Wilhelm Arcturus

More items have been revealed that will be coming to the existing Blizzard cash store.

MMO Champion has a lovely write-up with videos and pictures of the new stuffs.

There are lovely helms with animation that are purely for transmog, and some cute functional items, one for playing on a teeter-totter and another item that gives mounts to a whole raid.. temporarily, I’m sure.

This is causing me to stop and re-evaluate my position on the store concept.

Er, wait.. why?

Here is what my true, inner-gut reaction was to the new items that were revealed.

“Wow, those helms are incredibly cool. That ice helm in particular is just amazing. And the hitching post to give your entire raid team the look of a thundering army on top of the same horse model? What a neat concept.”

“But why are they putting such cool items with excellent art assets in a store to buy instead of in the game I already pay for? If they’re going to be spending development resources making a LOT of super-cool items in a short period of time, I expect them to be included in the game somewhere to find or earn.”

That was my true reaction. I could lie, but that is how I felt, and it made me question a few things about my attitude towards the game itself.

I’ve long said I love World of Warcraft for what it is, and you’ll have to pry my account from my cold, dead fingers. Or, y’know, close the servers down. When the last fortress on Azeroth is overrun, I’ll be the one lowering the Alliance flag.

What I didn’t realize was how much the monthly subscription fee was a part of my ‘WoW for life’ attitude.

Items for sale aren’t new to the game. That’s the funny thing. There have long been really cool items that you can only get by spending extra money, in some cases massive wads of cash, just to add them into the game we pay a subscription for.

I had no problem with those, so why would this be any different?

It all comes down to what I’ve felt was an unspoken agreement between me as a monthly subscriber and Blizzard as a content provider.

I will continue to pay my subscription fee every month, and in exchange Blizzard will continue to have their development team focused on creating and releasing fresh content for me to enjoy.

When we ask for more features, such as player housing, if the answer is “We are using those resources to create more quests instead, we prioritize our development resources on what will benefit the majority of players in the game, new quests for all or limited content for a few. You have to choose between the features you want and new content”, I accept that answer at face value.

When I suddenly see a flood of cool, fresh new items that have beautiful art assets/designs, and those items are going to be only for those who spend real cash money on them, I get irritated.

Those items look quite a lot nicer than a lot of what I see in the game. Sorry, but it’s true. There is some very nice art in there. There is genuine effort going into making those specifically desirable over items in the game.

The reason I’ve enjoyed the items previously in the Blizzard cash store has been their scarcity. They are few, and there has traditionally been a long time between new item releases.

A single pet design dropped in the store has never bothered me, when it’s both optional AND couldn’t possibly use up that many resources to make. A single pet every 4 months isn’t gonna kill anyone, and could even be a nice chore passed off to an intern. No worries.

If they are going to ramp up the design and production of a bunch of items that require unique art design and special coding, enough not just for three cute items in a Trading Card game run but a slew to populate a new store, I’m going to have a problem reconciling the use of those development assets on store shit instead of the game I pay for.

If you’ve got those assets available, then it is a conscious choice to use them for store stuff for added revenue instead of the content that has been asked for over the years, such as player housing.

No real changes here to what I do. I’m not rage quitting or even remotely thinking about it. Still paying to play the game, still having fun.

I can feel the quake, though. In my mind, we had a deal. I pay to play, you put the majority of your effort into stuff to drop in the game for me to enjoy.

I pay the money for the new expansions, for three accounts. I never cancel or suspend any of my accounts. Over the lifetime of the game, that’s been some investment on my part, and I’ve had my fun out of it, no question.

The deal has worked well, for both sides I think.

If you put in a cash store, I’m going to look very carefully at how much development time is going into the items there, and I’m going to be comparing, in my mind, the quality and style of those items over what is being added into the game for subscription payers.

If I start to feel that the best and brightest A-game materials are being reserved for the cash store, I’ll revisit my part of our agreement.

The quality of the game I play has been solid, never had any reason to complain, and I’m not starting now.

Just a fair warning. I’ve played other microtransaction driven games, I’m cynical as all hell about how they work based on actual experience, and I’ve got my eye on you.

I received a comment a couple weeks back, that if EVE Online players could do away with the general misogyny that is not uncommon among male gamers, if EVE Online could do away with such things as pornfleets and comments such as "tits or GTFO", then more women would flock to EVE Online.

I can certainly agree that if there were an attitude adjustment among some of the male subscriber-base of EVE Online, it would certainly make for a more comfortable gaming environment for women, thus increasing the percentage of women playing EVE. No doubt about it. Though, I argue that increase would be small. Perhaps on the order of only a couple percentage points.

Negative attitudes toward women are certainly not issues restricted to EVE Online alone. The attitude exists in any online game, from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy. Yet, why do those games have a higher percentage of female gamers? Perhaps because those games have more to offer, are more attractive to the woman gamer, thus their threshold for negativity is higher.

The ratio of men to women in EVE Online is currently estimated to be around 19:1. Five percent of the playerbase are female. If an attitude adjustment were to occur, maybe that jumps to seven or eight percent. Any increase is a welcome increase, of course.

EVE Online's larger problems in attracting female gamers are few-fold:  that it is hard science fiction, that the developed character plays such a small role in player-to-player interaction, and that EVE is difficult to roleplay.

47% of gamers are currently female. What sorts of games attract them?

You can correlate female interest in science fiction with women in science. Whereas "women comprise 48 percent of the U.S. workforce [they comprise] just 24 percent of workers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields."

You can correlate further with science fiction programming on television. The fourth season of Battlestar Galactica had a female viewership of only 25%. The Star Treks and Stargates have had similar numbers. Contrast that with fantasy programming – such as Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood – and the female audience rises to 45% to 60% of total viewers.

This is reflected in gaming. The highest female figures tend to be in non-science fiction and non-military oriented games. You'll find higher female numbers in games such as The Sims and World of Warcraft, than in games such as Halo or Starcraft. For World of Warcraft, an estimated 38% of players are women.

EVE Online is already on its back foot in this regard. EVE is marketed as hard sci-fi (the actual "science" in EVE not withstanding.) That's already a detriment if attracting more female players is a goal. Second, nearly everything that one does in EVE serves the military industrial complex. EVE is very much a game about militarization.

Women tend to prefer games that focus on interpersonal contact, whether with real people (in MMOs and multiplayers) or NPC-only (such as in games like The Sims or the Final Fantasy series.) Women tend to want to interact with their games at a more personal level, even if said interaction is programmatic.

This sort of interpersonal contact is made difficult in EVE when you're playing not a character, but a spaceship. The interpersonal is made difficult when you're a small bit of iconography on screen. There is no standing in front of someone. There are no animated emotes. There is no dancing. You're an object, and you fly to and fro, where distances are measured in kilometres when pals are on grid with you. There's certainly an element of the interpersonal via chat windows, but that lacks a certain expressiveness that a character and emote system can supply. If something pleases you in World of Warcraft, you can do a happy dance. You can't even waggle your ship in EVE.

Even EVE's questing system is impersonal. The characters in those quests are meaningless, and if you spend any amount of time missioning, you tend to "save" the same people over and over again. The interactions with those NPCs are entirely unidirectional and one-dimensional. They "talk" to you via a text box, and that communication is not at all interactive. The person you're interacting with is nothing more than a profile image. Hardly the sort of NPC-style interaction that women gamers prefer, which are the sorts of pseudo-dynamic NPC interactions found in games such as The Sims and World of Warcraft.

Whereas EVE has a backstory, it is not particularly prevalent in the game itself. The missioning system rarely touches upon the backstory. The missioning system rarely expands upon the backstory. There are the epic mission arcs, to be sure, but they are few and far between. You can count the number of epic mission arcs on two hands.

Few people know who the major NPC characters are in New Eden. The game never allows players to interact with them. The only time you ever hear of them are via news reports on the EVE Online website, and few people even pay attention to those.

The characteristics of the four races are ephemeral at best. The Gallente are democratic. The Caldari are capitalists. The game already directs every player, no matter race, into capitalist activities (EVE is a market-driven game, after all.) How does one play a democrat, when democratic principles are not game mechanics? Whereas one could latch onto these ideals, it is difficult to express them uniquely within a character, and be able to demonstrate those ideals through the game.

There's certainly roleplaying in EVE Online, but it's a niche activity. Roleplayers in EVE tend to be insignificant in the grand scheme of the game. They rarely have an impact on the grander player-driven conflicts, which are usually unrelated to any of EVE's backstory.

That the gameplay of EVE is player-driven would suggest a higher level of roleplay than in other games, but the reasons for these stories very rarely have anything to do with the history or characters of New Eden. Goonswarm does not attack Fountain because of some perceived slight by the Serpentis, they do so wholly outside of any stories CCP have created for their universe. Real roleplay (in my opinion, of course) is not only taking on a character, but fitting that character into the backstory of the milieu. Very few players do that. We create our own stories, but we're not really concerned with how those stories interact with the story of New Eden.

EVE Online is severely lacking in areas of gameplay that attract female gamers. To invest in an increase in female subscribers would be to develop into areas of the game that might turn away current subscribers. EVE Online would need a more immersive environment for interpersonal contact, and that would mean further expanding upon WiS (walking in stations.) The game would need a greatly expanded, and non-repetitive questing system, that is better woven into the New Eden backstory and history. Is this development that CCP is willing to tackle? Probably not. The scope of each, the development time required, would be a risky proposition.

EVE Online will likely remain a game that is simply not attractive to the general female audience. If CCP wants more female gamers, their best bet would be to focus that intiative on World of Darkness. That game has all the elements that would be attractive to female gamers – fantasy, roleplay, interpersonal contact. Even if World of Darkness is a sandbox game similar to EVE Online (i.e., cruel, harsh and relentless in its gameplay), it will still offer an experience more attractive to women gamers.

EVE Online's major problem is not the attitudes of its male gamers. (It is still a problem, and should be corrected, it is just not the primary problem.) Those attitudes are prevalent across the gaming spectrum, and yet certain genres still attract women despite negative attitudes towards them. These negative attitudes should certainly be stamped out, but they are not the primary reasons why more women do not play EVE Online.


Sources
Breckon, Nick. Nielsen Estimates 400,000+ Female World of Warcraft Players in US. shacknews.com, 2009.
Entertainment Software Association. 2012 Sales, Demographic, and Usage Data. theesa.com, 2012.
Hamilton, Erin. The Girl Gamer's Manifesto. gamespot.com, 2008.
Seidman, Robert. SciFi Scores Best Year Ever in all Key Demographics. tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com, 2008.
Wikipedia. Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (United States). en.wikipedia.org.

Blizzard and CCP have announced a partnership that will involve the merging of Eve, Dust 514, and Bliizard's flagship product World of Warcraft. It appears that although this joint game will be developed by both companies, CCP and Blizzard will not join to become a new corporate entity. The merger is due to take place around December 2013, suiting Eve and WoW's natural expansion cycle.

The mechanics were detailed quite thoroughly on Blizzard's website, and although some of them will not affect either of the games, some of them will completely revolutionise them. Firstly, a new planet will be added in Jita called Azeroth. This is where the WoW characters will be stationed regardless of their level. However, the Jita Azeroth will only contain the highest population realm, with the second largest realm being housed in the Azeroth in the Perimeter system, the third in Urlen, the fourth in Amarr and so on until all realms will have their own version of Azeroth in 983 of Eve's systems. There will also be 983 versions of Outland, but this time the least popular realm will have its Outland in Jita, and so on.

