So a good friend and one of my loyal 9 readers, Shouryu, happened to drop me a pseudo request on Facebook about writing on the distinct lack of LAN in Blizzard’s upcoming Starcraft II, and the ensuing fan movement to keep it in. Wow, I’ve never really received a request before! It’s like I’m a real blog or something! Well, all I have to say, Shour, is you asked for it.

So if you click the link above, and hopefully come back here to me, you’ll see that Blizzard removing the ability to LAN it up with your buddies has set off everyone’s favorite online cliche, the “internet petition”. Now guys (and those one or two gals that actually play Starcraft, so cute!), I do have to first off compliment you for giving that old school method a try. I mean, considering the wildly successful track record of online petitions and how effective they are at totally changing how the developers think, how could you not? There’s nothing like thousands of /signed posts with little to no content or reasoning to make a developer give pause, right?

But people – maybe you’re all being Eeyore on this shiz and you’re not looking at the potential benefits of not being able to play with your friends in the same room. Blizzard rep Karune talked about Battle.net being better, right? Don’t you guys want to  enjoy the clearly high quality community that has been affectionately labeled the “BNet kiddies”? You should relish the opportunity to clash guns and ships with people who have a clear handling of the colliquialism of the English language, like “n00b”, “roflol pwned”, and “fuk u hacker”. Expand your vocabulary – yet another  benefit to being completely on Battle.net.

Besides, Blizzard is trying to stop rampant piracy out there. They’re stamping out those pirated servers and hacked code because boy, that’d really cut into the millions-heavy money pie that Blizzard would be making on this game, and they want the whole pie, damnit. How can Blizzard execs swim in their profits properly if they’re short a million to fill a room? It’d be a travesty, and you should be more sensitive, petitioners.

This isn’t Diablo 2, either, oh no – surely the code will be ironclad and completely inpenetrable – pirate proof, dare I say. There’s no way that someone is totally going to hack up some way to enable LAN on modded code and distribute it anyway. No, Blizzard is the king of polish, and they’ll be polishing that code so hard you won’t even be able to see it all in one game, but three! Take that, pirates!

But let’s go back to how removing LAN shows that the Great Blue Hope of Blizzard is looking out for you. Do you really want to discuss your hopes and dreams, the way your day went, or talk about inside jokes with a bunch of people in the same room as you? No way! Blizzard is trying to save you from That Guy Who Prattles On About Shit You Care Nothing About, Attention Whore Gaming Girl, and Dude Who Probably Hasn’t Showered In Weeks – all people who definitely appear at LAN parties. When society fails you by throwing you into a room with these caricatures and not with real friends (since Blizzard knows you don’t have a few that would game with you, right) Blizzard is there to catch you and give you the Internet – a place where you can game in relative peace and quiet and talk all the crap you want about others without fear of getting punched in the face repeatedly. They’re so sensitive like that.

So get on the no-LAN train, Starcraft 2 fans, because Blizzard’s using it to make online play a better place for all of you. Don’t you feel better now?

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• No LAN Play For Starcraft II [StarCraft] (kotaku.com)
• LAN support not included in StarCraft II (joystiq.com)
• Blizzard defends Starcraft II’s lack of LAN support (destructoid.com)
• And The StarCraft II LAN Petitioning Commences [Heck No, Possibly] (kotaku.com)
• Blizzard Confirms No LAN Support For Starcraft 2 (games.slashdot.org)
• Blizzard kills StarCraft II LAN support (macworld.com)

Since Syp from Bio Break was so kind as to piggyback on a post of mine regarding Star Wars: The Old Republic last week, I thought I’d do the same.

The Sypster (who still needs to follow PhoenixRed on Twitter) writes today about how Everquest has news of a new expansion coming down the line, something seemingly unheard of in a game so old. Not surprisingly, I have to share in Syp’s optimism for MMOs. Despite people’s need to be correct or right on the internets and make every attempt to declare any MMO that doesn’t meet expectations as “epic fail”, “dying”, or “dead”, the reality is that most MMOs out there rarely go the way of the dodo. I could count on one hand the number of pay-to-play titles that have been canned in the last 7 or 8 years I’ve been playing online games, and of those, only a couple got wrecked within the first year or so.

MMOs declared by player perception to be utter failures are still actually active, meaning either A)operating costs are lower than actual profit, making it worthwhile to keep going or B)there’s still a market for said game. The first popularly known graphical MMO, Ultima Online, is slated to get an expansion, and still runs. Games like FFXI and Ragnarok Online still draw in their target audiences. A re-design of Star Wars Galaxies still hasn’t stopped SOE from announcing a new quest creation system and housing details. Recent releases like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have taken subscription hits but still soldier on.

