For those of you who didn’t play SWG like I did you’ll need a bunch of background on the game, the CU, the NGE, and other ways sony thoroughly shat on the player base. The wikipedia article is fairly informative.

The SWG saga ASTOUNDS me. I have literally never seen or even imagined a more dual approach to anything. When I talk about SWG I like to use the term “almost amazing“. It SHOULD have been the best game ever. It was extremely novel, most of it was INCREDIBLE, and it was an awesome platform for the social side of MMOs, which is the reason people keep paying. This means it was developed by a great team, period. At the same time, however, it was completely destroyed over and over by TERRIBLE management and design decisions. How these two things are possible together, I have no idea. SWG literally survived multiple TRAVESTIES that would have destroyed a lesser game.

It wasn’t destroyed, but it WAS maimed, and couldn’t recover with the relentless onslaught by its merciless (and brainless) masters. I could rant about SWG for hours (and I have before), but this is just about this dev’s post. Go read the wiki, particularly the ‘Controversy’ section, marvel at the inanity, then read the rest of this.

Here is a rather whiny rant by one of the head devs on star wars galaxies. I’m linking this one instead of the ‘official’ one since he keeps editing the latter. It has been censored by the re-poster, not the author.

For those of you who hate text, I’ll quote and comment on some key points, although it doesn’t really bring the length down much.

Across the article, he is basically saying that the NGE fiasco was a corporate decision – he made the fighting and it was awesome, but says he warned that destroying the skills was a bad idea. He flip flops back and forth between telling everyone who complains to ‘eat a dick’ and apologizing. If I had to distill it into one paragraph, I’d go with this:

“Hi, I know we destroyed SWG over and over, but we were given bad orders from above. Our changes were perfect though; it was marketing and community management that ruined it. We don’t care about subscribers, only about the number of subscribers. Sorry for making mistakes, but I’m proud of them, and go eat a dick.”

He clearly thinks the NGE combat is vastly superior, which I lol at, even with how boring the regular combat was.

The difference was the control scheme, not the rules. You clicked, You shot.
When we demonstrated it, the first comment was ‘Wooooah.’
And the producer left the room.
He came back shortly and was torn. He knew that we had to make the change. It was THAT much better.
We did a side by side comparison. We tried to play the old system. We couldn’t.

He claims SWG had 200k subscriptions which was considered a failure for a star wars game and on top of that was ‘bleeding 10k accounts per month’. So they redid the entire game in 3 months and pushed the NGE, alienating and/or SCREWING the 200k people that stayed with the game despite all its long-standing bugs and balance issues (read about NGE + jedi).

So, we were given the directive to make Galaxies better.
Not just make Galaxies better, but make it succesful. Not the 200k subs it had, but really succesful. The idea was that we had the most valuable IP in the entire world, and we f*cked it up to the point of having 200k subs.
And yes, all 200k of you were important, but 200k means nothing in the scheme of things.

It should be noted that 200k subscribers = $36,000,000 a year. By August 05 they claim to have sold 1,000,000 copies. If Sony is netting $35 a box, that’s another $35,000,000. While you should have more numbers with the Star Wars name, at $3 million in a month, you should be able to fix all the long-standing bugs without destroying the system. And you should be able to do it FAST.

We launched, the marketing push failed, and we lost subscribers.
It was a misread at an organizational level. Marketing, Production, community. You name it.
Epoch grade f*ckup.
But.
The f*ckup was NOT the changes.
Let me say it again, louder, for those who do not get it.
THE F*CKUP WAS NOT THE CHANGES.

Idiot. Guess what – marketing doesn’t maintain subscribers, it brings (or fails to bring) in new subscribers. If you make a change and you lose a huge number of subscribers, I’m going with the mistake being in the changes.

Right as I left SOE, post NGE..
Galaxies was subscriber positive.
A few thousand, but it was a far cry from the 10k per month we were losing.

