Every once in a while some of the other beta-testers and I start strolling
down memory lane, and when we get to the section of that well-trodden road
where it crosses Slamfest street we sit down at the crossroads, we have a
little picnic and we talk about the fun we had with a few less maps, a few
more game options and a lot less players. We reminisce about the good
times when Imperial Crowns were more impressive and less gaudy, when Dire
Marsh was more marsh and less dire, when there were more bungie
backgrounds and less rooms, when there were more personalities and less
collections of illegible ascii characters.
But it wasn't any of these things that made the beta-test fun. It was the
people, it was the game and it was the bugs. First of all, it was the
people. There weren't very many chosen for the slamfest, and there we
even fewer that played regularly. Those were the hardcore Myth fanatics
that would sit and play till dawn on a week night because that next game
held so much promise. These were the guys that would play with max
journeymen just in case there was an undiscovered winning strategy the
just happened to need three journeyman to work. These were the guys that
were doing troop mixing and archer fades before they had names. But these
were also the guys that would spend more time debating the value of pus
packets than they did using them in battle. These were the guys that
managed to play an entire game without saying anything that wasn't a
Princess Bride quote. These were the guys that made chatting the best
part of Myth.
It was also the game. Beautiful terrain that spun and whirled crazily as
you leaned on your orbit key desperately looking for that wight that you
could hear approaching. Crazy game options like Last Man on the Hill
which was nothing like anything we had ever seen before. (True story, my
first game of last man ended five minutes into it because we all met in
the middle and got eliminated. This was before camping was invented and
we were as confused as a thrall stuck on a tree) There were left-handed
warriors and exploding corpses and something called the fire-breathing
ghol that nobody but the veterans knew about. We knew this game had depth
and we could see that it was going to last a long time. Long enough to
get good at, long enough to establish a history of patterns and trends,
long enough to set up a webpage about...
What really made the beta-test fun, however, was the bugs. Every time
Myth locked up and Macbugs rattled off a string of gibberish, I dutifully
wrote down every symbol and filed an extensive bug report. Every time a
random Ghol started moonwalking on the top of a lake, I'd triangulate his
position and inform my programming buddies at Bungie who were on the other
side of a one-way form. Of course they already knew about them all, the
slamfesters were mostly to test the server load, but it was still fun to
be a contributor. Believe it or not, I took the special thanks to the
Beta-testers in the Myth Manual as a personal pat on the back...being part
of the beta-test was a great experience and I wish that all of you could
have shared it, but the Slamfest is over and Myth has been released...
Unfortunately, bungie.net has changed quite a bit since then. I'm not
talking about the abundance of cheaters, I had more games wrecked by
faulty networking than I have had ruined by droppers and lamers. It isn't
the fact that ranks are meaningless, during the beta-test, if you were
from beta-3 you were an Emp and if you were from beta-4 you were
flatware. It isn't the general atmosphere, the few creeps can't disrupt
the general politeness and civility of bungie.net, especially when you
compare the level of maturity on bungie.net to that of any chatroom,
channel or other public gathering on the web. It's not even the problems
with the scoring system, since bugs were a major part of the beta-test.
The change between the slamfest and now is not the people. If anything
there are more interesting and fun people now than there were then. When
any group gets larger the amount of smurfs in it will increase, but I
still find plenty of people worth talking to and playing with. It isn't
the game. Myth has actually gotten more complex and interesting as people
develop new tactics and counter-tactics. Instead of coming up with a
standard pattern to win, Myth actually gets more varied as we play. No,
the one essential change between the beta-test and today's bungie.net is
the sense that we are part of Myth's future. We no longer feel that we
are contributing to the game, we are customers and not co-developers, we
are along for the ride and not pulling the wagon or scouting the path
ahead. That one deficiency makes all the difference.
Fortunately, this is easy to change! If the game were lame or the people
worthless, all would be lost, but recapturing the beta-test excitement is
as easy as regaining the feeling that we are contributing. This is as
simple as making a small shift in attitude, and once you have made that
shift, your outlook will change dramatically. Think of it in this light.
Jason Jones, the project leader for Myth and one of their main programmers
has one thought in his head every morning when he wakes up. "Today," he
thinks, "I will get one step closer to making the perfect game." People
complain that he doesn't answer email...he doesn't even check his email.
He is too busy pursuing that one goal. Jason Jones has decided that
online gaming is an essential feature of the perfect game, and so he wants
to perfect that to.
Online gaming is in its infancy. Those systems that haven't been
destroyed by hackers, crushed by the internet's limitations or fumbled by
their administrators have been broken by the overload. Diablo, Quake,
Ultima, Warcraft2, Kali, The Zone, and a host of other games have been
plagued by cheaters and lamers and bugs. Compared to the competition,
bungie.net is incredibly stable and reliable. Folks, the _only_ thing we
have managed to find to complain about is a flaw in the ranking system!
And it is being addressed! When you are on bungie.net, you are on the
cutting edge of online gaming, done right and done well. Not only is
bungie committed to making bungie.net as good as it can possibly be for
today's players, but they are already working on the next step, the next
game, the next level that will be closer to perfection.
Bungie has not abandoned us, and they are listening to us, but they have a
one-man PR department, a new network programmer and a budget that is being
funneled into a huge expansion in employees and resources. They are
committed to using what they have learned this time to make a better
system next time and they are watching bungie.net very closely. Myth was
an experiment in a new genre, bungie.net was an experiment with a new type
of service and we are experiencing a new way of playing. And what we are
seeing is the beginning, not the end, the start of a new way of thinking
about games, not the isolated quirks of an abandoned customer base.
It's easy for me, I have seen the horizon, I know some of what is coming,
I have guessed more and I fully expect bungie to exceed what I have
imagined. It won't happen overnight, but you will get to watch it happen,
you will see each step unfold and, best of all, you get to contribute.
So, welcome to the beta-test, people. You'll have to excuse the mess,
pardon the bugs and keep in mind that things may change at any moment.
Bungie doesn't just make a game and engrave it in plastic, they are
constantly trying to improve things. I mean, look at Marathon, 2 games,
an expansion back, a huge map archive, and several third party conversions
and a half-dozen liscensed clones later, it is still being improved, so be
pateint while bungie takes the time to get things perfect. Bungie is in
for the long haul on Myth. The bungie employees are kinda swamped at the
moment, so serious bugs may be reported to any dazed admins you can
corner. If you have any ideas, talk to one of the many webmasters you'll
find hanging around, or go mention them in a forum or two. If you just
want to enjoy watching the construction, I'd suggest you get a bunch of
friends together and try testing the ranking system, or maybe look for
holes in the mesh. Make sure you look everywhere for potential problems,
so that they can be fixed eventually, but don't sweat the small stuff,
there's always a reset just around the corner...
-Case
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