On any one of these 983 versions of Azeroth, a level 90 World of Warcraft character will be able to board a rocket and fly into a station in the planet's orbit. Once there, they will be free to purchase a new space mount using gold. The entirety of the Eve Universe will become the level 90-95 zone that players who wish to grind to the new level cap will visit, with the main areas of space being separated by the level of the new NPCs (more below) that will inhabit them. Empire space will be used by characters who are level 90-91, nullsec by people that are level 92-93, and finally wormhole space is level 94-95.

The WoW characters will be able to fly a spaceship mount (resembling a shuttle) to locations where specific quest givers are. These new quest givers will either be situated in Data Centres that already exist within highsec, or they will be added as agents in space in lowsec, nullsec and wormhole space.

The quests that these agents give will be similar in format to the ones that already exist in WoW, and will feature tasks that involve killing ships, collecting items and going to different places, with gold and experience being rewarded as is the current system now. It seems that PVE will involve attacking several new types of primitive alien species which will attack an unprotected WoW player when they enter an asteroid belt, but will leave Eve players alone. Eve ships won't be able to attack WoW characters directly with weapons, but will be able to ram them to death, or fry them if they get too close to the engines.

The Dust integration comes into play in the PVP aspect of the expansion, where 20v20 teams consisting of both mercs and WoW players will fight on one of Eve's many planets. It's not quite clear how this will be balanced due to WoW players having hundreds of times more health than Dust mercs,  some change would be necessary to prevent an even larger fail cascade of Dust players. At the end of the round, honour points will be given to players which can be redeemed at a station in Rancer. These points can be used to purchase monocules for WoW characters, or traditional WoW equipment for Dust characters.

Eve players will now be able to enter the atmosphere of an Azeroth and shoot people on the planet, regardless of their race or level. Thanks to the speed and power of ships, a handful of frigates will be able to ravage an entire continent. A new 'local channel' will also be added to ensure that the WoW players can communicate their frustration to their space comrades. It has also been speculated that the planet collision models won't be fixed, and players will be able to drive massive ships through a capital city which will kill everyone inside.

The backstory will tell the saga by saying the 983 versions of Azeroth were pulled from a parallel universe, and ended up in the same galaxy. The Eve factions descended onto all of these Azeroths and gave them the knowledge of space flight, allowing them to construct rockets and 'breathe' in space, thus allowing them to move around without a ship. The primitive NPC 'monsters' are said to have followed their low-IQ prey to New Eden by utilising portals developed by tracing the scent of the character's locations. Although Eve's NPC factions are amicable towards the WoW world due to its cuteness, capsuleers do not feel the same way and Concord allows them to persecute them at their will.

Thanks to the relatively low impact on the Eve universe and the opportunities it offers Eve players, some capsuleers are in favour of the move. One said "I can't wait to find some WoW fucks ratting in belts, I'm going to stick my Phantasm's spikes so far up their arse they'll be permadeathed." Another commented "Can't wait to see those inbred bastards whine about being dragged from Stormwind to the centre of the planet by a Leviathan."

Dust players generally agreed that if the stats stayed the same- and they most likely will- they would get one-shotted by every single character, and the game would be dominated by WoW players. It looks like the new battlegrounds will only be a change in scenery for WoW players, despite having the same mechanics as Dust matches do now. The WoW members themselves say they're looking forward to the next expansion as much as any other one, and they can't wait to throw their money at Blizzard even if they don't have a reason to do so.

Apparently blogging or at least the MMO blogging community is dead.  Or something.  Well, I’ve never taken directions very well, so here I am.

Ardwulf’s “What Was Lost” post caught my attention.

As Wilhelm has been blogging, our formerly-WoW, currently Rift instance group has been on a bit of a roll (or a lack of one) for the last 6 months.  As adults with various combinations of jobs, spouses, aging parents, growing children, and real life in general, having all the stars align to put all five of us online on a Saturday night at the appointed hour to partake in group content has been a rare occurrence.  This year, our score has been 2 for 24 (weekends), if I score it correctly.

And even when the gang isn’t all there, no one is spending a great deal of time in Rift.  Was not always the case.  When we were in Azeroth oh so many years ago, there always seemed to be something to do, something to explore.

Ardwulf seems to have reached the same conclusion we reached a while ago for what seems like many of the same reasons.  Lots of things in Azeroth have changed.  Many things lost, but what were those things that made it so compelling in those halcyon vanilla days?

Its a bit difficult to define what it was, but as some of the comments in his post point out, certain changes changed or radically impacted many aspects of the game in a negative way (IMHO).  So by looking at the negative impacts you can infer a bit of what the secret sauce was in the vanilla days.

Worldliness

For me, it comes down to a loss of “worldliness”.  That doesn’t mean a sandbox per se, but that the game world was a place with a sense of dimension, danger and the unknown.

Quest-centricity

Quest content was a way to experience the game but not the entire game.  That was initially a great strength of the vanilla game, providing a non-exclusive guided path through the world. Of course, we often stepped off those paths, encountered others and generally explored.  There were quest lines that lead no where.  There were side stories that were interesting in and of themselves that were utterly “optional”.

Increasing quest-centricity to the exclusion of all else migrated what was a game world in which there were many storylines to a story in which your character was largely a passive and captive participant.  By the time Cataclysm rolled around and I was budgeted with three quests at a time and I had to complete the entire zone to unlock the next zone, I was done.

Lost with that was any desire for replayability with alts.  Why trod the exact same path again and again?  I may have wanted to do so in some instances, but to be denied any choice in the matter just sucked the life out of the game.

Dungeon Finder/World Wrecker

The dungeon finder was certainly the world shatterer.  The world became a game lobby of course, we started to see that when PvP became instanced and you could queue and be whisked away.  Both travel and story were trivialized and in large part the world-based story line was mostly divorced from what was the instance based climax of those story lines.

Phasing

Another world shattering “innovation” was phasing.  The world around the character was representative of the experiential path that character had taken rather than vice versa.  Players on different steps of a quest may be in the same location as each other but in another “phase” and completely unable to see each other, play or assist each other.  Player-centricity versus world-centricity, Player wins again.

Repetitive content

Because of Blizzard’s formerly vaunted quality control to not release an expansion before its time, daily quests and associated grinds were added to bridge the gap.  An utterly immersion breaking and transparent attempt to pander to the ADD crowd.

And why create more content when you could just repurpose existing content?  Heroic dungeons were added.  What was the story or setting-based set up for these again? Oh yeah, none.

Death of Travel

Flying mounts and the demise of travel.  Worldliness is defined by the perceived size of the world.  Whether that is by some peculiar scaled physical metric (feet, miles, meters, km) or by the amount of time that it took to cross a particular zone, etc. each of those experiences created a sense of space and dimension and with that investment of time into travel, a sense of rarity, danger and a heightened risk of loss was created.

EQ did this is spades.  I remember being utterly terrified doing the run from Ak’Anon to Qeynos as a low level character in 2000.  It was terrifying and wonderful.

Risking the time invested and fighting to make progress to discover that next flight path was a great part of exploration.  As annoying as it could be on those AFK flights across Kalimdor after taking the boat from Menethil after taking the bird from Ironforge, and then running across Tanaris to get to Un’Goro, you had a very real sense that the world was a very big and very dangerous place.

And in those very big, very dangerous and remote places are often wonderful things.

Difficulty

Finally, getting through the world was not a gimme as it is now.  The world was a dangerous place and you needed to be thoughtful about where you went, the path you took to get there and how to engage mobs.  You could die, and often did.  Sometimes in very bad places which was a good thing.

Those dire circumstances created opportunities for both good and bad behavior.  One could assist someone in need or ninja their miniboss.  At least there was the opportunity for emergent interaction.

With the world no longer being a “place” and the challenge dumbed down and generally meaningless, players not can’t get through if fast enough.

Final Thoughts

Alright, enough rambling down the rough road of nostalgia.  For all that it does right, poor Rift doesn’t quite have that same sense of place that old Azeroth did, but its certainly much closer than post-Cataclysm WoW.  But frankly there really isn’t anything out there now or on the horizon that looks promising.

I truly enjoyed my time on the EQ timelocked progression server, Fippy Darkpaw, at least before SOE went down.  I even enjoy the F2P version as well and a big reason for that is the sense of place that old Norrath has accompanied by its dangers and rewards.

I see Syp has a post up about emulators keeping the flame alive and I briefly ducked into the Emerald Dream vanilla WoW private server.  As its a bit dubious, I couldn’t get completely comfortable with the whole private server thing, but if Blizzard offered one, I would pay them for it.

Until then, I guess I’m waiting for the next world to be borne.

A summary of the progress of SOLAR Fleet's assault on N3 holdings in the Drone Regions over the past forty days.

A thought struck me after watching The Mittani, Marc Scaraus and Darius JOHNSON on their new show Wednesday.  While industrialists in null sec are no more important now than before the launch of Odyssey, changes in industry are extremely important.

If someone who plays MMOs asks me what caused all of the fighting we are witnessing in EVE, I would say that CCP added two new crafting materials and changed the material requirements on a whole bunch of crafting recipes.  That's right.  The trillions of ISK lost (which someone will convert to real world currency), the tens of thousands of man-hours worth of work destroyed, all the propaganda videos created and bad posting on forums, were caused by changes to the crafting system.

At the beginning of the conflict, The Mittani stated that the invasion of Fountain was about the moons and wealth:

"Tonight we are invading Fountain. But we are not going to bother with stating a grievance or demonizing the defender - We are doing it because we need the region and its moons for our people and our friends."

I wonder how many MMORPG game developers look at EVE with jealously in their hearts.  Most of those developers are looking at ways to create content fast enough to satisfy their players.  ArenaNet has even gone to an insanely fast two-week deployment cycle for adding content to Guild Wars 2.  But "all" CCP had to do was devote a small team of developers, probably supported by the economics team, and jiggle some numbers around.  Hard, difficult work to do properly?  Yes.  But compared to what other studios are doing, pretty cost-effective.

Of course, CCP can do this because of all the work done over the previous 10 years building a player-run economy.  Some game developers look at a game's economy and its crafting system as an afterthought.  In EVE Online, crafting is serious business and CCP is reaping the rewards.

The blogosphere (a term that I dislike for reasons I can’t quite pin down) is up for a round of navel-gazing (word of the day: ὀμφαλόσκέψις (omphaloskepsis), a term that I like for reasons I can’t quite pin down). Not in the unhealthy, overly self-absorbed way, simply in the way of talking about itself. A lot of people have the impression that blogging is going through another rough phase. Maybe that’s partially because Google finally shut down its reader after they realized they can’t scare everybody away with sudden arbitrary UI messups, and people are worried what that will mean to the dissemination of their thoughts.

I’m really not too worried about that, considering that I don’t think most of my thoughts are well-disseminated anyway. Not the way the bigwig’s thoughts are, in any case. And that’s just as well, because my flow of posts comes and goes, like rainy season in the Okavango Delta, forming a huge stream that then unceremoniously seeps away in the savannah. (Fun fact: after half a year of almost no posts, recently Feedburner claims my readership count has gone up. Though I’m not convinced that counter is completely trustworthy, I’ve seen it do strange things before.)

