Does persistence pay off in gaming?

While driving to our Monday activities my son was attempting to convince me we needed to stop at every toy store in a 10 mile radius to search for the elusive Bakugan booster paks. This is not a new endeavor for him, but today's execution involved a new technique that consisted of him droning the 'e' sound in 'please' for as long as he could. His attempt went on for several miles, despite my assuring him it would not soften my resolve and would in fact most likely trigger my alter-ego 'Grumpy Mom - Funsucker Extraordinaire.'

Finally he gave up, either in response to his ear-covering sister yelling 'stop it' or my 'I'm more interested in what's on the radio' fakeout. More likely because he got bored.

In the blissful silence that followed, I wondered to myself how he thought annoying me would ever end with a positive result. How could anyone? But I realized the saying "persistence pays off" is a common saying for a reason. It must work sometime. If it didn't, the telemarketing industry would have died off long ago. So that brought me to thinking about when persistence had worked for/on me.

Learning something new requires persistence certainly. "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" and all that. If you want to game, then you need a certain amount of persistence. It's rare to come into a game and be able to play it well without failing a few times first. Persistence and desire to play - if you really don't WANT to play, you're not going to keep trying until you get better at it, you'll just move on to something that does hold your attention. This is one of the reasons why I think playing age-appropriate games of all types (board, video and PC) is actually good for children. It helps them learn that they have to keep trying, gives them a sense of accomplishment when they do, and helps them learn to deal with the feelings that happen when they fail. Playing games against the computer is great for that last point - they don't blame you if they fail at a game, and they won't suspect you of 'going easy' on them if they win at a game (unlike in Sorry or checkers.)

Playing games certainly requires persistence. I know it took me a while to learn to coordinate using the controllers on our Nintendo Wii system, and my daughter still kicks my ass in the Wall-E mini games because she has a better mastery of moving around in "space." But my persistence paid off in Guitar Hero, where I'll regularly play songs over and over in practice mode until I can at least get a 90% or greater (but I've settled for 83% for that darned Stevie Ray Vaughan song - daaaaam that man could PLAY!)

My latest bout with persistence is playing my new MMORPG, Warhammer Online (WAR). And that persistence is paying off. The game has progressively become more enjoyable the more I've played. Partly because Mythic has been patching like crazy (Thank You Mythic) and partly because I've become more familiar with how to play my characters. Last night, my pet only got stuck a couple of times, and the RvR Battlegrounds worked as they should, making it a fun way to work off the stress of the day (Ha! Die Honeybunches, Die!)

Persistence has also worked for my son, just not his latest attempt. His birthday is coming up, and he keeps asking me to get him a couple special things. Every time we go to a toy store, he checks the shelves for his current "must have." He's stopped asking me outright to buy "right now", but just casually tells me "Look at that, they still have 3 left." Clever boy. Not enough to annoy me, just enough to keep that information at the ready for gift-buying time. But the joke's on him, I bought the toy 3 weeks ago and it's hiding in my closet.

WAR is live! Hurry up and wait.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning servers went live yesterday. I dutifully went to 2 different GameStops to pick up my pre-ordered full-game boxes.

Begin snark: there are two GameStops within 1 mile of each other near me (one in a strip-mall, one in a 'real' mall). I had to buy the pre-order box at two different ones because there was only one left at my regular GameStop. You'd think that because it was all one company, I could pick up BOTH of my game boxes at one store, right? Silly me. I forgot how retail works. Each store gets it's allotment, and does not share with other stores. End snark.

During the Open-Beta of WAR, I observed a few issues, mostly having to do with where mobs rendered vs where I was attacking them. I also observed a few NPC's running thru town while seated, and one "Unconscious Miner" running out of the mine.

Being a QA Person, (ie I point out other people's mistakes for a living)(but in a nice way, I am a team player) I know that you can't possibly fix all the bugs before shipping a product, or you'd never ship the product. Trade-off decisions have to be made about what problems are important enough to delay the product, and what you can put off fixing until later. And most of what I observed really could be considered minor in the grand scheme of what they accomplished in the game so far.

Most of the game play in the Live edition went as expected. A group of friends and I 'met' in the evening to play after spending some time on our own leveling our characters up to between levels 6 and 9, which we considered far enough to have figured out what our chosen character could do, and start familiarizing ourselves with how to get around and where to find important things like trainers and Rally Masters. I know choosing the first night that the game was fully live was probably not super-smart, but we're Gamers. We wanted to Game and we wanted to Game as soon as possible! We all managed to get on to the server without running into any wait times, but once we got on we ran into a few small snags. The /whisper system didn't seem to be working, although the /invite system worked, so we could group up and then chat amongst ourselves. And there was a LOT of lag. I noticed it the most moving between areas and zones, and often during battles as well. Alt-tabbing out of the game to load up Skype (or Ventrillo) was not a smooth operation, the game often would not re-draw correctly, forcing you to quit the game and restart it anyway. I solved this by running the game in Windowed mode, sized as large as possible.

