…Or IS He?

Apparently we love giving Brad the attention even more than he loves it.

Brad: “Hey guys, I’m still kicking around. Yeah, yeah, I know – that whole Vanguard thing kinda sucked. BTW, check it out, this is me mountain biking.”

Internet: “OMG! Brad McQuaid! ROFTCOPTER! O rly? No, not rly, he’s fake, look at the DNS n00b.”

Brad: “Yeah, I had a buddy of mine register my domain awhile back, it’s really me. You know, I’m reading some of these comments I’m getting, and I think Vanguard turned out okay after all.”

Internet: “OMG it was Brad McQuaid! Ima firin’ my laser! Pewpewpew!”

Brad: “… Why do I make games for you people again?”

A lot of people blamed the fact that EverQuest failed to completely fellate them on Brad McQuaid having a “Vision ™.”

It was bad enough that I seem to recall a great deal of chat around F13, way back when Vanguard was first announced, where they were pretty much hoping the game would fail just so McQuaid would be revealed as the hack they desperately want everybody to know he is. Honestly, I have no idea why McQuaid agreed to be interviewed by them – he either didn’t know that they very much wanted him to fail, or he thought he deserved the most harsh interview possible.

Ultimately, McQuaid’s a game developer. I don’t hold them as being inherently worse or better than any other game developer. All game developers have a “vision ™” – though few will come right out and say it, all games are a product of a vision. All game developers will put their products through as many levels of refinement as they feel is necessary for release. Often, these levels of refinement aren’t enough, and substandard games result.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that nothing that McQuaid is being maligned for is to uniquely McQuaid thing.

Neither is this nasty way Sigil’s closure was handled. When a business can no longer afford you, they typically will just give you your walking papers. If they’re worried you’re going to destroy the office, maybe they’ll pull something underhanded to get you outside of the office first. In the long run, the differences are minor semantics – fired is fired.

So I’m boggled that a lot of people call McQuaid a coward for not firing people personally. In no job I’ve ever had did the head of the company come down and send me on your way. That’s typically HR’s job – if you’re lucky – usually it’s just “oh, that’s strange, there seems to be a sheet of pink paper attached to my check.”

Frankly, that McQuaid said he was too emotionally bent-out-of-shape at the time to handle it tells me he was probably as much a victim as anyone else at that point. Probably more – it’s one thing to lose a job, it’s another to lose your company.

So we’ve switched to dumping on EverQuest now.

You know, all things said and done about EverQuest, it wasn’t such a bad game – at least if you take into account it being 10 years old and forgive it for being an atrocious grind. You can’t sell 14 expansions – and counting – for a genuinely bad game.

Nor did McQuaid and co behind EverQuest simply garner fame from doing a Dikumud cut and paste job in creating EverQuest. First, because EverQuest wasn’t the first 3D Dikumud out there – look at Meridian 59. Second, because making the transition from 2D to 3D isn’t that easy — you have to invent some game mechanics for it to work. If EverQuest had any big advantage of being a first, it would simply be that it had SOE behind it to promote it. It’s a really interesting sign that so many clones failed to steal EverQuest’s thunder for years.

The important thing to consider is that whole new game mechanics were invented that you don’t see prior to EverQuest’s main predecessor. A lot of the vernacular we use in MMORPGs was made popular through EverQuest – tanking, conning, pulling, raids, ect. Before EverQuest, the concept of the “holy trinity” (Tank, Healer, DPS) was not nearly as solid. The idea of having class specific niches (something only your class could do that would be in demand by teams) emerged as a major gameplay component – perhaps out of trying to satisfy everybody complaining on the message boards.

It’s really easy to look back at EverQuest and see things you could do better, but you can do the same thing about any of the firsts in MMORPGs. EverQuest was largely in the same boat as Ultima Online in the early decisions they made… all things considered, they fared a lot better.

Vanguard was a pity though. They bit off more than they could chew, taking the game back to the drawing board a few more times than they could afford. Water under the bridge now, though.

In my take on the WoW imitation situation, it’s really a lot more to do with big budget necessity. WoW didn’t do EverQuest so much better as they did accessibly and well-refined. Then its population was largely turbocharged by Blizzard rep.

If you’re developing a game whose budget is expected to run into the millions, do you make a game that’s deep and satisfying for the veteran gamers, or do you make a game that’s made to smoothly transition a much larger casual public into a skinners’ box? The later, because the veteran gamers are outnumbered severalfold, but everybody pays the same subscription fees.

