Steam Customer Service Sucks

Title pretty much says it all. Avoid any dealings with them if you can! If anyone is interested in hearing the details of my experience, follow the link below...

So I've used Steam for years, though only recently have I ever made a purchase through their system. Over the holidays, I bought several games during their New Years's sale. One of them, Mosby's Confederacy, never would work. It always locked up when I tried to go into a mission. I finally gave up, uninstalled it, and decided to ask Steam for a refund for that game (though I wanted to keep the other 4 games I had purchased at the same time since they worked splendidly).

1) First, I had to create a completely new account just to enter a ticket for customer service. Despite having this built-in cart/game launcher and updater/community service in one hand-dandy application, they couldn't add any customer support to it?!

2) Several days later I got the following response.

Thank you for contacting Steam Customer Support.

Unfortuately, refunds issued are based on the transaction itself and not the individual items within the purchase.

This means if you have requested a refund for a cart purchase, once the refund is issued, it will be for the entire cart purchase.

Note: Emphasis is mine. The spelling error with the word 'unfortunately' is theirs. Oh, the irony!

You have got to be joking me! They can't do line-item refunds? I can go to any store in the country, including McDonald's, and get a refund for a single item that was broken or non-functional or simply unacceptable. I worked for a number of retail shops in the mid-90s, including ones that used a computer system to track transactions and we could give line-item refunds. The company I work for now has a crappy shopping cart from the year 2000 that barely communicates with our other back-end server software, and we can give line-item refunds.

Yet here it is, 2009, and an online tech company that is hoping to position itself as a leader of downloadable games is unable to handle such a simple request?!! Utterly, friggin' ridiculous.

Where me Choppas!?

It was with heavy heart that I read this interview with Adam Gershowitz and Josh Drescher where they stated that there were no plans to work on additional careers for Warhammer Online! Which means, that the Dwarfs and Greenskins are left out in the cold. Not only do we not have the racial capitols available for either race, but they are also both short one class, that of the melee DPS variety.

Having recently started working on some Tier 4 PQs with my all-Greenskin guild, we ran into some extremely difficult end-events for a couple of early T4 PQs, ones that it seemed would have been a lot easier with the capacity to output more damage. Makes me wonder if these PQs were initially designed with all four Greenskin classes in mind, but never re-tuned when they decided to cut one of the DPS classes.

In this post by Mark Jacobs back in March (which was in response to the outcry when he announced the major content cuts) he says:

As to the future of these careers, I would love to say that they will be put into the game at some point but I can't. We will continue to look at them and if we feel we can make them great, then we will put them into the game. If we can't, then we will put in other classes to take their place.

The emphasis is mine, but I think the point still stands. And the devs in the first linked post aren't just saying that there are no plans for Choppas, they are saying that there are no plans at all for additional classes! So given that there aren't even any ideas in motion, the earliest we would see any filling out of the Dwarf and Greenskin factions would be six months down the line!

When Warhammer was first released, I remember there being a lot of complaints about how completing PQs required tanks and how the Dark Elves and Empire factions were having trouble due to their lack of tanks. Now, they are magically blessed with new tank classes. So I just have to ask...

WHERE DA CHOPPAS!

Warhammer Online: 2-week Impressions

It's been exactly two weeks since the official launch of Warhammer Online (not including the head start). And I thought it was about time for another post. Most of it will be complaints (because the annoying bits seem to stick in my memory), but I give the game a thumbs up rating overall!

In my last post I bitched about the dumb way that Mythic decided to roll out their servers, and I still stand by that.

My guild had initially chosen Skavenblight as its server of choice. But since that server wasnt open until the official launch date, it has a very low population. So low that we felt forced to switch servers. There just wasn't very much PvP action. And to top it off, Destruction had a great than 2-1 advantage in numbers, making our chances of finding a fun fight very slim. We switched to a more populated server (Ostermark), and even though we're a week behind most of the larger guilds, both in guild rank and character levels, our intra-guild activity is at an all-time high and everyone seems to be having lots of fun. Encounters with enemy players occur often, and the keeps come under siege from one side or the other on a regular basis.

