JP Powers

A few shots from the Streetlight Manifesto show, including one of Dan Potthast.

I’ve almost run out of my first batch of game time in APB that you get for buying the game, and I’ve spent enough time on both Enforcers and Crims side to make some judgments I think.

To understand some of my points, you have to understand APB’s manner of rating a player. There’s your actual rank, which is increased by literally doing ANYTHING in the game. You can never enter an Action District and reach level 50 rank just by maxing out your Fashionista and Tuner achievements. The higher your rank the more things you have access to, like weapons, upgrades, etc. The Threat Rating is kind of new to me in an MMO. It’s more like actual MMO levels I think, however it CAN decrease. It’s like the “RealSkill” matchmaking system many XBox Live games use now, I guess. There is also the Star Ranks, which for Enforcers is called Prestige and for Crims Notoriety. This ranking is a “by play session” rank. You start out low (2.5 for Enforcers, 0 for Crims), and doing actions either increases or decreases this star rating. When you reach 5 stars a bounty is on you. For an Enforcer that means you can kill every Criminal, but they can all also kill you. For a Crim EVERYONE can kill you, and you can kill everyone. Crims star rating increases at a faster rate, which is why they start lower, but also decreases over time if they’re not committing crimes. Enforcers decreases for doing bad things (running people over, crashing into road signs, etc), but increases for pretty much anything “good.” Higher the rank, the higher your rewards.

1. Matchmaking is OFFENSIVELY broken. The match making system is either taking too much into consideration or not nearly enough. I feel like I’m constantly being put against groups that are far superior to me, either in gear, in skill, or both. The problem I THINK is that since it sees that my character rises in threat/star rating quickly, that I’m a skilled player (arguable mechanic there). What it’ll do in response to this is put me against opponents of a higher rank. The problem is if I’m low enough rank I don’t have access to certain guns or upgrades, let alone would I be able to afford them, but my opponents might, and usually do, have these things. The game is effectively attempting to say “you’re good enough to fight these guys with better shit.” The problem is, you do two missions like that and all the sudden you’re shithoused right back down a peg because the guns and upgrades instantly make your opponent overpowered compared. Sure, I’ve killed the people with better stuff, but it’s far rarer then getting railroaded.
2. Looking For Group isn’t remotely intelligent. The actual mechanic of the LFG interface placing you in a group is a failure. Of the 50 hours I’ve spent in the game so far (including pre-release time), I’ve spent about 5-10 of those hours playing on a team with 1-2 people of my skill level or better. The vast majority of others are far under my level. It also fails to take into consideration the AFKers who leave themselves in LFG (which stack the numbers of your group) but aren’t active, there in placing you against groups of higher numbers/skill. I’ve noticed a lot of the time this last week that if there’s an AFK player making us a 3 person team we only are fighting 2 people, but I think that’s more to do with “Call for Backups” not working right either. If I’m in a group with two other people, that are of equal rank/skill, but my rank/skill is rated at twice theirs, I’m an outlier that is effectively placing us against higher ranked teams. If they’re both bad players, I’m carrying the team and losing further progression in rank/rating because they’re keeping/slowing me down. In the same effect, I know I’ve held back other people I was grouped with far better than me.
3. Matchmaking fail + LFG fail = RAGEQUIT. If I’m in a bad group against a good group, I’m gonna rage quit. Plan and simple. I hate dealing with the frustration of slamming my head against a wall. Far too often I’ve been in a randomized group against a clan group, and it just pisses me the fuck off. Every MMO that has PvP, after a certain amount of time, has to admit that PUG’s can’t fight clan/guild groups. Many clan groups in games like this play more than just one game together, so they’ve spent a lot of time together learning each others moves and habits, and have developed a lingo between themselves. Even if the match is 4v4, and the PUG is all good players of equal skill, the clan group will win the vast majority of the time due to how well meshed they should be. I say should because I’m sure there’s just as many clans of “WANNA JOIN MY GUILD?!” people…
4. Poorly planned out missions make for a failure. There are more than a few missions that are simply poorly laid out. Too often it’s excessively easy to camp a point, or too easy to body camp. There are a number of buildings and clusters that create excessively difficult defensive or attack maneuvers for small teams. I’ve been in a few large matches (8v8) and these kinds of problems evaporated quickly because of the sheer number of angles you can take at once, but in smaller matches like 4v4, 3v3, 2v2, many of the places where mission objectives are in have limited entry points or odd angles for sniper perches where it really is just a matter of which side gets to the point first. This is acceptable in SOME situations, but over half the missions I’m in feel like the objectives are an uphill battle. I don’t just mean for me, I’ve been on the side that can just ROFLPWNT a ladder to fuck the other team up and I’m easily aware of how imbalanced it is.
5. The Unreal Engine, no matter how pretty it is, was a HORRIBLE choice. Unreal Engine games are beautiful, no argument. This was still a horrible, horrible decision. I have a Core 2 Quad Q8400, 8GB’s of DDR2-800, the fastest harddrive available before 10,000RPM drives and SSD’s, and a GTS 250. My system is pretty beast for an Unreal game. However, APB still runs like SHIT. Why? It’s an MMO with DISGUSTINGLY HUGE ENVIRONMENTS. There’s just TOO MUCH SHIT going on on screen. I have to set it at the lowest settings just to hold 24-35FPS, and if I find a nice little spot where there’s 5 matches all fighting at once in the same place, you better believe that shit drops to 10FPS or lower. It’s very pretty, even with the settings so low, but it’s not worth the shitty framerates. On more than a few occasions while driving I’ll run into something simply because it hadn’t drawn in game yet because Unreal Engine’s loading mechanic is poor.

