Suddenly everybody except NCsoft wants me

It must be a Summer thing to send out free trials for MMO's,

Over the last week or so I've been contacted by SOE (Vanguard & EverQuest II), Turbine (DDO Ultimate Beta invite which is really the same thing) Mythic and Funcom.

I can't be bothered to find the SOE mail right now, it's the standard blandness you come to expect from them after a while along with crooning about the gazillion Free Realms "subscribers" (read: everyone and their dog who tried the game and managed to create an avatar before bailing out) which just isn't something I want in my "Come back to Norrath/Telon" mail. Then again it might have been a Station Exchange mail. Like I said, SOE's mail correspondence isn't exactly memorable given that GMail doesn't load the images by default.

The latter two show that resubscription request message software has become a mature technology product which SOE didn't buy into.
Well, more or less:

Funcom: %%%%%%! Your level 71 Barbarian awaits your return to Age Of Conan!

Funcom uses the First Name field from your account settings to address you personally (name removed to protect the guilty) and purposely mentions the character with which you've seen most, if not all, of the available content before painstakingly mentioning all the new content for which said character is no longer elligible since the one thing they didn't implement is a Mentor-down system.

Mythic's approach is somewhat different yet similarly flawed:

Hello Kettlexx,

The forces of Order and Destruction need you now more than ever! War rages on...

Character name: Kettlexx
Career: Ironbreaker
Realm: Order
Rank: 29
Renown rank: 21

You can almost imagine the Marketing dude trying to explain to the dev dude how he read in this book that adding personal touches to bulk e-mail creates a higher response while the dev dude tries in vain to explain how semi-personal crap like that has the same effect as those old personalized letters with the name-of-person in a different typefont.

Someone at Mythic was smart enough to convince them not to remind you of what's the first name of the person owning the credit card but I'm not sure where those two x-es behind the name Kettle come from. My guess is they imply my name's been soft-deleted. I.e. if someone were to make a toon and call it Kettle I'll have to rename her should I log on. That or they just screwed up the name format and there's two x-es attached by default. Either way it's not making me overly exited about trying the trial.

Funcom's trial lasts 14 days whereas WAR's is only 10. The difference becomes negligible when download days are factoreed in. AoC's patching system is still rather, well patchy at best. WAR makes use of EA's data resource network and is a lot smaller to start with. Not really interested in trying either again though.

I'm kinda missing NCSoft in the whole Summer trial thing. But I also missed NCSoft in the pre-Summer launch period. Along with Cryptic's Champions Online and What's-it-called's Evolution, NCsoft's launches have been postponed till September. I guess they don't want to laucnh during Summertime downtime. Something I have to wonder about. One of the biggest worries one has prior to launch is whether the newbie area's can handle the load, the WOW tourists e.t.c. every game coming out this year has some kind of pay-two-thirds-of-a-monthly-subscription-for-a-48 hour-headstart-and-a-1-2% buff item deal or is using Open Beta and other early start schemes to finesse a staggered launch. What's wrong with using the natural dip in player numbers during Summer?

Still, I would have expected an offer to try if my virtual spandex still fits. Maybe my spamfilter ate it?

Reaction Time

I started at 239 ms and got it down to the 190's in the last two of five tries but I guess my age is showing.

What's your reaction time?

The sadly not so naughty noughties.

Three posts I noticed today with some communal desultory, even morose tones.
A mixture of nostalgia with a lack of faith in the future based upon the experiences of the last decade.

The first two are sparked by the demise of 80's/90's Pop Icon Michael Jackson.
The first, an Airlock Alpha opionion piece dubbed "Death of a Sci-fi icon" talks about how Wacko Jacko secretly, and inadvertently, did a lot for the Sci-Fi genre becoming more mainstream. It also does a pretty good job of waylaying some of the usual critique against the man. I still prefer mine for being more succinct:
No-one who's not lived his entire life in the lime-light from age 5 can adequately judge Michael Jackson.

A good read in iteself but for me t's just a prelude to the next article:
"Did the Internet Kill Pop-culture?" by Photics, a site I not often share stuff from as it's all about Guild Wars which means there's Nichts neues am Western Front most of the time.
This article gives a good summation of how life in the 80's and 90's seemed so much more fun than during the last decade with some pretty strong arguments why this isn't just a case of Nostalgia just not being what it used to be and which factors may be contributing.
The title already hints at the Internet.

