Mercurial Gaming

Gaming of all shapes and sizes, covered with wit and aplomb. Or something.

[mercurial-gaming]

The Tyranny of Comment Voting Systems

Yesterday, I was chatting with my dad about the implications of the Oculus VR acquisition (still a good thing), and specifically, the crazy fan backlash against it. While we were talking, he said something interesting:

“I was reading the comments on Palmer Luckey’s reddit post, and it was incredible. The comments were universally negative.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised, but it also made me wonder - was it really universally negative? My knee-jerk reaction was negative too, so I expected gobs of negativity, but there have been plenty of cooler heads that have come out at least cautiously optimistic. Was that optimism really just limited to journos and developer celebrities, too removed from the real people to have a similar reaction?

I didn’t think so, so I headed to the comments to do some investigation…

Negativity? Check. And just LOOK at all those upvotes! Scrolling through the comments, sorted by the default by ‘Best’ comments, it looked like my dad was right. The response was overwhelmingly, shockingly negative. You could scroll through comments for DAYS before seeing anything remotely positive. But I wasn’t ready to give up yet, so I changed the comment sorting from ‘Best’ to ‘Controversial’. And wow, what a difference it made:

There’s still plenty of negativity mixed in, but now the response looks WAY more balanced. And that seems more real to me. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why voting systems in comments are a terrible idea. And Reddit goes a step further than just allowing voting - if a comment receives too many downvotes, it gets hidden by default, and you have to click a button to expand it. For example:

A couple things to notice. First of all, there’s no indication whatsoever just how far below the “threshold” this comment was, or, indeed, what that threshold is. It screams “Hey man, this is a really awful comment. Open it at your own risk.” And we all know how terrible the internet can be, right? That’s one heck of a risk. But, for the sake of Science, I took one for the team and opened up this horrible thing:

MY EYES! THE GOGGLES… THEY DO NOTHI… oh, wait, that’s actually a super reasonable opinion, followed up with another person agreeing with him. For this sin, the comment was banished to the nether realm supposedly reserved for comments about eating babies or hitler or other such Internet-horribleness.

Also of note: it got hidden with a score of -10. Keep in mind that the upvote/downvote count next to the total is essentially fictional, and only the total is correct. So it’s impossible to say whether this post got 0 upvotes and 10 downvotes, or 100 upvotes and 110 downvotes, but the fact is, a net difference of 10 people not liking what the post said was enough to banish it to comment-hell. That is absolutely silly. Let’s do some napkin math here. That post has nearly 6,000 comments on it. Let’s be really, really generous and assume that 10% of the people who read the post then went and made a comment (I bet its really closer to 1%, or maybe even .1%). That means that 60,000 people were looking at this post, reading comments. That means that those 10 net people who didn’t like that post represent 0.01667% of the audience. If you use 1% instead, it’s .0016%! This is giving an INSANE amount of power to an absolutely infinitesimal portion of the audience.

The other side of comment voting - upvoting - holds true as well. If you look at the ‘Best’ sort, one of the top comments is a long one about how disappointed the person is in Palmer and the rest of the team at Oculus VR. It has 3751 net upvotes. If we use our figures from before, that corresponds to between 0.6% and 6% of the total audience of the post. Less ridiculous than the earlier negative example, but still a crazy minority compared to the number of eyeballs that were on this post. Just so we’re clear, the post is good - thoughtful and earnest and not at all vitriol-laden. I don’t agree with his opinion in the slightest, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be able to share it. What I don’t agree with is this idea that because a few percent of the audience feels the same way, that it should be presented as the best comment, ahead of all other comments. Nothing about it is better than that comment above, that got -10 votes and was doomed to never be looked at again, other than it is expressing the right opinion. Where “right” is defined by this very active, very loud minority.

I have no doubt that the founders of Reddit added this system of voting in comments in a laudable attempt to democratize comments - to let the best comments float to the top, and keep the scummy underbelly down in the deep dark where it belongs. But the result is anything but democratic. It empowers a tiny minority to present the illusion of majority opinion - making people think that theirs is the only view out there, just like my dad thought about this thread. It’s a terrible system that actively prevents any kind of healthy discourse, and reddit, as well as the internet at large, would be a much better place without it. Get rid of comment voting, Reddit, and let users decide for themselves if a comment is worthwhile or not.

[mercurial-gaming]

The Oculus... FaceRift?

