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?

Lens on Guild Wars 2 Launch Review

I was going to be doing today's blog as an overview of recent launch successes and failures...unfortunately, Guild Wars 2's launch has been fail enough to justify me focusing solely on it.

Let's start with a bit of positive...

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS

For the most part, if you're playing solo, the launch hasn't been bad at all.  I've hit some latency bumps at launch, and for a couple of other brief occasions, but other than that the game response has been snappy.

Most everything (gamewise) that was good about the betas has been good in launch

The server my guild selected seems to be rather friendly, cooperative, even helpful.

And that's pretty much it for the positive...now we'll start on three debilitating problems...

UNFRIENDLY FRIENDS

The ArenaNet developers and designers made a BIG HUGE DEAL about how they wanted people to be able to play with their friends.  They talked about how the "guesting" system would allow people to group up and play, regardless of what server they were playing on.

What an awesome idea!

What a load of crap!

First, the guesting system didn't make it for launch...a fact they announced the day before the headstart began.  Don't boast about a feature for months and then stealth-vanish it a day before you launch.  It makes you look like a lying douchebag.

And then, with the launch...even better...you can't play with your friends most of the time on the same server!

Let me say that again, in bold, to make it particularly clear:

You can't group up with your friends.

Because the servers are so full, you spend most of your time in "overflow" zones, instanced copies of the main zones.  And since these overflows are server-independant, the odds of you ending up in the same overflow as somebody else are vanishingly small.

This was a problem back in beta weekend 1, but was supposedly fixed for BWE 2.  Well either it wasn't fixed or they've rebroken it.

But we're not done yet!

A friend and I spent 20 minutes waiting to both get into the "main", real instance of a space so he could help with a storyling quest of mine.  After going through all that, we grouped up, both stood on the right spot, I clicked to enter the instanced story space and...he didn't.  He didn't get an option to join, he didn't auto-port, the "Join" command on the group portrait didn't appear...nothing.

Of course ArenaNet are "aware of the problem" and are furiously working on it...

NOT REMOTELY GOOD ENOUGH.

Seriously, WTF MMO launches where you can't group up?  A basic, necessary function...and it simply doesn't work 95% of the time?

This is a fail so monumental that I could understand someone quitting because of it.  A lot of people play with friends exclusively or duo with spouses...and they're screwed.

For some people, this might not matter much, as some of us mostly solo...but even my _one_ attempt to team up to tackle some content summoned up such immense frustration and anger that I'm still fuming.

This simple game process has to work, every time, and it doesn't.

For more than 15 years, MMO players have been able to group up with their friends (on the same server) and play together.  But with their groundbreaking new technology in GW2...not anymore!

For grouping up, ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 gets a grade of...

Big Fat Fucking "F"

NOTHING IN STORE!

Here's another feature that worked in the beta but vanished after a brief appearance on Day One:

The Trading Company (auction house).

I understood when the Gem Store had some issues at launch, as that involves Actual Real Money(tm), and you don't mess around with people's credit cards.  But that was working in beta...

But we have another basic, fundamental game function...an auction house...that worked in beta and is now going 4 days in a row turned off.  For days it's said "Down for maintenance".  No, maintenance is 15 minutes, not 99% downtime.

The Secret World launched without an auction house, but it was announced long before that it wouldn't quite be ready for launch, and it showed up a couple weeks later.  I know a lot of people who planned on using the trading company to sell harvested materials and buy cheap weapons to skill up on and so on.

Good luck with that!

I got a rare dye that I assumed would be worth a fistful of gold and wanted to see what the market for that was...and I'm still waiting.  I waited so long I ended up using it.  I'm fine with getting and using a dye like that, but I'd like to know the opportunity cost involved.

But I can't.  "Down for maintenance" you know.

If you advertise an auction house, people will expect it.  If it works in beta, people will expect it to work at launch.

For a functioning trading company, ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 gets a grade of...

Big Dumb Disappointing "D"

(CUE LED ZEP) COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

If there's one subject that ALWAYS gets my dander up in dealing with MMOs, it's poor communication by the Powers That Be.

I spent years working in IT in high-tech companies, with my "customers" being everyone from terrifyingly savant engineers to techno-clueless space-wasters.  I learned very on the secret to keeping these customers happy wasn't in fixing their problems, it was making them feel informed about the state of things.

Note...I didn't inform them as to the state of things, I made them feel informed.  The perception of being "in the loop" kept the customers happy because it prevented them from stewing in their juices in ignorance.

When our $20M dollar computer was down, I'd update the message of the day every 15 minutes, even if just to say "It is being worked on and we still don't have an ETA."  And because people would see that the last time-stamp on the message was less than 15 minutes, they'd feel informed and in-the-loop.  They'd go do something else and we could continue to work on the problem without interruption.

That's what you get with pre-emptive communication.  Make the customer feel in-the-loop and it removes the stress.  They won't be happy, but they'll know where they stand, and it makes a HUGE difference.

So how is ArenaNet doing at communications?

Terrible.  Bad.  Awful.  Not good.

Hey!  You!  MMO makers!  Twitter and Facebook are awesome ways to advertise and market your product.  They are genuinely shitty ways to keep your customers informed when there are problems.

Twitter and FB are no substitute for real information that gets to your customers in a timely and useful fashion.

The Guild Wars 2 Twitter feed is as useless as tits on a bowling ball.  95% of it consists of cryptic, context-free replies to problem tweets from other users.  Even if there's a response that applies to your problem, good luck trying to find that one germ of wheat amidst a field of chaff.

Occasionally they'll tweat some useless bit of obviousness like "We are aware that the trade company is down.  We are working on the problem."  Hey, thanks!

And the Facebook feed is just as bad.  A couple of times a day they'll give an update on "obviously broken things you all know are broken and we're working on", while the rest of their posts are marketing type "look how awesome we are!" blurbs.

Again, almost nothing of use.

And the one, single, reliable source that players should be able to depend on for timely and useful information, the Guild Wars 2 forums.

Turned off.

They turned off the forums.  I assume because they would be too busy.  And why would they be too busy?  Because Twitter and Facebook are really shitty ways of keeping people informed, and people are properly fulminating about things like grouping and the trading company not working!

I can hardly imagine what a shitstorm the forums would look like in the threads for grouping-fail.

So I'm not sure which is the case...the forums are down because they would be overloaded, or the forums are down because the cowards at ArenaNet don't want to face the justifiably angry mob.

For communication breakdowns all over the place, ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2 gets a grade of...

Twitter + Facebook - forums = D-

LETTER GRADES AND TEN-SCALE

(Quick note...it appears the trading company is slowly coming on line as I type this...about goddamned time!  We'll see how long before it's actually functional.)

So I've thrown around some letter grades for individual fails...how about the launch overall?

Well, they started 3 hours early, as hoped.  They had some instability at launch, and some more lasting issues like login problems for the Euro servers.  Servers filled up early, but transfers were available after the caps were raised.

That part went...about average, overall.

The solo play element has been generally good with some occasional hiccups.  That part went slightly better than average.

But the problems I've noted above are real and really big.

The last-second appearance of the trading company will give a slight bump to the ten-scale rating.

OVERALL LAUNCH RATING FOR GUILD WARS 2:  3.5/10

I would rate this launch as significantly below the industry average we've seen over the last, say, two years.  And if the grouping functions aren't fixed and the communication doesn't improve, this rating could easily go lower.

ArenaNet launch...FAIL.

P.S.  The game is still a helluva lot of fun, launch notwithstanding!

EDIT:  P.P.S.  Mail and the trading post (including the gem store) are down again...

MAKE THAT 3/10

EDIT 9/3/2012:  A week and a half in and the trading company is down for most people most of the time.  Guild functions are still intermittent.  These are Really Big Deals, things that worked in beta (mostly) and need to be available and functional at launch for a major MMO.  These failures make GW2's launch the worst AAA MMO launch in years.  The game's still really good though!  The launch however...

MAKE THAT 2/10

Lens on Guild Wars 2 Headstart Launchblog!

Thursday, 9:00 PM Pacific (all times will be Pacific)--24 hours until hundreds of thousands of people all start hammering their "Play" buttons at the same time!  And hundreds of thousands of people start cursing profusely.

Friday, 12:08 PM--Sooooooo, is it time yet?  Nope, dammit.  I am patched and ready to go however!

1:07 PM--Repatched and reready to rego!

1:31 PM--A friend is having problems with the software for her brand spankin' new Razer Naga.  She was looking forward to breaking it in with GW2, but it seems that the Synapse software from Razer may be the biggest fustercluck in mouse history (cloud configuration for a mouse!?).  On the positive side, it gives me another thing to rant about in my Friday blog next week!

3:31 PM--A foraging trip to the supermarket has left me fully supplied for the weekend!  So many empty calories!

