As one of the zillion sponsors he conned into helping him out on this project (he’s devious!), I owe you all a little post about how you mine for blogging. Here’s the caveat: I’m the last person who ought to be dishing out advice. I’m a bad example because I’ve done almost everything wrong and still succeeded — and I’d do it wrong all over again because I care more about writing than about blogging. But that doesn’t mean you should.

Your blog is your portfolio

I came to blogging almost by accident. I had been a paid proofreader previously, so I was far more interested in editing than writing, but I didn’t have even a personal blog before I was hired to blog professionally after applying on a whim because I was tired of seeing typos on my favorite MMO blog. This does not happen to people. Real people do not get lucky breaks. Real people have established portfolios of published and unpublished work that they shop around for years before they get anywhere. I realized, belatedly, that I needed one of those too! I needed a place where I could post essays that would show off my writing and my editing at the same time. I needed a blog of my own, the blog I ought to have had before I got hired, because that is exactly how most of my colleagues broke into the industry.

Even if you don’t want to become a “zomg pro blogger,” treat your blog like a showcase of your best work in case you change your mind later (or in case a future employer of any stripe decides to Google your name). I tend to think that if something’s got my name stamped on it, I want it to be good, even (and maybe especially) if it’s about something seemingly trivial like online gaming. If you take your hobby seriously, other people will too.

Don’t write just to write

The world already has places where people can post one liners and random daily thoughts. I didn’t want to be another Facebook and Twitter. I wanted long pieces, thoughtful essays, stuff that I spent a lot of time working on and tweaking until I was really proud of the result.

The problem is that most of the world doesn’t want long pieces or thoughtful essays. Facebook and Twitter are popular precisely because they require very little investment of time to write or read. And small, daily posts bring people back over and over. My method of posting one article a month is really not suited for the tl;dr self-promotional age. In fact, I’m double-fail because I haven’t promoted Skycandy really at all, save a few Tweets and a link in my Massively bio.

That’s OK with me. I’m not interested in feedback from people who can’t be arsed to read anyway. I’m focused on the art of it. But that’s absolutely the wrong way to go if you want your blog to be lively and bring you internet fame. You’re going to have to suck it up and promote yourself like crazy, even when you hate it as much as I do. Being a hermit will not make you a star.

There’s more to blogging than writing

I landed the gig at Massively because I was not only willing and able but thrilled to edit; I wasn’t just someone who secretly wanted to be the Queen Writer. But at media events, I usually get blank looks when I explain to other bloggers what it is I do all day. Most blogs do not have copy-editors; they just kinda post up whatever by whomever. This is not a job the blogosphere usually offers (and it shows).

Nevertheless, writing is in fact a very small part of my duties. I spend at least half of my non-editing work day dealing with PR contacts, coding and updating the site, establishing style standards, playing email tag, babysitting comment threads, blasting out social media, tracking bugs, and on and on. That’s going to be true to a lesser extent on a hobby blog, too. If you’re blogging alone, you’re not just the writer; you’re the proofreader, copy-editor, code monkey, designer, photographer, moderator, and promotion guru. Chances are good that you’re not going to be an expert in one or more of those areas. You’ll need to learn or get help to install your blog, make it look pretty, and coerce people to read it. Content is key, yes, but people won’t want to read your lovely prose if it’s wedged into a site that looks like Geocities vomited all over it or if you’re convinced that “commas go where pauses go.”

Skills beyond writing (especially basic image-editing and HTML) are a huge plus if you’re trying to join the ranks of paid bloggers and related jobs, too. Nothing you learn by jumping into blogging will go to waste, so it will never be a waste of your time, even if no one ever reads you.

Commas do not go where pauses go

Bear in mind that I’m saying this as a proofreader, not as a poet (though even poets would agree you have to learn the rules before you can break them): Being able to compose a thought in English does not make you a writer. Unless you have an advanced degree and the AP Stylebook memorized, you’re probably not very good at this. And that’s OK. Blogs are an awesome place to practice grammar and syntax and style. [meta] I’m practicing right now! [/meta] And it’s true that most of your readers will never notice dangling modifiers, comma splices, and pronoun disagreement… but the grammar-junkies in the audience will, and though they might not say anything, they are judging you on not just your ideas but your presentation. Precise English matters, like it or not.

Future employers will do the same thing, and I say that from experience. A poorly written application from a blogger with a poorly written blog is the easiest one to delete, and when we’re going through 300+ applications for a single part-time job, we’re looking for excuses to cull the herd. A blog riddled with grammar mistakes doesn’t last long in my RSS reader, either.

If you have no plans to learn the difference between jive and jibe or how not to split compound predicates with commas, at least try out the grammar- and spell-checking tools available to you. Word and After the Deadline aren’t perfect, but they’re better than nothing (and cheaper than hiring me!).

You write what you read

What I’ve learned in the last two years of blogging is exactly how much I didn’t know before. But there’s a dark side to polishing your writing skills: You realize just how truly awful most other blogs are, even the professional ones. You start to mentally proofread everything — TV shows, catalogues, cereal boxes — but the blogs influence you the most, and they mostly suck at English. Every day, I skim a few thousand blog posts that reinforce this depressing reality, and all I can do is shake my head. Of course, they also make the truly well-written ones stand out. There’s your in.

Ten years ago I would have said the best way to be a great writer is to read voraciously, but now I have to temper that with “assuming you’re reading high-end newspapers and books that have gone through a professional-grade editing process.” If you’re reading more Gawker than After the Deadline, you’re learning the wrong things. Garbage in, garbage out. That doesn’t mean you should stop reading those sites; they’re valuable for understanding style, tone, readership, and SEO tricks. But don’t fool yourself into thinking your writing is good if it’s only as good as theirs. Hold yourself to a higher standard!

Takeaway

Sure, you could just whip up a blog to have fun and not care about presentation or internet fame. You can! People do it. If you go that route, enjoy it while it’s amusing for you. Even if you slop through the process, even if you’re a billionaire whose employment status is never in question, you’re going to improve over time. The goal of the Newbie Blogger Initiative, after all, is to get people to blog, period. You can worry about the details later, when you’re not a newbie running around in cloth rags and a rusty sword.

But do worry about it later. Justin wants you to blog, but I’m selfish — I want to read really great blogs, the kind that make me want to hire you. Go about it however and whyever you like. Join us. Entertain us. Do all those other bloggy things wrong. But make it good.

By now, everyone’s heard about Mittens’ apology, resignation, and temporary ban from EVE for comments he made during a drunken panel at last week’s Fanfest in Iceland. During the live event, “The Mittani,” leader of the the player-elected council that represents the playerbase to CCP Games, urged everyone present and watching at home to harass a depressed and suicidal guy in game and convince him to kill himself.

Honestly, I don’t really care whether Mittens quit before CCP fired him or whether he fits the legal definition of cyberbully in states X, Y, and Z. That’s just a smokescreen puffed up by fanboys. What I care about is that Mittensgate has put into perspective the real problem with EVE.

The MMO community sucks, and EVE is part of that. People were jerks in Ultima Online when they were stealing castle deeds and hacking accounts. People were jerks in EverQuest when they were kill-stealing and claim-jumping raids in the Planes. People were jerks in Star Wars Galaxies when fighting for control of roleplay cities. People are jerks on the forums and general chats of World of Warcraft. People are jerks in the comments of Massively. Anonymity gives people permission to treat other people horribly. MMOs allow people who have no power in real life to abuse people in virtual worlds where they do. Usually, we just call it griefing. When it goes as far and as publicly as it did in Mittensgate, we call it bullying.

