March 2016 – Page 13

OpenGame ID

March 2, 2016 by Belghast

The Problem

Now that I have consumed my morning coffee from my trusty skull mug… I am going to try really really hard to focus on a topic that I had kicking around my head. It all started with a rather simple announcement yesterday that the Microsoft store had Gears of War: Ultimate Edition available for Windows 10 computers. We will talk about the bullshit of making games Windows 10 exclusive some other day… but the discussion for this morning is game accounts. Right now I feel like I am deluged with account systems that serve no value to my life, and only serve to make shit more complicated when I just want to play a game…. and even worse when I want to try and play with friends. For a period of time my life was all nice and Zen, and pretty much everything I purchased went through the Steam interface. Sure Steam does some shifty shit, but it provided me a nice clean interface to play my games… and also a decent account system to keep track of which friends were playing which games. When a game integrated with said steam account system, and used steam servers for multiplayer… shit just worked and worked beautifully. Then Electronic Arts got pissy and spawned the Origin store, forcing me to deal with yet another store front with a significantly worse in every possible way interface. The worst bit about this whole thing is just how annoying the account system and trying to get everyone that I might want to play with “re-friended”.

Over the years I have picked up a number of these extraneous accounts that all do different stuff, and I need all of them for some reason or another. Just to rattle off a few of the multi game accounts: Steam, Origin, GOG, PSN, Xbox Live, Nintendo ID, Google Play, Amazon, Apple Store, Battle.net, Direct2Drive, NCSoft, Funcom, and now I am having to care about UPlay in my life as well. Then there is a whole other tier of things that are game social media like… Anook, Player.me, Raptr, Xfire, Discord and a couple of dozen other accounts that I am forgetting about right now. Then to even further confuse things you have Twitch, Hitbox, Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GPlus, and all of the other social trappings that folks want to interact over. Trying to maintain some semblance of the same group of friends among ALL of those platforms is complete and total bullshit. Sure some of them throw you a bone, by allowing you to either import friends or link accounts… but the end result is just pure madness. So this got me thinking… about all of the things that work well and all of the things that fail miserably. The challenge is that no two companies want to play together nicely… and everyone seems to revel in their proprietary crap. I think the problem is that they simply don’t want to have to comply to essentially their competitors designs, which makes everyone trying to re-invent the wheel and doing a piss poor job of it.

The Idea

In my perfect scenario there would be a single account that is portable and disconnected from any one manufacturer, that could be integrated with all of the existing services and act as a glue to allow players to share their connections between all of the platforms. The idea is that there would be an open standard, that was designed for social gaming. My idea is to start with something similar to LDAP, where you have an authentication core that then also has a metabase with different security bits that allow writing of data to different segments of a user account. This would allow PSN Trophies for example to exist in the same structure as XBox Live Achievements… but otherwise stay separate. The idea would be to divide up the social aspect of gaming from the structural requirements of running a game network, so that the friends list lives on its own… and all of the technical bits get buried in the segment of the account that folks don’t really need to look at anyway. Having a single game account would also go a bit towards solving some of the issues with anonymous access to gaming, and having disposable interactions. I don’t like the concept of real names being thrown around in the ether, and I think that is absolutely the WRONG idea to go about fixing that problem. However I do think that Belghast#1752 for example my Battletag is just as unique as knowing my real name… and so long as this is a piece of data that I cannot shed without a lot of effort it means you can track my actions across multiple platforms. If you see that a given “OpenGame” account has been flagged by Microsoft and PSN for abuse… then maybe it is time for Battle.net and Twitch and Steam to investigate their actions as well?

