This crazy stuff.

This article showed up on Kotaku yesterday, and before I link it I want to explain why I am linking it. The article is about the behavior of a youtube user and has examples of his videos where he does something terrible I'm not going to link to those videos because I don't want to give this guy traffic.

Read this article if you are interested, I will continue after the break.

Faith in Humanity Slowly Depleting

It's alright to just be a fan

I listen to or watch quite a few podcasts and streams related to gaming. For the most part it is where my gaming news comes from and my window to games that I may not have picked up, or maybe even heard of. Frequently viewers want advice on how they can get started doing this sort of thing. Playing video games and making money. Part of me wants to say this is unique to this Youtuber/Streamer fanbase. But ask a morning DJ and they'll tell you how often people tell them that all their friends say they have a great voice for radio. Or turn on American Idol or So You Think You Can Dance to see the army of minimally talented individuals who believe they have a shot.

I've fallen for it myself. I glance around and I have a magnificent web cam that points at a great angle showing off my gaming swag. I had one of those Yeti USB mics at the top of my Christmas list this year. I have this blog that I keep telling myself I am going to stay regular on. Looking deeper...this Aeron chair isn't for broadcasting, it's for marathon gaming sessions. These AS400's are not for hosting radio shows, they are for sound immersion without disturbing my girlfriend. This blog goes weeks without updates because I'd rather be playing games than typing about them.

The reality is that I am a consumer and that's ok. In fact, that's great! There is much less stress watching a brilliantly produced Youtube series than there is thinking one up and executing it.

I found gamebreaker.tv  while looking for scraps of info on Star Wars the Old Republic a year and half ago. It was among a half dozen podcasts I listened to in the lead up to that game. The build up, launch and collapse of my interest in that game has left me with a network of casters and content producers who I relate to, who's interests vary and extend beyond mine. It's a great way to experience games that I would otherwise overlook. Trials and Day Z are great examples. These are games I will never play. But watching other people play them is amazingly entertaining.

Thank you to all the serious Streamers and Youtubers out there. Us consumers appreciate the hard work that goes into what you do. I have no interest in taking over one of your shows, but if you ever want to play a game sometime, give me a shout. I am quite bad at most genres.

Leading a Guild

Over the last decade I have grown along with the MMO industry, social interaction has evolved a great deal.

Back in the Pre WoW days guilds were groups of people who spent days huddled in spawn locations for great monsters who's spawn times were legend. And then a phone tree would go out and players who were offline, would start to appear ready to fight this monster that their guild mate was running in circles with while dozens of other players looked on all hoping he'd screw up and get killed so they could start running it in circles until their guild got there. Eventually the once every 10+ days monster would be killed and he would drop his super awesome item and some sort of predetermined outcome would happen. Maybe it was sold and the profits shared among the members who were present. Maybe it was given to a particular member for their service, and maybe some day in the future, if you helped enough, months from now you could have your very own once every 10 days monster loot.

Placating dozens of players who all want cool things takes an extreme degree of skill. I've been there, and I hate it.

As I grew into WoW I started to become involved in the guilds I was associated with. I always put in extra effort to make sure I was bringing everything I could to raids as a personal contribution. Buffs and gear, rep grinds and such. I played a lot, hours every day plus raid times. I was calm and well spoken in voice chat and outwardly reasonable when it came to loot distribution conflicts. This lead to promotions to Officer rank all the time, and ultimatly to my frustration and abandonment of the guild in the long run.


What most people don't tell you about running a guild is that it becomes the game. More than that, it becomes the only game, because the primary asset it takes to lead a guild is time. You can be a great leader, but if you aren't giving the game 40 hours a week your guild will fall apart. Of those 40 hours maybe you'll spend half of them raiding. That's the content you are interested in, that's why you are leading this guild. The other 20 hours, you'll be recruiting, dealing with member disputes, learning boss strategies, keeping up to date on server activities, game news and helping guild members get various tasks completed. Very rarely will you have the freedom to just find something fun to do in the game.


This is why I don't want to be involved in guild leadership anymore. I just want to play the game. I would like to Raid and tackle challenging content. But I also want to have the freedom to just log in for raids for a couple of weeks, or to just not log in at all for a month. And you can't do that if you run a guild, because it's nearly impossible to recover from it.


This is the situation I am in with my guild. It is run by friends, and we like to play together, but we are no longer interested in "leading." As life has, over the years, shuffled our schedules only 7 of us are remain consistently active, and it's a rare time when we can tackle challenging 5 man content. The nature of our overlap means that usually there are only 3 of us at a time, or there are 6 or 7. Almost always too few or too many


I gave it quite a bit of thought and I have determined the only real fix is for someone to get sick of doing nothing and find a new guild. The rest of us would follow. We need to find new leaders and step into the crowd of their team. I am not interested in doing that, as much as I don't want to lead, I am just as uninterested in being lead. But I do enjoy playing with my friends, so I will follow them if they move forward. I feel, though, that they are feel much the same as I do.

Maybe we all just got old.

I like Dailies

I am a player that actually enjoys daily quests. Most gaming pundits seem to wonder where the players are who these quests are designed for. Well here I am.

