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.

Lens on Lensfail Again!

I feel shame...no blog today, too much going on.

But it's goodstuff going on, so I shan't complain in the least.

Wednesday for sure!

Lens on Friday Quickies IV

It was actually a pretty quiet week.  But into the silence, I come along with my noise...

PAX = PEACE = QUIET

PAX was, in a word, "meh".  Mind you, from everything I've read it was a blast to be there, with lots of smaller games and indie games and even non-computer games making good showings there.

But on the big name front, especially for MMOs, it was eerily quiet.

Mostly that's due to the fact that the big boys are already in play and so a big PAX presence filled with amazing announcements just wasn't in the cards.

TSW and GW2 have shipped (to diametrically different sales), LotRO and WoW and Rift have their expansions ready to go over the next two months, PlanetSide 2 is ramping up for their release...and it's going to be kinda quiet other than those and a raft of smaller MMOs, most of which you've never heard of and never will (seriously, check out the "Upcoming MMOs" on the front page of mmorpg.com for the list of 'huh-whuh?' games).

A few games dropped trailers, but nothing made much of a splash.

Last year Neverwinter busted out their big announcements and wowed the crowd (say that out loud! [and that too!]).

But this year...there was no Game of Show.

A bit of a let-down, but then as I said, most of the big players are already in the game.

CITY OF HEROES MEETS KRYPTONITE

In what came as something of a surprise move (perhaps even a shocking move), NCSoft is shitcanning the City of Heroes franchise.  Oh, and incidentally, all of the employees and the studio.

As I understand it, the game was still profitable.  So when NCSoft busts out the standard bullshit lines of "refocusing" and "re-allocating" and crap like that.

When Apple computer cancelled the much-maligned Newton (look it up!), the product was profitable.  But in that case, refocusing and re-allocating makes sense because the employees were put to work on other things (like helping to dig the company out of a great big hole and become Bigger Than God [and incidentally pay for my retirement]).

But in this case NCSoft killed a studio that was profitable.  So they are refocusing and re-allocating...what exactly?

At least when they did the same thing with Tabula Rasa it was explained in part because they were actively trying to save millions by screwing Richard Garriott out of his contract.  But why CoH?

CoH was a terrific game.  Movement and combat were so responsive it was a joy to play.  I remember the first time one of my characters got super jump.  It was...perfect.  It worked exactly the way every comic book reader dreamed it would.

Everybody who got it for the first time...EVERYBODY...spent at least 20 minutes doing nothing but jumping around.  And in that little time you could launch yourself blocks in air and stick the landing on a specific fire escape or window sill you were aiming at.

I have said, ever since CoH, that every game should have super jump.  So.  Much.  Fun.

There also seems to be some preliminary talks going on between NCSoft and "interested parties" as to whether the game (and perhaps the studio) can be spun off and/or resurrected.

Let's hope so.

Regardless, best of luck to the team of Paragon Studios.  The game was something to be proud of.

TERA'S NUMBERS AS SCANT AS THE IN-GAME CLOTHING

The guys running TERA announced that they will be merging servers down to three.  Every single person I know who played the game (all briefly) responded to the news with "Wow!  Already?"

That was fast.  Not to toot my own horn (oh screw it, TOTALLY to toot my own horn), but I pretty much called this one.  I still don't think there's much of an overlap between console-style action gamers and MMO players.  And certainly in TERA's case, with the most yawnworthy boilerplate MMO trappings on their (apparently quite) compelling action gameplay, it's already circling the drain.

As a further insult to those who are still sticking around, given the 8 character per server limit, if you've created more than 8 characters on the servers getting merged you're screwed.

Pick your favorite 8 because the others are gone.  Way to support the fans!

I guess including a race of adolescent slut-bunny characters doesn't guarantee success in the marketplace.  Who knew?

Well, me, actually.

UBISOFT AWAKENS FROM THEIR (SELF-INDUCED) NIGHTMARE

In a fine example of corporate double-talk, after spending endless time and effort defending the necessity and utility of their always-on DRM, Ubisoft announced this week that they were dropping the whole thing, retroactively, effective immediately.

When asked about this seeming (and actual) about-face, Ubisoft responded with "What always-on DRM are you referring too?  We've always had exactly this new policy in place.  These aren't the droids you're looking for.  Please start purchasing our games again.  Please."

