No sooner have we received 1.0.6, and the plague of newbie tanks that has accompanied it, than 1.1 has hit the US test server.
Lets have a rummage through, and I’ll interject as we go.
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Yes, it is December once more, and as usual, Matt over at X-Entertainment has succeeded in making me feel nostalgic for the days I spent as a teenager in the US. The UK never really had a lot of video game advertising on the television, but in the US during kids TV, we were barraged with everything from Nintendo, to Atari, and then back to Nintendo again, because actually that’s pretty much all there was. Every game was presented as if it was the greatest creation ever conceived of, and to be honest they were often pretty cool. Twenty years on though, even I have to look at them and wonder what the heck we were thinking: “Ms Pac Man, don’t you know. Is more than just Pac Man with a bow.”. Which was good, because I don’t think the video-game world was ready back then for it’s first transvestite hero. Holy crap! It’s Mr Hooper from Sesame Street! You can trust Mr Hooper to not be selling you a lemon. Mr Hooper would never lie to us. My favourite moment is when the annoying small child says “Those are supposed to be ghosts.” Even she knew that they just looked like coloured blobs on the horrible Atari 2600 version. As I’ve mentioned here before, in the 80’s, if something were even slightly popular with kids, there would eventually be a breakfast cereal made of it: So, a few days ago, the folks of Makaisson began their journey to Burlok. We now have many of our guilds rebuilt, and are slowly regaining our sense of place. It has been strange to see so many people online at once, and being able to get into scenarios for the first time in a month has been a pleasant change for me. But things are far from perfect, and in many ways I am missing Makaisson. Myself, I have been suffering from a sort of culture-shock. Gone is the idea that the Order faction should work together, and play nicely. Burlok seems to be a hive of ninja-looting, and other anti-social activities. People routinely abuse eachother. And I’m not talking about the faceless unguilded, but members of supposedly the leading guilds. So far I have had cause to contact five different guildmasters over their member’s ninjalooting antics. A couple have reacted in the way I would hope, and I thank them for that. The others have acted as if I was the source of the problem, or at best an inconvenient timesink. Yesterday, for example, we were in a warband fighting the forces of destruction in High Pass. The Devastator Steadcaps (a very rare drop needed for the t3 RvR armour set) for the Ironbreaker class dropped, and three people “needed them”. Two Ironbreakers and a Shadow Warrior, and the Shadow Warrior won. I pointed this out in the warband chat, and the Shadow Warrior immediately logged off. Now so far this is fairly normal. Any game has players who take advantage of others. What upset me is what came next. The Shadow Warrior was in one of Burlok’s larger guilds so I contacted another member to try to get in touch with his leader. Meanwhile, his guildmate in the warband started attacking me. “Osgard stop crying! It’s just a pixel!” Aye indeed, pixels that his guildmate thought were worth stealing. BTW, saying that something shouldn’t matter because it’s a pixel is a bloody stupid argument in an MMORPG. On Makaisson, a ninja-looter would have been roundly condemned by the whole band, but on Burlok his guildmates were prepared to defend his behaviour. And almost everyone else in the warband stayed quiet. The guild leader I spoke to seemed rather more interested in making me go away than looking after the reputation of his guild. After I had asked him to make sure the boots were given to the right person, he stopped responding to any further communication. Eventually the Shadow Warrior stated that his guild had decided they did not need the Devastator boots (Do they have a standing order to ninja all Devastator gear, I wonder?), and he would give them up. Seeing a thief trying to characterise being forced to return his spoils as generosity is always somewhat sickening. The highest rolling Ironbreaker was finally given the boots, and thanked me for my efforts, so it ended correctly, at least. I have screenshots and names, but that’s not what this is about. There is little to be gained in trying to shame the shameless. I’m used to viewing members of Order all as part of one big team, and it has been a shock to my system to see people willing to openly defend ninja-needing, and outright disrespect of the rest of the faction. If it’s like that on an RP server, I shudder to think what things must be like elsewhere. I won’t stop calling people out for it, even if it does mean that certain guilds despise me. They don’t have the right to steal from the rest of us, no matter how elite they think their guilds are. Do they really care so little for their reputations? Many of the Makaissonians I know are pining for home. I had, until recently, been opposed to creating a Makaisson guild alliance, as I had felt it would be better