Untranslated KFS1

After two weeks of Doc's absence, the patch is finally out and the player's are being reminded why having kfs1 posting on the forums isn't much fun. It's OK as long as what we're dealing with is relatively abstract or simple. As soon as we get to something which is a real issue for the players (like CTHL or death lag) the stakes go up. When it's Doc or Gophur, it's OK, because they're a step removed from dealing with the problem, it's their job to gather data from players and translate it.

When an MMO is consistently giving you a bad experience, well that's the magic bullet isn't it, consistency? Means its repeatable. How many times have I gone off at MMO devs for not fixing such an obvious and repeatable problem only to find that only a dozen other people are having the same issue? And if I'd posted my system specs in the first place, well we'd not be talking about this it'd have gotten fixed immediately or I could have turned off the option to "crash this particular game incessantly" in the driver settings.

We seem to have three pretty major issues which I think all revolve around the same thing – the increase in update rates. If I honor the players' expectations to "discuss" it, then it's going to take longer and longer to deal with it – each friendly exchange is coding time consumed. Even so, I took some time to explain a little. But it's never enough. Always the comebacks with "that's bs" or "that's rubbish". No, it's not dude. It's just more complicated than you need to understand – and clearly more complicated than you want to understand.

What they need is a producer to talk to them, but right now they got me, and as the coder trying to deal with the issue, I really wish I had some magic wand that would make them understand "hey, this is the guy who wrote the code, I want to take up as little of his time as possible, he can explain it to my satisfaction or get gophur to do that later on when it's not an issue".

Vanguard at Sony? Sense or nonsense?

Since Microsoft is involved, I want to state my stance on Microsoft first: I'm not a Microsoft hater. I'm a Linux programmer who often chooses to work under Windows as his desktop.

It never made sense, to me, for Brad to be accusing SoE of sucking The Vision(TM) out of EQ and then turning to Microsoft for non-vampiric funding. Exhibit A: Lived long past their bury-by date, Exhibit B: Litter of corporations' corpses scattered around One Microsoft Way, Exhibit C: "One Microsoft Way", Exhibit D: Sharp, pointy teeth, Exhibit E: Steve Balmer perspiring in the presence of daylight…