ELDER SCROLLS ONLINE REVIEW

"Welcome chosen one, you are the only one that can save us from the great doom. You are unique in the world and are the only hope, you and these 1500 other people."

Well I played through four beta rounds of Elder Scrolls Online, the newest big time Massive Multiplayer Online Game coming out.  Its meant to be set in the same world as Elder Scrolls games such as Skyrim, Oblivion, and Morrowind, all award winning, very fun games.

Having played through these beta rounds with different characters and races, I have a basic handle on the game and how it plays.  I did not get a character past level 15, nor did I play any PVP so I can't say what the high level content is like or what killing other player characters is like.

My basic analysis is that this game will start out charging people to play and within 6 months will start to retool so that it becomes free to play.  They should get a huge initial surge of interest just based on how incredibly good Skyrim is, but it will tail off rapidly as people play the game.

Perhaps its because I've played MMOGs since Ultima Online back in 1997 (and beta tested it), or perhaps its because I have been an Elder Scrolls game since the first one Arena way back in 1994, but I am deeply disappointed with ESO.

There were several key components of what made up an Elder Scrolls game and set it apart from other fantasy games, and none of those are really present in the online version.  The flexibility in character creation is very limited, the flexibility with magic is nonexistent, and the freedom and open world to explore is functional but meaningless.

There are aspects I enjoyed and admire in ESO.  They have moved away from the dumbing down and overly simplistic aspects of some games like World of Warcraft.  The graphics are simply jaw dropping, and they did retain a lot of the surface aspects of Elder Scrolls such as the curious and quirky racial differences.

The game could have been magnificent but they missed the mark on so many levels its just frustrating and disappointing.  In order for this game to be a big hit and succeed as a pay platform, it had to be better than WoW, the present king of the hill.  And they aren't.  In fact, I don't see this one doing even as well as Star Wars: The Old Republic.

So here's my analysis of the game, now that the agreement to keep the details secret has been lifted.  A lot of this is going to be inside baseball, but if you're still reading you probably are a player so it shouldn't matter.

1. It doesn't feel like Elder Scrolls to me, and this is a killer in its self. Yes, it has some of the trappings, but it is missing a lot of the very basic concepts and feel of the single player games. This isn't a consequence of being changed to a multiplayer version, its a loss of the basic weave of the games and universe. I get that they can't make things as flexible, but they abandoned flexibility almost entirely. I get that they don't want to set it at the current era of the games, but setting this game thousands of years in the past separates you from any feel of the single player games. This game isn't being produced by Bethesda, who are brilliant, but by Zenimax, who aren't as brilliant and don't quite have that feeling right.
2. The interface is horrible. I understand why they were trying to make it unique and uncluttered, but the real reason is because a console controller has 1/20th the buttons a computer keyboard has, and they want it to come out for console easily and smoothly as well as PC. You can feel the frustration and limitation almost immediately and its such an integral part of the game I cannot see any change in this whatsoever.   Having only 6 hot buttons for all your dozens of skills is incredibly frustrating and pointlessly limited.  If you can pause the game and choose abilities, this can work, but when everything is happening in real time, you just cannot do it.  Its just terrible.
3. The character design choices are just awful. They abandoned even the principle of basic archetypes and came up with their own sort of mixed confusing ones that do not feel intuitive or have any sort of hook that helps people get into the game right away. Dragon Knight? Templar? Nightblade? Sorcerer is sort of familiar, at least. But these classes attempt to encompass every character build ever by the use of talents and the results are not very attractive. You can make a wizard, a thief and a warrior type easily, but other build concepts work less well (druid, priest, ranger, etc). I do not know what they were thinking with this.  I guess I see why they don't want people making their own character class because the myth of class balance dominates game designers and PVP (which is going to be their main pull for the game, I suspect), but the direction they went was ridiculous.
4. Starting your character as The Chosen One who is unique and must save the world unlike all others works great for single player games, even if its a bit overused. But in a MMOG? Where there are 1500 other Chosen Ones in the game at the same time with you? Grouping up with 3 other chosen ones? It just is ridiculous. I suppose this was their attempt to make it feel more like Elder Scrolls games that always start this way, but that's like building your game world out of felt to make a game feel like billiards. 
5. Talent points are the computer game way of letting players customize their character, and it can be a good system.  WoW has all but abandoned the concept as being too much work and too hard to balance, but it is something players like and welcome.  But they only work if you can tell what is coming up next, not just what you can choose immediately.  If you cannot see further down the road, you have no clue what to build toward, because talent systems are like a tree.  In ESO, you can "morph" skills to do something different, but have no idea what's coming next, so you have a hard time choosing what to "morph" of your many skills.  Eventually people will get it all documented online anyway, so why not just show what it is up front?
6. The tradeskills system is pretty good, and you can make decent items. You don't even have to destroy things to make others in a ridiculous cannibalizing sytem, although you can if you want. The problem is that the same points that go into expanding and specializing your trade skill abilities... are the ones you use to get better at fighting. And you only get so many points: one a level, plus a scattering of some for quests and some from finding items in the world. If you are faced with a choice of "be better at weaving" and "be better at surviving in the world" which is the obvious choice for an adventurer? The simple answer is to give characters points only for trades, but that's not in the works and I doubt it will happen. There were other minor annoying aspects but the basic system is broken as it stands.  

