I sat down to play Call of Duty 4 once, while a friend watched over my shoulder. He noticed I wasn’t having a hard time with it and he asked, jokingly, “What, is this on Easy mode or something.” I confirmed that yes, actually, I was playing on Easy Mode. He laughed for awhile and when he was done he had some negative things to say about playing on Easy Mode. His primary complaint was that challenge is what makes a video game interesting and that since Easy Mode isn’t challenging my abilities, I wasn’t getting anything out of the experience. I looked at him funny, asked him to stop talking (or he could leave), and went back to my game.

MMOs don’t have difficulty selectors. The closest they get are usually the “solo” classes, like the warlock in WoW, but really in MMO's gamers have had to give up something that we've had since before the days of "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, A, B, A, B, Start" - the cheat code.

MMO’s try to focus gameplay on what developers must think is the most compelling part of MMO’s; the massive amount of people playing. As if since 40,000 people are all playing the same game they should all be doing it together. What a crock of shit! I’d much rather have a solid single-player experience which I can compare with other player’s experience. I'd rather socialize when I want to and be excused from it when the people around me are not worth socializing with ("Wanna go harrass some noobs, ha ha? Want to help the Corp with a CTA? Wanna get on Vent and make funny nosies?!")

We, the cheaters, have decided to hell with your lack of vision, developers. I compeltely understand why cheats are not in multiplayer games like Call of Duty or Planetside - it would dramatically change the expierence if someone couldn't be killed, or couldn't miss. But what cost is associated with a cheat in an RPG? If you could hit a button and not die (to an NPC) what would the harm be? If you could buy anything you wanted, but didn't have to pay for it, why would that be a problem?

We already have players who are leveling FAR outside the expectations of developers. In WoW, there were level 80 players mere days, if not hours, after it was possible to be that level. Did that player understand the game better than anyone else? No; he just had time to devote to the game and a friend to help him.

The existance of cheats for games doesn't seem to have stopped people from playing Oblivion, or Fable 2. Somehow these games survive and even thrive, despite the ability for some people to play them in a way that the developer never intended.

Isn't that interesting?

An out of cycle post...

So as you may, or may not, have noticed I tend to post only at midnight. This is because all my posts are pre-written and scheduled (that's how I'm able to post every day.) But, today I had to break the pattern because an Event happened - I was linked to from the official forums!!!

I'm pretty excited about this and I wanted to say thanks to Kance Tzu for the blast. I, of course, wish he'd been a bit more flattering but hey, free press is free press, ya know? I certainly don't think that I HAVE to AFK Mine - I can, so, I will, ya know? If you can do something, and not get caught, and pay no real penalty, then...why not do it?

"But the morals of it!!!" Right right...I start crying every time I go above the speed limit in my car, too :eyeroll:

April 16, 2009

Oh ladies and gentlemen, today is a patch day that changed the UI! It will be VERY interesting what happens to the price of minerals. I'm glad I have 8 million Titanium saved up. With the UI change I bet the macroers are going to produce less, and the price of Tritanium goes up!

Today they moved the cargo hold indicator, and changed it's color. It's now much simpler to determine when the hold is full. I don't know why it was so hard before but the solid color is simple to key on.

This change caused the items list to move down a bit as well.

Tritanium has been added into my dictionary now. No more red squiggly lines.

Online Debat Post 1

Recently I stumbled upon a debate hosted at Fly Reckless. Linky. I've decided to spend some posts dedicated to answering the questions there for myself. I figure it'll be interesting and, if not, at least fill my writing quota for a week or so!

Question 1, from Finnegan

What level of economic damage would you and other cheaters have to do to non-cheating miners before you agreed that it was too much? If you devalued their mining efforts by five percent, 25%, 50%, 90%, at any point would you stop cheating or does the state of the profession not bother you? Likewise, how much damage to your chosen macroing profession would it take before you chose another aspect of EVE to macro?

There are three things that converge to make mining the AFK Gamers’ choice activity. The first is the ease with which it can be done, on a technical level. Technically speaking, AFK Mining is a simple problem with a simple solution. That’s kind of why it is so boring for humans to do – there’s not much to think about.

The second factor is how difficult it is to be caught, either by another player or CCP, and again this is related to just how simple the activity is – because it is SO simple, there is little to no variety in how it is done. Thus, how do you differentiate between an At Keyboard (AK) miner and an AFK miner? The easier it is to hide, the more AFK Gamers will be there.

The last factor is profitability and, as The Evil Macroer stated, AFK Mining brings in between two and three million ISK per hour. That’s really not that much, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s sufficient reward for me to bother writing and maintaining my application. I can say that if it dropped to 1 million ISK per hour I would stop doing it and would focus my attention elsewhere, but before I did I’d have to take a look at what else I could do. If nothing else presented itself, 1 million ISK an hour would be what I did until another avenue opened up.

For a comparison lets look at ratting in high-sec. It would be facile to create a program that was capable of ratting in high security systems, and the likelihood of being caught is slightly less than that with mining. However, the profitability is damn near zero, so I wouldn’t even consider it an option.

However, profitability isn’t EVERYTHING. I did tinker with the idea of writing an AFK Pirating program but only saw a reason to do so if the Security Status reward was useful. For me, now, it’s just not.

So, I want to caution the reader away from seeing the AFK Gaming motivation as being about mining, per se – there’s a reason why AFK Gaming in EVE is connected with mining and not, for example, exploring wormholes.

So, this was a longwinded way of saying that the state of the mining economy does bother me, but not from a moral standpoint. It’s far more calculated and pragmatic because I am part of the same community that AK Miners are, and thus I’m impacted by their actions, as well as my own.

Further, as evidenced by the fact that The Evil Macroer does not still macro, it’s a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Having a lot of money is great, and all, but at some point you really do have enough. There’s only so much you need before the motivation to continue playing the AFK Mining game reaches zero. When that happens I personally will begin looking at other things to AFK with. Probably low-sec ratting.