Blizzard Deleted All Threads About My Article?

I think Blizzard locked and later deleted all the threads on the worldofwarcraft.com forums that had to do with my article. I see censorhip is their solution (not censorship of me, but of all the players who wanted to talk about the topics I raised). Is it their right to delete these threads? Of course it is. It seems like a pretty juvenile thing to do though. Either the ideas have merit and should be discussed or they don't and should be attacked by the other players. Either way, censorship is a pretty unenlightened way of solving a problem.

Edit: There does seem to be one thread left here.
For some reason, it took me over and hour to find it. Weird.

--Sirlin

World of Warcraft article

The internet seems to be on fire with this article I wrote about World of Warcraft. You probably came here to be all mad about it. If so, go ahead and say what you must.

On the other hand, if you have some ideas about how to create an MMO that doesn't have the problems I described in the article, that would be highly constructive.
Thanks,
--Sirlin

Managing Content

If we make content easy for people to create, they will create more of it. If it's a hassle to create content, they'll create less of it. Case in point: my own website. It's all html and when I write a new article, there's about 6 different places I have to hand-edit something. It's really amazingly poor.

This blog is pretty easy to post to, so I do that more, but now my site is in a fairly ridiculous state. I have forums that require one login, a blog that requires a different login, and articles that are managed in a different system (and that don't have rss). I figured it was time to do something about all that.

Unfortuantely, researching and installing various CMS's (content management systems) is all I've been doing for weeks now, so I've no time to actually write any content! The state of the CMS offerings out there right now is pretty bad, too. If you just want a forum, vBulletin is the best (that part's easy!). If you just want a blog, then Blogger is decent and Wordpress is good. But what if you want articles separate from blogs, articles with a summary and cover image that don't appear in the articles themselves, one page that lists all article summaries by date, another that lists all recent blog posts, a front page that lists som articles and some blogs (each displayed differently), and other stuff like that? It's quite a task to get a sidebar that automatically lists every single article by category, like I have on my current site.

So what's out there to do all this stuff? Drupal has a lot of features, but is hopelessly difficult to wrestle and no designed for non-technical people. Mambo...well I think the main developers left to create Joomla, so if you wanted Mambo, you might as well use the newer Joomla. I'm wary of both of them for some reason, even though I've hardly tried them. Subdreamer seems lacking. vbadvnced isn't up to the task. The integration between vbulletin and drupal found in "vb drupal" comes at too high of a price (a totally non-standard and unsupported version of drupal). ArticleLive has promise, but seems too hard to customize. EvoArticles has promise, but doesn't even have a working demo on its site. Wordpress is great for what it does, and pretty terrible for doing anything other than a straight blog (forget doing real articles on it).

I could really go on and on and on here, because I've certainly looked into a lot over the last few weeks. Ultimately, it's looking like drupal is what I'll go with, as soon as version 4.7 is out of beta. Drupals motto should be "Nothing is easy. A few things that should be easy are nearly impossible. Most things are hard, but at least most things are possible."

That motto beats the motto I'd give many competitors such as Wordpress and ArticleLive "Some stuff is incredibly easy and great. Everything else is hard enough that you basically can't do it unless you get into php programming."

This is boring stuff that makes for a boring post. I hope I can get past all this and go back to actually writing decent stuff someday.

--Sirlin

DOA Joystick, Better Than Expected

For some reason I like to review controllers, so here we go. I got the new Dead or Alive joystick (made by Hori) off Ebay recently because I couldn't find it anywhere near me. It has exceeded my expectations in several ways. I've been pretty happy with my Soul Calibur stick (also by Hori), and it doesn't even have an R2 or L2 button.

The DOA stick has:
1) All the buttons, including triggers, start, back
2) Even that crazy Xbox Live button, and even the four lights around it, telling you which player you are
3) A nice input on the front (toward you) for the headphone jack.

The game DOA4 even recognized that I had the DOA stick, had an in-game picture of the stick, and automatically set the buttons for me to something reasonable. Plus, it's USB, so you could even use it with your PC (though I haven't tried that yet.)

Meanwhile, the official 6-button game pads for Street Fighter Anniversary Edition were set so that by default, Fierce punch and Roundhouse kick were reversed when you played Street Fighter Anniversary Edtion!