Skavenblight is still a low population server to this day. And its unlikely that this status will change anytime soon. Most players want interaction with other players in their MMO, particularly when its focused on PvP. So new players will gravitate towards the more populated servers, leaving the low-pop servers out in the cold.

The interface needs a lot of work. Chat tabs have lots of issues (hopefully somewhat alleviated with todays patch). You're unable to customize what you see in the frames (for example, the large player pictures next the their status bar). Text sizing within frames is independent of frame size, so if I shrink down a window, the text shrinks with it, making most text unreadable. There is a lack of real options for the action bars. I can only have 1 2 or 4? Not 3? I can't turn them sideways? Or have them active but hidden? I'm sure some user mods will come out with these features, but since the game is only two weeks old, the mod community is still in its birthing stage. I installed a mod that gave me different unit frames, but then it screwed up my ability to edit the interface, so I had to remove it entirely.

I've also had horrible, horrible graphics lag in major RvR encounters. I've tried all sorts of changes to the graphics settings, but oddly, the one that seems to work best is using the default 'balanced' setting. Manually turning all the settings down and turning off the extra fluff seemed to actually make things worse. I also had someone suggest that I remove my combat log tab, which I've done. We'll see if that makes any difference.

Another issue I've run into with my guild is a severe lack of guild vault space. I can fill up our entire guild vault by myself after a couple of hours of PvE and Scavenging. There are just so many varieties of crafting materials. And for a large guild with 100+ players, this really becomes a major problem. We've ended up using the Guild Auctions as storage space instead. It's also pretty annoying that you cant stack items in the vault. You have to pull things out to your pack to get them to stack properly.

The amount of gold/level selling services spam via tells and in-game mail is pretty ridiculous. I reported them at first, but that doesn't seem to have much effect, as I find myself getting spammed by the same people the next day. Hopefully this will die down, as gold really isn't very useful in WAR once you get your mount. But this ties into my next point

No right-click functionality within the chat window. Right-clicking just brings up the options for opacity and such. I cant actually interact with the text in the window at all. I'm used to WoW where I can do such things as party invitations, sending tells and reporting gold spammers, all with a quick click. I have to say that I'm pretty surprised that such functionality didn't make it into WAR.

They just changed the way scenario queuing works other day so that you can queue for any scenario for your level from any zone pairing or the same Tier. This means that I can queue for the Chaos and Dark Elves scenarios without leaving my preferred Greenskin lands. This is an excellent change for those who love playing in the scenarios, but overall, I have found that I'm enjoying scenarios a lot less due to this alteration. No longer do scenarios have racial flavors. I used to go into the Gates of Ekrund and find that at least half, if not 90%, of the players were Dwarves or Greenskins. I knew that I could encounter my hated enemies there. Now its just a random mishmash of players from all over the world. All racial flavor has been removed. Also, this change has also had the undesired effect of pushing the average level of characters in scenarios up quite a bit. Now a large percentage of players are at the top end of the level range, making scenarios much less enjoyable for lower-level players.

Open RvR can be quite a bit of fun, provided that both sides show up for the fight. And though most large fights are reminiscent of the old Hillsbrad/Southshore battles back in the old days of WoW (ie. pre-battlegrounds), it has become apparent that there is room for tactics to play a part in the results. Using terrain to your advantage both to hide your own forces and to force the enemy into choke points is a viable strategy. Flanking maneuvers can also be highly successful. For example, a few nights ago there was a keep under siege by the forces of Order. We ran out there and went inside via the back postern door. But sitting in a keep waiting for the door to fall is not something I particularly enjoy, especially since I didn't have any siege equipment on me. So we sallied forth, catching a couple of players who were trying to camp the back door and then moving around towards the front. This resulted in some initial success, as we pulled a few players over and tore them up, but soon our foes realized what was going on and smashed our ranks apart, sending us back to the warcamp. After a couple of run backs and more defeat, the Order forces finally broke through, took the first floor and began trading long-range fire with the Destruction forces camped inside. Myself and several other players took positions out front, attacking any Order reinforcements that tried to run inside. A few of their stouter characters managed to get past our blockade, but we effectively blocked and/or killed the majority of them. This in turn forced those players inside to try and clear us out, which in turn gave the upstairs defenders an opening to push down to the first floor, and in-between our two groups, we crushed the remaining Order forces and drove their army back to their warcamp! Good times!


