Little Inferno

In an attempt to adjust my sleep schedule so I can actually be awake during the day this weekend I decided to stay up even when I was tired. I couldn't concentrate enough on Final Fantasy XIV to do anything useful so I decided to look at my list of games to play on Steam to see if there was anything suitably mindless to try out. Enter Little Inferno, one of the silliest games I've ever discovered.

The idea of the game is you're stuck in a house during a snowstorm and all you have to entertain yourself is a fireplace. The gameplay seems to revolve around putting stuff in the fireplace and then lighting it on fire. Watch things burn, and explode into a shower of cash. Pick up the cash, use it to buy other things. Burn those too. Things explode for more money than they cost, so the idea is to build up your stock of cash so you can buy more expensive things.

It sounds silly, but it was pretty fun. The game seemed to have a pretty good physics engine in terms of stuff moving around in the fireplace. There are items you can buy that modify gravity and such and things seem to float around reasonably. There's also a bit of an achievement system in that you get a list of combo names and need to figure out what to do to set off the combo. Like the Brains Ahoy HIYA! combo which needed me to burn a zombie, a pirate, and a ninja at the same time.

There was also a bit of a storyline with different people sending me letters talking about what's going on in the world while I sit in my little room burning everything I can get my grubby little hands on. Like their letters. Letters burn real good.

Is Little Inferno actually a game? I don't know. It's probably more of a game than Cookie Clicker and I'm still playing that! I do want to find out what happens in the rest of the story and I do like watching random things burn (including pictures of people imported from Facebook which seems very odd). Probably I'll just wait until the next time I want to stay up while tired (which could well be tomorrow) and then burn some more combos!

Final Fantasy XIV: Reasonably Realistic Outfits

I made a passing comment on my tanking post about how surprising it was for my female character specializing in taking to damage to actually look like she was wearing armour designed to prevent damage. I played three tanks in World of Warcraft and that was not the case there. Ok, the first was a male gnome (with a WICKED moustache) who did wear real armour. The second was a female druid and tanked completely naked as a bear. Bears don't wear armour, see. Also there wasn't really anything erotic about a 'naked' bear. The last was a female death knight and her armour was really not well designed for being tough. Revealed midriffs and cleavage galore! I'm pretty sure there are some vital organs back there that could really use some protection.

On the weekend I decided to go farm some monsters on the same class, and switched my tanking gear out for some more damage focused gear made of aldgoat leather. Other than the hat being an eye-patch (AWESOME!) instead of something protective this outfit also seems to make sense. The leather looks flexible to make it easier to do more damage (it has dex on it), but it's still completely covering and looks like it would be useful in a fight. Still very form fighting, mind, and I really don't know what sort of clothes you should actually wear to go kill wild goats, but this seems reasonable to me. I really like this outfit.

But wait, you may be saying... I want to see pretty clothes and animated cleavage! Well, it turns out Square has your back. The tank gear and the melee DPS gear may completely cover up, but there's some velveteen cloth crafting gear that does not. It's a nice outfit, clearly not of much protection against a wolf or an orc with a sword or something, but it's not used in those situations. This stuff is worn in town while making or selling stuff. In this case, food, as you can tell from the frying pan weapon. I really don't know what sort of clothes you should wear for making maple syrup, either, but this seems less inappropriate for crafting than it would be for fighting monsters.

Of course the thing that really matters is what the stats are on the gear. I will wear whatever crafting gear has the best crafting stats on it for my level!
I'd prefer if I liked the gear (those glasses are pretty sweet) but I'm not going to wear something worse just to look better. World of Warcraft eventually added in a feature so you could swap the look of your gear so you could have the best of both worlds which was nice. It's not in Final Fantasy XIV, so for now I just need to hope the best gear keeps making sense visually as well.

Extra Life 2013

I know this isn't a very popular stance to take, but I am against the concept of a charity. Ok, not that I think being nice to people is a bad thing, or that I think money and time shouldn't go from the haves to the havenots. It's more that I don't like our current system for charitable donations. Or maybe it's that I don't like our whole economic system and this is just a consequence of it? It's hard to say. I do think we'd be in a better place with higher tax rates and with the government in charge of distributing money to the places it should go. Assuming we could get a benevolent and corruption free government to make these decisions, anyway. (Robb really needs to get on his dictator plan.) The current system with tax incentives for donating and with lots of small places where corruption can spring up is the thing I'm against.

Anyway, we do live in the current system. Which means charities exist, and they need to spend time and money on raising more time and money. Extra Life is an organization that tries to get people to donate to the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals by having people play games for 24 straight hours. (25 hours this year because they're running it over the end of daylight savings time.) As far as charities go, ones that help sick children are way up there on the list that I'd hope Robb would fund with my tax money. And as far as silly things to do to encourage people to donate, playing games for a day is something I can get behind. Really, that's a normal day for me if I stay up a little longer than normal! The rough part, if you can call it that, will be being around (eventually) overtired people for 25 hours.

