Rails is an “application framework” which seems to take care of a lot of tasks that I would usually do manually. Security seems to be well baked into the platform. Things like XSS and SQL injection are easy to avoid either naturally, or with simple techniques that take very little time. I’m pretty sure that you don’t have to actually know programming to become productive in Rails, though it helps. The tutorial that I link to states that it is aimed at web designers too.

If you have a mac or linux box, installing ruby and rails is tedious but fairly straightforward. The tutorial will actually step you through it. If you run windows, I’ve read that it’s a bit more painful, but there are packages to help you out.

Well, enough talk. I must get back to my rails server. I still need to link it to memcached and postgreSQL.

Getting WoW running was straightforward. I installed the Nvidia 3d drivers via the System/Administration/Additional Drivers menu, installed some build tools like this:

sudo apt-get build-dep wine

I then downloaded the latest wine, compiled and installed it. I copied my .wine-wow directory from my old laptop and ran the launcher.

UWO is a very open-ended game. You can really do whatever suits your fancy. There are 3 main “classes” but there are many professions within those classes and you can freely switch between jobs in any of the 3 classes (assuming you have the item that allows switching jobs). If you’re a pacifist, you can trade or craft your way to fame. If you’re a pirate, there are plenty of areas where you can PvP.

The population in UWO is very international. It makes for interesting conversation in the school chat (a channel where noobs are dropped by default if there is room).

And the bad?

The tutorial is very tedious, and if you don’t have veteran friends, you probably have to do the tutorials. There are times where a class will send you to a port days away for no good reason. The actual tutorial text requires you to acknowledge reading every 30 words or so. There is a ton of good information, but the mechanics of the tutorial are awful.

The UI is simplistic and feels like a single task system. You can’t have the character screen and inventory screen open at the same time for instance. The skill bar (such as it is) doesn’t refresh, and closes every time you cross zones. This is just a couple of examples. There are other UI pitfalls.

The graphics have an anime theme. Some may like this. I don’t.

Even with its deficiencies, UWO is a fun game with a lot of depth. I’ll probably go back to it at some point.

What don’t I like about the game so far? There are 4 main factions; pirate, english, french, and spanish. Once you pick one and make a character, you’re stuck there. There is no moving to different factions unless you create a new account, or wait for a map to be won and make a new character. Each faction has smaller groups called societies which act like guilds, but the faction is the brightest dividing line between players. I don’t like the mix of a small number of factions and the inability to move from one faction to another. The EVE model of loose affiliation to an empire faction, but strong player groups is more appealing to me. PotBS seems to have the problem where many people jump ship to the winning side. This means that the smaller factions have the potential to get smaller and weaker. The whole PvP zone system seems wonky. Through player actions, most ports can go into a state of unrest and the area around them becomes a pvp zone (red zone). Each faction can create 3 of these zones at any one time, so quite a large area of the map can be in PvP status including capital cities, important trade ports, and mission hubs. I would prefer a high-sec, low-sec, no-sec model, but I’m spoiled by EVE.

The community is much like any PvP MMO community honestly. There are a lot of nice people and there are some vocal ass-hats. If you ask a question in faction chat (even inane questions), you’ll usually get a helpful response. There is occasionally the “RTFM!” comment but that’s relatively rare. All in all PotBS is worth a go if you’re an EVE burn-out or if you like pirate themed games.

I’m trying to imagine efficient data structures which could handle this without a huge increase in storage needs, but I’m at a loss. Each item in your whole inventory including vault and housing storage would need two links. One goes to the generic item data that each item of that type has, and one would link to the personalized data. For Mirkwood craftables, you would actually need a field to hold the inscription since this is unique for each item.

These extra needs would impact performance when browsing your inventory since more data would need to be collected to show a tooltip for instance. This feature could impact general game performance since it’s more work done on the server side.

What am I getting to here? All of the features you think are neat in some game and would like to see in your favorite game probably cost something. Even a seemingly small feature like personalized crafting likely costs a lot in computing resources and development time. That’s probably why you don’t see housing or personalized crafting in World of Warcraft (and maybe never will). Imagine having to add all of those data structures for more than 10 million users on tens or hundreds of servers. Housing would be an especially huge addition.

On the other hand, a game that starts out with these types of features will probably figure out how to grow with the features in. So, if your favorite MMO seems hesitant to add that small customization feature, remember that there is a lot of work and compute resources needed to implement those features. If there is no obvious financial benefit, you’ll probably continue to wait for that feature.

• export WINEPREFIX=.wine-civ
• winetricks corefonts allfonts
• edit /etc/sysctl.conf and add the following lines:

net.core.rmem_max = 131072
net.core.wmem_max = 131072

• run sudo sysctl -p to load the new settings
• run the setup from the cd and follow the instructions.

After this, you can just use the steam launcher to launch Civilization. The “directx 9″ version works for me.

