The Field Marshal's Guide to Forum Posting

Jelena Jensen

Some people obviously require some assistance when it comes to the very basics of online conversation. Perhaps they should spend less time fucking about grinding MMOs and, oh I don't know, go to school.
But I'm nothing if not generous, and so to give you a gentle shove in the right direction, and so that I don't have to come back later and kick your illiterate teeth in, here are some very simple guidelines to get you started and hopefully prevent you turning into yet another MMO forum twat.

1. Try READING a post before replying to it. All too often people reply to a title or opening sentence of a post and miss the entire point the original poster was trying to make. Don't respond to what the OP might have meant, but in all likelihood didn't mean. Don't assume you can predict every argument the OP will make just because it's a subject about which you're particularly passionate, or because you've been playing longer than them. Don't argue a point the OP didn't even make, or a point on which you actually agree if only you'd bothered to read their post in the first place.

1a. If you fail point 1 and someone calls you on it, do NOT attempt to justify your original reply by claiming the original poster obviously "meant something different" or that somehow you were actually correct, and begin a tiresome, thread-jacking argument just because you can't cope with being wrong. Shut the FUCK up and move on.

2. Do NOT begin a reply with "Uh,". That's shorthand for "I want to give the impression that I'm at least considering your point of view, but really I'm much more experienced and skilful than you, and I probably didn't even read beyond the first line or title of your post because that's all I need to know and now here comes my ill-conceived and probably entirely inappropriate, contradictory response".

3a. It's "couldn't care less", NOT "could care less". Fucking stop and think about what you're actually typing for one motherfucking second. If you do not care at all about something, you could NOT care less. If you COULD care less, you obviously care about it.
This one is becoming so common that people will even use that in itself as an excuse for using it. As if "could care less" is a sort of clever, louche variation that is doubly ironic. It's not, you're just a fucking idiot.

3b. It's rIdiculous, not rEdiculous, moron.

4. When someone posts a thread complaining about the difficulty of some in-game encounter, do NOT simply reply with some variation of "I did it easily" or "I did it first time". No one gives a shit about how good you are at a game, so stop looking for excuses to boast about it and try actually offering some helpful advice. Assuming you have any, and you probably don't. The fact is, there are some some games which can be beaten easily if you happen to get lucky, but can also be nigh-on impossible if luck is against you. Simply claiming "it's easy" is fucking ignorant.

5. If you've got nothing useful to add to a discussion, shut the fuck up. No one actually cares about your opinion specifically. No one's sitting at their computer thinking "oh, I do hope <insert your name here> posts in this thread". Your post is not some sort of definitive point of view that will render any further discussion unnecessary. You're not some sort of forum celebrity.

6. Polls should only be conducted by forum staff. Random yahoos conducting forum polls is like those fucking idiots in Guild Wars who announce "DANCE PARTY! EVERYONE COME HERE!!1!1!!", the ones who want to be seen as "popular" and "fun" and "wacky" but end up looking like fucking twats.

7. "Search is your friend" or "the answer's here: http://www.google.com" or any other version of "try searching" are not clever, crushing put-downs or witty responses to a question, no matter how frequently-asked it may be. They're not only arrogant but also stupid and short-sighted. Consider that in the future someone might be directed to the thread as a result of the very same search that you're advocating.
"Use Google"? I did, you fucking twat, that's how I got here.

8a. Do NOT quote an epic OP in full and then add a single-line reply. And doubly so if your reply is something fucking worthless like "+1" or "this".

8b. Do NOT quote some OP and then insert your ever-so-clever counterpoints within the quote itself, especially not when your additions are barely differentiable from the original text.

8c. Do NOT quote a post, and then alter the post, and then claim you "fixed it" for the OP you arrogant, lazy, self-righteous cunt.

9. Do NOT sign your posts. I fucking hate that. Not only is your forum user name visible for all to see at the top left (usually) of the post, but most forums also have a "signature" facility for all the shit taglines and hilarious quotes that you think will amuse everyone and make you popular. I know you probably think your forum user name is incredibly clever and original, and that you secretly want people to ask you about it so you can go into all the tedious details of how you chose it, probably including a list of the MMOs you've played under that name and how other people "probably remember you" from those games because you were such a popular, skilful player. The fact is no one cares, so shut the fuck up and stop adding your name to every single fucking post.

10. The "straw man" defense is a pretentious and lazy way of admitting that you are unable to refute a given argument. It is also increasingly common to see it being used by people who don't actually understand what it means.

