(no subject)
Feb. 16th, 2019 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellwayMe: Huh, I'm having Runescape cravings. I haven't had those in *ages*, and haven't played in even longer.
(Me: How long was it, anyway? *checks document labelled "Runescape Notes"* Wow, this to-do list is dated mid-October 2016. Yeah, I guess that timing *does* check out, come to think of it.)
Me': Maybe we should play? We did leave ourself some spare premium-membership credits†, in case we ever wanted to come back.
Me: I don't know. I mean, we have enough trouble with feeling overwhelmed by our to-do list as it is, and Runescape is so large and complicated that one's Runescape-related to-do list can easily be overwhelming all by itself. That was why we stopped, after all: they'd added so much content that it was just too much, we couldn't deal with it all anymore.
Me': We could just focus on one aspect of the game at a time and ignore everything else?
Me: I don't think our brain's set up to make that easy, and certainly the game isn't. We *like* to play a game optimally, and Runescape is so complicated that optimal play for almost any given task has a whole bunch of prerequisites, many of which have prerequisites of their own. And many tasks have real-time restrictions on how much you can do them, which means that *overall* optimal play requires switching between them all.
Me': What about Crawl? We don't play *Crawl* optimally; we don't even try. We *like* to approach Crawl with a certain amount of recklessness, not caring too much about whether a given move was technically the right one.
Me: That's because Crawl has no long-term meta-game unless you count stuff like greaterplayer. Crawl is almost entirely about the journey and very little about the destination: no individual Crawl game really matters in the grand scheme of things.
Me': I mean, *nothing* really matters in the *grand* scheme of things.
Me: That's a cached idea from people who are less egoist than we are. If playing Runescape would make us worse off in the moment *and* not set our future self up for a better life later, it is among the *worst* things that could happen.
Me': Counterpoint: resisting our brain's whims regarding which video game to play has, historically, almost never been a good idea. It makes us feel miserable and incomplete, and it should only be done under dire circumstances like a chatroom we run (and frequently re-read) whose archive is about to be lost. (and as I recall, it was in fact specifically Runescape that we were resisting in order to complete that project, and it *did* in fact make us feel miserable and incomplete; it's just that *that* miserable incompleteness was temporary, while the miserable incompleteness of not having a DS9 Rewatch archive would have been permanent, and so it was the lesser evil)
Me': Lowering our threshold for whether a circumstance is sufficiently dire, making us feel like playtime--and specifically playing *whichever game we feel like playing*, not whichever game we intellectually think we are in the best position to play--was a bonus for when everything else was done rather than a load-bearing psychological nutrient that needs to be given a certain amount of priority, is perhaps the single worst thing the financial nadir in 2017 did to us, and we should try to heal it.
Me: ...okay, you've got me there, that *is* an excellent point.
Me: Our current practice is to take civic holidays off, and there's a civic holiday on Monday. Since our exam is on Tuesday (I hope), we've already agreed to switch the Sunday and Monday workloads, taking tomorrow off and doing school on Monday.
Me: I propose the following: tomorrow, we take a look at the Runescape wikia, which last we checked was excellent. I'm sure they have a guide listing the time-limited tasks currently in existence. We will sort these tasks in priority order--completely ignoring any task whose sole reward is experience in a skill we already have max level in, even if we don't have max experience; we are *not* going to aim for max experience unless we somehow manage to reach a point where we've done everything else--trace back their prerequisites, and underneath the list of tasks themselves add a similarly sorted list of prerequisites. We may, optionally, pick a *single* additional aspect, and add that aspect and its prerequisites beneath that list.
(Me: I know this isn't how we normally go back to a game after a break, but we probably should *not* read through all of the news posts since October 2016: that's likely to be overwhelming.)
Me: We will aim to ruthlessly prioritise, and to not be too hard on ourself if we don't do as much on a given day as we'd wanted to. After all, if we weren't playing, we wouldn't have gotten to do *any* of it.
Me': *nods* [in the tone of one reciting a proverb] Some is better than none.
Me: Indeed. We'll see how it goes, and I reserve the right to leave again if we find we can't handle it. But there *are* a lot of good things about Runescape, and it would be nice to experience them again.
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†Context note: Runescape dealt with its gold-farmer problem by legalising gold-farming as long as you traded with the gold-buyers in Runescape store credit rather than dollars. I was high enough level when they did this (and therefore had enough access to high-level money-making techniques) that I haven't had to pay dollars for premium membership since.
(Me: How long was it, anyway? *checks document labelled "Runescape Notes"* Wow, this to-do list is dated mid-October 2016. Yeah, I guess that timing *does* check out, come to think of it.)
Me': Maybe we should play? We did leave ourself some spare premium-membership credits†, in case we ever wanted to come back.
Me: I don't know. I mean, we have enough trouble with feeling overwhelmed by our to-do list as it is, and Runescape is so large and complicated that one's Runescape-related to-do list can easily be overwhelming all by itself. That was why we stopped, after all: they'd added so much content that it was just too much, we couldn't deal with it all anymore.
