Lens on Friday Quickies VII

Time for another quick round through the interesting little tidbits of the week.

A bit slow, but here we go...

PANDAMONIUM COMMENCE!--So another WoW expansion has arrived, and this time it arrived via motorcycle jumping over a tank filled with sharks.

It's amazing how little attention this has received in the gaming press...or maybe it's not amazing.  Sure, everybody wrote about "New WoW expansion!" but that was pretty much the limit of the coverage outside of the WoW-specific sites.  But I think we can truly see that while WoW is still the single biggest player in the MMO field by far, for the first time I think I can say that it's no longer the 800 Pound Gorilla.

In fact, except for those still playing, I don't think WoW is very important or even very relevant any more.

It's certainly not going anywhere anytime soon, but it's like McDonald's now:  sure a lot of people eat there, and a lot of people occasionally go back for a taste of the fries, but unless you're a little kid, who cares about McDonald's?  (In the interest of full disclosure, I feel it is necessary for me to state that while I strongly dislike McD's, every couple of years I get a massive Big Mac jones.  I buy two, eat 'em, and that's McD's for me for a couple more years.)

And then there's the analyst estimates that put "Mists of Pandaria" box sales at 600-700K copies.  What that means is that even if they sold a digital copy for every box copy (unlikely), they still sold less than half of what Cataclysm sold (3 million copies) at launch.

Whether this is due to increased quality competition (Guild Wars 2), general WoW-fatigue, or former players turning away from the continuing dumbing-down of the game systems and inclusion of Pokemon-like vanity pet battles and Farmville-like farming mini-game, it's hard to know.

Maybe it's because the whole goddamned expansion is based on an April Fool's joke!

Some of the more discerning customers (such as your humble author) found that insulting.

First Diablo III sells a shitload, but disappoints.  Now MoP sales disappoint.

Blizzard, it seems, has lost its mojo.

SAVE THE PANDAS!--And in an enormously clever PR move, the guys at Rift are donating $1 for each pre-order of their new expansion to a fund to actually save pandas.

Their announcement also included a smartly written disclaimer about how the offer is limited by certain states and their inscrutable laws about such charitable behaviors.

A funny and clever way to weasel a little publicity out of the other guy's launch at a measly cost.

Again, Trion shows their savvy.  My admiration continues to grow.

THE CITY NEEDS A HERO--So the fans of "City of Heroes" and some of the (former?) employees of Paragon have been desperately trying to find a way to save the game from the November execution date that NCSoft has set.

They've signed petitions, they've contacted potential buyers, they've "had discussions", and I feel quite secure in saying...none of it will work.

NCSoft (and Nexon, who now are the owners of NCSoft) have decided to simplify, and they prefer to do so with simple, clean, deep cuts.  They are killing a profitable (we are told) business to simplify.  To most of us, this is just insane.  Why not sell it or spin it off?  Why just through away an asset?

Because to them, it's cheaper to toss it away with minimal fuss than expend the effort to keep the players happy and people employed.

Anyone working for an NCSoft/Nexon company should take close note of what they've done with CoH and Paragon.  Should they decide to "simplify" further, they'll unsmilingly do the exact same thing to you, and not look back.

It would be easy to say "See what happens when the Asian corp comes knocking at your door?" but on the other hand, there's Perfect World.  With the support they've given Cryptic (Champions/Star Trek Online, upcoming Neverwinter) and the guys making Torchlight (which just launched TL2) they've taken, to my mind, the vastly smarter move of building up and out with smaller, more niche products, into the US market.

As a gamer, right now, if two new games came out, one through NCSoft and one through PW, all else being equal, I'd go with the PW game...and not look back.

PRESSURE VALVE--And in further NCSoft/Nexon news, there are rumors that they are looking to buy Valve for about a billion dollars.

First, given Gabe's recent statements that he'd rather Valve "disintegrate" before selling out, I have rather severe doubts that he's sell, unless Valve is having some severe cashflow problems that nobody knows about.

Second, I find it unlikely in the extreme that if Valve was going to be acquired that it would end up under NCSoft and Nexon.  Because of moves like what I described above, the public view of these companies (at least in the US) is not very good at all.  If Valve went to NCSoft/Nexon, I expect a lot of Valve's talent would go to the door.

So that rumor?  I smell bullshit.

Far more interesting rumors coming out of Valve are the hints and winks we keep getting that they are working on their own hardware.

We know they are working on a Linux-based Steam, so the rumors of a Linux-based "Steambox" console have the ring of credibility to them.

Time shall tell.

Unless they get bought out by NCSoft and Nexon, in which case they're screwed.

THE SECRET WORLD HAS ISSUES--Hah!  I fooled you!  You see, they call their content patches "issues", like a comic book or pulp magazine.  I'm so clever.

Yeah.  No.

They had their first content patch on schedule, about a month after launch.

The second content patch was late...about 3 weeks.  So much for a monthly schedule.

The third content patch...came out a week later.  Whuh!?  OK...back on schedule patches every month!

Seriously, that's good news for the TSW fans (including me) and players (no longer including me, sorry).  Getting themselves back on their original schedule (assuming they can maintain it, of course) should be a very cheering note.

Regular new content is probably the best hope Funcom has of growing the niche audience, and I wish them luck.

The guys at SWTOR have certainly failed on their attempt for a monthly "cadence" and are continuing to fail on their attempt for a six-week content "cadence".

Keep an eye open for SWTOR announcing new content on a "two-month cadence" any day now!

TIME TO PICK THE BONES--There are a couple of auctions in October for the remaining assets of 38 Studios.  Hundreds of computers and monitors.  Lots of various hardware and equipment.

Six refrigerators.

This is the sort of thing that always happens when any company goes bankrupt, but it seldom makes news.  Last one I remember was the auction of the office assets from Bernie Madoff.

Far more interesting to me will be the final "resting place" of the IP, codebase, art and programming assets, etc.