11. I fucking hate the increasingly-common, probably American use of "addicting". AddictIVE games are addictIVE. Similarly, "looks can be DECEPTIVE", not fucking "deceiving". And I don't give a fuck if you can find some website that says I'm wrong, because I'm not.

12. Don't ever quote a "hilarious" captcha (where available) at the end of your post. It's just some random gibberish, it's not clever or amusing to anyone but you, you vacuous fucking retard. No one else cares at all.

More to come, as soon as I think of them.

On the Subject of Forum Idiots

"Eve Wyrwal"*

I made the mistake of browsing a notoriously fractious Vanguard community forum, and now I'm seething with righteous indignation, not to mention enormous disdain for all the fucking shit-for-brains morons out there who really shouldn't even be allowed to play MMOs.
Fortunately that's why this blog exists, and this post will briefly cover a few of the more commonly contested features of past and present MMOs. I am right, everyone who disagrees is wrong. It really is that simple.

On the subject of EverQuest
If you took the golden age of EQ and launched it now, how long would it last? Naturally the fanboys and hardcore purists would have you believe it would still be the revolutionary gaming experience it was "back in the day". Fuck off, would it. The truth is the majority of players only ever put up with the more shitty and ill-conceived mechanics because there was literally no alternative at the time. Let's not forget EQ was the first 3D MMO, or at least the first to have any significant impact (before someone comes up with a predictable "uh, actually *insert unknown game that only three people ever played* came out before EQ" qualification).
Anyone who's ever enjoyed playing MMOs will have rose-tinted memories of their personal defining MMO experience. But don't make the mistake of thinking what worked in that case will automatically work now. A lot has changed since EQ. WoW has happened, and has given a lot of people a taste for gaming that is polished and efficient and doesn't force them to waste time with the tedium. You might not like that, and you might feel that they're somehow debasing your beloved genre and that the only solution is to return to the boring, laborious shit that came out before anyone bothered to give any thought to what was fun. You're no better than a WoW player, just because you played EQ. They're both just about pressing some buttons and watching an XP bar increment. Grow the fuck up, you worthless, self-agrandising cunt.

On the Subject of Fast Travel
Oh yes, the ever-popular "OMG fast travel is so carebear". I read one thread where some moron suggested that actually he would be happy if it took an hour to travel to a group, as long as there was interesting stuff to do on the way, like being attacked by bandits or whatever. What about the people who are sitting on their thumbs waiting for you to get there, you absolute fucking dick? Is it fun for them, sitting there doing nothing? Jesus fucking christ. That is such a telling post, as it illustrates the utterly "me! me! me!" attitude these people have to MMOs. Fuck what's best for the game, as long as it works in a way that gives me the opportunity to demonstrate how knowledgeable and experienced I am, because I played EQ so naturally someone of my calibre would want mechanic X to operate the same way in this game, never mind if it's actually fun or not. And if you don't like it, you must not be a very good player.
Which brings the subject back around to difficulty, which I have already treated in dedicated post. Because spending an hour traveling to a group is not difficult. It's not more "difficult" to press the forward key for an hour than it is to press "take me to location X". It's simply more time-consuming.
Which isn't to say I'm a fan of teleporting in MMOs, but the game really needs to have it's content designed in a way that minimises the necessity to zoom to the opposite site of the world at the touch of a button. Vanguard is piss-poor in this respect. The unbelievably tiresome unicorn & shadowhound mount quests are notorious for requiring you to take the longest possible journeys, backwards and forwards across the game world, just to get to yet another region where you have to grind ever-increasing numbers of the local fauna. If you're going to come up with bullshit like that, you better believe there ought to be teleporters.

On the Subject of Spawn Camping
You've got to be fucking joking. Now and again some fucking retard will lament the decline of epic spawn camps, and how much fun they were because of the social aspects of sitting around doing nothing for hours on end. Let's not forget that spawn camping is the result of a fundamentally flawed game mechanic, namely creature respawning. The concept of killing a creature, only for it to magically reappear some time in the future is ludicrous enough, but to suggest that it's actually a positive thing which should be encouraged and in fact made as long-winded as possible is abhorrent. Hey, what shall we do this evening? I know, let's go and park our characters at some boss spawn, and then do nothing. Great! And that's even before you introduce the issue of kill-stealing, because it's not like you're the only group that needs whatever piece of shit quest item or weapon or armour might, but also might not, drop. But forget instancing, because, you know, original EQ didn't have that so it's A Bad Thing.

