f13.net

 :uhrr:

I'm thinking of writing an article. I got the idea while browsing through the MWO thread and reminiscing about better days! I want it to be an article that's kind of buzzfeedy. A list of really dumbfounding moments brought to us recently (or not so recently) by the gaming industry.

Of which there are many, and I can only imagine I really understand a few. My first contribution would be PGI's announcement, explanation, and implementation of Ghost Heat. Hoax linked a PGI forums post that said "I would like to remind people of all the reasons Ghost Heat is the single worst game design element ever committed to a game" and I think it only really scratched the surface of how dumb Ghost Heat is.

But first I gotta ask you guys - in loving detail, what's some of the most mindblowingly stupid, terrible, or otherwise bizarre things that have happened in gaming and game development that you still like to kvetch about? Together we should be able to get a pretty good top ten, at least.

Would need to be a separate top ten just to cover the history of EA's fuckups.

Probably an article worth writing.

The utter mismanagement of Flagship Studios, the trainwreck that was Hellgate: London, and the fact that it was followed by the stunning success that was Runic's (formerly Flagship North's) Torchlight that it managed to put together in 10 months on a shoestring budget.  It really crystallized just how utterly unforgivable Bill Roper's management was.

There's an important thing that needs to be either separated or incorporated into this idea. Can making tons of money still be considered a long-term failure? See, the Wii or what Blizzard has become, etc.

I'd like to nominate the Warhammer MMO.  A PvP MMO developed by a house who built DAoC.  I figured there'd have to be at least some carry over of knowledge on how to build and balance a PvP MMO, but that was apparently very very wrong.

Duke Nukem?  Aliens: Colonial Marines?  These are probably too easy in terms of targets, plus done to death.

Nintendo and Blizzard may have set themselves on long term trajectories that result in failure.  Who knows?

The shadow knows.

But really, the question should be: Will Nintendo be making homes consoles in a decade? To which the answer is, naw, probably not. But Mario will keep them afloat forever, let along their other properties.

As for Blizzard, eventually they will break free of Activision somehow maybe. Or everyone will just leave. If Activision can fuck up Infinity Ward, they can fuck up Blizzard.

the Infinity Ward one is pretty good, but I'm light on all the intimate details of it.

Sim City 2013 is a stunningly epic paean to all sorts of dysfunction that I'm going to struggle to mill down to an appropriate length. It was breathtakingly awesome to watch, in realtime, the process in which people slowly discovered that the absolutely broken launch had just served to temporarily conceal that the game underneath was absolute, painful shit. It's hilarious to go read most reviews for the game permanently crystallized at the point of "underneath the mess of its launch lies a beautiful jewel ready to emerge! 8.3/10"

Diablo 3 could maybe be on the list for "stupidest things" just because Diablo 2 was SO GOOD.  D3 isn't a total trainwreck (some here disagree), but given that it should have been so much better it could probably be fit into an  :uhrr: article.  Or maybe just the D3 auction house deserves a place on the list.  Again, not my least favorite thing in the world, but seems to have really cocked things up.


Also: Spore?

You need to make sure to illustrate the most salient points with a comic.

Diablo 3 doesn't even tick the radar of biggest cockups in gaming.

Well is this a list of biggest cockups or stupidest things?  

Either way, doesn't matter. We can just keep putting ideas out, and figure out it out later.  And be we I mean SamPrimary can figure it out later.

As a solution to the EA problem, I suggest you make a single entry for EA, covering everything it has done over the last decade, and then leave the other 9 slots open for non-EA games.

1. Bioware
2. TOR (this is separate from Bioware, IMO)
3. Origin
4. Mythic
5. Will Wright / Spore
6. OSI
7. Simcity
8. Bullfrog
9. Westwood
10. Basically whatever they do next.

In no particular order. That would make for a 50 page article.

D3's faecplant was I think mostly about how they completely failed to anticipate the impact that the auction house would have on the appeal formula of the game (they turned loot hunting and drops from the primary appeal to the primary frustration in one fell antigenius swoop) and how they should have considered the last difficulty level of the game to have been the one that needed the most balance attention as opposed to something they just tacked on almost experimentally, because it was what people were going to smash their faces against, pathologically, until they quit in rage.

I suppose it was also a story of how if your game is one that is progressed through via many multiple replays, your story should take the effort to not be completely terrible.

This largely seems to have to do with how blizzard is uniquely incompetent at storytelling these days. Some combination of really bad storytellers in inviolable positions alongside some weird policy that I hypothesize makes them use focus groups to dullard their stories to death.

Spore! Yes, that one's a good one. The epic transition from uncle wright's inspiring demo to a completely dumbed down product.

tl;dr - EA sucks.  Stop giving them monies.

This one is probably just a list of uniquely surreal things to experience as a gamer, usually pertaining to stunningly bad individual decisions or the consequential experience gamers had as a result of really terrible design or management of a game. It's really end-user based. There's some crossover with the epic wide-ranging incompetence of large groups, but individually surreal decisions and results make for better fodder.

There could also be a The Biggest Cock-Ups list alongside The Most Uhrr Moments

On some hard drive somewhere, I have the full audio recording of Brad McQuaid being Brad McQuaid. It's a stunning failure of being a human being.

I honestly don't believe there's any cockup in gaming quite like Sigil Games. I mean, there have been some massive top-down failures, but that thing was America's Takeshi no Chōsenjō.

Ion Storm

ha! the daikatana debacle was certainly impressively surreal, especially counting the whole JERN REMERERO IS GOANER MAKE U HIS BEEETCH thing

It is also something that people over the last 10 years have failed to learn any lessons from. Which is good for the  :popcorn:

All these developer failures are definitely worth talking about, but for me one of the biggest disasters in gaming has been the way "the community" have become such an important part of game development.  There's so much groupthink in the internet gaming community, and combined with the domination of the conversation by a vocal minority, it's a disaster.  Way too many games now try to give players what they say they want instead of what they really need, and sometimes they get rich doing it (see the Chris Roberts thread.)