The thing about EVE that distinguishes it from those other games is that the most public part of its community proudly revels in griefing and bullying. Normally, a lazy, laissez-faire sandbox like EVE is a blank slate on which the community can chalk anything it wants. But in EVE’s case, CCP set a testosterone-laden, misogynist tone for the playerbase. It’s right there in the official “harden the fuck up” marketing materials. The company itself is to blame for reinforcing the idea that being an asshole is welcome, acceptable, and even commendable. In turn, encouraged by CCP and this “culture of permisiveness,” the players embrace gank PvP and rampant scamming and anything offensive they can dream up to shock everyone else. They claim that this behavior (and ensuing drama) is what EVE is all about, when in reality, it’s just what these jerkface players are all about, which is why they were attracted to EVE in the first place: Because it permits and glorifies their indefensible conduct and lets them act out their aggression and frustrations in a “safe” and consequence-free arena until it escalates into something genuinely actionable.

This is why I have called EVE a bad game in the past. I do have strong mechanics-related complaints about the game (poor UI, poor ship combat, weak avatar support, slow travel, gank PvP), but more than anything, I just don’t enjoy other people’s suffering or want to hang out with people who do. That’s not what real games are about, and it’s certainly not how I want to spend my life.

It’s become such an unpleasant realm that many of players simply leave, having formed deeply negative and totally preventable but at least partly justified opinions of the game and its worst representatives, opinions that haunt the game indefinitely and cripple mainstream acceptance of the game and the sandbox genre as a whole. Compounding the problem, the sociopaths among the EVE playerbase band together with their sycophants and hardcore-wannabes in large, organized, hateful, vileness-spewing collectives out of self-preservation, which further aggrandizes e-thug ideology, inculcating this culture of asshattery and locker-room one-upsmanship that seeks as its only goal to offend. A quick Google search on “harden the fuck up,” for example, conjures up a slew of disgusting EVE slang that is common even outside of the game. Rape-cage. N****r-fleet. Motarded. These are not good people. This is not funny.

The Mittani is the leader of one such alliance dedicated to disrupting the gameplay of as many people as possible and drinking the tears of “carebears.” He has been elected to the CSM twice, both times as its leader. That’s why many gamers don’t buy the “but EVE has nice people too” grumping. I mean, I know it does. I know not everyone playing EVE is a jerk because I know people who play EVE and are not jerks. I have no reason to doubt there is a large contingent of players who play internet spaceships quietly and happily in the background and pay no attention to the doings of Mittens and his attention-craving e-thugs, and I understand because that’s precisely how I play World of Warcraft: with /general turned off and as if the forums don’t exist. What I don’t understand is why, if the Good Folks of EVE are as numerous as some of the Massively commenters insist, Mittens and his ilk keep being re-elected to the pre-eminent player office in the game, or for that matter, why anyone would want to play a single-shard game alongside 10,000+ proud hooligans who make everyone look bad. I’m embarrassed that they inhabit the same genre I do, let alone the same game.

By continuing to pay for and participate in EVE without denouncing the actions of the scumbags — or worse, pretending they don’t exist because to do so tarnishes the game’s reputation — the EVE-Has-Good-Guys-Too folks are in fact contributing to the problem. If they truly comprise the bulk of the population, then the only conclusion is that they allow the mob to run their city. In Ultima Online, we formed anti-PK guilds to hunt down and destroy griefers. Where are your vigilantes, your leaders, representing the Silent Majority of Invisible Gentlemen? Wherever the EVE humanitarians are, they’re eclipsed by official forum threads filled with support for poor, poor Mittens and #tweetfleet spam and blog posts making fun of “internet white knights” and ridiculing depression and suicide and claiming (with straight faces) that this is just an isolated incident and how dare the media cover it in a way Goonsquad didn’t pre-approve.

In fact, a “leaked” declaration purportedly from Mittens himself laid an impressive amount of the blame for his “persecution” at Massively’s feet in an attempt to control the story and make it about us rather than about him. He and his minions called out our writers by name, all but inviting grief upon them over Twitter and blogs and in-game, and the griefers were happy to oblige. While simultaneously mocking the idea that Mittens could be wounded by the media, the goons began assaulting that very media for wounding him, snarling over confusion about the sequence of events and “defamation” and the true definition of cyber-bullying and making demands that the press rewrite stories and issue apologies as if non-MMO journos actually cared about EVE in the first place beyond pageview farming whenever some internet spaceship crimelord crams his foot in his mouth.

I won’t claim that everyone handled the fallout with class. There are undoubtedly people within EVE who seized the opportunity to maneuver themselves politically, and there are certainly people outside of EVE, even in Massively’s comments section, who salivate for any chance to hate on the game. Irritatingly, in the tussle between the outraged (who blamed everything on the community), the weary (who sought to defend their virtuous corner of said community), and the goons (who blame everyone but themselves for their actions), the real issue — asshattery in MMOs has real-life consequences — was marginalized and forgotten. Meanwhile, EVE’s thugs are sitting in their private channels right now having a beer and a laugh and calling all of us dumb pubbies because for them, this is all part of the carnival, and they believe they’ve sucked us into their twisted freakshow.

Indeed, this scandal has confirmed to me what I’ve suspected for a few years but never verbalized: EVE’s bullying culture extends far beyond the game and its immediate vicinity. Any time Massively, for example, posts anything negative about the game, swarms of EVE fanatics flood our comments sections and inboxes (never mind social media) trying to shout us down. Sometimes, including this past week, it’s obvious that they’re part of a concerted and organized effort to, well, bully us, to threaten and insult us individually and collectively into not talking. Some of the podcast letters we get make me suspect the authors never did listen to us but instead were simply instructed to show up at the designated time and start picketing. At least one of our writers is being griefed by phone. The ongoing harassment has left me reluctant to debate EVE’s mechanics and place in the genre, which infuriates me. I’ve never before felt that someone out there was not just disagreeing with me but actively trying to frighten me into shutting up. I understand that criticism and trolling and even sexism are part of the territory of being in games journalism, being a woman in this hobby, and being an opinionated and argumentative person. I expect turds hurled at me from the dung heaps of the internet.

What I don’t expect are veiled threats that suggest EVE’s thugs will attack us IRL if we don’t comport with their demands, like this one: “I’m sure we shall see more if the gaming press decides they want to camp Eve Online. Eve players tend to be … creative. Maybe someone should warn those reporters to stay away.” And they say we take the game too seriously.

Notably, these hostile emails rarely center on games, not even when we flame LotRO or WoW or SWTOR or Diablo III. It’s just EVE, and that’s not a coincidence. No other playerbase seems to think itself that special or that entitled or that capable of mass-bullying the press and “dumb pubbies” and even CCP itself.

And CCP is ultimately responsible for all of it. EVE may be filled with people like Mittens, but CCP encourages this “EVE is h4rDc0r3″ behavior and then validates it with a slap on the wrist in the form of a month-long ban that doesn’t impact Mittens in any way except to elevate his status and consecrate his martyrdom with his goons. CCP Games could put a stop to this, but instead, CCP has impotently watched it spiral out of control, perhaps understanding that without people like Mittens and the drama and publicity they generate, the studio has nothing left but a sexist vampire MMO and a derivative console FPS that relies far too much on the continued success of a creaky, incomplete, nine-year-old sandbox that spent 2011 in deep decline.

So bravo, as usual, CCP. Bully for you. Now everyone who suspected your players were sociopaths has yet another reason to believe it’s really true, and the rest of us have a really good reason to never buy anything from you ever again.

Such a column is positive by design — you don’t generally focus on negatives when you’re explaining why you stay loyal to a niche title. But that doesn’t mean there are no negatives, and I don’t intend to let City of Heroes off the hook. There are certainly things about the game that irritate me and drive me into the arms of other games for months at a time. So here are 10 reasons I don’t play City of Heroes… when I’m not playing City of Heroes:

#10 – The economy

What the heck happened? Prior to the game’s move to F2P, I made a killing on the consignment hall. It was relatively simple to buy up cheap materials during the week and sell them on the weekends for profit. After F2P, the market for basically everything but the rarest IOs and recipes completely collapsed. It can’t have been the influx of freeps; they’re denied access to the market unless they’re longtime subbers. Even before the market collapsed, though, most recipes weren’t worth the effort to auction away. That continues to be a problem, especially for newcomers to the game.

