Fist de Yuma - December 23, 2003

This and that I'll admit I love e-mail. I get an easy 300 e-mails a day. Of course 90% of it is deleted without being read. Spam is awful and a total waste. The 20 or so attempts to steal my password by pretending to be my bank are treated as spam. The 30 or so attempts to infect my computer with a virus or a return from an infected machine that is spoofing my address is more bothersome. This is mainly because I have a dialup and it takes a while to download the attached file. Please check your machines, as there are a lot of infected computers that have my e-mail address in their address book. The three or four people a day needing my bank account to store millions of dollars was funny the first 200 times. I was even tempted to pull their chain for a while but never got around to it. That is treated as spam now. Of course the spam I hate the most are those that have wrong dates. The ones with forward dates are not as much of a pain until I get fast fingers and delete a good message while clearing out spam. I will generally see what I did and go into the deleted box to retrieve it. That is when the 20 forward dated messages get in the way. The good news is they get dated quickly or get tossed when I clean out the box. The very worse are the ones with backward dates. This will force me to scroll up through my saved messages to find them. Do they really think that helps the message get read? I'm not sure if I ever got an important backdated message because I will always delete them unread. There are ones where I would see the senders roasted over a slow fire. These open up a bunch of windows forcing me to reboot to stop it. Slow Mo takes a while to reboot and I lose Internet on the fast computer while it does. The rest of the time I get important mail that I really enjoy. Most start out with asking for forgiveness, as I must be busy. While yes, I do get a lot of messages a day I read, enjoy and reply to each and every one. Do not hesitate to send me an e-mail! I get ideas by interacting with people. As Yuma is not exactly a hot bed of game players I depend on e-mail to understand what is going on in the gaming world. Important note I have given up on my IP ever getting broadband for me. I've been with Mindspring for years and they have given me great service. If they had got me any hint of broadband in the future I would have stayed with them. I did an Internet search and found a company that will give me cable service. Much to my surprise I can get it quickly. The Tech is due the 24 of this month. This means I have suffered with Dialup far longer than I should have. This will likely mean I lose my e-mail address. While great that the spammers will lose me there will be a lot of overall work on my part. This is the second time I have had to change my e-mail and the last time was not fun. Nevertheless getting a cable will not be a minor upgrade. I'm even looking forward to getting my Xbox connected. While there may be a way to keep my old address I'm doubtful I they will let me. I'll give it a good try but I have a feeling they will not make it easy, if even possible. If you have any hints or experience on this please drop me a line. One thing I'm going to do tomorrow is send out a test message to my entire address book. This will allow me to delete the dead address and limit the work. Exciting day Today has been exciting to say the least. First off I get two e-mails saying MS was going to sell Asheron's call to Turbine. They were all text messages and I took them with a grain of salt. More than one e-mail generally means a hoax. All text generally means it is a hoax. Anything too good to be true is generally a hoax. I got an e-mail from a reader of the column saying he got the letter as well. I wrote back saying that until conformed it was a hoax. Imagine my surprise when I logged to the Turbine board and saw it was confirmed! Not only that but they are going to upgrade the graphic, bring out an expansion and start giving AC the support it deservers. I cannot say I saw this coming. My biggest want in the last column had all but MS stepping out of the picture. That would have been too much to dream for. In hindsight we should have seen this coming. Turbine got some seed money just last week. MS has stopped selling AC and was rumored to be dropping it. The developers of another game have just reacquired their product. All the hints were there for us to put it together. I think the reason we didn't see it coming was it was to good to be true. Cliff Bowman My long-term project was changing Cliff's Bowman from a poorly done Archer to an Armor Tinker. I had just short of enough buffs from my last trip to make the last run. As the second part is not so bad I decided to risk running out of buffs on the run. It was a close thing. I ran out of the creature buffs while running along the beach. That is where you will be attacked if anywhere. The Life protects dropped as I made the turn but I outran the only monster in sight. I got back to the mansion and used the gems. I had been waiting because I was getting the points for Endurance and Focus from Quick and Coordination. That would make my Run and Melee Defense far lower. Until I was ready to make the change there was no need to use them. To reiterate this has been a long-term project. I've been going to the two temples ever 14 or so days. I needed to add 50 points to Endurance and 70 points to Focus. That is a minimum