The Noisy Rogue

I’m still in ArcheAge and enjoying it, but goddam this game has been having some problems lately. With exploits galore, bots rampant, gold sellers going nuts, (and by the way, it now seems that mail sent by gold sellers in game can’t be deleted for some reason – the only option is just to send it back. Which is fucking bizarre), and players deserting the game and going back to WoW.

I have no intention of going back to WoW as I have seen the sandbox light. If ArcheAge goes under I still have some tasty sandbox morsels on the horizon such as Camelot Unchained. But the thing that really makes me scratch my head with puzzlement over the ArcheAge debacle is what is going on at Trion.

Let me explain a little something to you. In my working experience which has covered a wide variety of fields all over the world I can confidently put anyone I have worked with into two broad categories. Those who take pride in their work, no matter what it is, and those that do not. The ones who take pride in whatever it is they’re doing tend to be vastly outnumbered. And taking pride isn’t just trying to do the best you can. It’s also about not taking advantage of people or situations for the wrong reasons. It means you possess ethics.

If I were working at Trion in some management position of importance to this game, I wouldn’t be able to take any pride in my work at the moment. There are just too many stuff-ups, and too much belated response. Which leads me to believe that nobody who matters at Trion actually gives a shit about ArcheAge which means they don’t take pride in their work. And if this is true then the game really is doomed. They might be able to plaster over some holes but fundamentally it will stay the same. You can’t fake taking pride anymore than you can fake sincerity. After all, they are one and the same thing.

In the meantime I’ll keep playing away, watching the price of land fall further and further, (you can pick up an 8X8 pretty easily for 50 gold right now), and getting myself to the level cap. And I’ll keep hoping that someone at Trion will step up and start taking some fucking pride in their work.

I love games. I have played them in some form or another all my life. I count myself fortunate to have seen my hobby expand and develop in new and exciting directions. And I value it enough to want to defend it when its very existence is threatened. In Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead’, the character of Ellsworth Toohey is the main villain of the piece. It’s startling how prescient Rand was. Toohey’s tactics of infiltrating and tearing down of an institution by the gradual erosion of its standards is the tactic du jour for the left and their long march through our cultural institutions. They have contaminated and torn down universities and schools, social groups and networks, (such as the CWA in Australia), the media, journalism, art, film and books. Their destruction of the science fiction genre is an illustrative case in point. The Nebula and Hugo awards today mean nothing, a heady fall from grace in a mere 25 years which began in 1988. I was seventeen that year and I have watched the dissolution of a genre I loved with helpless despair.

And now they want our games. And they are using the same tactics as before. A concession here, a seemingly small change there. A gradual building up done with infinite patience over a long period of time. But the key to their assault has always been patience, and that is where they fell down with GamerGate. The ease with which they have won in so many fields of battle made them overconfident and weak. And they played their hand too quickly. And they reacted far too quickly when the general gaming population stirred.

“Depression Quest” was not a game. That was the point. Their tactic has always been to create poor hollow parodies of the art they hate and cannot replicate for lack of talent. The trick has been to get their versions accepted as the norm. Death by a thousand cuts. Controlling the media is the key to winning this in the gaming industry. Controlling the Nebula and Hugo awards was key to overcoming the science fiction genre, amongst other things.

GamerGate is about the gaming media, of course, but one must not confuse the issue and equate that the gaming media is GamerGate, because it is not. Gamergate is a reaction to the attempted subversion of the gaming industry to the left’s long march through all of our cultural institutions. It is the ultimate defense to their attack and it is vitally important to anyone who values games. To put it simply, if enough people do not stand and recognise this then we will not have a gaming hobby in the years to come. We will only have the games that they tell us we can have.

On the one hand I rejoice in the fact that Gamergate has come about. On the other hand I lament the deafening silence from the general gaming blogging community. They cannot or will not see the danger at the door. The wolf lying in their bed in grandmother’s clothing. Anita Sarkeesian is one of these wolves. She is the Ellsworth Toohey of the gaming industry, but without the smarts or the cruel ability. And she has just been publicly eviscerated. Will it wake up my fellow bloggers and gamers? Probably not, but one would be a start.

