I hope these two data points don’t mark a trend.

1. Oblivion makes enemies tougher as you level up. Unfortunately, leveling up doesn’t mean you’re better at combat. You could have leveled up via Speechcraft, which isn’t going to impress the now ultra-buff Orc.

2. Blizzard is sick of players using lower ranks of spells in World of Warcraft. It turns out, in a few cases the spell you learned back at level 40 is better than your shiny new one at level 60. In an upcoming patch, old spells will actually get worse as you level up. They’re doing a similar thing for items that help things like your critical hit chance.

Maintaining the illusion of getting beefier, better, and just plain awesomer has always been a dodgy proposition.  You can’t make the game easier.  You may even want to make it harder.  So you have to throw nastier-seeming baddies in the way, and tease the player with just out of range content, without making it obvious the player’s on a sophisticated treadmill.

Making some numbers go down instead of up seems like a great way to damage this delicate illusion.  The numbers getting bigger, the progress bars filling up: sometimes that’s all the player has!  Now you’re telling me that when I jump through your hoops and my level number goes up, you’re going to make some of my other numbers go down?  Some reward!

Beyond the satisfaction of growing numbers, there’s the hand-wavery behind the whole concept of leveling up.  What does it represent?  Your guy just got a lot better at stuff.  That skill you just learned?  Yeah, your guy’s been practicing that when you weren’t looking.  Congratulations on killing 100 boars: now you’re faster, stronger, and can shoot fire out of your eyes.  In World of Warcraft’s new system, my guy hasn’t been practicing while I’ve been away– he’s been off to the bar for a couple (dozen) drinks, and killed off some of those brain cells he needed for those elementary spells he learned so many dead orcs ago.

Get it together, RPG characters of the world.  Hone your monster-killing skills to their finest, and save the atrophy for those of us still living in the real world.

Even in World of Warcraft, many core MMORPG mechanics are dreadful. Watch health bars, click heal. Fireball, fireball, scorch, fireblast, if not dead, Frost Nova and repeat. Point at mob, spam aggro-generating attack. Click the other special button if it lights up.

World of Warcraft is making some baby steps. The warrior’s Intervene ability (scroll down) is a model for what tanking should move towards: instead of AI-exploiting taunts that don’t work in PvP, the game provides ways for the plate-covered warrior to insert himself between the big, bad dragon and the robe-wearing, squishy mage. The shaman’s Shamanistic Rage talent (bottom middle talent) gives the shaman mana for smacking things: finally, a healing mechanic that encourages getting into the fight.

Age of Conan is making much larger strides, as described in this interview. Cone-based heals mean healers have to get into the thick of battle (used successfully with City of Heroes’ area of effect heals). For damage dealers, scroll down to the bit about “spellweaving”: casting a spell will, they claim, be more than simply pressing your hotkey over and over. Of course, Age of Conan’s ambition and far-from-release status make me wonder if it’ll ever see the light of day. At least someone’s thinking beyond tanks, nukers, and healbots.

My most-hated MMO mechanic is definitely heal-botting. What’s yours?

Here’s a good weekend quickie: what are some of your favorite indie games? Here are four of my favorites. You can download a demo and try them out right now.

• Strange Adventures in Infinite Space: a space exploration and combat game you can play in 15-minute games. Bite-sized Star Control 2.
• Uplink: the hacking classic.
• Escape Velocity: Nova: a great space adventure/trading/combat game. Its biggest flaw is its single autosave: make copies regularly or pay the price!
• Starscape: a space shooter with a world map metagame and good loot/cash/upgrades.

So– what did I miss?

Cyberpunk. Ruthless mega-corps. Designer drugs. Awesomely functional body enhancements. Frightening near-future urban dystopias. Jacking in to freakin’ cyberspace, where highly illegal security programs attempt to hunt you down and kill you.

The cyberpunk of old– one of my favorite genres– no longer feels relevant. Corporate encroachment onto governmental activities has taken second stage to the swift return of big brother. Everyone does drugs and nobody cares; cyborgs just seem dorky; would-be suburbanites are moving back into the cities in luxury lofts and mixed-use zones. The internet isn’t a perplexing assault of high-density information: it’s a carrier for MySpace. Video games were the first media to reflect this decline: there’s been little of note in the genre since Beneath a Steel Sky, System Shock, and Neuromancer.

Is there any relevance for cyberpunk now? Can or should any elements be updated?

My initial thoughts have centered on the nature of cyberspace today: the best thing to happen to surveillance since the credit card. There’s Echelon, surreptitiously sniffing data from internet backbones all over the country. There are logs of your activities, and internet-accessible records to fill in the blanks (credit card histories, cell phone logs, security camera footage, your latest vacation blog). J. Edgar Hoover could’ve worked half days.

