Massive Ideals

Hey, that’s right, I have a blog! It’s been so long since I used this that I didn’t even think to post here about the ULTIMATE GREATNESS that is the unveiling of the game I’ve had so much fun working on, Heroes of Telara. Let’s see, without having specifically checked (because it really wasn’t an issue prior to us saying anything at all), I wonder what I’m allowed to say… Um… look, Facebook! And Twitter! Hurray!

One day you’ll all get to see and do battle with the lovely minions I’ve been preparing for you. Until then, just watch the trailer over and over again and try to imagine the AWESOME BATTLE SCENES that you’re missing every time we cut away to show you some other nifty graphical wonder.

After all is said and done, I now have a $10 credit towards any future Direct2Drive purchases because of the confusion and delay with getting the pre-order keys out. I consider that fine reimbursement for a single night and morning of frustration and annoyance thinking I’d spent $50 for the right to see an error message. Ultimately I’d already basically gotten over it and didn’t expect any compensation, so this was pretty cool. Props to IGN.

So this afternoon I got a response back from Direct2Drive’s customer support including this lovely gem:

We ran out of head-start keys for the Pre-order Warhammer Online game. This explains why you were not able to download and got the notice that “there was an error with your request”.

Well that sounds like perfectly accurate error messaging to me. I don’t see how I couldn’t have deduced last night that by, “there was an error with your request”, they meant, “we’re waiting for more keys”…

So with that, I finally got my e-mail containing the keys for the account and pre-order stuffs. It all seems to be working now. The download is proceeding and should be done by the time I get back from work and the pre-order key seems to have let me activate my new account (the account key kept giving me a message about how I can’t use it yet, which makes me wonder if that would allow me to make another account via the same process after tommorow). It may all still be a trap, but I’ll have to wait till after 6PM to find out for sure.

Unlike some people, I knew good and well that despite spending countless hours working essentially non-stop for the majority of the eight months I worked on it, I wouldn’t be credited for my work on Warhammer. I understood that certain people would casually make sure of that (complete with exaggerated hypothetical excuses that wouldn’t apply to the initial release anyway) well before anyone tried to stop me from leaving early because of it. It never really bothered me that much, because ultimately everyone will still see my work and the lack of my name on a few million pieces of paper didn’t stop a fantastic employer from picking me up.

No, what bothered me was the simpler fact that I would no longer be receiving a free copy of the game (let alone a free account). Of course it would ultimately be unreasonable to expect them to ship me a copy, but philosophically, it just seems silly to me to have to pay for something I worked so long and hard on. Knowing that would be coming up has bugged me more and more from the moment I decided to leave.

So here we are, the full release approaching, and the early starts already in full swing. Knowing it shipped yesterday, I stopped by Best Buy with some coworkers at lunch today to find out when they would have it. They said they’d get it tomorrow. That was fine with me, I’m still finishing my time with Spore anyway. I wouldn’t have thought of it again today if I hadn’t managed to check my e-mail when I got home. There waiting for me in my Inbox was an ad from Direct2Drive letting me know that I could still download WAR, get myself the pre-order items, and “Play Now”.

“Fine,” I thought, “One less required stop during lunch tomorrow.” A few clicks later and my $50 were gone. I click the button clearly labelled as, “Download Now”. That instantly takes me to an error page. Awesome. Unsure of exactly what they meant by, “empty your browser temp file” I tried deleting all related files from the website from my Temporary Internet Files and even went so far as to reboot. I tried again and got the same result. I tried waiting 10 minutes. Same thing. Totally awesome.

Finally I went ahead and clicked their support link. Surprise, surprise, no telephone numbers, just a pitifully useless knowledge base and a form I can fill out. Eventually I gave in and did what the error page had told me to do and reported the error via the form. The ticket was instantly closed with a similarly useless auto-response attached with generic information about how they can’t help you with problems registering on Mythic’s site and such (why that information wasn’t in their knowledge base, I can’t guess). I had to choose an option to add more information to actually open the ticket back up. There wasn’t any information to add, except my anger at the stupidity of the auto-response, because I’d already put all relevant information in the original form. So I expressed my anger and reopened the ticket.

