Purple Vagabond Cows
For years this was posted on pongo.com, originally written by Brash Endeavors. It best sums up for me about what what playing Asheron's Call is all about.
The original link is gone, and I was able to get the text from googles cache. I am publishing it here without permission as I have been unable to contact the original author. I do hope Brash doesn't mind, this article is just too well written to be allowed to disappear.
Again, I take no credit for the beloved prose you are about to read.
Fear And Loathing in Dereth or, Exploding Purple Vagabond Cows With Hats
by Brash Endeavors
It always amazes me how absolutely polarized some people get about differences in game strategy.
I follow archer forums a lot. On some other archer forums, flame wars often break out between the mage archer and tank archer contingents, each being convinced the other side is cruelly deluding an entire new and innocent generation of young players, to the eternal damnation of a forever 'broken" template. Any time someone posts 'forget arcane - just take creature' or 'don't EVER take alchemy on your main,' or repeats something they once read elsewhere, 'total waste to spec bow, trained hits anything in the game', its like throwing up a red flag -- the offended portion of the populace grabs their grenades, and World War XVII breaks out. Both sides argue that their only underlying motivation, is a sincere humanitarian wish to spare the innocent from the lies of the opposition. They only want to save someone from having to reroll later ... from wasting their time.
It goes beyond archery forums -- warriors rant about how perchers and drain-skimmers 'ruin the game', old-schoolers find their blood-pressure skyrocketing at the newest 'uber-extreme' template proposal, macroers and anti-macroers have ballastic fallouts in the mana pools, 'uber' powerlevelers and 'proud-to-be-a-gimp' roleplayers are at each others throat. Even during times of relative calm and quiet, each side stands ready to leap to the defense when a brave fearless champion, steps forward to strip the lies and damn the heresies of the other -- they might not agree with 'how' it was said, but by golly, 'its about time someone told the simple truth and put a stop to this nonsense!'
Asheron's Call is a lot different from the previous MMORPG I played, Everquest, in one core way -- you have almost complete control over the destiny of your character.. In EQ, warriors could never train magic, mages could not equip bow or metal armor, and no class could even adjust the attribute stats of their character at creation, beyond an extremely tight range of a few meaningless points here and there. Once you made your choice from a somewhat limited selection, what you were, and who you were, was decided by the gods .. er, the devs ... and what happened to you in the course of the game, was largely determined by those behind-the-scenes omnipotent ones. You were not responsible for who you became thirty-five levels later, only whether you got there. If you became a gimp -- it would not be your fault. But there actually were no 'gimps' in EQ -- to a nearly total degree, you were prevented from making completely fatal flaws in your character. There are no Vagabonds in Everquest.
AC is absolutely different -- people are given almost complete and utter freedom to design, plot and control the destiny of their characters. They are allowed to make the most amazingly and incredibly stupid asinine blunders, experiment with bizarre and heretical ideas, and basically gimp themselves into utter oblivion, if they so choose. They can spec Jump and Thrown Weapons, train War on their Spear fighter, and declare the perfect starting template is 10/100/10/100/10/100. They are free to set up the most spectacular 'crash-and-burn' strategies possible.
And they do crash and burn, over and over.
And most of us have too, in an earlier reroll, when we decided maybe a template of 55/55/55/55/55/55 was the secret undiscovered key to survival. Or that maybe no one else ever stumbled before on some unique eccentric combination that occured to us while fiddling with Split Pea.
The vast majority of character creations, get trashed and rerolled. And rerolled again, and again and again ... by nearly all of us. There actually ARE a few people still playing the template they first designed in beta, but they are a rare breed. I'll talk about them too in a minute -- but first, I'll talk about me.
I don't know how many characters you've created, but for me -- if you include all the ones that never got beyond level three -- there are oodles and skadoodles, cluttering up the slots of every server on the world selection page. In some ways, they are like the crayon scribblings of a four-year-old that one day ran amuck with an obsession for the green crayon, and on another, discovered the secret holy power of circles. Page after page after page ... of experiments, doodles, and bizarre fantasies.
