Monday was World Wildlife Day. I don't think people dress up as wildlife on that day, but you never know.
Neither of these World <whatever> Days explains why this member of staff at Asda was dressed as a tiger yesterday.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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7:22am on Thursday, 6th March, 2025:
Weird
Today is World Book Day, which in the UK means that parents of school-age children have to dress the little dears up as characters from their favourite books.
Monday was World Wildlife Day. I don't think people dress up as wildlife on that day, but you never know.
Neither of these World <whatever> Days explains why this member of staff at Asda was dressed as a tiger yesterday.
7:49am on Wednesday, 5th March, 2025:
Comment
BAFTA has opened a poll asking players from around the world to nominate the "most influential video game of all time".
Accepting that by "all time" they actually mean "yet", why bother to ask people? You can simply ask ChatGPT and it'll tell you the aggregate of what millions of illicitly-scanned writings conclude. I therefore asked it.
It ranked Super Mario Bros. (1985) at the top, with other contenders being Pong (1972), Tetris (1984), The Legend of Zelda (1986), Doom (1993) and Minecraft (2009).
MUD doesn't get a look-in, but then it's not really a "video" game so I can console myself with that.
Even so, now that ChatGPT tries to elicit more information for its ever-expanding data set by asking questions, when it ended with "Would you rank one of these higher, or do you have another pick?" I replied "I'd pick MUD".
Hey, if it wants to be trained, I may as well try to train it.
8:19am on Tuesday, 4th March, 2025:
Anecdote
Yesterday, I received an email asking me to encourage my students to fill in a Student Module Feedback form at the next opportunity.
The next opportunity was a class that afternoon. Five students attended the class, which is about a seventh of the number of students enrolled on it.
It's quite adorable how the people who send out these emails are so completely disconnected from the reality.
7:35am on Monday, 3rd March, 2025:
Weird
One of our hobs seems to like having pans boil over on it.
10:15am on Sunday, 2nd March, 2025:
Anecdote
Well, as I predicted on Friday, I reached the level cap (65) in Star Trek Online yesterday and have now stopped playing. I started on 1st February. I finished on 1st March, after 59 hours in the game. This is less than a third of the time I'd normally spend in an MMO before abandoning it.
If someone had told me Star Trek Online was single-player, I'd have been inclined to believe them. I didn't have a single interaction with any other player. I didn't even know how to interact with them. There might have been a couiple of them around in some kind of war zone I was forced into yesterday, but they could equally well have been NPCs. The whole event ended with me waiting at some animated yellow chevrons that were trying to tell me to interact with something, but nothing came along with which I could interact and the whole thing reset.
I did receive many, many invitations to join fleets. None of these were accompanied by any messages, they just appeared. I guess that fleets are the game's equivalent of guilds, but if it ever mentioned this to me at some point, I missed it. I didn't answer any of them, anyway. I could tell fairly early on that this wasn't going to be a game I'd be playing for an extended period.
Star Trek Online is a weird one. Half the time, you're a space ship; half the time, you're a humanoid. The gameplay for each mode is very different. The controls for each mode are very different. What's more, they're a mess. There were some icons I needed to click fairly frequently, especially in space battles, but I couldn't assign them to buttons on my gamer mouse: I did actually have to click them. Constant upgrades to my ship and to my character's gear meant that the action assignments I could change were constantly in flux, so in the first combat of the day I often found myself spamming new icons that had appeared, in the hope that they might do something good. Pick-up-the-loot buttons usually appeared over to the side where it was hard to spot them, except when they appeared in the middle of the screen.
The fiction is very Star Trek. They've really nailed that: it captures the feel of the Star Trek universe perfectly. That said, some of the quests would have made no sense at all if I hadn't watched the TV series. When I first encountered the Mirror Universe, the game seemed to assume that I knew what it was. Fortunately, I did, but I did meet presumably well-known characters from later series that I haven't watched who meant nothing to me. There were plenty of characters I did recognise, though, mainly from Star Trek: Voyager but also some from Star Trek: the Next Generation. These were invariably treated with fawning deference by the game.
