Represent for the fluff

· by · in MMO. ·

tantrum/rant

I’m sick and tired of hardcore ruling the freaking gaming world. Me wanting fluff from a game is just as valid as Mr Hardcore e-peen wanting more gore on his MegaAttack of Doom Swing, or more class balancing, or whatever the fark it is Mr Hardcore is bitching about this week. Knowing how to hit 3 buttons (or is it 2, with macros, now?) is in no way a particular achievement, and it’s not really superior to wanting ponies with flowers in their hair. But hey, whatever makes you feel less inadequate.

Secondly, if you’re going to bitch, and bitch, and bitch incessantly, then at least have the grace to go it cogently and in complete sentences. I’ll be bored enough to chew off my arm, but at least I won’t wince at the language (and, good thing for you, if I chew my arms off I can’t rant so easily anymore. It’s only a flesh wound!). Standing in one place stamping your little hardcore foot and screaming about the same thing week in, week out, on every single bloody forum (and blog) you can find does not make you an expert or worth listening to. Neither does it make what you’re screaming about any more interesting. Repeated exposure is not turning me to your infantile navel-centred point of view. Sorry. I just hope the developers aren’t listening either.

Reasoned debate — go look it up. Learn it. Love it… Oh, never mind.

Just because a game has combat and combat classes in it, and you happen to play one of those classes, does not a) make you a freaking expert in that class or b) make that class broken just because you got your ass handed to you a few times yesterday. (Take WAR — if you listen to one side, the other side is horribly overpowered and their own side is direly broken. Head to the other side, and guess what you’ll hear?) Just because you don’t care about fluff does not give you the right to get snarky when I mention it.

Oh I’m sorry, am I being snarky? Suck it up.

Here’s a golden rule: if you have nothing good to say, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

/rant

There, a little shower of happy for my new (and fast-retreating, I’m sure) readers.

31 responses to “Represent for the fluff”

  1. There, a little shower of happy for my new (and fast-retreating, I’m sure) readers.

    I’m only retreating to a safe spot because I want to get a good view while you tank the Internet.

    And possibly throw a few heals when you need them.

    Yours,

    A fellow follower of fluff.

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  4. “I want to get a good view while you tank the Internet.” –

    HAHA!

    I almost lost my left foot, as I double up with laughter…be happy it was my foot & not something else…

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  6. Fluff = DEV $$ flushed. That is all. 🙂

    No, I don’t entirely believe that. I also wish they’d bring include some non-combat, fun abilities as part of ‘fluff’ rather than it all being housing and stuff like that. I miss the days when you’d see a Druid asking for a Corpse Locate because they died in a forest and were in tree form.

    Active fluff > inactive fluff (IMO)

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  7. Holy hell in a hand-basket, what got your panties all knotted up?

    But yeah, can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people complaining about how “OP” the other sides classes are, blah blah blah. I try to calmly tell them, I’ve been in T4 on both sides now, and it’s not really as bad as they think it is.

    I hope the target of your ire is taking grammar classes at least.

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  8. @ Andrew — nothing major, it’s just a rant that simmers in the background most of the time and, boil-like, erupts every so often. Yeah, there was a trigger this time (mostly the idiotic leet comments on Schlotzky’s blog post a few days back), but it’s not like that button needs much pushing.

    Besides, a rant is good for the soul now and then. 😉

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  9. Oh, and @Smaken — only because the hardcore players say so. Course, many devs *are* hardcore whiners. But assuming that MMO customers are all fluff-hating hardasses, or that the fluff lovers are a negligible minority, is a big mistake. If the AAA MMOs ever finally realise that, maybe they won’t all fail on launch. 😛

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  13. Wait, did you follow your golden rule when you wrote that?

    And then to have the word “shower” so soon after, I really got confused about what the topic was.

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  14. I have a golden rule? The only one I remember is that I have no memory. 😛

    Oh, and that rules are meant to be broken.

    Ah… and that I have a fanatical devotion to the Pope.

    So, my THREE rules are….

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  15. I found this link over on another friends LJ friends page (whaddya mean, haven’t I got friends of my own? Goawaysalready!) – it’s certainly not directly relevant to any of the above but it’s worth a read

    Here’s hoping the link works!

    PS: Rude words in there – mind how you tread!

