This is a non-MMO post, so forgive me, but I have to vent.

I am incredibly tired of the way this country, our US-of-A, is run. Who the hell decided corporate America was anything other than an abomination, eh? I know that offends a lot of you but hear me out. I worked for Washington Mutual for three years, up until 2009 when our “We Ensure Slaves” progenitors bought us out. That’s Chase Bank Incorporated, by the way, the same company who has been repeatedly nailed for foreclosing on the homes of active duty veterans. Literally, one time wasn’t enough. Not to mention credit card exploitation. Don’t misunderstand, Washington Mutual was pretty terrible in its own way, dutifully ripping off its loyal customers with unethical posting practices — what, you mean deliberately posting charges in an order which maximizes $30 overdraft fees is bad, despite the actual order in which items were purchased? — and purposeless services charges which offer and require no actual service for $20+ a month. (Really, we did nothing on those accounts. Nothing. If you’re paying them, stop. It’s a fool’s errand.)

I am tired of working for Board of Directors, CEOs, project managers, and site overseers whose only job is to ask other people if they’ve done their job. This gets us nowhere. You know who makes America? Me and you. The people on the ground floor doing the work that makes these people their incredibly large paychecks. Our swear gets their mansions and our undersized houses. Hell, most of them don’t even answer their own email.

Let me give you an example. In the last three months of Washington Mutual’s life, over 5,000 people were laid off. Stock prices dropped immensely – two years made for an 85% drop in stock, from $45 to $3 per share. Our CEO earned a final quarter bonus of $15 million dollars. For three months. You and I lost our jobs. Kerry Killinger destroyed an American institution. He got millions upon millions while we got a spot in the unemployment line. Trickle down economics is working well, am I right?

Who are Boards? Faceless entities that give two shits about the people who are their company – because make no mistake, if you have ever talked to a customer, you mean more than any tight-wad suit ever did. They just earn off of our sweat. You get the anger and, on occasion, their kudos. It’s nice when it happens, really nice; makes you feel good as a person. Still, there is no millions to back up that satisfaction and probably not even a solid hundred. Maybe it’s because they had a family member in the business. Maybe they just worked their ass off. Both are possible. It doesn’t change the fact that it takes a heartless bastard to cast a blind eye to the people who make them their fortune and then fire huge swatches of them to match the bottom line. It’s self-serving. It’s un-Christian. And it’s damnably unkind despite the necessities of business. Moreover, it goes against the American spirit of Rising Up and Doing Well. That died with Nixon.

And on that token, let me give credence where credence is due. People need to be fired sometimes. I’m not some bleeding heart. In any industry, hard decisions need to be made and people will be hurt regardless. My issue is in pay differential. My issue is in social class differential. It is in the assholes collecting massive bonuses while simultaneously firing the people who made those bonuses possible. It is in the poor, the needy, and the weatherworn. It’s in the people that represent the companies who most of us probably have come to hate. Why? Because despite healthcare, despite the regularity of a paycheck, despite somewhere to go during the day – all great and admirable attributes we should all aspire to – that we’ve let our nation reward those who work the least.

Your damn board, your CEO, your store manager and power-hungry CSM, they all mean nothing. You know what pisses me off most? The deluded store manager who laces his emails with exclamation points hoping some douchebag manager sees it in hopes to get ahead. Make no mistake, a two year degree gives no asshole a right to talk down to you. And no, that’s not my case, but it is that of a friend — a well educated and highly experienced friend who has spent years upon years doing highly technical work for the Air Force. Work in corporate America a while and you’ll see. It’s not about how you can manage, it’s about how hard you can crack a whip. Why? Because we’re expendable, you and I. Forgive me for this, because I’m a Christian man, but it’s simply because they don’t give a fuck about us. We’re a means to an end. We on the ground floor and the managers in the store we work in. Except our managers have been fed a temptation of hope.

Forget your impoverished working-man and you doom yourself to Rome and the rest of our world’s fallen nations. Make no mistake: America, Europe, and all the world are one big Justice Scale. Let it lean too far in one direction and everything we work for gets pissed away in one great lean.

There is no hope to be found in this post, despite how much I hope their were. The only thing I offer is awareness. Don’t buy in to the utter bullshit that they can be you. Maybe in another life. And maybe you can build that. I hope you can. For most of us, our lives levy on the whim of people we’ll never meet and to whom are families are dots on a bottom line. Is that who you want to support? If you ask who else, I have no answer. Our nation is well and truly down the rabbit hole and we have no recourse. Occupy all you like but it would have best happened 100 years past. Today, all I can say is scrape with all your will. I wish you the best.

Not that this, or anything we might say, makes a differences. We’re not CEOs after all.

An interesting thought entered my head this morning as I bought a month’s subscription to World of Warcraft. Has it taken WoW’s decline to finally get them focus on the  virtual world again? I mean, beyond the set-piece stuff we need to quest. WoW has done a lot for the industry, but one of the things it has undone is the pursuit of a true virtual world. Who would have that that something as innocuous as quests would dismantle what was the foundation of our outlook.

