DPS, nerfs, epic loots, and wank

IT WAS ALL A SOCIAL EXPERIMENT GUYS

meagen.image@yahoo.com — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:56:11 GMT

http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2009/07/loyola_university_professor_be.html

P.S. BUY MY BOOK

More Eurogamer/Darkfall wankery...

meagen.image@yahoo.com — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:40:12 GMT

Previously on As the Srs Bsns Turns --

--Eurogamer sends a reviewer into Darkfall to play the game. Reviewer gives DF a 2/10.

--Fanboys and the game's lead designer both nerd rage over the review

--Eurogamer offers to bring in a second reviewer to placate the developers, only to get more nerd rage in response.

On today's episode:

--Someone in Darkfall creates a Eurogamer.net clan in the game, with every clan then declaring war on them.

--Similar declarations of war end up on YouTube

--The lead designer of Darkfall flounces and officially declines a second review from Eurogamer.

Dealing with this Eurogamer scandal has been extremely frustrating for us. To those of you that believe we’re unprofessional for calling Eurogamer out on this, we’ll have you know that there’s nothing professional about this entire affair. It’s obviously personal when someone will tear our game apart without actually playing it. It’s certainly personal for us to see our livelihood being torn to shreds by a fraud using a respected large game site to do it through. We tried to deal with this privately but Eurogamer wouldn’t hear it, so we had no recourse but to go public.

We would never accuse Eurogamer , Ed Zitron or anyone without solid evidence. We know for a fact that we’ve been wronged. Eurogamer is right to keep it up as they’re seeing some good traffic from this, but in the meanwhile we‘re taking irreparable damage and there’s simply nothing we can do about it. We are in an impossible situation, with many future possible repercussions to our game and we’re helpless to react. The Eurogamer smear piece is picked up by online media everywhere and this will stay with us long after this issue is forgotten. Gamerankings and Metacritic for example have already used this Eurogamer score of Darkfall, and unless this review comes down, a new review won’t be taken into consideration. Metacritic informed us earlier today that they sympathize but they can’t do anything unless the review comes down.

So we considered Eurogamer’s offer to have Kieron Gillen re-review our game on their behalf but in the meanwhile they will not take down the original review. We have to decline the offer for a re-review (as if we have a choice) for the following reasons:

* We don't need a re-review, we need a real review. We know for a fact that the original review is a fraud and yet Eurogamer stands by it. They should keep standing by it then or take it down based on the evidence *we have offered them, the numerous factual errors and omissions, the feedback they’re receiving on it, the reviewer’s questionable track record, former similar accusations about him, and our word. These half baked measures to save face mean nothing while this assassination piece stands. We’ve offered enough proof to justify taking it down to protect our game and their credibility. If they as much as suspect that we might be right, and we believe they know we are, they should have taken it down pending a re-review.

*The evidence: The reviewer’s supervisor and MMO Editor for Eurogamer spent 2 minutes in the character creator but didn’t create a character. Ed Zitron spent 2 hours 33 minutes logged in the game and the character creator. In this time the reviewer tried 9 different characters. Much of the time was spent creating and deleting these characters. 14 minutes before the reviewer stopped playing Darkfall altogether he said in global chat: “how do I cast spells…..help”. During his entire time in the game he repeatedly asks: “what do I do?” in public chat. After less than an hour logged in the game he speaks in race chat and says “this game is awful” His entire chat log shows someone biased that spent very little time in game, didn’t understand even the very basics right before he stopped playing to write his review. We offered to pay to fly one of Eurogamer’s IT people over here and cover all his expenses so he can also inspect all our logs, verify our claims, and see that they are practically impossible to doctor. Eurogamer refused.

* I spoke with Kieron and I believe he is capable of doing an excellent job at reviewing Darkfall, so much so that it’s completely unfair for him, and for us, that he does mop-up duty after the original fraudulent review. We hope he’ll review Darkfall for another respectable publication sometime and we don’t want to blow it on this one. If they wanted Kieron Gillen they should have let him write the original review instead of tossing Darkfall to some random and unsupervised amateur. They got what they paid for but why should we have to suffer for it?

