Oh, I'm not gonna say Blizzard has done bad for itself. In fact, I'll call their whole design nothing short of brilliant.
I've compared it before to boiling a frog alive, and lemme just recap that idea quickly. They say that if you drop a frog into a pot of hot water, it will hop right out. But if you put it into cool water and just very gradually turn up the heat it will stay there and get boiled alive.
Blizzard's model is just a brilliant implementation of that. In the beginning they put you in a place where the game is great, quests are aplenty, rewards come often, you see new content all the time, and it's all game and no filler (e.g., I don't think anyone spent more than 5 minutes just travelling within Northshire at any given time). And you're as happy as a frog in a pool of nice cool water. Maybe cooking pot shaped, but wth, I'm sure it's just the naysayers and whiners blowing that out of proportion, right?
And that's what gets people addicted.
And from there it just very very slowly goes downhill in all aspects. There is constantly just a little more grind, just a little less often rewards, just a little more filler (e.g., travel time or waiting to get a group) and less game, just a little less new content seen in an average day, etc. And just because it's just so slightly less comfortable than before, you don't jump out.
Until a point where it's all grind and no game, all filler and no new content, and you still pay them the monthly fee.
And I'll call that design nothing short of brilliant. I know that it's not Blizzard's invention. Like everything else, Blizzard didn't "invent" much, but took ideas from other companies and polished them into a perfect gem. Same here. They took the boiling-a-frog recipe and polished it into an _amazing_ master-chef recipe.
Even the end-game grind, if your purpose is just to take some people's money for as long as possible is brilliant. Considering that at that point most of the motivation is "but I'll lose my uber-character if I quit", Blizzard did a master work of making that separation even more painful. They gave you something _really_ uber to lose. Now it's suddenly "but I already have an epic horse and, umm, half the <insert class>'s epic equipment! I surely only need a few more instance raids to win the rest! I can't quit now!" (Ok, so the probabilities say it's only a few hundred more raids, but certainly you feel all lucky and the end boss will drop those boots right this evening. Right?)
Absolutely brilliant that. Getting people addicted and then keeping on raking in their money even past the point where they're having any fun or getting any new content... I can only admire the extreme perfection they're refined that to. They have all my respect, and they certainly deserve all that money.
You'd be surprised how many people _are_ too unimaginative to be a good GM.
And it's not just some 14 year old GM-ing in his spare time with his buddies, but there are some big names in the MMO industry who don't get those points either.
E.g., having recently reactivated my EQ2 account, it amazes me that Sony just doesn't get it either. You can tell that, in all that clueless thrashing through random changes to the game, they're _desperate_ to copy whatever magical element WoW has, and preferrably one-up it. But they just don't get it.
You can tell looking through their change logs that they expect it to be some lone disparate element (like "hmm, maybe our crafting was too complicated?" or "hmm, maybe we could simplify the classes too?") that they can stick into the non-unified heap that is their game, and instantly have a WoW equivalent. They just blatantly don't get for example point 2 on that list: details matter. There is no magic amulet you can stick into a heap of disparate parts and instantly have a polished product. Yet that's just what Sony is feverishly trying to achieve.
And even when someone points out to them that lack of a unified vision, like Penny Arcade did recently about the EQ2 graphics, they'll just get a flame email from SOE telling them to STFU if they don't have their graphics in a major commercial game. Again, like Penny Arcade got.
And just to give an example of why PA is right, it's not just that Sony stuck together graphics that don't belong together. It's that they also ran it all through some "look what we can do!" shaders and whatnot that just make it all worse. E.g.,
- the more I play it, the more it becomes obvious to me that they _must_ have some depth-of-field effect, because the graphics just go blurry with the distance faster than mip-maps and filtering should cause them to. At any rate, faster than in any other game. Playing the game makes me feel like I've suddenly gotten a bad case of myopia.
- the textures may be right, but just about everything has a gloss effect that just doesn't belong there. Everything looks like the same kind of molded plastic once any kind of dynamic lighting enters the scene. Whether it's a rock or tree or a deer or a weaver's loom, everything looks like plastic.
- water surface effects also snag the edges of objects in _front_ of the water and smear them around (basically incompetently written shaders again)
- and while I'm playing on a very high end machine, I still can't help wonder about the idiocy of using exclusively shaders for texture details instead of detail textures, and offering no fall-back to detail textures. So basically there is no middle ground. Everyone who doesn't have a high end machine won't see it as slightly worse graphics, but will see it all looking like _ass_.
- the lower part of any breastplate or long coat is attached to the pants model, not where it belongs. Why does it matter? Because if you wear pants that aren't from the exact same set, it looks like your coat changes colour in the middle. (And the recent "fix" of just giving newbies a sorta "disguise" vest that overrides the pants, gloves, sleeves and everything, is just another way to feel wrong. It tells me that someone finally realized the problem. Except instead of fixing the actual problem, they've just tried sweeping it under the carpet at least for levels 1-9 with a cheap quick-and-dirty hack.)
That's just some of the details noone paid attention to after more than a year in the graphics department alone.
But the list of wrong or inconsistent details goes deeper and pervades every single aspect of the game. E.g., only now they seem to have finally fixed fish so they swim _in_ the water, instead of hovering _above_ the water. E.g., only now fish actually stop at the border of the water instead of chasing you on land too. But the list is mile long, so I'll stop here.
And that was just point 2. Rest assured that they missed most of the other points on that list by a mile too. I just
He basically talks about the start game in WoW, not about the endgame tar pit.
Yes, WoW starts fun and ends up just a repetitve mindless chore to keep you busy while you're still in the "but I'll lose my level 60 uber-char and all my online 'friends' if I quit!" denial stage. (Which, btw, starts with a rationalization stage along the lines of: "this is, uh, the meat of the game, really. I'm only doing it because, uh, it's _fun_ to spend 2 hours waiting for everyone to log on, to do the same raid for the 50'th time, and use the same 3 icons total on that toolbar." So if anyone plans to answer that, save your breath, I've heard that rationalization in-game a thousand times, and invariably it progresses to the next stage after a while. For some it just takes longer. Basically, I already know humans are great at rationalizing why they take crap.)
Blizzard can't put infinite content in the game, so basically they distributed the most of it where it matters: in the beginning, when you get addicted to their game. And it gradually goes downhill to the endgame point where you're given 2-3 raids to do over and over again. At that endgame point, the game basically already ended, they just won't outright admit it. Because if they admitted it, you'd cancel your account and stop paying for the next month too. That's all.
It's called resource management, basically: they used their resources where it makes them the most income. And only started worrying about the next 10 levels (which by the sound of it might just be an even more unholy grind for people who _really_ don't know when to give up) when they had enough level 60 people who just won't quit, so adding something for those might actually make a financial difference.
But to get back to the article, that's not what he means there. A tabletop GM doesn't have to have the _whole_ adventure prepared in advance. A GM doesn't have to give you the same raid over and over again at the end, just because that's where his game stops. If you've just finished an adventure, the GM is supposed to come up with a new one, not just send you to do the last dungeon again.
So basically I'm guessing is that he meant that GM's should learn from WoW's first half of the game, not from the grind after WoW's game already ended.
While all you wrote is indeed insightful and true and very relevant, one doesn't even have to go that far to see why his "invention" is just bogus crap. The reason it won't work is quantum mechanics. Some basic knowledge of chemistry also helps, in that it's just applied quantum mechanics.
I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the exact equations are missing.
The thing is, the available states for electrons on a given "orbit" are a finite and well defined set. No two electrons may have the same state. I.e., if an atom has 2 electrons (helium), they can't both have the same orbit and state.
The inner layers already have the full set, so there's no way to flit an electron's spin there and still have it stay in that orbit: that would require it to have the same state as another electron there, which is strictly impossible.
The outer layer may have an incomplete set, but that's why mollecules and crystals form. E.g., the reason you find hydrogen as H2 (or bonded to other atoms, of course) and not as individual H atoms, is that they basically share their electrons to form a complete set. Or when you have a mollecule like CH4 (methane), each Hydrogen atom basically gets an electron from the Carbon atom to form its complete set, while the Carbon atom gets an electron from each Hydrogen atom because it needs 4 more to have the full set.
So you could only flip individual electrons from the outer layer if you kept those atoms as free atoms, not part of a mollecule or crystal. Otherwise, again, he'd try to create a situation where two electrons have the same position and state.
So how's he going to achieve that? The only atoms that stay free like that are those which, like say Helium or Neon, already have a full outer set, so they're useless there.
Lemme dawn some clue upon you
on
Know Thy Bosses
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· Score: 4, Informative
"I see. So, it's the designers fault if a person can't beat the game simply because the final boss is actually _supposed_ to be just that, a final challenge? [...] I just hope that this whole story is a joke, because if it isn't, society has failed"
Dude, a game's _only_ purpose is to entertain you. That's it. If it doesn't, then, yes, it is the game designer's failure. It's that simple.
Repeat after me: I _don't_ have some duty to finish non-fun games. I _don't_ have to overcome any challenge if it's not fun. And I certainly don't have to put up with crap tricks to make a short game seem longer, in a non-fun "ha ha, we'll just make you reload 100 times" way. And I _don't_ have any kind of duty to sponsor games I don't like.
There is good game design, and there is crap game design, and there is just game design which doesn't match my tastes. My purpose is to entertain myself and relax. If a game doesn't do that for me, then yes, I won't think I failed the game, it's the game designer that didn't catter to my tastes. And I have no duty to spend hours finishing it, nor to sponsor it. Good luck to the designers making a living out of the people whose tastes they did catter to, but if they want my money too, they better catter to my demographic segment too.
And yes, that does apply to bosses too, end-game or otherwise. If overcoming one turns into a non-fun activity, of the kind that makes tax forms seem more fun, then yes, that game failed to entertain me. It's that simple.
It's the same as with any other product. I don't have to watch a crap movie, if I don't like the genre, or if I don't like their "Noooooo" scene in the trailer, or for whatever other reason I choose. I don't have to put up with a car I don't like, I don't have to watch a sports game if I don't like that sport, and I don't have to wear an analog or digital watch if I like the other kind more, etc. For whatever reason. If _I_ don't like the product, then _I_ don't have to put up with it or blow my money on it. So just in the same spirit, I have no duty to spend hours on finishing a game I find crap, or overcoming some poorly designed game element that's no fun. It's that simple.
In a nutshell: it's just a game. If you think it's a society failure when people just want some entertainment and relaxation from a game, then you're taking it way too seriously. Go out some more, get some real life achievements instead, or join some 12 step group. It's just a game, not something you're duty- and honour-bound to achieve and overcome. Noone gives a fuck about your beating up a pixelated game boss, and certainly noone has a duty to do the same if they don't find it fun.
Relax. The "do something less stressful [...] - like filling in a tax return" was supposed to be a joke. (Though he does have a point that some games do get to a point where a tax form is more fun.) You're not actually supposed to raise your blood pressure some more in between blood rounds.
- when a hooker's boss (err, pimp) just wants to ride someone's butt to vent frustration or boredom, chances are he won't have the stamina to ride for hours. IT bosses can keep at it 8 hours in a row (preferrably starting in the afternoon)
- a hooker's client probably knows already what he wants or can make up his mind in a reasonable time. I don't expect anyone spent _months_ discussing whether he wants a blow-job or sex, or called a year worth of meetings to decide if he wants to be on top or underneath, just to avoid the responsibility of making a decision. (In a project I've been in, a PHB needed a year to decide whether he wants his reports printed landscape or portrait by default, and wouldn't accept the program until it printed by default in his orientation-of-the-day. In a program which let him do both already, _and_ came with a report editor so he could rearrange them as he flippin' sees fit anyway.)
- the hooker doesn't have to spend a lot of time in team-building/motivational/etc meetings (if you're a manager, don't kid yourself: you probably don't have the charisma for this. Boring 20 people to death with platitudes copied from a book does _not_ make them feel more motivated. Verbal masturbation about how great a leader you are, even less so, and it probably means you aren't), status report meetings, meetings where the boss is just bored and wants to talk about his vacation, and responsibility-avoiding meetings which are there only so we all talked about it (and had our feedback ignored) so noone is personally responsible for the decision... or lack thereof
- the hooker doesn't have to be diplomatic about it when someone tries to score some free sex (a la the "hey, can you come over and fix my computer/network/printer/etc for free?" in IT). Everyone can understand that a hooker does it for money, and won't turn deeply hurt and hostile when she does ask for money. But as an IT geek everyone assumes that by definition you have no life and would probably just sit there bored, staring at the walls, if people didn't call you to give you a virused computer to work on
- ditto when someone tries to get a free change-request disguised as "uh, I may have asked for a hand-job, and paid for a hand-job, but what I had in mind was really a blow-job. So now it's your fault for not giving me what I wanted, and you must give it to me for free." (I'm sure you had an idiot client like that by now if you're a programmer.)
