Combat Arms Review: Pt 2, The Game

In my previous post “Combat Arms Review: Pt 1, Nexon and the business proposition” covering Nexon’s online First Person Shooter (FPS) game Combat Arms (CA), I covered the general economic model and the attraction for playing this very comprehensive of “free games”.

This 2nd part of the review is looking now to the game mechanic and the strengths/weaknesses of the platform and community. Specifically:

1. Is the gameplay any good?
2. How good is the user interface?
3. What is the community like?

Background
I’ve been playing first person shooters for a very long time, albeit I don’t profess to being particularly good at them. I still have a zipped up version of the original Wolfenstein and Duke Nukem for a historical laugh. Similarly aged FPS players like myself have a chuckle that as we upgraded our machines from 386 proccessors to 486 architecture, we would turn off the “turbo” button to slow the computer down so that they could comfortably play the game in its original game state. A whole new world was unveiled with the arrival of the Pentium Processors of the day. I’ve been in businesses which played networked versions of Doom, Counterstrike, different versions of Quake, Unreal Tournament 2004 & 2007.

Ironically enough I never got into Call of Duty or the Battlefield 1942 type of games, being what I class as just a “casual gamer”,  I just never quite had a computer “fast enough” to run such heavy duty graphics and support the game play comfortably and always seemed to be 2 versions of Direct X behind what was current and more to the point what my computer and video card could support.

Recent times, though I’ve managed to get a laptop with a solid state hard drive, which has made a huge difference in terms of my gaming ability, connected to a decent external monitor. This led me to my search for different first person shooters that were free and had reasonable graphics and gameplay which would entice me to play on a semi regular basis.

Is the gameplay any good?
If you like Counterstrike, you’ll like CA. Set in modern times, there is an array of maps and assorted weaponry which is accessible to all players. The ranking system is modeled after the US Military, with some variation at the upper echelon ranks. As discussed previously, as you progress through each rank, gaining experience you are allowed access to different maps and more importantly, different GP (Gear Point) based weapons of varying types and capabilities.

When you first start off life in the CA world, you are the rank of T = Trainee, having to go through the mandatory training and orientation battles. When I joined a couple of years back, they didn’t have this orientation, instead throwing you in the deep end into the battle servers instead. There are an array of servers available – at the time of writing, I’m playing on the US based servers and I tend to spend most of my time on Server West. Within Server West, there are a number of different servers groups – Alpha, Bravo, Foxtrot, Black Market and Papa – each with an array of game play servers underneath that you can join. Access to these servers is based on either your rank or your KDR = Kill Death Ratio or in some cases both. Starting off life as a modest T= Trainee and than graduating to P = Private, you start with a KDR of 1.00. KDR is calculated by your number of kills divided by your number of deaths (yours). So if for example you manage to kill 20 people in a game, but die 15 times, your KDR = 20/15 = 1.25. If conversely you kill 15, but die 20 times, your KDR = 15/20 = 0.75. Really, anything above 0.85 is considered pretty good.

Gameplay itself is simple – you pick a room, with the appropriate game mode you want to play and join it. With up to 16 players (multiplayer) in the same room, games in general are surprisingly lag free. I play at home over my home wireless and ADSL and don’t have any problems. In game, graphics is fluid, and very much focused on rapid, real time decision making, skill and good representation of graphics. This to me is the appeal of CA – the gameplay is very enjoyable, as on the whole, everyone is there to have a good time. In game chat options are 1/All 2/Team or 3/Clan, which you can interface with via either keyboard or voice microphone/headphones.

On the whole, I spend the bulk of my time playing Elimination, as I find that, particularly when you are playing with some friends, it is the most enjoyable from a casual gaming perspective, as you can work together.  There are a number of game modes:

Elimination: Which is you and a group of team mates against an opposing force of similar numbers. The game has a target number of kills e.g. 140 and its the first team to get there, which wins. Each time you kill, it adds to an overall game tally of “kills”, each time you die, you re-spawn about 5 seconds later and continue on, accruing a “death” = hence the capability to calculate a KDR. Probably the most popular of the game types.

