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[GW2] Poor Feedback

With the next beta weekend event upcoming, I must confess that I bollixed some feedback last time. ArenaNet is using a system you probably know from other betas: when you finish a heart or event, you get a pop-up asking you to rate it on a few scales (with a comment box). Get that feedback now before the players forget, move on, etc. For me, the problem arose with stacked content. Early on in charr lands, and surely elsewhere, there is an event taking place on a heart, so participating in the event also fills the heart (at the junkyard, in this case). I completed both at once. I did not realize I had two stacked pop-ups until I cleared the first one and realized I was not sure what I just gave feedback on. It was two completions, and I think an achievement or two, plus some enemies still running around, plus whatever normally happens in that heart, plus all that loot to grab before “how long do I have to loot?” and do I need to salvage to make pack space, plus people to rez, and I may have leveled. I need a couple of minutes to decompress after that many things happen at once in a new game, and I have multiple feedback windows in the sky and glittering things on the ground. Aaagh!

: Zubon

[GW2] Guild Wars 2 Beta Key Contest

Congrats to all the winners! My favorite was  “to go back to their roots” as simple, and oft-repeated as it was. The winners, all randomly chosen, are:

Nicc0 – Oggy – Zazuki – alp – Peter Mackie – Bevis212 – TheSanto – Wok – Brimstar – Ancrath – Talzin – Moxxi – Stcha – Pirateking – Max Okazaki – Genzi – Andre Simmonds – Dark Link – Scott – Smi

Emails containing the key have been sent out. Please check  your spam folders as “winning” + links is usually spam anyways.

EDIT: Talk about a response! We are unfortunately ending this contest a bit early as we’re approaching technical issues. Thank you all for entering. I will determine the winners by the end of Friday. –Rav

ArenaNet was awesome enough to throw a couple Guild Wars 2 beta keys for the upcoming beta weekend our way. Did I say a couple? How about twenty! These keys are good just for the Guild Wars 2 weekend event occurring June 8-10.

How to enter? Simply answer this question via comments below: Why did the sylvari cross the road? with a clever, bookah answer by the end of this Friday, June 1st. (Hint: “to get to the other side” is not a clever, bookah answer.) Please leave a valid email with the comment, and only one entry per person please. I will then randomly choose 20 participants on Saturday, June 2nd and notify the winners here and privately via email.

Good luck, and thanks to ArenaNet!

–Ravious

[Eve] What Next?

Evenings in New Eden have seen a lot of activity from the pilots of INQ-E recently.   Ten-man fleets are becoming commonplace and the diversity of our activities has been very enjoyable and very rewarding.   We spent some time in Null, we have had a steady string of Grav sites and have hauled in so much ore we have not only filled the Corp POS holds to overflowing, but it has started spilling over into Weezi’s POS hanger as well, and that is in danger of capping out…  We have been running combat sites non-stop and even have had a bit of time to pew pew in LoSec or the other wormhole connections that have spawned.  We now run Ore Refinery, Gas Reactions, Invention, BPC Research, Ammo Production, and are producing T2 Modules inside the hole….

Busy, profitable, and fun, and the conversation every night turns to ‘whats next?’

  Continue reading [Eve] What Next?

[GW2] Guild Wars 2 Beta Weekend Zwei!

One nice bit of news is that the second Guild Wars 2 pre-purchase access beta weekend was announced in the midnight hours by Chris “Snowcrash” Whiteside on the ArenaNet blog. The most important bit of information of course is that the beta weekend runs from June 8th to June 10th, which gives gamers a good week or so to stock up on foodstuffs and earn points with the significant others. The next bit hints at further blog posts coming down the line:

We have listened intently to all of your feedback from our first Beta Weekend Event, and we’ve made great strides toward resolving many of the issues you’ve helped us identify. These include party movement into overflow servers, chat functionality, key bindings, server stability, performance, and many more that we will detail in the near future.

Since we already know that the asura and sylvari will not be playable, it is likely that the same content will be available to play. This is compounded by the blog’s mention that with no character wipe players will be able to access the explorable parts of the Ascalonian Catacombs dungeon (level 35). This is a bold position because instead of limelighting new content to shift community focus, ArenaNet is believably going to keep the same content in a more focused light.   The “great strides” are made all the more critical. That’s bold, ArenaNet.

I have a plan to play the lackey. I plan on playing a “support” elementalist that is big on daggers and the water and earth attunements who will basically run towards players instead of events. Elementalist is one of my last choices for live, and I want to kind of go crazy next beta weekend. What do you plan on doing this time around?

