2 Good

A few years ago, someone at work challenged me to a 3v1 Dota 2 match. We have an open office, so I imagine other people heard us discussing it. At the time, I said that I was average at the game (which I think is true given my rating was around 4000). Fast forward to a couple of months ago, when I organised a team Counter-Strike: GO night at the request of one of the devs on my team. I mentioned that I was rubbish at the game, and he said that he had heard I said I was average at Dota 2, and then I won a 3v1 game, so he thought I was just being modest about my FPS skills. I was not, and was definitely dumpster tier on the night (not that it mattered, because everyone had a great time).

It got me thinking, how do you respond to the question, "How good are you?" Ever since I started playing with the Kiwi stack, I've definitely felt bottom-tier in terms of my Dota 2 skills. Then again, that's a pretty biased view, given that most of them are divine / immortal rank. It would be like being the worst player on a VFL football team - sure, you might be bad at that level, but you're probably still ahead of a large number of people who play on amateur teams. You are the 1%.

Well... not quite. Based on my last badge (Ancient 7, which I guess is now Ancient 5), I was in the top 7% based on these opt-in stats from Open Dota users. But I still feel reluctant to say I'm good at the game because I don't honestly feel like I am. Part of it is probably the whole "I know that I know nothing" idea - I've seen just how good people are at the top end and it feels like they're so far away from me. I learn new things just from watching them play.

 

At a different work event, someone found out that I played HoN (it was a long time ago). He asked me how good I was and I told him my PSR. He replied with his, and I nearly said, "I didn't know it could be that low."  But I didn't, and asked him what kind of heroes he liked to play. We spoke a bit, and he kept saying, "Oh, but I bet things are different at your level" which made me feel really awkward. I really feel like I was average at that game, and it wasn't until Dota 2 when I put a lot of effort into improving.

I also think about a story a friend told me about when he found out someone he worked with also played Hearthstone. He asked her what kind of deck she played and she replied, "The blue one". He got the impression that she only played casually as she couldn't remember which class (is that what they're called? I don't play) her deck was. I don't remember the names of most of the spells in the game, especially for the heroes that I don't play. I mean, I recognise them when I see them, so if someone pings that it's on cooldown, I know what they mean, but what's the name of Juggernaut's spin? No clue. What's the name of Monkey King's long stick hitty ability? Wouldn't have the foggiest. Which ability is in Anti-Mage's second ability slot? *blank stare* And this is a game I've put thousands of hours into. Filthy casual, indeed! (But in all seriousness, there are things that I should really know, but don't, like how much gold Black King Bar is off the top of my head.)

So I'm often quite reluctant to say with confidence that I'm "good". Especially when I read online about how women are often quizzed about games in order to prove that they're a "real" gamer. Though I don't think it's happened to me recently. I've been asked about games I play, and people will follow up with questions like, "Which class do you play?" for MMOs, or "Who are your favourite heroes?" for Dota, but they seem like reasonable questions that aren't for the purpose of gatekeeping.

Back to the original question! I could respond with something that is objective, like, "I've played for 4,000 hours, or my MMR is 4000" (is there a link between number of hours played and MMR? Will my MMR shoot up if I play more?!), but what does that mean to someone who doesn't play? One of my co-workers told me that he received a resume where the person listed their MMR in Dota 2. He didn't know what to make of the information so he asked me. 

Depending on the other person, I might be a bit ashamed to reveal just how many hours I've put into the game. Is that the wrong mindset to have? They say that it takes 10,000 hours to master something, and 4,000 hours is a reasonable chunk of the way there. If someone told me they have spent 4,000 hours playing basketball, I'd be impressed - so what's wrong with spending 4,000 hours playing a computer game? Regardless, it's still not a good indicator, as it doesn't really give an indication of the quality of those hours. I could have spent 4,000 hours in the hero browsing screen looking at cosmetics (not talking about anyone in particular).

Let's rewind a bit, and think about why someone would ask such a question. They might be trying to make conversation, and lacking anything else to ask, they asked that. Personally, I think it's a strange question. Using basketball again, if someone mentioned they played basketball, I wouldn't ask how good they are. I might ask if they're part of a team / league, and how often they play. But that's probably because I don't know much about basketball. In any case, an in-depth answer about how good or bad you are probably isn't that interesting to them.

Someone might ask because they also play, and they're looking for someone to play with. And they're an elitist jerk who only wants to play with people who are the same level as them. (Still not talking about anyone in particular.)

In either case, I think the best solution is to answer the same way people answer the question, "How are you?": "Not bad, how about you?" If they don't play, they'll respond that they don't play and you can move on to another topic of conversation, or explain the game to them at a basic level if they seem interested. If they do play and they're an elitist jerk, they'll let you know pretty quickly, and you haven't wasted time telling them about your skill since they don't care anyway. And if they do want someone to play with, and don't care about your level, it opens them up to asking for your gaming details.

And by saying "not bad", you leave yourself a bit of space. If it turns out that they're really good at the game, then you haven't given them the impression that you're on their level. If they're really bad at the game, you don't make them feel awkward about it.

A Stardew Valley is Born

When it comes to reviewing the year, it would be remiss if I didn't mention a game other than Dota 2 which has eaten up a large chunk of it. Given how much I have to say about the game, it's worthy enough of its own post.

