annoyances
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The Daily Grind: What silly thing has bothered you about a game?
I like Star Wars: The Old Republic a great deal, but it still bothers me that I can't just sit in a chair. Same problem with RIFT, which also takes forever to give starting Defiants access to an inn. It bothered me when I couldn't toggle to walk mode in Guild Wars, it bothers me that I can't wear spectacles with a cowl in Final Fantasy XIV, and I'll no doubt find something else irksome in every MMO from this point onward. None of these are game-breaking issues. They're not even issues where the cosmetic style of the game isn't where you'd like it to be. No, these are all problems that can be worked around quite easily, but just wind up feeling annoying. So what about you? What silly and ultimately irrelevant things have bothered you when you've played a game? Strange idle animations? A lack of environmental interaction where it should have been possible? Minor inconveniences? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Breakfast Topic: What do other players do that really annoys you?
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. WoW is a game of interaction. If you want to do any dungeons, serious PvP, or tough quests, you have to work with other players. Also like the real world, occasionally we meet other people we like, some we instantly click with, some who grow on us over time, and some people who just annoy the heck out of us. Sometimes it is in-game actions we find distasteful; sometimes it is how they talk to other players or any other variety of actions that hits a nerve. With some of these people, we have to bury our dislike because they are in our guilds, and we just do an if they don't bother me, I won't bother them approach. Others, we can avoid entirely and make use of the wonderful /ignore feature. One of my biggest pet peeves is ganking. Killing someone who is 20 or 30 levels lower than you isn't honorable. It doesn't make you cool -- it is basically a grown man beating up a toddler. The worst part of it is that these same players tend to run and hide when someone their own level comes out to defend the noobs. This is a cowardly act. Another issue I have is people who use Xbox Live talk when they are frustrated -- they immediately devolve into racist, homophobic, and just awful and often nonsensical comments. My final pet peeve is people who mispronounce words in Vent but say them over and over as if it was on their word-of-the-day calender, pronouncing melee "mealie, mealie" and using it as if it were their new favorite word. Are there certain actions other players commit that really annoy you? What do you find truly distasteful? Do you have some of these people who annoy you in your guild? Or are you one of the offenders?
The Daily Grind: Taking inventory
One of the great points of commonality for MMOs is the time-honored tradition of inventory management. Specifically, the minigame wherein you have to decide what to keep, sell, throw away, or hold on to with a limited amount of space. One of the major contentions regarding the Allods Online cash shop at launch (aside from the huge debuff only removable via cash shop items) was how much it used to cost just to make a minor upgrade to your inventory storage. The prices have since changed, of course, but the irritation at inventory management was obvious. Nearly every game has to decide how much of a management aspect should be involved and the right amount of space for a given character in any stage of their career. Moreover, these aspects usually change with time, as stack sizes increase and decrease with patches. Some players see space management as a relic of games like Dungeons and Dragons, which used it to try and maintain realism in broad strokes. Others see it as an obnoxious limitation on gameplay that's long ceased to have any connection with its original purpose. So what do you think? Is inventory management a good thing, or is it one of those gameplay elements you'd like to see go the way of the dodo?
What I'd like to see in iPhone 3.0 (but probably won't)
Yeah, I know we haven't seen it yet, but based on what we do know, here's some things I'll bet Apple missed that I'd like to see ASAP. Unified mailbox as an option: This works great in OS X. I sure am getting tired of checking 3 email accounts with hundreds of extra finger swipes every day. Even an icon to get me to any inbox I want to see would be an improvement. Some people don't want this. A simple software switch would be fine. Louder speakerphone: I have no idea why this as been such a problem since day 1. The volume of this phone is just not loud enough in a noisy environment. Maybe this is a hardware thing, maybe it's software. Whatever. Just fix this! Getting to Bluetooth and location manager: These settings are just buried too deep. How about a switch in the top level of settings? Once again, save me all that tapping. Consistency of app settings: Sometimes they appear in settings, sometimes within the app. I shouldn't have to scrounge around trying to guess which app works which way. Moving icons around on the desktop: Have you ever tried to organize icons by type, or popularity? Gee whiz, what a nightmare. Maybe this could be done by dragging apps in iTunes, or some easy method on the phone itself would be even better. As it is now, it's like one of those old plastic puzzles where you had to get things in order. Every drag of an icon on the iPhone often has unexpected or at least unwanted results. This is not one of those 'it just works' things on the iPhone. Apple might surprise me and sneak some of this stuff in. Or not. You probably have your own list. Let's hear it. C'mon Apple, we're counting on you to get these things right. For the rest of us.
Breakfast topic: The good old days
I've been playing World of Warcraft for nearly three of it's four year run. It's kind of amazing to me to see how things have changed over time. Many of the adjustments have been by player suggestions, and most of them for the good. The folks I've been playing with lately don't have nearly as much time in the game. I find myself reminiscing and thinking about the way things were, and telling them how good they have it now. Some things I remember least fondly are: Single-server battlegrounds, and sometimes waiting hours for a queue. The old battleground ranking system, with one High Warlord per server. 40-man instances, if you think keeping 25 people in line is challenging, give this one a go. Epic ground mounts for 1000 gold in a time when cash did not flow so freely. Horde had no Paladins and Alliance had no Shamans. Before the report feature, I got a whisper message from a gold spammer about every thirty seconds. Many more limitations on where mounts were allowed.
