rant – Page 2 – MMO Fallout

MMO Rant: Onigiri On Switch Is A Pathetic Mess

Sporting Playstation 1 graphics and Super Nintendo performance, Onigiri is the most pathetic thing that will release on the Nintendo Switch in 2018.

Onigiri is such an offensively incompetent mess that I find it hard to believe that the game wasn’t made this bad on purpose, either as a method of intentionally driving a business into the ground to fulfill a personal vendetta, or it’s just the front for an international money laundering operation like a pizzeria run by the mob that gets its real money selling heroin on the side. Am I saying that developer Cyberstep Inc has underlying motivations for releasing this game on the Switch apart from releasing a game? Yes. Yes, I am.

And I do so because the alternative is to admit that Cyberstep is one of the worst developers to put out an Asian MMO, which is like giving the worst score of a pool of test takers that already sit in the .001 percentile in a classroom full of baboons. With this show of competence, I wouldn’t allow any of Cyberstep’s developers to boil me water for tea out of fear of somehow managing to be poisoned in the effort while my house burns down. It astounds the mind that people come into work on a daily basis, call this game a job well done, and actually get a paycheck to put this stuff out. The folks at Cyberstep do get a paycheck, right? This isn’t an involuntary internship program that specifically hires poetry students with no programming knowledge?

I’m going to state the obvious and point out that Onigiri is a port and isn’t new. It is, however, a port from a 2013 game. Yes, this game came out in 2013. It was ported incompetently not too long ago to the Playstation and Xbox where it exhibits most of the same problems that it does on the Nintendo Switch.

And where to begin with the Switch problems? Onigiri runs at a wonderful five frames per second, generally getting down into the slideshow territory the moment you try to do, well, anything. It doesn’t help that the game has a draw distance of roughly twenty feet resulting in the Amiga-tier engine barely capable of loading the double-digit polygonal structures without nearly dying of an aneurysm every two seconds. Movement is a frustrating tango of slightly touching the stick only to have your character always take four or five more steps than you meant which means navigating small spaces will have you contemplating death. Combat would be just barely passable if the creatures didn’t have the habit of disappearing and then reappearing about ten feet away. Throw in a UI that is a mess to navigate and you have a game that takes longer to download than it does to recognize that it’s an unfixable disaster that needs to be deleted.

I considered whether or not posting this article would ultimately be pointless. It’s fairly obvious from the state of the game and its continued quality over the past five years that the developers don’t care. I would be incredibly surprised if the developers go home from work every day with an attitude with pride in their work and less of a “well at least I’m getting paid from this dumpster fire of a company” line of thought. There’s no information in particular to give out since the game is free and very obvious from the start that it is of the lowest quality trash. So I formulated it as a rant.

I suppose my ultimate ending here is that I am disappointed with Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo because this proves that their quality assurance is a myth. Every so often we hear about games being denied release or patches being delayed because the developer didn’t pass the stringent certification from one of the three console manufacturers. If Onigiri is the kind of product that passes, I can’t imagine what a horrible state of existence those games were in for Nintendo to give its stamp of disapproval. It also marks a point where game consoles are no longer the curated stores that they once were, but are now willing to accept every mouth-breathing developer who shoddily compiles some code and calls it a game.

Those of you who read MMO Fallout will know that I don’t attack gamers as part of my coverage, but I think we all know who is playing this on Switch and saying “it’s really good quality.” Cyberstep’s main customer base are the depressingly lonely, the kind of people so sad that they look at these horribly drawn and posed anime girls and ultimately decide that the game is of decent quality because they’re kinda cute and they imagine a different reality where they can hold hands and kiss these anime ladies and the ladies like them and don’t bully them with their bad words like “you’re in your 20’s, shouldn’t you get a real job and move out?”

And for the record, I have nothing against people who like anime or even those who have waifus and like sexy anime girls (or sexy anime boys). If you’re going to like a game because it has cute anime girls, there are so many titles with better graphics, better girls, that are also free or pretty damn near close. There is also an internet full of drawn and animated media available for free if you need to get your rocks off. Have some standards, don’t be such a Thirsty Joe that you start deluding yourself into thinking games like this are good because of some of the NPC models.

MMO Rant: Blade of Queen Is A Lie Built On Fraud

I have to assume that there is a template for Facebook games on the same level as those stock Unity games that get released on Steam by the dozens. These games populate Facebook, they advertise using fraudulent means, and they disappear as fast as they showed up. Their developers/publishers are all based in Hong Kong, most of them have no physical address, and I can only assume that they’re being pumped out with something resembling sweatshop labor given their speed, frequency, and obviously mass-produced quality.

