The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (PUBLIC) The Pub Writing papers can be fun

So for my final paper in the Technical Writing class I'm talking for my Computing and Software Systems degree, I writing a "cause-effect" paper on the demise of Shadowbane.

Its a fun paper to write, except is going to be really hard to keep it short(550 words) since there's so much I can say about it.

I'm going to put all the blame on CoS. j/k. I'll post the thing here once I'm finished.

That should be interesting. I look forward to readint it.

i say you blame ccr mindworm for being a douche

I'm not finished but this is my first rough draft. It's definitely too long (782 words), and I even left out one of the causes I was going to write about (player exploits and cheating).

Quote:

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In March 2003, after 3 years in development the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) Shadowbane went live on ten servers. Highly anticipated by many in the online gaming community, Shadowbane (SB) offered unique experience for players: a dynamic player-driven world, where the story and environment was primarily shaped by the participants. Featuring unrestricted PvP—the Holy Grail to the hardcore gamer—SB promised a “game of crowns” where player–run kingdoms could be built and destroyed by the players themselves. A city siege in SB could consist of battles between hundreds of players and last hours. Shadowbane’s concept was truly grand in scale, and a radical departure from the trend of MMOs.

However, by March 2006 with only 3 remaining servers Shadowbane’s publisher Ubisoft announced that is was shutting down Wolfpack Studios, the game’s original developer, and that it was ending monthly SB’s monthly subscription fee: clear signs to the remaining player community that game was entering its twilight. How did this game with its ground-breaking concept fail to endure?

The first factor contributing the ultimate demise of Shadowbane was the quality of the software upon release. While it has been common for MMO games to have unresolved issues related to game design and balance when released, SB was notorious for the number of bugs which caused the both the game client and game servers to crash or lock up. Even as some of the more serious problems were patched over the first few months of the game, the game continued to have performance issues such as “lag” when large number of player congregated in the same area of the game world at the same time. Furthermore, the game client contained noticeable memory leaks where one’s computer exhibited substantially decreased performance over time during a gaming session. While there may have been substantial pressure to release the game due to its long development cycle, the low quality of the product at the beginning certainly turned away large number of players who did not have the patience for the bugs to be resolved in subsequent patches.

While Shadowbane’s concept was certainly revolutionary, the game looked old. When the development began on SB in 1999 it’s graphics engine may have been on par with similar games on the market such as Everquest, but after 3 years, graphics technology and expectations had surpassed what SB offered. Since the graphics are the first thing one notices in a game, it the second-class visual interface became a hindrance to achieving immersion in the world, or to even attract other players.

Shadowbane also faced competition from other MMOs. Many players who tried out SB returned to successful established games such as Everquest, Dark Ages of Camelot. Only 3 months after SB went live, Sony released StarWars Galaxies based on the wildly popular franchise. Later Blizzard launched its first foray into the MMO market with World of Warcraft, which has broken all sales and subscription records. While it may be possible to maintain a MMO as a niche game, these subsequent games (and others) certainly competed for many of the same players and ultimately cut into SB’s subscriber base.

Another factor is player burnout. Shadowbane’s unflinching gameplay, “Play to Crush” as it was marketed, did not lend itself to casual gaming. While leveling one’s character in SB was relatively easy in comparison to other games, it took hundreds or thousands of game hours to amass the in game resources necessary to erect and maintain the buildings and other structures that make up the various player-run cities. Building these “assets” required significant cooperation, coalition building and diplomacy among the players not only to build, but to defend, as city assets remained vulnerable to attack from opposing players and alliances. Because of the persistent nature of the virtual world, these attacks could happen 24 hours a day, not just when the owners were logged in. Ultimately, one’s investment of weeks or months could be destroyed in a matter of hours by a determined group of opposing players—regardless of whether you were at work, school or sleeping. The time commitment often becomes a burden to players of any MMO, however, with SB the loss of accumulated wealth, items, or city could be a crushing blow to both individuals or guilds ultimately turning them away from the game.

The last problem was that CCR Mindworm was a douche.

Shadowbane may prove to survive in some form in the future, possibly on player-run servers as a niche for the truly hardcore, but it clearly has failed to survive as a profitable MMO for Ubisoft. However, its original concepts of open PvP and a dynamic player-driven environment may find a place in some future game which manages to execute them without as many problems.

