Perpetually Pessimistic Optimist

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Being Overpowered In Warhammer Online.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Being Overpowered In Warhammer Online.

Play Destruction.

Seriously – play Destruction.  That’s it.

Oh, you want more details.  Play a Witch Elf.

Ok, Ok, you want MORE information.  

Perhaps a bit of history is in order (you knew I was going to drag THAT in, right?)  I am, by no stretch of the imagination, a “leet” player.  I am probably never going to be the top killer in any game I play or have the most impressive gear.  I aspire to competence, that is to say knowing how to press the buttons to achieve more or less what I want.  I am, however, easily distracted and am multitasking-impaired, which means I tend to gravitate towards characters which have a minimum of complicated bits.  Take, for example, any class which requires “twisting” – my measures of success with that class would be, to be blunt, minimal.  Healing would require me to pay attention to everything, and tanking the ability to spin around like a top smacking different monsters to keep aggro - nope, not going to happen.

Thus I play DPS classes.  These are conceptually simple; hurt something until it whimpers and then hurt it until it lies down and squeaks.  The tools don’t really matter – poky knives, bludgeons, Violet Shrike Butterfly Marshmallow Squeeze Atomic Weasel Projection – as long as it boils down to “click button, give other thing boo-boo” I’m all over it.  Again, I tend to keep things simple (as I prefer PvP over mashing AI creatures) and load up three or four attacks or reliable combos which I can mash over and over again.  Since I don’t mind getting brutally killed once and a while, the relative fragility of DPS classes is not an issue for me.  It’s a fast-paced life, run up and nuke/stab/wedgie the enemy until he falls down or I do.

So the latest game I’m playing is Warhammer Online.  I can sum up the experience as “such promise, such potential, such irritation.”  There’s two sides – Order and Destruction – with distinctive looks, classes, and races.  In Mythic’s Search To Reflect The Source Material and Need For Both Sides To Be Nifty they stuck fairly closely to the canon.  Warhammer is a brutal tabletop game, the sort you see being played at GenericDragon/And/Or/UnicornNamedConvention (GDAOUNCon) with a thousand lovingly painted miniatures ranging over green felt tables.  It takes sixty years to do one turn and people are always fussing about with rulers and dice and tables – actuarial accounting is fun! – before one person finally sighs and knocks over one of his five hundred Orcish Interior Decorator Rampagers (complete with Murderous Color Swatches!)

So the general outlines of the sides and classes were fairly well-established before Mythic tackled the game.  Still, the requirements of tabletop gaming and MMORPGs are different…that elusive quality known as “class balance.”  Mythic has…chosen poorly (cue scene of guy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he drinks from the wrong cup and dissolves into gray paste) in its attempts to balance the factions.  The Order side (the “good” guys, if there are any in the Warhammer world) is seriously underpowered.

No, really.  I know “Dude! Side X is SO OVERPOWERED!” is the standard-issue whine for any failure on the player’s part not to be “uber” at Nuclear Underwater Basket Molesting or whatever.  But…playing on the Order side you get the sinking feeling deep in your chitlins – akin to that after eating the chicken-fried steak at the local diner which is coated with the oddest pea-green-colored gravy (true story) that something very, very bad is about to happen.  Destruction (our friendly Orcs, playful Chaos Mutants, and the cuddly Dark Elves), quite frankly, stomps Order flat in the battlegrounds and in open-field RvR.  “Well,” you think, “perhaps it’s because of population.”  True, Destruction has a lot of people.  Part of it is the attraction of Being Bad, because if you’re evil it’s not a problem that your day-to-day life consists of murderous rampages and ecological devastation against forest creatures and Honest Peasants (tm, patent pending.)  I think, however, that a lot of it has to do with the fact that the cuddly Dark Elves are more like the Swedish Goth-Chick Emo Bikini Team than a True Force of Evil.  Oh, the male characters are elegant and refined but fully-dressed; on the other hand, the female characters wear outfits which would be banned on most public beaches (oh, and their armor upgrades consist of hats and gloves – the thong underwear, masking-taped-up bikini cups, and sexy ripped-mesh hose carry through to level 40.)  Not only that, the female characters pout – a full Angelina Jolie moue of full lips and slightly cross-but-cute little frowny eyes thing – in combat instead of snarling out their rage at all that lives.

On top of that the Dark Elves have a female-only class, the Witch Elf.  Now I understand that the previously mentioned abbreviated dress code for female Dark Elves is actually even more sketchy in the miniature game, but think about it – a class which “forces” you to play a girl toon, a SEXY girl toon with naughty-naughty-spank-me outfits is temptation enough for the legions of loners amongst the gaming public; but the cream filling, as it were, of this class is the fact that Witch Elves are tremendously deadly.

So here you are, a class which is a ) a sexy sexy nasty-girl toon and b ) murderous beyond measure.  Naturally, when I wanted to try out Destruction I made up a Witch Elf. 

I wouldn’t pass any judgments, by the way, since for all I know you regularly have your significant other slather him/herself with olive oil and peanut butter before he/she slaps the bare soles of your feet with slightly al dente spaghetti.  You can just check your giggles at the door.

The Witch Elf is a rogue-type.  She runs around with two daggers and does the whole stabbity-stabbity thing (as opposed to Order’s rogue, a hybrid between a Pilgrim and a Musketeer equipped with a rapier and a pistol to do the shooty-stabbity thing.)  I did a few quests, got a few abilities, and then thought “time for PvP!”  I signed up for a scenario.

