some college work at last. Write more nonsense tomorrow and maybe even do some programming plus college work.
Monday I start the search for new accommodation, moving out a week tomorrow. A week today I have 2 exams on my police course so I really must hit the books soonest. Wednesday I go to the fucking doctor for my throat, and hopefully haven't died of whatever it is by then.
Yup.
16/06/2014
On MMORPGs...
Over the last few days I've been downloading World of Warcraft after I got a hankering for some WoW lore by playing Hearthstone.
Whilst so doing I remarked that WoW seemed to be being developed in a proper manner.
Proper development, in this context, being the antithesis of how most interactive software is developed.
---
A game is designed and programmed for a given platform.
Each of it's components are effectively modular and substrate, as in the game engine consists of modules whilst it's assets are arrayed collectively. The graphics display processor for instance forms graphics according to the main line of the program, the models defined in files, with image textures wrapped around them, the whole forming a hierarchy [main < processor < model < texture] which is associated with, for example, sound files, to form a working entity within a gameworld.
The modification and upgrade of any given module of the program and it's corresponding assets is relatively straight forward if you've designed the game engine correctly. You simply adjust that component you wish to improve; to improve the graphics display processor, remove the old one, insert a new one and include in the assets higher resolution models and textures. Easy.
A PC format massive multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG, could be released, for example, ten years ago, and then over those ten years the components - systemic, graphical, audio, etc. - could be upgraded to take advantage of the rapid upgrade of publicly available and popular home PC gaming technology or innovations in games design.
The following could be done irrespective of advances in technology beyond perhaps storage space, although that's hardly an issue these days with multiple terabyte hard drives being commonplace.
Additional content includes refining or adding more of what is already in the game to maintain or elongate the currently active subscription base.
And expansion content could add in alternative [such as PvP arenas] or additional [adding in a card game where no card game existed before] forms of gameplay.
This sort of progressive development would mean that a game could be released and then continually developed indefinitely by a single studio, adjusted and upgraded on an on-going basis to maintain a profitable playerbase.
---
I remarked that WoW seemed to be being developed in a proper manner whilst downloading it's current client.
And then I actually played it.
The graphics and animations are the same as they were a good five years ago. As is the gameplay.
They haven't actually upgraded anything about it in five different major expansions.
Oh, they've adjusted the gameplay. I don't think you buy new abilities anymore for example, and the talent tree is now one ability with three variants where you pick one it looks like, and there's glyphs and other stuff, but you're still locked into picking a race, a class, and grinding your way to max level on quests and enemies.
Likewise with expansion content. They've added dungeons, they've added arenas, they've even added a kind of Pokemon pet battle system, which is all very nice, but still got 90 odd levels of grinding to do per character.
Point is that World of Warcraft has seen a lot of changes, a lot of what could be seen in a fair light as 'improvements', but the fact is that it's core gameplay, the World of Warcraft experience is OLD.
---
There have been a lot of other MMORPGs which have copied a lot of the World of Warcraft formula, [and justifiably so given it's popularity] WoW itself being based even older MMORPG's such as Everquest which predated it by a good five years.
My issue with the current crop of AAA [top of the games industry] MMORPGs is that they're all pretty much alt-WoW.
WildStar for example. I got into the beta of that and summed it up as WoW 2 in space.
The race list: you've got the good free humans and the bad imperial humans, the dwarf/orcs and the machine/trolls, the gnomes and the beastmen, the undead and the cuter version of goblins.
Different cords, same tune.
The game is an improvement, sure, it looks better than WoW and plays better too, but that's just it, it's still WoW, it's just an update. It's old archaic stuff with a new lick of paint. See past the gloss and you find the rust.
And that's my problem.
---
Everquest Next and Landmark, Sony's current central gaming enterprise, has been said to be the revolution of the MMORPG.
The best way to describe Landmark, as no one as yet has access to EQN, is as spherical Minecraft.
He also never programmed in proper gameplay or objectivity or instruction or any sort of templatism.
Most people who played Minecraft did so for five minuets before getting bored because they didn't know what to do next, and building anything is a painful process of putting every single block into position, like drawing in MS Paint.
Landmark is precisely the same. You spend ages running around collecting building materials, and then not knowing what the hell to do with them because there is no objectivity. And most people aren't 3D artists, and you can't edit the landscape beyond the confines of your plot anyway so your building often looks drastically out of place.
EQN may include objectivity as it's an MMORPG, but I doubt they'll tie the two systems together efficiently, or ever even address the perspective and information management flaws, even if they have addressed the efficency of the block placement with fill, copy and paste tools.
That's the point though; if Minecraft can be called Voxel MS Paint, then Landmark can be called Voxel 3D Studio Max. Both of which are tools designed for artists [even if Paint is for children in that respect] and most gamers aren't artists.
I'm not saying settlement builders and landscapers can't be games. SimCity for example provides a degree of both, as does The Settlers and Civilizations.
Dark Chronicles for the PS2 [if you can believe it] however is the only micro-editing gameplay system [the others I just mentioned being macro] that allows for small scale customization in an efficient and user friendly fashion.
An expansion of that system could permit accessible map customization to the average player who mostly just wants to hack things to pieces, not spend hours precisely detailing his porch lamp.
The hamfisted way Sony's crew is managing the evolution of Minecraft is stupid in the extreme. I wouldn't be bothered except the obvious solutions to the issues inherent in their system are so blinding obvious that a chimp could see them. How can smart people be so dumb is what I keep asking myself...
---
Anyway, an actual new MMORPG, an innovative improved upgraded game, in my view, should be a hybrid of four, to a give an example, other games: League of Legends, Minecraft/Landmark, WoW, and Civilizations [with maybe a lil of Dark Chronicles user friendliness].
League of Legends is masterful in it's presentation and gameplay. The fluidity, the low-poly high-quality graphics, the stylization, and characterization, all marvellous. If it wasn't for Riot Games' corporate attitude, blinding arrogance, lack of ambition, empty words and general asshattery [whoever wrote that statement on ELO Hell being a myth is going to get my foot up their ass] they'd be the best there is.
