Originally posted by Teiman

What you comment in this article, methinks is private to these people, and sould not be commented publicy in a website.

but thats me.. 

I can promise you this - there are no statements in that entire article that apply to one single individual. What I said applies, for better or for worse, to multiple people. And I'm told that the same is true across many industries, which vaguely depresses me.

People are broken. And people are magnificent, too. Usually the same people are both, if that makes sense.

Originally posted by Khalathwyr

Wait. So, would we (and by "we" I mean forum goers, game players) fall into that "anoymous dillweed" category for the things we say about them? Cause I have done so on more than a few occaisions (stating that they've lost touch with the spark that created this genre, etc...an example can be found here that I wrote today.) If so, don't get me wrong, I'm not upset at being called a dillweed (been called much worse, lol!!), I just don't put my real name out there because of you never know when something you write will piss someone off enough that they come after you. Sure, I have 8 years Army behind me and my home is a miniature armory, but have you ever tried to clean blood out of a carpet?

That and I don't think most of my jabs are hidden, lol.

No, and I'm not explaining myself well.

Right now, on several forums, there are people posting under newly created identities just to make cheap shots at someone they don't know, and they've made no effort to talk to anyone informed. That's a dillweed.

People who say "die in a fire" over a video game in any sense but an ironic one are dillweeds.

But I don't think an observation counts as dillweed behavior. And I clearly don't think using a forum handle is in and of itself dillweed behavior, although it is often a contributing factor.

I do think that if you are part of the game industry, you have a responsibility to identify yourself as such, either by affiliation or by your actual name. But plenty of people that I love and respect feel differently about this, and I don't claim to be walking the one true path or anything. For myself, I have made a point for the last eight years of using some variation of my real name everywhere that I post, and if I'm posting on behalf of a studio, then I use "NameOfProduct RealName" as my handle. Just so everyone knows where and for what I stand.

I didn't always feel that way, but I like to think I learned from my youthful idiocy.

Originally posted by Belsameth

Nice writeup. I also can't help but think there's a bunch of hidden jabs at Mark Jacob.

This went through ten drafts. If there were hidden jabs at anyone, I either deleted them or made them more obvious.

That's actually part of my motivation for writing this column - the anonymous dillweeds taking hidden jabs. My actual friends in the industry have their names on their posts, or spell out their job titles, past and present.

But that's another rant.

I can't speak to Xblade's whole list, obviously. But I can refute two points:

"* Annoying little bugs that add up to drive you crazy over time, like when harvesting, if you don't wait exactly 2 seconds+ between harvesting nodes, you'll automatically fail and use up a node charge. This is extremely frustrating. Or you'll cancel a spell and start running, and you'll randomly stop to continue the spell, causing unnecessary aggro."

I encountered neither of these issues from levels 1-10.

Yeah. I keep the horns filed, though.

Edit to add: What I mean is that I wrote press releases in my first two post-college jobs, and my experience in the game industry proved that there was nothing new under the sun. I do think it's funny when people take press releases literally.

I did say, straight up, that I didn't actually get to try the PVP. That is why I didn't review it. This was a first look - what the game looked like at first!

Unless I get to do some PVP, I won't be the reporter who writes the review.

The people I've talked to from the beta assure me that PVP is not an afterthought, and that the class balancing was done using PVP fights as the standard, not PVE fights. And certainly what I saw of the interface and the anti-exploit stuff, it seems to be true.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

Originally posted by ronan32

finally a real pvp experience, asians mmo's do pvp the right way.

 

What a ridiculous statement.  Most of their pvp was copied from US games lol.

I think Aion will do quite well initially, that is until the botters take over.  NCSoft has in the past refused to control them and we all know how badly they can destroy any game.

You are... just wrong, with your first statement. Asian MMOs have always focused on PVP, and the only US MMO to assume PVP was the point of the game was UO. At least until Shadowbane came along. I assure you that no Koreans have ever copied anything from Shadowbane.

However, you're pretty on target with the second comment, at least historically. I do think that NCsoft is planning to take more action this time around. I didn't say it in the review, but there appear to be several tools built into the interface to report/deal with bots.

