Onerous AEGIS

Ah, life. I meant to mine my screencaps for pictures for this post last night, but between running errands and spending time with my daughters, I never even turned on my laptop.

Sypster, yet again, has posted a post I wish I had written. In it, he calls out Funcom on the dreadful secondary combat systems they've tried to implement since the launch of The Secret World. As you may well know, Dear Reader, AEGIS basically broke the game for me. I was a huge cheerleader because I loved TSW. I still do. The Ability Wheel, with its multiple synergies, provided a classless system that left the Unholy Trinity intact. I truly felt the idea of "bring the player, not the class" was well served in TSW.

Auxiliaries were cool, though I agree with Syp that they would have been more interesting as full weapons instead of a single active/passive. Augments were always obviously optional and never seemed worth the grind, at the very least they were lower priority AP expense. But AEGIS, both being mandatory, and yet adding nothing to the game, was the ten-ton dumbbell that broke this camel’s enthusiasm.

At best, AEGIS increases the length of an already long combat cycle. At worst, it makes the game impossible to play, as the player may not be able to do any damage to a random encountered mob without the proper equipment.

I dipped a toe in again a couple weeks ago but never got around to writing about it. I re-did the Tower Defense and obtained the AEGIS controllers I was missing. Though my friends from Beyond the Veil were trying to do me a favor those many months ago, it might have been better if I had done the mission solo. I learned much more about what was going on with the individual towers and their proper distribution the other night. As is often the case when one is carried through group content, getting "help" from the BtV crew didn't really help me in the long run. In point of fact, that night was the last time I logged in for over a year, because I wandered down the wrong alley and encountered a mob I didn't have the controllers to combat.

Which leads back to the added unnecessary complexity and length of fight. Commenting on Syp's post, Sylow maintains that AEGIS isn't that big a deal once you get used to it—and use the AegisHud addon (which I do), and have some capacitors in your full set of controllers—a point echoed on Twitter by my old mate, Galactrix. Sylow goes further to lay the blame for both Augments and AEGIS at the feet of the playerbase, hundreds—or thousands—of whom insisted on power increases or they threatened to not spend any money on additional Issues or updates to the game. Funcom was over a barrel. I wonder, though, how many players Funcom lost because the system was both unnecessary and poorly implemented at first. I myself had just begun subscribing again a month prior to entering Tokyo. They got maybe 30 bucks out of me before I quit cold turkey, not even playing or being tempted to play for well over a year.

Syp is not the only one who dislikes AEGIS despite having powered through the Tokyo Issues. Tententacles, for example, despises the system despite having taken three alts through to the end. Apparently, Lead Designer Romain Amiel has said AEGIS will be relegated to end-game content (dungeons/raids?) after Tokyo.

I noticed (and Sylow pointed out) that the Tower Defense mission now gives a full set of controllers. I want to dip in again now that I have a full set and maybe see how things go because the stories are still fascinating. I feel a bit removed from what is going on though. It may be better to return to my lower level Dragon to get back into the swing of things, or even create a character to start anew. We’ll see.

~~~~~~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you repost part or all of the work (for non-commercial purposes), please cite me as the author and include a link back to this blog.

If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

A SPOILER-Filled Discussion of The Force Awakens

Scooter and I went to see The Force Awakens a second time, and while it hasn't quite been two weeks since the opening, I wanted to get down some of my thoughts regarding specific story beats in the film. Obviously, there are spoilers involved, so I am going to hide the bulk of this post behind a break.

Chores and Rewards

Syp has a post up about logging into a bunch of games to get login rewards and do basic "chores" before logging out again. Scooter and I were just talking last night—early this morning, actually—about daily logins and monthly patron/subscription rewards. (On a side note, how is "login" not in the default Firefox spelling dictionary?) Discussing GW2, Scooter didn’t like the idea of logging in and basically leveling a character to max without ever actually playing GW2. Rift has a similar daily login reward system—at least for patrons—but without the leveling boosts, if I recall correctly.

While I am perfectly willing to pickup a reward just for logging into a game, I am generally disinclined to log in solely for the reward. I have on occasion logged in regularly simply to do "chores" like repeatable quests for a larger reward, like during seasonal events. But that's only when I don't have time for more. And I become less inclined to chase such rewards the older I get.

The Hype Train Derails

Meanwhile, and I am late to the party here, the folks at BioWare announced, during the recent livestream, a monthly subscriber reward program.

Thanks to Vulkk for posting that, since BioWare apparently didn't. And GRATZ to my old guild leader Maric (@PaganRites) for getting his tweet featured, among others (top right, starting about 7:02).

I kinda see monthly reward programs as bonuses for playing the game; I would not subscribe to any game only for the rewards. So I have no issue with the program as announced. But as Syp pointed out in his rehash of the December Livestream: "BioWare is the most begrudging studio I’ve ever seen when it comes to its free-to-play model. It has it. It offers it. And it clearly loathes that it’s had to include it." For some people—including me for the longest time—SWTOR's atrocious F2P program keeps them from playing at all, much less subscribing. And if I decide to stop subscribing I lose all sorts of quality-of-life perqs, not just an XP bonus and such. And non-subscribers are limited in how much of the MMO aspects of the game they can participate in, from PvP battlegrounds to group instances. More on that later.

Contrast that with, say, Trion Worlds and Rift, which has just about the most generous loyalty program out there. You can play whatever aspect of the game you like as much as you like completely for free, and most of the patron perqs simply add to that. And the more you spend, the more loyalty points you get. And the loyalty rewards NEVER go away.

Let's Role

A lot of people were disappointed in the subscriber rewards leading up to the release of Knights of the Fallen Empire, and were again disappointed by the already announced subscriber/loyalty rewards relating to the companion character HK-55. I see reactions like, "We already have an HK droid. We already have enough companions." I don't have much of an opinion either way, to be honest. I don't have an HK-51; I don't have a Treek companion either. I saw no need—even before the new, more versatile, companion system—to get another companion when I was likely to only use a couple of the companions I had already anyway.

Seriously, of the stories I've played through, Scourge is the only final companion I've used while questing, and only because I got him after the new system launched, and it's funny to make him my healer. The final companion usually comes so late in the game that I've already established a playstyle with one of the others, and I don't need a new one. If this were more like Dragon Age, where I was forming parties with my companions, I could understand having more than one. As it is, only the new system allowing me to pick my companion's combat role has induced me to switch companions as they join my crew (which means basically, only my smuggler Heliantha).

Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic

Getting back to HK-55 (and HK-related stuff, I assume) as a subscriber reward: meh. While I agree that the eightish-month sustained subscription during a specific time frame seems a little much for that extra story (no a la carte option?), monthly gifts are not why I subscribe to SWTOR any more than TSW's monthly gifts were the reason I subscribed there. I subscribe to SWTOR to play the game freely, without restrictions.

Meanwhile, many players are disappointed by the lack of new MMO content in SWTOR. While BioWare has obviously been focusing on the essentially single player Story experience, they have neglected creating new operations (raids) and PvP battlegrounds. These people don't have enough to do, and the subscriber rewards that have been announced are not much inducement to stick around. I do sympathize with them. But since my appreciation of "group content" at this stage is limited to the Story stuff Scooter and I do together, I am not a strong advocate for more raids and PvP. We haven't even done much by way of Alliance building, since those conversations are totally solo. I can't even watch Scooter's confabs, and vice versa. (I assume any missions can be done together.) We're busy bringing up our newer characters to get legendary status. I kinda hope that doesn't bite us in the butt when Ep X comes out in February.

