AO makes the NY Times based on player uproar?

[Bionitrous]

http://www.homelanfed.com/index.php?id=9610

Good public relations.

"The way the people vote is by leaving the game, and we don't really want that," Mr. Godager said in a telephone interview from Funcom's offices in Oslo, ..."

Well, duh.

How about going to a psychiatrist to work on your fetish with foam rubber toys?

"Mr. Godager said that in response to the outcry over the planned changes, Funcom might scale back the adjustment in the scopes."

OK, so he goes from bad to worse. We start with the Crit adjustment on the LLTS and compensation for the crit loss and move to a total Nerf of any Melee profession.

Did this guy ever log into the game?

[Skebet]

Aha. Here's a link to the original story (i think free registration is required):

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/10/te...ts/10anar.html

[____________Psiraven]

Probably one of the higher-ups in the New York Times plays AO.

I especially liked the idea about gods worrying about souls leaving for competing realities. Too bad real life isn't a free market universe.

They interviewed Hayake...lol

btw...what Metaphysicist vs. Nanotechnician rivalry?

[DaveDread]

Hahaha... that was the wierdest piece of jurnalism I ever saw!

[____________Psiraven]

Hehe, I wouldn't be surprised if FC saw a small subscription boost over that article.

You can't pay for advertisement like that.

[Phione]

I do find it amusing that they'd do an article on the New York Times about AO... lol

[Getwrangled]

Yea, I used to "work" for HomeLanFed.

I was HF|E Coolboarder.

Kept the servers safe for little kids.

[Jason-M]

Here's what it says for those of you who don't want to sign up:

Gaute Godager has more power over his economy than Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board does. He has more influence over global politics than Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations. For the inhabitants of his world, Mr. Godager is nothing less than an all-powerful god.

Of course, Mr. Godager's world does not really exist. And deities do not have to worry about their universe's inhabitants' picking up and leaving for a competing reality because they are dissatisfied with their selection of weapons. Last week Mr. Godager was worrying about just that.

His world is the planet Rubi-Ka in the year 29476. It is the universe of Anarchy Online, part of the new breed of so-called massively multiplayer online games that have helped transform the game industry.

Fans of massively multiplayer games like Anarchy Online and EverQuest often spend dozens of hours a week in their virtual environments. In exchange for the subscription fees they pay (Anarchy Online costs $12.95 a month), players are vocal, active and sometimes downright ornery in demanding consistency in their online economies and overall balance in their digital worlds. If they do not like the way a game is going, they vote with their feet (or their keyboards), cancel their accounts and move.

That is what Mr. Godager, game director for Anarchy Online (www .anarchy-online.com), confronted last week. A tentative alteration to a set of rare and powerful game pieces called low-light targeting scopes raised the threat of a mass uprising and widespread cancellations by Anarchy Online players.

Funcom, the Norwegian company that runs Anarchy Online, does not release subscriber figures, but analysts say that the game must have at least tens of thousands of users. Last week many of them posted irate messages on online bulletin boards and sent e-mail to Funcom in protest, setting aside professional rivalries (Metaphysicists versus Nano Technicians, for instance) and interspecies tensions (different sorts of mutants do not always see eye to eye, literally).

"The way the people vote is by leaving the game, and we don't really want that," Mr. Godager said in a telephone interview from Funcom's offices in Oslo, sounding less like a god than like a junior congressman besieged by lobbyists. "People have invested so much time and effort into this and it's a big part of their life, and we were trying to take all of this into consideration when we made this decision for all of those people who feel like they own the game and own the characters."

Mr. Godager faces the difficult task of making Anarchy Online's virtual world as welcoming for newcomers as it is challenging for addicts. As part of that effort, his team announced last week that it was going to "nerf" the virtual low-light scopes, which increase the chances of inflicting more damage on a target. In online parlance, "nerf," after the soft, squishy real-life toys, means to make something drastically less effective. In June, Funcom had decided that no more would be created but that it would not disable the scopes that already existed in the game.

That decision made the few remaining scopes extremely valuable. A newcomer to Anarchy Online might play off and on for a month and accumulate, say, 100,000 credits by killing monsters and selling treasure found on the corpses. The most powerful scopes routinely sell for 200 million credits or more, putting them far out of the reach of all but the most dedicated players.

Some players - especially new ones who cannot afford the scopes - call that situation unfair. The majority - particularly the hardcore players who can think about buying the scopes - appear to believe that Anarchy Online should operate as a market-based economy, meaning that it is acceptable for luxury goods to be available only to the rich. But many of those players complained that the latest change contradicted the company's earlier statement that the scopes would remain in the game.

