paddling in the stream of consciousness

December...

2008-12-12T19:08:15Z

Nice time to get your credit-card compromised.

Economics, incentives, and why Warhammer Online is worse than ToA.

2008-12-03T10:14:00Z

For those that don't know, this won't make much sense: but people will still be talking about Trials of Atlantis, the expansion that killed DAoC, ten years from now. That's a major achievement. Let me summarise the experience.

You 800 people climb to the top of that mountain and sit down. Just sit there, although you will occasionally be forced to stand by randomness. (Note to Mythic: 'random' is not synonymous with 'awesome'.) You will sit there whilst three people do something incomprehensible. In a boat. If you are randomly attacked, don't heal yourself. That will lead to a total party kill. Instead, die, respawn, and hope to run back before the incomprehensible thing is over. Don't worry, this will only take two hours. Although you can bet real money on it suddenly being over in the ten-minute window you're running back from a random death. Never mind, perhaps there'll be another raid next week. Perhaps you're fed up? Well: not as fed up as you'll be when the person holding the only item that will let us progress dies, respawns an hour's travel and combat away, and decides not to come back.

My claim is that Warhammer Online is actually worse than this: it plumbs a new nadir in game design.

That sounds like a hefty claim. Let me defend it.

Firstly, ToA had a kind of absurdist humour to it. I spent eight hours sitting in a boat whilst two people did something that we couldn't see or help with. Every time Ruth popped up to see what was going on, I was still sitting in a boat. Occasionally the two people drowned. You honestly couldn't make this shit up. If I'd propped a painting of a Firbolg sitting in a dinghy with twenty other people in front of my monitor, it would have been about as much fun.

And ToA came with challenges: one of my favourite collection of memories (which are obviously rose-tinted) was when our regular Wednesday-night group picked up a 150-man raid and ran it with a fist of iron. Often because the people who had 'organised' the raid to begin with had no idea what they were doing. Herding 150 twelve-year-olds is a real challenge, but one we rose to.

Let me explain further. They weren't really twelve. They were probably twenty- and thirty-somethings, but by Christ they whined like mules. And occasionally a group would crash out or die and we'd have to repeat a stage. Here's an excerpt of my management style in action:

jan: No, we are all going to go back and do that again. With all of us. It'll only take five minutes. These people have been here for two hours, we owe it to them to get them through that stage.
whiner: why should we? I have the stage token.
jan: I will not brook 'no' for an answer. If you do not comply, you and your whole group are out of the raid. No second chances. Are you coming? May I remind you you're making a decision that will invalidate fourteen hours of other people's time if you do not bend to my unshakable will.

After you kick the first group it works like a charm.

So, that was ToA.

Warhammer Online is worse than that.

That's one hell of a claim. And don't get me wrong: there's lots of good stuff in WAR. The PQ system is great (if you could find anyone to quest with). The Warhammer tone is great. There's lots of little detail knocking around in the countryside. But despite all this, as far as game design goes, WAR represents more of a failure than ToA.

Mythic have created a PVP endgame where the objective is to run away from PVP as fast as possible.

That's right. The economics of the keep take system, the 'renown' system mean that players are hunting out undefended keeps to take. And defending a keep is a bad thing to do - you score nothing for it, your creeping death bar of 'renown' does not advance. You don't get a chance at the (random, obviously) gear drops. And if the enemy is trying to capture a zone using the baroque victory-point mechanics, you will only further their efforts if you turn up to fight them. If you want PVP, you have to fight in scenarios - only one of which appears to be popular. (Mythic's 'fix' for this situation is to lower the rate at which the popular PVP scenarios pop.) Yes, I'm sick of people who will scream abuse at their fellow players and then fall back, and fall back, until they are camped right up against the spawn point. Perhaps Order does lack tanks. They certainly lack balls. They're eight years older, perhaps, but they're still twelve. I'm more sick of the scenario maps that inexplicably have bits of ground that you have to jump over, lest you spend five minutes trying to disentangle yourself from a six-inch step.

Rather than merely complain, let me offer fixes.