Voila: conditions are now prepped for the veteran gamers to be repeatedly draw the conclusion that the reason why games keep sucking is because people are shit.

Me, I’ve gone to the next stage. Screw the industry, if I want to make a game that interests me, I’ll just have to do it myself. There’s no money in my pockets, it’ll be a tile-based fossil on a borrowed engine, but it’ll still have better gameplay than a game whose development budget is so wildly out of proportion that they have no choice but to cater to people who aren’t gamers.

Sullee :
I’m not trying to be arguementative I just don’t see much value in posts with crap like: “A lot of people blamed the fact that EverQuest failed to completely fellate them on Brad McQuaid having a “Vision ™.” mixed with revisionist history.

Neither would I.

However, I’m pretty sure you’ll find more than one definition of Holy Trinity. Just doing a quick search on Google, I see my case is supported by at least one other player, though I can see cases which support you as well.

In the wider scheme of MMOs, I suspect my definition is the more universal. This is because crowd control is often optional, but doing without DPS can be an exercise in tedium under many games’ balances. Even in EverQuest, you might be able to do without crowd control if you find a nice spot without wandering mobs, but doing without DPS s slow going

Also, I didn’t say that EverQuest invented those concepts – that would be silly – I was saying it was pivotal enough to popularize the terminology.

So, overall, this isn’t me doing revisionist history. This is you having a different (not necessarily incorrect) perspective in the first case and misinterpreting me in the later.

Brask Mumei :

geldonyetich :
A lot of people blamed the fact that EverQuest failed to completely fellate them on Brad McQuaid having a “Vision ™.”

This is what people are responding to. Such a statement is either troll bait or written by someone who didn’t play EQ in the early days when the Vision was pure.

No, that wasn’t troll bait, that was a fair theory.

I think a lot of people dislike Brad McQuaid simply because EverQuest got boring and they blamed him. Though it is a bit of an exaggeration to refer to this as “failing to completely fellate them,” the prime sentiment beneath it is true. They have taken their lack of satisfaction largely stemming from their own irrational desires and pinned it on McQuaid for failing to meet them.

Again, that’s just my theory why all this McQuaid angst is floating out there. I invite you to provide your own. (And, no, the way he didn’t personally lay off everybody when Sigil folded doesn’t count – I’m preferring to hatred that existed well before Vanguard.)

It’s less that I don’t know how to troll, and more that I abstain for moral reasons, and end up trolling inadvertently anyway because my method of thinking and/or writing is removed enough from the mainstream that the inevitable misinterpretations of those who don’t take sufficient time to think/read well enough to meet me half way will bring about a flame war over imagined differences in opinion in no time at all.

Thus, I troll without trolling. It’d be very Zen were it not so very much the fallout of ignorance born from a cross between the human condition and those who do not regard the Internet as serious business.

I’d like to say this is a uniquely me thing, but it seems to be the common reaction to anyone with more than four braincells to rub together.

JuJutsu :
I love having you around, you make me look like a nice guy.

I’m actually a real nice guy. I wanted to sugar coat that “four braincells” thing, but I ran out of edit time.

It’s tough to be an intellectual and also not condescending, because one tends to get misinterpreted constantly, their tenancy to over think things goes against the grain of people who are secure in their views, and it results in a lot of fear and persecution. It really jades your opinion of people.

How is this related to Brad McQuaid hate? Well, the dude is game designer, and being a designer is an intellectual pursuit. McQuaid had the bad fortune of being a game designer on the cutting edge of the MMORPG boom, and suddenly this whole new aspect was there that wasn’t there before: pleasing your core fanbase with incremental updates that put persistent-state assets at risk.

To a game designer, The Vision ™ is very important. What you design are engines that generate fun, and your mental picture of how this engine can work efficiently is what The Vision ™ is. Definitive applications of nerf sticks are quite necessary when things emerge that undermine the Vision ™ because it’s literally breaking the fun engine. When the fun engine won’t go, what have you got? A useless contraption.

As an early pioneer, McQuaid could do little more than be chagrined at how personally people took it. The tie in of the frustrated intellectual is there. The game designer, doing the best he can, is misunderstood by those who feel their personal beliefs are more important, and genuine dislike results. The bottom line is that if more people were capable of thinking beyond, “ZOMG he broke what I enjoyed about the game” they’d not nearly be so ticked off at the efforts of designers for daring to try to keep the game interesting.

