With this handy and sensible definition I’m going to start using the terms on this blog with this distinction in mind.

Give me a gun and a hallway of aliens, zombies or dragons and I am just fine, but The Ship makes me terrified of going into cruise liner bathrooms least someone beat me to death with a pot or umbrella. I am not actually sure I can enjoy the game fully as I spend a lot of time finding high powered weaponry and then nervously blowing away anyone who gets in my personal space (which in The Ship is anywhere closer than 10m). I realized the other night that my favourite way to play is to sit in an armchair next to a security guard as this is not stressful. Walking around? Madness! A fur coat wearing, pool cue wielding maniac could be around any corner!

Don’t even get me started on proper horror games like Penumbra. I made it up to a wild dog (about 10 minutes in to the first game) and promptly never played again. Or how about Aliens vs Predator? I distinctly remember early in the Human campaign crawling trough some tunnel when a pipe drops that is shaped like a Alien’s head. I think I wet myself a little.

Sadly, I do love a good scary film or story. I guess there’s something about games with high personal threat and a low-power protagonist that just hits all the fight/flight centers in my brain.

Am I alone in this? Does anyone out there love game horror?

In terms of playing physical carries, as long as I have two competent tanks on the team (and you need at least two, it seems) I’m able to sit at the back of the fight and pew pew to my heart’s content. But, if my team is squishy, it’s pretty much game over. Mind you, playing Miss Fortune blends both burst (her ultimate and her double-up powers) and sustained DPS (her auto-attack). Pretty ideal for my play style right now, now if only I was a better overall player!

Oh, I have my good games – I think I can claim to be a capable jungling Rammus, (although he’s just been nerfed due to being over powered) and I can play Mordekaiser quite well (although Morde has no real role in a team fight), but other characters? Not so much.

I would love to be good with Tristana, Miss Fortune, Corki or Sivir – physical damage DPS characters – but unless the team is fairly poor I don’t seem to be able to stay alive to be much use to the team, or if I do live, I mostly seem to tickle the bad guys, not chew them down (the exception would be a high-damage, fast, crit-focused Tristana – but if I’m that fed, I should be able to cut people down). I guess one of the issues is these characters do sustained damage, not burst damage, and I’m just not convinced they’re much use if fights don’t last long. If I’m a phys DPS character, and we’re facing burst DPS types, then usually I’m dead, or I’m forced to run (because others are dead) before I’ve fired more than a few shots. Perhaps I’m doing something wrong?

Recently I’ve been experimenting with more ‘bursty’ characters and I am quite enjoying Kennen. Kennen is fast, applies some pretty great burst damage and has an area-of-effect ultimate power that synergizes well with other AOE-focused characters. As Kennen I can hang on the fringes of a fight, zip in, drop all my burst and then back out. There’s a good chance I’ve killed someone or brought two or three people low enough for the tankier team-mates to finish off. There’s no need to stand there, right clicking, hoping no-one notices me (which seems to be the dominant way you need to play as phys DPS).

Specifics example: Contrast Kennen’s play style with Corki. When I play Corki I have usually end up relying on the long range rockets as standing around right-clicking for auto-attack damage really isn’t safe (he’s damn slow, even with boots of swiftness). The rockets are nice and all, but against all but the squishiest characters they’re not going to kill someone or even take a big chunk off their health (compared to being whacked with a fed Nidalee’s spear, the rockets tickle, even when I’ve been fed). Tanks can pretty much ignore me while messing with the team (perhaps I need Madreds sooner) and if the squishier enemies get involved then if the team are competent I’m spending my time dodging tankier characters trying to eat my face. If I was playing Kennen I have the stuns, speed and burst and these features let me chose the pace of the fight to a greater degree.

My goal is to learn three or maybe four useful characters really well so that when I play ranked games I will be able to bring something useful to the team, no matter how the draft picks are going. Rammus is a good start (and I’m hoping he isn’t banned every ranked game in future) but I need a few more characters under my belt, and my lack of skillz is driving me nuts!