Will those get picked up for a song and...dare I dream...have the breath of life put back into them?  Will a dashing Doctor Frankenstein purchase this beautiful corpse, tie it down in a thunderstorm, and run a bajillion volts through the moribund body bringing life back to the dead?

Probably not, no.

The refrigerators are probably a wiser investment.

IT SEEMS LIKE I'VE BEEN PLAYING FOREVER--But it's only 15 years.  Yeah, yeah, I know, there were MMOs before it, and lots of MUDS, but 15 years ago this week, "Ultima Online" was released.

I tried it and didn't like it way back when.  But I sure as hell can't say it wasn't important.

What's odd is that our hobby as we know it is only 15 years old.  So much and so little has changed.

We still have levels and hitpoints (I'll be writing a column on that real soon) and hot bars.

But we also have seen the number of players explode into millions and the number of dollars into the billions.

The games have become simultaneously much simpler and much more complex.

And 15 years later, after EverQuest and World of Warcraft and Star Wars: The Old Republic, after huge successes and vast failures, after billions of dead mobs and millions of dead players, one thing remains unchanged:

Goddamnit a lot of people who play MMOs are dickheads.

Lens on I Play MMOs Because Of Playboy

Yep...Playboy Magazine.

Allow me to explain...

ANCIENT HISTORY

Cast your mind back...most likely well before you were born...let's say about 40 years ago.

Like all young men in the days before the Internet, I'd sneak-read my dad's copies of Playboy.

Unlike most young men in those days, I'd actually read them.  I'd read some of the interviews (I remember Mel Brooks), some of the articles, some of the fiction (they published stories by name science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury), all of the cartoons, and closely read the pictorials.

Very closely.

In the back of every issue back then, there was a single page with 4 or 6 panels of "cool things for guys".  Maybe some interesting gizmo for the dual-use of cigar-trimming and circumcisions...that sort of thing.

And in one issue they mentioned this British company that sold lead miniature soldiers for use in playing miniature battles.  This company, "Minifigs" by name produced a wide selection of figures, from the days of antiquity through the Napoleonic wars...and incidentally, had a line of figures based on "The Lord of the Rings".

For the first time ever I experienced a Playboy-induced woody that had nothing to do with closely reading the pictorials.  You see, I had only a year or two previously started reading (and re-reading [and re-re-reading, etc.]) the Lord of the Rings.  Over and over.  I was learning the languages and had already memorized how to write in elvish and in two types of dwarf runes.  I was a LotR Loonie.

I immeditely ordered their catalog and started saving up money for my first purchase.

When the catalog arrived, I marked it up, analyzing how many figures I could get with the money I had, which ones were most important to me and so on.

I also noticed that they sold rulebooks for playing games with miniature figures, one of which was called "Chainmail" from a company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR.

Once the figures had arrived (and in retrospect, they were really terrible minis, sadly lacking in artistic quality or any kind of detail) the logical next step was, obviously, to buy the rules to play with them (in any other way than to hold the Gandalf figure in one hand and the balrog figure in the other while shouting "You shall not pass!" at the top of my lungs).

EDIT: omfg, I found a website that has pictures of the original figures!  http://www.dndlead.com/minifigs/Minifigs-Mythical-Earth.htm

Once my copy of Chainmail arrived, some friends and I started playing miniature figure battles using both the conventional medieval rules and the fantasy rules included.  We had a lot of fun, but I noticed that in the back of Chainmail, TSR had a list of products, and they mentioned this game called "Dungeons And Dragons".  I decided to give that one a try too...

And so my fate was sealed...

NOTHING CAN COMPARE TO WHEN YOU ROLL THE DICE...

That may be the first time I've ever finished three straight sentences with elipses.  Oh, and that last one is from the lyrics to a song that has nothing to do with anything in this article in any way except dice.

Eventually, this little fake-woodgrain box with three booklets in it showed up and my life changed.  It was the original D&D and it set me back ten bucks.

I can't remember if I got it in 74 or 75, but I do remember buying the first "expansion" for it, Greyhawk, when it came out in 1975.  I can't even begin to guess how many goddamned dice I've rolled for that friggin' game.

A bunch of my friends were into science fiction (lots) and fantasy (what there was of it back then) and I roped them all in.  We played at least once a week during the school year, and a whole lot more during summer.  I DM'd hundreds of times over the next few years, in a bunch of different RPGs and genres.  Along with D&D there were "Chivalry and Sorcery", "Traveller", "Bushido", "Call of Cthulhu", "Arduin", and a lot of "Runequest".

Hmm...I need to do another blog soon on why MMORPGs are still slaves to the original D&D and how they'd be better off if they copied more of what was in Runequest.

So most of my leisure time over the next few years was spent either reading or working on the next weekend's game.  I put a lot of time and effort into my gaming, and I spent an enormous amount of time jiggering around the rules to fit my own sensibilities about The Way Things Should Work.  With my background in board wargaming and a natural penchant for all things mathematical, some of my game-systems got pretty complicated.  Ah...but when something worked right, it was a thing of beauty.

I loved my dice, and for many years we were happy together.  But we were, at last, broken up by Woz and Jobs.

WELCOME MY SON, WELCOME TO THE MACHINE

In 1979, having gotten a part-time job in a game store (DUH!) while going to college, I bought one of the first Apple II+ computers to roll off the assembly lines.  It cost $1098 and came with 48k (that's _kilobytes_ kiddies) of memory.

I am old.

Until I got enough scratch to buy a floppy drive, I used a portable tape recorder as the only read/write medium available.  It's possible my mail-order packages back then were delivered by Pony Express.

We still had our game sessions on most weekends (a lot of us were going to college locally), but the computer took a larger share of my leisure-time pie.  I bought, and played, a lot of games.