Have you ever heard of the IGDA? Until yesterday, I hadn’t. Apparently they’re the “International Game developers Association” that have a sub-branch called WiG, (Women in Games …). I heard about them yesterday due to the fact that they actively supported, promoted, and it may turn out helped get off the ground a nice little Twitter “blockerbase” designed to block twitter accounts from their users twitter lists under the pretext of those being blocked being labelled guilty of harassment, a word which is in great danger of falling off a cliff due to being used incorrectly. I’m pretty disappointed at not being on the list. Other #GamerGate supporters are apparently launching legal action. Twitter has, of course, exploded, (another word in danger of dissolving into obsolescence).

All of this is fun and illuminating in many ways. #GamerGate continues into its third month, a lifetime on the internet, and i can tell you that it’s not 100 users making 60% 0f the posts. Good old Damion Schubert continues to post about #GamerGate without drawing pause for breath, whilst simultaneously declaring it a dud warhorse devoid of any influence. And apart from banning on general lists, (that one I linked to, by the way, includes over 10,000 twitter accounts), there’s now the resounding push from the anti-#GamerGate camp to label any supporters of the #GamerGate movement as … wait for it … misogynists.

You’d think they’d come up with something new by now.

Let’s talk about this miserable excuse for a man who has articulated so thoughtfully his position on the topic. Leaving aside the fact he is brandishing a knife, [is he insinuating that he’s going to go all ‘Jihad John’ on our asses? – ED], this is what you could happily label a “useful idiot”, although we’d have to leave our definition of the term useful rather broad. He is a white knight. He is a member of the male gender who is unable to attract a woman in the traditional sense, (assuming in this day and age that it is in fact a female that he wants to attract). To compensate for this handicap, these individuals seek to insinuate themselves on the side of that which they so desperately desire. With the left, it’s always about the sex you know. At school, if in fact he’s not still there, his strategy would have been to position himself as a girl’s male best friend. He would be her shoulder to cry on when those nasty boyfriends that she dated treated her badly. And he would constantly agonise over why she couldn’t see that he was the perfect guy for her.

These sad people become older, although they don’t grow up. Damion Schubert is simply a more sophisticated version but still cut from the same cloth. As they become more repressed, so their feelings of outraged indignity intensify. They will charge in to defend women at any price, in any situation, on any battlefield. No matter the nature of the person they are seeking to protect, she is above reproach because she is a she. And anyone who attacks her, and attacking means just being on the side of those who desire no more collusion and corruption in gaming journalism, is labelled a misogynist.

These members of the male gender are traitors to their own sex. They are quislings and they should be treated as the pariahs they are. They see no hypocrisy in their stance. The fact that they themselves are members of what they are seeking to condemn does not hold weight nor occur to them. They are apologists for an extreme feminist movement that would like nothing better than to see men wiped from the face of the earth as they dream of a future utopia where children are conceived artificially from banks of frozen sperm. The battlefield of #GamerGate is merely another front in the war on men in which these parasitic creatures so gleefully participate.

And they’re still not getting laid. Because the worst thing you can do is put the pussy on a pedestal.

Soon after you begin playing ArcheAge you will begin to wonder how to get some of your very own land. Even if this was never your gaming intention, you will succumb. As you journey through the world you will see player farms, houses, aquatic farms and housing, castles, workstations, and nudist colonies. And you will start to want your very own piece of the world. And then you will cry and mash your face against your keyboard in frustration.

Here are a few tips to help you through the wilderness. Firstly, there are two ways to get land – buy some or do some starter quests and be lucky enough to find an unclaimed plot. Buying is fraught with danger as there are unscrupulous individuals who like nothing better than to take your coin and run for the hills. It works like this; buyer gives them the money to buy the land, they take the money and laugh in buyer’s face. Or, they dismantle their plot for the buyer to place their own, which they do and then the buyer laughs in the seller’s face.

