Some Knowledge

One of the things I did not like about World of Warcraft was the continual use of item binding.  Every decent item in the game was either bind on pickup or bind on equip.  This made it impossible to share items after you used or obtained them, or made you not be able to sell an item once you had equipped it.

I think the whole purpose of the item binding system was to maintain an inflated value for game gold.  This really annoyed me and was one of the reasons I quit playing WoW.  I had items I wouldn’t use or try out because I could not decide if I would rather sell them or keep them.  There is no physical justification for an item that can only be used by one person.  It was completely artificial and arbitrary and meant to keep players from getting gold for items they had the audacity to actually use in the game.

This system is becoming more popular in other games.  I even noticed a bind system on some items in a MUD I play that has just been implemented.  When are game designers and administrators going to realize that the system is there to give the players enjoyment, not annoyance?  Probably when everyone quits playing.

It used to be if you wanted to become good at the game of chess you had to study boring books written in obtuse code.  We live in the modern age, and in this age the computer has risen above its creator and is now the master of the game of chess.  You will learn something from playing the game against humans, but you will learn more playing against computers.

There are numerous computer programs available that you can download for free that will play decent games of chess.  A simple Internet search will lead you to any number of possibilities.  Find and download the best program you can get, then run the game.

The first thing you will notice when playing chess against a computer is that the machine is ruthless.  It will hunt you down and kill you as soon as it possibly can.  You make any error in your play and the computer will exploit your faults to its fullest advantage.  You can not trick the machine by using any psychological tactics in an attempt to weird out the computer.  The computer does not care how long you wait to make your next move.  The longer you take, the more time the computer has to think of ways to kill you.

Unless you are already a grandmaster the machine will beat you.  The machine will win every single game.  This does not matter.  In playing against the machine you are learning tactics and ploys the machine uses against you.  You are gaining valuable experience for your future bouts against humans.  Do not be discouraged because you are losing so much.  The computer uses logic to make its moves.  The computer thinks ahead several levels and weighs all the possible moves you might make in its attempt to destroy you.  You will be destroyed a lot, but as I said, you are becoming more like the machine by playing like the machine.  Once you see the kinds of devious moves a computer thinks up in defeating you, you will be able to use these moves to defeat other people.

If you ever become good enough to consistently beat a computer program at chess, look for the settings of your chess program.  You can usually  set the program to think a certain number of steps ahead.  Increase this setting.  It will take more time for the program to think up its moves, and it will be harder to beat the machine.

Once you have practiced playing chess against a computer you might find that nobody wants to play you in this game.  That is because you have gotten too good.  Nobody wants to play a game they are certain to lose, unless they are thinking like an expert and desire to learn more about the game than they ever thought possible.

Kal is Korean for sword.  In this game you can play a knight, a mage, or an archer.  Knights are male, archers and mages are female.  You have to download a client and install this to play KAL.  I found this game on the net three or four years ago and started playing.  The story is that you live in a kingdom where demon armies have taken over the countryside.  You fight the demons to gain gold and items.

I started a knight in this game because I like fighting with swords.  The graphics are really good.  There is a lot of detail in the character and environment.  It is a very artistic game.  The music is very strange, though also repetitious.  You start out with no money and basic worthless gear, but they give you a sword so you can fight monsters.  Then, you go fight monsters.  You set up your skills on hot keys that you activate by clicking on them with the mouse or use the keyboard.  It is a very simple game to figure out.

If you like fighting monsters over and over again you might like KAL Online.  There are a fair amount of players in this game.  The downside is that if you plan on making a very powerful character, you will be spending a long time fighting monsters.  If you want to buy good gear, you will have to kill a lot of monsters.  Demons usually drop about 20 coins when you slay them.  A good helmet might cost 40,000 or more coins.  That’s a lot of monsters to kill for one piece of gear.  Levelling is very slow.  You get very little experience for each monster you slay.  It took me months of playing to reach level 28.  Still, I had fun watching this knight whack all the demons.  I got pretty good gear and did all the quests that were available.  I even went fishing a few times and made some coins that way.

I don’t play KAL Online any more.  The last game patch that auto-downloaded made the game not want to work.  I guess they updated to support Windows Vista and now it won’t run on XP.  There was really little point in playing this game anyway.  It was free and it was interesting for a while.  I lost all my gear after I didn’t sign in for six months and had to start over with nothing but a bag of coins I picked up off the ground.  Even with all the experience I had from levelling, there was no way to kill the same kind of demons without the expensive armor I had managed to finally buy, but that was now lost.  Oddly, it was more fun starting over with nothing fighting tiny monsters for little rewards than it was fighting the same strong monsters over and over for very little reward.

KAL Online is very much like any other MMORPG.  You fight and level and buy better gear until you have a strong character.  I never got powerful enough to fight any boss demons.  I wandered around the countryside as a wandering knight, or wondering knight, as the job title was translated in game, and fought random creatures for random rewards.  If you are really bored and are looking for a free MMORPG to play, try KAL Online.

MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon.  It is a text-based game played over the Internet.  MUDs have been around almost since the start of the Internet.  Playing a MUD is easy enough, but can be just as involved as playing any graphical online game.

To hook up to a MUD you will need what is called a client.  These games work on an implementation of telnet.  The standard Windows telnet client can be used to play a MUD, but it will lack a lot of the functionality of a dedicated game client.  ZMUD, Portal, and Pueblo UE are examples of clients that are commonly used to play a MUD.  Some of these are available in free versions if you don’t feel like paying money to play games.

Most MUDs are free.  Also, you can contribute to the running of a MUD by making a donation, but this is not necessary.  The MUD will be run on a server.  You will need to specify the URL of the server and the port you want to connect to, as well as any password you have for your character, in the login screen of your client.  Go to the MUD website you are considering playing and read any information they have on how to set up and play their game.   One MUD I have played off and on for a number of years is called Materia Magica.  Once you have downloaded and set up the client software you will need to play the game, it is time to hook up to the game and begin playing.

Unlike graphical games which are controlled by the mouse and hotkeys on the keyboard, MUDs are driven by words.  You will need to learn a list of commands available in the game in order to play.  The simplest of these commands are the ones to move in different directions.  The movement commands are usually n, s, e, w, u, d for north, south, east, west, up and down.  There may also be corner directions like ne and sw.  Commands are entered into the command line of the client window.  Some other common commands are look, get, inventory, stand, search, equip, drink, eat, and anything else your character might do in a fantasy world, like for instance kill things.  It takes a while, but most of these commands are just common English words.   Once you learn the commands and know how to navigate around the environment, playing a MUD is similar to playing any other roleplaying game.

Most MUDs give you some kind of room description for the room you are inside at any given time.  You can say things to non-player characters or to other players.  You can tell other players private messages.  You can yell or shout if you want to broadcast your thoughts to the general population.  There will not be any artwork besides the occasional text art.  The world of a MUD is conveyed by the words on the screen.  Combat is similar to most graphic games, in that you trade blows with your opponent, but you can also add spells or other skills into combat by typing commands.

Once you play a MUD for a while you will get tired of typing in whole words to do certain common things.  Most MUDs accept single letters as commands for certain common actions such as typing k instead of kill.  If you have a functional game client you can do what is called an alias.  You basically program a complicated command for some action into one short command.  This would look something like this:  #alias d {get water bag;drink water;put water bag}, which would get your water from a bag, drink water, and put your water back in the bag all by typing just the letter d.  With aliasing you can make many complicated things like casting spells very simple to command.

Another complicated thing you can do with game clients are action commands.  An action, or trigger, is a command that your client sends automatically when it receives a certain string of text.  An example of this would be standing up after you slip and fall.  The command for this might look lik: #action{you slip and fall.} {stand}.  Every time you get the message from the game that you have slipped and fallen, your character will automatically stand back up.  If all this seems like programming it is because it is programming.  The meta-language these commands are written in is called TinTin.  The # symbol specifies that this is a command to the client software to do some function.  With TinTin you can program complex game actions such as wandering around a city hunting certain mobs and taking their loot.  This is called “botting” and is sometimes disliked by game administrators.  It is very interesting to write these little programs to play games, though, and it can be a rewarding part of your game experience to work in this area.

If you are interested in exploring fantasy worlds and have enough of an imagination to visualize environments based on text you read, a MUD can be a fun game to play.  It is a chance to become immersed in a fantasy setting and meet other people who also enjoy gaming.  There are thousands of MUDs available on the Internet.  It is something to look into if you are looking for different games to play.

An MMORPG is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game.  They are all very similar.  The first thing you will want to do when setting up any MMORPG is to check out the website for the game.  Read the information on how to download and setup the game.  Read the information on how to start and play the game.  Find out which keys control which game functions.  This will save you a lot of trouble when you start playing.  Players have little patience for clueless noobs who do not know how to control their characters.  It is better to take the time to learn the game before you start so you will not be asking people all kinds of dumb and obvious questions that will brand you as the clueless noob.

If you bought the software for your game at a shop, it should come with a manual.  Read the manual first before you start installing the game.  This may not seem like fun and games, but you want every advantage you can get and you want to know about the strengths and weaknesses of different career paths in the game.  The manual will tell you what you need to know to make intelligent decisions on how to build your character.  This does not take a lot of time.  If you spend an evening reading up on what may end up taking a lot of your free time you will save yourself the trouble of doing something stupid.  If the documentation for your game is only online, read and search for alternative sources of information.  Player-run sites and third party operations often have better information than the official game sites.  You might check out Youtube to see if there are any tutorials or game videos posted that will help you make your decisions on if you even want to start a particular game.