~~~~~~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you repost part or all of the work (for non-commercial purposes), please cite me as the author and include a link back to this blog. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Another Dead Horse: "Clunky Combat" in TSW

It being the Halloween season, both Syp and Belghast (You may be able to tell how many blogs I actually manage to read on a regular basis. It isn't a long list.) have posts up today  about The Secret World. Belghast's post was a recruitment piece, promoting the virtues of the game. While Syp had some creepy screencaps. Perhaps inevitably, the topic of TSW's "clunky, slow combat" came up in the commentary, and Tanek finally offered up a possible explanation, at least from his perspective. I decided to write a rebuttal; however, Tanek did point out that TSW is one of his favorite games. But it is in spite of the combat, rather than a result of it.

Impact:
"Fighting with fist and blades I have not felt like most skills give any feel you are actually fighting anything. For most of my skills [those that don't involve knockdowns, etc.] there is no feedback beyond watching the enemy health bars tick down."

Name a game where this is not the case. None of the MMOs I have ever played effectively mimicked how a real battle with swords would play out. SWTOR, for example, makes some attempts to vary the animation to account for blocks, etc. But all too often the characters swing their lightsabers and weather blaster bolts with only a floating red number and a gap in the health bar to show for it. WoW was even worse, with dodge calculations happening entirely in the background.

Targeting:
"Some of this may come down to play style and choice of weapon, . . . the game decided that instead of your assist target being yourself or a group member, it picks the enemy or an inanimate object."

If you're trying to directly target characters in the battle area, I can see how this might be a problem. As a healer, I target using the party/raid frame (the default will do). This is an old habit I picked up playing WoW.

Mouse-look/target mode:
"I have come to like using what some call mouse-look mode. . . but it seems to only work when that was exactly where you had your cursor when you went into mouse-look. There is no easy way to temporarily use the cursor if needed to do something like click a loot roll button on screen (to be fair, the only game I have seen do this in a way I like is DDO. . .) Switching targets can seem a bit random. . ."

This seems to come down to preferred playstyle. I've never used "mouse-look" as described. (When I left-click-and-hold, the camera moves around my character. Right-click-and-hold causes my character to face the same direction as the camera. Holding both down, makes my character move. (Yes, I realize this is fairly normal behavior for MMOs post-EQ.) By default, reticle-based Target Mode in TSW is toggled by hitting "T" on your keyboard, and works consistently as far as I can tell. Toggling out in order to mouse click the UI or whatever is no more difficult than many other games where Target Mode is the norm and not just an option (e.g., The Elder Scrolls Online). As an aside, reticle targeting being the default is the reason Scooter and I never got into TESO. And if Tanek hasn't found a satisfactory toggle method outside of DDO, that's cool. But then TSW's is simply one of many combat systems he must not like.

Movement: 
"This is not always a problem specific to combat, but movement is TSW can seem somewhat 'floaty.' When fighting multiple enemies in an area that is not flat, this can lead to some interesting situations where you might have trouble avoiding environmental damage because you just… can’t… jump… on… that… ROCK!"

Again, this is not a problem unique to TSW. I've played plenty of games in which jumping and uneven surfaces were problematic at times. This is due to a discrepancy between the generally more intricate visual details of the game world vs the generally much simpler polyhedrons used to calculate collisions in the game environment ("hitboxes"). Hitbox Dissonance affects everything in this list, really.
~~~~~~~~
Overall, I would say that combat in TSW is on par with most other MMOs I have played. Having said that, I do have my issues with it. Though I still consider it one of my favorite games, I haven't played TSW in quite a while because I developed an extreme dislike of the AEGIS system the devs implemented with Issue 9 ("The Black Signal") and the Tokyo zones, making an already fairly long per-mob time-to-kill even longer.

~~~~~~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Blaugust the Sixth: Trumpet of the Elephant

So the big news today is, of course, Blizzard's announcement of the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion: Legion. Even though I have not played WoW with any kind of regularity since 2012, I am going talk about it now because of course I am. Mind you, I am writing this without having actually seen any information besides what trickled out on Twitter during the presentation. I will undoubtedly take a better look when I am not at work. Right after I delve into the details on Fallen Empire.

