The Million-Gnome March

This past Friday a sea of Gnomish fury swept over the chilly vale of Dun Morogh. The reason? Their character class isn't balanced. AFK Gamer has details on this outpouring of tiny fury, with liveblogging from the event itself and pictures of the naked gnome march from later in the weekend. Despite GM crackdowns and general apathy towards the Warrior cause, they appear to have gotten some sort of response from a developer (even though the response has nothing to do with the march). Terra Nova has picked up the topic and poses it as a question about the right to assemble in virtual spaces.

Comments

Not a MMORPG

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't roleplay a protester, it's not a MMORPG.

Instances, pvp-limitations, lack of death penalty, etc... I could list dozens of other infractions against using the term that Blizzard has accumilated, but actively breaking up a congregation and calling it a MMORPG takes the cake.

Re:Not a MMORPG

[Blakey Rat]

I agree. If you get inside your characters mind, you'll realize that they don't know that they're "nerfed" (I hate that term). They don't even know what "level" and "experience" they are... those are all concepts outside of the In Character world of the game.

And since very few people understand that, that's why all *true* RP games are MUDs. (Where the players can more easily be trained to tell the difference between In Character constructs and Out Of Character constructs.)

As Blizzard has said...

[Cookie3]

Warriors were being looked at. You can't expect the Blizzard devs to just look at the drivel in the forums and instantly assume, "Oh, because a tiny number of kids are complaining about warriors, they're obviously broken!"

First, players need to understand that Blizzard is a massive company. Blizzard has hired managers and moderators to filter out the noise to try and find meaningful posts. The devs may read the forums, but the moderators are supposed to organize the meaningful posts into reports, showing the issues and cultivating a positive atmosphere on the forums.

A post suggesting that Blizzard "nerf pallies" is quickly followed up by an equally uninformative post suggesting that the devs "buff warriors!" -- with inaccurate, undetailed and subjective posts like that, OF COURSE the Devs won't take action. The unintelligible posts, meanwhile, continued to accumulate, and ultimately generated the motivation for the march. Apparently some players are too stupid to be able to figure out that if THEY aren't being understood, that maybe the problem is on THEIR end.

Meanwhile, a handful of intelligable players wrote out their list of greviences and, in some cases, actually managed to get the moderators attention.. thus they KNEW the devs were actually, actively evaluating the issue.

Gee. Maybe it pays to realize that the world does not (yet) use AIM-speech as a standard of communication.

Community run servers

[QuantumG]

I wonder what will happen when the GPL MMORPGs take off. Presumably people will eventually figure out that they can get a better game if 100% of their money is being used to maintain the server and develop content (instead of increasing shareholder value and paying fatcat managers). When players start actively participating in these "co-op" game systems we're going to see some real democratic process, and unlike the real world, where refusing to pay your "taxes" will land you in jail, it's the system that will fail if vast amounts of people refuse to pay their subscription until an issue like this one is resolved.

A more appropriate response ...

[bigsteve@dstc]

from the admins might have been to unleash a fearsome monster with an insatiable appetite for naked gnomes. Or may be just some old fashioned thunderbolts.

If a denizen of an alternative reality complains about the nature of that reality, the gods may get angry.

Never Been in a Riot.

[DingerX]

Okay folks, we've had really big MP games for something like 30 years now, it's time to cull some principles for future development:

1. When online, people will not always play the "game", whatever the game is. They will do stupid stuff. So give them a place to do it. All you need is a barren landscape jutting up against some mountains, and a Zardoz head for the admins to intervene. Think about it.
whiner: My warrior class is nerfed
developer: The penis is evil. The penis shoots the seed upon the earth that spreads the plague of men.
whiner:we're not moving until you meet our demands!
developer:the gun is good.
every manner of rifle, pistol and ueberweapon shoots out of the mouth

Err.. sorry about that. Anyway, give them somewhere to do stupid things like crash the server.

2. Mass banning tools. Sometimes you need to kick off hundreds of people with one stroke. Griefers have friends too.

3. Riot Cops. Forum whining is an age-old tradiiton. When people want to make their voice known in the game, by pretending that their little virtual world is a democracy, smack them down. Most of those "virtual protesters" aren't gonna be there so much for the point they're making as they are for the thrill of causing havoc and virtually protesting. So why not virtually teargas them? Get out the virtual riot squad, the virtual water cannons and rubber bullets, and take them down. or hell, have some virtual riot control vehicle drive into the crowd, with bodies flying everywhere, and blasting "PLEASE DISPERSE" through everyone's earphones. Even better, recruit your own pinkerton squads. promise plenty of levelling action for anyone willing to go and kill those protesters. Turn on PvP and let the social dynamics of the game work itself out.