Van Hemlock

The Response of Officials...

Oh go on then...one more and then I promise to give it a rest for a while:

Official Second Life: Townhall With Philip Available

This is the transcript, and mp3 recording, of last night's 'Town Hall Meeting' in Second Life I happened to be listening in on it from the location I was at, while tinkering away on a rather complex scripting project - the land-owner in question having set up the land's URL audio stream to pick up the meeting in progress. The actual meeting took place for real...er...well....you know what I mean; 100 or so avatars gathered in-world at LL's special stage venue, to 'see' Philip Linden 'speak', or something. This whole Virtual World Analogue thing does my head in sometimes. Anyway, faced with something of a polite, but simmering mob all wanting answers about the C0pyb0tz0r, the meeting was effectively dominated by the thorny issue of Digital Copyright.

It's a pretty long transcript, and with so many people so concerned about CopyBot, it did tend to go in circles and repeat itself a lot. Here's some of the distilled pearls of wisdom, as I understood them. If you particularly care about SL, beyond the normal Snarky Blog Pointing-And-Giggling we all enjoy, do try and read through, or listen to, the whole thing, for a sense of context:

• It's the Internet, Stupid!
  Philip seems to hold at the core of his philosophy a passion for unbridled and unregulated growth of SL. In this vein, he seems to be keen on Linden Labs absolving themselves of as much regulatory responsibility as possible. 'No-one regulates the internet', and he makes a point that LL should be doing *less* dispute resolution and overseeing, not more, in all aspects of Second Life. The key difference is that no one company has a finger on the Internet's 'Off Button', or controls it's sign-up process and account details. Philip seems eager to have this state of affairs ushered in to SL as soon as is practical.
• Data Overload
  A number of technically minded questions and suggestions for copyright control were gently but firmly deflated, on the basis that the 'data corpus' - the total collection of objects in SL in total, is now far too big to enable any kind of technical copyright verification to work. He cites the internet again here, and has a point - it would be laughable to have someone check every other web page to see if the one you've just uploaded is original. To his credit, he comes right out and confirms that nothing you make in SL is 'safe', apart from compiled Scripts. He doesn't really suggest solutions, beyond a kind of publicly visible 'creation timestamp', which people could use to resolve copyright issues legally, amongst themselves.
• White Hats Are Cool Guys!
  He seems to like the libsecondlife project, the very people who *ahem* 'accidentally' unleashed CopyBot on the world, citing all sorts of useful contributions they've made to SL's architecture, code, and design in the past. He strangely makes no mention that these people costing nothing to 'employ', and at least one respondent calls them out as actually being 'Black Hats' in disguise.
• Bigger Better Faster More
  He makes no apology in the slightest for the current PR Overdrive, and if anything, seems hell-bent on getting everyone inside SL a.s.a.p, regarding a life in SL as the sort of life-affirming and empowering (he actually uses the word at one point) experience that no sentient being should have to go without. I suspect this is genuine 'vision', rather than a cynical attempt to boost SL to the point where it can be sold off to AOL or something. Even so, the creed of expansion above all is a bit disturbing, in a Ernst Stavro Blofeld kind of way, no matter how well-intentioned. I wonder if he has a white fluffy cat?
• Want a Job?
  Somewhat comically, Philip offers everyone listening, and presumably, anyone not listening too, a job. He invites us all to apply, regardless of skills or experience. The actual positions are unclear, but he points us at the website. I'll do the same here. He tells us that only 100 people work at LL, less then 30 of which are developers (vs. a notional 1.4 million customers), and that this is one of the main reasons for the shocking lack of service, stability, and slow feature updates, etc - simply not enough hands on deck. I wonder if LL are a bit out of their depth these days - it definitely sounds like they're desperate for more hired help.
• Bargain!
  Unrelated to anything else, we learn that SL has cost a total of 20 million US Dollars to make, over the last six years.

There are a lot of other points in there, but all in all, I doubt it was the kind of response folks were really after - some quick fix or magic wand. To his credit, the Linden Lab boss does seem to care, being disarmingly honest and open with his customers, and perhaps something of a visionary. It just seems as if he doesn't have the answers many pioneers of the Virtual World are looking for either.

