Almost all MMOs have waiting queues to log in to the game during the first few weeks of launch.

Star Wars: The Old Republic, however, has added the new feature of waiting queues to log in to their forums!

So, on the soon-to-be-wiped pre-launch SWTOR boards, someone began a thread trying to figure out which faction (Republic or Empire) would have the most “kids”. Here’s my reply, based on several years of playing faction-based MMOs and reading threads about such topics:

My experience has been that whatever faction you’re in is the faction with the most mature players, the most skilled players, and the most hardcore players, and the other faction(s) have all the kids, gankers, n00bs, carebears, and so on. What’s particularly impressive is that, the instant you decide to reroll on the other side, all the other mature, adult, and skilled players do so at the same time, while the side you used to be on has all the kids, babies, etc. 

Perhaps even more astounding, this applies to what political party you’re a member of, what style of music you like, even what religion (or lack of religion) you follow.

Also, when your faction wins, it’s because you have better players; when their faction wins, it’s because they cheated/they’re overpowered/both. Again, this holds true even when you switch sides; it’s important to realize that as soon as you roll for another faction, the developers sneak in stealth nerfs to your new faction and stealth buffs to your old, one which explains how your new faction (which now has all the better, more mature, etc, players) is losing to the kiddies and n00bs with their buggy exploits on your old faction.

Also, the devs love the other faction and hate yours, and they all play the other faction and it’s certain that they’re actively cheating to help their faction against yours. This is an objective fact and only lamer fanboys (or secret agents of the other faction) would claim otherwise.

As of this moment, I’m going to stick with the Bounty Hunter (Imperial) I tried in the beta, in large part because I want to see how my story comes out, and Mako is hot. I initially chose BH because the class sounded cool, and really didn’t even consider PVP or which side was “better”. I get to shoot explosive darts into people and watch them explode. I do not see how I need any more information than that to make my decision.

So, a long time ago, I posted my late beta experiences with Star Wars Galaxies, on this very blog, which shows how long it’s been going on and how infrequently I update it of late, what with Facebook encouraging me to write pithy one-liners as I click “like” buttons all over the net so that marketers (and DHS) know my soul better than I do. Wait, where was that sentence going? I started out with Star Wars and ended up with Orwell. Weird. Anyway, like half the rest of the United States, Europe, and every other nation where the biggest social concern is “The rich have too much money” as opposed to “No one has any money”, I’m in the Old Republic beta. Here’s what I think.

I like it so far.

What, you want more than that?

OK. Despite what you may have read, this isn’t a “single player MMO”. Indeed, grouping content starts very early on in the game — I was in a group when I was level 5. Sure, you don’t HAVE to do the group quests — or the many free-standing quests — and can just follow your class’ (that doesn’t look right… what’s the rule for possessives for words with a double-s? Class’s? Classes’?) scripted story to level, but saying “The game doesn’t FORCE you to wander around seeing who wants you to collect ten rat tails… I mean, ten WOMP-rat tails” isn’t the same as saying the possibility isn’t there. Indeed, you get rewards for grouping beyond the phat l00t. You earn “social points”, which let you… uhm… er… something, I dunno, but it’s a METER, dammit, and if it’s a METER, it must be FILLED! To the TOP! Because it’s THERE!

This being a Bioware product, you can bet its filled with voice acting and dubious moral choices. All the quests, so far, are voice-acted, with cut-scenes and scripted dialog, not just a voice over for some text. Fortunately, the voice acting is pretty good in most places, as is the animation. The people, sadly, often look like their skins are made of some kind of leathery plastic… Uncanny Valley FTW! You’re given several choices (and by several, I mean, “three”. Always three there are. A master, an apprentice, and… uh… this guy who kind of wants to be an apprentice and just hangs out) for most conversation trees, but it’s not always clear if all of them actually lead to different outcomes or just let you decide how snarky or not snarky you want to be when the NPC whines about their poverty, the pollution, the evil Hutts, etc, etc, etc. 

