Below are the 4 most recent journal entries recorded in daniel1971's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006
9:03 pm	Looking for a MMO: the ultimate-subejective guide how to find the right Ever so often I see people on forums asking, what Online Game should I play? Well, in honest, it is a personal question none really can answer. But sometimes we need a few questions, to sharpen our mental sword. So here comes, Elikal's Ultimate-Subjective Guide to find the right MMO for everyone! (In order of importance) 1. GRAPHICS: It's like dating. If officially asked, everyone says he chooses a partner by his/her character. But of course, we don't. I mean, character, in our case, game system is of course important. But what counts is, if we find the world visually attractive. As with dating, so with gaming. A really, really good advise is, don't look at screenshots. They tell you absolutely nothing. Really. I recall looking at screenshots I found awful, like WOW, they look so comic-like and in real it looks much more awesome. Or Dark and Light; the screenshots looks alright or some even good, but nothing can describe the visual horror of the actual game. So try to get into a beta or a trial or visit a friend who plays it. This is serious advise. Those graphics are what you will stare at for a VERY long time and MANY man-hours! If you hate the character models and the landscape, your date can be as kind and smart as whatever, but you will never marry. 2. THE COMMUNITY Yes, there is another one more important that game system and that is community. I played a lot of mediocre games because they had a great community. I guess the best example by far is City of Heroes. It has some great aspects, but a lot of tiresome, lacking repeatable stuff, but it's community is the best and most mature I have ever seen. On the downside, a really bad community can totally ruin even the best game. Alas, communities can hardly be analyzed or predicted, and they change on each server and over time. There are a few basic rules, though - The easier the game and the faster levelling is, the younger and more immature is the audience - games with a given lore can attract many "Lore Mongers" who harass people with lore correctness - Read the forums, but take a grain of salt; a forum CAN be an indicator; remember, that forums attract whiners and aggressive people and most decent people avoid forum wars, but it should give a sense if a forum is overly dark - more aggressive PVP-heavy games often attract younger audiences, while non-PVP games are usually played by more calm and older people; the more competition a game has, the more likely is immature behaviour (alas) 3. GAME SYSTEM This means, what the game offers inside. There are all things you may have as a personal preference, sure, but since we play those games expectantly many hours and months, you can claim a few things, so I divide this into a few most important sub-sections. a) IMMERSITY Since we play MMOs LONG and OFTEN, the question is: what can I do in this game, BESIDES questing? If your time is VERY limited you may want questing only, but most players desire living worlds in which they feel like in a second home. That’s why I never ever would play DDO. I have never played any game as non-immersive as DDO. You may want places to Role-play or socialize, living cities, housing, places to explore, other professions that combat, other ways to gather experience than questing and hunting. You can only hack on that Orc-Spider-Wolf-Skeleton mobs so often. It gets old very fast if you can't do anything else in between. b) REPLAYABILITY Few people really ever only create one single character. Most tend to try out other characters, or after reaching high end game want to start fresh. So, if you play a new character, will you see new things, or all the same quests again? Games like EQ2 or SWG have little replay ability, because if you start anew, you get all the same quests again. In that way WOW with Horde and Alliance realms and multiple starter areas is far better. Believe me, no matter what you think now, you WILL make alternative toons! c) HIGH - LEVEL (HIGH-END) GAMING This means, what will you do in a game if you reach the upper third of the level ranks? In so many good games the high end game is rather bad and mindless IMO. In EQ2 above level 40 or so quests begin to get VERY complex. So you may like making monthly schedules to get your quests done, but if you are a more spontaneous person (like me) you won't like high level gaming in EQ2. Or take WOW: currently you have to do raids in the high levels to get any good equipment and to have any real challenges, so if you don't like to run like chicken with 39 others, you wont like WOW high end game. High-end game is a rather tricky thing always, just keep a focus on what a game offers and what you like. d) INDIVIDUALITY This is also something not everyone values, just be sure to know how much you do. If you love Planetside, where everyone looks like the army of clones, well, then this topic is of no matter for you. I recall how frustrated I was in Lineage II and the RF Online beta with its 4 faces and 4 haircuts. And it doesn't get better in higher levels. Some people like me value to be recognized and some games offer this better than others. If you value real individuality games like SWG and CoH have set real good standards. Gear (Clothing can compensate this, but it may be so expensive or uber gear that any normal player will never lay his hands on it, like the goddamn EQ2 profession hats! They are so uber rare and far away, its a laugh.) e) CASUAL VS HARDCORE Know how much daily or weekly man(woman)-hours you are going to invest into