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EverQuest: What You Really Get From an Online Game
Everquest is a game centered on rewarding you for how much time you put into it. This is the core design philosophy behind the game, since they charge you by the month and make more money the longer you stick around. What they don't tell you is that taking your money is about all they're interested in. They care little for player complaints, and less about player suggestions and requests. They're in this to milk you for all you're worth, and that's the first thing you have to know.
The second thing you have to know is that the game stops being fun. By that time though, you're so "addicted" to the game, you don't realize it. The game becomes a source of frustration and anger instead of a source of entertainment and fun. It becomes a chore. It becomes a job. You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consumed with getting that new item, or finishing that last quest, and while so consumed you begin to hate the game. Vehemently. It's a game that goes on forever, and one that you can never win.
After playing the game for a while, you'll start conversing with other players, and you'll see the one thing all players have in common is that they all hate Sony - the designers of Everquest. (It should be noted that Verant, the original development company, has been absorbed into Sony Online Entertainment -- so will be referred to as Sony for simplicity) This is baffling at first glance, because they send Sony $12.95 every month for a form of supposedly voluntary entertainment, which they enjoy, and yet they despise them! Look a little deeper though, and you'll see that most people who dislike Sony are the ones who no longer have fun playing Everquest. They aren't getting what they want out of the game anymore, and they look to Sony, being the source of all changes and improvements/breakdowns in the game, as the cause. Right or wrong, this is the state of affairs; the consumers hate the company providing them with a service that they think they enjoy.
Let's go back to the part about Sony not caring about their customers. Recently, they changed their GM (Game Master) Customer Service system such that, instead of one GM being assigned to each game server permanently to handle problems, there would instead be a smaller pool of GMs roaming all the servers infrequently. When enough player problems on a server requiring GM help cropped up (around 30), a GM would be sent to handle the petitions (problems) one at a time until finished, and move on to the next server. This had the effect of increasing wait times on getting petitions answered from a few hours to many hours, or even several days by many accounts. This was introduced supposedly as a cost-cutting measure, which would improve efficiency. They'd have to hire less GMs if they pooled them up into a roving band, instead of assigning one for each server. In actuality, while this may have made things more efficient on Sony's side, the players were left waiting for days until that magic number was reached where a GM would log on to the server to help them out.
On Sony's website, there is a link to a feature called Developer's Corner. Over the two years this has been up and running, the person in charge of Customer Relations at Sony, Alan "Absor" VanCouvering, has turned it from a section dedicated to answering player questions, into a simple Press Release box with little useful information. Where there would be several updates per day, now there are perhaps one or two per week. Answers to player questions are few, and replies to player emails are fewer. Since most answers to customer questions are now handled on specific, "class" (ranger, paladin, monk, etc) message boards by the developers themselves (once in a blue moon of course), one is left wondering what Absor is paid to do. Twiddle his thumbs perhaps? The world may never know.
This leads up to a lack of will at Sony to address their customers with any sort of respect. Often, sudden "game-changing" features will be added or removed in a patch, with little or no explanation given to the players, and no recourse for the players themselves other than to submit comments to the black hole at the Dev Corner. Other changes can render a class' or items' abilities weaker, slower, or even drastically altered or removed from the game. Again, the players have no say in the matter officially, and rarely get these changes reversed through massive online signature petitions. It is quite common now for these sorts of changes to come completely unannounced and unexplained, leaving the players themselves to bug test, figure out what happened, what is wrong, and leaving them again to wander off to the Dev Board asking what the purpose of the change was. Far too often in this process, the sheer discoordination and incompetence at Sony is revealed, as the changes happened accidentally or were not intended to occur in the manner they did. The bottom line being, you can go to bed one night with a great character and items, and wake up in the morning to find all that has changed; leaving you holding your member and your opinions mattering less than a pig's squeals in a slaughterhouse.
The final aspect of the will at Sony to disassociate from the customers is how they handle disputes between players. In the Everquest game world, you can find yourself in competition with other players for the ability to play the game. Yes, in EQ, you compete with other players for the right to kill the monsters. It's massive artificial scarcity. If you aren't online early enough, or if you don't move fast enough, you lose. MOBs (as monsters are known) spawn at predictable intervals; and the design of the game itself, added onto the times that Sony resets its servers for patches, means that if you don't live in Europe or on the east coast, you and your guild (an organization of players) are provided with less game content than any other time zone or area. You get to have "fun" as another guild of players in another part of the world kills a mob required to advance in the game while you're in bed, or at work, and nothing can be done about it. Often, players will do this purposefully to keep you from killing other, stronger mobs, so they can keep that part of the game to themselves. The GMs will not help you, the Guides (volunteer player GMs) will tell you they can't do anything (and that's true, they are impotent for the most part), and you and the 60 people in your guild are left holding your collective members for six months while you wait for said east-coast unemployed or European guild to take pity on you and let you have the mob. Fat chance.
