Sugar Shack 66: MxO: The End, Part Two: Really The End

Looking back, it’s time to post Part Two. Thanks to Vesuveus for reminding me! Two parts follow. One’s a reflection on the end of the world and its characters. Then some feelings on how SOE lowered the boom and lowered the curtain.

1. How the World Ended.

The great poet P.B. Shelley wonders in "Mont Blanc" would the world matter if we were not here to witness it all. And what of a world that purges all observers? What will happen to those we have known for years, in our absence? More to the point, what will happen to us?

The Merovingian, having survived many a previous Matrixy catastrophe, has started to migrate to safety all he holds dear or at least interesting. Perhaps he has found some means of sequestering himself in the Desert of the Real until some unknown, unknowable future when his empires of desire will once more flourish and bring hope to the desperate. Long may he survive and prosper, and long may Persephone succor him.

The dazed, blinking bluepills will be resettled into the cool podded sleep. In unconscious bliss, they will never know what they were or what they have lost. Their mechanical overlords, the machines of loving grace, will engineer some new means of calibrating their electrical systems. Perhaps in the long night soon to engulf us, Pace and Grey and their colleagues will confer to learn from past losses to more perfectly serve the system. Past iterations of the Matrix left us the Angels, 01, and the seething Valkyries. In some future, in some other reality, intemperate adventurers will encounter swarms of nattily suited Agents, all against a backdrop of personalities we can scarcely imagine. But one thing we can be sure of: their hair will never be mussed.

Annihilation will take them all. In that one mad moment before oblivion engulfs them all, all the hopes and all the fears of all the exiles and all the bluepills will flail and fail. Late this coming Friday night, the floating population of Exiles, like the obsessive Hypatia and the cryptic Mr. Po, will instantly freeze and be locked out of time. Their passions will be lost, and their yearnings and furies will have the soul stripped from them, stored forever on idle backup tapes. No, not forever, until someone, somewhere at Sony decides to save some money by decluttering the off-site archives. Then, our sleeping world will go the way of last Christmas’s wrapping paper, perhaps recycled, but certainly expunged. There will be no future when an angry god will wake and seek his rightful place; there will be no god, no world, and no future.

The mighty winds that blow the emerald code through the steely canyons downtown will settle and still, and their angry code bits will eddy into crinkly piles of static. In perpetuity they will fret and simmer, lost with none to observe, frozen like insects in amber. The windows downtown will all grow dark. The restless traffic will fall silent. The yearning searchlights will grow blind. The lyric drone of DataMine will choke and fail, as the entire construct subsides into incoherent bits, like one colossal data cluster collapsing into itself in a scream that none will hear. And that’s just in the first ten minutes of death.

So will pass the Matrix, this maddening world that has preoccupied me for so many years now, from the first time I watched and felt with Neo as he made his journey to self-awareness, and understanding the love of others. With it I watched my children grow into a world that would someday leave me behind. Through it I learned their language and culture, and shared in its trivial intricacies. Occasionally it was a refuge from stress, though seldom without guilt at the ones I felt behind, however briefly. When death struck my family last year, it lost all color and feeling; only slowly could I return, and then never feeling the same as before. I could never forget the former life, and sometimes would watch the marching bluepills and the fretting mobs and envy them their peace and calm. I would see the world of code, still the same, and wonder what had happened to the woman I had been before, also watching them. They evoked for me the world I had lost. Yet the ties to my guild, and the ties to their enemies, gradually restored pleasure and purpose.

What will survive? For many of us, megs and megs of screenshots, or vast video archives will let us touch the pleasure of the lost world, to bid it adieu as it recedes. Most will move on to other games, perhaps with better luck. Time will tint our memories with sepia, and our furious fights and drama will come to seem like items in an old stamp collection.

For myself, I do not know. I came to MxO because I loved the Matrix, not because my time management goals compelled me to choose an MMORPG. For me, nothing can substitute. I will likely go with my guild, even as my family shake their heads at me (before going back to NeoPets and World of Warcraft!). Fortunately, my friends and in-laws don’t know of this secret love of mine that scarcely dares to speak its name. Who wants to be labeled as a geek?

My ever-lasting thanks to all who labored to craft such great beauty from such cold code. May it always flow bright and gold for them.

2. How the Game Ended.

Afterthoughts at Thanksgiving.