The Field Marshal's Final Thoughts
"Hardcore" MMO purists are like the fucking Amish, stuck in the past and stubbornly refusing to accept any of the real progress that has been made since EQ. If only they'd fuck off into a little community of their own where they can be culled by the occasional psycho gunman and stop polluting the rest of the world with their shitty, worthless opinions.

* AKA "Ewa Wyrwal", or "Iga" if you're searching for MET-Art sets. Enough said.

On the Subject of PvP

Emmanuelle Chriqui

Much as it amuses me to ridicule PvP whenever possible, to say I abhor all PvP would be an oversimplification. Personally I distinguish between two forms of PvP. The style that's most popular and prevalent in existing games is what I call "competitive" PvP. It's all about the ever-popular "pwning noobs". About attempting to make up for your real-life shortcomings by spending time playing some online game to the point where you can beat someone else at it. Woohoo, you are teh leet gamer.
This form of mindless competitive PvP is best demonstrated by the likes of Counter-Strike and other pure PvP FPSes. No storyline, no real objectives other than to get a higher score than the opposition. It's simple to implement and simple for players to understand. It doesn't appeal to me, and it generally attracts an inferior class of individual. The sort of players that feel they have to win at any cost, which is why competitive PvP is usually host to all manner of cheats and exploits, across all game genres.
The alternative to competitive PvP, although it's less appropriate within the context of FPS games, is what I call "role play" PvP. PvP that occurs as a side-effect of the design of the game world rather than forms the motivation for it. This can be as simple as having a game where you can choose to be lawful or criminal, where the goals of those opposing factions generally conflict, where a criminal can advance at the expense of an honest character (as a result of theft, or even murder perhaps) and it is also possible for the honest to advance at the expense of the criminals (bounty-hunting might be an example). The point is that the conflict itself is not the sole or even primary game objective for either side. Instead it's a natural byproduct of allowing for a broad spectrum of career paths within the game, and provides an element of genuine danger which enriches the game world. The trick is to achieve that without allowing griefers to essentially hold the game world to ransom.
Perhaps the most successful of current MMOs that has a genuine role play PvP component is Eve Online. As pretty much an MMO version of the classic Elite, players can follow a range of paths to fame and fortune, whether it's through law-abiding corporate business practice or piracy. The PvP in that case is not some sort of point-scoring exercise, rather players choosing piracy as a career are adding an immersive role play element to the game and are providing a compelling alternative to some AI-driven challenge to law-abiding players.
Of course piracy in Eve will still attract the same sort of educationally-subnormal sociopaths that populate competitive PvP games, but at least it's channeled into an aspect of the game that enhances rather than spoils the game environment for the more balanced and higher-functioning players.
From what I've heard about the almost mythical Ultima Online, that game took a similar approach to PvP with players able to choose a law-abiding or law-eschewing career path which could, but (and this is perhaps the crux of competitive vs. roleplay Pvp) didn't necessarily put those players in direct conflict. That wouldn't surprise me, as UO seems to have got a lot of things right which have subsequently been ignored and misinterpreted by more modern games.
It might seem that some games blur the distinction between competitive and role play PvP but in general if there's any doubt, you're talking about the competitive style. Warhammer might feature PvP set within the context of opposing factions, where the conflict is racially motivated, but the fact is that the races simply provide "teams", and the goal of one team is to pwn the other. In Counter-Strike the teams are terrorist vs. counter-terrorist, but the game is still very much competitive.
I know a lot of people are fans of competitive PvP, as evidenced by the enthusiam for Warhammer, and I freely admit that my preference for the elusive role play dynamic is entirely subjective. Perhaps I just haven't seen competitive PvP implemented in a way that appeals to me, or perhaps it's just that competitive PvP tends to attract the sort of people with whom I don't care to play.

On the Subject of Things I Hate

#235483455: People who write reviews of games that haven't even been released yet, on Amazon or Gamestop or similar. It either means they're desperate to show off that they're in the beta, or else they're just fucking idiots. Actually I take that back,

You. Are. ALL. Fucking. Idiots.