Read more »

THEY CARE IF ITS REAL

"Setting aside the legal reasoning and looking only at the findings of fact in the case, a great many reputations will need reconsidering. "

Almost three years ago I posted on a little piece of news from Ecuador involving Chevron and environmentalists.  It wasn't a very big piece, but it had a lot of power and was very important, I thought.  It didn't get much attention, and I saw almost nothing about it on the internet anywhere.

The story went like this:

Chevron Oil was doing work in the Ecuadorian forests when a team of scientists showed up on the site, looking at the environmental impact on the surrounding area. They alleged that Chevron was destroying the rain forest, sued, and won in an Ecuadorian court. The court issued a fine of $8.6 billion which would double if not paid immediately.

Chevron found out something, though. They knew they weren't contaminating anything, and they found this video evidence of a setup:

That video, if you don't watch, is from a documentary called Crude by Joe Berlinger.  Its one of the outtakes that he filmed as part of making the movie.  That movie is all about how evil gas companies are but this scene shows a US attorney talking to activists.

See, the activists (being followed by the documentary) did not find the contamination they claimed was there, but they were suing anyway.  The US Attorney advises the activists, saying "...it’s Ecuador and if they have 1000 people around the court house they win, the report is just smoke, mirrors, and bulls**t."  The activists wanted to "extrapolate" that the contamination existed anyway, and take that to court, with lots of protesters, and the US Attorney is saying "you win that way."

And they did win.  Ecuador found Chevron guilty of not contaminating anything with their drilling, and was fined almost 20 billion dollars.  Well Chevron filed a case against the federal government and the activists for conspiracy, under RICO statutes, and the case ground on and on in the courts, wit no news.  Until yesterday.

US Federal District Judge Louis Kaplan wrote in a court opinion:

This case is extraordinary. The facts are many and sometimes complex. They include things that normally come only out of Hollywood — coded emails among [lead plantiffs' attorney Steven] Donziger and his colleagues describing their private interactions with and machinations directed at judges and a court appointed expert, their payments to a supposedly neutral expert out of a secret account, a lawyer who invited a film crew to innumerable private strategy meetings and even to ex parte meetings with judges, an Ecuadorian judge who claims to have written the multibillion dollar decision but who was so inexperienced and uncomfortable with civil cases that he had someone else (a former judge who had been removed from the bench) draft some civil decisions for him, an 18-year old typist who supposedly did Internet research in American, English, and French law for the same judge, who knew only Spanish, and much more.

