Competition Feeds Addiction

I saw that one of my favorite authors of who I met through Second Life (NaNoWriMo 2007 & 2009) had added me as a friend to her face book account. I started looking around and noticed she was proud to have a high score in a game of Bejeweled Blitz from PopCap Games. I was even able to watch a little video of her achieving her high score. I decided to play a little bit on the flash version of the game.

I’m not someone who likes to play games against the clock. I’d much prefer to have as much time as I can get to plan ahead with strategy. This game is just like Bejeweled, except that it is only one minute long. Strategy goes out the window because you also get a bit more points for how quick to make matches as well.

At first, I wasn’t doing so well. The games play very fast, so my skill seemed to improve (slowly) over time. The randomness of my score in each game didn’t make me feel any better. I would have a high score of 25,000 points in one game, and the next would be 6,000.

The game seems to have many trophies (and levels of trophies) to achieve. It also has something similar with medals (which your friends can see). If you get 25,000 points in a game, you’ll get a metal. Get so many levels and your metal level improves. There are also Ranks for your total points accumulated over time. I’m up to rank 4 (beginner) after a couple hours of play. All of these “stats” really build up to make it look like I’m actually getting something accomplished.

Another “stat” appears to be the tournament. If your face book friends play the game, then you have a better chance of  being entered into a random drawing. Your team consists of you and your friends. If the total of everyones weekly high scores reaches one million points, then you are entered into the drawing. This weeks prize is a laptop worth one thousand dollars.

With the list of my friends scores, I was determined like crazy to try to get a better score. I’ve tried for hours now, and I only came close once. At that time, so much was happening on the screen that I couldn’t tell what was going on. You can use bonuses to try and get more points. You buy a bonus before you start playing with coins. You can win coins during the game, or get them as promotional offers. I got 50,000 coins for downloading the software rather than playing the flash game on face book. The software is fully functional for about an hour. I got an extra million after I purchased the game. The software has one drawback in that it doesn’t record a video of your game like the flash version does.

At this point, I believe I will need to get control over my addiction to the game and stop playing. I’ve gotten enough to get into the drawing. It’s just that I really wanted to get a higher score than my friend.

Planetary Commodities in EVE

EVE online is a strategic game with so many options, that I am constantly reminded that I hardly know anything at all about the game. When I first started playing EVE, I was shown an image of the learning curve of EVE Online compared to most other MMORPG games. In the image, I saw a gradual learning curve for games such as World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings, and Pirates of the Burning Sea steadily climbing as the gaming skill increased. As a joke, EVE’s learning curve was more of a steep cliff with people hanging off the edge while those that threw themselves off the edge landed on friendly pointed stakes sticking up from the ground. As skill progressed, a bull dozer was seen gathering up all the dead bodies in a neat little pile.

Come next month, I’ll have been playing EVE for about a year. It’s a hard game to get your head around. When you first start, you quickly find out that there is a ton of stuff that you’ll need (or you think you need) to master. With all the skills available to learn for your avatar, you could spend more than 20 years training your account to master everything. The latest addition to EVE is the planetary interaction. With all of the planets in the game, you can now build up little mining outposts on the planets to extract resources and process them into much needed materials.

I’ve torn down and rebuilt my structures several times, trying different strategies to get the most out of them. My latest strategy is just to mine one material from the planet and process it into a level 1 commodity. I’m usually able to do this with an improved command center, launch pad, 4 processors, and 13 extractors. Sometimes I have just 3 processors and add an extra extractor if I can’t get that many resources to keep the four processors busy.

Getting so many structures setup is a bit tricky, as it isn’t easy to figure out how much CPU or Power a link will take up. It seems that links take less power, if they are in a long chain. I used to keep items in a storage facility until I found a spaceport worked the same way and could hold twice as much material. I didn’t even need to worry about expediting commodities to the space port in order to launch to the customs office since everything is always sitting in the space port. At first, I even tried feeding extractors directly into processors, but that caused a lost of many materials when the processor started it’s work.

Just the other day, I was only extracting raw materials without any processing. There were so many materials that were produced in a single day, that I had to take the orca out just to pick up everything from all the planets that I had. This was the main reason I started to process them into level 1 resources. Things like water and oxygen take up less volume, so I am able to harvest resources for a few days before I have to pick anything up. This goes for everything except for Oxygen.

My corp has a player-owned structure (POS), so naturally we need to keep it fueled. In the past, we could only purchase supplies from NPC’s on the market. With the planetary interaction, I can now harvest my own fuel. So for now, launch a few tanks of oxygen to the customs station and take the drake out to pick them up. Afterwards, I set a course for the POS. There are many other types of fuel that the POS needs, but this one was the only one that I was already producing. It may be that I’ll have to change what my other planets are producing so that I can contribute more fuel. However, I still need to make a little ISK off of this as well.