What is this, the Wrath of Illidan?
Didn't we collectively beat the crap of this guy at the end of The Burning Crusade? (Yes, we did.) I guess they figured if they could go back to the well for Warlords, they may as well dig not so deep again. I don't know, maybe they can make it feel fresh again. Everyone was really excited about the chance to see Draenor in its pristine glory before the planet broke into pieces, and I am not familiar enough with the Lore to know whether the Broken Isles are new territory or a rehash of something else.

And how about those Demon Hunters?
I thought Illidan didn't get his horns until he'd become an actual demon himself. I am curious to know if they're "bad guys" like the Death Knights, converting back to their former factions (Nelfs and Belfs!) once they realize they've been duped or something. One side benefit (if they haven't changed it already) is that now the Warlock's demon form could be female if the Warlock is female. Can they do that still?

Might we get some romance in the story?
The most interesting thing to me is that we will find out happened to Alleria Windrunner and her beloved Turalyon. Alliance players met their son on the Hellfire Peninsula, but they've been missing for years. I'm a sucker for love stories. But that's not enough to bring me back.

Rowan the Realist
Now take all this with a grain of salt. If Legion excites you into playing again or continuing because you never stopped, have at it. I think it's awesome that you can still play the game you love. I have fond memories of WoW, too. But I think what Belghast said on TGENerates Episode 3, is true: Wow is in decline and has been for a long time. Fewer and fewer dungeons, raids, and bosses have been included with each succeeding release, replaced by dailies and other repeatable grinds. Garrisons were an interesting new mechanic (almost got me back). But mechanics are not content, which is what themepark players crave. The things that excite people at the launch of a new expansion become albatrosses, and then reasons that they stop subbing.

And those numbers fall farther, faster, with each new iteration. The earnings call on Tuesday posted official subscriptions at 5.6 million, the same level as December 2005—just a year after launch and more than a year before the first expansion was released. Still better than just about every other MMORPG out there—and many combined—but nowhere near WoW's peak of 12 million subscribers. With Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone going strong, Blizzard isn't going anywhere. But the World of Warcraft is winding down, even if it's nowhere near the waste heap of history.

~~~~~~~~

If you're interested in joining the madness (Vloggers are welcome, too!), Belghast has a set of rules for qualifying for any prizes at the end. Your second stop should be the Blaugust Nook, where Bel is keeping track of everything and community members are sharing encouragement and ideas.
 ~~~~~~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Credibility

On Sunday, Scott Rankin (whom you may know as @mylin1 on Twitter) commented on my Mental Energy post that "any interesting message that could have been looked at, discussed and even added insight into blogging that he had is lost under a wall of hate."

I'm not sure if Scott meant the hate of the original troll or the backlash. But assuming he meant the troll, I agree. I know a lot of people are of the opinion that if someone has a valid point buried in a wall of hate, we should still listen. After all, to do otherwise would be a form of "shoot the messenger." However, that takes a lot of mental energy I think most of us do not care to expend in such a way. Excuse my French, but we don't need to dig into a pile of shit prospecting for gold. It is the duty of the messenger to deliver salient points of the message with as little extraneous information as possible, lest the fluff be construed as the essence of the message.

From my point of view, the noise of the vitriol drowns out any bits of reason that may be contained in the message. It has to do with credibility. Anything you say that reduces your credibility will interfere with the message you may be trying to convey.

I work as a technical instructor. Credibility is everything, and if one or more students perceives that I or a colleague is giving out mistaken information or are not confident in our delivery, they will often decide we don't know what we're talking about, even if 95 percent of what we're saying is accurate. When that happens, we've lost the students, even if they're still sitting in the classroom.

Looking at a different context, the reporter Brian Williams was caught lying about his experiences covering the war in Iraq, and it has cost him the anchor position on NBC's Nightly News show. (Now, there's a real journalistic ethics issue, right there, and no need to smear some some person with patently false rumors about whom they may or may not have slept with.) Mr. Williams' reputation—and therefore, his credibility—has been ruined by just a single lie (repeated).

Someone spewing vitriol on the Internet has very little credibility in my book. They are showing disrespect for their peers, and rather than arguing their point on the merits thereof, they throw out ad hominem attacks. There's no way to know if they really believe in the issue they are supposedly championing and are simply unable to argue it effectively; or if any truth or valid point is simply being made in an attempt to legitimize their hate. And really, does it even matter?

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Mental Energy

@ggchestnut @0utofBeta @Ardua @Hidden_Wings @Liores @Talarianjs @belghast @ctmurfy @mevsmyselfandi he's not worth expending mental energy on

— Rowan Blaze (@rowanblaze) May 11, 2015

Except when I can squeeze a blog post out of it. :-P

It seems that a certain blogger—whom I will not link to here; but if you're really that interested, can be found at Tweet Zero of the thread the above embed was part of—has long decried the Newbie Blogger Initiative as a call to groupthink by a certain cabal in the MMO blogging community. Dissenters need not apply. This blogger fancies himself some kind of reasoned, original thinker while parroting the reactionary opinions of others and denigrating the personal experiences of a whole subset of bloggers responding to an NBI writing prompt.

There's no such thing as a wrong opinion, but the facts some people use to substantiate their opinions can definitely be faulty. And there is such a thing as being on the wrong side of history. While "extremists" on both sides of a topic can be completely wrong in their tactics, if you're crying about the "good ol' days" when your own label enjoyed the privileges of an unbalanced system while declaring those who disagree with you to be bullies, maybe you need to walk a few steps in the shoes of those who've been ignored at best, and actively persecuted at worst.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Sports and Games

While I was busy exchanging germs with a couple hundred people in an aluminum can on Saturday, a competition aired on ESPN2. While not unusual that a sports network would broadcast a contest for entertainment, this happened to be an "eSports" tournament, which got all sorts of people in a froth. 

