Another self-promotional podcast-type post, with another podcast link on it:
Van Hemlock (ep58): Cheapseats
With some news and a whole new feature to replace the Topic Bit!
Speaking for myself, I do worry that I've become a bit comfortable in my online gaming, with my three main choices (Guild Wars, City of Heroes, Lord of the Rings Online) becoming very fixed things which I don't see myself getting bored with any time soon. Not that there is anything essentially wrong with being a loyal repeat customer of a service you like and enjoy - quite the reverse in fact! But it would be dishonest of me to suggest its just those games themselves that has done this, and my now 'usual' MMO choices are as much (if not more) about the people I'm playing with, than the game I'm actually playing.
But I was a wanderer once, traveling the long and lonesome roads of the outer MMO darkness; soloing my way through a large variety of frequent free trials in search of some indefinable 'better'. You can even read about some of that in the Op. Cheapseats Category on the sidebar! I found some decent games and some real stinkers but the overall process was fascinating, becoming a bit of a game in itself for me. I'm long past the point where over-exposure to too many titles in a row makes them start to blend into each other, so may as well continue toward the full house, and thats what we'll be doing for the next few months on the alternate weeks of the show; reporting back on fourteen days of something completely unknown to us and perhaps, to you too.
We'll be working off of this list here:
MMORPG.COM: Game List (Released Only, by Rating)
I'm sure there is a lot of questionable junk on there, and also omissions of important MMO-like worlds that should be on it, but it serves as a handy and surprisingly large starting point for the odyssey. We've gone with two random picks for this first effort, but will be posting lists and asking folks to pick for us on future occasions.
Tune in to find out what gaming fate has picked out for us this fortnight!
As a rule, I don’t cheat in MMOs. This isn’t some moralistic smugness mind you and my online honesty is more a thing of fear than rectitude. I just assume that The Server Sees All and I’ll get caught and permabanned so fast my feet won’t touch the account cancellation page, and anyway, how do even go about it? Using leet hacking skillz out of War Games or Johnny Mnemonic, I’m sure. Everything I learnt about hacking, I learnt form Disney’s seminal work on the theme, Tron and I just look daft in a glowing blue cycle helmet.
I’d also just sort of assumed that because I don’t cheat, no one else did. You’d hear about these faceless ‘hackers’ of course, and the measures that MMO companies proudly (or sometimes apologetically) talk about to combat them, but I’d never had any hacking affect my own gaming on a personal level. Or so I thought…
So there I am, in PlanetSide, trying a bit of cloaking for a change on a freshly rolled alt. The cloaker uses an Infiltration Suit to hide in plain sight. When switched on, this suit makes the player invisible. Somewhat powerful, it is balanced by having the cloaker ‘ghost’ when they move, showing a faint outline which becomes more pronounced the faster they move. Its a bit like being a Predator, only with less gleeful howling.The cloaker also can’t carry rifles and has no actual armour points with the suit, making them one-hit fodder by all and sundry if they are seen.
In addition to the cloakers own impatience, there are other ways they can be detected; sensor equipment, audio amp implants, and the ‘darklight’ implant, which lets troops see invisible things, but only at a distance of 30m or so, and adds a load of fog while active, making it quite hard to see anything else. An engaging kind of gameplay and on the whole, reasonably balanced, I always thought; the power of being an almost invisible ninja assassin regulated by the extreme consequences if you are spotted.
The base assault was in full swing, with us defending. I’ve taken it on myself to creep about the surrounding hills, primarily looking for the similarly cloaked spawn trucks which are supplying the assault. These are key objectives, and if I can find them, I can try to steal them with my (ironically enough) hacking skill, which will flip them to our team's spawn points. Aware of my visibility issues, I’m taking great pains to crouch-walk for extreme slowness, which should make me barely perceptible at all, certainly by casual glances, when suddenly, PAF! Instantly murderized by a chap with a sniper rifle.
Having been a sniper myself, I appreciate the almost supernatural skill that making a shot like that entails, but that’s usually against running cloakers or ones that are on fire at the time; you need some kind of visual giveaway. I pass it off as bad luck…maybe he was aiming through me at something else – it does happen now and then. I head out again, different route, same speed and POW! Dead! A few of these and I work out where its coming from, a ridgeline around 350m away and all I can make out by squinting are five pixels of the top of his helmet. And then PAF! Dead, and this time, I was stationary; i.e. totally invisible, theoretically.
