• Continue getting straight A’s
• Launch E-Sports Rankings and make it successful
• Gain 10-20lb of muscle mass
• Read at least 12 books
• Do some stand-up
• Release a game on the Android market
• Update this blog daily
• Moar?

Here’s hoping I’ll at least get through half of those!

Justine: Life is only on Earth. And not for long.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For ToR, unfortunately, mostly the worst. This isn’t my first review – I reviewed the game during the beta several times, but I was shunned by incredulous and overzealous fans. After all, it was “just” a beta. Well here we are, at the dawn of release – no longer in the beta. So where does this game stand in the grand scheme of things? How does it compare to WoW, SWG, Rift, GW2? Lets find out.

Who am I? I’m some dude that led a top-US CS:S team for many years, was a part of two top-10 WoW guilds, and played in several WoW Arena Tournies (including the CGS invitational) and many many CS tournaments, including the CPL. I also had a stint working for an indie game developer several years ago. I like to think that I know what I’m talking about, and usually, I do.

Story

Story. Story. Story. We’ve heard it over and over again. Bioware has really hammered this home – much how Vincent Chase is Queens Boulevard, The Old Republic is story. And story is one of the few battles ToR wins. The voice over quality is top notch and primary class quests are mostly interesting and engaging. Some may be deterred by the incessant use of family drama as a plot device since it gets old pretty fast. With that said, don’t expect Chaucer, but the writing is sufficient.

Unfortunately, the side quests are problematic and suffer from trivial subject matters (“blah blah click some turrets”) or endless fetch questing (go to X, come back to Y, go to X again, now back to Y). This wouldn’t have been a problem 10 years ago, but 2012 is almost here. WoW has moved us past the trivialities of fetch questing and now we do cool stuff like lassoing dragons, bombing runs or mind-controlling giants. ToR pretends like there hasn’t been an entire generation of MMORPGs since KOTOR and suffers for it greatly. Bonus quests are an interesting touch, but more often than not, they insult the player. Here you are doing the most trivial of tasks (ex: clicking control panels – a Bioware favorite) and a bonus quest pops up that asks you to kill 30 of the same type of mob. And just like that, we’re all sent back to the late 90s. Bioware has a lot to learn from Jeff Kaplan.

On many levels, however, the VO is a technical achievement. Ordinarily, I’d have no problem with pouring so much money into something like voice over, but the gameplay significantly suffered from it. To me, that’s unforgivable.

Combat

The crux of a good MMORPG is solid combat. I expect combat to be fluid, responsive, and logical. ToR has a pretty good grasp of what it wants to do, but doesn’t quite reach the bar set by better MMOs. First of all, the “heroic” combat Bioware preached for years and years isn’t as heroic as they made it out to be. Animations are often choppy and blocking animations seem to happen at random times (as opposed to having weapons make contact). But lets face it, it’s not a big deal. What is a big deal, however, is the lack of an auto-attack.

This quizzical gameplay choice hurts more than it helps. It means that the gamer needs to manually press 1-1-1-1-1 (or right-click like a madman) to use the regular “white attack” ability and to generate resources that one may use (in the case of the Warrior-archetypes). Not only is this boring, but it literally provides zero gameplay improvement – what is the reasoning behind no auto-attack? Who knows.

Stealth and cover are very underwhelming. Cover, in particular, is nigh worthless in PvP. The conical radius, the spent GCD, the fact that 4 classes can easily close range, and the fact that almost every class has a knock-back should be very clear indicators that a mechanic like cover is a terrible, terrible idea.

Stealth, as mentioned, is very odd. On one hand, it tries to mimic what stealth is in WoW (a fundamental mechanic of classes like rogues and feral druids), while more often than not it becomes merely a trivial escape mechanism. It needs to be fundamentally reworked – stealth should be a game mechanic, not a novelty.