Sport (according to Dictionary.com):

1. an athletic activity requiring skill or physical prowess and often of a competitive nature, as racing, baseball, tennis, golf, bowling, wrestling, boxing, hunting, fishing, etc.
2. a particular form of this, especially in the out of doors.
3. diversion; recreation; pleasant pastime.

Most people fixate on the athletic component of the above definition in order to label a given activity as sport. I confess that I myself do so. On the other hand, I feel that primarily artistic competitions that happen to include an athletic component (e.g., dance, figure skating) should not be included. Neither would I consider competitions not involving athleticism (e.g., chess, videogames) to be sports. However, according to the third definition, I am wrong to think so. "Sport," much like "Obscenity," seems to be difficult to pin down, but we know when we see it.

Belghast thinks that we need to drop the "e" from eSports, as if they would be more legitimate without the wannabe prefix. I personally consider it a mistake to define every competition as a sport. We already have the ridiculous sounding Dancesport. What's next? Singsport? Why not? Singing involves plenty of physical exertion, more than the button-mashing of videogames that Belghast alludes to. How about Triviasport? The folks on Jeopardy mash buttons, too; and it's often reaction time/button mashing speed that determines the winner.

Game (also from Dictionary. com):

1. an amusement or pastime
2. a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.
3. a single occasion of such an activity, or a definite portion of one

Just as not all sports involve games (by the third definition thereof), not all games need to be called sports. My point is not to mock these various competitive organizations aspiring to be "Sports," but to point out that sports is not necessarily a  desirable thing to be associated with. Too many gamers (and other fringe interests) are concerned about credibility with the "mainstream." As the Godmother of Faff obliquely points out, the sports world is not exactly filled with proper role models. Nor are they likely to accept us "basement dwellers" into their cool kids' club in any case.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Axes to Grind

This rumination might ramble a little more than others.

Why'd You Have to Be So Mean?

Belghast is wondering when it became so "hip to be mean." Games are supposed to bring people joy, or at the very least some form of relaxation. Granted that there are many ways to relax—some folks like to lay on a beach, while others only yards away enjoy riding the waves. Some people spend their game time fishing, while others enjoy pitting their skills against each other in various forms of mock combat. But at some point, it became de rigueur to criticize—to judge—the pastimes of others. We accuse people of cheating when their playstyle or resources are different than ours. From our armchairs, we criticize the decisions of creators, athletes, and performers we can't possibly hope to emulate.

There’s a huge number of gamers out there who don't comment on websites, who don't know the ins and outs of the industry, who don’t care about who’s who. They don't know or care how exactly or technically games work. They're just interested in the experience of playing them. And I think that there is a hundredfold more of those people than the thousands who get paid to talk about games and write about games and the tens of thousands who leave shitty, nasty comments on game blogs and elsewhere.
~~An anonymous game developer on Don't Die

Politics Don't Only Happen in the Capitol

I can sympathize with game developers. I work in an industry, on a project, that always seems to be getting bad press. Some of it is perhaps deserved—we do a lot of internal critiquing ourselves—but much of it is not. The criticism is more about unrealistic expectations than any actual failing of the project. It's compared unfavorably to products that don't possess half the features, by people with their own axes to grind. Perhaps it suffers a bit from feature creep. Ultimately, it represents years of effort by people who just want to make the best product they can with the resources they've been given.

So many of us, and now I'm talking more narrowly about gamers, and particularly the gaming commentariat, come from a history of being bullied. And yet how quick are we to become the bullies ourselves? How often have we declared that someone not playing the way we do are doing it wrong? I have found myself on that bandwagon all too often. We become so defensive about our own interests that we wind up tearing down the interests of others. When we like a game, it becomes the delicious chocolate dish that everyone should love. But if we don't like it, we can't imagine why anyone would. And, therefore, those that do must be mentally defective in some way.

Look Beyond the Monkeysphere

We forget that these people are actually people. They have hopes and dreams, and hurts and difficulties, just like we do. We forget the long hours they devote to their endeavors, only to have someone come along and criticize, whether it's developers working on a game, or players playing it. We forget that those "evil" corporations are mostly just a bunch of people trying to make a living for themselves and their families. We forget that those other players may not have as much time as we do, or maybe not as much money. Or maybe they have some disability that simply makes it harder to play the game. Or, possibly, they just don't prioritize their lives and their game time the way we do.

I guess what it boils down to is that I think we should have a little less pride in our own supposed abilities or accomplishments and a little more empathy for one another.

Show a Little Appreciation

Someone I consider a good friend started something a few years ago he called Developer Appreciation Week. He wanted to shed a more positive light on the industry. I don't think anything like that has been organized this year, so you know what? I am declaring this coming week to be DEVELOPER APPRECIATION WEEK. If you're a blogger reading this, I encourage you to spend at least one post between tomorrow, 28 March, and next Saturday, 4 April, expressing your appreciation for those hard working people that make your life a little more enjoyable creating the games you play. And spread the word about DAW, because you reach people that I do not. If you do such a post, please send me the link either in the comments below or on Twitter. I will do an index post next week.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Gamergate Must Stop

Mi·sog·y·ny (məˈsäjənē)—noun: dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women.
(Google it)

I was trying to stay out of gamergate because up until now, it seemed pretty silly: a bunch of hot air and anti-feminism trying to disguise itself as a movement for journalistic integrity. But it has gotten way more serious, and it has to stop.

NEWS FLASH to the gamer-gaters out there: journalism has been prone to corruption for centuries, since long before William Randolph Hearst raised yellow journalism to an art form. News outlets are there to make money; whatever story that sells brings the most revenue will be printed. The industry is a revolving door in and out of politics and other businesses, and the video game development world is no different. Deal with it.

