Just some brief Thursday morning snark

People ask the most absurd questions in general chat in MMOs, questions that just scream “learned helplessness.”

From Guild Wars 2:

“As a weaponsmith, when will I be able to use silver?”  Gee, I dunno, but to find out, I would simply leave my mouse pointer over the item for a fraction of a second and it would tell me, jackass, so why don’t you go ahead try that for yourself?  In this case, it took me less time to find out than it took him to type the question.  The answer: never.

“Where’s the best place for copper?”  Since you must have been looking while you were playing, you must have noticed, like everyone else, that it appears in the lower level zones.  Even if you find a clump, it doesn’t respawn quickly, so shut up and wander around.  There is no magic infinite copper cave that everyone knows about but you.

“When should I upgrade my weapons?”  This one was a hoot, because it took chat about ten or twenty questions just to identify what the person meant by upgrade.  In this case, he meant “replace with one that is more powerful,” as opposed to actually upgrading, which is a game mechanic.  The answer: when you feel you need to.  When else?

“What attributes should I look for on my equipment?” The ones that support the way you play, genius.

Clearly I didn’t get enough sleep last night.

 

Guild Wars 2: Dynamic Events are Ghost Stories

When I was a little Sauce, I wasn’t a fan of horror movies.  My parents would not stop me from watching them and tried instead to warn me away, but of course I knew better than my parents as soon as I could walk and insisted on watching the end of one with them, burning myself with nightmares and a permanent inability to let anything touch my eye.

Ghost stories were scary enough for me.  Around second or third grade, I became both frightened and obsessed with a movie called Lady in White (imdb).  In this movie, there are a pair of ghosts whom nightly reenact the circumstances that led up to their death.  They go to the same locations, follow the same path, have the same conversations, and inevitably, they both end up dead at the bottom of the same cliff.

In Guild Wars 2, I’ve met a lot of these ghosts, frozen in time, doomed to repeat certain circumstances in the exact same locations with the exact same companions for all of eternity.  Or until the servers turn off at least.  Oh sure, as Syncaine points out, the events are stuck in victory mode, but he’s probably right as well that later they will be stuck in failure mode instead.  In Lady in White, the main character eventually breaks the cycle by finding the killer.  But instead of switching from a murder event chain to a confronting the killer event chain, the ghosts, and the narrative, move on.  The poor ghosts of Guild Wars 2 will never have that freedom.

GW2 is the best theme park MMO that I have ever played, and it has addressed a number of the minor annoyances that made me run quickly from most theme park games.  But it’s still a theme park, and dynamic events hammer that point home.  They’re the absolute lowest point of the uncanny valley.  They’re clunky, plastic, animatronic Abraham Lincolns giving the Gettysburg address at quarter past every hour for bored, sweaty, easily distracted tourists that only caught the speech at all because it started while they were sucking down hot dogs and soda before moving on to the next ride.

We’ve reached MMO 2.5, the refinement of the second generation.  And I feel part of that refinement is the acknowledgment that this style of game doesn’t deserve a subscription fee.  There’s not enough variety in the play mechanics and systems, there’s not enough variety in the ends, not enough variety in the game’s motivations to create social groups to retain players, to convince them to pay that entry fee for a long period of time.

What there is, instead, is a large variety of content and a respectable variety of game modes.  And while the stories told by the content are varied and often interesting, they all utilize the same underlying systems and feed into a predefined progression.

And while that’s provided for a heck of a lot of fun, the subscription model still hangs over most developers as a proverbial carrot on a stick, an admittedly attractive carrot made out of millions of $15 payments dependably arriving every month.

Getting that subscription out of me again is going to take a 3rd generation MMO.  Declaring something as a “next gen” MMO is going to take something else.  More on that another time.

Still, it’s pretty

Oh Syncaine, why come you on vacation now? A reaction to the 2012 GDCO Award Nominees

Candidate for most innovative game of 2012?  Star Wars: The Old Republic, the game that only claimed to have one innovative feature—full voice overs—but actually didn’t innovate that.  Credit for the first fully-voiced online game must go to DC Universe Online.  And then there’s this convenient little chart outlining their oh-so-innovative character and combat designs.  Wonderful!

Candidate for best online technology?  Star Wars: The Old Republic again!  A game that gimped itself with a bad engine, claimed the “low, medium, high” graphics options were a bug, that there were only supposed to have two settings, but had HD textures in beta has the best online technology!  Never mind either that they claimed HD textures with large numbers of players in the same zone are technologically impossible — they’re the best!

Also nominated for best new online game in 2012, despite having lost most of its launch subscribers by now, and being declared “not one of our top 5 games” by EA, despite costing around 200 million and taking 6 years to develop.

It’s also up for Best Visual Arts and Best Game Design.  Well, its graphics are derivative of WoW’s 2004 graphics, and its game design is derivative of every failed MMO that tried to copy WoW.  Part of me hopes these nominations are jokes, but Glitch happens to be up in these two categories as well.  Glitch has actually earned that nod.

At least they didn’t nominate SW:TOR for best community relations, then I would know it is just a joke.

However, I was not surprised to note that two EAware employees are on the GDCO Awards Advisory Board.

Let’s stop using the word “fair” when talking about games, okay?