Dear GOD this character is overpowered.  Now, as I mentioned before, I’m not the most skilled player around.  Given even odds (level, opportunity, and gear) I’d average pretty much a 50-50 chance of victory in any encounter.  Furthermore, I’m playing a brand new class at around level 7, not exactly a veteran at pressing all of the little buttons for abilities like “Kiss of the Deadly Vixen” or “Teasing Stab of the Vampirella Wannabe.”  But still…one-on-one, against a Ironbreaker (a Dwarf warrior class who wears steel armor and carries a BFA – Big F***ing Axe) one level higher I won.  With at least 30% health left.

Eurgh.  Yep, not overpowered.  Not a bit.

But then…I participated in another battleground (the Khaine one, a rather nifty scenario where one captures two flags which triggers a Nuclear Apocalypse which ravages the entire battleground except for a couple of safe areas) and I run down a tunnel and confront three Order characters of approximately the same level (give or take one level.)  There’s an Engineer – Dwarvish DPS with muskets and gadgets; a Rune Priest – a Dwarvish healer; and a Bright Wizard - a fire mage and my chosen Order class.  Given that I was outnumbered three-to-one, and the three had their own healer and two fairly nice damage classes, I thought I’d be lucky to kill one before I was shot/burned into a sexy dead corpse.

No.  Within a minute I’d killed them all and walked away with enough health to stagger to the enemy flag and tap it.   Something’s SERIOUSLY wrong there.  Scenario ends and I’m at the top of the list for killing blows and far up there in total damage (even though I’m 3 levels below the highest-level character in the scenario.)

Well, there you have it – proof that Destruction/Dark Elves/Witch Elves are seriously overpowered.  If a mid-talent player like me can leave a path of Destruction (pun intended) like that with a Witchy Elfy then there’s something Rotten in the State of Reikland. Mind you, I’m going to still visit the Dark Side once and a while so I can enjoy the unaccustomed sensation of undeserved victory until Mythic eventually Gets Its Bleep Together and strikes down the Witch Elf with a Nerf Tsunami.

Meanwhile, remember to stock up on peanut butter and olive oil.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Idiotic Game Company Decisions.

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.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to MMORPG Idiots.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to MMORPG Idiots.

Just like the Universal Constant or Pi, it is a given that a vast percentage of the people you will encounter in your travels through the MMORPG worlds are idiots.  But, like craft beers or fine wines, there are different flavors, bouquets if you will, of idiots, which must be sampled before you send them back to the virtual cellar with a strongly-worded note of protest.

It’s also true that even the most competent of players have flashes of idiocy, and I must admit I have my own crippling weakness – my “duh” moments, if you will – and that involves maps and directions.  “Enemy incoming!” I cry in Vent, eager to alert my comrades of the incoming danger.  “Where are they?” they ask, and I freeze.  East? North? South? Southwest? Two degrees off the port bow?  I have no clue.  “Uh,” I stutter, “Over…there?  By the big statue that looks like a knight holding a moldy sausage?”  By this time, of course, the enemy coming in from the EAST has already overrun us and my attempt to be alert and proactive has been completely and utterly wasted.

I am similarly impaired when it comes to giving directions.  I am a visual navigator – I know you go about sixty steps “thataway” until you reach the aforementioned Statue of the Moldy Sausage and then you go left and walk up the hill.  A person without my Directional Dysphasia would say “go west to the statue and then turn south.”  This is especially irritating because I am steeped in maps and geography through my academic training; I can point out the location of the Battle of the Bulge on a map without a moment’s thought, trace the line of Hadrian’s Wall in Britain in my sleep, but if you plopped me down on the heaths of northern England with a map and compass I’d wander around uselessly trying to find civilization until a kindly shepherd would direct me to a gas (or petrol, I suppose) station.

So, there is my personal confession of idiocy.  That does not mean, however, that I cannot diagnose idiocy in others, which I hereby do with great glee.

1 ) The Max Level Noob Idiot.  Now all of us were newbies at some point, sitting down before our keyboards and mice with trembling hands while “Mad Dark World of WarCheese” loaded.  We blundered around aggroing mobs, stealing kills, asking inane questions in world chat, and generally being clueless until we learned through harsh experience which button was “Hit Weeble With Sword” button and which one was “Flash Little Old Lady.”  But have you not encountered the level 60 noob?  The one who is max level but still a complete idiot?  Somehow, like the apocryphal monkeys with typewriters composing Shakespeare, this person managed to hit level cap through some accident of fate – perhaps he just kept killing monsters outside of towns with some dogged stubbornness until it dawned on him that the little red xp numbers stopped hovering over his head.  Now he’s asking for groups and trying to get into dungeons.  He has no idea how to do anything.  “Taunt,” you tell the Perpetual Noob tank, and he replies “What?  What’s that?”  “Heal,” you scream at the Noobish Healer, and he responds by casting his level one Fix Owie spell because “he doesn’t have the big ones on his task bar ‘cause they take up too much space.”  Run, and run fast, away from these sorts, because inevitably they will win the Purple Hammer of Nutcracking in the loot roll-off and become the most incredibly geared-out clueless noob in the game.

2 ) The Guy/Girl Playing a Friend’s Character Idiot.  A flavor of above, this sort of idiot is wandering around with a geared-out max level character on loan from a friend or relative.  “Aha!” you think when forming your PvP/dungeon group, “I know BozoBrain the Mage!  He’s good, we’ll invite him.”  At first you’re puzzled.  You try to chat with BozoBrain about the last dungeon run you had with him and are confused by the silence.  Then you hit combat and realize BozoBrain is casting his AOE “Nuclear Toejam” spell on monsters the tank hasn’t even pulled yet.  The group wipes and you frown.  “Hmm,” you think, “BozoBrain is usually really in top form.  I wonder what’s wrong.”  Your concern turns to annoyance as BozoBrain wipes the group four more times – again, without saying a word – and then you finally kick him from the group with a harsh curse.  Of course, the next day you meet up with BozoBrain and give him crap about his rotten performance and he says “Oh, I let my brother play my character yesterday.  Sorry.”  You fume for a minute but then have a moment of pure evil joy when he squawks to you, “Hey! That jerk sold my purple Boots of Asskicking!  And all of my Potions of Deadly Halitosis!”  You smile gently to yourself.