Blade of Queen, one of two “games” spawned by budding shovelware developer/publisher CarolGames is an embarrassment, its publisher is so embarrassed by what it has to convince people to play that instead of using Queen of Blade screenshots in its Facebook advertising, they went ahead and used a snapshot from Suikoden 2.

Blade of Queen is a game in the sense that there are graphics and animations of figures fighting on screen. It’s not a game in the sense that you have no control over your characters and the only influence you have is spending silver to boost your stats so that they can automatically fight and win their match by simple virtue that your combat rating is higher than their combat rating. The combat is punctuated by poorly translated Engrish dialogue, about some nonsense that most people won’t care about enough to try and read.

I can’t remember the last time I lost a battle in the story mode, nor can I remember the last match that did not end with a SSS rating. Giving ratings at the end of each combat match is pointless because the player didn’t do anything. There is no strategy, nothing to congratulate. There’s a game that Nexon published whose name escapes me, but it supplements the fact that the combat plays out automatically by giving the player varying types of troops, forcing you to plan out a strategy with your characters.

As if to further the idea that this game is a hastily compiled mess, combat sounds work about 5% of the time.

I’m rank 69 and I haven’t even fought a battle. Nobody is playing this. What am I doing with my life? You know, that rank 1 player looks oddly familiar. Where have I seen that name before?

I’ve found the game’s major financier, folks.

Here’s the thing about these games: They’re cobbled together in Hong Kong sweatshops for sweatshop budgets, get translated to English for about a dollar, and ultimately nobody ends up playing them because they see the game in the Facebook ad and have either been conditioned to immediately recognize the scam, or they click on the link and immediately see that the game looks nothing like what was advertised.

Sure, you’ll get maybe a half dozen, dozen players who spend more than the game deserves, but ultimately it’ll be shut down within a few months and nobody will notice because by that point it will have been replaced by several dozen more clones, all of which will similarly shut down several months later.

On the other hand, the game has boobs and booty for miles, it doesn’t take a genius to know that someone said “let’s throw some jigglin tiddies in here, that’ll make people overlook the rest of the game being worthless.”

Other than that, I have no opinion on the matter.

[From the Vault] Rant: More Money Than Sense

(Editor’s Note: This piece is an unpublished rant from 2013 that I decided to release because it is mostly finished albeit a giant text of complaints, I feel it still holds true today. The story below is true.)

I had an epiphany moment way back when Final Fantasy XIV first came out in 2010 that drastically changed my view on gaming and a notable portion of the gaming community. I came across a thread on the official FFXIV forums where a guy was complaining that Square Enix wouldn’t give him a refund despite the game being in poor condition. He explained in the original post that he knew of the game’s problems during beta, and even participated in almost every phase, but decided to pre-purchase with the hopes that they would be fixed by the time the game launched. They weren’t, so he wanted his money back. Understandable. While few would disagree that Final Fantasy XIV had major problems in its first iteration and was without a doubt a trainwreck, just keep reading. I wouldn’t be telling this if it didn’t get better. One of the users asked what exactly he found wrong with the game. His response? The slow combat system, the slow leveling, the individual profession levels, everything about crafting, the graphics, the lack of open world pvp, the lack of open worlds period, leve quests, traditional questing, story-driven quests, reliance on crafting, lack of looting players, and a few other things I may be forgetting. In other words, the entire game.

Personally I found this man astounding. What he wanted was Final Fantasy married to Darkfall, a hardcore sandbox pvp MMO, and apparently gave serious expectation that Square Enix would suddenly transform every single aspect between open beta and launch. I can see a guy who plays a beta, sees some features that aren’t available immediately or are buggy or broken or needs to be balanced, but buys the game to get in early because he expects those bugs to be fixed later on. That kind of disappointment I can agree with. What this guy wanted was a fundamental rewrite of the entire game. But boy howdy, does it get better. Just keep reading.

Eventually someone in the thread said “count it as a $50 lesson in spending your money wisely.” He didn’t spend fifty bucks. After our friend played through most of the beta phases, found not a single redeeming quality in his words, he went ahead and ordered the collector’s edition and loaded his account with a couple hundred dollars in Crysta. Not only that, but he did the same for his wife who similarly hated every part of the experience. Just sit back and let that sink in. Putting six hundred (at least) down on a video game that you didn’t like. Six hundred bucks. Ten new games, or two hundred on your average Steam sale. Several months of car payments. Many massage appointments to soothe your temper. I don’t know. The last thing I spent over six hundred dollars on in one go was a down payment on my car.