I don't know what the plan is, but I joined Sara's team and I think they're going to be playing board games for the 25 hours. As far as I am aware the more the merrier in the group, or playing the games, or donating the moneys. It's November 2nd at 8am until November 3rd at 8am. With 25 hours and other people around to play games with after an elimination I feel like maybe Titan could be dusted off... Or maybe World of Warcraft the board game! Or maybe 13 games of BSG back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back...

Bridge Match 2 - Board 20

Board 20 – Dealer West – All Vul

Opponents convention card: Dutch Doubleton
Opponents playing strength: Adequate

My hand: ♠ A K J T 7 4 ♥ Q T 4 3 ♦ A 6 ♣ 2

Three passes to me. I open 1 spade. West overcalls 2 clubs and that gets passed to me. I am uninterested in playing this, so I bid 2 hearts which gets alerted. Hmm... Partner bids 2 NT. I bid 3 spades which gets passed out.


West leads the 3 of diamonds.

	NORTH ♠ 3 2 ♥ 9 6 ♦ Q J 9 7 4 ♣ K Q J 7
WEST ♦ 3
	SOUTH ♠ A K J T 7 4 ♥ Q T 4 3 ♦ A 6 ♣ 2

West	North	East	South
Pass	Pass	Pass	1♠
2♣	Pass	Pass	2♥1
Pass	2NT	Pass	3♠
Pass	Pass	Pass
1Forcing

I have 2 heart losers, a diamond loser, a club loser, and maybe 1 spade loser. That's one too many, so I need to get rid of one of them. Fortunately it turns out the opening lead gets rid of one of them for me. If I insert the Q of diamonds here it either wins or I get to cover the K and still win the J. That was easy!

Do I have 9 tricks? I have 2 diamonds and 5 spades. I have 2 clubs after taking out the A of clubs. I may well have a heart too, or a 6th spade if I pick up the Q of spades.

Looking at it closer I may lose an extra heart too, if I draw trump first. I also have no entry to board to collect those clubs. This may be trickier than it first seemed. Oh well, let's play this diamond trick... 3-Q-5-6. If they have to play diamonds later in the hand I might get a board entry after this, so I should really pound out a club. K-4-2-A. West plays a diamond back to my A. I draw trump. A-9-2-6. K-Q-3-5. Glad I didn't finesse a spade!

Ok, I have 4 tricks in and 4 more trump tricks in hand. I need to find one more trick. The opponents have 1 trick in, and have set up a diamond and 2 hearts for sure whenever they get in.  So if they can get one more trick, they set us. I am going to have to break hearts myself, which means leading away from the Q, which means giving them the J. I don't see a play from here. Maybe I can make them pitch most of their hearts or something by running trump.

They pitch all clubs and a diamond. I decide to play my last trump because I don't see how it can hurt and East pitches a small heart. I wonder if that will be good enough? I exit a low heart and East wins the J. And then they cash all their tricks. Down 1.

	NORTH ♠ 3 2 ♥ 9 6 ♦ Q J 9 7 4 ♣ K Q J 7
WEST ♠ Q 9 ♥ A 7 5 ♦ 3 2 ♣ A T 9 6 5 3		EAST ♠ 8 6 5 ♥ K J 8 2 ♦ K T 8 5 ♣ 8 4
	SOUTH ♠ A K J T 7 4 ♥ Q T 4 3 ♦ A 6 ♣ 2

All 8 of the tables played a NS contract in NT or spades. 7 went down with 3 pairs going down more than 1 trick (and one of those was even doubled). One pair managed to make 3NT. So despite what felt like a really bad situation, we still get 9 MPs. I feel like partner's 2NT bid spun things out of control. I'm showing a two-suited hand in the majors. He has a 2 suited hand in the minors with no support at all in the majors. I feel like he should have showed a preference by bidding 2 spades instead of 2NT and let me make a big move if I want to keep going.

Captain Jack has all sorts of problems with this hand. His first problem is with my 3 spade bid. He thinks it's too passive and wants me to jump to 4 spades. This seems crazy to me. I have a 14 count and partner has shown no willingness to bid my suits. He probably has a club stopped for his NT bid, and that's going to be wasted values. Nevermind that he passed to start, so he can't have an opening hand! I thought 3 spades might be too high, not too low!

Next up he disagrees with my pounding out the club suit when I won the first trick. He wants me to draw trump. Then when I get in with the high diamond he disagrees with my drawing trump and wants me to play a heart. I guess this makes sense in that maybe, just maybe, I can ruff a heart. If the opponents are bad.