The third article, by Tobold, is called "Are we still having fun?" and goes on about a lot of people being disaffected to a lesser or greater extend with the current MMO-scape and are only capable of being positive about games that are upcoming. Not sure how that is much different from 2008 or 2007 for that matter. 2007 afterall was the year of MMO's comming out which had been broadsided by the launch and subsequent success of WoW while in mid production whereas 2008 can be seen as the year of MMO launches of games that got their funding in the wake of WOW's success yet didn't manage to equal the results. Somehow this time it feels different. Maybe because it's a feeling people have been having on and off for the last three years successively.

What all this has me wondering is how much of this is a true depiction of the naughty noughties or just a reflection of the current economic crisis affecting our outlook? Certainly if one looks at MJ's career over the past three decades, there's a definite difference between the 80's and 90's on the one hand and the 00's on the other hand. But is it a good comparison to our own lives (for those of us over 30)? And the Internet in all it's faceless, anonymous glory? It is sure to have a social or cultural effect. And not just in a sense that it's not likely to throw up an anonymous Icon but through some of its other less-than-savory uses of the Internet.

People (il)legally downloading 20+ hours of entertainment overnight and deleting anything that doesn't grasp their attention within a few minutes while they're doing something else on the PC in the mean time potentially miss out on a whole lot and actually contribute to lower ratings of shows, mvoies, albums e.t.c. Part of this is truly a matter of the publishing bussiness still needing to catch up with the technology of the times, but there's a shifting code of morality involved as well, in conjunction to the previously mentioned anonimity (e.g. no accountability) and a decade without real Icons to look up to. All of it spells dilution of something. Spirit maybe?
What was the Sign of the Times of the ##'s? Reruns, remakest sequals and prequels. Rehashing of what has gone before. In that sense the last 3 years of MMO's are clearly examplary.

One can turn onto a real bleak road if one wants to. But what do you think?

No Sexy Screenshot Sunday

For several reasons:

• For one I would never apply the term sexy to the available shots. I.e. the ones from the Birthday Bash in Oxton Square and the rest of my city-trip to London.
  While the Turing machine I took pictures of in the Science museum was pretty hot, the rest aren't that sexy.
• The more practical reason is that at one point prior to leaving for London I decided to pack my camera to USB port cable and then reversed that decision with the result i now have to spend time locating said cable. The last days have been to busy and hot to do so.
• Last, the SSS stands for Screenshot Showoff Sunday, no guaranteed sexiness at all.

So instead feast your eyes on this:

The new product from GiantMicrobes :-)

Having firmly re-established my Geek cred, here's some pictures from the trip:

R>L: Roommate who's name I never quite heard, Phè and Trin with assorted glasses of alcoholic beverages.

I call this piece "Girl completely oblivious to the History of Computing"
Ok so it's not THE Turing machine, but a close offspring.

Apple I, and Phè's legs.

Phè really was a lot taller than I expected :-)

Mild showers were expected

Soccermatch: VOS-VVV (27-06-09) cancelled.



Bunch of poofs.

Cosmic Karma and other thoughts regarding London

So there I was, Heathrow Airport. Passed Customs. Tax free zone. A book store. Three sections: Sci-Fi, Fatnasy and Historical novels. Twenty Brittish Pound Sterling to burn and a two for the price of one deal on all three sections...
And I couldn't find two books that sparked my interst! I either had everything, or they were the kind of books commissioned to appeal to 15 year olds as imagined by by 50 year old executives, or the trilogy/series would be missing its first installments.

That's what happens when you start printing "It's all Lani's fault!" t-shirts. Cosmic balance takes it out on me.
I feel you ought to be aware of that.

Other thoughts and comments after a short city-trip to London:

The London Underground:
Public transportation PA systems around the world are all the same. There's only one volume setting which is just too low for while the train's moving and a lot too loud when it isn't. The same volume is used on platforms meaning you need the background noise of a train rushning by to understand what is being announced. Finnaly, public announcers around the globe all seem to want to try to eat their microphone while making an announcement.

It took me less than 4 hours to 'go native' in the Underground and not bother getting my Oyster Card out but just slap my wallet agains the yellow Oyster pads. Also every Londoner must have an instant instinctive grasp of relativity. If not it can be explained to them as follows; "You know how the humid, sweat-ridden and stale air of the Underground stations actually seems like an improvement when getting out of one of the trains? That's Relativity". It still beats taking the Tram from Scheveningen to The Hague Central during rush hour on a "Beach Day" with all those wallrusses housewives who think leaving the beach at 17:30 will mean they can have the 18:00 train and be home before hubby gets through traffic. Then again, few things don't beat that.

