Reviews of items that a blogger received as free sample always carry a whiff of writing for profit, and open up the question of whether the writer’s opinion was influenced by the gift. Fortunately I am a slacker, so I managed to accumulate two very similar items I received as review copies. That should hopefully make a comparative review more believably balanced.
The contenders are The Guild Leader’s Handbook, written by Scott F. Adams and published by No Starch Press and The Guild Leader’s Companion, written by Adam “Ferrel” Trzonkowski from Epic Slant, self-published by Epic Slant Press.
Before discussing content, some technical remarks: The Handbook clearly beats the Companion in technical quality. It is a professionally produced book, with better layout, more text per page, and all the bells and whistles like an index at the end. The Companion still is okay, but the layout is clearly less professional, the line spacing is oddly large, and there is no index. But then the Handbook has a list price of $24.95 including E-book (cheaper at Amazon without), and the Companion is $7.65.
Both books have the same purpose: Giving guidance to guild leaders. They talk about managing your guild, recruitment, successful raiding, loot distribution, how to deal with guild drama, and similar subjects. Anybody who has ever read a book about management will quickly realize that these guild leader books are essentially management advice books. The Companion even names his chapters after departments you’d find in a company, like human resources, accounting, public relations, and production. That is logical, because running a guild is essentially a management position. On the one side this means the books are full of advice you might have heard before if you ever visited some management training. On the other side you can read these books and pick up some useful tips about management situations in your job while reading about guilds in MMORPGs. Ferrel’s five guiding STAFF principles are sound advice to anybody being in any position of responsibility in his job.
Both books claim to cover all sorts of guilds, and the Handbook has an extra chapter on PvP and role-playing guilds. But the core of both guilds is the classic raiding guild, thus raiding and loot distribution are well covered. That is not a random choice: A raiding guild is quite obviously very much in need of good management, while some ultra-casual role-playing guild might be okay with some more free-wheeling governance.
From the writing style, the Handbook is the easier read. It is written in a lighter style, and breaks up the text with tables and flowcharts. It also frequently phrases its advice in a more detailed way, for example giving advice on how to name a guild, or how to host a guild website and voice chat. There is a more frequent use of publicly known examples of what happened with guilds in various online games, and other references to common knowledge. The Handbook is the more complete of the two guild leader’s books, with a better chance for you to find the information you need. The downside is that by presenting the issues in a light manner as an entertaining read, the advice is not always really practical. For example the chapter describing various types of people behavior you might encounter in your guild in terms of a system of character classes and specs is a good read, but not necessarily helpful in managing a guild.
The Companion is probably better suited for people who already have a bit of guild experience. It doesn’t cover quite as many subjects, but it covers them somewhat deeper. That leads to mixed results depending on what you are looking for, some people will enjoy 35 pages of annex with detailed written policy examples for guild rules, others will consider that a waste of space. The book is less entertaining to read, but ends up being more serious about guild leadership. There are fewer examples, and they usually come from Ferrel’s own experience, not from events you might already have read about elsewhere. The strength of the Companion is how obviously serious the author is taking guild leadership, but the downside of that is how this makes the Companion the far gloomier of the two books.
In a way the two books are complementary, so if you want the best possible preparation for becoming a guild leader you might consider reading both of them. If not, I’d recommend The Guild Leader’s Handbook for absolute beginners and people who just want to read something entertaining about the subject. The Guild Leader’s Companion I would recommend to those who already have some ideas about guild leadership but would like a deeper and more serious discussion of the subject.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
The Raid documentary
If you get a chance to watch the documentary The Raid, I can recommend watching it. It is not always pleasant, but realistic enough, and touches a lot of the issues and misconceptions about raiding. Also gives you the opportunity to watch a complete Icecrown raid, in case you never did one yourself.
What struck me most about film was how much it made raiding look like work. You have to be there at a specific time for a specific amount of hours, and you have to perform well during that time. Sounds a lot like my job.
What the film failed to show was how the guild involved got their raid team together, and who got excluded. No interviews with guild members who didn't get a raid spot or got kicked from the guild, although those undoubtedly exist. Succeeding involves synchronous excellence of execution, and that ends up being both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the system: Winning together leads to a strong team spirit to develop (shown in the film), but losing together risks people pointing fingers at whoever they perceive to have been the weak spot.
