Category: General

General

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EA WTF Follow-Up

Despite how I have seen it linked, “we’re sorry you were confused and took offense” is not an apology. Since the approach is apparently, “any publicity is good publicity,” I’m just not going to mention any EA games for the rest of the year unless this is somehow made right. We’ll see how 2010 goes.

The beauty of being petulant about this is that I don’t need to think of what would constitute atonement. The creative minds that thought of “sexually harass women for prizes” can devote their efforts to that.

: Zubon
#EAFail

A Six Sigma Response?

Sanya Weathers at Eating Bees wrote in her seminal piece on the five things that will tank your community ‘(4) if you are a community manager that is ignoring the eighteen whiners on the boards ignoring them will hurt the community when all eighteen of them are saying the same thing.  You are the one who is wrong, not them.’  But, what is ‘not ignoring?’

There are a few shades of response a community manager or a developer can write, and unfortunately the most common seems to be something along the lines of “your concerns are noted, and have been passed along or considered.”  In my opinion, as a player, this response is only marginally better than being ignored.  I don’t understand why the responder does not employ one of the most basic of management techniques: active listening.  Repeat the players’ concerns in a condensed, polite manner, and some of the most acidic of criticizers will melt.  “Hey, this dude is on our side.”  Shocker, I know.  Plus, many community managers have to digest and reiterate player concerns to the developers anyway; might as well double-dip on the work already done.

Orion, a developer for Lord of the Rings Online, did just this in his most recent blog post.  He reiterated in a condensed version the complaints about hard mode/radiance gear/radiance gating in a few short paragraphs.  My kinship went bananas.  One of the guild leaders wrote “if he told us after [the active listening response] that it was ‘working as intended,’ I would’ve still been happy because they understand our problem.”  Well of course.  They have understood our problem all along.  Certainly there are varying levels of detail in the response, and I would submit that the more detail in the response that mirrors the actual complaint the more soothed the savage beasts will be.  Active listening in a super-condensed manner might not give the full result.

–Ravious
till Max said “be still”

I, MMO Investor

Valve’s Gabe Newell got an interesting blog-bite about players funding games to be developed.  Reminds me of buying pork belly stock.  MMOs that follow subscription models are already halfway there.  Subscribers are not just paying for the ability to play on the MMO.  They are also expecting new patches, new content, new technology upgrades, and so on.  Even with over 5,000,000 subscribers-worth of revenue Blizzard cannot churn out content fast enough for World of Warcraft.  The game then becomes a hopeful chat room community of investors.

This just does not go for subscription MMOs, but they are the most representative.  Players expect the MMO to be a living thing whether it follows Guild Wars or Wizard 101’s business model.  Once the game begins to feel stagnant and hopes begin to die, players will flag to another ship.  It would be nice to make developer decisions like a publicly-traded shareholders meeting, but we would probably make the wrong ones anyway.

The one other “hint” of MMO investment might be in the beta stage.  This is two-pronged with one being realistic (for now).  The first prong comes from pre-orders and getting pre-release access to the game.  While the gamer usually pays the same amount for the game whether he or she pre-ordered or not, the developer/publisher gets a read on future sales.  They can use this data to further excite vendors, newssites, and fans thereby generating more sales and money.  The unrealistic prong could be asking the gamer to pay extra to get in to the testing phase.  I saw plenty of gamers that would do this without question for Warhammer Online.  Could this small amount of money help final development more than hurt future sales?  Currently the answer seems to be “no” because I haven’t seen anyone willing to use this risky business model.

I know that Newell was approaching things from a more early development standpoint.  Would you be willing to buy Blizzard’s next MMO now even if you wouldn’t get it until 2012 when you might be funding it right now by merely playing World of Warcraft?  Fool me twice…

–Ravious
either way a sale is made

Video Game Voyeurism

I’ve always liked to spectate people playing video games, ever since the ability was added in online games.  Guild Wars World Championships were to me what the World Series was to a baseball fan.  I would watch and chat with other players in observer mode  focusing on the intense Guild Versus Guild battles between the best players in the world.  Or there was that one time Nihilum did a live Sunwell Plateau (World of Warcraft) raid from four different vantage points.  Even a quick break in Team Fortress 2 to spectate a spy taking down five cart pushers can be entertaining while I chew down some air-travelled White Castles. 

I had an all-time high (or low) this weekend amassing hours of video game voyeurism via X-Fire’s live video streams.  A gamer with a good connection and computer can stream in real-time the game he or she is playing, while a chat room is created so that viewers can chat with the player and create a running peanut gallery.  This past weekend I vicariously “played” Prototype, Mass Effect, and even Darkfall.  I have never experienced any of these games, but I am already planning to buy Mass Effect.  I also have a much better feel for Darkfall watching a live stream than any “professional” reviewer can give me.  The streaming gamer is a personal performer, demoer, and spokesperson for the game.  Developers couldn’t ask for better advertising.