- ditto when someone thinks he's so smart if he asks for "just a demo", and then tries to squeeze the final product functionality into the demo to avoid paying. I'm sure if you tried telling a hooker that you just want to see her naked to know what you're paying for, and then tried to change that little by little into being free sex, you'd get laughed at and told to fork over the cash.
- As a hooker you're paid if you do more work in a day, and noone will act as if it's your sacred duty to work an extra 4 to 8 hours a day for free, just to show loyalty and commitment to the company
- For that matter, as a hooker it's clear who brings in more money and who hasn't done any work in 3 years straight (cue the "you IT guys just cost us money" or "bah, we did just as well back in the days of typewriters and filing cabinets" comments, or Wally people making a living just with show-business for the boss's benefit, but with exactly zero job-related skill or productivity)
Etc.
All in all, I suspect the hooker has the more dignified job.
Just to illustrate what I had in mind when I wrote the previous post, along the lines of "yeah, but can gamers equally turn off other parts of a problem?", imagine a test which is the exact opposite:
Ignoring the grammar, which of the following sentences are true:
1. Apples trees on grow.
2. Apples nose on grow.
3. Milk cows from comes.
4. Raspberry jam cows from comes.
5. Yoda correct English speak can.
6. (In relation to a terrorist event) Somebody set up us the bomb.
7. All Iraq's base are belong to U.S.
Now you'd be able to answer correctly, and certainly a decade of dealing with l33t 5p34k3r5 and illiterate retards in online games helps a bit with that too. (I can easily think of people I've grouped with, who were harder to understand than any of the above sentences.)
But the point I'm trying to make is that even gamers _will_ think "Jesus F. Christ! Did Yoda write that monstrosity?" You _will_ notice that the grammar is all wrong, and it will disturb you more than the "Apples grow on noses" nonsense that games taught you to ignore. And if you gave that test to children, chances are that, yes, even gamers would voice their objection.
That's the point I'm trying to make: that just because someone can ignore _one_ aspect of a problem (e.g., absurd statements like "apples grow on noses"), it doesn't necessarily mean they can instinctively ignore _any_ aspect.
I suspect it's just that, actually. We gamers are used to solving the wrong problem (by RL standards) in the right way, or for that matter working with rules and problems that make no sense whatsoever by RL standards. We've got over two decades of experience saying that such stuff is just _normal_, if the game says so:
- that wolves, or for that matter insects, carry coins or pieces of armour, or that you can get a 6 ft two-handed sword as loot on a 1 ft rabbit
- but, conversely, things you'd expect each of them to have IRL, like meat on a pig, is equally a random drop and you might need to slaughter 20 pigs to get a pound of meat
- that shooting enemy planes leaves giant coins floating in the air, and you can collect them by ramming your airplane into them
- that the exact same armour piece, e.g., maille boots, fit a gnome or a half-giant equally well
- that, conversely, the "recipe" for frying a trout over a camp fire (you know, just stick it on a stick and hold it over the fire) works only on trout, and you have to buy a different "recipe" to fry a different kind of fish over a camp fire. Or that having learned to hold a sword by the handle doesn't also teach you how to hold a flanged mace by the non-flanged end, and you have to buy that skill separately. (Note that at this point we're not talking about using it well, or effectively. We're talking just being able to hold it at all.)
- that skills are only learned from trainers and you can't teach anything to another player (e.g., that if I'm a master swordsman and travelling for months with an archer, I couldn't possibly teach him to use a sword. He'll have to wait until he finds a proper weapon trainer for swords.)
- that, depending on your class, there are things you're physically unable to learn or wear. (E.g., if you're a hunter, you can't ever learn to even hold a mace or warhammer... although you already know how to use a sword or axe. And at least the axe is IRL literally the same kind of impact weapon, as medieval fighting styles went.)
- that smithing skill can be used to make a new sword or breastplate, but you can't possibly use the same skill to repair its edge or hammer the breastplate back into shape after it's been used in combat
- that the ingredients used and the type of item you end up with are completely unrelated. (E.g., that engineering headgear made out of medium leather in WoW counts as "cloth", so your mage can wear it, but you can't wear leather boots for example, although they're equally made of leather.)
- that things work differently during the cut scenes than in the actual game (e.g., that they couldn't use a Phoenix Dawn or spell to revive Aeris, although that's how it works the whole rest of the game. Or that the same handgun does 1% of your current HP in the actual game, but can kill or be threatening enough for a character to surrender in a cut scene.)
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically my take is that we gamers are so used to working with absurd rules, that we don't even really notice them any more. (Other than maybe for a quick smirk.) If a game sent you to pick apples from noses, the average gamer would just go and dutifully do just that. Sure. Why not? Compared to some other things I've done in games, that doesn't even start to disturb me.
Basically it's not that gamers can mentally turn off _any_ one aspect of a problem, to work on the others. It's just _this_ particular aspect which we've been beat upside the head with until it stopped bothering us. Yes, so gamers aren't bothered by absurd rules or sentences like "apples grow on noses", and can completely ignore the absurdity in that. No surprise there. But I'd be more interested if _other_ aspects of a problem can be mentally turned off by a gamer as well. My guess is that it might turn out to be a lot less natural to a gamer too.
The fact is, games started with a simple interface, if only by virtue of not having CPU or RAM for more complex stuff. Pong only had two directions: up and down. Pacman had four. At this point we're not even talking about a fire button yet: just the directions. Then games got a fire button. Then two. Then gradually... well, have you looked at a console controller lately? A PS2 one sports no less than 12 buttons, including the thumbsticks which can _also_ act as buttons, in addition to their normal function. And then there are PC games which put even that to shame: using two dozen buttons or more is the norm in some genres, like flight sims.
Then we've had to learn other stuff. There are all sorts of concepts and reflexes which got added one by one. And we gamers learned them one by one, over the course of two decades or more. We already had the previous concept, and the time to get thoroughly used to it, before we got the next one dumped upon us.
Another poster a while ago compared it to a "game grammar". (In the same kind of way as an XML Schema is called a "grammar".) It tells you what goes where, and what kind of thing is expected in which sequence. Quite often cotrary to any RL rules or experience.
E.g., you already know that if it's a RPG, you're supposed to walk up to every single person in a major capital and talk to them. (IRL that's not what it's expected.) Or that it's just normal to try all conflicting option in a dialogue until something happens. (What would happen IRL if you said the exact opposites within 5 minutes in the same conversation, is left as an exercise.) Or you're supposed to already know distinctions like between "named NPC" and "generic NPC". (IRL everyone is named. Other than in medieval Japan, noone was ever simply called "a rice farmer".) And about a thousand other little things like "quest", "random drop" (e.g., that you don't get wool by shearing a sheep or meat by slaughtering a pig, but both might -- or might not -- "drop" when you kill one. Or that when asked to bring 4 zebra hooves, that doesn't mean one zebra.), etc, etc, etc.
Or here's some more anecdotal evidence that a co-worker randomly provided in a conversation: he said that his old father, in spite of otherwise being an intelligent man, has trouble understanding that the same button can perform several different and unrelated functions, depending on the "mode" the game/device/etc is in or on what other buttons are pressed at the same time. The guy has a lifetime of experience telling him that, say, in a car, the windshield wiper button does only one thing: start/stop the wipers. And if you need a different function, like accelerate, it will be a different button or pedal, not switching modes and using the windshield wiper button to accelerate. Now look at the gamepad use in many games, and you can surely see how its use is based on the exact opposite assumption.
There are all these things that you're supposed to already _know_. And even when the game gives you a tutorial, it's usually just the fine points, not the basics you're supposed to already know. (If it were a RL language's grammar, imagine your very first tutorial being "how to use the Ablative mode in the Less-Than-Perfect tense", but no explanation wth is the Ablative and wth of a tense is that to start with, or how do you form either from a normal word. That's game tutorials for a first time gamer.)
That's the problem with first time gamers, especially if they're adults who can't spend 16 hours a day for 8 years just learning all that the hard way. They're expected to already know some two dozen years of game concepts evolution, and they just don't. It's not that we gamers are smarter or have a bigger, more flexible brain. We just know that "game grammar" already. We do ok with just some advanced tutorial to refresh that grammar, or the fine points used in that game, but a first timer simply lacks the basic notions he's expected to already have.
And to get back on topic, I expect it's the same phenomenon that they're s
This isn't reincarnation, it's just renaming
on
Hope Fading at Atari
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· Score: 1
"And Brand names in capitalism fall under the laws of reincarnation... The Atari you mentioned loving, based on your ref to Pole Position, died several lives ago. This is at least the 3rd incarnation since then and I doubt it will be the last. One day, I hope to own the rights to Atari..."
I fail to see how would Infogrames really be a "reincarnation" of the original Atari. It's like me changing my name to Mark Twain or JRR Tolkien. Regardless of whether I've paid anything for the name or it was just a quick trip through the apropriate bureaucracy, it doesn't make me the reincarnation of either, and it sure doesn't make me have the literary skill or style of either. It's just a PR stunt to get the attention of people who recognize the name.
You have to also realize that what you're paid and what you cost the company are very different things. Having a team of programmers involves not just their salaries, but also rent/taxes/whatever for the building, electricity costs, admin costs, maintenance costs, taxes (at least here a lot of stuff is paid 50/50 by the employee and the employer), management costs (you'll notice that even Linux involves some people at the top deciding what goes in and what stays out), etc, etc, etc.
For a lot of large companies, these costs can amplify a lot, because of the whole infrastructure and bureaucracy. E.g., I think I remember a study some time ago where a ballpoint pen at a large corporation could end up costing IIRC around 10 Euro. (Well, 20 DM back then.) Some cents for the pen, and the rest for the whole bureaucracy it goes through to get bought and distributed.
(And I might add: ironically, a lot of it in the name of cutting costs. There are hundreds of thousands spent in salaries on people whose job is to negotiate a better deal on pencils and save maybe a few thousands per year. Or to negotiate getting a cheap burger flipper instead of a skilled programmer, and actually cause the project to cost 3x as much after all the delays. Or as happened here once, to negotiate a 400k price, with a 50% discount, on a server that was listed in that exact configuration at 40k on the manufacturer's web site: if you measure people's job results in dollars discount got, they'll buy a 1000$ pen at 50% discount instead of a 1$ pen at no discount. But the investors love hearing about it anyway. But I digress.)
Basically when you hear numbers thrown around like "a programmer costs you 100k per year", don't expect that that's the programmer's salary.
Look at Blizzard games, WoW included. It has been pointed out before that Blizzard hasn't really innovated much. Diablo was just a scrolling arcade game (a la Contra or Gauntlet), Warcraft was a Dune 2 rip-off, and WoW has borrowed most of its elements from other games before it (e.g., the PvP theme had already been made mainstream by the likes of Dark Age Of Camelot and Anarchy Online). So what was Blizzard's secret mojo? Quality (including not just the lack of bugs, but also a good interface, smooth learning curve, and great balance) and generally giving customers what they wanted.
Last I've heard some numbers WoW was at about 10 times the number of subscribers of the original EQ at its peak, even farther ahead of EQ2, and it had outgunned some other games by as much as 50 to 60 times.
So maybe, just maybe, making the customer happy pays off, you know? No, that doesn't mean bending over backwards each time someone whines that his level 1 priest should get the mages' level 50 spell. But it means that those "idiots" are entitled to have some fun, and decisions should be at least partially based on "well, what do most customers want?" Turns out that most of us are happy just with quality and balance.
Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre. In fact, "EQ" became _the_ name in the MMO arena, stealing the spotlight completely from the genre's creators. It's no mean feat. It's like stealing the 3D FPS spotlight completely from Id. _That_ big a feat. Not to mention from the ones with the big franchise. "Ultima" was a major franchise for every gamer, while "Everquest" originally meant nothing to anyone.
What was EQ's secret mojo? Giving the customers a lot of the stuff they wanted, and which Origin refused to give them. (E.g., the fact that Origin finally grudgingly gave its players a gank-free facet was only to stop the exodus to games, like EQ or AC, which gave non-PK'ers just that: a place where you won't be ganked on sight and repeatedly as soon as you step outside the town. That was just one of the many little things that people wanted, and EQ delivered, while Origin was blatantly ignoring its customers.)
So maybe, just maybe, quality does matter. Maybe, just maybe, even "in a country full of idiots", those "idiots" can still cancel their accounts and go to another game they find more fun. And maybe, just maybe, 2x the investment in quality can get you 10x more revenue. Just something for this industry to ponder.
To put things into perspective, EA considered TSO a _flop_ when it stabilized at 100,000 subscribers. So 10,000 active subscribers is just dead. There were a couple of MUDs in the 90s which could boast more players than that.
Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development. We're talking a major commercial game, not someone's web-based exercise where making any money in a month is still great.
But I'm guessing they don't even make 150,000 USD a month. Two words: "station pass". If you're already paying for a Sony game, you can get access to all others for half the price of a game. If you already play two EQ games (e.g., Planetside and EQ/EQ2), you get SWG for free. Heck, Sony even offers in-game advantages for for getting a station pass even for a single game, such as getting extra moves (directly or via bundled mini-expansions), or extra character slots or whatever. So you could really play just one Sony game and incidentally get the others for free.
