Monthly Archives: July 2005

Archiving some comments

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Now that Lum readded the old archives I can save two comments I kept searching.

The first chunk is about the success of WoW and my personal crusade to find out the real reasons instead of just dismissing and trivializing it. The comment was written the 23 November, when the game was just released. It’s valid even more today with its 2 millions of subscribers. My “ultimatum” at the end of the first message was also correct even more than I expected.

The second is about another personal crusade about shifting the focus of the gameplay on other elements than just combat.

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(source)

So, the time has come where I point out you and Haemish discussing on the old WT.o that no mmorpg, not even WoW, will reach the 400k mark in the near future?

:)

My predictions seem to be correct. Now call me ‘fanboy’.
And keep minimizing what WoW does, blame the brand and the kids and repeat that it’s just EQ 1.5 with more ’shiney’. Keep trivializing, keep dismissing. (Oh, but it’s just a stable client with a polished interface, come on)

We’ll see in six month or a year if the subscriptions will fall or will keep raise. I’m sure I’ll found around a new bunch of “excuses” about why the game is indeed a long term contender.

The process of “Oh, but we all knew already about all this happening” is already started. Everyone! Jump on the bandwagon! QUICK! I wonder why any other company hasn’t tried to create a better WoW five years ago if it was that expected and easy to build.

Sure, there’s no innovation at all. This is why 600k supposed players are going to play *this* game. It’s just a miracle. Or “Blizzard”, or another excuse to dodge the *merit* of *why* this happens.

The “boring shit” is about to collapse. You’ll see that. Everyone that will keep with this type of blindness will be repaid with an even bigger failure. WoW is a (still weak) proof that sometimes something good happens. Even if 90% of the elitists will keep refusing to accept it.

Now go on with the sarcasm, it’s the only way to keep this defensive, jaded attitude. Go on to repeat the same old misunderstanding. You have to complain and whine, no matter of what happens or why it happens.

I feel a well hidden but consistent dose of hypocrisy. Quite spread around. About something I’m sure: WoW will be successful because of the “diet coke” marketing.

Diet coke marketing for the win!

P.S.
Or perhaps, if you want to be honest and have some modesty and humility, go read what even Lum directly wrote in the presentation about the ‘mass market’ and this genre that he posted around April. Then consider what WoW accomplished there and consider what any other mmorpg hasn’t. And why.

But going defensive is simpler and doesn’t requre any effort. Keep going.

I wonder if I’ll be ever able to see some professionalism in this genre. And for ‘professionalism’ I don’t mean being polite (aka known as: “(a) anything that can be construed as talking negatively about competitors is wildly unprofessional”). But being honest and unpretentious. Trying to accept the weakness and the mistakes, trying to learn from them with some humility.

To finish a last note: what I wrote has a value only if WoW is going to overwhelm EQ2. If it happens it means I was and am right. If it doesn’t happen and EQ2 subscribers will match WoW’s subscribers (low or high), it will mean that I’m an idiot.

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It wasn’t an ‘aimed’ accusation. I simply dislike when something successful is suddenly dismissed and trivialized. What I dislike is an attitude that I see raising everywhere (and not only in this genre), I accuse directly that. Even if it was just my own wrong impression in this case.

The advancements in the genre must be understood and anticipated with some honesty, not being dismissed and trivialized. Nor they need to become a banquet for elitists trying to jump on the bandwagon.

The ‘proven success’ doesn’t “happen”. It needs reasons. Now it’s extremely important that peoples understand those reasons without trivializing them. This is why I pointed to the presentation you prepared about the mass market in April. It’s where there are some *valuable* points to consider and learn. Once again. WoW is an occasion to learn that. But the general attitude doesn’t seem to accept this and will probably miss this occasion. Or will misunderstood it completely.

And I ‘lecture’ because I can. Because I don’t have to face the consequences. This allows me to be able to move and to learn quickly. To not fear to be wrong or disliked and try to improve on my own. Since this is my situation I’m going to use the related benefits.

And I criticize because I like to receive critics. For others they are annoying, for me they are useful.

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Making prediction isn’t useful as a practice in fortune telling. It is useful because there are reasons behind those predictions.

If a prediction is wrong it means that the considerations made as premises of that prediction were wrong.

That’s the point.

—
(source)

I strongly disagree with what Lum says for once but I won’t go with a counter-essay this time. Instead I just say that the three-classes system is the direct consequence of a set gameplay.

It is obvious that if what the game has to offer is: “pushing a bar near zero so that the mob dies”, all the mechanics produced will be about moving that bar up and down. The goal, the target will limit directly the implementation.

The three-classes system is the direct consequence of games offering bags of improvement. If the game is only that, following the logic, it will be able to offer that. Unavoidable consequence.

Instead what happens if you offer something different? That the game gains depth. Just as an example: In DAoC the stealth classes can climb walls. This isn’t about math or energy bars. Is it irrelevant? No. It’s a strong gameplay part with a lot of potential to offer. It involves a completely different layer of interactions that are specific just to that class.