Real-world groups of friends often include people who aren't quite as bright or successful than the others. Raiding makes that difficult for groups of friends in virtual worlds. Selecting your friends by their gearscore and raid performance gives you greater virtual rewards than selecting them based on how nice they or, or sticking with them through thick and thin out of loyalty. I still hope that we will get some mainstream MMORPG one day which is about people working together without penalizing players for sticking with their under-performing friends. I think that would lead to greater social cohesion than the raid system.
What struck me most about film was how much it made raiding look like work. You have to be there at a specific time for a specific amount of hours, and you have to perform well during that time. Sounds a lot like my job.
What the film failed to show was how the guild involved got their raid team together, and who got excluded. No interviews with guild members who didn't get a raid spot or got kicked from the guild, although those undoubtedly exist. Succeeding involves synchronous excellence of execution, and that ends up being both the biggest strength and the biggest weakness of the system: Winning together leads to a strong team spirit to develop (shown in the film), but losing together risks people pointing fingers at whoever they perceive to have been the weak spot.
Real-world groups of friends often include people who aren't quite as bright or successful than the others. Raiding makes that difficult for groups of friends in virtual worlds. Selecting your friends by their gearscore and raid performance gives you greater virtual rewards than selecting them based on how nice they or, or sticking with them through thick and thin out of loyalty. I still hope that we will get some mainstream MMORPG one day which is about people working together without penalizing players for sticking with their under-performing friends. I think that would lead to greater social cohesion than the raid system.
Failing hard drives
Hard drives fail. Several people commented on my thread about the new computer I ordered pointing out that solid state drives fail a lot more than classic hard drives, especially if in Raid 0 configuration. So I'm reconsidering the raid configuration, especially due to the TRIM issue. But the fundamental issue of the increased likelihood of my solid state hard drive failing doesn't bother me all that much, and here is why.
What exactly is the damage if your hard drive fails? Well, if it fails after the guarantee ran out, there is a financial loss. You need to buy a new one. But generally what people fear more is the loss of data. If that hard drive was the only place where you stored the photos of your children and now it's gone, you've lost something irreplaceable. If the hard drive that crashed contained the nearly finished thesis or book you were writing, you need to start over. And so on. I've been using hard drives for quarter a century now, at work and at home, and I've lost tons of data to hard drive crashes over the years.
Which is why my solid state drive(s) will not have any data of the sort I care about on them. For years already I have separated the drive containing the operating system and programs from the drive containing all the data. My new computer will have all my photos, documents, and other data I care about on the big regular hard drive. With one or two backups (depending on how much I care) on external hard drives, plus in some cases burned on DVD. I've implemented a solid backup strategy for home and work years ago, and haven't lost anything since.
Furthermore a lot of my data these days isn't even stored on my computer any more. I used to play single-player games where if you hard drive with your saved game crashed, my progress in the game would be lost. That isn't the case with MMORPGs. I can erase every trace of World of Warcraft from all my computers and drives, and if I ever restart WoW all my characters will still be there with all their possessions. (I just shouldn't throw away the authenticator.) The same is true for other online games I'm playing, like World of Tanks. My blog is stored somewhere in the Google cloud. So is all my e-mail. Right now Google going bankrupt would be a much bigger loss of data for me than if my main computer with all hard drives exploded.
Hard drives fail. But between data being stored off-site, and a good backup plan, that has stopped worrying me years ago. If my new solid state drives go belly-up in a year, it will not be a catastrophic loss. I just lose the price of the new one and an afternoon to re-install everything. And the next generation of drives will be cheaper and more stable again. The risk of crashing is the price I pay to be at the edge of technology.
What exactly is the damage if your hard drive fails? Well, if it fails after the guarantee ran out, there is a financial loss. You need to buy a new one. But generally what people fear more is the loss of data. If that hard drive was the only place where you stored the photos of your children and now it's gone, you've lost something irreplaceable. If the hard drive that crashed contained the nearly finished thesis or book you were writing, you need to start over. And so on. I've been using hard drives for quarter a century now, at work and at home, and I've lost tons of data to hard drive crashes over the years.
