Most of my time has been occupied with the family blog as opposed to my work-related/gaming blog. Sorry for that. Work’s been busy as has my home life and school life. I don’t seem to have a lot of time for much else these days! My daughter’s growing pretty well, so things have calmed down on that front. I’m looking forward to seeing her in late-July!
Work’s awesome. I’m working on a lot of really good community features right now that will be totally sweet once they’re done. I just wrapped up a lot of work on the Guild Standards system, which Josh talks about in the April newsletter. That feature was challenging work, but worthwhile if you ask me. I think it gave me a lot of experience in areas that I didn’t really have before. It also gave me a chance to break out of the typical programmer role and take a more software engineering role (yes, there is actually a difference…). Go me! Let’s me use that edumucation thingy that I’m paying nearly $30,000 for. It’ll be a very solid system that will give some good RVR perks.
I leave you tonight with my waaagh baby, who is now 7.5 months along and going strong!
Sigh… I guess it’s going to happen the closer Warhammer gets to release, so because I’ve seen so many stupidand uneducated posts to what I used to consider reputable game news sites, I have to post the obligatory link to Penny Arcade’s fantastic comic… it kind of just explains how I feel right now, without me actually saying it:
Last time I checked, I was still beta testing my butt off whenever I have time away from school and baby stuff. I also tend to work a lot to make sure this game has some great features. Sometimes, it’s just easier to shoot stupid people so they don’t breed.
Without sound too attention whore-y, I do have some ever so slightly good news to post about now. It’s the primary reason I haven’t been able to post too much, because to be quite frank, I’ve been super tired and unable to do much of anything but work and sleep. Anyway:
I’m pregnant.
There. It is that simple Maurice and I are really excited, and we’re looking forward to many months of strange cravings, backaches, and weight gain. We’re roughly 16 weeks along now and due toward the end of July (so no worries, AFTER Warhammer launches!!!).
We have a family site up and running, where we’re posting most of our baby updates so as to not clog our game/work/banter blogs with talk of diapers and ultrasounds: http://family.travin.com/
This semester I am taking two courses. One is on the design and implementation phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and the other is on verification and validation (aka “quality assurance”). My design and implementation course required me to write a rather long research paper. At first I was really concerned about what I would write, but I pushed for a gaming topic with the professor, and he allowed me to do it. I was really shocked honestly, because my previous courses had professors that believed the game industry was immature and not to be taken seriously by “real” software engineers.
My paper focuses on how to improve the scalability of online game systems. It happens to discuss quite a bit of what I have worked on in the past through Mythic and why online games need to be scalable and maintainable. In short, this is one paper I can post and know the gaming audience here will probably get a kick out of reading. Mind you, it is still a graduate research paper, so I tend to use technical text instead of flowery statements. I did try to make it entertaining though!
I’ve tired myself with the whole “WOW scene” as of late. Raiding Karazhan three times a week for four months has had its toll on many of the people in my casual little guild. While I didn’t raid nearly that much, I was merely fed up after seeing the same crap every week on Saturday nights. It’s boring. I’m sorry… no offense intended to those who work hard on the game, but when you don’t have a huge guild capable of taking on high-end content, only having 1 zone to raid every week gets a little old.
That’s when I turned back to EQ2. I don’t know why I left in the first place honestly. I guess I was doing the whole “stick with the herd” thing. Half of my guild left for WOW. The other half stayed behind and tried to recruit a new main tank, main healer, etc. I missed them. So, I resubbed. After not seeing the game for almost two years, I didn’t realize how much behind I was and what I hadn’t even seen yet.
The nostalgia is intoxicating.
I used to play EQ1 religiously. I’d race home from classes and play for hours nonstop. Three years later and I was still rushing home to play, but from work. There are a lot of things that were added with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion that brought back a ton of memories. First off, I could recognize a lot of the landmarks in Faydwer even though they had gone through the “Shattering” (e.g. when that moon with all of the pussycats blew up — no can has moon?). Secondly, I flipped out when I saw Kelethin looking just like I remembered it. And of course, Unrest… ahhhh unrest, how I missed thee! My memories of this dungeon primarily include:
Groups of players lining the huge brick wall surrounding the house
Idiots training the festering hag to the zone line, causing everyone in the zone to have to run out to Dagnor’s Cauldron and wait 10 minutes for the aggro to clear
Being too scared to go into the house until you were level 20 at the least
Getting my first piece of bronze armor!
The funny thing is I zoned in. At first, you’re walking up to it and you can’t tell it’s Unrest. It’s a big house floating on an island, but once you actually enter the instance it’s insane! The entire place looks just like it used to right down to monster placement!!! I was caught by surprise, a happy surprise. I didn’t expect it!