Minecraft/Landmark and voxel editing is great in functionality, but there's a massive chasm between that and the user that no developer has yet addressed, probably because developers don't mind using developer tools and for some reason they never consider user friendliness. I couldn't begin to tell you why this is, but in my experience (HA, maybe I can then) it's because people think of A, maybe B if they try, but never get to C, and as for D...well...
World of Warcraft [or WildStar as it might be] is again like League of Legends. Well made, well written, well organized, very entertaining, but stale, archaic and old. That kind of gameplay - third person RPG which is accessible and well crafted - but mixed with a hell've a lot more in terms of free-form character development and customization.
And Civilizations is my go to example of how to build an information management 4X strategy title. You start off with a settle or two and by the end of a match that can last a couple of days of real time you own the planet. Obviously in an ongoing MMORPG you would have to own a space of your own and interact with others who you couldn't directly conquer perhaps, but that kind of factional management scope anyway.
The efficiency and environmental perception of LoL, the customization of Landmark expanded to include the micro-editing of the character, with the presentation and writing of WoW/WildStar, hybridized with the civilization and factional customization of Civilizations.
With progressive updates to the entire game system you could perpetuate the game for decades. You own realm, you colonize it, make it your own, work in a cooperative online space in shared settlements, and then expand out into the wyldlands where you fight for territory.
You don't have classes and levels, you have a character you build into whatever you want and respec if you get bored.
You can adventure and go delving into dungeons, you can play cards, you can fight using monsters, you can race vehicles you built, you can explore unknown maps which aren't mapped and that've never been visited by another play but have points of interest in them.
You can actually live the fucking virtual world instead of just running through the motions and grinding your character in the usual online computer game.
That's what an MMORPG should be. A true virtual world.
And that is something no studio or developer is ever going to make. It exists only in my head.
Whilst so doing I remarked that WoW seemed to be being developed in a proper manner.
Proper development, in this context, being the antithesis of how most interactive software is developed.
---
A game is designed and programmed for a given platform.
Each of it's components are effectively modular and substrate, as in the game engine consists of modules whilst it's assets are arrayed collectively. The graphics display processor for instance forms graphics according to the main line of the program, the models defined in files, with image textures wrapped around them, the whole forming a hierarchy [main < processor < model < texture] which is associated with, for example, sound files, to form a working entity within a gameworld.
The modification and upgrade of any given module of the program and it's corresponding assets is relatively straight forward if you've designed the game engine correctly. You simply adjust that component you wish to improve; to improve the graphics display processor, remove the old one, insert a new one and include in the assets higher resolution models and textures. Easy.
A PC format massive multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG, could be released, for example, ten years ago, and then over those ten years the components - systemic, graphical, audio, etc. - could be upgraded to take advantage of the rapid upgrade of publicly available and popular home PC gaming technology or innovations in games design.
The following could be done irrespective of advances in technology beyond perhaps storage space, although that's hardly an issue these days with multiple terabyte hard drives being commonplace.
- Adjustments to gameplay.
- Additional content.
- Or expansion content.
Additional content includes refining or adding more of what is already in the game to maintain or elongate the currently active subscription base.
And expansion content could add in alternative [such as PvP arenas] or additional [adding in a card game where no card game existed before] forms of gameplay.
This sort of progressive development would mean that a game could be released and then continually developed indefinitely by a single studio, adjusted and upgraded on an on-going basis to maintain a profitable playerbase.
---
I remarked that WoW seemed to be being developed in a proper manner whilst downloading it's current client.
And then I actually played it.
The graphics and animations are the same as they were a good five years ago. As is the gameplay.
They haven't actually upgraded anything about it in five different major expansions.
Oh, they've adjusted the gameplay. I don't think you buy new abilities anymore for example, and the talent tree is now one ability with three variants where you pick one it looks like, and there's glyphs and other stuff, but you're still locked into picking a race, a class, and grinding your way to max level on quests and enemies.
This character class business was developed for Dungeons and Dragons more than 35 years ago, and although things have been added to it, it's core is designed for table top roleplaying and not computer games. It's absolutely ridiculous to still be using it, especially in the face of the fact that people will flock to a game which gives them customization and freedom to do what they want rather than what they're told.They've added a lot of additional content, but as I stated above, this is just more of what was already there.
Likewise with expansion content. They've added dungeons, they've added arenas, they've even added a kind of Pokemon pet battle system, which is all very nice, but still got 90 odd levels of grinding to do per character.
Point is that World of Warcraft has seen a lot of changes, a lot of what could be seen in a fair light as 'improvements', but the fact is that it's core gameplay, the World of Warcraft experience is OLD.
---
There have been a lot of other MMORPGs which have copied a lot of the World of Warcraft formula, [and justifiably so given it's popularity] WoW itself being based even older MMORPG's such as Everquest which predated it by a good five years.
My issue with the current crop of AAA [top of the games industry] MMORPGs is that they're all pretty much alt-WoW.
WildStar for example. I got into the beta of that and summed it up as WoW 2 in space.
The race list: you've got the good free humans and the bad imperial humans, the dwarf/orcs and the machine/trolls, the gnomes and the beastmen, the undead and the cuter version of goblins.
Different cords, same tune.
The game is an improvement, sure, it looks better than WoW and plays better too, but that's just it, it's still WoW, it's just an update. It's old archaic stuff with a new lick of paint. See past the gloss and you find the rust.
And that's my problem.
---
Everquest Next and Landmark, Sony's current central gaming enterprise, has been said to be the revolution of the MMORPG.
The best way to describe Landmark, as no one as yet has access to EQN, is as spherical Minecraft.
Voxel based engines like Minecraft and Landmark are either cubic [Minecraft] or spherical [Landmark] and is the different between a world made out of sharp edges and lines and smooth curves.One of the issues with Minecraft, which Notch never addressed, was that the best way to manage environmental editing was by using the topdown perspective for a birds-eye view of the landscape.
He also never programmed in proper gameplay or objectivity or instruction or any sort of templatism.
Most people who played Minecraft did so for five minuets before getting bored because they didn't know what to do next, and building anything is a painful process of putting every single block into position, like drawing in MS Paint.
Landmark is precisely the same. You spend ages running around collecting building materials, and then not knowing what the hell to do with them because there is no objectivity. And most people aren't 3D artists, and you can't edit the landscape beyond the confines of your plot anyway so your building often looks drastically out of place.