of 168 days and with missed days a little longer. I used all the gems and got a few minor and moderate items item installed. I buffed him for Armor tinkering. I ended up with a little more than I though I would, 530. While not in the chain range it is not bad for a player who had not killed anything in years. Tusks My last adventure was getting Tusks with Fist's Armorer. I also made a Pincer run but that is no adventure at all. In fact I might not have made the run if I hadn't burnt my dispel gems in the 80+ Tusker. I decided to skip on the two lower Tusks. They only return 800k and today that is not worth the effort. In fact I would not have bothered with the 500k pincer run if the Leg's did not drop Granite. That fact is amazing to me. It was not that long ago when 800k was to kill for. I also decided to make a run at the 100+ Tusk. While I know that I cannot do that solo with FA there is a rumor that I'll have lots of help. I cannot say for sure but the rumor is the 100+ is heavily camped and not much lives there for long. This meant that my normal path through the Tusker dungeons needed to be modified. I started with the 80+, then the 70 and 60. The reason for that is to be closer to the 100+ when I finished the loop. I think Turbine made changes to the 80+ Tuskers to get rid of the macros that camp it. If so they accomplished their goal. I ported in to an attack by five tuskers. A few feet later I had to fight four or five more. I hit the ramp and had another big group to fight. As long as I could cut the numbers attacking me to two I was ok. Any more than that and I was in trouble. With hits up to 40 they were bring me down fast. It might only take two to three spells to bring down a Tusker but I would have to toss in a heal or two between each attack spell. When I was almost done with the ramp I started to get hit with a back spawn. I knew that there was no way to fight my way through it at that point. I killed the one Tusker between the next ramp and me. I was then in a total run mode. I can do this because I have run through this dungeon a dozen times or more. Without that knowledge it is likely I would not have gotten the tusk. I was only trapped once. That trap did not shut as most tuskers were on the backside. I only had to kill one Tusker to escape and start running again. I got all the way to the end but that was not safe. When I hit the tusk room I had brought a lot of Tuskers with me. I got a corner but that still allowed three Tuskers to attack me at a time. I hit my last dispel gem and started to fight. I would fire off one or maybe two spells, heal a bunch, and finish off the tusker. Of course that Tusker would be replace the second it died so I was no better off. I guess I could have healed and looted but I was being stubborn and killed them all before looking for a tusk. In the end the wasted time did not matter. The 70+ was easy. There was a big fellow hunting inside as I came in. One added me to the fellow. It was a clear run to the Tusk room. I was glad there was someone there, as I could not dispel the Bludgeoning Vulnerability VII on me. I killed ten or so tuskers before finding the Tusk. This helped make up for the time lost in the 80+. I thanked the fellow and dropped it as I exited the dungeon. The last was the 60+ and would not be much danger normally. This was a touch different because I had used all dispel gems. That made me decided to do the Pincers to rebuild my gem stock. The 60+ was very camped so there was no danger. My Bludgeoning Vuln was expired before I ran in but I quickly picked up another by jumping to soon. There were a few spots that had Tuskers but I just ran by them. I got the third tusk and was ready for the run to the 100+. I was running along the beach as far out into the water as I could go. This required me to head back to the beach every so often to get by the water barriers. Here I had a small problem. As I was running towards the beach I hit a section where I became immobile. No matter which way I turned I would not move. The Tuskers just stared at me. I was very afraid I was really running across the island and going to die in some horribly inaccessible spot. I logged to clear the lock up. Much to my surprise I did not log in at the LS. I logged back in the exact spot I had logged out at. Even though Tuskers surrounded me nothing had attacked me. So it was a bad lag spot on the server and not some block in the Internet. The beach started running inward so I had to get very close to shore to keep going. This was a danger, as I would end up running into the invisible blockage. Several Tuskers finally trapped me. Two of the tuskers were the big ones I would be facing in the 100+. On my next try I'll to a total land run. While it was really the Assaulters that did most of the damage the other two were hitting me enough that I knew I could not defeat them all. I'm sure that they resisted every spell I tossed, despite my 415 War skills, but in the excitement I'm not sure. The key problem with those Tuskers was even landing a spell, not the damage they inflict, which is considerable. In any case I was not clearing the Tuskers and was spending 75% of my time healing. Without killing even one of the attacking Tuskers I ported out to safety. How not to do it The one thing I have learned over the years is how important customer service is. This has always made me wonder why MS does so well. It is not known for good customer service. It has