Sony of course doesn't mind these situations in the slightest; because you see, this is their high-end game. Where in the lower levels you'll spend your time getting great items by fighting mobs that take seconds to prepare for and a minute to kill, at the high end you are required to spend multiple hours (sometimes up to twelve hours) with a "raid force" of 60 or more people just killing useless, annoying mobs (which drop little or no loot) put there as obstacles. Finally, when you reach the boss mob, the fight may last perhaps 30 minutes or more. This 30 minutes of combat is certainly not fun, as all you do is point your character at a mob and press a single button to auto-attack. Many melee-classes go watch TV for the duration of the fight. Your clerics (usually eight or more) cast the same healing spell in a long healing chain to keep your warrior alive, and your wizards all cast the same damaging spells for the 30 minutes of the fight. This is to kill a single mob (in this case, named Aten Ha Ra), which drops four items for your guild.
These situations are 'lovingly' referred to by the players as timesinks; gameplay traps intended to waste your time and keep you playing longer. There are hundreds of them; others incredibly longer than simply getting to a mob. Several quests required to advance in the game require you to spend 100+ hours sitting in single locations, killing hundreds of mobs in 12-hour stretches for a "rare drop", such as ore in the ssraeshza mines, which you use to create "bane" weapons; or the shissar commanders for key pieces; with which to fight the boss mob of the zone. Unlike the other parts of the game, these timesinks are required for advancement, and there is no getting around them unless you wish to stop playing. This is of course not fun at all, but as said above, by this time you'll have long stopped having fun with EQ. You'll do it anyway though, as thousands of others have, because you, like them, are addicted. The quest to kill the shissar Emperor of Ssraeshza is one of the most vicious timesinks in the entire game, but it is merely one example among dozens. To even reach this area of the game requires months of non-stop raiding with your guild; sometimes up to a year of raiding. Only then will you be powerful enough to enter.
Expansions to the game are put out about once per year. These cost around $30 to buy when released, and are required to visit new zones, gain new levels, and so forth. For anyone just entering the game now to be on equal footing with others, they will need to buy the original game and all four expansions at retail price. Of course, no expansion yet released by Sony has been complete when it hit the shelves. Often the final zone in the expansion would be left unfinished, or in such a state of bugginess that it was unplayable. Other zones will be incomplete or have bad pathing for the mobs. Items and monsters will not be "balanced" for difficulty, and players will sometimes stumble onto great equipment for their characters, only to have Sony later decide it is too powerful, and "nerf" it. When an item is nerfed, it's reduced in effectiveness or power, often to the point of absurdity, or it simply stops entering the game world. This rewards players who gun through the new expansion as fast as possible to get the upper hand over their competition on the server, and punishes anyone who cannot put 12+ hours of EQing in per day. The problems with expansions highlight another aspect of Sony which is decidedly underwhelming: their playtesting (or lack thereof). Many bugs in the new expansions are left for players to discover themselves and work around; fixes are often delayed by as much as a week while Sony tries to find a solution. In Everquest, you pay to be a bug tester, and receive no feedback or acknowledgement that any bugs you report are fixed, or even looked at, unless its fix shows up in a terse (bi-) weekly patch message. Most bugs are left unfixed due to their overwhelming numbers.
Class balancing is an on-going project of Sony to try to make sure each class (warrior, cleric, wizard, ranger, etc) has its own niche, and feels useful and meaningful in the game world. They seem oblivious to the fact that items are just as much a part of the game as classes though, and it seems they let their zone (game area) developers run wild with items, creating more work for the developers. If you're keeping a tally, the Mrylokar's Dagger in NToV was one of them. The Mistwalker from Lady Vox was another. These weapons were both nerfed because they were too powerful, and made the classes who could use them much too strong versus the mobs of the time. There is no feedback to the players on what the "visions" for the classes are supposed to be (beyond the vague three-line descriptions in the manual), and no way to for the players to venture a guess of what might be "too powerful" and in line to be nerfed next. Playing EQ is a lot like playing in a casino; you can see your winnings vanish in the blink of an eye out of sheer bad luck. It is not a game where you can ever feel secure.
All this pales in comparison to player harassment, of course. From sexual-orientation insults to other players spamming your chat bar, EQ has it all. There are other forms of harassment too: Often when in competition with other guilds (as you will find yourself quite often if you play long enough), you will see them employ tactics such as "training" mobs onto you to keep you away from the contested mob encounter or zone. A "train" is typically a large number of powerful mobs (10-20), which the other guild will gather up from the zone and dump onto your raid in order to kill you. The GMs will again do nothing about this, nor will the Guides, unless they are there to witness it. Being that there are typically only a half-dozen GM/Guides on a server of 2500+ players at any given time, and that trains are completely unpredictable and random, there is of course almost no way for them to witness these events. While server logs exist that can prove this malicious player harassment occurred, they will usually refuse to even take a look, because it constitutes work, and simply dismiss the problem outright. Your guild is then left holding their collective members once again. Do you see the pattern forming here?