PvE and Leveling

Admittedly, a high point of the game are the instances (known as flashpoints). Black Talon, Athiss, Hammer Station, etc. are all fairly well-designed. Mechanics are tried and true: get out of the fire, interrupt heals, kite bad stuff. This is where ToR really does feel like “WoW in space” and it’s also arguably the best part of the game. As a matter of fact, the only reason I’m still playing is because I’m curious to see if the large-scale Operations will be as good as Flashpoints.

Leveling is fairly smooth, but the fact that the world is sharded can be distracting and does discourage grouping. Heroic 2+ man quests can be fun, but I found myself skipping them more often than not – the time invested doesn’t seem worth it. During hardcore leveling periods, I also found myself skipping all VO. I don’t care about your life story, I just want to get this quest out of the way. I feel somewhat guilty about it, but these are the scenarios that make me feel like side-quest VO is a swing and a miss – a very expensive miss.

PvP

PvP is a joke, there’s not much more to say. It’s an insult to any form of competitive activity. Huttball is one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen implemented in an MMO: Warsong Gulch with a passable flag? Really? What irks me most is that someone actually made money coming up with such a terrible idea. Inconsistent traps, obnoxious commentators, bad layout, Huttball has it all. There are 15-year-olds that designed better Unreal Tournament maps. Sure, there may be some occasional mindless fun to be had with Huttball, but there’s no real value here.

Alderaan is significantly better, but doesn’t even compare to the wide variety of BGs present in MMOs like WoW or Rift. Ignoring WoW’s trailblazing here, Rift’s “Black Garden” was a particularly awesome innovation. World PvP is more or less nonexistent.

If ToR was Communist Russia, PvP would be human rights.

Companions

Companions were lauded by Bioware as being an evolutionary step as far as the genre is concerned. Unfortunately, they turned out to be glorified pets. They even have an ability pet bar just like in WoW! Some companions are interesting, some are boring. They do seem to break up the monotony of the often morose landscapes, but they are basically just pets.

Companion crafting is a great idea, however. Not having to worry about crafting stuff yourself is pretty neat. ToR sometimes surprises you with interesting and progressive innovations. Unfortunately, these moments are far and few in between.

DOA

Does The Old Republic have a chance? Not with what we see on day 1. No chance. Fanboys and fangirls may try to make a case for ToR, but the reality is that there is no case for ToR. There are many changes that need to make their way into ToR for it to be a competitor to 2nd tier MMOs, let alone giants like WoW.

UI mods have been requested since beta. A combat log has been requested since beta. There are absolutely no features that even begin to address the social element of the game: guild achievements, guild skill trees, etc. There’s a need for competitive PvP, LFG finders, etc, etc. These shouldn’t be post-release patches, this is 2012! These are basic elements of modern MMORPGs. I don’ think ToR is finished.

The only reason ToR won’t die in 6 months is “Bioware” and “Star Wars.” Will these two names carry the burden for a year? Two? I doubt it. But then again, I could be wrong. http://warhammeronline.com/ is still going. Don’t fool yourself though. It’s dead.

You may berate me now, but don’t forget this review 1 year down the line. ToR is dead. Long live Titan?

In the words of Jeff Winger, “You’re just an average looking guy… with a big chin.”

“Son of a bitch!”

Absolutely epic. With the Office losing steam and Family Guy/The Cleveland show losing quality, it feels that Community is one of the few remaining shows that are both funny and unique. Props. Also, my birthday is in 2 days

Dove:

Drugs:

It basically uses histograms to analyze picture similarity. Right now, the histogram is three-dimensional (hue/saturation + y-coord) but for more accurate results I may have to make the histograms n-dimensional, where n >= 3. I’ve also been reading about SURF methods and template matching, but that may be overkill for comparing a simple sketch to a complex image (the sketch may be more representative than a template may like) so I’m not sure if that’s a good approach.

Its summit must be inaccessible, but its base accessible to human beings as nature made them. It must be unique and it must exist geographically. The door to the invisible must be visible.

“I need to put roots down, to vote and make the difference that I can. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that the exile avoids, is the trauma of self-transformation” (Mukherjee, Two Ways to Belong in America).