I know that first hand. The periods when I went back to SWG, only to find it a bigger mess and buggier to boot, were just that: I already had a station pass, SWG didn't cost anything extra (other than the download times for the patches) to try, so wth... sure, I'll give it another try.
So the question is how many of those 10,000 are just dropping by between rounds of their main SOE game (e.g., when their guildies aren't online in EQ), but don't actually pay a single buck to Sony for the privilege. It could be none, or it could be that SWG isn't actually making Sony _any_ income, or more probably somewhere in between.
Either way you want to slice it and look at it, it's a major fuck-up. Only 10k subscribers is MMO death anyway, but for a game based on the biggest franchise in history... there are no words to properly describe how big a fuck-up that is.
There were _millions_ of SW nerds who waited for SWG like it was the second coming of Obi Wa... err... the messiah. There were people who grew up with SW. People who put "Jedi" as their religion on census forms and _meant_ it. As Scott Kurtz aptly put it in a comic strip, there were people who said goodbye to their friends and family and never expected to leave the SW universe again. It was a franchise that made Warcraft or The Sims look like peanuts. (When was the last time you've heard someone debate Warcraft as passionately as "Han shot first"?)
And yet they fucked up. They were handed over the franchise and the fans on a silver platter, and they fucked up. There's no other way to put it.
Of course, I suspect that won't stop Raph Koster from giving even more interviews about how great a game designer he is, and spout various stuff like "a MMO doesn't have to be a good game, it's just a social framework" (then how come SWG never was much of either?) or "the biggest MMO success ever isn't WoW, it's Habbo Hotel." (Never mind that Habbo Hotel is a free game _and_ it still doesn't have the number of active subscribers that WoW has. We'll just redefine that as the new metric of success.) But I digress.
An observation I've made long ago is that humans (at least the smart ones) do what works, and as a result any game gets the kind of gamers it "deserves". E.g., if a FPS rewards camping more than anything else, it gets swamped in campers. E.g., if a MMO rewards farming, it gets farmers. It's that simple.
And doubly so when the game is a brain-dead exercise for the most brain-dead grinders. If the way to get ahead in the game is to be an obsessive-compulsive clicker willing to _work_ 8 hours a day on mind-numbing repetitive stuff (and pay each month for the privilege), yes, eventually some people will say "screw this, if I wanted more work, I'd do overtime and get paid for it." So they'll buy gold instead or cancel their account. It's that simple.
That creates the demand.
And conveniently most "me too" MMOs also create the supply. There's an abrupt differential in how much money you make per hour at each level. E.g., in WoW even a gray (junk) item dropped off a level 60 NPC is worth about 1 gold at the vendor (i.e., without even bothering with the auction house), while for a newbie 1 gold will pay for all your skills (trade skills included) and equipment up to level 10. E.g., in COH a level 50 can make more than 3 million per hour, money which you don't even need any more (no repairs, no more stuff to buy, etc), while for a new character 3 million will last you until level 35.
So you have:
1. a bunch of people who badly need gold (and face a non-fun repetitive grind of days, maybe weeks, to get it)
2. a bunch of people who can easily supply a newbie's need for gold (in a tiny fraction of that time)
So is it any surprise that a gold trade forms between the two? It's only common sense, not to mention elementary economics.
Complaining about the "evil" gil farmers when the game creates that slope, sorry, it's just brain dead. It's like complaining that things slide down a water slide. ("Waah, things should have slid up hill, and it's such an evil world when they go downhilll instead!") Well, what did they _expect_ there?
Want to make gil farmers go away? Well, yes, how about changing the economy then? Or for that matter, how about designing a game so it's fun for the casual gamer who plays it to relax after work, not to get more mind-numbing repetitive work?
Heck, it _is_ possible to design a game without gold at all.
E.g., look at Planetside. You're a soldier, so your tank or weapon are supplied to you for free. The balancing factors are your certifications (you don't get a tank if you're not certified to drive one) and the timer on some equipment (you have to play infantry a bit until you get your next tank, if you just drove your old one off a hill.) And unsurprisingly, there is no gold farming or trade whatsoever in Planetside. Go ahead, search ebay. You won't see gold or equipment for sale for Planetside.
The same could work in a lot of other games. E.g., in COH, you don't even have equipment or such, you have new techniques or enhancements for your signature moves: it's a trivial exercise to re-design that to work basically as skill points gained at level-up, instead of being bought. E.g., in WoW, you don't even need to go that far: bump quest rewards up to be actually suitable for the quest's level (as opposed to getting a level 12 mace as reward for a level 30 elite quest), and you've just made money entirely unnecessary. Etc.
And in FFXI's case, heck, they just need to get a brain and realise that the Japanese kind of "work simulator" is entirely the wrong game concept for the vast majority of us Westerners.
There's a difference between merely discussing history (yes, the Europeans fought Indians) and _revisionist_ history in which you paint the attacked as the aggressors. For better or worse, the Indians were really the ones attacked and driven off their lands there, and painting them as a bunch of bandits wantonly attacking the caravans isn't history, it's revisionist history.
Just for trivia sake, here's a historical tidbit for you: you know how scalping is thrown around as the example of how savage and cruel the Indians were? Well, it was invented by the Europeans. A bunch of Europeans decided they'd be better off if they just exterminated the Indians wholesale to make room for European farmers. (Incidentally the exact same plan Hitler had for Poland, for example.) So they paid headhunters for each Indian scalp brought in, as proof of one killed Indian.
The Indians just knew a good idea when it bit them, so they soon started scalping too, as a way to keep track of killed enemies.
That's the kind of wanton aggression the Europeans waged upon the rightful owners and inhabitants of that land. So now representing the ones who fought back as the aggressors is a tad rich.
It's like making a game in which you're a WW2 German soldier just defending yourself against the supposedly wanton aggression of partisans on the Eastern front. Or helping shoot Polish "aggressors" in the Warshaw uprising. You know, you're just minding your business there, and all of a sudden these aggressive Poles or Russians attack your convoy and you have to defend yourself. Great game idea to show people how harsh life was on the Eastern Front, eh?
I'm guessing noone would have any trouble spotting the shameless revisionism there, but when it's about American natives we all act so surprised that they're offended.
Let's face it, when I play a game, I want to do just that: just play a game. I don't want to deal with drama queens ("waah, I spammed on the linked city chat that I'm gay/pagan/whatever for 6 hours and now mean people are picking on me! I'm sooo persecuted!"... usually along the lines of "STFU already, get a life, stop trolling, noone gives a damn". Well what DID you expect?), attention whores (e.g., a guild member spending 6 hours straight advertising what colour "her" panties are, and how "she" looks like a horny schoolgirl with a sexy voice), etc, etc, etc.
There's enough of that IRL, and I play a game to get out of there, not to get another dose of "waah, I picked a religion that's especially crafted to look like satanism and tick off christians, and now they're so mean as to actually get ticked off." I don't care what your religion, politics, or sexual inclination is, and I certainly don't care what your favourite persecution complex is or your favourite technique of trolling for persecution, I just can do without them in a MMO. Unless your sexual inclination is an integral part of said MMO (e.g., you get different spells for being gay), I'm there for the game, not for that. That's all.
And just do get dragged into that, noone's saying "she was dressed like a whore, so she deserved to get assaulted." There's a fine line between how you're dressed (noone picks on male mages wearing dresses, for example) and actively trolling for attention. At some point it's just common sense that you _will_ get the wrong kind of attention.
E.g., if you show up in KKK regalia at a black meeting and start spouting white supremacy crap, you might get two black eyes and maybe a few broken ribs. E.g., if you advertise being a hot, wet and horny female, you might get harrassed by horny 16 year old males. E.g., if you advertise being a "witch" in a small bible-thumping community, you might get people avoiding you or harrassing you. Etc. It's just common sense. What DID you expect there?
Yes, it's still the transgressor's fault, but excuse me for not feeling too bad for the victim either. If you do choose to do something stupid, something where common sense should have made the outcome plenty clear in advance, well, it seems to me like just Darwinism in action.
And that goes double for stuff that's basically trolling for attention or feeding one's persecution complex. I see a lot of that. A lot of the whining about narrow minded people comes after working hard to bait those people into doing that. E.g., a lot of the complaining about Christians being so narrow minded comes after someone's going out of their way to bait and annoy said Christians. E.g., yes, a lot of whining about narrow-minded homophobes comes after actively baiting those homophobes. Well, what did they expect? I'm guessing they expected and wanted just that all along.
Being a poor defenseless victim is an _easy_ role. Suddenly you're absolved of any responsibility. Anything happening to you is just being persecuted, never the direct consequence of what you've chose or done. It's a damn easy role to play.
The hard part is dealing with life as it _is_, and doing your best to avoid the traps and work around the stupid bits. It has plenty of those, and we all get to just deal with them. Life is what it is, society is what it is, and there's certainly a hefty dose of narrow-mindedness, stupidity, and unfairness in it. Deal with it. Make the best out of the crap hand you've been dealt. That's what everyone else is doing.
Or, of course, you can back up into the comfortable "auugh, life is sooo unfair, and I'm such a victim, and I sooo don't deserve it" emo act. Well, cry me a river.
The "it belongs to a third party and Lucas made us do this and that" aspect has been mentioned, but I still can't shake the feeling that Lucas made better films than Sony made a game based on it. Yes, episodes 1 to 3 included.
For all his ever-changing visions, and all his later getting on a stupid quest to undo the very good-vs-evil foundation of his universe (the jedi weren't apparently all that good and noble, and the sith were just the other sect according to episodes 1-3), Lucas started from scratch and made SW the biggest movie franchise. Better yet, he made SF mainstream. It says something. The very fact that people still debate whether Han should shoot first, or whether Jar Jar is a worse comic relief than C3PO is a testament to how much Lucas's films touched a lot of us. You don't see that kind of passion in people arguing Godfather 1 vs Godfather 3.
By comparison, what did Sony do with it? They created a DIKU MUD with graphics, and a ho-hum "me too" one at that. It's always been massively buggy, balance was always non-existent, and Sony did their best to piss off the customers, like Sony always does. Even as a MUD it was of the "me too" quality seen when a third-grader downloads DIKU and throws together his own smurf areas. It featured such half-baked stuff ranging from whole areas and town that existed just to fill the map (but didn't actually have any NPCs, quests or anything), classes added without any thought to balance just because someone thought the class name was all that was needed (don't tell me Raph Koster gave even a second's thought to the balance of, say, entertainers vs animal tamers, and how fast one levels up in respect to the other, or how fast they make money), and pretty much the bog-standard DIKU combat and mechanics. And as is the case when someone just isn't competent enough to do the maths and balance a game, the balance swung wildly in patches, not getting any more balanced, but just for the sake of pissing off existing players.
Briefly, they made a crap "me too" game that survives _only_ because of the franchise. Far from being hurt by Lucas's franchise, it's their transfusion line that keeps their fetid corpse of a game alive. If SWG had started from scratch without a franchise, like AO or DAOC did, I believe it would have been a flop that went straight to the garbage bin of MMO gaming.
So basically all this "oh, we're just hurt by the Lucas's franchise" is just a crap excuse from the makers of a crap game. That's all. What did you expect? Them to come forward and admit "guys, we fucked up. We have no clue how to make a good game even when someone hands us the franchise, the fans, and the story on a silver platter"? It's not gonna happen.
Blizzard can design a good game, the SWG team just can't. That's all.
Heck, forget Blizzard. Even the SW franchise has been previously used well, say, in KOTOR. Note how both side-stepped constraints by stepping outside the time frame of the proper franchise. WoW happens some time after Warcraft 3, KOTOR happens some millenia before SW, buying them a lot of freedom to create their own story and characters in that universe. It's a neat trick, but it takes a real designer and some balls to come up with it, as opposed to mindlessly taking what's been handed to them and transcribing it into a MUD.
Been meaning to ask this since the original "woohoo, 'hackers' released an ISO of an unprotected XBox 360 demo disk" article: how's this hacking anyway? What's the coding or even cracking challenge in making an ISO of a DVD? How's it "news for nerds, stuff that matters"?
It's just piracy, and of the kind that doesn't need any skills. Any kid with a DVD drive and Nero or any other DVD burning program can make an ISO.
Now I can see how, say, finding an exploit to boot Linux on the original XBox was "hacking" (in either meaning of the word you swear by). Or how those people who made the PSP load *ahem* "homebrewn games" (strange how those are only waved around as an excuse to load _pirated_ commercial games) were "hackers".
- the "healer" doesn't heal. Ever. There could be a full team wipe happening around him, and he'd be out of mana blasting with his offensive spells, doing a whole 50% of a mage's damage output. (Yes, I know priests are a more complex class than just "healer", but there's something offensive when a paladin ends up spending half the mana to keep alive a priest that's busy blasting.)