My conclusion is that we shouldn’t think “out of the box”, we should think within the box. Within a genre, with all its myths and suggestions that don’t just belong to a company or another. They belong to the cuture itself and for a reason. I believe that the fantasy genre has a lot more to offer and suggest than collecting bags of improvement.

And I want to link this story. Who is here thinking “outside the box”? The player or the designer?

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IBM MMOG Webcast Roundtable – “Where next for MMOG?”

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Krones watched and commented it. I’m currently trying to rip it so that I can actually see it without dealing with streaming crap and keep it archived for the future (and the children, of course). If I want to watch it I have only this choice since my bandwidth doesn’t support that.

So it’s working, the whole file is 181Mb and I should be able to mirror it on this site in the next few hours. At least if IBM doesn’t come to threat me. I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong if I make interesting informations available (and accessible, for a change) to everyone at no costs.

The official slogan is silly: You can still share the vision of industry leaders!

Or their blindness, depending on the point of view.

EDIT- I ripped the streaming video and rebuilt the index. I had some difficulties to upload it but now it should be okay. To get it you need to log in, so or you register to this site or you log in with “qt3” as both username and password.

Download IBM MMOG Webcast Video

00h 00′ 01” – Paris: Welcome
00h 04′ 50” – L.A.: P. Fry – Keynote Speech
00h 26′ 33” – Paris: Moderators
00h 27′ 52” – London: G. Heath & S. Reid
00h 44′ 27” – Paris: Moderators
00h 45′ 47” – Austin: C. Chung
01h 27′ 57” – Paris: JM. Blotti

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Quests or missions?

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A quote from Brian Koontz discussing how derivative Auto Assault already feels. But the quote is valid for a bunch of different situations:

Have you ever noticed that in fantasy settings they are called “quests” and in sci-fi settings they are called “missions”? WHOA… killer innovation there! A whole different series of letters to talk about the same thing. What will these creative juggernauts think of next?

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Wrecking guilds

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This time the topic isn’t about developers and broken design, but players inventing they own rules and progressively wrecking the community. In the last day I had to go through a personal crusade about the organization of the guilds at the endgame of World of Warcraft, in particular about the system used by the “leet” guilds known as “Dragon Kill Points” (DKP).

Basically this system is a way to “bend” the standard loot rules in the game in order to favor a selected group. This is what happens objectively, it’s not an opinion and cannot be discussed. It’s not a case that it has been adopted by the more catass guilds because, at its roots, the system is meant to favor that group of peoples. It was built by them to favor themselves. If we translate this to other forms of government and politics (because guilds are a form of government and not much else at this same level) it can be quite obvious how this pattern can be identified as a “conflict of interests”. The peoples at the top make rules that favor themselves while discriminating everyone else.

What bothers me and that started an heated debate is that the peoples defending the DKP system justify it as “fair”. While the common loot rules the game already has, aren’t. Concretely the system allows each member of a guild to gain points by participating to guild events such as raids. These points can then be used to get the dropped loot, replacing the random rolls that are built in the game. Instead of rolling a dice on a item you need and comparing the result with the rolls of the other players, in the DKP system you bet some of the points you have achieved and, in the case your bid is the highest, you win the item. This to offer a direct advantage to the peoples that can be present to many raids and leaving out all those players that cannot afford to compete with the highest bids of the catasses. Who has “more” has the precendence on who has “less” (or nothing) to get even more. Who has nothing will keep having nothing if not the sporadic crumbs despised by those with the privileges.

Now every guild is free to build its organization. It’s true that this is just a game and there are no responsibilities to face, so all the possible choices are legitimate. But don’t fucking come tell me that this system is “fair”. Because this is bullshit. If you make a choice you must have the courage to stand by it and recognize its nature. You cannot go on and justify it telling me it’s fair when it’s obvious how it’s not. At least if “fair” hasn’t changed its meaning. In my language fair means also “equality”, or even “honesty”. If you built rules to advantage yourself over others what you do is NEVER fair, because it’s the exact opposite of the concept of equality. It’s a discrimination, it’s a way to bend the rules to your advantage and to your conditions.

The loot rules built in the system cannot be more “fair” than how they are. If you go in a raid, you can roll for an item. Everyone has equal possibilities to roll and get his chance to win. No system can be more fair than this. It’s impossible. If you then change this rule to bend it to your advantage the system is NOT fair. It can be a legitimate choice but you cannot pretend it’s fair. It’s fair FOR YOU. But way different from the meaning of the word. Even in the real life there is this constant shift in the meaning of the words in order to excuse and justify an egoistic and egocentric behaviour. Rich people thinks they deserved what they “earned”. They worked hard and the system will be always fair, for them. And they think (even if they do not explicitly admit) that the people starving next to them deserve that condition. This is the paradox of this world and it comes from excuses and pretensions of our culture. We hide our doubts behind the shield of false principles. Who accumulates deserves to accumulate more, who starves deserve to starve even more.

