“Oh man, I’m going to be so cool now with my expensive gear and my flying mount, I’m gonna get all the bitches”

The person who plays the game normally:

“Why should I even bother doing the work and the grinding when I can go online and buy some monies”

Doesn’t seem harmless right? Well this is the case where this stuff is just beginning, let’s take a look at what happens after a while of this kind of buying.

The new player:

“Crap, I can’t buy anything because of how high the prices are, guess I have to buy stuff online or quit”

The Company:

“The economy has gone to shit, people are no longer playing because of how pointless currency is”

GAME SHUTS DOWN

The company selling online currency:

Oh well, let’s move on to X of Y MMORPG.

then repeat ad infinitive.

This has become evident in more MMORPGs, certainly it’s become common in World of Warcraft, it’s caused Runescape to shit itself a new leaf but completely destroying free trade, and all it is doing is hurting the companies and the players. If you don’t have the time to play an MMORPG, then don’t. Don’t go and play just so you can spend money and stagnate the game. Besides, how fun is it to not work to achieve what you’ve earned, maybe it’s just me but I never feel right getting something without working for it. It’s much, much more rewarding to have achieved something by your own means, not by outside means. Hell it’s like cheating in Grand Theft Auto, sure it’s a blast for maybe an hour or two, but after that you just feel bored because it just becomes you doing the same thing over and over again without any challenge. I understand there’s a whole industry out there for people working to produce the online currencies, but you’re only killing the game you want to play by buying from them. So unless you want to kill that game, why not just play with friends to achieve currencies yourself?

It all started with Halo: Combat Evolved, the game had introduced some new elements and had fixed up some older elements, and overall the game was extremely enjoyable. Halo had a unique storyline (at the time), a well orchestrated soundtrack, and an adventure that seemed to be pretty expansive and epic. The game was regarded as one of the best games released at that time, and most people who played it seemed to think so as well.

Fast-forward to the release of Halo 2, now we have a massive expansion in the Halo fanbase, so much expansion that we now have younger kids playing Halo: CE, and waiting for the new one to be released. Halo 2 hits Xbox on November 9, 2004, people go bat-shit crazy, and start making line-ups to get the games before anyone else does. This could be understandable because Halo has become apart of culture at this point. Halo 2 now bring dual-wielding, a similar storyline, and addicting online play with it. More people now join the fan base, anyone from a non-third world country has heard of Halo, and some are playing it.

September 25, 2007, Halo 3 hits the world. Massive line-ups due to the massive fan base, many of them, kids below the age of 18 which is funny because the game is rated M. So now we are introduced to a very accessible online system, where even a child of the age of 8 can use effectively, and it shows, because now you have these kids yelling in your ear talking about god knows what because half of the things they say are so high pitched only a dog can hear them, and because the other half of the time, they’re screaming about either how good they think they’re doing, or about how you just mopped the floor with their face.

Another part of this fanbase is the “manly” kids who either play the game way to seriously, or believe there is no other weapon except for the power weapons and the assualt rifle and those are the funniest people ever. What you commonly hear from those people is “WHAT THE FUCK MAN, I HAD A SWORD AND HE TOOK ME OUT WITH A BATTLE RIFLE?! FUCKING HACKER!!! <insert screams of displeasure here>”. There’s something to be said about having a skill level in the game, and you’d think skill would be shown through the rank system, but oh how you’d be wrong. Often times I find people at top ranks get there by getting ahead by 1-4 points, then hiding, so it becomes difficult to win the game because the pussy is hiding. The best part is, they refer to this as a tactical skill, but as soon as I do it, it’s called unfair and cheating. Bullshit.

Just a few days ago I was trying to get people to report my gamer tag so I can change it for free (I never picked the name in the first place, disadvantages of a used Xbox), and my polite question has refuted with waves of “Fuck off” and “Pay for it you prick”, and maybe I should pay for it, but instead of responding rudely they could of said “Just pay for it”. Maybe throughout the whole 10-12 matches I found four decent people who said sure, and who were fun to play with.

