LeMU.waterbottle

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.

con­tinue reading…

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…

As the late CCP RP fiasco calms down, July 2011 Pri­or­i­ti­za­tion Crowd­sourc­ing is open for votes from all cur­rent Eve play­ers.  The list of issues stays rather sim­i­lar from the pre­vi­ous Crowd­sourc­ing, just with a slightly dif­fer­ent set of rules.  The essence is still the same: choose only the “top/major” issues and leave the rel­a­tive minor ones alone to not dilute the strength of the votes.   Per­son­ally I don’t think the sys­tem is per­fect… but just like the rea­son why dif­fer­ent play­ers need to vote is every­one has their own per­cep­tion of what is better…

Although it is now pos­si­ble to sub­mit neg­a­tive vote on issues that one objects, I haven’t find any of the entries needs to be voted down.  In the end the fol­low­ing 9 issues have made it to my top list.

46. Funky POS rec­om­men­da­tion
68. Make guns con­tinue fir­ing at pre­vi­ous tar­get after reload
73. Mis­sions under review
85. Pos­si­bly Prac­ti­cal POS Per­for­mance Pro­posal
99. Save and Reuse Scan Probe Pat­terns
121. Sui­cide Gank­ing Part 3
141. User Inter­face — Big Wins, Fan Favorites and Low Hang­ing Fruit
143. War-dec Mechan­ics
166. Ship Crews

The list is a healthy mix of prac­ti­cal needed, log­i­cally pre­ferred, and immer­sion extend­ing changes which deserve some pri­or­i­tiz­ing.  Use this forum thread to sub­mit your vote!

update: It has con­cluded, and the results are posted.  Noth­ing is really sur­pris­ing other than “His­tory of who added/kick char­ac­ter from Cor­po­ra­tion” made it to top 10, which should be part of Cor­po­ra­tion and Alliance tool over­haul (CSM) pro­posal but for what­ever rea­son is not included.  The upcom­ing Mass Test­ing on Sin­gu­lar­ity server con­tains changes to dock­ing and undock­ing code, which is cer­tainly a response to the issue being on top of the vot­ing result.