Throughout the quests, both the main class quest and the side quests, you often get to make “light side” or “dark side” choices. My understanding is that this mostly affects your ability to equip cosmetic gear, meaning, yes, if you’re evil, you literally *can’t* wear white. Still, it’s fun from a roleplaying perspective, though I have to wonder about their definition of light side and dark side. For example: I’m wandering around a fetid, rusting, junkyard/swamp, minding my own business, when I wander into a stranger’s house to see if they have any loot. They don’t, but they have a sob story about how they lost their jobs due to Faathra The Hutt and now they earn their living scavenging discarded power converters and recharging them and selling them, but now the husband has a lame foot and the wife is too busy whining about how they’re going to starve to go and get a job, so, they want to hire me, a kick-ass killer bounty hunter, to go pick up some junk for them. What the hell, despite being confused as to how they can afford to pay me for the items they need to sell to buy food… if they can pay me, they can buy food, right? Whatever, I get the converters, casually murdering anyone who might be committing some evil act like “guarding their employer’s property” or “being in my way”, and then go into the power plant to charge them. There, some flunky of Faathra comes up and begs me NOT to keep stealing power, because he’s in charge of the power plant and Faathra will stampede his family and rape his cattle if he keeps losing power. He proposes that I instead go back to the starving old twits who hired me with a power converter rigged for a tracking device, so he can track down the black marketeers who are buying the power converters. I can either agree to this, and save his family, or I can keep my word to the people who hired me, and who only NEED the power converters because his boss took their homes and jobs in the first place. Weirdly, being loyal to the people who paid me was the “dark side” choice and turning traitor to help this bootlicking lackey was the “light side” choice. I’d been generally picking “light side”, but in this case, I went dark. So lackey runs away calling me a murderer, when he’s the one who took the job working for the fat slug in the first place. At least the cranky old people were happy…ish. No one’s ever really happy. I mean, they’re still living in a junkyard.

Gameplay is pretty standard. Row of abilities along the bottom of the screen, spam until enemy dead. I love, love, love, my explosive dart gun. Step 1)Fire explosive dart at guy in center of enemies. Step 2)Wait three seconds. Step 3)Guy explodes, knocking other enemies back about 20 feet and killing or severely wounding them. Finish off with a few rounds of blaster fire. Then go loot whoever has a huge glowing searchlight sticking out of them.

Still too early in the game to know much about crafting, PVP, or how/if the world opens up once you’re done with your initial storyline quest. 

From a discussion on RPG.net where it was noted the oversized weapons we give to our PCs are based on weapons which were made for purely ceremonial use and not intended to be used in battle:

History class, circa 3500 AD or so…

 ”Despite the prevalence, in popular entertainment and games, of portraying early 21st century Americans of middling income and social status using the ridiculously inefficient and poorly designed land vehicles known as ‘SUVs’ or ‘Hummers’ (the technical distinction between the terms is of interest only to scholars and pedants who like to show off how much time they’ve wasted in the KnowledgeRealm), it is almost certainly the case that such craft were manufactured entirely for ceremonial use by the ruling castes, similar to other sorts of ceremonies where the ruling class would show the extent of its wealth by destroying it, rather than investing it or hoarding it against some future shortage. Even the most powerful, though, would never use such things for daily tasks. Images that seem to show these vehicles were used for normal transport by a sizeable fraction of the population must be considered to be purely idealistic portrayals of the kind of life people might aspire to someday, on par with their tales of faster than light starships or gaining godlike powers through exposure to the toxins and radiation that filled their environments.”