Kevin D Williamson goes on to explain how much further the corruption and conspiracy went, in National Review Online's Corner:

The questionable conduct ranges from the spectacular to the banal: There were bribed judges, to be sure, but there were also articles in The Huffington Post and Politico authored by former Andrew Cuomo and DNC aide Karen Hinton, who, according to court documents, as a public-relations consultant had attempted to negotiate for herself a “success fee” of “at least 5 percent” of fees related to settlement of the case, along with a $10,000-a-month retainer and expenses.

Corrupt judges, abuse of power, lying for money, a huge multi-national conspiracy to commit fraud... this has blockbuster written all over it. Except the bad guys are anti-oil environmentalists, activist lawyers, and government officials.  In other words: don't expect to see an HBO movie about this any time soon.

The case isn't decided yet, and I suspect it will go quite a ways up the court ladder with the government and all those lawyers whose reputations and money are at stake now fighting every inch of the way.  But this is bad in a spectacularly awful way that is difficult to believe, it reads like a B movie script.

If, as the evidence I've seen strongly supports, the court rules for Chevron, heads should roll all over for this.  The Justice Department, legal teams, environmentalist groups; not just fines, but jail time, disbarment, and general shame.  But again, given the players, I'm highly skeptical anything serious will happen to anyone.

Expect an HBO film all about how the sleazy oil companies tricked courts and bribed people into smearing the good names of heroic environmentalists.

RUN BY THE MOB

"They imagine the world as a new interconnected world where climate change is the biggest threat and they are shocked that the Russians actually are interested in territory."
-Charles Krauthammer

There's a lot of speculation about why Russia keeps ignoring the rest of the world and doing what it wants.  Some people are completely baffled by what Vladimir Putin is doing and cannot understand what on earth the pattern is.

Some predict another world war, some fear invasion of other countries in the east, some think its part of a plan to rebuild a Soviet Union.  There are plenty of guesses and lots of speculation going on out there.

People on the left are particularly confused, because they honestly did believe what President Obama said at the UN in 2009, when he claimed that no nation should or can dominate another in the 21st century.  That's old thinking, as Secretary of State John Kerry claims, 19th century thought.  We just don't do that any more.

Some in the press, pundits and so on are claiming no one could possibly have predicted this, although Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Michael Totten and many others can and did predict this years ago.  It was not hard to see coming for a lot of reasons, not the least of which the need for Russia to have a port for their navy that is open year-round.

But the key to understanding this is something Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov explains quite well in a series of tweets:

Years of West acting mystified over Putin's strange moves "being bad for Russia" ignore this. He doesn't care if it's good for his survival.
Putin can do that because he isn't interested in Russia's diplomacy or Russia's well-being, only his personal power & wealth of cronies.
I'll say it again. Stop trying to imagine long-term plans in Putin's actions. For 14 years, he always looks only at short tactical outcome.

The key to understanding Russia is to view the entire country as being run by organized crime.  Yes, I know, ha ha congress, but the fact is, this is exactly the situation in Russia.  They are literally run by a syndicate of mob bosses, with Vladimir Putin as the boss at the top.  He's not a dictator in the classic sense, because he's not running the country as a tyrant.  He's running it as a business designed to make him and his cronies as rich as possible.

Its true that Vladimir Putin, like many Russians, longs for a vastly powerful Russian Empire, for Russia to be the world's only superpower.  They feel humiliation over their 70-year attempt to create a new system of government ending in total failure and collapse.  They feel belittled by the ease and riches which the United States projects.

But their main method of running things is exactly like a New Jersey crime family: ruthless, swift judgment with absolute control by the people at the top that can do anything they want to anyone they want and enjoy all the benefits.

These guys are mostly old communists, folks who were in power when the Soviet Union collapsed, but for the most part they've abandoned their communism for a more practical system of cut throat ruthless business.  Russia is a massive criminal enterprise, except with a fundamental twist: they run the country so its not illegal.

