Happy Holiday

Be safe. Have fun.

The gift to myself I choosed this year is a book (in my language, of course).

David Foster Wallace is God. If you want to read *the* masterpiece of the literature go buy Infinite Jest. If you search an “easier approach” go buy The Broom of the System. If you want short stories go read Brief Interviews With Hideous Men : Stories.

Really, he is God.

This is what Amazon writes about “the boom”:

Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenoreâ

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Gold

A gold quote again from Ubiq/Damion Schubert:

However, I think it’s a disappointment that most of the new games that are coming out right now really do nothing to truly take advantage of being ‘massive’. Rather than focus on what you can do if you get 100 people together, the industry this year has focused once again on small groups of 2 to 6 people. This genre isn’t going to come of age until we stop trying to be Diablo, and start taking advantage of our own unique selling point.

My question is if it will be Blizzard to achieve that as well.

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When you work too much…

So, I’m fighting again to underline one of those small issues that are blatantly ignored by the community in general but that I consider important for the game. Way more than the nerf cries and the whines about the log-in servers. Anyway the problem I’m writing about is the one expressed here. The message:

I really ask the few community managers we have here (Caydiem, Tyren and Ordinn) to ask Blizzard to re-think the use of the /bug command. So that the players are able to report bugs directly. Both relevant bugs and the minor glitches with the mobs, the graphic and all the rest that is always overlooked.

I imagine that you decided to shut down the command because it becomes unmanageable when you have a so large population on the servers. The command can be easily abused and near impossible to have a bearable signal/noise ratio.

Now, it isn’t possible to work toward a compromise? The boards aren’t reliable to report problems, aside for those classes issues that you DO NOT WANT to hear because it’s impossible to have complete and unbiased considerations.

An idea that I don’t completely like but that could be already a step in the right direction could be about nestling the /bug and /suggest reports in a queue that needs to be approved by GMs before reaching the devs. This is still a filter that could go wrong because GMs could censor minor (but still important) stuff, so it could work only if the GMs are taught to let pass everything but spam, without applying a judgment. But it can be an improvement because we can keep sending /bug reports without being stuck with the tickets procedure that should be used only for customers issue.

Something going directly to the devs could be better, but I guess it isn’t doable.

Right now, for example, the patch broke (for the millionth time since beta along with the falling and sitting animations) the sheath/unsheath key. If you spam the command you’ll produce a bunch of graphic glitches, like the weapon blinking “on and off” in your hand. Or blinking between your hand and your back continuously, or blinking between the melee weapon model and the range weapon model.

Now, this is exactly a minor glitch. Noone cares to report these kind of problems. I also wonder why you broke it again, it worked perfectly before this patch and it doesn’t seem tied to something else.

So, please reconsider this aspect. It’s important to mantain a direct contact without too many filters in between. Surely you are purging a lot of spam, but you may loose even some good pearls in there. It’s pointless and ridiculous to report bugs by opening GMs tickets. It’s something you want to incentivate and use as a resource, not to inhibit with an annoying, frustrating procedure.

And also please fix the sheath/unsheath key once for all, without breaking it again with the next patch…

Now I understand those players going like:

Some people are in here are incorrectly telling others that /bug reports don’t go to anyone anymore, Tyren.

But then Tyren really arrives, sleepy and yawning:

Are you saying the bug command was removed from the game?

No, really?
The command is still there. But the point is that it’s a fake.

Get some rest during the holiday, I’ll make sure to bump the message now and then :)

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Servers statistics

I did a research to figure out what exactly mean the “high”, “medium” and “low” status of the servers in World of Warcraft. Here’s the result:

Total Players (Horde+Alliance):
3500+ -> Queues
3500-1500 -> High
1500-500 -> Medium
500-0 -> Low

On servers like Archimonde and Blackrock the Alliance/Horde population is even. On Frostwolf the Alliance doubles the Horde. The norm seems to lean toward the Frostwolf example. On the PvE servers it can be even worst with the Alliance being three times the population of the Horde and more.

The races for the Horde are in this order of popularity: Undead > Tauren > Troll > Orc (with orcs and trolls at about the same level and swapping at times)
The races for the Alliance are in this order of popularity: Night Elf > Human > Dwarf > Gnome (with humans and elves with a wide margin and swapping at times)

The classes for the Horde are in this order of popularity: Shaman > Rogue > Warrior > Hunter > Mage > Warlock > Priest > Druid (rogues and warriors swapping, priests and warlocks always nearly even)
The classes for the Alliance are in this order of popularity: Paladin > Rogue > Hunter > Warrior > Mage > Druid > Priest > Warlock (the first three swapping at times)

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Flakey login servers

Foton wrote:

Warcraft has their realm status page up and running. I’ll see how this works. All the MMOGs I’ve played, rarely did the status page truly indicate if the server was playable, as in … I can log in, retrieve my character and go whack some moles. Hey, it could happen, but I had the hope nerfed out of me long ago.

Today Blizzard wrote:

The Realm Status Page at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/serverstatus/ is unfortunately showing inaccurate information at this time. All the US Realms are currently down for the scheduled weekly maintenance that will conclude at approximately 10AM PST. We apologize for the inaccurate display of information.

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DAoC at a glance

A good general point of view about DAoC on F13:

AlteredOne:
At one point in DAOC, my guild had over 100 active members, and was one of the top 5 biggest guilds on our server. Now there are about ten semi-active members, most of whom farm ToA artifacts endlessly with buffbots. The ToA “arms race” is truly ungodly. You can get artifacts for nearly every equipment slot, and take weeks leveling each one. The true catassers might have multiple artifacts on a half-dozen high-level toons at this point.

