[Hero Online] As I was developing a post on the theme of “please stop making EQ clones,” I stumbled upon the open beta of a new MMO that seems be a bad Diablo clone. Would a lack of instancing make it a bad EQ clone, instead? In addition?
Has anyone tried Hero Online? I ran through ten levels and change last night. My present recommendation would be not to mention the game’s existence except as a warning, but I am open to the notion that things become interesting later.
Celebrate Small Victories
Let us try a simple variation on gaming gratitude journals: gaming gratitude moments. Barring outrageous fortune, something will go well tonight. Narrow this down to its smallest unit and celebrate as many of those as you can stomach.
A pull went perfectly — yay! Someone did a drive-by buffing of your newb — woo! You got out of xp debt — score! You cleared an entire level of the map — we win again! Every time something goes well, cheer: aloud, on Teamspeak, in /team, wherever you can do so without irritating others. Don’t be that annoying guy who lists every single drop he gets, but take pleasure in all the little things that go right.
We often dwell on one bad thing, and it spoils the night. Why not try to swamp it with dozens of small victories?
: Zubon
…why this is not a standard business model. Seriously, players will pay you to play your game and then pay you more not to play (portions of) your game.
Counter-thought: the majority of your game has not endorsed RMT. You only need a small minority to support a nigh-endless stream of sales. With 0.1% of the planet playing WoW, you only need about 0.001% of the planet wanting to buy gold to have more than enough customers. How much of your playerbase do you lose by endorsing RMT? Noted effects of “we sell gold” servers and “no RMT” servers? I imagine that, oddly enough, people will play on no-RMT servers and still want to buy gold, despite that being a legal option on the server next door.
: Zubon
Given enough repetitions, the ridiculously unlikely becomes almost certain. After all, someone wins the lottery all the time, even if the expected value of a ticket is always less than it costs.
I mention this because at any given time, for every game, someone is posting that something is wrong with accuracy, or the random number generator, or they are otherwise a victim of how things are being coded. Occasionally they are right, and there is a mistake in the game, but the vast majority of the time a normal random distribution explains what happened. Even for the most hideously freakish events.
If you can read this, you are one of the most fortunate people ever to have existed. You have access to a global communications network so plentiful, cheap, and powerful that you are using it to read commentary about video games. You have all the necessities of life available at a price, quality, and quantity nigh-inconceivable when your grandparents were born, even if your mother and grandmother were both teen mothers. You have the luxury of caring what color your imaginary priest’s robes are.
This is in no way to dismiss your problems in life. Some of you presumably have quite serious difficulties, and every form of suffering really is suffering, no matter how trivial it may seem to anyone else. But there is no point in creating new suffering for yourself when something happens in or to your game that you do not like. You really really care about how the raid is going or whether your class gets nerfed, but at the end of the night you log off and go to bed without wondering whether you will eat tomorrow. A knock on the door at night means pizza, not the secret police, so enjoy the pizza even if it is late.
The game is here to make you happy. The worst case scenario is that you will need a new game to make you happy. So be happy.
: Zubon
[City of Heroes] All changes to the game are done for a reason. Changes cannot happen on their own, so someone must consciously implement them. Today’s puzzle for you: why was the following change made?
All Confusion effects are now stripped from a character when they zone.
Answer after the break.
I stumbled upon a pretty good FFXI music video this weekend, and it reminded me that I have not seen many gaming music videos lately, except of course for WoW-Avenue Q. Good ones, I mean; I stopped looking for them after a run of badly shot PvP videos set to heavy metal (you can find your own examples).
Aladora made some really great DAoC videos, including Hero before it appeared in several dozen City of Heroes videos. I am told that she went on to do some who knows what else; toss a link in the comments if you know anywhere that has archived her excellent work (I still have quite a few saved). What are some of your favorites out there, recent or not?
: Zubon
In case you had not heard, World of Warcraft has 6.6 million subscribers. That works out to about $99,000,000/month in revenue. Here is a picture of how that makes other, hugely successful games look like a bunch of chumps.
Think about that for a moment. 0.1% of the planet plays World of Warcraft. The entire population of the planet Earth, including Tibetan monks, tribesmen on the plains, researchers in Antarctica, and the Amish: 1 in 1000 people plays World of Warcraft.
: Zubon
[Kingdom of Loathing] Last week, I finished my sixth hardcore oxygenarian ascension in the Kingdom of Loathing, completing my set of plexiglass items. At the end of the next run, I was finally able to put them all on. As a great actor once said, “Whoa.” I look forward to indulging in plexiglass garb fully once I finish my complete set of 102 hardcore ascensions, probably sometime in 2008. 2008?!
Does everyone get spam in Chinese and Japanese these days? Maybe half of these are ads for gold in WoW. It only happens to my blogging address, which is a Japanese word/phrase (depending on which version you have). My normal address just gets the normal spam every two minutes, with hot wet teen Nigerian royalty telling me I have already won all-natural herbal mortgage refinancing from lesbian tentacle-rape warnings that my PayPal account has been compromised. For all I know, the Japanese e-mail says the same thing, but I don’t want to know what the kanji for that sentence would look like. Also, sorry about setting off every alarm on your work internet filter.
: Zubon