Community: You're Doing It Wrong

My father once told me, if I have nothing to say, I should not bother saying anything at all. However, this is also the same person who told me to go play in traffic, so I've since decided that his wisdom is as practical as shoving a fork into an electrical outlet. However I suppose I will make a disclaimer in saying the following words are composed of not-nice things, to which some may call, "mean".

You see dear reader, both you and I are online gamers. As such, we have the inherent good nature of being connected to each other via this online community. This is something that MMOs especially have as one of their major positives. By being part of an MMO, you become inexplicably connected to your community. You connect with the people on the forums, you connect with the people in your guild, the guilds have their coalitions, and you've developed a connection tolerance to the people who never shut up in global or zone chat. Its really quite charming, don't you think?

It seems only natural that other game companies have been green with envy as they wished they had such a heavily layered community that tries to get so intimately involved with them. Tell me, when was the last time you heard of the players who all partied together as they hopped on with EA and asked about their next MADDEN game? If you can tell me, I'd actually rather you didn't, and I would encourage you to realize you are the minority, and to note that I hate you. I also request you take your keyboard, put it down, and step upon it until the keys stop working.

Obviously game journalists try to talk to developers, it's part of their job and its something they are very passionate about. But for the most part MMOs and a few exceptions rarely have such strong bonds. This is especially the case where the games are single player. Honestly, how much interaction do you expect to milk out of people playing Assassin's Creed? And the developers are catching onto the answer: Not much.We are seeing this evidenced primarily by Bioware (And their infamous DLC fueled by Bioware Points , Bungie with their Halo Waypoint, and most recenty Ubisoft pushing forward U Play. With the exception of Bungie, I would say this, "You're doing it wrong."

Now am I not against progress (Or whatever you want to call it,) fostering brand awareness/loyalty is not a crime, and I could not stop it anymore than I could stop the sun from setting or the wind from blowing, or from Cold Play making the same album over, and over (Yes. That's my one music joke for the year).

But that doesn't mean I can't point out the flaws in their methodology. The first obvious problem, would be the flawed attempts at advertising, which essentially equates to the fact that there aren't enough. Never while playing Assassins Creed 2 did I learn of "U Play", instead I was only perplexed by the occasional "U" that popped up on my screen. I then shrugged, assuming it had something to do with one of my achievements, and moved along. Meanwhile, BioWare took a step in the right direction by essentially handing you a free piece of content, to whet (Yes, there is an "H' in this case) but ultimately falls short in the actual page execution where they insist on letting you buy more than you can actually use. From a design perspective it makes sense to have there ahead of time as a placeholder; someone might even buy more than they need ahead of time! To this, I present an image to illustrate their understanding of PR:

To all, with the exception of the extremely thick, letting you buy more than you can do anything with makes you look bad. Even if you are money grubbing, you're not supposed to tell me up front. Most importantly, it makes you look like you're not sure what you're doing. Both Bioware and Ubisoft try to push out these new ideas with only one game to back it up; it's agonizingly obvious their testing it out instead of taking a confident move forwards. Perhaps I sympathize too much with typically Asian business ideologies, but implementing an idea with only one thing backing it is horribly uninspiring. Like the 3D Vision technology Nvidia is trying to push over and over. Sure, some people want to be on top, but who wants to buy into a technology no one is really using right now? I don't care how you want to approach it, but I would recommend a stronger show of confidence in a project. One method would be to spearhead it with one new game while seeding in retro-active content for earlier games, though this may be a bit of work logistically speaking. On the other hand, designing games with this in mind sounds far more plausible; Assassins Creed 2 has it, and the latest Splinter Cell will no doubt have it as well, couldn't you wait for both to come out first to make a better impression?

Come on guys, let's shape up.
/Rant

The Multiverse

Yea, sounds catchy doesn't it? There's not a lot to say in this post, and so if you wish to supplement your reading I would recommend looking at the nutrition facts label on a candy wrapper or the first thing you see that has one. More than likely, you'll learn more from that than you would from the average post of mine.

Moving along, another MMO-themed podcast has debuted, and I happen to be the obnoxious whipper snapper on the show. Not only that, but we have Ferrel from Epic Slant playing the part of the jaded and angry player, along with Chris from Game By Night, who plays himself, and hosts this mess that we share over at Vagary. I highly recommend both of my co-hosts for extra reading. In fact, remove the nutrition label suggestion and throw those guys in as the supplementary reading. You may notice they are also referenced on the blog roll to your right.

