failure
Latest
A Mild-Mannered Reporter: So what's the deal with Champions Online?
Let's be honest here. Champions Online is not in a good state. A couple of weeks back I wrote about how expecting a limited-time event to flesh out the game's endgame is silly to say the least, and I stand by that. But there are two issues under discussion here, and the second is "does the game need more content?" The answer, right now, is an emphatic yes. An event isn't the place to go looking for that content necessarily, but this is still a pretty significant problem, and the game certainly doesn't look as if it's fast approaching its fourth year of operation (and it is). So what happened? It's no secret that the game launched to some pretty poor reception, but that doesn't account for the way that the game has been managed since then, especially when its free-to-play conversion has by all indications been reasonably successful. So why is it that after nearly half the lifespan of City of Heroes it still feels like a game that just recently launched?
MMO Family: Failure isn't just an option; it's a requirement
The other day, I stumbled on an interview of author Paul Tough, who wrote the book called How Children Succeed. He stressed the importance of building grit, curiosity, and character in our children as they grown and learn. In addition, he emphasized the need to let our kids fail as they grow. In an age of helicopter parents and trophies for all, his message is simple but uncommon. It's not unusual to hear people debate whether children are getting soft because of the need to protect them from failure. Could video games actually be the answer? This week, let's look at the topic of failure to see whether it might be more than an option -- it might be a requirement.
Apple needs to learn how the Internet works before iCloud evaporates
Last week a former Apple employee posted a scathing breakdown of Apple's cluelessness in cloud services. The article notes that Google is getting better at design faster than Apple is learning to grok cloud services. Let's see, we've gone through iTools (yes, I'm ignoring eWorld), dot mac (the very name was awkward), iWork.com (forever a beta, now defunct) plus MobileMe and now... iCloud. For users of all of these services, the reality of the experience fell short of the promises made by Apple at packed-to-capacity keynotes. In the case of MobileMe's calamitous debut, those failures meant a team-wide, brutal evisceration by the CEO. Is the same angry finger-pointing happening now? Maybe it should be. Apple makes great hardware, adequate software and terrible web services. It's a huge problem for the company, and it will continue to weigh Apple down as iCloud continues to offer sync and data management nightmares. This time it's personal Let's ignore the myriad App Store errors. Let's forget what a clusterfudge MobileMe was, or how Apple-hosted mail dies like Prometheus (regularly and painfully). And does anyone even recall the "exclusive" dot mac Dashboard widgets we were promised? No, you do not, for good reason. Apple hasn't seemed to have its eye firmly on this stuff until very recently, when it realized that forcing customers to connect their Mac or Windows machine with a cable to sync iDevices was a patently bad idea. Well, that and Google (and pretty much everyone else in the Valley) has been beating them to death with excellent online services for a few years now. My own bout of horrid luck with Apple's ignorance of data integrity and web tech kicked off over Thanksgiving. While returning from a friend's new home, I needed directions to my own house. I figured I'd ask Siri for directions (again, let's forget how Siri has been up and down). Whoops! Siri suddenly didn't know where I lived or who I was! Why? Because my own primary account info had been deleted from Contacts. And iCloud. And all my Apple devices using iCloud. Unbelievable. I'm not the only one who has had contacts mystically disappear. Granted, the designation for the "primary contact" or "My Info" is a local Siri setting, not something that would necessarily sync back to iCloud. It's not linked automatically to your Messages emails, for instance; those are stashed in iCloud directly, and I've been able to associate a number of former emails (@mac and @me) with various iDevices so Messages could route to them. You'd think that there might be a flag to prevent your "My Info" contact from vaporizing, so the "me" the iPhone knows is a bit more protected. On the other hand, it would potentially be weirder if the iPhone didn't respect contact changes from the cloud (iCloud.com, in this case) and left you with a phantom, unsynced "me" contact. At any rate, I soon discovered a number of my family members had been deleted, including my dad and my children. The relationships were saved into my primary contact, which was also deleted. My mom was still in there, along with six instances of Apple, Inc. Since I started using contacts across devices and syncing them, way back in the Palm Pilot Pro days, I've never had such a massive screw-up with my data. Duplicates are one thing. Removing user data without warning or even good reason, at the