Okay, it’s been a few hours, and now that my knee has stopped jerking with furious abandon, I’m ready to talk about Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus VR, to the tune of a cool $2 billion. If this is somehow the first you've heard about this, I’ll go ahead and give you a minute to peel your jaw off the floor.

All better? Alright, now I’m going to eventually talk about why I think this is actually a really great thing. But first, let’s get into why it feels bad. And wow, did I feel bad when I first heard the news.

On Backing The Little Guy

Oculus is maybe the craziest ‘scrappy company trying to change the world’ story in years. Seemingly out of nowhere, this 23 year old guy landed on Kickstarter with a crazy pitch: to bring actual, non-terrible (cf. Virtual Boy), virtual reality out of science fiction (and every nerd’s dreams) and make it reality. The Kickstarter was a wild success, and ever since then, the hype has just kept on coming, as more and more people have tried out the first developer kit (and subsequent prototypes and the new ‘Dev Kit 2’). As a proud owner of a dev kit myself, I can confirm that it really is incredible. It also has a unique brand of buzz, because its the first kind of media since we've had the internet that actually needs to be experienced in person. No youtube video, no blog post, no screenshot is capable of conferring the experience that virtual reality is promising. And that, all by itself, is pretty amazing.

So the product they’re promising is incredible, yes, and the passion with which they speak on it is deeply endearing. However, I think a big part of why it felt so good to support Oculus is that they seemed like the little guy, fighting an impossible battle against the Man. It harkened back to the (good old?) days when video games were getting made by passionate nerds in their basements and garages (like John Carmack!), eating ramen and dreaming big huge nerd dreams (okay, there are indie devs doing that today, all over the place, but stick with me here). I definitely felt that way about Oculus, and it felt good. It felt like I was in on a big secret, that I was on the ground floor of something truly groundbreaking, and it was all the better because most people didn't know it yet.

That’s right, I, and probably everyone else that was psyched (and extremely self-satisfied) to be backing Oculus were VR Hipsters. God save us all...

On Hating Facebook

The other half of the ‘feel bad story’ is, of course Facebook itself. Looking back over the last several years and the company’s insane, meteoric rise to absolute supremacy of the social space, it’s easy to remember the missteps: the privacy blunders, the unpopular UI revamps, some unfortunate comments made by executives. Facebook is huge and powerful and pervasive, and companies like that are always easy to hate (Microsoft, anyone?). When a giant like this buys a lovable little guy like Oculus, it’s easy to knee-jerk your way into an end-of-the-world reaction.

The reality is way less one-sided (it always is). The excellent John Green speaks often about ‘imagining people complexly’ - not taking the easy, superficial judgment of a person, instead taking the time to think of them as a real life human being with tons of personality quirks and dreams and needs and baggage. Well, a corporation, even a Big Evil Corporation, is a giant seething mass of humanity, and to imagine a company as being any less complex than a person is to take the easy, cheap, superficial way (dare I say, the Reddit Way). Yes, they made missteps, and yes, the product they offer now may not be for everyone (though with nearly a billion users, someone must like it), but the fact of it is, Facebook is composed of hundreds of super talented, passionate people, and they can’t ALL be mustachio-twirling villains. The reality is, some not-insignificant number of people very high up in the company shared in the same Hipster VR passions we all did - they love Oculus, they love the promise of VR, and they’re willing to plop down $2,000,000,000 up front, and almost certainly billions more over the next several years, as Oculus gets custom hardware manufacturing set up, builds up their developer outreach and tools teams, and generally gets to focus on making something awesome, rather than something as awesome as they can make it given the money they have available.

The Good Thing

This leads me neatly into why this is actually a great thing. Oculus is an incredible company, their prototypes have been amazing, and the potential for virtual reality is astonishing. But! What they’re trying to do is going to be expensive. Really expensive. 10 figures expensive. Even with the substantial venture capital they’d gotten (and seriously, nothing says ‘strings attached’ more loudly than 100 million in VC funding), I’m willing to bet that their financial runway was actually pretty short, and were looking at some tough compromises to get their first consumer offering to market before it ran out. This is corroborated by Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey himself, bravely getting beaten up on Reddit today*:

“This acquisition/partnership gives us more control of our destiny, not less! We don't have to compromise on anything, and can afford to make decisions that are right for the future of virtual reality, not our current revenue. Keep in mind that we already have great partners who invested heavily in Oculus and got us to where we are, so we have not had full control of our destiny for some time. Facebook believes in our long term vision, and they want us to continue executing on our own roadmap, not control what we do.”