#9 – Enhancements

The enhancement system is still rough. While I cheer the “hardcore-optional” invention system, you need a third-party program and an insane amount of number-crunching and planning to come up with a decent IO build. Oh yeah, and a whole ton of money, which is much harder to get now unless you’re already wealthy or willing to farm. A lot. There’s no middle ground between dead-simple and insanely complex, and remember, this is the entirety of the gear system. Eliot, my CoH columnist at Massively, thinks the Enhancement system should be the first thing to go come City of Heroes 2. I don’t entirely disagree, although I think the problem is really the invention enhancement systems and the mind-numbing complexity and farming it brought with it.

#8 – OCD

Oh how the game feeds into my OCD. I have a One Note notebook with a chart that catalogues all of my character names, origins, archetypes, power sets, levels, money, unlocked day jobs, merits, open contacts, costume status, and other minutiae. That notebook is accompanied by several others with character concepts and build ideas and so forth. Keeping that record is simultaneously a ton of fun and a serious burden, and I CAN’T STOP. If I stop, I’ll lose track of my zillion characters and get that nagging feeling that I really should log out and make sure the chart is up to date, which ruins gameplay for me. Evil, evil alt-happy game!

#7 – Experience curve

Leveling still takes too long, especially for folks who don’t or can’t play in big steamrolly groups. I know it’s been tweaked several times, but it needs much more. Around level 35, it just takes too long for non-hardcores to progress without resorting to lame farms. Paragon: Your game works best when it’s not about endgames or long grinds to 50. It’s about alts. Embrace it.

#6 – PvP

Hahaha. No.

#5 – The cottage rule

For a long time, the cottage rule dominated CoH’s design — you know, that whole “we can’t fix broken powers to not suck because then the five dummies roleplayers who insist on using crappy skills will be sad” thing. That’s resulted in so many power sets’ having been broken and unusable for a long time. Ever so slowly, Paragon has been defying that rule and fixing catastrophically terribad sets like Gravity Control (a la yesterday’s Issue 22 patch). Yes! Good! Do more of that! And faster! And while you’re at it, quit making certain enemy groups and bits of content completely impossible for some classes! I’m sick to death of getting owned on my Dominator by purple-triangle bosses. In the devs’ efforts to make sure bosses aren’t trivialized, they’ve instead trivialized me.

#4 – Incarnate system

When the Incarnate system was first announced, I was excited. Woot, new content for CoH! But when it launched, it changed the tone of the game. It had been about joyful alting for almost seven years; suddenly, it was about tedious level-50 enforced-grouping and grinding and maximized builds. It was certainly possible to continue on as we had before, deliberately ignoring the Incarnate content. I did. Paragon made that easy when it locked the system behind the VIP paywall and the grouping system. But it lurked there like a shadow over the game, sapping away its charm. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was no longer the type of player for whom the game’s new content was being designed. Would I continue to be neglected? Paragon has recently changed its tune, and the next patch will deliver a solo path for Incarnate content, but it’s still endgame content, and it’s an even bigger grind for casuals, and it worries me. I like CoH for its fantastic midgame; any shift to the endgame disrupts that balance.

#3 – Villains

The Rogue Isles has always seemed like an afterthought and has had relatively few updates and additions since City of Villains launched in 2005. Add-ons to Paragon City are opened up for Villains, or content is made co-op, or Paragon just shrugs and says “alignment swap to blueside.” I’ve probably logged more hours on Villains than Heroes. They rock. I’d like to see them get some love on the whole. Also, Paul would like to punch the whole of Grandville in the face. On behalf of superspeeders everywhere, I’d second that.

#2 – Mission Architect

And while we’re on the topic of neglected systems, let’s mope a bit about the Mission Architect, CoH’s player-generated content system. The MA has been the site of the ongoing war between the people-who-like-to-control-other-people’s-fun and the people-who-want-to-farm-shit-lol. For years. For every original player-created roleplaying arc in the system, there are 20 arcs that facilitate farming. That’s fine by me. I don’t mind farms. I want access both to farms and to story-arcs. But Paragon is intent on nerfing farms, and the result is unintended nerfs to genuine story arcs, nerfs that never get fixed. Meanwhile, Paragon has stripped the MA of any sort of meaningful rewards (the story is the reward, Positron told me in person at an event last year — how dreadful!) and refuses to add a rating system that doesn’t suck. What a shame for the pioneer of player-generated content systems to decay to this state.

#1 – Freedom

Last year, City of Heroes went free-to-play, and by free-to-play, I really mean free-to-try. Like LotRO, CoH really just wants you to subscribe as a VIP player, and it withholds quite a few critical gameplay elements from non-VIP players. While it’s certainly possible to play one character to 50 on the bare minimum content, using regular enhancements, never trading or chatting, and being limited to basic archetypes and classic power sets, sooner or later, VIP becomes the better option, particularly if you want access to the newest powers, zones, and story arcs. I find CoH’s cash shop to be only mildly irrirating, perhaps somewhere between LotRO’s and Champions Online’s in offensiveness. There are certainly ludicrously overpriced items, along with the Super Pack fiasco and the anger that boils up inside of me when I remember that I paid for Going Rogue only to have access to the alignment system, among other things, stripped from my Premium account. But overall, it’s still a playable F2P conversion, and more importantly, subscribers get far more now than they ever did before.

Believe it or not, I found it a bit hard to summon 10 grievances. It’s an aging A-/B+ game that could be so much more… with probably more money than its playerbase really justifies. Still, in this market of rushed and unfinished releases, I’d rather play a game like City of Heroes with its genuine character and a few age lines anyway.

In this most recent edition, I referenced Glitch’s system of granting subscribers votes in dev-led referenda on the game’s content. It’s never actually been implemented (the game is back in beta), but it would give paying players a voice in the game’s design, making the game, on some scripted and limited level, pay-to-vote.

I expected that our readers would find this fundamentally unfair, but instead, many of them essentially said, “I already pay to vote — I vote with my wallet.” I’d like to think that means our readers are free marketeers, but I think that solution over-simplifies this particular problem.

Here’s a real-world example: Paul and I often take drives in the early morning to get the baby back to sleep, and sometimes we’ll stop over for a quick bite at McDonald’s. Now, Paul is a vegetarian for ethical reasons, so we’d find ourselves haggling with the drive-through attendant to get a freaking biscuit with cheese and egg, hold the meat. It’s next to impossible, folks. Sure, Paul could just pay for and take off the sausage, but the whole point for an ethical vegetarian is to not pay for the part he doesn’t want. Refusing to purchase meat is a vote against meat. If he just paid for it and tossed it later, McD’s would never know that vegetarians want better sammich options — his purchase would be lumped in with everyone else’s. The ordeal crossed into absurdity when McD’s not only refused to reduce the price for saving the restaurant some sausage but actually tried to charge us extra to take it off (we laughed and drove away). After that, we simply began going across the street to Wendy’s, which was more than happy to let him buy an eggy biscuit at a reasonable price.

The problem is that when we switched vendors, McD’s had no idea why. It isn’t that we hate McD’s and everything it stands for; it’s that we don’t want to pay for sausage Paul won’t eat. There’s no way to communicate THE SAUSAGE GRIEVANCE with your wallet alone. You can write letters to the void, but your wallet only counts as a vote for or against the entirety of McD’s, not that one irritant.

