Monthly Archives: July 2004

Thank You, Come Again

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A while ago, a rumor was circulating around the SWG boards that Sony had outsourced its CSR program to India. I never saw any official word on this (as in … That is a bald-faced lie, Love, Sony Online Entertainment), but just between you, me and the doorknob, I would not be surprised.

An example of my latter day experiences with Live and In Virtual Person CSRs:

Some assbangers were feign+training my SWG guild in the toughest dungeon in the game (Death Watch Bunker .. this noob pissroom can’t come close to the craziness of old world Guk, but, yanno, this is Bore Wars). So, naturally, my guild (FOOLISHLY) thought that notifying the CSRs in live chat might elicit some response, as this was a sleepy, uneventful evening during the week. What the hell else do they have to do with all servers up and the chat room just has a few “how do I change my eye color at the initial character select screen?” people in attendance?

I should point out, in all fairness, that if my guild (and more specifically if *I*) had access to a master smuggler also, I would have feign+trained their asses so hard, they would still be cloning. I’m that kind of an “eye for an eye” guy.

CSRApu tells our guild rep that a CSR will be there shortly to investigate. (Holy shit, maybe that India thing is just a rumor.)

About a dozen feign+trains later, and an additional 9 Super Battle Droids dropped into our camp, no CSRApu. (O where o where can he be?) Eventually, cooler heads prevailed … wait, scratch that … a more pragmatic head prevailed (me), and I decided that I wasn’t going down without taking most of the assbangers with me.

Which I did. Shame that.

Here’s the happy ending, though … we did receive a partially-coherent response to our CSR tickets — thanking us for playing SWG and assuring us that “someone” was investigating our report and there would be repercussions for such assbangery.

O yes, there most certainly would be repercussions for assbangery. Not in my lifetime, but possibly in my next lifetime.

So I have that going for me.

Hilarity Ensues

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I get quite a chuckle out of reading game reviews.  Other than what is available on the internet from regular schmucks like me, game reviews are a huge pile of sycophantic BULLSHIT.  If you were to believe what GameInformer and PC Magazine (step off, I read it for the hardware reviews), et al, write, you’d (mistakenly) think that every game ever released was, at the least, playable, and in many cases, A MUST-HAVE GAME FOR THE SERIOUS GAMER!

Which, we all know, is unmitigated bullshit.

I have three conspiracy theories about this issue.  Theory #1 – They’re all on the take.  Maybe the editorial staffs have decided, since these are “just” games, what could it hurt to take free stuff, go eat free stuff, listen to 20 minutes of hype and write a softball review?  Are they reviewing most of this crap by reading the press releases?  Or fanboi websites?

Theory #2 – They don’t actually play the games longer than one, maybe two hours.  If they are indeed giving these games a more thorough testdrive, then they must be the worst gamers on Earth if they can’t spot poor design, dull storylines, HORRID interfaces (Shadowbane, I’m looking in your direction here), lag like a brick wall, or learning curves so steep I need a sherpa to ascend its incline.

Theory #3 – They’re idiots on the take that don’t play the games for more than one hour.

Which is why, I love to compare the pre-release reviews to the second-look reviews after the game goes live and everyone (like you and me) starts thinking “wtf is this piece of crap I just bought?”

To be fair, word-of-mouth pre-release hype from schmucks (like me) isn’t much more reliable.  If I were to believe all the hoopla, World of Warcraft is going to change ONLINE GAMING AS I KNOW IT and is more absorbing than THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST and Blizzard has NEVER RELEASED A PRODUCT UNTIL IT WAS PERFECT. 

Except Diablo II, but that’s ancient history.  Right?

Ho’s, Queens and Homeys from the Ghet-Toe

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Gaming message boards are, almost without exception, a complete waste of time.  You might find a nugget of useful information there, but you’ll have to wade through complaints, false accusations and incomprehensible l337 d3wd sp34k and chest thumping to find anything worthwhile.  As far as I’ve been able to tell, message board communities are for mocking other players and wasting (what would otherwise be) productive work or school hours.

It’s been my observation that over 90 percent of posters can be categorized into one of the following profiles:

The Attention Ho – Look at me!  Look what I’m doing now!  Respond to my thread! Definintely, the most prolific posters around — every minor victory, every inconsequential slight and every excrutiating minutae of their virtual and real lives is documented in great detail.  (The attention ho will also usually dabble in incredibly bad roleplay fan fiction.)  JFC, wipe the cheeto dust off your fingers and realize that no one gives a fuck what you’re doing.

The Drama Queen – O M G, I’m quitting the game!  O M G, Soandso stole my noob mob!  O M G, you will NOT believe how mean PowerGamer04 was to me!  O M G stfu!  Not only am I not surprised that you’re the game’s whipping boy, I wish that I had been the one doing the whipping.  And btw, fucking quit already — I just know you’re going to return to the boards FOR MONTHS to annoy us all.

The Moral Barometer – These types chime in on every single thread involving any sort of game dispute, no matter how minor, with their self-important judgmental bullshit.  Get a clue Judge Judy, only the ho’s and queens bring their disputes to message boards.  Everyone else, and this is SHOCKING, settles their disputes in private rather than parade them on the internet.

Post Count Ho – This buttmuncher is just farming post count totals, because that statistic alone proves how super popular they are (on the internet).  They bump all the ho’s and queens’ threads, they bump every single auction of in-game items … no matter how STUPID the auction is … they bump all their guildmates’ threads (*bump* for my homey in the guild!), and some will resort to necro-bumping (resurrecting old, ancient threads) just to enhance their leet post count.  FYI, dumass, *bump* is not content and post counts don’t translate to dick size.

The Ghet-TOE Banger – Their board shit is peppered with alot of lingo, PROVING that they are not an internet nerd, but rather an incredibly cool person IRL that just stumbled onto the message board.  (ya, right)  They do a lot of posturing about their posses, their biatches, yo yo, werd bro, runnin wit da guildies to fuck shit up.  Get over yourself, yo!

The best way to deal with all these assclowns is to just stay away from gaming message boards.  Sure, it’s tempting to open Pandora’s Box just a tiny bit and peek inside, but once you do, you’ll want to rip your eyeballs out and stomp on them.  And trust me on this, you won’t find any useful information there, so just google what you seek far, far away.

Even 23,980,590 pop-up ads are better than that shit.