Everquest is a game full of people who want to "win" and "be the best" at any cost. This includes griefing you and your guild, making your gameplay miserable. Why not simply quit then, you ask? If the game isn't fun and sucks this badly, why would anyone play it? Well, because they are addicted. They are addicted to the mobs, to the loot, and to the social atmosphere with other people in their guilds. They have invested so much time in these characters (often hundreds of days of play time, sometimes more time than they spend at their jobs), that they can't will themselves to give it up. They play on instead, hoping things will get better, and nursing a great and deep hatred for Sony and the game itself. If you play long enough, you will see this as the universal truth. People who quit are viewed as giving up on their guilds; they are ridiculed, denounced, and hated. There is massive peer pressure to keep playing. Often people you thought were your friends in the game were simply using you to advance, or improve their characters. Online relationships between people in EQ are fickle, and are only good as long as everyone's getting a good dose of the drug (loot, advancement in the game, and good social relations with their guild).
Perhaps now you've begun to see the other side of EQ: The buggier side, the darker side; the side of despair and anger, fear and frustration. The game will absorb your life if you let it, while the days and weeks melt away into oblivion. I have barely touched on the repetitive gameplay you must endure to reach the top levels of the game: killing mob after mob, hundreds upon hundreds in an endless non-challenging stream to gain experience. I have not said anything about linkdeath (losing your connection) from Sony network problems, or server crashes where you lose any experience or items recently attained (and for which you are not compensated by customer service). I have not said anything about the Legends(TM) subscriptions, where you get to pay $40/month to get the customer service that you should be receiving anyway. There are many other problems with this game that I did not go into here. Before you get into EQ, realize what you're jumping into. Look before you leap.
David Sanftenberg
aka Dolalin Bonewielder
62 Necromancer of Lanys T`Vyl
Everquest is a game full of people who want to "win" and "be the best" at any cost.
Because they can't be in real life. Yay for delusions of grandeur!
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
DON'T PLAY IT.
Gaming addiction is not a behavior of gamers... it's a behavior of addicts. The games just happen to be there for the addict's mind to latch onto.
Blaming particular games (particularly in a manner which reeks of personal bitterness) for addictions is like blaming alcohol for alcoholism, or blaming heroin for junkies: it's a foil. The real ones to blame are the ones who are addicted.
But what do I know. I'm just looking for anonymous gay sex.
I'm not going to try and lecture you or come up with some kind of witty retort.
Simply stated:
It's a video game. If it pisses you off, turn off the computer, go outside and take a walk.
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
Have been the sort of, if you don't like it, don't play it!
I think it's this sort of defensive vitriolic reply that defeats the point of the article. That being, if you are considering playing EQ than you should probably save your money for something else. Albeit an obvious point. I myself found the game to be unfun after about 6 months running into many of the same problems. What did I do? Quit. I mean really, you EQ fan boys should just move along from this thread, it's not intended for you as I see it.
The most startling fact about EverQuest is how well it conforms to the Skinner Box model, making one believe that Verant specifically designed their product around principles to make it more addictive than it would be otherwise.
Here is an interesting read on that subject.
Honestly, if the company is exploiting psychological theory in order to make their game addictive on purpose, its not much different from cigarette companies using nicotine or cola companies using caffiene IMO.
Bad? Maybe... I've heard of a lot of otherwise well adjusted people playing EQ to thier own detriment. But then, ultimately it is the responsibility of the individual to take care of themselves.
By the time they've realized the hate for the game, they're addicted. So this is not an "easy" solution.
Um, did I miss the part where video games can now directly stimulate your pleasure centers? Addiction is not the same as laziness.
Either you like the game, or you don't. Exert some control over how you spend your time instead of passively absorbing whatever mindless pseudo-entertainment comes your way with the least effort. Turn off Everquest. Turn off the TV while you're at it. Go outside, take a walk. Go hiking, or skiing, make a friend, get some exercise. Get a dog from the pound, and take it for a long walk every day. Do something that gives you something to remember when you get old.
include $sig;
1;
Every commercial game produced is released in order to make money. The reality of this seems to have escaped the author of this review.
As a consumer, you have a number of choices. You can choose to buy the game and play it, or you can choose to buy the game and not play it. You can also choose not to buy the game, as well.
The problem that the author is trying to address has nothing to do with Everquest; It has everything to do with the perception of value. He wants you to know what you're getting into, and he obviously feels that EverQuest is not worth the money.
