Dec 6
Catching up with MMOG Nation
It’s been a long week and a half for me. My wife had surgery on the 26th (day before Thanksgiving, yay!), and it’s been a slow recovery process. We’ve had fits and starts, and a bunch of bumps along the way. Just keeping her happy, me sane, and Massively rolling during a week of seemingly non-stop MMO news and drama was … challenging.
So, my first December 08 post falls on the 6th. So it goes. That said, I want to do a little bit of catching up. Because, like I said, busy week.
- Tabula Rasa’s closure is pretty well BS. Sorry, I know I should be more politik about it, but that’s why this is my personal site and not my responsible-day-job site. I appreciate that they have business needs and all that kinda jazz, but guess what? I’m a player. I don’t have to care about their bottom line. The herculean efforts of the team to put out new patches, introduce new content, and encourage community behaviors at the end of days just proves to me that this is a collection of people which deserves to survive.
- Colin Brennan took them to task opinion-style on Massively for TR’s closure, and we got nothing but hell from it from people on both sides of the fence. I particularly didn’t appreciate this post from Lum; we talked via email and I guess I feel a little better about it. I perpetually live in a state of ‘you can’t please everybody’, but this issue was more like ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
- Good idea: Own up to the fact that one of your core game elements needs some fixing. As I’ve argued here in the past, these games simply cannot be released 100% perfect. If you couch it to the community in the right framework, they’ll be unhappy but understanding. Bad idea: Let your creative director bitch out the guy that made the mistake in front of the entire fucking internet. I’m sorry, I respect Mr. Barnett – as I’ve said here in the past – but come on. I disagree with Lum’s opinion on one point: it was at no point funny. I may not have had any formal management training, but I know one bottom-line concept pretty well already – you don’t make someone into an example. Ever. It’s not funny, it’s not cool, and it inspires people to, um, hate you. Anyone want to take a guess as to how long Colin’s going to stay with Mythic after this?
- In a week with so much bad news, it was great to see Darkfall and Chronicles of Spellborn moving forward after their lengthy development stalls. City of Heroes Issue 13, also? Awesome, completely. They’ve reinstated all the lapsed accounts this weekend if you’re looking for something to do.
- I’ve been struggling with the WoW vs. LotRO issue a lot. My ‘Monday evening’ character has turned into something of a going concern with me. I’m going to talk a lot more about this in the next few days, but … yeah, Turbine has a lot of respect from me.
5 Comments so far
Hope your wife’s recovery is coming along.
On that Mythic video… I am just taken aback. I have years of management training, formal and informal, and the whole thing just screams “bad idea.” No matter the intent, do we still need to be reminded that anything that can be misconstrued will be misconstrued on the internet?
And while I appreciate Mr. Jacob’s admonishment about having a sense of humor, it does not speak well for his own skills as a manager, since he obviously gave this video the green light.
But, then, I got that clue when he was saying things like “if we’re not adding servers six weeks after launch, we’re in trouble.” We all hate zero-meaningful-content press releases and the like, but don’t give people failure milestones off the cuff. That stuff never fails to come back and bite you.
Glad to hear your wife is doing better. Nothing worse than surgery during the holidays.
Looking forward to hear more from you about LoTRO. As a longtime player/fan of the game, I’m thrilled it seems to be getting more press lately.
[...] One last point….I have no idea what to do with WoW. It is a great offering in terms of PvE, but with LOTRO being what it is, I have trouble figuring out whether I’m scratching the same itch with both games. I’m not the only one apparently. [...]
[...] Paul poked me to be sure I watched the follow-up to the video I was critical of the other day. [...]
Michael,
You know that I’m loving LOTRO, and I’m with you on the “keeping off the character” problem. At least this time it’s not *me* being the one who’s always ahead of everyone else, level-wise (Darren, I’m looking in your general direction!) Fortunately my alt is fast approaching 30, so I can use him as a major distraction. Although I do need to go harvest more wood… damnit.
The idea of a static group when we first broached it, I kept thinking it was more of a “hey, this is nifty, I bet this’ll last about 2 months before it peters out” has turned into almost a year now of memorable quotes, one liners, and just a hell of a lot of fun, across several games (WoW, DDO & LOTRO). I’m really looking forward to 2009, when we’re all in Moria and rocking out :)
Adam,
Host – Witty Ranter (New Show forthcoming!)