First off you’ve got the serious military kinda guy. He’s up on the weapons the tactics used and he can be relied upon to check the corners of the room when he enters. However he can also be relied upon to be the sucker of any game tactics which players develop to win more than play the game for entertainment.Next you’ve got the aforementioned “winners”, though most of the time the term “whiners” would be more appropriate. They’re the ones who try to find every weak point of the game, the ultimate weapons, which guns don’t recoil and which kill most efficiently in all situations. These guys are the same as the ones who will do what I call “poor camping” but I’ll get into that later. They differ from the military guy as they don’t care for realism and if they could they’d fire chemical bullets which only killed their opponents and would happily gun them all down without a thought for game balance or the long term impacts of them living off other’s misery.

Then you’ve got the kids. I say kids but they can be of any age. Basically they play for a laugh and can be found doing some of the most comedic and annoying things going. One time you’ll find them desperately stalking people just to leap out and fire a shotgun at point blank range or charging a group of people with a knife to see how many they can bring down. They unfortunately also tend to throw around explosives like confetti creating havok for all involved. They differ from the previous two because they have no pretention of playing “seriously” but they too can ruin the game for others.

Second to last you’ve got the “proper” FPS players. They have their mouses set to ‘Oh my word!!’ and basically twitch every shot. They can be found moving from place to place taking people out with snap shots and inducing others to rage at their “hacks”. in fact these guys don’t hack, they just play far too much and probably are developing health problems by playing for so long. I both envy them and avoid their fate (I hope).

Lastly you’ve got the campers, the team players. These guys are a combination of the above and are usually a group of friends or a social clan who playy semi seriously. They don’t yet treat every missed shot as a sign of their weakness like the “true” FPS players but neither do they have reckless abandon like the kids. They can be found either securing an area (which many regard to be camping hence the inference earlier but infact camping merely means “lock this place down and let no one enter” which is a style of competetive play which is merely defensive in nature and not ruining the game as the whiners.. sorry “winners” like to claim. Wh did I mention team players? Well you can’t lock down a location without either being really lucky with your field of view or having someone watch your back. These guys usually epitomise team play more so than their more brazen breatheren. Not that any of the breatheren would ever admit it of course.

Now I should cover hacking briefly (I don’t want to give it too much credit as it’s the antithesis of the genre). Basically hackers are “winners” who just don’t know where the line in the sand is. They will quite happily try to get the latest hacks working perhaps figuring that it’s another facet of the game and that it’s such fun having a perfect score no matter how it is achieved. These people basically ruin games and it’s my opinion that it should be elevated from an unsocial practice to a criminal one as if I’d bought a nice new jacket and then someone else basically made it smell like a skunk so I couldn’t enjoy it then I could sue them under law but for some reason them ruining my experience (which is effectively what you buy when you buy a computer game) is not at all legally covered and these people only risk social notoriety and punishment in the form of removing them from the game… usually at which point they simply buy another copy and continue.

Anyhow I’ve seen recently a lot of complaining about “campers” in games and I’ve seen some stuff which I’d simply rather was not possible in an FPS game with any ties to reality. First off campers are not all little goits who hide around corners and simply shoot in the back any enemies who walk around the corner. Some of us (yes I “camp”) simply do not think that roving the map lookign for another kill is a good way to play the game. By camping I have secured areas for my team mates to spawn in relative safety, denied the enemy positions of advantage and basically had a wider effect than simply going around trying to kill everyone I meet. The only thing which seems to annoy people though is that they will get aced coming around a corner and that annoys them as they are roaming for a new kill, to this I simply state that if you’re wandering about with reckless abandon not checking for people ready to shoot you then you’re not really playing the game very well and deserve to be shot! After all this is modern warfare and your death is only a pull of a trigger away. Though you can respawn it would be nice for those of us who like realism if you treated your life with a bit more sanctity than simply a commodity which is to be expended much like ammo.

