Rant 636 / Conducive

UWO is fun atm. Sailing gets kind of boring but it's fine when I have something else to do/play. Game is free with a cash shop which NetMarble claims won't have any items that will seriously affect gameplay. Cash shop isn't open yet.

There are 3 main ways to play the game - trading, adventuring and fighting.

There are many kinds of trading and you won't want to master everything unless you're seriously hardcore. For example there are livestock trading, alcohol trading and textile trading. Livestock and textile trading is slightly related because you can get materials for textile from livestock, eg wool.

As for adventuring, it has some fighting involved too since you may encounter hostile humans when you explore unknown lands. The entire world is open (well, atm there's only Europe, part of Asia, the Americas and Oceania open) so there are plenty of places to explore. Again, there are many types of things to discover, like biological discoveries and, of course, artifacts of foreign civilizations.

Soldiering is another way to make money later in the game. You can protect ships or you can rob them. Early game is hard in this trade because there is limited prey and the rewards aren't much, but later when you have big enough ships you can try to take on large wealthy merchant ships. Assuming you can handle their guards and their battle-avoidance abilities, that is. Making money is never easy.

Fighting comes in 2 forms - sea battle and melee. Melee is obvious and it can happen in 2 ways - on land and when a ship gets boarded by another. Sea battles are common enough even for newbies. There are plenty of NPC pirates all around the world to make sure all players are experienced in such battles.

Single ships are easy to handle, but fleets can have tactics. For example, 5 barcas (basically boats) can take on a galleon by using a tactic which involves 1 barca boarding the galleon to stop it from moving (it's suicidal since a galleon is excellent at melee battles) and the other 4 bombarding it non-stop at its weaker sides.

Each of the three classes have access to the skills of the other classes but it takes longer to raise the level of a skill that isn't inherent to your class. For example, a merchant will always suck at fighting but a pirate will never be able to get as much discounts as a merchant.

In addition, players can build ships, cook food (useful for regaining energy spent on abilities) and even complete quests together. Even now there are players who are offering to construct ships at 70% of the prices offered by NPCs because they can afford to build them for 60% of the NPC prices. As for cooking, almost everyone cooks.












Today I encountered something that was kind of sad. I was in UWO and some Singaporean guy was saying on a public "School" channel he wanted to join a company (UWO's version of clan/guild) where company members can "enjoy each other".

Immediately I responded with "No I don't want to join a company where we enjoy each other." I was really quite serious in its literal meaning.

Apparently no one seemed to get what I was saying. In fact he then replied that there was no fun in that and I might as well play solo.

In case even you didn't get it, the right way to say it is to "enjoy each other's company". To enjoy each other sounds like something much more intimate.















It has arrived! Glasses-free 3D TV!

Kinect + 3D TV =



Of course, at this rate I'm most likely going to wait till the next generation of controller-free consoles that work well together 3D TVs. I'm guessing that's going to take 5 years. Won't be hard to wait some more. Been waiting for over 20 years for something of the sort; 5 is nothing compared to that.

I think it's obvious what the electronics industry will come up with next, now that we are going to have such a combination.

No, not a controller-free 3D MMORPG. The one after that. The one that is as different to that controller-free 3D combo as that combo is to the consoles of our present generation.

It will be interesting to see a remake of Matrix Online then.













Graphene, a material formed by 1 layer of Carbon atoms, made from graphite. Stronger than diamond and highly conductive.

As much as I hope this will give rise to another generation of computers that are insanely fast compared to today's PCs, there are just too many possibilities out there. Remember quantum computing?

Still, this raises the question of whether other elements will behave just as differently when arranged into a 2D sheet.