I never imagined I’d reach anything even close to 10k rep. Lots of thoughts and some analysis to come on this in a future post – but I’ve got two deadlines coming up, so very rushed right now.
Categories
Category: reputation systems
Categories
DRM and the consumer
The mashup
(My new “preferred explanation of piracy + DRM”)
The original
(From Cyanide&Happiness webcomic, if you don’t know it already..)
If you’re an MMO designer, and you *still* don’t grok the griefer-mindset, or you somehow hope/believe that “one day, there will be no griefers”, then maybe this RPS interview with the always-fun-to-watch Goonswarm will help you:
MT: We are griefers. If nothing is going to happen then we’re going to try to find something that screams and bleeds and poke at it.
RPS: Griefing is something goons are known for doing, but now I’m talking to you it’s not something I can imagine you personally doing.
MT: Technically speaking, by running a spy network I am griefing.
RPS: But would you go out and aggravate other players for the Hell of it if you were a lower ranking member of Goonswarm?
MT: Well, most lower ranked Goons make their money by doing that. Scamming people is a very quick way of making money in Eve. Rather than making an honest buck, you take that buck from somebody else.
and, much further down, maybe this will help you see how griefers often serve just as positive and valuable a role as all your “preferred” player-types:
RPS: For my money, Eve might be the most fascinating game in existence today. But that doesn’t stop it from being interminably boring as well.
MT: Right. I mean most Eve players are stuck in high security space mining, and a lot of the core PvE in Eve has you sitting there are watching three grey bars slowly turn red.
Goonfleet is a socialist alliance. We give people ships so that rather than being forced to rat [fight low-powered AI NPCs] they can take part in PvP, we teach them how to scam so that they don’t have to mine, we teach them how to make ISK most effectively, we give them a lot of ISK and we reimburse their losses. This way they can focus on the fun aspects of the game, like griefing and warfare, so they’re not forced to endure derp-derp-ing around high sec.
If they play your game, you should be glad; if they grief, you should be asking yourself why – and if you’re a commercial operation, you should probably be asking:
“are they fixing a problem for us?
can we afford to leave them to it, part of our unpaid workforce?
and:
is it worth our time trying to fix the problem itself, or should we accept their help and move on down our never-ending list of pending fixes?”
Sulka Haro, Sulake
Summary
The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it.
(I have more to add here later, but I’ve got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time)
Austin Hill, Akoha
Summary
Conference organizer introduced this as “during this first talk, think about the platform they’ve made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience”.
I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time taking a very “Don’t worry, be crappy” approach to core game design: lots of classic mistakes made, obvious stuff. Is this a case of being brave enough to deliberately make the mistakes they understand (because they’re easy to fix later when you’re more successful – and it leaves you more spare time to focus on fixing/avoiding the mistakes you don’t understand yet) – or just naivety?
Interesting to hear the philosophy that fed into the creation of the game, the speaker’s personal journey and how it informed the design. On the other hand, I was a bit disappointed how little actual content there was in this talk. It was perhaps 50% or more made up of a few long video clips. They were long and very little was pulled-out / emphasised from them. Most had very little information content per minute. Worst example was a mildly entertaining video of one of their players giving an intro to the product – but, frankly, so what? This was “new” and “interesting” 4 or 5 years ago, but by now it’s happened thousands of times over, and we’ve all seen it for many games. I didn’t understand why we were watching it.
I have a sneaking suspicion that – given he’s a VC – the speaker was pitching that video stuff to show “look, we have players who love our game”. That’s interesting and exciting to investors who have little or no immersion in the online world, but IMHO for game developers that’s just par for the course these days. No?