Category Archives: _

Blizzard offers keychain security dongles to secure your WoW account

Given the amount of exploits targeting World of Warcraft accounts, this isn’t a bad idea at all.

Monday: “Age of Conan sucks! And they have no subscribers! Look, we EVEN HAVE A CHART!”

Wednesday: “CORRECTION! Age of Conan ROCKS! I’m buying a copy RIGHT NOW!”

When questioned about the seeming slight discrepancy in opinion, facts, and charts, the author had this to say:

I realized after looking up more information that my original conclusions were unfounded.  After all, I have not actually played the game myself.

Well, OK, then.

This is quite possibly the finest political post ever made on any blog.

Various Chaos Gods hate each other. Khorne, the Lord of Skulls doesn’t get along with Slaanesh, the androgynous Prince of Excess, for pretty obvious reasons. Khorne hates Slaanesh’s decadence, while Slaanesh doesn’t like Khorne for being the living embodiment of all the hate, rage, war, violence, and killing in the known universe. Nurgle won’t support anyone who is deemed to be “weak” on illegal immigration, while Tzeentch pretty much hates everyone who doesn’t completely oppose abortion.

Don’t forget part 2, which explains in one simple punch list exactly what happened in the Republican nominating process:

• One player had the strongest econ. But everyone ganged up on him and he was obviously incompetent in nearly every other aspect of the game.
• One player turtled up big time in one large area in the Southeast corner of the map, hoping that a major victory there would propel him to a win. He got steamrolled.

Atari deals with poor reviews of its Alone In The Dark remake by… suing the reviewers TO DEATH.

Sometimes diners go slightly overboard with the decor.

From an interview on Massively, the interviewer asked Bartle about his thoughts on Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, leading into a short blast…

I’ve already played Warhammer. It was called World of Warcraft.

…which immediately segued into a somewhat more nuclear explosion:

Age of Conan – that’s PVP. Wow, gosh, PVP – it’s pretty hardcore, PVP, isn’t it? No. When you played [older MUDs] you got killed after three months of playing, your character was gone. Yeah, hardcore PVP – yeah, we’re hard, aren’t we? We’re evil. No. You don’t know anything.

But of course, if you fixate on the explosions, you miss the interesting bits.

I might have a look at it from a point of view of seeing what things – the class balances are like, seeing how they’ve implemented the – I really ought to write up a book on how to read a virtual world so that I have a vocabulary in order to explain it to people. But there are a number of things you can do with player versus player, and I want to see the way they’ve done it not because whether it’s cool or not but because of you chose that way. Now, why did you choose that way?

You chose that way because you’ve got a particular vision for your virtual world. Your particular vision for your virtual world is saying something. You made this the center of your virtual world. That tells me something already in advance. What it tells me is you want to compete with the games that don’t have it so that you’re carving your niche. But why did you choose that niche? You chose that niche or a particular reason. How did you implement it? You’re trying to rip off Dark Age of Camelot?

Well, that probably was a motivation, but there were a number of things you could have done. EVE Online, for example, was player versus player, and it’s got player created units or guilds. You’re doing it that way, and now you’re saying things that way. But when you create it, you’re actually saying something through the design. What is it you’re trying to say? Why are you trying to say it? How are you trying to articulate something? This is from the designer’s point of view what I really want to know. What are they trying to say? Why have they done it this way? Did they know about the other ways?

They’re designers. They’ve got millions. They must have known about the other ways, but they didn’t do it the other way. They did it this way. Why did they do it that way?

My immediate snarky response, from working on several MMO teams now, is that assuming that designers have any knowledge of games that came before their current favorite is not a safe assumption, and that what the designer may be saying is simply “I really liked Everquest” or “City of Heroes seemed fun, let’s nick those bits”, or more regrettably, “Yeah, World of Warcraft, make it more like that, because we like money hats.”

But of course, Bartle has a response to that too:

Did you know one in 100,000 people are psychopaths? Well, you do now. So figure out how many psychopaths there are in World of Warcraft. I don’t want any of them actually coming around to me in the belief that I am saying dreadful things about World of Warcraft.

Methinks someone received some blistering email…

You know, you might just consider, just for one episode, wearing a buttoned-up blouse. It could be fun!