Imagine Tony Soprano in charge of the country, and his buddies as the cabinet.  Imagine their system of running things, gaining benefits, and dealing with enemies as a government.  That's what you get in Russia.

Now, the people of various Eastern European nations might want to break away from the power and influence of Russia, but to do so is to repudiate Russia's power.  It is a direct defiance of the former Soviet Union and disrespects the bosses in Russia.

Not only that, but it is a legitimate threat to the money that the Russian government gets from them.  If your country produces things that are sold to Europe, Russia doesn't want you to stop paying tribute and join the EU, they want you to stay under their control.  What happens to a business that stops paying tribute to Tony Soprano?

I'm serious here.  You don't burn the business down, because it means no money ever again from them.  You don't kill the owner, because then he can't run the business.  So you lean on him.  Mess up a kid, break a few things, threaten him with something dire.

So when The Ukraine or Georgia threatens to split away too much from Russian dominance, well its time to lean on them.  But you don't invade and bomb them into oblivion, you just take a piece of them away, to remind them who's in charge.

The end goal here isn't statecraft or world opinion or some higher noble calling.  Its money.  Money and power, and what benefits Vladimir Putin (and his friends).  Someone causes you too much trouble, well drop some polonium into their salt shaker.  Some country rebels against your control and wants to join the EU, come stomp on them, a little.
Russia doesn't need to invade Poland or whatever other nation that is being discussed.  They don't even want to, because invasions are expensive and controlling an invaded country difficult and frustrating.  Mostly because its expensive.  That money could be better spent on chicks and caviar and gold plated bidets.

All you have to do is remind countries that they simply are not capable of fighting back against Russia and that nobody, anywhere, is going to protect them.  That's the most important bit.  These countries have to be reminded that they are utterly defenseless and alone in the world if they go against Russia.

See, the EU is busy ruling on what wood cricket bats can use and fining airplanes for putting out too much carbon emissions, but they are worthless when it comes down to actual power.  They are like a group of knitting ladies discussing the correct way to cook beans when a robber comes in the house.  Russia is more than willing to use any amount of force necessary to maintain its power and riches for its mob cabal in power, they do not care what anyone else thinks.

And this is the part that drives the left crazy.  They honestly believe that "world opinion" and esteem on the planet matters to everyone as much as it does to them.  They cannot conceive that someone might simply not give a damn what the UN thinks or what the world opinion of them is.

World Opinion and 50 cents can buy you a candy bar, its utterly devoid of importance.  Maybe if Russia wasn't supplying Europe so much of their gas and power, there would be a problem with how people view the country.  But the fact is, the EU cannot apply any economic leverage to Russia, because Russia has them by the base of their snardlies.

Any time they try to squeeze, Russia will shrug and squeeze back, and that hurts the EU far more than it will Russia.  This is what the Soviet Union was lacking before; any sort of economic leverage.  They had nothing anyone wanted or needed, so they couldn't prevent all those sanctions.  Now Russia has all the leverage it needs.

In fact, if some scientist discovered some amazing new energy source like an "arc reactor" such as in Iron Man, I would not at all be surprised to find they died in a lab accident that destroyed all their work.

Understanding what Putin is doing and will do next isn't really that hard at all.  And in this case, it was particularly easy.  The Ukraine is a mess economically, and has been run by looting tyrants for years.  The Crimean Peninsula speaks Russian, flies Russian flags, has a Russian navy at Sevastopol, and is essentially a Russian outpost in the Black Sea.  They didn't fight back, they welcomed the Russian forces.  When the Ukraine put a new guy in charge of their Navy, he immediately defected to Russia.

This wasn't a risk at all for Putin, it was a shrug of martial strength to make sure their interests were protected.  Yes, a strong show that we'd fight and kill to stop him would have made him rethink the position.  Russia is banking on nobody wanting a war and nobody wanting to fight any more.  He's relying on the west being passive and weak

But there's zero political and emotional support for protecting the Ukraine, and they don't even seem to want to protect themselves.