Appropriate levels of incentivisation

My first fix would be to remove levels and gear from the game. People are grinding creeping-death bars. Why? Is 'renown rank' 62 that much better than RR 38? You might be able to bump a stat by 10. Ooh. One of the nice things to realise is that the upper levels are close to each other. You might be grinding, but your character is imperceptably 'better' than someone of level 38.

My second line of attack would be to permanently ban the account of anyone who suggests that not travelling to the zone that the enemy are trying to lock down to defend it.

People should be incentivised solely by compelling gameplay. When you kill a character, across the internet, someone is banging their keyboard in frustration. Is that not excitement enough? Perhaps a character's second death should be permanent. However, that inevitably not being enough, here are my proposed alternative fixes.

Fixing renown

'Renown' is an odd term for something that you get the most of by attacking undefended keeps then running away before the enemy turn up. This is some kind of dadaist Flashman nightmare definition of 'renown'.

Fixing renown in scenarios

I feel strongly enough that this should be a team game that I've written a mod that chases the selfish idiots who move to 'solo groups'; it repeatedly joins their group. Why do they do this? For two reasons. Firstly, to maximise their own creeping-death progress; secondly, to remain in a group so that they benefit from the healing and assistance of others using the Squared mod. It was a productive 20 minutes of coding and I really hope that in using it I've ruined the afternoon of several morons. That makes me feel good.

Here is how to make it all better:

There is a fixed pool of renown and XP. That gets awarded at the end of a scenario, being divided up evenly amongst characters on the winning and losing sides. The split of reward between the two sides should be directly proportional to their respective scores.

You may object. You're wrong. I'm right. Let's move on. Not enough? Ok. By making it a linear relationship between a side's score and the reward, there's no 'hurry up and let them win'. Every effort, no matter how late in the match, has value. By making the rewards divide evenly, then by leeching off your team you're lowering their chances and thus lowering your own gains. By trying hard and playing by a team, you are not only increasing your reward but decreasing the reward of the other side. This is an important incentive for twelve-year-olds. Finally, there is a reason to actually try to achieve the scenario objectives rather than just farming kills: you will get a higher score, faster, and a larger proportion of the rewards.

There. Fixed. That took five minutes.

Fixing renown in open RVR

You only score renown for actions where an enemy player is present: either defending or attacking keeps. That is what 'renown' means to me, anyway.

That incentivises keep defence, keep offence, and most importantly, not fucking running away from a fight.

Keeps should offer tangible benefits from holding them. Not overlarge, just tangible.

whiner: but I cannot grind my renown with no enemies to fight
jan: look at what you just said. Why do you want to improve your renown if not to combat the enemy?

Fixing victory points

Keeps and battlefield objectives should generate victory points over time as long as they are held.

The major complaint here is that turning up to fight the bad guys speeds their victory - or so it is perceived. So, the obvious answer is to arrange it so that turning up to fight - even if you're just being farmed - should slow your opponents' VP gain toward locking a zone. Here's one example how this might be done. The goal is to make both attackers and defenders want to be in the same place.

A side that owns a keep should gain VPs steadily. Any combat in the keep vicinity will lower the rate of VP gain. An unoccupied keep will generate VPs unbelievably slowly. An occupied but unattacked keep will generate VPs at the fastest rate.

That is all. I don't offer details to this design because I'm not being paid to do game design. But the quick panic fixes we're seeing don't show any sign of awareness, or the ability to stand back and ask what's going wrong. Currently we're getting close-to-the-coalface twitches, not fixes.

Fixing the bridges

Send a dwarven sapper team to flatten those six-inch bumps in Grovod Caverns. They're a real trip hazard.

Human rights 'apply to UK troops'

2008-04-11T17:03:28Z

From the BBC:

Human rights laws can be applied to British troops on active service, a High Court judge has ruled.

Ministers are appealing against the ruling.

Nice way to support the troops, don't you think?

Prozac and other SSRIs; or, oh, for fuck's sake.