After the mass exodus of subscribers, it would be hard NOT to go positive. When you lose 90% of the subscription pool, naturally your subscription-loss number should drop by about 90% as well.

You may enjoy this subscribers chart: NGE was Nov 05 — check that subscriber drop!

Um… I feel like he needs to make up his mind between ‘this game was shit’, ‘it wasnt my fault’, and ‘I rock at coding’.

A lot of you were upset. A lot of you still seem to be upset. I’m sorry if you feel betrayed, or that we ruined something you liked.
But I’m proud of the work I and the rest of the team did. I’m proud of the choices we made, the direction we took. ALL of SWG.

Before we launched, I wrote the combat system, mission system, spawning system.
I wrote the combat model for JTL, implemented Content development tools and ship interior systems and more.
Hell, I implemented the original Jedi System in 2 weeks after we launched. Not because it was how we wanted it, but because we had 2 weeks to do it.

The design decisions and directions taken post-launch are probably the worst in mmo history IMO. SWG is the story of beating a live horse over and over until you finally get the dead one you wanted (which they are apparently still beating today).

This tickles me:

We were working in parallel, maintaining old code on the off chance that we would pull the plug on the implementation.

Everyone wanted the old swg back, but sony claimed the code was gone. None of us who have ever written anything believed them, but a full on admission now ices the proverbial cake.

As a bizzarro end to my post, this is how he begins his:

For those of you who want to misconstrue it, or perceive it as some ‘ZOMG YOU ROONED SWG’, please proceed to the back of the room where you can quietly eat a d*ck. OM NOM NOM.

Classy. Very classy. For the record, if I was a big game studio, I would never let this liability get his grubby hands on one of my games.

Can’t wait for the emulator.

Well, we got Age of Conan installed on my roomates computer after clearing a bunch of things off his drives to make room for the 30 GB required space. After playing it a bit, I really like the idea of the combat system, even though it pretty much sucks at level 10. Hopefully it picks up…

The biggest thing that is sticking out to me is the lack of polish. This game is 5 years in the making, and it really doesn’t look very good. I’m still scratching my head over where those 30GB are going. The roomate has a pretty nice computer with the graphics turned all the way up, and there are constant clipping problems (particularly with breasts through shirts, so it’s pretty much the best bug you could hope for) and animation glitches. The shadows and water look really good though…

The biggest problem for me are the parts of the game that just plain don’t work. Things that are supposed to be there aren’t, like the light meter (they talk about it and tell you to use it, but it just isn’t there), the refusal to let me  bind the keys I want to what I want, etc. This is release everybody, especially after the 3 delays setting it back over a year. What the hell were they working on?

On top of that, the quests are so damn boring. Hooray, a shitload of fedex and collect quests. I know this is an mmorpg and all, but this stuff has been fully explored for about a decade. There are some good additions like the way the quests affect the map to show you where to go, but not much beyond that. I guess I’m just not feeling like the envelope is being pushed, or even moderately filled.

That being said, I don’t want to completely submarine the game — it has its cool parts, but with so many missing features and lack of polish, this looks like an early beta, not a finished product. I refuse to believe blizzard is the only company who can put together a decent mmo.

Ok, I’m tired of the data/datum bullshit. Just LOOK at this definition from dictionary.com:

da·ta Audio Help /ˈdeɪtə, ˈdætə, ˈdɑtə/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[dey-tuh, dat-uh, dah-tuh] Pronunciation Key – Show IPA Pronunciation
–noun
1. a pl. of datum.
2. (used with a plural verb) individual facts, statistics, or items of information: These data represent the results of our analyses. Data are entered by terminal for immediate processing by the computer.
3. (used with a singular verb) a body of facts; information: Additional data is available from the president of the firm.

A plural, that has conflicting numerical meanings and can be used with both plural and singular verbs!? Are you fucking kidding me?? You have data… data are. Nobody says datum, and if they do they are forcing it because it is retarded.

