Well it’s been over 2 years since my last site update and I was due. Still in the testing phases but everything looks good so far. I much prefer the minimalist look and black on white is much easier on the eyes than the previous style.
I’ve added sharing buttons on each post, photos are working better, twitter is working and a few other small things have been updated.
Gone are the days of weeks of coding to get a website up. I sort of miss it!
I was/am a huge Lost fan. This is partly due to my curious nature but also due to the fact that the series had a mythical edge to it. Who doesn’t like myths? I have the entire series and decided to catch up recently.
There are strong parts and weak parts. Watching knowing what’s coming or rather why something is occurring now makes it a different experience yet a rewarding one all the same. Those tiny details I might have missed the first or second or third time now shine as beacons of structure. Also, since you know the “secret” of it all you tend to focus more on the characters and their intricacies. It’s really the only part that remains a mystery since their inner workings are never truly revealed. As the show progressed, they matured, grew and died. You become attached to them and kind of fit into their shoes.
The other interesting factor is that I’m now a father. The final episode aired a couple months before I had my daughter and re-watching the episodes with this new paradigm shifts my appreciation for it. I have a new appreciation for the links between the various characters. Their motivations, struggles, failures and triumphs have a tremendously different impact today compared to only 2 years ago.
The sense of loss of someone else when you yourself have little to lose is a fleeting emotion. You’re unable to properly empathize with them and that provides a different view to the show. With a new set of values today, I can better relate to all of the characters as I feel I’ve been in most of their shoes. I have been Charlie and had a hate for the world. I have been Bernard and dedicated to his better half. I had not been Claire to understand the loss of a child. Or Jack’s undying need for his father’s affection. These characters were shells to me. Great shells but shells that I could not see have any substance. Add a new life experience to the mix and the missing pieces of the puzzle are starting to fill. When the picture is complete, when you can grasp the intricacies that people put so much effort into portraying, you really gain a new appreciation of the art form.
Finally, the flipside is that as a human I can take those on-screen experiences and put myself into those situations. This has an effect of making you reflect on your own priorities and values. This added introspection is welcome and the true sign of personal growth. So in a way, I have grown alongside these characters and though my struggles have been different, we each have gained insight into the true meaning of our lives and I am thankful for the trip.
Blizzard has been doing a post-mortem on Cataclysm and MMO-Champion has some links to it all. Of all the items listed, this one quote sticks out to me.
Finally, we wanted to deliver all of this content more aggressively. We know players can only wait so long for something new to do before they start to get bored. This has been a goal for some time, but it has been a challenging one for us. When you compare the graphic fidelity of a raid like Firelands to an older raid like Molten Core, you can imagine how it takes both more time and more people to make a raid these days. That’s exactly the opposite of what we want to be doing though, which is providing players content at faster rates.
This is a point of considerable pain for Blizzard that has been largely ignored for years. UO and EQ didn’t really have this problem as the content was either so complex or hard that it was rarely consumed in its entirety by the next expansion. Blizzard followed that mentality up until the end of Burning Crusade and honestly, even the competition was in-line.
Flash forward to Lich King (late 2008) and the era of Facebook games. Even the iTunes store was starting to gain traction and Blizzard took the route of easy content that could be repeated in short time frames. Sadly, they kept their raid structure well out of reach of the “common” person until nearly 4 years later so that the actual content they pushed out in patches was never consumed nor even planned on being consumed. The “little details” like 1 dungeon every 4 months got consumed in 2 weeks and people just started quitting.
Move up to the start of Cataclysm and many, many games are on the market. F2P is all over the place and Rift is coming along nicely. Developers are keeping with the easy to consume aspect but also selling the content in small chunks at a rather rapid pace. Balance is certainly an issue but with a breath of content to explore and nearly all of it being modular, devs can get a significant patch out every 1-2 months. Blizzard remains firmly in the 3-4 month content race and when content does come out, it’s recycled content for 3-5 years ago. Quite a head scratcher.
So here we are in 2012 where the consumer is willing to buy content that will only last a few weeks, maybe a month and a bit, then move on. An MMO tourist if you will. Think about it, you could spend 15$ a month and easily play DCUO, LOTRO, DDO and Fallen Earth with cash to spare at the end. Rift has had 7 major content patches since launch. TOR has had 1 since launch (3 months now). Blizzard has had 3 since Cata launched 18 months ago (yes, 18 months already) and their next expansion is at least another 3 months down the road.
Looking at the structure of the MMO world today and Blizzard’s inability to stop the hemorrhage of players it’s fair, I think, to point the finger squarely at Blizzard and say “if you want me to pay you, give me something to pay for” as the alternatives are currently all more attractive. Blizzard has always seemed to be ahead of the curve when it comes to innovation but in this single regard, we’re looking at a lumbering behemoth trying to be agile. Time remains to see if they can actually put their words to action.