I saw a few people in the thread at this point calling the man delusional, and I have to agree with them. He genuinely believed that FFXIV would suddenly transform into an entirely new game literally overnight, against all evidence to the contrary, and was willing to bet six hundred bucks on it. When pressed on why he wasted so much money if he hated the game, the guy responded “it’s my money, I decide how I spend it, not you.” Fair enough, no one is trying to tell him how to spend his money. A little defensive of an answer for someone who believes to be in the right, I must say. Now, you may be thinking “oh this guy is probably rich,” and you would be correct. Pressed further on the matter, he admitted that six hundred dollars “was basically nothing” to him compared to his weekly income, but that his demand for a refund was on principle rather than price.

Three years later and I still think about this gentleman because his thread opened me to the ocean of people with more money in their wallet than common sense in their head. I saw it from people purchasing lifetime subscriptions to games that they had either not played, or had played and did not like. In people purchasing multiple copies of Star Trek Online just to get their hands on the multiple store-specific cosmetics, only for Cryptic to add them to the cash shop later on. In people setting up multiple accounts for WWII Online and Warhammer Online as a “donation” to keep the game running. Spending into the triple digits on a Kickstarter of a game that they might not even like in return for some cosmetics.

Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.

Rant: The Miserable Experience of Paladins

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I’m writing this while viewing my profile page on Paladins, the latest title by Hi-Rez Studios and something of a cross between a MOBA and modern day Team Fortress 2. It’s a pretty simple concept, one that has been in beta for the better part of the last year. Two teams fight over control of a capture point, with the winner then escorting a payload to the other team’s side.

Your character is customized outside of the match using a collectible card game style “deck” as well as inside the match by buying MOBA-esque items that boost certain stats. It is a popular game, well received by the Steam community with an 84% positive rating, and by all means it is turning out to be a solid game.

But after playing for nearly five hours and never winning a single match, Paladins has been the most miserable experience I have had with a game in recent memory. Not frustrating, miserable. A losing streak in Overwatch is frustrating, being perpetually locked out of my online banking because customer support is rubbish is frustrating. Paladins is miserable, it’s like a delicious slice of pizza that comes out of the oven only for someone to immediately walk all over it.

If you haven’t played Paladins, the primary focus of the game is on objectives. You have to capture the point in order to raise the payload and you must escort the payload in order to successfully deliver said payload. Killing the enemy and not dying to the enemy is a big part of this, however you’ll notice that at no point does killstreak or kill/death/assist ratio come into play in the terms of victory.

This is Hi-Rez’s fault, according to the forums and Reddit community. The game gives too little point incentive to focus on the objective, outside of the obvious winning/losing the match. So my experience with Paladins hasn’t been miserable on account of losing every match, but the moments where I die and watch my team clear out the capture zone, only for all four of them to completely ignore the objective and run off individually to be picked off so the enemy team can waltz right in and take the capture point.

The misery of yet another 0-4 loss because more than half of the team did not bother at all to play the objective. It’s like I’m back in little league soccer, playing on a team of kids who don’t want to be there and don’t give a crap. This isn’t the same problem that I have with standard MOBAs, where public matches are a crapshoot of random people who don’t really know how to play a game where five people are supposed to be juggling three lanes and a jungle area. That’s a complicated game to consistently get five random people to work together on. Paladins is not that complicated.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say this: I played a couple more games before finishing this piece off and, you know what? I lost. My team lost, but it was a very long game because both teams were fighting their best and the capture point was in a constant state of overtime as the bodies piled up and nobody seemed to be able to get an advantage. We lost 3-4, but we put on a hell of a show. The second game, I won, but it wasn’t fun. This time I wound up on the winning team, watching as none of the players on the other team even bothered approaching the capture point over the course of the match. That isn’t fun either.

One other thing I will say about Paladins is that the community is hell of a lot better than those I’ve encountered in MOBAs, SMITE included. Despite our heavy losses, I haven’t seen a single rage quit, nobody went afk in protest, and there wasn’t any trolling going on in chat. Barring this one, exceptionally major issue with people constantly not playing to the objective, I think Paladins will be the kind of game that could even give Overwatch a run for its money. It is, for all intent and purpose, exactly the fantasy spiritual sequel to Global Agenda that I always wanted.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Rant] You Couldn’t Lie Like This In Other Industries

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Let’s start this piece by making a bold statement that I’ve repeated to no end on Twitter: The gaming industry is the only one where you can outright lie to customers and just blame the fact that you were really excited to talk about it. This isn’t the first time I’ve made such a claim and it certainly won’t be the last, as we are talking about an artistic medium and artists are nothing if not passionate about their work. They also tend to be horrible planners and businessmen.