Alright, you’ve done your research.  You know what race, class, and build of character you want to start.  You know if you will be focusing on player killing or mob killing.  You know where to get quests and what you will need to do to complete them.  You know about training skills and earning experience.  You have installed the game and downloaded the ubiquitous patches.  Now what?

Look at your inventory.  Look to see what gear you have equipped.  Find out how much gold, if any, you start with.  Do you have food?  Do you even need food or water?  This is easy stuff.  Look for a quest.  If the game is based around quests these should be fairly obvious to spot.  Try talking to non-combatant characters in the starting area and pay attention to what they say.  Make sure your weapon is equipped.  Find something to kill.

In any current MMORPG you will find that fighting monsters is the main focus of the game.  Killing monsters is how you get experience and gold and items.  Look for a type of creature that you can kill without getting hurt too bad.  Now, hunt a lot of these creatures.  This is the level grind.  Keep killing things and taking their loot.  As soon as you have some game currency, buy better gear.  Look for a trainer and practice up the major skills you need to build your character.  Most games have some limiting factor on what and how high you can practice.  Make a list of the skills you want on your character and budget your resources so you can learn these skills.  It may be money that the trainers require, it may be skill points, it may be practice points.  Whatever the limiting factor is keep track of it and use your resources wisely.  It is better to get very good in one skill than to waste your points practicing all kinds of different things to a low level.  You want a character who is an expert in what he does, not a klutz.

Either do quests or kill creatures to advance in levels.  In general, you will have a more powerful character if you do some of both of these things.  You will generally become better in your main skills by using these skills repeatedly in combat.  You will generally get more gold by killing thousands of mobs than you will from running a few quests.  You will find more items from mob drops if you kill a lot of mobs.  It’s like this:  You kill and kill again.  It can get very boring.  It can be exciting if you find something good or valuable.  This is what the game is all about.  Endlessly fighting creatures over and over again until you get sick of it.  You will have to do a lot of this to get a high level character in some games.

Once you have a high level character you can look around for boss fights and dungeon raids or you can retire and spend all your time socializing with your clan or guild.  All of these games have chat functions.  You can usually talk to any other player just by sending them a tell or a whisper.  You might enjoy helping low level characters on their quests or with some difficult part of the game.  You may become an antisocial recluse who does nothing but farm the same mob endlessly for loot.   You might lead a raid that takes out the baddest boss in the game.  You might sit in a bar getting drunk on mead.  You might even go insane and start roleplaying.  What you do is your own choice.  I’ve told you basically all there is to know about MMORPGs.  If you make a powerful character you might specialize in player killing.  There are a limited number of things you can do in any game, but there is usually some way to have fun.

I purchased World of Warcraft a year ago.  I also paid thirty dollars for a two-month game card.  My total investment was fifty dollars.  Despite the fifteen dollar a month subscription fee, I decided to try out this popular game.

The game installed well and updated and I eventually got a character going.  I started a fighter.  I wandered around the starting area and did all the quests I could find.  It took a while to learn all the controls, but most things were simple enough and intuitive enough and mouse-driven enough to easily remember.  I had a good time fighting annoying kobolds and other creatures.  I noticed that there were a lot of other people playing this game, and that monsters appeared at a fast rate so there was never any waiting around to find a mob you might need for a quest.

I had fun with World of Warcraft for over a month.  I did not play every day and not play for more than a couple hours at a time.  I ended up hunting pigs for leather, as I learned the skinning skill at a high level.  I grouped with other players occasionally to do quests or fight high concentrations of monsters in certain areas.  This was pretty cool, but after a while I just got bored with the game.

The main problems I had with World of Warcraft were that it is very structured and there are a limited number of things you can do at any one level.  Different areas have different level requirements and if you go into a high level area you are bound to get killed by something.  The game is very focussed on combat, which would be a good thing if combat was more interesting.  As it is, you pretty much fight things on auto with a bit of throwing in skills now and then to do more damage.  I did not get involved in a lot of player vs player combat, because the level differences between players make this very much a contest of who has played the game longer and who has better equipment.

What I liked about the game was that there was a lot of content.  I did not even manage to explore more than a little of the world and there were many places I did not go.  I liked the fact that you can go into the territory of an opposing faction if you like player vs player combat, and I liked the various gear that was available.  The graphics were on the cartoony side, but nicely done and fairly artistic.  The auction house was set up well, and there were always many things to buy if you were looking for gear.  World of Warcraft is a good game if you like repeatedly fighting the same kinds of creatures over and over again.  The quests all seemed to be missions where you kill a certain number of the same kind of creature, which I thought was a bit lame.  There was a lot of room for adding more quests where you could go different places or do different things.

Overall, I think World of Warcraft is a good game.   I got tired of fighting so many of the same creatures all the time and got bored with the constant danger everywhere you go.  Still, I think the game is exciting and has many good features that would make anyone who plays MMORPGs happy.  I did not continue my subscription after my three months were up, but I can see where some people might get addicted to this interesting game.