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LOOPINGWORLD.COM

October 27, 2011 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

Books/mythology/metaphysics discussions moved to: loopingworld.com

This means that the site here won’t (usually) be updated and I’ll eventually
copy all of book-related posts over there. The rest of the stuff will stay here
for as long the site stays up (not planning of pulling it down for the
foreseeable future).

UPDATE: I’ll sporadically still post here, but it will be for writing about
roguelike development, tracking my own (lack of) progress, or other quirky
gaming things.

Posted in: Blog | Tagged: Blog


THE GOD IS A SPIDER.

November 5, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment



Posted in: Blog |


BLUESKY

November 4, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

On THIS side we only play hardmode. We embrace complexity and doubt, rather than
fleeing or ignore them.

On enshittification and BlueSky, which I’m currently using and hoping it will
work as an alternative.

> They did care about their users. They just cared about other stuff, too, and,
> when push came to shove, they chose the worsening of their services as the
> lesser of two evils.

> Any system where users can leave without pain is a system whose owners have
> high switching costs and whose users have none. An owner who makes a bad call
> — like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training
> — will lose a lot of users. Not just those users who price these downgrades
> highly enough that they outweigh the costs of leaving the service. If leaving
> the service is free, then tormenting your users in this way will visit in
> swift and devastating pain upon you.

> There is no such thing as a person who is immune to rationalization or
> pressure. I’m certainly not. Anyone who believes that they will never be
> tempted is a danger to themselves and the people who rely on them. A belief
> you can never be tempted or coerced is like a belief that you can never be
> conned — it makes you more of a mark, not less.

Posted in: Blog |


ENSHITTIFICATION PART 2 – BROGUE

November 1, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

This one seems to have been “justified” because the new way looks better on 4k
screens.

I guess next we’ll have ray tracing applied to ASCII games.

But more annoying is that there’s no reason to hardcode it, as if you
purposefully antagonized the original style.



…Why? And why purposefully removing the option that has always been there in the
old code?

There’s no reason to write those numbers as constants in the code. Once you know
the “rows” and “cols” of the tiles.png, and so the grid the game uses, then you
can read the size of the image and set tile width and height accordingly.

I always thought that in the case of Brogue and its neon-color style, a bold
font looks much better. Even all the screenshots at the website match the old
style: https://sites.google.com/site/broguegame/home/screenshots

Once again, old VS new.





By the way, you may notice an apparent contradiction between this and the other.
Because here I prefer a blurrier font, while there I want something that is
printed clearly and crisp without any fuzziness.

Brogue is a game of a certain aesthetics. It’s intended to be more immersive.
With ASCII being more tiles than text. It’s not a game full of numbers and
statistics, the UI on screen is minimal, and the levels of the dungeon have been
made with a certain size proportional with the screen available. It’s a game
built around simplicity.

Cataclysm is the opposite. It’s a game that needs to cram lots of information,
full with mechanical complexity and abstractions of “realistic” mechanics. It is
open world, you can see far away, therefore it is best that the visual range is
contained within the visible screen to have better awareness. Making ASCII ideal
specifically because they convey information immediately without wasting screen
space.

Posted in: Blog, Roguelike |


ENSHITTIFICATION :(

October 31, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

It especially hurts when enshittification comes close to home.

There are some spaces I consider safe. Even when not playing these “niche”
games, it feels good knowing they exist and continue on their path. I already
felt really bad for all that happened to Dwarf Fortress. More recently I felt
bad for Songs of Syx, which in some ways did things better than Dwarf Fortress
itself. I helped a bit popularizing it, because it was a really good game… again
only to see it destroy most of its (already problematic, but functional) art
style and UI.

But this is especially hurtful because I contributed a little bit, and was there
from the beginning. It really felt nice knowing it was a thing that kept going,
for ten years. Creating a legacy just like the ever going Angband or Nethack.
Switching hands but always moving on and improving, while staying close to the
original vision and ambition.

We’re really moving into an age where things simply end.

Angband and Nethack have their own fairly limited graphic support, but they
always existed as an optional feature. Even more modern projects like DCSS keep
offering the game in tile or console mode. Because the medium is fundamental,
and branching away from these roots is not a way to “improve” a game. It goes
beyond a game design decision, it’s a derail of the mission that has been part
of the game all along.