As I said this is a game and fortunately there are no responsibilities as in the real world, so everyone can choose how to behave. The point is just about being honest and admit that some rules are there because their aim is to give you an advantage over others. Building and maintaining a guild is never easy, in particular it requires a lot of time. While you can manage to play a game casually you surely cannot manage to run a guild casually. The “conflict of interest” comes from that. Only the catasses run the most successful guilds and it’a not odd to see that those who decide the rules are going to make rules favoring themselves. It’s typical, come on. I just want that they ADMIT this and do not come telling me that the system is built to be fair, because this stance is inadmissible. It’s blatantly false and pretentious.

This isn’t an isolated case, on my server I see a repeating pattern of guilds crumbling because all the players progressively leave to fatten the ranks of the bigger catass guilds. Smaller guilds just have no possibilities to survive and they move toward an unavoidable extinction. As you ding 60 you crash against a wall, you cannot progress anymore as before and joining bigger raids is the only possibility. All the accessibility (and the “accessibility” is the key) that characterized the game till level 60 simply vanishes to be replaced by the most painful grind ever. All the good premises of the game crumble like that to reveal what was known as broken in this genre and that the game was able to hide till that point. Catass for the win. The only gameplay that there is available is to catass and catass more. The accessibility of this treadmill is a progressive process of discrimination between those who can afford to go on and those who are left out.

This is the process that triggers the egoistical greed of the players. The whole purpose is to get shoulder penises and make your character stronger and stronger by competing with your friends over that loot. What follows is a comprehensible attitude if the game itself is strongly focused to promote this egocentric behaviour. Both the structure of the gameplay at the endgame and the consequent dynamics in the guilds are shattering directly the community into tight groups of elitists bending the rules for their advantage and discriminating even more the new or casual players. The catasses have more and will have more, while the casual players are progressively excluded, creating an increasing gap that will ultimately be the cause of a slow and painful decline of the whole game.

If the true purpose of a game is about learning, as Raph is trying to convince us, I really wonder what the hell we are teaching.

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My e-penis is bigger than me

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There’s a site leaking Blackwing Lair new loot graphic.

The two-handed weapons are just insane but I love them anyway. At least they have some personality instead of the same generic models that can be found in all the other games out there. My dwarf could definitely use the axe #2. I just wonder where the mudflation will go. I guess soon it will be the sword to wield the character…

Btw, wasn’t scooping the MPQ files an exploit?

P.S.
Here you can find the effects of the epic trinkets that come as a reward for collecting cards for the Darkmoon Faire. If you dig in the threads on the test forums there are more informations.

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Capitalism propaganda

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I don’t know about you but I had a good laugh reading this. I’ll quote some of the best passages:

Beginning yesterday morning, the FBI and law enforcement from 10 other countries conducted over 90 searches worldwide as part of â

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I’m pretty tired

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From Gamasutra, an “illumination”:

No, WoW has expanded to its player base beyond WarCraft and Diablo, but not to the mainstream. Many of these subscribers will not play another MMO in the near future. MMOs need to expand their playstyle from treadmills to focusing on fun factor. Mainstream players do not have the time or see any benefit in investing hours upon hours into an avatar that exists in a static treadmill world. Technology also needs to progress to allow MMOs to play like standard games, many mainstream people will not be willing to deal with the technical issues MMOs typically have.
-Patrick Lister, Computer Sciences Corporation.

The link is a collection of opinions coming from “professional respondents”. This is exactly what I meant when I wrote that I’m tired of the level of the discussion.

Alice may have more insight than those professionals:

MMOs have a tinsy audience still, and they’re PC based. Consoles kick PC’s arse. The mainstream aren’t playing MMOs.

Which is another well known debate. Maybe it could more useful to figure out why. So why? Again because of the accessibility. Consoles are accessible PCs aren’t. Consoles are cheaper, they plug directly on the TV, they basically come with everything you need, they are easy to use and easy to buy since you don’t have to understand what’s in the box to use it. They do not need to be opened, upgraded, updated, maintained, analyzed, get fixed and all the rest. They do not have conflicting or bugged drivers. Or they work or they are broken. If there’s a game it will run on it at its best possibilities.

Consoles are successful for the exact same reason why World of Warcraft became so popular: the accessibility. Lum praised the UI and the polish. In fact the UI and the polish make directly the accessibility of the product. Haemish praised the low hardware requirements, which is again about the accessibility. Others have noticed the smaller goals, the number and presentation of quests, the ease of levelling, the possibility to solo. Again all accessibility elements.

Building a mmorpg from scrarch can still be considered a complex and nearly impossible duty but figuring out (before the release) if it can be successful or not is just trivial. Because it’s all about the accessibility.

All the rest is about details.

Instead about these treadmills that have been the center of the debate for so long I have this image from Forrest Gump stuck in my head. He starts to run back and forth through USA without a precise reason. He just runs. Droves of peoples line up behind him. Then he stops and says: “I’m pretty tired”.

That’s about the same.

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