The most important part of dailies is that they are something that can be done every day by every player. It gives everyone a reason to log in every day. This is important for the broad community. It keeps populations stable and clumped so that they can intersect and feel like they are part of a community. This is also important for the small communities within the whole; guilds. Having a collection of daily quests to address each day gets me signed into the game, and into vent, and talking with my friends. We are bound by this common task and it opens the doors of communication. We start talking about dailies, and achievements, and then TV and other games, and news and local events. Also, they are entry level content, they aren't challenging, they offer players an opportunity to be powerful heroes, which I think is good emotionally.

So I like them. I also like running dungeons, working on challenge modes, or playing some of the games I bought in the Steam Summer Sale.

I haven't had an opportunity to do that for the last month since most of my gaming time (and a significant portion of the writing time) is soaked by the massive collection of dailies presented in World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria. It's really too much, when you add up all the crucial reputations it's about 40 quests every day. That doesn't count Cloud Serpents, Anglers or Nat Pagle. I feel like there are probably even more that I either don't know about or am forgetting. The system is not a good one.

There are a couple of ways this could have worked out better. The first would have been to use the Lesser Charms as a way to grant reputation. Have a weekly quest that costs X Lesser Charms and then rewards Y reputation in the amount that Blizzard wanted to limit the community to. The advantage here would be that after you finished the X dailies you could take a break, or store up some extras for the next week like you can for the Greater Charm quest. The disadvantage would be that there is a real risk that the servers kind of dwindle in population as the week goes on. On the other hand it could revitalize the community and allow more players to participate in all the great fringe activities we have in Mists. Pet Battles, and Challenge Modes and knocking people off their mounts with the turtle shell as they fly over the top of a mountain.

The other solution would have been to tie the gear to factions in a different way than they have. Instead of each reputation offering a certain item. Instead have every reputation offer every item, but with a unique look. Klaxxi armor, Golden Lotus Armor, August Celestial Armor and Shadow Pan Armor. Nothing crazy or over the top, but distinct. As pre-raid gear it shouldn't be the greatest in the game, but with Transmog as a feature there is no reason not to have a neat set of transition gear, people can choose to display it as a way of showing which faction they chose to focus their efforts to helping. Make it a real choice, you can only work on one rep at a time. You can do the other quests, but they don't generate rep, that way guild members can help each other out if they want, they still get gold and lesser charms, but no rep. Maybe block off those armor sets to only your first choice. Sure some people will want it all, but the more you offer limiting choices to players the more they will become distinct. And the less they will have to spend 3 hours running dailies every night for a month. God damn it I just want to play Assassin's Creed! The most epic thing I have had time to do is Perform a stunning aerial assassination on a Bunny Rabbit. Even in my single player action games....afkljfslad

The SWTOR Free to Play Model

...is insane.

Star Wars: The Old Republic has moved past being the game for me. Its initial design promised me a lot of things I was looking for in an MMORPG, more RPG less MMO. That is to say, a lot of story content and personal choice combined with the ability to run challenging content with my friends and guild. As the year has progressed the development process seemed to take a turn away from the type of game-play I was interested in.

That being said, I can still look objectively at this model and say, no...that's just nut-burgers.

The primary flaw in the structure of the F2P model seems to stem from the failure to recognize that the end game content provided was not keeping subscribers. The idea of giving away the 1-50 game in an effort to attract players who they would then block access to grindy end game content unless it was paid for seemed flawed from the beginning. Full details about their plan show a complete lack of touch with players and how they will respond.

In this sort of model certain things are expected. Limited inventory, limited Auction House access, limited character creation, limited character slots. Limited access to expanded content. All of these things seem in line. But then things start to get weird.

You can almost understand limited access to Chat, no access to Mail, no access to player trades, no access to the “who” command, as a way to limit tools that “Gold Farmers” would use to peddle their wares. But this has the negative effect of separating the free players from the community almost entirely, they won't become attached if they can't interact.

The limit on Credits is understandable for the same reason, but the limit set (250,000 for new free players and 350,000 for returning players) is so low that I don't think you can even purchase standard NPC sold features, like your final speeder training. Interacting and becoming part of the Player driven economy will be even more challenging. Considering certain rare cosmetic items can be found in random boxes purchased from the real money store are designed in a way that you can sell them to other players this is supposed to be a mechanic that allows players with cash to burn to have a path to extra Credits, but if the free players only have 250,000 it caps out the market.

The limit on Crew Skills seems arbitrary. (One for new F2P players, Two for returning players.) What benefit does limiting crew skills have. The inability to “queue” your crew seems fair enough. You'd think that you'd want to allow access to full Crew Skills. They generate materials that take up inventory space and credits that fill up a limited wallet. These would seem to logically drive sales.

Then things really get … well stupid.

Limited Travel options. Your quick travel is on a longer cool down. You can't use the fleet travel power. Sprint is a paid perk. If you die while questing you can only use your med droid 5 times before you have no choice but to return to a med center for your re-spawn.

Increased vendor costs for goods and services such as GTN use, repairs, and Talent Respecs, I think free players get less money from a vendor for trash items they want to sell. Free players also have to wait 3 days before selling an item they got from the Real Money store...which makes…huh? Someone will have to explain to me how that make sense or what purpose it serves.

