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.