I figure my QQing means that I’m doing something wrong. But I’m not sure what, and I’m not sure how to correct the problem! If you have any recommendations (other than keep playing – I’m only 175 wins, 180 losses in, after all) then please let me know. Perhaps I need to study some awesome feeds or follow some advanced blogs? Or perhaps my bitter tears will short out the computer and solve the problem once and for all!

It’s an interesting email and I thought I would reproduce it here in full to highlight the fact that, by all accounts, the tool bar is entirely benign (something I found as well). That being said, I still find it a strange sort of marketing tool for Battlefront to use, and they deliver it in a strange way. Anyway, here’s the email:

Hi,

One of your recent posts at After Action Reporter (http://afteractionreporter.com/2009/03/15/theater-of-war-2-demo-adware-available-now) was just brought to my attention and I wanted to touch base and get a better understanding about some of the items that were posted there.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with our company so I I’ve listed below a few quick facts about us. I am more than happy to share with you some more  information about our company and platform via phone or email or I can have you speak with a few of our customers, partners or team members should you want to learn some more.

Here are a few quick facts about Conduit:

1) The company was founded in 2005 in Israel by 3 engineers who founded Conduit as a marketing solution that enables web publishers of all sizes to build their own community toolbar.

2) From the very beginning, Conduit was set to prove that toolbars can be used as an innovative marketing tool to help publishers better communicate with their users wherever the users are on the web. And of course proving that wasn’t easy based on the bad reputation toolbars had, and as mentioned in your post: “those things that were all the vogue for marketing companies back in 2003 and are now considered homes of spyware, adware and general evilness”. The Conduit platform is safe and it is 100% [free] from any type of malware. Our products were tested and approved by the leading security companies, certified by trust-e and past rigid technical due diligence process before signing with our strategic partners.

3) The Conduit platform introduced an innovative technology that makes the process of building and promoting community toolbars really easy and cost effective. The technology was awarded a patent and also won several industry awards. It was recognized in all of the leading  technology blogs and in a few prominent marketing publications.

4) Today, Conduit serves more than 200,000 web publishers ranging from well known US brands (30 Major League Baseball teams, Universal Music, Travelocity and many others) to non profits (Greenpeace, ASPCA), media (TechCrunch), global brands (Lufthansa) and thousands of smaller publishers. our publishers have more than 50,000,000 active users that are based in more than 80 different countries and use toolbars

5) Our business model is clean and simple: instead of charging publishers for our services we are able to offer them for free by adding a search box that is powered by Google to toolbars that are built using our platform. This way we enable publishers to offer their users with the most powerful and popular search available today on the web and save on the significant costs of software development.

Here are a few specific clarifications with regards to some of the items mentioned in your post :

1) The Conduit platform is 100% free from any type of adware (or malware for that matter).

2) As mentioned above, the search box is powered by Google. The search results or the sponsored links are not offered by Conduit and we have very little to do with them. Other Google partners are using a similar search feed MySpace (http://searchservice.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=sitesearch.results&type=Web&qry=dvd) and EarthLink (http://search.earthlink.net/search?area=earthlink-ws&q=dvd&channel=www&cgid=1&li=0) are just two examples but there are many others.

3) Conduit does not monitor toolbar usage and does not share or sell user or publisher date. This is not our business and goes our against everything that we believe in.

4) I’m not sure what you meant by “I expect a few Conduit spam-bots will turn up”. Again, Conduit does not spam and we most certainly do not send “bots” to comment on the web. I am a real person and will be more than happy to prove it (J).

5) The Conduit platform is available to publishers of all sizes for free. As such, our objective is to serve our publishers and offer them with the best tools to build a successful community toolbar and deliver their content to their users. We have very little to do with the content of the toolbars that are built using our platform and we do not distribute any of these toolbars. our business is to provide a marketing platform and support our publishers  and that’s basically it… some of our marketing materials can be found here (http://www.conduit.com/Publishers/Toolbar-Marketing.aspx) and publishers can connect with us on different social networks (click the links in the previous page to see hundreds of examples of videos by our publishers in our YouTube channel, images on our Flickr channel, friends on Facebook, etc. you can also check out our newsletter here http://www.conduit.com/news/Newsletter.aspx).

