Lepus Lepidus

Personally, I’m pretty anti-cheat codes, and I understand the value of strategy guides, but I don’t usually use them unless I’m really frustrated. I’m playing through Gears of War again (to boost my Gamerscore; I’d finished it twice on the debug and once on my other gamertag) and I’m trying to get all the COG tags along the way. I thought, “Gee, I should double-check that list I saw that had all the locations pointed out.” Then I thought, “No, that’s lame — don’t just follow someone’s instructions, figure it out yourself, earn that Achievement without help.”

Then I realized the list I was thinking about…was one I wrote.

This is the worst “interview” I’ve read in a long, long time. And GameDaily is partly to blame, but not as much as Dusty Welch at RedOctane, who has apparently mistaken his actual voice for that of a robotic press release generator.

How is it GameDaily’s partial fault? It looks like an e-mail interview. I have gotten burned on e-mail interviews in the past so I can sympathize (Stan Lee, by god, if I ever catch up with you…). E-nterviews come off feeling very dead, because some good questions were asked and there is no follow-up; it’s literally a list of Qs and a list of As that may or may not have any relevance or interconnectivity. And the “Thanks, Dusty” garbage at the end is appalling. It’s like we’re watching two people performing a high school play and they think nobody else knows it’s a high school play. So yeah, GameDaily plays along instead of calling bullshit, or reworking the content into something you might mistake for news reporting. There’s no filter here, no making sense of the data, no “um, this looks plastic, but we’re going to pass it along as we got it and let you decide” sense of TRUTH to the thing. But hey, it says “exclusive” and I know there’s always pressure online to get the info first. Even if it’s pathetic.

But really, it’s a Dusty Welch embarrassment parade here. Every robotic answer made me cringe — moreso because I genuinely like RedOctane, Neversoft, and Guitar Hero. But I hate it when people refuse to communicate like human beings. I expect press release quotes in press releases, not in personal interviews. If you are not ready to speak to the press about something this important, say nothing. Say “No comment.” Say “We’ll have a statement in a few weeks.” But don’t spool off a carefully worded press release, full of finely crafted, committee-approved PR speak, and expect the rest of the world to accept your sales pitch instead of an honest answer. We are smarter than this. And if you underestimate your audience (or just the public at large) this much, then it gets me thinking that maybe I’ve given you too much credit and respect.

Seriously, I’m disgusted. I’m angry and a little sick at just how blatant, insulting, and disrespectful this is.

Dusty Welch has a long list of successful Activision games to his credit; he clearly knows what he’s doing in other respects of his career. He’s good at marketing his products and I can respect that. But next time I see a quote from him…I can’t say I won’t filter my interpretation through this experience.

I was very pleased to come into work and find a copy of the WoW expansion sitting on my desk. Awesome! Even though I’m a 360 whore, I still have friends at Blizzard!

Figuring it would be a madhouse — and I like madhouses — I logged on tonight to be part of the launch scene. My server only went down once, and only for a few minutes, so props for that. I started a draenei paladin (say what you will, but I like the class so far) and really only felt weird when I saw this:

Yeah. I’m fighting a flower that is also a monster but is still a flower. I listened to what the flower people said, and they said “Im in ur base, killin ur d00dz.”

And all I could think of was Capcom Fighting Evolution, which so confused me when I reviewed it, I had to take a particularly head-scratchin’ screenshot and make a macro for it.

In any case, I’m not high enough level to enjoy BC’s really good bits — like flying mounts and stuff — but I did jump on the jewelcrafting bandwagon and I gave all the stuff from one of my other low-level characters to the new one. Then I will kill the previous one, which I haven’t played in a while and likely never would. Huzzah!

I want to play every game out there. This, apparently, makes me stupid.

I play some more than others — City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, the Tony Hawk games, Guitar Hero — but I never really seem to master anything. So today in WoW, I found myself in a dungeon (which I rarely do, due to the time needed to complete these big group missions) that looked uncannily like this:

There was a guy in my party who totally mystified me with acronyms and shorthand that he obviously felt I should have known. My character was level 18 — not super high, but my l33t little Mini-Diablo pet, which was only available in the Collector’s Edition of the game when it came out two years ago, suggested that I had been around long enough to know what I was doing. (Not really; I stopped playing the game for roughly a year, then came back to it, and even now, I have several alternate characters, none over level 40.)

Anyway, our experienced guy in the party started typing “oom” and “shak” and “pass bop need boe” and I suddenly went “wtf?” We had to ask him what language that was. Turns out they mean “out of mana,” “shackle,” and “Pass on taking items that bind to your character when you simply pick them up, but do a Need roll on items that bind to your character when you intentionally equip them.” Clearly, acronyms serve an important purpose here. But they also confused the living shit out of me.

Plus this guy did one of my pet peeves, which is typing an ellipsis — you know, like “…” when you pause or are speechless — whenever something happened that he deemed to be incorrect or a bad decision. Instead of saying “Hey, keep in mind that blah blah blah helps or hurts us when you do that” or something in constructive English, I got the equivalent of staring in disbelief or a heavy sigh while saying “Dude, what the FUCK are you doing and how the FUCK did I get stuck on this team with so many IDIOTS.” Three dots = value judgment.

Naturally, this enrages me. It’s just a game, which means I can take it or leave it and play another one. I damn near logged off rather than have some invisible Comic-Book Guy deem me unworthy. Instead I whispered to him and said, hey, what am I doing wrong and eventually we got to talking. He was nice (he even noted that I “communicate better than the average WoW player” by typing out in full sentences — oh, the irony! And was he being nice or judging me yet again, this time as “not as bad as I thought you were”?). He was just super-experienced and assumed everybody else was just as experienced. And again, I did display signs of implied l33tness.

Which leads me to the problem. I’d say maybe 90% of people who play MMOs assume that everybody else has been playing as long as if not longer than themselves. I think that’s exactly the opposite of what should be happening. Assume that your random, pick-up teammates are not experts. If they seem like they are not moving like a well-oiled member of your guild’s inner circle, it should be assumed at the very least that their customs are not your customs and, at the worse, that they are stupid like me. Be ready to help create an expert, without being a condescending cock about it.

First one of you who posts “…” as a comment gets banned.