The usual suspects:
Phè is lot taller than I always imagined but as nice a person in person as you'd come to expect from meeting her online. And my suspicions regarding her avatar control have been confirmed. Evil Geek is uncannily like I imagined he would be after having seen his picture, to the point of giving me de-ja-vu. Tribina and Trinneke also are pretty much the same way they are online; Down to Earth, decent people who know how to enjoy Life.
God knows what they all think of me now. Especially Trinneke who managed to throw me off considerably by making me shift from "English mode" to "Dutch with a heavy Belgian accent" with results that were kinda like *blink* *blink* "Eh, what?". But apparently I look a lot like Maya, so I can just go "It's all Maya's fault!". Since I believe he isn't quite the bookophile I am, cosmic repercussions should be manageable.

Camden Stables:
After all the furore about Camden Town Market at Geek's birthday bash I naturally had to go see for myself. My overall impression: "Didn't I just spend two days visiting this place in virtual form?". I.e. Today's Second Life, especially the sections where you can get much needed freebie clothing for your avatar, is pretty much Camden Market with some houses and land for sale. You can buy pretty much the same clothes in both places, maybe a bit more male clothing in Camden and something other than t-shirts in Second Life. The female clothing is pretty much cut off the same cloth. The main difference being in SL you can adjust your shape to fill out the clothes as needed. I got a 'Something, somewhere went horribly wrong' and an 'Unknown Pleasures' t-shirt.

St Paul's Cathedral:
Dear Visitor, this is a house of worship so kindly respect this by keeping your voice down and by not using your mobile phone or excessive photographs byond this point (Yes, I'm looking at you Asians now) while inside the cathedral. In short, keep your gob shut and hand over 11 quid since we all converted from Anglicism & Catholism to Capitalism in here.

London Tower:
Ok, so we all know Brittish people have this queueing fetish and can stay at it for hours.
The rest of us, the other 98% of the world however tend to get belligerent when having to wait over 45 minutes in a queue with the only entertainment a bunch of overweight Americans trying to get money from an ATM because they can't pay for tickets through Credit Card. This really pales as a form of entertainment after about 15 minutes. Also it's worthy of note Brits seem to be less happy about queueing when it's said Americans causing it.

London London:
Ever notice how eveyrthing in London tends to have the word 'London' as a pre-fix? A barber isn't just a barber, it's a London Barber. The same for nearly every ohter service or shop. London itself is London England though. As if it's the London version of the whole of England or some such. Or maybe London London sounded to much like the way the rest of us tend to pronounce things like LLoyd or LLondon?

Brittish news:
You know, I think something may of happened to Michael Jackson? He's on the telly a lot today.
Ok, that probably wasn't just in the UK. It was a slow newsday everywhere and it is kinda a big item I suppose. But would it really have hurt BBC News to mention Farrah Fawcett's demise once every other hour or so? You know for variety and giving people the sense you actually have more than one item of news?

In closing:
If Phè ever offers you a "less walky" itinerary for the day, don't even bother hiding. RUN! ;-p

You know you're back on Dutch soil when:

My Perfect MMO part7: A Classy Post

The unHoly Trinity:
Just about every class system, and most 'classless' systems will slavishly adhere to the unHoly Trinity of Tank, DPS and Healer. The Tank draws fire, takes the beating, and generally tries to keep the enemy focus on himself. The DPS caster class tries to take down the foe(s) as fast as possible while the Healer tries to keep all the Tanks, DPSers, Utility classes and other Noobs alive.
The Tank is strong and can take a lot of punishment but has limited damage dealing capacity. He's the Damage Handler of a group. The DPS is the high damage dealer offset by a low capacity for handling incoming damage. The healer is generally known for his ability to heal, which is basically positive damage. As a rule he's also not blessed by a high capacity for handling incoming damage.

The Archetypes:
To put percentages to it you could say a Tank is 30/40/20 Crowd Control/Damage Handling / Damage Dealing. By comparison the classic DPS caster is the simplest archetype 20/80 Damage Handling / Damage Dealing which leaves the Healer as a 20/60/20 Damage Deal/Healing Damage/Damage Handling. You can argue percentages, but this is more or less the basic structure. Some systems will enhance the differences by giving the Tank twice the Hitpoints as the other ArcheTypes but this isn't always the case. The more 'refined' (read Solo-friendly) systems might have a DPSer at 20/70/10 giving them a touch of Crowd Control but in general it's advisable that only the Tank gets in direct contact with the foe(s).