So I get home from six hours of demon slaying (it’s kind of less heroic when the living incarnations of chaos and malice are trying to be calm and rational, and the heroes are being merciless engines of doom, but anyway…), and find that my son has taken after dear ol’ Dad in a new and exciting way… he’s somehow managed to turn Beth’s laptop screen upside down. An assortment of random keypresses accomplished nothing, and my computer was turned off (an extreme rarity, I know), so it had to wait until morning. Finally, I did some googling (you don’t need to actually know anything, anymore, except “how to use google”) and found a lot of hits on terms like “laptop” “screen” and “inverted”, and a surprising number also involved the word “cat”. For those who are concerned, ctrl-alt-uparrow or ctrl-alt-downarrow will do the trick, but you need to be logged in (at least in Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron); it didn’t work on the launch screen. I am very proud of my son; I didn’t even know that was possible to do just by PLOKTA. (Google it.) It reminds me of some of earliest coding efforts… on my Atari 400, with its cassette drive, 16K of RAM, and membrane keyboard. There was a POKE command that would cause the text on the screen to be inverted and mirrored. I have no idea why you’d want to do it, but I did it, because you could, and that is the essence of the hacker ethos. (Those of you who know what POKE was, give yourself some geek points… and take some ensure, you old fogeys.)

PS: The area under the bed is now officially the Rocketcave; the shelf in the kitchenette area is the Fortress Of Rocketude. Just thought you’d all like to know. 

So…I see a few minutes of My Little Pony while clearing off the DVR. It seems they were gathering bruised apples to feed to the pigs on their farm. Now, there’s only one reason to have pigs on a farm… and it ain’t for their milk, fleece, or eggs. This implies that somewhere in magic pony land, there must be a magical sparkly SLAUGHTERHOUSE where the pigs (quite possibly sapient, since the sheep are) are TORN APART by the ponies’ MAGIC TELEKINETIC UNICORN HORNS and then TURNED INTO BACON and DEVOURED by GNASHING PONY FANGS. I guess I understand something of the program’s appeal, now.

So, we decided to record “America’s Next Top Artist”, or whatever it’s called (Evidently, it’s called “Work of Art”), on Bravo, just to see what it’s all about. Hey, I managed to get hooked on “Design Star”, so, anything’s possible, right? (I refuse to watch the “Real Housewives” of anyplace. I have some pride.) I figured that, at worst, it would provide some fun moments where people publicly humiliate themselves for money. (Look, folks: We’re living in the last days of a decadent and dying Empire, and nothing any of us can do will change that. So eat the bread and enjoy the circuses while you can. It will end the same whether you do or not.)

Let’s put it this way: If I’d wanted to include an “artist” character in a story (oddly enough, the story I’m currently writing is about a graphic designer), and I decided to not do any kind of research, but, instead, decided to make up the most ridiculous over-the-top stereotype of “an artist”, based on my narrow-minded preconceptions and the various parodies and satires of artists done by other people who, I would hope, actually did the research before mocking their subject… I might have come up  with this crowd. Pretentious, emo, narcissistic (and for ME to call someone narcissistic, well…that’s the neutron star calling the wormhole light absorbing, or something…), and, of course, producing “art” that the Other 99.999999999 percent can’t understand or like. If you have to tell me what it means, it ain’t art. If I don’t understand what it means by looking at it, it doesn’t mean I’ve failed as an audience… it means you’ve failed as a communicator. 

So, of all of them, I’m currently rooting for Sucklord, because, dude… he knew the name of Gandalf’s sword. That’s major nerd props. Sucklord strikes me as the kind of guy who might have ended up in my gaming/SF circles if I’d stayed in New York. And, yes, his professional, possibly legal, name is “Sucklord”. Given that, whenever possible, I prefer to be professionally published as “Lizard”, I do not have any grounds to comment.

Sadly, Sucklord almost went home because his piece of art could be identified for what it was by someone looking at it. It was a plastic Gandalf. Now, I had proof of something I’d long suspected. I’ve always known literary criticism was utter and complete bullshit, and I’ve got the BA in English to prove it. (Dear Wall Street Occupiers: I learned a month after graduating that a Liberal Arts degree wasn’t even useful as toilet paper, and I sucked it up and learned skills people would actually pay me for. I didn’t hang around outside Bear Sterns and demand they hire me to deconstruct the institutional sexism in their latest bond underwriting scheme, or whatever it is they do. You don’t get a job because you need a job; you get a job because people need your skills. As in all adult relationships, your needs are only half the equation; the needs of the other people involved matter just as much. But I digress.) Anyway, where was I? Oh yes. If literary criticism is bullshit, and it is, then art criticism, at least judging by this show, is…. I dunno…. brontosaurus shit or something. (Dear Paleontologists: I know there was no such thing as brontosaurus. I know the proper name is apatosaurus.)