So go check it out here. Or I'll cry. It's not a pretty picture. It's actually quite horrifying once my tears turn into acid and start to melt the internet.

I need to go get a tissue...

Blogging Idols: What makes YOU special?

This is a logo of a B, not an 8. Idiot.

Greetings once more bloggers, casual readers, aficionados and obsessive fans! Doing like I do, I've picked yet another of the more self-aware topics in the MMO-Blogosphere. Of course, you could say that there are far too many blogging circles, friends, and networks for it to be something so simple as a sphere, and so I encourage you to imagine it as a dodecahedron instead. I'll give you a bit to go and Google what a dodecahedron is (because apparently, I put in too many links.)

Done looking it up? Okay. I understand, it takes a bit.

........

Got it? Gooooood.

So let's get started shall we?

We shall. Although I'm sure not all of you do, I'm also quite certain that plenty of you read the blogs of others, yes? It's just something we do. If we like blogging news, it's only natural to find similar thoughts or comforts with other vocal members of the community. Some are personal friends of ours, some have the talents (or money) for their own personal domain. Others happen to run free Blogger or WordPress accounts, in fact I've gone over this once before if you look through my previous entries. Pay no mind to that though, but focus on the idea that there are well known bloggers using all of the aforementioned sources. Sure, they may find the casual reader because of their origins, but they have ultimately drawn attention for other reasons. In my earlier mentions, I had been rather vague, so let's shine the spotlight onto some people and take some analysis into the writing styles the others present to us.

Let's start with someone I'm sure a lot of my MMOVoices readers are familiar with; Beau Turkey. In the MMO world, we could think of this fellow as part of a "celebrity pairing" as he has had the excellent fortune of being with his podcasting wife Leala Turkey. Both had their own respective audiences, and both very...well, varied I suppose. Eventually, like transforming robots, they came together in epic proportions and created Spouse Aggro, fusing their audiences together and ultimately drawing on a new one, like creating an epic hybrid animal, only far less exciting once you realize you're just thinking of a few different kinds of people, instead of a giant transforming robot or fire breathing godzilla rip off. In the end, what the Turkeys now provide is the most natural form of blogging, which really consists of just sitting and talking about what's on their mind. With this sort of Average Joe approach to things, it's a nice change of pace from the typical overly passionate rage or spewing cynicism. They don't really start talking about what's right or wrong...they just talk. As a final note, they have spanned the most mediums, having their own personal domain for blogs, a Ning network, countless podcasts, and their now more frequent videocasts, or as Beau calls them, "Vodcasts" (I admit, it does sound catchy.)

On the other end of the fence of not really doing a whole lot, we have Tobold. Tobold is probably the most reclusive of the bloggers that I'm aware of, but countless people recognize this name. To my knowledge, he has never appeared on a podcast, doesn't really advertise, and keeps almost entirely to himself, he doesn't need to cross post his blogs to get attention. Why this that? His writing seems to match the personality that he shows; No nonsense. There is very little catching up on his personal life or discussion, and what he presents, is typically presented as fact. Unlike myself, there is no round-about speech or beating around the bush, it's always to the point and has a seemingly deliberate confidence without any emotions leaking out, and he's had plenty of time to hone it. For six years he has been an automatic machine pushing out food for thought. Being around that long makes it very hard to disregard what he says entirely. Again, with his no-nonsense approach, he does not have any flashy site tools or an impressive domain, it's just a straight up blogger domain with his internet alias as the web address.

It's not often that there's a third side to the fence. Physically speaking, there's actually four sides, but they are far too narrow for many people to consider them. For the sake of maintaining the analogy where we stick to the important sides of the fence, let's assume that in this imaginary blogger town, Tobold is in the middle, with Beau Turkey on the left, and the third blogger on the right. So it's the other side of the other fence...Don't spend too long trying to make it work in your head though.