Allow me to point to my recent blog about Razer (http://lensonmmos.blogspot.com/2012/09/lens-on-razer-cuts-its-own-throat.html) about how this sort of cloud-based control bullshit is stupid beyond words.  And in this case, after watching the customers uniformly hold up a great big middle finger, Ubisoft got the message.

And for the record, Razer has now completely removed the old manual drivers from their website, forcing people who wish to avoid using their Synapse Piece-Of-Shitware to try to track down the old drivers from the murky and dangerous depths of the Internet.

Hey Razer...take a look at the message Ubisoft just sent out...the same one Cisco sent out a few months back..."We hear you, our customers, we were wrong and we're sorry."

Actually...that's the message that Ubisoft sent out, only they sent it out by denying that always-on DRM was every a policy and if it was it wasn't a mistake.

OK...whatever helps you sleep at night Mr. Ubi.

PETER MOORE, I NOW AWAIT YOUR APOLOGY

In last week's quickies, I flamed Peter Moore's BS statement about people just loving to hate on EA (and Zynga, and Bobby Kotick) for no good reason.

I made the statement that we hate them for perfectly good reasons.  Here's what I said about why we hate EA:

We hate EA because time after time they screw their customers in vast droves to try and leverage their business so that they can screw them better and more often in the future.

And if you had any doubts about me being right Mr. Moore, here's what Frank Gibeau, EA Games President, had to say this week:

"I have not green lit one game to be developed as a singleplayer experience."

Hey Frank...as a life-long gameplayer and customer of your company's products for as long as it's existed, just let me say with all warmth...

Frank Gibeau, please go fuck yourself!

Here's news...Frank...there are all kinds of gamers.  A great many of them...guess what...play games singleplayer.

Yes I know you tried to cover your ass with some mealy-mouthed crap about not green-lighting "anything that doesn't have an online service", but we're back to precisely the same sort of bullshit I talked about last week.

It's them trying to leverage their business for more control.  "Everything has online service" is nothing but extending control and forcing their lever down our throats, whether we want it or not, for EA's benefit.  Not for better games.  Not for happier customers.

So Peter...I'm waiting for your call.

Or you could fire that shithead Gibeau.  I'd take that as an apology too.

AND TO CLOSE, A FEW SHORT-SHORTS...

--Blizzard has notified me that I have a free week of WoW playtime to prepare for Mists of Pandaria.  And even the free doesn't interest me.  "Mists of Pandering" with the new addition of pandas, and pokemon, and Farmville...no thanks guys.

--"Marvel Heroes" is nearing its beta.  I believe on October 1st they'll open up registration for the website, with automatic entry into the beta pool.  I'll be interested to see how the Diablo-esque gameplay will mesh with superheroes and with MMOs.

--PlanetSide 2 announced their early-bird special.  $40 gets you immediate access to the beta and a whole raft of launchtime goodies.  It actually looks like a pretty good deal for those interested in the game.  http://www.planetside2.com/alpha-squad

--Lastly, because I am legally required to end on a sour note, Richard Garriott (aka "Lord Egoish") and Portalarium are teaming up with Zynga for a 'game' called "Ultimate Collector", intended to collect your money.  If you want to see a fine definition of why so much "social gaming" is utter crap, please read Garriott's blurb (http://www.mmorpg.com/newsroom.cfm/read/25465/Richard-Garriotts-Portalarium-Partners-with-Zynga.html).  It's funny, but I don't even see where what's described is a game.

When it comes to Garriott and Zynga's CEO Pincus, I picture them as two rocks on the bottom of the sea.  One of them pipes up "Hey, I've got an idea...maybe if we tie ourselves together we'll float!"

Lens on MMO Launches

I had intended to write this last week, but the specific badnesses of the Guild Wars 2 launch (note: the game itself is great!) required a full column.

YOU ONLY GET ONE CHANCE TO SCREW UP A FIRST IMPRESSION

To quote Princess Irulan at the beginning of the movie version of "Dune", the beginning is a very delicate time.  It certainly holds true for MMOs and their launches.

The very nature of MMO launches has changed enormously, and the players' expectations have kept up with those changes.

The old paradigm for an MMO launch went a little like this:

Work begins.  Alpha testing.  Friends and family testing.  Small, secretive beta testing.  Game launch.  Shit hits the fan.

