Killed in a Smiling Accident.

Dear Technology Sites (and the rest of the world),

“Rocking” is not a synonym of “featuring”, “running”, “including”, “wearing”, “demonstrating”, “eating” or whatever other sodbuggering verb, noun or adjective you’ve randomly decided to replace today.

“We’re totally rocking updates from the Mobile World Conference today where the latest Nokias are rocking a new operating system, HTC have unveiled a handset rocking a 3.7″ screen, I’m rocking a cool t-shirt and I’m going to rock a sandwich for lunch then rock a taxi to rock to the hotel to rhythmically move backwards and forwards myself to sleep.”

I’m not terribly sure as to why you spelt it Aion.

You know, as in “It takes an eon for the game to load, longer than my computer takes to boot” and “It takes an eon to get into the game, if you’re lucky, otherwise it’s sometime around the heat death of the universe”.

So that’s the status for each of the five available EU English servers. And yes one of them is “only” half an hour; shame it’s not the one where my character is.

And to all those who have said that this is the smoothest launch they’ve ever seen, of course it bloody well is, nobody can get onto the servers to stress them. I could solve all of the public transport problems in England if I only let ten people on to each bus and then thanked everyone else for their patience while they stand around for two hours to get on to the next one.

To think that NCSoft had the temerity to want to install nProtect GameGuard with their game, as if it’s the players who are the cheap cheating bastards. Talking of cheap bastards, what the hell gives you the right to open a browser up after I close the game down in order to pimp your products?

Cheap and utterly lacking in etiquette.

You know what, at least Aventurine had the decency to not let you buy Darkfall at all in order to keep their numbers down, rather than make you sit around adding up how much of your money you’re spending in order to watch a queue progress very slowly. I could do that at Disneyland, and at least then I’d get the opportunity to punch Donald Duck in the face.

Never mind, give it a year before NCSoft close it all down for no good reason whatsoever, eh?

I might just have reached the point where I’m allowed to log in by then.

Geeks now have a movement no less.

From Wikipedia:

The word geek is a slang term, noting individuals as “a peculiar or otherwise odd person, especially one who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc.”

But I’ve seen the Geek Advancement video now, so let’s update it:

From Melmothpedia:

The word ‘geek’ is now used by a huge proportion of the Internet population who own a Macbook or an iPhone, are pretentious, and like to pretend that they’re actually doing something incredibly rare, misunderstood or difficult.

They are likely to be mainstream actors; music stars with a penchant for ludicrously large trousers and dancing like a crab on a conveyor belt; or perhaps in some form of journalism. In a large number of cases they will be an attractive woman wearing a top cut so low that you can see her bikini line, but it’s cool because she’s a geek so she’s actually rebelling against the system and most certainly wasn’t ever a cheerleader, very often. Ok, so that was primarily because she was too busy sorting out being Queen of the Prom, but still. They are rarely socially inept or peculiar unless it is affected for promotional videos where they are being condescending to everyone they think isn’t part of their elite club.

Geek is essentially a term that has been appropriated by the high school cheerleaders, jocks and cool kids to represent the fact that they now have netbooks and smartphones and therefore mock other people through Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Blogger rather than by passing messages in class.

You can tell someone who isn’t a traditional geek through a simple test:

Does the person in question constantly jabber on about the fact that they’re “such a geek” in a way as to sound like they’re an outsider while at the same time knowingly acknowledging that they’re part of a club of several hundred million people all of whom profess to be geeks too, as if in some sort of masonic ritual of fellowship? Do they like broadcasting this fact in incredibly public ways? Do they think they’re better than you because of it?

Yes? Then what you have there my friend is a Geek2.0. An iGeek. Geek2020.

A member of the Chic Geek Clique.

Saying that you’re a geek these days doesn’t mean what you think it means. It lost its meaning when people started using it as a badge of social aloofness, when the term became cool with marketing people in expensive suits who write on large whiteboards diagrams that look like Mr Messy trying to copulate with a Lego set, and when films started to be made that showed geeks saving the world and getting the girl and being Jake Fucking Gyllenhaal.

