My Gamer Family

Posted by on May 20, 2012 in Blog, Everquest | 4 comments

My wife and I  just dropped off my stepson at the airport after a weekend that was way to short. Many of the things we’ve been talking about this weekend were about our common interests: online games. He didn’t need me to get him a “Secret World” beta key, since he’s already pretty busy with other games: Diablo 3, Aion, Vindictus and Everquest on the retro servers at Project 1999.  I’ve known him since I met my wife ten years ago. We were all playing Everquest back then. Since then, we’ve been going more or less through the same online games: Everquest 2, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Runes of Magic, Rift and probably some others. Over time we’ve been bouncing game suggestions back and forth between the two of us. His approach to most games is the geek path: Get into it deeply and intensely. Once the last secrets of his preferred classes are explored, it is time to move on.

He his my wife’s oldest son. She got introduced to gaming through his console games, just to do things together with her kids. You know how moms are. However, it took her youngest son to get her to play Everquest. He had asked for it as a Christmas present and played it passionately over winter break. It took only three month until they got a second account and a second computer. They actually ended up with a total of four computers and four accounts over time, with the oldest son dualboxing. My wife now plays World of Warcraft, with occasional dips into EQ2, Rift or SWTOR, but she returns to WOW when I get bored with the new game I dragged her into. She favorites healers, but by now with all that time spent on WOW, she’s played all classes but hasn’t raided with rogues, hunters or warriors.

My youngest stepson plays mostly WOW with his friends on a pvp server. Ever being the social type, he gets involved into groups and instances quickly and raids frequently. There have been forays into other games like Rift, but he returns usually to WOW as well.

As for myself, there’s been told a lot about me already on this blog. But let me assure you, it is certainly great to have a family that is as involved into gaming as I am. There’s no need to justify extended play times or the frequency of gaming sessions. We are also our own support group to deal with raid or loot disappointments, or to ask the other to remind you when you crossed your own playtime limits. As a stepfather, it was also a great way to bond with my newly found family and as already said, it is still our common interest.

However, we do have a black sheep in the family. The middle child, the stepdaughter, never got into computer games, but went out to safe the world, one drug addict at a time. We occasionally get some flak from her about our gaming, but it hasn’t exceeded a groan here or there. She even tolerated a WOW playing boyfriend for a while and the breakup didn’t have anything to do with the game.

Okay, that’s four gamers in the family. What’s your situation?


© Disclaimer: Everquest

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NBI by the Numbers

Posted by on May 16, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

Since we are halfway through the month of May and the Newbie Blogger Inititative, here are a couple of numbers I could collect around the event and its influence to my blog and my blogging environment. If you end up comparing these numbers to your own blog you need to  consider a few factors:

  • Your blogging frequency
  • Your activity on social media
  • How well established is your blog at the search engines

In short, this is just a glimpse ino this blogs specific situation.

before NBI today comment
Visitors 50/d 50/d Bloggers use RSS readers, search engines need time to index and pick up on increased popularity
RSS Subscriptions 9 33 That’s the important number. People will notice a new post on their reader, ignore, read or click through to comment
Twitter Followers 14 51 My Twitter account has only blogging related followers and I follow only gaming news and fellow bloggers
Spam 302/m 406/m 203 spam comments in May so far
Comments 20/m 22/m largely dependent on number of posts, and how often I’ll answer.
Trackback/ Pingback 1 4 4 in 2 weeks vs. 1 in 4 months
Inbound Links 800 total 1328 1073 links to the main page = blogroll links and 250 article links
RSS reader entries 15 161 And that list isn’t up to date, yet
Articles by NBI members 2540 Which makes you speechless
#nbimmo or #mmonbi 162 That’s the number of tweets containing either tag. including use of both tags and re-tweets. Call it 120 unique tweets

Some more remarks

Inbound links are difficult to interpret, since the main page links are most likely blog roll appearances, but Google sees those links on every single page of the blog, be it front page, archive pages or single article pages. Article links face other difficulties like links coming from dynamic blog rolls, like the one I am using myself.

