Who should pay for maternity leave?

Traditionally, it had been the women who paid for it, either by leaving work, or by returning to work after a month, at the cost of time together with the newborn.

In the 2004 Marriage and Parenthood package, 12 weeks of paid maternity leave was provided. The first 8 weeks paid by the employer, and the last 4 weeks paid by the government. This was a very encouraging move for working mothers and mothers-to-be. However, it almost immediately started to rear its ugly head, that pregnant women were unjustifiably laid off, or many small companies were reluctant to hire newly wed or women of a child-bearing age.

Small companies versus Large corporations

While activists may condemn small companies for their actions, they should also take a look at the situation from their perspective. Small companies may live on the edge of their profit margins. With a small headcount, every employee is needed all the time. With the current trends where employees tend to stay only one to three years at any given job, three months of paid leave seem an eternity, especially when the employer has no choice but to find a replacement, doubling their financial burden. And what replacement would only want to work for 3 months?

Anyone who has worked in a large multinational company, or in the public service will probably be aware that the problem is significantly less pronounced. Women working in large companies and in public service seem to face less issue with pregnancy and maternity leave. Large multinational companies are also less frequently guilty of wrongfully dismissing mothers-to-be.

A matter of perspective is probably another reason why there is such a difference between small and large organizations. The issue is that many large organizations have been around for generations. They can take the long view that a newly added member to society will one day grow into a consumer. Their large workforce may take the burden of women taking maternity leave in the same percentage as a small company, but it is evenly spread out throughout the year, in various departments, so it can have a less critical impact.

Small businesses may not even see where they will be in a decade, much less a whole generation away. They do not feel like true stakeholders in population growth because they cannot tangibly see the results, leading to another push factor.

Employment in Singapore moving ever so slightly away from a dependence of large multinational companies, due to a lot of these companies relocating to other parts of Asia as a result of them no longer being such a culture shock and a hardship posting anymore. It would be small and medium-sized enterprises (SME), that pick up the employment shortfall into the future.

A case for the government to pay

Let us look at how much the Ministry of Defence pays for our boys in green. For the 2 years of full-time National Service, the servicemen are paid about half or a third of what they are likely to be making if they were working. This is equivalent of 8 months of a young person’s working wages.

The servicemen are then required to serve 10 years of reservist training. Averaging to about two weeks a year, three if they were key appointment holders or officers. This can and do last up to the age of 40. Which means that the Ministry of Defence is paying two weeks of the wages of men who are 38-40, every single year. I daresay that an average 38 year old’s wages is possibly double that of a similar worker at 23.

All in all, the Ministry of Defence pays a minimum of 13 months of a serviceman’s wages over those 10 years. At least five or more of those months to employers to help them support the National Service. The role of the Singapore Armed Forces is to act as a deterrent to hostile forces abroad, and also to reassure Singaporeans that their defence is taken seriously.

Traditionally, men have been the bread-winners of our society, and in order for the National Service system to work, the government pays employers the wages of their employees during those times of training. The same mindset must be taken for women now, because women employment is increasingly becoming critical to our nationhood.

On one hand, it will show that the government is serious about women’s equality in the workplace. The amount paid to employers over the 10+ years of National Service can be equated to a minimum of 6 months of maternity leave paid during the lifetime of a Singaporean woman. That is the minimum of two child’s worth of maternity leave.

Will it work?

The first question would be, where would the money come from? The same might have been asked about the money for the National Service. Nothing could be more true to the commitment of Total Defence than the supporting of Singaporeans having the next generation of citizens. If the Ministries have ever argued about who should pick up the tab for this, then they do not deserve their million dollar pays. The Singapore Armed Forces protects our trade, finance, manpower, culture, art and our home, but their budget is fully borne by the Ministry of Defence. Likewise, higher childbirth will benefit all aspects of the our society, so the burden needs to be shared.

Ask any woman planning to have children whether they would rather work for a small company or a large company or public service, and you are likely to hear the latter.This move would come some way to equalizing the two types of organizations. With the cost savings, it might discourage some large companies from relocating elsewhere in Asia, and it would relief a burden from smaller companies as they do not get hit twice or thrice by an employee going on long leave. While there are still many large organizations employing women in Singapore, the urgency may not be there yet, but it definitely a necessary step when that balance tips.

Whether this would encourage women to have more children or not is beyond me. It would ease one of their worries about their employaibility.

Aion: Tower of Eternity – One month in

I have not written anything for a while because I have been quite busy with work, and also, quite busy playing games. Over a month into Aion, I have officially finished the month and a week that comes with pre-order and buying the game. I am currently into my first game time card.

I shall talk about each part of the Aion game as I have gone through them in my Beta articles.

Character Customization
The NA/EU game was launched with patch 1.5, which increased the variety of looks to include more Western style faces and stocky dwarf body types. Which was pretty cool. I made a fat guy with fiery red hair and beard, and a nice pink alcoholic skin.

Unfortunately most of the player base still made pretty standard looking characters, just varying in size.This means that it is still quite hard to tell players apart from their looks. Of course, there are also a handful of absolute freaks of nature. The high level plate armour turns out to be quite bulky, making the players look a little like Space Marines, which can be quite nice.