Some things I hope Mythic is already working on to patch A.S.A.P:

• The White Lion's pet that freezes or just fades away for no apparent reason. Several times during extended killing sessions in a Public Quest, the hot bar for my pet disappeared, so I could not change the War Lion's stance from Passive to Defensive, but the hot key for attack (left-shift + C) still worked so I could keep going until there was a big enough pause in the action to dismiss then re-call my pet.
  
• Kaine's Embrace RvR. I got stuck in the battleground with a group of friends last night during our first foray together. I participated in this battleground quiet a few times during Open-Beta, and did not experience near the problems our group did during the first night of live play. Time to respawn was overly long, sometimes a full minute or more beyond the count-down timer shown. Action points did not regenerate at the regular rate, if at all. And the session is supposed to last 15 minutes or first team to 500 points, whichever comes first. We got to 15 minutes and were tired of watching our corpses on the ground waiting for those overly long respawns and wanted to leave. No such luck. The RvR session did not end until someone made it to 500 finally and we were all kicked out. As this is one of the first major RvR's that players in the Elves vs Elves area would encounter, I'd think they'd want to make sure it presented the best gaming experience possible for players. Perhaps the server was over taxed and couldn't keep up, but they should have expected that and compensated for it.
• Shattered Beach Public Quest. We saw lots of mobs flashed across the fields, even after we started hitting them, and we couldn't find the area to participate in the second objective at all. Perhaps this last one was 'player error,' so I won't point too big a finger just yet.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not totally negative about playing the game. But some of these things are disruptive enough to take me out of the gaming experience that I so enjoy. Overall, I enjoyed my evening of play, and will probably be playing again this evening. My son, who's 10 next week, even asked if he could create a character in the game and I said "sure, but do it on Daddy's account, because I use my account" and he answered "yeah, a LOT." What do you think he's trying to say??

5 Things I Hate About W.A.R.

Listening to the Disney Chanel while taxiing the kids to various after-school things tends to melt my brain a bit, so to counteract the effects of Miley Cyrus and her "7 Things I Hate About You" I started compiling a list of my own.

5 Things I Hate About Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

1. No Auto-attack when I'm being attacked.
- it was most annoying when a new mob would 'get' me from behind and I'd mash my 2 -3 -4 keys only to find I still had the mob I just killed still targeted. If there's a setting for this, I didn't run across it.

2. "Target out of range" messages when I'm standing practically right on top of what I'm trying to kill.
- no matter where I move around the mob I'm trying to kill, every once in a while I'd get this message. My blows would still reduce the mob's health, but not as quickly.

3. Mobs teleporting across the field.
- I'm sure this was just a problem with the game still being Beta - right? Mobs that I was trying to attack would suddenly blink out and appear 10/20 yards away. Don't MAKE me chase you!

4. Crafting Talismans
- I only got 3 of the 4 things I needed to craft talismans. I never got a Fragment, nor did I ever figure out where to get one. I got boatloads of seeds, but never ran across the trainer to tell me what to do with them, so I sold them.

5. My Pet Lion constantly froze.
- again, it's a Beta problem right? They'll have that fixed by... uh... tomorrow?
Every 4 - 10 kills, my Lion would stand at the corpse of a kill, and at first I thought it was eating the remains (ew) but after impatiently waiting for it to finish the lion would more often just fade away, forcing me to 'call' it again. Usually twice.

Now, to be fair, there were some things I LIKED about the game as well:

5 Things I Like About W.A.R.


1. The red "stain" mark on maps to tell you what area to go for a particular quest.
- that feature was extremely helpful in preventing those of us who are directionally challenged figure out where we should be headed to accomplish anything. And the little popup text with the quest objective in it when you mouse over the "stain" was great when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next.

2. The Yellow/Orange marks on my mini-map to tell me where I had quests to turn in.
- What a great time saver. I can't tell you how many times I'd bop thru camp just to sell off things to make more bag space, totally forgetting that I had a quest or two to turn in until I noticed that orange dot on my mini-map.

3. Public Quests.
- this was actually a Love/Hate kind of thing. When there were lots of people it was a lot of fun to do my part towards killing 100 Followers of Ra (or whatever). When I was playing at an 'off' time however, not so much fun.

4. Joining a RvR anytime I was in the mood, instead of tracking down a battlemaster in the city.
- Clicking on that nice little symbol next to the mini-map and "joining" was something I enjoyed when questing got boring.

