Returning Again to My Gamer Profile

I have done the gamer motivation profile thing over at Quadratic Foundry a few times at this point.  It is one of those things that comes up every now and then, often part of something like Blaugust.  So you can read about my past runs… and how they differ every time… if you so desire.

• May 2020 – A Flawed Profile in Gamer Motivation
• Aug 2019 – My Gamer Motivation Profile Once Again
• Jun 2015 – Who Says I am Calm, Spontaneous, and Grounded?

However, I received an email from them last week that said they had something new for their profiles now.  They now have an array of nine gamer types to go up against Bartle’s now ancient array of Explorer, Socializer, Achiever, and Killer quadrants.  They are:

The Nine Gamers to oppose the Nine Riders

They are, if you cannot read the chart:

• Acrobat
• Gardener
• Slayer
• Skirmisher
• Gladiator
• Ninja
• Bounty Hunter
• Architect
• Bard

You can read about them in detail over on the page that describes them.

So naturally I wanted to see which type I was.  That meant going back and running through the quiz again, which is always the largest flaw in such and enterprise.  As I have said numerous times, the questions are a bit… squishy.  What I deem important can change depending upon the game or situation.  And, as such, my profile changes every time I re-do the quiz, as it did this time.

If you have an account, as I do, when you re-take the quiz you get to see your previous answers and the fact that I end up changing at least half of them every time is a pretty good indication that the question don’t have hard and fast answers.  At least not for me.

So I am apparently and Architect/Skirmisher this time around.

I am at war with myself

• Architects are solo gamers that enjoy planning, decision-making, and progression. They prefer slow-paced, relaxing gameplay where they can plan and build something grand and enduring.

I guess.  Certainly that describes my Minecraft style.

• Skirmishers want fast-paced team arenas that are accessible and easy to jump into. They are highly spontaneous gamers who dislike games that require thinking and planning.

And that sounds like the polar opposite of architect.  So I like relaxed solo, fast paced team games, and I enjoy planning but dislike thinking and planning.  I am also a by the book cop who is a loose cannon who breaks all the rules or something.

My adjectives this time around were: Aggressive, Spontaneous, Driven, Gregarious, and Immersed.

That is kind of a lot, while my graph, which I have posted with each of these was:

Where my motivations lay

And, as usual, once you have the profile the site tries to recommend games.  My top ten matches (for PC and Nintendo Switch) were:

1. Animal Crossing (series)
2. Starbound
3. Diablo (series)
4. No Man’s Sky
5. Stardew Valley
6. Elite: Dangerous
7. The Sims 3
8. ARK: Survival Evolved
9. Fallout Shelter
10. Borderlands (series)

I own games from half that list, but never really got into them save for Diablo.  The first game I have really invested time in on the list is Minecraft, which made it on page three of the recommendations.

Of course, judging from the Massively OP post where they did their surveys, an MMO player needs to be a Bard.  If I read the description for Bard, that sounds a bit like me too.  Maybe less on the social interaction, but certainly the bit about being a part of a grand story.  So I probably answered the questions badly yet again.  But if you go back and take the quiz knowing what you want the result to be, is it any more or less valid?

I went back and changed very little… slightly more emphasis on one thing, a little less on others, but no answer moved by more than one position… and ended up with Bard/Bounty Hunter.

Bard yes, but a Bounty Hunter?

• Bards are team players who want to chat and interact with other players in game worlds that are rich with lore, stories, discovery, and customization. For them, the game is a grand story that emerges from a community of players.

That is sort of me.  I am less of a chatter and more interested in interacting with the world.  Being part of a grand story that emerges from a community of players pretty much pegs why I play EVE Online the way I do, but not WoW or many other MMORPGs… largely because the grand story is scripted and has little or nothing to do with the community of players in those games.

• Bounty Hunters are solo, action-oriented explorers who want game worlds that they can make their own through customization and discovery. They also enjoy power progression and unleashing mayhem.

I think the questions about explosives and being an agent of chaos are more influential than one might suspect.  That is the only thing I can imagine would get me on the Bounty Hunter type.  I am not really at “action oriented” explorer by my own measure.  Look how low my action score is both times.