seldom had the best product. My guess is marketing and pure momentum has canceled out the weakness in other areas. The one thing MS did was make it easy to get their product. In fact they almost made it impossible not to get their product. Even computers for people that did not want Windows came with it. It took a lawsuit to get MS to stop charging people for the OP they did not need or want. The key to MS's success may well be their making their product easy to get. This was why I was so upset when AC became unavailable. They said search and you'd find a copy. Other than a die-hard gamer who really wants AC that is like saying, go play EQ. If your product is hard to get even the best can fail. The two experiences that sparked this section made things hard for me. It would have been very simple to make it easy. Many products want you to register. This is mostly to get data on who is buying their product. Most people tossed the register card in the trash along with the wrapping paper. Some companies would try underhanded things to force you to register the product. That mostly failed and even MS has had to back off on their demands. This company had a great idea. Have their produced registered on line as part of the instillation process. The first problem I ran into was after I installed it on my new computer was kind of stupid. The registration demanded I input the day I brought the software. Not knowing I skipped that field. I had gotten it a long time ago and never wrote down the date, why should I? When I hit submit it said I missed the sale date and to back up and try again. This is a big mistake because bad data is far worse than no data. When I backed up I found that all the data I had entered was erased and I had to type it in again. I retyped it all in and hit submit. This time it said I missed the country. At that point I closed the window and did not register it. When I installed an expansion I had the same screen but this time got all the data correct on the first try. I just got a third expansion and again tried registering it. After two times of filling out all the data and making small mistakes I gave up and, again, they missed getting what they wanted. When people are going out of their way to do you a favor you need to make it as easy, fast and as simple as possible. You might get away with forcing a customer to do something that is a bother once but after that they will pass. I don't know how hard it would have been for the web master to have the form retain data but not doing so meant they will get far less data. I'm sure most people gave it one attempt and quit. As gathering data is their intent their time and money was wasted. What is worse the customer's time was wasted and could lead to a lost sale in the future. In another example I am trying to order a Wireless Router. (Linksys as it had the best rep for working with AC.) I got a great price on one site and wanted to order it. I really looked but nowhere on the page was there a way to purchase the item. There were links about the product; links about shipping, links about other products but nowhere was there a link to buy the darn thing. Clicking the shopping cart gave me a message that I did not have anything in the cart. There are product details. There was a list of other items on sale. There is a nice picture of the item I wanted. Lastly there is a list of suggested products to get with it. All great stuff but how the hell do you buy it? I finally hovered the mouse over one button that had pop up text saying Find and Buy. That led me to a long list of products for sale. At the very bottom, several pages deep, was the product I wanted. Cicking the link got me back to where I started. (sigh) I back clicked and noted a buy button off on the right side. This was a color that made it blend next to bright color button that attracted the eye. I got it but a less persistent person would have likely moved on. It was a nice website. It had great prices and a good selection. Still they will lose sales because there is no easy way to purchase the product from the main page. The page most people will go to. Both these examples show a web developer with limited human reaction. Engineers are renown for making great products that you need to be an engineer to use. I would hate to see web developers go the same route. Fist rule number one; In other for something to be used it must be readily available. My wife wants me to use a placemat when eating at the coffee table and watching TV. She will then hid the placemat. When she complains about the table damage I just shrug. Put the placemat were I can find it and I'll use it. Fist rule number two; In order for something to be used it must be easy to use for the target user. What might be easy for you may be Greek to someone else. Get other opinions that don't think they same way you do. Note the s in opinions. The more important it is the more people you need to test your idea. Break either of these rules and you will likely fail. Lastly is honesty. I will not be buying from them again because they lied to me. Nowhere during the sale process did they say anything about additional fees. At the very end of the sale they added on a five dollar handling and processing fee. If they had added that to the product to begin with I would have still purchased it. By tacking it on at the end they insured I'd never use them again. Names There is a tread about names on the VN board. The question