4:59: PM--Another patch...that's four today and we're still four hours from maybe when we can launch.  My soul weeps bitter tears of despair.

6:00 PM--Only two more hours until it's one more hour until it's between zero and three more hours!

7:00 PM--Two hours.  The False Anticipation before the Real Anticipation starts at 9:00 is unbearable.

8:07 PM--I feel my life and indeed my sanity slowly draining away from me.  Will the servers come up before I suffer an aneurysm?  Time will tell...if I don't update this any more, you'll know why.

8:32 PM--My mind is going Dave...I can feel it.

8:35 PM--I got a different error message trying to log in!  The moment grows close!

8:50 PM--10 minutes until I turn to face Seattle and start screaming "TURN ON THE SERVERS!"

8:55 PM--The last 5 minutes took 45 minutes.  It looks like Einstein was right.

9:00 PM--LET ME IN!!!

9:01 PM--Thank you.

9:30 PM--Some stability and load problems...WHAT A SHOCK!  At least one name missing, but I got my first main one.

9:56 PM--Well, we got our guild name and most of us got our names.  Lots of weird delay and lag and stuff, but they are no doubt getting SO hammered trafficwise right now, it's understandable.

10:49 PM--So the creation is working relatively smoothly, so I'm creating alts now.  Do more levelling stuff later.

12:00 PM--Midnight!  Time for the launch!  Wait...what's that...three hours already!?!?  Seriously, things are running much, much smoother now.  I'm assuming they threw a bunch of hardware at various bottlenecks, unnecking their bottles.

1:04 AM Saturday--Things are running smooth right now, at least on our server.  In the overflows anyway.  I understand the Euro servers are having login problems :-(

2:55 AM--I've made good progress on my main once the servers settled down...finished out the daily achievement for a few bonus goodies and now...off to bed.  So for night one, about 6 hours of game time, 5 toons created, big funs had.  After an hour or two of flakiness, our server at least has been quite smooth.  A good launch from my perspective anyway!  More later today!

11:47 AM--I have had a good night's sleep, a quick lunch, and I'm ready to return to action.  However, given the Twitter and Facebook action, it seems that ArenaNet has been busy, handling lots of issues.  Let's see if it's all settled out a bit by logging in...

11:52 AM--Unsurprisingly...patching!

2:15 PM--Time flies when you're having...yes...fun!  Got my "main" up to level 11, time to start altifying now that I've got a bank full of weapons to share around.

5:40 PM--Dinner break!  And from another perusal of the various feeds, it looks like a generally poor launch for GW2 for a LOT of people.  Account issues, full servers, various trade house functions...I have to add, that things have been quite good for me and most of my guildies and friends, but unfortunately not true for everyone.

9:40 PM--My guildies should have had a pool to see how long I could last before getting more character slots.  The winning answer would have been "one day and 40 minutes".

9:45 PM--Grrrr, won't let me create my next toon :-(

2:05 AM Sunday--Another full day.  All 8 classes now created and yes...I need professional help.

10:28 AM--Having re-energized the batteries with a night's sleep, I am ready to face the long day of slaying dynamic events!  Rar!

5:41 PM--Still at it after lunch and dinner and potty breaks.  Finished the zone completion for the first human zone, starting to see some nice item drops, still some server issues, especially with the trade markets.  But despite all the problems many have seen, it's been a pretty uneventful weekend for me (so far).

12:05 AM Monday--Hmm, evidently time _does_ fly.  I guess the pre-purchase players are getting started and one more day until all hell breaks lose with the general launch.  One more day of launch log to go!

10:35 AM--Lens...you can't be serious!  Two blogs out of the launch?  You bet!  Better to play for a couple extra hours and pretend I'm blogging then spend a couple of hours writing a blog!  And just wait...Wednesday's blog is going to be about launches!

6:29 PM--New build!  Break time!  Well, ignoring lunch, dinner, bathroom breaks and quick runs to the fridge for a Coke...the first today!  :-P

12:37 AM Tuesday--It's official launch day!  I've got like 44 hours logged already, across all my characters :-P  OK, enough slackblogging, back to real blogs on Wednesday!

Lens on Wednesday(!?) Quickies!

Yeah, yeah, I know, I do my quick-hitting stuff on Fridays...but this week I'll be live-blogging the GW2 headstart launch Friday night/Saturday morning, so I bumped the quickies up a couple days.  So sue me!

Also, a slightly smaller number of quickies because, well, fewer days since Friday.

ONLIVE/ONDEAD/ONALIVEAGAIN--I remember seeing them unveil their technology at a Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco a few years back and thinking "Very clever idea...for everybody who has fiber.  The latency and bandwidth requirements for this thing are going to be brutal..."

I remember seeing OnLive's CEO, Steve Perlman make presentations when I was at Apple.  I worked at General Magic shortly after he'd left and heard a great deal about him.  A friend worked under him at Web TV.

I got the impression that he was a fairly technical guy who could really "sell" an idea...even if the idea itself wasn't all that great.  In the case of OnLive it seems that what he was selling hasn't been up to snuff with reports of a maximum of 1800 concurrent users.  Whether it's the product or how they've monetized it, it appears to be a failure.

And so they sold themselves...to themselves.  In essence, firing everybody, restarting the company, rehiring half the people, and managing to negate much or all of the outstanding debt and shares (yes, I'm handwaving the legal niceties involved here).  HTC's $40 million investment?  Poof!  Options owed to (former) employees?  Poof!

This whole deal stinks...  It will be interesting to see where everything falls out in this case.  Of special interest to me is whether Steve Perlman is another victim of the legal hopscotch we've seen so far, or one of the perpetrators.

It's always more interesting when I know one of the parties involved, even if it's only peripherally.

"I know, let's call it 'Girlfriend Mode!'  Awesome idea, right?  Guys?"--I enjoyed the hell out of Borderlands.  I liked the gameplay, loved the weapons, adored the living crap out of Claptrap.  The fact that the smartass robot in their game is voiced (brilliantly) by the company's VP of Business Development just gives me a warm fuzzy feeling all over.

It was a blast.  And I've seen some of the promo stuff for Borderlands 2, and it seems to be in full-on sequel mode so I'm expecting more fun of the same, but turned up to 11.

And then the lead designer talks about what he called "for lack of a better word", "girlfriend mode".  Look, a lot is made of the casual sexism in gaming (and often active sexism, along with occasional outright misogyny), with good cause.  Now this dumb-ass comment doesn't come close to my outrage threshold, and I mostly do understand what he meant by it...

But dude...seriously...you are a well-compensated spokesman (or spokes-tool in this case) for your game and company...

Think before you open your pie hole and say something this needlessly stupid.  The game shouldn't need this sort of pub, and you do yourself no favors either.

On the old 10-scale, this registers a 2 for sexism, a 4 for stupid, and an 8 for needlessly stupid.

IS WoW SCARED OF GW2?--Short answer, probably a little.  It'll certainly hit them...even with "Mists of Pandaria" in a month or so, I'm sure their numbers will suffer a big (if temporary) hit with the release of GW2.

In the long run, it's hard to know, as making predictions in the MMO field is a sure way of being wrong.  A lot.  If GW2 is the success I expect it to be, it will take a sizeable chunk of WoW's longterm audience away, but that seems to be happening anyway.  WoW is, in market terms, an old game, so it's going to suffer losses over time regardless of competition.

But are they scared?

Well they did go out of their way to launch the pre-MoP patch on GW2's launch day.  This will include some of the MoP content and changes and such, so it certainly looks like a naked attempt to steal some of the GW2 thunder.  There was a time where companies chose their launch days based on WoW and it seems that the worm has turned.

Upon further consideration, given that WoW is so desperate that they are including Pokemon-inspired pet fighting and FarmVille inspired farming mini-game in MoP...maybe they should be afraid of GW2.

IT'S NOT RIFT...IT'S RIFTASTIC!--I believe I commented before on the videos we saw of Rift's new "dimensions", their take on housing, and how omgwtfAWESOME it looks.

So to take advantage of that, and general enthusiasm for tripling the size of the gameworld, more souls to choose from, level cap raise, and so on, the clever folks at Trion also are offering a 12 pre-pay sub option that includes a title, a beefy-looking mount, free "Storm Legion" expansion and discount price.

SOLD!

I dropped the bucks, so I've been putzing around in Rift again, and probably will for the next couple of days until we get the GW2 launch.  I don't assume I'll play Rift for several months after that (wonder why), but I'm glad I dropped the money.  The guys at Rift earn that money more than most sub fees I've paid even while playing other games.  I look forward to reading more about Storm Legion over the next few months.  When it launches, I may even be ready for a week's vacation from GW2.

Two great games to choose from, neither of which I'm paying for...sounds just fine to me.