* It’s not helpful to us, this is not some grand gesture on Eurogamer’s part and it doesn’t do us justice. Eurogamer is running the re-review for their own sake, again at our expense. We’re not going to sit here looking at their bogus review while we wait for their next verdict in about a month. We won’t play that game. It’s pointless. If Kieron gives us a good review, a bad one, or an average one, the perception will be that he’s simply mopping up. Eurogamer will not take down the original review even if the new one overturns it.

* The MMO Editor for Eurogamer should have checked up on the review when Darkfall received a 2/10. When your site instructs the public to avoid someone’s livelihood at all costs, and calls their playerbase morons, you should at least make sure you’re not pulling these things out of your ass. We gave them 2 accounts for this reason and the MMO Editor chose to not use his. We pleaded with him to give us some time to discuss this, but he turned us down and sited Ed Zitron’s supposed impeccable track record. This about a guy who at best was happy to take Eurogamer’s money and spend a couple of hours using troll posts as reference to write a review on our game. We’re not the first developer to accuse Ed Zitron. He seems to have done this kind of thing before on several occasions and mostly against independent games. It’s not often that you see these kinds of accusations, but Ed seems to have collected a few of them. So much for his impeccable record. Eurogamer also knows this but chooses to ignore it. They’re forced to take his word over our proof and his prior track record because they’ve got nothing else to go on.

* It’s a conflict of interest any way you want to look at it. Eurogamer is paying another writer according to Eurogamer’s editor to “…see whether he agrees with Ed or not”. Ed is a fraud, there’s nothing to agree with here as far as we’re concerned.

So if it’s all the same to Eurogamer we’ll just take it on the chin and stick with the original review. We don’t need their concessions. If they can live with this, so can we. 2/10 from the likes of Ed Zitron is going to be a badge of honor for us. They can keep that fraud up as our memorial contribution to journalistic integrity and to independent games everywhere. At the very least they may think twice before they try doing this to someone else.

We hope these can be our final thoughts on this topic.

Given the sheer level of vitriol from the developer over this single review, I'm guessing there's a lot more going on behind the scenes. A bad review, or even an unfair one, shouldn't provoke this level of anger this quickly.

My guess? They're in deep financial shit and overreacting like this might give them some cover if the game goes under soon. They can blame it on Eurogamer's review rather than on anything they did. I might be wrong, but that's the sense I'm starting to get about all this.

Eurogamer reviews Darkfall. Srs bsns ensues.

meagen.image@yahoo.com — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:30:44 GMT

For those who don't know, Darkfall is a small indie MMO which bills itself as a hardcore, FFA PvP world with full player loot. It's supposedly not for the faint of heart and for those who want to be challenged.

It's also got a long, glorious history of wank for a variety of reasons: (1) an 8+ year development cycle, (2) a promised release date of Jan. 22nd being pushed back to Feb. 25th after the lead developer, Tasos Flamboursas, claimed in December that the game was, "more ready for launch than most, if not all of the MMORPG titles at the same stage that I've personally sampled and it has been for quite some time." (3) a botched launch that included people who pre-ordered the game not having access, multiple charges on credit cards, etc.(4) player complaints about non-existent customer support and rampant cheating, and whole other host of issues.

Being an FFA PvP game, it's filled with the usual suspects of that crowd-- griefers, hackers, exploiters, roaming bands of players that zerg n00bs and anyone unfortunate enough to be in their way, etc. It also has the requisite wank on its official forums that goes along with FFA PvP.

Also, the game exists in a limbo called "Closed Retail". Basically, Darkfall can only be purchased via download from the developers, but only whenever they announce more sales on their website, and with a limited number of slots being available for purchase at a time.

With all that in mind comes the latest bit of wankery-- the Eurogamer review of Darkfall in which they give the game a 2 out of 10.

Fanboys begin nerd raging about the review and final score, even trolling the comments section at the Eurogamer site.

