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.
.My brother (whom I call hard core brother or HCB) has taken many forms under the name of Grim. His latest is a blood elf paladin. He sends me this update about him and his guild Juggernaut.
The name of the mount is “Invincible“, and is a guaranteed drop off of LK25-H.
For obvious reasons, it’s the rarest mount in the game :) I was fortunate enough to be awarded our first one.
Not that long ago, this quote appeared on Massively:
The December first launch of the game “should never have happened,” and Smart is working to fix this. Among other things, he says the “WoW lookalike rubbish” is gone. The design team is throwing it out and working in a completely different direction to give the game its own unique look and feel. “You don’t go competing with WoW when you don’t have a WoW sized budget or the manpower to match.”
They copied World of Warcraft, realized it was a dumb idea, and are going to take all that WoW rubbish out.
Then I get the Alganon launch email and it has this quote:
“Traditionally, massively multiplier online games have been about three basic gameplay pillars – combat, exploration and character progression,” Derek Smart continued. “In Alganon, in addition to these we’ve added the fourth pillar to the equation; a story.
Where have I heard that before? Oh right, Star Wars:The Old Republic. Also, nice spelling. Multiplier?
Traditionally MMOs are built on three pillars; Exploration, Combat, and Progression. We at BioWare and LucasArts believe there is a fourth pillar: Story.
Do they have any original ideas? They didn’t have a WoW budget but they do have a SWTOR budget?
– Ethic
More people bought it without the queue, and more will, but we know that at least 140,000 people bought the sparkly pony. At $25 each, that is $3.5 million. There are costs to making it, dealing with billing, etc., but we’ll ignore those along with the people not in the 140,000. For the moment, I just want to help you get an idea of how much money they already got for the sparkly pony, since most of us have trouble visualizing numbers like $3,500,000.
Take all the money you have, including all your savings, your retirement fund, and any equity in your house. Now add in everything you are going to earn at work for the next ten years. It’s probably more than that.
: Zubon
Like any good subject, Blizzard’s latest online purchase for World of Warcraft, the Celestial Steed (i.e., the Sparklepony) created a lot of back and forth commentary around the blogosphere. Thankfully, some clarity poked through the clouds. Guild Wars also released another buyable costume set for the War in Kryta chapter of Guild Wars Beyond. Parallel discussions of item-worth, self-worth, happiness, and greed occurred on all affected forums.
Yet, when a collector’s edition for an untried, over-hyped (read: untrue) MMO drops for $30 more than the commoner’s edition, there is barely a peep. It seems that collector’s editions can contain nearly any in-game bonus, and unless it provides game breaking balance issues, the bonuses are merely seen as value added to the collector’s edition.
You may have heard something about a shiny pony. One thing I like is that you can keep the same mount your entire career. How many games let you improve the function while keeping the appearance? Fluff and stats should be entirely separable aspects, hence the glory of the now-common appearance tabs. If you really like how your first horse looks, it would be nice to be able to keep it and just have it run faster. You can even force the player to pay for the privilege, but don’t force fluff changes for function upgrades.
Okay, this is more than I was expecting in the sense of “pay for the privilege”…
: Zubon
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.”
Once upon a time, a western MMO was announced three years before it’s targeted release date. The developers tried to hide their more simplistic graphics engine by making use of “stylized” graphics. Some were turned off by the graphical design, but others argued the graphics would age better than realistic looking games. Besides, it promised to be a “seamless” world, which is worth something. Despite being the company’s first MMO, people trusted the developer because of their reputation for only releasing quality games. The developer had a reputation for making the some of the best games of their genre. The game of which I speak is Star Wars, The Old Republic and Bioware. But all these things could also be said of World of Warcraft and Blizzard.
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.
For a game that depends on a stream of income from subscribers or RMT shoppers, the first hour of play must be the top development priority. This is where you hook players. After that, the endgame is important because that is where your players will be spending time indefinitely and where your game’s chatter will come from in the long run. Next is the early game, when you build momentum. The mid-game has already fallen this far down the list, as you have certainly seen in a lot of MMOs, and frankly few care much how good the late-game is because they are already fully committed and racing for the end-game.
I stand by my repeated claim that optimizing the new player experience is of paramount importance. You must grab my attention within five minutes, and you must deliver a satisfying hour or two for my first play session. Without that, any free trial is worthless, and you may even lose some people who have thrown down $50 for a box. This is the part of the game that every single player will see on every single character, and if you cannot do a good job here, I have no hope for the rest of the game. Yes, it is hard to make things interesting while giving the player only a few buttons to play with. Suck it up, we all have hard parts in our jobs. That’s why they pay us. Continue reading Early, Middle, Late
There is no question that the strong majority of North American MMO players play World of Warcraft. Even assuming a paltry 3 million players are still playing in the twilight of the latest expansion, that is still a magnitude more active players than the next similar MMO in line. Other MMOs like FreeRealms and Runescape muddy the waters as to what is an active or subscribing player or even similar game. But, defining MMO is irrelevant. What is relevant is World of Warcraft is the god-king of MMOs, and like a good god-king, it views itself as above the rest to the degree that they might as well not exist.