Back when I was more involved in World of Warcraft I would occasionally give in to a certain degree of self-loathing, and visit their community forums. I’m just going to make an unqualified statement here, which in general is a bad and lazy thing to do, but I’m confident in the sturdiness of this limb I’m marching out on here: The worst thing about every massively multiplayer game is the community.
There is something even worse than this however, and let me now explain how this works - how something can be worse than the worst thing. Simple! What I’m referring to are people who are leaving or have left the game. They’re no longer a part of the game, so my reference now makes perfect sense, and isn’t just a horrid abuse of language.
There was and is a horrible habit of people to quit the game and want to tell people about it. Fond farewells these are not. They have zero investment in the game now, zero interest in the community. Typically their only goal now is to lash out at the people in and around the game. Perhaps they’re trying to quell their own dissatisfaction with themselves for having spent a fair amount of money on their subscription, even if they were indeed enjoying the game at the time. What they desperately need to explain now is why anybody still enjoying the game is wrong.
This is my post telling everyone I’m quitting World of Warcraft.
Again.
I’ll start at the beginning, why not? I wasn’t paying much attention to WoW leading up to its release. MMOs in general were not something I was interested in, almost entirely because of the monthly subscription fee. I remember expressing some disappointment that I was probably never going to play Star Wars Galaxies due to this. This ended up being true, though I believe now that my disappointment was misplaced. There were two things that turned me around on this. The first is a perfectly rational reason. The second is not.
Some time close to WoW’s late 2004 release, Guild Wars held a beta event. While technically GW is not an MMORPG, mechanically the game plays a lot like one, and this was my first exposure to the style. Turned out I liked it a lot. Running around in a somewhat open world hitting things had its appeal, and this was perhaps also the first time I’d experienced a sympathetic online gaming experience. That is to say, I was not constantly punished for not having the sort of fine motor skills and reflexes required in games like QWTF or CounterStrike. It was a space where I could play cooperatively or by myself, and just have a lot of fun doing so.
Guild Wars got me interested in the genre, but it was a ridiculous little detail that led to me heading way too far out of my way to pick up a copy of WoW a week after release. At some point I discovered players could send mail between each other. I can’t clearly explain what it is I like about these little features in games, but I dig them. Loved it in Tribes 2 as well, setting up a clan and sending out messages from the built-in browser and messenger. And now in addition to running around punching orcs, I could send messages to players within the game. I was sold.
My first day in game, I rolled a Night Elf Warrior named Mortigi, on the Gilneas-US realm. Warrior because I liked to hit things. Night Elf because they were tall. Gilneas because that’s where it told me to go. I’d played a Warrior/Monk in Guild Wars, and later concluded that I’d have been better off rolling a Paladin, but that’s where I was. I got in a few good hours and got my character to about level 8 before discovering that hey, Tuesday nights are maintenance nights you Australian fool.
The first few weeks/months were indeed quite a mess, though every major outage I can remember was compensated with free game time. It was frustrating when the game was unavailable, and perhaps more so when several hours of play were erased by a server rollback. However when the game was up, it was incredibly fun.
That first run I made it to about 51, it was February 2005, and I was running through the barren sands of Tanaris when my Gmail notification bubble popped up. Why I remember that particular moment is a story for another time (perhaps 5 minutes after the heat death of the universe) but it marked a period of losing interest in the game. This would happen often, I’d get into the game, play heavily for some time, and then lose interest. Sometimes it was for good reason, such as when in late February 2005 I was starting a new course at Uni, but just as often it was because I was just burnt out on the game.
It’s odd now to look back at my time in the game and think about how little of it was spent with any real understanding of what on Earth I was doing. I’ll try to recall now my major characters:
- Night Elf Warrior
- Human Warrior
- Dwarf Hunter
- Orc Hunter
- Blood Elf Paladin
- Blood Elf Death Knight
Towards the end there were a few more characters as I tried to fill out my roster. Nearly all the characters I’d stuck with were consolidated on the one realm and faction (Saurfang-US, Horde). I’d race-change, faction-change, realm-change. It wasn’t until I played the Dwarf Hunter that I really started to pay some attention to how to actually play the game though. I’d soloed my way through everything, very rarely even getting into dungeon groups. None of my local friends played the game, and only a few of my online friends gave it a go, with even fewer sticking with it. (A hello here to Jason and Erica from Canada, to Mycah from SLC, and to Frankie and Gareth from the UK whom I believe I spoke to for the first time in WoW)
It wasn’t until the second expansion and the introduction of Death Knights that I found a class I genuinely enjoyed. It was at this point that I discovered that while I’d had fun with the game before then, I hadn’t really liked playing any of the characters. Even the Hunter I had achieved some success with was loaded up with shot rotation macros that took me away from the more boring aspects of playing the class. Sure I knew a few more things about the game such as trap chaining and later the incredibly fun use of the Gorilladin, but that was really it. Once I got my hands on a Death Knight, I actually started enjoying hitting the buttons as well.
