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Personal Value

Personal value is the kind of value we receive from being active instead of passive, creative instead of consumptive. If you take a photo, or weave a basket, or build a model train set, you get something out of the experience. This energy drives the world’s hobbyists. However, as [a medical advocate] notes, there’s great value in seeing that we are not alone. Adding the social motivations of membership and generosity to the personal motivations of autonomy and competence can dramatically increase activities. Now that people can share videos on YouTube, far more people make such videos than ever made them when sharing was harder and the potential audience was smaller. Because humans have fundamentally social as well [as] personal motivations…social motivations can drive far more participation than can personal motivations alone.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

[GW2] Four in Shadows

Four unknown professions remain. We have a few official facts for all those speculating on the final Guild Wars 2 classes.

1. From the official site, we know there are three splats of professions: scholar, adventurer, and soldier. There will be three scholars, three adventurers, and two soldiers.

2. From an ArenaNet tweet: “Remaining four professions: at least one is a returning profession, at least one is similar with a different name, and at least one is new.”

3. Finally, ArenaNet gave us a little extra holiday gift when a community mananger announced the next profession reveal would be in January.

Continue reading [GW2] Four in Shadows

More Guild Polyamory

Is any game in the 2011 MMO crop going to break guild serial monogamy? A Tale in the Desert launched with the ability to join multiple guilds in 2003, and guild membership there meant a LOT more than just a chat channel and a tabard. 8 years later, games whose launch parties have larger catering budgets than the entire development of ATitD, and we still have games that are having trouble getting as far as alliance chat? Surely in this age of social media, someone in MMO land must have noticed that even we the introverts engage multiple social groups.

I have nothing meaningful to add to my post from almost two years ago. I am just perplexed that the situation has not changed at all, zero progress, not even an experiment.

: Zubon

The Rift Beta Tweet

In what really should be a tweet, I present to you my feelings on the upcoming Rift MMO. I would really like to experience more, but need a VIP key to do so (hint hint to Trion). Without further ado:

Rift MMO feels like a polished Warhammer Online with more dynamic public quests. I am going to get it.

Okay, I will shortly expand, but for a better impressions check out Syp’s. First off, the graphics, engine, and art style feel very Warhammer Online like. This is not a bad thing. In fact the game looks pretty good all around. There are a few issues like global cooldown and quest ganking, which is being looked at with a hard eye… but the dynamic content is the centerpiece for Rift.

Sadly, I did not experience enough of it to lay down The Wørd, but the little that I saw disappointed me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t because of the Rift system itself, which is quite awesome. It’s the old world mob tagging and grouping systems that seem to undercut this new world dynamic content.

Why do I have to be grouped to share in kills? Why is grouping not as easy as Warhammer Online? Why do I have to be grouped to even be able to participate in most of the dynamic content?  I believe these questions need a hard lookin’ at by Trion because I feel if they kowtow to the old ways too much it’s going to put some tarnish on their shiny.

–Ravious
(c) Kevin Siembieda

Tapas Gaming

Anybody that has followed this blog for awhile knows that we tend to have cycles of gaming and writing. I am currently going through a little downtime with MMOs. Perhaps it’s my subconscious prepping me for the intensity of 2011, the year of MMOs. I still have been gaming, even with MMOs. Yet, it’s been very different. I have not sat down for a long 2-4 hour session on a single game in quite some time. The seemingly endless Steam sale is only making it worse.

The games that are still on my short list all allow very quick bites of gameplay. I just beat Shatter’s story mode. It was a great buy for $2.50, and hopefully Steam will put it back up on sale. As that game left the short list, Super Meat Boy took its place. $15 is about $5 too expensive for my tastes, but the $4 I bought it for might as well have been free. The game is a fantastic, high-speed platforming romp. My favorite part is the combined replay of all my failures when I finally beat the level. It’s hilarious to see 10 out of 20 meat boys jump straight in to the nearest grind saw. Friend me up on Steam so you can see how much faster I am than you.

