in war there is no winner

this update just in from the Blizzard World of Warcraft Account Management Department regarding the great 'making fun of France for capitulating to the Nazis' Controversy:

Hello Mister WoW account holder,

Thank you for contacting us regarding this issue. When engaging in Chat in World of Warcraft, or otherwise utilizing World of Warcraft, you may not transmit or post sexually explicit images or other content or language which in the sole discretion of Blizzard Entertainment is deemed to be offensive; nor shall you transmit any unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable content or language, nor may you use a misspelling or an alternative spelling to circumvent the content and language restrictions listed above; Therefore, we regret to inform you that we are unable to reduce or reverse the account action previously issued. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused and hope this has resolved any concerns you may have had.

Regards,

Ticall
Account Administration
Blizzard Entertainment
www.worldofwarcraft.com

I'm not sure who won: Blizzard for not lifting the suspension on my account, or me for discovering two days ago that I was able to log back in anyway. Two hearty cheers for mismanagement and Vive le Customer Satisfaction!

i wasn't using that memory allocation space anyway

frequent visitors will note two things: infrequent updates, and the complete lack of color. Note above, that I've recently installed a new shiny thing called Xfire that lets you know if I'm playing a game, and which game I really play the most often. Not that you care, but think of it as a kind of geek code with a semblance of interface.

It beats a bunch of random numbers and dashes and plus signs. Usenet is over, boys. Get with the GUI or get off the intarweb.

okay now i'm officially creeped out

Much being made in gossip rags these days about Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise, and Scientology. I've always believed that Scientology was a crackpot serving of humanism. Fallout 2 taught me that. Its the tofu dog at the Great Religions of the World weenie roast - a strange, somewhat alien substitution for actual religion. But by and large, I was willing to ignore them and their ceremonial, mountain top thetan delousing sessions until i caught this on a website interview.

During the W interview, the actress wouldn't part from Jessica Rodriguez, who is described as her "Scientologist chaperone." Rodriguez's role in Holmes' life remains vague, though Rodriguez says they're "just best friends" since meeting around the time Holmes met Cruise.

'You adore him,' Rodriguez told Holmes when the actress was at a loss for words to describe her love.

Okay so here's the creeping out part for me: it would seem that unlike any other religion in the entire planet, being based upon a personal relationship with a Greater Being, Scientology uses the same playbook as the United States Marshals - only without the handcuffs. You are assigned a "chaperone" who is with you morning,noon, and night. And thank God and/or the little body Thetans for that, because without these Scientology Chaperones, I fear Scientologist would be at a complete and total loss should anyone ask them, "So how do you describe love?"

Creepy, my brothers and sisters. Total creepy.

not to mention the entire top half of their country

Account Name: *************
Realm: kargath
Character Name: Arcdelsol

Account Action: 72 Hour Suspension

Offense: National
This category includes both clear and masked language which:
. Promotes national hatred
. Is recognized as a national slur
. Alludes to symbols of national hatred

Details (Note - Times are listed in Greenwich Mean Time, GMT):
7/6/2005 15:02 Arcdelsol General - Ironforge the french dont have humor. They sold it to the Nazis

is it really that grim? well...

Microsoft plans to accommodate player-to-player commerce via Live. Game/Gossip sites fear the sky may actually be falling

While certainly not the only guilty party, Grimwell of and by grimwell.com, has posed the notion that an online service like Xbox Live accommodating the sale of MMORPG items on its service between players, as well as by developers to players, may well be the Last Days of Gaming. Not to be the bearer of the obvious, but generally speaking, anytime you increase the gyrating whirlwind of rotating revenue, its not going to vanguard the last days of anything. Lets look at things from a less doomy-gloomy looking glass and see where it takes us.

Gamers quit online games because of boredom. Online games get stale when you leave them sitting out with the lid off. The only thing that keeps people pushing through the 'last days of freshness' is the idea that just getting those last five kills and just getting to that almost-there-anyway Next Level, is going to make the game fresh and rewarding again. New places to explore (...while still alive), new quests to attempt (...while still alive), and new equipment to dress up your little dolly with (...okay, clothes don't kill you. Honestly. Polyester slacks are about as close to death as it gets).

So people resort to Ebay and its ilk because if the first 18 bubbles of experience gathering were so painful as to cause one to entertain notions of quitting, smart money says that the last 2 bubbles are going to be on par with the rest. So for a few bucks, you can take the fast track to all the paradisical wonderment of The Next Level, without all that tedium. At least, that's the rationale before the big steampunking Buyer's Remorse Gyroscope starts spinning like a khabbalic dradel of doom.

The really evil underside of online byte sales is the lack of policing. EBay washes its hands and quotes Pontious Pilate if the Ipod you thought you bought turns out to be a box of kitty litter. The game companies collectively put their ostrich heads in the sand whenever the Auctions-Persist-Despite-Being-Bannable debate patrols the flatlands. So maybe instead of pre-rendered gloomscapes in the image of Microsoft being blogged upon us like a grammatical goulag of angst and watercolors, we might stop and consider the BENEFIT this could have on the future of this industry. Auctions will happen. Game companies will not stop them with any measureable amount of success. The best we as players can hope for is that the marketplace itself, in the very least, is a fair one, and a secure one. Microsoft is offering to be our Mall Security Guard while we tour the faux marble catwalks from dollar store to dollar store, humming to the philharmonic bastardizations of the Flock of Seagulls anthology.