Class
I think there are pretty big issues with class viability balance. This is 1v1 PvP type of balance, but whether classes are needed/wanted for certain types of content.

The main problem is that the class role allocation for this game is quite old fashioned. The Holy Trinity: Tanking, Healing and Damage is overly dominated by one class each. This is rather unfortunate considering that over the years, games have successfully spread the load of such roles around to multiple classes. World of Warcraft has successfully spread the load of tanking to quite a number of class archetypes, and Age of Conan has forced the requirement of all 3 classes of healers for a raid situation. In Aion PvE, you pretty much only need 3 classes: Templar, Cleric and Sorceror.

The Templar has so many more tools for tanking compared to the next class Gladiator, who while able to tank perhaps 80%-90% of the content of the game, the fact that the Templar is able to do it so much easier makes it an automatic choice. People would rather sit around waiting for a Templar than to run with a Gladiator, while others have proven that Gladiators can tank certain content sufficiently well.

The Chanter’s healing does not come anywhere close to that of a Cleric. To a point that there is de facto only one choice of a healer class. Chanters are relegated to near passive buffing.

Assassins, Gladiators, Chanters, Spirit Masters and Rangers damage do not come anywhere close to making up for the fact that the Sorceror has multiple Crowd Control spells that are quite useful in an elite zone. A Sorceror can CC two mobs while the Templar tanks one. This takes away the role of Off-Tank and Off-Healers, effectively keeping them out of groups.

Even in PvP, the CC removal ability lies with the Cleric, so it is better to have two Clerics than to have a Cleric and a Chanter. The Sorceror has so many CCs that it is quite pointless to consider any other class for the CCing role. The Ranger CCs are lack lustre compared to the Sorceror’s. Most of the other classes are then limited to a one-trick pony style of play in PvP. The Chanter for their buffs, the Gladiators with their AoE damage, the Spirit Masters with their AoE fear, the Rangers in aerial combat, and the Assassin in stealth combat.

While the Templars can tank and damage, the Clerics can heal, damage and CC, and the Sorcerors can CC, damage and can get themselves out of trouble. The bias is quite obvious.

Graphics
While closed beta and open beta ran smoothly in terms of graphics, the live version of the game has some serious flaws. Basically, the CrySystem.dll crash. The game, being build on the 6 year old CryEngine 1 in 32-bit, is showing its age. Ironically, it is the machines that have more than 2gb of physical ram that is affected by this problem. Once your client hits the roof of rendering 2gb of graphics, it crashes. This means that people are crashing in the main cities, and during sieges. Which makes vital parts of the game unplayable for many people.

This is a game breaking issue, and if not resolved soon, will leave Aion on the scrap pile like many other MMOs. I waxed lyrical about how everything works in Aion during the beta, well, this does not work in live.

Leveling
There are several issues with leveling, they are kinda interrelated as well.

Firstly, grouping with people too far away in level puts a big hit on the Exp gained. When I say too far, I mean 3-5 or more levels apart. The issue is that it is still within the level range allowed to do certain content, but if the level difference is too far apart, the Exp hit is quite discouraging. This is the first disincentive to grouping, considering that grouping is vital to this game.

Secondly, mob and player resistance to damage is too great when there is a level difference. At about 5 or more levels higher, I only do half damage to the mobs, much less in PvP. Levels means everything in PvPvE. If you are higher level, you will do more damage, suffer less damage and will get most of the rewards. The problem is obvious when a single level 45 player can kill entire groups of level 3x players with impunity. A level 38 player can kill level 2x players by the dozens. The side effect of level dominance is that everyone then wants to level quickly, which leads to people not wanting to help lower level legion-mates because their time is better served leveling. This is detrimental to grouping, and also to the community building. One of the fun things I did in Age of Conan was when five of us in our late 3x managed to kill a level 80 assassin. That is impossible in Aion. 5 levels apart and you stand zero chance.

The last thing is, of course, the grind. It does get extremely grindy, with 90% of the level 40s needed to be grinded out, instead of quested. I can accept grinding, many traditional MMO players can, but if you couple the need to grind with the absolute dominance of level in PvP, then you create an issue of people wanting to grind instead of PvP. The “I will do this when I am max level” mentality.

This has two side effects, one of which is that people bot their level grinding. There are lots of bots in the game. To a point where it is sometimes hard to find real players. The situation is very bad and is putting off a lot of players. There is some action beginning to be taken by GMs with regards to botting, but in certain zones, you are likely to come across 5-8 bots before you come across a real player. That is very bad for player morale.

The other side effect is again that it discourages grouping up for quests. The positive and negative feedback loops in this game is very poorly implemented. The elite content is risky and expensive when you die, and the rewards are scant. The Exp is lacklustre to a point that it is better to mindless grind on mobs, mindless to a point of being a bot. If this risk versus reward situation is not addressed, it will just exacerbate the situation of botting and questing.

