About once a year we get to the holiday season when we still want to make sure we have content, but we’re also really tired of receiving our rewards. These are perfect times to look back on the past year, and if I haven’t been clear enough about it yet, it’s been a year. I’m not having a good time! But I still write Vague Patch Notes every week, something I’ve been doing since 2018 in the form of a column I pitched to Bree with the idea of ”what if I just wrote a column about, like… games.” thing every week?
It turns out that a week includes a lot of things, and this week I’m looking back at a year’s worth of things I wrote this week, especially my favorites. These are not necessarily sorted to any extent beyond what is stated; These are just my five favorite columns. If you preferred other columns, hey, I’m happy! I think I’ve written some good ones. These are the ones that struck me the most.
Vague patch notes: The MMO you play isn’t always the MMO that was designed to be
Sometimes I have things that stick with me, and one of those consistent things is the persistent belief that if you can play something without interacting with X, then X doesn’t necessarily exist. And to be clear, I understand where this comes from on a personal level. If you’re playing a game purely recreationally and your work isn’t focused on evaluating these things, it’s generally fine if you’re not looking for things and therefore not seeing them and having to think about them.
But they are always there. For example, I don’t go out of my way to look for people with offensive pet names in games that let you rename your pet, but my work East I look at these things in totality, and I have to evaluate them base on their entirety. It’s important to understand that while you enjoy a given game as a game you play with another person, it’s not the game itself, and it’s not what you need to talk about as a text.
Vague Patch Notes: MMO Fans Create Divisions That Don’t Exist
I wouldn’t consider these two columns to be sister columns per se – they weren’t conceived as part of a larger thesis – but they certainly both end up addressing things that regularly happen to be endemic to specific communities. And when I look at the two juxtaposed columns, yeah, there East a guide here. After all, these two chronicles ultimately constitute a kind of reality check; you can’t separate things you don’t want to consider or create different compartments that don’t actually exist.
Honestly, what I particularly like about this column is the reaffirmation of the idea that even if gamers see two things as different products, that doesn’t mean the studios that maintain them do. I think that’s a valuable lesson to keep in mind, and it’s disappointing that it seems so difficult to realize that any given studio can see two things selling the same basic offering as one contiguous idea.
Vague Patch Notes: MMORPG Development is a Guessing Game
I’m as guilty as anyone of tending to think I know more about the future of video games than I actually do. The difference is that I do a lot of research before expressing my opinion, so my guesses are somewhat educated… which still means they can be savagely false, a fact I am reminded of regularly, because as this article points out, it is always a guessing game. It is Never a sure thing. You can have access to the best data in the world, and it can tell you a story, and you can act on all this beautiful data and then find out that you were completely wrong.
A friend told me she found this conclusion rather depressing, but I personally think it’s just an important thing to understand. Of course, everything is a guessing game to some extent, but you can make more educated guesses and choose what you do when you discover that some of your guesses didn’t pan out. Do you double down or change things once you have better information? This is a much more important skill than being able to guess first time.
Vague Patch Notes: Can you really hate an MMO you don’t play in a way that matters?
So here’s a fun fact. If you’ve heard of Betteridge’s Law, you probably like to apply it to writing: “If you ask a question in the title, the answer is no.” Ian Betteridge said this because he thought it was bad journalistic practice for articles where the response is vague and a publication wants to publish instead of verifying sources. But ironically, Betteridge se I actually didn’t do any research before making this statement. Subsequent studies have determined that the majority of question titles that can be answered with “yes” or “no” actually receive a “yes” answer in the body of the article.
If only he had done the research, he would be angry at the people who didn’t do it, right?
That said, just for my own edification, I can say that every time I write an article with a question in the title, the answer is “yes”, but the question is asked because it’s an interesting question that can then be answered in an article of around 1,200 words. For example, the article written above. No, the article is not intended to throw shade at Ian Betteridge, and he does not appear once; I just did some research for a throwaway joke and wanted to share it because it was interesting to discover.
Vague patch notes: No, crypto and blockchain are not a monetization experience for MMOs
Last but not least, I still hope that the time I spent learning about crypto and blockchain will cease to be remotely useful, but for some reason we continue to see people treat “what if everything was an unlicensed security that you could bet on” as if there should be any. a few merit to technology. This seems absurd to me for many reasons, including the fact that this technology has been around for a very long time and if it ever had any truly useful applications, it would have long ago been used for products that everyone would want to buy and use.
For some reason, this one still gets brought up from time to time, despite the fact that “monetization” is literally the only thing crypto really brings to the table, and it does it poorly. I’m tired of writing about this sort of thing, but there are a whole bunch of topics here that could be brought up, misconceptions that assume there must be something valuable for technology and things he’s actually good at when the reality is there just aren’t any. But if this specter encourages people to Finally throw Smedley out with the bathwater, it’ll…well, it’ll still be bad, but I’ll take that as some sort of victory.
Sometimes you know exactly what’s happening in the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are vague patch notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior journalist Eliot Lefebvre likes to analyze these kinds of notes as well as vague elements of the genre as a whole. The power of this analysis can be adjusted in certain circumstances.