In time, I learned to color within the lines. There was a right and efficient way to do things. A good deal of the actual time I had previously spent with mucking about with my dozens of creative follies were actually unnecessary, if I had only listened -- other things could have been prevented, if I had only NOT listened. I might have been level 83 by now, if I had only known how to tell the two apart. But now I can prevent others from making the mistakes I did. I can save them, from ever having to reroll again. As others, once upon a time, had tried to save me. I can prevent them from wasting their time.
One interesting factor of an online MMORPG game such as Asheron's Call, is that there is no end to the game when you complete the final quest, destroy the final 'Boss' monster, and solve the final riddle. There is no true goal, that guides all players. We can make track of progress through our levels, and whether we've successfully designed characters that can survive the Cit, OHN, BSD, Aerlinthe. We can eventually explore all the lands and dungeons and defeat all monsters (at least till new ones are patched in), we can watch two level 94 warriors race to see who will be the first player in Dereth, to reach level 100. But there's no real point to any of that -- we're all here for one simple reason -- to 'waste time'. To amuse ourselves, distract ourselves, as ever we like. To powerlevel up to level 90 in four days, or to learn every cooking recipe possible. To make friends or to shun the company of others. To be brave, heroic and true, and help our alliance Defend The Crystal And Save The World ... or to try to figure how to scam someone out of a hoary mattekar robe.
We come here and immerse ourselves, some for a few hours a week, some for ungodly hours everyday. The time we spend here, is neither of greater nor lesser value, higher nor lower use, than the time a four-year-old spends at the kitchen table, scribbling on a stack of typing paper, drawing purple cows with hats. Exploring her creativity, learning about her world ... and just generally passing the time. We call it a game, but for some of us, it metamorphised at some point, into a life.
We hold these truths, to be self-evident:
Meleers must spec their weapon.
Mages must start with maxxed focus & self.
Archers must start with 100 coordination.
Someplace out there, are a very naughty trio -- a warrior, a wizard and a bowman who reached level 80 while ignoring the rules ... well, they don't count, we know some things work better than others. Some things work that shouldn't, and some things don't work, that should. We are delighted when we make sense of a vast array of confusing data -- and deeply disturbed when someone tries to go against our conclusions; even worse, when they nonetheless survive or even flourish. The universe cracks, ever so slightly, by a hairline, and we must repair it. We must tell them to knock it off. Else lies could one day become truths, and truths become lies. And we would need to ask ourselves -- not for the first time -- if we need to reroll, and again rearrange the truths of our universe into a new configuration.
Yesterday, someone posted to the barracks asking for advice on the next skill to train for his new level 12 character. Several people scanned his post -- and immediately recoiled in horror. This ... this ... monstrosity, had no item or arcane, had instead trained Assess Item and Thrown Weapons. It had 55 endurance, and not a single stat maxxed. In fact, though the poster never mentioned it .. it looked suspiciously like the stock Vagabond template. All of the posters immediately urged him -- REROLL! Now, immediately, before wasting any more time! If he didn't, well ... something terrible would happen. He would be wasting his time, otherwise.
Wasting time -- isn't that what we do best here? Are we not all Vagabonds?
My four daughters all like to color, and while they work on their projects, often pepper me for advice. I am happy to comply and to help. Cows sometimes have gas, yes, but no, they never explode. Yes, I am quite sure about that. Well, yes, they probably are best when colored brown, rather than purple. They may wear horns if you desire, but should never be drawn with hats, yes, you are quite correct on that. One of my children, is always very good, and listens to her mother. Another does as she pleases, and the result is Exploding Purple Cows With Hats. This is extremely disturbing to the first child, and often results in the most screeching, unpleasant exchanges imagineable. I think she fears the other children, might copy her sister's folly, and likewise waste their time. In the end however, the results are all the same. The kitchen floor is littered with papers, and the universe has rotated by a few hours more, and no cracks seem to appear despite the many heresies committed.
