experimentation
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The Tattered Notebook: Experimentation in EverQuest II
It's time to talk experimentation in EverQuest II. No, I don't mean sniffing, snorting, smoking, or otherwise illicitly subjecting yourself to the various flora in Norrath; I'm referring to one of the three new crafting prestige lines introduced with Chains of Eternity. As I'm an armorer, gear augmentation definitely seemed the most relevant to my trade. (Besides, can you just see me cranking out 100 breastplates at a time?!) So as I leveled through the 90s, I started plopping those prestige points into that middle line and looked forward to the day I could beef up my armor. But let's face it -- I don't always choose things on the basis of logic; a Vulcan, I am not. What actually drew me to the experimentation prestige line, even before I had any clue what it would do, was a remark from the devs during the panel and my interview at SOE Live: that failure was an option! Experimentation became the choice because it would bring back some of the feel of EQII's original crafting. You vets out there will know what I am talking about -- when there was some real risk involved in crafting and your skill meant something. I may still not have the chance to die at the forge anymore (booo!), but failure with experimentation comes with much more of a bite. Sound intriguing? Take a walk on the wild side and let's explore experimentation.
Ask Massively: Format changes for big questions
Potaco asked a great question two weeks ago for Ask Massively, one that I'm going to just post right here: "As a contributor to a gaming site that involves keeping up with many, many, many MMOs, do you find it harder to commit to a single game than before being forced to be exposed to so many?" Naturally, I could have answered the question simply for myself. But we're a diverse bunch here at Massively, with different tastes and opinions and experiences. Any answer I gave wouldn't reveal the whole picture, so I turned to the rest of the team and posed the same question. The resulting column was so big that I had to steal an entirely different feature's format just to make everything easy to read. (Hopefully the guy who does it won't mind.) As always, if you've got a question you'd like to see in a future installment, mail it along to ask@massively.com or leave it in the comments below. Questions may be edited for brevity and/or clarity.
iBooks Author Challenge: Adding spelling quizzes to iBooks
Dave Caolo and I were chatting this morning about iBooks and spelling. "It's not my daughter's favorite subject," he said, "and I'm looking for a way to make it more appealing to her." He asked if there could there be any way to incorporate spelling quizzes into iBooks via Author. The answer is, unfortunately, not clearly yes. That's because iBooks Author assumes that all interaction will be by multiple choice. That means you can create interactions to choose from common misspellings and from homonyms, but can't solicit freeform text entry. That gives rise to the kind of interaction you see below. The shortcomings are apparent. For example, you cannot define any item that isn't tied to a specific location (so you can't create a pool of misspellings without destinations). If the reader switches the order of the two misspelled words (here Tale and Flour) those are marked wrong as well. So I hopped into Dashcode and built a widget that would solicit a correctly spelled word and embedded it into an Author project as follows. This turned out to be a failure. Although the embedded audio prompt worked fine (albeit in a separate interactive element), widgets do not run in-line and iBook's interpretation of the widget hid my embedded checker button. This might be due to my subpar Widget construction, or I may simply be running into iBooks 2 limitations. So how can you expand iBooks for spelling? This post tells you where I am to date. If you have a better solution, drop a note into the comments. And if you are an expert Dashboard widget engineer, please ping me offline. I'd really love to test out the possibilities and limitations of this tech.
The Daily Grind: When do you alt?
We know that some of you love to roll alts and some of you just play one character until the end time. This question is not about that. No, today we want something that's much more fundamental but yet subtly more important -- when do you make those alts? When do you click back over to character creation and start fresh? For some players, it's a matter of boredom. Some players make new characters based on roleplaying demands. Some just love to roll new characters on a regular basis whenever one character hits an important milestone. And for some of us, it's just a matter of whenever the whim strikes, whether or not that whim makes a lot of sense at the time. If you don't make alts, of course, your answer is "almost never." But if you do, we ask you -- when do you make your new characters? What motivates you to start again from the bottom on a regular basis? When is it time to make another character? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Rod Humble details experimentation and innovation at Linden Lab
Linden Lab's popular Second Life is known for being one of the more creative, outside-the-box titles available on the market. That tradition carries over into Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble's newest initiative, which he says "puts the 'lab' in Linden Lab." Rather than having his developers spend all their time between projects working on bug-fixes, Humble has begun a rapid-prototyping R&D initiative. For all the information on this new project, head on over to Gamasutra and check out the full feature.
