Killed in a smiling accident.

So my theory, which is mine (and not Anne Elk’s) is that people tend to try an MMOG (maybe from peer pressure, maybe a dealerpublisher offers a free trial, maybe they see MMOG use glamorised on TV), then either hate it and get put off them for life, or become hooked, play that game for a long time, finally get bored, then flit around from other MMOG to other MMOG, trying to recapture that first hit but never quite finding it again.

It’s that old, old story of boy meets MMOG, boy falls in love with MMOG, boy plays MMOG unceasingly to a frankly unhealthy degree for many months, boy starts to tire of MMOG and starts looking around at other MMOGs, boy furtively subscribes to other MMOG (while still logging in to the first from time to time) and secretly enjoys it more, boy unsubscribes from first MMOG, boy suddenly finds the second MMOG isn’t so different from the first after all and rapidly tires, boy moves on from MMOG to MMOG never recapturing that original feeling and realises that first MMOG was his True MMOG, boy returns to that first MMOG but finds it’s moved on, expansions have been released, rules have changed and it’s not the MMOG he remembers, boy is spurned by first MMOG, boy is disconsolately on the verge of abandoning MMOGs for good when, in a hugely emotional finale, a “Classic” expansion is released for that first MMOG returning things to the way they were and boy and MMOG ride off into the sunset to live Happily Ever After.

(Richard Curtis can acquire the rights to Four MMOGs And A Classic Expansion Pack for a small fee.)

(And we’ll ignore the bit after the final credits roll where boy gets bored with the classic expansion pack after a week.)

I got prompted to thinking about it after unsubscribing from Age of Conan and going back to City of Heroes, so I scribbled down my MMOGing history, as per the previous post, and it did seem to suggest an ever-shortening MMOG attention span. Can anything recapture those first joyful stumbling moments getting to grips with a totally new idea, that all those people running around are *actually* *people*, fumbling with strange concepts like “aggro”, that moment when you realise that “grats” is actually a contraction of “congratulations” rather than some derivation of “gratitude” and the party chat around the time people levelled suddenly makes a whole lot more sense? Once you fire up a game, cast a jaded glance at the interface and say “there’s the health bar, there’s the mana bar, there’s my hotbar of abilities, she’s the tank, I’m the healer, he’s the DPS, those are mobile bags of XP and loot, let’s gain some levels”, is there any going back?

So I thought I’d see if other people followed a similar pattern, thanks very much for the responses. I can now confidently conclude, through the Power of Statistics, “yes and no”. (Well, I say “confidently”, based on the sample size and estimated population of players the confidence interval is approximately… erm… 0.00034%, but never mind.) Guido and Elf have a similar trajectory so far (which isn’t guaranteed to continue), but Melmoth, Stargazer and Jon vary significantly.

As it happens I’d been looking at my list again, and my longest subscriptions, City of Heroes and World of Warcraft, are the two games where, at various points, I’ve hooked up with other people, either small groups of friends or guilds that really worked. The rest I either played solo, or found guilds via forums/in-game chat/random blind invite that never quite clicked (the latter cases not being terribly surprising, it’s not a good sign if a guild’s prime criteria for membership is “standing within sight of somebody with invite privileges”, but sometimes you have to give it a shot for a laugh). Maybe it’s not the game so much as the people? I should’ve asked people to list whether they were in regular groups or guilds for the games they’d played.

And then I thought: people, that’s a social thing, Socialiser… Bartle type. Your play style must affect how long you spend in a game; if primarily an Explorer, it depends how large (and varied) the game world is, if an Achiever, how long it takes to the level cap (if such a thing exists) and what avenues for advancement there are after that, if a Socialiser or Killer, it’s all about the people (to talk to/mercilessly slaughter, delete as appropriate). I should’ve asked people to list their Bartle type as well (or an even more in-depth assessment of motivation).

And *then* I thought: that’s not entirely incompatible with Theory Mark I. I might’ve been lucky and started with a game that happened to suit my playing style to start with, or maybe that first game shaped my expectations for everything that followed? I could be particularly impressionable, though. What we need is government funded study of a large group of people who have never played an MMOG, put them through an in-depth assessment of motivation of why they might want to play an MMOG, start them up in a variety of games, then test them again after six months to see if their results change.