1. The last weeks of the Matrix were intense, and everything it should have been: new stuff (often small but cool), classic mishes, lots of socializing, and a dev that spent some time ingame, interacting with customers. Obviously I’m easy to satisfy! Like an end-of-the-world pot-luck, lots of people brought cool stuff to the game. The closer we came to the end, the more Bayamos et al unlocked new features. A lot of the effects were so great, so pretty, and so easy to do (even I could get them to work!), that it was hard to understand why Walrus and company never thought of (or, more likely, couldn’t be bothered) making them available to the community. Really, it was worth getting FRAPS just for long, lingering vids of dancing, fighting, running around with wings, datamining, and running new effects.

The last hours had some people in tears, for different reasons. For some, tears of sadness at watching a world pass with nothing to replace it. For others, tears of frustration at such unrealized, botched potential. I had no tears, only calloused resignation; the game team had long since lost my love. I liked seeing Recursion consistently at “Medium” for a change. Seeing old friends again was a deep pleasure; seeing old enemies was a deep vexation, and would have been worse, but for liberal use of “Ignore”. The end for me came with my clan in the same location where we had ended beta, gathered with those we loved to face the inevitable, surrounded by dead special agents, and gently pulsating data-clusters. For my meatwadded eyes, the sky was Sati-perfect. Walrus’s systemed “thanks” to all of us was a nice gesture that would have meant so much more had he made some slight effort to, you know, support his game more.

That being said, Walrus and “team” once more unerringly chose mediocrity for the end. A single dev was borrowed from another project for massive efforts, like popping a red-bit vendor, who still sold anniversary shirts no one could buy. Dracomet’s obscure quizzes were surely a delight to old-time videogamers; for me they might as well have been about soccer scores in Bengali. And after years of hearing how damn fragile the damn database was and how any effort to tinker with it would precipitate Armageddon, it was refreshing to see just how easy it was to make everyone 100^th level with four billion or so info without breaking the system. (And in passing, let me note what a pleasure it was to stop by Data-Mine and slap Raeder to death.) Clearly, where there is a will there’s always a way. Too bad no one had ever felt like making the effort. And as much as I enjoyed trying new abilities from pills, such as Razor Attack and Wall Kick, I couldn’t help asking myself what had been the big deal that they had not been able to make these available years ago. Clearly the System and the Simulation were way more resilient than anyone had imagined. Too bad no one had bothered imagining. Oh, wait, I can see it coming- they would have _unbalanced_ things. Like it would have made such a big difference!

Unlike most, I don’t blame SOE for closing MxO. If a game’s not paying its way, they’re sure not under any obligation to pour money into it. And it was not the recession. Now, from the long view of a few months, I think many of the problems were there from the outset, in terms of high-level management of the game’s development. And, for a change, here I don’t mean Walrus. MxO, I believe, was his first game. Where were his mentors? His steering committee? His sponsors? More support would have made him more successful, I am convinced. But that is not all. After a time, the MxO community grew toxic. You could see it rabid and frothing on the forums. But ingame too, the sexist and racist abuse, the incessant personal attacks, were all signs of a community gone bad. For me this is the greatest mystery and the greatest tragedy. How to create a positive, nurturing community? How to stop people from being twits? These days I am watching my daughter play Maple Story, and this game seems to have been more successful here, though at the cost of a lower level of interactivity. And no emotes!

Some might blame gameplay for the failure. But I don’t feel this is true. I’m not sure anyone ever made the effort to reach out to lapsed subscribers to get a feeling for their reasons for leaving, but it would have been invaluable. Ironically, some of the most annoying, vociferous whiners posted almost daily on the forums. No problems with gameplay could ever stop them from coming back (much to my personal dismay). However, no amount of gameplay makes up for a venomous play environment.

And so the world ended. Nothing dramatic like beta. No story explanation of why we were all dying. No eyes in the sky (unless you provided your own). Just some casual looting, denial grinding, lots of dancing (always fine with me), and a sprinkling of devil-may-care exchanges with Walrus, Virrago, with some typically terse, cryptic exchanges with Dracomet and 9mmfu. The final impression of half-hearted miscellany was like when you’re unprepared for your four-year-old’s birthday, and you rummage through the kitchen looking for _any_thing he might think was special: trade show tchotsckes, old Halloween candy, a glowing pen, a forgotten slinky, a few candy canes from last Christmas, some unopened TicTacs, and a few shiny pennies plucked from your purse. Happy birthday! And that’s all, folks! Wake up!

2. I’ve discovered I was completely wrong about something. Rarebit’s departure had nothing to do with self-generated hacks created by some ingenious players. The Nerfocelot exploit was done from the players’ side, not from the admin console, which I must say makes it very impressive, if ultimately pointless. But I suppose this qualifies as one sort of player-generated content!