Despite all this uncertainty, confusion, spin, hype and potential, and being somewhat interested in the continued, and free, existence of my little online Lego Set, I came away from it surprisingly reassured. Not that 'it'll be all okay' and that the Gods...the Devs and Management of the SL, were going to 'make it all better'. That would be naive, and is the Party Line you get from most normal MMOs. No...what I got from this was a sense that The Lindens are aware of the problems, are going to give it their best shot, but can't make any guarantees. I kind of respect that - moreso than the usual fluff at any rate.

Anyway, I'm sure you're all bored of hearing about this stuff by now - Oxygen of Publicity and all that. In other news, I resubbed to Everquest II, and am finding it surprisingly palletable in it's latest incarnation. Every time I quit, it gets a little better by the time I return, showing a good sense of design direction and commitment to feedback from SOE, I'd say. How long I'll last in there this time is another matter.

More on that later. This is the last post in the current series, but we'll be back with a new series in a week's time. Until then, remember - We at Van Hemlock do not condone Hats....Black OR White!

Toodle-pip!

posted @ 8:30 AM | Feedback (0)

The Theft of Copyright...

It’s lynch mob time in Second Life again, and boy are those Virtualfolk angry this time! While the hyperactive PR landslide continues, with all manner of Hip Cool Trendy Real People discovering this cutting edge ‘Life 2 Thing’, and promptly annoying the hell out of everyone by claiming to be the first company to have an online shop, EVER!!1!, and also the first online newspaper EVER!!1!, the more long time residents have a new and quite apocalyptic threat to worry about than massively out of control PR pushing the platform well beyond it’s capabilities and everyone else's indulgence. It’s those wacky open-source communists again, with a project called ‘libsecondlife’.

www.libsecondlife.org

Now I’m not terribly technical, but as far as I can make out, libsecondlife is an open source collaborative development project, aimed at providing all sorts of interfaces between the essentially closed world of SL, and The Outside – various desktop applications for editing things, websites, databases, and so on. The project seems to have some degree of official support, approval and backing by Linden Lab themselves, and has all the hallmarks of being one of those instances where naïve Scientists start banging bits of Uranium together, ‘to see what will happen’, and then see only that the ensuing result could provide cheap clean electricity for everyone!

Rambling analogy aside, what seems to have happened is that one of their debugging tools, created in the exact above spirit, seems to have been tweaked, and stolen/leaked/released in to the wild. Called ‘CopyBot’, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and is a third party application capable of almost completely circumventing the SL in-built copy-permissions system on just about every ‘thing’ in the game world, save compiled scripts.

I think it was Raph Koster who notoriously posted the observation:

“Never trust the client.
Never put anything on the client. The client is in the hands of the enemy. Never ever ever forget this.”

I seem to remember him getting a lot of flak for this glaring PR own-goal at the time, but it doesn’t make it any less true, and in the case of SL, pretty much everything is in the hand of the enemy. Only a few months ago, 11m+ cubes started turning up on the various online SL shop websites, for silly amounts of made-up-money, simply because ordinarily, the maximum sized cube you can make, is 10m. But some bright spark managed to hack the client, where the size limitation resided, and started making huge huge prims, unchecked by the server.

LL’s response to the CopyBot epidemic has been pretty harsh, declaring the application to be a ToS Violation:

Official Linden Blog: Use of CopyBot and Similar Tools a ToS Violation

This is a quite desperate kind of last resort, suggesting that a technical solution is not immediately feasible, and fear of the legal ban-stick is all they can muster for the time being. It’s doubly surprising in SL’s case, as the whole world exists on a very lassiez faire footing, and normally, pretty much anything goes in there. Certainly, in any other MMO, this would be called ‘Duping’, and you’d expect no less, but in SL things are less clear-cut – it’s perfectly all right to dupe objects you’ve made yourself, for example.

Virtual property protection has always been rather haphazard and flaky in there. One particular tool has been causing rumblings of discontent and taking its toll on skin and clothing designers for some time. It lifts viewed, and potentially copy-protected, textures directly from the graphics card memory, allowing one to re-upload them as your own, free of copy protection, and on the face of it, is almost impossible to do anything about.

