Category: General

Sometimes you hear a sentence in-game that adds no new information. It is something people say so often that saying it again creates no new knowledge in the world. In fact, only the sentence’s opposite would be notable. It isn’t always true, but at any given moment, someone will say it within the next 30 seconds:

• I hear there are going to be a bunch of nerfs in the next patch.
• There have been a lot of complaints on the boards lately.
• Some moron is babbling about nonsense in broadcast/general chat.
• Some morons are comparing e-peens in the lowbie zone.
• I hate Jack Thompson
• Did they nerf accuracy? I think they nerfed accuracy. I swear, I’m missing a lot more lately.
• My healer got another blind team invite.
• For the love of God, I am never joining another non-guild group again. This pickup group is herd of f’ing morons, I kid you not. There’s this one guy here who knows what he’s doing, and I think the rest are a bunch of twelve-year-olds on crack.
• I never get any good drops.
• Is anyone working customer service tonight? I’ve been in the queue for like an hour.
• That chick is so obviously a guy.
• I’m lagging pretty bad here. Is anyone else lagging?

Feel free to add your own examples.

: Zubon

What are some of the MMORPG companies doing to help those affected by the latest natural disaster? Well, they are trying to make it easier for their affected customers by making sure things will be like they left them in-game. If the game has housing maintenance, they are stopping the cost for now. Some games are even dropping the fees temporarily. Still others are linking to charities.

Mythic Entertainment: We’ve all got friends and family down south, and there’s a big player community down there as well. Like many of you, we’re struggling to find some small way that we can help besides the basic and obvious “donate to the Red Cross” stuff. We went through the game systems, looking for stuff that people could lose if they are unable to log in for awhile, and paying rent on the in-game houses is fortunately the only thing. We can’t suspend in-game house rent by billing address, so we’re just suspending house rent across the board for the whole game.

Sony Online Entertainment: In EverQuest II we have added the /donate command, type in /donate to be taken to the American Red Cross’s Hurricane 2005 relief page. For those members of SOE Communities in other games, you can contribute using this link, American Red Cross. The American Red Cross will process your donation and make sure that it is put to maximum use to help those whose lives have been affected by the hurricane.

Additionally, for our 13,000+ players actually in the affected areas, we will be suspending billing until such time as they are able to play again. In addition, any items or structures in any of our games, which decay over time, will be preserved until the user’s next login.

NCSoft: To show our support for the Gulf Coast victims of Hurricane Katrina, NCsoft has placed a banner to the Network for Good website on the front pages of all North American NCsoft websites.

Blizzard: Our heartfelt condolences go out to the individuals and families affected by Hurricane Katrina. We encourage everyone to assist the federal, state, and local organizations doing vital work on the ground by making a donation to the relief efforts. The Department of Homeland Security has asked that donations be made in the form of financial contributions, rather than supplies, which are difficult to get into the affected areas at this time. If you would like to make a donation to the relief efforts, please contact the American Red Cross: www.redcross.org; 1-800-HELP NOW (1-800-4357-669).

Kudos to Mythic and SOE for going the extra mile, but still more can be done. Give an incentive to players that donate, perhaps some in-game item or something. Or better yet, how about matching pledges?

Oh, here is a nice FU from Blizzard: Any player affected by the hurricane should call our Billing department to turn off their account until they power is restored. Characters and items on the accounts affected will not be removed, deleted, or changed during the time the accounts are turned off. WTF?

Anyone see something I’m missing, let me know.

Regardless, if you have the means to do something to help, whether it is a donation or something more involved, please do so. This is a terrible tragedy.

– Ethic

I’m just sayin’.

: Zubon

[Kingdom of Loathing] Don’t you hate it when you write something and it goes nowhere? My intro to this post became rambling contemplation on the various kinds of blogs, but I decided that it wasn’t all that good, so we’ll skip the foreplay and get to the topic of the post. (Would the world be a better place if, every time someone wrote something sub-par, he hit “delete” instead of “publish”? You could real all the best blogs in an hour or two.)

Shadow’s Light is a player of Kingdom of Loathing, and he was one of the testers for the endgame. Since then, he has been doing Hardcore speed runs, and he is a far better player than I am. He has been blogging since the end of his first run, tracking his daily KoL-ing. It is kind of like Hogit’s Story, in that we are following one specific person through a fictional world.

I have been reading his blog’s history, which provides great insight into what I could be doing better. KoL has rather little in-game to support community, except a clan system that does not seem to do a lot, especially for a Hardcore player. The community exists out-of-game, through forums, a radio show, and some web sites. (Oh, there is chat, but I have always avoided chat rooms so I cannot comment on it.) It is surprisingly robust for a little browser-based game in which the non-solo options involve trading buffs and items. In a world of forced grouping, you face the Kingdom of Loathing alone.