On the one hand, it’s a personality thing.  Here I am in a nutshell, according to Meyers-Briggs at least; I’m pretty much never going to sympathize with “fairness” as a motivator.  On the other hand, it’s one of the major issues with modern MMOs: fairness has no place as a design principle.

Let’s look at World of Warcraft, since that is ultimately the big beast on the block.  And it’s hard to argue that it’s unsuccessful, though some actually do, and now there does seem to be some truth that it has entertained as long as it can entertain: it’s numbers are slipping by Blizzard’s own admission, and in my incredibly limited and subjective experience, their last expansion did not seem to have much staying power.

I subscribe to the Syncaine theory of WoW success (a blogger, for any confused, add .com to his name and read him, you’ll find he’s got much more snark than me).  He would basically claim that while WoW was not a terrible game at release, its popularity was due more to timing than design.   You can go scan his site if you want more detail than that, and I think there’s a post way back in my first few months where I talk about it in more detail as well.  But only the core is important: WoW’s original playerbase came as much from releasing after broadband had become more common than it did from any element of design.

But let’s get to fairness.   I feel WoW’s current downward spiral can be blamed on thinking fairness was their key to success.  You will never meet someone in WoW that has anything special.  Anything anyone has can be obtained by anyone else.  All characters at endgame are utilizing pretty much the same equipment to complete the same raids, and while they may look impressive to new or mid game players, they’re really a dime a dozen, all of them equipped and leveled in nearly the same ways.

But in the early days of WoW, that simply wasn’t true.  It took effort and time to build a 40 member raid team: it took socializing, talking to people, getting to know their personalities and skills.  Folks that had done so, and had the equipment that proved it, stood out — it meant something.    But that wasn’t fair: only a few select guilds on each server were capable of putting together such a team.  So let’s make them require only 15 people instead.  But you know, that’s still not fair: while many more groups are capable of coordinating 15 members, some players don’t want to make that effort so create the looking for raid tool.  And yet, that’s still not fair, as players that have never spoken to each other and have no social ties to each other tend not to work well together, so this high end content is just “too hard.”

Well, they’re a heck of a lot more fair and accessible now, yet they’ve been bleeding subs.  But hey, it still must work since all these other games have gone the same route; you know, games  like Warhammer and Star Wars: The Old Republic just hit the ground running and never looked back, right?  Right?  Right?

Well no.  For one, they’re not the first MMO for the majority of their players, so they simply didn’t receive the benefit of the doubt that WoW received.  And they copied the later versions of WoW, the versions that took accessibility and fairness to extremes — so lacked any flair or flavor.  There was nothing for dedicated players to look forward to, nothing for casual players to ooh and aah over.  Vanilla WoW, as the original release version is now known, ironically had a hell of a lot more flavor than the later iterations.

Let’s look at an example of something that clearly wasn’t fair or accessible yet was good for the game.  I always lament the Jedi of SWG.   Until Lucasarts forced SOE to gut that game in an attempt to mimic WoW, Jedi were a rarity.  I won’t get into the process, but obtaining the ability to create a Jedi character was a huge time sink, practical to only a very small portion of the community, not even available to all who played the game frequently and for long sessions, but only available to a segment of that community that was willing to face a grind that was always long, but even worse, varied: it could be even longer than long.  And once the player got one, she might not get to keep it: after the third death, Jedi characters stayed dead.

And that made sense.  It might not have been fair, but it worked.  It rewarded the crazy grinders for their dedication, giving them reason to stick around and drive sandbox content, and giving them a high difficulty challenge to follow up all that grinding.  It gave us casuals “holy crap, I spotted a Jedi in the wild” moments.  And most important, it fit the lore: the game took place between Episodes IV and V, a time period in Star Wars lore when Jedis are either dead or in hiding.

And then they made it fair.  And everyone left the game.  Okay, fair enough (har har), we left the game for many reasons, but one of the major ones was that Jedi became a starting class.  And suddenly, while Luke Skywalker is the universe’s only hope, there’s a few thousand only hopes running around swinging lightsabers openly in front of imperial storm troopers.  Immersion was gone.  In the name of fairness, the game stopped making any sense at all.  And it failed: while the game only recently shut its doors, it peaked before the NGE update changed the game, shed subs like a sandwich artist on crack, and died a shadow of its former self.  Since the game’s numbers were never more than a shadow of WoW’s, we can actually say the game died as nothing but a shadow of a shadow.  Pretty sad really, but hey, it was fair.

And then there’s the game I mentioned way back in this blog’s first post, when I was listing the f2p games I had tried before starting the blog: Mousehunt.  I never imagined I would find the need to discuss Ronza’s Traveling Shoppe.  If you read the opening of that link, you probably noticed that this Shoppe only arrives for short periods of time.  If you’re on vacation without a computer, tough luck.  If you read further, you probably noted that those short periods of time are often separated by a year or more — if you played after a visit, and played for less than a year, tough luck.  If you read even further and for detail, you’d discover that she almost never offers the same goods twice.  If you weren’t playing the game in the year a certain item was sold, tough luck.  And these items are generally not cosmetic, they tended to be incredibly useful for certain parts of the game.  That’s really not fair.

And while I stopped playing after the friends that dragged me in stopped playing, the game, and the company that creates it, are alive and well.  And thriving last I checked.  And Ronza helps.  Ronza’s appearances and disappearances create excitement and buzz, create interest in playing.  Even before her 2009 visit, I would see traps from her 2008 visit and not look back with anger and envy; instead, I looked forward with excitement.