So, Sucklord was almost kicked off the island loft because his art was too comprehensible to mere mortals. However, while he may have artistic talent (or at least the ability to get people to pay good money for a stormtrooper action figure he spray painted pink, which is a talent of some kind, certainly), he needs to ramp up his ability to spew pretentious crap on demand. Here’s what I improvised, more or less, during the show (thank you, DVR pause button!). I have two witnesses who can attest that this, or words very close to this (since I didn’t record them or write them down) was peformed extemporaneously:

Well, you see, what this represents in the cheapening and commercialization of what should be the magical and the mysterious. Our corporate culture has transformed what ought to be an icon of our highest and most spiritual aspirations, a symbol of the ascendancy of the mystical above the material, into cheap plastic, devoid of any true mythic resonance or symbolic power to inspire us to reach beyond the limits of ourselves. By creating a cheap and meaningless figure, I have shown what happens when the personal experience of the magical is commodified for the mass audience and thus deprived of all meaning and value.

If he’d come up with that, he’d probably have been safe for the week. Unfortunately, he was a bit too honest, a deadly trait in what passes for artists these days (to judge by the show) and couldn’t pretend it was more than what it was. 

(The guy they did kick off was basically ripping off Keith Haring. Even I could tell that at first glance. On the other hand, the art he produced was something I could actually imagine being hung on someone’s wall, because even if it didn’t have any great meaning I could see, it still looked good as a piece of abstract sculpture.)

To all of my actual friends who call themselves artists: Well, here’s the thing. I can’t think of any of my artist friends who produce art I don’t understand. That is, when I see the art done by people I personally know, and who call themselves “artists”, I tend to feel mad fits of jealous rage that I cannot produce things like that. I write because I can’t draw, as I have said many times. If what’s on Bravo is what “artists” are supposed to be, then I think we need a new term for people who actually produce comprehensible art… or a different term for people who produce the kind of stuff Bravo wants to reward them for. (Of course, the mere fact any of them are on Reality TV kind of implies they’ve Sold Out to begin with… a REAL artist would never CHEAPEN themselves by allowing themselves to be edited down to a two-dimensional parody of themselves in order to allow ignorant lowbrow Philistines like me to write blog posts mocking them because I’m too shallow and soulless to appreciate them (or that I’m too shocked and horrified by how they’ve revealed the hypocrisy and evils of our greedy materialistic racist sexist society (Yeah, they’ve got one of those, too. Of course they do!)))

PS: In looking over the gallery from the episode, I should toss some props to Jazz-Minh. Her piece was comprehensible and told a story. I love art where a single image tells you an entire tale; you look at it and you can see the past and the future. To the rest of them? Wearing a cat mask is not art. Splattering fake blood on a canvas is not art. Here’s my tip for just about every artist: If you have to tell people that you are “shocking”, “controversial”, or “confrontational”… you’re not. You’re trying too hard. The art that truly changes the world does not come about because someone got up one morning and said “I want to be shocking and controversial!”. The art that changes the world comes about because the artist didn’t care if his work was shocking or not, didn’t care if people liked it or not, didn’t set out to make a statement or send a message… it comes about because they created what they had to create because they could not not create it, and it changed the world because the truth of it spoke for itself. It is highly dubious anything I ever create will have any impact, but, if I ever do make something meaningful, I assure you, it will not be because I set out to do so. The things I’ve done that people like the most or comment on the most are usually never the things I thought would be popular; the things I do anticipating popularity often have no resonance at all. The upshot is that a creator creates because they can’t not create; the more you concern yourself with what your work “means” or what you’re “saying” or how it will be “received”, the further you get from the whisperings of your muse. My muse whispers charcharodooms. (Didn’t draw this, of course; I just imagined it and a real artist drew it. If I could do the art and someone else could do the imagining, I’d be happy.)

