Tastes Gamey

This blog is about stuff. Sometimes that stuff has to do with MMORPGs.

Author: neschria

I haven't been logging in very much and I haven't been participating in any thoughtful, meaningful way on the forums, so I have dropped to 3-stars, down from 5. Oh, well. It's not like I was getting paid a rate that depended on the number of stars I had under my name. It's not like I was getting paid at all.

MMORPGs have become a sore subject in our household here. I am still interested in what's going on out there, but my husband doesn't want to talk about it at all. I can't tell if this is because he's jonesing hardcore for EQ or if he's one of those people who quits playing online games and then gets bitter about having played at all. I've tried to figure out which he is, but he REALLY doesn't want to talk about it.

He does have a bit of a pride thing going-- he got voted out of the guild he'd joined and he said he was quitting for good, and he hasn't played since then at all. He said at one point that he felt good about that. This doesn't mean that he doesn't want to play though, does it? He might be in conflict between his desire to play and his desire to not be that guy. You know that guy-- the one that goes storming off and says he won't be back, but then you see him online a couple of months later, being all sheepish about the earlier events or pretending that nothing ever happened at all.

Don't be that guy. Noone wants to be that guy.

I don't have those hard feelings. I am a little frustrated about my RL right now, and that may be bleeding over into my OL... er... online life... but I don't really harbor any bad feelings in my heart toward any game or any of my online gaming brothers and sisters.

Ok, you guys aren't really my brothers and sisters as such... But you could be, if we were all members of the same MMORPG church. Then we could have a preacher who would stand up and pound the pulpit, exhorting us to give to needy newbies and warning us of the Great Permanent Banning that awaits those who commit grave sins. We'd have services on Tuesday or Wednesday night, carefully timed to avoid conflict with as many raids as possible. Those folks in 7-night-a-week raiding guilds could be ministered to by missionaries and traveling preachers who bring the good word to those who only log off when the power goes out.

Of course, there might be different faiths and flavors of MMORPGism. Perhaps I should found a convent for female players playing female characters. We'll be The Neschrianic Order of Sisters of Everything Holy And Indisputably Right... Or N.O.S.E.H.A.I.R. for short. (Don't ask where that came from... I was originally going to go with "Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Lag". )

I'd better quit this line of thinking before someone gets their panties in a wad. I am not anti-religious, and I am certainly not advocating that anyone leave their real faith for MMORPGism. It just seemed like a funny, silly thing to suggest that anyone would start a religion based in or on MMORPGs. Why should I even have to say this? Shouldn't I give some people some credit for knowing what's real and what's not? I'd sure like to think people were smarter than all that... but then I go read comments on YouTube and lose all faith and hope I might have held for humanity.

[EDIT: Making the title shorter and more descriptive... I think... I did like "...and the potential for a tent revival service in the Desert of Ro",  but that was a WAY long title... Anyway, if we go out in the desert, we might spend the next 40 years looking for the zone line.]

I haven't been here as much as I used to be lately, so I was surprised to see that I had 6 messages in my inbox when I logged in today. You guessed it. SPAM... including this cliche among SPAM cliches:

From Sally ^^ who now has a larger penis. Hrmmmm... It must be an amazing product if it can give Sally a penis. I should invest in some of that so that I'll have something to swing around the next time people get into a pissing contest on the forums.

If people giggle at me, I hope it is because I am a comic genius, and not because there's something strange in my pants.

So, we went to see Transformers on Sunday. It was solidly action-packed, almost to the point of being overwhelming (particularly because we'd taken up our usual place at the front of the theatre). It was also very loud. Much giant transforming robot-vehicle goodness. I liked it.

I was supposed to go to Warped Tour with my ex and my teenagers yesterday, but I didn't have babysitting for the younger kids and I didn't want to spend that much time with my ex (who hits on me CONSTANTLY), so I gave my ticket to my middle son's girlfriend. And there was much rejoicing.