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  16. Rough morning? 🙂

    Fluff=$$ if you do it right. Witness Puzzle Pirates, for one. For some reason, people like customizing their characters and their “living space”. (Even if it’s just their armor.) I’ve been singing this tune for a while (mostly as a potential alternate revenue stream). The market demographics are changing. The hardcore are being outnumbered, and aren’t as profitable as giving fun stuff to the carebears.

    It must suck, being on the endangered species list, or being shuffled off to irrelevancy.

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  17. Rant on, Ysh! If you tank the Internet and Melmoth is healing then I guess I’ll dps. Though I left my bow at home, I can throw tiny rocks really, really hard. 🙂

    Even pointless things like houses or cosmetic appearance tabs give players options and other means of achievement besides raiding all the time. All the burglars in my kinship, for example, had the Rift armor set (or most of it) yet we could differentiate ourselves by the appearances we had displayed. Even many of our “hardcore” raiders would use the appearance options so they wouldn’t look like the guy standing next to them.

    It’s also a play style support argument: not everyone wants the same things in a game and if a game company gets more players by adding some fluff to the game, they get more money and thus the ability to add more of whatever players want (including the hardcore stuff). Dev $$ spent on fluff is not wasted.

    Anyway, nice rant, Ysh. 🙂

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  18. I like the fluff too, is it so hard to make a horse with more armor, or a little bunny to follow me around on my murder spree.

    I think not.

    BTW everytime I see that baby, I laugh. Thanks.

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  19. Woohoo! You go Ysh!

    I have to admit that in the … I dunno, 10-12 years I’ve been MMOing, not once have I ever sat there and gone “You know, they should nerf that class cuz he just beat my ass. OBVIOUSLY he’s OP because I lost and I’M the best EVAR!” I can’t understand where these people get their mindset from.

    Personally, I LOVE raiding. I love seeing everything a game has to offer whether it offers challenge or not. Hell I even invite some of my friends to my house when it’s time to raid if they can’t raid because of time restraints so they can see the content too. And you know what? Just seeing it makes them happy. They don’t have to min / max or get uber-leet macros to do 81 things at a time to feel awesome.

    So yea, fluff is awesome. All the little details that go into a world, and more importantly: the options! Options options options! It’s been a hot topic lately and for good reason. We don’t just need more options of how to kill a specific boss or options on which sword to do the most DPS. We need all kinds of options. Lack of fluff (graphically) is what made me wince initially about EQ2. Eventually they added more, but I look now and the armor STILL has the same look, just different colors here and there. That’s just lazy IMO.

    Anyway, sorry Ysh. Didn’t mean to derail. Fuck elitists. Most of the time they don’t even know what they’re doing in the game anyway. The people who are actually good at the game have nothing to complain about save for a random bug or not having enough flowers in their pony’s hair 😛

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  21. Not sure how much it’s worth, but it seems like you need (at least) the following three things in the following order if you want to be a successful MMORPG:

    1. Performance – work well and looks ‘good enough’ on most hardware
    2. Variety – provide enough for carebares to do that they stay interested
    3. Hardcore content – some type of end-game so the ‘hardcore’ can be goal focused and keep busy doing something other than griefing

    Yes, if the hardcore want stuff to keep them busy, there needs to be even more stuff for the carebares to enjoy or else their playground is either going to go away completely or through a slow painful death.

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  22. I like the variety of fighting along with friends in PVE or RVR, and I do some crafting in WAR, not as much as FFXI where it was a game in itself. I’ve found the tomb unlocks very rewarding, especially when they were a surprize. The unexpected small events have a lot of appeal to me. I swim alot in WAR, always looking at the bottom for a weapon, chest, jewel, dead body, lost coin..anything. I want to go into the buildings in pragg and search the cupboards and under the beds for hidden treasures. I envision small visual or auditory clues that something in the area is worth investigating, or a pop up- (something smells like old armor)
    or, the ground is soft in spots- git out yer lucky shovel.
    If the hidden rewards could be constantly moved to different locations would increase the thrill of the find.. that’s my style, maybe because alot of these actions were RPG mainstays when I started playing 20 years ago.