SERVER WARS IN GUILD WARS 2--So one slightly distressing bit of news on the GW2 front this week...it seems that "guesting" won't be in-game at launch.  Guesting is a feature that allows people to play with friends on other servers, in essence temporarily transferring to another server to group up.  It's a great idea, and it's one they've talked up only to sort of slip in at the last minute that it won't be in-game when we launch on Friday.

It's not a huge deal, let alone any kind of game-breaker, but it's disappointing that it won't be in and more disappointing that the news was just sort of slipped in.  This wasn't a feature "we expect will be ready" or "we're fairly sure it'll be available at launch", it was a listed feature right up until it wasn't.

They handled it in a very sleazy manner, frankly.  I would have expected, given what we've seen so far from the ArenaNet team, something more along the lines of "We're sorry to announce that the guesting feature will not be functioning at launch.  We are still perfecting the technology and hope to have it ready for prime-time shortly after launch.  We apologize and know it's important to our community and it is definitely a priority for us."  People would be disappointed, but feel very involved.  I haven't seen any great upswing in discontent, but my opinion of ANet dropped a couple points and they could have avoided the whole thing.

Another thing I think they've done...inelegantly...was the entire process for naming servers.  They took too long to get the comprehensive list out, and as a result various communities have been scrambling to try to find appropriate places to call home.  The APAC players, the RPers, the various website communities have all been looking around, asking around, wondering where everybody was going.  It will work itself out, but after the way SW:TOR handled the pre-launch-to-launch transition so well (more about that in a future blog!), I'd hoped for more from ANet to streamline the process for the players.

It took my guild quite a while to finally decide on a server because we spent so much time going "That one looks too hot..." and "That one looks too cold..." before we finally found one that looked just right.

DIABLO III LEAD DESIGNER IS A POO-HEAD, PASS IT ON!--So the latest in "adults acting like children", the lead designer for D3 is a complete tool.

Unsurprisingly, somebody asked the lead designer for D1 and D2 his opinion of D3.  His response was pretty measured, I thought.  A lot of "they did this and that really well", some "I would have done this differently", a couple of mild reproaches, but all in all, quite tame.  The response of the lead designer for D3 on Facebook?

"Fuck that loser".

Seriously, congratulations on taking your professionalism out in public and shooting it in the head.

Given all of the Internet monkeys flinging excrement at D3 and its design team (much of it deserved, btw), you choose to blow your top at some lukewarm comments by the guy who created what you just spent years trying (and failing) to perfect?

Adding to the PR disaster, a bunch of other people in the D3 credits pipe up on FB supporting this tool without ever noting that they worked on the project too!  Awesome display of even more professionalism!

My fave was one Blizzard employee telling the D3 lead not to worry because "you created the fastest-selling PC game of all time...he created Hellgate: London".

Yes, he created Hellgate: London.  He also took a team and budget a tiny fraction of D3's team and budget, and in 3 years he improved Diablo and made Diablo II.  In comparison, with TWELVE YEARS and the endless money provided by WoW, you clowns managed to produce Diablo III.  What's your excuse?

Y'know, I'd be more proud of "Hellgate: London" in comparison.  New studio, new IP, unfriendly corporate overlords, some poor high-level decision-making...and Hellgate was the result.  It underachieved, to be sure.

You idiots had an established studio with endless resources, one of the most beloved IPs in gaming (created by...oh yeah, that Hellgate guy), free reign...and D3 was the result.  One of the greatest disappointments in gaming history.  It's not terrible...it's even pretty good.  But after 12 years you have produced a less compelling game than D2.

So, to paraphrase your lead designer...the Diablo III team?  Fuck those losers.

Lens on Don't Be A Dick

When I first put together a simple "Read Me" for the Star Wars: The Old Republic guild I was going to be leading, I wanted to be clear about who we were, as a group, and who we were not.  I wanted it to be short but sum up the essence...  This was how I expressed it to applicants:

Don't be a dick. That's pretty much it. We are sort of a home base where people can offer/ask for help, share advice, form ad hoc groups for flashpoints and questing, chat about whatever, or just hang out. In a group of any size you're going to find...what I'll charitably call "personality conflicts". I don't expect everyone to be bestest buddies with everyone else, but if you find that somebody annoys you, just tune them out. Ignore them. Don't insult or bait or harass them...just ignore them. Again...don't be a dick.

Actually, it's less about "don't be a dick", because most people are dicks from time to time.  It's more about don't go out of your way to be a dick.  In fact, pretend it's like your job where you go out of your way to not be a dick.  Do that!  Oh sure, your boss and certain co-workers are definitely dicks, but there's a given amount of non-dickness that everyone is expected to maintain.  You don't have to respect people, but be respectful of them.  Be polite, be civil...don't be a dick!

July 29th is Wil Wheaton's birthday.  I know, this seems like a complete non-sequitor, but bear with me.  Wil Wheaton, the child actor, was someone I loathed.  Wil Wheaton the grown-up is a bad-ass geek icon with all the smart, funny, and cool that young Wil was so utterly lacking.  And how did he celebrate his birthday this year?

To quote his website at dontbeadickday.com:

"Hi! I'm Wil Wheaton, and my birthday is July 29th.  I can think of no better birthday gift than for my birthday to be known as Don't Be A Dick Day."

Wil Wheaton, you sir, are a god.

And he even included a handy flow chart:  http://dontbeadickday.com/howtonotbeadick.jpg

IS THIS REALLY ABOUT GAMING?

Well, yes and no.  It started out about gaming, then it went more real-worldy, now I'll take it back to gaming.

Every single MMO provides players with genuinely awful communication media.  Look what they give us...text, emotes, maybe voice.  That seems like a lot, right?  I mean everyone from Shakespeare to Stephanie Meyer used just writing!  He wrote in the 16th century and she wrote for 16 year-olds, it should be good enough for MMO players!  Yeaaaaaahhhhh no.

According to Wikipedia (the Internet's Number One Source for pseudo-authoritative information!), up to 80% of all communication (presumably in face-to-face situations) is non-verbal.  Evidently, one UCLA study pegged it at up to 93%.  I think the researchers agree...a lot of percents are non-verbal.

We attempt to overcome this with smileys and the like, but you may find ;-) to be a smiling wink, while someone else may find that it smacks more of a superior smirk.  In a text-only world, it's easy to lose context and be a dick no matter how many smileys we toss around.

Voice is better than text, certainly, but it too carries perils.  One big advantage that text has is that it's slow.  As we type, we often have a bit of time to process so that we are, inherently, less likely to be a kneejerk dick.  With voice, you are only a push-to-talk from full-on being-a-dick-ness.  The immediacy combined with the physical distance provided by this whole Internet thing makes it easy for some people to just pop off and be a dick in a way they would NEVER do face-to-face.

Voice in an MMO can be the worst of all possible worlds...a way for unfiltered dickness to be projected without the inherent self-censoring that occurs when getting fired or getting a fist in the face are very real possibilities.

Throw in a few CRALBs (cold refreshing adult leisure beverages) and guild voice chat can get very, very entertaining...and occasionally, very dicky.  It's important for everyone to remember that...not only does voice make the other guy more likely to be a dick, it makes you more likely to be one too.

Along these lines is why I was saying a few days ago that SOEmote was, in the short term, a non-factor.  If the facial animations aren't spot-on, then any improvement in communication is going to be lost...even in the unlikely circumstance that anyone can actually see them.  So I commend SOE for doing something interesting, but I don't think it helps with people being dicks (and let's not even discuss other animation other than faces...although I'm certain there's a market amongst the MMO cyber-sex community for more options).

PEOPLE ARE PEOPLE

Some people are more likely to behave like dicks than others.  Some people are more likely to assume that others are being dicks when they are not.  Some people take affront easily.  Some are immune to it.  Some people find everything funny (even when it's not) and some never, ever get the joke.

All of these have the potential for creating sparks, and sparks can lead to conflagrations.  I've seen guilds shed large portions of their player base over some of the stupidest "if only they hadn't been dicks" bullshit.  I understand that people enjoying abusing other people...hell, I'm abusing you right now by making you read this tripe...but sometimes everybody suffers.

The guild is a shared resource, one that we all contribute to and benefit from.  But much like the "tragedy of the commons" (look it up), it doesn't take much abuse for it to get screwed up for everybody.  Everybody has the right to be a dick, but occasionally, somebody will abuse the privilege, and that can lead to dire consequences.

But it's not just the guild that this should apply to...allow me to paint with broader strokes...

THERE'S ONE IN EVERY CROWD

Let's examine MMO gaming as a whole...jeez there are a lot of dicks.

Forum dicks, global chat dicks, people who are dicks in groups, PvP dicks...more dicks than a convention of Richards.  Almost without exception, all of these people are dicks in real life...but not in public.