3 ) The Drill Sergeant Idiot.  This person is a leader of men, a paragon of warriors, fearless, brave, determined, and completely stupid.  He’s the one in area chat during a keep attack shouting out inconsequential and contradictory orders.  “Get on the ram!  No, kill the guards!  No, half of you go to Other Location and scout for the enemy!”  A stream of clear and completely useless directives stream out of this individual, who by right of possessing opposable thumbs and a tenuous grasp of the English language is therefore (in his or her own mind) uniquely qualified to command others.  At first you’re pleased that someone seems to be taking charge of the herd of cats which is your usual collection of players and at least giving some sort of cohesion to the horde.  You’ll get increasingly uneasy, however, as it dawns on you that Mr. Commander Sir is clueless.  His orders will increasingly seem to be rather odd – why attack the guards who keep re-spawning over and over and not break down the door?  Why drop the attack and go over to the other side of the map to grab some other objective?  Why is he ordering the healers up the stairs to attack the Big Nasty with their Stunning Sneeze spell and holding the tanks back?  At that point you’ll realize that the Other Group – the one which isn’t talking but calmly chopping down objectives one after the other – is the one to follow and that Mr. Commander Sir is a complete idiot.  A special flavor of this idiot will squawk as everyone abandons their group that you should “listen to me, I’ve read Sun Tzu.”  Those are especially odious and should be put on your /ignore list.  Everyone knows Clausewitz is a better read anyway.

4 ) The Friendly Cheerful Accident-Prone Idiot.   The most common statement you’ll hear from this sort is “Aw, I’m sorry, guys.”  It’s hard to hate this sort.  They’re always friendly, always cheerful, a genuinely nice person, but under it as competent as a big St. Bernard.  They’re the ones who body-pull the Capo Di Tutti Capi by trying to jump onto the top of a statue next to the monster so they can “take a cool screenshot.”  They’re the ones who accidentally loot the purple Sword of Castration on their mages because they pressed the “Need” instead of the “Not Need” button.  You scream at the screen at every boneheaded move these sorts make but if you let loose even the vaguest murmur of criticism they burst into tears.  It’s like clubbing a baby bunny; they’re so cute and fuzzy, a cheerful little forest creature with Bambi eyes looking dewily up at you, that you relent and find yourself facing down GothLady Vampiria the Angsty with Dingleberry the Cleric as your only healer and swallowing down that pit-of-the-stomach feeling that you’re doomed.

5 ) The “X” Specialized “Z” Idiot.  This flavor of idiot has chosen a spec for his or her character which defies understanding.  Now I’m in favor of unusual specializations, going against the common wisdom, as it were, to find your own best play-style.  But there are choices which are completely without sense.  This person is the warrior who has, for some reason, decided to skill up Toss Knife and insists he’s a ranged class.  This person is the healer who insists that his Buff Brawny and Induce Splinters spell makes her the perfect melee class.  This is the person who has a rogue but doesn’t put a point into stealth, the archer who specs melee, and the mage who decides to spread his points evenly through all spell lines to be “balanced.”

6 ) The Stupid Character Name Idiot.  Now, character names are a touchy subject.  We often carry the same name through many games so that we are easily identified by friend and foe.  Some of those names are silly, some cool, and we are often forced to make variations:  “PuffBall” might be taken, so you take “PufBal,” or “Poofbull,” or any variation thereof which approaches your ideal.  But idiocy rears its ugly head in character names to an extreme degree; the first flavor of this is a character name from some popular culture/book domain.  Legolas, Legolaz, Legolas2, Legolas3, LLeggolass...if it weren’t so irritating it would invoke pity, pathos akin to watching a legless puppy flop its way towards a bowl of food.  Then, of course, there’s the Unnecessarily Long Not Easily Typed Stupid Name syndrome.  A name like “SirPoopsieOfFluffington” does not fit this archetype – although it is completely silly and stupid – because it’s easy, at least, to type.  No, in this case I vent my ire on Firzglobrimonfirzick, because inevitably this type of idiot not only has an incredibly nonsensical name but also gets belligerent if you ask them to /send you a tell so you can spell the damn abomination of letters they chose.  Finally you have the Nasty/Sexual Name Idiot – including gems like IBloUrDad or MsSexiBoobiez.  Now everyone’s allowed to be immature or stupid once and a while, but what really enrages me about this particular flavor of idiot is that when their names eventually get banned or changed, they phase into Righteous Indignation Idiot mode – “Y u appeal my namez?  U have no sinse of humr.”  Look, IDIOT, if you’re going to create a character with a dickheaded name like that, EMBRACE the ban.  LIVE the ban.  Hold the ban close like a long-lost lover.  God alone knows that it’s the closest you’ll ever get to a reasonable facsimile of a member of the opposite sex.