2008-02-26T15:21:42Z

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/feb/26/mentalhealth.medicalresearch

So, Prozac in the usual light doses it's prescribed in is indistinguishable from a placebo. But that's not what this is about. What this is about is the following gem:

[[[
The only exception is in the most severely depressed patients, according to the authors - Prof Irving Kirsch from the department of psychology at Hull University and colleagues in the US and Canada. But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.
]]]

Let's have that once again.

But that is probably because the placebo stopped working so well, they say, rather than the drugs having worked better.

This kind of crap is enough to put one in a mood that is as likely to be affected by placebos as SSRIs :-/

Worst misapplication of the uncertainty principle of all time?

2008-02-11T16:11:24Z

It may be supposed to be lighthearted; that's no excuse.

Asymmetry: D isn't M any more, but it certainly is A.

2008-01-22T22:39:21Z

From the Guardian (and elsewhere), a position paper on NATO. What an excellent quote:

"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

Let's have that once again.

"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

If you're reading this from a NATO member state then you're more likely to die in a road accident than in a terrorist attack. But let's just be clear on that:

"The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

For fuck's sake.

geek job at the uob

2007-12-06T09:07:13Z

http://www.bris.ac.uk/boris/jobs/ads?ID=71098

Tomb Raider Anniversary

2007-08-01T08:50:30Z

Turns out that the two centaur bad guys are easy to kill, once you understand how to reliably perform the adrenaline dodge.

The secret is not to treat it like a twitch game but to be running in plenty of time as the horse charges you. Then when time slows, you just tap the dodge button. I was doing the move/dodge combination in under half a second which isn't enough for Lara to actually be moving fast enough to roll out of the way.

The other thing which might help is to spot which of the centaurs is going to charge you: when an enemy rages, there's a small orange flash around their head. You can lock on (with L2) at that point to the one who is going to charge, which helps with camera angles etc. I have no idea if the lock is necessary to perform the head-shot, but having done this right the first time I tried it (thanks to Ruth for actually trawling through a million internet posts saying, "I cannot perform the adrenaline dodge!" until she found one with a useful description) I wasn't about to blow it on trying again.

Still can't use the move against the smaller raging monsters, but typically the shotgun to knock them down followed by the desert eagles to finish them off does the trick.

Next Big Brother....

2007-06-08T10:00:18Z

... so here's the idea. Take a dozen or so of the usual misfits, chuck them in a house for 10 weeks or whatever it is. Usual production team making up pointless and barbaric rules as they go along.

And don't screen any of it.

When the housemates nominate evictees, the one chucked out is selected by the toss of a coin. They go outside to find a waiting taxi. When they get in you might film five minutes of their expression as you tell them that they haven't been on TV for the last how long. You whisk them home and don't broadcast the resulting 30 minutes of total footage for at least two years.

For added bonuses the capricious producers can repeatedly lower the prize money (because it's clearly not about the prize money anyway, that wouldn't be Keeping It Real, would it?) until the value of "winning"* is 15 bob.

Now, I'd pay to not see _that_.

* The only way to win is not to play the game.

Quick trip to London

2006-10-23T11:07:40Z

then back from Paddington. Bloke sitting opposite me was in a wheelchair, bald with a scar over one eye. As we passed through Reading station, he looks up and says, "curses! I was meant to go to Brighton!" "Don't worry, Blofeld," says I, and pull the emergency cord. "Your train of error stops here."

Schneier on terrorism

2006-09-15T08:27:36Z

You should read this.

semiotic pudding

2006-07-31T10:27:13Z

These unmarried lesbians lost their bid to get their marriage legally recognised in the UK. The government's defence was that, since the rights due to a married couple are identical to those of a civil partnership (which, note, Ruth and I cannot enter into - unless, possibly, we both claim to be gay) there can be no discrimination. Why, then, prevent them applying the label of marriage to their union?

Summary: I disagree with the decision. Having said that, if a bunch of greengrocer's went to court to get their misuse of an apostrophe legally recognised, I'd be one of the morally outraged crowd who couldn't see past the syntactical issue. Conclusion: I am a hypocrite. (But God intended that an apostrophe be used to indicate possession or an elision of letters, not a plural form, dammit.)

Someone doesn't get it: object orientation.