When a game tries to expand on this basic DikiMUD setup (let's face it, DikiMUD copied D&D in turn but it's never polite to go back than further than one step back into the plagiarism history of any one Idea because we keep getting back to Beowulf that way) it's usually to go for mixtures of the Archetypes of the unHoly Trinity and slap on something vaguely defined as Utility on a few classes where Utility often means non-combat oriented abilities which will indirectly cause you to be passed over in most groups unless a group is doing the 0.5% of the content where that ability is required for completing a desired goal.

Class variants:
For instance there are what in SOE games tends to be called "Light Melee" Classes, which of course are DPSers that get in toe to toe contact. The 10% Crowd control is slapped unto the 20% Damage Handling ( the difference between Cloth and Light Armor). Melee DPS: 30/70 Damage Handlinger / Damage Dealer. The same way there's many other so called hybrid classes, The crowd control caster, the Ranged/Melee DPSing Ranger e.t.c. There's many combinations to make based upon the three ArcheTypes. Or more precisely, the five Elements of Class Building, Damage Handling, Damage Dealing, Healing Damage Crowd Control and Support. There's a Sixth called Utility by me but leave that for after I'm done explaining how the Lego blocks work :-)

Arch-Abilities:
The Lego blocks of Class building are:

• Damage Handling: (DH:) which can be subdivided into Damage Soaking, Hitpoints and Damage Deflection (dodge, block but if block means the shield deteriorates and holds back only a portion of the damage it's a combination off all three really).
• Damage Dealing: (DD:) which in turn is divided into Melee and Ranged, both of which can be further detailed by attaching acronyms like DoT, Spike damage, BuildUp damage, AoE, PBAoE, PBDoTAoE ETC.
• Healing Damage: (HD:) can really be classified along the same lines as DPS though melee healing is relatively uncommon.
• Crowd Control: (CC:)which can be further split into Taunts, Anti-Taunts, Holds, Dazes and Mezzes.
  The first two respectively mean getting the focus and deflecting the enemy focus to someone else, Holds mean rooting the foe but not otherwise incapacitating him. Dazes include all forms of stunning, blinding or other means of incapacitating the foe. With Mezzes I mean any form of mesmerization, seduction, mind-control or whatever that allows one to temporarily make the enemy fight on your side.
• Support: which comes in two forms Buffs and DeBuffs. Oh and DeBuff removal too. In essence this covers all Stats altering abilities like curses, blessings e.t.c. and come in the single target melee, single target ranged, AoE, group, PBAoE and LoS-AoE varieties. Possibly more.
  

When take a good look at your game's classes you'll probably note that the classes therein are pretty much made up off these Lego blocks or Arch Abilities where you can usually make a pretty obvious 20/60/20 percentage division. Especially those games (nearly the entire SOE stable as well as just about all the other First and Second Generation games) that are close to their DikiMUD roots.

Pet Classes:
Pet classes are really the only class customarily found within MMO's that doesn't really fit at first blush. They're really the first attempt at making solo classes and the traditional pet classes (rule of thumb the ones where you only have one pet at a time) are still easily recognizable as having these four components. The Pet serves to Soak Damage (DH) while the caster does the nuking (DD) and is either capable of healing his pet or it isn't really needed.

There's a few ways a game Designer can go from these Building Blocks. Most common and "safest" are the fixed templates, the Classes, as I've been mentioning before. Alternate Advancement Schemes are used to obscure the strict balancing involved in this type of traditional system. However there are exceptions to this approach.

Deviations:
I.e. we won't be mentioning SOE for a while now.
GuildWars tries and succeeds reasonably well to allow for more freedom of choice by introducing dual "Professions" that allow you to "flavor" your Character with a 70/30 combination of each Profession's Strengths. A WaMo (Warrior/Monk) is still a Tank with some Healing. Some of the other combinations are a bit more exciting though. But in essence the traits (what are they called again?) that come with each Profession are pretty much identical to the Arch-Abilities I mentioned and the Skills each require a Trait and can therefore be categorized according to the same blocks. The dual Profession system, in conjunction with the ability to readily swap out your secondary one (and of course the ability to completely rearrange all your stats as you please) grants a lot more freedom than traditional systems while still allowing the designers/developers a measure of control over the design and its templates. The Protection Magic line is the strongest deviation from the classic approach I think.

