Friday Editorial

This Social Game

has Antisocial Tendencies

By Shayalyn

---

<!-- if (!document.phpAds_used) document.phpAds_used = ','; phpAds_random = new String (Math.random()); phpAds_random = phpAds_random.substring(2,11); document.write ("<" + "script language='JavaScript' type='text/javascript' src='"); document.write ("http://ads.tentonhammer.com/adjs.php?n=" + phpAds_random); document.write ("&amp;what=zone:81"); document.write ("&amp;exclude=" + document.phpAds_used); if (document.referrer) document.write ("&amp;referer=" + escape(document.referrer)); document.write ("'><" + "/script>"); //-->

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 href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/modules.php?set_albumName=Exclusive_Screenshots&id=white_clerics_cant_dance&op=modload&name=Gallery&file=index&include=view_photo.php"> alt="White clerics can't dance"
src="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/files/gallery/albums/Exclusive_Screenshots/white_clerics_cant_dance.thumb.jpg"
style="border: 0px solid ; width: 119px; height: 150px;" align="left"
hspace="4" vspace="2">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 style="font-style: italic;">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 style="font-style: italic;">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 href="http://ddo.tentonhammer.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=330">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.

---