A friend of a friend came over one day with his collection of floppies and showed me something the likes of which I'd never seen...it was a pre-release, unfinished development copy of a game called "Wizardry".  Levels, classes, spells, monsters, and a poor-man's first person 3-D view.

I may have wept.

About the same time I picked up a game called "Akalabeth", a misspelled name from Tolkien, written by a guy named Garriott.  The next two things he'd develop were a game called "Ultima" and a zeppelin-sized ego.

And so the age of computer RPGs swung into action.

A lot of RPGs came and went, but I remember when I first saw Diablo I immediately thought "You know, if multiple people could play this and a DM could set up the dungeon, we could finally have a computer D&D game for real!"

About a year later, 15 years ago this week, Mr. Zeppelin-Ego and his minions brought out Ultima Online.

WHO NEEDS TWO PHONE LINES?

Somewhere in those first days of Ultima Online, I gave it a try.  I never got past the first month.

I have no idea at all why I didn't like it.  I can't remember why I stopped playing.  If I'd been griefed or ripped off or unable to play due to bugs or disconnects, I'd still remember the rage those things would have induced...but I got nothin'.

I even played with a friend a little, but it just didn't work for me.  I can't explain it.

So I kind of gave up on the online gaming for some time.  It wasn't until Anarchy Online showed up that I finally got to mainlining online.

A friend mentioned that the game was like an online version of "Shadowrun" (about as inaccurate a summary, in retrospect, as a person could conceiveably come up with) and thus, a couple of months after launch I gave it a try.

And so the hook was set and they reeled me in.  It's possible that I've been paying a monthly fee ever since.

Oh sure, the computers have changed, the connection has changed, the graphics have changed...but the basic reasons to game haven't changed much in the intervening years.

And now, MMOs are my primary leisure time activity and have been for years.  I still read, watch a little (very little) TV from time to time, but MMOs are my entertainment and also my community of friends.  I still have IRL friends, but a lot of them are online friends too.

More and more I am, like most of us, becoming more and more connected to the Internet.  Like the roads that we rely on to move ourselves and our goods from place to place, the Internet is an indispensible method for communicating, for getting our words (and our goods and our virtual selves) from home to everywhere else.

And for me, it all started with a stroke mag.

Makes you think doesn't it?  Makes you think that you probably don't want to touch my mouse or keyboard.

Lens on Friday Quickies VI

Here be some more flotsam and jetsam from a pirate-talkin' week me hearties!

ANOTHER SWTOR BUNGLE--This is becoming like shooting fish in a barrel.  Pretty much every week the Clown Show at BioWare working on Star Wars: The Old Republic manages to continue their uninterrupted stream of fail.

How did they shoot themselves in the foot this week?  Well they collapsed down a bunch of servers onto a smaller number of high-capacity servers.  So far, so good.

They renamed these servers with the same names as the old "destination servers".  OK...that seems bound to only create more confusion, so bad choice there.

Aaaaand then they made a whole bunch of players...and guilds...change their names because now there were conflicts.  So who got priority in the case of name duplicates?  Well depending on which BioWeenie you listen to, it was random, or based on creation date, or an indeterminate number of factors including (but not limited to) creation date and amount of time played and whether they'd had to change in a previous server merge.

And of course, being the TORtal imbeciles that they are, they didn't let people know in advance that this was coming.

Oh, they'd talked about the high-density servers, but never mentioned that shitloads of peoples (and many guilds) would have to rename.

There are two possibilities...they knew people would be upset and said, "Whatever, fuck 'em." or (to my mind even worse) they had no idea how pissed off a whole lot of people would be.  So either they don't give a shit about the players or they are totally clueless.  I was going to say "pick one", but it's possible that they are clueless and don't give a shit about the players.

As a friend pointed out, it's kind of hard to build any sort of "server community" (which the soon-to-be-leaving Daniel Erickson has often proclaimed to be really important) when players and entire guilds keep having to change their names.  And (as I blogged about a while back) community does matter.

LIKE A CESSPOOL, THE REALLY BIG CHUNKS RISE TO THE TOP--In more "SWTOR Blowed Up Real Good!" news, the two guys who started BioWare, the Two Doctors, Muzyka and Zeschuk are "retiring".

Yeah, pull the other leg.

Having sold the company to EA years ago and watched BioWare go from one of the most universally loved gaming companies around, to a laughingstock in a matter of...I was going to say "a couple of years", but more like "a couple of games", it's no surprise at all to see them go.

Everyone likes to blame EA for what's happened with BioWare, but I don't buy it.  Sure "Dragon Age 2" was a rushed out piece of crap, trying to take advantage of the success of the predecessor, so that one's on EA.  But "Mass Effect 3" was a polished, finished product that with a deeply flawed endgame and I can't see EA's fingerprints on that anywhere.

And then there's TOR...BioWare worked on that fucker for 6 years, and if EA is guilty of anything it's that they made them actually release it.  Was it ready?  No, but after 6 years I don't think another 6 months of polish was going to help.  They hadn't listened to the beta-testers before, so nothing was going to change until Paying Customers(tm) started complaining.

And to be frank (I'll be earnest if you'd rather), the problems with TOR go back to the basic game design, long before EA snatched up BioWare.

People blame TOR's disappointing quality on EA, but to my mind it's squarely on BioWare...and at some point, the guys at the top, watching over the whole thing, needed to be held accountable.  To paraphrase George Thoroughgood and the Delaware Destroyers..."And out the door they went..."

And still more about really big chunks heading out the door...

There was a nice article on Gamasutra detailing the dozen execs that have left Zynga in the last two months.  They are the Chief Operating Officer, the General Managers of Cityville and Mafia Wars 2 and Zynga Austin, Chief Creative Officer, Studio VP, VP of Marketing, VP of Mobile, Chief Technical Officer, Chief Marketing and Revenue Officer, Business and Marketing Exec VP, and the Chief Security Officer.

That's 3 GMs, 4 VPs, and 5 C-levels.