was who had the coolest name. I guess it shows the maturity of the VN campers that "His Meat" was a top vote getter. While it is very funny to see, "Drudge beats His Meat to a bloody pulp" once or twice, do you really want to have a long-term player with that name? I group names into a few categories. There are real names, joke names, mule names and toss away names. Real names take a little thought. This is what you will be known as. Of course that is old school thought as we were kind of attached to what we made back then. While some were big time re-rollers most stayed with their first players. Connie Wolfbane had one of the worse templates I ever saw but she stayed with it for years. Making a name that was funny or insulting was just not done. With 126lv players being easy to make people are less attached to a ppl today. If it gets deleted, make a new one and be 126 in a few months. This is an advantage and disadvantage I think. While it gives them more freedom it also brings less attachment to the player and game. Joke names are for someone bored and wanting to make people laugh. They are not to be really played. You play them, let everyone get their laugh and put them away until everyone forgets your joke and do it again. Mule names are self-explanatory. Of course you need to be wary about mule names because that mule may become a player. Fist's Armorer has that problem. He was made to be an Armor Tinker mule but became too much fun to play. I'm stuck with the name but at least it is not a joke. Toss away names are ones that have a chance to be deleted by an +Admin. I have seen a lot of these. Sometimes they can dance their way around the meaning of the name and keep the player but they are still at risk. While "Jack alot" might be ok today it only takes one +Admin to see it different and delete him. Insulting names are a matter of maturity. Those that make a play on letters to get racist or sexist names by the filter are generally very immature. The immature may think they are funny and smart but everyone else sees, "Stupid kid". If course it could well be an immature 40 year old but he is projecting "Stupid kid". What bothered me about the replies to that post is the joke names were the most admired. Well thought out names were not posted unless it was the posters name. There are some truly great names out there that deserver far more credit than the jokes. Winter Raven is a good example of a great name. Here is a name that expounds roll playing. It will not insult anyone or conjure negative images. It rolls off the tongue and sparks the imagination. There are so many great names; Elder, William the Bat, Romside, Cher'okee, Nene, Soul Riper, Archmage Lara, Requiem, Monte Cristo and thousands of others that ring hero! So it is up to you. What do you want to be known as, a hero or a joke? Lets admire the well thought out names and leave, "His Meat" to the joke but not a name category. One last name that I really think Turbine needs to delete. This is a name of a popular items or monsters. They are generally made to give Sixth Sense and Bandit Sight fits. While nothing wrong on the surface they were created with malicious intent. Possible Answer I was in the 80+ Matron today when a guy named Joedirtweed joined the fellow. I figured this would be my chance to get a reason for stupid names. I asked him why would he want to known as Joedirtweed? He laughed. I told him really. I wanted to know his reason. At level 106 I figured this was not just a joke name but he really wanted people to recognize him as Joedirtweed. He never answered so I was left with the mystery. As I took my shower it hit me as to a possible reason. We have had a lot of children over at my house this month. We had between 40 and 50 people over for Thanksgiving. Several of my sisters have multiple children under 10 so you can imagine the mad house we have had. One problem with children is they demand attention. If they don't get good attention they will strive for bad. As long as they are the center of attention they are happy. I figured that must be it! The reason for the insulting or just stupid names is clear now. They are waving their hands yelling, "Look at me, look at me." They don't feel they can earn attention by doing something. That positive attention would be welcome but it would require work and luck. Must humans need attention. It is a part of us. How we go about getting that attention defines whom we are. I get attention by writing this column and doing good deeds in the game. Negative attention upsets me. Some think their level will get them attention and it did for a while. Then the lazy decided they wanted the attention and now no one gets it for levels. Not everyone is the same. Thank God for that. The way we work to get attention can help or hurt. Some get their attention by tearing down others. While this is not always seen as getting attention, it is. Most people work toward positive attention. I see people like Cher'okee going out of their way to help others. I see Rene and Soul Riper leading quests and helping wherever they can. I see countless people doing tinker work for nothing. I see people giving away hard earned items just because someone else needs it more than they do. So next time you see someone with a stupid name don't laugh at them, pity them. Their low self-esteem and calls for negative attention may seem laughable but that is what they want. Ignore them and maybe they will go away.