Child’s Play can make you awesome

I’m not a fan of using images when words would do, but in this case I feel it’s warranted:

Child’s Play, if you’re not aware of it, is a char­ity that gives video games, books, and toys to children’s hos­pi­tals. Any child unfor­tu­nate enough to be stuck in a hos­pi­tal over the hol­i­day sea­son is low on opti­mism. A dona­tion to Child’s Play isn’t going to cure a dis­ease or get some­one a trans­plant that they need, but it stands a good chance of mak­ing a sick child happier.

My wife and I have made this a hol­i­day rit­ual since the char­ity was born in 2003, and it’s become one of our favorite parts of this time of the year.

Learn more at the charity’s About page, and when you’re done read­ing that, hit the main page to find your favorite hos­pi­tal to support.

Please, be kind to some peo­ple you don’t even know. Even a lit­tle bit helps, and if you give then you will be awe­some for doing so.

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The Most Successful Loot Systems

A friend recently asked me an off­hand ques­tion about zero-sum dkp sys­tems with a 25% monthly degen­er­a­tion with a weird main/alt pol­icy… and I could imme­di­ately rat­tle off the strengths and weak­nesses of such a sys­tem, includ­ing where it could be sub­verted and where the likely prob­lems would be down the road. Ok, so it turns out that I’m inter­ested in loot sys­tems and guild lead­er­ship.

So what’s the goal of loot sys­tems? Most arti­cles I’ve seen about loot assign­ments is about get­ting the gear to the right place while being fair.

Well… yes. That’s the stated goal. There’s more, though.

Cas­sio, a guest blog­ger at World of Mat­ti­cus, uncov­ered the truth in a post about assign­ing loot (empha­sis mine):

In my guild, I am cur­rently the raid leader for ten man raids and it falls onto me to sort out loot dis­tri­b­u­tion and how to do so with­out caus­ing prob­lems that could desta­bi­lize the raid group and force us back due to peo­ple leav­ing and hav­ing to replace with new people.

In pro­gram­mer speak, this is Step 0. You don’t list Step 0 to the guild, but when design­ing a loot sys­tem, it should be first on your list.

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Posted in world of warcraft | 6 Comments

But He’s Been Here Forever

In my guild, we have a long-time mem­ber, I’ll call him Mark. He’s a good and friendly per­son, but he’s def­i­nitely not offi­cer mate­r­ial. Passive-aggressive, flaky, self-centered. Mark’s been pin­ing for offi­cer­ship for years.

I haven’t been in offi­cer­ship for a while (because I’ve been raid­ing more dia­pers than instances), but I was sur­prised to learn of Mark’s recent pro­mo­tion to officer.

An offi­cer friend chat­ted me up:

“Hey, how you doing?”

“Good. So what hap­pened with Mark?”

<pause>

“What do you mean?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that he’s an offi­cer now.”

“Yeah.”

“So, what happened?”

<pause>

“Well, he’s been here forever…”

Oh… crap. Read More »

Posted in iconic players, world of warcraft | Tagged | 2 Comments

Bad Character Names

You’ve got a new char­ac­ter for a big mas­sively mul­ti­player game, so you need a name. How do you come up with a good name? Good ques­tion! I might write about that another time.

This is a list of what peo­ple do wrong. It was writ­ten with both a genero-fantasy set­ting and a stan­dard Eng­lish key­board in mind.

(Higher on list is less bad, lower on list is less good.)

  • Generic names: Dragon. Angel. Valor.
  • “For­eign” Lan­guage words: Grande. Iki­masho. (For­eign to you is not for­eign to all–you’d laugh at a char­ac­ter whose name was “Big” or “Let’s go!”)
  • Jammed words: Drag­o­nan­gel. Burningcat.
  • Meta: An undead named Rot­ting. A tau­ren named Beefcake.
  • Out of game con­text (OOC): Chuck. Spaceship.
  • Uno­rig­i­nal: Lego­las. Drizzt.
  • Jammed and meta: Deathknight.
  • Jammed and OOC: Chuc­knor­ris. Brucewil­lis. Captainplanet.
  • Jammed and meta and OOC: Undead­fred.
  • Jammed and talk­ing to the reader: Ucantseeme. Pwnyou. Imdeath. (Per­son­ally, I always choose the most obtuse nick­name pos­si­ble for these kind of names: “See you later, Imd.” “My nick­name is sup­posed to be Death <cry>”)
  • Uno­rig­i­nal and late: Lle­go­lass. Driiiiiiizzt.
  • Uno­rig­i­nal and late and jammed: Elfle­go­las. Deathknightt.
  • Pre­scrip­tion drug name: Prope­cia. Celexa. (Although given enough time, pharma could elim­i­nate the genero-fantasy namespace)
  • Swapped char­ac­ters: Dragòn. (pre­vi­ously dis­cussed: Text-based game, yet I can­not type your name.)
  • Uno­rig­i­nal and swapped: Lêgolâs.
  • Uno­rig­i­nal and swapped and late: Elflê­golâs.
  • Polit­i­cal state­ments of any kind: Nobama. Mclame. (Your polit­i­cal views are unin­ter­est­ing in a game context.)
  • Jammed and talk­ing to reader and swapped: Üçântsêêmê.

The order of these gets hairy in the mid­dle and is to taste, although I feel pretty solid about the top and bottom.

Thanks to the read­ers who helped with ideas.

Did I for­get any­thing? Is there a name worse than Üçântsêêmê?

Posted in world of warcraft | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Swâpped Letters in Namês

In these won­der­ful online games, the longer one sin­gle name­space exists, the fewer the names avail­able in that name­space. At some point, all the good names are going to be taken. What then?

Gúess.

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Posted in games, world of warcraft | Tagged , | 8 Comments