Elimination Pro: Tougher. Again, you are separated into teams, but if you die, you don’t re-spawn – get a second life until the round ends. The game lasts as long as a team has a player in the field, who remains alive, with the winning team that which has the last player standing. Games on big maps can last for ages, as you run around “hiding” and trying to get a clear line of sight with the enemy, without them getting a bead on you. Much less forgiving of mistakes and tends to be played by better KDR players, who fave higher powered weapons i.e. shotguns, sniper rifles or have particularly good aiming accuracy.

Fireteam: You verses the computer and hoards of either a/ Zombies or b/ Computer controlled players. There are limited maps being available in this mode, those being Cabin Fever, Desert Storm, or Desert Fox. Team work rules the day here – much harder to play as a lone gunman, you will get over run and swamped by the opposition in a matter of minutes.

Quarantine: A variant of Fireteam, you have a time limit to destroy all the Zombie hoards attacking you from all points of the game – played on a limited set of maps, you have the opportunity to “hole” up in specific places. Again, a heavy emphasis on team play to defeat the enemy overall. My least favourite mode.

Capture the Flag: 2 spawn points, 2 flags, get the oppositions flag and return it to your spawn point. Simple.

One Man Army: As the name suggests, everyone to themselves. Weaponry and skill rule the day here.

How good is the user interface?
When you log into the platform, navigation around the servers is pretty straight forward – there are different areas where you can gather on the server to take part in community chat, there’s a section to look at your game character and fit out the weapons you accrue over time. In the 2 or so years I’ve been playing the game, the Nexon guys haven’t rested on their laurels – every 6 months or so, they update the game interface, based no doubt on analytics of what people are looking at and where they are spending their time. Each time they have upgraded the interface, I’ve been really happy with the evolutionary changes and incremental functionality introductions/deletions – it’s all very logical and straight forward.

In game play, user interface is the classic FPS keyboard/mouse combination which can be specifically configured to your own requirements i.e. invert the mouse so that forward is up and reverse is down or change the firing keys etc. Sensitivity in game can also be altered too in game which is nice, when you want to tweak your settings to a sniper type game where you want slow movements verses a Close Quarters Combat (CQB) battle with high sensitivity.

Game play is full screen and the array of information around the screen is clear an unobtrusive. I think this is where Nexon really got it right in the game play – I’ve since downloaded and tried a few of the other games that are available in the space like  Operation 7, Cross Fire etc but they just don’t have (In my humble opinion) as good a user interface in terms of design or usability. It makes a serious difference when you’re running around a map and someone is taking snipes at you, how easy it is to read and interact with the user interface.

What is the community like?
I’ve mentioned that games can have up to 16 players in them – if you play regularly enough, you often get to know players by their call sign, as they tend to log in the same time as yourself and you can get chatting to them. If you find a particularly good bunch of people to play with, you can join a “clan” which is a collective of people who play under the same team or clan name. There are some distinct advantages to this, not least of all co-ordinated game play. The camaraderie that occurs during a clan match with like minded team mates is also a lot of fun. Clan War’s between 2 opposing clans, with both clans communicating on their own private channels to each other during the middle of a game takes the gameplay and complexity of the game to a whole different level – it is fantastic, the blend of tactics, skill and thinking involved.

A by product of clan wars, is that clans are sectioned off into levels – Level 1 can have a maximum of 10 players, Level 2 = 20, Level 3 = 30 and so on. With the accrual of each level (by way of clan war matches) the clan members can access different weaponry and armament which is wholly unavailable from the store or via ranking up through the levels as an individual.

I’m the member of a clan which is quite small – only 8 members, but because we are all based in Australia and play at similar times, each time we log on its nice to have people around. It’s an adult clan – we’re all got kids and mortgages and chat about real world things over voice chat – with the common thread of interest being the game itself. Playing a clan war in a co-ordinated way is a whole lot of fun, particularly on the bigger maps and in the team mode maps like capture the flag etc.

Overall, if you like FPS – I’d highly recommend giving this game a go, particularly if you have an office environment where there are network games on a Friday night – it’s great fun.

Adventure Racing

As I write this post on my daily commute into “the big smoke” – Melbourne CBD – heading into work after a long weekend, I glance at the time and realise that the best man at my wedding Michael Kolody, is taking starting position with his 3 team mates Kerryn Rim, Paul Gruber and Brendon Hills in what some would call masochistic, organised mayhem – an Adventure Race. They represent the revival of the adventure racing team Mike & I founded back in 2005: Tali Karng Trackers.

