Let’s change pace.  Who loves basketball?  I do.  Did you hear?  Electronic Arts is digging up the corpse!

Though not exactly surprising, EA finally officially announced an NBA Jam revival on the Nintendo Wii. The game is due out sometime in 2010, and promises a nostalgic basketball trip, along with “new game modes, characters, and gameplay depth.” As predicted, the game is in development at the Vancouver studio. Mark Turmell, the creator of the series recently brought on at EA Tiburon, is likely to be taking an advisory role in the series reboot.

“NBA Jam is one of the most recognizable franchises in video game history,” said EA Sports president Peter Moore in the press release. “Diehard fans of the original game have been asking for a remake for more than a decade. We’re very excited to give them their wish this year with the return of this iconic franchise.”

You’d presume I’d want in?  Hold that thought.

I’m not annoyed that eight-bit nostalgia is giving way to Generation Y’s Super Nintendo fetish.  I’m not annoyed that the game is rekindling the franchise’s visual deficiencies.  See, this isn’t about brand revival.  Gamers didn’t care the last time that now-defunct Acclaim tried to exhume NBA Jam.  This is about a casual competitive game (and consumer recollection of the title) mirroring the populsarity of its brand name.

Bo Jackson’s legendary Tecmo Bowl running accolades were the nature of simulation sports games in the eight-bit era.  Video game tech could not handle the intricacies yet.  So fuck it, let’s have the basketball catch fire.  Midway’s NBA Jam was a casual in-road to the arcade gaming scene of the early nineties because it never tried to be Street Fighter.  And it didn’t need to be.

But allow me note an important piece of information. NBA Jam came out in 1993.  How was that year in NBA basketball?

The second Golden Age of Basketball came to a close with Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls capping their first three-peat on one of the league’s greatest moments.  But that sort of basketball couldn’t possibly explain the success of the most visible basketball game in the history of American gaming, right?  A game built for those with passing interest in the product?

And five years later, the formula was so tired that “NBA Jam 99″ was a simulation basketball game.  Yes, NBA Jam was dead.  Don’t remember that part, huh?

Any sports game predicated on game mechanics (as opposed to accurate rosters) is going to have difficulty maintaining popularity.  But the NBA was not helping.  The Michael Jordan phenomenon was breeding a swath of imitators to lacked the talent to assume his offensive moxy or the will to play his defense.  Thus, breeding a league of one-man offenses that were getting stomped by excellent defenses.  What, you’re surprised a league dominated by the San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons wouldn’t be conducive to shilling a no-defense basketball game?

In its place, Electronic Arts’ embraced Allen Iverson’s crappy shot selection with NBA Street, one of the most playable sports game franchises of all-time.  Both games emphasized offense, but Street let you play both ends of the ball in a way NBA Jam never allowed. So even if Kobe Bryant was the do-it-all first option, Shaq was just as critical for eating any object thrown at the basket.

How popular was Street?  It did go on to sell millions.  And in 2003, Acclaim published an NBA Jam game to capitalize on its rival’s success (and failed spectacularly).  But Street got little press in the mainstream because it wasn’t fighting on favorable terms.  Madden was replicating the surging popularity of the National Football League at the same time the NBA was showcasing its most unwatchable basketball of the last half-century.  And the control scheme?  Real basketball is simpler than Volume 2’s control scheme:

Gamers complain their journalism overlords are there to push the message that’s best for business.  And then gamers demand sequels they already got.  This isn’t a matter of Deus Ex: Invisible war failing to match the accolades of its predecessor.  When people complain they haven’t gotten a sequel to Kid Icarus, they’re really saying “They made a Kid Icarus sequel for the Game Boy in 1991?  I never knew that!”

But if your passion for gaming wasn’t as pathetic as mine, you’d buy Peter Moore’s “asking for a remake for more than a decade” bullshit.  News flash to the target audience:  You got several sequels to NBA Jam.  You just didn’t care.  The only difference in the seven years since the last NBA Jam game is that the league has returned to respectability, where people are almost interested in watching NBA basketball.  And along the way, the video game industry sucked in enough casual games to justify the reboot of a franchise that disappeared for a reason.