Agreed on looking at the Battlegrounds for solutions, but I think Mythic is way behind the curve at this point. Last year’s “Frontiers” free expansion was supposed to be the great RvR revamp. Instead it drove a ton of people out of RvR, once they got over the novelty of the new gigantic keep sieges. I spent a couple weeks participating in massive ranged standoff battles, before I realized it simply was not fun. 90% of the players were just “farming realm points,” with almost no tactics or strategy involved. The other 10% were the uber-groups, who were simply more efficient at farming the sheep herd.

And, to complete, Walt admits that ToA was better if it was instanced and aimed at small groups:

If you’ll note, in the last few patches, with the exception of 1.73 – the launch of Catacombs, we’ve made numerous changes that make it easier to complete many of the ML’s.

We’ll continue the process in the future – particularly with the instancing technology that we now have. But progress will be measured in months, not days.

Yes, when they launched, in many cases they needed a zerg, and there were often bugs. Now, we have no known bugs – and we’re working on the encounters.

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I’m useful

If you need the last World of Warcraft patch and if you hate Blizzard’s download program, you can download it directly from: Here

The patch is everything but impressive and it seems to break a bunch of minor things that worked perfectly before (for example the sheath/unsheath command).

Please remember: length of patch notes != content of patch.

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Mark Jacobs, goodnight

I was expecting it and it arrived. Regular every six month the letter from the boss. Last year it was about the plans for the RvR, with a consolidation of the whole team to improve the game the best possible with a full disclosure of the design to involve the community.

Obviously as for each of this letters 90% is made of demagogy, but at least demagogy with some “grasp”. I always shared the point of view and I always thought that the direction was the right one (even if the result was more then often imperfect or completely off track). This year the letter is 100% demagogy and can only repeat how good are EQ2 and WoW and how they aren’t able anymore to catch up at copying their features: instanced areas, graphic updates, visual marks for quest-giver NPC, sidekicking, non-combat pets, the rest system, the mini tasks in Catacombs and a lot more.

“Folks, here we can just copy the features and paste them as a bleached copy in our game hoping noone notices the differences.”

This time many of the brags are blatantly false:

Catacombs injected a new graphics engine that puts the game right up there or ahead of anything else on the market.

False, Catacombs is a new skin for the same game. New shapes for the same objects. This is about trivializing the graphic aspect. This is about underlining exactly what isn’t relevant to show that an argument exists when it doesn’t (indeed, demagogy). Or as I defined it: fluff. The graphic is an important part of the game but often it is trivialized as something superficial and irrelevant when, instead, it has a strong role even in the gameplay, including level design, animations, customizations, interactivity and a lot more.
Catacombs is ahead of anything else on the market only in a pointless, proofless and completely subjective point of view of someone “slightly” biased (Mythic’s president in this case). Words without facts, on within a superficial point of view trying to glide on whatever could really matter in a (sincere) judgment.

Our instanced areas and other changes have made the game easier than ever to play and succeed in than ever before.

Again copying well tested and now “safe” features from other games and again gliding on how there features are implemented in the structure of *this* game. That Camelot is an “easy” game to play makes me laugh. False again. It’s a collection of patchwork design, its ruleset doesn’t make sense and is the perfect example of something NOT intuitive. Screwing up a character is common without knowing perfectly the nearly infinite stack of rules, subrules, exceptions and bugs. It’s an amass, a collage, a swaying tower on the point to crumble because the design itself is nowhere coherent and cohesive. But this is an obvious result when all that your design team does is too copy features from other games without even considering them aside a superficial, trivial point of view. The “free level” mechanic they introduced again represents a superficial point of view. It doesn’t make the game easier to play, it just underlines a void, an absence of game. The revelation that there isn’t much to offer. It’s a vacation from the work. The game is “easier” as: it’s flat and empty. They only rendered this as an evidence. A step closer to ProgressQuest. Free levels, free money, no taxes for everyone. We are able only to smile and be happy. Come join us in the land of superficiality.
Obviously another rip-off of the rest system in World of Warcraft. Gone wrong, terribly wrong, just because they have this superficial point of view even when staring amazed (and dazed) at other, better, games. It’s better, but they cannot “get it”. Their copy is an imitation doomed to be without value.

New classes and new areas have added new depth to an already deep world.

“Deep” here is equal to “inflation”. An interesting point of view. They take the game, build new zones to render the old ones obsolete and the result is considered “deeper”. The demagogy here fails even at the eyes of a goon. A barren world filled with obsolete zones cannot be considered as “deep” even by an idiot or a first-time player. Millions of fragmented player-classes also underline once again a broken mechanic and an obstinacy to go on with admitted mistakes. Why not to create at this point ten millions of new classes, each with one type of attack? Why not add in the game 300-400 new levels and brag it as the “deeper and longer mmorpg evar”?

The same error repeated over and over. Focus on the wrong elements, messing with them more. Depth is quality, not quantity. Depth requires an attention not a superficial copy of a form. But the understanding of what’s inside the form. The source of the quality, the essence of the simple rules that make something interesting and deep. Mythic confuses complexity with complication. They see things upside down ands their “fix” just produce new problems because they didn’t address the real origin of that problem. The effort they do is good. But the approach is wrong.

And, best of all, the Catacombs launch was the cleanest launch of all time from our perspective (least downtime, fewest bugs, fewest customer support calls, etc.) we have set the standard (again) for the launch of a product.

Yes, the standard of indifference. Noone complains when noone cares. Fewest customer support calls? Yes, let’s say: fewest customers. I guess this is a winning direction. Suffocate the community with lack of feedback, lack of involvement and lack of interest.

Even Shadowbane solved most of its technical problems when most of the players stopped playing.

But what pissed me off is this part:

While we could do something like a server merge, we wanted to come up with something better since even a â

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