And then I thought I’d been thinking altogether too much and I should leave this stuff to psychologists or possibly psychiatrists, so I played a bit of Guitar Hero instead. Oh, is there concrete all around, or is it in my head? Guitar solo!

A question for you, faithful reader, as a bit of data gathering to test a theory: what MMOGs have you played (in approximate chronological order, if it’s not too much trouble), and how long did you play them for (very roughly)? If you started with Meridian 59 and/or Ultima Online and have played everything since, feel free to go with edited highlights.

As a starter for ten, my MMOGing goes something like:

City of Heroes - 48 months and counting^[1]
World of Warcraft - 14 months^[2]
Auto Assault - 3 months^[3]
Guild Wars - 2 months^[4]
Dungeons and Dragons Online - 1 month
EVE (trial) - 14 days
Second Life - couple of days
Lord of the Rings Online - 2 months
Star Wars Galaxies (trial) - 10 days
Tabula Rasa (beta) - couple of days
Pirates of the Burning Sea (beta) - couple of days
Hellgate: London - 1 month
Age of Conan - 1 month

[1] Two main stints, first for the original release in 2004, then City of Villains in 2005-6
[2] Two main stints, first for the original release in 2005, then The Burning Crusade in 2007
[3] Technically was released after Guild Wars and DDO, but I’d been in beta and and off for about a year before that
[4] Total time spent on a couple of attempts at the original campaign then one of the expansions at various points over a few years

Guitar Hero - Aerosmith is… Aerosmith-y. This isn’t terribly surprising, what with it having “Aerosmith” in the title and everything, and a picture of Aerosmith on the cover just in case you missed that; 29 of the 41 songs in the game are by Aerosmith (or Joe Perry), you play them as motion-captured Aerosmith, there are short snippets of Aerosmith interviews between the levels as the game tracks Aerosmith’s career from playing a high school dance to intergalactic megastardom, you can play as one of the Aerosmith guitarist on the rest of the tracks if you buy/unlock them as a character in the Vault, playing signature Joe Perry Gibson guitars

If you’re unsure whether you should get the game or not, here’s a detailed in-depth questionnaire to help you decide:

1) Do you like Guitar Hero?
a) Oh yes! It’s a work of plastic instrumental genius!
b) It’s OK I guess.
c) No, it’s a stupid waste of time, learn to play a real guitar.

2) Do you like Aerosmith?
a) Oh yes! Who doesn’t like the multi-Grammy winning biggest selling American hard rock band of all time?
b) They’re OK I guess.
c) No, I hate them and everything they stand for.

If you answered:
Mostly (a): buy the game right now
Mostly (b): maybe rent the game, see how you like it
Mostly (c): don’t buy the game

Hope that helped.

Personally I remain fairly ambivalent towards Aerosmith, they’ve got a few catchy songs but I’m not rushing out to buy their entire back catalogue, so the game’s a neat enough diversion while waiting for World Tour rather than something I’ll play solidly for the next few months. If you love Aerosmith, though, I’m sure you’ll love this (unless you hate Guitar Hero).

I think the time’s come to move on from Age of Conan, at least for a while. I hit level 50 and just can’t get terribly enthused about carrying on. It’s not a bad game by any means, but it seems like there’s a wave of MMOG-ennui sweeping over the world and I’m as caught up in it as everyone else. I posted about Age of Conan being exasperatingly MMORPG-y; the latest Van Hemlock podcast has contemplations on the Meaning of MMOG Life; the first part of an interview with Paul Barnett on Rock, Paper, Shotgun covers some of the same ground, for games a whole, and then of course there’s the kerfuffle over a Richard Bartle interview, in which it was revealed that Bartle was the instigator of the brutal crackdown on the Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe, leading to Morgan Tsvangirai withdrawing from the presidential run-off. Least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for the outpouring of Fearsome Internet Rage that followed, the only other possibility is everyone’s getting terribly cross that he doesn’t realise that WAR is going to be the most amazingly revolutionary thing in the history of time ever, knocking trivial stuff like fire, the wheel or sliced bread (even a piece of sliced bread attached to a wheel and being toasted over a fire) into a cocked hat (the cocked hat itself ranking a distant third as far as amazingly revolutionary things go). Still, once you get past the unhelpful hyperbole and weird metaphors involving bicornes, there’s the ennui again. As Alec Meer puts it in the RPS piece “Much as I can enjoy a few days/weeks/months in a Conan or a Tabula Rasa, I’ve pretty much come to terms with any MMO for the next few years being disappointing on a fundamental level of exploration, purpose and self-expression.”

