Commander's Intent

Recently, the Rules Committee for the Magic: The Gathering format “Commander”, more commonly referred to as “EDH” (Elder Dragon Highlander) made a controversial change to the rules, one that upset a lot of the more avid players.  This ruling completely nullified a way in which players could prevent problematic commanders from going stupid very quickly; at the same time, it made people wonder where the hell the logic for such a change existed, if it did.

For reference, The Rules Committee is run by the original creators of the format, non-Wizards of the Coast employees, and the official page on Wizards’s site states that they make the rules.  This means individuals who may decide they don’t like something one week might ban it, and vice versa, unaware of the larger implications in individual playgroups.

The ruling affected sending a Commander (or General in EDH) into the library or hand.  These cards (called “tuck” cards colloquially) are solid answers to Commanders that pose a very real danger to a board state becoming something other than fair.  Many of these Commanders offer a lot early-, mid-, and late-game, and the longer the more they can be played with little fuss the more problematic they can become.

First off, though, we need to look at the rules of Commander.

Commander is a singleton format, with a 99-card deck and one card called the Commander.  In the format, the Commander’s color identity (this is, mana symbols in the casting cost, mana symbols in the cost of activated abilities, and mana symbols in activated or triggered abilities) determine the cards that can be played in the deck.  For example, if you have Rafiq of the Many as your Commander, you may only run lands that provide Green, White, or Blue mana.  Artifacts and permanents you control must cost either colorless mana to play or only those three colors, and effects they generate muct require only those colors or colorless mana.  Spells you play can only have those colors as well, and things such as “Kicker” must follow the same rules.  You can only spend your mana on those colors unless a card effect states otherwise.

Aside from basic lands, you may only have one of any other card in the deck.  In theory this tends to whittle down on the consistency that a deck has.  Under normal circumstances, a Magic deck will consist of sixty cards with a fifteen card sideboard, of which aside from basic lands you can’t have more than four of each card between the two “decks”.  Because you have exactly 99 cards in your library and can have only one of each card available, this cuts down on the deck’s ability to be consistent without outside help.  There’s loopholes to this rule, such as if a card states you can have “any number” in the deck you can run up to 99 of them in the deck, but it’s pretty much a hard-and-fast rule.  Alongside this, the format has a banned list which represents cards considered too powerful, and thus unplayable in the format.

The format adds a new “zone” to the game, known as the “Commander Zone”.  This is where your Commander sits when he isn’t in play, in your library, or in your hand.  You play your Commander from this zone as if it was in your hand.  Each time that your Commander is killed or exiled, you have the option to immediately put him in the Command Zone as a replacement effect.  However, each time you do this, the Commander costs 2 more colorless mana to play.

Overall, the format is the most fun you can play (in my honest opinion), mixing the longevity of the eternal formats with the shenanigans available in the standard and modern formats.  It makes for interesting interactions, and as it was created to be a multiplayer format, it really pushes diplomacy over brute force.  There’s variants of the basic Commander format (such as “French” or “Duel”, “Pauper”, and a new variant referred to as “Tiny Leaders”), but overall they follow the same general outline.

Now in general, there are loopholes to the rules, just as there are in the other formats.  But these loopholes have larger consequences, especially when concerning Commanders.  To give you an idea, my previous decks involved Commanders such as Glissa, the Traitor; The Mimeoplasm; Karador, Ghost Chieftain; and Brago, King Eternal.  Brago and Karador lent themselves to combo-tastic shenanigans that I freely admit required little to no interaction on the parts of my opponents, and while I enjoyed them I took them apart because they really pushed the limits on the fun of the format in the playgroup.  However, not everyone is going to view the format as something other than serious, and I certainly have my competitive decks.  My Commanders tend to be competitive, especially my Erebos deck, which is my longest-standing deck right now (given, it began as Drana, but it changed into the monstrosity it is today).

So what changed?

Previously, there was only one real way to handle commanders in any way that was considered remotely permanent, and that was by using the tactic called “tucking”. To put it in laymen’s terms, “tucking” is the act of using a card whose main objective is to put a permanent into a library, and normally they had a downside because of how strong the tactic was: Oblation allowed the player who owned the permanent to draw two cards, Chaos Warp allowed them to reveal the top card of their library and place it into play if it was a permanent, and so on, and so on.

The change that occurred was that “tucking” the commander, placing it anywhere in the library or into the hand, was changed so the commander could be placed back in the command zone, much like if it was sent to the graveyard or exiled.  This replacement effect essentially negated a large way to interact with problematic commanders, such as Derevi and Skithryx.  Using it on a commander, in most cases, will result in the commander returning to the command zone.  The caveat is that even if this happens, any other effects of the card still happen, because it still successfully resolved.  This means the negative interaction still ends in a win-win for your opponent, because that nearly permanent solution no longer applies.

Previously, white had the strongest amount of tuck effects, with blue coming up next, followed by red.  Red got a boon in the form of Chaos Warp, which many people felt was too powerful given its drawback normally hit a land.  This was an important card—a staple, in fact, in any deck running red.  Red is considered the weakest color in the entire format by far for many reasons: starting with a higher life total makes red’s cheap direct damage spells weak, and the format is slow enough to allow creatures with high toughness playable, even if under normal circumstances (read: modern and standard formats) they wouldn’t be viable.  Green is similarly placed as a weak standalone color, however it makes up for lack of control by posing a lot of questions (playing large creatures faster than other decks under normal circumstances).  Generally, green has a lot of creatures that are hard to get rid of (green makes use of a lot of creatures with shroud or hexproof, requiring board wipes to deal with more potent threats.  Or more frightening in nature is that creatures like Vorinclex and Omnath allow for large beaters that simultaneously control the board, and also giving you access to large amounts of mana.  Green also has a wide variety of cards that can tutor up creatures and put them directly onto the battlefield, which can cause havoc if the spell itself isn’t stopped in some way.  Green’s main control is via destroying non-creature permanents, which it can excel at.  Black’s variant of tuck is to either kill the creature, or to kill the player.

So that leaves us with white and blue.  Blue isn’t necessarily affected by the change, since it does a lot of countering.  White, however, took the brunt of this decision, and it sucks for the color because a lot of its control tends to revolve around tucking or exiling.  In fact, many of white’s exile effects (such as Oblivion Ring and Journey to Nowhere) are essentially a free trip to the command zone, unless they have a way to handle the enchantment/spell/creature.  With such exile effects having returns that can make a commander more expensive, in general people played these cards to handle other threats as well.

That’s not to say that the tuck cards are now bad in the format, it just removes a lot of their power for dubious reasons, at best.  Cards like Terminus are still highly effective for removing board states revolving around overextension, and sending multiple commanders to the command zone is certainly a big boon; however, in a situation where only one commander is on the board and/or opponents aren’t overextending, its power wanes significantly.

But we’re here to discuss the reasoning behind the decision, so let’s get into it, shall we?  And keep in mind, this is going to come directly from the original EDH/Commander page.

1.       We want to engender as positive an experience as we can for players.  Nothing runs the feel-bads worse than having your commander unavailable to you the whole game.

The format itself is supposed to be open and interesting.  Like the legacy and vintage formats, very few things are actually prevented from being used, and because of this is has made the Commander scene rather vibrant.  New cards routinely come out to make new commanders viable: it wasn’t long ago that mono-black was nearly unheard of, but the addition of Skithryx, Drana, Sheoldred and Erebos made the color valid.  Black had a lot of power, but it had little interaction with combos, especially those that involved artifacts and enchantments: it had to go outside the color for this to happen, usually in the form of artifacts and artifact creatures.  Additional spells like Sadistic Sacrament made black a powerhouse, and in many instances black has the capability to ramp mana as fast—if not faster in many cases—as green can.

Before I enter into my second point, however, I need to mention the second “reason” they give for the rule change.

2.       The presence of tuck encourages people to play more tutors so that in case their commander gets sent to the library, they can get it back—exactly the opposite of what we want (namely, discouraging the over-representation of tutors).