XP loss on death
Level loss from XP loss
Item loss from unrecoverable corpses
SWG NGE
Day one XP nerf in Planetside
That there was a monthly fee on it equivalent to EQ1
CoH XP curve
Walking avatars in Auto Assault

Not recent, but the U.S. launch of the Sega Saturn was a pretty massive fuckup.

More good games than the Wii U.

I'm not sure individual or even clusters of design choices should be included when so many manchildren walk the face of the industry.

Wasn't a matter of games, it was the surprise announcement during E3 that they were actually going to release it that day instead of months later in September like they had originally announced. Not only did they screw over every retailer other than the four that got to carry the Saturn at launch, but they also screwed over all the 3rd party developers who had been expecting a September launch (which is why the 6 titles that were available at launch were all made by Sega). That's a lot of bridges to burn all at once.

Curt Schilling's event is probably the one that sticks out most to me in recent memory.

The Ouya, maybe?  The XBone's original unveiling?

For PC releases, the big flops recently that I've been aware of have been the War Z / Infestation: Survivor Stories launch, and the Orion: Dino Horde/Dino Beatdown thing (you always know you're dealing with a quality product when the dev changes the name to get away from the metacritic rating).

I was gonna list Curt Schilling, but comeon. He's a fucking baseball player. They aren't exactly known for business acumen or getting relevant degrees or even getting degrees.

He tried to brute force success because he could throw a ball.

I know, I was merely commenting on the Wii U.

Plus we already have a thread for it I think.

Ah yes, the ill-fated Wiki thread.

tags: Nix, GetWhatYouPayFor

What about the Phantom?

Or the glasses douchebag who worked at mythic.

Wish?

A company is at steak!!!1  I think that was Glitchless, with their amazing negative ping code.

Horizons?

Christ, I don't think top 100 will even scratch the surface.

ET on the Atari?

Oh, I misread "game development" as game design decisions, not the events. Shoulda read the rest of the thread  :oh_i_see:

You guys already mentioned all the ones that come to mind. Only one I can think of now is AC2: both launching without an ingame currency (design decision) and being will to go live and for a year without a functioning chat system (development shackles to Microsoft's back end iirc).

I bet I could get David Allen to finally talk about Horizons. Chances are Mahrin Skel would talk about Wish at this point also.

Paul Barnett's Youtube videos.

Edit: More seriously, the latest SimCity really stands out to me. The launch was beyond bad. The EA executive (I forget who) saying that it wouldn't be possible to have a single player game, followed up with some developer saying it was possible. Oh and the Nissan Leaf DLC.

King Dorito of Mt. Dew
The XBox kinect/always on/no used games fiasco
Dickwolves
Bioware (Dragon Age 2, Hepler, ME3)
SWTOR
Final Fantasy XIV
Kickstarter flops (Takedown, Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded- especially now that Al Lowe bailed from further games since the Replay Games CEO got busted sending lewd material to a minor, CLANG, Yogsventures, etc)
Origin in general being awful
Simcity

This is quickly diverging into multiple topics, ultimately (and I like that).

1. Recent notable moments of Uhrr (PGI's Ghost Heat, SimCity 2013, Colonial Marines, etc)
2. All-Time most memorable moments of Uhrr (Romero's Daikatana ad, SWO's NGE, SimCity 2013, etc
3. Legendary Top-Down Company Consuming Systemic Uhrr (EA, Ion Storm, EA, Sigil, EA)
4. KickstartUhrr

Tabula Rasa.

Ultima 9 deserves a spot somewhere, for the sheer idiocy of Garriott throwing away the script and tossing together the fetch quest nonsense that eventually was released.

Another old one, but the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie. Pretty much the end of the Sakaguchi era of Square.

Citizen Kane Moment

(http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/184dvvfh7vf9dpng/ku-xlarge.png)

/pizza is always fun to talk about.

Guys, what the fuck is PGI's Ghost Heat? I seriously have no clue what that is.

A convoluted system in MWO to prevent massive alpha strikes with similar weapons.  It ranks on the Stupid Ideas to Fix Basic Design Problems By Implementing Stupid Systems, but not really worth mentioning in comparison to some of the stuff here.

So it's something that pisses off people that don't have to look up what MWO is (I had to), but nobody else?

Yea, that's a thing no one should care about at all.

I think AC2 also deserves honorable mention for being the only MMO I have ever encountered that had actual buildings that were completely useless.  Like, seriously, how do you go from AC 1 with fully explorable buildings to AC 2 with fucking hollywood backdrop style archetecture. Oh yeah, and also having their world laid out in a cubic grid where physically crossing a line in the dirt essentially triggered an invisible loading screen where you lagged out for 10 to 20 seconds as the game loaded the section of the map you had just crossed into.....

You're forgetting the best part of AC2, which had to be that the chat system didn't even work on release.

 ghost heat is inconsequential in scale but difficult to top in terms of how amazingly and completely baffling and surreal it was for the people playing the game.

i have never seen such a complete spurting arterial wound to a game's community support of the gamemakers as what happened in the ghost heat era to Paul and pgi.

big and small, i want stories like that: moments that just .. they're just bizarrely bad.

Why, precisely is ghost heat so bad? Like, what is it?

I need to see what it is to put it in scope with this other shit so I can find out what you're talking about. Brad handing out pamphlets on Christianity seems a lot more bizarre than a shitty design decision. David Bowman getting his literal panties in a bunch over the rights to call himself the lead designer on one of the worst MMOGs in the history of the genre is bizarre.