The new paradigm for an MMO launch goes more like this:

Work begins.  Game is announced.  Alpha testing.  Beta sign-ups taken.  Friends and family testing.  Small secretive beta testing.  Larger betas begin.  Press beta testing.  Press NDA drops.  Very large scale betas, either to pre-purchasers or by an open beta.  Game launch.  Game runs smoothly or...wait for the pun...the fans hit the shit.

If that joke made just a little more sense it might even be funny.  But probably not.

Now I've simplified what happens at launches, as there's been everything between "tragi-comical clusterfuck" and "something must be wrong because pretty much nothing went went wrong".

I'd like to touch on some of those zeniths and nadirs individually.

THE WORST MMO LAUNCH IN HISTORY

Maybe not the worst...there might have been some tiny-budget launch that exploded so badly the game was pretty much done on Day One.  But other than that...

"Anarchy Online" wins the prize by acclimation.  Go ahead and Google "worst MMO launch".  Yeah, AO is so far ahead that nobody else comes close.

You'd be hard pressed to name a single potential problem that ever appeared at the launch of any other MMO that didn't show up at AO's launch.  Billing problems (lots), server stability (none), customer support (hah!)...you name it.

And they had all of their problems with a whole, whopping 35,000 customers!  You can even see their mea culpa here:  http://web.archive.org/web/20010812075759/216.74.158.92/news/bigNews/statement.html

I wasn't around for the launch, but I joined a few months later and the performance in the cities was still often a slideshow of seconds per frame.

Despite that, AO did for me what EQ and UO didn't...it grabbed me.  It was the first MMO I devoted serious amounts of time into.

But if I'd been around for that launch and those first few months...

As a further note, Anarchy Online is still around 11 years later, and Funcom continues to update it, as it will be upgraded to use the engine used by Conan and TSW.  AO was also, I believe, the first "name" western MMO to adapt the free-to-play system.

So despite The Worst MMO Launch In History...Anarchy Online survived.  Bravo Funcom.

FUNCOM...THEY CAN BE TAUGHT!

For all the crap they (justly) received over the Anarchy Online launch, for all the issues with their "Age of Conan" launch (which I won't get into here), Funcom learned their lesson for the launch of "The Secret World".

I'll skip the details here as I gave full feedback on my TSW launchblog (http://lensonmmos.blogspot.com/2012/06/lens-on-secret-world-launchblog.html), but I gave them an 8.75/10 rating.  It was smooth, with only a few minor glitches and one significant absence, the auction house which was announced to be late, and showed up a couple weeks later.  And upon further review, the store issues weren't as bad as they seemed at the time, so it probably deserves a 9/10.

Regardless, bravo Funcom!  TSW launched beautifully.

If only more people were buying and playing it.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU SUCCEED TOO MUCH?

A question all MMOs hope they have to answer...but pretty much only one has really had to.

World of Warcraft was the first game to launch with what I described above as "the new paradigm".  They had a lot of publicity and incredibly good word-of-mouth coming out of their large (public?) beta.  And when they launched, the game exploded.

Well actually the servers ran OK compared with what was expected at the time.

No, the explosion was popularity.

Sure the game had some bugs and issues and instability...in those days it was expected.  Memorably, Blizzard would provide recompense for server outages with extra game time...unheard of!

But what WoW brought to the table that was new, was servers so crowded that queues to get in would last for hours.

20 servers weren't nearly enough.

So Blizzard, having dreadfully underestimated on their "best case scenario" was forced to do the unthinkable.

They stopped selling the game.

For a period of time (A month?  Six weeks?) they stopped making and selling their game while they hurriedly bought and installed new hardware to deal with their sudden success.

So while the WoW launch had its issues, especially being the first of the "new paradigm", what it's best remembered for is the ludicrous success in commercial terms.

And they're still at it...printing money, piling it up on the floor, rolling around in it, and laughing at every other game's launch ever since.

SWTOR GETS IT SO RIGHT...

The guys at BioWare have obviously had...issues...with "Star Wars: The Old Republic".  But I want to talk about something they did for launch that was wonderful.  And it's something that every other major MMO company needs to copy or steal.

It's something that Guild Wars 2 could have used for sure.

Launches are very stressful for the players.  What class should I play?  Will I get my name(s)?  Will the servers be stable?  How am I going to survive the wait?

Oh...and "what server am I going to play on?"

That last one is especially a problem if you're in a guild.  Or two.  The amount of e-mail back and forth and forum posting, and guessing, and cajoling, and weeping, and pulling of hair and rending of flesh...you get the picture...that goes on as everyone tries to coordinate one simple thing...