Me': We could just focus on one aspect of the game at a time and ignore everything else?
Me: I don't think our brain's set up to make that easy, and certainly the game isn't. We *like* to play a game optimally, and Runescape is so complicated that optimal play for almost any given task has a whole bunch of prerequisites, many of which have prerequisites of their own. And many tasks have real-time restrictions on how much you can do them, which means that *overall* optimal play requires switching between them all.
Me': What about Crawl? We don't play *Crawl* optimally; we don't even try. We *like* to approach Crawl with a certain amount of recklessness, not caring too much about whether a given move was technically the right one.
Me: That's because Crawl has no long-term meta-game unless you count stuff like greaterplayer. Crawl is almost entirely about the journey and very little about the destination: no individual Crawl game really matters in the grand scheme of things.
Me': I mean, *nothing* really matters in the *grand* scheme of things.
Me: That's a cached idea from people who are less egoist than we are. If playing Runescape would make us worse off in the moment *and* not set our future self up for a better life later, it is among the *worst* things that could happen.
Me': Counterpoint: resisting our brain's whims regarding which video game to play has, historically, almost never been a good idea. It makes us feel miserable and incomplete, and it should only be done under dire circumstances like a chatroom we run (and frequently re-read) whose archive is about to be lost. (and as I recall, it was in fact specifically Runescape that we were resisting in order to complete that project, and it *did* in fact make us feel miserable and incomplete; it's just that *that* miserable incompleteness was temporary, while the miserable incompleteness of not having a DS9 Rewatch archive would have been permanent, and so it was the lesser evil)
Me': Lowering our threshold for whether a circumstance is sufficiently dire, making us feel like playtime--and specifically playing *whichever game we feel like playing*, not whichever game we intellectually think we are in the best position to play--was a bonus for when everything else was done rather than a load-bearing psychological nutrient that needs to be given a certain amount of priority, is perhaps the single worst thing the financial nadir in 2017 did to us, and we should try to heal it.
Me: ...okay, you've got me there, that *is* an excellent point.
Me: Our current practice is to take civic holidays off, and there's a civic holiday on Monday. Since our exam is on Tuesday (I hope), we've already agreed to switch the Sunday and Monday workloads, taking tomorrow off and doing school on Monday.
Me: I propose the following: tomorrow, we take a look at the Runescape wikia, which last we checked was excellent. I'm sure they have a guide listing the time-limited tasks currently in existence. We will sort these tasks in priority order--completely ignoring any task whose sole reward is experience in a skill we already have max level in, even if we don't have max experience; we are *not* going to aim for max experience unless we somehow manage to reach a point where we've done everything else--trace back their prerequisites, and underneath the list of tasks themselves add a similarly sorted list of prerequisites. We may, optionally, pick a *single* additional aspect, and add that aspect and its prerequisites beneath that list.
(Me: I know this isn't how we normally go back to a game after a break, but we probably should *not* read through all of the news posts since October 2016: that's likely to be overwhelming.)
Me: We will aim to ruthlessly prioritise, and to not be too hard on ourself if we don't do as much on a given day as we'd wanted to. After all, if we weren't playing, we wouldn't have gotten to do *any* of it.
Me': *nods* [in the tone of one reciting a proverb] Some is better than none.
Me: Indeed. We'll see how it goes, and I reserve the right to leave again if we find we can't handle it. But there *are* a lot of good things about Runescape, and it would be nice to experience them again.
---
†Context note: Runescape dealt with its gold-farmer problem by legalising gold-farming as long as you traded with the gold-buyers in Runescape store credit rather than dollars. I was high enough level when they did this (and therefore had enough access to high-level money-making techniques) that I haven't had to pay dollars for premium membership since.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-17 11:39 am (UTC)What do you like about it?
no subject
Date: 2019-02-17 04:57 pm (UTC)As for freemium: while there was quite an uproar over the "hypocrisy" of legalising gold-farming for store credit†, personally I like being able to pay for membership and microtransactions with farmed gold. At my level, it's pretty easy to make enough gold to keep yourself in membership credits as long as you factor it in when deciding how to prioritise the tasks available to you.
(It *would* be a lot harder to scrape up...*checks price*...~20mil to get your *first* fortnight of membership as a lower-levelled and F2P player, but it would also make it feel like more of an in-game accomplishment.)
And I do like being able to keep my gaming accomplishments in-game: if I decide I want a microtransaction, I put a greater focus on gold production in my what-to-do-next decision process until I can afford it. I don't have to cross the streams and think in terms of ~real money~, I can just look at how many credits it needs, translate that to gold, and think "would I pay X million gold for this thing?". I am grateful for the existence of people who spend real money on games because they fund it for the rest of us, but I prefer not to be one of them.
(The multiplayer game I usually play at the moment, Flight Rising, has from the beginning been even further down the legalised-gold-farming route: premium currency is not only tradeable but a fully-fledged currency in its own right. Any item on the player marketplace has the option to have its price denominated in premium currency rather than regular currency, and on the forums there are player-run currency-exchange booths with floating exchange rates. For someone with my combination of in-game merchant skill and real-world financial situation, it is not only more fun but *easier* to obtain an extra 1k gems through in-game methods than to obtain an extra USD$10. Also this way of doing it unlocks a lot of exchange-rate-arbitrage opportunities, which I have been immensely enjoying tracking down and exploiting.)
