Moral Relativism: WoW Classic

It was something of a surprise for me this morning to find a bunch of "Boycott Blizzard" and "I'm quitting " posts in my RSS feed. In the handful of days I was away something blew up.

The whole thing appears to be layered in the way WoW Classic's servers aren't supposed to be any more. There seem to be freedom of speech issues going on here, political footprint issues, and draw the line issues.

There are also potential legal and commercial ramifications for Blizzard, who, at the very least, seem to have handled the whole situation in a hamfisted manner. The company now has a familiar task in front of it: rehabilitate their image in a highly volatile and emotional marketplace.

We've seen this repeatedly over the years as video game companies fail to behave in the manner their customers imagined they would. It's happened to just about every major developer and publisher and most of the minor ones too.

Blizzard is one of those companies that has been able to leverage an extraordinary degree of customer loyalty for a surprisingly long time. I thought Everwake put it particularly well:

"Nothing Blizzard is doing is different from what western companies have been doing for the past 3 decades. But we care more about this one because Blizzard was special. It created games, worlds, and memories that we could pour ourselves into. Turns out Blizzard wasn't really worthy of that love."

It's all about projection. Companies have "Mission Statements" and "Corporate Values". I remember very distinctly when I first came across the concept. I was working for a smallish subsidiary of a major international insurance company when we got our first official "Mission Statement".

I can't now recall what it actually said, only that, as Marketing Director (a more junior position than it sounds) I had to proofread the thing in a number of documents. I do remember thinking it was fatuous and taking the mickey out of it with colleagues who found it equally vacuous and self-serving.

Since then I have always assumed that all corporate statements of social intent are valueless ciphers, intended only to enhance the company's ability to make progress in spheres where income otherwise unavailable might be be found. It wouldn't occur to me that any company, charities and "Not for Profits" included, would have, at the level these shiboleths are signed off, anything other than direct, corporate advantage in mind.

Consequently I have never entertained any illusions that any company providing me with services or products would hesitate to throw me - or my loyalty - under a metaphorical bus if it would serve their purposes. Brand loyalty is nothing more than a psychological device designed to enhance corporate stability and provide a predictable income stream.

That said, it's also fun to have favorites. I have consistently said that my favorite MMORPG producer is and has always been Sony Online Entertainment and their successors Daybreak Games. That remains the case, even though SOE were responsible for some of the most egregious and unforgiveable betrayals of trust in the genre and DBG have obfuscated their corporate ownership to such a degree that who my money is going to when I pay my All Access sub is all but unknowable.

Slaying the Corporate Ogres with the Sword of Moral Indignation.

I don't expect companies who get my money to behave well. I expect them to sell me things I want at prices I'm willing to pay. Any other layer of emotion above that is a game I'm consciously playing with myself for my own amusement.

With no illusions of kinship between consumer and producer, the question remains: how to react to perceived transgressions? To what standards of corporate responsibility does one hold a notional aggregrated entity?

I have always been deeply uncomfortable with un-nuanced, absolutist stances on ethical and moral issues, even when I find myself intrinsically in agreement with them. The Specials uncompromising statement ("If you have a racist friend/ Now is the time, now is the time/ For your friendship to end.") in the song "Racist Friend" always bothered me and I found it highly instructive to discover that Jerry Dammers, who penned the lyrics, also found himself troubled by them:

"...for Dammers, who confesses he is "not a confrontational person", the song was substitute for a more direct challenge. He never actually got to tell the person why he had broken off contact.
"He actually died a few years ago. I didn't see him for years and years afterwards. When I heard that he'd died, I felt terrible that I hadn't told him that the song was about him, and why I'd cut myself off from him."

It's often easier to take the moral high ground and disengage than to stay and argue your case. Which is more likely to have an effect on the transgressor?

Another response to offense that I've never found convincing is the setting of boycotts. Boycotts generally seem to me to have the primary effect of making the person doing the boycotting feel better about the situation and about themselves. It gives the impression of action and allows the boycotter to regain some sense of control in a situation where otherwise they feel powerless.

Some boycotts do have effects. The long sporting strangulation of apartheid South Africa, together with the numerous economic boycotts that were sporadically effected alongside it, reportedly contributed significantly to the eventual fall of that despotic regime.

How effective the multifarious lockdowns attempted on individual companies over the years have been is much harder to parse. It always seems to me that "voting with your wallet" is about as likely to have the desired effect as casting your democratic vote does when the prevailing majority prefers another candidate to your own.

What often does seem to have a visible and meaningful effect in these situations is withdrawal of commercial support by peers, not customers. When advertisers and sponsors start to withdraw or cancel their contracts and make public statements dissociating themselves from their erstwhile, now errant, partners, then we do sometimes see a change of direction and even a contrite apology.

This is because significant sums are involved and corporate futures are in doubt. In the case of Blizzard, calculations will be made - will already have been made - around the relative potential damage to income streams that come from offending Western customers as opposed to appeasing China.

Blizzard-approved cultural stereotype.

Cancelling subscriptions and refusing to play Blizzard games sends a message but unless the commercial fallout is likely to be more damaging than the loss of income from sources under control of the Chinese state authorities, it's a message that can readily be ignored. Time will inevitably see any such strong reactions fade amongst most Blizzard subscribers to the point where continuing a boycott will seem as quaint as do the cadre of SWG veterans that still won't buy Sony products.