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I was doing just fine until I read the Mindworm line. . . .

It took several long minutes before I was able to read it again. . . .

( still laughing over that )

My name isn't in there for massively leveling the armies of KGB and owning like 10 on 1 every time I walk through a runegate............
&
Let me know if you need help with a exploit paper... im sure you would find me a perfect candidate?
You could name the paper.... (MMORPG) HAX vs HAX. Open it with this line. "if yo' kung fu no gooo den go back to schoo"

I wasn't active in ShadowBane, so I don't get the CCR Mindworm reference. What's the story behind that?

he was a douch, thats just it oh and he did not read the petitions sent into him i remember i sent a petition in and i wrote, I teabagged your sister last night i bet you dont even read these about 30 words into the petition and sure enough i just get an automated response to the petition based on the category i selected. So in general the CCR team really did not give a shit about the community is how it seemed

hehe sorry for the long post, but just had to repost this after stumbling across it recently. I started laughing as I recall all of this . . . . I figured this would have made a HELL of a paper Just a wee bit long though. . . .

Basically, it's the super rant of why Combine left ShadowBane

Combine left Shadowbane last night after 6 weeks in the game. We cancelled our accounts and will file disputes with our credit card companies to get our money back for Ubi's failure to provide the product paid for. A few will still play until their accounts expire but most won't even bother. I strongly urge you to do the same. Why is it that MMO gamers get abused like no others? Have you ever heard of a car company deciding to sell a car before the engine works? Do you start paying rent on an apartment 3-6 months before you actually move in? Why is this acceptable for an MMOG?

For the past month and a half I've been wondering the same thing every other paying customer of Shadowbane has been...what the fuck happened in beta? What was accomplished over the 12+ months of beta other than marketing? (Not counting those mysterious 2+ years of alpha no one ever got to play.)

The dev cycle is slower than a snail on heroin. As most of you know, I was given a beta account at the very beginning. I wrote up a complimentary piece on SB (the crow tastes lovely, thank you). At the time I saw the potential, all the testers and fans did. Yeah it was buggy, yeah it was unfinished, yeah it was unstable, but that was beta. It's still buggy, it's still unfinished, it's still unstable, but now we're paying for it. I left beta pretty early on because patches could take 4 or more weeks. Try playing a beta like that, it's beyond frustrating. Nothing has changed. Instead of doing many small patches they're still taking forever and the patches suck. Half the patch message is usually completely trivial crap like spelling corrections and the rest is usually not implemented properly. Every day that imbalances exist, bugs abound, the problems accumulate. Someone losing a town to a sub-guild they couldn't remove from the nation isn't going to care if it's fixed 2 weeks later. I miss Mythic (I can't believe I'm saying that.) DAoC became a boring piece of shit, but one thing I'll admit, Mythic's dev team did it right. Beta was beautifully done and in final they had patches running non-stop. WP is a huge step backwards in this arena.

The graphics engine is inferior. The graphics suck, yes, but I don't care. What I do care about is that the graphics engine runs crappier than a game with superior graphics. Where's the tradeoff? The argument is supposed to be the closer you get to stick figure graphics, the better it's supposed to run. It's not happening here. Even with almost everything turned off or turned down to minimal, the framerate gets really bad and locks up in big battles. Not exactly the place you want to drop the ball when you're promoting your game as big battle guild vs. guild and nation vs. nation.

I remember the very first criticism I had of Shadowbane in beta was the point and click movement. I think it's stupid and annoying. It's primitive for 3D non-FPS gaming. Their argument was that point and click movement would allow them to reduce bandwidth and server traffic thereby increasing p..e..r..f..o..r..m..a..n..c..e. Sorry, lag hit me while I was typing. Either the servers are Commodore 64's or somehow their plan had flaws. The lag is ridiculous still. Also, thanks to the lag, point and click becomes point and click and rubberband and point and click and rubberband to someplace you didn't even start from and point and click and throw your mouse at the monitor. For those that have never played a game with rubberbanding like UO or SB, the premise of point and click's server traffic reduction is that once you choose the spot to move to and select it, the server knows where you're going and what speed you're moving at and so does your client. They don't need to talk every microsecond to adjust your position. But what actually happens is that your client moves you 20 feet but then it checks with the Commodore 64 server and the lag is so bad there that you haven't moved at all. So while you saw yourself moving, the server wasn't moving you. Once they check with each other, the client bounces you back to where the server says you are. WP have perfected this to the point where you will bounce back to someplace you didn't even touch prior to the movement attempt. The interface is a piece of shit. They never took it to where it should've gone. Hell, the guild roster isn't even alphabetized, it opens in a new order every time! Try managing a forge, no one should go without experiencing the joys of junking. If you want to cast a summon spell it's case-sensitive. CaSe-FrEAk1ng-5enSitlv3. Meanwhile people are allowed to make names like [][][][ and 'D3grWE~,~.

