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Valve's fake, rigged, waste of time Progress Quest troll Portal 2 ARG
- Thread starter V_Ben
- Start date
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game#The_rise_of_the_self-supporting_ARGFirehead said:
!
But, yeah, mostly true.
It's not a test. It's part Steam sale, part sociological experiment, and part marketing plan for their upcoming game. It's really interesting to me taken as a whole but also a fairly callous way to treat their most ardent fanbase. Unlocking Portal 2 early doesn't really seem to be the point, just the carrot they're dangling.Jenga said:
I guess I'm looking at it like this: in an ARG, you never let on that it is what it is. You keep up appearances. You don't create a website that saysDrkirby said:
You continue the game until it leads up to something, or end it while players are still playing. This isn't a game anymore.
TheExodu5 said:
Clearly player focus has influenced the individual bars. As an experiment, I say that the forums should organize to surge all players at around 07:00 GMT
Also, take Friday night as an example of how it was influenced. There was a slight increase in the slope of progression coinciding with a rather constant CPU count at a time when the count should have been dropping.
I wouldn't suggest as such. I think it comes down to two main issues:Crunched said:
- Again, miscommunication. The "final test" on Friday was a bit cloudy, and the function of the completion and potatoes and such were left vague.
- Valve set the bar too high, probably due to overestimating participation or the ramping effect of the potatoes. Predicting human behavior is hard enough, trying to predict it within a time-frame is nightmarish.
Fudging the data isn't needed to explain why the ARG's final phase has hit a snag when miscalculation is perfectly reasonable. You don't have to posit a motive, for starters.
Morkins said:
"Slight increase" being the operative words. I don't think you can deny that the additional users have increased individual bar's speeds, but honestly the whole thing is more or less linear. The supposed Potato multipliers seem to be having no effect, and while having thousands upon thousands of people target a single game does seem to influence its overall speed somewhat it isn't a drastic increase. We've been steadily unlocking a little more than 1% progress an hour since the first minute, and it's pretty clear Valve has an ideal time they want the game to come out. That number should have been multiplied several fold with the potatoes going from 100k to 400k in two days, or it should fluctuate wildly with the user load. The reality is that while throwing people on one game does boost it, it looks like the net result is still a linear progress towards a single predetermine-ish date/time.
Which is fine, in theory - the game's due out Tuesday and it's coming out Tuesday. But don't make thousands of people burn tens of thousands of manhours for four days under the pretense that they're making the game come out early when they're really, really not.
Blizzard said:I would say that the HL2 thing is different than this. Any backlash from this would be more along the lines of say, L4D2 sequel backlash, or Modern Warfare 2 dedicated servers backlash.
Both of those games went on to be very successful, and the COD game line is tremendously successful.
If say, Penny Arcade and Notch asking everyone to help release Portal 2 didn't make much of an impact, I find it hard to believe that influential bloggers/podcasters would hurt Valve. Say they do hurt Valve, and Valve's reputation goes down among PC gamers. What happens then? If Valve announces another game (episode 2 or Half-life 3), are you going to boycott it? Could you honestly bring yourself to pass up a Valve game no matter how you are treated?
I'd disagree, if only because those backlashes involved very angry super fanboys who were very vocal, but ultimately not that important. HL2's launch had a much more sombre feeling, where there was a general level of disappointment from anyone who did not get the game working on its first try. So when Valve (or another company) launch a major game with Steamworks installed, these guys feel jaded and uneasy about having to install a service they feel is broken. Some go ahead and buy it, some decide not to buy the product because of a previous problem.
The parallel I can draw here is that the gamers who got invested in this marketing campaign are on average disappointed with how its going. They will still buy Portal 2, and any future Valve game. But when they produce a similar marketing campaign, a larger % of people will not get hooked, because they feel like they were fooled once before. They experienced a broken campaign, and they don't want to be part of another. Over the long term, it has an impact, even if its not immediately visible.
On a personal note, yes I would stop buying Valve products under certain circumstances (Steam was poorly maintained/didnt work & Gabe started to troll his consumer base the same way Kotick did).