For most of them (and us), the learned norms of civility prevent such deeply anti-social behavior from manifesting in public.  With no method for lasting punishment or social exclusion, the environment more or less encourages these sorts of behaviors.

Certain types of circumstances also encourage people being dicks, such as having a large captive audience (WoW's "Barrens chat"), or more generally in an activity such as PvP which seems to bring out the worst behavior in those disposed to such awful levels of dickness.

The Internet in general promotes two contrary views of the world...the distance provided by faceless conversation allows for a feeling of openness, honesty, and contrarily, even intimacy.  But the distance also allows for completely anti-social behaviors of the sort few people would tolerate in person.  The classic case being the filthy-mouthed Xbox LIVE 12 year-old playing FPS games and screaming obscenities nonstop.

Some efforts have been made to find ways of adding consequences to being a dick.  Blizzard floated the idea of putting real names on the forums before that blew up in their face and was removed as a possibility (and the evidence from real-name-required postings elsewhere on the Internet seems to be that it doesn't reduce dickishness).  Some games have tried implementing a vote-to-shame type of model, unfortunately most of those sort of systems can be "gamed" leading to people being dicks and labelling others as dicks.

There are no easy answers to all the dicks being dicks.

CAN'T WE ALL GET ALONG?

Short answer: no, we can't get along.  We prove this at the small and large scale.  But at least in our guilds, we can choose, to a degree, who we associate with.  We can thicken our skins and temper our words.  We can embrace positive behavior and shun negative.  If worse comes to worst, we can simply ignore the people we can't stand.

It's so simple...just don't be a dick!

If only it were that simple...

Lens on Friday Quickies II (Electric Boogaloo)

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

THE SECRET WORLD STRUGGLES--More industry layoffs...ugh.  Best of luck to those affected.  They announced some financials, saying they'd missed both of their potential targets (large sales/small subs versus small sales/large subs), probably splitting the difference with small sales and moderate subs.  On the positive side, their retention numbers are reportedly quite good and they look to continue with modest content patches every month (let's hope they can keep that up).  Funcom has said that the game is profitable.

One game commenter (I think it was Lum the Mad) noted that, as MMO players, "This is why we can't have nice things."  Funcom gives us something good and different and it mostly gets met with yawns.  Specifically, Funcom mentioned the Metacritic review numbers, which were solidly mediocre from the game press, and solidly very good from the players.  This has caused Funcom's stock to tank, and hence, layoffs.

Here's the thing...my reviews of the game were mostly positive, and I bought and played the game because I wanted to reward Funcom for "good and different", although I unsubbed after the first month because some of the playstyle didn't suit me (for me, individual combats took too long once you left Kingsmouth).  But in my reviews I was careful to describe it as a niche game, not for everyone, but worth trying because it might surprise you and be just what you were looking for.

I am unsurprised, but disappointed, by the result.  Let's hope it pulls an EVE and grows its niche over time.  There's a LOT of good in the game.

COPERNICUS RESURRECTION?  RHODE ISLAND LOOKS TO SELL 38 STUDIOS ASSETS--On the wishful thinking front...maybe, just maybe...Rhode Island can find a studio willing to take on the unfinished project.  One with enough financial and technical oomph to bring it to completion.  Hey...a guy can dream!

Also on the Copernicus front, Curt Schilling was quoted as saying that one of the big splashes they had planned for the game was that, at the end of the official announcement, they would do a Jobsian "oh and one more thing" and announce that it was launching, as always intended, as free-to-play with micro-transaction revenue.  I assume it would be more along the lines of GW2's buy-to-play model so they could recoup a quick $50-100M at launch to tide them over.

I still can't see the game pulling a Wesley and only being mostly dead.  Too bad, I'd really have liked to have seen it...more fantasy notwithstanding.

ANOTHER STRIKE AGAINST F2P--I saw that one of the speakers at the GDC in Cologne put out a pretty damning number...free-to-play has a rate of about 70% anti-retention.  Those are people who sign up and maybe log in once or twice and mostly never come back.  30% stick around.

While I completely agree that the "everything must have subscriptions" model is utterly dead, I think the "everything must be free-to-play" model is DOA.  Seriously guys...the model for any given game needs to be tailored to that game.  There is no one answer, and I think we'll see more hybrids in the future, along the lines of GW2's buy-to-play model.

This also means that those (hilariously) overstated numbers of 10-50M F2Pers coming to SW:TOR (seriously, a "games analyst" pulled those numbers out of his ass), means more like 3-15M.  And with the best part of the game being free...they are going to need a lot of "whales" (casino terminology for big-money customers) to squeeze any long-term cash out of TOR.

RIFT ANNOUNCES NEW MAGE SOUL (CLASS) FOR COMING EXPANSION--And it's...a melee dps mage (which sounds a tiny bit oxymoronic)!  Named "harbinger" it looks like it adds a number of nice abilities, and it's meant to combo well with a couple of the less obvious souls like chloromancer and stormcaller.

I look forward to a stealth cleric, a pure healer melee rogue, and a ranged warrior...or some other wacky combos.

The guys at Trion are machines...they crank out quality content at a rate that puts every other developer to shame.  The expansion they have aimed for a release by the end of the year will more than triple the land-mass, add 10 more levels, add 4 more souls (the harbinger and 3 more), 7 dungeons, 3 raids, dimensions (player housing) and when added to the free content drops since launch...kick the living shit out of every other MMO company out there.

I don't know what Trion has...better tools, more devs, demonic slave-driving project managers, coders cursed to never sleep, enchanted keyboards that create content via quantum tunnelling...whatever it is, everyone else in the industry needs some.

And this just in...in the middle of writing this, I came upon a link to some Rift info from Gamescom, so I decided, since I was writing about Rift, to pause and watch.  The harbinger video and the colossus fight video I'd seen before...but "dimensions", their take on housing is AMAZING.

I've already written about how much I love in-game housing, and based on a couple minutes of video I am willing to put Rift's dimensions in the running with the best that anyone's ever done.  Check from about 4:10 in the video here:  http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/08/16/gamescom-2012-rift-storm-legion-walkthrough/

Dammit...I may now have to buy the one year discount sub and get the free mount!  Curse you and your competance Trion!

SOEmote, BIG DEAL, SMALL DEAL, NO DEAL?--So the lads at SOE have added real facial animation to EQ2.  Your webcam reads your facial expressions and then animates your character to match.  But is this a piece of tech likely to change gaming?

Well, for EQ2, I'm going to go with "No deal".  For 99% of the gamers, it won't change their gaming experience one iota, even if they have a webcam.

The only people I can see using it (oh some people will mess around with it, but few will adapt it) are a small minority of role-players.  Most MMO gamers have their camera scrolled back so far that that they can barely make out the race of whoever they are talking to...let alone whether they are smirking or not.

In the near future, I'll go with "Small deal".  I don't see any major breakthroughs from it in the next year of two, at least in any games we know about from SOE.

In the far future, I'll go with "Wait and see..." This is the sort of tech experiment that you never know where it might go and what Sony might be able to do with it.

Short version, for gaming, no-to-small deal.

GUILD WARS 2 STRESS TESTS--OK guys, you are killing me by degrees here!!!

More tests, more stress.  They have had some issues during some of the tests, but then that's why they're tests!

They keep tweaking and polishing and it keeps getting closer...7 days and some number of hours to go!  We'll see if my preparations for launch involving moving sleep times around and naps and such will let me squeeze in a blog next Friday before they launch.  I may be reduced to a drooling idiot (more of a drooling idiot) by then.

Hell, I should probably just live-blog the launch Friday night...

ELECTRONICS ARTS LOOKING FOR A BUYER?--That's the rumor going around anyway.  Looks like SW:TOR, EA's "WoW-killer" kinda backfired.

The gaming industry, and gaming stocks in particular, are just about impossible to predict.  The two biggest 800 pound gorillas are EA and Activision...and now both are purportedly up for sale.

I should totally buy both...anyone got a few billion they'd like to loan me?  While I'm at it...maybe I can scoop up the 38 Studios leftovers too!  Game company bonanza!

RUNESCAPE PLAYERS ROBBED AT GUNPOINT--You probably saw the articles...one student tried to buy a bunch of Runescape currency with (badly) counterfeited money, then pulled a (real-looking pellet) gun on a guy, forcing him to call his friend to transfer the currency.

The amount of stupid in one person...and a college student yet...is astonishing.  Do you think they'll not notice the fake money?  Do you think they'll not report it if they don't notice at the exchange?  Obviously, you think they may notice, so you bring a pellet gun.  Are you going to shoot him with the gun if he says no?  You obviously think it will scare him into giving you what you want...you think he won't report SOMEBODY PULLING A GUN ON HIM?  Do you think, with the information they have, that the police won't find you?

I mean this moron went to the effort to make fake money and brought along a pellet gun...so this comedy of errors WAS PLANNED!