The bottom line is that Russia isn't expansionistic, they aren't trying to rebuild the Soviet Union, and they aren't looking to invade any other countries.  They don't need to or want to.  They just want to make sure all those nearby nations continue to obey and pay tribute.

Really the only thing that people need to learn from all this is that President Obama's "smart diplomacy" is unequal to the task of dealing with a hostile world, and that their vision of a 21st century where everyone gets along because we're all interconnected economically is naive and false.

And ultimately, everyone needs to remember how the people who warned about this were treated.  Remember the contempt and dismissal, the condescending arrogance they were treated with.  "The cold war is over, that was the 70s, you throwback idiot."

The left was so absolutely sure and totally confident they were right - and still certain that the USSR was never really a threat or all that bad to begin with - that they were contemptuous toward someone who pointed out the contrary.

And now who's laughing?

Vladimir Putin, all the way to his solid gold bidet.

A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE: Immigration

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus."
-Galatians 3:28

Few nations on earth oppose immigration by principle, but rather want to control and direct immigration.  There is no country on the face of the planet which does not have immigration laws and restrictions, and there are several nations on earth that are dealing with those who break those laws.  None have more of an illegal immigration situation as prevalent as the United States.

Since the US was founded by an immigrant people and for many years had no restrictions or limits whatsoever on immigration, it seems odd to many that the country is having a struggle over the concept of illegal immigrants.

Some consider the opposition to illegal immigration racist, others think it is fear of people taking jobs and changing culture.  Most who are on this side of the issue tend to drop the word "illegal" from the discussion, so it becomes a debate over immigration, period.

These arguments can become quite heated, and people who are immigrants, legal or not, can become confused or angry when the topic comes up.  Things are said on both sides that are unfortunate and uncharitable both about each other and immigrants.

And behind it all are forces interested not in the immigrants but what they can get out of them.  Some want the cheap labor, others want the votes they are confident they can get out of immigrants.  In the UK, for example, the Labor Party sent a memo around (later revealed to the public) stating that it would "rub the right's noses" in diversity and increase their electoral chances.  Others claim that food and labor prices would skyrocket if cheap illegal immigrant labor was ended.  "They're doing the jobs Americans won't do" is the argument.

So how do Christians respond to all this?  What is a Christian's reaction to the immigration debate?

The first thing Christians should do is react with compassion for those who want to come to the United States and other nations.  Many times, these immigrants are from places of terrible economic and political situations.  People flee countries like Venezuela because there is no freedom and little chance of a job or regular needs.  People flee countries like Mexico because of criminal violence and corrupt governments combine for continual misery and economic trouble.

They want to come to the United States to make a better life for themselves and their families.  Immigration is always an attempt to make a better life and a better future.  For all its faults and the generally negative portrayal of the US in popular media, it still is viewed as the "city on the hill" that Ronald Reagan spoke of in the 1980s.  It is seen as a place you can be free and achieve whatever your ambition and strength can get you.  It is seen as a rich, free, and safe place to live, for good reason.

So our first response should be is to recognize this longing and this desire, not first condemn for lawbreaking and distrust immigrants, legal or otherwise.  Whether they break the law or not, their longing is reasonable and shared by all of us: we want a better place for our families and selves.

I am friends with people and have worked with people who are almost certainly illegal immigrants, or children of illegal immigrants. They aren't bad people for it, in fact most are hard working productive members of society, often more so than legal citizens who take what they were born into for granted.

And certainly no honest Christian can throw the first stone at someone else for doing wrong.  We're Christians in part because we know we do wrong.  We all stand condemned before God and worthy only of punishment.  If our sins aren't identical to another person's, they're just as wicked and at least as numerous.

Secondly, we need to recognize that compassion does not trump right and wrong.  We can be sympathetic toward those who do wrong for what they consider good reasons, but recognize their wrongdoing.  Someone who steals to feed their children deserves sympathy and help, but they still have stolen and that is wrong.