There are corporate actions that would spur me to cease doing business with a company. Not in the expectation that doing so would make them see the error of their ways but more selfishly and solipsistically because it would make me feel more comfortable. I wouldn't play a game that actively endorsed moral choices I reprehend or one whose developers or owners did so as a matter of course.

Ironically, given that I'm writing this and posting it on the World Wide Web for anyone to read, freedom of speech isn't one of my trigger issues. Contrary to popular belief, citizens of the United Kingdom, where I live and have always lived, have no formal right to "freedom of expression" and it forms no part of my culturally dictated belief system.

On the contrary, we have what are known, in somewhat Orwellian fashion, as "negative rights": there are numerous legal proscriptions on what U.K. citizens can say or write in public. I agree with the existence of such enforceable limits and indeed might well support their extension to include more restrictive legislation on public discourse, depending on what those restrictions might be.

I am very much not in favor of the so-called "right to offend". It's my feeling that there's a very great difference between the invaluable existence of the kind of "freedom of the press" that existed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and a general free-for-all, where anyone can express any damn thing they please regardless of the effect it has on those who listen.

Bringing this all back to video games, what spurred the controversy was the banning of a Hearthstone player and others for expressing solidarity with the ongoing campaign in Hong Kong against further erosion of the freedoms supposedly guaranteed under the exit agreement that was negotiated with China, when the former British-ruled colony reverted to Chinese governance in 1997. The moral question is whether players of Blizzard's games should either cease to play them altogether or at least cease to pay for those parts which require payment.

That in itself is a nice moral choice: you could argue that to play the games and not pay for them would be a neat way to punish Blizzard. Only World of Warcraft requires a subscription. Everything else is either free to play or required a one-time purchase that would have been made before the controversy arose. Why not use their resources while giving them nothing?

I logged in to get a screenshot of populations in the hope of making some kind of point on the effectiveness or otherwise of the boycott, only to find Blizzard have changed the way they represent server load. I'm guessing "Layered" means a lot of people still.

From my perspective I see two valid reasons to cancel a subscription and/or stop playing Blizzard games:

1. You believe doing so will have a meaningful impact either on Blizzard's future actions or the actions of similar companies in equivalent situations;
2. It makes you feel better about yourself.

Neither of those applies for me. I think Blizzard will take whatever public relations steps they feel best mitigates the damage, while doing nothing whatsoever to diminish the effect they intended to create by their original action.

If they'd calculated that supporting the protestor would have been in their financial interest, that's what they would have done. Unless that balance changes, which appears unlikely, corporate decision-making will be unaffected, although they may make some changes to how they present those decisions in future.

As for making myself feel better I'm fairly certain I'll feel worse for denying myself the pleasure of playing the MMORPG I'm currently enjoying the most. It's not that I deny the satisfaction that comes from feeling morally superior (or at least consistent) nor the power of the illusion of self-worth that comes with donning the hair shirt, but this is not a hill on which I'm prepared to pause and self-evaluate, far less die.

It's a self-serving and morally questionable response but I make those every day of my life. This is just another in the never-ending chain that binds us to this imperfect existence we call life.

For what it's worth I think the protestor was entirely justified in his actions and from what I've read he clearly understood the implications. What's more, I'm sure he'll be delighted that Blizzard made the fundamental mistake of inflating his actions with the industrial wind-machine of publicity. Had they taken no action and made no comment at all, none of us would even know any of this had ever happened.

And now I'm going to go level my Hunter. I haven't played for three days and I'm itching to get back to Classic.

Rainy Days And Mondays (And Sundays. And Tuesdays)

Just a quick post to say I went for a short holiday and now I'm back! On Sunday morning Mrs Bhagpuss and I hopped in the car and drove down to the edge of Dartmoor, about a hundred or so miles away. We stayed in Buckfastleigh and visited Buckfast Abbey, which I highly recommend. The gardens and the stained glass are both well worth seeing and the whole thing is free, something incredibly rare in the tourist traps of the South West. Well done, monks!

On Monday we drove across Dartmoor, visited several small towns and villages, then spent the night in Boscastle, a lovely seaside town that was all but demolished in a flood fifteen years ago. There's a marker in the main street showing how high the waters reached. It was two feet over my head.

This morning we took a look at Tintagel, where King Arthur was supposedly conceived (as in where his parents did the deed, although it might just as well mean where someone made him up, since there seems to be precious little evidence he ever existed). Then we came back very slowly along the Devon and Somerset coastline, visiting a couple of Victorian and Edwardian seaside resorts, one of which, Lynmouth, was also destroyed by a flash flood in 1952. We hadn't planned on a tour of deluge disasters but synchronicity will have its way.

We were exceptionally lucky with the weather, ourselves. Plenty of sunshine and we dodged almost all the rain, which was heavy and plentiful but only when we were driving between stops.

I had planned to post something before I went away to explain why I'd finally broken my 66-day unbroken posting record but in the end I didn't find the time on Sunday morning. I took my laptop with me, thinking I'd probably get a post or two in when we were pinned down in our room by the rain but that never happened. In the end I never even took the laptop out of its bag.

