Everything Is Everything Else

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours doing dragons in EverQuest II. The Dragon Attack event is drawing to a close but if anything that's only made it even more popular. There were enough people at each dragon spawn last night to spin up a second copy of the zone and it wasn't even close to prime time for the server.

The event is very well designed in terms of pacing. Each dragon respawns an hour after it's killed and it takes a crowd of fifty or so players seven or eight minutes to kill one. A rotation falls into place; the dragons spawn in a predictable order with a wait of just a few minutes between. Time to go bank or swap to an alt to gather crafting mats from the dragon corpse.

At least, that's how it's supposed to work. It was that way for the first couple of weeks. Some days it still is. At some point, though, some clever bunny came up with a short cut. Instead of the dragon taking anything up to ten minutes to die, it's dead in a couple. I've seen one burned down in less than thirty seconds.

I've been trying to find out how it's done but without much success. Google gives me nothing. I've asked in game several times but the only reply I got was "it's an exploit" without any hint of what the exploit might be.

Over the last couple of days I narrowed my investigations down to "something Necromancers can do". My theory is based on a couple of throwaway comments in general chat, where someone has made a crack about things going a lot faster if the necros "do their thing". Also, I noticed on a couple of occasions in Nektulos Forest, where the dragon summons a horde of elementals that take quite a while to kill, all the sparks suddenly died at once. The cause of death in every case was a "Vampiric Orb" attributed to an NPC Mercenary.

Vampiric orbs are created when a necromancer casts Vampirism on an ally. I have no idea if this is the proximate cause of the so-called "exploit" but it's about the only clue I have.

One reason I'm posting about it is in the hope that one of the handful of people who read this blog and also play EQII might know more about what's going on and chip in with a comment. Another is background to how I came to be looking at Chinese Post-Punk bands on YouTube.

The effect of the "exploit" or tactic or whatever you want to call it is that the elegantly calculated cadence for kills breaks down completely. What tends to happen at first is that all four dragons get killed in about twenty minutes or so and then there's a half hour wait for the first one to respawn. Sometimes the dragons end up overlapping and the order changes.

Either way, there are periods when everyone just stands around in a big gang for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes waiting for something to happen. That suited me fine last night because I had six characters running around gathering dragon mats and it gave me plenty of time to log them in and out. But even then I found myself with time on my hands.

I'd read all the new blog posts in my Feedly and blog roll so I started flipping through my bookmarks, looking for something to keep me occupied. I have a ridiculous amount of unsorted bookmarks, many of which go to things I've completely forgotten about.

One of them goes to a potentially fascinating resource called The Music Industrapedia. When I bookmarked this it was fairly new and didn't have a lot of detail but someone's clearly been hard at work since then. It varies an awful lot country by country but some of the entries under the Music Artist category are quite extensive.

I had a good browse through the Canada, Japan and France sections, which are very well-represented, and picked away at a lot of the smaller territories, which aren't. Then I took a look at China.

Chinese pop/rock music fascinates me. We've had so much discussion in the blogosphere lately about Chinese influence on Western culture and mores but it seems to me that's very much a two-way street. The Chinese government may think one thing is happening but the Chinese people seem to have different ideas. A lot of different ideas.

Glancing down the list I saw several names I rcognized from my own explorations in hyperspace: Carsick Cars, Hedgehog, New Pants, Queen Sea Big Shark... One reason I'm drawn to music and musicians from that part of the world is the amazing, evocative names of the bands. I spotted one I hadn't seen before, Streets Kill Strange Animals, and clicked the link.

There were two more links on the landing page; the band's Bandcamp and an article on Post-Punk.com, a website previously unknown to me. The article was fascinating. It told me in a few paragraphs more about the development of alternative music in China than I'd picked up anywhere else in years, although I have to admit I've never made any attempt to research the subject. I'm sure there are tons of journalistic and academic treatises out there just waiting to explain enverything if only I wasn't too lazy to look.

For the next hour or so I killed dragons to the backbeat of Snapline, Ourself Beside Me, Pet Conspiracy and more. I also watched a tremendously unexpected cover of "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Massive Attack but that's by-the-by.