So when you said you wanted NBA Jam to return, you meant to say “LeBron James is pretty damn good.”

Battlefield fans: Your phony marriage with Electronic Arts is getting more interesting every day.  Two weeks after the release of Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the company severed SecuROM from any purchase made through Steam.

STEAM
Change: The STEAM version of Battlefield Bad Company 2 will no longer have SecuROM on the exe file. Instead it will use [sic] Valves own DRM instead.

Naturally, the makers of Spore are getting praise for a change of heart.  You know, proof Battlefield totally owns Call of Duty, a series that was lax on digital rights managament.

Noticing a trend?  Crippling DRM is announced for an upcoming game.  An outcry ensues.  The company charges headlong anyway.  Weeks after the game’s release, “Please Submit a Blood Sample to Continue Playing” is removed.  And people cheer a “victory”.

I hope you don’t believe this isn’t deliberate.

Digital distribution is granting computer games a longer sales life.  In the world of boxed retail, even the great ones eventually cede shelf room to Nancy Drew’s Pro Teen Detective 2010.  And despite the shift in consumer purchasing habits, it remains that your game development overlords are paranoid.

In a cubicle at Ubisoft or Electronic Arts or Activision, somebody hired for their Master’s in Business Administration degree (as opposed to their brain) has discovered the financial success of an upcoming game may determine whether they have a job in six months.  By fiddling through colorful graphs, this person has determined software piracy during the fourteen-day post-release period is the most monstrous and insidious communist plot we have ever had to face.  And because of this, both the company and various employees are prepared to risk their morality to stymie teh piratez…until that fourteen days is up.

Nobody wants to be the guy that makes the next Psychonauts.  And piracy is too easy to blame for that.  Nobody wants to be the guy that let years of hard work ‘fall victim to new-age tape trading’.  So even if a game like Assassin’s Creed 2 can have its “stay connected or we kill you” approach cracked on the first day, Ubisoft reps can play with each other’s cocks and say “Well, we tried our best and failed miserably.”

Know how the employees of Infinity Ward will instantly regain their babyface status when they deatch themselves from Activision?  Right now, removing DRM isn’t seen as a company calling off the dogs.  It’s seen as a company “coming to its senses”.  So there’s an incredible backlash against DRM.  There just isn’t any backlash to the play right after.

Enjoy your patch.  Developers and publishers really do care about you.  Honest.

Dear internet (now interchangable with “you dumbfucks”):

Trolling is the portrayal of sensationalist behavior as legitimate opinion.  It can be done for personal or financial gain, as sport, or to launch an ego trip. Don’t know where I’m heading with this?  Here’s a spoiler: Disagreement is not trolling.  Honesty is not trolling.  Sarcasm is not trolling.  What part of the collective community’s rectum did this horror story come from?

Why am I in a pissy mood?  The thing is, Jim Sterling’s game reviews have become events.  “Come for the well-written ass-kicking, stay for the irrational fanboy meltdown!”  People bitch that game journalism is bought and paid for.  People bitch that reviewers don’t have the balls to employ the entirety of the one-to-ten game review scale.  So what happens when someone shits on a number of Triple-A titles?  He’s a fucking troll, that’s what!

Mr. Sterling got the green light to review Final Fantasy XIII, a game that’s getting grilled for embracing the worst of Japanese Role-Playing Games.  Jim Sterling dislikes Japanese Role-Playing Games.  You’d believe the man would shit a biased brainfart, but the finished product was all “Boom, headshot!”

It takes more than graphics to make a game, and Final Fantasy XIII  offers very little else other than eye candy. Ultimately, this latest addition to the Final Fantasy series is a pompous and masturbatory affair, created seemingly to promote the developer’s ego first, and the player’s enjoyment second. Every now and then its fights can approach satisfying, but mostly this is a dull, dreary affair that is too busy licking its own arse to look up and notice that everybody around it has fallen asleep. Written with all the skill of a three-year-old and paced with the eagerness of a virgin in heat, Final Fantasy XIII isn’t just bad by Final Fantasy standards, it’s pretty damn poor for the genre itself.