The game has memory leaks. They cause a very serious degradation in performance. I have a P4 1.7ghz with 768mb RAM running WinXP and it barely helps. This is a dedicated gaming machine with nothing else, no ICQ, no IRC, nothing. It's even worse than that though, either the leaks or issues in the graphics engine (or both combined) have created the infamous sb.exe error. Some people don't suffer from it as badly as other do, but for most it's hell. There are 2 types, the insta-crash and the playable one. The playable one gives you the popup but the game doesn't crash. You can keep going but new graphics objects won't load, people that weren't around you when you got it will remain invisible, same for assets and walls. Eventually you have to accept the popup and crash willingly so you can restart properly. The insta-crash is obvious, you crash. You crash a lot in big fights. You crash a lot when you're around other people. Try moving a war party of 50 people to a target location, you'll arrive with 20. Those 20 will become 10 once you engage the enemy.

It gets worse. The login servers are fucked. They don't work right. They're slow when they're running and they are prone to crashing. Imagine how fun that is. You're having a big battle, maybe attacking or defending in a siege, you get sb.exe (it's almost guaranteed for everyone to experience it multiple times), then you try to log back in and the login servers are down. Welcome to Shadowbane's login screen, you will become the best of friends. The other night I discovered an even worse twist. After a few crashes during a big battle, my login became invalid. That's right, I was no longer able to get in the game regardless of the login servers themselves. I tried changing my account password, didn't work. I tried waiting an hour, didn't work. I had to wait until the next day. What did I get for my troubles? A 20 cent credit for a Sunday eventhough the failures have been occurring every day. I put it in my MMOG Devs Buy Me A Ferrari Fund.

Who remembers WP's early promises? I do. I remember one in particular that I really liked while I was playing DAoC. "Read my lips, no more raids." or something like that. Their "innovative" tree and bane circle combo was supposed to prevent raiding so both forces would have a chance to be present to fight over the assets involved which cost so much time and money to create. Another pipe dream shattered. Early morning and late night raids are alive and well in our beloved SB.exe, except this time instead of losing a worthless relic we lose something that took weeks and millions of gold pieces while we're getting sleep so we can go to work to pay for these worthless subscriptions. Walls are meaningless, groups can fly over them or teleport past them. Guards are pitiful, borderline useless. They can be killed easily, kited away, or made to fight each other through bugs. Handheld siege weapons can take down buildings without any delay. Brilliant. Outstanding. A superb job of fucking up a game's environment.

In order to have a functional town, you need to trust people with access to assets. But for some strange reason they never created a permissioning model. That means that anyone with access to an asset has pretty much total control over it and all the funds stored inside. In order to let someone open and close a gate, they also need to have that same control. How did this get by everyone? This is only made worse by the fact that spying and guild infiltration is so easy via alt characters. I've heard stories of guilds having assets deleted or stolen and alt character spies opening the gates for enemies.

Does anyone think we'll be seeing inter-server travel in the next year? I don't. The game isn't even playable on a single server, how could they handle travel? Meanwhile every server has one or two factions fighting for control while the rest cower on the sidelines or are unable to participate. Vital and dynamic communities can't exist when you have so few sides. The game mechanics encourage this lack of factions so of course the trend will be in that direction.

Has anyone seen a customer service rep? I haven't. Customer support is abysmal, I get better responses from the nearest wall. It certainly offers more support than they do. I've had them ignore game stopping bug reports.

Shadowbane? Play to crash. This one's an abortion, not meant to be.

Writing is a craft; this is the one thing my rhetoric professor stressed the most during my days in his classroom. Not only should the read be worded to be legible and entertaning; there are rules and guidelines to follow when crafting an essay. It goes through stages, the introduction, the body, and the conclusion, and there is a right way and a wrong way to do all of them.