City of Heroes/Villains in its way went a bit further, or maybe I should say further back. To the real basics to first set up powersets which tend to incorporate one or often two of the blocks then, when they had enough of those, loosely clustered them around their classes aptly called Archetypes. Then pretty much applied the percentages I mentioned at the start to them and Presto.
As a result a Defender (Support Class/Healing Damage) can have a powerset rather similar to that of a Controller (Support/Crowd Control) while they have different levels of veracity. In fact both often share a Ranged DPS Powerset with the Blasters (the Ranged DPS class) which in turn is mediocre at Support or Crowd Control but has no Healing. Both the Tank (Tank, duh!) and Scrapper (melee DPS) share some powersets with other Archetypes which results in a pretty big diversity of flavors. I didn't do the math as I'm unsure about the nr of Powersets available but I'm pretty sure there's more possible combinations in CoX than GW. Especially since there's a tertiary set of powerset for them to pick from. I'll leave it to Phè to give a stab at realistical percentage comparisons but I think it's about 50/30/20 or some such in the effectiveness of Primary, secondary and tertiary powersets. As mentioned, each powerset tends to incorporate two of my building blocks. Sometimes more even. Oh and each Archetype has its own 'Kink' much like all but the most dreary Class Systems have.

A Kink is an ability not really covered by the blocks that's specific to that Class or Archetype.
Palladins traditionally can often do a few spells of the healing, crowd control or Support blocks.
Blasters deal more damage the fewer hitpoints they have. A CoV Dominator will go in Super DPS mode if dealing enough damage over time. Pet classes can have Pets. Those are Kinks.

Free Form:
Of course there's the Classless so called Skill-based MMO's.
When you look at those in terms of my five building blocks, they're not that different from the classical class based game systems except that players have to work more at defining their classes. But since most players will gravitate to either being a member of the unHoly Trinity or play solo as a Jack of All Trades (oddly enough most classless MMO's miss a pet-class) the end result really isn't that much different from Classes with Alternate Advancement Schemes pretty much taking care of the usual deviations to the Archetypes produced in this kind of environment.
Of course, balancing tends to be Hell on Virtual World and there generally aren't any 'Kinks'.

My Perfect MMO Class System:
Reading between the lines you may have noticed a slight, slight I tell you, bias towards the way City of Heroes went about it. Although a Class System with a high number like Vanguard will catch my fancy too.
I'm not sure if they intended it that way, but putting 5 Building blocks into powersets that incorporate 2 blocks each strikes me as sheer genius. You always end up with a pretty good mix of abilities but mis one 'line'. Good enough to keep you going solo, but grouping will definately have an advantage.
I did mention that Tertiary Powerset remember? This Utility Powerset branch incorporates a msih mash of abilities ranging from transportation powers to third rate healing to group buffs. It's really a combination of weak versions of the other blocks and "true utility" abilities.
I really like the concept of three choices of Ability Sets containing two Ability Block each as well as the concept of leaving out one Ability Block with a power/strength division of 50/30/20. So in My Perfect MMO there'd have to be seven Blocks not five. Number six should be obvious by now. Utility although what exactly consists Utility can be a bit murky and background related.
Things like Sneaking, Tracking, Armor/Weapon repair e.t.c. would definately be Utility.
It's the Seventh block I'm having doubts about. It could either be the "Kink" or it could be a Crafting Ability line. The problem I have with the "Kink" is that many Class Kinks could arguably be Utility Abilities and vice versa. For instance a Rogue would traditionally be able to backstab and pick pockets. Backstab would be seen as a kink more often than a utility. Pickpocket though could be seen as a utility, a kink or possibly even a craft.
I think this is the kind of dilemma that makes designers go for the save option of classes or Cryptic's more ballsy Archetypes.

I'm very curious what you all think about this. Especially the Pro-Classless Systems people.
Next post, unless I leave the topic alone for another 2 months, will be how I see this in combination with my chosen Background of Shadowrun which despite it officially being classless not only includes Archetypes but also Races.

Morality System

As you can probably remember I'm usually dissatisfied with the usual Black and White morality system and even played with a concept including humanity for one post.
Today I ran across a different system. It's half Faction, half Morality really.