The problem with my idea is that it sounds great on paper… but the challenge is… who exactly would run such a system and who would administer it? If it is just an open standard and the individual companies are responsible for running their own servers… then where is the buy in and where is the cost savings. If it is a third party company… where is the monetization to make it work? I don’t have all the answers, but this is just the course of a “wouldn’t it be cool if” sequence that I had yesterday throughout the day. I would love to see someone fix this problem, and I would love to see things work in a way that is pro-consumer and not necessarily pro-company. We’ve reached a point where you can pretty much play any game on any console you like… and most of those also end up coming to the PC. I just wish we could get a point where you could also end up playing with PSN friends on your PC, and Xbox friends on your PS4. Considering we have examples like Street Fighter 4 and FFXIV that allow PSN and PC players to play freely together…. I have to assume that the roadblock is Microsoft, and even with an “OpenGame” system they would probably still remain a problem. This mornings post will not help in any meaningful fashion.. but I just wanted to get my thoughts out there. I welcome anyone with the right entrepreneurial spirit to come along and steal this idea… because I would rather have it be a thing than have credit for doing it. I’ve had a mantra for awhile now: “Anything that gets in the way of playing with my friends is bad” and this sort of “OpenGame” system would go a long way to fixing some of that. Here is some ideas for what a system like this would have to have.

Fixed ID that stays with a user between game systems and networks.
Not Real Name based… too much bad shit can come of this.
Systems in place to change that ID in case of dangerous shit like stalking and such… but enough friction to keep it from happening often.
Ability for each game system/network to update only their segment of the total account.
Friends lists are free floating and work regardless of what system you happen to be in… so cross pollination between games.
Thorough Privacy Settings… so you can say “this user can play with me in this game, but not in this one”.
Ability to go 100% stealth mode… because sometimes you’ve had enough interaction and need quiet time.
Linkages to social and other media platforms to allow folks to interact freely (but should also follow above privacy rules).
Cross Game/Platform/Whatever chat (again privacy aware).
In server based games, would be awesome to have suggestions as to which server most of your friends are on.
Ability for services to log account actions against the OpenGame ID.
Sign-Up process difficult enough to make it challenging for folks to keep spawning new IDs.

Coherent, Flexible Strategy

March 1, 2016 by Tamrielo

I wrote up a fairly extensive report on my games for this past weekend’s Infinity tournament (here, if you’re curious) and got some interesting feedback. People seemed to like my turn-by-turn commentary about what I was trying to accomplish at any given point and how I planned to go about it, as well as how my plans changed on the fly.

I’ve talked quite a bit about strategy vs tactics, and I’ve also talked about how I have a “background process” planning ahead most of the time, but I think I rarely go into specifics. Infinity might be a good springboard into my usual day-to-day thought processes, how I stay organized, and possibly some other questions that people have asked me.

When I’m playing Infinity, I’m very focused on what wins me the game. When I suggest strategy, it’s always focused more about what scores points (and thus wins you the game) than how to handle a specific problem. In general, I find that spending energy finding a specific solution to a specific problem isn’t a terribly efficient approach, and avoiding doing so is a good way to manage my time effectively. Sometimes, a specific solution to a specific problem is unavoidable, but at that point the goal (whatever “wins you the game”) simply won’t happen without that solution, and thus it’s almost not possible for that solution to be inefficient, because there’s no alternative. Efficiency is a relative thing; there’s no real objective baseline for doing something efficiently, just a set of comparisons.

In the tournament this weekend, I was faced with a couple of deeply entrenched enemy units hidden in a tower. Given the opportunity, these units could make my life very difficult, and an explicit goal of the mission was eliminating enemy units. As a result, the goal for my first turn was to neutralize those units as best I could. It was what I needed to accomplish in the first turn, and my planning centered on that. I had a couple of options– I could send a unit from my backfield up to threaten the tower, spending a lot of orders to climb it and then (hopefully) effectively attack both of the targets, or I could send my infiltrator up with a slightly broader toolset. The first option was cost-efficient but time-inefficient; it would cost me rather more orders to move the cheaper unit up safely than to move the infiltrator up. The second option was more expensive in terms of cost– the infiltrator was worth nearly twice as much, and losing her would cost me a valuable reactive toolset, but she would expend far fewer orders moving into position safely. Both would take a lot of focus on that turn, and success for either one was not guaranteed.