Black has always had an overabundance of universal tutoring, from Vampiric Tutor to Diabolic Revelations.  Black’s ability to mana ramp has allowed various power changes in the tutors over the years, and while in Standard and Modern such cards might not be run, a format in which Cabal Coffers can be copied by no less than two other lands and several black and artifact mana expounders being present, these tutors are only seeing more play.  Anecdotally, I have had 23 mana on turn 6, which is a severe outlier for the deck itself, and many times I find myself not getting close to that amount.  Black is never going to give up many of the cost-efficient tutors, ever.  Tuck made it so that a tutor was required to search up the commander if it was so integral, rather than looking for a win condition, unless said win condition ended the game then and there.  If anything, tuck allowed for a bit more in terms of control with regards to any black deck.  With commanders such as Skithryx and Erebos being present, removing such blatant threats and forcing them to spend mana and a card to get them back meant that players might be safe for at least one more turn.

Green was probably second in being better off, in that the more cost-effective tutors put the card in the hand, and green’s tutors specifically target creatures.  This made it possible to have cheaper tutors for the same objective—namely, finding a tucked commander—because of the restrictions, which black had nothing of.  More to the point, many of green’s creature tutors had the ability to place the creature from the library directly into play, meaning they had more versatility: what’s more, some of those cheats are at instant speed, so there’s even less time to interact with them!  So green’s not lacking in its ability to recover a tucked commander.

Blue?  Blue has oodles of card draw, which restricts how much time the commander may be in the deck.  Cards like Blue Sun’s Zenith are even instant speed, so you don’t really lose out on much.  Sure, of the five colors blue tends to be more combo-centric, but they have ways to control the board state until they can recover.  So, while blue might lack tutors, the card draw can and often does make up for this shortcoming.

White?  While lacking tutors and card draw, white had control to maintain a very powerful board state.  Some commanders even fall into the artifact category, so they have some tutors to get them but not many.  What’s really powerful is enchantment searching in white, but there are very few commanders in mono-white that are enchantments: Heliod is the only one I can think of off the top of my head, currently.  White also has some card draw, generally with a drawback (the addition of Armistice certainly helps mono-white players).  Their main defence was and is to send things back into the deck, or exile them, so white can maintain a very powerful presence while waiting to find their commander again.

In truth, the weakest has always been red, but that is because on the whole, red is the weakest standalone color in the format.  Usually, red’s very cost efficient burn spells will wreak havoc throughout the game.  But in other formats, the starting life total is 20, and so a 3-point Lightning Bolt will be felt all the time, unless their opponent has gained an insurmountable amount of life.  Because EDH begins at 40 life, that Lightning Bolt loses a lot of potency, and with only one copy in the deck, it’s not like you can back-to-back chain those burn spells for a huge advantage.  Commander is also intended to be a multiplayer format, thus reducing the effectiveness further, and really putting them to creature removal spells.  Red, however, has a solid tutor in the form of Gamble: tutor up your commander, but discard a card.  Oh well if it’s your commander, you can play him next turn—or this turn if you have the mana.  Chaos Warp provided a lot of power for red, and yes, it became a staple in any deck that splashed it, much like Oblation was.

So was tuck increasing the amount of tutors being run?  In general, no.  Green and black ran them because of their strength, and the other colors ran them for utility.

3.       While we are keenly aware that tuck is a great weapon against problematic commanders, the tools to do so are available only in blue and white, potentially forcing players into feeling like they need to play those colors in order to survive.  We prefer as diverse a field as possible.

In a debate, this would be referred to as a “slippery slope” argument, among other things.  It is taking one thing, and making a judgment without reason because the cause is true.  In this case, the Rules Committee assumes that because tuck is admittedly a strong mechanic, more and more players would feel forced into blue or white to deal with commanders that are problematic.

The problem with this is that there is no proof that it is the case, and that there are a lot of powerful commanders outside those colors being run in a competitive sense: Omnath, Locus of Mana, Drana, Kalastria Bloodchief, Erebos, Ulasht, and a multitude of others outside those colors see a lot of play because of their strength.  There is no proof that people feel forced to run blue or white because of tuck being so strong.

Skithryx, Derevi, Shaarum….there are a lot of commanders out there requiring a more permanent answer before they become a problem.  Simply sending them to the Command Zone is not going to work to stop them: it becomes more and more useless as time goes on, especially with Derevi.  Commander is a multiplayer format, is it not?  That’s what the Rules Committee has said previously.  So there will usually be a blue or white player sitting at the table to deal with that problematic commander while the rest of the table plays around.  The format is supposed to develop more diplomacy than anything, so why is the rules committee making decisions that affect the power of diplomacy in the format based on weak analytical reasoning?  Blue and white have routinely been the most diplomatic of the colors—until, that is, it’s time for them to win.  You can always expect decks to do what’s best for them first, and blue and white have always been more diplomatic than the other colors.  In the case of white, you’ve told them to run more boardwipes, and for blue to run more bounce.  In either case it’s going to piss off the players, isn’t it?

Or better yet, white will now run Armageddon effects more and more, to make sure those problematic commanders are dealt with in a more permanent fashion.  How long until we see Armageddon banned because of “how powerful” it is?  And will the reasoning above be used as justification for that ban as well?

MMOs routinely understand that power creep is an issue.  That’s why they look to balance rather

than remove.  You can always make a justification that the new flavor of the month is too strong and demand it be nerfed.  That just makes something else too powerful by comparison, and overall it will lead to constant complaining until everyone can only play with sticks, or in this case basic lands.

Commander has been a healthy format with the tuck rules for years.  Only now it is being seen as unhealthy?  That brings to question if it’s the effects, or the new legendary creatures in those colors that are the problem.

4.       It clears up some corner case awkwardness, mostly dealing with knowing the commander’s location in the library (since highly unlikely to actually end up there).

This is the oddest one of the lot.  They use the fact that Fate Reforged brought about the Manifest mechanic, and if your commander is manifested, even face-down attacks by the commander still count as commander damage.  The only corner case I can recall was with Praetor’s Grasp, in which if you pulled the commander with it, you had to reveal it to your opponent despite it being exiled face-down (because they had the “right” to send it to the command zone).  I can understand, for a bit, the issues that would come from manifest.  After all, if you were attacking, you had to let them know commander damage was incoming, and they had the right to block it.  But if it’s such open knowledge, than the commander being manifested doesn’t really create much of a corner case in the classical sense: you still know which one to block, though it tells people what creature not to waste a kill spell on.

Sheldon Menery goes on to claim in an article on Starcity Games that this affects very few commonly-played cards, and that overall it shouldn’t have a deleterious effect on the format.  So, if the numbers are truly so few—or rather if this fact needed to be mentioned at all—why did it need to be changed?  This isn’t a case of a format being dominated by one or two colors, or one or two commanders.  Almost every color combination has a solid, healthy representation via a number of viable commanders—mono-red being the sole exception as it is very weak overall.  There are other cards and rules that have been a source of contention for years, and the Rules Committee has either ignored them or given similarly bad excuses as to why they haven’t modified anything.  Examples include:

-          Several years ago, the Rules Committee said they would be looking into “split mana” cards, and if the color identity issue should be modified to allow them to be played in decks running only one of the colors (for example, Shattering Blow could be run in either red or white).  Some players said this would break the color pie, others said it was necessary to bring colors up to snuff.  The Rules Committee said they’d be looking into this, but to date has not made a ruling one way or the other.

-          Players have begged for years for Infect and Poison Counters to be increased in Commander, because it was felt 10 Poison was too few in the format.  Defenders of the current rules point out that they card pool for Infect is pretty subpar: there’s only one commander for a true Infect deck, and beyond that not many cards that are very powerful for it.  The Rules Committee stated they wouldn’t change this rule for a variety of reasons: they didn’t want to change the base rules (despite the format beginning at 40 life), the further we move from seeing a new Infect card, the better they feel about the decision, and that Commander is a multiplayer format, and infect tends to be bad in it.  Which leads to the obvious question of, “If it’s a multiplayer format and there are so few cards and you’re unwilling to change the rules, why are you banning a mechanic and using those reasons to do so?”