With my rose colored glasses on, I offer an optomistic "hey, thanks buddy!" to Microsoft, and blow them loud, smacking, gamer-kisses for being the one game company that actually means it when it says, "hey babe. I'll call you sometime."

Its enough to make a gamer like me feel all warm and cuddly inside.
RKDN

how did that go again?

Item: NetDevil is turning off the power to all of its European based Jumpgate servers.
The following is a quote from the press release. Please read it twice - trust me on this one...

'We are thrilled to be able to welcome the European players to the American server', continued Brown. 'We look upon this merger as a unique opportunity to expand the Jumpgate community with a more diverse player base.'

So lets get this straight: we have the complete shutdown of all servers in an ENTIRE HEMISPHERE OF OUR PLANET, and this is a '...unique opportunity to EXPAND the Jumpgate community...

Wow fellas - thats a prize winner right there.

Item: theres rumors of an XBox 360 port for World of Warcraft
According to 1up.com, which you can find by typing its very name into an address bar, says that according to other websites which THEY DONT NAME, thus making me more professional than them, Microsoft is quite the eager beaver to have the Worlds Most Greatest Massive Online Game Ever and Ever available for the XBox 360. In a related story, every OTHER digital platform developer pretty much said, "yeah, well who wouldn't, DUH?"

The sour in the sauce being attributed to Blizzard, whose response to these stories is, "While we'd love to make our game available to every single diverse digital platform known to mankind and several as yet undiscovered alien cultures, the bottom line is that Microsoft tripped on its poncho by not including a keyboard and mouse as standard equipment - and to be quite honest, if you can't /dance and /train, there's really no point to World of Warcraft anyway."

Please be aware that all the quotes in the above item are used to denote comments that are entirely not real. I understand that 1up.com uses quotation marks only when making actual, y'know, quotes - if you check your ticker, the score is Love-Love, and speaking of....

Item: Just in time for Father's day
As of this writing, she's two weeks and a handful of days. My wife and I have adopted a healthy, happy, and oftimes cranky little baby girl named Johanna Elise. Her surname, while not revealed for the purposes of not having any of you call me on the telephone, is equally Germanic.

She is all there was, all there is, and all there ever will be. Suddenly, all the other things in the world that I thought I loved, are now just the decaffinated coffee to the groggy morning of my soul.

..and lastly...
thanks for reading. Be well, be happy - be loved.
Arcadian Del Sol

but without all the readers

Guess what. I finally resolved my hosting crisis. Which means that (a). this isnt an update, and (b). there aren't any readers anymore. Note that I've not quite replaced my images yet that adorned the leftward menu system. But I'll find time for that soon.

In the meantime, if you're reading this - then wow, you sure are long-suffering. Be back soon. Promise.

RKDN

goodbye naked human pyramids, hello sweet brine chicken breasts

after nine years, I get another job and am compelled to tell you about it. And expect to keep telling you more as the mood strikes me... stay tuned.

Nine years ago, a friend of mine called me at my desk where I worked as a purchasing agent for a duty-free alcohol distributor. The pay there was crummy, but it was a small company that did huge business selling "pre-tax" import alcohol to foreign embassies in DC and incoming ships to the port of Baltimore. He said, "I got this great job at a defense department contractor and they need an IT tech here." Two weeks later, I had a job as a glorified receptionist. I answered phones and faxed other people's memos (you'd be surprised at how many high level professionals don't know how to operate a fax machine), and when time permitted, I would fix broken computers.

Nine years later, the technology has changed, but the good old boy system never did. People are still hired that do not know how to operate a fax machine and despite the fact that over those years, I had been promoted to a Systems Administrator, I was still expected to fax other people's memos when they were not able to figure out how to fax something. The only job qualification here is: "what branch did you serve in, and how many commies did you shoot?" Last week, I had to work with a program manager that couldn't brain the concept of pressing SHIFT+any other key. I told him, "your default password has a tilde at the end." He asked me what a tilde was. I told him to press Shift, and the accent key. He did exactly that. He did it seven times and each time, I tried to explain that you need to press them BOTH AT THE SAME TIME. Even after he did it, he didn't understand it. I was left to assume that this guy must have killed one hell of a lot of North Vietnamese to be a program manager for a gigantic defense contractor, and not be able to operate a computer, or a fax, or understand the simple concept of something we like to call VOICE MAIL. "So how do I get it?" "press four." "Then what?" "Listen to the message." "then what?" "then go get some coffee or shoot a viet cong - how the hell did you GET this job?"

Another recent example: a program manager hired to lead an entire defense contract, and she didn't know what email was. Maybe she did, but either way, she's as dumb as a barbell. After going over the login process for email with detail that an 8 year old could handle, she pointed at the 5 or 6 emails already in her inbox. "So these are my emails?" "yes." She opened one, and it was an email asking her to fill out an attached form and submit it to Human Resources. Her first question: "So what do I do with this?" "With what?" "Whats this form?" "I have no idea. I didn't send you that email. You may need to ask the person who sent it." "Well who is that?" LONG PAUSE WITH SEVERAL PERIODS OF RAPID BLINKING... "click reply and it will put her address in the "to:" field." "But I dont know her." "Well I can't really sit here and help you read and react to each email you're going to get. I really need to get back to my work."

