Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Idiotic Game Company Decisions.
Now there’s idiots on one end of the Series of Tubes – the players – but by no means am I inclined to let the game designers and customer service reps pass by without their own stupidities listed as well. If you’ve played enough of these games you know many of them quite well; the things that lead to frustration, cursing, frothing, and account cancellation. However, like any codependent relationship, your bond with the game and its developers transcends stupidity – after all, you keep giving them money even though the game drives you to drinking Nyquil every night – and approaches that depicted so lovingly in such shows as Cops (picture, if you will, the game being dragged off towards a police cruiser dressed in a beer-and-Cheeto-stained NASCAR T-shirt while the customer screams obscenities from the doorway.)
1 ) CS reps making any statement which may vaguely be construed as taking a side. CS is a thankless job. It’s rotten. Every person who talks to customer service is unhappy – angry, frustrated, confused, or enraged. Have you ever sent in an appeal which says, “Hey, just so you know, I’m having a great time, this game rules, you have a nice day and pop the cap on a brewski for me, eh?” No, you haven’t. You place your complaint in the list and someone pops up after six hours and says “Hello, thank you for playing Generic MMORPG Which Isn’t A Rip-Off of Every Genre Trope Since Tolkien, Honestly, I am Customer Service Whelp Grumblebuttons, can I help you?” They then endure your vitriol and – sometimes – attempt to address the issue. If they’re lucky you say “thanks” and they go back to their miserable job. But as you all know the Internet runs on an invisible and unlimited source of energy – Paranoia – which sparks all of us to believe that the Other Guy is getting a better deal. Your side loses battles all the time? The developers like Other Side better. XP too slow? Devs hate you. Victrola the Noisome, boss of the Bog of Eternal Skeeters, not popping? A CSR is watching you and stopping the refresh timer. So in this climate the worst – WORST – thing a CS rep can do is give the appearance of partisanship. The most glaring examples of this appear on forums; there have been cases where a company spokesperson makes a passing jest about “buffing” a given class or how “overpowered” a given class might be and the boards explode with enough hatred to kill a million unicorns. CS reps are human; and like most humans sometimes they don’t know when to shut the Hell up. We – the gaming community – are a hideous multi-headed beast, a ravening thing which feeds on suspicion and spite, and should the CS rep toss a nice juicy piece of Opinion Meat before us we will devour ourselves while we raven over it. Seriously, CS – SHUT UP. Put bland statements up on the boards: “Dismemberment Wizards – Bleeding Orifice will now cost five more Pus Points to cast.” Don’t explain why. Don’t give us an INCH. In personal communications, try to be even less emotional than Spock.
2 ) Developers love their creations. They love every little tree and bush, every little quest sideline, every little graphic frill. By GOD, if you don’t PAY ATTENTION TO EVERY LITTLE THING you’re some sort of philistine who can’t appreciate that the artist used cyan instead of cobalt blue to shade the Bilious FingleTroll’s poop piles. The developers force you to do stuff which is incredibly boring – click through multiple pages of quest text, the Go Here And Click That quests; a legion of little things they do to make you appreciate their hard work. Hey, developers – cut it out. We want to kill stuff to get stuff so that we can kill harder stuff to get more stuff and finally kill people. We appreciate your work, really. But for Corn’s Sake just stop putting roadblocks up that divert us from our straight-line path towards murderous rampages.
3 ) Grinding. Let us all cheer for the grind. It’s deceptive, isn’t it? You pop on to a new character and go out killing Fruminous Gigglers for a few levels and suddenly you’re level 10 and it isn’t even past 9pm! Yay! This game doesn’t force you to plod through encounter after encounter after encounter killing the same damn thing over and over and over again but oh, of course, the Gigglers you’re killing at level 20 are a pale yellow while the ones you were killing at level 19 were green and GOD WHY AM I WASTING MY TIME WITH THIS GAME and where did November go – and hey, why do I have a notarized copy of divorce papers next to my mouse pad – I’ll just move those so I can prop up the Prima guide on the stack of empty pizza boxes. Please, Devs, WORK HARDER at making the leveling at least a BIT more interesting.
