Life as a medic is harsh

One of the reasons I didn’t like playing medic is that you have to take the passenger seat in killing and doing objectives. Your goal in the game is to keep your team alive and support them in the push towards the objective. Sure you’ll be top of the scoreboard with assists and healing but you won’t be getting the satisfaction of a kill. The second reason I don’t like playing medic is that you are the bullseyes that everyone wants to kill. Getting close to an uber? Count on a crit rocket or a spy coming around your way. As other classes if I get killed, I don’t mind but with medic, it’s often when I’m past 75% in an uber charge that just got wasted and now I have to build it back up again. It’s just one of those laws of life where you count on something bad happening to you as you near the climax of joy.

Try surviving this without an Uber

What I found to make playing medic a much more enjoyable class for me to play is to be an offensive, or as other people call it, battle medic. If I see a large chance of myself being killed and I don’t have faith in the person I’m supporting to protect me, I’ll break off the healing beam and go for the kill with my saw. If I survive, my ubersaw gets a nice charge bonus, if I die, I would have died anyways so it’s better to die while trying than to die with the medigun pointed at the enemy. Other times, I just can’t resist the lure of an easy kill as there’s something satisfying about getting the drop on enemies and humiliating them with a kill.

Your medic is mine!

I don’t know if by being a battle medic I cause more harm to my team by dying instead of staying back and safe, but I do know it’s a lot more fun to run around causing distractions as the enemy try to hunt down an almost harmless medic. Lately though I’ve been moving away from medic. If I see there’s other good medics on the team, I’ll just stick to medic for the initial push out of the gates until I die. Sometimes however, we end up winning the round without me dying at all even with battle medic attacks on the enemy frontline.

The next time you play with me and I’m your medic, remember, if I see an easy kill, I’ll take it, even if I have to kill steal from you. If you’re the enemy, don’t think I’ll stick around with my medigun out waiting for you to kill me, I’ll go down trying to take you with me.

Moments later, we discover an all medic team only gets you to the second point

By the way, I use to prefer playing pyro back in the days, now there’s too many pyros running around not doing a good job of supporting the team so I decided to give heavy a try.

Burn baby burn

I had a blast at GDC and exploring the show floor. I only attended for two days but it was enough to explore what the show floor had to offer.

NeuroSky

One of the first products I saw was the NeuroSky monitor headset. They were showing off how it can read your brain waves and did a tech demo on what you could do. The one I tried had me focus my attention on one object making it explode and another had me relaxing to have a ball float up.

It was an interesting technology and the company stated that they were looking for developers to use their tech in games. The focus was in rehabilitation for people disabled by injuries as the machine will help the player learn how to control their brain waves. These brain waves could be used in mobility devices so instead of a user physically moving a part of their body, they can just think it and the appliance will move as if it’s part of the body.

www.Neurosky.com

The screen showing the Brain Waves

Making the Ball Float 

Me with the headset on

Boryokudan Rue

When I first glimpsed Boryokudan Rue, I immediately thought back to the adventure games of the 90s. The game is built on the Adventure Game Studio engine. What immediately stood out for me was the use of a cover system and gun fights. Adventure games I’ve played were always light in heart, had comedic violence, and no real enemies that could kill you. Just delay you or reset you to an earlier part of the level.

The level being showcased at GDC was the tutorial level and the character you play, Delta Six, is a experimental subject who has lost his memory and the tutorial serves as a way to teach you the basic movements. Once the scene got to the gun tutorial, I was hooked. The player goes into cover and you have to manually choose when to go out of cover and aim. Once you aim there is a quicktime like meter where you have to hit the right range to get the headshot or a regular body shot. I didn’t see what happened after but as I understand, eventually you must figure out how to get the gun and break out of your containment.

Below are links to the developer’s twitter and the development thread.

 http://twitter.com/thejburger

http://www.jburger.blogspot.com/

http://www.bigbluecup.com/yabb/index.php?topic=35594.0

Monaco

Monaco was the gem of the show for me. I got a brief 5 minute play of it but the game, event though it’s 9 months from release, it’s amazing. Monaco is a 4 player coop game where you and your 3 friends must steal a trophy and escape while avoiding guards with guns and bystanders who will report you on sight to the nearest guards. All you need is the movement keys, and your ability key. Interactions with doors, windows, and alarms can be done just by walking into it. Each character has a different ability such as shutting off alarms, instant lock picking, spy cameras, and sedatives for guards.