Having recently become a United States citizen, her entire essay struck a chord but the above quotation accurately resonated with my experience. To be frank, I didn’t know why I was so moved – I felt as if I had been abruptly woken up but couldn’t find the alarm clock. After all, America is permeated by the positivist idea of the “metamorphosis”. Chicken Soup for the Soul is the American staple of a healthy self-help diet; we like to think that change is good, that losing weight is good, and that seeing a therapist is good, but I digress. My self-transformation began in late 1997 when the Titarenco family (I use the third person because I’m not even sure I still know who these people were) stepped off of a Boeing 747 into the uncomfortably warm evening air of Phoenix, Arizona. We had just arrived from Romania, an Eastern Bloc country that was devastated by communism. Most of my parents’ lives were spent in the oppressive clutch of a communist dictatorship – America wasn’t only a childhood dream or a political ideal, it was a real-life Utopia. We found ourselves in Eden and we were elated; every man woman and child seemed to be a perfect human prototype: an Adam or an Eve. So then why does Mukherjee describe the immigrant self-transformation as “traumatizing”? Better yet, why do I almost subconsciously agree? I couldn’t help but wonder what exactly changed between that puerile inception, the grueling decade that was to follow, and the oft too-cynical position I find myself in today.

Even though I could have plunged into the abyssal depths of philosophical interpretations of whether change is good or not or whether bad is good or good is bad or this or that, I decided to selfishly figure out why I was feeling the way I was feeling; and to do that, I had to go back to Mukherjee’s quote. More importantly, however, I had to look at some of her other pieces of literature. She writes about social alienation, immigration, and the merits of tradition – motifs that have been all too prevalent in my own life.

Mukherjee’s works correspond with biographer Fakrul Alam’s catagorization of Mukherjee’s life into three phases. Her earlier works, such as the The Tiger’s Daughter and parts of Days and Nights in Calcutta, are her attempts to find her identity in her Indian heritage. The second phase of her writing, according to Alam, encompasses works such as Wife, the short stories in Darkness, an essay entitled “An Invisible Woman,” and The Sorrow and the Terror, a joint effort with her husband. These works originate in Mukherjee’s own experience of racism in Canada (Pradhan).

In her third phase, Mukherjee describes herself as an “immigrant living in a continent of immigrants” (Alam) and a non-hyphenated American, not an Indian-American (Alam). I wish I was in my third phase – my parents never wanted to be a part of the Romanian culture in America and they didn’t fully immerse themselves in the American culture, either. I vote, I watch the Super-Bowl, and I eat potato chips, but it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that I’ve never felt truly a part of American society. Maybe this Sisyphean effort of trying to become something that I’ll never be is what resonated with me in Mukherjee’s original quotation; maybe the very attempt of trying to Americanize myself is traumatizing. According to Mukherjee, there seems to be an acute difficulty immigrants experience by de-forming and re-forming an alien culture (especially a Western one):

[…] I’d say I’m an American writer of Bengali-Indian origin. In other words, the writer/political activist in me is more obsessed with addressing the issues of minority discourse in the U.S. and Canada, the two countries I have lived and worked in over the last thirty odd years. The national mythology that my imagination is driven to create, through fiction, is that of the post-Vietnam United States. I experience, simultaneously, the pioneer’s capacity to be shocked and surprised by the new culture, and the immigrant’s willingness to de-form and re-form that culture. At this moment, my Calcutta childhood and adolescence offer me intriguing, incompletely-comprehended revelations about my hometown, my family, my place in that community: the kind of revelations that fuel the desire to write an autobiography rather than to mythologize an Indian national identity (Mukherjee, Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee).

Her self-description as a pioneer not only resonates with my personal life, but with my familial life as well. My family lived in Arizona, Georgia, and now California. I distinctly remember the move from Arizona to Georgia and from Georgia to California as a sort of colonial apropos and as a meta-cultural (or rather, meta-social) experience. I remember the hot scaly Texas soil, the lush greenery of Tennessee, the dilapidated homes in Louisiana and Oklahoma. I was an immigrant that was migrating and as trite as it may sound, it felt strange and it still does. Much like Mukherjee, I also encountered discrimination and felt socially alienated; even though she constantly reminds us of her skin color, I think its importance is minor. Language and customs are paramountly more significant.