Five minutes after that exchange, I got a 30 minute repromand from my manager for not being helpful. Its not really a big problem for me that they hired complete morons to work here - but my manager wanted me to set up my own off-campus extension of the Kennedy-Kreiger Institute (a regional school for children with learning disabilities). Oh, and while juggling that AND being a Systems Administrator, he pointed out two office hallways that were my "zone" to keep clean and tidy. And anytime someone didn't like their desk, they could find another one in the facility, call me, and I'd have to roll up my sleeves and spend two days moving furniture around - and at the end of the third day, have my manager indignant that I didn't accomplish any IT projects during the previous 48 hours. This may well be the most unprofessional place on the planet, not counting every single elementary school playground in the United States.

For the record, I work (or worked for until Monday) for edited out after some legal advice- a defense contractor that specializes in treating half of its employees like second class citizen, and world record holder for the largest POW naked human pyramid. Also for the record, I never made any naked human pyramids, and declined any offers to be part of one. I was too busy moving desks around, and trying to uncrash our network tape backup server, y'know, when I had a few moments in between having to sweep up the halls, throw away coffee cups in the conference room, teach complete functional idiots how to read and answer emails, and shuffle office furniture around like a housekeeper.

The shocking part isn't that I'm walking away from a job I've had for nine years, but that it took longer than four weeks for me to start walking.

In the end, this is a good move for me - I actually do enjoy eating at Chik-Fil-A, so I believe in the product I'm pushing, and also there's the fact that Chik-Fil-A isn't guilty of violating any human rights worldwide....at least not yet, anyway.

and then it hit me - BOOM!!

So there I was looking at this question posed to me in an AIM chat window, and I gave it some real thought this time. It was a question I'd answered about eleventy hundred times over, but never really offered any kind of solution. My responses were a collective, "I dunno how to fix it. I just know it are busted." This time around, I passed on the question - only to have the same topic resurrect its dusty bones in yet another AIM session later that day, this time with a super important big wig developer - which I iterate only to make me sound important and well connected. Thank you very much.

The question was, in raw reiteration: what's wrong with online games?

Well, the question itself is almost a self-addressed, stamped envelope of answer - if the question is posed as a defensive "prove something is wrong!" interrogative, then merely asking the question validates the asking of that question. I have no idea what I just wrote. Lets try a new paragraph, and see if I can make some sense to at least one of us.

By and large, online games are built upon a single common event: violence against others. They are computer programmed, digitally simulated, theatrically animated, interactive Three Stooges shorts. We pay up to twenty dollars a month to poke our fingers in each other's eyes and race to be the first to the dessert cart where an endless spawn of custard pies just begs to be tossed. Before I give EA its next big project, lets get more focused: almost every successful (and unsuccessful) online game has been built on the fantasy setting of swords and armor and knights and hobgoblins - with portions of Barbie Malibu Dream Home thrown in to attract the females. But essentially, all we're doing is playing Three Stooges Meet King Arthur an average of two weekends a month. So as much fun as swords and dragons and custard cream pies can be, and believe me if you haven't tried that, you should - the question echoes back; why isn't this fun? Its like, we have this recipe for a rip roaring casserole of good times with every fun ingredient known to culinary science - yet no matter how many times we whip up a fresh batch, it tastes like a cow's hoof. Its like Peanut Butter and pickles. They're both great snacks. They both taste great in a sandwich. So what is it about peanut butter and pickles that doesn't let them get along at all? It defies logic.

And then amid all the confusion and hyphens, the answer just pops out of nowhere like bread from a toaster: because. the. combat. is. boring.

whoa - wait a second. You mean to tell me that the fundamental core of nearly every mmog design, has an undeniably boring implementation? That's tough to take. I need to sit down in a chair, unless I'm playing Dark Age of Camelot, in which case, I'll just squat on the floor and eat a power bar. So if every mmog has this problem, maybe its just a problem that we can't solve. Maybe there's no way you can simulate the raw adrenaline rush you get from cleaving your fellow man's skull apart with a hammer headed polearm. Again, if you haven't actually tried it, I strongly urge you. For a while, I struggled with the possibility that its just not possible to make combat fun.

and then it hit me - BOOM!!
It was a hit so hard, its what we call a 'de-cleater' - I got de-cleated. If you recognize that line, then you already know where I'm heading with this, and you can just stop now and add a comment or two. If you've not quite met your quota for hyphens today, then dash along with me, won't you?

-

If you erase the big cartoon numbers, and replace the shoulder pads with platemail, the game of football is essentially a gigantic wrestling match. If you add hammers and swords and replace the football with a black dye tub, well suddenly you've got yourself a relic raid, don't you. Yes you do - stop making trouble. In Madden 2005, guys go "OOFFDA!" when they take a shoulder to the solar plexus. They flip in a blurring whirl of shoes and shoulders as they get clipped at the ankles. They go from a 35mph sprint to a bone crushing prone position by a solid linebacker block. Guys sit in basement demoted sofas playing Madden, and when someone takes a notably devastating hit, or when someone blasts through a faltering defensive line, casting linemen around like match sticks, to score a game winning touchdown, one of them will leap from the sofa, race around the room like a retard, and whoop until their throat is raw. Five to ten minutes later, in a sweaty state of exhaustion, he sits back down, looks to his opponent and says, "wow good play." - and then they line up and punt the ball back into play.

That, my friends, is exciting combat. In a video game. With multiple players. Online. If most fantasy MMOG designs were applied to Madden 2005, this is what the game experience would be:

1. If you are sacked, your quarterback wakes up at the airport and has to flag a taxi back to the stadium, by which time, the back-up quarterback has finished the game, showered, and eaten his supper.