But a poor design decision? Yea, I need details.

Can I say Serek Dmart?  I mean, I thought at one point, you couldn't say Serek Dmart here.

(Serek Dmart)

 :awesome_for_real:

Curse you and your stupid filters!

Lots of folks have mentioned the decline of Bioware, but no one has mentioned the ending of Mass Effect 3 specifically. 

Going really old school, there was Ascendancy -- the really cool 4x space game that turned out not to have anything resembling an AI for the computer opponents!

Because overall good game has kinda crappy ending isn't one of the stupidest things to happen in gaming, in the same way that Diablo 3 was a huge disappointment but not one of the stupidest things (Jay Wilson's "fuck that loser" comment though may qualify). Dislike ME3 or SWTOR all you like but at least those were actual working games. People who bought SimCity and Battlefield 4 weren't so lucky.

Stupid to me is a lot of the shit Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said trying to defend himself when that sexual harassment lawsuit became news, or Zynga making almost identical copies of other peoples' games like the Tiny Tower/Dream Heights thing. Duke Nukem Forever's development was one of the longest running stupid things in gaming. Personally I think in some ways E3 is one of the stupidest things to happen in gaming.

I think 38 Studios is the stupid thing that irks me the most for some reason. I mean there was no failed product (KoA was only a failure due to the expectations they had) to explain how they could estimate their finances so badly when it came to completing the mmo (and still go so far in to red at full speed before giving up).

It's just seems so stupid in any financial sense without any of the insane that Sigil and Brad had going on (and even Vanguard managed to make it to launch).

Since no-one has actually answered you on what ghost heat is, basically its where you fire more than 2  of the same type of weapon at once it generates extra heat over and above the heat of the number of weapons combined. It was an attempt to stop the stupid numbers of 6 PPC Stalker mechs wandering around, and it was also an attempt to stop a fundamental flaw of MWO - when you the same weapons together, they all hit the same point of the mech at the same time, something that the Tabletop game which MWO is based on had systems to prevent but which don't work on a FPS. I don't hate it as I understand the rationale behind it, but there probably could be a better system. And anyway it encourages a varied loadout on your Mech.

Tabula Rasa is actually an interesting case on how a bad launch can fuck up a good game, and how gamers say they want a science fiction MMO and then don't bother playing one when one arrives. Lesson; Gamers talk a lot of shit they don't actually want. It also shows bot to bother with a sci fi game that does not have the words star wars or star trek on it if you want to have some kind of long term success.

Speaking of which the STG NGE patch should be mentioned as a place gun barrel in mouth and pull the trigger moment.

People now forget the Command and Conquer 4 launch, which actually was the dry run for the Sim City fiasco. The servers completely melted down for a week after that launch, which meant that I (yes I was one of the dumnasses that bought that game on launch day)  could not actually play that game for a week as it needed an always online internet connection and your saves were stored online. It was a total disaster, and it didn't help that the game when I did get to play it was utter garbage. And of course they totally learned all the lessens from that debacle when Sim City came along. Ooops, they didn't.

No seriously, this is just wrong.

Attempting to build UO2 with a star wars skin.

Attempting to beat WoW at being WoW, and expecting success with a fraction of the design budget because you have a star wars skin, or a warhammer skin.

Not copying sidekicking or character design from CoX.

Buying a lifetime subscription to Hellgate London.

An XCom cover based shooter.

Games for Windows Live.

Edit:
MtGO leaving such an obscene amount of money on the table.

I am surprised that Funcom and Age of Conan has not been mentioned yet. Or is that a drop in the bucket by comparison?

I'm surprised that Anarchy Online wasn't mentioned first.

Oh, I'm not necessarily disagreeing that its a bad idea, and like I said I could think of better solutions to the underlying design problem. But at least you can see the reason behind adding it. And its certainly nothing compared to a change of game mechanics like the NGE of Star Wars Galaxies, and it certainly has not "completely wrecked the game" like other competitors so I would query why it would be in their company. Others might disagree and have it in their list and that's fine.

Speaking of lists I would say the whole "Lockboxes" think in Star Treck Online is right up there in my list, along with introdicing 5 different "reputations" you have to grind up, and Starbases requiring massive amounts of grinding to get to the good stuff.

World of tanks -> Gold/premium Ammo. Fucking up the game for short term profit hoooooo!

What was wrong with Age of Conan? I remember playing it, but the only distintive memory is some unkillable Ranger dude harrassing melee characters trying to level.

I played Conan when it started and I it didn't hold my interest, but I didn't find anything particularly wrong with it at all, apart from a lack of voice overs after the first Island, and they fixed that quickly.

Unless "not being as successful as WOW" deserves a huge gaming disaster badge. I mean its still running so it must be turning enough of a profit to keep the doors open.

It was a bad launch for sure, for like 30-45 days iirc. But while the players were annoyed as all hell about it, it wasn't like EQ1, AC1 nor UO were crowning achievements in stability either. I still remember all the conversations about how hard MMO launches were and shit :-)

This ultimately did screw Funcom's credibility all the way through AoC, and that game didn't redeem it (wasn't it, like, not even using weapon and armor stats in comabt for the first month or so?) But it wasn't the colossal high profile heavily-marketed but-complete-disaster/developer-hissyfit that others have been.

SWG NGE.

I'd like to think I'm not the only one that saw that  :grin:

STO is creeping into our consciousness whether we want it to or not!!! WE ARE MARKED IN THE GREAT INTERNET TREK/WARS DiVIDE!!  :oh_i_see:

Internet dick-slapping between Serek Dmart and David Allen over Alganon. Also the way that Alganon stole stuff directly from WoW even to the point of copying UI frames completely that included buttons that Alganon didn't use.