Even after all that shit, I still LIKE the game, it’s just not worth picking up yet unless you’re a SERIOUS fan of the game type. When I do find a group that I mesh well with, and we’re up against opponents of our gear/skill level so it’s challenging, but not in a baby-punching way, the game is SO much fun. Problem is I spend FAR more time being angry at the little problems then I do having fun now.

For those unaware of the technology, Intel Wireless Display, AKA WiDi, is a new feature in many new laptops this summer. With a device that hooks up to your TV, you can wirelessly transmit what’s on your laptop’s display to the television.

At work, Best Buy, we’re using a Toshiba computer and HDTV, and the NetGear Push2TV as our display for WiDi.

Here’s an example situation: I have the WiFi on, so I’m connected to our wifi network and browsing the internet. The MyWiFi program (which is what actually controls the feature in Windows) is running but not yet connected to the NetGear. When I have MyWiFi start to connect to the NetGear, my connection to the wifi network drops and the TV will sync, now displaying what’s on the laptop’s screen, however it no longer is connected to the internet because the WiFi is now turned off. If I then try to reconnect to the WiFi to get online, the WiDi connection drops.

Literally: if WiDi is on, WiFi is off. If WiFi is on, WiDi is off. My coworkers and I are now under the assumption that’s just how the technology works, which is pretty lame. Are we wrong, @garryweil? Is this some sort of error?

I was really excited for Crackdown 2, but I’m already burned out on it. The largest complaint most people have is “it’s the first game, all over.” That doesn’t bother me. What does bother me at about it, at this point (little under 2/3’s done) is that it’s the same game, they just broke the environment. It’s still fun, I like it, just wasn’t worth the price of a full retail game. Should of been half priced.

I’m still playing and having fun with APB, but the problem at this point is that 90% of the people I get grouped with for missions are either complete shit, or they just stand there, AFKing in the game, and the LFG engine will just put them back in your group because there’s so few randomized groups going on at any one moment. It’s still a fun game, just not worth playing anymore because most the people I play with suck.

So yeah, seriously… lameness. Fable 3 come out nao plx.

WoW servers are currently down while patch 3.3.5 is being applied, and I suddenly had a thought for an “improvement” to the launcher.

Currently, to find out server status, there’s only a couple methods. You can either go to the status website (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/realmstatus/), or keep trying to log in over and over. My thought is simply a little ticker, as in the scrolling thing on the bottom of CNN for stocks for instance, that lists server names in red for down, green for up. WoW now has far too many servers to do this with easily, however.

Now, some MMO’s now have you login thru the launcher, where as WoW loads the game and then the user logs in. Since the user can’t login thru the launcher, there’s no “easy” way for the launcher to know what server the user has characters on. So why not just an option to list which servers I’d like to see?

Just a thought, nothing special.

John Noonan (http://twitter.com/JohnNoonan) started throwing out early release codes for the Crackdown 2 demo, and as a HUGE fan of the first Crackdown I jumped on it. To put it in perspective, I preordered APB, a “GTA style MMO” solely because it’s made by the guys that made the first Crackdown.

So I downloaded and played the demo. Let me say this off the bat:

If your game is an open world game, that can even remotely be described as “explorable,” a demo that has a time limit is OFFENSIVE. That shit pisses me off. I completely understand the IDEA behind it. You don’t want players spending TOO much time in the world, a demo is only supposed to be a taste. However, if that is the situation, limit the AREA I can explore. Limiting my time in a game demo only serves to piss me off because I’m the type of gamer that, when presented with a “go anywhere the fuck you want” environment, I’m gonna spend at least a little while going all over the place, which means I’m killing time I should use to actually “do” what you want me to in the demo.

THAT BEING SAID, I’m digging what I see so far. The controls feel VERY familiar to the first game, although slightly changed. The UI/graphics are similar enough that it feels like a true “extension” of the first game.

Part of what made the first Crackdown so great was it feels far more “sandbox”-y than most sandbox style games. There’s very little story, just enough to explain “this is why these guys shoot at you.” This one feels like it’s doing a bit more involved story, but it’s not a drastic switch. I feel like I’ll still be able to just run around shooting things.