I am as big of an MMO whore as the next guy...OK, bigger than almost any guy...but I never thought about counterfeiting and armed robbery as a way to advance my character's leetness.

LAST ITEM...WHERE I ABUSE MY FRIENDS--We all carry shameful secrets.  Things from our past, terrible burdens that we'd rather carry to our graves than share, even with our closest of friends.  Some are old scars, some are festering wounds, and some are fresh and bleeding...

This week, several of my best gaming friends admitted that they were...keyboard turners.

Worse yet...they were unaware that mouse-turning even existed!

I know, in this day and age, that seemingly modern, well-adjusted human beings could live in such a blighted and primitive state as to turn their characters using only the 'A' and 'D' keys...I'm at a loss to comprehend the personal devastation and deprivation such a lifestyle must inflict on the poor unfortunates.

One asked a friend how he could turn his warg so quickly in Player-versus-Monster-Player in LotRO.  When we described mouse-turning, we were met with dumbstruck awe.

Later, while discussing this poor girl's epiphany, another fellow piped in with "What's mouse-turning?"

I simply couldn't stop weeping at the soul-searing agony these poor wretches have been suffering.

I was going to suggest that we start a charity to help these unfortunates, but I think they may fall under the Americans With Disbilities Act.

Keyboard-turning...just say "No!  Noob..."

Lens on Lensfail!

Yeah, sorry...got caught up in the GW2 stress test today, so I don't think I'll have time this evening for a blog entry.

To my loyal and devoted reader...I apologize!

Friday fur shur!

Lens on Too Much Polish

Note, that's "polish" as in "shine", not "Polish" as in "sausage".

Because there's no such thing as too much Polish sausage, although "sausage polishing" sounds vaguely smutty.

HOW MUCH POLISH?

Once upon a time, you didn't patch games.  Hard to believe, I know!  You kids today may find it impossible to believe, but it was 17 years ago (give or take) before you started to see URLs on TV commercials.  Before that, most people had never heard of the Internet, let alone actually used it.

So if (almost) nobody had Internet, how did you patch games?

Mostly you didn't.

With no easy way to distribute patches and fixes, that meant that programs had to work the first time.  And that meant a lot higher bar for when a program was "done".  You would especially see this in console games and embedded systems where the only practical fix for buggy code was replacement.

But as we entered the late 90's, the Internet grew in ubiquity not just in gaming, but in the public mindset as well.  As an example of both, smack dab in the middle between Ultima Online (1997) and EverQuest (1999) came "Sleepless In Seattle" (1998).  It's safe to say that once they've made a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan rom-com about a subject (the Internet), everybody's heard of it.

Suddenly, fixing a recalcitrant program became a lot easier.  Whereas before such things as patches were the realm of people with USENET newsgroups and a knowledge of ftp (look 'em up, kiddies!), suddenly the Web made previously arcane knowledge easy to find and access.

And the good (Hey, they have a fix for that bug in my game!) was balanced with the bad (Hey, we can ship it with this bug and fix it later!).

I don't mean to imply that software/game companies suddenly started shipping clusterfuckware on the assumption that it could be fixed later, but certainly squishing every last bug (within reason) was no longer a show-stopper.  Sometimes good enough was good enough.  Especially when you are on a tight schedule.

And especially especially on an MMO.  Because after all, the players have to connect to you to use the thing, so patching problems becomes part of the process of playing every time you connect.

So we all got used to fixes getting patched in and games shipping in various degrees of complete.  The games could have a lot of rough edges, not just in their function, but the gameplay itself.  Getting the product out and providing revenue was a big deal, and often polish wasn't.

Then came World of Warcraft.

POLISH UNTIL YOU CAN SEE YOURSELF

Let me be clear...at launch, WoW had bugs and plenty of problems.  Overloaded servers, too few servers, stability problems, the "stuck mining" bug...it wasn't perfect by any means.  Hell, they even stopped selling the game for a period of time while they got their ducks in a row (I'm not sure why they had ducks or needed them lined up though).

But given the overwhelming response from the unexpectedly huge playerbase, WoW's launch was a smashing success.  Oh sure, we wanted things better (that's a given, we're MMO players!), but given the huge numbers and the performance of some of the recent competition at the time *cough*AnarchyOnline*cough* it was smooth as silk.

But more important than the polish of the launch (which wasn't bad), was the polish of the game.  I've said before that the biggest difference between WoW and EQ2 when they launched two weeks apart was simple:  EverQuest 2 was an MMO for MMO players and World of Warcraft was an MMO for game players.

That may not sound like a big distinction, but to my mind it's a huge one.  Game players usually play a wide variety of different games and are used to a wide variety of different game mechanics.  But since they don't come out of a (relatively) narrow game focus, they expect mechanics to be straightforward and easy to pick up.

MMO players had an established history with the genre and knew the standard mechanisms, the tropes of the game.  EQ2 expected the players to kind of already know "how to play the game".

It was very common for MMOs at that time to use the command line for many game functions.  Many games required them.

Quests often consisted of a line or two of bland text, perhaps with a high-lighted word or phrase you could ask the NPC about for more information, like an old-style text adventure game (look 'em up!).

The difference between the standards of MMOs pre-dating WoW and WoW itself was the difference between the tepid success of EQ2 and mind-boggling license-to-print-money success of WoW.

Game players who'd never played an MMO, who'd never played an online game of ANY kind, could pick up the game for sixty bucks, then "pick up the game" in sixty minutes.  That was where Blizzard and its reputation for polish made the difference.  Instead of shooting for a chunk of, maybe, 500K-1M hardcore MMO players, WoW was shooting for a chunk of, maybe, 5-25M hardcore gamers.

And boy howdy did they achieve their chunkiness.

The whole MMO genre had an almost instant sea change.  Game polish and ease of play become much more important.  Accessibility to a wider potential audience became important.  The rise of "casual" MMO players began, although I find it somewhat silly to call a WoW player "casual".  One can casually play Angry Birds or FarmVille.  One doesn't really "casually" drop a couple of months and scores of hours to "casually" reach level cap in WoW.  Casual in comparison to me?  Oh, obviously.  But casual in comparison to 99 cents on the App Store?  Give me a break.

The MMO genre has been struggling with the success of WoW.  On one hand, do we try to create a game for "the masses" and compete with WoW (good luck with that, btw)?  On the other hand, how do we sell investors on aiming smaller with the prospect of potential bajillions dancing in their heads?  Because regardless of what we do...players are going to expect something polished to a brilliant shine.

POLISHED UNTIL THE CHROME CAME OFF

So we come full circle to a question...can something, an MMO, say, be too polished?

A few years ago I probably would have poo-poo'd the notion (good luck washing that out, by the way...you can never get the notion clean again).  But not any longer.  Because the masters of polish, Blizzard, polished gameplay so much they took the fun out.

Let me explain...

WoW is an old game, at least in terms of MMOs.  While most of the competition has been trying to catch up and match up with them, they have been constantly tweaking their gamesystems.  A class revamp here.  A stat revamp there.  Talents, skills, itemization, it all gets tweaked.  With what objectives?  Balance and streamlining.

When WoW came out, it was a mystery.  Which stats did what, exactly?  Was this item better than that item for my character?  But over time, the endless energy, patience, and attention to detail of some of the more-on-the-savant-end-of-the-spectrum idiot-savant players led to the math behind pretty much every part of the game being made clear.  Once that was done, spreadsheet-warriors made figuring out "optimal" a hell of a lot easier.  If you've ever read one of the analyses from the guys at Elitist Jerks, you know the degree of hair-splitting that's been done to figure everything from rotations to best-in-slot gear to specs.

In short, they mystery was gone.  With that, the players and Blizzard could all see everything, from warts to wonders.  Over time, with the "support" of a very vocal fanbase, Blizzard tweaked pretty much everything.

Stats were removed from the game.  Skills were juggled around.  Talent trees got simplified and streamlined.  As a result, the game got more balanced and more transparent.

And less fun.  The player's choices became a lot easier.  Socketed items and item reforging let the player optimize his stats how he chose, instead of juggling gear to try to find the right fit.  Getting "the right item" didn't matter, because close was good enough.  You'd just reforge a couple of things to make it fit precisely.

For quite some time, as we've seen the itemization in the game balanced and simplified, I've joked that in the next expansion, every item will have a single stat, "Awesomeness", exactly equal to the itemlevel.  It would be both streamlined and balanced.  And boring.

But it's not just the itemization and character options that have become streamlined and balanced into generic bland boringness...it's the questing too.

WoW's questing was The Big Change, probably the single biggest factor in winning the huge audience.  It meant the player never lacked for "something to do".  Something that could be accomplished, usually in a relatively short time, that was usually wrapped in a little bit of quest color to raise it above the proverbial "kill ten rats".