In a way, MMOs sort of need players to leave them alone for a while, allowing developers to focus on core flaws that need fixing, new content, and keeping players who are loyal to them happy. Being pressured by immense marketing hype, sometimes scathing coverage of a patch gone wrong, and forum goers with little communication skill beyond the words “lol”, “stfu”, and “kin i haf ur stuff” can be grating and distracting to MMO developers. From a certain perspective, they need to fade into the background, allowing other titles to step into the hype limelight, while they work behind a grey fog of relative quiet to deal with things.

In some respects, an MMO that gets this kind of breathing room can have positive long-term effects. If you look at titles like EVE and LoTRO, who enjoyed high visibility releases followed by a period of malaise, post-hype, you can see that any decently designed game with a dedicated development team can become more agile and able to fix their issues. This leads to a curiosity and uptrend of subscriptions from non-MMO tourists (i.e. the “wait and see” crowd) and maybe, just maybe, a decent, successful product.

Post-World of Warcraft, MMOs have gone through curious roller coasters that have been steep in their ups and downs. But not many of them go to an early grave – they just shutter themselves indoors to roll up their sleeves and get to work. That can’t be a bad thing.

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• Lord of the Rings Online not merging servers, still growing (destructoid.com)
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The Escapist, among other sources yesterday, reported that China has banned the practice of gold-selling or Real Money Transfer services from the country.

For those not in the know, the businesses in question employ workers who play MMOs all day, farming in-game cash, and then turn around and have that cash delivered to players who pay real money via a website or other method. Players get saved the excruciating effort of farming gold for all their MMO related purchasing and the gold farming businesses make actual money. Sounds good, right? Well it was so good that 80-85 percent of gold farming business was located in China and that last year, the businesses drummed up a cool $146 million in American cashola.

But now, the party seems to be over for RMT services. Because of its blatantly illegal violation of many MMOs’ Terms of Service, which prohibit selling virtual items for real cash, the government is looking to “nip illegal online activities” while it’s still practical to create legislation to do so, according to a Chinese online industry expert.

Lots of people can rejoice over this, despite some folks losing a service that they’ve certainly come to take advantage of over the years. For one thing the constant aggressive marketing of gold-selling spam, taking the insidious form of advertising banners, in-game tells, and even in-game mail, will probably cease to exist. Players will now no longer have to clean out inboxes full of spam or fill ignore lists with gold sellers intent or bartering their illegal wares. In addition to that, areas normally frequented by gold farmers will clear up, allowing players to hunt their mobs in peace once more. Annoyance levels will be down, freeing up players to once again focus their nerd rage on something proper, like how they can’t kill that one raid boss, or that they’re getting screwed on gear because the officers in their guild who regularly cyber with each other are being biased. It’s all good.

From the developers’ side, things are looking up as well, from a variety of perspectives. For one thing, they no longer have to spend as much resources aggressively finding and banning gold sellers from their games. Players who would normally login for 5 minutes to get their 1000 or so gold will now have to earn their cash “the hard way”, leading to greater login sessions and higher traffic. Last but not least, the market now opens for developers to create legitimate versions of real-money transfer services if they so chose. The resources used to focus on purging the gold-selling disease can now be freely spent reading their forums about how this one class is “totally OP” and “needs to be nerfed” else “the game is going to die”. I bet they’re looking forward to that!

So pour your Red Bulls on the floor to recognize the death of gold-selling, folks, because as much as you might have loved to kill the Chinese gold farmers, their mismatched gear and terrible tactics did, after all, serve to make you think you were decent in PvP. Respect, yo.

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• China Bans Gold Farming (games.slashdot.org)
• Gold farming, real money trades banned in China (boingboing.net)
• Chinese Gov’t Tries To Officially Ban Gold Farming [World Of Warcraft] (kotaku.com)
• China bans virtual cash for real-world trade (theregister.co.uk)

Today I had a social outing with co-workers. Now, very rarely will I talk about personal or work details on this blog, if I do at all. This is mostly because I do not want to blend personal and work affairs with the internet. There are, after all, more and more people who do background checks by using online search tools. To have someone I potentially need to network with find out that I totally meant to stuff a server with cream cheese and turn it on as a joke, well – I just can’t have that (hey, that too is a joke, by the way – stop backing away slowly).

But this is one of those rare occurrences, because it’s a general topic that bears some thought. Today’s social outing was an attempt to get people to experience something different that the rest of us had, and that was the nuances of another culture. Japanese was the flavor of the day, as we went to a Japanese style food court and grocery store, attempted to travel to a Japanese toy store, and eventually ended up at a Japanese sushi restaurant, server “kaiten” style where sushi comes around on a conveyor belt and you pay by the plate.