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>>I mean, I like Fallen London, so I can hardly complain about weird fremium browser games.<<
Never tried Fallen London myself, but I've heard good things about it.
Runescape *used* to be a browser game, but it looks like they've moved to allowing access only through their client programs. Makes sense: the browser version ran through Java, and I hear Java is basically one big security hole these days.
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>>What do you like about it?<<
I love the lore. The quest plotlines, the flavour text. The world they've built up over the years is fascinating.
It used to be that I liked the self-sufficiency: making healing items so you can fight the monster so you can get the drop so you can make the potion... There have been a *lot* of improvements to the inter-player trade system since I started playing, so the economy is much more interconnected now, and I've found that has its joys too. However, for those looking for that experience there *is* an officially-supported "Ironman mode": you can create a character that is forbidden from trading with other players, and has to obtain and process all of its own stuff.
And I have a lot of history with the game. I've been playing on and off since 2003. I've grown up with it, and it's grown with me, and possibly we've grown apart but it's still an important part of my history and I treasure that.
(If the ruthless prioritising doesn't seem to be working out, I might try an approach of focusing solely on quests. (well, quests plus just enough gold-farming to keep the membership ticking over) Those tend to be my favourite parts of the game.)
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Having grown up with the game, I have no idea what it would be like to be just joining now, and therefore no idea whether I would recommend it to someone who hasn't played before.
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†Mind you, there's an uproar over pretty much every update. In a game with that many players you can always find people to complain about anything, and their voices drown out the people who like it or are indifferent. I try to avoid the parts of the community where people discuss updates.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-18 05:21 am (UTC)(Had a look at the linked flight rising thing, and huh. That seems quite mystifying, I lack most context for seeing what's going on there.)
Fallen London is a wonderfully written game, as all things by Alexis Kennedy are. It has the coolest lore and a wonderful setting. Shame about the gameplay being of the limited-actions-per-time plus much grinding model.
The impulse to optimize is a strong one, I should try and find some games where I can do this more, in terms to behavior being rated from very efficient to not very efficient rather than, like, life or death. (Current video game is Skyrim, which is very not that), but ultimately, I just don't commit massively to video games unless I have truly stupendous amounts of free time, so it's unlikely to come to anything.
It's good to have things you've spent a lot of time with! Again, not something I heavily associate with video games, but both Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic and Battle for Wesnoth come close (both being turn-based strategy games which I have played since I was young)
There are always people who are unhappy with every new update of everything. It will happen.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-18 05:47 pm (UTC)Yeah, I remember how mystifying it was the first time I looked at a Flight Rising page. I got the hang of it pretty quickly, though.
(Unlike past-me, my Gielinorian is a bit rusty, but it's coming back to me.)
(God, in hindsight there is so much foreshadowing in that bit about being into spreadsheets. Flight Rising ends up playing an important role in my choice of career, by making me realise just how great financial spreadsheets are.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 03:58 am (UTC)(Also comments from the first link I'm putting here rather than there:)
I have a lot in common, in terms of wanting to read all the guides before starting to play a game. I think the only new games I didn't do that for was pokemon (wait, no, I only bought that pokemon game because I spent two weeks reading guides to pokemon backend and wanted to trying playing again), skyrim (Because I read a fuckton of guides back when it first came out, even if I never seriously played because getting out the PS3 was too much effort) and Cultist Simulator (Because it was in barely-made Beta when I started playing and I was one of the people writing the guides). Maybe some random easyish JRPGs.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-19 02:00 pm (UTC)(I have read a fair bit of Replay Value fic despite never actually having read Homestuck, because
(Which I suppose is particularly fitting, given that the *reason* I originally bounced off of Homestuck is because I couldn't figure out how to *work* the thing. There was a point very early on--first scene? second?--where I was clearly supposed to *do* something to cause the animation to advance, and I could not figure out what.)
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>>(wait, no, I only bought that pokemon game because I spent two weeks reading guides to pokemon backend and wanted to trying playing again)<<
I think I know that feel. Nethack cravings often manifest for me as a *desire to read Nethack guides*, with the actual gameplay kind of coming along as a side effect.
And even when it doesn't go *that* far, I do find that reading guides is an integral part of the joy of video-game playing.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-20 03:28 am (UTC)(Speaking of Replay Value, I had a moment of absolute cringe when I had read a bunch of RV fic and then also the all three guides for a game I know quite well, and had the thought "This is what they have to go on, no wonder their life is so bad")
no subject
Date: 2019-02-25 10:57 pm (UTC)#relatable
Also, I am delighted that you've read the Sburb Glitch FAQ; it sits squarely in the center of one of my favorite writing genres. Mind you, I don't actually know what the proper name for the "programming/game rules in real life, and also it's glitchy in a speedrun-style way" genre is, but I sure do like it!