a game. The less you have time the faster a game must lead you to the fun. A reason why WOW has so many subscribers is, it leads you to the fun MUCH faster than any other game. Quests are simple and easy to find, zones are logically sorted by difficulty, there are many helpers to find a group, there is a very balanced difficulty and so on. Small things like that allow you to log into WOW and start something in a few minutes. If you want it complicated, EQ2 is the other example, because of the complex nature of the quest system. You MUST prepare and organize in order to accomplish anything beyond the basic levels. f) SOLO - GROUP - RAID BALANCE A tricky issue. Each game has a certain balance of quests you can do solo, in a group or a raid (20-40 people), but very few gaming companies give an honest statement on this and it takes some time to find this out on yourself. A 14 day trial is definitely too short to see this. Ask people who play a game about it, read reader-reviews. Some desire solo or raiding, I know, but IMVHO a MMO is designed around the old fashioned idea of the good old D&D tabletop days of fetching 4 friends and doing that adventure. I think both solo and raid should be the exceptions in MMOs. I soloed a lot once, but when EQ2 made so many mobs soloable, it became nearly impossible to find a group unless you were in a big guild. Keep this in mind, if too many mobs are too easy (=soloable) people unlike group, and a good group is where the fun starts. I am sure everyone has some other things in mind, but I guess this covers the most important and lasting topics. All statements are, naturally, highly personal and subjective. ^^ (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006
11:15 am	The degeneration of Game Websites The degeneration of Game Websites I am playing Online Games (MMOs) now for three years, playing computer games for about 20 years. I am reading forums regularly, both of games I played and those I just wanted to follow what was going on. Often I subscribed to those forums, only to read them, posting maybe 1-2 threads in half a year. I use the Internet to get news about games for a fairly long time, practically since it exists as a public medium. As gaming is one of my mayor hobbies, I want to be up to date. But I must admit, that in the last year or so it got worse and worse to a degree I have a decreasing will to use the Internet as a reference for information on games any longer. Why is that the case? And I wonder if I am alone in this changing view? First, it’s the deep change I feel that happened in the game forums. Game forums have always been a place of struggle between fanbois and hate-bois, the regular troll and much emotional, ideology burdened debates. However, it seems to me in the last year many forums have dropped under a level of minimal civility, that reading them has become unbearable. I take one example, famous, which stands for many: the absolute decline of the Star Wars Galaxies (SWG) forum. I played SWG since the first days, and I played it for about 2 years, which is a pretty long time, given that I did play it daily a lot of hours. I loved the game, and even though I played half a dozen other MMOs, I still think it was the best MMO time I ever had. Then the game was changed by SOE with the so called “New Game Enhancements”. Like in every long running online game, some deeper cuts come to MMO’s from time to time. It wasn’t an ideal change, and likely one of the deepest any MMO had so far. For many SWG fans, this was like Armageddon had broken loose. I really don’t want to go into detail, I too lost pretty much. (I was a Creature Handler, and that entire profession was killed.) There were arguably things that didn’t go well. But I had watched the game very closely, and there was a constant decline in members far before NGE, but what the hate-bois claimed, that the NGE suddenly killed a perfect and well running game, is no less than a myth. I had seen the decline in my huge friend list and the guilds, only shortly reanimated by that space addon. People were loosing interest, and with each new MMO the numbers grew less. That is a most natural process of MMOs, and on the background of the huge success of WOW it is only logical to think of making a game easier accessible for new players by a company that in the end wants to make money. No matter how justified the complains were or not – and I stand for my view that they were FAR over exaggerated, since SWG is still a pretty good game if you now start it anew – the flame war totally got out of hand and out of any civilized way to deal with other people. The SWG forum now practically lies in ruins, and no announcement, comment or explanation of the devs, no matter what they say, gain anything but instant flaming down. I know well there are reasons to be sceptic, but I thought every person should have so much decency, to keep the critic reasonable, with minimal emotional notes. The SWG forum is now practically useless, there just is no reasonable and fair debate anywhere. What I saw in the SWG forum, has also happened to other forums, some of the MMORPG sub-forums, the English part of the “Dark and Light” forum and many others are on the pathway down. While venting off some steam is ok and necessary, it has begun to get a dynamics of it’s own, where people flame for the sake of the emotional thrill of doing it. The forums have gotten a weird dynamics, where people, who play any game, and despite some shortcomings somewhat enjoyed it, start to feel cheated and enraged because they are talked into a frenzy of over-criticism and anger. I have seen how in many cases, formerly objective, rational posters were dragged into