Phantasmogoria

I get remarkably grouchy sometimes when I'm playing games. Maybe it's just me being an anti-social bitch at the best of times (in my defence, I claim stress from being a full-time carer and therefore just wanting a quiet time when I relax by playing my computer games), or maybe it's that I'm sometimes unlucky enough to meet up with some truly, truly terrible people while playing.

A month or so ago, Mr Sare and I were invited along on an Imperious Task Force in City of Heroes (for those not in the know, it's the one in ancient Rome where you fight gladiators, Nazis, robots and aliens). Mr Sare rarely does TFs because he doesn't like to team with people he doesn't know, but we knew the majority of people in the group so it was all going to be fine. And for 3/4s of the TF, it was.

( The story continues... )

tl;dr - I don't like playing with other people sometimes, and this is one reason why.

I was talking with one of my nieces last night about World of Warcraft. She recently had to quit playing because she had, in her own words, "become addicted" to the game and had been playing non-stop. We were joking about how its not nicknamed "World of Warcrack" for nothing, and she explained how she'd gotten a character to level 60 in under 4 weeks, and then levelled a death knight to 80. I jokingly said that my highest character was currently 19, and she asked me how I'd managed that. Now part of the answer is that I have a cat who likes to sit on my keyboard and/or mouse when I'm playing, thus limiting exactly what I can do in the game, but there is another reason - I find it difficult to focus on one character at a time.

In some games that isn't a problem. City of Heroes, for example, actively encourages this, with up to 36 character slots per server, more costume and power combinations than you can shake a stick at and more besides. Having several characters on the go all at once in CoX isn't a problem at all. With other games, however, it's more difficult. In WoW, for example, it feels to me as though you're expected to stick with one character all the way from 1 to 80, and then and only then can you make alts, and they're usually just for fun or because someone needs a different class to your main (this isn't a game policy or anything - considering the number of servers and slots on each server it's quite the opposite - but it appears to be an unspoken rule of the community). EVE Online is another one where alts aren't really considered part of the gaming experience - you can only have a maximum of (I think, it's been a while since I last played) three characters, and only one of them can be learning something at any time, which really cuts down the point of having alts at all there.

It's something that's gotten me thinking, how my taste in MMOs is partly dictated by whether or not I'm going to be tied to one character for a good chunk of the playtime. I have nothing against playing just one character, of course, it's just that I get... bored sometimes. And when I do I want to switch to another character, play in a different way for a while, till I'm feeling ready to play the first one again. To me, it stops me from getting burned out on a game, because if I ever get bored with, say, healing/controlling/support, I can just go play a ranged DPSer who DOTs things till they explode, or similar.

It's going to be interesting when future games come out (The Secret World, I'm looking at you), which may or may not have many options for those of us with altitis but I really, really want to play all the same. Will I be able to keep my attention fixed on just one or two characters, or will the rest of the game be so awesome that I won't care either way (hint: I'm hoping that it's the latter, and so far it's looking that way, but we'll see)?

It was 2002. Or maybe 2003, my memory's become hazy over the years and the fact that I was laid low for much of the time during those years with ME doesn't help much. I think it was 2003. But anyway. Mr Sare had gotten a game while out in town, called Anarchy Online. He'd liked the sound of it, because it was supposed to be sci-fi and it had "Anarchy" in the title, and he was curious because it as one of these new "MMOs" that were popping up in the computer game world. We like to keep up with the trends, do we in the Sareini household.

So he sat down to play it. An hour or so later, I went to see how he was doing and to languish in his bed for a while (it was bigger than mine, more room to sprawl about).

"I don't like this game," he grumbled.*

"What's wrong with it?" I asked.

"I can't understand the controls. Or what I'm supposed to do. Or anything, really. It's stupid," he sulked.

"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

"Dunno. Just not play it, I guess. Can't take it back to the shop."

Well, I couldn't just let him effectively waste money on a game like that, so I told him to move over and took his spot at the computer desk while he went to make coffee, or pizza or something. My only aim at that point was to try to figure out what the basics of the controls and things were, so I could show Mr Sare and everything would be happy again. As it turned out, the controls weren't that bad at all to get the hang of, and Mr Sare didn't know what he was supposed to be doing because he had just run headlong into things without stopping to read things like the tutorials or the starter missions (it's a flaw of his that continues to this day, and one day I'm going to snap while trying to lead him through a new game and beat him senseless with a coffee mug). But by the time he'd come back, I was actually enjoying myself playing. So, when even after I offered to teach him how to play Mr Sare wasn't interested any more, the copy of Anarchy Online passed to me.