Games are no different. I can vote against World of Warcraft by not playing it, but Blizzard will never know what it is about WoW that’s been turning me off unless I say so specifically; the team might think it’s Pandas when in fact it’s just endgame gear grind (I like Pandas). If you actually care about the design of a game that otherwise mostly gets stuff right, then it’s in your best interest to do more than merely vote with your wallet in a nod to grander economics. Glitch’s little referenda start to look like a good way to make your voice heard…

… If you have spare cash for a sub, that is, and that’s what I see as the real problem. While it makes sense to cater to the desires of the people who effectively make your paycheck possible, there’s no guarantee that paying-customers are actually any good at, you know, game design. And there’s no reason to think that freebie players won’t have good ideas. If a studio isn’t careful, it might wind up sacrificing creative, unified gameplay at the altar of customer whim — a problem already evident in such corrupt bodies as EVE Online’s Council of Stellar Management. I hope TinySpeck avoids CCP’s mistakes when it relaunches Glitch. In the meantime, I can only hold on to my votes and wait for a chance to use them.

In slightly unrelated news, I’ve now completed my ninth Massively Speaking podcast and my fifth as its co-host with the ever-jovial Syp aka Justin Olivetti of Massively and Bio-Break fame. I may be spreading my posts here out a bit as a lot of my briefer rants are spent there, which is a good thing since I’d always wanted to focus on longer essays here anyway. In the meantime, give it a listen!

Recently, the original designer of Ultima Online, Raph Koster, made waves lamenting the loss of immersion in MMOs. In a way, he’s making the usual sandbox-vs.-themepark argument, but he’s not using those words. I found one of his remarks to be particularly compelling, the idea that color-coded item systems (grey, white, green, blue, purple, orange) are part of the “junk” in modern MMOs that detracts from immersion.

I agree with him. A color-code is a shortcut, an appeal to a common idea shared by the players, akin to stock characters in movies: If you cast the rugged-but-intellectual action star, the vapid and mouthy blonde, and the comic sidekick (oh, let’s just make him a street-wise Asian kid), you can skip all that backstory fluff and get right to car chases, plane crashes, wayward minecarts, and lava. Your viewers understand the code. They understand whom those people represent within 30 seconds of introduction, no additional subtext required.

Of course, such characters are why most movies suck.

My original Massively blip on the subject discussed the item system in Ultima Online as a counterpoint to the WoW-esque color tiers. Here’s how it worked: All items dropped from monsters or found in chests came in a few different varieties. Weapons were named and scaled based on damage (Ruin, Might, Force, Power, Vanquishing), hit-chance increase (Accurate, Surpassingly Accurate, Eminently Accurate, Exceedingly Accurate, Supremely Accurate), and durability (Durable, Substantial, Massive, Fortified, Indestructible). Silver items dealt extra damage to undead monsters. Armor came with an armor rating based on the type of armor (leather, studded leather, bone, ringmail, chainmail, platemail) and was named based on durability (same as weapons) and defense (Defense, Guarding, Hardening, Fortification, Invulnerability). Theoretically, you’d be running around in your Supremely Accurate Katana of Vanquishing wearing all Indestructible Invulnerability Platemail.

But Bree, you say, how is that intrinsically different from a color-coded hierarchy?

It’s not — on the surface. The same shortcuts are communicated. “Vanq” and “Invuln” gear was the best, just like “purps” are superior in WoW-like/Diablo-like games. There are a few differences, though, that root classic UO in old-fashioned D&D-esque RPGs while WoW inches closer to spreadsheets online.

For starters, few UO players actually wore the gear I mentioned. We’re talking pre-Trammel and pre-Age of Shadows, a time early on in the game when there were virtually zero safezones and certainly no item insurance. Players could pop out and kill you and take all your stuff. Even monsters could loot your corpse. No one wears the good stuff in a world like that. You were going to die, often. Most players I knew kept their valuable armor in their bank boxes or their homes; I did occasionally take out some middle-tier weapons, but only when I was hunting in a group. The rest of the time, we all wore crafted armor — specifically, “Grandmaster” armor made by a blacksmith or tailor at the top of her game. Such gear would be printed with the artisan’s name as proof that it was “GM” and exceptional. It was decent and relatively replaceable.

That constant threat of gear loss served to fuel the crafting economy and bring player gear down to roughly the same level, be you poorbie miner or elite player-killer. Magic gear became too good, too rare, and too expensive to use for the vast majority of characters. Very often, players would venture out into the world virtually naked. This is not something that ever happens in World of Warcraft, where everyone’s wearing the very best gear he can get and PvP is dominated almost entirely by gearscore.

The second key difference is all about the numbers. For its weapons, WoW provides all the numbers and statistics and then delivers the color (and gearscore) as a shorthand for quality. Classic UO, by contrast, hid most of those numbers away from players. It’s hard to feel immersed in WoW when you’re hovering over two purple weapons, trying to compare their DPS and socket bonuses and stats. In UO, there were numbers behind your Silver Quarterstaff of Power, but you never saw them, which made the gear a part of the gameworld instead of a slice of the meta.

Ultima Online’s story doesn’t end there, sadly. In 2003, EA launched Age of Shadows, an expansion for UO that radically overhauled the game’s item system. The old tiers were demolished and replaced with dozens of new stats, all visible on the gear. Worse, it transformed what had been a vibrant skill-based game into an item-based one and destroyed a large chunk of the player-run economy for many years, which may sound familiar to Star Wars Galaxies players who suffered through the NGE. Some gamers called AoS the “Diablofication” of the game, and for the first time, UO’s subscription numbers, which had been on the rise since the addition of PvE facet Trammel, fell off dramatically. (The man responsible for Age of Shadows? Tom Chilton. Yes, that Tom Chilton, the one who’s been screwing around with WoW’s borked PvP system for years.)

A year later, WoW launched, having learned very little from UO’s mistakes.

The third and final point of divergence between the item systems in WoW and UO is this: Purps are all WoW’s got. Sure, WoW has consumables and quest items and stuff you can stick into your purps, but the “extra” items are offered strictly in the pursuit of more purps. That’s just how themeparks work. Sandboxes like UO, on the other hand, consider combat to be just one element of gameplay. I would wager that if the devs counted up all the zillions of items on all the shards of UO, the vast majority would be decorative items adorning player houses. Containers, furniture, knick-knacks. UO is stuffed full of stuff. Players have their fair share of artifacts and imbued gear, but clutter — and affording more clutter because it’s pretty or because it’s a status symbol — is why people keep playing.

If you walk around the busier shards of UO, you’re eventually going to stumble across a museum amidst all those bizarre player homes. In the 14+ years UO’s been online, the devs and gamemasters have been busy hosting live events, and at many of those live events, rare and custom items have been created and given away to player participants. The wealthiest players collect these priceless items together, often paying hard cash for transfer tokens to shuttle the most desirable items across the shards. Some of these baubles are flat out unique; there was only one created, ever, anywhere.

You’re never going to see an item museum in World of Warcraft, not because there’s no player housing but because there’s nothing unique to showcase.

Once in a blue moon, one of these museum curators turns out to be some sort of miscreant and is banned. For several years, EA turned such bannings into a massive auto da fe, setting homes permanently ablaze. Several museums and thousands of priceless, unique artifacts have been lost to such events, which makes me eternally sad. We can’t ever get those trinkets back; the stories they told are now lost to us forever. Those things belonged in a museum. I wish the current keepers of UO took the game and its history more seriously because these items and what they represent are precisely what makes Britannia so special. More than most MMOs, UO is about those old things and the creativity and history and yes, immersion, they engender.

WoW? WoW is about purps.

If common sense were common, cultures all over the world wouldn’t still be debating such basic “common sense” rights as life and liberty. Common sense is worse than uncommon — it’s non-existent. And if we can’t agree on important things like capital punishment and narcotics and equality, we’ve no expectation that we’ll all agree on something relatively petty like cheating at computer games.