I am missing a notebook and a book that I'd been using. The last time I remember having them for sure, I was watching Sci-Fi (Ghost hunters) last Wednesday. I have a vague memory of them being on the dining room table after that. I can't find them anywhere. I even looked at my mom's house, since I was there quite a bit over the weekend. It's a mystery. It's driving me CRAZY.

I am cooking. I should probably stop writing and go back into the kitchen before everything is charred.

1. In the previous entry, I said, "I just read a lot of nonfiction, and fiction has to grab me and give me enough payoff for the reading that I keep going."

And that's pretty much what I am looking for in games too. I tend to give MMORPGs more time than other games to grab me because I know that the newbie experience in many games is the least compelling content. Unfortunately, for some games, it is the most compelling content, and that's where the payoff part comes in. I may be wrong, but I think some games lose people when those players don't feel like they are getting a handle on the gameplay and making some progress in the first couple of hours. Other games wow folks for the first couple of hours and then create hostile ex-customers when those people realize they've already played the best part of the game and there won't be any additional payoff for "wasting" more time on it. 

Note how many people feel they've "wasted" time on games that they've played for a couple of YEARS. They must have been getting some sort of payoff at some point, or they'd have quit sooner. Maybe they were hoping the payoff would come back if they kept playing.

2.  Drat... I forgot the other thing I wanted to say. I am not sure if I wanted to talk about hearing people talking about World of Warcraft at the grocery store or if it was a thought about the scale of progress in older games... Or... I am drawing a total blank.

Hrmm... There's a thread in the Off Topic forum about the word "spastic" and whether or not it is offensive in the US. I think it is safe to say that it's not terribly offensive here and I have totally spazzed on the second part of this entry.

I'm easily distracted, like this cat:

Here it is, July 20. Since the last time I wrote, I've done oh-so-much packing and painting around the house. I've also been to see the latest Harry Potter movie. It was either that or Transformers. My brother was with us and he wanted to see both, but he's seen every HP movie in the theatre so far and didn't want to end up missing this one, so off we went to see "... and The Order of The Phoenix". It was pretty good. I kind of wish we'd gone to see Transformers, though. Maybe I'll talk the husband into doing that this weekend.

Needless to say, I'm not one of those people who will be staying up all night to get a copy of the last Harry Potter book as soon as it goes on sale. A lot of bookstores are opening at midnight to sell it. A lot of the bookstores around here are having release parties for it. I hope to be sleeping when it goes on sale. I read the first book, and that was the last of them that I've read. I didn't hate it. I do read quite a lot, too, so it isn't that I'm not a reader. I just read a lot of nonfiction, and fiction has to grab me and give me enough payoff for the reading that I keep going.

I read the first 3 books in The Wheel of Time series (Robert Jordan) and got 4 pages into the fourth before I decided it was going to be a commitment on the order of getting married to keep reading that series and I only liked it as a friend.

I read the first 3 books of The Song of Fire and Ice (George R. R. Martin), but that was a bit like being dragged from one carwreck to another-- you don't want to keep looking, but everytime you see a new one, you can't help but look AGAIN. If you haven't read those books, I don't want to spoil them for you, but suffice it to say that the moral of the three I've read so far appears to be "Nice guys finish dead." My son bought book 4 in that series (A Feast for Crows) and has offered to lend it to me, but I think I've been depressed enough lately without literary help.

I'd try to make this entry at least marginally game-related, and I've got a good opening here, since I've been writing about fantasy, which seems to be the bread-and-butter of MMORPGs so far, but I just can't quite put myself out that far this morning. I am going to get up now and go to the store. When I come back, I'll make breakfast and listen to the BBC News Hour on NPR (WHYY in Philadelphia. I also listen to WYPR in Baltimore, but they don't carry the BBC News Hour)... Then I will clean house some more and paint the bathrooms upstairs. I am pretty sure I can do both of them today. Doing the hallway might be a bit too ambitious, since I have to take care of kids too,  but I may try to get that done anyway. My husband will come home between 5 and 6, and we'll either have dinner or go out. We'll settle in for the night and either go to bed or sit on the couch together. He'll watch TV and I'll do something with my hands (crocheting, most likely). My point is that my life isn't even marginally game related right now. I do think about games from time to time, but I barely read my e-mail anymore, much less sit down and attempt to make even slacker level progress in a game.