The second expansion was when I finally got into some raiding as well, something that would not have happened had Blizzard not introduced 10-player raids. People raged against it, but I loved it. There wasn’t an overwhelming cacophony of voices in the group, and the intimacy suited me well. I found myself in a decent guild. Not the greatest progression-wise, but filled with people who didn’t drive me nuts with casually racist, sexist, immature banter whenever I logged in. An island in a shitstorm. It’s ridiculous now to think of the hours we put in playing Icecrown Citadel, but when the game is fun and I’m surrounded by people I get along with, what else would I rather be doing?
Seriously, if I can spend drink breaks piping Stephen Fry’s reading of Harry Potter down the voice chat line and people get a kick out of it, I think I’m in a pretty good place.
To make a brief and mildly unpleasant story even briefer, this didn’t last. The new expansion came along, we raced to be ready for the new raid content, quickly hit a wall and the guild started to crumble. Despite my still thinking the people left in the guild were fine, I found myself very disinterested in loading up the game.
It was an odd situation to find myself in. The game was as fun as it had ever been. There were two new races I was eager to try out, classes had been refreshed and I was enjoying trying out classes I’d never considered before like Druids and Shaman. Leveling heirlooms and the dungeon finder tool made progressing while being an unsociable git easier than ever. I should have been enjoying myself, but I was not. I happily let work take over most of my time, and soon enough in about March 2011 my subscription lapsed.
Fast forward to November 2011, I’m attempting to participate in NaNoWriMo, and desperately looking for ways to procrastinate. I figure $15 is too much to throw away on an attempt at fun, and I buy another month in WoW. Surely it’s been enough time away. By now I know that the people I’d left behind in the guild had moved to a different realm. It was an expensive and unlikely possibility for me to follow them.
I logged in and went about setting up my interface addons again. Then I set up my glyph-selling character, Gringott. The scourge of the Saurfang-US Horde glyph market. I still had a ton of unsold glyphs that I’d stockpiled before my break, so I put them back up. Then I jumped onto my Death Knight. Said hi to one of my old guildmates, who had just recently re-upped as well. There was a new quest zone available, so I took a look at it.
If I sound at all dispassionate here, it’s because I’m kind of boring myself. The game hadn’t changed, which wasn’t a terrible thing. It was still fun. Running around casting Howling Blast on jerks and generally slicing them up to feed my character’s crippling addiction to death and suffering was as fun as that kind of thing always is. I just didn’t feel like doing it with all these people around. I had zero investment in the community. I was there, but I wasn’t really a part of the game anymore.
Blizzard had announced their next expansion, Mists of Pandaria. The game was finally getting Pandaren, with a new class of martial arts masters, the Monks. There was even to be a Pokemon-style minigame. For all the predictable ire from people, this honestly sounded great to me. I’d love to play that, and for a while I considered taking Blizzard up on their annual pass offer. As fun and appealing as that all sounds though, I don’t think this disillusionment with the community is going to go away between now and then.
It’s tiring logging in to the game and seeing the constant racist, sexist, everything-under-the-sun-ist nonsense going back and forth in the global chat channels. There’s a point at which what people say stops being ironic, stops being sarcastic, and starts being simply the hate speech it looks like. I can ignore them, either personally or technically, but at some point it gets to me that this is a massively multiplayer game, and these people are a core feature of that. They’re part of what I’m paying for, part of the experience, and I can’t stand even the thought of them. It’s hopeless to even begin to imagine that the developers could do something about this without crippling the positive social features of the game, so it becomes a situation where the best solution is simply to leave and find something else to do.
So that’s where I am now. This is my fond farewell to the World of Warcraft. Not a permanent one, I’m sure. No doubt the kung-fu Pandas will pull me back in for a few months at some point. But never again am I going to spend three hours a night, three nights a week, chatting and screwing around and generally enjoying myself with a bunch of people I never encounter outside the game. Genuinely giving a crap about some of the most ridiculously cliched characters and plots in the history of mass entertainment. Laughing at the inept attempts at insults by the unsocialised. Actually enjoying multiplayer gaming for once.