Not just any adventure race either, but the grand daddy of Adventure Races in Australia – XPD. Held every 2 years in different, beautiful parts of this fare country of ours, it is a journey of exploration, self belief and ultimately achievement. Set across 10 days, it traverses 700+ kilometers of terrain by no means other than walking, mountain biking, kayaks, the occasional abseil/climb. It eschews modern navigational aids such as GPS and mobile phones communications (or Google Maps!) in favour of more classical methods – old fashioned magnetic pole compass and high quality cartographer maps.

By grand daddy of races, XPD is so highly regarded, this years event in its 6th year, is the final leg of the Adventure Racing World Series for 2011 and is also the “Championship” event.

The Adventure Racing World Series this year comprises of 7 events:

• Adidas TERREX, United Kingdom, Aug 2010
• APEX – Alpine Expedition, Switzerland, May 2011
• Costa Rica Adventure Race, Costa Rica, Jun 2011
• Raid The North Extreme, Canada, Jul 2011
• Raid in France, France, Aug 2011
• Gold Rush Mother Lode, United States of America, Sept 2011
• XPD ARWS World Championship, Australia, Nov 2011

80 teams from all around the world – 23 countries to be precise – have registered to be part of this race. Sporting teams representing the elite of the elite have trekked here in what is nothing less than an awesome field. An example of the calibre includes:

•     Team Adidas Terrax from the United Kingdom (#1 UK Team)
•     Team Black Heart, Australia (#1 Australian Team)
•     Wilderness Traverse.com from Canada (#1 Raid The North Extreme)
•     Team Wild Rose from Canada (#2 Raid The North Extreme)
•     Seagate from New Zealand (2nd in the 2010 Adventure Racing World Championship)
•     Team Silva (from Switzerland 1st APEX Switzerland)

So, what is Adventure Racing?

I liken it to this: If you think about anyone you know that does triathlon events, they have their race divided up into the swim then the bicycle ride and rounded off by the run. This is set out on a pre-determined course and the objective is to finish the course in as short as time as possible. With notable exceptions, the course is usually in an urban environment, near the beach and the course is known days, if not weeks in advance, so that competitors can go “train” there and plan out their attack. By this, if the course is slightly hilly, competitors can plan how they tackle the hills, according to their style of competition – attack the hills and conserve on the descent or take the hills conservatively and move quickly down the slope. Everyone’s different.

Adventure racing is totally different. For one, there isn’t a set course. You are given check points that are mandatory to pass through and you can only get there by old fashioned navigation with a map and compass.

For the XPD event, I spoke to Mick on Monday evening and expectations were high as at 9am on Tuesday morning, they were going to be receiving the maps to the entire course area, covering 700km of terrain. The course is across some 80km by 160km, which equates to 11,000km square of terrain. Wow. Rather than having the course marked out for them though, like in a triathlon event, they were only given particular destinations they had to pass through with their team. Mick expected that the whole of Tuesday up until midnight would be devoted to mapping out exactly where the teams would travel.

Each checkpoint carries a points value, with points assigned to the difficulty of the location. An example is that a checkpoint on the summit of a mountain carries maybe 100 points, but the next 100 point checkpoint is at the bottom of a valley in heavily wooded forest. To make matters more interesting, checkpoints carry different points values according to locale and with the underlying strategy of winning being accruing enough points, it suddenly becomes a tactical game of choosing which course will track the most amount of points in a given time period.

Each checkpoint is governed by GPS locators on each team, both for marshaling purposes as well as a safety precaution. It isn’t unusual to see an event with 200+ checkpoints ranging from a modest 10 points each to difficult, far flung points with 150 points attached to them.

It is for this reason that adventure racing is a team sport. Across the 700km+  XPD’s absolute elite teams are expected to cover this in some 5 to 6 days. With no sleep. And just walking, cycling, kayaking or (as has just been revealed this morning) caving.

Picture this: You’re alone with your 3 team mates, navigating by compass and maps. You have a backpack full of food and water, the mandatory safety provisions like flares, thermal blankets, first aid kit and spare parts for your bike. It’s 3am in the morning and you’re moving by torchlight. It’s raining. And you’re running.