So I was really sad to see that after a routine update of my local install of
Cataclysm I found that in-game menus now have been replaced by ImGui panels,
that badly clash with the rest of grid-based UI (not only because of style but
because the rendering of truetype fonts isn’t suitable to an environment built
around bitmap fonts). Right now it’s usable, but devs somehow decided this is an
ongoing effort to replace the whole UI. That’s how it is, and it’s not an option
anymore.

> “Why would we maintain two entirely separate instances of the game UI?”

Well, we used to care.

Old VS New



Posted in: Blog, Roguelike |


A DOG WHISTLES

October 21, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1848375429008073034

OBVIOUSLY he only meant red/republicans VS blue/democrats.

Yeah.

Btw, I jumped ship to BlueSky. It wasn’t the plan, but it seems quite nice. I’ll
see how it goes from here.

Posted in: Blog |


ON ASMONGOLD, AND HIS CRADLE OF MONSTERS

October 16, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

A few words on this, I guess.

I watched the part on stream where he was saying those things about genocide,
and I through it was all bullshit. Really stupid shit.

Then I read a bit on some forum at the reactions, and I got really annoyed by
how his words and opinions were twisted. So one moment I was assaulting him (in
my mind), and another running to his defense. That’s how I always find myself
fighting against everyone, and losing all battles. But… We should really not
need to resort to exaggeration and straw-manning when what is being said is
ALREADY evidently wrong when taken accurately for what it is. Why do you need to
distort, to make it worse, to point at an enemy and make it so irrational to be
incomprehensible?

That’s how you stop understanding, and how you start hating. The blind hate of
rage that only damns inwardly.

Before you try to understand WHY what Asmongold said was wrong, you need to
understand why he said it and why it was rational and logic from that
perspective. If that perspective doesn’t look logical, it’s not because it
isn’t, but because you conveniently distorted it, to make him the monster. To
feel good for hating the bad guy. As Diablo would say, you hold your
convictions, but understand nothing.

So what was Asmongold’s “logical” point? As he repeats in his “apology” video,
he is against religious extremism. So what he did in practice was to mirror and
so reverse the statement. In a way that looks like this: if these people want to
kill us, then they deserve to be killed. He applied a kind of silly reciprocity,
but that still kind of works on this simplistic line of thought. From his
perspective it’s like saying that he hates so much these religious zealots that
would slaughter with glee, because how deep they are in their absolute
ideologies and convictions, that if they end up eating their own “ends”, then
it’s only right. It’s only right that you suffer what you’d dispense to others.
If you want to deliver violence, then you deserve receiving it.

That’s the “rational” argument. If you don’t understand the legitimacy of it,
you’ll never know how to actually, properly DEFUSE it. We’ll go through
apologies and posturing, while those people will continue thinking what they are
thinking.

What is actually wrong in that argument has at least two core aspects. One it’s
tricky and complex, because it’s about realizing that it’s all circular violence
that perpetuates itself, and going that way only reproduces what it is,
progressively getting worse. Which is exactly what is happening in the practical
context of these wars. You’d have to learn how to “correct”, rather than
“punish.” And how to integrate, rather than expel and reject (which is the whole
ultimate point of this culture war and “canceling”, aka, accountability versus
recovery).

The simple part is instead realizing that groups and cultures are quite far from
homogeneous, and you need then be very careful to contextualize when you pass
judgment. Not everyone in Palestine is a murderous zealot, and this goes without
actually saying. But even then, see the point above, even if they were
(religious zealots who would murder with glee), do they deserve death? Because
here we’re back in theme with all the Gad Saad/Elon Musk rhetoric about the west
(and the left) having become too empathic with their “enemy.” And so we should
destroy our enemies in order to survive (prevail).

Well, that’s supremacist ideology, and it is VERY POPULAR.

You know what happens when you ban Asmongold? That you FEED that ideology.
Because you slap the wrist of the exaggeration, but you condone the underlying
ideology. You just hid the worm so that it keeps spreading the rot in society.
You clean the surface, while the rot spreads BELOW.

Everyone was ready to rage at the superfluous so that no one addressed the rot.

