SLENDER - A Brief History of Slenderman

I don’t want to be a dick, but I was crapping my pants over Slenderman before it was cool. Slenderman has a long and colourful history of making the bottom drop out of peoples’... bottoms, which extends far beyond his recent iteration in the indie game “Slender”.

Slender seems to have cropped up recently due to a number of prominent YouTubers picking it up as the perfect “Let’s Play” game. You spawn in first person, in a pitch black forest with only your torch to light your way. The game is almost completely silent other than your quiet breathing, and soft footfalls – both of which gradually get louder and more frantic as you progress through the game.

The idea is to collect pages from a notebook. These will be stapled to trees, abandoned cars and other landmarks across the map – eight in total. Each time you pick up a page the music will build to ramp-up the tension. Picking up pages or excessive running also alerts your presence to the antagonist of the piece – the eponymous Slenderman.

[GW2] GuildMag Blog Carnival - Learning to Wait

It’s been 5 years since we first heard concrete confirmation that we would not be receiving another Guild Wars expansion, and would instead have Guild Wars 2 to look forward to. And half a decade on here we are – still waiting eager eyed and slavering at the mouth, but not for much longer.

Rather frustratingly, the 5 year development of Guild Wars 2 has been somewhat “atomic”. Not just in its explosive rise to one of the most anticipated games of the new decade which we’ve seen over the past year or so; but also in its composition – vast amount of wide update-less space punctuated by the occasional proton of news or neutron of a blog-post.

My life is drastically different to what it was like 5 years ago. I was in the final year of my undergraduate degree – studying hard... *cough* no, REALLY! I was living in a flat in Durham with a couple of friends, watching daytime TV and playing Guild Wars while sitting on a purple plastic chair with a broken back. Unfortunately, the announcement of Guild Wars 2 and, with it, Eye of the North coincided with the most intense part of my dissertation write-up (“Under the Eye of St Cuthbert: Surveillance and Self-Surveillance in Durham Cathedral” 72 points – first degree honours. * breathes on nails, polishes on shirt* ah-thank you). The fact is I didn’t have quite the time to squee as much as I’d have liked, but the excitement was still palpable at Guru when I visited (back when the community was at least tolerable).

It seems I didn’t miss a whole lot though, from what I could tell at the time all we’d been told was “it’s coming” and not much else.

The years that followed are what I fondly refer to as the “When it’s ready” years. Three years of pretty much nothing: the occasional scrap of information, meagre sustenance for hungry Guild Wars players who were squeezing every inch of playtime out of the game they’ve loved for years but of which they were slowly growing tired. We were assured that behind the shroud ANet were harnessing the power of lightning to reincarnate the flesh of the long dead; building time machines, teleportation devices and rocket-boots; they were growing ears on the backs of rats. The game was coming, and while ANet tinkered, we waited.

I waited and filled my Hall of Monuments. I waited and got GWAMM. I waited and played new games. I waited and got a job, a house, bills and responsibilities. I did all those things, but ultimately I was, underneath it all, still waiting.

The most common thing I’ve heard since the start of August has been “I can’t believe it”. Whether its “I can’t believe it’s almost time” or “I can’t believe I’m going to get to play it as much as I want in just a few weeks” or even just “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!”, disbelief is totally understandable – things which are this long coming have a nasty habit of fading away into nothing. There was the ever-present fear of the game becoming vapourware, ArenaNet going out of business or NCSoft pulling the plug. Now, with release just on the horizon, it’s up to us as supporters and players in conjunction with ANet to make sure the game stands up to the new challenges every game faces in the current market. With SWTOR, Rift, DC Universe etc all struggling in the current mire, there is a real threat that Guild Wars 2 will get caught in the intergalactic pull of the MMO black-hole. We, as players, can only really do a few things to keep the game running – keep playing, promoting, blogging, vlogging and building a community which welcomes new players and supports the game over the next few years. If we do this effectively, if we ensure that our stoic patience has not been in vain, we might see Guild Wars 2 love a life as long and as fruitful as the Guild Wars 1.

[GW2] Gemsplosion!

I think I might just about be the only person in the world not to have been hotly anticipating the release of Diablo III. Neither have I played either of the previous 2. I know, now you’re in receipt of this knowledge about my meagre video game experience, all my previous opinions can be disregarded. My friend recently implored me to “join the online sensation before we all murder you”. A tempting offer, for sure, but for all the good things I’ve heard, I’ve heard endless bad. Not least a recent article over on TL:DR by Henry Feng – University of Sydney – regarding the catastrophic imbalance in the in-game market caused by endless exploits.

Feng describes how the numerous item and gold dupes, exploits, loopholes and imbalanced farms, thrown into the mixing pot with the Real Money Auction House (RMAH) and the Gold Auction House (GAH) has caused prices of even the lowest of items to spiral out of the reach of most dedicated rule-abiding players (Feng describes how the average top-level player can make roughly 50000 coins an hour, but with the discovery of these exploits prices have spiralled into the hundreds of millions).

Now, as stated above, I’ve never played the game, so I don’t have any way corroborate the information above. But as a single case, it is an example of the kind of worries I had about the Gem Store in Guild Wars 2. If you have read my 2c on the subject of the Gem Store you will know that I wasn’t hugely enthusiastic about it – not because of the way it has been implemented, but because I disagreed with the ethical thought process behind it. I’ve had to somewhat change my tune on this, mainly because from what I’ve seen the implementation of the feature in-game is deftly done and when play-tested by the thousands involved in the Beta Weekends, it seems to hold up to scrutiny and not cause the game to explode.

However, as with everything in the game atm, beta is beta. Just as those features which currently don’t work, might work once the game is released, so too those which do work in beta, might explode upon release. As stated on Henry Feng’s article, people will always eventually find the path of least resistance. Have ANet plugged all the holes? Experience says no, and that’s no criticism of ANet, that’s just the way it is – it’s the way the world works. It would be a mammoth job to predict the myriad of ways which players might pull and stretch every element of the game before the eventual moment when they find a way to break it.

The real test is how the game holds up when ANet have to start fire-fighting, when the system inevitably creaks will the kind people of Seattle be able to bring it back into line with the game intact? Considering the 7 year life-span of Guild Wars 1, experience says yes.

SIDE NOTE:

 

After examining the Gem Store during the last beta, I couldn't see any way to change the price at which you can sell your gems - suggesting the first of the two models (in that you sell the gems to "The House" and buy them back from them rather than directly from other players.) Sorry Greibach!