One of my favorite moments from the first game, I turned down the volume because I was on the phone, and all the sudden the game “locked up.” It turned out it wasn’t a lock up but the game was going to a cut scene because I killed a boss. By accident. I tuned out the audio enough to not hear the little queue’s that I was in a boss area and I just destroyed it. It sounds like that would mean the game is too easy, or that it’s too random, but really it was AWESOME. I loved the first game because I CONSTANTLY felt like a god walking amongst mean, dishing out bullets to foreheads where I saw fit. The challenge was rarely the individual bad guys, it was the sheer number of bullets that flew at me while I jumped from roof top to roof top raining down a firey death with my homing missiles. I really feel like this game is going to have that same feel.

All I got thru in the demo was clearing the first “tactical position” and clearing out the first Freak nest, and it’s definitely early enough that I’m not powerful, but I feel the potential even this early in the game.

Like I said, I HATE time limited demos, but this hit every button it needed to in order to ensure I pre-order the game. I’m very, very excited.

Trying to figure out if there’s a name for this art style. There’s gotta be, but I have no clue…

…I’ve already realized a few things:

• It’s really nice having a system monitor (gkrellm) that doesn’t crash every hour. Gkrellm for Windows is garbage.
• Apparently running games in WINE has taken a couple of steps backwards. WoW runs worse than I remember, and there’s already been a couple of “so that used to work just fine…but now it’s completely fail,” moments.
• Finding a desktop twitter client that does exactly what I want is damn near impossible, no matter what OS I’m using.
• nVidia’s Xinerama is actually usable, and runs perfectly (or nearly), now.
• Whoever decided to take the maximize, minimize, and close buttons from the right hand side of the window and move it to the left can go find a sword to fall on. I get that that’s Mac OS thing, but it’s god damned retarded. If you like that I can tell you exactly why: you didn’t get hugged enough as a child and now you express it by doing things differently from others SIMPLY FOR THE SAKE OF DIFFERENCE.
• It really is just like riding a bike. You may go slow at first, but it all comes back to you a lot faster than you’d think.

I really like being back in Linux again but there are a couple of “slight” problems that are bugging the shit out of me. Gonna be tough weighing the pro’s/con’s.

So today as I’m coming back from lunch an older couple stopped me to ask a question or two about printers. After we land on what they wanted, the husband says, “So we need one each.” I look at them both and say “… so… two?” He stairs down his glasses at me saying, “You were never in the military, son?”

You have no idea how tempted I was to say “Oh no, sir. See, I’m 24, and there hasn’t been a draft for any unbelievably moronic wars, so I never had a chance to learn military lingo that makes you sound mentally retarded to the rest of world.” One each? If there’s two of you, one each makes it sound like EACH OF YOU NEED ONE. That or he meant Ichi, as in the the Japanese word for one (which is often pronounced as simply ‘ich’), but that’s just as moronic because he just said one twice in a row. I didn’t know you could stutter in two different languages at once.

It’s not my fault that you talk in a manner only a select group of people can/will understand. So yeah, old people suck. Just an FYI.

So today at work we had an early meeting. While waiting on others to get there I updated a few of the jailbroken apps on my phone and restarted it. It never came back on. I had to spend my lunch in the Apple store getting it restored instead of eating. I’m taking it as a sign from On High to go ahead and switch my phones. I’m seriously debating between the HTC Droid Incredible on Verizon or waiting on the HTC Evo 4G on Sprint at this point. Not sure if there are any others I should possibly be waiting for either…

DO WANT! <3 whitewalls (via s2.desktopmachine.com)

I decided I’m definitely going to be switching to an Android phone before the end of the summer, but I have a few problems. I’m currently using Google Apps for jp-powers.com. All my email, calendar, my start page, etc. are stored in a single place. It’s designed more for small business which want to use all Google apps for all their employees. In essence, the only reason I really use it is so my jp@jp-powers.com email address is run directly thru gmail, with no outside email servers needed.

The problem is the entirety Google Apps is fenced off from other Google products. Meaning, if I want to log in to Picasa Web, I have to use an actual Google account, I can’t use my jp@jp-powers.com account. For a lot of purposes, this isn’t an issue because I don’t use many of these other web apps. However, I’d like to be able to considering Android uses a lot of these things by default. Things like my email and calendar can be configured to work thru Enterprise, just like how I’m using it on my iPhone right now. The thing is, the Android phones I’m looking at specifically all have really nice cameras, and I DO want to start taking more photos.

I’m currently trying to figure out the most efficient way to either configure a @gmail.com account to function as the mail server for jp-powers.com, or setup the mail server with someone else and have a @gmail.com account to act as a IMAP/POP3 client… It’s a headache, and I think it would be way cooler if I could get my Google Apps accounts to just login to Google’s web apps… but hey, ya know, why would anyone want easy to use services?

Recently decided an all out blog is completely unnecessary for me, so I’m gonna play around with setting up a flavors.me account to tag along with this new tumblr account.