Let’s say the game is an MMO and has the following features:
I ask this because this is the feature set that World of Warcraft launched with in 2004. I should know, I played at the time and I still thought it was amazing. Why you aks? Because my alternatives were Ultima Online (1997), Everquest (1999), Asheron’s Call (1999) and Dark Age of Camelot (2001). That’s right, there was a 3 year gap between the last game and WoW in terms of AAA MMOs. When WoW came out it polished all the bad stuff in the other games, made it look good (really good for a 3d game at the time) and added some features.
That being said, if you were to compare that feature set then to today’s gamespace, you couldn’t get 100 people to buy it. The same goes for all the other games that came before it. If they were to relaunch now, with the feature set they had when WoW launched, they would fail. They still exist for one reason, people have grown with the games. Find me someone who started playing UO in 2009 and I have some canned steam to sell you.
Massively’s last Soapbox covers this topic from another direction. The claim that an MMO can only succeed if it does X, and only X, is ridiculous. There are literally dozens of successful MMOs on the planet, some are P2P, others F2P and others are even hybrids. There are multiple paths for each game to try and the goal at the end of the day is to make money. When there is no more money to be made, the game shuts down. Looking at UO, you would think it would have shut down after 15 (!!!) years, even with people claiming the game died years ago. Yet here we are, still looking at it going fairly strong. If you spend your time complaining that a game 5+ years ago did it best and aren’t playing that game now, it really comes off as hypocritical.
Now from the other side of the same coin, perhaps you don’t like a game because of feature X. In the past, if you didn’t like it you had to suck it up since there weren’t any real options. Today if you don’t like a game there are plenty others that are willing to take you in. This does mean that people are moving around more, trying new games and old ones, to find that combination of features that pleases their palette. There is no “perfect” game for the masses. If there was, we wouldn’t have so many working at the same time.
Syp has a good MMO timeline that shows what game launched when and which ones are no longer with us.
I’ve already posted what I think about how BioWare and EA are handling the Mass Effect 3 launch. The cherry on the sundae is IGN though. I mean really.
The entire review screams “I bought this review”. I really couldn’t care less how good the game is when the entire screen is plastered with ads for the game being reviewed. We’re at a point in the industry where the big guys throw money at the wall and hope something sticks and the small guys take a brilliant idea and perfect it. 2011 was an amazing year for gamers, specifically the fall period. This year though, other than ME3, what is there to look forward for on consoles? Assassin’s Creed 3 and maybe Bioshock Infinite? PC players will get Diablo 3 (maybe) and a dozen other smaller games.
It’s an interesting time to be a gamer – even more so for a console gamer. It just seems like if you’re not an FPS player, there just isn’t a really good reason to own a console anymore. PCs (and laptops in particular) are just making such a strong push with their distribution models and plain ol’ variety that my boxes are collecting dust in the basement.
Anyways, here’s hoping BW can hit one out of the park this time. DA2 and SWTOR were such huge disappointments that this is really the last kick at the can I can give them without future blind purchases. Right now, Naughty Dog, Rocksteady and Blizzard are the only other ones sharing that list.
Darth Hater has a good sum of the Guild Summit that happened this weekend.
There are some interesting tidbits
So all in all, lots of stuff they talked about. Some good questions were asked and the answers were fine. It still marks me as funny that TOR is admitting their economics/crafting system is clearly broken and the 2 most demanded items (LFG and Dual Spec) are still many months away. Still, there’s progress. I guess I’ll keep the game on my radar and once those two features are on, I’ll jump in.
Oh, the most interesting item I read was that nearly 40% of players did Operations (raids). I have to say that an 8 man raid, that has 5 bosses and takes as much time as a dungeon (and less challenge) sure does make for accessible content. Rift did this with, uh, rifts but it’s nice to see that this trend is continuing. Will be interesting to see how WoW adapts to this “standard”.
IGN has a decent post (wow) about how gamers are turned off by trash talkers. This gist is that 1/3 of all people stop playing games because of other people.
This is the #1 reason I don’t enjoy competitive FPS games and abhor most PvP in MMOs. There are players of all calibers and I can accept that. Some people cannot and the stuff that comes out of their mouths is insane. I guess they have such low self esteem that they need to put other people down to feel better about themselves. I can’t see any other reason for it. Helping a player improve rewards both you and them. Degrading them makes them worse (they quit) and doesn’t provide you with any in-game benefit.
I also think that the gaming medium has a huge impact. Starcraft is a perfect example of where players are competitive yet respectful. You’ll see a “GG” every game. Swap to a Call of Duty game though and you’d be lucky to find a single person say that in a week.