2006-07-27T14:38:31Z

The register is a rag, let's face it. Here's an example: Code inheritance and reuse: a delicate balancing act. Read down the first page.

[[[
Changes to the external protocol

When a subclass adds new methods that are available outside the class, it changes the external protocol of the superclass. This happens in a number of different situations:

...

* The subclass restricts methods provided by the superclass. This may include removing methods, or changing method parameters to types that are more restrictive. Currently, there is no way in Java to restrict the methods inherited from a class.
]]]

Nor will there ever be. How very 90s: the author doesn't understand what "is-a" means. Clueless feckwit.

Note, it's perfectly OK for a subclass to provide a method that accepts broader types as parameters, or whose return type specification is a subtype of the parent method's. (Although the JVM has a little trouble with this due to the way it locates methods; you have to fake this, but that's an implementatino detail.)

One might find it surprising that the author doesn't mention contracts in his discussion of componentisation. On the other hand, the error here wouldn't be made by someone who understood them.

BBC online needs more computational power

2005-10-30T10:35:35Z

Each person in the world with a handheld calculator would still take decades to do the same calculations Blue Gene is now able to do every second.

Rather ambiguous, that. But I can understand how an innumerate "journalist" might think it would take "decades" for a single person to perform 40-50,000 floating-point additions or multiplications with the aid of a calculator. Even if you assume it talks about the population of the world who now possesses a calculator, I still think they could put in 280 trillion operations in under a year.

I cannot trype tdoay.

2004-09-06T14:41:34Z

Or spell either. Something's wrong.

For what it's worth, I don't think I had any hallucinations last night after all, so maybe Sudaca food wasn't responsible for my previous trippy night.

ticks are arthropods, not insects

2004-06-10T21:20:54Z

BBC "news": Greatest maths problem 'solved' on dBdB's latest crack at the problem scores twice as highly on the "BBC news is shit"ometer than usual.

First:

[[
The hypothesis concerns prime numbers and has stumped the world's mathematicians for more than 150 years.
]]

[[
It has defeated mathematicians since 1859 when Bernhard Riemann published a conjecture about how prime numbers were distributed amongst other numbers.
]]

Doesn't take a mathematician to work that one out. Then there's the "related story" link in the sidebar with the short title, "Largest Prime Number Discovered".

They really are very, very poor.

manly bruising

2003-08-27T10:23:48Z

Well, as stag events go this one was remarkably free from cocks. People took their hits, tempers didn't fray, and we had a whale of a time. Most people even managed to get their head around the "surrender" rule (you demand a surrender rather than shooting someone at point-blank range, Simon).

Spike made "man of the match" through good sniping, wiping out four opposing players when he was the last left on his team, and the "capture the flag" saunter which the refs interpreted as absolute cool rather than "must... put... one... leg in front... of... the other...".

Oh, and I couldn't bring myself to shoot the Stag in the back (although the opportunity presented itself).

Best bruise of the event (post a photo, Ben!) goes to the MBA starting a new job on Monday who has a purple-and-yellow concentric ring formation an inch across in the middle of his forehead.

gedhrel @ 2003-08-04T15:12:00

2003-08-04T14:55:51Z

zen in a nutshell
there is no reality
the world is just NUL

header incoming
like a needle pulling thread
we do it just SOH

confuscious enscribed
at the start of all his works
a neat "STX"

and when he had done
his brightest students would close
with an "ETX"

the end of all things
universal EOT
there will be no more

understanding sought:
wouldn't you like to know, eh?
make your ENQuiry

ACK: a straight answer
the dog has buddha nature
like you always thought

the monks come to prayer
ascend the holy mountain
to the chime of BEL

political talk?
what is said can be unsaid
with good old BS

moving right along
a handy delimiter
Horizontal Tab

the queue is for bread
many hungry mouths are there
this calls for Line Feed

turn ninety degrees
(that's pi-by-two radians)
Tab Vertically

when all's said and done
we turn over a new leaf
emit a Form Feed

riding in grand style
Sun Tzu leads his army home
the Carriage Returns

(this one's seldom used)
"Shift Out" calls the overseer
the workers go home

a new lot arrive
to begin their daily toil
the cry is "Shift In"

