It's been brought to my attention that a couple of people are still reading this journal. Which is my fault, as I'm the lazy bastard who couldn't be arsed to bother posting anything for a goddamn eternity.

That being said, the journal is dead. I'd say I just have no time for it, but that's not the real reason - it's more than I just wanted to move on. Those of you with an interest can still find me on Facebook, and of course I'm doing the whole paid writing gig on Massively these days. (My posts are here, there is an RSS feed if you want it.) I'm still getting my act together with a Twitter that I actually use on anything approaching a regular basis.

In the event you have some favorite entries here, I'm not planning on doing anything stupid like deleting the journal. I'll probably migrate stuff eventually, but I'm not in a big hurry.

Stay classy, San Diego. (And anywhere else. I'm not really married to a city here.)

I haven't played Magic since Invasion block, and not seriously since long before that. I've considered starting up again every so often, but it's a bit expensive at the moment for my tastes. (Though there is a store that runs FNM on a regular basis, so there's a pull.)

However, I continue reading strategy articles for the game, browsing article archives, et cetera, even though I do not actively play and haven't for some time. Both because there's a very sharp level of game design theory contained in many, lessons that can be applied to many different fields (yes, Magic theory can be applied to both WoW and Persona 4 with surprisingly good results), and... well, you occasionally find something like this.

And speaking of P4...

(Todd. You do own this game already, right?)

Finally finished P3 (hello again, Nyx, have a nice helping of Armageddon as Satan travels back in time to team up with Golden Age Satan), and the ending was...

Well.

See, I can't criticize it. Not really. Because the game has been on my plate for a long time, I cared about all the characters, there's no possible ending the game could have that would fully satisfy me. None whatsoever. It was a game I wanted to beat and didn't want to end all at once, even with the gigantic fricking annoyance at the end notwithstanding.

However, they were a bit too subtle with the message at the end there. Oh, sure, it was pretty well implied what was going on with all of the "you feel very tired" references, not to mention the reactions of others, but at the same time... subtle is good, but there's just far enough and then there's a bit too far.

I'm willing to wager The Answer helps tie that up a little bit better. At least it explicitly states what was going on in those last couple minutes.

So, B+ for the ending, with the understanding it couldn't have satisfied me. The game as a whole? A solid A, with some very high points and a couple disappointingly low points.

Dear Atlus,

I'm really happy about how awesome Persona 3 was. No, really. I've recommended it to several people, I've enjoyed it enough to buy FES and the sequel when I had the opportunity, and by and large I've greatly enjoyed the eighty-odd hours I've sunk into the game.

No, wait - make that eighty-two hours. Because, see, those last two hours? We need to talk.

I understand where you were going with the last boss. I really do. But this is a fucking problem. Your fucking last fucking boss has fourteen fucking forms to fucking kill before the fucking boss fucking dies. Fourteen fucking forms.

Fourteen fucking forms.

This is a fucking problem here, guys. Because those fourteen fucking forms are not fucking interesting as fucking battles, and they're fucking filler. I had to fucking fight the fucking boss for a fucking hour before I got to the actual fucking boss fight.

And then?

Another.

Fucking.

Hour.

Because she fucking periodically fucking reflects every fucking attack and forced me to fucking spend another fucking hour fucking fighting her, with no fucking breaks or fucking refills or fucking save points or any-fucking-thing to fucking indicate you realized this fucking boss required a fucking commitment on fucking par with fucking watching the fucking Lord of the fucking Rings special e-fucking-ditions to fucking just get through it.

But okay. Slow and steady, right?

Except that then your fucking boss charmed Yukari and got fucking healed back to fucking full, you motherfucking dogfuckers, which meant that the past fucking hour of fucking playing this fucking fight was just fucking wiped to fucking shit!

