Glitch: A Sense of Perspective -or- How I’m Trying to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

First person to tell me where the upcoming quote comes from, via in game mail only so don’t put it in the comments, wins a free, rare old style tree poison.

“Bet you’re wonderin’ what’s been going on.  Bet you think I’ve almost lost my mind.”

Eh?  Well a lot of outside stress.  That’s the best I can put it in a public space without breaking my own professional ethics.  When Stoot claimed iMG was two weeks out, despite thinking he might be full of shit, I was actually relieved.  It was not a good week for me.

But one still has to wonder why I give a damn, and even if you can imagine or sympathize with that, you still have to wonder why I can’t simply avoid the forums.

For the former, you should know that I’m broke.  As my About page notes, I freelance, so my pockets aren’t completely turned out, but I have to carefully separate wants from needs.  Social interaction, as necessary as it usually is for mental well-being, is a want.  My friends are too scattered and gas is too costly.  Although Glitch, like most gaming, was originally just a distraction to kill time between cover letters, it came to fill that empty social niche in my life.  And I am endlessly grateful to the people I’m close to in Ur — while the unemployed life is still undesirable, it is now much more bearable.

Sob story out of the way, avoiding the negativity, misunderstandings labeled as truths, the rage, the incoherent idiocies, and the self-entitled whinging and whining is not as simple as staying out of the forums.  It’s in local chat.  It’s in status updates.  It comes up in conversation even among those that aren’t part of the rabble.  I have the discipline to not enter the forums.  I do not have the discipline, or desire, to kill all my social connections in game, which would be the only way to successfully bury my head in the sand and ignore the rage, ignore the disgust and amazement at the rage.

And that makes me angry.  Not annoyed.  Angry.  And I don’t like me when I’m angry.  But as long as the discourse dominating my happy place is far from happy, I show a greater sense of perspective by walking away rather than bashing my head against a wall.  I doubt many others share this feeling, but I am who I am.

All that said, that feeling has passed.  I will likely log in today, if only to see if the idiocy has become easier to avoid.  Ironically, when I’m actually pissed in the forums, something I’m constantly accused of but has never actually happened until yesterday, I’m apparently much more polite and respectful.  But it’s a mask, and if that mask should crack, it’s covering a whole hell of a lot of ugly.

So I’m going to conclude by venting — warning: strong language.  If you have not bought a single upgrade card, but you’re in the forums posting about how you’ve been robbed and the game sucks now, fuck you — fuck you, you ignorant, stubborn sack of poison.  If you’re claiming your skills have been stolen, but aren’t willing to unlearn them all to prove they’re useless, you’re a worthless, hypocritical idiot.  If you’re whining that a reset would have been more fair and more accepted, you’re a delusional sack of shit who is whitewashing the memory of the backlash from being told there was a 1% chance of a reset.

In short, if I’ve politely explained to you why you’re wrong in the forums—and you are wrong, there are opinions and there are facts, your opinions do not outweigh the facts—and you refuse to listen or refuse to try, Penn Jillette has something to say about you hanging around the forums.  George Takei has a few words for you as well.

Gee, I feel better now.  Next time I’ll tell you how I really feel.  And for those that read along, nodding as they followed, I leave you with a wonderful song that will hopefully make you forget what a mean, mean meanie I just was.  Let’s turn and face the strange.  Enjoy.

Glitch: The iMG Dust Has Settled -or- My Real Impressions

I need to start this post out with a promise.  Not so much to the readers — I do like having an audience, but this blog is my personal soapbox.  If you all went away, I’d still be King Lear on the heath, shouting to the sky with nothing but the wind to hear me.  But I do need to promise myself (and have a record of it) that if I’m having a generally stressful and crappy week, I need to wait 24 hours before doing an initial impressions bit.  It’s not fair to the product to do otherwise, and it makes me feel like I work for Eurogamer.  But hey, if I did work for EG, I’d probably have had the gumption to call that a full review, which I didn’t, so I can feel slightly less of a jackass than your average EG journalist.