Finally he disagrees with playing the last round of trump. I don't know how it could hurt, but he wants me to duck a heart to start. I tried playing it out and I actually took a trick at the end. I guess letting East pitch his low heart was actually bad for me. Huh. Live and learn!

Ranking after board 20/60: 6/16 with 52.14%.

League of Legends: World's Semifinals Coverage

The first semifinal match from worlds is happening tonight in about 20 minutes or so. Well, coverage starts then, which means the games probably won't start for an hour after that. Regardless, tonight's match is between the two top Korean teams in the tournament, SK Telecom T1 and Naijin Black Sword. I don't care which one wins, but I expect the games will be pretty awesome to watch. Check it out at the main LoL eSports site!

Steam Machines

Valve has apparently decided the next step in being a game distribution platform is to move in on the console market. Microsoft got blown out when it announced all sorts of DRM with their new console and eventually had to fall back from that position. Steam has all of those same sorts of things going on. I can't give Robb my copy of Alan Wake to play for a few days even though I'd really like to because it's a fantastic game. If we both had standard consoles that ran the console version of Alan Wake I could easily just hand him the disk and let him play it at his home. (The flip side being that I probably would have paid triple the price for the disk Alan Wake as opposed to getting it on sale super cheap on Steam.)

How are they doing this? Well, it sounds like they've made a console operating system and they're going to let whoever feels like making hardware for it make the hardware for it. Basically it sounds an awful lot like they're trying to convince people to make small, cheap computers to hook up to a tv and pretend like it's a console.

A while ago a new feature cropped up in Steam called 'Big Picture' which made Steam into a full screen program that was very different from the normal interface. I was confused and didn't like it, but in retrospect that interface was very similar to the xBox 360 interface. And with the announcement that they're planning on making their own consoled that all makes sense. It was not a very good interface for someone who wanted to easily alt-tab to a bunch of normal Windows programs, but it makes sense for someone on a console. I even managed to figure out their weird chat interface in order to type a message to Lino with the controller instead of with the keyboard.

The announcement also mentioned that they're going to be giving away 300 console prototypes to get things started. They're going to hand out 30 of them to people active in the Steam community, whatever that means, and 270 at random to people who earn the 'Steam Hardware Beta Candidate' badge within the Steam client itself. Which basically meant filling out a contest form and then trying out the Big Picture mode with a controller. I played a little DMC on my 42" tv and it was actually pretty awesome. It futzed up my Windows display settings though, which made alt-tabbing to chat with Robb and Lino about playing Titan a little awkward.

Which just goes to show... Even for someone like me, who has their computer beside their tv... I could make decent use of a Steam console. Or maybe I just need to configure my computer a little better so my computer just stays connected to the tv 24/7 instead of just when I want to do something on it. And if I lived in an actual house, or had roommates or something, so my computer was not beside the tv it would be pretty sweet.

I hope I win the contest! Only 142,624 people have signed up so far. Hopefully the odds are ever in my favour!

Diablo III Auction House Removal

It won't happen until next March but Blizzard has announced they're going to be completely removing the auction house from Diablo III. They let me know via email, and by telling every single blog I follow that they should post about it. Well, I guess I'm following suit since I have my own take on the matter and getting it out there is what this place is for, isn't it?

I played a lot of Diablo III when it first came out, and have gone back periodically for more. I feel like the game launched in a very unfinished state, and even now is still missing features I consider core to an online game in this day and age like guilds and chat channels. They also failed badly in their first attempt to balance the end game difficulty and loot drops which really detracted from the fun of the game for someone who plays games as intensely as I do. The way items dropped combined with the tuning failure of monsters meant the only way to make meaningful progress was to grind up money and use the AH to get upgrades. Actually killing monsters for upgrades was not feasible since I couldn't realistically kill monsters that had anything resembling a decent chance of dropping an upgrade.

Different people came up with different solutions to this problem. Sky leveled up a character better at farming and used that character to gear up his main character. James decided the best way to get more powerful was to stop playing entirely and just wait for the prices of gear to deflate on the AH as more and more people became capable of fighting in the higher acts of inferno. I decided the best way was to become an auction house guru and make money flipping gear and finding great bargains from people who knew less about the economy. I then decided I had no interest in playing a badly designed economy simulator and stopped playing the game.

Eventually they smoothed out the difficulty at the top such that you didn't desperately need gear you couldn't obtain in order to play the game. (This was 'solved' at the start by Blizzard allowing the first wave of 60s to farm easy to reach treasure chests that they removed from the game after a few days which let the economy get bootstrapped.) I came back, and by that point James' plan worked for me and I was able to spend what little money I had on more than enough gear to get by even if the difficulty hadn't been smoothed out.

