I’m a Glitchless fanboy.

I’ve been playing Race War Kingdoms for several years, and am playing Nodiatis now. Why? I enjoy them. I realize that the RWK community is incredibly hostile and does not foster a very enjoyable playing experience, and I will admit I have contributed to that environment in the past. I realize that it’s just a MUD that uses IE instead of telnet. But I’m good at it. And I’ve made a few friends there. I keep on with RWK because I can do well there and I enjoy the company of some of the players.

As for Nodiatis, it’s still very early. I enjoy it because it gives much more ability to specialize your character than RWK did. Yes, there are cookie-cutter classes. There are standard builds. Yes, I play a standard issue tank. Why do I stick with something so generic when Nodiatis is supposed to offer a new breed of game? Easy: Same reasons I play RWK. I’m good at what I do and I like some of the people there.

Now, with that said, why don’t I just go play WoW? As a matter of fact, I did play WoW on a friend’s account for a while. It was fun leveling him from 46 to 60 (back when that was fairly impressive). It was fun getting that Paladin most of his Lightforge equipment. Why not go ahead and get my own account, join his guild, and stick with it? Because I just didn’t have time. In order to be among the best people in WoW, you need to expend EXORBITANT amounts of time grinding for levels, raiding for equipment, running battlefields, etc. I simply don’t have that kind of time. I’m in college right now and I have a job.

RWK, I don’t have to spend as much time, because once you reach a certain point everything gets easier to acquire. Granted, that usually requires a pretty decent initial investment in character upgrades. Yeah – go ahead and say it, Glitchless ripped me off. Say what you want, I feel completely comfortable with the amount of money I spent because it’s helped me get to a point among the top players in that game. That makes me happy.

Nodiatis, on the other hand, actually LIMITS your amount of play time! They say it’s not for the casual gamer, but the Rested Time system actually helps the casual gamer to keep up with those who spend 14 hours a day playing games in mom’s basement.

(for the record i do live in my moms basement but only to save up money while i attend school so that when i graduate i will have a fairly decent amount of money saved for a down payment on something like a house.)

I saw a comment above about how the trophy system goes against the story of Nodiatis, that sacrificing to altars at the church is in direct contrast to the fact that the people of Nodiatis have abandoned their gods. I see it differently: The players are the Heroes of the world. We are those who remain faithful, as opposed to NPC’s running shops and stuff. Our devotion to the gods and our regular tributes allow us to grow beyond the average citizen of Nodiatis, and allow us to take on the trials and tribulations of the harsh world. Through our example, perhaps the people will see the power that faith can bestow upon the individual, thus bringing back mainstream belief.

Granted, the NPC’s will probably never start worshipping gods and go out adventuring just because we did. But this is just storyline material.

As for the programming of the game itself… Jeff has come a long way from RWK. He has a basic storyline explaining the background of the game world. There are graphics. There is a VERY intricate crafting system (so intricate that i am avoiding crafting for the time being… it seems a bit cumbersome). I don’t know how hard it would be to program Nodiatis because I am not a programmer. But I can tell that it’s more complex than RWK was.

Say what you want about Glitchless. I applaud those that actually went and tried the game out. Those who enjoyed it, great! I hope to see you in there some time. Those who tried it for five minutes and turned it down, well, I would’ve appreciated more time spent there for a better evaluation but it’s not for everyone. Those of you who are blasting it without having tried it, though, are worse than any Glitchless fanboy. We like Glitchless because we enjoy their games. You, on the other hand, are determined to ruin Glitchless’s reputation based solely on Dawn and the fact that it has not come out. I doubt it ever will. It sucks. I know. But when a game DOES come out, you don’t even give it the time of day because “glitchless sucks so their games suck too”. No, that’s not a direct quote. It’s just the sentiment I am getting from a lot of people here.

Next time you want to **** all over a game, try playing it first. Some people here expected the worst and found something they enjoyed a little bit. Maybe it could happen to you, too.

-Ehlmaris
Glitchless Fanboy

If Scott has a problem with my comments being too long, or being too offensive to Dawn fanboys, he’s welcome to tell me. But that’s his role, not yours. You’re always free not to read what I write, you know.

As for what games I have or have not designed: Only Lum knows for sure. Seriously, though, do you ask a movie reviewer what movies he has written or directed? Do you ask a restaurant reviewer for his qualifications as a chef? I’m not a professional chef, nor even a more than passable cook, but I can damn well tell when the food is burned. Nobody has to be a game designer to say that a game has an awkward interface, inconsistent game mechanics, amateurish production values, and just plain isn’t fun.

You and I disagree on an important point about earning money: You seem to see it as a virtue in itself, an end which justifies its means. I see it as irrelevant, neither inherently good or inherently bad. You can earn money by dressing up as a clown and walking on your hands in the park, too, but that doesn’t make it art.