Everything to do with Duke Nukem Forever.

Noooooo you spelled out the name!  :ye_gods:

Wasn't there a point at release when male animations attacked faster than female animations?  Or do I have that backwards.

News at 11

Question: what are the stupidest things that happened in gaming?

Answer: Idris Corvettes sold (and purchased) at 1250$ each for a game that doesn't exist yet. (http://www.gameskinny.com/mdrty/200-imaginary-spaceships-sold-for-a-real-250000-in-star-citizen-24-hour-livestream-event)

About MechWarrior Online, "ghost heat" is not as bad as people claim it to be and saved the game at a time when balance was going out of hand and the only really unacceptable aspect of it is that it is not docuemented in the game at all even though it is super important and you have to look for how it works outside of the game, which is the stupid part. But MechWarrior keeps it stupid in many ways, and consistent with the Star Citizen idiocy, here are your 500$ gold 'mechs, which are nothing but standard versions (purchasable with money you get in game in about a week) that come with a UNIQUE gold skin. Five hundred US dollars.

EDIT: Also, pay 500$ now, get your gold 'mech Tuesday June 17th, 2014. true story.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3584773/MWO%20gold%20mechs.png)

Yea, really, the entire article should be about Roberts Space Industries.

I bet he tries to hit you up for capital, so he can try to get it right one more time.  :awesome_for_real:

People are buying Spaceships for a game that wont be complete for a year at least??? For over a thousand dollars???

I think I need to read that thread. Fuck me, I thought I was an idiot for buying the overlord pack of mechs for £80 to be delivered the following Tuesday. If Robers heads for Rio with a big bag full of Cash I will be laughing my head off.

I could talk about the major MMO that was the shoe in to win Best New MMO at the world's biggest consumer show that year but didn't win because the marketing team forgot to enter it.

Eve Online pricing in-game vanity items at up to $90 each despite the fact that no-one except the purchaser could see these items ingame, then trying to justify it by talking about how wearing expensive jeans makes you feel good and this is exactly the same. There's probably a long article just on CCP when you're done with EA tbh.

And what MMOG could that possibly be?

Nephalim: the nephaliming and the RMAH/AH system make the list for recent uhrr moments for me because I actually played the game, after buying it for $60, so that stings.

Like Simcity or the xcom shooter were really bad sounding and stupid but I people shouldn't bought them.

Ghost heat is just depressingly stupid and reveals how the designers are retarded, unable to learn anything from previous titles, unwilling to use the source material's solutions because they think they can do better and instead they make the most convoluted and cocked up piece of shit band aid "solution" that anyone with a brain can see is pants on head retarded.

Its not the NGE but its still not nice to play a game that is being designed by people who obviously don't understand the game. It feels just like when Blizz was flailing about trying to fix D3. Except the fixes were nerf everything that lets players get too powerful too fast (stupid in an arpg) then make the game so easy that the first 2 difficulties are just sleepwalkingly boring. Then they tried the Marie Antoinette tactic of guaranteeing more unique drops for awhile and so on.

The only other thing I can think of was when early in Tribes 2 tried to remove skiing from the game.

So let me get this straight. They put a mechanic in to keep people from making a very specific build when they could've just... removed that weapon?

No they have a fundamental problem that anyone who has ever played any of the mech games ever made could tell them they needed to watch out for that being that if all weapons can be fired at once and will hit an exact point, it renders the whole armor is not shared over different locations really moot.

They did nothing to avoid this pin point accuracy perfect weapon convergence problem. They didn't tweak the armor hitboxes, they didn't alter the armor in larger regions enough, etc. Anyone who has played any MW game could have told them this would be trouble.

They compounded this by not correctly implementing the heat scale and penalties the way they are in the actual game that they were getting all their numbers from. Which meant that the downside of firing all the guns at once (lots of heat, bad things) was not there.

So they created this perfect storm of a problem when they made a mech chassis that could mount 6 of what should be a high heat, high damage, weapon at once. Pilots could fire all 6 and hit the exact point. Which was not very fun because there was very little heat drawback to what players expected there to be if someone was doing that and it meant that lots of people could be killed or crippled in a single salvo that was on target. Which feels really bad when you are supposed to be a giant robot.

The community freaked the fuck out so they added this new ridiculous 100% self made up band aid fix that makes no sense except to cover up all their other mistakes and is bad for the game because its like a hidden nerf if you do secret hidden things. Except that didn't really fix the problem build in question, what fixed it was they nerfed the given weapon system into the ground, so nobody ran 6 of them anymore. At the time that they nerfed it they told the community "oh the XML values were incorrect, our bad". Just. Fuck those guys. You had to be there.

Any weapon would work. You would have to remove all the weapons  :why_so_serious:


The alpha strike combo thing has been a problem with Mechwarrior games since NetMech/Mech2. Table top rules vs in game pinpoint precision. We used to have house rules for all the leagues and ladders in Mech2 that limited you to like 3 or 4 of the same weapon, or everyone would just end up with 12 MedPulse lasers or something dumb. Mech3 was nothing but large laser boats insta killing each other before auto shutdown and Mech4 just did away with the full tabletop customization and dramatically limited weapon loadouts per mechtype.

Basically, what was actually needed was some randomization in the hit locations, like if you hit the leg some shots might go into the side torso and center torso or arm. something like that. It really affected the big crunch weapons though. Lasers you have to keep on the mech at the same point for the entire duration of the beam, missiles hit all over the mech anyway. It really effectes the 6 PPC and big multiple Autocannin builds. The Autocannon builds are still out there, and people are just firing 3 ppcs from one side then 3 ppcs from the other side if they want to stomp around with 6 ppcs, whch does have the effect of spreading damage around the opposition.