You shitfucking fucknuts, if you're going to fucking make me fight your fucking boss for two fucking hours just to get her fucking feathery fucking ass down to a fucking sliver of motherfucking health, don't then give me the fucking chance of fucking having two fucking hours of fucking work set fucking back to fucking square one! What the fuck did your mulefisting limp-wristed cockwrinkle of a ball-licking douchehorse scenario designer think would fucking happen, you vomitous man-slugs?

This is not good design. I expect this will be corrected in the next installment, or I will be mad.

Love,
Eliot

PS: Okay, it's kind of Yukari's fault and not the boss, but everyone but Koromaru and Junpei learn Diarahan. It had a unpleasantly high chance of happening.

PPS: Also, what the hell is with Mitsuru's dialogue if you max out her link prior to a date? Is she breaking up with you or what? I took a lot of time to get her to do the horizontal bop with me, don't want all that wasted.

Yeesh. I come back to poke my head in, and what do I find?

Sweeping masses of personal revelations.

Which would be really entertaining to poke my head back in for if I hadn't known all of these things before.

Maybe I'm getting jaded. I don't know. But when it comes to the things that people are unconsciously broadcasting within my ability to be aware of it, I want something, you know, surprising. I want the forty-something-family-man to come out and say that he runs guns for Cuba or something, not the guy with the Che Guevara t-shirt and a permanent case of four-day stubble. No, everyone has to come out with personal revelations that I had filed in my brain back a long time ago and didn't bring up because, well, it didn't matter.

For propriety's sake, I'm not getting closer than that, since my trawl back encompassed several things, and just because I consider it not-news doesn't mean it wasn't a big step for the people in question. It just meant that I'd divined it already, and when I get to the end of M. Night Shyamalan's Life Of Livejournal I don't like having come up with the big reveal ten minutes in.

Congratulations for everyone who's stepped out in the recent history for whatever reason. But guys, come on, tell me something to surprise me. That's what you have a personal life for in the first place, right?

We are now, for the most part, in the ending moments of the 2008 election in the United States. History is being made. Barack Obama has won Virginia - and with it the office of President of the United States of America. I've been sitting at my computer watching as the votes have come in, as Virginia and Florida and Indiana started out McCain and then slowly crept toward Obama until the gates finally came down.

And this is a historic moment, without a doubt. After nearly two and a half centuries, our country has elected the first African-American man into the office of president. If projections hold out, Obama is in for a very decisive victory, and the Senate and House are both poised to start swinging the country in a different direction. A large-scale change is in the country's course now, and Obama is just the first and most visible of the many changes taking place all across the country.

Despite all of this? I find myself thinking mostly about John McCain.

I picture him sitting in his nerve center - tired, weary, and hopeful. He's had a staunch goal, a single guiding purpose. For years, he has known what he's here for and what he's going to do, and he knows that despite everything that the pundits say - damn it, this is his time. He is going to make this happen now, finally.

I picture his face as Pennsylvania is called. And then Virginia.

I picture an aging man, a man who has given his all for his nation and its people, a man whose missteps on a campaign trail were borne out of a genuine desire to do right by his country. And I see him sitting, watching, seeing his last chance evaporate.

"No," he must be thinking. "Not like this. This isn't fair."

And it's not.

According to CNN, McCain has now called to concede to his opponent. A call that signals, for him, that years of working and hoping and trying have ultimately ended in defeat.

Whoever you voted for or supported - know that tonight, two good men went against one another, and no matter who won someone was going to lose. No matter who won, a dream and a hope would be put down and lost.

I can't stop thinking about John McCain. I wish it could have ended differently.

Remember the better time in World of Warcraft? Back at patch 1.8?

Back when Mages, Shamans, Rogues, Priests, and Paladins were still using talents that had been based on guesses which proved to be wholly inaccurate? Back when endgame meant doing the same instance with thirty-nine other people over and over with nowhere to go but the same place you were already going? In a time where flightpaths didn't link, Azeroth had no weather, Tier 2 looked like crud, Battlegrounds were single-server, and oh hell just forget it. I have lost interest in even the parody.