I have to side with Gx1080 on this one. “Doing anything you want” in a MMORPG sounds great on paper, but in practice “anything you want” will invariably involve “something somebody else doesn’t want.”

A large part of MMORPG mediocrity is trying to please as many people as possible.

Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green :

geldonyetich :
As an early pioneer, McQuaid….

I’d say something here, but then you’d misinterpret my motivations and think I’m an asshole.
Not that you don’t already.

I know all about Meridian 59, but that game doesn’t disqualify other games like Ultima Online, EverQuest, and Asheron’s Call from being early pioneers. Besides, I don’t think you’re an asshole.

I’m not talking about PKing at all.

Basically, you left yourself really vulnerable with that one statement:

Not to blame McQuaid, or him alone, but “the vision” are words that cause some trepidation to me as a gamer. MMORPGs, as worlds, are best enjoyed when a player can just do what he/she wants.

Unfortunately, and with great regret, I say thee: nay.

Players can’t do “just what he/she wants” in an MMORPG because MMORPGS are shared environments where it’s inevitable that sooner or later you will commit some minor infraction that annoys another player.

The thing is, what you’re doing might not bother you if it were done to you, but you will eventually encounter somebody who is bothered by it. It could be a really minor thing, like kill stealing, and it will inevitably snowball into a major game-breaking problem when griefers come into the picture and exploit the hell out of that tiny crack.

The reason I don’t want to flat out remove PvP is so that players have a little leeway to take care of those griefers like “kill stealers”, and event ruiners.

Make up your mind, now you are talking about PvP. Unfortunately, this whole idea that players will be able to enforce the peace on their own if you only let them kill eachother has been disproved time and time again. What actually happens is that you end up with two camps:

1. A camp of players who want to play the MMORPG as a virtual world.

2. A camp of players who want to play the MMORPG as a perpetual deathmatch.

#2 calls #1 “Care Bears” while #1 calls #2 “PKs” and often outright “Griefers.”

Funny enough, the griefers inevitably beat the care bears into powder, perhaps because it’s a whole lot easier and more fun to be a misery-inducing barbarian who dismantles society for the epic lawls than it is to be a steadfast peacekeeper forced to sit and watch their precious house of blocks be repeatedly knocked down by the barbarians.

Inevitably, the MMORPG developers eventually give up with cries of, “THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS” and we end up with the reinforced understanding that no, we can’t let the players do whatever they wanted after all. Sitting there complaining that the Vision ™ denied you your wonderful virtual world experience is being woefully ignorant of the whole story from the perspective of the people who have to maintain these virtual worlds.

@D-One
Over a decade ago (must be about 17 years ago now) I was the GM for a online game called TeleArena running on a local small multi-line MajorBBS.

We had discovered that there were some items that weren’t in the game, and just for the fun of it, I decided to distribute a few of those items and let players have fun with them. After all, introducing some cool items into the mix could do nothing but enhance the overall mystique of the game, right?

Well, that was a mess. Some of the items were grossly overpowered, and that other items were handed out at all greatly upset people because they felt it was favoritism even though I was pretty much just giving out a few cool things to random players and saying, “have fun.” I eventually went through the trouble of taking all these items back, leading to even more hard feelings, and I wasn’t the GM for much longer after that.

Did Brad cheat when playing his own online game? Maybe – I’m wondering how much of that favoritism is exaggerated. When you’ve got the powers, knocking down god with a snap of your fingers sort of diminishes the importance of maintaining the integrity of them. However even being a GM playing the game it all is cheating, even if you never use your powers, because you know where the secrets in the game are because you put them there.

However, even if he did abuse his GM powers, I wager he was learning firsthand the same lesson I did here. It might seem like a cool idea to use your GM powers to enhance the mystique of the game by bringing some cool artifacts into existence, maybe you’ll even confine that to people you trust not to exploit them. However, in the long run, this course of action just creates a lot of hard feelings.

You are the reason we can’t have nice things.

Tell you what – be my guest: go make your game where you let players just do what they want to do.

If after a few months of operation it doesn’t melt down into a horrible slag of broken dreams, like so many attempts before it, then you can tell me that I am the problem.

And you, personally, released unbalanced things, giving them to players and leaving all the other players out of even the chance to get them in fair game play, and you don’t blame yourself? Why am I not surprised?

