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.
.City of Heroes has started rolling out information on the Incarnate system, its post-cap alternate advancement. The initial ability, the alpha slot, seems to be effectively giving you an enhancement slot or two that affects every power on your character.
: Zubon
Crud, there’s a bug? Better go back to WoW.
— moondog548
How can so few words contain so many levels of meaning? I had wanted to comment on the usual lack of a middle ground between “dismissive” and “CRISIS!” but I think expectations are the more important point here. Every boss is bugged in a dungeon you visit for the game’s central quest line, more than a year after it went live? Par for the course. Any hope otherwise is risible, worthy of taking the time to publicly mock.
You really do get what you pay for, and you deserve it. If you are willing to pay for things as-is, or as-is plus a hope that they will get better, companies will happily sell them to you. Cryptic has been experimenting with how early in the development cycle you can start selling the game. WoW is what passes for highly polished in our genre; save the real “when it’s ready” for people who demand it.
: Zubon
As I established in my inaugural post, I’m a hobby game design nerd. So given the opportunity to attend the Buffalo Bills vs. Pittsburgh Steelers game this weekend at Ralph Wilson Stadium, what do I look forward to? That’s right…how the experience can apply to the browser-based game I’m working on.   Forget that I’ll be in club seating. Forget that I’ll have a Fanvision on me. Forget that I’ll probably drink enough beer to forget everything anyway…
I won’t bore you with my analytical break down of how the game of football could apply to the design of an MMO. Instead, I wanted to talk about the design of my favorite game and get some feedback on yours…
Today is the sixth anniversary of that MMO. It’s also the day that the Shattering finally takes place and the game world of Azeroth changes.
A criticism levelled at a lot some new MMOs is that they are trying to be World of Warcraft (and I’m not referring solely to Alganon). SWG’s aforementioned NGE, for example, seemed to be inspired not in the least by WoW’s success. So it seems somewhat meta that Blizzard are reshaping their old world to be more like itself – only better. Taking lessons learned from two successful expansions, out go all those damned tedious quests which require you to traipse back and forth between continents and in come new storylines for zones that bring the questing experience more in line with Outland and Northrend zones.
Incidentally, The Green Hills of Stranglethorn quest that Jeff Kaplan admitted may have been a mistake in its original incarnation is still in the game. Now, however, you only have to collect one page instead of twelve.
…in a galaxy far, far away, the NGE hit Star Wars: Galaxies. The date: November 15th 2005¹.
Five years later, despite server closures and merges and a minimal population, the game is still going and content has still been added to the game including, amongst other additions, the planet of Hoth which went live on November 20th 2008. The latest patch, Game Update 18, was released last month.
Continue reading A long time ago…
I’ve been slowly catching up on news, blogs, and emails since I took a journey half-way across the country for a wedding my whole family would be a part of. (Flower girls nearly stole the show!) I have been watching, though. I did see the When It’s Ready blog post from Guild Wars 2 master Eric Flannum. It made a 500 ton splashes at the various Guild Wars 2 communities because of the information it gives, the information it doesn’t, and the virtual pressing of the mute button for the rest of the year.
I decided to play a bit of LotRO over the weekend. If you have also sat out the last year, good news: you can catch up on all the new content for existing characters in a week or maybe a hardcore weekend. Most of the big additions to LotRO have been redecorating lower-level areas and adding the cash shop.
I joined a group for the Water-wheels works, having missed that dungeon while on a previous break. There are two boss fights. The first boss reset five times. After the first couple, we all ran on top of the spawning point to fight; the next two resets involved the boss running past us until it reset. We eventually ran past the boss and kept him on the far side of the area. The end boss respawned immediately after we defeated him, so we never got a chance to open the chests and get our reward. It’s good to know that, while they may be slow about introducing new content, they at least are equally slow about fixing bugs in old content.
: Zubon
To avoid having people set up 10 accounts and send themselves lots of free daily gifts, my Facebook restaurant game limits you to trading ingredients 1-for-1. You can set up extra accounts, and you can all send each other those daily gifts, but you cannot then go to each of those 10 accounts and send yourself the 10 gifts each received. Ignore the multi-account question and consider what this does to the game’s economy.
The best way to get what you want is to give it to someone else. First, if you need lots of beef, the easiest way to signal this is to send everyone beef. (You could also post it explicitly.) The default Facebook “send one back” option will get you beef. Let’s say you still want more beef. If the people you sent it to did not want it, you can trade with them, your whatever for the beef you just sent them.
To me, the interesting part is the deflation in the meat market. Flood the game with as much beef as you can for as many days as you can. This is entirely given away, so while you have lost nothing, you have gained no beef. But you still want beef, which other people now have excess amounts of. You can trade anything for beef, because people have more than they know what to do with.
In an MMO, when you flood the market with something, you are a seller and are driving down your own price. In a social media game, when you flood the market with something, you are a gifter and are driving down the price you pay.
: Zubon
Would you believe the internet moniker I’ve been using for the last 15 years came off a coffee mug? I was in a gift shop in Honolulu, Hawaii, looking at a rack of mugs that had English names on one side and the Hawaiian translation on the other. Matthew translates into Makaio. Some dude was already using that name on AOL…so I very creatively added the second ‘K’ and BAM!
In 1999, I learned that Ultima Online was an actual game, not a theoretical project. I had heard the name before, but I had somehow gotten the notion that it was a bit of science fiction. Considering how revolutionary Neverwinter Nights on AOL seemed, just a few years earlier, it was far-fetched to think that we were already living the cyberpunk dream of fully realized virtual fantasy gaming.
What I imagined under the name “Ultima Online” and the reality were rather different, but I would not come to learn that for years. I did not look into it immediately because my friend who told me about it went on to describe it as already broken. She told a story that I have never checked in the past decade: the code throttled how many grand masters there were of each skill by making it harder to advance as more people were advancing that skill. This would reward less common paths, but if 10,000 people were making horseshoes, blacksmith advancement would be very slow. So went her story, “sword” was an obviously popular skill, so improvement there went at a glacial pace, and characters were being slaughtered by chickens and deer as they vainly tried to get their first few points, while the first grand masters ran rampant.
Google was young in those days, and we were not in the habit of verifying what some guy said about online games. More importantly at the time, it seemed perfectly plausible. We all know some poorly implemented systems that spoil grand projects. Heck, it still sounds plausible, doesn’t it? The founding MMOs had experiments that did not always work. If I told you that some obscure MMO (and you know I love to cite obscure crap) had such a newbie-unfriendly system, where you ended up slaughtering 500 bunnies to compete for a limited number of sword-advancement points per server per day, you might just shake your head and mutter something about Korean grind-fests.
The effect was that my group of friends did not rush to UO. (It would be a year before I knew what EQ was, even after seeing it in stores. “Oh look, yet another fantasy CRPG I have never heard of.” Why would I bother picking up the box?) No, some of them joined late in the beta for this exciting new game called Asheron’s Call… Continue reading The Early Incursions: Asheron’s Call