risk of breaking things (like Siri and Maps), is just bad business. To be fair, things can go awry if you hold your nose wrong in Google and Exchange contacts, but what is baffling is the inconsistent behavior and the inability to pin down how sync is really working. I tried a number of tricks to divine how things got so messed up, scouring my Macs, iCloud.com and my iDevices for discrepancies. At one time I had four multiples for almost every contact. At another time I had half the contacts I had before. I still have a huge mess on my Mac, including 4 copies of every group I've ever created (which are practically useless as Apple doesn't seem to grok groups that well either -- add that to the ever-growing list). But I did manage to stem the magical deletions. Incidentally, a call to Apple for help left the tech handling the call baffled, and none of my questions about the sanctity of my data were answered. I solved this problem on my own. Here's something I learned: if you want to see what Apple really thinks you have in our address book, log in to iCloud.com and check. iCloud represents "the truth" as far as PIM data is concerned -- it stores the only real copy of your data. I'm still unable to remove the 800 or so duplicates in Contacts, but for now I'd rather err on the side of keeping the data rather than losing it. Fixing contacts If you're having issues with contacts, I encourage you to check out these potential solutions. My issue was far simpler, it seems. One of the joys of being a loyal Apple customer for three decades means that I have a plethora of email suffixes. My iPad 3 happened to be using @mac.com to log in to iCloud, whereas everything else appears to have been using @me.com. Unfortunately the email forwarding config is completely independent from the Apple ID being used to sync your various iCloud applications. I made the mistake of presuming my Apple ID suffixes wer somewhat interchangeable. For a while, it really seemed like that worked, since when iOS 6 first came out I tested Maps and at the time Siri knew where I lived. Something changed, but with the black box that is iCloud sync, it's hard to say when. Apple has some ID issues going forward. For one, you cannot merge Apple IDs. For whatever reason, I happen to only have one Apple ID (that I know of) -- that means I'm a lucky person! Unfortunately Apple's databases apparently cannot divine the sameness in my addresses as it pertains to iCloud services. Thus, the one disturbance in the force (a different suffix on my account email) was enough to start deleting contacts, willy-nilly. I don't know about you, but if I were a small business owner I would think again before trusting my data with Apple after reading just a few of the many discussion groups on the topic of data loss around iCloud. I'm still not 100% convinced that iCloud won't just randomly delete my data. As a lifelong Apple customer, I find myself hesitant to recommend its products because of this critical failure. Your data is hardly more replaceable than your device, but I sometimes forget Apple is in the hardware business. Things are bad right now, but maybe they'll get better And "things" are worse than most people know. In almost every discussion I've had with developers, I hear some horror story about iCloud. Ordinary users are bitten regularly with missing data, and not just contacts. We're talking about work documents. Can you get those back? Often, you cannot. There is no Time Machine for iCloud documents on iOS. Versioning? Good luck with it. How we wish Apple could have bought Dropbox. Issues with iCloud document management are documented elsewhere, so I won't go into that. I'm talking about Apple being incapable of simply storing your data. It seems the company just can't do it. I don't know that I can stand another @whatever, either. I wish Apple would pick a technology and stick with it. In perspective, iCloud issues represent a small group of dismayed customers. As I kvetched on Twitter about my predicament, I was reminded by others how data is routinely lost across a variety of company cloud offerings. No system is perfect, that much is obvious. But what is also obvious to me is that Apple, on a fundamental level, does not get cloud services. This is wasn't a big deal in the eWorld days, but today it's the biggest problem Apple may face. iTunes Match, iCloud mail, Messages -- the list of failures in this area is growing longer than the hardware achievements of the company. There's a Twitter account for iCloud downtime that makes the former IT nerd in me want to Hulk smash some Xserves. In the end, it could be these user-facing services and their continuing failures that impacts the bottom line of Apple. What Apple needs to do is focus on the back end for a bit and fix the underlying technology problems a few legacy systems have caused. Stuff like taking an entire store offline to update a product catalog is no longer retro chic, it's downright embarrassing. The biggest question of all is whether Apple will figure this out before it is too late. Then again, maybe next year we'll finally get an update to the Mac Pro.
Breakfast Topic: Do you view death as a failure?
