Also, Fraps crashed on me or something. I was smacking my screenshot button all through the endgame, and I have not a single image to show for it. Figures.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Dragon Age: Twitter Review Pt. 6”
Leslee was banned from Lord of the Rings Online. You should read the whole thing (it’s not long) to get the details, but basically Turbine thinks her account was potentially hacked, so they suspended it. Re-activating the account will take two weeks. In the meantime…
It’s pretty outrageous, and it does not speak well of the inner workings of Turbine if this is how they run their show. You’d have to be a sociopath or an idiot to approve a string of policies that operate this way.
Here is where Turbine is messing up:
1. Vague Accusations against the customer
Turbine things the account was “potentially compromised” – meaning they suspect something might be wrong. That’s not good enough. You should make sure a crime has actually been committed before you try to punish somebody.
If you’re not certain of a problem enough to put it in writing, then maybe you shouldn’t be taking such drastic action against your customers over it?
2. Lack of transparency
What happened to the account? What made them think it was improperly accessed? They refuse to say. Turbine just says something went wrong, without providing any details at all.
This is simply not good enough. A two week paid ban costs the customer $7 or $8. Once you’re talking about taking money and time from customers, you need to offer more than “take our word for it.” There is no recourse for the falsely accused.
How do we even know the system is working right?
Moreover, the customer has no idea what they might have done wrong or how they might have set off this mysterious “hacker detection”. It might be something innocuous. But the customer might end up doing it again because they have no way of knowing what’s causing the problem.
3. Ham-fisted response
How does a two-week ban help anyone? Are we really supposed to believe that there’s a team of investigators working for ten business days to get to the bottom of this? Of course not. They say the two weeks is not a punishment, but when the cutoff time is arbitrary like this it’s hard to see it as anything else. They do nothing to find the alleged “hacker”. They do nothing to explain what they thought there was a hacker. They just turn you off and then feed you into the customer service mill for a couple of weeks.
I’m sure the account is locked down for two weeks, then someone comes along and flips the switch to let you back in. It may even be automated.
I’m sure someone will jump in and point out another MMO that does this, but that’s no excuse. This is rotten, it’s unfair, and probably a good bit worse than the problem they were trying to solve in the first place.
EDIT: I’d like to add that this behavior would obviously not fly from most other types of service-related businesses. IF anyone wanted to put out the cash to fight this, they first thing they’d run into is the EULA. “Oh, you agreed to let us treat you like this when you signed up for the service.” So any challenge could very well come down to a test of the viability of the EULA as a binding agreement. It’s been tested before, but there’s still lots of room to fight over it.
It would not be a short battle.
I found this thanks to Kathleen of Loading Ready Run.
From the YouTube description: “This is an animation music video that produced independent in 2009.”
Link (YouTube) |
For the enjoyment of interesting events this video is to be reviewed until satisfaction is achieved!
Last week I somehow messed up my Experienced Points article and ended up making people think I was unhappy with BioWare, rather than celebrating their efforts. That is, I ended up saying more or less the opposite of what I intended. I tried to patch it up with additional comments and such, but alas the thing was published and its errant message was already delivered to the hearts of thousands of now-annoyed gamers. In print, you cannot un-say something, you can only append “clarifications”. I did what I could with the tools I had, but some people no doubt think of me as “that guy who hates BioWare”. Most wounding of all were the messages from people who do in fact hate BioWare, who were welcoming to their fold and accepting me as one of their own.
I began to think it might just be easier to learn to hate BioWare than to clear things up.
I suppose this sort of thing happens from time to time. I’ve written about 23 MB of text here in the past four years. For reference, that’s more text than The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the The Silmarillion combined. With that kind of output, it’s amazing this kind of misunderstanding doesn’t happen more often. It’s like the old analogy: If you put a monkey at a typewriter long enough, sooner or later he’ll type something you’ll have to apologize for.
So anyway, I was careful to make the gist of this week’s article as unambiguous as possible. I even put the message into the title, so that even if you never read my articles and you only click-through so you can look at my picture, you should still leave with the correct impression of my thesis. Then I made sure to link it four times, to make sure you wouldn’t miss it.
I’ve done what I can.
Q: What do Ronald McDonald, Bozo, and the Grey Warden have in common?
A: Far too much.
Responses on the previous post were gratifying, since nearly everyone had the same complaints that I did. I brought this up not because I wanted to pick on poor LOTRO, but because I was really curious how other people would react to it. I was worried that perhaps noticing this sort of thing was a leftover from the time when I did this for a living. Maybe I was just being a 3D art snob? Maybe the average player doesn’t notice or care about details like this? But it looks like people do notice this sort of thing.
For the record, I was talking about the texture mapping:
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(Also for the record: I’m playing the game with high detail settings, and this shot is not indicative of what the game looks like as a whole. Also also: I just now tried to fire up the game and make sure I didn’t accidentally set the graphics to “ass”, but LOTRO is in the middle of an update at the moment. So let’s just go with what we’ve got here.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “LOTRO Screenshot, Follow-up”
I want to try a little experiment, if you’ll indulge me. Take a look at these two screenshots from Lord of the Rings Online:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “LOTRO Screenshot”
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Why Google sucks, and what made me switch to crowdfunding for this site.
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
T w e n t y S i d e d
