Wow, WhistleBlowerZero was actually right.

I normally like to focus my ramblings on MMOs, but every once and awhile I'll dig into an issue that I think will have a broad effect on the entire gaming market. Notice my obsessive following of the DRM debacle for Spore. Still I try to limit myself from doing these kind of posts too often and boring everyone. If you follow any of the regular gaming news sites then you probably remember the story about the disgruntled ex-GameStop employee. After getting a new job he decided to make a series of YouTube videos which highlight the way GameStop stores are run. It's a fascinating series of videos that grabs the attention in much the same way as a brutal car accident. Several practices he described were downright immoral and a couple were probably illegal in some states.

The videos are done in the same style as Zero Punctuation and used photoshop images to successfully be entertaining while highlighting questionable GameStop practices. The one that most stuck in my mind was that employees were encouraged not to ask questions when people came in with multiple sealed copies of a new game. It was obvious that they were stolen, but the store made a huge profit reselling them since the "sellers" always wanted cash. You see GameStop buys games at two different price points. You get a bad deal if you just want store credit, but you get a really horrible deal if you actually want cash. Some of the descriptions of these "sellers" from the ex-GameStop employee were quite vivid. I especially like the point where he said there was just something wrong about a crackhead selling stolen goods in a store filled with 14 year old kids.

Anyways either someone was watching those videos or the world just loves big coincidences. By way of Kotaku I came across a story about a police sting on GameStop stores in Memphis. Undercover officers had no problems selling video games to clerks even after they made it clear they were stolen. It apparently happened enough that the police arrested eight different clerks. The regional GameStop VP had to suspend the practice of buying used games in Memphis area stores and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some sort of investigation. Still if the videos of WhistleBlowerZero are to believed then dealing in stolen property is only the tip of the iceberg.

So how does this affect MMOs in any way whatsoever? Well it's a long convoluted chain of thought but the basic premise is that MMOs alone can't keep the PC market afloat. It's great news that MMOs are immune to piracy and a company will never try to slap restrictive DRM on one. However, the massive amounts of money that used game stores make are the main driving factor for invasive DRM schemes. It's not that piracy is an issue as much as sharing and trading software. Companies like EA hate the used game market in a manner very similar to how MMO publishers hate gold farmers. They both see the practice as someone making a lot of easy money off a product they developed. Stories like the one about the GameStop sting operation probably encourage tougher and more draconian types of DRM for both console and PC games.


Update: WhistleBlowerZero's account has since been suspended by YouTube and all 9 videos he made removed. Will look for another place where they are linked. Copyright is not an issue here, though a defamation lawsuit by GameStop could be.

Video Games Almost Mainstream

It's nice to see the news media not putting a negative spin on a video game story even though the two industries have long been arch enemies. Still it's pretty hard to shine a negative light on the recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center. I guess they could frighten older viewers with the study's finding that 97% of teenagers in America play video games. But quite frankly that's getting old. Most parents who aren't completely nuts know that video games don't turn children into vicious, psycho killers. Only politicians who like appealing to reliable senior citizen voters still spout out such nonsense and associate video games with things like laziness, low intelligence, and violence.

If you think I'm wrong just look at the recent primary season where several candidates tried to drum up votes by making such claims. Even the youngest guy running has gone on about how video games make today's youth lazy. It's been standard practice to do this since the game Mortal Kombat first caught the attention of politicians. Luckily, things have changed in recent years to give the video game industry a better degree of respectability. The number one factor has to be the huge amount of money game releases like Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo 3 have brought in. When you have an industry that all of a sudden makes more money then Hollywood you can't help, but realize its not the whipping boy it use to be.

That's not to say that some people don't continue to scare uneducated parents with imaginary threats to their children. Not too long ago we had the Virgina Tech shootings which drew every pop psychologist and psycho claiming that the killer had been trained on video games. Of course this proved false and in fact the killer was probably more influenced by the wide media attention such school shootings always attract. It's not just violence either the media also loves to jump on any kind of sexual reference in a video game. Even though games are often much less sexual then a PG-13 movie they often have scenes blown out of proportion.

Who can forget the Mass Effect coverage on FOX News where they didn't even try to get any of their facts straight. I particularly thought the SexBox title was hilarious, but it displayed such a staggering amount of ignorance that my head hurt. Thankfully, if there's one thing the Pew study showed is that video games are well on their way to becoming mainstream. Ten years from now it will be impossible for the same kind of story to be aired by any news outlet. Of course by then I'm sure my generation will be worrying about how dangerous virtual reality pods are to our children.

P.S. Also interesting to note is that the Pew study found that MMOs were played by around 21% of teenage gamers.

Blizzard uses random loot tables to sell Blizzcon tickets

This is a rant. Just thought I would get that out of the way in case anyone tries to make a logical argument in the comment thread. I have the misfortune of being one of those idiots who have been trying to buy Blizzcon tickets for the past two days. This was the first year where I had the available vacation time and money to fly out to Anaheim so I was unaware that Blizzard had a reputation for making it impossible to get tickets. Most people who did manage to buy them this year made sure to post in the forums how long they had been in front of their computers hitting refresh. We are talking about people spending 15-17 hours in front of their computer waiting for the store to come back online.