Without the fanbase, Halo 3 would be probably the online shooter of all time (if we don’t count the Valve games), instead the online community is a lot like a sea of piss, with each individual. If you play with a friend or two you know via real life, the experience of shit is dimmed down, but without it? Boy.. just.. boy. It isn’t that there aren’t cool people on Xbox Live, it’s just finding them takes a bit of effort.

Seriously, what the hell happened when people where nice to each other after a friendly game? Now days, when I lose match, I get called a cuntface douchenozzle faggot, not just by the other team, but my own team as well. Recently with the release of Left 4 Dead, this has become very apparent to me. I get insulted by both my team and the other team. Not just Left 4 Dead, other modern FPSes on the PC have players with similiar attitudes – except Quake III, never really saw bad sportsmanship on there. The rage, anger, and bigotry are so strong in that cyber air that it’s enough to give one a stroke after a good single breath. Of course this has been around for quite a while, specifically around Xbox Live.

Now I’m not exactly blaming the community as a whole or am I trying to insult any Xbox players – but the travesty that is the hate-filled ignorance which is Xbox live is hard to ignore. Simply playing around a few games on Xbox live, I will be insulted by every single profane word that is in the English dictionary, and maybe a few other languages as well. I can simple say, “Nice round man” and I get replied with “You sound like a butthurt cunt, you know I’m the best there is”. Is this any way for players to treat each other in, what I thought was, a friendly game?

After all that malarkey, a few days ago I decided I want to take it old school and play some Starcraft on battle dot net. Of course there isn’t much a player base, but I was able to join a few games here and there. Most of which were Top vs. Bottom so I had to be in a team. The one thing that I noticed is that, it’s the exact god damn thing. I get bashed by my teammate who got killed quickly and blames their team. The other team was, of course, talking smack throughout the game. And out of all those games, guess what’s the one thing I never saw in the chat? “gg” or “good game” That’s right. No one said “good game” after a match, the equivalent of shaking hands with the other team in sports, the “gg” I thought was a courteous thing to do after a game. I would be saying “gg” and all I get is “lol i pwn u fgt”.

Where did all the friendly players go? I don’t remember this many assholes in the 90s and even early 2000 when I use to play on battle dot net. Sometimes I wish I was back in the 90s, with my dial-up modem, my piece of paper with quake hubs, and where everyone was actually mature, even knowing that I was still a prepubescent kid. What is the cause of all this hostility in internet games? Is world getting angrier? Is our youth becoming corrupted? Or just because now that you’re grown up, you can talk like sailors? Is this an American thing or is it worldwide?  What is the exact cause?

Now I know there is people out there that still act friendly on the internet and I would love to shake your hand, but nowadays, the unfriendly players outweigh the friendly ones. I can understand the gloat that people do, but it’s no longer gloating if you’re trying to demean the other players. It’s becoming harder and harder to actually enjoy online multiplayer games if this keeps up, so I ask every single one of you – say “gg” after that good game you just had.

Sadly, that doesn’t mean I’m immediately good at the game. Very often I’ll know a whole lot about the competitive state, every detail, all possible moves, but I never get a lot of personal experience. I’m hesitant to play with others, simply because I’m scared that I’ll suck. Add to that the fact that I’m easily bored, and I end up knowing a lot of things about a lot of games, but still sucking at them.

One thing that competitive games always have trouble with is Game balance. I thought I’d write some blogs (or articles) on this for multiple reasons. First of all, it’s to help me put my thoughts on paper. I have a lot of opinions on the topic but I never write them down. Furthermore, it’s to help people get insight into the matter. Often people talk about game balancing while not knowing the fine details of it. And last of all, I hope that maybe some new developers (or people that mod existing games) read this, so that it can improve their games

I’ll mainly write about Real time strategy games, because it’s so easy to find examples, and because game balance is most important in them (though one could also argue that fighters profit more from a good game balance). However, most of the things I’ll write about apply to a wide variety of genres: Fighters, FPS, TBS, RPG, Puzzle games (think Tetris), racing, etc. I’ll assume that the reader knows the basics of the RTS genre, though I’ll explain some lingo.

Throughout these articles I’ll refer to a number of words, that not everybody knows. I’ll outline them here.

