Category: General

General

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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.

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Leaderboard Prejudice

Sanya Weathers, an blogger of exponential blogs, has started writing over at the community manager watering hole, Metaverse Mod Squad.  In the latest post she discusses the fiscal responsibility of the community management team (not without comparison to another department), but the crux of the post is on Leaderboards.  Sanya writes that “achievement, respect, and a sense that time spent on your product is not time wasted can all be checked off with leaderboards, or whatever you want to call your comparative ranking system.”  Dan Gray at his blog echoes Sanya’s thoughts by saying “it’s free content, it’s recognition, and it’s a fantastic tool for your community.”

There is a dark side though.  A darkness that harms community.  We shall name it “elitism.”

Continue reading Leaderboard Prejudice

Developer Gifts

We here at Kill Ten Rats aim to kiss up to developers in any way possible to get free subs, dusted off loot, and star treatment.  Still, we have to appear as journalists-of-some-quality or we would be yelling at a cold corner on the internet.  Thankfully, the brilliant Think Tank division of Kill Ten Rats came up with a way we can make money, please developers, and get more quality articles to you!

For a limited time, when you register for the Looking For Group Expo we will send 10 dead rats to your favorite developer!  If you register a group of four or more people we will include a hand-drawn letter from the dead rats’ family.  It only gets better! If Activision is your favorite developer we will make sure to include a handful of work-friendly Hantavirus rat droppings for free!

But, wait!  There’s more!  Mention Kill Ten Rats to the people at Looking For Group Expo, and in the developer’s gift package we will include a flea circus complete with Yersinia pestis diving pool.  Hours of fun will be had as developers reinvigorate their creative juices watching fleas dance about on rat corpses.

Your recipient developers will be sent this wonderful gift package immediately.  The contents provide hours of nerfball-like office fun, and the day can be ended with with a grilling cookout with freshly tenderized meat!  There is no better way to show the developers that you truly appreciate all the hard work they do.  Act now before limited supplies run out!

–Ravious
void everywhere

Character Gender

In my experience, and I think the research agrees, male players are more likely to play female characters than vice versa. There is fun speculation about why that is.

The usual in-game reason is a perceived ease in getting assistance, attention, or gifts. A favorite sociological explanation is that our culture treats maleness as the norm, so women already know how all that works but men have this whole alien, Other realm to explore. My wife sticks with female characters because they have more pretty options, while many male options are intentionally and aggressively ugly. Many (heterosexual male) hardcore gamers have decided that, if they are going to be staring at someone’s backside for 40+ hours a week, it might as well be a shapely female backside. And then there’s this guy I know who is a mostly male-oriented bisexual and is married to a woman; his Second Life avatar is female so he can have virtual sex with men and relieve real life pressure.

Personally, I tend to have a balanced stable of characters. Continue reading Character Gender

Guild Transcendent

One of my favorite MMO related quotes from the sage Raph Koster discussing online tribalization where he says that people have a moment of clarity where they see they are part of things. They say in that moment “Oh, here’s my real community.”  For most of us social homo sapiens (and the few papio hamadryas that pop in here occasionally) a community is a necessary thing.  Yet, as the internet, the MMO genre, and even gaming platforms like Steam evolve the sense of community as a finite thing gives way to a mass of thoughts and people that ebb and flow with tides of activity.  The most basic of these units comprising the mass of community is of course the small, focused social club we call a guild.

Continue reading Guild Transcendent

The Quiet Before the sTORm

Hi.

You may not know me, but I go by the name Ethic. I used to play MMOs and write about them here. Somewhere along the line, I found myself with just enough time to play games for a few hours a week with nothing much to say afterwards. Same old same old, know what I mean? Thankfully, some other folks keep things going around here when I’m not feeling “wordy”.

Over the years, I have seen my interests flit about from here to there and back. TV has taken up more of my free time with Lost, Fringe, 24, Castle, Big Bang Theory, Justified and my Farscape complete series DVDs. There are some really enjoyable TV shows out there lately. After I get caught up with my shows on the DVR, I turn my attention to the PC.

Continue reading The Quiet Before the sTORm

Shadow of the Colossus MMO

No, one has not been announced, but I have long been wondering why there are so few games of the “it’s all boss fights” style. I can get the notion of having “trash mobs” like matting around a picture, but you probably should not want trash in your game. Grinds keep players subscribed, blah blah, killing 10,000 rats in your new game is not going to be any better than killing 10,000 rats in WoW, so that’s not going to be a huge draw for you. The only place I’ve seen where killing 10,000 rats is different is City of Heroes, where things get to be wacky fun in the late levels with massive AE buffs and attacks while you fight 20+ enemies at once.

Can we skip the crap and get to the interesting part?

: Zubon

Profile of an addict

I”m beginning to wonder if I’m too addicted to mmorpgs. Whether I’m addicted or not, is not really up for questioning, it’s just a matter of how badly I’m addicted. I stumbled upon my old Everquest 2 profile. I noticed that I logged an average of about 40 hours per week on my main character even though I know I was working full-time during that time period.

Continue reading Profile of an addict