The perils of crossing water on a mount
This is something we've all dealt with: my Hunter is traipsing through Terrokar right now, and nothing makes me more frustrated than hitting those little rivers on my mount and having to dismount in water. When you think about it, the logical reasons for our mounts disappearing once we hit water are pretty sound -- you don't want that cat or wolf you worked so hard for to drown. But on the other hand, it's a huge annoyance -- not only does it slow you down while crossing the water, but you have to wait another second afterwards to resummon the mount.On larger bodies of water, this isn't so bad, but those little rivers are nothing but trouble (and Gnomes have it even worse). Even cowboys knew how to ford with their horses -- why can't we do the same with our mounts?Zarhym, the new CM, doesn't seem very empathetic, so odds are that this won't change anytime soon. We can only hope that in future designs, Blizzard stays away from putting the deeper water all over the landscape, where it acts as nothing but an annoying roadblock in front of our next quest. It's not like we don't have enough problems with the water as it is.
Breakfast Topic: Those little annoyances
So like Alex, I figure I probably have a few more alts than your average player. I have 3 level 70s, 3 more characters above level 60, and a few more at various levels of play. I even started a new shaman just this past week, just because I decided I had a really cool character concept for a female Orc shaman. Anyhow, I've been playing the shaman quite a bit, and I've actually not been twinking her at all, enjoying the challenge of starting a character from scratch and making sure I still have my mojo despite getting all fat and sassy from all that easy daily money from Sunwell Isle. WoW's done a pretty decent job of keeping the lower level game easy enough for characters, but there's a couple things I've noticed while playing that still feel like they need some work. If I could highlight one, it would be the complete lack of Shaman trainers in Lordaeron.
Xbox 360 Annoyance #016: Moving
I never thought I'd find myself writing one the Xbox 360 annoyance articles, and yet here we are. I was moving yesterday, and naturally I decided I should take my 360 with me. It's ironic that with the new generation of gaming we have lost some wires, but gained many others. Wires, so you know, are the bane of my existence -- as they are for many technology enthusiasts. If you want to enjoy your 360 properly -- i.e. high definition and surround sound -- you need to configure a lot of wires. Of course you have the video cables, in my case VGA, which requires an audio adapter to work on my TV. You have separate audio cables, optical if you want surround sound. And, of course, if you have surround sound, you have numerous cables to deal with to hook up your sound system, maybe even a separate receiver. Then you have your ethernet cable, which must be hooked into a router, which has its own set of cables to deal with. Even if you use the wireless adapter -- a hardcore gaming no-no -- you'll still have to deal with a router at some point. It's easy enough to overlook these things the first time you pull your 360 out of its box, but it gets tedious when you move to a new place. Here's hoping someone finds a way to make the entire gaming experience wireless before the Xbox 720 arrives.
What are your app annoyances?
After my long-winded dissertation on Mac apps, I got to thinking how some people prefer clunky interfaces. I know people that actually like and use the horrid Sony-branded music player that shipped with Vaio's back in the early part of this century. SonicStink or something? Anyway, different strokes I guess. My wife, for instance, can't stand iPhoto's insistence on iWeb. She misses the utter simplicity of 1-click publishing to .Mac. Now she actually has to manage a website (simple though it may be in iWeb). I noticed a huge array of opinions about Disco, and of course, there are those who simply hate OS X for various and sundry reasons... So out of the apps you love, what annoys you? For me, #1 has to be Safari's lack of warning when you close out a window full of tabs. How is that supposed to make sense? At the least, let me turn that ON. Oh well, I guess it could be worse.
Breakfast Topic: The N-word
There's one word that gets my goat in WoW: "noob". With spellings as diverse as "nub", "n00b" and "nubcakes", dropping the N-bomb is seen by many players as a way to enhance their own social standing -- often with the opposite effect.I'm tired of "noob" being the default insult -- of Trade, General, LFG and local channels filling up with the word time and again. Of being called a "nub" for reasons as diverse as refusing a duel, wanting to find a group and capturing the flag in WSG. Of course, sometimes we do behave in ways that deserve reprimand -- but can't anyone come up with a more original insult? Perhaps that should be the next Blizzard competition.
.Mac syncing UI silliness
Today's "what were you thinking, Apple?" is brought to you by the .Mac System Preference pane, iSync and that "Sync Services wants to sync more than X% of your items" popup window.In case you can't figure out the silliness that is the image I've included with this post (and I don't blame you), it's a combination of the .Mac System Preference Pane (on left), the .Mac tab of iSync (bottom right), and iSync's preferences that allow me to chose the Data Change Alert percentage threshold (top left).I recently added about 200 notes to Yojimbo on my iMac that I exported out of an old copy of StickyBrain a while ago. On my PowerBook, this obviously triggered the .Mac Sync warning of "you're about to change more than 5% of your data, are you sure you want to do this?" dialog. I then thought to myself: "hmm, since I change a lot of my .Mac stuff on a regular basis, maybe I should increase that percentage so this dialog doesn't bother me again." I haven't done this in a while, but since I came up through Jaguar and Panther I was used to tweaking .Mac stuff in iSync. So I strolled on over to the .Mac tab in iSync to - oh but wait! As you can see in the bottom right of my screenshot, it sounds like iSync is no longer used to manage .Mac information. Woops, my mistake. Maybe I should open up the .Mac System Preference pane to - wait a minute... I don't see any place in that preference pane to tweak the Data Change Alert setting!By now you probably get where I'm going with this, so I'll just leave you with a question: how on earth did this happen, Apple? With Tiger, you said that you unified and improved the .Mac user experience... by sending me to three different locations and preference systems to get this figured out?Here's hoping Leopard brings with it the Mac-daddy (haha) of updates to one of your most-pimped features of OS X.
