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Blizzard's Rob Pardo asks players to direct Diablo III blame to him
When Jay Wilson announced that he was leaving his position as director of Diablo III, the forums were filled with responses. To the surprise of absolutely no one who has visited any forum in the history of the Internet, many of those responses were some variety of blaming Wilson for every issue the game might have or claiming that the game is clearly being abandoned completely. That didn't sit well with executive producer Rob Pardo, who took to the forums to tell players that if they want someone to blame, blame him. Pardo explains that he's extremely proud of the game and that everyone remains dedicated to making it the best it can be. At the same time, he stresses that he was responsible for hiring and overseeing Wilson's work, and he takes full responsibility for the game as a whole. The odds of this actually defusing forum vitriol are still roughly nil, but it does ensure that at least in Pardo's eyes it will be directed in a more deserving direction, and it's a classy move no matter what you think of the game.
Jon Bon Jovi accuses Steve Jobs of putting a shot through the heart of music
Steve Jobs, according to musical legend Jon Bon Jovi, is "personally responsible for killing the music business." This strident (and economically false) accusation comes from an interview he conducted with Britain's Sunday Times, where he candidly sets out his dismay at this century's move away from music distribution on physical media and toward ubiquitous download portals. Bon Jovi's nostalgia shines through in his detailed account of the "magical" experience of picking up records and enjoying their sweet touch and soothing analog tones -- though we're not sure how he missed out on the fact that CDs, not downloads, were the first to stab a dagger of digital convenience through the hole in his record collection. Still, Bon Jovi thinks Apple's iTunes success is to blame for the loss of our collective innocence and bright-eyed enthusiasm for music. What do you think?
Waging WAR: The blame game
In this installment of Waging WAR, Greg flips the world all upside-down-like and examines the soft, warm underbelly of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The PvE side. He holds a mirror to some of the questions he's found himself asking in bad situations involving mean, unforgiving bosses, and he shows us all how not to play The Blame Game. Oh, and HAPPY SECOND ANNIVERSARY, Warhammer Online!!! Ahem, we now return you to our regularly scheduled Waging WAR content. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is primarily about the RvR. As such, we don't often discuss some of the things in the PvE instances throughout WAR that we've all experienced at least once (or at least most of us, anyway). Whether you're heading into Hunter's Vale in Tier 1, setting up for a boss in the Tomb of the Vulture Lord, or preparing for any number of instances in-between (I can name five major ones off the top of my head), we've all been there and done that. Things have inevitably gone south for all of us at least once. For some of us, things have gone south repeatedly, on the same boss, with the same group, in the same instance. Frustration and enmity start to set in, and people start wondering, "What is going on here?" What follows then is usually a series of questions tracing a certain pattern that we ask ourselves as we try to figure out what the problem is. I guess it is only human nature to enter into this type of internal dialogue when faced with problem solving in social situations. Follow after the break to see what I'm talking about.
Officers' Quarters: Pitchforks and torches
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook, available from No Starch Press. Wipes are a fact of life. Everyone wipes. How you deal with these situations can be crucial to your guild's success. Some guilds cultivate an environment based on blame, where everyone's first thought after a wipe is, "Who messed up?" Sometimes, it's easy to figure out who is at fault: Someone with a spore goes the wrong way, or someone gets mind-controlled by the Blood Queen after failing to bite his assignment. When it's not easy to figure out, some guilds use a different strategy for assigning blame. Here is one such case: I have a real dilemma. I'm an officer, one of six, in a semi-serious raiding guild. We have 30 core raiders who raid with us, and one of them until recently was one of our druid healers, and the issue surrounding him is my dilemma. A little background information on the guild, since it is relevant, is that we have a strict rule involving loot due to some people in the past who have abused our requirement for Vent in that they wouldn't use it, or they'd log in but leave their headsets off. This caused a lot of problems with wipes and caused the officers, GM and co-GM to agree that a rule would be made that was you must be in Vent and actively listening at all times during a raid in order to be eligible for loot. This is what caused the initial problem. The player of this druid healer I mentioned before applied to our guild and told us on the application that he is deaf.
Georgia teen arsonists allegedly learned from GTA
The Grand Theft Auto blame-express keeps rolling on as three Georgia teens say they learned to make Molotov cocktails from the game. We must have skipped that level, is it the one with the points for the rape? WSBTV reports that the 15 and 16-year-old youths have been charged with 57 felony counts for a series of "car bombings" by Molotov cocktails.The real kicker here is that police figured out who the arsonists were by going to the local Wal-Mart and sifting through receipts. One had on it the purchase of "Sprite bottles, red rags and lighter fluid," then the cops pulled the tape for the time of the purchase to identify the suspects. Poor guys, the game allegedly taught them how to make their tools of destruction, but not how to get away with the crime. Pro Tip: Hop in a car and drive until out of the police's radius.[Via GamePolitics]
Teenager burns peer, blames WoW; WoW incredibly not sued
According to the Beijing News, a teenager was recently hospitalized by another, who set him on fire with gasoline, claiming later to have 'transformed into a Fire Mage' a la World of Warcraft. The author of the referring article has it right: had this occurred in America, Blizzard would have been sued by the victim's parents. Apparently the legal mechanisms for doing this are not (yet) in place in China, so this did not occur.This is an old, old topic, but since it's come up, I'll throw my 2 cp in. I've always thought it odd that whenever something like this occurs (which is all too frequently), parents and the media are so quick to demonize videogames, yet this behavior has been around since the dawn of mankind itself. Violence in movies is so much more pervasive and visceral than anything you could possibly see in a game, yet movie scenes are very rarely cited as the source of antisocial behavior.