There was one small hitch.  The most popular and most numerous live streams seem to be World of Warcraft arena PvP.  I don’t understand this because the information to noise ratio is pitifully low when watching World of Warcraft PvP via the lowered-resolution stream.  I can only surmise that the live streams become some sort of PvP community in and of themselves.  This is not necessarily the hitch.  The hitch is I did want to see some World of Warcraft raid or dungeon, but I had to pull up each World of Warcraft stream in order to figure out what the player was showing.  Requiring a little description for each gamer’s stream would help greatly (e.g., Mass Effect just starting, WoW arenakekeke, L4D noob watch me suck).

The service is still in beta for X-Fire users, but I expect that whole communities and services could occur around this feature.  Instead of game companies performing demos at E3 for journalists, the developers could bypass and give a demo straight to the masses.  New guildies could be tutored on a raid.  Personal vendettas could be resolved.  The list is endless.  I am pretty excited about this, and maybe I will find something worthwhile to stream in the future.

–Ravious
on the arm of a blind man

The Problem, In a Nutshell

Melmoth discusses:

Look, if I fight wolves in the dwarf starter area, and I kill the requisite hundred and fifty thousand million of them for the Wolf-Slaughterer title, it’s fair to say that I’m pretty good at killing wolves, some might say that I am accomplished if not a little genocidal. Therefore, if I then go to another area, further afield than where one might find a new character normally, I should not find super wolves, ten times the power of a normal wolf, who have but to look at me in a slightly disapproving manner for all my armour to jettison from my body and my skeleton to explode out of my skin and bury itself five feet under the ground. I am a wolf slayer! Look! You gave me a bloody title to acknowledge the fact that I spent a lot of time killing wolves, why can I not kill these wolves? ‘Oh’, say the developers, ‘but these are different wolves’. Different how exactly? Were they privately educated? Have members of their number graduated from Sandhurst? Did they train at Hereford in the use of special tactics and weapons?

The epic journey from pig to pig I comment with this image. That’s basically the state of things. The only thing keeping you from leveling on boars from 1 to the cap is that you must complete some quests to get access to zones, like exiting the newbie instance or the faction grind to get into Lothlorien, where the level 61 pigs are. You did not think of “access to higher-level pigs” as one of the benefits of that elf faction, eh? You haven’t even seen the edges of the box you’re trying to think outside of.

I pull this example from The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, but it is almost universal. My Dark Age of Camelot (Albion) character could do just the same, from piglets to rooters with some zombie pigs in between. I have killed the same goblin 100,000 times, with him in a variety of hats and colors.

: Zubon

4/10. Now what?

EG’s re-review of Darkfall is here.

Very good review, in my opinion. Just talking about the review in itself, that’s all. Enjoyable and informative, as reviews should be. This is why a second review was needed, and EG did the right thing on this one. People will say it doesn’t change anything; the faithful will keep playing it, the loathers will continue to loathe. But this is missing the point. The second review (and a good one like this one, at that) was needed because there’s tons of people that could -still- be looking for information about the game and could -still- use a good review of it. It changes exactly what needed to be changed; the replacement of a poor review with one of much better quality.

Does it change things about the game? To me? No. When reading the first poor review, with its errors (factual or not) notwithstanding, I knew the game wasn’t as bad as it was painted, but I also know the picture the review was attempting to present wasn’t that far off either. I don’t like using scores myself, and never liked it as a reviewer, but I can say that while I knew the game couldn’t possibly be a 2/10, I also knew it couldn’t possibly be 7/10 or higher either. The original review, terrible as it was in almost every metric you could apply to a review, was essentially not wrong in spirit. Unfortunately that spirit was buried under piles and piles of garbage. It was a bad review, but essentially not as wrong as the faithful claimed.

I wonder what happens now. Do people still care?

You Are Running on Defective Hardware

Part of the transhumanist cause is based on the failures of the human brain. The wetware running “you” is whatever evolution cobbled together over several eons. My new favorite example? Blue and green. Just click and look, because I cannot explain it any better. I even double-checked the graphics myself.

Your brain does not work correctly. Upgrade as soon as the technology is available.

: Zubon

Link via Volokh, and see also.

Copy / Paste

New MMORPGs are accused of being rip-offs of WOW. Before that people compared MMOs to EverQuest. New MMOs always copy what they think is working and slap on a new theme and and tweak a few mechanics. We could say that the developers are greedy and want a piece of that WOW pie, but I hardly think that’s all there is to it.

I used to play Muds, and every mud I played was a rip-off of some other Mud. I don’t just mean they copied some game-mechanics or ideas about leveling, I mean they copied entire zones and sections of code. I played Vampire Wars, which was a rip-off of God Wars, which was an altered version of Merc, which was a modified version of DikuMud. I coded for Cythera, which was a split off from World of Carnage, which was a heavily modified version of CircleMud, which itself also derived from DikuMud.

To this day, slash commands like /bow from early Muds are still used in the most modern of MMOs. We still have hit points and mana points and we still work on getting better gear when we’re done with leveling. We still have these things because they work. Why fix what isn’t broken?