Have you become so comfortable in WoW that dying during the course of normal play makes you die again -- from embarrassment? Progression raiding aside, death as a personal failure certainly seems to be the prevailing attitude in some quarters. When you're so familiar with every nook and cranny of the content, the general mechanics, and your character's abilities that you can recover from just about any momentary lapse of attention or care, death does begin to smell a little fail-tastic. Or does it? My fondest memories in any MMO almost always revolve around moments of temporary insanity -- times when we bit off way more than we could chew and somebody (or everybody) died spectacularly as a result. Heck, there's even a guild based on the premise! Still, you won't get very far exploring the range of what your character can do if you never push the envelope. Some players relish the challenge of seeing how far they get soloing a raid instance; others quail from the inevitable string of deaths. An overly cautious approach can push activities like PvP completely off the table for players who are afraid that death equals failure in their eyes and the rest of the players around them. Does death during the normal course of questing, grouping, or running a raid you're fairly familiar with represent a personal failure to you? Do you feel embarrassment when you die in front of other players? Do you prefer that the game be balanced so that you rarely if ever die? Maybe you believe a little death and danger add spice to in-game life. If you wish WoW's overall challenge rating were a little less forgiving, do you think you'd feel comfortable with dying more frequently, or do you think the bar and community attitudes on death and skill are already firmly entrenched?
GDC Europe 2012: Designer says American gamers can't handle failure
Game designer Don Daglow turned a few heads while participating in a GDC Europe panel this week. The industry veteran and co-designer of AOL's 1991 Neverwinter Nights MMORPG said that Americans don't deal well with failure, particularly in gaming. "The idea of failure has been dramatically reduced," Daglow said, before going on to opine that this stems from an educational system where failure has been removed from the curriculum. He also said that many gamers blame their failures on the game itself instead of analyzing their mistakes and trying again.
Storyboard: The RIFT project - conclusion
The RIFT project was a complete and utter failure. I'd like to say that this was something that I came to conclude very late in the project, but honestly it happened early on. Both Ms. Lady and I knew that the project had failed irrevocably, and while I'd like to think we tried gamely to keep running it as if the project were ongoing, I think we failed even at that. So, yes -- this is a project that ended in failure. But it ended in failure in the best way possible. Even with that having been said, the project didn't take off in the direction I had hoped and certainly didn't have the results I'd conceived of when I first came up with the project. So it's worth examining what worked, what didn't, and what advice I can give anyone else attempting a similar project in the future. I think it's a worthy idea, but I think that ultimately it just doesn't quite work.
OpCapita picks up GAME retail chain, plans to keep 333 stores open
The staff of UK video game retailer GAME's remaining 333 stores can breathe a collective sigh of relief today: investment firm OpCapita is buying the chain. "We are pleased to have reached agreement with the Administrator," declared managing partner Henry Jackson, "We strongly believe there is a place on the high street for a video gaming specialist and GAME is a leading brand in the £2.8bn market in the UK." The retailer's UK assets will be transferred to Baker Acquisitions Limited, an OpCapita funded company. The firm stated that it has "no plans for any further store closures," and that it hopes to safeguard the remaining 3,200 jobs the chain still has under its belt. Read on for the official press release.
UK retailer GAME goes into administration
Retailer Game, owner of the Game and Gamestation chains has entered administration. The chain has 1,270 outlets in Europe and Australia and rumors have circulated for months concerning unrest at the highest levels of the business. It was unable to agree deals with publishers Capcom and Electronic Arts for the latest titles, meaning it had to turn away customers looking to buy Mass Effect 3 during its blockbuster opening weekend. After the board informed shareholders that "it's uncertain any of the solutions [...] being explored by the board will be successful," the company's share price fell by 71 percent. A week later, the company withdrew its share listing from the London Stock Exchange as its share value collapsed to from 62p a year ago to 2.39p. A statement released today said that insufficient progress had been made in finding a rescue solution, but the company will continue to trade while talks continue: "Further to this morning's announcement of the suspension of trading in shares of GAME Group plc, the board has concluded that its discussions with all stakeholders and other parties have not made sufficient progress in the time available to offer a realistic prospect for a solvent solution for the business. The board has therefore today filed a notice of intention to appoint an administrator. In the short term the Board's intention is that the business will continue to trade and discussions with lenders and third parties will continue under the protection of the interim moratorium."
Flameseeker Chronicles: Setting up for success
Community Team Lead Martin Kerstein updated the ArenaNet blog a few days ago with some information about his team's plans for the Guild Wars 2 community. The two big bits of news were that there will be official forums (to the evident skepticism of the Guild Wars 2 Guru mods) and there will not be a typical fan site program. The most interesting bit, to me, is this: "Our goal is to use a scalable, inclusive ecosystem instead of a rigid fan site program that doesn't scale well and excludes large parts of the fan base." What I'm hoping this means is that the team members are opening themselves up to a lot more flexibility in which fan sites they support. This is great if it means that small blogs and niche communities can be more easily promoted; we already see this happening, as the Guild Wars 2 twitter feed is usually full of retweets pointing out various fan creations and posts. The flip side of this is equally true. In his article, Kerstein talks about wanting to promote a mature and helpful community, so hopefully the lack of a rigid structure in fan site support means the team members don't feel pressured to include and support toxic communities just because they've hit standardized milestones. I have high hopes for this scalable community engagement style, and I hope to see it pay off for a lot of smaller fan sites and projects. If the folks at ArenaNet want to demand more of the quality of their community, more power to 'em.