So what is the general conclusion?

It is quite hard to say whether the entire playerbase actively agrees or disagrees with the changes.  You have several camps, ranging from the “Fuck yeah, this decision rocks and it’s about time!” camp to the “What in the fuck are you idiots smoking?” camp, and everything in between.  I generally fall into the “WTF” camp, I’ll admit.  I don’t agree with this rule, I think the excuses for changing it are spurious at best, and overall I feel like there were other rules they should have been looking at because they are more important than this.

More importantly, potentially problematic commanders just became even harder to deal with in any form of permanency.  Who became even worse?  Let’s list them!

                - Derevi, Empyrial Tactician

        - Skullbriar, the Walking Grave

        - Shaarum, the Hegemon

        - Any God card

        - Brago, King Eternal

Let’s just say it: any commander who had a negative effect when put in the library or hand is no longer weakened.  Skullbriar, especially, has become stronger, so expect more decks with him as the commander showing up.  Derevi completely nullifies two rules, one of which is specific to Commander itself.  The God cards are indestructible, and sometimes not even creatures, thus making them that much harder to deal with.

Combo decks are now able to worry less about losing a combo piece so easily many times.

Heavy agro decks have lost a substantial weakness, since now the commander—many times the win condition in and of itself—can’t be tucked.

Control and tempo are slowly being weakened in this format, which is sad because of how healthy it was.  In time, people will grow annoyed, and I can see the prevalence of land destruction decks showing up.  Boros Charm on Isochron Scepter, and get ready to start the board wipes with Kamahl, Fist of Krosa and Day of Judgement, or just simple Armageddon.  As something becomes more prevalent, we risk the likelihood it will be banned because people are tired of playing against it.

And then it truly will be, “You can only play Grizzly Bears as your commander and 99 Forests” in the interest of being “fair”.

Elder Scrolls Online Dropping Subscription Model. Called it!

I’ve been busy the past few months with a legal battle with a former landlord, as well as finding a place to live, finding work, and signing up for classes for this semester.  Thus, my posting has fallen to the wayside while the stress bleeds off, but this single event is bringing me back.

So now it’s come out that The Elder Scrolls Online is going buy to play.  They’re dropping the subscription model altogether for whatever reason, and there are many reasons.  So, this does a few things, all of which are amusing to me.  But we’ll go over why this is a big deal first.

Back when the game launched, it had a decent and solid launch day.  There was no constant lag issues, no servers dropping because of overcrowding or bandwidth issues.  People who preordered the game were allowed five days of early access, so the servers could be tweaked and hardware changed to allow for increasing numbers in incremental stages.  Honestly, it had one of the strongest game launches in memory.  That was a good thing, but it died very quick afterwards.

From Day 1, the game was buggy.  Nodes of gatherable resources would respawn almost immediately, and you’d see piles of people around them, trying to grab it before other people could do so.  What’s more, the vast majority of these people were bots, accounts that had been compromised through many ways.  There was little account security involved, and pointing this out usually entailed the defense of, “Well, Rift and World of Warcraft had botting issues in the beginning!”

And it’s true: they did.  The difference was that as far as anyone is concerned, World of Warcraft came out at the beginning of the MMO craze, and so it wasn’t like they could foresee everything that would happen concerning compromised accounts and the ways that the gold farmers gain access to them.  But Blizzard took it seriously, and they made great strides with-in the first few months to minimize them.  Even when the “play to level 20 for free!” event began, they severely curtailed the ability for compromised accounts to pass on the information that could cause more accounts to be compromised.  But Zenimax had ten years of trial-and-error to draw upon, to look at the security precautions many MMOs have taken in order to prevent compromised accounts and hacking.  They didn’t do that, and so they ended up reaping what they sowed.  There was a lot of anger launched at Zenimax and the developers of the game, from Beta to when I stopped playing, which was about two weeks into the launch.  I actually ended up being permanently banned form the “official” forums for stating why I believed the game would stop requiring a subscription with-in a year at the outset, and on the Tamriel Foundry forums I was decried as a troll by the ardent defenders of the game and company.  But then again, so was everyone who said something negative about the game.

But now it’s come out that we were right: the game is no longer a subscription-based game, or at least won’t be beginning 17 March 2015.  The game didn’t even hit a year before this happened, so you should think about that for a second.  It’s no different than Star Wars: The Old Republic or Warhammer 40k Online, or probably the most infamous to do this, Guild Wars 2.  They all went free-to-play or buy-to-play with-in the first year, and they had all been hyped because they were triple-A names getting MMO franchises!  But the companies banked on the IP being the saving grace, and so they half-assed the actual games, and that’s when shit went down.  To this day, SWTOR bleeds people playing, and they are actively nickel-and-diming the people who have stayed.  The people at Electronic Arts, who published the game, have admitted as much, and have no intentions of shutting down the servers because they fully believe (read: hope) that the release of Episode VII will lead to a resurgence in the interest towards the entire franchise, and thus SWTOR will be saved by the people joining the game.

Zenimax is taking a similar look: the game is coming out to Xbox One and Playstation 4, and since you have to pay to use the multiplayer feature for both systems Zenimax can’t charge a subscription for the console people, and that’s part of the reason the game for PC is going buy-to-play.  I have no problems admitting that I believe this is part of the reason, but it’s a small part of the overall reason.  They made mistakes that they allowed to compound and grow.  They ignored the players and focused on recouping the losses that have happened since launching the game, and gave up on actual quality.  Because of that, they’re hoping a rename to Tamriel Unlimited will somehow unfuck the massive clusterfuck they have allowed to grow.  To use a medical metaphor, they allowed several small abscesses to grow and coalesce, and now they have a much, much larger problem to fix.  Elder Scrolls Online has consistently bled account subscriptions: what the exact number is we really can’t say.  Blizzard admitted in a few press releases that they were losing subscriptions during Mists of Panderia, but Blizzard is also a much larger corporation with a much larger amount of materials and manpower dedicated to each game.  As such, they had to admit this shortcoming to the public, also in part because they are a publicly-traded game.

Even the defenders of ESO admit that anyone who has eyes can see the declining activity overall in the game.

This is part of the reason I’m ecstatic about this news: those of us who stated that the game would no longer charge a subscription have been vindicated.  Those of us who attempted to tell the company that they needed to fix basic things and were rebuffed have been vindicated.  The defenders of ESO are now in an uproar, being told that everything that has been said that is negative is true, and what we predicated has come to pass.  To quote one former defender on Zenimax’s forums:

“OMG! NO! WHY! I thought you Listened to your community! Day 1 in beta, 1550+ hrs live, PTS hrs. Was patient through all the bugs and growing pains from early access. Defended this game with all my heart to all the haters and trolls. Now you invite them? So disappointing!!! And I just re-subbed for 4 mo to fight the F2P "rumors". This hit me in the gut. I can't even log in right now. May stop playing today. This is a sad day for Nirn...... So sad...:(“

Others are simply stating that they are jumping ship, end of discussion.  Still others admit they are not surprised, and are trying to play it off as a “welcome change”.  In the end, what matters is how Zenimax will recover from this decision.  Recently, the other titles that have made this same decision—or gone full free-to-play—have completely failed.  Zenimax’s track record is not looking positive.

PR Nightmares (and they're not Rifts)

For the past few weeks I’ve been silent, and what I have posted has been about Trion Worlds’s inaction on the part of the customer support, community management, and in general public relations teams to try to keep the customerbase of Rift updated on the issue that occurred three weeks ago.  Now it may seem like a long time to hold a grudge, but truth be told it’s no longer a grudge about the rollback, but rather the lack of Trion to actually take the complaints seriously, and to treat the paying players (really, all the players) as something of a money faucet.  Generally speaking, the anger at this point that is still simmering amongst the Faeblight denizens is that the company does not care, and looking back on many of the posts and what-not, I have to echo this sentiment.