I’m a software engineer in the aerospace industry. I’m a techno-freak. A gadgeteer.

Some people even say I’m weird and socially inept.

But I’m definitely not a geek. At least I hope not.

Until I switch back to being an MMO-loving fuzzy bunny, I’ll continue with the somewhat Grinch-like observations.

Dear old Ragnar Tørnquist has another interview, this time on Rock, Paper, Shotgun. And bless me, there’s some Class A hype in there, hype so strong that there are special government task forces set up to deal with an outbreak. There really should be a Misuse of Hype Act declared in the UK.

Funcom’s contemporary dark fantasy, The Secret World, is an MMO with a cliffhanger ending. So says its creator, Ragnar Tørnquist. In fact, it’s claims like this that make this one of the most significant MMOs currently in development.

Yes, right. Well. Give me five minutes, and an interview with a hype waiter, and I’m sure I can tout a bunch of features and make some ‘claims’ for the MMO that I’m ‘working on’ which will make it the most significant MMO currently in development. IN MY MIND.

RPS: Can you just explain the classless progression idea?

Tørnquist: We wanted to make a game system that was at home in the modern world. This isn’t a medieval fantasy world in which you can be born a baker and die a baker – it’s based in the modern world around us. We wanted to give people freedom to be what they want to be, and play how they want to play. You can read into that the idea that we’re reaching for the moon, but it has some important basic ideas: players will have a sort of deck of cards which will say how their character is going to be. They will be able to shuffle that deck to change how they play as they go along, they’re going to open up more options for that deck as they go a long. It’s much more dynamic than other such games, you won’t get stuck as the tank or the healer, and you should be able to contribute to the process and to the party no matter who you are. Clothes aren’t going to have stats – you can choose whether you want to wear sneakers and a T-shirt, or if you want full goth outfit, or a dress and high heels. All those things are possible, and they’re not going to effect how your character plays.

I mean, is it really just me that reads these articles with “A sort of deck of cards“, “you should be able to contribute” and “You can read into that the idea that we’re reaching for the moon” and thinks, these are all just design goals and not actual features yet? Do alarm bells ring for anyone else? You don’t actually have this thing implemented, it’s what you want to implement, and if you have implemented it, you certainly haven’t tried it on a server with a hundred plus non-developers to see if it actually works, at which point it’s too late to do anything other than rip it out and shove-in a token class system to cover the MMO checklist.

Grind – Check
Token character customisation – Check
Compulsory segregation of player population by continent, server type or colour of the moon at the time of subscription – Check
Classes – Check

It’s an MMO all right!

It reminds me of the last mistake I made in believing a developer’s hype: Mr Barnett’s “Bears, bears, bears” video, where he told us all that ‘we wouldn’t have to wade through an area full of bears and then be asked to kill 10 bears, the ones we had killed would already count!’. And what was actually implemented in Warhammer Online? The Kill Collector, an NPC glued to each quest hub who gives you a bit of extra XP for having had to wade through a bunch of bears to do some other quests. And who is standing next to Mr Kill Collector? Why it’s Mr Go And Kill Me Ten Bears, who is totally oblivious to the fact that Mr Kill Collector is rewarding you for killing bears, because you hadn’t got the Let’s All Jolly Well Trot Off And Kill Some Fucking Bears quest yet.

Anyway, go read the interview. Zoso says it’s Quite Interesting, and I’m sure I agree that the game sounds interesting from a design perspective.

It’s the touting of features with absolutely no game evidence of them whatsoever that I object to. Anyone can say “well we want it to have this and that and the other”, why don’t you tell us what you’ve actually got? Better yet, tell us what you’ve tried that didn’t work and why. Teach us. Inform us. Respect us.

Feed us information, not fantasy so thick that even your game world couldn’t sustain it.

You know, Mythic, having come back to WAR to give it a second chance after the tempting lure of being able to play a Slayer, it’s hard for someone like me to stick around when, after all this time, your game STILL doesn’t remember the position of my chat windows, such that I have to move them every time I log in.

Minor things like this make your game look disproportionately shoddy and unprofessional, because they’re in the user’s face, and they’re there every time that user logs in.

