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RMT

Years ago, goldsellers were the great plague of gaming. They were everywhere, they were annoying, they were criminal conspiracies that were hacking accounts and credit cards. I flipped the eff out when WAR launched without a working /ignore function and the majority of chat was goldspam during off-hours. Pitchforks and torches appeared when one of our former writers patronized a goldseller.

I know they’re still out there, so why don’t I hear much about them? I regularly get phishing spam at an address not even associated with a WoW account. I do not know how long ago I last saw goldseller ads, because they no longer mentally register, but my sense is that I have seen them recently. Account security is still a big thing, particularly for WoW.

Is it mostly a WoW thing at this point? There is only so much profit available in niche markets. Maybe companies have gotten better about anti-goldspam techniques.

I just don’t hear much about RMT in a F2P environment, and most MMOs have gone F2P or hybrid. If a player won’t pay for the game itself, you probably will not be able to sell him much gold. If a player is willing to pay to get ahead, s/he now can usually pay the developer directly.

: Zubon

Maybe it’s just me.

[GW2] Within Reach

With this Author Exchange, we’ve paired with Guild Wars 2 Hub to bring you an original editorial from outside of our regular authorship. The Author Exchange is intended to bridge the gap between existing Guild Wars 2 communities and websites to bring a new set of opinions, ideas and content to readerships that might not necessarily know one another. In this Author Exchange Lewis B from Guild Wars 2 Hub brings you an editorial on how he will miss the buzz and excitement of the Guild Wars 2 beta.

Continue reading [GW2] Within Reach

City of Steam interview and impressions

I was lucky enough last week to take part in the City of Steam Alpha preview event, offered by the guys at Mechanist. I came out pleasantly surprised by it. Even in such an early Alpha state it shows polish and potential, so I thought (in true investigative journal fashion) to shoot some questions to the Mechanist crew about City of Steam. We discuss the game, optimizations and frank views on elves and fantasy.

Mike Wallace, eat a bee.

Continue reading City of Steam interview and impressions

It Goes Without Saying

No it doesn’t! For any completely obvious observation you might make, you can also find someone who has obviously forgotten or failed to observe it, and you can probably find someone who sincerely disagrees with it. You can find someone who has failed to observe it at high stakes, like millions of dollars or at the risk of his/her life. People mess up the obvious all the time.

This observation probably also seems obvious to you. You know that people make obvious mistakes all the time. And yet you are still surprised by it sometimes. You can be oblivious to the obviousness of obviousness.

The Declaration of Independence holds these truths to be self-evident and then goes on to spell them out. It seemed kind of important to make them explicit. Also, you can name more than a dozen countries where you can still be killed for saying all of them in public.

So Ravious’s title is quite apt, and even if the principles seem patronizingly obvious, how long will it take you to name a dozen games that violate them? How many seconds will it take you to name a company that spent nine-digit sums developing a single-player MMO? You’ve seen me post about the obvious or trivial or review years-old games. Beyond the (obvious) fact that there are always new people to whom old insights are new, we forget old insights or forget to apply them because they seem so obvious. There are new implications to be found in old data. There are unknown knowns.

: Zubon

[GW2] We Hold These Truths…

I read Ben Miller’s blog post today. ArenaNet’s golden rules of development sound like they would be stone-forged on the groundbreaking of any MMO studio. I’ll rewrite the rules real quick : 1) prop world is boring, 2) solo MMOs will never be as good as single-player games, 3) pixel bitching sucks, especially in MMOs, 4) copying World of Warcraft is dumb, 5) slap-shod work is only worthy of seppeku, and 6) love thy customer.

Seems pretty obvious for the most part. I think the big missing link is why Miller took the time to write what gamers would think would be as evident as kindergarten rules. Except for rule 6, they can all be distilled in to the conundrum of all work. Quality, cost, speed – pick two. Continue reading [GW2] We Hold These Truths…

Gaming Glee versus Gaming Hobby

I am continuing to find like Zubon that there are various shades of gaming. I want to focus on a highly-sought wavelength of gaming called “glee”. No, this is not the high school musical show type of fun. This is the high excitement caused by spontaneity and action that jaded adults and angsty teen rarely get anymore.

