29 Apr 2011
In the book High Fidelity (and the movie too, for that matter), the main character is obsessed with making “Top 5” lists and categorizing his music collection. There’s a moment where he decides to organize his records autobiographically - the order in which he experienced them. I’ve always been intrigued by that idea: trying to express one’s journey in life through the music that accompanied it. So I’m going to do just that, except instead of sorting stacks of records I’ll be producing a playlist.
Unlike the character in the book I have no intention of organizing every single piece of music I own in such a matter. Really I just want to capture the inflection points. The problem is that as soon as you introduce choice into this exercise it becomes an entirely different activity. In defining the timeline of my life, what music was most important?
Do I choose songs that represent the evolution of my taste in music? Or do I choose songs that are steeped in personal memory? Sometimes hearing a song can take me to a time, or to a specific feeling. Some songs are tied so tightly to poignant memories that hearing them transports me to an exact moment. Clearly a musical timeline of my life has to include these songs. They may not represent me musically, but they do represent my human experience.
As I’ve tried to put this list together it’s become clear that I can’t just do one or the other. A progression through my music tastes alone is soulless; a trip through the highlights of emotional moments lacks context. There needs to be an intentional blend in order to achieve a sensible storyline. It’s a tricky task, and one I’ve been working on for months now.
I’ve finished reconstructing my timeline, and now it’s down to the logistics of writing, linking, and presenting this to the vast anonymity of the internet. Let this post serve as an introduction to the project. The next time you hear about it we’ll jump right into the early years of my exposure to music. Everything from Bob Marley to Michael Jackson to even New Kids on the Block. You heard me, I’m baring it all.
25 Apr 2011
I’m generally not a fan of landscape photography. Maybe it’s because the subject matter is infinitely patient. In general the photo will have everything in focus, and whatever is being captured has been there longer than you or I. There’s no immediacy to it. Sure, mountains and trees and waterfalls are pretty, but I just don’t know what a landscape photo is telling me other than “doesn’t wherever you are now suck in comparison?”
While writing my series on Lord of the Rings Online I decided I wanted screenshots to go with it, and that for some reason it was important that they be personally taken screenshots instead of stock images from whatever the internet had to offer. As I went about I decided I really enjoyed the hunt. No longer was I just some hero in Middle Earth; now I was some hero with a camera.
Once I started I just couldn’t stop, and I quickly gathered far more photos than I needed for my article. So I’ve decided to post them here as a visual journey through Turbine’s rendering of Middle Earth. I feel like I was a little harsh on them, because truth be told there are many beautiful scenic areas in the game. Anyway, here you’ll find no rants about game mechanics, just pretty pictures and some light captions. Enjoy.
It seemed natural for these photos to follow the hobbit journey from Hobbiton to Rivendell. Here we have Bag End in all its cozy glory. And excellent place to host a dozen dwarves.
A cute little hobbit hole cut out of the hillside. I’m thinking maybe this whole rectangular door things is overrated.
Frodo was found of hikes into the woods around the Shire. I imagine this forest path might have been one of his favorites.
Hobbits are none to comfortable around the water, but they have on big beautiful river running through the Shire. In classic hobbit fashion this river is named “The Water”.
They’ve gotta get over that river somewhere, and here’s one of the crossings at nighttime with a Bounder keeping watch. He probably doesn’t see much action, and more than likely is drunk on the job.
It’s daytime in this shot, but this is the Buckleberry Ferry where the hobbits escaped the black riders into Buckland.
I know they were trying to shake those scary black riders, but I don’t think going through the Old Forest was the brightest idea. It is not a happy place.
Here we have Old Man Willow, luring all passersby into a blissful slumber.
We’ve emerge from the Old Forest into the Barrow Downs. Cairns and tombs, oh my! You can’t take two steps without stumbling over reanimated bag of bones. This is where players will likely experience their first dungeon instance.
North of the forest are beautiful fields that would have provided a much more enjoyable path. But I guess the big open is just begging for a Ringwraith to swoop through and gobble you up.
All throughout the land of Middle Earth are ruins of ages past, such as this one.
And here we see the town of Bree, looking perfectly pleasant in the day light. For low level characters this is their main hub for banking and auctions. I guess it’s a more friendly place if you’re not trucking around the One Ring of Power.
22 Apr 2011
There are many reasons that people who met me over a decade ago would see me differently than those who’ve met me recently, but there’s one reason in particular that secretly bothers me. Most people I know now would be surprised to hear that I used to play the guitar. A lot. The people I met before would be equally surprised to hear that I no longer do.