In general I have to say that I’ve found my community. Getting into the newbie blogger initative made it pretty easy for me to find fellow bloggers, willing to interact with me. Of course, this would have happened eventually by following all blog rolls of my friends and following all comment authors on other blogs, but it would have taken 6 months or so.

Now I am looking forward to the second half of #mmonbi / #nbimmo



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Battlechicken’s Challenge

Posted by on May 9, 2012 in Blog, Everquest, Everquest II, Fallen Earth, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Vanguard, World of Warcraft | 2 comments

As part of the Newbie Blogger Initative Battlechicken has challenged the bloggers to tell her Why We Do What We Do, preferably in pictures. Here’s a small collection of my characters, the result of 12 years playing MMOs, who is answering the question.

Feliz: I am a yodel bard Sambaugh: Watching your back
Dimo: I heard they had cheese and pimp hats Minsk: Barfights and barmaids! Plintenegger: I’ve got Death Touches
Plinkocommie: Goblins of Azeroth unite! Dimkski: The Lich King is dead
Shamble: Looking into a radiant future Dime: There’s a vision, always was, always will Shambles: I am your father, Feliz

 


© Disclaimer: Everquest
© Disclaimer: Everquest II
© Disclaimer: Fallen Earth
© Disclaimer: Star Wars: The Old Republic
This site is not endorsed by or affiliated with LucasArts, BioWare, or Electronic Arts.
Trademarks are the property of their respective owners. LucasArts, the LucasArts logo, STAR WARS and related properties are trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries of Lucasfilm Ltd. and/or its affiliates. © 2008-2011 Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. or Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved. BioWare and the BioWare logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of EA International (Studio and Publishing) Ltd. You may not copy any images, videos or sound clips found on this site or "deep link" to any image, video or sound clip directly.
Game content and materials copyright LICENSOR. All Rights Reserved.

© Disclaimer: Vanguard
© Disclaimer: World of Warcraft

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A Colossal Cave Adventure

Posted by on May 8, 2012 in Blog | 7 comments

This article is going to date me, but looking at some sites on my blog roll, I am sure, I am not alone.

Way back, as a Computer Science student I spent a lot of time in the computer terminal room. Much more time than my fellow students, but about the same time as my friend who was living on the same dorm floor as I. Aside from our assignments we did a lot of research, aka snooping around. Of course we found something, a FORTRAN program called Adventure.

Trouble was, we couldn’t just run it in the terminal room. Those 20 terminals were lined up along the 4 walls without any dividers. Everybody could see what the others were doing. The terminals were shared between 1000 students with varying needs of access. As long as it looked like serious work, we were fine. To play, we either had to wait until the room was empty (fat chance) or visit the smaller terminal room at the local university at night or drive all the way to the Heidelberg data center.

All this was running on the IBM/370 mainframe computer of the University of Heidelberg, who gave terminal access to  our college. This was not the internet, the terminals were just that, some monitor and a keyboard. Cables were running into a box twice the size of today’s computer tower. It ultimately connected us to the mainframe some 20 miles away at mind blowing speeds. Did I mention, the terminals where 80×24 characters, green or amber on black? RAM at the mainframe had just been upgraded to a whooping 4 Mbyte, and each interactive session had 4 minutes of CPU time assigned, which was just enough for 3-4 hours of play.

This is what we finally saw on our terminals. It’s one of the very first text adventure games ever. It lets you explore a colossal cave, with huge halls, labyrinths and get occasionally annoyed by a wandering dwarf who throws an axe at you. And don’t forget the bridge troll. You can still play it on the internet here.