But I feel that post did a bit of rabble rousing, and I no longer agree with the rabble that I roused.  Oops.

After expressing my irritations with the conversion system, I felt a bit less stressed about the conversion and went back into the game to play with the upgrades.  I had realized from the beginning that the system would in no way ever place someone into the scenario that all of us long term players found ourselves in.  The conversion was very much the equivalent of being handed a max level character in a theme park but having to make all the leveling choices on the spot without any knowledge of how the particular character class works or which abilities would be most useful.  Anyone in that scenario would feel a bit overwhelmed but would certainly have a better grasp a few hours later than they would after the first hour.

And there was fear.  Fear of selecting upgrades I would regret.  Fear that I would regret spending iMG.  Just fear all around.  I really let myself down — acting or reasoning out of fear is guaranteed to make you do or say some stupid things.  If it wasn’t for a strong belief in never hiding my mistakes or censoring reality, I would delete the post.  But let this be a message to those that get upset when I call comments or issues in the community ridiculous, absurd, or idiotic — I try to be the first to point out when I’ve been stupid, and I damn sure want other people to know when I think I’ve been stupid.  Mea culpa.

Moving on.

When I got back into the game, I took a different approach to upgrades.   It’s clear to me now that by level 42 a player coming up in this system would have been purchasing these cards like crazy, if spread out over months.   So I just took a deep breath, exhaled, and started buying upgrades.

Boy am I glad that I did.  I purchased about 130 last night, and popped in for 20 minutes or so twice today to purchase a few more.  I am now much more effective at some activities than was even possible with skills alone in the old system  On average, I’m getting about 3 to 4 times more product from trees, my crops and herbs grow faster –hell, my metalworking machine plays metal music now and there’s just no way to express how awesome that is to me.

Sure, with Mining IV but without any Manic Mining upgrades, players will mine slower than they did before.  But there’s no reason not to just buy cards like a madman (or woman! women can go mad too!) until you find the ones you want, especially if you come into the new system with the greater than 2 million iMG that max level characters were given to play with.  And now that I’ve had more time to read the skill descriptions, there are at least a few skills that now give new benefits.  Mining III, for example, now reduces wear on mining tools — it did not before.  I challenge anyone who believes that the time spent learning their skills was wasted to unlearn them all and go try the activities they are complaining about again.  The time was not wasted, the skills are not gone, they are just different.  The game has a new backbone.

So if you haven’t already, go buy upgrades, go buy them in fistfuls.  You’ll like the results.  You really will. There’s no need to be miserly — there’s no longer a max level, and you can earn more iMG to spend from now until the day the game shuts its doors.  And may that day never come until the launch of Glitch 2.

So grab your towel and stick out your thumb — there’s shit to do and places to see in Ur again.

Glitch: An Initial Reaction to the Imagination (iMG) Conversion

Prepare to have your mind blown, especially if your mental capacity isn’t all that grand to begin with.  I am going to defy the image that some have assigned to me — so if you’re a reader who is not a close friend of mine in game, you might be shocked.  I am going to complain, and I am going to be critical.  Of course, I have been critical of elements of releases in the past (go look, it’s true), and I have never said complaining is inappropriate, only that complaining about scenarios you’ve developed in your head with no link to any thing resembling fact is idiotic.

So!  Let us begin on the positive.  Imagination is awesome.  As things shake out and we all get more chances to find the upgrade cards we want, the new system will work great.  New players are in for a treat — I already took a level 1 into the game just to get a feel for what it’s like to be at ground level in this new system.  I can’t speak for whether or not the initial new player experience has changed, however, as I did not create a fresh level 1.   But the new system will be wonderul.