Clearly something amiss there! Either this chap has REALLY good eyes or for him, the invisible things aren’t invisible at all. I logged in a huff and then spent a bit of time surfing around the subject of PlanetSide and Cheating, which was all a bit of an eye opener. Turns out, the Cloaking Cheat is one of the easier ones to perpetrate; since the cloaked person is still actually there, and needs to become slightly visible if they move, etc, they are still rendered, only with 100% Alpha texturing. So all the unscrupulous technical type has to do, is intercept those textures at the Direct X and/or Graphics Card level and replace them with, say, glowing fuchsia ones instead, and all supposedly invisible things light up like Xmas trees, and are probably very easy to snipe from 300m away on the first and only shot. (Apparently, massivley adjusting your Gamma settings can also ruin cloaking somewhat)
All of that happens on the client PC; the server doesn’t get involved at all, making it more or less undetectable. I have no idea how you’d do it, but I expect enough people do. The client-side nature of PlanetSide does allow a lot of this kind of thing, and my explorations uncovered ‘trainers’ which purport to offer all sorts of jiggery-pokery, including teleporting about the map, running through walls, infinite afterburner on the aircraft, speed-hacks, lots of messing about with the cone of fire, a necessary balancing feature which makes powerful guns artificially inaccurate, and reloading times too, making the big sniper rifle fire with perfect accuracy at machine-gun speeds. I'm sure some of that is just lies intended to get the greedy to download viruses, but a lot of it squares with things I've seen in game.
Seems not much can be done at the server end for such things, as the client-side hit-detection method means that the server generally just accepts what it has been told by the individual clients. Official advice is to use the somewhat cumbersome /appeal system, (which dumps out to a web page form filling exercise, somewhat breaking game flow) and wait for human intervention at the GM level; not terribly reassuring.
I know I’m not great at FPS games, but now I doubt the game itself. Was it always that I was rubbish at PlanetSide specifically, or was the playing field never as level as I naively assumed? I have no way to tell. The idiots are easy to spot and shut down; they’re the ones going berserk with flat-out impossible feats, sudden superhumanism. It’s the more cunning kind of cheating scumbag that is hard to do anything about – they’re clever enough to artificially boost their prowess just beyond everyone else’s reach, to always win, but only just. Their more lowkey kind of improved prowess is eminently plausible, and might go unnoticed for years. Aw, good fight! Try again! Next time you might beat me! All this in a PvP-only game where the /appeal system must see dozens of whining and false accusations every day. Any kind of benefit of the doubt will see them just let off the hook. I wonder if Darkfall has similar problems?
And over it all, my own paranoia…perhaps I’m just imagining it all…afterall, it isn’t the done thing to accuse someone of cheating! That's weakness and poor sportsmanship!
Anyway, it hasn’t quite driven me from the game just yet, but certainly has made me give up on cloaking; what is the point of an invisibility class if they can’t reliably be invisible? As for the other kinds of cheating which can apparently be accessed by merely finding the right download, well, now I know what to be looking out for, perhaps I’ll begin to understand some of the more extreme acts of superhuman ownage I see in there, and in turn, some of the reasons PlanetSide seems to be far less popular than its premise would suggest.
Some more excessive self-indulgence here:
Van Hemlock (Ep 57): A Tank, a Healer and a CC walk into a bar...
It's another What We're Playing One, which turns out to include:
- Guild Wars
- Lord of the Rings Online
- City of Villains
- Planetside
- Runes of Magic
- Beneath a Steel Sky
- Infamous
- Prototype
- Red Faction: Guerrilla
- EVE Online
- A Tale In The Desert
- Sam N Max Season One
- Wallace and Grommit's Grand Adventures
- Supreme Commander
- Burnout: Paradise
And possibly a few others we forgot to mention! Busy kind of week...
Do check out this site:
Good Old Games
Which I tried out with Beneath a Steel Sky, an ancient title with a minimum spec of a 386 processor running MS DOS 3.0. The game is officially freeware anyway, so being a free download isn't so impressive a fact as it running perfectly and first time on notorious finnicky OS Harridan Windows Vista, after GOG.com's presumably in-house technical jiggery pokery.