But it’s required by law that you’re not allowed to read the article.  So instead, everyone skipped two-thousand words of instant win and saw “4.0 — Below Average“.

As of this entry’s publication, Sterling’s review has 901 comments.  He has set off the biggest game journalism shitstorm since…his own 4.5-out-of-10 for Assassin’s Creed 2.

The hilarity is the golden goose that supposedly outs his ‘trollish intentions’.  His detractors are pointing to Sterling’s perfect score for Deadly Premonition, an X-Box 360 budget horror game that he wrote “goes above and beyond. This game is so bad, it’s not just become good. It’s pretty close to perfect.”  Somehow, his love for campy media was a declaration that Deadly Premonition was one of the greatest games ever released.

Why is it so hard to believe a cynic would reject the consensus?  If I was going to actively troll people as part of my journalism gig, I certainly wouldn’t choose one of the worst-paying, unstable outlets to do it. Want to read up on a real troll?  Hit up Armond White, a movie buff so notorious that Roger Ebert went out of his way to call the man a troll.  White would probably tell you it’s racism, which would be pretty ironic because the Cliff Notes edition of his movie reviews reads like a hate crime.

So I don’t know where this distortion of trolling began, but I’m fucking tired of it.  Yeah, the “known troll” wrote an article bitching about trolling.  Or am I trolling you?

Just troll the comment thread.

Heavy Rain
Playstation 3
Developed: Quantic Dream
Published: Sony Computer Entertainment
Released: February 23, 2010

This review contains mild spoilers.

There is a reason I don’t go to the movies anymore: The average weekly fare is pathetic.  It’s so pathetic that when Heavy Rain sold itself as a mature game for mature audiences, I should have seen this coming.

Yeah, Heavy Rain is a solid video game.  But as murder-mystery entertainment?  A game looking to lift a medium beyond second-rate storytelling?  Get the car ready, because you can drive it through Heavy Rain’s plotholes.

On paper, everything seems ordinary.  Your path to the Origami Killer leads through four playable characters.  With the exception of Madison Paige assuming the adventure game’s penchant for quality female leads, it’s standard fare.  Main protagonist Ethan Mars dabbles with an unlikable psychosis.  The F.B.I’s Norman Jayden is the counter-play to the most incompetent police department in video game history.

Interaction with the environment is controlled with a combination of R2 and the left thumbstick (to walk), allowing you to manipulate the environment with the right thumbstick.  It’s best compared to Grand Theft Auto IV, where it’s impossible to center Niko Bellic where you’d like to, and it’s a total hassle when the game begins testing how quickly you can escape from a mess.  Fortunately, in a game that makes liberal use of the SixAxis controls, command input is flawless.  And when the late-game arrives, you’ll need it.  Shit matters and there’s enough tension to sell it.  It’s a throwback to eight-bit single-player progression, where one mistake is enough to seal the books on the fate of your six-to-eight-hour playthrough (or at least force you to boot a backup save).

[Something about pressing X to not die and stuff.]

So what the hell went wrong?  Amongst middling voice acting and a script that doesn’t try to be flashy, producer and writer David Cage fucked it up.  No sugarcoating this.  The storytelling is bad enough that two weeks after the game’s release, Jim Sterling declared that Heavy Rain “lowered the bar for game narrative“, a plot twist “pulled from the bowels of M. Night Shyamalan’s most convoluted nightmares. ”

And when the game’s events unfold, a trained eye will see it.  Police helicopter pins you to a rooftop?  Enjoy your getaway in a stolen taxi.  You know, something the helicopter could easily follow.  Referred to the other half of a creepy-but-benign get-together as “Doctor Death”?  It’s safe to assume the alternate story branch was less comfortable.  Even after a fight sequence where I received the contents of an aquarium for my troubles, the bodyguard standing outside the room wouldn’t bother to ask why I was drenched.

