Story Time - Pulling My Nutz Out the Fire (Work Place Meetings)

Last week in Story Time I talked about my best-worst day, related to that is my most embarassing moment at work... It happened at that actual company I got caned by....

And this story came to me after I'd read this post from DadHacker... 

The company was split into two custom made buildings, the down stairs of building 1 was admin and offices, most of the directors sat there with plush offices, there was also a single large meeting room - which was always the hottest room in the company, come rain, wind, shine or snow you could pop in there in and get warm.

This was important between the two buildings as if you were based in the more technology orientated building 2, then you had to cross the open car park frequently to meetings & presentations, and in the hills of Derbyshire this was COLD!

So a warm, communal and often empty warm room got you back up to speed, you could organise yourself and your notes and then pop into the meeting you had on hand.

But this warm, embrace, was also a deadly enemy.  I was once called over to a very boring meeting, three technology guys, the totally real director and then me on just a couple of hours sleep...

They presented their idea, the tech guys dissected it for the hardware, and I was to provide the software, but it was way beyond any of the machines they had in the building, I straight off asked for a few reference books and a nice graphics card... Spending money!...

And Spending money on something other than camel cigarettes was something this guy didn't like, so he shelved me and they four went off on their own conversation.

Now I don't know how long it took, or what noises I made, but I was startled awake a indeterminate amount of time later by the lit cigarette end of this guy waving up and down in my wave... He was holding my shoulders and looking very angry.

Panick, panick... What to say... "Oh help" I wimpered "my bloooo" I stumbled on purposed "blood sugar low"...

SAVED IT!

The anger melted from his face and ordered one of the techies out to find something to eat, they came up with a banana from the receptionist - I hate banana's, but I unzipped that one and ate half chewing slowly and then holding a piece under my tongue as if recovering...

With the secretary at the door looking concerned a flow of cool air came in from the glass fronted reception area, and it revived me more.... I could almost convince myself that I had had a hypo... Despite not being diabetic.

They clocked me later, as another time I munched down a four pack of mars bars for lunch, but on that day... I pulled my nutz out the fire.

Gaming Update - Atari ST - Heroes and Generals

Its been a long weekend, and a busy weekend, first things first, the main man lab now has a new floor laid - the last one I'm doing in the whole house - someone else can lay a new stair and landing carpet, I'm done!

I've also put up two new wardrobes from Ikea, sorted the garage out and also moved the guineapig into a new hutch.  These last two items were related to the rat issue, no sign of any rats I clearly scared that sucker off... But there were other things living in there... The first things I found were frogs, I don't mind frogs and I gave them a lift out in my hands and set them loose in the lilly pands at the bottom of the garden... They looked well happy... The wife however was horrified I'd pick up a frog and ran for it... Frogs are silky smooth very nice to hold... Not slimey and not cold - least not when the atmosphere is not cold... But she'd have none of it.

Anyway, with them moved we took up the old run the rat had got into, and I hung it on the wall as a kind of giant basket for stuff and filled it with a bunch of things, I stacked and piled things and since the last floor had been laid I now knew I could rid myself of the excess packs of Laminate flooring, so they went back to the shop... I'm yet to get a refund, but they went back...  So lots more space in the already spacious garage... Yay.

I also got some time with an Atari ST... yes, I got one down and I played a few games, notably Verminator... Blood Money... and Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters... Lovely.

The wife also picked out a film from pay-per-view... Devil's Due... Utter shit, avoid it at all costs.  I'm staggered such a bad, low tech, inconsequential film was made for 7 million bucks, and made over 38 million at the box office... The film was so bad I was more bothered what happened to their pet labrador then the people, and the film didn't even let you know what happened to the dog.  Terrible, utterly stupid, film with so many dead ends, bad camera work passed off as POV filming, just rubbish.  So avoid that sucker.

Finally, I did get a little time Saturday night playing Heroes and Generals, I was pleasently surprised to see they had a free premium weekend, so I got to play a few missions with premium bonus... And you know what... It was not that helpful... I was making between 5 and 8k  credits per game... and with premium bonus I made between 6 and 9... Nothing to write home about.