It’s disappointing that it’s over but I figured that while some of the positive memories are still somewhat fresh in my mind I should take the chance to recall them. And since I’m preparing to have my heart broken all over again, perhaps it will help to lend me a little perspective the next time my chat window fills up with unimaginable anonymous dreck.
So as I mentioned at the tailing end of my last rant about rapidly changing platforms, Google has been working on their imaginatively titled “Google Music” platform for some time now, and they’ve now taken it out of beta and unleashed it upon the world. And by “the world”, I mean the USA. And by “taken it out of beta”, I mean they’ve taken the “beta” label off the web pages. Mostly.
The first issue here, that it is currently confined to the USA, just goes to show how little these new services are about solving technological problems, and are instead about solving licensing issues. Again it’s interesting the spectrum that is represented by these systems. Amazon launched first by completely ignoring the record companies, taking the position that it is merely acting as remote storage for a user’s files. Apple secured wide-ranging support from the record companies, even going so far as to secure a very customer-friendly feature in iTunes Match. Google’s offering lands somewhere in the middle, with limited (but surely growing) industry support, and an Amazon-style remote storage solution for users.
That’s the boring part of it all though. I hope Amazon sticks to their guns with their stance, because it makes a lot of sense to me. Media companies, music companies in particular, seem to have this weird sense of entitlement. Like when they took the position that Apple should be giving them money for each iPod, because it was “their product” that was making the iPod so popular. What an absurd stance.
(Aside: Not that I think a feature like iTunes Match could legally work in any customer-friendly way without industry support. But for simple remote storage of files users have already paid the record companies for? Fuck off with your double dipping, guys.)
What I actually wanted to note here was how average Google Music feels at the moment.
I installed the Music Manager app on my Mac, which adds a system preferences panel and an icon in the system tray. The purpose of this is to keep an eye on my iTunes library, uploading any songs not in my GM library. It looks decently configurable, though for some reason it refuses to transfer some of my non-protected M4A (AAC) files. There is a considerable setup period to start with where the music needs to be uploaded to Google’s servers. Not much Google can do about crappy upload speeds though.
The desktop web interface is not as good as iTunes, which is quite the anti-achievement. Simple options like playing a complete album are hidden behind mouse-over events or inside menus, depending upon where in the interface you are. As far as I can tell the player still requires Flash as well, or at least will complain if it isn’t present. I only point this out as an oddity because the mobile web app version plays music on my iOS devices where Flash is obviously not present. I’m curious what’s stopping them from using a similar solution where available.
The mobile web app is impressive in that it exists at all. Upon first launching it on my iPhone I was asked to allow Google Music to set up a larger database on my device. No problem there. And the interface is nice apart from some niggling issues. It adopts the Ice Cream Sandwich look, which seems to take a bit more from Windows Phone 7’s swiping panels than iOS’s hierarchical pages. It’s easy enough to navigate through the various lists of Albums, Artists, Playlists and the like.
The first problem is the inconsistent scrolling experience. Presumably in order to enable their swiping behaviour, the web app is overriding the default system scrolling. Therefore scrolling up or down varies depending on where the finger starts scrolling. Get it in the right spot, and the list will correctly scroll up and down. Get it in the wrong spot, and the entire page will scroll up and down. Not exactly ideal.
The web app also lacks some useful navigation. When I first used it there seemed to be no way to get back to the currently playing track without hunting it down in the lists again (this seems fixed now). It also seems like it relies too heavily on browser navigation buttons rather than providing its own, which is a problem if you’re doing what it seems like you should be doing, and adding Google Music as a web app on the iPhone’s homescreen. It becomes too easy to get stuck on a page with no way back.
Problems with poor and inconsistent layout aside, my last issue with the web app is that it doesn’t seem to update the library very often, if at all. I’ve read some reports of it taking about a week for the mobile web app to show new tracks. I didn’t wait that long, and had to delete the site’s database from my iPhone in order to update the library. Not particularly user friendly. I don’t know if this is an isolated issue or something Google have to work on to provide a better solution to.
It has problems. I’d rather be giving Apple US$25 and be using iTunes Match than putting up with these problems for free. It seems like a decent base to be building on though, and it goes a long way to making media management on Android devices not the issue it was before.
That’s it. I have no clever conclusion to recite.