Which is why my solid state drive(s) will not have any data of the sort I care about on them. For years already I have separated the drive containing the operating system and programs from the drive containing all the data. My new computer will have all my photos, documents, and other data I care about on the big regular hard drive. With one or two backups (depending on how much I care) on external hard drives, plus in some cases burned on DVD. I've implemented a solid backup strategy for home and work years ago, and haven't lost anything since.
Furthermore a lot of my data these days isn't even stored on my computer any more. I used to play single-player games where if you hard drive with your saved game crashed, my progress in the game would be lost. That isn't the case with MMORPGs. I can erase every trace of World of Warcraft from all my computers and drives, and if I ever restart WoW all my characters will still be there with all their possessions. (I just shouldn't throw away the authenticator.) The same is true for other online games I'm playing, like World of Tanks. My blog is stored somewhere in the Google cloud. So is all my e-mail. Right now Google going bankrupt would be a much bigger loss of data for me than if my main computer with all hard drives exploded.
Hard drives fail. But between data being stored off-site, and a good backup plan, that has stopped worrying me years ago. If my new solid state drives go belly-up in a year, it will not be a catastrophic loss. I just lose the price of the new one and an afternoon to re-install everything. And the next generation of drives will be cheaper and more stable again. The risk of crashing is the price I pay to be at the edge of technology.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
The politics of free stuff
The United States of America would not exist without riots. Nor would many other modern nations. Riots like the one 1770 in Boston are an integral part of revolutions, and most nations had some on their way from earlier more tyrannical forms of government to modern democracy. Having said that, the London rioters make for rather unlikely revolutionaries. As one lady in the middle of it said so correctly: "we are not all gathering together and fighting for a cause. We are running out of Footlocker and theifin shoes." Stories of rioters using Blackberries to text each other about where to get "free stuff" and mostly targeting brand clothing and electronics stores cast doubts on both the motivation and degree of poverty of the rioters.
Nevertheless British politicians dismissing the rioters as just criminals don't get the whole picture either. There were far too many of them to be just a criminal gang, it was more like a movement. And then you have to ask yourself why so many young people considered rioting and looting a better use of their time than what they were doing otherwise. Unemployment is not an excuse for criminal behavior, but often enough the root cause.
Of course rioting will not solve anything in the short term, and we are still a long way from a revolution. Nevertheless I wouldn't totally exclude the possibility of a revolution either, not if we continue like this. Politicians not only looked very helpless in face of these riots, they also offered only the full panoply of all the wrong solutions: The left thinks more welfare would calm the youths down, while the right wants to lock them all up and remove their benefits. The former plan of redistribution isn't economically sustainable, and the latter plan is the direct way into a police state. If you have 25% youth unemployment, you can't just lock them all up.
I believe the solution to be very different, not redistribution but a different distribution of the added value produced by companies right when they produce that value. And I believe the culprit who caused things to go wrong wasn't some politician, but an accountant hundreds of years ago, when the rules of company accounting were first invented. Let me explain:
Companies create value. They turn some lower value inputs like raw materials and energy into final products which have a higher value. Or they create value through services, like the distribution of goods. The added value the company creates is then flowing to the various stakeholders of a company, mostly the investors and the workers. A proper measure of how good a company works would calculate the added value created by the company by counting the value of the goods or services produced, and deducting the cost of the raw materials and energy consumed in the process.
Unfortunately real companies don't calculate like that. They do count the value of the good or services produced and deduce the cost, but at some point in time some accountant decided that salaries were a cost. That is an extremely narrow view, which is only true if you are the investor, and the only added value created that interests you is the one going into your own pocket. From a larger point of view, for society, it only matters how much total value is added, not whether that added value lands in the pocket of the investor, or in the pockets of the workforce.