Oh, and by the way: players play virtual worlds as a form of identity exploration and affirmation. If you're going to get them assimilated by the Borg or have them play as their evil, Mirror-Universe version, at least give them the option to progress the quest some other way. Removing player autonomy is almost always a bad thing (and yes, that includes in cut scenes) (which in STO you can't skip, by the way).
The timeline is all over the place, and I don't mean because of any temporal wars. I played as Federation, and at the start the Klingons seemed to be enemies, then suddenly they were allies. I met characters who were captains whom I had already met as admirals. Characters I'd accompanied through entire quest lines and praised me to the skies for helping them failed to recognise me in the next context we met.
Background NPCs were oblivious to what was going on around them. Citizens walked unperturbed through firefights.
Sometimes I arrived in a new location and the computer was describing it to me while at the same time Spock was talking over it and telling me something else. Even when this didn't happen, the well-meaning pop-ups instructing me in the nuances of gameplay seemed always to assume that I knew things already that I didn't. "Use the console to move the thing you need to move" — great! I'm standing next to the console right now: how do I use it to move the thing I need to move?
I kept being offered specialist upgrades to my shields that gave me a buff against transphasic weapons, or exotic particles, or disruptors, or any of a plethora of other options. I had no idea what these weapon classes were. I was offered upgrades that would buff my own use of such weapons, but couldn't tell if I had any of them or not (except disruptors, because they were actually called disruptors). Transphasic weapons could use exotic particles for all I know.
The graphics were very dated, but coming from a text-world background that didn't bother me in the slightest. What did bother me were the mini-games. Once I figured out what I was meant to do, they were a breeze, but making me spend six seconds matching wave forms every time I wanted to collect some kind of space gas quickly became tiresome.
My main complaint about the game was its accelerated progression. I don't know how many quests I missed because I shot past them. There appeared to be some dynamic difficulty-adjustment going on, too, because every combat I took part in seemed to have enemies eerily well-matched to my level. There's an argument that people like their massively-multiplayer games to be massive in scope; I don't really hold with this, but if you do like size, well, size isn't just about geography: it's about content. In a virtual world that has been operating for 15 years and counting, there's way more content than you could expect from a brand-new game, so that should put an older game at an advantage. I didn't get to see much of this at all, though, because I went through it like a rocket. New gameplay concepts added layer after layer of cruft. Ooh, now you can have more bridge officers. Ooh, now you can train them. Ooh, now you have junior officers you can send on missions. Ooh, now you can craft things. Ooh, now you can research. Ooh, now you have a fleet of spaceships you can also send on missions. Ooh, now you can replace a handful of junior officers with a better one. It just went on and on, and because the game had raised my level quickly but not the researching, resource-acquisition or offline-mission parts of play, I wound up as an admiral who had yet to make a level III (out of XII) bridge console.
Maybe I was supposed to pay real money for the rare gases or metals that I needed. I think there was some way to buy the pay-to-win currency with the dilithium crystals I got through regular gameplay, but I didn't try. I wouldn't have known what best to spend it on anyway.
Overall, Star Trek Online is a quirky game that I'm glad I played, but it was spoiled by a kind of desperate need to get players to the elder game (whatever that is) as soon as possible, yet in so doing leaving them ill-equipped to play it.
I think I'll play some non-MMOs for a bit now.
8:45am on Saturday, 1st March, 2025:
Comment
I'm just relieved that Trump didn't have Zelensky arrested and held as a war criminal.
4:02pm on Friday, 28th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I've been playing Throne and Liberty for awhile, but have stopped today. I'd have stopped a few weeks ago, but wanted to see how a server merge went so stayed on.
It went OK. There were many, many more people around than usual, so resource-gathering quests were harder to finish but open-world group content was a lot easier. It's a game that looks to have a future, albeit one in which I shan't be participating. I maxed out my character's equipment and skills (even fishing, which is a grind), but there's an expansion due soon so I know that all my efforts will be worth very little when that happens.
I played the game for just over 600 hours, which is three times what I usually average before giving up. I did this because it has some interesting features:
- Weather and time of day affects when you can get to some zones.