This kept us busy for a semester or two, until we started working on a side project for a company which gave us a loaner micro computer. There weren’t any IBM PCs around it could have been compatible to. It was an Ontel Op-1. It had a 5 1/2″ diskette drive and a BASIC interpreter. One of the first things my friend and I did was to port the FORTRAN program into BASIC and let it use the diskette to store the text, otherwise it would have been to big for the 55 kByte left useable by the interpreter.

And what did I get out of all this aside from entertainment? Education. I got plenty of my professional skills just by dealing with this,  by today’s standards, simple program. I never went into the games industry, which at that point in time not  even existed and only a couple of years later started to grow in the US. But it gave me experience in dealing with software projects, something I could actually mention in interviews as a college graduate.

It wasn’t the first computer game I encountered. The first one was a moon landing program on my TI-57 programmable calculator. The second one was a small chess computer, which moved a tower from the sidelines back onto the field when it got into trouble. It’s been a long way from a 10 digit LED display, an 80×24 terminal to todays 1920×1080 pixel standard and 3D models. Going from text based, to Pac-Man, to Pools of Radiance, to Baldur’s Gate, to Everquest, WOW and Guildwars 2. It’s been a long trip.

A shoutout goes to the “/con mmob blog” and this article about MUDs for the insporation for this article.



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Getting RSS From News Sites Without a Feed

Posted by on May 6, 2012 in Blog, Star Wars: The Old Republic | 0 comments

When I started out collecting feeds for Google Reader I noticed quickly, that there are webpages of MMORPG’s without a usable RSS feed. It seems that with the availability of Facebook and Twitter a few companies have decided they don’t need to provide RSS feeds anymore. But there is help in the form of feed43.com. They allow you to create your own feed for any news page you want. You have to define the search rules yourself, but once it’s done you can subscribe to the result in Google Reader.  It’s only updated every six hours, but it beats going to that webpage all the time. And the real beauty  is, you can share the feed.

And that’s what I am going to do. So far I have only two and I am working on a third:

For instance Dev-Tracker pages are often without RSS feeds, since the forum software doesn’t really support it. Should you know of any MMORPG websites without a RSS feed, feel free to ask for it in the comment section, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll keep this list up to date as it grows.

 

 


© Disclaimer: Star Wars: The Old Republic
This site is not endorsed by or affiliated with LucasArts, BioWare, or Electronic Arts.
Trademarks are the property of their respective owners. LucasArts, the LucasArts logo, STAR WARS and related properties are trademarks in the United States and/or in other countries of Lucasfilm Ltd. and/or its affiliates. © 2008-2011 Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd. or Lucasfilm Ltd. All Rights Reserved. BioWare and the BioWare logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of EA International (Studio and Publishing) Ltd. You may not copy any images, videos or sound clips found on this site or "deep link" to any image, video or sound clip directly.
Game content and materials copyright LICENSOR. All Rights Reserved.


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Friday is Link Love Day

Posted by on May 4, 2012 in Blog | 0 comments

It is a frequent occurrence, that our fellow bloggers publish a weekly wrap up about things that happened the past week, things they have read or stuff that’s still on some notepad and never grew into a blog post. Here’s my first one.

What happened last week?

  • Syp’s of Bio Break started the Newbie Blogger Initiative with great success. Right now 75 sponsor blogs and 60 newbie blogs are part of it. I played it safe and signed up on both sides 🙂
  • I got my Adsense back, without any explanation from Google and a “reboot or power cycle” kind of response to my trouble ticket.
  • Elder Scrolls Online got announced. Lots of things written about it throughout the blogosphere.My only concern: If they can’t provide a PC style interface and insist on console type controls, I won’t look no further. Channeling Roger Murtaugh. “I am to old for this sh*t”
  • My wife got Beta access to Mists of Pandaria. I’ll have a peek or two.

Things I read elsewhere

What’s left on my notepad?

  • Make a To Do list. ✔
  • Check off the first thing on the To Do list. ✔
  • Realize you have completed two  three things. ✔
  • Reward yourself (in progress)


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