7 ) The last idiot I’ll mention (but not by any means the last sort of MMORPG idiot, because their numbers are legion) is the Level 50 Board Warrior Idiot.  Now I’m willing to admit I’ve leveled a little vitriol on game boards from time to time – especially on class-specific boards against “visitors” which represent other classes and spout off on topics of which they have little knowledge – but in this case I’m talking about someone who spends far more time on the forums than actually in the game itself.  It’s irrelevant if this idiot has ever leveled any character up to cap, or experienced any advanced content; no, to this brave soldier of the keyboard, what’s important is winning arguments on the game forums.  In his left hand he wields the Nerf Summoner, which he believes immediately conjures a developer to heed his most eminent wishes; in his left he wields the Wand of Incoherent Illiterate Indignation, with which he so completely mangles the language that one cannot quite tell what the Hell he’s talking about.  With blazing speed he argues with everyone about everything, claiming his superiority over all with the contempt born of possessing the most rudimentary intelligence.  Screeching his ignorance all over the boards, peppering his manifestos with threats of quitting the game and how much his “influence” on others will spur a drastic drop in subscriptions, this idiot is as tiresome as he is impotent.  Furthermore, like rotting meat attracts maggots, this idiot will form a entourage of fellow idiots who echo his words like the mindless chorus of flautists who surround Azathoth (look it up.)  It’s my contention that like a remora this sort of idiot never actually quits but hangs on to the bitter end, spewing vileness on his chosen game in a masochistic fugue.

But, of course, the types of idiots you’ll encounter online approach infinity.  The best you can do is hunker down with people who have proven themselves to be competent and try to dodge out of the way of the idiots; and, of course, cut your friends some slack for brief idiot moments as they put up with your own whoopsies.  Now, could someone please tell me where the damn Healer is in this town?  And, for Corn’s Sake, if you say “North” again once more I’ll have to hurt you.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to The Care and Feeding of a Tank.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to The Care and Feeding of a Tank.

I’ve never played a tank, let me absolutely clear about that.  I’ve played melee DPS, but tanking…the philosophy is so incongruent with my addled personality that I’d probably be worse at tanking than healing.

I mean, seriously – a tank runs up, annoys something, and then stands there while that something tries hard to pummel the tank into mush.  All the time, of course, the tank has to keep grips on the something’s attention by “taunting” it – which, somehow, defies rationality, since the tank usually is just poking the something with a stick while some half-insane wizard (me) rains asteroids down on the something’s head.  Oh, of course, the tank is absorbing enough damage to melt through Manhattan Island lengthwise and kept alive by the overworked healer.

I cannot comprehend playing a character like that.  So, without further ado, here are my tips and comments about the proper TREATMENT of those brave chaps in armor:

1 ) Realize that playing a tank is probably boring.  Oh, it has its moments, like when Overwizard Weezle has blasted the tank down to a few bloody fragments held together with leathery scraps of armor before the healer miraculously (again) brings the tank back from the edge of the “Release Now?” screen, but that isn’t as much “fun” as it is “terror.”  No, step into the plate armor shoes of our average tank and realize that any soloing he does consists of walking up to a Nameless Hideous Sponge-Breather and hitting it with his sword over and over and over and over and over again until it gives up and lies down.  Wow.  That’s got to be thrilling.  Cut your tanks a break if they get grumbly about soloing, ok?

2 ) Never complain about the tanks getting Nifty Stuff in dungeons.  That’s just tacky, right?  After all, if they die, you’re next, you over-damaging psycho in a dress, and while they can stand there and be pounded into the concrete like a tent peg and still keep on swinging you’ll fall over dead in a brisk wind.  Let them gear up!  They need some cheese at the end of the maze or you might as well go back to fireballing noobs in their start-up town.

3 ) Face it – if you’re not a healer or a tank you’re completely disposable.  Need DPS?  Oh, there’s LOTS of DPS classes out there.  You might be the Precious Star Child of your mother’s adoration, but if you’re a mage, rogue, hunter/archer, or melee hacker, you’re expendable.  Since you can solo, there’s LOTS of your type around and you can be swapped out of a group with as much attention as changing a flashlight’s battery.  Thank your goddamn tanks for letting you into a group where you might get a chance to get stuff and xp.

4 ) NEVER blame the tank for a group wipe.  You’re a DPS class, it’s YOUR fault.  If you yank aggro away, it’s your problem, not the tank’s.  Fall over dead and just lie there like a good mage, all right?  The healer will put you in the queue.

5 ) As a follow-up to the above; stop running around like someone with tummy problems from a Pepto-Bismol commercial if you get aggro.  Stand there and take your hits so the tank doesn’t have to chase the monster who’s chasing you, you nitwit.  If you die, see above – you’re destined to die, you’re DPS.  If you stand still the tank might actually be able to use his Wheeze of Inflammation and get the damage back on his own thickly-padded skull.

6 ) Realize that PvP for a tank can be an excruciating experience.  After all, if they’re a proper tank, they’re specced for defense, which means that PvP consists of them being slowly beat into mush by other players and not NPC monsters.  They don’t get kills, they don’t get to lead glorious charges to victory – they step up, get stunned, stuck in magical mud, possessed by the enemy’s Make Tank River-Dance spell, or just immolated by some wizard on the other side.  Sure, PvP is fun for YOU – you get to kill stuff.  But them?  Not so much.

7 ) Leave your damage-specced tank classes alone.  Don’t fulminate about how unfair it is that YOU don’t get a tank to protect your pert little butt.  After all, most damage-specced tanks don’t dish out the DPS you can, and they’re still subject to the above stunning and so forth.  Sure, they don’t do all that well in dungeon crawls, but they make spectacular off-tanks and assists. 

Respect your tanks, people.  Tanks and healers play the classes you won’t because – and this is quite true – those two jobs are the most thankless in the game.  If you can’t be nice to your loveable rusty comrades-in-arms, go sign up for the Hello Kitty Online beta.  I hear it’s going to have some super PvP action.  Watch out for Badtz Maru, though – he’s a griefer.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Playing a Healer.