The conversion, however, is not so wonderful.  The issues actually comes from a few things.  First, some benefits from our skills have been transferred to iMG upgrades.  This means that while a mining action has taken me exactly 4 seconds for months now, since around the time of the Unlaunch, it is now doubled.  And so far, I have not managed to draw a single mining upgrade card of any kind — essentially making one of my primary in game activities, the activity that is the very reason I have the friends I have and that led to us creating a popular social group, is now impractical.  And second, since the cards we draw come at random, it’s actually conceivable that months from now I still won’t have seen a single mining upgrade card.  In the meantime, the miners of PBMS are going to have a lot of trouble working together in the mines.  And that’s a serious blow to the reasons we’ve stuck around up to this point.

I like that it’s random.  If we just saw every single card option, we’d inevitably end up with “min/maxers” and a good majority of the players running around with exactly identical upgrades and options.  The element of chance is interesting, and it will not be as big a problem for new players.  A new player will take a few months to learn the mining skills I have; in the meantime, they’ll have plenty of chances to draw new upgrade cards.

As vets, we were given some of our skill bonuses back as upgrades.  There seems to be some bug with whether or not those are listed on our profile.  I have a level 15 that showed 13 starting upgrades (or something very close to that), whereas my level 42 (where max level characters are now starting out) showed no starting upgrades but clearly has them, as he has come back to the game with more brain capacity, higher quoin multipliers, and more energy and mood available than the level 15, all things the level 15′s given upgrades were related to.  It’s really bothering me to have to wonder which harvesting upgrades I don’t need to worry that I’m not seeing — I don’t know if I have them or not.  I’m not really concerned here though — I’m betting this is a bug and will be ironed out.

In the grand scheme, Tiny Speck is the greatest online game company with a product on the market (or sort of on the market) — everyone that logged in to shock and anger after SWG’s NGE understands.  All the Squeenix fans praying that FFXIV actually works someday understand too.  I am not incapable of being critical — I just have an accurate perception of how Tiny Speck operates compared to other companies in the genre.  The amount of “suck” possessed by Tiny Speck compared to most MMO game companies is like comparing a candle flame to a forest fire.

But right now, I find myself, for the first time ever, really not all that motivated to log back in.  I told my friends I’d be back at new game day,  and I had no plan to write this post instead of playing.  But after 9 pm rolled around, I just kinda stared at the enter world button.  If I go play with my friends, those who’ve been lucky enough to get the Mining upgrades will be cutting through rocks like cheese while I’m stuck struggling in the mud.  It won’t feel effective or efficient. If I go play solo, I’m eliminating the reason I play the game.  Both options suck, even if it’s just a candle flame of suck.

So let me emphasize: I do trust Tiny Speck, as they’ve asked in the FAQ, that random upgrades are not a bad thing.  I think random is good in general: it’s going to be no trouble at all for new players, and it’s even okay for us vets to have to randomly receive many of these cards: the new benefits, the expanding energy pools, all those things are okay random.  But not the benefits from the skills we’ve already had.  My mining is back to October or November, and there’s no way for me to know if I will get back that ability when I log back in—as inevitably I will after publishing this—or if those upgrades won’t even show up as options for another six months.  And that’s frustrating, and not fun, and generally no good at all.

ETA: After realizing there was no reason to be conservative in my spending, as character upgrades have a bigger effect on game play than the size of my . . . home, I feel a lot better about the conversion.  I’m flying through upgrades and getting more of the ones I want as I go.  And I’ve even started buying some of the learning related ones I didn’t really want to spend iMG on — but if they release skills in those categories later, I’d rather already have those upgrades then have to look for them.

Glitch: Did Stoot Screw with Us?

God speaks, kicks everyone out of the world

I do not believe this sign has gone up since the original beta

I had joked last night that Stoot could actually be screwing with us when he said two weeks.  Someone said that seemed a bit over the top, but even as I agreed I kept thinking “well, if I were stoot, seeing all these entitled bastards in the forums whining about release dates that they should just be grateful they will be allowed to play through, I’d put the release further out in hopes they would shut the hell up.”