When Leisure Suit Larry underwent gaming’s first beta test, the program would record any command it couldn’t parse, granting the devs a form of peer review.  Heavy Rain almost never sees eye-to-eye with you.  The number of items and actions you’re capable of investigating are dreadfully shallow, turning a chance for introspection into “You’re only making me do this to make the game longer!” territory.  So despite a dynamic story tree and a multitude of endings, the game still finds plenty of room to feel on-rails.  Compare it with BioWare’s role-playing games, which offer staggering amounts of dialogue in the name of character and story development.

Heavy Rain is plagued by the same core issue as the last decade of Japanese Role-Playing Games: If you can’t sell people on gameplay, your story better get its shit together.  And as-is, she commits all the same sins as her Hollywood counterparts.  If your rebuttal is “It’s a video game, stop thinking about it too much!”, you’ve found the problem.  Heavy Rain was hailed as a mature title for a mature audience.  And in a gaming climate with no respect for the legendary adventure games of the 1990s, a climate with a burgeoning “Games are art!” movement, reviewers and fans were practically compelled to laud this Western take on Japan’s “interactive novel”.

So we got a murder thriller that’s a better video game than a murder thriller.  And it’s being lauded as a murder thriller.  Unless a follow-up can remove all doubt in the shoddy storytelling, I really hope Heavy Rain doesn’t don a different guise and strike again.

** out of *****

(Last Starcraft II update for a while.  Honest!)

Remember “LAN Latency”?  The ICCUP and Garena bad boy that exposed Battle.net’s inner workings?  That in order to ease concerns about Battle.net 2.0, I touted the awesomeness of “what’s coming”?  Yeah, scratch that.  As of now, Starcraft II has no “LAN Latency”.

(Credit to Gibybo for the data.)

Didn’t care much for LAN Latency in Blizzard’s previous titles.  Every hit point countered in Warcraft III, but delay usually didn’t lead to a unit’s spectacular death.  Starcraft DUI pathing and position-oriented micro didn’t make it a necessity, either.  But Starcraft II is fast.  And contrary to popular belief, there is a breaking point in the battle of speed versus skill.

Starcraft righted most of Warcraft II’s crippled online experience.  So when 1999’s Warcraft II: Battle.net edition offered a game speed of “Fastest”, veterans stuck with Faster.  Long-time player Axlotl surmised the issue:

If you were to ask, [this] would be the biggest reason to why even faster players do not like the top speed. You cannot pull your peons off of the gold mine. Now, I know you’re all thinking that I’m wrong, but I don’t mean it like that. If someone attacks your wallin suddently…say with 7 grunts. If you do not have any peons on wood, you are going to die. You can get peons off of the gold mine, but it’s very difficult. If the game is set on high or extra high latency, or someone is lagging up the game, you are a dead man. Even if you have some choppers, you are going to have to use those to repair, and will soon have over 5000 gold banked, with no wood.

In Starcraft, Vultures and Firebats were capable of massive damage.  But their effectiveness lost out as they took severe penalties (75% damage reduction against “large” units) in the late-game.  On the inverse, Starcraft II grants bonus damage.  So while health counts remain similar, an Immortal three-hits a Siege Tank and doesn’t have to stumble like a drunken sailor to do it.

That’s why we’re desperate for an upgrade over 2002’s Warcraft III.  Blizzard better hope “teh evil pirate serverz” don’t beat them to it.

I’d love to get off Starcraft’s ass for a day, but the World Cyber Games kinda disowned her.