anger and flaming, I experienced it on myself. Forums are now unleashed, and all civility is abandoned in more and more forums. It is not that I disagree with the complains per se, those people post. It is the way they do it, their aggression, sarcasm and anger dominating more and more postings, which make any discussion pointless. I always was against the use of sarcasm, though we live now in an age, where sarcastic and ironic comments are quite fashionable. Face it: they are discussion killers. A sarcastic or ironic comment only does one thing: it ends all debate, it is a killer for reason and objective conversation. No matter how funny or clever you feel, you only killed a debate, and in the long term shot yourself in the leg with sarcasm, because improvement lives from open and fair debates. Those aggressive, “funny” comments may win the day, but make us loose everything eventually. Things are never perfect. The problem is, now that gaming and MMOs are getting older, we have more to compare. Back in Everquest 1 or Ultima Online, there was no competition, and since it was a long time ago since we played those, many start to see those “good old days” with pink glasses. That’s a very human thing, but in the end many claim that all new nowadays must be junk, because it is so bad compared to their good memories. Maybe we should put a little less trust in our memories, they are a fickle thing. In the oh-so-glorious days when SWG or WOW started, a lot of the crucial features weren’t installed and took far over half a year to be implemented. So why go into such a frenzy over everything not working now? None of the successful killer games had that perfection. And a MMO is not a solo game, it is a hell of a difficulty to get all together, when 10.000s of people with more of less freedom have their impact on the same world. When SWG started, it had so little. To this day, there never was any reasonable amount of quests, compared to the big load of quests EQ2 or WOW have, so what? We organized hunting, events, parties and whatnot. We were never bored, because we made that game ours! We didn’t wait for daddy-dev to pour sweet candy into our mouth, we did a lot ourselves. Somehow I think the now young and new players expect everything to be ready made and easy led to them without much try and error. On the “Dark and Light” forum, only two days after launch, someone complains crafting is broken, because he can’t find a reagent. Well, after two days, he supposes to know everything. And even if it were really broken, every MMO took quite some time to have everything as is was supposed. When those good old MMOs started, we made what we had and enjoyed it. Housing only in half a year? So what, then let’s start making a city plan and get people together for the day housing is there! Really, some sound so much like spoilt little kids, who were used that mommy and daddy feed them with candy all day without the need to lift so much as a finger. They really should play some games of the 80ies, no journal, you had to write down heaps of papers with quests and conversations; no maps, other heaps of papers with hand drawn maps. Heck, I still have all those hand-made maps from Ultima IV on some chequered paper! Some really don’t know how much luxury they have today! When Wing Commander was new, it took me three weeks visiting all my distant friends to find a new mouse driver, so my 640 KB Ram had enough space left for the game! Now easy internet patch those days! Reviews going down the drain? A totally different topic, which surely has some connection to the first, is the side of Online Reviews. Back in the old days, we had paper magazines, which appeared each month, so the reviewer did have some time anyway. Often it took 2-3 months before a real review was published and there was some kind of codex, that reviews were made, if the author had played the game to the end. Now we have dozens of Oblivion Reviews a few days after the game was in stores. Or take Heroes of Might and Magic V, same story. Both are decent games, which offer a lot. But in no way they deserved the 90% praises they got! You may love the awesome graphics of Oblivion, or the size of the world, but all people I know, who play RPG’s for ages, admitted, after being quite happy in the first days, their interest to keep Oblivion playing dwindled with each day. Only recently some reviews pointed out the week points of Oblivion. The total lack of choices which make zero replayability, the dream-like weird AI conversations, the dumbed down magic system, the overall feel to be taken at the hands like a 8 year old child, being told what to do, the total killing of any sense to explore on yourself, because loot and monsters are always bound to your level – and so forth. It may be a question of personal taste, how much that matters to you, but it surely gathers enough controversial points that Oblivion is not the killer game it was rated to be. Since the reviews now appear so soon after a game hits the shelves, I greatly assume, most reviewers play a game a few days and then write their review. That many issues are only clear when you play a game a longer time is thus responsible for less and less reliable game reviews. I can understand, that under the pressure of competition a review must be published soon after a game is out; but the least any decent magazine should do, is make a new and altered review after the author has completed the game, or in case of an MMO played it for some months. I mean, how can a game like Heroes V get so many good reviews, while it has so many bugs and critical issues? The answer is, they become visible after you play a while, so I’d guess some amounts that