He does however raid all chests while everyone else is still in combat, or indeed got aggroed by a patroll while in a fight. He also rolls "Need" on everything, chain mail, leather and swords included.
He also leaves just before the boss fight, after he's got the staff he was there for.
- the mage thinks he's a melee fighter, bravely charging with his trusty old kitchen knife. Someone posts a damage dealer statistic and the mage is in the last place, doing half the paladin's damage, and, you know, the paladin is tanking and healing. He also has the annoying habbit of using the sheep spell all the time, and invariably on the target everyone else is blasting. Occasionally the mage pulls a Leroy Jenkins and is heard screaming "HEAL!" from behind a corner, and a good 100 yards away.
- the dual-wield warrior never waits for the casters to refill their mana. He also thinks that "pulling" means doing a charge into the next enemy group. Preferrably while everyone else is drinking to refill their mana.
- the hunter has his pet on aggressive, so it keeps pulling a different enemy, or running up a side tunnel to aggro a completely different enemy. He also can't decide if he's a melee fighter or a ranged fighter, and is occasionally seen rushing ahead of everyone else and trying to tank. He's sure to tell everyone every 5 minutes that he has 3 level 60 alts, though. (Yet doesn't even know what's in the first instance in the game, or basic tactics. Go figure.)
He too leaves just before the boss fight.
Add some seasoning in the form of a group member trying to discuss in detail their taking a dump. (Laptops are great, or what?) Another one is talking only in some engrish. Yet another one doesn't talk at all, ever, and the only attempt at communication is trying to give everyone some junk he rolled "need" for earlier. E.g., the Paladin gets to close trade windows once every 5 seconds, in combat, as the mage tries to give him a low level gun (which paladins can't use anyway.) Etc.
I don't know if that would take someone's mind off pain, but a cure for sadness it sure isn't;)
The FF series, ok, it does manage to have different stories, swing between medieval and SF, and even change the game mechanics (whether it's needed or not). Duly noted, and true.
But how many others do that?
E.g., to pick on another long series of games, take Sierra's empire building games. Exactly what was the fundamental change between Caesar and Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom? I've actually had Caesar III, Pharaoh, Zeus and Emperor installed at the same time at one point to make a comparison, and make no mistake, they were the same game with different sprites.
The only noteworthy tweak I can remember was that after Pharaoh they finally introduced road-blocks, so you can make essential NPCs (e.g., those supplying a city section with food and water) move in a loop instead of wandering stupidly into the desert while everyone in town leaves in droves. Otherwise, other than changing the sprites to fit a different civilization, they just largely kept releasing the same game over and over again.
It took PopTop's Tropico to shake the status quo, and give that team the idea to finally give NPCs a brain. E.g., to have each person on the map go to the market when they're hungry, instead of having pinball supplier NPCs walking in a loop. So they dutifully produced another mindless clone, I'm talking about Immortal Cities: Children Of The Nile, except this time they cloned Tropico instead of their earlier games. (And to add insult to injury, accompanied by a mess of interviews and trailers in which they act as if they're the ones who invented that, and noone before COTN ever thought of that.)
Which brings us to another phenomenon: mindless clones of whatever sold well last year.
Worse yet: often _clueless_ clones, by people who don't even like or understand the genre, but just have to make a RPG or The Sims clone or whatever, without even understanding what people liked about those games.
And city building is used above just as an example. It's not even the worst offender. Other genres are worse offenders.
E.g., take EA's neverending series of "Some Sport 2006", where the only major difference from last year's installment are the player names. 'Nuff said.
E.g., take economic games. For every occasional gem like "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400: The Guild"), you have about a hundred clueless "me too" exercises, often missing the whole point. Everyone and their grandma just has to imagine that giving people a rectangular area to place shops on, and slapping on a title ending in "Tycoon", is all there is to it. Actually worrying about gameplay, balance or diversity is obviously not needed.
E.g., heck, take FPS, the genre which pretty much made mainstream the practice of releasing two dozen identical games per year. Get a graphics engine, bolt on two dozen unrelated maps, and the bog-standard assortment of guns (knife, pistol, SMG, sniper rifle, shotgun, flamethrower) and call it a new game. Oh yeah, and bolt on a half-baked multiplayer mode where no thought was given to weapon balance or map layout for multiplayer, and just reused whatever the single-player game had.
In some cases the sequel not only didn't really add anything new, but was actually a step back and folded back into the comfy mediocrity of being another "me too" clone. E.g., Unreal 2. It did away with all the Unreal universe and unique weaponry (e.g., the flak gun being a unique something in between a shotgun and a grenade launcher, but not quite either), and replaced that all with a generic SF universe and generic FPS weapons (yay for having a standard shotgun again.) In fact, it was another dime-a-dozen generic FPS that only reused the franchise name.
I could go on, but methinks you get the idea already. When some of us complain about sequels, spin-offs and raping a franchise name for a quick buck, what we have in mind is the above. It doesn't mean literally that exceptions like the FF series don't exist. It just means they're just that: exceptions.
Relax, it's just another PR troll by Sociolotron
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Sex and the Modern MMOG
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· Score: 3, Informative
I even considered the topic being worth debating when I first heard it, in the year 2000 or so. Even though it was full of hard to believe outlandish claims (e.g., that you could even perform non-consentual abortions and lob dead foetuses with a catapult; e.g., that the only way to respawn was to be re-born, for example by raping a woman and impregnating her; e.g., that they could support millions of players on a single machine, which no MMO ever could) and the game was every time in a "closed beta" so noone could check those claims, people got in a big debate about it.
Since then, oh looky, there comes again the regularly scheduled PR troll that has just one purpose: to get attention. Complete with yet another claim: this time that you need spilled sperm for potions. Well, gee, that ought to fix crafting.
If MMOs were forum posters, Sociolotron would be the troll/crapflooder posting goatse links in every thread. That's all there is to it. Nothing to see here.
And oh looky, this time a bit down in the thread we even have the ISO-standard astroturfing testimonial post about how lots of women play it (including the poster's wife supposedly), just waiting to be raped and abused, and getting a kick out of it. And no siree, there are no griefers on it, and (unlike what experience showed us on a hundred muds and a few MMOs), player justice really really works here this time. Honest. If that doesn't sound _exactly_ like the astroturfing ads-disguised-as-testimonials for "enlarge your penis" and "find a sex partner in your area" sites, you haven't read your spam mails lately.
So basically I wouldn't take it too seriously.
Then again, _if_ it finally went live, I wouldn't really kill the "worthless fucker signing up to this abomination", as you aptly put it. Think positively. If it gets at least _some_ of the worst retards that plague some other games, and keeps them busy there pretending to rape each other's female character (or ugly sprite thereof), it's a good thing.
Before I even start, please realize that you're talking about people who don't know this. If they already had first hand experience with playing that MMO at level 60, they'd already have a level 60 character, hence wouldn't need to pay to have their main character power-levelled to 60.
The people who, in your words, "pay [...] to start with a maxed out character already" (my emphasis), are the extreme case who doesn't know _anything_ about the game or what they're paying for. Pretty much by the definition of the word "to start". It's not people who've played both the level 1 game and the level 60 game, compared them, and reached an informed conclusion that level 60 is more fun. We're talking about people who _assumed_ that level 60 would be more fun, without _any_ actual first-hand information to base that assumption on.
So that doesn't prove anything about the game.
So why do people do that? For various reasons, including, but not limited to:
- Because some people take virtual achievements _far_ too seriously. They actually believe that having a level 60 character makes them _someone_, and having a level 10 makes them a loser. That virtual achievement _is_ their life's achievement, not just a level in a game.
Or to put it a lot less diplomatically, for a lot of people it's like their penis size in inches physically depends on their character level, their castle's size in UO, whatever. I figure the conversion rate must be something like 1 inch for every 5 levels, because they won't admit even having an alt under level 30 or so, except as some dark secret or shameful concession. (Or if they're playing that alt, they'll make sure to mention their level 60 alt every 5 minutes to everyone in the group.)
So they'll do anything to get that coveted achievement, and join the big boys' club. Grind, farm, even reach for the credit card and pay for gold/PL/housing/whatever on eBay. Anything.
- Some aren't just PvP-ers, but _insecure_ PvP-ers, who need the deck fully stacked in their favour to finally feel secure enough to attack even a newbie. It's the kind who won't even load Counter-Strike without the newest aim-bot, or in a MMO _needs_ level 60 _and_ a full tier 2 equipment set to join in the "I killed u, so u sukk" willy-waving choir.
In a sense, this is just a sub-case of the previous category, except these make the PvP score their life's achievement. And in a sense, not. While the guys in the previous category saw just the level 60 or the UO castle as achievement enough, this category can't feel like they "rule", unless they "prove" that someone else "sucks". It's a parasitic category.
Except the problem with basing a "rule"/"suck" ranking on that is that it's also chalking an "I suck" mark each time _they_ are the ones faceplanting. So to prop their little ego, they _need_ to make sure the odds are as stacked in their favour as it gets. They just _have_ to be level 60 _and_ decked in full tier-2 equipment before they even try. And even then, a lot of them will go hunt newbies in a level 10 areas, just to make sure they really aren't taking any risks. Better make sure that newbie is AFK at that.
Actually, it's the exact opposite of what you seem to assume. Most games start with the "best" part, and gradually, slowly move you to the worst parts.
They're built upon studies saying that the average account is cancelled after 6 months (some sooner, some later, but that's the peak of the Gauss curve), by which point all that keeps you there is some mis-guided "but I'll lose my uber-character and all my online friends if I quit!" illusion. I.e., the fun is long gone by that point anyway.
The hard part is getting you hooked in the first place, which is why they start with the best parts. The end-game grind isn't the grand cake at the end, it's one last-ditch repetitive grind you're thrown. Its only role and purpose is to give you something to do at all while you're still in denial about quitting the game.
So, to give you a metaphor, they're built on the boiling a frog alive model. They say that if you drop a frog in hot water, it will hop out of the pot. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly warm it up, it will stay there and get cooked. (Mind you, I haven't actually tried it.) That's the model MMOs take. The have to make sure you don't hop out from the start, and from there it's just a matter of going downhill slowly enough so you don't mind just a little more grind, just a little more travel time, just a little more farming for your next weapon, and generally just a little more time-sink and less game.
Let me use WoW as an example: in the beginning you're seriously more powerful than the opponents (the newbie wolves in Northshire do 1hp per hit), you level up fast, quests are plentiful, and they don't require you to move travel more than one or two hundred ft. And you see new content all the time. It's all game and no time-sink, and you're happy as a frog in a nice (if cooking pot shaped) pool of cool water. And that's what gets people addicted.
And it gradually changes into something that's more and more time-sink and less game. At the end-game you pretty much pay the monthly fee just to sit there for hours getting enough people for a raid you've done a thousand times before, and then riding for half an hour to it. Not only it's a lot of time-sink, you're not even seeing any new content. You're doing the same repetitive crap, pulling the same NPCs, in the same order, using less spells/skills/whatever than you used at level 10... in the vain hope than you'll hit the 1% chance that this time the boss will drop the armour piece you need. And that someone else won't roll higher for it.
Or take the reputation quests, say, the Thorium Brotherhood. You need, what? To farm some 1000 pieces of medium leather just to get them to talk to you? And that's just the ante. Then you get to farm dark iron residue for the next stage.
Again, the hard part is getting you hooked at level 1. After that, chances are you'll take care of deluding yourself, and keep yourself coming back anyway.
The illusion that there's some massive reward at the end is all psychological, all a self-made illusion, once you got hooked in the first place. You just have to keep with the virtual Joneses. You just have to believe that anyone actually gives a damn about your having a bigger player house (in games that support that) than the Joneses and an epic horse (the virtual equivalent of a car with a big wing at mid-life crisis) before the Joneses got one. You just have to believe that having reached level 60 will make you _someone_. There's an unspoken illusion that once you've reached that apex, newbies will speak in admiration of you, TV shows will be dedicated to your self-made-man success, and random (elven) women will beg to have your child, etc.
I don't know about network problems. I had massive lag issues well outside the weeks you've mentioned, _and_ the game was showing 50ms latency. Yet creatures would come back from the dead to melee me, after having stood there staring at me during (what I thought was) the actual combat. And various other such occurences which in other games happen only during massive lag spikes.
And dodging the bugs might be harder than it sounds, seeing that you don't even have to do much to be bit by one. E.g., you only have to enter and exit your own vehicle enough times, for the game to eventually put you in combat with it.
So even with that, I've had about as much fun with SWG as in a dentist's chair. It's crap design, crap implementation, and crap support. Its _only_ merit is the SW license, and much as I _am_ a SW nerd, that only goes so far.
In fact, even if you want to run around with a lightsaber, here's a better idea: get Sega's PSO or get WoW and have a glowing enchant cast on your sword. They're not SW, but still, you can get a glowing sword without having to put up with a festering pile of crap trying to masquerade for a game.
