Trigger Finger

METHOD 1 Break one of its most innovative and fun components

Example: Forza 2 My friends all admitted defeat, I kick their ass on every single scoreboard with the best lap time, I beat them every single race with a stock car and by a country mile. Looking for some competition and a real test I turn to the fantastic tournaments section of Forza 2. This is competitive gaming at it’s best. A different qualifying round each night (sometimes two) giving incentive to build a finely tuned beast for that particular track.

Some intense qualifying laps to get into the top 64 times (because hey, who wants to win a ‘silver’ or ‘bronze’ tournament?) and then 24 hours to fine tune some more before the knockout rounds begin. 4 intense races stand between me and C class champion. Unfortunately the first of those 4 rounds is at 1am my time on a work night, but being the good little geek that I am, I stay up and somehow get through a bleary-eyed haze to qualify in 3rd place for the next round tomorrow. That’s dedication for you and the next round is at a more ‘alert’ hour of 11pm the next day.

The next round is on a new track so I spend 3 hours building my car and tuning/refining my beast to something that gets a top 100 laptime (according to the global scoreboard). It’s an awful start… despite getting to the 1st corner ahead of the pack and defending the inside line, I am rammed not once, but 3 times and end up pointing backwards with broken suspension and a growling engine. Still it’s a ten lap race so i carry on limping along some 10 seconds behind the back of the group quietly cursing. Over three laps I somehow manage to be clawing back time and by the start of the 4th lap I am on the tail of 7th place. I pass him sublimely on the 1st chicane of Mugello, he swears… a lot… then quits in indignation at being passed by a car with smoke pouring out of it’s bonnet. Steeled and amused I soldier on, and without boring (bragging) people with the details…. I finish in 4th! Good enough to get through to the semi-finals and the quest is still on!

So onto the semi-finals, another day, another track, another 3 hours fine tuning a car for the new track. But when it came to race time there was a problem. I am sat there in the lobby from and with only 2 minutes till start time I am still the only one in there… Strange. So I take a chance and leave the lobby and rejoin it…. still alone. I try it three or four more times and with about 20 seconds to go I land in a lobby with 4 people who have apparently been there for the last 10 minutes while I was sat in some ghost lobby. Close call!!!! Anyway the race goes as planned with 5 of us racing for 4 places in the final. Long story short – despite coming off on the last corner of the last lap (typical!) I still come second and am in the final wooohooo!

So the final is on and its a track I HATE… New York. I hate it because to be competitive on this track with enormous straights, you need to have a car that is a speed demon at the expense of handling. We are talking racing cars with 1000hp and no brakes or ability to turn, made in the late 60′s generally. But being on a Saturday I have a lot of time to practice and get used to these unwieldy beasts. I spend 6 hours total perfecting a car and developing the skill required to point it in ‘vaguely’ the right direction. So the final comes… I join the lobby with 10 minutes to go… I am the only one there again, but no need to panic yet as more people may join. 4 minutes to go and still I am the only one there. I leave and rejoin a few times until I am sat in a room with 3 other people. Great!!! The race begins with the four of us and its a crazy octane fueled carnival for 10 laps, by the time I cross the finish line, my uncontrollable beast is limping along at only 100mph when it should be close to 200mph BUT I WON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Awesome!!!!!!!!!!! Congratulations are shared and we chat a little after the race before leaving the lobby.

I go to the tournament screen to bask in my glory when to my horror it shows someone else is the winner. Someone who wasn’t even in our race…. it takes a few seconds to sink in that the 4 of us had been the ‘ghost race’ whilst the ‘real’ final went on with only 2 racers WTF!! 18 hours of effort, one very tired day at work, several times a pissed off wife as I hogged the TV and for what? NOTHING!!!

METHOD 2 Wipe out the hard work of your entire playerbase

Example: Forza 2 The main source of kudos in this game (more so than most other games) is setting the fastest lap times on the leaderboards. It’s a lot of work to rank highly on them all and thus on the overall leaderboard for each class. There are (were) 13 basic tracks, in various combinations of reverse, and chopped up versions. There are 11 classes of car from D class (think VW Golf) all the way up to R1 which is the highest racing class with the kind of cars you would see in Le Mans. I forget the exact number, but it makes a total number of track/car combinations something like 480. Imagine even just hotlapping how long it takes to set a competitive time on all of these combinations? It takes a good 5-6 laps to do your best time even once you know the tracks well. So as a very rough guess lets say: Average lap for a track = 1:30 (generously low) Number of combinations = 480 (ish) Number of hotlaps needed = 6 (generously low)

So even after spending many hours getting to know the tracks… you are looking at something like 72 hours of laptimes to get a decent time registered on every board How would you feel then if due to bugs that took turn 10 weeks and weeks to fix, they wiped every score for every person who ever used a manual gearbox (i.e. about 95% of the people racing) regardless of whether they ever used one of the bugged cars or had a time that could possibly be a result of that bug? All those times gone, rank reduced to newbie, those magical once in a lifetime laps (that took many more attempts than 5-6 hotlaps) … gone… tough shit. I don’t know which is sadder, that they couldnt write a database query to only delete times with the Lotus Elan, or that the scoreboards were so badly designed from the ground up that such a simple maintenance task took literally a couple of months of debate and screwing around.

METHOD 3: Make it impossible to find a game with your friends

Example: Team Fortress 2 So my friends and I like to play together… big shock! We like to play ranked games, bigger shock, we like to do it easily, HUGE shock! Team Fortress 2 is a online, multiplayer only game which has been in development for the best part of a decade. Yet these simple aims of the average player are near impossible at times.

First we can’t invite each other to ranked games…. in fact many times the option isn’t even there for non-ranked games. So plan B is to search for games, shout out the name of the one you join and the others simply follow… right? Wrong! Player one searches for games and sees 10 choices, player two searches and sees none. So they search again, this time player one sees no matches and player 2 sees 6 different matches to when player 1 first saw some. So they search again and neither of them find matches. Searching for a 4th time (if the interface hasn’t crashed yet requiring a restart of the Xbox 360) they both find matches but the lists are completely different. Finally on attempt 15 or something, they find and join the same match, one player gets in and the other is told the game is ‘No longer accepting players’ even though there are several places left in the lobby. On attempt number god-knows-what they finally get in a game, which launches and loads (taking way too long) only to find it is a lag-fest not seen since the world ran on 33.6k modems due to the fact their is no bandwidth testing when hosts choose how many players can be on the server. Meaning some 7 year old is hosting this match for 16 players with 0.5mb upload speed and about 15 torrents downloading on his computer.

Both players scream in frustration and load up Halo 3 with its fantastic Party system and play that even though its an inferior game. Whats most annoying about these supposed AAA titles by BIG publishers with years of experience is that they are on FREAKING CONSOLES. You know, those standardised gaming boxes with supposedly less bugs, no need for patches, easy to develop for, next generation, cost a fortune platforms that are supposed to make PC gaming obsolete? My ass.

No related posts.