Cav's Place

I’m freezing in here. It went straight from too hot to chilly in about a week, and chilly with no heating equals freezing for me! Couldn’t we just skip this “chilly” part of the year? I like rain, I like a cloudy sky, but I dread the chill. Couldn’t it be cloudy and rainy while staying in the mid-to-high twenties (Celsius, that is)?
Real cold weather has its place, it involves snow and ice and temperatures around or below freezing. I like that, as long as the heating is doing its job inside (it rarely is, but that’s another issue), but what’s the point of chilly weather? Yes, I know it’s the natural order of things and you can’t skip this transition, but right now I’m cold, tired, cranky and (as usual since she left) depressed, so I just want to complain!

I think this is the longest period of not feeling like writing anything at all here. Nothing serious and non-personal I mean. That said, here’s a look through my drafts, maybe having the topics posted here will make me actually write about them… Eventually… Some of them have been in drafts ever since I started this blog.

Let’s start with the things I’ve written about before. I certainly meant to continue writing about how to solve the overpopulation problem, mainly the part of the solution which involves controlling births, since there isn’t so much to say about the other things. I also meant to write another post on polyamory.
Then there was a planned post about the fact that change can be all about herding sheep, as long as you are better at it than those who currently herd them in such a way as to preserve the current state of things. There was also something about needing proper infrastructure to create said change.
At some point I also meant to comment on the greatest engineering challenges of the 21st century, as they were identified by those “experts”.
Relatively recently (compared to the others), I saved this link about the water footprint, since I meant to write about that as well… And admit that I still have a long way to go when it comes to this issue…
There are also planned rants about user-created content, the role of sex in a relationship, the future of contraception and something as generic as books.

Though this never made it into drafts (mainly because whatever ends up there has a very low chance of seeing the light of day within any reasonable time frame and I really wanted to write about this), I should also mention the plan to write about Tel Aviv University’s “Supercenter” for renewable energy, how this, being in Israel, seems connected with something Shimon Peres had said earlier and how that statement is perfectly true, renewable energy and lowering the dependence on fossil fuels does fight terror, both the direct kind employed by terrorist organizations and the “diplomatic” kind employed by countries such as Russia.

Stumbling upon Perfect World International seems to have offered me the chance to get caught up in something for a while, despite initially thinking that it won’t hold my interest. The fact that it’s still in beta and there are lots of small bugs certainly makes me pay far more attention than I would otherwise, so I can spot and report them.
What’s interesting is that I managed to get caught up in it without becoming obsessed. I keep saying that ever since she left I need to be obsessed with something in order to be able to do anything, so I end up doing that one thing a lot for a week or two, then I’m either done with it or I just lose interest and need something else, and if I can’t find something else I’m at rock bottom. On the other hand, I’m not exactly excited about this game (it’s on-line after all, despite being free) and I don’t feel any need to look for information about it from other sources, but it managed to catch my attention enough to make me think a little less about what I usually think about, and therefore feel just a little less awful. Maybe this will make it hold my attention for a while longer than usual? We’ll see…
Nice that it happened exactly during this time. Three years ago this was the time she wouldn’t let me be in the room with her while she was awake. And tomorrow night will be three years since that period ended, the moment when it seemed things could still be saved. Doubt any game will make me get out of the dark pit those thoughts throw me in, but at least it seems to work until then.

On another note, felt the need to hold the teddy bear she gave me tight when I went to sleep last night and woke up a couple of hours later to find it on the floor! I’m still feeling terrible about that…

I said there will be another post about it, so here it is.

When it comes to game mechanics, it’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Move around, get quests, complete quests, kill enemies, learn skills, gather ingredients, craft items, maybe join a guild, the usual drill. It can get pretty hectic in the fields where there are many enemies though, since there can be many battles going on at once, some monsters attacking on their own, others deciding to switch targets, players stepping on each other’s toes… I guess that’s regular fare for MMORPGs… I for one get completely confused in squads, or at least I did the few times I’ve been in one, but that might be just the fact that I’m not cut out for multiplayer.
One very basic thing that should be noted, however, is what will initially appear to be a bug. Not only that you can jump very high, but you can string together two jumps, jumping again while in the air. You can also sometimes stand on thin air when moving off irregular peaks. It’s obvious that this is a feature because one of the first quests you get specifically requires you to make full use of it.

