Right away, I am going to answer the question in the topic: No.

People love games. People love computer/video games. The number of people who love computer games continues to grow. The gaming industry is thriving and will continue to grow, expand, thrive, and include more and more people. Television and movies need to look out because computer/video games provide almost everything they provide, plus interactivity. (However, they don’t have to fear for their lives. Just like casual/social games won’t kill other types, television and movies provide a type of entertainment that is unique enough that many people will continue to enjoy and prefer it.)

Very few forms of legitimate entertainment get wiped out when something new comes along. The new just adds to the old, and the overall quotient of happiness increases. As I noted in a previous blog post, the Rubik’s Cube just turned 30 years old and has sold 350 million units. People still love the thing. I play Uno with one of my kids almost every day. I watch TV. I watch movies. I read books. I listen to the radio. I go for walks. I play catch. I ride my bike. The fact that we, as a species, have more and more entertainment options as our planet spins upon its axis is a GOOD THING.

Zynga is a wildly successful juggernaut that uses a variety of questionable business practices to succeed in the market with products of dubious quality. Right now, many (if not most) people think they are an unassailable titan that will continue to dominate its sector of the industry and perhaps crowd out others. Their own staff are becoming increasingly arrogant about it (perhaps as a defensive mechanism). When a Farmville developer was booed and heckled during his acceptance of the social game award at GDC, he fired back with “we’re hiring” and various other snide comments that amounted too “when you chumps are done being artists, come work for us and make money.”

I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot like AOL to me. How many of my readers are viewing this blog while logged onto the internet through AOL? Zero? Yeah, I thought so. AOL’s primary profitable business now is TMZ if I am not mistaken (yes, that’s how far they have fallen).

The power of social games like Farmville is that it let people play games with people they like (friends, family, etc.) that they probably never thought they’d game with – ever.  Parents gaming with their kids, grandparents gaming with grandchildren, and people gaming with high school friends they haven’t spoken to in 20 years are all pretty amazing things. The fact that some of the actual games that accomplished this are weak from a game design standpoint is not really the point.

Competition will come to this space, and crappy (at least in my opinion) games like Farmville won’t be able to compete. Zyngas will have to raise their standards. The same thing happened to AOL. In AOL’s case, they didn’t evolve so they died (as far as their ISP business).

Core games will continue to be made. AAA, multi-million dollar budget games will continue to be made. FPSes and fantasy MMORPGs will keep getting made. As long as there are people who like them enough to spend money on them, they will get made.

Farmville has grown the market for games, and in the end that is a good thing. This is similar to what The Sims did to help grow the gaming market – though admittedly The Sims is a high quality game in its own right. This is a good thing for us, people. Relax.

This story has been reported in a few places, and of course EA makes it sound like they just parted ways, but the ugly truth is pretty obvious. Warhammer grossly underperformed, and as a result Mark Jacobs has been sacked. While I feel he and EA/Mythic did a horrible job overall with Warhammer (despite it being a decent and playable game), I can’t help but feel bad for the guy. He built that company, starting with MUDs, then DAoC, the failed Imperator, and then Warhammer. And now he is out. I am sure he made a pile of money when Mythic sold to EA, but still… It has to be a little tough to know you no longer have any input or contact with the games you and your company made.

What do you think of the firing? Will this be good for Warhammer? Will it have any effect? My thoughts below the fold.

I think it will have little or no effect. I think Jacobs’ direct control over the design of Warhammer had become minimal at this stage, and I think the institutional fear within Mythic won’t go away just because one guy leaves. There are some glaring flaws in WAR’s design that have been there from release, but after they crapped the bed so badly on subscribers they are too afraid to fix those things.

If they gut crowd control and give Bright Wizards and Warrior Priests the nerf they desperately need, they are worried they’ll lose too many people. Also, they know they screwed up having 2 realms (and 1 of which has horrible looking character models), so they have to be worried that the overpoweredness of BWs and WPs is the only thing giving them some semblance of realm balance.

So basically, I think WAR is pretty much hosed unless someone takes over with the guts and the nerve to really make the changes the game needs.

1) Massively gut crowd control.

2) Restore some semblance of balance between melee and ranged. Range has been king since day 1.

3) Nerf Bright Wizards massively. No more morale 2 AoE disable. Less CC in general. Less damage.

4) Nerf Warrior Priests. The only class with AoE cleanse is a huge problem. The fact that they are nigh invulnerable and can heal forever is an obvious flaw.