- Time of day affects whether some zones are PvP or not.
- Time of day uses compressed time (days are 2 hours, nights are 30 minutes), deliberately chosen not to fit with real time.
- The cash shop is very cleanly done.
- I had to join a guild, and didn't like leaving my guildies in the lurch. You really do need to join a guild in this game.
- It relies much more on systems content than explicit quests.
The formal quests it does have are almost universally dreadful. The main story quest petered out and I barely noticed. The daily quests you get to do are dull and repetitive (very — you basically get to do ten a day in batches of five, and the second five can be the same as the first five).
Some aspects of balancing are nicely-designed, with a number of token-based caps to stop bots from looting indefinitely but not really getting in the way of ordinary play much. The diurnal cycle helped, too, in that if you wanted to do an instance then the best time was when it turned night and everyone got out of the open world dungeons because they didn't want to be PvPed; as a DPS, I rarely needed to wait more than a minute or two to do one of the two dungeons I bothered to learn (as a healer, I got in almost immediately; they're in short supply in T&L).
There are real-time hourly events in the game, some of which are group PvP, some of which are world boss fights, and some of which are basically kill-the-mob competitions. I won quite a few of the latter, probably because they're only popular among lower-level characters (it lowers your stats to level the playing field).
The main currency (s0lant) is way too easy to get. I had around 100,000,000 on both my characters when I quit. The cash currency (lucent) is rather interesting. You can get it in one of two ways: buying it with real money; selling stuff on the auction house. All the auction house transactions are in lucent, with a minimum price of 10 (which is about 17p). At low levels, you don't really get loot that you can sell for 10 lucent, so the temptation is there to buy some lucent so you can gear up. It wasn't there for me (I have a will of iron when it comes to cash shops), so I ground my way up instead. This wasn't all that onerous, really, and once I was getting sellable drops from mobs the floodgates opened. I'd play as normal, acquire some gear, use some of it to upgrade my existing gear and sell some of it for lucent. Once I had enough lucent to buy better gear, or better upgrades for my gear, I did so. As my main is maxed out, I only have my alt to spend it on now; I have about £6.20 worth of the stuff. Of all the miserable concepts of a cash shop that I've come across, this one is perhaps the cleanest: nothing is really hidden, and it's single-channel. If you're going to have a cash shop, this is as good a way to let people who don't want to buy your premium currency still engage with the game.
I did actually buy some lucent, by the way, for a battle pass. Its checkpoints were so easy to obtain in natural play that it was little more than a subscription. I approve of subscription models, so went with it. If players don't mind being tricked into paying for a month's subscription by renaming it a battle pass and making them work for their rewards, that's fair enough.
There isn't much of a crafting system. It's possible to craft objects, but you need to acquire the plans ("lithographs") and those only work once. There's not a lot of reason to craft gear anyway. Objects, rather than points, are used to improve items. If you want to upgrade (or change) one of the three properties each of your gear pieces has, you can do so by destroying an object of a similar kind that has the same property. You can also create "extracts" that you can sell on the auction house for lucent. Purple ones always work on purple gear; blue ones might work, but if they don't then they increase the chance of working next time. Greens aren't worth the bother. Selling two or three blue extracts every day on both characters (lucent is bound to accounts) is the bread and butter of T&L fund-raising.
The controls are of the awkward, console-friendly variety. S turns you round and moves you: you don't get to walk backwards except if you're in a fight. Q and E rotate rather than strafe. This is in "classic" control mode; "action" control mode is even worse.
Overall, the game is well-engineered but uninspired. Here are some further random notes on it:
- The water droplets on the screen when it's raining are a nice touch, but they're still there while you're teleporting. It rains in teleporter-transit land?
I can sell emotes to sundries merchants. If only that were possible in real life. I have some great exasperated sighs I've developed from teaching my students.
- Open dungeons turning PvP when it gets dark is an interesting idea, but the player top of the PvP leaderboard gets to call down eclipses every so often. This certainly isn't fun.
- It needs to make it clearer when you enter a PvP zone, especially when it covers the teleportation arrival point you innocently selected to do your innocent quest.