So whats the solution? Less cross breeding of platforms. Leave the kids playing Team Fortress unless you like their company, leave the “winners” playing Call of Duty and let those who want some realism play Battlefield. If people could be persuaded to behave responsibly (an impossible ask but what the hell) then perhaps the companies who make these game will be able to target their market better. I mean you should see the number of requests on the Medal of Honour games for a simple fire selector on guns. There’s many rebukes asking what the difference would be… it’s simple, some desire realism and real weapons have fire selectors because some times you don’t want to hose down the room with bullets. Some times you just want one round, hitting them precisely where you aimed. Note if you watch the real military, automatic fire is for cover fire mostly… the kill shots would appear to be burst fire at most.

Kinda puts pay to those who claim that bunny hopping and run & gun styles of play are proper ways to act in a serious game…. but then it’s a question of taste I guess.

Least I get to shoot the ones who bug me

Don’t pay attention too much to the details… or most of the design… it’ll change slowly… or I’ll reset it back to the old one after trying and failing to get this one looking right…

Hackers are those people who seem to only play games to clock up scores and wind people up. I can’t imagine they enjoy the game that much as with the right hacks you can basically sit in the corner of a room and fire through the walls headshotting everybody. In fact one such witnessed incident had one round fired by a sniper headshot six people in a row in different parts of the map. Why on earth people don’t write their code so that if that happens the user is immediately banned and reported is beyond me, I know it’d be some work but no more than error handling on a common office program or some such.

Any way, the current deterrent is a bit poor. Either the hacker will get banned for a certain amount of time or in the most extreme cases is prevented from playing by removing his license key from those which are allowed access. But then all the hacker has to do is re-buy the game. Oddly this financial loss doesn’t bother them, perhaps because if they’re hacking then it’s unlikely they will shell out the money for the game in the first place! Steam takes it one step further and if you’re a really bad boy they will delete your account which means that not only do you lose your original game which you were hacking on but also every other game you bought through Steam. Now that’s more like a deterrent… unless they have multiple accounts with only one game per account of course…

My thinking is though that these people are causing actual financial and psychological harm. I’ve seen people get extremely stressed by this kind of player and I know that people avoid games where hackers are not kept under control. So I find it odd that although you can get arrested and sent to prison for merely passing the security on some governments computer (without a shred of evidence that you did anything more than connect) but when you hack a game and ruin people’s experience of the game (which is actually what they paid for) nothing is done. Perhaps if the particular lowlife’s had to face a judge and possibly jail then they’d think a little differently. Gambling with a game you’re bored with or that you’ve taken issue with is one thing when you’re prepared to lose your game anyway but gambling with your freedom, your liberties, perhaps they’d think twice.

I know that some would read the idea and think me some kind of extremist but realistically I am extending the same kind of theories that communities operate on in real life to the internet. In real life if people cause a disturbance and refuse to stop and it’s to the detriment of everyone else then usually there’s laws made against it.

Is that a groan I hear? A complaint about the sanctity of the ceremony, the whole atmosphere being destroyed by commercialism? Well I’m telling you, you are the one at fault.

Sure you’re probably one of the one’s who doesn’t run out four months early to start getting the essentials, you’re probably one of the sensible ones who waits until a week before hand to rush out and dash through crowds of annoying adults, screaming children and the usual throng of people so wrapped up in their own existences they wouldn’t cry out if they saw you brutally murdered unless it were to get press coverage or counselling. But I bet you don’t voice your dissent to your friends who are busy whooping about having the shopping season… sorry the holiday season start early. I’d bet that those you see who begin shopping pretty much in February aren’t people you try to convince. I’d half bet that if asked in public you’d just shrug.

So yeah what’s a business supposed to do? One way they can spread the load and therefore the cost further whilst simultaneously maximising profit. The long term viewpoint of Christmas becoming an all year round event, losing it’s status as a special time and fading into obscurity.

