Monthly Archive for April, 2010

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Guild Wars Beyond

Posted by Ravious on April 16, 2010 in Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. 4 Comments

Gamespot has a good interview with the Guild Wars Live Team’s Linsey Murdock.  While the updates have been rolling in for awhile now, the interview helps to re-focus what is actually going on.  And, what is actually going on?  A new campaign has started titled ‘Guild Wars Beyond.’  This campaign will start to wrap up, and also advance, much of the lore of the original Guild Wars to set the stage for Guild Wars 2 with ongoing updates throughout the year.  It starts, obviously, by looking at the human side of things because in Guild Wars 2 the human nation is Kryta and the human hero is Logan Thackeray.  This first chapter gives some good answers as to how we get there about 250 years later.

It is important to note that anybody that wants to wait, for whatever silly reason, should be able to experience all these additions as well when they chose to join in.  In other words, these additions are not merely temporary stemming from some passing event.

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Upgrading Function, Keeping Fluff

Posted by Zubon on April 16, 2010 in World of Warcraft. 7 Comments

You may have heard something about a shiny pony. One thing I like is that you can keep the same mount your entire career. How many games let you improve the function while keeping the appearance? Fluff and stats should be entirely separable aspects, hence the glory of the now-common appearance tabs. If you really like how your first horse looks, it would be nice to be able to keep it and just have it run faster. You can even force the player to pay for the privilege, but don’t force fluff changes for function upgrades.

Okay, this is more than I was expecting in the sense of “pay for the privilege”…

: Zubon

Misery’s Peak

Posted by Ethic on April 15, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 12 Comments

Last night was Day 2 (or Week 2?) of Massively’s Nights of Eberron. Last week was fun but perhaps a bit disorganized.

During the week off, I took my Cleric out back and had him shot, to be replaced with a Ranger. I spent some time getting him back up to level 2 so he would be ready to go. Even still, I had a lot of things to learn. For example, how to use a quiver. It’s not obvious. It kind of works like a bag. You equip it and then you open it and put your arrows in it. However, not all quivers are alike. The two varieties I could find for sale at a vendor are called “narrow” and “wide”. They both can hold 1,200 arrows (that’s a big quiver!). The “wide” quiver can hold 6 types of arrows, with a maximum of 200 each type. The narrow can hold 3 types of arrows, with a maximum of 400 each. Since I only had 2 types of arrows I opted for the “narrow” quiver so I could hold 400 of the arrows I’m using right now.

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DDO and Super Rewards, Part 3

Posted by Ethic on April 14, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 4 Comments

Ravious has hit his quota of DDO posts so I’ve been forced to do the final update on the “Saga of Super Rewards”.

Marketroid posted a “final” update on the story here. The important part may be this:

Based on your feedback, we’re stepping away from the ‘Offer’ category for now. We’ll keep exploring alternate ways for players who want points to get them. We’ll also continue to innovate in pricing and accessibility because that’s who we are. As of today, the Offer Wall is coming down. We’ll collect all the feedback we’ve received over the last few days and will use it to guide future decisions.

Follow the link above to read the rest. In my opinion this should have never gotten off the ground floor but at they did a pretty decent job of responding to the player base (and finally responding to the security complaints). And hey, at least they didn’t charge folks 21 times for the last month. Bazinga!

- Ethic

DDO – Kobold Genocide

Posted by Ravious on April 14, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 9 Comments

In defiance, I played Dungeons and Dragons Online last night.  The Docks and Marketplace seemed oddly calm given the storm of chaos that blew through alternate worlds earlier in the day.  A little shing-shing to get the dust off of my dual khopeshes, and I was ready to roll.  One nice thing about Dungeons and Dragons Online is it promotes a very arcade-like wholesale slaughter of mook mobs.  This is where kobolds come in.  There is nothing mookier than the little reptile-weasel humanoids.  Their existence practically begs for a gibbing.

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DDO and Super Rewards, Part 2

Posted by Ravious on April 13, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 5 Comments

Via the Boss Man in Comment 1:

The latest: “We’re currently investigating the reports of privacy concerns with our new Offer Wall. That feedback has been escalated to our partners for deeper investigation. Until that investigation is complete we’ve taken the Super Rewards option out of the Offer Wall. We’ll let you know when we have more information!”

http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=2893059&postcount=116

Patience sent out a decent post on the DDO forum (thanks Ethic) regarding the shadiness of the whole thing.  It sounds like they have some really strict guidelines, which just weren’t fully in effect at launch.  (But, what is ever is fully in effect at an MMO launch, lololol… /sad)  Anyway, it is good that Turbine quickly responded, and I hope against hope that the filters will be enough to make it a decent option.  Forum posts are reporting that most offers require more real purchases, such as Netflix or buying shoes online.  Still, please be aware that the email linked to your Turbine account still seems to pass through the internet unencrypted.

DDO and Super Rewards

Posted by Ravious on April 13, 2010 in Dungeons & Dragons Online. 17 Comments

Yesterday Turbine dropped an unexpected announcement on the Dungeons and Dragons Online players.  They have made a deal with the company Super Rewards to provide another way for players to receive the cash shop points for Dungeons and Dragons Online.  It’s quite simple really.  Head on over to the Offer Wall to find current promotions along with the amount of Turbine Points a player would gain from doing the task.  It is great Turbine is finding another way to enjoy the game where points can be bought, earned in game, and now given via the Offer Wall.  The positives mostly end there.

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My Little Pony Tower Defense

Posted by Zubon on April 13, 2010 in Flash Games. 4 Comments

The challenge game of the week at Kongregate is a tower defense game with a backstory about galactic conflict, war, billions dead, yaddah yah. At some point, you realize that the waves of purple stuff are the Smooze from My Little Pony: The Movie, which kind of gives the entire game a different feeling. I choose to believe the red dots are flutterponies.

: Zubon

We Rule – Quick Review

Posted by Ravious on April 12, 2010 in General. 1 Comment

Against some rational part of my brain, I started playing the free game We Rule on the iPod this weekend.  I doubt the game will make it through the month on my device, but for how my weekends generally run it is a great, MMO-like dalliance.  Here is a really quick review for anybody interested.  Note that I have not played Farmville, so there will not be any comparisons to that and other Facebook games.

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Mission Maker

Posted by Suzina on April 12, 2010 in General and Star Wars: Galaxies. 11 Comments

I resubscribed to Star Wars Galaxies to try the new content that has been added since I last played. I remember reading the press release about one of the features which had been added called “Chronicle Master”. Apparently, it was like the mission creator system they used to talk about having in 2003. The press release claimed that over three million quests were made the first month. Considering SWG’s last reported subscriber numbers, that’s a lot of quests! One individual even created over 6,000 quests that month.

So now that I’ve had a chance actually try this system, I can say that SOE didn’t make anything worth bragging about. The reason an individual would create thousands of quests in a month is because everyone who wants to make cool quests has to grind for hours before they’re allowed to make anything worth doing. Almost all of the quests I’ve made have been made using a mouse recording program while I was asleep. Anyone that made six thousand quests in four weeks probably did the same thing. Every single one of those quests is as engaging as you imagine.

Why is that developers put in massive grinds into these things? I know they want me to play longer, but the ability to find well written player content would keep me playing a lot longer than a massive grind.