The area that has a couple tables is adjacent to one of the smaller gyms where they have dance classes sometimes.

The teenagers that take the dance classes, as well as sometimes their moms, pile all their bags, boots, fast food garbage, etc. all over the 3 or 4 small tables. They aren’t even using the chairs or tables, but they completely dominate them with all their junk and then go in and take their class.

So today I get there and every table is covered with junk. I pick one that only has a pair of dirty boots (standing, soles down, on the table), two soft drink bottles, a crumpled Arby’s bag, and the dirty peeled off top to a yogurt container, and put the stuff on the (carpeted) floor next to the table. (tons of their junk is all over the floors already too).

The class ends, and everyone comes piling out. Some moms show up as well.

One of the girls and her mom actually start complaining loudly about their stuff being moved. I think they were trying to get me to say something. I didn’t say a word. Then the mom actually taps me on the shoulder and faux innocently asks “Do you know who moved our things?”

Me: “Yes, I did. This was the most empty table.”

The mom: “Oh, I didn’t think anyone would need these tables for anything super important.”

Me: “My daughter’s gymnastics practice is 4 hours long so I try to get some work done.”

She kinda harumphs angrily, walks like 2 steps away, and loudly says to her daughter “I don’t know why he needs to move our stuff to play a game on his computer.”

I almost let it go, but I just couldn’t.

Me: “Ma’am, you MIGHT have a point if it weren’t for the fact that I make computer games for a living, and what you see on my computer is our latest game. Tables really aren’t the right place for people’s dirty boots and empty fast food garbage. There are 4 trash cans within 20 feet of us.”

She had turned around when I said ma’am, but after the above she just grumbled and left.

I get so sick and tired of these entitled, selfish, disrespectful (self censored).

Please give this article a read, and let me know what you think.

Facebook Games: Where Monetization Gimicks and User Growth Matter More Than Good Game Design

I look forward to your opinions.

1) “Designed by The Children’s Television Workshop” – He notes a failure to maintain the cool, original design of the Worgen, and “the Star Trek Ferengi inspired goblins with their ridiculously flamboyant starting zone that puts a stake through the heart of any semblance of high fantasy that WoW ever had.”

2) Trivialized Advancement: “1-85 being utterly devoid of any semblance of challenge or intensity. Mob density has been nerfed to almost nothing in outdoor zones and in those occasional outdoor mini-dungeons; killing these mobs takes zero skill as player power has reached all-time heights in WoW.”

3) No Challenge. “For the vast majority of what constitutes WoW, the following is true: the challenge is gone, the risk is gone, the suspense is gone. the wonder is gone, and the immersion — well it left town years ago. It’s one big Bacchanalian orgy of advancement and rewards. Eventually players become immune to this mindless routine and have realized that gear and levels mean nothing.”

4) Dungeon Finder: “Recently flawed design including the Trojan Horse of all MMO features — the Dungeon Finder — has resulted in the mechanization and trivialization of the beloved dungeon crawl. Dungeons have become nothing more than mob and loot conveyor belts designed to dole out instant gratification to mute loot addicted participants culled from various servers.”

This section leads to my favorite point he makes in the entire post, as it is one I have been making to people ever since I first heard about Dungeon Finder:

“Players are wise to the reality that being outgoing, friendly and polite has no value in WoW all thanks to the geniuses on the Dungeon Finder development team.”

One of these days I am going to write an entire blog post about this concept: making things easier and more convenient is not always better, and is very often worse.

Dungeon Finder seems like a great concept. It is super convenient and helps people do something they really want to do: dungeon crawl.

The problem is it absolutely killed the concept of a game world. It whisked you around the game universe instant-teleport style, and originally you didn’t even have to find the dungeon even once to be teleported to it.

Worst of all, it killed the necessity of making friends and allies in order to put together a solid tank-healer-dpsx3 team. You could be the biggest jerk in the world, but you still had the same dungeon timer queue time.

In the old days, jerks languished in misery as they couldn’t find groups while people with a decent, mature attitude reveled in fun and productive groups. That’s how it should be!

5) Culture of Entitlement. “The players through no fault of their own have become virtual slackers addicted to a steady drip feed of rewards. Shooting fish in a barrel would require too much skill for today’s average WoW player. People don’t want to work for anything anymore; they feel entitled.”

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With all of that out of the way, do I agree with his final conclusion? Do I think Cataclysm is the worst MMO expansion in history?