Anyway. Where was I? Oh, right. People ask “where have all the bloggers gone?“, (there’s a nice collection of posts at Wilhelm’s blog, someone who seems to deal much better with steady flows of posts) and when I read their posts, I can’t but feel part of the group they’re talking about. Even though I don’t feel like a cowboy at all, which is the image Ravious chose: I’m most definitely one of the bloggers that came and seems to have gone.

I still refuse to acknowledge that fact, though. That’s the reason there hasn’t been a Goodbye post, that’s why I still update this wordpress installation and the plugins (which is probably not noticeable at all from the outside, but I won’t let this site rot). It doesn’t have to do with me thinking that the medium is dying. I still like it, and I haven’t figured out how Facebook, Google+ or (least of all) Twitter could ever replace this method of publishing thoughts.

So, if I actually don’t want to stop writing, why have I? The reason, as often, is simple, mundane, and sounds like a copout, but it’s still true. Let me present my personal hierarchy of needs:

The pyramid is simplified, of course. Everybody needs food and sleep, but I skipped air and all those other pesky things you can read about from Maslow. Work sometimes becomes a WoW’s peon’s “Work Work”, and then there’s not much to do about it. I like my job, and it has good fringe benefits (billiard table at work?), but as it often is with jobs that provide a lot of amenities at your work place: they also tend to gobble up a good extra amount of time compared to the average drab cubicle job. Playing games (which again stands in for and has to share its time with other pastimes such as reading) is where it gets interesting, because who wants to blog about work? Or sleep? Food I can see, but that’s a different kind of blog. But of course, to write about games, I need to play games to write about. And for me, following other people’s blogs and reading their posts comes before writing my own posts. Mostly because I guess I don’t feel my posts are that exciting half the time, and I often only get inspiration to write after reading what others wrote. Plus, I’m a selfish bastard and, hey, I already know myself what I want to write, so I’d rather go and absorb other people’s thoughts before divulging mine!

So, what happened a lot this past half year was something like this:

I wasn’t completely overworked to the point where I only knew work and sleep, but it was enough to sap anything more involved than clicking a button a couple of times in a game. Even with reading, I fell behind. Now, of course, it hasn’t been like this for half a year nonstop. That would be horrible. Sometimes, it’s better, like it was recently:

I was able to play a bit, and I even managed to read some blogs again relatively regularly. I’m still ways behind with some of them (Hi, Wilhelm! Hi, HarbingerZero! Hi, MMO Melting Pot! Hi, Syl! Hi, Jester!) and will probably have to do a cut at some point and just skip some old posts. But at least I feel more connected again to what other people are doing and writing about. Still, whenever I sat down to write, either something else came up, or I just stared at a blank screen because I didn’t have the necessary rest and focus to write something of my own.

But when people start asking where everybody went, you have to at least shout that you’re still there. As I said, I still refuse to let this blog die. I’m not sure how much more time I’ll have in the future (I will have to write my actual dissertation document very soon, we’ll see how that much writing effects writing on this blog), but I will try. I actually have a bunch of half-finished posts in the queue. Some are quite old by now, but they will still work once I finish them. What can you expect? Well, I stopped playing EQ2 in the meantime, then started again. There are one or two posts about that in the queue. I also finally got the invite to the FF XIV beta, sadly only now during what looks like the publicity stunt “stress test beta”. But better than nothing, and once I order my thoughts about what I think about the game, I’ll probably have something to say there, too. There’s also some more general stuff about “the state of MMO gaming” which might or might not ever get finished. It seems people enjoy me talking about that, so I’ll try, but at the moment, they are a mess. To get back into the groove, I’ll probably try simple things first.

I’ll do my best.

My recent playing experience has me convinced that World of Warcraft is a lot less fun today than it was in its vanilla days. This isn’t nostalgia talking — I wasn’t even playing WoW until after Burning Crusade released. But let’s say I’ve confirmed it and leave it at that.

The real question, though, is why. Without talking in vagaries or throwing down meaningless buzzwords like “sandbox,” why does the vanilla WoW experience seem so much richer than the game today? A lot of what we think about this is annoyingly unspecific; how far can we dig into it?

There’s no question that a lot of changes have happened in WoW over its 8-year lifespan. Many of those have been positive additions to the game — few would quibble with most of the new races, for example, or the fact that new lands have been added. The addition of auction houses in every city instead of just Orgrimmar and Ironforge is probably a good thing. Autoloot saves everyone some hassle.

At the same time, the very process of expanding the game also irreprarably broke some things. Crafting has never recovered, for example — crafted gear at any level other than the current cap is still tuned to a gear level before the current expansion, making it worthless as new drops have been added to the loot tables. The progresion speed within each tradeskill is still tuned to the vanilla leveling speed — meaning that now, you will outlevel your zones long before you’re able to finishing doing the crafting for those same levels, which stalls you one way or the other: either you stop level and grind crafting, or you abandon crafting and maybe get back to it later — whereupon you need to grind independently of leveling. Perhaps the vanilla game wasn’t as well-tuned as it sems today in comparison, but the general trend toward the leveling game just being a time-waster until you get to the top level was much less obvious then.

Too, it’s easy to forget just how nonlinear the questing was pre-Cataclysm. There were quests all over the place, and no particular pointers to them in many cases. Even standard zones like Elwynn Forest had breadcrumb quests between the major hubs, but also a ton of quests off the beaten track that you could find, and lots of intersting locations not directly tied to particular quests. You had chains that you’d pick up at one level and then resume ten levels later. It gave exploration value over and above the pittance in XP you got from unlocking the map sections, and you could find and do things in the order you liked, instead of just giving being given a set progression that you can’t deviate from in any significant way.

WoW was a little more challenging then, partly due to mechanical changes and partly due to even low-level gear being totally busted now. WoW was never really about challenge per se, but who doesn’t have a recollection of of dying a dozen times in the Burning Blade cave or the Fargodeep Mine, or to those fucking robots in Deadmines? In a way it was frustrating, but your forward progress never really stopped, so it could still be fun. even if you were pounding your keyboard in rage.

The world was bigger. This is an illusion, of course, but it’s a powerful one. With no mounts until level 40, no flying mounts at all, and the flight paths few and far between, for a lot of the game you had to hoof it. Which could slow the pace of play dramatically, but it also had an interesting side effect when players left the straight path and tried to find shortcuts. Sometimes they discovered something interesting up there in the hills, tied to somebody else’s questline that they would otherwise never see, or perhaps a relic of some abandoned thread of development from before release. Sometimes it was just something that ate extra time, but even then it was showing the wandering player the texture of a world that didn’t have every iota of content already lined up in order. The expectation was that things would take time, so you felt less inclination to rush and spent more effort on the journey and enriching it.

I’m hoping that EverQuest Next can capture some of this magic that even Blizzard seems to have lost their grip on. It’s probably the Last Best Hope for virtual worlds on the visible horizon; “sandbox” isn’t really the right term for this, but it’s what we’ve got.

I talked the other day about making content for groups more engaging, but what about grouping in general?  Graev and I feel MMOs have a lot of room to improve the fun players can have while grouped together.  Accessing more difficult, dynamic, deep in scope content is one way to improve the fun, there are other obvious ways.

Class Synergies

Class synergies would be a great start.  I think Fellowship Maneuvers from Lord of the Rings Online are a great example of a very, very simple way to get classes working together.  Bringing a Burglar along was always a treat because that class could initiate some really helpful group abilities to stun and knock down mobs.  These abilities required group members to pay attention and even coordinate pressing buttons or activating skills.

More complex group synergies are needed.  Imagine if a warrior could pick up a rogue and throw him behind the enemy, or a mage could teleport teammates into position. Mages should be able to cause archers to fire arrows — or even duplicate those arrows magically to give the DPS in your group a boost.  Players these days only care about how good their DPS is compared to everyone else in the group, so most people just spam a rotation and watch a 2 inch box in the corner of their screen.

Clearly Defined Classes

Classes in general these days have homogenized way too much to the point where everyone can do everything.  Grouping has become boring because everyone I group with can do the same things as me.  Graev is constantly bringing up the Druid class from WoW (which can literally tank, heal, melee DPS, and ranged DPS) as an example of what not to do when creating a class.

Classes should have unique and clear roles.  Grouping with a Bard and Enchanter in EverQuest was (and is to this day) a life-changing experience.  Those two classes are so ridiculously different from any other class — again, even to this day — that having one in your group introduced you to new ways of accomplishing your goals.  If there are 10 classes, and each one brings something totally unique, then chances are you’ll run into many different combinations and, when combined with player input, no two groups are alike.

 A Reason to Group

We talk a lot about the importance of group content in MMOs and avoiding the single-player-syndrome.  Yes, it makes an MMO an MMO, and I can ramble on about all the many ways in which grouping is just better ‘for the good of the game’… but ultimately grouping has to be fun or it doesn’t matter.  Give me unique classes, awesome abilities and combinations I’ll only experience in a group, and lots of great content to explore in a group setting, and to me that’s a great start at making grouping a lot more fun.

How to Make Grouping More Fun from Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog

Generally I try to avoid meta-posts about blogging and specifically it's a busy week and I don't have time both to blog and play, but I wanted to get my two-penn'orth in before the whole End Of Days thing slides past uncommented.

I forget who started this off. It was probably Wilhelm but I'll link to Jeromai becuse he links to everyone else and it saves me the trouble. The gist of the debate is this: there may or may not be a cold wind blowing for The Blog, or more accurately for the MMO Blog. There might be fewer of them than there were, more could be going dark faster than they used to and fewer might be starting up to replace them. Either the bloggers or the readers have moved to Twitter or G+ or no-one's reading or writing anything any more because we're all Livestreaming.

Sometimes I like to claim I'm not a Gamer. Occasionally I've even claimed I'm not a writer. Neither of those claims really stands up to analysis. I've been playing video games since the late 1970s and writing since the early 1970s. Occasionally I have a few months off from one or the other and sometimes I think that might stick but it never does. I always come back.

I only started blogging a couple of years ago. I'd made a concerted effort to stop writing back in the late 1990s and for the best part of a decade I was convinced I'd cured myself of the addiction until one day I had an epiphany. All those hundreds of thousands of words I'd written on gaming forums starting about two weeks after I discovered Everquest in 1999? That was writing, too. I gave up giving up, gave in and embraced my demon.

By then I'd moved off forums and into the comment threads of blogs, which I discovered well after the famous Warhammer Blogsplosion, something about which I only became aware way after the dust had settled and the fires started to die back. It occurred to me, belatedly, that it was probably quite rude to write comments longer than the blog posts I was commenting on, especially since some poor bloggers got the benefit almost every time they put something up, so I started my own blog.

It turned out to be a very familiar experience. In fact it turned out to be exactly like writing and publishing apazines, which I did obsessively for a decade and a half in the 1980s and 90s. The community was very similar, the same kind of characters appeared, the same cliques, the same mutual admiration societies, mortal enemies, in-jokes and running gags. I felt pretty comfortable.

I still do. I've been especially touched to see my name and this blog mentioned in the current navel-gazing round. There really is some kind of a community happening here, even if most of us could pass each other on the street without a second glance since few have ever met.

Blogging may not last in its current form. Bloggers who post every day right now may stop at any time and never post again. Technology will change faster than we can keep up. In the old apazine days contributors came and went all the time. New enthusiastic members joined, burned brightly, jaded, faded and left. Old stalwarts plodded on. Some of them are probably out there, still cranking the mimeograph as I type

Will people who love writing stop writing about stuff they love? I don't think so. There'll always be more to read than there's time to read it, just like there are always too many games to play. And in the end, even if the only person reading me is me, well that's the audience I've been trying hardest to please these last 40 years. I'll just keep on doing that.

