Tag: problem

RAD is not rad

Random Thoughts

Rapid Application Development is not a horrible idea. Of course, much like Communism, it is not a problem with the idea it is the implementation. When most companies get into a RAD style of work, the result more often than not is just flying by the seat of their pants. No project plans, minimal design documents… usually it is just a list of features and a deadline, or a dozen lists and a dozen deadlines, and the lists change daily.

Having worked for two years on one RAD project, and then two and half on another, I really would like to work on something with more structure, or at least be part of team that is doing RAD instead of people one guy trying to work on multiple phases on the same RAD project by myself. I go into one meeting about phase one in the morning, then in the afternoon I go to a meeting on phase two when I have to pretend that I am not aware that phase one is behind schedule… it really is quite maddening.

The Whole Wide World

Gaming

If you have played any MMO, you have likely run into a quest that needed you to circumnavigate the world to finish it. Visit some guru in a far off place or take a note to an officer in some city’s army, whatever. You have also likely found a time when you wanted to group with someone who you grouped with yesterday, but today find them to be on another continent. If the game had no travel assistance, like run speed enhancements or teleports or griffin mounts, you probably got a bit annoyed at the twenty or thirty or sixty minutes all this running around was going to take you.

And, if you are like most people out there, you probably wanted them to fix the travel issue with instant travel teleports so that you only had to travel a couple minutes to a portal, port, then a couple minutes to your destination, at most.

In my opinion, though, the problem here has been misidentified and the solution is completely ass backward. The problem is not the travel time, the problem is that you have to travel.

Travel should, to me, be a non-trivial task, like it is in the real world. If you need to run errands in your life, don’t you try to get a few of them together and make one travel loop getting them all done and returning home at the end? I know I do, and that’s because I don’t want to go out and come back for each item, especially if those items are far away. To that end, I try to do things near home if I can, or if I find I’m always going far away for stuff to move my home closers to my interests.

This is the problem with most games: not enough content close to “home” for the player. There should be content for solo, groups, raids, PvE, PvP, every level, every class, whatever boundaries exist in the game within a reasonable distance from “home”. Now, what is a reasonable distance is another argument altogether, but for now we’ll just vaguely say that reasonable is “a travel time for which the majority of players feel no disappointment in making both there and back”.

A long while back, I started down the road in my design thought processes of what I refer to as a “town-centric” design. (If you are so inclided, you can go read the thread and my posts over at the MMO Round Table.) And I still hold that, in my opinion, this is the best way to design a game: start with the player’s home and radiate content out from there. At some point if a player tires of one town, they can move to another town, at which point they will have all the content they need around the new town, all within a reasonable distance from the new town.

I love travel in games, and sometimes just for travel’s sake, but I hate when travel becomes a barrier to fun.

NaNoWriMo

Random Thoughts

First off, Mr. Eko is dead. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it. If you understand it, well, I hope you already watched this week’s episode.

My problem with Mr. Eko was that when they introduced him as the silent butt kicking prayer stick guy, I liked him. His representation of a man with faith was cool, and looked to be a good introduction to the mix of people finding their faith only once they were stuck on the island. Then they had to go and make him just like everyone else as he decided that “the button” was his purpose. *sigh*

In a way, I’m glad he’s dead… So, what exactly does that have to do with the NaNoWriMo? I’ll tell you.

When I started thinking about the project, I have a handful of ideas swirling around in my head. Immediately, I narrowed it down to three. Then I tossed out one because it would work much better as a TV script instead of a novel, and that left me with two. I wrestled and anguished over which idea I would run with, and finally I picked one.

Then I started writing it… See, I’ve tried writing this story before. I know where it starts, and I know where it ends, and I even know a few places it has to go in the middle, but I’m missing all the inbetween parts. As expected, when I sat down and started writing, the story started not going where I wanted it to go. I got stuck, as I always do, trying to get from where I am to the next major plot point. I see where they should go, but my characters don’t seem to want to get there. And this is how it relates to Mr. Eko.

From the show, I get the feeling that someone wrote up the character of Eko as he was in the first few episodes. Silent butt kicker who, with Ana-Lucia helps the tail survivors actually survive the much harsher life they fall into as compared to the relative peace of the other group from season one. I think that it was intended for Eko to somehow die, perhaps sacrifice himself to save the other survivors, on their trip across the island, but the character proved so popular that they kept him alive. According to legend, Jack was the same way. The good doctor was supposed to die in the two hour premier, but they rewrote the part when Michael Keaton turned down the role. He went from a big name guest star to a smaller name major character. In Jack’s case it all turned out pretty well, but with Eko, it seems like they hadn’t considered what to do with him. Upon the tail survivors reaching the rest of the passengers, they made Ana-Lucia the fighter, and so they decided to make Eko pursue his faith, which lead him to the button, and the conflict of faith with Locke… and it was all pretty uninteresting, Eko’s half anyway.

