Michelle D'israeli's blog

The BBC’s Young Apprentice has returned for a second season, and a lot of people watching it, especially young people, will be inspired to try their hand at business. This is a good thing in general, but the show as a whole doesn’t teach you the whole truth about business. But what can we learn from it?

Firstly, some general points about The Apprentice show as a whole. These are always worth keeping in mind when watching the show, and are what sets it aside as being entertainment television, rather than factual:

• The applicants have clearly been selected for screen presence. Yes, they pick a range of personalities, but that is only because it gives better television
• The contract that goes with The Apprentice is one hell of a gamble – few people serious at business would take it on. Applicants are required to sign over all their business ideas whilst on the show and for the year following if they win or come second
• Each episode starts with an montage intended to make you already have a feeling about each applicant before you’ve even seen them in action that episode
• The show is highly edited to create a storyline for each episode, and a character for each applicant
• The Apprentice tasks are all one-off events, with no need to maintain a good reputation, and in general you can expect to see all the bad habits of pop-up businesses being played out
• The Young Apprentice prize fund of £25k is nothing, and won’t cover modern tuition fees. They are being offered basically a year’s graduate salary. The big win, however, is the easy industry contacts and the television coverage
• For businesses shown as the winning team ‘treat’, the apprentice is very much a major boon. These businesses are presented as the life of luxury, and are probably offering their services for free in return for an incredible advertising opportunity
• The team discussion after a failure is not about trying to actually figure out how to improve, but who to blame and how to make good tv. Engineers know that this sort of situation is ideally suited for root cause analysis. Sadly a culture of blame makes for better TV, but I worry about the precedent this is setting
• A regular feature in The Apprentice post-failure reviews is “what did you actually do?”, and sometimes this has to be asked as part of a root cause analysis. This is why it’s important to track what you do, keep a list of things done, and as a manager, ensure you have the statistics and analytics to make decisions based on evidence
• As the Apprentice operates pop-up businesses, come the end of the day they normally slash prices to near cost to clear stock. Businesses that are not pop-up traders would only do this with stock that would otherwise had to be disposed of, or if the goodwill was worth it. At the end of the first episode, Lord Sugar states “the fact that you ended up selling off a load of stuff in the end is, really unforgivable”, but that’s patently not true!
• One of the sad things we see every time on the Apprentice is that there is no incentive to really try and build an effective and working team. Time and time again we see a newly formed team descend into some form of infighting, often about who came up with what idea. This infighting directly interferes with the process of team formation. In the real world, it would probably better to acknowledge mutual input and praise, however there are no incentives to do this on The Apprentice

At the start of the first episode, Lord Sugar states that he doesn’t care what class people come from, only if they’re ‘first class’. This is entirely false – class advantages affect how people act, and have been shown to make a huge difference in business. Those applicants from better backgrounds will almost certainly do better on the show, unless any of the others have been suitably mentored.

The Task: frozen treats (ice cream, sorbet, etc)
Objective: profit (takings – costs)

Only one of the teams attempted to estimate their sales quantity, but in my opinion they went about it wrong. Don’t simply assume a quantity you will sell per hour when estimating supply – estimate instead this figure from footfall, how many you will catch to pitch to, how successful on average pitches are (assume a rate of failure), and on the time you will need to pitch and serve customers.

In this exercise, costs for raw materials were very low, so the cost of having spare stock was minimal. As in the end both teams sold out entirely, the teams would have been better to produce more stock, with the reserve plan of having to try and sell at cost.

Kinetic (the girls’ team) based their branding around “Treat and Trim” – this is utterly awful, as they are still selling ice cream. People don’t want to be reminded of a negative when they are going for an impulse buy. This might work out better when it comes to the long-term branding of a product, however, as you can switch the consumer from impulse thinking to brand association.

Some materials are commonly purchased by weight including wastage. This needs to be accounted for. Similarly, be careful proceeding with purchases reliant on another delivery that you are still waiting on – if this messes up, you may have excess material on your hands. For a pop-up business having any excess that can’t be used can be a disaster. Thanks to forgetting about this, Kinetic were forced to dump 30 litres of ice cream mix.

Atomic priced at £1.50 for one scoop, and £2.00 for two, which was sensible. This clearly shows to the consumer that it is better value to buy two scoops, and makes the upsell more likely. It is always easier to secure one customer and upsell, than it is to secure two customers, and this helps to also shift stock.

Atomic’s pricing strategy was to undercut the market on price – whilst potentially income, this often can help to increase sales. Of course, they didn’t then have the stock to take advantage of that and, as we saw later, it turned out that by charging so little they lost a lot of potential revenue. Something we did see here however was that most of their sales team were keen to have a low price, and proceeded to sell well thanks to having confidence in their price as well as their product.

Kinetic performed the legally dodgy activity of giving people extras and only afterwards charging for them. They also gave children ice cream and then hassled their parents for money. This would quickly get you in trouble if you where an established business, but as a pop-up business such tactics made sense to them. Ultimately, however, any long-term business trying this would get in a lot of trouble for such tactics.