And so rather than an episode (and following apology), we get a SEQUENCE.
Because that rot will continue spreading and surfacing again and again, having
not been addressed for what it is.

In the same way having powerful weapons and having the upper hand doesn’t give
you the RIGHT of killing your enemy, but charges you of actual, practical
RESPONSIBILITY of AVOIDING that brainless reciprocity. The same with Asmongold,
having popular stream and videos watched by tons of people, charges HIM with a
similar responsibility.

Because idiots are everywhere, and the worst is keep breeding them. One one side
you’ll have those idiots who hate Asmongold and will say his apology is
dishonest. Because they feed on the same certainty that drives their enemy. And
then there are idiots, the greater majority here, that do not believe his
apology BECAUSE THEY AGREE WITH HIM. And they think that this apology was ALSO
dishonest in order to comply with great censoring powers that control the world.

They double down on his defense, thinking that they KNOW that he spoke true the
first time, and false the second. And that’s Asmongold’s responsibility, here,
to remove ambiguity, rather than to feed it however convenient:






While I don’t think anyone is responsible for how other people decide to twist
what you may say or write, you still have the responsibility of what come after.
Of confronting what monster you have produced, rather than brushing it off and
deflecting responsibility.

These are your children.

(it’s quite funny, one of the guys there, thinking that correcting your parents
having the same impact of personalities on the internet with millions of
followers)

EDIT: Nevermind, he came back to be worse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCms-mad-Eo

Posted in: Blog |


A TRUE BELIEVER OF FICTION

October 5, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

Why is it always that leaders are the most stupid?





Posted in: Blog, Clownshoes |


APPROACH TO RELEASING CONTENT: WRONG

September 25, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

I’m slightly curious about the imminent release of another MMO: Throne &
Liberty.

NCsoft almost collapsed, I guess they really need this long-in-development
project to turn out well. But there are tons of problems. Some of these are
design concepts easy to fix, if the intention exists. But some other are
ingrained deep about the type of game. I won’t discuss any of this.

Instead I’ll comment this:
https://www.playthroneandliberty.com/en-us/news/articles/autumn-2024-content-roadmap



To begin with, how many times you’ve heard something along the lines of “I
absolutely have to play this game, there’s an Halloween event going on” ? I
guess never.

Seasonal events are a nice addition to any game because they add some flavor.
But they never are the guiding purpose. If a game relies on a seasonal,
transitory event to gain value, then it means that the foundation of what the
game has to offer is shallow. Unless of course you expect players to come and go
in phases, but once again, a seasonal event will never be enough of a motivation
to bring players back. If anything it helps engagement of those already there.
But okay. I only find quite weird this emphasis and focus, with the launch of a
game, for something as TRIVIAL as seasonal events…

In general we can say that seasonal events “follow”: if there’s interest in a
game, that interest can be translated to some interest in a seasonal event. But
a seasonal event will never magically bring interest BACK to the game itself.

The real problem is that reading this, and without having information about
details, I can already say this whole approach is WRONG. The idea of frequent
updates rather than wait for a big content drop after months is a better
strategy overall for a game that wants to stay alive and active. That part is
good. The part that isn’t good is that, as you can read, they put lot of
emphasis on the pacing of power, player-progress. Including some hints of a
catastrophic approach to deal with this: statistics-based design.

What would even mean “identify the best opportunity” and “active player data and
feedback” ?

Best opportunity for WHAT? Obviously, the underlying argument is that the
addition of new content has to be …paced. Therefore, as those two points
indicate, the western release will withhold some progression systems compared to
Korea. They will monitor how the overall community bites onto the game, and
measure the rate of progress, in order to keep this overall progression well
paced.

Do you understand WHY this whole approach is completely broken without any
further examination? I hope so. This is an MMO. It’s, in some way, a world. Yet,
the overall game design and game development approach, is to treat this game AS
A RACE.

You PAY MONEY to get an headstart, because the sooner you begin this race, THE
BETTER CHANCES TO STAY AHEAD.

(note that they gate events even AFTER the early access phase, so that early
access servers CONTINUE to be ahead even after the full release)

Itemization is a mix of loot-based systems, crossed with guild-based gating
systems (that promote community toxicity and elitism), blended with item
level-based progression as a materials and currency sinks. A somewhat “walled”
grind, but grind nonetheless, and GATED grind on multiple levels, the minority
of which are time based. All the rest is gating by selective systems. Of
guild-based rules of circular dependencies of “you need to be already qualified
to join.”