My return-to-work day is the 21st of October, at which point I would expect to go back to my old regime of three or four posts a week but until then I hope to bang something out every day. My post count for the year currently stands at 195, a mere two posts behind my all-time record of 197, which I managed in each of the first two full years of the blog.

This year is going to smash that. Apparently all you need to do to break your own posting record is to be seriously ill and spend half the year off work, sick. Who knew?

New Best Friend: WoW Classic

Just a quick update on how things are going for my Hunter and his pets. Following my post on the inadequacies of the Idiot Bear and the helpful advice given in the comments, I billetted bear in the Stables and spent a session or two wandering around taming beasts almost at random.

Okay, not entirely at random, but without any out-of-game information the process has randomness imposed upon it to some degree. All you can do is go to different zones and use Beast Lore on whatever you find to see if the animals there have any tricks you haven't learned.

I had two goals. I wanted to test a few different animals to see if they were intrinsically better at holding aggro than the bear and I also wanted to learn any new skills they might have so I could teach them to any pets I might use in future.

Very quickly something became apparent to me that I hadn't noticed before. In any given WoW Classic zone there are only a handful of species of Beast.  

It's easy to get the impression the place is over-run with wildlife. Badlands, for example, is teeming with animals to the point that it can be difficult to go ten paces without having a coyote or a jaguar try to tear the seat out of your leather trews. When you're killing them for quests or just to get from one place to another you tend not to notice just how very limited the variety of local fauna can be.

In Badlands I tamed a cat, a wolf and a bird. There are multiple examples of all of these, with different names and slightly different models (usually just a little larger) but they are all part of one of those three "families".

My first pick was a Level 36 Crag Coyote. From him I learned the "Bite" skill. It didn't take long. I think I got it on the third fight.

I didn't think to take any shots of the temporary pets. Here's one of the bear instead.

I tried him for size for a while and he seemed about the same as the bear. Couldn't hold aggro unless I was very circumspect with the gun.

I'd done with him but it took a bit of fiddling around to figure out how to get rid of him. "Dismissing" a pet just sends him to sulk in his kennel. You have to select "Abandon" from the right-click drop-down menu on his portrait. I had to look that up. I don't count checking UI functions as cheating on in-game information only. House rules apply.

Next I tried a cat, a Ridge Stalker. She had a skill called "Cower", which Wilhelm had warned me about in the comments. It lets the pet drop aggro, something my bear seems to do without the need of any special abilities other than his own innate incompetence.

I had to force the cat to cower by clicking the ability myself. I'm not sure under what circumstances the pet would use it voluntarily or pro-actively. With that in my book I put the Ridge Stalker to the test as a tank and she did noticeably better than the Bear or the Coyote.

For some reason I forget, I didn't keep the Stalker. Instead I abandoned her and went to Hillsbrad Foothills, where I tamed a couple of grey-con creatures, a bear and a spider. It occured to me after a while that taming grey creatures twenty levels below was less than optimal. They keep the level they were when you tamed them and the skills they have are ranked by level. You'd have to level them up to be useful in combat so you might as well just tame the highest you can manage.

I moved to the higher part of the zone and tamed aLevel 31 turtle, who gave me a skill called "Shell Shield". He was still too low so I wandered into Alterac Mountains and swapped him for a level 34 Hulking Mountain Lion.


The lion seemed pretty decent so, to get a fair comparison and since I was very close by, I moved to the huge ogre camp next to the Ruins of Alterac, where the Idiot Bear had let himself down so badly the day before. What  happened next was both instructive and surprising.

Whereas the lion had been holding aggro fairly successfully on the various beasts I set her on, all around her level, she did no better than the bear had on the level 34-36 Ogres. I could barely get off one or two shots on auto-attack before the Ogre would come charging towards me.

Once aggro was lost, the cat could no more get it back than the bear could. I began to formulate a theory that aggro depends on more than just relative levels, amount of taunting successfully applied and damage done.

Everything in Classic has resists. There are several schools of magic plus physical things like bleeding and poison. I can see my resists and my pets' but the resists of mobs are unknown. I began to wonder if the Ogres might be particularly resistant to whatever form of damage the bear and cat were doing, where the Beasts the cat was able to hold up quite nicely might not be.

I had it in mind to follow it up but something else happened to make me put that line of investigation to one side.

Classic doesn't permit you to tame anything higher than your Hunter's own level so I decided to go back to Badlands and grab a Level 39 or 40 beast from the orange sands. Once there, I scanned an Elder Crag Coyote, level 39, and saw he had a skill his junior cousin hadn't known: "Furious Howl". I tamed him to get that and then I set him to tanking for me.

Carry on, don't mind me. I'm just having a snack.

He was a revelation. From the start he could hold aggro better than any pet I'd tried but once I taught him "Growl", the taunt skill, he was able to lock down a mob like a vice. Not only could he grab aggro on the pull and hold it while I unloaded everything I had onto the hapless target, he could also regain aggro almost immediately on the rare occasions I did succeeed in getting the mob's attention.

My bear had never been able to do that, even before he lost his mojo. The bear had extremely poor dps and also suffered from a bizarre inability to taunt and move at the same time. If I had to back off the bear would pirouette and lurch like a drunken ballerina as he tried to complete his animations. Doing that, he was neither taunting nor doing damage, so I had to stand still and let the mob hit me to give him a chance to regain aggro, something he almost never succeeded in doing.