"When a person devotes a lot of time and energy towards something, a person tends to feel some sense of possession," Jen Kozar, a high-level Anarchy Online player from Hawaii, wrote in an e-mail interview last week. "The biggest problem with nerfs is that it can take what a player did and invalidate it."

Mr. Godager said that in response to the outcry over the planned changes, Funcom might scale back the adjustment in the scopes.

The players, meanwhile, say that in virtual worlds, as in real life, a gap between rich and poor will persist.

"At low levels you barely manage to scrape by unless you have friends in-game with higher-level characters that help you," a high-level player known as Hayake said by e-mail last week. "At higher levels you just keep on amassing funds, as there is nothing anymore that you can spend them on."

"In an hour of playtime," Hayake wrote, "I probably leave more money lying on the floor than a new character can make in a week of playtime. Decadence rules at high levels, I guess."

[______________Hayake]

I kinda liked it

[Gearbox]

Originally posted by Psiraven
btw...what Metaphysicist vs. Nanotechnician rivalry?

Nano technicians insist that they have the most enigmatic and hard-to-spell profession title. Meta-Physicists obviously disagree, though most of us secretly acknowledge that the real winner is Burocrats..

bearucrats...

beuracrats...

bureaucrats...

You know what I mean.

[kylee]

"The new proposed nerf ensures that only 33% of the player base, the "melee professions" will have a mass uprising and cancel their accounts."

brilliant!

[engelstein]

Sounds good, if it'll get you gone.

Who needs tanks anyway?

[_____Real Kinky Ityn]

LOL that article is for real?

That is some of the worst journalistic writing I have ever seen, not that it's particullary biased or poorly structured. I just can't believe the NY times editors let something so special interest as this with so much technical jargon that means about as much as the words "mugwump jisim" to everyone who missed all of the 50s beat writers.

Man, now I know why I don't get the times, the crap they publish these days =]

[Isgrimnur]

Surprised more ppl didn't quit over the bracer nerf. IMO that had a much larger impact then this scope nerf will have.

Also if they nerf melee with these scopes and don't give us at least 5+ IPR points, they are right, the masses will hit cancel. I mean game aint much but killing crap. Nerf that wee little bit of fun, and game is nothing.

(oh i can chat with friends on IRC, I dont need an AO client that chats to do that.)

[____________Psiraven]

I totally agree, Ityn.

For an article thats supposed to be about the phenomena of players forming political movements to lobby for change in virtual worlds, you'd think there'd be at least a passing reference to similar events in other online games. There should've been some attempt to research past events at larger games; maybe about Everquest moving to stem an exodus of players to DAOC.

An article like this would be much more impressive (and fascinating) if it explored the history of a game sponsored by some HUGE mega-lithic corporation (like Sony and MicroSoft, as opposed to tiny little Funcom) and how players try to force change in that world.

Stuff like that would actually be interesting reading...but nope, not a peep about it.

The quality of fact checking is equivalent to what you'd find in a forum post, not something thats published in the Technology section of one of the most prominent publications in the US.

Ex: Quotes like this...

"The majority - particularly the hardcore players who can think about buying the scopes - appear to believe that Anarchy Online should operate as a market-based economy, meaning that it is acceptable for luxury goods to be available only to the rich."

...have no way to be verified. There is no identifiable "majority." It was never measured by anyone. There wasn't even a clearly framed issue or question upon which this mysterious majority is based upon.

Take that and combine it with all the jibberish trying to explain the llts nerf, the narrow focus on AO, I can't help but suspect the writer is just another angry player whining in a different "forum" hiding behind a paper thin veneer of impartial reporting. I mean...c'mon...only a player would be able to explain the llts nerf in such exact detail.

If the goal was to paint FC with a subtle negative light to discourage future buyers of the game, it failed.

Here's how bad the writing is...If an NY Times reader was totally new to MMORPG's and then read this article, these are the impressions they would walk away with.

1) The article basically says that AO players are NOT angry because AO is a bad game, but because they are too personally involved in a game that's very good as a whole and very absorbing as well.

2) Anarchy Online = a game that has "helped transform the game industry." No other mmorpg is really talked about. AO has the spotlight, front and center.

3) Gaute Godager is presented in a positive and reasonable light; taking all things "into consideration" and is a man who has developed a virtual world with a complicated economy (actually very simple) and "tens of thousands" of players (the real number is probably on the very low side of that...maybe around 20000, but the general impression given by the article is that of a much larger base of players). Being the first name mentioned by an article in the Tech section of the NY Times is bound to give some positive new contacts to both Mr. Godager and FC.

I'm not saying these aren't true, just that the writer seems to have communicated the exact opposite of what was probably intended which was to give Funcom a minor stab. If I was new to mmorpg's this article would make me curious rather than act as any discouragement.

The NY Times have very good movie reviews though.