This game was one of the games club's monthly review games, but I didn't have time to go to the meeting that month, unfortunately. The game is based on the Harvest Moon type games, as the creator said he wasn't happy with the way that series was headed, so he decided to create his own version of the game, trying to deal with some of the issues he saw in the franchise. As you can imagine, farming plays a large part in the game, as well as getting to know the local townspeople (along with trying to find a partner). The only Harvest Moon games I played were the one on the Gamecube and the PSP. I really hated how tedious farming was in the GC version, and I barely got to interact with the townspeople, because my entire day was spent tending to the farm, and so I got quite bored. The PSP version went in the opposite, as eventually, you unlock a robot who does all the chores around the farm except harvesting and selling the plants, so I got quite bored.

I can't remember who it was, but I was talking to someone who mentioned how easy games are these days, because there are walkthroughs / guides for every little part of the game. There's no sense of exploration and discovery anymore. It becomes a matter of looking up the most efficient path from A to B, and in games like this, learning which of the crops has the best cost-to-income-to-time ratio. The game stops being about playing the game, and just becomes an exercise of you executing someone else's set of instructions on how "best" to play the game. So I decided to go into this game mostly blind - which meant I couldn't look anything up, and the only help I could get was from talking to other people who had played the game (that ended up mainly being MrFodder and IP).

Of course, being me before I hung up my hat, I had to start building dossiers on people, because you pick up quests to do things for the townspeople, and I have a horrible memory for faces.

Even worse, because I couldn't look things up, I had to write down things to save myself from constantly having to walk somewhere to find information. (I later found out that you can access the community centre info from the pause screen. I also didn't realise that not every task in the community centre requires you to get everything, so I could have finished them a lot earlier if I had known!)

I found the game really pleasant, though slightly repetitive in parts. Fishing is fairly straightforward in this game, and you don't need to use bait if you don't want to, so it's one less thing you have to keep track of. To catch a fish, all you need to do is keep the fish within the green bar.

My first experience with gift-giving was this:

So for the most part, I gave up on gifts, and becoming friendly with the townspeople, because it seemed like too much effort, and I'd be better off doing it all at once. But I slowly became more friendly with them by doing quests for them, and as you become more friendly, you unlock cutscenes with them and find out more about their personality. I decided I was going to make Leah my waifu (because the game seems to allow you to develop romantic relationships with people of either gender), but I guess I was being too creepy.

I thought I should back off a bit.

The people of the town are growing on me though, and I really want to see what happens to them. (Plus, there's an achievement for becoming good friends with all of them..... *sigh* The things that motivate me....)

I also made the mistake of doing far too much farming, which left me very little time to go to the mines and get metals to upgrade my stuff.

This means I was even more disadvantaged later, as I didn't have the crafting materials required to build enough sprinklers, which saves time and energy as you don't need to water your plants every day (I have one in the above screenshot, which waters 8 plants at a time). MrFodder said it would have been far more efficient to have a smaller farm and just explore the mines in the early game. We both started a farm at around the same time, but he was already mining gold in Winter, whereas I was still in the upper copper levels.

I do find the seasons tend to drag on a bit, but it's probably a necessary evil, as most plants only grow during certain seasons, and some plants (like grapevines), only need to be planted once, and will continue to produce fruit all season. Those plants wouldn't be nearly as viable if it weren't for the 28 day seasons.

It is becoming a bit frustrating not being able to look up people's likes and dislikes, but I do feel that it is a bit more "authentic", as if I were to befriend people in real-life, I can't really look up a guide on what they like or don't like (or is that untrue, as a lot of people have their "likes" on Facebook....?). It is pretty exciting to discover new things though, like when I find an NPC I haven't seen before, who sells seeds I haven't used before. I'm tempted to do this for more games, at least to start with.

I find Stardew Valley is an enjoyable game, but I don't think I'd be able to play it if I didn't have Netflix to watch in the background. It's a nice relaxing game, and a good way to wind down before bed, but at this point, not engaging enough to capture my entire attention. I still really enjoy it though, but if it weren't for Netflix, I'd probably only be able to play it a few in-game days at a time, and probably only for a couple of real-time days at a time. It is one of those games that makes you want to play it whenever you're not playing it. Whenever IP brings it up during lunch, and talks about the latest things he has done on his farm, I feel that compulsion to play again.

It is definitely a huge improvement over my experience with Harvest Moon games. I love the sprinkler system, as I still feel involved with my farm, and I love that you can build a stable to get a horse to ride around on (and I also like that, even though it's cruel, you can leave your horse behind anywhere, and it'll be back in its stable the next morning).

Northgard - First Impressions

I've been looking for a game like Banished for a long time. Banished is a game where you control a band of villagers who have been exiled and need to build a new town. You need to gather resources and survive against the harsh environment. You need to manage the production of food, wool coats, tools, firewood, stone, coal, among other things. I loved that the game was unbelievably harsh. One mistake could cost you years down the line. I remember my villagers dying off in droves, and it was because I had an ageing population. Or I hadn't planned ahead enough to survive through Winter where crops didn't grow, and then took in too many refuges, so a few years later, I had a giant shortage of food and people were starving. I traded as much firewood as I could in exchange for food. Which meant that later, my people were freezing to death when I had a shortage.

Well, from the description, Northgard sounded like Banished as an RTS.

Note: At the time of writing, this game is still in EARLY ACCESS. If you're reading this months after, things might have changed by then.

At the start of the game, you have a few villagers who start gathering food (the default action). There are also only a few buildings you can build: house, scout camp, woodcutters lodge.

You can see the green zone which indicates the area controlled by my clan. I can only build 5 buildings in this zone, and I've already got two (my town hall, and the woodcutter's lodge that's currently being built). You can upgrade the zone once, which allows you to build an extra building. If you want to build more than that, then you need to colonise new areas. You do that by building a scout camp, and having a villager turn into a scout. Once they've changed jobs, they will automatically go around the map uncovering new areas. Scouts are considered civilians, so they don't take up a slot in your warband, and they are generally ignored by enemy military units (though they can get attacked while exploring new areas).

