Category: General

I have before me an e-mail announcing open beta starting for a game this week. Clicking to their website, a winged woman in most of a bikini is hovering immediately to the left of the game’s name. Immediately to the left of their tagline is another woman who could not afford an entire halter top; she is blowing kisses at the screen, with an animated heart floating from her lips. Someone has reliably informed them that English is written left-to-right, so placing the boobs just to the left of your text makes it a sort of capitalization.

Still classier than the game advertising “one click to a Roman orgy!”

: Zubon

Some people will say that it isn’t reasonable to expect an online game to run on release day. I don’t agree with that. Just because incompetence is widespread, that doesn’t mean that customers have to put up with it. The game companies have no problem of charging me either in advance or the moment I buy the game, so unless they are willing to postpone taking my money, I don’t see why I should have to postpone my expectation to be able to play the game.
— Tobold

Tobold writes about incompetence. The first commenter hits the nail on the head for malice: it is not profitable to build enough infrastructure for Day One, so let the players suffer until it settles down, you already have their money anyway. My perspective on Origin has not been improved by this new data point, whatever the explanation.

: Zubon

QA has an unconditional veto in our workplace. If it does not work, it does not ship. But we work in public safety, so delaying a new feature a week is less of a problem than potentially messing up your criminal record.

I read the Tales from the Trenches archive over the course of a weekend, and one recurring theme there is the non- or misuse or QA. There is not much benefit to doing QA if you are not going to act upon the resulting information. (Bonus points to the companies that fired testers when they found serious problems.) When we incredulously ask, “Did anyone test this?!” the answer is often: “yes, and we reported the problems, and they shipped anyway.” And then they sob.

Reading through Tales from the Trenches, you can decide who has the worse job: testers whose work is ignored or testers who are denied work but must sit in featureless boxes if they want their paychecks (presumably “and no goofing off on company time”).

: Zubon

Success has many fathers, while failure is an orphan.
— exactly the opposite of what we’re talking about here

We are reviewing contract bids at work, and we are having trouble convincing the official buyer that you can lose a quarter of the available points for each of a dozen or more problems. He thinks it is absurd that X could be worth 25% of the whole scoring total. I am at the opposite extreme: if you cut half a leg off a chair, it has only lost 1/8 of the leg content, but I’d say the entire chair just failed even if the seat and back are really good. A system can have many single points of failure, and doing badly at any of them means the entire thing fails. If your MMO does not have a network connection, it is worthless, even if the content is really good.

So I am not entirely in disagreement when you say that Game X failed because it did not have your particular hobbyhorse. It had PvP/no PvP/wrong PvP; it was/was not F2P; it’s combat or guilds or crafting or achievements were this, that or the other — all fine. It is entirely possible for a game to fail on many points, each of which could be worth unsubscribing, or perhaps any one of several combinations of them. We, the online ramblers, tend to ascribe it to the world’s agreeing with our personal preferences, so every other game that comes out should cater to my whims or you’ll be the next Dawn, but we are not even necessarily disagreeing when we say that Game X failed because of ten different reasons. Yes, any or all of them, shame on Game X.

Should we also stop calling games failed when they are still online, running, and profitable? NC Soft has certainly had (enforceable) opinions on what characterizes sufficient return on investment.

: Zubon

1. I haven’t felt like playing that MMO in a while. I think I’ll boot it up and play a bit.
2. Oh, updates, right.
3. How long?!
4. I’ll do other things now, let it update overnight. (sleep)
5. (wake) Eh, not in the mood right now.
6. (wait an indeterminate amount of time)
7. (go to 1)

: Zubon

Ken at Popehat has developed his own online game:

The hardest game on the internet is one I call “C/S/T”, which is short for “Crazy, Stupid, Or Troll?” I like to think of it as a broader application of Poe’s Law. There are nuances to those categories — sometimes a troll is a performance artist, sometimes someone is not so much stupid as willfully ignorant — but the broad categories suffice.

… Occasionally someone is all three.

He goes on to cite some very challenging content recently added to the game:

Whoever is running the internet-threat operation… has certain defining characteristics — truculence, functional illiteracy, and a grasp of law cobbled together by listening to 13-year-olds swearing at each other on Xbox Live.

The nature of the game makes it difficult to Google for quest spoilers.

: Zubon

I picked up Spec Ops: The Line on a sale while people were celebrating it as one of the best games of the year, particularly for its message about escapist violence and moral ambiguity. I have the problem that I have never played a military shooter game, so the deconstruction is wasted on me. The characters start doing things that are morally problematic and I immediately recognize it as such, from the first fight in the helicopters where no one seems to care that those are potentially occupied buildings you are shooting around/through. Bioshock’s “would you kindly” is not quite the same if you are not inured to obeying quest givers just because they are quest givers. Funny Games and Natural Born Killers do not fully work if you are not familiar with what they are critiquing.

On a different level, not having played a military shooter game, there is gameplay for me to get used to that the game takes as a given. All those bars and dials and buttons and mechanics we are so used to in MMOs can be bafflingly complex for a first-time player. Starting my first game, I’m not 100% sure where I should be looking for those, while this game obviously assumes some familiarity. Maybe I need to play it on newbie difficulty so I can figure out the buttons while people are shooting at me. Conversely, I have the opposite problem in games where I already know all the genre conventions: the introduction is ridiculously tedious as it walks new players through everything while I just want to know the three things that differ in this game, and they might not even cover that because the few differences are “advanced features” that will be explained well after the tutorial. It is hard to find a good middle ground between “you don’t need to tell me everything” and “hey, the game never explained that!” particularly with wide diversity in player knowledge. (Advantage: WoW for being the first MMO for the vast majority of its players.)

: Zubon