Everyone in high school seeks out their thing that sets them apart, and for me that became playing the guitar. Well, that and I basically always wore the same poncho. I was happy to later find out that the key feature I enjoyed (the marsupial pouch in front) could also be found much more fashionably in hoodies. But this isn’t a story about my deep abiding love of a good zip-up hoody. This is the story of my rise and fall as a guitarist, my great shame, and how I plan to bring back something I once loved.
My parents purchased an old nylon string acoustic guitar at an auction sometime when I was very young. I’m pretty sure the intention was that one of them would learn to play it, but I first found it in a closet sometime around the 6th grade. This timing coincided with the beginning of what I’ll overstate as my musical awakening. I was beginning to really listen to music, and the idea of playing along and maybe creating my own music appealed to me. So I picked up that guitar, turned on the radio, and tried to mimic the sounds I was hearing.
Keep in mind that this guitar was horrifically out of tune. I had no teacher and no internet. I hadn’t the slightest clue what the relationships between the strings were supposed to be, so I just randomly tried different frets until it sounded like what was coming out of the radio. Eventually I got a hold of some old guitar books and was able to correctly tune the strings relative to each other, but I think there was still a good stretch there where I tuned off of the radio. (These kids today with their automatic electronic tuners, grumble grumble)
I remember playing for a talent show in middle school with a kid from my neighborhood, Mackenzie Pinch. We did a little self-written acoustic duet. The weird thing is I can’t for the life of me remember what sort of audience we had, so I don’t know if it a real talent show or just an audition. I don’t think they turn down anyone in middle school talent shows, so it must have been the real deal. All I remember is being critiqued on my lack of showmanship.
I played with a couple of different friends over the years. And of course every time we had to form a band name and concept. I remember Kindred and Sterc in particular. At one point I had a brief arrangement at a local church. Mind you, at the time I was a stewing pot of venomous anti-Christian pseudo-intellectualism. I think they hoped that by just being around the whole process it would somehow convert me. It didn’t work - I just enjoyed the opportunity to play with a band. The songs weren’t exactly rockin’, but it scratched an itch.
So I played around, had a good time, and slowly got better. But I don’t think it really became part of my identity until after my Freshman year of high school. It was then that I started bringing my guitar to school to play during the lunch break. That thing went with me everywhere, and my playing really picked up a notch. I had started my journey in the grunge era, and then went back in time through classic rock. But the thoughtful acoustic licks of the Dave Matthews Band gave me some excellent material to work with in my senior year.
But there’s a time for everything, and that time is college. That’s when my playing was at its peak. Some random evening in my dorm I wandered onto the wrong floor which turned out to be the right floor. I met Dan and Billy and we started playing music. It became a regular thing, us playing in the common area in the evenings. Half the students on the floor loved it and half hated it - presumably because they were trying to study or some nonsense. But me for it was the best of times. It was casual but fun.
One of us blossomed. Dan stuck with it and has really grown into a lovely singer songwriter over the last decade. You can check him out online here, or in person this Saturday the 23rd at the Crocodile.
The other component of playing music in college was sunny days on the quad or red square. One of these days some dude came by and started playing with me. His style was interesting, his material original, and we hit it off musically. We agreed to meet again and it quickly became a regular thing. It actually got kind of serious. We started recording songs, performed in the university talent show (for real this time - I definitely remember this one), and most of my guitar activity started to revolve around this duo. It seemed great at the time, but it was actually the beginning of everything unraveling.
The songs were his, and he also provided the vocals, so I settled into an accompaniment role. It was nice to focus on that and grow my melodic skills. But over time I became dependent. It wasn’t about what I brought to the table; it was about what I could add to what was already on the table. All of my song ideas started to dry up from lack of attention.
I realized I didn’t have a real personal connection with this guy and so I was only half interested in the partnership. I eventually broke it off. Well, I stopped returning phone calls. Same difference?
I had left myself in a situation where when I picked up the guitar I didn’t know what to play. I had the skill to do something with it, but no spark of inspiration. So I’d pick it up, fiddle around a bit, and then set it back down again feeling somewhat disappointed. Eventually I started accelerated the process by not picking it up at all. I got a job, moved, and it became all to easy to forget it all.
