Teppotastic

Odds are, if you follow what I have rather optimistically named a “blog” then you are also aware of the chaps over at VanHemlock.com.  This is good, as they are probably my favourite regular podcast, spliting into a “what we’ve been playing” episode and a “news” episode (currently on hiatus) and as wonderfully British as they are, they do have a tendancy to come up with some very interesting points (we won’t get into VanHemlock’s intimate practical knowledge of UK Supermarket Security).

In their latest episode, they are prompted by the furore over Ubisoft’s latest plans for DRM – namely the needing a continuous, steady internet connection to play your single-player games – to have a little chat about computer game piracy.

Being a recently graduated student, still fresh in my mind is the exploits of many a student (especially the Computer Science ones) in various nefarious activities, including various forms piracy; be it music, movies, games or through various means such as torrents, rent’n'rip, swap-parties (not your partners ) so-on and so-forth.

The way I see things is that we’re always talking about the effect on The Industry, on Developers, Publishers and Retailers but we always miss out an important aspect. The Pirates. In this I mean the people who actually download the games (we won’t get into the other media right now), as opposed to those individuals that get down-and-dirty with the code and crack them in the first place or the distributors who get it out there into the public domain. So The Pirates, the users – some speculation goes into their motives for doing this in the first place. Maybe, as VanHemlock points out, they may have a misplaced sense of Anarchy or perhaps they feel they would pay for them, if they could but afford them or perhaps they keep telling themselves that they want to know what it is like before buying it. Afterall, we can listen to music on the radio or in the store, we can view a painting or watching a movie at the cinema before deciding to buy the DVD later, so why not computer games? They are, afterall, just another form of media/entertainment.

But once they get into the habit of it, what’s to stop them? I’ve often heard that some of the most habitual pirates are, in terms of demographical statistics, the best consumers. They spent the most money on this assorted media, even if they also supposed commit the most frequent crimes against it. Does this perhaps suggest that by immersing themselves in so many games (and lets assume they do, I mean it’s free right?), they start to develop a certain level of taste or preference. They understand and appreciate the difference between a good game and a bad game (in their opinions), and perhaps the work that must go into them. So now they appreciate them, they may not stop pirating but the chances are they are more likely to dig deep for some cash for “Good Games”. If out of solidarity if nothing else. Maybe they evolve into only Saturday Driving Pirates or somesuch.

Personally, I agree with VanHemlock, I don’t think that piracy is ever going to go away. There will always be someone who wants to crack things for the fun of it. I know I have and I will qualify that by saying that only on software that I have paid for and I deleted the modified files after proof-of-concept. Call it Intellectual Curiosity. And I’m a bugger for buying the latest and greatest games. But that’s besides the point. Piracy is here to stay and it’s a good idea to make it as inconvenient as possible for the mass market, thus maintaining the market, but not to go all draconian on us. StarForce did that and various other disc-checking DRMs and it did not go well for them. It’s probably better off keeping Piracy around about where it is now, if you keep pushing it deeper and deeper, it’s practices will only get darker and more dangerous for everyone involved.

As a last note I would like to say that though I can see where people are coming from, I do not condone Piracy. Of any media. These people have put time and effort into these products, these creations. Blood, sweat, tears have gone into these things. Often spiced with a sprinkling of divorce and broken families. They deserve they’re jobs and they deserve the small trickle of money they get from the publisher for every item sold.

This is just a quick note to say no, I haven’t forgotten about this blog. I’ve been busy getting on with my last ever exam of my formal education (YAY!) and sorting things out for graduation and whatnot in 7 or so weeks time.

Inbetween all this I managed to catchup with the entire 5th season of Lost, which I enjoyed immensely. I have stumbled upon what may be The Answer to the mystery behind Lost which I’ve been hammering out with one of my buddies. They’ll be a substantial post on it going up over the next week I’ve never really been one to bother looking into this kinda stuff with TV shows but we’re really excited about this one mwuahahah.

As for games, I’ve been playing about of WAR with a buddy of mine – still thoroughly enjoying my healbot Zealot to his wild thrashing Choppa. OK, that sounds abit wrong but nevermind XD There’s also been abit of EVE happening, where I’ve finally got into an Abaddon, our Alliance has expanded MASSIVELY with the introduction of about 5-8 corps over the past week, so verrrry exciting times there.

But like I said, I’ll fill things in with abit more detail over the next week – I’m hoping things will quiet down now I have no further obligations

I often find myself return to games I’d played previously for a few weeks every year. I certainly do with Anarchy Online (my first ever MMO, not counting the likes of Aardwolf, Discworld and Terris MUDs) along with a couple of others including Dungeons and Dragons Online and Eve Online. Now I love my Sci-Fi, so Eve is a pretty logical choice for a static MMO for me but I could never quite stick with it. This was for a number of reasons, including the now infamous learning curve/cliff and the somewhat alien (to me at least) sandbox nature of the game. It was frankly overwhelming. So toe-dipping like the intrepid MMO paddler I am continued for some years. With the release of the Apocrypha though and some regular gaming buddies chatting about it on and off, I decided to take everyone’s advice and get stuck in with a corp.

In step EMC Mining Corp and the Puppy Reprocessing Plant alliance. Now I’ve been in afew corps/guilds/kinships/whatever in a great many games and some of them are just plain rubbish. The vast majority, from what I’ve seen. The best ones I’ve been in have involved people I know IRL, like my regular LotrO and CoX groups but EMC really bucked that trend. A friendly (and slightly unhinged) group of people, generally getting stuck in for the good of the corp and dispensing advice and goodwill as and when required. 