The scout has discovered a new defended area that I can colonise. It has two slots for fertile land (to build farms), it has a runestone (for extra lore resource gathering), and you it has 3 building slots. It costs 20 food, but because of my clan bonus, I can also use krowns if I want.

At the top right of the first screenshot, you can see all the resources you need to manage: food, wood, krowns ("gold"), stone and iron. There's also another thing you need to keep in mind: happiness, which is the overall happiness of your citizens.

The other resources are pretty straightforward, but happiness controls how often you get new villagers. The higher the happiness, the faster new people join your clan - which makes sense, if you think about it. If your happiness drops below zero, then new villagers stop joining.

The other interesting mechanic is the seasonal cycle.

The game starts in Summer, and progresses through the seasons as the year goes by. Summer allows for extra food to be gained from farming, but Winter needs to be planned around. In Winter, your army is 10% weaker in your own territories, and 30% weaker in other territories. Your villagers consume extra firewood, and food production is reduced. Winter is where bad stuff happens.

Unlike most RTS games, where the idea is to mass a large army as soon as you can, having too big a population can be a drawback in this game. Because people eat food, and you gather less food in the Winter, having too big a population can mean you'll starve if you haven't gathered enough food to prepare. Starving isn't as bad, except starving citizens produce less produce than normal, which can exacerbate the problem if those were the citizens that gather food. Same if you run out of firewood, resulting in freezing citizens.

Also unlike most RTS games, your military units are made up of your non-combat units. If you want a warrior, you need to take one of your civilians, pay some krowns, and turn them into a warrior. So you really need to balance maintaining an army vs having enough people around to gather resources. I've gotten tripped up a couple of times, with my army on a rampage throughout the area, spending food to colonise new areas. Then Winter hits, and my people are starving. I need to send my army back home, and turn them back into villagers so they can start gathering food. I try to build a silo to increase the food gathering rate. But now I'm out of wood! And they're freezing as well as starving. Somehow, I make it through Winter only losing a few people, but all those areas I just colonised are lost. Including that one that gives a bonus to happiness. My beer brewers are dead, and everyone is unhappy. So I'm not getting any new villagers to replace the ones that died. I remove the people gathering extra lore, and running the trade routes to get krowns, and set them all to gather food and wood. All because of a blizzard in Winter.

The first time I played, I thought the game was really slow. I think it's because I hadn't grasped all the intricacies of the game just yet, and I was just focused on winning. Now that I've played a couple more games, I don't think it's as slow as I initially thought, but I still feel like it's lacking something, thought I'm not quite sure what it is. redbeanpork, Pharmacist and I played a 3v3 game together, and that was kinda fun, but even after that, we were deciding whether to keep the game or get a refund while it was still within the 2-hour refund period. We decided to keep it in the end. My reason was because I think it shows promise, though maybe not as a multiplayer game. It definitely fills that niche that Banished left behind. But I've been looking for a game like those Wilderness survival custom maps in Warcraft 3. A bit like Don't Starve Together, except without all the weird stuff, I guess.

Anyway, there are some things about the game that annoy me. If you want to change class back to villager, you have to send your unit back to a house, which can be quite far away. Only villagers can repair buildings, so if you have a building burning in one district, and no villagers around, you need to send someone back, turn them into a villager, then have them go back to where the burning building is to repair it. Only villagers can build buildings. But they'll ignore buildings under constructions in other districts. So if you have a villager, you need to tell them to move to where you want the building built, then place the building up for construction. If you select a villager, and then put a building down, it doesn't seem to automatically send that villager to build it like it would in other RTS games. I've gotten caught by that quite a lot.

I do like that combat is almost a side thing in this game. There are a bunch of other victory conditions. Of course, there's the domination condition, where you crush your enemies, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women. Then there's the fame victory, where you gain enough fame, build an alter of the kings and conquer 15 territories. There's the lore victory, where you acquire enough lore to gain the blessing of the gods. There's a victory for controlling a certain portal for a year. And a trade victory for having produced a certain amount of krowns, have a certain amount in stock, and have 4 active merchants.

I will continue playing this game for a bit, and I really love the idea of it. It's not quite scratching that wilderness survival itch, but it's pretty damn close. I do like the visuals, and the interface is pretty good (minus a few niggly things). It can be a bit frustrating a times, wondering why your people are unhappy. It seems that they become unhappy if you have too many wounded units, so again, it's another thing that discourages long bouts of combat. But you do have healers who can heal your units from anywhere as long as they're in territory controlled by you or an ally. There is a bit of micromanagement in combat, to avoid losing units (as that means you effectively lose a potential worker), but it's not Starcraft levels of micro.

The Saga Begins (and Ends)

Someone made a post on reddit complaining about how they paid $80 (which is roughly the price of an AAA game these days) to buy Star Wars Battlefront II, only to find out that Darth Vader is locked behind a 40-hour grind, or a paywall. In an attempt to address this, the EA community team responded with this comment, which is currently the most downvoted comment on reddit, sitting at -675000 downvotes:

[–]EACommunityTeam -675k points 6 days agox86 

The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes.

As for cost, we selected initial values based upon data from the Open Beta and other adjustments made to milestone rewards before launch. Among other things, we're looking at average per-player credit earn rates on a daily basis, and we'll be making constant adjustments to ensure that players have challenges that are compelling, rewarding, and of course attainable via gameplay.