The Elder Coyote had no such aesthetic issues. He just ran at the mob, bit it and taunted and got aggro right back before the mob got anywhere near me. I tested him on any number of different types of creature, Beast and Humanoid and Elemental, and although there were some differences he was able to perform an outstanding job on all of them.

It was like playing a different class. I'd become so used to my pet providing no more than a brief window of opportunity that I'd developed a whole style of play, innvolving stuns, snares, fear and a lot of melee. Suddenly I didn't need any of it. I was able to stand at a comfortable distance and plink or blast away while my pet took all the hits - and he could take them easily, too.

I took him to the ogres just to get a comparison and he slaughtered them. I couldn't pull aggro even when I flat-out tried. I was able to sit and regain mana while he chewed away and when I stood up he'd almost finished the ogre off.  I found out later, hunting trolls and goblins in Stranglethorn, that he could also chase down runners and kill them, another thing the bear could never manage.

In the valley behind the ogres there are plenty of bandits. They're a couple of levels higher and they have more silk. The wolf handles them perfectly. We cleared half a dozen rounds of respawns across the whole valley and I came away with three stacks of silk and Level 41.

All of this leads me to two conclusions: firstly, there is a lot more to aggro management in WoW Classic than first meets the eye and secondly, unlike other MMORPGs, a bear is not automatically going to be first choice when it comes to pet tanking.

Loathe as I am to give up my new best friend, the Wolf, my next move is going to be to teach the bear all the new skills and see how he does. I suspect he'll still struggle. He has never been able to make much of a dent in any mob's health, whereas the Wolf takes great chunks off the target's green bar with every attack. Even if the bear can hold aggro the wolf will still be a lot more useful.

If I was willing to use out of game resources I guess now would be the time to start looking for Rare Beasts, some of whom, as I understand, have unique or best-in-class skills that Hunters covet. Without a guide to follow, I'll just have to chance running into them.

Of course, if I do, I'll have the pet up and won't be able to tame. I'll have to scan the creature, take a screenshot, then kill it if I can. I can then check the screenshot to see if the Rare can do something I'd like to learn, after which I'll have to go stable the pet then camp the spot to see if it respawns.

Without checking outside resources I won't know if that's likely to be an hour, a day or a week. I do know WoW took its rare spawn lead from EverQuest so it could be a long wait.

I probably won't bother. I'll stick with my Wolf for now. Unless the bear can show me he's learned how to do his job. He only had the one, after all...

The Other Side Of The Door

Continuing the "riffing on the news" theme from yesterday and as Jeromai mentioned in the comments, Mike O'Brien has left ArenaNet. This is kind of a big deal, seeing as how he co-founded the company. He's been with it for what seems like forever. His leaving is almost like taking down the sign over the door. And yet in a way it's also kind of not so big a deal after all. We've barely heard a word from him for what feels like a couple of years now.

He's leaving to start a new company called Mana Works. There's a lot of that going on these days. Paeroka at Nerdy Bookahs has an excellent, fully researched post up with all the details on just who's going to be working there, along with some speculation on what they might plan on doing.

There's clearly a lot going on here that no-one's going to talk about. Paeroka lists the eight people who have apparently jumped ship from ANet to follow Mike O'Brien to the sunlit uplands of independent development. That's a significant defection, especially coming off the back of the massive job cuts imposed by NCSoft earlier in the year.

When we learned that NCSoft had brought the curtain (or was it the guillotine?) down on a number of unspecified new projects I wasn't particularly concerned or, indeed interested, other than for the usual human concerns over the impact it would have on the individuals concerned. As far as Guild Wars 2 was concerned, my feeling was that a renewed corporate focus on core activities could only be to the benefit of that game and its players.

I didn't know then and hadn't heard since, until I read it in Paeroka's post this morning, that one of those cancelled projects might have been Guild Wars 3. Now that does make a difference.

GW2 is seven years old. As we are all coming to understand, seven years is barely into middle age for MMORPGs. The market is saturated with games that date back a decade, a decade and a half, twenty years, even. We all tend to get worked up over the occasional "sunsets" but few of us give a thought for the plethora of games drifting through a seemingly eternal twilight, neither growing towards the light nor shrinking into the darkness.

A long while back ANet claimed they planned to run GW2 indefinitely as their only ongoing MMORPG (the original Guild Wars having been officially shunted into maintenance mode). All that dithering with "cadences"  and "seasons", shuttling between a "Living Story" and a "Living World", that was ANet trying to figure out how to keep the ship afloat. They had to. There were no lifeboats.

Except apparently there were. Mike O'Brien may have been building one that could have launched, sometime, on a course for an undiscovered land, which might or might not have come to be known as "GW3".

Baby, it's cold outside.

Well that, as they say, is a pisser. While it's self-evident that GW2 could, and no doubt will, carry on largely as-is for many years, my personal feeling is that its future lies in the cruise ship trade. It long ago ceased to be an expeditionary vessel, headed away from the safety and security of the shore towards an unknown destiny beyond the horizon. These days it's a super-annuated hulk, living out its days as a half-heartedly refurbished tour boat, visiting only the best-known, most familiar ports.