In the meantime, you have allowed whatever modicum of integrity present in your movement to be blown completely away by misogyny. Anita Sarkeesian is pointing out literary tropes that fuel many of the games we play. Counterarguments—even countertropes—and justifications do not make the tropes vanish. It is a literary critique, not a scientific survey; something you would understand if you had paid any attention at all in your high school or college English classes. Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn are only trying to make games they want to play. There is not a woman out there who is capable of bringing harm to your precious access to digitized violence. You know why? Because there's too much money to be had in publishing the latest GTA or CoD, making your heroes manly men and bodacious babes.

Ter·ror·ism (ˈterəˌrizəm)—noun: the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
(Google it)

Both Wu and Quinn have had to leave their homes due to credible threats against them and their families. The threats are ugly, describing heinous acts of violation and violence no one should have to contemplate. And now Sarkeesian has decided to cancel a speech at Utah State University because she didn't trust the local police to be able to protect her and other attendees from a specific threat that referenced the Montreal Massacre, a mass shooting in December of 1989 directed at engineering students in Montreal's École Polytechnique. The shooter in Montreal also claimed that his life had been ruined by feminists, singled out women, and murdered 14 before killing himself.

Obtained from this story in the Standard Examiner

If this were an Islamic militant, I would bet money that DHS would already have him (because it's not a woman) in custody. I can only hope the authorities track down the USU threat with the same zeal they would any other terrorist and prosecute him to the full extent of the law. To do otherwise would be hypocrisy in the extreme. The ideology is irrelevant; only the threat matters.

As·sault (əˈsôlt)—noun; Law: an act, criminal or tortious, that threatens physical harm to a person, whether or not actual harm is done.
(Google it) 

And to those who are trying to defend the gamergate movement by saying these sociopaths are only a few outliers, and why shouldn't we be concerned about journalistic integrity, I say this: Look in the mirror. You weren't too concerned about the coziness of game devs and journos before. But your anger exploded based on lies told by a jealous ex-boyfriend. So much for the integrity of the movement. Fight real issues, not theoretical conspiracies. Your first step might be to shed the Gamergate appellation; because frankly, it's tainted by the trolls and whackjobs among you.

I grew up dealing with bullies (more on that in a different post). Gamergaters jumped on me the second I started decrying the movement through the StopGamerGate2014 hashtag. You are not downtrodden, no one is oppressing you. You are nothing but bullies, but you will not bully me. 

Sure, always be wary of what you read. Every journalistic story has biases; some are hidden better than others, and there may even be "corruption." That is no excuse for cajoling, coercing or threatening people out of their homes or jobs because they have opinions or beliefs contrary to your own.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

QOTD: Schadenfreude

It's one thing to deeply oppose a game's design, but if you take delight in watching major MMOs flounder, you don't really deserve this genre at all.
~~Brianna Royce, Massively (emphasis in original) 

I have seen this phenomenon over and over. Someone who doesn't like a game gloats over bad news regarding said game. It goes beyond simple a "I told you so" and becomes a perverted schadenfreude.

I say this not as a current subscriber to WildStar, but as a human being: Wishing for and then gloating over someone's failures (whether real or perceived), is the worst sort of immaturity. Especially since most of the armchair game designers could never even hope to get their pet ideas off the ground, much less have any sort of commercial success.
~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

MegaStar

Hello, Dear Reader. It seems so long since we have been here. Blaugust came to an end and so did my posting. I only planned to take a one- or two-day break that coincided with Labor Day and a business flight on Tuesday. Instead, that break stretched out to the weekend, and now it's been a full week since I posted.

Luckily, I managed to avoid the bulk of what has come to be known as GamerGate, an appellation that surely shows how serious it is. Which is not very. Someday, maybe people will realize they should not feed the trolls. And yes, while I do not believe that both sides of the debate have equal merit, I do believe both sides have exhibited trollish behavior, from what I have seen.

Meanwhile, Carbine has created a minor -gate of their own with the announcement of a server restructuring that will leave us with only four WildStar megaservers, none of which are designated RP servers. This caused immediate consternation within the RP community, who had seen WildStar as a haven for RP activity. While I have all my characters on Evindra, a North American RP server, I almost always play alone or in partnership with my beloved bride, Scooter. I usually view RP servers as friendlier and more mature, but many folks are taking to the forum feedback thread to complain bitterly and even announce their /ragequit.

The RPers don't want to be thrown in with the general population, full of players the RPers are clearly superior to. Seriously, they whine about griefers before the problem has materialized. They may have a point, I don't know. But I don't think they really do either. What they were bringing up as examples of griefing behavior seems to be mostly oblivious people going about their business, rather than a malicious attempt to ruin anybody's fun. And of course, the devs are complete hacks (according to some RPers) who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, much less implement the "simple" fixes these armchair programmers come up with. But at this point, we just have to wait see how things shake out. I do hope that the opportunities for RP that these players crave do materialize, though it may take more effort on their part than simply picking a server.

In preparation for the megamerger, Carbine is offering free transfers to other realms. Though I didn't really see the point, this guy totally did. Then again, he transferred all of his characters at once rather than stagger them, which meant two days of down time. In the future, I hope he learns his lesson and keeps at least one character playable until the others are fully transferred.

One last thing the forum RPers were up in arms about is the implementation of second names coming with the megaservers. Apparently, people are so hidebound that they can't even imagine having a surname for their character, and are even willing to quit over it. I, on the other hand, love the idea, having had formal full names for my characters ever since STO (still one of the most RP friendly games I have seen, though some may disagree). Up till now in WildStar, I've basically mashed my character surnames into their given names (e.g, RowanBlaze, LyraSedgeweaver, etc.). Despite some initial confusion on the forums, the plan is that, after the megaserver implementation, everyone will have the opportunity (be forced) to change their name to include two words with a space between them.