I hope that this email was helpful in providing you with more background about our company and offering. Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help or if there are any questions I can answer.

Please feel free to post my comment in your blog if you want. We work hard to keep our platform clean because of all of the “bad” toolbars that our out there and it is important that we clarify some of the points listed in this email.

I look forward to getting your feedback and I will be more than happy to jump on a quick call or communicate with you via email.

Thanks,

So there you go! Justin Timberlake might be bringing sexy back (so my wife tells me), but that’s nothing compared to Conduit bringing browser bars back! Good luck to them, I don’t have much use for them myself but I’m sure many people who don’t get RSS and whatnot find them useful.

But still, delivering this device in patches and demos. Does it make the average gamer feel better or worse about Battlefront? My feeling is worse, but I’m open to suggestions. Comment and vote in the poll and let us know what you think.

As you go to install your demo you’ll skip past the license agreement (there’s an interesting line in there, by the way, see if you can find it) and hit this info screen with interesting text at the bottom:

The text describes the toolbar,  here it is in full for the hard of squinting:

Battlefront.com Internet Browser Community Toolbar:

This new game demo includes the optional install of a new, and we think, exciting tool. This tool seamlessly attaches to your Internet browser (currently Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox supported) and gives you instant access to Battlefront.com game news, patches, demos, chat channel as well as other popular browser toolbar *gadgets* such as real-time weather reports (unique to your hometown!), a spell checker and pop-up blocker. Fully user configurable and expandable, your new Battlefront.com Community toolbar unlocks the full potential of your Internet browser to keep you connected with the ever-growing world of Battlefront.com games and resources! You can fine more details on this new free utility here: http://www.battlefront.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=388&Itemid=212

Sounds pretty normal, I suppose, as normal as one expects from Adware toolbars. I’m impressed to see it has amazing features like spell checking (already in Firefox) and pop blocking (already in both current browsers, I believe), amazing! If you follow the link you get to a fairly detailed page of info on Battlefront.com.

From there you get the browser bar option. Everything is ticked by default:

And then the browser bar install itself, which looks like this:

For what it’s worth the license is unremarkable. Once installed, your browser will pop up with the browser bar installed and a welcome page:

And now, lucky you, you’ll have the browser bar installed! But does it do anything bad? Well, one can use it to keep up to date with Battlefront’s news, join an (empty) chat channel or engage in a myriad of eCommerce related things through the clicking various buttons. Of interest is what happens when you conduct a search using its search box. Here I searched for afteractionreporter.com:

Using WireShark to watch the traffic one notices that instead of heading off to Google to pull results your search is routed through a server owned by Israeli company Conduit. Conduit is the company behind this browser bar and it seems they love to return your Google’s results, but populated with their ads (and not Google’s, I note)! Lucky you! So, instead of getting straight Google results from their search bar you get Google results plus about ten spammy ads at the top of the search list. No doubt this is how Conduit makes money – along with all of their sponsored weather and shopping links.

So is the toolbar really evil? Well, we can’t see anything particularly worrying about the traffic generated by the bar, other than the ad-bloated Google results, but we haven’t dug around too much. I would be interested to know if Conduit monitors your browsing, the bookmarks you add to the bar and other bar activity. Thankfully, the uninstall process is quick and easy and I can’t see any evidence of anything worrying left behind.

By all accounts Conduit is a “legitimate” eCommerce company, well, as legitimate as you feel anyone who installs browser bars can be, but the question is, why is Battlefront using their service? I imagine the Battlefront developers naively think this is some sort of nice community building tool, but for me the browser bar idea is extremely odd. If Battlefront wanted to help me stay in touch with their latest news, how about leaping into the 21st Century and RSS-enabling their news/home page? They’ve already managed it for their blog, after all?

To me, this browser bar idea feels amateurish and indicates that Battlefront don’t really understand their audience (or at least, not me). What’s more, were I new to Battlefront, packaging the bar with a demo doesn’t exactly build my confidence in their professionalism. What do you think?

ps. I expect a few Conduit spam-bots will turn up. Wherever the browser bar is mentioned on the web you get a series of slightly-mechanical feeling promotional comments by “users”. Fingers crossed some of them turn up!