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Oh, I'm not gonna say Blizzard has done bad for itself. In fact, I'll call their whole design nothing short of brilliant.
I've compared it before to boiling a frog alive, and lemme just recap that idea quickly. They say that if you drop a frog into a pot of hot water, it will hop right out. But if you put it into cool water and just very gradually turn up the heat it will stay there and get boiled alive.
Blizzard's model is just a brilliant implementation of that. In the beginning they put you in a place where the game is great, quests are aplenty, rewards come often, you see new content all the time, and it's all game and no filler (e.g., I don't think anyone spent more than 5 minutes just travelling within Northshire at any given time). And you're as happy as a frog in a pool of nice cool water. Maybe cooking pot shaped, but wth, I'm sure it's just the naysayers and whiners blowing that out of proportion, right?
And that's what gets people addicted.
And from there it just very very slowly goes downhill in all aspects. There is constantly just a little more grind, just a little less often rewards, just a little more filler (e.g., travel time or waiting to get a group) and less game, just a little less new content seen in an average day, etc. And just because it's just so slightly less comfortable than before, you don't jump out.
Until a point where it's all grind and no game, all filler and no new content, and you still pay them the monthly fee.
And I'll call that design nothing short of brilliant. I know that it's not Blizzard's invention. Like everything else, Blizzard didn't "invent" much, but took ideas from other companies and polished them into a perfect gem. Same here. They took the boiling-a-frog recipe and polished it into an _amazing_ master-chef recipe.
Even the end-game grind, if your purpose is just to take some people's money for as long as possible is brilliant. Considering that at that point most of the motivation is "but I'll lose my uber-character if I quit", Blizzard did a master work of making that separation even more painful. They gave you something _really_ uber to lose. Now it's suddenly "but I already have an epic horse and, umm, half the <insert class>'s epic equipment! I surely only need a few more instance raids to win the rest! I can't quit now!" (Ok, so the probabilities say it's only a few hundred more raids, but certainly you feel all lucky and the end boss will drop those boots right this evening. Right?)
Absolutely brilliant that. Getting people addicted and then keeping on raking in their money even past the point where they're having any fun or getting any new content... I can only admire the extreme perfection they're refined that to. They have all my respect, and they certainly deserve all that money.
You'd be surprised how many people _are_ too unimaginative to be a good GM.
And it's not just some 14 year old GM-ing in his spare time with his buddies, but there are some big names in the MMO industry who don't get those points either.
E.g., having recently reactivated my EQ2 account, it amazes me that Sony just doesn't get it either. You can tell that, in all that clueless thrashing through random changes to the game, they're _desperate_ to copy whatever magical element WoW has, and preferrably one-up it. But they just don't get it.
You can tell looking through their change logs that they expect it to be some lone disparate element (like "hmm, maybe our crafting was too complicated?" or "hmm, maybe we could simplify the classes too?") that they can stick into the non-unified heap that is their game, and instantly have a WoW equivalent. They just blatantly don't get for example point 2 on that list: details matter. There is no magic amulet you can stick into a heap of disparate parts and instantly have a polished product. Yet that's just what Sony is feverishly trying to achieve.
And even when someone points out to them that lack of a unified vision, like Penny Arcade did recently about the EQ2 graphics, they'll just get a flame email from SOE telling them to STFU if they don't have their graphics in a major commercial game. Again, like Penny Arcade got.
And just to give an example of why PA is right, it's not just that Sony stuck together graphics that don't belong together. It's that they also ran it all through some "look what we can do!" shaders and whatnot that just make it all worse. E.g.,
- the more I play it, the more it becomes obvious to me that they _must_ have some depth-of-field effect, because the graphics just go blurry with the distance faster than mip-maps and filtering should cause them to. At any rate, faster than in any other game. Playing the game makes me feel like I've suddenly gotten a bad case of myopia.
- the textures may be right, but just about everything has a gloss effect that just doesn't belong there. Everything looks like the same kind of molded plastic once any kind of dynamic lighting enters the scene. Whether it's a rock or tree or a deer or a weaver's loom, everything looks like plastic.
- water surface effects also snag the edges of objects in _front_ of the water and smear them around (basically incompetently written shaders again)
- and while I'm playing on a very high end machine, I still can't help wonder about the idiocy of using exclusively shaders for texture details instead of detail textures, and offering no fall-back to detail textures. So basically there is no middle ground. Everyone who doesn't have a high end machine won't see it as slightly worse graphics, but will see it all looking like _ass_.
- the lower part of any breastplate or long coat is attached to the pants model, not where it belongs. Why does it matter? Because if you wear pants that aren't from the exact same set, it looks like your coat changes colour in the middle. (And the recent "fix" of just giving newbies a sorta "disguise" vest that overrides the pants, gloves, sleeves and everything, is just another way to feel wrong. It tells me that someone finally realized the problem. Except instead of fixing the actual problem, they've just tried sweeping it under the carpet at least for levels 1-9 with a cheap quick-and-dirty hack.)
That's just some of the details noone paid attention to after more than a year in the graphics department alone.
But the list of wrong or inconsistent details goes deeper and pervades every single aspect of the game. E.g., only now they seem to have finally fixed fish so they swim _in_ the water, instead of hovering _above_ the water. E.g., only now fish actually stop at the border of the water instead of chasing you on land too. But the list is mile long, so I'll stop here.
And that was just point 2. Rest assured that they missed most of the other points on that list by a mile too. I just
He basically talks about the start game in WoW, not about the endgame tar pit.
Yes, WoW starts fun and ends up just a repetitve mindless chore to keep you busy while you're still in the "but I'll lose my level 60 uber-char and all my online 'friends' if I quit!" denial stage. (Which, btw, starts with a rationalization stage along the lines of: "this is, uh, the meat of the game, really. I'm only doing it because, uh, it's _fun_ to spend 2 hours waiting for everyone to log on, to do the same raid for the 50'th time, and use the same 3 icons total on that toolbar." So if anyone plans to answer that, save your breath, I've heard that rationalization in-game a thousand times, and invariably it progresses to the next stage after a while. For some it just takes longer. Basically, I already know humans are great at rationalizing why they take crap.)
Blizzard can't put infinite content in the game, so basically they distributed the most of it where it matters: in the beginning, when you get addicted to their game. And it gradually goes downhill to the endgame point where you're given 2-3 raids to do over and over again. At that endgame point, the game basically already ended, they just won't outright admit it. Because if they admitted it, you'd cancel your account and stop paying for the next month too. That's all.
It's called resource management, basically: they used their resources where it makes them the most income. And only started worrying about the next 10 levels (which by the sound of it might just be an even more unholy grind for people who _really_ don't know when to give up) when they had enough level 60 people who just won't quit, so adding something for those might actually make a financial difference.
But to get back to the article, that's not what he means there. A tabletop GM doesn't have to have the _whole_ adventure prepared in advance. A GM doesn't have to give you the same raid over and over again at the end, just because that's where his game stops. If you've just finished an adventure, the GM is supposed to come up with a new one, not just send you to do the last dungeon again.
So basically I'm guessing is that he meant that GM's should learn from WoW's first half of the game, not from the grind after WoW's game already ended.
While all you wrote is indeed insightful and true and very relevant, one doesn't even have to go that far to see why his "invention" is just bogus crap. The reason it won't work is quantum mechanics. Some basic knowledge of chemistry also helps, in that it's just applied quantum mechanics.
I'll dumb the explanation back a bit for the benefit of those (tbh, myself included) who don't have quantum physics as their day job. I.e., if you're a physicist, don't flip out if the terminology isn't just right or the exact equations are missing.
The thing is, the available states for electrons on a given "orbit" are a finite and well defined set. No two electrons may have the same state. I.e., if an atom has 2 electrons (helium), they can't both have the same orbit and state.
The inner layers already have the full set, so there's no way to flit an electron's spin there and still have it stay in that orbit: that would require it to have the same state as another electron there, which is strictly impossible.
The outer layer may have an incomplete set, but that's why mollecules and crystals form. E.g., the reason you find hydrogen as H2 (or bonded to other atoms, of course) and not as individual H atoms, is that they basically share their electrons to form a complete set. Or when you have a mollecule like CH4 (methane), each Hydrogen atom basically gets an electron from the Carbon atom to form its complete set, while the Carbon atom gets an electron from each Hydrogen atom because it needs 4 more to have the full set.
So you could only flip individual electrons from the outer layer if you kept those atoms as free atoms, not part of a mollecule or crystal. Otherwise, again, he'd try to create a situation where two electrons have the same position and state.
So how's he going to achieve that? The only atoms that stay free like that are those which, like say Helium or Neon, already have a full outer set, so they're useless there.
"I see. So, it's the designers fault if a person can't beat the game simply because the final boss is actually _supposed_ to be just that, a final challenge? [...] I just hope that this whole story is a joke, because if it isn't, society has failed "
Dude, a game's _only_ purpose is to entertain you. That's it. If it doesn't, then, yes, it is the game designer's failure. It's that simple.
Repeat after me: I _don't_ have some duty to finish non-fun games. I _don't_ have to overcome any challenge if it's not fun. And I certainly don't have to put up with crap tricks to make a short game seem longer, in a non-fun "ha ha, we'll just make you reload 100 times" way. And I _don't_ have any kind of duty to sponsor games I don't like.
There is good game design, and there is crap game design, and there is just game design which doesn't match my tastes. My purpose is to entertain myself and relax. If a game doesn't do that for me, then yes, I won't think I failed the game, it's the game designer that didn't catter to my tastes. And I have no duty to spend hours finishing it, nor to sponsor it. Good luck to the designers making a living out of the people whose tastes they did catter to, but if they want my money too, they better catter to my demographic segment too.
And yes, that does apply to bosses too, end-game or otherwise. If overcoming one turns into a non-fun activity, of the kind that makes tax forms seem more fun, then yes, that game failed to entertain me. It's that simple.
It's the same as with any other product. I don't have to watch a crap movie, if I don't like the genre, or if I don't like their "Noooooo" scene in the trailer, or for whatever other reason I choose. I don't have to put up with a car I don't like, I don't have to watch a sports game if I don't like that sport, and I don't have to wear an analog or digital watch if I like the other kind more, etc. For whatever reason. If _I_ don't like the product, then _I_ don't have to put up with it or blow my money on it. So just in the same spirit, I have no duty to spend hours on finishing a game I find crap, or overcoming some poorly designed game element that's no fun. It's that simple.
In a nutshell: it's just a game. If you think it's a society failure when people just want some entertainment and relaxation from a game, then you're taking it way too seriously. Go out some more, get some real life achievements instead, or join some 12 step group. It's just a game, not something you're duty- and honour-bound to achieve and overcome. Noone gives a fuck about your beating up a pixelated game boss, and certainly noone has a duty to do the same if they don't find it fun.
Relax. The "do something less stressful [...] - like filling in a tax return" was supposed to be a joke. (Though he does have a point that some games do get to a point where a tax form is more fun.) You're not actually supposed to raise your blood pressure some more in between blood rounds.
And let's not forget that:
- when a hooker's boss (err, pimp) just wants to ride someone's butt to vent frustration or boredom, chances are he won't have the stamina to ride for hours. IT bosses can keep at it 8 hours in a row (preferrably starting in the afternoon)
- a hooker's client probably knows already what he wants or can make up his mind in a reasonable time. I don't expect anyone spent _months_ discussing whether he wants a blow-job or sex, or called a year worth of meetings to decide if he wants to be on top or underneath, just to avoid the responsibility of making a decision. (In a project I've been in, a PHB needed a year to decide whether he wants his reports printed landscape or portrait by default, and wouldn't accept the program until it printed by default in his orientation-of-the-day. In a program which let him do both already, _and_ came with a report editor so he could rearrange them as he flippin' sees fit anyway.)
- the hooker doesn't have to spend a lot of time in team-building/motivational/etc meetings (if you're a manager, don't kid yourself: you probably don't have the charisma for this. Boring 20 people to death with platitudes copied from a book does _not_ make them feel more motivated. Verbal masturbation about how great a leader you are, even less so, and it probably means you aren't), status report meetings, meetings where the boss is just bored and wants to talk about his vacation, and responsibility-avoiding meetings which are there only so we all talked about it (and had our feedback ignored) so noone is personally responsible for the decision... or lack thereof
- the hooker doesn't have to be diplomatic about it when someone tries to score some free sex (a la the "hey, can you come over and fix my computer/network/printer/etc for free?" in IT). Everyone can understand that a hooker does it for money, and won't turn deeply hurt and hostile when she does ask for money. But as an IT geek everyone assumes that by definition you have no life and would probably just sit there bored, staring at the walls, if people didn't call you to give you a virused computer to work on
- ditto when someone tries to get a free change-request disguised as "uh, I may have asked for a hand-job, and paid for a hand-job, but what I had in mind was really a blow-job. So now it's your fault for not giving me what I wanted, and you must give it to me for free." (I'm sure you had an idiot client like that by now if you're a programmer.)