I encourage anyone reading this who's thought about blogging but hasn't given it a go to do the same.

I really wish media outlets, when reporting on big EVE Online ship losses, would stop converting ISK to dollars.

It makes us look goddamned retarded as a community, as though we're actually spending thousands of real dollars (pounds, pesos, euros, whatever) on single ships. We aren't retarded, because nobody is spending that sort of real-money on an internet spaceship, but the people reading those damned news articles don't know that.

The dude who lost the 300 billion ISK Revenant the other day, he didn't spend $9000 on PLEX so that he could buy that ship. That's money he earned in-game, being clever. He may have a bought a few hundred dollars in PLEX here and there, throughout his early EVE Online career, but that was likely the extent of the real-money he injected into the game, if any at all.

I'm sure nobody thinks that mynnna spent $27000 on his 1 trillion ISK net worth. He earned it being clever on the markets, smart speculation.

If the dude who owned the Revenant had actually paid $9000, real-money cash, for his faction super-carrier, I'm sure he would have lost it not long after the purchase – Pandemic Legion would have awoxed him themselves, for being a dumbass.

Whereas the headline, Man Loses $9000 Internet Spaceship, is a great headline, and likely drives a lot of curious pageviews, it just leads to the unfamiliar reader assuming that a lot of dumb people, with more money than good sense, play EVE Online.

This isn't Second Life or Entropia Universe, where spending some outrageous amount of money is an actual investment upon which one can see a healthy return. You don't buy a Revenant as an investment, especially if you're actually going to fly the damned thing into combat.

A nineteen-year-old has been jailed since March 27, 2013. He's been beaten — by other inmates, allegedly. He's been subjected to solitary confinement, sometimes stripped naked. The authorities have rejected calls for his release on a reasonable bail his family could possibly afford. All of this has happened because he wrote something online that concerned or offended or enraged the state.

What's that? Syria? Saudi Arabia?

No. Texas.

The nineteen-year-old is Justin Carter. Carter, like many Americans his age (or mine, for that matter) plays online games and indulges in the exaggerated trash-talk common to that culture. In the course of an argument involving the game League of Legends, he got into a dispute with another player, who called him crazy or "messed up in the head." That is a rather mild epithet coming from an online gamer; it's nothing like Carter might have gotten if, for instance, he'd had the bad taste to Game While Female.

Carter reacted the way many do in online gaming culture: with overblown rhetoric. Riffing of the idea he was crazy, he wrote: ""I think Ima shoot up a kindergarten / And watch the blood of the innocent rain down/ And eat the beating heart of one of them." Carter's family says that he immediately followed that post with "lol" and "j/k," further demonstrating — as if further demonstration was necessary — that the words were satirical bluster, not a threat anyone rational would take seriously.

But not everyone is rational. A woman in Canada — the land where freedom of expression is subservient to fee-fees — saw the post, used Google to find Justin Carter's contact information, and reported his "threat" to local police. Local police and prosecutors obtained search and arrest warrants — thoughtfully provided here at Ars Technica — and arrested Carter, eventually charging him with felony "terroristic threats."

Police and prosecutors maintain that Carter's "threat" should be taken seriously. They dispute his and his family's assertion that he followed his post with "lol" and "j/k." In evaluating the credibility of the police and prosecutors, consider this: in the affidavits seeking search and arrest warrants, they completely stripped Justin's "I think Ima shoot up a kindergarten" post of any context whatsoever, deliberately excising all mention of the online dispute, the connection to gaming, or his other posts. In short, in seeking a judge's authorization to arrest Carter and search his home, police and prosecutors made it appear to the judge that he had simply woken up one day and posted that on Facebook. That was breathtakingly deceitful.

The search of Justin Carter's home yielded no weapons and no evidence of dangerousness.

But District Judge Jack Robison has set Justin Carter's bail at half a million dollars. His family can't afford that. He has been beaten by other inmates — a common experience for younger, weaker defendants confined pre-trial — and confined naked in solitary, allegedly over suicide concerns.

Prosecutors sought and obtained an indictment against Justin Carter for a third-degree felony "terroristic threats" under Texas Penal Code section 22.07. To prove that charge, prosecutors will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Justin Carter had "the specific intent to place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury." District Attorney Jennifer Tharp is determined to pursue that theory, despite the context that makes it patently ridiculous.

Whose fault is this? My fault. Your fault. Our fault.

New Braunfels Police Lt. John Wells invokes the magic word:

The Comal County District Attorney's office hasn't responded to our calls, but police in New Braunfels, Texas, who have investigated the case, say in a time of heightened sensitivity to school shootings, their interest is in preventing violence when they can.

"The whole situation is kind of unfortunate," said New Braunfels Police Lt. John Wells. "We definitely understand the situation that Mr. Carter is in, however he made the comments, and it is an offense. We have to … protect the general public and specifically, in this case, with it involving schoolchildren, we have to act. We take those very seriously."

The magic word is "children."

We have fully and foolishly subscribed to the "Think of the Children!" culture. In an era in which violent crime has plunged dramatically, we think it is up. We think so because the media — hungry for money and attention — serves us bloody context-free meat every night. We think so because law enforcement — hungry for more funding, more power, more toys — relentlessly tells us we are in danger and that our children are in danger and that the only answer is to trust and fear. We are bid to trust not ourselves and our good judgment, but law enforcement. We are bid to fear not the power of the state, but the criminal forces arrayed against us and our children — forces that only law enforcement can hold at bay.

We accept this.

But who poses more of a risk to us, and to our children: the Justin Carters of the world, or the state that will file dishonest and misleading warrant applications against him, the state that will confine him to be beaten and stripped naked in a cell, the state that will confine him for a crass joke?

The state tells us that Justin Carter or Cameron D'Ambrosio are threats, and that we must trust the state's special powers to see danger behind teen bluster and dipshititude, and trust the state's choice to employ force against them. Is that rational? Carter and D'Amrosio haven't used force wantonly or recklessly or against children. The state has. The state actors we are supposed to trust have. The state, not D'Ambrosio or Carter, tase a naked autistic 11-year-old wandering confused on a roadside. The state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, smother a man with Downs Syndrome to death for trying to watch Zero Dark Thirty twice. The state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, will beat, tase, and pepper-spray your child when they mistake his speech impediment for "disrespect." The state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, will tase your 86-year-old bedridden grandmother because she may pose a threat from her bed. The state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, will arrest you for videotaping in public and then harass and threaten you for talking to the media about it. Violence against animals is often identified as a tell of pathological violence and dangerousness; the state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, mow down dogs like Autumn wheat. The state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, will confront you in the street if your child is the wrong skin color and bark at you when you don't grovel thankfully. If you criticize Carter or D'Ambrosio, they will subject you to trash-talk; if you criticize state actors, they will put up wanted posters of you or send police to knock on your door in the middle of the night or serve you with a search warrant. The state, not Carter or D'Ambrosio, thinks that concern for Constitutional rights is evidence of criminality. The state — through judges and prosecutors — lets armed state agents indulge in this behavior with impunity.

Lt. John Wells, defending the prosecution of Justin Carter, tells us that we need to act, that we need to take threats seriously, that we need to protect the general public, that we need to protect schoolchildren. I agree.

But if we are rational — if we look at evidence — then who represents more of a threat to us and our children? Is it Justin Carter's community, or John Wells' community?

I think my children and I are more at risk from the state than from Justin Carter — particularly because I choose to criticize the state.

If you care about this story, you can look at the petition Justin Carter's family has put up, or write to the officials named above. Be very careful what you write. This is America, I suppose, but still — be very careful what you write. I'd feel guilty if you were arrested, confined on half a million dollars bail, beaten, and locked naked in a cell. You know — for the children.

Let me leave you with a question.

The moral justification of the state to use violence against Justin Carter — to arrest him by force, to search his home by force, to confine him with people who (predictably, as his captors expected) beat him, to set an impossibly high bail to prevent his release, and to lock him naked in a cell because their acts may have made him contemplate suicide, all on a transparently weak and unconstitutional charge — is generally assumed and rarely questioned.

But if I were to ask "is it morally justified to use violence against the state actors who did that to Justin Carter?" — that would be seen as extremist, disturbing, dangerous.

Why?

What's more dangerous — their conduct, or my question?

No lol. No j/k.

Edited to add: An anonymous donor has helped the family make bail. Excellent.

Edited Again To Add: Jack Marshall has a good idea for a protest: quote Justin Carter on social media on August 1.

The First Amendment Protects Satire And Rhetoric! lol j/k © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

The EVE blog scene has been a bit heated as of late. Transitions for sites to new owners, and shakeups between similar sites have proved that in game and out of game, EVE Online drama knows no bounds.

Currently in the middle of both of those mini-whirlwinds is Cyber (@CyberInEve), the new manager of Eve Bloggers. I wanted to catch up with him about the site, and to discuss some elements of the recent interview done here by a competing site.

 

Winterblink: EVE blogs have caught a lot of attention lately, so what does Eve Bloggers bring to the party?

Cyber: I’ve still got a lot of ideas running through my head for Eve Bloggers, but for the most part I want to keep it the same concept that it started as, a stream that allows people to easily follow the blogging community.

I have plans to add a few more community type features to the site (secret for now :)), as well as other useful resources for the blogging community (and hopefully the greater Eve community itself)

I actually posted a shortish post on the Eve-O forums that explains it a little more in-depth. (Link to thread)

Winterblink: You’ve inherited the site from Marc Scaurus recently, can you talk a bit about how this came about, and how you feel about taking on the responsibility?

Cyber: Perfect timing I think was a major factor in it. I recently got back from a little over a year off of eve due to real life issues, and when I came back I heard rumors that Eve Bloggers wasn’t being updated anymore. I’ve always been a huge fan of the site, and as an avid blogger and webmaster I immediately wanted to see what I could do to help.

When I saw Marc post about looking for a new owner, I jumped at the opportunity. I actually didn’t think he’d pick me since I had just got back from a long absence, but I guess my expertise in the area made me a good candidate. As for the responsibility…I’m deeply humbled by taking ownership and from the feedback I’ve gotten so far. Marc did an awesome job with the site (and Alexia before him), so while I have changes in mind, I also want to stay true to the initial concept of the site and not change it too much. As we both know…the bloggers are a rowdy bunch so I want to make sure it stays a resource that they approve of.

Though, I guess that got off the topic of responsibility I bit…which I guess you’ll find out, I ramble a bit at times. I know it’s going to be a time consuming job but I have a feeling it will be very rewarding to watch the site (and more importantly the community) begin to grow.

Winterblink: You mentioned Alexia; I recently did an interview with him about his own EVE blogging site, and there seems to be some drama with regards to the two services. Assuming you’ve read that interview, I’m going to put you on the spot and ask whether you had any response to some of the assertions made about Eve Bloggers.

Cyber: Well, to start with, I think most of the drama that popped up was more about his new site than Eve Bloggers (or with what he wanted to turnEve Bloggers into if he got it back). Eve Bloggers was create by Alexia to be a “stream” of blogs for the community…yet somewhere along the line he decided that he wanted to confine the blogging community to one website rather than allow people to remain individuals. I do think he had good intentions, I have no issue with Alexia personally…just with that idea, I don’t think it works well for this type of thing. A good example would be podlogs, it was a good site while it was around…got new people into the blogging community…and then it disappeared, leaving tons of people stranded and having to find a new place for their blogs.