If one character gets killed, another just has to walk over and revive them. This proves tricky however if the dead buddy happens to be in the line of sight of a guard. What the players need to do is either sedate him with the yellow character or distract him by having the guard chase another player. Teamwork is an absolute in order to survive and reach the end in this game. This is one game I’m looking forward to.

http://www.facebook.com/MonacoIsMine

http://twitter.com/MonacoIsMine

3d Games at GDC

The 3d games at GDC did not impress me. For one, the 3d glasses did not fit over my eye glasses. The games didn’t really look special with 3d on and it didn’t really pop out at me. The 3d effects suffer from the small pc monitor sizes and the distance to the monitors. The ones I tried had you 5-6 feet away from the monitor and the 3d was contained within the monitors unlike in the movie theatres. The problem I think likes with the fact that in theatres, the screen fill sup your entire field of view so everything you see is in 3d while on the show floor, you had the environment to contend with.

I don’t think 3d games will be big until people get larger screens into their homes to fill up their view. Also, the glasses never sat right on my nose and some of them I had to hold in place in front of my eyeglasses.

Overall, GDC was a nice experience. I think I’ll go back again for 2011 and might pay for the higher priced passes so I can attend the summits.

When I started off with Rainbow Six as my first first person shooter on the PC, I had no inkling of this game mechanic called "respawn." When you died in the game, you had to wait until the end of the match. Depending on the map and type of players, it could take one minute to the end or in some cases, 20 minutes. This is where I learned about patience as all the dead players talked amongst themselves and watched as their last teammates get lost within the map and keep passing by each other without noticing. There would be talks about nice shots, tactics, and general everyday life during these afterdeath waiting periods.

As I continued my first person shooting career, I moved onto Delta Force series which introduced me to elements such as medics, spawn camping, and most importantly, the "Press Spacebar to respawn or wait for a medic" popup. I was amazed at the idea of being able to be brought back to life and how it made so much sense to me. The Delta Force series is about large groups of people battling other large groups of people while in Rainbow Six it was just your squad vs another squad with limited numbers on a small contained area and not a battlefield. Essentially, on the battlefield between factions, the leaders would not just send in some small unit, they would send their army to battle it out and continue to send in reinforcements so that the battle can be won.

I continued my FPS career through the years and when I hit Team Fortress 2, that was the first time I came across people complaining about respawning. "Respawns are TOOOOOOOOO LOONNGGG!!!!!," "Valve should balance the game for instant respawns, it makes the game better!" "Respawn timers were put in because Valve is too lazy to make good maps!" were the arguments I heard against timers.

It just doesn’t make any sense for me. Respawn time is there for you to observe your team, learn from their movements and strategy on where to go, what to do, and to celebrate awesome kills that people perform. Respawn time is also the perfect time to get up, stretch, relax, or use the bathroom. In an Arstechnica article I read, (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/02/study-fps-deaths-provide-sweet-relief-to-victims.ars) , there was a study into the effects of killing and dying in the videogame, "James Bond 007: Nightfire," and the study showed that with each kill a person got without dying, their stress increased while being killed gave them relief. I would say this mirrors my response in every shooter I play. When I kill another player, it adds to my kill streak, I become fixated on keeping my kill streak high and staying alive. I become even more paranoid of everyone around me, and I notice this happen to other players as well. As their kill streaks increase, they retreat out of battle faster and faster in fear of losing their awesome streak.

I always value each one of my deaths in any multiplayer game. I think back about my actions and how I would have handled it differently instead of staying stuck in the past about what should have or could have happen. I imagine the new scenario and practice it so I can change my timing. One example I would use is with the airblast on the pyro. With the Demo/Soldier update, I have dramatically increased my airblast reflection rates after many deaths and trying to understand when each soldier fires their load off and what is the best time to reflect.

Personally, I hate instant respawn in all first person shooter style games. For one, it doesn’t give me any sense of consequence for doing a foolish action that gets me killed and the game just says “It’s ok, now get back out there and do it again and again. ”I always feel like there is this pressure on me to move as fast as I can as soon as I spawn and I keep my body and senses in the "fight or flight" mode for an extended period of time. The body thinks there’s a threat everywhere, your heart starts beating, chemicals start filling your body and your brain shuts off non-vital processes of your body. Eventually, your body will deteriorate from this heightened state of alert and now things become more serious as video games start having a detrimental effect on your body.

