I recently found myself in a position to try out Cygwin again, to get my hands on the unix tools I love on Windows 7.  So far I’ve been pleased with the experience, and will take cygwin over putty any day.  I did hit a couple bumps though, and one I couldn’t find an answer to online, so I wanted to throw my own answer up here in case someone else encounters it.

For reference, I’m using cygwin 3.0-1, and OpenSS _5.9p1.  My second issue appears to be a bug, so hopefully it will get fixed soon.

The first problem is getting ssh-agent running and working.  The copy-pasta below that is all over the internet worked for me.  Add to the bottom of your ~/.bash_profile:

SSHAGENT=/usr/bin/ssh-agent
SSHAGENTARGS=”-s”
if [ -z "$SSH_AUTH_SOCK" -a -x "$SSHAGENT" ]; then
eval `$SSHAGENT $SSHAGENTARGS`
trap “kill $SSH_AGENT_PID” 0
fi

The next problem I had was that `ssh-add` failed to find my ~/.ssh/id_dsa private key.  The man page states very explicitly that it should be looking there, but it wasn’t.  If I specified the key on the command line with ssh-add, it would add it successfully.  Permissions looked right, with 700 on ~/.ssh and 600 on ~/.ssh/id_dsa.  The command that helped me figure it out finally was:

$ ssh-add -vT servername.com

[a bunch of garbage followed by]

debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Trying private key: /.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: Trying private key: /.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: key_parse_private_pem: PEM_read_PrivateKey failed

Those middle two lines show that rather than looking for ~/.ssh/id_dsa in my home directory, ssh-add is instead looking in the root of the file system for a .ssh/ directory.  Strange!  I used a simple hack to straighten it out:

ln -s /home/username/.ssh /

The symlink helps ssh-add find my private key without having to manually specify it every time.  This wouldn’t be a full solution on a true multiple-user system — but like I said, I’m on Windows.  ;)

Borderlands is a bit of an enigma.  I bought it on PC after a recommendation from friends without doing a lot of research beforehand.  I quickly found the game to be a fun and original take on the Diablo formula as an FPS with highly customizable weapons.  I also quickly found myself tripping over bugs and glaring issues, enough that it was hard not to fall flat on my face and ragequit the game for good.

What kept me going through the game enough to see the great underlying gameplay was to write down the many major glitches and failures I encountered.  Almost all of these are from the first weekend I spent with the game.  How could a game make it out the door and through four DLC content packs and still have this many obvious problems?

Since almost every level has the same junkyard theme, I thought that was appropriate – it’s fun to play in a junkyard, but expect to get dirty and possibly hurt.

Outright bugs:

1. Inventory items spontaneously re-order while you’re selling them.  This makes it very easy to accidentally sell one of your favorite weapons.
2. The video options menu is broken.  It only lets you scroll through (say) 8 of the 15 options.  Each time you try to scroll to the bottom of the first 8 options it jumps to the top and “unlocks” 1 more option.
3. When you have a prompt pop-up and it says to press enter, you have to press enter twice before it registers.
4. The game has a config file with a FOV variable, but instead of honoring the config file’s FOV, as soon as you sprint the game reverts to a (apparently) hard-coded FOV.
5. When in a vehicle, the keys for talent and skill trees do not work, and instead bring up the map.  Like many of the interface quirks, it’s really really hard to tell if this was an inexplicable poor decision, or a defect they didn’t bother fixing.  This one is probably related to the game’s poor console-to-PC port either way.
6. Many quests have incorrect tracking locations.  Judging from the number of google hits for those quest names, everyone but the QA department seems to have noticed these.

Over the six or so years (six? really?!) that I played World of Warcraft off and on, the game’s community changed immensely.  Fansites evolved and players got smarter and smarter about how they played the game.  Players, as well as the dev team, found themselves facing and re-facing the problem of “cookie-cutter builds”.  These didn’t exist back when I played in Vanilla WOW, but were de facto standard when I started up again during the Lich King expansion.

