Month: March 2011

Rift: Play games, have fun

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I’ve been pretty busy lately and not having a lot of time to do the things I enjoy.

During this time I’ve been skimming Twitter and, without really digging in to what’s going on, my casual glances seem to be picking up on a theme of some discontent coming about in response to some planned (or already implemented?) changes to some of the Rift souls. I’m am honestly ignorant of the details; something about balancing PvE souls based on PvP? One specific I heard is that the Bard’s reactive heals (Cadence, for instance) will only affect a party, not an entire raid.

Meaning no disrespect to the people who’re upset about the changes but… these are games. If you have the kind of free time to get so immersed in a game that you can be upset about these changes, you should feel thankful.

I have an experiment to try: set aside 5 days and don’t play any games. Instead, spend those 5 days working at your job, cleaning/rearranging your house, filling out forms, talking to lawyers, paying taxes, dealing with your landlord and all the other unpleasant chores that life throws our way. You’ll knock your “To-do” list down and feel so much better about yourself for having all that crap out of the way.

Now go log into Rift and tell me that the changes that have been made have really ruined the game for you.

I could be wrong, but I think instead of being disappointed you’ll be delighted to be in-game having fun again.

<Begin Vaguely Related Anecdote>

Last night I finally sat down to do some gaming about 10:15. This week has sucked and will continue to suck through Sunday, so I was just grateful to have the chance to unwind a bit. I didn’t have long to play but wanted to at least smell the air of Silverwood and do some crafting quests.

I awoke in Sanctum and got the quests from that strange little man that always has work to do. I wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on when I activated my portal to teleport back to Argent Glade. Mistake on my part.

As the aether settled around me in Argent Glade I opened my eyes to a world where all hell had broken loose. There was an open rift in front of the tavern and another smack-dab in the middle of Quicksilver College. The countryside was awash in rifts, in fact. I wasted no time in joining my fellow Guardians in beating back the denizens of the Plane of Earth.

Alas it was too little too late and the Guardian Wardstone in Argent Glade fell. Only one remained in Sanctum Watch so I ran to the porticulum and returned to Sanctum, and from there out to the Watch. A dozen or more invasions were headed for the Wardstone but were still some ways off. I joined a raid and we made our way up one road, slashing, hacking and burning down invasion force after invasion force. I worried that we were over-extended so I left the raid and rode back to the Watch. Sure enough forces were drawing near along the other road, but happily I wasn’t the only one who’d fallen back. Another raid formed, and another purge of Earth denizens was underway. The Wardstone was saved!

In the meantime other Guardians were gathering to fight epic bosses from the Earth Plane. The community was self-organizing very nicely. We headed to Overwatch Keep to take down the final opponent and just as we arrived, he fell.

After that it was just a matter of mopping up and finally peace returned to Silverwood.

* * *

I looked up. Somewhere in all that I’d gained a level, and I won a purple sourcestone to get myself some shiny new gear with. I had two green gear upgrades in my rifting goodie-bags.

I looked at the clock. It was nearly midnight. Where had the time gone? My legs and back were cramped, my dog was looking neglected, the world seemed a bit fuzzy and indistinct. I had been so focused on the game that I hadn’t moved (aside from fingers on keyboard and mouse). My quick visit to make some Burlap Shoes had turned into an epic confrontation that left me grinning ear-to-ear and thankful for having a way to escape the depressingly mundane life I’d been leading this week, at least for a few hours.

When our grandfathers wanted to have some fun they rolled a hoop down the road with the aid of a stick.

We’re blessed with the chance to play these wonderful games that no other generation has experienced. Take a moment every now and then to appreciate how good you have it.

DAW post: the little guys

Posted on by Nimgimli

It’s Developer Appreciation Week! If you don’t know what that is, read up about it on ScaryBooster’s blog (he invented it, after all!)

I like to think I always appreciate developers but maybe that’s just in my own head. I certainly do my fair share of bitching about games.