At the root those small changes altered my motivations a lot more significantly than I would have guessed.

Are my motivations a lie?

You can see my current profile in detail here.

With the change of profile, my game recommendations changed… a bit.

1. City of Heroes
2. Slime Rancher
3. Animal Crossing (series)
4. Star Wars: The Old Republic
5. The Elder Scrolls Online
6. Fallout Shelter
7. The Sims 3
8. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
9. The Elder Scrolls (series)
10. Dragon Age (series)

I guess I should be happy some MMORPGs made the first page this time, though I have to question City of Heroes being a recommendation.  You cannot legally play it currently, as it is only available via private/pirate servers.  Also, like the other MMORPGs that made the top ten, it was never a game I could get into really.  Not my thing.  And, of course, WoW and EVE Online appear nowhere on either recommendation list.

So there we go.  Am I what the first pass through the quiz said I was or the second?  Should I go take it again until it gets me right?

California Explores Gaming Power Usage

The misperception that computer gaming is conducted only at the “fringe” of society has dampened curiosity about their role in energy use.

-A Plug-Loads Game Changer: Computer Gaming Energy Efficiency without Performance Compromise

The state of California issued a 92 page long report last year exploring the electrical usage of computer gaming in the state,  prepared for the California Energy Commission by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, exploring both why video games use as much electricity as they do and how the state might plan for the future related to gaming power usage.

That electrical generation has an environmental impact is multiplied by the fact that the northern half of the state is mostly served by one of the more dysfunctional companies of the breed, Pacific Gas & Electric.  The company has gone bankrupt twice in the last two decades and has a habit of setting up situations where it ends up blacking out large swathes of the state due to its own incompetence.  Even my late grandfather used to refer to it as “Perpetual Graft & Extortion.”

Anyway, the whole report is available for download from the state as a PDF file here.  But the key graph early in the report indicates why this is even being discussed as it ranks various categories of electrical usage.

Estimate Power Use of Various Residential Activities in 2016

That is computer gaming using 4.1 terawatt-hours of electricity, which puts it ahead of the total power consumption of Cambodia, if the CIA is to be believed and I am able to do the unit conversion in my head.  Also, we appear to use about a terawatt-hour of electricity a year on hot tub pumps.  I could have guessed that I suppose.

The report opens, naturally enough, with how this number was arrived at, definitions for quite a few terms (kind of interesting), an attempt to break gamers out into discreet usage segments, and even a chart of power usage for specific titles from various gaming  genres on different platforms. Also, there is the revelation that people play a lot of games online.

For the purposes of this report the computer gaming energy use category includes:

…desktop and laptop computers, consoles, and media streaming devices and associated displays, local network equipment, and speakers, as well as associated network and data-center energy.

If I wanted to nitpick, I would go straight to asking how data-center power usage figures into  residential plug-load numbers, but nobody is going to listen to me and I suppose as long as we’re only referencing data centers within the state then I ought to let it slide.  Even the report admits that the whole thing is complicated to address.

Then there is the matter of what we should do about it.  As I like to put it, the “So what?” part of the report that attempts to move it from interesting trivia to some for of action.  As the report points out, there has not been a lot of focus on energy consumption in this area, dubious EnergyStar ratings and efficiency measurements for computer power supplies (the 80 Plus program) being about the sum total of the efforts.

The possible suggestions include expanding power/efficiency ratings for components to having a system of ratings for games that indicate the energy use effects that they might have, along with some possible ways to incentivize players to use less power.

Then there are some forecasts of power consumption going forward involving various scenarios from the status quo maintained to VR takes off to consoles explode well beyond current popularity.

In the end it is mostly an interest read, an attempt by some people serious about their jobs to quantify, explore, and explain a complex situation that defies easy measure.

Much of the information in the study is based on earlier studies which are available online from Greening the Beast and which go into more depth in places:

• Taming the Energy Use of Gaming Computers
• Green Gaming: Energy Efficiency without Performance Compromise

In the end you and I pay the electrical bill, so it makes some sense to be at least somewhat aware of the impact game, setting, and hardware choices might have on your monthly statement.