A discussion with an old friend unexpectedly brought up a relevant topic: he was taking an Asian Literature class at the University of Georgia and recommended I take a look at Hunger: A Novella and Stories (some of the stories reminded him of my family). Hunger is a short collection by Lan Samantha Chang, a Chinese-American writer that writes about the assimilation of immigrant families in the States. Her viewpoint tends to be significantly more pessimistic, especially when observing works such as “The Unforgetting”:

I think assimilation is a central issue only in one of my stories, one called “The Unforgetting.” It’s about a Chinese family that moves to the Midwest and tries to leave their old life, but as time goes on, they find that they can’t forget the old life. Meanwhile, their son, who was raised American, does what Americans do: leaves home. I think that captured some of my feelings about assimilation – that it’s necessary to a certain extent, but at the same time, it’s a tremendous loss (Chang).

The idea of loss intertwined with gain isn’t a new one. This holistic win-lose nature of immigrant assimilation could very well be Mukherjee’s, as well as my own, trauma. Hunger, the novella whose very name seems to evoke wrenching, primitive pain, is about the emotional starvation immigrant families suffer due to the parents’ rootlessness and the children’s need to integrate in society – in any society. As I widened my view from a personal approach to a more familial one, I couldn’t help but notice that the trauma and the hardship weren’t attenuated, but instead accentuated. Reading Chang’s stories, I felt emotionally stripped naked, disarmed and beaten, and left with the bittersweet aftertaste of reality. This loss, the loss of relationships between parents and children, is the ultimate price all immigrants have to pay – the price my parents inadvertently have to pay – a price whose cost may be too great. In Hunger, the resolution is often a direct result of the strength of individual characters. I couldn’t relate to Chang’s tidy solution and abrasively rejected it. If a solution even exists, it can’t be your American cowboy riding-into-the-sunset Hollywood ending, I thought to myself.

I decided to call my sister whom, ironically, was in Romania rediscovering her (and our) roots. I asked what she thinks about being an immigrant; about being Romanian as well as American. She told me to read some sociological articles, look up statistics, and talk to mom and dad about it. This was a personal journey, though; I didn’t want to pollute the sterile emotional Petri dish I created with data, numbers, or “hard” facts. She ultimately mentioned a poem which she read in middle school (a poem that I also had read but forgotten) by Aurora Levins Morales, a Puerto Rican-Jewish-American writer and poet. The poem, entitled “Child of the Américas”, deals with the same topics as Chang and Mukherjee do. Morales writes with the same type of bittersweet melancholy as Mukherjee: “I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return. / I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back. / I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.” (50). The pain and embarrassment of being a cultural bastard child is seemingly attenuated in the same way Mukherjee describes her third phase: “an immigrant in a continent of immigrants” (Alam). Even though Morales has a tendency to romanticize the “immigrant” ideal, she is attuned to the hardship that Jews, non-white races, as well as any immigrants experience when they decide to immigrate to the United States.

My dilemma still remains, however: I can’t understand why the immigrant’s self-transformation is so traumatizing. Maybe the trauma is inherent to the character of the immigrant, and maybe the answer is “just because”. I can’t help but think that there may be something more to it, that if we were to change the way we interact with people that are unlike ourselves – with people that are strange and interesting and fascinating – we could change not only the way immigrants relate to natives, but the way people relate to each other. The easy way out would have been to look at statistics and sociological graphs and figure out how many immigrants are “happy” and how many are “unhappy”, how many have jobs and how many don’t. I chose, instead, to go on an emotional journey, a journey that began in 1997 in Phoenix. I still don’t have an identity and I’m at peace with the idea that I may never have an identity. Much like Bharati Mukerjee and Samantha Chang, and Aurora Morales, I’m a child of the crossroads; this is simply what I’ve been given, for better or for worse.