2. To catch a pass, dodge two defenders, and run to the endzone for a touchdown, you press F5, F3, F5, F5, and then sit down at the 5 yard line to catch your breath before resuming your scoring run.

3. To win a game, you have to first give birth to your starting quarterback in a hospital. Then you have to raise him with a healthy diet and plenty of exercise. You have to make him study and focus so he gets on the high school team. Then if he hasn't already blown out his knees, he has to get scouted and awarded a prestige scholarship to a renown football university - and again has to avoid getting a serious injury and having to taxicab back from the hospital (see #1 above). Then he has to be drafted, and at that point, when he finally reaches "the frontier zone", he's level 35 out of 50, and odds are good that his body will wear out and he'll retire before getting to level 45.

To make a proper list, #3 should have been about four individual entries but to be honest, I gave up on the outline approach and went back into essay mode. But essentially, you see my point: you want combat to be fun, or in the very least, not so horribly boring that we as players resent the money we spent for it? Play Madden 2005 head-to-head against a friend, and see how much fun you have beating each other over the head.

custard pies optional.

the designer made me do it

Once upon a time, I was a volunteer 'counselor' for Ultima Online. It was a job that, in the real world of real jobs would probably be done in a factory somewhere, with an assembly line of nutless bolts that never stopped moving, and if you dropped a nut on the floor, you were fired. In the fake world of classic television, it was a lot like the famous I Love Lucy episode where she had to individually wrap chocolate bon-bons, and they came out at such an insane pace, she started hiding them in her blouse and cramming them in her mouth - and still, they rolled by on a treadmill faster than she could even grab them.
Being a counselor for Ultima Online was a lot like that television episode, only without the pretty red-head, and the fresh baked chocolate bon-bons. You logged on, and in seconds - the pages were piling up. You never stopped taking them, never blinked or even breathed, until it was time to end your "non-shift" and you'd run away crying. The churn rate for counselors was higher than butter, only without the creamy smoothness or delicious flavoring.

Oh its just shy of lunchtime if you haven't figured it out.

Okay so getting to the point, being that this is the day I took it all back; as you may recall, I recently updated about how much fun I've been having now that Electronic Arts was kind enough to make the Ultima Online client software available for free and I could use it to play on private, player-owned shards. If you missed it, scroll down until you see the big bold Barry Manilow lyrics and read quickly - I wont wait for you. Okay, then. As an Ultima Online counselor, I loved helping people. I hated people who used this service to tattle-tale on other players they felt were Unattended Macroers. Quick lesson: Macros are programs that execute keystrokes or mouseclicks in other programs automatically, so you can automate any highly repetitive processes - such as playing Ultima Online which may actually be in the Guiness Book of World Records as the single most repetitive process since the invention of opposable thumbs. If you ran such a program to fish, for example, it was legal as long as you were sitting in front of your monitor, actively watching this macro, and were capable of shutting it down in an instant should a GM or Counselor arrive.

Not really holding it against the busy-body tattle-tales who would spam the counselor page system with "OMG THIS PLAYRE ARE MACROING!" messages, I blamed the macroers themselves. They were the ones breaking the rules, after all. OSI/EA decided that the limited resources of their servers were intended to be used by active players, and while the total subscription rate for Ultima Online was enough to crush the Hal 9000, the average number of players online at any given time was how they modeled the server architecture. If everyone was running macros while they slept, the servers would never handle the volume of eternally logged in accounts. So these macroers were evil, bad, and foul abuser of The Rules. They were banned and many counselors and players were eager to find them and get them banned; bad player! bad!!

With all these player owned shards to select from, I've found several that don't really mind if people macro all day and night. Most of them are starved for players anyway - the more macroers you have, the higher your Average Players Online figures are, and the more new players are attracted to your "popular" shard.

So I tried one - set up a fishing macro, and in a day or two, I was a GM fisherman killing sea monsters and fishing up shoes and femurs and famous portraits. And I took it all back. I don't suggest that rule breakers are in any way validated because I see it this way: the foul lines in baseball are there for a reason - inside the lines is 'fair' and outside the lines is 'foul' - you play the game by the rules of the game - that's how it works. But here's where I take it all back. Get pencil and paper handy:

Any game that has to ban unattended macroers, is a game with a really lousy design. Yes - the devil-designers made you do it. Its like stealing. Stealing is wrong; its a crime. But if you're living in a poor nation run by a cruel fascist dictator who is taking Red Cross medicine and food, and selling it to buy himself another gold Mercedes - and just to survive, you break into his compound and steal a bag of rice; wouldn't it be only fair to spread the blame around a bit, and hold the dictator culpable in creating an economic system that requires one to steal in order to not starve to death? I say yes. So why not hold a designer's feet to the heated spade if his game is banning players at a rate of ten per week because the process of playing the game is so uninspired as to cause people to want to actually NOT BE AWAKE WHEN THEY PLAY?! Again, I say yes.

Other player run shards have found other solutions: in addition to the 'learn as you do' method of skill gains, you can hire an NPC 'mentor' to teach you their craft. You give them the gold they require, and X days later, you get a nice chunky skill gain; under the idea that while you're not actively out and about slaying the dragons, you're spending a few hours a day with the local scribe learning how to etch runic letters on papyrus rolls - and you as the player have been spared the painful boredom of such a process.