Virgin Media suffers three hour outage days after announcing super-fast broadband
Less than a week after announcing it would double customers broadband speeds nationwide, Virgin Media suffered a nationwide blackout that sent the network dark for most of Tuesday evening. At 5:00, the service dropped after router hardware decided it couldn't go on streaming the same episode of The Jeremy Kyle Show to the nation. The company admitted to the fault and service was restored by 8:00pm. Had it been smarter, it could have gotten away with passing the whole thing off as a SOPA protest, but we admire Virgin's honesty -- even if it did lead to the brilliant comment on Twitter pictured above.
The Daily Grind: How many times do you try before you give up?
The other night I was sitting on my couch watching my wife tackle a particularly hard boss solo -- the game wouldn't allow her companions or other players -- in Star Wars: The Old Republic. And she died, many, many times. I gave her a few pointers and watched as she continually struggled to overcome this challenge. After 14 attempts, she succeeded and was giddy from the victory. But I could tell she was growing close to throwing her laptop across the room right before that point. I could identify, as a week earlier I had spent an hour and a half trying to master a tricky series of jumps to get a datacron on Nar Shadda, only to land it right before I lost my sanity. So what about you? How many times do you try a difficult challenge in an MMO before you give up? I'd love to hear specific stories about particularly problematic obstacles that resulted in eventual success or frustrated surrender. 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!
Is Google Voice down between Sprint and Verizon?
Tons of people have contacted us pointing to a Google+ group full of angry Sprint customers who have found themselves unable to contact Google Voice users on Verizon's network. It seems that whenever you try to make a call, it rings once before returning a busy signal -- but the problem goes away when the app is uninstalled. It looks like it's isolated to Sprint users and the people who emailed in are really concerned, since they now use Google Voice for emergency calls. Is there a service outage or something more deliberate? We'll try to find out what's going on, but if you're having the same issue, sound off in the comments, folks. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
The Kodak Moment it never wanted: company reportedly prepping for Chapter 11 filing
Tough to smile in times like these, folks. Barely three years after yet another staple in the photography business filed for Chapter 11, Kodak is reportedly getting its paperwork in order to do the same. The Wall Street Journal has it that bankruptcy protection is looking all the more likely in the coming weeks, as its efforts to hawk a "trove" of digital patents proved to be in vain. As it stands, the employer of around 19,000 is currently working with lenders to secure around $1 billion in debtor-in possession financing to keep it alive during the actual bankruptcy process. Should this all pan out, its portfolio of 1,100 patents would then be re-listed via a court-supervised bankruptcy auction. Oh, and to make matters worse, it warned earlier in the week that it could be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after Kodak shares closed at under $1 for thirty straight trading days.
Richard Garriott: 'Exceptionally unusual pressures' helped tank Tabula Rasa
What truly happened with the sad tale of Tabula Rasa, the scifi MMO that had the full backing of Richard Garriott and NCsoft -- and yet lasted only 15 months before being shuttered? For the full scoop, it's good to go right to the source: General British himself. Garriott sat down with Eurogamer for a candid dissection of what went wrong with Tabula Rasa. Ultimately, he feels that he did not do enough to make the game the best it could've been. Initially, Garriott's team brought on several Asian developers to help shape the title to be appealing to the Eastern market. The partnership didn't work out, and after two years the team basically started over. By then, Tabula Rasa was already struggling. "So Tabula Rasa started its two-year late restart under exceptionally unusual pressures and with understandable corporate discontent, which made it very difficult to finish," he said. Garriott then acknowledges that the MMO's failure has caused players to be wary about his future projects: "Since Ultima Online was a fair time back and Tabula Rasa had its troubles, it makes perfect sense that people would go, 'I'm cautious as to what my expectations are.'"