As well as the allowance of at least one space in character names, I think the megaserver is something Carbine should have implemented from the beginning. And I am not alone in that opinion. If you're affected by all this and have not done so already, check out Kaelish's digest here. Along with the FAQ, you'll probably get all the info you need there, without developing an aneurysm.

Meanwhile, I started yet another character: Leonotis (Leonurus), pictured above. He's a Cassian Esper, and my first Explorer, as well. He's definitely a character, but I'll have more details in another post.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Whence a Gamer?

Expecting everything to be custom tailored for you is the surest way to end up angry in the end. It is like walking into a store and complaining that a red shirt isn't blue enough for you. If you don't want to wear a red shirt, don't buy a red shirt and then expect it to change into the color you want it to be.
~Belghast, Change is Scary

Apparently, there was much discussion yesterday on Twitter about trying to define the term "Gamer" and specifically, who gets to claim the term. Belghast would like to include folks playing Bejeweled on their phone while they wait for the bus, while others are far more exclusionary. Roger Edwards questions the need for labels at all. I think there is some value in labels, but that labeling everyone who happens to play Minesweeper a gamer diffuses the term so as to make it meaningless. I am not a mini-golfer just because I go to Putt-Putt once in a blue moon.

Let's put it it this way:

• If you consider the games you play to be a hobby, you might be a gamer.
• If you set aside time to play a game on a  regular basis, you might be a gamer.
• If you spend time thinking about a game while not actually playing, you might be a gamer.
• If you've ever bored or annoyed someone because you're talking about a game you've played, you might be a gamer.
• If you do research to improve your performance in the game you are playing, you might be a gamer.
• If someone who is definitely not a gamer would comment on your gaming when describing you, you might be a gamer.
• If you write about gaming, you might be a gamer.
• If you argue on social media about who gets to be called a gamer, you're probably a gamer.
• If you think you are somehow more a "Gamer" than someone else because you play on certain platforms or difficulty levels or are more "hardcore" or are more skilled or more committed—or whatever—shut the fuck up.

If you're interested in joining the circadian sun showers of Blaugust, breeze on over to Belghast's Blaugust Initiative Page on Anook and let him know you're there. It may even mean a small windfall for you, as Belghast has prizes prepared for high achievers.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Yes, All Women

I have sat thinking about this for a while now, but I can't remain on the sideline any longer. There are some who may see this as propaganda, but frankly, I've seen too much for it to be debatable. I am angry.

My normally fairly anti-feminist online buddy, River, just had his eyes opened regarding the recent Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen. He thought to himself, surely that's an exaggeration. Unfortunately, it's not; as he shares in the initial results of his poll.

Another Opportunity for Discussion

Elliot Rodger's particular brand of misogyny was brought on by deeper disturbances in his psyche. I hypothesize, based on what I have read, that the man was sociopathic, much like Eris Harris, one of the Columbine killers, superficially blaming others for rejection and bullying; when, in fact, they had only contempt for those around them. I also posit that perhaps Rodger didn't have "game" precisely because the women he approached romantically picked up on his explosive potential. But Rodger was encouraged by others (if unintentionally) who hold that women are prizes to be won, "targets," rather than individuals deserving of respect. Perhaps not all men are predators, but enough are that all women have encountered at least one, usually more.

That's not to say we should all be color/gender-blind robots. We all have preferences and orientations. Hell, I am about as interested in sex as it is possible to be, and fully aware of those around me that I find attractive. But just as homosexuals are generally smart enough not to proposition their hetero associates, heterosexuals need to be smart enough to know this: not everyone you are attracted to is attracted to you. And the ways they dress—or the activities they engage in—are no indication otherwise. Even if someone is attracted to you, for any number of reasons, that person may not want to have sex with you, nor welcome your sexual advances.

Sexism Stew

John Scalzi wrote a piece in April that came to my attention as a result of the hashtag, and I've been wading through the commentary. While his four levels of discrimination aren't perfect, I feel they are an excellent jumping-off point. I think the most instructive is the first level, Ambient. It's also the most contentious, given that Mr. Scalzi (accurately, IMHO) describes the cultural norms and memes (in the original sense as coined by Richard Dawkins) we all find ourselves stewing in. Since the higher levels of discrimination are fairly intentional, progressively fewer people engage in them. But recognizing our own complicity in ambient discrimination can be painful, and many resist the concept.

I have made mistakes of the sort Scalzi mentions myself. I am truly sorry to whomever I may have offended in this regard here or elsewhere online. Once, I was the center of a sexism controversy right here on this blog. It's still hard to see whether my words and attitude based on the cultural norms brought up in the commentary on that post were OK, or should be changed.

There are folks telling the people who want a more diverse set of heroes in Warlords of Draenor to go somewhere else if they don't like the "artistic choices" the guys at Blizzard are taking. While I agree that the devs are free to take the game whatever direction they want, the players are certainly free to call them out on perpetuating whatever social injustices in the game. Because then, when the expansion launches, they cannot claim ignorance on the issue. But some guys are tired of hearing about it.

Because if you're tired of reading our stories, imagine how tired we are of living them. #yesallwomen
— Ashley Hallett (@xashleysuzanna) May 28, 2014

How many times have I perpetuated some ambient discrimination? Or worse, one of the other more serious levels? The times I can think of, I deeply regret. But as I noted yesterday in sharing River's other post, sometimes we don't get to say I'm sorry. All we can do is try harder to be conscious of the things we do and say that make life more difficult for others.

We need to step up when we see problems, especially active harassment and discrimination. And we need to strive to reduce and even eliminate discrimination where it is within our power to do so, and exert influence if it is not. Because discrimination hurts all of us, even if we happen to be part of a privileged group.