Official Games ｜WCG 2010

PC

* Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne (Blizzard, RTS)
* Counter-Strike (Valve, FPS)
* TrackMania Nations Forever (Ubisoft, Racing)
* Carom 3D (NeoAct, Sports)

Xbox 360

* Guitar Hero 5 (Activision, Music)
* Tekken 6 (Namco Bandai Games, Fighting)
* Forza Motorsport 3 (Microsoft Game Studios, Racing)

WCG 2010 Promotional Game Title:

PC

* Lost Saga (IO Entertainment, Action)

One of two possible scenarios, maybe a combination:

- Screamed it for years: Warcraft III is international and Starcraft is not.  When I call it the “Korean Gaming Machine”, I don’t kid. South Korean dominance of Starcraft is best compared to American dominance of basketball leading into the early nineties.  And where the World Cyber games hosts the most important Warcraft III tournament of the year, the biggest intrigue on the Starcraft side was seeing how the Korean representatives would tank games in order to sweep the medal round.

- Starcraft II is also absent.  The powers that be could be waiting to see if the sequel is competition-ready.  Of course, Blizzard could also have thrown money at the Games to keep KeSPA’s meal ticket off the most visible gaming tournament in the Western Hemisphere.  Would that surprise anyone?  The tournament is paid and bought by Samsung.  Have you looked at their lineup?  Carom3D is a billards game that makes two straight hours of Pac-Man look like Daigo’s parry fetish.  The tournament also touts “Why is this here?” titles as “Promotional Games”.  Also known as “Samsung wants you to buy their crap.”

Either way, this is far from the end of this battle.

Credit goes to Starshaped for the link.

Despite warnings to Blizzard employees such an act would be punishable by death (or a Bobby Kotick conference call), I got access to the Starcraft II beta.  And since I was “hired” to address the game’s issues, allow me to continue my burial of New Super Battle.net Steam.  I’ve already explained that the matchmaking system needs to prove me wrong before I embrace it.  Time to focus on chat.

In the quest to protect children from the pedophiles and liberals that inhabit the internet, Blizzard gridlocked their communication system.  It’s pretty clear why: World of Warcraft is a pay-to-play MMO and the audience expects pay-to-play support, a game where you can report people for swearing.  Thus, this audience expects Blizzard to deal with Starcraft’s most dangerous criminals.  And rather than slash budget to enforce conduct on a free-to-play online service, they’ll just make it impossible to get your opinion around.

Why can’t I chat with all the people I don’t want to!?

The problem?  Blizzard’s official, possibly-stretching-the-truth story is that Starcraft II was beta-ready last year; an extra year to push the “Battle.net 2.0 is so awesome you wouldn’t want to pirate it!” spiel.  And you’ve reinvented the way chat does business.  Good luck selling this to long-time Battle.net users, the demographic most likely to jailbreak the game.

The two-name system is the culprit, which I thought was there to prevent name-squatting.  You select a visible first name a private last name, which players will have to know in order to add you to their friends list.  Hated friend codes for the Wii?  Here’s an upgrade: You can select the one you want!  You now have a system where you can’t see the full name of the dude who beat your brains out (sans the awkward process of adding them to your friends list), and a nightmare for competitive gaming where replays only identify players by their first name.  (Yeah IdrA, that wasn’t you.  We believe you.)  All of which makes no sense, since players can be identified through league rankings anyway.

And open chat channels?  Confirmed absent, presumably because they’re a conduit for spam and butthurt.  Yes, invite-only clan channels will be there later.  The problem is that as Starcraft and Warcraft III matured, open clan channels became the open chat channels, the GGLs and X17s became the get-togethers.  And Arranged Team and Custom Game invites fed off those channels.  All far less awkward than a feigned “What’s up?  Wanna 2s?” directed towards a random member of your league.

Not that any of this will matter to cross-ocean buddies if region-locking remains.  Currently a “feature” in World of Warcraft, there’s no word on whether Americans can stomp Europeans or Koreans if they want.  Think there’s no reason for concern?  Blizzard was pretty mum on LAN as well, and we saw how that turned out.

If it means disabling a safety net in the options menu, I’m fine with compromise.  But omitting these features to protect your consumer base isn’t going to solve software piracy.  Someone will find a way to implement them, even if it means doing it without your support.

This is going to be a legendary game.  I’d just like to be able to tell everyone that.  Through Battle.net 2.0.