Some games are addictive; The only difference is that you're not spending $x every month to play Tetris. Saying that 'you can't win' doesn't make a whole lot of sense. There are a lot of games you can't win; I own several of them.
Spy Hunter (the arcade game) was a great game. It cost twenty-five cents, and there's no way to win. It goes on forever. If you want to play Spy Hunter as long as you want to play EverQuest, it'll cost a hell of a lot more, unless you have crazy-mad Spy Hunter skills.
EverQuest offers a flat monthly rate. Some people pay something like $10 an hour for this, because they only play a couple hours a month. Some people are logged in sixteen hours a day. From an entertainment point of view, the people who are 'addicted to the game' are actually getting more value for their money. Read that again. Addicted to EverQuest: Hopeless gamer, or thifty shopper?
Maybe they don't update their site as often as they should. Are site updates part of the cost, or can anyone access them? If you're not paying for it, it does not apply to the 'value for money' problem. Poor updates, inefficient game masters... If you don't want to deal with this, don't buy the game, I suppose. On the other hand, I wouldn't rush out and buy a game that claims 'Kick-Ass Support!' and 'EXTREME GAME-MASTERING.' Game companies in the future will likely feel the same way, and just keep putting hot chicks on the boxes in the store.
All in all, I do appreciate the honesty of the rant, and I do believe that many people may not understand the value proposition of EverQuest before they buy the game and start playing. On the other hand, caveat emptor, baby!
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation
If Sony can get away with anally raping its customers on EQ, what makes you think they won't do the same and worse on a game where thousands will play simply because it's a Star Wars game?
No, my friend, there will be no happiness in SWG. The same morons that worked on EQ work on SWG... It's silly to expect anything good out of them.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
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It's addictive because it's fun.
Whether or not the author wants to admit it, it is VERY MUCH like the BEST parts of a casino, without the chance of losing your entire paycheck (well you could, but at 12.95 per account that's alot of accounts!)
Whether or not he gets 'screwed' by changes he doesn't like, the reason he plays is because he LIKES that moment when you THINK you will all die, but you win in the end.
He LIKES the teamwork.
He LIKES the feeling of progress when you waste 100+ hours but finally get that last brick of whatever.
He LIKES clicking combine and have an item appear on the end of the cursor or a text message show up saying, "You have gotten better at Tailoring (250)".
He LIKES talking to friends.
He LIKES planning things, following through, and tasting victory.
He LIKES seeing: "You have gained experience! Welcome to level 62"
He LIKES going back to places he's been and feeling incredibly powerful, like Sauron blowing through the enemy hordes.
He LIKES see his armor get better, his skills go up, and being able to kill bigger things.
He LIKES all of that, despite bad timing keeping him from getting certain mobs, bad luck keeping him from getting certain drops, bad planning preventing him from keeping things that are too strong for the game design, bad customer service to explain why his uber sword of necro dick licking had to be taken from him.
Most of all, he likes all of that despite his bad perspective that convinces him someone OWES him something. It's a game and it's addictive because it lets you set your own goals and work with other people to achieve them.
Maybe his problem is just that he needs to work on how he sets his goals.
Never confuse volume with power.
Some of what you said is EQ specific. Some is coporate greed and indifference.
At the moment, The Sims Online has just jumped from beta to production, and is "the hot thing" for Electronic Arts. I've got to believe indifference will be minimized at this point; maybe greed, too. The "mob" and "timekiller" stuff doesn't seem to apply.
Should EQers move from pikes to pizza, from dungeons to decorating, swords to Sims?
And the big question for Sony, since any individual player has time for at most one online addiction: How many will switch?
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Blaming particular games (particularly in a manner which reeks of personal bitterness) for addictions is like blaming alcohol for alcoholism, or blaming heroin for junkies: it's a foil. The real ones to blame are the ones who are addicted.
As far as i can tell, the story being discussed was not meant to blame Sony for creating an addictive game, it was to blame Sony for creating a poor addiction. It seemed more aimed at convincing current addicts to realize they aren't having fun, and warn new customers away from the game, than to actually alter or condemn the behavior of Sony itself. (Of course, it did seem *very* keen on condemning Sony, but i think that was more meant to be a secondary effect of the article. Altering Sony's behavior, on the other hand, the author appears to have given up on.)
While, yes, of course, it is addictive personalities and addictive substances that are to *blame* for putting persons like Mr. Sanftenberg into situations like this, it is of note that addictive personalities have a wide variety of addictions to choose from, and there is nothing wrong with attempting to steer potential addicts toward more pleasant things to waste their time and effort on than, say, Everquest, even if said steering is done in something of a rather bitter manner. Semianonymous gay sex, as you suggest, is i think a far more rewarding time sinkhole than MMORPGs.