all those 80%+ Reviewers never made it beyond the first Campaign. I think there is a strong connection between the great hype many game reviews and mags make of a game, and the flame wars which erupt on forums with greater frequency and more destructive than ever. Great expectations are made by those hype magazine reports which naturally must be disappointed by reality. I have seen it happen in “Dark and Light”, which was quite hyped as the next big thing, and I really bet it will happen to “Vanguard” also. Of all the many previews I have seen so far, only a few admit, the rollback Vanguard aims to bring to MMOs is a highly risky thing, which may greatly disappoint a lot of people who are now deluded how perfect this game is supposed to be, and gaming companies do their own share to rise unrealistic expectation in their customers. Just take RF Online’s PR mumbo-jumbo, how revolutionary the game was supposed to be. Now like that game or not, there is hardly anything revolutionary in this most mindless grind we have seen a long time. But raising such expectations is a dangerous thing, because it can greatly backfire, as the mood on many forums nowadays shows. All those extreme emotions and flame wars make the gaming scene not really attractive, and my only advise to people who are new to gaming and MMO is not to visit forums overly, or better not at all, for the sake of their peace of mind. It remains to be seen if the gaming scene in the internet goes down that spiral of hate more in the coming years. Hopefully, for an otherwise great hobby, not. Elikal (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 12th, 2006
8:31 pm	My Journey to Japan - Report Hiyo, ok now a little report from Japan, since I am asked about this from so many *sweatdrop* I tell the same again and again, so I thought to make a little report. It was my 3rd journey to Japan, one each passing year. This time it was the first in May, so it wasn't so extremely hot than the other two times. Living in Germany, I am accustomed to a less hot climate, so those summers in Japan were really hell, since I don't like heat anyway and don't get well with it. If you are a westerner and never have been to Japan, it is difficult to really understand. As Manga and anime fan, naturally I have a sympathy for that country, so I always travelled there with great respect and interest. Also as a reader of classic Asian philosophy (Confucius, Mencius, Sun-Tzu), I think I have a basic understanding of Asian less individualistic ideals, something which I honestly find refreshing compared to the aggressive egoism our western culture is plagued with. Especially in the last 15 years I feel a great rise of egoism and aggressive selfcenteredness in the west. If you life in a big city like Berlin, you are used to a high level of aggressive people everywhere, and I guess it is similar with all western big cities. So coming to Tokyo and Yokohama (which are practically together like one big city), it is quite different. I never have seen people yelling, arguing or shouting in public, even tho this double city is a REALLY huge metropolis. If you have never been there, you may think it as a forced thing, but nothing could be farther from truth. If you walk in the streets of Tokyo, even tho it is very crowded and dense, everyone is friendly and relaxed. You loose the urge to fight your way through very fast, and I found myself giving way nice and politely, because I felt sure everyone else gives it to me in just the same manner. It is very relaxing and comforting to be in a peaceful and non-egoistic environment like this. So while I sure value my western individualism, I also became to believe that we should adopt a little of eastern values also to reach some balance. Being in an eastern metropolis can in that way be really educating. The first two days I had a heavy jet-lag and was quite sleepy, so my host and I went to wander around a little in Tsurumi, the part of Yokohama where he lives. It is a lively little suborb between Tokyo and Yokohama centers with a big center of commerce and a nice Buddhistic Temple area, which in Japan serve like parks in the west, where people walk for recreation, even though it is also a religious place, so people come for a quick pray at the shrines. If you live in a Christian realm, the religion of Japan is very different. In Shinto and Buddhistic Temples, people pray on the outside of the temple, at the doorstep, not in the inside. (The same as the ancient people in Greece, btw.) Shinto is the old Japanese religion of nature spirits and ancestor worship. To me, the Buddhistic Temples are nice, but have a little to stern "atmosphere", so I like the Shinto temples more. Their energies are more light and welcoming than those serious and stern Zen Temples. I also had 2 bus tours, which is the common way for Japanese to travel to sites of interest. Unfortunately the tours are still only in Japanese. Japan still has little tourism from the west, the majority of people travelling in Japan are the Japanese themselves. Japan also has little foreigners, so 99% of people you see in the streets are Japanese, much unlike any western metropolis. As his is so, I usually feel like a green skinned alien in Japan, because as a blond westerner I could not stand out less as if a green martian alien would land in one of our cities. My first bus tour went to Kamakura, a cultural center in a part of Japan. There was the oldest Japanese Zen Temple, about 800 years old, where Zen Buddhism was brought to Japan from China. The great bell and one of the old trees where originally brought from China by the founder. My impression is, that the Zen Buddhism is the most successful in