While with each level gained you earn five skill points which you can distribute as you wish among the four main attributes (vitality, strength, magic and dexterity) from the character screen, learning skills requires you to find the respective trainers. Such training costs both money and spirit, which is how one starts to need to make choices as time passes. You receive spirit for almost anything that gives you experience. In the beginning you will be able to learn all skills and still have spirit to spare, but both the number of available skills and the spirit cost for learning each of them will be higher and higher as you level up. Still, this allows for a reasonable degree of freedom in advancing your character. It would be interesting to see if there are ways to optimize your spirit-to-experience ratio, since at first I noticed that the spirit I earned was more than a third of the experience I earned, while now, at level 24, it seems to be about one fifth. Dying can be useful in that aspect, since when you die you lose some experience, but not spirit.
Class skills become available at certain levels and can be upgraded after that, with each rank also becoming available at a certain level. But there is another thing that you need to keep in mind when it comes to skills, namely the spiritual cultivation, as class skills also have such requirements. There are quests, unlocked at certain levels, which you’ll need to complete in order to advance your spiritual cultivation and therefore become able to learn better skills. (Achieving a new spiritual cultivation level also gives you a large amount of spirit, which is very useful since several new class skills are unlocked at that moment.)
Crafting skills, on the other hand, are trained by using them. You can learn and advance all four of them, but spirit costs mean you’ll need to make a choice eventually. For the lower levels, except the first, all you need to do is craft ten items requiring that specific level and then go to an elder to train for the next level. For the higher levels (and also the first one) you’ll need to complete a quest before you are eligible for further training. Items can only be crafted at the respective shops and they require materials. Some materials drop from monsters, others can be gathered from the world and yet others need to be crafted themselves. Gathering materials from the world is simple, all you need to do is have a pickaxe in your inventory and you will be able to gather anything, from plants to metal, but you need to be a certain level before you can gather each type of material.
There are also other skills available, which I guess I’ll find out more about if I’ll keep playing. I know there is a flying skill that becomes available for Humans and Untamed after a quest that they receive at level 30. On the other hand, the Winged Elves can fly from level 1.

Each race starts in a different area, but all will be called to Archosaur, the capital, at level 21. You don’t need to get there right away, of course, but there won’t be much to do around the starting cities past that point. The effect of that city on a new player can be quite overwhelming, being several times larger than the starting cities and looking as if it had been buit with giants in mind. But I guess this is where the real game begins…

It can be interesting overall, though I look at it from a different point of view, that of a mostly single-player game in a multiplayer world. Others won’t do anything without a squad and look for guilds from the first levels…
The best part is that it’s free, unlike all those other games that charge you monthly fees if you want to keep playing. Of course there are many useful “donation” items, plus many others which are just for showing off, but it does seem like you can play reasonably well even if you don’t pay anything.
Of course, it’s just in the beta stage now and there are quite a few bugs left, but it’s amazingly stable. I didn’t have a single crash (except the patcher the first time I ran it) and didn’t find any broken quests so far. I’m expecting everything to be deleted and everyone having to start over once the beta phase will be over, but that should still be months away.

Was looking through newspapers a couple of days ago and saw an article which said that the open beta phase of Perfect World International had just started. Since I was bored enough, I said I might as well look to see what that’s about.
When I saw that it will be free to play I decided to make an account and actually try it out, even though me and MMOGs don’t get along well since I’m as much a loner in my gaming as I am in “real life”. Of course, free to play means “donation based”, they have to earn a living somehow, and I imagine that the benefits of the things you can buy with real money will be enormous, but you can at least toy around with it without spending anything, which is exactly what I intended to do.