This current episode is very serious however, as many people are in there to build things, and then sell them for money, imaginary AND real, and the arrival of this CopyBot on the scene, with it’s reputedly simple one-click interface, has significantly rocked most Content Creators' faith in the system, making them less likely to bother in the first place. And clearly, without people to actually make the fox costumes, sex poses, SLingo games and cutting edge revolutions in online retail, far less of the consumers are likely to stick around and spend their money. Why bother paying when you can download a tool and go on a help-yourself spree? It's not as if the stuff is real, afterall...

Obviously CopyBot will be stopped and dealt with, but what about the next one? And the next one? And behind these occasional malicious and intentional threats to their world, are the seemingly constant rumbles of accidental bugs, technical issues, teething troubles and system overloads. The problem here seems to be twofold.

Firstly LL seem to have a very cool and groovy attitude to the whole project. For them, SL really is destined to be the zOMGMetaverse!!1! They do indeed seem the somewhat bewildered crazy-haired scientists of the piece, perhaps thinking a little too much of how much people can experience, grow, learn and achieve with their platform, and too little of how much people can lie, cheat, steal and hurt others with it. Perhaps a more draconian approach, such as we usually see form the Blizzards and SOEs of the world, might help here? An open source project built largely around packet-sniffing and deconstructing your file internal file formats would never be allowed to exist in any other MMO, and it's only a matter of time before we see a SL Emulator come out of it all.

The second problem is that the whole endeavour seems to have become far too popular for it’s own good. Their current mission of getting as many people along for the ride as possible, and accompanying media frenzy, is indeed working – hundreds of thousands of people are coming to have a look. Trouble is, not all of them are friendly, committed to the Cause, or that invested in its success. Lower and lower barriers to entry also lower how much value people place on it, and how difficult it is to get back in to cause more mischief if you’re thrown out.

As for me, I’ve always found the idea of trying to make a primary income from what amounts to little more than ‘LEGO Online’ somewhat dubious. I like building in there, certainly, but do so for its own sake, and not with giddy dreams of 'Step 3: Profit!!!' It’s with some small sense of smugness then, that I seem to be vindicated in my cynicism once more.

Second Life really is shaping up to be a monumental train-wreck waiting to happen. I'll miss it when it's gone, and be sad, but the fascinating part of it all for me, is trying to work out how it’s going to happen, rather than if…

(One of the ways this apocalypse might come about, is if LL, under pressure, or not, start seriously cracking down on Copyright. You see there is an essential hypocrisy involved at the core of this whole DMCA Intellectual Property Theft issue in Second Life. It's one thing to bitch and moan that that evil bad-men are 'in ur shop, steelin ur textures', but just where exactly did YOU get that texture from in the first place, hmm? I wonder... Swords generally cuts both ways, I find, and surprisingly few top-notch graphic artists inhabit SL...)

Edit: Am I wrong to ridicule SL's future so frequently? Perhaps:

BBC News, Technology: Second hype or second life?

The BBC's Digital Pundit, Bill Thompson, with a somewhat different and less cynical, but refreshingly pragmatic positive take on it all.

Last Edit, I promise: Those interested in further analysis and discussion by somewhat more informed minds than mind could go to Raph's Website, for the current Analysis In Progress there:

Raph's Website: CopyBot

and Hamlet has In-World reaction at New World Notes, including actual store closure protests:

New World Notes: Copying A Controversy

posted @ 8:27 AM | Feedback (2)

The Desert of Crystal…

Spent some time over the last few days being slapped about the head by the Halibut of Frustration, in Guild Wars. My time there is rapidly dividing into two distinct phases.

There’s the solitary overland roaming, when I, and five mostly silent, entirely predictable and totally obedient AI NPC henchmen form up a party and explore the various non-mission Explorable Area regions of the Crystal Desert – Prophet’s Path, Salt Flats, Diviners Ascent, Arid Sea, Vulture Drifts, Skyward Reach and The Scar. I’ve always found GW to have one of the more good-looking MMO worlds – well designed and varied regions, and in some places, quite breathtaking. The Jeremy Soule soundtrack fits much of the place well, (despite being mostly knocked off from other J.S. games – NWN, etc), and the Desert in particular is a wonderful place to just roam, take in the atmosphere, see the sights and generally immerse oneself in the wind-scoured, desolate ruins of civilisations long gone. Technically, despite looking as good as it does, GW is perhaps one of the most forgiving MMOs when it comes to my poor ageing PC hardware, and flows along quite smoothly, despite hectic fighting, spell effects and the like. The mobs aren’t too difficult, but still present some challenges, with agro radiuses, etc, and tend to drop a satisfying amount of purple (WoW Blues), and occasional gold (WoW Purples), items. Fun, in a casual kind of way, but there is a certain lack of meaningful progress to it all. For that, you need to do the Missions.