No, I do not. I believe that title still goes to Dark Age of Camelot: Trials of Atlantis (DAoC: ToA), and I don’t even think its a fair fight.

DAoC: ToA was released October 28, 2003, a year before WoW in a time where Everquest was the WoW of the MMO industry. It wasn’t the quality of the content that made Atlantis such an utter failure. It was the fact that DAoC used an entire expansion, all that budget and manpower, to create an expansion that essentially tryed to EQ-ify (in the same way games now try to WoW-ify themselves) the game.

ToA introduced massive raids – some of them requiring 12 hours of straight gameplay with groups 50-100 large. It introduced massively powerful artifacts that completely dominated the PvP (RvR) landscape. Within a few months, if you did not have a full complement of fully leveled up artifacts you simply couldn’t compete in RvR.

This was an absolutely titanic shift in the game. Before ToA, you could cap all your stats, resistances, etc. with crafted gear. It might be expensive, but it didn’t require any raiding or specific boss farming. People lovede this because it made PvP a level playing field where skill, team composition, etc. were everything.

ToA utterly ruined and destroyed this, and the shockwave was fast and brutal. Within a few months, this expansion caused DAoC to lose approximately two thirds of its userbase, and it never recovered. Even Mythic staff (including Mark Jacobs, the founder) eventually admitted ToA was a gigantic mistake.

Can you imagine investing millions of dollars and zillions of man hours into an expansion – all with the goal of GROWING your game – and the net effect is to lose TWO THIRDS of your customers? Spending the ToA money on guns and booze would have been more productive. In order to stop the exodus of players, they had to release non-ToA enabled servers. That’s right folks: ToA was so bad, people preferred servers WITHOUT it. The non-ToA servers were the most popular, and probably saved DAoC from completely shutting down.

For that reason, I believe Trials of Atlantis is still far and away the worst MMO expansion ever made, and I think it is unlikely it will ever be dethroned.

And maybe, also at that time, that’s just to where the internet — I hate to use that broad-based term in quotes — had gotten. Like, people love flaming. The whole thing is all — they want controversy. They’re going to say things. It’s like, “Hey, you don’t know who I really am. I can say whatever I want.” You see it in the press now.

He blames “the internet” and flaming, but still after all these years cannot admit it was their absolute despicable and deceitful business model.

Amazing.

Roper is like a drug addict. Until he admits his problem, you can’t deal with him.

Nobody in the world should hire this guy until he admits the #1 reason people hated Hellgate and Flagship with such a passion was their absolutely disgusting business model.

I talked to people in the industry, they thought, “I thought that was a great idea, especially at the time, for a business model.” “Hey, the game is free to play? Oh, but if I want to give you $10 a month, I’m going to get everything you ever do? Sure, I’m in.” But gamers hated the idea.

Clueless. He acts like everyone in the industry thought it was a good idea. Did he talk to idiots? Hellgate was roundly mocked for its business model months before it came out, and they didn’t do anything to change it.

How could he not understand that you’re either subscription or not. And even if you must go with some kind of weird partial-subscription system, you can’t TAKE AWAY the content people already paid for.

If my subscription gets me access to Zone X, you can’t take away Zone X when I stop subscribing. You can stop giving me new zones – fine. But taking away old ones I paid for? Stupid.

Or even worse, locking characters because they are one of the “subscriber only” classes? Or locking out gear? ANYONE thought that was smart? Really?

I think I was very disappointed that followed into going Cryptic. You know, people go, “Oh, great. Now this guy is going to come here and screw everything up.”

Which he did. The Cryptic “C-store” is an absolute abortion of a “freemium” attempt. The things you pay for are grossly overpriced, and they are charging extra for things that should be core gameplay elements.

We even at one point just realized, “We’re never going to make money off box sales. Even if this game sells multiple millions of copies, we might never make our money back on the box sales. We’re going to have to make our money on the back end, on the online.” Because that was a much lower nut to crack every month. But we just didn’t get the number of players.

Perhaps this explains the stupidity and the greed: desperation. They realized that the online/subscription method was their only hope to break even, so they got desperate and greedy. Instead of figuring out a Guild Wars type model where they charged a fixed price for chunks of content – or mini-expansions – they were hoping for the cash cow of subscriptions (and the free money from “sleepers”). Stupid move.

Bill Roper joined established MMO developer Cryptic Studios as design director in 2008.

