Star Wars Galaxies Temporary Enemy Flagging

 Posted by (Visited 26761 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,
Apr 152015
 

SWG postmortem series:

  1. Temporary Enemy Flagging in SWG
  2. A Jedi Saga
  3. SWG’s Dynamic World
  4. Designing a Living Society, part one
  5. Designing a Living Society Part Two
  6. Did it fail?

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swgfactionbattle

I was sent this list of Star Wars: Galaxies questions by Jason Yates; he had seen this video interview, and didn’t know enough Spanish to be able to follow the answers. I posted up an English translation of the transcript here, but really, the interview didn’t much overlap with the questions he had.

Is there the possibility of you ever giving a question/answer session in relation to SWG, your views on the game development and direction, aspects of the game you felt worked, worked well, didn’t work at all? Like many, I have so many questions about your involvement with SWG and will likely never get all the answers I would enjoy hearing, but it never hurts to ask. ^_^

Well, honestly, for me it has been fifteen years since I started work on SWG, and twelve since I stopped. So a lot of these questions have either been answered before, or I outright don’t know or remember the answers! So I will give it a try. But the first answer turned out to be so damn long that it’s all I have time for today.

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Ten Years of World of Warcraft

 Posted by (Visited 21398 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nov 212014
 

500px-WOW_logoTen years of World of Warcraft. Well. So many thoughts.

WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered it in a package that was truly broadly appealing, enough so to capture the larger gamer audience for the first time.

Don’t get me wrong; that’s not a knock on it. If anything, it’s possibly the biggest game design achievement in all of virtual world history. After all, we’re talking about taking a game skeleton that was at that point already almost a decade and a half old, one which had literally had hundreds of iterations, hundreds of games launched. None of them ever reached that sort of audience, that sort of milestone, that sort of polish level.

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Do auction houses suck?

 Posted by (Visited 40949 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , , , ,
Mar 202012
 

Once upon a time, there was a game set in a science fiction universe where the economy was very important. Its name was not Eve.

In this game, players could, if they so chose, run a business. They could

  • designate a building as a shop
  • hire an NPC bot to stand in it
  • give the bot items to hold for sale
  • specify the prices at which those items would sell
  • customize the bot in a variety of ways
  • make use of advertising facilities to market the shop
  • decorate the shop any way they pleased

With this basic facility, emergent gameplay tied to the way that the crafting system worked resulted in players who chose to run shops being able to do things Ike build supply chains, manage regular inventory, develop regular customer bases, build marketing campaigns, and in general, play a lemonade stand writ large.

The upshot was that at peak, fully half the players in Star Wars Galaxies ran a shop.
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Anatomy of a meme, or why games journalism is iffy

 Posted by (Visited 10086 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 192008
 

It is like playing a giant game of telephone.

Accurate (The Guardian):

Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW.

Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the headline “How to be jobless in a down economy”):

Raph Koster at Massively picked up on a thread at the f13 forums in which we learn that a recruiter in the online media industry has been told by employers numerous times to straight-up avoid World of Warcraft players as potential hires.

Completely wrong (Softpedia):

Employers Don’t Like World of Warcraft Players
They make bad employees

Online gaming journalist Raph Koster has posted on his blog a statement he received from a job recruitment consultant accurately showing that even though some people cite the leadership experience gained from establishing a guild in WoW, employers tend to avoid such persons.

Not only did this little story bring down the blog, but it also managed to reach the Times of London, Silicon Valley Insider, etc etc. Yeesh.

Of course, this comment on BoingBoing did crack me up:

Interviewer: Do you play World of Warcraft?

SKR: Absolutely not.
Please don’t ask about EVE.
Please don’t ask about EVE.
Please don’t ask about EVE.

Interviewer: Great, when can you start.

SKR: On Monday.
but I have a fleet battle on Friday, so I’m going to take a sick day.

MMOG play as a barrier to getting a job

 Posted by (Visited 28825 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 152008
 

Spotted this on the f13 forums:

I met with a recruiter recently (online media industry) and in conversation I happened to mention I’d spent way too much time in the early 2000s playing online games, which I described as “the ones before World of Warcraft” (I went nuts for EQ1, SWG and the start of WoW, but since 2006 I have only put a handful of days into MMOG playing – as opposed to discussing them – I’ve obsessed over bicycles and cycling instead).

He replied that employers specifically instruct him not to send them World of Warcraft players. He said there is a belief that WoW players cannot give 100% because their focus is elsewhere, their sleeping patterns are often not great, etc. I mentioned that some people have written about MMOG leadership experience as a career positive or a way to learn project management skills, and he shook his head. He has been specifically asked to avoid WoW players.

— f13.net forums – Recruiter told not to hire WoW players.

I think the funniest bit is all the MMOG players in the thread agreeing with the recruiter…

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