I’ve done a few adventure races, but its been limited to 12 hour and 24 hour events. I’ve done a lot of rogaining – which is the spiritual sister to orienteering, relying on gaining as many points as possible in a set time limit. I used to work on 150 points per hour, because if you did that, you were a shot of taking a podium finish. Team mates, more fit and more talented than I, ranked a number of times over the years.

I’m not downplaying the fitness aspect of my team mates and the team that is on the trail at XPD. Back in 2005/2006 when I first founded TKT with Mike, I was relatively fit. I was able to comfortably run 10km in 38 minutes and on Wednesday evenings, we would walk/run 22 kms on single track with race packs in the Darabin park lands along side the Yarra River in around 2 hours 15 minutes. By relative, by way of example Chris Steven’s of PNG Trekking Adventures who is one of the TKT crew used to ride on his mountain bike before our weekly run 30km from Ringwood to my house in Heidelberg, run the 22km single track, than ride back home again. Then he’d be up at 4:30am the next day and do a 10km kayak. So in context, my fitness level back than, which by any standard is rated as high, pales in comparison to the team that’s out in the field this week.

Mick is a competitive bugger at the best of times. However chatting to him earlier this week, even he conceded the aura of “extreme” that the world championships has bought out in the 80 teams hes had teh opportunity to meet from Canada, UK, France, New Zeland, Costa Rica and the United States. He said he’d be happy just to finish the race.

I will watch with envy and satisfaction Mike, Kerryn, Brendon and Paul’s endeavour over the next few days.

Good luck guys, be safe, be well: Stay Strong, Stay on Target.

Websites:
XPD Live on http://www.trackmelive.com.au/xpd2011/default.aspx
XPD http://www.xpd.com.au
Tali Karng Trackers http://www.tktrackers.com
PNG Trekking Adventures http://www.pngtrekkingadventures.com/

The price of loyalty

In my case, $6.95 per month.

And the increase of my home broadband from 1,500Kb/sec to 20,000Kb/sec. THAT's worth alot more to me. The saving of $6.95 per month was just a bonus. 

I've been a home broadband user since 2000, when I first signed up to Primus Telecoms with a very humble 256Kb/sec ADSL1 Broadband connection which cost me (back than) $49.95 month. Circa 2001, I switched over to the new kid on the block – iiNET, mostly because they offered me 512kB/sec at the same price – still $49.95/month.

Over the course of the next 8 years 11 years, I moved 2 houses and ported successfully with no problems. iiNet were great. In this time, they upgraded me to the shiny new "high speed ADSL1" at a very rapid 8,000Kb/sec in 2006 and again upgraded me to ADSL2 in 2008 which cruised along at a very nice 24,000Kb/sec. Service across this time period was also excellent. We had a few speed bumps along the way, but they sorted it out and offered credits to my account and so forth as time progressed. It's nothing that was unexpected and the business was always interested in helping me out.

So earlier this year, when we moved to the country, I rung up iiNet and ported across our home phone and home broadband, having to go through the process of downgrading the internet speed we were on from 24,000Kb/sec back to 1500Kb/sec. I hadn't realised what a monumental pain that would actually be – not the downgrade and arranging for the port, but the actual reality of living with 1500Kb/sec after being used to downloading a 400Mb episode of True Blood in 10 minutes, as opposed to the 4 to 5 hours – if we were lucky – with our now default speed.

I don't even watch True Blood – my wife does – but I quickly found out the importance of these Vampire chronicles to her existence when suddenly she couldn't get her weekly fix and resorted to Facebook to vent her fury at our "slow internet connection". Suffice to say, you can't even watch YouTube properly at 1080p HD 1500Kb/sec, so our 3.5 year old son was saying the "internet was broken" when trying to watch Thomas the Tank Engine episodes on the "puter" (read: iPad)

So, not being in a "contract", it was now high time to upgrade our broadband speed, for our sanity.

Today I had a look at Telstra, Optus, iiNet contacted them all to check what I could do. Telstra could offer me at ADSL2+ at $6.95 month cheaper. I rung iiNet to see if they would match this deal, with their inferior offering of ADSL1+ at 8,000Kb/sec as opposed to Telstra's enticing ADSL2+ at 24,000Kb/sec. The response I got, after being put on hold for an extended period of time, was no, they wouldn't match it, not withstanding my 8 years loyalty, paying my bill on time (and often early) and ringing up on my own time to give them the opportunity.