Cookie-cutter builds are talent specs posted on fan sites or forums that are (allegedly) mathematically optimal.  This min-maxing of damage led to players not only using cookie-cutter builds, but also to routine bullying of players who chose their own suboptimal talent specs.

World of Warcraft isn’t the only game that has changed dramatically as the internet connected game communities and magnified their collective knowledge.  Once upon a time I used to play Magic: The Gathering.  I should have known that when they pulled the “first one’s free” trick on my friends and I at PAX that I would be hooked again.  Compared to those early-internet days when I played MTG and occasionally bought a copy of Scrye, the game is barely recognizable.  Sure, the cards all look pretty familiar, but the way the game is played bears no similarity to us kids trading cool cards at sleepovers.

What surprised me is how incredibly knowledgable the community has become.  Headed by pro tournament grinders, each new set of cards is boiled down to the best cards and decks almost before the set is launched.  ”Netdecking” is a playstyle that exactly mirrors WOW’s cookie-cutter builds.  To netdeck, you get online and copy a popular tournament-winning deck verbatim and play with it.  At the moment unless you’re playing the winning $500+ Caw Blade deck, you may may as well not waste time playing.

What happened to the creative games I loved that let me put together any crazy combo I could think up?  Is it becoming impossible for designers to create games that aren’t quickly whittled down to a small hard fraction of the big fun game they created?  Has the internet completely destroyed our creativity?

I think it would be more accurate to say the internet gives us the option to skip out on creativity.  In MTG they have a few names for common player profiles.  I’m a Johnny — my goal is to flex my creative muscles with elaborate decks that I can show off and call my own.  Not everyone is a Johnny, though!  Another stereotype is Spike – the guys who want to hone their skills and win, and could care less what deck they use.  The last stereotype is the one we all start out a new game as: Timmy: a noob who sees big numbers or cool abilities and just wants to take them for a ride and blow stuff up.  You saw these same stereotypes in WOW too, and presumably they exist for every game that allows for both creativity and competition.

Overall, I think this increase in community knowledge is good for games.  It doesn’t destroy creativity, it funnels it to where it matters most.  Players can skip out on the boring work of repetitive playtesting (or worse, calculus!) to get started.  Instead, we can skip straight to the heart of what makes the game fun for each of us.  Spike can hit the web, copy a build, and go to town.  Johnny can read articles full of crazy ideas and write articles showing off his own.  Even Timmys now benefit from player ratings that ensure they play other Timmys instead of getting shredded by a pro-playing Spike.  Even designers get more feedback than ever on what is working and what isn’t in their game.  The internet pushes games to a fun, stable state faster than ever before.  I’d say that’s a win.

Update: It turns out Caw Blade’s heroes got banned, and the standard metagame has exploded to a half dozen or more decks!  Looks like Johnnys will rule the MTG tournament scene…for a little while, anyway.

Here is the math I just did (and posted to wowhead) to see where the Forged Documents inscription recipe would “cap” herb prices in World of Warcraft:

40s = rep-discounted resilient parchment price
10g = conservative forged document average (sounds like it goes up to 30g, so it may be more like 20g average)
3 blackfallow ink = 1 stack of 20 high-end herbs, since they net 6 pigment

You should only buy+mill herbs to forge documents if:
(Cost of forging documents) < (Profit from forging documents)
40s + 20*(1 high-end herb price) < 10g + (1 inferno ink)
20*(1 high-end herb price) < 9g60s + (1 inferno ink)
high-end herb price < 48s + (1 inferno ink price) / 20

Low-end herbs get 5 pigment per stack instead of 6, and generate half an inferno ink per stack:
low-end herb price < 48s * 5/6 + (1 inferno ink price) / 40
low-end herb price < 40s  + (1 inferno ink price) / 40

You can use blackfallow ink for other things, so you also want to make sure it’s cheaper to craft than your profit from the forged documents:
3 blackfallow < 1 forged documents = 10g – 40s (parchment)
3 blackfallow < 9g60s
1 blackfallow < 3.2g
AND Backfallow Ink is worth < 3.2g

