LeMU.waterbottle

龙年快乐！

I was won­der­ing whether I came out of closet–of being a fan­boy of Are­naNet.  Look­ing back to my last Guild Wars post, the answer is yes.  Oh and, in case you won­der, this post is about Guild Wars 2 release date! (True Story!)

We recently fin­ished our first closed beta test, and we’re now ready to hold pro­gres­sively larger events. In Feb­ru­ary we’ll invite select press to par­tic­i­pate in beta test­ing, and in March and April we’ll aggres­sively ramp up the size of our beta test events so that many of you will have a chance to par­tic­i­pate. And of course, this all leads to the release of Guild Wars 2 later this year.

Source: Are­naNet blog

Any­way, I’m pretty sure I won’t be part of the “select press” (read: var­i­ous MMO news/review sites), so I’ll bet my luck on March and April of 2012… to say “bet my luck” is accu­rate since this is not an announce­ment of an open beta.  It is cleared up in this thread on GW2 Guru forum by the devel­oper guy who wrote the post: the term “open beta” is pur­posely avoid as cur­rently Are­naNet are not arrang­ing a play ses­sion open for “any­body on the inter­webs”.  The spec­u­la­tion seems to be that there will be pre­view week­ends where the game opens up a selected area for a greater audi­ence to participate.

This of course does not mean there will be no open beta (in its con­tem­po­rary mean­ing) for GW2.  It is pos­si­ble the OB will come shortly before the game releases.

con­tinue reading…

As of tonight, my BF3 sol­dier (PC) finally reached rank 45 (Colonel) after 103 hours and 29 min­utes of play­ing.  I reg­is­tered my Bat­tlelog pro­file on Novem­ber 23rd, 2011.  That would counts to roughly 35 days, which aver­ages to 3 hours of play time per day everyday.

Quite exces­sive(?)

Nonethe­less, the 103 hours spent on this game gave me a pretty good idea how it should be played to max­i­mize plea­sure.  In other words, every­thing that can be tried I mostly have tried.  It seems my brain is lit­er­ally impaired for fly­ing jets and heli­copters, so I learned never touch those.  Snip­ing isn’t my cup of tea, either.  Every­thing else I guess is fair game… except the 12.1% accu­racy hints that maybe I can’t aim, lol.

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O, EA.  What can I say!

One may or may not dis­like Elec­tron­ics Arts for its anti-consumer stance when it divorced Steam to marry its own infe­rior cre­ation, Ori­gin.  EA has a sub­stan­tial num­ber of games–good for its busi­ness, and harder for me to ignore… Dead Space, Dragon Age, and Bat­tle­field fran­chises all have my money in their pocket.

Here’s how it started.  I installed the brand new copy of Dragon Age Ori­gins Ulti­mate Edi­tion, with all DLC and the Awak­en­ing cam­paign.  Hav­ing tried Skyrim and swiftly quit with a sour taste in my mouth after 30 min­utes prompted me to revisit DAO, the two-year-old game, cham­pion of West­ern RPG.  I fig­ured: there must be some­thing in DAO that once immersed me so much into its world… some­thing (appar­ently) I did not find in Skyrim; or maybe some­thing in Skyrim but not in DAO that made me go “meh”?

The ques­tion is left unan­swered, as the game does not rec­og­nize I am the legit owner of the myr­iad DLCs and would load none of them.  Live chat agent from EA directed me to a labyrinth of threads total­ing up to tens of pages–all unof­fi­cial trou­bleshoot­ing.  Cul­prit: some DRM ser­vice that was improp­erly installed, that needed to be man­u­ally turned on from com­mand line and admin tools.

I won­der whether EA real­izes that if one to tor­rent a copy of the game from places like Pirate Bay, chances are the instal­la­tion steps will be much sim­pler and doesn’t involve dig­ging into crappy process of debug­ging my oper­at­ing system.

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I have a minor fix­a­tion on cat­e­go­riz­ing games based on my sub­jec­tiv­ity… often in a binary fash­ion.  To like, or not to like; it is the ques­tion.  I was never a big fan of stealth game­play, and I still am not after played through DX:HR.  I pon­dered whether the feel­ing I have is some kind of dilemma, and the con­clu­sion I reached is: it is not; the game is sim­ply not of my taste.