The second mode of play is a familiar nemesis, which I thought I’d ditched leaving WoW; random Pick Up Grouping. This is where six complete strangers, with unknown levels of skill, competence, commitment and patience meet for the very first time, and then immediately engage in life-threatening teamwork activity. In Guild Wars, this is something of a requirement to make progress through the 25 instanced Mission areas. These are scattered throughout the various campaign areas of the world, and by working through them, the player advances the ongoing story. In many cases, it’s possible to avoid them entirely, and take a ‘long route’ around the region, through the above-mentioned Explorable areas, but some of them are required to be completed in order to unlock further regions, and I seem to be at one of these bottlenecks now.

So here we are again, ‘LFG’, against my general inclination, or better judgement, but what surprised me was that in Guild Wars, it’s even worse. Because of the way the skills work, you don’t get nine (or however many) distinct ‘classes’, allowing you to at least guess what the random crazies might get up to. Instead, you get 100 possible Primary/Secondary combinations, and something like 400 different skills to make up each of their 8 active hotkeys from. Certainly, some particular builds are favoured over others (W/Mo 4TW! apparently), but it becomes almost impossible to second-guess what another player might be capable of from visual appearance, or even the Pri/Sec class ‘name’. Great for PvP - the element of surprise and all that, but not so helpful in a cooperative endeavour where the most introduction one can expect is ‘hi m8 u rdy???’, before the fun begins.

See that’s another thing – the average GW PUG member is, if anything, even less articulate than the typical WoW PUG Munchkin, often, not saying anything at all during the course of the enforced collaboration. I wouldn’t mind if they then instead used the surprisingly complex system of chat macros, designed for this very purpose. Spacebar attacks, CTRL+Spacebar attacks, and tells everyone else you’re attacking, and even sets up the Assist function for everyone else. All they need to do is press ‘T’ and Space, but nooooo…

Three missions in particular stood out this week – Elona’s Reach, Dunes of Despair and Thirsty River. These three are required so that I can then have a go at this ‘Ascension’ thing, which the plot seems to hinge on at the moment, and is the sole reason I’m in the desert in the first place. It’ll help me fight evil better or some such. Anyway, each Mission in GW is subtly different, varying from straight gauntlet killing sprees, through timed exercises, up to some quite elaborate capture the flag pseudo Team-PvP style matches against AI opponents, and in one case, actual other players. Commendable, but this variety does present problems for the average PUG, who are not known for mental flexibility or improvisational reactions. MONGO SMASH!

Dunes of Despair was fairly straight-forward with just henchmen – it basically involves you having to protect an NPC for so many minutes, while he does a ritual of some sort. Lot of running about swatting each wave of mobs before they got to him, but nothing too tricky.

Elona’s Reach, described in the GuildWiki as the one of most difficult missions, took a few goes. The idea here is to find and retrieve two flags within 30 mins, from behind some very dense lines of interwoven-agro monsters, many of whom patrol, and a few boss mobs to boot. I especially hate the timed missions – they make me panic, and make mistakes, which I guess is the point. I partied up for it, and got wiped a number of times by folks who seemed not to understand the idea of agro-radius. It bloody DRAWS your agro radius on the minimap, for godsakes! ‘sry gtg :(’ Several extremely frustrating and fruitless excursions later, I decided to just have a go solo. ‘Solo’ in GW generally means ‘with all AI henchmen’ i.e. No other actual Players, but this turned out to be far more relaxing, working my way through the mobs without the pressure of five pairs of scornful eyes staring at me through various monitors across the world, and what initially started as a dry-run/recon trip, suddenly turned into a serious attempt on the mission. I did it with about two minutes to spare, and even managed to complete the bonus task, for extra points, further reinforcing the idea that Other People = Failure. In most cases, the AI henchmen, despite being several levels lower than you, and only having a Primary class, and no Secondary, and NOT BEING REAL are STILL more effective than most people you meet in a mission lobby.