Originally posted by Snowdonia

While the review was fairly accurate and well done, there is one comment that is completely incorrect and probably deserves a correction or retractment.

"which is ironic given that accessing the microtransaction stuff requires a membership"

Sorry, but no. The Marketplace does NOT require you to be a member to partake in it. The TAB you were on, which is the first tab the Marketplace open up to, does indeed require membership, but only those items listed in that tab.

If you look at the bottom of the Marketplace window (and it's shown in the full screenshot) there are 8 buttons (tabs) of catagories you can choose from that most of the items in them are membership free. Again, the only items that are member only are the ones listed in that first catagory. When looking at other catagories, those member only items get shuffled into them as well but everything else in the 7 other catagories, are for everyone.

 

DOH.

Thanks... /blush.

This game is not an MMO in the traditional sense of the word. If I had been grading it as one, I'd have given it a lousy score for having no discernable community building, no sense of persistence, and no balance... all things I mentioned in the review.

But the game isn't trying to be a traditional MMO. It's trying to be its own unholy mixture of an MMO, Club Penguin, MSN Game Zone, Pogo, and more. And it succeeds very well at those things.

Saying it fails at being WOW or EVE is like looking at a beagle and saying, "You don't purr, you don't climb trees, and you are totally unaffected by catnip! You are a failure at being a cat!"

I wanted to make the review a full look at the game, so anyone booting it up would know exactly what they were getting into.

Thanks for all the pretty words, guys :)

Oof. I guess I should have mentioned I game off a Fios connection, and so I never noticed any problems.

Though I did play at two different airports without pain - maybe because I tended to play minigames? I did quest, but mostly in one area.

Originally posted by kopema

Originally posted by Szark

The whole thing feeds on itself until the entire hall is overflowing with hope, expectation, and excitement.

 

I had to read that last word twice.

Cackle. I bet I know which word you thought it was, too.

Eyes: This is the sixth column in a "behind the scenes" series, to show people the kind of stuff that simply isn't in most writeups. Read the rest of the entries.

Holy guacamole, I didn't expect so many comments!

In no particular order:

- Yes, I think Turbine "gets it" in a way few other studios do, but LOTRO as a license helps a lot. I don't mind running back and forth within one single town when the story is exciting - like the two hobbits in love quest one of you mentioned - but I mind a lot when I'm supposed to run from one end of the map to the other for a stupid non-story related reason. There's a dev in every studio that gets off on doing that. I don't know why.

- I didn't mind kill ten rats in EQ because that was my first MMO. I tried AC, couldn't get past the art style. That was part of my problem in WOW, too. I'm not a big graphics snob, but I do have major aesthetic preferences.

- Speaking of Kill Ten Rats... I just want to pimp these guys: http://www.killtenrats.com/

- Y'all saying that MMO studios are willfully interpreting the data so they can save money and use any old warm body as a quest writer aren't entirely wrong. But you are missing one basic thing - the metrics prove people are skipping the text, period. Not skipping the text if it's not well written, not skipping some and not others, not reading some lengths and not others. Customers are slapping the "gimme quest" button within two seconds. They are not reading the text, no matter what it says. If writers bury key clues in the text, the only result is a bunch of customer service tickets from people who can't solve the quest because they didn't read the text.

I suspect this is less true in LOTRO because if you're into LOTRO, you're into the lore, as some of you have pointed out.

- I haven't tried DDO since the third week it was out. It launched without dungeons or dragons, so I was not really into it. I meant to give it another shot ever since I heard about the massive improvements, and just haven't had the time.

Originally posted by Seen_Justice

Originally posted by Flummoxed

another slightly more sane way of breaking into games is the QA (Quality Assurance) aka Test dept.

• Same low pay,
• same long hours,
• same mind numbing / soul crushing work,
• same controlled substance abuse during lunch,
• same learning the business and interacting with all departments in the company,
• same leg up into art / music / programming / producer depts,

BUT

no customers to deal with.

 

I totally agree with that.