Normally, that would be bad enough, but Tasos gets mad and gets his own nerd rage on:

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185060

When we read the hostile review by Ed Zitron, one thing became apparent: he had not played the game at all. Eurogamer readers and Darkfall players are posting bullet lists of factual errors in the story. The reviewer hadn't even figured out the very basics of the game before he wrote about it. We checked the logs for the 2 accounts we gave Eurogamer and we found that one of them had around 3 minutes playtime, and the other had less than 2 hours spread out in 13 sessions. Most of these 2 hours were spent in the character creator since during almost every one of the logins the reviewer spent the time creating a new character. The rest of the time was apparently spent taking the low-res screenshots that accompanied the article. At no point did this reviewer spend more than a few minutes online at a time.

Darkfall is the largest MMORPG game of its kind and this guy spent a few minutes playing(?) before he tore it apart. How can someone do that responsibly? Ed Zitron didn’t even give Darkfall a chance.

The entire review is opinionated and hostile; it attacks the game, the creators and the company at every chance. The creators and developers of Darkfall, as well as the Darkfall community through its reaction, consider this review suspect and question the motives behind its publication. We can take a bad review, but not like this. Even the worst reviews that we’ve received commend our efforts and speak of the potential of Darkfall. The majority of our players love the game. This review might keep new players from ever trying a game they would enjoy.

We sent the play-time information to Eurogamer and asked them to take down the article as it is damaging our game’s reputation but also Eurogamer’s reputation. We asked to get an unbiased reviewer on the case who will actually play the game before writing about it. They said that taking it down now would be more damaging to their reputation than if they left it up. After our reaction to publicize the play history of their reviewers to protect our game, they asked us to wait while they try to confirm what we already knew from our logs. We’re afraid that waiting any longer is unacceptable to us, because this review was designed to drive people away from our game and allowing it to remain without any kind of reaction is out of the question. Out of professional courtesy we’ve waited 5 hours longer than we said we would before posting this.

I'm sure this will all end well. Heh.

Edit #1: ~~Fanboy supposedly finds Eurogamer reviewer on MySpace, continues to whine while doing so.~~ Never mind. It got deleted.

Edit #2: Eurogamer responds to Tasos and stands by their reviewer, disputing the claim that the guy didn't play the game at all, but also says they will bring in game journalist Kieron Gillen to write a second review.

That's not good enough for Tasos, however, and he nerdrages again:

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=185299

It just keeps getting better. I think I need to stock up on popcorn.

World of Wankcraft: Wrath of the Bitch King

meagen.image@yahoo.com — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 08:32:46 GMT

This is an epic, epic tale of guild wank and the seedy world of e-sports, my friends. A tale of weeping e-peens and betrayal, pay-for-play and Arab sheiks (no, rly.). I'll attempt to do it justice without a flowchart. It's long, but I swear to Baby Thrall, it's worth it.

Our Cast:

-Nihilum. An infamous Horde guild on Magtheridon EU. Suffice it to say this guild was considered by a lot of people to be the best ZOMG HARDK0R3 guild in the world. They were best known for a streak in which they got all the world firsts in PvE content, starting from Gruul's Lair, including being the first guild to clear Black Temple. They were also world champions in PvP at this year's Blizzcon. Nihilum is extremely Srs Bzns, in a scene full of much Srs Bzns, and have been no stranger to wank in the past. Previous kerfluffles involved them allegedly not allowing female players in the guild, an April Fool's flounce that left their many fanboys crying into their Mountain Dews, and allegations of intentional bug exploitation in their world first kill of Lady Vashj. They've also been dogged for years by rumors of gold buying, and that their guild leader, Kungen, has made guildies pay his RL bills (keep this in mind for later). To put it bluntly, wank wafts around these guys like funk in the air of your local con.