That sexism is an injustice all women should be enough for us to act to change it. But the truth is sexism affects all of us. Let me appeal to the selfish men who see no need to act outside their own self-interest. Did your mother work? If you're in a hetero relationship; does your wife or girlfriend work? If so, your household was/is poorer than you would be if they were paid a fair, equal wage. If they were promoted fairly rather than passed over in favor of some man. Every male human who harasses or assaults a female human makes it harder for the rest of us to form relationships of trust with them. We're seen as a potential danger, regardless of whether we pose an actual threat. Again, none of that matters nearly as much as the fact that we should treat people with respect, regardless of their gender, orientation, religion, race, ethnicity, etc.

More broadly speaking, prejudices and discrimination of any kind affect everyone, bringing down those on the outside and those on the inside. How many great minds have been lost to history because of the actions of oppressive regimes? How many people are unable to reach their full potential or contribute more fully to the progress of humankind—or provide for their families—because they are not allowed to serve in positions of research, or management, or government, because of the prejudices of others?

Rowan Smash!

When I was a kid, I was the victim of bullying on many occasions. Eventually, I grew large enough to defend myself, and defend myself I did. Currently, I am over six feet tall and within spitting distance of three hundred pounds. While not as fit as some of my fellow gamers and bloggers, I can assure you there is plenty of muscle under this chub.

Lilik Yanuar Pribadi

As Scooter can attest, I have two characteristics that arise from my experiences as a child: an overactive sense of justice, and a tendency to become very angry when I perceive an injustice is being perpetrated. I like to think I am normally reasonably cuddly. But I am also a big, scary bear who does not suffer bullies of any stripe. Perhaps, like Stubborn, this has caused me trouble in the past. It has definitely caused trouble for others. I may have lost friends as result, but I have gained far more.

I am probably preaching to the choir. Most of the people who follow this blog probably are not the sort of people that would sexually harass someone at a convention, for instance. We may never meet in person. But if we do meet, and it's because I saw you acting the fool with some poor cosplayer or geek girl—or whoever doesn't fit your perception of what a gamer should be—I can assure you, you won't like me when I am angry.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

Playing the Name Game

And a cry went out across the world, wherefore can we not log on to the Wildstar site and claim our selfhood?
~Rowanblaze 14:5

Twitter and the blogosphere were abuzz yesterday with the collapse of the Carbine webserver(s?) as people rushed to get their character names reserved before the impending headstart and launch of Wildstar. Since Scooter and I are still on the fence about even buying and subbing to Wildstar, I only looked on with bemused detachment.

My Experience with name reservation @WildStar #WildStar pic.twitter.com/dy7V1WpIew
— Tom Fallone (@tomfallone) May 13, 2014

Syp can't believe Carbine was not prepared for this onslaught with servers capable of handling the inevitable traffic. Since "first come, first served" in an era of global communication seems a bit unfair, Tobold thinks a lottery would be a good way to go. While I agree with him about commodities like tickets to Blizzcon (something else I have little interest in going to), I am not sure how that would play out in distributing unique items—names in this case.

As I did on those blogs, I wonder yet again why more companies don’t go with some @handle-type route, like Cryptic and, more recently, Zenimax have done. At its heart, this is a database design issue, a decision to be made by the devs. A character name (along with all other aspects of a character) is simply a part of a database. If you're distributing your playerbase across separate servers (another relic of prior decades), unique character names might be OK for a while. But if you have a flexible server system, then to me it makes more sense to have unique user names and let the players create whatever character name they want.

Within reason, of course. No need to allow offensive terms or phrases in character names or player handles. But systems for determining whether a name may be inappropriate are fraught with problems, too. I once tried to create a name in Guild Wars 2 that included the word "Jewel." It was "not acceptable" and the only reason I can think of is that it included the letters j-e-w in sequence. The system was not capable of recognizing an innocuous iteration of those letters.

With Wildstar's launch barely weeks away, it's probably too late to implement a system of player handles the way Elder Scrolls Online and Star Trek Online have. But I would plea with any game developer to consider such a system if you really expect to have a massive number of people playing your game. Non-unique character names means no rush to reserve said names, and no crashing of an unprepared server suite.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

For the Right Reasons

We can measure facts, but a cause is not a fact—it’s a fiction that helps us make sense of facts.
~Jonah Lehrer, Wired.com

So, I guess Turbine is laying off some workers. To those whose jobs are on the chopping block: you have my deepest sympathies. I hope you land on your feet in a great new place. Meanwhile, there are those jumping at the chance to gloat at your misfortune, ready to draw conclusions not only about the health of Turbine, but the MMO genre as a whole.

Instead of linking to that old PR release about how great LotRO and DDO are doing thanks to F2P, please use this updated link.

F2P ALL THE WAY!
~Syncaine, Turbine finally updates us on the continued success of their F2P conversions

Yeah, because no proprietor of a subscription-only game ever laid off any employee. Syncaine makes a fallacious correlation between a business model he personally dislikes and the health of a company that operates it. (And yes, it's fallacious, because we don't know the circumstances or reasons behind the layoffs.) Syncaine espouses all sorts of valid reasons to dislike F2P. This instance, sadly, is just his schadenfreude showing through.

No game succeeds or fails purely due to its business model. The success factors of both WoW (which has hemorrhaged more players than pretty much all other MMOs ever had) and EVE have little to do with their business model (btw, doesn’t PLEX make EVE a hybrid?) and everything to do with game design. Turbine’s “rightsizing” is business, not game design. We need to look at the design decisions behind LOTRO and other games, as well as external market pressures, to understand why they succeed or fail. Syncaine insists on oversimplifying it to a question of how the companies extract money from players’ wallets.

I'm not saying business model doesn’t influence design. But a crappy, unpopular game will be crappy and unpopular regardless of the business model. And a good game will be good regardless of how the player is asked to pay for it.

Pretty much every game that is not WoW (including EVE) has proven that WoW is a glaring exception to the rule that MMOs are basically a niche in western markets. Every game has its fanbois and haters, regardless of its relative success. And every fanboi thinks his favorite is the result of superior game design.