Was the AH itself to blame for the problems Diablo III had at launch? Yeah, I think it probably was. Either Blizzard put out an incredibly unpolished product or it put out what they thought was a pretty good game centered around the auction house without realizing that doing so was fundamentally changing the game and wasn't what the consumers wanted. Having a way to get gear outside the game allowed them to believe they could ramp up the difficulty because people could just buy their way out of the problems. But most people who play Diablo games don't want to throw money at the problem. They want to throw swords and spells at the problem, watch the enemies explode in a shower of experience and loot, and repeat the process.

I have been playing Diablo III every now and then, and I think they've gotten a lot closer to that game. I have fun logging in, killing monsters, and looking at what drops. But I realized that the last couple times I played the game I didn't even look at the auction house. When I'm really playing the game intensely I feel the need to use the auction house to get any edge I can find, but when I'm just logging in and blowing zombies up for a few hours I really don't need extra stats. So removing the auction house won't impact the way I'm currently playing the game at all. Even better, they're working on changing the way loot drops work to make things more interesting for people who go it alone, so that has to be good for the way I'm playing now. And good for an intense way of playing too, since then the way to get better actually will be just killing more dudes and looking at the shiny things that drop.

Blizzard certainly seems to be learning from their mistakes, and owning up to them, and I have to commend them for that. I just wish they were smart enough to not make such brutal mistakes with one of their flagship franchises in the first place!

Final Fantasy XIV: Elemental Shards

When you're crafting things in Final Fantasy XIV you need a small handful of elemental shards to go along with the actual raw materials for the item itself. I don't think there's any actual reason for this within the game itself, mostly it feels like that's how crafting worked in Final Fantasy XI and therefore that's how it works in this one too. Back in FFXI you'd need to grind monsters to get these crystals and they'd take up space in your inventory. To start crafting at all you'd need to use one of the crystals and then you'd get prompted to pick some more stuff out of your inventory to combine with the crystal. If you managed to pick a combination that made something you'd try to make it, otherwise you'd get an error message. So the crystals served as an item in the economy and as part of the game interface.

In FFXIV the shards have their own little tab in your inventory and you never directly interact with them in that tab. Instead you craft stuff by opening up your crafting log and finding the specific thing you want to make from a list. Very similar to the way crafting works in World of Warcraft, actually, except you then have to play a minigame to make an item instead of just watching a little bar fill up automatically. Each time you make something it uses up some of your crystals but I'd never paid any attention to them. Unlocking all of the crafting classes gave hundreds of every type of crystal and it felt like they were something to ignore. The gathering classes could choose to mine up crystals instead of ore but they're worth no experience and that just seemed like a bit of a silly option.

Well, today while leveling up my goldsmithing I actually ran out of wind shards. That was really surprising to me, especially when I checked my inventory and saw that I still have 1335 earth shards and more than 400 of the other four elements. Apparently I made a lot of things out of wind shards. Ok, fine, I still want to make more things out of them... How do I get more of them?

It turns out that isn't such an easy question to answer. Final Fantasy XIV in particular is a game where Google searches aren't as useful as they could be because most of the information on the game comes from message boards and blog posts and a lot of it refers to the original disastrous version of the game and not the more recent version that just came out last month. So I found lots of discussions about where to farm up more shards only to eventually realize that you can't actually kill monsters for shards in this game. You could in the first version, but not anymore. Now it seems there are four ways to get shards: quest rewards, killing elementals, mining/botany, and buying them off the auction house.

Elementals are pretty rare to stumble across, you get no experience for mining them up, and most of the quests with shard rewards are early on and I've already done them. There are some repeatable quests which give shards, but they all require you to craft items to hand in and it feels like you consume more shards than you get when you do them. At the very least the one I was doing today took 24 shards per turn in and you could get 4 or 6 shards back. And a lot of money and experience, so it was totally worth doing, but it wasn't a way to generate shards.

Realistically it seems the only reasonable way to get more shards is to buy them from other people. How do they get the shards to sell? Presumably they do the early crafting quests and then give up on crafting. I do have more than 4200 shards of the non-wind elements, after all! I fully intend on leveling all of the crafting classes though, so I don't intend on actually selling any of them off.

I wonder if creating a new character just to grind through the starting quests makes any amount of sense. I actually can't do that right now (it was $3 per month cheaper to get 1 character slot instead of 8) but it might be the 'best' way to get more shards. Which seems really terrible. Especially since if I sold off all my shards in my inventory for the same price I paid to get some wind shards I'd have about 6 times as much money as I've generated so far actually playing the game.