–Ravious

The MMO Siren Song

The dirges of 38 Studios and the many employees of BioWare passed me by last week as I lay in bed with a virus that wished it was strep. Thankfully at this cowboy ranch we call Kill Ten Rats, Cyndre was able to get up a heartfelt post for our team. My favorite two posts on the subject were the reawakening of Broken Toys as Scott Jennings penned an ode to the MMO genre, and Spinks hammering out an always amazing link post. A few days before as the virus began its assault on my tonsils, I wrote a few languishing thoughts that set a desperate preview of what was to come.

I’ll repeat part of the much quoted Jennings’ post where he writes “…the incredible amount of money wasted by EA on what was essentially a roll of the dice that came up 2 and 3, and the even more incredible display of massive hubris and utter incompetence on the part of Schilling and his management team, is killing the very concept of massively multiplayer gaming.” I thought a lot about his words as I lay there staring at the ceiling. Continue reading The MMO Siren Song

Giant Lag Spikes on Your Shoulderpads

Diablo III is doing hardcore mode wrong. … Let me get the most glaringly obvious point out of the way. Diablo III requires an internet connection to play. This means lag. This means that you WILL die due to circumstances which are beyond your control. No internet connection is 100% reliable. Sometimes the Blizzard servers cock it up, and this will happen no matter what premium you pay for your connection. Therefore, as enticing it is to take a hardcore character seriously, the fact that you are at the mercy of the internet connection turns what should be a test of skill and caution into a veritable lottery. If your name gets pulled out of the hat you win a one way trip to permadeath.
— The Mighty Viking Hamster

LotRO guides to the Undying title recommend against always running the easiest, safest content. If you have out-leveled the content, you are getting very little experience, while you are almost always safe enough on blue content. You are in a race with lag spikes and random perversity; given enough hours, your character will die due to no fault of your own, so if you want to achieve X before dying, you must reach it before “enough hours.”

: Zubon

38 Studios Lays Everyone Off

Via The Verge.

Items of note:

  • Reckoning was a “failure.”  They needed to sell 3,000,000 copies just to break even on the deal.  They sold 1.2M.
  • They are closing both offices completely.  Providence and Maryland’s BHG.
  • First internal communications grew ‘sparse’ then paychecks stopped coming, then email servers went down, they heard the bad news a few weeks later…

First of all…  3,000,000 copies!?!  Did anyone think it would sell that many?  I thought 1.2M sounded pretty good.

My thoughts are with all of the developers and their families who are dealing with a very difficult time.   This is a sad day for the entire industry.   Bioware laid off a ‘significant’ number of their employees working on SW:TOR and now all 337 employees of 38 Studios are unemployed.   Sad times, indeed.

~Cyndre

 

[Eve] Two Months

Today marks two months since I first set foot in New Eden.   It is hard to believe it has only been that long because I feel like I have seen and accomplished a lot in that very short period of time.   Let’s take a moment to reflect on what has happened over the last few months and take stock of my current situation and near term goals.

I joined INQ-E, moved into a C3 Wormhole, celebrated a 9th Anniversary, Burn Jita, Hulkageddon, the list goes on an on…  all in two months.  That is more that I would expect from a year in most MMOs.

Continue reading [Eve] Two Months

Non-Sequitors

A few news briefs that don’t really fit together in any coherent way:

 

  • My initial impressions of the Guild Wars 2 beta were wrong.   Go read the Facebook update from yesterday where ANet talks about how hard they are working on the client after the feedback from the BWE1 and Stress Test.   They aren’t even releasing a new BWE ‘until its ready.’  I can’t even begin to describe how happy this makes me.   Make it right, make it the best it can be, and I will help test when you want me to.

 

  • Today is patch day for the 17th Expansion to Eve Online titled Inferno.   My love for this game is no secret, and the pace at which CCP delivers content upgrades is simply amazing, and clearly leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else is doing in the MMO space…   add to that fact that the true game expansions are free, makes me scratch my head a bit, and really feel blessed to have found this game when I did, instead of letting one of the most impressive, and unique gaming experiences pass me by without ever giving it the proper due.

 

  • In a sad, but largely unsurprising turn of events, 38 Studios has started the process of downsizing their development staff.   For everyone out there commenting on the politics of this or that issue and forgetting that real people’s livelihoods are at stake, please take a moment to put yourselves in the shoes of the developer who was living their dream making games, and is now out of work.  This is a very difficult situation, and while you can hate on Curt Schilling if you want, try to temper your gloating by realizing that good people from our gaming  community are going through a hard time right now.

~Cyndre