Me three - but some studios have caught on to this dodge, and QA is considered a promotion from CS.

Sorry to kill the buzz.

Thanks for the kind words, guys. Credit goes to some old friends from the pits I've known who proofed this baby for me.

The real problem with satire is that it resonates differently for different people. I showed a draft of this to three people - one chuckled, one wiped tears of laughter from his eyes, and the third went "Uh, weak."

That's pretty good for someone with my sense of humor. Usually, most people think my humor is weak.

I tend to think that if you gotta tell people it's a joke, it loses 30% of the funny - the intro was written after the fact at editorial insistence. See the whip marks? They burn.

Humor, sadly, is not like stepping on a land mine.

Copeland: Nah, man, it's cool. I was joking with you - see my first post in the thread.

And thank you for the helpful list of article suggestions. I'll do my best.

Originally posted by Copeland

This was a blog or a rant?

Sorry but if you feel the need to write an article saying that an IT company (and all mmo developers are an IT company) cares about its backbone, you're probably dumber than the people saying "this company doesn't care about server stability". Or your just ranting.. either way, this blog equates too.. Pepsi really cares about its taste!..

duh.

 

I feel better now.

@Bel: hahahahahahahahahaha

I tell people that your sins follow you forever on the internet, and here you are proving it!

I don't regret most of those. Some were me being young and ignorant. Some were me being drunk and maudlin. All of them were funny at the time. Thanks for dredging them up for me, I lost the originals years ago.

After so many years doing community, I'm totally confused by kindness and approval. But thank you :)

Slushies - ah yes, my euphemism for "some of you people have driven me to drink, and it will take at least four shots of Jager to erase the memory of this day, but I can't talk directly about my incipient alcoholism on this website." Sweet memories!

@Vickykol - you, madam, assuming you are in fact a madam, are 100% correct and I wish I had a do-over for this article. I should have included those reasons. I personally play on Brandywine when I'm playing LOTRO because of those reasons, and would not transfer off for any incentive despite occasional queues and instability. But I also know that to keep my crackling chat channels, I'm gonna have to eat the lag. Maybe if everyone had to click something that said "This server is overloaded and occasionally crashes. Is it worth it to you? YES/NO." Because in most cases, the devs cannot do anything immediate about it, and can't give you an ETA on a fix at all.

It would help if dev people would pick a freaking engine suitable for their announced design, wouldn't it?

@Akousmata - what's it called if you're playing devil's advocate with someone widely considered to be Satan's minion? ;)

Okay, srsly - "write good clean code" - I have a followup next week from a technical director that goes into this a bit, so let me know what you think then.

The WAR Minion for my team, Richard, pointed me at this thread. Hi, Minion :)

We have all of GW's Games Day dates marked on our website, since they've told us they plan to talk about WAR every chance they get. Whether or not *Mythic employees* attend each event will vary depending on our schedule. Our attendance in Toronto was always tentative, which is too bad as I really, REALLY love Toronto - a love affair dating back to a Camelot party wherein I wound up on a hotel balcony at 3:00 AM with a bunch of players and some beer. But I digress.

I wasn't there, so I don't want to assume anything, but we certainly didn't "fail to show at the last minute." The only movie we have has been available online for a month now, so I have no idea what didn't "arrive in time." It's the internet. It's always in time! I really don't think our partners would have said anything nasty about us. We've really been enjoying the hell out of working with GW.

BTW, um, what's not to like about our E3 reception? As far as I can tell, practically everyone loved us. You can read what people DID say, and the awards we did get despite being more than a year from launch, at http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/news/pressCoverage/

We wouldn't have had anything new to say in Toronto that we didn't say the week before at E3 and then in Baltimore. (Our office is a short drive from Baltimore, BTW - it didn't cost any money for us to attend that one :))

Anyway, we weren't ever sure that we were going to the Toronto Games Day, but after I looked at our website, I feel like we should have been more clear. We'll be making changes to let you guys know if Mythic people are going to be GW's guests at each particular show. I'm very sorry for the misunderstanding, and I hope to make it up to the Canadians soon.