Today is, first and foremost, my wife’s birthday. Happy Birthday, sweetheart! Feel free to wish her well in the comments…
She is also happy to share the day with Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. It’s a good day.
- Ethic
Archive for the 'General' Category Page 2 of 93
J. and the Australian Gamer Podcasters have realized an important truth, namely that most user-made content is crap. Then again, most x is crap for all values of x. The question, I comment there, is whether you have tools to separate the wheat from the chaff (to jump metaphors). The goal is to set a million people loose, let it be 99% crap, and still get the work of 10,000 talented people (and remember that even talented people produce a lot of crap to get their good stuff).
Editing is hard. I will not even get into that here, except to note that many companies edit their own stuff too poorly to consider harvesting user-made content. If your internal content-production still gives mostly crap after filtering and editing, what hope do you have?
I spent far less time than usual in MMOs this weekend. I am still in the habit of being in my computer chair, but I had a few reasonable play sessions rather than a continuous binge. The weekend felt so much longer.
MMOs are great for flow, as well as being ideal Skinner boxes. Time gets away from me (and the wife in the back row: “I know“). It was like getting hours and hours back. I’m not sure what to do with the cognitive surplus yet. I’ll probably blow it on another game. I hear that Spore is out.
: Zubon
This is what it’s all about. The day before you can first log in to a new MMO. Everyone’s talking about it. People are excited because this is the best game ever. People are holding off because all new MMOs need 6 months to really be ready to play. People are angry because it’s just more of the same old thing.
It’s a fresh start, a new beginning. New adventures with old friends. Old adventures with new friends. Finding a new guild or moving with the old guild. New game mechanics to figure out, or just to figure out they are the same as the old. A new class, a new race, a new sex. What name should I choose? Should I use the old name so people know me right away? What if someone grabs my name before me? Maybe I’ll choose a new name and new identity, I was kind of a jerk in that last game. I think I’ll create a character on each server to save my name. Ah, who cares if someone else gets my name.
What server should I choose? Maybe the first or last alphabetically? Oh I know, I’ll pick the coolest name so I will be on a popular servers. No way, I want a quieter server so I’ll go for the lamest name in the bunch. Nah, I’ll wait until they add a new server and I’ll join that one.
Anyway, for me this is where it all begins. A new game. Whatever you plan to do and wherever you plan to do it, I hope it is everything you had hoped for and more.
- Ethic
You can pack that blogline in your feedburner and smoke it! You won’t see too much Mythic hate coming from me in the the next few months I’d imagine, but their most recent decision regarding server rules, is just too grotesque to ignore.
It has been noted that nothing gets me in Yahtzee-mode faster than technical issues. I sometimes start to feel bad about this, until I remember that an MMO is a service not a product. We put up with a lot of bugs. A lot of bugs. Like, hey, whoa, a lot of bugs. If you cannot list 20 bugs in your current MMO, you are not trying, and that is before considering balance issues like “this quest is brokenly difficult and gives you jack for a reward.”
I’m an MMO player, meaning I’m a masochist, so I deal. If the bug is an account or log-in problem, I’m not a player, so I can’t deal. I can fume. Oh look, a convenient form I can send in (web form; they’re not going to give you an actual e-mail address to contact). Someone will get back to me in one to two business days. You can fill in how useful that is.
Those are infrequent. The ones that upset me more often are the ones we do put up with. Example: the boss of an instance resets half-way through and breaks, so he cannot be fought. Wait on tech support, and you are helpfully informed that they know about the issue, nothing to be done; feel free to reset the instance and start over. And we come back the next night or next week to try again. How many times have you had some variation on this discussion: “We completed it but did not get the reward.” “That sounds unfortunate, but we cannot give you the award. Is there anything else we can help you with?” I have it far less often than I used to, back before I gave up hope. Getting useful tech support is a pleasant surprise because it really is a surprise.
: Zubon
I shouldn’t blog late at night.
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- Ethic
Ethic turns down money all the time. I’ve seen the e-mails. I’m just not important enough to be bribed. [Update: someone once offered me an exclusive screenshot.]
: Zubon
Wow, that first day hit to your new MMO’s servers is going to suck, isn’t it? It will be the busiest time your game has ever had, and it will be the first time you see all its problems. Thousands of people will be hitting your account creation, billing, download, patching, and log-in systems at the same time, and thousands are already prepped to go complain about how slow/crowded/whatever these things are.
Enter head starts. People will pay you a bit more for your game in advance, or they will pre-order, or both. Open the server a couple days early and let them give it a dry run. If the account creation system has problems, oh well, you already know these are paying customers. You’ll get it fixed by the time the masses arrive. When those masses arrive, a first lump of players has already moved past the very beginning content, spreading server load and reducing crowding in the newbie areas. These are probably the hardcore players anyway, so get them in a little early to start setting up guilds and the player-based in-game infrastructure your game expects. You have spread out account creation, downloads, patching, log-in, and early content, and you got people to pay you more/sooner for the honor of helping you. Good call!
: Zubon