Before I go into the actual posting, I’d like to take a moment to congratulate Turbine for their quick response today when the Dungeons and Dragons Online authentication server issue happened.  In under an hour the server was restarted, and the players were kept updated as to the cause, the status, and the final resolution in a timely manner.  Not once did anyone feel like there was an issue that they were being ignored or kept in the dark, and Turbine’s Twitter, Facebook, and forums kept the players in the loop.  Dungeons and Dragons Online doesn’t look as pretty as Rift, it doesn’t play as well as Rift, and in general feels like a lower-quality game than Rift; however, Turbine has continuously shown a good customer support team when it comes to PR (their in-game support is a bit lacking).

Now, I’m going to go into the root cause of the issue, but I’m going to touch on some secondary issues as well.  Let’s get those secondary issues out of the way first.

Rollbacks happen

Yes, they do.  Unfortunately, sometimes servers shit the bed and hardware problems occur.  There is very little that companies can do to prevent this: it comes with age and the like.  Server maintenance and downtime generally focuses on the software side, and that can help mitigate the problems that can appear when hardware problems happen.  I don’t think anyone is ever going to complain about scheduled downtime, because it’s a necessity in MMOs (CCP Games has recently begun doing minor updates and patchwork without bringing the Tranquility server offline for daily maintenance, but this is not the norm).

I ended up asking around and doing some research to find out what could have theoretically happened to the servers that would cause the need for a 25-hour-plus rollback of the servers, and the people I talked to were dumbfounded.  After all, it is simply something that doesn’t happen unless you have a huge clusterfuck happen, the starts align, and a virgin has been sacrificed by a competitor to Aule.  Properly maintained, software and databases don’t implode like they did, especially if you have multiple redundancies in effect to do so.  What happened to the databases for Rift (specifically, the Faeblight server) appears to show the redundancies and multiple “save points” on different servers does not exist.  And since we are told Faeblight is not on any type of architecture different than the rest of the game, that can only lead one to believe that safeguard is not being used for any shard in Rift.  That is a dangerous gamble, as we saw with the rollback: you risk hours—if not days—of information when something goes wrong.

So, how often do rollbacks happen?  Minor ones are actually more common than people think: usually it’s only minutes or hours at a time (more the former than the latter), and while specific amounts are unknown, it’s safe to say that each game has rollbacks of different servers at least every month because of :reasons:.  Major ones—rather, ones that require 6+ hours of rolling back—are nigh unheard of.  Not once that I can think of has there been a need for a game company to rollback servers for more than three hours, otherwise there would have been a huge uproar on the internet about incompetence when it was picked up on.

Now given, there were rumors of a five-hour rollback in 2013 when it came to Star Wars: The Old Republic.  In truth, I haven’t found any actual corroboration from EA/Bioware concerning it, but given that SWTOR is a half-assed game thanks to the efforts of EA, and how shifty the company is, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Just to make sure I was correct in not knowing of any major rollbacks with regards to WoW, I asked a friend of mine who works with their customer service department.  She can’t recall any, and as she put it, “If that ever happened to Blizzard, it would be everywhere.”

We can all agree.

Reimbursement Not Required

One of the more common claims by apologists is that the company does not have to give you anything.  By a strict reading of the EULA/ToS, you’re correct: the company is not bound legally or otherwise to provide you with any type of reimbursement for a failure of the game.  In fact, should the game die a day after you pay for a year-long subscription, the company doesn’t even have to give you a refund, pro-rated or otherwise (though good business practice is to do so, especially if your company has more than one game.  It gives the consumer a sense of honesty, and customers like being able to trust a company).

The problem is that in the past, Trion has done admirably with regards to reimbursing people for mistakes.  When the chat server issue was prevalent earlier this year, every player received three bundles of +160% vials, and they got these if they made new characters for a specific frame of time.  Likewise, when Patron-status players found their “patron buffs” not working for a handful of days (three, I think) each one got a stack of seven bundles, and once again new characters made during a specific timeframe on those accounts also received the same number of bundles.  So it truly is no wonder that the players not only of Faeblight, but the other affected servers as well as the playerbase-at-large expected better than what we got.

What the players got was a temporary 48-hour buff to non-quest experience gain, and 750 credits if you either (a) spent credits during the affected time, or (b) were a “paying customer”.  That, unfortunately, didn’t stack, so you didn’t get 1,500 credits if you filled out both parts of the criteria, and many Patrons pointed out that the buff didn’t affect them.  More to the point, this buff was during a set time, meaning many players couldn’t take advantage of it.  Also, since the credits were given unequally, it was impossible to determine what a “paying customer” was, as some Patrons received the credits and others didn’t; some people who bought Collectors Editions of Nightmare Tide received the credits, and some didn’t.  it made for unequal treatment, and the question of “What constitutes a paying customer’?” was never answered by a Trion employee.

Now you can imagine why after this was announced a week after the rollback had occurred, and the playerbase had been kept in the dark about what was allegedly going on, that said playerbase would rightly be angry.  It may seem like entitlement, but the playerbase had become accustomed to being given a very good reimbursement when something went wrong.  To many of us, this seemed like a slap in the face.

So then, what is the problem?

This is one of those questions that everyone will have a multitude of answers for.  The two chief concerns are Trion’s lack of communication during the entire ordeal, and Trion’s lack of giving a shit when the players say something.  This has not exactly been something new, as it has been happening for some time prior to this event.  For example, on 09 August Daglar responded to criticism of the proposed auction house changes with the following:

“I never want to see someone leave the game over a change, however the nature of the game is change.  We will make changes, sometimes ones that seem moronic to specific players (or even most players) that have the potential to make people stop playing.  We will make changes none the less.”

This was widely touted as Daglar saying that even if the majority of players disagreed with the changes, if he would want to continue on even at the expense of lost revenue he would push on.  I can see where people get that, but I also see that, while poorly worded, Daglar is saying that they cannot allow a vocal group to dictate the direction of the game.

The problem being that Daglar admitted in that very post that even if a majority of players found the change to be counterintuitive or “moronic”, he’d still go along with it.  Because fuck you, it’s his game to be the executive producer of, not yours you unwashed heathen.

Now, this is the beginning, as far as I’m concerned, of a very frightening trend.  But even going back further, my own experience with Trion’s customer service/GM group has been lackluster.  As I posted to my YouTube account, I had a ticket in on people who had been harassing me consistently for over a month.  Even after getting in touch with Ocho, the Community Manager most frequently seen, nothing happened.  As Ocho told me that he would talk to Daglar et al. about my problem, I thought things would be fine.  Two weeks after I finished my chat with Ocho (and a full four weeks after my ticket was initially submitted), I eventually updated the thread I had created, explaining my frustration with Trion’s lack of customer service or taking harassment complaints seriously (my ticket had had a GM copy-paste a form response to my ticket about a week prior with no response after I responded to it).  I had been in the process of editing a YouTube video I had done on Trion’s failure to take such things seriously when a GM magically contacted me in-game to talk about what had been happening.  In true form, they hadn’t read a thing from my ticket, despite it being stupid amounts of specific (listing dates, times, locations, and chat channels that the harassment had taken place in; specifically, the constant use of the term “pedophile” to describe me was mentioned).

That has, however, been a problem with free-to-play games: they put public relations on the back burner a lot of the time, and instead focus on the here-and-now.  Only when things explode and they need damage control do you see how competent your PR/community teams are.

I keep harping back to 2012, when the EvE online “Monoclegate” scandal broke.  This is for a specific set of reasons.  Chief among them is that it’s very simple for me to recall accurately, because I was at the forefront of the protests.  But it also served as a terrific primer on what not to do when it comes to PR, and how a gaming company—even one as big as Blizzard Entertainment—can make huge mistakes, and mistakes snowball, they don’t add up.