My first character was an Agent, which I picked because I wanted to be sneaky and, if I'm remembering correctly, I royally buggered up. I got slightly better with my next character, an Adventurer, and finally worked out what I was doing with the Fixer profession. Sadly, though, I was only able to play Anarchy Online for a couple of months, until they released a patch that made the game incompatible with my (admittedly low-spec) graphics card. I was very sad.

Since then I've played Everquest, Star Wars Galaxies (pre-NGE and everything), City of Heroes, EVE Online, WoW, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, Champions Online, Fallen Earth... There's probably others in there too that I've missed out, but you get the picture. I've even gone back to Anarchy Online a few times, once my system was upgraded enough to be able to play again. Its graphics are terribly, terribly dated now, but it still holds a special place in my heart as the first MMO I ever played, and in a way got me to where I am now.

(* - I'm paraphrasing maybe just a little here.)

There's a fair bit of talk at the moment (oh, what an understatement) in various corners of the internet about Real ID, Blizzard's new way of allowing players to stay connected with their friends regardless of what server they're playing on. Specifically, Real ID shares your real name (ie. the one you signed up with when you created your account, which usually has to coincide with your credit card details) with the people you're listed as friends with. And, if they click on it, their friends. And anyone who's friends with you under the Real ID system will also know your e-mail address, as to become friends you have to share it with them. Now Blizzard have also announced that, once Cataclysm hits on WoW, anyone posting on their forums will also have their real name posted there, and there's not going to be much that can be done about that.

This is all supposed to be a part of the wide internet world of social networking, and that's been an argument used by several people who I've seen defending this plan of Blizzard's - it's just something like Facebook, or Google Buzz. Besides, who needs anonymity on the internet nowadays anyway?

Well.

I don't use my real name on Facebook. I opted out of Google Buzz except for connecting with one person who I know in real life. Most of the people I play or communicate with online don't know my real name, except for a few who I have known for years and who I implicitly trust with my identity. Everyone else can go whistle for it, and that's the way it's going to stay. My name isn't even particularly uncommon, and yet with only a few pieces of information people would be able to track me down - as a specific example, when my brother and my nieces wanted to get back in touch with me after seven years, but didn't know my address, just my general location, all they had to do was look up my name on the electoral records for that area and there I was. Thankfully that one worked out well, but that's not always going to be the case. People might remember reading about the incident a year or so ago when the denizens of 4chan took it upon themselves to track down and harass a teenager who had posted a video of himself abusing a pet cat online, and they did it very well indeed, with far less information than his real name and e-mail address. That just shows that anyone sufficiently motivated can discover all manner of things about you on the internet if they have just a few pieces of your identity.

Why does this even bother me? Well, for one thing I had been vaguely considering going back to WoW out of boredom recently (yes, I played WoW once, I had a 41 Warlock, but the game just couldn't hold my attention for more than a month or so), but hearing how fast and loose Blizzard is wanting to play with my personal details has made me change my mind on that pretty sharpish. Secondly, Blizzard and WoW are seen by many as trend-setters in the online/MMO world, and so there is always the chance that other companies might decide to follow suit with this.

Finally, it makes me feel old. When I was first on the internet, back in 1997, it seemed like it was second nature to guard your identity when you were online. You didn't have to give your real name, so no-one ever did, and no-one cared. Or maybe I was just more sensible than most, and so I'm now remembering those times with rose-coloured glasses because of my own experiences. I'm sure there were plenty of people sharing information they shouldn't have been with perfect strangers back then too. But today it seems like we're being told in one breath to guard our identities, and then in the next to not worry about things like people we might never have met knowing our real names and any other information we might have given them in casual conversation, and it just makes no sense.

Ben Elton wrote a book a few years ago, called Blind Faith, that dealt with the growing intrusiveness of things like this (among other things). I'm starting to think more people should read it, to see how things might start to head.

I had my brother and my eldest niece around earlier today. My niece turned 18 last month, and so I'd gotten her a present all the way from the states (from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, in case you're wondering) and made some chocolate-hazelnut cupcakes in celebration. But this post isn't about my baking skills or mad props as a cool aunt.

During the visit, the conversation turned to gaming, and my niece revealed that not only does she play WoW, but she just dinged 80 on her Death Knight three weeks ago (which made her 18th a double celebration, really). I gave her the obligatory gratz, and then after they had left, I got to thinking about how I was actually proud of that.