But it stands to reason to say that the creative minds behind some of the biggest disappointments of the past decade need to do one simple thing: shut up. Either build a script before you go talk to the press or stop talking to the press, because while people like the fact that you talk off the cuff and don’t sound like a PR marketing person, they only like it at the time you’re talking. When the final product comes out and most of what you’ve said turns out to be at best exaggerated and at worst a blatant lie, you only go so far as to damage your personal reputation and that of the company you are representing. Acknowledge the problem and stop it.

It is terrible, because a lot of the games that get caught up with this are actually good. The Fable series is amazing, but a long series of false promises virtually guarantees that Peter Molyneux will go down as one of the industry’s most prolific liars above one of its most seasoned veterans. Bioshock Infinite was a fantastic game, but that doesn’t change the fact that early trailers were outright falsehoods, cutscenes featuring nonexistent content cleverly disguised as actual gameplay. As we found out much later on, the Duke Nukem Forever trailer we saw in 2001 was a total lie, the game didn’t really exist.

An even greater crime when the developer/publisher continues to push the lie past the point of launch. The most famous example of this discussed here at MMO Fallout is the 10% discount for ArcheAge patrons. This feature was promised only for Trion Worlds to move the goalposts, claim that it was never intended for inclusion at launch, lied about it being advertised at all, only to change the narrative again and drop the bonus after the game had already been out. As we later learned, nobody had bothered to figure out if such a discount mechanic was even compatible with the store, not that it stopped Trion Worlds from promising it in the time leading up to and following ArcheAge’s launch. Also no refunds.

Gabe Newell, a man whose closet isn’t free of its own skeletons, summed up perfectly why you should never try to lie to the internet:

‘Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet – because they will catch you. They will de-construct your spin. They will remember everything you ever say for eternity.’

For gamers, nothing raises a red flag quite like the phrase “actual game footage.” In recent years this term has come to mean exactly the opposite. For Ubisoft, you can bet your money that the game will be nowhere near as graphically impressive as the “actual game footage” demo showed at the previous year’s E3. For Peter Molyneux’s titles, you can expect that the more outlandish features, aka the ones Molyneux brings up in interviews, won’t actually make an appearance in the final product. Aliens: Colonial Marines lied about everything from the graphics to the animations and gameplay, honestly the list goes on Forever.

And before somebody brings it up in the comments, I’d like to address the burger analogy:

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We accept, although I don’t, the fact that a fast food burger doesn’t look like it does in the advertising for one simple reason: They are cheap, mass produced physical goods, and cobbled together by minimum wage teenagers, some of whom can barely comprehend that “no pickles” doesn’t actually mean “extra pickles.” Barring employee error in making said sandwich, however, you can also expect that if Burger King announces its A1 Whopper, that the Whopper will have A1 sauce on it. You don’t order your food only to find out that while the company kept the A1 name and the menu clearly shows the sauce, there is no sauce, and the manager tells you “oh sorry, that was actually a prototype build of the A1 Whopper and we removed the sauce since then. No refunds.”

And that is exactly the problem with the gaming industry, while minds like Peter Molyneux and Sean Murray spend years talking up their games with vague promises and hype, at no point do these men ever come out and make the disappointing announcement that no, No Man’s Sky actually won’t support landing on asteroids. Instead, these men make their rounds in the press and drop promises of all sorts of goodies, of which they are presumably aware on some level that they cannot guarantee will make it into the final product, and then leave it at that. No follow up, no ‘hey this didn’t work out,’ no nothing. If we are lucky, we might get an interview a few months down the line after launch explaining why so many promised features were cut. If we’re lucky.

Other times we receive the standard condescending remark. Situations change during development, this is your fault for presuming that my detailing all of the cool things we had in the game meant that those cool things would actually appear in the game. Did I not say that they were cancelled? My bad, no refunds.

So I have to chuckle whenever I see a developer on Twitter wondering why the games industry has such a hostile relationship with its customers, one that the industry has fostered along with the “do your research” culture that we currently live in, one that I absolutely despise. And who can blame consumers? You can’t trust the lead designers because they get really excited and thus can’t be trusted to give an honest or realistic description of the game. You can’t trust E3 demos because the game will either be dramatically downscaled graphically or show off prototype features, without explaining that they are such I might add, that won’t make it into the actual release. You can’t trust press previews because of day 1 patches, early builds, and the increasingly common process of pushing street dates as close to launch as possible. And you can’t trust the developer’s own videos in the year or even months leading up to launch because the demo was on an older build of the game and you’re a moron if you honestly thought that the final game wouldn’t remove some functionality or would look as good.