EQN may include objectivity as it's an MMORPG, but I doubt they'll tie the two systems together efficiently, or ever even address the perspective and information management flaws, even if they have addressed the efficency of the block placement with fill, copy and paste tools.
That's the point though; if Minecraft can be called Voxel MS Paint, then Landmark can be called Voxel 3D Studio Max. Both of which are tools designed for artists [even if Paint is for children in that respect] and most gamers aren't artists.
I'm not saying settlement builders and landscapers can't be games. SimCity for example provides a degree of both, as does The Settlers and Civilizations.
Dark Chronicles for the PS2 [if you can believe it] however is the only micro-editing gameplay system [the others I just mentioned being macro] that allows for small scale customization in an efficient and user friendly fashion.
An expansion of that system could permit accessible map customization to the average player who mostly just wants to hack things to pieces, not spend hours precisely detailing his porch lamp.
The hamfisted way Sony's crew is managing the evolution of Minecraft is stupid in the extreme. I wouldn't be bothered except the obvious solutions to the issues inherent in their system are so blinding obvious that a chimp could see them. How can smart people be so dumb is what I keep asking myself...
---
Anyway, an actual new MMORPG, an innovative improved upgraded game, in my view, should be a hybrid of four, to a give an example, other games: League of Legends, Minecraft/Landmark, WoW, and Civilizations [with maybe a lil of Dark Chronicles user friendliness].
League of Legends is masterful in it's presentation and gameplay. The fluidity, the low-poly high-quality graphics, the stylization, and characterization, all marvellous. If it wasn't for Riot Games' corporate attitude, blinding arrogance, lack of ambition, empty words and general asshattery [whoever wrote that statement on ELO Hell being a myth is going to get my foot up their ass] they'd be the best there is.
Minecraft/Landmark and voxel editing is great in functionality, but there's a massive chasm between that and the user that no developer has yet addressed, probably because developers don't mind using developer tools and for some reason they never consider user friendliness. I couldn't begin to tell you why this is, but in my experience (HA, maybe I can then) it's because people think of A, maybe B if they try, but never get to C, and as for D...well...
World of Warcraft [or WildStar as it might be] is again like League of Legends. Well made, well written, well organized, very entertaining, but stale, archaic and old. That kind of gameplay - third person RPG which is accessible and well crafted - but mixed with a hell've a lot more in terms of free-form character development and customization.
And Civilizations is my go to example of how to build an information management 4X strategy title. You start off with a settle or two and by the end of a match that can last a couple of days of real time you own the planet. Obviously in an ongoing MMORPG you would have to own a space of your own and interact with others who you couldn't directly conquer perhaps, but that kind of factional management scope anyway.
The efficiency and environmental perception of LoL, the customization of Landmark expanded to include the micro-editing of the character, with the presentation and writing of WoW/WildStar, hybridized with the civilization and factional customization of Civilizations.
With progressive updates to the entire game system you could perpetuate the game for decades. You own realm, you colonize it, make it your own, work in a cooperative online space in shared settlements, and then expand out into the wyldlands where you fight for territory.
You don't have classes and levels, you have a character you build into whatever you want and respec if you get bored.
You can adventure and go delving into dungeons, you can play cards, you can fight using monsters, you can race vehicles you built, you can explore unknown maps which aren't mapped and that've never been visited by another play but have points of interest in them.
You can actually live the fucking virtual world instead of just running through the motions and grinding your character in the usual online computer game.
That's what an MMORPG should be. A true virtual world.
And that is something no studio or developer is ever going to make. It exists only in my head.
14/06/2014
On Design...
Ye gods I feel like fried sheet. -_-
In my efforts to prep for my Day 2 fitness exam I think I gave myself a cold.
I don't get ill for several years, healthy as a horse, run like the wind, but the moment someone wants to measure my fitness level I get a strep infection for three months and then a cold a week before the test.
I hate this fucking world. >:|
---
Regarding other things that make me angry:
If you're writing fantasy fiction, or drawing fantasy characters, or, ya know what, if you go anywhere near fantasy anything, learn what things are fucking called.
Just met a guy on DeviantART who decided to draw a Dwarf - short, broad, line based patterns on his clothes with squares and diamonds, long white beard, granite express, the works - and then he tells me he's a Gnome Warlock.
But for crying out loud, Gnomes are effectively natural midgets.
Other stupidity includes people naming their Wyverns as Dragons. No, that is a Wyvern. It's only got two legs and bat like wings. It's a draconian bird, not a bloody true Eastern Dragon. And what's it doing breathing fire like that? True Dragons breath fire to guard their hoards, but that thing would burn it's own nest to cinders.
Poetic license is all well and good when it comes to rewriting Game of Thrones with more magic, but don't tell me that bloody flying lizard is a Dragon when it's very obviously a dam Wyvern.
And Nagas, oh idiots of DeviantART who I had a three month argument with over a misnamed Medusa, are lower half snakes, upper half humans regardless of if it has snake hair or not. Snake hair on a human, now that's a Medusa. What you have there is very clearly a Naga.
Get it right or go home.
A lion is a lion, and not a cheetah simply because you like the word and that they run quick and this specific lion you've defined in your work is fast on his feet.
---
What else...well, there's computer game genres.
The more or less industry standard list is on Wikipedia, although it seems to me like every shop, developer, player and anyone talking about them categorizes games their own way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres
What do we have here?
Action games. Action? Really? What interactive software doesn't include action of some kind? I've never played a game in my life where I thought, 'this game, this game right, what it needs is action of some sort because it just doesn't have any'. Biggest misnomer in the history of naming conventions.
Action-adventure. OK, firstly you've got two genres with the same word, which suggests that the latter is a sub-genre of the first, and secondly the addition of the word 'Adventure' does nothing for clarification on what games are part of that genre. Legend of Zelda includes both 'Action' within your own context and certainly has a deep and abiding adventure to it, but it's neither stealth nor horror, so wtf?
Roleplaying. Like action, most games give you a role to play, and it's a misnomer on general principles because most roleplaying games in my experience are essentially strategic number crunchers, and level grinders with more emphasis on base maths and inventory management than anything else.