The more important question that should be on your mind (Unless of course you already know, in which case, congratulations!) is, "Who could the third blogger be?" For those who know me, the obvious answer is Syncaine! Because I can not say one without saying the other, very much like Yin and Yang, day and night, etc, etc... Now, it's very possible that what I say can be taken the wrong way, especially for the analogy that I'm using to compare these two, which could very easily be interpreted as offensive. As such, I will clarify at the moment I mean absolutely no harm, and that exaggeration is used to help demonstrate differences between the two. That said, let's move along.

Syncaine refers to himself as the Hardcore Casual blogger, and it seems to fit what he wants. He does not take an absurdly outrageous opinion on things like the stereotypical Hardcore Gamer who wants everything to go back to the days of EQ where you have to force a conversation with NPCs and wait for a couple hours to get on a boat. However from what I have seen, he expresses a stronger degree of passion towards concepts and interests akin to that of "Hardcore" individuals (I mean, really. He likes DarkFall). While this isn't to say he doesn't use facts or is reckless, his passion (at least, to me) is his truth, as opposed to Tobold's truth, which is conveyed by a serious lack thereof. Hammering point after point, Syncaine is fueled by a brilliantly burning fire of a veteran attitude. It resonates well with the jaded concepts of many a blogger or podcaster who have emerged onto the scene to express their thoughts. His time spent is a fair two years of experience, equivalently a third of Tobolds. Of the web design, his approach is the medium of Beau's and Tobold's, as he utilizes his WordPress account with a small ad with a blog roll and some other useful, but simple, features.

So, there's three of the greats (If I didn't list you, and you think you should be up there, sorry. This post is long-winded as it is,) whom I think are good representatives of the three archetypes that I see as the pinnacles of MMO blogging. With all that said, what's your style? Do you intend to try and follow the foot-steps of one of these three, a hybrid, or are you some strange new blogger of your own, who blogs entirely in Sanskrit and Iambic Pentameter?

So come on, let's hear it.

Fit the Part: Feeling like a Hero

Now, it is a rare occasion indeed where I feel so compelled as to let people know what I'm doing in terms of gaming. Because to be quite honest, I doubt any of you care. More often than not, I don't even care what everyone else is playing. Tobold might be finding the time of his life playing Hello Kitty Online, but it doesn't mean a lot to me. Syncaine is playing Darkfall? Congratulations. Unless you are doing something so amazingly out of this world that you're actually not even playing an MMO, but are instead locked into the Cyberspace of the internet because you tried to shove a fork into a USB port, I'm probably not interested. Rather, I am reading to hear your theories and thoughts, hopefully something profound. Perhaps it is a bit hypocritical of me to say, since very rarely do I say anything concrete, but I do like to believe that there is something we are trying to convey to people. Using your blog as just a form of twitter without a word count isn't really all that great. Drop it.

Unless you actually have something you want to say about the game's mechanics or style, let's try to keep it real. "I'm having fun" doesn't help me at all. My sister is still probably having fun playing Web Kinz but I'll be damned if I think that her having fun on it will equate to me enjoying myself on it. Some men may enjoy wearing high heels or other women's clothing, but again, that doesn't mean I want to go and do it. Why are you having fun?

Surprise surprise, this does relate to what I was previously saying. As I recall, I do believe Ethec over at Ten Ton Hammer did a post about feeling cool in an MMO (Though, from the sheer length of the newsletter he may very well have a post about everything in existence). In particular, he said he felt cool grinding in Aion. Now, this had very little relevance to me at the time, because even as an Aion player I never felt particularly special during the grind. In the end its still a grind to me. That said though, I must speak of something far different, for recently I began to look at Champions Online. From the things I heard, I went into the game with a very heavy heart. However, I was amazingly surprised to find that all the words of mediocrity washed away to become instant moments of glee as I finished using Cryptic's famous character creator, and popped into the game. Never mind the impressive graphics, but I was amazed at how I just felt a degree of joy that seemed to stomp all over my experience in Aion. And when I became aware of this, I became horribly frustrated.