The only thing you can do is to stop pre-ordering altogether because, at this point, nothing said prior to a game’s launch can be taken at face value anymore. The indecisiveness and blatantly misleading nature of the gaming industry has made it impossible to trust even the most innocuous statements at this point like, will the game require PS Plus or will it go free to play or do I need to buy this starter pack to get access? Even after launch, you can’t trust developers to stick to their word, and MMO players would need a lot of hands to count the times a director or community manager has promised us that their game would never go free to play, that the cash shop would never sell non-cosmetic gear, that players would never be able to gain an advantage with real money.

What a wonderful way to interact with your community, on the common understanding that you have no obligation to realistically portray your game and that the consumer should from the start be under the impression that you’re either exaggerating or outright lying about features in order to sell a product. I have bad news for the industry, the ‘too bad so sad’ days of selling your games on the grounds that the customer has no avenue for compensation once they’ve opened/downloaded the game is over, it is over on PC and judging by how Sony has handled No Man’s Sky, it’s soon to be over on consoles as well. And if you don’t like that, just wait until the courts really get involved. Because they are. They definitely are. Oh boy are they.

Other than that I have no opinion on the matter.

Rant: Customer Service Doesn’t Get Much Worse Than A Full Guild Suspension

As you read this, Daybreak Game Company is busy cleaning up the mess of another incident in a series of customer service missteps. This time it involves the unfair suspension of several hundred (sources place the figure at least 400 and possibly upwards of 600), in a guild-wide three day ban in retaliation for the actions of one member. Yes, an entire guild had their accounts suspended because one player broke not the terms of service, but player-agreed rules.

Here’s how the story goes: Everquest’s lack of instancing means that the community has to compete for raids, leading to a raid schedule agreed upon by the leaders of the top guilds. If your guild isn’t scheduled to raid, and they do so anyway, breaking the rotation can result in penalties levied against the entire guild. Yes, the entire guild, even you members who don’t raid or might raid every once in a while.

That’s exactly what happened when one player from the Modest Man guild was recorded on video killing mobs outside of the Sky raid. In total, the player allegedly killed two mobs with a multi-box group of five accounts. The player was reportedly booted from Modest Man before Daybreak Game Company handed out a three day suspension to every single member of the guild. The suspensions were quickly overturned with players being allowed back into the game, but the policy that would hand 3-day and potentially 7-day suspensions to entire guilds still seems to be in place.

It also doesn’t address the underlying problems here. The fact that, as one player put it, a single player can “blow a 4-6 hour block for a whole guild” is ridiculous, a sign of a game far out of touch with today’s expectations. The idea that Daybreak is willing to suspend an entire guild, hundreds of players in total, for the dissociated actions of one member (who was kicked out) is unacceptable, regardless of it being overturned, and the fact that it was even considered for a moment to be an appropriate response should be worrying to Daybreak’s customers, aside from perhaps the toxic portion that supported the decision.

But ultimately every fiasco that seems to come out of Everquest’s timelocked servers is Daybreak’s fault, fostering and encouraging an atmosphere of exclusion, and nothing encompasses the attitude of a company that once stated that casual players don’t deserve to access content like Nagafen, than punishing an entire guild for the actions of one person. Again they pretty quickly reversed the decision, but they went ahead with it in the first place. And that is the problem.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Column] Gamers Never Rejected “Art Games”

Let me just start by saying that I hate the premise of this article. Not because of the ideas within, but as a gamer who has spent the better part of the past ten years, if longer, trying to make the argument that video games are indeed art, when not pushing against the idea that they make people violent.

So if we, as gamers, argue that all games are art, it leads to an important question: What does that make an “art game?” Ask around and you’ll likely hear a pretty consistent answer: A game with no combat, minimal interactivity, created by an independent art house developer trying to convey a personal message/experience. If I had my way, ‘art game’ would be a redundant term, but I can’t always have my way.

If you haven’t realized by now, this is mostly set around the recent failure of Tale of Tales and their game Sunset. I’m well aware of the developer’s response and demonization of the industry, gamers, and capitalism, and their overall attitude following their departure from the gaming scene. I touch on that near the end.

One idea I’ve seen pushed by the supporters of Sunset is that its failure is proof that the gaming industry needs to “grow up” and “mature” to join the other mediums, a fallacy if I’ve ever seen one. What other mediums? Television? Where the highest rated cable shows for 2014 were Game of Thrones, Major Crimes, sports, Nascar, and reality shows? Or film, where eight of the top ten grossing films of last year were riddled with sex and violence? Or perhaps in novels, where the best-selling list is dominated by the likes of 50 Shades, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and Bill O’Reilly?