Sports. Most sports titles are in fact based on the principles of strategic management of assets, environmental navigation, and effectively the same gameplay as your average combative game. Hell, eSports use strategy titles like StarCraft II because they play almost precisely like football games.
And the rest are 'We've not got a good way of categorizing these, so we're lumping a lot of gameplay types into the minc. category and closing the browser'.
The second word is related to systemic design whereby you have the base information of a game, which is presented via a setting [system mask; matter which can be quantified by math for example], that is built using an environment, which is interacted with via an interface, and those interactions are quantified.
The most important factor about my genre list is that no game belongs to only one genre. Quite the opposite in fact; all games belong to every genre, but are categorised by their apex aspect.
Take away any given factor entirely from a piece of interactive software, and you no longer have a game.
A game of the Strategy [Information] genre could be Civilizations for it's emphasis on information management, but it includes a setting, an environment, an interface, and interactions between units and the civilizations themselves via diplomacy.
It is categorised as a Strategy [Information] title but includes lesser components of all other genres, if quite significantly developed. Primarily though it's about information and numbers.
Tetris, under this definition protocol, would in fact be a Racing [Interface] title as it's emphasis is on precise control of the interface. It has information [different kinds of blocks and a score], a setting [the presentation stylization of information and environment], an environment [block shapes which drop down a rectangular gameworld], and interactions between the controllable units [lines vanish if made from wall to wall, if blocks pile up to the ceiling the game ends], if beyond the interface all of these are most basically defined, but nevertheless those components are part of the entire design of the software.
This is a genre categorization system designed by a actual games designer, an interactive software engineer, and not superficial morons who coined the 'Action' genre.
---
The last pertinent thing I can think of in relation to this, especially as I need to go get on with my college work, is this:
The lack of education of games industry 'professionals' is shocking.
No one has ever sat down and categorized computer game cameras for example. No one except for me anyway.
First person [Eye], second person [Shoulder], third person [Behind-the-Head], topdown [Birdseye] and sideon [Spectacle], with Cinematic [Rail] for recording in-game movies.
It's not complicated, it's not hard to build if you know about quaternions matrix math, but go find a university, find the head tutor and/or course designer and ask them about the different sorts of cameras in computer games, their best use protocols, and if the course includes how to make them and see what they say.
A blank look and/or a deflection is what you'll probably receive.
Games are interactive software. Virtual engines. They have components to them which are standard because of the technology we have, like 2D monitors and TVs. And no one I've ever met builds the basics. No one sees them like I do.
I know it's a young industry, it's still in it's infancy as far as RnD is concerned, but it just seems to me that people go around doing the same stupid shit over and over without ever actually sitting down and thinking about how to do it the right way for once.
If I had the time I'd go over the whole user customization of game content issue in RPG's. How old character classes are, as a concept, and how the addition of mastery trees is dam stupid in comparison to the rejected notion of freeform character class construction, but that'll have to wait for another time...
---
Got through Week 2 of my Certificate in Basic Policing course last night. Week 3 and 4 left to go by Thursday. Lots of running around on Monday still to do, revision for Week 5 exam on Saturday, and the forms for my Day 2 police interview Friday are under my keyboard and need filling out.
Asides from that; fight my cold and the strep [good grief] and don't play too much Hearthstone.
Against my better judgement I'm half tempted to give League of Legends ranked another go. Not out of expectation of being allowed to rank up through the ELO Hell I mentioned last post you understand, but out of a change of pace really. Hearthstone is OK, but I need to spend a lot more money on it before I can realistically rank up, and I'm not that bothered to do so.
Tempted to play World of Warcraft as well. Did a few years back around Lich King. Left after I made an OP Hunter who couldn't be killed because of a flaw in their pet/ranged system where my damage output on pet masteries resulted in insta-murder of anything I was fighting. Plus they required me to spend 10,000 hours grinding to gain a decent flying mount and I thought 'Fuck that'.
They might have made some improvements in several major updates though, especially to PvP and I wouldn't mind doing some third person rather than topdown.
We'll see...
Food, shower, college work, and maybe a trip to the hypermarket for caffeine later.
GG.
In my efforts to prep for my Day 2 fitness exam I think I gave myself a cold.
I don't get ill for several years, healthy as a horse, run like the wind, but the moment someone wants to measure my fitness level I get a strep infection for three months and then a cold a week before the test.
I hate this fucking world. >:|
---
Regarding other things that make me angry:
If you're writing fantasy fiction, or drawing fantasy characters, or, ya know what, if you go anywhere near fantasy anything, learn what things are fucking called.
Just met a guy on DeviantART who decided to draw a Dwarf - short, broad, line based patterns on his clothes with squares and diamonds, long white beard, granite express, the works - and then he tells me he's a Gnome Warlock.
UPDATE: Before blocking me from his account he sent me a message saying 'maybe I'll decide what and how do I draw?', direct quote from http://philiera.deviantart.com/
I don't remember telling you what you can and cannot or how you do or do not draw anything man. What I remember is telling you that you drew a Dwarf and are calling is a fucking Gnome.
I don't know what it is about artists but for some reason the ability to draw goes hand in hand with the ability to not see reason. They think with their emotions and when you settle down to try to explain anything to them they fly off the handle instead of listening to a word you say...OK, so do most people because most people are godawful dumb, but artists, almost intentionally, miss the fucking point.Nothing against Gnomes, and Warlocks can be interesting as dark wizards, especially Blizzard's masters of the demonic realms in World of Warcraft.
But for crying out loud, Gnomes are effectively natural midgets.
Halflings, Hobbits, or as I prefer 'Lilli' which is short for Lilliputian - the antithesis of Gargantuan, as I prefer the word Gargant instead of Giant, the opposite of which would be Small or Tiny possibly, which is ridiculous as a racial name - are miniature humans.My point here is this; I know my fantasy races and lore. And ye gods is it ever annoying when people misname things, like someone going around calling their dog a fox when it's clearly a German Shepard.
Halfling was coined by Wizards of the Coast after a copyright disagreement with Tolkien over the use of the word Hobbit, and Hobbit is related to Hob, as in Hobgoblin, or of the Hearth and Home which is why they're so homely. I go with Lilli and Gargant, both of which sound better and are taxonomically accurate.