We appreciate the candid feedback, and the passion the community has put forth around the current topics here on Reddit, our forums and across numerous social media outlets.

Our team will continue to make changes and monitor community feedback and update everyone as soon and as often as we can.

Here it is in image form, in case the above text breaks (note: the fact that there's no asterisk next to the part saying how old it is means that this comment hasn't been edited outside of the one minute window after posting where you can ninja edit a comment):

The downvotes reflect the fact that this was an incredibly unpopular decision in the /r/StarWarsBattlefront community, and a bunch of other people on reddit seem to have jumped on the bandwagon. As I mentioned when I made the post about people who had never played Dota 2 in their lives suddenly leaving bad reviews on Dota 2 as their way of complaining about the possibility that Half Life 3 will never be released, I don't think it's right for someone to give a review about a game they've never played. I haven't played Star Wars Battlefront (any of them), so I'll refrain from commenting about that.

What I want to write about is what people are up in arms about: the fact that one of the most popular characters is behind a grind or a paywall.

The gaming community tends to accept that exchanging money for time is an acceptable model for free-to-play games, as long as the exchange doesn't result in rich people having an overwhelming advantage over not-so-rich people. I think the Clash family of games does this quite well.

I haven't played in a while, but in Clash Royale, buying gems only allows you to open chests faster and buy gold, cards and chests. It does mean that you can upgrade your units to better units faster, but once you hit certain cap, that's it. Players who will have spent money on the game will probably blitz ahead to the higher leagues until they start getting matched with players who have similar cards, in which it all comes down to skill. Players who don't spend money can eventually get maxed out decks, but it's a long grind to do so (as opening chests has a real-time cooldown in hours). Same with Clash of Clans, where gems only allow you to train troops or upgrade things faster. Once you're in battle, it's all down to your skill. While the grind to get level-capped in both of these games is quite long, it's important to note that both of these games are free-to-play.

Contrast this with the so-called "pay2win" games, where buying exclusive items makes you stronger than the players who don't have these items. I don't know how strong it is at higher levels, because I got bored, but in World of Warcraft, phrost bought me a Lil'Ragnaros mini-pet, which is only available for purchase from the Blizzard store. I was crushing battles that I really had no right to be winning due to the level and elemental difference. (I feel kinda bad, because he bought it for me in return after I bought him the Cinder Kitten, as I know he likes cats and some of the proceeds were going towards Hurricane Sandy victims. Based on the comments, it seems like a crummy fighter.)

Out of these two categories, what happened in Star Wars Battlefront II was definitely more on the side of exchanging money for time, rather than pay2win. However, I can understand the negative outcry, because people were already paying full price for the game! I can sympathise with a free-to-play game having some sort of monetary incentive to save time, because that's their whole business model. I can choose to play the game for free, providing a service to paying players by expanding the potential player pool, but if I'm already paying for the game, I'd expect to get the full game from the start. Especially if I'm paying the price of a AAA game.

"But you do have the full game, you just have to unlock certain parts of it!" you might reply. A few games come to mind in response to this, and I'm glad Nintendo have learned their lesson. WarioWare: Smooth Moves for the Wii is a micro-game game. Rather than having a series of mini-games, like Mario Party, you play even shorter games, that last roughly 5 seconds. It's great fun at parties. Guess what the developers did? Made multiplayer mode an unlock. From memory, it took about 2-3 hours to unlock multiplayer mode, as you had to finish the single-player story first. Can you imagine being excited to play this, after enjoying WarioWare Inc. on the Gamecube, inviting some friends over, inserting the disc, and then finding out multiplayer mode is locked?

Similarly, in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, it tried to follow the previous games in having unlockable characters, but you either had to play through the story-mode Subspace Emissary, or play tens or hundreds of games to unlock certain characters. For a game where most of the fun comes from having friends over and beating the crap out of each other with your beloved Nintendo characters, putting in this barrier between buying the game and enjoying it is stupid. I guess they tried to reproduce that feeling you got when you played the N64 Super Smash Bros. and that "Challenger approaching" screen showed up, which for us was completely unexpected when we first played.

We had no idea how it happened, and it wasn't until a friend of ours bought one of those gaming magazines which detailed how to unlock all the heroes, did we finally work out how to unlock Ness. Now, with the Internet, all that excitement is gone, and we really just want to get down to it and play the game.

Back to Star Wars Battlefront II, I can understand EA's perspective, they might not have intended for the Darth Vader (or any other iconic character) unlock to have just been a cash grab. Unlocking things is exciting. What's not exciting is allowing someone to pay their way into getting that thing.  If you could just buy those items, you'd probably end up with the same problem the fashion industry is suffering with counterfeit goods. I can't find the article now, but I remember reading that certain iconic Louis Vuitton bags are considered unfashionable because they are often the target of counterfeiters. So people who could actually afford them don't want them because they're too easily mistake for knock-offs, so they lose some of their prestige. The same would apply to Darth Vader - you could have done a marathon grind to unlock it in 3 days, but someone would just assumed you just paid money to get it.

I still remember getting excited seeing certain famous players in Ogrimmar in World of Warcraft and ogling their armour. The armour had such a distinctive look that you would see them and know that they had cleared some of the more difficult raids in the game. They had the prestige because killing certain bosses was the only way to get that armour, and killing them was hard.