I wonder when the game companies will instill an ignore system where the matches no longer include people who are on each other’s lists. The main issue here is that most ignore lists are too small. I know in WoW mine was at the cap after the first month. If I were to ignore 5 or more people in an FPS, it wouldn’t take long for me to hit the 1000 mark. Maybe devs could put a temporary ban on people who hit certain milestones? Let’s say 500 people report you, no matter the cause, that’s one heck of a red flag and you get a temp ban. Hit the 5000 mark and you’re just done. Then again, CoD has 4 million players, piles of bungholes and rakes in cash. It’s hard to say that they would up their subscriber base if they magically banned 10% or more of their existing base.
Holy shart. Two things.
First, TOR is dropping the price of all high end mounts by a truckload and artifice items are available on vendors – until patch 1.2. Let me say that mounts are not expensive at 50. You should have 1 million + in your bank by that point and mounts are 200K. It’s enough but nothing like WoW were it took weeks at max level to get a mount (until Lich King). Artifice items, specifically color gems, going to vendors is mind boggling. They are putting the only unique item that Artifice has – and that is never replaced at 50 – on vendors for at least a month. That’s just crazy. No matter what they do in patch 1.2, they have effectively destroyed the market on color gems for a solid 6 months.
Second, they are asking plays in Austin (near their HQ) to help test 1.2. This is a paid position, one weekend a month. Now let’s get something straight here. When you need to pay your clients to test your game, you have some SERIOUS issues. These aren’t minor things, this is when you are saying “our internal testing is crap, our test server is crap, we don’t have a clue how to get this to work and we’re making massive changes”. Imagine if Ford sent you a letter asking you to test drive a prototype car.
It’s like the more I read about TOR, the more I shake my head thinking what they got themselves into. I’ve been in the MMO world for 15 years (UO launch, wow that’s a while back) and I’ve seen games come and go. I usually have a pretty good idea if a game will work long-term or not. TOR has rung so many, many bells that I don’t see how they can continue on their current path and maintain success. This huge re-write in 1.2 just makes me think of NGE (in Star Wars Galaxies) where the devs put up their hands and say they give up, here’s a new game. I really hope they can pull this off as the future of the subscription MMO hinges on this being somewhat successful.
Just… wow. I’m at a loss.
I’m trying a few different things with the site layout. Will try to better integrate Twitter and blogrolls and other tools as I see fit. Been a long time since I re-did the site like this.
All the same, I was talking with some folk at work about social shifts and a topic I take to heart came up. Kids leaving high school right now were born when the internet was around (1995 – so 17 years old). They have never known a time without it. My kid will never know a time without ease of computing (such as tablets) and ease of data access. How do you, as a parent or adult, teach your kids how to be responsible with that much power when you don’t use it or understand it yourself? It’s like the grumpy uncle who says “turn down that crappy music”.
We’re not talking about music anymore but the way kids see the entire world. What a world it is.
I’ve been over how TOR lacks content but more specifically lacks the actual mechanics to make that content work. Every single system has a major flaw and most are being addressed in 1.2 – or should be.
Well, I went back to Rift since I had time left on the account. They are 1 year in and have 7 content patches. WoW is nearly 18 months and has 3. I wanted to compare a bit between both systems. WoW has a Looking for Raid (LFR) tool set to get people together to raid. Cool, only 5% of their playerbase was seeing their raid content. Now it’s closer to 30%, good job. Rift doesn’t have that tool but they do have alternatives. Rift has Instant Adventures and Chronicles. The former is a non-stop set of 5-10 minute quests you can do with 1-20 people. The latter is a set of dungeons for 2 people. Both are accessible from the interface.
Rift also borrows from EQ in having an alternate advancement system for level 50s. Where typically at level 50 you are defined by your gear, in here you get additional experience from playing and get to assign points for extra abilities. These are more planar charges (for special abilities), more stats (about 30, half a piece of gear) or some speed increases. Nothing earth shattering but still some nice flavor. It’s a reason to keep playing if you’re not a raider since you get something in 5 minutes of work.
They also have faction grinds (like WoW) with bind to account rewards for a lot of it (like WoW) so that a single character has to go through it to get the cool rewards. This means that less players have the rewards (since the grind can be longer) but as a player, you don’t have to redo it for every character.
Dungeons are balanced, new crafting recipes were launched, there’s a world event on at all times with costume/pet rewards, there are multiple gearing streams, PvP has 6 instances that you can choose from, always invasions somewhere – the list goes on about how accessible the content is. What Rift learned from WoW and EQ has been expanded on. WoW could learn a LOT from what was put in here and TOR could shut down for 2 months and still not catch up in terms of mechanics/content.
A game is judged by what I can do within it. When I logged into TOR I could only PvP since the raid and dungeons were practically inaccessible due to their systems. I couldn’t craft or make money. When I log into WoW, I can raid, dungeons, collect, PvP, craft, explore, achieve and more. Rift does that and adds 6 other things to do. How do people put up with a game that doesn’t let you do anything more than pick your nose?
Leo's Life 