Gnomes are a sort of Light Fae like variant of Lilli, their opposite being the Goblins, which are technically Dark Fae, although some people prefer to lump Goblins into the same category as Orcs, which are effectively bestial humans, especially those in World of Warcraft. Elves of course are the Light Fae opposite of Orcs, their grace an antithesis to the brutality of the Orcs.
Other stupidity includes people naming their Wyverns as Dragons. No, that is a Wyvern. It's only got two legs and bat like wings. It's a draconian bird, not a bloody true Eastern Dragon. And what's it doing breathing fire like that? True Dragons breath fire to guard their hoards, but that thing would burn it's own nest to cinders.
Poetic license is all well and good when it comes to rewriting Game of Thrones with more magic, but don't tell me that bloody flying lizard is a Dragon when it's very obviously a dam Wyvern.
And Nagas, oh idiots of DeviantART who I had a three month argument with over a misnamed Medusa, are lower half snakes, upper half humans regardless of if it has snake hair or not. Snake hair on a human, now that's a Medusa. What you have there is very clearly a Naga.
Get it right or go home.
A lion is a lion, and not a cheetah simply because you like the word and that they run quick and this specific lion you've defined in your work is fast on his feet.
---
What else...well, there's computer game genres.
The more or less industry standard list is on Wikipedia, although it seems to me like every shop, developer, player and anyone talking about them categorizes games their own way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres
What do we have here?
Action games. Action? Really? What interactive software doesn't include action of some kind? I've never played a game in my life where I thought, 'this game, this game right, what it needs is action of some sort because it just doesn't have any'. Biggest misnomer in the history of naming conventions.
Action-adventure. OK, firstly you've got two genres with the same word, which suggests that the latter is a sub-genre of the first, and secondly the addition of the word 'Adventure' does nothing for clarification on what games are part of that genre. Legend of Zelda includes both 'Action' within your own context and certainly has a deep and abiding adventure to it, but it's neither stealth nor horror, so wtf?
Roleplaying. Like action, most games give you a role to play, and it's a misnomer on general principles because most roleplaying games in my experience are essentially strategic number crunchers, and level grinders with more emphasis on base maths and inventory management than anything else.
Sports. Most sports titles are in fact based on the principles of strategic management of assets, environmental navigation, and effectively the same gameplay as your average combative game. Hell, eSports use strategy titles like StarCraft II because they play almost precisely like football games.
And the rest are 'We've not got a good way of categorizing these, so we're lumping a lot of gameplay types into the minc. category and closing the browser'.
NOTE: Recently I've grown to really hate Wikipedia and Wiki's in general. Their rules, apparently, don't allow for people to define self-evident facts about, for example, a book series.
The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher has 15 books out in it's series as of 14/06/2014. Each 5 thus far, so 5, 10 and 15, all contained the same antagonist. It is a fair prediction that this is intentionally the case by the author. I stated that based on precedent and rumour the final in the main series of 20 books, which has been confirmed by the author for definite, will feature the same antagonist as 5, 10 and 15 as they feature every fifth book.
This observational note counts as 'Original Research' and is therefore inadmissible to any Wiki website despite being self-evidently the case. A statement of fact of the nature of three books, a definition of a trend in their creation, and the statement of the fact that a rumour exists that each fifth is thus is not original research, it is a factual conceptualisation of the truth.
By this logic you could not post on the 'Sky' Wikipedia entry that the sky is in fact usually a blue colour to humans. That's original research. Self-evident, obvious, and a statement of fact it might be, but unless a meteorologist wrote about it in a published work with evidence to prove it, it would be inadmissible.
Someone actually used the phrase 'Truth and fact don't actually matter here' during the argument, and it was at this point I just walked away shaking my head. When they stop mattering, so to does the argument.Whatever, so the point is that I categorise games thus:
- Strategy [Information]
- Roleplaying [Setting]
- Platforming [Environment]
- Racing [Interface]
- Combat [Interaction]
The second word is related to systemic design whereby you have the base information of a game, which is presented via a setting [system mask; matter which can be quantified by math for example], that is built using an environment, which is interacted with via an interface, and those interactions are quantified.
The most important factor about my genre list is that no game belongs to only one genre. Quite the opposite in fact; all games belong to every genre, but are categorised by their apex aspect.
Take away any given factor entirely from a piece of interactive software, and you no longer have a game.
A game of the Strategy [Information] genre could be Civilizations for it's emphasis on information management, but it includes a setting, an environment, an interface, and interactions between units and the civilizations themselves via diplomacy.
It is categorised as a Strategy [Information] title but includes lesser components of all other genres, if quite significantly developed. Primarily though it's about information and numbers.
Tetris, under this definition protocol, would in fact be a Racing [Interface] title as it's emphasis is on precise control of the interface. It has information [different kinds of blocks and a score], a setting [the presentation stylization of information and environment], an environment [block shapes which drop down a rectangular gameworld], and interactions between the controllable units [lines vanish if made from wall to wall, if blocks pile up to the ceiling the game ends], if beyond the interface all of these are most basically defined, but nevertheless those components are part of the entire design of the software.
This is a genre categorization system designed by a actual games designer, an interactive software engineer, and not superficial morons who coined the 'Action' genre.
---
The last pertinent thing I can think of in relation to this, especially as I need to go get on with my college work, is this:
The lack of education of games industry 'professionals' is shocking.
No one has ever sat down and categorized computer game cameras for example. No one except for me anyway.
First person [Eye], second person [Shoulder], third person [Behind-the-Head], topdown [Birdseye] and sideon [Spectacle], with Cinematic [Rail] for recording in-game movies.
It's not complicated, it's not hard to build if you know about quaternions matrix math, but go find a university, find the head tutor and/or course designer and ask them about the different sorts of cameras in computer games, their best use protocols, and if the course includes how to make them and see what they say.
A blank look and/or a deflection is what you'll probably receive.
Games are interactive software. Virtual engines. They have components to them which are standard because of the technology we have, like 2D monitors and TVs. And no one I've ever met builds the basics. No one sees them like I do.
I know it's a young industry, it's still in it's infancy as far as RnD is concerned, but it just seems to me that people go around doing the same stupid shit over and over without ever actually sitting down and thinking about how to do it the right way for once.