The initial thread started pretty much told us that CCP Pann, the CM they sent in to play early damage control, was simply biding time until the company could come up with a response they thought we wanted to hear.  At this point, the players were not happy, and CCP Pann disappeared, ostensibly because her daughter had gotten sick and she needed to be rushed to the hospital (I can neither confirm nor deny this is the actual excuse, and if it is not true it is a poor excuse when you realize someone is out of their depth.  More to the point, a few months later CCP Pann was among the people from the community team fired after Monoclegate happened, and the CEO blamed the players in interviews for “having” to fire them).

Trion to do Damage Control

As I said previously, I would update my initial posting concerning the Rift server rollbacks a week ago.  However, there has been nothing to update with until today.  The biggest thing is that there was no response or dialogue, no communication between Trion and the players.  As such, everyone was left in the dark as to what was going on.  Previously, I posted Daglar’s initial posting, which said that they were in talks about additional compensation for Faeblight in particular.  However, all the players received were any credits they may have spent during the time between the rollback start location and the unexpected downtime, and an additional 750 credits for paying subscribers.  Let me quote Daglar:

We've awarded back credits to users who spent credits, and additional credits to paying users for the downtime. I've unstuck the thread at this point in time. We also applied global benefits to the affects servers - a particularly large bonus to Faeblight as well.

This is not a monocle gate situation - this was an unfortunate hardware failure, and we could have kept the servers down for another 24+ hours attempting to recover the data. I made the call to get the servers back up so people could actually play as opposed to avoiding a rollback, but not allowing folks to play for at a minimum, another 24 hours.

~Daglar

Now, let me explain what this means.  It means that if you were a paying subscriber—I specifically say were because I know a lot of people have cancelled their subscriptions since the rollback and before this blog posting—you should have received 750 credits.  If you didn’t, you’re SOL.  If you’re not a subscriber, you’re SOL.

But you got that nifty 50% bonus to make up for the hours upon hours of playtime you lost.  Oh, and it only applied to kills, not quests.

You didn’t get enough to purchase even one +160% EXP potion.  You didn’t get anything worth mentioning, not even the loyalty associated with purchasing the credits.  Faeblight lost 56 hours of time—24 hours from the rollback, 12 from the downtime, and the additional 24 hours having to re-grind what we had already lost.  This puts us, as a server, out of contention for the majority of firsts associated with leveling and the like.

I’m going to be honest, it’s bullshit.  This is the type of customer service that has caused companies to fold before.  I’ll go into that later.

I will be keeping this post short because I’m livid and I want to make the post covering this bullshit a proper one, complete with facts and the like.  That requires me to take the time to do that.  But I will leave you with this picture validating that Daglar has sent it to me.

EDIT  Some people have said that Daglar didn't confirm that is all we'd be getting.  However, several minutes ago Daglar posted to the thread itself.

The official compensation was 750 credits for paying players, in addition to massive exp and token boosts for the entirety of the server. If you were a paying user during this time period that appears to have been erroneously missed, please contact customer support.

As stated in the original post, it was most certainly my decision to get the servers back up in the most timely fashion possible. We could have continued data recovery processes for Faeblight for multiple additional days - which would be multiple additional days of downtime. It was completely my call to return servers to a playable state and apply a rollback to Faeblight.

~Daglar

Congratulations everyone, you'll see nothing more.

Mists of Panderia 2: Electric Boogaloo

Has Rift’s new expansion died before it lived?

Sit back kids, and grab something to eat or drink.  This bitchfest is going to be long.

It feels like the expansion, Nightmare Tide, is an attempt to recreate the Mists of Panderia expansion for World of Warcraft, complete with a shitton of farming.  Trion appears to have pushed a “quantity over quality” mentality, thinking to overload the players at the beginning of the experience with the sheer amount of “stuff to do”, and to give them something to push for.  But if they had paid attention to Mists of Panderia itself, they’d have realized that the players—both hardcore and casual, and everyone in between—do not like that mentality.  It’s nice to know that we don’t have to push ourselves to get into things, and to burn out before we even begin raiding.

First, a few facts about the first seven months after Mists came out.

-         1.)  World of Warcraft saw a 54% reduction in overall revenue between September 2012 and April 2013.  Now given, Mists sold millions of copies in September and that would certainly cause inflated numbers, but it is still not an insignificant drop in subscription numbers.

-         

      2.) Coupled with this fact, World of Warcraft lost 1.3-million subscribers during this time period, or a loss of 14% of the playerbasev.  By September 2013 it had lost 25% of the playerbase, and Blizzard-Activision admitted they did not see it stalling anytime soon (to date, it has been staunched slightly).  It was also around this time that Blizzard did a huge mass banning of the bot farms located primarily in Europe and southeast Asia.

The next part is speculative, really supported by the threads that appeared on the forums for World of Warcraft, but also what many commentators in the gaming community mentioned about Mists of Panderia, but also Cataclysm’s end.

Mists of Panderia pushed the quantity-over-quality aspect of gaming hard.  Dailies were so abundant and damn-near mandatory that raiders had no choice: it was far worse than even Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm for enchanting and the like.  It was long, boring, and tedious, and players felt disenfranchised.  The leveling was absolute crap, and many progression raiders simply stopped raiding, myself among them.  It really began to feel like a grind every time you logged in, and when you feel like there’s no end in sight for two or three weeks in a row, you start to simply lose the will to log in.  I logged in because I had to: there were responsibilities inherent to my position, and I couldn’t simply ignore them.  After about two months of playtime, I had trained up the assistant raid leader to do my job, then told the guild I was leaving, and I didn’t know if, or when, I’d be returning.  I haven’t regretted this decision since, because it was simply not fun.  No one, not even the raid leader for a progression guild, should feel like they have to log in and view it as a chore instead of a hobby.  And if you honestly believe that there is a minority of people who feel that way, going simply be the data that can be extrapolated it is not the case: in 2013 even Blizzard admitted that the loss of paying subscriptions did not appear to be abating, and probably would not for the foreseeable future.

It should be noted that about this time, Ghostcrawler left the company (and thus the WoW Development Team) and the Warlords of Draenor expansion was announced.  Many more cynical players have said that it simply appears to be an attempt to placate the playerbase and bring them back in because of the failings of Cataclysm and Mists of Panderia, and I’ll admit to falling into that category.  Time will tell, but for now I have not preordered the expansion (the first one I have not done so) and I do not plan to buy it.

Now, Rift is a themepark MMO, referred to often as a “WoW clone” even though that isn’t fair: it brought quite a few nifty gameplay changes to the genre, but it still feels rather like a WoW clone at times, sure.  And to keep up with the feel, it appears Trion decided that the Mists of Panderia mindset was a good thing to emulate, thinking imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.  It isn’t the case, and it’s not just because Mists was so critically panned and negative.  To begin with, let’s look at the monetary costs associated with purchasing and getting into the game itself:

-          1.) New Souls (the talents) cost 4,500 credits in the store, which means you’re probably going ot drop $50.00 on credits because of sheer value.  To get something similar in terms of what you need to purchase it, you would have to buy four REX (the RMT version, much like a PLEX in EvE Online), or credits in some form to get to that point.  Either way, you’re hitting $40.00 with that, so you might as well just spend the extra ten if you can handle it.  This price, also, is assuming you’ve spent $15.00 on a subscription for the month, meaning you’re actually spending a minimum of $55.00 to do this; I am not, however, factoring in the subscription price for this.

-          

      2.) The “physical” expansion costs $25.00 at a minimum, and I’ll go into this in a bit.  However, most people will purchase the $50.00 expansion simply to get the “Instant Level 60” boost that can be sold for in-game currency.  At this current time, it is selling for 3,200 platinum on my shard (Faeblight).  More to the point, purchasing this version (or the next tier, which is $149,99) does not give you those souls, meaning you have to pay an extra $40.00 to purchase that.  In essence, to obtain everything from what would normally come from purchasing such things you would be paying the equivalent to two expansion packs.