James’s acting as pirate vanilla was a good idea “it created a bit of interest. It was more than what you normally get at an ice cream stall”. Characters help to get attention, and would work long term very well. Having lived in a coastal town, I know that the local characters and stories are essential to the community. Life outside of the main summer months is boring, and the colourful members of the community retain your adoration and such business become heavily used and loved by the locals. This generates initial trade, giving social approval of your business to the tourists, helping to build up trade further.

Kinetic also attempted colourful promotion using mascot suits, however these have a number of drawbacks. On a hot sunny day, these quickly become uncomfortable to wear for extended periods. Mascot suits do make you stand out, but in my experience they can actually be a detraction as a lot of people are very wary of them.

Both teams charged extra for sprinkles and toppings, in an attempt to drive up profits. These extras are very cheap, typically, so most businesses offer them for free – like condiments in fast food places. Free extras make customers like you more. Offering free things actually is a sales pitch – if you say “FREE CONE AND TOPPINGS”, it implies that other people charge you for these, instantly making your prices seem better.

Kinetic promoting to the audience waiting for the animal shows was genius – this is an entirely fair form of promotion. This is what kebab van owners do after gigs, or ice cream vans do at school closing time, and is the entire core business of many retailers.

Harry H decides to try and do deliveries to people on the beach – they can spare the people to make the deliveries, and this is a sensible way to access a market their competitors are not in. This is also something you can charge extra for doing, and people will accept. I actually did this back in school, covering the costs of my own chocolate by charging for deliveries.

It was no surprise that both team’s best selling products were established flavours that the market already likes – “cookies” “strawberries and marshmallow” “chocolate and banana” – better sticking to established successful products when in this for the short term. “apple and watermelon” is a nice flavour for a ice crush or smoothie, but as a frozen yogurt it didn’t appeal. Further, frozen yogurt is still a small market segment. In fact, vanilla would have made a lot of sense, as people do actively default to it if they want an ice cream but don’t like the other flavours offered.

Both teams managed to sell out, which was surprising given the difference in location and price. Kinetic were priced above the market rate for their location, and probably were generating disgruntled customers. However Atomic found that a seaside audience may be at a British beach to save money. In effect, this showed that the most important aspect of this week was pure sales ability, and pricing the product right. As both teams were able to shift all stock for at least cost, unusually cost management wasn’t a factor this week.

Kinetic’s project manager ended up operating in the back room, which should have been a very process-driven environment. By this point, the product was already agreed upon, and there was no checks really required for quality control (since they were operating a pop-up business). This prevented her from reigning in an unruly field team on the production day.

When in the board room getting the results, we saw that Kinetic had no idea how much was spent on raw materials. Never ever as a business lose sight of your costs.

Atomic spent: £117.92, sales: £677.17, profit: £559.25
Kinetic spent: £131, sales: £839.34, profit: £708.34

Interestingly, this is one of the few times that an apprentice task has seen a team take home an amount that would cover their wages!

Ultimately, Atomic lost because of their low pricing. To quote Lord Sugar, “That is the most heinous of crimes, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to business. Cutting the price before you even start”. There are a number of things Atomic could have done better, but the first is obvious:

• Higher prices – this is really why they lost in the end
• Charge for everything – this is very mean but what pop-up businesses do! They could have even charged extra for the delivery
• Replace the frozen yogurt flavour with something more generally agreeable. It is important to note that the apple and watermelon frozen yogurt was not the cause, as it did sell out in the end, and the prices were just too low

People tend to dislike someone who is attempting to claim all the credit – wrongly or rightly. We saw this in the boardroom discussions around Mohammed, with his lines like “I personally think I was the best salesperson in this whole team. I was pushing for sales. I was making people come” ultimately causing people to respond “Mohammad should be fired purely for his contribution, his lack of ability to accept when he has done something wrong”.

Similarly, one very true lesson for the real world is that people like people who admit they were wrong, and will show them consideration for the admission. Harry H also demonstrated that the converse is also true, failure to admit mistakes gets you disliked: “I have a thing I don’t like about you James – you can’t accept when you’re wrong”.

In my opinion, Mohammed was fired because:

1. Actually causing problems
2. They’ve had their TV fun from him
3. james is likeable
4. Harry H has yet to fail properly

Something Mohammed said at the end I thought was odd was “I’m really surprised I’ve been fired. I’ve still got my successful business, I’m still going to be a success”. In a way, this shows why they were fired more than anything. In business you should try to never be surprised by a negative outcome. Always try to know everything that’s going on to the best of your abilities and anticipate everyone’s next move.

So, how I would have done this week’s task?