How to Buy:

One of the two parties needs appraisal certificates which can be purchased from the in-game store or on the auction house. The party that stumps up the certs will lose 15% of the transaction due to the costs involved so negotiate wisely on this one. With the certs in hand the seller can open a window which lets them set the selling price, (the number of certs required will reflect this), and then they can list the property for sale. They can put the property up for general sale, (some little 4 sale signs will pop up in each corner of the plot), or they can specify a buyer by name, which is hopefully you. If they specify by name then only that player can click on the signs and complete the transaction.

If you sell your original 16X16 farm plot you cannot obtain another one in game except by purchasing another. Also, as far as I can ascertain, it’s not possible to sell 8X8s in this manner, so be very wary of scam merchants trying to pull a swifty on you.

How to Build:

Soon after you start a new toon you will stumble across a quest with the Blue Salt Brotherhood about farming. Following this quest to its conclusion gives you a small farm plan and the materials to set it up. This is the only way to get a small farm in the game. These cannot be purchased by any means. You cannot even sell them between alts, or even mail them between alts for that matter. Set up your little farm if you can find a spot and now you can do a little bit of farming. Yey! Mine is on a little outcrop high up in Hasla.

But soon you will tire of the boundaries of this small property and yearn for bigger things. Complete the 16×16 quest line, (which involves you having to turn a trade pack into the enemy faction’s port across the sea – fun times!), and you have the plan for your large farm, (but not the mats.) Finding a spot for this baby, however, is vastly more difficult. Last night we had a rough dozen of our guildies at an expiring large scarecrow plot and it was nabbed by a player who wasn’t even there using a hacking program.

Small farm plots, thankfully, are easier to find and less fought over. With the release of the new expansion we’ve seen a number of these become available. As well, the price of land has fallen, with 16x16s going for around 400-600g gold, whereas before they’d routinely fetch 1400.

Multiple 8x8s:

This can be done, but not with farms. Let’s say you have your original 8×8 but another one is expiring soon near your isolated little plot and you’re salivating at the thought of picking up the land. The key is to claim it with a workstation such as a leatherworking or carpentry bench. The plans for these can be purchased on Mirage Isle using 30 gildas. Get your plan and plonk it down on the land, (hot tip – when placing the workbench, adjust it by 45 degrees so the corners are at right angles to the plot corners. This will enable you to utilise the corner spaces to plant small crops.) Now all you have to do is pay the taxes and build two trade packs, (stone and leather if you want to build a leatherworking bench for example), and you have another plot. A whole bunch of things can be added to a workstation, such as storage chests, farmers work stations, and decorative items. And now you’re well on your way to becoming an ArcheAge land baron … of sorts.

Last week, good old Damion Schubert wrote another long-winded waffle-bucket post outlining in excruciating dullness how us folks at #GamerGate supposedly had a terrible week.  You would think after reading that post, [only possible if you enjoy such pleasures as masturbating with a cheese-grater – ED], that the #GamerGate movement was about to surge down a plughole into oblivion.

But if we had a bad week last week, then the AntiGamergate movement has had a shitstorming fucktard of a week up to now. I joined Twitter for the express purpose of keeping up to date with events, and Lordy, it’s been an eye-opening experience. Here are just a few of the catastrophic adventures from the SJW pinky left who oppose good games and demand equalities and wymens and, you know the deal by now.

Schubert accused us of horrible Holocaust denial in his post, but at least we didn’t go around advocating that our opposition should all be thrown into Treblinka’s newly re-opened gas chambers. For that we have to thank a sniveling nobody known as Geordie Tait, who not only advocated the mass-killing of GamerGate supporters, (thanks mate), he also had an epic meltdown when the site he writes for changed their tagging system, resulting in him writing a long diatribe on facebook of all places when he assumed they’d struck out all his previous ‘articles.’ Fail-cake doesn’t get bigger than this.

But one nut-bag doesn’t represent the #anti-gamergate movement. Right?