Facebook isn't looking to make a quick dollar (like Oculus’ VC funders undoubtedly were). They're making a long term bet that virtual reality is going to be big in the future. This is awesome. Now Oculus’ runway is very long indeed, and they’re going to be furnished with a huge set of resources to deliver a no-compromises product that’s going to blow people away.

So, I understand why it feels bad that Facebook owns Oculus now. They seemed like the little guy, and we all felt pretty awesome for loving (and often financially backing) this crazy little guy with an insane plan to change the world. But this was never the reality - Oculus stopped being the scrappy little guy the moment they got venture capital, and started being a scrappy little company with very little room to maneuver, and a huge chance of financial failure. Now, they’re owned by a big, powerful company who is willing to give them the time, money, and exposure (I didn't even talk about exposure! Just imagine how many more people are going to hear about VR now, and putting aside my hipster hat, that’s just awesome) to really, actually change the world. Imagining this changed world as being one where you get Poked and Liked and Friend Requested and Farmville’d in VR is failing to imagine things complexly. It’s taking the shallow, superficial, easy view, and that, dear readers, is something we should all rally against.

footnote: If any companies would like to give me two billion dollars, I too, will happily go get yelled at on Reddit.

[mercurial-gaming]

Thoughts from the WildStar Beta Weekend

Last weekend, my wife and I cleared our social calendars, ordered a mountain of pizza, and seriously binged on the first WildStar Beta Weekend. I have emerged, wrists sore from furious clicking, and am ready to dump my thoughts about it onto paper. Or whatever the digital simulacra of paper likes to be called.

So, yeah. The short version is, I loved it. My wife loved it. I can’t be sure, but it’s possible my dog loved it. This morning, though, my good friend Zac had the audacity to ask why I loved it. I had no idea what to say, because the elevator pitch - the 20 second why should I care - sounds… well, ‘been done’. Here it is: “WildStar is a massively online role-playing game, where your character uses skills on an action bar to beat up baddies and grow in power. You can group with friends and strangers to take on the BIG baddies, in 5 person dungeons and adventures, and 20 and 40 man raids. Beating up said bads gets you increasingly epic and impressive loot, with which to impress your friends and potential mates.” All of that is well and good, but I could have replaced ‘WildStar’ with any of a dozen or more contemporary MMOs, including that 8 gigaton space gorilla, World of Warcraft.

WildStar, from a thousand feet, isn’t doing much that’s new, and that’s why I had a hard time explaining why I loved it so much. It’s not like Everquest Next, where I could have just shouted “VOXELS! VOXELS! VOXELLLSSSSSSSSSSS” loudly and repeatedly until Zac went away and stopped asking. Or Elder Scrolls Online, where I can say “It’s the Elder Scrolls… Online”. No, with WildStar, I was left a bit short on words. But now I’ve thought on it, I think that’s a very good thing. Because the little one-sentence or bullet-point quips often turn out to be gimmicks. They’re great talking points in the hype phase, but when the game comes out, it’s actually the vast ocean of content and mechanics and polish and tiny little details that actually make it a great game. (I think, by the way, that this is a major problem with Kickstarted games - compared to the effort it takes to actually create a really great game (or even a kind of decent game), it’s really easy to put together a pitch for a game that sounds awesome. But that’s a topic for another time.)

Back to WildStar, and that ocean of stuff. If the makings of WildStar are an ocean, then it’s one where the coral is chocolate and the fish are the smell of mahogany and bourbon. And you can breath underwater, and the sharks all speak with amusing accents and also don’t eat you. It’s all just so… delightful. The writing so far has been engaging and often hilarious. I especially like the Chua - a race of hamster-like creatures of indeterminate gender that are so vicious, so far off the deep end, that even the other member races of the evil Dominion feel a bit uncomfortable around them. The art style takes the same kind of timeless cartoony approach that have kept games like Team Fortress 2 and World of Warcraft looking great for years after their release. It’s bound to be divisive - some people just prefer a more gritty/realistic style like Elder Scrolls Online or Dark Souls 2, and that’s okay! For my money though, I’ll take overblown cartoon sharkzookas (I don’t know if there are shark bazookas in the game, but it feels like there SHOULD be) and towering tree-robots over gray n’ brown swords and stones any day.

Great art and writing are all well and good, but the meat of the game is in the movement, combat, and exploration. This is where WildStar really distinguishes itself from the crowd. The combat follows the recent trend in modern MMOs like Tera and Guild Wars 2, where mobility and positioning play a much greater role than in earlier games like World of Warcraft. You can dodge to avoid attacks, you can hold shift to sprint, and you can double jump. It feels so good, I can’t believe it hasn’t already been done to death in MMOs. You even have to aim some of your attacks. Madness!