• Stuck to established, well-liked flavours – no time to establish new ones
• Stock was cheap, margins were very high, selling was relatively easy – always produce more stock!
• Theming and theatrics – helps to bring in people
• Delivery/selling to captive audiences
• More closely match competition’s prices, perhaps beat them if confident enough in theming
• Just give away extras like cones, toppings, etc – better to charge more for the base product
• Remember – a free thing that everyone does is still A FREE THING TO PROMOTE
• Try to get people to promote you for you to other people, or repeat visits
• Stuck to some kind of luxury treat theme
• Sell through being awesome, not dubiously illegal tactics – just good sense

As it’s now approaching winter, ice cream sales isn’t really testable, however

Earlier this year, I decided to do something about missing regular queer company, and got myself along to the Brum Bi Group. This turned out to be a lovely bunch of people of all genders, and amongst all the new friends I found that several old ones where regulars, too!

It was at the Brum Bi Group monthly meets that I heard talk of BiCon coming up in the summer. As a long time LGBTQUA+* activist, I’d heard of BiCon, but for various reasons I’d never actually attended one before. Now that I had a car and regular income, though, was this a possibility?

• I checked my calendar – that weekend was free!
• I checked with the girlfriend – she wasn’t going with me, but was happy for me to go!
• I checked with the bank – I could afford it!
• I checked with friends and family – several of them were going! “That settles it, “, I said, “I’m totally going to BiCon 2011!”

Unfortunately I didn’t have enough leave from work to go for the Thursday and Friday, but cost-wise that about worked out to my benefit (as I couldn’t afford a full pass). So after work on Friday, I spent the night with my girlfriend, then headed up to BiCon for Saturday lunchtime.

My past experience with similar events was strictly limited to Anime conventions, small student day-long events, and the occasional corporate event. Sadly as a science and engineering student, my course load made it hard to attend NUS events.

Even though I was only there for barely two days, every hour was eventful. Rather than try and remember all the details, here’s an unordered list of the highs and lows of BiCon 2011:

• In terms of the grounds, the location was quite nice, and managed to create a relaxed feel
• By arriving at midday on Saturday, there had already been two whole days of BiCon by this point. It felt very much like everyone had already met, so mingling was very hard
• …and on that note, BiCon does suffer very strongly from cliques. As a first-time attendee, it would have been easy to feel lonely. Thankfully I had some family there to support me, but it still felt closed. I suspect this relates to joining on the third day, though
• I fell totally in love with the con badge sticker system. BiCon has for a number of years done a craftwork badge system, wherein you are given the bare minimum of pre-made card and are pointed to a stand to decorate it yourself. This alone is cool, but what really make this work is the sticker system (from BiCon 2010) – the community agrees that certain stickers on a con badge have certain meanings. Unfortunately there tends to be a lot of sticker meanings, so they are hard to remember, but you tend to recall the ones you are most interested in. Very cool, I wish every event had something like it!
• …Sadly by the time I arrived, though, there were only a few stickers remaining. So I had to make do with only a few and a lot of “ask me!” stickers. Still, the system’s so cool, here’s a photo of my badge:
• BiCon started as a conference, but the name grew out of the Scifi convention community. This holds true across the whole of the event. In parts it felt like a student-organised workshop conference, with poor organisation but great workshops and lots of inclusion. At other times, there were some very hard-hitting talks, like an academic conference. All the while, though, there was the party atmosphere one expects from a convention. Definitely took some getting used to!
• Some of the more academic talks were very good, and quite surprising to see come up. Very much approved of the opportunity to attend these
• I heard that some of the workshops sounded good, but were aimed at a less experienced audience than the one that attended. This shows great things about the people who attend BiCon, but perhaps is something to think about
• Some of the workshops I missed, however, sounded positively fascinating. The brainstorming walls from a few of them remained up afterwards, revealing some incredibly deep discussions about Being a bi person. I was tempted to photograph them, but it didn’t feel respectful of their creation within a safe space
• One I felt safe to photograph, however, was one of the clear similarities to a scifi convention. There was at one point a discussion about bisexual fiction, and afterwards their recommendations were posted for everyone to enjoy:
• As the party unfolded on Saturday night, update newsletters about tomorrow where handed out. This was a great idea, and something I wish they had done at Ayacon a few weeks previously
• BiCon was one of the most inclusive spaces I have ever been in. I noticed a number of people with impairments, there were quite a surprising number of out trans people, and generally everyone was able to be themselves
• The party on Saturday night was good, however I missed my normal rock DJ
• …However there was a period on Saturday night that felt like “get hitched hour” – people’s body languages became distinctly about sleeping with people, it seemed
• Although staying with family off-site was cheap, it did prevent getting an early start
• The BiCon closing ceremony felt like a community love-in. This is understandable, since every community needs one, but as a first time attendee I didn’t get anything out of it (other than the location and committee of next year’s BiCon)
• Something that appears to be a yearly meme is accommodation issues. I didn’t meet anyone with anything positive to say about the accommodation this year or in previous years. People are optimistic about next year’s arrangements, however I know people who have stayed in the halls that will be used, and no comment
• BiCon was a very white-dominated event – which thankfully the community is already working to address
• In fact, there was a workshop about BiCon itself, and from the wall of notes, it seems that the event is aware of almost all it’s failings. This is very much a rarity, but the real test will be how they act on these
• Finally got to meet some incredible people I’d known online for a while!