I started playing computer games before I could really read. My brother had a Dragon 32 first, and then a Commodore Plus 4, and he used to let me play games like Dork's Dilemma and Manic Miner on them sometimes (but only after I proved I could actually pronounce words like dilemma). When I was 8 or 9 I was given my first computer of my very own, a Commodore 64, and I've never really looked back from there. So when my nieces were growing up, they were exposed to a lot of my gamer ways. They would see me getting up at 6am to play Quake on the family PC, because it was the only time the computer was free sometimes. And when Pokemon became the next huge thing for kids and they played it on their Gameboys, I played it with them (earning me a remarkable amount of street cred among the other children in the neighbourhood, who were amazed at this "adult" (I was about 17 or 18) who knew the names of all the Pokemon).

And now they're gaming themselves. They both play WoW, and if I remember correctly both have Death Knights and do raids. Hell, I never managed that when I played WoW. And they speak 1337. And gamer lingo. What was once something that seemed to be only known to myself and a few friends is now spreading to people whom I used to walk to and from school in the morning and help teach to read. It's an... interesting realisation.

Microsoft have announced their next big thing for the Xbox 360 - and to an equal extent console gaming I suppose - today, the renamed Project Natal/Kinect. When I was my nieces' age, this was more science fiction than anything; the Playstation was only in its first iteration and I don't even think there was anything that could be a precursor to the Xbox out. What kind of things are there going to be for gaming in 15 or 20 years' time? And perhaps more importantly, will my nieces be looking at these new innovations and feeling as old as I do now at the realisation that they probably weren't even thought of when they were back grinding in WoW?

Over the past couple of weeks I've seen a few mentions of a new and upcoming thing in the online gaming world, and discussed it with a number of friends. This "new thing" is a site called GameCrush, and it purports to act as a kind of facilitator for gamers to get "play dates" with girl gamers for a nominal fee.

Now I admit it, when I first heard about it I was dubious, what with the time of year (April Fool's Day, one of my favourite 'holidays', is now only one day away) and the fact that whenever I went to look the site was always down. And while I'm still reserving my ultimate judgement until I see an up and running version of the site, I'm more willing to accept that people hammering the site because of the publicity it's been getting has melted its servers for the time being, and that it could very well be on the level.

My problems with the site, however, go beyond that - the main one being that it's pretty clearly going to be one of the many 'adult' webcam websites out there, only this one has the particular spin of being staffed by girl gamers. Why do I think this? Well, several reasons, but mainly because I've done that job and know the signs.

I should make a point here, before I go any further - I have no problem whatsoever with adult webservices, be they phone, cam or otherwise. Hell, I'd still be working the lines myself if my job wasn't now that of full-time carer - it was fun, paid well for the work that was put in (although you needed to put in long hours to make the wages always touted on the recruitment hours) and I enjoyed that I always had to think on my feet. If that's the job that people want to do, then I wish them good luck and that they enjoy themselves. That, however, is one of my problems - from looking at comments I've seen on the web, a lot of girls are getting interested in working for this service without actually realising what the job could entail.

For me, it was pretty clear. The simple fact that they were offering webcam services was the first thing that pinged my radar, followed by the options of setting your chat mood to "flirty" or "dirty" and the fact that the site is 2257 compliant - that's the US law that requires all websites with adult or potentially adult content to have full records of all their models' ages, birthdates and everything else that proves that everything's above board. But most of the comments from girls I saw seemed to be more concerned with how their gaming skills were going to be evaluated - unless I'm very very wrong (and I'm always willing for that to be the case), that's not going to be at the forefront of the minds of most of the guys who will be paying for these services. I've seen their comments too, and believe me, gaming skills aren't what they're thinking of here. So I'm bothered that a lot of the girls who want to join this site are going to get something of a shock when the reality hits them.

That, and the backlash. As I said, I've seen guys' comments on this as well, and they're the kind of things that make me want to never admit my gender online again. I'm not easily shocked or offended, and I'm not pulling a raging feminist thing here (or at least I hope not), but when I'm gaming I don't see why my gender matters so much to people. My regular friends in my gaming circle call me a "saucy British tart", but that's because I'm British while most of them are American, and they know that I worked on phone sex lines for a while and find it deeply amusing. Which is as it should be, all in all. I don't get special treatment for being a girl, and I don't expect it. So this sort of thing bothers me, because it feels to me like we (females) are being encouraged to exploit the fact that we're girl gamers and therefore a rare and fascinating breed.

tl;dr - I'm not sure that sex and online gaming should necessarily mix (except maybe in circumstances with friends or in a far more anonymous setting, which is a whole other thing). Of course, if I'm wrong and things go well, and GameCrush expands to PC games and doesn't require webcams, then I'll not only change my tune but I might well sign up (listen for me talking sexy over your zombie-slaughtering antics). But right now, I'm happy watching warily from where I am.

