Virtues Interviews Lum

Thanks Nobile for these great news story links! Read the Virtues interview of Scott Jennings, Mythic programmer. The Man talks about past, present and the future. TS: Who did you rant to all those days while being gone from the webworld? Where is all your combined wrath documented now? Do you just yell at your co-workers, or do you actually write it down for others to read? Lum: I just yell at my co-workers. Mostly Sanya, we're both bitter and jaded, so we bounce off each other well. I have a weblog up at www.brokentoys.org, but I haven't had much time to actually write much there, and I try to stay off the subject of gaming anyway since I'm part of the DARK SIDE now. TS: Can we expect a comeback of the original classic Rantings Of Lum The Mad at all? Lum: No, even if I got fired tomorrow (please don't fire me, boss) I really doubt it. I wrote ltm.net for over 2 years, on a daily basis, and near the end I repeated myself a lot. At some point you have to quit yelling at the plumber that the sink is broken and actually try to buy a new sink. Or something. That was a really bad metaphor, and is why having me write again would probably be bad. TS: Do you have any idea what happened to that huge community after lumthemad.net shut down? Was there an irregular increase of users at somethingawful.com? Lum: Well, there's quite a few "successor sites" now that sprang from that community. I don't want to play favorites and rattle off a list since I'd probably miss one or two. But the community's still out there, which means in the grand scheme of things I didn't have all that much to do with it, other then have a really over-developed tolerance for active message boards. TS: What games do you play nowadays? Where can our readers PK you, or vice versa? Lum: I really only have time to play DAoC - I play on the Mordred server, so you probably already killed me if you play there. Sorry, no other clues. TS: Do you still get to make fun of game designers? Lum: In person, no less! One of the great things about this job is that during lunch I can berate people about hit points. TS: Quite a few new MMOGs have been announced lately, but very little actually been released. Projects are cancelled and a lot of smaller companies are fighting for funding. What are your thoughts about this crazy market? Will it be quality or quantity? Lum: Both. Nice safe answer there! There will be a LOT more MMOs, many of which will stretch the definition of the term - is Neverwinter Nights an MMO? How about Tribes II? Not all will be successful, but I think a lot will. There's some real monsters on the horizon in terms of growing the market - I think both Star Wars Galaxies and The Sims Online will do very well, and both will reach a lot of people who haven't played MMOs before. So why haven't many been released up to this point? Well, massively multiplayer games are extremely difficult to actually design, develop, and just RUN. I know I made quite a name for myself from making fun of MMO companies, but geez, from seeing what goes on behind the scenes just keeping one of these running on a daily basis, anyone who's survived releasing one has my respect. The technology behind these games - the Internet itself - just isn't as "turnkey" as we would like, and if someone trips over a router cable in San Jose, we suddenly have hundreds of thousands of angry customers. That's not to mention things like customer service, or data storage, or making sure your +16 Sword of Uberness isn't being duped in a back alley. TS: Asheron's Call 2 is creating quite a hype with it's impressive engine lately. If this was lumthemad.net, what would you tell your readers about it? Lum: I'd make fun of Jason Booth's puffy pants. Um, what I saw at E3 looked pretty spiffy, but I didn't really get a close look at it. They've got some interesting design concepts which interest me more than the engine though. It'll be neat to see how an NPC-less world works out. TS: As Nobile pointed out in a previous article, the Asian gaming market is exploding with even professional gamers making a living of it. Is the world going nuts or are they just looking for something they are better at than soccer? Is this a brief glimpse of the future, or how do you think will the gaming community look like in Europe and America in a few years? Lum: Well, we're about to release DAoC in Korea, so we've gotten a crash course in the Korean market just recently. They REALLY take games seriously there. I don't think we'll see "pro game tours" here, though, simply because watching people play Quake isn't as interesting as actually playing Quake. Then again I'd say the same thing about golf. There's a cable TV network about video games that just came out, so I imagine they'll find out first. TS: While the most vocal community, PvPers are still a minority of players. On the other hand purely competitive PvP games, i.e. Counterstrike, are becoming more and more popular. What do you think about the carebear/PK conflict? Why has PvP still not managed to become a major factor in MMORPGs? Should PvPers be thrown in jail or do carebears deserve the trout? Lum: "Carebears deserve the trout"? I don't want to know where that came from. Um, OK. I'm a PvP person myself, but at the same time I can understand a lot of people don't want the intensity of a PvP game when they play an MMO, they want to get together with friends and do the D&D dungeon crawl thing. Not coincidentally, almost all the games coming out soon and recently (including ours) allow you to do both. As far as the community aspect, I think PvPers are doing a good job of, for lack of a better term, growing up. We don't see as much outright harassment in game on PvP servers that we did when UO first came out. Some of that is from game companies learning how better to enforce the rules that are there, and I think some of it is just the PvP community realizing that they have a responsibility to some extent to be self-policing. TS: Warcraft III hit the shelves. Have you played it yet? What do you think of it or what is your favorite RTS game? Lum: Zug zug! I love it. I was a big Warcraft II fan, and Warcraft III is like it, but with another I. I play it on battle.net quite a bit, usually as the undead because it's easy to do the necromancer/spider slinger thing. TS: Neverwinter Nights sucks, still everyone loves and plays it. Why do you think is that? Lum: Because it doesn't suck? It does a good job of porting the 3rd edition D&D ruleset to a computer, and I expect we will see some fantastic modules come out soon from the fan community. It isn't really suited to be an MMO replacement, but I don't think that's what Bioware ever intended. TS: Bekka did an article about the DAoC PvP servers success and wanted me to ask if you could comment on it. I told her I didn't want any DAoC stuff in the interview, but she threatened my life with a custard pie, so here goes: Can you comment on it? Lum: VERY well written, and I made sure everyone else here read it as well. Your life is safe from a custarding. TS: Anything you would like to tell our readers? Like say hi to mom? Lum: You read all this? It's summer! Go outside! Shoo! TS: Thank you for your time, Lum! Interview by Thunderstorm

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