WTF is wrong with Age of Conan players?

Disclaimer: I work professionally in the video game industry, and have for about 16 years now. So while there is nothing I can do about my jaded, cynical, critical eye when it comes to video games, I should still at least take the time to mention that my opinions posted here are mine and mine alone, and do not reflect the opinions of my employers, or anyone else really.

So, I recently installed Age of Conan to give it a try. Where to begin? Let's start with the install, which took over an hour, and consumed 22GB on my hard drive. At this point I am thinking, "For that kind of time and space investment this had better be the best game I've ever played." Yeah. Not so much. After finishing the install and downloading the ~800MB day one patch, I was greeted by a game that chose default rendering settings for my NVidia 7800 that did not render anything except my characters hair and eyeballs and the water (basically, only textures that had alpha). Not off to a great start. I checked the video options and it was set to shader model 2.x, which was odd because I'm pretty sure the 7800 supports 3.0. Changing to that, it at least rendered correctly, which is unfortunate, because the game looks.... horrendous. I can't believe this game is getting 9.0 and 9.5s on graphics. People must be confusing "high-polygon" with "high-quality", which are very very different things. It is in-fact usually much harder to make something high-poly, or 'realistic' look good (see: uncanny-valley). WoW got away with their low low poly count by choosing a cartoony style, which was probably the very best art-direction decision they could have made. In Age of Conan, everything looks weird, mismatched, and bland. Additionally, the framerate was terrible, about 11fps in the jungle, about 6 in the town. I guess I could upgrade to an 8800 or 9800, but I'm not going to, because even if the framerate was high enough, the game would still be atrociously ugly. The resource loading/management was also awful; oftentimes, it would take at least 30 seconds for some textures to even load, and more than 5 seconds once combat started to load the combat animations. That is 5 seconds of my character and the NPCs just sliding around. Unacceptable. When the combat animations finally did load, I laughed out loud at how bad the combat stance and jump animations were for my character. And that is not something that a better graphics card will fix. I can't believe anyone ever looked at either of those animations and said, "Yeah, that is shippable." It is amateur hour at best (Actually I have seen mods with much better animations). People must be desperate for anything new that is not WoW... I haven't even mentioned the rampant graveyard camping on PvP servers, but honestly it doesn't matter because the game is so ugly, and performs so poorly, that I am really just going to uninstall it immediately (hopefully that won't take another hour) and get my 22GB back.

Second Disclaimer: I am in no way implying that every game I have ever worked on and shipped is perfect, far from it. But I expect a basic level of performance and aesthetics to make a game playable, and Age of Conan falls way, way short of that. It's only redeeming feature is that it is 'online', if it were a single player game, I'm sure it would be getting 4 or 5 out of 10s.

WTF is wrong with concert goers?

So, I went to see Flight of the Conchords last Tuesday with a friend at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. We got to the show, sat in our seats, and were getting ready to enjoy the opening act, when an argument about seating and seat numbers breaks out behind us. Fair enough, we think, there must be some mix up. They will surely clear it up in a minute though, right? No. Five minutes of increasingly heated arguing ensues, over the opening comedian, until finally the ushers show up. Thank god, right? No. The ushers apparently can't make heads or tails of the situation either, and instead of offering to re-seat one of the parties, or getting the managers (or even the cops; by this time a lot of belligerent swearing was going on) they instead toss their hands up in the air and just walk away, leaving the two parties to continue arguing loudly, ruining the experience for everyone around them. Now, I don't know exactly what the confusion over the seats was, or who was at fault (though in my book the house was at fault for not at least moving the parties to resolve the dispute elsewhere), but, it is at this point that the apparent leader of one of the parties, whom we shall call 'racist-jackass' going forward, muttered about the leader of the other party (who happened to be a group of two Indian men and one woman), "God, what a Jew." I was obviously aghast, and my friend, being from Texas (a carry-conceal state, where you don't say shit like that because anyone could be armed), visibly braced for gun-fire. I don't know if the Indian guy that the fallacious epithet was directed at didn't hear it, or what, but he didn't seem to react. I have to imagine he didn't hear it, because he was pissed off enough already that we were sure a fight was about to break out anyways. Now, I don't care who you are, or how in-the-right you think you are, but that is, very obviously I would have thought, not something you really ever should say... even ignoring the blatant cultural-social-religious inaccuracy! (I understand he didn't mean it in a literal sense, but still, come on!). And then, as icing on the unbelievably-stupid-cake, racist-jackass's girlfriend says, "Yeah." Really? 'Yeah' is your response? Not, I don't know, "Jesus, shut the fuck up, we're in public."? Who are you people? We left after the main show and before the encore because we did not want to be around when the physical fight finally did break out. Because we left early though, I can entertain the fantasy that after the show the two parties reconciled, were able to see the situation from each other's points of view, and apologized to each other and everyone around them. Yeah.

-100 points to The Masonic Auditorium's Usher Staff for completely failing to resolve the problem in anything approaching a professional manner.

-100 points to both parties for not being considerate enough to resolve the issue where it wouldn't ruin the experience for everyone around them.

-10,000 points and remedial world civilization classes to racist-jackass and his girlfriend for hopefully obvious reasons.