- ditto when someone thinks he's so smart if he asks for "just a demo", and then tries to squeeze the final product functionality into the demo to avoid paying. I'm sure if you tried telling a hooker that you just want to see her naked to know what you're paying for, and then tried to change that little by little into being free sex, you'd get laughed at and told to fork over the cash.
- As a hooker you're paid if you do more work in a day, and noone will act as if it's your sacred duty to work an extra 4 to 8 hours a day for free, just to show loyalty and commitment to the company
- For that matter, as a hooker it's clear who brings in more money and who hasn't done any work in 3 years straight (cue the "you IT guys just cost us money" or "bah, we did just as well back in the days of typewriters and filing cabinets" comments, or Wally people making a living just with show-business for the boss's benefit, but with exactly zero job-related skill or productivity)
Etc.
All in all, I suspect the hooker has the more dignified job.
Now you'd be able to answer correctly, and certainly a decade of dealing with l33t 5p34k3r5 and illiterate retards in online games helps a bit with that too. (I can easily think of people I've grouped with, who were harder to understand than any of the above sentences.)
But the point I'm trying to make is that even gamers _will_ think "Jesus F. Christ! Did Yoda write that monstrosity?" You _will_ notice that the grammar is all wrong, and it will disturb you more than the "Apples grow on noses" nonsense that games taught you to ignore. And if you gave that test to children, chances are that, yes, even gamers would voice their objection.
That's the point I'm trying to make: that just because someone can ignore _one_ aspect of a problem (e.g., absurd statements like "apples grow on noses"), it doesn't necessarily mean they can instinctively ignore _any_ aspect.
I suspect it's just that, actually. We gamers are used to solving the wrong problem (by RL standards) in the right way, or for that matter working with rules and problems that make no sense whatsoever by RL standards. We've got over two decades of experience saying that such stuff is just _normal_, if the game says so:
- that wolves, or for that matter insects, carry coins or pieces of armour, or that you can get a 6 ft two-handed sword as loot on a 1 ft rabbit
- but, conversely, things you'd expect each of them to have IRL, like meat on a pig, is equally a random drop and you might need to slaughter 20 pigs to get a pound of meat
- that shooting enemy planes leaves giant coins floating in the air, and you can collect them by ramming your airplane into them
- that the exact same armour piece, e.g., maille boots, fit a gnome or a half-giant equally well
- that, conversely, the "recipe" for frying a trout over a camp fire (you know, just stick it on a stick and hold it over the fire) works only on trout, and you have to buy a different "recipe" to fry a different kind of fish over a camp fire. Or that having learned to hold a sword by the handle doesn't also teach you how to hold a flanged mace by the non-flanged end, and you have to buy that skill separately. (Note that at this point we're not talking about using it well, or effectively. We're talking just being able to hold it at all.)
- that skills are only learned from trainers and you can't teach anything to another player (e.g., that if I'm a master swordsman and travelling for months with an archer, I couldn't possibly teach him to use a sword. He'll have to wait until he finds a proper weapon trainer for swords.)
- that, depending on your class, there are things you're physically unable to learn or wear. (E.g., if you're a hunter, you can't ever learn to even hold a mace or warhammer... although you already know how to use a sword or axe. And at least the axe is IRL literally the same kind of impact weapon, as medieval fighting styles went.)
- that smithing skill can be used to make a new sword or breastplate, but you can't possibly use the same skill to repair its edge or hammer the breastplate back into shape after it's been used in combat
- that the ingredients used and the type of item you end up with are completely unrelated. (E.g., that engineering headgear made out of medium leather in WoW counts as "cloth", so your mage can wear it, but you can't wear leather boots for example, although they're equally made of leather.)
- that things work differently during the cut scenes than in the actual game (e.g., that they couldn't use a Phoenix Dawn or spell to revive Aeris, although that's how it works the whole rest of the game. Or that the same handgun does 1% of your current HP in the actual game, but can kill or be threatening enough for a character to surrender in a cut scene.)
Etc, etc, etc.
Basically my take is that we gamers are so used to working with absurd rules, that we don't even really notice them any more. (Other than maybe for a quick smirk.) If a game sent you to pick apples from noses, the average gamer would just go and dutifully do just that. Sure. Why not? Compared to some other things I've done in games, that doesn't even start to disturb me.
Basically it's not that gamers can mentally turn off _any_ one aspect of a problem, to work on the others. It's just _this_ particular aspect which we've been beat upside the head with until it stopped bothering us. Yes, so gamers aren't bothered by absurd rules or sentences like "apples grow on noses", and can completely ignore the absurdity in that. No surprise there. But I'd be more interested if _other_ aspects of a problem can be mentally turned off by a gamer as well. My guess is that it might turn out to be a lot less natural to a gamer too.
The fact is, games started with a simple interface, if only by virtue of not having CPU or RAM for more complex stuff. Pong only had two directions: up and down. Pacman had four. At this point we're not even talking about a fire button yet: just the directions. Then games got a fire button. Then two. Then gradually... well, have you looked at a console controller lately? A PS2 one sports no less than 12 buttons, including the thumbsticks which can _also_ act as buttons, in addition to their normal function. And then there are PC games which put even that to shame: using two dozen buttons or more is the norm in some genres, like flight sims.
Then we've had to learn other stuff. There are all sorts of concepts and reflexes which got added one by one. And we gamers learned them one by one, over the course of two decades or more. We already had the previous concept, and the time to get thoroughly used to it, before we got the next one dumped upon us.
Another poster a while ago compared it to a "game grammar". (In the same kind of way as an XML Schema is called a "grammar".) It tells you what goes where, and what kind of thing is expected in which sequence. Quite often cotrary to any RL rules or experience.
E.g., you already know that if it's a RPG, you're supposed to walk up to every single person in a major capital and talk to them. (IRL that's not what it's expected.) Or that it's just normal to try all conflicting option in a dialogue until something happens. (What would happen IRL if you said the exact opposites within 5 minutes in the same conversation, is left as an exercise.) Or you're supposed to already know distinctions like between "named NPC" and "generic NPC". (IRL everyone is named. Other than in medieval Japan, noone was ever simply called "a rice farmer".) And about a thousand other little things like "quest", "random drop" (e.g., that you don't get wool by shearing a sheep or meat by slaughtering a pig, but both might -- or might not -- "drop" when you kill one. Or that when asked to bring 4 zebra hooves, that doesn't mean one zebra.), etc, etc, etc.
Or here's some more anecdotal evidence that a co-worker randomly provided in a conversation: he said that his old father, in spite of otherwise being an intelligent man, has trouble understanding that the same button can perform several different and unrelated functions, depending on the "mode" the game/device/etc is in or on what other buttons are pressed at the same time. The guy has a lifetime of experience telling him that, say, in a car, the windshield wiper button does only one thing: start/stop the wipers. And if you need a different function, like accelerate, it will be a different button or pedal, not switching modes and using the windshield wiper button to accelerate. Now look at the gamepad use in many games, and you can surely see how its use is based on the exact opposite assumption.
There are all these things that you're supposed to already _know_. And even when the game gives you a tutorial, it's usually just the fine points, not the basics you're supposed to already know. (If it were a RL language's grammar, imagine your very first tutorial being "how to use the Ablative mode in the Less-Than-Perfect tense", but no explanation wth is the Ablative and wth of a tense is that to start with, or how do you form either from a normal word. That's game tutorials for a first time gamer.)
That's the problem with first time gamers, especially if they're adults who can't spend 16 hours a day for 8 years just learning all that the hard way. They're expected to already know some two dozen years of game concepts evolution, and they just don't. It's not that we gamers are smarter or have a bigger, more flexible brain. We just know that "game grammar" already. We do ok with just some advanced tutorial to refresh that grammar, or the fine points used in that game, but a first timer simply lacks the basic notions he's expected to already have.
And to get back on topic, I expect it's the same phenomenon that they're s
"And Brand names in capitalism fall under the laws of reincarnation... The Atari you mentioned loving, based on your ref to Pole Position, died several lives ago. This is at least the 3rd incarnation since then and I doubt it will be the last. One day, I hope to own the rights to Atari..."
I fail to see how would Infogrames really be a "reincarnation" of the original Atari. It's like me changing my name to Mark Twain or JRR Tolkien. Regardless of whether I've paid anything for the name or it was just a quick trip through the apropriate bureaucracy, it doesn't make me the reincarnation of either, and it sure doesn't make me have the literary skill or style of either. It's just a PR stunt to get the attention of people who recognize the name.
You have to also realize that what you're paid and what you cost the company are very different things. Having a team of programmers involves not just their salaries, but also rent/taxes/whatever for the building, electricity costs, admin costs, maintenance costs, taxes (at least here a lot of stuff is paid 50/50 by the employee and the employer), management costs (you'll notice that even Linux involves some people at the top deciding what goes in and what stays out), etc, etc, etc.
For a lot of large companies, these costs can amplify a lot, because of the whole infrastructure and bureaucracy. E.g., I think I remember a study some time ago where a ballpoint pen at a large corporation could end up costing IIRC around 10 Euro. (Well, 20 DM back then.) Some cents for the pen, and the rest for the whole bureaucracy it goes through to get bought and distributed.
(And I might add: ironically, a lot of it in the name of cutting costs. There are hundreds of thousands spent in salaries on people whose job is to negotiate a better deal on pencils and save maybe a few thousands per year. Or to negotiate getting a cheap burger flipper instead of a skilled programmer, and actually cause the project to cost 3x as much after all the delays. Or as happened here once, to negotiate a 400k price, with a 50% discount, on a server that was listed in that exact configuration at 40k on the manufacturer's web site: if you measure people's job results in dollars discount got, they'll buy a 1000$ pen at 50% discount instead of a 1$ pen at no discount. But the investors love hearing about it anyway. But I digress.)
Basically when you hear numbers thrown around like "a programmer costs you 100k per year", don't expect that that's the programmer's salary.
Look at Blizzard games, WoW included. It has been pointed out before that Blizzard hasn't really innovated much. Diablo was just a scrolling arcade game (a la Contra or Gauntlet), Warcraft was a Dune 2 rip-off, and WoW has borrowed most of its elements from other games before it (e.g., the PvP theme had already been made mainstream by the likes of Dark Age Of Camelot and Anarchy Online). So what was Blizzard's secret mojo? Quality (including not just the lack of bugs, but also a good interface, smooth learning curve, and great balance) and generally giving customers what they wanted.
Last I've heard some numbers WoW was at about 10 times the number of subscribers of the original EQ at its peak, even farther ahead of EQ2, and it had outgunned some other games by as much as 50 to 60 times.
So maybe, just maybe, making the customer happy pays off, you know? No, that doesn't mean bending over backwards each time someone whines that his level 1 priest should get the mages' level 50 spell. But it means that those "idiots" are entitled to have some fun, and decisions should be at least partially based on "well, what do most customers want?" Turns out that most of us are happy just with quality and balance.
Or let's talk about how EQ itself took the crown and stole most customers from UO, i.e., from those who invented the genre. In fact, "EQ" became _the_ name in the MMO arena, stealing the spotlight completely from the genre's creators. It's no mean feat. It's like stealing the 3D FPS spotlight completely from Id. _That_ big a feat. Not to mention from the ones with the big franchise. "Ultima" was a major franchise for every gamer, while "Everquest" originally meant nothing to anyone.
What was EQ's secret mojo? Giving the customers a lot of the stuff they wanted, and which Origin refused to give them. (E.g., the fact that Origin finally grudgingly gave its players a gank-free facet was only to stop the exodus to games, like EQ or AC, which gave non-PK'ers just that: a place where you won't be ganked on sight and repeatedly as soon as you step outside the town. That was just one of the many little things that people wanted, and EQ delivered, while Origin was blatantly ignoring its customers.)
So maybe, just maybe, quality does matter. Maybe, just maybe, even "in a country full of idiots", those "idiots" can still cancel their accounts and go to another game they find more fun. And maybe, just maybe, 2x the investment in quality can get you 10x more revenue. Just something for this industry to ponder.
To put things into perspective, EA considered TSO a _flop_ when it stabilized at 100,000 subscribers. So 10,000 active subscribers is just dead. There were a couple of MUDs in the 90s which could boast more players than that.
Even if it were 150,000 USD at month, that just doesn't pay for the server costs, admin salaries, GM salaries (someone still has to make sure those 10,000 don't rampantly cheat), patching (if they do cheat, someone has to fix the bugs), QA (ideally a patch would be tested before release), and further development. We're talking a major commercial game, not someone's web-based exercise where making any money in a month is still great.
But I'm guessing they don't even make 150,000 USD a month. Two words: "station pass". If you're already paying for a Sony game, you can get access to all others for half the price of a game. If you already play two EQ games (e.g., Planetside and EQ/EQ2), you get SWG for free. Heck, Sony even offers in-game advantages for for getting a station pass even for a single game, such as getting extra moves (directly or via bundled mini-expansions), or extra character slots or whatever. So you could really play just one Sony game and incidentally get the others for free.