"What server are we all playing on?"

Believe me, we just went through this extended dance with Guild Wars 2.  Totally unnecessary stress and drama.

For TOR you could pre-create your guild on their website.  Give it a name.  Pick PvE or PvP, East or West coast.  They provided forums for your nascent guild on their web site to chat and organize and get excited about the game.  You could choose other guilds to be allies/enemies with (as long as you were the same PvE/P and West/East coast).

And when they launched, they automatically chose a server for your guild (along with allies/enemies).  When you first logged in, by default your assigned server was clearly marked and at the top of the server list.

Absolute, pure fucking genius.  It solved the players problems and one of the biggest launch problems for the guys in charge, server population imbalance.

The TOR guys get a 10/10 for this idea and implementation.

AND THEN SWTOR GETS IT SO WRONG...

And at launch it worked perfectly.  In fact, TOR's launch was generally pretty good.  Sure, there were a number of bugged quests, and the storyline ones could be cockblockers, but it was mostly stable and mostly good.

From a technical launch point of view.  Some of the game systems were shit *cough*openworldPvP*cough*, but the launch itself was pretty good.

But there were queues.  Pretty long ones, actually.  But with a launch like theirs, with 1 million plus players, that was to be expected.  As players levelled out of the introductory planets, queues would have shortened and in a couple of weeks, the problem would have fixed itself.

But no, BioWare got the wrong message.

They thought, "AaaaaHAH!  We have a WoW-type success on our hands!  We shall be rich and successful beyond the wildest fantasies of Croesus!  Let's open up a shitload of new servers for every to fill up while we start browsing for yachts on the Internet!"

So they created a bajillion new servers without putting in one percent of the thought and planning they had with the pre-launch guild system, as an example.

Because if people wanted to play on one of the new, non-queued servers they had to leave their established characters (and guilds so wonderfully pre-created and assigned as per above) behind.  Because any kind of character transfer was impossible at that time (literally, they could not do it).  And for months to come.

So the first batch of new servers got good-sized populations as queued players made alts and new buyers got into the game.

But subsequent batches of new servers had very light populations.

And as players finished the content and found the endgame lacking...OK, not "lacking", "missing"...they stopped playing.  And unsubscribed.

Suddenly all those extra servers were empty.  A friend of mine created alts on a few servers to check how empty.  One server, Imperial side during prime-time hours, had 35 people on it.

All those empty servers (not to mention all the PvP servers with huge faction population imbalances) became additional disincentives for people to play.  Or to pay.

Make no mistake, SWTOR was destined to disappoint.  But the bright spot of the launch prep BioWare provided to guilds was a beautiful thing.

And misreading of the launch "success" by BioWare only hastened the rapid exit to free-to-play.

We'll see how that launch goes for 'em.

A MERCIFULLY QUICK DEATH

I'll add a quick note here on one of the cautionary tales of MMO launches.

"APB".  I bought it at launch because I was in the MMO doldrums.  I got it via Steam.  It didn't work.  Ever.  I spent about 6 weeks going back and forth with the tech support people before giving up on it.

That's 6 weeks of the 9 or 10 weeks the game existed, as the whole company folded about 2 months after launch.

Note that the assets were purchased, the game was rejiggered, and it's currently available as a free-to-play title.

I haven't bothered trying it out.

But the lesson here is clear...you can drop a lot of money on developing an MMO and it can still be dead a couple months after launch.

APB was DOA.

ONE LAST WHINE

I'll finish up by reiterating one of the points from my launch review of Guild Wars 2.

Communication.

Please, figure it out before launch and use it correctly.

Guild Wars 2 is a fine game, and I'm enjoying it a great deal.

But in the two weeks it's been out, to be informed of what's going on with the "state of the game", players have to have kept track via Twitter, FaceBook, Reddit, and, finally, for a couple of days now, the GW2 forums.

That's four sources of official information that players need to try to keep an eye on, and three of them are totally beyond the control of ArenaNet.

If a player had a question or problem (beyond the veil of customer support), he had to create an account on one of these social sites and hope that someone at A-Net paid attention.  And face the venom of some of the jackholes that inhabit the Internet with the sole raison d'etre of inflicting insults and injury on others.

This is not acceptable.

NOT ACCEPTABLE.

ArenaNet needs to be called on this bullshit every single time they show their face in public.  They can't try to float their line of "oh we think the social media are awesome way-cool ways to communicate with our players!" without it being met with a universal display of middle fingers.

