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Computer Problems
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.
Character Gender
In my experience, and I think the research agrees, male players are more likely to play female characters than vice versa. There is fun speculation about why that is.
The usual in-game reason is a perceived ease in getting assistance, attention, or gifts. A favorite sociological explanation is that our culture treats maleness as the norm, so women already know how all that works but men have this whole alien, Other realm to explore. My wife sticks with female characters because they have more pretty options, while many male options are intentionally and aggressively ugly. Many (heterosexual male) hardcore gamers have decided that, if they are going to be staring at someone’s backside for 40+ hours a week, it might as well be a shapely female backside. And then there’s this guy I know who is a mostly male-oriented bisexual and is married to a woman; his Second Life avatar is female so he can have virtual sex with men and relieve real life pressure.
Personally, I tend to have a balanced stable of characters. Continue reading Character Gender
‘A’ for effort
LOG THE SAFETY NET!
Guild Transcendent
One of my favorite MMO related quotes from the sage Raph Koster discussing online tribalization where he says that people have a moment of clarity where they see they are part of things. They say in that moment “Oh, here’s my real community.â€Â For most of us social homo sapiens (and the few papio hamadryas that pop in here occasionally) a community is a necessary thing. Yet, as the internet, the MMO genre, and even gaming platforms like Steam evolve the sense of community as a finite thing gives way to a mass of thoughts and people that ebb and flow with tides of activity. The most basic of these units comprising the mass of community is of course the small, focused social club we call a guild.
The Final Countdown
A lot of times, developers get a lot more out of their advertising buck if they don’t tell us what the heck they are advertising. The Cloverfield movie trailer originally didn’t give us any clue as to the title of the movie it was advertising. All the speculation outside the movie theater actually lead to more word-of-mouth buzz than if they had just told us, “This is a trailer for a blair-witch like monster movie with a funny name”.
Bioware has once again decided to make use of the power of mystery with a countdown timer that appears on every Bioware website you can think of, except for TOR. Is the exclusion of the timer on the Old Republic’s site an indication that TOR fans shouldn’t care about the timer? Or is it an insidious plan to throw us off the trail of a big Star Wars announcement?
Well, I suppose we’re supposed to speculate until the countdown reaches zero, on Monday morning.
EDIT: Turned out it was a competition to win stuff like computers, t-shirts and other swag. My heart always yearns for a TOR announcement. /Sigh.
The Quiet Before the sTORm
Hi.
You may not know me, but I go by the name Ethic. I used to play MMOs and write about them here. Somewhere along the line, I found myself with just enough time to play games for a few hours a week with nothing much to say afterwards. Same old same old, know what I mean? Thankfully, some other folks keep things going around here when I’m not feeling “wordy”.
Over the years, I have seen my interests flit about from here to there and back. TV has taken up more of my free time with Lost, Fringe, 24, Castle, Big Bang Theory, Justified and my Farscape complete series DVDs. There are some really enjoyable TV shows out there lately. After I get caught up with my shows on the DVR, I turn my attention to the PC.