Whose to say whether a new MMORPG from ArenaNet would have been any better? After all, the fine promises Mike and his team made before GW2's launch came to nothing and his custodianship was, to put it mildly, uneven. Even so, I'd have liked to have seen it.

And maybe we will. The Mana Works website currently consists of a single page that reads "This website will return October 9th." I await that date with bated breath. There's also a sub-reddit, whose strapline, as quoted by Paeroka, reads: “We aim to create worlds to live in, skills to discover, and adventures to share with friends."

The Kotaku piece makes the point that the eight defectors, all of whom comprise the collective that "amounted to the early development team for a new Guild Wars project, potentially Guild Wars 3", didn't take any of the work they'd done with them. Like NCSoft would have let them!

I'm guessing that they also won't have any rights or access to the intellectual property that comprises the Guild Wars franchise, despite Mike O'Brien having co-created it all. As far as I can tell, gaming stil resides somewhere in that nebulous legal hinterland that was known in the comics industry as "work made for hire".

Years of legal battles, particularly by Jack Kirby and his estate eventually saw that tradition broken. Kirby lost his claim but new writers were able to sign contracts that gave them royalties and rights, sometimes including ownership of the characters they created, which they were then able to take with them to other companies when they left.

The upshot of that was comics writers and artists becoming millionaires. Also a lot of very bad creator-owned comics. Freedom does not always equate to quality. For good or ill, that kind of freedom only seems to accrue to video game developers if they're canny enough to own the company that makes their games. Which may explain why so many of them leve to start their own studios.

Onwards and upwards

Regardless of the legal issues, the Mana Works tagline suggests Mike and the rest of his freedom-loving crew will be staying in the virtual world business. Whether that's in the form of an MMORPG or a plain old RPG it's a fair bet it will have something of the feel of Guild Wars about it, even though I'm certain any overt references to that I.P. will be assiduously avoided.

As I was saying yesterday, older creators tend to polish and burnish their ideas. They don't usually spend much time or effort on coming up with new ones and why should they? Those that try usually end up embarassing themselves and alienating their audience. (Yes, I know I always link to that clip. That's because it's always true. Also because I'm old so I have no new ideas).

If Mana Works would care to come up with a small-scale MMORPG-like game that reminds us all strongly of games their CEO made in the past, well that would be perfectly fine with me. As I also said yesterday, there's absolutely nothing wrong with elder creators refining and perfecting their art for the pleasure and enjoyment of the audience that grew up with thier earlier works and would like some more, please. I'm looking at you, Brad...

If I had to bet on a horse in the non-existent race between Playable Games and Mana Works, on the equally non-existent evidence of what they're doing now and the rather more solid form book of what they've done in the past, I'd probably give it to Mike O'Brien by a nose. His project at least sounds less abstract and more feasible.

I hope they both make it over the finishing line. We could do with more passion projects by committed creators, regardless of their age or origin.

New Tricks

As I was tabbed out, recovering from a bad pull where my Hunter's pet died twice, while the Hunter himself barely escaped with a sliver of life after two Feign Deaths and a long run to break aggro, I came across this interesting little item on Gamesindustry.biz.

There is, perhaps, nothing so very new in Raph Koster starting yet another MMO-focused project, although he's been rather quiet on that front of late. Metaplace, which closed its doors on 70,000 virtual worlds in 2009, seems to have been his last big MMO adventure. I confess I'd forgotten all about it.

It had also slipped my mind that Raph was Chief Creative Officer at Sony Online Entertainment until  2006 and that he worked on (or at least would have had oversight of) the first and second expansions for EverQuest II, Desert of Flames and Kingdom of Sky

All of which is very interesting as far as it goes but it's not what first came to mind when I read the names of the people Raph will be working alongside at Playable Worlds. Several sounded rather familiar but Greg Kostikyan's name really stuck out.

Didn't I remember him from the 1980s? What was it he did? Oh yes, looking him up he turns out to have been the guy behind several of the more unusual tabletop RPGs of the 1970s and '80s. For example, the notorious Paranoia and the much-hyped and well-reviewed Toon.

I played sessions of both and they were, shall we say, not a great success. It was very hard to get anyone to take them seriously enough for any actual gameplay to emerge. And, to be fair to Greg, that was kind of the point, particularly in Toon.

That's by the by. It wasn't the quality or pragmatic value of his work that struck me so forcefully so much as his age. I found myself thinking "surely this guy must be older than I am" and I'll be sixty-one in in November.

So I checked and no, he isn't older than me. He's all of nine months younger. Greg Costikyan was born in July 1959, making him sixty this year.

What about the other people mentioned in the article? How about Raph?

Raph's birthdate as given by Wikipedia is September 7, 1971. That makes him just shy of fifty years old. Eric Goldberg, co-founder (with Raph) of Playable Games, has a short Wiki entry that doesn't give his exact age, but earlier this year VentureBeat described thim as "a 35-year veteran of the game, consumer internet, mobile, monetization, and edtech industries", which means he has to be in his mid-fifties at least.

I though his name rang a bell, too. Turns out he was behind one of my favortite 1980s pen and paper RPGs, SPI's Dragonquest. That game had a class which I believe might have been called "Beastmaster". I could go downstairs and dig out my ancient, boxed copy to check but it really doesn't matter what the class was called so much as the way it provided the archetype for all the MMORPG pet classes I've played over the years.