Back in olden times when I wrote for a gaming magazine I met a lot of game developers. In those days only the biggest companies had PR flacks. More often than not you’d sit down with a few members of the team and a producer and talk about their next big thing.

I can’t remember ever meeting a developer who wasn’t super-excited about their product. Now I was press so maybe the grumpy devs were all locked in a closet, but from my point of view visiting a company meant hanging out with a bunch of people who were overflowing with energy and optimism and a love of gaming. I’d come out of those meetings bursting with energy. So much fun.

But that was long ago and now it’s rare that I get to meet game developers. The closest I come is rubbing shoulders with them at PAX East. No, I didn’t talk to Cliff Bleszinski at PAX (my one and only meeting with him was at the very first E3 when he and a few other teen-aged guys were running around with a laptop trying to get journalists to look at some shooter they were building…it was called Unreal or something like that) or anyone from SW:TOR or Battlefield 3.

I talked to, or at least hovered around, the little guys. So my DAW post is going to be about the smaller developers. I’m constantly impressed at how devoted these folks are to making their games. They’re always on a strict budget, trying to figure out how to get published (or whether to self-publish) and how to handle PR & Marketing and pay the rent and do the taxes…while they’re also slaving away on a game.

I love the timing of DAW because it comes so soon after PAX East, and both years I’ve come out of the show enthused about the smaller and indie devs. Y’know, those “garage developers” that Nintendo doesn’t give a fig about. Stupid Nintendo. Really stupid.

So let’s name some names. There’s Fire Hose Games (Slam Bolt Scrappers) and Robot Entertainment (Orcs Must Die) and Demiurge (Shoot Many Robots) and Hothead Games (Swarm) and Polytron (Fez) and Owlchemy Labs (Smuggle Truck). These guys were all showing their games at PAX and I plan to buy and play them all (I’ve already bought Slam Bolt Scrappers and Swarm).

There were more there and of course there’s are a ton of small and indie developers who didn’t go to PAX. Blendo Games (Atom Zombie Smasher) is another small developer who I’ve recently supported via my gaming addiciton.

One company I have to single out is Dusty Monk’s Windstorm Studios. Their first game doesn’t have a (public) title yet, but what’s incredible here is Dusty’s transparency. Those of us who follow him on Twitter really get an inside peek at the day-to-day life of an indie developer. You are your only boss and it’s clear that you have to have a lot of inner strength to beat out some code when you’d rather be playing Rift like everyone else is.

I’m positive I wouldn’t have the willpower to do it and I’m kind of awed that all these companies have small teams that have to really behave as TEAMS with everyone pulling their weight and then some. These people bust their asses to produce games for us to play and let’s face it…very few of them are getting rich doing it. They make games because they love games. If they didn’t love games they could make a lot more money working on accounting systems or something.

I salute all of you ladies and gentlemen who’re working in teams small enough that there’s no hiding from the pressure or riding on another person’t coattails. Everyone has to give 110% every day in order to get your games to the market.

Your games are fresh and fun and awesome. Please keep up the good work, and I’ll keep buying them!

One last item: a special salute of admiration goes out to Werit, who is building a game by himself and seems to really be sticking to it. He is as indie as indie can be! I look forward to the day when he launches Stellar Fortune!

Rift: Guess I’m a public group convert

Posted on by Nimgimli

As mentioned on Twitter, going to PAX East has dampened my enthusiasm for MMOs a bit. Or more accurately, it has enhanced my enthusiasm for other games; I saw so many non-MMOs that I’m interested in playing that it makes dedicating myself to an MMO seem constricting. Since PAX East I’ve purchased Slam Bolt Scrappers (PS3), Atomic Zombie Smasher (PC), Arthur: The Role-Playing Game (PC but not new…it was on Impulse for $2.99 last weekend) and snagged the demo of Dungeons (PC). Whew!