I got an email from EB Games Australia:
Dave Raftery, you’re awesome!
What prompted this ebullient outpouring of admiration? I pre-ordered a game. Based on that fact alone, the company judges that I’m awesome. I could torture animals in my spare time, or harass small children. I could be the sort of person who defaces currency, or I could even be a German political leader from the 1930’s. But because I’ve put down a deposit on a video game, all my past sins are forgiven. $30 buys absolution for the murder of millions, according to EB Games.
So I could be overreacting. Actually, one might say, they’re just saying this to make me feel better. Some consultant somewhere took $30,000 to tell them to treat their customers like big-boobed, big-dicked superstars (not all at the same time, that might alienate folk). They don’t really mean to issue a blanket statement, “You’re awesome!”
Except that’s what they said. If they didn’t mean it, why say it?
In response to my rant about Virgin Mobile Australia (a wholly owned subsidiary of Optus) I received this mention on Twitter from Virgin Mobile USA:
@djr we appreciate your feedback. If you would like assistance from Virgin Mobile, just send us a tweet. ^PL
Judging from this account’s stream, I assume the “^PL” a the end indicates which customer service rep responded to this. The implication being that an actual human wrote this, and not just a bot programmed to respond to any mention of Virgin Mobile. My issue is, if one were to actually read what I wrote they’d notice that I was talking about VM Australia, a completely unrelated company.
A quick instance of confusion is no bother. Your job is to scan Twitter for mentions of Virgin Mobile and manage them. Except that this person, no doubt thanks to some $60,000 consultant, has to say that they “appreciate” my feedback. They “appreciate” it so much that they clearly didn’t read it. They don’t appreciate it at all of course. It’s just that that word has been chosen as the most adept at placating whoever they’re talking to.
They don’t mean it. They’re just saying it. I could say horrible things about their family, and they’d claim to appreciate it. Because that’s their job, and words are just words. They don’t really mean anything.
(Aside: Not that I blame ^PL, or the poor code jockey who had to script the automailer to tell me how awesome I am. I hold them as responsible as I hold people working in call centers.)
After years of bouncing from one free wireless access point to another, I finally picked up a smartphone with a data plan recently. Then I got rid of that crappy smartphone and got an iPhone. It’s nice having Internet access mostly everywhere. It’s less nice dealing with the mobile phone company.
I’ll set aside my problems with Virgin’s “image”, because they’re irrelevant here. What’s bothering me today is their billing scheme. And I’m not even talking about the massive industry-wide rort that is “value”, as in “$300 value for only $30 a month!” which if it were true would mean the company would go out of business in a second. No, let me describe the situation that has me cranky today:
I pay $19 a month on Virgin’s Your Cap pre-paid plan. Sorry, $19 per 28 days. This $19 nets me:
- 19 Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks, to be spent on their ludicrous call and text costs.
- 31 Bonus Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks, to also be spent on their ludicrous call and text costs.
- 1001MB of mobile data. Leftover data rolls over if I top up within 28 days, up to a maximum of 5005MB.
My first problem is that the system doesn’t do a very good job of telling me when I need to top up, such that this morning I lost all my leftover credit and had to start over because I was waiting for the last day of my current cycle to top up. Fair enough, my bad, I should have topped up earlier.
Except, as I have been told (will test it myself next time), if I topped up early then my next 28 day cycle would start from that day, instead of adding on to the end of my existing cycle.
So in order to not get a little bit ripped off, I need to jump online as late as possible and hit the “Recharge” button. If only there were some sort of auto-recharge function. Oh look, there is!
Except, the only options available are to recharge when my credit reaches a certain threshold, or on a specified day each month. I use maybe $20 of my Virgin Mobile Fun Bucks a month, tops, so the first option is no use to me. As for the second, my prepaid plan operates on 28 day cycles, not monthly. So if I set it to auto-recharge on the first of each month, I’m going to be without mobile access for a couple of days each month.
So their systems are actively customer-hostile. But I’m not going to leave, because they’re cheap enough, so whatever. This has all been meaningless.
But seriously, fuck you Virgin Mobile.
Betteridge’s Law states that if a headline ends with a question mark, you can usually answer ‘No’. You can then typically ignore the article.
In the spirit of that, here are a couple of other shortcuts:
If you begin a question with “Am I the only one who…” the answer is no. There are 7 billion people on the planet. I’m sure you’re nice and all, but nobody is particularly unique. Especially when you’re asking stupid things like “Am I the only one who doesn’t like Justin Bieber?” Internet superhero, you.