-Curse/SK Gaming. Another uber hardkore EU guild, Curse started on a different server. I won't get into all the wanktabulous history of this guild, except to say that back in the day, somewhat hilariously, they accused Nihilum of stealing credit for the world first downing of Archimonde. At some point down the line, they got invited into SK Gaming, a German team somewhat notorious in the European e-sports scene, and accepted, becoming known simply as SK Gaming. SK has had similarly scandalous rumors swirling around it; theirs involved a Mysterious Benefactor acting as sugar daddy to its leaders with real life money (again, keep this in mind for later).

Fast forward to the fall of '08, when members of Nihilum and Curse-now-SK merged to form the super-guild Ensidia. Ensidia's founding mission was to get all the world firsts for raid content in Wrath of the Lich King when it came out. Given the respective histories of these two guilds, it couldn't have possibly gone wrong, hmm?

Enter one SerbAndSteel. He's a former member of Nihilum who left days before the SK merger. He wrote an truly epic tell-all airing all of Ensidia's dirty laundry. And when I mean all of it, I mean all of it. Starting from the revelation that SK had several prospective guilds it wanted to merge with, and Nihilum was at the dead bottom of the list, largely because of Kungen. And why did SK not want Kungen, he with the rep for making his guildies pay his rl bills, in on their sweet, sweet action? Read on!

Eventually, they HAD to go to the ONE guild they did not want to go to - Nihilum and Kungen. You see, they knew for a fact that a merge would not be hard to set up. They knew Kungen would instantly sell out once he got to know the identity of their ”patron”, and the many benefefits the merge would result in.

Their benefactor and fan is noone else but the mysterious guy who kept buying pimped characters from all the top guilds. He is in possesion of Rulah (Nihilum druid), Zeuzonita(Method rogue) and a number of other characters that simply "vanished" from their guilds. This very same person has played in a number of well known high-end guilds and eventually ended up "playing" in SK Gaming.

This person also covered Mackzter`s rent of an apartment in Stockholm, Mackzter’s and Mek`s traveling expenses, among many other things.

Who is this Mysterious Masked Pimp taking care of the SK stable? The Crown Prince of Dubai!

The person behind Ensidia, Kungen, Mackzter and Meka is no less than the Crown Prince of Dubai, son of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. As I mentioned earlier, he’s been in the "scene" for years, he was a member of a number of top guilds with his brother and eventually ended up in SK-Gaming.

Let that sink in for a minute. The Crown Prince of Motherfucking Dubai is paying nerds to play World of Warcraft. They never tell you that on those Travel Channel specials. Sadly, our dear Serb refuses to reveal his sources for this bombshell in the post, but the LOLWTF doesn't stop there.

Next is some grudgey talk of being promised what amounted to a bench spot raiding the new content, which SaS never got, because of nepotism. He goes on to explain that despite SK's misgivings about giving Kungen their daddy's beeper number, the merger did go forward, on 11/25/08 (with the especially obnoxious tagline, "remember, remember, the 25th of November"). Needless to say, the honeymoon was extremely short-lived.

The first thing to be done in order to ensure that the merge succeeded was to "elliminate" all the players that were not wanted. A few players from SK were left out because Kungen, due to his ego, either ”never wanted to see them again”, and others because they "sucked". What really happened here was that people who had dedicated the past three to four years (less in some cases) were ditched like garbage, despite the fact that they had helped the "leaders" and guilds to get where are today. The biggest shame is that these players, who played to be the best, got screwed over without even knowing it themselves. Not a word. Nothing.

Yes, according to our poor Serb, the first act of this new Arab-prince-funded super-guild was to effectively gut it of the people who made the success happen. And it gets better. Oh, does it. Ensidia leaders were sent on paid junkets to various e-sport events and grabbed any and all swag for themselves. And those aforementioned bags of cash? Some was promised to members migrating to Ensidia's home server, Magtheridon. But they never saw it, according to SaS:

Also, as far as I know, all SK members who migrated should have gotten 250 euros each (cut down from 300 as originally promised), and Nihilum members who joined the merge should have gotten 100 euros each. Ok, that is not a lot of money, but if you take into consideration that only a few, SPECIFIC Nihilum members got the cash under the "excuse" from Kungen that only veterans would get compensated, while at the same time quite a number of REROLLERS who joined Nihilum during the last couple of months got the money as well. I doubt that the Sheikh would run low on money if he payed everyone 250/transfer (if not 300 and you took the difference?), so WHERE did the money from Nihilum members who got screwed go? If you calculate how many people got fucked over, the figure would reach at least a few a thousand euros. Straight down Kungen’s pocket?