Autofix found an image that I think summarises the whole thing perfectly:

A few days ago, EA announced that they are turning off in-game purchases:

https://twitter.com/EAStarWars/status/931332890717143040

EAStarWars‏Verified account @EAStarWars

Today, we turned off in-game purchases for #StarWarsBattlefrontII. The game is built on your input, and it will continue to evolve and grow. Read the full update: http://bit.ly/2hyFHce 

(Unshortened URL: https://www.ea.com/en-gb/games/starwars/battlefront/battlefront-2/news/pre-launch-update?utm_campaign=swbf2_hd_na_ic_soco_twt_swbfii-prelaunchblog-tw&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&cid=42029&ts=1511088840892)

And image copy:

Lesson for today: If you're going to charge people a lot of money for your game, don't put all the fun stuff behind ridiculous unlocks - especially not if you're going to charge more to bypass the unlock.

Breaker of Reigns

When it comes to lists of games that break friendships / marriages, I'm pretty sure Mario Kart is going to be somewhere near the top. It sounds like a fairly simple premise - famous characters from the Mario franchise (now extended to other Nintendo games, as it features characters from Splatoon, Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda) racing each other in various vehicles.

Then you add the items - the greatest source of fun and frustration in the game. Mario Kart has an interesting mechanic where the items you get depend on where you are in the race. In the older games, this was based on which position you were in the race (i.e. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), but in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, this was changed to be based on how far away you are from the player in first. Taken from Super Mario Wiki:

MrFodder gets mad, because I seem to get really lucky with my items when I'm in second place, and when we played today, I managed to knock him with a red shell so that he fell off the stage, and when Lakitu picked him up, he was placed further behind than when he fell and dropped to 6th place. Ahahahahahaha. I'm of the opinion that if you wanted to play a pure racing game, you'd play something like Forza. My gloating was short-lived, as he beat me in the next few races.

I do agree that the randomness of items makes the game seem unfair at times. While it does help newer players feel like they still have a chance to win, losing a race because you were unlucky feels pretty crummy. I haven't played many "crazy hi-jinks racing games", but I think my favourite will always be Diddy Kong Racing, and I really like the way the game approached items. There were five different coloured balloons: red, blue, green, yellow and rainbow. Driving through a balloon would always give you the same item depending on the colour of the balloon, and driving through the same coloured balloon multiple times in a row would upgrade the item (assuming you hadn't already used it).

For instance, driving through a red balloon would give you a missile. If you held onto the missile and grabbed another red balloon, you'd upgrade the missile into a homing missile. Getting another red balloon would upgrade it to 10 missiles. The balloons would always appear in the same place on each course, so you could be strategic about picking up upgrades, and using your items.

Unfortunately, this does mean that experienced players have a huge advantage over new players, so it makes the game fairly newcomer unfriendly. That's probably why the Diddy Kong Racing series never continued. Well, that and the fact that Rare moved to Microsoft. :(

I think the best fun in Mario Kart comes from playing with lots of people. The excitement of hitting an AI player with a green shell isn't nearly as fun as hearing the person next to you  yell, "Where did that come from?" And the feeling of evil glee when you get a blue shell while knowing who is in first place is something you have to experience to understand.

Some people from work, who also have Nintendo Switches, suggested playing Mario Kart together during a lunch break, and I was super keen for the idea, but after playing a bit I'm starting to have second thoughts. It's all well and good for me to trash talk with MrFodder, but when it's my co-workers (even the ones that I get along really well with), I don't know if it would go down so well. Even worse when one of the people is my boss.

I don't know if it just started with the Shadow Fiend training, but I have a feeling I have a reputation for being incredibly competitive, and willing to do anything to win. Personally, I think it's not true, as I usually only care about whether or not I played my best, and not whether or not I won. Even my co-workers are starting to imply that I'm super competitive. I think the only thing some of them have seen me play is Dota 2, and I lost most of the games.

I wonder if it's the whole 4000-hours thing again. Maybe they see this as some kind of crazy tenacity, when in reality, it's just a sign that I have been playing for a long time (4000 hours over 5 years is 800 hours per year, which is 2.2 hours per day. Not that much, especially considering some of that is idle time). Actually, that's probably more time than I ever spent practising any other skill. Oh, not true. I had about a year of playtime logged in World of Warcraft, which is roughly 8760 hours. I'm glad nobody ever brings that up in the office...

If it weren't for the competitive aspect of the reputation, I wouldn't mind so much. I'm trying to work on being a lot more confident, and proud of my skills. Modesty has its place, but I don't think it's wrong to say that I'm good at something if I worked hard to get there. As long as I don't cross the line into becoming arrogant. I read a great line on reddit:

Confidence is knowing that you are right. Arrogance is thinking you are never wrong.

When I play mid in Dota 2, I think I do toe the line a bit, and I always feel terrible about it afterwards, but aside from that, I feel happier about being more confident in myself. (And this post took a huge tangent, oops! On a happier note: MrFodder and I survived the Mario Kart test. Mario Kart, Settlers of Catan, or really any game where you can screw other people over to win should be used as a relationship canary.)

PAX Aus 2017 Wrap-Up

I didn't enforce at PAX this year, and only ended up buying a Saturday pass. I feel like three days is far too much for me for one weekend, on top of working full-time. I also feel a bit like there isn't that much for me at PAX that I can't do anywhere else. I had two tasks that I wanted to accomplish: get an FFXIV T-shirt for someone, and find a board game to play with Jal.

First stop was the Make A Strip panel.

Some lovely Enforcer art:

I'm not sure what happened to Mike, but it was Jerry with Kris Straub drawing.

I hadn't been to one of these before, as I'm usually on morning shift as an Enforcer, but it seems to involve Kris (or Mike if he's there), drawing a Penny Arcade strip, while Jerry answers questions that had been submitted earlier from fans. A few of the questions were along the lines of, "Have you heard of ?"