Maybe that wasn’t his motivation, but it does seem to be what Stoot has done.  Seriously, I owe this man a beer, if only for his resignation letter to Yahoo, and a couple more beers for his style of talking to the community.

ETA: Just saw a theory that Stoot meant “Ur weeks” rather than real weeks (there are six Ur days in 24 hours, so two Ur weeks would be about two days) — but that would just mean the answer is yes, stoot was screwing with us.

Glitch: Who Plays this Game Anyway?

Yes, yes, there’s new content in Glitch again, and yes, I will get around to reviewing it.  And yes, some of you might have caught that I’m playing Tribes off and on this week and planning to review that as well.  Both will happen, maybe even today — I seem to be ill and can’t sleep however, so it’s also quite possible I’ll sleep through today.

But lately I’ve found myself wondering, who the hell else plays this game?  I don’t mean to suggest the game is empty — even with a beta part deux population that certainly seems a bit less active than the original launch population, the game still isn’t empty, and I still meet new people.  I’d hazard a guess that  the activity numbers look similar to those on a single server of sharded games — or at least, I find myself around other players or stumbling into groups about as often as I have after the launch rush has faded to more stable numbers in games like EQII or CoH.

And I’m not thinking about demographics either — though such would be interesting if it were possible to be thorough.  Someone has created their own demographic survey for the game, but the sample is “players who frequent the forums and notice this post,” and there’s really no way to tell how well that sample reflects the population.

No, I’m wondering what types of gamers find themselves attracted to Glitch.

In my own circle, I’ve encountered a very different type of gamer than I have in other MMOs.  I’ve certainly encountered a fair number of more typical MMO players, the ones that have played other MMOs, the ones that play AAA console or PC releases.  I talked to someone in game that was already playing Tribes when I was suddenly realizing it had released and thinking about downloading it.  I talked to someone else that plays a few games of League of Legends most days that she spends gaming.  There’s a couple of fellow council members (the cofounders of the group I’m part of) that played FFXI extensively, one that played CoH for quite some time, and a few that, like myself, have reached jaded vet status.

But more frequently, and more interestingly, I run into players that I really would not expect to meet in the MMOs I’ve played in the more recent past.  To be clear, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with not being an experienced MMO player — it’s just that the last time I met this many people working through their first MMO was way back around the EQII launch.  If there’s anything bad about the number of fresh fish at all, it’s a sense of perspective.  Being critical of Tiny Speck’s communications with the community is rather hard if you played SWG through the New Game “Enhancement” update.  It’s pretty hard to be critical of the unlaunching and the sweeping game changes they decided to make, after offering us all refunds, if you’re a Final Fantasy XIV fan recently forced to start paying a sub for a game that still really isn’t in great shape.  It’s hard to be critical of Tiny Speck’s CEO for making the occasional unfortunate cryptic remark that sets the community off when you read statements from Big Point’s CEO—what’s his face, the guy with the clearly evil goatee—claiming that using cash shops to sell advantages and power in games is good and shouldn’t be criticized.

But I digress.  I don’t just meet people that have never played other MMOs; I meet people that also say they do not play other games.  Today, one of my friends had to admit she did not know what FPS stands for — I can’t remember if she’s one of my friends that does not play other games, but I feel safe assuming so.  Wolfenstein 3d happened a long time ago — FPS isn’t exactly an obscure gaming term.

If I were the audience, rather than the author, of this post, I’m pretty sure I know what I’d be thinking by the time I’d reached this point: casuals.  Casuals play Glitch.  But like my post on the Retro Hardcore Gamer from months back, I don’t think there’s anything casual about the way these folks play Glitch.  Over the initial months of the Unlaunch, many of these people showed a resiliency for repetitive grinding that Eve miners would find impressive.  And there’s nothing casual about Glitch — it takes a heck of a lot of depth to keep me playing the same game for seven consecutive months, an accomplishment no MMO can claim to have reached with me since SWG.

