Everquest: The Real Story Behind Sony's Addictive On-Line Game

Slashdot ^ | December 2002 | David Sanftenberg

[Fzob]

Believe it or not virtual stuff is sold for hard cash.

[strela]

Hello, my name is strela. And I am a Freepaholic.

Is somebody going to listen to me whine about my addiction and send me money now? I should sue ...

[Timesink]

The second thing you have to know is that the game stops being fun. By that time though, you’re so “addicted” to the game, you don’t realize it. The game becomes a source of frustration and anger instead of a source of entertainment and fun. It becomes a chore. It becomes a job. You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consumed with getting that new item, or finishing that last quest, and while so consumed you begin to hate the game. Vehemently. It’s a game that goes on forever, and one that you can never win.

Sorry, but if you know this and understand this, no amount of bitching or pseudopsychological rationalization is going to make me feel sorry for you. If the game pisses you off and you are no longer enjoying yourself, QUIT.

[Timesink]

Some info on the attorney Mrs. Wooley's trial lawyer Jack Thompson: http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/outthere/otthompson.html.

Yes, it's from conwebwatch, but this time they're right (once you filter out their usual liberal code word BS). Apparantly Mr Thompson has a history of his own here on FR, where he was threatening to sue anyone who said anything about him he didn't like without posting their full name and address at the same time.

[Hawkeye's Girl]

Someone I know got kicked out of college after he failed all of his classes because he never went to them. Why didn't he go to class? He spent all of his time on the college network downloading MP3s.

It doesn't matter if it's shopping, alcohol, drugs, gambling, online gaming, file downloading, or whatever else you can think of. Addiction is addiction, and that's not Sony's fault.

[Timesink]

Is this virtual stuff or physical stuff?

Virtual. They used to auction off thousands of "items" every day on eBay until Sony started hounding them and eBay cut most of it off. I believe there's now at least one all-Everquest auction site out there somewhere as a result.

[Hank Rearden]

Never heard of it, but I'm obviously not their target market because the name alone bored me to death.

Geek-o-Rama. Yawn.

[RabidBartender]

http://www.sptimes.com/News/010301/Hillsborough/Father_guilty_in_deat.shtml

Father guilty in death of son

The man pleads guilty to aggravated manslaughter and is sentenced to 15 years in prison.
By DAVID KARP

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 3, 2001

---

TAMPA -- As his 9-month-old son cried last July, Tony Lamont Bragg Sr.'s mind was on something else: a computer game called Everquest.

Authorities believe Bragg squeezed Tony Jr. to keep him quiet, then left him unattended in a utility closet in their Temple Terrace apartment for more than 24 hours. The boy died.

On Tuesday, Bragg, 24, pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Bragg had been playing the online fantasy role-playing computer game for hours and appeared to get annoyed by his son's crying, said prosecutor Suzanne Rossomondo.

Bragg discovered his son by his playpen at least 24 hours after the child died. The infant's heart had been punctured, causing him to bleed to death. His ribs and left collarbone were fractured.

Prosecutors originally charged Bragg with first-degree murder, but accepted his guilty plea to the lesser charge because they did not believe he intended to kill his son. "I think it was a horrible case of neglect," Rossomondo said.

Circuit Judge Rex Barbas added five years' probation to the end of Bragg's prison sentence.

Bragg's former wife, Brandy L. Rozier, left their son with Bragg after she lost electricity at her home. She also dropped off Bragg's 4-year-old stepson.

Bragg kept his 9-month-old in a playpen in a 4- by 8-foot utility closet that contained the air conditioner and heater. Authorities found pizza in the kitchen, but an associate medical examiner said the infant was undernourished.

Bragg originally said he was carrying his son when the child's head, chest and shoulder slammed into a door frame.

Before he was supposed to drop off his son at a relative's home, Bragg noticed his son was not breathing. He called 911.

The boy's mother, who is separated from Bragg, has two other children. Both are in state custody.

Rossomondo said she told the child's mother about the plea deal. "She was very happy about it," Rossomondo said.

[Timesink]

It doesn't matter if it's shopping, alcohol, drugs, gambling, online gaming, file downloading, or whatever else you can think of. Addiction is addiction, and that's not Sony's fault.

Or it could just be that he preferred doing something he enjoyed over something he didn't, and would have dropped out of college anyway. That's not an addiction, it's just not giving a damn.

The best way to tell if something's actually addictive is to restrict access to it by the patient and see what happens.

[Timesink]

FR thread on Jack Thompson from two months ago

[Hank Rearden]

David Sanftenberg aka Dolalin Bonewielder 62 Necromancer of Lanys T`Vyl

I'm gonna guess this "Bone Wielder" wields anything but.

[Fury]

We take care of EverQuest at the college I am assigned to by blocking it, both ingress and egress. The students who use the Internet for chatting, porn and gambling said the kids using EverQuest were hogging lots of PCs in the Open Labs... LOL!

[RabidBartender]

I played from about a month after release to soon after Ruins of Kunark came out (roughly 2 years). I absolutely agree with the entire summing up of Verant's customer service.

