Grrr…yet another kick in the teeth for players from EA/Bioware. Although everyone gets a month of free gametime as part of the game, you have to provide credit card details in order to play. Fair enough, but warn people. Having worked hard all morning writing SEO copy, I was looking forward to playing…and found that I was locked out because of the credit card issue and the now-nonfunctioning site.

I swear, this company is quickly becoming my Evil Overlord object of undying hatred due to the way that they have handled this launch. I mean, I was aware of EA’s horrible reputation – who isn’t? But I thought Bioware was ok.

I’m your average avid gamer, I follow Twitter accounts for devs and community managers and so on for the game. I read news on the official site, and the forums (painful though that is). I haven’t seen anything that said we were going to be locked out of our accounts unless we gave them our credit card details early. Personally, given the level of disregard that most sites treat our personal details with, I wait until the last minute to enter my credit card details. If I don’t end up subscribing, then my credit card details aren’t stored for you to give up to the first script kiddie hacker that manages to wander into your database.

Pro tip? Put that kind of thing on the loading screen. Tweet about it. Put it on the homepage of the site. Second pro tip? Have a working site.

So back to work. And in the meantime all of the mindless fanboys on teh Internets are making me crazy. I get it – you love the game. I love the game. But hopefully that shouldn’t turn you into a self-righteous, obnoxious prig. Just because a company made a game that you like playing doesn’t mean that they walk on water and fart sparkling clouds of fairy glitter. Sometimes they fail, and the people who point out said failure are not personally insulting you. Just sayin’.

/rant over.

Happy Holidays and peace to you all. May you always have a lamp to guide you through the darkness.

Phil and I have been playing a lot of Star Wars, and having a great time. Our two Sith Inquisitor mains have just got their ships, and there are a couple of sets of alts who are just behind them. The first two portraits above are both Ravvens, one Rattataki Sorcerer on a US server and one human Trooper on an EU server. I’d fallen in love with my Trooper during beta, and didn’t manage to recreate her on live – she looks a bit too pretty here, and doesn’t feel as booyah/gung ho as the original. I may scrap her and try again to get that look that just “clicks” as a person for me.

Inquisitor: Ravven, main.
Trooper: Ravven, second main.
Sith Warrior: M’alice
Plus a handful of alts that have been made but not played much.

Aside from our gaming holiday over Christmas, not much else happening. I need to finish the spellbooks for the kids asap, as Christmas is less than a week away. Yikes! It is snowy and cold here, and I walk around all day in layers of sweaters and shirts and furry monster boots and my Horde hoodie. Ah, teh sexx.

This is also a time of preparation, as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the book project. I don’t want to look at it or edit or anything right now; after the holidays, however, I have some ideas about a rewrite. I also need to start on illustrations.

Wishing you all good food and good cheer over the holidays – stay warm!

The headstart rollout for Star Wars has me quite irritable. As I wrote previously, I had a huge amount of fun in the beta while playing with the other half, and very much looked forward to doing it for realsies. Staggered launch, however, is going to make that impossible. Everyone I know is playing, and this morning are in the 15-18 range. Although MMOs are my game of choice, I am not the most social person in the world, and hate playing with strangers. I detest having to pug anything, and the forced grouping in SWTOR is going to ensure that I have to pug all flashpoints and heroic quests – or have a higher-level friend run me through, which is going to be stupid.

Have I mentioned my luck with pugs? If you are psychotic, a potty-mouthed ten year old on crack, or someone who dwells in a basement so deep that rats won’t even keep you company, I will get you in a pug. The gaming fae have cursed me to only get crazy people in pickup groups.

Thanks Bioware for making my MMO less social.

I am feeling quite nostalgic for the Rift launch, where the servers were slammed, everyone played at the same time, and it all stayed up and was playable regardless. Why don’t you call Trion and ask if they can share some of their wisdom with you? I have great memories Rift, and although laggy it was a TON of fun to have so many people rifting and fighting incursions into towns (although it did look like a series of photos at some points, which was ok – at least the servers generally stayed up).

Time and time again I have read on Twitter or guild forums or on the official forums that the server population is very light, and the starting areas seem almost deserted. The server status page shows light or medium servers across the board, except for later at night. Why keep server populations artificially low, just so that you can pat yourself on the back for having a problem-free launch? That is ridiculous. And the people (who got in, obviously) posting slavish praise on Bioware make me ill. If there are (as reported over and over again) 68 to 100 people on your server, it damned well BETTER be stable. I don’t think that justifies applause.

And why the secrecy about when people will get in? There is obviously a schedule, and they know when people will be allowed to play – why not just post that and still the raging on the forums? I can see no downside to it, since supposedly it is based on an impersonal preorder date. Speaking of the forums, why keep deleting all of the threads where people are quite legitimately complaining? I don’t like supporting game companies that are run this way. I think that the fairly substantial amount that I spend in an MMO that I am passionate about gives me a right to speak up, even if you refuse to read the message.

So I am a sad panda today. Something that I very much looked forward to has been ruined, since I won’t be able to make up those levels and play with friends. I’m not going to hope that people roll an alt so that we can play together, any more than I would have asked Phil to not play until I can get in.

EDIT: After the jump, screenshots of empty starting areas on Day 2:

Read the rest of this entry »

Deep into the second day of inputting all of the changes from the copyedit, I was going through one scene and realised that I had totally channelled Badger from Firefly as one of the characters. I literally hear Badger’s voice in my head when I read the scene, as I probably did when I wrote it. How odd.

/p>

I also realised during the edit that there was a whole section where I used the names Tyler (one of the main characters) and Toby (a talking dog) interchangeably. Now that kind of shit is confusing. Aside from that? Not a massive amount of changes, as those will wait until I can get people to read it for me and provide some feedback. I use too many damn commas. Aside from that? At this point I still enjoy re-reading it, which is something.

Next come the illustrations. *panic mode commences*

I’m doing a first rewrite on my story. I’m doing it ass backwards, of course (why would I do it any other way?) because there are still a few bits and pieces that need to be written. I’m hoping that during the course of the copyedit, and the rewrite of things that I know are weak or missing entirely, those missing bits will just come naturally. Hey, what do I know? I never did this before. :)

What I have learned, however, is that printing off a book manuscript makes a huge pile of dead trees. I have temporarily hidden this massive stack of paper underneath my scanner, so it won’t scare me. I’m sort of kidding…and sort of not. Tomorrow I jump in, with my editing articles* bookmarked and my red pens ready.

If anyone would like to do a reading exchange at some point, let me know. I haven’t let anyone read this, not husband or friends or family, but after I have a solid draft I wouldn’t mind getting some opinions.

Eeeeeek!!!

*Editing & Revision Tips:

How to Revise A Novel by Holly Lisle

One-Pass Manuscript Revision by Holly Lisle

From the First Draft to the Last, Part 1 and Part 2 by Brian Hodge