Perhaps there is some link between this idea of the Retro Hardcore Gamer and the Glitch player.  It is a side scroller, and I know that definitely hits the nostalgia button for me.  But even this link doesn’t completely explain who exactly is attracted to the game.  Although I do tend to meet older players more often in Glitch than in any MMO I’ve played except Eve, and I feel like being in my early 30s puts me solidly in the middle rather than solidly in the old men club, I have met a small group of male players right around 18 and a smattering of female players between 14 and 18.  Can I redefine Retro Hardcore to include this younger set, even if they weren’t yet alive when I threw my first fireball at a goomba?  Though I don’t think I stated so explicitly, nostalgia was a big part of the Retro Hardcore definition — is it possible to be nostalgic for an era you weren’t alive for?  Possibly.  James Murphy, lead singer for the now defunct LCD Soundsystem, has a great line about losing his edge to kids “with borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties” — maybe they borrowed their retro hardcore tastes from older siblings or parents.

Or maybe the phrase I made up to describe a group of gamers I keep encountering only seems like it might apply here because it’s a phrase I made up and my ego is rather healthy.  I don’t know — I do still think I’m awesome though.

I feel no closer to understanding who plays glitch now then I did before I started writing these thoughts.  Perhaps, after a review of the latest Glitch content, which I’ve now decided will happen when I wake up (though whether or not I will wake up today or wait until tomorrow is still up for debate), and after a review of Tribes: Ascend, I should sit down and think about why I play Glitch.

If you play, and you’re reading, why the hell do you play?  What characteristic of your personality or tastes attracts you to Glitch?

Glitch: SCIENCE! Part 2 or Oops, Should Have Waited

Scarlett was getting reports of trees dying, so I once again summoned the power of Global Chat to wear down a tree.  Turns out that after the patch wears down, there’s no way to care for the tree and restore its supply of the resource.  Instead, once out, it dies and can only be chopped for wood.  That’s not exactly what I thought was happening at the time I wrote my last post and has a significantly different effect on the near future of the resource routes, at last when it comes to trees.

The end story is as things are under R2, maintaining trees for a route will require completing the project for a patch and keeping a supply of the appropriate tree bean to replant.  And poison to take out trees someone planted unwittingly or mischievously.  And time.

But it’s not impossible.  Even with things exactly as they are, routes can work, especially if some members are willing to donate time and beans.  And while it has been asked why anyone would bother with non-renewable resources when there are renewable resources in the world, I personally find it an interesting challenge to provide a service inside the game that benefits others.  Ur is a world of plenty, and while interest in joining the roads may wane, there’s still a strong core willing to give it a go.  There’s also a number of us who are ridiculously well off in the game — even though our hoarded materials might be sucked up by building homes and furniture in the near future, those of us with maxed or nearly maxed skills have few issues gathering more materials.

But things are not going to stay the same.  To begin with, this is just a test.  We’ve already been told that in the near future we will receive a crafting helper, something that will craft for us while we do other things or are offline, and that alone will do a lot to ease the time needed to supply beans for roads — if many players are willing to donate the materials, just a few players can maintain the stock with little effort or time.

I can also conjure up ideas that balance the impact of patch lifespans.  Harvesting might be automated at some point in the future as well—so materials might be even easier to come by—and I have my own overly specific idea about that mechanic.  Patch lifespans are probably very subject to change, especially since the restoration project cost is expected to increase.  Items could also be introduce that extend or repair lifespan.  The magic rock, subject to have some role on our home streets in the near future, could hand out the proper bean when the tree dies for all we know.

A roaming, tie-dyed dinosaur with a no-no habit might agree to be my enforcer and fight poisoners with antidote and replant the proper trees when they’re gone.

As an upside, I see people coming together to maintain the roads as future social events.  Things are getting interesting.

ETA: If there’s one question I’d really love an answer to it’s whether or not the lifespan of resources will increase when the cost to restore increases.  That’s what I’m most curious about.

Glitch: R2 Arrives & Resource Lifespan SCIENCE!