All in all, BiCon was a very mixed event for me. Some of best things about BiCon was less the new, and more the time I spent with my family and old friends. Some of the worst would have probably been addressed by attending for the full duration.

There’s a strongly related unConference called OpenCon. Sadly I wasn’t able to attend this year, so I was very much pleased to find that Ludi had done a rather wonderful write-up of OpenCon. Although this was written about OpenCon, one passage applies to BiCon:

I think it was because many people had very little chance to talk about sexism in their everyday lives

For a significant group of people attending, BiCon is their only chance to be Bi or otherwise queer. I’m guessing most people would have never noticed this, since I’m more sensitive to body langauge, but it certainly created an odd atmosphere at times. It makes me wonder what can be done for these people outside of BiCon. I think events like BiFests and the local Bi groups are an important start, but clearly more needs to be done.

All in all, BiCon 2011 was a very mixed event for me. On the journey home, I was unsure about going to BiCon 2012. But almost two months on, I find myself remembering all the good bits and really wanting to be in such a space again. And as an activist, I know there’s only one way to improve community-ran events – to dive in and do what you can to make them even better!

Next up in my calendar is Brum BiFest, which clearly still needs some work on understanding the gender spectrum. I’m going to get involved with the community and see about improving everything I can. And, with any luck, see you at BiCon 2012!

* Lesbian, Gay, Bi*, Trans*, Queer, Undefined, Asexual and plus all the rest. Bit of a mouthful, but at least it’s now properly inclusive

Following setting WoW up, I’ve now had a chance to play for a few hours, and get an initial impression of what WoW is actually like, and how it compares to my expectations.

Following launching the game, I act like a typical PC gamer and head straight for the graphics options. Pleasingly, there are lots to tweak*, so I the pretties right the way up but turn down shadows. In my opinion, shadows don’t add all that much, and are very computationally expensive, so I prefer to have a longer draw distance and blob shadows. Even at this early stage, however, I am finding issues. The dropdown lists don’t function entirely correctly. I know how hard UI is to code, but this is a poor sign.

I log in, and select a preference for an RP server. irritatingly, the only one available is an RPvP, but it doesn’t warn me of this at all. I only notice this after I have created a character, so I have to drop all the way back out, manually select a server, then redo the character creation work.

Character creation is a staple of the RPG genre. It’s where you create the avatar that will represent you, embody all the awesomeness you want to be. Often, it is your first exposure to the mechanics of the world and the lore. In most roleplay games, this happens before any tutorial or exposition, and WoW is no different.

I get presented with a list of races. Finally there is some hint at the underlying mechanics, but no numbers to back it up, or any explanation as to what it all means. As all the details (such as “increased spirit”) are in the same text field as lore flavour text, I can’t just select them to get more information on what this will actually mean. However, I’ve played enough RPGs and read enough fantasy novels, and WoW feels fairly generic from all the descriptions. As a rule, Humans are a balanced race with few downsides, and as WoW seems no different, I go with that. Similarly for classes, it is unclear as to what they all mean. To be fair, most MMORPGs fall into this same trap, giving vague descriptions intermingled with strange words like “tank”, “dps” and “aggro”. Guild Wars might give cool descriptions, but they are similarly vague. There are some class archetypes that are staples for the genre, and tend to nicely define certain types of play:

• Warrior/fighter: Up-close meleé class that’s all about armour and hitting things with sticks, swords and axes
• Mage/wizard/sorcerer: Long-range magic casting and being made of wet tissue paper
• Cleric/healer: healing people
• Ranger/archer: distance attacks with a bow, often with an animal companion
• Paladin: Like the warrior, but with a little magic, and OCD about smiting evil

WoW seemed to have something to cover all the above, so I decided to try a warrior to see what the meleé game was like. Given it’s all about hitting things, it should be hard to get warriors wrong, but the industry has shown time and time again that it can. In table-top land, it wasn’t until 4th edition D&D that playing a fighter became as fun as playing some of the other classes. Ultima Online warriors generally needed a bit of magic to smooth the edges of the world, and in one expansion added some new casting skills specifically for fighters. Unfortunately I’ve not played a warrior enough in Guild Wars to really comment, but the joy of the Guild Wars skill system should mean that playing a warrior should just feel very up-close-and-personal.

Now that I’ve decided on a Female** Human Warrior, I have to give her a name. They insist on unique names, which is nice, but then they go and prevent spaces in names and restrict the length. If I recall correctly, my actual name isn’t possible due to the apostrophe, which always sucks. Without the use of spaces, and with the need for unique names, I’m forced to use something that sounds elvish. Ultima Online had restrictions on name length, but thanks to its international nature you could have some more interesting characters present. Ultima Online also didn’t require globally unique names, which was nice in some respects, but meant that you had to be careful when talking to people. Guild Wars, on the other hand, does require unique names, and does this by insisting on a surname. ArenaNet/NCsoft cunningly included a nice random name generator, which managed to not suck at finding nice surnames. There’s a distinct theme already emerging here, it seems. WoW tries really hard, but just ends up being a bit pants.