While it may not feel quite as tight as a dedicated platformer or action game, it’s still a joy to maneuver around the game world, both in combat and out. It also looks like they’re going to be playing with movement even more, through environmental power-ups that the game lore describes as crystals like ‘loftite’ or ‘accelerite’. Basically, crazy temporary buffs that let you jump a hundred feet in the air, or run miles in a minute. Those moments were some of the best in the beta weekend. I swear my wife spent nearly a full hour in a forest zone jumping on these giant mushroom-trampoline things that sent her caterwauling through the air- until she got distracted by an Explorer mission that had her eat a mushroom, which let her become a tiny person and join a tea party with a bunch of root vegetables. Like I said - delightful.

Back to the combat. It’s heavily based on what they call ‘telegraphs’. Many enemy attacks take a bit of time to charge up, and while they’re charging, they appear in the game world as a blue or red geometric shape, alerting you that fire or plasma or psychic death knives are about to occupy that space, so you can attempt to dodge out of the way. I’ve seen a bit of this before in Guild Wars 2, where area-of-effect spells and abilities would manifest as red circles on the ground shortly before they hit. This is like that, on psychedelic drugs. The designers went bananas with the shapes various abilities take - I saw circles and cones and rectangles, of course, but there were also wheels and sword-like shapes and arcs that erupted outwards in patterns reminiscent of good-old WinAmp music visualizers. I am definitely excited to see how this mechanic plays out in dungeons and raids, because I think it’s going to make for fun, challenging skill checks. I could go on and on about the combat, but I’ll wrap it up here and just say that I can’t wait to see more of it.

All this gushing is not to say that I don’t have concerns. First and foremost of which is performance. I’ve heard before that optimization is pretty much the last thing that happens in finishing up a video game, and I very much hope that’s the case here. I’ve got a pretty beefy gaming rig, and even with all graphics settings on low, my framerate would at times duck into the teens and twenties. Not enough to be unplayable, but definitely enough to be noticeably jerky.

Second is the interface. Pretty much all of it. The good news is, I know they’re way ahead of me on this one. Their ‘UI 2.0’ is apparently coming out in ‘the April Patch’, which I hope means the patch right before the next beta weekend, so I can check it out then. Right now there are a lot of important UI elements that are tucked away into weird corners of the screen. It took me a few hours to notice the XP bar in the lower left corner, or the ‘loot you just picked up’ window in the upper kinda-left side of the screen. The quest dialog, too, comes up in a strange spot - sort of three-quarters of the way to the upper left corner? It just feels messy, and the dialog box itself is tiny, which is a shame, because seriously, the writing is great. It should be big and bold and in my face.

Finally, other than leveling up (which is the most epic level up sound/animation in any game I’ve ever played), the game is really, really bad at communicating the rewards you’re getting. XP, reputation, money, loot - none of it is presented as front-and-center information, which seems strange for a game genre based on the joyfulness of gaining xp, money, and loot. Hopefully this will also get netted up into the UI 2.0 update, but for now it’s really poor. When prompted to fill out beta surveys on how I enjoyed a piece of content, I was often unsure how to answer the question ‘was the reward worth your time?’, because I didn’t know what I’d gotten. Item rewards were clearly communicated, but things like XP and gold rewards were, I think, squirreled away in the combat log. This is a problem, because for many quests, XP and gold are the only things you get.

So, there are definitely some things I’d like to see improved. For now at least, they have the excellent excuse that it’s Beta, and the game hasn’t come out yet, dude. I’ll be very interested to see what changes happen in the two weeks until the next beta weekend, and my condolences go out to the whole development team, who I’m sure won’t be seeing much of their loved ones for the next two months leading up to release. Overall, though, I am left massively stoked for this game. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what the game has to offer - PVP, crafting, player housing, guilds, adventures, shiphands, dungeons, raids, warplots. Not to mention a whole 40 or so levels worth of quest zones and levelup voice-overs to look forward to. I’ll likely write some more about it when I get to play again, and may also try to capture some video. It was killing me today to not be able to play anymore. I even went so far as to attempt to login, just to see if they’d left the servers on without telling anyone, as an amusing joke. No such luck, of course. For now, I’m left to ruminate on my experiences, and think about why it’s so hilarious to send a sentient rodent floating up into the sky with a shot from an experimental Loftite rail gun.