Are Hori parts as good as Sanwa parts (e.g. those used in the Real Arcade Pro stick)? No, but Hori's are still damn good. I'm totally satisfied with the product. All they have to do now is make a wireless version.

--Sirlin

Blizzard Treats Gay/Lesbian Group Unfairly

http://www.innewsweekly.com/innews/?class_code=Ga&article_code=1172

It's hard to even play World of Warcraft without wading through all the chat about how this or that tactic is "gay," and yet Blizzard did not allow a guild to advertise that it's a friendly safe-haven for gay and lesbian players. The reason Blizzard gave is that such a guild could cause those members to be harassed, and that other players would not like that the guild is discriminating based on sexual orientation.

This is exactly the kind of thing that is completely embarassing about Blizzard policies and a perfect illustration of how bad our virtual worlds are right now.

Even though Blizzard has a history of trying to babysit every possible player behavior, I didn't think they'd attept to regulate player-run guilds. Maybe it's ok if a guild has only Christian players in it, as long as they don't advertise? Maybe the Gay and Lesbian guild could have "stayed in the closet" and been ok?

The irony is that decisions like these are meant to make the game a "happier, safer place," and yet they will eventually drive away reasonable people looking for a reasonable environment in which to interact. Blizzard already lost the founders of that guild as customers, and I guess they lost me too.

--Sirlin

Virtual Worlds and the problem of player-rights

I'd appreciate some help from any thoughtful people about my post here on virtual worlds and player rights. You can find the post here.

Basically, the most current virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft have medieval heirarchy, where players have nearly no rights at all. In 100 years, this type of online government will be a cute footnote. I'm outraged that you aren't outraged about this, as virtual worlds will become increasingly important in the future, for reasons that reach beyond games. I'd like to be part of the solution, so lend a hand. So far the three most important topics I can identify are

1) Freedom of speech
2) Privacy
3) Ownership of virtual items

The question isn't whether these things should be allowed. I consider it self-evident that they should be. The question is how to deal with the consequences, and what other important rights should be addressed along with these.

This particular topic is too important to be burried in my blog, and I think the discussion on the forums would be more long-lasting, so I request that you post there.

Thanks,
--Sirlin

PS -- At the top of this blog, there's now a link to the Atom feed.

Second Life calls the FBI

http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2005/12/the_solution_to.html#more

Some people shut down the MMO Second Life by creating self-replicating objects with the in-game scripting system that replicated so much that they crashed the server. The CEO of Linden Labs (the game's publisher) turned over the names the griefers to the FBI.

I'm usually quick to point out the problems of banning people who perform legal in-game actions that have consequences that "you don't like." In almost all of these cases, good answers are "have the developer fix the problem in the code" or possibly "allow players a way of policing or otherwise sort out the problem themselves." This is an extreme case though, since these actions caused the entire server to crash, denying all other players the ability to play and the company the ability to make money. Perhaps in this extreme case, it *IS* correct for the developer to step in and ban, and call the authorities. Almost anything less than this probably does not warrant a ban or any penalty to the player from the developer.

In a Street Fighter tournament, if you do something that intentially crashes the game, you lose the round. Hypethetically, if you did something that somehow not only crashed the game, but stopped the entire tournament from happening, we would not hesitate to eject you from the building.

Meanwhile World of Warcraft will ban you for "playing too much," attacking Lord Kazzak in various unsanctioned ways, using a rogue/warlock combo to lure bosses too far from their spawn points, fighting on rooftops, entering unfinished areas (why are they accessible at all?), buying gold or items on ebay (eventually the courts will probably overrule them on this), collaborating with the other faction in battlegrounds, "using terrain exploits to your advantage," player-created casions (that merely use the in-game /random command), player-created bingo games, profanity (even though there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech), posting on forums about whether a guild is full of Blizzard employees, posting on the forums about why you were banned for posting about something seemingly constructive, having a name such as JustKidding, SergantTaco, TheAthiest, or roflcopter...and a whole lot more things, too.

Finall tally:
-----------
Linden Labs--Probably Justified
World of Warcraft--Apparently Fascist. :(

--Sirlin