Yes, a classic pyramid scam. SaS ends his expose in classic WoW wank fashion, posting a screenshot of his damage meter to prove his worth, "fanart" of the Ensidia leaders, and a hilariously misused music video as a tribute to the people who were screwed over. I know when I see Rage Against the Machine's video "Freedom", I don't think of politics or civil rights, I think of hardcore raiders pumping their sweaty fists in the air over guild wank.

So, is all this true? Or is it grudge on the part of Herr SaS, bitter at being jilted by the guild he poured his e-life into? Fortunately for us, the commenters can't decide. Marvel as e-peens are waved with abandon, accusations of noobitude and grudgewank fly. Thrill as exhortations of LRN2RAID are made, and SaS' friends duke it out with the Ensidia fanboys and random rubberneckers. There are way too many gems in there to pick any out, so have at it. Everyone fails here.

Be sure to check out #52, though, in which an escapee of Ensidia's ponzi raiding scheme relates how he was forbidden to go to a family funeral the day of Wrath's release. I'm not making this shit up.

meagen.image@yahoo.com — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 03:22:15 GMT

This isn't quite wank yet, but I'm posting it here rather than at clairvoyantwank because we need the activity.

Over at the LJ community for City of Heroes, a debate is going on as whether we should be discussing information possibly leaked out from under a NDA about the upcoming changes to the game. Already we have such gems as:

ebenbrooks
Don't care. Benefiting from wrong activity is wrong.
rogh_sensei
Or, to use the example of my former psych professor, a man breaks into a pharmacy to steal medicine that his wife needs to survive that he CANNOT obtain by any legal means. Is that still wrong?

ebenbrooks seems pretty anxious to push his view. Paranoid beta tester, perhaps? And does anyone know if the comm has some sort of special relationship with the game devs or something? "If NCSoft decides that we're not trustworthy...what then?" seems to imply there's something for the comm to lose.

Waah! Change is scary and bad!

meagen.image@yahoo.com — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 23:40:48 GMT

All right, let's get this place going!

City of Heroes is gearing up for their latest free update, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. While the Test Server is in Closed Beta (only those chosen through an obscure arcane process may log in to see the new stuff), articles and previews about the new stuff get posted regularly.

The latest news is about the Sweeping PvP Changes, and if you know *anything* about MMOs, that one phrase should be enough to let you know you're in for one wanky treat.

Quoth Frank "Castle" Grubb, the "powers guy" of the CoH devteam:

We want to take some steps to help make Player vs. Player encounters more attractive to a larger group of players, while at the same time opening up more "character build" options for the existing dedicated PvP players. This is a challenging issue to tackle, given the scope of the proposed changes, but we feel the time is right to address these issues.

At the core, many of the power effects are the same: Heals still heal, attacks still deal damage, and holds still hold. However, the new system makes a number of adjustments that should be friendlier to a wider range of AT's and skill levels. The goal is for players to be able to bring any AT and powerset combination into PVP and to be competitive and have fun!

So, there you have it. A whole slew of changes for you to chew over, plan around...and test on the Training Room! We still have a lot of testing and tuning to do. While our initial playtests are showing these changes to be fun, we’ll ultimately look to broader playtests to validate the changes.

Quoth the playerbase:
Egotistic

Wow... this is.. wow.

Mind you the wow factor is NOT a good one.

If you hadn't realized.

When asked to elaborate:

Castle, just get rid of pvp, you've just changed the game totally, Or join pvp and be an active role in it prior to the changes and then tell us what you think, not zone pvp either sir, zone is only fun for so long and easy to do.