It is what is likely to become, very quickly, toxicity: the game.

So, back to the actual problem hinted above, because what I described up to this
point was simply cause, not end. This overall strategy worked well for Lineage
and similar. It won’t likely work today.

What I mean to write here is not in the way of an “opinion”, but in the way of
an analysis. The intention is that what I write doesn’t depend on me, nor it
reflects my desires and preferences. It just is (unless I’m wrong, of course).

What “just is”? What is this mountain of a problem?

You are trying to design your game as a race, and then as consequence all your
effort is at trying to gather data and feedback so that you get the pacing of
that race as good as possible. All good? Yes, if you lacked the perspective.
This is exactly the right way of proceeding, as long you embraced the problem as
it is. But the scale of the problem is much larger: you are creating a gap
between new players and veterans.

To be successful long term (when these days “long term” can be as short as three
months), your game needs a constant influx of players. New players. Players who
have no idea what they are doing and put effort to learn things from scratch.
The game systems, game design, overall structure of the whole thing, need to be
constructed as if they EXIST OUTSIDE TIME. No matter if you start playing during
an headstart, or six months down the road, or two years from now: THE GAME NEEDS
TO BE ACCESSIBLE. It needs to be fun, and it needs to be well paced.

It’s not a fucking race, even if you want it to be a race. Because, no matter
what, you have two scenarios. Either you have millions and millions of players
on day one, and then are able to keep enough of a fraction to be successful. Or
you’ll have players, if the game is good enough to convince players to try it,
that maybe join a week later, a month later, six months later. If all your
efforts are spent in a well paced race, then you are ERASING the totality of
potential player-base joining PAST day one. You are desperately hanging on that
momentous splash of day one. Placing all your hopes that the game will bleed
players slowly enough to still make sense commercially. And even still, even IF
an enormous success, you still run on a countdown.

Or maybe just understand that you need a time-zero type of design: the game
needs to be well structured, out of time. No matter when a player joins.

I know how these games try to wrestle the problem: eventually they’ll implement
some catch-up system. Some cuts in the early game so that new players have a
faster on-boarding. Destiny 2 is that type of game. It’s also that type of game
that shot itself repeatedly in the feet. It just happens that eventually you
realize you can’t walk anymore.

You can’t fix this through band-aids. The “speed” is never a point, because
being in a constant race is only appealing for a tiny group of players. Within
some niches, a tiny group can be well enough to be sustainable, but I suppose at
the scale NCsoft wants to operate, it won’t be.

It can all be fixed, just as long you understand the game needs to be designed
to be accessible and fun AT ALL TIMES, rather than surfing at the temporary
edge, dominated by an elitist group. You want to have meaningful progression?
Ok, so the risk is that players get scattered across many power levels,
populations dilute below levels that are active enough. It becomes a solvable
problem of player distribution, and tiering that encourages players to also
continue to populate lower tiers.

The problem is already embedded in the words of that announce. Their efforts are
focused about timing the introduction of updates. Meaning that the CONSEQUENCE
of this strategy SOLELY affects the players who are active THAT PRECISE MOMENT.

Whoever will join the game later, whoever wasn’t active in that time frame,
whoever takes a vacation to do something else… Whoever wasn’t right there in an
ever fleeting FOMO, is screwed and cut out of the game.

A game built on an ever shrinking elitist pool, where the focus on timing will
be ironically PROPORTIONAL to the pacing of the game’s failure. The more
SELECTIVE the player progress, the faster the game will bleed players out.

The more focus they will put on TIMING THE GAME RIGHT, the faster the failure
they’ll get. Because every single timing they get PERFECTLY RIGHT, will also
cleave the playerbase between who was there, and who is permanently gone.

I have no specific information of what’s contained within the boxes labeled
“tier 2” and “rune systems”. Is it well designed, or is it not? You instead are
saying: if we release it in September it’s bad, if we release it in January it
is good. Then, I can confidently state that YOU ARE WRONG.