This whole experience got me thinking… perhaps what old fogy MMO players like myself need the nostalgia to get us going. Maybe we want to be reminded of our first MMO to bring back happy memories. It’s like how clothing stores will have the baked cookies scent going on in the background to make you feel comfortable and all “christmasy” so you buy their stuff. I think that the more MMOs put these nostalgic little elements into their games, the more likely it is players will feel comfortable playing them.
Now, this isn’t to say that all new MMOs need to have forced grouping, 12 hour camps for quest items (Ragefire, I f**king hate you, sir), or out-dated UIs, but some elements of the past MMOs could help out. Being radical, innovative, and the “new shiny” is great and all, but sometimes that can scare players away more than actually getting new subscribers.
So I mentioned earlier that I have been in and out of the hospital for the past couple of months. I suppose that now I know everything is 110% ok, that I can talk about it more openly without starting some sort of panic with family and friends. It’s not that I was overly scared when I spoke to the surgeon, because she was so reassuring; however, it’s the overall fear that looms in the back of my mind screaming “what if.”
I guess I could say it all started in early June when I detected that evil little lump in my left breast. I’m only 28, but the family history hitting me from both sides really had me freaked out. It took my husband and a lot of alcohol to calm me down. Two weeks later, I get the dreaded mammogram. I was the only person in the waiting room that was under 45. Again, I figured “God hates me.” Why not? I don’t and haven’t believed in a god in years. I’ve been through too much crap in my somewhat short life to believe that a benevolent being floats up in the clouds and determines my life’s path.
The mammogram and ultrasound were inconclusive. In human terms, that means they couldn’t see enough of the lump to determine if it was “hostile” or not. They could only guess. I was tossed out and given to the care of the top breast surgeon in NOVA. They took me seriously, which is more than I can say about some other doctors I’ve had to deal with since June. First came the core biopsy. That came back negative for malignancy, thank goodness, but there was still a chance it could eventually develop into cancer, so next came the lumpectomy.
It wasn’t until last week, nearly 4 months after this whole ordeal started, that I found out I was in the clear. It was a “Fibroadenoma” (a word I still, to this day, cannot pronounce correctly much to my doctor’s amusement). I feel somewhat silly for worrying about it. I mean, the odds were against me having cancer, but it isn’t totally unheard of especially given the family history (thank’s ma!, grandma #1, grandma #2). The news couldn’t have come at a better time, considering it was breast cancer awareness week and all.
It’s odd to be writing this as a blog entry, because it’s usually something people keep private. Right now I’m just too thrilled with life to hold it in any longer. I’ve been worried sick for months, but work has been good therapy to get me through this. It keeps me sane. It helps me forget even if just for a little while.
I suppose I should come up with something else to worry about, lest my performance go down the toilet
Maurice and I have been spending the past couple of nights playing Team Fortress 2. It’s currently in beta, but you can play it if you preorder the Orange Box. I’m sure everyone’s been chatting about this, but I’m pretty happy with it. I’m huge into FPSs, but the one thing that pisses me off about them is that they are popular for roughly 2 months and then the server availability starts to dwindle. I was holding out for Quake Wars until I saw TF2 at work. It’s a lot more fun.
I believe that the cartoonish appeal really makes the game seem more fun. There’s also a variety of classes to choose from for different gameplay approaches. I like variety. Variety is good. It keeps you on your toes and gives you different options. Sometimes I just want to kill people. Othertimes I want to hang back and defend (which seems to be the majority of the time).
I’m primarily playing the Engineer and the Medic. I really get a kick out of the shotgun on the Engineer. I think I may stick with him most of the time. I don’t know how, but I’m just too damn good with the shotgun. I think I get more kills from my shotgun than the danged sentries.
Loads of people from work are playing. It’s fun to just sit there at lunch and beat up people. It lets me get rid of some built up frustrations with life in general. I haven’t posted a lot, primarily because my personal life has been all kinds of hell since early August. I’ve had two hospital trips that required me to be put under (yes, I’m fine — no need to ask). Our fracking television busted (don’t buy a Toshita ever…). Work is about the only thing that’s kept me going.
On the bright side, work is awesome. I’m doing a TON of very interesting and innovative work on guilds. I’m really looking forward to that getting released to beta at some point so people can see all of the great things the community systems team has been pushing out. The guy that did the UI for the guilds did an outstanding job. I can’t get over how polished it looks everytime I see the latest version.
I used to be a huge fan of SWG, but times and tastes change… thankfully, my humor does not. I got linked to this great YouTube video where someone shot the same scenes in SWG as they were done in a Gunther video. If you don’t know Gunther… shame on you! Here’s the video:
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Maurice and I are really excited, and we’re looking forward to many months of strange cravings, backaches, and weight gain. We’re roughly 16 weeks along now and due toward the end of July (so no worries, AFTER Warhammer launches!!!).
