Lens on Friday Quickies VI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, pull the other leg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of stools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too weird for words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have a winner!!!

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

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

Uh...oops?