I'm not entirely sure if this should carry a [NVGR] tag, not being strictly game related, but it's about things which are about games. That's close, isn't it? Only two degrees of separation, and that's thrice as close as Kevin Bacon. I may omit the names, I may not. I haven't decided on that three sentences in, but I can tell you this much: I won't be sending traffic their way with a link after the treatment I was given.

It started innocently enough with a message over the PSN. I know someone on their staff and that was the method they had to contact me. I won't say it's professional, but it's functional and this ain't that highfalutin germes gerbalisms or anything. It's just a blog. Sometime over the course of playing games with this person, I've mentioned my profession and they would like me to ply my trade gratis. While I'm not falling all over myself to give up my free time, I know that contributing to what I would consider an actual website rather than a business' half-forgotten advertising screw-up would be good for my portfolio, so I say I'm interested in hearing more about it but can't commit until I know how much they're looking for. I have a job, I like to game and cook, and I might be an insomniac but I at least like to try to get a few hours of sleep in a night. I think, most of all, I just don't like making commitments I can't keep. Unfortunately, this is where everything starts to go wrong.



They want something "firm". What the hell is "firm" beyond "tell me what you want done and I'll tell you if I can do it or not"? I can't tell you how many times I asked what work there was to do, I wasn't counting, but the back and forth went on long enough for my voice to start getting rough on one occasion. Is there some part of repeatedly requesting a list of things that need doing that doesn't indicate I want to do them? Oh, and remember this, because it comes up again later. Eventually, I need to stop pulling my punches on this one, so I just go ahead with the gist of things:






I decided that I wouldn't include "So stop wasting my time and tell me what you want so I can get to work." The first step is planning, after all. I could have at least been brainstorming while they made up their minds. Hell, I can already post here on the dtoid cblogs and I barely do that outside of the Friday Night Fights posts because I either don't have something worth writing about or leave it rotting in Google Docs until I don't care. Oddly enough, that part of the email goes over just fine and another part is interpreted as sounding more upset than it was intended. I'm aware I can be blunt, but I don't like to mince words. Writing professional-sounding, businesslike emails for work is one of the hardest things for me because I always feel I'm hiding the actual message. This isn't an issue here because this is me doing them a favor and not me at work, and everything is talked out in the end with no bruised feelings. A nebulous intent of setting up a Skype meeting was stated and that was it.

Then the website is snatched away from them. While I am privy to some details on that, they aren't relevant here. What happened was the people I was interested in working with had to get a new site, and so they did. Also to note, is that no one bothered to tell me this had happened until weeks had passed and I asked out of curiosity.

A new website was created and I was asked if I was still interested. As I happen to love programming (nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd!), I told them I was and another meeting was set. The time for this meeting comes and goes and their Skype contact stays offline. That night, prior to the meeting I added them and sent an email to the address I was given to confirm that it was me attempting to add them, just to cover the bases. In the end, this would turn out looking like an issue with the piece of shit that is Skype, which would have been an excellent answer to the question I would ask in the future.

Nearly a month passes. No follow-ups, no emails, no PSN or Skype messages are sent to me. Sometime in there I check the "Team" page of the website they're on and the person I had been in contact with isn't there any more, which turns out to be in error. My thought is that since they have nothing to offer me other than entertainment unless their website becomes the next Destructoid or Joystiq, they would be interested in contacting me about the free programming I was going to do. Turns out I was wrong about that. Last night, I finally sent a message to ask about the apparently nonexistent meeting. Then things got really hairy.

Them:
"Wendesday at 9... Just be on Skype so we can all discuss."

Well, that doesn't really answer the question about the meeting, and I asked specifically about it, so I respond.

Me:
"So what was up with the meeting that fell through before?"

Them:
"It's probably going to have to wait once again... right now we still need to acquire a business license and a new web host."



Once again, my question is brushed off. All I'm really looking for is what happened with that meeting, but after a month without contact and the above, I finally don't care. I just bought Skyrim. I'm not going to have trouble filling up that off-hours web development time.

Me:
"I'm out. I don't like getting jerked around and still don't know why I was blown off for the last meeting, even after asking directly a couple of times."

Them:
"This will be the last time I discuss this business with you. To be honest I'm not really surprised by your reaction. I understand where you're coming from, fully. However, I don't think you get where I or anyone else stands. We needed something firm, and last time I checked we did schedule a meeting over Skype, we had the meeting, but you weren't online, so we just went on without you. You don't understand how accommodating we've tried to be with our offer. We needed you to give us something back."