I’d say that I shouldn’t be too hard on WoW, given it’s age, but it’s really not that old. Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron’s Call and countless MUDs all pre-date WoW and had to address many of the same issues. And aside from things like name selection, they could have fixed many of them with time.

So, I now have “Mykaellis”, a female human warrior, and she’s ugly. No, that’s not me roleplaying, that’s the poor graphics of WoW. Don’t get me wrong – I know that they were going for a stylised look, but somewhere they tripped up. The big problem is that the texture detail outstrips the mesh detail, showing up the low poly count in the player mesh. If they had stuck to lower resolution textures, it would have looked better. The appearance options open at this point as just as ugly – a dozen heads, a couple of (bad) faces, and a selection of skin and hair colours. I can also have piercings, which are just an overlay on the texture. I make the best of a bad lot and create my standard female character, whilst thinking about how much better other games have done the same. Ultima Online is a strange example, given the 2-and-a-half D graphics, but what it lacks in dimensions, it makes up for in detail. UO has a large selection of hair styles, and players were able at character creation to dye their starting outfits. Guild Wars similarly gave you heavy customisation of starting gear colours.

Getting character customisation right is no small matter. Character creation isn’t just about making a character, it is also about bonding with your character. You want the player to fall head-over-heals for their character, to care about them deeply. This is one of the things that pulls players back in to play more. There are more advantages, too. For roleplayers, being able to completely design your character’s look is a real boon, as it means that you could have the right character immediately and jump straight into the politics without having to kit up. It also means you can wear your guild’s colours, or have a way of showing that your character has a deep and meaningful history behind them (that’s why they’re wearing black).

So, an acceptable compromise reached during character creation, and I jump into the game! Immediately I am presented with an in-game cinematic, a sweeping reveal across the landscape with voice over, setting the post-catacyslm scene. This is very impressive, and the first real sign of promise so far. It seems that I do get to experience the new, redesigned, post-catacylsm new player experience (NPE) after all! But not before I have a chance to hate everything about the default UI.

Everything about the User Interface is ugly. As I play, it becomes increasingly clear that the mouse buttons only pretend to act in a consistent fashion. Movement is heavily keyboard based, defeating immediately the classic combination of piloting with mouse and commanding skills with keyboard. The standard quest scroll font is just a little too small. In fact, everything is just a little too small. Except for whitespace, which is often over-used. The spellbook is a good example of this – tiny icons and tiny text, separated by a sea of whitespace, then dozens of tabs to make up for the lack of content on any given page. ARGH! They also commit some total faux pas, like at the bottom of tutorial pages having the marker “next [->]“, where only the “[->]” is actually a clickable button. It seems very much like the design team for WoW thought that Fitt’s law was about gyms, and not about making your buttons nice and big and easy to click.

One of the first things I am given a quest for is to go kill some things. This is promising, as it means I am getting straight to the action! Or, as it turns out, I have to manually move myself to the action and make sure I’m facing exactly the right way. This may again sound petty, but this means I can’t focus on my skills, but instead have to manually pilot my character in an awkward fashion (using both mouse and keyboard) to just the right distance and orientation. Both WoW and Guild Wars are twitch games, but WoW focuses on the meaningless aspects (movement and facing), whilst Guild Wars focuses on the player-skill parts. Ultima Online also required that you move yourself into location, however it also allowed you to pilot entirely with the mouse, making it much easier and left your other hand free to fire off skills and spells.

There’s a muted particle animation and small message in my text notification area. Apparently WoW must be attempting to be post-ironic, with the most minimal level-up fanfare I’ve seen. In most roleplay games, levelling up is a big event. In table-top games, your Games Master (GM) would proudly announce that you had leveled up, and suddenly they would have an excited room of gamers, fighting for the books to see what they get. In most classic computer RPGs, there would be a triumphant sound, sparkly lights, and a big message in the middle of the screen, then you could open your character sheet and level up like you did around the table. In Guild Wars, there’s a very noticeable sound and animation, and you gain attribute points***. Ultima Online, err, doesn’t have levels, so we will ignore that for now. Basically, levelling up is supposed to be the big moment in an RPG, and WoW makes it as boring as breathing. Actually, that’s unfair – Breathing’s more exciting, everything about how it works is cool and when it doesn’t you really know it.

The new player experience quests should introduce a player to all the key mechanics required to progress in the game, so I wasn’t surprised to soon find myself on a quest to acquire a skill from a skill trainer. What did surprise me, however, is that they expected me to pay for it. This isn’t me being tight – players of games generally don’t like to lose stuff, so a quest that is basically “lose some money for something you didn’t know you wanted” is a huge “screw you” to the player. The better way would have been to do this over two stages – firstly have the player acquire a free skill from the trainer, then have the trainer give them money to purchase a second skill. Now the player is both comfortable with acquiring skills from a skill trainer, and with paying for them.