Level 60 Love is the finest example of rose-tinted lenses that you can ask for. It is remembering a better time that, frankly, never existed. It is cheerleading to roll back before "everything got ruined forever" without bothering to actually examine what's been "ruined".

It's the assumption that you're out of love with the game because it has changed, not because you just fell out of love with it.

On some level, it's not too hard to identify with. The endgame keeps changing and moving forward and darn it, it's not fair. Unless you are completely cutting edge, odds are you'll get blindsided as soon as the next expansion hits, and all the things you worked on for months are no longer the best of the best. Except it's a logic expecting the game to be beaten at some point, for you to be able to stand up and say "yes, I've totally finished the game now!" and then walk away in triumph.

MMOs don't want you to do that. They're hobbies more than games - particularly game-like hobbies, to be sure, but hobbies all the same.

What is it you want? We want servers that mimic World of Warcraft before any expansions were released, when the level cap was 60. To read more about our goal, visit the Our Goal page. Specifically, the creators of this site would prefer patch 1.8, immediately preceding patch 2.0.

This is funnier when you realize that 1.12 was actually the patch before 2.0. For added humor I have taken their statement at face value.

Why would Blizzard do this? What income can they generate from a move like this? There are several ways Blizzard can justify creating level 60 servers. First, we believe many players that quit WoW would come back if “Classic” servers were available. Secondly, if Blizzard allowed transfer off these servers, that would mean players that want to move on would now need to purchase two expansions to join the other level 80 players. Finally, once players complete the content in Wrath of the Lich King, things will become stagnant again. What better way to retain your player base than allowing them to play on a level 60 server, and experience a whole new realm of content!

"We believe many players... would come back if Classic servers were available."

Think about that for a second.

Then think about the fact that the game recently passed 11 million subscriptions.

Now ask yourself, really - is Blizzard worried right now that their fanbase is eroding? Or are they fairly confident that while they might lose an account here or there, the number keeps going up?

Perfect customer retention is a myth, one that fails when you look at the reality that even if Blizzard let each player create the rules of their individual server they still couldn't keep everyone playing and subscribing. And it's the subscriptions that matter, not the physical buying of the disk. I can go out and get both the base game and the expansion for, what, thirty dollars? Three months of playing and I've made more money for Blizzard than I did by buying the game itself.

And trying to advertise old content as new fails on many levels. It fails at the point that no one, ever, has been convinced by that - people know a rerun is a rerun. It fails when you consider that unlike the new content, there is reams and reams of material on the old content available - enough that with a minimum of effort you can find, execute, and repeat the strategy. And it fails when you realize that if you're running content at the level where you have top-end raids one hundred percent farmed out - everyone has every useful drop in your core raid group - then you are going to be done with the old content just as quickly.

Has this ever been done before? Yes! Because of player demand, the creators of Dark Age of Camelot created an “Origins” server, that reverted the game to it’s “pre-expansion” time.

This neglects to mention that this was after a widely reviled expansion that made huge, sweeping changes to the game to ameliorate the fact that they were hemorrhaging subscribers. The same sort of thing that Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes has done, actually - both games that have struggled to keep their head above water many times, because they made the mistake of trying to court the players who had already left.

Look, if I found out that right now FFXI had changed itself to be everything that WoW is? I wouldn't go back. Because to get me back it has to be more than what I'm replacing with it. All that changes like that do is piss off the people who have stood by you as your game has gone into the ground. Similarly, Vanguard managed to shoot itself in the foot by trying to cater to the more casual crowd... a crowd that had long since left and ignored it, while the crowd that cared was annoyed by the changes.

By contrast, games like EvE have always been very clear on what they are and what they want to be. I can say that I don't like EvE, but its designers haven't tried to redo the whole game to get me back. They figure I've left for my reasons and I'm not worth pissing off their existing subscribers to get back.