I hate fairness in games.  It’s bland.  It’s beyond vanilla: it’s a rice cake, plain, and covered in sand.

My inspiration for this post came out of the Glitch community — shocker I know.  These thoughts came up because an idea I pondered but was not seriously considering  was picked up and run with by others.  There are these meaningless collectible items in the game modeled after blind box vinyl toys — I thought it would be interesting to watch the prices if they were ever discontinued.  Others thought it might actually be good for the game for them to be discontinued, and oh boy was that an unpopular idea.  But the objection, almost every time, had nothing to do with whether or not it would be bad for the game — the objection most repeated was that “it wouldn’t be fair to players that came later.”  As self-appointed resident cantankerous windbag, I felt the need to argue against fairness, even though I didn’t really care: I just wanted one person to lead with something like “keeping all the series on the vendors for all time provides a greater currant sink than would come from the urgency of knowing a series is being discontinued” and then I would have shut the fuck up.

But if I’m going to be forced to talk fairness, let’s show how subjective it is.  I think it isn’t fair that players that come after launch might never have an opportunity to display something unique, an opportunity available to every alpha player, every original beta player, and supposedly coming to every current beta player.  I think eventually discontinuing the series 1 cubimals after several sets have released would provide players that come after launch with the same opportunities we have, and thus would be more fair.

Or we can just agree that fairness is basically meaningless and has nothing to do with what is good or bad for a game, that refusing to be fair can actually be better for a game: it provides the excitement.  Hell, you can even say it provides the lows — without the lows online games are just a series of progressive ticks, never a setback, never a boring moment.  But never an exciting moment either.

“Have Fun playing your F2P game” — Okay, I will!

I don’t believe I mentioned it to anyone but myself, but I told myself I would do a post a day this week, even if that meant scraping my mental barrel for content.  It’s a few hours past midnight where I am, but I’m unable to relax and suddenly realized I was failing my self-assigned goal.  Since that might be why I can’t relax (probably not, but I can hope), I have decided to stay up even later and make a post.

So here we go.  I’ve just decided it’s blog war Friday, but without a blogger saying anything I can flame, I’m going to pull out this quote I saw repeated from one commenter over and over on Massively, the quote in my title.  And we’re going to talk about a possible gamer mentality—not the personal psychology though such is also fascinating—that thinks such a comment is insulting to either the game or the gamer playing it.

But first, because I’m pedantic, let me point out that the commenter, every single time he posted these words, was wrong.  The game in question is Guild Wars 2, and while GW2 does not have a subscription fee, it is not a free to play game.  While free to play is an easily manipulated term used to describe a lot of different payment models, there is one element they all have in common: installing and launching the game will cost you nothing.  GW2, on the other hand, is what is often called buy to play (sometimes B2P).  It’s a sad fact of online gaming that buy to play has its own name, as really all it means is that the game is purchased like every game has been since the first board game — you buy it, you bring it home, you play it.   There’s nothing free about Guild Wars 2.

So aside from the fact that just calling GW2 free to play sort of proves the poster in question was either an idiot or intentionally being inflammatory, why exactly does he think it’s an insult?

Well good question, ain’t it?  I’ve tried to start this paragraph a few different times, and each time I find myself gravitating towards examples of similar behavior that have political implications.  And while I am actually politically active, informed, opinionated, and always 100% correct about everything, I really don’t want politics to ever enter into this blog.  Basically, all the examples were intended to show how sometimes people find one bad example of a service or product or human institution or ethnic group or what have you, and they decide that anyone or anything that shares any characteristics with that original bad experience must also be bad.

This tends, however, to only happen when the person is in someway motivated to tear down this group or thing and thinks they can use the one bad example to convince others that there are no good examples.  Again, it’s really hard to avoid political examples here, but suffice it to say politicians, on both sides of the spectrum, are experts at using this technique to drain support from something they want to pull funds from.  But it does require that others might be so outraged as to lose anything resembling reason and logic.  For example,  I have met few, if any, people who would deny there is such a thing as a dirty cop, an officer who uses his position to secure bribes or abuse others with his authority.  Yet I have never met anyone who thinks the existence of dirty cops means we should abolish law enforcement in all forms.  No story about a dirty cop, no matter how terrible, would ever drown out the follow-up that there are indeed still good cops and that law enforcement exists for a reason and serves an important function.

But getting back to gaming after that close brush with something real, this is exactly the logic process informing a person who believes “f2p” is some sort of insult.  And I can relate, this blog was only created so I would be motivated to explore free to play games despite the reputation that some of them have.  And oh boy do many of them deserve that reputation.  Free to play games like EQII, LotRO, and City of Heroes operate by severely inconveniencing free players, then dropping links to the cash shop items that remove the inconvenience at every opportunity.   Combine that with a low barrier to entry, as anyone with a high speed connection can get in the game at any time if they feel like it, and these games all have reputations for having terrible communities.  That low barrier has also been thought to encourage “gold spammers,” a term I will come back to (and define!) for those unfamiliar.

But is that the case for any free to play game automatically?   If you think so, I hope you immediately follow reading this article with a march to your town’s center of government, demanding the police department be abolished because of what that one guy did in that other state twenty years ago.  Free to play can, and has, been done right.

