Tag Archives: entertainment

That moment when you realize you’re probably going to quit an MMO

Computer Games, , , , , , , , , , ,

ghost5As I mentioned in a previous post, I was playing Star Wars: The Old Republic on an almost daily basis for the last few months, and only recently I stopped playing, focusing now on Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Since playing the latter game, I haven’t signed into SWTOR once. Which brings me to the point of this post, and that’s the realization that I’m probably going to be cancelling my subscription with them soon.

There interesting thing is how much email they send me, trying to convince me that GREAT things are still happening in the game. I still get endless emails from Lord of the Rings Online, even though I dropped that subscription nearly a year ago. They, and Guild Wars 2, are convinced all they have to do to get me back is somehow sound like their game is just as exciting as it was when I decided to start playing it.

What game designers don’t seem to understand is that if a player has left your game, he or she left for a reason, which means that continuous advertisements and announcements of doing the same things you’ve always been doing are probably  not going to win back your former members. An example: Star Wars: The Old Republic decided at some point to integrate starship combat into the game. That sounded great. But in doing so, they decided it was only going to be added as player versus player. Now, a lot of people, like me, abhor online player versus player sort of play in our games. If we want that, we’ll sign onto a game that is designed specifically for that. But SWTOR was never about pvp. It was about player versus environment (pve), which means now having to get totally into the wrong kind of play means that the game has moved into a direction that is never going to attract me back. So that means they can stop sending me announcements about all of the great additions they’ve added to the game that are all designed to “enhance” the galactic starfighter part of the game (i.e., pvp). I don’t think they understand that. Oh well.

The other thing they do is keep announcing extra goodies they’ll give me just for staying with the game. The current one is some kind of land speeder that everyone gets as long as they’re activated members on some date in March. I don’t know exactly what date because honest, I don’t care. If I’m not signing into the game to play it, I’m probably not going to sign into it to get my new speeder to run around on a planet where I’m not playing on any way. Just saying.

If you want to win me back into a game that I’ve decided to leave, address some of the reason why I left in the first place. Star Wars Galaxies was notorious for not doing this in the old days. They’d get nonstop complaints about some problem, never fix it, and then beg you to come back because they added elves, or some other stupid shit that you didn’t ask for and really didn’t want in the first place. Everquest was a lot like that.

At least World of Warcraft didn’t promise you anything new. They just figured they were so freaking awesome that you’d come back regardless. And at least three times I did. Not a fourth. They’re currently on yet another expansion I’m going to miss. They haven’t done anything to make the game more interesting. It’s still about running the same big end game dungeons for better gear so you can run those same dungeons at harder difficulty. That got old the second time. The 90th time? Well, that’s why they don’t get money from me any longer.

So, I’ll be dumping SWTOR any day now, kind of like the many women over the years who have dumped me. Like those situations, it wasn’t the game. It was me. Please don’t take it personally.

But please stop calling. The new game is starting to get jealous.

Martha Stewart loses it on Twitter and CNBC thinks it’s a big enough story to do an entire story on it

Business, News, Social Networking, Television, , , , , , , , , , ,
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets
This block of wood is more newsworthy than those tweets

The other day, Martha Stewart lost it on Twitter. The upside (or downside) of it is that she dropped her Ipad and then threw a fit because she doesn’t understand how technical support works (in that they usually don’t send someone to your house to fix something you broke, especially when it was given to you for free, even if it was given to you for free by the founder of the company). Basically, the title of the story, if it was worth the time, should have been “Old Female Celebrity Doesn’t Understand How Business Works” or my other favorite: “Old Woman Yells At Kids to Get Off Her Lawn”. Neither is appropriate but they’re probably better than the drama that ensued.

You see, CNBC, and I”m sure many others, seems to think it is a big enough story to have five news pundits sit around a desk and discuss it on national television. Really. 5 of them. What it boils down to is that five highly paid commentators sat around a table and discussed an old woman’s tweets about how she broke her Ipad. We have fewer commentators at one time discussing whether or not the US should get involved in a war in the Middle East. This should tell you what kind of priorities our national news have.

I think that any time a news program starts off a story with a caption showing you what someone tweeted, that station should be taken off the air indefinitely and should be replaced with footage of goldfish swimming in a bowl. Only if the goldfish learn to tweet can the station be allowed to air news again.

I’m just saying….

Happy New Year and Things the Media still needs to learn

News, , , , , , ,

wall2The New Year is here, and all that jazz, so I just think I’ll say happy new year and move on from there. Hope everyone is doing well. If not, hope the new year gets better for you.

One of my usual places to find up to date news is Google News. I’ve found it to be quite informative, and I tend to read first the technology section, then the entertainment section, then business and then US News. Maybe I might read some of the other categories, but those are the main ones that interest me. However, it wasn’t until today that I started to notice something that’s been secretly bothering me for a long time. And that’s what gets included in Entertainment News.

When I read Entertainment, I’m interested in movie announcements, revelations of new music and the ocassional ridiculous scandal that tends to make me laugh. However, I”ve started to notice other pieces of news that are being included in this feed, and it’s just wrong. I’ll give you an example: James Holmes, the nutcase that shot up  the midnight showing of the latest Batman movie, is having his hearing and the news wants to know what his defense will be. Why does this bother me? This is not entertainment news at all. I don’t care that he did his crime during a Batman screening. I don’t care that the media is excited and hyped about the case. THIS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT NEWS. It is national news, or serious news. To put it under the entertainment umbrella is sending a signal out to every nutcase out there that if he wants his 15 minutes of entertainment fame, do something ridiculous, like kill a whole bunch of people during a movie screening.