But beyond any issues I listed above, I am having a lot of fun, which is really the most important part of any game. All of my complaints can be fixed by Mythic to one degree or another. And in spite of those, I still login daily.

We have a large, active guild (which makes a huge difference), and there is almost always at least one warband engaging in RvR somewhere in the world. Just so long as I can get my graphics issues worked out, I see myself continuing to play this game for quite some time. My WoW time is way off in the distance of my rear view mirror and I wont be looking back that way again!

How to Screw Up Your Initial Server Release in an MMO (A Lesson from WAR)

1) Purposefully stagger your server launch so that the initial ones are overly full and the later ones are ghost towns.

2) Make copies of the full ones a couple of days later and encourage players to play on the new copies instead of allowing/encouraging transfers to the ghost town servers.

The Gutting of Warhammer Online

In a very surprising announcement yesterday, Mark Jacobs informed the Warhammer community that Warhammer Online was cutting out some pretty major parts of their game, including all capitol cities except for Inevitable City (Chaos) and Altdorf (Empire) and four careers! Holy Feature-Cut Batman! I don't think I've ever seen such a major gutting of game features since the great MMO disappointment that was formerly known as Horizons!


This is a pretty huge blow in several ways. First off, the capitol city removal. To me, this is almost a game breaker. Not having a capitol city completely destroys the culture of those races who are now forced to inhabit a city that is not their own. Very sad indeed. Not to mention the pain of having to deal with traveling to your racial-specific areas from someone else's capitol city every single time you want to adventure there! All the quests are going to be dogpiled into these same cities and they will be the ONLY place to trade, sell, repair, etc, and I shudder to think of the lag that everyone will get to experience in these towns. It will be like WoW (pre Burning Crusade), where only one city on each side is the hotspot and the other capitol cities are ghost towns. And that makes me weep.

Mark Jacobs has posted further elaboration on the VN Boards, part of which includes a thought about maybe rotating in cities so that the focus is on one at a time. That is an even more horrible idea. Who cares if the players are spread out in three areas of the game? That's what the game is about! If one side decides that they want to make a serious push on one city, then maybe they would need to try and coordinate with the other races to focus on that particular section of the world. If they cant get organized enough to manage that, then they don't deserve to lay siege to capitol cities. Sieging a capitol city is supposed to be a big deal anyway, right? It shouldn't be happening every other month!

I won't suggest additional delays to the release date (which would be fine with me), but personally, I would much prefer to have some sort of placeholders in place instead. I don't mind if my capitol city doesn't grow in size and cant be sieged and maybe doesn't even have all the amenities of those for Empire and Chaos. But I do want a place to call home. A place where I can meet up with my fellow Greenskins that is OUR home. They can always patch in city improvements later, but losing that cultural quality in the initial launch is a hard thing to swallow. And yes, I know that they'll add in the cities at some point. But how long will it take? Will the cities be less interesting because a majority of the player base has already outleveled a significant portion of their content? Given the loss of entire career options, its not as if each race has a lot of options for replayability. And how much of that initial awe and excitement of being part of our own capitol city will be lost? Too much, IMO. I really don't care how fancy Inevitable City is. I'm not planning on playing a Chaos character. I'm a Greenskin at heart and I want a Greenskin city, not a couple of token Greenskins in someone else's town. Knowing that you'll be making major changes in the future allows you to plan for that ahead of time and lock off parts of the capitol city area as needed. Blocking them off entirely is a demoralizing and crushing blow to those races.

