I’ll admit it; last week I wasn’t sure if this was worth it any more. I put a lot of work into these things, and I wasn’t sure if people really dug em’. This week, I think things turned out really well. Plus, the Big Story is kickass. Way to go, Flying Lab.

The Big Story
After months and months of radio silence, the folks at Flying Lab Software have come out swinging. Pirates of the Burning Sea finally, finally, finally has a publisher. Pirates of the Burning Sea will be published by Sony Online Entertainment. Though they’re best known for developing games like EverQuest and Star Wars Galaxies, they also publish titles via their ‘Platform Publishing’ label. Gods and Heroes is one title taking advantage of this service, and Vanguard used to be a Platform client, as well. Platform allows SOE to keep another developer in the driver’s, while they handle physical distribution and advertising. Indeed, that is the relationship Flying Lab and SOE will have for Pirates of the Burning Sea.

The announcement lays it out like this:

“Flying Lab Software handles the Game Development, Community, Customer Support, Server Operations. Sony Online Entertainment handles the Billing, Launcher, Retail Distribution, Localization, Marketing.”

Dear Blogger,

I love, love that you have chosen to express yourself on the internet. It’s a great place, innit? It’s a lot of fun to put your voice out here and give the world access to your ‘all new’ opinions and scintillating wit. Here’s the problem, though: you’re talking nonsense. You’re, frankly, talking out of your butt. Now, when I write on my website here I freely admit to butt-talking. I’ve been doing it so long that I’m a well-practiced butt-talker.

One of the things about butt-talking is that you need to understand there are two types of criticism. The constructive kind, and the other kind. Constructive criticism takes a stand on an issues while providing alternatives, and venues for conversation. Mystic Worlds has a great example up here: WOW Crafting 3.0. Lauren takes a topic she feels passionate about, lays out a groundwork, and then moves forward with her conversation. Cameron (of Random Battle) also has a great discussion on his site on the subject of random killing. It’s a topic that irks him, but he follows through with examples of things that work, and points us in a good conversational direction. It’s all good fun, and we can have a talk about it.

Then you have the other kind of criticism, the kind that made me rewrite the start of this post about a dozen times (to make sure I’d taken off my cranky pants). Here is the specific article that got me started on this, the one that pushed me over the edge where all the others didn’t: Quest Journals are Bad.

To start with, this article has no name attached to it. I have said before that blogs (mostly) aren’t journalism, but at least a pseudonym should be the standard by now. Let me identify who is making me angry. The article itself is a picture-book example of mindless blog fodder, spewed forth from some unthinking player’s brain without a shred of consideration or thought. The article offers no concrete objections or issues to discuss, and despite having a section called ‘Moving Forward’ offers no alternatives to the current paradigm of quest journals.

Also, to be blunt, the article writer appears to have been beaten about the head as a child during a daily lead-chip-eating competition:

Back in the days of EverQuest you would have to ‘remember’ what quests you were on and what they wanted you to do, then go out and use what you were told to find the answers, items, and/or people involved in those quests. As other games entered the market and looked to make things simpler – we’ve got the quest journal. All the while they were just making the game easier and much less of challenge than they were making them fun.

Just to clarify this, dear Blogger, the author is indeed advocating a return to the ‘pick out the [word] in the sentence’ style of questing present in launch-day EverQuest. He murkily refers to this as ‘better’ somehow, before going on to bag on “World of Easycraft” and Lord of the Rings Online. I’m going to move on here, but I do want to note specifically that his dismissal of LOTRO’s questing shows that the author himself doesn’t really understand what he’s saying. While, yes, the quests are optional to read, they’re far more story-driven than most other massive games out there: something he’d have noticed if he’d bothered to follow the ideas he’s proposing in this article.

For your sake, Blogger, I don’t want to bag on this nameless hack too much, but his work is a most flagrant example of the ‘wanna-be-designer’ complex. I fully admit that I’ve probably gone there too. I deliberately put my tagline as ‘industry cheerleader’ to try not to confuse the issue, but I’m sure I’ve gotten on my huffy bike once or twice since I started writing here. Just the same, within the last few weeks it seems like everyone is second guessing years of design work, or dismissing others’ gameplay styles out of hand.

I particularly find the grousing of espoused PvE players about the problems with PvP, or the avowed non-raiders about the problems in WoW’s endgame, to be confusing. Wherefore do they get the experience to speak on these matters, I ask myself.

My apologies, dear Blogger, as I am driving to a point: The mmogblogosphere (love that word) is still growing, and what we might be seeing here are birth pangs. Folks stretching their legs and getting their bearings, finding their own writing voices while discussing the subject matter they love. For the most part I think that’s wonderful, and it’s a pleasure to be able to see quality improve overall as more people begin to populate this formerly-occupied-only-by-Sanya-and-Lum part of the internet archipelago.

That said, I’d feel it’s important to observe that throwing rocks at something just because it’s popular isn’t ‘clever’. Second-guessing an element of the Massive genre that most of us now assume to be the standard isn’t ‘innovating’. It can be both of those things … if the rock throwing and second guessing is followed up with alternatives, changes, improvements that could actually work in the real world.

So, dear Blogger, I wish a good day, and I hope that my missive has been of some help. Keep writing, and good luck.

- Michael Zenke

PS: If you think that at-launch EverQuest’s quest system was a good thing, please don’t write anything ever again. Kthnxbye.

Update: Jeezus, you’d think after two years of posting links for living I’d be able to format some html tags. Thanks Tinman.

I feel like all I’ve done for the last week is link stuff I’ve written … but there you go.