So I’ve been filling my odd hours (and an evening or two a week) with Eve lately. I’ve finally got into my first Mining Barge, a Retriever and I’m almost ready to fly Amarr Battleships (Style > Substance!). I’ll also discovered the joy of banter of the mining lasers in afew corp mining ops, and the utter boredom of a bad war dec’ XD

But if there’s one bad thing to say about all this, it’s this. Why can’t CCP realise a patch that doesn’t cause me to have to do a clean install?! Every single patch, it crashes during the patching process and corrupts my install >.< It’s might frustrating!

Oh and for all those who have missed it, here’s a link to the first part of Clear Skies ep 2 on YouTube:

If you’re at all into Eve Online (as I am) then you really need to check out the Clear Skies movies. Well I say movies. The first ep has been done (at about 40ish mins long) using a mix of Eve’s ingame engine and the Source engine (for interior areas) and is truly a masterpeice of community created content. More games need fans as devoted as this.

You can DL it for yourself (in all it’s glory), here.

Ep 1 can be found via the links in this post on the eve insider forums.

I thought I should probably mention this – seeing as every other bugger is on twitter >.<

Beta entertained me for all of 5-10 minutes (half of which was spent in the character creator, as limited as that was). Simply put: it isn’t a game for me. I wouldn’t consider myself “Hardcore” really, but I’m just not that casual. I get spurred on by content that I haven’t seen before and it gets me into the swing of levelling (my regular Monday Night LotrO group will attest to that) but this entire game just did not interest me. But then again – I don’t think it was ever aimed towards my particular demographic.

Have fun in there shuttie-boy!

… there was a totally dissatisfied student who gained magical powers that allowed him to accomplish all his life-long goals.

Uhhh… not quite.

In short, I am a gamer. Since I moved to Wales when I was about 6 or 7 and my ‘rents bought me a Megadrive. Skipping all the boring stuff, I wrangled a PC of my own back in my days of secondry school (that’s ages 11-ish to 16/18 for non-UK people), and thus began the addiction! Well, I wouldn’t call it that so much. I kept decent grades (not amazing, but that is a WHOLE other story ) and so on and so forth.

For whatever reason, after my A-levels, I applied for a whole load of courses – almost all of them either Physics or joint-honours Physics-Computer Science. Apart from one. Which was Computer Science with Games Development at the University of Hull. I thought “well I looove playing games, wouldn’t it be just AWESOME to be making them?!” plus the money seemed pretty good at the time .

Oh how wrong was I?!

Over the next 5 years, I bounced from one mind-bending disaster to another, eventually culminating in my formally withdrawing from my Masters year just afew days ago (don’t worry – I’d already failed back before Christmas, I was just hanging around). 

Now this may be sounding abit like a sob-story by now, and I apologise if that’s true but there’s afew really good bits I’m going to mention now.

Though I discovered I have a problem learing from text-based sources (books, lecture slides etc), I did discover that I love working in more organisation and community-based roles. I much prefer working with people than face-planting the keyboard  Two people that helped me see this were John aka Shuttler and Shawn Schuster when they invited me to cohost TabulaCast with John, as Shawn moved onto greener pastures. It was like a kind of epiphany (y’know, aside from the 1st show jitters) and the listeners were incredibly kind and supportive.

Now ofc, times have moved on abit, TabulaRasa has gone to the great server-farm in the sky and I’m currently co-hosting (albeit alittle quietly at times) Limited Edition with Shuttler and RockJaw. Which is great, I thoroughly enjoy chatting with them and discussing the ins and outs of comic-based MMOs and the movies but I have to admit that I am somewhat lost when it comes to comics. Not for lack of trying, I might add

So all throughout this, I have been gaming. I used to always prefer playing offline single-player games but as I discovered that there was a vast repository of people out there playing together, I began my move towards almost exclusively playing MMOs. Starting with Anarchy Online back in 2000-ish. A great game, terrible launch and it took awhile to wrap your head around the skills-system – I still pop back for a afew weeks out of every year for a pure nostalgia trip. I was all about the Fixer there, which is a bit of a support role. The kind of role I still gravitate to, to this day. I’ve played (and often beta-tested) such varied games as Saga of Ryzom, SWG, EQ2, LotrO, DDO, Eve Online, Planetside, WoW, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Vanguard, WAR, AoC, CoH/V and there’s a probably afew more I cannot think of right now. With few exceptions (notably AoC and Pirates of the Burning Sea), I have returned back to each of these games from time to time. Rarely spending more than a year away. That’s the kind of gamer I am. Not so much hopping from one shiney thing to the next but I go to a game to get something out of it. Eve satisfies the Sci-Fi urges I get from reading too many such novels; LotrO and CoH/V are both fulfilling a need to play with people and keep in contact with some great friends; Saga of Ryzom is beautiful, has a truly dedicated community and has the best skill-based progression system I have played to-date. Occasionally I just need to shoot things and that is what Planetside and Left4Dead are for

Alot of people criticise alot of games past, present and future for being X-clones. Be it Ultima, EQ or WoW. The fact of the matter is provided there’s alittle something different (I draw you to the ease of getting into RvR scenarios and the innovative form of PQs in WAR as an example), that adds alittle something different, then does it matter if it’s largely the same mechanics as a previous best-seller? Are the vast majority of people really after something truly revolutionary? I don’t think they are. Most people just want to spend some time un-hooked from reality and the worries that brings; maybe spending some time with friends too far away to see regularly, or maybe just across the hall.

So as far as I’m concerned, so long as you’re having fun, the rest of the whiners and the haters can go take a hike