Pragmatism

Best post from Raph. Totally unexpected.

If only he would go in THAT direction instead of reducing everything to abstract systems…

Which brings me to flame Danc.

Danc at Lost Garden is one of Raph’s dearest puppies. The complicity between the two is understandable if you read what they write and their approach. They both have the proprensity to overanalyzing everything, researching to the extreme, rationalize, schematize. They have a great mastery of the medium. Think about it and you’ll see how these qualities would be the very foundation of what makes a Great Designer.

Well, I don’t agree. I’m not saying that the opposite is true, but that those points aren’t so determinant as implied. Maybe here I’m being just “defensive” because they are able to do something definitely out of my reach but, even if there some truth in that, I still believe that my critics can be objectively valid. And it seems I’m not alone thinking this.

I found Danc’s last article particularly irritating. But in this case not (only) because he already did a wonderful work at presenting his thoughts and schematizing, but because he points a trend that I consider just bloated, superfluous, too self absorbed, complacent.

On the forum thread I linked people criticized the “tone” of what he was writing, that form of partially concealed “arrogance”, but that’s not the part that doesn’t work, from my point of view. What I criticize (and that links above to that article from Raph) is the excessive rationalization in general, excessive schematization. These should be valuable tools availabe for a designer, and they ARE. But in this case I see them becoming more TRAPS than useful tools. I see the creative process, but even its concrete realization, as something much more alive and changing. Free of cages and chains.

Wittgenstein has always been one of my myths. It’s a lot of time that I don’t go back to study that, but I remember his most important thought that concludes his most important book (“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”). He consider the logic and the knowledge as a “ladder”. His book is also defined as a ladder. But when you are done with it, you are supposed to take it and throw it away. Completely forget about it.

This is also my idea about game design. I often repeated that I see game design as a process of observation more than a proces of rabid creativity. But the observation is about “something else”. The object is external. Sometimes, instead, while reading Danc or Raph, I feel as if the observation is not only the subject observing, but also the object. Completely autoreferential. It seems as if everything starts and ends there. Convoluted. It becomes a process alienated from its context and purpose and, no matter how this process is refined, it is just going off-track. And it’s not anymore useful, it becomes just redundant.

They seem too much self-absorbed. They are wonderful observers, but they seems to observe too much themselves (their brain processes) more than what is outside. Like if there isn’t anymore a displacement between themselves and their wishes.

An excess of qualities that should bring elsewhere, and not just back to themselves.

I don’t think adding another dude with a beret will make programs better.

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Am interesting, positive Vangaurd preview

From Tom Chick on Yahoo Games, a preview that anticipates some interesting bits from Vanguard:

This is the tough-guy MMO with complicated tactical combat, mandatory group harvesting, extended dialogue trees, grueling corpse retrieval runs, prohibitive death penalties, and metal clamps that send a shock to your nipples when you take damage.

Group harvesting isn’t mandatory in the sense that everyone will have to do it, but it will be used as a way to “control 3D space”, as Butler puts it. For instance, there’s a cave-in at one end of a dwarven city. It opens the way to mines beneath the city where there are unique quests. But getting through the cave-in will require a certain amount of mining skill, not to mention specially crafted tools. And even if you do get through here, you’ll have to develop your relationship with a powerful but secretive dwarven family to unlock the associated quest.

This is an example of how some of Vanguard’s content is locked behind separate layers of gameplay. If you want to access that content, you’ll need to engage in harvesting, crafting, diplomacy, and combat.

The combat in Vanguard is arguably where the game most deserves a “hardcore” tag. For example, there are rules for wound locations. Head wounds can slow mana regeneration, leg wounds will reduce movement speed, a serious chest wound can cause hit point drain, right arm damage can be an offensive debuff, and left arm damage can be a defense debuff. How’s that for hardcore?

There’s a system of counters, chains, and cooperative attacks that are built into the interface. This is where you can really get a sense for how the combat is distinct. There are four tiny windows along the bottom of the screen, designated for chains, counters, rescues, and sympathies. Whenever you have the opportunity to use one of your abilities in the appropriate situation, its icon appears in the related window.

There are no facades or skyboxes. McQuaid mentions “integrated ground, air, and water pathing”, which means that you’re not going to get away from that drake you see overhead by simply putting a river between you and it.

