About as long as it takes to get that camera for a “screenshot”.
: Zubon
If you can’t see it, read more carefully.
Author: Zubon
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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.
.Network Effects
My wife was recently in Second Life “networking” with colleagues at a shop for “custom” animations. We have screenshots but she will not let me post them.
: Zubon
City of Options
In City of Heroes, there are five archetypes and two epic archetypes. Blasters have seven primary power pools and five secondaries; Controllers have six and seven; Defenders have eight and seven; Scrappers have six and four; and Tankers have four and seven. Peacebringers and Warshades have just the one super-sized primary and secondary each, but in practice people choose to specialize in the human, nova, or dwarf forms or some combination of two or three, giving seven options for each. In City of Villains, there are five archetypes. Brutes have six primary power pools and six secondaries; Corruptors have seven and seven; Dominators and Masterminds have five of each; and Stalkers have six and five.
7*5+6*7+8*7+6*4+4*7+7+7+6*6+7*7+5*5+5*5+6*5=364
If you rest for one day a year, you can literally play a different character every day without repeating yourself. Leap year is coming next year, though, so we must hope for the villain epic archetypes sometime in the next eighteen months.
: Zubon
Yes, We All Loved 300
Now stop naming your characters after it. “Leonidas” does not make you any cooler than “Legolas.”
: Zubon
Not Addicted?
But I do not always feel like playing, or at least playing City of Heroes. I may spend half a night messing around with flash games or going out with my wife. When I am away from internet access, I do not feel the need to log in. It is nice to have a break and see the real world sometimes, although the big room with the blue ceiling is perhaps over-rated. I can go for a walk without worrying that I am falling behind my friends.
I never feel obliged to log in. It is not something I am required to do. I have no raids to keep up with, although we might plan on running a task force on a given night (usually: no planning). It is not a job, not a drudge, not a grind. Okay, it is inherently somewhat grindy, but I never log on with a resigned sigh. I play when I want to play and wander off when it is not exciting me.
The icon is always there, ready to be clicked, but it does not call like a dark siren.
: Zubon
Addicted?
I am logging in and playing every day, and I love it. I am just having a great time. City of Heroes is constant rock ’em sock ’em action. We crash through the enemies, set fire to things and send them flying across the room, then pause for no more than six seconds before rampaging on.
We almost always have a few people on Teamspeak, with our core group being very active lately. We might run a task force, or perhaps someone has something that s/he is working on today that we can join. I check the consignment house with my badge-whoring blaster who is working on the Fabricator badge: 7,921 crafts to go.
We Live on the Edge
Getting a supergroup member her last three bubbles of experience to level 50. Tank: drunk. So drunk he occasionally stops because, his girlfriend reports, he is distracted by his fingers. Blaster: drunk. So drunk that, her boyfriend reports, a single stair has caused her to fall down in laughter. Her chances of successfully making it to the bathroom are not as good as we thought.
: Zubon
Yes, she got 50, woo!
How’s SOE Customer Support?
A blogger’s problems with Sony VAIO customer service have me wondering how customer service is with the online games. Many people don’t seem to like SOE. Personally, I have never played anything from them except free Planetside, so I have no experience from which to speak, although I have complained about waiting for NCSoft customer service. Commenters have reminded me of Comcast customer service.
Thoughts?
: Zubon
Did We Mention That You Get to Play As a Chicken?
A chicken! Dude!
Yeah, that’s about all I have to say. I will need to borrow someone’s lifetime subscription for a few minutes sometime.
: Zubon
Guardians at the Gates 3: Restored Faith
In our last episode, I pondered whether city-building and -defense was a path to certain MMO failure. Robin Hanson has some words that apply well to this or any other radical departure from Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG:
To have the best chance of succeeding in a radical project, you should instead choose just a few related dimensions on which to make radical choices, and then make conservative conventional choices on all the other dimensions. This strategy minimizes the chance that some other project dimension will go badly wrong and take down your central radical idea with it.
While all-dimension-radical freethinker projects have little chance of success, their looming wreckage can be a great place to look for promising radical ideas to pursue…
Or as it has been phrased elsewhere, don’t innovate for the sake of innovation. It is hard enough to think through the implications of one radical change. One commenter adds, though, that sometimes one radical change forces you to change a lot of things.