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Apologists

The population distribution on forums has very long tails, but I still find myself curious about some of these people. There is a substrain of fanboyism that I call apologetics: some fans cheer their games or boo the others, but these folks are devoted to defending the game against complaints, right or wrong, and seemingly most loudly when least defensibly.

The stages of denial seem to be denying that something happens, denying that it is a problem, and denying its importance. This is the politest case, assuming it does not collapse into personal attacks during step one. To take last week’s example (now solved), this was an obvious and acknowledged problem including a customer effort to track it, and here we have players announcing that they play on four lag-free servers and maybe you should stop buying K-Mart blue light special computers. When Qaddafi says there are no problems in Libya, I get the motives and delusions in play, but is there some sort of e-peen value to defending the honor of a corporation’s servers?

A recent favorite is a highly rated comment on a flash game that paraphrased to: “Okay, this game isn’t very good, but you should not badmouth it because the guy makes a lot of flash games and many of them are better.”

Some people troll, but you get the sense that some really see themselves as the company’s defenders. They think they are helping. Maybe they believe their own propaganda and think their games are perfectly balanced, lag- and exploit-free utopias, undermined only by an impossible to please playerbase. They at least think you should believe it. They are rude and abusive to people with (potentially legitimate) issues. Do they really think the Alpha Nerd approach works? Maybe that the problems will go away if they can drive away dissenting players? I can almost hear Sanya saying, “Stop telling my customers to go back to WoW!”

: Zubon

[GW2] Front Loaded

The thief profession is starting to get pieced together as fans act like archaeologists piecing together what was once whole from fragments offered by GDC ’11 videos. The thief seems pretty well understood being a very mobile, very dangerous, and very squishy class in Guild Wars 2. It can steal skills from enemies, go into a Predator-mode stealth, shadow-step (warp), and so on. It’s a pretty cool profession that seems a little more complex than the other 5 released professions. It has one mechanic though that breaks the rules. It’s weapon skills have the costs front-loaded, which amplifies the risk for each weapon skill activation. But, that seems to be what the thief is all about, the Master of Risk.

Continue reading [GW2] Front Loaded

I Feel Safer

guarding This is not a guard on patrol about to turn around. He does not move. The sentry is staring into a corner while a poorly designed outhouse sneaks up on him.

He is guarding the secret camp of the rangers, which I found unaided on my first time in the zone because there is a giant horse head marking the spot, to say nothing of the road leading there.

: Zubon

[GW] Embark to a Mega Update

Today is the day Guild Wars will move on. It’s not a swan song per se, but I just can’t imagine Guild Wars having any further update bigger than the one for today. This update will change the game to such a degree that it might as well be Guild Wars 1.5 now. This is not to belittle the upcoming story content updates, which I am anticipating heavily, but just to paint a brief notion of the magnitude of this thing. First, here’s a WarTower interview with Live Team head, John Stumme:


Continue reading [GW] Embark to a Mega Update

[GW2] No. 6, The Thief

EDIT: And we’re back. Changed all links to fav site, Massively.

So much Guild Wars news today, but first I will start with the unexpected bomb so I can spend more time working on a post for the Guild Wars update later today. It seems that Massively received a pretty good demo at GDC, where they filmed it entirely. We know about the first part being the norn starting area, which was expected for the new demo coming out. And then at Massively’s demo the presenter casually drops that “oh yeah, the sixth profession is the thief. Play it.” I have to say I was not expecting another profession reveal before PAX, and I definitely was not expecting it in the updated demo/presentation.

Continue reading [GW2] No. 6, The Thief

[GW2] The Thief Unrung

It appears that megasite GameTrailers did ignore an NDA/embargo on the release of the sixth Guild Wars 2 profession, which I was unaware of when I wrote the thief post here. Out of respect for ArenaNet, and more importantly the people that worked on and were excited about releasing the thief, I am taking down my post until official release. Comments and the post are preserved behind Door #43.

It’s a tough decision between sticking it to the man, information must be free, we know anyway, and respect. I feel better inside taking it down, and I hope no one is offended. I expect that the post with modifications from official news will go back up in a week.

Thanks.

–Ravious

Lag and Gambits

As a Hunter, lag is inconvenient. I might need to wait an extra second before an arrow fires, and I will occasionally mess up my rotation because a lag spike lasted longer than an activation/animation time. Meh, I sometimes shoot people in the face a slightly different way than expected.

As a Warden, lag is fairly horrible. Gambits key off combinations of three skills, so you could be in trouble if thrown-off timing leads to your getting the wrong skills, the wrong order, or a gambit firing before it is complete. If I need my area effect morale leech (312-4), I may really need that health, and 31-4, 32-4, 12-4, or 312-“why isn’t this firing” are not going to cut it. Those are all other gambits, one of which has a small HoT, but they are not the one I need.

Server-side lag has been problematic since the last update. Every fight or two, everything freezes for 0.5 to 2 seconds. It feels absurd to whine about 1 second delays, but that is very frequent, relatively large, and annoyance builds up. Gameplay has a rhythm, and you do not want skips several times a song. I find myself paying more attention to the UI so that lag befouls fewer gambits.

: Zubon

One Entitled Eight-Ball

Is Rift a success? Yes, I am a happy customer. The end. Print that for a box top and smoke it, Trion. Everything else from their return-on-investment to some silly “3-monther” yardstick is irrelevant. Yet, the story doesn’t fully end because this is a subscription game, and I have to determine whether it’s a success every single month. I will never say I am going to subscribe until the servers go dark. Therefore, Rift is instantly a success, and it will never be a success.

The MMO community carries a weird sense of measure for a successful game. It’s like there is some pressure for the game to be timeless that seems found nowhere else in the video game world. People are buying a new Pokemon this month, which is the exact same game every iteration. What about the $60 console games with 10 hours of gameplay before the credits roll? I own games on Steam I have never even played! Yet somehow it matters if Rift is timeless now?

It must be some weird artifact of the bygone days, you know before World of Warcraft ruined “community,” to be benchmarking the game’s life at launch. I certainly am not looking for an indefinite home, especially in a subscription-based game. I am looking for a sweet-vacation spot. When I hit sunny Acapulco, my fun is definitely not inhibited by worries that the town is going to go donkey turds in five years. It surprises me that people are viewing their MMO time that way. Hopefully they are still enjoying the game regardless of what their magic eight-ball is telling them

–Ravious
so let it be written, so it shall be done

[Rift] Breaking Through

Starting the Event

Last night was the kickoff event for my Rift guild, Gaiscioch. We congregated at the entrance of Silverwood (from the tutorial zone), and rode through Silverwood on to Sanctum to help people pick up the porticulum warps. Along the way we ran over any extraplanar forces. Then we headed to the Defiant side, where we helped stop a water invasion, and then turned on the godless mongrels just outside of Meridian. Being that most of our 150+ person event was below level 25, the soulless guards of Meridian were able to single-handedly wade through the Defiant tombstones and stop our ascent. I had to say I don’t think I have had this much fun in an MMO since my first big RvR event a few years ago.

Continue reading [Rift] Breaking Through