The introduction is likely the most important paragraph. If the introduction is poor the reader may become bored or cynical in the beginning. The introduction builds up to the last sentence of itself which is the thesis. The thesis should simply mention the topics you will be covering in the body of the essay. This gives the reader an idea of what he will be commiting the next few minutes of his life to, and should also create interest in the subject matter.

The body of the essay should cover all of the points presented in the thesis in detail. Any arguments or descriptions go here. Try to stay objective, avoiding statements such as "I believe" or "you should", as they arn't as powerful rhetoricly. Whatever you state here should be presented as fact, whether it is your opinion, true or not. Just don't make any outragious clames because it will be necissary to support the argument with logic.

The conclusion is nothing but a brief restatement of the introduction but presented in a way that closes the argument instead of opening it. This is also where the writer can put his non objective ideas down.

Look, im not the best writer, and i only got Bs in my composition classes, but I did take a few things with me from the classroom. Hopefully I can be of some help to your grade. By the way, I tried to follow the rules presented here in this topic. If nothing it was at least a good exercise in rhetoric.

Intersting responses.

I'm going to finish up a my paper in a day or two. I'm working on implementing a binary coded decimal class (with "infinite" precision) for my programming class and another project for software engineering doing a case study of verticle market integration.

Reading that thing you posted Daye, remindes me how much Combine used to piss me off. Ah, the good old day(e)s. lol

Yeah I forget, what is the story with CCR Mindworm?

Heheh, a true gamer Val, writting papers on Shadowbane. But i'm not one to throw the first stone; I had a dream the other night about building some stuff in a city; it looked like Shadowbane/Darkfall hybrid. It's bad because I haven't played any games in about 6 months.

Val, forgive me for not remembering the details exactly on you want to do, but I just thought I would throw this out there for support.

It's a sad and almost unbelievable fact that many folks in the game industry cannot construct an analysis like this, and far fewer can put it into words. This is a great example of what would be termed an "executive summary" of Shadowbane. I suspect you could have written a very thorough breakdown of the product were you not limited by a word count.

My experience has taught me that while many game industry folks have a good sense about what's right and wrong with a game's design, qutie remarkably, only a tiny percentage of them can actually commit their thoughts to paper, at least in a constructive, coherent sense. Those who can are almost certainly going to succeed, particularly when they see the game both as a sum of its parts and as individual mechanisms, and can remain objective and stick to the facts.

One of my friends started writing short reviews of various game mechanics and started sending it around to different execs, producers, and designers. No one asked him to; he simply did it, and had this same style of effectively conveying the strengths or weaknesses of game content. It wasn't very long before folks started approaching him for reviews. Today, he is on what is known as the Third Party Development team, and has the wonderful job of reviewing game pitches and designs from development teams looking for a publisher.

I bring all of this up because while it may sound crazy, being able to strategically breakdown a game and creating a presentation of your analysis is not as common an ability as one would think. While it's been a while since we talked (I was Shaharazad in SB and WoW)... are you still considering game design or production?

In my opinion, this is a good initial demonstration that you have the talent to work in a production role, and it's great to hear that you're working on the skills as well.

Oh, hey Shahar!

Right now, thanks for the comments. I'm not 100% what I want to do, though game design and productions are both appealing ideas to me. One of the classes I just finished up was a survey course on software engineering. While I'm enjoying learning the computer science/programming in my other cleasses, the actually processes and management of software development are what I find particularly appealing. We've learned that by far, the majority of software projects fail---mostly from problems due poor management. It seems to be that this is an area of the industry where real improvement can be made, and I'm excited about working on that level.

Certainly, by being a gamer, game development is appealing. I don't have my heart set on it, but working on MMOs is defintely a fantasy of mine. (But then again so is two chicks at once )

Maybe i'm wrong but i'd have to think that having 2 chicks at once would be a lot more work then it's worth... unless they're of the $5 Thailand sort, in which case you don't do any of the work and 2 would be great!

combine was 100% right, and clearly the dev teams for sb never listened to the people who were paying for there game... well 99% of the time i did get my safe town on test when i wrote them a big long ass petition asking how you can test on a test server when you cannot even leave a town without being ganked to get your runes and such