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.
.I have repeatedly said that Guild Wars expects you to play with the wiki open. I have bowed to that and done what I should have a long time ago: set up a second monitor. Now I don’t need to alt-tab nearly as much. I am thinking about getting a USB video adapter for my wife’s laptop so that she can have Hulu on one screen and internet/documents on the other. She seems to listen to shows half the time.
: Zubon
You do not need a comparative advantage to be the best at something [FTFY] to enjoy the benefits of trade, nor does your trading partner. Even if you can do absolutely everything better and more efficiently than I can, it will still benefit you to trade with me because you do not have the option of doing everything at once. I may shovel well, but if I am also a pretty good obstetrician, it will probably be more productive for me to pay someone with fewer high-value options to dig.
If you were to start playing World of Warcraft right now, you could make decent money farming copper. The enemies are not gray to you, so you would not be the most efficient farmer, but people who earn lots of gold per hour are happy to give you a bit of it on the auction house. On a non-trade example, when I went back to Asheron’s Call with a fresh account, I financed several dozen levels by hopping a portal to a high-level hunting zone and scavenging a pack of trash loot that players left in their wake. If I had thought of it, I could have made a service of being the town-visiting pet from Torchlight, if anyone would trust a new character with their stuff/money.
The past weekend was Canthan New Year in Guild Wars. This is an amazing source of money for a new player. Offering to sell Lunar Tokens for 200g and Fortunes for 600g, I was deluged with buyers. There were quests that rewarded 25 Tokens, and the established players had run them in previous years; they were effectively level 5 quests that awarded 5 platinum. I financed my first set of prestige armor off those. If you could get your newb to Lion’s Arch, you could convert Tokens to Fortunes profitably (if slowly) playing Rock-Paper-Scissors.
An economy that is orders of magnitude above where you are can be daunting, but if you can get involved in it at all, the profits to be reaped are huge.
: Zubon
I picked up a somewhat recent DC comics collection from the library recently. Reading it, I realized I was not sure which apocalypse it came after. For most of my life, DC Comics has been resetting its world frequently. They do a multi-year story counting down to the apocalypse, a year-long apocalypse, and then a few years of a fresh new universe before starting the next countdown. Someone once said that there were three essential stories about a hero: the origin, the death, and everything else. DC has refined that into a business model. Every cycle, you get a new origin, a new death, and a chance to play with all the best stories and villains that have come before. As with the Silver Age, where stories were repeated because readership was expected to turnover every few years, few readers will be sticking around for enough cycles to get annoyed with it. If you do? Congratulations, you are the sort of fan who will keep reading anyway, so your money is already guaranteed.
I got over this annoyance all at once. Suddenly, it did not matter, so the story could live in the moment. Whatever continuity baggage it may have acquired, your favorite version of Blue Beetle or Supergirl, whatever — you have the story in front of you, and it stands or falls on its own. Every character is now an alternate character interpretation. Everything you like or hate will be reset in a few years anyway, so it does not matter which DC universe this is. The characters may be sixty years old, but they only “exist” in the present.
This is our gaming world. Games start and they end. There is a meta-game about which League of Legends champion is overpowered or how your favorite sports team will do in the next draft, but the game and the season in front of you are what matter. You have one hour to build from nothing to a satisfying conclusion.
And, behind the veil, this is our MMO gaming world. You will come and go, and nothing you do will have mattered except to the people who experienced it. We have the illusion of persistence, but you will quit playing, just like any other game; servers will shut down and everything will be erased, just like any other game. Within your lifetime, the computer environment that ran these games will need to be emulated, because no existing computer will run your MMO without more effort than goes into playing a game off a 5.25″ floppy on your laptop. Someone will have an EQ progression server set up, and others will view them like Civil War re-enactors.
Of course what you lose in this iteration is the ability to tell several categories of meaningful or significant stories. DC’s “Cry For Justice” series, for example, was driven by the death of a major character. The person leading the “Cry” had come just back from the dead, and pretty much everyone else in the room had as well, some of them in the last year. When the Flash ran himself out of existence fighting the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, that was a powerful moment; you cannot repeat it with a half-dozen other Flashes, and it retroactively cheapens it when you resurrect the sacrificed. GW Eye of the North has a story arc that ends with a death that would be much more compelling if the son giving the eulogy had not died five times in the mission leading up to that cinematic.
: Zubon
In a relatively rare bit of Skyrim criticism, Chris Sims talks about how the open-ended nature of Skyrim, combined with the mutability of its many choices, led him to lose interest in the game. I think this is a good critique of many of the things I say arguing for open worlds, options, player choices, etc. Some of it is specific to the game, other bits apply more broadly. Most people seemed to take to Skyrim as their own little world, but I suspect we have heard less from those who found the setup less compelling.
: Zubon
I’ll pick up the PC version at some point.
I have played a bit of Agricola recently. It drives home the appeal of virtual worlds and persistent online games in that it very much is neither. You do not always want that persistence, but Agricola is an economic game that ends potentially open-ended and just as everything is coming together. You set up your farmyard, you upgrade it, you learn an occupation or three, and you’re done — score your farmyard. You want that Civilization “just one more turn” button sometimes. Of course, you are free to extend the rules and do that, or just play freeform, but that’s not really the game.
The single-player version adds a little persistence: keep one occupation per game (and try to beat a higher score), so you become quite the renaissance person although your minor improvements go away.
Or maybe that’s just my having spent too much time with trade skills in-game. There is something satisfying about the stately simplicity of virtual farming, which I suppose explains part of the success of Zynga.
: Zubon
Useful Agricola resource: common mistakes. I am gratified to see that I was making only one, and minor at that.