I might well head back to Age of Conan at some point, Funcom seem to have plenty of plans for extra content to add, and if I upgrade my PC in the meantime I might get more than a couple of frames per second with high detail graphics. For now, though, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith beckons. Let there be rock!

PS: apropos of nothing else in this post, I just love the quote so much, from Neil Gaiman’s blog, Terry Pratchett in a spectacularly mis-headlined Daily Mail article:

“There is a rumour going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.”

I’ve had a few PalmOS PDAs, starting with a Handspring Visor (Handspring no longer exist, having been absorbed into Palm as part of the “hey, let’s split our hardware and software divisions and rebrand as palmOne… no, wait a minute, that’s a stupid name, let’s go back to Palm” exercise), then a Sony Clie (Sony have since stopped making PalmOS PDAs, though I believe they’ve achieved minor success in some other fields of consumer electronics) and finally a Tapwave Zodiac (a brilliant device that unfortunately pitched itself as a mobile entertainment system with a strong gaming element around the time the PSP came out, Tapwave going bankrupt less than a year after the Zodiac launched in the UK). Much as I love the Zodiac, and PalmOS in general, they’re getting rather long in the tooth and haven’t been updated much recently, so I started looking around for a handheld device that would do all the PDA-y stuff of a PalmOS device but with added WiFi and internet-y goodness.

This turned out to be a bit difficult. PDAs are all but dead, barring some last ditch resistance from a few aged Palm Tungstens and new HP iPAQs, but having committed to blind veneration of Palm back in the heydey of PalmOS vs PocketPC/Windows CE/Windows Mobile/whatever they’re calling it this week, I can never consider a Windows Mobile device on religious grounds. Smartphones are everywhere, but I prefer to have a small easily pocketable phone in addition to a larger pocketable-in-a-slightly-bigger-pocket device with a nice big screen and better input methods than going “7, 7, 7, 7, NO I MEANT R FOR CHRIST’S SAKE” (and in a perfect world the two talk to each other via bluetooth, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves). Then there’s… other stuff. Ultra Mobile PCs, Tablets, media players that happen to have a touch screen and WiFi, GPS units that happen to have a touch screen and WiFi. In the end I got the shortlist down to a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet or an iPod Touch, neither of which were quite perfect, but with the Touch being fairly limited in its initial form (though I’m waiting to see how Apple’s App Store turns out with keen interest) I went for the N810.

The N810 has a large 800×480 touch screen, a slide-down hardware keyboard, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, camera, coffee percolator and extending three speed chain driven rotavator (OK, not the last two. But the rest of the list is pretty impressive.) The screen is definitely one of its strongest features, being vibrant and with a high enough resolution to render most web pages as you’d see them on a regular PC. The keyboard is perfectly functional for something squeezed into such a small space, though you wouldn’t want to write a book with it; I was fairly adept with Grafitti (Palm’s character recognition input system), the keyboard is quicker and easier. WiFi connectivity is fine, easy to set up, and Bluetooth is handy for connecting to phones when outside WiFi coverage. On the not-quite-so-great side, the GPS takes a long time to lock on to satellites, though I don’t really use it much anyway, and the camera is a fairly standard VGA job on the face of the device, only really useful as a webcam (not that I’d want to inflict that on anyone). It has 2Gb of internal memory, a bit taken up with maps for the GPS software, and a single MiniSD card slot.