But Syncaine has declared himself arbiter of both quality and success. He has "yet to see a great F2P MMO," but he's also the one determining "great." He knows "what a great sub MMO looks like," but again that is his personal opinion. This reminds me a little of the SCOTUS definition of obscenity.

I assume Syncaine is playing EVE. He certainly holds it up as an example of great game design. I don't dispute its success, but I would never play EVE, given the tales of what I consider dickish, unethical, and downright criminal behavior of the players. All explicitly allowed by the premise of the game. That's not a great game, in my opinion; and it's by far a distant second in success to the behemoth that is WoW, a game that Syncaine deplores, if I am not mistaken. And when we take into account that the average EVE player allegedly has upwards of 2.5 accounts, Syncaine's 500,000 accounts translate into maybe 220,000 really enthusiastic players. So about the same number of subscribers as LOTRO from what I could gather; though they pay far more per player.

I love TSW, but I don't subscribe. I throw money at it every once in a while for either "fluff" costuming, or the DLC-style content updates. And I am happy with that. Does it struggle? Yes, but it is in a niche genre. However, I haven't encountered a better progression system (imho) or better content (imho) in any other game. Syncaine, naturally, probably thinks it sucks. But I defy you to find any way that TSW drives players into the cash shop from within the game. The shop certainly is available through an in-game interface, but I don't really think that's what we're talking about when we say a game is "purposely designed to make me use their cash shops," as Xyloxan put it. Maybe LOTRO does, I don't know.

I am past the point in my life that I want to be tied to any particular MMO because I am subscribed to it. You can argue about my level of commitment, I suppose. But there are more important things in my life I have committed myself to than a game. Therefore, F2P is perfect for me, right now. If I don't like a particular F2P system—*cough*SWTOR*cough*—I don't play. I don't play LOTRO either. But the reasons have nothing to do with the business model.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.

The Hornets' Nest

I seriously did not expect the hue and cry over my weekend posts. Many people delivered impassioned arguments about why there is such a thing as pay-to-win—or at least pay-to-make-someone-else-lose—and the ability to change classes is the Devil's doctrine. I'll make a few more comments and then let you guys duke it out in the comments if you so choose. You probably won't like what I have say.

Trivial Pursuits

That's what I think is really behind the cry of P2W. The awareness that the game is trivializing something I like to do.
~Arcadius

Arcadius has a point, and I certainly have railed against games that trivialize my preferred playstyle myself. The truth is that the way I play is trivial, and the way you play is trivial. and the way sports fans watch football all weekend is also trivial—to anyone not involved in it. While I thoroughly believe that recreation and hobbies are important for health and other benefits, the specific way people spend their leisure time is trivial to everyone else. Because the rest of us don't care. The only person in the debate that managed to express anything close to a legitimate argument was Balkoth regarding his top-end raid group. And sorry to say, but he provided his own evidence as to why top end raiders are just as trivial a market segment as any other special interest group in MMOs.

The funny thing is, the insta-90s are coming, is it that hard to imagine the opportunity to skip right to raid-ready status (for a fee)? No one—at least at Blizzard—is talking about selling top-end gear for RL cash.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Meanwhile, what Syl calls the Last Bastion of Character Restriction is showing early signs of crumbling. Allod's has started offering the chance to switch character class (for a fee). Upon hearing that some of us approve, the naysayers said nay.

Now a while back, when they introduced the ability to change race, faction, etc., I remember the folks at Blizzard saying basically that changing class was beyond their technical capability. I don't know if that is really the case any longer, if a bit complicated. Of course, the conversation seems to have shifted over at Syl's blog, from what I understood to be a fairly permanent change in class, to a more fluid, switch at will kind of class swapping, akin to the weapon swapping of TSW, or the multiple professions of FFXIV.

As a “player,” I'm primarily the facilitator and observer of my characters. They tell me what they want to do and I help them to do it. It needs to be consistent with their worldview from a perspective that stands within the culture of the virtual world in which they exist. (This is not role-playing, by the way).
~Bhagpuss, over on Syl's post.

Only for a certain definition of role-playing, Sir Bhagpuss. I have never heard anyone express their relationship to their characters this way before. Syl countered by declaring that she is her character, it is an avatar, and better to be able to multi-class than to hop alts on a whim. I am somewhere between, I personally love my alts, but I wonder if I would have developed into an altoholic if not for certain game mechanics in WoW, namely classes and rested XP.

Don't get me wrong, I would love for there to be a valid in-game reasoning for such a change. I came up with head-canon for why my Shadow Priest switched to Discipline, even though the in-game reasoning was flimsy at best, and instantaneous.

Over on his own blog, Klepsacovic expounds on why he doesn't think class swapping is a good idea, but much like the anti-P2W crowd, he decides that his personal feelings should dictate what is or is not available to the rest of us. I responded thus:

I'm with you, changing classes doesn't make sense for us. I couldn't imagine Rowanblaze as anything other than a Human Priest. I bet changing the race or faction of Kelpsacovic doesn't make any sense to you either. But the option is available for those players who are interested in changing faction or race. This would be the same thing. An option. A reformed warlock who took some time out to study the arcane. A warrior who felt the call of the light—or the shadow—set down the sword and board for vestments and staff. And aren't deathknights, at least from a lore perspective, converted from many other classes? There are plenty of RP justifications for changing class. If other players have the option to change the class of their character, how does that really, honestly, affect you?

In the end, players may rage all they want on the forum and the blogs, but if the game companies see an unfulfilled demand that they can monetize, you can bet they will do so.

~~~

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. If you are reading this post through RSS or Atom feed—especially more than a couple hours after publication—I encourage you to visit the actual page, as I often make refinements after the fact. The mobile version also loses some of the original character of the piece due to simplified formatting.