It struck me what a strange and wonderful world we live in. In the same moment I was sharing a virtual fantasy with a hundred strangers around the globe, learning about the aesthetics of cultures and the way they cross-pollinate, and planning a creative act to synthesize it all : this post.

And some people say video games are a waste of time...

I Say! That's Not Cricket!

There's something untoward going on in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Shintar and Ravalation both have something to say about it. I don't play SW:TOR but that hasn't stopped me chipping in with a couple of lengthy comments on Shintar's thread because the issue at hand is that universal bugbear of the genre - exploits.

The problem with pontificating on exploits in MMOs, as I rapidly found while arguing myself into a corner in the aforementioned comment thread, is that it's far too complex a topic to deal with meaningfully in anything short of a PhD thesis. Even that would be selling it short.

My attitude over the years has varied from "Ban 'Em All!" to "Who Bloody Cares?" Any time I stop and think about it my head starts to hurt so mostly I try not to think about it.

At root, an exploit depends upon the existence of a rule to break. If it isn't "not allowed" it can hardly be an exploit, can it? Except, of course, most MMOs don't have rules, or at least not in the parts where the kind of exploits I'm concerned with arise, namely the progression of your character.

There's the EULA, which we all click through and almost no-one reads. Actually, I did used to read them. I read the full EQ EULA before I decided to subscribe back in 1999. In those days and for several years I wouldn't make a character before reading the EULA in full but in those days EULAs were shorter.

The issue of the legality and enforceability of EULAs is another topic entirely. Suffice it to say that they are filled with catch-all clauses intended to provide fall-back positions for the game companies should they ever be needed. We have similar "Terms and Conditions" where I work but we are explicitly instructed not to apply some of them in normal day-to-day trading. They exist to be called upon in need, not to be rigidly followed regardless of commercial good sense.

MMOs exist in a strange hinterland between Product and Service. The game you buy and its updates are clearly Products, albeit digital ones, but the continued provision of servers on which to play them is clearly a Service. There are very different obligations on Producers and Service Providers and MMO developers need to maintain balance between them , especially when those needs conflict.

In the olden days, when the worlds were young, all players in a given MMO were obliged to share the same virtual space. Whole cultures arose within which players were socialized to varying norms. An EverQuest player would need to learn the etiquette expected - respecting camps, joining lists, refraining from kill-stealing.

When players stayed in one MMO that was manageable. It was never comfortable because, as in real life, people chafe against restraints even when those restraints are communally imposed. As the genre exploded and players moved from game to game, trailing their acquired and often conflicting social and cultural expectations behind them, however, it became harder to agree on what constituted acceptable conduct.

Over these many years, in numerous MMOs, I've observed more exploits than I could hope to remember. I can, however, very clearly remember those in which I have participated. There are two reasons for that: firstly, I very, very rarely indulge in "exploits" and secondly, when I do I always feel I've done something naughty and doing something naughty is always a memorable experience.

A strange thing has happened to me over time: I have become increasingly less likely to take advantage of a glitch in the game to accrue personal benefit at the same time as I have become less concerned about doing so. The less likely I am to do it myself, in other words, the less I care whether other people do it.

In part this derives from my increasingly convinced belief that, outside of formal PvP or organized PvE competitions, MMO design and MMO developers should in no way encourage or endorse any form of competitive activity between players. Competition and comparison with other players has and should have absolutely no role in the leveling aspect of the games, which I love so much.

With almost all character progression in almost all MMOs now being tied directly either to solo play or to group play that takes place in instances I can't see it as any valid concern of any other player what goes on in another player's or group of players' play sessions.

This, I appreciate, puts me in a minority position that derives from the solipsistic outlook on life I've had since my teens. I am, simply, not competitive at all in most aspects of my life. I don't benchmark my progress by the progress of others but by standards I set for myself. When it comes to leveling characters in MMOs it means any "Win" conditions are in my head and my head alone.

I began this piece by observing that the topic is far too extensive, nuanced and ruminative to fit a quick blog post so rather than even attempt to fit an ocean into a wine glass I'll leave things here, scarcely reviewed let alone resolved.

One thing I do know for sure. Exploits are going to be with us as long as we have MMOs and no consensus on how they should be handled is ever going to be reached.