Its nowhere near the worst decision ever in gaming, but you could easily think of better solutions. But would people have howled with rage if they had implemented a distributed damage model too? If I want to use something affected by ghost heat I just chain fire them myself. I can understand people bieng annoyed by it but I cant understand the white hot rage about it.

How is APB not on the list so far?

Ghost heat rage is overblown. Christ I'd been playing the game for months with it and didn't even know it existed.  Randomized hit locations still need to be put in.


Howabout the launch of ww2ol? Taxi to victory!

WW2OL, Anarchy Online and even Conan are too old to bother with.  They were an eternity ago in online nonsense, to the point the general reaction would be, "Meh, so?" If those games were people they'd be in Jr. High now and driving in 3 more years.

This can go on and on forever. The community is quite split, 50% appreciates Ghost Heat (but hates the lack of documentation) and half the community hates it to death. Listen to the most recent No Guts No Galaxy podcast if you need a source to validate this statement.

What happened has been explained: in MechWarrior you can easily put in your 'mech enough weapons to cream anything in a few seconds. Which is not fun in a HUGE ROBOTS kind of game. This is not possible in the tabletop because they have a. penalties for using too many weapons at once (meaning you start getting persistent penalties as soon as you heat up, not just when you hit 100%), and b. random hit location which makes even the hardest "alpha strike" more bearable by spreading it across various parts of your 'mech. Being that MWO is an FPS random hit location wasn't going to work but they could have still implemented a cone of fire system or some recoil mechanics, or simply more (documented) penalties like the ones in the tabletop to fix it but they didn't, because they thought those penalties would have made the game less fun (they slow down your 'mech among other things).

As a result for this lack of a. proper penalties other than shutting off at 100% heat, and b. cone of fire/random location hits, people could just put a ton of guns in a 'mech and make it nuclear sniper rifle that could one shot pretty much everything from any range, with little consequences. Withouth going to that extreme, building solid alpha strikers was the only way to go and the game wasn't fun because the whole concept of MechWarrior where you have to think what weapons to use and when was going down the drain substituted by the utter dominance of 1-button minmaxed that could concentrate the higest fire in your most vulnerable spot and destroy your big giant robot in two seconds.

So they decided to implement a change that gives every weapon its own penalty for using a given number of them at the same time. Simply put: You shoot 1 Medium Laser you generate 5 heat. You shoot 6 Medum Laser *at the same time* you generate 30 heat. But if you fire 7 (an arbitrary number they came up with after analyzing a lot of telemetry data) Medium Laser *at the same time* then you generate a million heat. And different weapons have different "arbitrary telemetry obtained number".

This didn't force players to change builds, but it forced them to stagger their shots so they don't all hit the same part of the enemy 'mech at the same time with an insane amount of damage. For so many reasons this change, or something like this or better, was needed. It reverted the flow of the game back to what it was supposed to be, more skill required in staggering shots, more skill required in landing more hits in the same location, and damage spread on different parts of the 'mechs. So, as I said, while there could have been better ways and more elegant ones, this solution made the game better than what it was before they implemented it.

Was it the best they could come up with? Certainly not, but it is not a bad mechanic at all. If the client took the effort to tell you about it when you build a 'mech, or if a game had been launched with this system in place no one would have found anything wrong with it. It certainly DOES NOT reflect the Tabletop but I think the moment they decided to make an online competitive FPS they had to leave the tabletop behind and I cannot blame them for that. You can't balance an FPS around a turn based tabletop game.

What I consider disgusting is that they didn't find a fucking way to put that info INTO the client, especially after 6 months since Ghost Heat went live.
What Hoax and others consider disgusting seems to be that PGI couldn't design something better than this (on top of the lack of documentation).

No what I find disgusting is they created the most obvious problem ever that like anyone who played the other MW games would know was going to be an issue.

They made that problem worse with just about everything they did.

They ignored the systems that were meant to penalize that kind of of massive alpha for reasons that aren't consistent at all with anything else they do. Its clear to anyone that what really has happened was PGI was too lazy or stupid to not design a heatscale that doesn't notice how far over 100% you go so one of the most efficient things you can do is get to 99% heat then fire a massive alpha to 300% heat.

Then when all of this obvious obvious shit that people had been pointing out for ages came home to roost.

They introduced the most poorly fucking designed system I've ever seen. That is only defended by people that don't want to admit how stupid it makes the game and the devs look. Not surprisingly all of those people have invested money in this game, probably at least the price of a AAA title and I'd wager more than for most of them. MWO in general is a great preview of what type of stupid shit to expect from Star Citizen's community.

The reason they don't document it is because if they did it would make it too obvious to ignore how immersion breaking and retarded and arbitrary with no linkage to actual balance the ghost heat system is.

Ghost heat is fucking stupid, but seriously, it isn't pistol damage not stacking with rifle damage.

There are too many words in this thread about ghost heat.

Tabula Rasa wasn't that bad.

That's not true actually. If you do that you will shut down for however long it takes for your heat to get back to 100% from 300%, and all the time you are shut down will be taking overheating damage even if no-one shoots you. Its very possible to die from overheating while shut down. All shutting down does is stop you generating more heat, it does not protect you from overheat damage.

If people want the numbers of Ghost heat for "bad game mechanic" examination they are here.

http://mwo.smurfy-net.de/#weapon_heatscale

Anyway, the ghost heat vote is cast. Lets get more gaming disasters please.

Amazed that no-one has mentioned Silicon Knights and their 'Come at me bro!' lawsuit at Epic.

The Assassin's Creed storyline. We couldn't just have historical fun, there has to be some convoluted meta game.

WoW Cataclysm. The idea that redoing old content could somehow stop subscriber loss. That and actively arguing with the players about difficulty.

The Fade in Dragon Age. When content gets modded out, that's bad.