R2, Glitch’s second round of housing test releases, receives the highest review I can give to anything ever. As both a New Englander and a baseball fan, R2 was shiny and interesting enough to make me miss most of the middle innings of Daniel Bard’s first career start. And when I finally looked back over at the TV to realize we were getting our asses handed to us by Toronto, my reaction was rather bland, consisting entirely of hitting the mute button and looking back at the computer.

One might think the fact the Red Sox were losing makes the R2 distraction less impressive, but no, bitching about the Sox when they are losing is more to the core of Red Sox fandom than cheering when they win.

Anywho, I didn’t waste a lot of time decorating the interior as there is only about one more week left until imagination releases and the test houses reset. Decorating my virtual home is something I certainly expect to do—I’m a big fan of online games with mechanics that allow individuality and creativity—but it’s something I expect to do slowly, and at first my emphasis will be on the practical rather than the cosmetic. I will want storage boxes, 40 or 50 give or take 100, and then I’ll begin to slowly pick out items and designs that feel right for me.

Even in this test version, there are some potentially awesome combinations of exterior backgrounds and home designs, which will certainly make the Grand Circuit Tour of Ur more interesting.  Here’s a quick tour I took this morning, starting with my own street and then running through those of  few friends:

The options are finite, of course, but there’s already enough in this test version that I have not yet run into identical homes on identical backgrounds.  Even more options are planned and should be available at launch.  All of this customizing has zero-effect on game play; however, custom cultivation of our land, the ability to place various resource nodes, some of which are visible in the above pictures, will end up changing the difficulty of obtaining some resources and modifying how many play the game.  I can see the cultivation mechanics coming into play with group-owned locations later, and I see interesting potential implications for cultivation projects on public streets that upgrade, add to, or change existing resources.  Imagination aside, just the cultivation mechanics alone are going to be reusable for other planned releases, and that’s a good thing.

My biggest concern, once I had my hands on the new content and got things all purdy, was the addition of a lifespan to our home street resources.  I admit I was a bit freaked out, concerned for the future of our resource routes, and tempted to go into the forums and create a post with a title like “Tell me what happens when lifespan runs out NAO you potentially evil goats.”  But that’s not my style (ok, it’s close, but not quite), so instead I searched through the release thread, reading staff posts, until I found one where bees! said something along the lines of “lifespan will run out, and the resource will need love to work again, keep using the resource and see what happens.”

Fair enough.  Well except for the implication I should patiently wait for the lifespan to run down — I did not want to go to bed without knowing what would happen.  I called upon the power of Global Chat, as well as Game of Crowns and PBMS chats, and recruited as many players to come by and help harvest my bubble tree as were willing.  And then we bribed some players so they’d be more willing, and finally, within a single game day, we managed to get the tree down to 0%.

And then: nothing.  I managed to find one more volunteer,  but he was able to harvest the tree normally.  I was at a loss — I commented to Scarlett (Housing Resource Route founder) that perhaps there was a mistake and that mechanic was not part of the test, perhaps bees! was only partially correct in his forum post that inspired my frantic experiment.

But then a wonderfully sharp Glitch named Grelca postulated that perhaps it was the patch that had worn down and not the tree.  After headdesking a few times to punish myself for an unusual bout of incredibly linear thinking (my least favorite thing in the world), I grabbed some tree poison, killed and chopped my bubble tree, and sure enough, the patch was demanding 40 beans to be rejuvenated before it would let me replant.

The great news is that the housing routes, at least when it comes to trees, will live on.  There’s still some question about whether the other routes Scarlett was planning will work — I’m not sure yet what happens when the lifespan of the non-tree resources is gone.