I should be playing your game and not sitting here contemplating writing an AddOn to fix such a stupid thing.

Looking at release schedules you’d think that World of Warcraft was the younger sibling to Warhammer Online and not the other way around, as soon as WAR got a chance to be front and centre with their initial game release, WoW came bursting in to the room and shoved WAR aside with its Wrath of the Lich King “Look at me, look at me, I’m the special one! Look at me!” routine.

So WAR patiently takes a back seat as bemused parents watch WoW perform its new expansion routine, in that sickeningly over-cutesy way that only younger siblings can. Once WoW has burned itself out on being the entertaining centre of attention and crawled off to the corner for a nap, WAR steps forward again to gentle smiles from the adoring parental audience and announces that it will now perform patch 1.2 for them. But just as WAR opens its mouth to begin a delightful recital of new classes and dungeons and such, WoW wakes from its slumber, realises that someone else might be getting some attention and charges back in front of everyone, shoving WAR out of the way yet again and announces with puffed-out chest that it is now going to perform patch 3.1 for all and sundry.

Once or twice is a coincidence, but Blizzard’s uncanny ability to release next to no content until one of its competitors does is coming across as quite childish to my mind. Not only that but it shows their lack of respect for their customer base, because we all know that one uses ‘competition’ with respect to World of Warcraft in the very loosest sense of the word because nothing can really compete at this stage of the game, so while their player base clamours for more content for their subscription fee, Blizzard seem to be holding it back until such a time as it is useful to stamp on the release schedules of other companies.

Quite frankly Blizzard you won this generation of gaming a long, long time ago, and one would expect a more mature and perhaps even benevolent attitude from such an unsurpassable behemoth as yourselves.

Anyone playing a healer in an MMO is perfectly adapted to being a fluffer in real life.

For example: there are always those melee DPS who charge in to an encounter and bang away for a short period of time until, before you know it, they’re spent, exhausted, and dropping to the floor limp from taking a severe beating, at which point the healer has to massage them into some semblance of life again and buff(!) them, after which the DPS can once again perform their heroic feats of flesh piercing and pounding.

So the next time that one of you DPS heroes decides to brag about how hard you are, don’t forget to thank your fluffer for keeping you standing proud on the field of battle. To pretend that you can perform many of your feats of endurance without a healer standing at your back is a fallacy (phallus-ee. See? It’s like… oh never mind).

I’m not saying that you should erect a statue to the healers you understand, it’s just that some of you could act like a little less like the perfect tool for a fluffer to operate on, if you catch my drift.

No?

I’m insinuating that you are PENISES.

I mean honestly, I’m not sure if this is just a World of Warcraft phenomenon, or whether it applies to other MMOs too, but what is it with people announcing in guild chat the slightest achievement they make and others feeling compelled to says “grats” or “congratulations” or “well done” or “Oh shut the hell up, it’s hardly a bloody impressive feat now is it?!”.

One of those answers only happens in my mind.

World of Warcraft has taken this to the next level by announcing achievements that guild members make to everyone else in the guild who happens to be online. And so now, if you miss the announcement because, say, you have it turned off, or have placed it in another window which you have made the size of a postage stamp, and hidden off the edge of the display, and then set on fire, and then stabbed repeatedly with a spoon, and then stamped up and down on… where was I? So if you miss the announcement for Some Reason all you get is a guild window filled with gratses. Which at the moment is Every. Five. Seconds.

I caught the announcement once, and you can click on it to see what the person achieved, in this case a level seventy hunter had managed to explore Bloodmyst Isle. I know! One of the first zones that brand new Draenei characters can get to when they start the game. However did he manage it? But the stream of congratulations and adulation that this chap got, well it would have made Winston Churchill blush.

From now on I’m going to start saying “Grats!” every time guild members manage to log in.

Now, this is a story all about how,
My life got flipped, turned upside down.
And I’d like to take a minute,
Just sit right there,
I’ll tell you how the WAR beta made me lose all my hair.

Our story begins, as these stories often do, with an old and cynical MMO player.