Questing in WoW got polished over time too.  Quest locations became marked on the maps, there was less running around, less back and forth between locations, and in time, the quests simply flowed.

By the time Cataclysm shipped, Blizzard had utterly mastered streamlined, elegant, quest-flow.  In that expansion the character would move from quest hub to quest hub, usually getting 2 or 3 batches of quests from 2 or 3 NPC's before being sent along to the next hub to repeat the process, until the zone was complete.  And then?  You'd be sent along to the next zone.

This mechanic was very similar in Star Wars: The Old Republic, ultra-streamlined, hub-to-hub-to-hub, single-track.  It allow for very quick, very simple levelling.  It's entertaining, and engaging and over fast.  It does not, however, provide any long term value.  In both Cataclysm and TOR, players could fly through the content, level up in a big hurry, only to find they'd arrived at a dead end.

For WoW, this wasn't terribly bad because the players were used to the endgame that awaited them at cap in WoW (for better or worse).  In TOR it was lethal.  Having sped through 49 levels in record time, they found themselves with nothing worth doing at cap.  And because the entirety of the game was so single-track (with the exception of the storyline quests, which were a single-track that ran parallel), once was often enough.

A WoW player at level 80 who buys Cataclysm has a pretty good idea of what the game will be like when he hits 85, even if that arrives a lot faster than he expects.  A TOR player at level 1 will have no idea of what awaits him at 50 (or, more accurately, no idea of the nothing that awaits him at 50).

In both cases, my reactions were similar.  I flew through Cata's content a few times and killed my sub.  I flew through TOR content a few times and killed my sub.  Cata was disappointing.  TOR was disappointing.

The difference was that for Cata, Blizzard had polished up the first 60 levels of content too.  TOR simply didn't have enough content that flying through it was a sustainable business model.  Their questing paradigm was too polished, and much of the rest of the game not polished enough.

In both cases, the questing was so polished that it was like an appetizer.  Once consumed, the players were asking "Where's the rest?"

TOO MUCH?  NOT ENOUGH?  WHAT DO YOU WANT LENS!?

Well I am an MMO player, so I always want what I ain't got!

The more accurate answer is that I'm not sure.  The arrival of WoW changed the amount and type of polish we expect.  Allow me to compare a couple of recent/upcoming games.

The Secret World has launched to mixed reviews, but I personally feel it's a successful game.  I also feel that it shows a lack of polish in a number of areas, where other areas are beautifully done.  The ability wheel is a polished piece of design.  The environmentals are excellent.  The quests are, generally, original and very polished.  The UI is at best functional, but certainly not polished.  Combat feels slow and "old-school".  And the combat animations look clunky and unpolished, although Funcom says that that's an inevitable result of untethering the combat animation from the movement animation to allow moving in combat.

Many of the negative reviews of TSW have pointed to the perceived lack of polish in certain game components.  I don't necessarily agree with those criticisms, but they do match what I said about the amount of polish we've come to expect.

Guild Wars 2 will launch soon, and the early reviews are pretty much stellar.  I've played a bunch in beta weekends and stress tests, but haven't gotten all that far into the game.  So far it seems to be extremely polished, and that seems to be the overwhelming consensus.

But does GW2 and what seems like its certain success rely on that polish?  Or is it simply a side-effect of their overall approach to the game?  In other words, is the game design so elegant that it seems polished or has enormous effort gone into making it feel that way?

Is GW2 more polished than TSW?  Why does it seem so?  Is it intrinsic to the game design and systems, or is it simply that ArenaNet has done that much more work than Funcom?

How much of what we call polish derives from fundamental design principles and how much from shining the base metal that's there?

I would say that what made WoW great was the polish inherent in the design, and that what's made it less great is from shining the baser parts.

I hope that GW2's polish comes from intrinsic design work, so that more polish will make it better, not just shinier.

Because sometimes you can polish the shine right off.

Lens on Friday Quickies

I'm going to try something new for Fridays, touching on some of the items in the news in bullet form.  Aaaaand we're off!

GUILD WARS 2 STRESS TESTS--One yesterday and another today.  The Thursday stress test consisted of an hour of us stressing out their infrastructure team by hammering their network into submission.  Lots of explosions in their NOC and gigas of bits spilling onto the floor.  Quite the mess I'm sure.

With an evening stress test tonight (For you East Coasters) their numbers should be even higher...and if need be, more stressful.

A couple of my guildies got their first shot at GW2 Thursday and it met with universal "Me likey!"

Two weeks to go!

WORLD OF WARCRAFT LOSES 1 MILLION PLAYERS...AND THEN GETS HACKED--Well with GW2 coming up and months to go for Mists of Pandaria, it's hardly surprising you'd see some churn and so WoW has lost 1 million subs in the last quarter.  That's a pretty big chunk for 3 months.  We'll see how big of a bump they get from MoP and how big a hit from GW2.  To my mind, WoW can see its end-of-life on the horizon.  By "end-of-life" I mean that the U.S. Mint will stop printing them money, not that the game will go away.  I wonder when we get more info on Titan...

And then Thursday, they announce that they'd discovered a system penetration to battle.net on the 4th.  Account names, security questions, encrypted password files, mobile authenticator database all compromised.  After the many fails in D3 I must say...those clown shoes Blizz bought are fitting very nicely!

Another major game company with great credentials has failed the basics.  None of that information, NONE, should be in a position where it can be compromised in that fashion.  And until they tell us precisely the nature of how (spearphishing, malware, sql injection, etc.), I'm going to assume "sheer incompetance" and trust them zero.

How does it feel to be put in the same category with Sony Online Entertainment, Blizzard?

VANGUARD GOES F2P--Speaking of SOE...hey, how 'bout that free Vanguard!  Actually, Vanguard isn't a bad game at all.  It's got some quite nice game systems.  Combat is very conventional for the most part (straight out of the mold of its antecedant EverQuest), but it has two other ways to advance, crafting and diplomacy.  Crafting has its own sort of mini-game, and diplomacy has a mini-game similar in certain ways to a CCG.  Both are kind of nifty and the game is certainly worth a look at the starting investment price of $0.

ELECTRONIC ARTS SUES ZYNGA--This is how much I loathe Zynga...Go EA!!!  What next...cheering for Bobby Kotick?  I'm not a big fan of all the lawsuitery going around, with every hardware maker suing each other and the software giants acting like monkees flinging their excrement at each other.  But in this case...please burn Zynga to the ground.

How blatant is their theft (in my not-so-humble opinion)?  Zynga's Sims-alike game has 8 different skin tones to choose from, same as EA's Sims.  And all 8 have exactly the same RGB values.  The odds of that?  About one in 1.56 x 10^53.  That's a whole lotta of zeroes.

Let's hope that EA extracts a dollar amount with a whole lotta zeroes out of Zynga.

LAYOFFS AT EN MASSE--This kind of thing is always a bit depressing, but not in this case overly surprising.  I never thought that TERA, a pretty MMO with engaging action-based combat and little else, would win a significant and lasting player-base.  That sort of game-play is more popular with the console crowd than the MMO crowd, and so TERA had an uphill battle to fight.  And the ludicrous clothing options did a marvelous job of projecting "this is a port of a Korean MMO" vibe to further disincentivize the Western MMO audience.

Not to mention the presence of the "12 year-old slut bunny" race, as a friend put it.

Let's hope those affected find new gigs soon.

"STAR TREK: INFINITE SPACE" MMO CANCELLED--It was hardly a big-name project, but it had the Star Trek license and that was reason for some hope that it would see the light of day.  It's another sign of the cruel world MMO developers live in at present.  With big money games (TERA, SW:TOR) seeing layoffs over the last few months, big and small games failing to launch (Copernicus from 38 Systems and ST:IS here), it's a very uncertain time.

Again, good luck to those who were working on this project.

STEAM GOES NON-GAME--It seems like kind of a non-game story..."Yeah, so Steam is going to start selling other software other than games.  So it's going to be like the PC app store?"  All of a sudden, the light goes on!

Holy crap could that be a license (Hah!, software humor!) to print money.  You thought Valve made money off games...imagine if they made money off everything!  Look what Apple does with the App Store on the iPad and iPhone.

No wonder Gabe Newell isn't a big fan of Windows 8 and their version of an app store.

The funny thing is...I'd trust Valve to handle that sort of complicated process in a streamlined and effective fashion more than I'd trust Microsoft to handle Minesweeper.

Of course, I've never used Microsoft's 360 Live service, so I can't make a cogent comparison between the two...not that'll I'll let a little thing like "knowledge" get in the way of my slagging on Microsoft!

"LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE", SAY HELLO TO MR. ANVIL AND MR. HAMMER!--Guild Wars 2 officially launches on August 28th.  Less than one month later, on September 25th "Mists of Pandaria" launches.  And LotRO's new expansion drops right smack dab in the middle on September 5th.