Japan develops a robot girlfriend for lonely men that can kiss on command.

Note: this robot can also attend high school, fire depleted uranium shells from wrist-mounted chainguns, and summon the Persona Athena.

This is quite possibly the coolest museum piece ever.

(Edit: it appears that bells are unringing, or at least the subject of this note took to heart some of the no doubt polite and reasoned criticism that arrived in his email and throughout the Intertubes. In particular, the everything-was-screwed-up-but-what-I-did parts were replaced with an honest mea culpa. So, as you read this, realize that I’m beating up on someone who’s trying to make good on his mistakes. And after that, I might go and punch some babies or something.)

Dear Mr. Rubenfield (I don’t really know you well enough to call you “Dan” and definitely not well enough to call you “Lord_Pall” like some internet weirdo):

OK, you can blame friends who should know better for baiting me into responding seriously. Despite the fact that SWG in general, and the NGE in specific, is basically the Derek Smart of MMO discussion. You bring it up and all the oxygen of coherent discussion just is sucked out of the room. Flames do that.

And why is that? Because in the space of two weeks from the player’s perspective, the entire structure of SWG was tossed aside and replaced with what you freely admit was the result of a few weeks’ mad crunching.

We told them. “If you do this, you will lose all 200k subscribers. It is that significant.”

It was explained that we would gain more due to the marketing push and relaunch.

So, we pushed forward.

Dude. Srsly. You CAN’T DO THAT.

At some point someone – your producer, probably, that being his job and all – should have sat everyone down and said “you. can’t. do. that.”

Those 200,000 customers – customers - you blithely dismiss as “dregs” and “weirdos” – are paying your salary. You can’t just blow them off for the mythical millions of people looking for a better game. Want to make a better game for them? Sure. As you said:

“Can you change an MMO drastically after it launches?”

Categorically, NO.

If we were to do it again, and wanted to make those types of changes, you have to make a new game.

Relaunch with a new title.

Or shut down Galaxies and relaunch for real.

You cannot change it at runtime.

And if you had kept your blog entry at that – just that – it would have all been cool. Hey, the designer of the NGE learned a valuable lesson. You can’t yoink a game and replace it with candy. Even if the candy is yummy. SCRUMPTIOUSLY. The customers – customers - not freaks or weirdos, customers – paid for a game. Not candy. They are paying a monthly fee for a game.

Maybe none of the team LIKED that game particularly. Maybe the higher ups were demanding millions of subscribers to pay for Lucasarts licensing fees. I dunno. I wasn’t there. You were.

But… dude. Srsly. YOU CAN’T DO THAT.

Especially this. Dude. Srsly.

We launched, the marketing push failed, and we lost subscribers.

It was a misread at an organizational level. Marketing, Production, community. You name it.

Epoch grade fuckup.

But.

The fuckup was NOT the changes.

Oh, no, you didn’t.

Oh, no, you didn’t.

You didn’t just point the finger for NGE’s commercial failure at everyone but yourself.

OH NO, YOU DIDN’T.

“It was a marketing failure.” (yeah, marketing makes or breaks games, plus everybody dislikes marketing, it’s easy to blame them!)

“Community dropped the ball.” (yeah, you know, the community person who was FIRED a week after trying to deflect the rage of a community, who for SOME STRANGE REASON en masse felt betrayed. I WONDER WHY.)

Dude. Srsly.

You completely changed the game. You ripped out the guts and replaced it with random bits from other systems. With two weeks notice to a community that you just sold an expansion pack to.

No, really, I’m sure there’s enough blame to go around. I’m sure marketing dropped the ball. I’m sure community could have been handled better (pro-tip: letting them know a bit further in advance may have been a good idea).

But your design – your work – was so smash up wonderful that everyone BUT you was to fault? Everyone BUT you was to blame?

Srsly. Dude.

So. Your final anecdote:

A cancellation email from UO came in. A diatribe, really.

It want on and on about how shitty the game was, how it was the worst piece of crap he’d ever played.

So, someone called him to find out some information.

They asked how long he played for.

His answer?

2 years.

So, what lesson did you get from that, anyway? Because, judging from the rest of your post?

I suspect you didn’t get it. Srsly.

DUDE.

Regards,

Scott Jennings