DARPA setting up a $130 million 'virtual firing range' to help battle cyber attacks
The US government is serious about online security, just ask any one of its cyber commandos. Adding to its arsenal for battling the big bad hackers, Reuters reports that DARPA is working on a National Cyber Range, which would act a standalone internet simulation engine where digital warriors can be trained and experimental ideas tested out. Lockheed Martin and Johns Hopkins University are competing to provide the final system, with one of them expected to soon get the go-ahead for a one-year trial, which, if all goes well, will be followed by DARPA unleashing its techies upon the virtual firing range in earnest next year. The cost of the project is said to run somewhere near $130 million, which might have sounded a bit expensive before the recent spate of successful hacking attacks on high profile private companies, but now seems like a rational expenditure to ensure the nuclear missile codes and the people crazy enough to use them are kept at a safe distance from one another. DARPA has a pair of other cleverly titled cybersecurity schemes up its sleeve, called CRASH and CINDER, but you'll have to hit the source link to learn more about them.
Have any of you tried...
One of the things I simultaneously love and dread about my guild on Malfurion is that we have a lot of slightly demented, creative, think for yourself types. Case in point is Vish, who often main tanks for runs when I'm healing on my shammy. The other day, in Shadow Labyrinth, before we got to Blackheart the Inciter the following paraphrased conversation took place."Hey, if we don't clear this room, do these guys come when you engage Blackheart?""Yes they do.""You've seen them come?""No, but WoWWiki says...""So you don't really know that they'll all come."He had me there. I'd never actually seen it. Ten seconds later, however, I did see it when he told the party to wait in Ambassador Hellmaw's room while he ran up and engaged the Inciter. Turns out that puts the whole party in combat even if they are hiding very far away, so I made use of my handy Astral Recall spell while everyone else died a gruesome but informative death. This made me wonder: have you ever disregarded the various guides, sources and general body of common knowledge about an instance and gone in cold? Have you ever tried something just to see what happens for yourself? I don't think we should run around seeing what that level with the skull on it does all the time, but as long as everyone in the party is okay with it, sometimes it's fun to experiment in game. It's like Mister Wizard, only he usually didn't end up having to run back to his body afterwards. Usually.
Your Perfect Swing
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I... I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost Who knew that Robert Frost played World of Warcraft. He didn't? Well, he should have. I think he would have played a survival hunter (maybe even a melee hunter) who did tailoring and goblin engineering. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages, I am going to take this time to vent (or rant, if you prefer) in as polite a manner as I can about something that really bugs me. It gets under my skin. It sometimes upsets me to the point that it affects the quality of my performance in-game. Before you continue reading this article, maybe you should go to the fridge and get yourself some comfort food, perhaps some of that meat loaf from a couple of nights ago and a nice glass of milk. There you go. All comfy? Ready for the jaw-dropping news that is going to change your perception of World of Warcraft? There is no magic formula. I see people looking for this magic formula in chat channels all the time. "What is the best profession for a..." or "What is the best spec for a..." or "What is the best weapon for a..." are all ways that sentences in these conversations start. Folks, you're missing the most crucial part of the equation: the human variable. You should play what feels good for you. I think one of the biggest reasons some guilds are so frustrated in end-game content is because all their characters are photocopies of each other, or builds that they picked up off the forums. Do you think maybe that Blizzard reads these forums too? They know with mathematical precision what the most popular builds are. So do you think when they were designing the instances and raids for The Burning Crusade that they took this data into consideration? They would be foolish not to.