5. Those sneaky spiders
- In several zones, there were spiders that actually hid in the ground and lept out at you if you got too close. Too funny! At first, I didn't pay attention to the text floating above the ground. I assumed it was a tiny little rat or bug, mearly there to add to the ambience. Can't you just hear the 'squeal like a girl' sound I made the first time one of those eight-legged monsters jumped out an 'got' me? Yeah - it DID sound just like that.

BTW - I've decided to give the game a month or two - on Saturday I did get to play again, and enjoyed it. Sunday was the day the Open Beta servers shut down, and the Collectors Edition head-start servers came up. Since I only have the Standar Edition, I'm blocked from playing until Tuesday, and found that I was annoyed I could not play. That means I wanted to play, right?

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Day 2

After my second day (ok, 1/2 day, there IS work to be done ya know) of playing the open beta of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) I'm still happy.

I've found my way around well enough to progress one character to level 7, and a second character to level 3, and have just made a another character of the opposite faction to try that out as well. I spent quite a bit of time playing RvR but never managed to get above middle of the pack in number of kills made (but did do much better in the number of times died column.) I think it's kind of funny that I'm enjoying RvR a lot more in WAR than I have in the Battlegrounds of World of Warcraft (WoW). Maybe because there are so many more of us in the RvR battles, I don't feel like I'm under so much pressure to perform. I did a couple more Public Quests too, but was more interested in gaining XP buy finishing up my other quests, so did not hang around to repeat the PQ multiple times like I did with the one in Chapter 1. I think the novelty has worn off already.

I've only joined random questing groups a couple of times, and both times did not stick around very long. No one was really collaborating on the quest objective, and one time the group members were on opposite ends of the zone. I've also noticed that when I do look at the list of groups available, it's almost always only got 2 members. So far, it looks like the whole 'grab a group' idea is a bust. Just my opinion.

This time my kids looked over my shoulder for a while while I played WAR. Neither seemed very interested in playing themselves yet. My daughter berated me for making a male character rather than a female. I've noticed that both of them always make same-gender characters in WoW, almost as if it's just too icky to pretend to be a boy if you're really a girl. For me, it's mostly a point of view thing - male characters tend to be taller than their female counterparts, and I like being a tall as possible. Random, I know - but hey - I make my football pool picks based on whether or not I like the team's city, and so far that's worked out just fine for me too. Anywho, I was thinking about whether I'd allow the kids to play WAR if they were interested. The Pre-Order box that I purchased at GameStop did not have the official rating on it yet ("rating pending") but I'm guessing it will get a T for Teen. As to allowing the kids to play, so far I have not run across anything I'd consider objectionable, like swearing or excessive or bloody violence, so the short answer is "yes" but the real answer is probably "I'm not paying for an account for them on WoW and War. I'm already paying enough my own accounts." And the ulterior motive-answer is I've got to save money so I can buy Spore next.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckonning First Impressions

Finally got my WAR beta downloaded, unzipped and playable. Yay!

I went with a White Lion, which is a Melee character with a pet. I don't play characters with pets much in Wow, so it's a nice change. I found it fairly easy to catch on to who I was supposed to talk to, based on the huge books hanging over their heads. Run over there, kills x number of blahs, run back and talk to me again. Basic, yet useful for figuring out how to get around, use the abilities your toon has, your range etc.

I was happy with the graphics in the game, which were comparable to Wow and vastly better than Age of Conan. For AoC I had to a lot of tweaking, and had to disable SLI mode for my dual graphics cards. For WAR, I didn't have to tweak at all. Later, I'll go in and look at the available video settings to see if I can boost the resolution, but for now it's good. I did not experience any graphic blocking - where portions of the screen look like huge wire-framed shapes instead of their more refined image (a big problem for me in AoC even w/ SLI turned off.) The only complaint I had was that it was not always apparent which elements I could get around/over so sometimes I got stuck behind a wagon or a rock, and had to run around the other way. /shrug.

Most of the quests were easy to do, level appropriate, and with plentiful mobs even with all of the new players popping in. There was one quest involving a Boom Crate that I just could not figure out, however - either I never got the Boom Crate, or I accidentially sold it. Not sure.

I did one Realm vs Realm (RvR) in which I did OK. My stats put me smack in the center of the list for kills, and how many times I died. The Destruction team won (big surprise) but it was fun all the same. Note to self - don't stand there like a tourist when the big wall of flames comes your way.