LOTRO is as easy to get running. I used the instructions on the winehq app page with an exception. To get the pando download to run, I had to replace wine Downloads/lotrohigh.exe with GC_DONT_GC=1 wine Downloads/lotrohigh.exe which apparently turns off garbage collection. If the download fails partway through for some reason (like accidentally turning off wireless… Who would do that? …), you can just pick up the download from where it stopped. You don’t need the GC_DONT_GC setting to actually run the game. I didn’t need to go through all of the machinations required to run one of the older versions either. YMMV of course.

It turns out that LOTRO is pretty fun. I started a hobbit minstrel (healer of course). They do a good job of weaving the Tolkien story into the game although you can easily get sidetracked by quests. The item store system is ok, but they could do well to look at the Runes of Magic model and pick what might fit. Selling turbine points in-game might be nice for instance although I’m sure that topic would ignite a flamewar on the servers. There seems to be some animosity from some old subscribers toward F2P folks. When a game makes a major change like going F2P, one can expect some unhappy folks I guess. I’m on one of the new servers, so I don’t see too much of this.

I started the game almost blind. I basically went to the allods website, downloaded the game, installed it and started playing. Compared to other MMO’s I’ve played, there is more of a sense of urgency immediately. I won’t spoil it by going into detail, but expect the cast to look to you for salvation. Pay attention and read all of the text during the crisis. It’s pretty enlightening and provides a lot of info on the history of Allods.

Mechanically, Allods is a leveling game. There is a progressive talent “tree”. As you level, you pick talents, though the only prerequisite to later talents is that you have some number of talent points. This isn’t a real tree. The mechanism that looks more like a tree is the talent grid. You buy “rubies” as you level up to fill out the grid. Take a look at a talent calculator to see what I mean. Each character has a pile of stats like strength, intelligence, faith, etc. The general consensus now is that one should keep fairly balanced stats. I suspect that is because the game is young enough that no one has done the math on stats to see which is better.

Itemization is pretty interesting. Quest rewards don’t seem to be limited to one class. Each reward will have stats for several completely different class. It is rare to find an item which is completely useless. Maybe that changes later in the game. I guess this would cause more people to roll on any particular gear, but then there is more gear which is available to roll on and less gear will be completely useless to any particular party. Stats seem to be immensely important. Small changes to stats seem to have a huge impact on everything you do, so be sure to keep your gear up to date. If you don’t, leveling becomes difficult.

Since I like to heal, I’ve become keenly aware of an interesting mechanic in the game called “wound complexity”. You not only have straight hit point damage, you also have a variable wound complexity scale which is measured in percent. The higher the wound complexity, the more chance that your heal spell will heal less then the optimal amount. The stat faith effects how much wound complexity you can ignore when you cast a heal spell. this means you can’t just stack intelligence to get better healing. It looks like many game mechanics have similar tradeoffs which promote a more balanced stats list.

As far as leveling goes, it’s pretty slow going although not boring. Currently, the group quests at the lower levels are pretty easy to knock off. There are always people waiting around to do them. Just give a shout in zone chat and start inviting people. Higher level players seem to help noobs a lot too. Apparently, around level 23 or so, you are required to do some questing in a PVP area called “The Holy Lands”. There is no way around this as far as I know. The end game seems to be a mix of raids and PVP in “Astral Ships”.

The auction house is easy to use, but the economy is not well developed. Prices vary wildly, so it’s hard for me to price my items at this point. Since bag and bank space is limited, I feel obligated to sell stuff on AH. I’ll probably end up using the mailbox as extra temporary bag space assuming the game will let me.

Give Allods Online a go if you’re looking for a change from WoW. It’s free aside from your time, and it’s different enough to be refreshing.

• They seem to be more epic. You are usually the focus of the whole world. It’s hard to do that effectively in an MMO I think.
• I can save and stop at almost any time without losing any time.
• No scheduling conflicts for raids or fleet actions.
• No asshats.

MMO’s are fun too. If I want to casually socialize with people, or if I want to complete some epic task with other people, there really isn’t a way to do that in a single player game. MMO’s are a great place to virtually people-watch without anyone knowing who you are.

Back to dragon age now. As I said, it’s a fun game. I’m currently working on my last treaty in the deep roads. I’ve made some mistakes along the way. Here are some tips based on those mistakes:

• Do *everything* you need to in lothering before you move on. Lothering becomes unavailable soon after you leave.
• Work on approval of your most common companions early. They get buffs which are useful in combat if their approval is high.
• If you have any DLC’s, do them early. The loot can really help out in your travels. If you have all three DLC’s (soldier’s peak, stone prisoner, and return to Ostagar), you can gain several levels too.
• If you want to be the highest level possible, explore everywhere and kill everything which is killable.
• Money is hard to come by early on. Loot all containers. There seem to be no consequences to looting. If you’re so inclined, steal from everyone.
• It almost feels like cheating, but you can also get herbalism to its highest level and make potent lyrium potions for profit.
• If there is an enemy magic user (or several) kill it first. I haven’t found a case where I wouldn’t do this. Player and enemy mages are powerful.
• Area effect spells seem to be situational. I probably should have waited on getting these until late in the game.
• Go for the eyes!