Why do I love history?  People change.  Human nature does not.

Activision was founded in 1979 when Atari programmers split from Atari, a company whose then-monopoly on Atari 2600 development was used to marginalize employees and promote the brand.  In 2002, twenty-two employees broke from 2015 Inc. (rumored the end-result of disagreements with publisher Electronic Arts) to form Infinity Ward.  Five years later, now-mega-corporate publisher Activision rejected Harmonix’s request to follow Guitar Hero with a band-oriented rhythm game. It culminated in a takeover that placed development under Neversoft.  And under Activision’s orders, the company behind the sequel-scarred Tony Hawk series proceeded to saturate and destroy the rhythm game market.

And after the public receives two contractually-obligated map packs for Modern Warfare 2, you can lay the roses on Infinity Ward’s relationship with Activision.  Kaputt.  Done.

We may not have all the information behind the tense situation between Activision and Infinity Ward, but we do have a conclusion: Activision has announced that the series will now be in the hands of Sledgehammer Games, a studio founded last year by veterans from Electronic Arts. Specifically, Sledgehammer is the brainchild of Glen A. Schofield and Michael Condrey, the head honchos on Dead Space.

It’s as fascinating as it is surreal: A developer founded by those who severed ties with Electronic Arts’ corporate culture has been detached from their child by a corporate culture founded by people attempting to escape a corporate culture.

This course of clusterfucks is currently sketchy, featuring the understatement of the year in “creative differences“, a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that’s probably foreshadowing a trip to Lawsuitville, and a physical response typically reserved for coming down on enemies of the state.  What we do know is that Call of Duty now falls on Treyarch and newly-founded Sledgehammer games, the latter slated to go action-adventure on the franchise in 2011 (presumably to fill Modern Warfare 3’s void).

In November, I said IWNet could be a turning point in game development history, a step in consolidating control over the product.  That assumed Infinity Ward’s talents would be leveraged against consumers looking to fight the power.  After Modern Warfare 2’s release, I stated Activision was prime to burn, a company totally behest to billion-dollar name power.  And even that assumed Infinity Ward would continue as the class of American game development, a company talented enough to stave off outside influence.

Almost fittingly, Activision-Blizzard released their annual fiscal report yesterday.  Three games accounted for sixty-eight percent of their 2009 revenues: The now-irrelevant Guitar Hero, the World of Warcraft whose user base has peaked, and the Call of Duty now separated from the developer responsible for the success.

So now, there’s only question left to ask: Does Blizzard have an opt-out on the ticking time bomb they’ve partnered with?  Bobby Kotick and Activision officially fail to recognize how video games work.  Guitar Hero III was the best selling game in the series because Neversoft was living on the moxy of Harmonix’s accomplishments.  Medal of Honor: Frontline blew up the sales charts because 2015 Inc. convinced people Medal of Honor was worth their time.  Chinese workshops molding established franchises do not win championships.  Talented development teams do.

UPDATE: As rumored, it’s about unpaid royalties.  Infinity Ward’s looking for their cash and the rights to the Modern Warfare property.  In other words, Kobe Bryant just got cut from the Lakers and is now dedicating the rest of his career to making sure that Los Angeles doesn’t win another title on his watch.

Blizzard Entertainment has an unusual issue: They are scared of their own success.

In 2002, the company crafted the most important netplay upgrade since Battle.net itself, a Warcraft III matchmaking system hailed for consistency and legitimacy.   It’s been downhill in the eight years since.  Today, Starcraft II is now in beta testing.  And so far, the only nice thing to say about this matchmaking system is that I can play Starcraft II with it.

Blizzard doesn’t get it.  Matchmaking isn’t about getting your cat into games against players of equal skill.  It’s about consumer confidence.  No one cares whether the Warcraft III matchmaking system works.  Nobody thinks it does.  And if people don’t believe in Starcraft II’s smorgasbord of algorithms and placement, they won’t convert their time and effort into shaping an accurate leaderboard.