The Ride Across Forochel

At the end of Volume I Book XII the cut scene intoned that the other half of the ring Narchuil, the current focus of the epic quest line, was somewhere in Forochel.

If it involves this server, it gets this graphic

However, the narrator pronounced as though it was spelled “for oh hell,” which was odd because I had always thought it was “for oh shell” or maybe “for oh chill.”  But that is what happens when you see a word written for many years without anybody saying it aloud I suppose.  And the same cut scene also pronounced “Narchuil” as “nar hu will” so I guess the silent “c” is a thing.  I only remember the hard “c” from the appendix when applied to names like “Cirdan” and “Celeborn.”

While I have been to Forochel before and have run a lot of the quests there, that was quite a while ago. Like, back in 2011. But I have a screen shot to prove I was there.

What I had forgotten was how big the zone is.  And the maps in the game do not really convey size very well, as they are all the same size in the game and do not have a scale listed.

An older Forochel map from the wiki because it is cleaner

Seriously, Forochel is a deceptively large piece of real estate relative to other zones. I rode into Forochel from Evendim, which was not that long of a ride. Book XIII, chapter 2 sends you to the first Lossoth encampment, Kauppa-kohta. There you check in, only to be sent on to Suri-kyla, the capital of the Lossoth people, to speak to the chieftain. I could ride on my own or pop a mithril coin for the stable master to get me to the next stop. Having a pile of mithril coins still, I opted to just ride, heading to the next stable master down the road and… that took a while.

Kauppa-kohta to Pynti-peldot took nearly five and a half minutes, stable master to stable master.

Pynti-peldot to Suri-kyla, my actual destination, was a further five minute ride, stable master to stable master.

To put that into perspective, going from the Foresaken Inn to Ost Guruth in the Lone Lands takes three and a third minutes. I would estimate that is about 75% of the length of the zone, so the whole of the Lone Lands end to end ought to be about a four and a half minute ride.

So the distance between stops in Forochel are pretty much the length of the Lone Lands.  You could basically fit the Lone Lands in between Kauppa-kohta to Pynti-peldot. Yes, the rides are not exactly as the crow flies, but then the road through the Lone Lands does a bit of twisting at the end as well.

And then where you need to go eventually is Kuru-leiri, which is way around on the other side of the bay… and you can’t just go all Evendim and swim there because the frozen water will defeat you… another case where defeat stands in for death… which means you need to make another ride back to Pynti-peldot and then a further ride to Zigilgund, something that closes in on ten minutes of riding again, and which still leaves you a fair walk from your destination.

Or you can spend a mithril coin and use the swift travel Kuru-leiri. Except that once you get to Kuru-leiri you cannot get the stable master stop. That requires you to finish a quest back at Suri-kyla which, in the usual kick in the nuts approach that the Turbine team seemed to prefer back in the day, the quest requires you to go all the way over to just shy of Kuru-leiri, do a few things, the go all the way back to Suri-kyla before you can get the stable master. Book XIII sends you over that way repeatidly, so you really want that stable master, and while I could just toss mithril coins at the problem, I feel the need to paraphrase the punchline to an old joke by saying, “Darling, do you think I’m made of mithril coins?”

Anyway, now that I have beaten that to death, suffice to say that I spent more time traveling back and forth than I would have preferred.  I’ll just sum it up in map form.

Your direct travel options in Forochel

This, of course, points out a problem I always have.  While the game is trying to tell me this epic tale, a series of background tasks that helped make the victory over Sauron possible, I am always more interested in my own story, the odd situations, and the petty inconveniences I have to face along the way, and riding all over Forochel makes that list.

Snow zones…

Seriously, I try to imagine the books written to conform to how some of these quest chains run.  What if the fellowship of the ring had to run back to Rivendell and consult with Elrond every third event.  Oh, the Redhorn Gate is snowed in, better ask Elrond.  Damn, the door to Moria is locked, better ask Elrond.  Hrmm, Gandalf is dead, everybody back to Rivendell for a consult.