That means we have to recognize that breaking the law is breaking the law, even if it is for a noble or understandable goal.  What someone was hoping to achieve with their actions is largely irrelevant to the fact of their lawbreaking.

Now, it may be true - and certainly is in this case - that the laws are flawed and almost designed to encourage lawbreaking. But that doesn't make the lawbreaking go away.  There are times when Christians must ignore and break laws, but this is not one of them.  The only time it is acceptable for a Christian to deny or reject the authority of someone God has placed over us is when they are directly and specifically telling us to do something against God's laws.

Telling us we must turn over Jews to be killed is against God's law.  Telling us we must go through a process - however expensive, slow, complicated, and idiotic it is - to become an immigrant does not.  It is a stupid system, but not an immoral one.

As Christians, we should further take our compassion and work through the system to make the laws better, if possible.  Immigration reform should take the form of streamlining the immigration laws to make it cheaper, faster and easier to get into the country thus negating much of the pressure to come in illegally.

And, as Christians, if we're looking to get into the country, we should stop and think about what we're doing and why.  We're never to make any decision based on emotion or pragmatism, but only on whether it glorifies God and is right.  Yes, the system is slow and expensive, and yes it is byzantine and stupid.  But that does not justify breaking the law.

Arguments such as "the Indians probably didn't like your illegal immigration, whitey" doesn't make breaking the law acceptable (in fact, the Native American tribes didn't have an immigration policy or laws, did not have organized national boundaries, and most didn't even consider land something any one person could own, only a place they hunted and lived on  Oh, and they immigrated to the Americas as well).  

Arguments such as "you can't own the planet, its God's" have some validity (all of everything is God's) but don't justify your breaking the law.  The truth is, we can own land, and all that is on it.  We can own the resources and the territory we live on.  That is a very Biblical concept, one which was strongly endorsed in the Mosaic covenant with all those laws for the children of Israel, and explicitly stated in the fifth commandment: you shall not steal.  If nobody can own anything nobody can steal anything, either.  If you can steal and violate God's law, that means God has declared that people have private ownership of property.

You have to stop and think when you are considering immigration: what am I doing and why?  You want to come to this nation because it is a land of plenty and opportunity, a place of liberty and safety.  Good, I don't blame you.  Being the grandchild of immigration, I recognize and embrace that concept.

But you're also looking for a new home.  And when you do that, you are recognizing and agreeing that this is also home for the people who live there already.  And as it is their home, you should respect that.  Part of what you want in the country you're going to is there because of their laws and culture, and you should not want to violate or ignore that in your desire to have a better place for yourself and your family.

You would not care for someone to show up in your house and stay there, then argue you're a jerk for saying they should ask first.  After all you have nicer stuff than they do and they were living in a box.  Your home is a place they envy and admire, how dare you say they should be polite and proper about it, instead of presuming.

What if you're here already illegally?  Then you should start up the process to come legally.  It doesn't matter how long you've been here, time does not erase wrong.  If you did something wrong five minutes ago or fifteen years ago, it still was wrong.  Being established and having time in the country does not make it all okay.

I understand that you just want to be in this new country and feel it is wrong to stop you.  I understand you want to be away from that lousy place, I would be too.  But this is the wrong way to go about it, and it does not glorify God to violate the law and be obstinate about it.

If you truly want to be part of a new country, you should also want to be part of its laws and culture and heritage, and that means doing so legally.  And then, as a citizen, you can work to make the system better to help others who come after you.

Because ultimately how right is it for you to break the law, gain the benefits of a new home, then do nothing to help others that want what you have?  And how right is it for a citizen who grew up with all those benefits to want to deny or limit others from having them more than is absolutely necessary and proper?

May God forgive us all, in whatever situation we are in, for our selfishness, fear, and bitterness toward others.

*This is part of the Christian Response series.