Eleven Things I Hated About 2011: 2011 Edition


Going into this article, I assumed I’d have trouble lowering my list to eleven items. Truth be told, I actually had more trouble filling this list than I did culling an even larger list. It must be my power of 20/20 hindsight to look at events of the past and think “well that actually didn’t affect me as much as I thought it did.” I also didn’t want the list to be too focused on this website, too specific towards any games but not too broad. In the end, something happened, and this is what popped out.
  1. Rebuilding My Backups: I have no backups of any images from MMO Fallout prior to March of 2011 (I’m spitballing a date), because my hard drive crashed. Since then, I’ve taken the intelligent route of storing my images on a flash drive, of which I have backed up on another flash drive. At some point this year, I will have to transfer my folder for MMO Fallout to a larger flash drive because it currently takes up 600 megabytes of my one gigabyte disk. That is just images, and isn’t even my backup of the actual database itself.
  2. Spam Writers Became More Intelligent: The spam writers are becoming rather intelligent, and for a few months back in September actually started reading my articles and writing appropriate responses. Take for example, I wrote an article in October about the Playstation Vita being viable for MMOs. Now, I always read through the comments Akismet marks as spam but doesn’t immediately delete, and I found one that said simply “Playing an MMO on the Vita, especially with 3G turned on, would kill the device’s battery life.” I actually un-flagged the comment and was in the process of approving it when I noticed in the website box was a URL for an offshore pharmacy website. So touche, spammers.
  3. Targeted By Jaded Gamers: I don’t mean physically. This year I noticed a new trend. Whenever I appeared on Massively.com, or MMORPG.com, or Tobold’s Blog or any other website far more popular than I am, there was a notable increase in attempts to steal any account associated with my email address. Email, gaming accounts, Steam, NCSoft, even an attempt to break into my student loan account. What is it about gaming that spurs people into thinking to themselves “this guy has an opinion I don’t agree with. I should…steal his RuneScape gold and armor!” Just a point of interest to anyone who tries this again in the future: Requesting a password reset email sends the email to my email address, not yours.
  4. Darkfall 2010: Or Darkfall 2.0, or Darkfall 2011, or Darkfall 2012, whatever you want to call it. Players of Darkfall have been reasonably annoyed this past year by the lack of information from Aventurine as to whether or not a wipe in some form will occur when the game goes live. Now, Aventurine has not commented on whether or not a wipe will take place because they claim that they don’t know themselves if they will need to wipe in some fashion. Darkfall 2.0 is still a long ways away, and granted some of the community is taking Aventurine’s lack of response as a confirmation and unsubscribing now to avoid having about a year of grinding be pulled out from underneath them.
  5. Project V13 Has No Hope: Project V13 falls on my list of games that pain me to talk about. On one hand, if Interplay wins I have high doubts that we will ever see the title released. On the other hand, if Bethesda wins it means that they will be developing the MMO and the varying quantity of bugs in Bethesda’s single player games leaves me with nothing but quantified concern.
  6. Babying Cheaters: I couldn’t help but notice a number of MMOs babying their cheaters this year, not that it occurred in any larger quantity than years past. Developers like Jagex who stopped permanently banning botted accounts, instead simply rolling back stats and items gained. Sony, who had warned cheaters that they were on their last warning, before following up with a few temporary suspensions.
  7. I Wanted More Indie: Bigpoint Games, despite my repeated shots to the kidneys, was kind enough to add me on to their press release mailing list (thank you, Lucianne). I love independent MMOs, and I’ve supported almost all of them by buying copies even if I didn’t have much intention on actually playing the game, but I can never get their developers to talk to me. I guess when your company is smaller than my extended family, everyone is too busy to talk to the bloggers. Still, I manage to keep on good terms with the developers I do know.
  8. I Have No Intention on Culling The List: I know I promised this earlier this year. MMO Fallout is getting huge, and at some point in 2012. We have 52 currently running games listed and 27 games still in development listed, and many of them are not receiving the love they deserve. That being said, I have no plans on combating this by de-listing games, rather in 2012 one of my resolutions is to pay more attention to them.
  9. Another Year, No MMO Calender: Back in 2010, I posted an article that the 2011 MMO Calender was cancelled. It hasn’t come back this year either.
  10. Altering New Player Promotions: I’m a bit of a completionist, which is slang for I want one of everything. So every now and then I have to add things to my list titled “not to be considered for 100% completion.” When I played World of Warcraft, this meant items given exclusively at BlizzCon, and more recently retailer-specific promotional items. More recently, however, I’ve noticed a small trend to offer new items to new accounts, that cannot be obtained by current accounts. Do I need to pull out the Ally Bank ice cream commercial?
  11. Massive Action Game Needs A Category: Seriously, who is running this dump?