Go ahead and malign the me of 17 years ago. As far as I’m concerned, that guy is 17 years less experienced than I am and, consequently, an idiot.

The way you’re carrying in in this message, I suspect the you of 17 years ago was in diapers, if that.

Really, I’m not even in the camp of MMORPG developers who think the players can’t be afforded freedom. However, my version goes, “for each freedom afforded, extensive checks and balances must be applied, because if you give people an inch they can and will trample all over eachother.”

The difference is that it’s not that I think more freedom in MMORPG is impossible, it just think it takes a lot of thought and effort to pull off.

So, you see, we’re actually a lot more like mind than you think.

However, this whole, “I just want players to be able to play the game how they want to play it” statement is unforgivable. It was dead on the drawing board four billion revisions ago by anyone who was really looking to do it right.

Don’t get pissy at me – you said it, own up. Your comparing it to democracy to defend it just makes you sound like a hypocritical twat to anyone who can grok what’s between the lines. No, what our ancestors died for is not the same as a virtual world facet to develop.

I’m not really here to demonize anyone – there’s no point to it, if that wasn’t what you meant then that wasn’t what we meant, and lets put that behind us.

However, just for future reference, your example didn’t exactly let you off the hook.

“I just want my vote to count.”
“I want just my vote to count.”

Even if we take the more favorable of the two, there’s a big difference between “I would like my vote to count towards being able to determine by popular consensus if I can just do what I want to do in the game” and “I should just be able to do what I want to do in the game.”

Plus, we were already taking the more favorable use of “just” into consideration when we were criticizing it, as (I hope is abundantly clear by now) the trouble is that differing perspectives if what you should be able to do in the game will inevitably lead to conflict between players.

And I wouldn’t ask a person to stop grokking you, as that’s essentially asking them to misunderstand you. Saying I did grok you is saying I know exactly what you meant.

I’d go so far as agreeing that players are predictable along the tangent of “players will eventually discover the path of least resistance and relatively consistently keep taking that path.” You will still have players who deliberately avoid the path of least resistance for whatever reason (roleplay, exploration, ect) but generally speaking it is a natural function of intelligence to find and exploit it, and when thousands of players are on the scene it’s inevitable the path will be found sooner or later.

The trouble that seems to emerge is that paths of least resistance will emerge that the developers did not anticipate. This is what exploits typically are. This is also one of the main reasons why nerfs happen – the players discovered a way to play the class that the developers did not anticipate (e.g. kiting, or twisting Bard song).

McQuaid fought against unintentional paths of least resistance, and that’s where a lot of the stigma against The Vision ™ came from. You could say that devs have “learned not to care” about this, but what does that mean, really? It pretty much means they’ve decided to let the bottom fall out of their game as long people ware willing to keep forking out their $15/mo. It’s not good practice if the goal is to maintain an entertaining game.

It sort of moves into EVE Online territory at this point. At what point does the game become secondary to the spectacle, and who is really playing them?

@Gx1080
Sure, I was just mostly talking about the point of how predictable people are by following it up with the point, “sure, but even the predictable aspects of people’s behaviors can manifest in unpredictable ways.”

@Amaranthar

*groans* I don’t think you guys get it yet. That’s not a crime nor am I ridiculing you. Most players don’t get it, even though “it” is exactly why they are so bored. So let me try to explain this.

Nothing personal, but this post just annoyed the living fuck out of me by having a body that went over things I’m already quite aware of, thank you very much. Hell, you’re probably quoting me without realizing it. Considering that, this was perhaps the most nauseatingly patronizing header you could have possibly ever put on it. Disclaimer aside, ridicule me you have.

Were it not for the fact you did this out of complete ignorance of not knowing exactly who you were talking to, I would ask you to kindly die in a car fire. So, instead, I’m just going to start ignoring you now because apparently you’re really bad at reading, to the point where your blundering poured massive amounts of salt on old wounds.

Seriously – good god – what the hell do you think this is, the MMORPG.com forums? How about you do a little fucking research before your overcaffinated fingers make even more of a mockery of you? Like maybe taking the time to notice that better interpretations of what you’re explaining already exist on the very right of the page you’re commenting on?

Well, another post full of complete incorrect interpretation. Well done.

No, this is arrogant:

*groans* I don’t think you guys get it yet.

In fact, nearly every paragraph you write oozes with arrogance that seeks to resurrect dead development agendas that were, at best, ill-advised shots in the dark in the early 1990s.