Each section is a faction in an upcoming MMO. They all have one arch-nemesis two allies and two enemies each.
Basically it means the closer another faction is to your (counter)clockwise the better you like them.
It makes kinda sense, but it immediately fails.
For instance, while Society & Self can be considered opposites, why would 'Nature' be closer to 'Society' than 'Science'?
I'd think 'Order' would be neutral to both Science and Nature as both by and large don't care about order. In fact both are essentially amoral.
But I can understand that they di it this way as they need to serve the factions, and for once they're not "Group A wants to destroy the world, Group B wants to own it and Group C wants to keep it". As societies these factions make sense.

Extra cred for who knows what MMO I'm talking about.
Hint: It's not Fantasy and not Space. Nor is it Cyber- or Steam- Punk as such.

I can't tell you much more just yet because after this I'm agreeing to an NDA.

Arranigng a meeting Old Skool

I gave Geek the heads up about my travel itinerary, which is to land at London City Airport (LCY) on Thursday the 215th at at aproximately 18:15then make my way, somehow, to the Old Street Underground station to meet up with Phèdre there at around 19:00
Since this trip supposedly takes 37 minutes this gives me plenty of time to get lost at either the airport or the Underground and find it again.

Geek then expressed his hopes that Phè dan myself have exchanged phone numbers or intend to prior to the meeting as Old Street Station has a warren-like number of exits.
Well, we did. However, me being a rabid anti cellphone maniac only recently felt obligated to acquire one. Because of the situation with my mom. So I have a pre-paid thing of which I'm unshure if it works.
Now one of the reasons why I hate those little buggers (besides their inexplicable tendency to run out of batteries at the worst possible times) is that it stiffles human ingenuity and makes us even more lazy than we are by nature.
I.e. people used to be perfectly capable of meeting up without the use of these newfangled technologies.

We did it using Google Maps street view!

Ok, so we used to do it by making prior agreements as to where exactly to meet.
Like "at the North-Eastern Exit", or "under the meeting point sign", which may be a Dutch railway station compulsive disorder excentricity. Anyway, looking around Old Street I noticed this lovely triangular piece of clear, out of the traffic flow, pavement which is ideal for meeting up.
Provided that Phè thinks this is a good idea of course. Maybe she's in favor of meeting somewhere she can park her car without the Bobbies pouncing all over instead. ut for a pedestrian meeting spot this looks ideal. There's even a candy machine just out of sight to the left/North for if anyone is early and fancies a snack :-)


See? With some ingenuity and Google Maps you can find Lo-Tek means of meeting up without needing to resort to cellphones. Next week we will demonstrate that I'm a bleeding idiot by totally failing to meet up this way and find each other at the appointed restaurant half an hour later instead. As it's only 0.3 miles away. :-)

Cekkphones are teH Evil!

Good Stuff

Since we're sharing newly found blogs now, I'll add my own :-)
Yesterday Sara Pickell from the Symptoms of a Greater Cure posted the following in an article:

What it comes down to most specifically is that of a competition between two fundamental business concepts, that of the creation of a product, and the running of a service.
[snip]
This creates a secondary battle between placeness and gameness. You see, the goal of a product driven business is to release the initial game with a certain amount of stickiness, hopefully full on addiction, to pay the intervening time frame until you can release another product. The goal of a service driven business is to create a 'place' that people want to be, and then to use that place to sell products, advertise, and/or charge admission. While a service may benefit from a more addictive style as well, it's single most valuable asset is positive word of mouth, and putting that in danger for a little more stickiness could cost you everything.

I think this is a really good distinction. From my own experiences, it's very easy for a development studio to think of the game they're going to release as a product rather than a service. Many mistakes can flow from that conception. Of course, some games are really more producty than servicy in a good way. I.e. Guild Wars, whereas others seem to have found a great balance between product and service, mainly the EverQuest franchise. And some franchises like Second Life and There! are all servicy, but very little gamey.

This might be more distinctive of "what's wrong with MMO's" in general than gamey vs worldy discussions. Then she goes on, after explaining audience types for products and services in Barttle's archetypes.:

The simple fact of the matter is that everything in the MMO genre is a service, but are being given the treatment of products. Those who make WoW-a-likes are banking on people wanting more of the same product, which is a complete fallacy, since they are trying to create a competing service. It's hard to blame them too much though, since it was WoW that was continuing on the mistake in the first place. I tend to believe part of the reason for WoW's success was primarily because they improved on the fundamental experience they were giving to their players compared to most games released before it.

