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Wednesday, December 19, 2012

The War Z Mess: Every Crazy Detail We Know So Far [UPDATE]

December 19th, 2012Top Story

The War Z Mess: Every Crazy Detail We Know So Far [UPDATE]

By Jason Schreier

The War Z Mess: Every Crazy Detail We Know So Far [UPDATE]

This week's wildest story is the story of The War Z, a new Steam game that has caused a great deal of controversy for numerous reasons.

Update: This afternoon, The War Z was pulled from Steam.

Fans have come out criticizing the zombie survival game for misleading advertising, suspicious microtransactions, and forum censorship. Meanwhile, The War Z's developers have defended themselves, telling us that "93% of [their] customers like the game."

It's a bizarre mess that we've been following closely and will continue to follow as this week goes on. Here's everything we know so about The War Z so far.

Controversy led the developers to change the game's Steam description.

Following yesterday's controversy—during which a giant thread on Reddit alleged that War Z's Steam description was full of lies—the people at War Z developer Hammerpoint Interactive have changed the game's Steam description to be more accurate. Hammerpoint no longer claims that the game has player skills, maps sized up to 400km, or private servers. (Private servers, the description now says, will be available "soon.")

Hammerpoint boss Sergey Titov also issued something of an apology to fans, saying that he was sorry they misread the description.

War Z looks a hell of a lot like Day Z.

The comparisons are impossible to avoid: from the name to the subject matter, it's easy to see War Z as a ripoff that sets out to cash in on Day Z's popularity. But while Day Z, a massively successful zombie survival mod for Arma II, is completely free, War Z costs $15 on Steam—and thanks to some newly-installed microtransactions, it could cost you even more.

In an e-mail to me, Titov addressed this controversy. (Spelling and grammar have not been altered.)

"As soon as we've announced game – we've received our share of hate from some of the DayZ fans accusing us of just ripping off DayZ concept to make a quick money," Titov wrote. "While over time, especially after game have been launched publicly players been able to see that those two designs are pretty different, there're still DayZ fanboys out there who just can't accept fact that similar concept doesn't mean being copycat... Interesting fact – only around 30% of our player base we have right now actually played DayZ. And 15% of our players never heard of DayZ before they started playing The War Z. This confirms that we've been able to attract new players to the survival/zombie war genre of the game."

Lots of people have been banned from War Z, both during the beta and the current release.

"Not too long ago, Hammerpoint banned roughly three thousand players, without providing any proof whatsoever, and blatantly lying about their anti cheat system being flawless," one Kotaku reader told me in an e-mail yesterday. "Today, they went back on their word, saying that a small amount of the bans were not legit, but still leaving a ton of people [banned], and almost 96 hours in queue from their support without any answers at all."

Several other War Z players have also e-mailed me over the past few days to complain about bans. A different player said he was banned a few days ago, then unbanned last night along with hundreds of others. "I've never hacked, or purposely used exploits that were in the game," he said. "They unbanned hundreds of players three days after the fact without saying a word between the events. They have been lying to the public non-stop."

Titov also addressed this during our conversation, telling me via e-mail that he thinks a lot of War Z players are lying. (Again, spelling/grammar are unaltered.)

"We also are pretty aggressive banning people who use cheats and hacks in a game," Titov wrote. "Those guys normally have paid $10-20 to purchase hacks that offered them'no hack detection guarantee' – naturally they're being extremely pissed off when we've detected their hacking activities and banned their accounts. Those guys are very active in spreading false information and lies about game."

You're not allowed to make posts on War Z's Steam message board about why you quit.

The rules, as laid out by a moderator who goes by the handle Kewk, are a little intense:

The War Z Mess: Every Crazy Detail We Know So Far [UPDATE]

Some crafty players have found ways to circumvent this.

Check out this message, screencapped by a NeoGAFfer.

The War Z Mess: Every Crazy Detail We Know So Far [UPDATE]

(Stumped? Try reading it vertically.)

A Valve moderator is investigating claims that people have been wrongly banned from The War Z's message board.

As the moderator writes:

Several users have raised concerns about censorship or other posters being banned unfairly. We take these complaints seriously and are investigating the issue.

If you have specific examples of what you feel was unfair or incorrect moderation on this forum, please post them in this thread (or on my profile) and we'll have a look. There has been a lot of traffic in this forum - a new topic every minute for the last day and a half, with thousands of replies. All that makes moderation a very difficult task.

