I have a love/hate relationship with WoW. I get disgusted with the repetitive grind, and cancel my subscription, but within 6 or 8 months, I re-up. It’s funny. I am as familiar with the layout of Stormwind or Ironforge as I am the area I live in. And I have more control over what happens in Azeroth than I do in rl. It’s an escape for me, when my life isn’t going as well as I’d like. I probably have 40 avatars in various levels. I have only managed to get a couple up to max xp – or at least max xp before the most recent expansion. I never got too involved with the endgame. I only get involved with guilds in order to purchase the special items only guildies can get. Some expansion ago, they made being in a guild less critical. You can queue up for a random raid as easily as you can queue up for a random dungeon. You don’t need to be social anymore.
Unfortunately, this most recent expansion plays up on the pvp. I never cared much for pvp. Too unpredictable fighting against something other than a limited AI. I may bail again if it gets to be too much.
I’ve played other mmorpgs. There was a super-hero based one that came and went. That one was pretty good. I would love someone to come up with a decent alternative to WoW, but no one can compete, I guess.
The “long term” that you plan for when you’re a game developer is maybe 3 years. And there’s a lot of winging it, even during that time.
(I was a developer for a company with text-based MMOs that predate WoW and are still running. Nobody really had an estimate for how many months/years of content there was in the game. But then, we didn’t have “level cap” or “endgame” or “expansion” thinking in our design anyway. Items were not a major part of the power curve as one levels – instead of bigger stats you tried to acquire cooler-looking, unique, customized weapons that do something flashy, rather than bigger stats.)
I’m sure I’ve posted about it before, but TIS-100 is one of my favorite games, even though I only got about halfway through it before I had to put it down for a bit. It’s one of the very few games for which I’ve never used internet guides for hints or walkthroughs. I do recall finding a sort of leader board on reddit, but I could only match the best/optimal scores for the first few puzzles.
Oddly enough, I’ve never played any of their other games.
I loved it! Got a ways into it (don’t know how far it goes) before I put it down. Trying to find those optimal solutions to get the best counts just based on the hints in the game manual and some creative thinking made me feel like a kid again.
Funny fact - I was watching the Halt and Catch Fire TV show when something they said in the show made me think of the game and then with a little experimentation I got the Halt and Catch Fire achievement.
So thanks to a few peeps at another online hangout I have been sucked into minecraft.
This is way more fun than I would have thought it would be. A few of us are still figuring all kinds of things out while another of us is a fucking mad wizard with his creations.
Google’s AI team, having tackled Go, decided to apply self-learning bots to Quake III: Arena. These bots had two key limitations: they screen-scraped (read: saw like humans) and had no communication with each other. Google dubbed these bots FTW.
Read more about these remarkably doofy bots and how they handle artificial limitations in this wacky writeup.