Now that's a company that's circling the drain.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of stools.

THE MAC STRIKES BAC!--The lads at Guild Wars 2 dropped a nice surprise mid-week, the beta client for Macintosh.  I wasn't even aware they were working on one, but out it popped.

I've got a friend with a high-end Mac who was super-stoked about not having to reboot into Boot Camp running Windows to GW2 it up.  She likes GW2, but she loves her some Lord of the Rings Online.

And LotRO is working on a Mac client for the Riders of Rohan expansion due out in October.  She'll be delirious.

It's an interesting note that we're seeing more of the mainstream MMOs coming up with Mac clients (Blizzard has always owned the heart of Mac gamers because their stuff has always shipped simultaneously for Mac and PC).  This is indicative of the growing awareness in the market that it's not "PC only" for MMOs anymore.  The landscape is changing, whether it's Mac or mobile, and the companies making the games are keenly aware of it and examining their options.

More platform flexibility is good for the players and smart for the companies.  I expect we'll see more games in the future that start using platform-independant design so that they can run on PCs, consoles, Macs, and mobile devices.

It was recently pointed out that in terms of pure processing power, the iPad 2 is about the same as the Cray 2 was.  That can sure as hell handle an MMO with cycles to spare.

I wouldn't be surprised if sometime in the next 2 years we see an MMO come out that's PC/Mac/iOS/Android compatible.  And maybe run in a browser as well.

That's the future.  Awesome graphics are great, but gameplay wins.

TRYING TO GET THE SECRET OUT THERE--The second "issue" (content patch) for The Secret World has arrived, with the game's first raid.  And rocket launchers.  Because...uh, well...fricken' rocket launchers!

They've also announced a 3-day free trial period which includes some bonus goodies if you finish up 30 in-game missions.  Do that and you get two extra free days and the equivalent of $10 of in-game store currency.

I think that's really smart, TSW is a game that grows on you with play, and encouraging people to give the game a fair shake is worth WAY more than $10 of in-game store funny money.

I hope they get a bit of a population bump with this.  I want TSW to succeed.  It's a good game and it doesn't deserve to wither away.

NEVERWINTER DEMOS FIRST CLASS VIDEO--The guys at Cryptic released the first class video, for the guardian fighter class.  They appear to be a tanky, sword-and-board class as you'd think from the name "guardian fighter".

The video looked sharp and the play looked smooth and frankly reminded me of GW2 gameplay.  They've said that the gameplay is supposed to be 'action-y', just as GW2 as said, and it struck me as very similar seeming.

I know there are those who think that anything less than TERA doesn't count as "action", but then TERA just had a server merge down to 3 so the TERA players can suck it.

Intentionally or no, modelling your gameplay after GW2 doesn't seem like a bad choice at all.

The video was mildly impressive.  I look forward to seeing more from the Neverwinter team.

Although I am still sick of freakin' dragons.  Just sayin'.

A LOON ON THE GOONS--Today had one of the strangest intersections of politics and games I've ever seen.  Glenn Beck talked about EVE Online's Goons.

Now the Goons are a multi-game group organized out of the forums of the Something Awful website.  They are a combo platter of anti-(game)establishment anarchists, merry pranksters, and outright griefplayers.  Some of the stuff they do provides me with vast entertainment, some pisses me off.

One of their brighter lights (known in-game as "Vile Rat") was one of the people tragically killed in Libya by the terrorists and/or religious nutbags protesting (or taking advantage of the protesting) the inflammatory movie made by one or more of our religious nutbags.

Anyway, before he was killed he posted to the Goons website "vile_rat: assuming we don't die tonight. We saw one of our 'police' that guard the compound taking pictures".  And Glenn Beck, of course, says that he was CIA contacting the CIA through the Goons.

Too weird for words.

One aside, the Goons are taking up money for his family, and this is A Good Thing.  He was a real life friend of theirs, and I sympathize with their loss and hope that they can make things a little bit better for his family.

But there have been cases where in-game memorials of real-life players by their friends have been disrupted by griefplayers.  I don't know of any cases where the Goons were involved, but it's the sort of thing I wouldn't be surprised by if they did.  They love pressing buttons and rubbing people the wrong way.

To the EVE Online Goons...I'm truly sorry you lost a friend.

To all who griefplay, reflect on the fact that everyone in these games is a friend to somebody, and we're all playing these games to have fun.  If your fun is dependant on griefing someone else, perhaps you need to closely examine how and why you play a game in that fashion.

To the real world family of Sean Smith (Vile Rat), he had a lot of friends in-game who loved him and miss him too.

BUG OF THE WEEK!--And finally to lighten up the mood, we had a true winner of a bug this week in the World of Warcraft.

It seems the last patch had a teensie little problem...Death Knights could cast their plagues not just on unfriendly mobs, but also on friendly characters.  Non-consensual same-faction PvP!

We have a winner!!!

Yeah, they hotfixed that sucker in a big fat hurry.  Too bad, I think I still have seven days of unused "please come back and play" time in WoW, I could have patched and busted out my DK to kill bajillions of lowb toons.

Oh, wait...wasn't I just talking about griefplayers needing to re-evaluate their lives?

Uh...oops?

Lens on Lens Sorta-Fail

Yeah, yeah, I know, "Excuses, excuses."

I'm finishing up some financial work for my retirement (full time MMO player!?!?) and can't spare the time for a blog today, I don't think.  Back Friday for sure.

Lens on User Interface/Luser Interface

For those of us who have worked as system administrators in the past, there is a collection of ancient wisdom, gathered over the years, which explains the mysteries of the universe...

Google up "alt.sysadmin.recovery faq" if you want to see Truth in its unvarnished state.

Down, not across.

In this Holy Writ you can see the word "luser" (the 'l' is both silent and omnipresent in my experience).  In this context it is a word replete with meanings, but I shall attempt to sum up with the phrase "an idiot whose infinite shortcomings will be blamed on the sysadmin's inability to 'help them be productive'".