On the Subject of Warhammer

Odette Yustman

I have always been quite dismissive of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (or "WAR", do you see what they've done there?). I've never been into P'n'P or tabletop gaming so the franchise itself means nothing to me, in the same way that I wasn't bothered about the LotR films since I've never read the books. Secondly, WAR has always traded on it's PvP credentials, and as a resolute PvE gamer I have no interest in "pwning" other players. Unlike some PvP whores I suspect, I don't have a tiny penis to compensate for.
In one of the regular "what games are you looking forward to" forum threads that always pop up in dry periods of gaming, there was post after post of predictable Conan and WAR name-checks. However, while the Conan references seem to be almost automatic now, the WAR posts appeared to be motivated by some genuine enthusiasm and excitement. I thought to myself, "Maybe I've got it wrong, perhaps there's going to be something to this after all, even for a PvE player". Which reminds me of the quote, "the only time I've made a mistake was when I thought I was wrong, which of course I wasn't".
One of the posts linked to a series of developer podcasts, which I started watching. They're entertaining enough, but sadly they ultimately reinforced my preconceived ideas about this game. There's one in particular which features an over-enthusiastic British creative director trying to explain how revolutionary the WAR quests are. Except they aren't. He bangs on and on about having to kill bears to get to a quest-giving npc who then gives you a quest to kill bears in traditional MMOs, while in WAR the bears you've already killed count. Wow, that's really revolutionary stuff. What they're missing is the fact that having any sort of quest that requires you to kill X number of species Y is fundamentally tiresome and old-fashioned, no matter how you dress it up. You could essentially achieve the same affect as WAR's amazing system by simply requiring you to kill less of the creatures. And not having to collect "proof" of kills is all very well and will reduce the frustration of having an inventory full of quest items rather than phat lootz, but is hardly a revolutionary development and in the context of an immersive world experience makes little sense. How are you proving your kill-count to the quest-giver?
On the other hand I will admit that public quests are an interesting addition. Large, narrative-driven quests that multiple unconnected players can get stuck into at any stage could be good fun. They could allow some nice big "events" to occur in the world in contrast to the necessarily limited scope of individual quests which can never really have any broad influence on the world because any number of people might be doing the same quest in parallel.
The only let down will be the repetition. This is an issue which affects every aspect of every MMO in existence, so it doesn't really count as a WAR flaw. Nothing is ever really world-changing because you have to allow for all the people who come through the region tomorrow, or next week, or next year. So your big public quest will be completed, whether successfully or not, and then it'll reset and start all over again. It's the same as having mobs respawn, which is something I frankly detest about persistent-world MMOs. For all the criticism of Guild Wars, at least you can go into an instance and clear it. You can work your way through a dungeon or region and kill every goddamn thing and have them stay dead (at least until you leave the instance). Not like non-instanced games where as soon as you've cleared one room the previous room is full of mobs again. Where you can't stop for a break because you'll get the mobs you just carefully carved your way through respawning on top of your head. Or worse, when you're wondering through a region and a dozen creatures spawn on top of you because unbeknown to you they were killed by another party 10 minutes ago. Then, when you reach the end of the dungeon you're forced to teleport out because the only alternative is killing everything you already killed, again.
I don't have the solution to that problem, and neither does anyone else it seems. It's by no means specific to WAR, just a pet hate of mine.
The other let-down was something I was already aware of, namely the style of the game. It's another vaguely cartoony-looking game in the style of WoW or LotRO. Looking at the concept art they've been producing WAR would have been a good contender for a much darker, nastier look, rather than the primary colours and hil-ar-ious jokey characters and animations they've implemented. Perhaps that's something AoC will get right, although I doubt it. I'd love to get stuck into a game that's gritty and realistic rather than some toy-town WoW clone, or the highly stylised and interchangeable Eastern MMOs. Vanguard almost got that right except the characters themselves, while not exactly cartoony, are decidedly odd-looking and distorted, in the style of Oblivion. Bennet Cross^tm-winner The Witcher did a much better job of character design, and an MMO developed in that style would be much more to my taste.
Then of course there's all WAR's PvP stuff. Bla bla bla boring old wank. Tiers, Realm-vs-Realm, capital cities you can ultimately sack, except the game will automatically and forceably reset the conflict after a sacking (see my complaints about respawning, above). And of course with PvP comes the ever-popular hacking and exploits and non-stop whining about class, or in this case Realm, balance. Have fun with that.
In conclusion, it does seem like WAR will be the PvP gamer's wet dream come true. But even the city capture elements don't exactly appear revolutionary so much as evolutionary. I was prepared to revise my opinion of the game but that has turned out to be unnecessary.
Unless, you know, there's a nice Limited Edition.