Tattered Page

Ok, maybe now I’ll have time to write again.

I managed to squeeze together an 8-pager for the comic book creator contest.  It’s available at hypercomics as is my original for any interested.  I had to cut short some of the ideas I wanted to meet the deadline, so I may revisit the piece in the future (once the judging’s done- I don’t want to risk a disqualification at this point).

Now that the contest’s over, I encourage everyone to go over there, pick a random comic, and post a supporting comment.  With 320 entries and 3 prizes, the vast majority will not realize any reward beyond a comment on the page, and with so many posting and so few reviewing, even that’s not likely to happen.  Only a few dozen have any comment at all.

Some of these comics are obviously kids- or adults that haven’t tried something creative since they graduated college.  That’s a bit of a leap, but something we sould all encourage.  Give them some confidence to keep creating.  Find a forgotten story, find something you like in it, and give feedback.  It can mean the world.

Well, I decided to pass on the Lord of the Rings preorder promotion, which essentially guarantees that I won’t get the game later on.  People choosing the “preorder rate” can opt for a special monthly rate of $9.99 or a one-time payment of $200.  It’ll be interesting to see how many people took the offer and how it may affect future growth or churn trends.

Some initial thoughts:

• I’ve seen comments that those opting $9.99 instead of $200 will kick themselves if they’re still playing 2 years from now (the rough threshold for when the $200 rate will be the better deal).  I’ve been on City of Heroes nearing 3 years, now, so that’s entirely possible, but I believe that the new titles to be launched in the next two years might alter our gaming habits and make this kind of play less likely.
• I’ve seen others comment that, like myself, if they didn’t opt for the founder’s discount, they’d be reluctant to later decide to take the $15 fee.  Will LOTRO see substantial launch numbers that peak early, as those interested took the early deal and those on the fence turn away?  I’m not sure.
• What about churn?  The special $9.99 rate only lasts until you cancel your account.  That means it’s unlikely that you’re going to cancel due to a “slow month” or, as many do in City of Heroes, play a new release like mad, cancel it, then resubscribe when a new expansion’s ready for download.  Why risk losing the special rate?
• What about other games?  This fall Age of Conan comes out.  It might have been able to capture some of the early adopter market from LOTRO, but will people be reluctant to abandon their special rate after only 4-5 months of use?  Will they try to keep both accounts open or just give up on a game that doesn’t have a similar deal?

Well, the deadline for the City of Heroes Comic Book Creator Contest is fast approaching, and I’ve barely started mine.  I’ve got plenty of stories in queue, but nothing I can distill into an 8-page tale… well, one, but it’ll be a challenge to get done. 

I’m doing it again.  I cranked out the 36 pages in a few days and got good reviews, but the 8-pager is going to paralyze me.  With nearing 200 entries, I’m not expecting to win any of the cool prizes (my gaming PC can’t even handle the video card prizes). I’m just

I’m sure that a great many people feel anxious about sharing their creative side.  I was a bit nervous until the first feedback was posted(positive, thank goodness).  Well, second, really.  First could have been my mom. 

If you had the time to waste to swing by here, go over to the hypercomics site and give a few words of encouragement to the fledgling writers.  I’m sure they’d appreciate it.

Ok, I finally gnawed off the chain on my leg. Have a few side-projects that I’ll be writing on soon enough… and I have three trillion blogs to comment on but I wanted to get things in here again.

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I’m still here, grinding away… wondering when I’ll get around to some more edits for the site.  Work has hit a “crunch time” and it’s not leaving me with much room for many other activities.

I first heard the motto “hurry up and wait” in the Army.  From the moment the first alert is sounded, we’d have everything packed, every vehicle rigged for heavy-drop, and every soldier fully ‘chuted up in well under 6 hours… then we’d wait for sometimes 18 more hours on the side of the runway for our ride.   Sometimes, after all that, they’d just send us home. Hurry up n wait.  Bust your hump now, then have nothing to do until the next fire drill starts.

Nothing much changes in the civilian side of things, it seems.

Some people can be critical about the expense of government contractors compared to more commercial endeavours.  Heck, I’ve bitched about that enough.  Truth is, every government agency I’ve encountered is a bear to work with… late in releasing funds, giving approval, or making decisions… even later in identifying specs or “critical requirements”… and they’re very persuasive in getting their way when you try to argue that the information’s well past a critical deadline. You can be 3/4 the way through the project, after countless client reviews, and someone will suddenly say something that nullifies all of your work.  The end result- for what we have to work with, the taxpayer’s probably getting a bargain.

That’s where I’m at right now- a grossly-late project suddenly gets the go-ahead with a “mission-critical” emergency call to get it started.  It enters the line with three other similarly-urgent similarly-late taskings… none of which were originally scheduled for this time.

It doesn’t leave much time for much else. Until the next big “wait,” which history has shown can come as suddenly and as unexpectedly as the “hurry up.”

Thomas Malby over at TerraNova has got a got a good writeup on ganking, or more specifically, why “ganking” isn’t just “emergent play that some folk don’t like.”  Raph managed to post a very nice and rather lengthy response quickly… (I’m beginning to think the man has access to a review copy or has a whole library in the queue for just such an occasion.)

(For those unaware of MMO terminology, ganking is essentially a very very powerful character going around and killing much weaker characters that offer no challenge and no reward.)

Two elements in Raph’s writeup that I’d like to build on:

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As I mentioned, I temporarily lost sanity and returned to that Galaxy Far, Far Away.  I took the Star Wars Galaxies trial.  It was a different game than when I left- but I’ll leave my critique of THAT for another time and focus on one observation. 