"Think of it this way: I offer you a job, knowing how many extra things you have going on, you accept the job under the agreement that you don't have much time, but even before you get work you don't show interest. You asked me twice about the meeting that was weeks ago, but only since yesterday. Does that prove your interest level? You have to put something in to get something back. Lastly, I've told you dozens of times that this will take time, Also, telling you to meet us on Skype once and cancelling is hardly "jerking you around." This won't get in the way of my personal ties with you, but I think that's the end of our business together."

It's like he wants to sound professional without acting it. I have to put something in? You mean like the free web development and site content you were set to get?! They've been accommodating? Their offer? I was offered nothing and they really have no choice but to accommodate because, lookie here, I already have a blog with no responsibilities which I control. They can't really beat that. They didn't even have the courtesy to follow up their meeting with an email and there was no contact for a month! What the would have been the problem with saying that the meeting went on without me the first time I asked? Moreover, they cancelled? Now it's just getting confusing because I thought it went on without me. It takes a couple more messages to finally get the response I was looking for, though it's only incidental and doesn't really explain things.

Them:
"I'm not sure how specific I needed to be about the work I asked you to do. And who did you email? You're one of my contacts and I have 2 messages from you, one pertaining to your Skype name and the other is an image. That's it... <- there's your reason, by the way."

So, because they have my Skype ID and email address, they were unable to contact me the night of the meeting? That makes so much sense. They also implied I was lying to them! On top of all that, in response to my asking if anything I said was in doubt, I get "let's not talk about lying..." Really?

/RAGEDUMP

I think I won't be doing any work for them. I'm glad I won't be doing any work for them. Even if they manage to come back with an apology for all this, they've burned that bridge. In fact, I doubt I'm going to attempt doing such work for anybody in the future. I'm sure there are some fine gaming blogs out there (we're where, again?), but I have a job already and FNF is chore enough each week. I guess I've sparked it a bit myself with this blog post, but oh no! Will people not come to me expecting me to prostrate myself in gratitude over the chance to work for free? I can see how that will be terrible.

Really. So terrible.

P.S. Dark Brotherhood 4 lyfe.

I've been considering writing a post like this for some time, and here it is. Lets not waste a bunch of time screwing around with a "friendly" intro when I'm going to say how crap a lot of things are.

Content/Sidebar


Why is this not consistent? There is a different amount of right-side padding on the post looking at the same area in the main blog view and an individual post. And here's the kicker: both are bad. The sidebar has too much margin either way, but at least in blog view the padding on the post isn't uneven as well.

Profile Color


This doesn't work at all. You can set it, and the value saves and is reloaded when viewing the profile page again, but changing it does nothing. It seems like this one died after reverting from the beta site, which doesn't make much sense. It's like it was rolled back, and then back some more, taking away not just the added functions of beta.destructoid, but some that were on regular old dtoid as well.

Broken Links


I don't think this tab has ever worked. It just goes to the "Gadzooks!" page because it's missing the "elephant" directory in the path. I know there was some other link or form submission that had similar results, but this isn't a hard fix. That it's sat broken for months is kind of ridiculous. I think there are one or two more things that are mispointed as well, but I haven't been able to find them again.

Toidlets


Toidlets are 2 things: Broken and worthless. The groups of the old beta.destructoid.com site had much more functionality and didn't require the one person that made the group to manage all the members. If I recall, it even said who owned it. When that was scrapped and toidlets were created, Red Veron created the PS3 FNF toidlet and I didn't track that down and get added for a couple weeks.

In the end, that didn't matter anyway, because the list doesn't appear to be displayed in any particular order. I guess that's fine for just a collection, but it's junk for anything else because it means that finding a specific post means scrolling past them one by one until you find it. Doubly worthless for FNF, which a chronological sort would be much more useful. I'm tagging them as PS3 FNF mostly as a formality at this point.

Neglect


The cblogs are generally like this. It seems like a few changes have been made and no one ever followed up on them. This should take a single viewing of any CBlog page to show that it isn't coded correctly. I get the impression that the attention was focused on the front page and no one even looked at the cblogs after modifying this.