Yet, now that WoW has seen a consistent decline in subscribers, we see a marketing shift away from endgame. While yes, they have acknowledged how important raiders are and plan to accommodate them in large fashion, their marketing has followed a much more casual air, highlighting Pokemon battles and pandas.

Pandas which while might seem ridiculous, strike me like a breath of relief. For years, we’ve seen Blizzard present “big bad” after “big bad” with a seriousness that is both too much and not enough over what the adul-cartoon art style leads you expect. After all, it has gracefully stolen the middle ground between playfully safe and cartoonishly serious. They have repeatedly denied that Pandarians would ever be part of the game yet here we are with an entire expansion devoted to them.

Maybe they were talking to a different audience. Those old schoolers (5 years or so at this point, right?) have had it reinforced again and again that WoW is just a FOTM – a noteworthy point in an evolving personal history. Absolutely, that’s not how they think of it in private, but culturally, that’s the reason we’re seeing the changes of the 2011-2012 MMO. WoW, as it happens, is just a great tracking point. Look to Blizzard’s added feature list and then to the MMOs recently released, and you’ll get a pretty good picture of MMO history.

Those 5-plusers want the competitive seriousness of the endgame in the same way the most vocal Ultima players wanted open-world PvP and scripted everything. Three generations in so few years: First: EQ/Ultima/DAoC +; Second: WoW/EQ2/LotRO Pre-F2P; Third: Allods/RIFT/Aion/SWTOR.  (There are way more games but we both know that, so let’s move on, shall we?) Gen3 is the Facebook generation, the Farmville daily, and only caught on to WoW after the vets got done arguing about who should be able to enter a raid instance and became a memory of yesterday’s blogs.

Those vets don’t play WoW anymore, not in the same number. I’d say they’re probably off in RIFT or SWTOR and probably both eagerly awaiting GW2. Good for them.

My point?

Maybe now that the subscriptions are leveling out the developers are more free to build up parts of the game their corporate backers considered second-rate. What does a world matter when it’s all about retention? (A cash register rings in the background). Is it at all possible that Blizzard’s dev team really did give a shit about virtual worlds and all those other fundamentals they destroyed?

Or is pokemon and personal farms a sub-grab, noteably the first outside the MMO genre?

I know what most of you are thinking, that SWTOR isn’t a single-player game, but hear me out. SWTOR does have a single-player component that you’ll spend hundreds of hours in. And during that time, you’ll find players rarely talk to one another. A world where those same players would rather kill steal and be generally obnoxious than to group up for the benefit of all. And when you’re done, you rush back to the quest giver only to find, disappointingly, this was just another “throwaway” story.  You know, though, deep inside that there are some really great stories just waiting to be found, so you keep on, and on, and on.

This might be why EA stock just dropped and and analysts rethinking their “churn assumptions.”

I see things a little differently than dedicated MMO-exclusive players in that my work requires me to play many non-MMO games over the year. So when I approach TOR, it’s with a particular eye to what Bioware is doing in terms of unifying their console and MMO experiences; what lessons have they learned, and finally in the online space, what is it they’re really trying to do with it. Comparisons to the Mass Effect series are inevitable, and with even the lowest level quests being fully voiced, I find it very hard not to feel like questing is that unifying attempt to bring the non-MMO player into the fold. Here, it says, you know this from our console titles… step in a little deeper.

And that’s really the part where it falls flat and why I think resub-rates rumoring low is probably pretty accurate. As all of these single player gamer’s sign up and take on the world without ever once grouping, they start to realize that damn, this is a really long game. At about 60 hours, it’s become, damn, I’m just skipping this other crap and listening to my class story. Fast forward to 100 hours and, damn… why am I even doing this anymore? I’m not even level 40… and this story is so SLOW.  The experience of playing through those hours varies from class to class, as does the scenery, but the repetitive nature of the side quests is static.  Compared to the $60, much more exciting console game, and the many hundreds of hours awaiting the final assent to 50, my only surprise is that players are closing the door quietly as they leave.

In the world of console games, forty hours is a harrowing experience; sixty is epic. TOR tries to offer you the same thing but asks for hundreds and hundreds of hours beyond that. It’s a recipe for burn out.

That said, TOR provides LOTS of grouping opportunities. Every planet has a handful of heroic instances for the leveler and there are dungeons (flashpoints) throughout. Great PvP, too, now that the bracket has gone in. So lots of opportunities to break from the monotony of quest grinding.

If TOR was released as a single player game, it would have gone down as one of the most long-winded and drear-failures in Bioware’s history. But it didn’t, so what does Bioware have to do to remind its players that it’s an MMO they’re playing in. From my seat, I offer a global LFG channel.  An easier way to jump in and out of other people’s groups. An easier and cheaper way to fast travel back to headquarters.

So this is my advice to help you prevent burnout: Step out of your comfort-zone and  invite people to groups yourself. Get in there and experience the group content. It will remind you that this is an MMO and that people who call the game an sRPG have only been telling half the story.

Class quests aside, I still haven’t decided if sRPG is made better or worse by how bad (read: pointless) it all seems.