- "Rare pure gold" is rarer than "pure gold" how?
- When a world boss instance opens, there's a five-minute wait before the boss shows up. This is pretty good for socialising, and also for buying things off the auction house. I suspect this was planned, which makes it an official good idea.
- It's hard to tell who the designated tank and healer are in instances. If you're healing and you don't know who the tank is, that's a problem.
- There are lots of badly-described puzzles in the levelling game, but fortunately they peter out once you've finished what passes for the main quest.
- Crafting ingredients are everywhere, but there's nothing much to craft
- Stuns in fights are amazing except when they're used on you. I had three in my main's repertoire, and even beat occasional PvPers when I didn't get out of a PvP zone in time before they tried to gank me.
- There are pets called amitoi, which pick things up for you that drop from mobs you kill. You can also send them on missions to collect crafting materials that you have no use for whatsoever.
- Outfits are on sale in the cash shop for one week only. This is so people buy them from fear of missing out. That's a tactic that only works on players who know they could miss out, though. If the game doesn't tell you it's for one-week only, how would you know unless you took longer than a week to decide to buy something?
- There aren't any mounts, but there are morphs. These are creatures that your character turns into for fast movement. It's quite a nice way of doing it.
- Healing magic isn't very powerful, so it's all about when to use what you have in your armoury, rather than just spamming heals whenever their cooldown ends. This may be why there aren't many healers in the game.
- If you leave the area where a quest was given, you might have trouble finding where you need to go. Several quests send you to areas beyond where you were given them, so this can be quite annoying.
- There are some comically bad English accents in there.
- I was disconnected by the cheat detector at one point, no idea why
- There's a grappling-hook mechanic, which is the way to get up tall cliffs in T&L. It's quite a pleasant way to cut out long climbs, although it uses the same key (F) that interact-with-that-thing-right-in-front-of-me does, which at times means you're trying to pick some flowers and suddenly find yourself hurtlingskywards.
- My first character death was when I used a grappling hook. I was expecting to land at the top of a ship's mast, but was instead flung high into the air and expected to fly from there. I didn't know that, and died from fall damage.
- I'd have paid money to stop the goblin sales people from speaking to me.
- The early-game tutorial amitoi is meant to be cute, but it looked like a creepy Sackboy to me.
- When you get stuck in the architecture, it waits 30 seconds before moving you. The first time it happened to me, it teleported me a metre away. The second time, after the mandatory half-minute wait, it teleported me two metres away but kept me stuck in the architecture.
- The healing weapons (wand and bow) share cooldowns on their workhorse heals, which throws a real spanner in the works. I wasted a lot of lucent preparing a bow for healing duties and was not pleased when I read the small print of the skill-use instructions.
- As in many MMOs, sacks put up a real fight when you hook one while fishing.
In the end, on my paladin-like main I had a gear score of 4257 (anything 4000+ is impressive). This was despite running very few instances because I don't like having to learn yet more boss fights. It turns out I'm quite good at MMOs.
Right, now to focus on Star Trek Online (60 hours in and close to hitting the level cap, so I won't be playing it for much longer).
7:40am on Thursday, 27th February, 2025:
Anecdote
From a student presentation last year.
This is the experience of all our students.
7:39am on Wednesday, 26th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I think my keen computer-science senses have detected another subtle phishing attempt by the university's anti-phishing squad.
Why not simply have it read "This is a phishing attempt. Please click here to be phished."? It's only mildly more obvious.
8:16am on Tuesday, 25th February, 2025:
Anecdote
Every year, I give my final-year students the same assignment: write a plot that conforms to the 17 steps of Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey formula. I tell them this isn't about story, it's about plot: I want to test the extent to which they understand the formula.
Also every year, I do the assignment myself, live, in a class, based on suggestions shouted out by the students. Well, by those present: this year, there were 9 of them out ofthe 31 there were supposed to be. It might have been the heavy rain that put off the rest, or the fact the class was at 4pm, but I suspect that the overriding reason was that they're students.