I was excited about the expansion, but after a few weeks of nonstop playing my 46 troll shaman - I still could not find one of the new spells that was supposed to come with the expansion. In fact, no one on the server had (keep in mind that many of these people are on 14-18 hours a day). We post on Verant's message board: "Hey, this scroll isn't in there." Verant's response was that the game was thoroughly tested and the scroll was in there. A few weeks later, still no scroll. We again posted on the message board, some a little more emphatically than others. Verant insists the scroll is in the game and threatens to ban the account (from the game) anyone on the message board who keeps up ScrollGate.

A week later, Verant puts out a patch stating: "We have discovered the Spirit Scroll has not been dropping like it should. It should be fixed soon."

Customer service and Verant go together like integrity and the Clintons.

[strela]

I'm gonna guess this "Bone Wielder" wields anything but.

The smallest bones in the human body (the anvil, the hammer, and the stirrup) are located in the inner ear. Maybe this one's into aural sex ...

[Slings and Arrows]

I find it utterly insane that anyone should waste their life playing EverQuest.

Diablo II, on the other hand...

FReegards,

Slings and Arrows

[Denver Ditdat]

On FR - one can't give oneself a high falootin' title like the one above.

Sincerely, Senator Pardek

Yep. If one could, you might be "His Most Exalted Eminence, President for Life Pardek", rather than just a mere "Senator". ;-)

[Fabozz]

"These situations are ‘lovingly’ referred to by the players as timesinks; gameplay traps intended to waste your time and keep you playing longer. There are hundreds of them; others incredibly longer than simply getting to a mob. Several quests required to advance in the game require you to spend 100+ hours sitting in single locations..."

Most of the article is pretty sound—EQ customer service absolutely sucks compared to Ultima Online or even Asheron's Call. Of course, since I used to work for UO and now work for Microsoft, I'm probably biased, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong. ;-) However, in this paragraph the author shows his ignorance of online game economics. Sony doesn't want him to play "longer," it wants him to play for short periods spread out over time. See, online games are like health clubs: To make a profit, they have to have many more customers than their facilities can actually support. The ideal customer for an online game plays one evening a week, week after week.

Trouble is, it's very hard to encourage that sort of play without encouraging obsessive play, particularly with a community of sophisticated players reverse-engineering the game design. Sony doesn't want this guy to spend 100+ hours watching a spawn point; the game's not designed to make him do that. Instead, the game is designed to encourage him to check in, see whether the MOB he needs has spawned, chat with friends a little while then log out and get on with his life. Randomly, that would get him what he wants sooner or later, provided that no one figured out what was going on. But since the parameters of all the quests have been painstakingly mapped out, everyone knows where that MOB is going to spawn, and so rather than log on randomly to check for it, a guild gets together and camps to wait for it to appear. Those people are costing Sony money (in the form of server load) while not having any fun, which is exactly what Sony doesn't want—but there's no way around it, because anybody that plays the game the way Sony originally intended it to work will get shafted by the campers.

It's a tricky problem that, believe me, the developers of the next generation of these games are working very hard on. I hear good things about Asheron's Call 2, and the guys doing Star Wars Galaxies are really top-notch. But it's not the kind of problem that can be solved by a patch, so the current generation of games are stuck with it. My advice would be to stop playing, or at least stop worrying about advancement, until the next generation hits the stores.

[Arkinsaw]

Of course, since I used to work for UO

I enjoyed UO. I developed a pretty good sixth sense about pkillers and enjoyed escaping ambushes. We had a little guild for awhile that only carried worthless stuff and tried to mob pkillers at the crossroads. For awhile we had that place pretty safe. It was also fun to find a large bunch of people in the mountain pass at Britain afraid to go out to the crossroads and get them to band together and rush the bad guys. Sure, you died sometimes but you could always kill one and badmouth his ghost.

But then people started whining, unwilling to be careful and develop tactics to keep their character alive, and before long UO changed things so it just wasn't dangerous anymore. You could walk the length of the land and not be in any danger. No fun.

The best thing UO ever did was that server where you allied with a color and warred with the other colors and tried to raid their castles. But they got rid of that after a while also. I never tried Everquest since they built in boring from the start.

[Dan Day]

Do adults really play these games?

Sure. They're more complex than chess, I like a challenge.

I've been playing Everquest for almost three years, and last time I checked I've been an adult for several decades now.

While the author of the article has some valid points, he *really* exaggerates most of them.

His article is a classic example of why the (previously) unmoderated "Gameplay" discussion forum on the Sony website was nicknamed "Whineplay" by many of the players -- some people can't seem to just stop playing a game (*any* game, you'll see this syndrome on most games' discussion boards) if they aren't enjoying it any longer, they have to stick around ad infinitum and bitch and moan about how the game developers are conspiring against them.

In fact, they seem to end up enjoying whining more than they ever enjoyed the game itself, and they stick around so they'll continue to have something to whine about.

Most people who play Everquest do it because the developers have made the game *enjoyable*. It's as simple as that.

[kassie]

Interesting article.