In the past I played a bit of pen & paper Dungeons & Dragons, and what I have always missed with computer games on the same ruleset is that it is too linear. I understand that for a computer game it is difficult to have a true open world for the player to do exactly as they wish, but it would be nice to have a bit more freedom to progress the world story along different paths than just the one story.

Saying that though, I haven’t been able to play for some time now, as the client crashes every time I try to login now. Unsure if I will bother with trying to solve the issue.

With so much more on the market now, particularly in the f2p market paying for a sub is becoming less and less justifiable.

Cryptic have come out with a large very honest post of the issue, What has happened and what they are working on to fix it. hopefully this should be fixed by the time I get home from work.Communication is a good thing, and very rare in the gaming world.

From the looks of the forum posts STO has also seen some issues today, This may be due to many of their web services being shared.

Well if it is any consolidation I have been playing for the last 5 days with no issues and enjoying the game.

- 2 different covers on the PC Games magazines in the US (and many cover mentions on many other gaming magazines both in the US as well as in Europe)

- Preview and review articles in every single gaming magazine and on 95% of the gaming websites out there.

- A massive siteskin/advertising campaign on many of the top gaming websites (in terms of hits) online

- Huge (and very popular) booths at all major computer gaming conventions including (but not limited to) E3, PAX, GamesCom and the Paris Games Week

- Massive closed beta weekends with beta key give-aways with all major outlets that usually give away beta keys. The last one had 100s of 1000s of people playing the game already.

It’s not TESO nor does it have the budget of Bioware for example but saying there was no marketing for it at all just makes you look like you lived under a rock

Everything was much more awesome actually…

I can appreciate both sides of the coin, and as a male working in the tech industry I agree there are some of my fellow counterparts that act in a neanderthalic fashion.

Ultimately, at the end of the day, we all should treat others with the respect we would like to receive in return irrespective of age, race, gender or any other factor that can used in a discriminatory fashion.

This reminds me a lot of the situation that went down with Adria Richards from Sendgrid (at the time) promoting on twitter and other public forums which didn’t end up ending well for either Adria or the other gentleman involved (both ended up losing their jobs).

It all makes for a salacious story, and it’s good to get it off your chest, but ultimately it doesn’t really help to bring anything to a peaceful conclusion, and I think that’s what we’d all like to see at the end.

Sometimes it’s easy to read into things what you want when you’re thinking a particular way when the intentions of the individuals outlined aren’t easily known, after all we don’t all reside in one another’s skin (for better or worse).

I’m looking forward to the day where gender, race etc don’t matter and people are judged on their merits and efforts other than what they happen to be born with.

It has been the first time I’ve been able to discuss such events without feeling harassed. I accept all apologies but I understand how none if it was done on purpose. I also believe that if any of the admins thought someone was being inappropriate they would have stopped it.

It’s no ones fault that this sort of passive sexism exists but hopefully we can all work together with empathy, compassion, awareness and action to stop it all together

I am not going to say anything more because its already there in the article above me and private conversations I’ve had with people that matter.

Your actions continue to be a reflection on yourself and has absolutely nothing to do with me.

I still honestly don’t know who you are besides the maybe four sentences I said to you. I have no idea what local chat you are talking about (I go to LANs to talk to people) or who linked you to my twitter although I think it’s very obvious that there was no reason to involve you. Your actions have actually hindered this whole event and it would have been resolved quicker and easier without your continue attempts to project onto me.

Furthermore, there was clearly a lack of forward planning and inadequate explanation with regards to the criteria that the best-rig competition was judged. I understand that there are logistical problems with running benchmarks on stage. And I think perhaps we’ll have to consider it in the future if the competition is to be more than just based on aesthetics. It was the first time in a while that the competition was run and it was handled by some of our newer, less-experienced team members.

Internet access has always proved to be something of a problem. Since most games require online activation to work we’ve had to provide some form of internet access (I remember in the good ol’ days that we didn’t have internet at LANs!). Our current arrangements involve a fibre-optic link to an ISP and we push significant amounts of data across it. We’re in discussions with them to upgrade our link, but it also depends on us purchasing very expensive hardware and gaining permission from the venue to do system/hardware installs.

I know that this has been very discouraging for you, but I do hope you consider returning to our events in the future, you will always be welcome.

It’s a “paid LAN” but it’s also “non profit” and “volunteer run.” I’ve been attending it for several years. When I started going it was less than half the size it is now and at a different venue. At my first one there were about three girls in attendance and two of them were on my team. Since then I’ve been to sixteen of their events. At one 300 person event three years ago my team had 35 people with 7 of them being girls. I’ve met a lot of guys and girls there over the years. The only event even marginally related to gender that I can remember is when one lanner started trash talking one of the girls on my team over the network, not knowing she was a girl. He called her out to meet him outside the venue. I don’t know if he was joking, but when I looked up from the game I was engrossed in all but two of my team had disappeared from their seats. I found them out the front surrounding the guy who was by now being quite apologetic.