In the time it took me to write this, I think I gained 10.3 fishing - and the good news is that now I when I go to sleep, I wont hear that 'sploink!" sound in my sleep.

we'll go dancin in the dark walking through the park and reminiscing

Ultima Online + Player-run shards = free fun

Once upon a time, there was this idea. It was a simple idea that was roughly ten years ahead of the technology that would be required to support it. It was an infantile idea that believed in the goodness of mankind, and relied heavily upon the notion that by and large, mankind was prone to do good, to act with honor, and to hold on high such noble notions as mercy, charity, compassion, and fellowship.

This idea was called Ultima Online.

The mistakes, failures, errors, and outright meanspirited administrations that drove this idea in to the ground weakened even the staunchest resolve. I myself had vowed to 'be there when the lights were turned off' only to cancel all my subscriptions five years later. The game had devolved into a walnut oatmeal cluster of bad programming, misguided management, and half-implemented features that ran poorly on a good day. Which was all perfectly fine until they raised the price by half. I don't mind paying for substandard quality if it comes at a discount. I eat McDonald's hamburgers for crying out loud, and there's a Checkers right next door. Sometimes, that extra buck and a quarter in my wallet makes even the stalest beef patty taste just a little sweeter.

So my departure from Ultima Online was not borne from an exhaustion of tolerance, patience, and abuse tolerance, but more of a financial 'cut back' - which is never really a heart-felt kind of decision for one to make. It almost smacks of remorseful reluctance and so I found myself periodically looking at Ultima Online's latest box at the store shelf and saying to it, in my best New Testament voice, "almost persuadest thou me" and then walking away.

I never played any player-run server. The number one complaint I had with UO was the uncontrollable cheating that went on, and I just naturally assumed that a player-run shard was going to be nothing BUT uncontrollable cheating. Because I had no personal friends running any UO shards, I had no real desire to be the training dummy for someone else who DID have such friends. I also had little desire to buy another copy of Ultima Online so that I could enjoy being a training dummy.

Then get this, right? I hear that you can download the software for free as part of some kind of 15 day trial. So I google around a bit and I find the link and sure enough, after about 20 minutes, I had a compressed zip file full of Ultima Online installation. I installed the 2D client and then installed what I guess you would call the "GameSpy for Ultima Online Servers" that basically will list a bunch of player-run servers for you, and then auto-configure your uo client to attach to them. In some cases, some files have to be dropped into the Ultima folder, and in most cases, you'll find yourself on a shard whose total population is under twenty players, but if you look around enough, you can find an Ultima Online that is right for you. Some have thousands of players at any given time, and some have deployed "UO Old School" as things were in the hallowed "Dread Days."

Total hours spent playing Ultima Online this weekend: almost 35.
Total dollars spent: zero.
Total moments spent laughing out loud at Electronic Arts: countless.

If you quit UO because you finally got fed up with shoddy expansions that never got completed, guess what: the UO you are looking for is still out there, and Electronic Arts is all but inviting you to give it a try. The only guess I have is that they assume that once you see how poorly-run the player-run shards are, you're one mouse click away from playing on an officially poorly-run server.

Word of caution to server owners: Electronic Arts will come after you if you charge an access fee, and right now they consider 'paypal donations' a 'grey area' - so here's a tip: open up a cafeexpress t-shirt shop and charge $20.00 for t-shirts. What you do with your t-shirt money is nobody's business.

The way I see it, for a half-hour worth of time spent downloading the software for free (do your own google-ing), what really do you have to lose?

chrysallis of gaming

Two weeks ago, Madden 2005 was the worst game I'd ever thumbed. It was insanely complex, with far too many options and features and button-clicks in order to complete a forward pass. And the AI was an unstoppable flood of football perfection, at any difficulty setting. I broke a controller. I was losing every game, and winning games only after quitting them in losing position at least twenty times before. I was simply not having any fun.

Then I decided to restart and create a new franchise, which is my preferred mode in any sports title. With all the same settings and with all the same features. I selected the same team, my hometown Baltimore Ravens. This time, I made a few more pre-season roster changes, dropping a few losers, picking up a few expensive free agents, and making at least one key trade for a very dominating defensive tackle. The great thing about the Madden 2005 Ravens is that while they have no Pro Bowl quarterbacks, there are three on the roster that are fully capable of carrying them into the playoffs. That makes at least two good trade candidates. Oh, for those who don't care to worship football like an ancient goblin religion, Defensive Tackles are the Volkswagon sized men on defense who line up across from the football and try to knock over other Volkswagon sized men. A very strong DT will be able to push the other guy back far enough that the opposing quarterback either gets bumped, knocked over, or just runs for his life, crying like a sissy. This exchange between automobile sized men is the essence of the game.

Anyway enough of the Pat Summeral show - so with all other things being the same, I found myself 11 weeks into the season with having won all 4 pre-season games, and having won all 10 of the regular season games. The only week in which I didn't win a game was the week in which I didn't have a game to win. Obviously, and in the name of sportsmanship, I restarted and raised the difficulty meter to 'somebody stop me - please!'

But I sure did have fun winning 10 games in a row and blitzing the quarterback like his offensive linemen were made of paper. Its like one day I was horribly bad at Madden 2005, and then without warning, something clicked and I was unstoppable at Madden 2005; like I'd just awakened from a chrysallis and emerged with wings and a reduced appetite for foliage.