The standard software is a mixed bag. The Mozilla-based MicroB web browser has handled all the web pages I’ve chucked at it, even the full version of Google Reader, though it does slow down a lot for script-heavy stuff. It’s a bit clunky to use, especially when compared to Apple’s multi-touch navigation, but then the N810 supports Flash and RealMedia for services like the BBC’s Listen Again or YouTube/Google Video etc etc, and the 800×480 screen means zooming isn’t often needed. Skype is included, and works very well for chatting while wandering around the house, and there’s the usual set of notepad, sketch pad, calculator, world clock, couple of games etc. The original e-mail client is very rudimentary (but has just been overhauled), and the base unit is almost totally lacking in PIM functionality, barring a very online-centric contacts application (you can store phone numbers, but not addresses).

So it’s generally a nice device, albeit with a few frustrating rough edges. The lack of PIM functionality can be partially remedied by installing GPE, though getting that to talk to anything else is quite hard work; Erminig will sync GPE with Google Calendar, but I gave up trying to import contacts. A few other apps like FBReader for e-books and AisleRiot Solitaire round out the N810, particularly for when WiFi isn’t available. Installation is mostly straightforward when apps are published via maemo.org, either browse to the web page and tap “Install” or use the application manager software, but things can get a bit more involved if you need to go further afield; before some kind soul packaged AisleRiot properly, it involved a lot of fiddling around with libraries, “red pill” mode and other hassles.

This past week there’s been a significant upgrade of the N810 operating system that I installed last night, in a fairly painless process (especially with this handy walkthrough) that’s greatly improved the e-mail client, and if it works as advertised also means that’s the last time I’ll have had to flash the device to upgrade it. While reinstalling applications after the upgrade, I remembered an e-mail about an updated version of the Garnet VM Palm emulation software; I’d downloaded an earlier beta when it was first available, but never spent much time with it, not least because it ran in Palm’s 320×480 resolution in the middle of the 800×480 screen. The new version now has full screen support and by all accounts an improved HotSync function, so I fired up the old Zodiac HotSync manager on the PC, enabled network synchronisation on it, tapped the PC’s IP into Garnet VM, hit HotSync, ate wallah, as the French seldom say. I hadn’t entirely been expecting it to work, and it hit a slight snag as I’d left Garnet VM set up with its default 16Mb of space and HotSync was merrily trying to restore 50Mb worth of stuff that had been on the Zodiac, but a swift bit of tinkering later, and Garnet VM is doing a very creditable impersonation of PalmOS with all the applications I had installed before. I haven’t tested it rigorously, but unless it explodes violently it looks like it really might be a best-of-both-worlds situation.

The only slight worry is that, if my past history of handheld devices is anything to go by, Nokia are due to totally withdraw from the Internet Tablet market any moment. Oh well, time to see how much the 3G iPhone will be on Pay & Go…

The producers of Hat News Now Today would Now like to apologise Today, Now, for the lack, Today, of Hat News, Now, Today. Unfortunately the crack team of hat news hunters have been unable to find any new hats.

Well… that’s not strictly true. There’ve been new hats by the bucketload. Barely a slaughter of 20 EnemyGroup EnemyTypes goes by without a new hat or three to add to the collection, and no two hats are the same, oh no, they vary in level, vary in armour type, and, most of all, vary in prefix. There are Sacrosanct hats that give Unholy damage invulnerability and Merciful and Mocking hats that reduce or increase threat respectively (if you wear both at the same time you get an Ambivalent hat, leaving mobs uncertain of exactly how they feel about you) and Invigorating hats that increase your stamina and Exsanguinating hats that tap enemy health and Interventionist hats that make you more likely to interfere with the peaceful business of NPC society and Euphemistic hats that are a bit rude if you look at them a certain way and Paraphrastic hats that re-word your dialogue options (I may have made one or two of them up. But not many!)

