{"id":9527,"date":"2010-09-22T09:04:40","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T14:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=9527"},"modified":"2010-09-22T13:16:43","modified_gmt":"2010-09-22T18:16:43","slug":"stolen-pixels-228-all-points-bu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=9527","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #228: All Points Bu"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.escapistmagazine.com\/articles\/view\/comics\/stolen-pixels\/8135-Stolen-Pixels-228-All-Points-Bu\">Yesterday&#8217;s comic<\/a> was about All Points Bulletin. <\/p>\n<p>In case you didn&#8217;t play it &#8211; which was the game&#8217;s biggest problem &#8211; you drove around a big sandbox city as either a criminal or an enforcer.  You couldn&#8217;t normally attack members of the other faction unless you were given a job to do so.  Jobs were phoned in from faction leaders.  These jobs were things like, &#8220;Kill player X&#8221; or &#8220;Player X is coming to kill you, don&#8217;t let them.&#8221;  No story. No sense of anything happening. Just an eternal firefight against specific foes with the quest givers acting as matchmakers. <\/p>\n<p>The problems in the game were not mysterious.  They should have been obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the last couple of decades of multiplayer evolution.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It wasn&#8217;t just PvP-focused, it was pretty much PvP <em>only<\/em>. I think there are some really good historical examples of why this is a horrible idea. PvP is a spice, not a main course, and I don&#8217;t think there are enough people out there to support even a modest-sized PvP game, much less a big-budget monster like this one.\n<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s really odd to be trying to fight another player on a battlefield where other groups of totally unrelated players are also fighting each other. Imagine trying to play Team Fortress 2, only you&#8217;re playing a game of payload and there is another pair of teams also trying to play capture the flag in the same space. And everyone can hear everyone else&#8217;s voice chat, even if they&#8217;re not playing with you and they&#8217;re from the opposite faction. It&#8217;s confusing and those other players don&#8217;t really add anything to your own experience except a bunch of confusion.  <\/li>\n<li>At low population levels the matchmaker would have to pit you against foes far above or below your own equipment and ability level. This was a wonderful way of making the game highly repellent to newbies, which only made matchmaking that much harder. <\/li>\n<li>By default, microphones were set to always-on. Which means many people were broadcasting when they didn&#8217;t mean to. Some of them had no idea. In a public area I&#8217;d hear people breathing, coughing, cussing, talking to their wives\/ girlfriends, mumbling to themselves, and watching TV. I never heard a single female player. No young people.  No old people.  The game world was filled with nothing but profane, heavy-breathing guys in their twenties.  I found it to be dreary. At any rate, Xbox Live has demonstrated why open mics in public games is a horrible idea. The signal-to-noise ratio is abominable even before you introduce the idea of cross-team, cross-game, open chat.<\/li>\n<li>It was possible to grief friendly players by ramming their vehicles and trapping them against a wall, blowing up their goals, or otherwise interfering with the game they&#8217;re trying to play. Developers figured out ages ago that some players <em>will<\/em> grief others if it&#8217;s possible and that doing so is bad for the community. <em>Developers who ignore these long-established truths do so at their own peril.<\/em>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Yes, APB had a lot of daring innovation and a lot of great ideas, but it also ignored long-standing conventional wisdom and paid the price charged to everyone who refuses to learn from history. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&#8217;s comic was about All Points Bulletin. In case you didn&#8217;t play it &#8211; which was the game&#8217;s biggest problem &#8211; you drove around a big sandbox city as either a criminal or an enforcer. You couldn&#8217;t normally attack members of the other faction unless you were given a job to do so. Jobs were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-column"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}