Yes, I’ve played a healing class – and to be absolutely honest, I’m very, very bad at it.  Why?  Well, part of it has to do with lack of focus – when there’s more than one thing happening at once I tend to get confused and wander off to sort the items in my character’s backpack by color and size rather than healing the tank; mages have the benefit of being up there killing stuff, usually mashing a two- to four-key combination of spells, and things are much simpler (bad guy roasts to death or kills me.)  The other part of it is that my impulse is to hurt things rather than help things so I end up specializing my healer in Incinerate Infidel rather than Mystical Band-Aid.

 

So take it as a given that I’m a completely rotten healer and therefore probably not qualified to speak too much to the issue – except by observation.  As such, here’s my guidelines:

 

1 ) Be an excellent multi-tasker.  You have to pop around from person to person slapping heals on tanks, buffs, curing poison or disease, rezzing the mage, back to healing the tank, shielding the mana-sink rogue, all while drinking potions, avoiding overhealing, and dodging aggro.  Remember, healing is a job, not fun.  If you can’t handle that, play the above-mentioned kill-or-die mage.

 

2 ) It’s all your fault.  Everything is your fault.  Mage blows up the enemy before the tank gets aggro and the Mage dies?  Your fault for not healing fast enough.  Rogue dies to sixteen monsters because he decided at level 10 to stealth past level 40 elites?  Your fault again.  Mage stands on the Magic Cyanide Bomb even though everyone was screaming at him to move just two feet to the left and stop getting injured?  You lousy healer, why didn’t you devote your entire life to keeping that poor soul alive?  Party wipes because the tank body-pulls two elites?  Guess what – your fault.  Just accept it; you are the martyr to your party’s sins, you take them unto yourself and absolve the wicked of their deeds.  It’s a priesty thing.

 

3 ) You will NEVER see the fun content.  Oh, you’ll get to go to the Temple of Eternal Flatulence and fight Gaslord Beano, but you’ll NEVER remember a bit of it because you’ll be too busy making sure all of the little pictures of people have green bars instead of yellow or red bars under them and you’ll be shoved in a corner standing looking at the pixilated wall because LORD KNOWS you can’t have any graphics lag during the fight lest someone die.  Two weeks later someone will say “Hey, wasn’t that Gaslord Beano fight cool?  Did you see the massive Poot Minions and how they sprayed green goo all over us?”  Your response will be “What?  Did we fight him?  I don’t remember anything except that the wall was a light gray while the other dungeons have pinkish gray walls.”  Also, you’ll have your graphics turned down to the Lego People level because, again, if you lag PEOPLE DIE.

 

4 ) You can never solo.  This is because the game designers of almost every single MMORPG yet created have, in their wisdom, given healers a spec line which is tantalizingly damaging and yet no-one can ever spec that line.  Why?  Well, it’s simple.  If you spec damage you suck, your family will disown you, your manhood (or ladyhood, I suppose) will wither and drop off.  Every person you meet in game will spurn you because you are not playing a True Healer because you want actually to be able to kill a green-level monster once and a while.  So it’s like the developers are sadistically teasing you with a spec that you can never have; there it is, just one click away, but if you spec that way you’ll never get a group, and what’s more rumors will spread about Dingo the Damage-Specced Healer and you might as well delete your character and go play Hello Kitty Online because no-one will ever group with you, you selfish bastard.

 

5 ) Corollary to above – it’s not YOUR character, stupid.  Like the sunshine, the rain, and little cute bunnies, healers belong to everyone.  You can’t ever do anything YOU want to do with your character because damnit, Jim, you’re a doctor, not a person.  You can’t spec the way you want, can’t wear the equipment you favor, wield the weapon you like best, or even play at times you prefer because you HAVE to be optimized to heal people the way THEY want to be healed.

 

6 ) Again, from above, you can NEVER have an alt.  You’ll ALWAYS be playing your healer.  “But,” the whine rains down from /guild chat, “we NEEEEEEEED a healer for the Lord Batguano fight!”  Therefore,

 

7 ) You’ll never have fun.  You get to experience the life of an accountant, frantically balancing numbers on a screen, mashing keys and watching mana, staring at the wall in dungeons, following a group of ungrateful shitheads around and preventing them from dying.

 

8 ) Finally, you’ll experience the level of human kindness you would expect from your average ungrateful little First-Grader.  You sacrifice your fun time to keep a pack of unruly, aggro-grabbing, over-damaging, reckless whiners alive and what do you get?  Nothing.  You hear complaints up one end and down the other if the party wipes but never “Hey, we made it through that one ‘cause the healers are cool.”

 

9 ) PvP.  Why bother?  Take everything said above and make it a thousand times worse.  Your side loses?  The cry echoes through the land: “OUR HEALERS SUCK!”  This is despite the fact that you’ve spent an hour healing, rezzing, shielding, and buffing in between getting killed by enemy stealthers because none of the glory-hog DPS classes bother to stick behind and watch your butt and protect you.  You aren’t a person, after all, you’re some sort of sophisticated AI who’s supposed to rez and heal on command and otherwise shut up and have absolutely no opinions or feelings.  Your side wins?  Again, you hear nothing but the deafening silence of people Taking You For Granted and not bowing down before you for even bothering to come out for PvP.  Oh, and of course you get no real victory points (unless you play a game which blessedly awards points for healing in combat) or other benefits.

 

10) Therefore, if you want to have fun, you’ll inevitably roll up an alt on the opposite faction on another server (or the same one, if you can) and pick a rogue or mage to play because then you can spend your entire play-time running around in PvP battlegrounds killing the people you normally heal up over and over again in some sort of psychotic gleeful revenge-murder daze.  Go ahead, enjoy yourself without guilt.  It’ll be cathartic.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to playing A Hybrid Class.