BBCode
Why does all (or at least most) of this not work in the cblogs? With this, the only thing stopping the forums from being better blogging tools than the actual blogs is the lack of a fixed width.

Youtube
This was removed a couple months ago now, I think. The rumor I heard was that "there is something better coming". Well that's slick, Destructoid. But why did you take away our ability to add youtube videos before that better thing was available? It doesn't make sense to me because if you just left it as is (or was), it would have been less work. Someone had to go in and modify things to remove it.

Beta.Destructoid
The beta.destructoid site, also known as "newtoid" was just a better site in general. I didn't like that the entirity of the forums were removed, but having forum and blog logins crossover was good, and as a whole the layout was better. It had great functionality with groups and was the first facelift the Cblogs got in years.

It also had a WYSIWYG editor for the cblogs (CKEditor, I believe) and a multi-image uploader. Honestly, it was buggy for a while, but it seemed like it got taken down just as it was running smoothly. Things were fixed and then it was gone. We were told it would be coming back sometime in the future when the kinks were iron out, but we seem to have some gradients and rounded corners crap instead.

Seriously, lets take care of repairs before we move on to improvements.

Every now and then, a game comes along with a combination of things I like that usually isn't brought together. In the line of Double Fine games, Brutal Legend was a combination of real-time strategy and hack-and-slash combat. It was actually quite reminiscent of the game Sacrifice. I can't think of something else quite like Trenched, but it has the same style of feature combination. Here's what you get:

Mechs
Do you like building robots? I like building robots. Trenched is about building robots. There are 3 varieties of chassis, each with a couple models and each of those with their own stats and properties. The same can be said for the legs on which you'll be stomping around, giving you stomp, sprint, or deployment options with certain bonuses to each. You can even slap some nifty paint jobs onto the whole thing.



The equipment of weapons on your "mobile trench" is handled without weight restrictions, relying on the number of available weapon slots on a given chassis. Some weapons take more than one, and these are generally more powerful.

All-in-all, the customization gives you plenty of options and creates roles to fill, but doesn't get bogged down with needless technical stuff as some dedicated mech games can. It is even worth coordinating with other players to ensure all the armament bases are covered.



Unlike Armored Core, you won't be boosting around, jumping and flying (or wall-jumping off buildings, if you've seen that sexay new Armored Core V gameplay). You will generally be plodding around in a MechWarrior style that makes your positioning an important part of the gameplay. While feeling restricted arbitrarily in movement is something I would normally dislike, in this case it fits with the gameplay. If you could race around, there would be little point in building turrets.

Tower Defense
To compensate for the somewhat sluggish movement, players can drop turrets onto the battlefield just about anywhere. These come in three varieties: light, support, and heavy. Light are guns in the standard style, such as machine guns and anti-air flak; support emplacements don't damage enemies but can slow their movements, collect currency automatically, or heal friendly players.



The gameplay itself is built on the tower defense model. Increasingly difficult waves of enemies appear and move to attack a central structure players are tasked with defending. There is a decent variety to the enemies and paying attention to the pre-mission warnings ultimately proves to be quite important.

Loot
One of the things I enjoy the most in games is a feeling of progression. I like getting new stuff, and one of the things that creates that feeling is loot. Loot from bosses, loot from rankings, loot from random enemies. You'll almost always get something worth upgrading to. It's a little bundle of joy that you race to collect.



The new equipment comes in quickly enough and with enough variety that you'll almost always have something new to try or waiting for you, free of charge, maybe after a level increase or two. There's not as much as in dedicated games like Diablo 2, and it isn't randomly generated, but until you've got six of everything you'll probably always be pumped to see a shimmering loot box pop out of something.

Co-op
Competitive multiplayer is great and all, but I almost always have more fun playing cooperatively with people. Trenched balances its multiplayer in a fairly effective way. There are extra enemies, and everyone splits the income from defeating them. This stops it from being an unbeatable field of turrets and makes working together on equipment more important. It's a quick road to failure if, between four people, you can't handle a certain enemy type like air. There's no way you're going to get a good ranking, and will just be stuck plugging away while they tear down the building you're supposed to protect.



Adding to the cooperative fun, there are also regiment challenges. Everyone you play with gets tied into your personal regiment listing, and so you all work together to unlock parts and customization items for your marine. It's a little extra something that rewards you just for playing with other people.