Thousands of people are signing petitions to protest The War Z.

Some of them want full refunds for the game.

Others demand that Valve take the game off Steam.

(I've reached out to Valve to ask if they plan on doing anything about The War Z, and will update should they respond.)

The man behind The War Z helped make one of the worst games of all time.

It's called Big Rigs, and it was immortalized by Alex Navarro in this entertaining GameSpot video review. Sergey Titov was the lead programmer on Big Rigs, according to a number of write-ups on the game.

Titov most recently worked on League of Legends at Riot Games, which makes it interesting that...

At one point, the War Z's terms of service linked to League of Legends.

Although the TOS has since been changed, several months ago, it linked out to League of Legends, which seems to imply that at one point, parts of War Z's terms of service were ripped from Riot's online game.

One Kotaku reader sent in this screengrab:

The War Z Mess: Every Crazy Detail We Know So Far [UPDATE]

The Terms of Service come with one rather interesting line.

ONCE YOU AGREE TO THIS TERMS OF SERVICE AND THE END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE GAME (THE "EULA") AND SERVICE FOR THE GAME COMMENCES, YOU WILL NO LONGER BE ELIGIBLE FOR A REFUND FOR ANY AMOUNTS OR OTHER CONSIDERATION PAID BY YOU FOR THE USE (OR FUTURE USE) OF THE GAME CLIENT OR THE SERVICE.

Expect to see more and more strange things as time goes on.

The War Z mess has been rather crazy. Quite a few people seem to be unhappy with the game, and a number of readers have contacted us with strange details and stories about their experiences with it. We will of course continue to follow this story and keep you updated as more details come out about this strange situation.

UPDATE: More craziness!

Here's a post on The War Z's forums from Titov asking people to vote for the game on Metacritic, where it currently has a user score of 1.5/10.

And here's an article from PCGamesN, who measured The War Z's first map, Colorado. On the Steam description for The War Z, the developers say that Colorado is 100 square kilometers. PCGamesN's Steve Hogarty determined that the map is actually... 9.7417 square kilometers.

UPDATE 2: And then there are the ripped images... Number of comments
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How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate

December 19th, 2012Top Story

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate

By Alan Henry

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate

Sometimes we have the pleasure of working with a manager we really like and respect, and who respects us too. Other times, the relationship isn't so great, and we have to deal with someone we can barely tolerate. Still, with the job market being what it is, you don't want to just quit every time you work for someone you don't get along with. Here's how to grow a thicker skin at the office and learn to deal with a boss you may not want to see every morning.

Is Your Boss a Bad Person or Just a Bad Manager?

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate The first thing you need to figure out is whether your boss is a bad manager or a bad person. The former implies that he doesn't give you the direction, priorities, and guidance you need to succeed at your job. The latter is a highly subjective way of saying the two of you don't see eye-to-eye for personal reasons. If your boss is just a bad manager, you can functionally compensate for their issues with planning and structure. If your issue with your boss is one of personality, your job will require some perspective-checking on your part. Still, there are ways through both problems, but you're not going to make any headway at all if you're not clear on which issue you're facing. Photo by Istvan Hajas (Shutterstock).

Find Out If You're Part of the Problem

Here's a question you probably don't want to ask yourself: are you the problem here? Remember, everyone's the hero of their own story, and everyone believes they're the party in the right. Your manager is no different. Step back for a moment and ask yourself if you're contributing to the poor relationship.

On Careers notes that many frustrated employees may just be oversensitive to the criticisms and natural flow of their workplace. For example, if you're caught up in the tone or approach your boss uses to discuss things, you miss the message underneath. If you're simply reacting to your boss instead of responding to the issues they bring up, you're probably letting your emotional responses get the better of you.

We've discussed how to take criticism like a champ and without getting worked up over the tone or delivery. Focus on the message, and in this case the work, instead of your boss's personality. Try to separate your emotional response from the things that irritate you, and give your boss clear but professional feedback when they do things that make you uncomfortable. You're both adults, you can act like it. Choose your battles wisely, and understand that you both have to work together.

