Don't Share Your Account Information . . . Even With Your Most Cherished Pet

Not even with your wife.

Ok, maybe your wife. But NOT your girlfriend of two weeks. She's going to dump you soon anyway.

I'm not linking this to add fuel to fire Silvermoon drama. But I did find the entire incident an outstanding reminder of why people shouldn't share their accounts with anyone and why people shouldn't assume that because someone says they're quitting for good, that they actually mean that.

I lay blame at both parties involved. If you give your account info to a friend, you almost have to assume that your username and password won't stop with that person. Don't want someone messing around with your toons while you're vacationing from Azeroth? Then don't share account information! And if you're playing on someone's account, you almost have to assume that the original owner will someday show up and want it back. Yes, even if they said six months ago that they were done with WoW forever and forever and forever.

I myself alternate between playing and quitting WoW. My most recent break was just last month, after some solid months of raiding. At the time, I felt exhausted with every aspect of the game; the prospect of months more weekly raiding made my head spin. But then a month away from it and I suddenly had the urge to play again. I've experienced this cycle before with WoW and I anticipate that I'll experience it again. I tell people, "Yeah, I think I'm done with WoW," and they roll their eyes at me and say a knowing "uh huh" and when I reappear weeks later, they show little surprise and only give me a little grief, which I have coming.

Which brings me back to people playing on accounts belonging to people that have "quit." Just know, they'll likely come back. And when they do, if they inherit a ton of loot and gold that you slaved on for months, don't be shocked or pissed, don't assume they're going to analyze the gold and gear on the toons and hand you a cut. Just grin and bear it because they should have never shared the account with you, you never should have been playing that account to begin with, and even if you didn't deserve to have all that work go to someone else, everyone definitely should have known better.

1UP Podcast Covers Gerstmann Firing

1UP's December 7th podcast discusses the recent Gerstmann firing and the merger of Activision and Blizzard. I haven't heard any commentary from people who work in the industry, so it was interesting to listen to four editors and reviewers talk about the firing. Surprisingly, they didn't all agree on the influence publisher marketing department's put on game reviewers.

They also talk about the Activision/Blizzard merger. Like me, they seem puzzled by it. The also made a point that none of them had any glimmering that any such merger was in the works.

The Gerstmann conversation begins about an hour into the two hour podcast, with the merger discussion immediately following.

American Dreamz (No, I didn't change the "s" to a "z")

If you haven't already, I recommend you rent American Dreamz. I dvr'd the movie blindly, on a whim, and was amazed at what a funny (though darkly so) movie it turned out to be. I won't say much more than that because part of the fun I had with this movie was experiencing it without any preconceived notions on what it was about.

So go out and rent it soon. You won't be disappointed.

FFS Chats about Hellgate: London

The dudes at FFS held a chat event last night, answering questions about their recent release, Hellgate: London.

Of most interest to me is the technical fixes due out as part of patch 0.7. Commenting on the fixes, Bill Roper said, "The biggest and best is yet yo [sic] come in patch 0.7 when we get our memory issue fixes in. There is also a new DirectX patch we’re looking at that potentially resolves a lot of issues. We’re very happy about this since some of our problems come from outside our game code."

Hopefully, the memory leak that FFS fixes combined with the DirectX update that Microsoft patches will let me play in gloriously smooth DX10.

Richard Garriott Rethinks Tabula Rasa's Open Beta

Tabula Rasa has been quietly garnering middling reviews after its early November release. Gamasutra recently interviewed Richard Garriott, the game's famous producer, who had some surprisingly candid comments about TR's open beta testing: "We burned out some quantity of our beta-testers when the game wasn't yet fun. As we've begun to sell the game, the people who hadn't participated in the beta became our fast early-adopters. And the people who did participate in the beta, we've had to go back to and say 'look, look, we promise: we know it wasn't fun two months ago, but we fixed all that. Really, come try it again.' We've had to go out and develop free programs to invite those people back for free before they go buy it. So the beta process, which we used to think of as a QA process, is really a marketing process."

I find this a fascinating realization on the part of Garriott, mostly because it begs the question of how increasingly more complex MMOs will QA their final product. If the beta should be morphed into a marketing process, then how will game producers successfully stress test their gameplay and servers with large numbers of players?

I didn't beta test WoW, but I did participate in its stress test. By then, the game was largely complete and the gaming experience was nearly identical to its retail equivalent. Looking back now, the WoW stress test was as fun to play as the retail version. What Garriott realizes, perhaps too late, is that their open beta wasn't fun to play which ultimately translated into those beta testers not picking up the game on its release.

I think Garriott makes a good case for the shortcomings of TR's open beta, but I think it's more likely that gamers beta tested TR, got a pretty good idea of what it was like, and then went back to WoW or LoTRO or whatever floats their boat. I do think he's on to something about shifting the open beta concept to more of a stress test: get the game polished, practically to retail, and then hold an open beta to whet gamers' appetites, generate some buzz, and test your servers.

But if gamers are shunning TR in large numbers, I think it's because WoW has a strangle hold on the MMO crowd and TR didn't have the mojo to pull away some market share. It isn't the first MMO to suffer this indignity, and it won't be the last.

File Under "Oops"

Gamespot reports that the recent Eve Online expansion update removes a boot.ini file that prevents Windows XP users from being able to properly load the OS.

Quality Control FTL.

Tom Chick Rips HG: L a New One

He gives the game a score of 4. I can't disagree with anything he says about the game, even if I think he scores it too low.

I've said this many times, but FFS needs to hit a homerun with their December content patch. If that patch is full of more stupid potatoe recipes, then this game could be sunk.