Now let’s keep in mind, Trion opens the entire leveling and gaming experience to everyone, even the players who don’t spend a nickel on the game the entire time they play.  As a free-to-play game, that’s how it should be done (Star Wars: The Old Republic should freaking take note here, considering how badly it has done since Day 1): you should give the players that much and put special things into purchases made with money.  No one is faulting them for launching “collector’s edition” versions of the game, and more power to you if you decide to help keep the game going, ladies and gents.  In all honesty, had I had the disposable income I probably would have dropped the $50.00 on the second tier version just to show my support.  Now, I’m not so sure I would, but that’s just me.

The most important thing right now, however, is the massive amounts of lack-of-clear-planning that appears to go on.  Itemization, for example, is complete crap.  Let’s give you an example of what I mean (sorry for the quality, you'll need to zoom in by clicking on the picture itself).  Now ,the stats on the item aren't bad at all, probably where they want epics to be to begin with.  Until, that is, you hit the Hit Rating: +53 hit.  That is the same amount of Hit found on epic-quality gear prior to entering raids in the previous expansion, and hit requirements did not remain the same with this expansion: to get into experts in the Storm Legion expansion it required 300 Hit, which one could easily do simply with crafted gear; for Nightmare Tide it requires 800 Hit, and the gear you will get will put you just at that base minimum, meaning this epic will not be used.  In short this epic will not see any type of play, relegating it to "less-than-trash" status.  No epic should ever be at that level.

Also on the topic of gear, several items that have been labeled "Bind on Equip" have simply become bound as soon as they are retrieved from a cache or box.  I'm not sure if that's a coding error or what, but it certainly seemed a bit iffy.

Next, on to questing.  There are no quest hubs, but that has generally been true throughout Rift's gameplay so I can't fault them for staying on-point with this.  Running form Point A to Point B can be tedious, but their liberal use of Porticulums for fast travel between destinations you've previously visited certainly helps to take a bite out of the strain generated by that.  but running from Point to to Point B, then to Point C and on to Point D only to return to a spot halfway between A and B is annoying, especially when it happens constantly.  You still have large expanses between those waypoints generally, and so you spend a lot of time getting to positions and less time doing the quests.

But that's okay, there's a lot of shit asking for your sword in their throat, and I'll be damned if I don't oblige!

The classes received "masteries" which are a set of four different "talents" that you can select between at each level.  Now, between fights you can switch from one mastery talent to the next without having to buy something like in WoW, but they don't really appear to be anything new.  Each class has it's own set of masteries, so there's no real variety for them: some are goign to be used, and others are just too broken that you don't look at it.  I can't fault them for doing this, though: World of Warcraft decided with Mists to nuke talent trees altogether, roll the spells and abilities into leveling itself and at certain levels (multiplications of level 15) you could put a point into a set of "talents" that would theoretically have benefits and drawbacks associated with them, allowing for you to be better in some instances and worse in others.  For Rift there are a lot of talent tress to work on, and adding five points into each would be tedious work, I will give them that.  But this game has been touted as one in which there is a lot more customizeability (spell check says that's not a word, but it can bite me) even when compared to Elder Scrolls Online, and in order to keep that they will have to work on the trees.  if it's a stopgap in order to allow them more time to work on refining the trees, I'd prefer they told us that.  As it stands, this is silly at best and downright lazy at worst.

The new capital city—Margle Palace—just seems like they threw together random schemes and backgrounds.  It is not aesthetically-pleasing, and it's not something that appears to be well-planned.  I mean, it seriously looks like an architect was not involved.  It isn't centralized like the other cities (Meridian is a fringe case, I'll grant you that).  It is too much like old Orgrimmar or Stormwind: not localized.  That drove people insane by the thousands, if not millions.  There's going to need to be a huge revamp of that city, otherwise people are going ot keep Tempest Bay as their destination when they hearth.

Now, with the exception of the itemization issue I can get over that,  It's simply stuff that can be fixed, as can what I'm about to write about that has really upset me.  The newest currency is called Void Stones.  Now, they're being used for everything in this expansion: buying Nightmare Rift lures costs Planarite and Void Stones, for example.  That is, of course, assuming you don't want to spend credits to do so (and yes, 9 credits is nothing, but that is not the point.  I simply have one question:

Who the fuck was in charge of this?

If you want to purchase gear upgrades like with Infinity Stones, you have to use Void Stones.  Fine, you're keeping with tradition.  But who thought it would be a good idea for dailies not to offer them, and more importantly to fucking cap them at a weekly amount?  Now given, not many people are going to take the days-on-end to farm up 35,000 stones (the weekly cap); however, I am assuming you intend to add ways to get a shitton of them in short amounts of time, meaning that people will go over cap very quickly.  I can only pray for this, because otherwise I will not give a damn about them, and neither will anyone else.

Two new slots (earrings) require 100,000 Void Stones each.  Much of the gear now requires a new "attunement", also requiring 100,000 Void Stones.

Per character, mind you.  Keep that in mind.

So with a 35,000 stone weekly cap, that is going to require a grand total of eight weeks (or two months for those of you who can do the maths in your head) to get those items.  Per character.  Hardcore progression raiders will be forced to get those slots and what-not in order to not gimp themselves and push for their server- and world-firsts.  This means they aren't purchasing Nightmare Lures.  They aren't going to spend 10,500 Void Stones to purchase the WoW equivalent of "dungeon gear" (oh, and that's for the cheapest items).  Sure, you're pushing them to purchase from the players and hoping to drive the economy, but you're also forcing them to do one thing to get geared.  you should have multiple avenues to do that, but there simply isn't.

Now, all of this can be bypassed by paying $25.00 for the expansion.  Well-played: it puts money into the hands of the company for "future development", which I am honestly assuming is simply being put on Trove and ArcheAge at this point, and that's not even working.  CCP Games learned the hard way that you can't focus on new ordeals and sacrifice on the old ones: their two new games have all but died in the case of one, and the second is done, with the team who had been working on it being laid off.

And I'll admit, that cap is high, because no one is going to spend the time to farm that many stones when it doesn't even appear in dailies!  So I guess in a way the cap is arbitrary, but that also means that the two months I talked about earlier is similarly arbitrary because no one will get to it.

And Daglar has been hesitant to actually talk about it, at all!

Now, I'll admit that I relatively enjoyed the leveling experiences (until level 64, which was a bitch in itself; now, imagine having to do it twice because Trion can't remember to back up your server's data on redundant drives!).  And I'm thoroughly enjoying the Minion idea (which seriously, you need to find a way to add that to the mobile app).  I think the stamina needs to regenerate faster, but I can live with it.  I'm also enjoying the streamlined profession leveling, as it's simply easier to farm mats now, and I can live with that, seriously.

Trion can fix this stuff that people have been complaining about.  It is early-enough in the expansion to get players to enjoy the game again, because right now players are annoyed.  First impressions are important, but if you work on fixing some of the stuff that people have mentioned (and not just myself, mind you: hundreds of people have developed threads on these topics) it will go a long way towards helping to repair whatever hit your reputation took.

But what do I know?  I've just been playing MMOs for over a decade, beta tested many of them, and have been writing for Joystiq for over five years.

Trion To Make Sense

You ever played a game in which there was a massive hardware failure, and the only way to make sure everyone’s account was safe was to roll the entire shard back over 24 hours?  This happened to the Tranquility server in 2012.  CCP Games’s response was a full rollback of about 24 hours, but as compensation to the players they immediately gave everyone who logged in a pretty sizeable amount of skill points.  Now given, in EvE Online, “character level” is measured in skill points, and characters can generally be given skill points equal to a specific formula to help balance out what may have been lost in the rollback.  Of course, this also means that ships lost are replaced, and anything you may have bought or found during the time between the rollback start and when it was rolled back to is lost.  That can be both good and bad, depending on how much Bob and RNGesus love you.