When writing my story, the character I want to make the main character keeps trying to step back and let other people be in the spotlight. I keep pulling him back in, but it just feels forced. So I think I’m either going to have to scrap the idea until I find a way to make him the main character without it feeling forced, or just let him fade into the background and use somebody else. I don’t want to turn him into a Mr. Eko.

Anyway… that’s all I’ve got today.

Stuff on the Net XIV

Stuff on the Net

Its been a while since I put up links…

The problem with Superman, it turns out, is that he landed in Kansas 10,000 years ago.

My issue with this story is that I got out a ruler and measured my head… 6 inches just wouldn’t be large enough.

Amber Night blurts out probably the single best mangling of Colonel Jessep ever.

Scriptapalooza, a contest for television script writing, has had its deadline extended. I didn’t partake of it this year, but assuming nothing Earth-shattering happens to me in the next year, I probably will in 2007.

I am horribly addicted to Line Rider, even though I totally suck at it.

Someone who does not suck at Line Rider. Search around YouTube for more… some of these are just incredible.

Fun threads over at the MMO Round Table: Variable Death Penalty, the Death Mechanic, Making Self-consistant worlds fun, Your Ultimate MMO in 10 Bullet Points, Roleplaying in Games, and Rewarding Longterm Players.

And that’s enough for now…

The Reese`s Effect

Gaming

“You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!” “You got your peanut butter in my chocolate!”

Sometimes when it comes to MMOs, that’s how I feel. Only instead of peanut butter and chocolate, its PvP and PvE or Raid and non-Raid. But so far, no one has yet come up with the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of MMOs, no one has found the right blend.

My most recent example is that I’ve quit playing in the Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft. I love the Battlegrounds. I think the idea of Capture the Flag, Control Points, and other typically FPS styles of play being integrated into RPG PvP elements is just awesome. And when the Battlegrounds released, you couldn’t keep me out of them. The problem is… I don’t raid. I really hate raiding. Spending an entire night following someone else’s raid guide to victory is just boring. If I had to do that, I’d cancel my account. Luckily, there is tons to do in WoW besides raiding, and for most of it, my lack of raiding has no effect… until the Battlegrounds. At first, it wasn’t bad. There were tons of people as ill equipped as me. A guy in full raid gear was a rare occurance. But its becoming alot more common, watching my damage spells become less and less effective, while my survival rate continues to plummet… all the fun of Battlegrounds has slipped away. If only there were a way to join a Battleground that was restricted, that you couldn’t enter if you had on you (equipped or in bags) more than 3 pieces of raid gear, and by raid gear I mean the stuff that takes more than a group (I think I’d be willing to let the 10 man instance gear in).

Of course, any game that has ever introduced PvP has had the eventual colliding of PvP and PvE… some skill is overpowered in PvP so they nerf it and send the PvE players into a tizzy. Or some skill gets added or fixed for PvE and it “cripples” some class for PvP. Most times it seems like the developers need to make two distinct and separate games to sort it all out.

Anyway… no lofty design stuff here, just an acknowledgement that it exists and a realization that I, personally, would love it if the problem could be solved.

Memory and Grouping

Gaming

Tobold, whose blog I’m reading more and more, made a couple of really interesting posts recently.

The first post is about repetition in game design. Basically, lots of MMORPG games are designed around the “fail and repeat” methodology. You fight, you lose, you try again with gathered knowledge. This can be great if you are the first, but once guides get put on the internet, chances are your guild is trying to learn the fox trot instead of inventing new dance moves.

I agree with Tobold in that games need more unique content. And by unique I don’t mean cramming a hundred developers in a room and refusing to feed them until they create a hundred unique dungeons, but instead games need a way to have content such that if you fail you can’t just repeat it, but instead it will learn from your failure or have a random set of possible design parts that combine upon spawning, if you kill all a bosses henchmen, they should have different henchmen when you return, not the same guys standing in the same places. But this isn’t something really easily done… there is a problem in that games that have tried to use randomly generated content feel randomly generated, and no one really likes RPG games that feel tossed together. They should feel like the tasks you are undertaking are important.