I can agree that many free to play games are attempting to milk as much as possible out of players, all while claiming to be free.  Even in games where I’ve put up with those practices while trying to spend as little as possible (like my brief sojourn in LotRO), I was certainly left with a bad taste in my mouth too.  But right off hand, I can name three games that have done nothing that made me feel miserable because I wanted to both play a game, and I wanted to do so while spending less than I would on a subscription game: League of Legends, Glitch, and Tribes: Ascend.  Although only one of those is an MMO, I can also say some of the “freemium” models, the ones that make things take longer or limit new players without offering to sell items that address each inconvenience separately, are rather excellent.  Fallen Earth’s free to play conversion comes to mind: crafting takes longer for free players, and free players are a bit limited, but the solution is to subscribe.  The freemium models do not nickel and dime — they simply are unlimited trials, a way to get a taste and then some from a game before deciding if it is your new online home.

But I don’t buy the bad community bit.  Or at least, not that it creates a worse community than that available in a subscription model game.  Thirteen year olds with access to mom and dad’s credit cards can be just as annoying as thirteen year olds without that access.  Hell, maybe even more so — the ones whose parents pay for them to be there feel entitled to make you miserable — the ones who just downloaded a game on a whim are just taking advantage of a possibly fleeting opportunity.

I also feel that many games have quite effectively removed gold spam while allowing anyone in for free.  Since many of my readers come from Glitch, and as I’ve recently noted many Glitchen are not gamers and gold spam has (thankfully) not yet found its way into Ur, let me explain (gamers can totally skip this paragraph, but might not want to since everything I write is guaranteed to be earth-shatteringly awesome). Gold spam is a phenomenon in which organizations—sometimes made up of players, sometimes actual businesses in places like China, sometimes rumored to have nefarious ties to terrorists, and probably all of them are haters of puppies AND kitties—gather in-game currency or goods to sell for actual cash using an outside website, usually directly in violation of the game’s terms of service.  They then spam high traffic locations in the game with advertisements for their sites.  If you buy from them, and you’re lucky, you might actually get what you paid for.  Even if you get what you paid for though, you’ll probably also end up with a wonderful new friend known as the keylogger, hiding in your system, stealing your passwords for games.  A frequent follow up to such a financial interaction is that the buyer finds their account has been compromised, and someone has logged in and redistributed the player’s virtual wealth into their own hands, with the intent to sell your stuff to yet another sucker and continue the cycle.  if you’re like most gamers, you’ll cry to customer service about how you got hacked, even though you actually got phished,  and you probably deserve to be buried alive in an unmarked grave before you can breed.

Back to the point, there are free games that have put protections in place to identify and ban gold spammers.  And in my extensive MMO experience, the most trouble I ever had with gold spammers was in a sub-only game that had no free trial.  So apparently gold spammers can find enough suckers to make paying for a new copy of the game or paying the sub fee every few days after each time their accounts are banned completely and absolutely worthwhile.  These costs don’t stop them.

And let’s flip this on its head: what exactly are you getting for your $15 a month in a sub only game?  Unless you are playing Eve or Rift, it’s my general feeling that the only thing you are getting is screwed — which would be nice if it was coming from someone of your preferred gender, but generally sucks when it’s coming from a business.  Rift and Eve are the only two games I can think of, off the top of my head mind you, that consistently put out content on a regular basis, justifying the subscriptions.  Rift, as far as I can tell since I’ve never played, seems to put out significant content at a slightly greater than once a month clip.  Eve does not release content as often as Rift, but Eve has also never once in its entire lifespan declared new content an “expansion” and forced players to buy yet another full-priced box.

WoW, on the other hand, does not release meaningful content at anywhere near the same clip as Rift, and whenever they do have a large content release, they package it up and make players pay separately for it.  That’s right, full box price.  More than once — in fact three times and coming up on the fourth.  Without even counting in subscriptions, someone could have theoretically spent over $200 on WoW if they purchased the game and every expansion at release.  But hey, apparently that’s not enough to keep the lights on over at Blizzard, so cough up $15 more each month or they won’t let you play anymore.

So why is f2p an insult?  It isn’t.  There’s simply some players who have been thoroughly conditioned to think the minimum needed to keep an MMO running is $15 a month from every player, so that any MMO asking for less must be providing less.  Frequently, the opposite actual seems to be true.  This isn’t 1998 anymore — the original EQ probably legitimately needed that money from its small (compared to WoW) player base just to provide the bandwidth needed to log in.  But as long as WoW has high numbers, there’s obviously some players out there convinced that just being allowed to play is enough value for their $15.  That doesn’t fly with me — if I buy your game, you damn sure better provide me content at least once a month, preferably twice a moth, if you expect me to pay just for the right to play  the game I already had to pay for.  And don’t even think of making me buy the game all over again with a new box if you’ve been charging me $15 a month since release.

So thank you, stanger from the internet I have decided to write about, I will have fun in my free to play game!  And I’ll get a hell of a lot more value per dollar spent than you will in your subscription game, more than likely.