In theory, at some point in time (no hours are listed anywhere, so who knows if they’re on PST, EST, or IST), they’ll probably send me a different autoresponse about how their servers can’t actually handle so many people trying to download Warhammer all at once (obviously giving me a simple error message admitting that would be too easy). That wouldn’t be a problem if they’d just give me the key so I can make my account and download it from anywhere. However, the page that “Download Now” is supposed to take me to also has the key on it. With a normal game, they also give you the key in the e-mail confirming the order and in a seperate e-mail if you press the button next to “Download Now”, “Send Info”. However, in this case, that simply sends me an e-mail telling me I can go back to the account page (where I pressed the button that resulted in that e-mail in the first place) whenever I want to download the game (as often as I’d like!). That same e-mail reminds me that no refunds can be given for this game, even though I’ve never been able to see a key that would cause any problems with getting a refund (the key that should be in that e-mail), just in case that’s what I was thinking when staring at all of this insanity.

Moving to a new area, introducing myself to new people, a number of them outside of work, I’ve been thinking about something that’s bugged me for a number of years now. When someone asks me what I do, my initial answer is that I work in the video game industry. It’s something that I’m proud of, though it makes me feel a bit guilty to say, because in my mind that’s akin to saying that I’m a rock star. The wierd thing to me is the response I always get of, “So you’re a programmer?” It takes a lot of explaining to get across the concept that my job doesn’t really involve programming in any way, shape, or form (well, technically, it sometimes does, but only because I often use scripting as a solution for my hatred of more mindless, repetitive tasks where others in my position would just do the work by hand).

Like… well… anyone likely to be reading this, I’ve been playing video games since very early childhood. My father was quite fond of a certain Far Side comic about hopeful parents imagining their child’s video game playing being put to use in the job world, but he never thought it would come true. Honestly, the thought never occurred to me either for many years.

My father was a programmer, but of far more serious software that’s actually useful to the real world. I always thought programming was fun as a novelty, playing around with BASIC making automated Mad Libs and the like. It just didn’t seem like something I wanted to do as a full time job. I only wanted to design games, but I had no idea that was its own career path. Even later, when more and more games started including level editors and the like which I had a great time playing around with, I never understood that there was an entirely separate group of people that used tools like those full time.

In fact, it really wasn’t until I was a team lead for the Animist class in DAOC and started to get to know the developers at Mythic that I really understood the difference in the type of people that came together to make a game, especially an MMO. There were engineers, artists, producers, managers, designers, community representatives, and customer service representatives. On top of that, individual members of each of those groups had their own specialty. World Designers didn’t touch class balance, server engineers didn’t mess with the client, and character modelers didn’t do concept art.

Thinking back on my previous concept of how games were made, I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t realized it was just like any other business where the sales representative doesn’t do accounting, the IT guy doesn’t write legal contracts, and the product designer doesn’t write commercials. I don’t know if I can excuse such thoughts simply because 30+ years ago the same person really did cover every discipline on their own. We live in a time when video games are advertised on network television during prime time and many people understand that today they’re made by huge teams of people for millions of dollars.

It wouldn’t even bug me as much if in the business of MMOs, this wasn’t just a matter of innocent ignorance, but a community relations issue. I can’t count the number of posts that I’ve read on various forums in response to patch notes asking, “Why are they working on this thing? They should be working on this other thing.” and the things that they’re talking about wouldn’t even be addressed by the same department. They complain about some sort of new art assets being added instead of their class issues being addressed. They complain about a new quest being added instead of a bug with the interface being fixed. On DAOC, I always wanted to respond to such posts with the thought that that was like asking an actor to use better lighting in his scenes.

So here I’ve got this fine little website that I never got around to using in the manner I originally intended during the perfect time I had to do so (read: while I spent 4 months lounging around between jobs). I figure it’s about time I start making use of it. So I will.

Or so it would seem…