Archives, eh
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# Links for 2008-08-29
WorldChanging: Paper from Wheat, not Wood
✴English Grammar 101: All You Need to Know
✴Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django reviewed. – By Grady Hendrix – Slate Magazine
✴Watchmen, Tintin, and…Drakmar?
✴Mad Magazine’s War on Bush collection – Boing Boing – Mozilla Firefox
✴0xDECAFBAD – UbiquityCommands
✴Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / My love-hate relationship with fantasy
“I hate it because I have read too much of it and the new stuff isn’t different. I hate it for giving me the exact same fix over and over.” <- This ✴ -
# Links for 2008-02-19
- The Arrival by Shaun Tan ✴
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# Links for 2008-02-03
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# Links for 2007-08-31
- sp!ked review of books | Towards an age of abundance ✴
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# Links for 2007-08-30
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# My Burning Crusade
Burning Crusade – the World of Warcraft expansion – was released last Tuesday to much silence except for the clicking. And the giggles at the monster being turned into a sheep in the cinematic.
Seeing as how I tied off my arm back in August and shot another fat streaming load of geek smack straight up the middle, I feel I should at least mention it. I’m pissed off.
What’s in it? A whole bunch of new content; which is to say a new landmass to run around; new monsters to collect the livers of; new loot of course, of which more will be said; two new races which, by the by, open up to each side – Horde and Alliance – the special class of the other; and a new profession.
Oh yeah. They raised the level cap to 70.
Why am I pissed off? For starters, I don’t think they should have opened Paladin and Shaman to Horde and Alliance. They only did it because they got sick of listening to fourteen year olds whine about not being able to play Shammies with their Alliance friends. There’s a better cure for that than diluting the flavour of the two sides, and that’s to stop reading the forums. I think they were also trying to do something similar to the Zerg Consume ability from Starcraft with the new Horde race – Blood Elves – but in the end gave up on tying it in with a new mage type and just allowed them to be Paladins. I mean, they’re hyped up as life-energy stealing ubermages and what we get is a Horde race that can be Paladins? Yeah, whatever.
The new loot. I’m told by friends that the magic loot – ‘greens’ in the parlance – are better than the very rare ‘purple’ gear that they had labouriously earned from playing the Battlegrounds and dungeon raiding. That just sucks.
Really though, I’m just being picky about the classes and the loot. What really pisses me off is the raised level cap. I’m not pissed because they raised it; no, I am pissed off because the cap is only raised if you buy the expansion.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be charging money. I’m quite happy to pay money in exchange for the creative effort, the design effort, the implementation and quality control. All of this required Blizzard to sink time and money into getting a product out the door for subscribers like me to use. They deserve to be rewarded. I am also happy to pay my monthly subscription fee to play the game; there are a ton of servers to pay for, bandwidth, power, maintenance and sundry fees associated with running a business that has millions of users logging on.
I have no hesitation to pay for all that. What I object to paying for is something that required a vanishingly small amount of effort. They increased a single constant – hah! – by ten. They worked out how much XP would be required to attain ten new levels. They extrapolated the existing spell/skill progression to accommodate ten new levels. They probably created a new spell for each class, although that might have been covered by the expanded talent tree anyway. That’s it. They didn’t expend weeks of time ensuring game balance for the new levels because the game balance is effected by the new items and the new talents. The new items were being balanced as part of the new item development. The new talents are available to level 60s anyway, so they were being balanced already. The new spell levels are almost assured of being balanced by dint of being extrapolations of an existing, well-defined spell progression tree. The levels are inherently unbalanced because that’s what levels are supposed to be; a Level 70 will butcher a Level 60 just as quickly as the L60 would a Level 50.
What irks me is that I don’t feel the increased level cap required any effort for which I am exchanging money. What I feel is that I am being charged a toll in order to keep up with friends who buy the expansion. So I am making a stand on principle; I will not buy this game until years from now when I have become Chief Justice pf the Supreme Court.
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# Links for 2006-12-28