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to playing A Hybrid Class.

You want to play a hybrid class?  What the hell is wrong with you?  You can’t make up your mind if you want mayo or squeezy-cheese on your hamburger so you mix them up into some hideous condiment mélange, an abomination against nature and the sign of the first Seal of the Apocalypse breaking?

Oh, all right.  You’ve looked through the class list and found the infamous hybrid classes; on paper, it seems neat – a priest/warrior?  Neat!  You get to dish out a bit of the ultra-violence and also rez your friends (you do have friends, don’t you?)  Oh!  How about the caster/whatever hybrid?  Nice – damage plus utility!  How can you beat that?

Easily.  The first rule to remember about hybrid classes is:

You can never be good at anything.

I’ll repeat that:

You can NEVER be good at anything.

“But!” you say, “why not?  I can heal, I can tank, I can julienne potatoes – what’s not to like?”  First of all, you’re the Swiss Army knife of classes.  You have lots of fiddly little tools, including a toothpick for God-knows-what reason, but they don’t quite do the job as well as a real tool.  Ever tried to open a can with the little can opener attachment on a Swiss Army knife?  You end up with bruised fingers and an unopened can of soup.  As with the knife, so with the hybrid class; you can tank but not as well as a “real” tank.  You can heal but the single-spec healer does it better.  You can cast but don’t have as much damage as a pure caster.

This means that you have two choices:  a) overspec in a single line of your skills, i.e. healing, and therefore be pretty good at one aspect of your hybridness and rotten at the others, at which point why didn’t you just bloody create a pure class of that type? or b) always be the last kid in gym class to be picked for a group (“oh…a Tankydruid?  Let me see if we have an open spot for your useless ass.  OK, we do.  Just don’t heal.  Or tank.  In fact, just sit at the back of the group and try not to aggro anything.”)

Once and a while the developers will take pity on the hybrids and give them Something Nifty.  Inevitably this means that for once the hybrid will actually be USEFUL and therefore, in the eyes of the rest of the player base, something to be loathed like broccoli coated with rusty nails.  Let’s take our theoretical Tankydruid and give him a taunt – let’s call it “Wild Expectoration” – which actually can divert aggro off of tender squishies.  So every Tankydruid specs in Wild Expectoration, and soon you’ve got a horde of spitting Tankydruids running around helping groups out by making sure the fragile healers and mages live through a combat.

“Well,” thinks the Tank player-base when confronted with this, “we can’t have THIS.  Aggro control is OUR role in a group.  It’s OURS.  Come, comrades, let us repair to the game forums and commence to whine like a schoolroom full of Kindergarteners denied naptime!”

Thus, next patch, Wild Expectoration is “adjusted” so that it only pulls aggro every even Tuesday under a full moon when the sign of Scorpio is in the ascendant.

So…if you can live with marginal usefulness and the constant sniping of “pure” classes who you play with you can still manage to have a marginally good time playing a hybrid class.  The most important rules to follow are:

1 ) You’re utility.  That means you’re the second-stringer, the backup, the spare tire in the trunk of the party under the luggage and the stale bag of French Fries that someone left in the car four summers ago.  That’s not to say you’re useless.  Rather, you can catch the aggro that the tank drops, add a few extra DPS to snuff out an add, or rez the healer after he does something colossally stupid like over-healing the rogue and drawing aggro.

2 ) Live your life like you’re an English butler.  A good butler anticipates his employer’s needs; you’ll be sitting in the back of the group keeping an eye on everything, ready to step in to whatever role you’re needed at the time.  “Excuse me Sir, shall I rez the thief?  Very good, Sir.  Ah, I see some ruffians have broken away from the tank.  Let me just tidy them up.  Very good, Sir.  Pardon, Master Wizard seems to have run out of mana, here’s a quick jolt of mana transfer, no, Sir, you’re quite welcome.  Shall I decant the brandy?  Very good, Sir.”

3 ) Spec for soloing.  You’ll be doing a lot of that.  It’s not that you’ll never group, just that you’ll never consistently group unless you have very good friends.  Once you get into the big leagues you can spec for group PvP or raid healing, but until you get there be prepared to be slaughtering Dyspeptic Weebles on your own.

4 ) Try not to compete with the “pure” classes for loot.  That tends to make them cranky.  On the good side, since no one sensible ever plays your class, class-specific items will be yours by default unless you’ve got some knob in the group who insists on looting that stuff “for his crafting alt to disenchant.”  If you meet up with one of that sort find out his address and burn his house down.

5 ) If you’re a damage caster hybrid, remember not to get too caught up in the DPS game.  You’ll lose.  You’re the ketchup on the DPS hot dog – flavorful, a bit spicy, and nice to have, but not the meat of the damage.  Use your damage to finish off weak bad guys or to bolster the main DPS but be ready to switch to your alternative focus – tanking or healing, for instance – if necessary.  Again, pay attention.

6 ) Oddly enough, you’ll end up being fairly good at PvP.  Why?  Well, because while the enemy is roasting all of the wimpy dress-wearing mages and healers, you’ll be sitting there in your Reinforced Leafy Squirrel-Snot armor and look like something else that PvPers usually ignore (tanks, for instance) and ready to give the enemy a Feral Sloth Fungal Wedgie faster than she can squeak “overpowered!”  Relish the fact that after levels upon levels of uselessness you get to vent your frustration out on a bunch of pure-class saps.