Differentiate "Like" and "Respect"

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate In the military, you don't get to choose your boss. You don't even get to just quit when you run up against someone you don't really like working for. You have to adapt, adjust, and find a way to figure out your differences and move on. Granted, working in a corporate IT department or helping customers on the sales floor isn't the same as being in the service, but you can take a few cues from our friends in uniform. Remember, you're not at work to make friends. It can be great to make friends at work, and you should try if you can, but you need to separate whether you like your boss from whether you can learn to respect their position. Photo by Tom Wang (Shutterstock).

We're not glossing over how difficult this can be. When About.com polled its readers asking what traits made someone a "bad boss," most of them had common refrains: their boss didn't respect them, or had never earned their respect. Their boss wasn't qualified to do their jobs, much less manage them. Their boss was terrible at communicating, or setting expectations or priorities. These are all difficult to overcome, but getting past them starts with at least respecting the fact that they're your manager. That doesn't mean accepting everything they do, or even respecting them as a person, but it does mean accepting and understanding that you have to work with this person somehow. The rest is small stuff you can work through.

What You Can Do By Yourself to Cope

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate Even if your job sucks, that doesn't mean you can't fix it. Let's start with ways you can manage yourself. Whether your issues with your boss are personal or professional, you can benefit from some simple coping mechanisms that will help you deal with a bad boss on your own. Photo by bottled_void.

  • Understand what stress does to you and how to fight it. If your boss stresses you out and makes you angry, you might benefit from simple office-friendly stress relief tricks like meditation, deep breathing for 10 seconds, or taking a walk to calm yourself before responding. If your boss is right in front of you and you're getting angry, try to intercept your emotional response and let them know you'll respond appropriately later. Whatever you do, separate the content of the message from its delivery. Focusing on the former is useful; focusing on the latter is a recipe for trouble.
  • Keep a work diary or a paper trail of interactions with them. If your boss is sexist, racist, or makes you uncomfortable at work, a work diary can be a great tool if you need to report them to someone higher up, but in this case we'd suggest using it as catharsis. Writing down how you feel and how your interactions with your boss makes you stressed out goes a long way towards helping you cope. You can keep your thoughts private, enjoy the benefits of getting it all out, and go back to work.
  • How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate Find a mentor, or another manager you can look up to. A mentor, even a manager in another department, can often help you understand your boss's pressures and challenges in a non-threatening way. They may be willing to level with you in a way your boss isn't. Plus, while you may not be able to tell them everything, the whole point of having a mentor is to help you learn, grow, and develop your skills—which include working with difficult people. Photo by Huntstock (Shutterstock).
  • Draw bright lines between your work and your life. Get a hobby outside of work. Exercise. We discussed how bad bosses can follow you home, and some of the best coping mechanisms you can muster are the ones that force you to remember and enjoy what you're working those long hours for in the first place. Spend time with family and loved ones, and make sure to fiercely protect your personal time away from work. Set your boundaries, and go to bat for them when you have to. Keep your relationship with your boss in its little box until you have to deal with it and enjoy living your life.

All of these coping mechanisms are things you can do for yourself to help improve your mindset. We're not getting into the "It's not fair that I have to learn to cope while my boss can continue being a jerk" battle. Like we said, we're all adults here, and we're all professionals. The moment you get stuck in that bean-counting, tit-for-tat mindset where "why should I have to do anything," it's over. We don't always get to choose who we work with—sometimes you just have to suck it up and work with what's in your power to change.

What You Can Do With Your Boss to Repair Your Relationship

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate Now that you have some tools to work on yourself, it's time to work on your boss and peel back some of those layers that you hate. With luck, you'll find something you can work with. Here are some suggestions to help.