But there I was in the snow, looking for the other half of the lesser ring Narchuil and hoping not to have to report back to Rivendell any time soon.

With the revelation that the remaining bit of the ring was in Forochel the usual cast of characters seemed destined to follow on.  First on the scene was Mordrambor, agent of Angmar, and special guest star in the epic quest line since Book X and the running about in Evendim.  He showed up to throw his weight around in the usual way.

Yeah, yeah, defy Angmar and face the whatever

Given that my fate so far has been that of glorified messenger between various NPCs, the locals ought to be wary of sharing it.

After doing various tasks to gain the favor and trust of the Lossoth eventually Saija consented to lead me to the missing ring.  This is another instance that was supposed to be fellowship only, but which you get the now usual buff in order to handle it solo.

And the end of the instance Mordrambor shows up, because of course he does, and Saija opts out on fighting him, so I am there to face him alone.

He obviously isn’t familiar with the mechanics of LOTRO

But first, of course, we have to have the monologue about the futility of my task.

This is your elevator pitch, isn’t it?

Then we fight.  With all the buffs and a decent rotation I am wearing him down, when suddenly Amarthiel appears, stuns me, and squares off against Mordrambor.  How many ways into this place are there?  Did we have to take the long way?

At this point my failure to pay close attention to the story starts to show, since I am a bit hazy on why these two are fighting again.  I get it, they both want the ring.  But don’t they essentially play for the same team?  I mean, Mordrambor is there declaring himself a servant to the Great Eye and Amarthiel was just on the palantir to Mordor to speak to his Eyeness not so far back in the tale.  I guess this is more of an office politics thing on the dark side.

Mordrambor, for all his talk, isn’t keen to stick around, though he leaves on an implied promise of a return visit.

You’ve not seen the last of me!

Amarthiel also departs, leaving me alive and/or undefeated this time.  Why, I don’t know.  But there I am and there is an ancient chest to hand… because nobody every stores things in a recently built chest.

Inside I found… uh…

Fragment? What does that mean?

At that point I was done with the instance and, as far as the epic quest line was concerned, done with Forochel for the moment.  The next step was, as expected, a run back to Rivendell to consult with Elrond.

I didn’t jump right on that however.  Elrond is a patient man… elf… half elf I guess.  I had done enough to get pretty well along with my reputation with the locals.  This was a bit of a surprise since you start with a factional deficit.   However, the mobs in the zone drop lots of trinkets that, when consumed, raise your reputation, so I was able to get the Lossoth to kindred without a ton of effort.  I was a bit disappointed that their mount wasn’t a moose or something, but I’ll take a tundra pony in a pinch.

That done, I headed back to Rivendell to tell my tale.  There I learned that “fragment” meant “the other half” and that basically all of Narchuil had been secured.  Laerdan was all giddy to get on the road to Erigon, where the rings were forged during the second age of Middle-earth, and get to work putting Narchuil back together.  And so it seemed that I might be headed to Eregion at last, the final zone in the pre-Moria content.

The Coming Battle in 9-4RP2

Not too long after this post goes live the first fleets will be forming up.  Fleets of ships, each as big as 255 pilots in size, will start to coalesce and begin their last minute preparations.  The final timer for a Pandemic Horde Keepstar in the system  9-4RP2 in Cloud Ring set to expire later today.

I logged in last night to take one last peek.  There were fewer than 40 people in system.  The Imperium citadels ringing the Keepstar sat in silent vigil, watching the timer tick down.

Less than a day to go at that point…

That was at about 04:00 New Eden time, which puts the the start of the Keepstar repair cycle at about 22:00.

In a bit of a quirk, a bunch of the citadels around the Keepstar hit their vulnerability window a few hours before the big fight, so there is the possibility of some early action, though Asher says that nobody defends on the shield timer, so it might just be some attackers and people gunning the citadels exchanging shots, but it will be a side show to the main event.