The Reign of Chaos approach worked because its transparent methodology was easy to explain: Start at level one.  Play anyone within six levels of you.  Five wins against equal competition earned you a level.  And if you win fifty percent of your games, the system will nudge you towards level ten.  Simple enough to make win-loss records mean something, simple enough to let players create personal goals.

Yup.  Casual players complained about that system.  A system similar to the one now used by TetrisFriends, a stronghold for casual gaming.  So Blizzard pressed the reset button.  In 2004, the new Warcraft III matchmaking system was built on Expected Ladder Level, where the game would guess your eventual level.  The formula for ELL was never disclosed, so nobody knew the game-to-game reward for beating other players.  What players did know is that one Azeroth player (Jubae) cracked the top five with a near-below-.500 record, that players were tanking games to launch ladder rampages, and top players couldn’t find games at all.  So rather than take the time to play the as-many-as-300 games required to reveal their actual ladder level, people quit.  Lots of them.

We now have Starcraft II.  It combines a modified Elo system with a league format.  Weaker players pad out Novice, Copper, and Silver Leagues, while better players hog Gold, Platinum, and (supposedly-invite only) Pro Leagues.

The first problem? Players in each league don’t directly compete against each other.  It’s a pseudo-league that’s just a simple size.  Instead of explaining you’re in the 97th percentile of all players in one gametype, you’ll be ranked third in a one-hundred-man league.

The bigger problem?  Let me put it this way: Know how people claim a good college basketball team would beat a bad NBA team? Rating in each level of play are independent of the other leagues.  As of this writing, the top-ranked North American player is Canadian Warcraft III semi-pro KiWiKaKi, who holds a rating close to 1900.  Meanwhile, Oakhill of the Battle.net forums (thanks to placement that was no fault of his own) has dominated his Bronze League to a 2100 rating  Great! I totally look forward to Copper League players telling me to get on their level.

Solve for x.

If you are going to create a matchmaking system that doesn’t disclose its methodology, it needs to be effective out of the box.  Even X-Box Live’s Trueskill (link credit to Veryrandom), the work of calculus hell, matches you on a fifty-level ranking system that appears to work consistently.  And right now, I’m looking at a Starcraft II ladder where nobody can explain how record correlates to rating, a team ladder where the best players can’t advance the rankings because they’re “heavily favored” to win.  You know, the same things that happened to Warcraft III.

So yeah.  Blizzard originally trashed their best ladder system to create fair matchups for weaker players.  They’re now tweaking it to give casuals false satisfaction.

What’s that saying about fixing things that aren’t broken?

I’m only following Battlefield: Bad Company 2 because of the “Fuck Activision” subplot, where a shining knight is off to slay Kotick the Dragon.  I have a problem with this perception.

Ars Technica recently sat down with Anders Gyllenberg, the producer of Bad Company 2 for the personal computer.  He explained the netplay model behind their Call of Duty-killer:

The server issue is key here, as Modern Warfare 2’s closed match-making system rubbed many PC gamers the wrong way. Gyllenberg laid out the details. “All servers are dedicated, hosted by some of our partners. If you have a clan or if you are a bunch of friends who want a safe haven where you can meet up, our server partners offer the possibility of controlling your own server,” he told Ars. “Reserved slots is one of the features. As an admin you will also have the option of enabling several features such as friendly fire ratio, Minimap on/off, 3D spotting on/off, etc. You can also password-protect your server if you want to do some serious practice prior to an important game.” Almost all the options you have after renting a server will allow it to continue to be a ranked server, but password-protected servers will be unranked to cut down on cheating and padding stats.

So please, allow me to get this straight: Infinity Ward usurped the consumer’s control of online play in the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, the console-oriented approach to a series that has been annualized by Activision.  To retaliate, PC shooter fans are going to purchase Bad Company 2.  It is the sequel to a console-exclusive shooter.  It is the eighth core game in the eight-year history of the Battlefield series.  And most importantly, you must rent servers directly through the developer and their “partners”.

And people think I’m insane.