Friday Editorial

This Social Game
has Antisocial Tendencies

By Shayalyn

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Shayalyn to Guild: Yeah, but not since he trimmed his nose hair.
Sylesstra to Guild: Say what?
Shayalyn to Guild: &*$#%@! Mistell...AGAIN.

That's the story of my life in Dungeons & Dragons Online--one mistell after another. The messages that are supposed to go to my group go to my guild. Why? Because I spent years playing EverQuest and I never could get the hang of typing /p for party chat instead of /g for group chat (which was the EverQuest way). Why, oh why, can't that sort of thing be standardized in MMOGs? Why do I have to remember different systems for the different games I play? I'm old and feeble-minded. The gods only know what sort of horribly embarrassing things I could say that might end up making their way into Ten Ton Hammer guild lore for all time. It's bad enough that, for a week or so around launch, our guild's message of the day said:

Shayalyn makes first guild mistell

And not only am I sending my messages to the wrong chat channel on a regular basis, but it gets worse. You see, my character can't dance. In fact, she dances so badly that she looks like she's trying to walk out a monster wedgie (without actually being so obvious as to jam her hand down the back of her platemail and pluck it). She gyrates in an endless loop of twist-step-grind, twist-step-grind. It's painful to watch. I can only imagine the flossing her poor little bum must be getting.

Not only can human females in DDO not dance, but there's a shortage of interesting emotes in the game, period. I've counted 21, ranging from ‘angry' to ‘wave,' but they're all pretty plain in a been-there, waved-like-that sort of way. They don't really allow characters to exert any...character. However, one of the more interesting ones makes my character sleep, something I haven't been able to do in a MMOG before. Problem is, if I happen to have another player targeted, I “go to sleep” with them, whether I want to or not. We girls have it rough enough in online games without some joker we accidentally targeted with a /sleep emote sidling up to us and murmuring, “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?” while bouncing his eyebrows suggestively. (I'm very glad that suggestive eyebrow bouncing isn't an actual in-game emote, complete with animation. Although it might be better than the infamous /flirt emote in EverQuest II.)

And WTF is up with the /sheath emote? It's fine that people want to sheath their weapons, and perhaps even emote about it, but the grammarian in me bristles at seeing, “Elwynn sheaths their weapon” as the emote text. I mean, how difficult is it to write a bit of code that recognizes the gender of a character in the text of an emote, huh? Can we get a little pronoun/antecedent agreement for the people who do enjoy speaking and writing reasonably proper English? (And lest you think I'm the only one who cares about this, I can guarantee you that it makes my assistant here at Ten Ton Hammer bristle, too. And I bet you thought I was the only one who actually gave a damn.)

These are relatively insignificant things in the vast scheme of DDO. I was going to progress to griping about something a little meatier, but it would appear that Turbine saw fit to fix the issues with their first major content update, Module 1: The Dragon's Vault, on April 5.

Ah, well, I'll gripe anyhow. For the first month DDO was live, the friends and guild lists were so horribly bugged that you couldn't tell who was or wasn't online with any degree of reliability, unless the person you were looking for happened to respond to a private tell you sent them.  Players showed as online when they were off. When a player was on an alternate character, all their characters often showed as online, so you'd have to try and guess which one they were actually playing, or sort through them all by sending a private message to each character and hoping the message went through. Unfortunately, messages would look, for all intents and purposes, like they did go through, because sending a message to a player who was offline didn't return a, “So'ndso is not online” error message.

I've yet to play DDO since Wednesday's update, but I'm hoping the friends and guild list issues have been properly resolved. Still, it's a shame we had to deal with these glaring flaws in the  system for over a month. After all, finding friends online is what DDO is all about, so in a game that forces grouping, having bugged friends and guild lists is a serious problem.

I'm going to wrap up this week's rant (yep, this is the premier of a weekly series of gripe sessions) and pass the torch on to our next writer. If you'd like to weigh in on possible topics, go ahead and grumble here. We also welcome guest writers, so if you have something to say and you know just how to say it (or you're willing to let us editors make you look like you know just how to say it), send your article to me at shayalyn AT TenTonHammer.com.

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