-- super ugly ultraman
And more than likely those who run Star Wars Galaxies will employ more money making schemes. The maintainers of everquest have added pay services such as a premium server, name changes for money, server transfers for money, and such. While there is a strong resistance to this from Everquest players as it goes against the precident of the game, there will be no such precident in Star Wars Galaxies. I think we can expect to see a situation in where, not only haveing more time but also having more money allows you to advance beyond other players.
I do security
I'm not gonna sit here and "defend" Sony or Verant or Absor or any of them, even though I have had the pleasure of meeting with them personally and sharing beers with them. This article is obviously by a bitter gamer who wants to smear EQ's reputation through the mud, and that's fine. This is the age of the Internet, and it's his right to do that.
:>
I left the Guide program due to hardware issues about a year ago - after about two years of service. This was back when we had our own GM on the server, but it was difficult to get in touch with him during his work hours. Why? Because of kids. Because he had to clean up after scammers and recover lost items...He was insanely busy for his entire shift, and he wouldn't really be on server all that much.
When I was a Guide, I can safely say that out of every 20 petitions I fielded, I was able to help about 17 or 18 of them. I was able to help the majority of the players I conversed with during my shift. But you don't hear about them. You don't hear about the people that had the volunteer CS staff help them in a quick and expedient manner. They don't come out and say "Thank you." You only heat about people like the author of this article, who feels he has been wronged. The ones that say that we didn't care.
And then, there are the people who petition and won't let you help them. Even if you do exactly what they ask, they will still curse you out and and call you incompetent. Or, if you inquire more information about the problem, they demand that you stop asking questions and just fix it. (As if we had access to the source code and could just recompile it on the fly...) Yes, I know. This is reality. This is how I was treated working in Retail, too. But luckily, people like this were very, very, VERY few and far between.
We did care about every situation, every petition. I was a Guide on one of the two Teams-PvP servers, so not only did we have to deal with training and kill stealing, but we also had corpse campers, bind rushers, and immortal healing. Some of these were no-nos, and some of these (like immortal healing, where someone outside of PvP range would heal someone who's killing you) were deemed "Okay" by Sony. Did I agree with the ruling? Not really, but there's really not much Guides could do. The author of the article is right - we pretty much had our hands and feet tied. We were the eyes and ears of the GM's - nothing more. We could unstick players from walls and document warnings for behavior if they were dumb enough to still do it while we were staring at them. (We could be invisible.)
I don't know how things are now inside the program, but I can say that when I was in it, we actually were helping many people and people enjoyed their time in EQ because of the ways we helped them. There are far more of those type of people than the type of people like the author of this article. However, everybody that will reply to my message here will be the bitter types that will tell me that I'm just a Sony PR person that believes the kool-aid fed to me by Michelle Butler for two years. (Just you watch, some AC will just cut and paste that exact sentence, or change a word or two.)
I stopped playing EverQuest because all my friends did - and there was no reason to stick around. However, we're all waiting for Star Wars: Galaxies. And you guessed it, it's by the same guys who made EQ.
For the bitter ones, you might want to stay away from all online games, because it will just be "Wash, Rinse, Repeat" for you.
If you're still open to an enjoyable experience, we're in for one helluva ride.
I think the moral of this whole topic is: EQ in moderation is awesome. But don't let yourself get bitter. That only brings you down.
There are many people that cannot do without a certain thing even though they are in no chemical process attached to it. Such is Everquest. To tell someone just to 'stop' is like telling a kleptomaniac to stop stealing or an alcoholic to stop drinking. It can be done but it is not easy and there will always be the draw to go back to it
I do security
Don't forget the expansion coming out, Kingdom of Stone, the phone version coming out, the single player version coming out, EQ2, and of course, EQ for the PS2.
... it's easy to stand there and laugh at those of us who have been there and tell us simply to "stop" or "don't".
For someone who has never had to kick a habit, like drugs, drinking, sex, smoking, etc
Face it, people are stupid, and the internet is the place where they all meet.
While I've never played Everquest, I am familiar with obsessive\compulsive behavior (through my own experiences). :). Pen & paper RPG's have several advantages over online, in that the players interact face to face, there is more room for creative input, more options for character development, and ultimately costs less. It still won't get you laid, though :)
The problem, I think, is that by the time a game like this stops being fun you have a huge time investment in it. Walking away from the game at that point would be difficult, because then it would feel like all those hours (or weeks, months, years) were wasted. Even if you are not having fun, I imagine that it feels like you have to keep playing simply to justify all the time you've already put into it.
Of course, the sad thing is that this time is already "wasted", since there can never be a conclusion to these games. Since the only real reward of these games is the fun you have, then if it stops being fun you should stop playing. For a while, at least. Maybe it will be fun to play again if you stop for a few months.