I think she's really on to something here, albeitI think the terms 'fact' and 'everything' could have done with a bit of softening. The F2P MMo's are already more Servicy than Producty mainstream Subsctiption based MMO's. But I think that's really due to strapping serive ontop of a product rather than really making a service to begin with.

Anyway, you should read the whole piece and then post your own thoguhts here :-)

Paleo-Future

I bumped into a very interesting blog. It is filled with future predictions from the past. Really interesting to read how people expected the future to be in the past. For the most part they were quite wrong. Both in underestimating and overestimating progress. But one entry I read I thought was really great. I got the (slightly changed) quote below from here, which is from predictions made in 1893. The commentator of Paleo-Future suggested to replace the word book with blog, so I did :)

Every person of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a blog. As a rule, it is a superficial blog, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more blogs are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of blogs that are not worth reading, but it is true of the blogs that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual affranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many blogs printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable.

I am so glad I did my part to prove it.

Ever wonder what the Internet thinks about you?

Click here to find out

Unhappy about Sims3 Shop

I'm unhappy with the Sims3 Shop.

For once not because of wierd ass Dollar / Euro exchanges. 1000 Simpoints go for 10 dollars or 6 Euro. That seems fair. I'd have to check if they get the Brittish Pound Sterling correct to though.
I'm unhappy for another reason. For that I have to explain about Sims 2.

Sims2 came out with a nifty little feature called "The BodyShop", this was essentially a Sim and Sim-clothing viewing cabinet with the means of exporting and importing items using a simpackage fileformat. These simpackages would consist of one or two textures, dubbed recolours, and a mesh which is used to depict bumpmapping and transparency. Not that different from the way Unreal or Quake skins are set up, if you are familiar with that.
What this allowed you to do was make your own clothing and hair for Sims2.

This was done, a lot.

What Sims2 created was what's probably the best argument in favor of User Created Content.

Several big sites popped up around the BodyShop feature, with litterally thousands of Victoria Secrets alike lingerie sets and probably a few dozen Calvin kleinesque trunks as well. It didn't stop there though. Hair ranging from better mohawks all the way to hair that Goldilocks would get jealous at. The modding community, already firmly established took up the challenge of regulating all of this additional content. One out of ten items you'd download would be missing a mesh, but soon crossreferencing between sites was a fact and tools were made to keep your download directory semi-clean.
The best of the best content ended up on "Premium Sites" which usually worked with a subscription or a pay-per-download bussiness model The original game was 6.5 Gb in size with some content added through the belatedly launched Sims Exchange. My Downloads folder peaked at 32 GB at which point I threw everything out and started from scratch as it'd gotten polluted with broken meshes e.t.c. It later stabilized at around 26 GB.

Besides clothing you could also share whole families and housing plots. People got very creative with that, to the point where a circular staircase, including the required animations was made for this game which firmly believed in straight-line stairs. A tie in with Sim City 4 allowed you to create whole additional city-scapes (well, ground and roads anyway) for use in Sims2. I suspect I actually spent more time going through this User Created content and picking out what I liked the most for my own games than I did actually playing the game.

It's only natural that with Sims3 EA/Maxis decided that:
A) they wanted the bigger slice of that pie
B) they didn't want all the tech-support issues they had to deal with from people with Sims2 client modded by little brother, big sister or themselves that wouldn't work anymore.

Sims 3 doesn't come with a Bodyshop anymore. Instead everything in the game is "skinnable" using "patterns". This has the benefit of making it easy for everyone to make horrid color combinations and uploading them through the new exchange.
The Sims 3 Exchange is set up a lot smarter than the old Simms2 one. The game comes with a launcher that puts the "highlights" in your face prior to starting up your game. You can download new stuff with a few clicks on the mouse, then you have to confirm that you saw it being added with another couple of clicks (Sims 3 is very fond of you clicking confirmations for some reason) and you can make recommendations, which are like votes for the items. You also can't modify city maps anymore. In fact, you can't even add plots beyond the predefined number and shapes anymore. A trade-off for the "Living City" I bet.

This is User Generated Content. Not User Created Content.
I know that Richard Barttle is all in favor of User Generated over User Created content but that applied to MMORPG's and I don't fully agree with him in that genre either.

