Verizon, Board Games, Gamex, and Gotgame.com!!!

It’s been a fairly busy past few weeks. Let’s start with Verizon! A job offer literally fell into my lap. Little did I know my resume is still floating idle on some database and Verizon happen to pick it up! The job entails customer support optics analyst. This job pays fairly handsomely compared to my current job…

The problem: The Job is in Oxnard and school would most certainly suffer as a result. This places me at a crossroads in life.

Take the job and possibly pigeon-hole myself into it forever and never really finish school, my goals, but get paid, move out, buy neat things and watch my family move! Or stay on track, taking 2 more years to get a real job, possibly move with the family, and get the job I want, build the resume and get a better career? Dilemma indeed…

 

I knew this would happen at some point in my college career, however I would be foolish not to explore the offer and I will certainly do so. We will see!

 

I’ve recently become addicted to two board/card games. Agricola and Dominion! Agricola features you as a farmer fighting for resources and building a farm of all things! The player who’s able to create a better farm wins.

Dominion is a card game featuring players with a similar 10 card starting deck.  Each turn you draw 5 cards and with those cards you buy more cards that increase your deck! Once you run out of cards to draw you shuffle everything together with all the cards you purchased and continue playing. Ultimately you buy points and those get shuffled into your deck. The games ends under certain conditions and the player with the most points in his/her deck wins!

So we went to Gamex! I have to admit I wish I had only gone Saturday. But I still had fun. I must give my friend Avery props for helping me out because with all the bills and obligations I had I could not have made a weekend out of it, so I'll get him back soon. We played some Agricola there, a new game called Amun-Ra (I think). That game was particularly not very interesting. I moped around some, but it was nice to be away from work, school and house.

Lastly I have begun writing again for Gotgame.com. I feel very rusty and I’m attempting to get my groove back. Opinion articles are the directions so hopefully I feel less restricted to say something controversial. The first article, which is indeed one I posted here, I dressed up and submitted it. It’s raising some eyebrows. =).

 

http://news.gotgame.com/battlenet-theory-why-you-will-pay-to-play-starcraft-2-and-diablo-iii/32741/#comments

I know, this was a quick and dirty entry, I’ll make up for it when I can…

Turing Machine’s up the ass, camping and Texas phase 1.

So I completed my last final at 10:00pm last night. I took the full two hours to work on it; however I managed to finish all 10 problems within 90 minutes. So I did cleanup and fixed some of my errors and actually ended up rewriting another problem. Thanks to this man right here, half of our test was on Turing Machines. I was fairly comfortable with them, however they get extremely detailed so a couple mistakes and I could have royally screwed things up. Needless to say, I definitely saved par on that test.

I was glancing around the room trying to get a feel for were everyone was at on the test. I noticed a lot of puzzled faces and saw the 3 people around me stuck on what was one of the more difficult problems on the test.

Find a regular expression for the language a^i b^j where (i ˑ j) % 2 = 1.

Basically what this is saying is find a statement that gives me ANY number of a’s followed any number of b’s given the rules.

Where if I multiply the number of a’s I have by the number of b’s I have then I divide it by 2, I get a remainder of 1. By definition this is an odd number.

This is sort of a trick question as long as you know the definition of an odd number. Note if we multiply an even number times an even we have an even number, which is wrong. Same goes for multipling an even number by an odd number. The only way to get a correct solution is to multiply an odd number of a’s by an odd number of b’s.

So this language produces words (strings for you computer science people) such as…

aaab , aaabbb , aaaaab, abbbbb….. Notice if I multiply the number of a’s and b’s together its always odd. The solution I came up with was (a(aa)*(bb)*b). The * means I can have an infinite amount of those or zero. So I can have infinite amounts of aa’s and bb’s and I attach a single a and b to it to each end. Guaranteeing an odd multiplying another odd. (I guess that math shit is kind of helpful).

I built me 3 of these last night, on paper......

So we decided to scale down our camping trip. Instead of Kern River we are going to a small campground called Atwood Meadows out here some place. Kevo seems to know where it is at and apparently it’s “Tight”. I purchased a tent and cool chair that match the color of my Jeep. I’ll have to get a picture this weekend to post.

My plans for this summer are somewhat up in the air. I’m still debating on taking the last Calculus class I have been putting off for years know and I have an insanely good job offer from Verizon however I risk slowing down my academic progression by taking it. The things I do know for sure are that I need to brush up on my C skills. I need an operating systems class next semester and it is very C heavy programming. Having weak C skills killed me in my Architecture Class.

I also plan to work got http://www.gotgame.com/ once again. Simply having a place to publish more of my written work and add another years worth of skills is only going to help. I also brought home a bunch of game theory programming books from the library I plan to read, but we will see how far that goes.

