Around 5:45 PM last night we got a call from my youngest who lives in Louisville. She was stuck on the interstate close to the airport and smoke was everywhere, and she called us to see if we knew what was going on.
While she talked to my wife, the Louisville native, I quickly got onto one of the Louisville news sites and found this:
From WAVE 3 News. The original news link is gone.
At first it was unclear whether it was a passenger jet or a cargo jet, as one of UPS' primary hubs is based in Louisville, but it shortly confirmed that it was a UPS cargo jet bound for Honolulu that crashed on takeoff.
From CBS News.
From NBC's Today Show.
For those who don't know exactly where Muhammad Ali Airport is located, it's immediately south and west of the Kentucky State Fairgrounds, Churchill Downs, and the University of Louisville (which is located in what is known as "Old Louisville"). South of the airport is an industrial area, which included an auto parts place and a petroleum recycling facility, both of which took a direct hit from the crash.
The city was under a shelter-in-place order, that has gradually shrunk overnight to encompass the immediate crash area. As of this morning, the airport has reopened. No
It's the sort of nightmare you really just push into the dark recesses of your mind and try not to think about, especially when you realize that once the crew had committed to takeoff there was absolutely nothing they could have done once they discovered the plane was on fire. There's simply not enough runway to stop a fully loaded jet going 200+ miles per hour.
As for my youngest, she made it back home safely and sheltered in place as requested. She's back at work today as the shelter-in-place is now down to a 1/2 mile radius around the crash.
Well, EA just got bought out by the Saudi PIF, Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, and Silver Lake Private Equity. For a grand total of $55 billion dollars.
So... Private Equity bought out EA. Not sure which is worse: that it's a private equity buyout or who is now the owner.
If you thought that EA was already bad, I guess the company can now say "Hold my beer."
If you want speculation, I'd imagine that with the Saudis involved there will be a lot of "selective editing" of content in Bioware's Mass Effect and Dragon Age, Maxis' The Sims, and other games to more "align" the games with Saudi-approved content. And no, I don't mean removing only LGBTQ content, but all PG-13 and M (for Mature) rated sexual/adult content. Except head shots and explosions, of course.
My second guess is that EA will largely replace all development staff with AI-powered coding. Saving money on salaries, you know, to boost profits. If AI creates skins for The Sims or Apex Legends to sell online, there's a boatload of profit created by, well, nobody. Same thing goes for AI-generated maps for Apex Legends, Battlefield, and Medal of Honor.
I guess EA is going to forge ahead into game development oblivion much faster than Microsoft is, even though Microsoft is forcing all employees to utilize Copilot to the point of integrating it into employee evaluations.
I sure hope that AI bubble bursts soon, because this is getting ridiculous.
I give major props to Brian Birmingham, the now ex-Activision-Blizzard manager, for his principled stand against the stacked ranking corporate policy at A-B, but as soon as I read the words "stacked ranking" I knew he was swimming against the tide.
For the life of me, I have no idea why executive corporate management loves stacked ranking among those other "corporate trends" --I'm looking at you, open office floor designs*-- but that it was popularized by GE's Jack Welch says a lot.
I've been in the work force full time since 1991, and yes, I've encountered stacked ranking before. Numerous times. And its basic principle, that teams should be shoehorned into a bell curve and that the bottom 10% are poor performers, is something I despise. There is very little nuance to the stacked ranking system, where the best performer on a crappy team is given a higher ranking than an average to poor performer on a fantastic team. The stacked ranking system also encourages cutthroat behavior among peers, which includes such items as coworkers sabotaging projects to make their own work look better. Again, I've seen such behavior in the past among coworkers. The focus isn't on putting out good work, but playing the system to maximum advantage.
From AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (1e), Page 111.
So yeah, I have a history with stacked ranking.
And if you're playing politics with the system, you're not spending time putting out a good product. And in the case of Blizzard, you're not developing bug free, well designed games.
*I'm incredibly grateful I work from home, because if I had to work at the office, it would have been in an open office design. Even in a post-pandemic world, corporations still love the open office design for some strange ungodly reason. I work in IT Security, so by nature I tend to have sensitive material up on screen a lot of the time. If you're thinking "Hey, wait a minute, if it's up on screen and you're in an open office, anybody can walk by and see that!" then you'd be absolutely correct. Without any privacy whatsoever, there's little ability to securely handle sensitive data. I didn't say there's no ability, because you still can, but proper handling of sensitive data out in the open also involves additional cost, and cost is the antithesis of corporate life.