3. Incredible talent thrives at mxoemu.info. Through nothing but sheer scary brainpower they have created a working version of MxO than will run on your computer. There’s no server, no player interactivity, no abilities, and (big sigh) no inventory. But there is still the whole wide world to wander in, including the matchless graphics and the great music. I got my son to set it up for me; smarter people will be able to do it themselves. Besides all the standard locations, there are also available several intriguing constructs which were built but never populated or developed. And I finally got to see the White Room!

4. Many MxO refugees have washed ashore at SWTOR, where there’s been talk of settling on a common server, an idea which I strongly encourage. That way you know right from the outset who your friends and enemies are.

5. How apropos at Thanksgiving to be thinking of MxO, which gave so much and could have given even more. Thanks for such depth of soul for an artifice of code.

Sugar Shack 65: MxO: The End, Part One

Recently, I spent several weeks on Syntax grinding merv rep, and then grinding through the 12.X missions three times, and then grinding endlessly for 60 Function Data (60!) for three of the fabulous webbed Blood Noble Blouses. I got all three in one night. I wore one to see how it looked, chilled for a bit, and then logged, feeling fulfilled and wondering what I would set for myself for my next goals. I was thinking of maybe doing the same thing with Zion, perhaps, to get a few of the Zion caps. Or getting a fourth Area K coat. I felt relaxed and fulfilled that night.

Then the next day I read Walrus’s incendiary post. The two-month clock had been engaged on the simulation’s self-destruct. But unlike the architect’s destruction of Zion, there would be no provision for survivors.

How did we get here? We started with such hope, and we will succumb with such loud silence. For me it’s not hard to see where the disease all began. Hold on while I take off my gloves and set aside my rose-colored spectacles.

Bad decisions from the top on down, with ineffective management, starting with the previous owners of MxO, back to Monolith and beyond. The game changed hands several times, and there seems to have been a lack of consistent vision, to say the least. Plus the re-orgs cost time, energy, and brain power. The technology of the game worked well, but there seem to have been serious disjunctions within the game team. As a result, while there are matchless graphics and glorious vistas everywhere, the actual game-play is more of an after-thought. The absolutely inevitable cause-and-effect result of this is that dumpy little games my son used to play, like Runescape, grow and thrive, while our beloved simulation is about to take the big sleep. This goes straight-as-an-arrow back to management. Who was the program manager? The design manager? Pull their jacks, and right now!

And that’s not all. Content design also should have received more attention. The gangs should have had some background. We should have had weapons better than bug-spray for the Corrupted. What qualifications did Chadwick have which merited his being put in charge of our world and our story? And the biggest, baddest decision of _this_ year: Rarebit letting some twerp abuse the administrative console, costing him his job, costing MxO its single developer, and costing us our world. And a big shout out to the addled moron behind “nerfocelot”. May someone do to you what you have done to us all. And then some!

Bad Communications. I’ll start with Walrus. Cheap, short notes, in the size of a text message. combined with screenshots from a one-minute visit to Mara, would have done a lot to make people feel like he gave a damn. Too bad he couldn’t even be bothered making the effort. Back when MxO first went live, the XP system was completely different from beta. Too bad they didn’t feel like telling us. The callous tone of Raijinn’s and Walrus’s recent notes. Thanks for nothing, we can all see how fast you’re trying to wash your hands and be rid of us all!

And anyone who’s tried to read 9mmfu’s Delphic posts will agree that communications has never been one of the qualities associated with the MxO team. In fact, after five years I am still not sure what some of the buffs on my clothes mean. And the awful, vague explanations of what the attributes mean make me wonder if the technical “writing” staff for MxO were not refugees from writing the tax code. Rarebit was usually exceptional in his communications, but paradoxically only started this when nearly no one else was left. A huge team of developers, but only when they were gone was there much communication at all. Yet another example of great leadership.

Weak QA. I don’t mean little things like graphics glitches. I mean stuff like the immediate post-beta problem of people leveling too fast. The management’s response was to dis-reward people for excessive speed. What? Not rewarding efficiency? That makes sense? But the key thing was that they still did not understand how people would play, and completely underestimated the time involved in reaching 50. Another example of this inexplicable ignorance is the time when some of the devs (including Walrus, iirc) came in to PvP the players, and were roundly trashed. It’s a bad space where the players know more about the game than the devs. SOE's miserly disinclination to provide a test server is a priceless (so to speak) example of penny-wise and pound-foolish.