While I’m not going to say that Alexia is going to disappear, what happens if he does? What if he loses interest, gets bored, has personal issues, etc. It will put whoever is using the site to host their blogs into the same predicament as podlogs did…having to find a new home for their blog with very little notice. A bloggers domain is his identity…changing it is a big deal. I originally was interested in working with Alexia, somehow working together with the two sites, although we never could figure out how to do so.

Then, when I read your interview with him…where he seems to have lost his temper and decided to bash those of us who prefer to run our own blogs…I realized that working with him would not be an option for me. In my opinion, the blogging community is a group of people…we don’t all have to have our domain at noidentity.blogsite.com.

I’m not sure what he was thinking with those comments. I know it personally made me decide not to support his endeavors…and while I can’t speak for everyone, I’m sure there are plenty of other bloggers that thought the same thing. Not many people enjoy being told to go screw themselves and that their opinions don’t matter…especially when everything we do is based on our opinions as bloggers.

Winterblink: There is an important distinction to make between the two sites really. Alexia is building a blogging consortium of a sort, hosted on his service. You’re administering a kind of Google Reader (RIP) for EVE blogs, aggregating the existing community. Is this assumption generally correct?

Cyber: I think that’s a safe way of putting it. Eve Bloggers intends to be a resource FOR the community, while it seems Alexia is trying to make a site to BE the community.

Though I do intend to add other features to the site that aren’t just based on aggregating content (guest blogs, guides, other eve related links, etc)…I intend to allow the eve community itself to help form the website into what they want it to be through the use of polls and suggestions. I want it to be about the community and not about me.

Winterblink: The blog hosting part of his site is certainly useful (and free) to those who want to start their own, though it will be a bit of an uphill battle against full featured blog hosts like WordPress and Blogger. That’s definitely going to be a challenge for him, and frankly anyone trying to be the EVE Online Uber Community.

You mentioned Alexia potentially leaving his site stagnant, and how that would affect users of his service. I have to point out, isn’t that exactly what happened to Eve Bloggers in the past?

Cyber: That did happen to Eve Bloggers, and funny enough Alexia was the one that had to give it up, but it went stagnant because of Marc (not Alexia). However, Eve Bloggers does not host peoples blogs so even if Eve Bloggers ended up stagnating again, it would cause no danger towards peoples blogs. (although I do run my own hosting company and have been debating opening a hosting service for isk up sometime, but that’s another story for another time :))

Winterblink: Thanks very much for taking the time to chat with me between fights in EVE.  To wrap up, if folks out there are interested in trying out your site as a blog owner or reader, where should they go?

Cyber: For readers, heading over to http://www.evebloggers.com/ will take them to the main page where they can see the most recent blogs from the community, and then from there find different feeds for different topics, or the full community blog list (coming soon). For owners, http://www.evebloggers.com/get-added would be a good place to start.

 

There’s no shortage of opinions in EVE, and blogs allow people to formulate those more than a simple forum post or tweet. In the absence of Google Reader, aggregating the RSS feeds from all the different EVE blogs can be done with newer services, but finding the blogs in the first place isn’t always easy. With EVE Bloggers now under new committed management, it stands to become another valuable source for people to go to for discovering new and interesting things from the EVE community.

Sources:

• Eve Bloggers

With the fall of Z9PP-H, the CFC now owns its first constellation in Fountain – Centaur. And own a little more than half of Pegasus.

I know that The Mittani is often explaining how capturing sovereignty is an after thought; that first you capture moons, then you crush the morale of the enemy, and then you go about the business of shooting sovereignty structures. There is, of course, some truth to that. Sovereignty, on its own, doesn't amount to much other than a bill to pay.

In terms of the morale of your own side, capturing territory is tangible e-peen. You can quantify it. Moons, sure they're quantifiable also, but only to a select few. What moons the CFC owns, that's information that is not disseminated widely. Thus any claims on the moons front by leadership has to be taken on faith by the front-line troops. And since we all know the size of the spin-zone from both sides, even CFC troops take the words of their leadership with a grain of salt. You'd think we were through Fountain and into Delve, to hear The Mittani speak of our successes. That might be some hyperbole, but he's definitely spinning our successes out of proportion to what can be seen on the ground. The CFC is definitely ahead in this war, but not by much, and our gains can once again become losses if we get too far ahead of ourselves.

Couple that with the fact that I've not seen any specific ops related to moons. I've never defended a moon. I've never been on an op to take a moon. Thus, whether we actually hold any moons or not is still a hazy mystery. (There might have been such ops that I've missed, but even if there have been some, they've been few and far between.)

The other benefit to taking territory is for logistical reasons. Now with Centaur under our control, it will only be eight days or so before we can set-up that jump bridge from J5A-IX to 4-EP12. At that point we probably stop deploying from B-DBYQ and start staging from 4-EP12. I would be surprised if a redeployment order didn't come down soon after that jump bridge is set-up. Capturing territory allows us to attack Fountain more effectively. If there are moons to defend and take, easier to take and defend them from within Fountain than from Cloud Ring.

Not much has been happening since the Z9PP-H crash. Apparently we tried to set-up an outpost in J5A-IX. Test & Pals destroyed it. A 20+ billion ISK loss. I'm curious why we would even bother setting up an outpost in J5A. Like I said, in eight days, when we get the jump bridge between J5A and 4-EP functional, it will make more sense to deploy from 4-EP. Any outpost that we could have set-up in J5A would see little use after the jump bridge is installed. Strikes me as a waste of ISK. Since we have not tried it again since losing the outpost egg, I'd assume someone else decided it wasn't worth bothering as well.

BoodaBooda wrote a heartfelt State of the Alliance today. Test finances are crumbling, and he's admitting as much. He appeals to the membership to start donating. They've only cleared up about half their ship replacement queue. He asks people to care. He asks people to log in. I'm not going to poke fun at any of it. I was touched by it. Hell, I almost wanted to toss them a billion ISK, and I'm not even a member of Test.

I hope Test Alliance can get their shit together. I'm doubtful, though. They just don't seem to have the strength of community. (Which is a subject for another post, Why Reddit makes for a poor community – the ties that don't bind.) And then there's the fact that Test & Pals all run as separate entities, thus coordination is made much more difficult than it should be, they aren't as effective as they could be.

Test & Pals have a bunch of problems to work through, and very little time to do so.


Read more about the War in Fountain:
The War in Fountain - Battle For J5A-IX and War Poster
The War in Fountain - What Are The Russians Doing For Us?
The War in Fountain - Fweddit Chooses a Side
The War in Fountain - Test Alliance Has a Bad Day
The War in Fountain - The Depth of Gameplay In Sovereignty Wars
The War in Fountain - The Importance of J5A-IX
The War in Fountain - Divide and Conquer
The War in Fountain - Gnrrr. History.
The War in Fountain - Cracking Down on Pornfleets
The War in Fountain - Blueballing
The War in Fountain - Old Montolio Had A Jump Bridge, EI-, EI-O0O
The War in Fountain - Hemorrhaging ISK
The War in Fountain - Fish or Cut Bait
The War in Fountain - Metrics of Success
The War in Fountain - Isn't That What Happened To BoB?
The War in Fountain - The Z9PP-H Node Crash

MMO emulators fascinate me from a fan and academic standpoint.  I’ve never had much interest in engaging with them, not just because of their shady relationship with the law, but also because of the sheer amount of bugs, workarounds, and potential to up and disappear if the property owner decides to levy the boom on them.

However, part of me thinks it’s cool that fans love these games so much that when an MMO is canned, dedicated players band together to keep it alive via emulators.  Again, I don’t condone it, but this is just something that fans do across all forms of entertainment — fan fiction, fan-made films and TV projects, restoring vaporware, remaking old games with new specs, mods, and so on.

So I was curious how many deceased MMOs have emulator clones out there that are keeping the spirit of these games alive.

1. SWGEmu

Yeah, so the Star Wars Galaxies crowd did not take to the abrupt cancellation of their favorite sandbox calmly, and several fled to the notion of emulators for salvation.  SWGEmu didn’t start up because of the game’s sunset, but came about because fans were dissatisfied with the combat upgrade patch (this emulator attempts to recreate a pre-CU environment).  The team claims that it does not use any of SOE’s code, but has rebuilt the game from scratch.  It also claims that the project is 100% legal because of this.

From hearsay accounts, SWGEmu going pretty strong, with a lively RP community.  You can read up more on the basics of the emulator’s history and goals in the FAQ.

2. Earth and Beyond Emulator

Earth and Beyond has been closed since 2004, but I guess that there are players out there who thought this was the absolute cat’s pajamas when it comes to space MMOs or something, because there’s been a lot of work done to get up this emulator.  The team has even put in new and restored content, such as three classes that never made it to the original game.

EA is aware of the project, but is either ignoring it or (according to some accounts) has given it its blessing, making it one of the only emulators I know of that has gotten a thumbs-up from the previous/current owner of the property.

3. The Matrix Online Emulator

Yes, there is an MxO emulator, although it doesn’t seem like it’s been getting a lot of attention since last year.  As it stands, it’s an unfinished project, although some can apparently play it.  There’s another emulator called Hardline Dreams which looks equally shaky.

4. The Infinite Salsa

This is the Tabula Rasa emulator, although I don’t know much about it other than it’s moved sites and changed names at least once.  The info is behind a message board registration process and I’m not going to register just to see what’s there.

5. SBEmu

Shadowbane’s fans (there are fans? I guess there are!) have a slick site up and a massive project underway to reverse engineer this puppy and get it out to players.  I’m pretty impressed how often the dev team is reporting on their progress.

DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View

I waited on making this post as I wanted to give Turbine added time to release their next round of twenty questions, however if anything those questions further exacerbate the issue as myself and others see it.  I’m not claiming to speak for the entire community, but I know at least many, and certainly I believe the portion of the community Sapience was addressing on Monday.  In answering the posts over the weekend, Sapience was a little bit snarky in responding to the community by explaining how much they’ve pushed out to the community and failing to understand why the community continues to ask the same questions.  I think this comes down to a few things.

The classic quote “I do not think that means what you think it does” comes to mind with regards to communication.  In order for communications to be successful, they need to not only be sent out, but received in some fashion.  One way communication isn’t all that successful, and I think Sapience’s post pretty much points out that there’s a disconnect somewhere.  Turbine needs to realize not all of their players read the forums, I’m guessing a pretty low percentage actually and probably about that same amount follow sites either on the web or through some sort of social media.  However, even those following in some fashion inevitably miss items as it can be hard to catch every single item that is ever posted.  As an example, it is a REDICULOUS process to even try to obtain updates on when a dev makes a post – the ONLY way to do it is check the dev tracker constantly or use a horrendous Yahoo Pipes setup that thankfully someone put up and shared with the community.  Even that dev feed can get cluttered with things like store sales and out of game events.  Providing a way to filter those out and subscribe in some fashion would be quite helpful.