But I did have a massive "ahaha I told you so" moment in there... I've been playing with the G43, and complaining about it... and the god damn huge prices for upgrading it for so little return... Anyway, in a mission I pretty much spend my time trying to scround a bolt action rifle... And I found one and had a 14/2 K:D mission... Totally validating my thoughts on the G43, where I can't get anywhere near that without sitting on my ass camping rather than actively playing.

Later on of course I was sent back to a G43... And instantly annoyed as shit at coming face to face with an opponent, putting 4 shells into him... 4 hits... in the torso... and he just turned around and shot me in the face... IN THE FACE PEOPLE... It so unbalanced!

And this ends my rant for the week... Heroes and Generals... I like it, it could be so much better, it needs balancing... Guys over there, go play Day of Defeat for some weapon balance ideas... Oh and weapon sounds, cus the ones currently in game are crap.

Heroes and Generals - Bugs & Problems

I played a game of Heroes and Generals last night, it was the only bit of relaxation time I got, and I'm sad to report it was not very relaxing... The game is of course only in BETA, so subject to change, and I hope to god changes happen, because there are some very very annoying problems with the game.

The biggest problem I found was the strange lack of a tactical direction, what do I mean by this?... Well in the game you have your missions, they have set objectives, they show you them, but then they don't actively reward you for them, so sitting on an objective, defending gets you no points.  To earn points you have to let the enemy take it, or neutralize it, and then recapture it... This is of course playing with fire.

Once you let the enemy in, you're asking for trouble, and sure enough once the clever souls around me figured they ONLY got credits/rewards for letting the enemy in we were screwed, we lost defensive location after defensive location, but the canny sods climbed up and up in the scores... Over all we lost, but they got massive scores, and I can't help but think this was backwards, and a better metric should be rewarded for defending, e.g. being within X distance of Y flag whilst that flag remains friendly and Z enemies have been within a certain distance... So the flag is being pressured, but you're stopping the enemy... Not letting them physically neutralise it.

The next frustration was the snipers and tanks... Players were sitting far away, untouchable, nailing whole buildings with fire... So what?... Well, we had to spawn in those buildings... So you spawned and were blown up, you spawned and were head shot, you spawned and were shot... Then you finally get a spawn away from the rest of the action, and you get shot running back over and into cover... Because the mission did not encourage or provide a counter to the enemy... If you can't see 'em, you can't shoot 'em...

And then, even if you did shoot them, and hit them, in the early tiers you really don't do any damage to the enemy... I was hitting people with my G43 and so frustrated that I could shoot 3 4 or even more times and they'd just run off... Then someone else gets one hit and they get the kill... I must have seen this fifty times (I'm not joking), and it annoys me greatly.  WarThunder handle this better with their assist system.

Then of course there was the anti-tank and grenade mechanics... Grenades, what a useless thing they are, I've seen them fall at an enemies feet, and blow up, and the enemy survives... Anti-tank weapons, I hate you can't fire them from the hip... But then I've had it so you can't fire at all... So bugs bugs bugs... Plus the bullet drop rate it terrible on the projectiles, they fly like British spring fired anti-tank rounds, not the rocket propelled rounds they are!

Next, collisions... I was on a bike, going across and open area, an enemy plane dived down and rammed me with its wing, this killed me... the message... "Xelous (Killed) Xelous"... NO I DID NOT!... I didn't kill myself, I was rammed, by a plane!

Finally, the weapon upgrade pathways, are about as clear as mud, there's no clear benefit to any one set of upgrades, they are so very very costly, yet when you mention this the elitist of gold spammers call you a fool or a noob because your weapon is weak... I find this very annoying.

Still, am I enjoying the game?... Yes, am I going to be interested in how it develops, yes... Am I going to continue to explore the title, yes...

But above all this, I hope the weapons get balanced, and this tactical problem of a "direction" and more reward for actually carrying out the mission is given.

Worst case for me last night was in a defensive mission, I was only rewarded +53 for capturing an outpost... I was meant to be defending an objective, not running away from those three objectives to re-capture something else... Very counter intuitive.

Heroes and Generals - G43 Game Play

Heroes and Generals has featured in my evening game play time this week, and I'm happy to finally find another commentor finding the G43 underpowered as I do...