Data Link Escape:
fly from Tibet to safety
DLE lama

undam the river
waters cannot be held back:
there must be XON

Device Control 2
we bend nature to our will
with this character

and turn back the tide
the ocean will not honour
our XOFF request

Device Control 4
haven't I heard this before?
ascii control freaks!

a shake of the head
I do not concur with you
NAK, I say!

the two act as one
the lovers move together
but is it a SYN?

the scribe takes a rest
and eases his aching wrist:
End of this Text Block

order rescinded
CANcel your actions at once
return to your post

the seer breathes his last
no more entrails shall he read
End of Medium

call for a new seer!
they send out at once for a
SUBstitute wise man

eat of the lotus
shake off these eartly shackles
ESCape the mundane

File Separator
the red cord stretched between the poles
keeps the queue in check

loyalists stand here,
revolutionaries there:
Group Separator

bing is not elvis
analogy escapes me:
Record Separator

one here and one there-
a Unit Separator
the joke's getting tired

stare into blank SPace
you've done too much opium
wisdom has left you

unweaving the threads
a life's works are all undone
naught left but to DEL

Dell

2003-07-07T09:16:26Z

Well, as you may know, it's rare for me to be so angry that I physically shake. I hate feeling like this.

Dell really fucking suck.

Dell computers... my glee was apparently premature

2003-07-06T12:45:37Z

... since I'd assumed that I wouldnt be actually lied to by their customer care department.

Oh well, I am still the proud possessor of a boxed Dell, waiting for collection - but bugger only knows when.

Nice machines, a shame about the after-sales service. Unless you take "service" to mean "fucking".

Recent government advertisements

2003-06-03T18:50:04Z

If you claim you're living alone, we can check your bills.
If you claim you're unemployed, our new powers let us find out about it if you're working.

Neither of these apply to me. So as an honest taxpayer, do I feel happy about these powers, about these threats?

Do I buggery.

These can be summed up as, "Big brother is watching you." This threatening attitude makes me concerned that maybe I, too, shall fall foul of the law - possibly through clerical error (there are two people who don't live in our house who we still receive mail for. What happens if they're committing benefit fraud?)

These advertisements seem fundamentally wrong. Now, instead of fearing being a victim of crime, they make me fear being a victim of the very legislature that is supposed to protect me.

If you've sat down in the cinema recently you may have experienced the same sensation. FACT adverts offer huge rewards if you shop your fellow film-goers for that bastion of international terrorism, piracy. We've seen cases recently where large corporate entities persue individuals for huge damages for the heinous sin of (promoting international terrorism and) offering MP3s to their college-mates. The law shouldn't be about setting examples; each case should be tried on its merits, with appropriate levels of punitive damages if justice is so served. This simply feels like another abuse of the legal system by overly powerful and unaccountable behemoths.

Glad to be alive.

another fucking fantastic piece of local journalism.

2003-04-08T17:39:19Z

here are the facts, there are 200 women working as prostitutes in Bristol. And almost all of them, 99.9%, have a drugs dependency.

And in shock news, of the 'journalists' working for Bristol Points West, over 99.9999% of them are innumerate fuckwits.

john cooper clarke, anyone interested?

2002-10-07T17:52:08Z

Tuesday 8th October

St George's - John Cooper Clarke & Lemn Sissay - 8pm
Two of the UK's finest and funniest poets performing on the same bill.
Supported by Kizzie Morrell and band.

I've no idea where "St. George's" actually _is_, I'd appreciate a pointer, but I'm probably going to go to this. JCC is pretty damn good.

my muse is far from topical

2002-09-03T08:02:24Z

I tried to depart from the ultimate expression of the poetic ideal (that is, obviously, rhyming couplets) and do something a little different. I just like the way the words sound. Possibly subtitled, "come back, Bill, everything's forgiven", here's anyone for an altoid?

(It would be great to hear Ronnie Barker reading it.)

off to Oxford tomorrow...

2002-08-19T17:40:47Z

... building plugins to out auth bridge code for jetspeed with Francisco.

Which should actually prove to be more fun than it sounds.