To my readers, what kind of respawn mechanics do you like? Instant vs timer?

Games with one life are also fine

I first encountered Windows 98 in 1999, when we got a new computer and my parents allowed me to buy my first pc video game. That game was the original Rainbow 6 and every day, the Windows 98 startup sound would echo through the house from my speakers as I began my PC gaming career. Windows 98 is my childhood; it was there when I began PC gaming, it was there when I began my foray onto the internet and all its wonders and horrors; and it was there when I finished elementary school. Windows 98 is why I am here today. That startup sound will always remind me of my childhood and I will always hold it dear to my heart.

To explain further, that was the operating system where I truly began exploring other games available to me. Before then, I was just another kid who sat at home all day watching tv, but now, with my 56k modem and AOL, I began learning about things like other internet speeds, lag, and courtesy (back then where I played, there was no flaming, people were actually nice and helped each other out). It was like a sort of awakening for me. Windows 98 was the platform when I started making friends who didn’t care how I looked, just that I was a nice guy who played games with them. That’s all they needed in order to start a friendship and become a community. It was because of these friends that I made I was gradually introduced to other kinds of PC games such as real time strategy in Age of Empires, Role Playing Games in NeverWinter Nights, and text games called Multi User Dungeons (MUD). I would even say that because of Windows 98 and its introduction of video games, that I began geeking out and learning about technology and made me the “computer guy” in my family.

Without Windows 98, I might not have become a PC gamer, I might not have begun my education into learning the latest tech, I might not even have all these e-friends that I now have and the communities I belong to which has lasted longer than real life groups and friends. So to Microsoft, Thank you for Windows 98 and beginning my career of pc gaming.

P.S. I also won Cities XL, woot!

All the Quachs I’ve met in San Francisco have similar backgrounds, born in San Francisco, parents are from Vietnam. The differences among the group is the language they speak. I’ve met some who speak a dialect of Chinese called, TeoChew and Vietnamese, while others grew up with only Vietnamese as their primary language. All the relatives in my family  can speak both languages fluently but can only read and write in Vietnamese.

When I asked my mom if we were Chinese or Vietnamese, she would always tell me to tell everyone else we’re Vietnamese. The only problem was that I never learned Vietnamese from my parents or even learned much of TeoChew from them. Things get awkward when I meet other Quachs and they begin to speak to me in either Vietnamese or TeoChew and all I can reply is that I never learned the language.

I never even knew how to spell out the name of the language I grew up learning until a few years ago when I found the Facebook group called, “Quach is better than your Last Name” and found out that TeoChew is the official name. My family pronounces it “Chew Chao” which is also known as Chaozhou, located in Eastern China.

Image from the Facebook group 郭 family (Guo, Kwak, Kwok, Quach, Kaku, 곽)

For the family name of Quach, it turns out it has different spelling and pronunciation depending on the country but maintains the same character of 郭. In Mandarian, the character is Guo, Cantonese it is Kwok, and Vietnamese is Quach. In my family, we pronounce all the letters in the name. It sounds almost like “crouch” (a nickname some kids would give me in school) as the “ch” in the name are not silent. Another version I’ve heard makes Quach sound like “Kwok” which I guess is the more mainstream version as every teacher I’ve ran into pronounces my name as “Kwok.”

I’ve figure that if anyone asks where my family is from, I’ll just tell them I’m Vietnamese that speaks a dialect of Chinese. I have relatives in California, Texas, New York, Germany, and the rest in Vietnam, but none that I know of from China as all the family my parents have grew up in Vietnam. My ancestors probably did come from China but seeing as how most of my relatives live in Vietnam all their lives, I say it’s safe to say I must have some Vietnamese blood in me.

There’s nothing like eating gods for breakfast as the Ghostbusters return to save the world once again from the minions of evil. Developed by Terminal Reality, Ghostbusters the video game is, in the words of its co-creator Dan Aykroyd, “this is essentially the third movie” and it shows through the cinematic and interactions with the main characters.