Sysadmins are almost always at the mercy of the lusers.

For those of us who play MMOs, we know that our ability to interact with the virtual worlds in which we choose to play, is through the "user interface".  This is the collection of mechanics that govern the information we get about the virtual world (other than vision and sound, for the most part), and perhaps more importantly, how we effect the virtual world around us.

The user interface does this by translating keyboard and mouse actions into shooting a bow, casting a spell, dodging dragon fire, or even picking up poop.  Seriously, the amount of scatplay that occurs in MMOs these days is inexplicable.

Now many times we find ourselves frustrated because, instead of streamlining our gameplay, the user interface mechanisms are getting in the way.  They don't do what we think they should, and often they don't even do what they claim they do.

MMO players are almost always at the mercy of the luser interfaces.

IN THE BEGINNING...

Before there were MMOs, there were MUDs.  Since these were text-only games, it was easy to see how keyboard commands were the obvious and correct way for your character to interact with the world.

But when games started stapling graphics on top of what were essentially DIKU-MUDs (look it up, noob!), the worlds of GUIs (graphical user interface) and MMOs came clashing together.

In this case, it was mostly straightforward.  Any given click would pretty much give a single, expected result.  The amount of information it would provide was fairly minimal, mostly just damage numbers.

Simplicity is always welcome, and in the case of the early MMOs, it was all that was needed...perhaps only because it was all we knew.

In fact, sometimes even the primitive graphics of the time were too much of a load, and players would point their camera at a wall or floor so as to not be distracted by the fight, or to avoid having their framerate drop to slideshow proportions.

In those days the game sometimes consisted entirely of playing the UI.  Watching the health bars and hitting your keys, while your character stared at the floor at his feet.

Big upgrade from a text-only game eh?

AND LET THERE BE MODS...

As the MMOs grew in depth, complexity, and graphical demand, the computers we played them on grew mightier apace.  And the players wanted more from their UIs as well.  And when WoW came out, Blizzard opened up their UI to all the amateur UI designers out there to add their own functionality.

And that shit exploded.

Using and abusing every little programmatical hook that Blizzard offered them, the WoW user interface almost instantly turned into the wild, wild west.  Almost any function you could conceive of, whether it made sense or not in game terms, had a mod written for it.

And because all of these were written by different people with different objectives...

Welcome to the land of the Luser Interface.

Even if you found a dozen mods you liked, trying to get them to work together and with the default WoW UI was usually a nightmare.  And if you found a package of mods you liked enough to install, some parts you wouldn't want or they'd interfere with this other mod...

And when the mods came that vastly simplified raid and dungeon bosses (like Dire Boss Mods and such) they became all but mandatory.

And DPS meters like Omen turned every group into competitive e-peen swinging contests.

At one point Blizzard said that they would be implementing a mod certification system to make sure that incompatibilities would be addressed, but they never did.  Over time they took away some of the hooks because some of the mods people had created turned the whole raid/dungeon game into follow the leader.

Somebody had come up with a mod that would draw on the players screens where to stand and tell them what to do for any given encounter.  It was both hilarious and inevitable.  Give the players a way to win easier, and they will.

Instead of the players playing the UI, the UI played the game for the players.

LESSONS SADLY UNLEARNED...

I will take a detour from the history lesson for a different sort of lesson...the kind of lesson that only the fail that is "Star Wars: The Old Republic" can truly teach.

I would say that to my mind, SWTOR has the Worst Luser Interface In The History Of MMOs.

Quite the claim, I know.

It had many things (not?) going for it...it was primitive, feature-free, locked tight, and broken!  And it took them 6 years and $200M to come up with a game with a Luser Interface that would embarass a designer from the days of EverQuest (the original).

There were so many things wrong with it at launch that it's impossible to list them all, so I'll settle for one function that simply could not be done...

Let's say you have a crafter, so you want to browse the Galactic Trade Network (the auction house) for recipes.  The GTN Luser Interface was a disaster in and of itself, but we'll ignore that for now.  You check the GTN and mouseover a recipe you already have...and in no way is it denoted that it's a recipe you know.  You can even buy it and learn it (again) and at no point does the UI let you know it's one you've gotten already.

But let's say, since you can't tell any other way, you decide to compare the GTN list of available recipes with the list of recipes you already have in your crafting window.  Note, this is the Least Efficient Method Conceiveable By The Mind Of Man, but it should work...unless...

There was no way to have both of those windows open at the same time.  None.  So even the LEMCBTMOM wouldn't work.  So, in fact, there was no way to compare recipes on the GTN with recipes you already knew except to write down a list of one to compare with the other.

So in a game where (at launch) you couldn't have more than two UI windows open at the same time, you couldn't have any two...just some of 'em.

How this abortion of a Luser Interface made it into beta, let alone through beta...well, it's just indicative of the magnitude of the gap between what the SWTOR devs thought was sufficient for an MMO, and reality.  And that distance showed up throughout the game and helped turn it into the resounding disappointment that it is.

Seriously, this was a UI that a part-time coder could have cranked out in 3 months.  How a team could take 6 years for this garbage is an utter mystery.

Note:  many (buy by no means all) of the most glaring deficiencies of the launch Luser Interface were remedied a few months later in the patch that updated the UI to nearly-modern status.

The engineers who fixed the UI were mostly competant.  Where the hell were they over the previous six years?

LESS IS NEVER MORE, BUT SOMETIMES IT'S BETTER

Over the years, UIs got bigger, more complex, and usually more customizeable, all in an effort to make the game better and more involving for the player.

And sometimes it worked!

Lord of the Rings Online had a very simple method for moving UI elements around on the screen, and this was a huge plus.  A plus it needed because by the time you hit level cap you probably had four to six hotbars full of icons, many of which you never used.