5) Add a third realm.

6) Figure out some way to make end game RvR not so boring.

That is a tall order for a released game.

1) Wikipedia is full of people gunning for an administrator promotion. In the current climate, the easiest path is getting articles deleted and getting players banned. These acts somehow show you understand what is best for Wikipedia.

2) An editor and his admin buddy put Threshold in their sights, and rules and policies went by the way side. Innocent people got banned and their efforts to improve the article were systematically removed. Once everyone involved with the article was banned, they proposed the article be deleted (an AfD or Articles for Deletion recommendation).

3) People who participated on the KEEP side of the AfD were frequently banned for cooked up reasons and their arguments stricken. The AfD was possibly the longest in Wikipedia history. Most people voted KEEP. In order to delete, the rules state there must be a CONSENSUS TO DELETE. The closing admin deleted it anyway, for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual policy.

4) When possible, other retaliatory action was taken against KEEP voters. When the owner of Top Mud Sites showed up and argued for KEEP, links from other MUD articles to Top Mud Sites were deleted. He would re-add them, but they would get deleted again.

5) A Deletion Review happened. I have not checked the tally recently (I am banned again), but at my last check most votes and arguments were to overturn. I highly doubt that will happen. Once the wikipedian insiders are against you, you are done.

6) My first ban was for edit-warring. What was I doing? Researching citations and then adding back content that was removed because of a “lack of citations.” My second ban was for “sock puppeting.” The people who were supposedly my “sock puppets”? They included: my wife, who has a 4-5+ year old account with active edits in many varied topics, someone from Alabama, someone from California, and others. My third ban was for pointing out that people with confidence in their beliefs are not scared of arguments from the other side (and therefore, don’t delete them just because they have the power to do so).

So, what is wrong with Wikipedia and how can it be fixed?

1) Wikipedia has too many people desperate to become administrators for all the wrong reasons.

2) Many Wikipedia “editors” are horrendously full of themselves, and believe they possess skills they actually do not.

3) Many Wikipedia “editors” are perfect examples of the expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

4) Wikipedia has little or no respect for experts.

5) The obsession with deleting obscure topics is a slow suicide. Obscure topics is what Wikipedia does best, after all.

6) Too much of Wikipedia’s leadership is corrupt.

How Can Wikipedia Be Fixed?

1) Delete WP:N (notability).

2) Make all adminships temporary.

3) Stop deleting obscure or niche topics.

4) Hire a paid staff to be the “real administrators” who oversee the volunteer ones.

5) Get rid of the stuff titles. Administrators become editors, and editors become users. Stop pumping up the users’ egos with names that inflate their illusion of talent.

6) One method of reporting bad behavior is plenty. You don’t need 20.

What should fans and developers of MUDs/MMOs do now?

Again, I direct you specifically to the full article about Wikipedia’s war on gaming history and Threshold :

We need to start recording MUD and MMO history now. We need to do it in an organized fashion that will be respected not just by the hacks at Wikipedia, but by an academic or other legitimate researcher. MMOs seem huge and mainstream now, so it is hard to imagine people considering them insignificant. But that is how we felt about MUDs 10 years ago, and nowadays many gamers don’t even know what a MUD is (or they are dismissive of them in the extreme).

This is a cautionary tale for people with interest in any obscure or niche topic. Wikipedia cannot be relied on to preserve history or information about non-mainstream topics. The current culture actually discourages it. It is our responsibility to find better ways to preserve such information, lest it be lost to the vicissitudes of time.

The first step is establishing the Mud Connector and Top Mud Sites as reliable sources. We need to help the owners of those sites do what they need to clean up things, codify policies, and write a coherent history of their site. Ideally, the two sites will keep a history of the OTHER site, so the historical information is not “self published.

Once we have that, other things can start to fall into place. Staff reviews will count again (hopefully). Articles will count. Mud listings might even count.

Then MUD owners need to really crank it up a notch and work every connection they have. Get mentioned in every newspaper, magazine, or journal article possible. And when they get mentioned, SAVE IT.

So bearing this in mind, why do so many developers deliberately make their own content obsolete? And why do they often do it at such a rapid clip? The trend these days is for games to encourage you to race to the cap and then sit. Then they want you to make alts, or farm gear. Soon enough, the population is top heavy at the level cap, and nobody visits 90% of the game. If someone makes a “real newbie” character, everywhere they go is vacant.

