On the Subject of Community Relations

Kelly Brook

The former Guild Wars "Community Relations Manager" Gaile Gray recently moved on to another position at A-Net after several years service. She was (and, I suppose, still is) regarded with some affection by the majority of GW players who had encountered her either in-game, or on one or another of the major fansite forums.
Although not by me. I always found her to be really quite condescending and always giving "I can't talk about that" answers whenever a subject of any importance arose. She didn't seem to really contribute anything of value, other than simply being a human face to the company. But as such some people regarded her as some sort of celebrity and were forever name-checking her in forum thread titles, "Gaile: please read my self-important thread and then reply to make me feel special and popular". "Gaile: I'm going to address this thread to you personally so that other people will be impressed and think I know you". "Gaile: I have some dumb suggestion, but if I address it to you personally then you'll ignore all the other thousands of dumb suggestions and pay special attention to mine and then you'll be impressed and we'll become friends and then A-Net will employ me as lead designer on GW2".
Community relations in games is a strange thing, especially in MMOs where there really is a community of players that are brought together within a single virtual game world. When I started playing Vanguard towards the end of the final beta I was actually quite impressed by the amount of open dialogue between the developers and the players. Of course the game was a piece of shit, but that's not the point. I even posted on a Vanguard fansite forum expressing my high opinions of these free and open discussions and my hopes that they might continue beyond the release of the game.
Funnily enough they didn't, and these impressive lines of communication were almost entirely severed, seemingly intentionally. As if some corporate arse-hat had decided that the developers are not supposed to mix with the lowly players. Maybe it was intended to protect the company for some sort of legal issues or some other tedious shit.
Of course Sigil had plenty of other things to worry about at the time, like an absentee lead designer, a game that had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and was a piece of shit that no one wanted to play, and the Sony vultures circling overhead.
But the lack of communication with the community is by no means unique to Vanguard. Sometimes it feels like the developers are smugly assuming that it is proper and correct and clever to take a hands-off approach where they leave the community to look after itself, as if their intervention would somehow compromise the natural order. Like when nature documentary film-makers don't interfere with wild animals killing each other.
They're wrong of course. What you end up with is a lot of people acting like smug, spoilt little cunts and making the game world a lot less pleasant place to spend time for reasonable, decent players. I know developers and publishers are terrified of upsetting their darling paying customers, but they really ought to think beyond the individuals to the game world as a whole. While devs often report having banned X-number of botting gold farming accounts, it's much more rare for them to address more personal issues of scamming, abuse or people simply acting like dicks. And even when individuals are targeted for more "serious" offenses such as hacking or duping they often get a slap on the wrist like a 24 hour account suspension.
I think developers should take a lot more responsibility for policing the behaviour of players and should be a lot more draconian when it comes to dishing out punishments. Players have long since reached the stage where they know nothing bad will happen if they scam someone, or abuse them. You only have to browse a typical MMO forum to see what smug, self-important fucks a lot of them are and the sneering, holier-than-thou, self-centered attitude they often have when it comes to other players. I've previously suggested that some players seem to be incapable of feeling like they've advanced unless they've been personally responsible for someone else failing. MMOs become an endless game of one-upmanship and competition, even in PvE when really someone else's progress has absolutely no impact on your own. Unfortunately those more balanced and higher-functioning players who are content to play their own game often find their progress interrupted or otherwise hindered by people kill-stealing or finding pleasure in some other activity that only serves to spoil the game for others.
And that's the problem - by leaving these little fucks to play their own "fuck up the game for everyone else"-game, hands-off developers are allowing the whole game to suffer. For every one player acting like a dick, many others might get sick of the developer's lack of intervention and start looking for something more fun to do. For every shit-head the developers ban, many more might be attracted to the game knowing that the increasingly common antisocial behaviour is being kept in check.
But it seams many developers are much too self-righteous and smug to worry about the little people who pay their subs and fund the developers' salaries. They continue to pretend that the hands-off approach is clever and intentional rather than simply lazy and stupid. The closest they come to mingling with the commoners is to hire someone like Gaile Gray to patronise people while refusing to tell them anything or do anything at all of any value. And the players lap it up, smugly boasting to each other about "that time Gaile answered my question in-game" or "I was right behind Gaile in the conga". If only they realised how worthless that was in the bigger picture.