As developers tried to manage needs and expectations from the player community, the UIs became more feature rich.  The devs were involved in a great juggling act between simple and complicated...and often the Luser Interface suffered.

But there has been something of a return to simplicity with two recent launches (one a huge success, the other...not).

We have seen in the launches of The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 that a simple, streamlined User Interface has a compelling case for improved gameplay.

They both have a simplified UI with a limited (and locked) hotbar.  They emphasize ease of play, doing without complexity and even what might be considered "essential" functions in other games.

And both are successful.  The gameplay works perfectly well in both cases, most likely because they were designed to work smoothly, simply, and transparently from the start.

And that, perhaps, is the difference between a "User Interface" and a "Luser Interface".  A User Interface provides an easy, functional way for the player to interact with the game that has been designed together with the UI.  A Luser Interface provides the player with frustration, confusion, and whole lot of repair bills in-game.

A User Interface will result in the players saying, when asked about the UI, "Yeah, this game has a good UI."

A Luser Interface will result in the players, when asked about the UI, reciting endless lists of what's wrong with it.

A User Interface is all but invisible.

A Luser Interface is like having a grain of sand in your eye while a cold-handed proctologist checks your prostate.  Painful from top to bottom.

Lens on Friday Quickies V

Another quick jaunt through the week's gaming news and notes...

WORLD OF WATERMARKS?--So it seems that Blizzard has been keeping secrets from us again.  This time it's hidden in plain sight.  It turns out that every time a player takes a screenshot, WoW puts in a digital watermark, noting the time and the player ID, along with some other information.

In and of itself, this is not a big deal.  I don't really have a problem with my player ID (which is listed on the Armory, I believe) being linked to my screen shots.  What's a tiny bit worrisome is that Blizzard never notified the players, and it's not listed among the "things we might do to monitor you" part of the TOS.

And to top it off, Blizz hasn't come forward with any sort of explanation, which just adds a whiff of the smell of fresh sewage.

I don't think it's a big deal in and of itself, but it does bring up the questions of why, and what else aren't you telling us?

THE 'C' IN 'CEO' STANDS FOR CRIMINAL--So I've described some of the challenges (marketing speak for "problems") that The Secret World has faced since its release.  I think the marketplace has unfairly maligned what is actually a well-done MMO with a great many new and interesting additions to the genre in terms of mechanics and gameplay.

But the critics yawned and the buyers mostly didn't buy.  Note, the players who like it, like it a lot, so I still have hopes that it can grow, albeit slowly, into a niche success.  When I first beta'd it I noted that I couldn't see it being a big hit, but that it could definitely find a niche market if enough people gave it a chance.

More people need to give it a chance for that to happen.

One of the most interesting developments as TSW headed toward it's launch was that one day before head start, the CEO of Funcom resigned his position.  Needless to say, this raised a lot of eyebrows amongst the game-watching media (I am not a game-watching medium, I am a game-watching extra-large).

And now we find out the reason...by resigning, he effectively removed himself from the list of monitored corporate "insiders".  So that when he dumped all of his stock (which he immediately did), it wouldn't set off any bells and whistles at the Norwegian equivalent of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So let's see...1.5 million shares at $17 rather than the $2.23 it's currently trading at, that equals...give me a sec...approximately JAIL.

The claim that he couldn't know about TSW's poor sales in advance assumes that he was the Most Incompetant CEO Ever...and I haven't heard him cop to that yet.

Although given Funcom's history, a case could be made...

THE BROOM CONTINUES TO SWEEP AWAY THE OLD--Another (very) familiar face appears about to exit, stage left, from Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Daniel Erickson, Lead Designer and Creative Director on SWTOR (aka "that bald guy in the videos") changed his LinkedIn profile to say that he was "actively looking for new opportunities".

In other words, if he ain't gone yet he will be soon.

The turnover at BioWare has been hot and heavy ever since the oh-so-brief launch euphoria faded quickly away into a landscape of servers where the only thing moving were womp rats.

In many ways Erickson was the most public face of SWTOR, an enthusiastic and persuasive voice and face (if not hairline) for the SWTOR team.  It's hard to know where to point the Fickle Finger Of Blame for everything that went wrong on TOR, but some of that...uh...Fingering...has to go in his direction.

I would love to get drunk with some of the SWTOR guys, like Daniel, and squeeze the truth out of 'em.  Curse those non-disclosure agreements!

I'll even spring for the drinks!

TICK TOCK, TOR'S NEW 'CADENCE'--Speaking of SWTOR, another one of the new faces of TOR busted out their "Word Of The Month" winner, 'cadence'.

Once again they have talked about increasing the 'cadence' of releasing new content.  They mean they're going to be releasing new content (flashpoint, warzone, raid, event [because their last one was so wonderful {that's sarcasm, btw, it was crap}], etc.) every six weeks.

I'll believe it when I see it.  They've been out 9 months, and the new content has been extraordinarily slow, and it's hard to imagine them picking up the pace that much with a much smaller crew of people working on it.

And when something new surfaces (or floats to the top)...well, it seems that pictures of the new tier gear have been met with pretty much universal loathing.  So even when they get something right (Look...new stuff!!!), they get it wrong (Look...incredibly bad-looking new stuff!!!).

As the perfect indicator of their mind-numbing incompetance, in the announcement of the high-capacity server tech they are investigating, they mentioned that you could help with the testing with existant test server characters.  Which sounds good, except...

So unless I'm wrong...9 months in and they still don't have a mechanism to copy characters over to the test server, or to auto-level characters up.  This is a function that should have been in place in alpha testing.  This is the reason why so much of the endgame, especially the open world PvP, never got thouroughly playtested.

This is why they deserved to fail.  Something so obviously missing that they still have never addressed.

But they have a new cadence, so...go TOR!

