Grimwell’s Blog

My mother in law is quite a seamstress. I’m not supposed to like my mother in law, or compliment her — I learned that on TV — but screw convention. She also created my wife’s wedding dress. Seems she’s got some talent eh? The girl in white is about to go through her first communion next weekend. It’s a pretty big deal in the Catholic faith, so my wife is excited.

I’m excited for my daughter. Even if I’m not a Catholic. I like rituals in life; markers that tell us a waypoint has been passed and hopefully for the better. I think this one is good because it makes my little lady feel pretty in her hand made dress, and who can argue with that?

Oh, and no, that’s not a pink elephant in the picture. You are just drunk. Sheesh.

Remember el-grimmsville? You don’t have to, here’s a picture:

Yup, I’m still at it and growing steady enough. I even have links over to the right and at the bottom of everything else. That makes it easy to check in on the page — well no, it used to. Now I have complications, and more links to manage. My kids finally found MyMiniCity. So now I had to make a page to do my kid’s links and make them easy for me.

BTW, I’m right — the game is all about community. Someone finds your page and leaves a note. You go to their page and thank them, and leave a note. Others see this and start visiting your page because you are known to pay that back. Suddenly you grow!

My approach is to try to reward anyone who visits me. If they stop visiting, so do I. So I’m not moving exponentially through the ranks, or spending hours on this ‘game’ of inactivity. I am watcing my city grow, and now I get to watch (and help) those kids and their cities.

I love PvP servers. Even when you are doing something simple, such as harvesting in the Enchanted Lands, PvP keeps you on your toes. Tonight was no different than any other, but I was able to enjoy the presence of a Qeynos scout who held mad skills. He killed me twice tonight, out of two and a third battles.

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I live in an apartment. Part of my rent ensures that I have a covered parking spot for my own personal use. I know, it rains so much out here… but it’s nice to have a spot that I can count on finding any time day or night. When I got home from work today, I ate very fast, loaded up the family, and went house hunting. We found a nice prospect and went for a fast look cause it was priced very low. We liked what we saw and are putting in an offer, which is a good thing!

So I was in a good mood when I got home to the apartment. I found this guy in my spot though:

I’m sure it’s bad taste to post his plates, but so is stealing my spot. My neighbor drives this car, and knows the deal. I put a happy gram on the car to remind them tha t I can and will call to have it towed, and moved along since I was relatively happy. We did find an open spot across the complex, so the kids had to zombie walk since they were up late.

It’s too easy to do the right thing sometimes, so people do the wrong thing because it feels easy. I can’t comprehend something so base as to take assigned parking spots when I know better — and I don’t like paying tow truck bills, so I don’t do it. Why others can’t… I don’t know. Ah well, if I have the best offer in, I will have my own garage again, rendering this all moot.

Today’s image is a quest reward I just picked up tonight. A new cloak for my Dark Elf Defiler on Nagafen. As you can see Lilenne is posing with the latest in Tailor fashions, available only to those who are willing to do a little work for their tradeskill society. If you look a little closer (or follow the link to the source and magnify it) you will discover that this cloak is 100% awesome sauce.

It Must Have Been Hard to Get?

Nope. I had to do a simple quest that came available when I dinged L30 as a Tailor. I went to two zones, harvested some wood — died to QQ’s who were on gank runs — and then went home and did a little chemistry to check for vermin. This cloak was a part of the reward. Every TS class gets one (I believe — remember, I don’t work actively on EQII; I play it actively though). It’s some very cool content that any crafter can get their mitts on. They don’t even have to adventure to get it so it’s really for every crafter in the game. That’s a great idea.

Steal This Idea for Your Game

A cloak like this is a pretty simple affair. It’s more artist work than anything; and after an artist gets the flow for making one, they can (probably) crank them out at a pretty good clip. In games where microtransactions happen, this is a very good thing to note. You could request 20 cloaks from your art team as a Producer, set aside one or two for in game event rewards, another few for quest rewards that the design team can give stats to; and then leave the rest as cool appearnce options that don’t affect gameplay but do cost a little money to get.

