Anyway, some background.

AoC’s UI is horrible. The hooks you have to do anything useful in it are pretty limited. Even EQ1 had the ability to make something as simple as a timer (with some creativity, enchanter timers were very common). WoW of course took this to the other extreme. The concept of XML+LUA = \\’ is a good one, but when taken too far it tends to ruin things. Content designers then need to start taking all of these “automation” tools into consideration and then design around it. This is of course the wrong answer to this problem, but that’s what happens.

So AoC first came out and said “YES API YES” and then quickly backed the fuck off of that statement shortly around release. This is good and bad, but uninspired content designers often put annoying tedium into a game. For instance, mobs that lack emotes, visual indicators or other such items to indicate something is happening or about to. Instead you just need to count to N and react. Most designers learned this was bad, but of course AoC lags behind. The only real benefit here is that someone can’t write a UI mod that will play the game for you (one button tanking, like in WoW, etc).

So what I did about it…

Combat logs are the key to any MMO. So first, you need a combat log parser. Sure, there is conan stats but it was fairly lacking in the beginning and never gave me all the stats I wanted. This is why the CLOG library came to be. It was a parsing engine that I wrote that originally just parsed AoC files. Now it’ll pretty much parse anything, but that’s not really the point. AoC wasn’t the best at logging (not even second best), but if it happens in game it should be in a log. With this information you can determine raid and mob state.

This is obviously very useful information to have. We often used it to determine exactly what went wrong on a wipe. Now if you have a handful of state machines tracking everything as it happens live, you’ve got a pretty good representation of what is going on in game as it happens.

This is only part of the solution. Now you need to get the information to someone who can use it. Chat bots are very common in AoC. Since AoC’s chat protocol is based off of AO’s, it was pretty easy to look at some original work (from Slicer) and write my own AoC chat bot. There other other bots out there, but this one was written from the ground up to do what I wanted. Beatrice, as we had come to know and love her, maintained guild roster, snarky comments and provided a ton of utility that the AoC UI never did. Ever wanted an AoC raid ready check? We had it. Ever wanted an AoC loot request system with voting for merit awards? We had it. Just about anything other than automatically tracking raid attendance and loot you can do with a chat bot. I even had had the bot talking with the forums.

So now that you have a mechanism for interacting with people in game you can obviously see the next step. You get the pool boy to talk to his mistress. Hector was broken into two chunks. One would monitor a combat log on a client that was in raid. This information would then be passed to Hector proper where he would then maintain state (which encounter you were on, what players were doing and how the encounter was going). Anything that was interesting could then be relayed to Hector’s lover Beatrice, which would of course be relayed to in game. And of course, since Beatrice was watching in game conversation she could send anything necessary back to Hector (!dps, !topdmg, !healing, etc).

So, to simplify a bit AoC Client -> Live Combat Log -> Log Relay -> Hector -> Beatrice -> In game guild chat.
In game guild chat -> Beatrice -> Hector or Forums or Guild Management System (GMS)

Boosh. All of those tedious timers that you had to sand bag someone with, gone. Of course you can do tons more than just deal with timers, but it’s probably one of the most useful things.

We had all sorts of other crazyness going on at TELoE. Every raid was tracked and everything about that raid was parsed. How long it took us to do something, how much damage, what type of damage, how much idle time someone had.. all of this was looked at. A subset of this data was permanently stored and then dynamically graphed.

This all may sound fairly time consuming, but everything was written over a period of a year or so. Once everything was in place it only took about 2 minutes after every raid to feed stuff into the system and then you could forget about it. It all was very easy, very useful and made AoC that much more entertaining.

And no… I’m not releasing any source code. I’m not telling anyone exactly how the state machines worked. It’s all pretty self evident. You could already be doing this for yourself or your guild. I’m sure what I did wasn’t unique. I certainly had fun doing it (more fun than I was actually having with the game at times) and that’s really all that matters to me.

As you may have guessed, all of the cool kids have moved to DDO and we’ve been leveling, flagging and raiding there. Good times.

But anyway.. now that we’re not playing AoC.. I’m going to be writing a post about a certain pool boy and his lover that some technical folks may find interesting.

Tempest’s Spine is a free to play raid encounter in DDO. It’s a pretty good run. It kind of reminds me of what EQ1 raid zones felt like back in the day. It’s nice to see a game that doesn’t throw all of their game mechanics to the wind as soon as you enter a raid zone. More designers need to take note.