As an aside, I think Everquest addicts should stop playing EO and maybe start up a D&D (or other pen and paper based rpg) with their friends, to wean themselves away from it (sortof like methadone
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
I just got an xbox recently as a gift with the live subscription. Gaming has apparently taken on all types of new money making schemes. Microsoft (which has you pay a per year fee for server access) enforces a CC number for all accounts. even if they were a gift like mine was. This is to allow you to 'unlock' features in games. Want the extra outfit for your character ($5) please. There is a setting so that it's not automatic and I have the setting toggled so. I wouldn't be suprised if the 'more you pay' type mentatlity creeps into games more. They are probobly tired of seeing all those scammers on eBay making a mint off selling gold pieces (or whatever the currency for the game is), enhanced characters, etc.
Once companies realize that adult gamers have little else to dispose their cash on you will probobly be able to start a lvl 80 character for the low low price of $24.99. After you've purchased the game and online subscription of course. Don't forget to get the extra cache of power weapons upgrades... only $4.99 this week...
You know, my initial thought was to respond to this in detail. I played EQ for some time, and eventually got bored with it and quit. Thus, the *GAME* is not any more addictive than any other recreational activity. Many, many people are far more "addicted" to television, sitting in front of the tube letting the hours melt away with absolutely nothing to show for it (and in fact, paying a monthly subscription to a cable company or satellite provider!).
Why don't you go on about how these poor people are being mistreated by the television networks? Afterall, THEY have no say in what they get to watch either. Customer service never pays any attention to the television viewer, and certainly diputes amongst family members over what channel will be turned on are ignored. Why some kids will actually set the VCR up to tape a channel just to keep their sibling from watching something else! Artificial scarcity of resources and regular "spawns" of TV shows are commonplace here too.
It's a game. It's a way to ignore reality for some amount of time so you don't become so depressed/angry at your situation/boss/President/etc, that you go postal. When it starts being more effort than fun, you stop playing it. If you can't do that, you have an addictive personality and need help. Be thankful you're only addicted to a $10/month game instead of crack or trips to the casino!
Not every game needs to have a "win-state". The point of a mud (and EQ is nothing more than a DikuMUD with a graphics engine replacing the room engine) is to enjoy playing it... there often is no ultimate goal (well, for some it was becoming a builder... but you can't do that with Sony), other than to be more powerful than your neighbor. The main difference is that a graphical mud doesn't let you use your imagination the way a text game does. Try reading a book instead of watching a movie sometime, you might get the idea.
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Any change in any part of the game has a signifigant chance of effecting multiple other parts of the game that no-one could predict. Players beat challenges with a speed that is awe-inspireing and demand more. Infact, the players do nothing but demand. ANY imbalance in the 15 classes causes thousands of complains. People get mad about the time that servers are patched, things spawning to fast and too slow. Things being too easy and too tough. Items entering the too fast or too slow. Players will use any method to win they can find whether legitimate or blatently exploitive. And then get mad when exploitive methods are removed.
SoE (Sony online Entertainment) is trying to satisfy hundreds of thousands of people of different levels, different classes, different races, different play times, different lengths of play and different goals, and at the same time trying to keep the game sustainable for the future. You can satisfy all the people some of the time, or some of the people all the time, but never all the people all the time. And those unsatisfied will be as loud about it as they possibly can.
I'm not trying to justify how SoE runs the game. I disagree with a lot that they do. They are by no means saints. But they DO face a daunting task.
I do security
I think we can expect to see a situation in where, not only haveing more time but also having more money allows you to advance beyond other players
Oh no... yet another example of where time == money!
Why does this perpetually surprise people? Even better, why do people always scream and moan about it? It's a game folks...
And yes, I say this as someone who has a L60 Enchanter and a L55 Ranger in EQ. Both played by me from L1, not bought. I quit the game 9 months ago though, so I have a bit of perspective on it now.
Is to give the players everything they want. Players are, by and large, whiney greedy bastards. They all say they want an environment where they have complete control and the best stuff, but the second you give that to them is the second they get bored out of their mind.
paintball
I frequently see the anti-capitalist rant. "The companies don't care about me. They care only about making money!"
When was the last time you bought something from Sony and gave them an extra $5 to help them out? No, you paid the minimum amount--just enough so that you could legally acquire what you were purchasing. Must be that you care only about keeping as much money as you possibly can. Your motives are selfish and greedy.
Sure Sony doesn't love me. I'm okay with that. I don't love Sony. Every now and then, they offer a product or serivce I want for a price i like and we do business. That's where our relationship ends. They provide me no more than I pay for, and I pay for no more than they provide me.
There are some exceptions--times when I've acted specifically to support a particular company. However, my efforts are primarily greedy because it's always a company I want to survive and grow, or a situation in which the company owner is a friend of mine.
Love your family and friends and get it in return from them. Business is just business.