I’m not sure that I can be bothered with the traditional wall-of-text rant here^[1] and, ironically, I’m also having trouble expressing this farcical comedy of errors in any sort of comedic way.

So here’s an outline, please feel free to add your own canned laughter track.

I woke up on Sunday morning and found an email from Zoso waiting for me, informing me that the registration for the Warhammer Online Open Beta was to start at 8:30am. It being just after nine, I hopped on to the WAR website and tried to log in. It failed. At this point I was entirely unsurprised, because despite GOA’s assurances to the contrary, everyone and his pet mushroom knew that the registration process would fail initially, this is The Way when it comes to MMO registration. Especially those registrations that don’t open until the day the servers are supposed to come online.

I seem to recall that I went and made some breakfast, read through my RSS feeds and pondered the meaning of life, the standard Sunday morning fare, and at some point I found out that the registration required a new website account and could not be applied to an existing account; as such, there was a shortcut to the registration page provided, and of course the registration process was totally bogged down, such that you could get most of the way through registering, and then it would fail to provide the captcha image that was required to validate one’s state of human beingness and you could proceed no further.

After a few attempts at this I resigned myself to the fact that this was not going to work any time soon and so I went and did something less boring instead. In this case, housework. After a few hours of chores, I popped my head back in to the website, saw that it was still not working, and then had a quick look at the Warhammer Alliance forums and quickly left when I saw that they were all glowing green and causing Geiger counters to explode due to high readings. After a brief decontamination session, I took the family off to see relatives and came back late that evening. A quick check again confirmed that still nothing was working, and the forum status had been upgraded from Nuclear Bikini Alpha to White Dwarf Super Nova.

I played City of Villains for a bit and then went to bed.

Monday was much the same as Sunday, really. I had the day off of work because Mrs Melmoth was otherwise engaged, and I was to look after mini-Melmoth, so the odd check of the Warhammer website and forums was possible every now and again, but after the first few tries I realised that we were in for the long haul of Open Beta cock-ups. The various ‘official’ unofficial forums had generally been locked at this point, mainly due to load issues I imagine, but also because it appeared that new forms of life had bred in the nuclear wasteland of the previous day, and the rage and bile spewing forth from these entities was actually starting to melt the LCDs of innocent forum posters as they stumbled into the midst of the chaos whilst looking for help on the situation.

Whether the rumours are true that the White House had to be evacuated and the president moved to Air Force One after a presidential aide accidentally browsed to the EU Warhammer forums rather than the US ones, I can’t tell you.

At 15:00hrs on Monday evening an emergency asynchronous activation webpage (also known in the industry as the “it’s all gone to shit in a handbag” page) was provided such that players could submit their account details, whereupon a million small monkeys with hammers would hit Fisher Price keyboards until they either managed to validate some of the seventy thousand applications that flooded in or they managed to finish replicating the complete works of Chaucer. Either one was as likely as the other. This process was only available to people with registered accounts, because the account registration process was buggered and nobody was able to register. The GOA CMs pointed out that they were gob-smacked that anyone thought that they’d need a new account, because they hadn’t stated such a thing. The fact that they hadn’t posted anything at all until the entire cluster-fuck had become a steamy writhing mass of rabid forum-based rumour, speculation and misinformation may have contributed to this somewhat, however.

Anyway, at 16:00hrs on Monday I submitted my Open Beta key, and after a few failed attempts where the page just sat there looking gormlessly at me like a bucktoothed yokel who’s just peed himself and is hoping you haven’t noticed the puddle on the floor, I finally managed to submit some details. Current estimation of a reply email – which would either tell you that your key had been validated; perhaps tell you that you’d got your password wrong and that you’d therefore have to go through the whole process again; or possibly just say “Thise olde gentil Britouns in hir dayes. Ook Ook! Ook! Of diverse aventures maden layes Oook!” – was one to two hours. Now, this estimate was given by GOA CMs, so a slight amount of pessimism was probably in order based on their performance up to this point.

It was some twenty seven hours later, late Tuesday evening when I finally got an email from the registration system.