Another aspect is using leading statements without providing any sort of clarifications or follow up information, a few examples:

• announcing pre-orders for the Rise of Isengard expansion (first expansion to not ship with an instance cluster) and not inform the public that an instance cluster wouldn’t be available for another 3 months.
• announcing pre-orders for the Rise of Rohan specifying that the cluster would be delayed, but delay the inclusion of that cluster with the purchase of the expansion
• and just recently – there will be an update between Update 11 and Helm’s deep, but not specifying that it would only be bug fixes and not additional content.
• these are just a few examples of this

I just don’t understand why Turbine continues to be as vague as they are with these kinds of issues considering how poorly the community reacts every time.  We knew in closed beta for a LONG time there would be no instances in ROI – why not release that and get ahead of it?  What was the point of not explaining how people could obtain the instance cluster with RoR?  And why not just be honest and say the only updates between Update 11 and Helm’s Deep will be bug fixes?  These are all examples of poor customer relations and leading the customer along a false path for fear of upsetting them with bad news.  Well guess what Turbine, while we don’t like getting bad news, we really don’t like feeling like we’ve been lied to.

Then of course there’s the recent – we’ll just ignore this question was ever asked and hope that it goes away as it pertains to things like the content license.  It is a simple factual question, even the question of “what content do you have a license for” took years to resolve and I’m still not sure I know the answer.  Sure it may be a very complicated arrangement and may in fact be in an incredibly nasty negotiation period (purely making this up for dramatic purposes) but you can admit the facts with something along the lines of “Our current licensing deal extends through 2014 and we’re in a constant state of evaluation of the future,” that simple statement acknowledges the question but still doesn’t back anyone into any corner or impact any potential negotiations.  The license issue got even worse as Sapience and the official twitter feed promised to settle the issue definitively in the 20 questions coming up.  Turbine has a history of this kind of teasing, and sadly it is becoming more and more childish and less exciting each time they do it.  Their answer was that they “plan to support LOTRO for many more years to come,” not only is this incredibly vague but there are a whole host of other things Turbine planned to do (or not do) that they went back against:

• not going Free to Play
• no gear in store
• new PvMP map with Isengard
• more frequent updates with F2P
• I could go on, but I think you get the point

Not only does Turbine’s track record not speak to well for us just blindly trusting them, but any agreement like this is a two way agreement and who is to say the Tolkien estate wouldn’t grow tired of what’s going on and pull the plug on the game’s license?  After the various tweets, I was really hoping for something substantial, but instead we just got some public relations nonsense that addresses absolutely zero concerns of the community.  What did that statement say that wasn’t something we didn’t already know, of course Turbine wants to continue the game as it is a way for them to stay employed and continue to make money for WB.  I have to question those who think this statement from Turbine is any sort of binding contract with the community.  I would have been happier if they would have hid behind the ongoing contractual discussions and not wanting to disturb them then the crap we got.

While I’m on the list of those questions, I find it incredibly insulting that Turbine has the nerve to redicule the community for asking the same questions multiple times, when they themselves pick and answer the same question multiple times.  Why not keep a consolidated list somewhere (go and find all the dev chats, trust me I tried, its damn hard) not only for the community but for yourselves such that you know which questions you’ve already answered and not pick those unless there’s a significant change.  Let’s pick on the deep meaty answer they did provide this time around regarding instance difficulty.  That same exact question and answer has been repeated numerous times, on various forums including live and bullroarer.  What would have been really interesting would have been how that process has changed as the game has evolved or how they roll in the feedback from Live into that process.

Finally, the waffling back and forth on issues when coupled with all the above completely muddies the water and makes it incredibly hard to understand what’s really coming or planned.  For example, mounted combat instances have been asked about numerous times and each time we get a different answer.  From not on the roadmap (which means no since the roadmap goes out quite a few years), to we’re actively looking at it, to there are much bigger issues that need to be tackled first before we look at that option.  What’s worse is that some of this waffling has been by the same person!  All three responses individually would be perfectly fine answers, as would be stepping up and acknowledging that you’ve provided a different answer before but things have changed for whatever reason.  At this point, while I want certain things in the game and aspects addressed, I’d be happy to have a consistent answer, or if the answer changes own the fact and you could even admit that player feedback caused the change in opinion.  I’m pretty sure there are others like me that keep asking questions (like the mounted combat one) simply because we don’t know what answer we’ll get.

My initial draft of this post was still negative, but this recent round of questions and the buildup to those questions just made the whole problem worse.  I honestly don’t know what Turbine can do to reverse this trend but while some claim (and possibly rightly so) that F2P was the downfall of LOTRO, personally I think this horrendous string of communications has done more harm to the community then anything that has come from F2P.  When you think about it, quite a few of the F2P issues could have easily been lessened (I won’t necessarily say solved) if they had done a better job of getting in front of the issues.

I’m still hopeful the player’s council will help allow Turbine to actually listen to the community as opposed to just randomly blasting out data that they hope we’re interested in.  But I think a more important concept would be to have a little more accountability in acknowledging what’s been asked and what they’ve said previously.

DocHoliday
Turbine’s Communication Issues

I've been following the Fountain war from a distance on blogs, newssites, and podcasts and some questions have arisen for me that I'm hoping someone has the answers to.

- Technetium is less profitable than prior to Odyssey but its still pretty lucrative. What happened to all those moons Pandemic Legion has up North? Were they given away or taken away by the CFC when PL joined in on TEST's side in the war? If so, when and how? If not, why not?

- If the CFC gain momentum and TEST is on its heels, will PL double down the effort to help TEST or will they just pull up stakes and leave? Or worse turn around and shoot TEST?

- How does TEST feel about having such a mercurial ally? How does CFC feel about it?

- Seeing how CFC reacted to Black Legion's harassing attacks up in the north, including an unprecedented pay off to get Black Legion to let them extract a capital fleet from a station, why haven't TEST and allies done more to send/recruit forces to do more backfield attacks?

- Why have we not heard of seen more of CFC forces hell-camping TEST staging systems? Or vice versa?

- Where are the jump bridge network attacks? Are they occurring and just not being reported? Or are the forces just too well prepared to defend against them?

- Why does this supposed great war seem more like a very big and well organized thunder-dome experiment? Is it that I'm too far removed from the action for the details, or are the details missing?

Many of my multiplayer gaming frustrations can probably be attributed to the excessive deployment of high variance tactics. Gamers take outrageous risks where they would normally not be warranted. If the risks pay off, they win big and feel awesome. If the risks do not pay off, they lose quickly, call something OP, then get another round to try to win big. After all, the downside of losing an online game is not that huge, especially if you down-weight the negative.

If you are the sort of person who plays Civilization on settings like “epic” and “marathon,” the idea of “win big or lose fast” is probably anathema. Whatever game you are playing, you are planning to settle in, focus on the fundamentals, operate efficiently and perhaps aggressively, and build to a satisfying climax. And then this twerp decides to throw absolutely everything at his first attempt, either failing miserably and quitting (smack talk on exit optional) or winning and declaring himself the best player ever (smack talk required).

This is where I place the distinction in an RTS between “rush” and “cheese.” Rushing is a perfectly legitimate tactic. It is early aggression that can be very successful, and a good player can rush while still developing a backup plan. Cheese usually involves overcommitting to one tactic that has a simple counter but is difficult to resist without that counter. When Cheese Fails is a series devoted to watching StarCraft II players fail at cheese. You will see people mis-execute their cheese, execute it successfully but have no idea how to follow through, get countered, and every other way your cheese can fail.

Playing Team Fortress II, you see players who stick with Spies and Snipers because they can get one-shot kills. You will see Snipers who get only headshot kills not because they are aimbotting but because they never dip the crosshairs below head level: miss or one-shot with no in-between. You will see other players using exactly one tactic for hours, such as placing an Engineer turret in the same location, charging with the caber, or sticky-trapping a particular corner. When it works, they get free kills; when not, they tend to die instantly. (You can tell who is actually good by their Plan B.)

You see these people in MMOs trying to clear dungeons as quickly as possible. They over-aggro, and if the AE works, they clear enemies in record time. If it does not work, they curse at the tank and/or healer, quit, and try again with a new group. Having a margin for error is for other people.

A key aspect of high variance tactics is total commitment to one path. If you do not hit the counter, you win. If you do, complain about the counter and try again. This also applies to tactics that usually work but still fail against an obvious counter. For example, your D&D mage is awesome but prepared no way to deal with golems except whining to the DM. For example, many games have some sort of stealth that allows you to ambush your targets at will but is completely ineffective around a detector. It is not just that counters to your favorite tactics exist; the particularly grating player is the one who knows almost nothing beyond his favorite tactic, is always all-in, and is morally committed to the notion that it is the counter that is cheap rather than his tactic.

As some of the examples suggest, this is not a strictly PvP problem. Having these people on your side is similarly annoying, especially when they expect you to support them to help their cheesy one-shot succeed, especially when they take credit for any success because the big numbers are by their names. Having one member of your team flame out within the first three minutes is enormously frustrating. It can mean that everyone loses and starts over because you cannot complete your objective without the full team, and this one person unilaterally decided (before even starting) to win now or leave.

When it works, few of us will refuse easy points, gold, whatever, but it definitely feels gimmicky and unsustainable, and the flash in the plan often flashes quickly or quite violently.

I have also placed some emphasis on attitude. With or against a mature player who is aware that s/he is taking a large risk, you may not get a complete and satisfying game experience, but you will at least have a gracious personal interaction. S/he is a fierce competitor who tried a risky gambit this time, likely calculated to be effective given the circumstances. You can respect that where another player might just be annoying for trying a gimmick. If the mature player recognizes a cunning or lucky counter to his/her gambit, s/he will respect that as the risk inherent in the tactic, rather than complaining about balance/teammates and quitting. Context and intent matter for your perception of meaning.

If you were playing American football against a team whose Plan A was an onside kick followed by a Hail Mary pass, win or lose you would wonder what was wrong with those idiots. Many gamers know little else.

: Zubon

In the original Nintendo Tecmo Bowl, the Minnesota Vikings (if I recall correctly) had a hand-off, reverse, and fake-reverse bomb. That fake-reverse bomb took forever but had a very high success rate for 50+ yard gains; failure meant a 2-second sack and try again. As a child, this was the greatest thing ever.

Premature Climax is a post from: Kill Ten Rats

This post about blogging over at TAGN, along with the comments, is worth reading, even if you are only vaguely interested in the topic of MMO blogs. As the posts-per-day rate here has slowed over the last two months, it’s a topic I’ve thought about as well. This blog is almost 6 years old now (yikes), and I still don’t feel like I’m ‘done’ talking about the MMO genre. At the same time, something has happened to slow the content rate here, and not all of that can be pinned to changes in my RL (though that is a major factor). So what exactly is going on?

First, I don’t think the fad that is blogging is passing, if only because it never was a fad to begin with. Sure, blogging might have had its ‘time in the sun’ around the time the Warhammer hype machine was at its peak, but it was around before that and is still around after. So long as MMOs still somewhat resemble virtual worlds, they will be worth writing about.

What is happening is that the genre itself is changing, and right now the change is just not really giving us much to talk about. A little history lesson first.

When I was writing about WoW sucking before writing about WoW sucking was cool, a major reason for that was because Blizzard was shaping the genre, and the direction they were going in was not one I liked (or that works). I don’t really care about Blizzard/WoW now because they are non-factors. No one is building the next ‘WoW-killer/clone’. No one is taking a great IP (Warhammer) and driving it into the dirt thanks to the WoW taint.