For those of you who don’t know who or what the Ghostbusters are, Ghostbusters is a science-fiction comedy film made in 1984 about parapsychologists, doctors who study the paranormal, who decide to open up their own ghost hunting firm. Things start off slow for the Ghostbusters but an increase in paranormal activities rockets the Ghostbusters ahead in jobs. Two movies later, a few possessions, and the defeat of a Sumerian god, Ghostbusters became a hit in the late 80s and becoming a classic.

The Ghostbuster video game has its own sordid history. When the publisher Vivendi merged with Activision in 2008, Ghostbusters was one of the titles not confirmed for release through the new Activision Blizzard publisher. By the end of 2009, Atari announced it would be releasing the game in the United States in June 2009 for the 25th anniversary of the Ghostbusters franchise.

When I picked up this game for $30 on pc, I had low expectations. Multiplayer was not included, video games of movie franchises are not known for being good, and I wasn’t really a Ghostbuster fan having only seen the movies as a child once.

The game puts you in the shoes of a new recruit during the Thanksgiving weekend, two years after Ghostbusters 2. A psycho kinetic surge sweeps the city of New York and a resurgence in ghosts break out through the city. The Ghostbusters get to work on investigating the cause of the surge and the return of a familiar Sumerian god.

Throughout the game, your weapons are upgraded to include different function for different ghosts and uses. Each weapon has dual functions such as a massive missile like energy blast, a slimer, a freeze ray, , and even a homing machine gun like the one found in the movie, Fifth Element. The recruit himself is only known as the Rookie as the Ghostbusters don’t want to get attached to him in case one of the new weapons blow him up and this works well in the story of the game.

The game is more like an interactive movie and you are the spectator who helps drive along the story. The Rookie never speaks and the only sounds he makes are screams or grunts in the game as the real stars are the main Ghostbusters who explain the events in the game to you and how everything relates to the previous two movies. The amount of tie ins and how all the events in the previous movies were all part of one large master plan really did give me a sense that THIS is a movie. Although, towards the end of the game the story begins to lose steam and it just becomes a “the evil guy is there past all the mazes, go get him.”

For gameplay, at first the controls felt very laggy to me, especially the mouse movement. After tuning the sensitivity a bit and an hour, I got the mouse controls down. The camera controls are decent and good enough that you can move around to follow ghosts zooming up above you but it also took a while to adjust to.

Almost every furniture, decoration, and items laying about are able to be blasted apart or used by ghosts and sent careening throughout the room which really adds to the feel that you are the classic property destroying Ghostbusters of the films. However at times, there are so many interactions going on that my computer started slowing down at these scenes dipping below 15FPS until the effect wore off. One scene in particular early on in the game involving water flooding a hallway required me to lower the graphical settings for that section.

Scanning the Librarian Ghost

There are some frustrating mechanics in the game though such as the knockdown effect. You and your fellow Ghostbusters will be knocked around, a lot, by the ghosts and their weapons. The normal amount is 3 knockdowns within a short time and you’re incapacitated and must wait for your teammates to come by to revive you. There are points in the game where enemies can swarm you and quickly incapacitate you and your team at the same moment at which case you’ll have to reload from the checkpoint again. That would be alright with me if it were not for the long load times in the game. Each time a map is loaded, it took around 40 seconds at the loading screen as the game seems to load an entire level so each level has one loading screen but at the cost of longer time spent starting at a black screen saying “Loading.”

Reviving a fallen Teammate

Aiming and using the different modes of proton packs are easy to learn and using your PKE meter + goggles to scan ghosts before you fight tells you the weakness of each ghost and what weapon mode works the best against them. For each ghost you capture and scan you complete, you receive money that you can put towards buying upgrades for your proton pack to increase how long you can fire and the strength of each weapon. One upgrade I particularly like is the slam dunk upgrade which allows you to just slam a ghost into the trapper to capture the ghost immediately without having to wrangle it into the capture cone.

The energy meter of the ghost shows around the crosshairs

Each ghost has a little meter that shows up on your crosshair that shows the energy that they have. You must deplete the negative energy of these ghosts with your proton pack so that they are weak enough that you can use your trap and contain the ghosts. When the ghost is weak enough, your proton stream automatically turns into a capture stream that holds on to the ghost while your wrangle it in over your laid out trap. Using the right mouse button allows you to toss the ghost around in your stream to the walls, ceilings, or floor of the area to daze the ghost allowing you an easier time to draw them down into the trap.