We all come here for one central reason -- to change the way we feel. To either accomplish something, or to avoid something, matters only as a means to change the way we feel. To try to make sense of a small world, when a larger one makes no sense at all. Some are called through the portals of Dereth ... some are pushed. All of us, no matter how lividly we deny it, are Vagabonds. We vary only in how efficiently we are able to waste our time. In the end, it is only a game, and its only purpose, is to change the way we feel. One player doggedly stays with the same character over the course of 13 months. Another skitterishly rolls three new characters each month. Both are online for 35 hours a week, and during that time, both succeed in their goal ... of passing another 35 hours a week.
Now, if this were true -- that the only real goal, is to change how we feel, while immersing ourself in the game -- it would seem to make the most sense to help each other feel good. As long as we are all vagabonds, we might as well be Happy Vagabonds, yes?
But, it doesn't work that way. One person's vagabond, becomes a threat to the other person's vagabond. One person macroed their vagabond, and another perched his. One vagabond can solo the acid vault at level 17, and another is a 'lameass loser' vagabond still meandering through the Citadel at level 47, interferring with the younger vagabonds there. Some are recommending stupid advice, from our vagabond's perspective. Some of us are wasting our time more properly than others.
Some of us end up rerolling, after discovering that we wasted our time in the way we selected to waste our time. And by golly if we're going to let someone else make that same mistake.
So, we eyeball the boards with an uncompromising eye, looking for slipshod vagabonds who are not wasting their time efficiently. Every so often, we launch a nuclear attack when we discover someone giving blatantly bad advice on how to waste one's time. We yearn for the day when the meleeD-less uber extreme finally realizes his fatal error, when the 10-strength fighter is crushed under the sheer weight of his own folly, when the character who spec'd nothing, ends up with exactly that -- nothing, except ... more wasted time. We are outraged when they not only survive through some odd whim of fate ... but start leading others down that same misguided path. We make sure they are not allowed to taint the young, beguile the innocent, or lead astray the newer player. We do this from the most sincere and humanitarian of motives. We are going to make sure all are allowed to enjoy the game, by immediately unmasking those who are playing the game wrong.
I am myself, of course, the greatest hypocrite of them all, when I shrilly criticize others for shrilly criticizing others. If you've gotten this far, I can only apologize, for having wasted so much of your time.
Time to go make Level 42. Stay safe, and good journeys to you.
The original link is gone, and I was able to get the text from googles cache. I am publishing it here without permission as I have been unable to contact the original author. I do hope Brash doesn't mind, this article is just too well written to be allowed to disappear.
Again, I take no credit for the beloved prose you are about to read.
Fear And Loathing in Dereth or, Exploding Purple Vagabond Cows With Hats
by Brash Endeavors
It always amazes me how absolutely polarized some people get about differences in game strategy.
I follow archer forums a lot. On some other archer forums, flame wars often break out between the mage archer and tank archer contingents, each being convinced the other side is cruelly deluding an entire new and innocent generation of young players, to the eternal damnation of a forever 'broken" template. Any time someone posts 'forget arcane - just take creature' or 'don't EVER take alchemy on your main,' or repeats something they once read elsewhere, 'total waste to spec bow, trained hits anything in the game', its like throwing up a red flag -- the offended portion of the populace grabs their grenades, and World War XVII breaks out. Both sides argue that their only underlying motivation, is a sincere humanitarian wish to spare the innocent from the lies of the opposition. They only want to save someone from having to reroll later ... from wasting their time.
It goes beyond archery forums -- warriors rant about how perchers and drain-skimmers 'ruin the game', old-schoolers find their blood-pressure skyrocketing at the newest 'uber-extreme' template proposal, macroers and anti-macroers have ballastic fallouts in the mana pools, 'uber' powerlevelers and 'proud-to-be-a-gimp' roleplayers are at each others throat. Even during times of relative calm and quiet, each side stands ready to leap to the defense when a brave fearless champion, steps forward to strip the lies and damn the heresies of the other -- they might not agree with 'how' it was said, but by golly, 'its about time someone told the simple truth and put a stop to this nonsense!'