Texas Phase 1 is underway. For those who are not in the know, our family has been attempting to sell the house for some time now with the intention of moving to Texas. My father has a great job offer out there and the family is honestly quite sick of this communistic state. The people here act like there shit don’t stink and the women are some of the most snobby/bratty/spoiled bitches I have every met.
Texas phase 1 include my father, brother and my brothers girlfriend all going to Texas as of June 1st. They plan to live there and begin establishing their life while my mom and I stay here to maintain the house and I continue going to school. My fate is still uncertain as to how soon I will be going to Texas. If CSUN is going to continue throwing money at me to go there I have no good reason to stop and out of state tuition will kill me in Texas.

An old urge of my past is slowing creeping back into me....

http://paladintales.blogspot.com/2008/03/vial-of-sunwell.html

Finals, Starcraft II Beta and Kern River…

I feel very strong about finals week. Once again, to my luck ALL three of my finals were to land on a single day, but I will have none of that this time around. I asked one of my professors if I could move my Comp 310 final to Thursday night at 8:00 pm. The time is late but I would rather avoid a potential disaster. On the flipside I get two whole days to study for a final that I could probably take today and do very well.

Without warning and barely a week after my Battle.net rant the beta signups for Starcraft II fell upon us! This tells us we have nearly a finished game and in the worse case we are only a year away from its release. But that case is highly unlikely. We are probably looking at a late fall or quarter 1 of 2010 release. Beside the release date we also know there are no plans to release another World of Warcraft expansion probably until at least summer of 2010 and Diablo III is way off in the distant haze some ware.

While on the topic of “game politics” if you will, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is projected to release this November, putting it right in my potential time frame for Starcraft II. Activision, the publishers of the Call of Duty franchise, is partnered with Blizzard. So could this be a possible sign that Starcraft II may come sooner or later than late fall? I do not have that answer however I don’t think the companies will compete on top of each other. Call of Duty and anything Blizzard creates is really the only thing selling big in the game market.

Literally right after I get done with finals, I plan to head to bed, hit an 8 hour work day Friday morning then make a Blitz for Kern River. I’m fairly exited however I am not prepared at all! I still need a tent I got to grab food and all my critter containment devices! I also might go get one of those nifty snake grab thingy’s and go snake hunting at night. I also wanted to get a tube to down the river in, but I think the water is going to be extremely frigid.

Battle.net theory… Why you will pay to play Starcraft 2 and Diablo III

So the anticipation of Blizzards upcoming releases probably has most gamers in quirky funk. By now most of us have known Blizzard to announce a title and on average take about 4 years to actually produce it. It’s been almost two years since Starcraft 2 wasannounced, so were looking at no more than and additional two. But I have high hopes we will see it sometime 2010. But all that is really besides my main point, which has to do with monthly subscription services and Blizzard.

In case you have yet to witness the recent move by Blizzard, they have decided to create and merge all of your previous Battle.net games and your World of Warcraft Account in one happy little thing they like to call a “Battle.net Account.” Of course you don’t have to do this but in the end you will likely have to do it to continue playing. Why would Blizzard decide to do such a thing? Everything seemed to be great and happy the way it was?



Because in the end, Blizzard plans to make you “pay to play” your Battle.net account. Don’t believe me? Of course this is my crazy theory but I have a couple arguments to make that will hopefully get you thinking.

I’ll begin with my strongest argument. Blizzard is sitting on top of a mountain of 11 million players paying an average of $10 a month to play World of Warcraft. The only thing that is going to stop this gravy train is Blizzard themselves! Why would they even think to jeopardize this cash flow with another game they plan to release?

Blizzard knows that it is fairly inevitable that they would loose even a million players at the least to Starcraft 2 or Diablo III. That is 10 million in the minus per month for Blizzard at a minimum; that is an unacceptable business move. The way I see it is Blizzard will get the sales rush from the game, that a guarantee they can count on. So why loose monthly revenue?

The Next not so strong argument is that everyone is doing it, so Blizzard knows they can get away with it. Microsoft makes you pay monthly for Xbox live, If Microsoft can get away with it Blizzard can get away with it.

Lastly, if you remember in the late 1990’s (god I’m getting old) there was this tremendous emphasis on Battle.net being free to play all over www.Battle.net. I can’t say that I have looked hard enough to find the word free on the site, but I used to not have to look at all. I’m fairly certain the terminology is absent from the site. Why remove the word free? Players can easily distinguish between Battle.net and World of Warcraft right?

I could be wrong but it makes to much sense to me. My friends and I have always joked that we would pay to play Starcraft, Diablo or even Warcraft RTS. Then World of Warcraft came out, that’s when the laughing stopped.. While subscriptions to Battle.net would not be the end of the world, you know damn well you and everyone else will pay it!