One sticking point: what’s the imagery of cyberspace? What does a hack look like? Can today’s computer-comfortable audience be sold a Neuromancer- or Snowcrash-like electronic reality, in which individual users and processes take form and move about? Or does it have to be brought back in a bit closer to reality?

In The Matrix, the only view we get of data– aside from the real world lookalike– is a bunch of scrolling green characters. Introversion’s Uplink is a monochromatic view into a world of command-lines and progress bars: it’s a fun game, but a tough act to improve upon. TV shows and movies tend towards super slick programs that seem magically designed for exactly what the show needs them to do: “scanning footprint… plant matter detected… scanning plant database… location discovered… collecting infrared security logs… analysing heat signatures… suspect identified!”.

To cut to the chase: is there still a cyberpunk game out there? Is there a hacking game out there? Or is it time to retire the genre and move on?

Back in August, I posted a bit about my backup solution.  I’ve been doing a more work in this category and wanted to follow up.

First of all, you absolutely need to back up your most important data off-site.  I’ve been using a friend’s Subversion server, but there are now a number of free services.  Check out this pretty good roundup (from January) for some contenders.  I haven’t settled on a free provider, but I’ve selected iStorage for a client who needs more reliability and security (for a monthly fee).  If you’re backing up sensitive data, you might like the fact that it encrypts everything before sending it.  Also, make sure whoever you go with has software that’ll send success or failure e-mails: a non-running backup is just as bad as no backup!
Keep in mind that many personal offsite backup providers have clauses like this:

The Company may terminate the Agreement, or terminate or suspend your access to the Software at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice. Upon such termination or suspension, your right to use the Software will immediately cease. UPON SUCH TERMINATION OR SUSPENSION, ANY INFORMATION YOU HAVE STORED ON THE COMPANY’S HARDWARE AND/OR USING THE SOFTWARE MAY NOT BE RETRIEVED LATER, AT THE COMPANY’S SOLE DISCRETION.

If you’re relying on an offsite service as your sole backup, you’ll need to pay more for a place that will only terminate for cause, and will store copies of your data at multiple data centers.

Add that limitation to another: most of these services are only free or cheap for 5 gigs or so.  Clearly, you’ll need an additional solution.  Perhaps the easiest way to go is to get a fat external drive, and get an automated, incremental backup program that’ll do nightly diffs.  I use an entirely separate machine (as described in my previous post), but if you’re just backing up one computer, a Firewire/USB2.0 drive is easier.  For software, I use Backup4All because it’s really easy and has all the functionality I need.

Hard drive failure is not uncommon.  In recent years, backing up your data has become cheap and easy.  It won’t even take you an hour to set up.  Get to it!  If anyone has a favorite program or offsite service, let me know.

There are a lot of questions about making Wordpress play nice with other functionality on your site, so here’s the solution that works for me.
One of the first things to do after installing Wordpress is to configure it for “pretty permalinks”, in the options tab. That gives you links like this rather than some “index.php?a=144″ gibberish. Unfortunately, it modifies your .htaccess file to do this, and in a way that isn’t terribly friendly with other functionality you might want.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix: enable Wordpress’s “verbose” rewrite rules by setting “use_verbose_rules” to true in your wp-includes/classes.php file.

Now that you’re good and friendly with your .htaccess file, let’s do a bit of search engine optimization (SEO) to your site. If your site displays the same at “mydomainname.com”, “www.mydomainname.com”, and “www.mydomainname.com/index.html”, you can easily confuse search engines. Unless you explicitly tell Google otherwise, for example, it will treat “mydomainname.com” and “www.mydomainname.com” as two different sites. If people start linking to both, it can hurt your PageRank.

There’s an easy solution to this, too: a 301 redirect. Several sites explain the ins and outs of 301 redirects and .htaccess syntax, so I’m just going to give you the code that works for me. Put this near the end of your .htaccess file, but before the “#BEGIN WordPress” section:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.independentcreator\.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.independentcreator.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule index\.html$ http://www.independentcreator.com/%1 [R=301,L]

Finally, I had a problem with this rule breaking WordPress comments: I had accidentally configured WordPress to use my site’s URL as “independentcreator.com” instead of “www.independentcreator.com” in the Options tab.

If you’re having Defcon flickering issues– and a lot of people are– it may be because Defcon can’t handle multi-core processors. Open up the task manager, list processes, then right-click on the Defcon process. Click “Set Affinity”, then shut off all but one of the cores for Defcon.