For those of us who have worked as system administrators in the past, there is a collection of ancient wisdom, gathered over the years, which explains the mysteries of the universe...
Google up "alt.sysadmin.recovery faq" if you want to see Truth in its unvarnished state.
Down, not across.
In this Holy Writ you can see the word "luser" (the 'l' is both silent and omnipresent in my experience). In this context it is a word replete with meanings, but I shall attempt to sum up with the phrase "an idiot whose infinite shortcomings will be blamed on the sysadmin's inability to 'help them be productive'".
Sysadmins are almost always at the mercy of the lusers.
For those of us who play MMOs, we know that our ability to interact with the virtual worlds in which we choose to play, is through the "user interface". This is the collection of mechanics that govern the information we get about the virtual world (other than vision and sound, for the most part), and perhaps more importantly, how we effect the virtual world around us.
The user interface does this by translating keyboard and mouse actions into shooting a bow, casting a spell, dodging dragon fire, or even picking up poop. Seriously, the amount of scatplay that occurs in MMOs these days is inexplicable.
Now many times we find ourselves frustrated because, instead of streamlining our gameplay, the user interface mechanisms are getting in the way. They don't do what we think they should, and often they don't even do what they claim they do.
MMO players are almost always at the mercy of the luser interfaces.
IN THE BEGINNING...
Before there were MMOs, there were MUDs. Since these were text-only games, it was easy to see how keyboard commands were the obvious and correct way for your character to interact with the world.
But when games started stapling graphics on top of what were essentially DIKU-MUDs (look it up, noob!), the worlds of GUIs (graphical user interface) and MMOs came clashing together.
In this case, it was mostly straightforward. Any given click would pretty much give a single, expected result. The amount of information it would provide was fairly minimal, mostly just damage numbers.
Simplicity is always welcome, and in the case of the early MMOs, it was all that was needed...perhaps only because it was all we knew.
In fact, sometimes even the primitive graphics of the time were too much of a load, and players would point their camera at a wall or floor so as to not be distracted by the fight, or to avoid having their framerate drop to slideshow proportions.
In those days the game sometimes consisted entirely of playing the UI. Watching the health bars and hitting your keys, while your character stared at the floor at his feet.
Big upgrade from a text-only game eh?
AND LET THERE BE MODS...
As the MMOs grew in depth, complexity, and graphical demand, the computers we played them on grew mightier apace. And the players wanted more from their UIs as well. And when WoW came out, Blizzard opened up their UI to all the amateur UI designers out there to add their own functionality.
And that shit exploded.
Using and abusing every little programmatical hook that Blizzard offered them, the WoW user interface almost instantly turned into the wild, wild west. Almost any function you could conceive of, whether it made sense or not in game terms, had a mod written for it.
And because all of these were written by different people with different objectives...
Welcome to the land of the Luser Interface.
Even if you found a dozen mods you liked, trying to get them to work together and with the default WoW UI was usually a nightmare. And if you found a package of mods you liked enough to install, some parts you wouldn't want or they'd interfere with this other mod...
And when the mods came that vastly simplified raid and dungeon bosses (like Dire Boss Mods and such) they became all but mandatory.
And DPS meters like Omen turned every group into competitive e-peen swinging contests.
At one point Blizzard said that they would be implementing a mod certification system to make sure that incompatibilities would be addressed, but they never did. Over time they took away some of the hooks because some of the mods people had created turned the whole raid/dungeon game into follow the leader.
Somebody had come up with a mod that would draw on the players screens where to stand and tell them what to do for any given encounter. It was both hilarious and inevitable. Give the players a way to win easier, and they will.
Instead of the players playing the UI, the UI played the game for the players.
LESSONS SADLY UNLEARNED...
I will take a detour from the history lesson for a different sort of lesson...the kind of lesson that only the fail that is "Star Wars: The Old Republic" can truly teach.
I would say that to my mind, SWTOR has the Worst Luser Interface In The History Of MMOs.
Quite the claim, I know.
It had many things (not?) going for it...it was primitive, feature-free, locked tight, and broken! And it took them 6 years and $200M to come up with a game with a Luser Interface that would embarass a designer from the days of EverQuest (the original).
There were so many things wrong with it at launch that it's impossible to list them all, so I'll settle for one function that simply could not be done...
Let's say you have a crafter, so you want to browse the Galactic Trade Network (the auction house) for recipes. The GTN Luser Interface was a disaster in and of itself, but we'll ignore that for now. You check the GTN and mouseover a recipe you already have...and in no way is it denoted that it's a recipe you know. You can even buy it and learn it (again) and at no point does the UI let you know it's one you've gotten already.
But let's say, since you can't tell any other way, you decide to compare the GTN list of available recipes with the list of recipes you already have in your crafting window. Note, this is the Least Efficient Method Conceiveable By The Mind Of Man, but it should work...unless...
There was no way to have both of those windows open at the same time. None. So even the LEMCBTMOM wouldn't work. So, in fact, there was no way to compare recipes on the GTN with recipes you already knew except to write down a list of one to compare with the other.
So in a game where (at launch) you couldn't have more than two UI windows open at the same time, you couldn't have any two...just some of 'em.
How this abortion of a Luser Interface made it into beta, let alone through beta...well, it's just indicative of the magnitude of the gap between what the SWTOR devs thought was sufficient for an MMO, and reality. And that distance showed up throughout the game and helped turn it into the resounding disappointment that it is.
Seriously, this was a UI that a part-time coder could have cranked out in 3 months. How a team could take 6 years for this garbage is an utter mystery.
Note: many (buy by no means all) of the most glaring deficiencies of the launch Luser Interface were remedied a few months later in the patch that updated the UI to nearly-modern status.
The engineers who fixed the UI were mostly competant. Where the hell were they over the previous six years?
LESS IS NEVER MORE, BUT SOMETIMES IT'S BETTER
Over the years, UIs got bigger, more complex, and usually more customizeable, all in an effort to make the game better and more involving for the player.
And sometimes it worked!
Lord of the Rings Online had a very simple method for moving UI elements around on the screen, and this was a huge plus. A plus it needed because by the time you hit level cap you probably had four to six hotbars full of icons, many of which you never used.
As developers tried to manage needs and expectations from the player community, the UIs became more feature rich. The devs were involved in a great juggling act between simple and complicated...and often the Luser Interface suffered.
But there has been something of a return to simplicity with two recent launches (one a huge success, the other...not).
We have seen in the launches of The Secret World and Guild Wars 2 that a simple, streamlined User Interface has a compelling case for improved gameplay.
They both have a simplified UI with a limited (and locked) hotbar. They emphasize ease of play, doing without complexity and even what might be considered "essential" functions in other games.
And both are successful. The gameplay works perfectly well in both cases, most likely because they were designed to work smoothly, simply, and transparently from the start.
And that, perhaps, is the difference between a "User Interface" and a "Luser Interface". A User Interface provides an easy, functional way for the player to interact with the game that has been designed together with the UI. A Luser Interface provides the player with frustration, confusion, and whole lot of repair bills in-game.
A User Interface will result in the players saying, when asked about the UI, "Yeah, this game has a good UI."
A Luser Interface will result in the players, when asked about the UI, reciting endless lists of what's wrong with it.
A User Interface is all but invisible.
A Luser Interface is like having a grain of sand in your eye while a cold-handed proctologist checks your prostate. Painful from top to bottom.
No comments:
Post a Comment