Visually, though… I have a suspicion that some Enchanting Corporation ordered a huge container-ship loaded down with identical mass-produced hats, then stuck ‘em on a conveyor belt going past drunk magician with a thesaurus. “Sacrosanct! Pow! Salubrious! Zap! Turn you into a pig! Newt! Pig! Newt! Pig! Louder pig louder pig louder pig mute pig!” So a level 21 Iron-mail Helm is identical to a level 34 Invigorating Iron-mail Helm which is remarkably similar to a level 37 Mocking Bronze-Studded Helm which is identical to a level 48 Bronze-Studded Helm. Once you’ve seen one heavy armour helmet you have, quite literally, seen them all (apart from a few level 30 Vanir and Nemedian bits covered last time out on Hat News Now).

There is a bit of Hat News Hope, as some higher level players do appear to be sporting slightly more interesting headgear, so maybe somewhere in the distant corners of the world there’s a rogue hat maker creating wild and crazy headgear for those brave enough to seek him out… or there’s a 10% chance of a rare helmet drop from some boss at the end of a hellish instance. Find out soon, in Hat News Sometime In The Future, Maybe.

So far the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows has saved three PCs. I created one a couple of years back, when a PSU died and slightly mangled a hard drive in the process; with utilities on the UBCD I fixed the boot record and reverted Windows to a previous system restore point when it wouldn’t load (after recovering the system restore points from files chkdsk had recovered). Last year a friend had an almost identical problem, and once again the UBCD got us back to a previous system restore point. Yesterday another friend’s PC was showing the dreaded Blue Screen of Death on bootup; it’s a Dell, with a some built in diagnostic tools on another partition, but all the tests ran absolutely fine. Booting from a Windows CD and dropping into the recovery console, it couldn’t find the hard drive at all, so it wasn’t possible to run chkdsk or fixmbr. UBCD to the rescue! A DOS NTFS utility on it found the NTFS partition, chkdsk’ed it, fixed some errors, and all is well again (hopefully…)

The UBCD also has CD/DVD burning utilities to save data, just in case you can’t get a hard drive booting again, anti-virus/malware tools in case they were the cause of your problems, and a whole bunch o’ other stuff. Hopefully you’ll never need it, but just in case, it’s a damn handy thing to have around.

In the month since my last update, I’ve lost about half a stone, so the Wii Fit regime is definitely working. Though technically, it’s not really the Wii Fit regime; I use the Body Test facility to keep track of weight, and run through its muscle workouts now and again (though I could probably figure out how to do sit ups and press ups without the plastic board, if I tried really hard), but I suspect most of the weight loss has come from dieting (drinking lots of water instead of sugary carbonated beverages, eating more fresh fruit and all that) and putting in more time on the exercise bike (while listening to the radio).

So is Wii Fit a waste of money? Rationally, yes, as per the previous update you could get a similar benefit from a workout DVD, set of scales and a notepad (and maybe some graph paper and coloured pencils), and even then I suspect all that is secondary compared to eating less/more healthily (I wasn’t particularly unfit previously, just carrying a bit of extra weight). But… despite, on several occasions over the past five years, making a bit of an effort to lose weight, it’s only since getting Wii Fit that I’ve managed to stick at it, so I’m not sure it can be entirely discounted from the equation, even if just as a psychological spur to stick at the diet to keep losing weight to prove it wasn’t a waste of money.

Anyway, even if the Wii Fit disc starts to gather dust, the balance board can be used for a bunch of other stuff…

I like to listen to the radio while wandering around doing housework, or exercising, or grinding level 20 mobs at level 46 thanks to someone deciding that when you learn armour crafting (level 40 at the earliest) you’ll have to make innumerable pieces of light and medium armour, and the rough leather you need for them won’t drop from level 40+ mobs, oh no, despite decimating the wolf, lynx, wolverine, marmot, wombat and shrew population of the Fields of the Dead apparently their combined pelts are barely sufficient for a single glove (and a fingerless glove at that), you’ll need to go back to the lower level zones and speed-slaughter your way through the wildlife there…

… sorry, slight digression there. Anyway, dull-but-necessary tasks can be enlivened by a good radio programme, and the joy of modern technology means you’re not restricted to what’s broadcasting at that moment (which is handy if you’re doing the dishes when The Archers is on). A mobile internet thingy, the BBC’s “Listen Again” service, which streams programmes from the last week whenever you want, and you’re set. Last night I was listening to Chairman Humph, a tribute to the magnificent trumpet-blower and panel show host Humphrey Lyttleton.