Good luck with that, Lord of the Rings Online!

Yes people have been wanting Rohan and mounted combat for a long time, but your commerce-driven design, with increasing costs for content and more pay-to-win goodies on the store are driving away your long time loyalists, leading so many of us to say...

"With Guild Wars 2 and MoP coming out...LotRO, screw you and the mounted combat you rode in on!"

FASA REDUX PART ONE: MECHWARRIOR ONLINE--Once upon a time there was a game company (not computer game, board game and paper-and-pencil role-playing game!) called FASA.  It initially stood for "Freedonian Aeronautics and Space Administration" (look up the Marx brothers you cultural illiterates!) but came to stand for, more generally, some really, really good game IPs.

One of those fine fanboy-loved properties was the Battletech boardgames and the Mechwarrior RPG.  In time, there were a lot of computer games (some meh, some very good) based on the Mechwarrior universe.

And after years of absence, we're getting a new Internetty MechWarrior, in "MechWarrior Online".

Superficially, it looks to be about what you'd expect...big honking robot blasting the crap out of each other with missiles, lasers, and auto-cannons.

What's not to love about that?

It seems that they are looking at a model somewhat similar to the very successful "World of Tanks", which I have downloaded, but not yet played.  I have a bunch of guildies playing the hell out of WoT though, and they loves it longtime.

It doesn't really fall into the MMO category by most standard definitions (15 players per side on a fight to the finish, no persistant world [yet, although the makers have talked about adding world control with the announced but not yet shipped "World of Warplanes" and "World of Warships"]) but it does have a number of the elements.

As I wrote about a few columns ago, the definition of an MMO is getting a lot more blurred these days.

Regardless, MWO looks like it may be heapin' buckets o' fun, especially for the old fanboys.

FASA REDUX PART TWO: TWO SHADOWRUN GAMES--And this would be the other immensely popular, fanboy-infested FASA property, Shadowrun.  Think "cyberpunk smooshed up with the return of magic into the world".  Yep, William Gibson meets J. R. R. Tolkien.  Johnny Mnemonic meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

They cranked out LOTS of quality material to support the old RPG.  There were even a few Shadowrun computer games, from some pretty good console games (Sega Genesis and SNES I think) to a tragi-comically awful FPS from Microsoft that crapped all over the much-beloved IP.

Seriously...people, we geeks LOVE the stuff we love, treat it with respect.  Microsoft, we won't buy it when you mess with Shadowrun.  Ang Lee, we won't go see your Hulk movie when it has a hulkpoodle in it.

So, rant complete, there are two new games coming for the Shadowrun fans, both via Kickstarter.  One is being overseen by Jordan Weisman who created Shadowrun in the first place.  "Shadowrun Returns" is going to be a single-player game for tablets and PCs.

And the other, perhaps overly ambitious entry, is a browser-based MMO, "Shadowrun Online".  They don't have the inherent pulling power that Weisman has to the old-school fanboys (and their Kickstarter dollars), so they have a harder row to hoe.

Both games look interesting, and I'm hopeful that both can succeed and lead to more projects.  I've always felt that Shadowrun was fertile ground for an MMO.  Perhaps at last we'll see!

UNTIL NEXT TIME--I think this new Friday format worked...at least for me.  I hope we get enough news every week!

Lens on TANSTAAFG (yes, really)

WTF is TANSTAAFG?  I'm glad you asked!  There's an old saying, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch"...TANSTAAFL.  Having just eaten mine, I paid for the components a couple of days ago, so it wasn't free.  More generally it implies that there is always a cost, even if the cost is hidden or indirect.

While eating a game is seldom advisable, it is in other ways similar to lunch in that there is always a cost.  TANSTAAFG.

The MMO space has undergone a lot of changes over the years, but nowhere has it changed more than in the way it reaps revenue from the users.  It all used to be subscription based, but now it's more often via free(HAH!)-to-play and so-called "freemium" models.  Some pundits (Ever notice that someone who writes or blogs that you disagree with is a "pundit", where someone who is brilliant and perceptive like me is a "deep thinker"?  Yeah, me neither.) have loudly proclaimed that the subscription model is dead...and they are, of course, idiots.

THOSE WHO CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT THEMSELVES

Yeah, that joke doesn't completely scan, but I had to go with Santayana as best I could.  What can I say, once upon a time I was a history major.

To many of the pundits (again with the pundits!) loudly (and wrongly) proclaiming the death of the subscription model of MMOs, the coup de gras came via a lightsaber.  With Star Wars: The Old Republic announcing it would be transitioning to the F2P model less than 8 months after launch, the logic seems to be "If BioWare and the Star Wars franchise couldn't make subscriptions work, then the subscription model is dead."

This is similar to saying "If Ford Motors couldn't make the Edsel successful, then the automobile industry is dead."  Google "edsel" if you don't understand the reference.  You kids today...

I'll even steal a line from the Wikipedia entry for the Edsel..."The aim was right, but the target moved."

TOR was sold to the masses of slavering fanboys (including yours truly) as some revolutionary new gaming experience.  But upon getting into the beta I was disappointed to discover it was exactly what I feared it would be, a thoroughly conventional MMO with a Knights Of The Old Republic theme.  They'd done what I expected and stapled some MMO boilerplate on the KOTOR games and convinced themselves that it was new.

A friend asked me if I thought SWTOR would be a hit and I replied that unless they had an aggressive content pipeline ready to go at launch, vast numbers of people would level up to 50 once or maybe twice and then quit because the game was so linear.

Unfortunately, their pipeline was comically empty, despite their boast of "unlike other games, we aren't laying people off after launch because we're still making so much new content!"

That's why TOR failed under the subscription model.  Because after a few months most players had done everything the game had to offer (except each of the storylines), often more than once.  No endgame, little replay value...those are the reasons for lousy retention, not the monthly subscription.

I've seen one prominent analyst claim that TOR could easily see a top-end of 10 million players under F2P, with a ceiling of 50 million.  This fellow needs a long vacation and his attending physician should re-examine his meds.

I guarantee they won't see anywhere near 10 million players playing, let alone paying, for the same reason subscriptions didn't work...there's simply nothing to do.  Will they have 10 million accounts?  Maybe.  How many will be active?  How many will be using the microtransactions?  What will the revenue-per-player be?  Who knows?  In the short run at least, I expect EA and BioWare will see increased revenue from the F2P change, but in the long run TOR will never be a "success".

Not because of the subscription model, but simply because it is a profoundly disappointing game.

OH LOOK, A GREAT BIG ENORMOUS ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

The subscription model is DEAD!  Unless of course you include World of Warcraft.

The people who claim that subs are dead either ignore WoW entirely or put it off with something like "WoW is such an outlier, it doesn't count."

OK, hmm...what about EVE Online?  Subscription-based success there.  "Well, EVE is different because it's EVE."

Seriously!?  WTF!?  WoW doesn't count because it's WoW and EVE doesn't count because it's EVE.  Thanks for your insightful commentary!  I'd win every argument ever if I could simply exclude all of the counter-arguments too!

I could pretty much end the discussion there..."If the subscription model is dead, then WoW and EVE don't exist, right?"

Here's one more...Lord of the Rings Online.  Yes, it went F2P, but it was still profitable and successful before that.  When DDO saw its revenues skyrocket after going F2P it was inevitable that LotRO would change.  As a lifetime subscription LotRO player I can genuinely say that even if F2P has increased the revenue for Warner Brothers and Turbine, it has negatively impacted the game.  This opinion is shared by the majority of my LotRO guild, as we've seen our collective enthusiasm wane drastically over time.

And here's a difference...unlike TOR the guys at Turbine have been keeping the content pipeline relatively full.  Unfortunately, they are no longer designing a compelling game, they are designing a compelling commercial enterprise.  And it shows.

So here's a case where going F2P helped the bottom line (in the short-to-medium run, at least) while irreparably damaging the game and loyalty of the player base.  In the long run, it may kill the game.  Not because the game went F2P, but because of the implementation.

TOR didn't fail because it was a subscription game, it failed because it wasn't compelling over time.  LotRO won't fail because it went F2P, but it might because commerce-driven design decisions are making it less compelling over time.

Subscriptions aren't dead.  They just are no longer the only option.  And F2P isn't the only option going forward.

LOOKING INTO THE CRYSTAL BALL

So if subscriptions aren't dead and F2P isn't the only option, what does the future look like?

Subscriptions and the much sought-after recurring revenue they represent is still the Holy Grail for MMO developers.  But the landscape has changed enormously and anyone bringing a new game out needs to very carefully decide how they are going to approach the question of monetization, and they have to do it from the very outset of the game design.

Going F2P for a game like TOR may salvage it financially, but then the question comes up...how would the game be different if that had been the plan from the start?  How will the design and implementation be different going forward?