Capturing a ghost

The graphics and sound do their job well within the game and the proton pack is extremely detailed as it should be. It tells you all you need to know in the game, your current weapon mode, heat lode on the proton wand, your health, and the PKE meter hanging from it even changes color to show hidden object nearby. Although the lips seem to lag during cinematic, the actors really bring out their enthusiasms for the voice acting although Bill Murray sounds a bit more deadpan than usual during his scenes.

The Stay Puft doesn’t look very happy

If you’ve watched the movies, you’ll understand things a whole lot better for the story in the game. If you’re looking for choices or ways to change the story, this game is not for you. It’s shooting and capturing on rails and you only have to activate key spots to advance the story along. The game is also quite short coming in at around 7 hours for me to complete and get all the hidden artifacts and scanning every new ghost in the game. Although the ending felt rushed, the timing felt right as I began to get tired of all the ghost capturing and the waves of ghosts being sent towards you near the end. It was a nice, enjoyable, and funny continuation of the Ghostbusters franchise and I would recommend it to all Ghostbusters fan and for everyone else, you will enjoy the game as long as you know about the key plots from the previous games.

June 1st, 2009, the day I lost faith in Valve. Left 4 Dead 2 was announced and I was in utter disbelief. I come home from a hard days work and start reading the rants on my twitter stream about a Left 4 Dead 2 and I could feel the anger that they were feeling. Announced seven months after the original, and to be released one year after the original at full retail price of $50,  that’s just not something Valve does.

Historically, Valve takes a long time to do any sequel but they make good games. Take Team Fortress 2 for example, I bought it bundled with the Orange Box only because I wanted episode 2. Everything else was just extras I was willing to pay for. I bought Orange Box for $45 and would have at the time, valued Episode 2 at $25, Portal at $15 and Team Fortress 2 itself at the full $45 because that was how fun and non beta like the game was. Team Fortress 2 felt like everything that needed to be there was there, all the classes felt balanced and there didn’t feel like a need to patch anything.

In the first six months of Team Fortress 2, the Medic unlocks were being released along with the new mode, Payload with the map Gold Rush. There were countless custom maps made, both horrible and good, and communities were founded around the game.

With Left 4 Dead, I have yet to join any custom server with any custom map nor do I intend to. With the server browser hidden away you can’t discover new maps to try out and the Left 4 Dead steam forums only talk about the Valve created maps, not any custom maps or any discussion for the custom maps. With the lobby process, there are no ties to any particular server unless the players know a private one from their own community before playing Left 4 Dead.

I could tell right away in the first week of the game that unless custom maps were released in a few months, people playing the game would be burned out from knowing all the maps inside out, with no important variable change. That’s why I liked the random tank and witch encounters and always playing survivor. You never knew what was waiting around the corner and you were always excited. Once Valve removed the luck variable, the games just started to drag and I started getting frustrated more and more with the minor bugs and glitches that would cause me to die.

By the time the Survival DLC was added in late April, I had already grown tired and burned out with Left 4 Dead. The new survival mode just didn’t draw me in and felt like a cheap add on where they just lock you in a room and turn on panic mode forever. The new Versus maps just felt too limited in spaces for infected to hide or attack from, unfinished in numerous out of bounds walls and ceilings, unbalanced towards the survivors, and today still feature the bug that lets infected players spawn before the survivors even leave the safe room.

It feels like Valve already know they’ve missed the prime time for Left 4 Dead 1. For me, the first six months of a game determines its worth. Left4Dead was not worth the $45 I paid to beta test this game for the past 7 months. Suggestions the players put in, the bugs they’ve found, will of course carry over into the sequel. Left 4 Dead feels more like a $25 game and the Survival pack does not cut it with the two versus maps should have been in since the start.

By saving the content they had planned in the original for a sequel, they can jump start their failed game after spending all these months gathering data from all the beta testers. Plus, it is for the console market which has no understanding of expansion packs. They’ve been exposed only to yearly sequels thanks to EA and apparently enjoy buying the same game over and over every year.

Left To Hang

For PC gamers, we actually remember when extra missions, monsters, characters, weapons were in expansion packs and only recently did games seem to start offering expansion pack content as free updates with the proliferation of broadband connections in households.

If Left 4 Dead 2 were priced as an expansion, I would gladly buy it, but at full retail price as if it were an entirely new game? That’s just shows to me that Valve is turning into the money hogging sequel every year publisher that EA has become.