I love Radiohead’s post-OK Computer albums, especially Amnesiac, and one of my absolute favourite songs is Life In A Glasshouse with its mournful New Orleans sound; I was just Audiosurfing it the other day. I hadn’t the faintest idea that it was Humphrey Lyttleton and his band playing on it, until it was mentioned during Chairman Humph (with Stephen Fry helpfully informing Radio 4 listeners that Radiohead are a “modern indie band”).

In this age of digital music and streaming media, I can’t remember the last time I looked at an album’s liner notes; maybe a quick flick-through while waiting for an MP3 ripper to work through a CD then back on the shelf to gather dust, and not even that since digital downloads became prevalent. Still, you catch up in the end.

You know, games are like buses. You wait all day, then it turns out that in a deregulated public transportation system the route you’re on is considered insufficiently profitable to keep running. And then three come along at once.

So a couple of months back there wasn’t really much going on games-wise, provoking an Attack of Opportunity Impulse Purchase, whereas now quite literally several games all clamour for attention. Mass Effect is just out on PC, which I’ve been looking forward to since everyone raved about the 360 version, but I haven’t even got around to buying that yet; there’s still Audiosurf, and Dawn of War, though after conquering 90% of the planet in the Dark Crusade campaign I’ve run out of steam slightly there. Issue 12 of City of Heroes has been out a few weeks, and I’ve rolled up a new Arachnos Soldier for some rather splendid villainy, though not nearly as much as I’d like, plus there’s a new zone I must get around to exploring with my trusty old hero. What I’ve mostly been playing, though, is Age of Conan. There are the glitches of a new MMOG, bugged quests and such, but that’s the price you pay for starting at launch instead of giving it six months (or a couple of years), and the patches are coming thick and fast. The problems are offset by the fact that it still has that New MMOG Smell; everything is fresh, there are new areas to explore, new levels to gain, new abilities to learn, new things to craft, wave after endless wave of new people/monsters/demons/wildlife to mercilessly slaughter.

Well, I say “new”…

Age of Conan isn’t exactly revolutionary. The combat system is a bit faster, and involves pressing a few more buttons, than other MMORPGs, some of the classes are quite interesting, there are tweaks and flourishes here and there, but at its heart there are stats and levels and XP and quests and mobs and loot, it’s an MMORPG (according to the standard definition, where ‘RP’ obviously stands for “stats and levels and XP and quests and mobs and loot”, ‘cos it sure doesn’t stand for Role Playing); if you didn’t have to kill ten rats to gain 20XP to get to level two it wouldn’t be an MMORPG, and if you didn’t want to do that you probably shouldn’t be playing an MMORPG in the first place but…

Now none of the following is at all new or original, most of it’s been going on since the dawn of (MMOG) time, I’ve blogged about similar things before, you’ve probably blogged about it, there are several libraries worth of blog posts and forum posts and web pages and magazines and books and pamphlets and flesh-consuming shadow swarms that cover the same ground, but sometimes Age of Conan is just so exasperatingly… MMORPG-y. It does try. Some quests do things a bit differently, and you have to feel for the designers who know that any attempt to be witty or innovative or different in the quest text will be lost on the 99% of players who click “next… next… next…”, then look at the quest log to see what the actual goal is, and that any attempt to mix things up, do much other than send you to a named person or to kill clearly specified mobs, will send half the players straight off to Google while the other half make thousands of forum posts and GM petitions and eternal loops in zone chat saying “ZOMGZ KWEST IS BUGGED WOT TO DO???” So I understand entirely why it happens, but sometimes…