It’s hard to explain the emotion. Sitting there feeling like you have this untapped potential. You have a voice, but you have nothing to say. I felt creatively barren, thoroughly uninspired and uninteresting. And then I was ashamed for leaving it behind. It had been such a huge part of me but then it was gone. It’s like an old relationship where there are all these awkward maneuverings to avoid having to think about what it used to be and how it can no longer be that. You find yourself avoiding contact altogether just to prevent any opportunity to stir up old emotions.
Time has given me the perspective to understand what went wrong, but it’s been harder to find a path to fix it. Essentially, I became overly focused on creation. If I couldn’t bring something original to the table then I was a failure. By concentrating on the value of creation, I had lost the simple joy of just playing. Before it had never mattered if I was playing someone else’s song. But as soon as it mattered more if it was my song, my sense of contentment became susceptible to the ebb and flow of creative juices. God forbid there be an extended period of ebb.
So the fix that had to be made was to restore that joy of playing. It sounds easier that it is. If every time you pick up an instrument you feel like a failure then it’s hard to muster up the energy to idly strum a few tunes. And the longer you go without playing, the fewer songs you can remember to play. So even though I’ve known what the problem is for years, it’s been hard to overcome the wounds and move forward.
Thankfully a potential solution has fallen from the heavens: Pro Guitar for Rock Band 3. Basically you can now play a real guitar with Rock Band. You choose the song, it’ll tell you how to play it, and you can just focus on having a good time. But it’s real. Real chords, real scales. Real. It’s exactly the thing I’ve needed. So I dropped the (not insignificant) chunk of cash on the setup to get me back on the wagon.
I’ve been at it for only a week now. It’s too early to say how this will play out. But I’m optimistic. It was good to feel the muscle memory kick into action and pick up right where I left it. The callouses haven’t fared as well, but a daily regiment will have those back in no time. In the meantime I just have to pace myself a bit. But I think it’s working, and it’s got me walking around with a bit more bounce in my step.
31 Mar 2011
At last we’ve come to the reason that I’m even talking about Lord of the Rings Online again in the first place: the fact that it’s now to free to play. But what does that even mean?
It means you don’t need to pay a monthly subscription to play LotRO. You don’t even need a credit card. You can play this game for dozens of hours on end and not spend a dime. To do this you just set up an account on the website, click a button to download the game client, and start playing. Easy. Extremely high quality content for what you pay (nothing).
So, how is this possible? The game developer clearly still needs to make money to pay for operating costs and ongoing development. So they replace a fixed monthly subscription fee with a large set of optional “micro-transactions”. In other words you don’t pay a fixed $15 a month, but instead you spend a couple bucks here and there on smaller purchases. This will likely result in smaller per-account revenue, but by removing the steep up-front subscription cost it’s possible to reach a broader audience and hopefully achieve similar overall revenue. That’s the basic business model, and it’s an increasingly popular one. But of course the devil is in the details.
The term “micro-transaction” conjures an image of being stopped every couple minutes to be solicited for money. It sounds disruptive and cheap. Certainly paying more up front sounds less obnoxious, right? Well I’m happy to say that LotRO handles micro-transactions with class and restraint.
You can happily level a character up to at least level 30 before you really feel like you have to spend any money. At that point you’ll run out of free zones and maybe you’ll put down $5 to unlock another zone for around 10 levels of quest content. You don’t have to, though. The epic quest-line is always free, and there are always tasks, skirmishes, and level-scaling instances to keep you busy.
Smoothing everything over is the fact that you gain the real-money currency (Turbine Points) while playing the game. Every deed you complete gives you some points. So even if you absolutely refuse to spend real money on the game you’ll still be able to pick up a couple things from the store.
So, what sorts of things can you buy?
- Quest lines for levels 30-65
- Additional skirmish instances to change up the scenery
- Cosmetic outfits
- Shared storage across all characters on your account
- A wardrobe space for your characters to store and share cosmetic outfits
- Shorter teleport home cooldowns and/or multiple home destinations
- Short term acceleration for xp, crafting, or deeds
The larger priced items are content related (quests, skirmishes, etc.) or feature related (e.g. shared storage), and are usually a one-time purchase for the account. They’re less “micro” and more a replacement for that monthly payment. The key difference being that unless you blaze through content too fast that it’s going to be much cheaper.