Continue reading Tapas Gaming

Read the Wiki, Follow the Guide

Foray’s third condition for combinability is clarity of the knowledge shared. We communicate instructions about cooking in recipe form for a reason: by listing ingredients and ordering instructions in steps, a recipe is clearer than a purely narrative description of how to cook a dish. A rambling description might have the same informational content as a recipe, but the form of a recipe is clearer. As a result, once any field of endeavor acquires something like a recipe–a set of instructions for an activity, separable from the activity itself–it can circulate much more effectively among people who can understand it.
— Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

: Zubon

Nice Dagger

Long-time readers have seen several versions of my dissatisfaction with LotRO’s epic chain, in which you mostly provide support for the heroes of the story of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. This is not the main cast of The Lord of the Rings, rather the local cast developed for the game, and you (pay to) play their supporting cast.

This weekend, the kin fielded a group to help someone run the last mission of Volume I. Yes, there is a buff to let you solo everything now, but it is an escort mission. You are familiar with how escort missions translate into suicidal NPCs, and LotRO players realize that Sara Oakheart is the central menace of Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ after the second or third time you escort her through certain doom. (You think I’m kidding.) So we fielded a group to support our friend who was supporting the NPC.

Jump to the very end of the quest. There we are, surrounding the redeemed elf as she confronts the Big Bad. It is not quite a cut scene; you lose control of your character and the camera, but it is still happening right there in front of your characters. It is odd to watch your characters just watching it happen. The villain has her at his mercy, taunting her as he lingers over the deathblow. “Wow, guys, think we should do something? She looks like she’s in trouble. If only our characters cared enough to help her out.”

And then, my apologies if this is a shocking spoiler, the good guys win. She pulls out a dagger and stabs the Big Bad through the chest: one-shot on a 150,000 hit point archnemesis. Maybe that was a devastating critical, but if she is carrying around a weapon that can deal 150,000 damage, why are we here? Why didn’t she use that earlier on the 20,000 hit point enemies? She was just sloughing for the entire epic chain!

: Zubon

Why don’t you want me to play?

Some time ago, I signed up to Runescape as I figured it would be worth trying out the largest free-to-play MMO in the world. It was definitely some time ago and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this year and it may well have been 2008 or prior to that. I know I wrote about free-to-play games on this site 3 years ago so maybe it was after that. I should probably have an email about it somewhere but it’s also possible it’s on an old PC that is going to be difficult to resurrect.

This is relevant. I’ll come back to it.

This morning I thought I’d give Runescape another look – partly because it had come up in conversation in my guild chat last night and partly because of an article published over at Massively the other day. And hey, it’s slow at work at the moment and it might pass the time during my lunch break.

Before I could play, however, there was the little matter of logging in.
Continue reading Why don’t you want me to play?

Minecraft and Warcraft

I am out of town today, so let me refer you to Tesh’s post about playing online with his daughter, “How Minecraft Ruined World of Warcraft“:

She then asked if we could go catch fish in the canals, and when she made my Dwarf jump into the canal, she saw the crabs and naturally wanted to go grab them. Since we didn’t have the fishing skill or a quest to gather crabs, again, we couldn’t do much more than swim around and wish.

She lost interest in the town until she happened to notice an apple tree.

Ah, to see things come full circle. She got excited and wanted to pick the apples. She is truly her father’s daughter, a quirk which is quite heartwarming. When I told her she couldn’t pick the apples, she got quiet for a while. She then announced that she wanted to play Minecraft.

: Zubon

[GW] A More Divine Wintersday

As with other MMOs, Guild Wars winter holiday celebration has arrived. Wintersday 2010 is here until January 3. This year there are two significant additions to the festival, and the Hearts of the North chapter in Guild Wars: Beyond wraps up. I have to say that I am pretty impressed with the amount of content the Live Team is getting out. I know there was a big hiccup during con season, but I hope this is more akin to the steady pace we might be seeing in the future.

First off, there are new buyable costumes: Agent of Balthazar costume and the Disciple of Melandru costume. One enterprising fan at Guru actually found the concept art for the costumes stuck in with a Guild Wars 2 concept art bunch. Anyway, they are pretty cool. I really like the Balthazar one, and I am considering picking it up. The Melandru one is a bit too… alien or Sylvari-ish for me. I guess I prefer spikes and horns to leaves.

Continue reading [GW] A More Divine Wintersday