Not so old after all

I have been playing a lot of WOW these past weeks.  What often happens to Wendy and I when we resub is that we play together doing story and levelling stuff for quite a while, and then eventually I decide to start doing hard stuff and she keeps on doing story stuff.  She loves to see things from both factions sides, do all the side quests, and see all the cinematics.

I love to find something hard and beat it into submission.

The trouble in the early going was that my performance was just not up to snuff.  I was standing in bad, failing to interrupt, generally just being mediocre.  I knew my mouse was being an issue because sometimes I hammered on the keys and just got no response, and had to sit there and watch myself die.  I am getting old though, and it has been years since I played seriously.  In that sort of situation you have to ask yourself if maybe you just don't have it anymore.  It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, after all.

Turns out it was the tools, not me.

I got a new mouse and it was like I could fly.  I circle strafed around monsters, slid out of fire, and bashed all kinds of faces.  I have to remember this - I can't keep up the kind of performance I could deliver 15 years ago, but I am not a chump.  I just need the right tools!

It does bother me to buy new stuff when I have old stuff on hand that still kind of works though.  My mouse, while it was a disaster for gaming, still mostly functioned.  Plus it wasn't a cheap thing when I got it many years ago.  It makes me twitch to see it just sitting on my desk, never to be used again.  I paid over 100 dollars for a new mouse just to play WOW!  My money demon is losing his mind.

Nonetheless, the feeling I get from playing with proper equipment makes it all worthwhile.

I am certainly finding it odd to plop down into an expansion so late.  After a couple weeks of levelling I joined a guild and ended up beating heroic N'Zoth, the final boss of the expansion, on my first raid.  It was fun, don't get me wrong, but there isn't anything new to fight, there aren't any fights to learn.  That is the end.  I can still gear up (and I am!) but it is extremely strange to not have that big end boss waiting for me as the final goal.

There is a long way to go in gearing up, inching ever closer to that perfect gearset.  I wonder if I will end up playing right to the end of an expansion and starting the next one right away.  It will have been a long, long time since the last time I did that, if indeed it does happen.

Suppressing the natives

I have plowed through all of the questlines in the Battle for Azeroth WOW expansion.  Mostly they were light and fluffy as per usual, but there was a surprising amount of emotional punch to a subset of them.  Blizzard has gotten quite proficient at putting out polished content and their craftmanship shows.  Still, there was one thing that stood out to me in a negative way - the main Drustvar questline.

It starts out with the people of Drustvar being under attack by witches.  The witches were mind controlling people, summoning up monsters to assault villages, and sacrificing people to perform nasty rituals.  That part seems fairly clear cut - stop all the murder!  I did find some of it troubling though, because part of the story involves saving a woman from a lynch mob intent on killing her for being a witch.  They went through the whole false accusation schtick, talking about which idiotic 'witch tests' they were going to implement.  After that mess I was a lot less interested in saving the mob from the actual witches.

The most challenging part of the whole thing came later though when it came out that the people living in Drustvar right now are all colonizers.  They arrived some time ago, decided that the natives were just barbarians, and committed genocide, killing every last Drust native.

Now one of the Drust natives, who survived for generations because magic magic magic, is trying to fight back against the colonizers who massacred his people and took their land.  My job is to destroy him, to defend the colonizers, and end the Drust completely.

I wonder if the people who wrote this questline thought about what this all means in the real world.  Do they think that we should murder all the natives that were displaced by European colonizers?  Do they think that doing this is right?  Did they stop to consider that the story of defending a genocidal people from those they annihilated is a problem?

This isn't some side questline either.  To access huge portions of the game you simply have to go through it.  I did all the quests, but it bothered me. 

The funny thing is that certain bits of WOW stories bother me, like supporting the genocidal colonizers above, or using torture to extract information from people.  When I encounter those stories they stand out and I quite dislike them.  But there are tons of quests where some goblin wants money so I go and slaughter 50 people to collect some bit that the goblin needs to make a get rich quick scheme work.  Those don't bother me.  I have slaughtered thousands upon thousands of enemies in WOW, yet I shrug that off.  Kill one spirit of a native that represents a destroyed people though?  This gets under my skin.

Seems like the breakpoint is whether or not people in the real world would actually support the action in question.  People wouldn't support me murdering 50 people to get a Ionizing Galvinator for a goblin, and the absurdity of it means it doesn't get to me.  But torturing people for information?  Lots of people think that actually works, and media portraying it as an effective tactic is actually dangerous.  We have real debates in society about whether or not torture is a thing we should do, so torturing people in the game is a problem. 