The Basic Argument of All My Writing about Games: Change is Inevitable

I’m going to reiterate this argument another time, as explicitly as possible, so in the future I can just link people here rather than have any more wonderful comment wars that eventually lead to me dismissing my opponent as a small-minded idiot.  Such might not be a fair conclusion for me to reach, but if you’ve read my About page, you should already be aware that I’m not going to apologize for perceiving people that oppose this argument as small-minded idiots.  Not very nice of me, I know, but it’s not because I’m a sandbox sociopath—there are very few MMO games in which I actively participated in, never mind enjoyed, PvP—it’s just because I’ve reached a point in life where dealing with what I perceive as a frustrating set of assumptions is no longer part of my job description (and for the sake of world peace, hopefully never will be again), and I no longer have the patience required to *headdesk* politely.

I might as well let people know up front that they’re pushing a very heavy rock up a vertical cliff.

The argument is simple, no amount of any kind of evidence allows any one to say “this is what people want and all they will ever want” or “that isn’t what is popular recently so it never will be.”  At the very basic level, such statements require not only identifying trends in marketing or gaming culture, but they require assuming that these trends will continue on to infinity.  They also require assuming that the medium which the products operate on will never change — and this triple-processor, 1 terabyte hard drive, 4 gigs of RAM with two HD monitors, while not top of the line even when it was purchased, would certainly have a thing or two to say about changing mediums to the 486 DOS machine that was handed down to be my first personal, as opposed to family, computer.

I don’t just apply this to the MMO genre — I apply this to every industry, every task, every minute facet of life that currently utilizes information technology.   For any that look into the past to justify predictions of the future, I find it absurd to not reach the same conclusion — at any point in the last 50 years any prediction based on current trends, marketing, and product popularity that attempted to limit the future would have been wrong.

But let’s apply this directly to MMOs.  The MMO genre has existed anywhere from 15 – 30 years.  The MMO-as-we-know-it is closer to 15 than 30 years old — going back 30 years generally requires accepting precursors that wouldn’t be called MMOs today.  The theme park structure (as-we-know-it of course) has only existed for about 7 years — prior to that many of the characteristics existed in EQ, but WoW (and to some extent EQ2) set the standards for that structure.

That means that in 15 years since the birth of a genre, we have seen one major change.   To assume that such a change is permanent and to perceive that change as a step on an evolutionary scale that will only travel one direction is unsupportable.  Even if information technology was never going to improve beyond what we have today, predictions based on trends have little strength given the youth of the genre and the long shelf-life of individual games.  WoW is just now seeing a decline after releasing 7 years ago — in what other video gaming genre do we frequently see games still at the top of popularity 7 years after release?  The genre has only seen two or three possibilities of structures released on a large scale — I certainly find it small-minded to imagine that there will never be anything new under the sun after such a short time.

Even icebergs travel, if but slowly.  The MMO genre has not been around long enough to determine its rate of travel, not even long enough to determine the direction of travel, or if there even is one.

Calling people “small-minded idiots” is unproductive at best, I know.  But I don’t look at “never” comments as hyperbolic.  Or at least, I see them so frequently as responses on news articles and blogs about MMOs that the possibility that some might be hyperbolic slips my mind.  And there’s the whole “my sub-genre is better than you sub-genre” trend that I just refuse to be part of.  I am not a proponent of any particular sub-genre.  I am a proponent of inevitable change.  I will play Guild Wars 2 not because I think it is a return to the sandbox, but because I think it will, at least in some ways, offer up something different than the repeated structure that other games have continuously put forth — many of which have failed.   In the process, I think that gamers’ assumptions, designers’ assumptions, and the assumptions of investors and publishers will slowly become meaningless, much as they have for other genres, much as they have for video games as a whole, much as they have for everything that has ever depended on information technology in any way, since the first home computer became a reality.

I can recall a time I was about 5 or so years old when my parents and I would have high score competitions—pinning the top results to the fridge—playing River Raid on an Atari.  Nearly nothing about that experience applies to the games of today.  I think in another 30 years, we’ll be looking back and realizing that nothing about the games of 2012 predicted anything about the games of 2042.

I hope to live a long life.  I’m in my thirties now, and I don’t find it a stretch to imagine I could still be alive and gaming in my eighties.  Any prediction involving “never” or “always” or “must be” or “cannot be” will seem like small-thinking to me, as it is my own assumption that whomever is using such words is looking at the immediate future and refusing to acknowledge that the immediate future is only a small slice of what is possible.

Glitch: Stoot Speaks, Live, In Game, Yesterday.

I’m not going to reproduce the transcript in chunks with my own comments again.  There are transcripts for both sessions here for any that are interested.  My post with summary and commentary on the impromptu, original Q&A is here.

Among the reasons I will not go point for point with the transcript are the questions: there’s a lot of questions that had already been answered, and there’s a lot of questions that just aren’t worth repeating.  I can sum up some of these quickly.

When?
The future.

More?
Yes.

Will there be a reset?
Wharrgarbl

Can I have a pony?
There may be opportunities for your pet feature someday.

The third question was frequently asked.  Many of the reset questions  were a bit passive-aggressive and attached to other questions, but to one he responded: “Who says there will be a great reset? And: very few changes to our servers require closing the game.”  I have to assume this means the answer is still probably not, and with all the talk about XP to Imagination conversion, I would say they’re leaning as far from a reset as possible.  Seems they are only asking themselves how to set the players that have accomplished a lot at a point that will feel as if they have still accomplished a lot under the new mechanics, and where to scale it from there so they will feel there is still a lot to build and accomplish.

I’m going to go ahead and make a prediction: there’s not going to be a reset.  Oh, and the Red Sox won’t win the World Series this year.