You see while Blizzcon tickets were supposed to go on sale Monday, that was a baldfaced lie. The site was constantly down and even when it was up wouldn't allow most people navigate it because of heavy traffic. I spent about four hours just trying to make an account before they brought the site down for the rest of the day. It then became a waiting game for when Blizzard would bring the site up again. They're were no announcement and only people who were constantly hitting refresh were eventually able to buy tickets. When tickets finally did go on sale at 3:50pm EST there were enough refreshers that they sold out within minutes. I just love the time frame too, which makes sure to screw over anyone whose workplace blocks Blizzard's site.

Anyways they saved a small number of tickets to sell at 11:00pm EST which was the first time they actually announced a time frame. I didn't have much hope for getting them and I was actually surprised when I was able to put 3 into my shopping cart and make it almost to the last purchase page. Unfortunately, the site was getting hammered enough that it kept not taking my 3 digit CCV code. Eventually after hitting the continue button for the sixth time I was bounced to the main page and told the availability of the items in my shopping cart had changed and were now sold out. This was probably a worst case scenario, but it really was the most frustrating online experience I've had in recent memory. I came up with a nice string of offensive post titles the nicest of which was "Blizzard can suck my ...", anyways nerd rage is never pretty.

I was wondering why bloggers weren't talking about Blizzcon and now I know. It's impossible to get tickets so why bother talking about it. Only scalpers and people without jobs seem to be able to navigate Blizzard's horrible ticket distribution system which is run on an old Pentium 1. As some people posted in the forums it was the same for Blizzcon 2007 and they weren't surprised nothing changed. Oh, and I know that you have to show the credit card you bought the tickets with to pick up your badge. However, this doesn't seem to have stopped tickets from showing up on stubhub and ebay already. I'm pretty sure the scalpers have a work around or simply just meet people at the convention. One of my friends suggested that Miley Cyrus and Blizzard have a lot in common since about 95% of their event tickets are scalped.

The interesting thing to note is that Stubhub was mentioned in a couple articles as being under investigation for illegal scalping. The site has tickets listed for Blizzcon 2008 at 1500$. If not illegal its at the least criminal.
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20137827,00.html

Also while searching the customer service forums I found this youtube video that perfectly matched my experience with the Blizzcon ticket buying process. The voice acting is horrible but it's so true.
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=z_wV6ax3FKI

I'm sure I could score a single ticket if I wanted to but the idea was to go with some people I actually play the game with. I'm starting to suspect that Blizzard is just too big and slow to have good customer service anymore. I just hope that most of the tickets sold were to actual fans and not scalpers like I suspect. Anyways while I partially blame the web team at Blizzard I also realize that with such a high demand not everyone can get a ticket. It's still really turned me off Blizzard though and I don't think I can discuss anything related to them for awhile without putting a negative slant on it. So if my next posts have titles like "Blizzard employees sacrifice kittens" take it with a grain of salt.

War is not Perfect and WoW doesn't know everything

Warhammer has so many interesting ideas that I must say I'm getting excited as September gets closer. Just today I noticed Tobold did a post on the game's open grouping system and how it might encourage players to team up more often. Of course he's careful to remark that the system's usefulness depends on how quest items and experience are divided between group members. Grouping will still remain unpopular if Mythic makes the boneheaded mistake of making soloing better for gaining experience and completing quests. Even a good idea can be ruined by bad implementation. Warhammer is the new guy, but just because he has a clean slate doesn't mean he's perfect.

What I'm trying to say is that Warhammer is not the MMO messiah by virtue of being unreleased. I highly suspect that it will have the best PvP experience in a MMO, but it's impossible to know that at the moment. Even the people in beta don't know, since the experience between live and beta could be quite different. Things always change when people are involved and the more people, the quicker the change. Some of the PvP content could work differently when subjected to things like population imbalances or bot programs. That's not to say those will be an issue for Warhammer. In fact I believe they are using faction based queues to control server population and hired Punkbuster to prevent bots. Still I'm sure we can expect one or two things to pop up which will surprise everyone.

The other side of this argument is that World of Warcraft is not the best MMO by virtue of it being the most popular. There are parts of the game that many players will agree were implemented very poorly. I'm looking at you, honor ranking system. Also World of Warcraft often has a lot of criticism directed at it by older gamers who have more experience in the MMO genre. This probably lends some weight to the argument that it mostly polished established gameplay mechanics instead of revolutionizing anything. That's not to say releasing with polished content wasn't an accomplishment. Just look at all the buggy MMO launches last year to get an idea how hard of a goal it is. Still its ridiculous to portray Blizzard as a game design guru simply because they have the money to delay games while the polish them to a bright shine.

The truth is that neither game is perfect and they are a lot more alike on the surface then fanboys on either side are willing to admit. I get the difference between RvR and PvE treadmills, but it still doesn't change the fact that the first thing people see is orcs and humans fighting each other. I guess the real problem is that the fans might be taking their cues from the developers. I'm pretty sure that Mythic and Blizzard are dueling with release dates by leaking information to game retailers. It's actually kind of childish and I don't see why they can't just reach an agreement. Have EA's lawyers call up Activision's lawyers and get us a solid schedule for god's sake. I thought I might reading too much into the release dates and then I hear a nice story about Paul Barnett saying Warhammer is basically ready to ship now if they wanted.

Arggg, I'm just going to ignore the release date fencing for now and plan on playing Spore in September.