Zenimax, which we gamers know more for Elder Scrolls Online and Bethesda in general, has had their QA testers vote to join the Communications Workers of America. Unlike certain other tech companies, Microsoft "officially" remained neutral on this vote. Since they decided to not oppose the union, I suppose one could take it as a tacit endorsement of unionization for the QA people, who are frequently among the lowest paid of the development staff.*
I honestly have no idea if this will change anything, but we'll see.
I read with interest the experiences of Bethesda's disaster of a game, Fallout 76, in an article just published on Wednesday by Kotaku. While the article itself could have used better editing*, the basic premise remains the same: Bethesda refused to listen to the multi-player part of the studio, used crunch needlessly on QA and dev staff, refused to let the release date slide, utilized a game engine not built for what it was being used for, and relied upon snitches and bad management to deal with a project that chewed up and spit people out.
It sounds a LOT like what happened to Bioware with Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, doesn't it?
But for me, the most interesting part of the article was how the QA and dev staff thought they were gonna be saved when Microsoft bought the game studio, and once they came onboard they were sadly mistaken.
Microsoft operated in a "hands-off" policy, mainly because they feared too much corporate interference would disrupt the "secret sauce" of the creative nature of game development.
“The impression that I got was that Microsoft would not make big changes unless they needed to,” one staffer told Kotaku.
“Simply because they’re like: We hired you to be excellent. And if we
touch you, it could be like a house of cards situation where you just
fall apart [as creatives]. I don’t think health benefits are going to do
that to anybody.”
Microsoft did not address a request for comment by the time of publication.
A former Bethesda employee told Kotaku,
“[Xbox CEO Phil] Spencer’s word when picking up Bethesda [and ZeniMax]
is largely that his preference is that studios be let to operate as they
always have, let the talent be the talent.”
One
source spoke cynically about Bethesda’s potential for changing from
within: “It would be great if something like [Activision Blizzard worker
advocacy group] A Better ABK
existed for Bethesda, but everyone is terrified...because [Bethesda] HR
is super cutthroat.” A current employee agreed it did not feel like
Bethesda HR was actively interested in addressing “any real employee
concerns.” Similar cynicism is reflected in the company’s Glassdoor reviews. --From The Human Toll Of Fallout 76’s Disastrous Launch
My big takeaway from this is that if people thought that Microsoft would "right the ship" with Blizzard's handling of World of Warcraft or any of their other franchises, they are being naive.
There isn't going to be a big cultural shift at Activision/Blizzard, and there isn't going to be a sudden improvement in the quality of the work done on WoW. The stories aren't going to get better (or worse, I suppose), and the focus on WoW isn't going to change from raiding and Mythic+. And Diablo Immortal? It's not going to change from it's own insidious version of gambling mechanics.
Unless Blizzard itself wants it to change.
*Having blogged for almost 13 years has given me some appreciation for that part of the creative process. I mean, I read an old post I'd made and cringe at the grammatical errors I find, years later. And don't get me started on One Final Lesson; every time I go back and reread it I find new areas I could rewrite and improve the flow of the story.
Alas that Bobby Kotick is going to stay as head of the new MSFT subsidiary, because if he were kicked out Microsoft could put one of their own people in charge and bring salaries in line with the rest of Microsoft. But I guess Bobby wouldn't like that, would he?
So for gamers, this is a non event. The people in charge of the Titanic are still there.
EtA: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Bobby will be officially gone after Microsoft closes the deal. Of course, that doesn't change anything until Microsoft actually does something with ActiBlizz. So I'm not exactly waiting with baited breath for WoW's content to suddenly improve; so the old line of "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" still applies until proven otherwise.
I don't typically pay much attention to the Retail side of WoW, particularly after I grew tired of the post-Wrath emphasis on the faction leaders being both the driver of the action and the central figures in the expacs from Cataclysm onwards.*
However, when I asked a friend whom I knew played both Retail and Classic his opinion of the 9.1 update, Chains of Domination, he said "I've played Horde, and what they did with Sylvanas was nothing short of character assassination."**
That's when I knew something had gone down on Retail.
Then my YouTube feed showed vlog commentary from Bellular Clips about a PC Gamer article, and so I hopped on over to PC Gamer to find this:
Hoo boy.