I noticed this fallacy again and again in a recent comment thread on Massively, where interesting points are often subsumed beneath the roar. I asked: When does a clever loophole become a bannable exploit? Many posters believe that common sense tells them the difference, but common sense must be telling them different things because good-faith commenters couldn’t come to an agreement on what constitutes an exploit, whether players should know they’re exploiting, whether the first exploiter or only copycats ought to be punished, whether bans are too harsh, whether players are obligated to report bugs in a live game, whether some exploits are worse than others, and whether the developer bears any responsibility. The “common sense” theme is repeated over and over; the more confident the poster of his own moral compass, the more self-righteous, insulting, infantilizing, and personal the dig:

• “Do you really need someone to tell you what you are doing is wrong? Are you that clueless as to basic rules and fair play? Maybe you need to go back to kindergarten and go watch kids play at a playground. It really is that basic.”
• “You’re ridiculous and so is the article, if it can be called that, if you want the blame to be on the developer because people don’t have common sense.”
• “Or you can be a normal human being, not cheat, and not try to say it isn’t your fault you cheat.”
• “A lot of MMO players are children who were never taught to discern right and wrong.”
• “I do not for one minute believe that people can’t tell when what they’re doing is an exploit. The fact you even take this position, Brianna, makes me wonder from what game you were banned.”
• “Nonsense. People know the difference between right and wrong, they make free choices and should take responsibility for their actions accordingly.”
• “Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out when you are exploiting. None of what we are discussing are unknown consequences. These are people who KNOW they are breaking the game mechanics. Ban em.”
• “So at no point should common sense kick in and say, ‘Oh I probably shouldn’t [exploit a bug]‘? [...] Goddamn this world is fully of children latched at the teat.”

I flinch away from the “I’ll know it when I see it” definition of exploit. Initially, I wrote the post with a slight allusion to bugs/exploits in both WoW and SWTOR. The SWTOR Ilum bug incentivized not-PvPing in PvP warzones and allowed lower-level characters to participate where they should not have. Before the post ran, the SWTOR /getdown bug went viral; it allowed players to pacify aggressive NPCs using a simple emote. Most players had one or both of these TOR exploits in mind when answering, but the question was and is broader than that.

While I’ve never been banned from any games, I have certainly done things the holier-than-thou types would consider exploits. For example, way back 1997, there was a bug in Ultima Online that allowed players to resurrect each other’s ghosts inside of locked houses. Because EA was slow to fix the exploit, many victims, including teenage me, used it in turn to get back at the thieves and recoup lost property. Is exploiting for vigilante justice acceptable in a game that allows murder and has a stealing skill? Grown-up me says no, and I’d not do it again, but I won’t say it’s not a grey area in such an anything-goes gameplay environment. The sense of lawlessness of that game affected everyone’s perception of right and wrong. Hacking and betrayals and impersonations were all part of the metagame, and we had zero recourse with EA. Moreover, vigilantism is a grey area in the real world too; even the fifty states have different policies on such questions as whether we have the right to use lethal force to protect our own person or property.

And really that’s the trouble with any sort of a real-world analogy. Exploiting a game bug isn’t akin to yoinking a little old lady’s purse, as my commenters tried to argue. For a start, stealing from a little old lady’s purse is legal and legitimate gameplay in a lot of games. Everyone in Ultima Online knew that if a bag hit the floor at the bank, it was fair game for grabbing, even if we’d not behave that way in the real world. Players insist that everyone ought to know that stealing is unacceptable, but we know that’s not true, don’t we? That’s why different types of theft crimes have different punishments and mitigating effects. Peoples and societies and cultures don’t agree. “Common sense” and all such appeals to tradition are meaningless.

Let’s suppose, however, that our thief does dip his paw into granny’s purse. Whether or not we agree with them, this country has laws forbidding petty larceny. A robber will be arrested and punished. The law, not common sense, is the set of formal rules that govern real life, and we can only arrest people for crimes that are formally outlawed. The sports-analogy comments fit well here. Said one poster, “There is nothing like ‘behavior that is not in the spirit of the game’ in the NFL rulebook. You will never see a referee call a foul and then say the player did something against the spirit of the game. The foul has to be spelled out in the rulebook or there is no basis to call it.”

Within a game, the game mechanics are the law, those bits of code that define and limit gameplay. Everything else is ephemera. A game developer might overlay additional behavioral proscriptions; this is why players should read the EULA/TOS for any game they buy, but we know they don’t. It would be easy to put a quick end to this debate by saying, “BioWare can ban anyone it wants.” Obviously it can. The question is whether it should do so, whether it’s right to do so, not whether it’s legal. Most players skip past legalese and forums and social media, where these extra rules are posted. If the developer isn’t taking overt action to make players aware of additional limitations on play (e.g., popups on login about punishments for specific exploits), then players aren’t getting that information, which means that a developer that takes action against “exploiters” is knowingly lumping the clueless in with the malicious. Baby with the bathwater and all that.

Ultima Online's SA Client: Unfair?

But Bree, you say, /getdown and Ilum were cut-and-dried exploits. Everyone says! So let’s look at an example that isn’t cut-and-dried. Let’s look at something that is flat-out illegal in one game and totally legal in another.

In Ultima Online, AFK-macroing was and is considered illegal. During the first few years of the game, people didn’t really care. They’d do it anyway, using third-party programs or ye olde paperweight (you remember paper, don’t you?) to press a key down and spam their skills repeatedly. Eventually, EA approved UO Assist, a third-party macroing program (believed by many players to violate the spirit of the game, in spite of its being legal). And to this day, idling within the game is against the rules: AFKing or failing to respond to a GM query is grounds for your transportation to jail for further investigation. I don’t think it’s “common sense” that going AFK is against the rules, but there you have it.

But in Star Wars Galaxies, before its demise, anyway, AFK-macroing was completely legal. The game launched with an unparalleled scripting system that allowed players to design elaborate macros for looting, killing, dancing, music-making, buffing, talking, and so on. Critically, recursive macros were permitted, so it was possible to keep a character logged in for days while you were AFK. This is how players were able to level up entertainers (“macrotaining”), combatants, and pets quickly while AFK post-NGE. SOE took a few measures to make some AFK actions difficult (nerfing loot drops and adding confirmation screens to buffing), but to its credit, the company never made AFK-botting illegal — I’d like to believe SOE was unwilling to sacrifice all the good uses of the macro system at the altar of repairing a few bad ones.

So, Common Sensers — is AFK play evil? Can you understand that a perfectly ethical person might go from SWG, where a gameplay element is legal, to UO, where it is not, and run into trouble? Such a person might not even realize that he is exploiting or cheating or breaking any rules. It wouldn’t even occur to him.

SWG Aide: Cheating?

What about goldselling? It’s not illegal in every game; for example, it’s been legal in Ultima Online for years, just not on the official forums (nor on eBay, which eventually banned all such sales in all MMOs). I’ve personally sold accounts and purchased gold in that game. In fact, EA actually maintains an insurance program to help players sell their accounts to other players legally, with EA acting as a protective broker in the process. True, UO is the exception, not the rule. But that’s the point, isn’t it? In UO, it’s “common sense” that if you’re broke, you can buy cash from other players for less than $1/mil. But if you try it in most other MMOs, you’ll be tarred and feathered for “cheating.”

Scamming’s another good example. CCP takes great pride in allowing players to scam each other in EVE Online through trickery and lotteries and so forth (as I chronicled in Caveat emptor is lazy game design). Most MMOs, however, have strict rules about scams and lotteries. World of Warcraft placed a game-wide ban on player lotteries; Star Wars Galaxies was very strict about lottery scams and frequently and publicly banned offenders.

How about multiboxing? It’s legal in many games, like WoW, Camelot, and SWG. It’s not completely legal in other games, like Glitch. I once asked readers whether alts and mules were cheats. A surprising number said yes. The fact that some players will argue you shouldn’t multibox or AFK-macro or buy gold in games where it’s legal makes me suspect that this argument isn’t really about fair play or rules or common sense at all — it’s about individual consciences and our being deluded into thinking everyone else shares in our “common sense.” But we cannot be expected to guess or apply common sense about whether the devs really meant for some advantage, loophole, bug, or exploit to exist when people — and games — can’t even agree on what common sense is.