If the timing is perfectly right on day 1, it automatically means the timing is
WRONG on day +x. Meaning that every player joining past day one will have the
game being WRONG, always. One determines the other. Either game systems are good
and work at all times, or they are wrong most of the times.

In the presence of everything I wrote here, all accusations and recriminations
about P2W that DOMINATE discussions everywhere else ARE IRRELEVANT.

I don’t care if you can PAY TO DELETE FUN out of a game (you are the victim of
your own choices), I care that a game has good game design built on rational
analysis.

—–
In light of all I wrote above, the first line of that image is obviously
completely wrong and quite silly: “The content release cadence is one of the
most important (and trickiest) to get just right.”

It’s written as a matter of fact premise, when it instead just pure irrational
delirium. The faster and the greater the amount of content, the better.
Obviously. Of course considering the quality, that usually is the cause behind
delays. Imagine taking that line seriously: “we’ve made a game that is simply
too good and too big, our players are not prepared. We’ll destroy our
competition, we cannot release it.”

You have a certain amount of limited resources, costs, and you try to make the
best work you can. You try to match the speed of making something, with the
amount you can spend, and the quality you have as a target. Within this context,
you simply try to do it as fast as possible, as much as possible. Of course you
don’t add a ton of content at once so that you open onscreen seventy pop-ups at
the same time like in Black Desert, but that’s again a matter of gaming
direction and designed flow, not of some ideal “content quantity” to guess
right. The part that is tricky to get right is to avoid mistakes as much as
possible, and focus development on what makes enough of an impact. You want to
avoid making predictable mistakes, that then cause more time wasted to overhaul
systems already complete.

How many resources you want to reinvest to secure the long term future of a
game, and the quality of your game design. That’s all that matters. Everything
else is out of your hands.

Posted in: Blog |


BLACK DESERT ONLINE

September 14, 2024 by Abalieno | Leave a comment

I’ve just bought a second account of this terrible MMO. It’s just 1 euro right
now (or 1 dollar, I suppose). Likely because an “expansion” just released, but
it’s usually on sale more often than is not anyway. The reasons why I bought a
SECOND account are too long to explain.

But let’s start from here. Why selling a game for 1 euro? It’s just a silly
barrier of entry. Just make it free. I have played BDO for a few years very
casually, I still have to spend any money on it outside of the initial purchase,
that at the time was 5 euros.

BDO is a game that is outside of rational plausibility. It’s something of this
world that is not explainable. That’s why I’m writing this. The whole situation
of the MMO space has always been a mess, and only got worse in recent years.
Making a decent MMO is extremely hard, now exceedingly rare. And make it survive
the market even more so. BDO is this absurd anomaly because it has the concrete
potential of DESTROYING the competition. I’m not joking, I’ve been observing
this space for a too long time, I’m not exaggerating. It’s a game that realizes
things we were dreaming about in the early 2000s, when the genre was starting to
flourish. It does stuff that no other game even attempts, and it does it in a
way that seems effortless.

Yet, it’s all a fucking disaster. A COMPLETE, UTTER disaster of the game. Flawed
beyond anything you can imagine. What’s infuriating for me, it’s how easy it
would be to repair. And what a marvel it would be when simply restored to its
ideal shape. The shape that you can SEE, if you have eyes to see. The shape that
is already there, waiting to become. DEMANDING to be delivered. A work of art
that waits. If even someone out there was just willing to spend some time… and
listen. Fucking LISTEN.

Because if on one side the game already realizes wild dreams no one thought even
possible, on the other it completely fails on everything. Base game design,
structure, every single little thing, accumulating to a trainwreck of galactic
proportions. And it’s not even that, not even just game design. The game engine
is at the same time a marvel and a continuous list of small problems. The UI is
a disaster, and so on. Again all solvable if anyone simply cared to stop,
observe and do something. Just a casual mention of one of the smallest problems:
while you can move some UI elements, what you can or cannot move is arbitrary.
So for example you can move your stamina bar, but you cannot move the
gathering/processing bar. If you happen to move some of these widgets you will
keep getting problems because they will overlap with other unmovable widgets,
especially when they share a similar function. The example about stamina and
gathering is meaningful because you consume stamina when running or fighting,
meaning that there’s no contextual overlap between using stamina and a gathering
process (you’re forced to be still). So why not use the same widget? Why have
two, and why, IN PARTICULAR, you make stamina movable but gathering bar not, so
that if I move the stamina to avoid some overlaps then I get the gathering bar
in the way no matter what? Again, just a MINUSCULE example for something
unambiguously bad, that has no rational reason to exist. You can only move 50%
of the things, forcing the things that can actually be moved still be moved
around and in the context of what cannot. A way to give customization only to
take it away.