Can we seriously expect responsible behaviour from companies? History shows us that we cannot. There are some companies which are shining examples, unfortunately they are stars in the night sky defying the darkness more so than leaders of a culture. If it makes money then a business will do it. The only time they hesitate is when it has repercussions which may hit their bottom line.

So seriously, if you do care about your surroundings, your way of life, your happiness then step up and speak your mind. Forget your useless niceties and politeness’s in case you offend some unnamed yet ever present stranger. Perhaps if people did speak up we wouldn’t have such things as advertisers trying to squeeze another month out of the Christmas rush cause no one complained and people still bought stuff.

Firstly why?

Secondly why can’t I start with some skill, some reason to think I would be of use or indeed survive as an adventurer?

Thirdly why don’t more people adventure? It seems like the fast track route to fame and glory and UNLIMITED POWER…. And yet adventurer’s are always the exception without being exceptional to begin with…

So the concept is to allow players to start with skill and be capable enough to reasonably come to the conclusion that they could get by as an adventurer.

The idea is that at the moment you get power in all aspects every level, this means that unless you start off as rubbish at everything you can’t really progress without already being a long way down the road to epic-hood already. So what about if you can start off being skilled as a mundane normal but to be able to pull off the more fancy manoeuvres you need to be a higher level?

Now I know that some object to the theory of levels but as far as I see it levels are a good concept for abstraction just poorly implemented. Without levels then how do you restrain say two out of four players ruining the other two’s attempts at subtlety because they just shoved everything into killing? How do you stop a Devlin Stormweaver from becoming the centre of all magic but being so easy to shove over as to keep him inside whenever there is a light breeze blowing?

Now I think to execute this concept properly would require a massive reshuffle of the whole system as it reprioritises abilities, skills and spells significantly… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Spells wise certain spells would be classified as achievable by anyone, these would be then tied to say spellcraft. If your character is built to be trained in spellcraft to a high degree then you’ll begin play with a larger arsenal of spells. Other spells would then be considered special and would have level prerequisites at least. Perhaps these larger than life abilities would form prestige paths rather than classes, I think that would be more thematic and organic for sure.

Melee would be an excellent example of the formula, hitting someone with a weapon or using a shield proficiently is not linked to your level precisely. If you have a combat based background and build your character around using weaponry then you will have a commensurately higher chance of hitting at "1st level" but to be able to leap into an enemy formation on the field of battle and swiftly drop into a leg sweep followed by wielding your greatsword as a shield and weapon as one would require capabilities beyond the grasp of the average man, this would be what awaits at higher levels.

I reckon that in this way you can feasibly start as a twenty year old who hasn’t just sat on his backside and also you can effectively play an elf without having to explain why this whelp is as good as you are despite being a hundred years younger!

Actually that highlights a flaw in the plan, either one will start out more powerful or the elf will still look like he’s learned nothing…

Right perhaps there needs to be a selection between power right now or faster progression. Perhaps with 3 or 5 settings you could select to start between effectively 1st level and say 7th (effectively as a rough translation of basic capabilities… noting that HPs has to go at some point so ignore them). Now when it comes to XP rewards, use the older "this much XP if you’re this level" system and those who started at a lower level should catch up those who started at a higher level. That way you can choose to start as noobish as you wish and simply progress faster (to a point) or start more experienced and advance slower.

Mind you this would then cause confusion with the whole "these are mundane powers and these are not and require you to have adventured… blah blah blah"… No. Actually it should work. Those who spent years picking up a trade should be more skillful in general, more resilient and those who progress quickly should know more of the high level stuff and less of the basic skills. In jedi terms one has seventy billion powers but a skill roll to activate them of +2 where as the other has + a billion to their roll but only two powers. Balance would be preserved but choices would have to be made. How many levels of mundane would you like? They give you more skill points, knowledge skills and other benefits. How fast do you want to progress? How noobish do you want to be at the beginning? This could all be compensated for!

I doubt he would argue with this case though.