Asheron's Call is a lot different from the previous MMORPG I played, Everquest, in one core way -- you have almost complete control over the destiny of your character.. In EQ, warriors could never train magic, mages could not equip bow or metal armor, and no class could even adjust the attribute stats of their character at creation, beyond an extremely tight range of a few meaningless points here and there. Once you made your choice from a somewhat limited selection, what you were, and who you were, was decided by the gods .. er, the devs ... and what happened to you in the course of the game, was largely determined by those behind-the-scenes omnipotent ones. You were not responsible for who you became thirty-five levels later, only whether you got there. If you became a gimp -- it would not be your fault. But there actually were no 'gimps' in EQ -- to a nearly total degree, you were prevented from making completely fatal flaws in your character. There are no Vagabonds in Everquest.
AC is absolutely different -- people are given almost complete and utter freedom to design, plot and control the destiny of their characters. They are allowed to make the most amazingly and incredibly stupid asinine blunders, experiment with bizarre and heretical ideas, and basically gimp themselves into utter oblivion, if they so choose. They can spec Jump and Thrown Weapons, train War on their Spear fighter, and declare the perfect starting template is 10/100/10/100/10/100. They are free to set up the most spectacular 'crash-and-burn' strategies possible.
And they do crash and burn, over and over.
And most of us have too, in an earlier reroll, when we decided maybe a template of 55/55/55/55/55/55 was the secret undiscovered key to survival. Or that maybe no one else ever stumbled before on some unique eccentric combination that occured to us while fiddling with Split Pea.
The vast majority of character creations, get trashed and rerolled. And rerolled again, and again and again ... by nearly all of us. There actually ARE a few people still playing the template they first designed in beta, but they are a rare breed. I'll talk about them too in a minute -- but first, I'll talk about me.
I don't know how many characters you've created, but for me -- if you include all the ones that never got beyond level three -- there are oodles and skadoodles, cluttering up the slots of every server on the world selection page. In some ways, they are like the crayon scribblings of a four-year-old that one day ran amuck with an obsession for the green crayon, and on another, discovered the secret holy power of circles. Page after page after page ... of experiments, doodles, and bizarre fantasies.
In time, I learned to color within the lines. There was a right and efficient way to do things. A good deal of the actual time I had previously spent with mucking about with my dozens of creative follies were actually unnecessary, if I had only listened -- other things could have been prevented, if I had only NOT listened. I might have been level 83 by now, if I had only known how to tell the two apart. But now I can prevent others from making the mistakes I did. I can save them, from ever having to reroll again. As others, once upon a time, had tried to save me. I can prevent them from wasting their time.
One interesting factor of an online MMORPG game such as Asheron's Call, is that there is no end to the game when you complete the final quest, destroy the final 'Boss' monster, and solve the final riddle. There is no true goal, that guides all players. We can make track of progress through our levels, and whether we've successfully designed characters that can survive the Cit, OHN, BSD, Aerlinthe. We can eventually explore all the lands and dungeons and defeat all monsters (at least till new ones are patched in), we can watch two level 94 warriors race to see who will be the first player in Dereth, to reach level 100. But there's no real point to any of that -- we're all here for one simple reason -- to 'waste time'. To amuse ourselves, distract ourselves, as ever we like. To powerlevel up to level 90 in four days, or to learn every cooking recipe possible. To make friends or to shun the company of others. To be brave, heroic and true, and help our alliance Defend The Crystal And Save The World ... or to try to figure how to scam someone out of a hoary mattekar robe.
We come here and immerse ourselves, some for a few hours a week, some for ungodly hours everyday. The time we spend here, is neither of greater nor lesser value, higher nor lower use, than the time a four-year-old spends at the kitchen table, scribbling on a stack of typing paper, drawing purple cows with hats. Exploring her creativity, learning about her world ... and just generally passing the time. We call it a game, but for some of us, it metamorphised at some point, into a life.
We hold these truths, to be self-evident:
Meleers must spec their weapon.
Mages must start with maxxed focus & self.
Archers must start with 100 coordination.
Someplace out there, are a very naughty trio -- a warrior, a wizard and a bowman who reached level 80 while ignoring the rules ... well, they don't count, we know some things work better than others. Some things work that shouldn't, and some things don't work, that should. We are delighted when we make sense of a vast array of confusing data -- and deeply disturbed when someone tries to go against our conclusions; even worse, when they nonetheless survive or even flourish. The universe cracks, ever so slightly, by a hairline, and we must repair it. We must tell them to knock it off. Else lies could one day become truths, and truths become lies. And we would need to ask ourselves -- not for the first time -- if we need to reroll, and again rearrange the truths of our universe into a new configuration.