I declared it the wost game I'd ever played - that the developers were among the most untalented morons ever, and this was just so typical of the flunkies at EA. Gosh, I sure was mad. I experience this with almost every game I play, and each time - it makes me laugh at how angry I was when I was just a worm.

we used to call pacifiers 'binky'

When good Binkys go bad

This promises to be long and informative, which are two things every Community Manager should be able to accomplish. Ultima Online's lastest attempt to replace Jonathan Hanna, by the name of "Binky" has more or less quit his job. Okay techincally he hasn't filed a two week notice or walked off the job just yet, but based on his actions of late, I can't imagine any other justification; and I use the word 'justification' with the realization that I've so completely stretched its definition, that it no longer stays up without a belt.

For those who don't play Ultima Online, a group which includes the entire population of this planet with the exception of about 150 thousand of us, its an online game. This online game has a particular 'server world' which has long been considered the 'All Star' server - things are harder, faster, and more painful on this world called Siege Perilous. Problem: most people dont like Ultima Online. Problem Deux: most of the few people who do like Ultima Online, hate Siege Perilous. Its a server with all the costs of every other game server, but with a dramatically smaller population of players. In other words, Siege Perilous is going to be closed unless something happens.

In steps the Electronic Arts Community Manager, heretofore known as "Binky" which, when I was a wee tot, used to be the nickname for a pacifier. While I am not privy to the background behind this person's choice of the name Binky, pacification is certainly not part of the metaphor.

Binky starts a thread on EA's home away from home, known as 'Stratics' - a popular information/news broker for many online games, and at one time, actually hosted by Origin Systems, EA's Ultima Online babysitters. Shady relationships aside, Stratics was always looked upon as a closely mommied, but mostly independant source of information and news about Ultima Online. So back to Binky's thread: he asks in a poll question, what should be changed about Siege to attract more players.

This is where Binky gets to share the blame. A forum moderator for Stratics named Subishi, while not the only person to do so, fired an essay salvo at Binky's poll - the explosion sounded something akin to "Why do people not playing on Siege get to decide what happens on Siege?", and again, not the only person do offer this opinion, Subishi's clout and status in the Stratics organization certain gave this platform a seventeen ton delivery of muscle.

As an aside to the story, it should be pointed out that so far, Binky is in the right and Subishi is entirely in the wrong. If the issue at hand is 'how do we get people who are not playing on Siege to begin playing on Siege', then logic insists that the most important feedback would be from the people who at present, are not compelled to play there. To make them play there, the barriers that hold them back must be examined. Logic would also insist that people already playing on Siege would be, by and large, content with the server as it is. Not entirely, but certainly content enough to be playing there already.

But here's where Binky steps up to the plate, and crushes him an idiot home run out of the stadium: he issues the following private message to Stratics management:

So I am fed up with Subishi and his\her unprofessional attitude and way in which he\she conducts him\herself.
This is the message I was going to send him\her but decided I would just go to you. Who should I send my complaints to aside from you?
~~~~~~~
As a moderator on these forums I expect an unbiased and a much less personal and attacking tone from you on your responses and\or questions.

This is not the first time I have witnessed this from you and I personally do not appreciate it. You represent Stratics and as much as you may not like to hear it, EA.
We do have a professional relationship with Stratics. I don't care if you make these posts from a different screen name that does not have a UO Mod title, but I will no longer tolerate this type of conduct from you.
~~~~~~~~
As you can tell I am not a happy camper with this person and I want them talked to and\or removed.
If I ever posted and asked my business partners "why the hell does everyone get to vote on what happens on Siege?” I would be terminated.
Thanks.

So far, Binky is a crybaby, but just wait - the homerun comes in the next inning. That was just a seeing eye single down the foul line. It gets better. In a subsequent message to Stratics management, he reminds them that having game developers posting on the stratics forums is an honor easily removed from Stratics, and if they continue to post news updates that Binky requests they not post, well - what would Stratics be without any devs posting there?

Also, we, the developers, are in a precarious spot. We enjoy posting but not everything we post needs to be posted on the Stratics front page, all that does a lot of times is fuel the fire, especially after I specifically requested info not to be posted. I am trying to be as open and honest with the community as possible, and no, I don’t regret posting what I did, but it was for those people who were in the thread being vicious and implying they know how the company works.

This has been a topic of discussion here in the past, more so recently with more devs posting, and if we can’t be worked with on this we will have no choice but to scale down our posting even more.

Thanks for your time.

Not wise. Not wise at all. To make matters worse, he posted that Stratics was, whether they liked it or not, a representative of UO and EA; that Stratics had a professional relationship with UO and EA. Now, I only have relationships of the personal nature, but from what I read about in the funny papers, these 'Professional Relationships'; they mostly center around the transfer of money for services. Joshua Rowan should expect large sums of money in the mail soon.

The centipede's other fifty shoes have yet to fall, and the funny thing about millipede shoes is that if you dont watch closely, and listen with intent, you might not actually hear them. Im sure in the quiet silence of the forest leaf bed, Binky is getting chewed like a cow's cud by everybody including the night janitor - which in this man's opinion, is a waste of time. Its far less expensive to just let Binky continue setting fires and then racing to everyone's rescue to stomp them back out - until Friday, the unofficially official You Are Fired day for corporate America. Binky, you'll find card board boxes with lids in the supply room, but you'll probably have to put away the printer paper if you want to take them. Just some advice from somebody whose watched his share of morons come and go at the workplace.