There were plenty of women entering tournaments and competitions at this LAN. You can see their photos on the Facebook page. I believe there are also at least 4 female admins currently. Admins are recruited from the attendees so the ratio of female admins will always correlate to the ratio of female attendees. I was also involved at a another incident at this LAN. A girl was feeling uncomfortable with another lanner’s photography and I got involved even though it was a bit awkward. What he was doing wasn’t related to her gender, but it was intrusive.

Now onto the main incident of the weekend..

Late on Saturday night I wandered up to a small group of people next to the main stage. I had no idea there was a competition going on. The only people present were the four judges, the six contestants, and about 2 or 3 spectators. There were some other people nearby watching MOBA casting and playing arcade games but none of them were paying attention. Kristy was standing there watching one of the other contestants being judged and I asked what was going on. She said it was the beast build competition, and she was disappointed because she thought it would involve benchmarks and not just talking about their builds. I said it was daft that they had to unplug and drag their rigs all the way over to the stage just for that, when they could be sitting at your desk gaming instead. She agreed. I didn’t bother watching the competition and left to wander around some more.

Not long after that I was standing near the admin area talking to a friend when Kristy walked past. I asked how she went and she said she was upset about the judges saying she got points for being a woman, and being condescending with comments like “oh so you did THAT, well done.” Or similar. I asked her several questions about what they had said. She mentioned the shirt comments. I asked her about her shirt. It was the Serenity with some other stuff. I recognised it as the ship from Firefly but I wasn’t sure if it was one of those mash up shirts or something so I asked her about it too. It’s now uncommon to see a pop culture shirt that ISN’T a mash up! I’ve also seen the shirts all the other competition entrants were wearing. They were an IT crowd mashup, a flannel print, a volcom shirt, an OCZ shirt and a SC2 “Bronze level” shirt. Out of the two interesting shirts only Kristy’s was at first glance unclear. People come to LANs wearing all kinds of things – onesies, zombie costumes, and a lot of geeky shirts. It’s not unusual to break the ice by talking about someone’s shirt.

I told her that I could only remember who one of the judges present had been, and asked her if some physical descriptions matched the other judges. My intention was to show her who the senior admins were and advise them of her problem. She told me that “it doesn’t matter” and that she was “just going to podcast about it when she gets home.” I remember thinking that if she didn’t want to do something about it on the spot, even when assistance was offered by a friendly passerby, then she didn’t have much grounds to (presumably) rant about it later. I’m not saying the article is rant, but it’s what you assume when someone says they’re “going to podcast about it later.” She mentioned Oceanic Gamer. I said to my friend that it’s sad that people don’t want to stand up for themselves these days. I repeated what she had described to a couple of the senior admins anyway. I also described it to a female admin who is a proud feminist and gamer. You’d already left the LAN by then, so without your first hand account I didn’t think the admins could do a lot with the info I gave them.

Someone at the LAN was hosting a local chat server. A large number of attendees were on it. I was quite active on it, and I am a very unusual looking person, so “hey are you that guy with…” was frequently mentioned in reference to me on the chat. There are some contact details for me clearly visible by my name in the chat. These details consist of my nickname and a chat server I use. On Monday morning someone logged on to that chat server and sent me a PM with a link to Kristy’s Twitter feed. This was a person I did not know, and I had only spoken about her incident with people I knew. The only person who knew I knew about it, and who wasn’t already on that IRC server, was Kristy. The person disconnected from the chat immediately after giving me the URL. I assumed it was her.

When I looked at her Twitter feed she had been complaining about the network at the event, and I first responded to that as it seemed a bit over-entitled. That’s not uncommon because some people don’t realise the LAN is non profit and volunteer run. A couple of other attendees also disputed her statements about the network. One of these attendees has no love lost between himself and the event admins, so he wasn’t just being a fanboy.

She had also tweeted from the event saying “Looking forward to writing my next article for @TheOceanicGamer about how there are still hostile places for women in gaming.” I responded that the LAN isn’t a “hostile place for women” just because approximately 4 young people of the 600+ people present had been rude. Now, I am a loudmouth and I’ve had people make threats on my life and property at LANs. People can be idiots, but I’ve still never described a LAN as a hostile place for anyone. Kristy then denied saying the LAN was a “hostile place for women.” She also denied having spoken to a random attendee about the problem and called me a troll. These statements were not true so it was flame on time. This is Twitter, and you’re going to have to expect some flames when you start being untruthful, right? Nothing to do with gender, just normal human interaction.

Kristy had also tweeted to the LAN admins saying that writing an article about the incident was better than going directly to the organisers because “Look at all the anger from just one tweet. This is exactly why it should be public.” This confirmed my suspicions about her motive. I believed she wanted to flame the event and use it to further her ambitions in writing. Even in this article she said the people on Twitter “had no details” but I saw part of the competition, I spoke to her about the incident, and everyone else on Twitter was an attendee or admin of the LAN. I suspect the admin she eventually ended up talking to is the active gender equality campaigner senior admin.

tl;dr Kristy complained about the incident to random lanners, didn’t accept IRL offers of assistance bringing it to the senior admins, boasted that she would flame them on the internet instead of standing up for herself IRL, and fudged the details on Twitter later. Everyone else I’ve stood up for at events has wanted it resolved on the spot but she didn’t.