I’ve been meaning to do a home page update, but I haven’t been taking screen shots. Honestly, I’ve been too busy having fun playing the game. I’m mid level on two characters (OMG, I rolled an alt before I had a max level character? I think this is a first.) and I’ve ran more dungeons than I’ve ever ran in AoC. I know, crazy. I’ve ran the same dungeon more than once and not dreaded it. I’ve ran the same dungeon over and over and got different loot each time.

I know, this is absolutely INSANE. It’s crazy talk. And no, it’s not totally worthless loot. I can sell the loot to something called a broker (just like vendor diving, for those of you that don’t suck), I can use the loot to twink an army of multi-classed alts, or I can price gouge the bitches that can’t do the content themselves.

So, loot is nice, but what really makes the game is the fact that the content simply does not fuck’n suck. It’s repeatable. It’s fun. It’s memorable. It’s content that makes use of your entire party. You’re more than just DPS, a tank or a healer. And seriously, whomever said real crowd control was a stupid idea should be beaten with a lead pipe. Stuns, charms, mezes.. you name it, it’s there.

I’m sure after I’m max level, have played all of the classes I want to max level.. and play with the seemingly infinite number of builds (feats+enhancements+mixing and matching character classes == win!).. and reincarnate my max level character and play the game all over again.. twice… and once I’ve done all that, I’m sure I’ll be bored and ready for a change.

Well, you can place TELoE on the side of we’re tired of eating the shit you call progress.

I could go into this rant about release cycles, the type of content that’s repeatable versus the bullshit content Funcom has been releasing that’s maybe worth only doing once.. but I think I’d rather just quote some folks from my guild.

Here is a subscription cancel reason:

There has been no new endgame content in forver. Xib was fun. CN was bad but at least a worthwhile loot pinata. Iron tower is neither and was barely amusing the first time through.

I have little hope for T3 due to the travesty that raid balancing/bugfixing/itemization has been in T2/T1. Population is awful and solid guilds have been dwindling for months. My guild had full raids at the beginning of the summer, but Aion etc. + no new endgame content has sucked many players away. I’m tired of sticking around in a game I don’t want to play anymore out of loyalty, and asking other core members to do the same – of asking them to train new people every week who will loot and then disappear in two weeks.

I might resub for T3 or the expansion, but I’m not dropping $100+ on the current game plus what might end up being more of the same incredibly slow development cycle with spotty moments of good gameplay.

You have a good product, but you’re just not catering to me, the end-game raider.

Here’s another guildmate stating his opinion…

I’ll confess. Logging in sucks. I pretty much only login to raid because I don’t care to alt in this game (I have a few, several 80 or close to, but nearly not as much as many of you). The 6 man content takes what feels like 20 years to release and a few hours to enjoy. Usually I go “Well, that was interesting from a design standpoint, but there’s no reason to do that again”.

Raiding, in any game really, is usually pretty cool. You get all these people together, do cool shit and get stuff that enables you to do other cool shit. So, let’s break it down into a formula:

Cool people + Goals + Stuff that enables more awesomeness = Win

We still have cool people, but there aren’t any goals because Funcom hasn’t released anything worth doing since Wing 3 opened.. and there is no progression because end game raiding has taken a back seat.. to what I’m not sure because it seems all sections of the game are being ignored almost equally.

And another…

I’ve generally played the silent partner in TELOE and have avoided these conversations (two cooks in the kitchen and all that), but I suppose it’s my turn to chip in. I’ve been at this MMO thing a long ass time now (about 10 and a half years apparently), and it’s fair to say that I’ve pretty much seen it all. I can tell you the most important thing I’ve learned is that when you stop logging in to have fun, and instead do it out of a percieved responsibility to the others you’re playing with, it’s time to wrap it up. We’ve got a good core group of people here (including many of the people who aren’t officially “core”), and I’d hate to have people start resenting each other for feeling forced to do something they no longer enjoy. The game had promise, but it’s just not meeting our needs and slamming our heads into a brick wall on a nightly basis is going to do more harm than good. My play time recently has taken a nose dive, and even with that, I’ve found myself looking for excuses to not log in on the nights I’m actually available. It’s just not fun anymore … and I’d imagine everyone in the guild (if not the entire game) is feeling the same way.