All these elements blend together quite seamlessly in Trenched with little to no confusion other than some convoluted menu layout. It's the kind of game that's spent weeks making me say "just one more level" hunting for the last bit of equipment or trying to get a good ranking and sucked up hours of my time in the process. Trenched, in the end, obviously isn't more than a $15 downloadable title but I have received well more than my money's worth out of that exchange.

At launch, MAG was a game that, while very enjoyable, needed some updates. You know, just one of those games that could use a tweak here and there. Just over eight months later, I've basically given up on ever seeing those changes. While I suppose that “postmortem” implies the game is dead or finished in some way, and that really isn't the case, I'm at a bit of a loss for a more apt title. The game is still quite alive.

Sigh. Where to start on this? I've been taking potshots at it for a while now, but I never really condensed it into a blog. When MAG dropped I, along with IronPikeman, started the Dtoid SVER clan. It seemed that most people gravitated toward Raven and we switched over to consolidate the more active players. I then played some sixty-three levels on Raven. As a result, I'm convinced Zipper doesn't have a fucking clue how to make video games. Perhaps that's kind of harsh. They can program things that function remarkably well; I have essentially never had any lag in MAG. They simply have no good ideas. I actually kind of hope someone from Zipper reads this and realizes they've convinced someone that was pumped about SOCOM 4 not to ever buy it. Seriously. That shit is going to need to roll on 10s across the board for me to even consider dropping money on it.

MAG is fun, but after numerous updates and even a big 2.0 patch that basically overhauled how the game's skill and equipment systems worked, Zipper has failed to fix even the most minor of problems. Just as an example, on Raven's Domination map, the first default objective is on the other fucking side of the map. This thing has got to be a variable, a scant few lines of code to actually change at worst and a check box on a map editor at best; changing it should take minutes and yet literal months have passed without a fix. I've actually made a diagram:


A: Where you start.
B: Where the default order should be.
C: Where it is.
The dashed line represents one of the few effective paths between points A and C.

Now, looking at this without any experience with the game might not seem terrible, until the size of the map comes into play and the need to navigate past a major enemy inroad and the highly contested anti-air guns. Can this be changed? Yes, your squad leader can change it to whichever objective they like. Unless they get jammed at the start. The only reason I feel such a minor thing is so damning is the ease with which it could be fixed and the obvious, binary nature of its incorrectness. Is it on the right thing or the fucking wrong thing, Zipper?

They've also taken to kowtowing to the players, SVER primarily. Most people are on SVER because SVER has the advantage in basically every respect. The forums were filled with complaints about imbalance, but anytime something was changed, SVER would whine and it would get changed back. I hear they put up a vote about making domination maps faction neutral (simply, you will defend on all of them instead of just your factions) and that was shot down because SVER, having the strongest map and the most players, didn't want to give up their easy wins. I've also heard about people getting banned from the forums for complaining about these things.


Obligatory picture to break up the post!

Take that policy of useless faffing about and impotent administration and apply it to literally every other aspect of the game that needed-slash-needs work. Maps and weapons still need balancing but it won't happen because Zipper will buckle as soon as someone complains. The skill system is still inherently flawed to favor some factions over others but there's no way to fix it without some massive "3.0" patch and I doubt they can handle it. MAG is still that game that launched back in January, but slightly different. The things that needed work still need it. It's still good-but-needs-a-patch. I just don't believe it's going to get that patch anymore. The game is still good, but it's always going to be a little broken—I'm not sure how many times I need to restate this to get the point across effectively, but it always feels like one more is about right. That doesn't prohibit a good time playing with friends, because, ultimately, playing with friends is really the strength of any game. Better the douchebags you know than the douchebags you don't.

Speaking of, MAG bros (and sisses? Broettes? Is 'bro' really a gender qualified term anymore?) I've noticed our teamwork has gone to shit since the faction switch. I'll be going for the frago, which is somewhat irregularly updated only to look down and see the map ringed with sky blue triangles going off in other directions. Maybe you want to whore points with randoms instead? Last night, I had better teamwork with a blue dot I could only sort of talk to with prox-chat than I have with any of you since the switch. As squad leaders, you've been changing fragos to get yourself extra repair points. If I wanted to play with disorganized randoms, I wouldn't wait to spend double-XP happy hour with you guys.

UPDATE:
You know what? Here's my final thoughts on the topic of MAG.