Bad move. I've rung Telstra and sorted out my homebroad band and landline, all in 20 minutes and they'll be doing a rapid churn early next week.

iiNet in reaching #2 nationally for ADSL broadband services and getting to a 2,000+ staff capacity appears to have lost that agile hunger for customer satisfaction. For the sake of matching a $6.95 difference and upgrading my service to match a market leading competitor, they declined.

So iiNet has forfeited some $1,200 per year from me. A regularly paying, loyal customer.

I wonder what the cost of acquisition per customer for them is?

And I'm still paying $49.95 per month for my new ADSL2 + connection with Telstra. Result.

Bad luck iiNet, you had your chance. and blew it.

*** Update: 25/10/11 – iiNet rung be back again today – nice of them to do so and confirmed that I had actually been with them as a customer for not 4.5 years (on the account I had registered with them) but 11 years. Ouch. That's a long time. They also rung to confirm that they couldn't move on the pricing set out in stone on their website. Shame. Good customer service, good feedback, but poor adapting to the market. 

Facebook Timeline

I have a little Macbook Air 11" which I hook up to a 22" widescreen monitor at work so that I can dual screen and be more productive. Because I spend most of my day working in MS Word or Outlook, I have the large screen in portrait mode, which I find makes working on documents much easier. Having the monitor arranged this way draws lots of comments from office visitors who note how websites and pages look. So, with my hacking my way into Facebook Timeline, courtesy of a timely post from Tech Crunch, I've been able to have a look around. I like what I see. Viewing it in the portrait format you get the real sense of the timeline and how useful it is in viewing your data.

Steve Jobs: 1955 to 2011

Steve Jobs passed away earlier today, succumbing to that bitch: Cancer. Twitter has been going off tap, exploding in reportedly the heaviest load since it launched, causing the site to experience outages. News and tributes are flowing in from around the world. This is a quick snapshot of the sites I visit regularly and how they are handled this sad event in the first 2 hours after the news broke.

Apples influence on my life?

• Apple IIE at Primary School in Grade 4
• Apple Mac at High School in Year 7
• Apple Macbook – my future wife's, 2004
• Apple iMac, 2006 – my fiance's end of work present, before our first child
• Apple iPhone 3 – my wife's toy (I use a Blackberry, but played with her phone – alot) 2007
• Apple iPhone3GS – replacement for hers that was stolen – 2009
• Apple iPad – launch day, we were out shopping and chanced upon one: May 2010
• Apple Macbook Air 11" – launch day, my new work laptop, October 2010

Ashton Kutcher summed it up most aptly for the masses:

Apple's own Home Page, www.apple.com

With the click through going to a simple tribute:

On Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg's Status:

On Twitter: Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft & Philanthropist

On Twitter: Lance Armstrong, 7 Times Tour de France winner and full time cancer fighter.

Boing Boing, changed its entire site to reflect Apple's Macintosh's original interface:

Googles Home Page, had a subtle, tribute, linking straight to Apple.com, their arch rival.

Wired's Home Page, is probably the most dramatic change, devoting its entire homepage, in place of its diverse blogs and news feeds:

The Cult of Mac, has an extensive collection of posts, historical archives and tributes:

Merus Wines, Napa Valley

I like wine. Good wine. A fine appreciation of Red and a growing appreciation of White. Over the years, I’ve had opportunity to go visit different vineyards on wine tastings, lunches, dinners and lucky enough to attend a few events like weddings and corporate gatherings at different locations across Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales.

Hand in hand with this appreciation of the fluid stuff, I also like architecture, having lived with several architects and interior designers in my share house days. So, it is with some delight I stumbled across Merus Wines in the Napa Valley in California.

Merus, as its website www.meruswines.com declares is Latin:

Mer-us (N) (Latin) 1. Pure, Unmixed. 2. Complete, Absolute, Undiluted; Especially of Wine

The architecture was done by Amsterdam Studio UXUS Design www.uxusdesign.com and opened in 2009.

On my lonnnnnnggggg list of places to visit in the future. I cannot wait to have lunch here.