His comments about the gun taking 3 hits to kill is so true, and probably the most annoying thing.

I think I'm even more annoyed because this balancing act has already been done in Day of Defeat for me... So I'm used to the K(or G)43 taking 2 hits max... The Garand taking 2 hits... The K98 one, the MP4 3-5 hits then each weapon matched up with its alternate in the allied tree, and my brain appears to be wired for this, so seeing 4 hits from a G43 strike and the target start to jump and rotate annoys the shit out of me.

Though I'm still to accrue enough credits to fully upgrade the gun.

Gaming Update - Heroes & Generals

War Games, Games of War, Call of War... We could list any number of iterations of warlike words and find a hint of a game in there, so we each need to pick our genre and wade through the mess of bad games to find good ones, this weekend however I've found one which I find strangely compelling, but which I don't think is the perfect game.

What do I mean by perfect game?  Well, I think for everyone their perfect game is different, I once thought World of Warcrack was my perfect game.  But fifteen minutes of thinking about how much time I'd wasted collecting tokens to then see an expansion appear with yet more quests to collect yet more tokens (BUT THEY WERE BLUE THIS TIME!) had me quit, from sheer frustration... Many other games have come and gone since...

World of Tanks for example, this has been a staple over the last few years, but it ebbs and flows to and from in my playing landscape, mainly because of the huge step up in skill and memory needed to just play tanks... As a kid I could play tanks, I poured them out of my plastic tub and drove back and forth across the iron curtain with them in the soil and sand of the back yard... Now-a-days the entry level is so much higher, especially when you add competitive people into the mix, and you suddenly find yourself meeting people who don't just want to wallow in the mud like the little white bull, but instead they want to ammo rack you and hide behind your burning hulk.

This isn't a jab at competitive play, I was very competitive in other games, notably Day of Defeat, my first major and perhaps the only multiplayer third person shooter I mastered, and the one of the few games I've chosen to actively play competitively.

So finding Heroes and Generals, and being a little tired of being shot out the skies in War Thunder, or having my Tank blown from under me in World of Tanks, and so very annoyed with other titles in my Steam library, I downloaded and set to figuring out this game.

Figuring out is the main challenge, you see the game comes in multiple parts, there is a browser like part, which acts as a window onto the solider's, weapons, vehicles, training and skills you have - as well as the credits or game gold you've earned or purchased to unlock more of the game.

Then once you enter battle a 3D client launches connecting you to the battlefield.

Once into the 3D world, you choose your spawn location, and set about working out how this game works...

Its a massively multiplayer World War Two landscape, this is Day of Defeat of old for me... Except, one can end up training to drive tanks, jeeps, trucks, planes... Or just fight on foot.

And as a beginner, fighting on foot was my only option.  So creating a German soldier, I was handed my G43 and a few potato masher grenades and thrown into the mix.

Almost the first thing I found was the ability to use nearly anything you find on the battlefield, enemy guns, ammo, vehicles and even a villagers trusty bicycle.

At the low levels you need to get used to the bikes, because they're the ubiquitous and only transport in the game, at least transport faster then your own feet.

The mechanics of the soldier are good, raising his weapon, aiming and reloading all come naturally to anyone with even a modicum of first person shooter experience.  Moving has its down sides.

The initial problem I had with movement was using sprint (shift) and then sending my man prone (z), between the two is the "\" key or "|" bar key on a UK layout keyboard... pressing this rogue key brought up the 3D engines message queue, a little like the old style console in the Quake engine... And hitting it was very very annoying, locking out your controls and initially I was not aware I'd miss keyed and hence had no idea how I'd opened this console view... once I got it closed a controls remapping was in order... Except, I could not change this damn key - least not in the base view.

The game is very atmospheric however, providing early morning fog, dust, smoke, impressive explosions and good terrain.

If you can find a position to shoot from, you can pretty much shoot from it... However, there are some annoying problems, and problems with benefit the annoyance causing, teeth gnashingly smug, camping... Yes, this game encourages more camping than...