He did, however, address some questions that asked for ponies, and some of the answers even ended up interesting.  So fair enough, citizens of Ur, continue to root for your personal ponies — for every nine that get ignored, a maybe, or a the future, one touches on something that might resemble something that someone might be working on.  He didn’t get around to answering my friend Epilady—who quite literally asked for a pony implying, perhaps, that Stoot could hand deliver it—but I suspect Blanky caught the sarcasm and wit.

Or perhaps not — they are still sifting through the questions and will do another session to cover some of those.  And take new ones apparently.  I’m personally rooting for a Glitch blog post that answers the remaining questions and doesn’t worry about too many more.  That pretty much puts my entire upper body in the horse’s mouth — and probably quite a ways out the other end for that matter.  But at a certain point, 32,000 questions are no better than 3,000 questions are no better than 300 questions.  Not until there are more tangible specifics to look at or play with — then the questions can be more targeted, more insightful.

I’ll just cover some of the more revealing answers rather than continue perfecting the forehead shaped groove in front of my keyboard on my desk.

There’s a bit of a teaser about revisions to the crafting system.  In the improptu Q&A, Stoot mentioned an overhaul of crafting but said little more, but in the live session he specified that they are “considering a fundamentally different approach to cooking and recipes which would let people create different items based on their particular ingredients and skill level.”   I get the feeling that this might not be so much revolutionary as cosmetic.  Right now crafting is approached by identifying the final product you want, and then figuring out the ingredients and steps needed to have all the components.  I suspect they are examining the UI to make crafting flow both ways — either by looking at a desired final product or by looking at ingredients to see which final products they can get to.

That’s not a prediction though — that’s just a musing.  And it actually sounds like all Tiny Speck is certainly doing is musing, and no actual decisions have been reached.  Likely the crafting overhaul is not a current development priority but one on the list.

There were also a lot of questions about lore or story, though only two really received interesting answers. The first was an area apparently teased in the original beta—before my time—called the City of Abassid.  This location is confirmed to still be in the works and not forgotten, though there weren’t any real specifics given.   Stoot also said elsewhere that they “ have long planned a “macro-game” (as opposed to a minigame) of keeping the Giants in balance. Once we have the basics (re-)done, I suspect this will happen … special skills for oracles, more temples, higher levels of piety, etc. would be part of it.”   So the giants will eventually be more than birdbath shaped rubbage bins, and that’s good news.

Another new bit of info was that  ”[g]roup-based co-op puzzle and challenge levels are in the works. I believe that they will be awesome (and a better way to earn imagination than making recipes over and over then donating to shrines … but that’s just one person’s opinion).”  I believe they will be awesome too.

At the end, Stoot let us know there would be another session in the future to cover more questions.  I’m not sure if he intended the comments to be humorous or sarcastic — the difference is debatable and both make me laugh anyway.  I’d like to think that if I were in Stoot’s position, I’d have closed in the same way.  So I’m going to close this post in the same way:

And, we’re done ….
only 1,437 questions did not get answered
so, that’s pretty good … got to at least 0.6% of them!!!!
if we do this 9 times per day for the next 43 months, we’ll be all set
however, that means I won’t be able to work on Glitch for … hmmm … almost 4 more years!
that will make it 2016
oh well … when I said “8 weeks” a while ago, I really meant to say 193 weeks
carry on and thanks for all the questions!!

It’s Friday somewhere, I guess, in some dimension

If you’ve found yourself here because I tipped Massively to a story and they were kind enough to link back to me, the post you are looking for summarizing and breaking down Stoot’s impromptu Community Q&A about Glitch can be found here.

I hesitated to make a new post knowing that Massively’s article linked to my home page, but it’s been over 24 hours.  Time to move on.

Speaking of Massively, today Syp made a post at his blog Bio Break about being happy to be a gamer right now that seemed a bit of a poke about gamers nostalgic for a past that theme park fans are often tempted to claim never existed.    Syncaine responded with a post on Hardcore Casual strongly disagreeing, in his somewhat snarky, fully sarcastic, yet rather insightful style.  I was participating in the comments on both pages, when I found I was writing about the same thing on both blogs.  And that the current response to Syp was going from comment territory to small novel turf.  So I’m going to try and put it here.

What I really want to address is the idea that in early MMO history, gamers had less choice.  They were stuck, to use an example, with either harsh death penalties or harsh death penalties.  The thought behind this thought, at least as I understand it, is that when WoW released gamers were given a choice between meaningless deaths and harsh death penalties, and by virtue of WoW’s subscription numbers, clearly gamers chose the meaningless deaths, right?

Except I don’t see when gamers really had those two options side by side.  When Ultima Online was at its peak, more people were using AOL for internet than their cable company.  Most had no other choice.  By the time broadband became more common, UO had been patched to have more in common with EQ, which alienated a lot of the UO vets, did nothing to convince EQ players to switch, and generally marked the beginning of the end for the game.  In 2004, WoW releases into an MMO field which included EQ II and really nothing else, at least nothing else that was polished and well marketed.  I did not, personally, hear about SWG until most of a year after it launched.  However, I not only saw articles about WoW on sites like gamespy (remember gamespy?  I remember gamespy); I even got a “talk” about how much better WoW would be delivered to me by the pimply faced kid at Best Buy that was ringing up my EQII preorder.