4 ) Kill quests. Ah, kill quests; the alfalfa sprouts of the gaming salad bar. Every game has them sitting in a huge bowl in the middle of the table, and you’re obligated to take a big scoop of them and munch them down with the paltry few non-kill-X-of-Y-monster quests they offer. They’re unappetizing and tasteless but you have to chew through a big glob of them before you get the tasty little croutons of Other Content. Oh, they come in different flavors – “Get 5 Soiled Thongs by slaying Verminous Chippendales in the Valley of Odiferous Stripmalls”, for instance, or “Lord Boilingbottom needs his wine cellar cleaned out, so go slay 15 Sickly Sommeliers so that he can put in a hot tub” – but it’s basically the same quest. Please think of SOMETHING to replace these quests. Please.
5 ) High-End Dungeons. Of course, throughout the game every little cave in the wall is another Mines of Moria, filled with dastardly villains and fabulous treasure. When you’re leveling that’s fine; you need somewhere else to go to shake off the ennui from kill quests and grinding, so you go into the Abandoned K-Mart of Bluelight The Special and slay Zombie Bargainhunters until you triumph over Bluelight and get loot. It’s fun, it’s different, but sometimes I have to wonder that the surface of the virtual world doesn’t collapse into a series of sinkholes with all of this tunneling. No, what is truly painful is high-end content, the dungeons you go into when you’re done leveling and now are Questing For Gear. The ridiculousness of the whole exercise is apparent; while you were leveling up you’d visit the Abandoned K-Mart maybe once or twice, completely believable in its way – you could imagine you were the first adventurers to brave the depths, and your triumph over Bluelight would liberate the world from his Demons of Price-Cutting. But now, you’re level Zillion and you NEED PURPLES. No aspect of the game is more like work than high-end dungeon raiding. Your boss is a tyrant who explodes into rage if you mess up on one little step of the choreographed dance. Your co-workers are idiots who just skim along while you do the hard work. In the end you wonder if it’s worth it because the payoff goes to some other jerk who was lucky enough to win the die roll or have enough Buttkissing Points to get the Nifty Item – and if you’re the lucky sod you KNOW that it’ll be sixteen weeks before you get another bite at the apple. Furthermore, the unreality of it dawns on you; every week you spend ten hours on a Sunday where you could be going out to the movies, reading a book, or taking a nap, instead clicking Hateful Salesclerks and casting Expunge CreditScore while the raid leader shouts over voice chat “MORE DOTS!” And every week the same monsters are back in the same place; you haven’t saved the world, you haven’t defeated the scourge of Overlord Scrooge the Miserly, your life is a futile repetition of the same meaningless movements day after day without end, and for what? So you can get enough stuff so that you can go to the even more high-end Dungeon of Purposelessness and kill even more things for more stuff which you’ll use against the NEXT dungeon. So much for you saving the world – you are, instead, merely a ticket-puncher in the grand cycle of MMORPG life. You’re trapped in a place where nothing ever changes, much like the DMV.
6 ) Expansions. Just when boredom is about to drive you to do something that spousal anger, whiny children, malnutrition, chair-sores on your butt, or CRT/LCD poisoning cannot do – turn off the computer and cancel the game – the developers come out with a Sorry, This Time Will Be Better expansion with NEW CLASSES AND RACES! NEW AREAS TO EXPLORE! NEW SPELLS! NEW NEW NEW! and your free time dies a whimpering, pathetic death once more. At first the newness is a breath of minty-fresh air, reminding you of the fun days you had before level fifteen where everything was unexplored, you got new spells every level, maidens (or comely lads) kissed you for slaying Gastro the Feeble, and you didn’t want to put your fist through the monitor after the eighth group wipe caused by the Goddamn Idiot Bard Who Stood in the Wrong Place In the Dungeon. You fall a bit in love again, but soon you discover that your virtual significant other didn’t go through rehab, isn’t clean and sober, but is the same manipulative and controlling jerk you were getting bored with before the expansion. The grind returns; all of the STUFF you got throughout those eternal dungeon raids is useless; and in the end you’re still fighting Gigglers, but these are Outworldly Gigglers and they’re plaid instead of yellow. Oh, and of course the New Class and/or Race is so cool and overpowered that everyone rolls up one and then abandons it when it’s nerfed. Thanks, developers, for dragging us back into the morass of futility and addiction which is your world, and thankyoueversomuch for making the new stuff basically the old stuff but in a different place in your game world.
Comments