That skill I acquired from the trainer was a rather awesome sounding “Charge”, and so I was excited to be asked to go try it out. I approved of this, as it is good design to get players to try out their new abilities immediately after learning them (Infamous on the PS3 does this very well). I head over to the training dummies, and… the skill doesn’t work. I try again, and it doesn’t work. I try a third time, and it still doesn’t work. Huh.

In my last post, I lamented the poor quality of the WoW community. Thankfully since then I was able to find the rather nice WoWpedia and WoWhead, both of which are very well maintained and documented wikis, full of very useful guides and information. So I looked up Charge, it made it clear what I had been missing – that I needed to be far enough away from my targets. Whilst there was a little tiny bit of text on the skill listing it’s range, this should have been made clear in the quest text to begin with.

Charge instantly made things better. The skill would bring me right next to my selected target, fixing the movement issue. It also was the first time I had felt cool and awesome so far in playing. This, however, was let down by the cool-down timers. Most of the UI, you see, is black. Most of the skill icons are dark colours. And the cool-down indicator that visually shows how long until a skill is ready? Yes, that’s right, it’s black. Part of the problem with figuring out the charge skill was also that the only indication of a skill being available was the quickbar button number turning from red to white, a number which is also very, very tiny.

I continued for a while, and found a couple of interesting side quests. Quite what a fire extinguisher was doing in the world was beyond me, but the firefighting sidequest was certainly amusing. However, this also let me find out that the backpack window, whilst looking in every way like a moveable window, was fixed in place on the screen. I also managed to find a bug with the quickbar.

Eventually I found myself on a quest to a neighbouring village, where I then found some Halloween celebrations underway. Given that they are special events, I’m not going to complain about them. But thanks to them, I died and got to experience the death mechanics. WoW has fairly standard death mechanics that feel a little inspired by Ultima Online, only in reverse. I don’t actually have any issue or great love for them, so instead I shall write more about death mechanics in MMOs another time. I returned to the town and camped up in the inn, having found out about WoW’s rest mechanics. I think WoW does get things right there, and that also might have to be the subject of a dedicated cross-game post.

Since I last played, I’ve had a look into replacement UIs. I have a lot of respect for Blizzard for making this moddable, however this should have never meant that the default one has so many flaws. All my investigations have found is that the WoW community is obsessed about raiding, and sadly I wasn’t able to find a nice UI to use at this time.

My adventures in Azeroth shall continue, as there’s still quite a lot more yet to see and comment on. Tonight I’m going to explore my first instanced dungeon, and perhaps encounter craft skills. Later on, I may also try out another class or two, to get a properly balanced picture.

* It’s actually debatable as to if having a large number of options is a good thing or not.
** For some reason, the client defaulted to male. I’m going to pretend that this is randomised, otherwise Blizzard will have a lot to answer for….
*** Until you reach level 20, at which point you don’t really gain any new levels, but instead gain skill points. It’s rather… unique

Well, this is a surprise. After all these years of avoiding it like the plague, I’m giving World of Warcraft (WoW) a try. I’m still a little in shock about it myself, but I keep reassuring myself that I’m doing the right thing, if for dubious reasons:

• Given my claim to know about MMO design, I should really play WoW at some point
• …and on that note, I have in the past debated WoW’s design having not actually played it. Whilst Raph would understand, having credibility is a good thing
• I’ve lost many good friends to WoW in one form or another, so I’d like to confront their drug face-to-face
• Having played Ultima Online (UO) far too much in the past, fallen hopelessly in love for it, and yet hating it like a passion, I doubt any other MMO could come as close to UO’s darkside for getting me addicted
• …and my experimentations with Guild Wars * has shown that I’m mostly immune these days to MMO addiction
• …as have my playing around and running like the plague from Facebook ‘MMOs’, Runescape and Second Life (SL) (the later two of which I may have to write more about another time) – who would have thought it, UO may have cured me of MMOs!
• I happen to have some free time at the moment, a desire to play an RPG, and a yearning for fantasy landscapes. And sadly Ultima IX: Ascension has not magically became not-crap with age
• Most importantly, WoW is now free to play! Huzzah!

Since I claim to be playing WoW for academic purposes and not at all for personal enjoyment (oh no, of course not, whatever would give you that idea? Good heavens!), I’m going to be blogging my thoughts as I play through WoW’s free trial content. As previously mentioned, I think I’ve a pretty good idea about WoW, so I’ll be seeing how it compares to my impression of it, to the other MMOs I have played (UO, SL, Runescape, Guild Wars and various Facebook things), and what I know of product and game design.

WoW is currently trundling along installing itself in the background, but already I’ve noticed a few things:

Firstly, the WoW main website is pretty and has a good overview on what it feels like to play the game, but it is lacking in real figures and in-depth content. As a total geek and life-long roleplayer, I’m comfortable with hearing of “+2 epic kingslayers”, so I felt a little dumbed down to. I suppose this is good for getting more casual players involved, though! After digging around the site for a while, I found that I could no longer see the “Play for free!” link, which was a pain.