One of the questions Jerry was asked was why he bought a bunch of Nintendo Switches for his staff members before buying one for himself. I really liked his answer: he said he did it because he wanted to work for a place where the boss did things like that, so that's what he decided to do.

Another question I'm surprised he answered was someone asked Mike what Jerry's shatterpoint is, and Jerry answered on his behalf, saying he thought he knew what Mike thought Jerry's shatterpoint would be. Nerd side note: they're referring to Mace Windu's speciality, which is the ability to pinpoint shatterpoints - the point at which a person or event breaks. He said that Mike (who draws the comics) would probably think that Jerry would be sensitive about the idea that he's simply riding on the coattails of Mike's success. Jerry laughed at the idea, because if it were true, it would mean that Mike is the stupid one, since he could be making twice the amount of money for the work that he does, and Jerry would have a pretty sweet life.

He also mentioned how he often gets asked whether PAX Aus would continue. It's question that came up in the Enforcer Q&A with Robert Khoo after the second PAX. He said that people kept coming up to him and asking whether PAX Aus would continue. He responded that when PAX set up somewhere, it was there to stay. I guess in Australia, we're used to having games say they'll set up Australian servers, and then when they're less popular, take them away so we always live with the fear that this awesome thing we have will be taken away someday.

I also filmed Jerry miming his favourite poem: https://youtu.be/DMpVWD_21bk (sorry for the shaky video)

I think he said it was called Feelings First, and the closest thing I could find was this poem by E.E Cummings: Since Feeling is First, which doesn't quite match up with what he mimed.

The final comic looked incredible. Sorry for my potato phone quality photo, but I'm sure the real comic will be up on their site eventually.

We saw some cool Dota 2 cosplayers, including someone cosplaying KotL! :D

(from left: Axe, KotL, Dazzle, Death Prophet)

The line for the FFXIV T-shirt was longer than I expected. To win a T-shirt, you join a raid group of 8 people and have to defeat an event boss. Saturday's boss was Lakshmi. The line was pretty long... I was in queue for 2 hours before I got to play. As I approached the front of the queue, there was someone asking whether people had played before, and which role they would like to play. Finding a tank was hard, so the guy had to keep going down the queue until he found a tank, who was brought to the front.

The boss fight was pretty cool, though our black mage walked off the edge of the platform and died at the start for some reason, so we didn't have the best start. But the rest of the fight was pretty easy - especially as our entire party had experienced players (it was open to new players, too, and they had some people to help you play). I died at the end to meteor, but the boss was on less than 5% HP by then, so it was an easy win.

Once you're done, you get a token which lets you collect a T-shirt.

We checked out the indie showcase, and I noted a few games that I want to try. I also set myself a new task: I was going to practice the moustache compliment skill!

After that, it was time to find a board game for Jal. I needed something that could be played during our lunch break, and his requirements were a game where you can screw other people over, and ideally involves combat. It was tougher than I thought, but in the end, I settled on Small World.

I also tried out a new game to help practice my Dota 2 carry skills.

The last panel the indie showcase panel, and it's amazing how many cool games are being developed right here in Australia (a couple were from NZ). There was this interesting shadow puppet game, where you control a light source and can use it to create platforms to get through the levels. But honestly, who am I kidding? I'm probably just going to go back to Dota 2. Oh, but there is an expansion for Orwell coming out, so that's pretty exciting.

As for the moustache compliments, we saw a guy cosplaying Bob from Bob's Burgers, and he had a cool moustache. I was going to compliment him, but he was walking away, so I started following him. But he had a friend with him, so I didn't get the chance to compliment him on his own, so redbeanpork told me that wasn't the right time to practice. While we were looking at board games, there was another guy with a cool moustache, and a girl walked up to him and complimented it. Just like that. I wanted to try it, too. but it would be too weird doing it immediately after someone else had just done it. We passed Bob again, and I was working up the courage to approach him when another girl showed up. It looked like she was his girlfriend, so it was a good thing that I chickened out. Time was running out, and as we were walking to the last panel, I saw a guy on his own with a moustache. It wasn't as great as all the others, but it was still pretty nice. I walked up to him. I didn't even have time to get worried, because we had a panel to get to, and I was running out of time to achieve my goal.

Me: Hi, I just wanted to say that I think you have a nice moustache.
Him: Thank you very much.
Me: You're welcome.
*runs away*

I did it!

It's weird, even though I didn't have an enforcing shift, the day felt really short. I think one day was enough for me though. That being said, the hoodies sold out really quickly, which redbeanpork was sad about. If we were going to go again, maybe we'll do Friday instead, so we have the weekend to recover.

I'm also losing my voice. Probably from all the shouting in the expo hall.

Code + Breakers: Women in Games

Another exhibit they had at ACMI was one on women in the games industry. There was one booth for each of the women listed on the left, and it had a quote from them about their thoughts on the game industry, and a list of their accomplishments.

I thought it was interesting seeing the different perspectives, and some of the reasons they got into the games industry, but there were two that particularly spoke to me.

Brooke Maggs, who worked on The Gardens Between and Paperbark, said:

Games are a wonderful creative expression. They're the main reason I'm a storyteller. That's why I want to see more women and girls making, playing and sharing games. There are many different types of games but we need more stories, more characters, and more voices to capture our imaginations and inspire us. I invite you to develop and grow your own game making and playing style because we're here, we'll support you and we want to play your games.

I know that I pretty much only play one game (Dota 2), and so I can't really speak much on this topic, but I as I've said so many times, I love hearing about different people's perspectives, and games are one way to do that. I think games are a unique medium in that unlike a lot of books or movies (with maybe the exception of choose-your-own-adventure-style books), a lot of games put you in the drivers seat, and when you make a choice that leads to a certain outcome, it starts to make you think about yourself.