Yesterday, someone posted to the barracks asking for advice on the next skill to train for his new level 12 character. Several people scanned his post -- and immediately recoiled in horror. This ... this ... monstrosity, had no item or arcane, had instead trained Assess Item and Thrown Weapons. It had 55 endurance, and not a single stat maxxed. In fact, though the poster never mentioned it .. it looked suspiciously like the stock Vagabond template. All of the posters immediately urged him -- REROLL! Now, immediately, before wasting any more time! If he didn't, well ... something terrible would happen. He would be wasting his time, otherwise.
Wasting time -- isn't that what we do best here? Are we not all Vagabonds?
My four daughters all like to color, and while they work on their projects, often pepper me for advice. I am happy to comply and to help. Cows sometimes have gas, yes, but no, they never explode. Yes, I am quite sure about that. Well, yes, they probably are best when colored brown, rather than purple. They may wear horns if you desire, but should never be drawn with hats, yes, you are quite correct on that. One of my children, is always very good, and listens to her mother. Another does as she pleases, and the result is Exploding Purple Cows With Hats. This is extremely disturbing to the first child, and often results in the most screeching, unpleasant exchanges imagineable. I think she fears the other children, might copy her sister's folly, and likewise waste their time. In the end however, the results are all the same. The kitchen floor is littered with papers, and the universe has rotated by a few hours more, and no cracks seem to appear despite the many heresies committed.
We all come here for one central reason -- to change the way we feel. To either accomplish something, or to avoid something, matters only as a means to change the way we feel. To try to make sense of a small world, when a larger one makes no sense at all. Some are called through the portals of Dereth ... some are pushed. All of us, no matter how lividly we deny it, are Vagabonds. We vary only in how efficiently we are able to waste our time. In the end, it is only a game, and its only purpose, is to change the way we feel. One player doggedly stays with the same character over the course of 13 months. Another skitterishly rolls three new characters each month. Both are online for 35 hours a week, and during that time, both succeed in their goal ... of passing another 35 hours a week.
Now, if this were true -- that the only real goal, is to change how we feel, while immersing ourself in the game -- it would seem to make the most sense to help each other feel good. As long as we are all vagabonds, we might as well be Happy Vagabonds, yes?
But, it doesn't work that way. One person's vagabond, becomes a threat to the other person's vagabond. One person macroed their vagabond, and another perched his. One vagabond can solo the acid vault at level 17, and another is a 'lameass loser' vagabond still meandering through the Citadel at level 47, interferring with the younger vagabonds there. Some are recommending stupid advice, from our vagabond's perspective. Some of us are wasting our time more properly than others.
Some of us end up rerolling, after discovering that we wasted our time in the way we selected to waste our time. And by golly if we're going to let someone else make that same mistake.
So, we eyeball the boards with an uncompromising eye, looking for slipshod vagabonds who are not wasting their time efficiently. Every so often, we launch a nuclear attack when we discover someone giving blatantly bad advice on how to waste one's time. We yearn for the day when the meleeD-less uber extreme finally realizes his fatal error, when the 10-strength fighter is crushed under the sheer weight of his own folly, when the character who spec'd nothing, ends up with exactly that -- nothing, except ... more wasted time. We are outraged when they not only survive through some odd whim of fate ... but start leading others down that same misguided path. We make sure they are not allowed to taint the young, beguile the innocent, or lead astray the newer player. We do this from the most sincere and humanitarian of motives. We are going to make sure all are allowed to enjoy the game, by immediately unmasking those who are playing the game wrong.
I am myself, of course, the greatest hypocrite of them all, when I shrilly criticize others for shrilly criticizing others. If you've gotten this far, I can only apologize, for having wasted so much of your time.
Time to go make Level 42. Stay safe, and good journeys to you.
posted by Doom Lightblade | 11:05 AM
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