SimCity and basically every decision they made, especially unnecessary always online.

EA actually putting together Origin because they were so cheap they didn't want to pay Steam.

Mass Effect 3, where you had to play all 3 games to make the huge difference that Sheps chest might breath. And the shitty end to the story as well.

the last i'll say about ghost heat is that it was brought up here because it was what inspired me to make a list of similarly surreal moments in gaming, because I'll never forget when I was reading the developer, Paul Inouye, giving us a Super Simple! mechwarrior 101 explanation for how it was going to work, using an 'on the chalkboard' set of pictures, and just realizing that he had no fucking clue what he was doing and would never be able to balance the game. ever.

(http://i.imgur.com/9sArBqE.png)

Solve for english. (there would be no tooltips or anything put into the game or the UI to explain to players what was going on if their weapons triggered ghost heat. You had to find this chalkboard post in the bowels of the game forum if you wanted any official explanation about what the fuck was going on with your mech)

Heh, I don't keep up with video game industry news, so never saw this till your post prompted me to google it.  Now that is fucking hilarious.

MWO people are just pissed off their game isn't half the game WoT is.

Its still more of a game than World of Warplanes  :why_so_serious:

As far as higher profile kickstarter flops/fails go I nominate:

Takedown: I backed this one; it was being made by a guy who RB6 modder turned dev and some other industry veterans to bring back the tactical shooter genre. Basically the hardcore sperg stuff like SWAT/RB6 where tools/routes had to be planned. After making funding, they basically shit out an alpha as a finished game. Everyone turned on them, and most of the steam gamehub forum stuff was people asking to get it removed from Steam or set as "early access".

Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded: The game turned to be okay, just dated as hell since the whole premise of it was dated. But then the CEO of the company that developed the game got busted for sending lewd material to a minor. Guy was having sex with a 26 year-old dude who also had a 16 year-old girlfriend; who started texting him after noticing his phone # on her BF's phone repeatedly. She flipped out on him, he sent her a video of him having sex with the guy thinking it would shut her up and cause her to break up with the guy. Turns out he didn't know she was underage. Whoopsie. Al Lowe instantly broke all ties with the company.

Rise of the Eternals: I can't recall if I even got the name right. This was going to be made by the leftovers of Silicon Knights including the lead sociopath. They failed at Kickstarting it, so they made their own fake kickstarter thing on their website which also failed, then they went back on kickstarter again and failed. During this time one of the developers got busted for child porn and was sub-sequentially memory-holed and disappeared off their website. After failing to get any venture capital they finally called it a wrap.

CLANG: not much more needs to be said about this.

Yogsventures: A Minecraft clone kickstarted by the Yogscast guys, who are complete fucking idiots. Funded for a bunch of money, then they hired a guy who was "just learning Unity". The result...yeah, it was bad.

I don't watch the boardgame one but Schild might know who it was that was making some board/card game thing and funded, then everyone found out she was completely batshit insane when she said "the sun" was talking to her and said not to finish the game.

Also the guy who made the Cthulu boardgame thing and discovered it's hard to make a thing when you don't do any research on where you get shit made. He spent his own money trying to make it right and then Cryptozoic stepped in and fulfilled all the guy's orders.

The Vegas or Atlantic City or whatever Boardwalk/Cthulhu thing never should've gotten funded anyway.

The girl who talked to the sun, I mean, whatever.

Look, most people shouldn't be making a product. When something gets Kickstarted that probably shouldn't fails, I don't even bat an eye. None of the results from the projects you mention above should shock anybody.

MMOs as a whole. How did we get from the potential of MUDs and UO to this shit?

Also CLANG. Yeah. But apart from Kageru we all knew this when it was first mentioned.

Yeah, I think in a lot of those cases the stupidity award goes to the people who funded those Kickstarters. If you find out after the fact that the person behind a Kickstarter you funded takes orders from the voices she hears, chances are you probably didn't do your research before you put your money in.

My Kickstarter track record is superb. The only minor cockup was Glory to Rome, but goddamn the finished product was THE TITS. I also won a contest for a sweet print, which they delivered. The only things I'm waiting on right now are:

Baby's First Mythos: Learning with Lovecraft
Ascension Online
Moongha Invaders
Hex, sort've
Mr. Card Game

oh

Dice Age

Yea, that's a cockup.

I boost my previous MWO nomination with a Forbes article, and wonder where's the Forbes article about Star Citizen. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/12/15/free-to-play-mechwarrior-online-offends-players-with-500-golden-mechs/)

That MWO ghost heat thing just sounds like a less hardcore version of COH's Enhancement Diversification.  :awesome_for_real:

It's just a bad game design with terrible patch.
CoH is trying to patch out the fun for... god knows what.

You mean like the time there was that Eve patch that deleted people's boot.ini file? heh

Ascendancy is one I remember. I think some of the earliest dumb moments stick with me, maybe because back then it all seemed both more innocent and more inexplicable. Figuring out why John Romero took the money and ran is not hard, and these days, most of the time dumb moves are strictly about middle-management assholes who neither understand the product they're selling or the consumers that buy it. But Ascendancy was such an interesting visual design and then, well, there was absolutely nothing inside of it. Not just a bad AI, no AI to speak of. Plus tech trees that didn't really do anything. So you just played for a while and then asked, "Why isn't anything happening?"

The other really early one I remember was Outpost. Which seemed like it was going to be so very cool and then didn't have most of its features implemented. I think that was the first example of game reviewers playing a beta, saying, "This looks promising", and writing their release reviews based on the promise of everything missing in the beta being implemented. What I remember is the Sierra guys saying, "There's nothing wrong with it, it's working as designed". Even back in the primitive BBS-centric Internet, that produced howls of fury at how patently untrue it was.