Japan, since it's temples fit to the more elegant simple style, compared to the very colourful chinese buddhistic Temples. Kamakura has many interesting sites, and a grand nature everywhere. It is more a huge village, as there are no skyscrapers. There was a scenic peninsula with a small mountain to overlook the area, which was very beautiful. The other day I went to the region of Hakone, where Mount Fuji is located. The bus drove to a plateau about 2700 meters above sea level; Mt. Fuji itself is about 3700 meters or so. From the plateau I had a wonderful view over the dfistant landscape and the mountain ranges. Fuji-san is an old volcano, but long inactive. Hakone is a forest landscape with many hills and mountains. Unlike here in Germany, where people travel by themselves into the environment, in Japan people stick to some roads, leaving the forests alone, so despite Japan is heavy populated, people do not just venture into the forests, so seeing them from afar you see forests unspoiled by men, as I said totally unlike here in Central Europe. Those bus journes were quite enjoying, even though sitting in that bus for many, many hours to reach those places was quite exhausting. I never liked to be confined in a small, crowded space with many humans, but in Japan EVERY place is crowded. Since people do not just venture by themselves into nature, all are crammed into those ways and places which are "official". If you see my pictures, you may get a bit of that impression. For a westerner, Japan feels quite a little overcrowded. On another day my host and I went to the center of Yokohama, where I was on top of the landmark tower, the highest building in Yokohama, 296 m above ground. It was a wonderful view, but alas weather was bad that day, so the view was limited. They have a really huge ferris wheel beneath it, also, but I didn't drive it. I was in a nearby Onsen in the evening. An Onsen is a Japanese bath on a hot spring, where the water comes from great depths, heated by the natural lava underneath. So I can tell you, it was VERY hot, really at the very limit and human can bear. After 5 minutes or so I had to get out to cool down, before getting in again. It was very relaxaing and wonderful. One of the things to learn there is, Japan is not Christian culture. I guess Americans might find the visit in an Onsen disturbing, if seperated by gender, in an Onsen everyone is naked. Even though it was a male bath, a father took is 4 year old daughter inside, which was totally normal there. As I am European and no Christian either, it wasn't of any matter to me, but it was very interesting. The other thing is, the people in Japan are slim! There is a MUCH less part of people with some body fat, which naturally is the result of their food, which has little fat and less calories than any western food. In fact, we westerners eat quite unhealthy. Still, I must admit, I never liked sea-food at all, and Japanese food, although looking good, was not for me. I just could not eat most things there, so I was very grateful for the dozen McDondalds free-food cards my Host's mother gave me. I did try all things, but as I said, I just can't eat Japanese food. (Hey, I even tried those fly larves on the rice, so I DID try! The shark fin soup was very tasty though, tasted a bit like chicken.) I also visited Yokohama Chinatown, which was interesting to me, since we have no Chinatowns in Germany. I ate a very exclusive Chinese dinner there. (The best food for western tongues to eat in Japan is Korean, by the way. It is thin meat, cooked on an oven right on the table. The only thing I really missed in Japan is Salad, since I love salads. They only have vegetables.) For me, in a way, visiting Japan was also a kind of sweet torture; so many things I wanted but could not have. I was, naturally, in a Manga and Anime store, and man, it was filled with thousands of Mangas and Animes, most of them never will be published in english or german, so all the wonderful things I could never read and watch. Also, since I am a great gamer, especially RPGs, I have seen many great console games, most of them are never published outside Japan, too, alas. On another side-note I can tell you many Japanse men and boys look really good. Mouthwatering good. Now like any westerner, before I travelled to Japan, I did not think Asian men to be beautiful for my taste. Don't think so, unless you have been there! It is difficult to say, my taste in men surely hasn't changed, but they have a lot good looking males there, I can tell you. (And those black school uniforms en masse really made my hormones go wild, haha! *cough* Ok, forget that last sentence.) Japanese males are quite slim and tender, which I am really into anyways. (Never was into bulky, muscular guys.) Even though I am not really big and huge, my shoe and clothing size was quite in the upper limit in Japan, heh. Sometimes, so many beauties, I didn't know where to look first. As I said, don't judge before you haven't been there. Only I fear as gay man it might be difficult to get one of them, since Japan isn't said to be quite open minded in that topic. Oh well... So, while I really enjoyed the trip, I must admit I was glad to be home. I am quite a couch potatoe, and, as Dorothy said, it is nowhere better than at home. ^^ Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Monday, May 8th, 2006
4:51 pm	I am back from Japan, and hi and welcome all :) Ok, I am back from Japan, and thus exhausted. A weird way to start a journal, sure more to come. See some of my pics from my journey, be warned, they are huge in size and KB. ^^ See gallery here: http://pics.livejournal.com/daniel1971/gallery/000015z1 (Comment on this)