"The natives are inconvenient, so we would be better off with them all dead." is a thing real people believe.  It is abhorrent to me, but it is a sentiment I have even heard at family events in the past few years.  When that sort of sentiment appears in a game it isn't a silly thing we can all laugh at - we seriously have to stop this kind of thing.

I want people making games to be able to tell any kind of story they want.  However, I also want those games to stop supporting truly evil mindsets, and it is wrong to place things like native genocide into stories in ways that suggest that it is fine and banal, and we ought to just accept it and move on.  It isn't fine, we shouldn't accept it, and we are a long fucking way from just moving on.

The systems, at least

I recently bought the online version of Terraforming Mars, and it was something of a disappointment. The graphics are fine, and the implementation seems to be complete, but there are serious problems with both the AI and the multiplayer stability.

I totally understand when an AI isn't good at a game.  It is a complex problem to make an AI understand the fine points of a game, especially when you want that game to be moddable or extendable.  Chess is an easier problem that other games, in a way, because the rules are set in stone.  Unfortunately a game like TM needs an AI that can cope with card changes, expansions, and variable numbers of players, and this dramatically increases the challenge of coding it.

Given all that, I get why the AI in TM is bad.  What I don't get is why it isn't even capable of understanding game systems.  Some cards in TM take a production from one person and give it to another.  Unfortunately the AI doesn't understand this, so it will try to play a card that takes steel production when it is the only one who is producing steel.  It ends up stealing production from itself, completely negating the card.  I am fine with an AI that plays cards suboptimally, but an AI that plays attack cards to blow up its own stuff?  That is unforgivably sloppy coding.

This reminds me of the AI in Civ 6.  I get that the AI there is weak and makes random choices.  That is fine, if unfortunate.  But when the AI is completely incapable of understanding an entire game system I get grumpy at the developers.  You can't just make aircraft a big portion of the game and then forget to tell the AI how to build or use them!  (It turns out you *can* do this, and they did, but it makes them look foolish in the extreme.)

The other issue with TM is the buggy multiplayer.  When I tried multiplayer there were serious disconnect problems and the chat window just stopped working.  I get that online games are not a simple problem, but if your game can't even maintain a basic chat window, you are not ready for release.  It is not just me either, as lots of reviews on the product on Steam talked about similar bugs in online play.

Really the TM game is best played solo.  It is a fine game for that, and seems to work flawlessly.  I just can't get past the game having massive issues with any number of players beyond one, and it irks me that the one company to get the rights to produce the game I like so much really screwed the dog on this one.

I am not asking much here.  An AI that takes random actions that all forward its position in some way, and an online mode that lets players stay connected, play the game, and type to each other.  That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, and yet apparently it is too much.

Maybe someday TM will be sold to a competent developer.  Until then, I guess we are likely stuck with in person play, playing solo, or a buggy, half baked mess.

Do it again

World of Warcraft has recently captured me again.  I suppose it wasn't much of a surprise because I am stuck here at home and I need something to soak up 8 hours a day of downtime.  What actually got me to do the thing though was Wendy being eager to go back to our old haunts and reignite the addiction.  Wendy and I have been looking to find games to play together again and WOW absolutely fits the bill.

I was nervous coming back because there have been some expansions that have deeply disappointed me.  Cataclysm was the worst offender because they designers decided to make all content purely on rails.  No choices or flexibility - you do all things in a single order, or do nothing at all.

Thankfully Battle For Azeroth doesn't seem like it has that problem.  There are some big storylines to do, but there are tons of random quests all over and there seem to be tons of choices in how to play.  I suspect it will be really weird when we hit level cap though because we are almost 2 years into this expansion so there are going to be huge gear gaps to make up before we can do anything even near the current raid tier.  I am used to being into an expansion on time and going through content at a slow pace, but everything is already out there to be had.

I remember the old days when I knew everything that was happening in the game, but I know nothing now.  I looked at the level caps for expansions and saw 60, 70, 80, 85, 90, 100, 110, 120, 60.  Wait, what?  That sequence of numbers has something really odd in it...

And apparently in late 2020 the entire game will radically shift.  All level 120 characters will drop to level 50, and the entire world will be set up so you can level from 10-50 in any expansion you want, and 50-60 in the new xpac. This seems amazing to me, because the current levelling situation is a mess.  When you want to go to a given expansion it is a puzzle to figure out how to get there, and travelling from one to another feels strange.  You also outlevel an expansion and have to abandon all the content there.  With the new update you can just adventure anywhere you want from 10-50, so you won't have to worry so much about how to get to each expansion.