  • Get closer to your boss. If your boss's problem is that they don't communicate, or set priorities or expectations for the work they assign you, get in good and close with them. Meet with them regularly—even offer to schedule the meetings yourself—to discuss those priorities and the things you're working on. Yes, those meetings could result in even more work, but wouldn't you rather get it every Wednesday at 3pm when you're talking work anyway than on Friday at 4pm when it's due before the end of the day? Plus, setting a time where you can talk about work gives you the opportunity to push back and ask your boss what can come off your plate to make room for the new stuff you have to do.
  • Learn to "manage up" and give constructive criticism without sounding like a jerk. Like we mentioned earlier, you and your boss are both adults and you're both professionals. Unless your boss is both a bad manager and a bad person, they'll understand a little constructive criticism from time to time, especially if you deliver it properly. Let them know what about their behavior and demeanor is getting under your skin. Come armed with suggestions that might improve your relationship too—telling them you hate when they talk to you isn't helpful. Asking them to pull you aside to talk privately when they have a concern or asking them "What can I/we do to make this work better," is helpful.
  • Work with your boss's skills and on his/her priorities. The fact is that the most qualified people for a job don't always get it. Sometimes a manager is brought in from another department because they're owed a favor, or because the company couldn't find someone to fill a role. Sometimes you'll have an engineer leading a team of project managers, or vice versa. Get familiar with your boss's background and see how you can relate on common ground. While you're at it, find out what their priorities for your team are, and who your boss works hardest for. That should give you some insight on what you should be paying attention to and who's projects are most important to your boss. A surefire way to take the heat off is to work on your boss's priorities first.
  • How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate Don't just be an employee, be your boss' assistant. Use your one-on-one time with your manager to discuss upcoming priorities as well. Don't leave any excuse for you to not know what your boss is working on, or what rumors or rumblings your boss may be privy to that will have an effect on your workload. We're big fans of the weekly review. Bring your boss in on it as well, or schedule one just for the two of you. If you have a small team, suggest to your boss that you all spend a short time each week clarifying priorities and talking about what's on everyone's shared plates. Doing so will get your boss communicating with you in a group setting, and take some of the sting out of their poor managerial skills. Photo by Riza Nugraha.
  • Solve problems and propose solutions as a way to get revenge. It's often said that living well is the best revenge, so flip the problem on its head and kill your boss with kindness and productivity. If your boss makes you upset, treat them like a bully: Don't give them the satisfaction of a reaction—instead give them exactly what they're supposed to want in their role: a solution to the issue they've brought up. Solve your work problems, take credit for them, and then let them know the good work you've done (make sure to do it in that order so they can't steal your thunder.) Take the initiative, and make yourself appear to be your boss's peer to your colleagues and customers, not their subordinate. The best way to do this, of course, is to do great work. Let your bad boss transform you into a better employee.

If the problem with your boss is that they're a bad manager, sometimes using personal leverage and common ground to get around their managerial problems is the best way for you—and for them—to succeed. After all, part of working for someone is to help cover their butt—if you prove to your boss that you're interested in doing this, they'll be more willing to work with you. If the problem is personal, sometimes getting close enough so you grow on one another is the key to breaking the wall between you. Working on the same priorities towards a common goal can melt even the thickest ice. Remember, you're on the same team here.

If All Else Fails, You Know What To Do

How to Stop Being an Oversensitive Employee and Work with a Boss You Hate If nothing else works, quit. Sometimes all of the common ground, shared priorities, coping mechanisms, and de-stressing techniques can't heal the rift between you and a bad boss. That said, don't just quit at the first sign. It's easy to say "your boss sucks, get out of there" when you're good at being employed, or if you're someone who's already employed talking to someone who loves their job but hates their manager. Sometimes it's worth it to try and work it out, and working it out takes effort and time. Give it a try first. Photo by Carey Ciuro.

If that doesn't work though, it might be time to look for something else. If you love your company, see if you can find another opening in-house you can transfer to. That comes with its own risks, but it may be worth doing to stay where you love the work. Otherwise, make a graceful exit. Granted, there's no guarantee that you won't wind up in a new job with a new boss you hate, so plan carefully and make sure to check yourself before doing anything rash. Worst case, maybe you're just not cut out to work for someone else, and you should consider working for yourself or starting your own business. In both cases, you get to work for yourself, and if you boss still sucks after that, you have a real problem.

Title photo made using Aleksandr Markin (Shutterstock) and fuzzbones (Pond5).

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This is 40 Minutes Too Long of a Movie Highlighting Every Reason Never to Get Married

December 19th, 2012Top Story

This is 40 Minutes Too Long of a Movie Highlighting Every Reason Never to Get Married

By Rich Juzwiak

This is 40 Minutes Too Long of a Movie Highlighting Every Reason Never to Get MarriedJudd Apatow's miserable new comedy, This Is 40, is a cautionary tale that warns against two things: getting older and being married. I don't know what messages you are to extract from this thing if not: kill yourself and get divorced now.