There’s a downside, however, that didn’t occur to me until this morning but will hopefully be balanced out if it becomes an issue.  Right now it only takes one or two determined players to grief entire resource routes, poisoning tons of trees over a short period of time with few controls.  While patch projects might prevent them from replacing what they kill, the projects might actually make it more amusing, for the griefers I mean, to poison trees.  Now instead of just costing a bit of time and a small amount of resources to create a seasoned bean and plant a new tree, there will be a significantly larger resource drain.  The griefers could previously only annoy, and not well at that, so it was easy enough to simply not let them bother me and, occasionally, laugh at those that think they’re bothering me.  So I’m not an attractive target, and on at least one occasion, I frustrated the griefer enough that he actually got annoyed and left. Good times.

But now that same griefer doesn’t need to annoy me to know that he’s causing me issues.  Just poisoning my tree will cost me more resources to replace than it did before, and with the possibility that the cost of these projects will increase at launch, the griefer can feel confident that he has actually set me back not just time but also resources, and my only possible defense is to be present when the tree poisoning happens.

There’s some balancing that needs to happen with poisonings, at least on home streets, and sooner rather than later I’d hope.  I’m not from the school of thought that thinks players should simply not be able to poison trees on my home street — actually, I appreciate that players can choose to misbehave in a sandbox as that makes it easier for me to figure out whom I do not want as a friend.  I just want more weapons at my disposal to prevent that griefing, or a hard limit on the amount of poisoning players can do on streets that don’t belong to them.  Either or.

Next up in the world of Glitch, the death of old housing and XP, the birth of new housing and imagination.  Excellent.

Glitch: The Opinion Poll

I thought this might be fun to try.  This could possibly solve all controversy about the future development plans of Glitch.  Possibly.

Wishful Thinking: Glitch Street Projects

This will be the second of a planned recurring series of posts where I imagine what could be done with a particular game mechanic in some game or another — also known as Glitch, lately.  Each time, I try to think of ways to improve the mechanic for the good of the entire game, not just my particular play style.  I might like to think that I do this from a developer’s perspective more than a player’s perspective — just a developer with infinite time, resources, and with absolutely no concern for the practical complications of coding and the limitations of platforms and such babble, mostly because I don’t know what any of that means.

Street projects, for the unfamiliar, are when new streets are “built” by players, working from a street that will border the new one, donating items or performing actions until a certain amount of each is reached, unlocking the next phase unless three have been completed, which would instead open the new street.  As players, we have been told the street project mechanics are in development or being revised, but we do not know much beyond that.

I don’t want to spend much time complaining or talking about the old system, but in order to talk about ideas for improvements I need to identify the problems.  The largest was lag—by which I mean the game responding sluggishly to input for whatever reason—there were large crowds present at most phases of most projects the last time any were available.  Second, success–defined as participating enough to earn a trophy piece—was mostly due to foreknowledge from previous failures, followed by noting the items required for each phase, and preparing large stacks of them to donate.  Third, the minimum threshold needed to succeed was ill defined and possibly varied — I’m still not sure if it was based on each individual’s total number of items donated/actions performed, or if it was based on reaching a minimum percentage of the total work — though either way is in competition with other participants based partly on how much crafting is stored up.

I’m just going to assume that it’s best to work with the lag.  Even wishes need to be somewhat rational.  Otherwise the next of these articles will be, “I think they should replace the servers with cutting edge supercomputers,” and I’ll wait a few decades before I write again.  So assuming either the hardware or the flash platform puts a hard limit on how many people can be in the same place before there are performance issues, the easiest solution is to spread the population out through more than just multiple active projects.

This could be done hundreds of different ways, but I can think of a few.  Sticking with street projects as we know them: the center for donations could be more spread out, appearing in many different places in multiple regions; it could be instanced, such as already done for areas like Bureaucratic Halls and Axis Denyde; or it could be not necessarily instanced but individualized, occurring through an item in a player’s home.

But this is Wishful Thinking, where staying with the known would be thinking too small.  In my circle of friends, we like to talk about ponies (see my blog here for the origin) — my Street Project pony would be to do away with donations and repeated actions completely.  Recently talking about the craftbot, I noted that crafting, as something players do in large amounts and with high frequency, was easier to make out of sight than to make fun.  Trying to make it fun would likely make it more irritating, more dragged out.  Street Projects, on the other hand, tend not to be everyday occurrences.