Spent about five and a half hours downloading the 2.31 Gb client and had to open the archive with Windows Explorer since my WinRAR couldn’t handle it properly, but then it installed well enough. The next problem was the updating process, which you are required to go through before connecting, since it seemed that their servers decided to take a break just as it was finishing downloading the required files. I can’t know whether that was a crash or a scheduled reboot, but the timing was a bit annoying. Eventually the patcher decided to crash, so I had to restart it. But that was the only crash so far, so at least the client seems reasonably solid.
The next order of business was going through the graphics settings and making what I thought were pretty nicely balanced choices, considering my weak video card. Also noticed that some of the links on the patcher screen weren’t working. So, in order to be on the safe side, I told it to verify the installation and was greeted by a rather broken translation: “Progress will take longer time. Sure to proceed?” Don’t worry, though such broken English is what you’ve come to expect when it comes to translations from East Asian languages (especially Chinese – Perfect World International being the English version of a Chinese game), things are quite different once you are actually inside the game. Or, at least, I have only spotted a few mistakes so far…
I should also note that so far there are only two servers available, Heaven’s Tear for PvE and Lost City for PvP. The patcher also lists two others, Plume City and Etherblade, but they are greyed out, which probably means they will become available at a later time.

Once all of that was done, I started the game. The first thing to do was, naturally, character creation and customization. There are three available races and six classes, each race having two available classes, which can be summed up as warrior and mage, so your choice of class determines your choice of race. The Humans can be Blademasters or Wizards, the Untamed can be Barbarians or Venomancers, while the Winged Elves can be Archers or Clerics.
As you’d expect from me, I made a Wizard (on Heaven’s Tear, of course). That forced me to be Human, which I really don’t like, but I certainly wasn’t going to make a Cleric, which is the main party-based class, just to be an Elf! On the other hand, the Venomancers look interesting, especially since they are listed as the primary solo class. You could say they’re the game’s “special” class and the description says they are a “Hunter/Mage hybrid”. That sounds like a Warlock in World of Warcraft to me, but then again I don’t know much about that. Also from the description, they can tame animals to be their pets, can summon, use poison and their spells are mainly focused on weakening their enemies. They also have the Untamed ability of shapeshifting. That said, I might also make a Venomancer in the future, if I decide to stick around for a while, to try it out as well.
Next comes the character customization, which can get quite confusing due to the huge amount of options. You can customize pretty much everything. Not quite happy with how Calad’s face turned out, but I didn’t spend too much time on it. As long as his hair is long, white and straight, I’m good. (Why Calad? It’s the randomly-generated name of my Neverwinter Nights character, it came to mind and I thought I might as well use it since I suck at coming up with names.) The default gender for wizards is female (and, as a side note, they look damn nice), but in on-line games I say it’s better to play what you actually are.

The game itself seems to go smoothly enough, but to say that the interface and gameplay have been inspired from World of Warcraft would probably be an understatement. Not that I ever played World of Warcraft, but from all I’ve seen… They do say that the game isn’t just a translated version of the original, but “adapted specifically for North American players”. That’d explain it, they wanted to make it so World of Warcraft players would feel comfortable trying it. The story is completely different, however, being based on Chinese mythology. The appearance and names of the NPCs are also along those same lines.
The controls might take a while to get used to, or at least they did for me. You are told that you can use the W, A, S and D keys to move or just click on where you want to go. Don’t click unless you have a clear path to your destination. There are absolutely no waypoints, if you click on a place then your character will go there in a straight line, slamming right into the first obstacle in its path, if there is any. The help file also only mentions pressing F9 to be able to move the camera. However, a much better way to both move and change camera angles is available, though undocumented. Simply move the mouse while pressing the right button. This moves the camera and also allows you to move your character smoothly by just holding down one of the directional keys while you use the camera to steer. It is, of course, the way camera movement is usually handled in games, so it shouldn’t take a new player long to figure it out on their own.
The hotkey system could also be better. You only have two active action bars, one with eight slots and one with six, the keys for each being set to F1 to F8 and 1 to 6. Yes, overall you can have a lot of action bars and can switch between them with the click of a mouse, therefore changing what each of those 14 keys does, but you are still stuck with only a maximum of 14 actions showing up on the screen at once. They should have made more keys available for the action bars, making each of them have 12 slots, using F1 to F12 and 1 to +. They could also allow you to activate different bars by pressing Shift, Ctrl or Alt instead of clicking with the mouse. You won’t feel this need in the beginning, but it will become a problem as the number of skills grows.

Interesting how I only intended to write a brief note about this and it’s turning into a full review, including suggestions since the beta has just launched and there are plenty of things left to do and many bugs to sort out. Another post will follow, dealing with game mechanics and actual gameplay.