I know that first hand. The periods when I went back to SWG, only to find it a bigger mess and buggier to boot, were just that: I already had a station pass, SWG didn't cost anything extra (other than the download times for the patches) to try, so wth... sure, I'll give it another try.
So the question is how many of those 10,000 are just dropping by between rounds of their main SOE game (e.g., when their guildies aren't online in EQ), but don't actually pay a single buck to Sony for the privilege. It could be none, or it could be that SWG isn't actually making Sony _any_ income, or more probably somewhere in between.
Either way you want to slice it and look at it, it's a major fuck-up. Only 10k subscribers is MMO death anyway, but for a game based on the biggest franchise in history... there are no words to properly describe how big a fuck-up that is.
There were _millions_ of SW nerds who waited for SWG like it was the second coming of Obi Wa... err... the messiah. There were people who grew up with SW. People who put "Jedi" as their religion on census forms and _meant_ it. As Scott Kurtz aptly put it in a comic strip, there were people who said goodbye to their friends and family and never expected to leave the SW universe again. It was a franchise that made Warcraft or The Sims look like peanuts. (When was the last time you've heard someone debate Warcraft as passionately as "Han shot first"?)
And yet they fucked up. They were handed over the franchise and the fans on a silver platter, and they fucked up. There's no other way to put it.
Of course, I suspect that won't stop Raph Koster from giving even more interviews about how great a game designer he is, and spout various stuff like "a MMO doesn't have to be a good game, it's just a social framework" (then how come SWG never was much of either?) or "the biggest MMO success ever isn't WoW, it's Habbo Hotel." (Never mind that Habbo Hotel is a free game _and_ it still doesn't have the number of active subscribers that WoW has. We'll just redefine that as the new metric of success.) But I digress.
An observation I've made long ago is that humans (at least the smart ones) do what works, and as a result any game gets the kind of gamers it "deserves". E.g., if a FPS rewards camping more than anything else, it gets swamped in campers. E.g., if a MMO rewards farming, it gets farmers. It's that simple.
And doubly so when the game is a brain-dead exercise for the most brain-dead grinders. If the way to get ahead in the game is to be an obsessive-compulsive clicker willing to _work_ 8 hours a day on mind-numbing repetitive stuff (and pay each month for the privilege), yes, eventually some people will say "screw this, if I wanted more work, I'd do overtime and get paid for it." So they'll buy gold instead or cancel their account. It's that simple.
That creates the demand.
And conveniently most "me too" MMOs also create the supply. There's an abrupt differential in how much money you make per hour at each level. E.g., in WoW even a gray (junk) item dropped off a level 60 NPC is worth about 1 gold at the vendor (i.e., without even bothering with the auction house), while for a newbie 1 gold will pay for all your skills (trade skills included) and equipment up to level 10. E.g., in COH a level 50 can make more than 3 million per hour, money which you don't even need any more (no repairs, no more stuff to buy, etc), while for a new character 3 million will last you until level 35.
So you have:
1. a bunch of people who badly need gold (and face a non-fun repetitive grind of days, maybe weeks, to get it)
2. a bunch of people who can easily supply a newbie's need for gold (in a tiny fraction of that time)
So is it any surprise that a gold trade forms between the two? It's only common sense, not to mention elementary economics.
Complaining about the "evil" gil farmers when the game creates that slope, sorry, it's just brain dead. It's like complaining that things slide down a water slide. ("Waah, things should have slid up hill, and it's such an evil world when they go downhilll instead!") Well, what did they _expect_ there?
Want to make gil farmers go away? Well, yes, how about changing the economy then? Or for that matter, how about designing a game so it's fun for the casual gamer who plays it to relax after work, not to get more mind-numbing repetitive work?
Heck, it _is_ possible to design a game without gold at all.
E.g., look at Planetside. You're a soldier, so your tank or weapon are supplied to you for free. The balancing factors are your certifications (you don't get a tank if you're not certified to drive one) and the timer on some equipment (you have to play infantry a bit until you get your next tank, if you just drove your old one off a hill.) And unsurprisingly, there is no gold farming or trade whatsoever in Planetside. Go ahead, search ebay. You won't see gold or equipment for sale for Planetside.
The same could work in a lot of other games. E.g., in COH, you don't even have equipment or such, you have new techniques or enhancements for your signature moves: it's a trivial exercise to re-design that to work basically as skill points gained at level-up, instead of being bought. E.g., in WoW, you don't even need to go that far: bump quest rewards up to be actually suitable for the quest's level (as opposed to getting a level 12 mace as reward for a level 30 elite quest), and you've just made money entirely unnecessary. Etc.
And in FFXI's case, heck, they just need to get a brain and realise that the Japanese kind of "work simulator" is entirely the wrong game concept for the vast majority of us Westerners.
There's a difference between merely discussing history (yes, the Europeans fought Indians) and _revisionist_ history in which you paint the attacked as the aggressors. For better or worse, the Indians were really the ones attacked and driven off their lands there, and painting them as a bunch of bandits wantonly attacking the caravans isn't history, it's revisionist history.
Just for trivia sake, here's a historical tidbit for you: you know how scalping is thrown around as the example of how savage and cruel the Indians were? Well, it was invented by the Europeans. A bunch of Europeans decided they'd be better off if they just exterminated the Indians wholesale to make room for European farmers. (Incidentally the exact same plan Hitler had for Poland, for example.) So they paid headhunters for each Indian scalp brought in, as proof of one killed Indian.
The Indians just knew a good idea when it bit them, so they soon started scalping too, as a way to keep track of killed enemies.
That's the kind of wanton aggression the Europeans waged upon the rightful owners and inhabitants of that land. So now representing the ones who fought back as the aggressors is a tad rich.
It's like making a game in which you're a WW2 German soldier just defending yourself against the supposedly wanton aggression of partisans on the Eastern front. Or helping shoot Polish "aggressors" in the Warshaw uprising. You know, you're just minding your business there, and all of a sudden these aggressive Poles or Russians attack your convoy and you have to defend yourself. Great game idea to show people how harsh life was on the Eastern Front, eh?
I'm guessing noone would have any trouble spotting the shameless revisionism there, but when it's about American natives we all act so surprised that they're offended.
Let's face it, when I play a game, I want to do just that: just play a game. I don't want to deal with drama queens ("waah, I spammed on the linked city chat that I'm gay/pagan/whatever for 6 hours and now mean people are picking on me! I'm sooo persecuted!"... usually along the lines of "STFU already, get a life, stop trolling, noone gives a damn". Well what DID you expect?), attention whores (e.g., a guild member spending 6 hours straight advertising what colour "her" panties are, and how "she" looks like a horny schoolgirl with a sexy voice), etc, etc, etc.
There's enough of that IRL, and I play a game to get out of there, not to get another dose of "waah, I picked a religion that's especially crafted to look like satanism and tick off christians, and now they're so mean as to actually get ticked off." I don't care what your religion, politics, or sexual inclination is, and I certainly don't care what your favourite persecution complex is or your favourite technique of trolling for persecution, I just can do without them in a MMO. Unless your sexual inclination is an integral part of said MMO (e.g., you get different spells for being gay), I'm there for the game, not for that. That's all.
And just do get dragged into that, noone's saying "she was dressed like a whore, so she deserved to get assaulted." There's a fine line between how you're dressed (noone picks on male mages wearing dresses, for example) and actively trolling for attention. At some point it's just common sense that you _will_ get the wrong kind of attention.
E.g., if you show up in KKK regalia at a black meeting and start spouting white supremacy crap, you might get two black eyes and maybe a few broken ribs. E.g., if you advertise being a hot, wet and horny female, you might get harrassed by horny 16 year old males. E.g., if you advertise being a "witch" in a small bible-thumping community, you might get people avoiding you or harrassing you. Etc. It's just common sense. What DID you expect there?
Yes, it's still the transgressor's fault, but excuse me for not feeling too bad for the victim either. If you do choose to do something stupid, something where common sense should have made the outcome plenty clear in advance, well, it seems to me like just Darwinism in action.
And that goes double for stuff that's basically trolling for attention or feeding one's persecution complex. I see a lot of that. A lot of the whining about narrow minded people comes after working hard to bait those people into doing that. E.g., a lot of the complaining about Christians being so narrow minded comes after someone's going out of their way to bait and annoy said Christians. E.g., yes, a lot of whining about narrow-minded homophobes comes after actively baiting those homophobes. Well, what did they expect? I'm guessing they expected and wanted just that all along.
Being a poor defenseless victim is an _easy_ role. Suddenly you're absolved of any responsibility. Anything happening to you is just being persecuted, never the direct consequence of what you've chose or done. It's a damn easy role to play.
The hard part is dealing with life as it _is_, and doing your best to avoid the traps and work around the stupid bits. It has plenty of those, and we all get to just deal with them. Life is what it is, society is what it is, and there's certainly a hefty dose of narrow-mindedness, stupidity, and unfairness in it. Deal with it. Make the best out of the crap hand you've been dealt. That's what everyone else is doing.
Or, of course, you can back up into the comfortable "auugh, life is sooo unfair, and I'm such a victim, and I sooo don't deserve it" emo act. Well, cry me a river.
The "it belongs to a third party and Lucas made us do this and that" aspect has been mentioned, but I still can't shake the feeling that Lucas made better films than Sony made a game based on it. Yes, episodes 1 to 3 included.
For all his ever-changing visions, and all his later getting on a stupid quest to undo the very good-vs-evil foundation of his universe (the jedi weren't apparently all that good and noble, and the sith were just the other sect according to episodes 1-3), Lucas started from scratch and made SW the biggest movie franchise. Better yet, he made SF mainstream. It says something. The very fact that people still debate whether Han should shoot first, or whether Jar Jar is a worse comic relief than C3PO is a testament to how much Lucas's films touched a lot of us. You don't see that kind of passion in people arguing Godfather 1 vs Godfather 3.
By comparison, what did Sony do with it? They created a DIKU MUD with graphics, and a ho-hum "me too" one at that. It's always been massively buggy, balance was always non-existent, and Sony did their best to piss off the customers, like Sony always does. Even as a MUD it was of the "me too" quality seen when a third-grader downloads DIKU and throws together his own smurf areas. It featured such half-baked stuff ranging from whole areas and town that existed just to fill the map (but didn't actually have any NPCs, quests or anything), classes added without any thought to balance just because someone thought the class name was all that was needed (don't tell me Raph Koster gave even a second's thought to the balance of, say, entertainers vs animal tamers, and how fast one levels up in respect to the other, or how fast they make money), and pretty much the bog-standard DIKU combat and mechanics. And as is the case when someone just isn't competent enough to do the maths and balance a game, the balance swung wildly in patches, not getting any more balanced, but just for the sake of pissing off existing players.
Briefly, they made a crap "me too" game that survives _only_ because of the franchise. Far from being hurt by Lucas's franchise, it's their transfusion line that keeps their fetid corpse of a game alive. If SWG had started from scratch without a franchise, like AO or DAOC did, I believe it would have been a flop that went straight to the garbage bin of MMO gaming.
So basically all this "oh, we're just hurt by the Lucas's franchise" is just a crap excuse from the makers of a crap game. That's all. What did you expect? Them to come forward and admit "guys, we fucked up. We have no clue how to make a good game even when someone hands us the franchise, the fans, and the story on a silver platter"? It's not gonna happen.
Blizzard can design a good game, the SWG team just can't. That's all.
Heck, forget Blizzard. Even the SW franchise has been previously used well, say, in KOTOR. Note how both side-stepped constraints by stepping outside the time frame of the proper franchise. WoW happens some time after Warcraft 3, KOTOR happens some millenia before SW, buying them a lot of freedom to create their own story and characters in that universe. It's a neat trick, but it takes a real designer and some balls to come up with it, as opposed to mindlessly taking what's been handed to them and transcribing it into a MUD.
Been meaning to ask this since the original "woohoo, 'hackers' released an ISO of an unprotected XBox 360 demo disk" article: how's this hacking anyway? What's the coding or even cracking challenge in making an ISO of a DVD? How's it "news for nerds, stuff that matters"?
It's just piracy, and of the kind that doesn't need any skills. Any kid with a DVD drive and Nero or any other DVD burning program can make an ISO.
Now I can see how, say, finding an exploit to boot Linux on the original XBox was "hacking" (in either meaning of the word you swear by). Or how those people who made the PSP load *ahem* "homebrewn games" (strange how those are only waved around as an excuse to load _pirated_ commercial games) were "hackers".
But pirating an unprotected DVD? Gimme a break.
Picture this. So you're in an instance and:
;)
- the "healer" doesn't heal. Ever. There could be a full team wipe happening around him, and he'd be out of mana blasting with his offensive spells, doing a whole 50% of a mage's damage output. (Yes, I know priests are a more complex class than just "healer", but there's something offensive when a paladin ends up spending half the mana to keep alive a priest that's busy blasting.)