ArenaNet, use a few of those millions of dollars you're taking from us to buy some hardware to run decent forums on, hire some moderators and community reps and behave like pretty much every other professional MMO-providing company.

AND TO FINISH UP...

Yeah, back to launches...

Sorry, I love GW2 and that amateur-hour communication really pisses me off.

Perhaps you noticed?

We MMO players have to put up with a lot when a new game launches.  It's stressful for us, to be sure, but it's even more stressful at the other end.  I can't imagine how much coffee and aspirin gets consumed at the launch of a major MMO.

We've seen a number of smooth launches over the last few years.  "Rift", even though I've not mentioned it before now, perhaps set the bar for good launches.  Between that and the quantity and quality of new content they crank out...I'd say that right now Trion are the best in the business, regardless of whether you enjoy the game or not (and I do).

As players, we've come to expect a LOT more at launches than just a few years ago.  Perhaps we've come to expect too much.  I mean it's easy to say "Well why is Game A having so much more trouble than Game B had at launch?"

So what do I want from a game at launch?

Relatively short queues.

Fast server reboots for hotfixes with at least a few minutes notification in-game.

Regular fixes and small patches, with patch notes.

Regular (and extensive) lists of known issues being worked on.

A single location for reporting and tracking issues (i.e. official forums).

All previously announced major game systems in place and functioning.

Communication, communication, communication.  Let the players know what you're thinking and that you're listening.

Oh, and one last thing...

I want a game so goddamned much fun that I consider moving the fridge next to my computer and using a Texas catheter to avoid breaks.

Is that so much to ask?

Lens on Razer Cuts Its Own Throat

Today, I'm going to be going off on a rant.  I know, you thought I was full of bluster and bullshit before, just wait until I get rolling!

And what's got me so pissed off didn't even happen to me!  It happened to a friend and when I tried to help her out...well, heads must roll (if only I were King)!

THE MOUSE THAT WORKED

I've owned a Razer Naga MMO mouse for a few years.  I didn't even buy it because of the "MMO" in the name.  I bought it because I needed more thumb buttons.  The mouse I had at the time had one or two, and I wanted at least four.

Why four?  One for push-to-talk, and one each for Shift, Control, and Alt, so that I could more easily activate my first four rows of hotkeys in Lord of the Rigns Online.

The Naga haz 12 thumb buttons.  That's way more than I needed, but nobody else had more than two at the time.  So 12 was it!

It worked fine when I got it and the software installed OK.  Configuring it took a bit of poking and prodding, but I got it to do what I wanted, mostly.  True, to get it working the way I wanted I needed to set my push-to-talk to F12 where it occasionally gets in the way.  GW2 defaults that to "Logout", so I changed that in GW2 immediately.  Chrome uses that to pop up the Java window...and doesn't allow you to disable it.  The plug-in to turn off that function only works most of the time, so occasionally I talk and up pops the Java window when I'm in Chrome, but I can deal.

All in all, it worked well enough and I would have recommended it to friends looking for a thumb-button-rich mouse with programmability.

And now for a brief aside...

FLASHBACK 1995

In 1995 the Internet was just dawning on the public at large.  URLs were starting to show up on TV ads and "You've Got Mail" was still a couple years off.  Netscape had gone public and the stock was skyrocketing at a ludicrous pace.

I was working in a high-profile tech company at the time, and one day in an executive staff meeting, one of the VPs, unable to contain his excitement, exclaimed "OK...this Internet thing is going to be BIG!  We need to be involved in it!"

His pronouncement was met with stunned silence until someone said, "Our entire business is predicated on it, actually."

Yes, a VP had no clue what the business they were in was working based on.

It was a wild time, where any dumb-ass idea that involved "the Internet" could get funding.  I referred to it as "smoking the Internet Weed".  Seemingly intelligent people could toss logic out the window in the gold-rush for Internet-related anythings.

It's often referred to as "the Internet Bubble".  And it sure popped.

THEY CALL IT "THE CLOUD" BECAUSE IT'S MOSTLY VAPORWARE

Today's version of "smoking the Internet Weed" could be called "inhaling The Cloud smoke", because it's about that substantial and will probably make you choke.

A couple of interesting facts surfaced lately in polls.  First, more than 90% of all people using "The Cloud" aren't aware of it.  Because "The Cloud" includes things like gmail, FaceBook, Flickr and so on, people don't realize they're clouding (I made up a word!).  The other number was that 50% of people think that "The Cloud" can be affected by the weather.