This wrong way of accounting for investors profit instead of total added value over the centuries has led to companies doing their utmost to become "more efficient" by reducing labor cost. If money given to employees is a "loss", you strive to avoid that loss. What companies should have done instead is searching for the optimum number of workers which would maximize the total added value created by the company. It is pretty certain that this optimimum for total wealth creation would mean more employment, even if the share of the profits for investors would be somewhat smaller. But the benefit for society would be huge: Less unemployment, more value creation, and more money going towards people who actually spend that money, thus growing the economy even further. And ultimately less riots. Because if you can afford to shop for expensive trainers at Footlocker, you're less likely to go looting them.
Salaries are not a cost, they are an important part of the value created by a company.
Nevertheless British politicians dismissing the rioters as just criminals don't get the whole picture either. There were far too many of them to be just a criminal gang, it was more like a movement. And then you have to ask yourself why so many young people considered rioting and looting a better use of their time than what they were doing otherwise. Unemployment is not an excuse for criminal behavior, but often enough the root cause.
Of course rioting will not solve anything in the short term, and we are still a long way from a revolution. Nevertheless I wouldn't totally exclude the possibility of a revolution either, not if we continue like this. Politicians not only looked very helpless in face of these riots, they also offered only the full panoply of all the wrong solutions: The left thinks more welfare would calm the youths down, while the right wants to lock them all up and remove their benefits. The former plan of redistribution isn't economically sustainable, and the latter plan is the direct way into a police state. If you have 25% youth unemployment, you can't just lock them all up.
I believe the solution to be very different, not redistribution but a different distribution of the added value produced by companies right when they produce that value. And I believe the culprit who caused things to go wrong wasn't some politician, but an accountant hundreds of years ago, when the rules of company accounting were first invented. Let me explain:
Companies create value. They turn some lower value inputs like raw materials and energy into final products which have a higher value. Or they create value through services, like the distribution of goods. The added value the company creates is then flowing to the various stakeholders of a company, mostly the investors and the workers. A proper measure of how good a company works would calculate the added value created by the company by counting the value of the goods or services produced, and deducting the cost of the raw materials and energy consumed in the process.
Unfortunately real companies don't calculate like that. They do count the value of the good or services produced and deduce the cost, but at some point in time some accountant decided that salaries were a cost. That is an extremely narrow view, which is only true if you are the investor, and the only added value created that interests you is the one going into your own pocket. From a larger point of view, for society, it only matters how much total value is added, not whether that added value lands in the pocket of the investor, or in the pockets of the workforce.
This wrong way of accounting for investors profit instead of total added value over the centuries has led to companies doing their utmost to become "more efficient" by reducing labor cost. If money given to employees is a "loss", you strive to avoid that loss. What companies should have done instead is searching for the optimum number of workers which would maximize the total added value created by the company. It is pretty certain that this optimimum for total wealth creation would mean more employment, even if the share of the profits for investors would be somewhat smaller. But the benefit for society would be huge: Less unemployment, more value creation, and more money going towards people who actually spend that money, thus growing the economy even further. And ultimately less riots. Because if you can afford to shop for expensive trainers at Footlocker, you're less likely to go looting them.
Salaries are not a cost, they are an important part of the value created by a company.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Ordered a new computer
Since decades now I buy a new computer every two years. I give my wife the 2-year old PC, and throw out her 4-year old one. The 2-year cycle used to be determined by the speed of technological development, and a necessity to play the latest games. That stopped to be strictly necessary a few years ago, but I'm keeping up the cycle out of self-indulgence. So I just ordered a new computer with the following specs:
Core i7 2600k 3.4G processor
8 GB DDR3 RAM
Asus P8P67 motherboard
Geforce GTX 570 graphics card (1280 MB memory)
2 x 120 GB Vertex SSD HD in Raid 0
Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black HD
DVD recorder 12x SATA
800W PSU
NZXT Tempest Evo case
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
The most visible speed improvement of this new computer will be the 240 GB solid state hard drive as the system drive. Whenever you actually wait for your computer to do something, like booting up, chances are the hard drive is the speed limiting factor these days. Solid state drives are still rather expensive (the 2 TB regular hard drive costs only 30% of the 240 GB SSD), but easily cut boot time in half. And I took one big enough to enable me to put some games on it, reducing load times.