DragonQuest was published in 1980. Unless Eric was in his teens when he wrote it (which I guess he could have been) that pushes him up to around sixty.

Mat Broome, comics artist and games designer (and ex of Ashes of Creation, it seems), would appear to be the baby of the bunch. He began his comics career in 1993 so he's most likely in his mid-to-late 40s now. The only other Playable Games staffer mentioned by name in the article is Brian Crowder, "an SOE veteran with stints at Electronic Arts and Zynga". His role is "lead server engineer" and, not surprisingly, he doesn't have a presence on Wikipedia so I have no idea how old he is. He is "a veteran" though, so let's assume he's at least in his 40s.

And where, you may well ask, am I going with all this? Well, somewhere quite awkward. I probaly wouldn't be saying it if I wasn't ancient myself.

I think it's still very easy to imagine the people behind the MMORPGs we play as being "young". Aren't video games made by young people for young people?

No. No, they're not. Not the big ones for sure and not most of the little ones, not in the MMORPG field, anyway. They're made by people in mid-life and now, as evidenced by Raph's latest venture, by those in, or about to enter, their senior years.

Does that matter? The same is true of movies and music and books, isn't it? Creative artists mature, don't they? Isn't some of the best work in the field often produced by writers and artists and musicians in the later phases of their career?

Yes, yes and yes again. But...

Those maturing and mature creators are rarely innovators. They perfect and polish and sometimes produce exquisite examples of their style... but that style is set. Occasional geniuses confound expectations by carrying their ability to surprsise and shock into later life but geniuses are rare.

There's a feeling that surfaces frequently among MMORPG fans; the genre is stale, flat, treading water before it goes under, perhaps for the final time. It's not a feeling I share but it's one I understand.

If the success of WoW Classic and the lesser but still significant successes of the EverQuest Nostalgia Train and Old School Runescape prove anything it's that a lot of people don't want innovation. They want, and quite reasonably so, well-made, familiar games that play the way they understand MMORPGs ought to play.

All new buildings above ten storeys high to be fitted with zeppelin mooring masts. It's the future of transport.

It's a fine and respectable market and it deserves to be well-served. It won't, however, push the genre forward. It won't innovate.

That was what the overhyped and underprepared EQNext proposed to do. It's what EQNext's would-be spiritual successor, Ashes of Creation would like us to believe it will do. It's what any number of smaller-scale projects wish or claim or believe they can do.

And all of them are being built and designed by "industry veterans", people with a proven track record in the industry. People who know what can and can't be done. Or think they do.

Raph Koster is a genuine thinker in the genre. He does know what he's about. Even so, I find it hard to imagine a team of people around my age creating "a completely new experience that will push the boundaries of persistent game worlds and social competitive play".

I rather think that will come, if it comes at all, from some twenty-somethings who don't know what can and can't be done. People with the deep conviction and confidence of inexperience. They won't have wikipedia entries or names that ring bells. They'll have energy and ideas and uncynical self-belief. That's how we got Ultima Online and EverQuest and Asheron's Call and EVE Online and...

When they appear we'll know them by their works, not by their reputation.

Meanwhile, best of luck to Playable Games. Dad Rock has been a huge commercial success. No reason Dad Gaming can't be, too.

We All Love Our Pets: WoW Classic, EverQuest, GW2

SynCaine was singing the praises of WoW Classic's Hunter class the other day. He suggested it might represent "pet-class perfection" in the genre and I wouldn't disagree.

There are other contenders. Magicians in classic-era EverQuest had an equivalent range of options and requirements. They had to travel far and wide for some of their their pet spells, as well as having to craft most of the others (or else commission a crafter to do it for them).

Obtaining the essential focus items that empowered their pets was a far from easy task. Not to mention the perpetual buffing and keeping the pet supplied with appropriate weaponry and armor so they could function effectively.

Mages also had four very different "pets" to work with and you didn't always have access to the one you wanted at the level you'd reached. The line-up was the classic elemental quartet, Earth, Wind, Fire and Air. Don't ask me who played which instrument...

The Earth pet was a tarbaby tank that did next to no damage. The Air pet was often preferred as a tank at higher levels because of its ability to chain stun while evading attacks. It  also put out some decent damage.

Water I was never quite sure about. I  remember it as something of a jack-of-all-trades, possibly with the best dps output after Fire but able to take a lot more punishment. Despite playing several Mages over the years, occasionally to relatively advanced levels, I never really used my Water pets. 

The Fire pet, as you would expect, was all about the damage, which it dealt well and took badly. No Magician could reasonably expect to solo with a pet that had a caster's armor class and hit points, but Fire was often used, indeed generally preferred, in groups where the Mage's primary role was DPS.

Yes, that torch is right for your level. Stop questioning my decisions and don't wave those things at me. I am your master!

Elementals aren't very cuddly and neither do they easily develop a personality. I always thought of mine as tools more than entities in their own right. Hunters' pets, being animals or, as the game has it, "beasts", enjoy a considerable head start in the affection stakes.

That poses a problem for me. I tend to develop a peculiarly strong affection for my characters' starting pets in any MMORPG. In Guild Wars 2 each of my several rangers hung on to the pet they chose at character creation for far longer than made practical sense.

