Back around the time of Anarchy Online’s first big expansion, Shadowlands, I had a frightening revelation. To put a date on it, it would be after the release of the expansion, and before I crashed RK1/Atlantean’s economy by causing hyperinflation after I dumped two or three billion credits into the market by AOE kiting Hecklers in Elysium (I copped onto the potential of the loot drops a few months before anyone else). This revelation has honestly shaped me through to today:

If you ignore the big, pretty numbers that flash up for the player’s gratification, every single attack in every MMO can be boiled down to something that changes the current percentage value of a stat as compared to its maximum.

…wait, what? Bear with me while I try to explain this. You have a health bar that – for the sake of convenience – has one thousand health units. You unleash your biggest, most-Earth shatteringly powerful attach and deal 800 damage. That’s 20% of the maximum. Your smaller, regular attacks hit for 40 points each, or 4% of the total health. All attacks and heals in video games can be seen as having a percentage-based damage/heal value and cost.

When I had this revelation, and stripped away all of the big numbers that Anarchy Online displayed I realized three things:

1. Net player power decreases as you level up. You face tougher challenges, obstacles that cannot be defeated by one player alone. Your attacks do (as a percentage) less damage at the maximum level, while in maximum level gear, and facing maximum level challenges, than they do as a brand new, inexperienced players.
2. The game developers’ (Funcum’s) only effective avenue for increasing challenge was to reduce net player power. I felt disgusted and betrayed by what I perceived as my decreasing ability to influence the game world, as I progressed through Shadowlands content. Surely I should feel the opposite!
3. I am probably a reductionist. Pray for me.

The aftermath of this was that Player versus Environment content was forever soured for me. I still look at boss encounters in this light. As I reach the very end-game content, my ability to affect the game world drops precipitously. This sucks. I gravitated toward Player versus Player combat instead, because although we’re both still playing The Percentages Game, we’re playing against sentient human foes, and not just reacting to a script running from top-to-bottom.

Mathematics.

Eh. It is a bit nerve-racking when, after the first sixty minutes elapse, half of your year gets up and walks out of the exam hall. At the seventy-five minute mark three-quarters of those remaining get up and leave. I am still sitting there patiently working through some matrix problems.

C#

Good: It built. It ran.
Bad: There was a bug I couldn’t fix, and instead worked around. Sloppily.
Good: It formatted nicely.
Bad: You could charitably call my formatting code “obfuscated”. Other synonyms like “Byzantine” or “Walter Bishop-esque”come to mind.
Good: Throwing a stack of copies of “Alive” in the bin is a true feel-good moment.
Bad: I am missing a bunch of features; It outputs everything, and it displays an average. I didn’t touch the search/index.
Good: There’s a bottle of whiskey on the counter at home and a copy of Diablo 3 on my hard disk. They say “there there, it will be all right”.

What’s your story?t

If you don’t squint you can’t even see the sore!

Update: Garrett does not like his new, beardless daddy; he kept asking me to put my beard back on.

:(

Progression of the infection:

1. I get out of the shower on Wednesday, and to my alarm I notice that a large patch of my face is still damp. Stick damp. Not good.
2. By the evening it starts to hurt, so I make up my mind to shave the beard off the next day.
3. On Thursday I shaved my beard, but put off going to the hospital because it was lashing rain outside.
4. Went in on Friday, was diagnosed, given a prescription, and sent home.
5. Drained it Saturday.

The medication has worked great! It’s already drying up and a lot of the scabbing is gone.

Roundabouts: My enhancement Shaman took down the Void Reaver in Tempest Keep solo. It is one of the toughest single soloable boss fights for Shaman, because you spent 95% of the fight silenced. You effectively have to exploit a boss mechanic – an intermittent knockback – to be kicked out of the silence for a second so you can pop Melstrom heals, or your wolves.

This was definitely a tough fight – It took about six wipes before I got it down to pat, and even then it was relatively close. I had to swap out some glyphs and use Earthliving Weapon on my offhand so I could take in some healing during the fight. There are strategies out there, but I will add this: Lead in with cooldowns blown. Drop Stoneclaw Totem, bring out your wolves, lay on Shamanistic Rage, and pop Heroism; with all of these combined you won’t have to worry about your health for the first 30-45 seconds of the fight, which rally helps.

(The offline character in this raid is my Death Knight Shabura)