Today Rock, Paper, Shotgun as an article on ownership of games, especially on the Steam platform. It’s a good one for anybody holding a virtual library of games on the many available platforms. The simple fact is that we [probably] do not own our games. There’s a lot of uncertainty as discussed by a lawyer that commented within the article, but the issue of a EULA creating a license over property is largely untried.
One reason I like MMOs, is I know that I am a guest from the outset. I don’t own anything in the game. It seems to make things clearer, yet the war over virtual items bound by a license as property is becoming ever more prominent. If virtual items were seen as “owned property” the liability of the MMO developer could be on the bankruptcy level. Niche MMO games could cease to exist overnight at the thought of owing someone thousands of dollars because of a server glitch.
Massively commented that in a criminal case the Dutch Supreme Court decided that Runescape virtual items were in fact “goods” which could be stolen. It is very important to note that Runescape was not a party in the criminal case (although they may have submitted an amicus curiae to the court). I am not happy with this ruling. I would have preferred that the Dutch Supreme Court hung their hat on the thieves affecting the use of the license. A license is property, and just like me stealing the seats in your car, if I can affect the enjoyment of your license there can be criminal and civil consequences.
The coming of Diablo 3 is also one of great interest on this front. Whereas with, for example, EVE Online, where one can use money to buy PLEX to sell for ISK to buy a ship, in Diablo 3 I could theoretically buy someone’s sword for straight up cash. It moves the Dutch thought of “time and energy to acquire” equals property and bring its right back to money to acquire equals property. At the very least the Dutch defendants could not have claimed Diablo 3 items had no tangible value. The cash-driven auction house already been dropped as a feature in the Korean release of Diablo 3, apparently.
It will be interesting to see if any game licensers, MMO or otherwise, change their EULA’s and business practices within the Netherlands based on this ruling. Once Diablo 3 launches it could really redraw the lines in the sand as well.
–Ravious
The scroll had an inscription, “Measure for Measure,” making it highly salvageable. I extracted 7 Planks of Wood from the paper. That is some highly salvageable paper.
: Zubon
I am pretty much done working on the my Guild Wars Hall of Monuments. I am at 35 points, and while I would love 40, I just don’t have the will to grind those last few. Recently, I’ve been going through archives of this and interviews of that. I had the sad task of cleaning out my burgeoning RSS feeds of some of ye ol’ dead blogs. So I’ve been re-thinking much of what has been promised or mentioned in Guild Wars 2 that is far from being the topic du jour. The link that ArenaNet created for players between its two games is one of them.
I love my time in Guild Wars, and I love that ArenaNet thought to honor the players in the sequel. I don’t believe we will be getting any “pay-2-win”-type rewards, but it will be neat stuff. Everybody must want an Orrian baby chicken, right? Yet, the chicken is part of the new hotness. The few items that strongly remind me of the original Guild Wars are the Fellblade, Fiery Dragon Sword, Black Moa, and Black Widow Spider, and a scattering of others are reminiscent of my time there. I know that the Wayward Wand and Ice Breaker are in the original game, but they just don’t hold that this-is-Guild-Wars tone. Continue reading [GW2] Unicorn Costumes
I drove to Chicago yesterday. I-90 splits to local and express lanes once you are in the city. Ideally, you stay in the express lanes until the next opening back to the local lanes is the one before your exit. For that to work, you need to know when the lanes re-merge. The signs helpfully explain that the next exit from the express lanes is at Pershing Road. Great. Is Pershing before or after my exit? What number is the Pershing exit? This sign is a helpful reminder for people who already know where they are going, but not if you are just coming into Chicago and do not know what order the roads are in.
Our friends at Language Log define “nerdview” as “writing in technical terms from the perspective of the technician or engineer rather than from a standpoint that would seem useful to the customer or reader.” This is probably their best example, while our friends at Popehat present this gem that looks incomprehensible, becomes clearer through the comments, and then becomes fully comprehensible but completely useless after an informed commenter explains that the somewhat-reasonable explanation is not the true one (assuming he did not make that up).
In gaming, we might call this newbie-(un)friendliness. This has been a theme in the recent Guild Wars posts, both about the game and the community: the explanations of what to do assume that you know what you are doing. The developer or experienced player may have great difficulty dialing his knowledge back to the newbie, and then there are tiers of newbie because some people are completely new to the genre and some have experience with similar games, and then the experienced players need to unlearn what they have learned elsewhere.
Some games and communities do this intentionally. Developers usually would prefer more customers, but some like to keep their community small. Some players just don’t like to bother with newbies and want to keep casuals, trolls, etc. out. It is a form of initiation or hazing: if you are not willing to put up with X, we do not want you here. The original A Tale in the Desert was an accidental example (great community, strongly self-selecting), and I don’t know if Dwarf Fortress is intentionally that hard to get started on. Rogue-likes tend to like to have a painful introduction. Or, as was said about D&D as it left 2nd Edition, “THAC0 kept the riff-raff out.”
: Zubon
I am enjoying Guild Wars in a non-focused way. I have not seen much of the game, but I have been enjoying what is around. I feel absolutely no pressure except maybe that I might want some Hall of Monuments points by the time Guild Wars 2 comes out, assuming those do something useful for me.
I started a Ranger in the Nightfall campaign. I picked up Monk as a secondary profession, but given how I’m playing, I think I’ll switch that to Mesmer at the first opportunity. (Monk/Elementalist alt?) I am up to three hero companions, one of which I don’t have much use for yet (the suicidal Dervish), but this works nicely, bringing along my own tank and healer. I have not yet grouped with anyone.