Now to be somewhat less specific to Shadow’s Light, I have realized how some others are getting through Kingdom of Loathing runs so quickly: they have spent a lot of money on the game. Well, not a lot compared to what most of us spend on MMOs, but they have donated $70+ to a nominally free game, in order to get donation rewards. I do not know how many people regularly donate or shop at the Mr. Store, but it is a nice little system that provides incentives to donate. I suppose that some of them did not donate money; they just exploited dupe bugs long long ago and have been trading stacks of in-game cash for others’ donation rewards. Donating $10 every month or two to support a game you enjoy is not a bad thing, and maybe I should have sent more donations (I did so once before I knew there were rewards, once after). It is just surprising to see tips that recommend using, say, 3 Mr. Accessories ($10 each), a Coffee Pixie and/or Cheshire Bat ($20 each), Wax Lips for that pet ($10), maybe a Pygmy Bugbear Shaman ($10) or an Inflatable Dodecapede ($10? $20?). That is a lot to spend on a free game.

: Zubon

I have been away from my home for over a month now, visiting family down in Texas. Before you ask, don’t! It’s hot and hellish.

Anyway, it has been a month since I have touched an MMO. After playing MMOs almost continuously for several years, a month break was a frightening venture. It has however turned out to be quite refreshing. I have had time to ponder many things in the realm of game design and how the social implications of MMOs bounce and react to real life group behavior. I would suggest it to anyone who has not had a break in some time.

Anyway, I fly back to Los Angeles on Wednesday. I previously tried WoW and it was not my bag really. However, a good friend of mine has been playing and really likes it, so I may pick it up again and play a little with him. I never really gave it much of a chance before so I plan on playing more than three hours this time.

Four at least! :)

-Spot

If you are a practioner of the nerdly arts (I just recent received the rank of Grand Poobah Nerd from my local lodge) then you will appreciate this: Ninja Radio.

The intermingling of anime, J-pop and video game themes is so beautifully cobbled together into a play list that I believe I experienced an autoerotic nerdgasm.

Initial D 4th Stage theme FTW!

ringthree

Monkey Ninja Pirate Robot Online. Too bad it has not been made yet. I’d buy it.

Until then, we have the non-MMO version to play.

– Ethic

[World of Warcraft] I pose a question to our readers. A simple question that I will use as the basis of my next post.

What is different about WoW that has caused it to get so many subscribers?

A plain question, but one that has many answers. 3.5 million subscribers is more than any MMO ever. What about WoW has caused this explosion? Is it sustainable? Was the MMO market truely such an untapped resource? Are we the new Korea (including the millions of players dying in front of their computers after 60 hour marthon sessions)?

Thanks ahead of time for you input, and I can’t wait to tell you how wrong you all are! ^^

ringthree

[World of Warcraft] Well I have been busy. You know how it is, playing day in, day out. Well, just recently there was an 18 hour downtime for physical server maintence to the Final Fantasy XI servers. These happen about 3 times a year and since I knew it was coming I was planning to play WoW for a little while. I should have just read my new Harry Potter book…

In the time that I was playing, I would say about 3 hours, the game crashed out to the desktop two times, and the freaking server went down! Just my server… How often does crap like this happen? I mean the game crashes to the desktop with some regularity, so the software appears to be a little unstable. But how can just one server crash? Not all the servers but just one! If this is something that happens as often as I hear how do people play this game?

Maybe it was a bad day, but with Blizzard’s track record on “stability,” I dont think that is likely. Blizzard needs to stop giving empty promises of what is coming and get some people working on the “stability” thing. Every time they add something new the game becomes less stable. I mean have you ever stopped to read the patch notes for most items? Its not new things they are adding, its all fixes. Why release a game that has so many problems?

I understand that a company as big as Blizzard can have people working on content AND stability. This is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the stability of the new content. Any time new content is released the next three patches are fixes for the new content. If they had just kept the content for those three weeks and fixed it on the test servers then I would be a happy lad.

No more empty promises. Test your crap before you release it! Know what the issues are before you dump them on the players base. Everything with Blizzard is “rush it to the public, it doesn’t matter if it works, the hype machine solves all ills!”

Oh and my guess is that you are not going to see an expansion anytime soon OR you are going to get an expansion but you wont want it… neither of these are good options.

ringthree

One of my life-long friends is moving across the country soon. This last weekend we had a going-away party for him. Quite a few people there I had not seen in a long time, like since high school.

It turned out to be a blast because several of these are the ones that first introduced me to RPGs. We talked about gaming all night, even dipping into MMORPGs for a bit. It was strange for me to be able to talk openly with other people about MMORPGs because most people I mention them to stare at me with that “what the hell is he talking about?” blank face. They just don’t get it.

Mostly they are playing Neverwinter Nights on a private server and they invited me to join them. I’m sure I will at some point. They also talked a lot about City of Heroes. This is not suprising to me as a few of them got together and ran a comic book shop for several years right after high school graduation. World of Warcraft? Guild Wars? Everquest 2? They’ve heard of them, but have no interest in playing any of them. Dungeons & Dragons Online? Their eyes glossed over and they started drooling. Major excitement and interest in hearing more.

Really, I was just shocked to sit at a party of regular folks and discuss video games all night. Crazy.

– Ethic