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If you really care about playing a good MMORPG, devote some time to one of the open source MMORPG projects like WorldForge. Or just teach yourself how to make good 3D models of game objects and put those out under the GPL for programmers to use. (The reason there aren't a lot of great high-end open source games out there for you is because there isn't enough great high-end art for the programmers.)
If 1% of the Everquest addicts had put 1% of their dedication into helping create open source games, the situation today would be much better than it is. It probably seems like a lot more effort to help make a game than to simply play it, but in the end it can be much more rewarding in the sense of being a hobby/craft, instead of just a hobby/game. You still get the sense of seeing things improve, being part of a community, and building up a good reputation.
The game industry hasn't quite reached the same point as other media, where the *only* way to make it big is to prostitute yourself to the corps - theoretically it should still be possible to make games via grassroots means. But not unless grassroots people (i.e. YOU) put some dedication into solving it.
Also, computer games are actually *important*. Seriously. Look at the list of reasons why people are still using Windows - up in the #1 or #2 slot will often be seen, "No games". Yet ironically, many open source developers will scoff at game efforts, "The project will never fly", "It'd take too much time", "Open source can't work for games", "They should be coding it in [C|Python|Java|etc.]", et al. The plain fact is that there are not enough creative and skilled people making open source games.
Open source games are particularly important, because unlike proprietary games, they have "longevity". This is due mostly to the fact that there are so few of them, to begin with, but also because of the intrinsic nature of open source. For examples, look at Hack, NetTrek, FreeCiv, etc. Games that originated a LONG time ago. A single good/big open source game can have a vast and long lasting benefit to the open source community.
Many of the problems mentioned in the articles can be avoided via open source. Bugs can be fixed by anyone who can read source and has an afternoon or two to kill. If the people running the server aren't providing decent service, find someone else that's running a copy of the game - or set up a copy yourself just for you and your friends. If the game seems too long in the tool art-wise or feature-wise, well grab a copy of the content and/or code and start making patches.
Anyway, unlike the problems of the RIAA, Globalism, suppression of freedoms in the US, etc. etc., this is a problem that YOU can _directly_ do something about to fix, without risking anything but some freetime.
If you have a flair for art, create some good 3D meshes. If you can do photography, build a massive library of texture images. If you're good at making or performing music, or have a good voice, or just like to wander around in the wilderness with a microphone, then create sounds for games. If you can do code design, then come up with modules for game logic (like a perl module for simulating vegetation growth, or a C code for making snazzy spell effects, or a library to go with SDL). Design nifty looking GUI interfaces. Make maps of an imaginary world. Scan in your fantasy drawings and post on the web for 3D artists to use as sources.
If you know none of this, well, at least you can (presumably) write. And it turns out that writing is the 100% MOST needed skill by most open source projects, games in particular. Write a paper summing up good ideas for certain game rules you've seen, and your thoughts on improving them. Invent a new race for a RPG and put in intricate detail into every aspect of it.
Can't write? Well, likely you can read web pages and make lists. Find some topic of relevance to games and start building a table. Create a spreadsheet of different kinds of real-world flowers, with data about how they grow. Collect a database of riddles, sorted by difficulty. Invent a list of futuristic handguns. Build a solar system with details for each planet.
The important thing here is to create reusable *components*. Games are *hard* to make. They take more time than you have yourself; more time then you and your clique of friends. (Well, except for dinky little arcade or card games, but of course those aren't what we're talking about here.) In order to make these big games, we need to leverage open source's strength of _modularity_. We as a community need to have lots of really good "bits" that someone can gather together in a year or two and turn into a good game. Or, hopefully, a bunch of people can take and turn into a bunch of different games.
If you don't like working alone, no prob - there are still a bunch of game development projects/communities out there that you can join for feedback/help/encouragement/friendship/etc.
Whatever you choose to do, please, PLEASE put it out explicitly under the GPL license (or BSD, or Public Domain). If you do, then open source game developers will be able to make use of it in their game efforts. (There is tons of content out there on the web right now, but most of it is unusable due to license issues.)
So, next time you feel a sense of frustration over some proprietary, closed source game, that disempowers you from being able to fix it, grab Blender, or emacs, or Sodipodi, or Timidity, or whatever, and create something to help the game developers out there.
ALL Online RPGs are like this.
There are a couple of reasons to make multiplayer games. First, it's a cheap way to get good AI. Good AI is hard, and it's easy to slap a people in chairs.
Second, there can be positive interaction, like chatting with friends. That can be good for the player experience.
Third, and this is not insignificant, it's much easier to stop piracy if the player *must* log into a server to play.
Okay. That pretty much sums up the pros of multiplayer gaming. Now for the cons.
First, player interaction can be pretty negative. I think Penny Arcade said
it best: "And those you encounter online are, almost as a rule, complete and utter cockmongers." Players will happily cheat, get angry and harass people, attack connections, etc, etc.
Second, multiplayer games with a central server frequently have monthly fees.