Best of luck in your new career - I dont see a huge demand for lousy community managers in the online game industry. You are as 'common as a robin', my grandmumma would say. Dime a dozen if there were only twelve of you, my grandpappy would add.

(much of the information used to draft this was taken from Battle Vortex, specifically from this particular discussion thread.)

EDIT:This just in - Subishi is a 'she.' Which means drama++ because Binky is picking on a GIRL!

isaac newton

I vote quack. The guy was one of but a very few 'scientists' blessed by his constituents with the pope-like ability to declare the sky was green and have that instantly recorded as a "law of nature" or other similar self-generated accolade.

Parallel lines extend forever in either direction remaining at equal distances at all places. Where exactly? Prove to me that said lines don't find themselves somewhere in the known universe making a Celtic love knot at the end due to some sort of wobbling ripple of time and space? We don't know because we cant actually create these infinite rails to find out. Nevermind the fact that because our planet is round, there is no such thing as 'flat' in any kind of Law of Physics way - because in our existence, if you made a ruler long enough, it wouldn't be flat at all, but would be curved to conform to the shape of our world, upon which our physics exist.

every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Hmm. Okay, unprovable but hey - we need another Law of Physics to round out the whole Laws of Physics Commemorative Plates collection, so lets forego the whole theory->experimentation->fact process by skipping the experimentation process entirely. Lets just say in this case, Theory = Fact and then commission another plate from the Franklin Mint. This time, we should put a gigantic green atom on it with all those swirling circles around it. Those are really quite fetching.

If conventional science granted me Newton's Instant Law Powers, believe me I would be using them for something a little more important than whether or not gravity is a magical spell or not. I'd be submitting something like the following:

Arcadian's Laws of Physics:

1. Time is consistent unless you're in the McDonald's Drive-Thru at 10:50am, where 10 minutes of time instantly vanishes from the universe by the time you drive up to the speaker box and are asked to submit your lunch order.

2. Socks in the dryer. Its not gnomes

3. Every action has an identical reaction in the opposite way. This time, it actually IS the gnomes.

4. The earth revolves around the Sun, and the moon revolves around the Earth. That means the Sun revolves around Valhalla.

5. Every great and excellent Science Fiction movie has a horrible and opposite sequel. Lucas is part gnome.

30 second previews of games i never seen

Wow but did the MMORPG market blossom while I wasn't looking. There are more of them now than you can count with a whole sack of three-fingered hands, and we're just getting started. I've looked at practically none of them, and expect to be playing exactly none of them in the near future. The reasons for this are numbered in the legions, but the recurring theme is one of "holy crap, are they still trying to remake EverQuest?" Having blah-dee-blahhed all of that, here's a few thoughts on some MMORPGS I've played, and some thoughts on others that I've only seen a few screenshots of. Read along - it promises to be ribaldic.

Tabula what?
Tabula Rasa, for those who aren't Ancient Roman, means blank slate. The game would have been better named Oris Rasa, or in a language specifically non-dead; "Blank Stare". Good idea for a game whose official response to the question, "So what exactly is this?" begins with "Well its kind of difficult to explain..." and ends with a gigantic ::boggle:: emoticon. I've seen a few screenshots of Tabula Rasa - fifteen of them to be fake/precise about it, but the funny things about all of them is that I only really needed to see one. I've selected a random screenshot to serve as an example:
Ignoring with much strain and struggle the fact that her loins appear to be ablaze with the white hot fires of hades, it is obvious that what we are looking at is a female form. While that isn't a problem for me in, and certainly of, itself - this is what  ALL of the Tabula Rasa screenshots consist of. While I'm not entirely positive, I'm somewhat certain that the land of...Tabula-Ville(?) has its male population. But the question is, where are they? With all the screenshots I've seen, I am left to assume that Tabula-Ville is somewhere on the island that Wonder Woman is from. They have men, but they must be keeping them well hidden from the rest of us. Or is it just that in a population of five thousand buxom Linda Carters, the men find themselves as invisible as the Amazonian Air Force?  The fact that Tabula Rasa continues to find itself populated with people is proof, I must suppose, that progenics do in fact, take place there.

I burned myself really bad once in a gasoline-and-green-army-men accident when I was a child. The life-lesson I took with me that day, along with a few lingering twenty year old scars, is that hot things hurt - real bad. Looking again at the picture above, well... The punch-line is yours; my gift to you. Use it for good.

EverQuest Deux
(This will be a six second preview)
Its EverQuest with prettier graphics and higher minimum system requirements.

The Son of Lineage
actually titled Lineage II, its the game that Richard Garriott's company agreed to un-stupid in exchange for funds to develop Tabula Rasa. The riddle that needs solving is how they wound up with the development funds anyway. I say this because Lineage looks about as un-un-stupid as I've ever seen. Computer Gaming World's recent preview of it left me angry that we never definitively solved the mystery of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. It left me angry about this seemingly non-sequitious observation because it inspired absolutely zero thought and interest in me about the game itself. Whenever I'm at a complete loss for thought or interest in general, I tend to ponder the mysteries surrounding the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. Don't ask me to explain - I'm not a therapist. Lineage II will be great if you already love Lineage itself and are not a complete moron. I say complete, because a minimum level of moron is already established for you. Lineage II will also be great if you like pretending to be a Japanese schoolgirl and KEKE is a lion's share of your vocabulary. That's what makes it the perfect internet game. Thousands of thirty-forty year old men are already playing it.