Now, let’s assume that a game’s expansion launched during the week.  Let’s pretend it was on a Wednesday that it launched.  The launch was pretty good: no massive issues except a slightly longer-than-anticipated downtime, and a couple of per-usual hotfixes.  No massive server lag spikes, no issues with questing.  It’s pretty good, and you’re thinking it’s doing really well.

Thursday rolls around.  People have taken these two days off to enjoy the new expansion and explore/level, as gamers are wont to do when a new expansion drops.  Once again, plenty of issues that were expected don’t show up, and you’re feeling really great.

Okay, now let’s put a name to this game: Rift.  The expansion that came out is called Nightmare Tide.

At 0400 Pacific Standard Time on Friday, three servers went down.  The official reason for this was some key databases for the Laethys, Wolfsbane, and Faeblight servers had become corrupted, and so the servers were taken down to facilitate the transfer of data to new databases.  No ETA for when it would be fixed, but we didn’t’ find out the reasoning until four hours after the problems began and the servers went down, and we were told they didn’t know what was causing the issue (rather, they were vague on the cause).

At 1200 PST, Laethys came back online, a full eight hours after it went down.  Wolfsbane followed 25 minutes later.  Faeblight remained offline.  During this time, a hotfix was announced.  However, Laethys and Wolfsbane found themselves rolled back after they came back up, but only to an hour at maximum from when they went down (so at most they were rolled back to 0300 PST on Friday, so people lost nine hours of playtime, though only one of it was actually played).  Faeblight was not so well off: the server was rolled back to 0300 Thursday morning.

That’s a 25 hour rollback, for those keeping track.

Now some people will point out that players on Faeblight didn’t actually lose 25 hours’ worth of gameplay.  After all, no one at that point is going to play that much on a single day.  We need time to rest and what-not.  And you’re correct, we did not.  But I want to explain it like this.

Three servers lost a total of nine hours minimum compared to the rest of the shards out there.  They were down, and so that is time at the beginning of an expansion in which those players are not playing, and getting ready to raid.  For progression raiding guilds—even in games outside World of Warcraft—that’s a big thing.  Sure, the individual server may be at an equal footing for server firsts, but can you imagine if <Ensidia>’s server dropped like that?  Could you imagine the shitstorm that would be caused, and Blizzard’s responses to get them back into contention (we’ve seen Blizzard previously coddle their favorite guild, allowing them to bypass mechanics and exploit for world firsts)?  Trion may not have the same issue in that guilds aren’t vying for world firsts for real-world money, but it still causes headaches for them in that it shows ineptitude on the part of the technicians.

Quite literally, the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing.  Technicians do not talk to GMs (Game Masters, the in-game fixers of problems) do not talk to CMs (Community Managers, who handle social media and forums).  I did a video a few months back in which I had reported some players to Trion about harassment that went beyond any type of trolling.  I had gotten in touch with Ocho, a member of the CM team who promised he would talk to the GMs.  A month later, the head GM (Daglar) contacted me literally five minutes after I had finished the initial video to talk to me about the problem.  It took a month to get on that, and that was after I had talked to a CM, whom Daglar said he never heard from.  So someone was lying, or just dropped the ball.  I would have been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I had been a royal pain the ass with the issue: forum thread that I had updated two weeks and four weeks after the initial ticket-and-canned-answer fiasco, so it was a sign, to me, that they didn’t actually care.  But that is a topic for another posting.

The point is, here the GMs hadn’t talked to the technicians, and it took six hours to find out what the fuck had happened.  Just fucking think about that: the players didn’t know why it had happened, and given most of us probably didn’t care about the why as much as we cared about the how, as in “How do you plan to fix this?”  And we probably don’t care about how they plan to prevent this from happening in the future, because those of us on Faeblight feel completely cheated.

So let’s go back to the problem right now.  The server as a whole is a minimum of forty-eight hours behind every other server.  I say “minimum” because I’m really not taking into account the nine hours we had offlined alongside Laethys and Wolfsbane.  That really affects the morale of the players, who have routinely felt that Trion does not care as long as they are making money.  Now given, I’ve had far more positive experiences in this game than negative, but that doesn’t absolve them of blame when they fuck up big time.  A hardware failure may not be completely their fault, but the corruption of a database so severely that it requires you to go back twenty-five hours in order to restart everything screams negligence (and that’s according to some database analysts, who have said this to Daglar et al. on the forums).

Faeblight was called “venerable” by Daglar, which means two different things: highly respected, or old and antiquated.  Faeblight, being one of the few original launch servers remaining, is probably on the old architecture for the game, so it wasn’t ungraded with the other servers.  It also means that it isn’t backed up like the others (which appear to be once every hour).  That says that those of us playing on Faeblight can probably expect to have this happen again, and the same results will happen.

Players have lost credits they spent, which the company claims they will reimburse (and after the fiasco with Guild Wars II, I believe it will be).  They’ve lost currency, and they’ve lost items that were expensive, or powerful (we’re talking relic-level treasure boxes, epic-level BoE gear, etc.).  They’ve lost experience they gained.  But that can all be retrieved in short order, once people (including myself) get over the shock of what appears to be such a monumental failure in thinking.  More importantly, however, the people on Faeblight (and to a lesser extent Wolfsbane and Laethys) lost time.  Time is a precious commodity, and is the most expensive thing each and every one of us has.  Time is money is a common saying, and it’s true: the server is two days behind as a collective, which hurts us for progression raiding and the like.

But the most important thing Faeblight denizens have lost is trust: we’ve lost trust in the capabilities of Trion to successfully keep the server going.  It may not seem like much, but something as simple as properly backing up the database would have done far more to calm us.  As-is, the players feel slighted, and it’s going to take far more than a title, cosmetic pet, mount, or packaging of +160% EXP packages to alleviate that feeling.

As of this writing, Trion’s head GM Daglar has said that for reimbursement they are putting up an experience boosting event on Faeblight.  However, Patrons (that is, paying subscribers) are not seeing this bonus applied to them, thus alienating the people giving a consistent income further.  Try as the free-to-play crowd might to say that we aren’t special, we are a far more consistent income than the people who spend money to buy credits, because that is a one-time thing normally.  You simply can’t count on that every month, where-as we are generally paying for months upon months in a row.  Many of us have also received 750 free credits to spend in the store as we see fit, which is the equivalent to buying $5.00 worth of credits.  It’s not much, but it’s a start.  You may not be able to buy us completely, but you can definitely make us feel better with reimbursement that is commensurate with the level of fuck-up presented.  I’m not saying that we should all get a million credits, but something as simple as some special vials that might last four hours and over +400% EXP gain, as well as everyone on Faeblight affected by this server issue receiving a free 3-day Patron pass to make up for the time we are missing out on because we have to redo what we already did would go a logn way to showing us we care.  And that’s just for starters.

The EULA might say we can’t expect anything from Trion, and in fact Trion doesn’t have to give us anything as compensation, but companies have tried that before, and the negative publicity alone has caused them endless amounts of headaches.  I fully expect Trion will try to repair the damage, but the repairing needs to happen sooner rather than later, and it needs to be seen as something serious.  If Trion does that and restores the faith of the playerbase—because players on other shards are certainly watching this, understanding it could happen to them—they will have a lot more loyal customers, and the media will pick up on it.

I will update as more information becomes available.

Head GM Daglar's Public Response

Edit At the beginning of the post I mentioned that CCP Games rolled the Tranquility server back 24 hours.  This was incorrect.  At the time, the Tranquility server was under a concentrated DDoS attack that kept the server down for a period of 18+ hours, which meant that during this time skills were not training.  As such, CCP reimbursed players a specified formula of skill points in order to apologize for this issue and worked to resolve the problem.  CCP did not roll the server back.

Gamergate: Why Movements are Bullshit Now

No greater friend, no worse enemy.