Hot Coldman
Banned
Fletcher said:
Yes, go check Steam to see for yourself.
Lostconfused
Member
I checked some numbers for Toki Tori's progress...
In 6 hours 10 minutes while the number of CPUs hovered around 650, the bar increased 7.44%, which works out as ~2% per hour.
When it was being focused on, for 1 hour 54 minutes with CPUs stable at around 4450, the bar increased 15.97%, so ~8.4% per hour.
That's ~6.8 times as many people but only a ~4.2 times increased progress rate, which means the number of CPUs doesn't have a linear correlation with progress rate. This proves that the theory of each bar representing a certain amount of man-hours is wrong, and it's also the reason we're not seeing big changes in the overall progress as total number of users fluctuates, because there are diminishing returns.
In 6 hours 10 minutes while the number of CPUs hovered around 650, the bar increased 7.44%, which works out as ~2% per hour.
When it was being focused on, for 1 hour 54 minutes with CPUs stable at around 4450, the bar increased 15.97%, so ~8.4% per hour.
That's ~6.8 times as many people but only a ~4.2 times increased progress rate, which means the number of CPUs doesn't have a linear correlation with progress rate. This proves that the theory of each bar representing a certain amount of man-hours is wrong, and it's also the reason we're not seeing big changes in the overall progress as total number of users fluctuates, because there are diminishing returns.
theinfinityissue
Member
A seemingly plausible escalation to me would be for Valve to announce the existence of a new game by changing the end of an old one then announcing the existence of a new game during the release of that one. I'm holding on to that hope, anyway.
The last few bits of news on the wiki are interesting, Jeep saying flat out that anything unrelated to GlaDOS@home is unrelated to the arg, then immediately being corrupted. Things may just heat back up tonight.
The last few bits of news on the wiki are interesting, Jeep saying flat out that anything unrelated to GlaDOS@home is unrelated to the arg, then immediately being corrupted. Things may just heat back up tonight.
Datwheezy said:
Conservative estimates are four hours early. More liberal estimates are about 10 hours early, which might put it into late Monday night for some timezones.
Either way, most people will end up playing it Tuesday night regardless, so the whole thing is sort of a joke.
Crunched said:
Here's my big issue with the whole thing, if you're making an ARG you have to be prepared for the eventuality that your player base isn't going to be big enough or won't be able to complete the challenges in time. You always have a Plan B and their Plan B should have been to increase whatever calculations they are using for filling the bars. The fact that they aren't kinda makes me think that this isn't the End Game for the ARG.
Wild Mass Speculation tells me that the ARG will have another Phase after Portal 2 releases.
This is pretty much why I consider the ARG done. J:Crunched said:I guess I'm looking at it like this: in an ARG, you never let on that it is what it is. You keep up appearances. You don't create a website that says
You continue the game until it leads up to something, or end it while players are still playing. This isn't a game anymore.
The timer is the scheduled release and is independent of our efforts (aside from the compensation hours knocked off for completing bars). We go with that if we don't complete the global bar in time, so essentially a failure state.epmode said:
If we complete every game's bar (and thus the global bar), the game releases immediately. Without some serious ramping up, we may end up only gaining a little time over the scheduled timer.
darkpaladinmfc
Member
I think you miiiight be right, I just averaged up all the bars and it seems to add up. But I can't imagine Killing Floor or The Ball being even close to finishing in time...Botolf said:
Lostconfused
Member
Its episode 2 stuff.claviertekky said:
Campster said:
The community response was not big enough. End of story. Valve set it up to be difficult. Valve set it up to require community dedication and effort. That has not happened. There is some effort, but collectively, the difference has not been that large. Peak times are still peak times and the total number of players has only increased marginally. Thus, we aren't breaking through this challenge and it is reflected in a relatively constant progression.
Also, they could have just as easily included a curve to reflect the fact that as people players over the weekend, more potato multipliers would have been collected which means that they become less effective. There is a relatively constant potato multiplier curve so clearly people aren't involved enough to make that become a major factor in the progression...
The community response wasn't big enough. Thus, we only get the game a few hours early.
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