I also asked specifically for a larger case this time. The previous computer only had 8" of space for the graphics card, and the newer cards can be 10" to 12" long. That came to haunt me when I wanted to upgrade my graphics card, so this time I wanted to make sure I have room for improvement. Literally.
The CPU and graphics card are rather high-end. Which is a bit silly if I consider what kind of games I'm currently playing or planning to play. This is way beyond the system requirements for SWTOR. But with computers being my main hobby, I might as well spoil myself. So what do you think of this system configuration?
Core i7 2600k 3.4G processor
8 GB DDR3 RAM
Asus P8P67 motherboard
Geforce GTX 570 graphics card (1280 MB memory)
2 x 120 GB Vertex SSD HD in Raid 0
Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black HD
DVD recorder 12x SATA
800W PSU
NZXT Tempest Evo case
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
The most visible speed improvement of this new computer will be the 240 GB solid state hard drive as the system drive. Whenever you actually wait for your computer to do something, like booting up, chances are the hard drive is the speed limiting factor these days. Solid state drives are still rather expensive (the 2 TB regular hard drive costs only 30% of the 240 GB SSD), but easily cut boot time in half. And I took one big enough to enable me to put some games on it, reducing load times.
I also asked specifically for a larger case this time. The previous computer only had 8" of space for the graphics card, and the newer cards can be 10" to 12" long. That came to haunt me when I wanted to upgrade my graphics card, so this time I wanted to make sure I have room for improvement. Literally.
The CPU and graphics card are rather high-end. Which is a bit silly if I consider what kind of games I'm currently playing or planning to play. This is way beyond the system requirements for SWTOR. But with computers being my main hobby, I might as well spoil myself. So what do you think of this system configuration?
Monday, August 8, 2011
A new hope
Samuel Johnson said: "A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.". So is a second MMORPG. Or a seventeenth. Actually I lost count. Nevertheless I do feel some hope towards Star Wars: The Old Republic being a fun enough game, which is why I pre-ordered it, in spite of my experience already now being able to point out some major flaws in the game. Like far more people wanting to play a "Jedi Knight" than a "Trooper". Or how you can invite a full group of jedi (which are all tank or healing classes) and still don't find anybody willing to tank or heal. Not to mention how there will be horrible queues and lag on launch day.
While the cynicism is based on experience and awareness of fundamental problems of the genre that SWTOR is unlikely to have solved, the hope is based on what is new in the game. Specifically the hope is that the improved story-telling will make us care about the story. Which is a tall order. World of Warcraft shipped with slow-scrolling quest text so that people would read the story, and one of the first addons widely used was the one that made the quest text appear immediately, so that you could just click accept without reading the story. I don't know if in SWTOR you will always have to hear the full voice-over or whether there is a way to cut it short. But I don't think that the voice-over alone is enough to engage the player more in the story.
Rowan thinks that our neocortex might be too small to care about all these NPCs. I'm not sure Dunbar's number theory really applies to that situation (I know more than 150 characters from books, films, and TV). But what is certainly true is that players tend to care mostly about themselves, and very little about NPC Farmer Brown's problem with the womp rats. Thus the part of the quest text they are interested in is what the reward for them is, and what they'll have to do to get it. Then they'll happily run off to kill those 10 womp rats, and come back for that reward. Why exactly Farmer Brown wanted those womp rats dead isn't of any importance for the player. Thus to succeed the stories of SWTOR have to be more about the player's character than about the NPC's various problems.
So my hope is that the "200 hours of story per class" that Bioware promises will be really about my character, and engaging enough to keep me interested. I hope that the stories are more than window-dressing for repetitive quests. I hope that "developing my character" means developing my avatar's *character*, and not just his stats. Because if it is 200 hours of running errands for Farmer Brown and killing womp rats for him, I know I'll quickly get bored with Star Wars: The Old Republic.