Nor do I give any credit for “effort” to anyone who presents himself as a professional. I’m of an era in which you got credit for right answers, not hard but fruitless work to not get them. To pick a popular target, I have no doubt that the SWG devs put “a fair amount of work” into NGE, but that does not change the fact that it drove players out of their game by the tens of thousands. It’s not how hard you work that counts; it’s whether or not you get it right. Glitchless did not, in my opinion, get it right.

If you can refute what I said about Nodiatis, the comment box is open to you. If not, then perhaps you need to find more productive uses for your time than insulting fellow readers because their opinions differ from yours. I should direct you to the numerous game magazines whose staff, despite not being successful game developers, dare to review games. I’m sure they’re eager to get mail from you telling them how wrong they are for disliking games which took “a fair amount of work to make” and “earn some money”; no doubt they’ll see the error of their ways and terminate publication immediately.

The first I heard of this glitchless thing was this blog and yeah.. the transcript read was pretty funny. Frankly though this person\company is out there making games that earn some money (no idea if profitable), and sure, they are making mistakes. Nodiatis isn’t my cup of tea but I recognize there is some depth there and likely a fair amount of work to make.

Really Wanderer, enough of your dribble in this thread. Please post the games YOU have designed so that we all can put your opinion in perspective (and rip you a new one). At this point we are seeing giant design blunders at the AAA 150m level so I honestly don’t really give a shit what glass house you are chucking rocks from.

There’s a lot to be said for pursuing your dreams, true. There’s also a lot to be said for telling the truth, dealing honestly with people, and not throwing tantrums when people (especially people with a lot more experience in the field than you have) question whether it is possible to accomplish what you are promising. He’s been at this for eight years, and so far the only thing we’ve seen of Dawn is some pictures that he claimed were screenshots without any proof that they came from anything but 3DS.

Eight years is time enough to get a college education in game design, team up with a few classmates, and build something that will kick ass at the IGF. Instead, we get something that, bluntly, I could have written (the back end, anyway; I hate Java), and I am not the God Among Coders by any stretch of anyone’s imagination, even my own.

Chasing your dreams is all well and good, if you catch them; laboring for eight years to give birth to that mouse of a game seems to be an unfair drain on one’s mother’s resources and a waste of her basement space.

Shame on him.

And If he was 9 back then (I do remember the whole Dawn, Fetapult saga)….which is what he sounded like, who gives a shit. I just give him a mini-grats for accomkplishing something some people NEVER do.

“Anyway, unles he was 9 years old hen he set up the Dawn website and announced the imminent release of Dawn…”

Given the wondrous clod (yes, “clod”) that is Nodiatis, would this in any way, shape, or form surprise you? After spending about 5.2 minutes “playing” with it, I would probably believe you if you told me it was written, designed, and coded by a drunken casaba melon.

Not that I could personally do any better, mind you, but that uber MMO API they’ve got just seems to be lacking a bit of… everything.

(It wasn’t? Ohgawd.)

Second, “To Catch a Predator” (you really need to learn the parts of speech, by the way) has nothing whatsoever to do with people criticizing businesses’ products or production, no matter how old the business owner is. How anyone can equate pedophilia and child molestation with commentary on a business enterprise just boggles the mind.

Finally, is Jeff a teenager? Let’s see: In the fall of 2000, in that chat on Stratics, he mentioned having a quiz in pre-algebra. That would put him, in my estimation, in at least 7th grade, maybe even 8th. A 7th grader is usually 12-13 years old. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, and saying he was 12 years old — a pre-teen — at the time he claimed to be close to releasing Dawn (which seems unlikely to begin with), that would still make him around 20 today. Sorry, not a teenager. Even if he was just 10 years old at the time of that chat eight years ago, he’ll still be voting in November.

His actual age, though, is irrelevant. When you step into the grown-up world, as I did when I started my first business at a young age, you subject yourself to the rules that govern interactions with business owners, not the rules that govern interaction with children. The minute you set up the website, announce the game, and present yourself to the world as a businessman, you’re not protected by the “he’s just a little kid” exemption to accountability for your actions.

It was Jeff’s choice to abandon the protected status of a child for the free-for-all of business. He’s the one who typed /pvp. When you choose to do that, you have no right to bitch about getting ganked.

Anyway, unless he was 9 years old when he set up the Dawn website and announced the imminent release of Dawn, he’s legally an adult now.

And his game blows.

Lum > Dawn + [Dawn Fanbois and/or "'nonny mus" Dawn devs who R pohst teh bad](hereinafter known as: “You”).

But don’t let anything that I say here dissuade you from posting more… I need more humor with my frosted flakes this morning. Keep the hits coming!

the kid might be full of some hot air, but you have to give him some credit for the feats he is pulling off at his age is above the normal fold.

Or you could stock him around chatrooms till you appear on to catch a predatory. Would be good publicity for your site.