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Three Guild Wars Things

Mondes Persistants was able to interview the Guild Wars Live Team, and there are some pretty interesting answers (HT: Fril Estelin @ Guild Wars Guru) .  The most interesting answer to a pretty common question regarding future content additions / events was:

Yes, we have a lot of ideas on our minds, probably more than we will be able to implement. We love the game and always try to come up with new things we hope players will enjoy. Who knows, maybe players will bear witness to some of the cataclysmic events that transform Tyria prior to Guild Wars 2?

ArenaNet keeps mildly hinting at using Guild Wars as a platform to introduce some Guild Wars 2 lore, but that is an overly candid response to an easily shunted question.  We know that skill balance is a top priority, but we haven’t heard anything about upcoming features or content. Hopefully after the dust from the skill balances clears, the Live Team can preview what else they are working on.

The second is that the popular Guild Wars fansite Guild Wars Guru was hacked, and the hacker was able to obtain some personal information.  Read about it here, but the bottom line is to change your passwords to Guild Wars Guru and Guild Wars 2 Guru (and Auction Site).  I would also watch any other sites / games where you combo your email, username, and/or current Guru password.

The third is I have to say with one of my last controversial posts on Guild Wars, I had the weirdest pingback ever.  We are breaking grounds with the MMO genre people! (And go River Rats!)

–Ravious
remember two things

Worthless Announcement

This just in from Interplay, regarding the “upcoming” “Fallout” “MMORPG”:

This MMOG will have many unique features that we will disclose before launch of the public Beta in 2012.

Hey everyone, guess what? We will open up for beta testing in 2012! Save some time for beta testing in 2012! We only started work on this in 2007, give us a break! Unless the Mayan thing is true. In that case, nevermind.

-Ethic

This gaming life

I’m the gamer in my family. I’ve been playing video games for 25 years and it’s a habit which doesn’t show any signs of letting up. Apart from a few drunken, post-pub sessions on Dance Dance Revolution on the PS2, my wife is a total non-gamer. She is vaguely aware of World of Warcraft and knows that I will sometimes stay up late to play “those silly games” on my laptop.

A fair few years ago, shortly after I started playing SWG, I attempted to explain to her all about MMOs, that a lot of the other characters on the screen were other players and that I was able to interact with them, talk to them, play with them. She showed about as much interest in it as I tend to do whenever Strictly Celebrity X Wife Jungle Dance Factor is on.

So, guess which one of us introduced our four-year-old son to Club Penguin!

Guild Wars Holy Trinity

The holy trinity is well known.  The DPS fight the mobs with damage.  The Healer fights the damage from the mobs.  And, the Tank fights the agro from the DPS and Healer.  In World of Warcraft the formula is pretty well set for easy gameplay.  Lord of the Rings gets a bit hazier with their use of hybrid classes, range tanking, and tank swapping, but for the most part it follows the doctrine of the holy trinity.

Guild Wars came very close to shirking the entire thing.  Agro does not really exist like it does in World of Warcraft or Lord of the Rings Online.  Each battle with PvE mobs is reminiscent of a PvP battle.  Players have 8 bodies against the team of enemies to kill.  Because PvE can feel so much like PvP (especially in comparison to the stark contrast of PvE/PvP in World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online), ArenaNet moved away from the holy trinity to a more enlightened trinity: the three lines.

Continue reading Guild Wars Holy Trinity

YAMMOB

A new MMO blog is up and running over at GameMonkey.  I know the writer personally (as personal as we get in our internet ways), and as the writer is a gamer and developer, the articles will have an unabashedly clear viewpoint from which to criticize and comment.  There should be some very good, possibly controversial posts on our favorite game genre.

–Ravious
but first take care of head

Chatty, Online and Off

“Talking” with a friend on chat last night, I mentioned that, despite how I appear online, I am rather quiet and reserved in-person. (Ethic also seems to be the strong silent type, so you can imagine that our occasional get-togethers look like The Adventures of Dour and Taciturn.) You may have noticed a bit of logorrhea here, too.

