Monthly Archive

I’ve written a couple times recently about the WoW Glider controversy. To sum up, Blizzard is suing some guy that made a program that other people use to bot in WoW. Some of the Forge’s commenters seemed to feel this was ok.

I’m curious how those people would feel about Microsoft suing this guy if he sold his simple little device, assuming that MS had something in the Xbox Live EULA that prohibits automation? (No idea if they do or not. Consider it a thought experiement if not.)

After all, even if it’s just a simple little machine consisting of a couple of solenoids and drive belts, it’s still a “cheating” device, right? Aside from the copyright infringement claim with WoW Glider (which I’ve got no problem with), I don’t see any sort of real difference aside from DMCA-wankery. It’s a tool created explicitly to ‘bot’ and gain you points in Xbox Live, just like WoW Glider is a tool created explicitly to ‘bot’ and gain you points in World of Warcraft.

Taking it a step further, perhaps Microsoft should sue itself, since I used the cord for the microphone they manufactured to wrap around my dual joysticks on the 360 controller in order to automate my rise up the ranks in Rainbow Six: Las Vegas.

I had a really negative experience this weekend with American Airlines that got me to thinking about the nature of providing customer service as a large organization with an equally large number of customers. Is it fundamentally impossible to provide good service on a large scale? What is it that defines customer service? Is it a cost center or is it a profit center? How does treating it as either option affect how you deliver CS?

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I’m in need of a human prop to play Leeroy Jenkins for my talk at GDC this year, which is on Friday March 9th from Noon to 1 pm.

I’ve already got a real, live ninja coming and I just need Leeroy next to him to illustrate something (ok, mainly to amuse poeple, but I can pretend). The ideal Leeroy candidate would:

• Be attending GDC on a Classic or Giga pass so you can get into the talk.
• Be willing to scream LEEEEEEEERRROOOOYYY JJJJJJEEEENNNKIIINNNSS at the top of your lungs, in front of a room full of fellow games professionals.
• Be someone other than Jeff the Ninja, since Leeroy is no ninja. (Sorry Jeff!)

If you’re interested, just email me please: matt (-at-) ironrealms (-dot-) com.

First, a better summary than I delivered in my previous post on WoW Glider may be found on Gamasutra. This issue has been on my mind a fair amount the past day or two as I’m genuinely outraged by Blizzard’s approach to this.

Three of Blizzard’s main claims in terms of the damage they claim to have suffered (leaving aside the infringement issue) is that

“Blizzard has suffered damage in an amount to be proven at trial, including but not limited to loss of goodwill among WoW users, diversion of Blizzard resources to prevent access by WoWGlider users, loss of revenue from terminated users[emphasis mine],”

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Allegedly, Blizzard has sued the creator of WoW Glider, software designed to let people automatically perform certain WoW actions while away from the keyboard and mouse. Damion Schubert has some thoughtful comments on the situation here.

Damion concludes by opining that he hopes Blizzard wins, writing:

That being said (and this may show my bias as having worked on these games in the past), I have to be rooting for Blizzard on this one. Unattended macroing is a huge problem for the people trying to run an MMO:
1) It becomes the easiest and most efficient way to farm for gold, which causes inflation of the economy.
2) It creates a huge number of customer service calls, as people who aren’t using the tool complain about the people who are (or more frequently, who they suspect are).
3) It starts a slippery slope towards the automated PvP bots that ultimately decimated games like Counterstrike.
4) While not applicable for WoW and most other games, if the company is in the business of selling gold or advancement for real cash, the bot can effectively compete with your business model.
5) While subtle, fast advancement creates a mentality that characters are cheap and disposable, which increases the likelihood of antisocial behavior.
6) Left unchecked too long, and you get a situation where so many people have the tool installed that you can’t take action.

I sympathize with what Damion is saying, but I am vehemently against holding the creator of what are effectively third-party clients or client-addons responsible for what users do with them. I dare say, in fact, that the majority of publicly accessible virtual worlds are accessible only via third-party clients. There are perhaps 1500 text virtual worlds publicly available, and almost all of them have no client of their own.

Zmud, the most popular text MUD client, has elaborate scripting capabilities, and our text MUD admins fight a constant battle against users who use botting scripts illegally (we allow botting in some circumstances, like combat, but not in others, like commerce). Further, there are a host of other clients with similar capabilities ranging from Tinyfugue for Unix-type systems to the defunct Rapscallion for Macs. Should we sue them all because our games are bottable?

In absolutely no way do I see any of this as being Zuggsoft’s (the creator of Zmud) problem, nor do I see Blizzard’s supposed woes as WoW Glider’s fault. Blizzard comes across, to me, as a bit of a whiny bully throwing its weight around to crush the small guy. If they design a game in which the equivalent of pressing a button repeatedly is this rewarding, then I see no reason why the law should punish someone who makes software to perform the actions that Blizzard’s game rewards any more than creating a program that uses Word macros more effectively than Microsoft intended should. (I say this, as well, as someone whose games ban people for unattended macroing.)

Sure, they’re welcome to ban players who are using WoW Glider, but I think using their legal bully-boy tactics to intimidate WoW Glider’s creator crosses the line of acceptability pretty outrageously and wastes our tax dollars to boot. Shame on you, Blizzard.
–matt

We’re looking to bring on an engineer for a few months to help take some of the load off our existing tech team. You’d be working off-site, spending helping out with a variety of things, as needed. The ideal candidate:

• Has an excellent grasp of C++ and Java and at least 3 years of professional experience working with them.
• Has reasonable 3D knowledge and experience.
• Has worked as an engineer on an MMO previously.
• Is capable of self-motivating and managing his/her time well.