I made three new characters on three servers.  I tried this at odd hours that really weren’t “peak.”  All three times, I found Mos Eisley comfortably alive with a great deal of the characters displaying the “roleplay” flag.  There were many, many more roleplayers than I used to encounter just passing through.  It was a welcome feeling.

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I’m still here.  Work cranked up a bit and some of my “big idea” posts are in heavy re-editing.  It’s amazing how the art of just writing a “really cool” idea down can reveal exactly how full of holes the whole thing is.

Aside from that, last week I did something I swore I’d never do.  As I prepared to try EQ2’s Echoes of Faydwer trial, I noticed that my SOE account had listed a “free trial” for SWG.  I left shortly after the NGE, but the temptation was too much.  I had to climb the mountains in Correllia one more time and take my rusting Y-wing through one more mission.

I’d figured that the visit would make a few easy blog entries.  As it is, they remain half-written as I still try to figure out where I stand about that galaxy far… far… away.   I’ll give em time to brew…

We haven’t heard many public figures stand up in support of gaming, so we’ve come to expect the worst… particularly from someone that you’d expect to claim moral authority and judgment, as many see the Pope.  On January 24th, BENEDICTUS XVI released his message for the 41st “World Communications Day” and it briefly alluded to violent video games.

I’m a bit amazed to discover that anyone reading this document can come away thinking the Pope ”Dislikes Games”  like Scott did over at Broken Toys.  Then GU Comics runs their own rather defensive comment.  

Are we reading the same document? 

I think, if you’ll look again, you’ll find the game industry has an ally here.

I resisted the urge to buy Neverwinter Nights 2 on release, but over the holidays I had an extra incentive- a co-worker bought it only to find it too demanding for his system.  Unwilling to upgrade his PC for one title and unable to return an opened game, he let it go cheap. 

First impressions….  Despite many great marks for excellence, I will never finish this game and will likely keep playing my library of mods for the original NWN.

It was a headlong dive into the Uncanny Valley. 

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Although I’ve grown comfortable in my little Paragon City residence, I’ve been thinking of doing some MMO tourism starting sometime in February- hop a bit around the different gamescape out there. I’ll still be active in Cities of Heroes and Villains, but this is a chance to gain a fresh perspective on done, what’s being done, and what’s changed since launch.  If I want to intelligently write about the field, figure I’d better keep up with the changes. I’m avoiding the queues of WoW for a while… EQ2’s expansion piqued my interest, so maybe I’ll start there.

This is all still in the planning stages, though.

I just figured I’d toss out a notice- and an open invitation:  if you’d like to explore along with me, have a suggestion on where to go or what to see, or want to show off some of the worlds you call home, let me know.

Oz over at KTR has posted his “5 things” and #3 struck close to home.

I also learned spanish to impress a girl.  Mine wasn’t so successful.

Back in college, I roomed with a guy from Thailand that was attending an “Immersive English” program- he came to the states barely able to pronounce the school’s name & had one semester of intensive training to be ready for regular classes there.  One of his friends was a lovely Mexican lass  in the same program.  Despite the language barrier, we were fast friends.

I quickly changed courses (to fulfill my language requirement, of course) Problem was: after 4 years in the Army- touching four continents in four years- I’d picked up a smattering of phrases in a number of languages… and my mind was a bit of a jumble.  Heck, english still gave me trouble.  At that time, the easiest way I had to remeber things was through word association. As an example, the American Sign Language gesture for “pretty” involved a hand passing across the face, so I easily associated “pretty => face.”

Remember that.  It of course comes back to haunt me. So, as we struggled in one conversation in a mix of English and Spanish, I proceed to tell her how pretty she was.  That stupid word association popped into my head and my mind immediately inserted the first spanish word that came close to “face” : facil.

Some advice: in any language, “you are very easy” is not usually taken as a compliment.

Thanks to http://fireflychinese.kevinsullivansite.net

Yeah, I’m finally cursing in Chinese. That’s what happens after watching the Firefly DvD collection plus Serenety and realizing that there’s no more to come.

I’m a browncoat.  A bit late to the fight, but a browncoat. While I found “Buffy” smart enough to watch while channel-surfing, I was never a Whedon fan. Hearing about a sci-fi-themed project by him was not enough to get me watching- particularly when my weekly hours of TV watching can be counted on one hand. It didn’t even show up as a blip on my radar until the cancellation notice had already been made.

One pass through the collection isn’t enough to be a hardcore fan, but fortunately Jenn missed a few episodes, so we’re far from done with the series.

Once I’ve washed away the “unbeliever” stigma a little more with another round through the DVDs, I’ll be ready to talk about the challenges facing the “Firefly” MMO.

*Everyone under the heavens ought to die (Mal, Serenity, pt 1)

I didn’t forget the holiday, just had a bit more active one than I expected. I promised a bit more on the story, so here goes:

Jenn and I had just returned from visiting my family on the 23rd when we got the message that her grandfather had been hospitalized. He’s home now. Still not 100%, but he’ll get there: he’s a stubborn one. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading the Escapist’s interview with Curt Schilling (thanks for the heads-up, Ryan). If the company and game philosophy plays out as well as he pitches it here, count me as an early fan. Here’s hoping they deliver.

One of the lines there serves as a lead-in to something I’d been mulling over:

The three most branded franchises in the history of the MMOG space were Star Wars, Lord of the Rings and, to me, Blizzard. Lord of the Rings had a century to brand their IP, Star Wars had three decades and Blizzard has had a decade of branding and franchise in the world of Warcraft. And they’ve done it so impeccably well, but at the end of the day, the thing that sticks out amongst those three is Blizzard stayed truer to their visions than anyone else, and fans got what they wanted.

I’m left wondering if maybe WoW had it a bit easier. They not only were the original source of the franchise, but it was built from the start to accommodate gaming.

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