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DDO: Static Style

Last night was the first night of the Massively DDO static night, officially called “Massively’s Nights of Eberron”. I’ve always said that I’d love to play DDO in a static group so I rolled up a Cleric the night before and then logged in last night. I expected maybe 15 or 20 people to show up. I’d guess it was closer to 50, including some famous folks like Psychochild and Green Armadillo. Syp would have been there but instead he was off doing something important like “welcoming a new baby into the world”. Yeah, whatever dude. Seriously though, congratulations!

The first thing that confused me is that we all were on Korthos but some of us had snow and some had sun. We had to all get to the sunny version which meant we had to sail to Stormreach and then back to Korthos. At this point we tried to form groups of 5 to do some quests. I invited one person and we stood around waiting for others to express interest. Eventually we got a group of 4 together, 1 Cleric and 3 Rogues. Off we went with voice chat enabled.

Continue reading DDO: Static Style

Leaderboard Prejudice

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.”

Continue reading Leaderboard Prejudice

New Annals in Design Stupidity

We are all familiar with the principle that you can design anything as a bonus or a penalty, right? You can give characters a “hunger” debuff, or you can give them a “well fed” buff for eating food; if you balance enemies with the assumption that everyone will have eaten, the practical effect is negligible, but players like the idea of being rewarded instead of being punished. Similarly, most games give you the normal amount of experience if you are “rested” in some form, rather than saying that you only earn half xp if you play too much. No, it’s not “bonus xp” where you are somehow putting something over the very developers who implemented it.

Most Facebook games reward you for logging in every day or having many friends. Many will even give you increasingly large bonuses for playing many days in a row or for having many friends. I have found two that take the opposite approach to an idiotic degree. Hotel City is the latest from Playfish, and if you go a few days without playing, cockroaches will take over your rooms so you must pay to clean them out. Yes, they punish you for returning to the game after an absence. Food Friendzy randomly hits you with a “21 Club” tile. If you have at least 21 friends playing, you get 21 points for landing on it; if not, you lose 21 points. That sounds like an unfortunate prospect to bootstrap: “Come play this game with me where we get punished for not having enough friends playing. No, not many, we’ll need to recruit about 12 more, why do you ask?” It is also one of the worst excuses for a game I have ever seen, where the entire gameplay is picking tiles at random to get points. Many of those tiles will make you lose points, including “lose all” and one that flips your score from positive to negative. And then they will mock your “strategy” if your score ends in the negative.

: Zubon

Guild Wars – War in Kryta Recap

Day by day the viral campaign for Guild Wars and believably its 5th Anniversary is bringing life to the Guild Wars community.  Almost every weekday it seems some small piece of the puzzle drops even if its an image that just becomes slightly less blurred.  I can barely keep up with it, and I definitely seem unable to tell the story here.  But, other people can.  Neo Nugget and Borx at Guild Wars 2 Guru forum have put together an excellent recap walking all late-comers step by step through what we have found in the viral marketing campaign.  The thread covers everything from the webpages that were discovered to the Facebook status updates for each faction.

Continue reading Guild Wars – War in Kryta Recap

SWTOR, the real WOW 2

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.

Continue reading SWTOR, the real WOW 2

Guild Wars – Shining Blade Camp

The ongoing Guild Wars viral campaign has reached a culmination, but likely not the culmination. The community was able to come up with two more hidden websites (/neeuqsiamlas/ and /stnarytothtaed/) each showing one word in the Tyrian alphabet. When combined it gave “Blade Camp” which lead to a site showing an in-game screenshot of the Shining Blade’s supposed camp after the Henge of Denravi fell to the White Mantle.

The camp turned out to be Dakutu Village in the Talmark Wilderness explorable area, which I believe is currently unoccupied.  The Blade Camp image also contained another hidden link sending people to an extremely blurry War in Kryta link.  What this means is anybody’s guess, but the viral campaign is marching on both in-game and out.  Big thanks to everyone working very hard to crack all the codes.

–Ravious
the poetry of war

EDIT: Also be sure to check out the on-going courtship between Gwen and Thackeray.

Developer Gifts

We here at Kill Ten Rats aim to kiss up to developers in any way possible to get free subs, dusted off loot, and star treatment.  Still, we have to appear as journalists-of-some-quality or we would be yelling at a cold corner on the internet.  Thankfully, the brilliant Think Tank division of Kill Ten Rats came up with a way we can make money, please developers, and get more quality articles to you!

For a limited time, when you register for the Looking For Group Expo we will send 10 dead rats to your favorite developer!  If you register a group of four or more people we will include a hand-drawn letter from the dead rats’ family.  It only gets better! If Activision is your favorite developer we will make sure to include a handful of work-friendly Hantavirus rat droppings for free!

But, wait!  There’s more!  Mention Kill Ten Rats to the people at Looking For Group Expo, and in the developer’s gift package we will include a flea circus complete with Yersinia pestis diving pool.  Hours of fun will be had as developers reinvigorate their creative juices watching fleas dance about on rat corpses.

Your recipient developers will be sent this wonderful gift package immediately.  The contents provide hours of nerfball-like office fun, and the day can be ended with with a grilling cookout with freshly tenderized meat!  There is no better way to show the developers that you truly appreciate all the hard work they do.  Act now before limited supplies run out!

–Ravious
void everywhere

Guild Wars – Bad, Bad Mr. Mantle

The Guild Wars viral campaign leading up to… something is creating a playful rift in the community.  Playful, so far, I should say.  As soon as the links to the White Mantle and the Shining Blade, two NPC organizations in Guild Wars, people started using hashtags to proclaim allegiance to a certain side.  I bet ArenaNet was absolutely gleeful at the response considering all they did at that point was put up a poster for each adversarial organization.  It was pretty fun, but what is most amazing to me is that people are actually siding with the White Mantle.

Let me put this into perspective.  You go to a Super Bowl or World Cup party.  There are too many available members of the opposite sex to really watch the game (even though you want to) so you flirt, eat, and talk while the game runs in the background.  You leave to go home, without having watched much of the game at all, but you do catch the final score.  Your team gets pummeled.  So what do you do?  You go home to where you recorded the game, sit down with a fresh pint and some nachos, and start cheering for your team like some madman who believes that by yelling at the TV you are actually giving your team energy.  This is what it’s like to be proclaiming allegiance to the White Mantle right now.

Continue reading Guild Wars – Bad, Bad Mr. Mantle