Remember, an achievement-oriented player’s goal is to figure out the best and most efficient way to win in a game — to make the most money, to beat the dungeon first, to level up the quickest, however winning is defined. At the top tiers of gameplay, the slightest edge makes all the difference, and every edge skirts the boundaries of cheating or poor sportsmanship. Slicing your way to millions of credits a week into the game. Mailing CoH inspirations to yourself to free up inventory. Stacking exactly the right character classes to beat a raid boss. Using mods to coordinate debuffs. Voice chat. Gamepads. Macros. Ganking. Farming. Auction house parsers. Fast-travel. Potions in PvP. Heck, even certain character builds (UO’s Sampires, CoH’s Ill/Rads, WoW Pallies) make you sit up and wonder, wow this is so ridiculously overpowered — did the devs really mean for this to be in the game? Will I be banned for discovering this SHORTCUT TO AWESOME?

All of these things give someone an advantage. All of these things are considered hateful cheats in some games/communities and perfectly acceptable gameplay in others. Placing the burden on the players to guess what’s an exploit and what’s a clever manipulation of possible game mechanics starts to sound ludicrous in this context. We might think the /getdown bug is obvious to most players, but that’s just one exploit in a sea of others not remotely obvious, so why would we support a one-size-fits-all exploit policy?

The Utilitarian in me would rather see nine guilty men go free than convict one innocent because the conviction of the innocent creates more harm to more people than the freedom of the nine. I can’t get behind the “Ban ‘em first, let CS sort ‘em out” sentiment in the thread, not in real life and not in-game. I might hope that players will play nice, but I would never expect such in a setting where the rules and mechanics and bugs and exploits are nebulous, subjective, and entirely the fault and responsibility of the developer. Developers should accept that their code allows for unintended consequences. Patch it. Fix it. Roll back the servers if you must. But don’t channel your embarrassment into vindictiveness for those who discovered and used or even abused it. Give them the benefit of the doubt and don’t rely on the argumentum ad populum “common sense” fallacy to adjudicate your game. If you really want to create a fair game, you have to code it that way from the start and test it brutally, and here’s why: If there’s one thing MMO designers have learned over the last 15 years, it’s that players never play the way you planned.

And yet not one game since SWG has made me care so much or try so hard, and it’s not because SWG was my first love — I’d been playing MMOs for almost six years before SWG even launched.

I’ve talked before about the things that we, as gamers and inheritors of the MMO genre, have lost with the passing of Star Wars Galaxies. My colleagues at Massively have done the same. But none of us really touched on free-form roleplaying as one of SWG’s highlights. That wasn’t something the game itself provided, and roleplaying won’t die forever without SWG; people roleplay en masse even in World of Warcraft. But they’re hemmed in by rules and regulations, by the game mechanics and the lore. I couldn’t adjust to it. Roleplay in post-SWG games like World of Warcraft, Warhammer, and even City of Heroes felt flat, contrived, and stale to me, and I started wondering why someone who had once considered herself a hardcore roleplayer was suddenly turning away from it, even looking down on other roleplayers with disdain. Was I, to borrow a term from Matt Daniel, becoming a roleplay snob?

First I stopped roleplaying in public. Then I stopped writing stories, then character outlines, then guild lore. In recent games, I’ve just plunged in without any RP preparation at all, not even a name. Why bother, I thought. None of it matters anyway. RP is ephemera. The game contradicts everything I plan. The game doesn’t care about me enough to let me do my own thing.

That’s when I realized that what SWG provided so uniquely wasn’t its space flight, player cities, or storyteller system at all. Above all else, SWG provided freedom, even in its NGE form, and losing that freedom has become my arrow in the knee.

Star Wars: The Old Republic lacks that freedom and makes no apologies for it. This is our story, BioWare says, so you had best enjoy it. As one of the Massively commenters joked, BioWare is known for telling a great story — “the same story, over and over.” Bloggers are particularly hard on the role of story in SWTOR, and maybe the studio deserves the criticism.

But for the first time in a long time, I’m roleplaying again.

I’m not sitting in a cantina until 4 a.m. arguing philosophy, gambling, or singing, as I did in SWG. There are people in cantinas doing these things; it’s hard not to overhear their slow and plodding and usually amateur attempts at dialogue (which isn’t to say that they’re any worse than BioWare’s storytellers). I pass them by. Even to them, I’m a level 23 mostly Light-side-aligned Female Mirialan Smuggler Scoundrel Scrapper with the same origin story as every other Smuggler, the same ship, the same companions, even the same love life. The good RPers will pretend they don’t know that, but they do. There’s no mystery. A “dancer” in SWG’s Mos Eisley cantina could be anything skill-wise — an Imperial spy, a bounty hunter, or even an actual dancer. Her backstory was whatever she said it was, and her skills were masked. By contrast, TOR contradicts your character design. Roleplaying there requires an additional level of suspension of disbelief, even above what is necessary in a basic RPG setting. First accept the setting, then reject parts of it, and try to keep it all straight. That isn’t fun.

What is fun is what I’m going to start calling rolepursuing. I didn’t really design the role my Smuggler is playing in the SWTOR story context, but I can certainly pursue a role within the mechanics provided, far better than in any other themepark I’ve sampled. I’m finding it enjoyable. I’m not a fan of the specific alignment dichotomy as BioWare’s implemented it, but it’s been relatively easy to play a Han Solo-esque rogue with a heart of gold alongside Paul’s play-by-the-rules Commando. Having him as an audience helps, and for our amusement, I go out of my way to choose snarky responses to the situations with which we’re presented. Oddly, I don’t miss sitting in a cantina to eke out 10 minutes of RP per 60 minutes of gametime, not when I can roleplay — well, rolepursue — all the time.

It turns out that I miss having the freedom of SWG more than what I actually did with that freedom. SWTOR isn’t SWG, not by far, but it sure beats moping in a tavern with the other old-timers, moaning about the arrow in my knee.

The conceit of Glitch is that you’re a darling little “Glitch” wandering around in the imaginings of eleven giant-gods. There’s a lovely map filled with interesting locations that range from generic farmlands to swamps to straight up bizarre and comical homages to Dr Seuss. Because the game is a 2-D sidescroller, you pilot your character from left to right along interconnected streets running within and between each of these larger landscapes. The streets are populated with animals, trees, rocks, merchants, and shrines. At its most basic, gameplay consists of running along these streets, harvesting nodes, creating items from collected resources, and then either selling said items or donating them to shrines. Doing basically anything increases your experience, allowing you to level up and increasing your total mood and energy, which are juggled and replenished by your consumption of food, beverages, and potions. Failure to properly manage your energy will bring about your death and send you off to Hell, which is amusingly just another level from which you must emerge to pick up where you left off.

And if that’s all there were to Glitch, there’d be no point to writing anything about it. It isn’t a deep game, but it is an intriguing game, one meant for explorers and crafters and dabblers. There’s (effectively) no combat at all, but there is a massive achievement system that awards badges for basically everything you do. (I love the achievements — they remind me so much of girl scout badges.) Characters are developed through a convenient offline leveling system that will take casual players a few months to master (at least until new skills are added). In fact, it was the table-of-the-element-esque skill tree (and the promise of leveling while I’m away) that convinced me to play in the first place. How clever and cheerful is this?

The skills allow you to perform various actions, like planting crops, milking butterflies, digging ore, crafting food, pressing herbs, meditating, and even teleporting. The more you learn, the more quests you’re offered (yes, there are quests! Mostly exploration and crafting quests!) and the harder it is to learn more, meaning that you have to choose wisely and prepare for a game that’s meant to take a long time (at least offline) to master, although you can speed up your rate of skill acquisition by donating items to the giant-gods in mass quantities (and I do mean mass).