Seriously, that's how much of a bullshit, meaningless buzzphrase "The Cloud" is...that half of all people think it's dependant on the weather.

"The Cloud" is great for certain things...say like those I mentioned above, where you need your data to be accessible by yourself or others via the Internet.  But there are immense problems with it too...if the company you're trusting with your data has a security breach.  Or burns down.  Or has snoopy employees.  Or a bazillion other potential problems.

"The Cloud" is a tool.  Like every tool, it has a proper place and function.

But because it's suddenly in the ideaspace (I think I made up another word!) of every halfwit executive, like the Internet Weed before it, suddenly it's vital that everybody, everywhere include it in their product.

Even if it's a terrible idea, these halfwits are going to shove it down the customer's throats!

THE MOUSE THAT FAILED, "RAZOR SYNAPSE"

Cue Razer, and one (or more) of their halfwitted execs!

My friend picked up a Razer Naga a week or so ago.  She installed the software and...it wanted her to log in to the website.

Uh...this is a MOUSE.  No website is needed for a mouse.

Or so you'd think.  But the software wouldn't continue with the install until she created an account on the Razer website and logged in.  Logically, she said "Screw this bullshit" (actually, I don't think she swore...yet) and cancelled.  She just wanted freaking drivers and config software.

But it wasn't available on their website.  The only thing available was the software abortion known as "Razer Synapse", the web-based configuration software it had tried to install earlier.

So I tracked down the drivers, which still existed on their website on an orphaned page (i.e. not reachable by browsing from their home page) and gave her the location.

She tried to install the good old-fashioned driver/config software, but it failed, because the Synapse shitware had crapped the bed before she cancelled out of it.

Just starting her long journey to frustration, she contacted Razer customer support.

HELL IS TECH-SUPPORTING SOME OTHER ASSHOLE'S DECISION

It's clear what has happened at Razer.  An executive moron made a decision, that Razer needed cloud-based mouse configuration (hey asshole, it's a fucking mouse!) as the ONLY SUPPORTED OPTION, to force customers to use it.  And the poor bastards in tech support had to try to deal with all the problems.

So my friend gets to customer support where she's told that the old drivers are no longer supported (or supposed to even be available) after about a week before her purchase.  It was Synapse only from now on.

She explains that she has the installer for the previous version and she doesn't want Synapse because she doesn't want her mouse config dependant on being connected to the Internet.

"Do you have Internet reliability problems in your home?"

"No, I have a laptop that I use in locations with no Internet connectivity, asshole (she didn't say that), and I'd like to be able to use my fucking (that either) mouse configuration.  Because it's a GODDAMNED MOUSE! (nor that whole sentence)."

"Oh."

So the guy tries to help her get her mouse working.  He insists on upgrading the firmware.

No joy...so she uninstalls all of the Synapse crap...no joy.  Now the tech thinks he may have broken the mouse when he futzed with the firmware and she should exchange it.

At this point I can actually hear her temple veins throbbing through Ventrilo.

She nukes every last piece of Razer software from her computer and, against her better judgement, exchanges the mouse for another of the same.

She installs the old driver/config software...

And it just works.  Like mine did.  Like several other guildies did.

What is our lesson here?

RAZER TREATS THE CUSTOMER LIKE THE SMALLEST CON ON THE CELLBLOCK

OK, idiot exec...if you want to offer the numberless advantages of cloud-based configuration (numberless as in "zero") as an option on your mouse, go for it!

Y'know...I really can't think of a single advantage to it.  Under what circumstances am I going to pick up my mouse, unplug it, carry it with me, plug it into another computer and then log into Razer's website (with another install of the Synapse shitware on the destination computer) so that I can use my mouse?

But, if in your infinite stupidity Mr. Exec, you insist, then fine.

When a person starts the software install, offer them two options, the old-fashioned driver/config and the shiny new (pointless) cloud-based web-config.  Just make sure to inform them of the drawbacks of your brilliant option, you microcephalic coprophage.

Because whatever advantage you think that Razer will accrue from leveraging this centralized control into some sort of marketing-driven monetization, it will be more than offset by the number of dissatisfied customers.

Including this one.

BECAUSE I WILL NEVER PURCHASE ANY RAZER PRODUCT AGAIN.