I am once again at a point where this site is more fun than actually playing MMORPGs. I think it might be time for me to take another 6 month break from both the games and this site. There are other forums, wholly unrelated to gaming, that I could be terrorizing, and I've got at least 3 other blogs I could be posting on. I could be using this valuable internet time to watch TG4 or something constructive like that. (Watching TV in foreign languages is constructive if you're trying to learn the language in question. That's my justification, anyway.)

I'll be back. You know I will. Probably in 24 hours when this fit of introspection passes.

Today's trip down memory lane is courtesy of WRDX ("The River"), my husband's favorite radio station*. Our clock radio came on to wake him up at 6:30 this morning, and at some point after that, I woke up to the song by Simple Minds that is mentioned in the title of this entry. I am probably about to show my age, but that song is the inspiration for the following bit of bloggy weirdness:

What if MMORPGs were being cast for The Breakfast Club?

• "The Jock", Andrew Clark (Emilio Estevez):  World of Warcraft. It's popular. It's the "big man on campus". If a game were going to tape another game's buttocks together, it would probably be WoW doing the taping.
• "The Princess", Claire Standish (Molly Ringwald): EverQuest 2.  It's pretty, and some people think it is shallow, while others see that there is substance behind the graphics.
• "The Brain", Brian Johnson (Anthony Michael Hall): EVE Online. It's smart and popular with its fans, but compared to WoW, it's still a nerd. Also, there's something about being a ship that suggests failing shop class to me, but I can't quite figure out why. Maybe it is because it is one of those things that looked like it would be an "easy A", but turned out to be a bad point for some people (like me).
• "The Rebel", John Bender (Judd Nelson): Shadowbane. Carebears beware. (Suddenly I have a commercial for the Honda Fit in my head... Werewolves beware. The Fit is go. Darn you, Honda! Darn you to heck!)
• "The Basket Case", Allison Reynolds (Ally Sheedy): The Saga of Ryzom. It's quirky and not as popular as other games, but there's something interesting there if you can get past how different it is.

 I am tempted to cast EQ1 as Principal Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), for being a middle-aged pompous ass, and Asheron's Call (1) as Carl (John Kapelos), the janitor, but I'll have to think on that. I considered DDO for the nerd role, as well, for being the kind of game that would plan to commit suicide with a flare gun. And I was tempted to cast Star Wars Galaxies in the role of Bender because it seems to be what you'd get if devs thought burning their game with a cigar was a good corrective measure for disappointing performance. 

I am sure other people would cast things differently. Feel free to drop a comment with your suggestions if you have ideas of your own. I don't bite much. Or very hard.

*re: Radio Stations: WRDX is not my favorite radio station. Despite their claim that "It's All About Variety!", they don't play enough They Might Be Giants, Jethro Tull, Sarah McLachlan, or Cypress Hill for my tastes. I like variety with my variety. I think my radio recommendation du jour would be 'Groove Salad' on SomaFM.com. It's ambient music, good with a cup of coffee and excellent background music for writing, if you're into that sort of thing.

So, in a comment on my previous entry, diarheasauce said that LOTRO was the "WORST GAME EVA YO".

While I briefly planned on preordering LoTRO, I decided not to because I already have accounts in WoW, EQ, EQ2, SWG, DAoC, AO, and FFXI* that I have paid for in the past, and there just wasn't enough new on the table to entice me to drop the $500 on 2 boxes and 2 lifetime accounts like I had thought I would do. It's a solid enough game. It does have some features I like, like the achievements that give titles and/or other benefits. I'm not a huge LoTRO nerd**, so I was satisfied with the representation of Middle Earth. It just wasn't enough new to justify buying yet another game when I could just resubscribe to one of the ones that I already have. Anyway, I don't think it was the WORST GAME EVA.