And I’m writing this to start from ONE thing. We’ll get to it.

Let’s say the game has an opening cinematic scene, done in-engine, already
showing a bunch of problems right from the start, with plenty of graphical
glitches, hair sticking out of clothes, and the usual “jank.” BDO is all jank,
everywhere. A complete lack of polish. But okay, that’s not the point here.

The game starts through some quick forced dialogues and then gives you some
control of the character. Already HERE it’s a mess. Because you can spend 20
minutes just figuring out a tons of crazy attacks and combos you’re given. Some
of these are shown through the UI, but many you can discover by experimenting
with controls. There’s enough complexity here to overwhelm even an experienced
player. It’s nice to show what the combat system is capable of, but it’s really
messy and confusing to present to a new player. But this is also beside the
point. The trick used here is that the game gives you a full powered character,
only to strip away those powers a minute later. A classic, but not quite so
because even when stripped down you still have way, WAY more than you can handle
as a new player.

But all of this is again beside the point.

After this initial few scenes where you got through some cryptic dialogue that
sets up the “mystery” of the black spirits, you finally get ported to the actual
MMO world. You get a quest and everything. Same as many MMOs, BDO even more than
any other game, evolved through an accumulation of systems that got
progressively patched in. So you get multiple layers of quests, and a near
infinite aggression of on-screen messages and alerts not even remotely related
to your character. I’m not even delving about all this. Because again, it is
beside the point. Just know that any of these IMPLIED sidetracks could take
multiple pages of text to analyze, to explain everything that is wrong, and how
with minimal tweaks they could all be resolved by marking a clear path through
all this mess…

So let’s get to the point. If you happen to hit the special key that evokes the
Black Spirit, something that you’ll do a whole lot through the game, you get
pushed into a quest that isn’t the starting quest. It’s something new that was
added about a year ago.



A quest to help new players, on top of all other introduction quests that are
supposed to help new players (a reminder of the accumulation of layers I
mentioned, you can’t even imagine how many layers of “new-player-help” have been
added, all overlapping, creating one of the messier new player experience in
history that is infinitely worse than one of the worst games doing this so
badly: Destiny 2. The race to the bottom is always crowded.).

You accept this quest to obtain an item, that lands right in your inventory.



(I mean, you could argue that the description is misleading, there are no “Edan
adventures”, that the green line has the most emphasis, yet it’s just a quote,
and the important message that indicates the actual FUNCTION only arrives at the
bottom, in a gold color, but that is much easier to miss. It’s a small example
but indicates well the attention fatigue you get, because BDO drowns you in
worthless information that is extremely hard to parse, and will continue to be
hard to parse even after 100 hours in…)

“Press RBM” to open a UI thing, is the only function of this object. So
important that a new quest was added, as one of the first things you see as a
new player. What is it in practice? A browser window, thankfully done in-game,
with basically a portal to a bunch of introductory guides. It’s actually useful
and I often use it even if I’ve played for quite a while: BDO is a mess of
systems, you’ll constantly look up stuff on the internet.

…Especially because of a near-infinite clutter of items and descriptions to
figure out. Beyond your wildest dreams or nightmares. Which is odd. Usually a
large itemization pool means lots of stuff you can and want to collect. But BDO
is a game of near-linear progression. You have a thing that you upgrade, but you
don’t find loot and randomized equipment that drives most games to their fun and
addictive progression systems. No, you only get a large number of materials and
tricky sub-systems to simply upgrade a thing and tickle some gambling addiction.
But again, this is all beside the point. The progression system is a large, high
level concept and problem. And we’re only dealing with minutiae here.

The problem at this small scale and the first main issue to solve for all
players, both new and veterans, is the limited inventory. The game will drown
you under piles of items, all fighting for limited space (and one of the things
you can buy, with real money, is inventory space). The real mastery is telling
what is useful from what is not, but that again is a thing that plagues most
“gachas”, and BDO is often more a gacha than a typical MMO.