This seems like a fantastic change.  Instead of progressing through the entire story of more than a decade you can just pick the story you like the best and bash through that on your way to the level cap.  So many choices, and so much less being lost at how to get to the next area you are required to visit in order to play.

WOW certainly is slowly fading away, but it does seem to me that the people running it are getting better and better at their craft, finding the best possible way to craft each part of the game.

I am already dreaming WOW.  Thinking about gear upgrades, rolling spec choices about in my mind, wishing for addons to streamline my play.

It has me again, and I don't know when it will let me go.

Two plus one

I have been playing a lot of Terraforming Mars over the past year and much of that has been training people new to the game.  One of the greatest acquired skills in Mars is the ability to figure out which cards to pay for and which not.  Mostly I find the problem that new players have is they keep far too many cards and end up with 100+ cost worth of cards at the end of the game that they need to dump.

This is a major flaw in their game, and leads to huge blowouts.  The key is that all the money you don't have invested into infrastructure is wasted.  If I keep 3 extra cards for 9 bucks I could have probably spent that money to get 2 income per turn.  That income adds up, and means that people who perfectly ride the wave of cards with little waste end up with a lot more stuff at the end of the game.

Obviously the way to fix this is to play Mars 100 times and git gud.  However, that isn't much use to a newbie in the short term, so I have come up with a formula for how many cards to keep that I call Two Plus One.

What this means is that you keep cards that you can afford to play over this turn and the next.  You get two turns, including the turn you are buying the cards on, to play everything in your hand.  If you want to keep delicious cards such that you can't play them all over 2 turns, slap yourself smartly across the face, both sides, and stop buying cards.

There is an exception.

You don't want to end up with no cards to play, and sometimes the game throws you only crap.  The way you hedge against this is to keep one singular card in addition to the guidelines above.  That singular card must be generically good, extremely expensive, and hopefully uses up steel or titanium if you are producing any significant amount of either.  The best examples of this are cards like Open City, which you can slam down for a bunch of points and plants to use up steel and/or cash, or Giant Ice Asteroid which also provides points and income to use up your titanium and/or cash.

Do not under any circumstances keep a bunch of cheaper cards just in case you don't draw anything good.  Spending 3 bucks to hedge against a total whiff on new cards is okay, spending 9 is game losing.

Keep 2 turns of cards, plus 1 more expensive card.  That is all.  Throw the rest away.

This strategy won't win you championships, but it will put you steps ahead of the other noobs, and it will make sure you don't end up throwing away a hand of cards you paid good money for at the end of a game.  You don't want to be that chump.

I did it again

Many years ago I was in a DnD campaign where I caused a lot of problems.  The GM had a fairly sedate pace for us much of the time with lots of travel, so characters with spells got many opportunities to use them.  DnD is unfortunately balanced around groups having many fights in a single day, so this ended up being a bit of a problem.  I was playing a cleric and so with the slow pace (which it should be noted, I quite like) I was able to always use all my best spells and be overly powerful in combat.  If we had done standard dungeon crawls with tons of pointless, contrived fights to drain away my spells things would have been more balanced, but that wasn't the sort of game we were playing.

We also had issues with me solving all the problems we encountered with some spell or other.  We were playing with all the expansions and extra books at the time, so whenever some difficult situation showed up I was free to peruse all the cleric spells ever printed to find the one that would trivialize it.  We got to the point where when we found a difficult situation the other characters would look at me expectantly, assuming I would suggest sleeping for the night so I could memorize the spell that would whisk us safely past the obstacle.  I busted us through a stone wall with Stone Shape, summoned creatures to scout or carry us, and made us immune to all kinds of other things.  It was frustrating for the GM I am sure, because it made so many of his creative works fall down flat.

This wasn't much fun for the other players, I think, and it felt kind of silly to me too.  I can't just look at the solution to a problem and do nothing just so somebody else can try something far inferior, so I decided to retire my cleric and take up a paladin instead.  I still could cover the healing role, but my spell list was much more restricted to simple bashing and healing so other problems could still pose a threat.

