:uhrr:, the article: what are the stupidest things that happened in gaming?

[IainC]

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.

[schild]

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.

And what MMOG could that possibly be?

[Hoax]

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.

[schild]

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?

[Hoax]

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.

[Fordel]

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


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.

[Sir T]

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.

[Furiously]

How is APB not on the list so far?

[Shannow]

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!

[Merusk]

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.

[Falconeer]

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).

[Hoax]

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.

[eldaec]

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.

[Surlyboi]

Tabula Rasa wasn't that bad.

[Sir T]

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.

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.

[IainC]

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

[Paelos]

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.

[Sir T]

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.

[Samprimary]

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.



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)

[Teleku]

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

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.

[Draegan]

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

[Sir T]

Its still more of a game than World of Warplanes 

[Fabricated]

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.

[schild]

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.

[lamaros]

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.

[Velorath]

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.

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.

[schild]

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.

[Falconeer]

I boost my previous MWO nomination with a Forbes article, and wonder where's the Forbes article about Star Citizen.

[Zetor]

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

[rk47]

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

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

[Nevermore]

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.

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

[Khaldun]

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.

[Sky]

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.

[Sky]

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

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.

[Hutch]

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

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.