Bibliography

Alam, Fakrul. Bharati Mukherjee. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Print. In this definitive biography of Bharati Mukherjee, Fakrul blends objective observations with personal input from Mukherjee herself to provide a concise, clear, and immensely valuable resource. Fakrul provides not only literary and professional details of Mukherjee’s life, but also personal tidbits of information that cannot be found anywhere else.

Chang, Lan Samantha. A Conversation with Lan Samantha Chang. Brian O’Grady and Adam O’Connor Rodriguez. 28 October 2004. Web. This interview personalizes the work of Chang in Hunger and her other novels and short stories by asking pointed questions about immigrant assimilation, the difficulty of being a multi-cultural writer, and what the resolution may be, if any. Chang also explains her work in detail, adding an important facet to any scholar’s interpretation of her works.

—. Hunger: A Novella and Stories. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. Print. Even though I didn’t cite Hunger, I read several of the stories within. Chang provides acute observations of the plight of the immigrant lifestyle. She tends to provide simple and clear-cut solutions, but her insightful observation of the effects of alienation and assimilation are a rarity.

Morales, Levin, Aurora Morales and Rosario Morales. Getting Home Alive. New York: Firebrand Books, 1986. Print. A mother-daughter work, this anthology of short stories and poems outlines the introspective perspectives of an immigrant family in the states. Even though I was only interested in one poem, I read several works and noted the emotional landscape: a melancholic and often times hopeful one.

Mukherjee, Bharati. Holders of the Word: An Interview with Bharati Mukherjee Tina Chen and S. X. Goudie. 1997. Print. This interview by two North Carolina State University graduate students is very throrough. Even though most of the interview deals specifically with writing style and literary methods, it also touches on important social issues and exactly how Mukherjee sees herself in the social arena of the United States.

—. “Two Ways to Belong in America.” New York Times 22 September 1996. Print. A quotation from this article in the New York Times was the catalyst of this entire exploratory essay. The article is about differing views on immigration policies, but it ends with a generalized comment about the immigrant life which profoundly affected me.

Pradhan, Shilpi. Bharati Mukherjee. May 1998. 9 February 2011. Web. <http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Mukherjee.html>. This online resources provided by Emory’s english department outlines Mukherjee’s life with broad strokes. It was a wonderful introductory resource that allowed me to branch out and seek more specific sources.

Weberian life chances can be seen as an expansion on some of Karl Marx’s ideas. Both Weber and Marx agreed that economic factors were important in determining one’s future, but Weber’s concepts of life chances are more complex; inspired by, but different from Marx’s views on social stratification and social class. Where for Marx the class status were the most important factor, and he correlated life chances with material wealth, Weber introduced other factors, such as social mobility and social equality. Other factors include those related to one socioeconomic status, such as gender, race, race and ethnicity.

While some of those factors, like age, race or gender, are random, Weber stressed the link between life chances and the non-random elements of the three-component theory of stratification – how social class, social status and political affiliation impact each individual’s life. In other words, individuals in certain groups have in common a specific causal component of their life chances: they are in similar situation, which tends to imply a similar outcome to their actions. Weber notes the importance of economic factors.How the power of those with property, compared to those without property, gives the former great advantages over the latter. Weber also noted that life chances are to certain extent subjective: what an individual thinks of one’s life chances will affect their actions, therefore if one feels that one can become or is a respected and valued member of society, then it is likely to become a reality and results in one being more successful and respected than somebody without this conviction.