Third, single player games can be played...well, just about forever. If you loved X-COM, you can still sit down and play a good game of it. Players of the (much more recent) Weapons Factory Quake 2 mod are far more difficult to find.
Fourth, a computer can lose and lose and lose, and doesn't care. Players generally like to win more than half the time, which doesn't work too well for competitive multiplayer games (and purely cooperative games, while really neat, are *very* rare). So if players are playing an RTS, someone is probably getting unhappy.
Fifth, multiplayer games are much more open to failures. Firewalling, network problems, a slow connection, traffic from other users...all can contribute to be a real annoyance to the player playing the game.
Sixth, multiplayer games (with a *few* exceptions, like play-by-email games) must be real-time. To avoid inconveniencing other players, there is no pause feature. You can't get up and stretch or answer the door or do what you want whenever you want.
Seventh, it's very difficult to do a reasonably good plot-based multiplayer game. I can't think of any multiplayer games that use plot to much advantage.
I've looked at the shift towards online games with a profound lack of excitement. Sure, it's great for game companies, but it isn't all that great for game players.
Already, game companies are so eager to get on the game bandwagon that they've thrown a glut of games into every "fad" multiplayer genre that's come out. Three years or so ago, it was multiplayer FPSes. Everyone and their brother had to have a multiplayer FPS. More recently, a glut of "realistic" multiplayer FPSes has come out. There was a *huge* explosion in MMORPGs...and companies kept entering a market that they knew was already saturated.
Few really good single player games have come out in the past few years. Max Payne -- I didn't play it, but it was so cinematic that I watched a friend play through the entire game. Very impressive piece of work, sold very well...and yet, unlike multiplayer games, it didn't spawn twenty clones the next year.
The single-player RPG market for the PC is also pretty weak. There's a few, mostly obscure games. Arx Fatalis is pretty impressive. Blade of Darkness.
Kind of sad, the shift away from single player games. It used to be that you could play a fifteen-year-old game. People did too, and loved the nostalgia. Pac-Man, 1943, Centipede. Four years from now, all of today's games will be dead, because there will be almost no one playing them.
May we never see th
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I did.
You have no proof of this. The article does not make the claim that any designer from Verant specificically cited the Skinner Box model. The gameplay is not terribly different from any other online game (it's a MUD with graphics). You could level the same claim on ANY other MMORPG because they all have similar reward systems.
I have played the game. For approximately one week. I didn't like it. Strangely, I didn't experience the heroin-like withdrawl of which you speak.
Oh, *now* I get it. You're a zealot. Dark Age of Camelot is a subscription-based role playing game that encourages players to ever-increasing amounts of time on-line in order to receive rewards... but is somehow TOTALLY different than EverQuest. Right. But I'll humor you: explain to me the specific ways in which DAoC differs from EverQuest and therefore is not addictive.
This is just ludicrous. The designers of the game did not purposefully create a trap to ensnare hapless passersby. They endeavored to create a game that people wanted to play. They succeeded. If there are addicts, then they are to blame for their addiction, pure and simple. The harsh fact is that they withdrew from the real world because they *wanted* to. They wanted the escapism. It's more fun to be a fireball-wielding wizard than to be a grocery store clerk. It's more fun to slay a dragon than to solve substantive problems in your *real* life. It's more fun to do these things when you wish you were someone else and are desperately unhappy with your life. It might be easier to swallow the thought that your friend was a victim but it just isn't so.
Are there people addicted to EverQuest. Sure. Is it Sony's fault? No.
ironically similar to the American public school system these days...
"that they can't will themselves to give it up. They play on instead, hoping things will get better, and nursing a great and deep hatred for Sony and the game itself."
Ironic I'm using one fantasy world to describe another fantasy world, but this system sounds much like the 'One Ring' in LOTR. I am not an EQ player and will not be. I certainly know I would enjoy the game, for a while, but then I know I will fall in the same trap as just described. I don't have to be a player or even know an EQ player to realize that what was said would be true. Of course it is a money making venture. For the same reason EA Games won't fix bugs in 'Battlefield 1942' or enable ways to remove team-killers, it just isn't profitable. Why spend resources fixing the problem when it won't really keep new players away and that same time can be put into an expansion pack that just ads a few new maps and weapons (easy to create after the game engine is done) and sell it for nearly the same price as the original (which of course must already be purchased). After going through countless hours in Counter-Strike playing the same damn 4-6 maps over and over, I can understand how bad it is. I will not even try the Star Wars: Galaxies for the same reason. Same idea, just different graphics.
Every player in EQ, to me, seems to be like Gollum. Reading the article, if I replaced 'Sony' with the 'Ring' or 'Sauron' I would swear I was reading a synopsis of Tolkien's world. The plays both love and hate the game and cannot be rid of it.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
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