10 Blackfallow can be traded for 1 Inferno ink, so you also want to make sure:
Inferno Ink < 10 * blackfallow ink value
AND Inferno Ink is worth < 32g

Considering the glyph and Darkmoon card markets, it won’t be worth spending inks on forging documents any time soon.  Even late in Cata with a huge herb supply, lower glyph prices, and lower demand for these mats, I don’t think forging documents will cap herb prices.  Each scribe can only forge 1 set of documents a day (1 stack of herb) — there aren’t enough scribes to forge a significant percentage of the herb gathered daily.

That said, this recipe is one of those knobs the designers could turn to increase herb prices later on — either by increasing the sell value of the forged documents or by lowering the cooldown.

I love Google, and trust it more than most tech companies to be a good shepherd of all things tech.  I tried hard to adopt their browser Google Chrome, but I couldn’t stick with it.  Two major UI blunders made it nigh-unusable for me.

The first, and most unexpected, was their status bar truncation.  Even with a 1600×1200 window, Chrome will truncate URLs to a ridiculously short length, perhaps 30 or 40 characters, replacing most of the path with an elipses (“…”).  Unfortunately, the URL is of utmost importance when clicking a link, especially in this day of Search Engine over-Optimization (SEO), targeted ads, and rotating headlines.

The worst culprit is CNN, who runs several headlines for the same article, seeming to pick at random, in an attempt to either tie their article to multiple wordings of the same story, or to test viewer preference between headlines.  CNN will even link the same story multiple times on the same homepage with different headlines.  For example, today there is a headline that says “Black Friday’s black eye“.  What an indecipherable headline!  Hover the URL and you see the real story they’re pitching in the status bar, if you’re using any browser besides Google Chrome:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/26/thefts-stampedes-make-black-friday-blue-for-some/?hpt=Sbin

The actual story is that there were poorly run stores that let customers trample each other instead of handing out vouchers to a well-managed line of waiting customers on Black Friday.  Just like last year.  And the year before that.  I can pass on wasting any time on this article, but only because I stopped using Google Chrome.  I did hunt for an option to disable this pointless URL-shortening, but with two viable browsers (Safari and Firefox) I’m not exactly sold on hacking the Chrome source to fix such a blatant problem.

The second major issue I had was Chrome’s New Tab behavior.  When I open a new tab, about half the time is to select a bookmark, and the other half is to type in a url for address bar history auto-completion.  In Safari and Firefox, opening a new tab puts the cursor in the address bar of a blank page so you can immediately start typing.  In IE and Chrome, the new tab is made to visit the URL “about:blank”, which then loads (after a brief second of processing during which I would normally have my URL half-typed), and clears the cursor.  Making me move the mouse (or painful-to-use Dell laptop trackpad) up to the address bar, triple-click-delete or home-shift+end-delete, then finally start typing my URL.

I expect both of these behaviors exist because Chrome is primarily targeted at Google’s Android mobile platform, where keyboards and large-windows are non-existent.  It’s great that they target these platforms so well, but I’ll wait until they put some of these basic touches on the desktop browser before I put any more effort into adopting Chrome.  Don’t worry Google, I still love you anyway.

One of the biggest challenges designers face is interpreting feedback from users. I’m thinking of the rabid online communities around video games especially, but this applies to any product subjected to users’ brutal gaze before the product launches.

This article on addictive social games included a perfect example — even more telling that it was provided to show how “useless” feedback is:

McMillen said Super Meat Boy was designed without the aid of metrics. And while there was one focus testing session for the game, most of the feedback was thrown out. (One tester suggested that having a static loading screen would be preferable to a cutscene that couldn’t be skipped for the first few seconds because the level was loading in the background.)