I'd have to say that the game that gets my WORST GAME EVA vote (not counting complete vaporware) would have to be Dark and Light, for being an out-and-out total failure. Oz World comes in a close second, or might even tie,  for being a stupid concept ("online virtual chat/dating... with FISHING!") While I am sure some people love Oz and would disagree with my assessment, Dark and Light is a little harder to defend.

First, it was a pain to install and get running to begin with. The character customization (in terms of looks) was abysmal. The UI was awful. It ran like crap for me. And then there was the game itself. Would it be wrong to use "abysmal" twice in the same paragraph? I usually try to force myself to play a game a little bit before I uninstall it, but there was nothing that suggested to me that I wasn't going to just keep hating myself for every second I wasted on it.

SEED may have been a concept that some people had a hard time getting their head around, and it was really buggy, but it was STILL a better game that Dark and Light.  A lot of people dump on Horizons, but at least it had a couple of things going for it (crafting and dragons). Shadowbane might have stability and lag issues on top of a questionable UI, but...  Well, you probably know where this is going.

I don't hate Asian games like some people do, but I'd bet that even people who hate them would rather be forced to play a point-and-click grindfest than play DnL. Feel free to test this hypothesis.

*Re: FFXI: I think I'd actually have to pay for an account again because it has been more than 3 months, but at least I still have the disk.

**Re: Tolkien: You might think I'd be a mad crazy The Lord of The Rings fan, since I am into making up languages. I might share Tolkien's "Secret Vice," but I am not that wild about the books. I know. Heresy. Burn me at the stake already.  I thought the language bits were the best parts of the books AND the movies.

As a PS, I will likely be going to Georgia in a couple of days for a funeral. You can rest easy knowing that I won't be blogging for a few days. =P

I started off this morning having a fight with my husband about sex. Unlike arguments about money or kids, arguments about sex are deeply and unavoidably personal, which makes them just about the worst kind of argument to have. And then my dad called to tell me that my grandmother died this morning. She was very old and had been in poor health for a long time, but it is still a sad thing. And I am worried about my dad.

Happy 4th of July.

I think I'll distract myself from my misery with a few random bits of Net news.

Auto Assault is shutting down, as you've undoubtedly read on this very site. I tried Auto Assault briefly in beta and decided it wasn't for me. Nonetheless, I always feel a little sad when a game gets shut down. I feel bad for the people who enjoyed it and for the lost potential that might have been in that game. 

I thought that Asheron's Call 2 had potential right up until they shut the servers down. Potential that is unreached and unrealized is nothing more than wishful thinking, though, so there's probably little point in mourning what might have been.

I think Asheron's Call 2 pretty much made it clear for future games that NPCs are not expendable in a large scale, mass market release. Empty towns full of buildings you couldn't change or even enter didn't work so well without the illusion of life provided by townspeople NPCs.

Underlight didn't have those sort of NPCs, but it was a different animal. It was relatively small, RP enforced, and didn't have towns sitting around looking like they should have had people in them. The Underlight approach had its own unique problems, but it was worlds away from the model that's become the standard.

I've been wanting to write a blog entry here about mass-market MMORPGs vs. small niche games, but I haven't yet written it. Someone should kick me sometime later in the week to get on it. There is room on the Net for smaller community RP games in addition to big games like WoW, EQ2, LoTRO, and other new titles coming out in the near future. Small games don't have to suck; a game that emphasized the RP part of RPG would naturally draw a smaller crowd, but there may be room on the food chain for games that aren't aiming for even 100,000 subscribers. In fact, those games may already be out there.

On an Internet note, but having nothing whatsoever to do with MMORPGs, David Peterson gave Teonaht the 2007 Smiley Award. It was well-deserved. Grats to Sally Caves!  I realize that conlanging (er... constructing languages) is offtopic for this blog and this site, but it is my OTHER obsession, so I thought it was worth a mention. It's a happier topic than the death of my grandmother, anyway.