I know...what a terrible threat!  I'm sure Razer is quaking in their boots.  But here's the thing...it's not just going to be me.  The first time somebody has to log in to the web site to configure their mouse will be the last time, for most people, that they'll buy a Razer product.

Think I'm wrong?  Take a look what happened with Cisco a few months back from this collection of urls (the titles are sufficiently informative):

http://www.neowin.net/news/cisco-locks-users-out-of-their-routers-requires-invasive-cloud-service

http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/07/new-cisco-connect-cloud-enrages-users-over-privacy-issues.php

http://www.slashgear.com/cisco-responds-to-connect-cloud-complaints-03236934/

http://technology.newsplurk.com/2012/07/cisco-rethinks-service-after-customer.html

They tried the same shitware approach, that if you wanted to configure your own router, you had to use their cloud-based config.

Customers went batshit crazy.

Cisco backpedalled, FAST.

Google up "Razer Synapse" and note the top auto-completes:  "not working", "2.0 problems", "account locked".

How about that last one!  Your account is locked so you can't configure your mouse!

Razer...fuck you.

I will not use one of your products again.  And backpedalling this decision isn't enough.

I need to see, on YouTube, every single stupid bastard involved in this decision being physcially thrown out of the Razer headquarters, along with all their office shit.

Because I am the customer, and when you try to leverage me, I'll use the only leverage I have in response.

I'll give you the finger and take my money elsewhere.

Lens on Friday Quickies III

More quick little blurbs on some of the news of the week in MMOs and gaming

NOW I DELAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP...

Yeah, pretty lame, I know.  Three games announced delays of various importance recently.

"Neverwinter" has pushed their launch into next year.  The game was expected by the end of 2012, but they've decided to continue work on it.  This is almost always a good idea.  They could try to push for Christmas, but unless they are already close, I think waiting until Q1 is probably wise.  Hell, Q2 might not even be a bad idea.

MMOs are seldom released in a sufficiently polished state, and so I'd rather see "late" than "too early".  Neverwinter got some really good press a year ago at PAX (which is this weekend), and I'd like to see another positive bump for them, because most of what they've showed lately has been pretty generic.

"Riders of Rohan", the latest expansion for Lord of the Rings Online has been delayed for another month or so.  Again, more polish is better, so I approve of this delay.  A friend who was in the beta had positive things to say about the expansion, so that's more good news.

It was probably a good idea tactically to push back the launch as well, because dropping neatly between Guild Wars 2 and Mists of Pandaria could easily lead to them getting swallowed up.  Better to give GW2 five or six weeks, and MoP two or three, and then let slip the horses of war!

"The Secret World" has chosen to delay launching their second "issue" (content patch) for a couple of weeks.  Again, more polish is always good, and they have suffered layoffs so it makes sense.

It's unfortunate.  TSW has been successfully launched to critical and player enthusiasm...and marketplace disinterest.  TSW sold 200K copies.  GW2 sold over 1M copies and has had 400K concurrent players during the headstart.  Now certainly TSW is nowhere near as fun and involving as GW2, but it also deserves a far better fate than it is experiencing.

ANNOUNCEMENT OF A TORCHLIGHT 2 ANNOUNCEMENT!

Seriously.  Torchlight was a surprise success when it launched, a fun little Diablo-alike.  Unsurprisingly, they've been working on the sequel.

And the other day they had an announcement...that they'll announce the launch date at PAX this weekend.  Yes, they announced the announcement.

Sometimes the game business is really weird.

It will be interesting to see what the game has to offer, especially since Diablo III was an enormous financial success, while simultaneously one of the most disappointing games of all time.

Sometimes the game business is really weird.

MORE LAYOFF NEWS

This time, it's Popcap.  The makers of "Plants vs. Zombies" and "Bejewelled", having served up a bajillion downloads (and probably sold half-a-bajillion) had layoffs.

The day after PvZ 2 was announced, they laid off the lead designer for PvZ.  Really?  One day later!?

Oh, and naturally these layoffs had nothing to do with Popcap getting acquired by EA for $750M.

It amazes me how baldfaced the lying can be in today's world.  Marketers, politicians, public figures...I guess a lot of people simply don't care that they are being lied to.  And EA can lie with the best of them.

PETER MOORE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THAT HE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND

More EA slagging!  Or is that "Moore EA" slagging?