Above level 10 free players earn 50% less experience points. I would have to play through the entire game to confirm my suspicion that this will make the 30-50 experience unplayable. I think you will run out of content And have to run Flashpoints and Warzones in order to catch up to the story content when you run out. And since you can only run 5 Warzones a week and 3 flashpoints this could prove difficult.

If with all these restrictions you still manage to somehow get your hands on a purple item you will not be able to equip it. You will need to purchase a license for your character to equip purple gear. A one time purchase at the moment, but how long until they introduce the next tier of gear as “epic” instead of “artifact” and then “legendary” or whatever that you have to keep buying licenses for.

Finally, the most ridiculous restriction is action bars. Originally limited to 1, recently amended to 2. This is a game known for its ability bloat. Depending on your class the 4 default action bars may not be enough for you, two most certainly will not be enough, you will run out of space by the time you are half way through the game. I have no idea why you would limit access to the UI. At this point I would not be surprised to see them charge for other elements of the game's engine. The UI customization feature. Maybe Shadows are set to Off for free players, or maybe they don't have access to the Hide Helmet toggle. Why not at this point!

Free players do not have access to SW:TOR 1-50, They have access to a shitty nearly unplayable version of SW:TOR 1-50.

The idea is that if these players see a game they enjoy they should pay for it. The problem is that they have this model already and it is hemorrhaging players and has been since January.

If you gut your game and make it unplayable the reasonable response from a player is not going to be “Oh, I should chip in 5 dollars to make this experience not terrible.” it will be “This game is terrible, I'm going to go play something else.”

I don't really have any advice for Bioware on this, They've spent a long time digging this hole, the only way out is down. My advice for people interested in seeing the individual class stories in SWTOR would be to check them out quickly, I do not expect there will be an opportunity to play them in another year's time.

Back Again

I had some pretty major stuff going on at work for the last couple of months. It looks like that's mostly behind us, which frees up a considerable amount of mental real estate for me. I hope this means I can get back to writing. For those of you who know me, when I say I have a dozen of something on my desk you will assume it is half empty cans of pop, and you'd be right. But for those of you who know me well, you would also guess half empty cans of pop, listen I said you were right, but there is something else! I have all these scraps of paper with notes and subjects I want to write about on them. Some of these are topical, some of them are time sensitive, others are timeless and broad reaching. I thought about how I wanted to tackle this. Since I don't exactly have a reader base at the moment I figured it would go completely unnoticed if I just filled in the two month hole in content with the things I planed on writing about. On further thought, though, I felt like that wasn't really worthwhile to paint that false reality. So I had to think about what I wanted to do with the time sensitive backlog, things like Impressions of 5.0 World of Warcraft prior to Mists of Pandaria's release. I still want to write about these things I feel that it's important to get on paper who I am and how I view the landscape of gaming. How will this impact new stories that need to be told? I think new time sensitive items must be given priority, otherwise I will just always be chasing the story and never get caught up. There are items I have that are not time sensitive, I can back burner these stories and write them in the future. I will not be back dating my opinions. When I write the stories I thought of writing two months ago they will include my current perspective on things. Here is the list of topics I plan to cover in the weeks to come. Expect content three times a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday followed by a Youtube post on Saturday that digs deeper into one of my news stories of the week.

Economies in Beta

Respect for other games

Guild Wars 2 Impressions: Dynamic Events

Guild Wars 2 Impressions: Dungeons

Guild Wars 2 Impressions: World Versus World

Guild Wars 2 Impressions: Structured PVP

SWTOR's Free To Play Model

World of Warcraft: Why do I enjoy dailies?

World of Warcraft: Monk impressions

World of Warcraft: Pandaria impressions

World of Warcraft: Mini games in MMO's

FTL: Faster Than Light Impressions

The Next Big Thing: Where will the MMO Market Move to Next

The MMO that would own my life

Wildstar Thoughts

Mechwarrior Tactics Vs Mechwarrior Online

World of Warcraft: Character Development

Ok, that seems like everything I have jotted down. I'm sure I'll find something else written on the bottom of one of my socks next time I do laundry. What!? When do you come up with great ideas? I will come back and cross these out as I generate the corresponding article. The youtube post is the part that scares me most. Frankly my spoken word is more interesting than my written, and I don't have to worry about spelling and grammar, yet it still feels more vulnerable. I really want to get on there and talk about SWTOR quest design though. One step at a time!

Right, it's Wednesday again.

So I had two solid collums to right two weeks ago and they remain unwritten, I have a review of World of Warcraft patch 5.0 but I haven't even finished installing it yet.

What can I say Guild Wars 2 is fun.

I have been up to some other stuff though, I want to get Twitch and Youtube content involved, and I've taken the piliminary steps towards that.

On a side note...no longer unique legacy names. Interesting. Feels like a server integration thing. Specifically for cross server PVP and PVE queue'ing. So the game doesn't freak out when two Prime Legacies end up on the same map.

I'll take a hard look at content this weekend and see if I can get on a more regular schedule. Also an editor.