Author: Zubon

Life Is Good

lolcattery is a strong indicator that there has never been a better time in human history to be alive. Sending a message around the world used to take months rather than moments, and being illiterate did not matter much when you might encounter two books in your life. Now information and energy are so cheap that we use a global communications system to circulate captioned pictures of cats with odd grammar and spelling. We have so much free time that this has spawned a lolcode programming language, and serious professors of linguistics consider lolcats.

Your needs are so easily satisfied that you can spend a considerable amount of time pretending to be a digital elf. This blog is effectively a meta-discussion of being digital elves, and it is available to you for free in your home with frequent updates. You can delve into irrelevant crap like fake online lesbians or whether two imaginary spaceships pretended to bump into one another. You cook make-believe food in-game while eating a pizza you had delivered to your home.

Admit it, modern life is a pretty sweet deal. If you get a chance, you might toss a few dollars to folks in countries where information is still rare and expensive.

: Zubon

Self-Reflection

Contemplating the latest EVE brouhaha, I began to wonder why I did not give CCP the benefit of the doubt. This is not a question of whether CCP lost trust over the t20 incident (and he still works there, right?); I assume the best of people, to a ridiculous degree unsupported by the past several millennia of human history. And it is not as though I am ignorant of who the Goons are. I think it was the firing of the volunteer. I feel rather alone in thinking that is a larger issue than having a direct line to the developers.

Continue reading Self-Reflection

Landing

EVE[EVE Online] [Later update: this was probably not a real thing, at least not exactly as stated. While there may have been some official misconduct, the likely larger story is one faction from the game playing the metagame and “working the refs.”] Have you heard about the latest EVE scandal? You can read about it here or here; you can read about the previous (similar) one here, although that one did not include abuse of volunteer staff. Wasn’t it nice when the drama was just about players cheating each other? Is it an official perk for employees that you can ban people if their presence annoys your friends?

So I’m about to uninstall EVE. I am not currently subscribed, and I cannot think of anything that would make me re-subscribe at this point. Also, I do not plan to try World of Darkness Online, as I would hate to find my chantry deleted because someone’s friends’ Garou wanted a new caern.

: Zubon

Update: CCP responds. I am headed out of town, and with any luck there will be a more complete response from CCP when I get back. My apologies in advance if I have contributed to unfair accusations.

Guardians at the Gates 2: Empty Cities

Returning to a topic I started a while ago, am I on the cutting edge, or am I recommending that MMO companies commit suicide? There are several games that have tried some form of robust housing and city building/defense system, and almost all of them have been disappointing.

Asheron’s Call was the weakest performer of its crop of games, and its sequel did worse. A Tale in the Desert and Wurm Online are niche games. Shadowbane and Horizons have a recurring feature at GU Comics called “the Bug Zapper,” and Horizons still beats Vanguard as a model of how not to make a game. Star Wars Galaxies … yeah. Wish never went live. EVE Online is the lone winner of the pack, although didn’t it hit 100,000 subscribers before it added player-owned outposts and starbases? Age of Conan is the next test case, although its high violence and gore quotient may affect its results.

Is this just an apocalyptically bad idea? Perhaps the technology was not there in the past, but it is now becoming viable, like voice chat? It is not the sort of thing you can easily add to an existing game. You cannot just paste some cities on the side and call it good; that is meaningless. Where would you put it in Azeroth or Middle Earth? Shadowbane built around the idea, and it fit EVE’s existing structure perfectly. I know I am not the core MMO audience, since I do not play WoW, but am I completely in left field here?

: Zubon

Service Restored

coh[City of Heroes] I have previously complained about bugs and customer service waiting times in City of Heroes/Villains. I have had no significant issues since my return. Issue 9 had no game-breaking bugs, and what bugs there are are mostly contained within the new things (although the “fix” for perma-stealth with rescues/kidnappings is keeping me out of Warburg). Oz and others have commented on how lovely customer service has been.

I suspect these two issues are related. The more bugs there are, the more customer service needs to do, the less time it has. You will not have a 90 minute wait if the help queue is three people deep. I usually fear playing after a new Issue, but the game seems to be working rather well.

I have not had any problems with Comcast either. My internet connection has been stable for months. This is good, since the only thing that had been delaying my switch was AT&T DSL’s problem recognizing my condo’s address.

: Zubon

5 Things About Planning

Being tagged for five reasons why I blog reminded me that I was tagged for five things you don’t know about me, before my flashdrive ate my post. Rather than rewrite that, I am going to tell you about what I do for a living and the perspective it gives me on game development.

I am firmly of the belief that many gaming projects fail or are executed badly not because of any problem in design but because of poor processes. Some really creative and dedicated people do excellent and inspired work, but they have no interest in the various meta skills that keep organizations functioning and keep things organized over a multi-year project. It still works for some small teams, but coordinating operations is a separate skill set from game development, just as coding is a separate skill set from graphic design. Even people who can do it all do not have the time to do it all themselves, and it shows in games that have brilliant features but poor overall coherence or ones that consistently fail to fulfill promises or meet deadlines.

Continue reading 5 Things About Planning

Start of Darkness

Again returning to our comics section, Order of the Stick: Start of Darkness has been released. Or it should have been; I had to delay my trip to the comic shop today, which means I will not be able to check for a week or so. Anyway, if you have a copy, please tell us all whether it is worth buying. :)

: Zubon