Naturally, this interesting sociological idea immediately made me think of Markov chains and how one would mathematically model such a hypothesis. Having never attempted to implement a Markov chain programmatically before, here’s my first stab at it:

class Markov {
public:
	Markov(int _o) {
		this->order = _o;
		markov_chain.resize(this->order+1);
	}

	void Learn(ifstream &_i) {
		string word;
		while (_i >> word) {
			this->words.push_back(word);
		}
		for_each (words.begin(), words.end(), bind1st(mem_fun(&Markov::LinkChain), this));
	}

	void DumpStates(string _s) {
		int _o = _s.length();
		if (_o <= markov_chain.size() && markov_chain[_o].find(_s) != markov_chain[_o].end())
			for_each (markov_chain[_o].find(_s)->second.begin(), markov_chain[_o].find(_s)->second.end(), bind1st(mem_fun(&Markov::DumpChain), this));
	}

	string GetLink(string _s, int _o = 1) {
		int order = _o;
		string seed;
		if (order == 0 || order > this->order || order > _s.length()) {
			return "";
		} else {
			seed = _s.substr(_s.length() - order, order);
		} if (markov_chain[order].find(seed) != markov_chain[order].end() && !markov_chain[order].find(seed)->second.empty()) {
			random_shuffle(markov_chain[order].find(seed)->second.begin(), markov_chain[order].find(seed)->second.end());
			string s = markov_chain[order].find(seed)->second.back();
			return s;
		}
		return "";
	}

	~Markov() {

	}

private:
	// just for debugging
	void DumpChain(string _s) {
		cout << "dumping: " << _s << endl;
	}

	void LinkChain(string _s) {
		transform(_s.begin(), _s.end(), _s.begin(), ::tolower);
		for (int order = 1; order <= this->order; ++order) {
			for (int i = 0; i < _s.length(); i++) {
				// Create a new key if we need to
				if (markov_chain[order].find(_s.substr(i, order)) == markov_chain[order].end() && _s.substr(i, order).length() >= order) {
					markov_chain[order].insert(make_pair(_s.substr(i, order), vector<string>()));
				}

				// Link the next single state to key of order o
				if (_s.length() > (i + order) && _s.substr(i + order, 1).length() >= 1) {
					markov_chain[order].find(_s.substr(i, order))->second.push_back(_s.substr(i + order, 1));
				}
			}
		}
	}

	int order;
	vector <string> words;
	vector <map<string, vector<string>>> markov_chain;
};

The above implementation actually works with any order which is kind of neat; it also dumps the chain as a sort of unit test but the class could be significantly cleaned up. This was also my first encounter with bind1st(mem_fun(...)) which, as most would agree, is a complete nightmare. C++0x should fix some of these annoying idiosyncrasies when binding functions (or rather, function pointers).

However, as I was writing this C++ class several months back, I couldn’t help but think that Weber, and Marx, were perhaps partly wrong. It’s easy to forgo personal responsibility for ones life when one owes much to what they are to a socially deterministic model so easily put into an algorithm. Not only that, but I was looking at the problem from an admittedly personal perspective. My parents had incredibly poor life chances – even I had arguably poor life chances, and yet the current position along this “Markov chain” of life seems to be completely anomalous (at least statistically speaking). However, Weber has made the stipulation that life chances are largely subjective; saying that, however, seems to discredit the very idea of life chances and perhaps some aspects of social determinism.

I do appreciate the elegance of the idea of life chances and how eloquently it’s modeled – and the Markov brothers would perhaps agree. As far as 2011 goes, a new year brings new life chances, and I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that maybe another year is yet another link in the (Markov) chain, or another year is what we (or rather, you, dear reader) want to make of it. The programmer in me wants to believe the former, but the romantic in me wants to believe the latter. After all that, I really need a drink. Thank God it’s New Years.

• I’m getting straight A’s. Yay.
• I applied to four UCs: UCI, UCR, UCSB, and UCSD. My grades should be good enough by the end of Spring semester.
• I made Pong with SFML.
• I’m working on a Starfox64-type tunnel shooter in Ogre3D.
• I decided to play Cataclysm. This is probably bad news bears (for a number of reasons).

And speaking of bad news bears, The Old Republic went from looking awesome to looking “meh”, to looking like absolute poop. Disappointing. I was just thinking the other day how awesome it must be to be a game designer. *fantasy*. Now I’m going to sleep eagerly awaiting finals week and all the anomie that comes with the holiday season. Did you know most suicides occur in December?

PS: Sociology is stupid. Brb, turning a correlation into a sociological theory.