McQuaid rides a dragon into the sky to show off the volumetric clouds. He has a programmer show us the weather systems they’ve built that will sweep across the world. Clouds build up and darken as a storm rolls in. The idea is that this will even have an effect on gameplay. A druid, for instance, might have spells that only work when it’s raining. Imagine what this might then do for weather prediction spells, or even cooperative spells that can summon rain. Like so many things in Vanguard, there’s a cascading set of interrelated systems being carefully pieced together.

This preview hands out more concrete informations than all the steam that emerged through the beta along these months.

Some of the principles, on the general level, are valid. We still have to see how much of this will reveal to be consistent and not just vapid. Vanguard is really the only mmorpg that I cannot figure out. I just cannot anticipate if it will be a big success or a tremendous failure.

I remain skeptical for now, but the plan to give the game world more consistence and integrate different systems together has potential.

Brad may actually be able to create a virtual world and a sandbox by just improving the same, stale patterns we have seen till now. Focusing on the “adventure” and giving back relevance to all the parts that have been frustrated in the more recent games (travel, inventory managment, environment, exploration, interaction and so on).

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EverQuest 2: some gripes

Queued spells

On the other post I criticized some elements of the UI, like the lack of a graphical mark to see which spells I have queued.

Someone then commented stating that THERE IS, in fact, a graphical mark. So I thought I had messed with some options and I went to double check everything again, without success. I forgot the issue since then but today I finally noticed the effect for the first time:

Look. Then look better. That image shows the icon inactive on the left and the icon active on the right. See the fucking inner border SLIGHTLY brighter? That’s the effect. It’s FUCKING INVISIBLE! That “effect”, assuming that you are able to discern it even in that example, pulses on and off, where “off” corresponds to the icon on the left and “on” to the one on the right. Just try to imagine how usable it is in the game, where your attention goes to a bunch of things and you have at least two or three hotbars each with twelve of those slots to manage.

I swear I’m not joking.

This is one of those situations where I would like to look the UI designer in the eyes and ask: what the fuck were you thinking?

Then I also wonder what all the rest of the team was doing. Aren’t they playing the same game? Haven’t they played from the beginning of the development till now? Don’t they see these problems either? These are really very basic and simple functionalities. The very basis of design. Something that is suddently noticeable. So, what they were ALL thinking?

If the answer is that they didn’t see any problem with these issues and if this is working as intented then, well, it means that WoW truly deserves that disproportion in the success. Because if you cannot understand something as simple as this, you cannot understand ANYTHING about game design.


The pacing is all wrong

The gripes don’t end here but the rest is about something more conventional, like the pacing all wrong and other odd things that don’t work quite right.

My character is currently at level 9, with the combat exp till disabled. I still wanted to check the crafting side of the game so I tried to figure out how to access it. I already complainied about this part being quite obscure if you happen to “miss” the beginning quest on the noob island like I did.

You have very little direction when you leave the island and I had to resort to spolier sites since I couldn’t figure out how to start crafting. I found out that I’m supposed to join some sort of crafting guild/shop. I had already found some of these on the game but I couldn’t undserstand what were my options and on which assumption I was supposed to choose between one and the other. Anyway, once you join one of these shops you’ll need to complete a basic quest before you can start crafting.

My starting quest wants me to collect fifteen pieces of “severed maple”. Okay. I wish I had a clue about where to go get them. Right now I only know two zones beside the city itself: commonlands and the cemetery zone. So I went to the commonlands to discover that all the things I could gather were about the generic “gathering” skill and not what I needed. I noticed a few pieces of wood to harvest but my skill was too low. So I explored much more, hoping to find something at a lower level but without success. Then I decided to move to the cemetery and try there.

Here I could finally harvest the wood, but not the type of wood I needed. I had to rely again on a spoiler site to figure out what the hell I was looking for exactly and I discovered that the maple I needed could be found on the commonlands, from those pieces of wood beyond my level. So what I had to do was to harvest stuff in the cemetery to skill up till the point I could be able to harvest stuff in the commonlands.