Fasque gives us some poetry:

Goodbye baby.

Goodbye bathwater.

Arena > Zone ???

Do not grok.

Define "fun" plz.

In. Slow. Motion.

black_barrier is cheerfully nihilist:

lmfao. castle you just killed arena pvp, thanks dude!

im gonna go cut myself.

Jimmay (forum title: #1 PVP SG, We wanted to win this way!)

Congratulations - you Looked at arena PVP since you could not focus on zones - took zero input from the arena pvp teams and put the final nail in the arena pvp ladder...

(By way of explanation: since you can copy characters to the Test Server without any limits, it has become the place where the "serious PvPers" congregate, and there's a player-run PvP ladder which I'm told is fairly active.)

_Scorch_ predicts that LOTSA PEOPLE WILL QUIT, and uses smilies!

Funny thing is that most PvPers have multiple accounts,
This might put a bigger hurt on their pocket book than
they thought......

Pretty (angryface) ritenao

Thats what we get for having DEV's that dont know anything about PvP (confused)

And then manages to contradict himself within two lines:

If the Dev's PvP'ed at all they would know that most of these changes are terrible.

I don't disagree with some of them, but a few are really questionable

Emo_Bitter just wants us to know we'll be losing our FINEST PLAYERS.

(quote)I don't think [PvPers are] even 1% of the playerbase. Heck, I'd be amazed if it was 0.5%.(/quote)

With this mindset I'd have to say your a dev.

But take this into consideration. Most of us PvPrs are the ones that run those epic TF/SF's and keep entire teams buffs and do their jobs in a team and do them well (Mind you i said MOST, not ALL). I can think of a handful of people just on infinity that schedule many different PvE events that the entire player base benefits from; they PvP. Now take away those people and you got a LOLtastic PuGFest from Doom and guess what; you gimped yourselves in the process.

I know our numbers were small (now even smaller) but we contributed alot to not only PvP but PvE too. So before you wish away the people that made your Hami raids possible, your MoSTFs run smoothly, and MoLRSF's go w/o flaw you can now kiss them all goodbye. I dunno I heard the Mime RP'rs from Virtue are looking for new members!!!

Nerfing_Kills has lots of punctuation!

Who do you have testing this!?!?!?!? Is it anyone from the PvP Ladder???

And more!

When are PvPers getting into Test? Being that it's

i13: The Road to PvP Hell and Back

shouldn't the PvPers be doing an immense amount of testing? To be honest, I believe that the Test PvP Ladder should've been among the first wave with Family and Friends, but only because these PvP Changes are utterly radical and will make everyone who's ever PvPed RE-LEARN EVERYTHING

jr0ck gives us this... *almost* readable assessment.

I am in strong disagreement of diminishing set bonuses. Thats like someones boss telling them "thanks for working overtime last week but instead of paying you your regular hourly rate (or even time and a half) we are gonna pay 1/2 your rate. In fact the more you work the less we will pay you per hour" Your taking away what some of us have worked really hard to get by doing this. I have spent countless hours in this game (like some others) trying to get my pvp toons set up and now your talking about taking some of my hard work away for those that dont put in the amount of time that i do

Castle is posting regularly, addressing player concerns and such, but also gets in this little burn:

(quote)Why should you be rewarded when you have put no effort into something?
That's a Rule of Life, work for what you want, it's not just going to be handed to you. (/quote)

Any competent PVPer should be able to beat any "casual" player using identical characters more often than not. Your "work" results in better skills and situational knowledge in terms of PVP encounters. The fact that you also know how to build a character so that it performs better in PVP is another aspect of your "work" paying off.

These changes should mean that the disparity between an average player and a PVP spec'd hardcore Player is lower.

Exactly how easy do you want your kills to be, anyway?

Also, there's this puzzling exchange:

Cyber_naut

(quote)Im sorry, but this is just a stupid arguement.(/quote)

First of all, stop calling my argument names. What are you a tank?

That's some hand-picked stuff from the first 30 pages.