This goes far beyond the normal complaints that you see from people about this or that part of the expac, but strikes at the heart of Blizzard's cash cow.
As Bellular pointed out in his clip on this article, this isn't a more niche site, but something the general public is more apt to see, which becomes harder to sweep under the rug or just dismiss it as trolling.
This sort of thing is also likely to perk up the ears of the institutional investors of Activision-Blizzard, causing them to wonder what is going wrong with the Blizzard side of the house.
And really, I believe this can be laid directly at the feet of J. Allen Brack and Ion Hazzikostas. Brack, because he's in charge overall, and Hazzikostas, because he's the one in charge of WoW. The snark in me says that when the person in charge of WoW is most well known for his participation in Elitist Jerks prior to being hired by Blizz, this is what you get when you let a theorycrafter and raid encounter designer without real narrative experience run the show. I'm certain you get a lot of nicely designed raids, but narrative is gonna suffer if you hand wave a lot of stuff (or offload it into books because.... it's not important or something? I guess we'll never know for sure.)
And, apparently, suffer it has.
*And that includes having a significant portion of the action tucked away in books and other media, not in-game. I personally like the authors that Blizz employs --I've encountered some of them in social media and I can speak rather highly about their likability and thoughtfulness-- but in the end Blizz' management drives the show and they just interpret the direction management wants to go. Just like in the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, the decision to kill off Chewbacca wasn't the decision of the author, but management.
**My opinion, which I expressed to my friend, was that Blizz had been doing that ever since Wrath. There were quests in game that showed her humanity behind the bravado, especially one memorable quest where you find a piece of jewelry given to her by one of her sisters. (It's a drop from a Scourge near Windrunner Spire, naturally.) However, Blizzard chose to ignore those overtones and instead sent Sylvanas down the path she's been on from Cata onwards.
In the midst of everything going on, I forgot to mention that Kamalia of Kamalia et Alia has celebrated her tenth blogoversary on March 9th.
Kamalia's Gravitar.
I've enjoyed her fashion sense with her Sunday on the Promenade recurring series, having been able to create fashion outfits out of the tons and tons of WoW gear that you can use. Me, I'm just happy if I don't look like Burning Crusade clown gear, but maybe I should learn a thing or two about fashion sense (and I don't mean wearing white after Labor Day).
Over the years, Kamalia has seen her family grow with two new additions, and I can truly appreciate her efforts at keeping the blog running with two little ones around.
Of all the PS4 exclusives, this is the one I was most interested in, and I know I'm not the only one. However, I'd kind of resigned myself to never seeing the game on PC because, well, Sony would like to keep their exclusives in-house and make you buy a PS4 instead.
I guess Sony must have run the numbers and decided there was more money to be made by releasing the game on PC rather than keeping it in-house. I'd like to think that's the case, as I can't possibly be the only PC gamer who simply doesn't have an XBoxOne or PS4 lying around.* Additionally, it certainly seems that consoles are driving the video games market, so PC ports can be more trouble than they're worth: with the XBox and PS architecture, you only have to design for far fewer sets of hardware than in the PC market. Additionally, PC gamers are used to much higher framerates and graphical detail than can be found in the console market. Nevermind that the number of PC gamers who have hardware that can achieve those lofty heights aren't that numerous, that the potential is there is the important part.
Officially, Sony is saying that they want to lure PC people into using the PS4, but I believe that everybody who wants and/or owns a PS4 already has a PC, so chasing after dollars from people like me --who don't have and don't want a PS4-- is kind of a head scratcher.
But hey, I'm happy to accept this lure by Sony. Sony had better not expect me to drop the full price for the game, however, as a) I don't have that sort of money just lying around, and b) I'm busy with other games first.
*I'm not including the Nintendo Switch here, as third parties aren't exactly flocking to putting their latest and greatest on the Switch. Their loss, in my opinion.
A year ago on February 23, my friend and fellow WoW, SWTOR, and Neverwinter blogger Shintar was married. I can't tell you how happy I am to wish her a Happy Anniversary!!
You know, I'm always surprised when I see a real pic of Shintar that she doesn't have the Cyber-thingie over her head. From Shintar's Twitter feed.
Now, go wish her on her blogs (pick one, they're linked above) or her Twitter Feed (I linked that on her name) a Happy Anniversary!!
