Month: April 2010

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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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Guild Wars 5th Anniversary Pre-Party

Yesterday the celebration for the 5th Anniversary of Guild Wars began to start off the week-long celebration.  The festivities ramp up with prized Birthday Cupcakes dropping from mobs at the start, and today the Shing Jea Boardwalk opens up for all those waiting to stand in one of nine rings and drink booze.  Also, some lucky few will get their 5th Birthday gifts today.  I am pretty sure my main guy will be getting his Monday or Tuesday, and after four years of common gifts, he deserves a rare.

I want to call it a pre-party though not only because April 28th is the actual anniversary for Guild Wars but I believe there will be more to come.  The interesting thing is no one really knows for sure.  When the prelude to the 4th Anniversary hit we were given a massive list of content updates.  The current celebration site gives no hint of “and more to come next week!” or anything like that.  At the very least, I thought the War in Kryta might culminate to some point around the 5th Anniversary.  The Community Managers have been tight-lipped with regard to any possible event that might occur next week.

Continue reading Guild Wars 5th Anniversary Pre-Party

The Blog Unsubscribing

There are two ways blogs die.  The most common is for the blogger to simply stop posting.  Sure, the activity seemed fun for the first five or so times, but then it felt like work.  There is another way.  A darker way.  It’s when the blogger has decided something important.  Something that changes things.  Suddenly the articles and stories the readers were used to become overshadowed by the other thing. 

In our little arena, if a blogger merely switches games people will unsubscribe but the blog is not dying.  One good example is when Syncaine at Hardcore Casual became a Darkfall crusader.  Post after post was filled with Darkfall ambushes, tactics, and alliances.  I did not unsub from the RSS feed because I love stories coming from sandbox-style MMOs and it is an excellent blog, but I am sure some people (read: WoW tourists, wink, wink) did.  He has since come back around to providing healthy, acidic commentary on other games, but will those that unsub’d come back?  That is the biggest determination I have to make when I unsubscribe from a blog.  Do I ever want to come back?

Continue reading The Blog Unsubscribing

Dear Quickfoot Cat Burglar

BoomI infiltrated your warehouse the other day and, well, perhaps I shouldn’t be saying this but I think you guys are getting some bad advice. You see, some of the barrels in your warehouse are rather clearly labeled as “Explosive Barrel” and yet each and every last one of you chose to stand right next to one. I mean, even though it made it quite enjoyable to put you guys out of business, you might find more success standing next the the plain old “barrel” next time.

Not that I can blame you, your boss was standing between 2 explosive barrels.

Respectfully,

– Ethic

Interview with ArenaNet’s Chris Lye

I had the chance to ask ArenaNet’s Global Brand Director, Chris Lye, a few questions about marketing in MMOs.  Chris talked about dreams, demons, and marketing the Guild Wars series, and he was kind enough to drop a nice big Guild Wars 2 bite.  Check out the full interview after the break!

At gamer events, how do you describe your job to people?

Basically “Marketing Guy” gets the point across. Alas, people seem to have a very narrow (and dim) view of marketing – usually they think it’s just the ads. However, to do marketing right, especially for an MMO, it’s about building customer relationships – so I’m also responsible for ArenaNet’s website and the community team. Continue reading Interview with ArenaNet’s Chris Lye

Pony Revenue

More people bought it without the queue, and more will, but we know that at least 140,000 people bought the sparkly pony. At $25 each, that is $3.5 million. There are costs to making it, dealing with billing, etc., but we’ll ignore those along with the people not in the 140,000. For the moment, I just want to help you get an idea of how much money they already got for the sparkly pony, since most of us have trouble visualizing numbers like $3,500,000.

Take all the money you have, including all your savings, your retirement fund, and any equity in your house. Now add in everything you are going to earn at work for the next ten years. It’s probably more than that.

: Zubon

Walk to Mordor ARG

Thanks to Merric and Goldenstar at the weekly podcast, A Casual Stroll to Mordor, I learned about this prety cool “reality overlay” for people getting in shape for the summer can use to make walking and running a little more fun.  Eowyn Challenge has a mile by mile breakdown of Frodo’s journey in Lord of the Rings.  People can then match up their daily walking or running distance and chart it with the location of Frodo.  My Lord of the Rings Online kinship is doing this as a group journey where people are buying pedometers to track their journeys to Rivendell.  Not often does the fantasy or MMO fringe intersect with physical fitness, but I think this is a great way to get motivated.  Good luck to all participating!

–Ravious

Multi-Purpose

American Red Cross Donate blood. If you can, you ought. Fewer people die, and the survivors share your blood type, so you will have more people around who are potential donors for you. It’s win-win. You also get a cookie.

As part of their social media, the American Red Cross site has avatars for download. Most of them are variations on “I gave” and “please give,” but note the avatar to the left. I don’t know about your favorite FPS, but in Team Fortress 2, everyone I kill gets an image of the kill along with my name and avatar. Now with every headshot I can show off my civic spirit, encourage others to donate blood, and taunt my enemies. I am also thinking of changing my spray to one of the “give blood” avatars, to decorate the enemy base.

: Zubon

Reverse Collector’s Edition

Like any good subject, Blizzard’s latest online purchase for World of Warcraft, the Celestial Steed (i.e., the Sparklepony) created a lot of back and forth commentary around the blogosphere.  Thankfully, some clarity poked through the clouds.  Guild Wars also released another buyable costume set for the War in Kryta chapter of Guild Wars Beyond.  Parallel discussions of item-worth, self-worth, happiness, and greed occurred on all affected forums.

Yet, when a collector’s edition for an untried, over-hyped (read: untrue) MMO drops for $30 more than the commoner’s edition, there is barely a peep.  It seems that collector’s editions can contain nearly any in-game bonus, and unless it provides game breaking balance issues, the bonuses are merely seen as value added to the collector’s edition.

Continue reading Reverse Collector’s Edition

Breaking Your Game’s Economy

in one easy step!

Following Tobold’s link to NanoStar Siege, one of the other games from that company is NanoTowns. There are a variety of these on Facebook, usually Farmville clones with a different graphics theme, although this one is interesting in that it does not have the standard formula of “click 20 times then wait 12 hours to harvest.” It instead is the sort of thing where you do a lot of clicking every five minutes, and you use the resources you gather to complete “quests” like “Could you get me some fries?” If you have a large enough city, you can presumably keep clicking indefinitely once it starts taking more than five minutes to go through your city.

nacho1 And then I bought a taco stand. I suspect there is decimal place error, because it costs less to make it NOW than to wait five minutes. Maybe they meant it to be 550. And it sells for 29% more than it costs to make it. If only the game had a multi-create or multi-sell, this would be an infinite money loop. As it is, it is a tediously long positive sum money loop that requires many many many clicks. There does not seem to be a limit to how many times you can click; you can see that I went as far as 70 wondering if it would stop.

nacho2 Oh, this isn’t good. You can start it up and then hurry the completion. Hurrying the completion gives you money back. The game is not really sure how to feel about that; it gives you the money then fails to hurry completion. You can then exit that window and re-hurry. Smaller profit, fewer clicks, two nigh-infinite money loops in one!

And if anything brings home the gameplay of the standard Facebook game, it is “tediously click here for as long as you like to watch your numbers increase.” Kind of like ProgressQuest without the “fire and forget” feature.

: Zubon