Turns out he was right, mostly.  But I digress, the point is that aside from MMO vets, whom at that time were a much smaller club, most people did not see their choice as between WoW and SWG.  Even those that were aware of SWG weren’t necessarily rejecting it for being a sandbox, but instead were rejecting it because it was buggy and unpolished despite having been live for quite awhile, and grinding missions to skill up to the “real game” was kind of a pain in the ass.  SWG was perfect for me, since I was primarily into crafting, but my glasses are clear rather than rose-colored — it was not the game for your average combat aficionado.

No, most gamers saw their choice as between WoW and EQII.  So their choice was between meaningless death penalty and meaningless death penalty.  Their choice was between questing or questing.  Their choice was between nearly polished and lacking polish.  And with broadband becoming cheaper and more common, there were more gamers looking for an MMO, and WoW, being nearly polished, managed to hook in a whole crap load of them.

Publishers took note.  What they saw was a game with formulaic character classes, solo quest-based progression, and a rather linear leveling game that led players from quest hub to quest hub without ever giving them an overwhelming set of choices.  They jumped all over those characteristics and decided that these, combined with as much polish as possible, were the reasons for WoW’s success.  They ignored any role shared by the increased prevalence of broadband, and they dismissed MMOs that did not achieve WoW status based on their game mechanics, rather than the fact that there simply was a smaller pool to draw on at the time and that when the pool finally became larger, WoW was the most logical choice.

Now is the point in this rant where I direct you to Extra Credits Season 3 Episode 15: Working Conditions.  While I do recommend watching the whole thing at some point, especially if you work in or hope to work in the game design industry, for this discussion I only ask that you jump to about the six minute point, and listen to the bit about ways that publishers can negatively interfere with a game’s designers.

I’ll wait until you get back.  I promise.

Publishers appear to be doing the same thing to MMOs that Extra Credits claims they tried to do to FPS games.  They’ve locked on to the features that were present in a game that happened to be more successful than any previous game, ignored anything else that may have contributed to that game’s success, and declared that the failure to achieve similar stellar results from games that did not include those features were a direct result of those missing features, so no game like them will ever be successful again.  They were wrong before.  I think they will find they are wrong again.  FPS games have a short shelf life, so that blunder of marketing governing design didn’t last so long, but I believe we will eventually begin to see polished sandbox releases as future competition.

Yes, I’ve seen the comments on Massively attacking sandbox fans as outdated troll that just need to accept that their genre moved on without them.  But I also remember friends saying there was no point to FPS games without multiplayer, and I haven’t heard any of them say that in years.  And most of them played Fallout 3.  I borrowed Bioshock from one of those very people, actually.

Just like I don’t see gamers ever having been presented with a choice between harsh death and meaningless death, I don’t see gamers having ever really been offered a choice between sandbox or theme park, not with games of equal quality, both still operating off their original design plan, both still live at the same time.

So yes, I too am happy to be a gamer in 2012, but only because, in my secret dreams of my secret heart, I feel the end of this hidebound repetition is somewhere just out of sight, just over the horizon.  Not because I think the games of today are objectively better than the games of a decade earlier — I think the games of today are different than the older games, that they traded one set of problems for a new set, and really have done little to advance the genre since WoW polished up a lot of EQ mechanics and made them the new shiny.

And I think next the gamers I mentioned in an earlier blog, the ones who project every mechanic on to WoW, will have many new opportunities to see mechanics, that they assume must be terrible, in games that build specifically around that mechanic and make it awesome.  The two MMO sub-genres may fuse for the sake of accessibility, or they may split further until most think of virtual worlds as a different genre altogether — but the idea that an MMORPG must be based on WoW to be successful will first drain from the publishers and then from the gamers once we actually reach an era where there are real choices.  Where the choice is not between harsh death penalty with no real direction and harsh penalty with no direction, and once the choice is not between hotbar combat solo leveling experience with endgame grouping and hotbar combat solo leveling experience with endgame grouping.

Eventually there will be real choices.  And many gamers, myself probably included, will likely find they are entertained by both.  Many will wonder why they didn’t have sandbox elements in those other games they tried, because it will seem so obvious once they play one where it works.

In the meantime, I steeple my fingers and stare out of the darkness.  Lurking.

The Bane of Innovation: Gamers

I’m finding it hard to write this post without sounding like I’m bragging.  So let me just get it out of the way: I do indeed  think I’m pretty awesome, and I do happen to know that I’m pretty damn smart.  Moving on.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the lack of innovation in many of the recent major MMO releases.  I certainly do not doubt that pressure comes from the investors — I suspect many venture capitalists have never played the successful MMOs they desire to emulate, but they are likely familiar with them.  And I find it possible that they make the mistake of equating “hasn’t been done” or “hasn’t been done successfully” with “shouldn’t be done” or the even worse “can’t be done.”

But I don’t think we can place the blame entirely on these theoretical spoilsports.  I think we can place just as much blame on the inability of many gamers to stretch their thinking, on a tendency to simply assume something couldn’t or shouldn’t be done and then to insist that their feeling is universally true.  There seems to be a number of gamers that simply lack imagination.

Even as I write that, I find it an odd feeling, especially given recent research that shows a correlation between young gamers and creativity (pick an article, any article).  Then again, maybe creativity and imagination aren’t words describing the exact same thing.  I can conceive a person who can write very creative fan fiction about Jedis and Sith yet cannot create an original universe from scratch.  Perhaps innovation requires both of these traits.  Or perhaps I’m way off — but my purpose here is not to nitpick over words.