If they can't add compelling content to TOR in a timely fashion, then the game will end up in a Zynga-like death-spiral, where the company is relying on fewer players over time spending more money.  At that point, it's no longer about making a game, it's about desperately trying to keep addicts hooked in something akin to JediVille.

But right as so many are talking about how everything needs to go F2P, with microtransactions being the only route to financial success...here comes Guild Wars 2 with a pay-to-play model.

In GW2 you pay full rate for the game, but there is no subscription.  There are some convenience and cosmetic options available through microtransactions to keep the revenue stream flowing somewhat until the next paid-for expansion comes out.

It worked in Guild Wars and I expect it will work in Guild Wars 2 even better.

So I guess maybe the future isn't completely F2P after all eh?

I repeat the question...what does the future look like?

It used to be all subscriptions and some pundits (Hah!) are saying it's going to be all free-to-play, but life is more nuanced than "all".

I expect we will see more games follow the GW2 route.  I think theirs is a sound market approach, but not the only one.

I think we'll see more games try different approaches in an effort to find the "sweet spot" for their product.

Because there is no right answer for all games, but there is a right answer for each specific game.  Every game has an ideal monetization model that fits the strengths and reduces the impact of the weaknesses of the game.  The hard part is finding the right model.

I hope we'll see the debate broaden out from subscription vs. F2P, because more options is usually better.  But I think even something like subscriptions can be fiddled around with.  Why is $15 seemingly the sacred number?

What if it was $5, would you get three times as many subscribers?  What if your F2P game allowed you to buy 300 store points for $5 but gave you 400 per month if you subscribed for $5 per month, what would that do to your numbers?

Just as the "pay per month" model went unquestioned for too long, the idea that the F2P/microtransaction model can't be fiddled with has outlived whatever usefulness it had.

Not every game needs a subscription.  Most can't support one.  But some games can and some could in the future.  To successfully launch with a subscription, a game needs to be compelling enough to create a loyal player base like WoW and EVE have.  TOR just wasn't compelling enough.  The industry as a whole needs to have a wider discussion than "subscriptions are dead", one that examines more options for more games.

Because building your game along with your monetization method is a necessity now.  There hasn't been a single "right answer" for quite some time.  But finding the single right answer for your game is the key.

There ain't no such thing as a free game, but how we pay matters, both to us and to the game design itself.

Lens on Two Is Greater Than One

IN THE BEGINNING

Let me make a dark and dreadful confession...I really didn't like Guild Wars.

Shortly after it came out I picked up the Collector's Edition, tried it, couldn't get into it at all, put it away.

A couple months later, I tried again.  I picked up the Prima guide hoping that more information would allow me to "get over the hump" and latch onto GW like a remora.  Newp.

I must have tried five or six times over the next couple of years to "get into" Guild Wars...and I finished with a .000 batting average.  The game struck me out every time.

Now I was no MMO tyro...by the time that Guild Wars launched I'd played, in varying amounts, (to save space I'll use the abbreviations) AO, DAoC, E&B, SWG, CoH, EVE, WoW, MxO, and had even poked a bit at EQ, UO, and EQ2.  But the mechanics in Guild Wars seemed not only different, but off-puttingly so.  Movement by clicking.  Instanced playspaces.  Artificially constricted movement areas (no jumping or moving through much of the terrain).  Skills acquired in irregular, even unpredictable ways.  And not much in the way of guidance as to how to navigate this very different way of doing things.

In the years since, we've seen WoW's Brobdingnagian market presence blot out the sun of innovation...jeez, even for me that's purple prose...so something different is valued more today.

I tried to love Guild Wars...but I didn't.

And then, a little more than five years ago, they announced Guild Wars 2!

My reaction?  "Oh god, not another fantasy game!"

I may have yawned.

THE WORM TURNS

I am a bit more than just an average MMO player.  I actually own (and have read!) maybe a dozen books on MMO design.  I have a keen interest in games, game theory, game history, and more than 30 years of playing computer games.  I also like to keep my eye on games in development...even games that might otherwise make me yawn.

My yawning stopped when I read the first interview with one of the ArenaNet team where they specifically said that Guild Wars 2 would be a full-blown MMO.  Now I was going to start paying attention.

Guild Wars 2 moved into the "check out all articles that come out on this game" category, alongside such contemperaneous projects as Rift, SWTOR, and The Secret World.

My interest slowly grew in GW2 as it seemed that every article and every ArenaNet dev blog I read made things sound niftier and niftier.

And then it happened...

No, they didn't have me at "Hello".  They had me at "The Shatterer".

I believe the first time he showed his adorable little head was at Gamescom in 2010, where ArenaNet let RealLivePeople(tm) play one of the dynamic events, the one that ends with The Shatterer, an adorable big-honking skeletal-looking dragon.  I saw a couple of videos of the event and the guest of honor and had an immediate, visceral reaction...

Sold!

So began the Dry Days, the Days Of Our Waiting, and they were numbered in the way-too-many.  Oh sure, I scoured the MMO websites for info, clung to every honeyed word that dripped from the mouths of the ArenaNet employees, and still it wasn't enough.

But we knew it was getting close...first they opened beta sign-ups in February and had 1,000,000 of us raise our hands and shout "Oooooo, me, me, mememememe!"  In March, they included select media into the beta test, always a sure sign.

Finally, in April, they announced the first beta weekend, with access guaranteed to anyone who pre-purchased the game.  And like a massive school of piranha when a victim of a severe cheese-grater accident falls into the fish tank, we launched ourselves in a frenzy.

Once I could finally get through the Boston-Marathon-like congestion, I happily handed over my $80.

I'd love to see what their networking numbers looked like when they opened up the pre-purchases.  And I'd have loved to have seen the smiling faces of the Money Guys over the next couple of days.

The waiting was almost done...but they never tell you that the last two weeks are the worst...

CUE CHOIR OF ANGELS

Friday, April 27, 2012.  How can the anticipation of so many players be measured?  How much more anticipation can be piled on top of that by the ArenaNet folks, eager to see something they've spent years working on get its coming out party?

The beta starts on time!  I create my character and after a couple of hours...I'm thinking maybe I blew eighty bucks.

It's not the same problems I had with the first Guild Wars, but it just feels...funny.  Odd.  Not only are some mechanisms new and different, but some are really frustrating too.  And I'm dying a lot when level 5 and 6 mobs come in waves to our little level 3 event.

A couple of hours later...and it's beginning to get better.  I'm starting to grok how the differences work and how to work the differences to my advantage.

It's happening at last...that thing I looked for so many times in the original Guild Wars...I'm getting "over the hump", it's all clicking into place.

And a couple hours after that, with me now a near-rabid fanboy, I'm desperately trying to keep a couple of my friends from giving up on the game.

They too have hit the "wtf just happened, why is my level 3 getting nuked by waves of level 6 mobs at an event" problem.  I try to soothe them with "It's beta, there are a lot of players around so the events are spawning lots of mobs, it'll get fixed!"  (Note: I was right...it did get fixed.  But it was bad that first weekend!)

Slowly...they come around.  The game "clicks" for them too.

This procedure is repeated several times over the next couple of days, where more friends and guildies get to try out the game and start off with a lot of cognitive dissonance.  We assure them, "There's a learning curve.  Give it a chance!  Here, let me show you this cool thing..."

In time...they all come around.  Far too soon, the Epic Bunny fight that marks the end of the first beta weeekend is done, and shortly thereafter the servers go down.

Withdrawal symptoms begin early the next day.

THERE AND BACK AGAIN

Since then we've had several short stress tests (so-called because the stress of only being able to play for four hours has been proven to cause brain aneurysms) and a couple more beta weekends.

I've played all of the classes to pick out the ones I like most (and the ones I only like a lot, and the ones I only like slightly less than that), and I've tried out all the starting areas.  Outside of the game, my friends and guildies have talked about Guild Wars 2 extensively, and it's made regular appearances in many of my blogs, where I've discussed everything from the "real-money in" system, to the event system, to the tactical and strategic value to the weapon-based hotkey system.

I've even live-blogged it a couple of times.

And now I find myself back where I was in April...waiting out a couple of very long weeks!  Hell, I've even gone back to Guild Wars and finally managed to get "over the hump" a little bit and play more in the last few weeks than I ever managed to in 6 or 8 or 10 tries in the past, put together.

But at long last, the clock is almost done ticking.  We have a launch day, and a launch time.

With three weeks left, I expect in comparing the suffering of the next two weeks with that last, excruciating week of waiting...

One will be greater than two.


Note:  this was written for GuildMag's Blog Carnival (http://www.guildmag.com/blog-carnival-4-five-years-of-waiting-for-guild-wars-2).  Thanks to my guildies for suggesting I add my two bits into the discussion.