The Road to Mordor: Anatomy of a failed quest
After last week's column on the 10 most memorable quests in Lord of the Rings Online, I had a couple of people ask for the polar opposite: the 10 worst quests. While I know that there are many -- stupid Sara Oakheart escort! -- they don't stick in my mind the way the best ones do. However, I think it's worthwhile to examine one such quest to see how game design can fail the player in small but meaningful ways. The quest in question? Rise of Isengard's Taking a Stand, which, coincidentally, was the only quest I've done this past week, and not because I was super-busy but because every time I'd log in I'd hit my head against it, try it a half-dozen times, and then give up out of frustration. Rinse and repeat. Since it was part of a chain and I am trying to do all the quests in RoI, skipping it wasn't a possibility. It had to be done, and it stood between me and the remainder of the content like a bully that's four times my size and has no compunction against shoving me to the ground. So what was it about Taking a Stand that failed me so badly? And what could Turbine learn from this quest for future reference? Hit the jump as I break it down, piece by stupid piece.
In-app purchasing fail on iTunes is starting to bug developers
In-app purchases via iTunes have apparently been failing in a big way for the last ten hours and app creators who depend on this heavily taxed income are getting antsy. We're hearing unconfirmed speculation that the problem may be connected to fake purchase receipts getting into the system. Whatever the cause, one developer told us the failure is "losing lots of sales" for apps that use receipt verification and is "threatening to more-or-less take down the entire IAP ecosystem." Seeing as Apple insists on this being the only route for in-app purchasing, they'd better fix it pretty darned quick. [Thanks, Tipster]
The Soapbox: The Republic must stand, the Republic must fall
Disclaimer: The Soapbox column is entirely the opinion of this week's writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of Massively as a whole. If you're afraid of opinions other than your own, you might want to skip this column. So there's a game coming out called Star Wars: The Old Republic. Maybe you've heard about it once or twice. It's no secret that a lot of people are excited to see what BioWare's long-anticipated title will do once it's finally released. The title has had a huge amount of time and money poured into its production, extensive voice acting, countless demos and revelations and debates... all without having yet amassed a substantial playerbase. What happens when it gets released will have a huge impact on MMOs as a whole for years to come, and even if the developers aren't calling it a World of Warcraft-killer, a lot of players are expecting just that. And for the good of MMOs as a whole, it needs to be just that -- but at the same time, for the good of MMOs as a whole, it needs to fail.
Storyboard: Making it worse
Last week, I talked about how cross-eyed the whole roleplaying dynamic looks when compared to MMO progression models as a whole. Some of you probably looked at that column and shook your head in confusion, either because you don't roleplay or because you have a much lighter method for RP (which is perfectly fine -- I wrote a little while back about the fact that there's a lot of RP that covers a very wide band). Others probably looked at my litany of recent misery-inducing events in my character's life and wanted to know how to get to that same point. The former group I can't help a whole lot, but the latter group is the focus of today's column. If you know you want to get your favorite characters up into a tree while being pelted by rocks, you need an idea of what sort of rocks make the best projectiles and what the worst trees are to climb down. So let's take a look at ensuring that your character pretty much fails at everything he or she tries to do -- and how to succeed after all.
Intel to finally issue firmware fix for faulty 320 series SSDs (update: available now!)
When Intel first unleashed its third generation 320 series SSDs, we were thrilled with their prices that were 30 percent lower than Chipzilla's previous offerings. The love fest didn't last long, however, as many customers soon found they hadn't gotten what they paid for -- drives of all sizes were reporting only 8MB of capacity due to flawed firmware. Well, good news, storage speed demons, Intel's in the final stages of testing a firmware fix, and it'll be made available "within the next two weeks." SSD salvation's only a few days and a download away, so hit the source for the full details. [Thanks, Philip] Update: Look's like the update's live folks, so just head on over to second source link below and get all those bytes you paid for!
Choose My Adventure: Dat's it, boss, I'm outta here
As of today, I'm finished with Warhammer Online. Today is my final installment of Choose My Adventure, with the torch passing along next week to Larry Everett. Before anyone asks, yes, I'm definitely going to miss the feature... but that's not really what you're here for at the moment, is it? You're here for the fanfare, and it's all over but the depressing part. Last week's vote was overwhelmingly meta -- rather than a recounting of events, the audience clearly wants to hear my thoughts on the future of Warhammer Online, what worked and what didn't, and why the game followed the trajectory it did. (Also, an awful lot of people want to know about the Choppa Song.) I'm admittedly coming into the game late and with somewhat less passionate eyes than many of the game's fans, but looking at my experience, I think I found a lot of the game in microcosm. I see all of the things it did right... and in hindsight, where certain choices went wrong.