My advice? Go back to the MMORPG.com forums, where most of posters are naive enough to think you know what you’re talking about.

Trust me, ignoring you is the best possible course of action anyone who knows what they’re doing can come up with. If you want to do something about that, you need to pull your head out of your backside, shut up, and pay attention.

An unexpected coming of full circle, resulting in a player mistaking a player who has been around a lot longer than him as a developer, assaulting him with the very same complaints he assaulted developers with years ago.

Awesome. Karma is most assuredly the best comedy.

I guess it just goes to show, developers basically are players who have decided to take matters into their own hands. You can whine at them all you like about how their game doesn’t do exactly what you want it to do but, in the end, it’s your own damn fault for not exhibiting the effort to make your own game.

The real irony asserts itself when, inevitably, you discover that you’re doing the same thing you were whining about in the first place because you discovered the validity of it.

All is forgiven, McQuaid.

So, if I am to understand you correctly,

1) You will make the worst possible interpretation of what I’m saying possible.

2) Because you’re trying to win an argument that I am not having with you.

3) And creatively reinterpreting what somebody else is saying is easy, but makes young blowhards feel good about themselves.

4) So long as this is your mindset, I am wasting my time speaking with you, because you’ll just do the same in your next messages.

Yeah, I hear you loud and clear. Glad we could come to an understanding.

I agree with what GX1080 is saying, but I have to admit, my presentation is bad. A patient, understanding person probably wouldn’t immediately put people on the defensive by flat out telling them they’re being ridiculously clueless, no matter how sure I am of it. Verbally slapping stranger’s kids for being kids is not a good habit. If there’s any sign I need to realize I’m not as smart as I think, it’s the existence of these habits.

If I got specifically banned from F13 for white-knighting Brad & pals, that would indicate they’ve got some kind of anti-Brad McQuaid hate board where anyone who says anything in his favor gets banned. That’d be more of a point against them than me.

However, that’s not what happened. It’s more I got banned from F13 for spamming the hell out of their boards to the point where they were completely sick of me. Part of that is that they just post too slow to handle me. A larger part of that was that I apparently have unlimited energy to take the time to evaluate if a sentiment is justified, and baseless sentimentality (e.g. ‘teh hate’) is a regular staple of epic lawls over there. It was a very bad mix.

So you see, I’m not really a McQuaid defender specifically, it’s just that McQuaid hate is just one small thing that qualifies as a fairly baseless sentiment I like to evaluate. To an extent, you’re giving the fellow too much credit to think he deserves that much scorn – to be an anti-fanboy is every bit as delusional as to be a fanboy.

Fairly spot-on evaluation, I’d say.

If I could add anything, it’d probably be that F13 is less an Internet sewer and more an Internet dive bar. I’ll give them some credit – they showed some tolerance in throwing my spammy ass out – but I really shouldn’t have been down there in the first place if all I was going to do is ruin the taste of their drinks with unrequited rationality.

I didn’t like being tossed out, Buzz Killington might enjoy a risque party, but that doesn’t mean he belongs there.

If you’re trying Vanguard at all, chances are you’re already thinking, “I would like to have more fun than I am playing WoW” – otherwise, why bother with the competition in the first place?

Of course, since different people like different things, it’s a fair bet that there really does exist people who enjoy Vanguard more than WoW. If you think there’s something wrong with that, ask yourself: how boring would life be if everybody liked the same thing?

McQuaid’s probably among those who think Vanguard is better than WoW. After all, if there’s any one great benefit of being a game designer, it’s that you inevitably custom tailor your games based off of what you think makes a good game.

geldonyetich :
McQuaid’s probably among those who think Vanguard is better than WoW. After all, if there’s any one great benefit of being a game designer, it’s that you inevitably custom tailor your games based off of what you think makes a good game.

Actually, this is wrong.

If you’re a professional game designer, you’re actually custom tailoring your game towards what you think your audience thinks is a good game. More specifically, what will sell.

This is one of the reasons we so much mediocrity – professional developers are pretty much developing for imaginary people and sometimes end up with a game that pleases no one.

To say nothing for even a bigger factor: implementation is a bitch.

Brask Mumei :If you want us to take your claims of intellectualism seriously, you need to use said intellectual ability to improve your writing to the point where you are no longer misunderstood. If everyone misunderstands the fault is with *you*, not everyone else.

This, of course, would be the first impression. I’ve seriously investigated this possibility to a great degree. Humility has been tried and failed, with only regret I wasted the time in humiliating myself to show for it.