The question and answer session every character has to go through before being allowed to set foot in Tyria doesn't help. You're encouraged to build up an RP background for your character that includes picking best friends and favorite pets. The game then proceeds to forget about all that forever, leaving you wondering in the thirties just whatever did happen to that Charr who always had your back in the Warband or that childhood friend from whom you were once inseparable.

If you play a Ranger, your First Pet is always with you. Until you send them away. I always find it a notionally traumatic experience. I put it off for as long as possible but eventually you have to admit that pink Moa just isn't right for the job any more. It's time to send him to the farm.

The trauma is ameliorated by GW2's vast, user-friendly stable facility. You can have two pets active at any time, hot-swappable, and all the pets you've ever tamed remain permanently accessible as load-outs.

Best Friends Forever

Compare that to WoW Classic, where you get just three stable slots and can only have a single active pet available at any time. You want to tame new pets because part of being a Hunter is finding beasts with useful special abilities. But sacrifices have to be made. On a pre-Columbian scale.

You tame a beast and then, by hunting alongside them, transfer their abilities to you. That allows you to train your keeper pets to use those abilities in future. The beast that gave of its skills and knowledge is then duly discarded to make room so you can suck the next victim dry.

Or so the theory goes. I wouldn't know from experience because at level 39 my Hunter is still adventuring alongside his first and only pet, the Ice Claw Bear he tamed for his Level 10 Class quest.

Which was fine until the last couple of days. The bear (or Idiot Bear as I tend think of him, when he does the exact opposite of what I wanted him to do) has never been a stand-out tank. Compared to those EQ Magician superglue pets or the kind of bears favored by the infamous Bearbow Rangers in GW2, he's pretty hopeless at holding aggro.

Still, I've learned to work with him and most of the time he manages to keep the mob's attention well enough. Only not any more. I can't work out what changed but over the last couple of days, where I would previously have been able to send him in, give him four or five seconds to establish aggro, then DoT, stun, DD, DD, auto-attack until dead, throwing in a snare as necessary at the end if the mob turned and ran, suddenly I could barely DoT and Stun before the mob turned and ran - at me.

FFS, you idiot bear! What are you doing? You think you can taunt him by waving your backside at his kneecaps?

Towards the end of yesterday's silk-farming session at the vast and barely-visited Ogre camp outside the Ruins of Alterac, there were frequent occasions where I couldn't even send the pet and just auto-attack. A couple of arrows were all it took to infuriate an Ogre and send him bumbling my way, waving the barrel on a stick that passes for a Mace where he comes from.

Given that I was also training up Bow, using a weapon with barely two-thirds the DPS of my regular gun, I found this behavior perplexing. It wasn't a problem in that I was also training four different Melee weapons so I was happy enough to go toe to toe with the ogres, all of whom were two or three levels below me, but it seemed obvious something was wrong.

It became much more of a problem when I finished my farming and weapons training and moved on to Swamp of Sorrows, where my targets were at-level and above. I began to wonder if I'd missed some training for the bear (I hadn't) or whether there was some link between his original level when tamed (he was Level 8) and his usefulness thirty levels later.

I still don't know and since I'm avoiding out-of-game information sources I'm not sure how I can find out. Other, that is, than by the tried and trusted method of trial and error. I'm going to have to park the underperforming ursine in the stables and go and tamed an at-level bear. Then I'll need to bring him to Level Six loyalty and run some comparison experiments.

Maybe it's time I went solo. I mean really solo.

If that bear does as badly then I guess I'll have to go find some non-bear alternative tanks and try those. Boars might be good. Maybe Raptors, although they look more like DPS to me.

Playing a Hunter does indeed involve "many different mechanics" as SynCaine says. Some of them, like what each pet eats, what skills it possesses and what are its stats can be seen clearly enough in-game. As always with WoW Classic, though, I get the very strong feeling that a lot is going on under the hood.

And that's the charm of it. I find it much more entertaining to suspect something is going on yet not be sure exactly what it is, let alone how it's happening, than I do to have everything laid out before me in neatly tabulated columns. I understand not everyone feels that way but it works exceptionally well for me.

If I do prove to my own satisfaction that my first pet has outlived his usefulness it's going to be hard to consign him to history but I'll do it. With only three stable slots available I can't let sentiment stand in the way of productivity. I'm not running a rest home for cast-off companion animals here.

I guess I'd better get out there and tame something. Here, kitty, kitty!

My Little Ponies, You Opened Up My Eyes

It's Tunesday. Let's have some tunes!

A few years back, as I was ferretting about down the back of YouTube for pennies, I tried using the names of animals or colors or textures as keywords to find unfamiliar bands and songs. It was like planting semi-random seeds to see what would come up.

I grew a jungle. Certain animals - fox, cat , rabbit - sent tendrils creeping in all directions. Silk, velvet, satin. Almost any color. A cornucopia of pleasureable exposure to novelty and wonder.

• Sidebar: there is - or more likely was -  a band called "Fox Cat Rabbit". Not all that interesting apart from the name but they do have one good number, raised to another level by a mood-elevating video.

After a while I began to notice a trend: bands with "Pony" in their name tended to be worth a listen. From memory, it was New Young Pony Club, the oft-reviled darlings of the short-lived noughties nu-rave scene, who clinched it for me.