And related to this is bad practices. How is it possible that the game’s management could merge nine servers into three, but cannot merge three into one? Is their documentation that bad? Were they so careless? And the “CSR”s who run amok like Brewko, did little to encourage us. His captious, fractious, and flat-out wrong bannings were so irrational, so misguided, and so whimsical that I was frequently aghast. How could anyone make sense out of such irrational behavior? Was he uninformed that the CS in CSR means Customer Service, and not Congenitally Spiteful? Is there any other business where behavior like this would be tolerated? Anyone who reads the transcripts of his interactions with players (the forceful renaming of the Tetragrammaton is the first that comes to mind, followed closely by the sheer stupidity of the data-mining fiasco) can see that this is a guy who needs training in customer service and power management. Could someone please re-start his meds? This is all the more galling when you compare this “service” with the world-class customer support I’ve seen given to my son by Blizzard on different occasions. So the best practices are out there for good customer service. It’s just that nobody can be bothered applying them for us.

And let’s not forget mean-spiritedness. Sony owns the Matrix IP stuff for gaming, and can’t be bothered making it work, yet perversely refuses to let the customers do anything with it. And Brewko- oh, wait, I already mentioned him.

“The community” was one of the reasons people endlessly trotted about when challenged as to why they stayed in the game. Now, looking back, I wonder what they were smoking. Where’s the community? The MxO forums often became such hissing, flaming cesspools of bile that I could hardly stand it. So I mostly posted in my clan’s forums. Where did all the jerks come from? The frothing hysteria from MCDOE? OMG, who took away their pills? The prolonged personal attacks and baiting from Endless? Were they having such problems with insecurity in high school that they had to get it out of their systems by baiting everyone else? And the other hormonal, young teens out there….where will they go be angry now? Think of the children! To be honest, one relief from the end of this game I so love is that I will be spared the incessant whining about how MxO is doomed, and how things used to be so good. When I posted highlights from 2008, it quickly turned into a whine-fest. And when I oh-so-politely and positively asked when we might expect some management communication, the “community” started such a froth-fest that the entire thread was banned. Way to go guys! Guess it’s back to NeoPets for you now. Similarly, the leaks of the LESIG list- what was the point of that, exactly? Punishing those who contribute time and effort for us all, however imperfectly, is supposed to strengthen the community how, exactly? It’s the sort of thoughtless, self-centered destructive behavior you expect from children, not from adults. If this is the community, then maybe it’s time we all gave it a rest.

Naming Names. I have a list of people I have come to despise over the years. But why give them the gratification of being named? And Sattakan has always counseled discretion. Instead, I’ll be naming those I’ll remember fondly, next time.

Sugar Shack 64: The Year in Review

Sugar Shack 64: The Year in Review

Another year has come and gone! For many of us, 2008 was a colossal bummer from beginning to end. My life was marred by death in the family, financial trauma, new responsibilities, and my son preparing to leave us for college. Off the top of my head, I can hardly think of anything from 2008 I will ever savor or look back on with a smile, at least publicly. Amidst this seething chaos, the nightly forays into MegaCity were a blessed relief, where the worst that could happen was dying. For redpills 2008 was eventful: lots of new content and constructs, reforms, decommissions, and controversy. Here’s what I remember most vividly.

Data-Mine

The first major content of the year was Datamine, whose innovation evolved in stages: great wealth, fidgety security, tragic backstory, daunting boss fights, and paranoid plundering in a massive free-for-all free-fire zone. The latter was not as much fun as I expected it to be, and I had not expected it to be fun. I soon lost track of how many times FH pwned me; around the time I lost count, it stopped annoying me. I liked the variety of venue, the convenience of cash, and the cramped coziness of architecture and encounters.

Besides this, I savored the awesome new items, particularly the SSR glasses and the SSR gum. Along with this, I liked the seemingly inadvertent recycling of very old content, such as the Hyperjump Beta and the Mobius Code, since it opens the possibility for recycling more old items, such as blue frags or (please! how I hope!) translocation programs. Still, most people seemed to wail about this, and it has not been repeated. However, the great idea of creating a new construct persisted, as we soon saw.

Sati’s Playground

Unlike most of MxO, which displays such a somber, edgy style and tenor, Sati’s Playground seems more whimsical. It’s small and cozy, with toy boxes, rippling ninja scarves, and even a pink gi. I have yet to score a single one of the Playground items, but enjoyed the great times helping others farm and design strategies for overcoming the sleepwalker menace. Often I stood at the edges gazing out across the misty void, wondering what might lie in the island skyscrapers, cars, and trees. Once I thought I glimpsed a tree whose fruit consisted exclusively of FM-1500 pistols. Definitely fun.