The types of skills and gameplay currently available ensure that the game is a crafting paradise. In fact, the crafting interface is one of the very best I’ve seen in any MMO (AAA games, take note). When you attempt to craft, say, Fried Noodles, the interface will prompt you to make any missing sub-components, like Plain Noodles, which themselves require Flour, nesting (seemingly) infinitely without forcing you to exit the tool and start up another tool or remember where it was you left off in the initial crafting process. It’s so simple, yet I can’t think of another game that does it so cleanly. The piles and piles of tools necessary for crafting are a bit tedious, though. In fact, the inventory system itself is annoying; in no time at all, I found myself clicking between all my bags, trying to find that stack of ham or emblem or cubimal. WTB the all-in-one inventories pioneered by WoW modding enthusiasts!

True to the sandbox genre, Glitch offers housing. It’s instanced housing, akin to housing collectives in Lord of the Rings Online, but it’s cute. Houses currently serve as a handy place to stash your excess stuff, farm crops and trees, and raise livestock. I was able to acquire the second-largest home in the game within a few days of playing, but large isn’t always better. Right now, houses aren’t particularly customizable, and some of the cheaper homes have more desirable perks (like herb gardens and rare trees), but Tiny Speck promises this will eventually change. (I’m still waiting for a home that will support my crops and an herb garden, hopefully in the swamps!) The team has also been continually releasing new housing blocks to the players, which is very much welcome. Some of the zones sold out the very first weekend after launch. When last I looked, there were only a few hundred vacant homes across the game, most of those too small and with too few features to be worth the purchase price. This housing crisis reminds me a bit of the situation for player cities in Star Wars Galaxies or medium homes on the larger LotRO severs or heck any housing in Ultima Online ever. In Glitch, the problem is exacerbated because there’s no reclamation process for homes purchased by Glitches who then leave the game.

Housing isn’t the only typical sandbox problem to plague Glitch. The economy is something of a trainwreck. The balance of craftable and harvestable items and energy management is such that there’s an oversupply of virtually everything, including money, in spite of the brilliant gold-and-item-sink of the shrines. All but the most casual players will find it simple to make what they need and never need to buy supplies from anyone else, so the auction hall, though cleanly integrated in the game and the browser, is practically a storage bin for excess stuff at prices that sometimes encourage clever Glitches to buy from players and then sell to the NPC vendors for a profit. There are a few items — a high-end soup, shrine powder, mining milkshakes — that sell for small profits, but it’s barely worth the trouble even just a few weeks into the game’s life. This is a deep disappointment to me, as I tend to play crafting games for merchant PvP.

And instead of trying to balance the game’s economy organically, Tiny Speck appears to be taking a heavy-handed approach. Among the first nerfs to the game were experience caps on food preparation, ostensibly intended to diversify the types of food being sold on the auction hall. Instead, the patch just diversified the types of foods being grinded and sold to vendors (or donated to shrines, the primary means of leveling once you’ve blown through all the quests) since there was still no profit to be made at the AH. In addition to being ineffective, that nerf in particular seems to violate the spirit of an open sandbox (why do I learn by making 20 soups but not 21? Why have arbitrary caps that encourage me to metagame, to log back in when the game-day resets and just pick up where I left off?).

Tiny Speck also seems afraid to simply let the players do what they’re meant to do in a sandbox: figure out their own solutions to social problems. Compare TvT (can I coin this? tree-vs.-tree combat?) and piggy-snatching. During the first few weeks of the game, groups of players “battled” to plant certain types of trees in certain public areas. Some players wanted more spice trees; some wanted gas trees. When one group would plant a public tree of one type, the other group would come in with tree poison, kill it, and plant the other type. New social groups formed to alert tree-huggers that local trees were under attack and needed a quick rescue by way of tree antidote. Note that Tiny Speck placed tree poison and antidote in the game, on purpose. Whether the company intended those for use only on private trees or it foresaw such public usage, I don’t know, but over time, the sides have settled down and come to an uneasy truce as the market has dictated the victor (not that it stopped either side from labeling the other “griefers”!).

Piggy-snatching, on the other hand, is one of those “tragedy of the commons” issues that Tiny Speck handled all wrong. By default, a small number of piggies roam some of the streets, waiting for someone to hug and nibble them. Players can, if they desire, craft piggy eggs and hatch them on other streets. But there also exists in game piggy lure, with which players can capture these free-range piggies, loosing them in their homes, selling them to vendors, or donating them to shrines. While the default piggies do respawn, players who willingly hatched extra piggies bemoaned those who were using the lure to capture the animals for their own profit. Thieves, such folk were labeled. And instead of saying, “Duh, stop putting free piggies on public streets” or encouraging players to use social pressure, communication, and coordination to keep the pig population up to those players’ desires, Tiny Speck just took away everyone’s ability to vendor and donate hog-tied pigs, end of story, end of debate, never mind that TS apparently thought the system worked well enough through months and months of beta testing. That decision amounted to a kneejerk stomping of anarchy when anarchy was supposed to be part of the point.

A “fix” like this is so… top-down and butterfingered. It startled me because ultimately, the social interaction, the fishbowl part of this game, is really all Glitch has. When you boil away the cuteness and the incessant crafting and the energy management and the exploration and the clever (if not polished) writing — that’s a lot of things, but bear with me — the game is nothing more than a chat community organizing itself into a social hierarchy, moreso than themepark games. The initial part of the game is about learning the rules (both the game mechanics and the social quagmire); the middle part of the game is about looking inward, about very intense and yes, selfish, character development. And the last part of the game is about looking outward, about creativity, about philanthropy. This mental process, this personal growth through a game, is made much more difficult when some of the hard choices (piggy-snatch for immediate reward or serve the greater community?) are removed from play.

So what do you do in a sandbox when you, personally, already have everything and have done everything the game itself offers you? Some people will quit. At level 22, I have a nice big house, a great many skills and achievements, plenty of money and resources, and emblems representing hundreds of donations to the gods. I’ve done most of the things I wanted to do. I can already feel my interest waning, though when I leave, it won’t be forever. Without the time to commit to this grand social experiment, I’ll depart for a while and wander back to this endearing little toy when new content that’s appealing to me is added. I’ll play it like I play the Sims: fiercely and briefly, right after every expansion.

But for those with the time and inclination and effort, Glitch offers a wealth of long-term entertainment. Sure, there are street building projects that bring players together to improve and add new locations to the game through the application of collective resources. But I’ve also seen impromptu parties that step outside the boundaries of game mechanics. I read of a player setting up a cafe where players could buy food direct from the cook rather than through the bazaar. There are now dozens of Greasemonkey scripts, wikis, databases, and spreadsheets to help players navigate the game — all made by volunteer players. I heard of a player RPing a milkman, dropping bottles of milk on his neighbors’ doorsteps, and more than one group uses paper and the writing skill for treasure hunts. Heck, there’s even a group dedicated to picking up litter! I doubt folks have even scratched the surface of what can be done beyond the confines of the experience bar.

And even though I know that my community-spirit days are behind me, I still want the game to survive for the players who didn’t burn out on zone overwatches and RP weddings and casual raiding coalitions and server newspapers over a decade ago like I did. I worry for the game’s long-term financial sustainability — I don’t think Tiny Speck is charging enough money! If you’re satisfied with your outfit, limited teleportation, and the lack of a voice in the game’s development (yes, subscriptions grant you votes), you can be content to play the entirety of Glitch indefinitely for absolutely nothing. I’ve been tempted to buy a few outfits just for fear that the game will go under. Charge for auction hall slots or better housing or something. Surely outfits and votes aren’t enough!

Stay alive, Glitch, and keep doing that weird thing you do. You’re one of those imaginative little realms that I’m sure I’ll bumble into again. Until then, I’ll be in The Gold Hatted Bouncing High Jumping Memory Place, catching fireflies in a jar and working on my Eyeballery skill.

“It’s not a sandbox.”

And what SWTOR die-hards mean when they say “it’s not a sandbox” is this: “The game was designed as a themepark, not a sandbox, so sandbox fans’ complaints about the lack of sandbox elements are biased and invalid. In fact, you shouldn’t even let a sandbox fan review the game.” It’s not a sandbox, it’s not a sandbox, it’s not a sandbox, they say, holding it up like a talisman to protect BioWare from criticism. I call bullpucky!

