Comments on: [Links] Where are the links of yesterweek?

By: Goodmongo

Goodmongo — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:40:37 +0000

When I played WOW I had both my sons playing. They were pretty young aged 13 and 10. But they held their own. The problem with many guilds is that 20-30 year olds think using the F word every second word somehow makes then strong/smart/cool/wahtever. Not to mention the topics. Those were the big issue for me as a father.

I amde sure they were geared correctly had the buffs/food and they knew their toons well. The problem was finding a guild that was more mature than most guilds and realized that cussing or talking about doing drugs and their sexploits (mostly in their dreams) was not the way to go.

By: spinks

spinks — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:56:32 +0000

That’s probably also the mental state of people who make wild impulse purchases.

By: Stabs

Stabs — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 11:03:47 +0000

PS love the Catch 22 reference.

By: Stabs

Stabs — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:59:21 +0000

I’ve often thought that the MMO industry went wrong early on with the whole listening to customers thing. In the games of my youth there was no opportunity to protest: if you complained during a chess match your opponent would simply gaze back impassively while your clock ticked down, if you complained during rugby the ref would penalise your team a further 10 yards.

On to MMOs where if you and enough of your friends do the MMO-equivalent of “you need glasses ref, that was never offside” the refs buy themselves glasses and give you the ball back 5 yards ahead of the last defender so you can run in and score.

In psychology there is a wealth of literature on how bad decision making becomes when someone is in a state of arousal. They use the word arousal not to mean anything sexual but to mean excited and engaged which of course is exactly the state irate “you nerfed my paladin” MMO players are in when they visit the forums.

By: The Renaissance Man

The Renaissance Man — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:18:39 +0000

Bioware plagiarized heavily from an old sci-fi novel called The Armageddon Inheritance. The plot twist at the end involving Catalyst happened in Mass Effect because it happened in the book and the writers at Bioware stuck to the source material far too close.

By: Simon Jones who is blogless

Simon Jones who is blogless — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:28:25 +0000

I think it was more a matter of expectations. Dragon Age was a step back from Mass Effects movement towards crappy action games (Mass Effect is a not terribly good cover based shooter) with RPG elements and towards an older school Bioware style rpg. A lot of people were annoyed that Dragon Age swung towards the Mass Effect end of the spectrum. Which they might have survived, because Hey, Mass Effect 2, except Dragon Age 2 was also a really mediocre example of the genre they were trying for. So the two effects kind of piled on each other and the overall effect was the extended rage over Mass Effect 3.

Also, RPG fandom tends to be pretty terrible and overinvested. So that didn’t help.

By: spinks

spinks — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 13:19:52 +0000

DA2 was certainly a very polarising game. For me, the good points outweighed the bad, but even without that I’m sure I have played worse games that didn’t engender the same level of fan hatred. I can’t remember if Bioware was in the firing lines as much pre-DA.

By: Simon Jones who is blogless

Simon Jones who is blogless — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 12:01:57 +0000

Thinking on it, I’m beginning to suspect that Mass Effect 3 is mostly catching flak for the sins of it’s forefathers. I mean, the ending isn’t great (No. Seriously. There is no need for anything ever to include *SPOILER*A glowing child dumping exposition on you*SPOILER* in anything. It’s just a terrible, terrible thing to do.) but it’s perhaps out of proportion with the actual issue.

Biowares problem is that they horribly misread their market in the case of Dragon Age 2 and Mass Effect 3 is still catching some of the aminosity from that.

Blizzard on the other hand suffers from having too many players. At any point, a siazble proportion of them is going to be unhappy and, it being the internet, they’re going to be very loud about it. And given that said minority of unhappy players are going to be more numerous than the entire player bases of most other games, it’s going to be seem like there’s rioting in the streets.