Tish Tosh wrote a long and very good blog post about this over on Tish Tosh Tesh . I read it and commented there, so if you want even more commentary of this sort please read his post and check the comments.

As I noted in response to his post:

The way you preserve your old world is you make it so your entire game is fun and always relevant. You do not put the entire emphasis of your game on being cap level and then raiding till you die. You create fun things to do in the game that are not even connected to level.

This seems so obvious to me. I do not believe I am the wisest and most brilliant game designer out there. There have to be many other developers who understand this as well. Some readers might say, “Well, that’s easier said than done. What exactly do you recommend?” Well, here come some standard recommendations that not only help here, but help with a million other MUD/MMO problems:

1) Player Housing. Once you let people customize their own part of the world, they will invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours on it. It will be a constant project. If you give them things they can find and use from all over the world inside their house, they’ll make use of every inch of your game world. And when they want to change something, or decorate a friend’s house, they’ll be right back again scouring the world for this or that little nick nack.

2) Mini Games. Make them! People will play them with other friends and have a blast. I’ll name a few from Threshold : Trial Arcanus, Quail Hunting, Saber Dueling, Fishing (and make it an actual mini game – not just click a button and then click another button), Chess, Poker, 5 Card Draw, Rock-Paper-Scissors. I am just one guy, not a huge development team. If I can crank out tons of mini games for my MUDs/MMOs, why can’t Blizzard or other big MMO companies?

3) Admin/GM Run Events. As the developer, you have incredible power and tools at your command. Use them! Create fun storyline events that happen all over the world. When you do, you’ll lure people to various locations in your world. You will make people interested in them. Even when the event is over, people might come back and check things out.

Again, those are just a few examples. Yes, it takes a little effort, but it is less effort than the effort wasted when you let 90% of your world rot and die.

Ok… I lied a little.

Alright, I lied a little. I don’t hate raiding. Sometimes it can be fun. What I hate is the way raiding is currently implemented in MUDs (graphical or text), and the fact that raiding is generally the ONLY serious end game MMOs offer. (Yes, I am using MUD and MMO interchangeably. See my Gaming Terminology page. This is my subtle ruse to get people used to the term MUD and use it instead of MMO.)

I know a lot of you out there love raiding, or at least claim to love it. I know there are things about it that are enjoyable: the shared experience, the challenge of figuring bosses out, the sense of accomplishment when you beat a boss or finish a dungeon. But raiding, as currently implemented on most MUDs (like WoW) is horribly flawed, and does not even do a good job of maximizing the positive elements people claim to enjoy.

Raiding as a Concept is Horribly Designed.

1) I play games to PLAY THE ACTUAL GAME. I don’t play games to load up a web site and read a step by step strategy for how to defeat a boss. Sure, you don’t have to use raid walkthroughs, but you have to be masochistic not to. Raid encounters are generally designed to require an extremely specific set of maneuvers in order to defeat them. Bob has to stand on point A and hit 1, 2, 3 in succession. Joe has to stand on point B and hit 1, 2, 3 within 2 seconds of Bob hitting his 1, 2, 3. Cindy has to stand EXACTLY behind Bob, face backwards, kneel, alternate between the Macarena emote and a focus change macro, and press the 1 button exactly every 10 seconds. Frank, the raid leader, has to constantly bark commands over Teamspeak/Ventrilo to make sure nobody get distracted from the raid and does something foolish like trim their nails for some excitement.

Raid encounters feel like crappy community theater to me, not epic game play. I feel like an extra in a low budget Hollywood fantasy movie where the producers are only making the movie for the tax write-off and don’t care about how illogical the directions are. Uwe Bol ’s action scenes make more sense than even the best raid encounters on WoW and most other modern MMOs.

2) An hour of killing trash for the “reward” of a 10 minute, scripted boss battle is like suffering through a root canal for the reward of a prostate exam. Oh, and if something goes wrong in that boss battle, you very well might be clearing that same hour of trash to take another shot at it. Why they make the trash mobs so pointless and worthless is beyond me. You have a capitive audience of 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 players and you make them spend an hour each (25 man hours of trash killing for a standard WoW raid) doing something that is DESIGNED to be a pure, boring time sink. That’s good game design? That makes sense to ANYONE? How about we swap that? I’d rather feel uber clearing pansy minions for 10 minutes and then fight the boss for an hour. I’d find that a lot more epic, frankly.

