Author Archives: Donny Rokk
When Good Guildies Go Bad
This was a Shared Topic over at Blog Azeroth:
“What do you do when a normally good guildmate performs poorly or behaves badly?”
Most people join guilds because World of Warcraft is a social game, and guilds are big gooey melting pots of personalities. Slapping that tag underneath a character’s name unites him or her with others wearing the same tag, joining them into one big family. But every family has that asshole uncle who gets drunk at holiday gatherings and pisses in the punchbowl. The one that Grandma Edna wishes she could punch in the head.
Guild miscreants are generally easy to sniff out. Turds, much like cream, tends to float to the top. Guilds have a size limit now, which means there’s only so many people to hind behind. Maybe that’s why I’ve only met a couple of prizewinning spaz monkeys in my guild – they have a few thousand bodies to act as their own “Operation: Human Shield”.
World of Warcraft Killed Starcraft Ghost
According to Mike Morhaime, Startcraft II, Starcraft Ghost and World of Warcraft were all being developed at the same time. But when WoW started picking up steam, something had to give.
“We have to choose, we can’t do everything,” he said during a panel last week at the Design Innovate Create Explore summit. “Our vision for what’s possible directs that. We like complex games and we like casual games.”
Those choices sometimes lead to killing a game in progress.
“They were working on StarCraft Ghost the same time we were working on World of Warcraft and StarCraft II,” Morhaime said, “World of Warcraft exploded and we needed to make some resource decisions. It just wasn’t an environment in which a project like (StarCraft Ghost ) could succeed.”
Fortunately, not all of Morhaime’s decisions are followed.
The head of Blizzard said that he initially fought the push for a context sensitive interface for one of their games, because they were done with it and ready to ship.
“The entire programming staff said absolutely not, and I said absolutely not,” he said. “Adam went around me and went to a programmer and had him add it on his own.
“It luckily worked and it was very elegant. In retrospect it would have been a disaster if I had won that argument.”
