General
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.
.http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/
I must start linking people there whenever the inevitable forum question arises. If only it worked for game servers (since the server pages are so often inaccurate).
: Zubon
I have not had occasion to test it. For all I know, it does not actually ping the sites to check.
Have you seen Zero Punctuation for this week? I think it would have been even better without the GTA4 negativity — the Saints Row 2 positivity was great. Plan for the day: mayhem, destruction, violence, whimsy. Yes, that sounds like what many of us are here for.
Happy day in City of Villains: going into a Mayhem Mission with a Fire/Fire Brute. Nothing says “flaming maniac” quite like having boxes explode because you walked by them. I need to level that character someday so I can do the same to cars.
: Zubon
My wife became a citizen this year, which means she can now vote, and for the past few months has been asking everyone she meets (and I mean EVERYONE, including random people at the store) if they were going to vote. Yes, she has an opinion on which she likes, which she does not push on the people involved, but is completely filled with glee that people have an opinion. The country she hails from had a mock political system, that offered only one party, one candidate for leader, which was part of a ruling family that bankrupted the country. The ability to choose your leader is, she feels, akin to super powers. She asks everyone if they are going to vote, and I’ve learned to simply get out of the way when I hear someone say no. The lecture they get about having a choice and failing to execute it is intense. Do not retort about the “lesser of evils” as she will explain to you about what true evil is – the lack of a choice at all.
Not looking nor will I post to convince you to one side or another – simply employ your right to choose. Don’t make me send my wife over.
My deepest apologies.
It is my understanding that my invading forces, in their attempts to besiege your cities and snuff out all life on Azeroth, have inconvenienced the activities of common civilians. In the future, I will ensure that your commanding officers are informed well in advance of planned invasion times so that they may properly fortify themselves.
I have also looked into the issue of my plague being too quick in its purpose and too difficult to cure. Please be reassured that I have taken the matter up personally with my top necromancers and that any further incarnations of said plague should be only a slight challenge for your natural immune systems to overcome. Please forward any additional complaints to either Kel’thuzad or Anub’arak.
Regards, the Lich King Arthas.
(By Zampyr, Tichondrius US via Lum)
William Gibson wrote in his book Pattern Recognition about the concept of a Mirror World. The Wikipedia masses define the newly-coined term “to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets.” I think the excellent term does not need to be so constrained, and it may be as broad as “fundamentally the same, but elementally different.” This happens for better or worse all the time with MMOs. Take, for instance, the way an MMO tells its story: Continue reading MMO Mirror World – Storytelling
I have mentioned before that second-best might demand movements further away from first-best. That is, if you cannot get exactly what you want, the next best thing might be something very different rather than something close. You might prefer PB&J to a ham sandwich but prefer ham to jelly alone, so if you have no peanut butter you can improve your situation by moving further from PB&J.
This weekend, the top two US movies were High School Musical 3 and Saw 5. Thought completes itself, including that proviso.
If I might surmise about the preferences of many WAR players, open world RvR at its best is better than scenarios at their best, but scenarios as they are available are better than open world RvR as it is available. If I might surmise about the preferences of many former WAR players returning to WOW, WAR RvR at its best is better than WOW PvE at its best, but WOW PvE as it is available is better than WAR RvR as it is available. For those people, for both, respectively.
Or, if you are a CoW, open RvR rocks.
: Zubon
The HSM3 note reminds me: I recently learned, through no fault of my own, who the Jonas brothers are (don’t Google it). If reality betrays me like that again, I may never leave my basement.
This is a topic that has caused considerable discussion in the past. Not all of it awesome discussion. So let’s just get it out of the way: I like playing with by myself. I like soloing. If you give me the choice, 8 times out of 10 I’d rather be out there doing my own thing than being in a group.
But I’m not anti-social. At all. All my characters (of some importance) in every MMO (that I played more or less seriously) have been guilded. I have many good game friends, and these friendships persist even when either party moves on to another game.
Is there a disconnect here? No. Why? After the break.
Try it sometime.
Or read about the connection between Raph Koster, sex, and English lit essays. Raph refers you to Word On Play, which takes it eight ways.
: Zubon
Kill Ten Rats: pointlessly salacious since 2004. Well, maybe since 2005, when I joined up.
I am going to address something that was said on Warhammer Alliance. Lemming Jesus, in a rather pouty post, said that Warhammer Online was “neither massive nor multiplayer” because the the population was far too split up. I agree for the mid-levels (but not to the degree of rage-quitting), and suggest a different route.
I would have had ONLY one racial pairing to begin with as the main part of the game. Tier 1 would remain the same as it is now. Tiers 2-3 would NOT have any Dark Elf vs. High Elf (DEvHE) or Greenskin vs. Dwarf zones (GvD). Tiers 2-3 would all be Empire vs. Chaos (EvC) as it is now. However, Tiers 2 and 3 would have an additional “contested” map (like Prague for Tier 4) between the two current maps. Then Tier 4 would begin to umbrella back out to include the DEvHE and GvD zones with future released Tier 4 zones focusing on their story and conflict. In other words, DEvHE and GvD get the shaft with initial content, but later content would go to those racial pairings. This would kill two birds with one stone by making the mid-level areas have higher population density, and giving more end-game later on.
This is not wholly my idea, as Lord of the Rings Online nearly does the exact same thing (only they don’t umbrella back to the Shire for the end game… yet). It allows the race to matter in terms of story, and for the player to get a feel for the race. But, then it elegantly funnels the population together to start moving en masse to the end game. At the end game you want lots of content, and I think Mythic made a big error in providing so much population spreading content for the slow-moving mid-levels.
For alt-oholics and what not, the three racial pairings with so many zones is fantastic, but it makes for a lot of ghost towns, empty RvR lakes, and sad and lonely public quests whose final Hero boss sits in a dark corner and cries himself to sleep while holding a shrunken dwarf head because no one will ever get to his stage. It’s too late now, and my hindsight is not even 20/20.
–Ravious
Let’s hit the wayback machine. I don’t just want a ding, I want a lot more. I want an entire celebration system. No more of this “little graphic and audio effect” nonsense. Give me fireworks that shoot 100 meters into the sky along with Ode to Joy, as if this were Peggle. Send a message to my group, the zone, and my guild. Keep a permanent journal on my character that commemorates the moment with a time stamp, what put me over the edge, and a note about how awesome I am. Then have the nearest NPC send me a letter in the mail reminding me of how awesome I am, for the next time I hit a mailbox. And think of some more ways that the game can tell me just how great it is that I leveled. If I hit the level cap, have a statue that looks like me (at least when seen from my client). Ooh, better: have two lines of them along the path to the main castle (or whatever), with the number of statues set to the number of characters you can have on a server. If you cap all your characters, they all see lines of YOU YOU YOU OH SO AWESOME as you ride into the castle.
Also, give me a menu option so I can toggle all that crap off, at least other people’s meaningless ding spam. I mean really, this is all about me, not them.
: Zubon
That statue idea isn’t half bad, really.