On the Subject of The Future of MMOs

Misa Campo

The internet hype machine is starting to grind into gear in preparation for the (allegedly) forthcoming release of the supposed saviour of MMOs, Age of Conan.
Of course it won't save anything, and will be another by-numbers combination of mindless grind and cheap, lazy PvP designed to cater to some focus group's notion of the ideal MMO experience. With the added bonus of a no doubt clumsy, limited interface designed not to intimidate the poor little console kiddies.
Meanwhile the ambitious but ultimately tiresome pirate MMO "Pirates of the Burning Sea" has closed 7 out of it's 11 servers, just months after launch. Just like Vanguard did. Vanguard meanwhile continues to crawl along on it's bloodied knees, barely kept alive by a handful of hopeless idiots who refuse to let go and admit the game was a tragic disaster.
It seems to me that the glory days of MMOs are over. Developers and publishers should not fool themselves into thinking that their "next big thing" will ever achieve the astronomical success of WoW, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, while WoW had only limited competition during it's formative years, we're rapidly approaching the time when all those games that were spawned by companies desperate to cash in on it's success are reaching the final stages of development. Well, they would be if they didn't keep getting delayed. In any case it's not going to be a "WoW vs. EQ" competition like in the olden days, a competition WoW won by choosing to embrace a player-base beyond the tedious PnP D&D RPG purists that played EQ in between wanking over life-size statues of Brad McQuaid.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, a lot of people have played WoW. That might sound obvious but consider that those people have "been there, done that". The depressing trend of games like LotRO trying to lift WoW's design wholesale will only result in games which might emulate it's style, but fail to emulate it's success because all those millions of WoW veterans will actually want something new, not just a cheap knock-off of a game they've already played to death.
Personally, I've never played WoW. The toy-town style never appealed to me and at the time I was content to play subscription-free Guild Wars. But the same principle applies, to a lesser extent with GW's own sequel. I don't want GW2 to be GW1 + a minor facelift. I want it to be different. Keep the lore, I'm not bothered about that, but I can't stand the attitude of people who more or less demand that the sequel is just more of the same, preferably without having to sacrifice their achievements from the first game. Those are people who would, in that case, undoubtedly power through the content in a matter of days and then proclaim the game is too easy, too short, too boring. But heaven forbid they should actually have to start over along with everyone else. Surely they should get some sort of head start, some sort of advantage over newer players? No, they should not. Catering to those people will only hurt the game itself. Unfortunately I foresee A-Net being much too scared of offending the vocal minority of GW purists to introduce anything truly ground-breaking. Rather than keeping the veterans amused with new mechanics and challenges I would put money on them doing it with the sort of mindless grind that is all too common in MMOs, and has sadly become an insidious "feature" of GW1 in the form of titles.
AoC's approach to advancing the genre is mostly by virtue of it's "mature" themes and content. That could work out one of two ways. Either they'll find a clever balance where the more adult themes are kept in check and work with the wider themes and design of the game as CD Projeckt did so well in The Witcher, or, more likely given it's an American game, it'll be cheesy, gratuitous and disjointed and generally undermine the cohesion and immersion of the game world.
Conan's other gimmick, and as far as I can see it is just a gimmick, is some sort of "advanced" combat system. If they pull off a system that offers more than the "1,2,3,2,3,5,1" idiocy that is the mainstay of pretty much every MMO released to date then I will applaud them. On the other hand I foresee a very simplistic, clunky, console-tastic system like in Assassin's Creed. They've already admitted they've "streamlined" it, or in non-PR-speak "dumbed it down".
I think MMOs should stop trying to be the next WoW, and especially that they should stop trying to do that by simply copying WoW's design. Why not design an MMO that's essentially a single player game set in a multiplayer world? The obsession with grouping and ultimately raiding, with leveling as fast as possible to reach the endgame before the next person, with making more money than the next person, with having better armour, with grinding for more hours than the next person and pretending that that makes you "better" at the game than them, is tired and old. It's time for a radical shift in the whole philosophy of MMO design if we're ever going to progress to the Next Generation(tm). Vanguard was supposed to take us there, and failed spectacularly. Unfortunately that particular failure was not limited to Vanguard, as I suspect we'll discover over the coming months as the next crop of contenders appear, and no doubt they'll fail to to deliver anything inspirational or even remotely ground-breaking. People will get all excited about them, will play them heavily for a few months, and then realise it's just the same old MMO they've been grinding for the last decade and start looking for yet another alternative.