If I had the time I'd go over the whole user customization of game content issue in RPG's. How old character classes are, as a concept, and how the addition of mastery trees is dam stupid in comparison to the rejected notion of freeform character class construction, but that'll have to wait for another time...
---
Got through Week 2 of my Certificate in Basic Policing course last night. Week 3 and 4 left to go by Thursday. Lots of running around on Monday still to do, revision for Week 5 exam on Saturday, and the forms for my Day 2 police interview Friday are under my keyboard and need filling out.
Asides from that; fight my cold and the strep [good grief] and don't play too much Hearthstone.
Against my better judgement I'm half tempted to give League of Legends ranked another go. Not out of expectation of being allowed to rank up through the ELO Hell I mentioned last post you understand, but out of a change of pace really. Hearthstone is OK, but I need to spend a lot more money on it before I can realistically rank up, and I'm not that bothered to do so.
Tempted to play World of Warcraft as well. Did a few years back around Lich King. Left after I made an OP Hunter who couldn't be killed because of a flaw in their pet/ranged system where my damage output on pet masteries resulted in insta-murder of anything I was fighting. Plus they required me to spend 10,000 hours grinding to gain a decent flying mount and I thought 'Fuck that'.
They might have made some improvements in several major updates though, especially to PvP and I wouldn't mind doing some third person rather than topdown.
We'll see...
Food, shower, college work, and maybe a trip to the hypermarket for caffeine later.
GG.
13/06/2014
On ELO Hell...
Hai. Not a happy temporary resident of a tent at the moment. >:|
Went running last night, did one lap of stage one of my two hour running route, of which contains three stages, and then spent half an hour barely able to breath.
Once I could walk I went to the hypermarket and got some liquid mucus cough meds and drank about half bottle [so against the label but I'm built like a jungle ape and have a slow metabolism so taking more than recommend dose is recommend for me] by sipping every time I needed to cough or couldn't breath normally.
This resulted in it clearly enough for me to do two more laps of the course. Go in, showered, slept, and now my sinuses have thick [sorry] yellow mucus in them, which I'm assuming is the corpse of the growing strep that suddenly found itself bathed in poison last night.
Woke up, decided to give running a miss tonight, and played some Hearthstone to wake up.
---
I just don't understand that game. You build a deck, you find it works, win four or five matches, and then it stops working and you drop to the bottom of the table again. So you try another champion, Druid instead of Rogue, and the same thing happens again.
Mostly I lose because either I have a bad hand [sheer luck factor] or someone pulls out cards which are a] expensive/rare [like the dragon edged boss cards] and b] have this OP ability [the freaking priest champion, in 3 moves in the late game, can make a minion with 15/15 in 3 cards, including summoning the fucking minion, I mean how do you fucking fight that?].
---
I don't know...
You play League of Legends, and you encounter ELO Hell whereby the system puts you with idiot allies who can't possibly fight your opposition. You score 10-15/0-5/whatever assists every match outside ranked, but go into ranked and you lose because of your allies feeding the enemy and dragging you down.
So despite your skill and knowledge of that game, you leave because it's rigged and biased so you lose and can't possibly reach the higher ranked leagues. You could if the game, most sensibly, took YOUR own performance into account when ranking, so regardless of your allies you yourself would still be marked on your own ability, but it doesn't.
I mean, imagine taking an exam where the nearest four people to you in the hall's marks were added to yours and you were given the average of that. You know the material and they don't, so you end up in the 'special' class and can't leave because you're surrounded by idiots. That's how I feel playing League of Legends.
So you go to play Hearthstone on the basis that it's single player so there's only your own ability taken into consideration in ranked. But here you encounter a randomized system with a edge of power-for-pounds, the UK version [the two P's make for eloquent pronunciation] of 'spend cash to be more powerful than other equally or greater skilled enemies'.
Personally I'm of the point of view that both games are rigged, only Hearthstone is a tad more obvious about it's biased game maniacs as if you spend money you can afford more powerful cards.
---
Consider this:
Both LoL and Hearthstone are free-to-play computer games. This means that they don't ask players to spend money to gain access to the gameplay. Instead they give you access to the game's content, for free, but you have the option to pay for customization or unlock devices which expand the content gained by playing the game itself.
In LoL's case customization comes in the form of champion skins so you can make your favorite champions your own. Unlock is then provided in the form of Riot Points which allows access to other champions not on the free roster [the free set consists of two handfuls of weekly rotating champions, and then you can pay either money or RP to unlock new ones quickly or slowly respectively]
And in Hearthstone additional cards can be acquired at a faster rate than what you can gain by playing the game itself and earning gold to buy packs if you spend money. This is indicative of power-for-pounds because those who spend money have a stronger deck than those who don't.
Now, you own the studios behind these games and you want people to pay money for the game and you can achieve this in two ways.
The first and public way is 'Optionally'. This is where you tell people the precise mechanics of the system. Play the game to unlock content. You can unlock content faster and customize your version of the game by spending money. People play the game, become invested, and then spend money of their own free will.
The second and secret way is 'ELO Hell' or 'Rank Bias Failure'. This is where the unranked modes are fare and set up so people of equal skill fight on even footing. However, the ranked modes are designed so that anyone who has not spent money on the game is allied with noobs so despite their own ability, they cannot win matches.
But surely your playerbase would notice this? You'd have a lot of players who play the game for the game for ages and don't care about customization or quick unlocks, or can't afford them, who find that no matter what they score outside of ranked, they can't rank up because their allies all feed 0/10 in minuets and drag them down.
Well this is precisely what Riot Game's have. A large quantity of their playerbase complaining about ELO Hell.
So what do you do about this so the facts of the matter don't make your company seem like a right bunch of assholes?
Well two things:
Firstly, you swear blind, black and blue that ELO Hell is a physiological perception issue, negativity bias, that the players only think it's their allies and is in fact they themselves who are not as good at the game as they believe themselves to be.
And secondly, and concurrently, you play on the fact that this is a partial truth. There are plenty of players who, because of their own personality flaws, will either confirm Riot's statement on the matter [surely it's other people's ineptitude because Riot Game's is the god-king of the universe and other people are garbage] or will play badly and then blame others for their own personal failure [because if there's one thing the average human hates, it's taking responsibility for failure, it's a survival reflex].