He does however raid all chests while everyone else is still in combat, or indeed got aggroed by a patroll while in a fight. He also rolls "Need" on everything, chain mail, leather and swords included.
He also leaves just before the boss fight, after he's got the staff he was there for.
- the mage thinks he's a melee fighter, bravely charging with his trusty old kitchen knife. Someone posts a damage dealer statistic and the mage is in the last place, doing half the paladin's damage, and, you know, the paladin is tanking and healing. He also has the annoying habbit of using the sheep spell all the time, and invariably on the target everyone else is blasting. Occasionally the mage pulls a Leroy Jenkins and is heard screaming "HEAL!" from behind a corner, and a good 100 yards away.
- the dual-wield warrior never waits for the casters to refill their mana. He also thinks that "pulling" means doing a charge into the next enemy group. Preferrably while everyone else is drinking to refill their mana.
- the hunter has his pet on aggressive, so it keeps pulling a different enemy, or running up a side tunnel to aggro a completely different enemy. He also can't decide if he's a melee fighter or a ranged fighter, and is occasionally seen rushing ahead of everyone else and trying to tank. He's sure to tell everyone every 5 minutes that he has 3 level 60 alts, though. (Yet doesn't even know what's in the first instance in the game, or basic tactics. Go figure.)
He too leaves just before the boss fight.
Add some seasoning in the form of a group member trying to discuss in detail their taking a dump. (Laptops are great, or what?) Another one is talking only in some engrish. Yet another one doesn't talk at all, ever, and the only attempt at communication is trying to give everyone some junk he rolled "need" for earlier. E.g., the Paladin gets to close trade windows once every 5 seconds, in combat, as the mage tries to give him a low level gun (which paladins can't use anyway.) Etc.
I don't know if that would take someone's mind off pain, but a cure for sadness it sure isn't
The FF series, ok, it does manage to have different stories, swing between medieval and SF, and even change the game mechanics (whether it's needed or not). Duly noted, and true.
But how many others do that?
E.g., to pick on another long series of games, take Sierra's empire building games. Exactly what was the fundamental change between Caesar and Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom? I've actually had Caesar III, Pharaoh, Zeus and Emperor installed at the same time at one point to make a comparison, and make no mistake, they were the same game with different sprites.
The only noteworthy tweak I can remember was that after Pharaoh they finally introduced road-blocks, so you can make essential NPCs (e.g., those supplying a city section with food and water) move in a loop instead of wandering stupidly into the desert while everyone in town leaves in droves. Otherwise, other than changing the sprites to fit a different civilization, they just largely kept releasing the same game over and over again.
It took PopTop's Tropico to shake the status quo, and give that team the idea to finally give NPCs a brain. E.g., to have each person on the map go to the market when they're hungry, instead of having pinball supplier NPCs walking in a loop. So they dutifully produced another mindless clone, I'm talking about Immortal Cities: Children Of The Nile, except this time they cloned Tropico instead of their earlier games. (And to add insult to injury, accompanied by a mess of interviews and trailers in which they act as if they're the ones who invented that, and noone before COTN ever thought of that.)
Which brings us to another phenomenon: mindless clones of whatever sold well last year.
Worse yet: often _clueless_ clones, by people who don't even like or understand the genre, but just have to make a RPG or The Sims clone or whatever, without even understanding what people liked about those games.
And city building is used above just as an example. It's not even the worst offender. Other genres are worse offenders.
E.g., take EA's neverending series of "Some Sport 2006", where the only major difference from last year's installment are the player names. 'Nuff said.
E.g., take economic games. For every occasional gem like "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400: The Guild"), you have about a hundred clueless "me too" exercises, often missing the whole point. Everyone and their grandma just has to imagine that giving people a rectangular area to place shops on, and slapping on a title ending in "Tycoon", is all there is to it. Actually worrying about gameplay, balance or diversity is obviously not needed.
E.g., heck, take FPS, the genre which pretty much made mainstream the practice of releasing two dozen identical games per year. Get a graphics engine, bolt on two dozen unrelated maps, and the bog-standard assortment of guns (knife, pistol, SMG, sniper rifle, shotgun, flamethrower) and call it a new game. Oh yeah, and bolt on a half-baked multiplayer mode where no thought was given to weapon balance or map layout for multiplayer, and just reused whatever the single-player game had.
In some cases the sequel not only didn't really add anything new, but was actually a step back and folded back into the comfy mediocrity of being another "me too" clone. E.g., Unreal 2. It did away with all the Unreal universe and unique weaponry (e.g., the flak gun being a unique something in between a shotgun and a grenade launcher, but not quite either), and replaced that all with a generic SF universe and generic FPS weapons (yay for having a standard shotgun again.) In fact, it was another dime-a-dozen generic FPS that only reused the franchise name.
I could go on, but methinks you get the idea already. When some of us complain about sequels, spin-offs and raping a franchise name for a quick buck, what we have in mind is the above. It doesn't mean literally that exceptions like the FF series don't exist. It just means they're just that: exceptions.
I even considered the topic being worth debating when I first heard it, in the year 2000 or so. Even though it was full of hard to believe outlandish claims (e.g., that you could even perform non-consentual abortions and lob dead foetuses with a catapult; e.g., that the only way to respawn was to be re-born, for example by raping a woman and impregnating her; e.g., that they could support millions of players on a single machine, which no MMO ever could) and the game was every time in a "closed beta" so noone could check those claims, people got in a big debate about it.
Since then, oh looky, there comes again the regularly scheduled PR troll that has just one purpose: to get attention. Complete with yet another claim: this time that you need spilled sperm for potions. Well, gee, that ought to fix crafting.
If MMOs were forum posters, Sociolotron would be the troll/crapflooder posting goatse links in every thread. That's all there is to it. Nothing to see here.
And oh looky, this time a bit down in the thread we even have the ISO-standard astroturfing testimonial post about how lots of women play it (including the poster's wife supposedly), just waiting to be raped and abused, and getting a kick out of it. And no siree, there are no griefers on it, and (unlike what experience showed us on a hundred muds and a few MMOs), player justice really really works here this time. Honest. If that doesn't sound _exactly_ like the astroturfing ads-disguised-as-testimonials for "enlarge your penis" and "find a sex partner in your area" sites, you haven't read your spam mails lately.
So basically I wouldn't take it too seriously.
Then again, _if_ it finally went live, I wouldn't really kill the "worthless fucker signing up to this abomination", as you aptly put it. Think positively. If it gets at least _some_ of the worst retards that plague some other games, and keeps them busy there pretending to rape each other's female character (or ugly sprite thereof), it's a good thing.
Before I even start, please realize that you're talking about people who don't know this. If they already had first hand experience with playing that MMO at level 60, they'd already have a level 60 character, hence wouldn't need to pay to have their main character power-levelled to 60.
The people who, in your words, "pay [...] to start with a maxed out character already" (my emphasis), are the extreme case who doesn't know _anything_ about the game or what they're paying for. Pretty much by the definition of the word "to start". It's not people who've played both the level 1 game and the level 60 game, compared them, and reached an informed conclusion that level 60 is more fun. We're talking about people who _assumed_ that level 60 would be more fun, without _any_ actual first-hand information to base that assumption on.
So that doesn't prove anything about the game.
So why do people do that? For various reasons, including, but not limited to:
- Because some people take virtual achievements _far_ too seriously. They actually believe that having a level 60 character makes them _someone_, and having a level 10 makes them a loser. That virtual achievement _is_ their life's achievement, not just a level in a game.
Or to put it a lot less diplomatically, for a lot of people it's like their penis size in inches physically depends on their character level, their castle's size in UO, whatever. I figure the conversion rate must be something like 1 inch for every 5 levels, because they won't admit even having an alt under level 30 or so, except as some dark secret or shameful concession. (Or if they're playing that alt, they'll make sure to mention their level 60 alt every 5 minutes to everyone in the group.)
So they'll do anything to get that coveted achievement, and join the big boys' club. Grind, farm, even reach for the credit card and pay for gold/PL/housing/whatever on eBay. Anything.
- Some aren't just PvP-ers, but _insecure_ PvP-ers, who need the deck fully stacked in their favour to finally feel secure enough to attack even a newbie. It's the kind who won't even load Counter-Strike without the newest aim-bot, or in a MMO _needs_ level 60 _and_ a full tier 2 equipment set to join in the "I killed u, so u sukk" willy-waving choir.
In a sense, this is just a sub-case of the previous category, except these make the PvP score their life's achievement. And in a sense, not. While the guys in the previous category saw just the level 60 or the UO castle as achievement enough, this category can't feel like they "rule", unless they "prove" that someone else "sucks". It's a parasitic category.
Except the problem with basing a "rule"/"suck" ranking on that is that it's also chalking an "I suck" mark each time _they_ are the ones faceplanting. So to prop their little ego, they _need_ to make sure the odds are as stacked in their favour as it gets. They just _have_ to be level 60 _and_ decked in full tier-2 equipment before they even try. And even then, a lot of them will go hunt newbies in a level 10 areas, just to make sure they really aren't taking any risks. Better make sure that newbie is AFK at that.
Actually, it's the exact opposite of what you seem to assume. Most games start with the "best" part, and gradually, slowly move you to the worst parts.
They're built upon studies saying that the average account is cancelled after 6 months (some sooner, some later, but that's the peak of the Gauss curve), by which point all that keeps you there is some mis-guided "but I'll lose my uber-character and all my online friends if I quit!" illusion. I.e., the fun is long gone by that point anyway.
The hard part is getting you hooked in the first place, which is why they start with the best parts. The end-game grind isn't the grand cake at the end, it's one last-ditch repetitive grind you're thrown. Its only role and purpose is to give you something to do at all while you're still in denial about quitting the game.
So, to give you a metaphor, they're built on the boiling a frog alive model. They say that if you drop a frog in hot water, it will hop out of the pot. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly warm it up, it will stay there and get cooked. (Mind you, I haven't actually tried it.) That's the model MMOs take. The have to make sure you don't hop out from the start, and from there it's just a matter of going downhill slowly enough so you don't mind just a little more grind, just a little more travel time, just a little more farming for your next weapon, and generally just a little more time-sink and less game.
Let me use WoW as an example: in the beginning you're seriously more powerful than the opponents (the newbie wolves in Northshire do 1hp per hit), you level up fast, quests are plentiful, and they don't require you to move travel more than one or two hundred ft. And you see new content all the time. It's all game and no time-sink, and you're happy as a frog in a nice (if cooking pot shaped) pool of cool water. And that's what gets people addicted.
And it gradually changes into something that's more and more time-sink and less game. At the end-game you pretty much pay the monthly fee just to sit there for hours getting enough people for a raid you've done a thousand times before, and then riding for half an hour to it. Not only it's a lot of time-sink, you're not even seeing any new content. You're doing the same repetitive crap, pulling the same NPCs, in the same order, using less spells/skills/whatever than you used at level 10... in the vain hope than you'll hit the 1% chance that this time the boss will drop the armour piece you need. And that someone else won't roll higher for it.
Or take the reputation quests, say, the Thorium Brotherhood. You need, what? To farm some 1000 pieces of medium leather just to get them to talk to you? And that's just the ante. Then you get to farm dark iron residue for the next stage.
Again, the hard part is getting you hooked at level 1. After that, chances are you'll take care of deluding yourself, and keep yourself coming back anyway.
The illusion that there's some massive reward at the end is all psychological, all a self-made illusion, once you got hooked in the first place. You just have to keep with the virtual Joneses. You just have to believe that anyone actually gives a damn about your having a bigger player house (in games that support that) than the Joneses and an epic horse (the virtual equivalent of a car with a big wing at mid-life crisis) before the Joneses got one. You just have to believe that having reached level 60 will make you _someone_. There's an unspoken illusion that once you've reached that apex, newbies will speak in admiration of you, TV shows will be dedicated to your self-made-man success, and random (elven) women will beg to have your child, etc.
I don't know about network problems. I had massive lag issues well outside the weeks you've mentioned, _and_ the game was showing 50ms latency. Yet creatures would come back from the dead to melee me, after having stood there staring at me during (what I thought was) the actual combat. And various other such occurences which in other games happen only during massive lag spikes.
And dodging the bugs might be harder than it sounds, seeing that you don't even have to do much to be bit by one. E.g., you only have to enter and exit your own vehicle enough times, for the game to eventually put you in combat with it.
So even with that, I've had about as much fun with SWG as in a dentist's chair. It's crap design, crap implementation, and crap support. Its _only_ merit is the SW license, and much as I _am_ a SW nerd, that only goes so far.
In fact, even if you want to run around with a lightsaber, here's a better idea: get Sega's PSO or get WoW and have a glowing enchant cast on your sword. They're not SW, but still, you can get a glowing sword without having to put up with a festering pile of crap trying to masquerade for a game.