Category: Asides

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Another Warhammer

Ardua reminds us about Warhammer 40K. Coming sometime to MMO, yes? In particular, he reminds us of the TV Tropes page for the game. Even if you know nothing about 40K, a category I share outside one RTS, this will give you a sense of the setting that went from “Warhammer in space” to “darker Warhammer in space” to “the World of Darkness is a bunch of fairies that fart rainbows” to “Cthulhu is a fairy who farts rainbows” and then one step beyond for the latest edition. You can still see the six WAR factions (one of which was eaten by bugs).

: Zubon

No Strangers to Love

And then there was the story of Charles. Chuck, like so many of us, spent too much time online. How much is too much? Let me put it to you this way. When he got down on one knee to propose to his girlfriend, he told her how he felt in words that just sprung from his heart fully formed. He explained that he would never give her up or let her down. He would never tell a lie, never hurt her. She realized it before he did: “Excuse me, are you Rickrolling our engagement, and doing it badly?!”

: Zubon

Feedback Sought: Scheduling

Blogs get far less traffic on weekends. I presume that many of you are reading from work. Lucky. The blog-reading I do from work needs to be at least plausibly work-related. This leads to a feedback loop where blogs post less on weekends. So you are less likely to read on weekends. So we post less. Does this fit your reading pattern? I tend to worry less about missing a weekend, which often leads to missing a Monday because I write now and schedule it to go live at 12:02am Central. (And I only post once a day, or else my wife makes fun of me.)

I notice that many blogs have less content on Friday. This is a letdown for readers, who want to do something other than work on Friday afternoon, but then it also demands that bloggers work Fridays. Would it be better for me to plan longer pieces for Friday? Or pieces seeking lots of feedback/discussion/comments? Might as well fill that gap. I have hit Monday and Friday harder without great planning in the past.

Anything else in how you like things or what you want to see? I stopped the CoX Character Contemplations series because they seemed to get few views, which I interpreted as “tl;dr” (though I have a couple more written). I should do another “Recent Searches” post; I fell out of the habit after skipping a month of WoW porn searches. I have not looked at the site stats at all in the past three months or more.

And this is a Monday morning post seeking discussion, so it’s all meta. Please, your thoughts.

: Zubon

Online Surveying Bleg

My workplace would like to do an online survey, but we do not have the capacity to recruit survey participants. We can write the survey, but putting it on Survey Monkey and asking around will not do it for us. I have taken surveys through Greenfield Online, but I have no idea what online survey companies there are, who is good, etc. Can anyone recommend an online surveying firm that supplies its own respondents? We are going to be looking for a limited age range and geographic area (of the United States).

Thanks!

: Zubon

Hikikomori

the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare defines hikikomori as individuals who refuse to leave their parents’ house, and isolate themselves away from society in their homes for a period exceeding six months.

It’s an interesting entry, worth reading if you haven’t. But what I love is the list of related links:

  • Solitude
  • Hermit
  • Loneliness
  • Loner
  • MMORPG
  • Quarter life crisis
  • Reclusiveness

: Zubon

GamerDNA

When did they ruin GuildCafe? I made a GuildCafe page a while ago, but when I went to my new guild’s site there to try to connect to it, I could not edit my The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ status. Going in to edit my games only lets me see the first six, with no option to reach the rest, and I cannot even delete and re-add the game.

Why don’t we make a lousy version of MySpace, intentionally focus it on a limited audience, then change the name and bork the tools so it is even less useful?

I shouldn’t blog after midnight.

: Zubon

Seen in May

Jeff Freeman discusses pricing models and ponders gaming one-night-stands.

Brian “Psychochild” Green (I think he legally changed his name to that, complete with quotes, since I never see him called anything else. I forgot to check his license at IMGDC) spoke of the early stages of MMO development. This one is good enough to come back to single time, but I’m telling you now so that you can read it a few times before we discuss it. (via)

Alex Taldren suggests that Princess Peach should get a job.

Alex also suggested that MMO Gamers are lazy and not really gamers.

Should this t-shirt remind me of Scott Jennings?

Saylah at Mystic Worlds discusses We We Solo in MMOs. (Okay, that was April, but I read it in May.)

How about (the apparently nearly most influential person in the MMO world) Scott Hartsman on being organizationally broken? Bonus chance to hate on Dell, if you like. I have commented previously on an outsider’s view of organizational failures in MMOs.

“The Midnight Squad” trailer from City of Heroes is pretty good. I have some editing disputes, but their call. The other one for Issue 12 is less entertaining, but it has some fun with costumes in the crowd. If you missed the magic and Rikti connection in Issue 10, this is a good time to hit that part of the story again.

Many people reviewed Age of Conan. Many many many, too many for me to remember whose I’ve seen. Here are Ethic, Saylah, Keen and Graev, ferv0r, and pretty much all of Tobold and Bildo’s sites for late May. Need a leveling flowchart? Jalum’s review that I linked earlier is probably non-relevant, especially since the miracle patch(es) seems to have miracled pretty well (by varying accounts). I hear a strange mix of “great launch,” “meh, yet another WoW clone with 5% difference,” and “game-breaking bugs and exploits” (to say nothign of the early launch).

Are you reading Ding!? Also pre-May (February), but I think it is a recent addition to our blogroll. WoW-themed webcomic from Scott Kurtz.

Another new friend on our blogroll: The Battered Shield. He has some interesting stuff to say.

Ending off-topic, Greg forms words to list 100 Must-See Movies.

: Zubon

Midwestern Conference

IMGDC is in Minnesota. After having had conferences across the Atlantic coast, this is a nice change of pace. People hold doors and say words like “please” and “thank you.” They smile and greet you even though they have never met you and will never see you again; these are not paid employees, these are just people at the same store being friendly Midwesterners. If you turn on a blinker, people will make space for you, instead of tailgating to make sure you don’t get ahead of them.

It is like going from Something Awful to Terra Nova.

: Zubon