I don't think we're in the "we're bored" levels of Classic yet, but considering that the player base is wanting PvP in the worst way, this is likely a bone thrown to keep us preoccupied while the rest of Phase 2 is being completed.
While I've done a full Blackrock Depths clear in Wrath, I've never done a full Dire Maul clear at level. That ought to be fun.
My only question now is, how are we going to distinguish Dire Maul from Deadmines in LFG? I guess Dire Maul will have to be "Dire", because otherwise there's going to be a lot of disappointed L60s when they join a "DM" group to discover it's populated with L20 toons....
Yes, I do have a couple of posts in process, but nothing that's finished and ready to post.
But no, none of those posts are things that I'm particularly proud of, so they may never see the light of day.
Yes, I've been sucked into watching the FIFA Women's World Cup, and yes, I've been enjoying the matches so far*, but yes, it does cut into my gaming time.
And finally, yes, I've been watching E3 with a great deal of interest, and more than a bit of a jaundiced eye after the disastrous releases of Fallout 76 and Anthem (not to mention the Blizzard layoffs and other things happening in the gaming industry). But AMD... That is interesting. VERY interesting.
Anyway, I'll try to check back in next week (if not sooner).
*Except the US' nuking of Thailand. Not the score itself, because the only way the US could have stopped scoring is to simply kick the ball around the midfield for about 45 minutes, but the goal celebrations that went on after the US shot past a 6-0 score. Some people seem to think that this celebration backlash was because "women aren't allowed to show emotion", but in my case, I just felt bad for Thailand who were so clearly overmatched that I could have been playing out there for them and nobody would have noticed.
That actually gives me some hope for the long term health of the game, because I was afraid EA would shut down BioWare after Anthem. But maybe EA and BioWare will figure a few things out, like letting BioWare people with experience running online MMO-esque games work on the content of Anthem for a change.
I was finishing something else for the blog when I came across this new post on BBC News* about what gaming --particularly WoW-- meant to the disabled son of Oslo's vice-mayor of finance.
Mats Steen died in 2014, but his funeral was attended by members of his WoW guild, people whom Mats' parents had never met before. The article shares the story about how Mats fell ill, how he discovered gaming, and what the connections meant to everyone involved.
Mats' father, Robert, next to a pic of Mats' toon, Ibelin. URL from the BBC article.
The article was originally written in Norwegian, and if you want to read that, the link is here.
I'll freely admit that I got all the feels from the article. I laughed when a guildmate of Mats', Lisette, met Mats for the first time. In Goldshire. And then there was the time Mats was in the hospital, and his guildmates grew concerned.
For the most part, however, I understood Mats in a way that prior to 2009 would have been foreign to me.
My access to the internet, and before that to online services such as GEnie, led me to online communities** that I grew to know and respect, but I never exchanged cards with anyone from those groups. I never connected with them offline, shared in their adventures with their families, exchanged pics of family members (including the four legged ones), and kept up with their personal lives.***
But I did to my fellow MMO gamers and bloggers.
That sense of community, of family, is what Mats experienced. He also experienced freedom that he was unable to achieve in real life, running and jumping, and also the freedom from judgment that comes from living with a disability.
Go and read the article, and grab some tissues while you're at it. And celebrate some of the best parts of gaming.
*Yes, I do read news outside of the US. That's an aftereffect of being a shortwave listener and being a member of my university's Model UN Club. Model UN, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a club where we simulate a committee or the General Assembly of the UN on a particular topic. We follow the UN rules for public discussion, and each person selects (or has selected for them) a country to represent on that particular topic. You can't just fudge things (much), you actually have to research the country's position on said topic. Our club also hosted a conference for high school/secondary school students to send a "delegation" to, representing a specific country across many different committees (from the General Assembly to the World Health Organization to the Security Council). The year I was to lead one of those committees, I ran the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, and while I wasn't expecting a very vigorous discussion, a few months before our conference was to take place Iraq invaded Kuwait. While the topics we covered were already set, the OIC managed to finish official business early enough that we were able to devote an hour or two to "the elephant in the room".
**Shout out to soc.history.medieval, one of the old USENET newsgroups that I used to hang out in.
***I did meet with a fellow member of the Cincinnati Bengals newsgroup for lunch back in the Fall of 2005, the year the Bengals made the playoffs for the first time since 1991. Unfortunately, the fellow Bengals fan passed away from cancer before that playoff game, so while he was able to see the Bengals make the playoffs he wasn't able to actually witness the game itself. He was a very gregarious person, with a shock of white hair and wearing an old style Bengals jacket, but the impression he made on me ran deeper than that. He asked me if I wrote for a living, and when I told him I worked in IT, he said that I really need to start writing. "I love your posts," he said.