I also found my way into my first Public Quest, which was loads of fun, but still a bit buggy. There were several mobs who's names were in red, which usually means "bad guy," but no one was able to attack them. Also, the second wave of the quest called for Crew members by a certain name, who never showed up, but after we killed enough of the mobs that did show up, we progressed to the third and final phase of the quest. The last part involved killing a named NPC, and a huge multi-headed monster. The monster was a bit laggy, and would suddenly appear a bit farther down the bridge, or across the courtyard. The loot system for PQ's is something that's new to me. It's an auto-generated random roll based on your contribution and some bonus stats. My first time thru, I ranked #2 and got a Lesser Loot bag w/ several green items to choose from inside. The other 2 times I didn't get any loot, dispite ranking in the top 10 for contributions. So I guess the moral is, don't depend on PQ's to net you phat loot.

I'm only up to level 4 on my White Lion. Leveling was well paced, but I had lots of /AFK time as I had to assist w/ brunch making, prompt the kids to get dressed etc before their friends started coming over, take a shower, answer 2 wrong number phone calls and 1 real phone call, throw in some laundry, show my daughter how to use the rug cleaner for the chocolate stains she left yesterday, change batteries in 3 Wii remotes so 4 10 year olds could play Mario Kart, make 4 bowls of popcorn and a pitcher of punch for the 8 kids playing in my yard and finally sweep up all the popcorn dropped on the deck and cups left around after 7 of the kids ran off to play another neighbors house.

Time for lunch.

BTW - hubby just asked me where I got the Beta key so he could try the game too. Guess I'm going to have to see if the online retailers have gotten any better about delivering the Beta Keys. He doesn't care about a shelf-full of pretty boxes.

Balancing NEED with WANT and Games

As I sit here, watching the ticker on my Fileplanet Download Manager slowly tick downward, I'm arguing with myself. (I like doing that, either way, I win) On the one hand, I could suck it up, and pay the $39.99 annual fee to become a member, and Skip the Line. I could - it ways so right on the download page. 'skip the line'. Ahhhhhh - that sounds so NICE. Like getting cut-sies at Starbucks. On the other hand, that's $39.99 out of budget that I don't really NEED to spend.

I'm downloading the Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning (WAR) open beta. Or, I'm going to be, just as soon as that little ticker moves me to the front of the line. When I first logged on to Fileplanet, did all my account creation, Beta Key activation who-ha, downloaded the Download Manager, I was number 1139 out of 1139. Now, 5+ hours later, I'm 203 out of 2112.

I admit, I am slow to the starting line with this. I'd been reading bits and pieces about WAR, but did not really pay attention to any release dates until last week. And then, didn't even catch that the pre-order folks would get open beta and head-start on the other dweebs - uh- players. But I should have, after all, Lord of the Rings Online did it, as did Tabula Rasa. The front of my forehead has a hand print from me slapping myself on it. Multiple times, as I had to go to three different stores just to find the boxed version of the Pre-order for WAR. I could have just done full-download only of the pre-order, but I'd heard Amazon was having "issues" with delivering the beta keys. And that is the whole reason I'm even bothering to pre-order. I. Want. The. Beta. Key.

Why? I need something fun to play. I've been rather bored with Wow lately. My 54 priest has not been leveling very fast, despite Blizzard's adjustment to XP needed to get from 20-60 (and soon from 60-70). And my 70 is just a gold farmer at this point. As a matter of fact, Wow is in the background right now. I set my toon flying somewhere, the flight timer said 12 mins, so I went poking around for something else to do. Lucky you, this is what I chose! I recently purchased Age of Conan (AoC) to try out, and it really did not grab me. I've already paid for my first month (after the free one) so I really need to re-visit it to decide whether I'm going to keep it or not. If WAR beta is better than release AoC, then I think I'll be dumping AoC. After all, I'm not planning on dumping Wow with Wrath of the Lich King coming out in a couple of months, and how many monthly subscriptions do I want to carry? If my contracting job was pulling in more money, I could be a little more relaxed about it. But it's not, so I'm not.

Back to WANT vs NEED. Looking around Fileplanet and GameSpy's sites to see if the $40 spent would be worth more than line-jumping to me, I do see some other games I'd like to try. Spore looks like gobs of fun. And Cysis Warhead kind of looks like fun. But I can get those at the Brick and Mortar stores without spending $40 on top of the game prices. Sure, it won't be the very minute the games are released, auto-downloaded for me. But do I really NEED that? WAR Beta doesn't even start until tomorrow. So spending $40 tonight will get me nothing more than less eye strain from no longer staring at those tiny little number (I'm at 138 of 2221 now). And the awful temptation of spending more money on games way too easily. Plus, I wouldn't have the pretty boxes to line the shelf over my desk. I like my pretty box collection. There, see. I've just won the argument with myself. I do NOT need to spend $40 just to jump the line, because if I did, I wouldn't have my collection of game boxes to gaze at while I'm deep in thought.

I guess I'll go kill some aliens in Unreal Tournament III for a while.

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