Once I had the link back, signing up was gloriously painless. I wish most games had a sign-up this straightforward. Few basic bits of details later, and I’ve downloaded the installer and received a welcome email explaining that I’ll need the details I just entered to log onto the game. There’s also a handy link to the free account limitations, which seemed fairly standard.

The installer itself looks very pretty which, whilst non-standard, helps you feel immediately immersed. I ignore the manual link for now and get the install going, then… wait, were’s the manual link gone?! Without being able to get to the manual in one click, I’m forced to rely on the internet for my new-game-information fix – more on that in a moment. The installer itself is tiny and downloads most game content, and is actually pretty swish. I can launch the game before it’s finished, making it quicker to get playing. As a long-time Steam user, I’m not used to this at all! Thumbs up, Blizzard!

So, the game is busy being schlurped** down the interweb pipes and I set about trying to learn all I can about my new addictionobject-of-academic-study. As previously mentioned, the Blizzard site for WoW is short on game facts, and the beginner’s guide isn’t written for hardcore geeks. To be fair, most other games are exactly like this, too. Ultima Online has always relied heavily on UO Stratics to provide newbies with information. Second Life’s website looks and reads more like a realtor’s site – because they’re more in the business of virtual real estate than games, anyhow. Almost all Facebook games are as incomprehensible as they are boring (which they are). Runescape I recall had a fair amount of beginner information available, probably because of it’s younger audience and the need to get those free players hooked fast. I guess runescape can also cheat because it’s all about the ad revenue anyway***. Guildwars, however, beats everyone. There’s a great big obvious link to the Guild Wars Wiki, which is well-written, complete, and has starter guides.

The fascinating thing about the Guild Wars Wiki is that, despite being officially hosted, it is entirely community maintained. ArenaNet/NCSoft (the publishers of guildwars) really know how to generate a community around a game and keep it active and accessible. Blizzard, on the other hand, suck. Most of the major WoW wikis and blogs are awful things, that read like puff-pieces and are just impossible to understand. They also make the game sound entirely boring, which I’m really hoping it’s not.

The install is still underway, so I’m going to fire up Guild Wars to visit Nicholas the Traveler. So far it looks like WoW is living up to my expectations – all polish with little real substance. Well, we shall have to see….

* I originally accidentally typed “guidwars” here, and got images of an MMO based around Globally Unique IDentifiers. now that’s a MMO for coders! *ponders*
** Yes it is a word, because I say so
** Not actually true, but ads do cover the operating expenses for Jagex.

In my last blog post, I mentioned the following command line to replace new lines i
n text with something else:

sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n/replace new lines with this/g'

A line like this looks complex, but once you understand it, you begin to see the full power of stream editors like sed:

sed -e

This invokes sed, the stream editor. This runs programs on an input stream, one line at a time. The flag “-e” tells sed that the program to run is supplied on the command line – that’s the ‘:a;N;$!ba;s/\n/replace new lines with this/g’

:a;

This declares a label, like those for goto in C, assembler and basic. Unlike those, labels for sed begin with a colon, rather than end. The semicolon ends the statement, just like in C, and program control moves to the next statement.

N;

Load the next line into the stream buffer and advance the line index. This is the magic right here. Normally, sed operates on a single line at a time, loading only that line into the buffer. The command ‘N’ moves the next line also into the buffer, and advances the position in the stream, letting you work with more than one line in the buffer

$!

Only perform the next command if not on the last line of the document. Sed supports conditionals based on range within the file, for example $ means the last line of the file. Following a range marker with a ! tells sed that you want it to match the opposite of the specified range – in this case, every line but the last

ba;

Branch to label a. This is just like a goto. The full statement is “$!ba”, meaning branch to a if not on the last line of the file

s/\n/replace new lines with this/g

This one is slightly complex. “s” means substitute, it replaces anything that matches the immediately following pattern with the statement after that. Normally, substitution only works on the first approprate target in the material. By specifying ‘g’ (global) at the end, the substitution will be performed for every matching position within the buffer

The problem: Removing new lines from text, optionally postpending each old line with some content

The solution: Use the common tools ‘tr’ and ‘sed’ to do all the heavy lifting for you

It’s 16:52 on friday. You’re looking forward to the weekend, and your colleague has just packed up and left the office. Then you get the following email from a client:

Hey Michelle,
Can you send that incident report for that outage out to the following people right away?

jeff.blogs@client.co
jane.bloggs@client.co
playon@personaladdress.org
nighthawk@thinkstheyreahacker.com
fred@client.co
techteam@client.co
seniormanagement@client.co
everyone@client.co
reallyeveryone@client.co
[and it goes on like that for another 50 addresses]

Thankfully, you finished that report earlier, so that’s no issue. But your email client can’t exactly handle a string of email addresses, one per line. Your colleagues might have gone and manually attempted pulling them together, but you know better.