3) There is no room for error or improvisation. Everything has to be done in a completely orchestrated way, and for the most part nobody can screw up. If someone makes a mistake, it is generally a wipe for the whole group. If someone pulls aggro that shouldn’t, it is almost always a wipe. If someone attacks the wrong thing or in the wrong order, wipe. If someone kinda spaces out for a minute and lets off on DPS or healing, wipe. I am fine with games punishment bad execution or inattentive play, but the problem is it only takes a very small mistake on the part of one person to cause the other 9, 24, 39, 49, or 99 a lot of pain, suffering, misery, and wasted time clearing trash. And with each person’s role so incredibly explicit, there is rarely the possibility of someone else picking up the slack. If Bob sees Joe is slacking off, what can he do? He can’t pour on more DPS, because he is already expected to be at maximum DPS. If Cam the Tank loses aggro to a crazy DPSer, there’s nothing he can do. He can’t be a hero, because he is already operating at maximum threat and most likely the boss is immune to any snap aggro taunts anyway (another gripe, but I digress). If Cindy the healer isn’t healing enough, Kalli the healer can’t make up for it, because she’s already healing at max efficiency and even if she could heal more she’d either run out of mana or pull aggro.

4) So may elements of boss encounter design are absurdly arbitrary. I have fought bosses who did incredibly ridiculous things that were clearly designed solely with the idea of nullifying a specific class, tactic, or ability for no logical reason other than the devs thought it would be funny. I have fought raid bosses that were immune to all sorts of standard abilities for no apparent reason other than to make you feel impotent. I have participated in raid encounters where mages had to tank a boss… just because. People don’t make mages because they like tanking, folks. They make mages because they like to make things go boom. I have fought bosses where they you have to interrupt some of their spells, but not all of them, because being too good at interrupting their spells triggers some kind of Uber Spell. If the boss possessed the ability to perform this Uber Spell, why isn’t he just doing it all the time? Why punish people for being GOOD at a core mechanic (interrupting spell casting) with this arbitrary result? I have fought bosses who cast spells that require NOBODY in the entire raid move a single pixel, and then randomly follow it up with an attack that makes people stagger around against their will. And this boss in particular gets us back to #3. If one member of the raid accidentally hits their D button (move right), the raid wipes. That’s good design? The tiniest little finger twitch by one person and everyone dies and starts over? Huh?

5) Loot. Hopefully soon I am going to write an entire post about how stupid I think current loot systems are in games, but I’ll hit this one briefly now. So 10, 25, 40, 50, or 100 people work together to mindlessly clear trash, follow their little script of brain disconnected button pushes to beat the boss, and now he drops 2 or 3 pieces of loot. This loot will often be useful/needed by multiple players present, so someone loses out. The same item might drop many times in a row, resulting in certain classes feasting while others enjoy famine. Or sometimes loot will drop that nobody can use, and it just gets blown up or sold to an NPC Vendor. NEVER is the entire group happy with the loot that drops or the way the loot gets distributed. There are always people unhappy with what happens at REWARD TIME. This is BROKEN. At the moment of ultimate success, there should be happiness all around. Not happiness for 10% or less of the participants. I have a variety of suggestions for improving this, but I’ll save those for the previously mentioned LOOT post I intend to make.

6) Raid encounters have very strict requirements for the classes you need and the numbers you need. This results in a lot of friends and guildmates getting left out on a regular basis. It results in arguments and hurt feelings about who gets “rostered” to go on the raid. There are arguments about who will get rostered to kill bosses 1, 2, and 3 but not bosses 4, 5, and 6. Sometimes a player will only want/need loot from boss 4, 5, or 6 and thus will not want to even go on raids planned to kill boss 1, 2, or 3. But you have to cajole such people into joining because you need their class. The amount of heartache involved in creating rosters for who gets to raid is absolute misery. You are lucky if half the people are happy with the system you use, and at some point everyone is likely to be very pissed off by a roster decision. Since raid dungeons have lockouts and reset times, you can’t simply run the same raid 2 or 3 nights in a row so everyone gets a shot.

I could continue, and I probably will in the future. But I think I’ve made a pretty clear case for how incredibly flawed at the core modern MMO raiding is. The worst thing about this is the fact that far too many MMOs have pretty much hatched their cart to the concept of raiding and that’s all you get for end game content. If you agree with any of the above points, most MMO developers pretty much don’t care about you. Your desire for more varied and interesting gameplay will be completely ignored and discarded. They will tell you “join a raid guild” or “roll an alt.” That attitude is ridiculous, absurd, and terrible for the industry as a whole.