Despite he plays an horrible game, I like what he thinks and how he writes. I notice also some kind of naive hope that I’ve shared too in the past.

I imagine that this will change. He’s trying to push more on SOE exactly because he has the strong belief that things can be changed for the better. Something that I tried too, before leaning how pointless it is. And keeping wasting my time even after realizing the situation. Because I’m a stupid dreamer.

So yes, he feels like a dreamer, I imagine we share this attitude. I’ll just edit a couple of words from his last article to amplify the magic:

Jargon plagues us. We find meaningless words or phrases everywhere. Everyone has an idea, everyone has a complaint, and everyone has something about the game they want to talk about. Instead of finding ways to properly communicate what our problem is, we fall back to generalizations and buzzwords that may have meaning to us but lose that meaning the more they are used and misused. These words don’t help us to communicate. Instead of articulating a problem, they muddy the conversation and cloud the real problems.

What he writes here is somewhat specific but I think the value of these words is far greater in a generalized context.

I’m not directly in the beta even if I know “something” about EQ2. In this case I don’t need to leak directly. This appeared on a certain forum:

EQ2? Is leagues behind in terms of polish. I’m not talking about gameplay here, I’m talking about releasability: WoW is so far ahead, it’s not even remotely close.

If SOE thinks they are releasing by Christmas, they will be foisting yet another steaming pile of unfinished S(WG)hit on us.

And now I can say that it’s one of the two main points about EQ2:
1- It looks and feels like an alpha, not even like a beta. And it’s not about the polish. It’s about the graphic, the interface, the engine, the animations etc… Everything.
2- It’s HEAVY. You can have all the processing power they have at NORAD and the game will still stutter. Plus there’s loads of “morphing”. Models on the distance are like “placeholders” and you’ll see them morphing to look cute as they move near. Even the colors change and morphs.

And, yeah, it feels exactly like SWG: cold and unappealing.

Anyuzer is back.

Surely not an uneventful day.

Saving a comment, since they choosed to ban me and they may delete it:

You don’t see my point.

I’m sure that they all felt pimped and stuff during these conferences. And I’m also sure that they felt the discussions interesting and useful.

But for me the real and concrete *value* comes from the direct experience with the players and the game itself. “Get your hands dirt”. I’m simply stating that talking with the players, even the most stupid ones in a cesspit like B.net, is way more concretely useful than the chatter between “high-profile” elitists with complex theoric studies on the topic.

I believe that the creativity, the passion and even the innovation comes from *below*. Not from the high level theorization. I still have to see a damn GOOD concrete result coming out from all that fancy stuff because the most interesting and fun games to date, imho, are those that DON’T follow the ideas coming out from those places.

Peoples like Jakobs, imho, just demonstrate that they are willingly to discuss only inside an highly protected environment where they are on top of the ladder and can choose exactly how much they can be open or not.

As I said, what they write is all faked. I’m sure that its their true opinion, I’m just stating that they are trying to fool themselves as part of their PR game. It sounded like the G8.

So, they passed those days discussing in those conferences, while I passed my time reading and discussing in the beta forums of WoW. I’m really wondering who learnt more. And who is really open to learn new things and new approaches.

Incredible. I just checked one of my e-mails to discover that I’m invited to WoW Stress Test … which ended like an hour ago.

The fun is that I NEVER applied for it since I’m already in the standard beta.

The mail was the one I used to apply to the beta back in January, so I guess they mass-invited those already in the database and still pending.

Well, now it’s too late. I could have offered the key to someone else.