I have a table-top gaming group, and our default when no one is up to game-mastering a role-playing game is Magic the Gathering. We mostly play long games of multiplayer EDH (commander, 100-card no duplicates), but occasionally we change it up. I noticed last weekend that our EDH games feel like work, and we usually comfort ourselves at the end with the amount of “zany hijinks” that crossed the table. We always hate the winning/losing part of the game, but secretly each pray for death after the 7th or 8th turn.

A few weeks ago we decided to pull out our dusty 60-card decks to play a tournament with them. The catch was that a deck owner couldn’t play his own deck, and since we mostly played our own decks, we would be learning many decks on the fly. Winning and losing didn’t much matter anymore. We just played for the fun of it. It was missing from our Magic games for a long time, but I felt glee. That elated, uncaring happiness.

Continue reading Gaming Glee versus Gaming Hobby

Fun and Relaxation

We are home from a two-week vacation. Fortunately, we came back with enough time to relax before going back to work, because vacation is something that demands recovery time.

A fair amount of folks’ talking past one another is because of the differing goals that they bring to the table. Some people are at a restaurant for the dining experience rather than the food. Some people are playing the same game as you but not for the purpose of having fun. If you’re an anti-social teetotaler who just happens to like sitting on stools at bars, you are going to be a very lonely voice in a discussion about what makes a good tavern.

The title suggests the big distinction I am thinking about. After work, some people like to chill while others want to do something. I don’t know how much of this is a factor of personality or type of work, although the two are hardly independent, and of course it can vary by the day. Some people are not going to have a good time going out to “have a good time.” Even within narrower frames, some people tend towards more challenging entertainments, say marathons instead of going for a walk or George Martin versus JK Rowling. Baseball is America’s favorite pastime — it is mostly downtime, punctuated by brief potential activity, less occasionally by actual action.

I do not have far to run with this idea today. I am just reflecting on how this covers many differing reactions. I am very insistent that a game be a good game, repeatedly arguing that if I just want something to do while hanging out with my friends, we have lots of options that do not involve monthly fees, level barriers, and a dedicated server with maintenance windows. Other people, eh, they’re not here for the game; if they have fun, bonus, but they’re just looking for something to mess around with after work.

: Zubon

Guild Wars 2 Release Date (8/28/12)

The most bittersweet of days for Guild Wars 2 is today. It is by far more sweet than bitter, but now the world is indeed moving on. In two months, possibly my most anticipated MMO ever will be real. In one summer morning, with a few characters of information, the community is shaken from a state of speculation to mobilization. I was expecting late September to November, honestly. So this is as much a surprise to me as anybody.

I am at a loss for words. I’ll just keep watching this video instead.


–Ravious

The Origin of Sandbox / Theme park Distinction

Longtime reader and commentator, Curuniel, emailed me and asked if I knew the origin of the sandbox / theme park distinction? I admit I really did not so I decided to crowdsource the question.  Google is not much help because it wants to show the more recent hits.On KillTenRats, the first instance of the term “sandbox” is in 2005 where Zubon praised EVE Online and A Tale in the Desert for being such MMOs. “Theme park” occurs in 2007 and 2008, again by Zubon.

Syncaine has a post from early 2008, but he uses the terms like ordinary vernacular. Looking at Syp’s MMO timeline, I would imagine that the actual distinction happened a bit later than Syncaine’s theory of Everquest. World of Warcraft, I feel, was really the MMO that streamlined quests in to “rides” instead of mere activities. It was so fresh at the time, the backlash of it becoming a theme park I feel came about much alter. Perhaps only later when around Blizzard’s first World of Warcraft expansion in early 2007  people began to see more of the same and a swath of alleged copycat MMOs came around. But, really this is all guesswork on my end.

Anyway, I’d love to hear people’s opinions or any better search attempts to find the origin of the distinction.

–Ravious