The developer apparently disagreed with the tester’s solution and said “What a stupid idea, focus testing is worthless”. This is a very common type of feedback in game forums – bad solutions. Stuff like “Make my character overpowered” or “Throw out this level entirely”.  But solutions aren’t the goal of focus testing to begin with! What you’re looking for are problems.  Then you can have your experienced designers find the best solution to those problems. The trick here is converting the user’s bad solution into a problem, then working back to a better solution.

In the Super Meat Boy example, the user’s solution translates to a meaningful problem that most likely made it into the released game. I’d guess the user’s problem description should have looked like this:

“The cutscenes get old and take too long. I was unable to skip the cutscenes.”

Adding cutscenes to pretty up loading screens is a fine idea. But it sounds like this user may not have realized the cutscenes were skippable at all. Notice the developer says “Couldn’t be skipped for the first few seconds”? Is there any indication to the user that those cutscenes can be skipped after the first few seconds? Or do users mash the spacebar, see that it can’t be skipped, give up, and go get a sandwich? A silent delay in skipping cutscenes could easily cause extinction of the user’s attempt-to-skip behavior.

Maybe text could show up that says “Press spacebar to skip” once the background loading has completed. Or a progress bar could be overlaid at the bottom of the cutscene. Or the cutscene could switch to a blank loading screen after a keypress to help speed up loading (however slightly).

These are some possible solutions that should have been explored as a result of the user’s feedback. From the sound of it, the developer treated the focus testing feedback as change requests, rejected them, and tossed the whole exercise out the window, bathwater and baby. If feedback had been translated into stories about the user’s problems then focus testing would have have been a valuable tool for improving the game.

I was surprised to find an e-mail in my inbox from Comcast pitching their new Usage Meter. It’s just what you would expect from the name: a website to see how much bandwidth you’ve used so far this month. The bulk of the text follows:

We are pleased to announce the pilot launch of the Comcast Usage Meter in your area. This new feature is available to Comcast High-Speed Internet customers and provides an easy way to check total monthly household high-speed Internet data usage at any time. Monthly data usage is the amount of data, such as images, movies, photos, videos, and other files that customers send, receive, download or upload each month. Comcast measures total data usage and does not monitor specific customer activities to determine data usage.

The current data usage allowance for the Comcast High-Speed Internet service is 250GB per month. This means that the vast majority of our customers – around 99% currently – will not come close to using 250GB of data in a month, and do not need to check the usage meter.

Heavy bittorrent users may rightfully complain about Comcast advertising “unlimited” when there is actually a 250GB cap on traffic. But I think this is a step in the right direction for Comcast, towards completely transparent usage plans. There will be no more fears of finding out your usage is beyond Comcast’s arbitrary limit by receiving a nastygram canceling your service.

Soon you’ll be able to check your usage and compare to their monthly cap. If you go over, perhaps Comcast will offer a higher bandwidth plans at extra cost. How do you advertise “more than unlimited”? I’ll leave that to Comcast’s marketing team to figure out.

Why wasn’t this available long before they started canceling users’ service or slowing downloads? My guess is this was their escape plan for continuing to restrict heavy users despite the FCC’s move towards Net Neutrality. What does that mean in light of the appeals court ruling overturning the FCC’s authority over Net Neutrality?

According to the e-mail this is only a pilot restricted to a few areas – with the FCC out of the picture, will Comcast have any incentive to be this transparent with their users? Or will they return to their old tricks of secret caps and traffic throttling?

I wrote about how flawed the Torchlight demo was in a previous blog post.  I decided not to buy the game after it rehashed Diablo’s formulate to a fault, except with bugs that culminated in a game crash losing my progress after a very long boss fight.

If you know me and how many times I’ve pulled Diablo 2 and even Diablo 1 back out of the closet, though, you won’t be surprised to hear that I ended up buying Torchlight anyway.  After playing the demo with the other two classes and farming the demo’s boss a bit, I just had to plow ahead and see the rest of the levels and spells.  For a $20 bill you can’t be but so picky, right?