I’m on a tangent, but that’s how RMT can work without blowing up the actual play of a game. Imagine a cloak dotted in skulls and crossbones — I’m a pirate yar! Or one that is done up in flames (I’m a flamer, yar??). Or a nice leaf pattern so woodsy elves can use it to show how close to nature they are. Or pretty much anything you can imagine that an artist could do. If you don’t hook up any stats/benefit to the item beyond the appearance, it’s the perfect RMT item.

I’m just saying…

(Don’t be a dork and start freaking out that RMT is coming to EQII. It’s not. Further, I’m not the guy who makes those sort of decisions. I’m just blogging and showing off my cool new cloak!)

Another steal from Zonk today, this time indirectly. He has a blog post about his ultimate MMO in ten bullet points. Bullet point #9 is pretty fun:

No Server Bullshit - Have a single world. I know it’s hard, deal with it. If you have to have multiple servers, let slipping between them be as effortless as logging in. Ship with the idea that the in-game economy is one continuous stream across all shards, and design accordingly. Let nothing stand in the way of players getting together with one another.

I actually agree with this, it’s even easy. I want to take on why I think it’s a good idea after the break, specifically to answer Ryan Shwayder’s points as to why it’s not good in games like EQ or WoW. I think he misses a point, and if you get excited enough to make the jump you can see his comment, and the point I think he’s missing.

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Time to start a fun project. If I am at home, and not sick, I’m going to post an image every day on the website. Sometimes a work image, some times a fun image, whatever I feel like really. Don’t worry folks — no porn. Just an image. To kick things off, here’s a shot I took on my Helio last night as Brenlo and I waited for the local Best Buy to open their doors and sell us video games.

There were over 100 folks in the line, easy — so Best Buy was happy I’d guess. For my friends from BBY in Michigan, the big difference was that it wasn’t so damn cold for the sale! I remember doing the Halo 2 launch event, and people had power generators and Halo 1 lan parties going in the parking lot while they waited; and it was November in Michigan.

Californians don’t know how easy they have it. The event went well, and was very organized. No fighting, they used paper to sort out who was getting the special editions and the rest of us got the normal one. I did it more to see how the store would handle the event than to have GTA IV RIGHTNOWOMGITSTHEAWESOMEZZZZZ. I used to manage there after all, and curiosity has killed more than cats. I didn’t see any magical centricity going on… so the only difference was the weather.

Good times though. It was fun.

(Images will be hosted at Mojobaby.com)

What do MMO’s and Zoo’s have in common? Fun question right? Here, read this, he’s hit on a smart point. Here is the power quote:

What I’d like to see are deliberate attempts to shake up the status-quo every once in a while.

This is something I really agree with. Mind you, I’m not a designer, but I am an avid player and love events that break up the normal flow. Is it hard? Yes. Is it impossible? No. The Devil is always in the details, but where there is a will, there is a way. I look forward to the day when more ways are found and his blog post is looked back and viewed as “What? It wasn’t always this way?”

For the last two months, I’ve been listening to a lot of streaming music from Slacker. At home or at work, it’s been a great tool for getting the music I want without much effort. Slacker is a lot like Pandora, with an exception in that it’s not looking at a music genome — it appears to be hand sorted. This means the contextual matches are much more accurate. It also seems to have a deeper library for the types of music I like.

I have playlists for: thrash, metal, punk, girl-punk, alternative, and more. While I don’t control every single song coming in, I have done a good job of managing the artists that it’s based on, and blocking songs that don’t fit, and I really get good matches. Much better than Pandora. The girl-punk for instance, I get female singers about 95% of the time, without much effort. How Slacker knows that, I really don’t know; but it picked up on it and really does seem to ‘get’ the goal of different streaming lists better.

So I’m giving it a recommendation. It’s free, and there is a downloadable player, so you can give it a try with ease. If you dig streaming music, you should give it a try.

Vegas baby!