Enter your handy command line, and ‘tr’, the translation or deletion (trim, as I like to think) tool. tr is very simple – it replaces characters matching the first set with those from the second:

tr '\n' \;

So you run the above*, feeding in the email list**, and you get the below output:

jeff.blogs@client.co;jane.bloggs@client.co;playon@personaladdress.org;nighthawk@thinkstheyreahacker.com;fred@client.co;techteam@client.co;seniormanagement@client.co;everyone@client.co;reallyeveryone@client.co;[and so on]

There’s no spaces between the addresses, but that’s what tr does – it just removes and replaces, one character for one character. No matter – it might be ugly, but most email systems should be able to manage that.

But what if you wanted to add those spaces? Or that client asks for something like the below:

Hey Michelle,

Sorry to bother you again so late, but since we’re launching that new campaign tonight, the whole senior management team want text alerts for any issues. Can you set them up to go out to the following?

07700 955095
07700 933404
07700 966227
07700 967067
07700 934567
07700 910984
07700 958368
07700 957390
07700 967390
[and there's another twenty numbers]

Thankfully, text alerts are something you already do – you’ve got a lovely email-to-sms gateway setup that takes an email address in the form [phonenumber]@textnow.michelledisraeli.com. So all you need to do is remove that space from each line, turn them all into email addresses, and remove all the new lines.

Removing the spaces is easy:
tr -d [:blank:]
tr supports some predefined ranges, of which [:blank:] represents horizonal whitespace, like spaces. Then you just add the “-d” flag to tell tr that you want to delete characters, not replace them.

To add the email address details, we can’t exactly use tr any more – it can only replace a single character at a time. You know, however, that sed is able to do far more complex replacements through the magic of regular expressions:

sed -e 's/what-to-replace/replace-with-this/g'

Unfortunately, sed doesn’t like finding new lines, so you instead replace all the new lines with a unique character, and then get set to replace those:

tr '\n' \#

This gets us the ugly text:

07700955095#07700933404#07700966227#07700967067#07700934567#07700910984#07700958368#07700957390#07700967390#

Which we can then work on via sed with something like:

sed -e 's/\#/@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; /g'

Which finally gives us the output we’ve been wanting:

07700955095@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700933404@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700966227@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700967067@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700934567@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700910984@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700958368@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700957390@textnow.michelledisraeli.com; 07700967390@textnow.michelledisraeli.com;

But if sed can manage to replace regular text, why can’t it replace new lines as well? Well, the problem is that sed is a stream editor, so it normally treats new lines as a change of what to work on. To get sed to do this, you need to use a more archiaic command:

sed -e ':a;N;$!ba;s/replace/withthis/g'

This command looks crazy, but once you figure out how it works, the entire power of sed becomes visible. And that’s what I’ll explain in the next article

*Note the need to escape the semi-colon, otherwise the shell you’re using will think you’re talking to it rather than instructing tr. To escape characters, just type a backslash (‘\’) before them. Some normal letters do special things when escaped – so ‘\n’ means new line, and ‘\t’ means tab. To get tr to actually look for new lines, you need to quote it as in the above example, to get the shell to ignore the escape character.

** Need a quick means to just paste in a pile of text and then feed that though a pipe into some unix tool? try using the below, then typing ‘END’ once you’re done:
cat <<END | [some tool]
cat echoes a file or standard in straight into standard out. “<<END” redirects a program’s standard in to use whatever text you enter all the way until you type END. You can replace the word END with something else if that appears in your source material.
Whilst you can use stream input on the command you’re running directly, I find using cat and piping it in to be safest when you’re working with a string of pipes to make sure the data all enters at the correct point. It also means your workflow will be much the same when working on the command line as when working with files.

Thursday night – well, friday morning now, according to some. My life’s been extremely hectic and busy over the last few months, and a lot has changed. Family has been lost, but family has also been gained. My days are stressful, but often extremely rewarding, and I’m growing in ability all the time. I am learning to be a better manager of people and projects, and at the same time developing exciting technical skills. The Linux commandline now feels properly like home.

Home, now there’s an interesting concept. For most, this is a physical building, but I’ve yet to find one of my own to call that. The homes of others feel far more like home than the house of my own, and yet still I am searching, looking for my own sanctuary.

It’s been over ten years since I found Ultima Online and my life changed. Sanctuary back then was the game in more ways than one. It let me escape my world, and it was also the name of the roleplaying village we founded. I still look back on the game fondly, but can never play it again. The pull of the darkside from it is still too strong, yet both the mechanics and the interface are now intollerable.

I may not play Ultima Online anymore, but the people I met ultimately through it continue to shape my life in all kinds of delicious ways. And my experience within it’s communities gave me the confidence to rebuild my life anew at university.

I may have graduated from a different university in the end, but Warwick still is a central place in my life. Through it I met my girlfriend, made some of my closest friends and family, and had the opportunity to experience things I never would have otherwise.

And experiences are what life is all about. In the last few weeks I’ve clocked up some big ones, including the best gig of my life, a much needed appointment, and finding a way to carry my family with me on my journey to find my sanctuary.

I have been through a lot, and there is still much more to go. But there is promise. My life was once ruined, but I am human, and humans rebuild, better than before. This will be my journey, my rebirth,