The loss of no less than four careers is a bit less galling to me (likely because it didn't hit any of my main class choices directly), but probably even more damaging in terms of gameplay. Those races that have lost careers are now much less viable as single-race entities, especially the ones that have lost their tank class! Single-race guilds are reeling beneath this announcement. ARAC all the way it seems, which makes me weep even more. If you wish to read more, there's also a thread covering this topic.

These changes seem to really destroy the concept of racial-pairing and will have a huge impact on both RvR and PvE.

So, I issue a heartfelt plea to Mythic. I certainly understand the desire to get things right and not release half-assed efforts, but I also understand that MMOs go through a lot of changes, especially in the first few months after launch. I can only speak for myself, but I would rather have partial, incomplete content that maintains the immersion and flavor that I've been eagerly awaiting for well over a year, instead of HUGE missing gaps that force players into a big, generic mash that undermines the concept of racial pairings. Let us have our cities and classes, as incomplete as they might be rather than completely denying each race their individuality.

To Twink or not to Twink?

Not, its not really a question. At least not for me.

I've thought about this a couple of times in the past but then I always come back to the fact that the whole process of 'twinking' is specifically to unbalance the competition and make the game easier for the 'twink'. Before video games, this was usually the other way around. In order to make the game more fun and engaging, the experienced player would give the newer player some leeway or a small advantage to try and balance out the skill discrepancy. Twinking is the complete anithesis to the concept of fun and fair gaming.

And to top it off, its pretty sad to see that Blizzard is considering adding extra support to the twinking process in WoW...

Tom Chilton: Potentially legacy items, haven’t really talked about those in the past.

We are planning to do certain types of items that essentially bind to your account, so they are deliberately created as twink items. You might be able to find one of these items when you’re doing an end-game instance or raid, something like that.

You might be able to get an item that binds to your account so you are then able to hand it off to your other characters, but, it does have to stay within your account. They can be deliberately overpowered for a low-level character to help level up, or whatever. link

That being said, I see no problem with having characters who don't level so that they specifically can stay in a certain bracket for the battlegrounds. But when these characters start sporting level 70 enchants and enhancements, its gone way over the edge in my opinion.

Outsourcing Quality

This post was inspired by a quote I saw from a Blizzard talk at DICE '08

"A lot of studios wouldn’t do QA, tech support, PR internally..."

Really? Well no wonder so many games turn out crappy. How can you adequately perform any of those roles if you aren't invested with the product? And how can you be invested if you don't work closely with it. All of that interaction amongst departments is vital. QA and developers need a close, active relationship. Otherwise its too easy for both sides to be dismissive of the other. Same goes for Tech Support. How often have you been frustrated by talking to someone in tech support who has obviously never talked directly to anyone involved with making the product and has no clue about the product in question beyond what their screen prompts tell them? It's happened to me too many times. And the experience was always awful.

But let's focus some more on QA, because that's where my experience lies. I have worked in QA for almost 10 years now at a variety of companies and with a varied amount of responsibility, including a year and a half at Origin working on UO, and a summer at Sega working on console games.


Sega was awful. I never even set eyes on a developer during my three months there. They were completely isolated from us. You never knew if they saw your bugs or not. Or if they even cared. And, in fact, we were at times told to only enter crash bugs. They didn't even want to hear our thoughts about gameplay, interface, etc. Result? None of the QA folks cared, none of them enjoyed the job after the first few weeks, and the turnover was tremendous. Crappy job, crappy games.

Contrast that to my previous QA job with Origin where we all worked in the same building and QA was right next door to all of the developers and programmers. The developers would come to us when they had a question about a bug and we would do the same when we had questions of our own. Not only was the communication great, but a general camaraderie developed amongst all involved, from HR to the server techs.

Towards the end of my tenure there, we were even getting QA involved with the initial design process, which IMO, worked great! I was the lead for that project (character transfers) and was able to point out potential issues before development began as well as get a head start on creating thorough, informed test plans. Result? What was probably one of the smoothest feature releases in UO's history.