I intended to write the unfolding plot on the large, wall-length whiteboard that I knew to be in the teaching room. The dry markers provided in such rooms almost never work, so I brought my own box of a dozen of them. Unfortunately, these dry markers are now so old as to have lived up to their name rather too literally: they were actually dry. I couldn't use them.
Never mind, I had a back-up plan prepared. On the memory stick in my pocket was a spreadsheet that I'd put together in COVID-19 times; I could use this on the presentation computer and type in the various components rather than expose students to my handwriting.
The USB ports for the computer were dead. Of course they were dead. I needed them to work, so they were dead.
Still, no problem! I had the spreadsheet stored in a directory on my shared drive. I opened it up and found that yes, I HAD the spreadsheet there, once, but not any more because some kind of delete-old-files sweep had been undertaken and there were only three files present instead of the 20+ there should have been.
Ah, but I'd put the spreadsheet onto Moodle (which I loathe). I could download it onto the lecture room computer from there.
This actually succeeded, and the class began.
It took me an hour to do my assignment, and another ten minutes to read it out as a story.
If I'm lucky, it'll take me less time than this to mark each student's submission. If I'm unlucky, they'll have used ChatGPT to flesh it out and I'll be wading through pages of turgid prose for 90 minutes before failing it because they used Vogler's 12 steps instead of Campbell's 17.
The rain had stopped by the time the class had finished.
8:38am on Monday, 24th February, 2025:
Anecdote
I've just finished reading a book I was given for Christmas: Around the World in 80 Games, by Marcus du Sautoy.
I enjoyed it a lot more than I was expecting. Du Sautoy clearly loves board games, and has accumulated a large collection of them from all over the world that he's built up on his many travels. Some of them are well-known, some I've never heard of; some are modern, most are ancient; all are interesting. He often uses them to introduce aspects of mathematics, pointing out how it underlies many of the mechanics or board arrangements, which is a little preachy at times (especially if you already know the maths) but I can appreciate why he did it; he is a mathematician, after all. I could quibble with some of his historical points, and the fact that some of his "80 games" aren't actually games, but on the whole it's a nice piece of work.
I have to say, though, for someone who holds the Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science, he's really bad at explaining things.
9:49am on Sunday, 23rd February, 2025:
Anecdote
We ordered a new car yesterday. We went with the MG ZS Hybrid+ Trophy.
Although I would have preferred a plug-in hybrid, all but one were too expensive for what you get for your money. The exception was the MG HS, but I got travel sick after driving that for ten minutes so it was off the shortlist.
The Toyota Yaris Cross was a realistic option, but there wasn't enough room in back seats for our liking and I didn't like the steering (which seemed to work on a geometric scale: the more degrees of steering-wheel turn you gave it, the more each degree translated into degrees of road-wheel turn). That could have just been the test drive car, although the steering wheel felt too small anyway. The car was very good, but cost 40% more than the MG ZS Hybrid+ and wasn't 40% better.
Although it didn't factor into our decision, we didn't like the Toyota salesman. His name was Richard, and although for obvious reasons I hesitate to say this, he came across as more of a dick. The MG salesman was far more personable, likeable and informative. He was also honest; the Toyota guy might have been honest as well, but he didn't say anything bad about the Yaris Cross so it was hard to tell (the MG chap expressed some reservations about certain aspects of the ZS, particularly when going up a long hill with a low battery charge).
We could have had the car in slate grey pretty well immediately, but my wife wanted it in red (it is a nice red) so we have to wait until April before it arrives. The vehicle registration tax more than doubles at the start of April, so this decision cost us another couple of hundred quid. Our car is currently on a container ship between here and China, whereas with the Yaris Cross it would have been on a container ship between here and Japan.
It took an hour and three-quarters to complete the purchase. Some of that was related to the fact that we were trading in our old car, for which we received a whopping £750. If we'd paid Ford £1,700 to replace the cam belt and paid a body shop £500 to get dents undented and a bumper replaced, we could have got £1,250 for it. I therefore don't regard £750 as too much of a rip-off. I once traded in a Citroën and got less money for it than I'd just paid to replace its tyres, so had learned that lesson.