My bosses came to me with a new contract this week, more money and more hours. So kinda wheel and woe right? Well they added the caveat that they wanted my memory to improve… no mean feat in my terms. In fact they went on and on about it almost as though they knew their purchase on this as a complaint was shaky at best.

Then the irony. Today I handed my cup to one of them asking for a cup of tea as he went to get himself a drink (he did offer, just in case you’re wondering). He returned some 5 minutes later with nothing chastising himself for forgetting and taking my snide remarks in his stride. He left and returned again 10 minutes later with, in his hands, his bottle of squash and my cup… of coffee…

Lesson 1 never be a smartass as there’s always going to be a bigger fish and you might just end up falling over it and looking like a real idiot.

If your computer slows down, penny to a pinch of snuff that your registry is at least partially to blame. Computer keeps crashing? Could be a fragmented registry.

Now you’d be correct in googling registry problems and finding yourself looking at some tech speak that seems to be capable of instructing you in how to hack in to the pentagon but it doesn’t have to be like this.

Viruses can nest in your registry, trojan horses and all kinds of nasties so you are going to have to look into your registry at some point if you are at all serious about your computer.

So what’s the solution? Get a registry program. NtRegOpt is brilliant for XP but won’t fix problems (Vista and Windows 7 claim to have it as part of their OS as does XP come to think of it but for some reason they don’t seem to work as well as the stand alone version). PC Matic will try to fix your registry and to optimise it, that one is a good choice as is it’s cheaper and lighter sibling Optimizer. As for other programs, I cannot vouch. Just make sure you don’t buy or install just any old program which promises to fix your registry. This stuff is serious. Get it wrong and you may be left with no other option but to format and start again from scratch!! Get it right however and you’ll breathe new life into your PC.

I know. It happened to me this morning at work. PC dies during startup, restarts itself claiming to have fixed it’s registry (also asking me to activate windows which is odd on a machine which has been running for like 3-4 years straight) but it’s been slow recently so I figure to do belt and braces and use NTRegOpt. After the restart the PC is far more slick and responsive.

So yeah, theregistry is important.

Anyhow to aid those unfamiliar with the concept I offer… the wikipedia.

In a debate there are manoeuvres and tactics designed to lead your opponent down a certain path so you can verbally and mentally ambush them later with your killer come back. There’s winners and losers and people deciding this fate sitting as impartial judges on the process. But isn’t this a logical process? Aren’t the great debaters seen as having sharp minds and an excellent grasp of logic?

A bunch of hooey… and I’m only being polite because this is public.

If a debate is to decide whom has the strongest argument then riddle me this, what precisely has this to do with whomever is presenting the idea? If I debated the ideals of socialism against a right wing extremist who happens to be a prize winning mind then it is very conceivable if not inevitable that he would win the debate. What does this say about his argument?

Let’s consult logic then shall we, the two debaters know they are going to be debating their pet projects and know the enemy they’ll be debating against and the details of their idea. So it should be fairly easy to predict what they will bring up and the counter points which will sink their argument. So there fore your idea is better if it’s points sink your opponents ideas right? Well yes that’s logical as long as the points involve proofs and objectivity. If they are not objective, measurable and provable then logic would not be sufficient to answer. Yes an INTP just said that logic was insufficient… get over it

Logic works as a process and in cases where the information was not provable then any answer it leads to is similarly constrained. Logic itself is often mistaken for proof or a result in and of itself where as in truth it is merely a means of going from a certain pool of information to an answer in a fashion which is communicable to others and should make sense to everyone, in other words it’s a standard. If you say that a persons argument is logical, if you’re correct, then all you have actually said is that their conclusion follows on from their information in a logical fashion. Not exactly the be all and end all it’s often made out to be.

So if you can’t rely on logic to tell you whether what they’re saying is actually true or not and you most certainly can’t rely on what the people say as a persuasive person will make more headway than someone who’s perhaps brilliant but socially unskilled how can you decide who wins debates and whom to believe?