My findings were that, the vast majority of the time, there’s a far more prevalent problem that exists: when an idea is disassembled from ideas into words, and reassembled from words into ideas again, there’s a great margin of error that exists. Furthermore, differences in perception will create further misconstruence.

The bottom line is that fundamental reading comprehension takes more effort than most people are willing to invest. Unfortunately, they’re quite happy to flame eachother over the perceived difference that result. Often, these differences wouldn’t exist if they put the prerequisite energy in understanding eachother in to begin with.

So, while I appreciate your lengthy help to the poor beleaguered idiot who just needs to shut up an improve the way he writes, the fundamental fact of the matter remains that you have no idea what you’re talking about. Thanks for the caring, though.

If you don’t believe me, I recommend taking the time to read any lengthy comment or forum thread, and if you’re sharp enough to actually muster the focus (it’s not an easy challenge in today’s rapid-fire information world), you will see several misconceptions in no time.

EQ had some extremely dumb “screw the player” mechanics in the early days. The blind insistence on corpse running as a fun game mechanic (interestingly, I enjoyed corpse running in UO and hated it in EQ, I’m sure you can reason out what other game design elements resulted in this disjunction?), the utter inanity of having a Sense Direction skill (a skill most useful to newbies who don’t know the topography but useless until you’ve levelled and macroed a lot), those are just a few that I hit… The problem isn’t these mechanics, we all make decisions that in hindsight are dumb. The problem was that any complaints about them would be dismissed as they were part of the Vision. Hence the hate.

My answer here would be, “so what?”

We had Ultima Online, a game nothing like EverQuest. We had Meridian 59, one predecessor with different methods here and there. We had a ton of text-based MUDs and BBS door games.

My point being: do you honestly think that it wouldn’t be very easy to make a bunch of dumb “screw the player” mistakes given the relatively new ground they were staking out?

Games are improving all the time. The other week, I went back and played Ultima 7, a great game when it was released, and it sucked. In 2003 terms, EverQuest was a great game, just check out the ratings. Whether you know it or not, you learned a great deal about what screwing the player meant in EverQuest at about the same time the developers did.

So, taking that into consideration, harboring resentment for the developers to having the balls to even try to learn what does or does not kick the players in the balls, is an occupation of backwards-thinking fools. I advise learning to let go.

But then, GX1080 said this shorter and better than I did. There’s some truth to my tendency to drag on making me harder to misunderstand.

(Of course, there’s also some truth to peoples’ being too impatient to bother interpreting what I write as being an equal part of the problem. I don’t know if any great literary organization agrees with this opinion, but I have come to believe that the responsibility of comprehension is as much the readers’ as the writer’s. Perhaps even moreso, as the reader has the harder job.)

You are correct that you aren’t an intentional troll. I have a special subcategory for your sort of obsessive compulsive behaviour. Unlike most trolls which relatively intellectual websites can quickly innoculate themselves to, your messages are coherent, thought out, and… lengthy. The latter is the problem – the relentless inability to *stop* posting long after it is clear that the participants have completed the useful part of the dialog. This floods the forum, resulting in painful signal-noise ratios and a risk of participants starting to TL;DR.

It takes more work to write a single post than a dozen posts. Turn your energy into that pursuit and you can increase your readership and influence.

This is actually a bit closer to the truth. I’ll go with you so far as to believe that there could very well be a mild OCP nature to my tendency to post so damn much. However, I would say that there’s a lot of jumps to conclusions going on here.

That said, I really don’t address the same point over and over again, I wouldn’t keep going unless somebody threw me a bone to comment on, and then I’ve said my piece and am done.

At the point where you start to question that I said something, that’s just a whole new bone. It’s a perpetual cycle in this regard, true, but it’s not truly an inability to stop posting. It’s more like, why wouldn’t I post at this point? You’ve given me something to post about. (Apparently you gave me 3 things to post about here, in fact.)

I would like to say everybody else is justified in getting all up in a dander about it, but it’s a bit like a child whining that somebody made them commit a wrong. No, there is a subtle choice going on there where you’ve decided to get ticked off about something.

Bah, thread derail complete. Why must you poke the borderline OCD so? That in itself is some kind of passive aggressive domineering tendency on your part. The nice thing about being the guy who reacts is that I’ve never truly started it.