It's hard to see why Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Pete (Paul Rudd), whom we were introduced to in 2007's Knocked Up, stay together since they spend much of the movie fighting and nagging and correcting and mistrusting and undermining and fighting. Signs of their love come in pithy form: reminiscences, a shared persecution complex, the ability to go quip-for-quip, a stoned night in a hotel room. It's harder still to understand why these characters are worth paying attention to, as they are both bland and free of surprises – their nuances are shown in eye-rollingly trite contrasts like his love of the Pixies' "Debaser" and hers of a-ha's "Take on Me." The hardest thing to wrap your head around is why it takes 134 minutes to tell their non-story, which spends about 90 percent of its time building up to a birthday party that isn't even that special or populated. Its centerpiece is a pool. This movie is supposed to be endearingly relatable, and yet it is a metaphor for life in spite of itself: you spend what feels like an eternity with someone and all you get in the end is a dip in the pool. Seriously, kill yourself and get divorced, in that order.

These characters are also not particularly savvy. About two thirds of the way into the film (you know, around the 90-minute mark), Debbie halts an argument by musing, "What are we even doing? This is not making me happy. You're not happy. You don't like me. I can feel that. I'm not blind. Jesus. We're like business associates. We're like brother and sister. There's no passion there." The content of this final-act epiphany is evident in the film's first scene, when Pete reveals he took Viagra before they had sex and she flips out. These people's journey is to realizing how insufferable and ill-suited they are. Why are we watching them? So that we can then see a sad-music montage of each sad member of the family alone and staring at things sadly? Because that's what we get.

Perhaps we are here for the jokes, which are sometimes very funny in themselves ("What is a difference between a straight man's mustache and a gay man's mustache?" wonders one character; "The smell," answers another), but often, not so much ("My hard-ons are still in analog. [Viagra] makes it digital!"). Scenes routinely fall flat on their closing zingers: After dancing to Alice in Chains' "Rooster" in front of his apathetic wife and two daughters (who just happen to be Apatow's wife and two daughters, Maude and Iris Apatow), Pete snorts, "Sometimes I wish just one of you had a dick." "Well, we don't want one," says 8-year-old Charlotte, closing things up. Haha, feminism.

In addition to defining 40, or at least what it looks like for middle-class white people living beyond their means in Los Angeles, it is clear that Apatow is out to define our time in general, and so we get several mentions of the family iPad, Pete's fear for the brain of his oldest child, 13-year-old Sadie (Maude Apatow), as a result of her watching the entire series of Lost in five weeks, a Borat reference, a Justin Bieber hair joke, Lady Gaga worship, Charlotte playing The Office theme on her keyboard, a derisive sneer at Twilight. If hip-hop is dead, it decomposed a little more rapidly the day on set when Mann and her daughters danced and rapped along to Nicki Minaj's Busta Rhymes reference in "Roman's Revenge" ("Rah! Rah! Like a dungeon dragon!").

If the idea is to create a time capsule, perhaps this movie will work a lot better when everyone who's currently on earth is at least 40. It will at least look less obvious and feel less redundant, hopefully, or we're really doomed. To be 40, according to Apatow, is to throw pointed barbs at only the easiest, most common pop culture references. I don't know if he's intentionally admitting that age puts you out of touch, but he is effectively doing so.

Despite what he claims, Apatow just does not give a fuck what people say about the way he writes women. His here are shriller than ever, with some of them being either proud whores or proudly frigid, depending on what's needed for the scene. Debbie's incompetence as a store manager is causing the family to lose money, whereas Pete's record label is at the mercy of a crumbling industry and his own generosity for continuing to help out his deadbeat father, Larry played by Albert Brooks, whose performance is a little too on the nose in terms of annoyance.

Brooks' deadbeat Larry joins the rest of the despicable over 40, who are either crazy (like a worker in Debbie's kid's classroom, who rants about blinking and your life passing by in a thick accent), embarrassing (musician Graham Parker, playing himself, whose doomed album release Pete's label is handling, wears an Oreo hat to be interviewed), or detrimentally apathetic (John Lithgow as Debbie's father, Oliver). The youth-fixation is evident in the way that Sadie and Charlotte are set up to steal the movie with uncommon wit and a palate of emotions beyond their years and fellow characters, even though the latter is a sub-sitcom rendering of what a precocious child actually is ("I want an Asian baby!" and "I'm gonna have some freaky-ass nightmares," says the 8-year-old). All of it points to the idea that as bad as 40 is, it only gets worse.

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