The pace is all wrong. I passed two hours walking around the cemetery and just harvesting the pieces of wood. After those two hours I was at 13 in “Foresting”, starting from 7. Exactly as in WoW (they are cloned, not similar) for each level you can up your skills by five points. Being at level 9 my maximum skills would be at 45. What I got was six points in two hours. Barely more than one level in progression. From level 2 to level 3. Doing just that. The rates of failure on harvesting are EXCESSIVELY HIGH, so you have to repeat and repeat with the “Nothing Found” pop-up appearing continuously. Despite the high failure rates I managed to collect 41 friggin pieces of “severed elm” and even one rare. But my skill only went up by six points and I needed at least 20 (level 4) so I could finally go out in the commonlands and be able to START my newbie quest (and that was another 15 pieces of stuff to collect). This revealed to be one hell of a grind. For a level 9 characters collecting level 2 junk.

As I said, they got the pacing all wrong. The high failure rates, the excessively low rate of advancement. It just didn’t feel good and I finished to log out even if I actually had more time available to play and had planned so. But the grind and bad design got in the way and my interest in playing decreased.

I wouldn’t compare every inch of the game with WoW, but the game BEGS you to do so when the mechanics are absolutely identic.

EQ2 not only uses the exact same skill system, just paced wrong, but even the exact same resource system. Around a zone you can find roots, pieces of wood and other types of junk that you can “harvest” and obtain resources from. With the difference that the resource system made sense in WoW while it is once again inconsistent in EQ2. In WoW the resource nodes spawn where it makes sense, the minearals near the mountains, the herbs scattered around, the skins on the mobs you kill. In EQ2 these spots are scattered without a sense, they are just random dots on the map without an attempt at an excuse. On top of this each spawn point is also not unique, so that the minute before you can find a “wood” resource and the minute after a “stone” resource. Totally inconsistent.

I was disappointed when I tried to sell the resources I gathered after my bags were filled because I discovered that the NPC vendors just don’t buy them, not even at a low price. And speaking of consistence and another direct comparison with WoW, I also found a player mnining a resource on top of an horse, without even the need to dismount.

Why WoW must always outclass every system in the game? Wrong pacing, high failure rates, generic spawn points, inconsistence, impossibility to sell to vendors. I feel like I’ve scratched just the surface.


Hallucinations

Is this all? Hell no. While running around the cemetery it *continuously* happened something that freaked me out. I was getting hit by “something”. I was just running around and getting hit by something. I could see the animation, the sound and a “-9” or so damage popping on top of my head. So I looked around but there were no monsters close to me or chasing, my health bar didn’t move and my combat log didn’t register ANYTHING AT ALL. But every five minutes or so I was getting hit again, sometimes even with multiple hits, with damage numbers popping up all around me. Still nothing around, nothing in the combat log.

I double checked everything, I examined the effects on my character to see if it wasn’t some sort of odd DOT or disease but nothing. I was being hit without a reason, without my health bar reacting. I even thought it could have been because of falling damage but again I wasn’t able to reproduce that, and the falling damage WAS registered in the combat log.

Still now I have no clue, but I’m pretty sure it’s some crazy bug and not something intended that I wasn’t able to figure out (you never know with this game). I actually think it could be because of a graphic bug of the client going crazy and “burping” some events out of synch by 4-5 minutes. Which is still really odd and that I never seen happening anywhere.


To conclude, a tiny but positive thing I found. I noticed that there are small objects around the world that you can click and “flag” with your name. Before the flagging these objects just highlight on mouse-over, but without any kind of feedback. But if you click on them the object will be flagged with the name of your character: “Gaen was here”.

Initially I though this was a per-character thing. Like landmarks that you have on different accounts, but I found later another of these objects that was flagged with the name of another character. So it seems that these are little “discoveries” that are shared between the whole server. You can go around and hunt for these little object and flag them with your name for everyone to see.

This is really a good idea, something I never seen before. I don’t know if the flagging decays after a set amount of time (I hope not), either way it is a nifty feature for the explorer types.

For them EQ2 is a much better game than WoW, even if the environments are much better in the latter.

The yearly bite on Mythic’s ass

(okay, I’m tired. Sorry for the title, ok?)

I’ll start with a post from Mark Jacobs on their virginal community as an excuse to write down some notes that I was planning from quite a while: DAoC and PvE.

Folks,

Instancing is indeed a tool which, as it already has been said, is neither good nor evil. It has some very, very good uses but it can be abused. Thus, we will use instancing in a number of ways but not so that they destroy the sense of being part of an MMO.

As to DAoC, yes, we are doing it very well there but I think we can do it even better here.

Mark

He doesn’t say anything as always, but there’s that comment about DAoC and the use of instancing technology: “We are doing it very well”.