The PH 9-4RP2 Keepstar

As these things tend to go, the form up and the start of any fight will happen while I am still at the office.  The earliest I can possibly be home and logged in is about 23:00 New Eden time, which is a full hour after the timer.

That is still better than last week, as the times have crept later and later with each fight.  But, if nobody shows up to defend the Keepstar… or if nobody shows up to attack it… the whole thing will be over in 30 minutes and I won’t even be on the road home by then.

I’m pretty sure the attackers are going to show up.  Imperium Jabber has been full of pings about the coming battle over the last five days… which probably means half the coalition still doesn’t know about it.  There have been no end of move ops to get ships pre-positioned for the fight, while the capital ops have been opened up, and reimbursement offered, to people who can only qualify for CrapSwarm, to fill out as many capital fleets as possible.  We shall see if people will risk their ratting carriers.

Which leaves the defenders.

I suppose the easiest option for Pandemic Horde would be to play the “Didn’t want that Keepstar anyway, made you form!” card and just let the Keepstar die without forming.  That at least has a reliable result.  Other options involve more risk and may not save the Keepstar.  But if they go that route, the question then would be “What will they defend?”  The Imperium might just move forward and try their Keepstar at C4C-Z4 in Fade to see. (We were there recently.)

On grid with the PH Keepstar in C4C-Z4

Ideally for them, they and their allies would both save the Keepstar and destroy copious Imperium capitals and super caps.  Saving the Keepstar but losing a lot of supers would not bode well however.  I strongly suspect that the Imperium’s primary goal is to destroy as many super capitals belonging to the coalition of the north as possible, the Keepstar just being the bait to get them on the field.

The Imperium would happily trade titans with them all evening and consider themselves the winner based solely on their ability to replace losses.  You have seen the production numbers for Delve from the December Monthly Economic Report, right?

December 2017 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

I suspect that were not just building Rorquals and ratting carriers down there.

And, of course, there is the “good of EVE Online” aspect to this.  Big fights like this generate headlines in the wider gaming press and bring attention… and new players… to the game.  I wonder what is going on at CCP as the battle looms?

From my own selfish point of view, I hope for a big fight as well because then time dilation will kick in and the fight will drag out to the point that I can get home, get settled, and log in to see things unfold.

The view from the Fortizar where I am docked

Maybe I will even get on a few kill mails with my stealth bomber.  We shall see.

Anyway, the coming timer is the topic du jour over on Reddit, with plenty of speculation, advice, and memes to be had.  Elsewhere there are some reviews of what has happened so far and previews as to what may come.

• EN24 – 9-4RP2 Keepstar – Final Timer Pre-Game
• INN – 9-4RP2 Final Timer Tonight
• INN – 9-4RP2 From the Front Lines
• Massively OP – EVE Online’s biggest battle ever is about to happen, but both sides may be afraid to fight

The Challenge of Train Valley

I brought up Train Valley as one of the titles I bought during the Steam Winter Sale.  It wasn’t quite what I expected it to be… but you never know what a game really is until you start playing it.  I am not sure exactly what I expected, something more free-form or open world, like a Minecraft rail mod, or maybe a more hands on Ticket to Ride.

Train Valley is not either of those.  Still, it looked to be a fun little game so I played on to see what it offered.  It seemed simple enough, you just build tracks between stations and then send trains back and forth.

Simple track layout

Each level starts with a couple of stations and more get added as the level goes along.  Trains then appear at each station and you click on them to start them off and then make sure they arrive at their destination.  Piece of cake.

You play through various scenarios, which are akin to levels, as you need to succeed on one in order to advance to the next.  The scenarios are divided into various geographical areas, starting with small European countries, then the United States, then Russia/USSR, then Japan, and finally Germany.  Germany is actually a DLC addition, but I bought the whole Train Valley package, including all the DLC which included Germany and the soundtrack.

The first set of scenarios

There is a postage stamp theme to the scenarios and they each have some bonus goals, called “Advanced Objectives” associated with them.  For each goal you manage you get a cancellation stamp on the level.  I would guess that there is a range of about 20 standard goals which get re-used in different combos throughout the scenarios.