If you ask “Am I an old fart, or has there been nothing of value created since I was a young person” the answer is that you’re an old fart. Even if you’re not an old fart, you’re being an old fart. So the books and films and music being produced these days don’t interest you. They seem to interest a lot of other people. Get over it, enjoy the old stuff that is so good to you, and quit shitting on other peoples enjoyment.
Am I overreacting to what are basically rhetorical questions? Sure. But they’re stupid, self-serving rhetorical questions, and people shouldn’t use them. There are better ways to start equivalent discussion without painting yourself as some lone cultural hero.
There’s only one mobile platform that isn’t a real bore to talk about. Its name is Legion.
My apologies then for wasting a couple paragraphs of precious written language on a couple of contemporary operating systems for (among other things) smartphone devices: Apple’s iOS, and Google’s Android. If the universe truly is a finite phenomenon and one day all life and all matter is extinguished into a warm hum, I’m going to feel even more guilty for spending a little of my brief speck of time contributing to this vast universe on such a dull, pointless topic. I’m sorry to me, and since you’re reading this I’m especially sorry to you.
Apple’s iOS grew from iPhoneOS, which was basically a custom version of the OS X system that runs on desktop Macs. The original iPhone was a phone mashed together with an iPod, and the operating system was built accordingly. The relevant point for this discussion is that like the iPod, the iPhone was designed to be tethered to a PC for the purpose of shifting media on and off the device. This was one of the features that made the iPods so gosh-darned popular in the first place, so it was no surprise that Apple wanted to keep this feature in their new device. So despite the iPhone in essence being a regular old computer running a regular old OS, the system was designed to work differently.
The Open Handset Alliance’s Android, formerly Android Inc’s Android, but really Google’s Android, essentially came out of nowhere. Unlike iPhoneOS it was not the continuation of a previous product line, but rather a chance for some industry veterans to start again and build the system they wanted to build. So while it certainly had antecedents, it was not tied to any particular model and was free to come up with its own. As such, since its release on publicly available phones it has been a comparitively standalone system, not requiring a PC to tether to for backups, restores, and the like. Much of the personal information (contacts, calendars, etc) was maintained by syncing over the Internet to Google’s servers. Media syncing (songs, videos, etc.) was not handled at all, and was left up to second or third-party solutions.
Two different approaches, each with their positives and negatives. iPhones were much easier to maintain media collections on, with an integrated and automatically sorted media library, and built-in high quality playback software. But in order to maintain the phone, you needed to plug it into a PC. Android phones did not require plugging into a PC to run software updates, and personal profiles could be backed up and restored over the Internet quite easily. But maintaining a media collection was at best a chore when compared to the iPhone, with uneven software selection and often manual media management required.
One of the reasons that these sorts of discussions are as boring (even more so, I’m sorry) as I made out at the start is that partisans will often look at the state of the feature-set now as some sort of constant, and then backfill some grand philosophy about why we’re now in a state of perfection. The iPhone doesn’t need wireless updating, that would just kill battery life and anyway it works fine as it is. Android doesn’t need uniform media management, because freedom.
And then there’s the gloating on either side. Even more dull.
Platforms are not static however, and people who argue with the underlying assumption that they are do so at their peril. With the version 5 release of iOS, Apple has re-engineered their mobile platform to work independently of a host PC. The split that I described above is now altered, such that the iPhone now has superior media management capabilities, as well as catching up to Android as an independent platform.
This came up on Twitter as Apple released its first Over-The-Air update, iOS 5.0.1. iOS users were delighted at the ease of the process, Android partisans were quick to point out that the feature is old hat on their platform, as if fighting the old fight were somehow still relevant.
So what’s my point? I’m an iPhone user and have been and iOS user for longer still. I had an Android phone briefly and was not a fan, but I know several people who have no problem with it, and I’ve no reason to believe they’re not acting rationally. I’m not aiming to point out why iOS is superior to Android in general, but merely point out this one narrow set of features, how many of the arguments that spring from it are foolish, and hopefully hint at why the larger argument, ongoing in so many corners of the web, is such a waste of time.
Also, I want to use a lot of commas.
(Aside: As I said, the platforms are constantly shifting: Google seems to be making an attempt to address Android’s media management shortcomings with their Music service now in beta. Whether it succeeds or not, the attempt is a positive move. Once both platforms have succeeded in implementing these features, they can focus on innovating in new areas. Everybody wins.)