Wow, that’s a news. I’ve yet to see someone praising these wonderful instances that DAoC is supposed to have, because it would be really a novelty. If there’s ONE GAME where the instances have been abused to the point of destroying the fabric of the game, that game is DAoC.

The technology may be solid, but in that post Mark Jacobs wasn’t commenting the underlying technology supporting the instances, but their use, abuse and purpose in the game. He was commenting the game design. The same game design that is, honestly, undefendable considering the really poor results that those choices brought.

When “Catacombs” (the expansion that introduced the instances) was in development I presented my worries clearly. I didn’t have *any* direct information, and the game was still in closed beta. But those doubts relvealed to be correct.

Not only I was correct but also “optimist”. The situation revealed to be much worse than what I expected. Not only “Catacombs” made the old world deserted (the same world that the new players can access). But it also sucked out the little life the PvE had left. I was expecting the content to be at least good but not only it wasn’t, it was also subpar compared to what the game already had and that the designers decided to replace.

The work on “Catacombs”, beside developing the instancing technology itself, was about reskinning and remodel the dungeon tiles, reskinning and remodel the mosters and assemble/shuffle the two as a bunch of corridors with a row of glassy-eyed mobs in the middle. There is no “content” here, but just a big, gaping hole of nothing. There isn’t anything to offer, any value if not the biggest experience bonus in the game to speed up the treadmill to the maximum level.

No journey. Just reward.

The PvE wasn’t being enhanced, revised and reorganized as it needed, the PvE was being COMPLETELY REMOVED. The part of DAoC that the most needed some “added value” saw the little that was left completely squeezed out to only leave an empty corpse. A remain. “Catacombs” didn’t just move *all* the players inside the instanced zones, leaving the non-instanced world deserted as I was expecting. “Catacombs” OBLITERATED the PvE (the journey) from DAoC:

Amber:
DAoC is no longer a PvE game. You grind task dungeons until you can do battlegrounds, then you do battlegrounds until you max RPs, then you grind for the next battleground. Rinse, repeat until 50. You can mix it up a bit with your Champion and epic quests, but otherwise it’s TD-BG to 50 now.

You can of course buck this trend, but just try getting a group. To say that the original lands are deserted now is an understatement. There are giants in Cornwall who are at this very moment collecting pensions. You can probably kill them by whacking their walkers with a staff. On the downside their loot drops may not be so interesting. Last one I killed dropped a piece of hard candy, a magnifying glass, half a pack of Pal Malls and a Life Alert bracelet.

The real problem is all in a misinterpretation. All in wrong design assumptions that always plagued this game.

The problem wasn’t about the treadmill being too long or slow. The problem was (and still is) that the PvE experience has very little to offer. Very little value. Mythic needed to blow life in. Not suck it out.

Simply put: a problem of quality, not a problem of quantity.

Dave Rickey:
I wouldn’t say that a complete abandonment of PvE would be a good idea for any game. Very few MMO players want to PvP *all* the time, non-stop, and I think this is why totally PvP games like WW2O or Planetside have limited appeal. Many like it as a sideline, to greater or lesser degrees. And most of those want the ability to say “I am *not* getting ganked today, I’ll just whack mobs.”

But when you have a long treadmill, most of your PvE content is just filler. If it wasn’t intended as such, it will be after the 100th time the players see it. If you have only a certain amount of manpower to devote to building content, and you need a lot of filler to satisfy the demands of the treadmill, then you’re going to have to produce less *good*, interesting, novel content, and you’re going to use up the attractiveness of what you build through sheer player fatigue.

So I would say that what I would be a proponent of would be shorter treadmills, more use of AI-based content creation tools for the filler, and where content is being hand-built that content is high-quality, well thought out, and highly polished.

DAoC needs badly its PvE side. It cannot do without it as it cannot do with it but without value.

Even if the PvE has always been the weakest point of the game, this shouldn’t mean that it should be pushed out of relevancy. This is a terrible mistake that Mythic is paying way more than what they paid with the design mistakes in ToA (which remains Mythic’s most ambitious and most clueless expansion ever).

The PvE is the first consistent part that is presented to new and returning players and fundamental for their “education” through the game. Yes, now it’s possible to move directly toward the PvP. But it’s not possible to expect this to be always viable. The PvE is required as a training ground and to add some depth and consistence to the game. To create bonds and significance. Only then you can expect the players to slowly approach the PvP. It’s a transition and it is the main duty of the game to drive the players along this transition. Gradually.