The more controversial items are the true micro-transactions. But you’ll note that none of the them will outright make your character more powerful, they just make progression faster. For example you can’t buy levels, but you can spend a dollar to get a small percentage increase in your experience gain for 6 hours. That means you’ll level faster than someone who didn’t pay any money, but it doesn’t give you better stats, or items, or anything like that. You still have to play the game and overcome the same challenges. It’s fair.
The micro-transactions are all poised as purely optional efficiency boosts. Sick of travel times? Pay a quarter to make your next couple trips instantaneous. Like crafting but don’t have time for the grind? Pay fifty cents to double the rate of craft skill gains for awhile. This allows you to pick the parts of MMO grinding that annoy you and pay a little bit to have them go away. The cynical way to look at this would be that they’re making you pay to keep the game from being awful. But the key thing to remember is that the free experience of today is the same thing people were previously paying a subscription for. They didn’t make it worse for free accounts. You can pay for a more streamlined experience if you want to, but it’s not necessary. That’s what helps the micro-transactions feel optional and not gouging.
I was really wary of the false promises of “free to play”, but I’ve been extremely impressed with how elegantly LotRO has pulled it off. I believe that you can play the game for free and have a perfectly good time. I’m also happy to occasionally give them money to make my experience better.
Being presented with all these optional purchases forced me to confront what I really value about my MMO play experience. It turns out that leveling faster isn’t important to me, but looking cool is. So my first purchases were an awesome looking set of cosmetic armor, some wardrobe space to save fun hats and such, and some more outfit slots so I can choose my look to match my mood.
I also bought some crafting acceleration to get my weaponsmithing skill up high enough to create my own weapons as I level. I like feeling self sufficient. Plus crafting is way more fun if you cut the grinding in half. It’s amazing how a numerical tweak can completely turn things around.
Beyond all that frivolous stuff I did pick up a couple quest packs after I cleared out the free zones. I’ve enjoyed the skirmishes so I bought some more of those too. I feel like now that I’ve spent some startup capital I can coast for quite awhile before my next purchase. It’s hardly been a free experience, but I feel like the money I’ve spent is well worth what I’ve received in return.
So, the real question: Is this the right game for you?
Do you like the depth and scale of MMOs, but have very limited time to play and can’t justify a monthly fee? Then the new free to play LotRO is perfect for you. It doesn’t matter if you progress through the game slowly because you’ll pay for new content equally slowly.
Are you the sort of player who enjoys MMOs for the first twenty levels when things are fresh, then gets bored somewhere in the middle and quits? Then LotRO would be a great fit for you because you’d probably quit right before you actually have to spend real money.
Do you get obsessed with your MMO and grind through content extremely quickly? Well then LotRO may still work for you because it still offers a compelling subscription option. It’s only $10, not $15, and you get a substantial grant of points every month (~$6 worth). So it’s kind of like Zune Pass where you get unlimited access but get to keep some stuff permanently if you ever cancel your subscription.
What I can’t tell you is how well LotRO satisfies a player at the level cap. I’ve got a character there, but I don’t play him because I personally don’t care for grinding the same content over and over again. I do know that that there are raids, and there’s a community of people running them. But I don’t know how well LotRO stacks up here.
From a value perspective LotRO is hard to beat. High quality content, flexible pricing. The real reasons to not play the game are if you don’t like RPGs or you aren’t particularly interested in the Lord of the Rings fiction. If killing orcs in the English countryside bores you then this game is not for you.
If you do decide to try out the game, please set up your account using this link. That referral will give me some kickback (and no, that’s not what motivated me to write this series). Be sure to create your character on the Gladden server, send me a note, and maybe we’ll have a chance to adventure together. See you in Middle-Earth!
25 Mar 2011
We’re now at part five of my ramblings on Lord of the Rings Online. Time to stop beating around the bush and start complaining about what I really want to complain about: User Interface
LotRO’s UI is approachable, largely due to its similarity with WoW, but it lacks the same polish… There are a ton of small issues with the interface - I could really go on and on.
During almost every topic I’ve covered on this game at one point or another I’ve mentioned problems with the user interface. I should put a disclaimer here: I’m a professional user interface developer. It’s safe to say that I’m more sensitive to this class of issue than most people. But the reason I do this for a living is because I think it’s extremely important. Good interface creates happy experiences; bad interface creates frustrating experiences.
Looking at the progress of this game over the years, it has gotten better. They have fixed some hiccups in the experience. But there are still warts, and the rate of improvement is too slow. Too many problems that have been there for years are still festering. The only conclusion I can come to is that refining the interface isn’t a priority, and that they don’t have the right kind of talent focused on these issues.