As a result, I focused on smaller wins first, to see how my turn would unfold. An apparently quick, easy set of small victories was more time-expensive (cost more orders) than expected, pushing me towards using the infiltrator. I debated scoring a valuable win (in the form of a secondary objective) right away, when I was less likely to be opposed, but I was concerned about being left open to a strong counterattack (in a mission where winning fights is key to victory) and had alternative options for securing that secondary objective in later turns. When I finally started committing the infiltrator, she was discovered almost immediately, forcing me to spend more orders moving troops around to cover her advance and allow her a stealthy approach. It wound up costing me almost as much time (orders) as using the other unit would have, but she was ultimately successful, whereas the other troop would likely not have been. Had I committed the other troop, I probably would have been stymied by various obstacles that the infiltrator was better equipped to handle, and I would have gotten fewer ancillary wins. It was also extremely valuable to focus on smaller wins first, so that I could ensure those were in hand before committing to the larger task.

I apply a lot of this same logic to my day-to-day. I know that I will need several hours to write a paper, and that I also need to run a handful of errands. If I wait to run the errands, they’re a lot more likely to get put off if I wait until the paper is done, and may not get done at all. It’s a quick way for me to get overwhelmed later by lots of little things adding up. Instead, I handle the smaller things first, the “quick wins”, so that they don’t pile up. Run to the bank, get lunch, pay a toll bill, clear out comment spam, send a couple of important e-mails. Maybe a couple hours’ worth of tasks, time that I *could* be spending on the paper, but it keeps my to-do list uncluttered.

I prioritize things based on the energy and time they take to do, and try to keep the total number of things I need to do down as much as possible. I keep track of little things that are nevertheless important to get done (and do them first), bigger things that require a larger time investment (do these once the smaller things are done, to ensure I’m doing that work with a clear head and no distractions), and other things that don’t require my attention right away. I finally picked up a TV remote this morning, while getting my car looked at, because it was a convenient time to get it done. It wasn’t a high priority (it’s been on my radar for months) but it was something I could get done in parallel with something else I was doing.

The less I know about how long it will take me to do something, the more I want to get that thing done last, after other tasks are complete. If I’m not distracted, I can more readily focus on involved tasks, and if it takes longer than expected to get done, I’m (usually) not sacrificing anything else. The nice part about it is that I can then adapt my planning to however long it takes to get things done, and prioritize based on what needs to happen that day. I’ve found that I very rarely have single large overwhelming tasks that are top priority– when they do come up, I can focus entirely on them because I don’t have a long task backlog (because I’ve complete tasks-of-opportunity all along the way).

It’s a system that works for me, and it keeps my day-to-day strategic planning organized and complete. I complete what I need to and don’t have to worry about “death by a thousand cuts”, and I very rarely forget to do things, because I get things done immediately as they crop up as opposed to waiting. To return to the Infinity example one last time, partway through one of my games this past weekend I noticed a nice set of opportunities– neither were part of my strategy for the turn, but they were valuable enough that I could deal with them immediately and return to my longer-term plan. Dealing with them made my long-term strategy easier and less stressful, and while it was a minor setback in terms of time, it brought me out ahead in the end.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast

Contemplating Forge

Last night was another night that was all over the place. Firstly I decided to reinstall Forge.gg and give it another chance. I have so many mixed emotions about this service, I like the concept that I can grab short clips at the end of my gaming session. I dislike the fact that I can ONLY grab short clips, which are generally too short to show a boss fight for example. I like the always on nature, and that it can just run in the background without me feeling like I need to be entertaining. However I ran into some issues last night where apparently even though I had push to talk set… it was still actively picking up my microphone the entire time as you can see in the above clip. So you get a snippet of a conversation between my wife and I about something I don’t even remember. I like the idea of streaming but I don’t always want to be actively interacting, and forge is this great middle ground. Ultimately I wound up muting my microphone at a system level just to make sure that it was not picking up. I am hoping this is just a bug in the current client, and I will crawl the site to see if I can find out why this was happening.