World of Warcraft
The previews and beta reports on this game promise great things. I have reservations not because I don't believe the previews and reports, but because I've seen nothing from Blizzard and Friends to make me believe that they'll have any idea how to control hacking and bug exploitation in their MMORPG. But what do I know? I've only played years worth of Diablo, Diablo2, and Starcraft. I mean, its not like ALL of blizzards online games are ripe with players using 3rd party tools to kill you anywhere in the map by pressing a button.

Oh wait - its IS like that.

Star Wars Galaxies: Now With Space
Whatever clever name they've given the first official expansion to Star Wars Galaxies, its still a game without focus or purpose. Unless becoming a Jedi is a purpose for you. In that case, hope its worth the several hundred dollars you spend to get there. I just played Knights of the Old Republic again. Ah, the simple pleasures of life - like lemonade in July, Baseball in August, and being a jedi without paying twenty bucks a month. What a time to be alive.

Post-Mortem
I'm sure I could go on and on and on because I've only scratched the surface, but I have an important project to get back to. I'm writing the Unofficial Player's Guide to Tabula Rasa. Chapter One is entitled "Well, uhm, you see, the thing is..." And I haven't finished the prologue yet.

More to come.

hell hath no fury

So Kelly-Fornia Governor Arnold Shwartzeneggar referred to some political rivals as "Girlie Men" and the next thing you know, he's in a Democratic Cauldron simmering in a derivative recipe for Trent Lott Stew. The recipe calls for one Republican elected official, scalloped sound bytes (they don't work if they are raw), and a dash of radical semantics. Let simmer in the media for a few weeks, and serve up with a side of Sour Grapes.
 
The problem here is that the Democratic bally-hoos calling for Mister Shwartenzeggar's resignation are the ones that have actually done the so-called Gay Bashing, and they're trying to rush their Trent Lott Stew by microwaving it in the overnight press. This makes for an unsavory stew that nobody is eating. Sorry, guys - back to the kitchen.
 
Their beef, as it were, is that the Governor insulted homosexuals by calling his rivals "girlie men", because of course, ALL HOMOSEXUALS ARE EFFEMINATE (caps used to emphasize the stupidity). If only Rock Hudson were alive today to address this slanderous assumption on the part of the Democratic leadership in California. Because his way of addressing it would be to punch them in their faces and never stop punching. He wouldn't use a Liz Claiborne purse to do it. He'd use his bare knuckles until they were swollen and red. That's what he would do. Rock Hudson, homosexual that he was, was no Girlie Man.
 
Its just an irony worth pointing out, that all this 'OMG HE OFFENSED SOME GAY PEOPLES!' rhetoric, its the rhetoric itself that is doing all the inappropriate cataloging of a selection of law-abiding citizens. If only Homosexuals weren't such devout, cool-aid drinking Liberals, maybe they'd hold the right people accountable in this case.
 
But that's not how you make Trent Lott Stew. The best way to spoil such a concoction is to stir in a bit of sanity and truth. Ptui!

while I wuz out

a few things that made me go, "okay thats very cool":

1. Bethesda Softworks, makers of Morrowind and publishers of Sea Dogs, now own the Fallout franchise. Fallout, using the Morrowind engine - somebody get me an IV drip right now because all I want to do for the next 4 years is sleep. Wake me when its on sale.

2. F13.net engaged Raph Koster (again!) in a discussion about MMORPG economics, under the flawed assumption that any of them had one. Scott Jennings of Mythic Entertainment said so, and when he says 'so', it is. Hey F13 - stop baiting Koster, he has games to make.

3. NCSoft, makers of City of Heroes and LineageII, will be making an MMORPG called AutoAssault. I guess that the name AutoDuel Online was too expensive, but basically this is what it is. Is this a good thing? Between City of Heroes and LineageII - I have no earthly idea.

4. Fable is on target for a September release. I'd like to withdraw the IV request earlier because it looks like I don't want to sleep for five years after all. So put down the needle and forget that I sa

i thought this already happened 10 years ago

Vivendi lays off 250 from games development division, finally closing the book on 'Sierra'.

Proving once again that this industry has a healthy respect for irony, the brand label "Papyrus Games" now exists on paper only.

to my fellow XBox owners: you stupid idiots

from 1up.com:
Eidos Patches Thief: Deadly Shadows Glitch
By David Smith
6/18/2004

Players who've encountered a particular bug in the PC version of Ion Storm's Thief: Deadly Shadows can today download a fix in the form of the first patch for the game. The patch corrects the level difficulty reset bug, which automatically kicks the game back to the default level of difficulty each time the player reloads a saved game.
The patch is presently available at the Eidos support page. It naturally applies only to the PC version -- Eidos has made no mention as yet of any changes or upgrades to its Xbox counterpart.
(emphasis added)

To my fellow XBox owners: you are stupid idiots. The PC gaming community warned us, and Microsoft assured us. Guess what: despite putting our money up so that developers can work on a defined and unchanging hardware platform, they're still shipping you crap on a platter. And when the crap smells funny, and they release a patch - you're moron X2 for buying a cross-platform game in its XBox variant.

Enjoy your unfixed copy of Thief 3. Morons.
If someone gives me XBox 2 as a Christmas present, please include the sales slip. I'd like to exchange it for a new ATI video card or something.

now we know what to put on its headstone

From the Official Lineage 2 forums, comes a one-line fan review that I can't make funnier if I tried:
"The game isn't about anything, so if you are looking for a meaningful way to spend your time, do something else."

source.