It later struck me: given the ebb and flow of chat, it amounts to maybe a sentence or two per minute. You might read 1000 words from me here, but that is 1000 words per day. Even when I am being chatty, it is mostly silence.

: Zubon

Re-Emergence

Yesterday afternoon I was in a pretty bad mood.  I had destroyed a part of my main character in Lord of the Rings Online.  It wasn’t until later that evening when I could apply a salve to my character’s gaping wound that I felt better.  It wasn’t my fault, but the change needed to happen.  I had to switch crafting professions. 

Continue reading Re-Emergence

Fanspeak

Do you refer to nerds as “my people”? I know it’s not just me, since I have heard others of my tribe doing so. Here is a blast from 1999 about how our people speak: Fanspeak.

On those occasions when she showed up at a con to meet Elise, she saw lots of fans in groups talking. To her they seemed angry and rude. To Elise they seemed nothing of the sort. Observing them more closely, she realized that they were using different social cues, different body language, different eye contact, and even different ways of forming vowels than what she jokingly called “my people”, or what for convenience sake I’ll call mundanes. …
We also speak in larger word groupings between breaths. This does not necessarily mean that we speak faster; we just pause for a shorter time between words — except where there is punctuation. … We use punctuation in our spoken utterances. Sometimes we even footnote.
What we say in those large word groupings is also different. We tend to use complete sentences, and complex sentence structure. When we pause, or say “uh”, it tends to be towards the beginning of a statement, as we formulate the complete thought. The “idea” or “information” portion of a statement is paramount; emotional reassurance, the little social noises (mm-hmm) are reduced or omitted. …
We interrupt each other to finish sentences, and if the interrupter got it right, we know we’ve communicated and let them speak; if they get it wrong we talk right over them. This is not perceived as rude, or not very rude.
… We accept corrections on matters of fact and of pronunciation; when I asked her about whether fanspeak might be related to Asperger’s Syndrome, and mispronounced “Asperger’s”, I was corrected in mid-sentence by the man sitting next to me, corrected myself, thanked him, and finished the sentence. One Doesn’t Do That in Mundania. Fans understand that mispronouncing words one has only read is very common in fandom, and not mortally embarrassing. …

As they say, read the whole thing. I totally footnote when I speak, citing sources in case you want to follow up for more information. I’m not sure how much that helps or is caused by blogging with links in text.

: Zubon

An ode to the random stranger picker-upper tool

It was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS.
It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction.
I pugged an instance.
I went as a tank
because I could.
After four years as a ‘lock.
But then the paladin left.
Now there’s no sense crying over every mistake
You just keep on trying till you run out of rage
And the killing gets done
And I’ll finish the run
With the people who stick by my side.
Continue reading An ode to the random stranger picker-upper tool

Facebook TD

I was rather pleased when the makers of Desktop Tower Defense sent me an e-mail notifying me of their new version. Hurray, sequel! Clicking the link, it took me to Facebook. Hurray, easier to share with/addict friends!

Sadly, it turns out to bring little new to the table. It is a simplified version of Desktop TD, stripped down for Facebook, with an item shop to let you buy back the assorted towers that start deactivated. You earn coins by playing, bringing friends, or spending money; the difficulty is low enough to beat everything (except the level you pay for) with a few moments’ worth of coins. It does add new cards, assorted powers that make it even easier. “Send next wave” is now a coin-bought ability, but you get a bonus for killing waves quickly (similar effect).

I do not recall if I donated to the makers of Desktop TD. It sounds like something I would have done, but the game has been out long enough for me to forget. You could treat the coin shop as that, but it feels more like paying for a bad deal. It would not cost much to buy back everything the original game had. There is a million coin option, and I wonder how many sales they get. There is no sane use for one million coins, although that would let you play the paid level indefinitely with no worries. Oh, and one more thing you can spend money on…

It now has a “Send Ninjas!” button. Every Facebook game needs a “Send Ninjas!” button. These are just the hopper creeps from previous editions, now as an extra wave on your victim/friend (I’m told they will not appear on the paid level) with a new graphic. Still, seriously, every game needs ninjas or something similar to send. That might make Farmville interesting enough to play.

: Zubon