for us to integrate into our new server. Now I am beginning to feel that we might be better off banding together for our own safety and sanity. Almost everything I’m not enjoying about WAR at the moment is a result of player behaviour, rather than anything wrong with the game itself. Perhaps I’m getting old, and I’m too out of touch with how people think these days to carry on playing MMO. Maybe I just need to find more nice people on Burlok so I can avoid ending up in PUGs with thieving scoundrels and their enablers. The Warhammer Vault has an front page column titled “Kid kills family because he is unable to dye cloak, Warhammer to blame”. That title has been appearing on feeds around the internet, which is where I saw it, and followed the link to find out what sort of tragedy had occurred.. In case you’re wondering it is just a rant piece about not being able to dye certain items. The child killing his family is just a shock tactic designed to get people to bother to read such drivel. The possibility that it might cause bad publicity for Warhammer, the Vault, or our hobby in general does not seem to have been considered. As the title of the piece has appeared on every site that has an RSS feed from the Vault (For instance), it will have been seen by thousands. Many of these will not have clicked through to find it was simply a rant with a lack of taste. They will have taken away the belief that someone did harm their family as a result of playing the game, and that could affect parents willingness to allow their children to play. Do we really need to put fuel on the anti-gaming fire? I sure hope the large number of extra clicks that this shock-jock style posting generates is worth giving up the pretence that the big gaming sites are any classier than the rest of the blogosphere. The columnist, White-Orb, said:
If it had been written on some little backwater blog (such as this one) nobody would have noticed or cared. Instead it appeared as primary content on an IGN website. Different rules apply, if only because IGN has actual relationships with advertisers and game companies to consider. The Vault staff are backing White-Orb to the hilt, which I approve of on one level. Unfortunately, they too are suggesting that critics lack a sense of humour. As so often, they are not sorry about what was said, but that our reaction was incorrect. It is not the writer I take issue with, in any case. He should be allowed to write whatever nonsense he likes. However, whoever has editorial control over there, and chose to publish him on the massive IGN platform, has extremely questionable judgement. And if I were Mythic, I would be writing a very strong letter to IGN about making untrue statements about Warhammer. Once again, I suspect I’ve just demonstrated how horribly old-fashioned I am. I just can’t bring myself to consider family-killing to be an appropriate source of humour. Update: Looks like the column has been renamed, and the IGN forum thread relating to it that contained all the defiant writer and staff responses has been scrubbed. Good thing I took screenshots, really. It was with a certain amount of surprise that I saw Lord British (AKA General British, AKA Richard Garriott), had quit NCsoft last week.
Like many, I wondered what revelation Garriott could have had, that would lead to him walking away from his latest creation, so soon after its release. I had been hoping that peaceful space-beings had entrusted him with the secrets that would bring about a green energy revolution (perhaps given in trade for Stephen Colbert’s DNA), but it turns out he just got the can because his game failed. Nice of them to wait a week after his letter before announcing this:
What I do not understand, is that NCSoft are not a single game company, and so far as I know they are not short of cash. Why do they need to shut down Tabula Rasa completely? Could they not just transfer everyone onto one or two servers, and let them chug along, without updates, for those who still wanted to play? They are giving all Tabula Rasa players with active accounts the following compensation: * 3 free months of City of Heroes including digital client That is pretty decent in the general scheme of things. I’m not suggesting at all that NCSoft are being unfair, and in fact I think their compensation sets a fantastic example to other companies. Actually it would have been worth reactivating your account just to get all those goodies, if they hadn’t foreseen and closed that loophole! I just think it’s odd that they’re shutting Tabula Rasa down so completely, when it is obvious that there are still people who want to play it in it’s current state. I guess, even now, we’re not used to MMOs shutting down. Once they get through the difficult bit of getting released, they tend to linger on forever (Well, apart from Asheron’s Call II). As the market gets ever more cluttered, closures are going to become a whole lot more frequent. It occurs to me that the occasional complete failure might actually be good for the industry, if it discourages people from rushing incomplete games into the market. |
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