My experience with the rest of the game stayed very true to what I said of the demo.  The game mimicked Diablo to a fault, had numerous glitches, but also remained fun throughout as I gathered loot and blasted baddies as I upgraded my spells.  In fact, the game stayed true to what I said of the demo a little too well.

The final boss is a very big monster with a very big health bar.  I would guess the back-and-forth fight took me a full 10 or 20 minutes to whittle his health bar down to zero.  He exploded in a hail of colorful loot which I carefully picked over when – cue shocked gasp – the game locked up, losing all of my progress.  I suppose I can’t say I didn’t know what I was in for after playing the demo.

The precursor to my previous blog post Removing Mana From DPS Classes in WOW was a post I made to the WOW forums. It turns out Ghostcrawler read it and liked it enough to quote it!

Ghostcrawler:

This is a prettty good summary. The answer is that we are changing mana-based nukers but not by removing their mana. Instead we are just going to make them less dependent on mana regen, specifically Spirit. You are correct that we really only want healers to run OOM, and we can’t really get rid of it for reasons Squirrelbot mentions. DPS casters still have to manage mana to some degree but they should have tools (e.g. Evocate) to handle that. They shouldn’t “run dry” the way a Holy priest or Resto shaman needs to run dry (ideally — I know this isn’t happening now) when the encounter isn’t going well for you.

Sounds like no plans for a new resource system for mages or warlocks, but that is confirmation that evocation and similar mechanics are intended to give all dps caster specs near-infinite mana.

After several hints leading up to this year’s Blizzcon, Blizzard announced they would be changing the Hunter class to use a Rogue-like resource called focus. A Blizzard designer answered some questions about it recently on the World Of Warcraft forums. Quoting for emphasis:

Ghostcrawler:

you can’t balance mana-using spells around cost since casters have nearly unlimited mana at any point in time and certainly early on in a fight. Energy (and focus, and rage to a much lesser extent to where it’s actually a problem) are limited at any given moment but come back pretty quickly. Mana-spells have to be balanced around cast times and cooldowns instead.

Abilities and damage can’t be balanced based on mana alone. If you gave mages an ability that takes 50% of their mana and does huge damage, mages would cast that ability twice (gibbing 2 players) and then complain that they go OOM too fast.

Mana is a fight-timer mechanic, not a DPS or rotation balancing mechanic. This used to apply to all ranged classes as well as healers. For healers the fight-timer mechanic is obvious: once your healer is out of mana, the group is going to die. If you can’t beat the boss by then you need a new strategy or better gear.

Applying a fight timer to ranged DPS is less clear-cut. I believe it was intended as a trade-off for the fact that ranged classes took less AOE damage.

Increasingly mana has been made near-infinite for damage classes and specs. Likewise, AOE in the LK expansion has spread out to the ranged dps. The primary purpose of mana in the game is now only to limit the longevity of healers.

This is ultimately a good thing. It guarantees you won’t brute-force encounters by, say, 2-manning a single raid boss for 3 hours with the paladin spamming his biggest heals while you slowly chip away at the boss’ life. More practically speaking, if your group’s tank or dps undergear an encounter, the healer’s mana will prevent you from completing it.

The fact that ret paladins and enhancement shamans also have healing specs prevents them from being converted to a new mechanic. Instead they will continue to receive near-infinite mana in their DPS specs, requiring their abilities to be balanced around cooldowns and buffs/debuffs.

Without a healing spec, it will be much easier to convert hunters to a new mechanic that can influence their dps and rotation decisions. It also “feels” right because mana is traditionally a spell-casting mechanic.

What about the other two non-healing ranged DPS classes that currently use mana? Mages and warlocks could also be improved by switching to a new mechanic. Why should those classes continue to be limited at 5 minutes of damage, while hunters and melee can dps indefinitely?

It might feel strange having mages not use mana, but perhaps they’ll come up with another mechanic that feels equally magical. I don’t think we’ll see this in Cataclysm’s launch, but I’ll still cross my fingers and hope for it!