They blithely reused the votes system used by most of the independent sites, except without the distinction applied by those sites. Nor should they. They really ought to have put something along the lines of some "which of these two do you like best" votes during launch. It's quick, it's easy, it's non friend-biased. And if they do it without a confirmation pop-up to click to confirm you saw that the game saw that you voted, it'd not be annoying. it'd allow them to "feature" the top 2% which is all you really want to see anyway.

Essentially the Exchange right now is loaded with crap. Most of it is low data content as all you're really storing in the new packages is the number of the Maxis made object-meshes, the 1-4 patterns per mesh and the 1-4 colors per pattern. For anything but a sim itself which has lots of postional data for physical attributes, except a boob-slider for some reason, that's under 1KB.
But you can't add your own actually created stuff. I tried a third party site for some custom patterns (e.g. Snoopy for t-shirts kinda) but that's far from working well right now. Adding custom made clothing is going to require not just modding, but hacking skills.
As I said, it's very easy to create crap using the pattern system. So if you're at all miffed about the User Created Content lock-out, that's exactly what you do as it's real easy and a lot less time consuming than say painstakingly apply an overall colourscheme to a small bathroom.

In other words, Sims3 Exchange has the usual 98% User Created Crud and the 2% who'd actually be making beautiful stuff are adding their own crud out of resentment. I already noticed that the few gems I found on the Sims3 Exchange were first available through one or more of the third-party sites I have bookmarked since Sims2 days. But I was going to complain about the Sims3 Store, not the Exchange.

The Exchange allows you to share your creations, screenshots video's and stories with your fellow sim gamers. The Sims 3 Shop allows you to buy additional item meshes (hair, clothes, furniture, e.t.c.) My problem isn't that they're offering a single matching furniture / wallpaper combination for a third of what the game itself costs (20 vs 63 euros). Nor is it that there seems to be no correlation between in-game worth 9which is arguably subjective) and Simpoint cost.
No, my problem is that every three or four downloads of the previously mentioned crud is going to result in an error message saying you're missing necessary premium content. Note that this could be a single wall-hanging in a very big plot as was the case with a very nice cabin I uploaded to the Exchange and no-one could get because they hadn't downloaded that (a freebie btw) particular item.

The "free as in included in the purchase price, not free as in beer" free 1000 Simpoints everyone gets at first ensure a nice spread of these premium items which is of course a sneaky way of enticing people to spend more money on Simpoints so they can download that hot item from the Exchange. However, the warning gives absolutely no clue as to what item you might be missing!
Again, a single lightbulb in a huge mansion might be the problem. You can't opt to use a lot without that particular piece of content either. That'd lead to tech support calls from people who don't understand the concept of consequences anymore. It's almost enough to start spamming that Exchange with crud yourself even though you're not personally gimped in your creative desires.

Most of the active modder sites have a strong "Boycot the Exchange" streak going, a leftover from the times when people'd download high grade packages and take credit for them through the Sims2 Exchange which was the only one without any source tracking at all. They're now boycotting for pretty much what I ranted about above and I think I'll join them.
As it is, the upload/download manager thinks I'm logged out even though the site doesn't think so and I'd need tech-support to get it solved. I think I'll go the way of the modders instead.

I can understand them wanting to have less "problematic" User Created Content.
I can understand them wanting to make a buck from micro-transactions
I can even understand them trying to keep the User Created Sims Porno to a minimum.

What I don't understand is how they manage to shoot themselves in the foot so thoroughly while completely missing the fact they can't really prevent the last point as long as the client remains in the hands of the enemy.

I am still having fun with the game though.
That "Fertility" Trait you can buy as a Lifetime happiness reward so you have a better chance at getting offspring?
You really don't need that as a Young Adult. My first family oriented Sim dropped 6 of them (5 girls, one boy, one set of twins). She probably would have dropped more, she got pregnant every time hubby so much as looked at her, but 8 is still the maximum number of sims on a plot. And there's a reason for that.
In order to regulate breakfast & shower traffic they ended up living in a trailer park with a central "sanitation" wagon with lots of showers and, er... No not that way.
By the time I managed to have teenagers turn into young adults leave the nest she'd aged to mature and was near retirement. I also discovered that if you spend the afternoon e-mailing Phè the AI will keep going and your lesbian couple will adopt a child without your intervention but leave the naming up to you (and a confirmation click).

Sometimes

a picture says more than a thousand words:

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