On the Subject of Prey (and Steam, and Jade Raymond)

Sophia Vergara

I picked up Prey on Steam for $5 the other week, on another one of the special weekend deals which also resulted in me grabbing Two Worlds. Except unlike TW, I actually played Prey.
I already knew it was quite short from all the forum chatter when it was originally released, although I have to say it was longer than I expected. That's the good thing about low expectations.
I thought it was ok. A bit same-y, with no real surprises and no really mind-bending puzzles once you get the hang of how spirit walking and gravity walkways work. Unsurprisingly the story was a bit shit. I don't know how whatshisname could be so infatuated with Jen, what with her bizarre elf ears. I'm trying to remember the end boss battle but I can't, even though I only beat it about a week ago, which says a lot.

Anyway definitely worth $5, but probably not much more. At least it ran well and looked ok (once I discovered that it doesn't like being run in "multi-monitor performance mode" or whatever it's called in the nvidia drivers).
Plus being on Steam means no stupid copy protection and needing the disc in the drive to play. Woohoo!

I've previously described Steam as having reached "critical mass" as a content delivery platform. Since then there's been quite a rush of new games being offered on the service, including a load of Epic games and a whole shit-load of Ubisoft stuff including Far Cry and also now Assassin's Creed (aka "Jade Raymond's Game") which naturally I picked up. Steam really does seem to have come of age, and is rapidly becoming a lot of people's first choice for buying new games, including mine. Now that Ubisoft's on board I assume we can expect Far Cry 2 to be on there when it appears.

Talking of Assassin's Creed, I'm not a big fan of padding posts with random youtube videos, but in this case I'll make an exception. Just how difficult did they have to make it to get out of that fucking game?



That's the thing about Jade Raymond, she's there to distract you from complaints about things like shitty interface design.

Here she is looking lovely.

Yes, Jade, Jade Raymond's Game Assassin's Creed is the best game EVER! Please take your top off.

Here she is looking lovely and giving a speech at a conference, the entire purpose of which was to teach players how to exit from Assassin's Creed.

'And then, it will say "Loading" again...'

Here she is looking lovely in an educational video on Gametrailers.com

'And then, you select "Exit Animus"...'

Here's Jade looking lovely and congratulating the winner of a competition to reward the first player ever to make it out of Assassin's Creed. Notice how even more petite and slim and lovely she looks next to the enormous gaming nerd. She almost manages to look relaxed and charming, rather than disgusted and irritated.

'Don't you touch me, fat boy'

Here's Jade looking lovely and showing an everso-subtle yet alluring hint of cleavage, and thereby eradicating all thoughts of AC's shit menu system.

That's it, baby, just a little bit more

Here's Jade looking lovely against an exotic view of the sea and palm trees. Imagine if that was a hotel where you and her were spending a romantic holiday together!

You're lovely, Jade. Please have my babies.

Here's a blurry picture, probably a frame grab from some video taken on someone's shitty phone. Jade Raymond looks lovely from all angles, in all lighting, even in low resolution.

Jade, Jade, lovely lovely Jade

Here's Jade looking lovely in a proper, professional promotional photograph.

How about a Jade vs. Lara bikini oil wrestling stage in the next Tomb Raider?

... aaaand right about now is the point where you've completely forgotten that Assassin's Creed even exists, let alone that is has a ludicrous menu system.

That's the magic of Jade Raymond.