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.