Wrong. Here’s a nice catalog of industry figures giving their support to this little trumped-up Nazi, [apparently he likes his own Facebook posts – ED]. Thankfully the #GamerGate movement isn’t one to assume that one individual speaks for all …

Then we had major D list celebrity Wil Wheaton write a gloriously facile op-ed post in the Washington Post, where he advocated for the removal of anonymity in gaming, under the guise of if you’ve got nothing to hide why hide at all? The real reason that dropkicks like Wheaton desire this cloak to be lifted is that the person making a comment is more important than the comment itself. They’d like nothing more than to be able to go on a personal attack on any individual that crosses their path, which of course is hugely ironic considering the majority of their wailing is when their own tactic is turned against them. Mind you, I’m quite happy that good old Wil has jumped on the opposition’s bandwagon, although I’m not too sure that they’re all that happy about it.

Journalist Milo Yiannopoulos who tweets under the name @Nero, was banned from Twitter this week for apparently saying things that SJWs don’t like, [he’s the ‘wrong’ type of gay man as far as they’re concerned -ED]. 12 hours later his account was reinstated after a furious Twitter war resulted in the SJWs having a most short-lived victory. But as I tweeted, the only reason they tried to get him banned in the first place was because his words do great damage to their crumbling house.

But the best thing to come out of this week was #OpSKYNET, named for operation Skynet out of the terminator movies. This was launched in response to the previous week’s infighting which resulted in a lot of supporters of #GamerGate realising that they didn’t want to rely on authority figures within the movement to carry it forward. The movement is grassroots and intends to stay that way. We are advocating only one thing, and that is good games. #OpSKYNET was a huge success, so much in fact that poor old Schubert wrote a wailing post of angst in which he lamented at length on the fact that Twitter is broken because his side isn’t winning.

A week is a long time in #GamerGate.

The favored attack of SJWs is the ad hominem. It’s an easy way for them to feel safe and secure in the false characterization of their intended victim, and it’s a big trap for the unsuspecting recipient. For the inexperienced layman coming across this situation, one’s normal reaction is to go on the defensive and attempt to explain why you are not whatever they are accusing you of being. This plays right into their hands as they then embark on continuing rounds of illogical argument designed to drive their victim to despair. A common tactic is to get the victim to apologise – apologising isn’t so hard, is it? This again is a big trap, much like when they ask for concessions – give them an inch and they’ll take a mile. And they are never ever satisfied. They will keep going until you are destroyed.

So for the unitiated I have prepared a sample list of common ah hom attacks that SJWs use in these situations. This list is not comprehensive, (it is rather difficult to keep up with the bewildering number of terms which they continue to invent as it suits them), so I encourage my faithful readers to add their own to this list. Perhaps some SJWs can chime in, in case I’ve missed any that they know about! Ahahahahahahaha. But seriously folks …

Racist – a white person who disagrees with a non-white SJW on any matter.

Misogynist – a man who disagrees with an SJW female on any matter.

Homophobe – a man who disagrees with a homosexual SJW on any matter. For some reason females are exempt from this tag.

Fascist – Term used by an ‘intellectual’ SJW in place of Racist.

Bigot – Back-up insult used together with one of the other terms to add weight to the abuse.

Vandal – Someone who disagrees with an SJW over anything to do with the environment.

Denier – Anyone who refuses to follow the Great Global Warming scam.

Gamer – a new insult signifying a person who does not agree that games should be a platform for SJW activism.

Sexist – Back-up insult used with one of the other terms to add weight to the abuse.

Rapist – a man who does not adhere to a strict, vague and ever-changing performance and behaviour criteria during any form of physical contact with a female.

Traitor – any female or non-white person who disagrees with an SJW on any matter.

Not a real ‘…’ – someone of a protected sub-group who disagrees with an SJW on any matter. For example, “He is not a real homosexual.”

Victimizer – anyone who opposes any SJW on any matter.

Intolerant Oppressor – a person who objects to another culture’s practice no matter its shape, form or intent.

Nazi – a person who publically wins an argument against an SJW.