But I'm digressing into personal reminiscence now. In short, all parts of the process should be kept as close together as possible. With distance comes communication issues, estrangement, lack of enthusiasm and a disinterest in taking ownership of the product. And I just fail to see the advantages in that.

Blizzard Still Clueless on How to Make World PvP Interesting

So this recent quote from Blizzard once again proves to me how little they understand the concept of meaningful PvP:

"Based on the information we already know, I think Lake Wintergrasp will be more active than Halaa because one of the things that hurt Halaa was the Diminishing Returns on honor points. With this removed in patch 2.4 people will be able to continue piling up honor points until they've had enough. I know rewards play a huge factor, so with the knowledge that people have now of items we've made available through honor points, I think it will continue to be a busy place for a long time."


Blizzard seems to somehow think this lack of interest in their oh-so-cleverly-designed World PvP Objectives is directly related to diminishing returns on honor gains for killing other players! Obviously, it has nothing at all to do with how worthless Halaa is as an objective. There is nothing there worth fighting over! A couple of vendors selling mostly junk and two quests involving gathering tokens/dust for items that are only interesting to a handful of players in the 66-67 level range.

How about making something worth fighting over for a change!? If they really wanted Halaa to be a point of contention they should have made it THE town in Nagrand. Give both sides small encampments with flightpaths where the current towns are, but move a majority of the quests and vendors into Halaa so there is a genuine reason to want to capture it. As it is, Halaa is just a novelty that quickly wears thin for all players, and thus, completely fails as a PvP objective. Give me a chance to actually make a difference or have an effect on the gameworld! Removing the diminishing returns on honor for killing other players will have no effect at all on the action around Halaa. And if Lake Winterspring is nothing more than a glorified battleground, well, hopefully by then I'll have better options for MMO PvP.

Halaa is by far the most active of their six outdoor PvP objectives, and even then its mostly just one side overpowering the two to three players on the other side. That should be a clear warning that something is seriously wrong with your world PvP designs. And let me give out a little hint: It's not due to diminishing honor returns!

The WoW Battlegrounds are popular due to the carrots available at the end of the racetrack. A lot of those carrots are rather nice and tasty. But the carrot rewards for World PvP are small, stringy things with no tastiness or lasting value, and for some of them (I'm looking at you Zangarmarsh and Hellfire towers), the measly little carrot can be taken away in mere minutes, before you even get a chance to take a bite. Even worse are the towers in Terrokar Forest. It's nice that the bonus from them last for several hours, but, someone then decided that you would also have to run through the local dungeons again, and again, and again, ad nauseum, to gather enough tokens (which are only available while your side controls the towers) to buy items that are also only useful to a very small percentage of players in a very strict, sub-70 level range! Insanity and stupidity all rolled into one!

So Blizzard either needs to come up with some better veggies for rewards from their World PvP Objectives, or completely retool the impact these objectives have on the game. I doubt that either will happen and battlegrounds and arena will remain the only semi-interesting points of PvP in WoW.

Alterac Valley: The More It Changes, the More It Stays the Same

So it's been several weeks since the much lauded patch to fix Alterac Valley, and once again, we're back to the same old, zerg-the-enemy-base-ignore-opposing-players strategy. I blame both the developers for creating a crappy setup that promotes that sort of strategy, and the players who are too scared to actually engage the enemy in what is supposed to be a PvP instance!

Minor MMO Idea #4: Meaningful Quest Text

One of the common occurrences in online, quest-based games, and WoW especially, is the fact that veteran players tend to skip reading the quest text, instead simply focusing on the pertinent parts, ie, who do I kill and what rewards do I get! I find myself even doing this with new quests that I haven't seen before. Just a quick skim to see who needs to be eviscerated and where they live and what my phat loot will be when I return with a bloody head as a trophy.

