Category: General

Okay. Just shoot from the hip on this one. A simple scenario and a simple question:

“WTF Studios, a leader in the interactive blah blah blah, is proud to announce the development of its flagship MMORPG Title – Grynd : Legends of the Shadows of Fantasy and Ancient Wars with Vampires and More Stuff Online…”

And so on. You go through the usual bulletpoints and see what it’s all about. You check the screens. You may or may not look at beta videos that may or may not have been leaked. Standard Operating Procedure, basically. Some features you like, some others you don’t, some others you’re indifferent about. Until it comes to crafting, which essentially boils down to the following:

“Players can only have one character designated as crafter per account, per game server. There are no limits to the number of alts, however only one character per account and server can be a crafter.”

How does something like that tickle your game bone? Yea? Nay? Doesn’t even tickle? What’s your reaction as a hip-shooter? Utter lunacy, or an effective way to inject a little bit of common sense into an online economy?

If I cannot jump, you do not have a 3-D world. Don’t bother with a Z-axis and the pretty models. Just go 8-bit and get it over with.

: Zubon

Have you ever noticed that Plan A and Plan B look nothing alike? If my wife cannot have cannelloni with spicy chicken soup, her second choice will be a chicken-kabob pita with fries, and #3 is sweet and sour chicken with garlic bread. The only common link here is chicken.

All the points between A and B may be worse than either A or B. You cannot make a Prius from an Escalade by gradual degrees, nor can you stop halfway through making peanut butter cookies and switch to chocolate cake. Well, you can, but it pretty much means throwing everything away and starting over. You cannot build EVE Online out of Auto Assault.

Yesterday’s discussion was about a patch to Everquest 2. If we could have an ideal crafting system, it would probably look something like this crossed with this. That’s Plan A. If you can build that as your system from the start or have the luxury of re-doing your entire crafting system (and figuring out what to do with current crafters), fabulous. Please tell me how I can work for you or play your game.

Plan B involves going to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Given existing problems, doing something silly that moves you further away from Plan A can improve things. If nothing else, it is something you can do right now while working on that complete overhaul in the long run. We can see the duct tape, but it will hold until we can get a replacement.

Is it silly that bikinis cover plate mail? Yes. Do you have a better solution for customizing appearances that does not involve an entirely new system of itemization?

: Zubon

As you may have noticed, Ctrl+Alt+Del and Penny Arcade are both mocking the Game Fuel commercial today. Apparently that advertising works, in the sense of getting people to talk about it, since here we are… oh, and those comics that are way more popular than we are.

Previous mockery via GU Comics and how many others have hit an easy target? Is the soda any good? I am tempted by a few positive comments, but the marketing turns me off.

: Zubon

A couple of years ago, a game I’ve been playing for quite a long time had some new content added. As with all new content, there was that short period afterwards where it demands all your attention and you can’t think about anything else. You lose sleep because of it, your relationships are affected to it and it takes a while to adjust to.

My long term gaming companion was far more involved with the new content than I am although I love it too but has since decided that she can’t keep up her tradeskill because of it. She is planning on learning a new one at some stage but for now, she’s devoting her time to matters in hand. I’d love to do the same because I don’t particularly enjoy my profession. It’s not difficult but it’s a total grind and I need to do it because of the heavy costs of playing the game.
Continue reading Freeplay

Ok, so I’ve been hankering for some Counterstrike lately…I haven’t played in a good two years (omg!). So I downloaded steam the other day. Anyway, steam started blinking at me a few minutes ago about a new update and the “all new” steam community.

Shoot me an invite. My SteamID is Nicodemus.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/Nicodemus

Any of the regulars here feel like a match sometime? Nothing hardcore, I just want to have some fun on old maps I remember. Dust2, Vegas, Office…hell I don’t remember their names anymore. Damn.

Yeah, I know this doesn’t have anything to do with MMORPGs…or does it? I’m looking at you Tabula Rasa!

For the first time in nearly a decade I am not playing any MMOs.   Sure I’ve taken ‘breaks’ before but I only rarely let my subscriptions lapse and always intended to return.  More recently, un-sub’d time periods were filled with Betas so I still had my hands wet and spend nearly as much time on unreleased MMOs while on a ‘break from playing MMOs.’

 Not so this time around.

Continue reading Dark Conspiracy

(or how I learned to stop worrying and love RMT)

This is a complete 180. Yup. Yessiree. I’m not ashamed to admit it. It came to me as an epiphany. No, I didn’t have to bang my head on the toilet and come up with a flux capacitor. But it was close.

I, like many many others, used to be quite opposed to RMT in more or less venomous terms depending on the situation and the company. I never hated the concept in itself, but I did have a lot of mistrust built up towards it. Years and years of seeing systems used and abused by the userbase will make one a cynic about promises of rainbows and pots with gold. That’s how it is.

But now? I saw the light, one might say. RMT is an inevitability, that’s where we’re heading. I knew this, but I also knew I didn’t have to like it. However, that changed. Count me in. I’ve seen the future, and it’s lined with silver thread. RMT is good, if you design around it well. I am now a firm proponent of RMT. How? Why? Read on.

Continue reading Fluff

“A recent survey of 6,407 players of ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games’ (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Everquest found that 63% of hours in-game are spent in groups.” Well duh, thank you for discovering that playing online is a social activity. With all the raiding and forced grouping, and standing around waiting for the group to get its act together, it is surprising that the number was that low. Remember, one hour in a group of five means five hours grouped, so you need five solo players to balance that out, and a duo is still a group.

Wait, no, sorry, I wrote that backwards. “A recent survey of 6,407 players of ‘Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games’ (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft and Everquest found that 63% of hours in-game are spent alone.” Thank you captain obvious, of course we spend a lot of time soloing. All the new MMOs are more solo friendly, especially at the lower levels, and World of Warcraft is the biggest of them all. Sure, we hardcore people spend a lot of time raiding, but the teeming hordes of casual players will never see level 70 and will not be part of a raiding guild. With all the time we spend traveling, crafting, farming, or standing at the auction house, it is a wonder the number was that low.

Wait, sorry, my bad again, I made the whole thing up. What I read was a study of speed dating results, which was reported as “men like attractive women.” You were probably wondering about those loud cries of “Duh!” last week. A great deal of research is received this way because all possible results, even mutually exclusive ones, are taken as intuitively obvious. “A new study shows that absence makes the heart grow fonder”: duh! “A new study shows that out of sight really is out of mind”: duh!

Wait one last time, one of a set of mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive options must be true. People play more in groups, solo more, or the division is exactly even. Was the answer obvious after reading the first paragraph? The second? Now? If I told you that the 63% number was accurate and came from a working paper that is circulating via e-mail, could you tell me which version is correct?

: Zubon