Bonus goals for the Tokyo scenario

Those goals do not actually enter into your ability to successfully complete a scenario.  They just add up for achievements and provide a bit of extra challenge.  The final round in each region doesn’t even have extra goals.  In fact, you can do all sorts of things wrong… crash trains, send them to the wrong station, lay out your track badly… and still complete a round.

The gating item in each scenario is money, something I didn’t fully grasp until I was into the series of US levels. (And yes, I am using “levels,” “rounds,” and “scenarios” interchangeably, deal.)  There I actually started running out of money, at which point you are declared “bankrupt” and the round ends.

Laying track costs money.  Removing structures that may be in the way of where you want your track to go costs money.  And then there is a tax on your rails that you pay at intervals which takes money out of your budget.  So there is a constant drain on your cash.

To earn money you have to get trains to their destination.  The sooner they roll out and the sooner the arrive, the more money you get.  You can even call for “extra” trains.  (One of the standard bonus objectives is to have 5-10 additional trains run during the level.)

Levels start out with just one train and a station or three, but then things heat up and soon you have trains waiting to go and more stations to hook up and you have to consider how to lay things out so that a train from any given station can get to any other station.  And if a train waits in the station too long, it will eventually just go, rolling out onto the rail line and mucking up whatever you might be trying to do.

I think I got this one laid out okay

You can see on the level in the screen shot above that there is a tunnel.  That is an added complication that rolls a train at you every so often.  More complications.  And when trains crash, that costs money too.  There is a loss for the train, the need to clear away the damage, and the building of new track.

I started going bankrupt occasionally on the US levels until I started paying closer attention to my budget.  It wasn’t until the Russia/USSR levels that this became critical.  At the “Iron Curtain” level the initial stations are far enough apart that you have to thread exactly the right path or go bankrupt immediately.  Again, more attention to budget and pathing required.

Still, I made it through that and into the Japan levels, which were the original end game.  Here is where I started having to take a few swings at the ball in order to finish a level.  The Sapporo level took me more than a few tries as it is a tight layout and throws trains at you from off map… fast trains… fairly often.  Still, I managed it.  I didn’t get any of the bonus objectives, but I made it without going bankrupt.

Then I arrived in Tokyo, the penultimate of the Japanese levels.  The trains are long and fast and show up at a rapid pace once the level started moving, you end up with a lot of stations, space on the ground is tight, and to get the layout you need you have to destroy some expensive buildings.

Starting off in Tokyo

You end up with a fairly generous starting bank account, but having that first train show up wanting to get between two difficult stations can strain your budget almost immediately.  In the screen shot above I am blowing almost half my initial capital for the first stretch of rail, and I still have four stations unconnected.

I tend to start off okay… if I get a good first train or two I can often add a couple of extras just for a bit more cash… but eventually I hit a point where things begin to spin out of control.

Things begin to go badly

In that screen shot the train in the upper right is going to leave the station, ready or not, two trains have collided at the green station, I haven’t finished repairing after the collision at the purple station, the red station isn’t even hooked up yet, and every station has a train ready to go.  And, as I noted, the trains are long, the freight trains are fast, and the passenger trains are faster.  I forget to set one switch correctly on the tracks and it is like an air traffic controller mistake and everything is going to end in disaster.  I go bankrupt… or quit when I know that is headed my way… every time.  I’ve had the rails full of stopped trains, another train threatening to go in a couple seconds, the game paused, and no solution in sight more than a few times.

But I persist.  Somebody even put together a page of rail layouts that seem to work… I searched for that after a lot of runs at Tokyo… which I am not miles away from on this level, but you need to earn cash to tear down buildings to get it just right, and even then it is a near run thing.  This is the twitch reaction level for the game so far.  I not only need to get the rails laid right, but I need to keep the switches set and the trains going in the right direction… and forget about the bonus objectives.

I haven’t even seen ze German layouts yet.  Not bad for a $3.39 investment.  I have gotten my money’s worth in play time out of it, and I still sit down every night and take a few runs at Tokyo.  I’ve just got to make fewer mistakes to best it.