The most important point is that this part must be fun. It must be reiterated till it isn’t proven fun. Till some true value isn’t found. If the PvE “sucks” the answer is not “Okay, so we’ll get rid of it”. The answer is to ask more questions. Go find out what didn’t work, what is missing, where are the limitations. What are the elements that need to be changed to find that quality.

Is this possible with the resources Mythic currently has?

Shild says DAoC “has no legs” and I agree. From the exodus of players that started one year before WoW and exploded with its release, the game lost around a 40% of its worldwide subscribers. The game is still solid and I’m sure it can still continue to be profitable for a reasonable amount of time. But does it have anything anymore to say in the genre? My answer is still the same: A WHOLE LOT.

Imho, Camelot has always had and still has a huge potential. Not if in the hands of another company, not with a bigger founding, not with brand new, fancy technology. But with the resources they already have available but that they aren’t using at best.

RIGHT NOW an expansion is being designed. For DAoC this is the most crucial moment of the year. But it’s also years that DAoC throws away these possibilities to just slide some more into the oblivion. The game needs to stand up. To revive the interest. This doesn’t mean that it should change abruptly its direction. I like THIS game and I think it has still a lot of potential undisclosed. Adding some more items and a couple of new zones following a pattern that has been consolidated along the years isn’t anymore appropriate. It may be vaguely interesting for the same players the game already has. But it doesn’t add quality, nor it would draw the attention of possible new players. It only translates the game horizontally but without enriching it.

DAoC lacks design. This is the biggest and longstanding problem in every expansion and patch. At their origin. In every step that seems going forward but that goes instead backwards, or aside. Content is being developed and pushed into irrelevancy continuously. The artists have proven to be able to do not just a “good work” but the *best* work, the technology is solid (even if the client is still subpar). DAoC has all the requisites to be able to compete with the latest mmorpgs and stand among and *above* them instead of feeling like a rusty remnant of an old generation.

But it lacks design. It lacks vision, it lack a long term plan, it lack ambition and it lack enthusiasm. It lacks the will to fight its battle.

It lacks verve, drive. It lacks some healthy arrogance to impose itself again on the market as something that cannot be dismissed too easily.

It lacks that “you’ll see”. Anticipation and complicity.

It needs to be streamlined and reorganized to draw the best from its parts. Because the design “wandered around” without a direction. Just following the wind of the last hour. The last trend of the competition. The latest misunderstanding with the players.

DAoC started to lose its verve around the time Dave Rickey left. No, it’s not because the “old times” look always better. Nor because I’m in love with Dave. But because the atmosphere was much different. Way more vibrant and dynamic, more involved. You KNOW I’m right. There was at that time the will to push the boundaries. Right now there’s instead the need to retract to fit slightly better within the shrinking borders.

It’s not the situation that changed and that I’m criticizing: it’s the mindset.

(and I still left out a bunch of notes. I’ll have to go back to some of these arguments)

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I win?

This was a discussion a year and a few months ago. The subject is “Catacombs”, an expansion for DAoC that at that time was still in closed beta, and how it would have affected the rest of game:

HRose:
My first fear is that now the rest of the old PvE world is basically useless. More desolation for the game, useless space and wasted content. This to push the “brand new shiney”. With higher exp bonuses and the like.

Another “plug in” in the game to pensionate old, obsolete content that will still lay around as a “memorial”.

Or the comic sense of the title and the double symbol of above/below <-> old/new: The real “catacomb” is the old world on the surface, as a cumbersome and inconvenient symbol of decadence.

Instead of adding something, this expansion seems to replace, leaving around the remains of the past (above, instead of below). Nothing new, just more of the same as a “flat” expansion. Hopefully a bit more polished and playable but still “replacing” instead of “enriching”.

Walt Yarbrough:
I look forward to your additional commentary when you have actually played the expansion.

HRose:
Hint: Walt was being sarcastic because I’m “reviewing” the exp without having played it even for a second.

You choose. Or I’m longsighted or I’m a moron :)

This is nowadays:

DAoC is no longer a PvE game. You grind task dungeons until you can do battlegrounds, then you do battlegrounds until you max RPs, then you grind for the next battleground. Rinse, repeat until 50. You can mix it up a bit with your Champion and epic quests, but otherwise it’s TD-BG to 50 now.