WoW is what it is. If you no longer like what it is, it hasn't been a sudden change by any means - they've been steadily realizing what people in general do and don't like about the game, and moving things to accomodate that. The times will change, gear will be outdated, old instances will go unused, just like you don't read your books as often as when you first buy them.

The luster dims, inevitably. Blaming it on anything other than time is foolish, and thinking you can go back again is naive.

It clocks in at a little under 72,000 words, which is too large.

It no doubt has a bunch of scene disjoints from how it was put together.

There are parts that are clunky and should be replaced with something better.

I have underused some good characters and overused some bad ones.

But fuck it all.

I finished writing a goddamn book.

So, we're at almost-release-time for Wrath of the Lich King, and while things are doubtlessly going to change over the next month I think all of they "hey boy wow" bits have dropped by now. Numbers will be tweaked, but the core of what's coming is there. And so I sit back, think, and ask myself - where am I going? Where are my favorite characters going to be when this is all said and done?

Micharan is going to be in a pretty good place. She honestly went in the opposite of the direction I thought she would - rather than getting more DPS, she got more pure utility, but I'm hardly complaining. Her DPS will be solid and versatile, and her healing and replenishment abilities will be well-loved. Not to mention that she'll have honest-to-anything crowd control capacity, which just plain makes me happy. If anything, I'm unhappy about the fact that I think her build at the moment is getting just a bit more filler than I would like and not enough real hard-hitting awesomeness. Play will be required to tweak it, but it is an ultimately minor complaint amidst a sea of being happy with where she is. She will, undeniably, be viable for small and large groups, which is where I wanted her to be but never actually expected her.

Truce, on the flipside, is not quite in a place I like. Which is strange, ultimately, because I've been liking the direction they've been going with her talents and abilities overall. My main things that I don't like aren't about damage, really. She looks more than fine there, and being able to get some more spellcasting out of her is nice. It's just subtle stuff here and there:

• Feral Spirits doesn't feel like an Enhancement talent. It feels like something for Elemental. I got my new melee strike, I can't complain about that and I won't, but Feral Spirits just feels... strange. Important but not really meshing.
  
• There isn't a compelling reason to aim for melee stats over spell ones. Okay, there is, but with the push for Shocks and Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning to be a part of our rotation comes a question of how much is the shaman really relying on that spellcasting? I think we would sort of be in a better place if Lava Burst really didn't work so much as a damage spell as a trigger for Elemental Devestation.
  
• Static Shock just isn't good enough for its placement and cost. I had been thinking that when it first came out, but I figured that there would eventually be a chance bump or an "on crit" effect. Neither happened, and it doesn't feel quite like it justifies its place there. That might just be me.
  

Having said all that, I like the increased synergy of abilities and the actual purpose to having different weapon enchantments, not to mention that we get a form of crowd control. Sure, it's about at Sap levels of utility, but it's better than nothing. So I'm not quite as happy with Truce as I am with Micha.

Telsa is going to be fun. Not just because she's a character whose backstory is still a secret to me, but because tanking with her promises to be odd and different and engaging. I've got ideas in my head of what it will look like, but all in all it promises to be an experience unique to tanks. I can't quite explain why I'd rather do Frost with her rather than another option, except that I'm not much of a pet person and I have people who heavy physical DPS already. Frost seems a bit more unique, in context.

Kirlia has been getting pretty much an unabated string of love this whole time. When she is not being distracted by shiny things, she will be well served by her talents. I continue speccing Arcane because, well, it's the strangest tree and it's the one that I like the most. Fire would probably work better for what I use her for, sure, but why would I break the trend?

And... then there are a bunch of other characters that don't quite make top-billing for various reasons. Chiefly my warrior and "pet vendor" (okay, he's a hunter, but he's got a real Elim Garak routine going).

This is for one person's benefit, and one person's benefit alone. You are warned.

So, Luke, if you're reading this, shoot me an e-mail because I seem to have misplaced the one I had for you (or mistyped it, or it's outdated - either way it's bouncing). I would like to catch up.