Valve had initially announced similar update plans for Left 4 Dead as Team Fortress 2 such as new maps, new weapons, and new unlocks but with the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement, we learn that the team immediately focused resources into creating a sequel instead of using the resources to add onto the life of the original. If the new content were planned for the original, and they knew it would be a large increase in content, why not plan for an expansion instead of continually developing content which they knew would never make it into the original game for free.

If I had a choice, I would say keep the new characters, melee, special infected, and locational damage for the common infected to the sequel, but bring over the campaign and other weapon types.

Anyways, knowing Valve/Turtle Rock Studios, either Left 4 Dead 2 will be shipped as a beta like Left 4 Dead 1 or it will be delayed to Summer 2010.

Below is a link to the Boycott Left 4 Dead 2 Steam community and a few videos with player’s reactions to the announcement.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/L4D2boycott

YouTube Insights, YouTube’s version of analytics, is a wealth of information to content creators who want to know who watches the creator’s videos, how time people spend watching the videos compared to other videos of similar length, and even tells you where the viewers are coming from.

When Valve’s Left 4 Dead was released in November, 2008, I began recording gameplay and uploading select parts to YouTube. One of the very first videos I uploaded that month was titled “Oh look, a witch.” Since then, I’ve been amazed at how much traffic that one video has generated. In the period of November 28th, 2008 to April 10th, 2009, the video accounts for 15% of my total viewership.

It’s quite astounding considering how boring the video was. I wasn’t quite sure WHY so many people would want to see that video. Were they finding it by looking at my past videos? Did it show up in searches? The answer was provided to be in the “Discovery” tab.

83% of my viewers came from related videos

The videos that are related

From what I can tell, most of the other related videos were uploaded around the same day as my “Oh Look a Witch” video. During that period, there were few left 4 dead videos and the only videos out on YouTube were the trailers, intro to the game, and some gameplay from betas earlier on. My guess is that being one of the few videos that contained gameplay from the full game, people were interested in seeing how the game looks and plays like.

A look at the view counts shows that one of the highest peak is right before Christmas. Right when people would be getting their presents and are anticipating the Left 4 Dead surprise.

I get another high peak around the time that Valve offers the 50% off sale for Left 4 Dead in February. Could the release and sales of games have an impact on YouTube viewership? Are the sudden spikes due to people wanting to find out more about the game before they buy it? I know from my own experience, I always look on YouTube to look at how the game is played before I even look at reviews for the game. If I like what I see, I go on to read the reviews and then decide if I want to purchase the game or not. Perhaps this is the same for the other YouTube viewers? Maybe publishers should start advertising more on video websites like YouTube to capitalize on the fact that people will be looking to these sites for more information about the publisher’s game.

Countries that viewed my video

Hotspots compare viewership for each moment in video

The great thing about the Hot Spots tab in YouTube Insights that it compares when viewers leave your videos compared to other videos of similar lengths. From the “Oh it’s a witch” video, I can see that the moments leading up to the elevator, I’m losing viewers, but once I start attacking the witch, the viewers stay on until the witch dies and it lowers off again. The ending peak is due to the last few seconds of me climbing up the ladder with Zoey above me.

Looking at my demographic data which shows that males make up a large percentage of my viewers and the ages of 13-17 are also a large percentage of my viewers, I can hypothesize that my viewers only want to see the action parts of my videos and Zoey’s butt. I should give my viewers what they want, right? I’ll keep looking at my Insights data to better tailor what my viewers want so be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, which can be located here and be on the lookout for future videos.

Now onto the title of this blog, “Pronounced My-Kee-On.” Quite an odd title isn’t it? Well the alias I’ve been using for since 1998 in the online world is “mikeon.” I was a kid at the time, trying to think up a name for a multi user dungeon (MUD) game called Arcane Nites. I wanted an RPG sounding them and “mikeon” sounded RPGy at the time and thus, “mikeon” was born.

It wasn’t until I started playing in games where voice communication started to emerge that I began to realize “hey, everyone is pronouncing my name wrong! They’re calling me “mike ON” instead of “my-kee-on!” It never really bothered me though and I just went with whatever people would call me. When asked how to pronounce the name, I would reply the correct way. Although, I have to admin, I have no idea what kind of tonal sign I should but on top of the name to make it easier to tell it’s not “mike ON”

Perhaps with this blog, things may change.