Starforce. The DRM that made people who weren't peeved about DRM peeved about DRM.

Ultima 9. (Ultima 8 after the jumping patch was a good game)

Spore.

UO2.

Death penalties.

Strategy games going 3d. They're just now getting the level of graphics that would make it worth it over 2d sprites. Late 90s sprites were getting so good and early 3d was so bad.

The MWO stuff, too niche. It's like me bitching about how they went so over the top with combo strings in Tony Hawk 3. Except TH3 in the day wasn't niche like MWO. Other than basically being WoW in space mechanics-wise, TOR is a solid game and still quite fun, so I don't get the hate towards it. (renaming issues I have with it notwithstanding). I thought SWG was more fun post-NGE, but I played a rifleman which was pretty screwed under the OGE. I don't think Trammel (aside from 'not a mirror') belongs on the list, because UO showed quite well how we can't have nice things online. Something that still doesn't seem to penetrate the naive skulls of many devs. I know some people like to make fun of the developers themselves, but most people don't give a shit who makes the soup, as long as it tastes good (and if the soup sucks, I'd rather talk about that). Some of the best musicians I have jammed with are total douchebags, but I'd sit in with them any time they call because they're great musicians.

I think the fuckup you are looking for is 'WoW'. A truly tepid game catering to the LCD that was in the right place at the right time and all but destroyed the mmo niche, creatively.

LOL, "destroyed the mmo niche creatively". Please. As if the cock monglers running these things have any creativity in them. If WoW hadn't been a smash success, everyone since then would have been emulating EQ instead, and we'd still be waiting for an MMO that isn't an utter cockstab at every turn. All of the shitty, hateful design elements that Darniaq listed in his post up the thread would still be with us. I'll even add one that he missed: forced grouping. Cock stabbity stabby stab.

It went from hobbyist enjoyment to monetary device.

Let's not forget that every single MMO system has to survive the full griefing weight of the internet crashing down upon it, and there are some ridiculously fat internet nerds out there. The inevitable conclusion which the industry is slowly realizing: people only want to play online in worlds inhabited by their actual friends, not random idiots. Between stupid money and the internet, MMOs were doomed from the start.

When your solution to "we don't want people to curse around kids" is to simply disallow player-to-player communication, and you're making a multiplayer game...  :oh_i_see:

MMO's as an entire medium is a failure above and beyond probably anything - because the fuckups have been so spectacular and the money spent post-WoW has been so goddamn over the top obscene. I don't think you should differentiate any particular MMO's because they've all been shit even the ones that were worth playing. Hell, this site probably wouldn't be here if not for the fuckups of MMO's even though it started as more than an MMO rant site. There could have been several decently budgeted Hollywood movies made out of the money pissed away on MMOG's since WoW's success and none of them have been worth a fuck even compared to EQ1. Just an utter museum of failure.

For the people who are to lazy to google but mildly interested. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1820893788/katalyka/posts/239764)

Was it Anarchy Online that had the late-beta patch that put windows 2000 machines into a bootloop?

Ooh Oooh Oooh ;  what was that game that uninstalled the boot-root of your drive if you tried to get rid of it ?  It was a D&D one, wasn't it ?

That one's worth a giggle.

The re-make of Pool of Radiance could trash your Windows installation when uninstalled, not sure if there have been others.

Edit, another candidate in that same category: Sierra's HL1 uninstaller used to forcefully remove the entire parent directory of the one HL1 was installed into. Installed it into /games/HL? Too bad. No more games for you.

Witcher 2's combat tutorial. It might be the most confusing and difficult "tutorial" in all of gaming.

How about selling early access to games on Steam?

Or am I the only one that is bothered by that.

WoW meeting stones.

Beats the fuck out of what they used to do, which is sell early access games on Steam but not tell you they were early access (like Towns).

Would any of Brad Wardell's stuff make the list?  The launch of Elemental, that weird harassment lawsuit, etc?

Romero's about to make you his bitch.

Not directed at Haemish, just using the quote to make a point:

I think some of you people have developed a very interesting definition of "failure".

And when I mean "interesting", I mean matches no measurable reality at all.

Often did not meet delusion target success metrics, sure. Pissed off players by the thousands, ok. Were qualitatively subpar experiences when compared to games from genres with a narrower set of requirements, yea definitely.

But don't forget the amount of people MMOs have employed, how almost every business and design advance, and a good chuck of those people, have jumped to every one of those other genres, that there's still millions of people spending as much and billions more in hours playing them, and that outside of a niche group of ranters who have been around since the days where whole companies didn't stand in the way of direct developer/player dialog, most players don't give a rat's ass.

I mean jeezus, you all might as well say the Palm Pilot devices were a failure because they're not still around. Or Compaq. Or the Roman Empire.

Just because something is on the decline now doesn't mean a lot of people didn't make serious bank at it previously. Shit changes.

Failure is a relative term, no shit. Are you proposing a universal definition we all have to abide by, or are we free to use language as language still?

Why are MMO's a failure? How about the fact that every post-WoW release has been so well-received that the very idea of a non-WoW game charging a monthly subscription fee is strange enough that people around here, who used to be diehard MMO people some with subscriptions to multiple games, most of us see an MMO charging a subscription and are like "NOPE NOPE NOPE." The entire business model has evaporated, and that was what made MMO's so attractive as investment properties for a good decade or so. Now? What do we have on the horizon MMO-wise? Elder Scrolls Online and Wildstar. Can you think of any others? MMO's used to be big news and now it seems the only one that can make any money without being F2P is WoW. Billions of dollars have been poured into MMO's since WoW's release - is even one of those MMO's that were released since still charging a subscription fee?

MMO's are creative failures and these days, they are such huge risks, almost no one is bothering anymore when they used to be the THING to develop.

