Category: General

What gets rewarded gets done. You know this because your game has incentivized you to do insane things that you would never have done on your own, like camp the same spawn for days or wake up at 4am to play an online game at just the right moment. (Also, job, you get money for being there.)

Your decision as a consumer is essentially binary: buy or do not. (There is no try.) If you are willing to give them your money right now, your message is that this product is worth what they are asking for it right now. MMO players are famous for complaining endlessly about games and then sending the $15 anyway. Because hey, maybe they will take the money as a sign that you have hope rather than that you approve of where it is right now, right? Mmhmm. Do you have a lot of products in your life that you buy in the hopes that they will use your money to get better later?

Maybe they will get the proper interpretation, that you are unsatisfied but consider it the best option available. All companies have competitors, and a new competitor or product might steal your business if they do not improve. Mmhmm. Or are you one of the two dominant MMO player types: sticks to a game for years through thick and thin, or jumps from new shiny to new shiny in search of The Game? There is some margin at which they need to fight to keep some customers, but that is just triage, and almost all the vocal players are in the “no help needed” and “no help possible” categories.

Your only threat is your ability to take your money and leave. Yes yes, and take your guild with you, we know how important and influential you are. The key thing is that you must carry out your threats. Talk is cheap, and years of indignant forum posts have devalued it further. Threatening to cancel is not threatening. It is a low-cost signal, something anyone can do with no effort, and without actually canceling. You will think of reasons to give it another month or two. That’s how human psychology works: you will rationalize why you should keep doing what you are doing. It works the other way too: once you cancel, you will find ever more things that they must do to regain your patronage.

This is not complex game theory. You have one tool.

: Zubon

Bonus points if someone can find me that quote along the lines of “shut up and send me your $15 little man. I need to make payments on my Ferrari.” My Google-fu is failing me on an approximate quote search, and I cannot remember the site that archived fun bits like that. to commenter Afterhour, and having the exact quote led me to the wiki I wanted.

Our friends at GamersInfo.net say this:

No game shall be compared to another game unless it is a sequel. All games should be reviewed on their OWN merits or you run the risk of the player not understanding the comparison.

You may notice that I work on more or less the opposite philosophy. I see everything in a web, with connections to all the other places from which this game got its ideas. I might throw in some books and movies too. I am also quite happy to label a game as “[existing game] +/- 5%.” Because if you are not going to innovate, I am not going to pretend you started with a blank page. If you already know the industry standards, saying how this game differs slightly is how I will express myself most clearly. If you do not know the industry standards, you are probably not reading a MMO blog.

But we love our friends at GamersInfo.net and wish them well on their approach to things. We are just not that kind of site.

: Zubon

My gamer buddy Andrew was late to my wedding reception. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought I had more time.” His wife looked irritated, but we just had to laugh.

Andrew had perhaps the worst time management skills in the world, a bad trait for a gamer, when there is always another shiny a few minutes further along. Or maybe he just always underestimated how long things would take. Whatever it was, his line was invariably, “I’m sorry, I thought I had more time.” We would occasionally hear it as he ducked out near the end of an instance, as he headed off to some event or late to bed. Mostly his wife Sharron heard it as he finished his playing with us. Many a night, as he was shutting down TeamSpeak, we completed it for him in chorus as his connection closed part-way though. Did you get the dishes done while I was out? “I’m sorry, I thought I had –” Honey, we were supposed to leave twenty minutes ago. “I’m sorry, I thought –”

Andrew was 24 when the crash happened. Sharron raced to the hospital when she got the call, but Andrew never made it. 24. I wonder what he was planning to do; we never discussed career plans much. I wonder how many more hours he would have spent with her instead of us if he had known. We never really meant it when we said those would be his last words. He didn’t even get the chance to say them. I’m sorry, Andrew, we thought you had more time.

: Zubon

The near-universal consensus I hear is that Spore is four poor mini-games packaged with an odd version of Master of Orion 3 and a great creature creator. The connection between the games is weak, so you might as well play the good versions sequentially. Impressions of the spacefaring game vary, with the advice to expand gradually to avoid getting overwhelmed by every species out there; the most common comment I have seen is that your ability to do much interesting is limited because your worlds are constantly under attack and need personal attention.

That would be the most common comment on gameplay. The most common comment I have seen is that it comes with the worst digital rights management system ever invented, one so problematic that EA has threatened to ban people for talking about it. That is in the MMO sense of “you cannot play anymore,” not just banned from the forums. Maybe I could try it if they use Steam for distribution. And have a sale.

: Zubon

I am in an abusive relationship with my cat. That he contributes nothing to the household except his presence is a given. He wants to be left alone to do his own thing for most of the day. When he wants attention, though, he wants it now and he wants it on his terms, or he will crap on the floor. He wants attention at odd hours, usually when I would prefer to be sleeping.

Given the chance, he will gorge himself to the point of vomiting. I get to clean that up too.

: Zubon

Every time I see “KOTOR MMO,” which is more or less constantly in the VirginWorlds feed there, my brain first registers “KOL MMO.” Because the world needs 3-D Pastamancers.

: Zubon

It would be pretty cool if a mainstream MMO tried the “Ascension” scheme of letting you start a character over with something from your last class. Or it could be a huge disaster, but hey, I’m probably not an investor.