You pitch up at a village, look for the people toting giant floating punctuation, have a quick chat, and find out there’s bandit trouble. “Perhaps I could seek the underlying causes of the conflict” you offer, “determining what unfortunate events drove the bandits to crime in the first place, and then offer an independent conciliation service bringing bandits and villagers together to forge a peaceful outcome beneficial to all parties”.
“Yesss…” replies Neville T. Arbitrary the Villager “… or you could just kill ten of them.” So you toddle off to dispense some rather presumptive sword-based justice, and find the bandits have most distinct social groups. There are Bandit Campanologists and Bandit Philatelists and Bandit Chartered Accountants and Bandit Certified Accountants and Bandit Neoclassicists and Bandit Constructivists and tucked away somewhere amidst them all is Geoff the Bandit Leader. Neville T. Arbitrary the Villager was most specific, though, and only wants you to kill ten Bandit Campanologists and Bandit Chartered Accountants. Who knows why, he’s Arbitrary like that. It’s 2am, and there’s nobody else about, just you and the bandits, so you make a start, picking off a lone Bandit Chartered Accountant scout. Moving closer to the main camp, there’s a Bandit Campanologist, only he’s standing next to a Bandit Philatelist. Oh well, bells, stamps, it’s all the same, in you wade, smiting them both down, though of course only the Campanologist counts towards your quest tally. Further and further into the bandit encampment you go, picking off the bandits in ones and twos as their fellows stand idly by; then you get a bit too near a group of three who all notice you and leap to the attack, and as you pop a health potion and back off to try and deal with them a pair on patrol decide that would be a really good time to wander past and join in the fun, and the five of them mash you into a pulp. Tum te tum, corpse run, back to the camp and resume the hunting of Bandit Campanologists and Chartered Accountants, who are still inconveniently hanging around with Philatelists and Neoclassicisits. After some gruelling combat, another death caused by respawns in the middle of a fight, and innumerable kills of all types of Bandit except Campanologists and Chartered Accountants, you finally kill precisely ten of the requisite mobs. And you’re now stuck in the middle of a bandit camp, with a host of rather cross bandits (all of whom, naturally, are Campanologists and Chartered Accountants now you don’t specifically need to hunt them down) between you and the village. So you decide you can’t be arsed to fight them all, again, and just start running as fast as you can, occasionally activating the /train emote as about three hundred bandits follow in hot pursuit, at least until the gates of the village where a couple of NPC guards nonchalantly swat aside the pursuing bandits, wiping them out with such ease you wonder exactly why the village is in such peril when the pair of them could take out every bandit within thirteen miles without breaking a sweat. But never mind.

Neville T. Arbitrary is so delighted by your martial prowess that he gives you a handful of loose change he found down the back of the sofa, and a piece of armour carefully selected to be utterly useless to your class, if you’re even allowed to wear it at all. And then another bit of punctuation appears over his head. “What now?” you ask.
“I was wondering if you’d mind awfully killing 10 Bandit Philatelists and Bandit Constructivists”, he says; “ten minutes ago I was firmly convinced that only Bandit Campanologists and Bandit Chartered Accountants posed any sort of threat to our village, but no, I realise now that they’re irrelevant when compared to Bandit Philatelists and Bandit Constructivists.”
“Oh” you say. “Well, luckily for you, in the process of killing those Campanologists, I happened to mow through a bunch of Bandit Philatelists and Bandit Constructivists as well.”
“Oh, no, they don’t count at all” explains Neville. “You were killing them *then*. This quest is to kill them *now*.”
You sigh. “What about Bandit Neoclassicists and Bandit Certified Accountants?” you enquire.
“Oh, no, I don’t care about them at all” replies Neville.
“You’re *absolutely sure* about that? It’s just that once I’ve killed these Bandit Philatelists and Bandit Constructivists, I have this funny feeling you might want me to kill ten Bandit Neoclassicists and Bandit Certified Accountants, and really, it would save us all so much time if I just killed them all at the same time.”
“That wouldn’t be very Arbitrary, would it now?” says Neville in a shining example of nominative determinism.