Valkyrie Mishes

The great downtown venue got some serious love this past year, for instance with the Valkyrie mishes, deriving from a rich blonde bombshell who loiters near Pillsen North, tormenting the nearby wisps and horrors with her frosty demeanor. There are enticing hints of backstory (reminiscent in this respect of the great Pandora’s Box arc) and the history of Pace here; if they are true, then make sure you stay on Pace’s good side. The outfits and eye effects pleased, as did the items. Besides some good clothes, there were spectacular spectacles, some of which easily rival the epically hard to get SSR glasses. And on top of that, there were some great non-buffed items too, namely the lush, buttery gold-colored spurs and plumage. This is a great, worthy money sponge.

Story Developments

Others in my clan follow the story more closely than I do, and I accede to their judgment on this. Most interesting to me was gradual emergence over the year of a world larger than the one we have known for years. The overrides and the wireframe invaders all hint of a vaster world, with its own culture, motivation, and politics. And at the same time this larger world beckons to a future, I felt myself drawn to the past with the seeming return from the dead of Trinity or some semblance of who she was. It’s promising. I’ll wager on her making her way to the Westview apparition of Neo’s body at some point.

Promising too is the use of our great backbench of characters, ranging from new a mission for the Chessman to Rose and Hypatia wandering the streets, to expanded use of the neighborhood contacts in story-related missions. There are dozens of them, and many who it would be great to see in expanded use, like Mr. Po, Lotus, the Chef and the Jeweler: NPCs with distinct personality, style, and language. Along with features such as pills for gang leaders’ RSIs, this is a good example of leveraging the existing character base. Great to see.

New Approach

The new approach to organizing story, events, and critical missions excited enthusiasm and opprobrium late last year, along with significant high-end content and the toughest set of encounters since the wasteland corruptors. Not everyone who plays posts on DN1, and not everyone who posts on DN1 posts about this, but there’s been no shortage of heated discussion, with occasional insight. LESIG has been, as they say, “re-engineered” to a less central role in advancing the story. Since the less savvy, less mature set at MxO has always enjoyed frustrating what others create, the LESIG program was plagued with leaks (I remember reading on one site’s forum smug posts about how much fun it was to gin up controversy), and was for its leader(s) more hassle than it was worth. Thus the curve of ROI curled against it. Props to all the players who put their 50s on the backburner to start over with new, unknown characters to make a better world. But I digress. The new approach, in essence, lets us run the “critical missions” as often as we want, and adds stuff to farm. This I kind of like. On the other hand, the missions are currently only available to those of level 30 or higher, and the end-missions are definitely not soloable. That being said, during the recent Winter Holiday, I was able to grind through the 30s in less than a week, so this should not be regarded as so major an issue as some may think.

Greatest of All: Email

For me, the email system enhancement early in the year was the greatest, most influential, most satisfying change of 2008. We received a massive, glorious overhaul that allowed is to scroll through everything (I’d forgotten I had blue code frags!) and to append up to 12 items to a single email!! The great benefit of this is that it gives a definitive solution to the problem of inventory space, which has bedeviled players and devs since the days of beta. Now, with up to 300 emails, each with a maximum of 12 items, even shopaholics and clothes-horses like me have been satisfied. This must be the greatest thing to come out of 2008, by far!

This is not say there is no room for improving a good thing. At some point I would like to see this enhanced with the following:

- I’d like to be able to email stuff to myself on different servers. I’d be willing to pay for this as a service.
- I’d like to be able to set up email folders.
- I’d like to be able to email singletons to myself or other characters of mine.

Puzzling, Odd New Stuff

Updates included major additions of content, such as the two constructs, as well as dozens of relatively minor ones. Some of them were significant, whereas others seemed less so: the sheen on the floor at Peg’s Diner, typos in mission texts, and a new mission from the Chessman. Some were surprising: emotes for “confused”, “deafened”, and “pickupdesk” in Update 53, for example. The new emotes were certainly welcome, yet the selection was baffling. After all, over the past five years there have been several lists of desired moods, including couples-dancing and smoking. The recent ones must have come from some other source, since I do not remember anyone ever clamoring for the ability to emote deafenedness. It may be that these are left-overs from some years-old to-do list that is only now receiving attention. Similarly, can it really be that the dev team has time to worry about things like adding pants to women’s Gis? One can only speculate how devly priorities are established.

There was drama too, with religious slurs and community rip-offs, but they just don’t make the list, any more than vomiting dogs do.

So, in contrast to the unimaginable catastrophes which, irl, came in swarms like sizzling hornets, ingame there was a lot to enjoy and a lot to appreciate in 2008. My confidence in the talents of our devs and their commitment gives me hope for the future, for our future.

This review and many others may be found at manifoldmischief.blogspot.com, along with other writings relevant to MxO.