Gadgets blamed for making the world a shier place
Though we certainly feel as if we've had this discussion before, gadgets are yet again being blamed for an increase in shyness around the world. 'Course, we doubt you'd need any fancy degree to understand the cause, but a Harvard Business School researcher and psychologist has insinuated that the ease of communicating in roundabout ways (read: not face-to-face) has caused an increase in the amount of people that feel shy in public. Essentially, it was suggested that "technology is enabling us to opt out of difficult situations and causing people to become more insular," but hey, it's hard to argue how much easier life is with a little texting mixed in, no?[Via The Raw Feed, image courtesy of ABC]
Breakfast Topic: This is all your fault and all of you suck
Every single time you're in Alterac Valley and your faction starts losing, someone starts whipping out the blame. Unless you ignore the battleground channel, you will be forced to read all about how you suck, how everyone else in this battleground sucks, how you should have done what they told you to do, and so on. Then, the other guy will pipe up with something like "would you shut up, dude? It's just a game," which sends the first one even deeper into his rage. Eventually he may just leave the match, or else quiet down while someone starts a chorus of "Guys, just let them win! I want to get my mark and go home."Personally, I'm a proud believer in the power of reason. Every time this happens, I find myself giving helpful suggestions, calming tempers, offering insights on how we could improve next time, and generally trying to play the peacemaker. Sometimes I can even find a strategy I think will turn the tide in our favor (and sometimes it works!), but usually I count myself a victor if people just see reason and behave civilly.What's your experience of people in battlegrounds who just can't handle losing? Have you been able to contain their blame explosions?
iPod blamed for stealing the thunder from contemporary art
If you've been yearning for controversy, why not meet Mr. David Hockney? Commonly know as "Britain's best-loved living painter," Hockney has suggested that the proliferation of the iPod has been a primary contributor to the recent "fallow period of painting." He insists that today's society is "all about sound," and even mentions that people are turning off their eyes and ignoring contemporary art whilst "plugging their ears." Put simply, he believes the modern "decline in visual awareness" rests heavily on Apple's own cash cow, and further stirred the pot by insinuating that it led to "badly dressed people" who cared not about lines nor mass. As expected, a spokeswoman for Apple Australia refuted the claims, and while we certainly have seen no shortage of brilliant creations since the iPod explosion, there's always two sides to the canvas.
US bars Ciber from testing e-voting terminals due to negligence
Call us crazy, but we had a sneaking suspicion all along that all these e-voting woes were due to a lack in quality control testing somewhere along the approval line, and now it seems the US government has found its scapegoat. Ciber, Inc., the Colorado-based company responsible for testing a majority of the nation's electronic voting terminals, "has been temporarily barred from approving new machines after federal officials found that it was not following its QC procedures, and moreover, could not document that it was conducting all the required tests." Aside from wondering where the oh-so-critical auditors were during this entire debacle (read: federal scrutiny of the testing began just recently), this brings into question the legitimacy of the votes that were actually placed and counted through the potentially faulty machines, but alas, what's done is (presumably) done. Eager to keep that expectedly gigantic government contract money pouring in, Ciber seems to be on top of the issues at hand, and a spokesperson for the outfit even stated that "the company believed that it had addressed all the problems, and that it expected to receive its initial federal accreditation later this month." We just hope that undercover chess functionality somehow goes unnoticed.[Via Slashdot]
Microsoft blames Apple's "quality checks" for iPod virus
Ah, how we love mindless bickering between two mega corporations. In Apple's case, its beloved iPod seems to be a globe-sized target for attacks (and lawsuits), and just a day after the company laid blame to Windows for "not being hardy enough against viruses" found on recently shipped 5.5G 'Pods, Microsoft is firing back with its own harsh criticisms. James Abrams, Microsoft's former head of quality control, pronounced that "Apple didn't know what they were shipping," and suggested that fault should be redirected to Apple's lackluster "quality and content checks." Abrams even stated that McDonald's handling of its own virus-infected DAP problem was far superior to "a lesser company's blame game." Johnathan Poon, Microsoft's current quality assurance guru, finished off the tongue-lashings by prompting Steve Jobs to "contact Poon if he needed someone to advise on how to improve quality checks." Regardless of which party is truly culpable, it looks like we've got ourselves another full-fledged Mac vs PC battle royale on our hands here, and we're certainly not stepping in to break this one up.