Even though my entire department are all healthy geeks, only a few of us had really experienced, were familiar with, and enjoyed Japanese culture. It got me to thinking why some geeks are attracted to something like Japanese culture. It seems obvious that those geeks out there who like Japanese animation and comics would eventually become curious about the cultural influence behind them.  I think, however, that there are reasons why geeks are so keen on something different from their own stuff.

By nature, geeks are obsessives, but they are also dreamers. They use interest in things the mainstream is not to build their own identity, provide a level of escapism, or simply look for something that is perhaps better than being all about their own native culture’s leanings. It can be computers, anime and manga, games, and much more. To be honest, it doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it is something that a geek can claim as different than the social norm. For example, if you asked most if not all geeks whether or not they thought Perez Hilton should have been struck by Will.I.Am’s manager for calling Will a “f***ot”, they’d react in one of two ways – A)Who cares about a celebrity trash blogger like Perez Hilton or B)He had it coming. There’s also always the possibility of C)Who? as well. But tell them that their favorite anime series is being cancelled, or that a vendor won’t support drivers for their OS anymore, or that a major content patch is going to ruin their game, and they’ll be all up in arms.

I’d say we geeks shun pop culture because there isn’t much depth or ability to pick it apart due to everyone making it, well, popular. Everyone’s talking about it, you eitther agree or disagree, and you move on. But something like foreign culture, the nuances of a roleplaying game, or other such things aren’t norms. They require thought and the kind of mind that appreciates taking something apart and putting it back together. They require a sort of agility to understand and accept things that are not their own and also to be a bit adventurous.

Putting aside all of these things, however, geeks like different cultures and norms because they are not what you’d normally experience in everyday life. The Japanese culture in particular has many things that are different about it that are completely foreign to those outside of it, which is an attraction to many budding geeks looking for a new fix of something they haven’t experienced before. That being said – there’s a difference between liking something because it’s different and appreciating it for being different. The former makes you a trend whore, and the latter makes you an open-minded person. I’d like to think that most geeks pursue the “different” for the second of the two reasons, and even if it may sometimes cost them mainstream friends and opportunities, most of us don’t seem to mind that at all.

Via Destructoid, I’ve found out that some fancy British fashion place has decided to use an interesting marketing campaign to sell its high-priced clothes. Seems that they’ve taken a page out of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, mocking up fake 2-D fighting graphics of models looking quite snappy in clothes that cost more than a month of my salary. Be sure to click over to Destructoid to check the images.

Now, on the one hand, if they’re trying to attract those who play video games to step into their hallowed halls, this might seem like it’ll backfire. Silly fashion retail outlets – don’t you know that we’ve already spent all of our cash on motion controllers, the latest game in a hit franchise, or cases upon cases of Bawls? Considering gaming is an indoor hobby, wherein you are not required to look good, just talk like you look good, my first thought is not to wear an Armani while killing other players in Left 4 Dead.

Still, let’s put all that aside and think about this for a second. If a high class place like Harvey Nichols can see the value in creating marketing using video games, perhaps there’s hope for their perception yet. It’s clear that most times you hear about video games in a news outlet that doesn’t have a cool-sounding brand name (ala Kotaku, Joystiq, and the like) it’s normally to say that games caused something bad, whether it’s violence, death, or or puppy dogs to keel over and die. The fact that we rarely see games or gaming in a positive light means that people are sometimes predisposed to the whole video games = the devil argument, even before they open a piece of news about it.

Finding practical applications for games and video gaming in general is probably not the thing that will necessary attract your normal Halo or Madden fanboy, but what it will do is make people look at games twice as a way to market, sell, or otherwise bring value to things. Why wouldn’t you want to see Mario marketing better plumbing tools and utilities? What about Tetris as a viral marketing campaign to sit together pieces to create a logo for a movie? Imagine the possibilities of GTA’s Niko Bellic was selling the best and latest cars.

Ok, well….maybe NOT that last one…but you get my drift. Many times, people forget that while video games are a pasttime and a hobby, they’re also a type of media – media that can be used by anything from a clothier like Harvey Nichols to practical services like grocery stores, banks, and more. The more video games and gaming can break intot hese markets, the more forgiving people will be when they see that a 7 year old injured himself trying to do a Dragon Punch. So buy a pair of socks or something at Harvey Nichols if you can – it’ll show them that displaying Chun-Li and Cammy ripoffs has some market movement, right?