Metagame:

Metagame’s official definition is a bit different from the definition used in online games. When people talk about the metagame, it’s usually what people use. For example, a metagame could be melee-heavy, meaning that there are a lot of players that use melee units. Usually, the metagame changes constantly because people react to each other. If the metagame is melee-heavy, players will start using counters to melee units, and the metagame could shift to anti-melee instead. But with so much anti-melee, players will start using a lot of ranged units, and so the cycle goes on.

Macro:

Macro is usually referred to as a mixture of economy and territory control. It means the game on a large scale: For example, you might be losing small skirmishes, but you can still win in the macro game because you control much more territory than the opponent. Usually, if you are ahead in macro you will win the game because you have large advantages over the enemy: Better economy, better positions, more territory, etc. It is hard to find a corresponding definition in a genre like fighters, but positioning in those is still pretty important: If you’re in the corner, you’re bound to get hammered hard.

Micro:

Micro is literally ’small’. It’s the game on a small scale, with individual units. An example of micro is to not send your units into battle and let them fight, but to manually assign targets to all of your units. In FPS, you could call aiming a form of micro.

This is the end of the introduction, I hope people will look forward to the rest of the parts.

So here we have the root of the problem; somewhere along the line some wires got crossed and everybody decided MMO = grind (now with added social interaction!).

It’s time for “Cooking with Kintak”. Today I’ll be teaching you how to make your very own money farm. It’s quite easy, really! Take Diablo, stretch out the content as thinly as possible, host it on your own servers so you have an excuse to charge $15 a month, and watch as the money flows in (or wait to go bankrupt, as the case may be. See: Every WoW knockoff). To make the monthly fees really convincing, release a half-finished game with the promise of additional content maybe being added at some point. To make even more money, charge for any additional content that you plan to add, and call it an expansion pack!

“But Kintak, the name of this article is ‘An Untapped Potential’. What’s all that about?”

Why yes it is, isn’t it! And true to my words, there is an untapped potential: the “human potential”. You see, at this point in time, the majority of mass multiplayer games are stagnant universes that require their creators to breathe life into them every time their subscription base starts getting antsy. Every speck of content must be constructed by an omnipotent being (I hear they call them “developers” in the holy land). Every single byte is under the control of this god, but because of this, the game does not generate interest or content by its own merit.

So I come back to this human potential. Like Prometheus stole fire from the Greek gods, like Eve took a bite of the apple in the Garden of Eden, we too must demand freedom and power from the developers. The players must be able to police themselves. They must be able to create their own content, their own rules, their own cities, their own armies, their own wars. This has already been put into action in some games. In fact one of the earliest MMOs, Ultima Online, was like that back during its mythical days. Unfortunately, nowadays, thanks to EA’s control, it’s nothing but a husk of its former self.

However, the hope of freedom does not die with Ultima Online; rather it has found new homes. Though neither as free nor as intense as Ultima Online once was, EVE Online is very much player-driven. Almost every object in EVE except NPCs is player-controlled, including the economy (and every resource inside of it, from minerals to full spaceships) and the law (outside of high-security areas).

Even games that were once static may someday be given player control. For example, there is a planned feature in the works for City of Heroes which is due to be released with its next free expansion, Issue 14. This feature, dubbed the Mission Creator, will give players the ability to craft their very own missions (quests) that other players will be able to play and rate.

So you see, this dream of freedom is not dead. The thing you, as a player, can do is demand that it be realized.

A whiner’s post is easy to differentiate from other posts. First of all, it will say there is a very big problem in the game. Not just a tiny annoyance, but something that destroys the complete game as we know it, and if we leave it untouched, the poster will stop playing and so will everybody he knows. Of course, this is a hyperbole; there is not only a low chance that the poster will actually stop playing the game, but there is a low chance that his friends agree with his problems.

That brings us to the next point. A whiner’s post is incredibly biased. It is usually very clear from the post in question what class, race or weapons the whiner uses. Usually, they are underpowered, and all classes are too strong. To put it in simpler terms, “I play Scissors, Rock is overpowered, Paper is fine”. This means that most of  the whiners don’t agree with each other for the simple reason that they play in another way. While one whiner may be saying that the warrior class is terribly overpowered, and how it completely dominates another class, another whiner may be saying that his warrior always loses to said class, and that warriors need a big buff.