7 ) Have fun with your weirder abilities.  Can you transform into a Killer Turnip?  Go for it!  Can you charm monstrosities and let them loose on the hapless enemy?  Drag ‘em to the capital city of your faction!  Embrace the weirdness.  Enjoy the weirdness.  Sure, it’s the plastic toothpick of your class’ Swiss Army knife, but no-one else has it, so live it up.
 

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Playing A Mage

Sterny’s Completely Useless Guide to Playing A Mage

Throughout my extensive, if haphazard, career in MMORPGs I’ve developed a play-style – perhaps, may I dare to say it, even a philosophy of online life – which has helped me through the vagaries of playing a pure ranged DPS class.  These rules are generic enough to be relevant to any MMORPG – be you a Blaster in City of Heroes or a Bright Wizard in Warhammer.  Share and enjoy!

1 )   You will die.  Die die die.  You will spend more time waiting for resurrection or returning to your bind-spot than you will surviving a fight.  You will miss xp on boss kills.  You will miss out on rolling for loot because you accidentally released instead of waiting for a rez.  You will die two feet away from a clickable quest objective.  Get used to it.  If you do not have the patience to spend a lot of time running back to wherever or waiting for your overworked healer to get to you, play something durable like a rogue.

2 )   Never blame your healer(s) for the aforementioned deaths.  I swear, if I ever hear one more DPS caster blaming a healer for their deaths I will by the Seven Dead Gods hunt that person down and rip out their lungs with a plastic spork.  You are like a butterfly in a forest fire – one hit will kill you.  Your healers have only so much mana to keep you alive, you numbskull, and they also have to watch everyone else.  It’s not the healer’s fault you died, it’s yours for picking a class with no hit points or defense.  If you want consistent healing, play a healer so you can sit there in boss fights and make sure that at least your precious little behind survives long enough to be the last one killed because you’ve spent all of your mana keeping yourself alive and not the tanks or DPS.

3 )   You will be nerfed.  Everyone on the other side will claim you are overpowered because once – just once – your six-spell combo chain worked before lag, another player, or random interruption broke it and you did a thousand gazillion damage to a tank (a quick aside to my good friends who play tanks – stop whining about dying once and a while, you over-armored pansies.)  Oh, and your own side is worse, trust me – you’ll come out on top of whatever damage meter someone uses and they’ll bitch up one side and down the other that a class DESIGNED FOR DPS out-damaged their protection- or defense-specialized tank.  You’ll absolutely fall in love with a particular spec because you get to drop the Fire of the Gods down on the enemy’s head and they’ll chop your DPS in half because of the Legion of Whiners spam-flooded the CSRs’ mailboxes.  If you can’t face that prospect, play something which never gets nerfed, like the previously-mentioned defense-specialized tank.

4 )   Everyone will tell you the spell line you’ve chosen to specialize in “sucks.”  You’ll hear this from everyone, that is, except other DPS casters.  Rogues, priests, tanks, even passing NPCs will tell you how much of an idiot you are to have chosen to specialize in Neutron Nuclear Basket Weaving instead of Freezy-Soft AOE Goo Projection.  Ignore them.  Actually, from time to time, /ignore them.  Are they currently playing the class?  No, they aren't, are they.  Chances are they’ve either: a) played your class to level 10 and quit after finding out how bitter the taste of face-planting into the dust is every five minutes, or b) read a forum post once and therefore have a PhD in Telling Everyone Else How To Play.

5 )   On the topic of forum posts – read them only if you want your blood pressure to rise to aneurysm-provoking levels.  This applies generally to any class, by the way, because a brief acquaintance with the forums will inform you of two things: a) your class is overpowered and/or sucks because it’s wimpy (often simultaneously) and b) anyone who plays your class is an idiot and doing it wrong.  So, read the forums only to get clues for quests and to post screenshots of your most amusing death.

6 )   Remember this mantra: First Dead, Last Rezzed.  Face it, you’re not essential for most fights.  The tanks and healers are key for group survivability, but the only purpose you serve is to make the fight a bit shorter.  Just bring along some crochet, a paint-by-numbers page, or a good novel to read while you’re waiting for a rez.  You aren’t the One Blessed Child of Eternity, you’re a DPS caster.  The healer will get to you when he or she gets to you.

7 )   Control your aggro.  For pity’s sake, if you cast on the MegaUltraBoss before the tank has even wafted his axe gently in the boss’s direction you’re an idiot.  Wait for the tank to bop the bad guy a few times – you can watch the enemy’s hit points and wait for them to dip a bit before unloading. The good tanks will even announce “go to it, blow ‘em up” and THEN you can let loose with your Nuclear Basket Weaving Annihilation Dragon Star Burst attack (yes, I know it sounds Anime, but have you seen some of the things the designers call most caster attacks?)  Refer back to 1 and 2, above – if you mess up or the cards are stacked against you and you die, SHUT UP AND LIE THERE WITHOUT COMPLAINING.  You’re blasting away at the bad guys and turning them into ashen bloody husks of painfully-writhing flesh, in case you hadn’t noticed,  so it just might happen that once and a while they might get annoyed at you and decide to stomp you flat.

8 )   You may have heard of the term “glass cannon” – i.e. you deal a lot of damage but are fragile.  Forget the “cannon” part – you’re glass.  Do not be deluded by the massive world-shattering damage you do to inanimate objects and computer-controlled idiot monsters.  The first PvP opponent you play will be a) more often than not – but not always – smarter than the computer; b) have resists which reduce your 2000-point Ball of Flaming Phlegm attack to 50 points; and c) for some reason decide that what he’d really like with his fava beans and light Chianti is a side of Sliced Mage Tartar and ignore everyone else to chop you up.  Just go into PvP combat with the conviction that you’ll be dead within seconds and just blast away like there’s no tomorrow.  Remember Hudson from Aliens – the “Game Over” guy?  His death scene consists of him standing his ground against hopeless odds, blasting away with his auto-rifle.  That’s you, seconds away from death, but snarling out a last defiant quip before planning your run back from the rez point.