But why does this happen? Why is some quest designer's hard work ignored? Well, because its mostly just fluff! The details of the quest text have little to no impact on your character and oftentimes, don't even correspond to gameworld events!


A prime example is one of the early Blood Elf quests in WoW which is designed to teach you how to use the special racial abilities. It's called Thirst Unending.

Part of the quest text reads:

"If there is only one lesson you deign to remember from your time on Sunstrider Isle, let it be this - control your thirst for magic. It is a thirst unending, - you must absorb energy to survive via Mana Tap, and you must control how you release it via Arcane Torrent. Failure is to become one of the Wretched... hopelessly addicted and insane."

But is any of this true? Not at all! I can spend my entire WoW lifetime without ever using Mana Tap a single time. And if I do use it, I can release it whenever I want. There is no side-effect. I don't have to ever worry about becoming "one of the Wretched". All of the quest text above, while suitably ominous, is completely irrelevant to any actual in-game occurrence.

So why would should I want to read fluffy quest text that isn't even consistent with the virtual world. If it gave me some new insight into the land, that would be something. But, as it is, I, like most other players, simply scan for location, required objectives and the available rewards. Anything further is just a waste of time.

And this reminds me of Shadowbane. During development Shadowbane hired a writer to create incredibly engaging and detailed lore for the background of the game. But, when it came to actual gameplay, the lore was nowhere to be seen. This was a disappointment to a lot of players and left the game feeling extremely shallow (which it was).

It's kind of like the whole anti-drug propaganda that talks about the evils of marijuana. I bought into it when I was young. But then I met people who smoked casually, and I tried it myself, only to discover that all of those crazy tales my PE teachers related to me (why we were taught about drugs by the PE teachers I have no idea) were completely false! If you want to tell me about the dangers of inhaling super-heated smoke into your lungs, or the propensity for glassy-eyed TV viewing while under the influence, then I can accept that. But marijuana stories about friends trying to crack open car-sized rocks with their heads is just ludicrous. Are we still buying into Reefer Madness? But I digress.

My point is, if you're going to go to the trouble of creating interesting lore or NPC speech, tie it to your gameworld!

WoW's 'Matchmaking' System is a Joke!

So a while back, Blizzard introduced a 'matchmaking' system for determining who you would fight against in the battlegrounds. This system was supposed to weigh your gear and whether or not you were joining in a group to determine the matchups.

I played some Arathi Basin today, joining by myself, and six out of six times, I was placed into a battleground with a bunch of random Horde from various servers against a full Alliance guild team!

More weight needs to be given to organized groups. That is much more valuable than gear! Blizzard really needs to pull their heads out of their asses in regards to understanding PvP.

WoW Rant: Alterac Valley

And no, this post is not about imbalances in the map layout.

Ever since the advent of accumulated honor points (a concept that I fully support), Battlegrounds PvP in WoW has really gone downhill... especially in Alterac Valley.

Just yesterday I joined a match and heard someone say "Only seven AFK in the cave. That's pretty good!" Yes, that's right, having "only" 17% of your team sitting on their asses doing absolutely nothing is considered a good turnout! And even better, those 17% still get just as much bonus honor as the players who are out there actually trying to complete objectives and gather that honor. And I've seen as many as 20 of the 40 players choosing to simply absorb bonus honor rather than contribute in any way to their team!

There are a couple of very easy ways to ameliorate the problem (I don't think it can ever be stamped out completely).

1) Simply not give honor to any characters in or near the cave. This would force the AFKers to at least go outside, where they might actually be engaged in some of the action, whether they want to or not.

2) As an alternative or addition to #1, remove the guards from in and around the starting caves.

3) Dump the caves altogether and make everyone start in their respective fortresses.

But as it is now, Blizzard is simply encouraging and supporting this self-first attitude in what is supposed to be team-oriented PvP combat. And its not as if they aren't aware of the issue.