You can of course buck this trend, but just try getting a group. To say that the original lands are deserted now is an understatement. There are giants in Cornwall who are at this very moment collecting pensions. You can probably kill them by whacking their walkers with a staff. On the downside their loot drops may not be so interesting. Last one I killed dropped a piece of hard candy, a magnifying glass, half a pack of Pal Malls and a Life Alert bracelet.

It seems I was longsighted (and optimist).

I’ll return on this.

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Lum is lurking!

Ahaha, this made me laugh:

All guilds, being composed of people by and large, are dicks.

Especially the all-female ones.

(I should stop stalking …I guess?)

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Aren’t “walls” required so that the players can find themselves in the same shit?

I got swamped in a silly problem that seems unsolvable. I swear that I’ll figure it out, but right now I’m helpless like a total noob.

EDIT: There’s a discussion on F13.


This is something I was thinking lately, it’s a very simple problem but it may be more serious than how it appears.

Till now the repetition of endgame raid instances (but also the repetition in general) has been a strategy to keep a balance between the time needed to produce content and the time the players need to go through it. Since the players go a hell of a lot faster we have the grind as a workaround that allows the devs to “buy time”. So the very low drop rates and faction farming.

But let’s imagine a scenario where this problem doesn’t exist and where the dev teams have become so competent and efficient to be able to push out content at an incredible pace, faster than how the players go through it. The production of content wouldn’t be anymore a problem and there wouldn’t be anymore the need to artificially “stretch” the gameplay by adding timesinks. You would be able to get your fat loot in a couple of runs, obtaining all there is to obtain without no need for boring repetition.

But wouldn’t this just break the game?

The problem is that the biggest is the repetition, the more the players will be unite, since they need to do stuff together: the same stuff. If there’s an “infinite” amount of content everyone would be spread on multiple levels, without being able to find “other players” who share the same situation.

How would you be able to build even a small raid group if it would be really hard to find players who share the same goals? If instead of 4-5 instances there are 30 and if you are “done” with them after the first run, how you create a “pool” of players sharing the same goals, and so being able (willingly) to group together and have fun?

If I reduce by 50% the drop rates in a set dungeon like UBRS, I also obtain the players to create 50% more occasions to find themselves together. Again sharing the same situation.

If instead I increase the drop rates by 50%, those players will go 50% less times in that dungeon since they don’t need it anymore, making 50% harder to find players available to go there in a casual, improvised raid.

Is there an exit point from this? Putting completely aside the problem of the production of content, how you can create a social PvE game without also the implied grind that unifies the players? Aren’t these “walls” required so that the players can find themselves in the same shit?

Rage against the catass

I forgot a note from the previous post. Consider this like its “short version”.

Something such as a new instance cannot be just thrown together, plopped down, and expected to be fun or well received. Your proposal seems more like a Fargodeep mine with elites thrown in, and it probably wouldn’t satisfy those looking for new instances. That being said, even to drop everything and create this new instance would require key people being pulled from their current projects.

WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU DOING ALONG ALL THESE MONTHS THEN? PLANNING RAID INSTANCES? RIGHT.

(then I still complain about how the raid instances are designed, and not because they exist)

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Winds of change

Today I find on Q23 a thread about EA buying Mythic. I was already aware of this rumor but I decided not to write about it because after a brief research I found out it was completely unfounded.

Then I find there a link to Corpnews. Odd. Why write about something like that if there’s no reason?

Maybe it’s because of the change of pace. With Lum’s gone Mythic may become a target once again? :) [insert here Coke-like conspiracy theories]

Beside this, and despite the rumor was dismissed, some trustworthy posters on the boards (Pop on Corpnews and Alan Dunkin on Q23) still confirm that there may be parts of truth.

We’ll have to see. For now I cannot undersand which part may be true and if it may be on relevant level or not. I usually try to read between the lines but, for now, I see nothing. Maybe about raising funds while maintaining control?

On the other side, I tend to believe Lum when he says he decided to move mostly because of his family.

Am I too naive?

MJ: Even if it was true, I couldn’t comment. So, no comment from me today.

MJ: I learned a long time ago that if I start commenting on rumors (true, false or somewhere in between), nothing good can come of it.

Freakazoid: The plot thickens. I can hear hrose shitting his pants in delight from here.

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