Initially without resorting to camping I found myself dead time and time again, but at least I was leading assaults, one tactic I noted benefited the early games (which are played on a simple set map with three capture flags) is that if one flanked around and went to capture the enemies first flag, they would all rush back to save the flag.  This allowed your own team to then capture the contested middle flag more easily... I'd be there time and again, capping the rear enemy flag as about 8 enemy would hove into view and nail me with a nail of gunfire and grenade... But all was good, because we took the middle, kept the middle and I kept going back to the enemies flank and rear to stir up trouble, thinning the struggle for the middle.

I just did this, it was obviously a winning tactic, and game after game we won...

You know what reward I got for this active effort... NOTHING.

Not a dime, not a sausage, not a scrat... I had a horrendously negative Kill to Death ratio, and received no capture points - because I never completed a full cap - and though I might spot and nail the odd enemy coming in, I was basically hiding in their base, with a limited field of fire, so unable to really get meat a head of my shots and so I didn't score much.

The agony of this state of affairs was only added to by the crappy G43 weapon I had, and the very high prices of alternative weapons... For instance, in the whole weekend I earned around 40,000 credits.... I had to spend 5,300 on grenades and was forced to spend my initial credits on a MP36 (which I never use) by the tutorial...

So, what could I get for my 40,000 credits... NOTHING... The K98, a more powerful rifle is 71,000 credits... So for playing maybe 12 hours over a busy weekend, and winning games, I didn't earn nearly anything.

Luckily I levelled up quickly and around level 4 I was earning "Soldiers Pay", this is an amount of credits automatically awarded on a Win, if you're active for 50% or more of the battle... And Winning I was in the early games, so with credits coming in, I decided to upgrade my pitiful G43 rifle, rather than save up for the K98.

New sights, different ammo and a new barrel and I had added to the punch of the weapon significantly, though it was still perhaps 100,000 credits away from being a one shot killer.

The upgrade statistics are also a bit of a black box here, you can select items to see how they affect range, or damage done, but there are no real obvious benefits to some of the options available... Huge damage, but massive accuracy penalty... Right, I smell the game balance here, but this is a war game, in war designers don't generally strike the nerf bat so hard on an option.

However, from level 4 and above I had a very quick rise in Ranks, mainly because once you get over level 4 you're out of the boring 3 flag set map and into the open world of any battle on any map... You can select which mission to enter, or even join a battle on a specific location, for example I took part in the defence of Nottingham several times - loosing each time - DOH.

But, I did find a general rule of thumb, missions either consisted of winning quickly with friendly armour and combined arms... Or my team literally under performing all around me.

Add to this the already mentioned - no reward for tactical actions - and I was getting a little bit frustrated.

So much so between Saturday and Sunday, I took a break and thought about how should I play, should I come to this game and try to play it like others - like Day of Defeat, where I would never have had a G43 as my main weapon? - or should I try to learn more about this game, about how the game designers want you to work it.

I chose the latter option, and things started to take form...  The first thing I noted was that one could select a badge on ones character, the badge is like a special skill, and it defaulted to a badge given to me by the training mission, however, changing it to a different skill I found I was much less noticeable by the enemy, great for my flanking actions.

Then I changed how I moved, instead of running from A to B, I found myself going from tree to tree, from tree to rock, reading the terrain and trying to learn how to stay in cover.  To my delight the game picked this up and awarded me skill points for scouting, for combat movement, for all manner of things... And these added into the very complex layers of the browser section of the game, upgrading my soldier.

One can pay to win here, just throw gold at your skills (or ribbons as they're called in game) and you can max them out, buy any weapon and take people out, but I'm in this for the long haul, I want to unlock the game as I go.

I think, when I'm bored of WarThunder or everything else, Heroes and Generals might be a place for me to while away an hour in first person combat.  I just hope that the unlock curve is not as exponential as I fear it maybe - as I'm now 20 hours into playing and after upgrades and ammo refills, still only have around 40,000 credits, where I want to really start to buy more powerful weapons, such as those I pick up off of corpses.

Rethinking the game play style I found most successful, it consisted of hiding in the flanks, taking out enemy as they were in obvious locations and then picking up a sniper rifle, or other such powerful rifle as soon as possible.  Sticking with the issued G43 is a real struggle, especially as you pick up the US counterpart Garand and its far superior...