Which just leaves Thirsty River. This one is basically a sort of team-v-team challenge. You and your band of hapless idiots have to first beat one AI team, then two at once, then three at once. Each enemy team completely resurrects every two minutes unless you can kill its priest, who is stood behind that team’s boss mob. Sounds straight forward, but it’s this one I’m having the most trouble with, largely because one of the final three Bosses is a Monk (GW’s Cleric class) who is capable of massively out-healing my entire team’s damage, on either himself, or the resurrection priest. Two minutes later, his entire team spawns on top of us and blam. ‘Your team has been defeated. Returning to the Outpost’. Again. There might be a build I can use to lock him down, while the henchmen do him in, but theoretically at least, it would be easier with 6 Players – more damage, better abilities than the henchmen, etc.

So I’ve been throwing myself into it with the usual morbid abandon, in the hope that one time I’ll get lucky and end up a team that knows what the hell it's doing. ‘lfp no n00bs!’ they shout, little realising that anyone still this side of the mission, is probably a n00b, or they'd be there by now. The nature of the mission – kill the enemy teams – means that I can’t even pay someone to ‘run’ it for me, which in this particular case, would be quite a desirable proposition.

(Running is where we all wait at the start, and a character with extremely specialised run-speed, evasion, dodging and self-healing skills just blasts through to the end point, ‘completing’ it for all of us, as if one players gets to the far exit, the whole party zones out, regardless of where they are. We used to call it ‘Blitzing’ in Anarchy Online. It's a big industry and an enormous number of players would rather fast-track to the end of the game than actually have to take part. I begin to see why...)

The worst part of it all, is that unlike WoW, I can’t even get a decent anecdote out of these nightmarish outings. We group up, we enter the mission, we get to the first difficult bit, we wipe, we bounce back to the outpost, we disband, we wait to join another…often without a world spoken. No Ranterbury Tales here I’m afraid - there's simply nothing to report. No personalities ever emerge, and often the only way you know the person isn't actually an NPC Henchman, is that the Henchmen normally use complete sentences, albeit from a very small repertoire, and tend not to all charge off at different targets without being told. WoW PUGs are bad too, but at least they’re interesting!

All in all, it’s a good job I quite like the Crystal Desert really…going to be there for quite some time…

posted @ 12:08 PM | Feedback (0)

The Power of Touch…

Back to Guild Wars once more, and the familiar unfamiliarity, as I try to work out how the hell yet another dusty abandoned MMO works – the usual sort of deep and philosophical questions: who, where, what, when , why. Time for a little stock-taking!

(Note: Whether or not Guild Wars is technically an MMO at all is a matter for some debate. I’m going to just ignore that debate and call it one, simply because I can’t be bothered to invent a new term for it! It’s close enough for me.)

My main GW Self seems to be a L20 Ranger/Necromancer, and I have no idea why, other than I was going through a bit of a Thief: Deadly Shadows play-through at the time and quite liked the ‘Pagans’ concept. A bit of informal and casual census-taking of the various town, outpost and mission lobby areas seems to show that at least 75% or more of ALL players are Warrior/Monk hybrids, and I begin to suspect I’ve done something terribly, terribly wrong in picking my own particular hybrid combo. Most of the other players have Monk in there somewhere – hell, who wouldn’t want to be their own cleric on top of their ‘real’ class? I’ve been back several days now and have yet to see another R/N.

GW has always been one of the trickier gameplay mechanics to understand, I’ve found, with it’s curious blend of skills and attributes making for some kind of real-time Magic: The Gathering kind of experience, largely based around building up interesting and effective combos of eight specific skills, out of the various hotkey actions you accumulate on your journeys and quests. Coming up with a workable ‘build’ becomes paramount then.