Combat
Currently, as it stands, ranged classes have a much greater advantage over melee classes. This is because the ranged classes all have CCs and the melee classes do not have comparitively as much snares, roots and stumbles that they need to keep up with kiting PvP. The problem is exacerbated in aerial combat, especially when the Z-axis range is quite buggy for melee combat.

This is a common problem with MMORPG PvP balance, and it would be good if NCSoft makes the right noises that it understands the problem and will address it, which it has not.

Crafting
Crafting is expensive, largely because it is a market controlled by players. Players sell materials for too high a price, and many crafters sell crafted items for too low a price. I cannot put my finger exactly on why people do that. Either many crafters are buying in-game currency and are funding their material buying spree with the ill-gotten kinah, or tha many crafters are failing at simple mathematics and just selling their crafted items cheaply in a desperate hope to recoup some kinah. My guess is that it is somewhere inbetween, which creates a little vicious cycle where legitimate crafters are stuck inbetween.

It also means that there is money to be made exploiting crafters by playing the Trader Broker market.

Economy
I said that the economy might just work. Well, I made those assumptions without considering the effects that in-game currency buying would have. The high cost of living in the game should, in theory keep inflation in check, but it appears that it has limited effect in that area, because player sold items are still too expensive for legitimate players to afford. I have no idea how much RMT and botting plays a part in this but I suspect that it is not small.

Gold spamming was a massive problem for the first month of the game. Chat channels were completely dominated by gold spam that people had to spend a good few minutes blocking players every single time they logged on. The GMs have taken some action, but it still exists albeit to a lesser extent. Gold sellers open stores in the main cities advertising their websites with impunity for days, and no action is taken against them.

The Abyss and Fortress Sieges
The problem with factional PvP games is that it is very likely for servers to have completely lopsided player population. This leads to near complete dominance of open PvP zones and PvP content. It creates a domino effect of demoralizing the weaker faction, leading the people opting for grinding levels over PvP, and people quitting the game or defecting to the dominating side. If the situation does not improve quickly, this over dominance will lead to player exodus, both on the losing and the winning side as the feeling of a lack of challenge sets in.

I am in a server where the other faction completely dominates PvP. They own 44% of the abyss and the Balaur 56%. Yes, my faction owns 0%. Ocassionally we can muster enough to take one of the lower Fortresses, but they would very likely take it back within days.

Rifting
I enjoyed rifting in the betas, where the level limit meant that we could spend lots of time doing fun stuff. Unfortunately, that did not translate to live servers. People are too busy leveling up that they do not want to rift. I have not gotten any rift groups to do any of my Spy quests. One can level safely in Eltnen/Morheim because no one wants to rift into them. With the global chat channels, defenders can organize themselves quickly which also discourages rifting.

This is slowly changing as many players reach their mid-40s. Facing an uphill grind for Exp, they have started to rift into Heiron/Belusia. It is also quite rewarding as there are a ton of bots in both of these zones for free Abyss points. The smaller number of players also mean that defence is harder to organize. Level 3x questing in these zones can do nothing to hurt the level 4x rifting through. It is not ideal, but at least it is exciting as it was designed to be.

Instanced Dungeons
These are a mixed bag. Nochsana Training Group a level 25-28 dungeon is so overwelmingly rewarding in Exp that players have almost no reason doing any other sort of Exp gaining during those levels. The later dungeons like Fire Temple and Steel Rake, are relatively much harder dungeons, with severe risk of dying, and quite rare rewards. The rewards are great but not reliable. This is one example of NCSoft’s failure to balance positive and negative feedback loops. I reckon that the Soul Healing penalty for dying in these dungeons should be reduced to encourage more daring play. Currently, players wait for hours for an “ideal” group. Legions refuse to PuG the dungeons, etc. I have no problems with difficult content, but it should not discourage grouping.

Conclusions at this stage
I think Aion has impressed as many people as it has disappointed. For many, like myself, there is this nagging feeling of not having much to look forward to when logging into the game. It becomes a case of sitting around waiting for the right group to form to do something that you need doing. I think while this game enforces grouping, it also does a lot to discourage grouping. Players are beginning to realize how thread-bare the game is. An unbalanced PvP system too dependent on levels and zergs seems to put many people off. While that may be fixed when the vast majority of players reach level 50, the steep leveling grind may mean that servers may not have a chance to see that happen.

I am still undecided whether to subscribe beyond this month’s game time card. There are adrenalin pumping moments, but there are still a lot of issues for the developers to work out. Several game breaking issues plague Aion at the moment: the CrySystem.dll crashes, the imbalanced factions on servers, the bots and gold sellers/buyers, the poor implementation of a risk versus reward system, the dominance of levels.

Thankfully, there are a slew of single player games that are capturing my attention at the moment: Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins. Has the video game market come full circle back to single player games? If MMORPG developers do not shape up, it might just happen. The MMORPG player base is blase and bored with what is on offer. Developers need to up their game, not just in creating the game, but in maintaining and balancing the game. There seems to be a disconnect between the discerning players and the developers. There might still be hope in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Guild Wars 2, but I will look at them with my cynical eye when they get closer.