A last way to determine whether a post is simply whining, is to check the arguments that poster is using. Most of the time, it will be about his own experiences. This is of course not a crime by itself, but if you read between the lines, there is a high chance that the whiner is simply a bad player and, well yeah, if you’re a bad player, you lose. Another technique whiners like to use is to propose a hypothetical situation, in which everything is in favor of the enemy, and the player loses of course. These situations are created to show how overpowered or underpowered something is, so these are of course tainted by bias. Without this bias, you’ll probably come across a perfectly normal, balanced situation.

So why should you care? Well, these whiners love to open their mouth. Everywhere. On unofficial forums, but also on official ones. If the developers keep in touch with their community and actually read suggestions and complaints, there is a chance that they will take these whiners seriously and that is when you should start to worry.

If a developer listens to such a whiner, the game will start to become unbalanced. Maybe it was already unbalanced to begin with, but it will become more unbalanced. The problem is that most games only need minor tweaking to become balanced. But oh no, that is not enough for a whiner. A whiner wants a weapon to deal double the damage. A whiner wants to double the hit percentage of an attack. A whiner wants to make an armor set basically free.

Of course, these kinds of drastic changes are bad for a game. Sadly, there is nothing to do about this problem. The only thing you can do is to try and ignore the thread as big threads draw the attention of developers, who probably have little time to spend on reading complaints. What if it grows to become a big discussion? Let’s say I hope that you’re renowned enough in the game or on the forums that people will believe you when you say that the OP is just wrong.

A lot of people who own a Nintendo Wii know the problem. When you first get your Wii, you’re excited. You play the games, you think everything is awesome. You’ll never need another console. The controls are so good, the gameplay is so much fun, you’ll enjoy your Wii forever. Fast-forward to the present, and it’ll probably be collecting dust. Maybe you used it for a couple of hours to play a recent release, like Disaster: Day of Crisis, but then you went back to doing other things. Why is it so hard to keep enjoying your Wii?

The answer is that there are no games on the Wii that you can put a lot of time in. As an example, let us take a look at Metacritic.com’s top 20 list for Wii games. There are 8 games that are strictly single-player, and all of them are quite short. 6 of them are Wiiware (which is quite shaming for big developers, honestly), and the remaining games include Guitar hero, Brawl and Wario ware.

Wario ware? Yes, it’s a fun game if you’ve got some friends over. But will you ever play it for more than an hour? No, you won’t. The same goes for Guitar hero. The only game in the 20 best games that you can put a lot of time in is Brawl. And one game does not make a console.

So what does the Wii need? It needs three things:

Long single-player games

It needs those games that you can just play on your own for hours. Things like long RPGs that take over 80 hours to complete. Things like strategic games that you can just play over and over again. Most games on the Wii take less than 10 hours to complete, and have very little replay value. Games like Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy take a bit longer to complete, but they still aren’t fantastic: And you’re basically done once you’ve collected everything, which shouldn’t take too long either.

Multiplayer

One of the most confusing things is how there are hardly any good multi player games on the Wii. Sure, there’s Wii sports and Wario ware, but I’m talking about those games where you can sit down with your friend and play a co-op campaign, or spend a long time playing against each other. The only game I can even think of that has co-op campaign is Brawl, and the Subspace Emissary is not one of its best modes.

On-line multi player

The way to spend most of your time is, of course, on-line multi player. For some reason, there are only two games with decent on-line play: Again, Brawl, and Pokemon Battle Revolution. However, Brawl is hurt by lag issues, and the settings for random battles are far from optimal. Battle revolution is a lot of fun, but it’s not very addictive.

Luckily, there are some games coming out that will help remedy this. For example, Monster Hunter Tri will have extensive on-line (without friend-codes), and Animal Crossing: City Folk will give you a lot of fun while chopping down trees in your friend’s town.

I think that as long as these wishes are fulfilled, the Wii will stop collecting dust and will instead become a great console. While it’s currently lacking in the games department, it has great potential. Especially if you look at the amazing lineup the Wii has for the next year, it will definitely get better.