If you want to put gaming on the same pedestal as other mediums of art, it holds up pretty well. Even the artistic side of gaming matches up against the other genres. A few big successes, a bunch of smaller successes, and a whole lot of failures. The industry is saturated on all levels, and there isn’t enough consumer time and money to go around when just about anyone can release a game and hundreds of new titles add to the clutter on Steam on a weekly basis.

But the thing about Sunset is that the more we try to rationalize why the game failed, the closer we should be getting to the realization that sometimes success or failure can’t be explained. Sunset was focus tested, marketed to specific groups, and at the end of the day it sold 4,000 copies and knocked its developer out of the gaming industry. Sometimes you can do everything right and still wind up failing. The game was never going to sell millions of copies and I doubt that Tale of Tales expected it to.

To say that games like Sunset have no place in the genre is a farce, full of condescension from the gamers claiming to speak for the market and from those on the outside talking down to the community like we’re all a bunch of uncultured morons. The idea that a walking simulator is doomed to failure doesn’t hold water in a reality where games like Gone Home, Dear Esther, and Ether One have made a comfortable place for themselves. The industry is massive, it outperforms Hollywood, and as with film the people who call themselves gamers aren’t a hive mind that agree on everything (and often don’t seem to agree on anything).

If the gaming industry was truly populated by dullards banging controllers, we wouldn’t see unconventional titles that manage to grab hold and survive despite the hailstorm of “I don’t know what people see in this.” Games like Papers Please, The Stanley Parable, Brothers: Tale of Two Sons, and Gone Home attract substantial audiences and loyal followings. The horror genre has seen an entire subsection of games built on the idea of not being able to fight back (Amnesia, Alien: Isolation, Outlast, etc), and Telltale has managed to grow an empire on the strategy of episodic gaming and powerful narratives that make us feel our feels.

The evidence of diversity in the gaming community is no more obvious than when you consider that the anti-indie sentiment has been able to grow alongside animosity towards AAA developers. More and more, people turn toward the indie community as a source of content that is deemed too risky or not profitable enough for big publishers who seem all too concerned with making the same low risk cookie cutter games year after year. People are getting tired of AAA gaming pushing out titles at premium prices with content slashed to sell at a later date, for a title that despite its massive budget can’t even make it out the door without game breaking issues.

On the other hand, people are getting really sick of the shenanigans coming from the indie development scene, between the unprofessional behavior of certain developers either trolling, constantly arguing, or throwing temper tantrums whenever someone responds negatively to their game, to the entitled reaction from other developers and their blogger friends when their games fail in the market. People who think that consumers have an obligation to throw money at them because they made a thing, and inevitably when the game fails the blame is put on the market, with the implied or explicit reason being that gamers are too uncultured/stupid to know what they want.

One of the earliest popular Youtube videos was from a vlogger Chris Crocker going on a rant about people criticizing Britney Spears, culminating to one point in the video where he says “you’re lucky she even performs for you bastards.” This is a mentality that I see a lot in gaming, both in the indie and AAA field from producers and customers. That we, the consumer, should just shut up, pay up, and be grateful that we get anything at all, and just be happy that the content creators are willing to grace us with their presence and work.

To say that Sunset failed because its genre has no place in the industry is inaccurate, as is saying that it failed because gamers don’t support indie devs. At the end of the day, it didn’t sell, but its failure isn’t indicative of a greater problem in the industry, it shouldn’t have PC gamers worried as some publications have stated, and it shouldn’t put off other people who might be interested in trying their hand in creating products. It didn’t sell and the blame definitely doesn’t fall on the consumer.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the subject.

[Rant] Double Standards And The Scrubbed Starting Line

I dove into this topic in my piece about Infinite Crisis last week, but the line between beta and launch has become so blurred in the MMO industry that the whole concept has lost its meaning and many of us in gaming journalism are thoroughly sick of it. Go to virtually any website that reviews MMOs and you’ll likely see the same policy: We start judging when they start charging. I’m paraphrasing, but the point is the same regardless.

In earlier years, I defended the practice of selling beta access as a perk for pre-ordering because it was the best a customer could do to get a “demo” on an MMO. Granted, these were the days when 90% of western titles had subscriptions and wouldn’t see free trials until at least six months post launch, if at all. Furthermore, it was relatively low risk for the consumer. All you normally had to do was throw down the $5 minimum at Gamestop (or your local equivalent), a refundable/transferable five bucks I should add, and you’d get a beta key on your receipt. Apart from some know-how of the game and maybe a participation item, people in the beta didn’t get any advantage because characters were reset before launch.