One of the games I really enjoyed playing was Heavy Rain. In the story, your son has been kidnapped, and unless you perform certain challenges set by the kidnapper, your son will die. Some of the things involve you doing things that are dangerous to your own life: driving the wrong way down a freeway, crawling on floor covered with shards of glass, stepping through an electrically charged fence, trying not to get electrocuted, cutting off your own finger. Then came the challenge to murder someone. And that's when I stopped to think. There are a lot of things I'd do to myself to save my son, but what right do I have to kill someone else? Even if that someone else is a drug dealer. Arguably, driving the wrong way down a freeway is also endangering a lot of people, but I think I was too caught up in the game and focusing on not crashing to think about that at the time.

So it's not just about gender diversity, but about inviting as many people as possible to come up with stories and games. People always complain that all the future holds is Call of Duty 99 and NBA 2030, and I don't doubt there will be those "safe" titles that will get pumped out year after year, but there are so many amazingly different games that are being created these days, and it's great. Games like Orwell and Papers, Please sound like really stupid games on paper, but I really enjoyed playing them. I find it difficult to believe that these kind of games would exist if the only people who made games were the stereotypical "brogrammer"-types.

Lisy Kane, who worked on Armello, Hand of Fate and Push Me Pull You said:

The art of game development is unique, bridging creativity and techology into a chaotic bundle of entertainment. Having more diverse people including women making games means that I'll have more games to choose from and explore!

On similar vein to Brooke's comment, but the last part is something I think is worth emphasising: having more people making games means having more games to choose from. I get that some of the games made by women are not everyone's cup of tea, but some of the games made by men aren't their cup of tea either. The great thing about games is that nobody is forcing you to play them. If you think a game sounds cool, by all means, go and play it. If you think a game sounds rubbish, then move along. I honestly don't understand the mentality behind trashing someone's game, and then going on to trash the person who made it. That's time you could be spending playing a game you do enjoy!

That being said, I am grateful for people who have reviewed games I have thought about buying, warning potential buyers about flaws in the game, and I think criticism like: "Mechanic X gets really repetitive after a while" is helpful. But reviews like, "Nobody wants to play a game about depression, Y should stop making games and go back to the kitchen" aren't very helpful. I guess it's hard to be objective and judge which camp you are in.

Anyway, I thought it was a great exhibit, and was cool to check out while we were in the area. They also had game stations set up, where you could try out some of the games that these women made. Unfortunately, yesterday was the last day of the exhibit, so I think it's gone now. But I thought it'd be nice to give a shoutout to these women who I never knew existed:

• Cherie Davidson
• Erin Dupuy
• Rebecca Fernandez
• Elissa Harris
• Lisy Kane
• Brooke Maggs
• Katharine Neil
• Maru Nihoniho
• Siobhan Reddy
• Nicole Star

Ready Player One

On today's edition of "What is Fodder reading now?", I'll be talking about Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. I bought this book in August last year, because of a comment I read on reddit, and it has been sitting there on my Kindle until someone from work mentioned it and I thought I should finally check it out.

The story is set slightly into the future, where the energy crisis has resulted in a crapsack world. Most people escape by entering a virtual world called OASIS, which sounds like a much more advanced version of Second Life. There's a virtual economy in the game, arena-style e-sports, and even an online school with credits that actually count for primary school / high school education.

One of the creator of OASIS, James Halliday, was a huge fan of the 80s. When he died, he had no next of kin, so he created a game within his game, The Hunt for Halliday's Egg. The person who manages to find the egg will inherit his entire fortune - several billion dollars. Finding the egg involves finding three keys, which open three gates.

This spawns an entire subculture of people called "gunters", short for Egg Hunters, who are furiously trying to find the egg. They study Halliday's life, and anything to do with the 80s, in the hopes of finding a clue that leads towards the Copper key - the first of the three keys.

I started pretty slow, as the story explains how things got to be the way that they were, and explains how the OASIS works. There are a lot of references to 80s culture, especially 80s nerd culture: anime, gaming and music. It wasn't until about halfway through the book where it got to the "I don't want to put this down" stage, which was tough, as I was reading it during my lunch break at work and when I got to that point, I looked at my watch and realised I only had about 5 minutes left until I had a meeting. I was pretty tempted to skip the meeting, but I did the responsible thing and put it down. I finished the rest of it after work, plowing through 25% of the book as soon as I got home.

The thing I liked most about the story was that it was a typical hero's journey, except the hero wasn't your typical hero. It never felt like the main character was the one destined to do great things. In fact, during the story, you meet other characters who seem equally as likely to end up the victor at the end of the book.

One other thing I really liked about the story was how the author dealt with one of the "female" characters. Her avatar is a young female, and the main character is in awe of her, possibly even in love with her. But throughout the story, he constantly questions himself, and whether he would still love her if he found out she was in fact an overweight, middle-aged man - since in the OASIS, anyone can look however they want, that's what makes it such a great equaliser.

The whole girl gamer thing is something I don't really like talking about much. I think it's great to be able to be a rolemodel to girls who are interested in going into technology, or who want to play games but feel like they would be shunned for it, but it's really draining being the poster child for diversity. I want to be treated as just another programmer, and just another gamer. It's one of the things I really love about where I work - I've only felt like "the girl" a handful of times, and thankfully, the people who treat me that way are far enough removed from my everyday work that I rarely have to see them. The other devs on my team make jokes at my expense, and treat me like any other person.