The other gotcha it seems is that it did not pick up and start recording Elder Scrolls Online. I spent the first part of the evening doing garrison dailies and doing at least one Tanaan objective in World of Warcraft and it recorded all of that perfectly. However as soon as I swapped into ESO, it never came up with the forge icon in the upper right hand corner of the screen letting me know it is recording. I will say that the really really nice thing about the client is sometime in between my last attempt at using the service and this one… it seems to work nicer with Fraps because there is no way I am giving up that just to use the service. I am too used to having a common and centralized screenshot tool for all of the games I play. It is an absolute necessity that I have a fresh source of new screenshots for this blog, and I hate having to try and find the screenshot directory for each individual game. So instead I tend to unbind the screenshot key if it is allowed and just use Fraps for everything. It was awesome last night that I was able to use fraps just fine while still recording on forge…. at least when it came to World of Warcraft. I am going to be a sad panda if that ends up being the issue with it recording Elder Scrolls Online.

Return to Greenshade

The bulk of my time last night was spent wandering around Greenshade in the Elder Scrolls Online. Generally speaking I tend to play this game by wandering aimlessly from objective to objective, but last night I actually seemed to move through the zone with a purpose. That purpose being ingratiating myself to the Court of the Wilderking, a forest spirit that controls the Valenwood and that the local Bosmer worship as a God King. As part of trying to quell the rebellion and steal forces away from the Veiled Heritance, my mission was simple… get the support of the Wilderking to get the support of the local forces…. thus ending the rebellion. I of course did a bunch of other stuff along the way, and I am not entirely complete with the main story sequence… but I am having a blast. I got sidetracked in helping a friend level in World of Warcraft, and then again by the Love is in the Air event…. and finally I am settling back into Elder Scrolls Online for a bit. Granted currently I will probably continue to hop games like mad because there is just so damned much stuff that I want to be playing. In Elder Scrolls I have yet to see any of the Imperial City content, or Orsinium… and they are just about to release the Thieves Guild as well. So much catching up to do… but at the same time I feel like I have all the time in the world to do it because I am not playing the game at a serious end game focused level.

The other big happening of the night is that I finally dinged Veteran Rank 4, allowing me access to the next tier of crafted gear. I was doing awesome…. until I screwed up and rushed to get my shield made and forgot to go to the set crafting area. Originally I was planning on having 5 piece Alessia’s Bulwark, and 4 piece Ashen Grip… except I am now sitting at 3 pieces in that set because I got sidetracked and ended up making a non-set shield. Unfortunately I am completely out of the right kind of wood so I will need to do some more adventuring before I can finish things out. For the time being I have opted to abandon my costume and go with the actual armor look because I dig the Imperial armor look. I will probably always favor the Dunmer sword type, though recently I did enjoy using an axe for a bit. The game looks amazing on the laptop, and I am so damned happy with how well everything is performing to be honest. It does get a little hot but then again what gaming laptop doesn’t. My previous one had a SLI graphics card configuration so had insanely hot air venting out of both sides of the laptop. At least this setup isn’t continuously baking my mouse hand. I just need to sort out why exactly Forge was not recording the game.

The Division

Also looming on the near horizon is the launch of The Division. At this point it is absolutely certain that I will be playing it on the PC, at least at first. When the price comes down a little I will probably also pick it up for the PS4 so that I have access to it for any of the friends that happen to be playing there. For the last few days since the end of the beta I have trying to sort out how best to organize folks for the upcoming launch. The game itself does not really have guilds or clans or any structure like that…. at least that I saw in the two betas I have been part of. So as a result this is going to make getting stuff going a little more difficult than in other games. However my friend Sigtric, the man who coined the hashtag #BelEffect is firing up a Discord group and attempting to get it to be the official/unofficial chat server for the game. If you are going to be playing I highly suggest you pop by and join the “Gone Rogue” community. There is a shared general chat and breakout channels for PC, PS4, and Xbox One to make organizing things a little easier. I honestly wish I had something like this for Destiny. Discord is one of those things that is growing on me, and while I still find Slack easier to use… there is a point in the near future where I could see abandoning traditional voice servers and moving to Discord entirely.

Wilderqueen

March 1, 2016 by Belghast