But then free to play became dominant and the goal posts got moved time and time again. Developers stopped wiping beta characters, began opening up the cash shop in beta and in some cases even alpha. It’s important to read into the motives because the general consensus is that once you start charging for the use of a product, you agree that it is worth selling and therefore worth critiquing.

The launchification of beta, or early access as the industry has started calling it, has presented a remarkable double standard in game developers who want the freedom to treat the game as effectively launched in the sense that the servers won’t be wiped, the cash shop is open, and anyone can create an account and start playing, but keep up their shield against criticism whenever someone like myself posts a preview saying “this isn’t worth buying right now.” I have several times been the recipient of an email conveying disappointment or offering corrections, calling my criticism unfair because the product wasn’t considered launched yet.

What we’ve learned from the industry these past few years is that certain devs have no problem blurring the lines between beta and launch so long as it conveniences them and, when pushed on it, rubbing it out and flat out denying that it exists. When pushed on refunds, Turbine turned around and said no to founders because they’ve been playing for two years and, by Turbine’s opinion, they got their money’s worth regardless of if the game launched. When players struck back and pointed out that at least a decent portion of the time was spent dealing with outages, extended maintenance, game breaking bugs, and missing or incomplete features, Turbine’s CM simply denied the concept of launch altogether.

Because, in their logic, what does launch really mean when the game will continue to receive updates, bug fixes, and new heroes in the coming years? It makes sense, yes, but going by this line of thought, when are reviewers allowed to critique your product? Because if it’s unfair to criticize a game before it is finished, and a game like Infinite Crisis is in your explanation never finished, are you trying to say that it is never fair to criticize the game?

Or does the whole narrative eventually collapse and we go back to where we started?

With games increasingly shutting down mid-beta or very shortly after and then refusing to compensate customers, the need for tough scrutiny is higher than ever. The days of beta being a low risk, fun thing we did to get some game time in, help squash some bugs while stress testing, and ease the pain of waiting for launch are long over, and in its place is the high risk, predatory game of early access that carries no customer protection, no guarantee of ever receiving a final product, and no out once you’re in.

Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

MMO Rant: Vote of No Confidence In Trion Worlds

I’ve been sitting at my computer trying to come up with a word to describe Trion Worlds, and so far the best that I’ve come up with is “impressed.” Not impressed in a good way, if you’ve noticed that this is a rant, but more impressed in the sense that you’ve walked into your home to find a man with a flashlight and your finest jewelry, and he impressively tries to convince you that he’s actually a jewelry cleaner who does house calls. Actually, the word would probably be audacity. As in, I can’t believe the audacity that Trion Worlds would, once again, lie and assume that nobody would notice or care.

So what am I sitting here fuming about, you’re probably asking. This week saw the release of ArcheAge’s new continent Auroria, and the launch went about as well as you’d expect. Hackers, gold farmers, and big guilds scooped up most of the new land, server problems meant that many players couldn’t even log in until after the land was already taken, and the response from both the developer and publisher on land hoarding has been nothing. Really, there’s too much to talk about with the expansion, dealing with things I don’t fully understand like item consolidation and the usual Trion tactic of nerfing drops and expanding the cash shop, so I will forward you instead to Massively’s “It’s Getting Harder To Like ArcheAge” article to better explain those aspects.

Instead, I am going to focus on the bold faced lie that has been the ever-delayed 10% discount on marketplace purchases for founders and patrons. During its alpha/beta stage, Trion Worlds listed a 10% marketplace (cash shop) discount as a bonus to purchasing patron status. When it was obvious that the feature wouldn’t be ready for launch, due to relying on XL Games to code it in, Trion Worlds quietly slipped an “after launch” into the advertising and, in the first wrong move of this ballad, played it off as the post-launch implementation having been the plan all along. I didn’t cover this discrepancy because, while questionable, the discount was still on its way and we were assured that it would be applied retroactively.

At this point, Trion starting talking about an “equitable” alternative, one that was never mentioned in the game’s advertising. With this week’s update, the company revealed that the 10% discount has been replaced with a 10% bonus to credits purchased in credit packs. And oh, it gets better. Just read the forum post by Scapes:

A few months ago when we first discussed the ArcheAge Patron Program, a 10% discount on Marketplace purchases was mentioned as a perk of being a Patron. While an “after launch” caveat was included in this perk, both XLGAMES and Trion Worlds have determined that the time to develop this perk would be significant, delaying the benefit to our Patrons longer than we’re comfortable with. Instead, we will be implementing an equitable solution that Trion Worlds can execute on its own.