Personally, as usual, I discount anything anyone says and just test to see what happens.
I can't be asked right now to go rummaging through my image folders, though I will post this in 'On Games...' at some point, but I've played matches in non-ranked and then played ranked, and found that whilst non-ranked is with fairly good allies, ranked is almost terminally with abject noobs.
Additionally there's this:
On LoLKing they have access to feeds from player accounts which show ranked histories, what champions you were playing, your current rune pages, etc.
And what I noticed there was that when I first started playing the ranked mode of LoL, having a really good go to get to Challenger mode, I discovered that my progression through ranked went diagonally up. OK, I lost a few matches, no one's perfect, but on the whole I was rising steadily. Then my score dropped like a stone as ELO Hell took effect and booted me down two or three divisions.
This happened a couple more times before I gave up.
---
In my own mind I know ELO Hell exists. It might be speculative to suggest that it's tied to how much money you've dropped on the game, but there's a definite biased to ensure that certain highly skilled players are not placed with equally skilled allies and against equally skilled enemies.
Riot Game's denies it, the majority of their playerbase is with them, and no one gives a flying fuck to anything about it. Developers still takes home profits, players still enjoy the game, and who cares if a minority are ignored and treated unfairly. It doesn't concern those who rigged the game in the first place.
---
Hearthstone may have sometime similar in it's design, although it's easier, as I've said, to spot. There's no way you can break out of the lowest ranked division [lv20-21] without dropping some serious cash on higher tier cards. The Dragon/Boss cards are just way too powerful [and can't realistically be earned by playing], and the lower level higher utility cards [which I admit you can gain fairly easily by simply playing and earning gold to pay for packs] in abundance can smash any lower tier deck.
---
In my professional opinion, both games are at least definitely 'Probably' rigged so those who spend money on them are 'Permitted' to rank up.
These games might be free-to-play, but skill is no where near enough to be crowned monarch of the playerbase. As with most things in this world, quality of character isn't enough to jack unless society has decided to give you great riches to go with it.
---
Alright, I've not had breakfast or anything to eat since yesterday afternoon and it's not gone 3pm so shower...Lunner [Lunch/Dinner, lol], and then college work until snooze.
---
Got two and a half days to get through one and half weeks because I need to switch to exam revision on Monday - Thursday for an exam Saturday [got my Day 2 interview on teh Friday at the police recruitment center so].
That's not as impossible as it sounds, doing a weeks worth of work in a day or two.
Each college 'Week' takes place every two weeks in an eight hour session with eight hours of homework, and is easily doable in a day or two.
Although really what my tutor does, because he's a bloody pillock, in 'Class' is simply repeat what the homework states in text. I don't know why I go to them to be honest. Spending eight hours reading and answering online quizzes would be a better use of my time.
When I mentioned this to him he said that 'you wouldn't be able to have the homework set in a proper context'...I have an IQ of a couple of hundred points, more or less, I probably understand and could document this content in greater context than you have you fucking asshat, was my mental reply.
I think the guy has the intellectual capacity of a turnip, and got his rank based on rigid observation of protocol. He sure as hell didn't get there by intellectually adaptive, imaginative and naturally curious like me.
Dam silly nonsense, the lot of it.
---
Anyway, I's need's food's. :O <---
Bai.
Went running last night, did one lap of stage one of my two hour running route, of which contains three stages, and then spent half an hour barely able to breath.
Once I could walk I went to the hypermarket and got some liquid mucus cough meds and drank about half bottle [so against the label but I'm built like a jungle ape and have a slow metabolism so taking more than recommend dose is recommend for me] by sipping every time I needed to cough or couldn't breath normally.
This resulted in it clearly enough for me to do two more laps of the course. Go in, showered, slept, and now my sinuses have thick [sorry] yellow mucus in them, which I'm assuming is the corpse of the growing strep that suddenly found itself bathed in poison last night.
Woke up, decided to give running a miss tonight, and played some Hearthstone to wake up.
---
I just don't understand that game. You build a deck, you find it works, win four or five matches, and then it stops working and you drop to the bottom of the table again. So you try another champion, Druid instead of Rogue, and the same thing happens again.
Mostly I lose because either I have a bad hand [sheer luck factor] or someone pulls out cards which are a] expensive/rare [like the dragon edged boss cards] and b] have this OP ability [the freaking priest champion, in 3 moves in the late game, can make a minion with 15/15 in 3 cards, including summoning the fucking minion, I mean how do you fucking fight that?].
---
I don't know...
You play League of Legends, and you encounter ELO Hell whereby the system puts you with idiot allies who can't possibly fight your opposition. You score 10-15/0-5/whatever assists every match outside ranked, but go into ranked and you lose because of your allies feeding the enemy and dragging you down.
So despite your skill and knowledge of that game, you leave because it's rigged and biased so you lose and can't possibly reach the higher ranked leagues. You could if the game, most sensibly, took YOUR own performance into account when ranking, so regardless of your allies you yourself would still be marked on your own ability, but it doesn't.
I mean, imagine taking an exam where the nearest four people to you in the hall's marks were added to yours and you were given the average of that. You know the material and they don't, so you end up in the 'special' class and can't leave because you're surrounded by idiots. That's how I feel playing League of Legends.
So you go to play Hearthstone on the basis that it's single player so there's only your own ability taken into consideration in ranked. But here you encounter a randomized system with a edge of power-for-pounds, the UK version [the two P's make for eloquent pronunciation] of 'spend cash to be more powerful than other equally or greater skilled enemies'.
Personally I'm of the point of view that both games are rigged, only Hearthstone is a tad more obvious about it's biased game maniacs as if you spend money you can afford more powerful cards.
---
Consider this:
Both LoL and Hearthstone are free-to-play computer games. This means that they don't ask players to spend money to gain access to the gameplay. Instead they give you access to the game's content, for free, but you have the option to pay for customization or unlock devices which expand the content gained by playing the game itself.
In LoL's case customization comes in the form of champion skins so you can make your favorite champions your own. Unlock is then provided in the form of Riot Points which allows access to other champions not on the free roster [the free set consists of two handfuls of weekly rotating champions, and then you can pay either money or RP to unlock new ones quickly or slowly respectively]
And in Hearthstone additional cards can be acquired at a faster rate than what you can gain by playing the game itself and earning gold to buy packs if you spend money. This is indicative of power-for-pounds because those who spend money have a stronger deck than those who don't.