Was this just the new rush that I felt from playing a new game, why did I enjoy this compared to another game? The cutscenes perhaps? No, they were few and far between. The cheesy voice-acting? Certainly not. And I pounded away as I looked at the game. Perhaps I really enjoyed making a superhero. I did enjoy City of Heroes a fair bit after all, and that did seem to be a logical similarity, and became my conclusion, though I felt sorely unsatisfied with my answer. Only when I looked at the tag of a simple gray enemy as I passed through the tutorial area that suddenly Ethec's article came to mind that I was able to piece two and two together. And what was the tag of the simple gray enemy you might ask? It only said, "Henchman". But the concept worked all too perfectly as I pondered on it further. One thing that Cryptic had mastered so perfectly was capturing the feeling of being a hero. The costumes and graphics helped a lot, and the combat was good enough, but I had for ages failed to consider the importance of the categories of enemies. So many games have us fight creatures one at a time, sometimes two, maybe three, unless you are an AOE fighter.

In both the "City Of" Games, as well as Champions, we would fight countless henchmen before meeting the boss. But we would fight these creatures in packs. The base concept of many an Online Role Playing Game of Massively Multiplayer origins involved you fighting one enemy at a time. When has it ever been okay to pull in a Raid? Never, to my knowledge. There is a very precise limit to how many enemies you could fight on par at your level. In both the hero games though, you can take down countless weak henchman on your own, and only does it become a one on one fight as you take on the apparently equal supervillain (Or hero) that stood in your way. By the end of that, I truly felt like a hero, a step above the rest. It may be mostly psychological, but Cryptic struck a gold concept that needn't remain just in the Super Hero genre. This was briefly touched upon by the early Tabula Rasa until the developers felt that players were burning through enemies too quickly, which would ultimately make content too easy to progress through.

Conclusion: More fodder to make me feel special, thanks!

Land as far as the eye can Sea

Hey guys. You wanna chat? If yes, you probably should go talk to someone, because these paragraphs, although they say a lot, never let you get a word in edgewise (In other news, I'm still not that funny.)

Poor humor aside, I'm willing to bet money that if you read this blog you also probably know that Dark Fall is releasing its expansion soon. While I applaud them for working on this game so diligently, I'm most interested about the fact that Aventurine is actually letting people sail the seas of Agon. Like it or hate it, you have to at least give Darkfall credit for staying so true to itself. Although I've played the game and know that it isn't quite my thing, every time I see an update on it I feel like there is a crowd of the "cool" people cackling about the fact they're in the cool game while I go around flapping wings and fighting crime.

Back to the sea though, I must say that water and I don't get along much anymore. Sure, I drink plenty myself, but after falling asleep in the shower enough, suffering from sea-sickness for nearly every-boat ride I have ever been on, I have learned to be quite wary of it. Quite honestly, I wish I had straight rocker hair like Beau, because I have to completely soak my hair when I get out of bed so that it doesn't come out as some surreal mohawk.

Imagine it like this, only worse.

But yea. I hate water. Despite that, I always feel especially fascinated by it, and I was remarkably disappointed when Pirates of the Burning Sea flopped. In the end, I was underwhelmed by the execution, though I was glad they gave it a try. Never the less, that hardly means my desire to see sea-faring was satiated. I distinctly remember feeling somewhat entertained waiting for the boats during my brief sojourn in WoW. And always I enjoyed get aboard that boat and searching the few rooms in it, and watching the boat go across the water, which would ultimately transfer into a boring loading screen. I almost wished that it just hid the loading screen with just a longer wait aboard the boat. I'm not even saying I want to be captain aboard a bout. More than likely I'd be horrible sailor because I was too busy throwing up overboard.

While I'm not going to pound on the devs for not thinking of this or declaring this to be a must in the next MMO, but why don't we even use boats as a setting anymore? In the same way people wanted to walk aboard their starships in SWG, and plenty more clamor and beg still to explore more of the ship space in Star Trek Online. Even DDO, with so many instances, nearly all of them are just going through large land masses or dungeons of some kinds. Of all these IPs, and some as vicious as they are, I somewhat doubt that the only thing the ocean is good for, is to be a convenient excuse for a loading screen.

Are there any sort of settings you'd like to see presented more often in your game?

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I Push My Fingers Into My Eyes

And to be quite honest, I'm probably not going to do it again, because that really hurt (Sorry to those expecting emo poetry. Both of you.) Although this isn't emo poetry, I must say I've been quite depressed seeing how Funcom (unsurprisingly) is not doing well this Quarter. Not only that, but powerhouse EA needed to (once again) lay people off, including 40% of the WAR team, though many people suspected due to a precursor; Mythic making Tier 1 an unlimited free trial.