Iconography
Icons are too small and lack strong enough silhouettes to be quickly identified.
Let’s look at the action bar screenshot above that I talked about last time. There are a couple things you might notice, but the first is probably that the icons are incredibly tiny. 32x32 pixels, specifically. You can scale this bar up, but the source assets are 32x32, so the scaled up version looks terrible. By comparison WoW’s source icons are 64x64, containing 4 times the amount of information.
So why are they so small? Well, I’m pretty sure that’s because of design choices made in the skill system. If there are many skills to choose from then the icons need to be very small to fit on screen. The decision to regularly give the player new toys has lead to these icons being small.
But the size of the icons isn’t the real problem. Depending on your settings your WoW UI might display at a similar size (from my informal sample I found many people had a 34x34 display size for their WoW icons). No the real problem is with the contents of those icons.
You’ll notice that the attack skills all have a red background to their icon. Skills that buff or heal seem to have green backgrounds. There’s an intentional pattern here. A terrible, terrible pattern. By definition these are actions you need to perform in the heat of the moment. Most of these are attack skills, so your bar is going to be a sea of red. By giving the icons all the same primary color they’ve lost the most glance-able pieces of information.
The other problem, other than small size and uniform color, is that the icons are trying to be little paintings. There’s too much detail in those 32x32 dimensions. I think it’s time for a comparison:
Here we have samples from 7 different MMOs. This is by no means a comprehensive list, it’s just a set of MMOs that I personally have played (or have seen played, in the case of Rift). Not all of the above have excellent iconography, but you’ll notice the ones from LotRO really blur together into one mass. The icons are too tightly grouped, they all have the same color, and it’s hard to pick out strong silhouettes.
At this point you might think I’m nit picking. But your average MMO player spends almost as much time staring at these action bars as they do observing their virtual surroundings. I’ve known players to completely lose context of what was going on because they were overly focused on their bars. It’s a mission critical piece of interface, and on this LotRO does a real sub-standard job.
Inventory
The bag view is frustrating because you can’t do key tasks from there like sell.
To the right in the screenshot you see my bag view. Pretty standard, although once again you’ll note that the icons are frustratingly small. To the left is the window that you get when you talk to a vendor. You’ll note that one is a grid view and one is a list view.
So what if I want to sell something? I’ve probably arranged my bags in some way meaningful to me so that I can find items later, so you’d think I’d sell from my bag view. This is the MMO standard, but it’s not how it works in LotRO. I have to open up the Sell tab in the vendor window, browse a list view of my bag contents, and find the item there. I have to track down the item in an alphabetized list where up until this moment I may have not known its name (the grid view doesn’t show titles until you hover for a tooltip). And I have to do this despite the fact that I might have organized my bags in some way where this would be a trivial task from the grid view.
This is frustrating to do even once, and if you’ve ever played an MMO you know that selling trash to vendors is something you do very frequently. It’s clear that the developers knew that this was awkward, because there are a number of features of the list view designed to make the experience less terrible.
You can lock items from the vendor window so that they won’t show up as options to sell. But of course you can’t lock an item from the bag view, further reinforcing it’s presence as a useless visualization.
You can filter the list view to different qualities of items, presumably to help find the items you want to sell. But the filters are opposite of what you want. You can filter only by increasing quality, not decreasing quality - so you can’t filter down to trash.
None of this fixes the core problem: the original design was bad. Either embrace the list or embrace the grid - don’t attempt some unholy hybrid.
The Solution?
WoW provided an open platform that enabled the community to patch up the rough spots. Blizzard would watch popular trends and integrate those features into the core. The end result is that the default WoW UI has become better and better over the years at an impressive pace
At last we have a sign that the developers are paying attention: recently (as in within the last six months) LotRO opened up it’s platform to support LUA scripted plugins. This is huge. This empowers the community to start making things better. What’s there now from an API perspective is very conservative, but it’s still a huge step in the right direction.
There aren’t a ton of high quality plugins available yet. This stuff takes time. But the basic tools are there, and the developer is listening to what the community needs. If I didn’t have a day-job I’d probably take matters into my own hands and start modding again. Alas, I have no interest in burning out like that, so I’m just going to have to hope the plugin development community does what needs to be done. Let the healing begin.
In the next and final segment I’ll talk about the only thing all of you probably want to know: what does it actually mean to be “free to play”?