Sector Yawn

This morning I woke up with the expectation that we'd have a SB to hit, as has been the case every Sunday afternoon EST for quite awhile now. When I realized that the SB didn't even turn imminent and that, moreover, an IB looked closer to happening on Bespin, I had to stop and scratch my head. I also realized that I'd structured my life around SBs for an entire year. Every Sunday, like clockwork. I literally counted on it.

That's not to say that SBs consumed my life or anything else as dramatic. On Sundays, I do fairly obvious and, dare I suggest it, normative things. Make eggs. Take a shower. Do dishes. Go grocery shopping. And so on. Usually, I'll spend several hours during the day earning BPs with crew runs. Do a load of laundry, bank more BPs. Clean up the bathroom, bank more BPs. By the time I sit down to play, I'll easily have 250 BPs banked. After realizing that there wasn't a SB imminent today, I made a conscious effort to shrug off my disorientation by making a cup of coffee and writing. At least writing makes sense. 

In a KoB blog post, "Anoat IB Update 4," I noted that Kabam Support outlined how SBs and IBs fundamentally work. That is, the notorious Game Team determines the "rate and schedule" of these MMO battles. Ironically, as I write this someone in GC just said there weren't enough players active to trip the SB and, while that's a cutely dour thought, it's also wrong. Make no mistake, Kabam put the kibosh on today's SB. While I can make a number of assumptions as to why they did so, I'll go ahead and guess that it has something to do with the proposed improvements scheduled to go live on Monday. 

With that said, now that I've taken a few hours to reflect, I really believe that this kind of game manipulation is precisely how Kabam failed. Sure, they didn't listen to their player base enough. That's granted. More importantly, though, Uprising is designed to require an extremely high degree of commitment on the part of its players. The game, in other words, literally becomes part of a player's life. An active part. Or, well, not precisely active.  More interactive.

I don't think they ever understood this fundamental fact about their own product. If they did, then they'd also realize that randomly changing IB clocks or, more to the point, stymying a Sunday SB significantly comes to bear upon how real people live real lives in the real world. In another KoB post, "Focus on Your Regulars," I noted that Aaron Loeb, Kabam's President of Studios and Live Services, likened MMO games like Uprising to serialized television shows. At the time, it was an interesting analogy. But I now believe it's a misguided one. 

As players we don't simply sit down and watch the game once a week, religiously, as most television viewers do. There's an element of this to Uprising, certainly, as I clearly say in my opening paragraphs. However, the commitment to succeed at Uprising is just that. A television show has no degree of success or failure on the part of the viewer. Television's passive. One simply watches. On the flip side, Uprising isn't active, either. It's something more. Uprising requires interactive   engagement, interactive  participation, and interactive  thought. To succeed at Uprising, a player must make the game their own, with their own time and energy. Until Kabam both respects and regularly acts upon this fact, they will continue to fail their players.