But again, this is the issue that made me wrote all this: you get a starting
quest, dumping a book in your inventory. If you click on this item, you get a
browser page with some guides.



Ok. See here? Among a million of other options (by the way, yes, there’s a
million of stuff, but the game cares for you, so you cannot customize the UI
until level 10, but you can of course have your screen full with end-game
options and pop-ups and alerts that IN NO WAY relate to your character at least
for the next 50 hours). Among all those options there’s that button. And what
does it? It opens the same UI widget that you access from right-clicking on the
book in your inventory. It’s always been there, the book is only a shortcut to
the same thing. A “shortcut” taking inventory space, for something accessible
from the main menu.

(lets say you miss it, it’s still plastered all over the place. The “hotkey
help”, which appears as a giant button always present on screen for new players,
brings up another screen. pressing “F2” is yet ANOTHER shortcut to the same
screen. But if you press F1, it’s THE SAME. It brings up the same browser, but
pointed to a different tab. Still has all the other pages, you just need to
click. But more! see the bottom of that screen, there’s ANOTHER button
“Adventurer’s Guide” that again does the same of the F1 shortcut… There are no
less than FIVE things to get to the same place: book in inventory, main menu
button, F1, F2, button inside hotkey help UI)

Nothing else is explained.

If you are a new player, you will be extremely wary of throwing items out that
may have some uses later on. Tons of stuff that BDO throws at you FROM DAY ONE,
is important stuff that you should store safely. But it’s lost in a
near-infinite ocean of pointless clutter. Something in there is stuff that is
important later, and that no matter the length of its tooltip, you will have NO
IDEA how to use, when to use, or even if. Everything you do in BDO has a good
chance of crippling your character, by wasting some important item. And there is
no sane way around. But again, all this is beside the point and a much larger
problem.

The problem is that, in this specific case, this book is worthless. But because
nothing in the game tells you it is worthless, there’s a high chance you will
worry it may be useful, and keep it in your inventory, or dumped and forgotten
inside some city storage, taking away precious inventory space…



Beside the vague point that this might be done deliberately, since the game
sells inventory space, it’s still bad design. And it would be easily fixed. If
anyone cared.

This has been added slightly over a year ago, for a game that existed since
2015. BDO updates once a week regularly, with massive, systemic updates
delivered at an absurd pace. It’s unprecedented in the genre. And yet, it’s all
clumsy. It’s all knee-jerk, back and forth, doing and undoing. All going to
waste and rot. It does 500% more of what it needs, but delivers nothing. Because
it has no direction.

So here’s the solution:
this is a quest that is shoved on your face, you can’t miss it. So let’s REMOVE
the option from the main menu first. Place the book in the inventory as it
happens already. During the first three minutes the inventory is thankfully
still clean, so the book is easy to notice. You right click on it, and make it
so the book IS CONSUMED. Rather than opening the UI browser, you give a pop up
that points the player to a NEW option appearing in the main menu. You follow
the instructions to find out the book unlocked this new menu button, and using
it brings up the browser with the guides. The option is always there in your
main menu, and the book delivered by the quest had only the function to trigger
it and guide the player to be aware of its existence.

No waste of one (precious) inventory slot. Less clutter. No worries about
whether this item can be safely deleted or not. And overall better guidance to
navigate the mess that is the main menu.

This is just one thing. One minuscule example of bad design. There’s no
ambiguity about it, it’s just bad, and easy to fix. In a sea of other problems,
just as tiny, all the way to mountains. But all within reach, I assure you.

If simply someone cared.

Someone who does listen. Someone who can see.

But no, of course. BDO is just another MMO in decline. Something that won’t even
be remembered that fondly, after all. And yet, this is potentially, concretely…
not just one of the best MMO out there. It could be one of the greatest games,
of all times. A masterpiece. Not after a massive overhaul, but by fixing what is
easy, simple and quick. Cleaning the junk, and polish what’s underneath so it
shines. If simply someone cared. If someone had eyes to see.

BDO is not a game to save or that will be saved. You just observe in dismay what
it could have been. It’s nostalgia of another world.

Posted in: Blog |


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