I GOT YOUR CADENCE RIGHT HERE, BUDDY!--As opposed to the guys at Trion who work on Rift.  They've been out for about twice as long as TOR and probably have put out 10 or 20 times as much new content.  Maybe more.

Hell, definitely more.

They just released their 10th content patch in their 18 months, and the last before they release the new expansion in two months.

The new expansion will TRIPLE the available land-mass to run around on.  Imagine how long it will be before we see triple the land-mass from TOR.  Yeah, imagine "never".

Once again the devs working on Rift simply make the rest of the industry look like rank amateurs.

I don't know what their secret is...I can't believe their devs and designers work harder than everyone else.  It's gotta be one of three things.

1) Their program and project management team is incredible.

2) Their content creation tools are an order of magnitude more efficient than everyone else in the industry.

3) They have harnessed Skynet for peaceful purposes.

I figure by the time "Storm Legion" launches, I'll be due for a break from GW2 and I'll head back to Rift for a bit.

WHAT'S THIS?  SOMETHING NEW?--So here's a game I don't think I've mentioned here before...

Firefall.

The first trailer and gameplay videos looked quite good.  But then the game went a little quiet.

Then a couple of friends got into the beta and their reports agreed completely...fun to play for a while, but repetitive and essentially without "content".  I immediately lost interest.

And tacit in the announcements this week from the Firefall team is agreement with those sentiments.

Their next big target is for big improvements in the PvE game, including creatures, PvE content, PvE player direction and rewards, PvE core combat, exploration and achievements, and so on.

I will now, officially, start paying more attention to Firefall.  The fact that they've acknowledged the game was sadly lacking in a panoply of PvE boilerplate and are moving to remedy the situation has be back in the slightly optimistic mindset I got from those first gameplay videos.

I shall be watching, Firefall team.  Game on.

Lens on What's In A Name?

Let's face it, Shakespeare was wrong.  A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but if it was called "corpse flower" it sure as hell wouldn't have the same romantic associations.  This probably accounts for the historically sluggish Valentine's Day sales of Amorphophallus Titanum.

I've certainly seen my share of terrible names in MMOs over the years, and it's possible that Guild Wars 2 has the most bad names ever, simply by default, because all of the servers have a shared namespace.

But I'm not certain people who name their character 'X X Thor X X', 'V V V V V V V V V V', or 'xXx Drizzit xXx' are likely to come up with anything that isn't headshakingly stupid with an empty namespace to choose from.  Not to mention the names that are vulgar or racist.

By the way, those names above are ones I've seen in-game in GW2.

The only game(s) where the namespace is pretty much free are from Cryptic.  In "Champions Online" (and I believe in "Star Trek Online" as well), you can pick just about anything that doesn't violate the TOS (no copyright or trademark infringement, nothing vulger or racist, that sort of thing) because every name is associated with an account handle or nickname.  So if you've got a friend with a character named "Superduper Fellow" you might have to specify which "Superduper Fellow" you're trying to send a tell too, because there can be more than one.

It's not perfect, but it pretty much guarantees you get the name you want.

And names are important to players.

I was a little disappointed that two of my names were taken very, very quickly in GW2.  "Spongo" and "Borborygmus" were both already gone when I got around to trying to use them, the first about 20 minutes after the game launched.

But I got the name for my main, and we got our guild name as well, so that's a big plus.

But after playing these silly games for years, and seeing countless names that were jaw-droppingly bad, I've come to some conclusions about names...

SPELL IT RIGHT--Seriously, that's the single most important thing.  If your character or (especially) guild name is recognizeable, especially if it uses English words...spell it right.

The other day I happened to be doing an event in GW2 with three players from a guild and I clicked on one to see their guild name was "The Vangaurd".

Now I suppose it's possible that it's intentional, or ironic...but we all know it's just that whoever started the guild is an imbecile.  And everyone who joined should have said, "Yeah, I'll join, as soon as it's spelled right."

And I just had to check, so I Googled it...another server has a guild named "The Last Vangaurd".

I have no words...and they have no spellchecker

DON'T COPY THE OBVIOUS ONES--Somebody once did a search for how many variants on Legolas they could find amongst the elvish hunters in WoW.  Hundreds of 'em.

Every server in Lord of the Rings Online has a bajillion different variations on Legolas and Aragorn and other characters from the lore.

A number of my standard names are ripped off too, but I stole them from really obscure places.  And if somebody's taken 'em, I don't double up the letters in attempt to keep my "cool" name.

So don't go with Legollas, Legolaas, Leggolas, Legggolas, or, Eru help you, xXxLegolasxXx.

"Leggomyeggolas" I'm perfectly OK with.

DON'T CHOOSE SHORT-LIVED CULTURAL REFERENCES--It's really easy to make a joke name based on an Internet meme.  Cultural reference humor can be easy and sometimes even funny.  We all use it all the time...hell, I do it here sometimes.

But a name lasts, and you don't want to be trying to explain how funny your name used to be until everybody forgot about "that song that was always on the radio" or "that video clip that became a meme".

When I see those sorts of names, I am reminded of http://failblog.cheezburger.com/ugliesttattoos where you will see a never-ending array of short-lived cultural references permanently inked on people's bodies.  You can see a lot of Charlie Sheen "Winning!" tattoos there...who's going to get that joke in five years?  Who thinks it's funny now?  Lots and lots of bad-choice meme-based tattoos.

Oh, and a lot of misspellings too.

Here's a simple example of what can go wrong...

Today, Justin Bieber is a Really Big Deal(tm) with all the teenage girls.  Before him, it was the Jonas Brothers who you might not remember (if you're lucky).  Before them...yeah, I have no idea either.

Don't let your character or guild name have that fate.  Some cultural references can live on while others are so transient you'll be regretting your joke name in a month.

WATCH OUT FOR PRETENTIOUS--In GW2 we ended up on the informally official role-playing server because, generally, you have a less juvenile crowd on an RP server.  Yes, sometimes the RP stuff can be a bit...much...but better that than a server chock-full of adolescent asstards.