So as I said yesterday, due to a bizarre bug, I'm still able to log into my Champions Online account and play, even though my account ran out on the 5th. This is a bug that's affected quite a few people who cancelled their CO accounts after the first month, and so far there's no sign of it being fixed - or even of what's causing it, although the most likely suspect is a coding error that's mistakenly identified us all as lifetime subscribers somehow. (And if that's the case, then likely the only solution is for some poor codemonkey to go through every single subscription manually and check to see if they're a lifetime or not, a thankless task if ever there was one.)

Now, until this weekend I'd not touched CO since my account expired, but out of a combination of boredom and curiosity I thought I'd pop back into the game while I could and see what had changed in the couple of weeks since I'd last played. There had been a good few major patches, after all, and they might have addressed some of the issues and problems I'd had. So I stepped back in...

( Bullet points here )

Last night I found myself hating someone I was teaming with.

This was something of a new experience for me, as most of the time I consider myself to be pretty easy-going when it comes to other players in MMOs, mainly because I'm very much aware that, so to speak, "there but for the whims of Eris, go I." I'm practicially infamous among my circle of MMO friends for being able to grab aggro by just standing there, I have no sense of direction and get lost in missions all the time, and I all but have a keybind that says, "BRB - cat aggro". So if people can put up my my flaws, then I can certainly put up with theirs. But last night was... different.

Things had started off well enough. I'd been invited onto a Task Force in City of Heroes by a couple of friends, the rest of the team being filled with people they knew more than I knew them. I was playing on my Blaster, because there was the promise of being repeatedly shielded and buffed into omnipotence and I couldn't let an opportunity like that go by. As it turned out, one of the others on the team was a /Kinetics controller, but I didn't actually know this until someone requested a Speed Boost from them (for those not in the know, Speed Boost or SB is a buff which greatly increases speed and endurance recovery for a short time when cast on someone. If Adrenaline Boost is the amphetamines of the CoX world, then SB is indeed the crack). This made me stop, and blink. I actually had to check my icon bar to see that, yes, I did have an icon for another of the Kinetics powers on me, but no SB. And yet the player had SB.

I admit that this is somewhat personal for me, as one of my very first characters - and the first I got to 50 - is a Mind/Kinetics Controller. And I love this character, and happen to consider myself to be both not bad at playing him and pretty knowledgable about the powersets involved therein. So when I see someone else who has Kinetics and yet isn't bothering to use the buff that is, to be honest, one of the best in the game - I get a little upset. And by "upset" I mean I set my jaw and try very hard not to start grinding my teeth.

Throughout the whole TF, this player never SBed anyone unless they were asked. Not once. To me, it just seems strange to take a power and never use it, but hey, that's just me. And because I didn't want to make a fuss, I didn't say anything and just mentally willed Drain Psyche to recharge faster so I could dive into large groups of mobs and hyper-charge my recovery for a minute or so each time. And all in all, even without the boosts that SB would have given us, we were doing pretty damn well.

Then we came to the final mission. This particular mission was something of a pain - it was an escort mission, and there were two ways of doing so. One involved fighting your way through the map and them back again with the escort, and the other involved someone with fly going to find the escort and bringing them back while avoiding the mobs because the escort can fly too. Because one of the team was due to go to work soon, we opted for option B, and in the mission before the last it was explained and decided up on that I would pick up the escort as I was the only one with fly and, when buffed up, was unstoppable for two-three minutes. Just before we enter the mission, however, Kinetics player suddenly pipes up: "I have Group Invis and SB"

Well, bully for you, I think, but say nothing as we're zoning in and I need to get buffed up and ready. The rest of the team start to turn me into a firey psychic engine of destruction, a SB is asked for... and it's then that we realise that Kinetics player has gone off by themselves, not telling anyone else, to rescue the escort and aggroed half the map.

And it was there, dear readers, that I realised that it was indeed possible to hate someone playing a computer game. I swore so much I nearly scared the cat (and she's heard me swear before), had to turn off Team chat for the duration of the mission (especially after the Kinetics player, being told again what the plan had been, and that the escort needed to follow someone who could fly, responded with "lol I can't fly who's the flyer?"