So, to sum up – play a DPS caster if you don’t mind dying and like to get a few blasts in before you die.  Remember to thank your healers for even bothering to waste a few heals on you, you mana sink, and remember; you may not be able to heal, or survive damage, but you can always have the best-dressed corpse on the battlefield.

Video Games! Video Games! VIDEO GAMES!

I've been playing with pixels since I was around 8 years old, beginning with what has to be the first commercial home video game system - the Odyssey -through Ataris, Apples, Macs, and PC games...my youth was filled with Ultima and Wizardry and Crush, Crumble, and Chomp...as well as the coin-munching machines which filled arcades in the heydays of the 1980s (Wizard...is about to die.)  My wife also has similar credentials, playing Rogue on her Dad's PC and playing many games alongside me throughout our marriage and evolution into MMORPG junkies.

Therefore I can speak with some perspective about the latest missive from our electronic entertainment overlords, i.e. Grand Theft Auto IV.  I played one of the earlier iterations - the top-down version, before the days of 3-D first person - and, yes, the no-holds-barred freedom to be a Bad Guy has a certain playground bully appeal.  Steal a car! Run over the owner! Ram police cars!  Be a bad guy!

The series, however, morphed into something grittier, more "edgy," taking cues from gangster movies and immersing itself in the Hollywood version of the "gangster experience," which includes, apparently, a lot of prostitutes, random murder, and fuzzy-lens off-screen sex. 

A lot of commentators have objected to any discussion of the game by claiming just that - it's just a game.  Well, it is...but it's the 800-pound gorilla of games.  It's the game that attracts mainstream attention, the one which shapes the publics' view of the industry, and what do they see?  Violence, murder, sex, and hookers. 

But back to the objection...it's just a game, right?  True.  I wouldn't be so annoyed, however, if there were more options.  Almost all of the major video game offerings have only one type of protagonist - male, white, and murderous.  Why not whip up a couple of character models?  Why not have the same story line option for a black man, or a white woman, or whatever?  How would that destroy the "immersion" to allow the player to "be" him or herself?

Take another couple of examples, Portal and Team Fortress 2.  Both are popular and critically acclaimed.  Portal has a female protagonist - which doesn't seem to bother any of the reviewers.  True, it's not a shoot-em-up, but do all games have to be shooters?  Team Fortress 2 is an unabashed multiplayer shoot-em-up, with sly humor and excellent graphic design - but why not give the player an option of a female character model?  How much more would that cost in development or voice acting time?  I know my wife doesn't mind playing almost any type of video game, but it's harder for her to be interested in one which doesn't allow her to connect with the character.

MMORPGs are on the cutting edge of this...almost all offer customizable character models ("toons" in the parlance) so that the player can change the skin color, sex, height, and so forth of their avatar or persona.  MMORPGs are big sandboxes, with lots of options, so I think it wouldn't be that much more difficult to add options to "traditional" video games.

I'm not calling for censorship or restriction, but it seems that the majority of the games being offered out there have one perspective, one type of protagonist, and one type of goal, accomplished with big guns and lots of bloodshed.  A lot of gamers argue that that's what the market wants, but by not offering options the market is by definition restricted...and there are breakouts, like Portal or the Wii games, which prove that almost all gamers want different choices. 

So here it is, gamers and designers - why not dip your toe in the big pool and just start by offering some avatar customization or plots which can apply to all sexes or races?  Why not give the players a few more options, a few more choices, before plopping them in your world?  It certainly couldn't hurt...

They mean it.

It's a simple statement, a golden truth, but often ignored.  What do I mean?  It's simple.  When Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the Jews were a bacteria which needed to be eliminated, he meant it.* When Stalin spoke about the destruction of the Kulaks as a class he meant it. So what does that have to do with anything?

It, again, is simple.

When representatives of the Right in this country speak of censoring books, banning music or games, rolling back rights for minority groups, they are speaking from the heart.  When a right-wing talk show host makes an offhand comment which is insulting and denigrating he's speaking his perceived truth, from his unedited thoughts, from the depths of his subconscious.  The spin factories, however, gear up to massage the public snafus, to soothe over the ruffled feathers, to speak of figures of speech or exaggeration or misunderstanding.

It's all whitewash and lies.  If a particular political candidate wants to ban abortion, pay no attention to fudges about extreme medical procedures, parental notification, the rights of the father, or what have you.  That person wants to ban abortion and is proceeding down the gradualist approach.  If another representative speaks of homosexuals being more dangerous than terrorists pay attention, that person means it.

Unfortunately we humans have an infinite capacity to rationalize, both our own actions and those of others.  If you like and support someone you'll pick up the whitewash brush and help, make excuses, point out inconsistencies, and ignore the little poke of conscience in the back of your mind that perhaps your idol has feet of clay.  If, on the other hand, you bring those utterances to light you're vindictive, vicious, and unforgiving.

People will continue to blurt out their truths and then backpedal and lie, prevaricate and alter, changing their history to one which does not challenge the average person to realize the speaker's hidden depths.  Don't let them get away with it.  Hypocrisy is the only poison which can kill a free society.

* Look! I Godwined my own thread.

This is the way to get more women involved in MMORPGs and Comics!

Referenced here:

Eve Online Advertisement

Brilliant!  That'll expand the customer base.  Good job.