It will be interesting to see how Warhammer handles their instanced PvP. I hope that their more PvP-orient

Note: Interestingly enough, I actually wrote this up before I ever read any notes from Blizzcon. I think that the whole 'other players can flag you for being AFK' idea wont work at all. For one, enough players have to take time out of their battle to figure out who's AFK and then flag them. Secondly, the flagged person just has to enter combat. Whats to stop them from sitting outside one of the mob caves and killing one every few minutes, or even just attacking one of the wolves/rams deep in their own territory? Most of the AFKers aren't actually AFK, they're just actively choosing not to participate, occasionally dancing or throwing out a smart-ass comment over BG chat. It's easy enough for them to reach out to their keyboard and 'enter combat' for a few seconds before alt-tabbing back to their porn/book/other game while still accumulating bonus honor from the sweat and blood of others!

The caves will still be a safe haven for honor suction.

So I applaud Blizzard for recognizing the problem. But I boo them for taking nearly a year to implement any solution, and curse them for coming up with a half-assed fix that really won't solve the problem.

iTrackr Sucks

Plain and simple. I just spent a frustrating hour driving through crappy traffic and dealing with crappy drivers today because they said two stores in my area had the Nintendo Wii in stock. Neither did, and both said that they hadn't had any for many days.

A completely inaccurate and unreliable service. Not even worth the free signup.

Learn to Improvise (We Don't Need No Stinkin' Mages)

So this rant stems from the outcry that has come up over Blizzard's new Armory feature (which I think it just plain awesome by the way). Lots of people across the WoW community are bitching about 'lack of privacy', but once you look at the reasoning presented by these complainers, the main issue seems to be a sense of worry about how their character might be perceived by their guildmates. Especially concerning talent builds. What an extremely silly thing to get upset about. If your guild is so anal and unimaginative that they demand that you spend your talent points in a certain way, then you need to find a new guild (unless that sort of thing doesn't bother you).

Are these guildmates really so set in their rut that they cant figure out how to use an arms warrior or shadow priest effectively?! This brings back memories of the early days of Shadowclan in WoW. For those unfamiliar with Shadowclan, we are an orc-only guild (recently, we began to allow trolls with restrictive guidelines). In the early days of the game, as the guild began to hit the upper dungeons, there was much debate about allowing other races into our orc-only guild, with some claiming that we could never do many of the dungeons with an orc-only group. If I recall correctly, this first came up in regards to the Lycaeum in Blackrock Depths (the place with the massive dwarf armies that respawn every 30 seconds).

"You must have a mage," they cried, "Otherwise its impossible!"

Nope. We did it. Many times. Sometimes with warlock help, sometimes sneaky rogue attacks, and other times with just quick-moving, coordinated firepower! Then it was said that LBRS would be too hard. Done. Then UBRS. Done... one time with only 8 orcs. Five orc Dire Maul tribute run? Done. Stratholme? Done. Scholomance. Done? Epic Dreadsteed quest? Done. Epic Shaman hat quest? Done. We never had the numbers to try Molten Core, and the smaller raids weren't released until a large portion of our guild had already left WoW for other pursuits. I'm sure there are plenty of naysayers that will claim the raids would have been impossible with an orc-only group, but, we'll never really know for sure at this point.

This is one problem with class-based games. Players get stuck in this single-path mentality and refuse to escape it (or can't due to overly restrictive game mechanics that make their class choice a cookie cutter mold). This has also limited the skill-based games, because players aren't able to think outside the box and dont know what to do with themselves when presented with an open skill tree. The entry barrier that Eve suffers is a great example. It's obvious that many MMO players need some sort of guidance, especially those who are new to the genre, but locking players into a cookie-cutter mold (even if there are two dozen varieties of cookie shapes), just doesnt cut it for me in the MMO theater.

This rant may seem a little hypocritical, as Shadowclan requires that all players in the guild play an orc, but, in comparison to many WoW guilds, thats a very small requirement. We have no class requirements, no talent specifications that must be adhered to, no equipment expectations, etc, etc. So we're sort of the anti-anal-rentitive-raiding guild. We'll take four warriors and an enhancement-spec shaman into a dungeon and find a way to emerge victorious.