Entertainment news needs to be held to actual entertainment stuff, not this kind of thing. The message the news is sending by this sort of thing is that we’re going to be entertained by whack jobs killing people in real life. This is why “news” people like Nancy Grace exist, and I so wish that they didn’t get a single moment of air time. We don’t need media celebrities trying to make a name for themselves by going crazy on the news and trying to gain attention, which is one reason why I refuse to watch anything Nancy Grace related. She’s exactly the kind of reason why we have this sort of thing turning in on an entertainment feed instead of simple news.

And that’s the problem today. News has become entertainment, which just fuels that old problem of watching the evening news and seeing that the lead story is a fire that affects less than 0.001 of the population. Fires are exciting, and you can watch things burn, which is why you rarely see a fire story in the newspaper (unless it burns half the city). It’s only exciting on television with pictures and footage.

This is why we’re now seeing Holmes as an entertainment story. Instead of CNN, Fox and the major networks covering this story and its impact on America, we’re now going to have E!, People, and the Celebrity Gossip talking about what clothes the killer was wearing, and why the prosecutor so shouldn’t have been wearing those shoes.

On another note, chances are pretty good this web site is going to be closed soon. I’ve discovered very few people are actually interacting with me and that most of my views appear to be from spammers trying to sell shit to people who do read my blog.

Why is the News Obsessed with Unimportant, Marginalized People?

News, Politics, , , , , , , ,

ABC News ran a story today warning informing us that Sarah Palin may in fact be running for president. As a news junkie, my immediate thought wasn’t (to the shock of many) “wow” or “isn’t that interesting” but “who cares?” I mean, honestly, this is such a non-story that the level of ridiculousness borders of a word that would have to be more ridiculous than “ridiculous”. Maybe super-ridiculous. Let’s be honest for a moment here, kids. Sarah Palin has as much of a chance being elected president as I do. Yeah, not kidding here. I have as much chance of being elected president as Sarah Palin does. The only way she would ever be elected president is if 70 percent of the country had a lobotomy the day before the election, which is exactly, not surprisingly, the requirements it would take for the American population to write me in as a write-in candidate in all fifty states, garnering me enough electoral votes to finally call Starving Students to move my furniture into the White House. Then again, with a $400,000 a year salary, I’d probably just leave all my stuff in place and buy all new shit, because I’d definitely be living a completely different life. I’d keep my stuffed animals, and maybe my Playstation 3 (because it gets my streaming Netflix movies, and you know I’d be wanting Netflix in the White House). But the rest of it can go to Good Will, or Good Will Hunting, or wherever it is that you send things when you finally get elected president by a write-in vote because the country has decided it doesn’t want Sarah Palin in the White House.

But I’m starting to digress here. What I really wanted to talk about was Taylor Swift and her new album. Oh wait, that’s not what I wanted to talk about, although I will admit it’s a great album, and I really have enjoyed continuously playing it in my car each and every time I get into it. No, what I wanted to get back to was the subject of how the news seems obsessed with such unimportant stories.

Take Charlie Sheen for instance. Why has the news spent so much time talking about him? Before his ridiculous melt-down, he was really unimportant, insignificant and compartmentalized to a television show that relegated itself to the importance of appearing next to Big Bang Theory. Seriously. And somehow, because he blew up one day, he’s the next most important thing since, well, I don’t have a comparison because it still doesn’t make any sense. Yet, the news, for weeks, was obsessed with all things Charlie Sheen, and honestly, he wasn’t all that significant before it all happened, and now that it’s finally blowing over, I wonder if they’re not all thinking to themselves, “how exactly did that happen?”

Which is what brings me to the obsession itself. Why do they get so obsessed with such unimportant figures in celebrity? We live in an era where people are becoming famous for being famous, and I just don’t understand it. Kim Kardasian recently announced she’s engaged to be married. Who is this person? Why is she a celebrity? Why do we care? Why is she getting so much attention when she hasn’t done a single significant thing ever. Yeah, I understand she was some kind of reality star, but really, is that enough to substantiate all of the attention? Yeah, she’s a bit attractive, but so are a lot of people. They’re not made into media sensations that require booking agents and sit down sessions with David Letterman.

Why aren’t we hyping people for doing great things? That’s one thing I’ve never understood. If a scientist discovers a property that might change humanity and civilization, that person is important and should be considered seriously significant. But rarely is such a person treated that way by anyone outside of his or her scientific discipline or academic community. Instead, we over-hype really ridiculous characters who perform stupid antics, and then make a media career out of that one moment in time.

Could this be a symptom of our need for a 24 hour news cycle, but the reality is that we don’t have 24 hours worth of news to fill that cycle? Is that the problem here? Are we so obsessed with pretending that we have news that we’ll do anything to sell an unimportant story because we don’t want to admit that on a daily basis, nothing really significant tends to happen? Congress can’t come up with a budget. Is that news? Not really. But the day that they do come up with a budget IS news. Then it should be reported. Instead, because we have no news to report, we’ll focus endlesslessy on gridlock as if that’s a story itself. It’s not. Gridlock means you can’t make a decision, or a consensus of a decision. Try to sell that as a story, and you start to see the problem that we seem to be experiencing in our daily lives. We have nothing to report, so we report unimportant events as “events” and then we hype the hell out of them until the rest of us suddenly feel it’s important.

So, what’s our solution? Stop paying attention. Really. That’s it. Discontinue watching news that hypes stupid shit as actual news. It may mean looking for alernative avenues of news because the old avenues don’t know how to stop hyping crap as news. However, I suspect that most of us are addicted to this crap, so we’re kind of doomed to a continuous process of receiving fake news as news, and our attention will continue to be focused on unimportant people doing unimportant things while the rest of us are told to treat it as important. Mainly because we don’t have any other way of looking at the situation.