Tea-bagger – a woman or gay man who is penetrated by a non-SJW man.

Sock-Puppet – a lower caste version of a victimizer. Victimizers are a legitimate threat to SJWs, whereas sock-puppets are akin to bees in a bee hive. Trust me, it makes sense to them.

So Trion badly stuffed up their Auroria release which resulted in a huge percentage of players being locked out with a disconnect issue while a lucky few swooped in and took all of the new land release. I was one of those locked out players and i gave up attempting to log in after half an hour. Saylah over at Mystic Worlds has a good little rundown of the event and its problems. (Incidentally, I think she has some of the best, if not the best current commentary of ArcheAge so give her new blog a look).

There has been some major meltdown on the official forums and a good deal of butt-hurt and general angst is present there in all its glory. Myself, I’m not too fussed. If a bunch of players get all upset and leave the game crying into their cornflakes, well that just leaves more goodies for the rest of us. The biggest whinge at the moment is that there is not enough land and it’s not fair! What these people fail to understand is that land and its cost is based on supply and demand. So if a wave of players leave the game then the cost of land will go down. That is how basic economics works, [try telling that to EU governments – ED]. At the moment I have a little 8×8 plot in Hasla courtesy of Syncaine’s abortive attempt at the game. But even without that plot there is so much to do in this game and so very many ways to make money that purchasing land is not going to be a problem.

The problem that these players have is that, they want land right now! Now, baby! Now! These are the people that you can make a lot of money off if you’re selling. It’s why credit companies exist. let’s face it, the majority of people in real life suck very badly at the whole money thing. If you’re currently in debt then you unfortunately are one of those people. Gevlon is a master at making money from players who aren’t able to plan a shopping trip profitably and I’m not too shabby at it myself either. Myself, I’m more than happy to sit back, work on my fishing, get a bit better at PvP, do trade runs, maybe get a little clipper and sail around the oceans, mine lots of iron ore at the vast ore area I found that not many players know about, and keep leveling my toon. All these are fun and I will be steadily making the monies. And I will be keeping my eye on the land market. And when the time is right I will begin to acquire. That is my long term plan. And Trion’s enormous balls-up has just played right into my hands. Or to put it another way, I plan on making the most of this stuff-up on their part. You should too.

Vox Day has a post up concerning what is supposed to be a leaked internal post from Gawker Media’s Nick Denton. Here is the interesting bit:

“… It was there all along and oh so very simple. infiltrate the group and kill
them from the inside. The media parade that has been going on for weeks
now hasn’t done anything worth a damn. Time and effort thrown out the
window with needless articles over this shit show. None of it has made a damn bit of difference until now. Everyone is eager to throw themselves at mainstream outlets. but none of them are eager to spend the money they are already using to fix this problem the right way. So I had someone send out feelers looking for people to work on a “special project” for me. Those that made it through screening have been taking part in an effort to police the group from the inside, causing a wedge to be driven amongst them. Today serves as evidence of money well spent. they have begun to crack and their influential people are beginning to part ways with the group.

Eventually there will be such a small minority that it will just blow over and nobody will care …”

My bullshit antenna went up very quickly on reading this. If gamergate was really such a problem and you had gone to such lengths to infiltrate its activities, why would you be sending out this sort of rubbish even internally? This seems to me to be an attempt to salvage something from their own failed infiltration attempt. In other words, their initial plan didn’t work so maybe they can stir up the gamergaters by “leaking” this one out to the general mainstream. Once again, and I’ve said it before, the anti-gamergate crowd is in serious trouble because their usual tactics are not working and they are not astute enough to put themselves in the heads of their opponents in order to figure out what to do. They think everyone sees the world the same way that they do and they react accordingly.

There is another possibility as well. That they really did do an infiltration attempt and that this memo was indeed leaked from inside Gawker. Which behooves me to ask, who has exactly done the infiltrating here? You’re boasting internally that you’ve gone and infiltrated your enemy and someone on the inside of your organisation leaked that out? That’s kind of embarrassing and ironic all rolled up into one fun-bag of shame if you ask me. Either way the panic continues.