You turn to the farmer standing next to him, Neville S. Arbitrary. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any more sensible quests?”
“Well… you could kill some wolves, I suppose, they’re causing havoc with my livestock”
“Wolves, right. That doesn’t sound too bad. Hang on a minute… is it just Slightly Elderly But Not Infirm Wolves With A Bit Of A Limp And A White Stripe Down The Nose that you want killing?”
“What?”
“Not Youthful Wolves, or Adult Wolves, or Wolves With No Stripes Down The Nose, just the Slightly Elderly But Not Infirm Wolves With A Bit Of A Limp And A White Stripe Down The Nose?”
“What are you drivelling about? No, any wolves. Any wolves at all. So long as my flock is safe.”
“Oh. Right. That sounds quite sensible.”
“Only when they’re in my fields, mind.”
“What?”
“You can only kill the wolves when they’re within the boundary of my fields, or they don’t count.”
“What is this, restrictive rules of engagement in an attempt to prevent the wolf/human conflict escalating? Is there a demilitarised zone surrounding your fields? What about if I attack a wolf outside your field, but in the process of the fight end up inside your fields and kill him there? Or what about if I’ve got a bow, and stand inside the field shooting wolves outside? Or stand outside the field shooting wolves inside?”
“Look, I don’t make the rules. No, wait a minute, that’s not true at all, I do make the rules. Hey, that’s why they call me Neville Spatial Arbitrary.”
“Ohhh. That explain a lot… And the bloke next to you is…”
“…Neville Temporal Arbitrary, yes.”

Unable to face the Arbitrary brothers, you log out. Next day, you log back in at 8pm, determined to hunt down those Constructivists for Neville T. At peak evening time, the camp looks a bit different. There are players everywhere, and not a hostile to be seen. Every now and then a bandit materialises from thin air and looks a bit surprised as he instantly vanishes in a hail of arrows, swords, flames, bolts, ice shards, maces, stuffed marmots, socks, geese, inflatable hammers, lightbulbs, zeppelins etc. With a sigh, you start doing laps around the area, very occasionally having the good fortune of a bandit respawning right in front of your face enabling you to get the first hit in before it’s annihilated, though it’s impossible to be choosy about exactly what you’re attacking as if you paused to check exactly which sub-type of bandit it was, it would be far too late. On one lap, you happen to land a blow on Geoff the Bandit Leader, who’s faring no better than his men, and eventually, after an awfully long time and an awful lot of killstealing, you manage to tag ten Bandit Philatelists and Bandit Constructivists. You head back to Arbitrary Neville.

“Well done”, says he, favouring you with a bit more loose change and a dagger that you instantly throw away, spearing a passing chicken. “Now go and…”
“I should warn you” you interject “that if you say ‘kill ten Bandit Neoclassicists and Bandit Certified Accountants’, I’m going to flip out, like a ninja”
“Oh no” says Neville “wouldn’t dream of it. I was going to tell you to go and kill ten Bandit Neoclassicists and Bandit Certified Accou…”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
“…. AND! And! Also Geoff the Bandit Leader.”
“Geoff the Bandit Leader?”
“Geoff the Bandit Leader”
“Look. I’ve already killed Geoff the Bandit Leader. That bloke over there has killed Geoff the Bandit Leader. Those three over there, where two of them are 10 levels higher than everyone else, they killed Geoff the Bandit Leader 73 times to try and get their low level friend a certain sword that he drops, only it turns out that got changed in the latest patch so he no longer drops it and they’re writing a stern forum post even as we speak. There is currently a line of people, and when you join it an automated voice says “you are number 113 in the queue to kill Geoff the Bandit Leader. We greatly value your bandit killing, please enjoy this music as you hold to kill Geoff the Bandit Leader”. I’ve seen Geoff the Bandit Leader die so many times he makes the killer at the end of a film who everyone thinks is dead but suddenly pops up going “GRAAAGH” look like a rank amateur in the not-actually-dying stakes. I could just about suspend my disbelief at the constant stream of random Bandit underlings with peculiar hobbies popping out of thin air with some unconvincing theory about constant reinforcements emerging from underground tunnels or something, but unless Geoff the Bandit leader has SIX! BILLION! identical clone brothers this is frankly silly.”
“I’ll give you this rare ring”
“Oh, all right then”