So on top of going back to The Witcher (based on everyone having fun with DA2… I want to finish The Witcher so I can then go back to DA:O and Awakening and finally catch up and play DA2) I haven’t put a lot of time into MMOs recently.

But I did get some time into Rift this past weekend and, as usual, got caught up in events beyond those I’d planned when I logged in, having a ton of fun in the process.

But one thing I did encounter which irked me a tad. I ran into a non-public group while trying to close a rift. There I was, ready to beat back the denizens of the plane of earth. It was going slowly since I was alone. Then I spotted help on the horizon. Huzzah! I went to click the Public Group button and it wasn’t there.

Bwa? Huh?

Turns out it was a private group consisting of members from a guild. They got to work sealing the rift. There wasn’t much I could do buy lurk behind them and contribute DPS (was playing a Rogue DPS build). If I tagged a mob and got aggro they’d ignore me, working as a team to kill the mobs they’d tagged. Generally this resulted in my death, which then allowed them to tag the mob I’d been fighting and get credit for the kill. I’m not saying they were doing this maliciously but when you’re in a group you tend to only pay attention to other members of your group.

So like a hyena I skulked around the edges of the party, sniping at mobs they’d already tagged. Aside from making me feel like a leech it wasn’t really that bad. I still got decent rewards and stuff, so I’m not really complaining so much as marveling at the fact that I missed that Public Group button, since I wasn’t really a fan of the system when it was first introduced.

But now I find I miss it when it isn’t there. I guess I’ve been converted.

More on Rift hacking

Posted on by Nimgimli

Saw this post on RiftJunkies:

RIFT Junkies NOT The Source of Account Hacks

Despite the odd title (I guess people were accusing them?) they link to a thread in the official forums where someone claimed they’d found an exploit with the login system of Rift that let him log into a friend’s account without having his password:

Here’s a link to the post. It’s a huge thread so I’ll summarize. The person then said he’d been in contact with Trion and later, that a fix was incoming.

Assistant Community Manager Elrar responded in that thread:

All,

We have some things in the works right now and have been passing on your feedback, concerns, and thoughts throughout the day (no matter how radical or unlikely).

Sharing sensitive information about our actions (no matter how broad) naturally also informs those carrying out these attacks. This puts us in a tight spot with how much information we can provide, and the questions we can answer.

Apologies we can’t be more forthcoming at this time, but we appreciate your understanding – its always our goal to ensure you can play and enjoy the game securely, and unfettered.

Thanks everyone,

After this, the original poster referred non-believers to this thread which is about an emergency server restart having to do with Account Security (this was on the 18th).

Later still, the original post was back with, among other things, this to say:

Last but certainly not least, I must also sing the praises to Trion. Most companies do their level best to hide critical security issue sand sneak in fixes. Trion responded to the news by contacting me within the hour, discussing the details in detail, and responding within minutes of getting info that they verified the issue and were expediting a solution. A couple hours later, everyone gets to try out Coin Lock and the hole is plugged with steel-reinforced concrete under twelve feet of kevlar policed by sharks with frickin’ lasers on their frickin’ heads.

And later:
Got word back from Steve Chamberlin, the development lead for Rift. This hole is sealed.

That’s not everything but those seem to be the salient points.

It sounds like the hacks were more or less random. You could log into your account and then log into some other random account. If you had a piece of info (as yet unspecified but apparently not email or password) you could target a specific account, but it sounds like most using this exploit were just jumping into whatever account was randomly exposed to them.

So we’ll see. Hopefully things will be better now.

[Updates:
Zam has an interview with the user who discovered the exploit.
Scott Hartsman’s post about the situation.
]

Rift and hacked accounts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Disclaimer: I am not a security expert.

I’ve been seeing a lot of talk about folks getting their Rift accounts hacked. Most often the #1 question is “How did this happen?” People go crazy examining their systems for key loggers or other malware that might be delivering their credentials to some hacker.