Recently I concluded that my crossbow specialist in my 5th edition DnD game was too good.  Other characters could do similar damage to me under ideal conditions, but I could do my damage to any target on the map, while they had to run about and struggle with rounds where they could do nothing at all.  I also had the ability to burst out huge chunks of damage on command which they did not.  Like before, I retired my character to let everyone else have a better chance to be the big hero.

I decided to start up a cleric instead, so I could take over the healing and buffing while other characters did the beatdown.  I settled on a Light cleric because the roleplaying stuff behind this seemed to fit.  The first fight we stepped into was against trolls, which regenerate like crazy until you apply fire damage to them.  Light clerics also get lots of fire spells so I used Wall of Fire, Flaming Sphere, and Scorching Ray to blast them with fire.  Our melee people got to deal a lot of damage, but nothing like the carnage I was laying out with my burnination.

The next fight was supposed to be a deadly confusing mess with our group and a pile of allies being ambushed in the dark by a bunch of gnolls with night vision.  A big part of the challenge was the vision disparity with our allies being overwhelmed by foes they could not see nor effectively fight.  Just before the gnoll attack hit, I used Daylight and filled the entire battle area with bright light, completely negating the surprise attack and giving all of my allies light to see by.  We brutally crushed the gnoll attack and sent them fleeing with their entire leadership wiped out.

Our next fight is for the following day, and I already have another spell lined up to completely trivialize it.  The enemy force we face is overwhelmingly powerful, and although we have allies with us we would be crushed if we fought them in open combat.  Thankfully I expect to be able to defeat all of them without any danger at all because I have a day to prepare just the perfect response.

For much of this campaign we have had barrages of fights every day and I wouldn't have been overpowered as a cleric.  Now we are back to 1 encounter per day, and my new cleric is dismantling them by employing the cleric spell list to its greatest possible effect.

I don't know if Naked Man, my GM, likes the creativity I bring to the problems he presents to us, or if he finds this all kinds of frustrating.  My fellow adventurers certainly love the way we stay alive, but they also surely grumble at the way I solve all the problems.  Now the only question is whether or not Naked Man will respond to my arrogance towards our latest problem by trying to kill me off once and for all.

Flappy bird

In Wingspan there is a variety of bird that moves around from place to place.  Normally you have to build up your card, food, and egg rows separately, but this kind of bird can fly to another zone after you use it, which effectively gives you extra development in all 3 zones.  It does constrain your actions and plays some though, which is a downside.  I haven't ever played with flappy birds before because they always arrived too late to be good, but today I opened a starting hand with 2 of them.  Time to experiment!  I was especially excited because two of the round goals were 'number of birds in a zone' and flappy birds are fantastic at scooping those up with minimal effort.

I was optimistic.  Being able to always take actions at rank 3 is crucial, and I expected it to give me a huge early game advantage.  I slammed down my two flappy birds and got busy.

I ended up with my worst score ever at 78.  Ouch!

When you do this sort of experiment it pays to look at the other factors like how my bonus cards and end of round goals played out.  My score card looked great, except for one thing.  I had 26 points in eggs, just 2 shy of maxed out.  That is good.  I got 18 points in round goals with little invested in getting them, which is excellent.  My single bonus card got me 6 points, again with minimal investment.  I got 2 tuck points and 2 food points, which is fine, but the crushing failure was my 24 points in birds.  Normally I end up closer to 40 points in birds, which explains why most of my scores are in the mid 90s.

I made 2 errors that I know of, each of which cost me 1 point at endgame, though both were defensible in that they might not have been errors, depending on draws.  I also ended up with 5 bird cards in hand because I took a single draw action trying to get something good to play and whiffed completely.  

Overall my game looked strong, except for those extra bird cards and that terrible ending score.  I think the conclusion is that flappy birds, while they seem powerful, just aren't.  They have wretched point values on them so you pay a huge price to have them.  They also suck in the endgame where you just want to take eggs a bunch of times in a row because they don't have any ability to help those actions.  You do get rank 5-6 eggs, which is nice, but you don't get anything extra.

I thought that flying around the board would be a massive advantage, but it doesn't seem that way.  I have had consistently superior results going with normal birds that stay in place and keep on using their abilities to generate points or resources.  Flappy birds are exciting but the total advantage they bring just doesn't seem to add up.

I am curious to know if other people have had this same experience.  When other people have had flappy birds I have been worried about it, but I have never actually lost to someone using one, so maybe that was a sign.  In any case if you have used flappy birds and been really successful, please let me know, and explain why you think that is.  In my admittedly limited experience, flappy birds are weak indeed.