Kindly stop referring to my personal defects as you perceive them, and I’ll stop talking about them. It’s really that simple. It’s no real achievement to inadvertently troll me as effectively as you did here. I probably enjoy replying more than the troll did trolling.

At the risk of further besmirching Lum’s comment threads (ah well, he can always come back and delete em’) I think I figured it out.

It’s the caffeine. I only had a Zone Perfect bar (contains cocoa powder and hence caffeine) and a Cherry Diet Dr. Pepper (caffeinated) this morning. Not the best breakfast, but it was quick.

I know, I know. “Take some fucking responsibility for your actions, Geldonyetich.” But check this out:

1. OCD behavior is about dissipating nervous energy.
2. Caffeine stimulates the nervous system.

Pretty easy logic to follow, really. I’m spastic this morning, and here, and run across somebody pointing out my flaws. I’ve got more than enough nervous energy in my system right now to quibble over the details, so away I go.

I wonder how much more productive I’d be if I cut down on my caffeine. I might actually be able to focus on dynamic content generation systems instead of seeking an immediate outlet like rebounding my psyche off of some stranger’s shot-in-the-dark accusations.

If they had shown a desire to learn, I doubt there’d be such a hate over the Vision. The problem was that, from the viewpoint of players, the Vision was the catch-all excuse to not learn. The massive hate you encounter over the Vision did not spontaneously materialize out of the ether. It was earned. To ignore that history, to pretend it was just because they were visionaries, or imperfect, is to risk falling into the same trap yourself. Brad McQuaid is not attacked because he had a Vision. He is attacked because he used the Vision as a cudgel to crush accurate complaints.

If I were just to stick with that bold-faced passage, then we’re done. From The Viewpoint Of Players is pretty much a given. The masses tend to resent authority of any kind after awhile, and apparently (even fascinatingly) this apparently extends into the authorities who create the games they play.

I could guess it was going to go this way: were the developers learning? Put another way, were they *even trying*, or were they just leaning on the vision as an excuse?

My angle of approach here is to ask if there really was deliberate malice or if the developers were simply doing the best job they could at the time. One the “ball-breaking” aspect of EverQuest was discovered, a problem was revealed – solving it would involve being able to come up with a solution and implementing it… which is hard, right?

If I’m going to harbor grudges against folk for not having all the answers, or the means to make them happen, I’d have a whole lot of baseless grudges after awhile.

Triforcer :
Lum, can you please make the hurting stop, admit that we (as a site) aren’t smart enough to handle geldon ( ), and cleanse by fire? Thanks. Its getting to the point where I am afraid to open any thread on this site, because the horrible buzzing will start again.

I’m torn between. “yes, please” (insofar as “cleanse by fire” involves removing the airing of my dirty laundry and my over-caffeinated cascade of replies) and “post moar, n00b” (conferring that maybe if you guys weren’t so slow on the comment-making, maybe the Geldonyetich:Others ratio would be a bit less pain inducing).

I do agree with GX1080 again in that I should probably give you guys a break. So I’ll try… but, you know, I might end up back here if I’m bored and can’t find a better distraction. Hopefully you’ll have managed to come up with something interesting by then.

Says the guy whose head was so big as to wander into a popular MMORPG burnout hangout and be so blind as to where he was as to painstakingly explain to us what a grind is, prefacing it with, “*groans* I don’t think you guys get it yet.”

Amaranthar :If you think I was telling you what a grind is, you really don’t get it.

You weren’t?

a) You start in zone 1, designed for levels 1-5.
-You can run the quests or you can kill the same stuff. But you get extra xp for doing this same thing if you complete the quests, so you run the quests.
-Or you can harvest stuff for your trades skill, designed for levels 1-5 in this zone.
b) You must move to zone 2 now, designed for levels 6-10.
-rinse and repeat
-rinse and repeat
(But different MOBs and new abilities give you more choices and new sparkles)
c) Now you must move to zone 3, designed for levels 11-15.
-rinse and repeat
-rinse and repeat
(rinse and repeat)
d) You now must move to zone 4, designed for levels 16-20.
-rinse and repeat
-rinse and repeat
(rinse and repeat)
Etc. etc. etc.

You so were.

Following that lovely introduction (“*groans* you guys don’t get it do you”) this is about the point where my patience left me.