His second post about grouping in games details exactly one of the major issues that I have in World of Warcraft. The problem with grouping is in actually finding a group (well, not for me, I play a priest, I have half the server on ignore). So his conclusion is thus:

But even more effective would be for the developers to introduce tools that diminish the group finding time. World of Warcraft could make huge improvements in their looking for group tools. And meeting stones could be reprogrammed to work like a warlock summoning, so the first three people arriving at the dungeon could summon the two stragglers. The beauty of such changes would be that at first sight they don’t change the rewards rate at all. But by cutting down on the rewards lost to a group due to waiting, improved group finding and gathering tools would make grouping relatively more attractive to players, and lead to more positive social interaction between them. We are not a bunch of hermits preferring to play alone, it is the parameters of the game that influence our behavior and preference for soloing or grouping.

And that’s it. WoW needs a looking for group tool beyond the meeting stones, which most people won’t use anyway because they don’t want to be in queue so long that the game decides to make weird groups.

In Good Company

Reviews

I have a problem with the business world… it has become cold. Mantras like “It’s just business.” have become the defacto for meaning “I’m going to destroy your life and I refuse to feel the slightest bit of guilt for it.” Companies are sold and bought, people are downsized, reintroduced to the market, and let go. And more and more I hate dealing with them in any fasion.

When I call a help desk… excuse me, a call center with a problem, I want someone to listen to me and assist me in finding a solution. Instead these days I get my “data” collected and I’m entered into the system. I can’t remember the last time someone said they would call me back and they actually did so. Instead I’m left calling them back in a few days and re-entering the system, starting over.

When I go into a store or talk to any salesman, I never get the feeling that they want to actually sell me a product. I do get the feeling that that want to take my money. When was the last time you heard a salesman say, “You know, I don’t think this product is really the right one for you. Perhaps you should look into a …” without it being a disparaging remark about your social status but an honest assessment of your needs and the capabilities of the items they sell.

I knew going in to see the movie ‘In Good Company’ I was going to like it. Its the story of a good business, a sports magazine, whose head of sales actually cares about his product and his clients, that is bought by one of those global conglomerates who emphasize numbers and profit, and couldn’t care less about the people who work for them and their lives.

I really don’t want to talk about the movie too much, only to say that its excellent, as long as you aren’t on the side of the global conglomerates.

Does Anyone Else Have a Work Ethic Besides Me?

Random Thoughts

You’ll forgive me if I am repeating myself. I’m too lazy to go back and check my own archives to see if I have ranted about this before, but then, I feel its worth repeating anyway. All this is a bit ironic considering the title and subject. heh heh.

When I was young, or younger depending on how you want to look at it, I was a complete slacker. Even at the tender age of 8 I was standing around while the rest of the family did yard work proudly declairing that I was “supervising” the rest of them. If I could avoid work, I did so.

My grandfather, my father’s father, gave me a tired old piece of advice that I didn’t understand at the time. “Any job worth doing is worth doing well.” Frankly, I didn’t consider yard work worth doing, which is hilarious considering the plans that I have for the yard I will have at the house I will one day own.

Later on, when I took a “real” job after high school, I came to believe and follow this tired piece of advice. I even went so far as to come up with a couple of pieces of “tired” advice myself.

The first: “Any job that pays a decent wage is worth doing.” Its just a logical, for me anyway, extention of the old standard. Basically means what it means that if the job pays okay then its worth doing, and furthermore, worth doing well. Simple.

The second: “Any wage you agree to work for is a decent wage.” Another logical extention. Personally, I won’t work for peanuts. If its not enough to cover my bills I will find something else. So, if I take a job, then I am agreeing to the wage, therefore the wage must be decent, and the job worth doing, and worth doing well.

So why am I writing about all this you may be asking yourself? (and if you aren’t, please pause and ask yourself this now) Sometimes its hard to not hold people to the standards that you hold for yourself. To expect others to live up to your ideals. I have come to the point that I cannot work in a good 95% of the world’s help desks or customer service areas. Other people, and companies in general, just seem to not give a shit. My coworkers tell me to just “let it go” and that its “not your problem”. But… it IS my problem, and its my job to NOT let it go. Its their job too, but they give in to the adversity of the workplace. Every day I seem to pull my hair out
(what little is left) at the bizarre hoops that I must jump through. Things that should take a day, two at most, to resolve take a week. And if someone here says it should be a week, the customer should just cancel service with us because its never going to get done.

There are far too many transfers, changing of hands, and with it all done through an electronic call tracking system problems can sit open for days with no one looking at them, adandonned in the queues. There are too many gaps and holes in the system for it to function with any degree of certainty. Calling this helpdesk is like playing Russian Roulette. It shouldn’t be that way, and with the smallest of effort it wouldn’t be.

Someone, anyone, please. If you know a company that actually cares, that actually provides good complete service to its customers, one that is hiring, send them my way.