A Random Battle from last week fought over why MMOs use servers to keep you from playing with your friends. I have had a couple dozen friends play City of Heroes over time, but being spread across servers was always an issue that kept us from meeting up, joining together, and keeping them from quitting. There have been previous notes that chat and auction houses go across servers in City of Heroes.
When testing server transfers, Cryptic mentioned that they are looking at a potentially server-less game, in which you can team with anyone regardless of server. I imagine this could be done either as putting everyone on one big server or allowing teams to enter instanced missions from the doors on their respective servers. The follow-up clarified that this is a “maybe, someday” idea, not a “next issue, we promise!” idea. If they do it, not in 2007.
That would be really cool. It feels a little like slipping toward Guild Wars or Diablo as a model (big joint chat room leads to instances), but if you can never have an impact on the game world anyway, why not share that game world instead of making little copies of it? Of course, if you all shared one world, you could let players influence it without worrying about maintaining story and development across divergent shards…
: Zubon
In a weird way, I’ve recently found that EQ taught me how to be a better MMORPG player. Because of The vision. No really. Stop laughing, the soda’s coming out of your nose again. Ok look, let me explain. Remember how long you camped Mitty for that gold ring? Or you class BP from Trak? Tormax’s head? Or any of a thousand separate tradeskill items in PoP? Ya, that sucked, right? But you learned to wait.
WoW isn’t like that. And that causes some grief on us old school gamers.
Continue reading ‘EverZen’
I paused reading Harry Potter about 5% of the way through. Noting that, my brain instantly translated it to “half a bub.” Dammit.
: Zubon
Yeah, some of you may know this one, some others won’t. Still, I inflict this WMD upon ye: Murloc RPG
And that’s all she wrote.
Friday night is normally my nice relax at home night, although tonight I’d planned to farm some materials for some enchants for some new gear I’d aquired. However, instead I took my kids to get their Harry Potter book at the local Borders. At least, that was my intention. Despite filling in a pre-registration form that asked for far more info than I’d ever seen for a book weeks ago, I was turned away tonight. We stood in an hour long line outside of the store only to be told our names (and phone number, which they could have used to tell us this) had been moved to a “backup hold waiting list”, whatever that might be, and that we could come in Sunday and get a book. If they had any left. Apparently “reservations” don’t mean what they used to. Came home and ordered it off Amazon like I should have in the first place.
Bad things happen when I leave WoW. Duly noted.
Conveniently, xkcd has that covered, too.
: Zubon
Going completely off-topic, a professor of my acquaintence is conducting some survey research. I thought we might be a different audience than he normally reaches, so I offered to post a link. Hence, link: SURVEY. Completing the survey enters you in a small drawing. It does not take long. To avoid biasing your answers, please do not read the comments on this post until you have taken the survey.
Thank you. And now back to our gaming blog.
: Zubon
The web is full of posts about how addictive video games are, especially MMORPGs, and especially World of WarCraft. Over the last few weeks, I’ve had ample time to play WoW as much as I’ve wanted, and I did. Continue reading ‘Yet Another Post About Addiction’