That is one of the sayings when it comes to United States Marines: we are so loyal to those we care about that we will bend over backwards and then some in order to help them out; at the same time, we’ll do everything in our power (legally and otherwise) to “destroy” a perceived enemy.  It’s been a saying that I remember hearing for over a decade, and General James “Maddog” Mattis, possibly the greatest general the Marine Corps has had since Lieutenant General Lewis “Chesty” Puller, both of whom take a larger-than-life presence in Marine Corps history/lore, quoted it when speaking to Marines and sailors in Iraq.  We are truly the most steadfast and true friends you can ever have, and many times that goes for our sister services as well.

As a gamer, I obviously have female guildmates and the like that I play with, and am thus also protective of.  As I stated in my last posting, I recognize and understand the hardships that female gamers go through.  It’s simply part of the fact that over 80% of the playerbase in almost every game is male, and also socially-awkward.  When a being with tits shows up on Ventrilo, you can hear the collective boners popping up, and you pray to whatever deity you worship that nothing else pops into your head.  My guild master in Rift is a woman, and she’s someone every person in the guild would kill a motherfucker to protect her.  It’s not because she’s a woman, it’s because she’s someone who gives a shit about all of us.  Sure, being viewed as a sister and thus everyone wanting to be a big brother certainly helps her as well, but she’s got a husband so no one is under any impression they have a chance.  Simply put, we’re protective and that’s that.

The problem now is that you have those same subsects of humanity that are using someone’s gender against them.  I only became aware of this today when I saw an article on “gamers” who dox’d Felicia Day (“DOX”ing” someone means you release their personal details—such as address and telephone number—on the internet for anyone to find), and was only marginally aware of what is being dubbed “Gamergate” prior to this.

For those who don’t know, “Gamergate” revolves around two camps of the gaming community and is largely based around perceptions of misogyny and sexism in the gaming community, as well (and to a lesser extent now) as journalistic integrity and ethics when it comes to people who review video games as a whole.  It started in August 2014 when an ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, an “indie game designer” posted that she had had romantic relations with a Kotaku journalist, and the perception was that because of this it had an influence that was easily a conflict of interest.  Now, it came out that the allegations were unfounded, but the damage was done and Ms. Quinn found herself inundated with a deluge of harassing e-mails and the like, threatening violence and rape against her.

Once again, this is not a political piece, and I don’t want people to view it as such.  But this is what has been happening with a social media network generation that knows “everything” and can help propagate the lies without doing any fact-checking.  And while many of us may not be willing to (or even expected to) actually check the facts, it is still preferential to the alternative, such as rioting in the streets because a white officer shot a black man and everyone’s claiming it was an execution, only to have the evidence of the case come out over months that that narrative was unfounded and patently untrue.

The rampant misogyny and sexism would be fine if it was just words and jokes.  But the problem is this vociferous fringe group has gone beyond that, issuing threats of rape and murder against female journalists and gamers who they believe are stepping “out of line” with their viewpoints.  Felicia Day was one such person to be subjected to this type of vitriol, and it runs counter to everything that the majority of gamers actually believe.  We are not here to denigrate women—the game companies do that well enough with the female avatars running around in plate string bikinis.  Sure, we all say sexist and misogynistic jokes and what-not, and we might say stupid shit but the vast majority of us do not mean it.  This subsect, while they may think what they write, will never act on it.  Here’s why.

I’ll go back to my opening statement.  Marines (and most servicemembers) are the best friends you can have.  If you’re in a pickle, we’ll do our best to help you.  More to the point, we’re stupidly protective of our female friends and relatives.  I have been present when my friend Erica wanted to move out of her abusive boyfriend’s house.  She was afraid he’d beat the everloving manshit out of her, and probably hurt her daughter as well.  She asked me to come along to help her move her shit out, and I did.  I didn’t say anything.  I simply followed her, helped her move, and that was it.  Sure, he said shit, but he wasn’t actually going to follow through while someone was there.  One, it’s a witness.  Two, he’s never had to actually fight for his life (and yes, he would have been doing that had he acted).  And my friends know that if shit happens and it can be validated, I have a network of servicemembers through the United States and Canada, as well as friends in Israel, England, and Ireland whom I can turn to in order to make a point.  If you fuck with me or mine, I fuck with you.  And while we may bend the rules a bit, it will never be to the point that they won’t find your body, and if you press charges, you’d be surprised how many juries clear us on all charges because we’re veterans, and because you’re a fucking cunt and we have evidence of it.

But this vitriol is aimed at women, and has been.  Feminist Anita Sarkeesian canceled a speech at the University of Utah after receiving death threats from the fringe group of gamers, and Utah’s concealed carry laws meant that the campus couldn’t guarantee her safety.  Felicia Day had threats of rape and murder launched against her.  Yet when former NFL star Chris Kluwe called these same people “basement-dwelling, cheetos-huffing [sic], poopsock-smelling douchepistols” nothing happened to him, despite him being a much softer target in terms of publicity and the like.  It is stupidly easy to find his information, after all.

Women are simply seen as much safer targets to take out criticism and anger on.  They’re not as likely to actually find out where you live, come to your home and murder you in your sleep.  As such, these people (and I am using that term very loosely here) feel that they are in a much safer place with regards to being able to act like badasses.  Making a bunch of threats you will never be expected to carry out makes one a man on the internet, and the community understands that even if they also ridicule you.

Sure, you have instances of gamers being dox’d, along with the name, work location, and school locations of children.  You have the threats of violence against your family if you don’t do what they want.  This happened a few years ago in EvE Online, when a group of Russian players decided to release that information to the public, with the very real and clear threat against the families of the players part of Goonswarm Federation, the player-run alliance made up of Something Awful forums denizens after there had been talks of invading and capturing space owned by said Russians.  But this is by-and-large not the norm, because people understand this is a game, and even the most sane, hardcore gamer will tell you that much.  It is legitimately not worth going to prison because you don’t like what someone says.

I have plenty of disagreements with gamers and game companies.  I’ve voiced them, and been quite vociferous.  I have submitted a letter of no confidence that was signed by players against the CEO of CCP Games, even if it was several years ago.  I have not, however, threatened to hunt down someone I have had problems with and threaten to kill him and his family.  I’ve seen those threats made in-game, and the companies tend to react accordingly (enjoy your ban).

And what’s more, this fringe group has received more publicity from other media outlets simply because of how outrageous they have acted, and because of that its cast a net of complete and utter inability for people to differentiate between the “good guys” in the movement and the “bad guys”.  Now given, this stems more from the media enjoying sensationalized stories of people acting like cunts, because it sells papers.  But what started out as a decent movement—fighting against the corruption or biased “reporting” of media outlets is something we should all want, whether we care about the news or not—has become synonymous with a rape culture and the stereotypical gamer: the type that hides in mommy’s basement, unwilling to leave and run their own lives (as Mr. Kluwe pointed out).

Is it important to distinguish between the two camps?  Absolutely.  But it’s really not going to happen in the media because it does sell copies.  Period.  Ratings go up.  Sold copies go up.  In either situation the bottom line is affected positively, and that means that Gamergate has a negative stigma associated with it.  The group of journalists that want to demonize something like this will just lump the fringe group in with the main one; the group that wants to protect and point out their grievances will not be heard, and so it’s now important to belittle and shame that fringe group.

Unfortunately, I don’t think it’ll work: you have to have a sense of shame in order to feel it.  These are the people you bring behind a bar and put a bullet in their head, because they offer nothing of value to the movement, and really nothing of value to humanity as a whole.

Am I afraid of being DOX’d and having someone show up in my house to kill me?  No.  I know they’re cowards, but more to the point I have on me at all times a FN57 pistol, which has a notch in the handgrip.  It’s killed before and it’ll do so again if I need it to.  But as I said, they’re cowards, and it won’t come to that point.  Plus I have a penis, so that automatically protects me from them.