The forum speculation had continued apace, and after Zoso had had success Tuesday morning with the forum theory of the moment, that spamming the authentication system over and over with ten or twenty applications in quick succession was the way to go, I succumbed to the hysteria somewhat and had a minor spamming session myself when I got back from work, and indeed, a few hours after that an email arrived. Well, three arrived at the same time.

Each email said the same thing in the subject: “Registration issue”. Upon reading each one I was told that my beta key had not been validated and that I should click on the provided link to see why. Fuelled by nothing more than weary curiosity at this point, I clicked the link. The message was simple: “Your account has not been verified, please check your inbox”. So the account that I applied with, the account that I have had since July 5th, the account which I have used to access your site repeatedly since that time, this account, the one that has worked for two months, has, apparently, not been validated?

I’ve said that I’ve boggled at things before, but really it was just artistic license. This was the first time that I have truly boggled.

I sighed.

I checked the game patcher one more time, since now the latest and greatest forum theory was that even if you hadn’t received a confirmation email you could generally log in after a few hours of submitting your application. No dice. So I went and read a good book for the evening; Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge, incidentally, and it’s very enjoyable so far.

At about 9pm, just as I was going up to bed to finish my reading for the evening there, I decided on impulse, tugged by that somewhat pathetic hope that if you catch a beta unawares it might forget to not let you in, I checked my email of which there were no new messages, and attempted to log in and run the game patcher.

And it started patching.

After patching the game I managed to play for an hour, but generally just wobbled around like a drunken partygoer on a cocaine high, all Captain Jack Sparrow, staring at the pretty pictures in boss-eyed confusion and wonder, unable to fully appreciate that I was really there in the game. I logged on to the guild’s Teamspeak server, but was afraid to open my mouth lest all that came out of my microphone was “Heeaaaahhahaeeeeeerrrrrrruuggggghhhhhhaahhhh” followed by a minute or two of unrestrained sobbing. So I failed to introduce myself entirely.

Hopefully this evening I can take some time to actually appreciate the game, get to grips with it and give it a decent test drive; you know, clear that new game smell out and replace it with the stale musty smell of regular use, fill the glove box with tissues, scraps of paper with directions on and partially melted boiled sweets, and stick a humorous sticker in the back window that says “Gamer onboard”.

This morning my inbox was full with the replies to the other ten or so applications I made last night, each one saying that I had failed to register.

I still haven’t had an email telling me that I’m officially a part of the beta; the way things have gone, I’m not sure I ever want that association in writing.

[1] Having now finished the post, this was clearly a lie. Never underestimate the power of rant.

For those of our readers who are too busy to trawl through the many blog posts out there, here’s a brief summary of the current ‘debate’ circling the MMO blogosphere concerning WAR (and what it’s good for):

WAR Orchard

——————————————————————————–

(Opening music)
Announcer: MMO Blogger Theatre comes live tonight from the Evon MMO Blogger Theatre near Guildford. L. D. Blogger, M. J. Blogger and R.S. Blogger star in The WAR Orchard by Mythic Entertainment. The action takes place near the real world in the 2000’s.

Bloggers: (War song, knock knock)
COME IN!
(Crash)
NO, OPEN THE DOOR AND COME IN!
SORRY!
HELLO!
SORRY!
SHUT UP!
I GOT MY HEAD STUCK IN THE CUPBOARD
SORRY!
SHUT UP!
I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING
HELLO!
(Smash)
I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING
HELLO!
SHUT UP, MR. BLOGGER
(Smash)
UHH, MY BRAIN HURTS
SHUT UP!
SORRY!
OOOHH!
(Smash)

Announcer: Meanwhile in another area of the blogosphere several bloggers await news of the beta NDA being lifted.

Bloggers: HELLO
(Crash)
I’VE BROKEN IT, I’VE BROKEN IT
GET OFF MY FOOT
SHUT UP!
SORRY!
MY BRAIN HURTS
MY BRAIN HURTS
(Closing music)

With apologies to Monty Python’s Cherry Orchard, and no apologies to the ‘controversial’ and ‘informed’ blog debaters out there.