Less than two years later, Roper would resign from the company after the launches of Champions Online and Star Trek Online, each of which was criticized by gamers and reviewers.

Reconcile that “resigned” part with the fact that he hasn’t been able to find a job – ANY job – for 8 months.

Translation: Roper was fired. This guy appears to be allergic to honesty.

Today I learned about this really amusing parody “television commercial” for Evony. It is worth a watch:

Gamespy interview, Feb 2004:

Chris Lye (Microsoft product manager): The massively multiplayer genre is a hugely crowded and competitive space.

The Wikipedia entry notes: “Some commentators said at the time that the cancellation was evidence that the (English language) massively multiplayer market had become saturated.”

Hugely crowded huh? 10 months later, November 2004 would see the launch of World of Warcraft. I guess it wasn’t really all that crowded and saturated in Feb 2004, was it Chris and “commentators?”

And this part is just for amusement:

GameSpy: Based on the “evaluation of the MMORPG landscape,” in MS rethinking True Fantasy Live Online for Xbox as well?

Chris Lye: Plans for True Fantasy Live Online are the same as always. They are completely unaffected.

True Fantasy Live Online was cancelled less than 4 months later, on June 2, 2004.

Over the last decade or so, there have been a lot of horrendously wrong predictions and opinions about the MMO industry offered by insiders, media, commentators, etc. Please share some of your favorites!

Why then is this same attitude not taken towards MMORPGs in the press?

I can tell you that I honestly believe PLAYERS take this attitude, as there are a wealth of games that have been enormous successes despite mediocre graphics.

Runescape, Farmville, even WoW have all been panned for their graphics.

Were they a success despite their “weak” graphics, or because of them? And because of them, I mean because the focus was not put on graphics.

I think the answer is not that simple. I think there are two reasons those games were still a success despite the graphics:

1) Gameplay. They all had gameplay that resonate with a huge number of users who loved the game despite it not being a graphical marvel.

2) Art. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter how many polygons your game is pushing. What matters is what you do with them. Having a consistent, appealing art style can be (and usually is) far more important. People love to bash WoW’s cartoony style graphics, but to a lot of people that stylized, unrealistic art style helps maintain the fantasy feel. Farmville’s cutesy style appealed to a wide base of customers.

I’ll go even further back. Diablo II. That game launched with a max resolution of 640×480 which was ancient even then. But the game had such great art direction, it didn’t matter.

How important are graphics to you in your enjoyment of a game? I ask because in the same issue of PC Gamer, a game developer wrote in another column that without a visceral light show of uber graphics he finds the experience “shallow.” I thought that was itself a pretty shallow way to look at games, but hey, that’s me.

One of my writers recently wrote this article about the Carbonite Add On for WoW. The part that struck me is the quest tracker information. It sounds like quests continue to be dumbed down as a form of content, and have become less about story and more about following an arrow like a rat in a maze seeking cheese.

Years ago, I wrote that a quest grind in quest based advancement is no different (and in many ways worse) than a mob grind. It would appear that nothing has changed.

So, am I right or am I wrong?

This F2P maneuver by CO is one of the most laughably absurd attempts at changing from subscription to F2P I have ever seen. They have locked F2P players out of the USP (Unique Selling Point) of the game which is character customization. F2P players have to choose rigid classes, whereas everyone else gets the “real game” which has an open power selection system. You would think having Bill Roper on their staff for a year or so would have given them the institutional knowledge that segregating your players like that is a recipe for failure.

I predict this will be a total failure. I leave you with this (click on it for full size)

But why just 3.3 million? I mean, if you play WoW, is it really an option whether or not you will buy the expansion? It really isn’t. What this tells us is that WoW’s “real” subscriber number is far closer to the 4 million number that I often hear behind closed doors and that I’ve often estimated myself.

Now, 4 million subscribers is still awesome and crushes every other western MMO. But that doesn’t justify the 12 million+ lie that is based on grossly overestimating and overcounting their Asian/Chinese customers. This also fits with the data from one analyst, who estimated that Asia accounts for only 6% of WoW’s revenue.

I wish more people in the gaming media would call Blizzard out for this absurd tripling of their numbers. I imagine this is part of WoW’s PR campaign to make it far harder for any new MMO (e.g. SWOTOR) to make a splash. Blizzard/WoW already has enough advantages in the marketplace. Gaming journalists should stop giving them a pass on this one.