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description=Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;

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let them do whatever all the time because i did intervene when grades started slipping or there were other issues that required parental involvement but i wanted to make sure they were given enough freedom to find their own way rather than be sheltered from the world i didn t force them into playing sports or any other activities i merely provided the opportunities in athletics music nature programs or whatnot and let them discover if it was something they wanted to do i was the one who introduced them to gaming and geekery and i gave them the freedom to explore both without judgement have i succeeded in my approach i m not sure because i don t know what s going on in their heads but i think they re on the right track i guess that s more of an about them rather than about me but i suppose they are a reflection of me to an extent whether i like it or not it ll be some decades before i discover if i really did the right thing but here s hoping his getting to know you round 1 is also worth reading but is much more depressing i converted this to my sorta home office because my wife gave me an ultimatum to move out of the basement i used to have an office in our unfinished basement but every winter i would come down with a severe case of bronchitis and she finally got tired of me getting sick when the weather turned cold when i graduated high school i pretty much cut the cord from any real relationships from my classmates and those of the all girls catholic high school next door if you ve ever been a non conformist or a geek in a catholic school environment that prized athletics more than anything else you d understand even those who i considered friends would attempt to use my friendship to get me to do things for them as if friendship were a bargaining chip i suppose i shouldn t have been surprised given that most of my friends dads were salesmen cue willie loman references from death of a salesman posted by redbeard at 11 12 am 4 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2021 family gaming tuesday july 2 2019 just one more time when i wrote my last post i honestly didn t know that jim sterling would create his latest jimquisition taking on gambling mechanics and that it d be released today and that i d be so pissed at the game design that torulf jernstrom talked about inside the video oh i knew on an intellectual level that it existed because a lot of it is modern marketing amped up to an extreme level but the brazenness of the major dev houses is really galling and here i am falling for that trap because i m thinking yeah i have to login to eso so that i can get the daily reward in much the same manner that a long time ago i discovered i was on an addictive precipice in smoking the occasional cigar this is not good on the flip side of it now that i recognize what is going on i can adjust my habits as much as i can to walk myself back from the ledge but for those who have fallen off the precipice there s no going back they can t stop and the video game industry is happy to oblige because they can make a ton of money off of these people if nothing else the overall amorality of the video game industry toward this situation will be their downfall here i was thinking that self righteous moralists shifting blame from everything from teen suicides to mass shootings onto the video game industry might have an impact but the reality is dawning on me that the video game industry is setting themselves up for a fall by this behavior it s not too late for the major dev houses to walk all of this crap back and get rid of gambling mechanics in their games but that window is shrinking i d imagine that the eu is going to crack down on them in the next year or two and that potential player base is large enough that the dev houses can t ignore them or they could try but if there s one thing that the investors in today s market want it s a maximum amount of money and if the eu says jump the investors will push the dev houses into finally saying how high posted by redbeard at 12 37 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels gambling mechanics gaming musings wednesday june 19 2019 maybe i shouldn t have taken a bite of that apple i spent the latter part of last week at mini red 2 s university orientation and while it was wonderful to look around and enjoy the university atmosphere i couldn t completely shake work from the back of my mind wrong time of year perhaps but there were vistas like this across campus you see work often means being beset by business terms business speak discussions about how to do more with less and the steady advance of business analytics the concept of business analytics isn t exactly new given that methods of separating customers from their money have been around for millenia however computers and electronics have grown to the point where the big data of business analytics is now a huge business the targeted advertising in the past has yielded to analytics driven methods of optimizing sales even getting away to a university in a small town hasn t allowed me to escape all of this stuff and what you may be asking does this have to do with a gaming blog everything actually why do you think live services lootboxes and other in game purchases are so big and yet so reviled with game dev houses right now because they do a great job of utilizing analytics to target the gamers who will pay for such things there are companies who market toward dev houses to help them maximize their profit and if you said well of course there are watching their sales pitch is less about watching a meeting in a dev company and more about watching something that d have been at home in a traditional corporate boardroom here s a snippet of one from jim sterling s the jimquisition from back in 2017 sorry about adding the 50 second preamble but i thought it was better to get a sense of the overall situation rather than simply dropping it into a post as is and although i do take issue with jim sterling at times this entire episode of the jimquisition does cover a lot of items that i used to see regularly as a salesperson at radio shack back in the early 90s i guess you could say that as a player of mmos i ought to be inoculated to this sort of monetization but there are times when it does bother me a lot like when i m walking through a small college town enjoying the scene and see something that makes me think you know if pick a storefront any storefront knew their customer base better they could really do well here in town it s like being a musician and not being able to turn your analytical brain off and simply enjoy the music any more only far far worse and i really am concerned that monetization schemes in the gaming industry will become not only more invasive with time but paradoxically harder to detect and also i fear that game companies particularly the major corporate dev houses have lost sight of the reason why games truly exist for fun although he and i had been at his university twice to visit my wife hadn t therefore both of us tagged along with him for orientation the drawback to those extra days off from work is that there was an absolute pile of work to get done when i got back yay me bingo i won buzzword bingo sorry but the term back then was salesmaker not salesperson radio shack loved their own lingo