Right now, everyone is basically in two camps. You are either in the EAWare camp, where you just believe MMOs don’t work, or you are in the indy camp, where you understand that MMOs work when they are virtual worlds rather than sRPGs with a login server, and that the market for THAT is not millions. There is no “let’s make a bigger/better WoW” camp, and so I no longer need to keep educating people about it. You’re welcome. When WoW goes F2P in 2015, it won’t be a surprise but rather confirmation of about a hundred posts I made in 2007/8. Feel free to look back and just leave a “damn, Syn right again” comment on each one. It’s the least you can do.

Where MMOs are going is both obvious and as uncertain as ever. It’s obvious because EVE is still crushing it and for good reason; it’s the definition of MMO design done right. If only someone had pointed that out in 2007… What’s really scary is that CCP might be doing its best work with the game right now, ten years in, so rather than decline like “all MMOs do”, EVE is still very much on the way up, with the only real question being just how high up it will go. I know I said the market is not millions, but CCP might prove me wrong in a few years.

The uncertain part is, spaceships aside, where does everyone else go? I think Darkfall: Unholy Wars is a much improved version of DF, and the patches Aventurine has been doing are hitting all the right areas, but the game and the company behind it have a long, long way to go before they reach anything close to current EVE/CCP status. The foundation is there, certainly, but the goal is so far away its borderline impossible to even think about right now. And much like EVE itself, DF doesn’t NEED 1m subs to be what it needs to be. The current population in the game is just right; fights can be found, but the world is not overcrowded to the point of game-breaking (as can happen).

GW2 continues to do what it’s doing, but nothing since the 3rd week has struck me as a reason to return. It’s just there, which since day one has pretty much been the issue with the game. Again, there is a reason Anet isn’t asking for a monthly fee, and it’s not because they are just that nice. Similar statements can be made about most other MMOs; it’s amazing SW:TOR has not been shut down, Secret World is what it is, and a few other titles are chugging along or milking the last bits for whatever is left (LotRO).

The genre is evolving and devolving at the same time. It’s evolving in terms of how games are made; Kickstarter being the biggest factor, but even having games on Steam vs requiring a box in a store is a big change for gaming, and MMOs in particular. A niche game for 50k gets made today if that 50k votes with their wallet strongly enough, while just a few years back this wasn’t the case.

It’s devolving in that we are returning to games based off what Ultima Online was trying to do (virtual world) vs what WoW became (sRPG). Designing your game for a target audience vs ‘for everyone’ is once again happening. Games with scale and longevity are being pitched. Catering to the lowest common denominator is once again seen as a negative.

The great unknown right now is whether the above will deliver or not. Will an MMO off Kickstarter release and be what it promised? Are all of the devs that today talk about “not being WoW” follow through, or are we just in another Warhammer cycle where people in white shades talk about bears but really just deliver a crappy knockoff?

And because all of this is unknown right now, we can’t really blog about it at length. The genre, and as a result, blogs covering the genre, are in a bit of wait-and-see mode.

Linden Labs - best known for creating the sandbox virtual playground Second Life, has purchased digital distribution platform Desura for an undisclosed amount of money. Linden Labs did not say exactly why they purchased the platform, but one would guess that it was an easy way for the company to get into the business of digitally distributing games.

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EVE University, one of New Eden's oldest and most successful rookie training corporations, has announced that they will be commencing training classes for rookies on July 15th.

From "Trading 101" classes, to "Aggression and Engagement" and "Drones 101", EVE University has training classes to suit a wide range of playstyles and interests. The corporation is also on the lookout for lecturers and teachers who can assist in delivering further training opportunities for new players.

You can read more about the upcoming classes here, and view the entire EVE University calendar at this address.

Mynnna looks at the industrial cost of warfare.

Epic quests are turning into a thing of the past in favor of scripted experiences designed to make individuals the center of attention and story.  Graev and I were talking tonight about group questing, and how there really aren’t a lot of quality content options for groups of characters to complete while leveling up or adventuring in the world — even at max level.  Sure, there are “group quests” in WoW, but those are just ‘harder’ versions of a normal quest.  There are quests to go into an instance, run through it, and get a reward.  That’s not quite what we’re thinking.

What if there were special quest lines designed for groups sending groups of players around the world to accomplish grand tasks and/or slay epic mobs?  These quests could provide a bonus or massive incentive to complete the quest with the same group of individuals.  These quests wouldn’t be something done in a day, or even a week.  These would be grand adventures designed to give each group their own story to tell after several play sessions of adventuring.  I can remember logging off in EQ in a dungeon and coming back the next day and picking up with my same group of players who all agreed to meet online at 7:30pm.  I’m talking EQ Cleric epic weapon quest style.

To promote community and meeting new people, a bulletin board could be set up next to these quest givers.  The board could provide a list of players looking for a group to complete the quest.  Players could provide the times they play, their play style, etc.  Groups would be encouraged to bring along these players to fulfill the bonus of completing the quest in a full group, and keeping those players for the entire quest would also be rewarded.  Massive amounts of experience, great (unique/cosmetic) items, and even some sort of alternate character advancement could be the reward.

Obviously the idea hinges on a massive virtual world instead of a themepark, and its not a perfect idea.  We’re just thinking that promoting and creating content for groups to complete gives players an incentive to group and socialize.  Will this drive some players to stick to their inner circle? Yeah, but it will also get some people who always solo to group up, and promote meeting new people.  The idea of really long, involved ‘epic’ group content also gets developers away from creating procedural questing, scripted scenarios, and promotes playing with other people instead of playing a single-player game online.

Group Questing from Keen and Graev's Gaming Blog

I'm strongly considering giving Orson Scott Card the benefit of the doubt and assuming that he doesn't want me to be killed, and therefore I might go see Ender's Game, the movie they've made out of one of his books.

Now, I'm not certain that Orson Scott Card doesn't want me killed.¹⁰ I mean, after all, I think same-sex American couples should be able to get married. I've voted and advocated for that position when I've had the opportunity. I strongly supported the decriminalization of "sodomy,"¹¹ and generally oppose the use of government power to enforce personal and religious opposition to homosexuality. Orson Scott Card thinks that any government that agrees with me and fails to prevent gay marriage should be overthrown by any means "possible or necessary":

Because when government is the enemy of marriage, then the people who are actually creating successful marriages have no choice but to change governments, by whatever means is made possible or necessary.

. . .

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

Orson Scott Card has also called for private sexual contact between consenting adults to remain criminalized, though to be fair as far as I know he has not specifically advocated violent overthrow of any government that fails to imprison sexually active gays. Nuance alert!

Card has called, in short, for the government to be the tool of his personal religious preferences, and for it to be overthrown by (implicitly) force if it fails to satisfy those preferences. In addition to being an opponent of criminalization of sodomy and a supporter of gay marriage I am a vocal opponent of the use of government to promote individual religious dogma, which further puts me at odds with Mr. Card.

Now, Mr. Card only speaks of bringing down by any means necessary the government if it fails to ban gay marriage to satisfy his religious views. He doesn't specifically threaten supporters and fellow-travelers and thus and such. However, violent revolutions often result in violence towards those who have supported the ancien régime. Mr. Card rails against the term "homophobia," against decreasing acceptance of his views, and against social mores with which he disagrees; it is certainly not outside the realm of possibility that he will consider me, a promoter of that which he hates and a supporter of government policies he views as destructive of his family, to be bloodworthy.

But I've decided to give Orson Scott Card the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn't want me dead!

I was moved to this assumption by his moving plea for tolerance in the wake of calls for a boycott of his movie:

Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984.

With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state.

Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.

Orson Scott Card

Here Orson Scott Card has shamed me.

First he's shamed me by correcting my ignorant and mistaken impression that the equality and humanity of gays was a political issue prior to 1984. Next he shamed my meager grasp of the law, which had led me to believe that the impact of the Windsor decision striking down DOMA on states that currently ban gay marriage is unsettled and will likely require years of litigation to sort out. I'm sure that when gay couples married in, say, California seek legal recognition in his state of North Carolina, Mr. Card will file an amicus brief asserting that the matter is now settled and that North Carolina must recognize the marriage. I believe in Orson Scott Card's consistency and good faith!

Most of all Card has shamed me in my grievous misunderstanding of tolerance. I had assumed that tolerance meant that it was a good thing for a free people to let consenting adults engage in private sexual conduct without government interference, or allowing loving consenting adult couples to marry even if some religious traditions oppose it. I assumed that tolerance meant that unpopular views — at one time the view that homosexuals should not be jailed, and now the view that they should be — ought to be addressed by the marketplace of ideas rather than by government force. But I was wrong! Tolerance means that people must be able to revile gays and gay marriage without any social consequence. Tolerance means that I should go see a movie by someone who makes me want to vomit — who wants to overthrow the government by force for doing something I agree with, who might or might not think I deserve to die so that his social policies can trump mine — because botcotting his works would be oppressive to him. Tolerance means that if he calls me a barbarian, and suggests that my friends have dark desires to seduce his children into homosexuality through the machinery of the state, then I should smile and go see his movie, because otherwise his speech might be chilled and he won't be as free to call me a barbarian and my friends child-craving tyrants.

I've already learned so much from Orson Scott Card just from this brief plea. Imagine how much I can learn from a whole movie based on his book! I just can't wait. I thought that I held Card in contempt and that I would express that contempt like a civilized man, by eschewing his society, directly or indirectly, in an exercise of my freedom of expression and association responding to his. But it all right, everything was all right, my struggle is finished. Mr. Card has helped me win a victory over my intolerant self.

I've Decided To Give Orson Scott Card The Benefit of the Doubt! © 2007-2013 by the authors of Popehat. This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Using this feed on any other site is a copyright violation. No scraping.

Earlier today Wilhelm posted some thoughts on the past, present, and future of MMO blogging. The scene is arguably past its prime, a fact that particularly bothers me because I joined in too late for the fun. Curse my poor timing! Anyway, I started writing a comment over on TAGN that turned into a post, and so here we are.

Let’s get this out of the way first: I write this blog because it makes me happy. I would still be posting if I had 10 visitors a day. However, if I honestly didn’t care at all about other people reading what I write I’d just jot posts on a piece of paper and then stuff them under my mattress. As much as I write for my own satisfaction, I definitely get validation from people reading, listening, and commenting, and I very much enjoy seeing the number of readers and listeners increase over time.

Well, increase over time in theory, anyway. My site gets far, far less traffic than some of the “big names” like Bio Break or Kill Ten Rats, but one of the things I’ve realized in the last year is that I’m likely already at the peak of what I can muster. The MMO blog scene is losing writers and readers just through the attrition of time, and there just isn’t that big a pool of folks who are be interested in reading about RIFT add-ons or rants about Huttball. Which, again, is definitely not the only reason I write but it is still kind of a bummer.

So if developers and players looked to blogs a few years ago for insight or publicity, where are they going now? Social media and video are killing the blogging star. People now to go Twitter and Facebook, or to Twitch and YouTube. And this sucks, frankly. I don’t like putting in a lot of effort to create content for other people’s websites, where they own everything and can make weird and arbitrary decisions about what to do with it. I’m good at writing, frankly, and I’m not confident with video or extemporaneous speaking. And honestly I just don’t have the bloody time to be present on social media AND stream AND make videos AND blog AND podcast.

I mean, I’ll try anyway, but it’s under protest against .. change.. and .. the passage of time. Dammit.