I have my own theory on what’s going on. Part of it is Trion’s fault, part of it is the internet’s fault. I don’t think we’re seeing a massive key logger issue here; at least not one on our home computers. That’s assuming the problem is as extensive as the community seems to think it is.

I think we’re seeing an organized, brute force hacking attempt across a multitude of accounts. If you’ve never read about rainbow hash cracking, now might be a good time to do so. Note the first line in that post: The multi-platform password cracker Ophcrack is incredibly fast. How fast? It can crack the password “Fgpyyih804423” in 160 seconds. and the post is from 2007; you can imagine how much faster these cracking software packages work today.

[Update] Glad I put the disclaimer about not being a security expert in there. According to a friend on Twitter (who I won’t credit just so as not to put him in the spotlight) in order to use these rainbow tables, the hackers would first need to have access to Trion’s database of hashed (encrypted) passwords. Or, of course, a dump of any other database of passwords where you used the same password. So I may be off-base in my whole theory. [End Update]

So what can you do? Honestly, not very much. I think Trion stumbled when they limited password length to 16 characters. Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood promotes the idea of pass phrases. So instead of “!ah84&nah3” as a password (which can be cracked pretty quickly using rainbow tables) your password might be “IreallyLove_Rift_(because)all(!)myhawtfriendsplay!” My understanding is (again, not a security expert) that a password that long is going to be hard to crack even with rainbow tables, because the size of the table it would require would be so freaking huge. There’s a little bit of “When a bear is chasing you, you only need to be faster than your friends” thing going on. A lengthy password takes you out of the “low hanging fruit” demographic.

For me, that long passphrase is also easier to remember and faster to type than !ah84&nah3, but maybe I’m just weird.

Anyway the point is moot since Trion limits us to 16 character passwords.

I’m also not sure about having to use your game login credentials to log into the forums and website. How many people log into the forums from public Wifi at a coffee shop or something? Since the site and forums use https:// to log in, they *should* be secure but I still feel uneasy about that.

Anyway, the good news is… well, there isn’t really any good news, except that if you get hacked don’t pull your hair out examining and re-examining your system looking for key loggers.

The best you can do at this point is using all 16 characters of your password and definitely mix in punctuation. But I suspect that the gold farming companies that are doing all this hacking are using rainbow tables that cover punctuation. Also make sure you’re using a unique password for Rift, not one you use on other sites.

Hopefully the Coin Lock feature will be the first step in putting an end to this outbreak of hacking (but I suspect the hackers will quickly start spoofing IP addresses to get around it), and I’m looking forward to Trion’s future anti-hacking techniques like authorization via emails/sms or smartphone authenticators.

Last thought: If you’re buying gold, you’re part of the problem. Remember that the gold you’re buying most likely originated from a hacked account. By creating demand, you’re encouraging hacking.

Music Unlimited vs Rdio: a Paid Streaming Music Battle

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few weeks ago Sony introduced Music Unlimited and gave PSN members a free month of the service (Music Unlimited appears on the XMB of the PS3, as well as on the web). A week or so later, Rdio & Roku announced a partnership that put a Rdio channel on the Roku. Rdio is also on the web as well as mobile devices.

Over the past few years I’d sort of gotten out of the habit of listening to music but I figured a free trial is a free trial and pretty soon my love of music was reborn. Now in the past I’d generally go to Pandora if I wanted some random tune to flood my ears, but both Rdio and Music Unlimited let you search for a specific song to play. Both cost about $10/month for the whole enchilada (and both offer a slightly crippled service for about half that).

I paid for a month of Rdio to test it, and I’m still on my free month of Music Unlimited. There’s no way I’ll subscribe to both services but I’m pretty sure I’ll do one or the other. And I’m having a hard time deciding which to go with.