Trove and EQN/Landmark?

The disk-trashing D&D game was indeed Pool of Radiance (the "new" one, which was not a remake) - it "only" did it if you installed to the non-default path, which just about everybody did back then.


Failure at f13 means "I didn't like it".

Also you would uninstall it because it was a pile of utter shit. Not just equally bad as most party-based RPGs with an actual P&P system under the hood but actively awful and borderline unplayable.

Meh, lots of people don't like the Bioware games, or WoW, or Activision, etc. They are hardly failures by any important metric.

The Ruins of Myth Drannor "wiping your hard drive" thing also only applied to like... Windows 98, and I think you had to have no service packs installed, at a time when Windows XP was starting to come out.

This topic has failed pretty spectacularly.  Perhaps it should go on the list. 

I think samprimary wanted specific gaffes, not "Blizzard touched me in a dirty place", "all MMOs are bad", or "games with too much dialogue, LOLLLLERSKATES".

My bad, I haven't played either.

The perils of crowd sourcing with a loose brief instead of just doing it yourself.

I think there's a lot of useful and directly pertinent replies in here amid the general thrashing about around MMOs etc.

My addition would be the general bone-headedness of publishers and companies this cycle and their insistence to dictate what consumers should like and how they should use/consume stuff, despite ample evidence to that this doesn't work.

EA's insistence to follow a broken monetization strategy with their franchises even though it doesn't work and worse is counterproductive.
Microsoft's insistence on always-on DRM, Kinect, etc. even though the kinect hasn't been a customer draw nor did anything to add to game design and even though they had to backtrack on basically every policy they devised.
The insistence of publishers to shoehorn multiplayer into basically any franchise even though people don't play and even though it adds costs and delays to products that should have always been single-player experiences
Nintendo's insistence on a business model that makes sure they sell less units each console cycle and has pushed away all third parties.

Basically the ability of the big publishers to repeatedly fall on thier face without learning anything as if somehow the result will be different after the fifth total faceplant.

Well, to be honest the insistence of publishers to add multilayer is encouraged ny the horde of rampant "WHAT ABOUT MULTIPLAYER THIS MUST HAVE MULTIPLAYER THE ONLY ADJETIVE I KNOW IS GAY AAAARGH" horde of morons that insist that multiplayer is always the most important thing in a game and that singleplayer is "gay"

And of course Valve repeatedly saying that a minority of people who played half life 2 and its expansions actually completed the single player campaign (And that wasn't a hint that it was shit.)

I know EQN/Landmark are going to be F2P (discounting the whole pay for alpha founders nonesense). Is Trove sub-based or F2P?

EDIT: And now that I think about it, how about the stupidity of all these Founder's Packs for alpha access shit on games that won't be finished even when the dev runs out of money and calls the game released? Looking at you, Mechwarrior, thought it's certainly not the only culprit.

Has anyone mentioned Day 1 DLC yet, or is that rolled into the Mass Effect 3 shenanigans?

ctrl+f

sb.exe

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Really f13? Really?

Hmm yase, Microsoft, EA and Sony set up and funded entire MMO divisions for "hobbyist enjoyment". Now please excuse me, my eyes have rolled clean out of my head and I must pick them up from the floor.

(Yeah, yeah, Turbine only had their game published by MS rather than funded. Details, details.  :grin: ).

And an actual example: The unsustainable "Blockbuster or bust!" AAA-game development model. It's only going to get worse from here on out.

It's the same with Movies and Books. All media produced by large companies follows similar patterns. I wouldn't call it a game specific thing.

MUDs == hobby
MMOs == money

So you didn't really dispute a word I said, but thanks for playing.

here's the ones I'm starting so far:

"You're a gamer who has purchased and downloaded Sim City 2013 to be ready for the launch. You're probably a fan of the venerable series. You're probably pretty excited about their much-touted Agents system. You start the game, and .."

and

"You're a gamer who has been playing Star Wars Galaxies for some time. Apparently, something called the New Games Experience is getting patched in, ..."

and

"You're a special little snowflake that just bought Aliens: Colonial Marines. ..."

and

"As a longtime fan of the franchise, you are excited to partake in an eagerly anticipated new Final Fantasy MMO, successor to 11,"

Final Fantasy is too easy, everything has sucked since VI.

I don't even know what the deal is with Aliens.

I think it sucked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uWrXA3nwU4

Bad games are bad, I guess.

Combat in Anno 1404 probably goes on my list as one of the most headscratching mechanics in a game I absolutely adored otherwise.

describe it?

Aliens Colonial Marines was like a shit burrito with all the layers of badness it had.

Stuck in development hell for seemingly forever, they basically used the money Sega gave them to make the game to instead put more time into Borderlands 2. They then farmed out the game to another studio who produced a gigantic pile of shit after making what was a Vanguard style "Dog and Pony show" fakedemo to woo the press (which didn't work so well since even the very gussied up demo wasn't great).

Still, just a bad game.

It's a bit more than that considering Gearbox pretty much completely fucked Sega over.

It's like a slow moving non-tactical version of military in an economic simulator. It felt like, well we have to add it in there so we will. It's an indirect system of combat. You build a camp, and the camp does stuff, you can give orders to the camp, but not orders to the units. Everything moves at a snails pace and the whole system feels like it's moving in molasses.

You have to move camps to get close to targets, but they can't counter attack in that move. Then they have to set up, which takes longer. Then, they can finally do stuff, you can only choose attack or defend. Then you can assist with other camps. Otherwise, units do their own things and are represented by health bars on the camps. It doesn't sound horrible describing it, until you play it and realize this can take FOREVER. It creates these stupid long battles over nothing while all you really wanted to do was trade spices.

Yea, but Sega sucks and nobody cares.