to no end and boy could i tell you stories about life at rat shack posted by redbeard at 11 36 pm no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels gaming musings tuesday april 4 2017 in praise of the code jockey i don t talk about my work at all on this blog for obvious reasons but at one time in the now distant past i worked for a software development house sorry the software involved was cad cam cae the design software companies use to create new products so it s not like i worked for microprose or something while i wasn t a dev myself i worked on the software qa end of things i was one of the people who designed and built the testcases maintained and expanded our own testing software and helped debugging the thorny problems by quickly zeroing in on which software code change was the likely culprit it was tough work particularly for a guy who came from a science background who puttered around coding in his spare time but it taught me a lot about how to code how to design software and how to handle group dynamics there were projects i was assigned to that pushed me to the limit physically and mentally and i will be forever grateful to my wife for tolerating me during those insane hours but no matter how hard or long i worked the devs worked even harder when i was pulling 80 hour work weeks they were hitting 90 i would frequently get to work at 4 am so i could make progress without having people drop by and there would always be about 3 5 devs in the building coding away you d think that the hours and demands would keep me from wanting to make the jump from qa to developer but you d be wrong i looked up to those people because i admired their coding skill and their drive they were creative they were fun and yet they were serious about getting the work finished it irked them when we had to release the software when they knew there were bugs in the system but the decision was never theirs so you can imagine the smile on my face when i read ravanel griffon s post at ravalation about developer appreciation week the idea is a simple one to acknowledge the devs in the game industry and give them a big thumbs up give a shout out to the dev team or teams that you admire the most and why you like them basically make them feel welcome and believe me i can do that when i criticize a game i make a clear distinction between the game and the dev staff itself the dev staff almost never control the release schedule they re on a tight timeline and they re chronically underpaid for the amount of hours they put in i knew a guy who used to work for a dev team that put together betrayal at krondor and i heard stories about how they had to do it for the love of coding and designing games as the money was definitely not the same for the game devs as it was for other software developers they have to work with tradeoffs and limitations of the hardware they recognize that people will find weaknesses that they never envisioned and that meeting expectations is often a fool s errand we gamers don t exactly help our cause either as we are frequently cranky overly nitpicky and demanding of a standard that nobody could ever hope to achieve and if the devs ever do catch lightning in a bottle they set themselves up for an impossible standard that gamers will try to force them to meet but here s a shout out to all the devs out there trying their best to make gaming fun and meaningful oh you wanted some specific dev team well i think i d have to go with giving some love to the original swtor development team you know the ones who had to deal with he inflated expectations that accompany the bioware name the kotor brand the star wars galaxies loyalists the amount of money ea spent on development and ea s own promotion that swtor was going to be a wow killer with a expectations like that nothing less than wow like numbers and subscriptions would mean success and as we know swtor did not reach those numbers was that the fault of the devs no they made an mmo that was essentially wow in space but with specific class stories with light or dark side endings the technical challenges of the mmo genre meant that swtor couldn t expand the star wars universe and provide persistent changes based on your choices such as with other bioware titles such as kotor mass effect or dragon age without massive use of phasing like wow used the devs felt that in swtor the journey and the ability to play around in the star wars universe was the important part of the mmo while the semi transient mmo community believes the game begins at max level in spite of all of those expectations and challenges and misreading of tea leaves the original swtor devs produced a very solid mmo that continues to hold its own over the years i still love the classic game l1 50 and based on how the mini reds have reacted to the class stories those stories still hold up well several years on swtor had to change in order to survive with a steady stream of updates end game content and switching to f2p to stem the bleeding to compare with another heavily hyped aaa title i m actually surprised that wildstar is still around because i thought they d waited too long to convert to f2p swtor has not only survived but gotten mentions on the e3 presentations from ea and it would have been all for naught if those first devs hadn t decided to change the game rather than simply circle the wagons so here s to the original swtor dev team who hoped to catch lightning in a bottle but ended up having to change the game s entire focus to survive it was no small task but they met the challenge and left us a legacy i mean really i ve no idea why some people natter on about their jobs on blogs because you re just simply begging for trouble when i was hired at all of my jobs one of the requirements for the gig was to sign non disclosure agreements and i ve seen people fired from their jobs for what i d term innocent discussions on social media so why risk it also known as how to run meetings and keep from going nuts when people don t listen to you there was once an april fools day prank played on the entire development staff where every time you opened a new window on the sgi workstations from 3 am through noon the machine would play a little jingle and make a weird laugh the first person to discover it loved to come in at 2 am to work on his graphics coding when nobody else was around and so he opened a new window at around 3 am and he nearly fainted i heard later that for a few short moments he thought his workstation was possessed i and several other qa people were also on the release team and we frequently argued for more time to fix the bugs because we could see the impending train wreck a bad release would make the release manager would also agree but we were overruled by senior management who had their own agendas my evidence for that is the mmo itself wow is designed to get you to max level as quickly as possible wildstar went totally old school and recreated the attunement quests to even begin to raid and lotro is designed to immerse yourself in middle earth if the journey wasn t as important to swtor we wouldn t have had 8 separate class stories and plenty of group quests per planet posted by redbeard at 4 26 pm 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels developer appreciation week gaming saturday february 11 2017 finding value out of gaming rocky i can t do it adrian what rocky i can t beat him adrian apollo rocky yeah i ve been out there walking arou...