Music Unlimited offers Channels which are pretty nice, if a bit similar to Pandora. So you can listen to a channel based on era (50s, 60s, 70s, etc) or mood (Energetic, Dance, Morning, etc) or Genre (Jazz, Rock, R&B, etc) or choose a Premium Station (not available on the $5/month plan). Premium channels are things like Hot Songs, Global Top 100 and so forth. I tend to stick to Era or Genre. The Top 100 lists are filled with songs I don’t like…

You can also create playlists or, as mentioned, search for a particular artist/song. If you search for an artist you can pick an album or a song to listen to.

You can Like/Dislike songs, or add them to your collection. It’s not clear to me what this accomplishes, if anything. On the home page there’s a “You might like” recommendation engine but it shows songs that I’ve Disliked, and the selections change infrequently. I wish this bit was a lot better because I’m open to finding new artists.

Rdio, on the other hand, is heavily social. The idea is that you Follow people and then Rdio composes a play list based on “heavy rotation” of your songs, your network’s songs, or all of Rdio’s songs. This is awesome in theory but in practice…I don’t have anyone to follow with musical tastes similar to mine. I know lots of folk on Twitter but generally speaking they’re from a different generation, assuming any of them are on Rdio (only 1 or 2 are).

Rdio doesn’t have any pre-generated play lists other than the heavy rotation stuff, so if I’m busy I can’t just click a button and start listening to music; I need to stop and think about what I want to hear. (Hmm, I just found a button to create a ‘radio station’ based on an artist. Will have to check that out.)

Rdio also offers artist or song search with the added benefit of offering you some data about the artist or a review of an album or something along those lines. Album liner notes for the internet, I guess.

But Rdio works on my Droid, and in fact you can download songs to your phone (Android and iPhone, at the least, are supported…maybe others too) so you can save on bandwidth. There’s also an Air desktop application that’ll run on Windows or Mac, and as mentioned Rdio plays through the Roku.

There doesn’t seem to be a way to explicitly Like or Dislike a song on Rdio.

Cost of the two services is a wash, music libraries seem about the same. Both do play lists, both will read your existing desktop music collection to jumpstart your streaming collection (neither uploads songs, they just pluck titles out of their overall collection and add them to your personal collection).

What I really want is a service that will allow me to Like or Dislike songs and create recommendations based loosely on what I listen to, tempered by my explicit Likes and Dislikes. Which sounds suspiciously like Pandora, doesn’t it? But I also want to say, like I just did, “I want to listen to The Best of Herman’s Hermits” [wow were songs short back then!] and have just HH play, not songs similar in tonality or however Pandora does it.

Having the service on mobile devices is nice but not something I’d use very often. In the car I listen to podcasts, not music, and when I’m walking around I tend not to listen to anything. 99% of my music listeningis done in front of a computer or on the home stereo, so Music Unlimited on the PS3 or Rdio on the Roku are both really nice options.

Anyway…would welcome input. I know there are a lot of other services out there: is there something better/cheaper than these two?

Is 38 Studios going Free to Play?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I thought for sure someone was going to run with this but I haven’t seen anything yet so wanted to throw this out there.

Note: I’m using the common phrase “Free to Play” but we all know these games aren’t really free. Non-subscription based is more accurate but less catchy.

At PAX last weekend we went to MMORPG.com’s “The Future of Online Gaming” panel. Great session, by the way.

One of the questions asked was about the trend towards Free to Play. Turbine’s Craig Alexander was the obvious person to answer the question and he spoke positively about how well DDO Online and LOTRO have been doing since going Free to Play. 38 Studios’ Curt Schilling was also on the panel, sitting right next to Alexander, and he was nodding along and enthusiastically supporting Alexander in sharing the benefits of a Free to Play model.

I wasn’t there as a blogger, just a gamer, so I wasn’t taking notes or anything, and so I can’t provide quotes, but coming out of the show Jeremy (@_JWGoodson) speculated that Schilling’s comments were telling and that they may have tipped us off to 38 Studios’ plans to forgo the subscription model and going straight to a Free to Play model when Copernicus finally launches.