There, I just said it.  I just love that dis­claimer.  Now I can praise and smack it how­ever I want with­out becom­ing inco­her­ent or illogical.

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Word­Press is sure act­ing up lately.  First is the dis­ap­pear­ance of “open in new win­dow” option for links, then came the clas­sic Armaged­don of all dig­i­tal type­writ­ing: unsaved doc­u­ment van­ishes due to … what­ever that hap­pened.  I don’t know which part of WordPress’s auto-save fea­ture messed up, but yeah, I typed up a long wall of text and it did not save.  Since I’m not in mood to rewrite I’ll keep it short.

BTW I blame Fer­gus, since this screen­shot was the only thing got salvaged.

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Despite being the lore dig­ger on vir­tu­ally all MMO games I spent much time play­ing, the con­cept of role-playing has always been a taboo sub­ject to me per­son­ally.  Eve Online, a sand­box game with heavy empha­size on PvP, is of a less pop­u­lar sub­genre of MMO games that cur­rently are dom­i­nated by what is called, “theme park” games.  Yet I find Eve’s lore are no less fas­ci­nat­ing than its coun­ter­parts that, in the­ory, should have a deeper back story by design.  As a result, I occa­sion­ally enjoy the moments which I pre­tend to be a play writer and my char­ac­ters are really my char­ac­ters, and the game’s back story is the stage.

It is like play­ing with dolls.  Per­haps I just don’t like to play dolls with oth­ers as much as doing it in my closet.  Per­haps that has some­thing to do with the “RPers” in all MMO are a rather dis­tinc­tive minority?

In Eve Online, that line is rather blurry largely due to a group of writ­ers often known as the ISD.  They are respon­si­ble for writ­ing in-game news, semi-roleplaying style.  So it seems they are the biggest RP group in the game, or at least that is because the stuff they write is granted infi­nite vis­i­bil­ity by CCP– those arti­cles is view­able every time a player logs in to the char­ac­ter selec­tion screen.  Hav­ing played the game over a year now, it is not too hard to fil­ter out the RP fluff and find fac­tual stuff in the ISD writ­ings.  Not say­ing those stuff aren’t worth read­ing… but I have my bias, and it is there to stay.

Then came today’s ISD Post:

Lost Helios Full of Mys­tery
reported by: ISD Pareto Pol | 2011.07.26 20:11:43

J105934, Unknown – Cap­suleer dis­cov­ers Helios of miss­ing researcher, but only learns of its mys­te­ri­ous ori­gin after she blows it up.

For Cori­alis Wyr, what started as a typ­i­cal explo­ration run into a rival’s worm­hole ter­ri­tory ended with a bizarre turn of events. She was fly­ing with her wing­man Phil­good, who scanned down a pack of six unmanned Helios ships in the worm­hole. Just as they were about to try to steal them and take them home for Trans­mis­sion Lost (LOST), their rivals Aper­a­ture Har­mon­ics (AHARM) returned. They played cat and mouse for a while but even­tu­ally decided to with­draw back to LOST territory.

Some­thing about those Helios ships lured Cori­alis Wyr back into AHARM’s home sys­tem. When she jumped through, she did not expect to be right on top of a fleet in process of clos­ing the worm­hole. As she warped away, she could see the worm­hole clos­ing, leav­ing her trapped and hunted. Her pur­suers gave chase for a while, but in due course, she was able to evade them. Finally alone, she was able to scan down the six float­ing Helios’ again. It proved to be too dif­fi­cult to take the ships, as her hunters may return at any time… so she decided to shoot them, assum­ing they belonged to her rivals. The cargo, a sin­gle unit of Tri­nary Data was destroyed. An attempt at sal­vage puz­zled her even fur­ther when she found noth­ing to be looted.

…

The rest of it con­sisted mainly a con­tin­u­a­tion of an ongo­ing series of RP news, which you can read here for the full arti­cle.

con­tinue reading…