Today the Escapist’s issue on Massively Multiplayer games went up, and I’m happy to have been a part of it. I got the chance to interview some of my favorite podcasters about that thang they do, and the result is a piece called Massive in the Morning.

Brent of the VirginWorlds podcast feels the podcasters themselves are ultimately the tie that binds. “I believe that podcasting builds community and trust better than any other medium online right now because of the personality involved. … Before the podcasting at Ziff [Davis] launched, most people wouldn’t have cared one lick if one of those people left the site. Now, though, if Jeff Green were to leave the magazine, people would be like, ‘Ahh!’ … It would be very disconcerting to the VirginWorlds listeners and browsers if Brent were not here tomorrow. There’s no replacement for that.”

All of the articles this week are good reads, though, and I suggest you check them out. Kwip talks about the first ‘M’ in MMOG,  Dana Massey discusses the lessons learned from World of Warcraft, Allen Varney tackles a less contentious MMOG-related subject this week with a well-considered article on the eastern MMO invasion, and Darius Kazemi looks at what it takes to catch a farmer.

They’ve updated the PotBS site a bunch recently, and today they’ve got one up that takes the cake:

Pirates of the Burning Sea will be published in partnership with Sony Online Entertainment’s Platform Publishing. This is an important deal for Flying Lab Software and we know how passionate our community is about this issue. So before you start posting your thoughts on our forums, let me share how this particular arrangement differs from publishing deals you may have read about in the past.

Nicely done for both Flying Labs and SOE. In case you were wondering, this right here is this week’s “Big Story”. :)

ps: Last week’s Massive Update did go up, just late. This time it was my fault. It went up here. Go read it if you missed it.

This was originally slated to be an editorial in the Escapist, but never made it up on the site for some reason. I figure it’s been long enough, and I think I put together words okay here, so … here you go. Not MMOG related, but I feel like I’ve been ignoring MN recently. I can assure you that given a return to more ‘normal’ writing schedules and such this week I should be paying more attention here. I hope.

I’ll own up to it: I’m a sucker for trashy nerd books. I’ve read extensively from the Star Trek and Star Wars novels. In my youth I had an almost-complete set of the abysmal “Worlds of Power” Nintendo novels; I’ve even put down money (a whole dollar) to buy the right to read the Star Trek: TNG book X-Men Planet X. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept behind the book, a publisher actually ok’d the crack-addled team-up of the X-Men and the crew of the starship Enterprise. Thankfully Professor X is not one of the dimension jumping superheroes, so there’s no uncomfortable Patrick Stewart vs. Patrick Stewart action.

Read more

After my stint in WoW (still ongoing, but already tapering to the point where my account is closing up again next month), I got blindsided by a bunch of people all wanting to play the same game. It was absolutely thrilling to get in and dish it out again, as for various reasons we’ve been low on the EverQuest 2-playing recently. WoW is awesome to play by yourself, but not anywhere near as awesome as where I’ve been. Where’s that?

Take me down / To Paragon City

Where the thugs are mean / and the heroes are pretty

Please, won’t you please / let me 0wn, yeah yeah

My elec/elec Blaster Jacob’s Ladder has been dusted off and fully revamped in the wake of Issue 9, and thanks to a quirk of timing he’s now even the (temporary) leader of ye olde Super Group. My time in CoH has always been pretty awesome; it’s one of the few games that I’ve played extensively with RL friends (along with WoW and EQ2, now), and so I have lots of great memories associated with the game, as well as plenty of conversation at parties about our gameplay.

Who knows how long this jaunt will last, but so far I’m having a kickass time. I’ve been working a Invulnerable/Ice Tanker on the side with a group of lowbie characters also run by mostly rl-friends, which gives me three characters (including my scrapper Deft) within a wide range of levels to monkey around with.

The best part, of course: doesn’t matter what level avatars are! Yay! So refreshing after endless not-playing-with-people in WoW, and the fight to stay together in EQ2.

I know Issue 10 won’t be out for a while yet, but Rikti Invasion? C’mon! That’s awesome.

Our SG name is “Pants Are Not the Solution”, and our tag is P.A.N.T.S … meaning we have a recursive name, which is okay, because it was founded by nerds. Anyway, possibly the dorkiest thing I’ve ever asked a Massive developer to do is right here hosted on my personal blog. I felt the need to share. Thanks Jack! Sorry again! ;)

Just over a month now, and still (I’d like to think) going strong. Massive Update #5 is available for your perusal, at your leisure, if you so desire. Apparently, with a new format, too. Who knew? I know that 1up users have expressed enjoyment of the feature’s usefulness, but is anybody else liking it f’reals?

The Big Story

EVE Online’s tear-soaked drama session back in May has resulted in a stunning announcement: EVE Online is going to have a user-elected governance council.

This was unveiled in the New York Times article from last week, but a week has seen commentators taking up positions around the concept. Raph Koster is ambivalent about the decision, as he’s wanted something like that in previous titles he’s worked on. The inherently cynical nature of Massive game players, he fears, will stop them from treating it seriously.

“Anyway, the thing that makes me ambivalent about it is actually what the role of the group is, and how they do it. They’ll be flown out to CCP’s headquarters (on the company dime) and they will be there to check for evidence of corruption on the part of the staff. First off, a player-elected group of any sort can’t do this effectively in any way. Nobody just walking around an office can detect it effectively. Corrupt game admins don’t have posters on their walls saying “This is the gear I stole.” You can really only detect that sort of activity via careful monitoring of logs. In other words, an Internal Affairs department, which CCP already has.”