Sheer speculation at this point, but I thought it was interesting enough to share, but too long for tweeting. 🙂

Sci-fi art imitates life

Posted on by Nimgimli

This post includes spoilers for the new V series, in particular the episode that aired on March 8th in the US.

So in-between walks around the PAX show floor this weekend, and into yesterday evening, I’ve been watching the situation going on with Japan’s nuclear plants in the wake of the earthquakes, and hearing politicians start to call for an immediate halt to work on any and all nuclear plants currently being built.

Last night we watched Fringe from last week (it aired a few days before the quake hit). In it, the Visitors are building bases on earth. They’re disguised as buildings to benefit mankind, but the resistance (the Fifth Column) realizes they’re landing platforms for hidden motherships. The problems for ‘The Fifth Column’ is how to take out hundreds of installations around the world to prevent the motherships from landing.

Their solution is to destabilize the “blue energy” power source in the local construction site. The idea is to cause an accident which in turn will cause people to worry about how safe blue energy is and thus create a popular sentiment to halt progress on all the blue energy sites being built around the world.

I tell you, it was pretty eerie watching that episode after seeing the same thing happening in real life, substituting nuclear power for blue energy…

Note: This isn’t a political blog and I’m not meaning to comment on nuclear power, either for or against. I just found the timing of this particular episode kind of interesting. Art imitates life and all that.

PAX East 2011, Day 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

Ah PAX 2011, I hardly knew ye and now you are gone… so sad.

We had a pretty short PAX day today, to be honest. The only panel we were really interested in was at 3 PM, but we had to be back home in time to pick up Lola from the Puppy Hotel by 6 and I was worried about cutting it so close (one good traffic snarl and she’d be stuck there for another night).

So we just wandered around the exhibit hall one last time. Angela made it a game to snag as much swag as possible today, so that was fun. I finally found Guild Wars 2 and watched some of that being played.

Overall seeing the “big games” at PAX wasn’t a huge deal for me. These games get so much coverage online, and I know I’m going to wind up playing them all anyway, so it’s nice to see them, get an idea of what they’re like, but I don’t hover much (plus those booths are always mega crowded).

I enjoy looking at all the rest. For instance I’m a huge hack & slash action-rpg fan so I’m stoked about LOTR: War in the North (developed by Snowblind Studios who are great at this kind of game, and published by WB) and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge by Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment (published by Bethesda).

FireFall still looks awesome but it’s a team-based shooter and sadly I don’t really do those. Unless they add bots. 🙂

Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment…think I mentioned this already…is a day 1 purchase. Oh and both Child of Eden and The Michael Jackson Experience may threaten us with actually using the Kinect. (CoE for both of us, MJE for Angela).

Anyway, we were pretty tired (hey PAX, next year don’t have the show on Daylight Savings Time weekend!) and anxious to get home so we left early. By the time I was unloading the car I was kinda wishing we were still there. 🙂 Now I have post-PAX melancholy. It didn’t help that I opened the mailbox to find claim forms for my mother’s life insurance policy and emails in my inbox from family members about how we’re going to settle her estate.

Yeah, back to real life. In my head I was anxious to leave so I could come home and play games, but in practice I just came back to catching up. Oh well.

I did, in a moment of temporary insanity, buy a $250 set of headphones for my PS3. Set those up and wow do they sound great but..what was I thinking? They’re wireless RF for audio and bluetooth for voice, very comfortable and all that. But I tell you, a few days living in a conference environment and money starts to lose it’s value. (Two nights in the Westin Hotel, at their $179/night rate, managed to cost just about $500 once they added parking, internet, and a skillion taxes, and there’s nowhere near the center with cheap food, really.)

Oh well it’s once a year and now the “Pax credit card” goes in a drawer until next year, though I’ll be paying off the hotel and those silly headphones well into the summer!!

I’m already looking forward to next year, but between now and then I’m really looking forward to keeping in contact with all the folks I met via twitter and hopefully in-game.

PAX East 2011 gets a big thumbs up from us!