Chi Chat

Daily Ramble 192: Chit Chat

Today’s ramble focuses around chit chat. A bit of chit chat about my Angels and the fact that they won their 3rd in a row and Shohei Ohtani got his first MLB win; A bit of chit chat about the fact that the new Eve tutorial is full of pointless dialog and not enough direction on how to play the game; and some chit chat looking at how the AL West is doing after the first week of the MLB season.

Shohei Time

Shohei Ohtani took the mound Easter Sunday as the first player since Babe Ruth to play in the opening day starting lineup as a hitter and then pitch within the first few games. The Babe did it 99 years ago in 1919…that’s how rare this is in modern baseball.

He also pitched pretty well. Besides getting the win, Ohtani looked good doing it. Sure, he gave up a 3 run home run but that was only one of 3 hits he gave up. After that mistake to Matt Chapman in the 2nd, he retired 14 of the next 15 batters he faced and left the game after 6 innings with the lead.

Firstbaseman Jeffry Marte and shortstop Andrelton Simmons each went 3–4 with some runs and RBIs scattered in there, but my player of the game goes to Ohtani.

Eve Tutorial Experience

The first thing that strikes me about the new tutorial experience in Eve Online is that it seems to take forever. There’s so much voice acting between the Aura AI and the Gallente leadership that I just tuned it out.
I suppose if it were your first time in Eve the chit chat would be a somewhat familiar time in a tutorial so that the background of the game could be explained. Lore plays a large part in most MMOs – but do people even listen to this stuff? I mean, when most players aren’t even reading quest text in MMOs these day, do they actually sit and listen to dialog in the tutorial? For my 2 cents, I think they could have easily kept the dialog but hold off until we’re flying from place to place…I mean, as I was motoring the 80 kilometers to catch up to the first bad guy, they could have chatted then since nothing was happening.
On top of all the dialog there really didn’t seem to be any easy way to get rid of it. I tried multiple times to stop the tutorial and ended up just logging out since I didn’t realize the game was gonna lock me in for the entire (what seemed like) hours long experience.

Sure, there’s a ton of stuff to learn for new players to Eve – tell them that. Don’t try to create a narrative like other MMOs, Eve is not other MMOs.

With that said, I still haven’t finished the tutorial since…Easter…but I will say they gave some good direction when it came to “Approach”, “Lock On”, and “Orbit”. In fact, I think that should be the focus of the dialog rather than all the chit chat about strikers and raiders and such. Just tell people that the Eve control scheme is different from other MMOs – there is no WASD to control your character and instead you need to use the radial menu, the right-click menu, or hot keys to control your ship…and moving your mouse around on the screen is not gonna point your ship in that direction.

Finally, while I’m not done with it yet, I really hate that the tutorial asks you to click items on the screen to “Set Destination” or “Warp to” things when those items do not exist outside the tutorial. It sets a bad example to ask someone learning a game to click on things that are not going to be a part of the game later on. There is no Aura later on telling you to “click here to set your destination” – you have to find where you want to go through the map or “people & places” search, or through a bunch of other means, but not “click here below Aura to set destination”. And there’s no mention of the Overview that I recall so far -> and that’s one of the most important parts of the user interface! All this time listening to chit chat and barely a mention of the most critical part of the game.

So far, the tutorial is a disappointment.

How the AL West was Won

With the first week of the 2018 MLB season in the books (somewhere I read that a week is considered full if it includes a Thursday since that means there are at least 4 days in the week), the American League West is pretty bunched up of course. With Houston and the Angels playing Texas and Oakland 4 times, we’ve got two teams at 3–1 and 2 at 1–3. Seattle is the oddball since they were playing Cleveland and took 2 outta 3 games from them. So I suppose for the entire division, they were 10–9 for the week which compares to 9–10 for the AL East and 5–8 for the AL Central.

The current standings look like this…

• 1 tie – Houston 3–1
  This week, the Astros head home to play Baltimore (1–2) and then they battle the winless Padres (0–3).
• 1 tie – LA Angels 3–1
  The Angels head to Anaheim to take on a team that swept them last year, Cleveland (1–2), and then the Athletics come to town.
• 3 – Seattle 2–1
  Seattle heads down to San Francisco (2–2) and then to Minnesota (2–1) for a couple.
• 4 tie – Oakland 1–3
  Oakland keeps things in the West as they remain at home to try to turn things around against Texas and then head on the road against Anaheim.
• 4 tie – Texas 1–3
  The Rangers head out to Oakland for a 4 game series and then return home to play Toronto (2–2) for a few.

I think the most interesting contest might be the Angels against Cleveland since the Tribe has really dominated my team the past few years. The other match up to watch is between the 2 4th place teams in the West – Oakland and Texas. I think after the series this week, we may have a wider spread in the standings.