How to screw over your own customers in one simple step:

1. Be EA.

The Spore DRM debacle is a mess EA has created for itself.

Do not fuck over your paying customers. Especially do not fuck over your customers under the excuse that you're trying to stop piracy. You're not punishing the pirates, you're just giving piracy a wider margin by reducing your legit players.

As if we needed any more reasons to dislike EA. Sheesh. Do they not realize this actually affects player spending habits? There are several people in my guild where WAR was the first EA product they've begrudgingly bought in years. And they did so only after Mythic took the EA out of EA-Mythic.

There are piles of game boxes on my shelf and notably the majority are not EA games.

If there was any question over whether they might abuse their DRM-schemes, it's now been answered. You don't ban players from your game over their legit questions and complaints on your forums. You just don't. Especially when their complaints are specifically that you're holding too much power over a product they've purchased. /facepalm.

This kind of heavy-handed nonsense towards their customers has serious impact on their sales and brandname identity, don't they get that?

Dumbasses.

Spore had the potential to go huge and instead it's just gone big. It's no slouch, but with its pedigree, EA could be raking in a lot more dough. Shareholders, take note, because ultimately CEO John Riccitiello is responsible, hold him to it. Errors like this significantly reduce potential, plus the fodder he's handed the pirates: It's achieved the exact opposite of what EA was going for.

If anyone is wondering why the games industry isn't as bulletproof in the economy as it should be, it's nonsense like this. Consumers don't need another excuse NOT to buy a product right now.

Oh yeah, this post adds to my negative-parental filters I'm sure. =)

Update: Mythic may have some features in place to make their public dungeons a little more sane, much like their public quests. This post has been made without experiencing them first-hand, so I'm open to retracting depending on how it works once I've seen it personally. Regardless, I dislike the idea, why bandaid something that works so poorly when there are already better options?

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Public Dungeons suck, that is all.

Or at least, that should be all.

I'd have thought that this antiquated design in MMOs would have been long buried. a throwback from the early days of UO and EQ. Whether it's on a PvP server or PvE, making a dungeon open as a public space is a welcome invitation to the worse kinds of asshattery. Didn't we have enough of that already?

Anyone who's experienced one shouldn't need me to list the numerous idiotic activities that public / open dungeons attract, so I won't bother.

But Funcom revived this tired concept and made some public dungeons in Age of Conan. It was a huge mess and a low point for AoC and that's saying something. Now apparently Mythic has also left some of their Warhammer dungeons as open spaces. What were they thinking?

I can guess the intention, to have a bit of extra crazyness on 'Open RvR' servers. But shouldn't the designated RvR capture areas be the focal point for skirmishes, not some cheap ganking while players are occupied with a dungeon boss / mob?

If they've got to balance these dungeons for the extra sorts of 'activity' they'll have, then the encounters won't be well balanced for a standard 3-6 man team. That's a big disappointment to me, because the small team tailored stuff is the best fun I have in these games.

Note: There's a huge difference between Warhammer's Public Quests and a dungeon that's just left open. Public Quests have inclusion so that all players can participate and benefit, they're completely designed around having crowds go at them.

I'm really hoping they don't have much in the way of these open dungeons in tier 4, that would be a huge disappointment for me and such a waste of content that could be great otherwise.

Wired is reporting today on a Pentagon presentation about how WoW could be used as a terrorist tool to plan attacks on the White House. It revolves around an assumption that antagonistic organizations don't have other basic tools like email, instant messaging, text messaging and encryption and therefore would be inclined to spend their time leveling up characters in a game. Are their drawing skills so poor they can't make their own maps?

Some essential problems with this theory:

• If terrorists wanted to piggyback encoded messages on a communication system with a lot of traffic so they can hide, there are tons of better and easier choices than MMORPGs.
• Wouldn't terrorist want tools that are easily accessible on even the most modest hardware? I can't imagine a lot of game-ready laptops with decent network connectivity floating around in Afghanistan, Iraq or any other war torn or financially desperate area. WoW's system requirements are comparatively low, but they're not that low. Compare this to applications that could run on most any cellular phone or handheld computing device.
• Other, more typical tools can be installed in seconds. Last I checked, a full WoW + TBC installation was about 10 gigs, which will be closer to 20 gigs with WotLK. A playable installation of WoW can take hours given the patches that must be downloaded. This is far removed from the needs of a clandestine tool.
• What tech-savvy terrorist would be happy with a technology where communication is readily monitored? WoW is arguably tracked more fervently than any alternative. Blizzard notoriously stores databased information persistently, everything from chat channels to player travel, so they can follow player trends and keep a leg up against gold farmers and exploiters. Games are one area where the western public will happily give up privacy rights in order to stop a few cheats. Just because some Senator doesn't understand the jargon doesn't mean it's hard to track.
• In order to learn the jargon, these conspirators would have to play the game and keep playing to stay current.

It's absurd. I'd like to say I'm surprised that they actually spend American tax dollars on such ill-informed idiocy, but it sounds just like the kind of excuse for a research grant that some administrator was naive enough to sign for. This is plainly a situation where fear of what someone doesn't understand has gone into wasted resources. There is a neverending supply of unsavory individuals willing to exploit this kind of nonsense for a handful of defence contract dollars.

/facepalm

It'd make just about as much sense worrying that terrorists are encoding messages in cybersex on dating websites. I shouldn't say that though, it's bound to give someone an excuse to listen in and arrest some pervs in the name of security.

Sooner or later I was bound to take this snapshot, because it's been nagging at me. This is my 2004 World of Warcraft retail box:

A whole lot of people either have selective memories, or they arrived on the scene later, but the release of WoW was not 'polished'. It had numerous bugs, abysmal server stability, barely passable Endgame and virtually none of the faction-PvP features that were highlighted during pre-release.

Sieges of course, were not included. Nor was the "mighty Dragon of Blackrock Spire", although Nefarian did arrive 7 months later.

It was still a great game.

Accolade it for what it was and what it became, not what it wasn't.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a disparity between Male and Female damage output in Age of Conan. This was predicted by many during pre-release because it was obvious that Funcom was rushing the female animations out the door in time for release.

It's a no-surprise bug based on motion-captured animation speeds that while perfectly reasonable technically, is no doubt a PR disaster for a game that's already ripe for sexist accusations. There've been more than a few "OMG how could they let that one happen?" reactions.

Age of Conan's biggest selling feature is the melee combo-driven combat. It's very animation-based, which is what gives it a tangible charm (rather than say, watching a casting bar). You push buttons to whack at things and you ~see~ yourself whacking at things in "real time" (or a close approximation). This takes meticulous animation work, which is astounding considering how good their animation is and how much variety they have of it, including death animations.

Funcom has now addressed the issue to make players aware they've been working on it. I'm not sure if that was the wisest thing to do because it's likely to hit mainstream media now that it's been confirmed.

They were bound to slip on this, if not on gender then on classes. The biggest downside to me right now is how much the game will suffer from a lack of new animations while their teams put in many hours fixing this problem. It will also be keeping their QA department busy, which is noted in the post linked above.

I'm glad they're making progress on this, but geez this is an epic bug.