So what am I bitching about? I'm not complaining about the class system itself (thats a rant for another day). WoW actually does a decent job of using the talent trees to allow players to customize their characters so that they are all a little bit different. I'm bitching about the types of players who can't think for themselves or use some creativity to come up with a solution that doesnt require a friend to remold their character. Learning to work together and to play off each others strengths as well as shore up weaknesses is relatively easy to do and much more fun for everyone involved.

Lack of Community in WoW

So I play MMOs with a guild called Shadowclan. We've been in existence since the early days of UO and have since participated in many other MMOs together and we're a very solid, tight-knit group. But, for some reason, we can't seem to keep a large number of members active in WoW. I was mulling over this problem recently and came to the conclusion that WoW not only lacks any community tools or support, but also, simply by its design, greatly hinders any community development beyond the hardcore raiding guilds.

When you join a guild in WoW, the only things you get are another chat channel, a guild tabard (which is hardly noticable on any of the character models) and a guild tag over your head! There is no guild hall, no uniforms or clothing/armor customization. Huge gaps in the crafting patterns available make it so that guild crafters have minimal use and the separation of players by zone/level leaves little opportunity for face to face interactions.

In fact, the players are so severly segregated by levels, that really the only chance to form strong bonds comes when everyone gets to level 60 and you can start hitting the high-end instances together. Unfortunately for Shadowclan, we're not really a raiding guild.

But the hardcore raiding guilds have their own issues. Squabbles over loot, players coming on going on a regular basis, membership restrictions based on class balance, and often, huge schisms amongst the guild members that usually results in a split, merger or complete abandonment of the guild entirely! Some raiding guilds manage to hold things together better than others, but for the most part, it's an extremely dysfunctional community.

Sadly, this lack of a coomunity feeling has led to my guild gradually dying off in WoW despite several resurgences and even an attempt at an entirely different guild concept (The Cog on The Venture Co. server). I expect another resurgence for Burning Crusade (and maybe even a small one for the new honor system), but given that Blizzard shows no interest in promoting and supporting community and player tools, I don't think that Shadowclan will exist in WoW in the near future with all of the upcoming MMOs next year.

I think WoW is too far involved in itself to make any signifigant changes along these lines, but, for the purpose of discussion and thought, here is one simple way I would go about trying to foster a greater community feeling in WoW.

1. Expand crafting. And I'm not simply talking about adding in more level 60+ epic weapons. The lower levels are really where the crafting system is lacking. For example, I'm an axesmith. Yet, for some reason, I can make a level 18 two-handed axe and a level 39 two-handed axe, but nothing in-between! That's a 21 level gap where my specialty is completely useless (not that either of those axes require a specialty). If I'm an Artisan Axesmith, I should be able to make all sorts of axes for all levels and classes. Same goes for every other profession. Alchemy and Enchanting are better covered, but they could all use some help.

I don't have any other suggestions off the top of my head. The very limited amount of player interaction and world interaction within the game creates a difficult barrier to overcome. Feel free to chime in if you have any comments and/or other ideas!

EA Used to be Cool

I was thinking recently about all the great games I used to play on my Commodore 64. And then I realized that a lot of the most innovative ones had been published by EA!


I remember they came in a slick, thin, bookshelf type packaging. It opened up like a record album, with screenshots and blurbs on the inside. One flap held the 5 1/4" floppies while the other side held the game manual and any other documentation.

Not only was the packaging accesible and minimal, but the games themselves were fountains of creativity. M.U.L.E, Seven Cities of Gold, Archon and Archon II, The Bard's Tale, Mail Order Monsters, Adventure Construction Set... just to name a few.

Now what does EA give us? The same sports titles year after year, and expansion after expansion for their Sims titles. They buy up smaller companies in an attempt to harness and leech off of their creativity. But, ultimately, their overbearing corporate-ness seems to drive off the more creative types, leaving EA holding the shattered remains of once great gaming companies.