I haven't intentionally gone silent after the New Year's Day, but work and family conspired against any updates until now. It's not like I've stopped playing games --I've played quite a bit, thankyouverymuch-- but my traditional blogging time has been taken up by other items. However, I did want to mention a couple of items that were MMO related.
***
Bethesda had a major announcement on January 15th, announcing the next ESO expac to be the home of the Khajiit, Elsweyr. I kind of expected the expac to be a homeland territory, given that Summerset and Morrowind covered the Altmer and Dunmer, and I also knew that Black Marsh was already covered as a purchasable DLC. The addition of dragons, however, did catch me by surprise.
And, to be honest, I was really amused.
Although the name Elsweyr is pronounced "Elsewhere", it's a space away from the name of a settlement of Dragonriders of Pern*, whose places are known as weyrs. Between the obvious naming similarities and the references to dragons, I can only imagine that we might see a surreptitious homage to Anne in the expac.
***
After the brouhaha at BlizzCon with the Diablo mobile game announcement, I noticed that a ton of "Blizzard is dying" "WoW is dying" "Activision is killing Blizzard" videos popped up in my YouTube feed.
I'm not one to say that the sky is falling, but I'm sure that to some hardcore fans, Activision is the new EA.** Between the disaster of the Fallout 76 release and Blizzard's internal and external problems, it seems that no AAA developer is immune these days. I've said for a while now that a lot of these problems are brought on by the incessant need to post upward trending quarterly results for investors, forcing development houses to push out games that aren't ready.
From a developer's standpoint, Bungie's split with Activision made perfect sense. From an investor's standpoint, however, a company they invested in --and expected to generate regular profits-- is losing a major franchise after having shuttered another major franchise (Skylanders), along with (supposed) poor performance of one of the jewels of the company (WoW). So it's not a big surprise that investors are now upset.
If this were any normal publicly traded company, I'd start to expect layoffs to "stabilize the bottom line". But this is still Activision Blizzard, so I have no idea whether the Blizzard side will finally start standing up for itself against Bobby Kotick. I'd not necessarily count on it, but I'm surprised that Activision let Bungie go, so you never know.
As 2019 rolls on, stay tuned. I'm sure this isn't the last we've heard from these events.
*By Anne McCaffrey. Some of the behavior behind the first two books, Dragonflight and Dragonquest, don't hold up in today's world vs. the early 70s when the first two books were written. Dragonflight was, in fact, three novellas published separately and then put into a single book.
**And we'll have someone pop in with a comment about how much worse EA is in three... two... one...
EtA: Corrected the name of Elsweyr. That's what I get for typing while tired.
I'm not sure what to think of this. On one hand, it's nice from Obsidian's standpoint to not have to worry about where the next set of paychecks is coming from, but I do wonder at the cost to independence and culture.
Obsidian's forte is the CRPG, having been involved with the genre for 20+ years*, so I'm not sure what Microsoft is expecting out of Obsidian, given that the XBoxOne's (and PS4's) forte is more heavily graphically oriented than what Obsidian works with. Don't get me wrong, an isometric CRPG can work well in a console format**, but that's more the exception than the rule for console games. And, truth be told, console gamers aren't exactly clamoring for a CRPG design style that dates back to 1998 and Baldur's Gate with the original Bioware Infinity Engine.
Still, what CRPGs like Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny have is story, and if Microsoft wants to take Obsidian's world building and storytelling, throw in some current-gen console magic, and whip up a new CRPG franchise, that's fine with me.
All I ask of Microsoft is to let Obsidian do what Obsidian wants to do also, because that independence will reap dividends in the long run. Yes, yes, I know Microsoft says that they will, and I'm sure that they'll try to at first, but the thing is that very few companies retain that independence over the long haul. By giving Obsidian the chance to fail without fear, Microsoft will be giving a software studio a chance to dare to reach even higher.
And who knows, maybe that'll provide Microsoft with the next Dragon Age or Witcher franchise.
*Obsidian was formed by former members of Black Isle, who'd created Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout 1 and 2.
**Just look at Blizzard's D3 port to consoles for an example.
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