One of my very first posts on this blog was how I set up my action bar in WoW. And now I’m getting serious about ArcheAge I’ve used the same method here with good success. For those too lazy to click the link, essentially what I do is bind the majority of my combat abilities to the scroll wheel on my mouse. Scroll up and I make my main attack. Scroll down and my secondary which has a combo effect as well. And then click the mouse wheel for my third main attack.

Three options doesn’t sound like much but the possibilities are endless when you take other keyboard buttons into account. Most of my stuns are locked into the mouse wheel in the same positions, but I activate these by hitting shift at the same time. So shift + mouse wheel forward is my main stun. My healing and escape options are bound to Alt + mouse wheel. On top of that I have a logitech g600 mouse which has 12 buttons on the side grip for a variety of other possibilities. But I find these close together and it can be tricky in tight moments. That’s why a mouse wheel option is so good as you cannot make a mistake.

Recently I was talking to an MMO player who uses an infra-red mouse. This player has played primarily PvE games in the past. I want to make it clear that you will get slaughtered in PvP with a cordless mouse. The difference in reaction time with a mouse with a cord is big enough to be the difference between life and death in PvP.

I am now level 30 in ArcheAge. Yesterday I took my trade pack from the safety of my continent across the sea to the enemy wasteland in an attempt to hand in the quest to obtain a large farm. I have a small farm but I can’t get to it, as it is locked away in the high level pvp zone of Hala. Before, I journeyed there with ease through a portal that came out in one of our guildies’ houses. But that guildie began to play weirdly. She made repeated rearrangements of the indoor layout, blocking off the exits with high screens that required complicated feats of aerial acrobatics off high ledges to reach the door. I assumed she was doing this to deter intruders and that we just had to put up with it. But it turns out that she was a plant in the guild designed to spread disunity and harm, and her plan achieved she has left with her cohorts in tow and the door to her house is firmly locked. Access to farm securely denied for now.

Syncaine has abandoned the guild but I persevere as I presently have no other options. I took my tradepack overland from Mahadevi into Austera. This is not the traditional route to take, but I had seen chat reports of a large fleet of reds camped offshore further north. I had three options to make the crossing. Go with a convoy, row my little rowboat, or swim. I had no convoy as my guild is dead. My rowboat would have been a sitting duck out on the high seas. I chose the only alternative which was to swim the bastard.

I played Pirates of the Burning Sea back in the day. If anyone is still playing that rubbish you better to get over to ArcheAge right now. This is no pretend sea like WoW. This is no sea that exists only on coastlines and the rest in the imagination. This shit is real and it is big. It is populated by beasties and flocks of seagulls hovering over schools of fish. Storm clouds thunder ahead and lightening strikes around you as you get closer. And then there is the enemy. You are alone on a huge ocean, swimming gamely along and then suddenly a clipper ship streaks up from the horizon. I would have been lost numerous times but I had delayed this crossing until I had obtained the stealth ability in the shadowcraft tree. My crossing alternated from swim sprinting as I drained my mana reserves to a very slow stealth cruise as I avoided trouble around me. It was nerve-wracking, and the closer I got to my goal the tenser the situation became. Which is just how I like a game to be. There were a few high level reds swimming in the water on my final approach, and I worried that they might have had some super stealth-seeing abilities, but my plan held true and I made the dock and turned in my pack. Then I zoned the hell outta there.

I haven’t mentioned the water yet. The graphic water features are nothing short of superb. I remember years back when WoW had a major patch upgrade and the water features improved and we all went nerdlike crazy over it. This makes that look like a pre-school drawing versus The Last Supper. The water is water, that’s all there is to it. Your toon swims through the water and it is real swimming. When I began playing computer games way back in the early eighties I couldn’t have dreamed of something like this. And in an MMO. And the sea is real, there are no screen-loading shots from zone to zone. I don’t care about all of Trion’s problems and people paying to win. I really don’t care. Because this old gamer has found his sea, and me, I’m getting a boat.