I love being an independent content creator, and as a content consumer I know I vastly prefer seeing what independents and amateurs say about games than almost anyone who is a pro “games journalist”. I suspect, then, that the future of blogging is going to be .. small artisan collectives. Think about your favorite podcast — it’s probably part of an amateur network. Small Twitch channels are frequently managed by a group of people or are part of a circle. YouTube channels also mostly band together as networks, although unfortunately for the medium most of the networks there are big entities who care for the bottom line more than the happiness of their creators and the quality of their content.

I think blogs, too, are going to start looking at the network model, whether it’s multiple authors posting at the same site, or 3-4 multi-discipline creators contributing equally. I’m not talking about some site with a draconian central editor with the goal of squeezing out advertising dollars, a scheme which Wilhelm rightfully dismisses in his post. I mean more .. a collective, in the truest sense.

(Full disclosure, I’m kind of slowly working towards that myself — a couple of months ago I got a business license for Totally Legit Publishing (check out my content-free hipster web design!) and although technically right now it’s just the blogs of myself and Ellyndrial, I have some plans in the longer term.)

This all being said, I think there will always be a place for the single-author, independent, blog-only site. Right now these folks produce my favorite things to read on the internet every day, so this reader isn’t going anywhere, anyway.

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And now.. I am off to the UK! I’m going to a wedding in Edinburgh of one of my closest friends, where I will eat chicken tikka masala and find out what Scotsmen really wear under their kilts. (Like photos? Follow me on Instagram!)

I’ve pre-written a couple of posts that will appear while I’m away, plus J3w3l contributed a guest post about the good, the bad, and the ugly of MMO PvP which will show up next week. Also Arolaide and Ellyndrial will be producing episode 30 of the Cat Context Podcast on the 17th! It’s the first Liore-free episode, which means it should be full of swearing, chaos, and pet battles. Don’t miss it.

While I’m at it, today there is a “Behind the Blogging Scenes” interview with me over on World of Matticus! With a photo of my horribly messy desk!

I guess basically what I’m saying is that it’s easy to feel a little cranky because MMO blogging is past its prime, but it ain’t slowed me down yet. Have a great few weeks, folks!

The Ancient Gaming Noob has an excellent post over on his blog that you should read. In it, he provides a bit of perspective on the condition of blogging these days in a gaming sense, and raises a great question (actually six of them):

Where do you think blogs in general, and MMO gaming blogs in particular, are headed these days?  Has progress passed them by?  Are they relics of a bygone age?

Or have they just gone from being the latest “new” thing to being just part of the norm and have settled down?

And is there really a blogging community out there?  Am I just making that up in my head, or do you feel like you are a part of it as well?

I thought it might be fun to take a stab at these. First, a disclaimer: my views are biased due to the fact that I have been blogging for some time, primarily in the EVE Online sense of blogging.

MMO gaming blogs seem to have settled into a niche which suits their format and accessibility, in that most these days simply recount the experience of its author in the game(s) of their choosing. Put simply, most gaming blogs are really just about the experience of playing said game. There was a time when every blogger out there had an opinion on a Very Important Matter. And while there is certainly no shortage of navel-gazing or Deep Thought regarding issues in the gaming community these days, alternatives like TheMittani.com (in an EVE setting) or GameSkinny (in a general gaming setting) provide a larger soapbox from which to proselytize. The thing about opinions and Deep Thoughts is that, generally, authors want to share those things with as many people as possible. Thus, sites like TMC or GameSkinny provide an advantage that a MyBlog.Blogspot.Com address simply can’t compete with.

That’s not to say that there aren’t success stories out there. Do a search for MMO Blog and on the first page you’ll see a handful of bloggers that have carved out a space for themselves in a crowded and old community: Tobold, Taugrim, Nils, etc. Pay closer attention, though, and we might just have our answer to the followup “Are they relics of a bygone age?”

“Massively’s top 10 MMO blogs”….of 2010. The MMO Community Awards….of 2011. “What are some good MMORPG blogs?” on ask.metafilter.com….from 2006. Again, this is not to say that blogging has actually died. There are still more than can be counted being updated daily. If the question is whether blogs are relevant anymore in the wider context of gaming and games development, the answer is there for those who can accept it.

However, I think that the slow fade of the average blog from importance (if not relevance) is not something we need to dispute or cry over. Blogs still have their place and bloggers can still become moderately successful at what they set out to accomplish, but gone are the days in which linkbacks were king and blogrolls were relevant. These days, social media is how I find new blogs to read – and this is a good thing. If I see a blog post retweeted by a bunch of people I already follow, I can almost guarantee myself a good time by clicking on that link those retweets provide, whereas blogrolls and linkbacks can lead you down dangerous alleys of wasted time and soul-crushing self centeredness.

The proliferation of feed readers probably also has something to do with it. If you provide a feed of your blog with full posts enabled, you are guaranteeing to yourself that less people will actually visit your blog. And while most bloggers will say “I don’t do it for the hits,” most honest people will admit that when they make a blogpost that gets read by a couple hundred spiders and bots, and only about a dozen real people, it takes a bit out of you. The sad fact of the matter is, however, that most blogs I read these days are read using Feedly. Why? Uniformity of design, ease of reading, accessibility – all the things that by their very nature blogs tend not to have.

There is still a place for blogging in the gaming community. I do believe that blogs will continue for a very long time, which isn’t exactly the most ‘out there’ prediction to make given the age of entitlement that we live in these days. However, blogs may be moving into a place where they are ancillary components of a conversation. As I pointed out the other day during the Evebloggers Handover Thing, blogs tend to be something that individuals keep up in order to have something to point to from their Twitter, or Facebook, or G+ profile when 140 characters isn’t enough or the thought deserves to be preserved. You can engage in a bit of back and forth on Twitter all day, then sum up your thoughts and drop it like the nuclear option for those who can’t be bothered to read through your Twitter feed. Or, if something particularly thought-provoking comes up on your Internet Horizon, you can crap out a bunch of ~words~ and feel like you’ve contributed.

In that way, the community at large has never been closer together. Social media allows for immediate conversations to take place, as well as a more efficient and self-policing way of introducing readers to blogs they may enjoy. Sure, maybe there aren’t as many blogs these days. Sure, maybe there are fewer posts on the blogs that do exist. But rather than lament over those facts, let us consider the alternative: there are fewer dangerous alleys of wasted time to meander through, fewer opportunities to be disappointed when a blogger goes dark, and less chance of wasting your time engaging in pointless blogwar.

I purchased MmoQuests.com back in July 2006 and it’s seen some good years and some bad, but I always came back to writing here about my video game experiences. There have been over 2,300 posts in those 7 years, 62,896 spam comments since 2007, and 247,891 visits since 2010 (no idea why it didn’t count earlier than that). There are so many posts these days about ‘blogging and community‘ and ‘where did the MMO bloggers go‘ – well, this one is still right here. Still doing the same posts I’ve done for years now because I never went into this thinking I was doing anything more than writing about a hobby of mine, for myself. I love writing. In fact I have three other blogs besides this one, and although Nomadic Gamers doesn’t get a lot of traffic in the way of posts it’s still there. I don’t post very controversial topics but there are a few from the past. I also don’t get a lot of comments, but I never have – and I never ever let that stop me.

One thing I did do a few years ago was remove my blogroll from the right hand side column – and I want to change this and put it back. I had no reason for it other than the fact that it was a design choice I made at the time when I changed the theme around and just never added it back.

Anyhow, the point is – thank you. Every single person who has ever read this blog, ever supported me by clicking the donate button (it’s not free to host this massive blog for 7 years ya know), everyone who has put up with my rants, followed me from game to game, etc. I’ve met some very wonderful people by blogging here. I got a job writing for Beckett Massive Online Gamer (before they shut down of course) because of this blog. Will I be giving it up any time soon?

Most certainly not. Writing is just what I do.

Activision Blizzard is at the top of the gaming world.  With games like World of Warcraft and the Call of Duty series, one would think that gaming giant doesn't have a financial care in the world.  Sure, WoW has seen the number of subscribers dipping down to 8.3 million after a 1.3 million subscriber loss in the first quarter.  But Activision Blizzard's next gen MMORPG, code-named Titan, was delayed until at least 2016 indicating that the gaming giant figured that WoW still had a few good year's left in it.  And with the Financial Times indicating that Activision Blizzard has $US 4.6 billion in the bank, one would think Titan is not needed right away.

But while Activision Blizzard is in good shape, the same is not true for Vivendi.  Vivendi is important because it owns 61% of Activsion Blizzard's stock.  That same Financial Times article indicates the French telecom and media company is not in great shape and is rated BBB with a negative outlook by Standard and Poors.  The BBB rating is the second lowest credit rating.  According to the article Vivendi is trying to restructure its business by selling off its telecommunications businesses and build around its content companies like Universal Music, the home of Justin Bieber and Rihanna.

But things aren't going so well, as the company had a negative balance sheet of $US 16.8 billion at the end of Q1.  The company is also apparently having some difficulties selling off its telecommunications assets.  On Wedesday Vivendi sold 750 million euros in corporate bonds for the purpose of refinancing bonds maturing in 2014.

Some are speculating that Vivendi is about to use some boardroom maneuvering to get some of Activision Blizzard's money.  Joystiq reported on 8 July:

"Financially strapped conglomerate Vivendi wasn't able to sell off its controlling interest in Activision Blizzard, but it's looking to get money out of the $4.4 billion cash and asset-flush publisher through other means. The Financial Times (via Reuters) reports Vivendi will try some boardroom maneuvers to obtain a massive payout.

"Coincidentally, the play Vivendi is reportedly trying to pull off is nearly identical to a theory published by Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter in May. And it goes a little something like this: July 9 (tomorrow) is the five-year closing date of the $18 billion Activision and Vivendi merger, which means Vivendi will have the ability to nominate a majority of Activision's board of directors. After that, the board could take out a mega loan, and initiate a dividend (a standard payment given to shareholders).

"'Borrowing of $5 billion would permit a dividend of $8.5 billion. As the holder of 61 percent of Activision's common stock at March 31, 2013, we estimate Vivendi would receive approximately $5.2 billion in cash, easing its mounting debt concerns,' wrote Pachter."

The Reuters report explained why Vivendi could not force such borrowing earlier:

"Current rules [that expired 9 June] require Vivendi to secure the support of Activision's independent directors ahead of any dividend payment that takes the division's net debt above $400 million.

"But as these rules expire on Tuesday, Vivendi would be able to gear up Activision's balance sheet and force the payout of a special dividend without the approval of independent directors."

In the Financial Times article, another possibility emerged.  Some analysts believe that Vivendi could use the thread of a leveraged dividend as a threat that would lead Activision Blizzard to respond with a tender offer for part of Vivendi's stake in the company at above-market prices.  However, don't expect Vivendi to give up controlling interest in the game's company as Reuters reports that Vivendi plans to group Brazillian telecom unit GVT, Universal Music Group, Activision Blizzard and pay-TV provider Canal Plus into a new Vivendi media group, with efforts to sell of GVT to occur later.

News of Vivendi's grab into the Activision Blizzard cookie jar puts the recent disclosure of plans to introduce an in-game cash shop to World of Warcraft in a new light.  The move isn't necessarily due to World of Warcraft performing poorly.  Instead, the move to sell convenience items to Asian gamers and pets to Western gamers looks like a move to refill the war chest because Vivendi is not doing well and looks like it has put Activision Blizzard on its raid schedule.