Allow me to quote Peter Moore, EA's COO, from a recent interview:

"I can filter out hate, vitriol, rants, it's cool to rag on EA, it's cool to rag on Zynga, it's cool to rag on Bobby Kotick, it's cool to rag on Peter Moore,"

Actually, it's not cool.  We don't rag on you because it's cool.  We want to love you.  Believe me, gamers desperately want to love the companies that make their games.

We hate Zynga because they profited off of malware to become a successful purveyor of shitty and/or ripped-off games.

We hate Bobby Kotick because he's a smug little shit who doesn't like or even care about the games he sells.  They could be donuts for all it matters to him.

We hate EA because time after time they screw their customers in vast droves to try and leverage their business so that they can screw them better and more often in the future.

We hate Peter Moore...actually, I don't hate Peter Moore.  His statement above is ridiculous, but I don't hate him.  In fact I'd love to have a couple of cocktails with him and get into a long, empassioned debate about games.  I bet I'd actually like Peter Moore when I got done.

We love games...what we hate is that Zynga and Bobby Kotick and EA don't love games.  And we hate that they don't understand why we hate them.

SCHADENFREUDE ALERT!

And speaking of Zynga...another executive has left the company!  That's something like six execs in the last two months that have left.  What's that saying about "rats" and a "sinking ship" again?

Of course, Rat Bastard In Chief Pincus isn't going anywhere.  He's cashed out $200M in stock already, clearly demonstrating that his job security is based solely on his owning the majority of the voting shares.

Seriously, who the hell invests in a company where a single guy still controls most of the voting shares?  This guy could completely screw the company and you've got no recourse.

And now EA has unleashed a horde of flesh-eating lawyers in their lawsuit against Zynga, and that could result in a deathblow to a company that's rapidly circling the toilet as is.

And it couldn't happen to a better target.

If anyone took a job at Zynga because it was the only one they could get, I feel truly sorry for what might happen to them.

But for everybody else...if you choose to dance with the devil, don't complain about the cloven hoof marks you get on your shoes.

In short, if you went to Zynga unaware that they used malware to prop up their business early on, then stealing other people's games to become successful...you're an idiot and deserve what you get.  If you went to Zynga aware of those things and didn't care...you're a scumwad and deserve worse.

Have I ever mentioned that I don't care for Zynga?

ARENANET POINTS THE FINGER OF SHAME

Bad behavior in MMOs is as old as...well, MMOs.

Players have sufficient anonymity to feel that they can spout any kind of vulgarity, vileness, and vitriol (not to mention a lot of other things that don't start with a 'v').  Other people will complain and, occasionally, the people running the game will dish out some well-deserved discipline.

But one thing that almost never happens is that the people running the game will publicize or explain their decisions.  In fact, most go out of their way to keep any discipline well behind closed doors.

ArenaNet opened the doors up a bit the other day.  They had a thread on reddit where people could ask "Hey, why did I receive a three day suspension?" and ArenaNet would answer them.

Allow me to quote from a Forbes article on this:

"Hi, my in game name is Clouce and I was banned for inappropriate behavior. I think its because I said boner… but I am not sure.” ArenaNet let him–and all of Reddit–know that it was because Clouce wrote, “Oh I am gonna break dance on your anal intercorse.”

Poor Clouce probably thinks he got banned for misspelling "intercourse".

Thank you ArenaNet, for pulling back the curtain on some of the asstards out there, and showing them for what they are.

I'M REALLY OLD

There were a couple of articles recently about Chris Crawford and his comments on KickStarter.  His comments were interesting, but more interesting was...Chris Crawford.

There was a time where he was one of the Big Names in game design.  Seriously, this guy made important games like "Eastern Front" and "Balance of Power".  He has also made a number of important speeches and written influential books on games and design.

And I first met him (whether he remembers or not) about 35 years ago.  He was giving a presentation (I think it was on energy) to a high-school auditorium full of seniors.  Before starting, he spotted me reading a copy of "Strategy & Tactics" magazine and told me to come talk to him after his speech.

When he was done we chatted a bit about wargames and he told me about this game he had made called "KIM-Tanktics" (I just looked up the spelling), a real-time, two-player tactical tank warfare computer game, and he'd be showing it at upgaming local game conventions.

When the next convention popped up, there he was and there my friends and I were.  We tried the game and loved it.  He seemed genuinely pleased by our reactions.

Think about that...35 years ago.  Real-time, two-player tactical tank warfare computer game.  Terrain, line of sight, and so on.

How many years ahead of its time was that?