Because they’ll change the graphics back soon, I wanted to preserve BoingBoings tribute to Steve Jobs:

As for me…. well, obviously, his work’s had a huge influence on my life, but when I realized he was only 55… less than a decade older than me… all I could think of was Tom Lehrher’s famous quip: “It is sobering to realize that, when he was my age, Mozart had been dead for ten years.”

There’s really only one possible response to this.

The Sad Life Of The Male Angler

And that is this:

I’ve been rewatching Eureka, catching a lot of episodes I missed (Pretty much season 3.5 and 4.0, which we’re just getting into now), and, last night, I had a thought of the type TVTropes calls “Wild Mass Guessing”.

Eureka is, in fact, a plot by ultra-luddites to retard the world’s progress, or possibly foreign agents out to sabotage America’s future.

Think about it. First, people with Eureka-level IQs aren’t common. There simply aren’t that many of them born into each generation, and, of those that are, many will pursue fields other than science, whether it’s art, business, or living under bridges because they’re unable to accept the fact that any kind of advancement in the world means putting up with taking orders from people less intelligent than you. (Took me a while to internalize that.) So you gather them all in one place, and remember: “When all men have a single throat, it can be cut with a single knife.”

Every week (or, if you prefer, on average, 13-20 weeks out of the year), Eureka is threatened with some disaster that is likely to kill the entire town… removing thousands of highly intelligent specialists in obscure fields, AND all of their accumulated knowledge and research. (Trust me, I don’t think they’d back up the computers at GD using Carbonite.) On average, 2 to 4 people end up dead before the Sheriff figures out there’s a pattern (or before anyone else listens to him when he says there’s a problem… you’d think scientists, who rely on the idea of repeated confirmation to prove the validity of a concept, would think “Every other time the big doofus has said something’s up, he’s been right… even if I don’t understand how he does it, I should accept the fact he does.”). This represents a tremendous, concentrated, destruction of extraordinary talent and knowledge, and it’s been well-established that a lot of the work going on is so idiosyncratic and specialized that it’s not easy for someone else to take over. 

Sheriff Carter is, obviously, a flaw in the plan. If not for him, the town would have been wiped off the map [[insert number of episodes here when you get around to it]] times. Simply killing him or moving him out might be too obvious (though they’ve tried both a few times), so it’s probably not pure coincidence that he’s at the epicenter of every disaster, or that it directly impacts his daughter or any visiting relative. (Presumably, they figured he’d want to leave a town that is more dangerous to his daughter than living in South Central LA would be, but, like most Californians, he knows that if you happen to have a home in a district with good public schools, you STAY there, period.)

The other option is that there’s no one actively plotting to destroy Eureka… it was set up, Hari Seldon style, long ago, and it was calculated that when it reached a critical mass (as it were) of geniuses with access to anti-matter, Casmir energy, alien artifacts from before the big bang, etc, it would self-destruct. This would explain why the time prior to Carter’s arrival was, it seems, relatively peaceful, or the town would have been shut down ages ago. That Carter keeps saving the town implies he wasn’t accounted for in this presumed plan, making him the Mule.

It would be interesting to calculate if the productivity gain for a scientist of having access to Eureka’s labs, funding, and general freedom to experiment is actually greater that the productivity loss caused by a greatly increased probability of early death. (On the other hand, it’s been shown that almost all breakthroughs happen very early in a scientist’s career, that the bulk of their work from then on is generally just refinement or the pursuit of doomed ideas. So, perhaps, it actually evens out — you increase the odds of having a genius breakthrough, and the decades of future life lost when someone decides to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow and thereby turn the entire town into cotton candy do not represent a significant amount of productivity.)