Sloe Times

The best blogs I've read have generally been focused on a given topic or theme. To that end I have usually tried to identify the theme I wanted for my blog and stick to it. First it was poker and now it's REI. The problem is that there's a ton of other junk I think about and want to record for posterity or whatever and it has nothing to do with my theme (or is at best distantly related). I can not bring myself to spawn another blog for these other things. While some other notables *cough* Pauly *cough* have multiple blogs for probably this very reason, I just can't do it. So rather than get wrapped around the axel about it I'll follow in the footsteps of my uber posting idol and periodically just brain dump what's on my mind generally unrelated to my primary theme.

On Poker
You know a sure fire way to make yourself want to do something that you haven't had any urge to do lately? Tell everyone you're never going to do it again. Talk about an itch needing to be scratched but I've probably played more poker in the last two weeks and had more thoughts on it than in the last 3 or 4 months. Go figure. So I'm applying the SSH approach to the $0.50/$1 tables at party and have so far booked solid winning sessions. Still taking my lumps with some bad beats but for the most part exercising some patience and play that I haven't used in a long, long, time. Up to about $75 from $14, yay me.

Has anyone else noticed the proliferation of poker content on pay per view? First was Helmuth with his online poker video, and next up was lederer's similarly themed program. I guess it sort of makes sense that it would show up, but it's still a little stunning to actually see that type of content while scrolling through the PPV listings.

Paradise is kicking off their $1 million freeroll starting on 7/1 going through 8/26. This seems like a good way to get involved in playing some MTT if you're willing to move your play over to Paradise for a couple of months. Like all good drug dealers, the first shot is free, but after that you have to earn points by playing raked games to get another shot at the freeroll. The structure for winning a seat is interesting. If you play in the 4pm daily only the top 10 (out of a possible 4000) win a seat. If you instead you play at 9pm, the top 20 win a seat. The best odds of all are available if you play at 1am, in which the top 30 win a seat. I think I figured up that by August 26th 3400 people would have won a seat to the tournament and sure enough if you look at the fine print you see that Paradise will probably be offering up to 600 seats through alternate tournaments or intra-casino promotions. The business of an online casino/poker room is pretty facinating and this is no exception.

On Gaming
MMORPGs are the future of gaming and perhaps more. I say this because the global communities have no other way to get together in real time in a large scale combining both visual and audio senses. This medium provides not just the tools to communicate but also the structure and setting to 'do' things as a community. The problem with the genre as I see it is that the things that made their ancestors great (MUD, MUSH, etc) appear to be lost in the race for great graphics and mass produced generic content. I appriciate that these games can not be all things to all people which leaves plenty of room for alternate and competing products but there are some very basic design fundamentals that seem to get lost in whatever becomes the final product.

As a player you want an invironment just interesting enough to explore. Once you've become comfortable with getting around you then want a way to extend it and make it your own. As a business you want a product that will draw in consumers and keep them engaged so that you have a steady stream of revenue. Despite what you might see on the various forums for MMORPGs, these two perspectives are not at odds with one another and there is a way to have everyone win.

From the player perspective the aspects that give them what they want is the ability to customize and be unique (or not as they choose). The environment should be open ended enough to allow them to explore and become familiar with the mechanics of the game and 'taste' the possibilities of what can be if they make the investment to continue on after the initial 30 days. The best way for a game to achieve this is to provide the customer an opportunity to become part of the game and develop a sense of ownership and impact to the game world. This can be done a number of ways through player housing, crafting, guild formations, town/city development, and the opportuntiy to become a part of the games history as well as impact its direction.

Bah, enough on this for now since if I can keep my attention on it, this may become a business case for creating a new game.

Other
If you want your own Solaris capable system and some support to go with it SUN has a deal for you. Buy the support and they'll give you a system for free. Very tempting offer and an interesting way to finance an AMD Opteron workstation. If you subscribe to SUN support for 3 years at about $30/mnth they'll send you a nice new shiny 64-bit workstation with Solaris 10 on it. As a technologist this does have a certain amount of appeal but I'm still on the fence if I want to do it. I believe the same system bought outright would be about $850 (from SUN) so to get it via the support subscription the system would cost $1080... or I guess you could flip it around to say that the system cost you $850 and 3 years of support only cost you $230. Check it out if you're interested here at SUN's website.

posted by Andres Silva  # 6/30/2005 10:55:00 AM