Today, all Patrons who purchased Credit Packs after Head Start began (September 12) will get a 10% bonus of those sums granted to their accounts. This bonus will only apply to accounts that purchased Credit Packs after their Patron Time was purchased, are in good standing (not banned, no chargebacks), and have not had their Patron Time or Credit Pack purchase refunded. It does not apply to the Credits from the Founder’s Pack and Starter Pack packages. The 10% bonus Credits will apply on future Credit Pack purchases by Patrons.

Just so we are crystal clear, let’s go over just who has been stranded out in the wilderness. The 10% bonus applies retroactively to credit packs made after patron time was purchased, after the head start. Those of you who purchased founders to use the 10% discount in conjunction with your credit stipend get nothing. If you spent money on credit packs during alpha and beta, you also get nothing. APEX buyers also receive absolutely nothing. The only way to receive the altered terms of the deal is to have purchased credits, after head start began (September 12th), with active patron.

It’s also hard not to laugh at how this is being spun as pro-consumer, when the new deal just so happens to benefit Trion Worlds most of all while giving founders and those who bought their credits early the middle finger. It also doesn’t acknowledge the fact that if you buy credits from Trion Worlds, you already get at least a 10% bonus regardless of your patron status.

I’ll wrap up by saying this: In one of my previous jobs, a co worker was fired after their cash register came up $150 short for the second time. In his infinite wisdom, the manager declared that this worker was either stealing or dangerously incompetent, but either way he couldn’t be trusted with money and had to be let go. I feel the same can be said about Trion. Whether they meticulously lie and justify it with the idea that by the time customers figure out that they’ve been duped, Trion already has their money, or whether the team is honestly this out of touch that they don’t see the problems with their decisions, it is evident that Trion Worlds cannot be trusted to stick to their word.

Just remember that the next time Trion Worlds is advertising a new game, anything mentioned in the perks is subject to unannounced caveats. Otherwise I have no opinion on the matter.

[Rant] Shame On Activision/Bungie

MMO Fallout doesn’t appear on Metacritic or Gamerankings, and it never will. Those of you who read our MMOments pieces will know that I refuse to attach a numerical score to my reviews, because the criteria for scoring differs between reviewers and the number is ultimately meaningless and only serves as troll-bait for the inevitable flame war courtesy of our friends in the perpetual hate machine. I also have a measured disdain for Metacritic, who treat all ratings as the same on a percentage scale and, when called out on their inaccuracy, flat out deny that the point scale differs between reviewers.

Destiny currently stands with less than an 80 on Gamerankings as publications continue to come out with reviews labeling the game as “good, but not great.” That’s cool, these reviewers are entitled to their opinions just as you or I are. According to an article I read on VG247, review scores may have cost Bungie $2.5 million in bonuses that would have been paid out had the title achieved higher than a 90% overall rating. The clause was revealed way back when Activision was embroiled in a lawsuit with Call of Duty developers Vince and Zampella.

Let me just say, shame on Activision for putting this clause into their contract and shame on Bungie for accepting it. Tying bonuses to performance is a standard in business, but if you’re going to hold money over a developer’s head, do it in return for sales. The fact that Destiny sold more than $300 million in the first five days should dwarf any talk about review scores, especially when this same panel of apparent experts you’re sticking up on a pedestal generally can’t even agree with one another on what constitutes a good game.

The problem here isn’t with Metacritic or Gamerankings, inaccurate as they may be. The issue lies with an industry that is dependent on the scores of a few people to measure their success, with developers refusing to hire people unless they worked on a game with sufficient ratings, or publishers using the scoring system as a method of withholding deserved money from developers. You’re not making a game for the reviewers, unless you are in which case you may want to rethink your choice of careers. You’re making video games because you hopefully enjoy them yourselves, and you want to sell them to gamers who will enjoy them. To put more weight on the approval of a handful of writers, most of whom have little more qualifications than the simple fact that they have an audience, rather than the purchasing power of the market is not only short-sighted, it’s self destructive in the long term.

If Michael Bay’s performance was based on review scores, his movies would be considered utter failures, but I get the feeling that Bay can’t hear his critics from under the mountains of money that he pulls in with the movies that he directs, not to mention the smaller mountains of money from the movies that he produces. Michael Bay doesn’t care that film critics don’t like his movies, because he doesn’t base his success on the opinion of critics. Age of Extinction broke $1 billion worldwide, I somehow doubt that Paramount Pictures is going to be withholding his bonus because the film didn’t get a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Otherwise I have no strong feelings on the topic.

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