September 27, 2012
Yahtzee Croshaw reviews Guild Wars 2
September 21, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My regular community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. In addition to the usual assortment of articles, videos and podcasts, there is the Mac OS X announcement, a flurry of whining over YouTube monetization, and good information on password security for players.
September 18, 2012
Guild Wars 2 to be available on Mac OS X
ArenaNet just announced that they will be releasing Guild Wars 2 for Macintosh computers (so you Mac heads now have no excuse for not playing Guild Wars 2):
Today we’re happy to announce another major milestone in the development of Guild Wars 2: going forward, ArenaNet will also be supporting the game on Apple’s Mac OS X. The Mac Beta client is available immediately for all Guild Wars 2 players. It shares the same features and connects to the same live game servers as the PC client. Anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2 can now play it on both PC and Mac.
Bringing Guild Wars 2 to the Mac is huge for us, because it introduces the game to an entire group of players who are often ignored by game developers. The ability to play together with your friends is one of the underlying principles of Guild Wars 2, and providing a Mac client means that friends and guildmates can play together regardless of what operating system they favor.
September 14, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. In addition to the usual assortment of articles, videos and podcasts, there is lots of discussion about the official Guild Wars 2 release video (mixed reviews at best) and celebration of the news that ArenaNet has sold over two million copies of Guild Wars 2.
September 8, 2012
Gamers are not superstitious (all the time) about their “lucky dice”
Many gamers are highly protective of the “lucky D20” they use for certain die rolls. In some cases, that’s not superstition at all, it’s taking advantage of a manufacturing flaw in polyhedral dice:
One of the biggest manufacturers of RPG dice is a company called Chessex. They make a huge variety of dice, in all kinds of different colors and styles. These dice are put through rock tumblers that give them smooth edges and a shiny finish, so they look great. Like many RPG fans, I own a bunch of them.
I also own a set of GameScience dice. They’re not polished, painted or smoothed, so they’re supposed to roll better than Chessex dice, producing results closer to true random. I like them, but mostly because they don’t roll too far, and their sharp edges look cool. I couldn’t tell you if they truly produce more random results.
But the good folks over at the Awesome Dice Blog can. They recently completed a massive test between a Chessex d20 and a GameScience d20, rolling each over 10,000 times, by hand, to determine which rolls closer to true.
In a video from a few years back, Lou Zocchi explains why his dice are the best quality in the business:
September 7, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My weekly community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. It’s not quite as long as last week’s monstrosity, but there’s more than enough in the way of articles, videos and podcasts to keep you busy for a while.
September 6, 2012
August 31, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
My regular community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. Now that the game has finally launched, there’s lots of articles to read but (temporarily) fewer videos to watch: I think many of the video folks have been too busy playing to record and comment on their footage. I imagine that it’ll be back to pre-release volume by next week’s round-up.
August 28, 2012
Last of my Guild Wars 2 pre-release journal entries
I started doing these short posts using my nom-de-gaming identity “Raphia Naon” at GuildMag during the first beta weekend event — partly because we needed something to keep the page active while everyone was busy playing in the beta test. I continued doing a daily entry for almost all the beta events and stress tests (I missed a few because they were scheduled at times I couldn’t take part). This is the final entry in that series, briefly talking about the last day of the headstart access period (the game is now on sale to the general public).
August 25, 2012
Posting will be light for a few days
ArenaNet’s Guild Wars 2 will be released to the general public on Tuesday, but everyone who pre-purchased the game has early access to the servers today and for the next two days. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the virtual world of Tyria as a result.
If you happen to be in-game, my main character name is Raphia Naon and I’m on the Darkhaven server.
Update: My first day’s gaming report is now posted at GuildMag.
Update the second: The next day’s activity is rounded up here.
From wargaming to war-making
Wargames have been used to plan real wars for more than a century, but in at least one instance, a commercial wargame was a significant planning tool for a real war:
By the end of the Cold War, American military planners had contingencies and plans for just about every conceivable crisis – Latin American counterinsurgencies, confrontations on the Korean Peninsula, a full out Warsaw Pact onslaught against NATO. But on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi tanks surprised the world and rolled into the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Kuwait, decision makers in the Pentagon had virtually no plans on the shelf for the defeating the world’s fourth largest army. Out of desperation, someone in the American military nerve-centre reached for a copy of a hobby store military board game entitled Gulf Strike. Designed in the late 1980s by a subsidiary of the commercial war game company Avalon Hill, Gulf Strike allowed civilian hobbyists to battle through a series of hypothetical wars involving the U.S., Soviet Union, Iraq and Iran on a hexagonal-grid map of the Gulf region. According to a 1994 Military History article on war games by Peter Perla, before lunch on the day of the invasion, the Pentagon had the game’s designer, Mark Herman, on the phone. By mid afternoon, he was on the military’s payroll. And by day’s end, Herman and a group of senior officers had already successfully played out a shorthand version of what in five months would go down in history as Operation Desert Storm.
Of course, the results of wargames can’t predict with great accuracy: the level of abstraction is too high and the “fog of war” quickly introduces far more uncertainty than any simulation can dispell in advance. However, disregarding the data from wargaming a battle or campaign has resulted in disaster at least once: the Japanese navy wargamed the attack on Midway Island in 1942. the wargame showed that the Japanese would lose at least one aircraft carrier from the attacking forces. The admirals, suffering as a group from what was known as “victory disease”, disregarded the game result and ordered the sunken ship “refloated” and the exercise continued.
In the real world, of course, the IJN lost not one but four aircraft carriers and the majority of their combat-trained pilots and crew. It was the turning point of the war in the Pacific.
August 23, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
A day earlier than usual, my community round-up at GuildMag has been posted. With everyone waiting for the headstart period to begin in just over 24 hours, there’s lots of articles to read and videos to watch to while away the time.