We did complete the mission, albeit 25 minutes later than it should have been and with numerous deaths because no-one knew where to go and the escort kept trying to aggro the whole map (dear CoX devs: could you turn her lust for battle down, just a little?), and I informed my friends through clenched and grinding teeth that I really, really didn't want to team with that player again. Thankfully they agreed with me on that one.

Gah. I know it's not healthy to get so mad at someone in an online game, even if they are so incompetent and lost in their own little world that they wouldn't be able to find their own arse with both hands and a map. But really, some people are just asking for an internet Boot to the Head.

I like having a birthday in late October. Not only did I always avoid having to celebrate my birthday on a schoolday because it would always fall during the half-term holidays (no getting doused with water by sadistic teachers for me!), but because it's so close to Halloween there's always plenty of horror stuff coming out at that time to entertain me.

Last year, for example, Channel Four devoured the Big Brother house in a zombie apocalypse, which was just like seeing all my dreams not involving George Clooney and/or Eliza Dushku coming true at once. And then City of Heroes introduced the Zombie Apocalypse zone event as part of their Halloween celebrations. Really, give me zombies and I'll be your friend for life.

This year, I'm getting Left for Dead 2 (okay, not till November, it seems, but still...), and last night I got to see Zombieland, which was just all kinds of awesome. The best way I can come up with to describe it without spoiling it is to call it a buddy movie with zombies and more than a few sly nods to the genre-savvy among us. And Woody Harrelson as Tallahassee is just... awesome. I thoroughly reccommend this film to anyone and everyone.

There's a couple more films I'm very much hoping to catch as part of my October-horror-birthday celebrations as well. One is Paranormal Activity, which is this little film apparently made for just $11,000 in about a week, and is currently terrifying audiences wherever it goes. I'm always on the look out for a movie that can instill in me the same level of terror that BBC1's Ghostwatch did all those years ago (and I still have problems watching that now...) It would help me immensely if it was actually given a release date in the UK, of course, but... The other is a movie called Triangle, which I admit I don't know that much about (although I'm guessing there's a Bermuda Triangle connection...), but it's made by the same people who did the movies Creep and Severance, which I did enjoy, so I certainly want to give that one a look.

In conclusion: October: it's a good month.

Over the past few weeks, while I've been hanging out on the Champions Online boards (and by "hanging out" I mean lurking and looking for threads that cause the most amusement or headdesking and forwarding them on to my friends) I've seen one particular topic come up repeatedly. During an argument over whether CO is any good or not (and this isn't that argument), City of Heroes will inevitably be brought up and someone will announce, with all the self-importance that someone posting anonymously on the internet can muster, that the Mission Architect system killed that game and they've never been able to find a team to play since.

To which I practically have to sit on my hands to stop myself from replying, "You poor thing. Don't you have any friends?"

Seriously, I'm at a loss on what else to think on this one. Certainly I've never had a problem with teaming up in CoX since AE hit, or before it, and when Nick plays he quite often has to beat off the blind invites and tells asking him to team with a stick, just to prove that it's not just my circle of friends who are teaming and no others. What I guess these people are complaining about is the fact that, as with anything in MMOs, there was a group of people using the AE system to farm xp/gold/fluffy bunnies (note: if there actually had been fluffy bunnies, I would have been there like a shot), and for a while that seemed like the only teams that were going on. If you didn't bother to look any closer than Broadcast chat in Atlas Park, that is. Everywhere else, there was still plenty of non-farming teaming going on, and still is. Either that, or I hallucinated the team I was on yesterday afternoon in the RWZ where I hit 38 with my Storm/Energy Defender.

Where am I going with this? Well, I'm not too sure right now, but I think I'm trying to make a point about teaming in MMOs. MMOs are an inherently social set of games, after all - even my socially-phobic self recognises that - and and so teaming up with people, be they friends or just random people you see trying to do the same mission as you as you fly/run/teleport about the place, is always going to be an important part of an MMO. But the fact of the matter is, it goes both ways. It's one thing if an MMO doesn't have a system in place to team or their teaming system is flawed (although to be fair to CO, they're working to fix that, even if it should have been in there at launch), but it's entirely another if a player just doesn't bother to look beyond their own virtual nose for a team and then complains that there's no teaming to be found. In their own way, those people are just as lazy as the people in Atlas Park endlessly farming Freakshow boss missions - possibly even more so, because at least the farmers are teaming!

So, in conclusion: teaming - it won't bite you, and you might even like it.

(This Monday morning snark post brought to you by chocolate and Amitriptyline. Amitriptyline, it's supposed to be making me sleep but it's just making me manic and bitchy.)