Moreover, the common phrase ‘points of data’ drives me crazy. I personally think it fits nicely, but it doesn’t follow any of the plural rules. You don’t say slices of pizzas, pieces of papers, or points of informations, and if you do, it’s because you mean something different and distinct from points of data – that the pieces/points/slices are coming from different sources. For example, if you had a bunch of slices from one pizza, they are certainly slices of pizza. But if you have slices from each of say 10 pizzas, slices of pizzas might be more appropriate (but still not very clear). Meanwhile, I have NEVER heard ‘points of data’ mean from many different data sources (datum! sources). ARRRRGGGHHH!

So, for the good of all, please remove datum from english and just use data for both singular and plural. You can have some data, it may have pieces or points of data, and everything can be happy again. Please, do it for the children(s).

Article: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/afghan-student.html

This student downloaded and distributed an article criticizing the oppression of women by Islamic fundamentalists. Apparently someone complained and he was convicted of blasphemy without a trial and is sentenced to be executed.

Now, I’m not going to discuss the sides about getting involved with other countries’ governments (although isn’t that what the UN is all about?). Nor am I going to criticize Islam or any of their beliefs. However, I will say this: these people are so incredibly different than us that we are incompatible. They should not be brought into a world government organized by the west. we shouldn’t be there trying to help them attain democracy. Their economy should not be joined with ours.

Incompatible.

This is not good guys. Link

This teacher in Sudan has been jailed for allowing one of her seven year old students to name the class teddy bear muhammad, after himself (also supposedly the most common name in the world, according to npr – link). She is being charged with “insulting religion and provoking the feelings of Muslims”, the punishment of which is a rather broad “40 lashes, six months in prison or a fine”. The entire school has been shut down until January while tensions subside. (!) Remember when people would bring guns or knives to high school and get sent home, then we would all go about our business? News to the kids — if you want your christmas vacation to last a little bit longer, don’t forget to stick Teddy in your locker and leave an anonymous note.

This over-zealous knee-jerk muslim reaction is terrifying. Hopefully it doesn’t escalate to the point mentioned at the end of the article where a newspaper editor was kidnapped and beheaded for allowing articles to be printed that question Islam.

Here comes my semi-related 2 cents, prefaced with a bit o’ background:

For those of you who don’t know, it is a “sin and an unforgivable offense to draw the prophet Muhammad or depict him in any way”. For more info check the NPR link above. Some claim it is so people don’t start worshiping the picture/man, but I just don’t see how that fits since muhammad is supposed to be the living koran/quran/whatever and they certainly worship that (an entire battle was once stopped because one side raised Korans on their spears and the other refused to fight, even though they were on the edge of victory, running down their blasphemous opponents Link – search Battle of Siffin). Maybe there is a good reason not to show the prophet in any way, but this isn’t it and I don’t know what it could be.

That being said, here is what comes to my mind. Making it a SIN to draw/depict the prophet is rather extreme. At most you could attempt to create some mystery and intrigue around his figure, but that would pale in comparison to the deeds that earned him the title prophet anyway. For me, that leaves only the conclusion that ‘they’ are hiding his identity for one reason or another. I suppose it could be fear of assassination, but this kind of hiding doesn’t fit at all with what little I know of muhammad’s attitude and rise to power. Instead, the thought takes me back to The Princess Bride, specifically the Dread Pirate Roberts. If nobody knows what he looks like, a whole world of possibilities arise. With this kind of renowned anonymity (/coin term), one could pass on the mantle of prophet when you were bored of it like in the princess bride, feign immortality by simply filling the empty position every time a prophet died, or even coordinate an elaborate ruse if you had a few people with enough balls to claim such a title and order the clergy around.

Now, I’m not saying that is what happened, but those are the reasons I came up with for banning all pictures of what should otherwise be an instantly recognizable religious figurehead. Food for thought.