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  23. *enter Devil’s advocate*

    I think I look on it with different eyes. I see a ton of fluff in most of the games I play. Fluff to me, it’s just another collection game, and I have Nintendo’s animal crossing for fluff collection. By the way, my animal crossing guy will kick your ass so hard it’ll make your nose bleed. Anyway, I’m signed on with SOE right now. They let things slide, except for the fluff, which should be extra sprinkles on top. Maybe chocolate sprinkles, I like chocolate. Let’s talk EQ2, do we really need a choice of 40+ mounts? That’s a guess, but if it’s not 40 it’s pretty freaking close. How about we stop making any more mounts and you guys rework the client so it works better with dual and quad core processors. It was designed for a single core processor that was super fast. Perhaps SOE could tighten up those 5 year older textures in the original lands – no, we need more house pets you say? Or how about you fix my damage spell. It no longer does damage, yes it’s a known issue, but you implemented the whole Xmas land patch, fixed the bugs, and removed it without fixing my damage spell. It’s only been broke since November. I wish they would optimize/fix things before adding new content or fluff. Really I do.

    how much is too much fluff? here’s a picture of my guildhall.

    all the fluff stuff you would ever want.

    here’s a picture of my inventory, it got a bit more in there then I like right now, but I have a lot of quest on my plate right now.

    Anyway, I’m not against fluff, it has it’s place. If I wanted to play a pure fluff MMO, second life – from what I have seen would be it. All fluff no content. but then again, is second life a game?

    After all this, I glad games do have fluff, the world would be vanilla without it. but lets get the basics fixed before adding more fluff.

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  25. HAHA Ysh!!

    I support this and shall post my support within the next couple of days. I’ve been with you in the fluff-push since you and I discussed the dragon-pets and goofy annoying robots of WoW!

    And that was quite awhile ago. Its a lonely world, and a cute little indestructible non-combat snotling that said something stupid every time you clicked him surely wouldn’t hurt!

    FLUFF! FLUFF! FLUFF!

    We want dragons! But small ones. Ones that snort smoke when they fly next to you but do nothing more impressive! We want cowering blobs of goo with cheesy 1-tooth smiles! We want christmas elves with santa hats!

    FLUFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF

    -Helik of Wall of Text (formerly of RP That Way)

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  26. I think it is very illuminating that in one comment thread, Wiqd knocks EQ2 for a lack of emphasis on fluff and Teki knocks it for having too much emphasis on fluff.

    FWIW, EQ2 seems to me to have more fluff than just about any other game out there.

    However, I’m not sure its as simple as “instead of making more mounts they should be re-engineering the client to take advantage of dual-core machines.” That’d be true if EQ2 was a 1 man operation, but I’m pretty sure the people designing mounts aren’t the same people doing low-level client optimizations.

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  28. I think the point is that hardcore people shouldn’t complain about things that don’t directly effect their game play, specifically things put in a game that attract less hardcore people. I think they find it some kind of offensive front to gaming if people play the game and dont’ try to make it to end game content or don’t worry about getting the uber cool pork sword of envy with +20 sharpness. They think people who play a game with no goal in mind other than spending time enjoying the roses, is obscene and disrupts the concept crafted by the devs.

    I agree with Yish…Fuck them! Who are they to judge us because we don’t want to spend 1,000’s of hours each week trying to slay the Golden dragon. Who says they are even playing the game correctly? Games like Vanguard and EQ2 were created with casual gamers in mind, just look at the crafting systems.

    Sorry, it’s late and I’ve been away lol.

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  29. See, Teki, you’re going from the point of view that ONLY combat balance and combat-related stuff (and maybe itemisation) is important, and that everything else in an MMO is secondary. It may be to you. It’s not to some of the rest of us. Point being, just because *you* think it’s more important, doesn’t make that gospel. I hope that makes sense.

    And again, saying “If you want fluff, you should go off and play single player games that have fluff” is facile.

    But anyway, it was a rant and therefore polemical. I’m not going to try and be balanced here now! That’s not the point.

    So Teki, STFU and GTFO! (Am I missing any acronyms?) (Just don’t hunt me down with the projectile-spewing twins! 😀 )

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  30. The typical MMO model (a rat maze / addiction model) rewards hardcore achievers above all. They dominate MMO communities because their goal-oriented playstyle makes it easy for subscription-model MMOs to hook and manipulate them. Perhaps this new wave of microtransaction-model MMOs will be more favorable to other playstyles.

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