Well that’s the kicker, you can’t. I’ve often said that certainty is for idiots and this is one reason why.

In the wider world of political issues and big decisions it pays to remember to not only listen for what sounds like the best idea but also to ask why it seems like the best idea. Whether or not the speaker is relaying the information well and is formulating a decent argument is not as important as forming your own idea from what you glean from what they said. To cut out the spin and to get past the presentation to the information is a hard and error fraught process but to choose the easy route and simply to believe or disbelieve the points presented based on some personal intuition or read of the context is to invite deceit and redundancy. Even in the passive activity of reading the news you are engaging in forming politics. Put down the papers which spoon feed and take up those with in depth analysis and the government will change it’s interaction style to suit. In fact I guess you could blame the current spate of spin doctors and image on the world interest in stars and their lifestyles. After all who really thinks that politicians are that interesting? Their own mothers?? Perhaps.

So next time you’re watching two people bat the conversation back and forth in combative manner, try to see if there’s a point in there somewhere. Are they just butting heads in a verbal form of combat for their own amusement and ego, or is there some point to this?

Roleplay is one thing and Rollplay is another. To Rollplay all you need is a vague excuse to kill the next thing coming and some dice and structure to decide if it works or not, roleplay is almost a breed apart.

To put it plainly, the problem I’m pussy footing around, if you’re in a fantasy setting then play as a fantasy character and not Neo with a new wardrobe!

How many times have you heard characters discuss and intricate plan and decide to meet somewhere in an hour? How the dickens are they going to know when an hour has passed? There are no watches, clocks are rare and inaccurate (often the characters are going for precise timing) and why would they be referring to such small pieces of time??

DMs often write long campaign designs with things happening in the background, different adventures to go on and so on. One thing that they forget is that in that kind of time period (fantasy seems to me to be replicating the period where knights were the pre-eminent force on the battlefield) waiting a year wasn’t uncommon. Waiting a minute was.

Travelling times are an issue which to my mind is at the heart of the fantasy genre. Pick up a few fantasy novels and nine times out of ten there’s usually some long journey involved. In fact it’s a bit of a joke when you consider things like Tolkein and how quickly Frodo got back from Mordor compared to how long it took to get there. Many books have more high adventure involved in crossing the terrain than they do when the characters eventually arrive and in some cases the journey is the entire point of the book! So why is it then when you come to roleplay in a fantasy environment, all anyone wants to do is skip the journey?

I’ve seen instances where almost the entire campaign is one long torrent of teleportations, portals and mystical happenings just to get you to the action quicker. It’s no wonder that D&D tends to break down into a game more about maths and how to accumulate the largest bonuses when you never have to worry about transporting all the stuff you want to bring or concern yourself with how comfortable your character would be travelling for 3 months with nothing to wear but full plate armour.

Another thing, what’s with the magic item systems in most of these games? Efficiency was barely a concept in those days so combining disparate powers into utility items seems a little counter convention but realistically the worst thing about 90% of the magic items and magic itself in these systems is that it’s so homogenous. Think about this in terms of old world culture. Nowadays two pints of Stella will look identical, the glass is homogenous, the design of the glass is the same, the chemical contents of the glass are identical to all intents and purposes. Would two pints look the same in what 1650? Is that being picky? Well in a rollplay game yes it would be but in roleplay? Not at all.

You see the reality around you is not made up of over-arcing concepts and structure but rather the smell of rain, the colour of the sky, the sound of traffic in the distance. Reality is the combination of a million details. If you are to suspend your disbelief and truly roleplay then the details must be looked after. That’s not to say they need listing or used as a stick to stop people making use of their modern day perspectives but it does mean that every once in a while your characters should have to sleep rough, every once in a while ensure their diet consists of gruel and water… If they’re supposed to be middle ages kind of character then give them the middle ages instead of some weird place where the only difference between the sword coast and california is people ride around on carpets not cars…