My pony would be to do away with donations altogether and replace them with minigames.  From a social engineering standpoint, I don’t think it would be the best plan to make players compete, to make trophy pieces or whatever that replaces them depend on doing better than other players in these minigames.  If the games were competitive in any way, the ultimate reward for winning should just be time: they could achieve a trophy piece faster or perhaps the reward could add up, and winning would provide slightly more than not winning.  Games could also be cooperative, where the players in each game work together to complete a puzzle or challenge, and the total number of successful games by everyone participating in the project moves the phase or completes the street.

These are not predictions, of course, these are ideas.  Just this short analysis made realize that prediction is impossible: once the frame that was present before is thrown out, anything goes in Ur.

Glitch: R2

More news in the land of Ur.  It’s coming so frequently — I’m not sure I can take it.  The beta lull we hit for awhile made me an even lazier blogger than I was before: if there’s more than two stories in a week, it takes me nearly a month to discuss them all.  Fie on thee, Tiny Speck, making me work at not working.

We have a new blog post from the wonderful people at Tiny Speck, outlining upcoming releases and hinting at others to be released over the next six weeks.  Next will be the R2 of my title, the second round of housing releases, which will include options to “expand & add floors to your house, enlarge and change the style of your yard and exterior street, cultivate your land to add resources and customize & change the style of your house exterior.”  What it will not include, however, will be the transition from XP to imagination.

I did not anticipate that the next release would not include imagination, as I have come to specifically associate enlarging our yards and streets with imagination upgrades.  I figured the release of one would necessitate the release of the other.  However, this release will not reset housing: it is more testing.  Perhaps we will have access to some version of the imagination menu or one of its sub-menus for playing with features that will later be linked to imagination.  Or perhaps I’m not remembering correctly and none of these features will be linked to imagination.

Although it’s clear that these releases—and take the time to read the blog, I’m not covering many of the juicy but vague bullet points at the bottom—will occur over the next six weeks, it’s not entirely clear from the blog or the related forum post when to expect R2.  As it stands, we were expecting something around the end of the month and the beginning of April.  This post doesn’t contradict that.  But it doesn’t reassert it either.  I feel that promising both R2 and Imagination within the next six weeks while explaining there will be time between the two releases to test out the kinks sort of requires releasing R2 very soon, at least within the next two weeks.  They wouldn’t actually be contradicting anything they’ve said in this blog, however, if they were to release R2 in a month and imagination at six weeks.  I’m leaning toward optimistic, and expecting R2 and its new skills and items around the beginning of April.

A lot of changes on the horizon.  I’m particularly impressed with the last of the bullet points, the crafting servant.  This item seems designed to address what people do with their time in game.  Crafting is a grind for sure, and when I’m crafting large quantities (such as when racing to max level or preparing for a party), I’m really not even playing the game.  I’m multitasking: crafting with the sound effects on to hear when a run ends while simultaneously watching hockey or reading a book or anything along those lines.  Really, mass crafting in Glitch is only for the hardcore — it’s just plain not fun and a huge time sink.

I’ve said in the forums a few times that challenging is not the same thing as time consuming.  This position does not mean that I think everything should be instantly accomplished or that they should replace all the game mechanics with an “I win” button (both accusations from the forums in response to this position).  However, I do think that if a mechanic is not fun,  if there is no challenge other than coming up with enough free time while being determined and patient, then the mechanic is broken.  It doesn’t need to be made faster, or easier, or instant — it just needs to be made fun or out of sight.  I don’t know if there is a way to make it fun—my first thought would be to associate crafting with a mini-game, but while that might make crafting more interesting, it would make mass-crafting even more unbearable—but the option to set crafting and walk away will put it out of sight.

And then we can get on with the fun stuff and socializing more often.  Tiny Speck: game designers with brains.  How refreshing.