Hmm...
E33 JAB (Ford)
G115 JOK (Peugeot)
K930 YAV (Citroën)
T323 JVX (Rover)
EK07 SKJ (Ford)
Hey, I remember the registation numbers of all our previous cars. That's reassuring. Oh, wait, my father-in-law gave us a T-registration Vauxhall before we got the Ford XR2, and it'll take me awhile to dredge up that one's registration number. Damn.
One thing I liked about MG's approach was that they only had two versions of the ZS: the SE and the Trophy. The SE ("standard edition"?) is the basic car, along with a set of useful add-ons. The Trophy is the basic car with all possible add-ons. Unlike most other brands, where you have to pick and choose between assorted "packages" that add to the price (heated seats, four-camera display, sound system, faux-leather interior, forward-pointing machine guns, ...), you either get most or all of them. The only configuration decision you have to make is what colour you want it in.
I wish more MMORPGs took this approach: you get a bunch of stuff for free and everything for a subscription (or "battle pass" as they're now known). Sadly, deveelopers can't resist selling extras, which unlevels the playing field even among paying customers. Car manufacturers aren't quite at the level of "oh, you wanted tyres on all four of your wheels?" but that's where we are with many MMOs.
We don't know whether my wife will drive our new car or not. She has no way of knowing whether she'll get along with it until she tries it on a completely empty road with no prospect of encountering other vehicles. I'll try to warn you when she's about to try, in case she doesn't like it.
9:21am on Saturday, 22nd February, 2025:
Anecdote
I received this email on 5th February:
--------8<----------------
Dear Colleagues,
Some alarming news - we are going to try and phish you using email in the next 4 weeks.
This is being done to understand how resilient our first and last line of defence, you, are in resisting malicious actors. We don't do this lightly and we are already behind the scenes using technology to delete 552,000 emails per month.
We realise that all security makes your lives a little bit harder - but if we weren't to do this the consequences are potentially devastating. We also know the technology is not perfect, and we quarantine another 555,000 emails that appear honest, but in actual fact your interaction tells us only 0.16% (or 907 in total) were. We simply can't turn these filters up any more or you would not be able to work and this is where you come in to protect the University. These eased off filters however leave us more open to attack.
It would be unfair of us to launch a phishing attack without alerting you and give you the opportunity to refresh your counter phishing skills - so shortly you will receive an invitation to undertake some training - it will come from an external address - so you might normally delete it and please feel free to do so, but if you want the refresher then look out for the source address of notification@attacksimulationtraining.com. This is not spam. The training will be offered this week.
The phishing will happen in the next 4 weeks, so be on the lookout for it. You don't need to alert the IT Helpdesk when you spot it. A simple delete will be admirable.
Kind regards,
Digital Innovation and Technology Services
University of Essex
--------8<----------------
The training was indeed offered that week and I did indeed delete it.
I deleted the second offer, too, on the grounds that it could have been the actual phishing attempt.
It probably wasn't, but they really shouldn't send these things on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning.
9:00am on Friday, 21st February, 2025:
Weird
I'm guessing that this furniture store doesn't have any voice-command devices on site.
I wonder if US vice-president Vance has a love seat.
7:42am on Thursday, 20th February, 2025:
Anecdote
Another of my Chinese students, having heard I like tea, has given me some to try.
This is a black tea, and I have to say I really like it. I liked the green tea I was given too, but this one doesn't involve the same amount of faff to make it. On the tin (which is very nice — that red part is some kind of fabric) it says "Han Zhong Hong", which if asked I would hazard at a guess meant [something]-middle-red, although Hanzhong is a city so who knows? When I asked Google Translate what the symbols meant, it told me "Chinese New Year".
OK, so it's Chinese New Year tea. Whatever it is, I'm a fan.
Before I accepted it, I asked my student if it was expensive. We're only allowed to accept small-value gifts — mere tokens — and I didn't want to fall foul of being given something worth a lot more. The student assured me it wasn't expensive.
Apparently, his mother owns the tea plantation, so I guess he has a point.
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