Their list is a bit on the spartan side at present, but does have some gems; I recommend Descent, Spellforce and Haegemonia, all titles which I already own in their original releases, but had lost to OS incompatibility in the intervening years, and shall probably be buying again, via this service. I'm a big abandonware fan in general, but theres always the vauge guilt of what technically amounts to software piracy, even if I am unable to actually pay anyone for it, and the mucking about to get these old classics to even run anymore, both of which seem to be addressed here. Bravo!
Apologies on the overun; we'll have to buy a great big clock for the studio wall!
Part Two of the Tuesday N00b Club Sorrows Furnace rampage went well, seeing us complete the last bit of To Sorrow's Furnace; Noble Intentions without too much mishap and roll on to the finale of the interesting but underused Sorrow's Furnace quest set; The Final Assault.
It isn't a new place by any means, dating back to September 2005, long before the addition of the Eye of the North dungeons, but the place functions in a very similar manner; a large underground map whose contents can alter depending on currently active quest states. I'm not sure why it had taken me this long to give the place a serious look; possibly a mistake assumption that it was Hardcore Endgame Raiding, when in reality, a team of two players with six Heroes, or even one player with seven NPCs, could probably do very well in there with a bit of practice. Enemies seem to consist mostly of very angry dwarfs and those strange Dredge mole-men from Factions, all in the L24 range.
Like EotN, it also features a big end boss set-piece which was the focus of the last quest and this turned out to be a Giant Robot!
Everything is made more awesome with the addition of Giant Robots (with the possible exception of Planetside), and this one was very nifty, roaring a lot, swinging big robot arms about, dropping big spikey metal balls on us, and periodically bathing the slower or more unfortunate members of our gang, in molten steel. Good times!
The molten steel attack hurt very much, but was the final necessary step in the ongoing Black Moa Chick minipet treasure hunt some of us had been chipping away at, and several thousand degrees of heat later, this hatched!
...which was nice. Blowing the giant robot's head off and decommissioning the angry evil dwarf weapon factory also resulted in this rather neat trophy for the Hall of Monuments too:
The place seems to drop a disproportionately large amount of Guild Wars' 'green' unique weapons too, which I ended up with several of. Guild Wars isn't really about gear, so these don't have mind blowing or game breaking stats on them, but are often interestingly skinned and more appealing from a collector's perspective, than a powergamer's.
All in all, well worth a few evenings pottering about; challenging, but not being so technically difficult that casual players need not apply, and being neatly divided up in to a number of manageable tasks that can be fit in to half-hour and hour-long sessions. Head for the Deldrimor War Camp and find the Dwarven Prospector just outside, to get started.
Having a guild of competent and even seasoned veterans means that this kind of end-gamish activity is now a lot less remote a prospect than it once was and in future weeks, we'll be looking into some of the other big events available; Fissure of Woe, Tomb of the Primeval Kings, Domain of Anguish and similar, but next week is going to be The Great Nightfall Treasure Chest Ransack Roadshow again, because everyone likes money, and as guild leader, I'm sensitive to complex psychological motivations like that!
Yikes! Two of these posts back-to-back. This is likely to be either the Editor's tardiness on the previous show or alacrity on this one, but either way, even more talking here!
Van Hemlock (ep56): Axe-Grinding as a Participation Sport!
A casually thrown out Twitter Question went supernova this week, and became the topic in itself; "This week saw us literally paralysed by LotRO's Dread System, which was quite irritating! What MMO mechanic annoys you the most?"
A massive list of gripes ensued, showing that pretty much all of us dream of a somewhat better game than we play at present. Pretty much the entire spectrum of irritating MMO design got lambasted; random loot, travel times, group sizes, resource gathering, uninspired storylines, lfg tools, tanking, taunting, and even steep hills, all got a good angry fist-shaking at.
Our own two most annoying game mechanics turned out to be 'Lacking Sidekick/Mentor Mechanic' for me, and 'US/EU Server-List Segregation' for Jon, both of which are continual annoyances that put gameplay and/or distribution deals ahead of friendships.
Boo!