Thought for the Day - Eve/Eva Wyrwal

Whatever, it's not like it's her real name anyway.

On the Subject of Vanguard

Some Model

It turns out there is currently a "free month" thing going on with Vanguard, and possibly some other SOE games, no doubt in attempt to suck up some of the AoC quitters. I've been seeing various "It's a whole different game to when it launched!!!111!"-type posts which are obvious lies but in the spirit of fairness I thought I'd give it a go. When the installer crashed half way through the download I knew it was the same old Vanguard.




My (second) first impressions:

• Still hitches like a motherfucker. Don't claim it doesn't. People who claim it doesn't are either lying, deluded, or don't understand what hitching is. Unless you stay in the same chunk the whole time and give it a chance to cache everything it's just painful. Of course the god-awful quest design usually involves making you cross as many chunk lines as possible.


• Higher frame rates than the old days (in between hitches), but also looks worse than I remembered.


• Still the same old soul-destroying, utterly mindless grind that EQ veterans mistake for gameplay.

And that was just the five minutes I spent in it. Plus the two characters I logged onto both sported shiny new helmets. Unfortunately my druid's helmet looks like some sort of crab claw.
Oh well, back to trying to find a Sanctum group in AoC.

On the Subject of Mods

There used to be a picture of Teresa Moore in her knickers here, and then 4 years after posting it I received a DMCA notice. True story.

On this occasion I'm referring to MMO mods, as opposed to mods like Counter-Strike. Mods that, typically, modify the user interface and don't really affect the gameplay (and not including hacks, I'm talking about mods that are effectively sanctioned by the devs who expose an API to mod authors that offers more low-level control of the interface than you might get by simply editing GUI configuration files.


There are only 2 real reasons to want to be able to mod an MMO:

1. You want some feature that the devs have been too closed-minded or lazy to implement themselves.
2. You want a competitive advantage over all the players who don't have the same mod(s) as you.

In reality it's generally more to do with (2). Mods often include more verbose feedback on damage dealt to or by the group, as well as offering shortcuts for healing or otherwise interacting with your group. I dismiss (2) as a valid reason for mods. Trying to fabricate an advantage over other players through mods is no better than "proper" hacking and just indicates a lack of skill on the part of players using them.
Which leaves (1). It's true enough that both Vanguard and AoC have pretty worthless interfaces. It was interesting to see that there's be been absolutely no improvement in Vanguard's in the last 18 months. And I admit I have been using the MirageUI for AoC, just because it offers more convenient, smaller and more numerous skill bars. That's not a competitive advantage, even if I was a competitive player, it's a simple interface improvement. But really improvements like that should be implemented globally by the developers. Rather than treating the GUI as something that it set in stone and must never be changed, as seems to be the attitude of current MMO developers, they should be more open to the notion of ongoing refinement and improvement.
In which case mods would be unnecessary. But of course we're stuck with a vocal community of players who demand to be able to run realtime log parsers or whatever other shit they used to run in EQ because they're unable to achieve anything without their precious mod training wheels.

On the Subject of Quitters

Gianne Albertoni

I've been too busy protecting the free world to spend much time in AoC recently, but I have had the opportunity to stay connected via the magic of internet forums.
The first thing that has to be said is that the official AoC forums are a complete and utter shit-fest. For a game that was supposed to be designed for, and only available to "mature" players, the number of whiny little retards running loose on those forums is quite incredible. I recall when SOE launched official Vanguard forums after their acquisition of Sigil, the general mood was fairly up-beat. While it did go through a fairly rapid decline into patronising name-calling and generally worthless bullshit, even at it's deepest depths it was never a patch on the current state of AoC's.

Now that AoC has passed the one month mark, there's a very familiar smell spreading across the forums. Namely, the ever-popular "leaving" posts. One month passed means the end of the free month for all the early-adopters, which means all the sad, poor little people with no jobs who can't afford a measly $15 a month quit after a month of freeloading.

That in itself is fair enough. If you're too lazy to get another paper-round or work some extra shifts at MacDonalds to cover what is in reality a minor expense, then good luck when you finally grow up.
Unfortunately these worthless fucks deem it necessary to pollute forums with tedious posts either a) providing long, smug, self-important explanations as to what is wrong with the game from their obviously ever-so experienced, professional MMO player point of view, or b) sneering at the remaining players and smugly bragging about how they are moving to some other, inevitably far superior game.
What they don't seem to understand is that no one gives a shit. It's a well-known fact that official games forums are largely populated with posts from disgruntled customers, and that while the overall tone is often largely negative that is often not representative of the population as a whole. People who are pissed off make the most noise, in other words, especially when anyone who dares to contradict their often wrong or illogical claims will inevitably be labeled a "fanboi".

What's particularly sad is how mind-numbingly predictable the whole cycle is. Some game gets hyped to the moon. People develop massively unrealistic expectations and begin claiming the game will be the saviour of modern MMOs, especially in "leaving" posts on the forums of some other game. Then, as the release date approaches, tales of the new game not achieving it's potential begin to emerge. By the time the game is released the "hardcore" are already over it, purely because it's no longer in beta and no longer their secret little club. It's not fashionable to like a game that the unwashed masses are able to play. Meanwhile the "sub-hardcore" play the game, realise their unrealistic expectations were, in fact, unrealistic and therefore claim the game sucks. They then post some tawdry leaving post in the official forums, name-checking whatever forthcoming game is now being hyped. And so the cycle continues.
This was especially evident with AoC. It has been name-checked by people leaving other games for years now. The new "next big thing" is WAR, but I can make two very obvious predictions regarding that particular game:

1. It will, at launch, suffer the exact same lack of content, especially at the high end, and very likely the same amount of bugs and lack-of-polish as every other MMO that has ever been released (with the possible exception of Vanguard, which had more than average).

2. It is very much a PvP game, and while that might disguise the lack of content (because in a sense the players are the content) it also means the game will be a shower of hacks, exploits and especially nerfs. If I haven't already delivered a sermon on how PvP and PvE are mutually exclusive, then I will. Expect epic forum threads from whiny little bitches crying that their class has been nerfed into oblivion, or how some other class should be nerfed because the author was soundly beaten by someone playing it. If you think the AoC forums are bad, wait until WAR is launched.

The fact is there's nothing else worth playing right now, which makes all the bitchy leaving posts sound quite hollow. There's even a new trend of people claiming they're going back to Vanguard, of all things. That's simply laughable. While the early levels in VG might provide some short-term entertainment and while I'm told there have been substantial performance and stability improvements, it's still the same pile of grind it always was, and still full of promises that have yet to be fulfilled.
So while the smug idiots proudly proclaim that VG is the next big thing, that just means they either never played it, or have forgotten how fucked-up it is, or are just lying to try to sound special.

But what is really astonishing is how people who have by their own admission quit the game continue to post on the forums bashing both the game and the people who continue to play it. What the fuck is that about? Move on, you sad, worthless little cunts. It's obvious you're just desperate to have your decision to quit validated by trying to get other people on the forum to agree with you. It's also obvious that there's nothing better out there worth playing, otherwise you'd be playing that and not spewing your shit onto the forums day after day. It's like it becomes their mission to try and convince other people to quit, so that they don't feel like the odd one out while everyone else is having fun. Ultimately it's just desperate and pathetic.

It's just a game. If you don't like it, don't play it. End of story. You're not important, your opinion is not important, and no one cares at all what you think of the game or whether or not you're even playing it. GTFO.

And you know what, I don't even want your stuff, moron.

Thought for the Day - Aria Giovanni

Too much jibber-jabber, time for some visual relief.