But I keep encountering gamers who get their minds in ruts and then assert that rut is all there can be, while speaking in absolutes such as “never” and “always.”   There’s only one absolute that I find absolutely true: absolutes are never true.

And here’s where the “I’m so awesome” part comes into play.  For example, with the upcoming changes to housing in Glitch, I’ve pointed out in a number of places, including this blog, that one of the major issues with housing is that it is linked to particular physical locations.  And while I actually like that, it causes some issues for the devs.  Locations and styles sell out, forcing the devs to pay attention and add more, and causing irritation among players who feel as if they are settling for second best when they didn’t get that house in region whatever with all their friends.   But I keep running into players saying things like: “I’m sure even if we can’t keep our current house, we’ll be able to keep our address.”  At first, I sort of dismissed these comments as likely only coming from people who were quite satisfied with their current location, but eventually I started also noting people that did not want to keep their current address and were worried that others would not be forced to move and as a result, the regions they prefer would not open up.

These realizations guided me into a *facepalm* moment.  Was it not apparent to everyone else that the fixed addresses were clearly part of the problem of the current system so that any system they might imagine with a fixed address was just not thinking big enough?  Am I really that much smarter and awesomer that what I perceive as obvious might be a stretch to everyone else?

Probably not.  But what I am willing to do is to throw everything I already know about a system off the table and start over.  And it turns out I’m right — this thought is no longer speculative but verified by the big man himself.

I don’t actually think I’m that much smarter (though I am probably awesomer, deal with it), but I think this was a clear example of gamers in a rut assuming that rut was the only option.  Glitch houses have street addresses, and Glitch houses have always had street addresses.  Glitch housing blocks are accessed from the main world of Glitch and always have been.  The idea that these basic characteristics might change never occurred to them.  They never analyzed the assumptions that created the walls of that rut though they did attempt to be creative within the confines of those walls.

As another example, a recent Daily Grind column on Massively touched briefly on the idea of permadeath.  Many commenters immediately jumped in with the absolutes, making statements such as “permadeath could never be fun,” “no game could ever be interesting with permadeath,” etc. etc.  But again, I find these statements to be failures to examine their assumptions about MMOs.  I imagine these conclusions result from consciously or unconsciously asking “How would I feel if my character in [WoW/SWTOR/Eve/any current game] was permanently deleted when he died?”   And I think that they’re right to answer that question to themselves by assuming it would be terrible and that it would ruin the game.  Especially with current theme park offerings, the only thing that playing the game changes is the actual character, so a loss of that character would be the same as never playing.

Instead, with the permadeath issue, I think the question should be: “What set of circumstances could I imagine in which permadeath would be fun or add to the experience.”  And when I ask myself that question, with the basic assumption that it would be possible, I do find answers.

I can see it working as a control on ganking in an open PvP game: imagine an Eve in which killing players in low sec or suicide ganking in high sec not only leads to a low security clearance, but eventually leads to being denied cloning facilities.  Most players would have no fear of permadeath, but pirates would be knowingly choosing that risk.  And then there would be a built-in punishment for (unsuccessful) piracy, and a huge deterrent to suicide ganking.  I wouldn’t place this into Eve as is, but I can imagine an Eve-like game launching with this feature and being incredibly praise-worthy for trying it.  I imagine it would even expand the audience of the game — carebears (a group I am often a member of) and the not-so-hardcore PvPers might find such a mechanic more attractive than the (nearly) anything goes world of Eve or Darkfall.

I also think this could be an interesting mechanic in any game where characters’ actions have lasting effects on the game world rather than only on the character himself.  I can imagine a game where I can build a house, work the land, and fight off wild animals.  In that same game, I can imagine wooing a virtual spouse and having virtual children, then growing old and dying.  One of my children could be my heir, and my new controlled character, and the rest could filter into an NPC town and serve as potential virtual spouses for other players.  Something along these lines might be the reason why permadeath is going to be a launch feature of Salem — what you do with the world around you may very well be more interesting than the character you do it with.

Perhaps investors are behind the drive to produce more of the same under a different title.  But if they are paying attention to the things gamers say about games, to the questions gamers ask themselves when faced with an innovative concept, I can’t really blame them.  Clearly, gamers often fail to ask themselves how a game could be built around an odd or “hated” mechanic, and instead only ask themselves what that mechanic would feel like in the games they are already familiar with.

The former question is often fascinating to ponder; the latter question is quite often useless.

Saturday Morning Snark: A Source of Noob Bashing

Just a theory, and perhaps this only explains some instances of more veteran players mocking newbies though personally it is the only time I’ve ever been tempted to be a sarcastic jerk (failure to resist may occur but is generally rare): one reason why that “noob” question might elicit more derision than direction is that just by asking the question, just by even being in the game or on the forums, you’ve demonstrated access to the tools needed to answer that question for yourself.  Somewhere along the way you’ve acquired a feeling of helplessness in the face of uncertainty, and you are shifting your burden on to others, hoping they already have the information or will find it for you.  Of course, if they do help you, they are not really helping you, as they should probably direct you to a wiki or some other useful source that will not only answer your current question but any future questions as well.

They’d even do better by sending you here.