To those of you who see this as a good thing (which it is, for consumers), I would like to note that this is far more solemn note compared to DDO creating a Free to Play option. While that was an expansion that added new revenue method for the game, this scenario is an act of desperation on Mythic's part. WAR isn't as modular as DDO, and isn't selling adventure packs or items, it wasn't designed in nearly as convenientl a fashion as it was for Turbine or the original game to try it: Guild Wars. While the companies currently try to draw the silver lining around the cloud, the cloud itself becomes all the more apparent, as NCsoft go about parading Aion for exceeding the one million box sale mark, yet still remaining hush hush about their actual subscription numbers.

These problems no doubt only place more pressure on Christmas sales, which people have already been leery of due to harsh economic times. With more people still going out unemployed, and Thanksgiving just around the corner in America, you have to squint really hard to see what there is to be thankful for. (I spent 20 minutes blinking and I think I see it. That, or I now have pink eye.)

The Mainstream Identity

I was listening to the Van Hemlock podcast yesterday, and while I'm sure there's plenty to said about those guys, that is not my goal for today. Rather, I would like to hyper-focus on a quote that initiated a thought, which ultimately became the blog you are reading (If it's not the post you're reading then...well...I don't know. I guess the first thing that comes to mind is, "How?").

Now, this has no doubt been brought up many times before, and I'm fairly certain, qualified as Jon Shute may be, he was most likely not the person to first mention how the barrage of releases we are seeing are affecting the actual Online Gamer population. Simply put, aside from World of Warcraft, MMOs have been more or less cycling through the same number of people. Massive a population we are, there are still only a finite number of humans, and so naturally there are only a certain number of MMO players. The most well known example of multiple MMOs strangling each other would no doubt be the rivalry that had existed between the Age of Conan and WAR as the two yelled and screamed at each other through the gaming dimensions over who had the grittier game, the better PVP, better IP, larger shoe size...wait...where was I again? Oh yes. Suffice to say, when AoC first came out, there was a dip in the number of WoW players, and AoC swelled. Eventually people flocked out of AoC back to WoW, and when WAR came, again, some people left Conan and Azeroth to visit WAR. Again, some stay, but plenty more were just tourists, who went back to their "Home" game.

The popular term is that these games are just cannibalizing the MMO market without bringing in new players.

The "real" face of the MMO Companies

This again, has been applied to many things. There are of course some factors that net a small number of new players (Intellectual Properties, the people who are playing AoC or Lord of the Rings just because they are Tolkien or Howard fans). But these are tiny details that come across as specks in the big picture. Ever since World of Warcraft came out, these games have picked at the more adventurous spirits who just discovered these new and amazing Massively Multiplayer Online Games. This seems to be the cardinal sin that people will always bring up, but I now ask, "So what?" At some point, you really can't push the numbers, certain interests will attract certain people, and you can make it more accessible, but that doesn't mean you can make everyone like something. MMOs didn't go and become mainstream. World of Warcraft just happens to be a mainstream MMO. A genre is not mainstream when a subsect is. You could say Halo is a mainstream FPS, but that doesn't mean the FPS genre is main stream. What does main stream even mean? To me, it essentially equates to a house hold name. If you say Halo, someone will recognize it. If you say World of Warcraft, someone will recognize it. It is big enough to be a phenomenon, and that is what makes it main stream. Your grandmother probably doesn't play either, but she'll nod her head thinking, "So that's what the kids are doing these days."

So, when we have all these demographics playing something, (Have you seen all the kinds of people and guilds there are in WoW?) we find niches. At a certain point though, if we somehow expand so much more, they become their own sub-groups that the other players don't jive with. That's practically the point of guilds, to gather like-minded folks. Guilds for raiding, PVP, PVE, RP, etc etc. In the end, we're only going to play with so many. And so you can say fine, that you think WAR and AoC are choking each other, and we're all just acne on the back of Blizzard, but I'm really not losing any tears only being with Super Hero fans while I'm in Champions Online. No hard feelings to the happy grand father playing the wii, the young girl playing peggle, but we probably wouldn't be best of buds, because in the end we are on differing spheres of the gaming interest. I could go on and on with more examples and justifications, but I'm long winded as it is. Just give these fledgling MMOs a break, they have enough trouble as it is.