What possessed you to outline in such painstaking detail what the grind was here?! It’s like going to a burn victim recovery ward and giving them a napalm face mask! It’s really no wonder I got so pissed off at you at that point. It wasn’t good behavior on my part, but nonetheless, you lit a powder keg of annoyance under an extremely sensitive spot there. It was a move to make even a veteran Usenet troll proud.

You did move on to try to bend this in support for how oldskool Ultima Online will abolish the evil levels and save us all from the drudgery of the grind.

The sentiment was not completely invalid… but the thing is, it had crossed our minds before. Like, years ago. Then we found out it wasn’t such a hot idea – a lot of it having to do with that being baseless nostalgia.

We told you why it wasn’t such a hot idea on the earlier portion of this thread… and we it seems we’ve failed to make any progress ever since because you’re really stuck on this idea.

The thing is, levels aren’t the grind. Repetitively performing the same activity that you’re bored of is the grind. It happened in skill-advancement mechanics just as easily as it happens in level-advancement games. It happens in risky griefer-friendly PvP gankfests as easily as it does in carebear-friendly PvE games.

You think you have the answer, but don’t. I’m sorry. Keep looking, though, because when you do find that answer I’m sure I’ll want to play your game.

demonix :
Hey geldon, could you just let the thread run for a couple of days without posting, then present your dissertation? I would like to see what other people have to say.

Sure.

Really, all somebody has to do is ask. I’m not unreasonable, just bored.

Man, why is it whenever I say I’m going to take a day off from a thread, a half-dozen monkeys descend from the trees to throw feces at my receding backside?

Oh well, keep em’ coming. I’ll address these tomorrow. Or maybe not – bickering with belligerent monkeys demeans myself while making the monkies look more important than they are.

Hey, it’s been two days and I’m hopped up on caffeine again. Lets throw away any pretense I might have some class by coming up with some replies.

Schild
I’m fairly sure we’d throw shit at your face if it wasn’t already covered with the shit that comes out of your mouth. How now, brown cow?

Hmm. I guess that method of speaking makes you look pretty good where you live. From here, it just sort of reinforces your reputation of being a douche.

But then, in my mind from our dealings in the past, you’re probably pretty comfortable with that by now. You wake up every morning and think, “okay, I’ve got a cool website where I write edgy things by coming off as a douche. How can I be more douche-like today?” You appoint moderators primarily on the understanding that they, too, are douches, and this helps to reinforce the factor that keeps your site interesting amongst all the other ones out there.

And who I am to judge? I’m not judging at all. I’m just saying that, considering where I’m sitting in perspective to what little I know about you, why should I care about anything you have to say? You’re, like, working towards being a professional douche. You’re just pursuing the dream.

Owain
He’s not only a pompous asshole, he’s an intolerant asshole.
He’s a game bigot.
He’s a self appointed expert who knows far less than he thinks he does, but lacks the self awareness to know that he’s a dimwit.
He’s a bully who tries to shut down discussion with personal attacks when the argument fails to go his way.
He’s intellectually dishonest. Don’t waste your time with him.

As an open-minded, conscientious, individual, I would normally take a lot of this personally and maybe do a bit of soul-searching to understand whether or not there may in fact be some gravity to what you’re saying here.

But the thing is, anyone who has seen you defending Darkfall Online knows that you’re hardly the open-minded, honest, non-bullying individual you’re making yourself out to be. You largely took everything we were saying to you about why we found the game to flawed, waved them off as non-problems, and called us lairs an fools to believe otherwise. Apparently, you’re still doing that.

Thus, if you’ve seen in me any of these characteristics of this incredible combo-attack you’ve written to me in the block quote above, I’m betting a good deal of it was reflecting off of me from your own conduct. Meditate on that possibility a bit, if you can.

Granted, my behavior towards Amaranthar was fairly unforgivable. I respect my elders. If he’s 56, perhaps he possesses wisdom I do not that makes him understand why it is that Ultima Online is, indeed, the answer. I was just cheesed off because (a) I was full of caffeine and (b) my synapses are so raw ground from the grind that they were a hair trigger.

I said what he wrote was like going into a burn victim ward and applying a napalm face mask… but it’s really more like going into a burn victim ward and saying, “you don’t get it, do you” and then describing the sensation of burning. I don’t think he intended to do this, but it did set me off…

Which was wrong. No matter how irritated I was, I’m 32 years old and should have more of a brain in my head than to let my little pet peeves to cause me to condemn anyone. I’m sorry about that, Amaranthar.

So, basically, my detractors are idiots in their own little way, and so I am I.