So yea, suck it pretty much sums it up. How about if I go play a game that has shitloads of group content, shitloads of MEANINGFUL gear that doesn’t have a one size fits all situations of a given genre attitude?

Yea, how about I go give those guys my money instead you. That’s a great idea.

Oh wait, it’s free!

When T3 comes out we’ll check it out. We’ll check out House of Crom and the expansion, but if it’s the same brand of crap we have now it’ll only be worth doing once and probably not even worth touching a raid zone. Raiding without consistent new content is pointless.

Stock Footage!

Instead this is going to be a story and release of frustration by how we got screwed by a buggy game. I mean, “screwed” should be relative here as this is a game. Nobody died. Nations didn’t nuke each other and it’s not like we’re not going to kill him again next week; however, it certainly isn’t fun that your guild experiences their first significant raid loot bug on the last encounter currently in the game.

OMG Story Time!

After a 1% wipe and respawns, we clear back into Leviathus’ room and down him with some relative ease. There’s the sigh of relief that we’re done progressing, some brief celebratory whatever in guild chat and in raid and then I notice there’s no chest. Someone else notices that the quest didn’t update. The specter refuses to talk to anyone, presumably because the quest never updated.

So, WTF gives?

About the only thing you can possibly do, knowing full well what the action is going to be, is to petition. The mandate comes out “Raid, petition this bullshit.” and in flies 20 some odd petitions for Leviathus. The usual hour or so passes and the petition is finally answered.

Why thank you GM sir for your stock script response. It just so happens I’m in a safe spot and I’m ready to “give you the know” (thanks random guy from Bangalore for an awesome quote).

We killed Leviathus, everybody was in the room, at his feet, 1%, then 0% and he’s then dead. Specter spawns, we get boned on the rest of it.

Did you not listen to what I said? No, nobody went LD, there were maybe four people dead total, everybody else was humping him minus the dancing bears. Nobody got credit, nothing dropped.

I will copy and paste what I just said for you if it will make it more clear.

Well, that’s pretty swell. I imagined it would have gone this way and I do understand you’re a cog in the machine, but this is a pretty BS support policy. I do know GM’s have been abused in the past, but the correct answer is not to say “F U Mr Consumer” but rather to fix the logging and have your developers enable the GMs and give you the power to do something useful. I know for a fact that your XML scripts for encounters have debug output, maybe you should look at one of those. So, either way, just tell your management that they suck ass and they need to enable you to do your job.

Well, what can you do? You can set the petition to raid via pet, what’s the point of petitioning for a raid if you can’t do anything about it to begin with?

Oh, I see. The generic customer service face and someone to beat up. It’d be easier to just submit a bug report and go about your day.

Hey, you too!

Soooooo, anyway… It’s not like my experience is any different than any of you other folks out there who have petitioned the same damn thing on different/the same mobs many times before me.

How about you kiss our collective asses?

I’m old school since I still have my slave ink.. UNF

Oh, so much drama and nerd rage! It’s an outlet I suppose. If I/we didn’t do it here, who knows. I might cruise around town looking for kittens, puppies or POTENTIAL children and take it out on them.

Quotes and More Rambling!

While riding on my white stallion with nothing but a bit of hide to cover my unmentionables (cock, lol)… living out my gay fantasies… I noticed that the animation is rather unkind to what would be your junk if you weren’t anything but a Ken lump. Literally, you pound your non existent man parts into the saddle like some desperate puppy on someone’s leg. I imagine it’s a good thing male characters don’t have sex organs as everybody would have a broken cock and/or busted testicles by the time you were 80. It’s not like that hide gives you any, much needed support. Please add better undergarments for dudes in the expansion or at least make it so we don’t pile drive our would be cocks into the mount.

Thanks!

It’s dead.

Depending on how our petition goes will dictate the tone of the rest of this post. The petition queues are pretty shitty at the moment, so I doubt we’re going to get an answer any time soon.

Just as I figured — the petition was a big “We can’t do anything for you.”

It’s late and this home page update will require some tender loving care to put together. It’s not the GM’s fault by any means. He’s a cog in the machine, doing what he’s told (thanks to the assholes that took advantage of previous GM’s good will). But I can have fun with it anyway.

Maybe next time.