Month: April 2007

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Healing drama

Here comes one of those opinion type pieces that always get me in trouble later. Of my limited WoW time however, it’s the one that comes up the most. Every night in guild chat, and present on every board I read. So I’ll give my feedback on it. After pondering words for a while, it seems it’d be easier to simply just type out the shortest ones and go with it. So here goes – buff priests.

Ah there we go. Half of you have already tuned out. I can hear your mental gears already shifting into defense mode. You’ve got a long drawn out, probably number filled reason why priests don’t need buffage. I’ve got another one, but it has no numbers involved. It’s like my original statement, short ‘n sweet – healing sucks.

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Tell Me How Very Wrong I Am

One reason I write is to learn. We toss ideas out and see how far they go. The blog has ideas, opinions, anecdotes, questions, speculation, snark, rants, reviews, half-formed ideas, and well-considered proposals. My specialty seems to be extended ruminations that explore several aspects of an idea without necessarily going anywhere. We have many notions that could be improved by further discussion and critique.

Some posts are entirely ironic or intentionally skewed because exploring a wrong answer can shed light on the right answer. Sometimes the answer to “why isn’t anyone doing this” is “they are.” Ideas can be really dumb, tried and already failed, or pure GENIUS! If I ever work for a game developer, I expect to say, “Yep, that was 85% wrong” regularly. We keep trying new things or old things in new ways, and some of them will work. If I ever run out of bad ideas, I will probably be out of good ones too.

So thanks for contributing and critiquing. It’s your site too.

: Zubon

Guardians at the Gates 1

When I posted about barbarians at the gates last month, I did not expect the most famous one in English literature to appear in response. As it turns out, the upcoming Age of Conan has exactly what I was looking for, including PvE and PvP city-building and -defense that integrates crafting and has various sizes for big and small guilds. Ask, and the internet delivers.

My thanks to our commenters who pointed out my ignorance and cited other games doing something along these lines. Please consider this your report-out on games that have aspects of player-run, -built, or -defended cities. Add more to the comments if you think of any.

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Me-tooism, Re-blogging, and Negativity

Why have we built an internet culture that encourages negativity? If you are on a message board, replying that you agree with the original poster is often taken as pointless, content-free post-count building. Blogging “look at this great post” is sometimes described as being unable to develop worthwhile content of your own, the sort of thing you can only occasionally indulge in. If someone replies with “Great post!” there is no point to anyone doing so again, right? The only thing you can post agreement with is that someone else is wrong. You can agree with each other that someone else is an idiot.

You are only to post if you have additional content to add. Generally, that means you disagree. Even if you agree, you are extending the post away from where the original poster took it, which can easily come across as a slight in the sea of negativity.

The major exception I can think of is posting examples and stories. “Yeah, something like that happened to me one time…”

: Zubon

Wayback machine: Shiny Happy Week

Quick Hits

Peggle is fun. It’s a bright, happy arcade-style game. No, I don’t care if you can’t feel hardcore with bright colors, this is a game your kids could play, too. It’s like the Wii: my mom could play the Wii. The game gets bonus points for really wanting you to win. When you beat a level, it goes into slow motion for the final hit, and then you move into Beethoven’s Ninth and kick off the fireworks. Celebrate! Also, you get to start with a unicorn.

I did not enjoy Maple Story.

Desktop Tower Defense has a new edition out with a new enemy type, a new tower, a new challenge, fun mode, and some rebalancing. It is supposed to be harder with the new spawn enemies and point deductions for juggling, but I got my best score yet under the new rules. There was a tweak a day or two ago that I am looking forward to trying out. I am told that the 100-wave Challenge is currently impossible, but you might be just the guy to… no, those flying enemies are ridiculous.

: Zubon

Random Thoughts

It’s time for another outburst. I have not had a lot of time to play anything in depth, so I just came up with some random thoughts to share.

World of Warcraft: My wife wants Blizzard to add an option to stop earning XP. Her level 35 Hunter has 8 days /played. Mine? 4 days. She spends a lot of time talking when she could be out playing with other people instead of saving her XP for grouping with me.

Continue reading Random Thoughts