I like just about everything I've heard by NYPC. They make fine videos but they really shine in the live clips I've seen. They have that bleak edge that turns dance music so deliciously, astringently, sour. I especially like Tahita Bulmer's oddly off-kilter vocals but the post-punk rhythms are a draw, too.

New Young Pony Club is a truly magnificent name for a band. According to their Wikipedia entry, they would have been called just plain "Pony Club", which would have called to mind some kind of wistful C86 combo. Fortunately, an Irish band had already nabbed boring old "Pony Club" so NYPC added "New" and "Young", thereby taking the whole thing to an entirely new and stellar level. The power of happenstance at work there.

• Sidebar: Pony Club, the Irish band, aren't terrible but they don't get into my Pony Club. This one, CCTV, reminds me of something I can't quite bring to mind. I think it's a tune by The Charlatans. PC do have that early 90s vibe about them.

If you're not really feeling the plain PC vibe or you're worrying there's not much "young" or "new" about you any more, there's another club for undersized horses you could try: Pink Pony Club. I think they might be from Malaysia. Or maybe Indonesia. This isn't such a great song but I do like the "oooh-wah-oooh" part and, like a lot of bands from that part of the world, they manage to make the same old, same old sound like they just heard it for the very first time.

If it was only about names, the superbly-monickered Pony Pony Run Run would be Blue Ribbon winners. Unfortunately they're a bit bland and somewhat uninteresting. I'm not even going to link them. Much better to go with Montreal's wonderful Pony Up, another superbly named band, only this time one with the attitude and songs to do their name justice.

I liked Pony Up so much I bought two CDs and a digital download. They have the insouciant charm and hidden claws of Tiger Trap or Angelica amid a gorgeously chaotic DIY tumble of a sound. Their later work takes a more serious tone, which I still like a lot but, as with Woody Allen, I do prefer the earlier, funnier stuff.

Possibly my favorite and certainly the funniest is "Heard You Got Action", for which I sadly can't find either a proper video or a live version. "Matthew Modine" is a close second but I'm saving that for a post I have in mind on songs about real people. "The Real Truth About Cats And Dogs (Is That They Die)" is kind of going to the other extreme but there's a stunning live version in the Triple-J studio so let's have that.

(I should also mention that, somewhat unbelievably, there are two bands called Pony Up, both of them four-strong, all-female acts. What are the chances, eh? Ours is the indie one; the other is country and I don't like them much. Or, indeed, at all). Moving on...

I don't know much about Coma Pony. Okay. I didn't know anything about them other than what I could glean from the video, until I did some research for this post. You'd think from this video that once again I'd chosen an all-female combo. I did think that. There's a lot of it going around and long may it continue. Coma Pony also have that instantly recognizeable bell-like guitar tone so prevalent in South American bands, so I pegged them for Argentinians.

• Sidebar: Did you know that a "combo", as applied to musical bands or groups, means four people exactly? No more, no less. Or so Alan Johnson, ex-Labour Cabinet Minister turned nostalgia biographer and panel show guest believes. He's wrong, as it happens. The dictionary definition is "a small jazz, rock, or pop band". No specific number of players, just not a lot of them. Never believe a politician even when they're not talking about politics, I guess...

In fact, Coma Pony is four guys from Mexico. Don't believe everything you see in videos either.

Jetstream Pony really is the new normal for under-the-radar indie - three women and a token guy. The reverse of the punk line-up that shoved the industry doors open for female musicians by just a crack back in the late '70s. You can draw your own throughline.

They sound more 1986 than '76. There's that JAMC drone the Reid brothers stole borrowed from Can. What goes around... And "Had Enough" came out on a German label although the band are, almost inevitably, from Brighton.

• Sidebar: There's a German band called "International Pony", who were, at one time, signed to Brighton-based Skint Records. The two are literally next to each other in my Pony file. Synchronicity or conspiracy? They're a bit... I'm not sure what. They like to dress up as superheroes. Well, don't we all?

Now, here's something that really shouldn't work. If I believed in guilty pleasures, which I don't, this would be the definition. Tired Pony is a supergroup in the grand old style, formed by someone from Snow Patrol (jeez...) and featuring members of R.E.M (Peter Buck, no less) and Belle and Sebastian (the drummer, who has also been implicated in Snow Patrol-related incidents in the past). 

As if that wasn't enough of a warning salvo, Zoe Deschenel had something to do with the "project" at one point and this performance features Minnie Driver on backing vocals (mostly going "wooo-aaah" which, as has been established, is something I am a sucker for). And it's on "Ellen", who gushes. 

And yet I still like it. Mostly it's that endlessly repeated "I will love you better than him" that does it. Another thing I'm a sucker for is that helpless, desolate, wounded, lost pride trope of which Lloyd Cole is the king. It's also the power of putting "pony" in your band name. Possibly.

That's probably enough pony for one post. 

Oh, hey, no! Wait! How could we finish without something from the most famous and celebrated ponies of them all?

The Shake-Ups in Ponyville are "a power-pop band dedicated to writing, recording and performing songs inspired by My Little Pony" and the weirdest thing about them is... they're pretty good! This is probably what you'd expect and they give the fans plenty of sort of sevice but they also rock! Well, kinda...

And with that I'm outta here. Giddy up. Giddy up a ding dong!