But even if SWTOR really has 200 hours of good story for each of the 8 character classes, the general fate of the game will be determined by the kind of people playing the game. If Bioware manages to attract a lot of new players, people who haven't played a lot of previous MMORPGs, or only ever played casually, they could succeed in a major way. 200 hours is a lot of content if you play casually, and by multiplying it with 8 alts you end up with something like 2 years worth of content for a casual player. On the other hand there will be people concentrating on just one character, believing the old "the game starts at the level cap" fallacy, and playing in a hurry. I bet you'll read about the first people having finished their 200-hour story arc before their free month is over. Soon after we'll hear the first complaints that the game shipped with not enough raid content, and that the raids are too easy anyway. You can never please the bitter veterans, and I'm not sure Bioware already has the wisdom already to not even try. I hope they realize that the unique selling point of Star Wars: The Old Republic is the story-telling, and that this isn't a feature hardcore players are likely to care about. The last thing the MMORPG market needs right now is yet another game in which people rush to the endgame only to find that this endgame doesn't offer enough entertainment for a large enough percentage of the player base to keep the game successful in the long term.
Well, if SWTOR fails there is always hope for Guild Wars 2.
While the cynicism is based on experience and awareness of fundamental problems of the genre that SWTOR is unlikely to have solved, the hope is based on what is new in the game. Specifically the hope is that the improved story-telling will make us care about the story. Which is a tall order. World of Warcraft shipped with slow-scrolling quest text so that people would read the story, and one of the first addons widely used was the one that made the quest text appear immediately, so that you could just click accept without reading the story. I don't know if in SWTOR you will always have to hear the full voice-over or whether there is a way to cut it short. But I don't think that the voice-over alone is enough to engage the player more in the story.
Rowan thinks that our neocortex might be too small to care about all these NPCs. I'm not sure Dunbar's number theory really applies to that situation (I know more than 150 characters from books, films, and TV). But what is certainly true is that players tend to care mostly about themselves, and very little about NPC Farmer Brown's problem with the womp rats. Thus the part of the quest text they are interested in is what the reward for them is, and what they'll have to do to get it. Then they'll happily run off to kill those 10 womp rats, and come back for that reward. Why exactly Farmer Brown wanted those womp rats dead isn't of any importance for the player. Thus to succeed the stories of SWTOR have to be more about the player's character than about the NPC's various problems.
So my hope is that the "200 hours of story per class" that Bioware promises will be really about my character, and engaging enough to keep me interested. I hope that the stories are more than window-dressing for repetitive quests. I hope that "developing my character" means developing my avatar's *character*, and not just his stats. Because if it is 200 hours of running errands for Farmer Brown and killing womp rats for him, I know I'll quickly get bored with Star Wars: The Old Republic.
But even if SWTOR really has 200 hours of good story for each of the 8 character classes, the general fate of the game will be determined by the kind of people playing the game. If Bioware manages to attract a lot of new players, people who haven't played a lot of previous MMORPGs, or only ever played casually, they could succeed in a major way. 200 hours is a lot of content if you play casually, and by multiplying it with 8 alts you end up with something like 2 years worth of content for a casual player. On the other hand there will be people concentrating on just one character, believing the old "the game starts at the level cap" fallacy, and playing in a hurry. I bet you'll read about the first people having finished their 200-hour story arc before their free month is over. Soon after we'll hear the first complaints that the game shipped with not enough raid content, and that the raids are too easy anyway. You can never please the bitter veterans, and I'm not sure Bioware already has the wisdom already to not even try. I hope they realize that the unique selling point of Star Wars: The Old Republic is the story-telling, and that this isn't a feature hardcore players are likely to care about. The last thing the MMORPG market needs right now is yet another game in which people rush to the endgame only to find that this endgame doesn't offer enough entertainment for a large enough percentage of the player base to keep the game successful in the long term.
Well, if SWTOR fails there is always hope for Guild Wars 2.
Jadwal imsakiyah ramadhan 2012
Jadwal imsakiyah ramadhan 2012 lengkap,Untuk seluruh wilayah Nusantara ( indonesia )
Catatan : Untuk mengetahui waktu imsakiyah wilayah anda yaitu dengan klik Nama kota pada menu ‘pilih kota‘ dibawah dan pilih nama kota anda
( Baca Juga : Karoseri Dump Truck dan Hydraulic Dump Truck )Sumber : Widget Jadwal Imsakiyah 1432 H – PKPU
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