Now, you own the studios behind these games and you want people to pay money for the game and you can achieve this in two ways.
The first and public way is 'Optionally'. This is where you tell people the precise mechanics of the system. Play the game to unlock content. You can unlock content faster and customize your version of the game by spending money. People play the game, become invested, and then spend money of their own free will.
The second and secret way is 'ELO Hell' or 'Rank Bias Failure'. This is where the unranked modes are fare and set up so people of equal skill fight on even footing. However, the ranked modes are designed so that anyone who has not spent money on the game is allied with noobs so despite their own ability, they cannot win matches.
But surely your playerbase would notice this? You'd have a lot of players who play the game for the game for ages and don't care about customization or quick unlocks, or can't afford them, who find that no matter what they score outside of ranked, they can't rank up because their allies all feed 0/10 in minuets and drag them down.
Well this is precisely what Riot Game's have. A large quantity of their playerbase complaining about ELO Hell.
So what do you do about this so the facts of the matter don't make your company seem like a right bunch of assholes?
Well two things:
Firstly, you swear blind, black and blue that ELO Hell is a physiological perception issue, negativity bias, that the players only think it's their allies and is in fact they themselves who are not as good at the game as they believe themselves to be.
And secondly, and concurrently, you play on the fact that this is a partial truth. There are plenty of players who, because of their own personality flaws, will either confirm Riot's statement on the matter [surely it's other people's ineptitude because Riot Game's is the god-king of the universe and other people are garbage] or will play badly and then blame others for their own personal failure [because if there's one thing the average human hates, it's taking responsibility for failure, it's a survival reflex].
Personally, as usual, I discount anything anyone says and just test to see what happens.
I can't be asked right now to go rummaging through my image folders, though I will post this in 'On Games...' at some point, but I've played matches in non-ranked and then played ranked, and found that whilst non-ranked is with fairly good allies, ranked is almost terminally with abject noobs.
Additionally there's this:
On LoLKing they have access to feeds from player accounts which show ranked histories, what champions you were playing, your current rune pages, etc.
And what I noticed there was that when I first started playing the ranked mode of LoL, having a really good go to get to Challenger mode, I discovered that my progression through ranked went diagonally up. OK, I lost a few matches, no one's perfect, but on the whole I was rising steadily. Then my score dropped like a stone as ELO Hell took effect and booted me down two or three divisions.
This happened a couple more times before I gave up.
---
In my own mind I know ELO Hell exists. It might be speculative to suggest that it's tied to how much money you've dropped on the game, but there's a definite biased to ensure that certain highly skilled players are not placed with equally skilled allies and against equally skilled enemies.
Riot Game's denies it, the majority of their playerbase is with them, and no one gives a flying fuck to anything about it. Developers still takes home profits, players still enjoy the game, and who cares if a minority are ignored and treated unfairly. It doesn't concern those who rigged the game in the first place.
---
Hearthstone may have sometime similar in it's design, although it's easier, as I've said, to spot. There's no way you can break out of the lowest ranked division [lv20-21] without dropping some serious cash on higher tier cards. The Dragon/Boss cards are just way too powerful [and can't realistically be earned by playing], and the lower level higher utility cards [which I admit you can gain fairly easily by simply playing and earning gold to pay for packs] in abundance can smash any lower tier deck.
---
In my professional opinion, both games are at least definitely 'Probably' rigged so those who spend money on them are 'Permitted' to rank up.
These games might be free-to-play, but skill is no where near enough to be crowned monarch of the playerbase. As with most things in this world, quality of character isn't enough to jack unless society has decided to give you great riches to go with it.
---
Alright, I've not had breakfast or anything to eat since yesterday afternoon and it's not gone 3pm so shower...Lunner [Lunch/Dinner, lol], and then college work until snooze.
---
Got two and a half days to get through one and half weeks because I need to switch to exam revision on Monday - Thursday for an exam Saturday [got my Day 2 interview on teh Friday at the police recruitment center so].
That's not as impossible as it sounds, doing a weeks worth of work in a day or two.
Each college 'Week' takes place every two weeks in an eight hour session with eight hours of homework, and is easily doable in a day or two.
Although really what my tutor does, because he's a bloody pillock, in 'Class' is simply repeat what the homework states in text. I don't know why I go to them to be honest. Spending eight hours reading and answering online quizzes would be a better use of my time.
When I mentioned this to him he said that 'you wouldn't be able to have the homework set in a proper context'...I have an IQ of a couple of hundred points, more or less, I probably understand and could document this content in greater context than you have you fucking asshat, was my mental reply.
I think the guy has the intellectual capacity of a turnip, and got his rank based on rigid observation of protocol. He sure as hell didn't get there by intellectually adaptive, imaginative and naturally curious like me.
I have this thing with people, like a mental perception memory link where I link people with animals. It's one of the issues, if it is an issue, with being a genius who makes connections between packets of data whether or not they want to.
Sometimes I think of someone and instead of their face I get another image, like you look up someone in a computer database and you get the name and information but you get this picture as their avatar and it's an animal or object instead of them. They are in there, but so is this 'Thing' as well. I mean, I know the thing isn't them, it's just related to them in some way, shape or form.
This one guy from YouTube strikes me as bear like for example. It's like metaphor only it's my perceptions doing it automatically.
And my course tutor for my policing certification course, he's a pig. It's not an insult, it's not a descriptive phrase, it's just my brain looks at him and a couple of neurons are saying 'this chap, in another life, could've been a pig with a curly tail and trotters, and he's the mental image to go with it'.
My personal universe is a very strange place, or would be if I had any other to compare it with, but I hardly think that's bloody normally, anyway...Can't skip the college class sessions though because otherwise I'd miss the written exams, in themselves a load of fucking nonsense as the 'Exams' consist of a test of half a dozen questions, which you're given access to from Week 1. Essentially all you need do is formulate your answer before hand from your notes, online handouts and text book, memorize it, and then write it down during the one hour 'Exam'.
Dam silly nonsense, the lot of it.
---
Anyway, I's need's food's. :O <---
Bai.