Month: October 2007

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Nancy Drew more popular than WoW; EA doesn’t know what a PC is

I have a theory about game industry execs…most of them are pretty dumb. Sure, I’ve met a lot of really smart guys that “get it” and are just totally awesome. There are a few that I look up to and I try to follow their example in business, design, etc. But there are so many idiots out there that have either gotten their position by dumb luck, the ideas and work of others, or simply being in the right place at the right time, that the joke about the stereotype is actually pretty right on the mark in a lot of cases.

This is pretty self-evident in the industry. How many times have you seen a press release that has left you scratching your head and thinking “wtf?”. This usually happens when someone cancels a project or title that everyone is just dying for, or some stupid concept is greenlighted and given an outrageous budget, and the list goes on.

But I digress, lets talk about Nancy Drew for a moment, and then on to EA.
Continue reading Nancy Drew more popular than WoW; EA doesn’t know what a PC is

EVE Online – Security Breached

EVE Online had some unexplained downtime last weekend. Now it has been explained:

…we discovered an anomaly in the EVE Online Database indicating a potential exploit. Our policy in such cases is to mobilize a taskforce of internal and external experts to evaluate the situation. At 12:57 that group concluded that our best course of action was to go completely dark while an exhaustive scan of our entire infrastructure was executed.

What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach…

Read the rest here. CCP sure gets their share of controversy.

– Ethic

Trick or Treat III

Since we like holiday events, I thought I would mention that City of Heroes/Villains starts its third Halloween event today. In addition to last year‘s features, you can also get temporary powers that make you look like any of 33 enemies (well worn territory in other games, I know). Event info here.

I like that City of Heroes has cumulative holiday events. If you missed last year’s, they recycle that code in addition to adding this year’s. And I stand by last year’s statement that trick-or-treat is the Platonic ideal of the grind. 1/minute: click, monsters appear, crush; repeat, badge.

: Zubon

Holidays

One feature I have always enjoyed about online games ever since my first MMO, Earth & Beyond, are the live holiday events. Back on E&B, the Halloween event consisted of receiving special pumpkin-launching cannons for your ship, resulting in the areas around space stations becoming large messes of splattered pumpkin bits. These days I play WoW, and it looks like Blizzard is getting better at its holiday events.

WoW has seen two back-to-back holidays in recent weeks. First up was the all-new event, Brewfest. Themed to match the real-world equivalent, Beerfest, Brewfest included some hilarious moments. In the Brewfest main event areas outside Ironforge and Orgrimmar, tents and vendors were all set up, offering quests and, of course, alcoholic beverages to keep your character wasted. Music in this area consisted of an upbeat fanfare overlaid with either Dwarves or Goblins, depending on where you were, getting drunk and joking around like madmen. One of the funniest moments I found was on the Horde side, where the Goblins were making a mockery of the Dwarven version of the event by wearing horribly cheesy Dwarf masks and calling themselves by Dwarven names.

Continue reading Holidays

You Online

Via Jonas Lamis at the Singularity Institute blog, Adam Sarner issues some predictions on life going virtual and how your personal online agent will help you interact with a virtual world.

If you are not familiar with the idea of what he calls a “persona bot,” think of it as a virtual mini-you. You tell it what sort of filters to apply to the world, and it finds things that you want to see. You already have much of that functionality in parts: spam filters get rid of e-mail you do not want, ad blockers remove ads you do not want, feeds bring you blog messages you do want, Amazon recommends other books or movies you might like, Google Alerts runs searches for you automatically. There are dozens of competing sites that want to help you find the next thing that might interest you based on your current preferences. Combine all that into one virtual agent who gives you an info dump when you check in; if it makes mistakes, tell it what to do differently.

This sort of thing reminds me that everyone needs to read Permutation City, and I need to read more Greg Egan generally. If you have other citations to contemplations of our virtual future, comments are open.

: Zubon

MyJob Online

My workplace is planning to make the jump to “new media,” which is to say “online.” Buying banner ads on a few major commercial sites was a big step for them, and suddenly I have managers trying to figure out what Second Life is. They want to engage in participatory networks and have user interaction, although they are shaky on the vocabulary there.

I have been considering how to express “time to cock” in government-speak without saying, “cock.” My manager should know that we will be creating a tool by which ten-year-old boys can send each other crickets saying profane things, both aloud and in text. My current plan is just to go with it. To heck with all restraint, this will be the most often that penises have been discussed (on-topic) in a meeting. I will go in-depth on Second Life, including defining furries, Gor, pony slaves, “attachments,” “cyber rape porn,” and that copyright lawsuit about a sex table with many functions. In today’s meeting, I described how it can be used as a teleconference site, but I should give them an accurate picture. The majority of time and space in Second Life have been devoted to gambling and pornography, and they have been getting rid of gambling.

Or do you have a better idea?

: Zubon

CoX Guilds

Tobold has been thinking about how game design affects guild life. Foton already explained this one pretty well with respect to how WoW raiding has killed guilds.

In the Cities, we have supergroups (guilds) with 75 member caps. Do y’all have caps in other games? ATitD required you to pony up more bricks and boards to increase the guild cap, but I cannot recall caps in other games. I cannot imagine that in WoW, with 40-man raids and a 75-man cap. The 75 cap might have related to something at some point. I recall the claim that it was needed for supergroup PvP raid balance, or to prevent massive lag in said raids, but since said raids are two years late with no plans to implement them, it is just annoying to have alt supergroups into which to shuttle characters.

Am I mis-recalling the normal estimate that 1/5 of your subscribers are online during peak hours? That would mean a full CoX supergroup, with no alts, would average 15 members online. This is about two full groups, which is quite enough for a game that only recently added its second raid — there is not much to do with large groups. In our glory days, I recall our Teamspeak setting up rooms because we were running two full groups at once. We never went past that, despite a massive flurry of activity.

This seems like a combination of guild and game design. Your guild caps at 75, so your active guild playerbase caps around two full groups; letting alts in caps you around one full group. Since the full group is the standard unit for task forces and high-end play, that all falls together.

It all falls apart when people leave. You have an alt SG for alts, an elite SG for folks’ level-capped characters (now alts), and the main SG. Conveniently, you can communicate in a coalition channel or a global channel across the lot of them. When people leave, though, you are already that fragmented. You may only have a dozen members in these SGs, so any loses can kill the whole thing. Now the surviving members are spread across three guilds, each of which is a collection of alts and ghosts. I know one SG that made a half-dozen alt SGs for the various hero classes, then ended up with only a few active characters in each after the next wave of MMOs came out. Do you abandon the old base and everything that went into it? There are a lot of orphan supergroups out there, inhabited by long-dormant alts.

: Zubon