Now that I'm a lot older, or maybe it's because the playerbase has matured somewhat, I find that I'm getting less of the "OMG, it's a gurl!!!!" response. But whenever it happens, I feel like I need to temper people's expectations. I still remember deciding whether to show up to the Tuesday night WoW dinners, as I was worried people would hate me after meeting me.

As unfair as it is, I feel like a lot of the time, people find out I'm a girl, and they build this image of me as some hot girl who plays games. Despite the fact that it's statistically unlikely that I would be hot (simply based on the % of people who are attractive), I get the impression that people project an image of whatever they find attractive on me. Then, if they ever meet me, they are inevitably disappointed that I don't look like what they imagined.

For a long time, I tried to keep their expectations low, telling them that I'm overweight, not great looking, etc. Even when I was incredibly overweight, they would reply, without even having met me, that I was probably exaggerating, and women have too much pressure on them to be skinny anyway, so it doesn't matter that I don't look like a stick figure. Which was kinda nice to hear, but hard to tell if they were being sincere, or just trying really hard to hold on to that fantasy image they had of me. It was pretty frustrating sometimes - I'm not being modest, WHAT IS IT GOING TO TAKE TO BURST YOUR BUBBLE?!

Then I had a friend tell me that the reason he wanted to meet me IRL wasn't because he was hoping to start a romantic relationship with me, but because he really enjoyed talking to me, so he just wanted to hang out (he was a dirty Alliance player, so all our talking was over MSN, and quite staggered as I'd either be raiding, in a PvP group, doing dungeons or questing). He also said that I never purposely led them on to believe I was a supermodel, in fact, I did the opposite. If they wanted to believe that, and then feel upset that I shattered their reality by not living up to that dream, then that was their fault, not mine.That seemed like a pretty fair stance to have, so I adopted that. (Though the people-pleaser inside me still felt bad every time I wasn't able to live up to their expectations.)

Since I'm no longer looking for a romantic partner, it's probably easier for me not to care what other people think of my appearance. Especially people I meet in games. Plus, the chances that I'll see one of the randoms I play with in Dota 2 again are pretty low. Looking through my teammates list, the random I've played with the most, who isn't a friend of a friend is some person named "Super Bogan" that I've played with 8 times. I don't remember them, and I doubt they remember me.

Wow, once again, I took a really huge detour from my original topic. I didn't want to spoil the story in the book anyway. Oh, but the guy from work told me that they're making a movie of the book and it's going to be directed by Steven Spielberg. They didn't want it to clash with the new Star Wars movie, so it was postponed to March, 2018. I'm super hyped for the movie now, though I'm still going to avoid trailers like the plague.

Good Things Come in Small Packages

This was released yesterday, but I thought it would be more fitting to write about the AFL grand final on the 30th of September, since I could use the title that references September.

After a long, long wait, we were finally able to pick up our mini SNES / SNES classic!

The full list of games on the console are:

• Contra III: The Alien Wars
• Donkey Kong Country
• EarthBound
• Final Fantasy III
• F-ZERO
• Kirby Super Star
• Kirby’s Dream Course
• The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Mega Man X
• Secret of Mana
• Star Fox
• Star Fox 2
• Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting
• Super Castlevania IV
• Super Ghouls ’n Ghosts
• Super Mario Kart
• Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars
• Super Mario World
• Super Metroid
• Super Punch-Out!!
• Yoshi’s Island

Star Fox 2 was never released, so this will be its first official release.

MrFodder and I were super excited about this one. I think we were both a bit too young to really appreciate the NES, but the SNES and N64 are probably my two fondest consoles. I was incredibly sad that we only ever rented Yoshi's Island from Blockbuster, so after we finished the game (in one night), we returned it and I never got to play it again. It was far superior to Yoshi's Story and the music was amazing.

The first problem we had after getting it was deciding which game we would play first. We decided on Donkey Kong Country, which is almost two-player, in the sense that one of you plays Donkey Kong and the other plays Diddy Kong. Only one person plays at a time, but if one of you "dies", it swaps to the other person and they have to finish the level.  If you crack open a DK barrel, it brings your partner back to life. I remember playing with my brother when we were young, and sometimes we'd purposely try to avoid the DK barrels just so the other person wouldn't come back. So petty.

The great part is that the game records who finished which level. I got to play Diddy Kong.

Hahahahahha, I am the superior one in this relationship!

I also beat all the bosses we've come across so far.

OK, it's a bit misleading. I did beat the rat boss on my own, but MrFodder beat the ostrich boss, but must have also been hit by a walnut or something at the same time, because he died and I took over just to see the boss collapse. But... I count it as a win for me!

The game looks really pixelated on our TV.

MrFodder checked out Yoshi's Island and I had completely forgotten how much I hate the sound of Baby Mario crying.

It's pretty amazing how well the games have held up. The graphics are definitely far behind the kind of stuff we see today, but it didn't even matter, even scaled up to a 65" screen.

The games also brought back that feeling of Nintendo Hard, which I haven't felt in a long time. I've never heard MrFodder drop so many F-bombs in a single gaming session before (fittingly, he was playing F-Zero). Some of my incredibly rusty platform gaming skills were starting to come back, but there were so many occasions of "Where did that guy come from?!" and "I swear I pressed jump!" that I felt like I was 10-years-old again. I think we both did a lot better than we did as kids, but I was incredibly grateful that we managed to rack up 21 lives, because we definitely needed them!

I'm really happy that we remembered to pre-order one of these. It's not even the nostalgia (or maybe it is and we haven't worked that out yet), the games are just genuinely fun.