The caveat here is that we can’t afford to pay what are market rates in expensive markets like the Bay Area or NYC, but if you’ve got experience and are looking for a situation that lets you work from home for a financially stable small company with zero bureaucracy and no publishers pulling the strings, this might be right for you. There’s good potential for this to turn into a permanent position post-release as well.

If you’re interested and meet or come close to the above requirements, email a resume to me at matt (-at-) ironrealms (-dot-) com. Thanks!

I almost finished Lost Planet this weekend, but ended up sending it back to Gamefly after dying to the final boss a few times.

Lost Planet was a decent game as a rental, though it wasn’t buy-worthy. It did have some very large insectoid bosses, and the in general was about 8 hours of throwaway fun up until the final Boss battle.

Throughout the whole game, you’re building a skillset. You’re learning how to fight on foot as a person. You’re learning how to fight largely on foot (and briefly while hovering) as Mech. You’re learning how to skip past the excessively long and inane cut scenes.

Finally, you make it to the last battle. You’ve beaten the owner of the best Mech evar and now you get to use that Mech. Now imagine that you’re 16 years old, and your parents say they’ve bought you a car, but instead of a car, it’s a farm tractor.

Instead of simply giving greater scope to the skills you’ve already developed, you see, they give you a mech that is completely different from anything else in the game. Suddenly, you can’t even really walk on the ground. You’re purely aerial, fighting in a purely aerial arena set at the top of a large tower (a bounded sky area). And instead of the projectile weapons you’ve used all game, you’re suddenly effectively limited to an electro-sword that functions like it’s in cold molasses.

In any case, I gave up in disgust after a few tries at the aberrant final boss and sent it back to Gamefly. On the plus side, my garden in Viva Pinata is getting better and better.

Drool.

James Wagner Au, in an absolutely laughable attempt to play down the overwhelming amount of overtly sexual content in Second Life, has written an article that really must be read to be believed, in which he attempts to convince readers that…well, it’s too embarassing to even suggest that anyone would be convinced by such an absurd argument. Here’s the best quote:

“Take the center stage of the very popular Barbie Club [a strip club in SL], for example. Were you to count the sexual content in this most adult of places, only the dancers’ costumes, their sensual animations, and their avatar genital attachments would qualify.  (And that is stretching the definition, and assuming that wearing genitals is only for sexual expression.)

But look closer: entirely non-erotic are the furniture, the money, most of the textures, all the construction materials of the building, the fixtures, and more. Seen this way, maybe 10% of this location depicts commercial content that is unambiguously sexual.  (And this in a white hot center of avatar-based sensuality.)  If it’s just 10% here, how much smaller is it across the wide swathe of the grid?”

You see, in Mr. Au’s world, there’s no such thing as a purely sexual porn movie, because there’s furniture in porn movies. In fact, maybe that XXX movie you and your girlfriend rented last weekend shouldn’t be considered a sexual movie at all! I mean, think of the paint on the walls, and the carpet, not to mention the bed itself. None of that is sexual!

Ahhh, fanbois. They’re so cute as they wander around blind, missing the forest for the trees.

Facebook has launched an experiment in virtual item sales, allowing members to send each other small virtual gifts for $1. The gifts are icons designed by Susan Kare, the designer of the original Mac icons.

This idea isn’t new, of course. Funhi.com (now-dead social site) did this years ago, but Funhi never approached Facebook’s size or cultural influence (#8 on the Compete 200). I suspect Facebook is going to make a killing on this, though I question the visual style of their icons.

Thanks to Techcrunch and the Razor for pointing me at it.

SOE has released a white paper detailing the results of the first year of Station Exchange’s operations. Gamasutra has good coverage of it. For those who aren’t sure what I’m referring to, the Station Exchange is Sony Online Entertainment’s attempt to make money (and reduce CS costs) by operating a legal exchange for players to buy and sell virtual stuff obtained in Everquest II. Sony takes a piece (10%) of each completed transaction.

The service itself hasn’t made much money for SOE, relative to their size (about $275k), but as PlayNoEvil notes, customer service calls related to RMT went from 40% of calls to 10% of calls, and that alone demonstrates an unquestionable success for Sony’s experiment.

Compete.com, one of the numerous sites trying to measure user behavior on the web, has released an interesting list that they call the “Compete Attention 200,” or the top 200 sites for US web surfers in terms of attention spent there, which is a measure of how much time people spend on the top 1 million websites.

It makes a lot of sense to me, especially as attention has long been one of the two most important metrics that we use internally to measure what our users are doing. We track user-minutes spent online and non-idle for a rolling 24 hour period, and I know when I’m online, I look at that number at least once an hour. (The other metric is revenue, which has a strong correlation to attention for us.)

The top 10 are reasonably predictable:

1. myspace.com
2. yahoo.com
3. msn.com
4. ebay.com
5. google.com
6. aol.com
7. pogo.com
8. facebook.com
9. amazon.com
10. craigslist.com

A couple caught my eye below that.

#18 - neopets.com - Often imitated, but very clearly, not yet successfully duplicated.

#19 - adultfriendfinder.com - I knew it was big, but I didn’t know it was that big.

#21 - runescape.com - The juggernaught does not stop.

Warcry published an interview with me this morning about Earth Eternal. You can find it here.

I just wanted to add, as well, that I’m deeply grateful to sites like RPG Vault (thanks Richard!) and Warcry (thanks Dana!) for their willingness to help bring attention to a game like Earth Eternal that doesn’t have the backing of a major company.

I was part of an Online Worlds Roundtable for IGN’s RPG Vault recently, focused on ‘alternative’ business models for virtual worlds. You can find the first page here, and the page my response is on here.

Sorry for the dearth of blogging activity on the Forge lately. Things are just very busy!