Category: Asides

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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About

This is Ethic’s site. Because I have the most posts, my name is above his on the list to the right, so I am the one who gets many of the e-mails from people who want to pay us $2/month to post flash ads for their casinos. But if you look at our traffic, we are mostly Ravious’s Guild Wars 2 news site.

: Zubon

Wrong Context

All yesterday, I kept seeing headlines about like “Blizzard Cancels Hundreds of Flights Across the Midwest” and how many people Blizzard was forcing to stay at home. WoW has really gone mainstream. Was there a patch or something? I also heard about crashes and such, so maybe it did not go well.

: Zubon

Blogger Habit or Too Much Time in Academia?

I provide citations in conversations. If I could speak in hypertext, I would. Most people find this odd.

I once read of a language (possibly fictional) where the grammatical structure demanded that you state the source of your claim. For example, every declarative sentence would start with something like “I once read of…” or “I was thinking…” If this is a fictional language, we need to make it.

: Zubon

Scheduling and Potential Apologies

In a very unusual turn of events, I will be offline for most of the next two weeks. In fact, I am already there, having scheduled posts for my absence. I will apologize now if any of them turn out to be really inappropriate due to events that had not happened when I scheduled them. Nice boat.

I have the last of the Cognitive Surplus quotes scheduled. Also apologies to Clay Shirky and his publishers if I have gone beyond fair use. There are lots of good ideas to discuss here. I presume I am helping business more than hurting it, but that’s your call if you want me to take posts down. (The potential irony is noted, yes.)

: Zubon

Annual Safe Driving PSA

I am heading to my usual weekend-long New Year’s LAN party, and while I may no longer work for the state traffic safety office, I want to remind you to drive safely wherever you may be celebrating.

The worst time for alcohol-involved traffic crashes is midnight to 4am on January 1. Having a sober driver is a given, but I recommend celebrating somewhere you can sleep. As you know from your PUGs, you are not the problem, that other guy is, and that other driver lost count after the fourth tequila. Do not be between him and the tree. In case he missed the tree, watch for him in the morning. Your body processes about 1 drink per hour, so many people will be waking up still drunk.

If you are transporting alcohol to or from a party, put it in your trunk. There will be extra police out. You do not want questions about open container laws, and anything with a broken seal is “open.”

And if you are staying home, remember: don’t drink and tank.

: Zubon

Metaphor Breakdown

I went to a theme park recently. Yes, it had nice polish and scripted events, but you could consume all the content in a hardcore day or two, even with the lines they had around the ride spawns to stretch it out. Lots of downtime. They add like one or two new rides per year, so I probably won’t resubscribe unless I feel like grinding that rollercoaster.

There was a literal line on the ground guiding you around the park, mindlessly from ride to ride, and almost all the rides were non-interactive, just watching it happen. The most meaningful decision I made was which seat to pick; it does not even matter if you ignored the line and rode the rides in any order. I appreciated that lack of gating, but most rides had forced grouping. I initially resented the randomized player-matching system for those groups, but I never had PUG problems.

The business model was unfortunate. There was no client to download, just a short-term subscription, but everything beyond the rides and bathrooms was part of the cash shop, including all the mini-games and (get this) all the loot, although it was mostly cosmetic gear. Even basic food was in the cash shop, and there were literal vending machines for energy potions.

I went to complain about that on the boards, but I could not find the log in.

: Zubon

Strange Convergence

Since my promotion earlier this year, I have effectively been a producer for the live team in an online non-gaming environment. We have an existing application with customers and a rather large database. The backlog of bug fixes and new features has requests dating back to the day the current system went live. We have a small team of programmers and testers. We have development, test, and live servers. There is a development process, documentation that we seem to be keeping up to date, and programmers with varying degrees of “big picture” versus “get this off my desk as quickly as possible” views.

By headcount, most of my staff is the customer service team, ranging from answering phones to database maintenance (which is a higher level CSR function here). You find an exciting variety of problems when interacting with the customers. Customer service tools are very important; I wish we could spend more programmer time automating things CSRs do frequently, but we have crises and legal requirements ahead of wish list items. Based on the feedback of the customer service team, they are surprised that management is asking for feedback. My new division seems more divided and stratified than my previous one, but then it is five times larger.

All those things I have written over the years about process and organization and documentation and development cycles? I am now in charge of making sure those happen. My project for next week is changing our patch notes process to improve documentation and make sure the CSRs are fully informed about what is intended behavior and what calls for bug fixes. While I got the job because of my professional experience, my experience here may be just as useful.

: Zubon