a group of adventurers on an epic quest
[City of Heroes] All changes to the game are done for a reason. Changes cannot happen on their own, so someone must consciously implement them. Today’s puzzle for you: why was the following change made?
All Confusion effects are now stripped from a character when they zone.
Answer after the break.
I stumbled upon a pretty good FFXI music video this weekend, and it reminded me that I have not seen many gaming music videos lately, except of course for WoW-Avenue Q. Good ones, I mean; I stopped looking for them after a run of badly shot PvP videos set to heavy metal (you can find your own examples).
Aladora made some really great DAoC videos, including Hero before it appeared in several dozen City of Heroes videos. I am told that she went on to do some who knows what else; toss a link in the comments if you know anywhere that has archived her excellent work (I still have quite a few saved). What are some of your favorites out there, recent or not?
: Zubon
In case you had not heard, World of Warcraft has 6.6 million subscribers. That works out to about $99,000,000/month in revenue. Here is a picture of how that makes other, hugely successful games look like a bunch of chumps.
Think about that for a moment. 0.1% of the planet plays World of Warcraft. The entire population of the planet Earth, including Tibetan monks, tribesmen on the plains, researchers in Antarctica, and the Amish: 1 in 1000 people plays World of Warcraft.
: Zubon
[Kingdom of Loathing] Last week, I finished my sixth hardcore oxygenarian ascension in the Kingdom of Loathing, completing my set of plexiglass items. At the end of the next run, I was finally able to put them all on. As a great actor once said, “Whoa.” I look forward to indulging in plexiglass garb fully once I finish my complete set of 102 hardcore ascensions, probably sometime in 2008. 2008?!
[EVE Online] I just read this over on the EVE forums. In just one day (granted it is open beta) China surpassed all previous concurrent records for EVE Online. The previous record was around 26,000 people playing in a single gameworld.
CCP Games, the game’s Icelandic developer, today announced that more than 30,000 users were concurrently playing in a single gameworld, which it claims is a new world record. In the first day, more than 200,000 people registered for the game. The Chinese version of the game is run by Optic Communications and runs independently of the Western edition of EVE Online.
June 14 Update: 33,000 PCU (Peak Concurrent Users) and now up to more than 360,000 registrations.
- Ethic
[Guild Wars] Our guild in Guild Wars is growing at Blizzard-like speeds, 400% in just a week. Fine, we have 4 people now. If you want to join us, in Prophecies or Factions, send me an email telling me your character name and I will invite you, or leave it in the comments if you prefer. You do not need to be online in order to be invited.
We have characters in many levels and in both games. If you just want to goof off and aren’t concerned about levels, come join us. We only want to have fun and don’t care about XP or who wins a PvP battle. We will be buying a cape soon and when we can afford it we will get a hall too.
| www.flickr.com |
- Ethic
As I close in on 60 with my first WoW character, I’ve of course started a small army of alts. There’s the token overpowered-class-I-didn’t-pick, which always happens. Greener grass and all that. Also I picked a healer class, because somewhere, deep inside, I live to bandage people I guess. Also, I have the normal stealth alt, the one next to no one knows about, where I can go when I want to “get away”. As I look at my character selection screen, I begin to wonder why so many of us deliberately do this to ourselves.
Does everyone get spam in Chinese and Japanese these days? Maybe half of these are ads for gold in WoW. It only happens to my blogging address, which is a Japanese word/phrase (depending on which version you have). My normal address just gets the normal spam every two minutes, with hot wet teen Nigerian royalty telling me I have already won all-natural herbal mortgage refinancing from lesbian tentacle-rape warnings that my PayPal account has been compromised. For all I know, the Japanese e-mail says the same thing, but I don’t want to know what the kanji for that sentence would look like. Also, sorry about setting off every alarm on your work internet filter.
: Zubon
I recently had a bit of a conversation with a friend of mine who is a producer at a game development community, and the topic was religion. There were two main threads to the chat…the first was about the use (and misuse) of religion and religious symbology in games, and the second was about making “Christian” games. Religion is one of those topics people don’t like to discuss, along with politics, mostly because people can be quite passionate about them and when you have individuals with differing views, things can get a bit out of hand…in my experience, this is because strong point of views (both in religion and politics) are usually the product of how someone has been raised, or indoctrination in the higher education system. Very rarely will you find a person who has strong beliefs, and can tell you WHY they believe so strongly. It is even rarer to find someone that can have a DISCUSSION about differing views without things turning into an arguement. Anyway, back to games…
[City of Villains] Many former City of Heroes/Villains players were invited back for a free weekend of play, not that Issue 7 is out. My verdict from the test server: “Once all the major bugs are worked out, this will be exciting.”
Having had several days to play with it, my new verdict: “Once all the major bugs are worked out, this will be exciting.”