Combined with the RP server, given that the namespace is so full, a lot of people are using surnames and a lot of the surnames are descriptive.  These tend to be a bit of fantasy boilerplate, but given the namespace, I understand.  So on our server I'll give a pass to all but the most pretentious sounding name.

How do you know if your name is too pretentious sounding?  Certain words are a dead give-away.  I like to use them ironically, like with a pet named "Doomchicken" or a character surname of "Alebane".

Here's a hint...the pretentious words in those names weren't "ale" or "chicken".

Just ask yourself the question, "Does this name sound like the kind of thing a 12 year-old boy would name his character to sound cool?"

If the answer is yes...well, you have your answer.  Unless you _are_ a 12 year-old boy, in which case...awesome name dude!

THE THREE CHOICES FOR NAMING YOUR GUILD

Naming a guild is particularly difficult, as it has to be acceptable to everyone who's going to join up.  Generally, it can't be stupid, because nobody wants to be associated with something obviously asinine.  So I've narrowed the field to three types that can work...

SOMETHING COOL-SOUNDING--Often, these names will be lore based names.  It's an attempt to project an aura around the guild, and it's always a double-edged blade.  Because attempting to sound cool too often sounds pretentious.

Now a role-playing guild has every right to have a pretentious-sounding name.  But other than that, the guild members are likely to feel that other players are giggling at them.  And they'll probably be right.

I can give a perfect example...and it's from GW2, but it's not a player guild.  It's the "guild" that was made up of the main NPCs the players work with as they journey through their storyline quests, one from each of the five in-game races.  That group, or "guild" in the game lore, was called "Destiny's Edge".

Seriously..."Destiny's Edge".  You'd have to put in some work to come up with something more pretentious sounding that that.  In fact, it's so trite that every time one of the NPCs says it, I wince.  It's so goddamned "ooooooo, cool, fantasy, destiny, edge, oooooooo!" that it's laughable.

I myself, as a lifelong fantasy fanboy, feel the temptation sometimes to go with "cool sounding".  But it's a tough line to walk.  I've used the guild name "The Council of Ashes" in a few games, but I've always been concerned that it was both generic and pretentious, thereby failing on two counts.

It's a fine, fine line.

SOMETHING FUNNY--As long as you're not using one of those short-lived cultural reference I talked about above, a funny name can work out too.  But humor, like cool, is in the mind of the beholder.  Beminder.  Whatever.

Again, because everybody in the guild is going to have to wear the tag, it's a balancing act.  Everybody in the guild is going to have to find it funny or at least inoffensive.  And they're all going to have to be willing to wear a guild tag that's a joke.  And some people aren't comfortable projecting the "we're a joke" vibe.

Lore-based humor can work if it's well-crafted.  I have an alt in LoTRO in an alt-guild named "Isengard Bids Five", a direct (and funny) reference to a epic storyline quest in the "Rise of Isengard" expansion.  I thought the name was inspired and joined up.  Hell, I wished I'd come up with the name.

But it doesn't have to be lore-based at all...the other night in GW2 I saw a guild named "We Never Finish Anyth".  I actually laughed out loud.  And as long as everyone in the guild is comfortable wearing that, more power too them

But too many joke names are, well, just jokes.  Not funny, not inspired.  And the only bad joke is one that's not funny.

Of course, it might still violate the TOS, but if it's funny, at least it's not a bad joke!

As an aside, you can combo these first two...  Everything in Latin is cool-sounding (and pretentious), so you can put something silly in Latin and get a twofer!  One of my old guilds was the "Deadly Hedgehogs".  Goofy, but in Latin it sounded pretty awesome.

SOMETHING NEUTRAL--My standard fallback position.  I want a guild name that all of my guildies find acceptable.  Getting something they all love isn't likely to happen, but by taking something relatively safe you can at least avoid conflict.

Removing a potential source of drama from a guild is always a great, big, fat plus in my book.  Because if people can find something to quarrel over, they will, and that becomes more true as the guild grows in size.

Let me give you the perfect example in the name I came up with for our SW:TOR guild, "The Anchorhead Irregulars".

Why Anchorhead?  Because in the Star Wars universe that most of us are aware of, the movies, and in the previous Star Wars MMO "Star Wars Galaxies", Anchorhead was the most insignificant flyspeck of a settlement.  But it's one all the players would recognize as it got a prominent mention or two in the first movie.

That it turned out in the SWTOR universe to be the main starport for the Republic side and we were a Republic guild was a bonus.

Why Irregulars?  Threefold.  First, we're kind of a weird, heterogenous group, hence not regular.  Second, it's a common military descriptor for an ad hoc group of soldiers, fighting, say, against the Empire.  Third, it summons up, for those literarily inclined, images of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of street urchins Sherlock Holmes used to use to aid him in his cases.

So "The Anchorhead Irregulars" was perfect...it was neutral, it had lore resonances and multiple rationales.  It wasn't funny or cool sounding, but it definitely worked.  I think everyone even liked it.

IN CONCLUSION

Gamers are weird.  MMO gamers are weirder.  Many things have great importance to us that we would have a difficult time explaining (let alone justifying) to non-gamers.

But the importance of many of these things springs from the amount of time and effort we can put into these games.  I can't even begin to guess the number of /played hours some people have put into WoW or EQ.  Or how much time some people have managed across a number of games.  Tens of thousands of hours in some cases, I imagine (as a point of reference, 10,000 hours would be about 5 years of standard workdays).

And the first thing people see about us in our virtual existance is a name.  We grow attached to it and, in some cases, it becomes attached to us.  People get to know the person behind a given name...it really does become an altar ego.

It's natural that, over time, we would place great value on a name.  On our name.

Because a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but nobody wants a dozen "xXx Drizzit xXx"s for Valentine's Day.