I could understand the argument if, say, we were complaining that a teapot isn’t a very good window. The teapot wasn’t designed to be a window; it has nothing to do with windows. The idea is absurd.

But that’s not what the sandbox vs. themepark debate is about. Paul points out that this is really an open vs. closed smartphone debate. He reminds me that niche, high-end sportscars deliberately omit features we might consider basic and necessary — like air conditioning — so that they can do one thing (go fast) as well as possible. We certainly wouldn’t say that makes such a sportscar less of a car, but then again, unlike that sportscar, SWTOR isn’t being marketed as a niche product. It’s being marketed as WoW’s successor, the next big thing in the genre. If the next Honda Accord rolled out with no air conditioning, I don’t think we’d be amused.

I’ve come to think the whole “sandbox elements” concept is a sham, a construct of companies and their apologists pushing MMOs with increasingly limited feature sets. If those companies can convince you that certain complex and difficult-to-implement game mechanics are “just for sandboxes,” then those companies can be excused from including them.

And that just feeds into the false dichotomy. Forget sandboxes and themeparks — there’s only MMOs and the stuff that goes into MMOs. There’s a spectrum of MMO features. Either your game has certain features or it doesn’t. So potential players are absolutely correct to complain when your MMO lacks features considered standard in so many other MMOs. If you’ve chosen to exclude open-world housing, free-form flight, custom storytelling, intense crafting, player-generated content, non-combat professions, a player-run economy, and unique character development, you deserve criticism for those very intentional design choices. You can’t just wave it away by redefining “real” MMOs as things that conveniently happen to omit the same features you do. And every time you suggest that sandbox fans can’t adequately review a themepark game, you’re suggesting that people who like things in their game can’t possibly understand a game with no things, which is just a fancy way of admitting your neglect.

And that’s silly — who defines his own product by what it lacks? We don’t call a sportscar “that car that doesn’t have air conditioning”; it stands out by being “that car that goes fast and looks hot doing it.” When you call your game a themepark and then define themeparks as games that lack sandbox elements, we all know what you’re really up to. Deep down, players know that themeparks really have no features to call their own — even some sandboxes have linear, quest-driven content!

“It’s not a sandbox” really means “this game is purposely minimalist and lacking in multiple areas; take it or leave it.” Some of us will take it on its own terms (like I will — my preorder is still intact, for now), but let’s do away with the pretense. “Themepark” is neither a compliment nor an excuse. It’s an admission of limitation.

Oh yeah, and while I’m thinking about it, BioWare?

Stay classy.

Do the legacy questline

Added to the game after the NGE, the legacy questline starts out as a tutorial and ultimately becomes the primary questline in the game, capable of pushing a character to level 50 or 60 quite easily. It is the very definition of linear: It’s one quest after another, complete with easy-mode waypoints to most destinations, and it drags noobies all over the lower-level planets in the galaxy, introducing them to most of the important NPCs. While many longtime players loathe the legacy line, I’ve always liked it — it’s a bit mindless but a quick way to level while touring the big cities in the game. Combined with missions and various themeparks, the legacy quests ensure that leveling to 90 — even as a combat character — takes a very short amount of time compared to leveling tracks in other MMOs.

Go shopping

Star Wars Galaxies is like its sandbox cousin Ultima Online in that it was designed by Raph Koster, who in the late nineties and early aughts was obsessed with player-driven economies. Both of his games revolve around crafting and trade, and both games have something few others do: player-owned vendors. Unlike Asian imports like Zentia in which player-controlled vendors are really just stalls in a common marketplace, SWG allows players to set up NPC vendors inside their own homes, from which they can sell their crafted or found items to other players. The current implementation of the system in SWG also allows players to use an auction-hall-style Bazaar to scope out what’s being sold in player shops on different planets. If you’re a shopping junkie, you’ll have no end of entertainment traveling the galaxy in search of a good deal. And if you’ve a knack for arbitrage, you can often travel to buy cheap goods and bring them to a more convenient location (like Mos Eisley or Rori) for an easy profit.

Be Uncle Owen

I mentioned this in an earlier article, but I’ll mention it again: It’s perfectly possible to live a non-combat lifestyle in SWG. In fact, it’s perfectly possible to avoid even crafting and entertaining (the two non-combat roles) and set yourself up as an industrialist. Back in 2003, a guildie of mine played the game strictly to sponsor a mining conglomerate than rented lots for resources. He didn’t need a single skill box, combat or otherwise, to become one of the richest players on the server! My Droid Engineer on Bria has played as a moisture farmer for a long time, partly in rebellion against the idea that players don’t want to be Uncle Owen. I set up water harvesters in permanent positions around her house, collect the water every few days, and sell it on a vendor. It’s not only possible to play this way, but you can even be extremely successful while doing it — you just can’t say that about modern themepark MMOs like World of Warcraft.

Become a storyteller

While my Massively article touched on storyteller items in cities, players can make just as much use of storyteller items without any need to live in a metropolis. I use storyteller objects to decorate my own little collection of houses — flowers, vehicles, a dock on the lake… all of these things make relatively static and identical exterior buildings look more natural and unique. Though I think the last one has come and gone, Starsider’s Nomad Market was a remarkable example of how to use the storyteller system. The organizers set up an open-air market at a random location, complete with parked vehicles and starships and tents and entertainment, all decorated beautifully. To accomplish something like this in any other game would require the intervention of a GM. In SWG, anyone can do it.

Do something extinct

The NGE killed a bunch of things that were subsequently (and slowly) added back to the game. Were you a Creature Handler? Try out Beastmastery. Were you a Teras Kasi Master? Pick a profession with a melee specialization, grab some claws, and get your TKA on. Go around and buy up spice from vendors. Eat it. Be contrary. I’ve saved up a huge stash of spice for the last day myself. My characters won’t want to be sober for that.

Listen to the music

Logging into the game and listening to the opening chords of John Williams’ score still gives me chills. Star Wars: The Old Republic has great music, but it won’t trigger those same associations. Fly to Lok or land in Theed and you’ll see what I mean. Remember that feeling. You can’t get it back.

Bree, you promised the title would make sense

I did! You’ll notice that all but one of my suggestions was focused on content other than combat, and that one (the legacy questline) is as much about leveling quickly and checking out a speedy take on quest-grinding as combat itself. The game’s story and economy can revolve around combat, but most of the things players can do — and indeed, the most time-consuming and engrossing things — are non-combat in their nature. That’s just how sandboxes work, and that’s why we need more of them.

See, gamers are always complaining that modern MMOs just aren’t doing anything new in terms of combat. Combat sucks, they say; combat hasn’t advanced past what World of Warcraft had to offer, which in turn is really no different from combat in EverQuest or even Ultima Online. Gamers don’t really seem to want twitchy, reactive combat either, else those MMOs with such systems would be a whole lot more popular than they are. I think that we’re never going to see anything new and innovative in MMO combat, not until we’re at the true virtual reality stage. This is it. There’s nothing left to innovate. We’re tapped out.

And that’s OK because combat really shouldn’t be the primary focus of design or gameplay that it is. In a lot of ways, implementing combat is just taking the easy way out. It’s a cheap collection of systems that travel in a straight line: make the players level, group them up, set them to a cooperative (or competitive, in the case of PvP) task, give them loot, rinse, repeat. It’s staggering that the zillion other non-combat activities possible in games are simply being overlooked in this wrong-headed and ridiculous quest to re-innovate combat. The arena for MMO innovation they seek is in the other direction. They’re digging in the wrong place.

We’ve been playing combat MMOs for 14 years. Combat nowadays just makes me feel numb and bored, and it’s not because I’m burned out or time-crunched; it’s because I’ve seen behind the curtain, and the idea that only violent content matters has lost its charm. I play games to feel something, and SWG made me feel something. I didn’t play SWG; I lived there. And I’ll truly miss it.