Previously, I’d got where I am now with an almost exclusively Marksmanship/Expertise based set up, designed to simply make my bow shots really hurt, and to hell with anything else, and I largely ended up ignoring my Necromancer half entirely. This rather unsubtle approach, in a game based around buffs, debuffs, counters, interrupts, lockdowns, and all sorts of other intricacies, has started to become less effective in recent lands and missions however, and besides, it does seem a shame to have an entire half of my character I never use, so I’ve recently been looking for proper R/N Builds, and have come up with the following:

Expertise: 16 (12 + 4 from rune/mask)
Blood Magic: 11

• Vampiric Touch (Blood Magic) – Touch, damages target, heals me
• Touch of Agony (Blood Magic) – Touch, damages target, damages me
• Throw Dirt (Expertise) – Touch, blinds target and nearby other enemies
• Whirling Defense (Expertise) – Stance, increase block chance, partial damage reflect
• Dodge (Expertise) – Stance, increase run speed, increase evade chance
• Signet of Agony (Blood Magic) – Signet, damages surrounding enemies, makes me bleed (DOT)
• Plague Touch (No Attribute) – Touch, transfers a negative condition from me to the target (e.g. bleeding, above)
• Resurrection Signet (No Attribute) – Signet, raises fallen party member from the dead

Druid Armour, with Vigor, Atunement, Expertise runes, with the Expertise Mask: Extra Energy
Blood Magic based Truncheon + Idol: More Extra Energy.

It’s an extreme close combat type build, based mostly getting in the enemy's face, and spamming out the Vampiric Touch and Touch of Agony skills as often as the enrgy pool allows. The Rangers’ Expertise attribute massively reduces the energy (mana) cost of touch-based skills of any profession (which this build has a-plenty), and the self-healing element of the Vampiric Touch allows me to survive fairly well at point blank range. The Rangers’ greater armour, melee survivability and cheap touch skills make this strategy more suited for an R/N than an N/R. (Necromancers instead get an exclusive skill that gives them extra energy any time anything dies near them.)

It’s based extensively on the R/N Touch Ranger build found on the GuildWiki (which seems to seriously need some new hardware, asap!), with some alterations – 'Vampiric Bite' is a Factions only skill, and therefore inaccessible to me at present. I’m using 'Touch of Agony' instead, which kind of negates the healing effect when I bounce between them, but still makes for a pretty high DPS output, equivalent to the DPS I was getting from the Marksmanship bow build, only with needing to muck about with Preparation and Ritual buffs before each pull! I haven’t got to the Boss Mob that drops the 'Offering of Blood' elite skill yet, so I do tend to run out of energy a little too often still. There are no potions in Guild Wars. The rest of the skills increase survivability and offer a few neat tricks; 'Signet of Agony' followed swiftly by 'Plague Touch' being my favourite.

It makes for a more hectic experience than just hanging back with a bow, but quite fun and surprisingly viable, although I really could do with the other life-drain touch – with both my main attacks also healing me, I’d be pretty unstoppable. Need Factions…ahhh….now I see! Very cunning…

Anyway, once I’ve been around the block a few times with this, and got the hang of it, it’s back on with the PvE Story, and the Crystal Desert Missions – Ascension awaits!

posted @ 11:08 AM | Feedback (4)

The Wheel of Interest…

I find myself at something of a crossroads at the moment, regarding matters MMO. This current malaise seems to have been largely caused by me recently winning of World of Warcraft. An arbitrary thing, I know - just a number, but more importantly, I’m now at the point where most of the interesting and varied solo content options are running out, to be replaced by endless repeatable "Kill 100x [L58-60 TrashMob], Gain 10 Faction Points" type open-ended blue-question-mark types of work, and of course the nightmarish prospect of 5-Man L60 Instance Pick Up Grouping. (Which I'd have to massively, and almost exclusively, specialise myself into 'Group Tanking' talents to be able to do - all or nothing.)

Burning Crusade being postponed hasn’t helped, but I read with some alarm that BC is likely to not be my cup of tea, with Blizzard disappointingly falling back on the tried and tested EQ classic of ‘Hell Levels’ to keep bums on seats for longer than they would otherwise like to sit there. It makes sense - give out beta places to only the most obsessive hardcore, and of course they'll complete it in two weeks. Duh!

Coupled with this current nonsense regarding their new Premium Content Upgrade Variable Micropayments system…err…sorry…'Collectable Card Game', a marketing brainwave